So, in your your view, could a particular fact constitute “evidence,” but then lose its cachet as evidence if another, stronger fact came to your attention that made another conclusion more likely?
Civil law in the US allows the Unions to exist. Unions did not always exist, it is only through legislation that they came into being - are you suggesting this is not true?
I’ll do more than suggest it. I’ll say it: not true.
Unions came before the legislation that protected some of their activities. The National Labor Union, the Knights of Labor – what “legislation” made them come into being?
Sure, we can nitpick all day about the history of the labor movement. I should have parsed my statement to say that unions as they exist today have strength and legitimacy because they are backed by legislation.
The point I am making is that unions are backed by legislation - which you are agreeing with. If unions are backed by legislation, I don’t find Shodan’s argument to be particularly strong.
If you had said that, I would have agreed.
We were talking about academia in general and social psychology in particular. Conservatives do not own that bus, but instead encounter discrimination and double standards.
So the racism example is rather appropriate, and a demonstration of the hypocrisy of people who claim to value diversity and reject it at the same time.
The question was, who represents “the people” better. Unions represent their members; the state government of Wisconsin represents all the citizens of that state. Therefore, it is the state government who can better be said to represent “the people”, insofar as they represent a much larger percentage of the population in question.
Certainly unions are allowed to exist by the laws of the state (but see Bricker’s correction on how they came into existence). Stamp collectors and the Ku Klux Klan are also allowed to exist by the laws of the state, but they don’t represent “the people” either, at least as compared to the governor and the state legislature.
Regards,
Shodan
No it’s patently ridiculous. In a field which focuses on social issues, a person’s political stance is a fair place to discriminate. It may be applied unfairly but it just isn’t remotely akin to judging on skin colour. Pushing this line just shows how over the top you are attached to your conservative viewpoint.
Why?
I argue that this is a serious error – not because of any analogy to racism, but because of the bias introduced by limiting the field of social psychology to a homogeneous political viewpoint.
In this study, groups of peer reviewers were asked to review an article for publication. The article was a fake: although the introduction and the methodology sections were identical, the results were altered. I suppose you won’t be shocked to learn that when the results aligned with the reviewers’ political beliefs, the review was positive; when the results did not, reviewers rejected the paper for supposedly poor methodology.
If social psychology research is monolithically liberal, then social science researchers will chose to research topics which accord with liberal thinking, and define terms that mirror liberal beliefs:
Because the field of study is focused on subjects that are often highly politicized. In many instances it’s akin to prejudging a Biology researcher for their stance on evolution or a Physicist and their ideas on cold fusion.
As I said, of course it may be unfairly applied. Maybe Shodan can start some Conservatives in Social Studies scholarship and advocacy program to help lift up this poor underclass
Would you say that the standard as applied in the linked cite, where if I agree with the conclusions I say that the methodology is good but if I disagree the methodology is bad, is fair, or unfair?
Would you say that that standard ought to be applied in other fields of science?
Regards,
Shodan
But earlier you were trying to argue that conservatives were being actively discriminated against in social psychology. Now you seem to have backtracked on that and are arguing – more reasonably – that you feel there aren’t enough conservatives in the field of social psychology. How many should there be? Whose fault is it if the psychological makeup of conservatives is such that they have no interest in social psychology (as suggested by the paper I linked earlier)? So what? There are other indications that conservatives are just less interested in academic pursuits in general. Many of them have probably never even heard of social psychology and wouldn’t care about it if they did. What are we supposed to do about that? Why?
If you’re suggesting that there’s some kind of social harm in having conservatives under-represented in social psychology I don’t see what it is. But I would point out that conservatives are very much over represented in the group that likes to make a lot of money by starting businesses, and therefore over represented in the cohort of wealthy individuals who get to fund and control some of society’s most important institutions and our principal means of communication and public persuasion. And that is indisputably a problem. How come you’re not worried about that one?
So you don’t believe in diversity? OK, fair enough.
Social psychologists claim there are benefits to it, although they don’t act as if they believed it.
Regards,
Shodan
Depends. In that one stunt where they faked up a conclusion, did the conclusion fly in the face of all previous research? If so, then a “flawed methodology” rejection letter might just be the polite way of saying “i think you’re full of crap”. Something similar might happen if you faked up a physics paper that concludes that theres a simple solution to cold fusion.
The two points are not mutually exclusive.
I argue that the reason that conservatives are so drastically underrepresented in the field is the active discrimination. In support of that, I have offered two independent pieces of evidence:
(1) That underrespresentation in a field creates a presumption of discrimination. This is the tack taken by those who argue that racial underrepresentation in a field shows discrimination. Against that, you have offered the same types of arguments that are rejected when the topic is race: perhaps they don’t want to be social psychologists.
(2) There are specific examples of people who have experienced discrimination, some of which have been cited above.
Except that the cites provided above show that there are conservatives who have been interested in the field and have been discouraged by discrimination.
And many liberals haven’t heard about it, and wouldn’t care if they did. However, many other conservatives have heard of the field, and would be adept practitioners in it, but for the discrimination levied against them.
I’m not sure who “we” is in this question of yours.
We, participants in this thread, are supposed to acknowledge the weight of persuasive evidence and adjust our conclusion based on that evidence.
Why not? Didn’t you read post 168?
In post 168, I clearly exposed a harm created by a field dominated by one political persuasion.
This is a hijack which I decline to address in this thread. But I promise that if you start a GD thread with this premise I will participate and share the reasons for my lack of worry.
The conclusions in each case were plausible. Did you read the study?
And why “stunt?”
I offered specific examples where that wasn’t the case – for example, the study in which where “ethical behavior” was defined as siding with a female colleague who complained of sexual harassment, as opposed to waiting for both sides of the story.
That’s a question upon which people may reasonably disagree, and not something factually settled such as evolution.
Ok. That would appear to be a place where it was unfairly applied; that is if you think believing a woman’s sexual harassment claim is a conservative-liberal dividing point…
I think it’s fair to say – while certainly acknowledging the wide range of opinions on both sides – that if you were to graph data points for people’s tendency to be closer to uncritical belief of a sexual harassment claim, those who tended more towards uncritical belief would also tend more towards the liberal side, yes.
So with that in mind, do you you wish to modify your assertion that in a field which focuses on social issues, a person’s political stance is a fair place to discriminate?
Nope.
First off, by “conservative” are we meaning a concern with preserving a set of current values and opinions and carrying them forward into the bright future? Or are we talking about turning back the clock to an earlier, discarded set of values and opinions, a mindset we of the progressive left call “reactionary”. At least when we are in a polite and generous mood.
And do we mean fair and non-discriminatory? And is this happy state best embodied in equivalence?
Does that mean that our academic economists must be equally distributed between the “Keynesian” economists and “Supply side” theorists? Will that require some sort of affirmative action program? Might we not further insist that unemployed Soviet economists be hired to lecture on Marxist economic theory? You know, balance and fairness. Then why not biology classes that offer equal time to Creationism? Why not Physics 102, the Dynamics of Phlogiston?
The history of conservatism is a dismal record of defeat, or a hopeful example of progress, depending on how cramped and constipated your world view may be. The Founding Fuckups full realized that power to govern must rest in the hands of men of substance, men of property with “skin in the game”. Political power must not be squandered on the unwashed and unworthy. In its time, that was a “conservative” position, holding fast to tried and proven truths.
The “conservative” opinion was later amended to oppose votes for women, for all manner of perfectly good reasons. Then that wall came tumbling down, we got smarter, men voted for female suffrage. Men, given wise advice and counsel, voted to dilute their power because they knew what was good for them. In a manner of speaking.
Conservatives opposed child labor laws and free public education, since it was useless, even cruel, to turn children away from the workplace and fill their heads with intellectual fluff that would be of no real value to their employers. The “job creators”, whose well-being was crucial.
Should we have intervened to assure that these positions were accorded the respect they did not deserve? Should we re-inflate the Zeppelins, perhaps armor plate them to withstand attack from those pesky little airplanes?
All persons are entitled to a fair hearing, they are not necessarily entitled to equivalence. We progressives are a generous bunch. Even here, where gather the smartest and hippest people on the planet, we ensure that there is a place for a few total dipsticks.