Mr Khan said:
You respond with an accusation of intellectual conspiracy, and an ill-informed one at that. All sciences need some grounding in statistics, and i can quite assure you that most everyone with a PhD is by necessity at least as good at statistics as you are. It's pretty much the only way to launch a defensible dissertation or to keep putting out research. If there is propaganda in colleges i haven't seen it, and i've made it a point to pay attention to all my professors for biases in one direction or another, and while i have seen more liberals than conservatives, i've seen a fair few who were better at playing their beliefs closer to their chests, and never have i witnessed substantive distortion of the facts. Granted, anecdotal evidence on my end, but this returns to other ideas from my original topic: any institution the right sees as espousing the wrong kind of fact is inherently a liberal conspiracy: the ivory tower and the "Lame-stream media" being two of them. Once they are dismissed as liberal conspiracies, anything they say can be freely disacknowledged. And it was not the point of my post to declare the left free from guilt in all cases on these matters. Aside from "9/11 was an inside job" i really don't remember much that was circulated about Bush that was factually false (likely by his own admission, he has a checkered past of fratboy antics). The question of "intellectual overreach" is a considerable one, but i sure as hell would rather have someone learned fixing their own mistakes than someone blustering forward on mere "conviction." Smart people can make dumb decisions, but they are better-equipped to fix them. If you want someone who is going to exercise caution and restraint, you're not going to find it on the right as it is (perhaps in the libertarian movement, but i've noticed users around here have a hard time figuring out that the american right doesn't like libertarianism except where it suits them, which is again factual evidence presented by the fact that Ron Paul is currently fourth place to Newt frickin' Gingrich, but this is a rant aside). There are even elements on the right who are openly yearning for the movement to shed the mantle of wilful ignorance. George Will's been reasonably vocal about it, which could be one of the reasons why he's one of the few conservative thinkers i respect, because he actually promotes thinking. |
A) With statistics... not really, I mean you need to have a Statistics class for Qualitative research, but they'll push qualitative students through statistics with both hands usually. Most social science papers have pretty much no statistical backing. It's just based on how your methods were conducted, how well your article represents said journal, and some would maintain, how much it fits the current view or a popular "off view"
B) As for not seeing a distorition of the facts... you yourself are quite libral. Isn't more apt to say, you haven't seen much distortion of the facts.... based on how you see the facts.
