[HN Gopher] Taboos and Self-Censorship Among U.S. Psychology Pro...
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Taboos and Self-Censorship Among U.S. Psychology Professors
Author : kvee
Score : 51 points
Date : 2024-05-16 19:10 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (journals.sagepub.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (journals.sagepub.com)
| pmarreck wrote:
| At least none of you studied evo psych in college... /facepalm
|
| And its legitimacy didn't matter. It conflicted with the blank-
| slate hypothesis, therefore it had to go...
| blamestross wrote:
| The last thread holding together the illusion of fair
| meritocracy in our society is tabla rasa.
| Dig1t wrote:
| The 10 questions will get you banned/flagged/ousted from even
| normal conversation amongst friends or casual groups, of course
| people are not going to risk their professional reputations with
| them.
|
| Discovering the truth of these questions is not really worth
| ruining your life.
|
| Look at James Watson, even if you win a Nobel Prize, your career
| can still be ruined if you say the wrong thing.
| bluescrn wrote:
| Of course, without heretics, we could still all believe in a
| geocentric universe, or even a flat Earth.
| iknowSFR wrote:
| This is one of the more wild social concepts that the modern
| age of social media has super charged. At its core: what's
| the acceptable line between presenting counter-views versus
| heresy? And one level up: what's the responsibility of the
| audience to consider any counter, even heresy?
|
| There are consequences in every choice.
| stared wrote:
| From "Kolmogorov Complicity And The Parable Of Lightning"
| (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-
| complicity-...):
|
| "Did Giordano Bruno die for his astronomical discoveries or
| his atheism? False dichotomy: you can't have a mind that
| questions the stars but never thinks to question the Bible.
| The best you can do is have a Bruno who questions both, but
| is savvy enough to know which questions he can get away with
| saying out loud. And the real Bruno wasn't that savvy."
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| Speaking your mind is something you can afford only once you
| already own a fortune, see e.g. all what is happening around
| J.K. Rowling.
| dj_gitmo wrote:
| I am not against taboos. Taboos can be good. However, it can be
| a problem when what is considered taboo expands to encompass
| basically everything.
| bithive123 wrote:
| What you say is true, but tragic. What is a professional
| reputation worth if one ignores inconvenient truths? No opinion
| (however lay or erudite) is deeply serious if truth is less
| important than ego preservation. Any system of thought that
| disregards truth is ultimately incoherent and will produce
| nothing of real value.
| devindotcom wrote:
| An odd article. Their previous work hits a lot of the same notes.
| But the selective transparency on the methods - for instance,
| only briefly describing how they arrived at these "taboo
| conclusions" - suggests they're more interested in stirring the
| pot and keeping these assertions circulating under the guise of
| suppressed science. (My mistake, they relocated the pilot study
| to supp mat, but it is not reassuring to read.)
|
| "A vocal minority and silent majority may have created a
| seemingly hostile climate against taboo conclusions and the
| scholars who forward them, even if the silent majority has great
| contempt for the vocal minority. Future research should test
| these possibilities more directly."
|
| This kind of editorializing feels out of place and very
| revealing. This retraction is perhaps indicative of the general
| quality of the work as well:
|
| https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095679761989791...
| crmd wrote:
| The most surprising result to me is how scholars tended to report
| that _moral concerns that a study's conclusions could harm
| vulnerable groups_ was NOT a valid reason to avoid publishing (M
| = 29.61, SD = 27.68). I assumed this was a primary motivation for
| all the tiptoeing around taboo topics.
| lupusreal wrote:
| > _" Younger, more left-leaning, and female faculty were
| generally more opposed to controversial scholarship."_
|
| That's so counterintuitive, I simply cannot believe it's true.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| I have a large and very eclectic group of buddies, ranging from
| one extreme to the other, in term of politic, life style,
| believes, education, etc.
|
| Anecdotally, this is true in my circle.
|
| Left leaning people around me think they are more open minded,
| but really they just have a different set of things they
| accept. They have the same number of icks, just not at the same
| place.
|
| The big gap is in how they behave when in contact with things
| they don't like.
|
| And right leaning people have been so far more capable of
| cooperating with those who don't match their values.
|
| Also, on paper, left leaning have expressed more humane values,
| espacially when very general or abstract. But in the day to
| day, when it comes to the mondain or practical, I've seen the
| sexist or racist guys help more my muslim or girl friends that
| the ones saying every body is equal.
|
| It weirds me out.
| 2cynykyl wrote:
| I too always got the impression that 'cancellations' were
| spearheaded by young, leftists. Not sure where gender comes
| in to play though.
| gmarx wrote:
| I refer you to the definitive resource on this issue- the
| movie "Mean Girls". This movie is the key to understanding
| the current age.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Early on perhaps that was true, but cancel culture seems to
| have broad appeal across the political spectrum these days.
|
| Although you could make an argument that it still leans
| left on the public side, with more of a focus on private
| death threats and harassment on the right. They don't
| approach the problem of crushing dissent with exactly the
| same strategy.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| I find it very unlikely that you have exposure both to the
| extreme left and the extreme right.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| That does seem unlikely. The extreme left is a good bit
| smaller than the extreme right. The vast, vast majority of
| Democrats that MAGA folks like to paint as communists are
| in fact damn near as conservative as they are on most
| issues. You could probably put all the actual communists in
| America in a single stadium, with space left over.
| dj_gitmo wrote:
| I don't find it surprising and it fits my experience with
| millennial, and younger, Anglo sphere women. If you bring
| topics like "race" or gender, you had better stay within
| heavily policed boundaries.
|
| I don't even disagree with the goals of these people, but I
| think there is such ridged ideological conformity, that the
| quality of the thinking suffers. In other words, I am very
| skeptical of the solutions that they propose because I don't
| think they have the freedom to really consider these problems
| from every angle.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| I'm genuinely surprised you find that counterintuitive - that
| would have been my exact guess.
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| I wonder if they're less successful in finding an advisor or
| related to publishing efforts. Not sure if the paper accounts
| for survivorship bias.
| subjectsigma wrote:
| That definitely matches my experience (in areas outside of
| psychology)...
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| > That's so counterintuitive, I simply cannot believe it's
| true.
|
| Science, ladies and gentlemen.
| ChainOfFools wrote:
| It turns entirely on what is meant by 'controversial.'
|
| Applying a 1950's sense of the word would indeed be hard to
| square with the rest of the statement. But a 2020's sense of
| the word completely aligns with my own experience both as a
| student and as someone with several minority professors as
| close family.
|
| The most vocal and internally-conformist group, by far, are
| white female grad students and professors under 40 or 35 or so.
| Change any single parameter and the population of anti-
| controversial (in the current sense) voices drops sharply.
|
| Also familiar is a general undercurrent of sentiment among
| departmental and field-adjacent colleagues that the behavior of
| this group is noxious and counterproductive, even among those
| who broadly sympathize with them. Along with a resigned and
| quiet dread that nothing can be done about it.
| senorqa wrote:
| Cancel Culture at its best!
| brikym wrote:
| When even the real faculties of science have become financially
| driven and corrupted you know that soft 'science' like psychology
| is even worse.
| ano-ther wrote:
| Is it meaningful to do linear regressions through clouds like the
| ones shown in Figure 1?
|
| https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/17456916241252...
| airstrike wrote:
| No
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