(2022-03-14) Gelman How To Think About Intellectual Diversity In Academia The Case Of Astrology And Dr Oz

Andrew Gelman: How to think about intellectual diversity in academia? The case of astrology and Dr. Oz. So, Columbia University has a lot of problems right now. For one thing, it seems we’re falsifying or misrepresenting some of the statistics for our college ranking. Also, our most famous professor offers tips on “What Your Astrological Sign Can Tell You About Your Health.”

This raises some interesting issues about intellectual diversity in academia. It’s easy to laugh at Dr. Oz for promoting crap...

But . . . given that 30% of Americans believe in astrology, it’s no surprise that some nontrivial percentage of university-affiliated doctors are going to have the sort of attitude toward scientific theory and evidence that would lead them to have strong belief in weak theories supported by no good theory and no good evidence. So what’s the right level of diversity here? (cf science-based medicine)

Even 30% seems a bit too high... But should Columbia have 0% of medical school professors who believe in astrology . . . is that too low? Maybe it’s good to have one or two mavericks, just in case there’s something to all that mumbo jumbo.

Ideally maybe we’d have something like 15% of Columbia medical faculty believing in astrology: lower than the national average because we’d hope our faculty to know better, but comfortably different from zero to keep us somewhat representative of the general population. And then ideally these 15% would be kept someplace where they wouldn’t cause much damage. For example they could be in the Department of Surgery. Surgery doesn’t involve astrology and it doesn’t involve magic weight loss cures, so you could have all sorts of wacky beliefs there and not cause any damage, right?

the solution is not to purify the university and purge it of knaves and fools but rather to move beyond the idea that, just because someone is associated with a prestigious organization, that they actually know what they’re talking about.

Should the director of the university hospital say, For reasons of academic freedom we can’t fire the guy but we loudly disagree with his promotion of these scams?