Emil O W Kirkegaard

It is a ProSJ thread because spending the gods only know how many tens of 1000s of researcher hours and millions in grant money chasing nonexistent or tiny phenomena does little good to advance SJ.

At best, it has a huge opportunity cost resulting from NOT studying REAL phenomena that actually WOULD advance social justice. At worst, the promoters of these phenom were charlatans advancing their careers more than SJ.

Somewhere in between, the promoters were simply misled by their own conceptions about the nature of bias & discrimination; and the self-interest advanced by promoting these phenomena (grants, pubs, fame, TED, fortune, books, consulting fees) did not encourage skepticism.

Is there REAL SJ work out there? Stuff that takes advantage of common sense to make people's lives better? That stands on its merits, does not involve massive webs of assumptions to accept as true (as w/stereo threat and implicit bias)?

Of course there is. I suspect it is the type of SJ stuff that pretty much all of my academic followers, and most of the rest, even those on the right, would at least respect and possibly welcome. Here are two examples:

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you @dynarski, Professor Susan Dynarski, an econ/policy prof at Michigan. I have no connection to her. I only know of her through her work. Some is so elegantly simple in principle (maybe not execution) that its compellingness is obvious.

More She has done tons of stuff so here are two of the simplest and most compelling. You know why some poor kids don't go to college? They can't afford to take the damn SAT or ACT tests. In rural areas, some are so poor they can't even get to the testing sites.

(Brief aside: Did you notice something? Her work includes poor rural kids -- who can be of any racial/ethnic/gender backgrounds. Where, in all the SJ stuff you see on witter do you EVER see someone caring about rural kids? Also, did you notice the emphasis on being poor?)