Anti-intellectualism: America's fundamental flaw.

[dust1n]

I favor of independent inquiry.
The alternative leads to research which finds that cigarette aren't linked to cancer.

I guess, I misunderstand the situation. If it's the case the team was hired, but then dismissed because the results did not show what there were hoping to be true, then to be replaced with another group specifically to the purposes of finding contrary information, then, yeah, that would be a bad thing.

 

[philbo]

If one looks in other countries for exact counterparts for the worst views seen here, one might miss their intellectual abominations.
Where there are people, there will be bad ideas. Where there are people in power, those ideas will be particularly offensive.
Example: France regulating dress to prevent overt religious symbolism, which is selectively applied.
I might be a substitute French teacher, but that doesn't mean I approve of them froggies!

I don't think we have quite the overt anti-intellectualism you get, though the way both Dorries and Tredinnick continue to get re-elected as members of parliament does put a bit of a dent in that thesis. However, they are a very small minority.

Government's repeated willingness to prefer dogma to evidence does suggest that we're not completely free from a more subversive lack of critical thinking than what gets shouted far louder on that side of the pond. Though I have noticed what one might call the "elite university corollary to the Dunning-Kruger effect" - we have a lot of theoretically very intelligent people in government, a high proportion having graduated from Oxbridge with PPE or similar degrees, yet seem to take that as confirmation of their being right about everything with no need to consider evidence.

 

[philbo]

An interesting article in Psychology Today, yesterday: Anti-intellectualism Is Killing America | Psychology Today

..in the quote from that:

it is beyond dispute that critical thinking has been abandoned as a cultural value.

..not completely beyond dispute: for it to have been abandoned, you'd need to show that critical thinking ever was a cultural value