"Academics and “thought leaders” are lying to the public"

Everywhere the press laments the uninformed skepticism of the unsophisticated and un-credentialed lay person for the "expert."

And yet everywhere, we empirically know that a healthy dose of skepticism should be applied to experts. Their knowledge frequently is very deep, but it is also very narrow. They proclaim with great confidence based on the depth of their knowledge but the accuracy of their prognostications tends to be bad because they are contextually unaware. They are right about the knowledge in its narrow domain and wrong about its implications when it is mixed with all the other domains.

If humility among experts were greater and if willingness to acknowledge errors were greater, trust might also be higher. But those conditions tend not to broadly prevail.

Razib Khan offers a very specific example of the failure of the expert or public intellectual to maintain any semblance of trust by spouting convenient untruths for their own personal comfort. From The Myth Of The “Model Minority Myth” Probably Tells Us About The Pervasiveness Of Lying. It is far more pervasive than acknowledged and the myth of the "Model Minority Myth" is a single example among many.

Recently I was listening to a radio interview with an Asian American professor. At one point she had to expound about the “model minority myth,” which refers to the fact that the public has a misimpression about the state of Asian Americans (after prompting from the white host).

The idea is that while the public believes that Asian Americans are successful, often well-off, and disproportionately professionals, this is actually misleading and perpetuates the myth that they are a model minority.

The problem is that it is not a myth. The public’s eyes are not lying. The term “model minority” is loaded, and comes out of a specific time, the 1960s, and was used in contrast with black Americans. But, descriptively it points to the fact that Asian Americans on average are more educated, more well-off, and live longer, than the average American, including the average white American.

This taps in to Lee Jussim's research on stereotype accuracy. It is appropriate to condemn negative prejudices when the perceiver has independent reason to know that the individual is not the average. But in the absence of knowledge of the individual, everyone defaults to assumptions based on group averages. Assumptions which are statistically accurate but which should never be used when direct knowledge of the individual is available.

Jussim has explored the degree to which commonly shared stereotypes are positive or negative (and in what ways) as well as the extent to which the group stereotype accords with psychometric data. And broadly there is a close fit.

I’ve heard the well-actually-the-model-minority-is-a-myth responses in various forms since the 1990s. It has been perfected by Asian American activists, who use as a template the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, and so must flatten and negate the unique characteristics of Asian Americans which make the template ill-fitting for their purposes.

First, “remember the Hmong. Not all Asian Americans are Indian, Chinese, or Japanese….” Aside from the fact that the Hmong have made massive strides in the last 30 years, the reality is that the overwhelming majority of Asian Americans are Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean. The “traditional” Asian American groups. This is not to negate Bhutanese refugees, but they are a very small community, and their experience is not typical. Sometimes the average does tell you a lot.

[snip]

Academics and “thought leaders” are lying to the public. Some of the academics and most of the “thought leaders” probably actually believe that the model minority is a myth because they can’t be bothered to take a few minutes and avail themselves of free Census data. But, many Asian American scholars surely understand that the myth is a lie they are promoting for ideological reasons on some level (I have no doubt they have sophisticated rationales for why the myth isn’t a myth, but the data and your eyes tell you the truth).

Where does this leave us? I’m not super interested in the obfuscation of Asian American scholars, and the perpetuation of a lie by our intellectual overclass. Rather, I wonder, how many lies are presented to us as the truth by our intellectual overclass? I suspect more than we like to believe. If you have domain expertise in an area there might be lies and falsehoods and obfuscations that your field promotes to the public because they’re convenient lies. And you think to yourself, “well, my field is special, my colleagues are particularly craven and we study a very sensitive topic.”

Read the whole thing.