It’s funny that instead of making points or adding data, you just repeat the same slogan and act like a victim. Many of us have tried to listen for a long time but we have never found any intellectual meat on the slogans. It’s boring.
There is data that some ridiculous percentage of academics are on the left, and drastically so for liberal arts departments.
“Everyone knows” that they filter against conservatives (maybe there isn’t hard data, but it’s pretty obvious to a lot of people, so I would say this is something that need to be disproven, not proven).
Liberals deny this, so what’s the point of discussing it. Let the dismantling continue until corrections happen I guess.
There was a paper published in 2022 on the political leanings of scientists [1]. Here's the abstract:
> Scientists in the United States are more politically liberal than the general population. This fact has fed charges of political bias. To learn more about scientists’ political behavior, we analyze publicly available Federal Election Commission data. We find that scientists who donate to federal candidates and parties are far more likely to support Democrats than Republicans, with less than 10 percent of donations going to Republicans in recent years. The same pattern holds true for employees of the academic sector generally, and for scientists employed in the energy sector. This was not always the case: Before 2000, political contributions were more evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. We argue that these observed changes are more readily explained by changes in Republican Party attitudes toward science than by changes in American scientists. We reason that greater public involvement by centrist and conservative scientists could help increase trust in science among Republicans.
An example they give of the changes in the Republican Party are the Republican position on climate change. For a good illustration at just how much Republicans have changed just take a look at the 2008 Republican Party Platform [2].
They wanted to address climate change by reducing emissions and greenhouse gases, increasing energy efficiency, promoting EVs and natural gas powered vehicles, and create multi-million dollar prizes for technological developments to eliminate the need for gas powered cars or abate atmospheric carbon.
They also talk about the need for renewables to become mainstream and supported long-term energy tax credits to promote that.
Compare to today. Now they are opposed to nearly all of that. The current administration's position is the climate change is a hoax or scam.
Members of an ideological group that sees educational institutions as their enemies less likely to find jobs in educational institutions, news at eleven.
Have you considered that it's not filtering for conservatives, but conservatives are self-selecting out or can't cut it at all? Isn't liberal arts degree a literal punchline to so many on the right, yet you cant figure out why that might skew left?
> maybe there isn’t hard data, but it’s pretty obvious to a lot of people, so I would say this is something that need to be disproven, not proven
Huh, wonder why this world view doesnt jive with academia.
It’s worth thinking about why you’re wrong, because it explains why those comparisons aren’t valid. Modern conservatism is defined by rejecting ideas like objective truth or pluralism which are the core of academia. There’s no way to have conservatives more represented in science when conservatives refuse to allow people who practice science to be part of their movement: you used to be able to find Republicans who wanted to do something about climate change, for example, but anyone who wants to apply scientific principles there now has been purged from the party. Vaccines aren’t quite there yet but it’s trending in that direction and the percentage of doctors who are Republican have been declining since the pandemic.
Contrast that with women in tech or men in nursing and it becomes obvious why the comparison isn’t valid: women want to be good technologists, not to reject the validity of technology or say we should all go back to the Amish lifestyle (that desire is common to senior developers of both genders). Male nurses want to be good nurses, not claiming that their gender means they can commit medical malpractice.
Well if “I can only act until there is hard data” is a principle in academia then maybe academia deserves what it’s getting. We live in a Bayesian world after all.
Also the whole idea that they are self selecting out is absurd. There are many flavors of conservative, not just the ones you see on Ali G show or whatever.
> maybe there isn’t hard data, but it’s pretty obvious to a lot of people, so I would say this is something that need to be disproven, not proven
This is not religious thinking? You’re arguing based on faith and claiming the rest of us have to prove there is no tea pot floating in orbit on the other side of the sun
