American IQ scores have rapidly dropped, proving the 'Reverse Flynn effect'

Careful here. STEM definitely requires critical thinking, but crtical thinking is not just 'formal proofs', which is only useful when you're dealing with problems that are already obviously formalizable. This is not the case with the majority of problems in the humanities, e.g. history, literature, and large swathes of philosophy where data is qualitative.

Humanities majors are equipped with their own toolbox of concepts the same way STEM majors are equipped with theirs. For example, a philosophy major would learn important distinctions such as analytic/synthetic, extension/intension, descriptive/prescriptive, a priori/a posteriori, ontological/epistemological, type/token and so on. These are not concepts that you read once and remember and you've 'learned' them. It takes a lot of reading and writing and thinking and arguing over the course of years to grok. When done well, it can greatly illuminate a problem. Expressing the argument formally or in symbolic logic is usually a trivial exercise afterwards, the nature of philosophical inquiry puts the 'critical thinking' prior to the formal parts.

For example, consider the SEP article on Two-Dimensional Semantics: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/two-dimensional-semantics...

The article is riddled with formal sections containing matrices and symbolic logic. But these are not the argument itself, and the people who came up with this framework did not arrive at this analytically through formal proofs. Rather, the formal aspects are only used to aid the intuition and remove ambiguity for readers. The bulk of the thinking requires creative and precise conceptual analysis that borrows and reinterprets a variety of well-trodden ideas in other areas of philosophy.

The more sociological and cultural departments of humanities probably have their own set of skills that are considered their versions of critical thinking. I imagine in cultural theory, one probably needs to know several interpretations of history to analyze their problems, since that fields literally deals with how historical baggage muddies the way we even define said problems to begin with. A STEM education, in a vacuum, is not going to be equipped with those tools. Why would they be? To think critically about cultural theory requires understanding facts that are embedded in its subject specific concepts. My ability to work through proofs in discrete mathematics is not going to be helpful here. But my ability to analyze history through say, systems of power is probably going to be necessary. That kind of thinking is missing from STEM, and trivially so -- it literally has nothing to do with STEM.

That is not a failure or criticism of STEM. That would be akin to criticizing English Lit departments for not engaging with math. But (and this is often the context "critical thinking" as a boon that the humanities offers is brought up) being able to recognize a politician's actions as bullshit is going to require more than just 'formal proof' -- it's going to require an ability to sort through social, historical, qualitative, ethical, and philosophical landmines. That ability is critical thinking.

Your post all sounds very good. Have an upvote!

But here's the thing. How does this critical thinking methodology fit in with the strong leftward tilt? I don't know of any successful Marxist societies (forcible or voluntary), so why do critical thinkers think they can get Marxism to work?

Here's a topical example:

https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/violent-enough-to-stand-...

When the facts don't fit Marxist theory, the researcher gets cancelled.

Here's what I see is the difference between humanities critical thinking, and STEM critical thinking. In STEM, if you design an airplane, and the airplane doesn't fly, no amount of wishful thinking and rhetorical reframing is going to make it fly. The humanities have no such constraint.

For another example, Seattle recently completed a $1 Billion new terminal at Seatac to accommodate new larger planes. After it was finished, they discovered that the airplanes did not fit in the slots for them. There's just no way to spin that one into a success.

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/sea-t...

The strong leftward tilt is because part of the political ideology of the left is that society is not currently already leftist (it obviously isn’t — we live in a capitalist world) and critical theorists analyze our society under the historical and structural conditions as to why our society is the way it is. More quantifiable explanations are going to draw from anthropology, economics, sociology and political science. More qualitative explanations are necessarily more philosophical, so that means drawing from thinkers like Marx. That should be expected.

That does not mean that every person in those departments is a communist. Marx simply did a lot of early table-setting for critiquing capitalism. Later thinkers did a lot to extend and refute him, so I don’t think it’s entirely fair to say that critical theorists are trying to make “Marxism work”. To my knowledge, orthodox Marxists hate a lot of critical theory. Foucault, for example, is widely read in these circles, but as much as he criticized capitalism and society, he was ultimately a neoliberal. Politics is messy and critical theory is not a monolith.

The wishful thinking part cuts both ways. Leftists members of the academy would probably criticize liberals for wishful thinking that say, the capitalist status quo with some modifications could actually save us from climate catastrophe, or that the most sensitive and important parts of being human are not lost when we live under what they consider a structurally unjust system. Or the blind optimism that the “moral arc of history bends towards justice”.

Given that Marxist-Leninism has failed (although MLs would argue otherwise), I agree with the sentiment that it would be unwise to “try it again”. But an honest and charitable engagement with Marx would show that the claims he makes are rather minimal and broad. His relevance is tied to the fact that he can be reinterpreted, and it would be wrongheaded to see it as any more dogmatic than run of the mill non-leftist, folk politics. The guy simply had a lot to say about the industrial revolution.

You're not rebutting Walter's argument successfully. Everything you've said there is extremely subjective, difficult to pin down and mostly an emotional argument to begin with. Even your starting "obvious" premise that society isn't already leftist would get howls of disagreement from many quarters of society and because nothing that comes out of the humanities is in any way precise or rigorous it would be impossible to even resolve that dispute. You wouldn't even ever get to the point of arguing about whether Marx's claims were really "minimal" (lol) or whether he has "relevance" or was not "dogmatic"!

Whereas we built an airport and the plane doesn't fit is something not something anyone can argue about. Either the planes fit or they don't. Humanities academia devolves into Marxism so fast exactly because it's not pinned down by reality in that way, which is why it should just be abolished. Why should the rest of us be forced to pay for gibberish like "cyborg techno-feminism"?

> data is qualitative

I always felt that just means it's poorly defined. If you can't precisely define what exactly it is you are arguing about and what are the premises in play then we are just wasting everyone's time.

> It takes a lot of reading and writing and thinking and arguing over the course of years to grok.

But that's just learning the domain.

I'm under the impression that humanities people claim that they can think in a different way that STEM people can't.

Frankly, I feel almost everything can be processed via first order logic - I know there are some really niche things that can't.

> How does this critical thinking methodology fit in with the strong leftward tilt? I don't know of any successful Marxist societies (forcible or voluntary), so why do critical thinkers think they can get Marxism to work?

Frankly this way of talking about humanities as a whole does betray lack of critical thinking on itself. For start, back in real world and in real actual universities, critical thinking does not mean Marxism.

> When the facts don't fit Marxist theory, the researcher gets cancelled.

If you mean this as a statement about actual universities, this is a lie. I mean, so much that it seems more like talking point from TV designed to make people agree with actual legislature banning actual books.

> "cyborg techno-feminism"?

Naomi Wu is an excellent engineer and a luminary for the DIY space.

> always felt that just means it's poorly defined.

No, it just means that it’s qualitative. Why would qualitative descriptions of entities mean it’s poorly defined? Take for example in philosophy of mind where qualitative descriptions of the colour red are more relevant to the discussion than quantitative descriptions of it, such as it’s frequency on the electromagnetic spectrum. In this example, having a qualitative description of the colour red, or a qualitative description of what qualia is (if it were to exist) is actually necessary in order to engage with the problem.

> Frankly, I feel almost everything can be processed via first order logic - I know there are some really niche things that can't.

What do you mean by processed?

There’s a difference between whether propositions can be expressed in first order logic vs. whether the argumentation itself is derived from first order logic. People did not sit down with a table of axioms to figure out all of aerodynamics by decree. Like many fields of inquiry, it took deduction, induction, abduction, and the scientific method. Writing things down via first order logic came after.

Your average philosophy graduate student is comfortable expressing virtually any proposition in first order logic, or even other types of symbolic logic. But I can assure you that modal arguments regarding, say, philosophy of mind, are conceived and argued in prose, with symbolic modal logic being used to aid the reader. What does that tell you about “processing via first order logic”?

You’re making a lot of criticisms, but you haven’t shown me why what I’ve said is extremely subjective, or why it’s an emotional argument.

First of all, it is obvious that society isn’t already leftist. If you’re citing “many quarters of society howling in disagreement”, you’ll have to show me to 1) the data and 2) this somehow changes the actual nature of our society. Do you actually think that we live in a leftist society? I certainly do not see a plurality of worker co-ops walking down the street, and last I checked, the vast majority of the means of production are still privately owned. I am not going to explain my argument again as to why this gives critical theory a leftist bent.

Your argument seems to be motivated by the fact you don’t like some of the conclusions drawn out by academics in the humanities because they don’t fit your priors. To me, it’s obvious you fall right Dunning-Kruger’s trap, having read and understood virtually nothing about the subjects in question if you’re citing “cyborg techno feminism” as an example of “Marxist devolution”. You’re really proving the point here that a lack of engagement with the humanities leads to a lack critical thinking.

To make a long complicated story short, Marxism is the study of how class contradictions resolve themselves. Using Hegelian dialectics, it poses different classes against each other and theorizes what the synthesis would become. It could be said that this (and branching philosophies like critical theory) is the ultimate end result of Western philosophy, hence the leftward tilt of the humanities.

In an ideal sense, Marxist theory should be capable of updating itself to match actual conditions. In a degenerated dogmatic sense, it can be used to force actual conditions to fit within a narrow and false theory.

There is no end to the different interpretations of Marxism and the arguments and debates between them, because there's only so many real world examples that could be tested and examined.

Compared to an engineering problem, Marxist theory ends up touching so many fields and variables on a global scale that the problem space ends up being orders of magnitude greater. There's too much to examine and make sense of, so interpretations end up being strategies on how to navigate through this problem space and how to achieve Marxist theories and goals, either orthodixcally or heterodoxically.

In the example of that anthropologist, it does not go into detail with what the Marxists disagreed with. However, I think a Marxist argument could be made for the wars over women in that their society is of a more primitive stage where stealing women was a part of their socioeconomics. Their system works out so that a population equilbirum is achieved.

In works like Engel's On the Origin of the Family..., there is a Marxist interpretation of how humans orient themselves accordingly to the Marxist theory that the base economics form the superstructure of the culture and society. In more advanced societies, they went through agricultural revolutions that vastly increased the population and reshaped how societies must function to keep order.

Another example of Marxist theory gone wrong could be the USSR, and you have Marxists either defending or condemning it for various reasons. It could then be said that the Chinese Marxists learned from the USSR to create their own branched off lineage to prevent similar collapse and to forge their own path towards the Marxist stages of socialism and communism. (And of course you have Marxists condemning China too. Tl;Dr: the arguments are largely either China must develop before being advanced enough for socialism or China must advance to a socialist stage or else it will gravitate back towards complete capitalist control.)

Edit: That being said, while STEM has rigorous methodologies to verify truths, the fields can also be swept up by orthodoxies and heterodoxies and different interpretations. There's always been the derisive websh*t meme for fads on Hacker News. Or there's the unsolved problems in physics with different interpretations to resolve them. The scientific process did have its roots in philosophical developments after all.

If you believe Dunning-Kruger is fictitious, you can't use it as an appellation on those who don't.

I'm not sure how you define a "Marxist society", but if this means an economic system where there's no notion of owning capital to collect economic rent from it, then MAREZ (Zapatistas) would seem to qualify.

To some extent also AANES (Rojava). Although that one is a hybrid economy where co-ops and wage labor small businesses coexist, it's roughly a 80/20 split in favor of the former, although there's no clear line there as some co-ops use wage labor as well. For the most part, this happens because the local councils actively support co-ops with loans, so organizing as one gives you an initial advantage.

There's also a "Marxist-Leninist society" where it is a transitional one to socialism and communism like the USSR and China.

Yes, I was pointing out the irony.

> If you can't precisely define what exactly

Or if no one can define or agree on the definition those subjects should just be ignored by everyone?

In economics for instance if you try to achieve this you can often end with an oversimplified model which mostly pointless and not particularly useful unless you're writing a schoolbook for undergraduates.

In a way it might be closer to medicine than to more exact sciences (just with no way to directly test your hypothesis...). You're analyzing a very complex dynamic system with many unknown or not easily definable or measurable variables. Even if you manage to come up with a model which makes sense it might be suddenly become nearly useless when something unpredicted in that system changes.

> that they can think in a different way that STEM people can't

Maybe they can and maybe they can't, I guess that depends on the individual. But you ussually do need to think in certain ways which are likely to not be very familiar to some people whose only background is in exact sciences.

The irony doesn't work if it's based on something that one claims is logically fictitious.

> critical thinking does not mean Marxism

I didn't say it did. I said that there's something wrong with the critical thinking that goes on in the humanities department when they wind up advocating Marxism, despite Marxism having a dismal historical record of relentless failure.

Marxist failures are always written off as being caused by not being "true" Marxism.

STEM has had many false theories (like the sun revolves around the earth). The virtue of STEM is when the facts contradict the theories, the theories get revised, even if the old guard has to die off before the corrected theory replaces it. With Marxism, however, the facts get re-written to conform to Marxism, rather than the other way around.

One of the beauties of the scientific method is it tests the predictions a theory makes. If the predictions come true, the theory is validated. If the predictions don't pan out, the theory is false.

A famous example is Einstein's Relativity theory predicted that gravity bends light. Einstein became world famous when decades later, this bending was observed.

Marxist theory also makes predictions, but none of those predictions pan out. This never discourages the critical thinkers in the humanities, which leaves me unimpressed with the critical thinking skills of it.

Critical thinking != Critical Theory

This is a seriously cold take that’s infamously descended from Karl Popper’s argument that Marxism is unscientific. It’s obviously the case that Marxism is unscientific under Popper’s criterion of falsifiability for science, but

1) it’s contentious in Popper’s field itself on whether this criterion is right (it is generally accepted today that he is wrong) and

2) it’s contentious on whether Popper even understands Marx’s theory of history, which is where his criticism comes from, and

3) even if we decide by fiat that the predictions made by Marxism are unscientific, that does not preclude it from being a source of knowledge, or prevent Marxism from being imported as a normative political or ethical framework.

The whole “not true Marxism” thing usually comes from the mouths of people who’ve never read Marx, let alone explicitly non-Marxist thinkers who were influenced by Marx. In other words, the kinds of people who have never given this serious thought at all, but have likely watched some YouTube videos or read a couple articles. There is really no such thing as “true Marxism”. Marxism in practice has ranged from the USSR to Zapatista, which are very different from one another, but they are both no more “truly Marxist” than the other. The only person who could decide that is probably the guy himself, who is long dead.

>This never discourages the critical thinkers in the humanities, which leaves me unimpressed with the critical thinking skills of it.

If nuance and actual engagement with primary source material (as opposed to whatever it is you’re doing) does not count as “critical thinking”, then I strongly believe we cannot have any further discussion here.

I don't believe Marxism would work in practice, I believe you'd always just get a _different_ one percenter class composed of party leaders instead of business owners, but I'm not sure that it's actually been given a fair trial. To steel man their argument, communist countries always had the world's top economic and military superpowers like USA doing whatever to could to prevent communism from spreading. I'm no history surgeon, but I can't think of a time when it was tried without external interference.

> Or if no one can define or agree on the definition those subjects should just be ignored by everyone?

Don't see why we can't have multiple mutually exclusive definitions, as long as they are clearly defined, then we can have different lines of argument - kind of like with geometry and the parallel postulate; and which one reality matches is a separate issue we can independently investigate.

> Maybe they can and maybe they can't, I guess that depends on the individual. But you ussually do need to think in certain ways which are likely to not be very familiar to some people whose only background is in exact sciences.

I'm curious as to exactly how the thinking is different. An example would be nice.

> Take for example in philosophy of mind where qualitative descriptions of the colour red are more relevant to the discussion than quantitative descriptions of it, such as it’s frequency on the electromagnetic spectrum.

How is it more relevant? Is there some property of the color red that physics doesn't cover?

> Your average philosophy graduate student is comfortable expressing virtually any proposition in first order logic, or even other types of symbolic logic.

So can mathematicians and most engineers. So we are on the same level.

So what is it that students of humanities supposedly can do that STEM can't?

Well, they claimed to have socialism and to be building communism, but Marx himself would hardly approve or consider it "socialism" if comparing notes. There's a reason why Lenin and company were seen as hacks by many Marxists of their time.

But I don't think Walter had that degree of precision in mind when he said "Marxist". It sounded more like a generic label for anti-capitalist left to me, so I went with the broad definition to match that.

It is poorly defined: that is why it isn't maths, yet.

What is the purpose of philosophy? In its most basic sense to teach one how to live a good life. Abstract concepts like justice, fairness, ideal social structures, social values flow from this basic question.

Any precise definition of any of the above concepts is open to question, and societies and institutions to some extent embody sets of answers to them. The domain evolves over time, ideas change, pressures brought about by various outside phenomena change.

After all, we are simply a collection of organisms evolving in an environment that we don't understand, according to rules we dimly discern.

This is not to contribute to any STEM vs the humanities fight: it's fundamentally an arbitrary division of knowledge, and neither side benefits from the division. The STEM side is prone to a naive scientism and an amorality that is much to the detriment of the species. On the other hand, the humanities has unfortunately largely devolved into a sort of philosophical rag and bone yard.

Frankly, both sides should get together and have sex for a while. Something might come out of it.

They can make fluffy, borderline poetic phrases like "qualitative descriptions of the color red" that, frankly, mean nothing. Emotional sure, but the actual quality of a color is its wavelength for instance.