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While it doesn't invalidate the takes, I'd like to point out that this is not exactly an unbiased selection of scientists. With the possible exception of David

• mvdwoord 9y ago
  There IS censorship at colleges, and emotional grievances ARE being prioritised over logic and facts. You can dislike Ben Shapiro, you can have a lot of valid criticism of breitbart but It's all just Ad Hominems. Good luck with those.
• sebastos 9y ago
  Phew - I was worried I would actually have to read the responses and form an opinion on the science. Good to hear that we can Kevin-Bacon them over to "uncritically praising" an event put on by Ben Shapiro. There can be little doubt that they're evil shills now, so I don't have to bother.
• darawk 9y ago
  All of that is great as a signal, but both the memo and these scientists have all more or less uniformly asked one thing: Respond to the points on their merits. So, if you'd like to note that these individuals may be right leaning, and that they are not a random sample of scientists, that's fine, but it's not much of an attack on the credibility of their arguments, or analysis of the science.
• wyclif 9y ago
  I'm glad you've made me aware that the acronym "SJW" or the phrase "free speech" immediately marks the person using it as biased and therefore holding an illegitimate opinion. Thanks!
  • zimpenfish 9y ago
    "free speech" is a mild indicator that the person in question is almost certainly libertarian or right-wing leaning. Doesn't generally mean they're biased, though. "SJW" is a very strong indicator of right-wing leaning and generally does mean they're strongly biased against the left.
    • CumfartablyNumb 9y ago
      I guess I'm a unicorn according to you. Reading Chomsky, Haidt, and Pinker at the same time before it was popular. SJWs are the enemies of free-thinkers everywhere, across a variety of spectrums.
      • hackinthebochs 9y ago
        I upvoted you then read your name and almost regretted it
    • comex 9y ago
      It’s not about free speech in general. It’s about a specific narrative, wherein free speech on college campuses is under serious threat thanks to liberal orthodoxy, usually linked to concepts such as trigger warnings and microaggressions. This narrative is currently in vogue on the right, and thus making a fuss about campus censorship is likely to indicate a right-wing persuasion. Of course, the issue itself is very complex, and as a self-described leftist I happen to believe there’s some room to be concerned about free speech on campus (although I view the causes and nature of the issue very differently from the typical right-wing perspective) - but that’s not the point. When I called out those “free speech” references, I didn’t mean to make any statement about the merits of the issue; I was more using it as a sort of shibboleth, given the context of current trends in political discourse.
• raleighm 9y ago
  You got eaten alive in the name of "science" and objective inquiry for sharing information relevant to assessing the impartiality of experts. Funny. Thanks for sharing.
• js8 9y ago
  Just wondering, which scientists would you like to see to respond, and why?
• lee12255 9y ago
  With all due respect, the manner of your inferences about our political beliefs is deeply flawed. Just as one does not need to be a woman to be concerned about sexism, or African-American to be concerned about racism, or LGBT to be concerned about homophobia, or Muslim to care about Islamophobia, one does not need to be a conservative to be concerned about leftist biases distorting social science. Psychologists are massively, overwhelmingly, leftwing in their views. I am most certainly NOT conservative. My best guess is that there were ZERO conservatives in this group. For data on the near complete absence of conservatives in psychology, see Duarte et al, 2015, Behavioral and Brain Sciences. The day that only people on the right care about free speech or unbiased science is the day that we are all really and truly doomed. Sincerely, Lee Jussim
  • comex 9y ago
    Hmm. This is a somewhat tricky situation. I did not expect my comment to be read by the people it mentioned. I feel bad if I misrepresented you, but I am not sure I really did. I admit the source I had for you was weaker than the others - but then, if I now investigate further, what I see tends to confirm that your beliefs, at least on the topic of diversity in general, fall into a broad category I'd associate with right-wing thinkers. First of all, it's not just that you're concerned about left-wing bias; it's something you spend quite a lot of your time on. Looking at your blog on Psychology Today[1], just about every article is complaining about liberal bias or liberal beliefs. You're not afraid to use charged language like "creeping tyranny of the left" or "mirror-image McCarthyism". This is a bit random, but here's a quote I found especially surprising from one of your articles: > So whose level of trust in science is more well-justified? My answer: Conservatives. Deep skepticism and even mistrust in science and its conclusions are entirely well-justified. If science reveals some "truth," then it should show up again and again and again and again, so that, at some point, it becomes (to paraphrase the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould) perverse to believe otherwise. Until that time, however, it is not at all perverse to believe otherwise. [2] When it comes to conservative mistrust of science, I'd say there's an elephant in the room, namely climate change. That is, of course, the biggest issue where belief in science has become politicized. And when it comes to the existence of anthropogenic climate change, it became "perverse to believe otherwise" quite a while ago, yet in the United States conservatives still do; in fact, increasingly so[3]. It seems absurd not to mention that (which the article does not, at any point). But going back to the question of diversity... There is some risk of circular reasoning here: I claimed your opinion should be taken somewhat more lightly because you were biased; now I'm claiming that you're biased because you have a different opinion from me. However, I think the following is meaningful to the extent that it ties your opinions on the memo to a broader pattern. One of the entries in your recommended reading list from the 'Four Scientists' article is a WSJ article you co-wrote with Jonathan Haidt[4]. Broadly speaking, the article is an appeal to colleges to not do any of the things liberals want them to do to address social inequality: not just affirmative action, which is pretty much the same issue as in the Google memo, but also such measures as diversity training and microaggression training. While the article cites several different studies at various points, most of the stronger claims are not supported by such citations. In particular: Regarding diversity interventions, your article states: > The evaluations that have been done are not encouraging. A major 2007 review of diversity training in corporations concluded that “on average, programs designed to reduce bias among managers responsible for hiring and promotion have not worked.” A review of diversity interventions published in 2014 in the journal Science noted that these programs “often induce ironic negative effects (such as reactance or backlash) by implying that participants are at fault for current diversity challenges. But the 2014 review states that "there is promising evidence that several interventions raise participants' awareness of diversity issues and reduce explicit and implicit biases." It does criticize the use of non-evidence-based diversity interventions, but its overall message seems quite counter to your article's suggestion that diversity training is overall useless or harmful. (The 2007 review is less so, but it does mention that certain types of training can have positive effects.) Your article goes on to criticize microaggression training, stating that "microaggression training is likely to backfire and increase racial tensions" and "activates an oppressor-victim narrative", and that "the threshold for what counts as an offense falls ever lower". But it cites no studies for these claims, and spends zero words on the potential benefits of such training, i.e. avoiding the harms caused by microaggressions themselves. It is hard not to see bias in a piece that concludes the harms outweigh the benefits without even examining the latter. The article also defines microaggressions in a rather unfair manner: "The idea covers everything from asking someone where they are from to questioning the merits of affirmative action during a classroom discussion." Of course, "questioning the merits of affirmative action" is not a core example of a microaggression (which is not to say nobody has ever claimed it to be one, but still). "Asking someone where they are from" arguably is, but only because of the tendency for people of certain ethnicities to be inundated with such questions, even if they were in fact born in the United States (I'm assuming a U.S. context); this creates the feeling that they're not perceived as real Americans. While I'd argue it's actually an important type of microaggression, it's much less obviously sympathetic, from a short description, than other commonly cited types, and I suspect it was chosen for that reason. Actually, I wasn't surprised to read something along those lines. When I first read your Quilette article, where Jonathan Haidt shows up as well (as the author of one of the books you recommend), the name jumped out at me. I'd heard of him as a coauthor of "The Coddling of the American Mind"[5], a well-known article I find quite infuriating for, among other things, purporting to diagnose liberals with (effectively) a psychological condition, pooh-poohing PTSD, and, more relevantly, taking an extremely one-sided view of microaggressions. I don't know if he was also the driving force behind the section of the WSJ article about microaggressions, but you put your name on it in any case. Meh... I could go on, but I'm not sure I'm making a useful argument to anyone other than myself. After all, it's unlikely that anyone will read this other than perhaps you, Lee Jussim, and I hardly expect to convince you that you're biased! But maybe you can at least see where I'm coming from. FWIW, I care a lot about free speech, and I'm troubled by the scarcity of people who vigorously defend conservatives' ability to express their views without actually agreeing with those views. I kinda wish I could consider you one of them, but I don't think I can; regardless of what you consider yourself, from my perspective you seem pretty far to the right on social issues. [1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rabble-rouser?page=2 https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rabble-rouser?page=2 [2] https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rabble-rouser/201304/conservatives-distrust-science-are-they-right-do-so https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rabble-rouser/201304/co... [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/03/us/politics/republican-leaders-climate-change.html?_r=0 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/03/us/politics/republican-le... [4] http://www.businessforum.com/WSJ_Race-on-Campus-05-06-2016.pdf http://www.businessforum.com/WSJ_Race-on-Campus-05-06-2016.p... [5] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-cod...