I think we're raising whole generations who regard facts as more or less optional
"They're being taught that it's important to have views, and they're not being taught that it's important to know what you're talking about. It's important to hear the opposite viewpoint, and more important to learn how to distinguish why viewpoint A and viewpoint B are different, and which one has the most evidence or logic behind it. They disregard that. They hear something, they hear some rhetoric, and they run with it."
Join the Discussion
[This comment was removed]
I don't think it's ever not been that way. Only now you've given a soap box to everyone in the world.
Thomas Sowell, in his twenties, was what polite society would now call a Marxist-Leninist. As respected and revered a figure as he is in conservative circles today, he was once a devoted Stalinist. Proving there's no zealot like the converted, Sowell now rages against a left that he understands expressly in terms of his former Communist self.
Funny to see him raging against misguided youth, even though projection like that is the fabric of his work for the last fifty-odd years. Known himself to argue from his assumptions rather than from knowledge, for instance theorizing that women are not discriminated against in the workplace so much as they are busy with children and housework, here he scolds new generations for his own predilections.
Considered a fount of wisdom among such greats as Ted Cruz and Michele Bachmann, Sowell’s world may not have changed since the Kennedy Administration, but somehow he keeps cranking out columns and think-pieces like this. Gives me hope for my dotage.
What do you define as knowledge? The wealth disparity study was the result of years of statistical research and scientific method. His findings from said study are what you are discussing. He clearly states them as conclusions here.
edit* He discusses his motivations for his slow transition to his present beliefs, here. I'm not sure it's right to say that someone who has dedicated his entire life to the study economics has acquired no new knowledge or understanding on one of the most widespread economic systems.
You’ll be relieved then that nobody's making that claim. People that I respect and enjoy turn out to respect and enjoy Sowell. Me, I’m not feeling the magic. When a new column comes along and if I happen to find it, I will give it a go. Ultimately, though, it seems to me that he's shadow boxing with himself.
Brilliant as people tell me he is, his political economic schtick, which he might call his defense of traditional values and insider’s perspective into the evils of collectivization, strikes me as a completely fossilized world view and whatever latest improvisation on stale conservative dogma.
As towering geniuses go, maybe he’s everything people who share that entrenched perspective say he is. I am underwhelmed, even when, as you link above, he takes the civil rights movement down a peg or two whilst sitting with a leading segregationist.
Thank you for pointing that out more eloquently than I can.
24 Hour news cycles and the Internet, they give a previously silent now have the ability to shout from the mountain tops what they think and not have to worry about hearing anybody else. Throw in the way we act we not getting our way, things like You're racist, you're intolerant, you suck, you're an ass, go fuck yourself come up in seemingly innocent topics where that language wasn't really needed... it's a world of horrors. When we don't have to be accountable for our world view, we don't need facts, we don't need to be tolerant of another opinion, we just don't have time to deal with opposing views, you are with us or against us and that's what things usually come down to now. All you need to see is Washington, DC to learn about this, bipartisanship is pretty much gone. You either need to be left or right, you can't be in the middle anymore and that's a shame because most people, they're in the middle somewhere and they are still silent while the loudest of people make mockery's of us all.
Facts are inconvenient, all you need are "cites" ;-)
...go on...