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Comment by ABeeSea | Hacker News Reader

The Republican Party has abandoned data and evidence driven policy decisions in favor of ideology. The last Republican Party convention had no official policy platform outside of “whatever Trump wants today.” Why would you expect Professors to be excited to join a party that is a cult of personality that incessantly demonizes the very institutions they lead?

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It's not clear to me why this is getting downvoted. This strikes me as a pretty clear description. At this point major Republican figures are getting censured and demoted for saying that lies aren't true. Look at surveys of belief around the election. (Or previously, Republican beliefs on whether Obama is an American citizen.)

If universities are about anything at all, it's about pursuit of truth. At different points in time and space, different political sides have been the one more eager to ban inconvenient truths. Lysenkoism comes to mind, for example, or the Great Leap Forward. But here and now, it's Republicans who have as a group more or less abandoned factual inquiry altogether. And you don't have to believe me on this. You can read prominent dynastic Republican Liz Cheney: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/11/liz-cheney-vows-to-keep-figh...

The study I cite was published in Sep 2016, so it predates Trump.

The abandoning of evidence and data happened long before Trump. Denying evolution, denying climate change, promoting abstinence only education, etc. Look to Liberty University if you want to see what a Republican institute of “higher learning” looks like.

Have you ever tried showing a Democrat a twin study?

Not sure what you are getting at.

White supremacists like to claim that twin studies prove that black people are less intelligent due to genetics. Apparently Sam seems to think that Democrats refusing to accept the shoddy science behind twin studies (the conclusions of which are often used in service of racist meta-studies) somehow implies that they are also "anti-science". Probably best to just ignore the comment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_Fund https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_race_and_intell...

Wow

Yup. "Scientific" racism has a long history. Some of the various Confederate declarations of secession claim natural inferiority as a cause for slaveholding.

Twin studies are mostly used to show that traits are heritable at an individual level.

Edit: It strikes me that the strawman argument you've constructed is a perfect example of left-wing science denial. The endemic use of the technique in fields like psychology, criminology, biology, is something you prefer to ignore.

Can you link to a specific study that you claim is left wing science denial?

"Heritable" doesn't mean "genetic" or "inherent to a person".

does "genetic" mean "inherent to the person"?

I wouldn't agree with that either, but most people would, so might as well stick it in there.

Let's say it's part of the causal chain, but also your cells don't even have the same genome, it mutates over time, women integrate cells from their children, so it gets messy.

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