Reacting to a new study on academia’s left-leanings, Megan McArdle explains how bias could result: Unless they are really, really brilliant, academics, like everyone else, need personal connections to help them up the academic ladder, from recommendations to mentors to advisors. Those personal connections are always much easier to make with people you agree with. Nor would I discount the possibility that, just as women’s work can be subtly dismissed because we know women aren’t as bright as men, academics who think that conservatives are stupid would factor that into their assessment of someone’s intelligence–and then factor that assessment into their assessment of someone’s work. And of course, one’s ideas are to some extent socially constructed; simply by virtue of the arguments and information we hear, even if there is no social pressure to conform, being surrounded by a political culture will tend to drag our ideas in their direction.
g, you write "The assumption here is that the *right* point of reference is midway between the Republican and Democratic parties, or the average opinion of all US voters, or something."
Actually, one needn't make that assumption in order to worry about bias in academia. Consider that even if one doesn't believe that the *right* proportion of race or sex or religion or close blood relationship to major financial donors is equal to that of the general population, one can still believe it's bad (pragmatically unwise, morally wrong especially when funded by taxes ostensibly paying for the public good of education and research, or both) to let such considerations trump the more usual notion of merit in academic hiring and promotion.
One can also believe that fields dominated by partisans of one faction are overprone to disastrously silly groupthink in that partisan direction. Mainstream academia today seems to suffer from rather impressive left-slanted goofs which become obvious to all in hindsight, like a journal being respectable right up to the Sokal hoax, or like historians giving an award to _Arming America_, or like a large bloc of faculty cheering on prosecutorial misconduct in a politically charged criminal case. Am I just suffering from selection bias when I have trouble thinking of many such impressive goofs by mainstream academia which are politically charged in other directions? I understand the worry that not checking faculty factional affiliation would make a field susceptible to goofs of other factions. But I hold the hope that the more pronounced effect would be to reduce groupthink, and so to reduce the chance of impressive goofs in any direction.
The only thing funneier than the sociologists who ignores "group norms" in academia setting is the economists who turn a blind eye to goverment subsidies to academia.
William, please feel free to be amused by the fact that (1) when Robin said that the paper *starts with* a long rant attacking earlier work by people "such as my colleague Dan Klein" I observed that there's no disapproving mention of Klein until page 12 (and there's plenty of non-ranting between the start and page 12), and yet (2) I do in fact mention that Klein's work is discussed with some disapproval at that point. I don't quite see the joke, but I'm sure it's an excellent one.
Their comments about anti-McCarthy-ism don't seem to me to be particularly evaluative; but assuming arguendo that they're approving of it, it seems relevant to me that just about everyone now regards McCarthyism as a thoroughly bad thing that should have been immediately recognized as such. And that their actual complaint about the allegedly low-quality allegedly agenda-driven work coming from the right is more about the alleged low quality than about the alleged agenda, and that they think the work that was motivated by anti-McCarthy-ism was in fact of high quality. Of course there's scope for skepticism about why they think that.
Anyway. I'm not, perhaps despite appearances, undertaking to defend this new study from all criticisms, and actually I agree that some slant is discernible. I just don't think Robin's description of the introduction was at all reasonable.
Attempting to bring this discussion back to something vaguely in the area of "overcoming bias"... This sort of thing is almost always presented in terms of statements like "Academics tend to be liberal" or "Professors are much more likely to be leftist". Or more tendentious phrases like "academia's left-*leanings*". The assumption here is that the *right* point of reference is midway between the Republican and Democratic parties, or the average opinion of all US voters, or something. I think there is some danger of bias right there, as I think can be seen by considering (1) the results of a similar approach to the question of creationism and (2) what would happen if instead of the US population you took the world population or the population of the "Western" nations or just about any other halfway plausible group.
Also, it seems like some people expect there to be a single explanation, preferably one that makes their side look good and the other side look bad, and I don't see any reason for that expectation other than a bias towards single-factor explanations of things. And, indeed, single-factor strongly evaluative explanations. Eliezer's posts "The scales of Justice, the notebook of Rationality" and "Politics is the mind-killer" are perhaps relevant here.
g, defending against my complaint that the authors attack all the studies in the time period without even identifying them or saying what they're attacking them for (except for having an agenda which is not antiMcCarthyism), you write "But they do talk about specific flaws of at least some of the research they see as agenda-driven, later on. (Pages 12-15, about Klein's work.)" I see two problems with that.
First, it's an amusing contrast to how, when defending against Robin's complaint that Klein is attacked, you write about the same paragraph "No mention of Klein in this paragraph."
Second, granting for the sake of argument that their criticisms of Klein's work suffice to justify their claim that his work is low quality, it is still unreasonable to make a sweeping claim that multiple people's work is of low quality based on analysis of one person's work.
To me the introduction still looks like it was written by people who have never had to learn how to construct a sound criticism, or who have been preaching to the choir in a political echo chamber for so long that the skill has atrophied.
Right-wingers aren't immune to writing stuff like that, but its stuff I'd associate with openly partisan right-wing organizations, not mainstream academia. Imagine a piece on the economic minimum wage which approved of an early study produced as political ammunition against the New Deal, then attacked an entire decade of recent studies as low-quality work beholden to the organized labor agenda. If I saw something like that come out of mainstream academia, I'd be very surprised.
(And if you saw something like that, would you be responding to a complaint analogous to Robin's by saying "sure, Card and Krueger worked in that decade, but that paragraph didn't call them out by name"? And would you be responding to a complaint like mine by saying "but they did back up their dismissal of all that work! See, they had specific criticisms of Card and Krueger's work!"?)
On a separate point, when Eliezer wrote "when the studies are done by Democrats, Gross and Simmons don't dismiss the studies because of their political agendas, but actually speak of the agendas approvingly" you responded with "That doesn't seem to me to be an accurate description of, say, their discussion of the AFT report (pages 18-19), or the work of Zipp and Fenwick." I believe Eliezer was writing about the introduction, and I believe his "approvingly" was in reference to the early anti-McCarthy work. Read it again: does it sound like they disapprove? (If they disapprove, couldn't they have used the sentence "too late to be any help in the fight against McCarthy" to say something explicitly disapproving?) And while it is true that in the body of the paper there is criticism of Zipp and Fenwick, that doesn't stop the introduction from ignoring it and giving the very strong impression that the right, and only the right, is guilty of a agenda-driven low-quality work on the subject.
Regarding the correlation between leftists and academics, it is possible to be very agnostic or to embrace explanations on relatively slim clues. This range of caution is possible for many similar correlations as well, such as between gender and wages, gender and CEOs, race and politicians, and so on. What would be a bias is to leap quickly to a conclusion regarding one correlation, but be very reluctant to draw a conclusion about another correlation, all because you liked the first one and not the second.
(Er, that was of course a response to Floccina, not to TGGP. Incidentally, those wanting a good account of substantially the explanation she's offering could do worse than reading Robert Nozick's "Why do intellectuals oppose capitalism?".)
One might assume that. Or one might assume that being a professor goes with being more open-minded and that that conflicts with being right-wing. Or one might assume that belonging to an institution with a pre-existing liberal bias pushes you towards liberalism. Or one might assume that professors are cleverer than average and therefore aren't taken in by the stupidity of right-wing views. Or one might assume that professors are people who can't face the real world and therefore retreat to the comfortable illusions of left-wing views. Or one might assume that since the US is something of a right-wing outlier in the "West" generally, professors tend to have a more cosmopolitan outlook and hence look like leftists from a US perspective. Or one might assume dozens of other things.
In the absence of some actual *evidence* as to why US academia leans somewhat in a left/progressive/liberal direction relative to the rest of the US population, I don't see that anything whatever is gained by offering just-so stories about why it might be. Especially as it seems that everyone offering them prefers stories that fit one of two templates: (1) academics are good/clever/imaginative/etc., and therefore have Good opinions; (2) academics are stupid/politicized/warped-by-their-circumstances/etc., and therefore have Bad opinions.
I agreed with Robin's reading, but I read his description before I read the pdf, which could have influenced my thinking.
Also, didn't McCarthy just go after people in government, like that bastion of pinko liberals known as the U.S Army? It was supposed to be people in the State department giving secrets to the Russkies, college professors wouldn't have access to information that classified.
For a funny example of inconsistency involving McCarthy, read about Murray Rothbard's take on him. At first he praises him, not because of any real political affinity, but for the populist nature of his attack. Then he bemoans the effect he had on the Republican party of bringing in ethnic catholic anti-communists with little interest in the political tradition of liberalism i.e populists.
Wouldn't one assume that being a government employee as most college professors are (even those who are not, get government funding) would tend to make one be more pro government action.
Eliezer (re Republicans and cognitive conservatism): of course I agree that you've just acquired a little evidence against the idea that Republicans are cognitively more conservative; I just don't see how it can possibly be enough evidence to justify saying "Guess not." about that idea being "remotely correct".
Eliezer and William (re different politics of US academics and US population), I find your descriptions of this study every bit as tendentious as anything in it. A few specifics:
1. [William] "instead of calling out the agenda-beholden allegedly low-quality research for its specific flaws ...": But they do talk about specific flaws of at least some of the research they see as agenda-driven, later on. (Pages 12-15, about Klein's work.) Do you think it's impermissible for an author to say "such-and-such a body of work had such-and-such a general weakness" if they don't then analyse all of that work?
2. [William] "and their papers are cited and praised without even a hint about what was good about them except the appropriateness of their agenda": There isn't the least suggestion that what was good about these papers was the appropriateness of their agenda. (It seems to me that there is a big difference between saying that an inappropriate agenda is a problem, and saying that an appropriate agenda makes work good.)
3. [Eliezer] "they dismiss by argument from flawed motives the studies done by Republicans": where? It seems to me that they engage with what they consider to be the best such studies, and make specific complaints about what they think is wrong with them (example: Klein, as already mentioned, though Klein isn't exactly a Republican), which is as much as they do for any of the studies done by liberals. (With one exception: they have a lot to say about Ladd and Lipset, mostly positive. But they mention a number of problems with that too.) They say, in so many words, more than once, that the ideological motivation and methodological problems they purport to find in others' work is *not* grounds for dismissing that work. (Example: transition from p3 to p4.)
4. [Eliezer] "... but when the studies are done by Democrats, Gross and Simmons don't dismiss the studies because of their political agendas, but actually speak of the agendas approvingly!" That doesn't seem to me to be an accurate description of, say, their discussion of the AFT report (pages 18-19), or the work of Zipp and Fenwick, of which they say "More problematic, from our point of view, is that the Zip and Fenwick article -- much like the recent studies from the other side of the aisle that it aims to counter -- is more concerned to make a political point than to fully and impartially address the distribution of political views", etc., etc.
Perhaps I am merely showing my own bias (or, as Eliezer suggests, naivety) here, but it seems to me that Robin, Eliezer and William may be adopting a double standard. If Gross and Simmons either criticize a study done by conservatives, or pass over it quickly, they are "dismissing" it; if they do the same to a study done by liberals, they are "approving" it.
I don't quite agree with Robin's description of the introduction as a long rant, but I don't think his description is much of a stretch. I would say the introduction is a long embarrassment. The authors start by praising a study of academic politics apparently commissioned to fight McCarthyism (though as they say, in the event "_The Academic Mind_ was published too late to be any help in the fight against McCarthy). They go on to complaining that "in the 1990s [...] an unfortunate tendency became evident: increasingly, those social scientists who turned their attention to professors and their politics, and employed the tools of survey research, had as their goal simply to highlight the the liberalism of the professoriate in order to provide support for conservatives urging the reform of American colleges and universities." I'm sorry, nasty and screwed up though McCarthyism was, when you start by praising a study commissioned as political ammunition against McCarthyism, you are in a very poor position to disapprove of other studies for being "beholden to this agenda" just because "this agenda" happens to be one of which you disapprove.
I'm not trying to excuse shoddy work. It's common for shoddy work to be caught by people who have personal or political reasons to oppose it, and that's fine with me. But instead of calling out the agenda-beholden allegedly low-quality research for its specific flaws, the authors fade into a near-rant here (around pp. 1-2). "A few sociologists continued to produce high quality work on the topic" and their papers are cited and praised without even a hint as to what was good about them except the appropriateness of their agenda. Then the opposed work of allegedly lower quality isn't even named, much less cited and specifically criticized. And the authors go on to write "with this essay we take a step toward moving the study of professorial politics back into the domain of mainstream sociological inquiry." They expect people to read past the internal evidence in the introduction without becoming skeptical about whether being in the domain of mainstream sociological inquiry is a good thing?
On an unrelated note, I noticed patterns in their detailed numbers which don't match my claimed general pattern at all. E.g., on p. 34, 13:31 Democrats to Republicans in electrical engineering vs. 28:6 in mechanical engineering? That's a pretty impressive difference in ratios for a pretty similar pair of fields. But not only does it not match my pattern, it doesn't seem to follow from anyone's explanation about what's going on. It seems quite weird, actually, unless it is just something that doesn't need explaining, such as sampling noise in very small sample buckets.
g, it's not impossible, or even implausible, but I made a trial of my guess and it came out negative. I try to notice when I am confused. In a politically charged case like this, trying to guess without already knowing the answer, counts as a more reliable trial of a hypothesis than any amount of post facto rationalization. Of course it is only one piece of evidence.
I don't know Klien's results so I don't know if this study confirmed it or not.
Gross and Simmons are obviously, blatantly working from a Democratic political bias. For example, they dismiss by argument from flawed motives the studies done by Republicans - which, when dealing with experimental reports, is ad hominem - but when the studies are done by Democrats, Gross and Simmons don't dismiss the studies because of their political agendas, but actually speak of the agendas approvingly! That's not just bias, it's lack of self-awareness.
I would say that g read what the authors wanted readers to see, and Hanson automatically read through to the authors' intentions - it seems to me correctly so, but it is still an inference. Remember also that what would be an extremely mild opinion piece in a newspaper may well be a "rant" by the standards of scientific journals.
Eliezer, it looks like you're inferring too much. Why is it impossible, or even implausible, that (1) Republicans are on average more conservative cognitively but (2) "tribal" loyalties can swamp #1 and (3) in this case it happened that the original proponent of change happened to be a Republican?
The guess was based on the distant off-chance that allegedly scientific studies were remotely correct about Republicans being in any sense cognitively conservative. Guess not.
g, you write "The assumption here is that the *right* point of reference is midway between the Republican and Democratic parties, or the average opinion of all US voters, or something."
Actually, one needn't make that assumption in order to worry about bias in academia. Consider that even if one doesn't believe that the *right* proportion of race or sex or religion or close blood relationship to major financial donors is equal to that of the general population, one can still believe it's bad (pragmatically unwise, morally wrong especially when funded by taxes ostensibly paying for the public good of education and research, or both) to let such considerations trump the more usual notion of merit in academic hiring and promotion.
One can also believe that fields dominated by partisans of one faction are overprone to disastrously silly groupthink in that partisan direction. Mainstream academia today seems to suffer from rather impressive left-slanted goofs which become obvious to all in hindsight, like a journal being respectable right up to the Sokal hoax, or like historians giving an award to _Arming America_, or like a large bloc of faculty cheering on prosecutorial misconduct in a politically charged criminal case. Am I just suffering from selection bias when I have trouble thinking of many such impressive goofs by mainstream academia which are politically charged in other directions? I understand the worry that not checking faculty factional affiliation would make a field susceptible to goofs of other factions. But I hold the hope that the more pronounced effect would be to reduce groupthink, and so to reduce the chance of impressive goofs in any direction.
The only thing funneier than the sociologists who ignores "group norms" in academia setting is the economists who turn a blind eye to goverment subsidies to academia.
William, please feel free to be amused by the fact that (1) when Robin said that the paper *starts with* a long rant attacking earlier work by people "such as my colleague Dan Klein" I observed that there's no disapproving mention of Klein until page 12 (and there's plenty of non-ranting between the start and page 12), and yet (2) I do in fact mention that Klein's work is discussed with some disapproval at that point. I don't quite see the joke, but I'm sure it's an excellent one.
Their comments about anti-McCarthy-ism don't seem to me to be particularly evaluative; but assuming arguendo that they're approving of it, it seems relevant to me that just about everyone now regards McCarthyism as a thoroughly bad thing that should have been immediately recognized as such. And that their actual complaint about the allegedly low-quality allegedly agenda-driven work coming from the right is more about the alleged low quality than about the alleged agenda, and that they think the work that was motivated by anti-McCarthy-ism was in fact of high quality. Of course there's scope for skepticism about why they think that.
Anyway. I'm not, perhaps despite appearances, undertaking to defend this new study from all criticisms, and actually I agree that some slant is discernible. I just don't think Robin's description of the introduction was at all reasonable.
Attempting to bring this discussion back to something vaguely in the area of "overcoming bias"... This sort of thing is almost always presented in terms of statements like "Academics tend to be liberal" or "Professors are much more likely to be leftist". Or more tendentious phrases like "academia's left-*leanings*". The assumption here is that the *right* point of reference is midway between the Republican and Democratic parties, or the average opinion of all US voters, or something. I think there is some danger of bias right there, as I think can be seen by considering (1) the results of a similar approach to the question of creationism and (2) what would happen if instead of the US population you took the world population or the population of the "Western" nations or just about any other halfway plausible group.
Also, it seems like some people expect there to be a single explanation, preferably one that makes their side look good and the other side look bad, and I don't see any reason for that expectation other than a bias towards single-factor explanations of things. And, indeed, single-factor strongly evaluative explanations. Eliezer's posts "The scales of Justice, the notebook of Rationality" and "Politics is the mind-killer" are perhaps relevant here.
"Reality has a well-known liberal bias." - Stephen Colbert
;)
g, defending against my complaint that the authors attack all the studies in the time period without even identifying them or saying what they're attacking them for (except for having an agenda which is not antiMcCarthyism), you write "But they do talk about specific flaws of at least some of the research they see as agenda-driven, later on. (Pages 12-15, about Klein's work.)" I see two problems with that.
First, it's an amusing contrast to how, when defending against Robin's complaint that Klein is attacked, you write about the same paragraph "No mention of Klein in this paragraph."
Second, granting for the sake of argument that their criticisms of Klein's work suffice to justify their claim that his work is low quality, it is still unreasonable to make a sweeping claim that multiple people's work is of low quality based on analysis of one person's work.
To me the introduction still looks like it was written by people who have never had to learn how to construct a sound criticism, or who have been preaching to the choir in a political echo chamber for so long that the skill has atrophied.
Right-wingers aren't immune to writing stuff like that, but its stuff I'd associate with openly partisan right-wing organizations, not mainstream academia. Imagine a piece on the economic minimum wage which approved of an early study produced as political ammunition against the New Deal, then attacked an entire decade of recent studies as low-quality work beholden to the organized labor agenda. If I saw something like that come out of mainstream academia, I'd be very surprised.
(And if you saw something like that, would you be responding to a complaint analogous to Robin's by saying "sure, Card and Krueger worked in that decade, but that paragraph didn't call them out by name"? And would you be responding to a complaint like mine by saying "but they did back up their dismissal of all that work! See, they had specific criticisms of Card and Krueger's work!"?)
On a separate point, when Eliezer wrote "when the studies are done by Democrats, Gross and Simmons don't dismiss the studies because of their political agendas, but actually speak of the agendas approvingly" you responded with "That doesn't seem to me to be an accurate description of, say, their discussion of the AFT report (pages 18-19), or the work of Zipp and Fenwick." I believe Eliezer was writing about the introduction, and I believe his "approvingly" was in reference to the early anti-McCarthy work. Read it again: does it sound like they disapprove? (If they disapprove, couldn't they have used the sentence "too late to be any help in the fight against McCarthy" to say something explicitly disapproving?) And while it is true that in the body of the paper there is criticism of Zipp and Fenwick, that doesn't stop the introduction from ignoring it and giving the very strong impression that the right, and only the right, is guilty of a agenda-driven low-quality work on the subject.
Regarding the correlation between leftists and academics, it is possible to be very agnostic or to embrace explanations on relatively slim clues. This range of caution is possible for many similar correlations as well, such as between gender and wages, gender and CEOs, race and politicians, and so on. What would be a bias is to leap quickly to a conclusion regarding one correlation, but be very reluctant to draw a conclusion about another correlation, all because you liked the first one and not the second.
(Er, that was of course a response to Floccina, not to TGGP. Incidentally, those wanting a good account of substantially the explanation she's offering could do worse than reading Robert Nozick's "Why do intellectuals oppose capitalism?".)
One might assume that. Or one might assume that being a professor goes with being more open-minded and that that conflicts with being right-wing. Or one might assume that belonging to an institution with a pre-existing liberal bias pushes you towards liberalism. Or one might assume that professors are cleverer than average and therefore aren't taken in by the stupidity of right-wing views. Or one might assume that professors are people who can't face the real world and therefore retreat to the comfortable illusions of left-wing views. Or one might assume that since the US is something of a right-wing outlier in the "West" generally, professors tend to have a more cosmopolitan outlook and hence look like leftists from a US perspective. Or one might assume dozens of other things.
In the absence of some actual *evidence* as to why US academia leans somewhat in a left/progressive/liberal direction relative to the rest of the US population, I don't see that anything whatever is gained by offering just-so stories about why it might be. Especially as it seems that everyone offering them prefers stories that fit one of two templates: (1) academics are good/clever/imaginative/etc., and therefore have Good opinions; (2) academics are stupid/politicized/warped-by-their-circumstances/etc., and therefore have Bad opinions.
I agreed with Robin's reading, but I read his description before I read the pdf, which could have influenced my thinking.
Also, didn't McCarthy just go after people in government, like that bastion of pinko liberals known as the U.S Army? It was supposed to be people in the State department giving secrets to the Russkies, college professors wouldn't have access to information that classified.
For a funny example of inconsistency involving McCarthy, read about Murray Rothbard's take on him. At first he praises him, not because of any real political affinity, but for the populist nature of his attack. Then he bemoans the effect he had on the Republican party of bringing in ethnic catholic anti-communists with little interest in the political tradition of liberalism i.e populists.
Wouldn't one assume that being a government employee as most college professors are (even those who are not, get government funding) would tend to make one be more pro government action.
Eliezer (re Republicans and cognitive conservatism): of course I agree that you've just acquired a little evidence against the idea that Republicans are cognitively more conservative; I just don't see how it can possibly be enough evidence to justify saying "Guess not." about that idea being "remotely correct".
Eliezer and William (re different politics of US academics and US population), I find your descriptions of this study every bit as tendentious as anything in it. A few specifics:
1. [William] "instead of calling out the agenda-beholden allegedly low-quality research for its specific flaws ...": But they do talk about specific flaws of at least some of the research they see as agenda-driven, later on. (Pages 12-15, about Klein's work.) Do you think it's impermissible for an author to say "such-and-such a body of work had such-and-such a general weakness" if they don't then analyse all of that work?
2. [William] "and their papers are cited and praised without even a hint about what was good about them except the appropriateness of their agenda": There isn't the least suggestion that what was good about these papers was the appropriateness of their agenda. (It seems to me that there is a big difference between saying that an inappropriate agenda is a problem, and saying that an appropriate agenda makes work good.)
3. [Eliezer] "they dismiss by argument from flawed motives the studies done by Republicans": where? It seems to me that they engage with what they consider to be the best such studies, and make specific complaints about what they think is wrong with them (example: Klein, as already mentioned, though Klein isn't exactly a Republican), which is as much as they do for any of the studies done by liberals. (With one exception: they have a lot to say about Ladd and Lipset, mostly positive. But they mention a number of problems with that too.) They say, in so many words, more than once, that the ideological motivation and methodological problems they purport to find in others' work is *not* grounds for dismissing that work. (Example: transition from p3 to p4.)
4. [Eliezer] "... but when the studies are done by Democrats, Gross and Simmons don't dismiss the studies because of their political agendas, but actually speak of the agendas approvingly!" That doesn't seem to me to be an accurate description of, say, their discussion of the AFT report (pages 18-19), or the work of Zipp and Fenwick, of which they say "More problematic, from our point of view, is that the Zip and Fenwick article -- much like the recent studies from the other side of the aisle that it aims to counter -- is more concerned to make a political point than to fully and impartially address the distribution of political views", etc., etc.
Perhaps I am merely showing my own bias (or, as Eliezer suggests, naivety) here, but it seems to me that Robin, Eliezer and William may be adopting a double standard. If Gross and Simmons either criticize a study done by conservatives, or pass over it quickly, they are "dismissing" it; if they do the same to a study done by liberals, they are "approving" it.
I skimmed the paper.
I don't quite agree with Robin's description of the introduction as a long rant, but I don't think his description is much of a stretch. I would say the introduction is a long embarrassment. The authors start by praising a study of academic politics apparently commissioned to fight McCarthyism (though as they say, in the event "_The Academic Mind_ was published too late to be any help in the fight against McCarthy). They go on to complaining that "in the 1990s [...] an unfortunate tendency became evident: increasingly, those social scientists who turned their attention to professors and their politics, and employed the tools of survey research, had as their goal simply to highlight the the liberalism of the professoriate in order to provide support for conservatives urging the reform of American colleges and universities." I'm sorry, nasty and screwed up though McCarthyism was, when you start by praising a study commissioned as political ammunition against McCarthyism, you are in a very poor position to disapprove of other studies for being "beholden to this agenda" just because "this agenda" happens to be one of which you disapprove.
I'm not trying to excuse shoddy work. It's common for shoddy work to be caught by people who have personal or political reasons to oppose it, and that's fine with me. But instead of calling out the agenda-beholden allegedly low-quality research for its specific flaws, the authors fade into a near-rant here (around pp. 1-2). "A few sociologists continued to produce high quality work on the topic" and their papers are cited and praised without even a hint as to what was good about them except the appropriateness of their agenda. Then the opposed work of allegedly lower quality isn't even named, much less cited and specifically criticized. And the authors go on to write "with this essay we take a step toward moving the study of professorial politics back into the domain of mainstream sociological inquiry." They expect people to read past the internal evidence in the introduction without becoming skeptical about whether being in the domain of mainstream sociological inquiry is a good thing?
On an unrelated note, I noticed patterns in their detailed numbers which don't match my claimed general pattern at all. E.g., on p. 34, 13:31 Democrats to Republicans in electrical engineering vs. 28:6 in mechanical engineering? That's a pretty impressive difference in ratios for a pretty similar pair of fields. But not only does it not match my pattern, it doesn't seem to follow from anyone's explanation about what's going on. It seems quite weird, actually, unless it is just something that doesn't need explaining, such as sampling noise in very small sample buckets.
g, it's not impossible, or even implausible, but I made a trial of my guess and it came out negative. I try to notice when I am confused. In a politically charged case like this, trying to guess without already knowing the answer, counts as a more reliable trial of a hypothesis than any amount of post facto rationalization. Of course it is only one piece of evidence.
I don't know Klien's results so I don't know if this study confirmed it or not.
Gross and Simmons are obviously, blatantly working from a Democratic political bias. For example, they dismiss by argument from flawed motives the studies done by Republicans - which, when dealing with experimental reports, is ad hominem - but when the studies are done by Democrats, Gross and Simmons don't dismiss the studies because of their political agendas, but actually speak of the agendas approvingly! That's not just bias, it's lack of self-awareness.
I would say that g read what the authors wanted readers to see, and Hanson automatically read through to the authors' intentions - it seems to me correctly so, but it is still an inference. Remember also that what would be an extremely mild opinion piece in a newspaper may well be a "rant" by the standards of scientific journals.
Eliezer, it looks like you're inferring too much. Why is it impossible, or even implausible, that (1) Republicans are on average more conservative cognitively but (2) "tribal" loyalties can swamp #1 and (3) in this case it happened that the original proponent of change happened to be a Republican?
EY wrote (about daylight time):
"I'm guessing the Republicans opposed it."
No, it was the other way around.
The guess was based on the distant off-chance that allegedly scientific studies were remotely correct about Republicans being in any sense cognitively conservative. Guess not.