Interesting article…I like to like this issue to something like selection bias. If I conduct a snowball sample survey and it ends up being a bunch of similar people who take the survey, I would lack confidence in my findings.
Published research as a whole is like this. If all the people doing the research have similar beliefs and attitude…
Interesting article…I like to like this issue to something like selection bias. If I conduct a snowball sample survey and it ends up being a bunch of similar people who take the survey, I would lack confidence in my findings.
Published research as a whole is like this. If all the people doing the research have similar beliefs and attitudes, it is likely that at the margins they will discard more findings that conflict with their beliefs or alter their research (look at Roland Fryer for an example). For a junior academic publishing controversial research in a conservative direction would likely be career suicide
Basically all the mistakes go in a liberal direction (because conservative findings are challenged more both at peer review and again if published), some conservative findings get round filed because the researchers don’t want deal with the blowback, and conservatives while generally not run out, are made uncomfortable enough that only the really obstinate assholes stay around.
It’s not because anyone is evil and if academia were dominated by conservatives it might be worse. It’s just group think and polarization.
That said, it has reduced my faith in science as a whole.
People find what they are looking for in the sense of "where you point the telescope impacts what your see". Practically speaking, when you design a study in social science, you generally include factors to test your hypothesis. Your hypothesis is generally downsteam of values and culture.
My dissertation was intended to demonstrate how education enables structural transformation-- it doesn't. Me a kid in university thought this was a no brainer, especially with correlations of educated people in services while farmers are relatively uneducated. Furthermore there was a very pro-education human capital literature (wonder why). Armed with cross country census data and DSGE I proved myself wrong, and my peers laughed about my paper in defense of the null hypothesis.
Monocultures are bad for innovation. Off topic, I do find that high performing conservatives want to build something and the peer review game is unfulfilling.
Interesting article…I like to like this issue to something like selection bias. If I conduct a snowball sample survey and it ends up being a bunch of similar people who take the survey, I would lack confidence in my findings.
Published research as a whole is like this. If all the people doing the research have similar beliefs and attitudes, it is likely that at the margins they will discard more findings that conflict with their beliefs or alter their research (look at Roland Fryer for an example). For a junior academic publishing controversial research in a conservative direction would likely be career suicide
Basically all the mistakes go in a liberal direction (because conservative findings are challenged more both at peer review and again if published), some conservative findings get round filed because the researchers don’t want deal with the blowback, and conservatives while generally not run out, are made uncomfortable enough that only the really obstinate assholes stay around.
It’s not because anyone is evil and if academia were dominated by conservatives it might be worse. It’s just group think and polarization.
That said, it has reduced my faith in science as a whole.
People find what they are looking for in the sense of "where you point the telescope impacts what your see". Practically speaking, when you design a study in social science, you generally include factors to test your hypothesis. Your hypothesis is generally downsteam of values and culture.
My dissertation was intended to demonstrate how education enables structural transformation-- it doesn't. Me a kid in university thought this was a no brainer, especially with correlations of educated people in services while farmers are relatively uneducated. Furthermore there was a very pro-education human capital literature (wonder why). Armed with cross country census data and DSGE I proved myself wrong, and my peers laughed about my paper in defense of the null hypothesis.
Monocultures are bad for innovation. Off topic, I do find that high performing conservatives want to build something and the peer review game is unfulfilling.