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Science-y types do so much damage when they venture into social or political topics. You just know theres some bright-eyed youngin who will uncritically transfer over the esteem they have for their science communication & just accept their premise without second thought.
The crazy part is that they have so little to gain from it, much to lose, and yet… All the cred she had from making quality, seemingly-informative content vanished with one video. Now, even if she were to present valid info on science topics, I’d forever be skeptical of her basic ability to vet information. I doubt theres an equivalent converse effect within the capitalism fanboy demographic. All she had to do was nothing.
I have a hypothesis that this phenomena of science types overestimating their ability to draw conclusions in the social sciences is a result of STEM-y people persistently being told they are smart for being relatively competent with more concrete subjects, making them far less likely to negatively assess their understanding of the more squishy world. Thoughts?
I think part of it is that they underestimate the complexity of the topic. I think Sabine doesn’t know what she doesn’t know, and then she’s too overconfident to realize it because neoliberal narratives are fucking crammed into every conceivable corner of human discourse — and if they’re that ubiquitous, they must be really well vetted and they must be fuckin true!
“We peer-reviewed ourselves and found no social murder”
I have a hypothesis that this phenomena of science types overestimating their ability to draw conclusions in the social sciences is a result of STEM-y people persistently being told they are smart for being relatively competent with more concrete subjects, making them far less likely to negatively assess their understanding of the more squishy world.
This is absolutely 100% a thing. I’m a software dev and every other colleague is like this to some extent, they’ll make the most puddle-deep analysis of a societal problem backed up by nothing but their personal biases and think they’re fucking sociological geniuses.
This is my experience as well. People act like there’s a data structure for any and every complex social phenomena.
Physics is the absolute worst with this, too. When I was doing my postdoc in a climate lab, by far the greatest amount of pushback against climate science as a discipline (at least internally) came from the physics department. They sometimes think that since physics is in some sense the “most fundamental” science, they have a right to pontificate on anything else since everything is, at bottom, a physical system. Combined with the fact that they deal with mathematically sophisticated but frequently highly idealized or constrained models–and thus are skeptical of complexity in general–this sometimes gives them the attitude that they can pick up any other discipline and do it better than genuine experts. It’s a pretty pervasive problem.
I have a hypothesis that this phenomena of science types overestimating their ability to draw conclusions in the social sciences is a result of STEM-y people persistently being told they are smart for being relatively competent with more concrete subjects, making them far less likely to negatively assess their understanding of the more squishy world. Thoughts?
STEMlords get told their shit don’t stink, which cultivates a form of arrogance. The funny thing is that this happens enough that once they get old, they start doing the same shit to STEM fields that they have no expertise in. It starts with the social sciences and the humanities when they are younger, but by the time they’re old, they become full-blown cranks who think their expertise in electrical engineering makes them an expert on the efficacy of vaccines.
I said it in a previous thread about her, I think she’s intentionally misrepresenting this. She did some shady stuff with climate change which is science. She doesn’t deny it but talks it down for her audience.
In first minutes of climate change video she says we can’t stop using cars. This is a “scientist”. Idk why people bother
Capitalism is literal extortion. It’s the exploitation of the cost of producing redundancy, which lacks reasonable justification. Producing redundancy is what they menace workers with in order to receive ransoms.
For example, a landlord purchases a home to transform into a rental property. He asks consumers to pay him a ransom to be able to access the captured property. If they refuse, they have to produce a second house to fulfill the same amount of demand. Producing two houses to only be able to use one is twice the cost, a way higher price than the price of the ransom. So the ransom get paid to avoid producing redundancy. It’s extortion.
This is a really simple way of explaining it. Any reading you recommend that talks about this in more detail?
I recommend you read your country 's criminal code, particularly the extortion article.
Says here I need to arrest my landlord
And the best part is that the original capitalists despised landlords.
Forgive me if I’m confusing him with someone else, but Cockshott is TERF-ish, right?
hes a terf and homophobe and a good free resource for marxian economics.
it is what it is
Hossenfelder has also been a little TERFy lately, so if the TERFs want to fight it out, I’ll put critical support behind the one who is at least correct about the economics.
Cockshott
Homophobe
Huh.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7h3ccRFtS90
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pI792W5rkoA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFCYbjSISoA
weirdo behavior
in the last video he makes the case that gay and lesbian couples are less oppressed than straight couples and should be taxed for it citing “only the top 10% of straight families are as well off as a mid income gay couple”
then makes the argument that the “Rainbow Movement” has an inherently middle class basis and no revolutionary potential.
What the fuck is going on in Britain lol
There has GOT to be something in the water over there.
oi wot u mean i aint sposed to be drinkin sea woterdeleted by creator
he makes the case that gay and lesbian couples are less oppressed than straight couples and should be taxed for it citing “only the top 10% of straight families are as well off as a mid income gay couple”
How does someone spend their entire life researching how to use computers to plan an entire socialist economy and not realize that marginalized people tend to have greater economic difficulties?
if I recall the ridiculous core of his argument is that homosexual couples don’t have children and so don’t have to carry the burden of raising families unlike het proles. Which is absurd. I should know, because I was raised by two women. Is he unaware that LGBT people adopt children? Often the unwanted children of neglectful cishet parents? And also play roles in larger multigenerational family support structures even when they don’t have children? Nah, he can probably figure that out. He’s just a phobe. That’s to say nothing of the systemic discrimination against LGBT in the home, school, workplace, places of worship, and public in general, because of antiquated bourgeois and feudal “morality” forced onto society at gunpoint by reactionaries.
in the last video he makes the case that gay and lesbian couples are less oppressed than straight couples and should be taxed for it citing “only the top 10% of straight families are as well off as a mid income gay couple”
He isn’t TERF-y. He is an unrepentant turbo TERF. Some TERFs like Rowling try and couch what they say to not appear transphobic. Cockshott doesn’t even bother, he wears his transphobia on his sleeve.
And Towards a New Socialism was invaluable in helping me understand Capital so it’s complicated for me.
I would say non-fiction works is a good time to practice the ‘separate the artist from the art’ principle. You can pirate a useful book from a shitty person, but you can’t exactly pirate a concert from a shitty musician.
Hakim also made a video on this which is probably preferable if you’re not some weird bri*ish queerphobe boomer
Paul Cockshott is an unrepentant TERF who hangs around on Mumsnet, Britain’s foremost TERF forum. I’ve also watched him spew transphobic garbage in several leftist Facebook groups I’m in. He’s directly told a trans friend of mine she’s not a real woman through a comment he posted. He is every bad part of the worst sorts of transphobes and this should disqualify him from being a serious leftist voice. Fuck Paul Cockshott and fuck the island of white devils he came from
paul cockshott isn’t wrong when he says capitalism is bad just because he also happens to be a transphobe (calling him a TERF is too dignified since the RF implies that he’s a radical feminist, but he’s not even that). but yes I agree we should post comrade hakim’s takedown of sabine instead
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Fuck this was posted 4 days ago lol
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Is Cockshott related to the Cockburn journalists?
They are part of the Cock extended universe
