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>Also note that conservative politicians in the U.S. are increasingly applying ideological pressure on academic research Conservatives didn't politicize the ac

by k5329 10y ago

>Also note that conservative politicians in the U.S. are increasingly applying ideological pressure on academic research Conservatives didn't politicize the academy alone. Studies[0] have shown left-wing professors will openly admit to discriminating against conservative peers and students. From the abstract I quote: "In decisions ranging from paper reviews to hiring, many social and personality psychologists said that they would discriminate against openly conservative colleagues. The more liberal respondents were, the more they said they would discriminate." Other studies[1] have confirmed that there is an incredible lack of political diversity in certain university departments and that it's likely caused by outright discrimination. "This article reviews the available evidence and finds support for four claims: (1) Academic psychology once had considerable political diversity, but has lost nearly all of it in the last 50 years. (2) This lack of political diversity can undermine the validity of social psychological science via mechanisms such as the embedding of liberal values into research questions and methods, steering researchers away from important but politically unpalatable research topics, and producing conclusions that mischaracterize liberals and conservatives alike. (3) Increased political diversity would improve social psychological science by reducing the impact of bias mechanisms such as confirmation bias, and by empowering dissenting minorities to improve the quality of the majority’s thinking. (4)" Given that these university departments are overtly discriminating based on political affiliation, is it any surprise to see funding for these university departments being politicized? Sorry, if you're discriminating based on political affiliation, you're not doing science, you're doing activism. [0]: http://yoelinbar.net/papers/political_diversity.pdf http://yoelinbar.net/papers/political_diversity.pdf [1]: http://heterodoxacademy.org/2015/09/14/bbs-paper-on-lack-of-political-diversity/ http://heterodoxacademy.org/2015/09/14/bbs-paper-on-lack-of-...

hackuser 10y ago
> Conservatives didn't politicize the academy alone I'm talking about conservative politicians - external actors, not internal. Also, I'd love to see some cites about the issue you raise from reliable sources. I'm sure it happens to a degree - it happens everywhere - but there is so much static on the issue from partisan conservatives, who follow the program of delegitimizing everyone who disagrees with their ideological program (e.g., the "media", climate scientists, Obama, Clinton, etc.) that they can't be trusted on anything.
- k5329 10y ago
  >I'm talking about conservative politicians - external actors, not internal. Yes, I'm claiming (and evidence supports) that internal actors politicized these disciplines. Do some research into these fields. All of them were politicized in a remarkably short amount of time. Conservatives are just responding by denying public funding to self-identified partisan political activists. > Also, I'd love to see some cites about the issue you raise from reliable sources. I gave you cites from reliable sources. The second link I sent you is a review article of all of the research done into this subject. I'd highly recommend checking out some of the citations in that paper, they're very illuminating. Another good one to check out is this paper[0] from Stanford which measured the implicit bias association test applied to political groups. In all of their studies (I believe they recreated 3) they found that implicit bias is as much as 50% stronger for political identity than it is for racial identity. From that paper: "Compared with the most salient social divide in American society—race—partisanship elicits more extreme evaluations and behavioral responses to ingroups and outgroups. This remarkable patterns applies to both explicit and implicit measures of group affect and holds even when the tests of ingroup favoritism are unobtrusive and completely nonpolitical, and partisans are incentivized to treat copartisans no differently from opposing partisans." [0] https://pcl.stanford.edu/research/2015/iyengar-ajps-group-polarization.pdf https://pcl.stanford.edu/research/2015/iyengar-ajps-group-po...
  - hackuser 10y ago
    > I gave you cites from reliable sources. The second link ... Heterodox Academy's stated mission is to advocate for more conservatives in academia. They also have no independent claim on credibility that I know of. That's not what I mean by a reliable source; it's the kind of source I avoid (of any political stripe). > Conservatives are just responding by denying public funding to self-identified partisan political activists. Can you give examples? I've seen them attack climate scientists and tenure for everyone.
    - k5329 10y ago
      > Heterodox Academy's stated mission is to advocate for more conservatives in academia. Heterodox Academy advocates for ideological heterogeneity in departments, which in the context of the academy as it exists today means conservatives. It was created by Jonathan Haidt[0] who is not and has never been a conservative. Considering the results of the study, it would be impossible for any significant number of conservative social psychology professors to be a part of the organization (there are no significant numbers of conservative social psychology professors). If you choose not to read the studies that I've cited, that's your own partisan anti-intellectualism and it's a perfect example of how partisanship (even left-wing partisanship) prevents the search for truth. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Haidt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Haidt
tstactplsignore 10y ago
Honest question: does this also mean that Earth Science departments should go out of their way to hire climate change denialists, and Biology departments should go out of their way to hire creationists and anti-vaxxers? I suspect you think the answer is no, but many US right wingers likely disagree with you. It's difficult for me to understand how things are "just different" for the history, psychology, and sociology departments when it seems also very possible that widely held and well supported positions in those fields might also inherently contradict the US conservative worldview as they do in the biological and Earth sciences. Also, have you considered that academics don't select for liberalism, but liberals select for academia? In my field (Biology) it seems like it'd be almost impossible to find a well-qualified faculty candidate who is an average US conservative without applying some truly outrageous "affirmative action" for conservatives. Difficult to see how that sort of thing would do anything but dilute the quality of a department's faculty. Honestly it's funny, because usually conservatives seem to reject the concepts of relativism: have you considered that there are certain truths in these fields that simply contradict the conservative worldview? If that is true, wouldn't departments be throwing these truths aside in a quest to be basically be "politically correct"?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- k5329 10y ago
  >Honest question: does this also mean that Earth Science departments should go out of their way to hire climate change denialists, and Biology departments should go out of their way to hire creationists and anti-vaxxers? Absolutely not. >In my field (Biology) it seems like it'd be almost impossible to find a well-qualified faculty candidate who is an average US conservative without applying some truly outrageous "affirmative action" for conservatives. Have you considered that your view of an "average" US conservative is incredibly biased by the media you consume and the environment you operate in? And that your incorrect stereotype might be the reason you seem comfortable making arguments against observed discrimination that you would immediately reject if they were applied to other groups? In the current environment you operate in, would you even know if one of your peers is conservative? Is it safe for them to be "out" about their political beliefs? > Also, have you considered that academics don't select for liberalism, but liberals select for academia? I've considered it, but the evidence suggests that discrimination is a better explanation of the facts. Haidt notes that historically most university departments were not the political monocultures they are now. Haidt also responds directly to your criticisms about qualifications and personal preference. I quote: On intelligence: "[Are conservatives simply less intelligent than liberals, and less able to obtain PhDs and faculty positions?] The evidence does not support this view… [published studies are mixed. Part of the complexity is that…] Social conservatism correlates with lower cognitive ability test scores, but economic conservatism correlates with higher scores (Iyer, Koleva, Graham, Ditto, & Haidt, 2012; Kemmelmeier 2008). [Libertarians are the political group with the highest IQ, yet they are underrepresented in the social sciences other than economics]" On self-selection: "Self-selection clearly plays a role. But it would be ironic if an epistemic community resonated to empirical arguments that appear to exonerate the community of prejudice—when that same community roundly rejects those same arguments when invoked by other institutions to explain the under-representation of women or ethnic minorities (e.g., in STEM disciplines or other elite professions). [Note: we agree that self-selection is a big part of the explanation. If there were no discrimination and no hostile climate, the field would still lean left, as it used to. But it would still have some diversity, and would work much better.]" Given that there's ample evidence of explicit evidence of discrimination against conservatives in academia, that is a straightforward explanation for the disparity we observe. I'd highly recommend reading the three papers I've linked in this thread for an overview of this issue which goes deeper than the "conservatives don't want to be in academia and even if they did, they'd be too stupid to contribute anyways" idea. >have you considered that there are certain truths in these fields that simply contradict the conservative worldview? Have you considered that every ideological system has its own blindspots, and that the mechanisms of peer-review breakdown in an ideological mono-culture? Consider that some of the social scientific concepts facing the toughest scrutiny in the ongoing replication crisis are concepts beloved by a certain ideological group, like implicit bias and stereotype threat[0]? And that ideological blindspots can negatively affect the search for scientific truth, both by embedding values in the research that's conducted and by the absence of research in other directions? That these ideological blindspots might even exist in your own field of biology? [0]: http://heterodoxacademy.org/2016/02/23/are-most-published-social-psychology-findings-false/ http://heterodoxacademy.org/2016/02/23/are-most-published-so...

by k5329 10y ago

hackuser 10y ago

> Conservatives didn't politicize the academy alone I'm talking about conservative politicians - external actors, not internal. Also, I'd love to see some cites about the issue you raise from reliable sources. I'm sure it happens to a degree - it happens everywhere - but there is so much static on the issue from partisan conservatives, who follow the program of delegitimizing everyone who disagrees with their ideological program (e.g., the "media", climate scientists, Obama, Clinton, etc.) that they can't be trusted on anything.

k5329 10y ago
>I'm talking about conservative politicians - external actors, not internal. Yes, I'm claiming (and evidence supports) that internal actors politicized these disciplines. Do some research into these fields. All of them were politicized in a remarkably short amount of time. Conservatives are just responding by denying public funding to self-identified partisan political activists. > Also, I'd love to see some cites about the issue you raise from reliable sources. I gave you cites from reliable sources. The second link I sent you is a review article of all of the research done into this subject. I'd highly recommend checking out some of the citations in that paper, they're very illuminating. Another good one to check out is this paper[0] from Stanford which measured the implicit bias association test applied to political groups. In all of their studies (I believe they recreated 3) they found that implicit bias is as much as 50% stronger for political identity than it is for racial identity. From that paper: "Compared with the most salient social divide in American society—race—partisanship elicits more extreme evaluations and behavioral responses to ingroups and outgroups. This remarkable patterns applies to both explicit and implicit measures of group affect and holds even when the tests of ingroup favoritism are unobtrusive and completely nonpolitical, and partisans are incentivized to treat copartisans no differently from opposing partisans." [0] https://pcl.stanford.edu/research/2015/iyengar-ajps-group-polarization.pdf https://pcl.stanford.edu/research/2015/iyengar-ajps-group-po...
- hackuser 10y ago
  > I gave you cites from reliable sources. The second link ... Heterodox Academy's stated mission is to advocate for more conservatives in academia. They also have no independent claim on credibility that I know of. That's not what I mean by a reliable source; it's the kind of source I avoid (of any political stripe). > Conservatives are just responding by denying public funding to self-identified partisan political activists. Can you give examples? I've seen them attack climate scientists and tenure for everyone.
  - k5329 10y ago
    > Heterodox Academy's stated mission is to advocate for more conservatives in academia. Heterodox Academy advocates for ideological heterogeneity in departments, which in the context of the academy as it exists today means conservatives. It was created by Jonathan Haidt[0] who is not and has never been a conservative. Considering the results of the study, it would be impossible for any significant number of conservative social psychology professors to be a part of the organization (there are no significant numbers of conservative social psychology professors). If you choose not to read the studies that I've cited, that's your own partisan anti-intellectualism and it's a perfect example of how partisanship (even left-wing partisanship) prevents the search for truth. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Haidt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Haidt

tstactplsignore 10y ago

Honest question: does this also mean that Earth Science departments should go out of their way to hire climate change denialists, and Biology departments should go out of their way to hire creationists and anti-vaxxers? I suspect you think the answer is no, but many US right wingers likely disagree with you. It's difficult for me to understand how things are "just different" for the history, psychology, and sociology departments when it seems also very possible that widely held and well supported positions in those fields might also inherently contradict the US conservative worldview as they do in the biological and Earth sciences. Also, have you considered that academics don't select for liberalism, but liberals select for academia? In my field (Biology) it seems like it'd be almost impossible to find a well-qualified faculty candidate who is an average US conservative without applying some truly outrageous "affirmative action" for conservatives. Difficult to see how that sort of thing would do anything but dilute the quality of a department's faculty. Honestly it's funny, because usually conservatives seem to reject the concepts of relativism: have you considered that there are certain truths in these fields that simply contradict the conservative worldview? If that is true, wouldn't departments be throwing these truths aside in a quest to be basically be "politically correct"?

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
k5329 10y ago
>Honest question: does this also mean that Earth Science departments should go out of their way to hire climate change denialists, and Biology departments should go out of their way to hire creationists and anti-vaxxers? Absolutely not. >In my field (Biology) it seems like it'd be almost impossible to find a well-qualified faculty candidate who is an average US conservative without applying some truly outrageous "affirmative action" for conservatives. Have you considered that your view of an "average" US conservative is incredibly biased by the media you consume and the environment you operate in? And that your incorrect stereotype might be the reason you seem comfortable making arguments against observed discrimination that you would immediately reject if they were applied to other groups? In the current environment you operate in, would you even know if one of your peers is conservative? Is it safe for them to be "out" about their political beliefs? > Also, have you considered that academics don't select for liberalism, but liberals select for academia? I've considered it, but the evidence suggests that discrimination is a better explanation of the facts. Haidt notes that historically most university departments were not the political monocultures they are now. Haidt also responds directly to your criticisms about qualifications and personal preference. I quote: On intelligence: "[Are conservatives simply less intelligent than liberals, and less able to obtain PhDs and faculty positions?] The evidence does not support this view… [published studies are mixed. Part of the complexity is that…] Social conservatism correlates with lower cognitive ability test scores, but economic conservatism correlates with higher scores (Iyer, Koleva, Graham, Ditto, & Haidt, 2012; Kemmelmeier 2008). [Libertarians are the political group with the highest IQ, yet they are underrepresented in the social sciences other than economics]" On self-selection: "Self-selection clearly plays a role. But it would be ironic if an epistemic community resonated to empirical arguments that appear to exonerate the community of prejudice—when that same community roundly rejects those same arguments when invoked by other institutions to explain the under-representation of women or ethnic minorities (e.g., in STEM disciplines or other elite professions). [Note: we agree that self-selection is a big part of the explanation. If there were no discrimination and no hostile climate, the field would still lean left, as it used to. But it would still have some diversity, and would work much better.]" Given that there's ample evidence of explicit evidence of discrimination against conservatives in academia, that is a straightforward explanation for the disparity we observe. I'd highly recommend reading the three papers I've linked in this thread for an overview of this issue which goes deeper than the "conservatives don't want to be in academia and even if they did, they'd be too stupid to contribute anyways" idea. >have you considered that there are certain truths in these fields that simply contradict the conservative worldview? Have you considered that every ideological system has its own blindspots, and that the mechanisms of peer-review breakdown in an ideological mono-culture? Consider that some of the social scientific concepts facing the toughest scrutiny in the ongoing replication crisis are concepts beloved by a certain ideological group, like implicit bias and stereotype threat[0]? And that ideological blindspots can negatively affect the search for scientific truth, both by embedding values in the research that's conducted and by the absence of research in other directions? That these ideological blindspots might even exist in your own field of biology? [0]: http://heterodoxacademy.org/2016/02/23/are-most-published-social-psychology-findings-false/ http://heterodoxacademy.org/2016/02/23/are-most-published-so...