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Political correctness (PC) is the third great evil arising from Western civilization in the last century. PC and fascism are both derivatives of Marxism and both have their roots in the 1920s. However, unlike fascism and Marxism, PC is not restricted to a small number of countries, it pervades every country in the developed world right down to the level of the family. In this sense, the spread and acceptance of PC fascism (PC is a form of fascism) means that we are currently experiencing the darkest days of fascism so far experienced in the world. There has never been anything more anti-scientific or unjust in the history of Western culture.
A surprising result requires more evidence. In practice, this should mean that the onus of "proof" should lie with those who support the more surprising hypothesis.
Bayesian reasoning makes this clear:
P(hypothesis) = prior belief × strength of evidence
The prior is your degree of belief before viewing the data.
For example, given my prior beliefs, it would require a great deal more evidence to convince me that astrology works than I would require to convince me that it does not.
In classical statistics, the null hypothesis:
i) is that no difference exists; and
ii) is presumed to be true initially.
Note that from the outset the onus lies with those who hypothesize inequality, rather than those who support the more surprising hypothesis. The conventions of classical statistics (setting alpha less than beta) ensure that scientists bias their decision-making systems towards accepting the null hypothesis when it is false (type II error), in other words, failing to observe a difference when in truth there is one.
Political correctness dictates that—even when there is evidence to the contrary—one should assume by default that all things are equal. The politically correct, for example, will insist that the onus of ‘proof’ should lie with those who propose that the sexes or races are different. Given that there are obvious observable differences between the sexes and the races plus plenty of evidence for unobservable differences, this is clearly irrational. As another example, in the politically correct multicultural west all religions (along with atheism) are assumed to be equally valid, and it can even be an offence to criticise a religion (despite the fact that criticism is the only rational response to any religion). As a third example, PC fascists hate Bayesian methods, because Bayesian inference explicitly forces them to put their prejudices in the prior where everyone can see them. They put the onus on me to justify using Bayesian inference. Various distinct axiom systems developed to deal with uncertainty (the axiomatic approach, Dutch book argument, scoring rules and using a standard) all lead to probability. Also, Bayesian methods have not been bettered in over 200 years. Therefore, it would be surprising if Bayesian methods were not the best way of dealing with uncertainty, so the onus should lie firmly with the Bayesian skeptics to provide evidence.
Imagine that, being somewhat unhealthy, you’d never eaten fruit before. You are presented with an apple and an orange. Given that from the outside you can see that they are different colours, different textures, different smells and slightly different shapes, would you expect that
a) they are the same inside; or
b) they are different inside?
The rational answer is b) but the PC answer is a).
The twin evils of the egalitarianism of political correctness and null hypothesis testing are self reinforcing. Regardless of the evidence, political correctness dictates that one should prefer the hypothesis that two or more things are equal. Moving up a level, the ‘things’ that the PC claim are equal may be hypotheses.
The politically correct dictate that multiculturalism is good, and ignore the evidence which portrays it in a bad light (such as the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, the 7 July 2005 London bombings and Iraq). Every human being is equipped with the same psychology—of perceiving their membership of their own community, race or nation as an ‘in-group’—whereas other foreigners belong to an ‘out-group’. Indeed, Vanhanen (1999) found that ethnic heterogeneity was strongly correlated with institutionalized ethnic conflict. Therefore, a priori, it is far from self-evident that multiculturalism is inherently good. Mass immigration means that the middle classes can get a cheap plumber; but there is a cost. Cheap imported (mostly male) labour displaces home-grown working class men. On the plus side, multiculturalism offers an enticingly exotic gene pool to the opposite sex. On balance, it may be, or it may not be a good thing; that is not the point here. The point is that the PC dictate what you should believe.
Political correctness dictates that men and women are equal. That's not ‘deserve equal opportunities’, they believe, insist and dictate that the are actually equal. But there is no symmetry, the PC, via feminism, have decided that women (at the expense of men) require privileges. This means that women end up displacing possibly better qualified men.
The irony is that although political correctness emerges where liberalism and leftism intersect, it is totalitarian and it is working class men who suffer the most. Therefore, the liberal left are quite literally working against themselves! I have attempted to show why here.
Lawrence Summers was pushed out of the Harvard presidency for academic honesty (he actually considerably understated his argument). That was a disgrace. The current president, Drew Gilpin Faust, ran the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study which is one of the most powerful incubators of feminist complaint and nonsensical academic theory in the US. This is worrying. The triumph of political correctness over science and meritocracy in the most influential university in the world does not bode well for science or progress.
British universities muzzle their academic staff, too. Chris Brand was sacked from his 27-year tenured position at Edinburgh University in 1997 for his opinions. Last year Dr Frank Ellis was suspended from Leeds University for restating what has been known for half a century. Of the eight signatories on the letter published in the Sunday Times in support of Frank Ellis, only one had its roots in a British University, and that was Chris Brand. It would appear that political correctness also breeds cowardice.
Helmuth Nyborg, one of the most cited Danish psychologists, had a paper on intelligence pass peer review in Personality and Individual Differences (Nyborg 2005). Because of his politically incorrect findings (that men have a higher mean IQ than women), Aarhus University assembled a committee to investigate accusations of scientific malfeasance and fraud. They found errors but no fraud. In 2006 he was suspended and then given a ‘severe reprimand’.
In October 2007 James Watson, the Nobel Prize-winning co-discoverer of DNA, stated publicly that Africans are less intelligent than Europeans. Despite the fact that Dr Watson's statement was true (Malloy 2007), and should not have even been controversial, he was widely condemned by the media, the Science Museum cancelled his talk, the Bristol Festival of Ideas cancelled an appearance, he was been suspended from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and forced to cancel his tour of the UK. That a Nobel Prize-winning scientist is heavily vilified for telling the truth is an absolute disgrace. For more on the story, see James D. Watson.
Orchestrated mob rule has been used to intimidate professors Michael Levin, J. Phillipe Rushton, Chris Brand, Arthur Jensen and Hans Eysenck.
US universities in particular are some of the most PC fascist places on the planet. Throughout the west, the PC liberal left in academia have formed their own smug (and totalitarian) in-group.
Neither is the British judiciary immune. In his book Institutional Injustice the former president of the Law Society, Martin Mears, provides plenty of evidence that the courts are deeply biased and hopelessly infected with all the worst aspects of political correctness.
Miller (1994) uses Bayesian reasoning to show that groups such as races, sexes, ethnic groups and age classes are, in general, relevant to problems of selection for school and employment. The implications go further than dismissing positive discrimination and recommending that people are treated as individuals, the paper proves that discrimination on the basis of the group that one belongs to is quite rational.
Filters out the politically correct!
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