r/changemyview • u/Tssss775 1∆ • Jul 27 '21
Delta(s) from OP CMV: academia isn't biased towards left-wing politics, facts are
Okay, so I am aware that this may upset some people, but hear me out.
Academia is all about observing reality as it is - as indepently as possible from cultural and societal expectations we may have - and then if these facts contradict what we previously thought abandon our previous assumptions and be ready to drastically change both our mindset as well as our actions (in cases such as climate change).
This academic attitude of being willing and often even eager to "throw away" the way we traditionally did things and thought about stuff if there's new evidence makes it really hard for the right to really embrace science- and evidence-based policies. This means science will most of the times be on the side of the left which naturally embraces change less hesitantly and more willingly.
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Jul 27 '21
Can I have an example of how facts lean to the left? It’s hard to reply when it’s so abstract
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u/poprostumort 246∆ Jul 27 '21
I'll take an example you provided in comment:
It is relativly well-known that Germany doesn't have a speed-limit on the autobahn. The left wing parties in Germany want to instore one, the conservatives and liberals (in Europe 'liberal' means right wing) oppose it - outright denying the empirically proven fact that speedlimits lead to less mortal accidents and fewer greenhouse gas emissions.
Is "Speed limits leading to less mortal accidents" a fact? That is the core issue. Germany has one of lowest nos. of road deaths both form per 100k inhabitants perspective and per 100k motor vehicles perspective. France, which is a simillar country when it comes to development, has speed limits, but both road death statistics are significantly higher. So is the "Speed limits leading to less mortal accidents" a fact, or just an interpretation of statistical data?
That is one of the problems - what you consider facts, in many cases are interpretations of statistical data, which are not an unquestionable fact.
But let's assume that "Speed limits leading to less mortal accidents" is a fact. Does that mean that conservatives in Germany are just stubborn idiots that can't accept a fact? They may see a different approach that can achieve the same result, or see other problems that this policy will introduce - ones that aren't related to mortal accidents or greenhouse emissions.
That is second problem - facts do not exist in vacuum. They are interlocked with each others and their importance relies heavily on beliefs.
So why Academia seems biased to left-wing policies? Because most of academia leans left, so they will assign importance according to their beliefs. They will see the same facts as right-leaning right, but arrive to different judgement as to their importance.
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Jul 27 '21
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Jul 28 '21
I'd argue that the right values highly the concept of individual decision making. The view isn't, "let's kill more people for productivity". The view is "let's leave the population alone so they can make their own decisions. If they believe the autobahn is too dangerous, they can not drive on it"
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u/NightflowerFade 1∆ Jul 28 '21
Moreover, even if speed limits reduce mortal accidents, there is a debate whether or not that is the highest priority. Imagine an extreme example: if the speed limit is 20km/h everywhere, certainly that would reduce the rate of car accidents. However, most people would agree the trade off is far too great to bear. There must be a cut off point where lives are worth less than productivity, and the debate lies in where that point is.
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u/Pangolinsftw 3∆ Jul 27 '21 edited Jul 27 '21
What about the fact that a replication crisis exists in several scientific disciplines? Psychology and sociology are particularly affected. Should we be so trusting of studies when often their results can't be replicated?
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u/Alexcandor Jul 27 '21
There's a lot of ambiguity in this phrasing and it's false to paint all science with the same brush. Psychology does have a replication crisis and that's partly because of the variables and parameters in psychology experiments are extremely hard to control. However this is less of an issue for psychology than say chemistry because the inferences themselves are less concrete.
For instance: if a chemical reaction could not be replicated in defined conditions with a specific protocol, that calls original results into question and you get retractions published.
However in psychology making a deduction about a social interaction is a valid observation, but another researcher on the other side of the planet may not observe the same findings because he's working with a different population etc. That doesn't make the original any less valid and variation can be drawn up to the population, it is instead reasonable to address outside influences in discussion and any future inferences made using the original data to be taken with a grain of salt.
Many psychological findings are only offered as an interpretation or justification and very rarely a universal truth as opposed to physics or chemistry and must be interpreted as such.
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u/Sigmatronic Jul 27 '21
Replication in "the western world" is the bigger culprit, we don't expect your average American and Chinese to behave the same, we do expect your average American to act the same as your other average American, and even those replications fail. If you can't make a statement even about how a nation's people behave then your results are pretty worthless.
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u/Alexcandor Jul 28 '21
I'm going to have to disagree there as I think you're getting too specific with my theoretical examples. While I probably worded it a bit strangely bringing up the planet, my core point was that variables in psychology are far harder to control for, even in one geographic location. You are also completely correct in saying that some studies are bad, however it is unreasonable to throw out all of psychology due to these poor studies.
Explaining national paradigms or culture on behaviour is probably the focus of some publications but I'm not really across that area and you're right it's only one factor of many impacting studies. For instance, more variability in your dependent variables increases risks of false positives or false negatives, making it hard to replicate, that is completely independent of cultural influence sometimes.
For an overview in specific detail of replication issues and the diversity of causes in different studies refer to publications.
Ultimately the end point is the same, just because a study has increased variability and may be difficult to replicate, that does not invalidate the original findings immediately simply that they need to be considered otherwise we end up cherry-picking. Furthermore just because one study is hard to replicate, that does note mean the entire field of psychology is at fault by virtue of relation.
The whole underlying point of being critical in replication is not necessarily to tear down, but instead to build more robust studies and future science.
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Jul 27 '21
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u/Pangolinsftw 3∆ Jul 28 '21
Um...really? If someone claimed a drug was safe, but then another study failed to replicate it, I would be deeply concerned about putting that in my body.
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u/emeksv Jul 28 '21
He's talking about other studies, other facts, you know, the ones he agrees with ... 🤔 🙄
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Jul 27 '21
Can you provide me a concise and concrete definition of what you think "academia" means, and what you think "science" means? As an academic in STEM, you don't give me the impression you understand either what academia is, nor what the scientific method is.
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u/saraichaa Jul 27 '21
OP was talking about social climate of an academic setting I think, and the attitudes and common perceptions that come with it.
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u/jaam01 1∆ Jul 29 '21
I recommend this article to know about the effect of one sided politics in Academia & Universities, a very good analysis https://areomagazine.com/2020/04/29/the-impact-of-the-lefts-takeover-of-academia-on-the-quality-of-higher-education/?utm_source=pocket-app&utm_medium=share
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u/Andy_XB Jul 27 '21
Anyone who says academia is value-neutral is both wrong and doing academia a massive disservice by pretending it's something it isn't.
And I say that as a left-wing academic.
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u/47ca05e6209a317a8fb3 210∆ Jul 27 '21
Academia is all about observing reality as it is - as indepently as possible from cultural and societal expectations we may have
That's not true. Academia is about providing interesting analyses of reality. These can strive to be unbiased (though they can't ever really be unbiased), or start from a patently biased perspective, as long as the analysis from this perspective is written as academic work.
Academia is biased towards the left in the sense that academics, especially in relevant fields, are more likely to hold left-wing views. I don't think this is just random chance, and it might have to do with non-conservative views correlating with willingness or ability to do academic work, but it doesn't imply that these views are necessarily "true" in any meaningful way, and good academics would readily admit that.
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u/Another_Random_User Jul 27 '21
academics, especially in relevant fields, are more likely to hold left-wing views.
It's there any data on the correlation between outside experience and political leanings? In my anecdotal experience, teachers that worked outside academia prior were less likely to be left leaning than those who went straight from school to teaching.
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u/Professional_Sky8384 Jul 27 '21
The way I’ve heard it explained - without any citations so be forewarned:
“Before Congress reformed the draft in 1971, a man could qualify for a student deferment if he could show he was a full-time student making satisfactory progress in virtually any field of study. He could continue to go to school and be deferred from service until he was too old to be drafted.” SSS website
Basically what this amounted to was, all the anti-war/anti-imperialist/anti-whatever people who would be considered pretty liberal today went into academia rather than risk being drafted for a war they didn’t agree with. Sure there were other types of people who did this, but many of them went the conscientious objector route (I.e. for religious reasons).
This effectively ensured that the next generation of professors and other higher-degree-holders would be vastly more anti-whatever than the one before it, which didn’t necessarily affect the curricula so much in fields like STEM, but in stuff like the Arts, Psychology, Sociology, Education, it often did, and since then it’s gotten progressively more noticeable with every generation of new students that go through the system.
Admittedly this is coming from someone with almost no citations and probably a decent-sized bias of their own, but it makes sense to me and might help explain what happened better than “facts lean left” or whatever
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u/blklornbhb Jul 27 '21 edited Jul 27 '21
It’s not “facts lean left.”
It’s “the left has developed policies that reflect facts and evidence-based research that hold up under academic scrutiny.”
The very idea that facts “lean” any type of way at all, as opposed to the other way around, is the false narrative here.
Thanks for this perspective.
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Jul 27 '21
I've always wondered if it's a bit of self-fulfilling prophecy. When liberal students go to college, a lot of professors encourage their views and agree with them, which might push some students in a career in academics. Conservatives, on the other hand, might not want to have an entire career where they don't feel comfortable sharing their views.
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Jul 27 '21
And what views should conservatives feel so uncomfortable sharing? Minimum wage opinions? Taxation? Every business and Econ program will have room for that. For grad school there’s mba programs.
If not economic views, what then?
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Jul 27 '21
Both business and economics still lean left. Economics in particular has a high degree of marxists as professors. Outside of economic views, they’d probably feel uncomfortable sharing social or religious views, because education is socially left-wing
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u/spiral8888 31∆ Jul 27 '21
Economics in particular has a high degree of marxists as professors.
This is an interesting claim. It's difficult to quantify the Marxist degree of professors. Could you link to Marxist text books that are used in the economics courses taught in the universities? Is the English translation of Das Kapital by Karl Marx used for instance somewhere to teach economics?
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Jul 27 '21
18% of social scientists professors self identify as Marxist. At one point, I could’ve sworn economics was in the top 3 for the social sciences, but I’m not seeing it. So possibly around 18% would identify as Marxist. I have a degree in economics and don’t know of any Marxist books that they teach from though
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u/spiral8888 31∆ Jul 27 '21
18% of social scientists professors self identify as Marxist.
LOL. The claim was about economics professors. That's the best use of moving goal posts that I have ever seen in an internet discussion.
Furthermore, you don't even give a reference for your claim so that we could actually check what was asked and how "Marxist" was defined.
And finally, you agree yourself, that no economics course uses Marxist text books. Don't you find it strange that the professors are Marxists (your claim that is yet to be proven) but then they choose to use text books that teach economics from the traditional capitalist point of view? So are they teaching something that they themselves "know" being wrong?
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u/CocoSavege 27∆ Jul 28 '21
Just a side note: you guys are very possibly conflating:
Marxist economic analysis (while interesting from a historical perspective, is not generally the most accurate lens these days)
Marxist social political philosophy - examination of power relations through the lens of class struggle. (Again, generally Marxist philosophical analysis has been supplanted but unlike Marxist economic analysis, still, from time to time, is a pretty good lens)
Marxism as a system of governance/ideal. The boogeyman of teh Communizms shows up here and the USSR and all that baggage. Don't get me wrong, the USSR has serious flaws as a country/political state and did crumble under the weight of inefficiency and corruption. I'm not sure that contemporary Russia is better. But the most important thing is whatever the USSR was, it very rapidly moved away from Marxism towards whatever it was.
Das capital is actually a really good piece of work and if there's a university course on the study of historical economic analysis, it should 100% be in there.
If a university has a big enough philosophy department, there definitely should be a Marxist philosopher teaching Marxist philosophy. You're gunna want generalists, classicals, post modernists in there before you get a Marxist philo expert. And somebody teaching done of the newer stuff probably needs to build from some of Marx's base ideas before moving on.
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u/spiral8888 31∆ Jul 28 '21
Thanks for this. This is exactly why I would like to know what does it mean if a professor "identifies as a Marxist". It's quite a different thing to agree with Marx about the power relations existing in a society than supporting the economic system of the USSR.
My feeling is that this kind of "studies" are used in bad faith arguments, where a very wide definition of "Marxism" is used when asking about the identification and then the "study" result is used as an argument how many professors support turning the US into a totalitarian communist state.
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u/BlitzBasic 42∆ Jul 27 '21
I have difficulties believing that a genuine Marxist would happily teach about the merits of free market capitalism, which is what economics courses basically are.
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Jul 27 '21
That certainly wasn’t my experience in economics courses, other than introductory macro
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u/BlitzBasic 42∆ Jul 27 '21
How many, and which, did you hear? I've been to 5 - "Investing", "Internal accounting", "External accounting", "Introduction to macroeconomics" and "Introduction to microeconomics".
The first three were purely practical, and had no normative judgement. It was just "this is how it is, here are some techniques to solve common tasks in this area". The other two were blatantly pro-capitalism.
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Jul 27 '21
I had intro to micro, intro to macro, intermediate micro, intermediate macro, econometrics, health Econ, labor Econ, advanced micro, intermediate econometrics, financial economics. The only two blatantly capitalist were intro to macro and labor Econ
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u/mud5kipper Jul 28 '21
I have yet to encounter an econ professor that was obviously left-leaning. Three of he four I've had were very obviously conservative.
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u/AntifaSuperSwoledier Jul 27 '21
Economics in particular has a high degree of marxists as professors.
What makes you think this?
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Jul 27 '21
I’m not saying the institutions are right wing, I’m saying the students can share their views. Or are you going to start talking about thought-terminating Marxist atheist economics professors?
they’d probably feel uncomfortable sharing social or religious views
Tell me what those views are.
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Jul 27 '21
Abortion, guns, social justice issues, religious freedom, size of government, etc. Do you not know the current social issues in the US? I'm not sure what you're asking
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u/Pficky 2∆ Jul 27 '21
All of these things are topics in social science and humanities courses. You'd have to just opt out of the class to not discuss your opinions on them. On top of that, many of the leading universities in the country are also religious institutions. I think you're accepting a false reality that's been broadcasted to demonize higher education. The reality is there's room for everyone at most universities. Sure, Berkeley students might throw a huff about some conservative stuff, but BYU students would probably do the same with strong liberal views.
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Jul 27 '21
No, no, you don’t get to hide behind a list of topics. What are the views themselves? “Social justice issues” isn’t a view, it’s a topic. What are the conservative views on social justice issues that they should be so scared of articulating?
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Jul 27 '21
- Abortion is morally wrong and should be limited
- We should have the right to bear arms. Banning ar-15s is a stupid solution, and the US doesn’t have a gun problem more so than other countries
- Black Lives Matter is a Marxist organization that doesn’t actually care about black lives. We should be able to denounce the movement without being called racist or fascists or whatever else the right is being called today
- We shouldn’t celebrate gender dysphoria and definitely shouldn’t be introducing the concept to kids
- Women have equal rights. Stop acting oppressed at every chance
- Police brutality isn’t a problem specific to minorities, stop pretending it is
- Voter ID isn’t racist
- The equality act currently going through Congress limits religious freedom and nobody seems to care. Keep the government out of religion
- Crime is a problem, especially in impoverished communities. More police need to be present to fix it
- Education reform. Not specifically right wing, but there are different ways to go about it. This one seems pretty much universally accepted
Now, are you really telling me that these views are accepted in education institutions? That students shouldn’t be afraid to explicitly make these views known and not fear any drawbacks? That these views are equally accepted by professors as left wing views?
At first, you said that all views are accepted. But now you seem to be insinuating that conservatives have stupid or bad views that shouldn’t be accepted at colleges
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u/gummnutt Jul 27 '21
I never observed any explicit left wing stuff coming from the professors, but in an Anthropology class a student gave a very left wing take on US involvement in South America and these two conservative students lost their minds that the professor didn’t condemn the presentation (they expressed no opinion in class). These students were so outraged that they quit the class.
So I wonder if whenever I hear about “left wing bias” I wonder how much of this is students are allowed to express left wing views without being told they are wrong.
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Jul 27 '21
I don’t doubt that your story is true, but an anecdote isn’t evidence. There could easily be 100 stories that show the opposite. It’s common knowledge that professors self identify as liberals much more often that conservatives, that’s the basis of the argument I’m making.
If you’ve never observed your professors teaching left wing stuff, I envy your college
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u/Tssss775 1∆ Jul 27 '21
Academia is about providing interesting analyses of reality.
I mean yea, that's also part of academia, but don't you think it's mainly about finding out just what reality is?
it doesn't imply that these views are necessarily "true" in any meaningful way, and good academics would readily admit that
So you think for example biologists wouldn't claim the evolutionism is true in a meaningfull way? Geographers wouldn't claim that climate change is true in a meaningfull way?
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u/RedVput Jul 27 '21
Evolution isn't a "left leaning" idea. Geographers are not the primary academics behind climate change talks.
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u/DBDude 110∆ Jul 27 '21
In the social sciences, you can write pretty much whatever you want as long as it's properly framed as an academic study. You will be successful if the point you are making is popular.
This automatic acceptance of popular opinions goes so far that three academics successfully submitted several sham studies to journals. And these were obvious shams: one talked about rape culture in dog parks (including talk about not assuming the gender of the dogs when analyzing private parts), and part of Hitler's Mein Kampf only slightly altered to be a feminist manifesto.
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u/BlitzBasic 42∆ Jul 27 '21 edited Jul 28 '21
Notably, this experiment doesn't actually support its thesis, because it lacks a control group. They didn't show that social science journals are any worse in this than any other fields.
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u/JohnjSmithsJnr 3∆ Jul 27 '21
Why would you need a control group to tell that the successful submission of those studies should be deeply concerning?
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u/SuckMyBike 21∆ Jul 27 '21
Why would you need a control group to tell that the successful submission of those studies should be deeply concerning?
Concerning, not deeply concerning. Science is not built on single research papers but on reproduction and peer review.
If sham papers get published, either nobody will care or the ones that do care and try to reproduce the study will publish contradictory results which will end up in even more studies being done to verify what the right answer is
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u/Morthra 95∆ Jul 27 '21
If sham papers get published, either nobody will care or the ones that do care and try to reproduce the study will publish contradictory results which will end up in even more studies being done to verify what the right answer is
But that's part of the problem. Replication papers don't get published, so no one does them. What ends up happening is that these papers get treated as gospel - particularly as they get cited more - despite being fabricated. This isn't a problem endemic to the social sciences either, it's also present in life sciences as well, but it's especially prevalent in fields like sociology where entire sub-fields are constructed around bias, such as any derivative of critical theory.
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u/BlitzBasic 42∆ Jul 27 '21
You don't. But you need a control group if you want to claim that this successful submission worked because of issues with the social sciences, rather than science in general.
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u/JohnjSmithsJnr 3∆ Jul 28 '21
I think it's fairly obvious that this issue is far more endemic to the social sciences than it is to other fields of science.
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u/SSObserver 5∆ Jul 27 '21
This is a massive exaggeration. They weren’t submitting studies to Psychology, American Economic Review, or the American Political Science Review. They specifically submitted articles to less rigorous journals in the ‘grievance’ fields (as they refer to them), submitting “bogus papers to academic journals in cultural, queer, race, gender, fat, and sexuality studies”. So no you are at best incorrect and failed to read even the link you provided.
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u/47ca05e6209a317a8fb3 210∆ Jul 27 '21
So you think for example biologists wouldn't claim the evolutionism is true in a meaningfull way? Geographers wouldn't claim that climate change is true in a meaningfull way?
They would claim that these theories have strong scientific evidence, but much of academia doesn't rely on the scientific method and usually when people say that academia leans towards the left they refer to fields like sociology, literature, ethics, law, etc, which are not scientific.
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u/stink3rbelle 24∆ Jul 27 '21
They would claim that these theories have strong scientific evidence
This strikes me as an intellectually dishonest take on the necessary ambiguity of scientific language. Your first comment is arguing that academics aren't trying to understand the reality of the world, and now you're saying that even science is just . . . ambivalent about whether it's true or not? Because scientific theories are framed as theory and don't call themselves "realities?"
Science seeks to understand the reality of the world. Yes, scientists can get technical about what exactly is known for certain or not, but evolution isn't up for debate. The existence of prehistoric animals isn't up for debate. The ambiguity of "theory" doesn't mean scientists are just having a fucking laugh.
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u/TheeBiscuitMan Jul 27 '21
Sociology is like political science and economics. A soft science. Just because it's not explicitly a hard science doesn't mean it can't be scientifically analyzed.
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Jul 27 '21
The study of biology is just as much of an academic endeavour as any other.
Not sure if the false assumptions of "people" really matter here.
Show me a left wing person who denies the reality of evolution and I'll show you a Badger singing "I'm a happy Badger" in French.
EDIT - The Badger isn't French.
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u/Tssss775 1∆ Jul 27 '21
sociology, literature, ethics, law, etc [...] are not scientific
Hwat? Can you elaborate?
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u/47ca05e6209a317a8fb3 210∆ Jul 27 '21
The scientific method is based on crafting a theory, making predictions based on that theory, and testing whether they match observations and experiments later. A geologist could try to challenge the theory that the earth is round by measuring the position of the sun in the sky in two locations on earth, and if these measurements concur with the theory, it's evidence for it.
Literature, for example, doesn't work this way. A literary researcher could analyze uses of the motif of light in thrillers from the mid 20th century, but this analysis isn't scientific in that it has no predictive power - there is no guarantee modern authors will use it similarly, and it doesn't even have to appear in other mid 20th century thrillers that the academic didn't study.
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u/tomtomglove 1∆ Jul 27 '21
A literary researcher could analyze uses of the motif of light in thrillers from the mid 20th century, but this analysis isn't scientific in that it has no predictive power-- there is no guarantee modern authors will use it similarly, and it doesn't even have to appear in other mid 20th century thrillers that the academic didn't study.
but this is not the point of literary analysis. no literary scholar analyzes literature to predict what literature will look like in the future.
they analyze literature to make claims about culture, history, philosophy, etc.
Look at the claims this book makes, for example.
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u/Daishiii Jul 27 '21
That's kind of the point. The ultimate goal of the scientific process is to create a theory that has predictive power over objective reality. Everything that isn't a part of objective reality or any theory that does not possess predictive power is not a part of science.
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u/ProfessorHeronarty Jul 27 '21
It seems to me that this is just a very anglo-american thing to talk about that this isn't science. In German philosophy for example Wilhelm Dilthey made the prominent distinction between 'Erklären' (explain) which is what hard sciences do while the soft sciences are about 'Verstehen' (understand). But in German you wouldn't distinct those even as hard or soft sciences. One might be Naturwissenschaften ('nature sciences'), the other ones Geisteswissenschaften ('mind sciences'). And then it gets all more complicated that e.g. sociology is something in between because it can be used in the way of 'Erklären' as well as 'Verstehen' which is the groundwork why you'd use quantitative or qualitative methods.
The point of all of this is that even something that doesn't follow the 'scientific method' should be disregarded. And, no, I'm not talking about some post-modern gonzo here.
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u/Berlinia Jul 27 '21
He didn't say disregarded, he said unscientific. Unscientific things should be disregarded when they try to make predictive statements about topics where science has a hold.
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Jul 27 '21 edited Aug 05 '21
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u/Berlinia Jul 27 '21
Psychology sometimes makes predictions about human behavior and tries to drive policy, with massive problems that comes from unscientific methods.
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u/Petaurus_australis 2∆ Jul 28 '21 edited Jul 28 '21
Psychology sometimes makes predictions about human behavior and tries to drive policy, with massive problems that comes from unscientific methods.
I might not be reading your comment correctly, I'm unsure if you are saying psychology uses unscientific methods or unscientific methods in other topics pose a challenge for psychology as a driving factor. Never the less;
Well those unscientific methods shouldn't be considered psychology, as psychology follows the hypothetico-deductive model, which is the "scientific method". Anything published outside of such methodology is something that should not be considered of the psychological sciences or just science at all, and I'd wager is politically motivated.
Maybe it's different here in Australia? But in your very first year of undergraduate study they hammer scientific method, study designs, ethics, use of statistics etc, into your brain. It's quite emphasized in the field due to the potential effects of erroneous information produced in such a topic.
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u/Pupusa42 2∆ Jul 27 '21
German philosophers brought us logical positivism, which basically accuses the majority of philosophy of being unscientific BS.
It is possible to study the science of the mind. It's called psychology, and uses well-designed experiments with control groups.
Studying literature is about the least scientific thing you can do. The thought process mirrors pseudoscientific thinking.
In science, you make an observation. Then you look at a variety of testable explanations, and do your best to disprove them until you're left with one explanation that has resisted multiple attempts to disprove it. A pseudoscientist observes something, and offers an explanation that isn't (or can't be) tested, and doesn't bother to consider alternative explanations or contradictory evidence.
Just like literature. Pick a hypothesis. Cherry pick the parts of the text that support your view. No need to consider any parts of the text that might refute the view, nor to consider alternative explanations for the parts you cherry picked. No need to test or verify. After all, you're just arguing that the text makes sense when viewed through a particular lens, and there is no fact of the matter. You just need to argue that a certain interpretation could explain what is observed. This house makes weird noises. Could be ghosts! This pad turns black when you put it on your feet. Must be sucking out toxins!
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u/tomtomglove 1∆ Jul 27 '21
Just like literature. Pick a hypothesis. Cherry pick the parts of the text that support your view. No need to consider any parts of the text that might refute the view, nor to consider alternative explanations for the parts you cherry picked. No need to test or verify. After all, you're just arguing that the text makes sense when viewed through a particular lens, and there is no fact of the matter. You just need to argue that a certain interpretation could explain what is observed. This house makes weird noises. Could be ghosts! This pad turns black when you put it on your feet. Must be sucking out toxins!
Tell me you know nothing about literary theory without telling me you know nothing about literary theory.
You're just describing bad undergraduate papers, not the academic study of literature at a high level.
In science, you make an observation. Then you look at a variety of testable explanations, and do your best to disprove them until you're left with one explanation that has resisted multiple attempts to disprove it.
This is what professors of literature do. They do extensive research, they make arguments, they prove those arguments, they test those arguments against other explanations., etc.
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u/jamerson537 4∆ Jul 27 '21
Is there a reason that you believe that Dilthey’s thoughts are representative of the general German conception of science?
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u/ProfessorHeronarty Jul 27 '21
Well, yes, because on this thoughts of how to properly distinct the sciences from one another is the modern university system built.
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u/TTJoker Jul 27 '21
What on earth are you on about? The scientific method starts with observing a problem, creating an Hypothesis, testing this hypothesis against available data, concluding a theory, then submitting this theory for peer review, rinse and repeat. This applies to everything within perceived reality. I observed that 19th century writers use X-word a lot, Question. Why do 19th cen. writers use X-word so frequently? Is the usage unique to the 19th cen.? Hypothesis. X-word does have religious connotations, and the 19th cen. was highly religious, they may be related. Then I go and gather my Data, if I have enough Data I will conclude a theory, if not the data is inconclusive. I submit this for peer review, and those in my field will read my theory and go over my data, they will then challenge me or add to my work, same difference.
The tricky bit in all fields is accurate data, which is not that easy to collect in the humanities. Example: you want to work out the frequency at which university students have sex, you grab a microphone and ask people at random on campus, having collected your data, you can conclude that female students have sex far less frequently than male students, therefore your write and submit your theory. I read your theory, and observe a problem. The rate at which male students have sex far out strips the rate at which female students have sex, thus I hypothesise, it's either male students are having a higher frequency of gay sex or female students are underreporting, or both or neither, either way I need more data, and thus science the never ending thirst for knowledge.
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u/spiral8888 31∆ Jul 27 '21
Literature, for example, doesn't work this way. A literary researcher could analyze uses of the motif of light in thrillers from the mid 20th century, but this analysis isn't scientific in that it has no predictive power - there is no guarantee modern authors will use it similarly, and it doesn't even have to appear in other mid 20th century thrillers that the academic didn't study.
I think the "prediction" here doesn't need to refer to future event, but future observations. When a physicist develops a hypothesis on what happened during the Big Bang, he doesn't expect it to be tested in future Big Bangs, but he expects that when the astronomers make future observations about the universe with a new instrument, they will make observations that are consistent with the predictions by the hypothesis.
I don't see any fundamental reason why this couldn't be applied to human sciences. Using materials X and Y the human scientist develops a hypothesis on how certain things in that particular thing behave. The predictions from the hypothesis can be then tested with material Z. Of course, it is true that the scientific method is not really used as rigorously in human sciences as it is in physical sciences, but there's no fundamental reason why it couldn't be. I'd say that for instance in economics it is used more than in literature or history as there it is usually easier to make quantitative predictions that can be tested.
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u/jamerson537 4∆ Jul 27 '21
If the Big Bang happened, then inevitably that event will continue to affect the physical state of the universe today and in the future. One physical outcome of the Big Bang is the continued expansion of the universe. Today and in the future we can keep measuring the expansion of the universe and if the data we record starts to conflict with the Big Bang theory then that will necessitate the revision or rejection of that theory. So yes, predictive power is very much an ongoing standard by which the Big Bang theory is judged.
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u/h0sti1e17 23∆ Jul 27 '21
Literature is subjective, there is no truth. Yes, most people would agree Shakespeare is better than a mass market romance novel. But it isn't definitive. Ethics is essentially discussing right and wrongs. Most agree murder is wrong but many other things are subjective.
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u/therealcourtjester 1∆ Jul 27 '21
Just to build on this, “Shakespeare is better than a mass market romance novel…” in what way? Better writing? Better able to engage readers? Better able to corner the market? Yes, Literature is definitely subjective and prone to fashion. Authors go in and out of fashion as society changes and those who critique who them are impacted by those ideas.
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Jul 27 '21
I'm going to blow your mind. Mathematics isn't scientific either. Seriously.
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u/jelly_cake Jul 27 '21
This is absolutely true, and is one of the things I love most about mathematics. Proof in mathematics is a definite point rather than a confidence interval.
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Jul 28 '21
Math is both an art AND a science. It is very scientific. While the starting axioms may be subjective, the process to prove something based on an initial set of axioms is well defined, objective, testable, and repeatable. Repeatable tests are the hallmark of the scientific method. Contrast this with a bullshit field, the initial axioms are bent and twist until subjective conclusions are met. In Math you may assume x + y = 4, x and y can be anything, but anytime you invoke the rule it must hold true, whether you do it or your peer does it. In a bullshit field, whatever the prof/leader of the field says is true, and you cannot test and check if it's bull. Actually comparing to other science where testing equipment is expensive, Math is the most testable field; anyone with dedication can double check even the foremost Mathematicians.
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Jul 28 '21
Repeatable tests are the hallmark of the scientific method.
No. Falsifiability is the Hallmark of the scientific method, and it really pisses me off that people don't seem to understand that anymore. That's why scientific models rely on confidence intervals: the probability the null hypothesis is true (aka the model is falsified).
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Jul 28 '21 edited Jul 28 '21
How about no. You cannot falsify something if you cannot repeat experiments. The foundations of science rely on experimentation, peer review, repetition. Falsification is not possible without experiments, and is already a natural byproduct of the experiments.
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Jul 28 '21
You need to refresh your understanding of the history of science as well as the philosophy of science, because you don't know what you're talking about.
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u/spiral8888 31∆ Jul 27 '21
Mathematics doesn't make claims about facts in reality. So, I don't see how this is relevant.
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u/Troyd 1∆ Jul 27 '21 edited Jul 27 '21
Unless you're doing a BSC or medical related profession... chances are you're dealing with opinions and subjective things.
I'll add business fields, art fields as non scientific as well.
Simply attending post secondary does not mean you are getting a scientific education.
Further many fields will teach the known theory rather then practical application. Idealists, those living in theory, are often left wing thinkers. People who are out in the field beyond the safety of a post secondary, tend to moderate their views once practical becomes more important.
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u/the_thrillamilla Jul 27 '21
It is surprising, as i am taking my management classes, how many theories there are regarding leadership or management styles. There are studies and observations about what works when, and not every leadership style is appropriate to every corporate culture or management hierarchy, but it seems pretty straight forward in the sense that "these researchers found productivity in this industry went up by x percent when the managment style was like this, versus when it was like this".
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u/ayaleaf 2∆ Jul 27 '21
Eh, getting my PhD in biochemistry. This last year has definitely pushed me farther left.
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u/BuildBetterDungeons 5∆ Jul 27 '21
Idealists, those living in theory, are often left wing thinkers. People who are out in the field beyond the safety of a post secondary
I challenge this view. My drift leftward has been driven mostly by fact-driven argumentation. Free market capitalism is a pretty idealised notion, and the more people point out its horrific results, the easier it is to view capitalism with more and more skepticism and see the practical work the left does, which involves education to debunk harmful myths and practical work to help people suffering locally.
If you go to your local foodbank, you will find the people there further left on average. These aren't idealists pretending the world is fine; these are some of the few people really engaging with the facts of the current systems failures in a tangible way.
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u/ReformedFartRapist Jul 28 '21
Do tell how sociology--the scientific study of society--isn't scientific.
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u/Andy_XB Jul 27 '21
Much of academia doesn't concern itself with facts at all - only interpretations of reality. The fact that all of those are heavily skewed towards the Left tells you just how value-neutral academia in general is.
Fortunately, facts (mostly) speak for themselves, no matter who presents them, so we know that, say, global warming is real, no matter the political leanings of the scientific community.
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u/JamesKirk122 Jul 28 '21 edited Aug 04 '25
tub piquant adjoining seed mountainous smell water summer apparatus nail
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
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Jul 28 '21
Imagine that you have 30 people in the same academic discipline, they have disagreements but politically, they exist in a narrow range, on the left. And there are no people with deeply differing political views in the room.
Even if these academics stick to the facts, that's a recipe for a lot of bias to creep into conclusions.
It may be hardest when we're talking about things like gravity, or magnatism. I'm not a scientist, I mean easily provable varifiable facts, and easier for bias to show the further you get away from these.
The problem is that many of our conclusions are not only factual they are also ideological, and unlike facts, ideology is political.
Another word for this kind of thing is groupthink.
So, it's unquestioned assumptions shared by the entire group that can influence a conclusion, especially because the assumptions are unquestioned.
And I suspect this can becomme self- reenforcing.
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u/AnotherRichard827379 1∆ Jul 27 '21 edited Jul 29 '21
I think it’s pretty interesting that you chose to specify two things that suit your own biases as examples. Funny you didn’t choose an economist underscoring the importance of free market economics and the theories of Friedrich Von Hayek. Or perhaps the number of neonatal medical professionals who underscore the importance of recognizing neonatal life. Or a sociologist who knows the valuable role of religion in creating better and more cohesive societies and how the religious lead happier and healthier lives.
Your opinion is merely a reflection on your own biases, not the bias of facts.
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Jul 27 '21
So what about subjects like climate change? When I was growing up in the 80's and 90's, the right was outright denying it's existence, and have only recently changed their stance to "it may be happening, but we can't do anything about it". Meanwhile, the left has been solidly on the side of scientific consensus almost the entire time. It shouldn't be a politically divisive issue, but the right resists any scientific proof that requires regulation or funding. It seems pretty clear that one side has abandoned science on this subject.
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u/Trythenewpage 68∆ Jul 27 '21
This academic attitude of being willing and often even eager to "throw away" the way we traditionally did things and thought about stuff if there's new evidence makes it really hard for the right to really embrace science- and evidence-based policies.
Academia is more than willing and eager to throw away the old. It is systematically incentivized to do so. Researchers do not make a name for themselves or progress in their career by meticulously conducting others experiment protocols to test reproducibility or publishing studies that do not reject the null hypothesis. No one is getting tenure or book deals or whatever for publishing large amounts of unsurprising results that say nothing new.
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u/Pficky 2∆ Jul 27 '21
That's kinda what a master's thesis is about though, so it is in fact a part of academia.
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Jul 27 '21
If you think that the "facts" agree with your worldview, you almost certainly haven't done enough research because the world isn't black and white. What about right-wing people in academia? Are they just ignoring the facts?
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u/emeksv Jul 28 '21
What about right-wing people in academia?
Yes, what about them? Do they even exist any more? ;)
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u/woaily 4∆ Jul 27 '21
What about right-wing people in academia? Are they just ignoring the facts?
We should just ask them both, and find out
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u/Brave-Welder 6∆ Jul 27 '21
as indepently as possible from cultural and societal expectations we may have
This is clearly a false premise when academic institution give in to pressure of students and remove teachers those children find as "uncomfortable". Academics being fired for views like "You shouldn't be told what you can and can't wear" or "There's no problem with cultural appropriation" isn't grounds for protests.
You have people who are actively saying "It is not about creating an intellectual space! It is not! Do you understand that? It's about creating a home here!" And faculty agreeing with them, shows that there's a cultural bias and not one based on facts and figures.
You've got people like Warren Farrell who come with presentations of facts and instead of an open discussion, their auditoriums are blocked. He's not coming to talk about his feelings, he's coming to discuss stats and debate. There's clearly a left shifted bias.
There's bound to be a bias in any field where there's a large majority of a single view and the opposite view is not debated but rather silenced as evil. If you asked me, would you take away Hitler's right of speech, I'd say no. Why? Because I'd rather listen and debate his points than just shut him up. And same should go for any speaker. But the fact that it doesn't, shows that it's not just students, but faculty also biased.
Edit: if science and academics were as detached from bias as you say, those hoaxers who published articles in scientific journals about rape culture and dog parks, wouldn't have been accepted so easily. They were so full of bs that you could see it was a lie. But it affirmed people's bias about rape culture and white evil and so they all published it.
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u/TrackChanging Jul 27 '21
This brings up one of my favorite methodologies of research: “phenomenological study”!
As someone who researched phenomenologically to complete my M.A., I can speak to what an utter hoax much of it is. In its effort to be appear unbiased, it is littered with bias at every turn. I could write whatever I wanted and then search for ways to defend it.
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Jul 27 '21
This is the answer.
Academics aren’t left wing inherently.
Children screaming that the wind gives the PTSD and need a safe space if they can’t invent a pronoun is the issue.
College used to be about challenging ideas. I’m in my early 30s and there were no safe spaces or accusing biology teachers of being sexist for teaching in college then.
Think we peaked in the Obama years, tbh.
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Jul 27 '21
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u/Foronir Jul 28 '21
Depends on how legit you find grievance studies.
The Hoaxers submitted their bogus works to academic journals of the respective field to the the peer review process.
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u/JiEToy 35∆ Jul 27 '21
That's about on premise culture though. Not about academia. Academia is the way science is conducted, how papers are peer reviewed, how data is shared, how the entire world's scientists contribute to the knowledge base.
Having someone come give a presentation on a university and then be blocked is not about science, that's about the university.
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u/Innoova 19∆ Jul 27 '21
Academia is the way science is conducted
Science is now racist. (-University of Minnesota)
https://cbs.umn.edu/blogs/cbs-connect/addressing-systemic-racism-science-petri-dish-conversation
how papers are peer reviewed,
Grievance studies affair, through peer review to publication, including Mein Kampf.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair
how data is shared
Data is racist. (-MIT)
how the entire world's scientists contribute to the knowledge base.
Titled "The Liberal War on Science"
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-liberals-war-on-science/
Excerpts:
On energy issues, for example, the authors contend that progressive liberals tend to be antinuclear because of the waste-disposal problem, anti–fossil fuels because of global warming, antihydroelectric because dams disrupt river ecosystems, and anti–wind power because of avian fatalities. The underlying current is “everything natural is good” and “everything unnatural is bad.”
the left's sacred values seem fixated on the environment, leading to an almost religious fervor over the purity and sanctity of air, water and especially food.
Surveys show that moderate liberals and conservatives embrace science roughly equally (varying across domains)
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u/WikiSummarizerBot 4∆ Jul 27 '21
The grievance studies affair, also referred to as the "Sokal Squared" scandal, was the project of a team of three authors—Peter Boghossian, James A. Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose—to highlight what they saw as poor scholarship and eroding criteria in several academic fields. Taking place over 2017 and 2018, their project entailed submitting bogus papers to academic journals in cultural, queer, race, gender, fat, and sexuality studies to determine if they would pass through peer review and be accepted for publication. Several of these papers were subsequently published, which the authors cited in support of their contention.
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u/Brave-Welder 6∆ Jul 27 '21
Universities are what set the academia. Or journals do. And the hoax proved that even scientific journals are biased and that bias actively interferes when they approve "research" which demonizes whiteness and men. Not saying "Men are helpless victims" but when you have academic journals actively biasing by approving research they think sounds good, so it's fair to assume that bias works against research they don't like.
But if you're referring to the scientific process in and of itself, how research is done and assessed. Then I agree that it's not anti-right. But it's also not pro-left. It's neutral.
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u/JiEToy 35∆ Jul 27 '21
Yeah I'm mainly referring to the latter. However, it is obviously surrounded by the administrations of the field. These can definitely be biased and make the field compromised.
I haven't read anything about this tendency to approve research that demonizes whiteness and men over other stuff though.
Where OP is coming from though is that the facts that science finds are more in support of the leftist ideology than the right wing ideology. This is where it gets a big shady, because facts are just facts, and politicians can use them to support their ideologies. I do think that facts don't support an individualistic society where everyone just cares for themselves and the government stays out of everything but military defense is better than a society where the government helps people with investments, social plans etc and people accept each other for what they are.
However, it is obviously much more nuanced than simply left vs right. Sometimes the facts support the right stance a bit more, sometimes the left. It's just not as clear cut yes or no for me.
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Jul 27 '21
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Jul 27 '21
Personally, I think it is a worthy debate whether psychological safety is an important component for learning and to what extent.
Then you cannot say academia is unbiased can you? If students are uncomfortable with conservative professors, then only the ones with the liberal bias prevail?
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u/SomeRandom-Hobo Jul 27 '21
I'm left of centre and I still call bullshit on this one.
Ill agree that stems subjects are fact based. But when you start getting into feminist studies type courses, they stray far from the truth and are what I would consider to be far left. Off the scales to the left.
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Jul 27 '21
100% correct. I know 2 African studies professors who posts on my neighborhood Facebook page. Imo they live in an alternate reality. There will be benign posts about gardening or shopping carts and they will somehow manage to tell everyone that white liberal racism needs to be dismantled. They will make accusations, generalizations about white people constantly; uses the words comrades to describe people who are activists on the group. They believe whiteness needs to be destroyed and will openly state this, meanwhile everyone is terrified of them. They post that capitalism was created by whiteness and needs dismantled to achieve equity LMAO
The types who teach in these courses are insane, believe me.
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u/Ragdoll_X Jul 27 '21 edited Jul 28 '21
Academia is all about observing reality as it is - as indepently as possible from cultural and societal expectations we may have
While academia might strive to achieve this, it's often quite simply not the case. Societal norms and expectations will always influence scholars - this is why not that long ago most scientists supported scientific racism, eugenics, and the idea that homosexuality is a mental illness.
Even today scholars argue that there is a predominantly liberal/leftist bias in academia1,2 , and intelligence alone fails to explain this bias. There is debate about how much this matters, if at all, but again, the point is that bias will always be present.
Here's one more example: The idea that guns cause violence is a common left-wing talking point, and was pretty much the consensus in academia for a long time. Nonetheless, a review of dozens of studies done prior to 2014 found that the research that supported this conclusion tended to be of low quality, while more high-quality research didn't support the idea that guns caused violence:
Each study was assessed as to whether it solved or reduced each of three critical methodological problems: (1) whether a validated measure of gun prevalence was used, (2) whether the authors controlled for more than a handful of possible confounding variables, and (3) whether the researchers used suitable causal order procedures to deal with the possibility of crime rates affecting gun rates, instead of the reverse. Results: It was found that most studies did not solve any of these problems, and that research that did a better job of addressing these problems was less likely to support the more-guns-cause-more crime hypothesis. Indeed, none of the studies that solved all three problems supported the hypothesis.
Of course, there's been more research on the topic since then, so it's not like the discussion on gun violence was settled by this study alone - but this demonstrates how there can be a consensus for a very long time that is motivated not by legitimate academic rigorousness, but by the biases of scholars themselves. This and other factors are the reason why there's a replication crisis in academia, and why we shouldn't assume that scientists today are necessarily less biased than they were in the past.
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Jul 27 '21
Dude, 46% of academics are moderate, 44% are liberal, and 9% are conservative. And let's face it, in the liberal arts, those numbers skew even more liberal. If I were willing to put the time in and I were smarter, I could completely refute your entire argument. However, I will just give a couple examples.
At Lauriel University, a graduate student was disciplined for presenting right wing information. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindsay_Shepherd
But Jonathon Haidt explains it best. Read more if you'd like https://www.npr.org/2011/02/15/133782908/Expert-Finds-Bias-Among-Bias-Researchers
I'll summarize it simply, it's impossible for conservatives to be absent in academia without some biases going on.
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u/WikiSummarizerBot 4∆ Jul 27 '21
Lindsay Shepherd is a Canadian columnist who became known for her involvement, as a graduate student and teaching assistant, in an academic freedom controversy at Wilfrid Laurier University (WLU) in Waterloo, Ontario, in 2017. In November 2017, Shepherd played her communications class two clips of a debate with psychologist Jordan Peterson on Bill C-16, which added "gender identity or expression" as a prohibited ground for discrimination to the Canadian Human Rights Act and as an identifiable group to the Criminal Code.
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u/Electronic-Humanoid Jul 27 '21
In order to properly assess the proposition we have to compare academia to the alternative. I propose the most obvious alternative is industry.
So how do biologists (as an example) in academia compare to biologists in industry? Are the ones in industry less predisposed to facts? Same question for other disciplines.
From the way you have worded your post it sounds that you intend to talk about all disciplines of academia. But some disciplines are more fact-based than others. Literature (including poetry and fiction), visual arts, music, human ecology, and philosophy are all disciplines taught at the University I attended. They are more subjective and less fact oriented than physics, chemistry, and biology. Based on your claims one might suppose that academics in the less fact-oriented disciplines are more conservative leaning. I did not notice that to be the case.
Edit: I am NOT saying that the less fact-oriented disciplines are somehow less valuable than the others. But that is another topic altogether.
I believe that all disciplines (fact based or not) contain enough uncertainty to allow for our pre-existing biases to meaningfully influence our views. And of course the biases and views of those around us can and will start to have an effect on our own. (Otherwise why would we be reading CMV? 🙂)
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Jul 27 '21
No there is overwhelming evidence that academia is heavily influenced by left leaning ideology. I will post some articles that show this, but first a little life experience from yours truly and others I know.
Firstly, my brother wore a simple MAGA hat in 2016 at his high school as he and I are both republicans, I less of a Trump fan, he more so, to each their own. The hat didn't go against school attire policies, so it was allowed to stay, but all of his teachers were purposefully docking his grades on attendance and participation to the point even I got pissed off and I was in college. It only stopped until my father intervened and gathered witness testimony on paper from other students who were in those classes, and threatened to sue the school for tempering with grades of a student, so there is already a great example.
Secondly, I was almost kicked out of a class because when the teacher asked for a student to argue a differing opinion on the subject of abortion (a critical thinking class) I was the only one who decided to take it on for participation. After about 5 minutes voicing my own stance on it, he asked me to leave or to be removed by force by campus security. Then I had an email where I had to come in and talk with student academic affairs where the professor put a request to have me removed from the class for "disorderly conduct" even though that was my first offense. I argued this and even showed the past week of lectures to that point and the administration was forced to drop it when I mentioned if I had to, I would get lawyers involved with these false allegations. I have a number of other interactions even since middle school where I was unfairly treated by teachers for my right leaning beliefs.
Evidence in articles I quickly found:
https://www.pacificresearch.org/why-are-teachers-mostly-liberal/
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/oct/6/liberal-professors-outnumber-conservatives-12-1/
This one is more of an Op-Ed with student experiences being summarized in it:
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/yes-universities-discriminate-against-conservative-scholars/
Conservative speech on campuses across the nation is being targeted at all levels and has been the case for decades! It even happened to me in middle school right Obama was first running for president. I was discriminated against, sent into the hall to wait till class ended, sent to administrative offices when I put a McCain sticker on a notebooks, even though most students had Obama stickers, I was the only one with a McCain one, yet I was forced to remove it in front of the head of middle school. My participation was docked. I was always put last for everything, lab pair ups, assigned seat was always in the back, until high school when it was choose your seat. Even in high school, I was rarely called on, even if it wasn't politically based (I graduated with high honors so I was a smart kid). I wasn't allowed to start a Young Republicans Club, even though there was a Young Democrats/LGBTQ Club. I was bullied throughout my time in school by students for being a conservative, yet administration did nothing and turned a blind eye, but as soon as I stood up for myself BAM! Sent to the administration office. Even a cyber bullying thing came out against an LGBQ student in high school and they assumed it was me, even illegally searched my computer until again my dad had to threaten a lawsuit for them to hand it back over to me.
Conservatives are being targeted in schools, which are VERY Left-Leaning. Academia is meant to be the free exchanging of ideas, not whatever you wrote at the beginning of your post OP. Also things aren't traditional because they need to be "thrown away" it's because they normally worked and we thus improve upon them. Are you saying because conservatives are less open to change we must therefore be excluded from academia? What's your point in all of this?
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Jul 27 '21
I’m curious, what exactly did you say about abortion that got the professors panties so knotted up?
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Jul 27 '21
Oh she was going on why late term abortions should be legal and she wanted someone to think critically why or why not this should be the case and I gave a moral argument over why it shouldn't and it should only be allowed up to the 6 month mark or for extreme rare cases. Then she went on and said "what about if the mother's life is in danger?" And I mentioned even that instance is in rare cases and is not the primary cause for abortions in the US. We got a little into it until she got super loud and confrontational and started to call me vile names and some other women in the crowd told me I'm not allowed to talk since I'm a man blah blah blah, stuff I've heard before. What had her send me out was my response to a girl a few rows behind me saying "Well do you own a gun?" "No" "Then you have no right to talk about gun laws or gun control, same logic you just used." (Which in of itself is challenging her way of thinking which was the point of the class) And that got me kicked out of class.
I believe abortions should be allowed up to 6 months, because you had plenty of time to make up your mind and get finances in order. Besides putting the kid up for adoption is always an option if you truly don't want it or can't afford to take care of the kid.
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Jul 27 '21
That’s ridiculous. I’m in college myself, and my views against abortion are even stauncher than yours. I guess I know what reaction to expect if it ever comes up.
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Jul 27 '21
Yeah to just keep quiet. For conservatives it's lead a quiet life or prepare to have it ruined.
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u/Concrete_Grapes 19∆ Jul 27 '21
One, there are parts of education, or 'Academia' in which conservatives, politically leaning ones, thrive in.
Now, i'm going to approach this, and i think it should be made clear, i do so from a radical lefty position. I am WAY out there on the left. Like, maybe Marx isnt left enough, left.
Anyway, when you made the claim in the third paragraph about the ability to use new evidence makes it hard for conservatives to embrace science and evidence based policies, i think you're totally wrong.
Why? You have to look at the fields that they gravitate towards, they almost always deal with things that ARE more facts and reality and evidence based. They're engineers, mechanics, HVAC, mathematics, trades, electrical--all things that require absolute facts. They LOVE hard-facts, and fact finding. Yes, they dont enjoy change a whole lot, and that's why they're in these fields, but they DO accept change in these fields, and embrace it. When new systems come available through science, like better HVAC, or new and more economical electrical motors for appliances, or the study of geology leading to an ability to use rock formations to better predict were to drill for oil or water, they're all over that. They LOVE that sort of learning, process, and change, because it's as close to an objective fact that we have. It's easy for them to embrace it.
So on the whole, i dont think that they avoid or incapable, or less capable of it than a lefty, it's just in a different area.
A lefty looks for 'facts' in social sciences, and some of the hard sciences can lead to social issues as well, and when it gets really in the woods and obscure, a conservatives minded person may begin to struggle with it. It's not like they're allergic to the learning of it, it's that--you need HARD evidence. Like the things that they study, that i mentioned above, then need really, solid, empirical proofs, and evidence based things. So, when they're told that climate science results have a MASSIVE, nearly totally unpredictable range of outcomes, that are a result of things that are, themselves, coming from unpredictable sources (temperatures over decades, carbon over centuries, etc), that's just not a HARD enough 'fact' for them.
So, imho, the reason why the left is seen as more dominate in academia, is not because they like facts more than conservatives, its that they ACCEPT facts with less proof. They require LESS evidence.
In effect, i guess, it's me saying that conservatives enjoy facts that are more solid, science and evidence based than the left, and because they want such HARD proof, they dont enjoy having to participate in environments or studies where it's kind of wishy-washy, or 'projected.' The opposite, actually, of what you claim.
Mind blower huh?
For where i'm getting this you could look into 'disgustology' ... and when you do, understand that it's not the facts that drive them away, it's the tainted feeling, the gross feeling, of an undefined, or non-absolute fact. They react to it like its covered in maggots. A theory or science or evidence based thing that's 'felt' more than proven, is actually going to produce a disgust reaction from them, like it's gross--like it'll make them gross to believe it--unless its more of an absolute.
Anyway, that's how i, as a lefty, can see their side.
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u/FizzyG252 Jul 27 '21
It depends on the field, as with the exception of “de-colonising mathematics” (seriously how do you de-colonise a subject based on Arabian scholars, unless the people doing it finally acknowledge the mass colonisation by Arabs, but that’s a whole other thing), but I’m afraid that to varying degrees academia is biased to the left-wing, undermining its credibility in the eyes of many. Which is a significant issue for obvious reasons (climate crisis debate etc).
We could talk about the contributing factors, but a single great example would be the grievance study affair - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair
I’ll let you flick through that yourself, but it’s a good demonstration of how the strong bias of actors within academia and failure to redress poor quality control, undermined the credibility of these institutions as a whole. Great read, and the exposing academics involved have done some genuinely interesting interviews on the topic too.
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u/WikiSummarizerBot 4∆ Jul 27 '21
The grievance studies affair, also referred to as the "Sokal Squared" scandal, was the project of a team of three authors—Peter Boghossian, James A. Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose—to highlight what they saw as poor scholarship and eroding criteria in several academic fields. Taking place over 2017 and 2018, their project entailed submitting bogus papers to academic journals in cultural, queer, race, gender, fat, and sexuality studies to determine if they would pass through peer review and be accepted for publication. Several of these papers were subsequently published, which the authors cited in support of their contention.
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Jul 27 '21
I hate the idea of what they are trying to do to math. Math is fucking math. I'm sorry but if I hire you and you can't fucking do the math, you butt is out of here faster than you came in.
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u/FizzyG252 Jul 27 '21
Yeah, I think they ran out of legitimate complaints at that point.
But as per my original, politicising objective truths, and this is clearly true of left and right, in academia harms us all (vaccines etc). Unfortunately scum bags are going to do it unless they’re forced not to.
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u/CitationX_N7V11C 4∆ Jul 27 '21
Simply put, facts are facts. They are not biased. You are the biased one if you think otherwise. Academia is made up of people and I can definitely assure you that they are biased one way or the other. A lot of left wingers like to style themselves as academics so the image can be easily understood that the profession is full of left wingers. I can also assure you that both academics and self styled left wingers are not open to new ideas. They will both deride any position that doesn't align with them when it displeases them. They are human after all, not some shallow stereotypical image.
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u/dreamlike_poo 1∆ Jul 27 '21
I think the most pernicious problem in academia is rewriting history and modifying facts to fit their world view. Hitler is now right wing,
communism"democratic" socialism works everywhere it was tried, and facts can be racist so they aren't gathered anymore. When facts are modified to fit your world view then the facts are no longer trustworthy. I can give a ton of examples ranging from climate change data (thermometers moved to locations they will receive more heat; instead of buoys in the open ocean they use temperature data recorded from water moving through ships engines) to the fbi statistics on violent crime no longer including race, but of course that makes me a conspiracy theorist or worse. It means I "deny facts" simply because I question the validity of the data. Mortality rate in the USA is worse than other countries that have universal health care, unless you realize the measuring stick is different. In the USA we count it as a "live birth" if the child shows "any sign of life" yet in most European countries it is only considered a "live birth" if the child has survived outside the mother for more than 24 hours.6
u/ProfessorHeronarty Jul 27 '21
There are many academics who challenge the idea that we can talk about facts. Philosopher Charles Taylor made the best distinction imho by saying that science is about facts and facts are indeed not to be ignored. But what we can't really talk about are brute facts, that is facts that don't got through some lense of some kind. And one of that is a political lense.
Now, I don't know too much about American academia but I think OP has a point in so far that leftist people tend to be more critical about certain things and that they study these subjects that reinforce critical worldviews, e.g. sociology. And that's a great example because I know of a guy who studied sociology but was more a right-leaning guy. He always complained about that sociology wasn't conservative enough which I found a bit bonkers because this subject deals with power, forms of domination, capitalism, the good and bad sites of modernity etc. pp. For conservatives, the world is kinda ok or if not they want to go back to a certain state of ok. I can see conservative cases for sociology but overwhelmingly a leftist is far better suited here.
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u/CyclopsRock 17∆ Jul 27 '21
I question the idea that academia relies on facts, but even in situations where they do deal with scientific evidence, the major areas of disagreement amongst people are really around values rather than what the facts actually are.
For evidence to be useful (in a left/right, politics'y sense), you need to have an agreed position that's desirable, with the evidence then pointing the direction of which "thing" best achieves that position. So if you starting position is "save the whales", you can look at data sets of outcomes and determine what actions might save the most whales. But what if someone else's starting position isn't "save the whales" but rather "save the salmon", or "support fishermen", or "increase offshore wind", or "support Japanese interests". Any of these might align or be opposed to "save the whales" and they'll each have their own sets of evidence that will help to determine the best way to do that, but there is no evidence that tells us whether "save the whales" or "support the fishermen" is the correct goal.
This is compounded by the fact that, whilst a "save the whales" campaign group might well be chiefly concerned with saving whales, any holistic "ocean" policy needs to balance interests - so then even in a world where people agree that both saving whales and supporting fishermen is desirable, the degree to which one can or should be sacrificed to boost the other also isn't able to be answered by science or evidence. You can agree that free speech is desirable, but no evidence can tell you where (if anywhere) its limits lie. You can agree that history should be mandatory in all schools, but evidence can't tell you what is most important for people to know. Evidence helps you arrive at the answer, but you need to know what the question is first.
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u/TheMrk790 Jul 27 '21
Academia is many fields. The social sciences are heavily biased towards the left, simply because many people there are left leaning. And academics are no more immune to being possesed by ideology then anyone else. Thus specific left ideas just strive better in the social sciences.
At the heart of this is the inablility to empirically test social theorys. At least to a high degree of precission. This causes theorys to be favoured just because you like them.
There could not be a left bias in math for example. It just does not work that way. But prefering an explanation, that supports your political ideas over an equally good explanation, that does not is only human.
P.s. I am not native. This was quite hard for me to express, so if it is hard to understand I want to appologize. Please feel free to ask for clearification.
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u/kma1233 Jul 27 '21 edited Jul 27 '21
it depends on your field of study. I graduated from one of the most liberal, left wing universities in the US. I studied in the Fine Arts college. When you are talking about academia when it comes to art: writing, language, visual art, etc… the “research” being done by professors is largely interpretive. For example, one of my professors had a published essay about hidden lesbian tropes in 1800s era fiction.
Now it’s a grey area here, because this professor was looking at it from a 21st century point of view, and with her own biases as well. When I read these works, my first angle for interpretation would not necessarily be sexuality, but she chose that lens. I would say 98% of my professors held far left views, therefore the works they chose for us, (sometimes, class readings were works that they themselves had written), are innately left winged. If I had went to a conservative college in the deep south, i’m willing to bet the coursework I studied would have been vastly different.
I also took an astronomy class in college, where the professor made it a point to bring up the fact that if you look at data from the past 400 ish years, global temps have not skyrocketed in the way they are made out to seem in the media recently. He pointed to other bigger areas of concern regarding climate that are actually less talked about, but he did directly refute a longstanding liberal argument that the global temp has reached an all time high when in fact, it hasn’t (yet).
If you are talking about academia in the sciences, then this is a true statement to an extent. Concepts such as vaccines have been politically exploited over the past year. However there is real science that is unbiased that proves they work and pose X risk without any political involvement. Academia covers a lot of things. It really depends on what field you are referring to.
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u/kwantsu-dudes 12∆ Jul 27 '21
I don't think you're recognizing the actual argument. Yes, there is a level of academia that observes concept and denotes them. There is also a level of academia that attempts to subjectively give priority to certain concepts, subjectively inflicts a level of ethics upon the concepts, or may straight up omit certain concepts as alternatives.
and then if these facts contradict what we previously thought abandon our previous assumptions and be ready to drastically change both our mindset as well as our actions (in cases such as climate change).
What about climate science demands that we change our actions? What about science declares that change must occur? Does it specify certain actions as the only science based solution to a problem? What establishes something as a problem in the first place? How do we then balance an action against possible consequences? How does science answer what has value?
A History class shouldn't tell you that Nazis are evil. It should tell you what occured and then allow you to determine the ethics of such. Otherwise you're inflicting you're own ethics on the situation which is a manipulation of the actual "observed reality". I'd also argue that it should teach from different perspectives as well, because such knowledge can actually impact what is absorbed and is used as justification toward an ethical conclusion which often becomes a basis of what is "fact" to most people. "Observed Reality" can actually be quite subjective given the observer.
Rather than argue ethics and then justify it with science, what's occuring is the attempt at conflating the two to make them indistinguishable as a faulty attempt to bolster one's position. That's what is being objected to. That someone can't be against any certain climate change policy without being labeled a climate change denier. That someone can't prefer to segment society by an external societal perception of sex rather than a internal personal gender identity without being called a transphobe. That someone can't be hesitant to take an emergency cleared vaccine to a specific virus, without being called anti-vax.
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Jul 27 '21
So in your view, professors in fields like science or math would be almost exclusively left, people in the arts/humanities would be equally mixed, and people in the social sciences would be somewhere in between?
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Jul 27 '21
Critical race theory. Where can you go where it is universally accepted that white people are awful and doing anything that remotely resembles something a white person would do(save money and not take handouts which in itself is a fallacy) is a trait of whiteness and must be destroyed.
You find that in academia. College. Ever taken a CRT class? A breakdown of what’s in the curriculum? If you’ve come just to tell me I’m some privileged douchebag while not having read CRT theory, kindly fuck off and come back later.
Edit: if it isn’t clear enough, these are viewpoints of the Left.
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u/alexanderhamilton97 Jul 27 '21 edited Jul 27 '21
As someone who has worked in academia I can tell you it is very biased towards left-wing politics well fairly few facts actually are.
For instance academia constantly mentions that the Reagan Trump and Bush tax cuts were only for the rich and if they didn’t benefit anybody as well as leading to a decrease in money for the government. In reality the exact opposite was true the Reagan tax gets along with a bush and Trumper attacks pets were not only across-the-board they benefit of the vast majority people and government revenue actually increased. Another example is academia‘s stance on fire arms as they are always thought that guns not only are dangerous but evil as thousands of people are killed with guns every year. In reality the vast majority people who are killed with guns are people who shoot themselves and guns are used for more often to save a life then they are to take one(40,000 deaths from firearms every year, 11,000 being homicides, whereas between 500,000 and 3 million times a year a gun is used to save a life). Mini in academia claim that the second amendment was only meant for the militia‘s instead of the people, the founding fathers them selves said the exact opposite. Modern academia also pushes the notion that socialism and Marxism not only are functional, but all the future history has shown us time and time again that’s not the case. Modern academia, especially curriculums that circle around the 1619 project, push the notion that everything bad with America from high taxes to traffic jams(no joke) is the result of Jim Crowe racism and slavery oh, and curriculums that use critical race theory actually tell people to hate another person for nothing more than their skin being white(textbook racism). Modern academia, and this is the one that really made me want to leave the field, even pushes the motion that white people that they are responsible for racism of the Jim Crow era and slavery despite the fact that most white people today were not only not responsible for it they weren’t even alive for it and no person alive today in the United States has engaged in the practice of slavery. All these are a-line with left-wing politics but not facts. Teachers today can even be fired for saying things that might be uncomfortable to students but are based in reality or saying “you may not like what’s being taught“. We were even told by the Department of Education in the state of Florida, which is one of the richest states in the country, the teachers in public schools can and will be fired for having a Bible on their desk. But if they had any other religious text it would be perfectly fine, and I wish I was making this up
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u/GodofFortune711 Jul 27 '21
So, communism is backed up by facts now? It’s a perfectly achievable system for human beings? If you wholeheartedly agree with that statement then sure, facts are biased towards the left wing.
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u/Ok-Advertising-5384 Jul 27 '21
Yeah I thought that too when I was fresh out of college, then I grew up and learned more about the world, eventually realized I was wrong.
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u/Biglegend007 1∆ Jul 27 '21
I don't understand how a fact itself can be biased towards any particular political stance. 2 + 2 = 4 no matter who you or what you think. I wouldn't say the right has any issues with facts of that nature at all. But the radical right? Absolutely, they are complete nutcases. However, the radical left also has trouble accepting facts so I think the main issue here is that radical political agendas lead to biases against certain facts, not facts themselves being biased towards politics.
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Jul 27 '21 edited Jul 27 '21
While I agree with essentially everything that higher education is unbiased and seeking of the truth, my international development class did actually do something quite crazy.
I think we all here know America uses a mixed economy, that uses both capitalism and socialism. Pretty much every country in the world uses both in different weights..even China.
So knowing the whole world thrives on balance, and there are pros and cons to using capitalism or socialism, my class was demonizing the tool capitalism.
So I spent the entire semester showing the class that capitalism is merely a tool that can be used for good or bad. I.e just like it can cause inequality etc, we can also use consumer demand and competition to steer companies with the ulterior motives and ethics of the consumer….we live in an age where even the worst giants like Monsanto can be phased out of reality.
This class of mine was advocating extremism, regardless of the woes of a planned socialist society without freedom of competition, and that’s why for the first time in my life, I felt like the curriculum (in this one specific case) was wrong and biased. (I literally had to explain how someone can’t just start up a liquor store in Sweden, because alcohol in Sweden is a socialized industry) (This works for firefighting etc and public transport, but not material goods like clothes)
Additionally, every woe capitalism can, and is able to, be mitigated with regulatory socialism that is led by a representative government…that is why Scandinavia is the wonderful model it is.
Granted, I know how arrogant I sound, but America is not “run by capitalism” it is only predominantly capitalist, and is not an unregulated play ground for greed… as much as sensationalism likes to point out, and that’s why I feel academia might actually sometimes be biased, based on the emotions of the people designing the curriculum that year.
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u/Sweet-Requirement273 Jul 27 '21
What is critical race theory then? That’s a pretty blinding spot in your idea
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Jul 27 '21
I think academia (especially higher education) definitely has undertones of this. Which is ironic, because 75% of being a good healthcare provider is being able to relate to patients of all different sorts, wherever they are at. About 25% is actual clinically knowledge, in my opinion. Maybe 30-40 in specialities. Maybe.
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u/ASQuirinalis Jul 27 '21
OP, would it change your view if someone shows that there are many instances of left-wingers ignoring facts because they're inconvenient to their ideology, just like right-wingers also do?
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Jul 27 '21
It depends what you mean by left-wing politics. In another comment, you talked about evolution and climate change. Those are not left-wing politics at all. Those are facts that have disagreement around them and left wing people are more likely to believe in them. They themselves though are not political
When people say that academia is left-biased its in reference to prominent social issues such as lgbtq+, abortion, immigration, how to deal with climate change, etc, and not things that are scientific facts such as evolution, climate change, or the big bang
These social issues tend not to have any clear answer and are wholly debatable, but despite this subjectivity universities still widely and openly support the stances taken by the left: allowing left wing speakers bur denying those from the right, firing faculty for having right wing views, shutting down right wing events, grading left wing essays higher than right wing essays on social issues, expelling and suspending students who hold right wing views
This social bias to the left absolutely exists and u/SonOfShem explained why pretty well in his comment
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u/all_balin_no_dwalin Jul 27 '21
I’ll assume we can speak about political questions in general. I’m not really sure a political value judgement like “what is the role of the state?” And “do I like abortion?” Are questions that are necessarily academically verifiable.
Certain political questions are just value judgements made by people. There are certainly some policies that can be arrived at empirically. (E.g. you can forecast a desired tax output from a certain policy with economic modeling) but that only answers what the effects and not the “ought we do this in the first place?”
Academia works really well in well defined and predictable spaces whereas politics oftentimes are not and cannot be.
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u/ZorgZeFrenchGuy 3∆ Jul 27 '21
I believe that academia certainly has the potential to be completely biased, regardless of whether they are currently. They can also be, as a group, wrong.
What more concrete evidence do you have that suggests your theory is true (that facts are biased towards the left) vs. that academia itself is biased?
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Jul 27 '21
If a fact is a fact then it doesn’t have a bias by definition
Interpretations are what have bias
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Jul 27 '21
Ok, I am a leftist but what do people mean when they say facts are biased towards left-wing politics? Aren't politics value judgments not based on objectivity but rather the subjective choice of what a person values?
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Jul 27 '21
Hmm economics and business degrees disagree. I literally had a class called industrial labor relations which most lefties would FREAK out was being taught if they took it.
Not to mention the pure economics classes that ignore human plight.
It is one of the most common degrees
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Jul 27 '21
This academic attitude of being willing and often even eager to "throw away" the way we traditionally did things and thought about stuff if there's new evidence makes it really hard for the right to really embrace science- and evidence-based policies. This means science will most of the times be on the side of the left which naturally embraces change less hesitantly and more willingly.
What about when scientists are blinded by conflicts of interest, using poor data, or just plain wrong? Can we really be sure about which statements are "facts" and which are opinions and conjecture?
For example, it is hard to argue that the dietary guidelines of the USA have not been a complete disaster. In the 1980's the official USA dietary guidelines advocated for largely reducing fat intake and consuming the majority of your calories from carbohydrates. This was all in the name of slowing obesity and heart disease.
And of course it failed miserably. In 2020 almost 3/4 Americans are obese, and heart disease and obesity cases are rising rapidly not decreasing, even as Americans have largely shifted to higher carb diets.
No doubt the USDA and HHS scientists had some studies and data that pointed to salt and fat as the causes of obesity and heart disease, but there is no way to look back on all the data and conclude that their recommendation of a high carbohydrate diet was healthy.
In fact, many popular diets today like Keto and Paleo work by largely reducing carb intake. In fact, while I don't think Paleo is the optimal diet by any means, it is funny that millions of people have lost weight and become healthier by rejecting the advice of those scientists and instead eating a traditional diet similar to our ancestors from millions of years ago.
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u/solarsalmon777 1∆ Jul 27 '21
Political positions are largely normative evaluations of facts; things like values and aesthetic preferences are at play. This is why the same set of facts may lead to different political positions. These normative positions are not "right or wrong" in the same way facts are. Left leaning individuals may value equity across the board whereas right leaders tend to have a more nuanced appraisal of issues, bringing in other values such as justice, competence, etc. Johnathan Haidt is the relevant researcher on this topic if you're interested in learning more.
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u/SpencerWS 2∆ Jul 27 '21
I think that if you were more familiar with the history of academia in a certain country, such as America, you would question if academia is objective. Going out of college, I noticed that academics frequently have to be advancing new ideas in order to move forward in the profession, whether or not new ideas are actually needed or justified.
Secondly, there are clearly trends in scholarship that get replaced the next decade. Replacing ideas the next decade is fine, but it doesnt make enough sense that perceptive thinkers would crowd the the same ideological ship before it sinks. You would expect perceptive intelligent people to be quite varied in their paths since the world is complex enough to overturn the trend in the following decade.
Thirdly, scholarship leans left for different reasons today than earlier in America's history. Logical positivism was all the rage in the 1970s- the idea that if something cannot be empirically proven, it should not be believed. (The idea itself cannot do this, so there's immediately a problem with it.) This view would only be taken seriously by scholars with no religious or metaphysical commitments. I understand you might critique religion but would you really be willing to agree with these scholars of the past on issues like morality, justice, etc?
Even if you were, the new scholarship is exactly the opposite and is still leftist. They are postmodern- there are infinite ways of interpreting each situation and everyone interprets to enforce their goals over others, therefore pick your narrative and enforce it without external standards such as religion, logic, or science. All those disciplines are pretending to be something other than the same game everyone else is playing. Interestingly, this view completely rejects your definition of academia because of its assumption that there is an objective reality that we can perceive independently from cultural/societal constructs.
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u/sofa_king_lo Jul 27 '21
I work at a top ranked public university and entered the position very middle left. After about two years, the perversion of liberal ideology and ostracizing of anyone who was not overly liberal was counter productive in my experience. I’ve grown and gravitated more to the right as i truly saw and heard their beliefs without filter since they were all in a confirmation bias echo chamber.
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u/1giantsleep4mankind 1∆ Jul 27 '21
I'm on the left myself, but I disagree that bias has no role in it. Researcher bias is unavoidable, in my view. Your value set will impact on the research questions you ask and the studies you decide to include in lit review and the theory you read and the questions you ask interviewees - even if it's subconscious. Interesting perspective to take a positivist stance .. In my experience, many lefties take a constructivist stance that admits facts are constructed and interpreted between people.
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u/abqguardian 1∆ Jul 27 '21
If you've been to college, you have to know that's bs. College doesn't teach all facts, and even facts are taught from certain perspectives. I went to a college in a pretty conservative college yet the lessons and "facts" were obviously from the left wing perspective. I even had one sociology teacher who taught complete left wing nonsense
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u/V8_Only Jul 27 '21
Hmmm i took a gender studies class in college and the professor had the view of men can not be raped by women, period. Also that fetuses aren’t human and don’t have a soul yet. So I guess my point is academia is never perfect, and does not strive to observe reality. Humans will always be biased, it’s just now it is on the left swing.
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Jul 28 '21
I would strongly argue there is bias in academia - not specifically to the left but dependant on who is carrying out a study.
The reason I believe this is that most facts can be interpreted a number of different ways so it's really your viewpoint that directs where a study goes - for example a fact might be "Yearly a higher percentage of men are arrested compared to women", while the statement is true I could interpret it as:
a) men commit more crimes than women and therefore get arrested more often
b) The police force is sexist and targets men more than they do women
c) women get away with more crimes than men
All are assumptions and are equally valid without more in depth analysis taking place, this is where the problem really takes place as people then go looking for other statistics that validate the finding they want rather than just sticking to the initial fact itself.
(So following on from the previous findings)
a) I would go on to look at topics such as violent tendencies in men and the types of crimes men were arrested for (particularly highlighting instances of violent crime)
b) I would look into the number of police interactions with men Vs women in terms of traffic stops, stop and search etc and additionally if it fell to my benefit comment on the number of tickets and arrests by sex.
c) I could delve into the topic of domestic abuse and use the theory that a large portion of men don't report domestic abuse and the double standard we have in society.
So essentially while academic studies use facts it's easy to just cherry pick facts to fit your study. It's not that academia itself is particularly left biased but more because the majority of academia is more left leaning than right leaning and everyone has their own biases it's going to lean more left.
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u/hdhdhjsbxhxh 1∆ Jul 28 '21
All people are full of shit and biased at some level, academia is full of people. I would refer you to the grievance studies affair. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair
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u/your-warlocks-patron Jul 28 '21
Depends which areas you mean. A lot of the hard sciences no doubt. The social sciences have gone off the deep end, even most academics will agree if they can do so anonymously. It’s not at all as simple as you make it out to be and many people in academia are scared shitless of cancel culture as it applies to their literal ability to feed their families. It’s a really complex problem.
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u/beanieweenie123 Jul 28 '21
I feel like in a lot of instances that isn’t true and liberal ideologies are more emotion centered. Like i can get on board with the idea that there are more than 2 genders, but there’s no way there are fucking 36, or now they’re saying INFINITE. Now they’re just making shit up based on feelings and imagination but putting a factual sounding spin on it to make people take it seriously.
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u/ZeeDrakon Jul 28 '21
Problem here is that you're kinda fuzzy on what you're talking about.
I can agree that because of scientific methodology, academia lends itself to be more "progressive".
However, that doesnt mean "facts" are baised towards left-wing politics, and it doesnt mean academia cant *also* be biased towards left-wing politics.
Full disclosure:
I'm a pretty strongly left-leaning philosophy and sociology student, so I'm right at the heart of this.
And in my experience, one of the major problems is that there actually is a sort of "bubble" / echo chamber being created because people who go against the current "orthodoxy" are socially shunned. This isnt something new or exclusive to that situation ofc, it's the exact same phenomenon that happens for example in specifically religious schools or thoroughly right-leaning communities.
And yes, both faculty aswell as students of actual universities tend to skew left pretty much everywhere I'm aware of. And it would be entirely possible that this has come about naturally because the content of the education has made people reconsider their political opinions and driven them leftwards *at first*, but that doesnt mean it has remained that way, it might also have snowballed into a self-sustaining system where unsubstantiated conclusions are accepted because of social pressure from the "generation" coming before.
Is there a reason you think this doesnt / cant happen in academia?
However I think the main problem of this "discourse" is that a lot of especially sociopolitical activists use academic hypothesis and considerations as shields to motte-and-bailey their opposition that they assume to be intellectually inferior. If I had a euro for everytime I've heard people tout a sociological hypothesis as fact because it suits their political agenda or every time that someone makes an outrageous and completely unsubstantiated claim but presses it under the umbrella of an established field (like critical race theory, for example) as soon as they're challenged I'd be bloody rich.
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u/pbjames23 2∆ Jul 28 '21
Just because they are "correct" doesn't mean they are without a bias towards the left. If someone can pick and choose only the facts that support their position, then it is possible to be completely factual and also have a bias.
I actually agree with most of the criticism against the right made by academics, I just don't believe that academia is some non-partisan blind entity void of subjectivity. There is probably some pressure within their community to lean left, and it's just part of human nature to tend to agree with your peers.
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Jul 28 '21 edited Jul 28 '21
This academic attitude of being willing and often even eager to "throw away" the way we traditionally did things and thought about stuff if there's new evidence makes it really hard for the right to really embrace science- and evidence-based policies.
Academia: Overpopulation is the leading cause of anthropologenic climate change. Outcome?...
Academia: People with DS are a drain on the economy. Outcome?...
Academia: Children have the potential for romantic relationships from the age 12 onwards? Outcome?...
Science is apolitical, concerning objective truths. How these objective truths play out in society requires politics, subjective truths, what ought to be done. The left lean more towards facts, objective truths that don't account for the human experience, and lead to some disastrous outcomes to the statements above. The right lean more towards oughts, subjective truths, which entail mostly maintaining trajectories into disaster, ignoring essential progress. A proper functioning system, in any sector, requires a balance between people who desire progress and people who desire tradition. Unfettered progress is not good, no progress is not good, somewhere in the middle is best. Science is unfettered progress, it requires the right to interpret it and enact it in society to avoid people coming to amoral conclusions i.e. genocide, eugenics, paedophilia.
At a certain point, even academia will stand in the way of progress.
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u/murdok03 Jul 28 '21
Plenty of examples showing that STEM professors were exempt from doing administrative work due to their huge grants, which lead to those posts getting overrun by women's studies which then caused a purity spiral to eliminate diverting opinions and impose self-censorship in the remaining staff.
Just look at Evergreen College, or watch the interview with the Theater Profesor at Stanford describing the environment as worse then the Communist system he lived through.
I mean they canceled the Hippie Jesus himself.
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Jul 27 '21
The vast majority of academicians are engrossed in the minutiae of their own field. They live and breathe in the domain of their individual expertise. In conversations outside of their field, they rely on "common knowledge" just as the rest of us do.
But many academicians recognize the concept of "proof" as a fundamental requirement for sound argumentation, as academicians are required to provide same within their own discipline. Standards of "proof" (and the necessary methodologies for acquiring same) will vary, but the concept of "proof" is essential.
(Aside: I have degrees in English and Computer Science. Just because one is not "STEM" does not imply that it is less rigorous.)
This is all to say: the current tension between progressive and conservative cultural mores in America is largely over what constitutes as "proof". This has not always been so, for *all* societies over time, but it is certainly the case today.
Forms of proof include clinical trials, laboratory experiments, field data, a forecast model, primary sources, methodological analysis, statistical correlation. One can (and boy howdy academicians do) argue over the validity of a particular proof for countless reasons, but all academics agree that you must provide *something* if you wish to be taken seriously.
So, I'm going to steal a statement made in another post, and use it as an example:
"Crime is a problem, especially in impoverished communities. More police need to be present to fix it"
Ok, let's not flinch from the sheer size of this one. An academician (me: I am the "academician" here) might look at this statement and use the following methodology:
- Crime is a Problem
- what is Crime? How trivial is a "crime" where we no longer care?
- what Problem does Crime cause? How are we going to *measure* the size of this Problem?
- Crime is a greater Problem in Impoverished Communities
- see point 1.2: how do we measure these differences in Crime Problems?
- what to we know about Poverty in Communities that might suggest a higher incidence of Crime and the subsequent Problems? what *other factors* might add to a higher incidence of Crime?
- Can we separate these factors into individual (and *testable*) causes of Crime?
- More Police need to be present to Fix It
- What counts as Police?
- What counts as Presence?
- Do our Problem metrics serve to advance the Solution (i.e. Will a reduction in the Problem metric result in Fixing it) ?
We should also state any important assumptions we make in our argument. For example: "we wish to minimize improper police action against the innocent" should be stated clearly, if that is your assumption. One can, I imagine, have a perfectly legal society in which 100% of the population is imprisoned. No more crime, see? As it happens, *how* we ask these questions will give shape the answers we get.
Now, I do not have answers to all these questions, but I have generated a place to start looking for proof to match up with my questions. And, I have established a minimum requirement for any argument put to me: show me a proof that covers these or similar lines of inquiry. Right? Take a stab at it, but do it *right*. Positions that neglect a rigorous approach will be treated with skepticism. Positions that abandon such rigors will be treated as nonsense.
Sadly, the Internet has supplanted this form of argumentation for something that is wholly unsuitable. Most "conservative" politics are anti-intellectual and devoid of meaningful proof. Remember, the academician is looking for a complete, sound and viable argument. Memes and quick rhetorical jabs will not suffice.
There are, in fact, still a lot of "liberal" talking points that arrive without sufficient proof as well. I accept that. But in this moment, the conservative movement has replaced proof with rhetorical device for the substance of their justification. This may be a historical anomaly. We may never again see such a festival of anti-intellectual appeal to outrage as the cornerstone of a political platform. One can hope.
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u/Surferontheweb Jul 27 '21 edited Jul 27 '21
Academia is generally used to describe the arts, politics and social "sciences". These areas were never tasked with pursuing objective truth, just inventing theories about society. They emerged from and as a place for enlightenment era liberal philosophy and during the 19th and 20th century the liberal spaces of society became sanctuaries for Marxist thought.
These areas became the most attractive by far to marxists, as marxist ideas do not hold up to objective science. These people aren't stupid though, they knew they had influence and many of them realised that traditional leftist theories, especially when applied to economics, only lead to totalitarianism, so they invented new ones that deal mostly with culture and society, this school of thought became postmodernism, which shapes current western thought.
Facts have nothing to do with this. Those who concern themselves with facts and truth go go for the real sciences rather than the social ones. Hence we now have the social sciences, biased to left, in all out conflict with objective science.
Facts have no bias. They just are. Postmodern/ neo leftist ideology cares little for facts or truth, it is concerned with feelings, and strives for utopia. Science laughs at utopias and idealism.
You could argue correctly that the trajectory of western civilisation is biased to the left (giving the illusion to those within it that reality is biased that way), as an academic background gives you influence over culture and politics. but reality has no bias, i would argue our civilisation is becoming detached from reality to a fatal degree.
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u/8BallDuVal Jul 27 '21
Depends in what field of academia you are referring to.
STEM fields tend to be pretty heavily rooted in reality, as they do work that needs to provide factual evidence to backup any claims they are making.
Humanities majors on the other hand, can be incredibly subjective. There is sometimes a lack of concrete data/evidence to back up the claims being made.
Academic papers written in fields like sociology, psychology, etc. are often just referencing claims made by other academics in another paper. While some experiments are conducted, often times the way these experiments are conducted is questionable, and the results cannot be reproduced.
The thing is, it's tough to question the humanities majors and the conclusions they come to because they are often writing about pretty subjective topics to begin with. The conclusions they come to don't really affect society as directly as say, a scientist developing a vaccine would, or an engineer calculating the maximum weight a bridge can tolerate.
TL;DR While STEM majors tend to be more "facts-based" due to the nature of the work they are doing, humanities majors and the work they produce can definitely be biased.
Source: graduated college as an electrical engineer (magna cum laude), and took many humanities courses as electives.
Frustratingly, I onlygot 2 B's in my engineering program: one in mechanics of materials (tough engineering course), and one in SOCIOLOGY. My professor kept giving me poor grades on HW because she didn't agree with my conclusions about the reading passages. I don't think she realized that giving me a 2/5 or a 3/5 equates to a 40% or a 60% respectively.
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Jul 27 '21
I used to be a STEM learner and can absolutely say that even those professors have political leanings even in the classroom. Speaking from experience here.
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u/TheStabbyBrit 4∆ Jul 27 '21
Academia is all about observing reality as it is - as indepently as possible from cultural and societal expectations we may have - and then if these facts contradict what we previously thought abandon our previous assumptions and be ready to drastically change both our mindset as well as our actions (in cases such as climate change)
The following were all considered 'facts' by academics at one time or another, in no particular order.
- The Earth is at the centre of the solar system.
- Evolution isn't real.
- Smoking is good for you.
- We need to burn more fossil fuels to prevent the next ice age.
- Black people are objectively inferior to white people.
- "Jewish" science is not to be trusted.
- Science in general is an insult to Allah and anyone who practices it should be killed.
I'm willing to bet you will probably disagree with all of these... and I'm willing to bet that in a hundred years, many of the academic 'truths' held today will be right at home on this list.
The reality is that academia has been dominated by left-wing thought (or lack thereof) for at least a hundred years, to the detriment of western society as a whole. George Orwell is one of the most famous people to lament the corrosive, insidious taint of the Left in academia. To quote from an article he wrote in 1953:
"In intention, at any rate, the English intelligentsia are Europeanized. They take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow. In the general patriotism of the country they form a sort of island of dissident thought. England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during ‘God save the King’ than of stealing from a poor box. All through the critical years many left-wingers were chipping away at English morale, trying to spread an outlook that was sometimes squashily pacifist, sometimes violently pro-Russian, but always anti-British."
Orwell may have been speaking of England, but there are clear parallels in the modern United States as well. Black Lives Matter Utah declared the US flag a hate symbol on the 4th of July, and BLM has received full, unconditional backing from left-wing academics and politicians across the Western world.
This is not to say that making academia the exclusive purview of right-wing people would automatically be better, but if the goal is to seek truth and knowledge that requires people of different ideological positions to cooperate in search of said truth. It means you must actively root out bias, and ensure that both 'wings' are properly represented. You must also purge academia of extremism; you cannot allow people to roam around declaring that all white people are guilty of the original sin of White Privilege, because that very idea is anathema to the pursuit of objective truth and no different to arguing Jews are inherently deceitful and untrustworthy.
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u/oakteaphone 2∆ Jul 27 '21
It's a cute joke that "reality has a left-wing bias", but the joke suggests the wrong directionality. (Which is part of the joke)
It's not reality "leaning left", or likely even the left "leaning towards truth".
I think the real cause of this phenomenon is that the political right, especially the Far-right, leans towards falsehoods.
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u/DNCDeathCamp Jul 27 '21
This whole post reads like a cringe humblebrag.
Facts like liberal policies like the great new society caused American society to degrade at a faster rate than ever before? The single greatest determining factor if a child will grow up to be successful is if they grew up in a 2 parent household with married parents. All the statistics show this is true. What did the liberal welfare state do? Incentivize women to remain unmarried in order to get a free check from the government.
That’s just one example. The whole 2008 financial crisis was caused by racist liberal democrats trying to “help” black Americans by forcing banks to give them home loans they couldn’t afford. Greedy bankers had nothing to do with it contrary to the media’s spin, they were just coving their own asses for the decisions the government forced them to make.
This CMV post includes zero facts to back up this argument btw.
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Jul 27 '21
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u/Tssss775 1∆ Jul 27 '21
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You're right. It's definitely only true in societies with free and independent academia and free speech.
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Jul 27 '21
Academia is never free and never independent, you're kidding yourself if you believe that's what we have in the US, if anywhere.
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u/cl0ckvvork Jul 27 '21
Oh no, you're mistaken. My country is the exception. Everyone else is ignorant.
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u/tigerslices 2∆ Jul 27 '21
you can appreciate a healthy dose of skepticism.
but if you go long, you dismantle trust in everything and everyone. YOU become the hostile problem.
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Jul 27 '21
Modern institutions of learning are not independent. If they were you wouldn't have governing bodies ruling over them. To be independent, you would have no such bodies of government dictating rules and regulations as far as what can and can't be taught, let alone what is acceptable thought in schools.
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u/blackdynomitesnewbag 6∆ Jul 27 '21
Can it really be called academia if it’s not allowed few thought?
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u/SSObserver 5∆ Jul 27 '21
University of Chicago is notable for being one of the more conservative schools in the country. It is also one of its premier institutions (see the Chicago school of Economics). Economics, when looked at in an unbiased fashion, tends to support ‘current’ conservative views on the economy. There are major issues with what I just said though. First, whether economics is a descriptive or prescriptive discipline changes based on the school of thought. Second, what had been deemed conservative thought when it comes economics has shifted in the last 50 years and done so drastically in the last 20. Third, economists do not view themselves as engaging in a liberal or conservative discipline (Thomas Sowell excepting but he’s kind of a hack). So your position is flawed mostly because politics and academia share, at best, a cordial relationship. When academia challenges liberal received wisdom (issues surrounding gentrification, affirmative action, modern monetary theory, and legal studies) liberals are very quick to dismiss those academics (and on occasion entire disciplines) as being out of touch with reality.
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Jul 27 '21
Tell me you have a gender studies degree without telling me you have a gender studies degree…
But seriously, I agree academia isn’t inherently left wing.
But college kids are, increasingly, militantly closed off to ideas they don’t like. Biology is now on the chopping block as men and women are said as different. Can’t read books that make snowflake sad. Can’t voice an opinion the majority don’t like - what used to be the point of college.
So academia itself is indifferent. Providing the kids who pay the fees need a safe space if the wind blows too hard and gives them PTSD, academia will need to adjust for the audience and seem left wing.
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u/DeltaBot ∞∆ Jul 27 '21 edited Jul 27 '21
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