The headline is a Left-liberal’s wetdream Study: Trust in science among educated conservatives plunges
Conservatives, particularly those with college educations, have become dramatically more skeptical of science over the past four decades, according to a study published in the April issue of the American Sociological Review. Fewer than 35 percent of conservatives say they have a “great deal” of trust in the scientific community now, compared to nearly half in 1974.
“The scientific community … has been concerned about this growing distrust in the public with science. And what I found in the study is basically that’s really not the problem. The growing distrust of science is entirely focused in two groups—conservatives and people who frequently attend church,” says the study’s author, University of North Carolina postdoctoral fellow Gordon Gauchat. […]
Gauchat attributes the changes to two forces: Both science and conservatives have changed a lot in 40 years. In the post-WWII period, research was largely wedded to the Defense Department and NASA—think the space race and the development of the atomic bomb. Now the scientific institution “has come out from behind those institutions and been its own cultural force.” That has meant it is increasingly viewed as a catalyst of government regulation, as in the failed Democratic proposal to institute cap-and-trade as a way to reduce carbon emissions and stave off climate change.
“People are now viewing science as part of government regulation,” Gauchat says.
Not that Gauchat views that as problematic on its face. The published study is here and is revealing in its language. Look at what Gauchat bases his study on:
Pg 6: Data for this analysis come from the General Social Survey (GSS), 1972 to 2010 (Smith et al. 2011). […]
The GSS asked respondents the following question: “I am going to name some institutions in this country. As far as the people running these institutions are concerned, would you say you have a great deal of confidence, only some confidence, or hardly any confidence at all in them [the Scientific Community]?”
Note the sleight of hand here. The question is specifically about scientists not science. Yet this paper uses the word SCIENCE!!1! as if the individuals that practice it, and the process and resulting knowledge, are one and the same. Thus Gauchat, throughout his paper, tries to explain why the “authority of science” — the “accepted” consensus science of scientists involved in “public policy” — finds itself at odds with conservatives.
Gauchat attributes the decline in trust to the elections of Ronald Reagan (the arise of the “New Right”) and George W. Bush. What might have been happening within the science community during those times is never mentioned in the paper. It’s as if the changes within conservative attitudes were spontaneous political events rather than reactive to scientists demanding unelected political authority.
Gauchat also finds counter-intuitive the higher mistrust of “science” among well-educated conservatives. However, this, too can be explained
Pg 13: As mentioned, one interpretation of these findings is that conservatism in the United States has become a cultural domain that generates
its own knowledge base that is often in conflict with the cultural authority of science.[…]Martin and Desmond (2010) distinguish between ideology, which they argue shapes public opinion by providing knowledge of what is the case, and political sophistication, which they describe as the capacity to incorporate new information or political arguments into an existing ideological rubric.9 This implies that educated or high-information conservatives will hold hyper-opinions about science, because they have a more sophisticated grasp about what types of knowledge will conform with or contradict their ideological positions, and they will prefer to believe what supports their ideology (see Vaisey 2009). Thus, contrary to conventional wisdom and predictions of the deficit model, Martin and Desmond predict that educated conservatives will show higher levels of distrust than noneducated conservatives.
Thus the assertion that even educated conservatives are political hacks who refuse to consider any data outside what will conform to their ideology. Nice, neat and so scientifically based. Also consider that science as some-sort of badge of unaccountable authority is revealed by Gauchat’s further language manipulation:
Pg 17: [T]he public defines “what science is” in three distinct ways: (1) as an abstract method (e.g., replication, empirical, or unbiased); (2) as a cultural location (e.g., takes place in a university or is practiced by highly credentialed individuals); and (3) as one form of knowledge among other types such as commonsense and religious tradition (see Gauchat 2011). Interestingly, conservatives were far more likely to define science as knowledge that should conform to common sense and religious tradition.
Gauchat doesn’t even take a breath between science as one form of knowledge among others to conservatives demand science to conform to the other two forms of knowledge.
Pg 17: Contemporary sociological theory has placed science at the power-center of modern social systems, along with governments and transnational corporations. Political realignment and social conflict in the United States related to science is thus worthy of theorizing and further empirical analysis. Not only could growing conservative distrust of science threaten funding, it may also fundamentally transform how science is organized.
Ah, but we can’t have any interruption of our power and money!! Nein! Nein!
Conservatives have absolutely no reason to mistrust publicly-funded scientists, do they?
A former researcher at Amgen Inc has found that many basic studies on cancer — a high proportion of them from university labs — are unreliable, with grim consequences for producing new medicines in the future.
During a decade as head of global cancer research at Amgen, C. Glenn Begley identified 53 “landmark” publications — papers in top journals, from reputable labs — for his team to reproduce. Begley sought to double-check the findings before trying to build on them for drug development.
Result: 47 of the 53 could not be replicated. He described his findings in a commentary piece published on Wednesday in the journal Nature. […]
Begley’s experience echoes a report from scientists at Bayer AG last year. Neither group of researchers alleges fraud, nor would they identify the research they had tried to replicate.
But they and others fear the phenomenon is the product of a skewed system of incentives that has academics cutting corners to further their careers.
George Robertson of Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia previously worked at Merck on neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s. While at Merck, he also found many academic studies that did not hold up. […]
When the Amgen replication team of about 100 scientists could not confirm reported results, they contacted the authors. Those who cooperated discussed what might account for the inability of Amgen to confirm the results. Some let Amgen borrow antibodies and other materials used in the original study or even repeat experiments under the original authors’ direction.
Some authors required the Amgen scientists sign a confidentiality agreement barring them from disclosing data at odds with the original findings. “The world will never know” which 47 studies — many of them highly cited — are apparently wrong, Begley said. […]
For one thing, basic science studies are rarely “blinded” the way clinical trials are. That is, researchers know which cell line or mouse got a treatment or had cancer. That can be a problem when data are subject to interpretation, as a researcher who is intellectually invested in a theory is more likely to interpret ambiguous evidence in its favor.
The problem goes beyond cancer.
On Tuesday, a committee of the National Academy of Sciences heard testimony that the number of scientific papers that had to be retracted increased more than tenfold over the last decade; the number of journal articles published rose only 44 percent.
Yessiree, those Conservatives and their War on Science!
Send ’em to the re-education camps, posthaste!
Science is great. Scientists, often not so much.
When I was in high school we were doing an experiment from the text book, so there I was, open book in front, test tube heating nicely on it’s Bunsen burner, and the book said pour in the next chemical, so I did. Then I turned the page to see the end of that sentence, which was “slowly”.
Long story short, that wing of the school was evacuated due to a choking green smoke, and I was a hero to all that longed for an early lunch break.
I love science!
The year my son was a freshman at OU, one of the Chemistry labs caught fire. He swears it wasn’t his class that did it.
Actually it’s not even about scientists.
It’s about those who administer institutions that fund scientists. They may be, have once been, scientists but are now administrators, bureaucrats.
So the question is, “Do you trust bureaucrats?”
The study is a way to determine the success of the “long march through the institutions.”
Lee, mine was a heavy brown gas, bromine. It was supposed to cool down to liquid but overloaded the cooling apparatus and spread across the floor.
The argument for public funding of science is that then the information is available to everyone. Considering the quality of information we’re talking about, it’s difficult to justify continuing to fund this stuff publicly.
One problem with public funding is that while scientifically a result that fails to support the hypothesis is good, politically it is not. It also does not result in publications. Therefore the impetus is to produce good results no matter what.
“Good results” being results that support the hypothesis, and that appear to advance whatever is currently hot.
I was told (erroneously) in grad school that research was good because you could do what you want to do. The fact is, you do what you can get funded.
I’m not in research any more.
I miss Michael Crichton.
Anywho…
At least Lee’s was in school. Our Chem teacher in HS was dumb enough to tell us that urine combined with granulated chlorine in a sealed container would go ‘splodey.
Cut to that summer. A few of us had lazy jobs as life guards at the four pool complex (which was actually just across from our high school)….you can guess what happened.
One rainy summer day (while the pool was closed) eight of us finished a case of beer while playing “pool baseball”, then all stood around like jackasses and peed in a half full 100lb HTH chlorine drum, latch sealed the lid…and ran.
It blew out two windows in some poor guy’s house just behind the back gate. We all got fired.
Nominal political conservatives hate scientism I reckon. They wouldn’t be wrong either, by and large, nor could hardly find better examples of an extreme error as to our common humanity than the twerps who trot out pseudoscientific papers eliminating human beings.
Study: Trust in Lysenkoism
scienceamong educated conservatives plungesWhile I don’t know that I can be considered conservative (matter of perspective, I guess), I think it is fair to say that I am a well-educated scientist. I don’t trust scientists. If I did, they wouldn’t need to do any experiments. Even with the data in front of me, I still look for reasons to cast doubt on it. All the more so if it’s my own data. I’ve known some truly world-class scientists over the years, and I’ve known some piss-poor ones. Even the great ones can let their positions and their egos become so intertwined, that when one goes the other goes with it (to paraphrase Colin Powell). Another reason why I don’t trust my colleagues (“trust but verify”).
The very definition of a true scientist. You are of course a member of an endangered species.
Jeebus-Jumping-Cheyrist-onna-Pogo stick, I was raised by a couple of scientists. Mom opted out of the profession in the early Fifties to raise the four of us, but Dad carried on to just a little short of a doctorate in Zoology, and we had scientific method over the dinner table.
Dad was rigorous in cause and effect, and in the producability of results. Theory – experiment – duplicate predicted results. Otherwise – wishful thinking.
What he thought about the global warming scam peeled paint from the walls. Pity we couldn’t have figured a way to bottle it. Lowes and Home Despot would pay a tidy sum.
Pretty much what Crimso says.
I do not trust politicized science. I do not trust scientists to report themselves accurately if their funding is endangered or if a political cause they’re emotionally involved in is at risk. Too often, scientists at large have demonstrated that they’re willing to abandon basic principles of science and manipulate people’s perception of it as absolute truth to get what they want.
And that’s unacceptable. The plunging, piss-poor quality of health research in this country due to the increasing desire to politicize and monetize science is unacceptable. The fact that studies like this one exist is unacceptable.
this is why i am mad basically all the time
In other words, “Why don’t you stupid conservatives shut up, stop thinking for yourselves, and just listen to us?”
Meet the new priesthood, same as the old priesthood…
this is why i am mad basically all the time
That’s just healthy misanthropy. Pellegri.
I’ve told about this before, but way back in the day when “The Bell Curve” was first published, by fellow shrinkers were universally outraged!! since it basically debunked all of the clap-trap we’d been told was gospel for lo those many years. Poor Murray has been vilified ever since.
I was secretly thrilled since I’d been a closet conservative/curmudgeon/empiricist for a long time and events over the next decade or so finally gave me the nerve to crawl out of the closet and stand in the harsh light of peer disgust. Apostasy is never a pretty sight to true believers and I lost people who I had thought were my friends—to politics.
by =my
Also reprinting wholesale a lovely comment in reply to the usual “hurr hurr conservatives use blind faith and that opposes SCIENCE1!!!!” BS on the original article:
“Conservatives, particularly those with college educations, have become dramatically more skeptical of science over the past four decades”
As a conservative with an engineering degree, if that sentence above was clarified, I’d wholeheartedly agree.
We’re not ‘skeptical of science’. We’re skeptical of what the government calls ‘science’. There is absolutely NO ‘consensus’ in science. It’s either provable or it’s not. Climatologists are more akin to astrologists than scientists. We don’t believe them, and with good reason. They have made hundreds of predictions that so far have proven even less accurate than random predictions made by rolling dice.
Just a head’s up to the non-science crowd – the vast majority of chemical engineers, chemists and mechanical engineers don’t buy into this AGW crap, and are also strongly conservative/libertarian. I’d say it’s an 80/20 split, but I live in the south so it might not be quite that awesome.
lysenkoism: cleans impure thoughts and leaves no toilet ring! do it for gaia.
Scientific American used to be a magazine about science. Now it’s a magazine about Science(TM) Issues, mostly those related to AGW and overpopulation, with some occasional astronomy or a new aircraft design in there to keep the last hangers-on happy.
You are SUPPOSED to be skeptical about science. Without such skepticism you won’t ever falsify and jettison bad theories like the ether and phlogiston.
link
Reading Science magazine is always interesting, because many of the articles that touch on global warming either:
1) have hilariously bad conclusions drawn from hilariously bad manipulations of data, and so should not have passed peer review if the peer review process were doing its job. Given “peer review” is pretty much a code word for “we mailed this to a bunch of people and nobody voiced any objections but that doesn’t mean they read it” at this point, it means very little.
2) give lip service to the whole AGW/climate change shenanigans in their conclusions but do not actually question whether or not the valid data they’ve gathered might contradict the consensus “truth” on the matter.
3) just don’t say anything. at all.
It’s the same with any other heavily politicized topic. Data that undermines the consensus is either buried, ignored, or misconstrued.
My son’s roommate works at NOAA (his films of tornados are on the weather channel quite a bit) thinks AGW is bullshit. He’d get along great with Pellegri’s dad on that score.
Science!(TM) gave us all sorts of wonderful things because Joe Average wasn’t paying attention–at all–to what the priesthood, err, scientists were up to. Some examples:
*Eugenics.
*A sheen of respectability to Hitler’s atrocities.<–might be a Godwin violation, but that doesn't make it any less true.
*The marginalization of nuclear power.
*The elimination of DDT to kill malaria-bearing mosquitoes.
*Global warming *and* global cooling.
*The McPizza, a crime against mankind if there ever was one.
This list could go on for days, but I'll stop here.
Funny how most of these things dovetail nicely with the leftist belief structure, cost us trillions (and not a small amount that has gone into lefty-friendly NGOs, corporations, and govt jobs) and racked up a pretty nice body count in the process, eh? It's almost like they were working hand-in-hand…hmmm…
(Note for Team Gotcha: I am, of course, referring to Science!(TM), i.e the religious arm of leftism; not science, i.e. the method by which we obtain knowledge via empirical evidence which has been so badly corrupted by the former, that most people don't even realize what actual science looks like anymore.)
, referring to Science!(TM), i.e the religious arm of leftism; not science,
lysenkoism: cleans impure thoughts and leaves no toilet ring! do it for gaia.
“This just in~! The State Science Institute has just condemned Reardon Metal. News at 5 …”
(It’s not that ‘Conservatives’ don’t trust science as methodology, it’s just that we don’t trust State-funded Science, AKA Big Science, because the funding is, because of it’s polity, steering science study results ideologically and irrevocably to the Left. We’re witnessing the socialization of scientific processes via mechanism of it’s funding; now the results of applied science are expected to be socially, politically, and ideologically correct, or else the funding goes away. That’s not how ‘real’ science works, and we Conservatives know that…so, expect our rejection of any (expected) results derived from biased funding, or at least enough skepticism to demand that all scientists must practice true scientific methods. There is never a clause in ‘real’ science, “the science is settled”.)
i’m the harvard grrl : wow
mittens 2012: at least i’m not sort of like a harvard communist
We’re supposed to believe, of course, that the left-wing politics that gave us the “Voluntary Human Extinction Movement”, Pol Pot’s “Year Zero”, and Al Gore are all about the science.
Ask a lefty what they think of the Laffer Curve to see how much they respect science.
harvard: where you punch your ticket to the proggtard class.
I stopped reading Scientific American when they got rid of the “Computer Recreations” (and to a lesser extent “The Amateur Scientist” after the Forrest Mims dust-up) columns.
Science!!!!!!! Really, really, really.
Ich bin eine self-blinder.
Science has turned into big business, as evidenced in big pharma and the climate change BS. I don’t believe a word climate change “scientists” spew because a. there is every incentive for them to lie and b. its been shown that many many climate “scientists” are, in fact, complete liars. The science is not settled, when a majority of scientists don’t agree with your version of “science.”
With big pharma, scientists are pushing to get drugs to market, with little concern about whether the drugs actually work.
If the drugs don’t work, how are the scientists supposed to get paid?
Ich bin eine rigoroustester.
If they don’t work, how would they sell? And if they don’t sell, what’s the incentive for getting them to market?
Evil drugs just don’t launch themselves you know.
There is a link in the extended post to an article from “Big Pharma” scientists who are talking about the unreliability and unrepeatability of the “research” coming out of the academe.
And this from LYBD:
Makes me think of Dr. Science. He Knows More Than You Do.
“I have a Master’s Degree…in SCIENCE.”
(Be sure to picture that being said with a really snooty tone of voice, with the nose elevated to about 45 degrees above the horizon.)
This seems relevant:
Thus it seems to me that the Left only has itself to blame here. pPrticulary since they’re the ones who’ve taken their lessons to heart, and in so doing undermining not only the credibility of those truths they seek to discredit, but of the alternative truths with which they would supplant the older ones as well. They certainly haven’t helped their cause any getting caught “constructing” global warming for example, instead of “finding” it.
Jeff G, people take all sorts of harmful or useless nonsense that doesn’t work. They just call it health supplements instead of drugs.
Ionized “Q”-bacelets, kelation, colloidal silver, ingested mercury compounds, reflexology, uranium mine exposure, homeopathy etc. ….
There is virtually no limit to what idiots will do to feel healthy even if in fact it hurts them.
Now eventually a useless or harmful drug will be discarded from the market(thalidomide) but in the short term it can bring in investor money and eveb big short term sales.
…which comes with over a a billion dollar price tag these days.
palaeomerus, that stuff isn’t coming out of Big Pharma and it isn’t drugs. That stuff comes from hacks and quacks. A fool and his money…
There are plenty of hacks and quacks in the drug industry too. There are people who ask for and receive drugs for conditions they probably don’t have. Antibiotics are being over prescribed often against against viral infections with no culture having been made. There are pharmacies that sell a lot of quack medicine on the side (like People’s Pharmacy) .
I mentioned those things to point out that there is a HUGE market for stupid crap based on people being swallowed by various anxieties about something or other, and big Pharma is not above trying to get their piece of it.
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