Personal Experience

Personal experience is a horribly flawed way of reaching valid conclusions about reality. Nobody is a representative sample of anything significant, except by accident. You cannot go out in the street and find a "typical person." For example, I might conclude from my own experience that violent crime does not exist in the US. After all, I have never been the victim of such a crime while living here for 50 years. Zero percent of people I've met, Black, Latino, Asian, White, have sexually assaulted me or mugged me. Amazing. I might also say that the common cold is a rare occurrence, that it is easy to publish in the PMLA, that shaving one's face every other day is sufficient, that coffee does not cause insomnia, etc... After all, these statements are true of me. I could also explain how rock and roll is dull, but flamenco is pleasing to the human ear, or why even the strongest coffee requires no sweetener, why pitchers' duels are fascinating...

Yet, of course, but despite the extreme limitations on individual perspectives, we are very interested in people's personal stories. I would suggest that the main interest lies in their atypicality, or in their very curious combination of seemingly typical experience and wholly idiosyncratic outlier stuff. The statistical sample leading to the "average person" produces a kind of bland view of things.

Students often seem bland to me, because what they write is generic. They give me a standard view of things, not what they really think when that is stripped away. On the other hand, bloggers like Clarissa or Z always have something interesting to say because they are very much themselves. It doesn't even matter whether I agree with any particular statement they make or whether I think their personal viewpoint is generalizable to any other human being on the planet. Who cares?

Maybe that is why I am a not a great reader of fiction. Real people seem more interesting to me than generic agglomerations of character traits assigned to random proper names. You couldn't invent a fictional character as interesting as anyone I know because that wouldn't be "realistic."

Studies Show...

Whenever anyone says "studies show..." just ask them what studies they are. The phrase "studies show' is about as valid as the phrase "people say..."

Of course, there are good studies and very well-documented conclusions, and a portion of what "people say" about them is valid. There is overwhelming evidence that smoking causes cancer.

The results of any recent study cited in the media to show that children are dumber than they used to be, however, are likely to be distorted. The media are always looking for such stories so they will interpret the results that way if at all possible.

Bullshit Fields (18)

Educational Testing and Psychometrics.

Here we have media reports on how little kids know about history, but the testing organization marks right answers wrong and throws out easy questions, preferring those that distinguish very good students from not so good ones. You can't use a test designed to discriminate as a measure to evaluate the proficiency of the group as a whole. Those are two contradictory aims.

Bullshit Fields (17)

Social Science

Social science, in general, is bullshit. Thou shalt not commit a social science, said Auden. The problem with social science is that can prove anything it wants to. If medical trials sponsored by drug companies are mostly bullshit, what about studies that demonstrate very narrow or very obvious results? Social science does not have the solidity of the physical sciences, but it also lacks, typically, the hermeneutic sophistication of the Humanities at their best. Quantitative social science itself constructs the data that it then subjects to analysis, in a circular way. Ethnography is suspicious because it places the Western anthropologist in a position of understanding a culture through a very suspect methodology. I don't understand my own culture in the slightest. I don't think a Martian could come and spend 9 months here and understand a thing.

I think a lot of social science is very interesting and valid, but I often feel that it is just a guy, or a gal, trying to explain things in the best possible way, just like anyone else who is not a "scientist.'

Duncan, Bloom, HD, and Psychoanalysis

Ok, I know that I said psychoanalysis was a bullshit field. Here I am going to take a slightly different perspective. From the historical vantage-point, Freud's ideas were very influential, and you cannot look at the modernist and late modernist periods without knowing something about him. It would be embarrassing not to know something of the intellectual history of these literary movements.

H.D. was the only major modernist poet who was also analyzed by Freud, and she even wrote a book about him. Duncan deals with H.D's Freudianism, also, in the H.D. Book. Bloom's theory of poetic anxiety is also rooted in Freudian concepts like repression. The Freudian concept of the "narcissism of small differences" might explain the way in which people like Duncan and Bloom, or Bloom and Rothenberg, could not talk to one another. H.D could be analyzed by Freud, but Pound, the subject of another H.D. book, dismissed Freud completely, as he did Marx. Two Jewish thinkers uncongenial to Pound's antisemitic sensibility.

Duncan connects HD's Freudianism to the idea of the occult, the hidden, and hence to gnosticism. It is not an orthodox reading of Freud, by any means, but how interesting would that have been? Duncan's view of the differences among major modernist poets and thinkers, Pound, Williams, Yeats, H.D., Freud, is very nuanced.

If I could connect Freud to Lorca, I would be doing very well. I don't mean doing a Freudian reading of Lorca, but connecting the two from the perspective of intellectual history.

Bullshit Fields (16)

New Historicism and Postcolonialism.

New Historicism is bullshit because it uses anecdote rather than data. You find a suggestive similarity between, say a legal document and a play written about the same time and construct a clever argument around this similarity. It also uses the Foucauldian method of giving a dramatic, aesthetically striking image more explanatory power than it really should have, like Bentham's panopticon, which never really became the model for prison-building. Never mind, it is such a powerful image of surveillance that it should have been the model.

Postcolonial theory is bullshit because it reproduces Derridean jargon in a gratuitous way, to talk about things that have nothing to do with deconstruction. Both of these movements decided to make literature about whatever the critic was interested in. The same goes for ecocriticism and a thousand other possible approaches that decide that, if x is the most urgent issue facing humankind, or to the most progressively minded segment of humankind, literary criticism should devote itself full time to x.

I really liked queer theory at the time, when the idea was to queer the renaissance, queer everything to show that the hetero / homo distinction was at the base of all Western Culture. Stepping back from it a minute, however, what this really shows is that you can do this with any x. The environment, the relation between nature and culture--what could be more significant than that? Therefore, that's what literary criticism should devote itself to. Or the nature of power. Or gender. Or colonialism. Or class conflict. Give me a theme, and I can show that all literature is really about this theme.

Bullshit Fields (15)

Semiotics.

Semiotics once seemed to be the field of the future, or at least of the present, before Umberto Eco became a best-selling novelist. It is not "bullshit" per se, but it tied its fortunes to structuralism and has lost its luster with the decline of this larger movement. People who don't like poststructuralism and postmodernism don't want to return to structuralism either, so there's no natural constituency for semiotics as an explanatory framework. Cultural studies uses some semiotics, to the extent that it's based on Barthes' "mythologies," but the influence there is attenuated.

The idea of semiotics was to study everything else as a language, not just language itself. A few problems emerged: other languages, other systems of signs, were simply not as complex or interesting as language. Secondly, linguists were all not interested in the Saussurean idea of the sign. There was a lot more to do in linguistics than try to refine an idea from the early stages of the discipline. Structuralism in linguistics was associated with an earlier model, more descriptive and anthropological.

Bullshit Fields (14)

Cultural Studies.

What makes Cultural Studies BS? Well, it is not. But if someone asked me argue that is was, this what I would say.

It has too much invested in studying what is popular at any given time. It hitches its wagon to the cultural marketplace, and thus cannot formulate criteria of value apart from the market. The other major criterion of value it espouses is political, of course. So something becomes worthy of study because it is popular, the product of mass culture, but then the "cultural work" (I hate that phrase) done by the piece of mass culture is some political intervention. "Cultural" ends up meaning "political," but in the symbolic politics of culture.

Cultural Studies is bullshit because it tries to wed these two sources of value, one capitalist and the other quasi-Marxist, into one argument. Debates are always whether the implications of some new development in mass culture are politically positive or retrograde. The Adornian idea that pop culture is simply the worthless product of the "culture industry" caused the contrary reaction, meaning you can't just dismiss pop culture in his high-handed high modernist way. That's good, of course. Adorno was an idiot about jazz, but you can take things too far in the opposite direction.

There were so many articles about Madonna back in the day. Cultural Studies is bullshit because it pretends to be hip but is really looking too hard for positive political meanings everywhere.

Next: Postcolonial Studies.

Bullshit Fields (13)

Psychiatry

For obvious reasons, drug companies make very sure that their positive studies are published in medical journals and doctors know about them, while the negative ones often languish unseen within the FDA, which regards them as proprietary and therefore confidential. This practice greatly biases the medical literature, medical education, and treatment decisions.

In other words, the Texas Marksman's Fallacy.

There is an even more startling finding in one of the books reviewed here (Kirsch). Patients in a double-blind placebo study knew they were getting the real drug, and not a placebo, because of the side-effects. When given another drug with side effects, as a placebo, the difference in effectiveness between the real drug and the placebo disappeared! Unbe-fucking-lievable.

According to another author, Whitaker, reviewed here,

the natural history of mental illness has changed. Whereas conditions such as schizophrenia and depression were once mainly self-limited or episodic, with each episode usually lasting no more than six months and interspersed with long periods of normalcy, the conditions are now chronic and lifelong. Whitaker believes that this might be because drugs, even those that relieve symptoms in the short term, cause long-term mental harms that continue after the underlying illness would have naturally resolved.

Bullshit Fields (12)

Deconstruction.

(Ok, that's not even a field, since it's more of a theory. I even like Derrida, so I have to phrase this rather delicately. Most critiques of deconstruction are also bullshit, so I have to make sure I don't repeat those errors.)

The idea that deconstruction provides a "rigorous" method of looking at a literary text is pure bullshit.

My reasoning is that most American critics who tried to use the theory simply did not have the philosophical and linguistic chops to understand and evaluate it. They used an argument for authority, often filtered through a popularization such as that of Jonathan Culler. Blended with Fishian reader-response, anything goes criticism, it became the opposite of Derrida.

Because of a strongly anti-empiricist bent in French rationalist thought, deconstruction also became self-validating, unfalsifiable, like psychoanalysis. You couldn't question its validity without seeming naive and untheoretical. Nobody wanted to resemble the old-school skeptics, who didn't like it because it emphasized the instability of meaning in a literary text.

Of course, literary meaning is unstable. We can prove this empirically by looking that the history of the reception of texts. Somehow, though literary critics forgot this when Derrida and de Man came along.

Whenever Anyone Says...

Whenever anyone proposes to make the study of literature more scientific, or calls the humanities bullshit because it has trouble with verification and validity, it might be a good idea to remember that epidemiology and other scientific fields also have a lot of troubles. That's why I'm skeptical of Franco Moretti and the proposal for a quantitative study of literature (one of the reasons, the other being that I hate it). The epistemological questions are immense.

Generalized Skepticism?

Despite my skepticism about many fields, in humanities, social science, and the hard sciences, I still believe in the idea that there is such a thing as knowledge and that it can be learned and refined. The worst danger is that if a field like psychiatry is seen to be the bullshit that it is, people will just throw up their hands and believe nothing. Believing nothing, they will end up believing anything. If science is bullshit, why not believe in astrology? It's no worse. I'm sure anti-scientific and pseudo-scientific people react will glee whenever someone argues that "most scientific findings are incorrect." In my view, that is not at all the lesson to be learned. It is discouraging to learn that so much of what we think we know, we don't, but that just means we have a lot of work to do. I'm doing my part.

Cherry Picking

Suppose you tested a classroom of 30 kids for about 40 separate variables. Chances are you would find that some of those variables would line up by sheer chance. In other words, you could find a strong correlation between two independent variables. If you came up with even more variables you could find even stronger correlations. Four of the five kids who wore glasses also had names beginning with J. This is a little like shooting bullets at a barn and then going and drawing targets around the bullet holes, the Texas Marksman's Fallacy. Correlation is not causation, but sometimes correlation is not even correlation.

Bullshit Fields (11)

I've read this paper before and have gone back to it recently. It makes a plausible case for the seemingly counterintuitive argument that "most research findings are false" in science. A combination of factors, including researcher bias, small sample sizes, the role of pure chance, and the fact that the effects measured are often very small, make the majority of scientific findings very questionable.

Let's take a weaker argument out of this. Not that all or even most science is bullshit, but that if the media reports a story about scientific findings, you have to take it cum grano salis. Part of the argument is that the hotter the field, in terms of scientific and media interest, the more the likelihood of falsity. The author of this study,Ioannidis, makes the startling claim that "Claimed Research Findings May Often Be Simply Accurate Measures of the Prevailing Bias":

For example, let us suppose that no nutrients or dietary patterns are actually important determinants for the risk of developing a specific tumor. Let us also suppose that the scientific literature has examined 60 nutrients and claims all of them to be related to the risk of developing this tumor with relative risks in the range of 1.2 to 1.4 for the comparison of the upper to lower intake tertiles. Then the claimed effect sizes are simply measuring nothing else but the net bias that has been involved in the generation of this scientific literature. Claimed effect sizes are in fact the most accurate estimates of the net bias. It even follows that between “null fields,” the fields that claim stronger effects (often with accompanying claims of medical or public health importance) are simply those that have sustained the worst biases.

If you read about a study saying cell phones cause cancer, you should look into it a bit more before just believing it. I can't follow every technical detail of the paper, nor do I have the statistical chops to say whether it is wrong or right. If it is wrong too, then it would be another example of a research finding being false!

***

One problem, of course, is that "negative results" are harder to get published. For example, on the front page web site of my university there are stories about people at KU finding a new species of lizard, and about school bullying. Apparently there is a correlation between visits to the school nurse and being the victim or perpetrator of bullying. Why are these news stories? If a team of researchers found no correlation between bullying and visits to the nurse, there would be nothing there to report. It would be surprising, because we would expect bruised knuckles and bloody noses, but it wouldn't be a research finding in and of itself. Or suppose the team of scientists found that a lizard thought to be a separate and new species was not, just the same old lizard we always knew about. That's not too exciting either.

A correlation is not a causation, but a lack of correlation is almost nothing at all, unless it was a definitive reversal of a super well-established correlation. The main bias in science is in proving positive, not negative, results.

The Social Misconstruction of Reality

This book by Hamilton, the Social Misconstruction of Reality: Validity and Verification in the Scholarly Community is one I want to read. Basically, it is about why scholars continue to believe certain things that have been discredited. It's one think to poke fun at yokels who believe in creationism, but why do scholars persist in mistaken beliefs?

Hard and Soft (2)

Here is an example of linguist who is able to contextualize an intellectual debate in broad terms, looking not just at the empirical evidence for knowledge, but at how we claim to know what we know. Few people can do this as quickly and accessibly as Liberman. Those are the kind of "chops" I was trying to get at in my previous post.

Hard and Soft

Now obviously the harder the field is, the more likely it is not to be called bullshit. Hard science like physics or chemistry seems beyond question. Biology seems a little softer but still hard enough. "Applied" sciences come next. Social sciences outrank humanities, to the extent that they claim mathematical models, etc... I don't want you to get the impression I think like that.

Actually, the level of argumentation is often stronger in the Humanities than in the social sciences, which often have a weaker philosophical base. I'd match up ok against the average cultural anthropologist or sociologist. Within the social sciences, an economist might be more bullshit than a sociologist, or a quantitative sociologist might not have the intellectual firepower to debate a social theorist.

So softer does not mean worse. You need some hermeneutic chops to really address wider intellectual questions across disciplines. You could be in the most rigorous, non-bullshit discipline of them all and still not be able to hold your own against a bullshitter humanities professor like me.

The other problem with my series of posts, as some of you have noticed and kindly pointed out, is that it often ended up being merely a rehearsal of familiar prejudices. Economists can't predict anything, nutritionists exaggerate the significance of their findings, etc... Much as I've tried to be fair, that was implicit in my approach, especially when I knew less about a field.

Bullshit Fields (10)

Nutrition.

Once again, I'm not in a position to evaluate the intellectual solidity of this field. From the point of view of a member of the general public, however, this field seems a bit bullshitty because of the way in which scientists cannot shape the public debate in a way that makes coherent sense to anyone outside of the field. The public hears alarmism and conflicting, or changing views. Diet books of questionable scientific validity are bestsellers, and many are written by people who seem to have scientific credentials. I'm sure actual research in nutrition deals with narrower questions and uses the scientific method to arrive at valid conclusions, but since everyone eats, there ought to be a way of presenting best practices in a way that does not confuse the public so much.

Bullshit Fields (9)

Economics.

I don't actually know enough about economics to know what percentage of it is bullshit. It seems like its predictive power is often pretty poor, that economists often disagree with one another not based on evidence, but on interpretation and ideology, that it is plagued by zombie ideas and prone to popular simplifications. I know that is often serves nefarious interests, as a discipline. That it is too influenced by the recent past. Keynesian economics seemed dead after the stagflation of the 70s, and now Chicago school economics seems on the defensive, with a return to Keynesian regulation. It does use mathematical models, but that in and of itself doesn't mean much. There are intellectually brilliant economists too, but that doesn't mean much if they aren't good at predicting things. Economists are also notorious for professional deformation, wanting to reduce everything to an economic question. If their field is not on solid ground, then they shouldn't be going around trying to explain other things in economic terms.

So the question is not whether it is a bullshit field. A lot of fields have some component of bullshit, even ones I like and practice myself, such as literary criticism and theory. The question is if it is fifty / fifity // eighty / twenty, etc... in its relative ratio of bullshit to validity. Once again, I have no idea, and the critique I've offered here is merely a bunch of clichés one hears denigrating the dismal science.

Bullshit Fields (8)

Creative Writing

Academia is very good at reproducing forms of writing, standard modes that will acceptable to other academics. It is desirable to have a standard form for an academic article in a certain field and to judge the article by how well it manages its evidence, presents its conclusions, etc... So it is understandable that creative writing as an academic field is also very good at the self-reproduction of forms and styles. This happens anyway, without the aid of academia. Writers are pretty mimetic of other writers because not that many people are very original. What Creative Writing does is to magnify this clone-like effect by using a workshop format in which groupthink is bound to emerge. Think of whatever the standard New Yorker story of any decade looks like, whether it's Cheever or Carver, Barthelme Sr or Barthelme Jr. Creative writing tends to sand down the rebelliousness of the avant-garde, making it safe for consumption, co-opting it in tepid "third-stream" alternatives. It offers a professionally worthless degree, the MFA, in vastly greater numbers than academia can re-absorb, but that doesn't guarantee competence in writing either. Should being poet be a credential?

Please don't rehearse the standard defenses here that I've heard a thousand times before. How diverse these programs are, how you can in fact, teach writing, how my description corresponds to these programs 20 years ago. How poets I admire have taught creative writing. The historical damage of the Iowaization of American poetry has still not been repaired.