It's worth noting there are a few (unlikely) alternative explanations, like:
I am convinced that it makes sense to assume there are important right-leaning research findings that aren't being publicized.
I'm less worried about Less Wrong than I am academia. If we really are committed to figuring out what's true even when it's uncomfortable, what's comfortable and uncomfortable should matter less.
Another point: Less Wrong isn't obviously a bastion of left-wing ideas, so it's possible whatever is filtering out conservatives from posting here is also filtering them out of academia.
Back in the OB days, iirc, Eliezer referred to the community as mostly libertarian;
Robin and Eliezer both are libertarian-leaning, and participated for a long time (accumulating audiences) in libertarian transhumanist circles such as the Extropians. New audience members aren't primarily attracted through those channels, so the effect should decline with time.
I wonder what would happen if they unpacked 'liberal' and 'conservative' into their component parts and repolled.
I hope (but not necessarily expect) that a lot of the discrimination would come out as social scientists being 'biased' against specific positions whose advocates claim to be conservative, that make no sense from a social science perspective - and not against other conservative positions with no such implication. These could be swept up by bandwagon formation.
It might possible to find certain other disciplines where the participants would have a similar bias against liberals due to some particularly popular boneheaded positions claimed by their advocates to be liberal, and again bandwagon formation.
Or it could just be a liberal dominance of social science, complete with discrimination. A more detailed poll might help to elucidate this.
First, I am surprised that a serious study would settle for self-assessment, the least accurate of all possible polls (for example, it's hard to tell if the liberal-identified participants exaggerated their bias due to their pangs of liberal guilt or understated it, as usually happens). Second, I am even more surprised by the high degree of identification with such a broad movement, like it's all Berkeley out there. Surely many of them disagree with at least some of the ideas proclaimed by other "liberals". I guess they are not up to date on their Paul Graham studies:
there is a step beyond thinking of yourself as x but tolerating y: not even to consider yourself an x. The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.
A interesting NYT article I saw linked to in your inside higher ed link.
Social Scientist Sees Bias Within
...SAN ANTONIO — Some of the world’s pre-eminent experts on bias discovered an unexpected form of it at their annual meeting.
Discrimination is always high on the agenda at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s conference, where psychologists discuss their research on racial prejudice, homophobia, sexism, stereotype threat and unconscious bias against minorities. But the most talked-about speech at this year’s meeting, which ended Jan. 30, involved a new “outgroup.”
It was identified by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who studies the intuitive foundations of morality and ideology. He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.
“This is a statistically impossibl
Political bias on LessWrong as well?
We rely heavily on academia for determining what is true or isn't and academia has turned out to be biased in a certain way. I have recently grown convinced we can see examples of such bias playing out here as well. Considering politics is the mind-killer and how strange our demographics are this isn't really that surprising a realization. Similar conditions and incentives may recreate the problem here This compounds the progressive bias we inherit from academia.
Remember LessWrong is 3% conservative and ~30% socialist and another ~30% "Liberal"! People say "Wow" when they see someone being socially conservative.
Even many of our libertarians are probably left libertarians and nearly all of our high quality right wing thinkers are somewhat eclectic, eccentric and often aren't really conservative in the small c sense of the word. Examples include machinations like Anarcho-Capitalism, Moldbuggian Progressivism-curing Rationalist Uberfact, Eugenic Aristocratic Monarchies or Multi-universe spanning TDT zombie computational theocracies (something like that! ^_~ ).
Intellectual hipsters indeed. I'm not sure such fun ideas cooked ...
I would be even more interested in the answer to this question: "A 'politically conservative result' identified by an author would have a negative influence on evaluation/publication of a paper." In other words, are these researchers unfavorable to the expression or advocacy of conservative perspectives or are they unfavorable toward evidence that supports a conservative viewpoint?
In other news the group X has decided that the most reasonable set of political positions is held by the ideology Y. It just happens to be the ideology that has a ready made and politically viable arguments for more funding to be funnelled to group X.
This seems to be his strongest argument:
Sixth, “we asked whether they would evaluate papers and grant applications that seemed to take a conservative perspective negatively.” Well, I would. But I would also evaluate negatively a paper or grant that takes a liberal perspective, because I happen to think that scientific papers ought to strive for having no ideological perspective whatsoever (they are not op-ed pieces, or works in political philosophy). And psychology, last time I checked, was presenting itself as a science. Incidentally, the authors immediately admit, in the same phrase: “but we did not ask whether they would evaluate work that seemed to take a liberal perspective negatively.” Well, why on earth not?
It's a good point, and I think enough to call the paper's findings seriously into question, but I don't think fixing it would be enough to salvage the methodology. Ideological bias tends to be transparent from the inside: I'd expect any academic with a strong commitment to academic neutrality to punish perceived ideological bias in proportion to its magnitude, but I'd also expect the same academics to perceive viewpoints leaning toward their own ideology as less biased than the alternatives. Probably much less.
You'd need to do something a lot more clever to filter that out: maybe something like asking academics about the perceived rates of each type of ideological bias in papers and grants they evaluate, and normalizing based on that.
Bear in mind that the labels "liberal" and "conservative" are not timeless or neutral. There is no reason to expect that there would be equal proportions of "conservatives" and "liberals" in any given intellectual movement, phyg, profession, or other group, without first asking what those labels are used to mean, and whether those meanings are in accord with, or opposed to, that group's goals or interests. It is not reasonable to proclaim that unequal representation of political labels in a group is indicative of bia...
(@_@)
This was not about low representation being an argument for discrimination, this was about people in a field out and out admitting in huge numbers that they would blatantly discriminate against people hurting their careers because of political affiliation!
Worse they would hinder papers and research that carried ideas they don't like for political reasons? Don't you see how that disfigures our map of reality and turns out to be a mockery of what the scientific process should be?
And even if that would have been that argument, like it partially seems to be in say this NYT article describing the work of Dr. Haidt:
“Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation,” said Dr. Haidt, who called himself a longtime liberal turned centrist. “But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations.”
sigh
Naturally I do agree with you and in the commentary I did invoke an argument based partially on demographics that we may be similarly biased. I don't ...
The common use of "conservatism" today proudly includes positions that are anti-science
I could make the same case about "liberalism". The difference being that since liberals have more influence in academia, they can actually force most scientists who disagree with them to keep quiet.
I feel like you're conflating "unbiased" with "zero-knowledge". Flat-earthism is not an accepted viewpoint here, but that's not because we're biased against flat-earthism, it's just that flat-earthism is stupid. If it turned out that flat-earthers on average were happier and better at getting things done than other people, and if we failed to acknowledge that because flat-earthism is stupid, then that would indicate a harmful bias against flat-earthism.
If the reason we don't debate theism vs. atheism is mere bias, then we're all fooling ourselves terribly. If the reason is that we've thought sensibly about it and come to the conclusion that atheism is correct and the expected benefit of further debate is less than the time and energy costs, then that's okay.
This article suggests implicitly that the social sciences should be about truth-seeking, not about promoting some political/moral agenda.
If the social sciences aren't about truth seeking the same way physics or biology are I think we shouldn't be calling them sciences.
Relevant LessWrong article:
Some Heuristics for Evaluating the Soundness of the Academic Mainstream in Unfamiliar Fields
Summary: Current social psychology research is probably on average compromised by political bias leftward. Conservative researchers are likely discriminated against in at least this field. More importantly papers and research that does not fit a liberal perspective faces greater barriers and burdens.
An article in the online publication inside higher ed on a survey on anti-conservative bias among social psychologists.
Numerous surveys have found that professors, especially those in some disciplines, are to the left of the general public. But those same -- and other -- surveys have rarely found evidence that left-leaning academics discriminate on the basis of politics. So to many academics, the question of ideological bias is not a big deal. Investment bankers may lean to the right, but that doesn't mean they don't provide good service (or as best the economy will permit) to clients of all political stripes, the argument goes.
And professors should be assumed to have the same professionalism.A new study, however, challenges that assumption -- at least in the field of social psychology. The study isn't due to be published until next month (in Perspectives on Psychological Science), and the authors and others are noting limitations to the study. But its findings of bias by social psychologists (even if just a decent-sized minority of them) are already getting considerable buzz in conservative circles. Just over 37 percent of those surveyed said that, given equally qualified candidates for a job, they would support the hiring of a liberal candidate over a conservative candidate. Smaller percentages agreed that a "conservative perspective" would negatively influence their odds of supporting a paper for inclusion in a journal or a proposal for a grant. (The final version of the paper is not yet available, but an early version may be found on the website of the Social Science Research Network.)
To some on the right, such findings are hardly surprising. But to the authors, who expected to find lopsided political leanings, but not bias, the results were not what they expected.
"The questions were pretty blatant. We didn't expect people would give those answers," said Yoel Inbar, a co-author, who is a visiting assistant professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and an assistant professor of social psychology at Tilburg University, in the Netherlands.
He said that the findings should concern academics. Of the bias he and a co-author found, he said, "I don't think it's O.K."
Discussion of faculty politics extends well beyond social psychology, and humanities professors are frequently accused of being "tenured radicals" (a label some wear with pride). But social psychology has had an intense debate over the issue in the last year.
At the 2011 meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia polled the audience of some 1,000 in a convention center ballroom to ask how many were liberals (the vast majority of hands went up), how many were centrists or libertarians (he counted a couple dozen or so), and how many were conservatives (three hands went up). In his talk, he said that the conference reflected "a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” in a country where 40 percent of Americans are conservative and only 20 percent are liberal. He said he worried about the discipline becoming a "tribal-moral community" in ways that hurt the field's credibility.
The link above is worth following. The problems that arise remind me of the situation with academic and our own ethics in light of this paper.
That speech prompted the research that is about to be published. Members of a social psychologists' e-mail list were surveyed twice. (The group is not limited to American social scientists or faculty members, but about 90 percent are academics, including grad students, and more than 80 percent are Americans.) Not surprisingly, the overwhelming majority of those surveyed identified as liberal on social, foreign and economic policy, with the strongest conservative presence on economic policy. Only 6 percent described themselves as conservative over all.
The questions on willingness to discriminate against conservatives were asked in two ways: what the respondents thought they would do, and what they thought their colleagues would do. The pool included conservatives (who presumably aren't discriminating against conservatives) so the liberal response rates may be a bit higher, Inbar said.
The percentages below reflect those who gave a score of 4 or higher on a 7-point scale on how likely they would be to do something (with 4 being "somewhat" likely).
Percentages of Social Psychologists Who Would Be Biased in Various Ways
Self Colleagues A "politically conservative perspective" by author would have a negative influence on evaluation of a paper 18.6% 34.2% A "politically conservative perspective" by author would have a negative influence on evaluation of a grant proposal 23.8% 36.9% Would be reluctant to extend symposium invitation to a colleague who is "politically quite conservative" 14.0% 29.6% Would vote for liberal over conservative job candidate if they were equally qualified 37.5% 44.1%
I can't help but think that self-assessments are probably too generous. For predictive power of how an individual behaves when the behaviour in question is undesirable, I'm more likely to take their estimate of how "colleagues" behave than their estimate of how they personally do.
The more liberal the survey respondents identified as being, the more likely they were to say that they would discriminate.
The paper notes surveys and statements by conservatives in the field saying that they are reluctant to speak out and says that "they are right to do so," given the numbers of individuals who indicate they might be biased or that their colleagues might be biased in various ways.
Inbar said that he has no idea if other fields would have similar results. And he stressed that the questions were hypothetical; the survey did not ask participants if they had actually done these things.
He said that the study also collected free responses from participants, and that conservative responses were consistent with the idea that there is bias out there. "The responses included really egregious stuff, people being belittled by their advisers publicly for voting Republican."
This shouldn't be surprising to hear since to quote CharlieSheen: "we even have LW posters who have in academia personally experienced discrimination and harassment because of their right wing politics."
Neil Gross, a professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia, urged caution about the results. Gross has written extensively on faculty political issues. He is the co-author of a 2007 report that found that while professors may lean left, they do so less than is imagined and less uniformly across institution type than is imagined.
Gross said it was important to remember that the percentages saying they would discriminate in various ways are answering yes to a relatively low bar of "somewhat." He also said that the numbers would have been "more meaningful" if they had asked about actual behavior by respondents in the last year, not the more general question of whether they might do these things.
At the same time, he said that the numbers "are higher than I would have expected." One theory Gross has is that the questions are "picking up general political animosity as much as anything else."
If you are wondering about the political leanings of the social psychologists who conducted the study, they are on the left. Inbar said he describes himself as "a pretty doctrinaire liberal," who volunteered for the Obama campaign in 2008 and who votes Democrat. His co-author, Joris Lammers of Tilburg, is to Inbar's left, he said.
What most impressed him about the issues raised by the study, Inbar said, is the need to think about "basic fairness."
While I can see Lammers' point that this as disturbing from a fairness perspective to people grinding their way through academia and should serve as warning for right wing LessWrong readers working through the system, I find the issue of how this our heavy reliance on academia for our map of reality might lead to us inheriting such distortions of the map of reality much more concerning. Overall in light of this if a widely accepted conclusion from social psychology favours a "right wing" perspective it is more likely to be correct than if no such biases against such perspectives existed. Conclusions that favour "left wing" perspective are also somewhat less likely to be true than if no such biases existed. We should update accordingly.
I also think there are reasons to think we may have similar problems on this site.