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Correcting for “liberal” slant in social psych? Huh?

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From Scientific American, we learn that we mustn’t be too hasty:

How Do We Fix the Liberal Slant in Social Psychology?

Not by adding more conservative voices, but by subtracting out bias

Ah, how convenient. One does not need to add voices that might provide a check/balance effect.

There is no way of “subtracting out bias”; bias is where people stand when they gather information.

The normal way of ensuring fairness is to add more voices to the discussion, something author Piercarlo Valdesolo is clearly not anxious to do.

Fine. The smelly little social psych clique will continue to brew more scandals.

When people start fancy-dancing like this—when we ask them to just be honest—we know something is up.

Let’s start by blowing off the most obvious lies:

First, what ails the social sciences today is not a “liberal” bias. It is a progressive bias: = Things would be better if the government just had enough power to investigate more, collect more data, spy more, police more, jail more, smack enough heads, and engineer society toward approved outcomes by denying freedoms, then there would be more justice in the world.

Yup. That’s everywhere in academia today, as Greg Lukianoff has demonstrated in Unlearning Liberty. Apart from serious STEM subjects, campuses today are mainly turning out the ‘crats of tomorrow. Whatever you want to do with your life, their job will be to make a law for or against it, and enforce it. They have no other skills, purpose, or function.

That has never been a liberal approach to life, though some have succeeded in recent years in marketing it as such.

Look at the clickbait articles from social psych, seized on by pop science writers, which often turn out to be fraudulent (um, yeah, right?), which exhibit one or more features of flyover country is racist .

Three things to keep in mind when we face still more pathetic pleas from these would-be mini-bosses:

1.The “flyover country is racist” (etc.) theme is not counterintuitive to the people who go into social psychology. It is one of their core beliefs. A significant number of retracted studies allegedly demonstrate these beliefs as facts, conveniently packaged for the public as “counterintuitive.” However, not everyone out there is a stupe, and we all grasp the true situation quite clearly.

2. “Whether this bias in what people find interesting is reasonable is a topic for another day,” we are told. It is probably the only fact of longterm public importance adverted to [in some greasy defense of the current mess]. But it somehow a topic for another day.

3. The alleged “trap” that “some scholars and journalists” fall into [authoritarian progressive bias] is precisely the groove they want to, are supposed to, and are paid to fall into. And all hell would break loose in their own comfy watering holes if they didn’t.

As for accommodation, sorry, the ship has sailed. The controversies around peer reviewed fraud testify to the heart of the problem.

See also: New social sciences scandal: Oft-cited paper is complete rubbish —again? There was no way of distinguishing this Sokal hoax from the real thing, apparently.

What is the backlash and why?:

Does science know the answers to absolutely everything? (Widespread backlash against scientism)

Decline in belief in God masks rise in superstition

Are two out of three people really secret torturers?

“I will” means something after all

An end to the madness (the fall of the DSM)

Scientists clash over the origin of monogamy

The slow death of a pseudo-discipline

But people, grab a ringside seat, okay? Bring chocolate pretzels.

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