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wedrifid comments on 2014 Less Wrong Census/Survey - Less Wrong
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I expect that doctors (of the medical kind) would agree as much or more than the average person. Most of the 'Doctor' role is oriented toward enforcing (or following) social norms. They also have relatively little professional incentive to have beliefs about race that match reality (and more than enough compartmentalisation capability to ignore the occasional diagnostic relevance of race). Further, since the medical profession relies on far more arbitrary social constructs than race (for example: Most of the DSM) I'm not sure whether their considering something a social construct should be considered a criticism.
I'd be much more interested what doctors (of the scientific kind, preferably of a relevant field) say.
I think that would depend on the context and on how the question is phrased. Professionally, doctors know quite well that race matters -- e.g. some blood tests have different acceptable ranges depending on your race, the prenatal testing of pregnant women depends on their ancestry, etc.
I think academia is much more politically correct than the medical profession.
There's a pretty big gap between what doctors tell the public and what they tell each other.
There's a nation wide, low profile, supposedly secure internet forum in Finland for doctors only. Identities are checked by a reliable system involving official registries. For some reason it's used mostly by senior doctors, many in higher positions, who happen to know each other, didn't grow with the internet and seem to have discussions with no regard to public image whatsover. Political mind kill seems to stand strong there, and some opinions regarding culture, nationality, race, religion and so on are interesting to say the least from the perspective of political correctness. Even the N-word and the R-word seem to be used quite liberally. Needless to say the same people are masters of PR at their day job.
Note that if it is a site for doctors from Finland then the 'N-word' use is still shocking but far less shocking than if it were in the United States. "Bad words" are actually an example of pure social constructs and second-hand arbitrary negative associations can be expected to be weaker than first hand arbitrary negative associations. (And if it were a forum in China it would mean even less.)
You're probably right. In Finland the word can't be used in casual conversations with people you don't know well unless you want to be pigeonholed forever and using it publicly could definitely end a career. Many of our social norms seem to be borrowed from other cultures because of our desperate need to fit in to ensure survival.
Does Finland have a political correctness problem? The Swedish minority is perfectly fine, and the Russians come and (having bought everything in sight) go. Are there a lot of third-world immigrants?
Well, Finland is next to Sweden which is notorious for taking political correctness to totalitarian levels.
Sweden has a very strong element of conformism in its national culture.
There's definitely a political correctness problem concerning topics like income differences (they're pretty much the lowest anywhere in the first world), third-world immigrants and islam but YMMV. I'm not an expert on history or politics and tend to interact with the world from my comfortable bubble of a strict information diet especially as of late, but as far as I've gathered people are quite patriotic because of our short history as an independent nation. Both Sweden and Russia have historically been an obstacle in that regard and the more nationalist oriented people hold grudges on one level or another because of this reason.
The Finnish-Swedish minority tend to be privileged both in heritage and education and both learning the Swedish language and using it in service professions have been compulsory in Finland for quite some time. For example the Finnish-Swedish have their own quota in med school with easier entrance requirements because of less competition. Naturally this makes less well off people envious. There's significantly more racism against the Russians than the Swedish since Russia is still viewed as a military threat, and polls show this fear is increasing because of late developments in Ukraine and other flexing of Russia's military muscles.
The worst political correctness problems concern third world immigrants and refugees in my opinion, and anyone who brings up problems raised by some of them is very easily labeled a racist and politically crucified. There are problems like letting people in without being able to check their real age i.e. adults pretending to be children, not being able to drive them away when they commit multiple serious crimes, people living on government subsidies with no intention to work ever in their lives etc.
You could be right. Now I'm more curious.