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Most of any content, anywhere, is written by people who are leftist or center-left. Not only is the average human center-left by US standards, but to be able to

Most of any content, anywhere, is written by people who are leftist or center-left. Not only is the average human center-left by US standards, but to be able to write and publish you'll need to be at least somewhat educated, and every additional bit of education pushes you, on average, a little bit further left.

jacooper 4y ago
> and every additional bit of education pushes you, on average, further left. That's a big statement with nothing to back it up with.
- tomrod 4y ago
  Not the person you're responding to, but we aren't an orb suspended in the aether nor does historical text necessarily give meaningful answers. Liberalism and progressivism call for a more informed and skeptical populace historically and in modern times, which exposure encourages people to realize how much they don't know and calls for more education. College isn't liberal because it makes you so, it's liberal because reality requires exploration to be known, understood, and then predicted which happens with increased difficulty in a society that decrees certain areas taboo or against their common morals. Conservatism doesn't have to be an enemy to growth, with its default bias to status quo its a reminder that unbroken things may not need fixing, but when dominant conservatism rides coattails of others who seek understanding through liberal exploration instead of quiet, ascetic, essentialist existence.
  - boppo1 4y ago
    >reality requires exploration to be known, understood, and then predicted which happens with increased difficulty in a society that decrees certain areas taboo or against their common morals That's an awfully conservative sounding description these days.
    - brookst 4y ago
      Only because conservatives have adopted the language of persecution because they saw liberals using it effectively. “My cis-male theologically divergent heirloom belief system demands I burn the gays, and I am being oppressed!”
      - tomrod 4y ago
        I disagree that all conservative critiques of universities philosophical and political bends are superfluous. I agree that most are, especially as a propaganda-driven meme, but not all. You _need_ second order diversity of ideas, which tends to be achieved by the first order diversity of background, in order to flourish. Subject to paradox of tolerance criteria, an institute of learning and research should allow academic freedom but not necessarily academic safety. Bad ideas are bad!
        brookst 4y ago
        > I disagree that all conservative critiques of universities philosophical and political bends are superfluous. Well you just obliterated that straw man. > You _need_ second order diversity of ideas, which tends to be achieved by the first order diversity of background, in order to flourish That I 100% agree with. But that is not a conservative position, at least for any normal definition of conservative. Conservatives fought school desegregation, fight immigration, and fight admissions policies that aim to provide that diversity of background. Please don't infer my opinions from that statement. Affirmative action-like policies especially are very complicated and I don't have an easy dontrinaire answer. But the fact is conservatives are generally much less interested in diversity than liberals (see: gender/racial mix of the parties in congress, or their judicial nominees).
  - joenot443 4y ago
    What you’re describing sounds a lot more like centrist pragmatism than it does the dogmatic progressivism growing popular in the west. It sounds to me like what you’re describing is “using facts and data to better understand your experience of reality” which is certainly not what I would call the progressive mindset these days.
    - kuschku 4y ago
      That's a claim that's commonly echoed on the right, but that's mostly because of filter bubbles. Centre-left politics (or even leftist politics such as Bernie Sanders) are still firmly founded in facts and data. But that's not what people perceive. Take for example crime. Crime statistics have trended down in all areas for years. Yet you'll hear more about crime in your Twitter feed or on conservative news today than you'd have heard 10, 20 years ago. This kind of selection bias can lead to a massively different perception of reality compared to what actual reality is.
    - tomrod 4y ago
      > centrist pragmatism than it does the dogmatic progressivism Correct, centrist pragmatism is the core of what US conservatives rail against universities regarding and deem "Leftist", "Woke", or "Progressive" due to modern propaganda bubbles. It's hard to communicate this point through the haze of propaganda, sure to get worse with generative text. This is also why most techno-libertarian companies are deemed "leftist" -- broken barometer.
  - mbg721 4y ago
    Is there a more reliable status-quo than left-leaning thought dominating universities? Anyone there who sought understanding decided that they found it and stopped exploring sometime in the 70s.
    - tomrod 4y ago
      Here is a snippet, the history and development of complexity theory's major themes from the 1950s to the present. https://www.art-sciencefactory.com/complexity-map_feb09.html https://www.art-sciencefactory.com/complexity-map_feb09.html Any field that doesn't evolve dries up as "solved" and boring. As an example, no one researches calculus anymore, they research measure theory, category theory, and other derived fields. Things evolve in an environment fostering free and liberal exploration. The solution to liking a particular set of dogma isn't to create alternative universities (e.g. Liberty U, BYU, Austin U) but rather to test the predictability of the dogma.
- rsynnott 4y ago
  I mean, it depends what you mean by 'left', to an extent. But if you take the sort of populist nativism that has become fashionable on the right wing in the west, in most countries, one of the biggest if not the biggest demographic gaps is around education; people with third level education or better are _way_ less likely to be into Trump, or Brexit (only about 30% of people with a degree or better voted to leave!), or the recent transphobic panic... Education is a less reliable predictor for whether someone will, say, vote for a centre-left party vs a democratic socialist party (or a non-populist centre-right vs centre-left party). But it has become a _really_ strong predictor for voting for the populist right vs something which is not the populist right, particularly over the last decade.
boppo1 4y ago
>every additional bit of education pushes you, on average, further left. Not financial education, my guy. Don't come at me with Piketty as 'financial education' either, I'm talking working-knowledge: CFA, CPA, CFP
- kuschku 4y ago
  I don't know enough about accounting to make such claims, but I believe it's very unlikely that this one field is the exception to the trend. On average, with every additional level of education the chance to vote for right-wing parties or issues decreases significantly. And this is true across the entire anglosphere, it's held true for the US elections 2008, 2012 and especially 2016 and 2020, but it applies just the same to the Brexit referendum.
dagw 4y ago
every additional bit of education pushes you, on average, a little bit further left. If you look at voting statistics from most European countires you'll find the eduction pushes you towards the centre-right and Liberalism (on average), lack of education pushes you either further left of centre or far right, depending on various other socio-economic factors.
the_optimist 4y ago
A statement overfit to the point of absurdity. You think that attending a madrassa for long enough will make one a Marxist? Rather clearly, “education” homogenizes beliefs with “teachers.”

jacooper 4y ago

> and every additional bit of education pushes you, on average, further left. That's a big statement with nothing to back it up with.

tomrod 4y ago
Not the person you're responding to, but we aren't an orb suspended in the aether nor does historical text necessarily give meaningful answers. Liberalism and progressivism call for a more informed and skeptical populace historically and in modern times, which exposure encourages people to realize how much they don't know and calls for more education. College isn't liberal because it makes you so, it's liberal because reality requires exploration to be known, understood, and then predicted which happens with increased difficulty in a society that decrees certain areas taboo or against their common morals. Conservatism doesn't have to be an enemy to growth, with its default bias to status quo its a reminder that unbroken things may not need fixing, but when dominant conservatism rides coattails of others who seek understanding through liberal exploration instead of quiet, ascetic, essentialist existence.
- boppo1 4y ago
  >reality requires exploration to be known, understood, and then predicted which happens with increased difficulty in a society that decrees certain areas taboo or against their common morals That's an awfully conservative sounding description these days.
  - brookst 4y ago
    Only because conservatives have adopted the language of persecution because they saw liberals using it effectively. “My cis-male theologically divergent heirloom belief system demands I burn the gays, and I am being oppressed!”
    - tomrod 4y ago
      I disagree that all conservative critiques of universities philosophical and political bends are superfluous. I agree that most are, especially as a propaganda-driven meme, but not all. You _need_ second order diversity of ideas, which tends to be achieved by the first order diversity of background, in order to flourish. Subject to paradox of tolerance criteria, an institute of learning and research should allow academic freedom but not necessarily academic safety. Bad ideas are bad!
      - brookst 4y ago
        > I disagree that all conservative critiques of universities philosophical and political bends are superfluous. Well you just obliterated that straw man. > You _need_ second order diversity of ideas, which tends to be achieved by the first order diversity of background, in order to flourish That I 100% agree with. But that is not a conservative position, at least for any normal definition of conservative. Conservatives fought school desegregation, fight immigration, and fight admissions policies that aim to provide that diversity of background. Please don't infer my opinions from that statement. Affirmative action-like policies especially are very complicated and I don't have an easy dontrinaire answer. But the fact is conservatives are generally much less interested in diversity than liberals (see: gender/racial mix of the parties in congress, or their judicial nominees).
- joenot443 4y ago
  What you’re describing sounds a lot more like centrist pragmatism than it does the dogmatic progressivism growing popular in the west. It sounds to me like what you’re describing is “using facts and data to better understand your experience of reality” which is certainly not what I would call the progressive mindset these days.
  - kuschku 4y ago
    That's a claim that's commonly echoed on the right, but that's mostly because of filter bubbles. Centre-left politics (or even leftist politics such as Bernie Sanders) are still firmly founded in facts and data. But that's not what people perceive. Take for example crime. Crime statistics have trended down in all areas for years. Yet you'll hear more about crime in your Twitter feed or on conservative news today than you'd have heard 10, 20 years ago. This kind of selection bias can lead to a massively different perception of reality compared to what actual reality is.
  - tomrod 4y ago
    > centrist pragmatism than it does the dogmatic progressivism Correct, centrist pragmatism is the core of what US conservatives rail against universities regarding and deem "Leftist", "Woke", or "Progressive" due to modern propaganda bubbles. It's hard to communicate this point through the haze of propaganda, sure to get worse with generative text. This is also why most techno-libertarian companies are deemed "leftist" -- broken barometer.
- mbg721 4y ago
  Is there a more reliable status-quo than left-leaning thought dominating universities? Anyone there who sought understanding decided that they found it and stopped exploring sometime in the 70s.
  - tomrod 4y ago
    Here is a snippet, the history and development of complexity theory's major themes from the 1950s to the present. https://www.art-sciencefactory.com/complexity-map_feb09.html https://www.art-sciencefactory.com/complexity-map_feb09.html Any field that doesn't evolve dries up as "solved" and boring. As an example, no one researches calculus anymore, they research measure theory, category theory, and other derived fields. Things evolve in an environment fostering free and liberal exploration. The solution to liking a particular set of dogma isn't to create alternative universities (e.g. Liberty U, BYU, Austin U) but rather to test the predictability of the dogma.
rsynnott 4y ago
I mean, it depends what you mean by 'left', to an extent. But if you take the sort of populist nativism that has become fashionable on the right wing in the west, in most countries, one of the biggest if not the biggest demographic gaps is around education; people with third level education or better are _way_ less likely to be into Trump, or Brexit (only about 30% of people with a degree or better voted to leave!), or the recent transphobic panic... Education is a less reliable predictor for whether someone will, say, vote for a centre-left party vs a democratic socialist party (or a non-populist centre-right vs centre-left party). But it has become a _really_ strong predictor for voting for the populist right vs something which is not the populist right, particularly over the last decade.

boppo1 4y ago

>every additional bit of education pushes you, on average, further left. Not financial education, my guy. Don't come at me with Piketty as 'financial education' either, I'm talking working-knowledge: CFA, CPA, CFP

kuschku 4y ago
I don't know enough about accounting to make such claims, but I believe it's very unlikely that this one field is the exception to the trend. On average, with every additional level of education the chance to vote for right-wing parties or issues decreases significantly. And this is true across the entire anglosphere, it's held true for the US elections 2008, 2012 and especially 2016 and 2020, but it applies just the same to the Brexit referendum.

dagw 4y ago

every additional bit of education pushes you, on average, a little bit further left. If you look at voting statistics from most European countires you'll find the eduction pushes you towards the centre-right and Liberalism (on average), lack of education pushes you either further left of centre or far right, depending on various other socio-economic factors.

the_optimist 4y ago

A statement overfit to the point of absurdity. You think that attending a madrassa for long enough will make one a Marxist? Rather clearly, “education” homogenizes beliefs with “teachers.”