Annie Lowrey on "Facts-Man"

Ok, so about that i.e. this...

   It's not worthless--or so I hereby suggest--because there may be such people (indeed, mostly guys) out there. In fact, I'm sure there must be. Lowrey can't resist the urge to mix in characteristics that are inessential to such a type, and unequivocally bad--e.g., they make pronouncements about science when they don't really know what they're talking about. Anyway--so described, this imaginary-but-possibly-real guy is a jackass.

   But what ought to be obvious is that "facts-men" aren't the main problem in this vicinity. Not to put too fine a point on it, but: I'm not saying that they're not our biggest problem. Problems are rarely our biggest problem. That biggest problem dodge ought to have a name. Since we generally only have a couple of biggest problems at any given time, you can dodge almost any problem by pointing out that it's not in the small set of our biggest ones. I decree that, henceforth, this will be called the biggest problem fallacy...

   What I'm saying is that, among the problems in the vicinity of what Lowrey's talking about, the facts-man problem isn't the biggest and isn't nearly the biggest. They problem is, roughly: too few facts men. Not too many. 

   Lowrey's facts-man is an asshole and a charlatan. So what's to disagree with about such guys?

   Thing is, stripped of such uncontroversially shitty characteristics, the people Lowrey's describing are epistemically and morally virtuous and in damn short supply. We need more not fewer. 

   And one suspects Lowrey's against them for the same reason the rest of the elite progressive establishment is--progressivism is political correctness, and political correctness is the subordination of facts to leftist dogma. "Facts-man," even when stripped of the gratuitous asshole-ism that Lowrey illicitly builds in, is anathema to progressivism. 

   Lowrey paints a picture of a guy who doesn't really know what he's talking about, who is recreationally provocative, and who shoves uncomfortable questions in people's faces willy-nilly. A kind of evil, low-rent Socrates. 

   Again: no disagreement that such guys likely exist, and that they're undoubtedly annoying. 

   But the real problem is that the progressive left shuts down legitimate, important politically incorrect speech and discussion. The real problem isn't that a smattering of people are gratuitously provocative. The real problem is that anyone who dissents from PC orthodoxy is attacked by the mindless progressive mob. And the other real problem is that progressivism is fact-averse--when the facts refuse to comport themselves in a politically-correct manner. 

   The real problem is that progressivism is against anyone who tries to discuss actual un-PC facts and raises un-PC questions. 

   The kind of guy Lowrey et al. should spend more time thinking about was James Damore. Hell, maybe that is who she's thinking about. What Damore wrote in his infamous memo was true. Which doesn't so much matter as that it was reasonable--it was (and still is) supported by actual scientific research. The left pretends to be pro-science--follow the science, bigot!!!. But, of course, it isn't. Political correctness is never actually pro-science since it subordinates evidence to dogma. When it accidentally agrees with some of "the" science, it crows about it. When it disagrees with "the" science, it simply pretends the science is otherwise. That's what it does with IQ, for example. And research on sex differences. Which is, of course, exactly what it did with Damore.

   As for those scare quotes around 'the' above: it's commonly misleading to write of "the" science. There's often conflicting science. Since it controls all the elite institutions, however, progressivism can pick and choose, declaring the science it likes to be the...and the science it doesn't to be not.

   The real problem isn't that some people insist on discussing uncomfortable topics when they could easily be avoided. The real problem is that progressivism tries to make such discussion verboten always and everywhere. We all agree that it's sometimes best to avoid certain uncomfortable truths. Progressivism, however, wants un-PC truths to be not only never discussed...it wants them declared non-truths. It especially wants them never discussed at universities--the place where such discussion used to and ought to be freest. It's attacked people for political incorrectness on campus, off campus, in class, out of class, in professional contexts like conference presentations and out of them, on the internet and off...often even in professional journals. The progressive left does not say: Hey, could we maybe exercise a bit of discretion with respect to these one or two radioactive topics? Rather it says Thou shalt never speak what we have decreed to be hatetruths, hater... And their list of hatetruths is long and lengthening. 

   Well, you've heard this all before. No big finish. Unfortunately progressivism cannot, at present, be reasoned with. They've created a moral panic on man fronts, and they're in crusading mode. All we can do, I suppose, is keep trying...well...and hope that the remnants of liberalism on the left eventually stop enabling the antiliberal left that's currently running the show...