Post by fellow LW reader Razib Khan, who many here probably know from  the gnxp site or perhaps from his debate with Eliezer. Somewhat related to a post we also seem to have discussed.

In my post below in regards to Sam Harris’ recent interactions on the web I reasserted by suspicion of reason. This naturally elicited curiosity, or hostility, from some. I’ve talked about this before, but the illustration to the left gets at my primary issue. When individuals are reasoning alone they often have a high degree of uncertainty as to their conclusions. But when individuals are reasoning together they seem to converge very rapidly and with great confidence upon a particular position. What’s going on here? In the second case it isn’t reason at all, but our natural human predisposition toward group conformity. There’s a huge psychological literature on this, so I won’t belabor the point. When people brandish “reason” and “rationality” explicitly I’m somewhat skeptical. If rational conclusions are so plain and self-evident why are we even asserting the primacy of reason? If something really is so clearly reasonable you usually don’t go around trumpeting how reasonable it is.

Another pitfall of reason is that it lulls use into the delusion that we have a transparent understanding of our own motivations and logic, as well as the motivation and logic of others. In my post below I explicitly stated that I disagreed with Harris on the substance of much of what he asserted and assumes in the first paragraph, but multiple people simply imputed to me his views as if they were mine! Even though I declaimed this position very early on, they simply could not generate an coherent framework where I did not agree with either them or Harris. There were only two options conceivable for them which the “reason” engine could operate upon. As I clearly did not agree with them (or so they thought), they simply injected in the axioms which would be appropriate for Sam Harris into my own box, and then began firing the appropriate propositions.

Here we have the problem that reasonable arguments and the self-evident truth of rationality is often only clear among people who already agree on everything of substance. People who agree can confidently assert the rationality and reasonableness of their arguments to those who have the exactly same perspective. So, for example, you have educated people like William F. Buckley, Jr. explaining that there is more evidence of the resurrection of Jesus Christ than that Abraham Lincoln gave the Emancipation Proclamation. This was eminently reasonable to the circles which Buckley moved in. After all, Christ did rise from the dead, everyone knows that!  Well, not really. Buckley’s son, Christopher, who is not a believer, has explained that his father had a genuinely difficult time imagining the perspective of those who did not share his beliefs on this matter.

This is not to say that reason and rationality are not without utility. These are humanity’s great cognitive jewels. But great tools can be used to various ends, and true reason and rationality are very difficult. Mathematics for example is undoubtedly true rationality, with crisp and precise inferences being derivable. But most other intellectual structures are not so clearly self-evident as mathematics. Verbal logic and reasoning are riddled with the pitfalls of cognitive bias. Because most people share the same systematic biases it is very difficult for groups of individuals engaging in self-reinforcing masturbatory ‘rationality’ discourses to perhaps step back and wonder about their motivated reasoning. Unfortunately it may be that reason emerged as a human faculty to win arguments, not resolve truth. If this is true we are much more lawyers than mathematicians in our discourse. Does this seem plausible to you? Unfortunately it does seem plausible to me.

Where does this leave us? I think we need to be skeptical of reasoned arguments. This doesn’t lead me down the path of intellectual nihilism. Reason is which leads us to truth is possible. But it may be that this is a very specialized usage of reason, which requires special conditions. ’tis far easier to seem clever than be correct.

Edit: I linked to the wrong article! (~_~;) Fixed!

Summary: Current social psychology research is probably on average compromised by political bias leftward. Conservative researchers are likely discriminated against in at least this field. More importantly papers and research that does not fit a liberal perspective faces greater barriers and burdens.  

An article in the online publication inside higher ed on a survey on anti-conservative bias among social psychologists.

Numerous surveys have found that professors, especially those in some disciplines, are to the left of the general public. But those same -- and other -- surveys have rarely found evidence that left-leaning academics discriminate on the basis of politics. So to many academics, the question of ideological bias is not a big deal. Investment bankers may lean to the right, but that doesn't mean they don't provide good service (or as best the economy will permit) to clients of all political stripes, the argument goes.

And professors should be assumed to have the same professionalism.

A new study, however, challenges that assumption -- at least in the field of social psychology. The study isn't due to be published until next month (in Perspectives on Psychological Science), and the authors and others are noting limitations to the study. But its findings of bias by social psychologists (even if just a decent-sized minority of them) are already getting considerable buzz in conservative circles. Just over 37 percent of those surveyed said that, given equally qualified candidates for a job, they would support the hiring of a liberal candidate over a conservative candidate. Smaller percentages agreed that a "conservative perspective" would negatively influence their odds of supporting a paper for inclusion in a journal or a proposal for a grant. (The final version of the paper is not yet available, but an early version may be found on the website of the Social Science Research Network.)

To some on the right, such findings are hardly surprising. But to the authors, who expected to find lopsided political leanings, but not bias, the results were not what they expected.

"The questions were pretty blatant. We didn't expect people would give those answers," said Yoel Inbar, a co-author, who is a visiting assistant professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and an assistant professor of social psychology at Tilburg University, in the Netherlands.

He said that the findings should concern academics. Of the bias he and a co-author found, he said, "I don't think it's O.K."

Discussion of faculty politics extends well beyond social psychology, and humanities professors are frequently accused of being "tenured radicals" (a label some wear with pride). But social psychology has had an intense debate over the issue in the last year.

At the 2011 meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia polled the audience of some 1,000 in a convention center ballroom to ask how many were liberals (the vast majority of hands went up), how many were centrists or libertarians (he counted a couple dozen or so), and how many were conservatives (three hands went up). In his talk, he said that the conference reflected "a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” in a country where 40 percent of Americans are conservative and only 20 percent are liberal. He said he worried about the discipline becoming a "tribal-moral community" in ways that hurt the field's credibility.

The link above is worth following. The problems that arise remind me of the situation with academic and our own ethics in light of this paper.

That speech prompted the research that is about to be published. Members of a social psychologists' e-mail list were surveyed twice. (The group is not limited to American social scientists or faculty members, but about 90 percent are academics, including grad students, and more than 80 percent are Americans.) Not surprisingly, the overwhelming majority of those surveyed identified as liberal on social, foreign and economic policy, with the strongest conservative presence on economic policy. Only 6 percent described themselves as conservative over all.

The questions on willingness to discriminate against conservatives were asked in two ways: what the respondents thought they would do, and what they thought their colleagues would do. The pool included conservatives (who presumably aren't discriminating against conservatives) so the liberal response rates may be a bit higher, Inbar said.

The percentages below reflect those who gave a score of 4 or higher on a 7-point scale on how likely they would be to do something (with 4 being "somewhat" likely).

Percentages of Social Psychologists Who Would Be Biased in Various Ways

	Self	Colleagues
A "politically conservative perspective" by author would have a negative influence on evaluation of a paper	18.6%	34.2%
A "politically conservative perspective" by author would have a negative influence on evaluation of a grant proposal	23.8%	36.9%
Would be reluctant to extend symposium invitation to a colleague who is "politically quite conservative"	14.0%	29.6%
Would vote for liberal over conservative job candidate if they were equally qualified	37.5%	44.1%

I can't help but think that self-assessments are probably too generous. For predictive power of how an individual behaves when the behaviour in question is undesirable, I'm more likely to take their estimate of how "colleagues" behave than their estimate of how they personally do. 

The more liberal the survey respondents identified as being, the more likely they were to say that they would discriminate.

The paper notes surveys and statements by conservatives in the field saying that they are reluctant to speak out and says that "they are right to do so," given the numbers of individuals who indicate they might be biased or that their colleagues might be biased in various ways.

Inbar said that he has no idea if other fields would have similar results. And he stressed that the questions were hypothetical; the survey did not ask participants if they had actually done these things.

He said that the study also collected free responses from participants, and that conservative responses were consistent with the idea that there is bias out there. "The responses included really egregious stuff, people being belittled by their advisers publicly for voting Republican."

This shouldn't be surprising to hear since to quote CharlieSheen: "we even have LW posters who have in academia personally experienced discrimination and harassment because of their right wing politics."

Neil Gross, a professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia, urged caution about the results. Gross has written extensively on faculty political issues. He is the co-author of a 2007 report that found that while professors may lean left, they do so less than is imagined and less uniformly across institution type than is imagined.

Gross said it was important to remember that the percentages saying they would discriminate in various ways are answering yes to a relatively low bar of "somewhat." He also said that the numbers would have been "more meaningful" if they had asked about actual behavior by respondents in the last year, not the more general question of whether they might do these things.

At the same time, he said that the numbers "are higher than I would have expected." One theory Gross has is that the questions are "picking up general political animosity as much as anything else."

If you are wondering about the political leanings of the social psychologists who conducted the study, they are on the left. Inbar said he describes himself as "a pretty doctrinaire liberal," who volunteered for the Obama campaign in 2008 and who votes Democrat. His co-author, Joris Lammers of Tilburg, is to Inbar's left, he said.

What most impressed him about the issues raised by the study, Inbar said, is the need to think about "basic fairness."

While I can see Lammers' point that this as disturbing from a fairness perspective to people grinding their way through academia and should serve as warning for right wing LessWrong readers working through the system, I find the issue of how this our heavy reliance on academia for our map of reality might lead to us inheriting such distortions of the map of reality much more concerning. Overall in light of this if a widely accepted conclusion from social psychology favours a "right wing" perspective it is more likely to be correct than if no such biases against such perspectives existed. Conclusions that favour "left wing" perspective are also somewhat less likely to be true than if no such biases existed. We should update accordingly.

I also think there are reasons to think we may have similar problems on this site.

Post by fellow LW reader Razib Khan, who many here probably know from  the gnxp site or perhaps from his debate with Eliezer.

A few days ago I stumbled upon a really interesting post. And I’m wondering if my readers are at all familiar with the phenomenon outlined here (it was a total surprise to me), The myth of “they weren’t ever taught….”:

With all this I am not saying conditions which are non-hereditary are irrelevant. What I am saying is that we can’t ignore the shape of the pre-existent landscape before we attempt to reshape it to our own image. Excoriating teachers for having pupils who can’t master mid-level secondary school mathematics is in some cases like excoriating someone for the fact that their irrigation canals from the plains into the mountains are failures. You need to level the mountains before your canals can work (or, barring that design and implement a mechanical system which will move water against the grade). Easier said than done. E. O. Wilson said of Communism, “Great Idea, Wrong Species.” The reaction of Communist regimes to this reality was brutal and shocking. Obviously the modern rejection of unpalatable aspects of human nature are not so grotesque. But they have a human toll nonetheless. I’m skeptical that this generation will pass before we have to acknowledge these realities and calibrate our policies accordingly.

Stage One: I will describe this stage for algebra I teachers, but plug in reading, geometry, writing, science, any subject you choose, with the relevant details. This stage begins when teachers realize that easily half the class adds the numerators and denominators when adding fractions, doesn’t see the difference between 3-5 and 5-3, counts on fingers to add 8 and 6, and looks blank when asked what 7 times 3 is.

Ah, they think. The kids weren’t ever taught fractions and basic math facts! What the hell are these other teachers doing, then, taking a salary for showing the kids movies and playing Math Bingo? Insanity on the public penny. But hey, helping these kids, teaching them properly, is the reason they became teachers in the first place. So they push their schedule back, what, two weeks? Three? And go through fraction operations, reciprocals, negative numbers, the meaning of subtraction, a few properties of equality, and just wallow in the glories of basic arithmetic. Some use manipulatives, others use drills and games to increase engagement, but whatever the method, they’re basking in the glow of knowledge that they are Closing the Gap, that their kids are finally getting the attention that privileged suburban students get by virtue of their summer enrichment and more expensive teachers.

At first, it seems to work. The kids beam and say, “You explain it so much better than my last teacher did!” and the quizzes seem to show real progress. Phew! Now it’s possible to get on to teaching algebra, rather than the material the kids just hadn’t been taught.

But then, a few weeks later, the kids go back to ignoring the difference between 3-5 and 5-3. Furthermore, despite hours of explanation and practice, half the class seems to do no better than toss a coin to make the call on positive or negative slopes. Many students who demonstrated mastery of distributing multiplication over addition are now making a complete hash of the process in multi-step equations. And many students are still counting on their fingers.

The author is involved in education personally, so is posting their own reflections as well as what others report to them. In personal correspondence they explain that this phenomenon is common among children of average intelligence. The lowest quartile presumably would never have been able to master many of these rules in the first place. Some of the information resembles the stuff that a friend of mine experienced when he went in to do tutoring for disadvantaged students in Boston when he was getting his doctorate at MIT. At first my friend was totally taken aback at the level of ignorance (e.g., the inability to see the relationship between 1/10 and 10/100). Today he works at a major technology firm as a scientist, but continues to be involved in mentoring “at risk” kids. At some point you have to muddle on. He does his best, and does not indulge in the luxury of shock and disappointment. That helps no one.

This matters because American society is notionally obsessed with education. All this isn’t too clear or important to be frank when you aren’t a parent. It’s somewhat in the realm of the abstract. That changes when you become a parent. Suddenly you become immersed in the data of your local schools, and begin to weight various options to optimize your child’s schooling experience. Of course the real differences in school metrics have not only parental relevance, they matter in terms of national policy and attention. Both the political Left and the Right have their own pet solutions. More money, reform teachers’ unions, charter schools, vouchers, etc.

But the biggest problem at the heart of the matter is the fundamental populist drive to ignore human difference. American schools were designed to produce the citizen, and the citizen has the same rights and responsibilities from individual to individual. In some ways the public school system as it emerged in the 19th century was a project by the Protestant establishment to assimilate white ethnics, in particular Catholics (who of course created their own alternative educational system to maintain cultural separation and distinctiveness). In the 21st century the drive to produce H. Americanus seems quaint, rather, we want to citizens of the world with skills and abilities to navigate an information economy.

What American society on a deep philosophical level, no matter the political outlook, detests acknowledging is that a simple and elegant public policy solution can not abolish human difference. Some children are more athletic than others, and some children are more intelligent than others. Starting among conservatives, but now spreading to some liberals, is a rejection of this premise via blaming teachers. The premise is bewitching because it presents tractable problems with solutions on hand. Here is John B. Watson, the father of behaviorism:

Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. I am going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary and they have been doing it for many thousands of years

I think if Watson were alive today he’d have to admit he was wrong. Your ancestors are not destiny, but they are probability. If your father plays in the N.B.A., the probability that you will play in the N.B.A. is not high. But the probability is orders of magnitude higher than if you are a random person off the street.

Yay a new cool post is up on West Hunters blog! It is written by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending with whom most LWers are probably already familiar with (particularly this awesome entry). It raises some interesting points on biases in academia.

I was contemplating Conan the Barbarian, and remembered the essay that Robert E. Howard wrote about the  background of those stories – The Hyborian Age.  I think that the flavor of Howard’s pseudo-history is a lot more realistic than the picture of the human past academics preferred over the past few decades.

In Conan’s world, it’s never surprising to find a people that once mixed with some ancient prehuman race.  Happens all the time.  Until very recently, the vast majority of workers in human genetics and paleontology were sure that this never occurred – and only changed their minds when presented with evidence that was both strong (ancient DNA)  and too mathematically sophisticated for them to understand or challenge (D-statistics).

Conan’s history  was shaped by the occasional catastrophe.  Most academics (particularly geologists) don’t like catastrophes, but they have grudgingly come to admit their importance – things like the Thera and Toba eruptions, or the K/T asteroid strike and the Permo-Triassic crisis.

Between the time when the oceans drank Atlantis, and the rise of the sons of Aryas, evolution seems to have run pretty briskly, but without any pronounced direction.  Men devolved into ape-men when the environment pushed in that direction (Flores ?)  and shifted right back when the environment favored speech and tools.  Culture shaped evolution, and evolution shaped culture.  An endogamous caste of snake-worshiping priests evolved in a strange direction.  Although their IQs were considerably higher than average, they remained surprisingly vulnerable to sword-bearing barbarians.

In this world, evolution could happen on a time scale of thousands of years, and there was no magic rule that ensured that the outcome would be the same in every group.  It may not be PC to say it, but Cimmerians were smarter than Picts.

The basic idea of their book "The 10 000 Year Explosion" (LessWrong review, Amazon).

Above all, people in Conan’s world fought. They migrated: they invaded.  There was war before, during, and after civilization.  Völkerwanderungs were a dime a dozen. Conquerors spread.  Sometimes they mixed with the locals, sometimes they replaced them – as when the once dominant Hyborians, overrun by Picts, vanished from the earth, leaving scarcely a trace of their blood in the veins of their conquerors. They must have been U5b.

To be fair,  real physical anthropologists in Howard’s day thought that there had been significant population movements and replacements in Europe, judging from changes in skeletons and skulls that accompanied archeological shifts, as when people turned taller, heavier boned , and brachycephalic just as the Bell-Beaker artifacts show up. But those physical anthropologists lost out to people like Boas – liars.

Perhaps this little old entry is relevant here. ^_^

Given the chance (sufficient lack of information), American anthropologists assumed that the Mayans were peaceful astronomers. Howard would have assumed that they were just another blood-drenched snake cult: who came closer?

Now I’m not saying that Howard got every single tiny little syllable of prehistory right.  Not likely: so far, we haven’t seen any signs of Cthulhu-like visitors, which abound in the Conan stories.  So far. But Howard’s priors were more accurate than those of the pots-not-people archeologists: more accurate than people like Excoffier and  Currat, who assume that there hasn’t been any population replacement in Europe since moderns displaced Neanderthals. More accurate than Chris Stringer,  more accurate than Brian Ferguson.

Most important, Conan, unlike the typical professor, knew what was best in life.

Heh.

Cochran you are such a nerd.

A recent entry from the West Hunters blog (written by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending with whom most LWers are probably already familiar with) caught my eye: 

People who grow up in a small town, or an old and stable neighborhood, often know their neighbors.  More than than that, they know pretty much everything that’s happened for the past couple of generations, whether they want to or not.  For many Americans, probably most,  this isn’t the case. Mobility breeds anonymity.  Suburban kids haven’t necessarily been hanging out with the same peers since kindergarten, and even if they have, they probably don’t much about their friends’ sibs and parents.

If you do have that thick local knowledge, significant trait heritability is fairly obvious.  You notice that the valedictorians cluster in a few families, and you also know that those families don’t need to put their kids under high pressure to get those results. They’re just smart. Some are smart but too rebellious to play the game – and that runs in families too. For that matter, you know that those family similarities, although real and noticeable, are far from absolute.  You see a lot of variation within a family.

If you don’t have it, it’s easier to believe that cognitive or personality traits are generated by environmental influences – how your family toilet trained you, whether they sent you to a prep school, etc.  Easier to believe, but false.

So it isn’t all that difficult to teach quantitative genetics to someone with that background. They already know it, more or less.  Possession of this kind of knowledge must have been the norm in the human past. I’m sure that Bushmen have it.

The loss of this knowledge must have significant consequences, not just susceptibility to nurturist dogma.  In the typical ancestral situation, you knew a lot about the relatives of all potential mates.  Today, you might meet someone in college and know nothing about her family history.  In particular, you  might not be aware that schizophrenia runs in her family. You can’t weigh what you don’t know.  In modern circumstances, I suspect that the reproductive success of people with a fair-sized dose of alleles that predispose to schiz has gone up – with the net consequence that selection is less effective at eliminating such alleles. The modern welfare state has probably had more impact, though.  In the days of old, kids were likely to die if a parent flaked out.  Today that does not happen.

Seems quite coherent. It meshes well with findings that the more children parents have the less they subscribe to nurture, since they finally, possibly for the first time ever, get some hands on experience with the nurture (nurture as in stuff like upbringing not nurture as in lead paint) versus. nature issue. Note that today urban, educated, highly intelligent people are less likley to have children than possibly ever, how is this likley to effect intellectual fashions?

Perhaps somewhat related to this is also the transition in the past 150 years (the time frame depending on where exactly you live) from agricultural communities, that often raised livestock to urban living. What exactly "variation" and "heredity" might mean in a intuitive way thus comes another source short with no clear replacement.

Please remember to have no heroes or villains, but this just looks plain bad to be honest. I'm lowering my estimation of the quality of Stephen J. Gould's work in this area.

USA today:

The late scientific icon, Stephen Jay Gould, botched and perhaps faked his critique of a racist 19th-Century scientist's skull collection, suggests a second look at his efforts.

CAPTION

UPenn

In a 1978 Science paper, Gould (1941 - 2002) , reported that the Samuel George Morton (1799-1851), "a prominent Philadelphia physician," had mis-measured the cranial capacities of his 1,000-skull "American Golgotha" collection gathered from around the world, to suit his racist beliefs. The finding led to one of Gould's best-known books, The Mismeasure of Man, a critique of scientific racism.

"Morton is now viewed as a canonical example of scientific misconduct. But did Morton really fudge his data?," asks a PLoS Biology study led by anthropologist Jason Lewis of Stanford University. "Are studies of human variation inevitably biased, as per Gould, or are objective accounts attainable, as Morton attempted?"

So, the study team remeasured the skulls collected by Morton, now owned largely by the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Philadelphia.

Overall, they find, Morton did make mistakes in measuring skull capacity (he first stuffed them with seeds, and later lead shot to measure their brain size). But the mistakes were random. The random mistakes didn't favor any racial theory of larger brain sizes for white people over others.

"Given how long Gould's work has been criticized in this arena, I'm a little surprised that it took this long for the work to be done to write this article," says the University of Texas's David Prindle, author of Stephen Jay Gould and the Politics of Evolution. "People who dislike Gould's work will likely go on disliking him even more after this article. People who are fans of his writing will likely go on supporting his views."

Haha. Humans.

The paper itself:

In reevaluating Morton and Gould, we do not dispute that racist views were unfortunately common in 19th-century science or that bias has inappropriately influenced research in some cases. Furthermore, studies have demonstrated that modern human variation is generally continuous, rather than discrete or ''racial,'' and that most variation in modern humans is within, rather than between, populations. In particular, cranial capacity variation in human populations appears to be largely a function of climate, so, for example, the full range of average capacities is seen in Native American groups, as they historically occupied the full range of latitudes, say the study authors.

...

Samuel George Morton, in the hands of Stephen Jay Gould, has served for 30 years as a textbook example of scientific misconduct. The Morton case was used by Gould as the main support for his contention that ''unconscious or dimly perceived finagling is probably endemic in science, since scientists are human beings rooted in cultural contexts, not automatons directed toward external truth''. This view has since achieved substantial popularity in ''science studies''. But our results falsify Gould's hypothesis that Morton manipulated his data to conform with his a priori views. The data on cranial capacity gathered by Morton are generally reliable, and he reported them fully. Overall, we find that Morton's initial reputation as the objectivist of his era was well-deserved.