Too intellectually limited - ouch!

A very nice summary of a recent controversy, The Timothy Hunt Witch Hunt by Jonathan Foreman. Too often, something comes up, there is all sorts of noise and cognitive pollution borne along by tidal waves of emotional reasoning. Only later, sometimes much later, does someone sort through the intellectual debris and come back with a full report of what actually happened. Not uncommonly what happened was not what was perceived to have happened.

With the recent tenth anniversary of Katrina, someone republished such a post facto summary of what actually occurred as opposed to what was reported to have happened at the time (Katrina: What the Media Missed by Lou Dolinar). Undoubtedly the hurricane was a tragedy and undoubtedly the political system (local, state and federal) missed many opportunities for a better response. But, contrary to much of the partisan reporting at the time, the operational aspects of the Katrina response were far, far better than reported.

Regrettably, most post-facto summaries are downplayed and so it can be many months or years before you discover the real circumstances. Who remembers the Air France Flight 447 which disappeared over the South Atlantic. It took two or three years after the crash to discover the wreckage and then another year or so to piece together what happened. I came across a good review of the current state of knowledge last year and Wikipedia is always there for a more bare-bones summary. But I would wager for every 1,000 people who were aware of the Air France Flight 447 crash at the time, only one or two know what actually happened.

A recent example is the controversy around comments the esteemed scientist Tim Hunt made at a conference in South Korea in early June. A third-wave feminist sent out several tweets either lying about his comments or misrepresenting them (depending on your interpretation). The tweets were false but picked up by a New York Times reporter without checking and amplified from there. There was two or three months of increasing exposure of the lies and misrepresentations but of course by then the reading eye had moved on.

Foreman's is a good summary of the timeline and his reporting is consistent with all the evidence I have seen. This was a terrible event with major damage done to a fine man at the hands of despicable cognitive lowlifes. But who will now pay attention to the truth as opposed to the SJW lies? More to the point, the university which employees the woman who started this mob has not fired her nor has been the New York Times "reporter", two individuals who clearly did much damage with ill-intent and no regard for truth or accuracy. Actually, the latter is also a professor of journalism at MIT. What is it with universities harboring radicals of low intellect?

Foreman observes.

But there’s another explanation for the fact that reporters such as Zadrozny and Ferguson felt no obligation to verify the facts of the case or do any old-fashioned reporting. In their cases, the temptation to cut journalistic corners may have been overwhelming. That’s because for anyone with an ax to grind about gender equality or sexism in science, this was one of those stories that the tabloids used to label (jestingly for the most part) “too good to check.”

Ouch -

The most generous interpretation of Connie St. Louis’s bizarre behavior is that she was too intellectually limited to recognize irony that was somehow obvious to an audience composed mostly of people who spoke English as a second language. A leak of the unedited version of her “Stop Defending Tim Hunt” piece for the Guardian is so garbled and incoherent that this actually seems plausible, though it also makes you wonder how and why she came to be teaching journalism even at a third-rate institution like London’s City University.

The sooner we are rid of these intellectual flounders, these social justice warriors, third wave feminists, critical race theorists, these postmodernists, the better off everyone will be. Read Foreman's whole article for a full dose of outrage.