Freedom and Fulfilment

Personal Development, Spirituality & Psychedelics

Why The Public Can No Longer Trust Academia

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Most of us still believe academic credentials and publications have some intrinsic value. You see a citation – a bracketed name and date (Smith, 1983) or an authoritative looking little number (1) – and trust it to mean something. But what if it doesn’t?

We assume published papers are written by well-educated experts, and that the work is put through a rigorous peer review process. We assume the ideas have been critically analyzed by other experts in the field. That’s how this works, right?

Not exactly.

We are at a place today where viewpoints with no substance are taken as legitimate, solely because they emerge from the architecture of higher education. The consequence is that poor thinking and bad ideas have found their way into public discourse, news media, education, public policy and more.

The mechanism for this, it seems, is the iterative nature of academia itself. The process starts with an academic who has an idea that is somewhat novel, may contain some truth, but also contains some falsehood.

The idea may be wrapped in near-incomprehensible jargon, making it overly difficult or time consuming to criticize. It may be in line with the homogenous political persuasions of the field, so there is no opposition. Alternatively, opposition may be afraid to speak up for fear of going against the grain. Or perhaps other academics are simply too busy with their own work to take notice.

In any case, the bad idea is published and becomes part of the established literature. It is enshrined in academic legitimacy, making it available for others to draw on. Then another academic takes the idea – it’s published in a paper, after all – and iterates on it, creating some variant or an entirely new bad idea.

Now multiply that by hundreds of universities and thousands of individuals and publications, over decades. The result is a situation where entire fields of academic study are filled with complete nonsense.

Don’t believe me? Let’s look at some examples from the Twitter account Real Peer Review.

Note the citations to other works, which add the appearance of legitimacy. In some cases, the nonsense is built right into the methodology:

There are countless examples like this, but that is enough to illustrate the point. Different academic fields have more or less finely tuned bullshit detectors, and some have none at all. The uncomfortable truth is that it is entirely possible to exist as a thinker at a highly respected institution while holding beliefs that are antithetical to reality.

This gets dark when it begins to affect the public and private sphere. Decisions with real consequence are made and justified with these bad ideas, because they carry with them the appearance of academic legitimacy.

See for example the recent controversy at Wilfrid Laurier University. A teaching assistant named Lindsay Shepherd showed a clip from public television that featured University of Toronto professor Jordan Peterson speaking about controversial Canadian legislation. Shepherd was accused by the university administration of being “transphobic” and committing “gender based violence”, in violation of Canadian law.

The only reason we know about this is because Shepherd secretly recorded the meeting with her superiors. You can hear excerpts in the video below, and there is a full recording embedded in this article.

The university has since issued an apology, but several people have countered this by speaking out against Shepherd.

PhD candidates and fully credentialed academics have called for Shepherd to apologize to trans people, and even blamed her for the incident. We live in strange times.

My guess is that a non-trivial number of smart, ambitious young people see what is happening and are avoiding universities like the plague. Nevertheless, most legitimate scientists and scholars still operate in university environments, and their work is some of the most valuable in the world.

But the public can no longer trust academia on its face, as a whole. Credentials and publications were once a reliable sign of intellectual honesty and rigorous scholarship, but this is no longer the case. Bad actors with bad ideas have contaminated the pool of knowledge and we need to adjust our filters accordingly.

Please don’t blindly accept credentials, publications or citations as signs of legitimacy. The opinion of an individual, even one with a PhD, is not the same as the results of an empirical study, and in fact may not be worth much at all. Do your own research!

  1. This makes it look like my work is backed by legitimate research and scholarship. But that’s not necessarily true. ↵