Leftists have a big bag of tricks to get people to go along with their agenda of social control. One of them is to create seemingly scientific arguments that bolster the need for more government, but which are built upon faulty statistics.
In today’s Martin Center article, David Randall of the National Association of Scholars addresses this serious problem. Randall writes, “In September 2022, three researchers published the provocatively titled article, ‘Do Introductory Courses Disproportionately Drive Minoritized Students Out of STEM Pathways?’ That article got loads of social media publicity for its conclusion that unequal withdrawal rates from STEM degree tracks are due to systemic racism.”
Horrors — more racism keeping “minoritized” students from good careers. Proof that America must be transformed. Right?
Wrong. Randall continues, “The scholarly article is bunk. Professor Lee Jussim, a man who has considerable experience in detecting scientific emperors without clothes, eviscerated it on Substack.”
Unfortunately, lots of clueless people believed the conclusion. Worse, such shoddy “research” now abounds in academia, nearly always done to propel “progressivism.”
Randall correctly observes, “The monolithic politicization of science and social-science professionals, alas, is likely to become worse. A growing minority of these professionals have become committed to addressing the intellectual and institutional failures that have led to the irreproducibility crisis, including politicized groupthink. At the same time, unfortunately, the radical advocates in charge of higher education have significantly tightened the politicization of the sciences and the social sciences.”
He suggests that we need to focus on providing the statistical training that will enable more people to spot and call out bogus research.