Posted on 08/24/2018 2:02:42 AM PDT by cartan
Everyone knows the real reason people like Donald Trump are sceptical of climate change is that conservatives are fundamentally anti-science. Some doubt science because it conflicts with their religious beliefs; others because its implications might mean radically shifting the global economy in an anti-growth or heavily statist direction, which goes against their free-market ideology; others because, being conservative, they are prisoners of their dogmatism, need closure and fear uncertainty. I hear this all the time from lefties on social media. And there seems to be some evidence to support it.
At least there is if you believe studies like The Republican War on Science (Mooney, 2005), Politicization of Science in the Public Sphere (Gauchat, 2012), and ‘Not for all the tea in China!’ Political Ideology and the Avoidance of Dissonance-Arousing Situations (Nam et al, 2013).
But there’s a wrinkle here and you may have guessed what it is. The world of social science is overwhelmingly left-wing: so heavily agenda-driven, so rife with confirmation bias and skewed methodology that almost inevitably its studies will show conservatives as blinkered and dim, and lefties as open-minded and clever regardless of the evidence.
Lest you think this is my own bias showing, another recent study confirmed it: a survey of 479 sociology professors found that only 4 per cent identified as conservative or libertarian, while 83 per cent identified as liberal or left-radical. In another survey — of psychologists this time — only 6 per cent identified as ‘conservative overall’.
Just occasionally, though, a more balanced study does slip through the net — like the one just published by a team from Oxford University. The study by Nathan Cofnas et al — Does Activism in the Social Sciences Explain Conservatives’ Distrust of Scientists? — pours scorn on the idea that conservatives are any more anti-science than lefties. It’s not science they distrust so much as scientists — especially ones in more nebulous, activism-driven fields like ecology or sociology. As Cofnas told Campus Reform, a site that exposes left-wing bias at universities: ‘Conservatives are right to be sceptical. Take any politicised issue that is connected to some disagreement about scientific fact. I do not believe there is a single case in the last couple of decades where a major scientific organisation took a position that went against the platform of the Democratic party.’ He added: ‘What an odd coincidence that “science” always, without exception, supports the liberal worldview.’
Wait, though. While Margaret Thatcher said the ‘facts of life are conservative’, how can we be sure that the facts of science don’t naturally swing left? This is what left-wing scientists seem to believe. But as Cofnas shows, in order to reach that conclusion, they have to torture the data till it screams. Or even just make it up.
In 2014, a paper was published in Science called ‘When contact changes minds: An experiment on transmission of support for gay equality’. This demonstrated that instinctively homophobic, buttoned-up conservatives were more likely to become liberal on meeting a gay man. Their study showed that ‘a 20-minute conversation with a gay canvasser’ increased their acceptance of same-sex marriage nine months later. Great! Except as two graduate students subsequently demonstrated, no study was ever conducted. To the chagrin of the social scientists who had welcomed this paper and its heartwarming message, it had to be retracted.
Where are the peer-reviewers who are supposed to vet these things? Well, it turns out they’re generally willing to give a free pass to any thesis that accords with the liberal narrative. For example, over the course of more than a decade, Diederik Stapel ‘published dozens of sensational papers on such topics as how easily Whites or men can be prompted to discriminate against Blacks or women’. When exposed as a fraud, Stapel explained that he was merely giving social scientists what they were ‘waiting for’.
Stapel probably had a point. If research supports a liberal shibboleth — say, the notion that violence is a learned behaviour rather than innate — then it will be given huge prominence. In 2000, the American Academy of Pediatrics testified to Congress that ‘more than 3,500’ studies had investigated the link between exposure to media violence and actual violent behaviour. This was a lie. Even those few studies — fewer than 1,000 — that purported to find a causal link often did so on the flimsiest of evidence. For example, one established the elevated ‘aggression’ caused by watching an exciting film by asking a child ‘whether he would pop a balloon if one were present’.
If the evidence doesn’t accord with the correct ‘woke’ narrative then right-thinking social scientists tailor it till it does. This is what happened to a 2007 study showing racially diverse communities are more suspicious, withdrawn, ungenerous, fractured and fractious. Such an incendiary refutation of the well-known truth that ‘diversity is strength’ could not go unedited. So it didn’t. Publication was delayed until the author could ‘develop proposals to compensate for the negative effects of diversity’. To publish the facts on their own would be ‘irresponsible’.
Eventually, the author published it with a disquisition on how increasing diversity would lead to ‘significant benefits in the medium or long term’. This accords with ‘contact theory’ — a notion popular among social scientists (see also the imaginary encounter with the gay canvasser, above) that the more we’re physically exposed to diversity the more we’ll learn to love it. And if the hard evidence speaks otherwise, well never mind. You can just do what the author of that diversity report does: every time some unhelpful conservative type cites it to back up their argument that diversity causes social problems, he accuses them of selectively citing his findings because they’ve ignored the bit at the end where he explains that diversity will be good one day.
Bump to save for arguments
The Heterodox Academy is another.
From President Eisenhower's farewell address:
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present--and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
I agree & would add evolution as part of God's magnificent plan.
Leftists sure are anti-science like for example when science shows that there are only two genders.....or when every climate model produced fails to show an imminent climate catastrophe....or when it shows that warming has been a leading event for higher levels of atmospheric carbon rather than a trailing event.
Then the science gets cast out the window.
I think I first saw that essay in one of the three "Imperial Stars" books of Mr. Pournelle. It was a good collection of stories and essays. Some are kind of dated now, but still worthwhile. I think Baen has all three volumes as ebooks.
Most disciplines with “science” in the name are not related to science in any way.
Example:
Social Science - not science
Physics - science
Everyone with two brain cells connected together knows that Democrats deny science as relates to who is a human being and what isn’t.
Everyone with two brain cells connected together knows that Democrats deny science as relates to who is a human being and what isn’t.
currently there are no medical protocols successfully using embryonic stem cells. Also not reported.
Your example:
Social Science - not science
This one fails on both counts. Contains "social" and "science". This tells you it really has nothing whatsoever to do with actual science at all.
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