I mean, I’m not an expert on this topic, I’m in my 40s and decades away from my own university experience, and I don’t particularly feel like arguing with strangers on HN. One thing I did learn in college was Wittgenstein’s TLP maxim that whereof one cannot speak, thereof one should not speak.
I’ve certainly had friends with soul-crushing experiences in academia and I’m well aware there are cost disease concerns about academia. At the same time, state universities allocations from state government have been greatly reduced over the past few decades. I think attacking university administration is an easy target, but is it, perhaps, a target in support of a larger goal of defunding public education?
I don’t think this article’s really worth much intellectual engagement, and I think it’s generally helpful for readers to understand authors’ policy agenda — I’m old enough that this was called “critical thinking” when I was in school.
So you aren't an expert on the topic, you note the bias of the think tank, and therefore you choose not to read it, regardless of the expertise of the author. Despite not reading it, and not wanting to argue with internet strangers, you feel the need to warn other people of its supposed flaws. Got it.
It sounds like you are trying to make a bad-faith argument here and this absolutely is an ad hominem fallacy (regardless of how well you cloak it in Wittgenstein).
We all should be aware of the biases of our sources.
Some of these organisations have a long history of producing misinformation, pay-to-play commentary (oil companies, tobacco companies) and outright lies in defence of their ideology. There is no way to read anything from thie cluster of bullshit factories like heritage.org (for example) without questioning their motives, because they are obviously compromised and will go to extremes to push an agenda.
We all know information sources like this and it saves a lot of time to simply dismiss everything they have to say about anything, because if you can't trust them to be truthful on one subject, why would they be truthful about anything?
The right love to call this kind of wholesale dismissal "cancel culture" but really, it's just the natural filtering of bullshit that everybody should do.
I don’t see how this is a solid defense against GP comment. You’re criticism of a source your unfamiliar with follows very tribal / ideological lines, which you admit to, but don’t seem to think that this is itself way more biased than the bias you’re warning of in the source.
At the very least, you’re comfortable with knee jerk judgements based on personal ideology, and I don’t think that’s good for any discussion.
On the contrary. It serves me very well to ignore a swathe of organisations if they get caught fabricating information. If your friends caught you lying in a social interaction, they would ostracise you (and rightly so). It's no different for the industry of bullshit.
But this organization hasn't been caught fabricating information, unless I'm misreading the thread. You're saying that organizations with similar political ideologies (that you disagree with) have fabricated information, so I can dismiss this source due to their ideological association with distrusted organizations.
How is that a reasonable way of thinking? Unless you're one of those people that assume "All Republicans/Democrats/Libertarians/Communists are lying thieves, except members of $MYPARTY."
I mostly stick to a "3 strikes you're out" philosophy. I can't deny a bias against avowedly right wing bullshit factories, but I'm not watching the noisefest of MSNBC or CNN either. Being reasonable is not hard.
I will say I block everything Murdoch. At this stage, the chaotic evil of Murdoch news sources is not just noise any more, it's deliberately disruptive.
I for one appreciated this warning. The first thing I thought when I saw the header was "I wonder if this is a right wing think tank". So I am happy to have that question answered.
I’ve certainly had friends with soul-crushing experiences in academia and I’m well aware there are cost disease concerns about academia. At the same time, state universities allocations from state government have been greatly reduced over the past few decades. I think attacking university administration is an easy target, but is it, perhaps, a target in support of a larger goal of defunding public education?
I don’t think this article’s really worth much intellectual engagement, and I think it’s generally helpful for readers to understand authors’ policy agenda — I’m old enough that this was called “critical thinking” when I was in school.