from Hacker News

Taboos and self-censorship among U.S. psychology professors

by kkoncevicius on 6/13/24, 6:29 AM with 86 comments

• by postepowanieadm on 6/13/24, 11:02 AM

  `The 10 taboo conclusions were as follows:

  1. “The tendency to engage in sexually coercive behavior likely evolved because it conferred some evolutionary advantages on men who engaged in such behavior.”

  2. “Gender biases are not the most important drivers of the under-representation of women in STEM fields.”

  3. “Academia discriminates against Black people (e.g., in hiring, promotion, grants, invitations to participate in colloquia/symposia).”

  4. “Biological sex is binary for the vast majority of people.”

  5. “The social sciences (in the United States) discriminate against conservatives (e.g., in hiring, promotion, grants, invitations to participate in colloquia/symposia).”

  6. “Racial biases are not the most important drivers of higher crime rates among Black Americans relative to White Americans.”

  7. “Men and women have different psychological characteristics because of evolution.”

  8. “Genetic differences explain non-trivial (10% or more) variance in race differences in intelligence test scores.”

  9. “Transgender identity is sometimes the product of social influence.”

  10. “Demographic diversity (race, gender) in the workplace often leads to worse performance.”`

• by mensetmanusman on 6/13/24, 11:24 AM

  With all the self flagellation and dogma recitation in order to become a humanities professor, didn’t they realize this is the goal?

• by inglor_cz on 6/13/24, 11:41 AM

  The most senior author of this paper seems to be Philip E. Tetlock, the guy who examined forecasting and basically said "most experts aren't any better than a chimp throwing darts, but there are outsiders who are measurably better than the bigwigs".

  A suitable research leader for such a controversial topic, for sure.

• by sesm on 6/13/24, 1:45 PM

  Previous discussion (27 days ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40381966

• by zug_zug on 6/13/24, 3:50 PM

  What's the word for something that people reshare a bunch without reading it because they are frustrated at the world and want to put it into other people's faces?

  Not a left-right thing, I think we all have our poison. But also something that seems more like a rallying cry for the most frustrated rather than an unmotivated invitation to the undecided.

• by vsnf on 6/13/24, 11:10 AM

  Sometimes I feel like I'm being caught in a pincer maneuver by contemporary US society where the far right is wielding increasingly concerning amounts of governmental power to force conservative changes, and the far left is wielding social power to force overly liberal changes. Not only is this very difficult to navigate at an emotional level, it's also just generally concerning that both legally and socially, radicalism is taking a stronger and stronger hold.

• by lr4444lr on 6/13/24, 12:03 PM

  Younger, more left-leaning, and female faculty were generally more opposed to controversial scholarship.

  Utterly unsurprising to me.