(Apologies if you're joking, but you don't appear to be. Hmm but I'm not sure.) "Consider the fact that in the social sciences, about 18 percent of American pr

(Apologies if you're joking, but you don't appear to be. Hmm but I'm not sure.) "Consider the fact that in the social sciences, about 18 percent of American professors are communists.." - whoaaa! hehe. Well, that was the most remarkable start to a sentence I've experienced on HN. Allow me to stop there, and examine for a moment how much of a fact that is. Well, more than a moment - I couldn't access "The social and political views of American professors" (2007) on that link, and it's 76pp long. It reports a 2006 survey. I think your "about 18 percent of American [social science] professors are communists" refers to pp40-1 : "Before moving on to consider the substantive attitudes items, we consider three other political identities that professors may hold that would indicate something about their political views: whether they think of themselves as radicals, political activists, and Marxists. We queried respondents on these matters by presenting them with a series of labels - including "radical," "political activist," and "Marxist" - and asking them to indicate how well, on a seven point scale ranging from not at all to extremely well, the labels described them. ...Table 12 shows the percentage of respondents in each broad disciplinary grouping who said these terms described them at least moderately well (giving a score of 4 or higher).." There's a figure of 17.6% given in the table for professors in the "Social sciences" + "Marxist category". So, in a 2006 survey, 17.6% of social science professors said "Marxist" described them moderately well, extremely well, or somewhere in between. I'll leave it there for now, just remarking that it strikes me as rather ironic that the "fact" you asked us to consider came as part of an argument purporting to show someone else's stats were false. I'm not sure of the technical term for what you were doing in your last sentence, but it wasn't pretty either. Edit: I thought my comment was as usual tangential at best to the main story, but on second thoughts maybe this was a small journalistic investigation of exactly the kind hoped for? :-)