A Columbia intellectual’s baseless police-shooting claim is just one example in a troubling genre.
A Columbia intellectual’s baseless police-shooting claim is just one example in a troubling genre.
W e need to talk about today’s critical mass of unimpressive “experts.”
Just a week or so back, at the end of July, Columbia and UCLA law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw — the founder of “intersectional” theory — took to Twitter/X to argue a point. As she passionately put it: “Black women make up less than 10% of the population, yet when it comes to killings by police, we make up a 3rd of them, with the majority unarmed. And that’s exactly what happened with Sonya Massey. #SayHerName.” This post, so far, has received 1,800 likes and has been shared 1,200 times.
The only problem here is that Crenshaw is wildly, almost bizarrely wrong. In reality, a simple trip over to the excellent Killed by Police database maintained by the hardly right-wing Washington Post reveals that exactly 84 of the 9,229 citizens who were fatally shot by American police over the past decade were black women. This breaks down to .9 percent of the database, or about one thirty-seventh of the tenured academic’s estimate. The total number of unarmed black women shot, across all of at least recorded time, appears to be nine.
Going further, far less than 100 unarmed women of all races have ever been shot by on-duty law enforcement officers (LEOs). Ninety-five percent of all victims recorded in the data set have been conclusively identified as male. This pattern is typical of crime and violence more broadly, as it happens. While society quite properly spends a great deal of time condemning violence against women and girls (VAWG), this is precisely because it is so aberrational. Men are not only more likely to commit, but also far more likely to be victims of, most nonsexual crimes (think brawling): In the typical and frequently used year of 2019, 4,716 FBI-recorded murder victims (72 percent) were men, and just 1,857 (28 percent) were women. Crenshaw’s claim, in short, was off on every particular.
This actually matters, and a broader point grows from it. Crenshaw is “not some random clown,” to quote the title of a popular recent book on sport (which some may call satire). She is the generally recognized founder of intersectional theory — which is the, um, fascinating idea that more than one variable may influence the life outcomes of individuals. It would be no exaggeration to say that she is one of the 50 or so most influential public intellectuals in the world. But her very confident and simple takes on an important social issue like policing are falsifiable in seconds — and I simply do not believe that this single example stands alone.
During the past few years, across a range of settings far more formal than Elon Musk’s X, well-read citizens have seen “incorrect expert” almost become a genre — as we have witnessed the collapse of a good number of supposedly empirical academic paradigms popular with the political Left: “racial resentment,” “implicit bias,” “stereotype threat,” and Dr. Ibram X. Kendi’s idea that performance gaps between racial groups are largely or entirely related to racism, to name a few.
Racial resentment — the idea that mere agreement with statements a la “black people should pull themselves up by their bootstraps, like the Irish and Italians did” is an effective measure of latent white prejudice — faltered embarrassingly when recent research revealed that many minority taxpayers also strongly agree with them. “Implicit bias” scores — an attempt to measure even more subtle racism by looking at how quickly individuals associate faces of different ethnicities and ages with positive traits — have rather famously turned out not to correlate with any real-world behaviors. And, after years of cringe-inducing writing on how teacher stereotyping must be the thing holding back minority youth, the biggest single predictor of academic success remains time spent studying — and Asians and South Asians (and many West Africans) lap whites.
The first question to arise from a smart layman, in light of all this, would likely be: “The hell? How can this keep happening — and always in one political direction?” In response to that, several points are worth unpacking. The first is the simplest: Many modern “experts” in the soft sciences (and within the media) are not very smart. A remarkable number of Americans attend university at least to the BA or MA level: At present, 59.3 percent of Asians, 41.8 percent of all whites, and 27.6 percent of blacks not merely pursue but complete the first of those degrees — and a huge chunk of them then go on to graduate school.
As a result, as the edgy but statistically sound Twitter user I/O has pointed out, the average IQ for an American degree holder logically has to have regressed back to about the population mean: He provides an estimate of 105 even for graduate-degree holders.
Dr. Kendi himself has spoken quite openly and earnestly about only scoring 1000 or so on the SAT. Given this, and also given the prevalence of relatively low-scoring “legacies” — who are often Caucasian — from some of the more selective colleges, a simple answer to the question of why today’s woke experts keep getting it wrong presents itself: Maybe they’re just not that brilliant.
Whatever role that factor plays in this arena, an even bigger issue is bias. Per an astonishing finding about “the prevalence of Marxism in academia,” currently housed on the EconLib data resource website, about 18 percent of social-science professors today identify as Marxists or communists. Another 24 percent ID themselves as political radicals, and another 21 percent are “activists.” In contrast, in American society at large, roughly one-half of 1 percent of all citizens identify as communists.
Given the findings of basic attitudinal research, this sort of deeply bizarre imbalance almost certainly contributes to an environment where ideas that are bad and silly, but which appeal to majority-position ideologues, are kept around for as long as is ethically possible and tested only in the most slanted and gentle ways imaginable. And, at the fringes, things get considerably worse. Bad- or questionable-faith actors not infrequently conduct research that seems designed to smuggle “evidence” for incorrect theories into the mainstream.
For example, researchers such as the psychiatrist Jack Turban have studied the rate of regret among “trans youth” primarily by surveying those teens still in contact with their transition doctor. However, by definition, few if any detransitioners are — while there are 54,000 of them here, who might easily be surveyed or interviewed but rarely are. Similarly, as Based Camp writer and “Baby-maxxer” Malcolm Collins recently pointed out on the popular Dad Save America podcast, almost all “gentle parenting” research that finds that spanking has a negative effect on child behavior does not use controls. This is to say, what scholars have found is that, almost entirely, children who behave badly are spanked more often. They then assume, on the basis of very little, that the correlation there cuts in the opposite direction. As Collins noted, improving research designs to include a basic before-and-after analysis results in the discovery of modest, but statistically significant, positive effects of non-abusive physical discipline.
There is a final problem with today’s level of reliance on mediocre experts, often quite separate from the accuracy of the individual predictions that they make. As millions of Americans now go on to university and obtain degrees in such fields as sales, hospitality management, and kinesiology/physical exercise, we are beginning to formalize much of life — including things adults always just did. Codes of “best practices” similar to the compilations of ideal statutes used in the law have recently been drawn up to regulate sex and parenting; dating and consent guidebooks reaching into dozens of pages are omnipresent on the university campus.
In practice, almost no one appears to actually follow these artificially complex standards. A half-joking but anonymous and large-N poll on one of my social-media accounts indicated that only about 18 percent of married and dating adults conform to the theoretical campus standard of seeking “explicit, enthusiastic, preferably provable consent . . . while totally sober” even three-quarters of the time. In fact, 67.4 percent of all respondents, a group that (per qualitative comments) included a majority of women, never or almost never meet it.
There are obvious reasons for this. Applying rules of legalistic procedure that are suitable to a courtroom to day-to-day interactions strikes most people as absurd. Imagine the reaction to your swatting a glass of Riesling out of your wife’s hand on date night and then formally asking “Is this okay?” before every kiss. Cupid wept. However, many upper-middle-class citizens, living in today’s overregulated world, must constantly — at some level — feel that they are doing things that are wrong or taboo or “against guidance.”
A revolt is overdue, and it is time to say the obvious. Expert advice is simply not required to complete almost all of the everyday tasks of life, which our therapy-free ancestors largely got done better than we do today. Further, many academic ideas — one in three of the people shot by law enforcement are black women, working hard to please your spouse is “domestic slavery” — are silly and wrong, and taking them seriously is far less likely to bring about success in life than is following the dictates of plain common sense.
Let’s permanently retire ideas like “unquantifiable misogynoir,” and recognize that many of the people ranting about them from behind academic or media podiums should be stocking shelves somewhere or managing a Walgreens.