Comments by "Mark Pawelek" (@mark4asp) on "The Dark Reason the Elite Turned Woke - Emily Hewertson (4K) | heretics. 78" video.

  1. Advice to students. Re: challenging Left dogma in universities. 1. One cannot win every battle. Don't even bother arguing unless you must. Because - see 4 below 2. Don't waste your time doing essays. Avoid those "studies" courses. Learn how to use data. Do some statistics courses so you can legitimately infer correlation from evidence. Do a course on skepticism, or logic, too if you find one. Like Schermer's course: Skepticism 101. One should also master debate. Learn all the logical fallacies. Apply them to criticise everything. Everyone uses logical fallacies - even great people and geniuses. So this can be a great source to make good points for your essays. 3. Evidence, evidence, evidence versus laundered ideas. When reading the left, check evidence they provide in their citations. Is there any? Most likely the Left will cite "laundered ideas". These are untrue claims, nonsense ideas, or theory-laden conjectures published in academia which other activists use as a source to build their nonsense ideas on. Hence: nonsense piled on nonsense. 4. By and large - you cannot change other people's minds. Research in psychology shows this. That led Peter Boghossian to develop his "Street Epistemology" technique. Which, at least, allows people to explain why they believe an idea. Knowing why we believe is the first step to revising our opinions. PB wrote a book on this "How to Have Impossible Conversations" 5. Young people, especially those without responsibilities are going to be mainly left/liberal no matter what. Just accept, & live with that. 6. Prefer Thomas Sowell to Scruton, or JB Peterson. Sowell argues against dogma by directly citing evidence. Evidence-based reasoning is the habit you need to develop which they cannot mark you down on. You may even change a professors mind with it! Thinkers such as Scruton and Peterson are worth reading too, but don't try to cite them when writing your uni-essays. PS: Boghossian on Idea Laudering https://www.wsj.com/articles/idea-laundering-in-academia-11574634492
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