Or at least to post on my blog so others can hold me accountable:
[I]f you’ve reached the point where you don’t pay attention to anything that might disturb your orthodoxy, you’re not doing science, you’re not even pursuing a discipline. All you’re doing is perpetuating a smug, closed-minded sect.
Paul Krugman, Nobodies of Macroeconomics
Everyone's vulnerable to confirmation bias. Everyone has to guard against it. Everyone.
Compare to this recent statement from Krugman (http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/other-stuff-i-read/)
“Some have asked if there aren’t conservative sites I read regularly. Well, no. I will read anything I’ve been informed about that’s either interesting or revealing; but I don’t know of any economics or politics sites on that side that regularly provide analysis or information I need to take seriously. I know we’re supposed to pretend that both sides always have a point; but the truth is that most of the time they don’t.”
Stuart,
Since I said everyone’s vulnerable to confirmation bias, I’m not sure what criticizing Krugman (or anyone else) has to do with this, since “everyone” includes Paul Krugman.
But since you quoted him, I’ll point out out that Krugman’s main gig is being an academic. If Krugman’s job revolved around responding to online stuff, or if you were quoting Krugman saying he ignored conservative academic writing in his area, you’d be pointing out an inconsistency. Or if you documented where his discussion of conservative economists was a misrepresentation, you’d have a case. Or if you documented where his discussion of economic issues ignored important evidence. But that’s not what you quoted.
No, he’s writing as a columnist and blogger for the NY Times, where he writes about many issues that are far outside any expertise that he has. And he’s saying that on all of those issues, he refuses to read anything that he disagrees with. You’d couldn’t ask for a more picture-perfect example of confirmation bias in action.
I’m not disagreeing with you, by the way — I just think it’s too bad that Krugman has so thoroughly forgotten his own excellent advice.
Every one means everyone.
Hal Hansen compares the German edu-vocational system with our own, giving him leverage for a critique of the triumphalist grand narrative of higher education in this country.
Before the academization of “learning,” pathways to adulthood and skills were through the workplace, the home, and any where else. Then along came the school-master, who monopolized credentialing, eventually controlling entrance to the workforce with a new institution, the school. But worst in Hansen’s eyes is the sanitization of the history of education and training by academics, resulting in predictable distortions of the past.
Yup. Definitely something “historians of education” need to guard against.
If I remember correctly, Hansen’s latest article from January of this year argues that Germany’s system fit more of a human-capital model and the U.S. a credentialist model. I think he retreads some of the theoretical ground James Rosenbaum did in his 1990 (1991?) article on human capital, credential, and signaling models of school-labor market links. Well, except for Rosenbaum’s advocacy of Japan-style networking (which he argued right before Japan’s lost decade began).
I haven’t seen Hansen’s dissertation, so I probably haven’t read his historiographical argument. We’ve had roughly 55 years of historians of ed railing against a previous generation, and since that’s often been correct, of course we’re also vulnerable. I don’t think that the complaint about an obsession with schooling (as one formalized version of education) hits the mark as a general criticism. Bernard Bailyn made that argument in 1955, and you can point to loads of historians who write about education more broadly (including historians of early childhood and the family). A more typical weakness among U.S. historians of ed is not a confirmation bias but a narrowing of scope and then forgetting to fill in the gaps (e.g., ignoring private education in some critical contexts, or treating four-year colleges as synonymous with higher education).
Here is the article at ERIC. He argues that because education history is taught and produced by the winners, so to speak, they distort the past, both in this country and in Germany. I know you don’t have time for this. He even takes swipes at M. Katz (my hero and yours), Gintis and Bowles. I know that I have some major re-thinking to do, but I will enjoy every painful second of it. Damn those that turn my world inside out!
http://eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/detail?accno=ED433292