A review paper on the lack of political diversity in social psychology | Hacker News Reader

A review paper on the lack of political diversity in social psychology

heterodoxacademy.org

42 pointsajdlinux15 comments

Ironically, a lot of conservative criticisms of the political bias of various institutions [1] are based on two very non-conservative premises: 1) Cultural relativism: They assume that all political views are equally deserving, which is almost certainly not true given any random group of political views, nor based on any reading of history. 2) Affirmative action: Instead of pursauding people in the marketplace of ideas, they argue that 'conservatives' and conservative ideas should be gifted with status. (They also assume people are of pure and immutable ideology; someone either is 100% 'conservative' or 100% 'liberal' forever; they can't have a mix of nuanced beliefs and can't change. Judges keep disappointing them.)

To be clear, certainly people have an equal right to any belief and an equal right to voice it. That doesn't mean they have a right to equal acceptance of their arguments. If so many academic faculty, an exeptionally intelligent and educated group relative to the general population, lean liberal, maybe that tells us something. If you don't like it, persuade them otherwise!

(I'll add that it's disappointing to see comments voted down and up based on politics, not quality. It reinforces the perspective that people of a certain political pursuasion are not critical thinkers, which undermines everything they say.)

[1] Some valid and some not. There's criticism of the 'liberal judiciary', even though most judges were appointed by Republicans (at least that was true a few years ago); criticism of the 'liberal media' even though Fox dominates cable news, the Wall Street Journal dominates business news, and radical conservatives dominate talk radio.

I'd take a look at Haidt's actual paper, not just chalk it up to conservatives complaining. Among other things, Haidt is fairly liberal in his politics—this is an honest attempt to improve diversity in sociology (a pretty liberal-leaning goal, usually), not conservative complaining.

It's good to see self-assigned liberal psychologists realizing the field's weakness in it's near-universal acceptance of the "liberal progress narrative", and the need to push for more diversity in the narratives it embraces.

Perhaps they should set a quota for grad student political affiliations :) ?

There was a discussion of the preprint (or more accurately a blog post summarizing the preprint) early this year at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8840261

> Why are there so few non-liberals in social psychology?

Because social psychology's main role is to justify liberal government policy and other social engineering. Just take a cursory look at the history of social psychology and this is obvious. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positivism_dispute

What a strange thing this Heterodox Academy is. They bemoan the lack of political diversity (however you define that, they don't, seems they leave it an exercise to the reader) in the Social Sciences, and then they proceed to list Judith Curry, a climate change skeptic, amongst their members. Can someone make a convincing case they don't have an agenda to sell?

Seems that they define it pretty clearly: has long been noted in psychology: nearly everyone in the field is on the left, politically.

Yes. The main organizer, Jonathan Haidt, is a well-regard sociologist. He's been crusading for more political diversity in science for... years? A decade? He has, of course, been doing very impressive science as well; check out his book, “The Righteous Mind”, if you're interested in understanding how people talk about morality, for example. Like it or not, climatologists sceptical of climate change should get their voices heard, just like Levin should be allowed to doubt the possibility of quantum computers, AI researchers should be allowed to doubt the possibility of general AI, and so on. They must, of course, conduct their science to the standards of their field, but the fact that they can argue for ideas not widely held in their field makes that field stronger, not weaker. Science isn't a battle for consensus, or even a battle for getting the largest agreement on a truth; it is a battle for the truth itself, any discussion and conversation, within a process that enforces good faith and good epistemology, only helps.

As for people with heterodox views who "conduct their science to the standards of their field", I suggest reading this very amusing/disturbing review of results in paranormal research.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-ou...

"Two experimenters in the same laboratory, using the same apparatus, having no contact with the subjects except to introduce themselves and flip a few switches – and whether one or the other was there that day completely altered the result. For a good time, watch the gymnastics they have to do to in the paper to make this sound sufficiently sensical to even get published. This is the only journal article I’ve ever read where, in the part of the Discussion section where you’re supposed to propose possible reasons for your findings, both authors suggest maybe their co-author hacked into the computer and altered the results."

Yeah, I've seen that. I would posit that paranormal researchers with unusual political beliefs are no less an asset to their field than those with normal political beliefs. (How much of an asset the field as a whole is is for you to understand.)

Is there a way to conclusively prove that any time spent further considering an idea is a waste, and if so, should that idea be tossed out?

Failing that, if you can show that an idea is almost certainly wrong, is it appropriate to almost never condescend to discuss it?

It's important to have a good answer for this stuff. Time is an important resource. If we spend 1000 years answering questions that should have been solved in 50, we have failed at science.

[Libertarians are the political group with the highest IQ] Nice fact.

Out of context relevant quote time:

"...and reality has a well-known liberal bias" -Stephen Colbert

Only if we remember that every generation's liberals is the next generation's conservatives.

Apologies for the somewhat incoherent post, my lunch break is about to end.

Here I thought this was going to talk about how almost all of social psychology, economics, and other disciplines that influence social policies almost never question capitalism. The difference between liberals (lowercase 'l') and conservatives is very little when it comes to the basic premises of how societies should be structured. Very disappointing. The only departure the post makes from this dichotomy is a mention of libertarians and moderates. Something tells me they mean 'right libertarians' and not libertarian socialists.

Heterodox Academy is a striking name for an institution, so I looked up what it's supposed to be about and, of course, I found the typical boring premises that infest right wing institutions[1]: Their ideologies haven't been rejected because their policies were implemented in real life and produced bad outcomes; clearly it's because there is a systematic bias against them. Talk about a persecution complex!

As if neoliberalism infesting governments and supranational governing bodies isn't enough, it also needs to recapture academia and regain intellectual primacy! The last thing social psychology needs is an infusion of ideas from the end of the spectrum that embraces Murray Rothbard.

Last observation before I go: There is a tendency for reactionary movements (and yes! right libertarianism is a reactionary ideology: it dreams of a never borne out vision of laissez-faire capitalism the world abandoned generations ago) to adopt the language and lexicon of those opposed to them. In this case, the adoption of the language of diversity is being used while very likely the people who want the social sciences to be more right wing spit vitriol at the mention of diversity in the broader context of society. I don't think it's sincere, and if it is, it's laughable.

> [Libertarians are the political group with the highest IQ, yet they are underrepresented in the social sciences other than economics]

/snicker

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...

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