Was asked why so many social scientists are left wing. Could it be this? If you look at the world of inequality and poverty and think ‘we need to understand this and do better’ you might become a social scientist. But if you think ‘this is basically all ok’, you won’t. - ThreadSky

jowolff.bsky.social • 82 days ago

Was asked why so many social scientists are left wing. Could it be this? If you look at the world of inequality and poverty and think ‘we need to understand this and do better’ you might become a social scientist. But if you think ‘this is basically all ok’, you won’t.

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simonglend.bsky.social•82 days ago

Does this fit economics (the point is to explain it)? Is it back to front for sociology (the point is to change it)? If you accept that there are brilliant thinkers who are not left wing the difficult questions are about institutional capture and the ugly assumption only left wing people are clever.

jowolff.bsky.social•82 days ago

Didn’t have space to qualify. It fits sociology and political theory, not economics, political science and history which are much more ideologically diverse. And of course there are exceptions.

jlyons1991.bsky.social•82 days ago

It is also possible to look at a social situation and ask how the level of inequality can be best sustained, of course. If you are already predisposed to think that utopias are inevitably a scam and that people are irredeemably corrupt, then why not?

duhe.bsky.social•82 days ago

I am always baffled by how entrenched it is that values and ideologies come first and are in immutable. It’s related to the fact-value distinction. Why not wonder whether people who study social science become left-wing because of what they learn about the world and how to conceptualize it?

duhe.bsky.social•82 days ago

Another manifestation of this bias is the implicit assumption that is a natural state of things is to have representation of political views within disciplines similar to their share in the general public. The assumption being that political orientation is the akin to religious faith.

conjugateprior.org•82 days ago

Deep down, a lot of people have an unacknowledged belief that the every public-facing body - academia, politicians, police - should be filled by sortition. Nothing else is consistent with the expectation that the distributions of demographic characteristics in each subgroup match the population.

oskarkohonen.bsky.social•82 days ago

Makes sense. I think that if one is looking at a social phenomenon using some objective measurement, trying to find systemic explanations for them and having to argue within the known results in the scientific area, then just to be able to do that, one has already rejected many conservative values.

oskarkohonen.bsky.social•82 days ago

You can't be loyal to an in-group because then you're not objective, you can't say this way of doing thing is ours and good, that is bad. You can try looking for evidence supporting that, but you can't discover it itself if you think you already know it. Unless you are very lucky. And data is messy.

vonkriegstein.bsky.social•82 days ago

It's surely both, no?

duhe.bsky.social•82 days ago

Yes.

keithwilson.eu•82 days ago

Right. Many on the political right seem to believe that academics and college graduates tend to be left-leaning due to some sort of institutional bias. It never crosses their mind that they are left-leaning *because they are educated*. So academics, or education itself, are seen as the enemy.

keithwilson.eu•82 days ago

I think we will see this with the Trump administration gutting the education system so that it produces fewer Democratic voters and more Trump loyalists at the cost of educational standards (and academic institutions) across the board.

ilmariwalker.bsky.social•82 days ago

if you think ”this is basically ok” you become an economist

loveisallweneed41.bsky.social•82 days ago

Are we just animals living out our naturalist lifestyle? The animal kingdom seems to run similarly to the human kingdom.

stevebeing.me•82 days ago

A high percentage of the would-be right wing social scientists became plasterers instead.

sarabuschova.bsky.social•82 days ago

I think most *out there* scientists are going to be fairly neurodivergent- which means they are outside the statistical norms and things like money don’t really interest them.

sarabuschova.bsky.social•82 days ago

And because of being on the outside they can see the societal inequalities more.

sarabuschova.bsky.social•82 days ago

And isn’t that the tussle at Unis - the neurodivergents versus the statistical norm professors who have got their professorship because they’ve sucked up to the Provost. UCL was a case in point as I recall.

jowolff.bsky.social•82 days ago

As someone on the promotions committee for a few years at UCL, and spending a significant part of my time on it, I don’t recognise this description during my time (up to about 2016).

sarabuschova.bsky.social•82 days ago

It would be inappropriate to name folk, but it littered with it. Perhaps women are more attuned to it, because they have been discriminated against in Universities.

jowolff.bsky.social•82 days ago

The Provost had a tiny part in promotions. There were hundreds every year. The significant filter was at Head of Department level. Once applications were made the procedure was very fair (I was on a School committee of 6, always 3 men 3 women), but I know HoDs discouraged some people from applying.

sarabuschova.bsky.social•82 days ago

I was there in the 2000s and the Vice Provosts run the show and there were a lot of highly dubious professorships

robb.doering.ai•82 days ago

Put another way: leftists are interested in understanding society through experiment, conservatives have absolute faith in their hunches about hierarchy and are not interested in testing them.

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