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I don't agree with 100% of the article, but overall it is convincing. I've been worrying about this stuff for a while, the article puts it into words fairly wel

• eropple 10y ago
  What is there to suggest that the arrow of causality is going in the way that you imply? Personally, I am fairly convinced that academia and science being "liberal" is, I think, much more a characteristic of the underlying philosophies involved than some externally-imposed groupthink. "Conservatism", at least the modern variant, and "exploring and expanding knowledge for a greater good, while entertaining ideas that you don't necessarily agree with" are literally antithetical. I thought of myself as a conservative before I went to college and realized that, hey, American conservatism is not only railing against stuff like observational science, but "morally" against the existence of these fellow human beings who have done nothing wrong and deserve to exist. So, yeah, maybe "the public" would trust academia and the whole "science" thing more if it was More Conservative, but who's to say that it'd actually work as well? It's not like this stuff exists to tell people what they want to hear--and the epistemic closure of the American conservative is such an ideological purity test that if you're not telling them what they want to hear, you're not conservative. It's not on "science and academia" to break itself for such a warped thing, is it?
  • godzillabrennus 10y ago
    I read The_Donald on reddit and they believe they are the only ones willing to entertain ideas. First, and most notably, they believe that being liberal means full embracement of leftist group think like the USSR had during its communist days. That is the most fundamental problem with reaching them since you can't unmoor the thought of leftism from liberalism with them. They believe the scientific community has become strangled by this leftist/liberal ideology. I'm not sure what happens next but I think it's bad for humanity. If half the population needs a reminder on why science is good I guess they'll get it. Usually that's mass death.
    • justavoice 10y ago
      Funny thing is, membership in a group does not limit the spectrum of thought: there are people on both sides of the liberal/conservative divide that are rational. The problem is in the meta-group-think going on for the groups as a whole. Kinda like emergent behaviour in insects. The reasonable voices on both sides are drowned out by the crazies, on both sides.
    • eropple 10y ago
      Your read jibes with my own when I've studied that community (and washed afterwards). I'll give what passes for a "left" in this country a lot of flak on a lot of things, but a fundamental unwillingness to work with people who disagree with them on some things but are willing to find common ground on others is not one of them. Often to their, and our, detriment.
      • MichaelGG 10y ago
        >fundamental unwillingness to work with people who disagree Identity politics is even worse than this. From what I can see, among people not totally ideologically driven, this discredits the left very much, and liberal values will be caught in the backlash.
        • eropple 10y ago
• 1_2__3 10y ago
  As conservative ideology becomes more and more unmoored from reality how do you propose we keep conservatives participating in academia? I'm not just being snarky - it seems to me the increasing liberalization of colleges is inextricable from the increasing non-fiction of conservative thinking.
  • deleted 10y ago
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  • hackuser 10y ago
    The idea that conservatives should be represented in academia is a kind of a affirmative action, ironically - but for a group that has great power in the nation and world, not an oppressed one. The test in academia should be not ideology, but whether your theories withstand scrutiny. Should environmental science departments hire climate change deniers, for ideological diversity? Should biology departments hire creationists? Should political science and history departments hire people who say Saddam Hussein had WMD and Obama is Kenyan?
    • WalterSear 10y ago
      >The test in academia should be not ideology, but whether your theories withstand scrutiny. Any what do you do, hypothetically speaking, if this requirement keeps out a large proportion of a specific ideological group, or if the process of science changes the views of individuals of that group, to the point where they leave it? And, what if, said ideological group is unwilling to accept that?
      • hackuser 10y ago
        I'm not sure I understand the question. Why should people be included based on ideology? Put plainly, we want people who are factually right. Who wants otherwise? The Middle Ages were defined, in a sense, by the priority of ideology over rationality. The enlightenment was a rejection of ideology in favor of factual accuracy about the world. The ideology may say the Sun revolves around the Earth, but the facts say otherwise. The ideology may say that that climate change isn't happening, but the facts say otherwise.
• cooper12 10y ago
  As they say "reality has a liberal bias". These scientists and colleges just understand how things really work.
• maxxxxx 10y ago
  I would argue that at least in the US the people who call themselves conservative are not really conservative. They are hard right wing ideologues. What they did right was to raise the abortion issue so a lot of people vote for them no matter what else they say. Their positions on climate change , the environment, health care and economics (more tax cuts for the highest incomes) are simply not accessible to rational investigation. I have never heard anything coming from the Republicans party that would indicate deep thoughts about these issues. Either they don't want to hear about it (climate change) or they flat out lie (health care in other countries). I bet a lot of people who used to be called conservative are now called liberal because the Republicans have moved so far to the right .
  • brighteyes 10y ago
    I have to repeat what I said above. What you say about conservatives does not match up with the conservatives I know and listen to. I admit my sample may be not representative. So I can't be sure. But how many of your friends are conservatives, and how many of them have you talked to in depth about this stuff?
    • hackuser 10y ago
      I've seen plenty of research saying the Republican Party has moved far to the right. Personally, having talked to people who are Trump supporters and fellow travelers, my experience matches the GP. It's an ideological movement: ideology - not facts, democracy, national welfare, global welfare, humanitarianism, morality or other normal considerations - seems to predict what they support: Climate change denial, Trump, racial and religious discrimination, etc.
    • mattnewton 10y ago
      It is a shame your reasonable conservative friends don't seem to be getting prominent positions in the party. A look at Trump's cabinet nominations shows ample evidence for these criticisms, and a few more can be found scattered through the senate.
      • 10y ago
• Puts 10y ago
  Could this be a reason people don't trust "experts" any more? http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidthier/2012/07/18/how-this-guy-lied-his-way-into-msnbc-abc-news-the-new-york-times-and-more/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidthier/2012/07/18/how-this-g... Related TED talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2Zq2VWvmW4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2Zq2VWvmW4
  • losteric 10y ago
    Experts are increasingly politicized. News reports and political groups pick whoever will support (or sell out) their lies and delusions... credentials and background don't matter when consumers refuse to do their own research and hold the news accountable for the truth.
    • hackuser 10y ago
      Interesting claims, but what are they based on?
• hackuser 10y ago
  > Universities and colleges have become very liberal, with hardly any conservatives left. Have they become more liberal? Academia has long been called liberal; I don't know that it has become more or less that way. Also, liberal is a matter of definition and is relative to a degree; perhaps society has become more conservative. > The downside to this liberal success is that the public image of "scientist" is now tied to "liberal". That's not a downside to "liberal success", IMHO; it's an intended outcome of a propaganda campaign. The perpetrators want to discredit any opposition to their ideology, whether Democrats, whose voters and politicians are called frauds (voters, Obama), demonized (voters, Obama, Clinton, etc.), and criminalized (voters, Clinton, etc.); "liberals" (made a word of ridicule rather than a valid but differing point of view); groups that provide services to the poor (ACORN, Planned Parenthood, etc.); scientists, other academics, experts of any sort, even theories of science (evolution, climate change), etc.
  • eropple 10y ago
    Purported legitimacy is another big thing that troubles me. I remember "not my President" getting some nontrivial shit when liberals employed it about George W. Bush. (I threw some of it.) I do not remember the same sort of "unpatriotic", "treasonous" rhetoric employed when the Republicans did the same thing in 2008. I do not remember birtherism being considered unpatriotic, either. "The only legitimate government is a Republican government" is reason enough to fear.
    • CalChris 10y ago
      Exactly. This is equivocation nonsense that the right trots out. We did it therefore you must have done it. The two sides are not mirror images of one another.
  • edblarney 10y ago
    " I don't know that it has become more or less that way. " Universities were mostly founded by Churches - and they were for the Upper Class. They were bastions of conservatism in the classical sense. In the 1930's it started to change. Many profs in the 1930's were card carrying Communists. Unlike today, wherein nobody would care, and many would be sympathetic - they would be destroyed in that era if it were found out. Put more simply: Universities were not leftists until the middle of last century. It was the 1960's when things really flipped. There is no 'propaganda' needed: open discussion is suppressed on campus and this is a fact. Banned speakers, profs not allowed to speak of certain issues due to 'trigger warnigs' etc.. All of your comments about 'ACORN' and 'Obama' etc. have nothing to do with academia - those are completely political issues. And FYI it is progressives who are against GMO's - and science indicates they are completely safe. The 'anti vaxxers' are definitely 'anti science' and those groups lean left. Those supporting Chinese medicine, herbal therapy etc. - that's fairly 'anti science' - and those people tend way left. (I have hippie family members who practice Chinese medicine and some of the stuff they do should be illegal. They don't actually diagnose patients with illnesses, but they truly believe they can, by looking at your tongue etc.) I don't support any political ideal, but I would say that 'leftist / progressive' populism on campus is seriously a problem. I think it's mostly the culture and the students, not so much the course material.
• eli_gottlieb 10y ago
  There are countries with lots of conservative scientists. Usually, in those countries, the conservative parties don't deny science.
• laretluval 10y ago
  An interesting source of data on this point is scientific fraud. Let's take a look at scientific work which has been proven to be fake. That tells us what scientists would like to publish to advance their careers, without regard to whether it's true or not. Thus any bias in faked research is evidence for political bias in science beyond what is justified by the truth. A good place to start is with the name Diederik Stapel in social psychology.
• pessimizer 10y ago
  It's bizarre that you try to force things into a conservative/"liberal" linear continuum. These are not real categories, these are media categories, "liberal" as Americans use it is simply a made-up word, and many right-wing traditionalist nationalists all over the world tend towards socialism. This is about power, and how sovereignty has moved from the sovereign to the populace, but now to the powerful. The sovereign was expected to be ruling on behalf of the deity (or as the deity) and had a responsibility to tend and care for its creation. With popular sovereignty, representatives of the people were supposed to focus the people's will in order to accomplish the people's goals. Under neoliberal capitalism, the wielders of power are specifically admonished to only be concerned about their own interests, so as not to break the forces that automagically put everything to right. To the extent that our governments are controlled by the wealthy, we live in a laissez-faire system, with laws as assets to be manipulated. When the wielders of power have no moral obligation to anyone but themselves, they are untrusted, and untrustworthy. When the system recognizes no moral obligation, being caught in deception doesn't disqualify you from being rehired, it shows that you are willing to do what needs to be done to win. People recognize this, and use what's left of their control of government to disrupt the current consensus as much as possible. Without Brexit or Trump, they would simply start murdering each other and the particular wielders of power who they feel hurt them the most. Of course, I'm pretty much restating the article in a different way. The reason people don't trust scientists is because they shouldn't. ----- edit: To make it personal, the reason I believe in global warming is because the profit motive tends to point in the other direction, and because my naive understanding of the mechanism sounds plausible. The fact that it remains the dominant theory when the dominant financing all goes in the other direction makes me attribute that dominance to a residual dedication to truth over self-interest in many scientists. It is not because scientific consensus is truth, which is a form of vulgar market-worship. It wouldn't surprise me at all if it turns out to be horseshit, and in retrospect should always have been seen as horseshit. It would surprise me if that happened, and there weren't also some other competing channel to self-interest that I wasn't aware of. I think that many suspect that the academic hierarchy represents that channel, and that's why they are suspicious of global warming.
• forgottenpass 10y ago
  I don't agree with 100% of the article Me neither, but it's a really good start. Something that we hadn't yet seen good writing on anywhere regarded as even remotely serious. The problem with discussing "fake news" isn't to say inaccurate information hasn't been taking on a life of it's own, but the current "fake news" narrative is a slight of hand trick. In appearing to debate conclusions, it's tricking you into accepting the form of the argument.