Critics’ followers either reinforce a system or seek to replace it

Evidence

Second: the 2016 meta-analysis’s design was shaped by the 2002 critics’ objections. This is the correct way for science to work: not the dismissal of critics but the engagement with their specific methodological claims in a study designed to test them. The critics asked for a narrower definition of the behavior, a more rigorous statistical method, and more longitudinal data. Gershoff and Grogan-Kaylor provided all three. The result was not a more equivocal finding. It was a stronger adverse association and the elimination of the only beneficial outcome. The critics’ demands, when met, produced a result that more completely refuted their position than the 2002 paper had. This is the dialectical process of scientific progress working as it is supposed to work, and it is worth marking as such. — , The Rod and the Child, 9593 (#complicates, via linked claim)

What kind of critique is possible when you are positioned in the center of a system of power on which your livelihood, future, and family depend? How to imagine his position and portray his choices without lapsing into an apologia for them? In Valck’s case the distinction at the moment was clear: between a good state and corrupt men, between a moral project and immoral people. But that too was to change. He knew he would be “thwarted, duped, and slandered from all sides.” Still, he trusted the Governor-General to back his efforts to expose “the real situation to the highest placed people in the Indies.” — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1434 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Dissent is neutralized by demands for a universal alternative system — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 227; Critics are implicated in the systems they condemn; Reform-minded dissent within a system strengthens rather than threatens it (+10 more)

Broader Connections

• Meeting critics’ methodological demands strengthened rather than weakened the adverse finding #complicates (0.82) — , The Rod and the Child, 9593
• Critique from within a colonial power system is entangled with the critic’s own interests #complicates (0.76) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1434