That this tragedy is happening is undisputable. As a psychologist myself I'm much more interested in how so many otherwise intellegent researchers got swept up in in and came to see identity based activist-research as the preferred method of discovering "truth." It almsot seems like an opportunistic pathogen has infected them but why this happened at just this point in our cutlural history remains a mystery. I like your writing and hope you pursue that deeper question at some point.
Because intelligence is used by humans to detect the sentiment of the tribe that can determine their fates and to align themselves with it. Once the "pathogen" acquires the power to determine career trajectories, everyone falls in line.
The quality whereby people - intelligent and otherwise -resist this dynamic is called "agreeableness" in the psychometric literature. It's one of the Big Five personality axes. It's orthogonal to IQ. For a resistant personality, you're looking for low agreeableness.
The primary purpose of intelligence is to facilitate the survival of the organism. A secondary re-purposing of intelligence is the pursuit of scientific truth. That means scientific truth will be subordinate to politics in most intelligent people if and when science becomes too heavily politicized . You can even argue that intelligent people are especially good at sensing where power lies and get in line early and eagerly.
An important step in acknowledging how far we’ve fallen. The sad part is when all of this is over, just like with Cornoavirus, they will all pretend they were on the side of reason.
That this tragedy is happening is undisputable. As a psychologist myself I'm much more interested in how so many otherwise intellegent researchers got swept up in in and came to see identity based activist-research as the preferred method of discovering "truth." It almsot seems like an opportunistic pathogen has infected them but why this happened at just this point in our cutlural history remains a mystery. I like your writing and hope you pursue that deeper question at some point.
Because intelligence is used by humans to detect the sentiment of the tribe that can determine their fates and to align themselves with it. Once the "pathogen" acquires the power to determine career trajectories, everyone falls in line.
The quality whereby people - intelligent and otherwise -resist this dynamic is called "agreeableness" in the psychometric literature. It's one of the Big Five personality axes. It's orthogonal to IQ. For a resistant personality, you're looking for low agreeableness.
The primary purpose of intelligence is to facilitate the survival of the organism. A secondary re-purposing of intelligence is the pursuit of scientific truth. That means scientific truth will be subordinate to politics in most intelligent people if and when science becomes too heavily politicized . You can even argue that intelligent people are especially good at sensing where power lies and get in line early and eagerly.
An important step in acknowledging how far we’ve fallen. The sad part is when all of this is over, just like with Cornoavirus, they will all pretend they were on the side of reason.