There are three really weird ideas that many academics believe that they are kind of forced into by other, equally-wrong bad things academics used to espouse.

The first one of these is that if distributions overlap, then those two distributions are really the same. This is because of the history of racial “science.”

Another is that if something does not have a discrete point at which it occurs — say the fall of Rome — then it isn’t real. Thus, there was no Dark Ages because Rome didn’t really ever fall as any single identifiable event. That’s only one of hundreds of examples. Utterly absurd but has to do with relativism that has infected the academy beyond all reason.

The third (what I call the Cosma Shalizi fallacy) is that if something isn’t discretely localizable in space, then it also isn’t real and can’t be generalized about. This is used in many areas, such as IQ, against the idea of personality types, etc. Also clearly wrong.

Once you see these ideologies revealed, you can see how ridiculous they sound. But now they are just accepted “truths” in most of academia.