Nobody is arguing with basic research. But when a peer reviewed gender studies journal publishes a rewriting of Mein Kampf, I think it's fair to suspect that a lot of non-science masquerading as real science is indeed pouring out of Universities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affilia#Grievance_Studies_affa...
See: basic research on climate change. Republicans don't so much argue with it as dismiss it outright.
The political left calls GMO crops dangerous and fear mongers without a shred of scientific evidence. Or they spread fear about the pharmaceutical industry -- and how those evil drug researchers are trying to get people addicted to their drugs for profit.
Then when regular people decide not to trust any drugs at all -- including vaccines -- people wonder how that could have possibly happened, after demonizing the entire field of research for decades.
And on the political right we of course have wilful disinformation about climate change.
Not to mention that it’s not even that good an example to prove anything about academia - it’s a minuscule subfield with little funding in comparison to any other academic discipline. None of the major public universities I attended even had a gender studies department - at best it was a specialty within sociology/anthropology with a dozen grad students or so. The only thing in which gender studies has a disproportionate representation is as the favorite example in the rhetoric of anti-academics.
Please show how physics/biology/math/geology/climate science/etc is “monothically leftist and activist in nature”.
And professors of all majors are almost monolithically left-leaning, compared to the population.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/01/11/the-d...
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/is-social-s...
Complaints about "gender studies" are mostly a red herring. Social sciences are not the same as geology, climatology, or biology and don't inhabit the same departments in most universities.
Academic institutions have leaned left since at least the 60s, back when leftism was an actual counterculture movement. This has nothing to do with climate science.
>Complaints about "gender studies" are mostly a red herring. Social sciences are not the same as geology, climatology, or biology and don't inhabit the same departments in most universities.
Gender studies is fully related to the discussion, because it is an exclusively leftist pursuit, intrinsically linked to modern "liberal" policymaking, and respected institutions tacitly enforce their pseudoscientific, sexist, racist, and classist drivel by allowing them space and funding, while making no such allowances to anything related to right wing politics. Right leaning ideas are effectively forbidden at the majority of so called elite universities in the U.S.
How can you expect scientific departments to be unbiased when their administration and sources of funding are openly and strongly politically leaning and active?
Further, and most importantly, do you really believe that climate science is immune to dogma and the statistical abuses that are responsible for the replication crisis evident in other empirical disciplines? Even asking such a question is career suicide - which unfortunately justifies some degree of right wing scepticism of modern academia due to politicization.
The conspiracy you imagine of academic administrators shutting down research that undermines climate change because of gender studies is inane.
You've misrepresented my point. The point is that the existence and condoning of politically slanted departments like those of gender studies is further evidence of a strong liberal bias in academic administration, which will inevitability bleed into management of climate science because of how politicized it has become.
I am not advocating for dismissal, I am merely suggesting that social and political pressure for certain results from the hiring and financial appropriation practices of a politically biased administration can introduce aggregate bias in published results. And on the subject:
>The majority of academic scientists identified as Republicans, up through the 80s
You've failed to establish how even a republican leaning scientific establishment is immune from the whims of administration resulting in, say, only publishing results that support the politically correct positions. It is a fact that the overwhelming majority University administration's lean strongly left - and when science is politicized, there's a strong chance that, again, such administrative bias will affect results in seemingly innocuous ways. Not to mention that most environmental scientists have personal left leaning biases and experience social and professional pressures which also may be reflected in results.
Significance testing, publication of only positive results, and model design are three methods by a which slant may be unintentionally introduced and, again, we know that these problems have lead to the replication crisis explicitly identified in other empirical sciences - why do you think no one is willing to ask the same, legitimate question about climate science, particularly when climatology by nature is not a reproducible discipline?
Oh, for Christ's sake. If anything, climate scientists talk about this more than most other specialties:
"Perspectives on Reproducibility and Replication of Results in Climate Science"
https://www.nap.edu/resource/25303/Reproducibility%20and%20R... (No, the National Academies of Sciences aren't comprised of crypto-socialist ideologues.)
It took literally 10 seconds of Googling to find that. Writing this comment is taking several times as long.
Perhaps the fever swamp that's constantly wondering if climate scientists understand basic science should perform basic due diligence on their own mental models of how the world works.
Why do you refuse to admit the possibility that political and social pressures in such a strongly politicized field can bias climate science? All of the ingredients are there, and the only reason such an assertion is contentious is because of these very same political norms. It begins to resemble dogma, when any criticism is treated with such disdain.
This is patently false. Maybe you aren't arguing with basic research, but people absolutely are.
I think there's evidence of a fairly significant amount of bias being introduced.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis offers the best evidence I can offer for bad science being done.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_views_of_American_ac...
Goes over the issues related to politics, conservatives aren't as under-represented when you include STEM fields, but pay special attention to the disciplinary variance.
>Focusing specifically on social psychology academics, a 2014 study found that "[b]y 2006, however, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans had climbed to more than 11:1.
Also note what fields are facing the most obvious replication crisis.
I expect you'll want to do your own research, but that should get you started.
Another interpretation could be: the GOP platform is highly anti-science and most scientists wouldn’t want to be associated to such a horrendous organization which doubts scientific consensus regarding an issue that’s threatening the whole of civilization.
[1] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/is-science-...
How would you go about finding that evidence? What would be sufficient evidence that they're correlated for you?
My naive first skim seems to demonstrate that political slant does have an effect on reproducibility, although it doesn't matter if that ideological slant is conservative or liberal.
It's not much, but it was tricky to find and it is what you're looking for. More research is needed.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/01/11/the-d...
> and that it’s systematically introducing bias into research
Publishing a rigorous scientific paper saying "well look, here's the problem" is going to be difficult, given the issues such a paper would address. It could be career suicide if handled indelicately.
Given that we have weak evidence that there is a problem, the burden of proof is now on you to provide stronger evidence that there isn't a problem, unless we have a strong prior for there not being a problem or something.
Applying higher standards to things you disagree with is a great way to end up biased. If you require a well reviewed research paper showing that there is a problem, you should also require a similar paper showing you there isn't a problem.
At the very least trying to provide a counter viewpoint to the evidence you've already being presented with would be polite.
I'm not even on the right, but I certainly take issue with a lot of the ideas coming out of gender studies (and similar) departments and how easily they are accepted as truth and how quickly they spread. Many of those ideas, if taken seriously, seem to have the possibility to rearrange society in a pretty awful way. In fact, anecdotally, they already seem to be having a pretty negative effect on our world and their influence seems to be on the rise. Now, I'm not quite as concerned about this as climate change, but it's still a real issue. Do you not see this as a real issue?
The validity of the social sciences as "real science" has long been in question, long before the concerns of modern day politics. This problem is inherent to these fields, because instead of studying the objective physical world they study literature, history, politics, art, etc. Many social sciences are more accurately called liberal arts in my opinion, and they co-opted the word "science" to lend themselves credibility.
Then on the other hand you have climate science, which does study the objective physical world. The science around this involves collecting data and building models to describe the physical world instead of speculating about the nature of mankind. It is an apples to oranges comparison.
Just to illustrate, forget about climate science and gender studies because they are politically charged. If the above poster had criticized something like the study of French medieval literature and used that to argue that particle physics is a systemically flawed and biased field, I would also call that comparison absurd.
The argument is not: Social science is nut trustworthy so no science is trustworthy.
The argument is: Social scientists pushed to be put on the same level as natural scientists, but then they pushed a bunch of politicized bullshit and tarnished the reputation of all scientists in the public's eye.
It doesn't matter what is true or not, people in general are stupid. The masses on the left trust scientists, since they feel that these bullshit pushers are pushing bullshit in the right direction (Not related to climate change). The masses on the right doesn't trust scientists for the same reason. The solution is not to teach people to properly evaluate the validity of different scientific claims, that is impossible, the solution is to build up the trust of scientists in everyone's eyes as much as possible by kicking out all the bullshit. Good arguments actually works, but if you try to feed them 50% bullshit they will refuse to swallow even the good parts since they stopped trusting you.
I largely agree with this, but I think the masses on the right approach it more like the first argument:
> Social science is nut trustworthy so no science is trustworthy.
More accurately, it seems to me that it has become "social science is not trustworthy and I don't agree with the field's mainstream ideas, so I can consider any science I don't agree with to be not trustworthy". So when climate science suggests that climate change is a problem, and the proposed solutions do not agree with right-wing economics, the natural conclusion is for them to reject climate science. This conclusion has been reached by right wing governments across the world, so it certainly seems that those who follow the ideology tend to reach it.
I think it happens both ways with people of all political persuasions, saying "I agree with these conclusions so this science is trustworthy" or "I don't agree with these conclusions so this science is untrustworthy".
You have only to spend 5 minutes in a typical economics class to understand that that field favors neoliberal ideas. If you sit down and have a conversation with an actual leftist (particularly a marxist) professor, you'll hear something that nobody outside of the system seems to discuss. Marxism is very uncommon in most departments.
> Nobody is arguing with basic research.
Are you kidding me?
There are places in the US where powerful organizations and even state legislatures are actively trying to prevent schools from teaching evolution. Look at this development from two years ago: https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/316487-new-wave-of-...
At the federal level, we have congresspeople carrying snow into session so they can deny that climate change is occurring. I regularly see arguments online include discussion of how NASA and NOAA are doctoring the evidence. I wonder where they're getting THAT idea from...
So yea. People absolutely ARE arguing with basic research. Large numbers of people. Significant fractions of the population.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affilia#Grievance_Studies_affa...
From your link: Affilia: _"Journal of Women and Social Work is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal that covers social work practice(s) and feminist analysis of gender inequality."_
How is this related to science (much less basic scientific research)? Even if it WERE a scientific journal, an anecdote about being fooled by a hoax doesn't invalidate the scientific research being done today.
I'd say there's a lot more diversity of opinion in the rest of the departments than there is in econ. I didn't get any sense of political agenda in the history department, and the sociology department seemed to be deliberately avoiding it.
I actually started university under the assumption that professors would be dogmatically pushing their agenda. I was wrong.
There may be good ways to participate, but you need to be more specific than "lean in with everyone else".
(I exclude voting from this. Increasing turnout obviously requires all hands on deck. But that doesn't take much time.)
If you're going to push forward with language like that, don't be surprised when science becomes a political issue.
Climate change isn't an extinction level threat.
1) The rich countries can almost surely make it through with, worst case, major inconvenience and deaths of lots of foreigners.
2) We've had the technology to go carbon free for a long time now (in nuclear) and generally the environmentalists say that nuclear power is at least as bad if not worse than climate change. France has been basically emissions free for quite some time now.
If you want to argue that climate change is a major threat, go ahead. But if it is an extinction level threat, the nature of that threat is being communicated truly terribly, to the point where I doubt anyone on the right has heard enough of it to reject it. I've heard a lot of horrible predictions, none of them are scarier than all the other things that could go wrong over the next 100 years. Even the last 100 years had WWII in them. 100 years is a long time.
It's similar to accusing people of racism. Very very very few people who are called racists would agree with that, and the ones who would you're not going to win over anyway. People shut down when accused and get defensive. If the goal is to make progress (in the traditional sense of "liberalism", to reduce human suffering through gradual reform) rather that "to be right", then calling someone stupid or racist or saying that all of human knowledge contradicts their claims isn't really a good way to get there.
Scientists getting into politics opens them up to the attack that they are pushing an agenda out of political rather than professional beliefs or truth-seeking behaviour. See Trump's attacks on Mueller's team because many voted for democrats. His attacks are probably in bad faith but the point stands: give people something to attack other than a belief they're wrong about and they'll happily switch to that.
I totally understand that feeling I believe we all get when someone acts like a jackass and you don't mind alienating them, but every liberal democracy is built on a foundation of presuming that people can be convinced rather than having to be forced. That may not be true all the time, but it seems like we should at least act as though it is true.
If we're not going to act as though it's true, then we should call a spade a spade and say that it's ok to use authoritarian methods when they serve what we know to be right. Rule by strength of arms seems like a bad road to go down, though.
Now the fact that you immediately leap to authoritarianism is just plain stupid. No one at all is advocating for that in the linked piece or any of the comments. Passing a carbon tax for instance is not authoritarian if done through the democratic process.
The kind of language that alienates better serves the purpose of creating a group of people that is an enemy that can be fought against, which goes to my point about authoritarianism. There are lots of instances in a democracy where you put your foot down as a group and decide that certain behaviors are unacceptable. I just think it's morally important to distinguish between the times that we're using reason to drive policy and the times that we decide that we're officially so right that it's ok to use the power of the government to force people to behave in what we believe to be their own best interest.
FWIW, I absolutely believe massive change needs to happen on the climate change front. I just think that calling the other side deniers and anti-whatever is entirely counterproductive and only serves to deepen divisions. Policy can be made without creating a bogeyman, and if a policy requires a bogeyman, it's way more likely to be authoritarian, in my estimation.
This whole "you're with us or against us" thing? It's not working for me, and if it keeps happening I'm going to have to not be with you.
That being said If climate science becomes more about punching the other side into submission than about looking for truth I am going to take new research as to the effects and pace of climate change less seriously.
If a field was built on a less solid foundation, like say economics, started doing that? Well yeah, I'd absolutely start taking everything they say with an even bigger grain of salt.
The unreasonable perseverance on CO2 levels not only distracts attention from truly severe issues, like loss of amazon rainforests, but makes them worse by introducing policies like biofuel quotas.
I think the older generations, the poor uneducated families, and the bitter religious folks have more disbeliefs in science than 'the right' in general.
If the Right wants to drop its anti-science reputation, it needs to start there.
> Climate change is far from this nation’s most pressing national security issue.
That is an admission by the Republican Party, in its public policy, that climate change is not a myth. It just means they've decided not to care about it in regards to national security.
I also found this:
> Information concerning a changing climate, especially projections into the long-range future, must be based on dispassionate analysis of hard data.
Again, that is an admission that the climate is changing and that scientific research and data can give us information about it.
So as said elsewhere in this thread, we're back to politics determining decisions about what to do about climate change; the Republican Party's official platform doesn't seem to deny that the climate is changing.
"The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive."
"The whole climate crisis is not only Fake News, it’s Fake Science. There is no climate crisis, there’s weather and climate all around the world, and in fact carbon dioxide is the main building block of all life."
"Obama's talking about all of this with the global warming and … a lot of it's a hoax. It's a hoax. I mean, it's a money-making industry, okay? It's a hoax, a lot of it."
I can do this with any given Republican who's been in a leadership position.
I won't, though, because you're clearly dissembling and not engaging in good faith.
Someone replied to "The public position of the Republican Party is that climate change is a myth" with a link to their web platform stating something different.
I think it's not really fair to counter that by quoting Trump and closing with the assumption of bad faith.
On the other hand, all of the Republican leadership cast doubt on it. And as a result the large majority of Republican voters reject the idea of anthropogenic climate change.
I am guessing from their admission that they acknowledge climate is changing, but refusing to list it as a priory is that where the difference in opinion between Democrats/Republicans lie.
When it comes to the root cause of the climate change, how much humans are accelerating/impacting the change and how we can reduce the impact are all topics where the different political party's opinions differ.
I'm quite sure 40% of the US population that voted for the GOP does not fit the description you have provided.
> They should be fired, we can't have science legitimize fascists movements.
Ok, if you want to get rid of a strong scientific community continue on with this fantasy. Propagandists making things up should be exiled.
The climate change assertions should be challenged. That's apart of the scientific method. You don't publish directly to a respected journal. Also, correlation does not imply causation.
Their unbiased* findings should assist in the creation of solutions which involve policymakers. It's not a scientists' job to make a decision that affects everyone.
Unbiased means: As unbiased as you can get. Get it peer-reviewed. Work with others to test out effective change strategies to avoid unintended consequences, present options, accept failure. (Yes, that last one is the biggest thing)