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>Honest question: does this also mean that Earth Science departments should go out of their way to hire climate change denialists, and Biology departments shoul
by 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...
- tstactplsignore 10y ago>Have you considered that your view of an "average" US conservative is incredibly biased by the media you consume Err, I was just speaking in terms of public polling information- gallup is the "media" I'm consuming here. The median US Republican (good proxy for conservatism) does not believe in evolution or climate change- extremely difficult to find a serious faculty candidate who fits that profile, just for starters. Do you not agree with that? You misinterpreted my second point- I am not trying to argue that liberals are more intelligent than conservatives (the data you share would have been what I suspected, though) - rather I was trying to explain that if we require a faculty candidate to have views similar to the median US conservatives, we'd likely be passing up on many, many highly more qualified candidates if it's simply a numbers game. >Given that there's ample evidence of explicit evidence of discrimination against conservatives in academia This is possible in the social sciences, where one's work can explicitly belie one's political worldview- but how does it explain the trends in the life and hard sciences? Faculty in fields like Biology and Physics are also overwhelmingly liberal, but departments generally know nothing about the political views of faculty candidates. Honestly, the only people who can be discriminated against here would be those who are very vocal of their political views on public internet profiles, and even then honestly nobody is stalking your Twitter when evaluating you for a faculty position. I think that this evidence directly contradicts the possibility that discrimination is primarily responsible for the political imbalance of academia. > 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? Of course- this is all serious stuff to think about and I often do. The other thing to think about is: how do we achieve that while also keeping cranks and denialists out of power positions in institutions of learning? It seems like those in the field are usually the best at distinguishing crankery from genuine ideological difference- if we don't trust them, who do we trust? I get that you personally see the difference between what you're proposing and affirmative action for climate denialists, creationists, and anti-vaxxers. I do too. I'm okay with Scott Alexander and Peter Thiel faculty. I'm okay with Milton Friedman. The problem is I think that this line of ideological affirmative action would lead to professors Ken Ham, Jenny McCarthy, Glenn Beck, and Milo Yiannopoulos. There are many people in the US who talk the same way about academia, but are talking about this kind of change. If you can propose measures to introduce the reasonable kind of change you seek that is robust against the insane, anti-intellectual, scientific-existential threat kind of change a large number of other conservatives are seeking, I'd be tentatively on board.