Sound of fiftieth shoe dropping.
From “skeptic” Shermer Scientific American:
Although there are many proximate causes, there is but one ultimate cause—lack of political diversity to provide checks on protests going too far. … The problem is most relevant to the study of areas “related to the political concerns of the Left—areas such as race, gender, stereotyping, environmentalism, power, and inequality.” The very things these students are protesting.
How does this political asymmetry corrupt social science? It begins with what subjects are studied and the descriptive language employed. Consider a 2003 paper by social psychologist John Jost, now at New York University, and his colleagues, entitled “Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition.” Conservatives are described as having “uncertainty avoidance,” “needs for order, structure, and closure,” as well as “dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity,” as if these constitute a mental disease that leads to “resistance to change” and “endorsement of inequality.” Yet one could just as easily characterize liberals as suffering from a host of equally malfunctioning cognitive states: a lack of moral compass that leads to an inability to make clear ethical choices, a pathological fear of clarity that leads to indecisiveness, a naive belief that all people are equally talented, and a blind adherence in the teeth of contradictory evidence from behavior genetics that culture and environment exclusively determine one’s lot in life.
Duarte et al. find similar distortive language across the social sciences, … More.
Who knew? No, seriously, read the rest. It’s enlightening. See the vid below too.
But the one thing the social “scientists” are sure of is, they don’t want more diversity. They want ridiculous strategies that they know won’t work, as does everyone else.
Note: It’s good to be a skeptic about lots of things but bad to wait until one hears the fiftieth shoe…
See also: Japanese U’s shedding social sciences
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