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Conservatives' Trust In Science Has Fallen Dramatically Since Mid-1970s
An anonymous reader writes "While trust in science remained stable among people who self-identified as moderates and liberals in the United States between 1974 and 2010, trust in science fell among self-identified conservatives by more than 25 percent during the same period, according to a study by the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. 'Over the last several decades, there's been an effort among those who define themselves as conservatives to clearly identify what it means to be a conservative,' said the study's lead author. 'For whatever reason, this appears to involve opposing science and universities and what is perceived as the "liberal culture." So, self-identified conservatives seem to lump these groups together and rally around the notion that what makes "us" conservatives is that we don't agree with "them."'"
There's a difference between social conservatives and fiscal conservatives.
interactive hologram, or it didn't happen.
Link to full summary. Good thing this bias and falsification of data only exists in the biomedical sciences. Whew! Quick question: you're a researcher and you've just found, by empirical research, something that confirms what conservatives have been saying for decades. The effect of your research will be profound, and likely change the course of public policy. Do you publish, or quietly bury your story? Or, do you falsify data to support what you desire to be true? It happens. For real. Real scientists do this, people just like you.
They DO declare their belief in science by asking to be treated by a modern medical facility. If they really didn't believe it would work, they wouldn't bother.
They're not stupid, they're hypocritical, and lying to themselves about what they believe as much as to anyone else.
There is no 'i' in team, but there is in fiasco...
Wait a minute. Hasn't this been going on at least since Galileo?
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
People trust in science because it's self-correcting, and regardless of what you seem to assume, the peer-review process is bloody strict. It's not blind faith, but simply using logic.
Right, because all those guys who pointed out that burning coal releases mercury that shows up in your can of tuna, or the Day the River Burned Down was due to water pollution, were heavily invested in windpower companies and alternative methods of manufacture. Actually, turns out they were like the 'agenda-driven climate alarmists' of today: mostly university professors.
Believing that science has an agenda is to believe that thousands of independently-working and independently-paid researchers are all part of a vast conspiracy. That's practically the DEFINITION of 'The Paranoid Style in American Politics', which is actually not inherently right-wing at all (think most Kennedy theories), and goes back for centuries (the original essay traced it back to Illuminati fears in the 1700s).
But the paranoid style has steadily taken over the right wing in recent decades, until fact-based, or at least fact-conceding, old conservatives can hardly be heard (or found) any more. It's the paranoids among them that are anti-science, not the whole group.
Umm, no.
It is possible to NOT claim to be conservative, and still vote conservatively.
Which makes "self-identified conservative" a subset of "conservative", but not the whole thing.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Between 1974 and 2010 the demand for immediate practicality in order to obtain funds for scientific research has dramatically increased in all government and private sector funding agencies.
It's not just AGW where conservatives are unwilling to face reality. It's economics, where faith compells them to continue cutting taxes on the rich in the face of ever growing inequality. Or health care, where conservatives cannot face the reality that we have the highest health care costs in the West and some of the poorest outcomes. Or contraception, where conservatives continue to push for abstinence only education, ignoring countless studies which prove it ineffective. I could go on...
Essentially you can turn on the news and find any conservative pushing any typical conservative wedge issue. Their position will be completely based in fantasy. This is why there's no liberal equivalent to Rush Limbaugh. We don't need to listen to blow hards make shit up for us to believe. We just listen to the news and decide for ourselves.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The problem for climate change deniers is that they behave *exactly* the same as deniers of evolution, and they are equally ridiculous positions. Even their words and phrases are the same, only substituting "climate change" for evolution. In two key ways they share strategy and beliefs with deniers of evolution:
They maintain that there is a controversy - There is no more controversy in the scientific community about anthropogenic climate change than there is about evolution, and just like deniers of evolution, climate change deniers trot out "skeptical" scientists from unrelated disciplines as examples of the controversy. A zookeeper who doubts evolution is no more of an authority on the validity of evolution than is a meteorologist on the validity of global climate change.
They imagine a grand conspiracy to silence doubters - For some reason climate change deniers seem to believe that the scientific process works well in all cases except climate science. In climatology they imagine a grand conspiracy to perpetuate a hoax on the world in order to secure research funding. That this conspiracy requires the participation of refereed journals, thousands of scientists across dozens of disciplines and from hundreds of countries doesn't phase the denier in the slightest. I think what thoroughly discredits them is that at the same time they deny any possibility that multinational corporations with trillions of dollars at stake would never do anything so dishonorable as engage in any activities to discredit sound science (apparently only scientists stoop that low). So, the upshot is that there is grand global scientific conspiracy to secure a few billion in research grants, but no possibility of any conspiracy when there are trillions of dollars of profits at stake. Irrational much?
They discredit themselves - Many climate change deniers ruin their own credibility by advocating nuclear power to address carbon emissions. In essence, they are proposing nuclear power as the solution to a problem they maintain doesn't exist. By doing so, they give the appearance of being liberal with the truth if they see an opportunity to advance their agenda.
In the end, deniers have a logically indefensible position which is why they have to resort to the conspiracy theories, false controversies, and employ innuendo and appeals to emotion in making their case.
The idea behind the joke was that there were well-known conservative positions at the time Colbert said it which specifically countered by reality. For instance, conservatives were proudly proclaiming that Iraq had chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons capable of reaching the United States and that the Bush tax cuts increased revenue.
I am officially gone from
The meaning of "reality has a liberal bias" is only that conservatives like to call very solid facts and well-established science biased, rejecting reality. Agree or not, that's the meaning. See: Conservapedia.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
>>>Reality has a well known liberal bias
Read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn, and you too will not trust science (or to be more accurate: the flawed human beings that backstab, lie, cheat, and censor new ideas in order to protect their old scientific research & theories).
It's an eye-opening piece of literature that liberals, such as yourself, should read. Blind faith in scientists is as illogical as blind faith in priests.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
"fiscally conservative social liberals" is an oxymoron.
Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, and Clinton ALL come to mind. Every one of them decreased our debt relative to GDP. And all but Carter decreased the total debt .
It was under ALL 8 years of reagan, 3 years of Poppa Bush, and 7.5 years of W that massive increases in deficits/debt came about.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Uhm - nope. You are confusing Fiscal Conservatives with Republicans...that isn't the same thing!
In this case let's call them all US Politicians and agree that they LOVE spending our money exponentially. Doesn't matter which party.
Have you compiled your kernel today??
Reagan - Democratic Congress
Bush 1 - Democratic Congress
W - Most if the debt racked up after getting a Democrat Congress.
BTW...Clinton - Most of his decrease came after getting a Republican Congress. And he had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into fiscal conservatism.
Guess who taxes and spend? Don't know? Ask your mamma.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Implying that wasn't the libertarian position.
After Reconstruction, the people we would recognize today as libertarians had won, and those same people proceeded to forge America into a middle-class society and industrial superpower. They tore down the fascist/feudalistic society, and repurposed its components within just a few decades. The legacy they left us with has lasted for almost 100 years (since the fascists struck back with the installation of the Central Bank).
What the dividers either don't understand, or don't want others to understand is that D and R are both fascist parties. There is no significant difference in the policies implemented when one part or the other is in power, and with each passing administration things just get worse and worse and worse.
Or there the uncomfortable truth that the Democrats didn't consider slavery to be a dirty word.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
You missed the biggest liberal idea. Prohibition of alcohol.
That was certainly NOT a liberal idea. It was pushed by the evangelical Protestant churches. It was accomplished with help of the "drys" - The Prohibition Party. You should educate yourself on what "liberal" means. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_liberalism_in_the_United_States
It seems clear that this article was a title first, and then they crafted the article around the title. No research or poll was done.
And you reached that conclusions without going to look at the actual study by Gauchat in "American Sociological Review". Admittedly it is a forthcoming publication, but here is the author's bio. I am sure that you can read the article in April if you like, and then take up any issues with the author.
I study the anti-science movement in both conservatives and liberals, and the although they are both equally anti-science in their own way, the conservatives have a powerful anti-science champions in fox, the evangelical movement, Beck, Limbaugh, and pretty much every conservative think-tank that I can think of.
All that propaganda has an effect.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
We could go on and on, but you get the idea. Virtually every single initiative that has improved the lot of the average citizen has been advanced by those with liberal or "progressive" ideals.
I am confused as to what you are trying to say. I thought one of the main reasons that MTBE was added to gasoline was that it raised the oxygen level of the gasoline. This would then make the gasoline burn cleaner. What is BS? Was that not the reason that MTBE (and now ethanol) was added to gasoline?
The conservative Christopher Buckley, son of William Buckley, traces the problem to a misplaced war on intellectualism by the right. His thoughts on this is that for the last half decade or so, conservative intellectuals had a tendency to go to Wall Street after college while liberal intellectuals had a tendency to go into higher education. Over time, colleges and universities had a more liberal personnel influencing future generations of students. Many conservative intellectuals like his father warned about this liberal intellectualism influence. The problem was the less intelligent members of the right would ignore the "liberal" part of the warning and the right grew to distrust all intellectuals regardless of their ideological views. People like Sarah Palin almost revel in their lack of knowledge portraying intellectuals as "elitists.". This is a very dangerous stance according to Buckley as it hinders progress and science.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I would argue liberals tend to believe there is finite wealth which still would be enough to support everyone.
Meanwhile conservatives also believe there is finite wealth but feel those who do not "deserve" it should not have access to it. (ie there should never be enough wealth for everyone).
>Its that liberals believe there's finite amount of wealth to be had, and that's just not true.
I for one would love to hear the converse of this statement. Can you please explain to me how there is infinite wealth in our closed system?
---Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A START
I'm not sure what you're little story had to do with what he side. Can your side at least try for ten seconds not to invoke red herrings and every other logical fallacy at every turn.
It's a good question. What does regulation have to do with evolution? Why has the Right decided to continue a war on a theory for which has been mainstream science for a century, or for education that gets rid of some of the ludicrous myths of sex? And how does some crazy teacher demonstrating masturbation in Japan have to do with any of it?
The worst part about this is that I think you've probably got your fucking head so far up your ass, you can't even see how moronic you make yourself look with these sort of Rush Limbaugh-styled outbursts. Surely you're not a halfwit, so why do you insist on playing one on Slashot?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
It's called push polling. They didn't give a shit what you thought, they just wanted you to hear their framing of the question and believe it was true.
Push poll
I really am not saying this to be a dick, but both you and a previous poster got this wrong. It's "cast aspersions on" not "cast dispersions on". http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/cast+aspersions+on
"sometimes he felt that his whole life was a dream, and he wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it."
Yeah, no.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Niigata+Minamata+disease
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
You should know that he conservatives during the revolutionary war opposed most of the things you listed, and sided with the monarchy. Freedom of religion and the press are not conservative ideas at all. "Conservative" and "libertarian" are not interchangeable terms. In fact, in the rest of the world libertarians aren't known for being conservatives or right wingers, and are in fact more associated with socialist movements.
You should also know that the ACLU has been standing up for all of those rights you claim they don't "like". You should read about some of the cases they've defended some time. You might actually be surprised.
That's pretty much exactly what IQ measures, by design, and often weighted to account for cultural differences.
That's exactly what some IQ researchers wish to claim that IQ measures, but that's not the same as IQ actually measuring that. What IQ actually measures is a long standing topic of debate in the field. Less than a year ago this study was published showing that motivation plays a big role in the outcome of IQ tests. Or look at the work or Richard Nisbett, whose research shows the exact opposite of your claim that IQ differences persist after controlling for societal factors.
This is an excellent example of how conservatives misunderstand science. They take a statement like "IQ measures intelligence" as fact, and don't question the evidence behind it.
Stupid fucking conservative.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Speaking of religious texts, check this out: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2012/03/22/mischief-follows-in-partisan-bible-translations/
Exodus 21:22 is used to say: "If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follow: he shall be surely punished, according as the woman’s husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine." or "If men chide, and a man smiteth a woman with child, and soothly he maketh the child dead-born, but the woman liveth over that smiting, he shall be subject to the harm (he shall be subject to a fine), as much as the woman’s husband asketh (for), and as the judges deem (appropriate)."
Lately certain translators have been replacing words meaning "miscarriage" with words meaning "premature birth". Why that, you might ask? Notice that penalty for miscarriage is not the same as the penalty for murder, implying that according to the bible itself (Old Testament, even, none of that namby-pamby turn-the-other-cheek Jesus stuff), a fetus is not a person. Whoops! Looks like the inspired word needs a little clarification.
(If you care to argue, follow the link and read it first. They've documented it rather well.)