

Diversity of the Mind - jeremynixon
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2015/01/diversity_of_th.html

======
Gatsky
The 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!

[1]
[http://yoelinbar.net/papers/political_diversity.pdf](http://yoelinbar.net/papers/political_diversity.pdf)

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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.

~~~
m-photonic
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.

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

~~~
wmil
The issue is that theories start with liberal values and assumptions and
conservative ideas aren't fairly evaluated.

This creates blind spots in the field. There are examples in the draft paper.

Moreover it taints policy recommendations and causes Republicans to distrust
calls for "evidence based policy".

Read the draft paper linked in the article.
[[http://journals.cambridge.org/images/fileUpload/documents/Du...](http://journals.cambridge.org/images/fileUpload/documents/Duarte-
Haidt_BBS-D-14-00108_preprint.pdf)]

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
I think considering the massive policy advantages - if not the total lockdown
- given to conservative ideas in government, especially in economics and
banking, that's not quite the problem it might seem to be.

The real problem with left-wing academia is that it has been persuaded to
believe that ritualised criticisms of conservative public policy are a
substitute for political influence. The academic left has almost exactly no
political influence at this time.

As for evidence-based policy - when conservatives stop promoting frankly kooky
positions like climate change denial or an insistence that raising the minimum
wage kills jobs it's going to be easier to accept that conservatives have an
interest in evidence-based rational policy.

~~~
wmil
You can't get a senior job at the DOE without a PhD in Education, and you
can't get an PhD Education without publishing a thesis the academic left
supports...

At least in education the academic left has had a complete stranglehold on
policy for 50+ years.

Saying that conservatives have a total lockdown on policy is just silly.

The deeper problem that Haidt is found is that people on the left can't
actually answer a survey as a conservative would. Libertarians and
conservatives can answer surveys as a liberal would when asked to, but
liberals are too insular and only have a caricature of conservatives in their
mind.

Your statement about economics and banking illustrates that. Wall St has power
and influence in DC because it has a lot of money, not because it has
ideological support from conservatives.

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iskander
This 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.

~~~
jerf
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!

~~~
dragonwriter
> 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.

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jdp23
Jonathan Haidt, one of the authors of the paper, has a page on "Post-partisan
social psychology" with a 2011 presentation of his on the subject and various
responses/debates.

[http://people.stern.nyu.edu/jhaidt/postpartisan.html](http://people.stern.nyu.edu/jhaidt/postpartisan.html)

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hackuser
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 understand what I'm reading.)

[1] [http://www.libertyfund.org/](http://www.libertyfund.org/)

~~~
none_for_me_thx
The Liberty Fund doesn't engage in political advocacy. They primarily
(re)publish literature important to classical liberalism and the moral case
for liberty (and history and law, etc). They also put on occasional
conferences, and they maintain online libraries.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
How is that not political advocacy?

If a Socialist site 'republished literature important to classical Socialism
and the moral case for social equality' would you not consider it a political
entity?

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paul
I wonder what other disciplines are this badly skewed. Theology maybe?

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kijin
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
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?

~~~
mrxd
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.

~~~
kijin
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.

~~~
mrxd
But liberals' political views aren't relevant here. What matters for Haidt is
that irrespective of their true politics, people who identify as liberal tend
to be hostile to 3 of the moral foundations.

I'm not saying his approach is right, just that his ultimate goal is not
political diversity as such. I agree that there are other approaches to
correcting bias, and the fact that he doesn't even consider those makes me
think something else is going on. Liberals tend to believe that morality is a
product of reason. Haidt thinks it comes from innate dispositions or
intuitions, which I think is closer to a conservative viewpoint.

~~~
kijin
> _But liberals ' political views aren't relevant here._

How does one justify a sweeping generalization about some group of people
while totally ignoring diversity within that group? "I don't care what they
truly believe, but methinks they believe that three of my six (not five) moral
foundations are unimportant." doesn't sound particularly convincing.

> _I 'm not saying his approach is right, just that his ultimate goal is not
> political diversity as such._

That's exactly what I was trying to point out in the GGGP comment. This is
little more than a conservative political agenda wrapped in the language of
diversity. Yes, some people emphasize some of the "foundations" more than
others. But unless Haidt can convince us that we _ought to_ take all of them
seriously, his views are utterly uninteresting in the context of ethics.

When religious people demand that creationism be taught at school "for
balance", most HNers can easily see through their thinly veiled political
agenda. But when a conservative and/or libertarian guy makes an argument that
has an identical logical structure, anyone who dares to disagree gets
downvoted into oblivion. Funny, but I guess that's exactly how political
biases work IRL.

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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...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2015-01-05/stiglitz-blocked-from-
sec-panel-after-faulting-high-speed-trades.html) and got angry again.)

