Earlier this month, we learned that the University of Virginia’s board of visitors had forced out President Teresa Sullivan for lacking “strategic dynamism” due to her refusal to run the university like a business (including mothballing “obscure” academic programs like Classics and German). Now we learn that Jonah Lehrer, the lamentably popular science popularizer, has been republishing old materia l on his blog for the New Yorker.
Both incidents should be seen as scandals for the national cult surrounding wowy-zowy TED-talk & consultant-speak. As Isaac Chotiner details in an outstanding review in The New Republic , Jonah Lehrer is a profiteer off gullibility: “What his book has to teach, and by example, is the fetishization of brain science, and the anxious need for easy answers to complex questions.”
Lehrer’s rising star is of a piece with the increasing popularity of “statistical methods” in business and “business methods” in non-business areas. To cite numbers this way, which is really to invoke them with an unearned and usually impossible certainty, is to claim an aura of expertise that substitutes for real thinking. When we act as though “insights” from brain science or McKinsey regressions can replace older forms of understanding, we fail to put first things first.
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