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Diversity of the Mind

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Re: Diversity of the Mind

#11

Post by michaelhoney »

Real talk: if someone describes themselves as conservative (in US political parlance) they are probably (not certainly, but probably) more selfish and more likely to have either factually incorrect or morally indefensible views on e.g climate change and social issues. I'd probably avoid hiring them too.

Professions which require intellect but which aren't well-remunerated are typically stacked with "liberals", yes – because smart, non-greedy people tend to be liberals. (Yes, this is an assumption for which I only have a lifetime of anecdotal evidence. No, the fact that there exist smart, non-greedy conservatives and dumb greedy liberals is not a counterargument).

(FWIW, I wasn't going to post this, as I didn't want to stir up a hornet's nest. But then I read http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2015-01-05/stiglitz-blocked-fr... and got angry again.)

Re: Diversity of the Mind

#13

Post by wmf »

hackuser wrote: post #9

For 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 und…

If you want the scholarly version, skip the blog post and click through to the original paper (which was discussed on HN previously but I can't find the thread).

Page 26 of the paper does cite a study showing that libertarians have higher SAT scores, but that's probably not the only reason Caplan blogged it.

Re: Diversity of the Mind

#14

Post by mrxd »

kijin wrote: post #7

Liberal/moderate/conservative is an outdated distinction that is no longer useful to anyone but demagogues.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…

Since the cultural turn of the 1970s, liberals have focused on cultural change as a way of achieving justice. They assumed that people conform to dominant social norms which they learn about through the media and through others in society. So the operating hypothesis is that, if you create the impression that (for example) racial equality is the dominant social norm through consistent and uniform expression of those views and the suppression of racist norms, then racism will disappear as people start to conform to those new values. (This is in contrast to the prior Marxist-influenced social science which assumed that culture mainly reflects economic realities, and you can't make racism just disappear while keeping the same economic conditions.)

Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist and one of the co-authors of the paper. His work theorizes five foundations of morality—basically, ways of assessing the moral value of an act: harm, fairness, respect for authority, loyalty to one's group and purity/sanctity. The impact of the cultural turn shows up in his research. He found that conservatives tend to use all five foundations, while liberals only use the first two. Obviously for liberals, the remaining three are associated with patriarchal authority, nationalism and religious oppression.

So, he's not just demanding equal representation of political ideologies. It seems that Haidt believes that the dominance of liberalism among social psychologists is harmful to the field because it is associated with a strategy of cultural change which obliges liberals to avoid lines of research into these other foundations of morality.

Re: Diversity of the Mind

#15

Post by clarkm »

hackuser wrote: post #9

For 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 und…

He's a Professor of Economics at GMU, and is probably one of the top 10 most popular econ bloggers on the web.

Re: Diversity of the Mind

#16

Post by tomlock »

Is this really presenting a fair picture? Really, if I had two candidates who were identical and the only differentiating factor I had was that one liked Candy Crush and the other one played Age of Empires, I don't think I'd take it to a coinflip. I like Age of Empires more than I like Candy Crush.

I suppose this is the same type of insidious discrimination that happens because, for instance, people feel like a woman wouldn't be a good "culture" fit in a predominantly male dev team. My preference is however to work with people that have similar interests to me, but it is a preference very low on my list of co-worker traits. How low would it have to be before I'd answer I'm not at least "somewhat" biased based on the Candy Crush/AoE schism? I'm not sure, but honestly if two identical twins walked into my office with identical everything and one wore an ugly sweater I'd hire the one without. Unless the ugly sweater was really funny.

I'm not sure if the wording of the question here could be better, or I'm just discriminatory.

Re: Diversity of the Mind

#17

Post by m-photonic »

tomlock wrote: post #16

Is this really presenting a fair picture? Really, if I had two candidates who were identical and the only differentiating factor I had was that one liked Candy Crush and the other one played Age of Empires, I don't think I'd take it to a coinflip. I like Age of Empires more than I like Candy Crush. I suppose this is the same type of insidious discrimination that happens because, for instance, people feel like a woman…

You're being discriminatory in a sense, but then being discriminatory is normal. It's just what people do, and the large-scale consequences can be trivial or important depending on any number of things. Whether or not it's worth intervening through policy (or simply through culture or collective intent) varies case by case, but I think there's a case to be made here.

Re: Diversity of the Mind

#18

Post by tomlock »

m-photonic wrote: post #17
tomlock wrote: post #16

Is this really presenting a fair picture? Really, if I had two candidates who were identical and the only differentiating factor I had was that one liked Candy Crush and the other one played Age of Empires, I don't think I'd take it to a coinflip. I like Age of Empires more than I like Candy Crush. I suppose this is the same type of insidious discrimination that happens because, for instance, people feel like a woman…

You're being discriminatory in a sense, but then being discriminatory is normal. It's just what people do, and the large-scale consequences can be trivial or important depending on any number of things. Whether or not it's worth intervening through policy (or simply through culture or collective intent) varies case by case, but I think there's a case to be made here.

But why? What tangible impact has it had on conservatives?

Re: Diversity of the Mind

#20

Post by kijin »

mrxd wrote: post #14
kijin wrote: post #7

Liberal/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…

Since the cultural turn of the 1970s, liberals have focused on cultural change as a way of achieving justice. They assumed that people conform to dominant social norms which they learn about through the media and through others in society. So the operating hypothesis is that, if you create the impression that (for example) racial equality is the dominant social norm through consistent and uniform expression of those…

The group that you call "liberals" is spread out across the political spectrum, from the center to the far left. Some are authoritarian, others are libertarian and even anarchist. They do not present any unified front; in fact, there's so much disagreement among "liberals" that they would never consider themselves to be a single group unless forced to choose among a very small set of labels.

I agree with the authors that homogeneity can be bad for a field, but I don't think this can be fixed by increasing the mindshare of conservatism. There are plenty of people who would pick "liberal" on a "liberal or conservative?" questionnair and still devote their lives to researching, for example, people's relationship with authority. Not personally believing it to be a matter of morality might even help the researcher become more objective.

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