Posted on 01/07/2003 7:06:38 PM PST by Willie Green
For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use.
Dick Armey, retiring majority leader of the House of Representatives, created such a stir recently with comments about liberal and conservative Jews (the latter have all the brains, Armey said), that another aspect of his comments attracted less notice: Science, according to Armey, is the stomping ground of conservatives. "Conservatives," said the Texas Republican, "have a deeper intellect and tend to have occupations of the brain in fields like engineering, science and economics. Liberals, on the other hand, tend to flock to occupations of the heart."
Armey spokesman Richard Diamond concedes he has no evidence to back up Armey's claim, although he insists that his boss stands by it. "It's his perspective about how people think," says Diamond.
Nor does a search for scientific evidence turn up much research into the broad political leanings of scientists. Neither the major scientific associations nor the polling firms were aware of studies.
Anecdotally, however, it's not hard to find blue chip scientists who take issue with Armeyincluding some of the 53 Nobel laureates on the board of the Federation of American Scientists, a social policy organization often described as a "liberal think tank."
"Armey is just completely wrong," says Nobel physicist Steven Weinberg of the University of Texas at Austin. "I have lots of political conversations with other physicists and my impression is that, on average, physicists are extremely liberal in their politics. I certainly am."
Nobel chemist Roald Hoffman of Cornell objects to Armey's "assumption that occupations of the brain are somehow better than those of the heart. That's crazy. The United States is not a computer . . . For (solving human problems), we need both the brain and the heart."
In other words, Armey hasn't met any scientists.
Based on physics, eh?
It looks like Hoffman is assuming.
Congrats on the advanced engr degree. It will serve you well.
My experience has been different. I work in a research laboratory occupied by engineers and scientists, and find that generally speaking, scientists are pretty hard to the left (which I guess would be about average for the college population), and engineers are generally center-to-right, politically. I'm an engineer who has gone over to the dark side.
I think engineers are that way for the reasons you offer, and it would make sense that scientists would be that way too, but I've found that not to be the case. My theories for this are that (1) scientists tend to spend more of their formative years in academia (you can't go far in science without a ph.d. while engineers can start making money with a bachelor's degree), and (2) scientists get more attention and funding for doing work that supports liberal causes - who ever got an NSF grant for disproving that global warming?
I don't know for sure, but I can guess that the members Federation of American Scientists are mostly college professors. Most scientists aren't college professors. Many scientist were brave, ambitious and competent enough to get better-paying, mare demanding jobs in industry.
College professors are people who, after being in a university setting all through undergraduate and graduate school, decided they liked it and wanted to stay. Or were afraid to leave.
They are and have been accultured to a very unique environment, the conscientious libralization of which has been well documented since the 1930s.
I would like to see a poll, I have no doubt that it has been done before. I would like to what a survey of the IEEE yields.
I think that you would find that most professionals in the "tough majors" are on the conservative side, with a disproportionate skew toward the libertarian axis.
My son has a PhD in physics and he is liberal. (He's getting a little better with age though)
Yeah, what fuente said.
Liberalism doesn't make sense. The whole ideology is full of nonsense and self-contradiction.
Has anyone ever read the latest iteration of the Humanist Manifesto? I think it is called something like The Statement of Humanist Principals. It explicitly asserts both a right of all humans to life and the right of a woman to have an abortion.
With a document like that as a summary of your beliefs, how can you possibly claim to be a rational person?
Scientists and engineers are forced by their occupations to apply reason and analyze rationally. The kind of "Dada Philosophy" to which the left subscribes proves itself wrong without even looking past the "givens."
Having said all of that, if consevatism means religiousity, you might find it to be less dominant.
The division is between Academia and the Real World.
Most scientists in Academia are leftists
(it comes with the territory)
those who do their science and technology in industry
would tend to be conservative.
Of course
those in the Humanities normally lack marketable skills
so all are in Academia
thus
are leftists.
The sole qualification for joining the FAS is a checking account with a $25.00 balance.
Academics in general are liberals, the govmint is where they get their cornpone from. Liberals turn everything they touch into $hit, which is why universities in this country are such cesspools.
The fact is that people tend to be more conservative politically with increasing education, except that PhD's tend to be *much* more liberal than the general population. Almost all PhD's are rent-seekers. They expect the government to enforce policies which benefit the credentialed at the expense of the competent and the productive. Which is one more reason that PhD's hate Harvard Drop-out Bill Gates.
One possible explanation is that the former often deal in theories, where no absolute measure of "rightness" or "wrongness" is apparent. The latter often deal in absolutes: When designing, troubleshooting or repairing a large commercial aircraft, there are no "alternative realities" Either the techniques employed work, or hundreds of passengers suffer a gruesome death. Conversely, an economist can be wrong his entire career, and still keep his job.
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