Caitlan Flanagan has an odd piece in the Atlantic today asserting that American university professors are no longer interested in presenting both sides of controversial issues—and I use the word assert advisedly here. The piece is odd because she presents literally no evidence for her argument even though she's written a whole book on the subject.
What really struck me, though, is that Flanagan's essay turns on a lesson from her father, who would listen to her youthful harangues and then quietly ask her, "And what is the best argument of the other side?"
I had learned the style and the rhetorical turns of making a great case, but I didn’t know the first thing about fortifying it with facts, reason, logic—or the best argument of the side I was treating in such a cavalier way.
This is a very strange takeaway. My guess is that her father was asking her to at least consider the possibility that she was wrong. But she took away something different: she just needed to learn to argue better. This doesn't strike me as a great look from someone who's urging students to think for themselves more effectively.
But long as we're on the subject, I have a similar story. Like Flanagan, my father was a university professor, and when I was in the 8th grade I was assigned to write a report on the Taft-Hartley Act.
(Why? God only knows.)
So I found a book, read it, and began writing. But one night I was regaling my father with the greatness of Taft-Hartley and he pulled me up short. "Well, that's what the proponents say," he said.¹ It hadn't occurred to me that the book might be biased. It was a book! And anyway, Taft-Hartley was a law, and aren't laws good?
This might seem fairly obvious to us adults, but it's surprisingly common for us adults to ignore it anyway and believe whatever we hear. But my father's implicit advice has stuck with me since I was 14. To this day, practically the first thing I ask when I read something is, "Does this guy have an axe to grind?" Almost all of us do, after all, and it's dauntingly hard to figure this out if you're reading or listening to a skilled arguer. This is because only doltish propagandists outright lie. The good ones make their case by what they leave out, and unless you're an expert yourself it's all but impossible to know what you aren't being told.
So there you have it: good advice from two fathers. I'll close with another piece of good advice, this time from Flanagan herself:
You don’t have to delve into the arcana of the Third Reich to destroy anyone making a case for it. But these layups rarely present themselves in decent places. Most of the time, the subjects we talk about are—for all of their flattening by cable news and internet wormholes and all the rest of it—extremely complicated.
Yep. For any subject interesting enough to matter, both sides will have some good arguments. I mean, what are the odds that your side literally has a monopoly on good points? The world is just too complicated for that.
¹Needless to say, Dad was old enough to have been an adult when Taft-Hartley was passed in 1948. He was keenly aware that it had been very, very controversial.
I mean, what are the odds that your side literally has a monopoly on good points?
This (election) year? Somewhere (far) north of 1 million to 1.
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You, one other item is to always ask Cui Bono? - "Who benefits?"
>> The world is just too complicated for that.<<
A lot of the time the problem is that people want simple answers to complicated problems. Most always complicated problems require complicated answers. But politicians always want to claim they have the answer and it’s easy. Illegal immigration? Build a wall. Government waste-fraud-abuse? Across the board cuts. Unemployment? Impose tariffs on imports. By golly, it’s a wonder those deep state types never thought of those things. You just need an outsider who sees things clearly.
> A lot of the time the problem is that people want simple answers to complicated problems. Most always complicated problems require complicated answers.
Thank you for making this point. If there is one thing that I wish more voters understood, it's that. We might not get better outcomes, but at least we would have more productive discussions.
I would say that this complicated world is that way by design. Oh yes the artiface of its technology is complicated, but the byzantine nature of law, finance, politics, etc, it's that way and has been that way to exclude the majority for one reason: we talk about about it here non-stop and it's power. I don't know if there are simple solutions but I do know that the complex solutions reside solely in the hands of the powerful.
Some people would say that simple answers may be barbaric in the nature, but I give you the Donbas, Gaza, the Horn of Africa, the Back of the Yards, Eagle Pass as examples of what complexity has wrought.
"For every problem there exists an answer; one that is neat, plausible, simple, and wrong."
I was thinking a variant of that myself - thanks.
Just surrender...
https://youtu.be/Lpok-nG8sw4?si=mNaCukhCIEGhFk5A
Brother, have you ever read Caitlin Flannigan before? Everything she writes is odd and full of unsupported assertions. I have no idea why anyone takes this woman seriously. She is a female David Brooks.
100% true, but still far better than Megan McArdle
Well OK but that is a low bar. Flannigan has a certain stylistic skill that masks the utter lack of logic and reasoning behind the things she writes IMO.
She also writes in a style that comes across as absolutely certain that what she is saying is true and unassailable. Those that truly know how to think for themselves have already learned that there’s a lot more that they don’t know than what they do, and are therefore a bit more humble.
There was a time, about a quarter century back, when I subscribed to The Atlantic. Its arrival in my mailbox was the signal to drop whatever else I was doing in favor of sitting down and reading it. I never expected to love every bit. That would be an unreasonable expectation. But I could go in with a baseline assumption that the most of the contents would be thoughtful and informative. Then I gradually noticed certain writers that I knew would simply annoy me with stupidity. I could simply skip these pieces, but I also gradually noticed that these were taking up more and more of the page count. When Fallows and Coates left, I knew it was time to give up.
Nowadays I occasionally see a link to something in The Atlantic that looks interesting. Clicking the link produces a demand for payment. I ask myself "Are they still publishing Flannigan?" The answer is always yes, and I conclude that I would simply be annoyed, just like in the old days.
The old ‘teach the controversy’ canard.
From my younger years I always remembered--perhaps because it is such strange phrasing to the modern ear--Jacob Bronowski quoting Crowell's "I beseech you in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken." (I think that should be used as a comeback more often. What do you say to that?)
You probably know this, but for those who don't, Bronowski was quoting Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658), revolutionary, general, and Lord Protector of England during the Commonwealth.
Not everyone knows that "bowels" meant something different then than it commonly does now.
From the Intertubes:
Innate compassion; the bowels were traditionally regarded as the seat of tender and sympathetic emotions, as in Colossians 3:12. From: bowels of mercy in The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable »
Both the King James Version and the Geneva Bible (favored by Puritans like Cromwell) have similar wording:
"Put on therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, bowels of mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, longsuffering; 13 Forbearing one another, and forgiving one another, if any man have a quarrel against any: even as* Christ forgave you, so also do ye." KJV
"12 Now therefore as the elect of God, holy and beloved, put on the bowels of mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, longsuffering:
13 Forbearing one another, and forgiving one another, if any man have a quarrel to another: even as Christ forgave, even so do ye." Geneva
Flanagan's just a terrible writer. Why an otherwise very good publication like The Atlantic keeps her around eludes me.
They also publish David Brooks. I like the Atlantic but ignore pieces written by these two.
Respectfully disagree. When she writes about neutral topics, or controversial topics where I agree with her, I find her writing lively, funny, and occasionally really insightful. But when she's wrong... wow, is she ever wrong.
(I read this particular piece before Kevin's post. It seemed, well, not very well reasoned or supported, but since it appears to be adapted from an entire book, I wondered if it would look better in context.)
We all tend to find writers more reasonable when they write something that agrees with our prior beliefs. Be wary of confirmation bias.
I absolutely agree. Notice that I didn't call her writing "reasonable" or persuasive, just "lively, funny, and occasionally really insightful", which is not the same thing. There are writers out there online that I never read, even though I'm pretty sure that I would agree with almost everything they would say.
"what are the odds that your side literally has a monopoly on good points?"
Significantly better than even. My side is in favor of adhering to scientific principles in every context. An initial conclusion may be off base, but we are rigorously skeptical of the assumptions ostensibly supporting the conclusion, and so we discover the flaws in our assumptions, learn from our mistakes, and employ what we've learned in the next iteration.
But don't tell anyone. It's a secret.
"Significantly better than even. My side is in favor of adhering to scientific principles in every context. An initial conclusion may be off base, but we are rigorously skeptical of the assumptions ostensibly supporting the conclusion, and so we discover the flaws in our assumptions, learn from our mistakes, and employ what we've learned in the next iteration."
This is of course false. Entire fields like psychology have been inundated with politically correct but unrepeatable findings.
But the errors are found by other psychologists following the scientific method, of which replication, exact and constructive, is an essential part. The replication crisis was a consequence of inappropriate incentives for researchers, not of flaws in the scientific method.
"...inappropriate incentives for researchers .."
The inappropriate incentives being little scrutiny of papers with purported findings appealing to lefties.
No, political leanings are not a significant factor. It was mostly reluctance of journal editors to publish negative results, and the ‘publish or perish’ culture of academia.
"No, political leanings are not a significant factor. ..."
So where are all the lousy papers catering to right wing prejudices?
You made a sweeping, ideologically driven claim about a field about which you clearly know little, without citing a shred of evidence, and now you are asking me?
Neither in academia nor industry do incentives favor ‘catering to political prejudices’.
"This is of course false."
This is of course false. The failure to adhere to scientific principles is not evidence that it is impossible.
Beware of self-fulfilling prophesies. If I assume I won't catch a fish, then I won't fish, and then I won't catch a fish. Same goes for adherence to scientific principles. This of course is self-evident!
If you grow up Catholic and halfway smart, you encounter the concept of the Devil's Advocate early on; if you're more than a little perverse, you get to like the concept. Wasn't it an admirable rhetorical skill in ancient Athens to be able to present convincing arguments for both sides of an issue? .
At the very least you learn how to create an armor-clad argument.
I was lucky to have some very good influences in school and training as a therapist. One thing I have never forgotten is to reflexively ask one's self: "what is my bias/agenda here?" Not if, but what. It's there, so how do I see it, understand it, and make it conscious? This parallels the critical theory we practiced in my English classes, where any part of a text that makes an assertion, claim, statement, is "problematized" (remember that one?), "pressured," subjected to intensive scrutiny. One effect of doing this for years is that you develop a kind of meta-awareness for thin or nonexistent argument, which I think might be the core reason American reactionaries have declared war on "critical [anything]”.
There is always bias. There is always an agenda. The first question is not “what’s yours?” but “what’s mine?” Because if I make this kind of self awareness a functional, moment to moment reality, then seeing, understanding, and responding to another’s becomes intuitive, perceptive, and automatic. Critical theory fundamentally changed the way I think, in a kind of remarkable way. If every American had some effective exposure to it we would be a better people.
Science is not supposed to proceed by making "arguments" for different "sides" and then somehow judging which side is better, like a jury in a trial. You are supposed to formulate hypotheses to explain the data, then devise tests which could falsify the hypotheses. A hypothesis which is not falsifiable is not technically a scientific hypothesis. The more tests that are successfully passed and the more rigorous they are, the better the hypothesis. A theory is supposed to be a hypothesis that has passed a lot of tests and not failed any.
Of course in reality people, even scientists, tend to think in terms of their own "side", and not what would disprove their hypothesis but what would make it look better. This is very much what Kevin does with his favorite hypothesis, the lead hypothesis to explain the 90's crime wave. He never discusses the things that are inconsistent with the hypothesis, only those that he thinks make it look better.
In societal matters there may literally be different sides to things like the Taft-Hartley Act - that is some people may lose and others gain. The gains and losses are not necessarily immediately material - what can often be most important is the status of a person or a group. Logic is lost when tribal dominance comes to the fore. Although of course personal or tribal dominance may ultimately be a matter of life or death, or it has been in the evolutionary past.
In my field (climatology) it’s rare that a hypothesis is actually falsifiable. The observational evidence is sparse and usually not complete enough to be conclusive. So for many important questions we often have two interpretations, both of which are plausible.
Thus - if for no other reason than to be clear about the point I’m making - it is essential for me to clearly state any differing interpretations in both the introduction and conclusion of a journal article. Honestly and fully, in my own words: what would be the implication if my interpretation is wrong? Else reviewers (editors will try to pick experts who disagree, but even ones who agree with me) are likely to reject the paper as biased and unscientific.
Sure, but it take less time and effort to come up with a simple rebuttal to a complicated argument, and that time might be better used elsewhere. For instance, one might simply quote a politician on some issue and not bother with the boring, tedious work of determining whether or not their statement is actually true. If that is good enough for the NYT, it is good enough for me.
"I ask when I read something is, "Does this guy have an axe to grind?""
My rule of skeptics rule of thumb is to require a level of evidence in direct proportion to how self serving is the argument being made.
Regarding this:
“Caitlan Flanagan has an odd piece in the Atlantic today asserting that American university professors are no longer interested in presenting both sides of controversial issues.”
Well, that was certainly my experience. Perhaps 1/3 of my fairly recent grad school program consisted of classes that match that description.
Here’s one example of what that means in practice: you sign up for a class on Composition Pedagogy assuming that the class will cover some measure of the wide range of theory on this potentially fascinating topic. Instead, you wind up in a class that teaches why composition teachers must be anti-racists.
How does the class do that? Well, every reading provided by the teacher is written by a self identified anti racist promoting antiracism. And all (or at least most) of these readings assail any and all other perspectives not just as wrong but as irredeemably evil.
And the quite obvious result is that no one in the class ever speaks their mind (unless they agree wholeheartedly with antiracism) since they don’t want to be associated with all those heretics constantly denounced in our entirely one-sided assignments.
And in our presentations and other contributions to the class, we weren’t asked to critique anything we’d read; the class simply engaged in an antiracist catechism in which students demonstrated that they’d learned the correct way to think. After all, how can you criticize infallible doctrine?
You may think I’m exaggerating, but one of the main things I learned in my grad study of Comp Pedagogy is that both the conservative critics and the Liberals still willing to speak out are right: higher Ed in our country is significantly, perhaps even shockingly, one-sided. And Comp pedagogy apparently has a well earned reputation as one of the more radicalized of the academic fields of study.
Here’s a fun example of what I’m talking about: an antiracist screed published by what was once the premier organization for promoting composition pedagogy (before it discredited itself): “This Ain’t Another Statement! This is a DEMAND for Black Linguistic Justice!” (Look it up)
Believe it or not, I tried to push back, but I tried in vain to do so politely. In two of the classes in question, I had the same professor, and I would request, fairly regularly, that additional perspectives be made available to the class. Those efforts were only marginally effective. Honestly, I was sometimes left with the genuine impression that the professor did not understand what I was asking for. Can you imagine, after all, asking a priest for arguments against his church?
So then I would simply proceed to incorporate other views into my own work. And I knew that I was risking some serious wrath and potential fallout by once referencing, in a presentation given to the class, a Comp scholar asserting that a standard form of American English can be a good thing by facilitating communication among people with different dialects and by providing potentially important tools for success. Seems pretty harmless, doesn’t it? But not to ideological fundamentalists.
So, yeah, Caitlan Flanagan has a point. Regarding Kevin’s observation that she doesn’t provide proof: fair enough. How does one do that? Because it is, in fact, important to document the sort of ideological capture of higher Ed that I and others have experienced. So how do we go about doing that?
One could pull syllabi from courses that feature debate and see if counterpoints are featured. I remember my African-American studies class being transformative to my thinking about race and politics without anyone mentioning 'racist'. Wonder if that holds today?
My experience with many academic liberals on this issue is that showing how gosh-darn mad they are about racism seems to be there way to feel angry, righteous, and good. Do they break bread or really know many people from a different race, particularly from a different socioeconomic class? Rarely.
"For any subject interesting enough to matter, both sides will have some good arguments" is not quite right.
On critical thinking: In my youth I had the pleasure of arguing both sides of the coin in mock trials and arguing the spectrum (as opposed to opposite) of sides on issues in a class taught by a former State of California librarian. Having said that...
First, it's not that there are good/bad arguments, as the bad ones are automatically dismissed. It's that there are valid arguments that aren't easily reconcilable with each other if at all. Often, there is nuance of circumstance when an argument is valid or invalid.
Second, most issues are not binary but for simplicity and convenience, we whittle down subjects to "both sides", which then dilutes the diversity of thought into an "us" and "them".
Debates teach students that any argument has two sides. It's good training for a career in party politics or the law, perhaps, but not for engaging in critical thinking. "Lord" Monckton for example might win applause at the Oxford Union for clever mockery of the case that climate change is happening, but he's still wrong. Any objective examination of the relevant evidence confirms it.
But unfortunately, Americans seem to get stuck in a binary mentality about practically everything these days, which impedes any constructive discussion about solving problems within each side. For instance, looking from abroad, it's pretty obvious America has a serious problem controlling immigration. But because the "sides" are locked into binary positions, even a slight departure from the doctrinaire position triggers furious criticism from within that same "side". Similar observations apply to issues from education to energy.
My university used to get exchange students from US universities. They tended to be excellent at making oral presentations in favor of an argument, but pretty unimpressive at written assignments which required extensive engagement with diverse litersture. I used to wonder in idle moments whether it reflected the emphasis on "debate" in their high school education.
Putting the subject of Caitlin Flannigan aside, a real question is indeed how to tackle a complex problem with some modicum of objectivity. Even in the natural sciences like physics, where there are measurements (mass, temperature, velocity, energy, etc...) how all the facts must be taken into account, leading sometimes to unforeseen consequences.
Issues become even more difficult when approaching biological problems, molecular biology, pharmacology, drug design, vaccine, health care, etc. Even in good faith, many experimental results in biology are not reproducible because unknown factors were at play. Identifying those factors then becomes a key to progress.
In the social sciences, it is even harder because one can hardly carry out any control experiment (except by comparing two very equivalent states when two different policies are tested -- and assuming that everything else "remains the same").
A real, honest scientist, recognizes this uncertainty and knows that every answer is tentative, until it is demonstrated to fall short. Fundamental scientists do have big arguments and disagreement, sometimes vicious ones even. Typically it mainly reflects power plays, lack of data, and deplorable stubbornness and other human traits that are beside the scientific question. But science still moves on through this however clumsily because there is an objective reality and ultimately the scientific community collectively wants to acquire real understanding and knowledge about the real world. Science is imperfect but the flaws are not at a level that the whole enterprise is undermined.
In social sciences, economy, policies, the debate are much more polarized at the start. People have already adopted the "answer" that they want, and then they just pick the facts that support their goal, and ignore the facts that contradicts them. In some case, laws have been passed to forbid acquiring undesirable facts (e.g., no public funds can be used to study the cause and consequences of gun violence). There is almost no effort at intellectual honesty here. There are facts, but they serve as window dressing to justify the end result that one wants. This is mainly a power play, disconnected from the facts as they exist.
"The good ones make their case by what they leave out..."
There's that. There's also Dunning Kruger. Some people just don't know what they don't know.
"[B]ut I didn’t know the first thing about fortifying it with facts, reason, logic—or the best argument of the side." And it sounds like she thought the key point was the last one, not the rest (though that's relying on Kevin's take because I can't read the full article).
I love this quote because it highlights how dumb so many of the arguments about this issue are. It's good to be alert to the possibility of arguments on the other side, and to think about whether they have merit or one's responses to them. But a huge number of opinion writers and journalists like to pretend this is the key to education, thoughtfulness, and critical thinking, when it's just a small part. Learning how to collect and assess facts and apply reason and logic are far more crucial and far harder to learn. And learning to be skeptical of what people are saying and their motivations and methods is far more important than learning to parrot that "both sides must have a point." Part of critical thinking is learning that sometimes they don't, or more often, sometimes one side is much less supported than the other side.
The people who love to rant about the need for more debate largely don't focus on facts, reason, and real skepticism, in part because in many instances, facts, reason, and logic tend to support certain arguments, policies, and statements. And within the range of actual political debate by the actual elected politicians in the USA (as opposed to twitter and outlier academic leftists), many current Republican views often don't look so good if you consider facts, reason, and logic. So, the point is everyone must embrace broad debate, where the conservative, Republican views are treated equally and without real judgment, and that's serious thinking. It's like they think the height of critical thinking is learning to think and argue at a middle school debate level, and then they think the flaw with higher education is that it's not recreating that environment.
"For any subject interesting enough to matter, both sides will have some good arguments."
This is absolutely untrue, as we can see all the time on this very blog. "The public should not be allowed to choose whether to eat lab meat" is one good example of a subject that matters, but only frivolous arguments can be made in its favor. "It's reasonable to repeatedly ask the Singaporian CEO of a social media company whether he's a Chinese Communist" would be another. "It's accurate to characterize a Biden family associate's testimony that no business dealings were improper as the opposite" would be still another.
And so on. All of these matter, and none of the proffered statements warrant extensive effort to refute. When the side that doesn't care about the truth floods the zone with bullshit, you're not obligated to carefully dismantle every argument.
+1