Professors are liberal and have become more strikingly so in the past twenty years. At present sixty percent of professors identify as liberal, while only fifteen percent identify as conservative.
This is often taken as evidence of an academic culture hostile to conservatives. However, surely that is only one of two possible explanations.
After all, there is a broad academic consensus on many issues. For example, if one were to poll academics about whether dinosaurs have feathers, or who Euclid is, or the plot of Oliver Twist, one would expect academics in general to have more accurate answers than the general public. This is not because of any bias in academic against people who think dinosaurs didn’t have feathers; it is because it is actually true that dinosaurs had feathers, and the whole point of academia is to find out true things. We’d expect even non-paleontologists to be more likely to get the correct answer; perhaps they happened to talk with a paleontologist at lunch one day and the paleontologist set them straight about the matter.
The accuracy of academic consensus is true even for politicized issues. Far more than sixty percent of academics believe the Earth is billions of years old and life evolved through a process of natural selection. This is not because of anti-young-earth creationist bias, no matter how much Answers in Genesis complains. It’s simply because it is actually true that the Earth is billions of years old and life evolved through a process of natural selection. (Note that young-earth creationists do, in fact face a hostile environment in academia. People tend to mock them and they are often discriminated against in hiring. It is nevertheless true that this hostile environment does not cause the underrepresentation of young-earth creationists in biology; the causation goes the other way.)
So, when considering why so many academics are liberal, we must consider two hypotheses. First, there is a hostile environment driving conservatives out of academia; second, liberals are correct and thus successfully convince their most avid and able students, the same way that biologists convince even young-earth creationist biology majors that evolution is true.
It would be very strange, after all, if both liberals and conservatives were exactly 50% right about everything. Even if rightness were randomly distributed, one group would be more right than the other, simply by chance. And if you have to gamble on a single group to be more likely to be right than the other, then it’s probably safest to bet on the one favored by more highly educated people; we expect that, in general, people with PhDs are going to have more correct opinions than people who dropped out of high school. Of course, I have a particular reason to be sympathetic to this hypothesis. Being a liberal myself, I do in fact think liberals are right on more policy issues than conservatives are (although I also occasionally fantasize about dropping an anvil labeled REGULATORY CAPTURE on various liberals’ heads).
And many, many fields influence one’s opinion on politics. Of course, the entirety of social science has political implications. So do many scientific fields, such as ecology and epidemiology, and many fields in the humanities, such as history and philosophy. So we’d expect many academics to have their opinions on politics influenced by their research (as well as, say, discussions with fellow academics).
Even if liberals have more correct positions on average, they are unlikely to be perfectly right about everything. So we’d expect even if professors consider themselves liberal, their actual political opinions would often be kind of weird and hard to classify into the left/right binary. In economics, which as far as I know is the only social science field that polls its academics sometimes to find out what the academic consensus is, this is true. Economists, like professors as a whole, are about sixty percent liberal. Conversely, their actual beliefs are kind of weird and not exactly what I would call a liberal orthodoxy.
I don’t mean to say that it is definitely true that liberals outnumber conservatives in academia because liberals are right about everything. Indeed, I can see a solid case for the other hypothesis. We know that people can feel excluded from an environment due to an endless accumulation of individually small slights. Surely that could also apply to the conservative student in a sociology class whose teacher jokes about the president resembling a Cheeto and presents sociological ideas on a spectrum from liberal to Marxist, with nary a mention of conservative viewpoints. We know that discrimination often happens on a subconscious level, even in people who sincerely believe they don’t hate anyone and are just judging the work on the merit. Surely a liberal hiring committee who sincerely believes they’re looking for the best candidate, regardless of the candidate’s political opinions, might form unconscious judgments based on the candidate’s conservative political volunteering or papers.
However, the fact that there exists a difference does not mean that it exists because of discrimination. This is particularly true for political beliefs, which involve empirical claims about how the world works. The academy could theoretically represent genders, races, sexual orientations, levels of ability, classes and so on and so forth in accordance with how common they are in the population, without sacrificing academic quality; it would be very very difficult and involve a massive restructuring of society, but it could be done. The academy could not, even in theory, represent all ideas equally in accordance with how common they are in the population. You are simply not going to get as many anti-vaxxer epidemiologists as pro-vaccine epidemiologists without making the entire field of epidemiology useless.
So I suggest that interested people begin a research program into discrimination against conservatives in academia, perhaps using all the tools used to study discrimination against women, people of color, and poor people. I would also be interested to see the results of an affirmative action program for conservative professors; maybe conservative students would experience a less hostile environment and would have high-achieving conservative role models, and thus would be more likely to consider graduate school.
Thing of Things 
(Note that young-earth creationists do, in fact face a hostile environment in academia. People tend to mock them and they are often discriminated against in hiring. It is nevertheless true that this hostile environment does not cause the underrepresentation of young-earth creationists in biology; the causation goes the other way.)
The causation doesn’t go that way, but does it really go the other way? I’d say rather that they have a cause in common.
(Also uhhh this post has a number of problems the most of which are caused by the basic problem that it takes the “liberal”/”conservative” axis seriously but I don’t really want to take the time to detail them right now.)
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I’d roughly define the difference between conservative and liberal as how much they value keeping social systems as they are versus making them work better.
That divide would naturally give a slightly greater number of liberal academics, as more academics will be involved in looking at flaws in the current system/ alternate models that could be put into play than how good the current system is or issues with modifying it.
Also, most academics have enough resources to cope well with changes. (People whose communities don’t generally have those resources tend to have to leave those communities to become academics.)
On the other hand, American politics seem to be really crazy. I don’t know if young earth creationism or anti-vaxxers are actually common conservative positions, but I’m willing to consider it given that “global warming is a myth” seems to be. I’d expect a position of denying academic truths to discourage academics from supporting a political group.
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Young-earth creationism is a very common conservative belief in America; anti-vax seems to be pretty equally common on the left and the right.
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You seem to assume that being liberal or conservative is about believing certain facts are true. Certainly, it is the case that liberals and conservatives often end up arguing about factual issues when they get into a political debate over thanksgiving dinner but we all know that it is the policy preferences driving the facts cited and not the other way around
It’s tempting to think about liberals and conservatives as differing on factual issues because we believe policy choices should be a based on facts about likely benefit. but it seems to me that this is really the tail wagging the dog with factual disputes being manufactured insofar as they are the most effective cheers for their team.
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Philosophically, sure. Politically and practically, nope. The parties actually have official platforms, and these can include both statement of meta-level values and statements of fact. One US party has made denial of an overwhelmingly-supported fact an official part of their platform, and >50% of their Presidential candidates reject the most strongly supported idea in science since Newton’s Principia Mathematica. And if you ask any of them about either, they come of sounding like anti-intellectuals at best and flat-out morons at worst.
Academics are generally a tolerant lot, but stupidity grates at us, and willful ignorance is absolutely intolerable. Is it any wonder we avoid the party which actively embraces and cultivates both?
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The problem is that when people pick a side, their cognitive dissonance resolution mechanism starts to make them ignore part of the nonsense of the party they side with. Furthermore, that the other party is provably wrong on some things, leads to many people just assuming that all alternative theories are wrong, rather than actually proving them wrong.
The outgroup homogeneity effect makes this even worse, as it has a tendency to lead to weak manning, where the weakest positions on the other side are seen as ‘their’ position. Even worse, those on liberal side who have opinions outside of the Overton window often get considered to be conservative, so not just conservative opinions are ignored, but also alternative progressive opinions, in favor of groupthink. One can expect the narrowing of the Overton window to get quite bad if liberal academics no longer have contact with conservative (or heterodox) academics, so they start to compare the upper crust of liberals (their ingroup) with the average or below average conservative (or heterodox person).
For example, young-earth creationism is treated by Ozy as a position that a conservative academic might often favor, but a 2012 Gallup poll found that 58% of Republicans and 41% of Democrats belief in it, which is presumably much, much less common for the professor-level people in each group. So the likelihood that conservative scientists would en mass favor creationism is silly for the same reason why we don’t see many liberal scientists who favor creationism.
It’s also not like the dominant liberal beliefs are perfect. Quite a few commonly held liberal beliefs are not scientifically proven to be correct, are not what most of the science points to or are provably wrong.
The replication crisis really drives this home even more, as we see scientists who are quite happy with the outcome of their studies, which matches their bias, but which then very often fail to replicate when conscientious scientists try to replicate these studies. In practice we see that the initial findings spread broadly among the populace and then the replication failures don’t become widely known (which is what one would expect due to the primacy effect).
Anyway, if you look at the Heterodox Academy data, it shows that moderates have also become substantially less common in the last decades. If (more) parts of science become purely liberal, can we expect them to become quite useless, like some fields already are?
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Which political party denies QFT?
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Re Aapje’s post, we should also note that the Gallup poll is not exactly polling for YEC – it’s asking about “were human beings created fully formed within the last 10,000 years”.
I’d love more detailed polling to suss out how many people accept an old earth and evolution of plants and animals combined with a Genesis-y ex nihilo creation of Man, because that seems, from my study of Christianity, like it’s a set that has a lot of room to not be empty.
(Also, people should note that politics isn’t necessarily first; imagine you’re a deeply religious person looking at political views and getting a “feel” for them.
Are you likely to pick the side that constantly sneers at you and mocks you for your religion, even if you think they’re right about various other things?
Even if your religiosity is, say, within the Catholic “obviously evolution is real, duh” camp and you’re not even a human-creationist, and not in this case “against reality” at all?
The implications to the parent post’s not-quite-trolling are left to the reader.)
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@Sigivald
The reason why I referred to the survey was to point out how close the numbers for Reps and Dems are. I often see these sweeping statements about how liberals all believe in scientific truth X and conservatives all believe in scientific untruth Y, but reality is a lot more messy than that. Often, large subsets of liberals and conservatives believe in X and large subsets of liberals and conservatives believe in Y.
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Interesting choice of academic discipline, since I always jumped to “economics” as the area which would probably contain the most conservatism among academics (where sociology might lie at the other end). Economics comes across to me (from my standpoint of being quite liberal-leaning) as the discipline with the greatest potential to produce hard numerical evidence of conservative policies working.
Out of curiosity, have you started identifying as a liberal in absolute terms (I thought you identified as libertarian)? Or was your point to declare that you staunchly prefer the left within the simple framework of left/right binary?
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Ozy,
Your post is frustrating, because despite linking to the Heterodox Academy, you are not actually addressing the evidence they have collected and instead are arguing against a weak man. For example, they found rather extreme disparities in some fields, like psychology and law, on the order of 12 liberal professors to 1 conservative and 8.6 to 1 respectively. This is way more disparate than the field you (cherry) picked. Heterodox Academy specifically makes the claim that the social sciences and related fields tend to lean way more liberal than academia on average. If economics doesn’t belong to that group, this doesn’t prove that other fields are not hugely imbalanced.
There are actually pretty strong reasons to believe that economics is an outlier.
Furthermore, we have evidence that shows a large shift in professor viewpoints over the last 2 decades (it’s in the link you supplied, actually). Even if your argument is right that liberals are simply correct more often, this doesn’t explain why liberals would have suddenly become more correct over time. You actually need an explanation for that shift.
Your statements about the possibility of subconscious bias against conservatives makes it seem like you think that this is the only possible way that discrimination against conservatives happens. However, there is a study that surveyed social and personality psychologists about their willingness to discriminate against conservatives. It found that: “One in six respondents said that she or he would be somewhat (or more) inclined to discriminate against conservatives in inviting them for symposia or reviewing their work. One in four would discriminate in reviewing their grant applications. More than one in three would discriminate against them when making hiring decisions.” And this is just what they are willing to admit to.
So while you worry about the possibility of microagressions and subconscious bias, we actually have large number of people who are consciously willing to discriminate. Note that AFAIK, the willingness or Americans to refuse a job to blacks/women is so low as to not being surveyable. So if you think that discrimination against blacks/women is an issue, the level of discrimination against conservatives by social and personality psychologists seems way, way higher.
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There are many more possible explanations and multiple explanations can be correct and be responsible for part of the effect.
One additional possible explanation is that liberals may be more interested in academic jobs because of their characteristics. It definitely seems to me that academia is a pretty bad career choice nowadays, with bad pay and low job security. We know that conservatives differ on the Big 5 traits. They may be far more sensitive to bad pay and low job security than liberals. This explanation has the advantage of also explaining the shift towards liberalism, since pay and job security is now worse (compared to other jobs) than it was in the past.
Another possible explanation is that since we know that large percentages of conservatives have a negative view of academia, they are unwilling to work there. This is similar to how conservatives tend to have a negative view of government and government workers and there are few conservatives who pursue a government job. Now, of course then the question is why they have a negative view of academia, which can be a multitude of factors, like perceived hostility, a perceived bias, etc.
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“Nothing gives more credence to the correctness of our idea than the triumph of National Socialism at the University”, Adolf Hitler, July 8, 1930, from S.L.Segal’s Mathematicians under the Nazis.
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I don’t think the causal arrow goes the way you are saying. People don’t get to go out and study fossil layers or whatever, they get graded by their teachers, and told that the liberal answers are correct.
That is, it isn’t that education increases your information about the world, which is innately blue, and consequently the more observant people become blue. You don’t see anything about the world in school. You speak with your teachers, you read your textbooks. They, being blue themselves, tell you that the world is blue.
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There are many problems with that. For one, we see that people in academia keep trying to find significant results for marginal effects that at best explain only a fraction of the observed issues. Due to the factors causing the replication crisis, they do find ‘significant’ results that seem to be mostly noise or confounders and thus keep thinking they are right and propose fixes for the marginal effects. Examples are IAT studies, blinding studies and ‘symbolic racism’ studies (which measure how much you believe in the ‘anti-racism’ narrative, but get treated as a proxy for racism), as well as proposed solutions like blinding, teaching people the narrative and affirmative action. The former generally has marginal effects, the second has been found to be counterproductive as the narrative is generally unconvincing to those who are not yet convinced and it just puts more focus on the differences between people, while the latter doesn’t address the real issues and thus tends to fail in various nasty ways.
Ironically, some of these types of studies may actually find (real) significant results when looking at discrimination against conservatives, although probably not for the reasons that the researchers would think (since they would think they were looking for subconscious discrimination or discrimination that people don’t want to admit to, while there seems to be substantial conscious discrimination of conservatives in some fields that people are proud of). Based on precedent, we can already predict that the conclusions would probably be dogmatic/wrong and the proposed solutions thus flawed, with fairly predictable outcomes. For example: ‘affirmative conservative professors’ who leave academia in high numbers, who are lower quality on average and thus perform poorly (increasing the stereotypes against conservatives), who self-segregate and get isolated from the rest of academia. Basically, the same things we see for other affirmative action programs.
The role models are telling conservatives that academia have become corrupted & hostile and to go to trade school!!! Having more people do this probably doesn’t help the cause. High-achieving role models seem to be highly overrated anyway. For example, in sports there seems to be little correlation between having a highly successful role model and amateur participation. The primary reason why so many people credit role models is most likely a rationalization by people who are unaware of/in denial that their behavior is mainly driven by a desire to fit into their (immediate) peer-group.
Anyway, if this contempt of and anger at academia increases among conservatives, the question is not going to be: how do we get more conservatives in science? The question is going to be: how can we convince them not to defund universities, reduce student aid and do everything else in their power to harm academia?
It’s all fun and games until the ostracized group decides that if their concerns are not listened to, they will take their ball and go home. If that happens and science has dug itself into a hole that is immensely difficult to get out of, academia will have bigger problems that just a lack of diversity.
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* Clicks through to site called ‘Evolution News & Science Today *
* Notices link to another article celebrating the work of Michael Behe *
* Scrolls down to the bottom of the page to see “© 2017 Discovery Institute” *
Hmmm. If they are going to be creationists, could they at least try to not be so sneaky about it?
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The two ‘Intelligent Design’ links in the Trending bar made it quite obvious to me. I thought that my link was especially illustrative because Jordan Peterson doesn’t address the issues the blog is about in the video (and he believes in evolution anyway), but they still thought it was an important message for their readers. IMO, this suggests that this message has strong memetic reach among conservatives.
Although better evidence of that is that polling shows that conservatives have been getting way more negative about academia in the last couple of years.
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I’m assuming this is a parody.
Point the first: academic jobs represent positions of authority at greater rates than occupations in general. Therefore is should not be surprising that academia is attractive to authoritarians and repellent to libertarians.
Point the second: the idea that academics are more in touch with reality than the average person is mindbogglingly false. Only a few academic disciplines are primarily concerned with reality, more are reality adjacent, and even more (including all the trivium and half the quadrivium) are completely disconnected from reality. Literature, poetry, law and the like are purely conglomerations of opinion, and those fields like history and architecture which nominally have a connection to objective facts are mostly opinion, aesthetics and politics particularly when it comes to career advancement. This is hardly surprising when you look at the history of the university. The fact that the university was so deficient in practical, reality-based applications lead to the innovations of the Agricultural and Mechanical school, the Polytechnical institute, etc.
The trades, on the other hand, are completely in touch with reality. The plumbing works or it doesn’t. They pay more or they pay less for materials, health insurance, electricity, etc. The actual effect of regulations (as opposed to the purported justification) is felt more strongly by (or only by) the tradesman than it is by the academic whose white paper was used by the lobbying group to get the politician to promulgate it.
Which isn’t to say that reality doesn’t have a liberal bias, just that the ivory tower is completely the wrong place to look for the answer.
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@Fisher
On SSC (Reddit and blog) there is currently a analysis/discussion of post-modernism and how it’s borne from people in the humanities realizing that the subjects of their studies are in large part subjective or in other words, that a map is not the territory*.
However, while it’s true that there is no truly objective way to decide by which standards one should judge architecture, it is still true that designing a long stairway with no side protection is going to cause more deaths than a stairway with a balustrade. While there is no objective standard of what is good music, we know that certain patterns engage the human brain in ways that John Cage’s 4’33” or white noise don’t.
So while there is a danger of becoming dogmatic about the conceptual framework that one uses, the way one judges things, etc; there is also a danger of ignoring the value of having a solid conceptual framework that makes good predictions for the outcomes of interventions we make; or ignoring the value of having a shared way of judging that many people think has good outcomes (like: does it end in genocide? then it is bad).
The irony is that post-modernism had the potential of making humanities more resilient to it’s tendency to develop and judge each other by arbitrary dogma and ideology, making a better distinction between reality and the things we layer on reality. However, in practice it is often used to rationalize certain arbitrary dogma and ideology, and even to justify the use of the dark arts.
But perhaps this is the inevitable outcome in fields where it’s hard to draw a strong casual relationship between a choice and a bad outcome (like people dying).
* Well, that is my subjective conclusion, at least 🙂
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I can speak with some competence as to university-level music programs, having spent a few years in one back in 19-mumblemumble. It was as idyllic a time as a college experience could be. However, a student’s pathway to a degree was completely controlled by a handful of professors that could, would, and did prevent students from enrolling in the next level of classes based on political differences. The formal process was called a “barrier,” and one occurred before the junior year and one before your senior year, and then a last one for graduation. I do not believe that I witnessed this being abused over electoral politics (though I never experienced a barrier during an election year) but I did know students that switched officially to the oboe (though they played bassoon in all the different performing groups and went on to play bassoon professionally) because of the bassoon professor’s willingness to refuse to pass students through the barrier that he didn’t like.
The degree was the same: A BA in Music Performance.
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Let see.
first, staff working in academia openly admit they discriminate against conservatives in hiring decisions and in the workplace:
Click to access political_diversity.pdf
You’re familiar with the classic research where they send out CV’s with either a typically black or white name and show the while one gets more callbacks.
The same has been done with political party.
Click to access iyengar-ajps-group-polarization.pdf
Same CV but either Young Democrats or Young Republicans.
It turns out Partyism is a much stronger force than racism.
If you want to measure how much conservatives are excluded due to being conservatives rather than reality being against them in academics you might want to look at non-factual statements of values that have no absolute truth value. indeed things that can’t be falsified. Does academia mirror the general population for such beliefs or is it heavily heavily biased away from conservative values?
Statements like “an 8 month old developing foteus [is]/[is not] an entity deserving of human rights”
it has no truth value, it’s entirely based on personal/social values but academia is highly weighted towards one side vs the general population. Which isn’t too surprising since those already in academia quite openly state they consider it fair game to try to push conservatives out. And they have the majority.
When there’s a heavy weighting like that we then suffer the problem of confirmation bias. Can we really trust that recent research paper? or did the authors unintentionally P-hack until they got the answers they were sure they should be getting that happen to be conveniently supportive of certain social policy positions.
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Statements like “an 8 month old developing foteus [is]/[is not] an entity deserving of human rights”
At an underlying level, perhaps a lot of our problems here are due to people not realizing that this statement has no strictly objective truth value.
(I can understand the religious sorts thinking otherwise; they have a Deity to appeal to for ultimate value judgments, and it’s consistent for them to do so.
The non-religious sorts that think it has an objective truth value are more troubling…)
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@Murphy
That didn’t replicate with a different set of names. A person had Mechanical Turkers compare the black names in the old study with the black names for the new study and answer which name they thought had higher socio-economic status. The outcome was that the new study had names with much higher socio-economic status. So the inability to replicate strongly suggests that people strongly discriminated by class, but (almost) not by race.
Of course, this is not what liberals currently tend to believe, so perhaps reality does not always have a liberal bias* and there is value in having scientists who aren’t content with an explanation that suggests that racial discrimination is the (sole) cause, but look at all possible confounders.
Note that the Inbar and Lammers study (your other link) did replicate in a more extensive study, which also tested discrimination by conservatives against liberals. It found roughly equal willingness to discriminate in both directions. This suggests that the crucial factor for allowing mutual coexistence may be having a lot of moderates (in a similar way to how the middle class might be crucial to hold society together). If so, the core issue may not actually be a lack of conservatives, but that the percentage of moderates in academia went down. Moderates may act as a neutron moderator, keeping the academic environment from going critical if enough of them are present, keeping the more extreme elements from imposing their culture on their entire environment.
* Although it is the liberal belief of yesterday, so you can still argue that reality has a liberal bias, although a different liberalism from the one that is currently popular.
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Cheers, I think I’ve come across some other datacolada posts on the subject of the hard problem of choosing names that don’t slip in confounders like that.
But my main point was that partyism is one of the confounders. Since names are so strongly party-biased as well and the partyism does replicate.
I have a vague feeling that by the time you’ve cut out names that could pull in various external biases you might end up with a small enough set of generic “research names” used often enough to start tipping people off to experiments.
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Something seems to be eating my comments under the name Murphy. Spam filter? I tried to post a post with a number of links/citations.
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Should be out, please tell me if I miss anything else!
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Isn’t it possible to tune your spam filter to be a little more permissive? Merely having two links is enough to trigger it right now. This blog doesn’t seem to have a problem with spam getting through now, so the downside to being more permissive might be minimal, while the upside is much bigger.
PS. There is a comment of mine in the moderation queue.
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I’ve updated the spam filter so it’ll only be triggered by four or more links.
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Thanks!
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Perhaps the bias of reality is more in the “grey-tribe” (rationalist, scientific, vaguely libertarian) direction in preference to the less reality-based parts of other ideologies ranging from religious-right to social-justice-left which insist on dogma that conflicts with reality?
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My former comment here probably ended in spam because it had a link. I’ll try again:
It could be argued that, on the contrary, reality has a conservative bias – because in spite of the replication crisis in psychology, many “conservative” findings replicate well.
See for exemple “Top 10 Replicated Findings From Behavioral Genetics”. Most of them (except the second) seem quite “conservative” – especially the first:
“1. All psychological traits show significant and substantial genetic influence”
Or the many studies about the differences between men and women: interest in “things” vs “people”, higher variability etc. – see “The Google Memo: What Does the Research Say About Gender Differences?” on heterodoxacademy.org
Of course, I don’t think that reality really has a conservative bias – or a liberal one. It’s just that, most psychologists being liberal nowadays, “conservative” findings have to face a higher scrutiny than “liberal” ones like “stereotype threat” – so the ones who get published had to be quite solid.
(Sorry if I made mistakes – I’m not a native English speaker.)
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