18 SCIENCERead more at location 3488
Note: Quanta ideologia si traveste da scienza? Tanta... "Sono fatti così". Sto parlando dei neri, delle donne, degli omosessuali o dei conservatori? A seconda posso essere un razzista, un sessista, un curioso o uno scienziato sociale... Diffida di quelli a cui "interessano i fatti"... Due tipi di "scienza": quella in "cattiva fede" e quela in "buona fede selettiva"... Come si capisce se possiedi una mente pro science? Semplice, basta qualche domandina sull'evoluzione, su cosa ne pensi del cambiamento climatico o delle cellule embrionali. Perchè nn chiedere nulla sull'ereditarietà dell'intelligenza? O sul dolore fetale? O sulla distribuzione delle abilità cognitive tra i sessi? O sul geoegineering? O sull'energia nucleare? O sugli OGM?... La vicenda di Larry Summers. Ottimo esempio di come il dibattito debba essere soffocato in fretta e furia... E la scienza di Obama? Doveva essere il suo fiore all'occhiello quando poi si affrontò la questione delle trivellazioni petrolifere: balle e censure fioccarono da tutte le parti... In realtà la scienza è vista sia dalla destra che dalla sinistra come un mezzo x avvalorare le proprie posizioni.. L'accusa di essere anti scienza accampando motivazioni etiche mescola i puani: nessuno vuole bloccare i piromani xchè crede che il fuoco nn bruci... I vecchi misuratori dei crani sono stati rimpiazzati dagli scanner cerebrali ma le inferenze infondate sono sempre lì... Psicologia sociale: si fa un esperimento, per altro con campione ridotto, si isola una correlazione significativa e si formula un'ipotesi tra le tante possibili che viene poi ripresa dai giornali... Ipotesi ricorrente: quelli di destra sono più stupidi. Ipotesi alternativa: quelli di destra sono meno deferenti rispetto all'autorotà accademica, quelli di sinistra sono + proni ad assecondare i loro inquisitori. Oppure a ds ci si chiede "dove cazzo vogliono arrivare con tutte ste domande sceme"… Chi conduce qs esperimenti? Di solito un ricrrcatore di psicologia sociale, ovvero di una facoltá in cui il 96% dei prof. vota a sinistra... L'uomo di destra UD è spesso accusato di credere di avere "Dio dalla sua parte". Ma l'US nn è molto diverso quando sostituisce le scienze sociali a Dio... Scientismo: l'assunto che la scienza possa essere applicata a qualsiasi ambito della vita e che la fede sia sempre un'intrusa. Un atteggiamento che rivela una grande nostalgia di Dio... L'esempio più noto di scientismo: il marxismo. L'intellettuale come prete con il dio della scienza dalla sua parte... Theodore Adorno: essere di destra denota una tara mentale... Nei test adorniani per "misurare" il fascismo di una xsona la fede e il rispetto delle tradizioni erano considerate tra le cause di fascismo. Adorno vedeva un nesso tra la famiglia tedesca e il nazismo... Adorno influenzó l'accademia americana, ben presto l'inclinazione politica venne fatta risalire alla struttura psicologica. Ben presto il conservatore assurse al rango di tarato... Alle elezioni presidenziali nn manca mai l'appello degli psicologi: XY (ovvero il candidato americano) nn è psicologicamente adatto... Non opporsi alle diseguaglianze e rintracciare del buono nel passato vengono considerati difetti mentali. Hitler, Mussolini e Reagan vengono assimilati nello stesso minestrone. Stalin e Castro? Conservatori anche loro per far quadrare i conti... La psicologia influenza senz'altro l'ideologia ma le causalità grossolane della pseudoscienza al servizio della politica vanno denunciate: il mercato è la più potente forma di cambiamento e chi lo invoca? La destra, guarda caso... Sospetto: come mai la stragrande maggioranza delle ricerche si focalizza sul Conservatore di Destra? Assunzione implicita: uomo di sinistra = uomo normale... Per Kanazawa US è un tipo genetico nuovo: si preoccupa degli altri, anche se nn sono parenti. Questo tipo genetico prevale x la sua intelligenza... Kanazawa: US, grazie alla sua intelligenza superiore, controlla ormai tutte le istituzioni, eccezion fatta x il business. È un'eccezione nn da poco. Ma soprattutto riguarda un'area che nn consente barriere ideologiche... E i cristiani? per K. dovrebbero essere degli US eppure vengono esclusi e nn occupano un bel niente. Una confrrma che l'ideologia pesa più dell'intelligenza... E i neri? Anche loro sono sottorappresentati nelle istituzioni. Forse perchè sono ottusi?... Andiamo a vedere l'orientamento politico di chi popola le Università. Ebbene, possiamo fidarci di cosa ci raccontano certe ricerche? Meglio andarci coi piedi di piombo... Simpatizzarr x le nuove idee nn è un merito a prescindrre. Quando si rivelano sbagiate? aUn bilancio al netto degli erreori è difficile da fare. E poi lo scetticismo nn è forse indice di mentalità scientifica?... US teme le speculazioni sulle diffrrenze genetiche tra razze e sessi, ma quando si tratta di ideologia si lancia alla grande... Ma xchè tutto qs? Semplice: meglio delegittimare l'avversario che rispondergli... Naturalmente il classico US pro science di sciena ci capisce ben poco ma è pronto a fidarsi dell'esperto di turno, che nel 90% dei casi è un US anche lui, ma qs nn conta: la scienza è scienzs! Lo stato dell'arte negli studi che collegano personalità e ideologia, quelli seri. L' uomo di sinistra US non è più intelligente dell'uomo di destra UD, cominciamo con lo sfatare questo mito, è cruciale distinguere gli ambiti in due sfere: economica (E) e sociale (S). USS sembra leggermente più intelligente di UDS mentre UDE sembra più intelligente di USE. D'altro canto, se consideriamo il meglio, USS sembrerebbe più curioso, il che lo indirizza verso gli studi accademici mentre UDE è più attratto dal business. Senonché nel mondo accademico, diversamente che nel mondo del business, esistono accessi per cooptazione, ovvero su base ideologica, cosicché UD trova un clima ostile se non addirittura ostracismo, il che, in presenza di preferenze già orientate altarove, induce facilmente alla rinuncia... 18@@@@@@@@@@@ Edit
They do that because they were born that way.” If you say that about homosexuals, you are tolerant and realistic. If you say it about blacks, you are racist (unless you’re black). If you say it about Jews, you’re anti-Semitic, unless it’s in the context of criticizing Israel, in which case you’re simply telling “hard truths” everyone else is afraid to say. If you say it about women, you may or may not be sexist, depending on who is manning (er, Womanning) the feminist battle stations at the moment. If you say it about men, you just might be a writer for Esquire. But if you say it about conservatives, you’re a scientist.Read more at location 3517
From climate change to embryonic stem cell research to early childhood education, patently ideological agendas are camouflaged under the tarp of scientific rhetoricRead more at location 3524
A host of liberal activists and intellectuals are deeply invested in the idea that conservatives are “antiscience.” Obviously, not all of these people argue in bad faith. But many argue in very selective good faith.Read more at location 3528
So, for example, if you disagree with not only the diagnosis of climate change but the proposed remedies for it, you are antiscience. Before it became clear that culling stem cells from human embryos was essentially unnecessary, it became a matter of faith that opposition to creating life to destroy it wasn’t a matter of conscience, but evidence of antiscience views.Read more at location 3530
Why can’t the measure of being proscience hinge on the question of heritability of intelligence? Or the existence of fetal pain? Or the distribution of cognitive abilities among the sexes at the extreme right tail of the bell curve?Read more at location 3535
Defenders of embryonic stem cell research insist that opponents want to deny people life-saving remedies.Read more at location 3539
how are we to deal with the armies of activists who oppose the use of DDT, which could save millions from malaria?Read more at location 3540
Summers speculated that there might be more male geniuses than female ones. Some evidence apparently suggests men are overrepresented among morons and brainiacs, while the average woman is smarter than the average man. Scientists got the vapors because he violated the principles not of science but of liberalism.Read more at location 3542
conservatives and liberals alike oppose such practices not because they are against science but because ethical considerationsRead more at location 3553
The scientists have put away their calipers and replaced them with MRI machines and gene sequencers.Read more at location 3560
this is a white-smocked effort to explain away conservatism as a mental defect, genetic abnormality, or curable pathology.Read more at location 3562
In their 2008 paper, “Two Genes Predict Voter Turnout,” James H. Fowler and Christopher T. Dawes found that “individuals with a polymorphism of the MAOA gene are significantly more likely to have voted in the 2004 presidential election.”1 And researchers reexamining the Minnesota twin studies—surprisingly these have nothing to do with baseball players—have found that political outlook has a nontrivial amount of heritability.Read more at location 3564
basically the test asked subjects to spot Ms and Ws on a screen for a fraction of a second. (500 ms—“milliseconds”—is one half second. 100 ms is a tenth of a second.) It turns out that the liberals—as per the authors’ definition—did somewhat better on the test than the conservatives. What does that mean? Well, according to the authors, it means: “Liberals are more responsive to informational complexity, ambiguity and novelty.” Liberals are also “more likely than are conservatives to respond to cues signaling the need to change habitual responses.” Meanwhile, “a more conservative orientation is related to greater persistence in a habitual response pattern, despite signals that this response pattern should change.” Translation: Conservatives are literally too stupid to be spell-checkers at an M&M factory because they won’t be able to understand that the occasional W is just an upside down M, particularly when they start coming off the conveyor belt really fast like in the chocolate factory episode of I Love Lucy.Read more at location 3581
The Guardian dutifully declared, “Scientists have found that the brains of people calling themselves liberals are more ableRead more at location 3590
The Los Angeles Times announced in an editorial that the study “suggests that liberals are more adaptable than conservatives” and “might be better judges of the facts.”Read more at location 3592
The authors found a statistically significant correlation between the fear responses of subjects and support for various “Protective Policies.” According to the authors: Individuals with measurably lower physical sensitivities to sudden noises and threatening visual images were more likely to support foreign aid, liberal immigration policies, pacifism, and gun control,Read more at location 3601
Perhaps liberals are simply more deferential to academic authorities and therefore have calmer responses when the expert in the lab coat busts out the calipers or electrodes? Maybe liberals are more interested in pleasing their inquisitors? Perhaps skeptical conservatives are constantly wondering “What the Hell are these people doing?”Read more at location 3608
Besides, it’s not preposterous to believe that there’s ample nature to go with the nurture when it comes to our political views. Scientists know that we are not blank slates. We are hardwired as a species to believe and act in certain ways. In fact, conservatives have been saying as much for several millennia now—think original sin and human nature—while the Left has repeatedly bought into the idea we are born Rousseauian noble savages,Read more at location 3619
Well, for the Left science has long been a god. Friedrich Hayek called this misuse of science as “scientism”—the assumption and claim that scientific principles can be smuggled into the world of nonscience. As we’ve seen, part of the genius behind Marxism’s brand was its claim to be scientific.Read more at location 3626
It’s a largely forgotten insight to both Marx and Engels that they came to their communism via their atheism, and not the other way around. They hated God and sought to replace Him with a more reliable competitor.Read more at location 3629
Georges Sorel, the intellectual John the Baptist of both Italian Fascism and Russian Leninism, recognized that the science of Marxian scientific socialism was nonsense, but it worked extremely well as a political religion.Read more at location 3634
This created the rationale for the Leninist vanguard of the proletariat, the intellectual high priests of Marxism who took it upon themselves to shape attitudes and wage a merciless war on backward thinking. They had the god of science on their sideRead more at location 3637
The Authoritarian Personality, the study purported to “prove” that holding conservative or right-wing views was a mental defect. Using the notorious “F-Scale” test (the F stood for Fascist),Read more at location 3650
the assumption that traditionalism and devotion to a strong family were both symptoms and causes of fascismRead more at location 3653
Charles Beard was a pioneer of this approach as well, arguing that the Founding Fathers were motivated by little more than their class consciousness as rich landowners.Read more at location 3660
conservative “fears change, dreads disorder, and is intolerant of nonconformity,” and he tends to “derogate reason and intellectuality and… eschew theory.” These “personality types” were drawn from the ranks of “the uninformed, the poorly educated, and… the less intelligent,” but also that they were “inflexible and unyielding” and “intolerant.” To boot, the conservative “derogates reason.” How can you reason with people who are hardwired to “derogate reason”?Read more at location 3664
D. Ripper character in the movie Dr. Strangelove and his phobia about CommunistsRead more at location 3669
In 1964, over a thousand mental-health professionals thought nothing of signing a statement that Senator Barry Goldwater was not “psychologically fit”Read more at location 3670
Today textbooks from grade school to grad school are chockablock with subtle variations of this clinical bias, working from the assumption that conservatism is something to be educated out of students.Read more at location 3673
In 2003, researchers at UC Berkeley’s Institute of Personality and Social Research published “Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition”Read more at location 3675
and found—shockingly!—that conservatism is, as much now as ever was, a kind of mental defect.Read more at location 3677
The press release issued by Berkeley explained that: Disparate conservatives share a resistance to change and acceptance of inequality. Hitler, Mussolini, and former President Ronald Reagan were individuals, but all were right-wing conservatives because they preached a return to an idealized past and condoned inequality in some form.Read more at location 3679
Ahah. So Hitler and Mussolini—who both sought to socialize their economies, ban guns, ban dissent, ban freedom of every kind—were just like Reagan and Rush Limbaugh, who hold diametrically opposite positions in virtually every regard.Read more at location 3683
What about authoritarian personalities like, say, Castro and Stalin? Easy! They too were conservatives.Read more at location 3688
And remember: in no way were Stalin and Castro “against change.” Stalin transformed eastern Europe, imposed revolutionary changesRead more at location 3695
As I write this the Republicans are being routinely denounced for their “radical” desire to “fundamentally change” America’s social contract by reforming Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.Read more at location 3700
The market, which conservatives and libertarians want to radically expand at the expense of government, is the most powerful force for change in human history,Read more at location 3704
The clearest sign that this is all a con built on a lie masquerading as science is that the overwhelming majority of this “research” seeks to find why conservatives are the way they are. A truly dispassionate approach would yield as many papers trying to decipher why the hell liberals are the way they are.Read more at location 3707
Satoshi Kanazawa of Psychology Today argues that liberalism is genetically abnormal and its rise is a direct result of the fact that liberals are smarter than conservatives.Read more at location 3711
liberals control all institutions. They control the institutions because liberals are on average more intelligentRead more at location 3716
The Achilles’ heel of his argument can be found in his parenthetical concession that there are a “few areas in life (such as business)” where his theory falls apart. Why is business—a huge sector of American life—a contradiction to his thesis? The reason should be obvious: The institutional ideological filters do not screen out conservatives.Read more at location 3719
Anybody who’s actually looked at how academia, Hollywood, or publishing works understands that the gatekeepers aren’t simply keeping stupid conservatives out;Read more at location 3727
Christianity, while genetically novel, is not novel in a historic sense, and it is by his definition intrinsically liberal. After all, at the core of Christianity is the faith that we are all children of God.Read more at location 3729
Blacks are woefully underrepresented in the leadership of institutions. Replace “conservative” with “black” and you have, on liberalism’s own terms, a quintessentially racist argument.Read more at location 3731
According to a 2005 tally, registered Democrats at Stanford and Berkeley outnumber registered Republicans by a ratio of 7 to 1. In all the California schools surveyed, the ratio between Democratic and Republican professors of neuroscience is a staggering 13-1.Read more at location 3737
Psychologist and author Shawn Smith responding to Kanazawa writes that the field of psychology, “which is unquestionably dominated by liberals, has developed an ugly habit of falsely maligning the political right. Through respectable-looking ‘research’ we sling mud with flawed data and tendentious methodology.”11 “These bogus studies,” he continues, “build on each other to create an inbred, incoherent body of literatureRead more at location 3740
Liberals routinely insist it is outrageous to speculate about the genetic basis or heritability of intelligence or other traits among different races and sexes, while at the same time they are giddy to entertain the notion that conservatives have broken brains—basedRead more at location 3764
