In the last two installments of this blog, I’ve been discussing the so-called “Intellectual Dark Web(IDW):一种活跃的、不断扩大的互联网亚文化，旨在为学术正统提供一种替代选择。一般来说，IDW的明星和他们的观众认为人文科学和社会科学陷入了政治正确意识形态的泥潭，他们认为自己的事业就像一所流亡大学，没有被女权主义、身份政治和其他腐败的影响所玷污，思想和言论自由不受限制是今天的秩序。

I’ve also made the point that one of the problems with the IDW, in common with other online, non-academic outlets for discussing big ideas, is that it doesn’t have have any effective mechanisms for intellectual quality control. There’s nothing that resembles peer review, and there’s no need for these pundits to come up against real experts on the topics that they like to pontificate about. Consequently it’s up to consumers to guard themselves against being led down the garden path. As the ancient Roman proverb says:购者自慎!买家要小心了!

With this in mind, I’ve assembled a twelve-point checklist for evaluating what you might come across on the IDW and beyond. I set out four of the points inlast month’s blog，我将在这里给出接下来的四个，并将在下个月的文章中结束这个系列。这是一种认识论自卫手册:一本粗略而准备的指南，用来保护自己不受知识骗子的侵害。因为这些要点是关于形式而不是内容，即使你没有背景来批判性地评估专家先生的主张的实质，你可以利用它们来帮助你确定你是否应该接受这些主张。So, while listening to Mr. Expert, ask yourself these questions:

Does Mr. Expert talk about people as belonging to “types”?Thoughtful people do not march in intellectual lock step with one another, so it’s usually a mistake to lump them together under a single umbrella as “feminist types” or “social justice types” or “right-wing types,” but we’re often inclined to describe people whom we don’t identify with typologically. Psychologists call thisoutgroup homogeneity bias.This refers to the tendency to imagine that members of out-groups (groups that we don’t identify with) are something like clones, barely discernible from one another. Conversely, we tend to think of members of our own groups as individuals with varied points of view. It’s so easy to slip into a cookie-cutter image of people whose views you are uncomfortable with, and this distorts your perception of their beliefs and values. That’s why it’s important to avoid thinking of others as “types.” So, if Mr. Expert seems to have no compunction about lumping people together in this way, it makes sense to treat this as a red flag.

Does Mr. Expert overindulge in generics?Well, consider the sentence “Mosquitos carry Zika.” We tend to accept it as true, and it may lead us to exercise caution in our dealings with mosquitos, even though it would be far more accurate to say “some蚊子携带Zika病毒。”像“蚊子携带寨卡病毒”这样的句子被称为仿制药。这些句子是关于整组事物的，不包括“一些”、“所有”、“许多”或“少数”这样的词。Psychologists have found that this form of speech can be both harmful and misleading when they’re used to characterize whole groups of people, because suggest that the specified traits are part of theessential natureof every member of the group, perhaps ensconced in their DNA. Generic statements like “women aren’t interested in engineering” are more than just descriptions. They send the message that an aversion to engineering is an innate and ineradicable characteristic of women, and that women who take up engineering as a profession are either not proper women or will find this career unfulfilling.

This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t talk about the prevalence of traits in groups of people, but there are far more intellectually responsible ways of doing this—for example, “Manywomen aren’t interested in engineering” or, better still, “Fewer women than menare interested in engineering.” So, if Mr. Expert habitually throws generic statements around, this should be cause for concern.

Does Mr. Expert champion reason and science but do violence to the norms of scientific reasoning?Often, talking heads of the IDW proclaim that they stand for reason and science, in contrast to the “social justice warrior types” who are dismissed as shallow purveyors of ideology. Claims like this shouldn’t be taken at face value. It’s important to check out whether what these people do matches up with what they say.

Scientific reasoning is grounded in a procedure called “inference to the best explanation.” It goes like this. First, you identify something that you want to explain. Next, you gather together a range of possible explanations for the phenomenon in question. Finally, you devise a test that will allow you to determine which of these explanations is the best one—the one that’s most likely to be true.

这是非常清楚和直接的。但是，那些声称科学理性高地的人往往在实践中忽视了他们在理论中提倡的东西。很多时候，这些人没有认真考虑他们想要解释的现象的所有合理解释。

I’ll use a real example to flesh this point out. One argument that I’ve heard from the mouths of more than a few IDW pundits goes like this:

(1) Women are far less likely to graduate with degrees in science and technology than men are.

(2) Feminists claim that this is because of patriarchal oppression, but it might be because not being interested in STEM disciplines is part of women’s innate biological nature.

(3) If the feminists are right, then there should be more women graduating with degrees in scientific and technological fields in egalitarian countries like Sweden, where women are free to choose their own path, then there are in more socially conservative countries. But if women are innately uninterested in STEM, then there should be even fewer women graduating with such degrees in gender-egalitarian countries.

(4) In fact, there arefewerfemale STEM graduates in the countries boasting high levels of gender equality.

(5) This proves that women are by nature uninterested in science and technology.

This is a slapdash argument. Even if the conclusion turns out to be true (which I very much doubt) the argument doesn’t give us good reasons for accepting that it’s true. The problem with it is that there isn’t any attempt to honestly consider the full range of plausible explanations for the underrepresentation of women in STEM discipline. Here’s an obvious one. Legal equality is necessary foractual平等，但这还不够。平等主义政策并没有让根深蒂固的性别歧视态度消失。她们甚至可能加剧这种情况，促使缺乏安全感的男性积极抵制女性进入传统的男性领域并取得优异成绩的威胁。顺便说一下，这可能与斯堪的纳维亚女性遭受亲密伴侣暴力的高比率有关。

I’m not claiming that this is the best available explanation. I’m only claiming that anyone who’s truly interested in applying scientific reasoning to understand gender disparities (as opposed to dressing up ideological commitments in a scientific disguise) ought to take it and others like it seriously.

Finally,does Mr. Expert offer simple explanations for complex phenomena?Many of the things that we’re most interested in explaining are intimidatingly complex. This is especially true of social, behavioral, and even biological phenomena. There are no straightforward laws, like we find in physics and chemistry, which we can turn to for help in these cases. Instead, we are saddled with having to make sense of extraordinarily intricate webs of causes and effects that we are not yet equipped (and my never be equipped) to untangle.

以行为遗传学为例。对这个问题不甚了解的人可能会对某些行为“在基因中”这一看似科学的说法印象深刻。当然，基因对行为有重要的影响，但这种影响的确切性质往往是模糊的，即使在非常简单的生物，如蛔虫。Because there are multiple forces at work—including the background influence of unrelated genes, developmental pathways, environmental factors, learning, and cultural forces—all interacting in ways that are poorly if at all understood—anyone who purports to offer genetics astheexplanation (rather thananexplanation) social or behavioral phenomena is either ignorant or irresponsible. So if Mr. Expert purports to offer definitive explanations of complex social and behavioral phenomena, beware!

Come back to the中国伊朗亚洲杯比赛直播如果你想了解更多，下个月再写博客——下次关注情绪操纵在表面上理性话语中的作用。