> what evidence do we have to believe that we haven't made some of the same mistakes in classifying pseudoscience in the present?

None. I just think that when we suspect something might be pseudoscientific, we ought to read and study it really carefully, explore the arguments, and discredit it by formulating and publicizing well-reasoned counterarguments. And since the demographics that traditionally practice this sort of thing have some gaping blindspots, we ought to be actively recruiting a broader set of perspectives into this pursuit, so that we can generate more good ideas and discredit more of the bad ones.

We don't need to throw out science to deal with bad ideas put forth by scientists. Science itself has the mechanisms for this. We just need to do it better.

Not scream at the author's speaking engagements until he leaves the room.

To be clear, the side I'm on is the liberal/academic/technocratic orthodoxy, where smart people engage seriously with ideas, arguments, and data (including devil's-advocating positions they don't agree with) to discover the truth, and formulate policy prescriptions based on the truth, i.e. what's romanticized on The West Wing. I do believe in reality's well-known liberal bias and on most policy questions I am pretty much indistinguishable from an "SJW." As far as getting to those policy positions, though, it was clear I would not have been welcome in my campus's left-leaning political scene.

It is clear to me from reading your previous comment that you've made an effort to understand the arguments made. That's a breath of fresh air.

>Not scream at the author's speaking engagements until he leaves the room.

Student politics just suck. But, I don't think they're representative of some of the underlying ideas they are based on. I've met some incredibly intelligent and well-read anarchists - but I wouldn't think anarchy was a system with that thought behind it if all I'd met was the loudest proponents of anarchy.

I think one of the problems currently we have in discourse-at-large is its really easy to find the egregious and ridiculous arguments people make, and paint the rest of the whole ideology with it. Perhaps the only partisan movement in politics today? :)

>I just think that when we suspect something might be pseudoscientific, we ought to read and study it really carefully, explore the arguments, and discredit it by formulating and publicizing well-reasoned counterarguments.

>We don't need to throw out science to deal with bad ideas put forth by scientists. Science itself has the mechanisms for this. We just need to do it better.

I think the problem has been that in the past (and still today) women and PoC were hampered by their inability to even get stuff published. If people begin in a position where suspicion is immediate, its harder for them to get a foot in the door, even if the gatekeepers hypothetically would allow in a person they are suspicious of.

As a result, some people still feel like one of the few levers they can successfully pull is the protest lever. Some protests suck.

>And since the demographics that traditionally practice this sort of thing have some gaping blindspots, we ought to be actively recruiting a broader set of perspectives into this pursuit, so that we can generate more good ideas and discredit more of the bad ones.

I think we agree on this - and I think we agree that there's the possibility of bias in science as it stands.

Where I'm going next with this: The idea then is that science internally sucks at making choices to correct this bias. Therefore establishment science needs to be externally influenced. That's not a dismissal of the scientific method, that's a claim that the scientific method never existed in an unbiased form in the first place.

> what evidence do we have to believe that we haven't made some of the same mistakes in classifying pseudoscience in the present?

The uncomfortable thing is that this can cut both ways. Things can and do get rejected because it doesn't fit the ideology.

Feynman called it Cargo Cult science:

    We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways
    we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron
    by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know
    not to be quite right. It's a little bit off, because he had the incorrect value
    for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements
    of the charge of the electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of
    time, you find that one is a little bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a
    little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that,
    until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.

    Why didn't they discover that the new number was higher right away? It's a thing
    that scientists are ashamed of--this history--because it's apparent that people
    did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's,
    they thought something must be wrong--and they would look for and find a reason
    why something might be wrong. When they got a number closer to Millikan's value
    they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far
    off, and did other things like that. We've learned those tricks nowadays, and now
    we don't have that kind of a disease.

    But this long history of learning how not to fool ourselves--of having utter
    scientific integrity--is, I'm sorry to say, something that we haven't specifically
    included in any particular course that I know of. We just hope you've caught on by osmosis.

As you say, it takes a lot of faith to believe that we're now clearly on the path where the truth can only go one way. For example, given that history will always be discriminatory, is there a situation where it will be clear that societal discrimination now reversed to be against, say, white men? After all, even if it was in some hypothetical future, people could still point to history as a justification for why women or other races are actually the oppressed (it's essentially the argument you just made, I don't see why it'd be any less valid in 50 years or whatever).

If after 50 years we have clear evidence that men aren't getting published or hired in science in relatively similar quantities as women of color we probably won't consider all history as being discriminatory against women.

However, all the evidence we have now points to a long history of discrimination.

> However, all the evidence we have now points to a long history of discrimination.

I don't know if you're saying that "the juice is made with 100% real oranges" (A) or if you're saying that "the juice is 100% made of real oranges" (B).

In our situation, this maps to:

A) Although there exists evidence on both sides, the balance of discrimination has been, through history until now, unquestionably to the favor of white men

B) All the evidence that exists shows discrimination against non-(white men). No evidence of (white men) exists.

Now, if you're saying A, then I agree, except that this seems to entail that in order to legitimately complain about "reverse discrimination" essentially requires that men be confined to the household or that whites be slaves respectively (or some sort of equivalent), for a few hundred years before the complaint can be made.

So, it seems more reasonable to me to assume that you mean B, or at least something closer to B. I don't get what the "long history" part of "all the evidence […] points to a long history of discrimination" is for however, since hypothetically when we get to a point of no discrimination whatsoever, history would still show a tally favoring white men the way I understand the way people tally things up.

Anyway, the truth is that evidence is never that one-sided. Here's[1] for example an article explaining that in veterinary science, over 90% of students are female. The university responded by opening a scholarship favouring men as a group and (some) students responded that this was actually perpetuating male privilege.

The argument here isn't even about male privilege. Even if every single other field of study was 90% male or something like that (for the record, it is not, vet science is not the only female-dominated field), you'd just have a situation where everything is pro-male except veterinary science and one may call that male privilege, sure. But there would still be evidence of (limited) male "discrimination" in vet science.

[1] http://www.smh.com.au/national/education/sydney-university-d...

One of the points made in the article is that men still have a higher wage in the field.

Discrimination leads to bias. If wage/gender matchups were a total coinflip we'd still expect around 25% in each of the quadrants along the axes of male/female and men have a higher wage/women have a higher wage.

It is totally possible for some fields to have women in higher numbers and with higher wages in the field than the men, and for there to still be discrimination.

If your argument is that there is also discrimination against men, the vast majority of feminists agree. Its just clear in terms of wages and gender ratios in jobs, men have the upper hand :)

> Discrimination leads to bias.

What do you mean by bias? As far as I can tell, in the context of gender differences, either the bias IS the discrimination or it is the cause of the discrimination, but I can't make heads or tails of what it'd mean the way you worded it (or, for that matter, why it's relevant here if you just meant the swapped version).

> If your argument is that there is also discrimination against men, the vast majority of feminists agree. Its just clear in terms of wages and gender ratios in jobs, men have the upper hand :)

First, I'm totally confused by the smiley face. Maybe you just meant to imply 'no hard feelings' which makes the display understandable, but it's at any rate a confusing thing to "read" in context.

Now, my argument is not actually that there is discrimination against men. Well, I'm also not saying that there isn't, I'm just saying that my argument is on a different point, but if anything I'm bet there's some sort of evidence of "discrimination" against just about every one characteristic/group.

Actually, I didn't really make a specific argument, but if I had to, it would be something along the lines of: evidence of differing treatment (particularly statistical differences) could actually be evidence of differences between groups.

Like let's suppose that males just don't, on average, care about veterinary science. Maybe it's something that should be incentivized against, maybe not.

But if it's true, one would expect that someone will interpret that hypothetical fact as "males are not good veterinarians" and basically legitimately discriminate against male applicants (and probably there's going to also be people who would believe that males are going into vet science less only because of this discrimination). In this hypothetical world, both of those groups would be anywhere from quite wrong to slightly right, depending on what truth means to the beholder.

At any rate, a corollary of this is that even evidence of discrimination doesn't refute the underlying assumption to the degree that we might expect.

Bias is a stats term.

I think if we look through history - there has clearly been a change in treatment of women over time. Why is it that now the treatment is reliably indicative of some underlying quality that has remained static through time? Couldn't it just as easily be that the treatment of women currently isn't indicative of some underlying truth? What would indicate to us that now over other times the differing treatment was in line with underlying qualities and not cultural assumptions?