Liam Out Loud: When Institutions Stop Valuing Truth

Liam Out Loud posted a short essay-video on August 31 titled Why Feminized Institutions Stop Telling the Truth.

Watch it here: [VIDEO]

The claim is not that women cannot do science, law, or teaching. It is narrower. Those fields only work if they keep discriminating — science on truth, law on justice, education on intelligence. Once the culture inside them tips toward social equity and consensus, the original job recedes.

He never names Helen Andrews. He is in her argument anyway. I wrote about her Compact essay and the UnHerd interview in June. Her line was that wokeness is not a new ideology so much as feminine group patterns applied to institutions that used to run on different rules. Empathy over detached judgment. Safety over risk. Cohesion over open conflict. Ostracism instead of argument. Liam is asking what that flip does to shops whose job is to tell the truth.

h/t Newsalert

What “feminized institutions” means

Andrews’s timing is the point. Law schools turned majority female in 2016. The New York Times newsroom crossed that line in 2018. Medical schools followed. Psychology is further along. Fields that hit the line tend not to stop at 50-50. After the culture flips, the scoring system changes. What gets rewarded is consensus and emotional safety. What gets punished is the person who will not drop an ugly finding.

That is what “feminized” is supposed to mean here. Not that women cannot do the work. That average differences in priorities, once they become the majority culture of a shop, change what the shop is for.

Read Helen Andrews' column The Great Feminization.

Liam’s points

His evidence is a 2024 survey of U.S. psychology professors by Cory Clark and colleagues. Asked whether scientists should put truth first when it collides with social-equity goals, 66.4 percent of the men said yes. 43 percent of the women did. A slim majority of the whole sample still chose truth. Almost nobody said equity should simply beat it. The interesting number is how many would not say truth wins. Psychology now trains the therapists, the HR offices, and a lot of the language other institutions copy. If that guild ranks harmony above an ugly result, the result has a harder time leaving the lab.

He uses Jason Arday at Cambridge as the specimen. The appointment led with race, a redemption story, and a job ad that listed support for equality, diversity and inclusion as essential. When Nathan Cofnas posted the plagiarism comparisons, the heat went to the auditor.

Then he reaches for older pictures of the same split. Frans de Waal: males compete over outcomes, females over relationships and atmosphere. Le Bon: a crowd stops asking “is this true?” and starts asking “will I still belong?” Nietzsche: what preserves the group is called good. Jung, used more loosely: selection versus completeness. A family can run on completeness. A lab and a court cannot.

The useful piece does not require all of those names. Institutions are tools. A tool has a job. When the people inside it start optimizing for how the room feels, the tool stops doing the job.

Averages are not persons. Plenty of women put evidence first. Plenty of men hedge. The question is the scoring system. Once equity support is an essential criterion, truth is no longer the only test.

I am not ready to say this is the only cause of what we call wokeness. Birth rates, elite overproduction, social media, and ordinary status competition are all in the mix. I am willing to say this much. If an institution exists to tell the truth, you should notice when a growing share of the people inside it will not say that purpose comes first.

Science should discriminate on the basis of truth. Law should discriminate on the basis of justice. Education should discriminate on the basis of intelligence. Once they select for social equity instead, the primary function falls by the wayside.

That last line is Liam’s. Ask what the shop is for. Then ask whether its hiring and punishment rules still serve that.