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While this explicit cancel culture has been slow to arrive, this is exactly the kind of traditionally left leaning activism which has gradually come to infest a

While this explicit cancel culture has been slow to arrive, this is exactly the kind of traditionally left leaning activism which has gradually come to infest almost all of academia (and to a lesser but growing extent, industry). The result is an extremely strong, emergent cultural pressure against certain results and certain questions, which has been holding back a wide range of fields and ensuring pursuit of severely one sided science for decades. Our understandings of intelligence, social dynamics, genetic influences on behavior, sexually dimorphic psychology and performance, climate change, et al. are mired by unspoken taboos, not because certain lines of inquiry are logically unsound, but because they may uncover results which run contrary to socially acceptable, but ultimately poorly or un- justified assumptions about reality and human nature. More importantly, a subset of results may justify certain traditionally right leaning beliefs, and so certain necessary research topics are effectively forbidden. Please understand, I'm not suggesting choosing between left and right, only pointing out that the bias is pervasive and undeniable. The results are less effective social and economic policy, and poorer research in general, as incentives are no longer aligned with classical goals of objective knowledge discovery.

sandoooo 7y ago
On the other hand, this suggests there are low-hanging fruit in those areas. The trick is to find one that will produce money for you as a researcher/investor even if it's an unpopular opinion (i.e. not reliant on investment / cooperation from mainstream players). Suggestions? Related, what's the best way to short cancel-culture-heavy endeavors? Seems like it predicts a much higher chance of failure in the long term.
zzzcpan 7y ago
> this is exactly the kind of traditionally left leaning activism > ensuring pursuit of severely one sided science for decades More like a government level effort, not some random left leaning activism infesting science. So this is the social and economic policy they want.
xenocratus 7y ago
I've been brewing in my own rage for this for a while, thank you for spelling it out.
bsder 7y ago
You argument might be okay when you only used social "sciences". Once you start trying to attack climate change, you lose all your credibility. This is something that has MOUNTAINS of evidence that is quite clear and gets even clearer with the passage of time.
- natalyarostova 7y ago
  If someone came up with novel and valid research that disputes some specific claims of climate change I'd wager the research would have a difficult time being published and the author would be considered to be a denier.
  - magduf 7y ago
    We have plenty of evidence already showing the concentration of CO2 in Earth's atmosphere going back many thousands of years (from core samples). There really isn't any room left for debate, because the facts are clear, the only question is "just how bad will it be with all this extra carbon in the atmosphere?".
    - booboolayla 7y ago
      Why is "how GOOD will it be will all this extra carbon" never considered as an option?
    - allovernow 7y ago
      >We have plenty of evidence already showing the concentration of CO2 in Earth's atmosphere going back many thousands of years Excellent example! I'm no climate scientist, but I am a former geoscientist, and as it happens, all of our estimates for historic atmospheric conditions are based on various proxies which in turn are rooted in assumptions. Let's take a look at ice cores, for example. The theory is that bubbles of gas are trapped during solidification and a very strong assumption is that gas ratios do not change through processes like diffusion while the ice changes state through gradual burial over thousands of years. Now I could not find any literature after a cursory search questioning or even exploring such assumptions. But it is a fact that at least one other indicator contradicts estimates from ice cores. Plant stomata overreport historic CO2 concentrations relative to ice cores. Now, a hypothetical thought experiment: suppose a scientist is able to obtain funding for and completes research which suggests that ice cores actually underestimate peak CO2 concentrations, indicating that modern levels are actually not as unprecedented as commonly believed. Which scenario do you think is more plausible: 1. The paper is published and the field of climate scientists, quite entrenched in a particular dominant viewpoint, become much more sceptical. 2. The scientist is shunned, if they even find an outlet willing to publish, for being a denier, and their career is jeapordized. Remember, scientists need to eat too. I do not wish to turn this into a debate about climate science. But there are other perfectly valid indicators, hard to find in "prestigious" journals, which are in desperate need of scrutiny but are not explored because people who spend their best years pursuing a PhD are unlikely to risk destroying their careers and losing their jobs when they have safer questions to ask. That's a large component of this emergent pressure to research in a particular safe direction. Honestly, given the massive uncertainty that we deal with in geoscience, with strong economic pressures to be precise (oil wells are expensive) it is extremely difficult for me to see the same wildly uncertain proxies, models, and technologies being used to justify unquestionability of facts in climate science, particularly considering the risks of overestimating warming are far lower than drilling a $200MM dry hole. Climate is a massive, complex, chaotic system which we have only recently begun studying, and requires enormous infrastructure for data collection, processing, and modeling, the latter of which cannot be empirically verified. To believe that the science is settled and beyond questioning is naive. CO2 levels are rising, but how far this deviates from the norm and how bad it may ultimately be for humans and animals is still an open question.
Fishysoup 7y ago
This is complete nonsense. First of all, there has been and still is plenty of research on gender differences and even differnces within the LGBT spectrum from biochemistry to psychology. Genetics is the same with all kinds of insights coming up about alleles related with personality changes, autism, OCD etc. We even know about genetic factors that contribute to different drug efficacies between people of different racial backgrounds. (edit:) And that's just the stuff I know about. There's so much more out there. What this article and other "dark web" people are doing is trying to play the victim and contriving a boogeyman. Just because science isn't shouting "omg women are inherently submissive" and "oh black people are better suited to manual labor", "dark webbies" make it sound like someone is suppressing research into any such area. Finally, climate change is real and people should get over it. If you look within the scientific community there's a huge range of diversity on opinions on every issue, including climate change. It's just not of the type "dark web" enthusiasts would like it to be because it's constrained by actual facts and not fantasies. By the way, scientists tend to be left-leaning in general. It's not like there's some force out there "pushing them" to act like lefties. And no, the general leftward tendency of scientists doens't negatively impact research, because science isn't political. Climate change isn't a political issue, and neither are any of these other so-called "points". Science is about learning how nature works. The scientific establishment certainly has some flaws, most notable being the publish-or-perish regime that dominates many fields. But this dark web stuff is total nonsense that's only there to justify shitty beliefs or make people feel special and part of some "cool", "rebel" outsider group without having to put any work in. Edit: oooh looks like i made some dark webbers salty. Downvote as many comments as you want, everyone is onto this charade. If you care about objectivity, fairness or justice then stop looking for boogeymen and easy narratives and focus on trying to make a difference for people who need help.
alasdair_ 7y ago
>I'm not suggesting choosing between left and right, only pointing out that the bias is pervasive and undeniable. Can you point to specific examples of this where the science is actually robust and well documented but has somehow been blocked from being published or otherwise stopped due to this pervasive bias?
- deogeo 7y ago
  I can point to specific examples of requiring candidates to be politically vetted before hiring: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/11/19/mathematician-comes-out-against-mandatory-diversity-statements-while-others-say-they https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/11/19/mathematician... You don't have to block science, if you can block the scientist. Also take into account this is an official, open requirement. For something like that to manifest, it has to be preceded by a lot of bias.
- ratsmack 7y ago
  How about a correlation between IQ and race. It seems that no one will touch the subject out of fear the it would end their career.
  - nitwit005 7y ago
    A racial label doesn't tell you much of anything about their underlying ancestry or genetics. Here in the US you can easily find people who identify as white or black who have a mix of European, African and Native American ancestry. There are people looking for genes influencing intelligence, which is a more practical thing to look for.
    - Animats 7y ago
      It's been tried using 23andMe genetic data for over a million people.[1] No one gene seems to have a large effect, “Yet when we analyze the combined effects of many genetic variants, taken together they can predict the length of a person’s formal education as well as demographic factors.” [1] https://blog.23andme.com/23andme-research/massive-study-on-the-genetics-of-educational-attainment/ https://blog.23andme.com/23andme-research/massive-study-on-t...
danShumway 7y ago
There are two possible dangers that you can fall into with science. One is to assume a conclusion with such force that it causes you to avoid certain questions or to suppress certain research. The other danger is to be so fascinated with doubt or so averse to a particular outcome that you ignore consensus, and place less weight than you should on the obvious conclusion that research is pointing to (and yes, I think the author is guilty of this). I have been hearing for a long time about how scientists are scared to question climate change, or gender differences between men and women. From what I've seen, the reality is that there are pretty clear conclusions that we can draw in those areas: that climate change is human-caused and dangerous, and that purely biological, mental differences between men and women are usually overstated. Frankly, I don't think that there's a particularly strong culture in science that is scared to ask those questions, and while cancel culture is a real thing, I don't think it's a real problem here. I do think there's a culture at the edge of science that doesn't like the answers researchers have found, and that is aggressively underestating the degree of confidence in those answers in the hopes that certain debates can be prolonged forever rather than used to influence policy changes right now. In other words, pervasive doubt can be just as dangerous and just as politically motivated as pervasive certainty. There are certain topics (such as climate change) where we effectively know the right answer. Of course we never reach 100% certainty, of course there are areas where we want to learn more, but we're a heck of a lot closer to 100% certainty than we are to 50% certainty. Because of that, some of the taboos you notice on the far-edges of the scientific community are actually justifiable defensive measures -- because running the clock down while introducing impossible standards of certainty is an effective strategy to circumvent scientific and social progress. We saw this happen with the sugar industry, we saw it happen with the tobacco industry, we saw it happen with race science, and we're seeing it happen today with gender studies, climate science, and anti-vaxers. If you were to look at the subjects I just listed to pick out a common theme or lesson, I would say that it is, 'beware isolated demands for scientific rigor, particularly when those demands are selectively applied in ways that benefit a political or socioeconomic status quo.'
- mikedilger 7y ago
  Scientific and social progress should continue with the near certainties we already have -- I think we are in agreement here. So long as we don't cancel contrarian scientists. We need to accept their long-shot research and be grateful for it, because we cannot predict ahead of time which one of them will turn out to be correct, as long as they couch their statements when they present them publicly. As a defender of free speech, I think that if some people want to believe in the long shots, they are making that ill-advised decision for themselves. When it comes to anti-vaxxers, they shouldn't have that choice as the effect is upon all of us. If a voting majority choose to believe the ill-advised long shot research then something is definitely broken, but it's not the existence of long-shot research. I won't pretend to know what that 'something' is.
etrautmann 7y ago
No, this particular example is a group of partisan trolls looking to discredit science through quasi intellectual seeming “conferences” which bait this particular response
- mindfulhack 7y ago
  I don't care what context I'm in. allovernow's comment made sense at face value and I couldn't agree with it more.
  - voxl 7y ago
    So you don't care about evidence at all, rhetoric and troll testimony are sufficient for you to double down on your preconceived beliefs.
nitwit005 7y ago
Science is a global effort these days, with a lot of cultures involved, and a lot of immigrants working as researchers. The biases aren't consistent, and vary greatly. A bunch of liberals at American universities isn't enough to completely throw off something like climate change or genetic influences on behavior. A lot of eyes have looked at a lot of data.
ajross 7y ago
> Our understandings of intelligence, social dynamics, genetic influences on behavior, sexually dimorphic psychology and performance, climate change, et al. So... the correct results that are being suppressed all skew to the political right and in favor of established social order? Really? You're sure that's not itself an observer bias?
- BurningFrog 7y ago
  > skew to the political right and in favor of established social order One interesting difference between the left and the rest of us: The left is proud that it's fighting the power. To the rest, the left is the power! In SJ terms, how you think of what the left does depends a lot on if you see it as punching up or down.
dragonwriter 7y ago
> Our understandings of intelligence, social dynamics, genetic influences on behavior, sexually dimorphic psychology and performance, climate change, et al. are mired by unspoken taboos Perhaps, but all the spoken taboos—that is, the concrete examples of things which are cited as being supposedly taboo to address in research—are, it turns out, actually quite well covered in the literature (sometimes, they are things one side would like to be true that are consistently refuted by empirical research, sometimes, as is the case with race/IQ correlation, they are facts both opposing sides acknowledge but each side prefers a different explanation for, and where one side, rather than acknowledging the dispute over the explanation, prefers to pretend the other side denies the phenomenon, and sometimes there is some other dynamic at work, but its pretty much never that the research either isn't done or is suppressed.)
- thu2111 7y ago
  Well covered relative to what? The problem is you don't know how much research into taboo topics would exist in an academic environment where freedom of speech was actually respected. It could be double, triple or 10x what we see today. Or it could be equal. However, it would be strange to assume it's equal given the very public mob mentality and academic "executions" for conservative thought, the many testimonies from academics saying they're afraid to even voice conservative ideas in academia let alone apply for grant funding for them, and the work of people like Jonathan Haight who showed fields like psychology are dominated by one political ideology. To me it's obvious there are areas that are under-researched by academia. To name just two: 1. Climate change skepticism. All the research I've seen here is done by academic outsiders. They find real problems, publish papers and get real retractions or changes made in the field, but none of it is done by academia itself. When you read the various emails showing how academics try to block people who disagree with them from getting published, it's obvious what's going on. 2. Men's rights. Academia churns out vast amounts of "research" into various feminist and intersectionalist topics. I've seen very few papers on anything approximating the male opposite. The small amount that does exist tends to come out of psychological research into education in the context of why boys are falling behind at school (they find some worrying things about teacher bias). But it's an occasional dot compared to the torrent of government-funded feminist thought. The problem with areas of inquiry like these is that leftists attack them as not only illegitimate to study at all, but to even talk about. This is despite the fact that they're both completely mainstream sets of views.
turk73 7y ago
A true scientist, a true intellectual, must follow the evidence wherever it takes them, and not the other way around. It causes me great concern, and my teeth grind, when I hear phrases such as "settled science" of which there is not such thing at all and never was. It is foolish, anti-intellectual drivel, then? Humanity can do better, but we must put these children to bed first. Otherwise our extinction will be sad conclusion.
api 7y ago
I thought conservatives were often sympathetic to taboos, extolling would be reformers to first explain why a taboo (or gate) is there before seeking to remove it. So why do taboos against topics like race and gender biology exist? Tell me why the gate is there.
jeromebaek 7y ago
it makes me sad this sort of unnuanced, oh-so-rational take unengaged by any sort of philosophy is still getting upvotes in HN. posting here feels like a lost cause.
growlist 7y ago
'The long march through the institutions (German: der lange Marsch durch die Institutionen) is a slogan coined by student activist Rudi Dutschke to describe his strategy for establishing the conditions for revolution: subverting society by infiltrating institutions such as the professions.' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_long_march_through_the_institutions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_long_march_through_the_ins...
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  So the diabolical strategy of living their life, doing good work to their conscious, and the qualified replacing those who die of natural causes? History's greatest monster right there! That is a downright sinister use of moving the goal posts that effectively calls not actively ensuring suppression of all inevitable all succession related mutations an evil. Since how else do they hope to maintain a status quo post-mortrem? Merely leaving the replacements to decide would. I wonder if there is a word for that "not-even remotely a crime" cast as something sinister vilification effort. Given an inverse Halo effect I wonder if most users are even aware that they are doing it.
  - growlist 7y ago
    Or: having seen their plans for global domination utterly fail over and over again (with the deaths of tens of millions of people as an inconvenient side-effect), communists fail to get the message and instead of being able to succeed whilst being honest with people, are only able to advance their wrong-headed utopianism through a covert and anti-democratic approach.
    - dang 7y ago
      Please don't take HN threads even further into ideological flamewar. That's the wrong way down a one-way street. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      - growlist 7y ago

sandoooo 7y ago

On the other hand, this suggests there are low-hanging fruit in those areas. The trick is to find one that will produce money for you as a researcher/investor even if it's an unpopular opinion (i.e. not reliant on investment / cooperation from mainstream players). Suggestions? Related, what's the best way to short cancel-culture-heavy endeavors? Seems like it predicts a much higher chance of failure in the long term.

zzzcpan 7y ago

> this is exactly the kind of traditionally left leaning activism > ensuring pursuit of severely one sided science for decades More like a government level effort, not some random left leaning activism infesting science. So this is the social and economic policy they want.

xenocratus 7y ago

I've been brewing in my own rage for this for a while, thank you for spelling it out.

bsder 7y ago

You argument might be okay when you only used social "sciences". Once you start trying to attack climate change, you lose all your credibility. This is something that has MOUNTAINS of evidence that is quite clear and gets even clearer with the passage of time.

natalyarostova 7y ago
If someone came up with novel and valid research that disputes some specific claims of climate change I'd wager the research would have a difficult time being published and the author would be considered to be a denier.
- magduf 7y ago
  We have plenty of evidence already showing the concentration of CO2 in Earth's atmosphere going back many thousands of years (from core samples). There really isn't any room left for debate, because the facts are clear, the only question is "just how bad will it be with all this extra carbon in the atmosphere?".
  - booboolayla 7y ago
    Why is "how GOOD will it be will all this extra carbon" never considered as an option?
  - allovernow 7y ago
    >We have plenty of evidence already showing the concentration of CO2 in Earth's atmosphere going back many thousands of years Excellent example! I'm no climate scientist, but I am a former geoscientist, and as it happens, all of our estimates for historic atmospheric conditions are based on various proxies which in turn are rooted in assumptions. Let's take a look at ice cores, for example. The theory is that bubbles of gas are trapped during solidification and a very strong assumption is that gas ratios do not change through processes like diffusion while the ice changes state through gradual burial over thousands of years. Now I could not find any literature after a cursory search questioning or even exploring such assumptions. But it is a fact that at least one other indicator contradicts estimates from ice cores. Plant stomata overreport historic CO2 concentrations relative to ice cores. Now, a hypothetical thought experiment: suppose a scientist is able to obtain funding for and completes research which suggests that ice cores actually underestimate peak CO2 concentrations, indicating that modern levels are actually not as unprecedented as commonly believed. Which scenario do you think is more plausible: 1. The paper is published and the field of climate scientists, quite entrenched in a particular dominant viewpoint, become much more sceptical. 2. The scientist is shunned, if they even find an outlet willing to publish, for being a denier, and their career is jeapordized. Remember, scientists need to eat too. I do not wish to turn this into a debate about climate science. But there are other perfectly valid indicators, hard to find in "prestigious" journals, which are in desperate need of scrutiny but are not explored because people who spend their best years pursuing a PhD are unlikely to risk destroying their careers and losing their jobs when they have safer questions to ask. That's a large component of this emergent pressure to research in a particular safe direction. Honestly, given the massive uncertainty that we deal with in geoscience, with strong economic pressures to be precise (oil wells are expensive) it is extremely difficult for me to see the same wildly uncertain proxies, models, and technologies being used to justify unquestionability of facts in climate science, particularly considering the risks of overestimating warming are far lower than drilling a $200MM dry hole. Climate is a massive, complex, chaotic system which we have only recently begun studying, and requires enormous infrastructure for data collection, processing, and modeling, the latter of which cannot be empirically verified. To believe that the science is settled and beyond questioning is naive. CO2 levels are rising, but how far this deviates from the norm and how bad it may ultimately be for humans and animals is still an open question.

Fishysoup 7y ago

This is complete nonsense. First of all, there has been and still is plenty of research on gender differences and even differnces within the LGBT spectrum from biochemistry to psychology. Genetics is the same with all kinds of insights coming up about alleles related with personality changes, autism, OCD etc. We even know about genetic factors that contribute to different drug efficacies between people of different racial backgrounds. (edit:) And that's just the stuff I know about. There's so much more out there. What this article and other "dark web" people are doing is trying to play the victim and contriving a boogeyman. Just because science isn't shouting "omg women are inherently submissive" and "oh black people are better suited to manual labor", "dark webbies" make it sound like someone is suppressing research into any such area. Finally, climate change is real and people should get over it. If you look within the scientific community there's a huge range of diversity on opinions on every issue, including climate change. It's just not of the type "dark web" enthusiasts would like it to be because it's constrained by actual facts and not fantasies. By the way, scientists tend to be left-leaning in general. It's not like there's some force out there "pushing them" to act like lefties. And no, the general leftward tendency of scientists doens't negatively impact research, because science isn't political. Climate change isn't a political issue, and neither are any of these other so-called "points". Science is about learning how nature works. The scientific establishment certainly has some flaws, most notable being the publish-or-perish regime that dominates many fields. But this dark web stuff is total nonsense that's only there to justify shitty beliefs or make people feel special and part of some "cool", "rebel" outsider group without having to put any work in. Edit: oooh looks like i made some dark webbers salty. Downvote as many comments as you want, everyone is onto this charade. If you care about objectivity, fairness or justice then stop looking for boogeymen and easy narratives and focus on trying to make a difference for people who need help.

alasdair_ 7y ago

>I'm not suggesting choosing between left and right, only pointing out that the bias is pervasive and undeniable. Can you point to specific examples of this where the science is actually robust and well documented but has somehow been blocked from being published or otherwise stopped due to this pervasive bias?

deogeo 7y ago
I can point to specific examples of requiring candidates to be politically vetted before hiring: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/11/19/mathematician-comes-out-against-mandatory-diversity-statements-while-others-say-they https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/11/19/mathematician... You don't have to block science, if you can block the scientist. Also take into account this is an official, open requirement. For something like that to manifest, it has to be preceded by a lot of bias.
ratsmack 7y ago
How about a correlation between IQ and race. It seems that no one will touch the subject out of fear the it would end their career.
- nitwit005 7y ago
  A racial label doesn't tell you much of anything about their underlying ancestry or genetics. Here in the US you can easily find people who identify as white or black who have a mix of European, African and Native American ancestry. There are people looking for genes influencing intelligence, which is a more practical thing to look for.
  - Animats 7y ago
    It's been tried using 23andMe genetic data for over a million people.[1] No one gene seems to have a large effect, “Yet when we analyze the combined effects of many genetic variants, taken together they can predict the length of a person’s formal education as well as demographic factors.” [1] https://blog.23andme.com/23andme-research/massive-study-on-the-genetics-of-educational-attainment/ https://blog.23andme.com/23andme-research/massive-study-on-t...

danShumway 7y ago

There are two possible dangers that you can fall into with science. One is to assume a conclusion with such force that it causes you to avoid certain questions or to suppress certain research. The other danger is to be so fascinated with doubt or so averse to a particular outcome that you ignore consensus, and place less weight than you should on the obvious conclusion that research is pointing to (and yes, I think the author is guilty of this). I have been hearing for a long time about how scientists are scared to question climate change, or gender differences between men and women. From what I've seen, the reality is that there are pretty clear conclusions that we can draw in those areas: that climate change is human-caused and dangerous, and that purely biological, mental differences between men and women are usually overstated. Frankly, I don't think that there's a particularly strong culture in science that is scared to ask those questions, and while cancel culture is a real thing, I don't think it's a real problem here. I do think there's a culture at the edge of science that doesn't like the answers researchers have found, and that is aggressively underestating the degree of confidence in those answers in the hopes that certain debates can be prolonged forever rather than used to influence policy changes right now. In other words, pervasive doubt can be just as dangerous and just as politically motivated as pervasive certainty. There are certain topics (such as climate change) where we effectively know the right answer. Of course we never reach 100% certainty, of course there are areas where we want to learn more, but we're a heck of a lot closer to 100% certainty than we are to 50% certainty. Because of that, some of the taboos you notice on the far-edges of the scientific community are actually justifiable defensive measures -- because running the clock down while introducing impossible standards of certainty is an effective strategy to circumvent scientific and social progress. We saw this happen with the sugar industry, we saw it happen with the tobacco industry, we saw it happen with race science, and we're seeing it happen today with gender studies, climate science, and anti-vaxers. If you were to look at the subjects I just listed to pick out a common theme or lesson, I would say that it is, 'beware isolated demands for scientific rigor, particularly when those demands are selectively applied in ways that benefit a political or socioeconomic status quo.'

mikedilger 7y ago
Scientific and social progress should continue with the near certainties we already have -- I think we are in agreement here. So long as we don't cancel contrarian scientists. We need to accept their long-shot research and be grateful for it, because we cannot predict ahead of time which one of them will turn out to be correct, as long as they couch their statements when they present them publicly. As a defender of free speech, I think that if some people want to believe in the long shots, they are making that ill-advised decision for themselves. When it comes to anti-vaxxers, they shouldn't have that choice as the effect is upon all of us. If a voting majority choose to believe the ill-advised long shot research then something is definitely broken, but it's not the existence of long-shot research. I won't pretend to know what that 'something' is.

etrautmann 7y ago

No, this particular example is a group of partisan trolls looking to discredit science through quasi intellectual seeming “conferences” which bait this particular response

mindfulhack 7y ago
I don't care what context I'm in. allovernow's comment made sense at face value and I couldn't agree with it more.
- voxl 7y ago
  So you don't care about evidence at all, rhetoric and troll testimony are sufficient for you to double down on your preconceived beliefs.

nitwit005 7y ago

Science is a global effort these days, with a lot of cultures involved, and a lot of immigrants working as researchers. The biases aren't consistent, and vary greatly. A bunch of liberals at American universities isn't enough to completely throw off something like climate change or genetic influences on behavior. A lot of eyes have looked at a lot of data.

ajross 7y ago

> Our understandings of intelligence, social dynamics, genetic influences on behavior, sexually dimorphic psychology and performance, climate change, et al. So... the correct results that are being suppressed all skew to the political right and in favor of established social order? Really? You're sure that's not itself an observer bias?

BurningFrog 7y ago
> skew to the political right and in favor of established social order One interesting difference between the left and the rest of us: The left is proud that it's fighting the power. To the rest, the left is the power! In SJ terms, how you think of what the left does depends a lot on if you see it as punching up or down.

dragonwriter 7y ago

> Our understandings of intelligence, social dynamics, genetic influences on behavior, sexually dimorphic psychology and performance, climate change, et al. are mired by unspoken taboos Perhaps, but all the spoken taboos—that is, the concrete examples of things which are cited as being supposedly taboo to address in research—are, it turns out, actually quite well covered in the literature (sometimes, they are things one side would like to be true that are consistently refuted by empirical research, sometimes, as is the case with race/IQ correlation, they are facts both opposing sides acknowledge but each side prefers a different explanation for, and where one side, rather than acknowledging the dispute over the explanation, prefers to pretend the other side denies the phenomenon, and sometimes there is some other dynamic at work, but its pretty much never that the research either isn't done or is suppressed.)

thu2111 7y ago
Well covered relative to what? The problem is you don't know how much research into taboo topics would exist in an academic environment where freedom of speech was actually respected. It could be double, triple or 10x what we see today. Or it could be equal. However, it would be strange to assume it's equal given the very public mob mentality and academic "executions" for conservative thought, the many testimonies from academics saying they're afraid to even voice conservative ideas in academia let alone apply for grant funding for them, and the work of people like Jonathan Haight who showed fields like psychology are dominated by one political ideology. To me it's obvious there are areas that are under-researched by academia. To name just two: 1. Climate change skepticism. All the research I've seen here is done by academic outsiders. They find real problems, publish papers and get real retractions or changes made in the field, but none of it is done by academia itself. When you read the various emails showing how academics try to block people who disagree with them from getting published, it's obvious what's going on. 2. Men's rights. Academia churns out vast amounts of "research" into various feminist and intersectionalist topics. I've seen very few papers on anything approximating the male opposite. The small amount that does exist tends to come out of psychological research into education in the context of why boys are falling behind at school (they find some worrying things about teacher bias). But it's an occasional dot compared to the torrent of government-funded feminist thought. The problem with areas of inquiry like these is that leftists attack them as not only illegitimate to study at all, but to even talk about. This is despite the fact that they're both completely mainstream sets of views.

turk73 7y ago

A true scientist, a true intellectual, must follow the evidence wherever it takes them, and not the other way around. It causes me great concern, and my teeth grind, when I hear phrases such as "settled science" of which there is not such thing at all and never was. It is foolish, anti-intellectual drivel, then? Humanity can do better, but we must put these children to bed first. Otherwise our extinction will be sad conclusion.

api 7y ago

I thought conservatives were often sympathetic to taboos, extolling would be reformers to first explain why a taboo (or gate) is there before seeking to remove it. So why do taboos against topics like race and gender biology exist? Tell me why the gate is there.

jeromebaek 7y ago

it makes me sad this sort of unnuanced, oh-so-rational take unengaged by any sort of philosophy is still getting upvotes in HN. posting here feels like a lost cause.

growlist 7y ago

'The long march through the institutions (German: der lange Marsch durch die Institutionen) is a slogan coined by student activist Rudi Dutschke to describe his strategy for establishing the conditions for revolution: subverting society by infiltrating institutions such as the professions.' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_long_march_through_the_institutions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_long_march_through_the_ins...

Nasrudith 7y ago
So the diabolical strategy of living their life, doing good work to their conscious, and the qualified replacing those who die of natural causes? History's greatest monster right there! That is a downright sinister use of moving the goal posts that effectively calls not actively ensuring suppression of all inevitable all succession related mutations an evil. Since how else do they hope to maintain a status quo post-mortrem? Merely leaving the replacements to decide would. I wonder if there is a word for that "not-even remotely a crime" cast as something sinister vilification effort. Given an inverse Halo effect I wonder if most users are even aware that they are doing it.
- growlist 7y ago
  Or: having seen their plans for global domination utterly fail over and over again (with the deaths of tens of millions of people as an inconvenient side-effect), communists fail to get the message and instead of being able to succeed whilst being honest with people, are only able to advance their wrong-headed utopianism through a covert and anti-democratic approach.
  - dang 7y ago
    Please don't take HN threads even further into ideological flamewar. That's the wrong way down a one-way street. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - growlist 7y ago