Saturday, February 07, 2015

Conservatives more open minded than liberals to science that contradicts their beliefs

A prominent social scientist could not get his scholarly paper showing liberals are far more biased towards science that contradicts their beliefs than conservatives until they dropped every reference in the text saying so. The data and conclusion remained the same it's just that academic journals won't print things that openly contradict what they and their liberal readership believe. (And a corollary is that once the reviewers confirm from the introduction that the paper takes the "correct" position they don't bother to critically read the paper so: both bias and junk.)

The same researchers also sent out 2 grant proposals identical in every respect except that one's introduction said it sought to better understand why there was so much bias against conservative ideas in the academy while the second said it wanted to understand why conservatives were so biased. The first, conservative proposal could not get funded while the second one with a liberal thesis sailed through. This raises the question at least in overwhelmingly leftist social science of how we know what we know when only left handed ideas get funded and published. And imagine the implications if this holds for policy in an area like Climate Change (PS: it does and the implications are enormous and disturbing).

So is our increasingly left handed science really science or just another flavor of manipulative agitprop by tenured radicals with an agenda? And if so why do we subsidize their bias?

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