{"id":4375,"date":"2013-08-21T11:25:23","date_gmt":"2013-08-21T16:25:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=4375"},"modified":"2013-08-21T11:25:23","modified_gmt":"2013-08-21T16:25:23","slug":"culture-warriors-like-always-commit-hasty-generalization","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=4375","title":{"rendered":"Culture warriors, like, always commit hasty generalization"},"content":{"rendered":"

Robert Stacy McCain’s<\/a> post at the American Spectator is an exercise in hasty generalization.\u00c2\u00a0 McCain reports on the egregious behavior of one Hugo Schwyzer of Pasadena City College.\u00c2\u00a0 Schwyzer loves sleeping with the undergrads.\u00c2\u00a0 By his own reckoning, by 1998, he’d slept with at least 24 of his students.\u00c2\u00a0 He also passed himself off as a scholar of feminism, sexuality, and gender justice.\u00c2\u00a0 So he teaches classes about pornography and then sends out pics of himself masturbating.\u00c2\u00a0 Dude sounds like a straight-up weirdo, no doubt.\u00c2\u00a0 Trouble is, McCain takes Schwyzer to be representative of what the professorate is like generally.<\/p>\n

Actually, there was a lot<\/em> odd about Schwyzer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s career, but he may have seemed fairly normal among the lunatic perverts employed by sex-crazed academia nowadays….<\/p>\n

But he is certainly not alone in his madness, which is merely symptomatic of how American academia has lost its collective mind.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So, how does McCain base this thought that Schwyzwer’s behavior is representative of academic culture?\u00c2\u00a0 By invoking Bill Ayers, Herbert Marcuse, some women’s studies professors who are ‘queer theorists’ and advocate lesbianism to their students, a Columbia prof who had a sexual relationship with his own daughter, and Freud.<\/p>\n

Here’s the deal.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s too easy to take the worst actors (or who may seem the worst) in a group as representative of the group.\u00c2\u00a0 Say, for example: Republican Senators against gay rights but who nevertheless proposition men in bathrooms.\u00c2\u00a0 Or preachers who preach clean living yet take advantage of their position of power to coerce women to have sex with them.\u00c2\u00a0 See? Easy.\u00c2\u00a0 But they aren’t necessarily representative.\u00c2\u00a0 What happens is that these folks and their behaviors are so egregious, they stick with us and become easy ways to characterize the groups.\u00c2\u00a0 This is the error of what’s called an ‘availability cascade<\/a>,’ and it screws up the way we make reliable inductive inferences. And so we see one here – egregious behavior by professor causes right-wing pundit to generalize that behavior to all profs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Robert Stacy McCain’s post at the American Spectator is an exercise in hasty generalization.\u00c2\u00a0 McCain reports on the egregious behavior of one Hugo Schwyzer of Pasadena City College.\u00c2\u00a0 Schwyzer loves sleeping with the undergrads.\u00c2\u00a0 By his own reckoning, by 1998, he’d slept with at least 24 of his students.\u00c2\u00a0 He also passed himself off as … Continue reading Culture warriors, like, always commit hasty generalization<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[1722,1967,1695],"class_list":["post-4375","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hasty-generalization","tag-availability-heuristics","tag-hasty-generalization","tag-stereotyping"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4375","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4375"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4375\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4382,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4375\/revisions\/4382"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4375"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4375"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4375"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}