Hey! I been to college.
One could test this theory by polling professors in engineering and hard sciences. If the poll is done anonymously, I predict that engineering and hard science professors turn out to be much less liberal than professors in humanities.
I’m in contact with both engineers and professors (where do scientists fit in?), and I’m pretty sure the teachers are more liberal than the engineers. By quite a bit, in fact. This observation is anecdotal, but has value.
I work in a oil company research facility. And I ask questions, and talk.
Forgive me for asking what I suspect is a stupid question, but: do the moderators of the various debates draw up the questions themselves? I had assumed the questions were composed by a group of people, representing “both sides” of an issue.
At the beginning of the VP debate Gwen Ifill said she wrote the questions. I see no reason that wouldn’t be true.
Wow. I find that very odd. I’m not saying it was wrong or that she did a bad job or showed bias or anything of that nature, but I assumed (as I said above) that although she was the moderator, the questions were the work of a panel or something. I don’t know how I missed it when she said she’d written them, I guess I was getting a cushion or something.
Ah! you might be right. She said chosen by her.
The handwaving appears to be all yours. As already noted, peer review does nothing to establish the validity of the paper. It is a relatively effective method to prevents cranks and idiots from getting published, but as long as the technical protocols are satisfied, many papers with serious errors get past peer review.
You, on the other hand, have simply handwaved away an actual criticism of the study that took specific note of its underlying errors. Unless you are prepared to show the actual “peer review” that allowed the paper to be published with actual statements in the reviews rebutting the critique of the paper, you are really providing less anaylsis than I am–and far less than mhendo. Basically, you are saying, Oooh! Ooooh! Look here, I found someone in academia who agrees with me. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
(I would not characterize your pet study as deliberately misleading, by the way. The authors may have made a good faith effort to be fair. However, the actual study has already been shown to have been hopelessly flawed (inadequate number of think tanks named, omitting several important ones, inadeqate definition of “liberal” or “conservative” think tank, etc.), and their methodology does not even make sense (associate the number of times an institution is mentioned, regardless of context, then correlate it to a similar number of references (regardless of context) in which it is mntioned by various congresscritters).
Looks like conservatives have a new data point they’re trying to trumpet: SNL took down last week’s bailout announcement sketch (which drew attention to Democratic involvement in the meltdown, and featured George Soros, whom a caption called “Owner, Democratic Party”) for “quality concerns.” Frankly, that sounds like BS even to me.
Of course, the sketch also featured an elder couple who participated in the financial shenanigans and profited mightily from it, with a caption saying they “should be shot,” and THAT may be the impetus. But conservatives are drooling over the assumption that Soros and/or the media’s Democratic masters demanded NBC yank the sketch.