Diversity of the Mind
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Diversity of the Mind
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Re: Diversity of the Mind
#2This would be more interesting if they had teased apart more informative axes of belief instead of categorizing people along the uninformative liberal vs. conservative spectrum of US politics. Do social psychologists believe that the class structure of society is meritocratic or unjust? Do they believe that racial discrimination plays a significant factor in social success? Do they believe that it's the appropriate role of government to remedy potential injustices? Do they want their country to be ruled according to religious traditions?
I don't come away with a clear sense of what "conservative" means to the respondents, and it's possible to imagine some definitions which are very healthily at odds with the skeptical/questioning mindset of academics.
Re: Diversity of the Mind
#3This would be more interesting if they had teased apart more informative axes of belief instead of categorizing people along the uninformative liberal vs. conservative spectrum of US politics. Do social psychologists believe that the class structure of society is meritocratic or unjust? Do they believe that racial discrimination plays a significant factor in social success? Do they believe that it's the appropriate r…
Additionally, it would have been interesting to hear where the respondents fall on the moral matrices, of which Haidt --who is leveling the assertion that conservatives are less common-- is a proponent.
For those who haven't heard of Haidt's ideas, I highly recommend checking out his book The Righteous Mind: why good people are divided by politics and religion.
Re: Diversity of the Mind
#4This would be more interesting if they had teased apart more informative axes of belief instead of categorizing people along the uninformative liberal vs. conservative spectrum of US politics. Do social psychologists believe that the class structure of society is meritocratic or unjust? Do they believe that racial discrimination plays a significant factor in social success? Do they believe that it's the appropriate r…
No, it really wouldn't be more interesting. Does it matter precisely what "liberalism" is when 98% of the current grad students identify themselves as such? Do you really think you're going to be able to slice and dice words until this isn't a problem anymore, in the face of such a percentage? We're not talking 55%/45%, where the question of exactly what the borders are might be an interesting question. We're not even talking the overwhelming dominance of 80/20%. We're talking effective monoculture. It defies belief that this is just the error bars talking. And especially so for social scientists... are they really the people you want to accuse of being unclear on the meanings of the words "liberal" and "conservative" in some context? Betcha they could go on about the distinction for a great deal longer and with a great deal more precision than either of us!
Re: Diversity of the Mind
#5This would be more interesting if they had teased apart more informative axes of belief instead of categorizing people along the uninformative liberal vs. conservative spectrum of US politics. Do social psychologists believe that the class structure of society is meritocratic or unjust? Do they believe that racial discrimination plays a significant factor in social success? Do they believe that it's the appropriate r…
No, it really wouldn't be more interesting. Does it matter precisely what "liberalism" is when 98% of the current grad students identify themselves as such? Do you really think you're going to be able to slice and dice words until this isn't a problem anymore, in the face of such a percentage? We're not talking 55%/45%, where the question of exactly what the borders are might be an interesting question. We're not eve…
> Does it matter precisely what "liberalism" is when 98% of the current grad students identify themselves as such?
Nothing in the source indicates that. There is a claim -- which cites a personal communication with no identified methodological basis -- that 2% identify as conservative (given a set of options that, from the parallel listing of the numbers from a broader population, appears to be liberal/moderate/conservative, and so which does not, even if accepted as ironclad, support a 98% liberal conclusion -- and further, the subsample size of "graduates and postdocs", and therefore the error margins of that group, are not identified.) But, in any case, yes, it matters what it means (and, particularly, whether it means the same thing to all the people with that self-identification) if you are interested in whether there is diversity of ideology rather than diversity of ideological identity labels. It is a fairly massive error to assume that those mean the same thing.
> Do you really think you're going to be able to slice and dice words until this isn't a problem anymore, in the face of such a percentage?
If it doesn't mean even roughly the same thing to the various people, what a large advantage in self-identification may tell you is that "liberal" is a popular label, without telling you that the label has any shared meaning which is itself overwhelmingly popular.
> It defies belief that this is just the error bars talking.
That would only be true if we had the size of the relevant subsamples and thus could have any idea of the size of the error bars, all we have is the full sample of 292, but that includes more than just the subgroup with 2% conservative identification for which you have invalidly assumed a 98% liberal identification.
> And especially so for social scientists... are they really the people you want to accuse of being unclear on the meanings of the words "liberal" and "conservative" in some context?
As someone with a degree in political science, I am quite aware that those terms have lots of different meanings even in the context of political ideology, which is why -- when actual substantive ideology rather than ideological identity is studied (and the "liberal" and "conservative" labels are used in the study), the actual operationalizations used of "liberal" and "conservative" are radically different between different studies.
Re: Diversity of the Mind
#6This would be more interesting if they had teased apart more informative axes of belief instead of categorizing people along the uninformative liberal vs. conservative spectrum of US politics. Do social psychologists believe that the class structure of society is meritocratic or unjust? Do they believe that racial discrimination plays a significant factor in social success? Do they believe that it's the appropriate r…
Yeah, there's a lot of variation in those terms, even just within the US.
In the political sphere: conservative = extreme right wing (Republicans); liberal = moderate right wing (Democrats).
In universities, I imagine it's a lot more complicated. A weak rule of thumb might be conservative = obviously pro-capitalist/racist/patriarchy; liberal = professional/managerial class? But it's complicated with von Humboldt conservatives and classical liberals.
(Disclaimer: I tend to ignore most flamewars contrasting conservatives vs. liberals, so I may be uninformed. Because it's like Coke vs. Pepsi. I find critiques of liberals from leftists interesting though.)
Re: Diversity of the Mind
#7Liberal/moderate/conservative is an outdated distinction that is no longer useful to anyone but demagogues.
When 98% of your subjects fall into one side of your division, it doesn't mean that there's not enough diversity. It means that your division is meaningless.
People who would pick "liberal" when presented with the three choices above are by no means a homogeneous group, especially since the questionnaire didn't offer an "other" choice. Anarchists, communists, socialists, social democrats, feminists, postmodernists, and even some libertarians might pick "liberal" since the alternatives are even further from their true beliefs.
Curiously, conservatives seem to be the ones who are always worried about "ideological imbalance", whereas most of the rest don't really care. It boils down to this weird idea that conservatism should account for roughly (and preferably more than) 50% of our mindshare, with all the other ideologies (conveniently lumped together under the label "liberalism") accounting for the other 50%. But that's just wrong, because there are more than two ideologies in this world. It's like dividing the world into "those who do X" and "those who don't", for any given X, and demanding that both groups be roughly equal.
The wiki page for "political ideologies" lists a dozen major ideologies with hundreds of subdivisions. Should they all get equal mindshare?
Re: Diversity of the Mind
#8The blog post has a mistake, there were only 292 not 2923 respondents (he copied a superscript 3 from the PDF). The mailing list had 1939 members[1], so only 15% responded. All the data quoted in the paper discussed in the blog is survey data... so it seems that a large proportion of academics that respond to surveys about their political ideology are liberal. This could also be explained by a large number of non-liberal academics who don't care for answering surveys about political ideology. Not sure what counts for rigorous exposition in the social sciences, but I had to laugh when the authors actually said that these ideology surveys overestimate the proportion of liberals because conservatives don't want to self-identify, and that this supports their point!
Re: Diversity of the Mind
#9For purposes of understanding this article, does anyone know anything about the author, Bryan Caplan?
The website is the Library of Economics and Liberty and is funded by The Liberty Fund,[1]. In my brief review they appear to advocate for modern libertarian ideology. Does anyone know more about them?
At least, this seems to be political advocacy and not scholarly analysis. (I'm not criticizing it; just trying to understand what I'm reading.)
Re: Diversity of the Mind
#10Libertardians who hate well built infrastructure. Time to expat to europe before these guys come to power.