You appear to be confusing smart and educated. If the elite academics, very smart, are all liberal, the mid level people with bachelors and associate degrees are somewhat more conservative, and the poor with little college and not even high school are liberals, you both might be right.
My daughter is working on a PhD in Psychology, and is publishing a fair bit, and it appears that reviewers often or even usually check the data carefully and often call for an additional study. When I review engineering papers I certainly look at the data, and recommend rejection of the benchmarks used are inadequate.
In any case, I was unaware that MatLab had a liberal bias.
I was not. His claim was about academic success.
I believe this is correct.
[Although it’s a bit more complex, because the poor with little education tend to be conservative socially but liberal fiscally, and the mid-level guys are reversed to some extent. But again, this is all a tangent.]
You’re touching on what I posted earlier. Apparently, self-reliant people never need help becoming self-reliant - except maybe from sky-buddy.
No. You are confusing cause and effect. The implications of positions that are perceived by you as liberal have everything to do with their causes. For example, if their causes are “unbiased research findings”, then the implication is that some liberal positions are correct.
A quote from the speaker mentioned in the OP:
That’s true. But the question is whether in fact it was the result of “unbiased research findings”. And one factor that has a bearing on the likelihood of this being the case is whether the predominent mindset in the field is liberal.
IOW, once the predominent mindset is liberal - for whatever reason it came about - then it is reasonable to assume that this mindset influences the results. What you (& others) are talking about is how this mindset came about. But this is irrelevant - this is cause (of the mindset). I’m talking about the effect (of the mindset). That’s what I meant that you’re confusing cause and effect.
The problem with that is that conservative dogma is filled with beliefs that are simply flat out factually wrong; it isn’t surprising conservatives would do bad at anything that requires them to be correct about something. That quote presumes that Left and Right are automatically equally correct, which isn’t true - you often tended to get poor science from hardline Communists, too.
In what way are women and minorities “wrong”? A woman unlike a conservative isn’t by definition committed to falsehoods.
Yes, and the sentence that I quoted nicely summarized his position on the matter.
Too bad. What if I don’t like Einstein’s theory of relativity? You know, it doesn’t feel right to me. But I’m not inclined to point out a flaw in it. I just reject it on lazy ideological grounds. That would make me a crackpot.
Again: crackpot. I can point you right now to a guy making erroneous claims based more or less on a “gut” feeling. Happens all the time on the internets. Experts do their best to clarify, but its a futile, meaningless argument, if you can’t point to a flaw in any particular piece of data or study. Where’s your evidence? It’s insulting to an expert to hear that your results are biased or wrong, yet not be inclined to actually point to anything specific. It’s insulting because if you work in the field you see just how much care goes into removing and accounting for bias.
Cite?
Perhaps the reason for this is that we have specific instances of discrimination aganst women and minorities in many areas, but not against conservatives. There are alternate explanations we do have data to support - business school professors make twice as much as psychology professors, so those who are more interested in money, who are likely to be conservatives, may be attracted there. I don’t know what the ratio of conservatives to liberals is in business schools, but I am pretty sure it is a lot higher.
Well surely it is likely to have some effect. But the question is how big an effect. Everyone has biases, but the scientific community does its best to remove or account for biases. In fact, that’s what we spend the majority of our time doing. Accounting for bias. It’s something that is at the very core of the modern scientific paradigm. One way we do this is through a very competitive environment. We don’t all agree with one another, and we would like to disprove each other. When a competitor’s paper is released, we would love to prove it wrong. Studies are examined scrupulously and repeated, and criticized. “I think you have bias” doesn’t cut it. What is your criticism? How was study X biased? What did they do wrong? Otherwise your argument boils down to conspiracy.
Obviously, the human psyche has a liberal bias.
It must be eradicated.
I disagree, but am not inclined to keep arguing about whether some other poster expressed themselves clearly. Whatever.
It would, but you’re mistaken in comparing people’s opinions about psychology and sociology to people’s opinions about complex areas of physics. The former is an area in which people have extensive personal experience, and access to a vast amount of other empirical evidence, even if they don’t have letters after their names. The latter is a different story.
Perhaps you’ve misunderstood what I wrote. I wasn’t referring to a case of not being able to point to anything specific. That was 1). Under 2), I pointed out that a guy might have some specific objection. But the counter-argument is “it’s you against the world, do you really think all these scientists are wrong?”. And the answer might be “yes”, if these scientists are influenced by their own personal prefences and professional mindset.
Your best is not necessarily good enough. As above, I think this is a naive attitude, and one that is not supported by history.
That only works if the audience to which the criticism and scrupulous examination is directed is receptive to this type of criticism. If the audience is similarly biased - as is apparently the case here - then no such scrupulous examinations are likely to take place, or if they are, to be paid heed.
Which is even besides for the fact that, as I posted previously “many times the bias is not so much in terms of interpreting the data but in terms of what gets considered, studied, and published to begin with. The article in the OP gave two good examples of this, in racial and gender studies.”
For example, the issue in Summers’ case is not that someone made a study which proved that women are inherently as capable as men in math & science and Summers was saying this was a biased study. The theory that Summers put forth was simply rejected as unacceptable on PC grounds, by an audience that was predisposed to think this way. (Actually my understanding is that Summers’ position is thought to have some validity by actual scientists in the field. But very very quietly.)
See also the graduate student cited in the article in the OP, for another example of this type of issue, on which your argument has no bearing.
Faculty positions in the social sciences pays poorly - typically starting at well under 6 figures after 5-6 years of grad school AND a post-doc. This COULD be a reason that highly driven conservatives avoid it - they would rather put that energy into a more fiscally rewarding path. However, I am now painting with a damned broad brush - which brings me to party affiliation and education:
As for party affiliation, here is a table from one quick Google link that shows that it can be risky to ASSume that education is a perfect predictor:
http://people-press.org/report/?pageid=750
I will say that my experience in academia reveals some strong bias against the right wing when you are on the social sciences side. A smart conservative grad student or assistant professor keeps their mouth shut until they are tenured.
According to that article democrats in general faculty at top universities outnumber republicans 6-1
People in life and physical sciences see the same biases.
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/141264/most_scientists_politically_liberal_(reality_must_have_a_liberal_bias)/
So I don’t know if you can claim it is anything about psychology itself that draws liberals. I think academia is just more appealing to people whose worldview is also more liberal.
I don’t know what role that plays in how psychology develops as a field though.
I think this shows a profoundly distorted view of the reality of the field. But this is one opinion against another, and a perfect example of why you really need to provide some kind of case against a particular position, rather than the ad hominem attack on psychology that you are attempting.
Higher education discriminates against the less intelligent!
I think the Summers’ debacle is a red herring. Just so you know, I actually agree with the hypothesis he presented, or at least that it has some possible merit. And there was indeed a PC overreaction. But the fact is, there are many hypotheses regarding the “women in science” issue; many of them have merit and are likely contributing factors, and there is very little evidence that the “IQ variance” hypothesis is a large contributing factor. There just isn’t. But it’s a complex issue, and the Psychological community, as far as I am aware, has not even come to a position on the matter. And it shouldn’t – more research is needed. And, as the very fact that Summers cited such research indicates, research is in fact being done.