Comment by DannyB2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DannyB2 | Hacker News Reader

It should not be about whether people are conservative. It should be about whether they are stupid.

All view points should be represented at the table? Otherwise you have an echo chamber?

Should we allow the view point that the earth is flat and the sun rises in the west? Otherwise, we end up in an echo chamber of people agreeing the earth is round, and the sun rises in the east.

Discrimination against 'conservative scholars' should not be about being conservative, but about being scholars. Is the earth round? Does the sun rise in the east? Does your policy idea fit the facts, or do you want to make up facts to fit your policy ideas?

Is it bad to say reality has a liberal bias? Well, I suppose, it's okay to say that if it turns out to be true.

It's not to discriminate against people's values. But policies that are contrary to clear evidence. Creation or manipulation of evidence to fit policies. No matter which political party engages in this fact shaping and evidence manufacturing.

Reality is more complicated.

1. Experts are wrong.

The unanimous findings of the experts ranged from a Hillary victory to a Hillary landslide.

2. Experts disagree.

I've yet to see an economics theory that doesn't have huge disagreement. That we need money? Hm...maybe, but gold standard or fiat...

3. Many view are not factual

Science tells when a fetus' heart starts beating, and maybe even it experiences pain. But abortion involves notions like the value of life. The scientific method doesn't really work on morality.

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Reality's "liberal bias" is weak at best.

Here's one of the biggest in terms of suspected havoc wreaked by "experts". Literally all my life (and I turn 56 RSN), dietary saturated fats and most especially cholesterol were BAD things.

Today, from health.gov "Cholesterol is not a nutrient of concern for overconsumption. (hmmm, the "for overconsumption" was added recently or this is a different document, anyway, that's from "https://health.gov/dietaryguidelines/2015-scientific-report/...)

And if Gary Taubes and company are right, the resulting push from fats to carbohydrates has been responsible for perhaps the worst 1st world heath catastrophe in modern times....

But, yeah, the liberal love to laugh at those fat Middle Americans, who got that way by following the government's dietary guidance, which was based on liberals enforcing from the top down their "reality".

Honestly, I don't believe that anyone in the modern era really got fat because they were following guidelines.

I think it's much more likely the fact that we put sugar into just about everything, portion sizes having gone up, edibility of foods having gone WAY up (texture, taste, sugar/oil/salt portions), manual labor decreasing, sedentary habits increasing (tv, movies, video games)...

The first world and especially the West faced a storm of changes which individually might be fine but which together form a nightmare health scenario.

And "putting sugar in everything" as a way to make it taste better is completely unrelated to the government scoring this as "good", whereas using fat scores as "bad"?

There are also those who thing the portion size issue might have to do with a too carb rich diet not satiating appetite as well as a more or fat rich diet.

Edibility has gone way up? I don't think so, the old stuff tasted damned good, and often better (I'm of an age where I've tasted a lot of it made by old fashioned grandparents). And many of the changes pushed by this directly make foods taste not hardly so good, e.g. McDonalds let themselves get pushed into removing beef tallow (rendered fat) from their fry oil, their french fries aren't worth much anymore.

I've also been trying some Cambells Chunky Soups for the first time in many many years, and some of the old favorites don't hold a candle to when they came out in the '70s.

Less manual labor doesn't explain why those who didn't do a lot of it didn't used to get fat like they do now.

More sedentary habits, that's a possible cause, but the evidence for it is shaky, and still has to be balanced against calorie inputs.

Cholesterol, carb-heavy food pyramid, global cooling, the Brexit outcome, 2008 financial crisis.

expert consensus != reality

Everyone loves ridiculing the global warming deniers. But there's been as much error on the other side of the fence.

Earth's point of no return was 10 years ago, according to Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth". Fossil fuels are always running out, and yet the world supply has grown. Half a century ago, Paul Ehrlich declared the inevitable mass starvation of billions. In 1970, Life magazine reported "solid experimental and theoretical evidence...in a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution...by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half..."

These guys are venerated by liberals, yet their predictions are barely more reliable than rapture-and-apocalypse cults.

Sometimes expert consensus and fear mongering leads to action. 1970, 1977, and 1990 saw major amendments to the Clean Air Act that might have changed the trajectory described in that Life article.

I doubt 1977 or 1990 affected whether city folks wore gas masks in 1980.

Global cooling was never an "expert consensus".

There's a lot of things that economists agree on, the gold standard being a prime example.

http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/gold-standard

Planet Money has done a couple episodes where they get economists from a blend of ideologies and find things they all agree on.

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/02/26/468298576/econo...

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/19/157047211/six-p...

The gold standard is a great example of a disagreement - you cited a group that is probably dominated/biased by the Chicago School of Economics, and even then there is no real consensus on anything there.

Economists are a lot closer to astrologists than astrophysicists, they agree when the notion is vague enough to not have any testable inferences.

For the large part thought fractures into schools and is built off broad ideas (government should intervene in business cycles, or government should never intervene, etc), and you might see agreement there.

I don't think your too far off with the astrologists angle. So much of economic thought seems to boil down to "we went from A to B while doing X therefor X is responsible".

There is a wide range of issues for which there are different legitimate ways of interpreting the same evidence. The humanities, for crying out loud, are generally philosophical rather than empirical---how you interpret James Joyce is much more fluid than whether the world is flat.

Your implication that conservatives are stupid is a great demonstration of exactly the echo chamber phenomenon described in the article.

It's an unfair analogy to compare all of conservative values to believing the earth is flat.

Academics certainly has a liberal bias, after all, look at where they get most of their funding. Conservative professors are being publicly shamed and chased out of their positions.

It's an unfair analogy to compare all of conservative values to believing the earth is flat.

Especially since the concept of this having any vaguely modern, and by modern I mean, like, High Middle Ages (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth#High_and_Late_Middl...) credibility is vile 19th Century and beyond propaganda: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_flat_Earth

And you're right about the consequences of daring to do science while conservative. It's sobering to realize the career I dedicated myself to until finances prevented me from getting a bachelor's degree would not be open to me if I were to enter college today (well, I might get away with exiling myself, but that's itself is telling).

And if reality has a liberal bias, as that word is used today in the US, it sure is funny how much of it was elucidated by devout Christians.

>Academics certainly has a liberal bias, after all, look at where they get most of their funding.

It was Vannevar Bush who created the NSF. It was the Clinton era, IIRC, in which Republicans all of a sudden decided that funding for basic research was a partisan issue dealing with the role of government, rather than a nonpartisan matter of kicking ass and taking names.

The problem is when it criticizes you for criticism. I for one would be happy to know that the other side of every point is properly represented.

A scary one is climate change, it is now no longer palatable to question whether it is happening. So we don't hear the other side, instead the echo chamber has destroyed the scientific process.

I'm not saying scientists don't work on it productively (and I'm not denying climate change), I'm just pointing out that we can no longer have science work on the conservative view.

I'm not a climate change denier, I just don't think anyone fully understands it yet, and I definitely don't think giving the UN money will fix it.

"it is now no longer palatable to question whether it is happening"

So, back this up. Who are the people with the careful theories, the detailed data, the ironclad arguments, who aren't being heard because of intolerance for their 'conservative' views?

Academia has officially decided that it no longer needs science, it needs populism. You won't get funding anywhere and a journal won't publish you. Your peers will ostracize you.

Skepticism doesn't need to produce theories or data, it just needs to try on different views. We can't anymore, you're classed as a believer or a non-believer for even attempting. Have you noticed how still the conversation falls when you ask someone the exact details of climate change? What % is natural? What is the error terms on the assumptions?

It's like questioning god in the 16th century, are you surprised that there is nothing in the public sphere?

What a funny world we live in where scientists use the word 'skeptic' as a derogatory term?

Is academia required? There is a lot of money to be made from a lot of vested interests for anyone that can come up with a credible theory to explain the current warming level.

100% agree. It's hard to fully capture how stupid religion makes people, because a lot of the root beliefs are rarely forced to surface. Gay rights vs. the church is a good example where a lot of Christians harbor pretty intense hate toward homosexuals. But, no one ever asks their opinion and we only see snippets of the hate when a flower shop refuses to provide flowers at a gay wedding or something.

The other thing this article overlooks is the role that breadth of experience plays both in liberal ideology and Christian proselytizing. If you've never had a black friend or never really talked to a women who is not content with the sexism inherent in the Bible (or any mid-evil religious text, really), you might not be able to understand why someone is afraid of the police or why anyone would ever opt for abortion. Further, if you never take the time to understand carbon dating you might never have reason to question stuff like new-earth creationism. This factor is more severe in my opinion and is grounds for keeping narrow minded individuals out of academia.

That education correlates with liberal ideology should not be ignored. It's actually one of the first things that helped me escape from an evangelical/racist/homophobic/conservative family/community. There were a lot of steps but considering my own ignorance was the first and biggest step.

Side note: I would love to see a study linking capacity for empathy with political leaning. My suspicion is that anyone with a "strong" conservative mindset has low capacity for empathy.

> My suspicion is that anyone with a "strong" conservative mindset has low capacity for empathy.

Probably.

A man who is not a Liberal at sixteen has no heart; a man who is not a Conservative at sixty has no head. — Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881)

look up Jonathon Haidt videos on youtube, I think it's one of the TED talks. He talks about moral psychology, and conservatives do not rank significantly lower on empathy.

Conservatives do rank higher on several moral scales that liberals are close to zero on.

I'm too late to edit my own comment, so I reply:

Haidt's video "keynote at American Psychology Assn" is a very good succinct presentation too. synopsis: how left wing people need to be a little more open minded wrt right wing people.

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