13 ms·

>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 wh

>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...
    - soyiuz 7y ago
      Or, it might be evidence of systematic racism. Would it surprise you that the genetic bouquet associated with people of color would also correlate with a long history of racism, which includes poverty and denial of education?
    - Nasrudith 7y ago
      Well yeah - at that point you could trivially start mapping relations in those groups which to families who are advantaged materially or culturally in the sense that nine year olds usually only have access to genetics textbooks and latest papers lying around their home if their parents are genetics professors. I am pretty sure the British royal family has distinctive combinations of genes which are of course strongly correlated with a college education!
  - toasterlovin 7y ago
    > A racial label doesn't tell you much of anything about their underlying ancestry or genetics. It absolutely does, which is why medical practitioners ask for race. Different races have different susceptibility to various medical conditions, for genetic reasons (even if we don’t understand the causal mechanisms yet).
    - soyiuz 7y ago
      Please review your basic understanding of race as per my comments above. If you still think there are five races or whatever, you are living way in the past century.
      - toomim 7y ago
        Your argument is that people do not teach Race in the same way anymore. I think that your implication is that the previous way of teaching Race was wrong -- however, this very article is making the point that political activism is changing the way that people teach, and politics has certainly affected how we teach Race -- the most politically-charged topic of them all! So when you say "you are living in the past century", that could be a compliment -- it could say that the author is not being censored or brainwashed by a political orthodoxy. If you actually want to improve his understanding of Race, I'd suggest providing him with some data that contradicts his statements, rather than just dismissing him as old-fashioned. Because on the other side of that, it implies that you could just be getting lost in a fashion.
  - barry-cotter 7y ago
    https://www.ias.ac.in/public/Volumes/jgen/089/04/0417-0423.pdf https://www.ias.ac.in/public/Volumes/jgen/089/04/0417-0423.p... Comparing genetic ancestry and self-reported race/ethnicity in a multiethnic population in New York City Self-reported race/ethnicity is frequently used in epidemiological studies to assess an individual’s background origin. How- ever, in admixed populations such as Hispanic, self-reported race/ethnicity may not accurately represent them genetically because they are admixed with European, African and Native American ancestry. We estimated the proportions of genetic admixture in an ethnically diverse population of 396 mothers and 188 of their children with 35 ancestry informative mark- ers (AIMs) using the STRUCTURE version 2.2 program. The majority of the markers showed significant deviation from Hardy–Weinberg equilibrium in our study population. In mothers self-identified as Black and White, the imputed ancestry proportions were 77.6% African and 75.1% European respectively, while the racial composition among self-identified His- panics was 29.2% European, 26.0% African, and 44.8% Native American. We also investigated the utility of AIMs by showing the improved fitness of models in paraoxanase-1 genotype–phenotype associations after incorporating AIMs; however, the im- provement was moderate at best. In summary, a minimal set of 35 AIMs is sufficient to detect population stratification and estimate the proportion of individual genetic admixture; however, the utility of these markers remains questionable.
- dtoma 7y ago
  What's the use about a study on _correlation_ between these two things? You could also have a study on correlation between IQ and poverty, IQ and access to education... Not to mention, what's the point of IQ anyway? Maybe no one is picking up the subject because it would be a waste of time?
  - traverseda 7y ago
    Well IQ is an attempt to measure the mythical G (general intelligence, if there is such a thing), and more studies in that direction would allow you to better control for various factors relating to G, and figure out what interventions are best for increasing G. I'd personally consider those other studies to be more important than race and IQ, and certainly more palatable. I think it's possible that the race/IQ factor has made that whole field untenable though. I very much doubt it's because it's a waste of time, figuring out what interventions allow people to be smarter, to flourish, is pretty important. I'm pretty glad we got rid of lead paint, and leaded gasoline. That's a very visible and important intervention of the type that IQ research would help with. A lot of related research goes on, but it seems like it very rarely touches directly on the subject of IQ. That being said it's understandable when any IQ researcher's research would be immediately weaponized by racists, no matter how useful it could be. Most of the examples you cite (race, education, economic background) would not be useful in-and-of them-self (at least in a just world) but would be useful to help control for those factors in other research.
    - threatofrain 7y ago
      General intelligence is as dubious as general AI in that performance in one domain can predict performance in other domains, and the degree to which that’s possible is attributed to general intelligence.
      - JamesBarney 7y ago
        General intelligence was a statistical artifact discovered from testing. It basically a theory that if you do well on a history test you'll probably do well on a math test.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- tenpies 7y ago
  Not even race, but just suggesting that evolutionary psychology is a valid scientific field can get you crucified in some circles. Somehow the human brain avoided all sexual selection forces, environmental pressures, and even difference between the sexes; but everything else in our bodies was at the complete mercy of these factors.
  - stephencanon 7y ago
    But evo psych isn't a valid scientific field; there's no way to go back and conduct experiments to validate hypotheses. It's a bunch of nonsense just-so stories that appeal to people's existing biases. It's horoscopes-and-crystals-woo dressed up in the language of science.
    - gnaritas 7y ago
      > there's no way to go back and conduct experiments to validate hypotheses. That's not required to do science. The notion one must be able to go back in time to prove evolution is absurd. Evolution happens, that's a fact. No system in the body, including the brain, is untouched by its processes and consequences.
    - shard972 7y ago
      But we can test people who exist today who evolved independently over millenniums? Why is it nonsense to think that maybe humans who mostly existed in hunter gatherer societies for thousands of years would face different evolutionary pressures than agricultural societies? Is it really insane to believe the Sentinelese have a difference in genetic ability to engage in abstract thinking compared ashkenazi jews?
    - outlace 7y ago
      It's just as valid as evolutionary biology in general. You can say there are a lot of bad evo psych studies out there but that doesn't mean it's impossible to make scientific inferences about evo psych. You can run experiments with animal models and intervene on sexual selective pressures and see the outcomes.
    - 7y ago
- dragonwriter 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. Uh, this has been and continues to be extensively studied (along with other correlates of each, causal mechanisms, etc.), so the “no one will touch it” claim is rather firmly empirically refuted.
- wesleywt 7y ago
  Because using a flawed test to make racist generalisations about Africans, who are the most genetically diverse racial group is not a good idea?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
tastygreenapple 7y ago
It's hard to find an unbiased article about the event, but trans activists got Brown to withdraw a paper for reasons other than defects with the paper: https://thebridgehead.ca/2018/08/30/trans-activists-bully-brown-university-into-suppressing-a-study-exposing-the-dangerous-of-transgenderism/ https://thebridgehead.ca/2018/08/30/trans-activists-bully-br...
barry-cotter 7y ago
You’re asking people to prove a negative, and also assuming that there’s no chilling effect as people learn that certain topics are not a good idea if you want a career. The premier example of robust, well documented science with vociferous opposition has to be intelligence. Besides scholars with a fiercer attachment to their politics than the truth like Gould you also have introductory psychology textbooks that go out of their way to muddy the waters by giving space to alternative theories of intelligence to g with fuck all empirical backing like Gardner’s or Sternberg’s. If they had similar standards in other areas of psychology everything would be as bad as social. For suppression there was an article in Third World Quarterly withdrawn due to credible threats of violence because a mob didn’t like the topic. Note it wasn’t retracted and it passed peer review. David Graeber recently led a campaign to have Noah Carl’s offer of a postdoc withdrawn at Cambridge, successfully. And there was a campaign at Hypatia, a feminist philosophy journal to have an article withdrawn for discussing trans racialism in the context of transsexuality.
- allovernow 7y ago
  Hell, look at the insane, wholly unscientific public crucification of James Watson for commenting, totally reasonably, on this very subject. Stripped of a Nobel prize for suggesting that two and two may equal four. Find me one credible media outlet which even questioned such treatment! Edit: sorry, I misread a headline about him losing the prize, it read stripped of "honors". Point still stands.
  - specialist 7y ago
    You're claiming that Watson's views of IQ, genetics, and race are scientific?
    - frogger23127 7y ago
      Absolutely. Your negative emotional reaction to scientific research is not a valid refutation of that research. Science is based on logic, not emotions. Facts do not care about your feelings.
specialist 7y ago
A list of victims of cancel culture would be handy. I'll start it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Donahue#MSNBC_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Donahue#MSNBC_program
- klyrs 7y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism#Victims_of_McCarthyism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism#Victims_of_McCarth...
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
freepor 7y ago
I wouldn’t say robust beyond dispute, but Brown disavowed their own professor’s research because it disagreed with the orthodoxy: https://thefederalist.com/2018/08/31/explosive-ivy-league-study-repressed-for-finding-transgender-kids-may-be-a-social-contagion/ https://thefederalist.com/2018/08/31/explosive-ivy-league-st...
- klyrs 7y ago
  There was quite a lot wrong with this paper, and it wasn't about the "orthodoxy." The study makes claims about children, but the study was actually a survey of how parents felt about their children's transition. There was significant bias in how parents were selected to participate in this survey; it was predominantly advertised on anti-trans websites. The survey itself was biased. By all accounts, the statistical analysis of this data is not in dispute. The methodology, however, leaves much to be desired. I read both the Federalist and the Huffington Post, because it's interesting to contrast how issues are being presented in mass media (and I get a certain pleasure in exercising my bullshit detector). But I certainly don't link to them in pursuit of a reasoned argument, because they're both quite biased. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-biased-is-your-news-source-you-probably-wont-agree-with-this-chart-2018-02-28 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-biased-is-your-news-so...
  - tgv 7y ago
    There are so many papers that make claims that are in no way proven by the actual research done, whose authors don't get disavowed, that it's almost certain it was because of the topic.
    - klyrs 7y ago
      The egregious and apparently deliberate sampling bias, and begging the question, are factors that cannot be ignored in this case. They tip the scales from this being a mistake made in good faith, to this being a politically motivated bad-faith effort. Science makes room for mistakes, retractions and replication efforts. But the paper in question was unscientific to the core. Authors who engage in fraud are regularly discredited.
SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
One example is unconscious bias training. Modern meta-analyses strongly suggest that it doesn't work at all, that whatever the IAT is measuring is unrelated to patterns of discriminatory behavior. This is well-documented in the literature, and by a subset of news sites including some left leaning ones. But it would be completely impossible for a big company's HR department to say "we are cancelling our unconscious bias training because it doesn't do anything".
turk73 7y ago
I was writing my dissertation on Internet privacy right as 9/11 took place. Talk about a subject suddenly becoming taboo! It basically ruined my academic career because I went through with it despite the warnings from my adviser to tone it down. Everyone was scared of their own shadow back then and couldn't back the statism more if they had to! PATRIOT Act, Know Your Customer, I lost everything. Man that was a hard thing to go through. Screw those damn fools who did this to us and keep doing it even now with their mass surveillance.
wutbrodo 7y ago
You're asking for examples where science is robust and well-documented but has been _blocked_ from being published? You understand that this is effectively an unanswerable question, right? How would anyone here come to know about such findings if they existed, and further know that they well-documented _despite their not being published_? It's fundamentally unknowable how much science is being denied the imprimatur of good science for ideological reasons while "actually" being good science. The best you can hope for is examples that meet a lower, more reasonable bar that point to problems in the culture of academia, from which you can extrapolate chilling effects. There are examples of things like this, as in Case & Deaton's description[1] of the reaction to their study on declining mortality amongst US whites: > Deaton: Anne presented the first paper once and was told, in no uncertain terms: How dare you work on whites. Case: I was really beaten up. Deaton: And these were really senior people. Case: Very senior people. This example is just off the top of my head, and it's a blatant example of a study that _isn't even saying anything that taboo_, except among those whose brains have been thoroughly liquefied by politics. If examples as dramatic as this exist, at well-known, highly-regarded institutions, for a paper _published by a Nobel Laureate_, it's not unreasonable to conclude that there's some degree of unobservable cases that were actually successfully blocked, along with chilling effects changing the direction of research in the first place. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/04/06/how-dare-you-work-on-whites-professors-under-fire-for-research-on-white-mortality/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/04/06/how-d...
- Retric 7y ago
  Many academics are more than happy to raise a stink about suppression of other topics outside of traditional channels. Ex: https://www.politico.com/story/2019/06/23/agriculture-department-climate-change-1376413 https://www.politico.com/story/2019/06/23/agriculture-depart... So, it’s reasonable to expect examples of actual suppression. If nothing else I expect someone to be making that argument on at least one paper somewhere. Though how much merit that’s worth depends on the paper.
  - wutbrodo 7y ago
    This isn't inconsistent at all with the premise we're discussing. Academics are happy to make a stink about _external_ influence on their research, influence that runs contrary to beliefs dominant in academia[1]. Bitching about the Trump administration isn't going to lose you any friends in academia, but bitching about forces internal to academia, whose sympathy much of academia lies with, is a whole different ballgame. (Note that I'm referring to the opinions of "academia" fairly carelessly here for conciseness, when I mean things like "the dominant opinion among the individuals making up the departments that affect an academic's career") [1] Note that I'm not making any statement about academia being left or right specifically. Ie, I think the OP comment of the thread may be right about these forces being sometimes lefty
sysbin 7y ago
The only thing coming to my mind for a possibility to this question is any type of research that would be for pro-assisted-suicide. Research promoting positives of assisted suicide for people with illnesses or disabilities. That type of thing likely was held back by certain ideologies rooted in culture. I'm not sure if it can be proven and makes me think the question is very difficult to prove.
s_y_n_t_a_x 7y ago
Dual Inheritance Theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_inheritance_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_inheritance_theory
s9w 7y ago
people would be banned for a truthful answer for flamebaiting
gvjddbnvdrbv 7y ago
You just reframed the debate into terms that suit you. Very clever and great for arguing on the internet but ultimately you won't convince anyone with these methods.

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...
  - soyiuz 7y ago
    Or, it might be evidence of systematic racism. Would it surprise you that the genetic bouquet associated with people of color would also correlate with a long history of racism, which includes poverty and denial of education?
  - Nasrudith 7y ago
    Well yeah - at that point you could trivially start mapping relations in those groups which to families who are advantaged materially or culturally in the sense that nine year olds usually only have access to genetics textbooks and latest papers lying around their home if their parents are genetics professors. I am pretty sure the British royal family has distinctive combinations of genes which are of course strongly correlated with a college education!
- toasterlovin 7y ago
  > A racial label doesn't tell you much of anything about their underlying ancestry or genetics. It absolutely does, which is why medical practitioners ask for race. Different races have different susceptibility to various medical conditions, for genetic reasons (even if we don’t understand the causal mechanisms yet).
  - soyiuz 7y ago
    Please review your basic understanding of race as per my comments above. If you still think there are five races or whatever, you are living way in the past century.
    - toomim 7y ago
      Your argument is that people do not teach Race in the same way anymore. I think that your implication is that the previous way of teaching Race was wrong -- however, this very article is making the point that political activism is changing the way that people teach, and politics has certainly affected how we teach Race -- the most politically-charged topic of them all! So when you say "you are living in the past century", that could be a compliment -- it could say that the author is not being censored or brainwashed by a political orthodoxy. If you actually want to improve his understanding of Race, I'd suggest providing him with some data that contradicts his statements, rather than just dismissing him as old-fashioned. Because on the other side of that, it implies that you could just be getting lost in a fashion.
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  https://www.ias.ac.in/public/Volumes/jgen/089/04/0417-0423.pdf https://www.ias.ac.in/public/Volumes/jgen/089/04/0417-0423.p... Comparing genetic ancestry and self-reported race/ethnicity in a multiethnic population in New York City Self-reported race/ethnicity is frequently used in epidemiological studies to assess an individual’s background origin. How- ever, in admixed populations such as Hispanic, self-reported race/ethnicity may not accurately represent them genetically because they are admixed with European, African and Native American ancestry. We estimated the proportions of genetic admixture in an ethnically diverse population of 396 mothers and 188 of their children with 35 ancestry informative mark- ers (AIMs) using the STRUCTURE version 2.2 program. The majority of the markers showed significant deviation from Hardy–Weinberg equilibrium in our study population. In mothers self-identified as Black and White, the imputed ancestry proportions were 77.6% African and 75.1% European respectively, while the racial composition among self-identified His- panics was 29.2% European, 26.0% African, and 44.8% Native American. We also investigated the utility of AIMs by showing the improved fitness of models in paraoxanase-1 genotype–phenotype associations after incorporating AIMs; however, the im- provement was moderate at best. In summary, a minimal set of 35 AIMs is sufficient to detect population stratification and estimate the proportion of individual genetic admixture; however, the utility of these markers remains questionable.
dtoma 7y ago
What's the use about a study on _correlation_ between these two things? You could also have a study on correlation between IQ and poverty, IQ and access to education... Not to mention, what's the point of IQ anyway? Maybe no one is picking up the subject because it would be a waste of time?
- traverseda 7y ago
  Well IQ is an attempt to measure the mythical G (general intelligence, if there is such a thing), and more studies in that direction would allow you to better control for various factors relating to G, and figure out what interventions are best for increasing G. I'd personally consider those other studies to be more important than race and IQ, and certainly more palatable. I think it's possible that the race/IQ factor has made that whole field untenable though. I very much doubt it's because it's a waste of time, figuring out what interventions allow people to be smarter, to flourish, is pretty important. I'm pretty glad we got rid of lead paint, and leaded gasoline. That's a very visible and important intervention of the type that IQ research would help with. A lot of related research goes on, but it seems like it very rarely touches directly on the subject of IQ. That being said it's understandable when any IQ researcher's research would be immediately weaponized by racists, no matter how useful it could be. Most of the examples you cite (race, education, economic background) would not be useful in-and-of them-self (at least in a just world) but would be useful to help control for those factors in other research.
  - threatofrain 7y ago
    General intelligence is as dubious as general AI in that performance in one domain can predict performance in other domains, and the degree to which that’s possible is attributed to general intelligence.
    - JamesBarney 7y ago
      General intelligence was a statistical artifact discovered from testing. It basically a theory that if you do well on a history test you'll probably do well on a math test.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
tenpies 7y ago
Not even race, but just suggesting that evolutionary psychology is a valid scientific field can get you crucified in some circles. Somehow the human brain avoided all sexual selection forces, environmental pressures, and even difference between the sexes; but everything else in our bodies was at the complete mercy of these factors.
- stephencanon 7y ago
  But evo psych isn't a valid scientific field; there's no way to go back and conduct experiments to validate hypotheses. It's a bunch of nonsense just-so stories that appeal to people's existing biases. It's horoscopes-and-crystals-woo dressed up in the language of science.
  - gnaritas 7y ago
    > there's no way to go back and conduct experiments to validate hypotheses. That's not required to do science. The notion one must be able to go back in time to prove evolution is absurd. Evolution happens, that's a fact. No system in the body, including the brain, is untouched by its processes and consequences.
  - shard972 7y ago
    But we can test people who exist today who evolved independently over millenniums? Why is it nonsense to think that maybe humans who mostly existed in hunter gatherer societies for thousands of years would face different evolutionary pressures than agricultural societies? Is it really insane to believe the Sentinelese have a difference in genetic ability to engage in abstract thinking compared ashkenazi jews?
  - outlace 7y ago
    It's just as valid as evolutionary biology in general. You can say there are a lot of bad evo psych studies out there but that doesn't mean it's impossible to make scientific inferences about evo psych. You can run experiments with animal models and intervene on sexual selective pressures and see the outcomes.
  - 7y ago
dragonwriter 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. Uh, this has been and continues to be extensively studied (along with other correlates of each, causal mechanisms, etc.), so the “no one will touch it” claim is rather firmly empirically refuted.
wesleywt 7y ago
Because using a flawed test to make racist generalisations about Africans, who are the most genetically diverse racial group is not a good idea?

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

tastygreenapple 7y ago

It's hard to find an unbiased article about the event, but trans activists got Brown to withdraw a paper for reasons other than defects with the paper: https://thebridgehead.ca/2018/08/30/trans-activists-bully-brown-university-into-suppressing-a-study-exposing-the-dangerous-of-transgenderism/ https://thebridgehead.ca/2018/08/30/trans-activists-bully-br...

barry-cotter 7y ago

You’re asking people to prove a negative, and also assuming that there’s no chilling effect as people learn that certain topics are not a good idea if you want a career. The premier example of robust, well documented science with vociferous opposition has to be intelligence. Besides scholars with a fiercer attachment to their politics than the truth like Gould you also have introductory psychology textbooks that go out of their way to muddy the waters by giving space to alternative theories of intelligence to g with fuck all empirical backing like Gardner’s or Sternberg’s. If they had similar standards in other areas of psychology everything would be as bad as social. For suppression there was an article in Third World Quarterly withdrawn due to credible threats of violence because a mob didn’t like the topic. Note it wasn’t retracted and it passed peer review. David Graeber recently led a campaign to have Noah Carl’s offer of a postdoc withdrawn at Cambridge, successfully. And there was a campaign at Hypatia, a feminist philosophy journal to have an article withdrawn for discussing trans racialism in the context of transsexuality.

allovernow 7y ago
Hell, look at the insane, wholly unscientific public crucification of James Watson for commenting, totally reasonably, on this very subject. Stripped of a Nobel prize for suggesting that two and two may equal four. Find me one credible media outlet which even questioned such treatment! Edit: sorry, I misread a headline about him losing the prize, it read stripped of "honors". Point still stands.
- specialist 7y ago
  You're claiming that Watson's views of IQ, genetics, and race are scientific?
  - frogger23127 7y ago
    Absolutely. Your negative emotional reaction to scientific research is not a valid refutation of that research. Science is based on logic, not emotions. Facts do not care about your feelings.

specialist 7y ago

A list of victims of cancel culture would be handy. I'll start it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Donahue#MSNBC_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Donahue#MSNBC_program

klyrs 7y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism#Victims_of_McCarthyism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism#Victims_of_McCarth...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

freepor 7y ago

I wouldn’t say robust beyond dispute, but Brown disavowed their own professor’s research because it disagreed with the orthodoxy: https://thefederalist.com/2018/08/31/explosive-ivy-league-study-repressed-for-finding-transgender-kids-may-be-a-social-contagion/ https://thefederalist.com/2018/08/31/explosive-ivy-league-st...

klyrs 7y ago
There was quite a lot wrong with this paper, and it wasn't about the "orthodoxy." The study makes claims about children, but the study was actually a survey of how parents felt about their children's transition. There was significant bias in how parents were selected to participate in this survey; it was predominantly advertised on anti-trans websites. The survey itself was biased. By all accounts, the statistical analysis of this data is not in dispute. The methodology, however, leaves much to be desired. I read both the Federalist and the Huffington Post, because it's interesting to contrast how issues are being presented in mass media (and I get a certain pleasure in exercising my bullshit detector). But I certainly don't link to them in pursuit of a reasoned argument, because they're both quite biased. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-biased-is-your-news-source-you-probably-wont-agree-with-this-chart-2018-02-28 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-biased-is-your-news-so...
- tgv 7y ago
  There are so many papers that make claims that are in no way proven by the actual research done, whose authors don't get disavowed, that it's almost certain it was because of the topic.
  - klyrs 7y ago
    The egregious and apparently deliberate sampling bias, and begging the question, are factors that cannot be ignored in this case. They tip the scales from this being a mistake made in good faith, to this being a politically motivated bad-faith effort. Science makes room for mistakes, retractions and replication efforts. But the paper in question was unscientific to the core. Authors who engage in fraud are regularly discredited.

SpicyLemonZest 7y ago

One example is unconscious bias training. Modern meta-analyses strongly suggest that it doesn't work at all, that whatever the IAT is measuring is unrelated to patterns of discriminatory behavior. This is well-documented in the literature, and by a subset of news sites including some left leaning ones. But it would be completely impossible for a big company's HR department to say "we are cancelling our unconscious bias training because it doesn't do anything".

turk73 7y ago

I was writing my dissertation on Internet privacy right as 9/11 took place. Talk about a subject suddenly becoming taboo! It basically ruined my academic career because I went through with it despite the warnings from my adviser to tone it down. Everyone was scared of their own shadow back then and couldn't back the statism more if they had to! PATRIOT Act, Know Your Customer, I lost everything. Man that was a hard thing to go through. Screw those damn fools who did this to us and keep doing it even now with their mass surveillance.

wutbrodo 7y ago

You're asking for examples where science is robust and well-documented but has been _blocked_ from being published? You understand that this is effectively an unanswerable question, right? How would anyone here come to know about such findings if they existed, and further know that they well-documented _despite their not being published_? It's fundamentally unknowable how much science is being denied the imprimatur of good science for ideological reasons while "actually" being good science. The best you can hope for is examples that meet a lower, more reasonable bar that point to problems in the culture of academia, from which you can extrapolate chilling effects. There are examples of things like this, as in Case & Deaton's description[1] of the reaction to their study on declining mortality amongst US whites: > Deaton: Anne presented the first paper once and was told, in no uncertain terms: How dare you work on whites. Case: I was really beaten up. Deaton: And these were really senior people. Case: Very senior people. This example is just off the top of my head, and it's a blatant example of a study that _isn't even saying anything that taboo_, except among those whose brains have been thoroughly liquefied by politics. If examples as dramatic as this exist, at well-known, highly-regarded institutions, for a paper _published by a Nobel Laureate_, it's not unreasonable to conclude that there's some degree of unobservable cases that were actually successfully blocked, along with chilling effects changing the direction of research in the first place. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/04/06/how-dare-you-work-on-whites-professors-under-fire-for-research-on-white-mortality/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/04/06/how-d...

Retric 7y ago
Many academics are more than happy to raise a stink about suppression of other topics outside of traditional channels. Ex: https://www.politico.com/story/2019/06/23/agriculture-department-climate-change-1376413 https://www.politico.com/story/2019/06/23/agriculture-depart... So, it’s reasonable to expect examples of actual suppression. If nothing else I expect someone to be making that argument on at least one paper somewhere. Though how much merit that’s worth depends on the paper.
- wutbrodo 7y ago
  This isn't inconsistent at all with the premise we're discussing. Academics are happy to make a stink about _external_ influence on their research, influence that runs contrary to beliefs dominant in academia[1]. Bitching about the Trump administration isn't going to lose you any friends in academia, but bitching about forces internal to academia, whose sympathy much of academia lies with, is a whole different ballgame. (Note that I'm referring to the opinions of "academia" fairly carelessly here for conciseness, when I mean things like "the dominant opinion among the individuals making up the departments that affect an academic's career") [1] Note that I'm not making any statement about academia being left or right specifically. Ie, I think the OP comment of the thread may be right about these forces being sometimes lefty

sysbin 7y ago

The only thing coming to my mind for a possibility to this question is any type of research that would be for pro-assisted-suicide. Research promoting positives of assisted suicide for people with illnesses or disabilities. That type of thing likely was held back by certain ideologies rooted in culture. I'm not sure if it can be proven and makes me think the question is very difficult to prove.

s_y_n_t_a_x 7y ago

Dual Inheritance Theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_inheritance_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_inheritance_theory

s9w 7y ago

people would be banned for a truthful answer for flamebaiting

gvjddbnvdrbv 7y ago

You just reframed the debate into terms that suit you. Very clever and great for arguing on the internet but ultimately you won't convince anyone with these methods.