Jose L. Duarte
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I was denied admission to a PhD program because of my perceived political views: reflections of a sellout; how diversity would strengthen social science (Updated)

2/10/2015

20 Comments

 

 Some of my mentors advised me to take down the post from July 22, 2014 about discrimination because it would hurt me in the job market – that hiring committees would discriminate against me (again) for my perceived political views, or would discriminate against me for documenting past discrimination.

So I took it down last week. I now think that was a terrible mistake. People were looking for the post to cite in journal articles and e-mailed me to ask where it was. That sparked more reflection on this issue. This post is the result.

I think I sold out, and I will not do it again. I've reposted the discrimination story below. If modern American academia is so intellectually emaciated that they would discriminate against someone for having criticized something Jimmy Carter said seven years ago, well... I don't have a closing clause for that sentence.

This is ridiculous in part because there's really nothing to see here. There are no raging politics here. There's not much ideology at play. I'm not a conservative (not that there's anything wrong with that), or a theist (not that there's anything wrong with that). This could be an issue only in an incredibly tribal ideological environment, and I think most academic departments are operating at a higher level than that (i.e. I don't think discrimination will cripple my career.)

Discrimination against dissenting voices harms the field, and is morally repugnant. Let me offer some reasons why.

Our upcoming paper in Behavioral and Brain Sciences documents the impact political bias has had on the validity of some social science research (only some.) Of all the points we make in the paper, I care most about the practices that undermine scientific validity (and much of my focus was on that section). I care about the validity issues far, far more than I care about the political demographics of the field, how those demographics have changed over time, issues of hostile climate, or discrimination. Validity is everything. Science is centrally about method – valid methods.

I'm appalled at the idea that I could be excluded from the field for writing about my past discrimination, or for pointing out scientific scams, or for writing what I'm writing now. We need more diverse voices in social science. We need them for functional scientific reasons. Ideally, politics should have no place, and if there's anything I would change about the paper, it's that we focused on politics as the only level of analysis. We spoke of political diversity. I would have preferred to focus on intellectual diversity – to also get at deeper levels of analysis where there the field is homogeneous in some of its assumptions about human nature, the inferences that can be drawn from certain inferential statistics, and the particular brand of empiricism we operate with. We voted on most things, and I lost that vote. The paper is outstanding, far better than anything I could have produced without my collaborators, so I don't care too much about that omission. My point is just that this is deeper than politics, that my focus is more at the level of methodological validity, not simple political bias.

In the present era, political ideology is remarkably influential in academia. And it's one ideology in particular, which raises several challenges. Ideological assumptions are baked into research questions and measures in ways that I doubt the researchers are even aware of in many cases. Given the starting conditions of ideological homogeneity, this is inevitable if we assume human researchers with normal human minds. We need people in the field who can call out bias, and who can articulate why a method is invalid. We need people who will call out cases where human beings have been harmed by research that falsely linked them to damaging beliefs because they happened to be conservatives. A vigorous science needs a wide range of vigorous voices. Mexicans have some utility here. And we benefit from researchers who investigate prejudice toward overachieving minorities (some of my empirical work) instead of looking exclusively at prejudice toward poorer minorities (if you think poverty is ipso facto interesting and exclusively important, you're operating with some ideological assumptions, not a descriptive framework.)

Examples of the bias and its consequences

1. We've got researchers asking participants if hard work tends to pay off in the long run and labeling it "rationalization of inequality" if they say yes (Napier & Jost, 2008). In that same paper, they also measured simple attitudes toward various forms of inequality, and treated those attitudes as, again, "rationalization of inequality". By pure fiat, by a wave of the hand, they converted an established attitudes measure into a measure of rationalization of those same attitudes, with no attempt to measure rationalization. So a non-leftist attitude is rationalization, by definition apparently. That's incredible.

2. We've also got researchers asking participants if they agree with the analogy "The earth is like a crowded spaceship with limited room and resources", and calling it "denial of environmental realities" if they say no (Feygina, Jost, & Goldsmith, 2010). In other words, we've got people treating ideological canards as descriptive realities. Even analogies are being confused for facts. Analogies. The inability to distinguish between 1) ideological tenets, value judgements, and favored analogies, and 2) descriptive, observable reality is an epistemic and scientific collapse. The importance of that distinction can't be overstated. Scientists have to be able to tell the difference. Social science is especially vulnerable to this conflation, so social scientists should be most alert to it. This collapse might be limited to a couple of labs, but if we don't address it and eliminate it, our standing as a scientific field will be at risk.

3. We've got people reporting that Americans would prefer a flatter income distribution, when in reality they asked participants to imagine a universe where their own incomes would be randomly determined – i.e. a casino universe (Norton & Ariely, 2011).

Actually, I was wrong about the Norton and Ariely paper. They also asked participants for their preferences in a non-Rawlsian, real-world context, so I've deleted the remainder of this section. I apologize to Michael Norton and Dan Ariely for the error. It was inexplicable and inexcusable. (Joe Duarte -- October 20, 2015.)

4. We've got people measuring a purported fundamental personality trait of Openness to Experience by asking participants "I see myself as someone who..."

... is ingenious, a deep thinker.

... values artistic, esthetic experiences.

... is inventive.

... is sophisticated in art, music, and literature.

... likes to reflect, play with ideas


You've got to be kidding. These items are obviously grounded in – and biased in favor of – academia. This core personality trait of "openness" is measuring intellectualism and urban sophistication. These items are invalid on their face, and should not have lasted this long.

How are people in rural communities going to show up on this scale? How about people in developing countries? How would they express their openness to experience? Where do we give them a voice? They don't have opera houses, symphonies, and gallery openings with which to express their "sophistication" in art, music, and literature. They're structurally excluded and marginalized here. The items are not situated at the level of analysis necessary for a valid underlying human personality construct that is commensurable across cultures and backgrounds. We're not even speaking their language. I guarantee that many people in rural communities would be embarrassed to say that they are "ingenious" or "sophisticated". It would be unseemly to them, narcissistic and snobby. They might never use words like esthetic or inventive, not because they're stupid, but because they live in a different world and don't necessarily have use for the same terminology that contemporary intellectuals use.

This is deeply offensive. We're denying these people a voice. I grew up in a rural copper mining town with a population of 2,000. I know these people. I am one of these people. The bias of these items should be obvious to anyone, but it will be most obvious to people who never lived within 100 miles of an opera house. If openness is a real personality trait (I doubt it), commensurable across cultures, then we might ask them:

If they enjoy learning new things from their kids.

If they enjoy looking at the stars at night (FYI, seeing the stars well outside of a city is a radically different, much more powerful experience)

If they enjoy being in the woods.

If they enjoy the tranquility of being on a boat at the lake.

If they enjoy figuring out how something works and repairing it, physical things, like car engines, transmissions, or TVs.

If they enjoy the uplifting experience of church.

If they enjoy reading.

Note also that rural communities are likely to be conservative, and urban sophisticates are likely to be liberal or libertarian, so we've rigged a systematic political bias against conservatives showing up on our "openness" measure. The fact that conservatives score lower on openness is widely reported and savored by politically biased and incurious science writers and sloppy scientists. Take another look at the items. That's what "openness" is. That's what conservatives are scoring lower on. It's urban intellectualism and perhaps narcissism. Given its profound cultural bias, we have no justification for calling it openness.


5. Duke political scientist Evan Charney makes some powerful points in his upcoming commentary on our BBS paper. He reports that the longer version of the five-factor personality measure – the NEO PI-R – includes the following items in its Openness to Experience scale:

I believe that we should look to our religious authorities for decisions on moral issues.

I believe the new morality of permissiveness is no morality at all.

I believe that the different ideas of right and wrong that people in other societies have may be right for them.

In what sense do any of these items bear on a personality construct we would call openness to experience? "Openness to experience" here is isomorphic with liberalism. These are political and philosophical positions. The first item is a measure of traditional religious faith. The second measures endorsement of moral subjectivism, which has become popular in academia. The third measures endorsement of cultural relativism, which has become popular in academia. This is pure politics. As we saw above with the other studies, liberal ideological tenets are being smuggled into the measures like jail cake. Openness to experience is simply being defined as one's agreement with the ideological framework favored by contemporary American academic culture. This is nonsense. There's no science here.

Why would they?

There's been lots of noise lately about how conservatives don't respect science or the intellectual sphere. Why would they? They know we're politically biased. They know that today's academic and scientific communities are dominated by liberals and leftists. They're not morons. Anyone who has lived a significant number of adult years is going to have common sense intuitions and wisdom about the nature of human bias and human frailty – intuitions that are fully validated by decades of flagship social psychology research on motivated reasoning and assorted cognitive biases. They know we're biased. They know that academia doesn't like them, doesn't respect them or their values. Why in the hell would they trust us? Why would they trust us given that we measure openness – and loudly report their paucity of it – based on self-reported "sophistication"? Vanity is a vice to them. In what universe, given what priors, would it be rational for members of one subculture to flatly believe everything scientists claim when they know that science is dominated by a subculture that despises them?

Conservative distrust of academia is trivially easy to justify given what we know about bias – and what they
know about bias. Let me remind you of examples 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 above – that is what we do. Our bias isn't conjecture – it's simply a fact (and to be fair, we should expect any homogeneous ideological or intellectual community to be biased, and for some of those biases to be deeply embedded, nonconscious, or implicit, given basic facts about human nature – I don't assume that liberalism is itself to blame.) Given all of this, it makes perfect sense that the most highly educated conservatives are the most distrustful of academia (see Kahan.) It seems eminently rational and wise. They would have to be dimwitted to trust us given the basic facts here.

Taxonomy

The above examples are profound errors. They undermine the validity of the studies, and they are pervasive. It's important that these errors be caught and eliminated. They're too large, too severe, for a modern science. Our errors need to be much smaller. The field as it stands doesn't catch these errors, and these studies are published in top journals. No one has attended to these issues, or developed the underlying epistemological framework that social science may need to prevent them. We lack a taxonomy with which we could better classify and understand these validity issues. We don't even have labels for these phenomena, and that cripples us. Human cognition is heavy on categorization and conceptualization (and those are often isomorphic, in that having a concept for something serves to categorize it, like how the concept "flower" bundles together all past, present, and future flowers as a category of thing, and distinguishes flowers from trees, pine cones, and hot dogs.) Humans have a hard time grappling with things for which they have no ready concept or label (see Lisa Feldman Barrett's wonderful work on how having a concept for an emotion – a word for it – shapes whether and how we experience that emotion).
I think my methodological work here is valuable to social science, especially the upcoming systematic integration of these issues into an epistemological taxonomy, the new statistical methods, etc.

Moving on...

6. And of course we've got people linking climate skepticism to belief that the moon landings were a hoax when only 3 out of 1145 mysterious blog survey participants took those positions (Lewandowsky, Oberauer, & Gignac, 2012). This can't happen. It harms innocent people. We simply can't go around harming innocent people, certainly not our participants. Free market endorsement was linked to rejection of the HIV-AIDS link when 95% of free market endorsers agreed with the HIV-AIDS link. We might linger on the impact such a planted link might have on people's dating prospects and romantic lives. These false and incredibly damaging links were widely reported in the media. Not just by hacks like Chris Mooney, but by The New York Times and Scientific American.

No one looked at the data, except for climate skeptics, and they were ignored. No one in the field called out the scam. Quite the contrary – the Association for Psychological Science proudly reported the false findings in its news magazine, and fabricated new ones. They just made up findings that were never reported in the paper, and which are completely false, such as that endorsement of free markets predicted belief in the MLK assassination conspiracy and the moon hoax nonsense. There were no such links in the data. In fact, free market endorsement was negatively correlated with belief in the MLK conspiracy, and uncorrelated with the moon business. APS just made it up. They committed incredible, incomprehensible fraud. They've also refused to correct it, which any random small-town newspaper would do. I've never heard of a scientific body fabricating findings whole cloth. It's deeply disorienting, makes me want to double-check my sensory perception and connection with reality. How could APS fabricate? Who fabricates? Someone needs to either purge APS of those fraudsters, or purge the S and revisit their legal classification as a 501(c)(3). (More on the APS fraud next week.)

Apolitically, we've got researchers misusing statistics, from linear correlation to mediation to SEM, to make inferences that do not follow from those methods. Correlations are often converted into likelihoods, by both scientists and science writers. For example, if X is positively correlated with Y, people are taking this to mean that if a person is high on X, they're likely to be high on Y. This is wildly incorrect. Most researchers know this, but we're not doing anything to correct those who don't and science writers who convert our correlations into likelihoods, like Adam Corner. We've got lots of significant correlations that are driven by variance on one side of a scale, which will impact the inferences we can make from them. In general, natural human languages (e.g. English) aren't very good at describing probabilistic truths, which are the only kinds of truths we report. This is a deeply interesting issue to me, and I plan to do a lot of work there.

Conclusion

We need more researchers and scholars to identify these issues. We need to invite them in, not keep them out. We need more social psychologists who grew up in rural communities. We need people who are willing and able to advance our epistemological framework, and thus our science. As a field, we need to understand that the breadth and depth of fruitful scholarly inquiry might extend far beyond any present-day political ideology. And really, we do need more Mexicans, more African-Americans, and perhaps most of all more Native Americans. I know of two Mexican social psychology faculty in America. Two isn't enough. There are too many obvious vulnerabilities in doing behavioral science from the perspective of one culture.

I was deeply disturbed at the discrimination I've experienced in part because the loud commitment to racial-ethnic diversity was instantly sacrificed in favor of prejudice against a perceived conservative. It made the field's commitment to bringing in people of color and first-generation Americans seem less than serious, a subordinate and symbolic proxy for ideological conformity. An empirical field needs to put ideology in its proper place, which is no place at all. And my ethnicity is perhaps not unrelated to my willingness to speak out. Embracing diversity means embracing cultural differences, and those differences will manifest at multiple levels of analysis, in all sorts of domains. I'm not sure people think through what diversity means on the ground. The passivity of the field with respect to calling out scams and fraud might well be related to the dominant racial culture of the field, or a subculture, and people of different races and cultures might have different comfort levels with confrontation, directness, and so forth. Or not. It's an empirical question. No hay peor lucha que la que no se hace.

In any case, discriminating against me is discriminating against a person who brings a different racial-ethnic cultural background, one that the field severely lacks and has committed to including. Discriminating against me is discriminating against a person who brings a rural background, another underrepresented perspective in the field. It's discriminating against the son of immigrants, another dimension of inclusion marked by the field. It's discriminating against a person for whom English was a second language. It's discriminating against someone who brings a different intellectual framework, who won't have the some assumptions – both explicit and implicit – that prevail in our field.

Every single one of these dimensions of inclusion and diversity has functional, scientific, empirical value to the field. Those underrepresented dimensions will lead to new hypotheses, new discoveries, and more reliable identification of invalid and biased work. I trust that the six substantive examples I gave, and the various other reflections, were clearly articulated and satisfied the standards of intellectual rigor and insight that would be expected of a member of the academy. I trust that we agree that the practices I pointed out were worth pointing out. I trust that it's clear that a decision to discriminate against me is a decision to have a less diverse and less vibrant social science, and that such discrimination would vividly contradict the field's explicit and resounding commitments to diversity and inclusion. If it's going to happen again, if any scholar is inclined to ignore the merit in my contributions out of resentment, tribalism, or partisan political antipathy, be sure to clean your mirrors.

We were born in an arbitrary place and time – this one. There were never any guarantees. The state of social science is free to vary along those dimensions of place and time. There is no reason to assume that an early 21st-century social science dominated by a particular political ideology and the residue of postmodernism is the Platonic height of behavioral science. There's work to be done, and I'd very much appreciate the opportunity to do some of it.


The original post from July, 2014

I was denied admission to a graduate program because of my political views

Actually, it may have been more my perceived views than my actual views.

Now that the BBS paper is posted, I'll tell this story briefly (we cut it from the paper.) Some social psychologists have been skeptical of the idea that people in the field suffer discrimination due to their dissent from left-wing politics, even after many social psychologists explicitly said they would discriminate (against conservatives in particular.) Some skeptics have demanded systematic evidence of actual discrimination, which is a bit cheeky of them, since we know that such evidence is almost theoretically impossible to collect (especially in an academic field, given its career structure and stark power imbalances.) But I can offer one account.

I applied to several PhD programs in Social Psychology, and was accepted by Berkeley, Arizona State, and UNC - Chapel Hill.

At another program, the faculty had apparently seen my blog (an old blog that I canned later that year). Among posts about my recent marathon experience, I had posted about the mass resignation of all fourteen Jewish members of the board of advisors of the Carter Center, former President Jimmy Carter's nonprofit. They resigned because Carter's new book seemed to suggest that Palestinian terrorist bombings of Israeli civilian targets were justified until a Palestinian state was established, or a particular type of peace accord was accepted by Israel.

In my post, I supported the board members and criticized Carter's apparent tolerance of terrorism¹. On a phone interview, a faculty member from the social psychology program directly asked me about this blog post (and no others.) She also asked if I "really" felt that way about Jimmy Carter. She also openly stated that all of the faculty in the program had a problem with my post, except for her (it would've been 4 - 6 other professors), and that they all opposed my entry into the program. From her questions, I got the impression that my politics needed to clarified and vetted before final decisions were made. They subsequently denied me admission, with no further interaction or visits. (If it matters, this program was somewhat less selective and prestigious than the programs that accepted me.)

That was an extremely awkward phone call. I was blindsided, was not at all prepared to talk about politics or my precise feelings toward Jimmy Carter. It's the kind of thing that could not happen in a normal professional environment, and would give HR people nightmares if it did. Nothing like this ever happened before my entry into academia. That she was willing to openly discuss the fact that the faculty opposed me because of my apparent political views, and was willing to actively probe my political views, speaks volumes. The academic climate with respect to political/intellectual diversity is much like the Mad Men universe with respect to women – blind, clueless.

During the call, I got the impression that they thought / were worried that I was a conservative. The horror. I'm a secular libertarian, but many academic ideologues don't make such distinctions. They're not very aware of the intellectual landscape², know little of the enormous volume of space in that landscape outside of the modern leftist framework, and they collapse it into binary us/them boxes. You're either with them, or you're with Sarah Palin / Glenn Beck. (FYI, I know very little about Glenn Beck and his intellectual crimes – I just know they hate him.) Note that it was siding with a bunch of liberals who served on the board of the Carter Center that got me in trouble, along with direct criticism of Carter. Remarkably narrow straits...

1. I oppose murder, and mass murder, and I think one of the absolute tragedies of our era is how casually we justify mass killings, or ignore them, when they're distant from our daily lives – and how mass killings are so easily legitimized by politics. Killing a person is an enormous thing – there's nothing more enormous, and nothing more irreversible. The amount of suffering in the world staggers me, and can paralyze me if I let it – especially all the killing. If we target an alleged terrorist in some hardscrabble village in Yemen with a drone strike, and we also kill his kids, or his neighbor, or the mailman... that's an absolute catastrophe, a rupture in the universe. TV stations should cut to the news of the catastrophe – it should be as big as a space shuttle blowing up. We should know their names, and we should be in their debt, their families' debt. But there's so much of it, that we don't know their names, we don't pay our debt, and I feel terrible going back to coding data in SPSS. Steven Pinker is right that violence is down wordwide, but 1 is a towering number – if you're a just a kid, your whole life ahead of you, you should never be blown up while eating lunch with your family, so that we can get Israel to the bargaining table. So yeah, I was very disturbed by Carter's statements.

2. It's also worth noting that one's intellectual or philosophical framework need not give rise to a political identity. I'm not comfortable with politics being used as the primary sorting variable in the intellectual sphere. People don't have to care about politics, and separately, they don't need to have an easily labeled political identity that neatly fits the political terrain of our era. Many scholars and scientists do not fit into such schemas. (Politics as a sphere is central to the modern left in part because their ideology includes explicit and specific claims about the force of politics and power structures – life is largely about politics in that frame. Most of the forces in people's lives are attributed to politics, privilege, discrimination, and so forth, and there isn't a whole lot going on in human affairs that isn't political, at least not that they talk about.)



20 Comments
Michael Strong link
2/11/2015 10:04:35 am

Joe Duarte enters the ranks of heroic public intellectuals big time with this blog post. I love the fact that he combines 1) Intellectually sound arguments for his positions. 2) Outrage that the principles he espouses, which were once the essence of responsible intellectual discourse, are now largely neglected or betrayed in academia 3) Multiple legitimate examples of such neglect and betrayal 4) The willingness to keep the conversation focused on these issues even after he has been told to shut up for the sake of his career.

Reply
Theodore Dawes
2/11/2015 01:31:24 pm

Mr. Duarte,
Thank you for this splendid piece. And thank you for the many examples you provide of the modern faculty dynamic at work.
Let me point you to another. I want you to see what I believe is surely the best-ever example of the willing blindness that the academic ideologue can bring to bear.
In 2012 Gordon Gauchat, who would have been your colleague at UNC-Chapel Hill had you chosen that route, released a study that purportedly found that conservatives, particularly college-educated conservatives, are losing their faith in science.
The story was picked up by thousands of media outlets (Google it). Virtually all covered it the way Scientific American did (i.e., without question, and surely without reading the study).
I've provided a link below to the article in the Scientific America.
The headline reads, "Conservatives Lose Faith in Science over Last 40 Years."
The subtitle adds detail, saying "a new academic analysis finds conservatives expressing more and more distrust in science in recent decades, particularly educated conservatives."
Unfortunately for the reputation of Scientific American (or so one hopes, rather bleakly), the study says no such thing. In fact it reports that educated conservatives have lost faith in the "scientific community." The two -- science and the scientific community -- are simply conflated.
Gauchat says his study is based on the data found in the 2006 through 2010 General Social Surveys, which he chose "because it contains a wide variety of items that probe different aspects of public trust in the scientific community."
I'm unfamiliar with the Survey, but fair enough.
But in his study he makes a leap of faith that is simply breathtaking: "These analyses suggest that the confidence measure used in this study is a reasonable approximation of a favorable disposition toward science."
If you parse that properly -- and by his choice of words we can assume Gauchat wanted to discourage you from doing so -- you will discover that it is pure bullshit.
In the end, Gauchat had much more to say, including floating a number of theories on why conservatives are losing faith in science. Let me point you to http://www.asanet.org/press/conservatives_trust_has_fallen.cfm
If you're interested in learning more, here's a link to the study.
In the meantime, keep up the good work.

Reply
you're an idiot, you got what you deserved
2/12/2015 03:38:34 am

So you wasted your life on trying to become one of the rich and famous libertarian propagandists, but you weren't at the right school where entire process is bought and sold and you were rejected. Like most ideological hacks, you refer to all criticism as an attack on your just and rigorous scientific principles - which you don't have, because you're not a scientist. Hiding behind the principle of your correctness has no weight, also, if you're going to try and use the emotional appeal of the poor wretched scholar, just innocently trying to reverse-engineer reality to fit into market ideology frameworks, don't refer to everyone who opposes you as "Leftists". It immediately makes it clear that you're the same class of brainwashed idiots that can't understand that the political spectrum is objective and not to be used a bludgeon for people you disagree with.

Reply
GAR link
2/12/2015 12:32:20 pm

Bruh, he didn't waste jack, he was accepted to USC Berkley's PHD program and is a current published researcher in the Social Sciences field.

You're a fool.

Reply
Michael Ellis
2/12/2015 01:38:46 pm

Thanks for writing what was obviously a perfect satire of the type of ignorant, hateful and intellectually stunted attitudes shown by adherents of the far left cult. Hysterical!

Reply
John M
2/13/2015 12:21:36 pm

The leftists always squeal the loudest when they are accurately called out for their behavior. Like cockroaches, they don't like the light being shined on what they are and do. Note the bullying language, too. Scratch a leftist and find a thug.

Reply
Joe Duarte
2/13/2015 05:19:47 pm

A note in response to GAR's comment:

When it comes to PhD and other graduate programs, it's really only the prestige and quality of the particular program that matters.

The prestige and selectivity of the university as a whole is much less important to scientists and prospective graduate students. The public prestige of universities is largely driven by their selectivity at the undergraduate level.

Within the field of social psychology, getting into Berkeley is hard because they have a good program.

However, it's not harder than getting into Arizona State's program. The ASU program is elite. Getting into UNC - Chapel Hill was probably easier than getting into ASU's program at that time, even though UNC is a public ivy and much more selective than ASU at the undergraduate level.

Just wanted to make sure ASU got it props. It's a top program. ASU gets mocked a lot in general media, 30 Rock, etc. based on its rep as party school or something, but that has no bearing on any of the graduate programs, many of which will be world class.

Reply
Barry Woods
2/13/2015 08:15:21 pm

ref 'science writer' Adam Corner..

Dr Adam Corner is a well published academic psychologist first and foremost, he of ALL people should know better...
http://psych.cf.ac.uk/contactsandpeople/researchstaff/corner.php

he researches climate scepticism!, and is part of a large group doing so at Cardiff University. but here is Adam painted Blue on a demo:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/cardiff_friends_of_the_earth/4190476939/

Dr Paul Matthews challenged Adam for his failure to be even slightly sceptical of the paper that a fellow psychologist (Lewandowsky) had sent him, a month before even the APS press release.

2nd comment here (Adam’s blog, where the Guardian article was reproduced, this was amongst the first location, that Lew’s paper got looked at by sceptics, five of us commenting there were named in the Recursive Fury revenge paper, by Lew))
http://web.archive.org/web/20141117111746/http://talkingclimate.org/are-climate-sceptics-more-likely-to-be-conspiracy-theorists/

but of course Dr Adam Corner is an activist/campaigner on climate himself, professionally frames his opponents as motivated by motivated reasoning and psychology.

When those opponents (sceptics) look at him and ask him to look in the mirror, he blinks and accuses people of smearing him...

Adam stood in front of an audience of MP's in a discussion of conservative scepticism and motivated reasoning and ideology, and said

"I am a researcher not a campaigner"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLPpOS2BpH0&feature=player_embedded#t=820
the members of parliament in the audience took that at face value (on trust) how they laughed afterwards (I asked them) - Not least because Adam was a Green Party Member and had even been listed as standing to be a member of parliament for the Green party..

Picture of Adam Corner - Green party candidate carrying a banner at Copenhagen - 'Act Now' it says...

http://t.co/Hdqz9Wbn

original greenparty source and write up by Adam Corner(Green Party parliamentary candidate)
http://t.co/ezqsBusb

Whilst also at Copenhagen waving banners, Adam tweeted

@AJCorner
loving Brown calling people 'deniers' and 'luddites' on Cif. Tell it like it is Gordy! www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green
12:59 PM Dec 7th, 2009 from web
http://twitter.com/AJCorner/status/6429777167

Adam, was also Friends of the Earth Transition Towner, Policy Advisor to COIN, whose founder started the Halls of Shame for the Deniers..

Should sceptics just think of him as a liar, or delusional, and activist... or just laugh..
I settled on laugh. but it would have been very easy to write a liar and delusion blog post at WUWT, with all his activist photo’s to be seen
and outside of the 'sceptics' how would ANY member of the public see Dr Adam Corner, neutral unbiased,non activist? I think not... but he can’t or won’t acknowledge that.

Adam even had his own 100monthsandcounting blog ( which he used to link to in his Guardian bio) indicating perhaps he is on the doom side of climate activsism.
http://100monthsandcounting.blogspot.co.uk/search?updated-max=2010-09-04T08:40:00%2B01:00&max-results=7

and just for fun: Dr Adam Corner’s (Green Party) Friends of the Earth - Climate March write up - in London - pre copenhagen

http://www.foecardiff.co.uk/content/cardiff-campaigners-demand-climate-action-record-breaking-protest

And a photo of Adam on the March, painted blue, wearing a blue fright wig, holding a stop climate chaos banner...
https://www.flickr.com/photos/cardiff_friends_of_the_earth/4190476939/

this is not to smear, just to say look in the mirror!

Why should ANY sceptic trust you. Adam?

He published Lew's work in the guardian without a thought! or any questions, we merely asked him, if a research paper had said greens/climate activists were inclined to be 9/11 conspiracy theorists, he would have been all over the data and paper like a rash..
The second point is, if psychologists are going to research the public with respect to cimate scepticism (and they should research activsism as well) can we have somebody at tiny bit more perceived as 'neutral' on the topic... pretty please.

Juut so the whole filed of psychology doesn’t get laughed at?

but you have seen my responses from the University of Western Australia, the journal – Psychological Science, and the APS. this is not a laughing matter..
they both enable this political activism of Lewandowsky/Cook and protect them.

Reply
Barry Woods
2/13/2015 11:07:15 pm

Dr Adam Corners asked about why are so many in academia on the left: In an article in the Times Higher Education Supplement.

and seems to show us why, with his own prejudices, without realizing it..

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/if-theres-no-spectrum-of-colours-is-the-result-white-noise/421185.article


"The researchers' confirmation that people with conservative ideologies are uncommon in social psychology common rooms will surprise no one. Seeking to explain (or, from a conservative perspective, excuse) behaviour is a trait more commonly associated with the Left. Ask a group of social scientists to explain the rioting on the streets of Britain in 2011, and they will point to problems in the rioters' childhoods, or social and economic inequality, locked in over generations - not the "criminality, pure and simple" seen by Prime Minister David Cameron.

The very act of enquiring into the underlying reasons for particular attitudes and behaviours seems to slot much more neatly into a left-wing than a conservative ideology."

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Dr Chris
2/26/2015 04:45:16 pm

It seems to me you're very defensive and taking this entirely too personal. As an academician my impression is that graduate schools prefer candidates who are malleable. Those who think they have all the answers and already have their own soapboxes can spell trouble. What we do and say in public is the impression we choose to give others about ourselves. If you want to convey a less know-it-all attitude about your ideologies, then write with more supposition and less authority. More than likely it's you they're getting a glimpse of, not your politics; how you carry yourself spells trouble for those whose life work is to help the educable advance their intellect in the academic arena. You sound like someone whose myopia is known to all but you. You could be a little more humble, a little more open and display a little less hubris. They're not picking on you. You outed this side of yourself. If applause is what you're after, enjoy your blog. Otherwise, stop whining and get back to the research you claim to enjoy. Evidence-based means observing what you measure empirically. So take the bad with the good and learn from it. It will make you a better student, a better thinker, a better doctor one day, and a better human being. Namaste.

Reply
Joe Duarte
2/26/2015 05:06:44 pm

I don't think it's reasonable to say to someone that they shouldn't take discrimination so personally. That just seems upside down. It would be so strange to say that to women, minorities, etc. after they've been discriminated against.

I can see the malleability angle, although I'd think teachability the better value. Malleability seems too clonish for science. I'm not sure if that was an issue of not. The post they interrogated me about was a paragraph or two, wasn't much of soapbox. I think my blog was mostly marathon stuff at the time.

I'm not sure about humble, open, etc. I care about arguments, reasons, evidence, etc., so if we're talking about my substantive points up top, I think all that matters is whether they're right or well-reasoned, not whether they're sufficiently humble. I'm all business as far as the concrete points are concerned. I value humility at a broader level of analysis, but for specific points I want to see arguments.

I can see the defensive point. I think my post is too beggy, too "please don't discriminate against me again". I'm not into begging, so I'm not a big fan of that vibe in the post. In any case, I think the points I raised are a lot more important than how humble I should be. I don't value humility as a personality trait, only as an epistemic orientation, an openness to arguments, evidence, etc.

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Andres
12/16/2015 04:42:59 pm

Joe,

I have seen discrimination in the academy from both sides: liberals and conservatives, Marxists and non-Marxists to be more precise. Academic departments are cliquish and exhibit these traits incidentally to their politics. One sees the same in business and other pursuits. Yes, it's a bummer when you are the object of discrimination but no one said life is fair.

Good luck and please remember not to behave in the same fashion when you make it: there will be liberal applicants to your department that don't say things you don't like or approve of.

Namaste!

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ThirteenthLetter
12/17/2015 12:10:13 am

"I have seen discrimination in the academy from both sides: liberals and conservatives"

Oh, come on. Where did you even find any part of the academy that had enough conservatives to successfully discriminate? Unless it was Bob Jones University, I'm calling shenanigans on this.

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Dain link
12/17/2015 10:39:05 am

Some econ and business departments in handful of universities are as close as you'll get to seeing that.

Mallory Williams
12/16/2015 05:01:05 pm

All very interesting I suppose, but let's not pretend that the 'social sciences' are actually a scientific discipline. The academic rigour found in the real sciences is simply not present in this field - it's no surprise you so easily found examples of poorly performed research.

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Matt
12/17/2015 01:11:13 am

So ... affirmative action hiring for hillbillies?

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Loren Pechtel
12/17/2015 10:14:02 am

The world needs more people like you proclaiming the Emperor's attire. Unfortunately, as you have seen it generally doesn't work very well.

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Dave
12/27/2015 04:31:12 pm

Thanks for writing this up, Mr. Duarte. As someone who is taking the plunge into the humanities, the bias and bullying here is even worse.

Reply
wala
1/6/2016 09:00:57 am

Thanks so much for sharing this

But by the end you make it sound as if researchers should explicitly be chosen having a more diverse background. How would this not introduce another bias?

While i agree academia would benefit from diverse backgrounds, how would you actually implement this change? How can you diversify the demographics without damaging the opportunities of more capable people? Is it worth it?

That only seems to work in context where you have lots of capable and readily available "3rd worlders and rural folk".

I agree with pushing towards being more self-concious about biases in academic work, and I hope this results in the acceptance of more different views and people, but not push it.

Two wrongs won't cancel each other out.

Reply
Paul Shunamon
10/7/2016 03:30:04 pm

Jose you are lucky you are not contending with this in Evolutionary Biology...it is so severe there Professional Papers by legitimate scientists are selectively excluded by peer journals unless the opinion implied supports their accepted hypothesis.

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    José L. Duarte

    Social Psychology, Scientific Validity, and Research Methods.

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