The 10 questions will get you banned/flagged/ousted from even normal conversation amongst friends or casual groups, of course people are not going to risk their professional reputations with them.<p>Discovering the truth of these questions is not really worth ruining your life.<p>Look at James Watson, even if you win a Nobel Prize, your career can still be ruined if you say the wrong thing.
The most surprising result to me is how scholars tended to report that <i>moral concerns that a study’s conclusions could harm vulnerable groups</i> was NOT a valid reason to avoid publishing (M = 29.61, SD = 27.68). I assumed this was a primary motivation for all the tiptoeing around taboo topics.
When even the real faculties of science have become financially driven and corrupted you know that soft 'science' like psychology is even worse.
Is it meaningful to do linear regressions through clouds like the ones shown in Figure 1?<p><a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/17456916241252085#fig1-17456916241252085" rel="nofollow">https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/17456916241252...</a>
An odd article. Their previous work hits a lot of the same notes. But the selective transparency on the methods - for instance, only briefly describing how they arrived at these "taboo conclusions" - suggests they're more interested in stirring the pot and keeping these assertions circulating under the guise of suppressed science. (My mistake, they relocated the pilot study to supp mat, but it is not reassuring to read.)<p>"A vocal minority and silent majority may have created a seemingly hostile climate against taboo conclusions and the scholars who forward them, even if the silent majority has great contempt for the vocal minority. Future research should test these possibilities more directly."<p>This kind of editorializing feels out of place and very revealing. This retraction is perhaps indicative of the general quality of the work as well:<p><a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797619897915" rel="nofollow">https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095679761989791...</a>
Psychology is privatized. It consist of one guy writting queries running against annonymized userdata at palantir. Ocassionally he has a mental breakdown and turns into a grandfather clock writing strange gobledegock on a message board with a orange border. He is not happy, but then again, those are just the gears grinding making sound.
Is self-censorship a bad thing?<p>Suppose you had a finding that infidelity leads to "better" genes for the kids. I imagine most scientists wouldn't want to publish that paper because it's unpleasant to think about and seems to challenge a core tenant of our society (fidelity).<p>Or for example suppose one found out a huge correlation between IQ and a political party. No matter which direction they found it, most researchers would probably rightly self-censor that on the basis that it's not really a productive thing to try to put out there.<p>A few of the examples in the paper really are important questions in my opinion (understanding gender identity on as scientific a level as we can), but most of them aren't. For example I don't think question 6 is important -- what's important is research on reducing crime rates.<p>I think claiming a certain race commits disproportionate violent crime is like pointing out one gender commits disproportionate crime. True or not, it kinda doesn't matter, and when somebody brings it up you have to ask if their motivation is to reduce crime or grind an axe.
<i>Bien-pensants</i> will tell us "Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?" But it's impossible to deny forever what the lying eyes say.<p>Example: From a 2018 open letter by an eminent geneticist, "How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of 'Race" <<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/opinion/sunday/genetics-race.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/opinion/sunday/genetics-r...</a>>:<p>>I am worried that well-meaning people who deny the possibility of substantial biological differences among human populations are digging themselves into an indefensible position, one that will not survive the onslaught of science. I am also worried that whatever discoveries are made — and we truly have no idea yet what they will be — will be cited as “scientific proof” that racist prejudices and agendas have been correct all along, and that those well-meaning people will not understand the science well enough to push back against these claims.
> <i>"Younger, more left-leaning, and female faculty were generally more opposed to controversial scholarship."</i><p>That's so counterintuitive, I simply cannot believe it's true.
At least none of you studied evo psych in college... /facepalm<p>And its legitimacy didn't matter. It conflicted with the blank-slate hypothesis, therefore it had to go...