7 ms·

Taboos and self-censorship among U.S. psychology professors

69 points by kkoncevicius 2y ago

postepowanieadm 2y ago
`The 10 taboo conclusions were as follows: 1. “The tendency to engage in sexually coercive behavior likely evolved because it conferred some evolutionary advantages on men who engaged in such behavior.” 2. “Gender biases are not the most important drivers of the under-representation of women in STEM fields.” 3. “Academia discriminates against Black people (e.g., in hiring, promotion, grants, invitations to participate in colloquia/symposia).” 4. “Biological sex is binary for the vast majority of people.” 5. “The social sciences (in the United States) discriminate against conservatives (e.g., in hiring, promotion, grants, invitations to participate in colloquia/symposia).” 6. “Racial biases are not the most important drivers of higher crime rates among Black Americans relative to White Americans.” 7. “Men and women have different psychological characteristics because of evolution.” 8. “Genetic differences explain non-trivial (10% or more) variance in race differences in intelligence test scores.” 9. “Transgender identity is sometimes the product of social influence.” 10. “Demographic diversity (race, gender) in the workplace often leads to worse performance.”`
- dgacmu 2y ago
  Thanks for summarizing. Note that the article specifically observes: > Professors strongly disagreed on the truth status of 10 candidate taboo conclusions: For each conclusion, some professors reported 100% certainty in its veracity and others 100% certainty in its falsehood. So it's worth contextualizing these with the note that there's _disagreement_ about whether or not any of these statements is actually correct or not. But it's not 50/50: Some of the statements had higher overall belief ("Biological sex is binary for most people" being the most widely-believed among survey participants, with 66%), and some had much lower belief ("demographic diversity .. worse performance" being the lowest, at 21%). (Table 2 in the article, about 1/3 of the way down)
- yawpitch 2y ago
  Is there much point in enumerating them, considering the paper makes it clear these are just potentially “taboo” polarizing issues for which no actual conclusions or consensus exist?
  - postepowanieadm 2y ago
    Yep I also find it off-putting, it seems there had been a thesis to be confirmed.
    - yawpitch 2y ago
      Whose (and what) thesis, specifically?
  - svnt 2y ago
    The point is to highlight topics that people would be inclined not to research, or not to publish if their conclusions did not support their perception of the majority view. It would have been more interesting if in addition to capturing the professor’s position they captured the professor’s perception of the majority position, to see if the professor believed they were part of a silent majority or in the minority, but if they did I skimmed past that part.
    - ithkuil 2y ago
      Yes. But unfortunately the conclusion that many people take home is that if something has been censured it must be true. It's not how logic works, but it's how human psychology seems to work. Or perhaps that's taboo too? I don't know. IANAP
  - lr4444lr 2y ago
    I think the point is that if such conclusions existed, they'd have to come from trained researchers undergoing peer review who exist only in academia. If the academic environment has moral taboos on their mere discussion, then the inconclusive polarization is not necessarily reality- it's a self fulfilling prophecy.
- CoastalCoder 2y ago
  I notice that some of those questions are pretty vague. I can see why that's okay for the purposes of this study, but I hope it's not indicative of the field's typical rigor.
- DrDroop 2y ago
  1. Only to the extend that this also benefits the the genes of a coerced female. 2. Maybe it is, but not sure if that needs to be a problem. 3. No, at least admittance rate of blacks vs asians would make one believe the opposite is true 4. Yes for the vast majority. 5. Probably, but most conservative philosophy is boring and backwards anyway. 6. Are we counting a history of oppression as part of racial biases here? 7. Euh yeah, how is this even controversial? 8. I don't/can't know, but it would surprise me if it was higher then 10%. 9. I would not classify epigenetic as a social influence, so no. (maybe use the word environmental here) 10. No, but unit cohesion can help performance a lot. I hope this helps
  - d0gsg0w00f 2y ago
    The point wasn't the answers themselves. It was whether providing any answer at all would get you cancelled.
    - TMWNN 2y ago
      >It was whether ~~providing any answer~~ asking the question at all at all would get you cancelled. FTFY If someone were so uncouth to ask the question, there is a prescribed "correct" answer for others to immediately repeat, mantra-like, that will avoid social and professional opprobrium.
  - joeblubaugh 2y ago
    This is the opposite of a: scientific b: the point of the study
    - DrDroop 2y ago
      I know, but that doesn't mean that I am not helping
      - bilbo0s 2y ago
        To be honest, you're not answering a lot of the questions. That's not a criticism. That was the point of the post. That a lot of people read a question, and allow emotion to get the better of them. (I would argue that nearly all people do this.) Just as a for instance, you answered "no" to 3. This was based on, again, according to you, "admittance rates of blacks vs asians". But if you read the question, it was about discrimination in "academia". Point being, you had your preconceived narrative, which would be confirmed if you took "academia" to mean undergraduate admissions. And people who answer "yes" have their preconceived narrative, which would be confirmed if you took "academia" to mean, say, hiring into academia from a pool of people who already received a PhD. (Even those receiving a PhD from the same department in the same school.) The question as posed, is not answerable in an objective manner without qualifications. But you gave an answer, which will be taken as an answer without qualifications. Which evokes claims of bias and on and on and on. For instance, will you sit on a hiring panel for your department after such an answer? And, at root, the trouble is only due to the question being an unfocused question, calibrated to evoke an emotional reaction and an almost instinctual deviation from scientific rigor. Not really due to the biases or baser instincts of people offering an answer of yes or no to said question. My recommendation: We should stop with all the sensitivity training, and instead have yearly reinforcement training on the principles of scientific rigor. Training where we work through just these sorts of exercises so that people can see how easily they can be moved away from the scientific method if they're not paying attention.
- delichon 2y ago
  > 1. “The tendency to engage in sexually coercive behavior likely evolved because it conferred some evolutionary advantages on men who engaged in such behavior.” I once tried to have a discussion about whether opposable thumbs were partly successful because they make survivable rape easier. It didn't go well. We never did make it to the merits or demerits of the actual argument.
  - pjc50 2y ago
    I'm not really surprised that got an immediate "what the fuck" from your interlocutor.
    - gipp 2y ago
      Yeah, it's not like the utility of opposable thumbs is exactly a mystery
      - delichon 2y ago
        Is the fitness value of grasping tools greater than that of grasping wrists? I don't know. Is either behavior an exaptation of the other? I don't know. Does rape and slavery precede or follow tool use? I don't know. Either way the answers don't seem trivial. We may descend from tool users who also rape and enslave, or rapist slavers who also use tools. Understanding more of that should inform our social engineering.
    - ithkuil 2y ago
      There is nothing wrong to say WTF and try to persuade the interlocutor that their idea is wrong. You can also argue that some ideas are not only wrong but if believed can lead to antisocial behaviors etc etc. But unfortunately very often people don't have the patience to do this with a civil discussion and instead they cut the discussion short by just painting the interlocutor as somebody who must be a monster to even bring up such a topic in the first place. And I understand why that's the case. Sometimes (often?) that's actually true. Sometimes we're just tired of bullshit flooding and rebuttal asymmetry. But often I just think we're shutting down interesting explorations and we're ill-equipped as a society to have discussions which are truly hypothetical and neutral genuine devil-advocacy. Probably we're so much used to the abuse of those genuine techniques by people who just want to flood the scene with true bullshit.
- pjc50 2y ago
  So .. this seems to reflect the problem of a set of very carefully hedged statements that touch controversial topics, but people are aware that if they give a yes/no agreement to the qualified version, it will be turned into a declaration that they agree with a whole bunch of qualifier-removed or indirect-consequence versions of the statement. So it's dangerous to answer honestly because your answer will be used against you. For example: > “Transgender identity is sometimes the product of social influence.” I think you could find trans people themselves who might to some extent agree with that - I've more than once heard of people who knew themselves to be deeply miserable before ever hearing about transness, then discovering it, finding it "clicked", transitioning, and becoming much happier as a result. Does that qualify as "social influence"? They might not have transitioned if they hadn't known it was a possibility. There are then two political views derived from this: - the rightwing view that people should be prevented from knowing about the possibility of transness, especially as children, in order to discourage them from transitioning - the leftwing view that, as part of the totality of the human experience, it is useful to include a description of it in the education given to children to help them understand their own process of puberty But all sorts of things could be said to be "social influence". "Eating healthily is sometimes the product of social influence". "Turning up to events on time is sometimes the product of social influence". "High income is sometimes the product of social influence" (there are entire books sold on this thesis!) The statement on its own is a semantic trap for assuming a whole bunch of things follow from that statement which can then be used to condemn people who agree/disagree with it.
  - Akronymus 2y ago
    > I think you could find trans people themselves who might to some extent agree with that - I've more than once heard of people who knew themselves to be deeply miserable before ever hearing about transness, then discovering it, finding it "clicked", transitioning, and becoming much happier as a result. Does that qualify as "social influence"? They might not have transitioned if they hadn't known it was a possibility. I don't think that is what is meant with the statement, but rather, that they mean the people are identifying as trans due to their peers, rather than actually being dysphoric. As an anecdote, for me that's almost what happened, but I was just miserable for other reasons (depression). In todays climate of affirmation being seemingly the only socially acceptable choice, I likely would've started transitioning and become even more miserable. This is one of the reasons why I REALLY dislike the current paradigm of affirmation first, rather than actually checking whether the problems are caused by dysphoria or something else.
- peterfirefly 2y ago
  Number 3 is not like the others.
  - HyulianGrader 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - em-bee 2y ago
      as one female academic said it: scholarships specifically for women are reinforcing the idea that women are inferior because they would not be accepted without that scholarship. https://youtu.be/LKiBlGDfRU8 https://youtu.be/LKiBlGDfRU8 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39943464 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39943464
- hef19898 2y ago
  For everything genetic, biology and evolution related, I'd rather prefer psychologists to shut up. Unless the publish together with researchers in those fields. If they don't, it resembles more the BS "evolutionary psychology" than actual science.
  - red-iron-pine 2y ago
    ITT: biology has no impact on psychology. guess all those anti-depressants need to get tossed out the. Pretty sure schizophrenia is heavily genetic / predisposed, too...
  - dumpsterdiver 2y ago
    To be fair, almost every new college student (exaggerating) starts off wanting to join the mysterious field of psychology. As they continue to learn and grow most of those students use their critical thinking abilities to conclude: * There is no cushy job waiting on the other side of a Psychology degree for most people, but more likely a job in an unrelated field. * Psychology is about the softest science we have, to the point that it eschews the general rigor of the scientific process in favor of what can only be described as pathological bike-shedding. Can you remember the last thing that came out of this field that wasn’t just some form of moving labels around? * Feelings are unfalsifiable, and humans are known liars and drug addicts. Some people will absolutely lie every chance they can to get what they want, and will even make a living out of doing that (for instance, illegally selling prescription medication on the streets that never should have been prescribed in the first place). Dishonest people like this will inevitably be the same people providing the “evidence” for some of these studies. And so an already soft science becomes even softer because professional grifters have an incentive to taint the samples by lying (even if they are misguided and ultimately wrong about gaining any benefit). The students whose critical thinking abilities did not make them aware of these things, or worse, did inform them but they didn’t care… those are the people who end up publishing Psychology papers.
- sesm 2y ago
  > 10. “Demographic diversity (race, gender) in the workplace often leads to worse performance.”` This is an interesting one. Diversity is definitely beneficial to large international corporations, so the main question here is "at what granularity should we apply diversity". Small team level is probably not the right place to apply diversity.
  - peterfirefly 2y ago
    > so the main question here is "at what granularity should we apply diversity". Or it could be "what should we sacrifice (if anything) to obtain diversity", or "how fast should we try to obtain diversity". (Or even: "what kinds of diversity matter? Race and gender -- or ideas, values, and experiences?")
vsnf 2y ago
Sometimes I feel like I'm being caught in a pincer maneuver by contemporary US society where the far right is wielding increasingly concerning amounts of governmental power to force conservative changes, and the far left is wielding social power to force overly liberal changes. Not only is this very difficult to navigate at an emotional level, it's also just generally concerning that both legally and socially, radicalism is taking a stronger and stronger hold.
- 1992spacemovie 2y ago
  If feels that way sometimes. I heard a joke the other day related to this: Q: What is the most important priority? Liberal A: Letting kindergarten teachers help kids transition their gender. Conservative A: Banning abortion and contraceptives.
  - rrr_oh_man 2y ago
    I don't get the joke?
    - high_na_euv 2y ago
      I think the joke is that those issues arent important at all
      - lukan 2y ago
        But they are important to them. And social media bubbles maybe makes people think, the whole world shares the priorities of their specific bubble - and act enraged, when they learn that is not the case. I mean, we tech nerds can maybe relate with our struggle of privacy, open source etc.?
        mewpmewp2 2y ago
        I can't relate. Sure these are problems, but definitely not the most important problems in the World.
mensetmanusman 2y ago
With all the self flagellation and dogma recitation in order to become a humanities professor, didn’t they realize this is the goal?
- lr4444lr 2y ago
  Many chase tenure in the hope that they'll be sufficiently immunized against pressure.
inglor_cz 2y ago
The most senior author of this paper seems to be Philip E. Tetlock, the guy who examined forecasting and basically said "most experts aren't any better than a chimp throwing darts, but there are outsiders who are measurably better than the bigwigs". A suitable research leader for such a controversial topic, for sure.
- vsnf 2y ago
  For the interested, Tetlock wrote a book called 'Superforecasting', and also set up a company using his research to utilize the prowess of those forecasters (https://goodjudgment.com/about/ https://goodjudgment.com/about/). I don't know how good the company is at what it does, but the book was very good.
lr4444lr 2y ago
Younger, more left-leaning, and female faculty were generally more opposed to controversial scholarship. Utterly unsurprising to me.
sesm 2y ago
Previous discussion (27 days ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40381966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40381966
zug_zug 2y ago
What's the word for something that people reshare a bunch without reading it because they are frustrated at the world and want to put it into other people's faces? Not a left-right thing, I think we all have our poison. But also something that seems more like a rallying cry for the most frustrated rather than an unmotivated invitation to the undecided.
- bithive123 2y ago
  Propaganda. It is a form of violence.
  - zug_zug 2y ago
    So by that reasoning, if I'm frustrated about global warming and I share an article without reading it I'm spreading propaganda? And committing violence? I don't think so.
    - bithive123 2y ago
      If you are doing it primarily out of frustration, without reading the articles, and merely out of a desire to "put it in other people's faces", then yes. Motivation matters. I may care deeply about the environment but if I act from a place of wanting to coerce others, I sow seeds of resistance to the very thing I am trying to achieve.

69 points by kkoncevicius 2y ago

`The 10 taboo conclusions were as follows: 1. “The tendency to engage in sexually coercive behavior likely evolved because it conferred some evolutionary advantages on men who engaged in such behavior.” 2. “Gender biases are not the most important drivers of the under-representation of women in STEM fields.” 3. “Academia discriminates against Black people (e.g., in hiring, promotion, grants, invitations to participate in colloquia/symposia).” 4. “Biological sex is binary for the vast majority of people.” 5. “The social sciences (in the United States) discriminate against conservatives (e.g., in hiring, promotion, grants, invitations to participate in colloquia/symposia).” 6. “Racial biases are not the most important drivers of higher crime rates among Black Americans relative to White Americans.” 7. “Men and women have different psychological characteristics because of evolution.” 8. “Genetic differences explain non-trivial (10% or more) variance in race differences in intelligence test scores.” 9. “Transgender identity is sometimes the product of social influence.” 10. “Demographic diversity (race, gender) in the workplace often leads to worse performance.”`

dgacmu 2y ago
Thanks for summarizing. Note that the article specifically observes: > Professors strongly disagreed on the truth status of 10 candidate taboo conclusions: For each conclusion, some professors reported 100% certainty in its veracity and others 100% certainty in its falsehood. So it's worth contextualizing these with the note that there's _disagreement_ about whether or not any of these statements is actually correct or not. But it's not 50/50: Some of the statements had higher overall belief ("Biological sex is binary for most people" being the most widely-believed among survey participants, with 66%), and some had much lower belief ("demographic diversity .. worse performance" being the lowest, at 21%). (Table 2 in the article, about 1/3 of the way down)
yawpitch 2y ago
Is there much point in enumerating them, considering the paper makes it clear these are just potentially “taboo” polarizing issues for which no actual conclusions or consensus exist?
- postepowanieadm 2y ago
  Yep I also find it off-putting, it seems there had been a thesis to be confirmed.
  - yawpitch 2y ago
    Whose (and what) thesis, specifically?
- svnt 2y ago
  The point is to highlight topics that people would be inclined not to research, or not to publish if their conclusions did not support their perception of the majority view. It would have been more interesting if in addition to capturing the professor’s position they captured the professor’s perception of the majority position, to see if the professor believed they were part of a silent majority or in the minority, but if they did I skimmed past that part.
  - ithkuil 2y ago
    Yes. But unfortunately the conclusion that many people take home is that if something has been censured it must be true. It's not how logic works, but it's how human psychology seems to work. Or perhaps that's taboo too? I don't know. IANAP
- lr4444lr 2y ago
  I think the point is that if such conclusions existed, they'd have to come from trained researchers undergoing peer review who exist only in academia. If the academic environment has moral taboos on their mere discussion, then the inconclusive polarization is not necessarily reality- it's a self fulfilling prophecy.
CoastalCoder 2y ago
I notice that some of those questions are pretty vague. I can see why that's okay for the purposes of this study, but I hope it's not indicative of the field's typical rigor.
DrDroop 2y ago
1. Only to the extend that this also benefits the the genes of a coerced female. 2. Maybe it is, but not sure if that needs to be a problem. 3. No, at least admittance rate of blacks vs asians would make one believe the opposite is true 4. Yes for the vast majority. 5. Probably, but most conservative philosophy is boring and backwards anyway. 6. Are we counting a history of oppression as part of racial biases here? 7. Euh yeah, how is this even controversial? 8. I don't/can't know, but it would surprise me if it was higher then 10%. 9. I would not classify epigenetic as a social influence, so no. (maybe use the word environmental here) 10. No, but unit cohesion can help performance a lot. I hope this helps
- d0gsg0w00f 2y ago
  The point wasn't the answers themselves. It was whether providing any answer at all would get you cancelled.
  - TMWNN 2y ago
    >It was whether ~~providing any answer~~ asking the question at all at all would get you cancelled. FTFY If someone were so uncouth to ask the question, there is a prescribed "correct" answer for others to immediately repeat, mantra-like, that will avoid social and professional opprobrium.
- joeblubaugh 2y ago
  This is the opposite of a: scientific b: the point of the study
  - DrDroop 2y ago
    I know, but that doesn't mean that I am not helping
    - bilbo0s 2y ago
      To be honest, you're not answering a lot of the questions. That's not a criticism. That was the point of the post. That a lot of people read a question, and allow emotion to get the better of them. (I would argue that nearly all people do this.) Just as a for instance, you answered "no" to 3. This was based on, again, according to you, "admittance rates of blacks vs asians". But if you read the question, it was about discrimination in "academia". Point being, you had your preconceived narrative, which would be confirmed if you took "academia" to mean undergraduate admissions. And people who answer "yes" have their preconceived narrative, which would be confirmed if you took "academia" to mean, say, hiring into academia from a pool of people who already received a PhD. (Even those receiving a PhD from the same department in the same school.) The question as posed, is not answerable in an objective manner without qualifications. But you gave an answer, which will be taken as an answer without qualifications. Which evokes claims of bias and on and on and on. For instance, will you sit on a hiring panel for your department after such an answer? And, at root, the trouble is only due to the question being an unfocused question, calibrated to evoke an emotional reaction and an almost instinctual deviation from scientific rigor. Not really due to the biases or baser instincts of people offering an answer of yes or no to said question. My recommendation: We should stop with all the sensitivity training, and instead have yearly reinforcement training on the principles of scientific rigor. Training where we work through just these sorts of exercises so that people can see how easily they can be moved away from the scientific method if they're not paying attention.
delichon 2y ago
> 1. “The tendency to engage in sexually coercive behavior likely evolved because it conferred some evolutionary advantages on men who engaged in such behavior.” I once tried to have a discussion about whether opposable thumbs were partly successful because they make survivable rape easier. It didn't go well. We never did make it to the merits or demerits of the actual argument.
- pjc50 2y ago
  I'm not really surprised that got an immediate "what the fuck" from your interlocutor.
  - gipp 2y ago
    Yeah, it's not like the utility of opposable thumbs is exactly a mystery
    - delichon 2y ago
      Is the fitness value of grasping tools greater than that of grasping wrists? I don't know. Is either behavior an exaptation of the other? I don't know. Does rape and slavery precede or follow tool use? I don't know. Either way the answers don't seem trivial. We may descend from tool users who also rape and enslave, or rapist slavers who also use tools. Understanding more of that should inform our social engineering.
  - ithkuil 2y ago
    There is nothing wrong to say WTF and try to persuade the interlocutor that their idea is wrong. You can also argue that some ideas are not only wrong but if believed can lead to antisocial behaviors etc etc. But unfortunately very often people don't have the patience to do this with a civil discussion and instead they cut the discussion short by just painting the interlocutor as somebody who must be a monster to even bring up such a topic in the first place. And I understand why that's the case. Sometimes (often?) that's actually true. Sometimes we're just tired of bullshit flooding and rebuttal asymmetry. But often I just think we're shutting down interesting explorations and we're ill-equipped as a society to have discussions which are truly hypothetical and neutral genuine devil-advocacy. Probably we're so much used to the abuse of those genuine techniques by people who just want to flood the scene with true bullshit.
pjc50 2y ago
So .. this seems to reflect the problem of a set of very carefully hedged statements that touch controversial topics, but people are aware that if they give a yes/no agreement to the qualified version, it will be turned into a declaration that they agree with a whole bunch of qualifier-removed or indirect-consequence versions of the statement. So it's dangerous to answer honestly because your answer will be used against you. For example: > “Transgender identity is sometimes the product of social influence.” I think you could find trans people themselves who might to some extent agree with that - I've more than once heard of people who knew themselves to be deeply miserable before ever hearing about transness, then discovering it, finding it "clicked", transitioning, and becoming much happier as a result. Does that qualify as "social influence"? They might not have transitioned if they hadn't known it was a possibility. There are then two political views derived from this: - the rightwing view that people should be prevented from knowing about the possibility of transness, especially as children, in order to discourage them from transitioning - the leftwing view that, as part of the totality of the human experience, it is useful to include a description of it in the education given to children to help them understand their own process of puberty But all sorts of things could be said to be "social influence". "Eating healthily is sometimes the product of social influence". "Turning up to events on time is sometimes the product of social influence". "High income is sometimes the product of social influence" (there are entire books sold on this thesis!) The statement on its own is a semantic trap for assuming a whole bunch of things follow from that statement which can then be used to condemn people who agree/disagree with it.
- Akronymus 2y ago
  > I think you could find trans people themselves who might to some extent agree with that - I've more than once heard of people who knew themselves to be deeply miserable before ever hearing about transness, then discovering it, finding it "clicked", transitioning, and becoming much happier as a result. Does that qualify as "social influence"? They might not have transitioned if they hadn't known it was a possibility. I don't think that is what is meant with the statement, but rather, that they mean the people are identifying as trans due to their peers, rather than actually being dysphoric. As an anecdote, for me that's almost what happened, but I was just miserable for other reasons (depression). In todays climate of affirmation being seemingly the only socially acceptable choice, I likely would've started transitioning and become even more miserable. This is one of the reasons why I REALLY dislike the current paradigm of affirmation first, rather than actually checking whether the problems are caused by dysphoria or something else.
peterfirefly 2y ago
Number 3 is not like the others.
- HyulianGrader 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - em-bee 2y ago
    as one female academic said it: scholarships specifically for women are reinforcing the idea that women are inferior because they would not be accepted without that scholarship. https://youtu.be/LKiBlGDfRU8 https://youtu.be/LKiBlGDfRU8 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39943464 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39943464
hef19898 2y ago
For everything genetic, biology and evolution related, I'd rather prefer psychologists to shut up. Unless the publish together with researchers in those fields. If they don't, it resembles more the BS "evolutionary psychology" than actual science.
- red-iron-pine 2y ago
  ITT: biology has no impact on psychology. guess all those anti-depressants need to get tossed out the. Pretty sure schizophrenia is heavily genetic / predisposed, too...
- dumpsterdiver 2y ago
  To be fair, almost every new college student (exaggerating) starts off wanting to join the mysterious field of psychology. As they continue to learn and grow most of those students use their critical thinking abilities to conclude: * There is no cushy job waiting on the other side of a Psychology degree for most people, but more likely a job in an unrelated field. * Psychology is about the softest science we have, to the point that it eschews the general rigor of the scientific process in favor of what can only be described as pathological bike-shedding. Can you remember the last thing that came out of this field that wasn’t just some form of moving labels around? * Feelings are unfalsifiable, and humans are known liars and drug addicts. Some people will absolutely lie every chance they can to get what they want, and will even make a living out of doing that (for instance, illegally selling prescription medication on the streets that never should have been prescribed in the first place). Dishonest people like this will inevitably be the same people providing the “evidence” for some of these studies. And so an already soft science becomes even softer because professional grifters have an incentive to taint the samples by lying (even if they are misguided and ultimately wrong about gaining any benefit). The students whose critical thinking abilities did not make them aware of these things, or worse, did inform them but they didn’t care… those are the people who end up publishing Psychology papers.
sesm 2y ago
> 10. “Demographic diversity (race, gender) in the workplace often leads to worse performance.”` This is an interesting one. Diversity is definitely beneficial to large international corporations, so the main question here is "at what granularity should we apply diversity". Small team level is probably not the right place to apply diversity.
- peterfirefly 2y ago
  > so the main question here is "at what granularity should we apply diversity". Or it could be "what should we sacrifice (if anything) to obtain diversity", or "how fast should we try to obtain diversity". (Or even: "what kinds of diversity matter? Race and gender -- or ideas, values, and experiences?")

vsnf 2y ago

Sometimes I feel like I'm being caught in a pincer maneuver by contemporary US society where the far right is wielding increasingly concerning amounts of governmental power to force conservative changes, and the far left is wielding social power to force overly liberal changes. Not only is this very difficult to navigate at an emotional level, it's also just generally concerning that both legally and socially, radicalism is taking a stronger and stronger hold.

1992spacemovie 2y ago
If feels that way sometimes. I heard a joke the other day related to this: Q: What is the most important priority? Liberal A: Letting kindergarten teachers help kids transition their gender. Conservative A: Banning abortion and contraceptives.
- rrr_oh_man 2y ago
  I don't get the joke?
  - high_na_euv 2y ago
    I think the joke is that those issues arent important at all
    - lukan 2y ago
      But they are important to them. And social media bubbles maybe makes people think, the whole world shares the priorities of their specific bubble - and act enraged, when they learn that is not the case. I mean, we tech nerds can maybe relate with our struggle of privacy, open source etc.?
      - mewpmewp2 2y ago
        I can't relate. Sure these are problems, but definitely not the most important problems in the World.

mensetmanusman 2y ago

With all the self flagellation and dogma recitation in order to become a humanities professor, didn’t they realize this is the goal?

lr4444lr 2y ago
Many chase tenure in the hope that they'll be sufficiently immunized against pressure.

inglor_cz 2y ago

The most senior author of this paper seems to be Philip E. Tetlock, the guy who examined forecasting and basically said "most experts aren't any better than a chimp throwing darts, but there are outsiders who are measurably better than the bigwigs". A suitable research leader for such a controversial topic, for sure.

vsnf 2y ago
For the interested, Tetlock wrote a book called 'Superforecasting', and also set up a company using his research to utilize the prowess of those forecasters (https://goodjudgment.com/about/ https://goodjudgment.com/about/). I don't know how good the company is at what it does, but the book was very good.

lr4444lr 2y ago

Younger, more left-leaning, and female faculty were generally more opposed to controversial scholarship. Utterly unsurprising to me.

sesm 2y ago

Previous discussion (27 days ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40381966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40381966

zug_zug 2y ago

What's the word for something that people reshare a bunch without reading it because they are frustrated at the world and want to put it into other people's faces? Not a left-right thing, I think we all have our poison. But also something that seems more like a rallying cry for the most frustrated rather than an unmotivated invitation to the undecided.

bithive123 2y ago
Propaganda. It is a form of violence.
- zug_zug 2y ago
  So by that reasoning, if I'm frustrated about global warming and I share an article without reading it I'm spreading propaganda? And committing violence? I don't think so.
  - bithive123 2y ago
    If you are doing it primarily out of frustration, without reading the articles, and merely out of a desire to "put it in other people's faces", then yes. Motivation matters. I may care deeply about the environment but if I act from a place of wanting to coerce others, I sow seeds of resistance to the very thing I am trying to achieve.