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.
Discovering the truth of these questions is not really worth ruining your life.
Look at James Watson, even if you win a Nobel Prize, your career can still be ruined if you say the wrong thing.
What you say is true, but tragic. What is a professional reputation worth if one ignores inconvenient truths? No opinion (however lay or erudite) is deeply serious if truth is less important than ego preservation. Any system of thought that disregards truth is ultimately incoherent and will produce nothing of real value.
I think that self-censorship is practically universal and a core tenant of our social behavior.
Somehow I think some group(s) of people have gotten it in their head that they are the only ones who have to self-censor and that they are a victim for it, but I think if you challenge yourself you can come up with hundreds of times self-censoring in social situations is the obviously correct choice (political or not).
Think about it, from disallowing words like "hell", to talking about death, to discussing sex, to oversharing, there actually is a very small percentage of combinations of words that are appropriate conversation.
"Did Giordano Bruno die for his astronomical discoveries or his atheism? False dichotomy: you can’t have a mind that questions the stars but never thinks to question the Bible. The best you can do is have a Bruno who questions both, but is savvy enough to know which questions he can get away with saying out loud. And the real Bruno wasn’t that savvy."
This is one of the more wild social concepts that the modern age of social media has super charged. At its core: what’s the acceptable line between presenting counter-views versus heresy? And one level up: what’s the responsibility of the audience to consider any counter, even heresy?
The most surprising result to me is how scholars tended to report that moral concerns that a study’s conclusions could harm vulnerable groups 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.
We have to look not far from our own field to see a replication crisis brewing. The results in ML papers are obviously moving in the same direction, all while beating SOTA by miniscule amounts.
IMO psychology became a lot less interesting when it tried to become more scientific.
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.)
"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."
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:
I agree with many of the "taboo" conclusions, so just like the paper I am not commenting on their veracity when I say these are common beliefs held in many righter leaning academic circles. There's nothing wrong with polling people about these ideas, but I would have rather the respondents be given more open ended prompts about what they thought were taboo ideas vs what the researcher wanted them to think about.
Literally 100% of published papers in psychology, sociology and related fields will have "editorializing" equal or greater to the line you quoted. This one likely only stood out to you because it went against your beliefs while others align to them, or because you don't regularly read such publications to be familiar with norms.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Yes it’s a bad thing, both scientifically and societally. For science, having taboo subjects limits our ability to understand the world. For society, it obfuscates what an effective solution to societal problems looks like.
>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.
Readit News
Discovering the truth of these questions is not really worth ruining your life.
Look at James Watson, even if you win a Nobel Prize, your career can still be ruined if you say the wrong thing.
Somehow I think some group(s) of people have gotten it in their head that they are the only ones who have to self-censor and that they are a victim for it, but I think if you challenge yourself you can come up with hundreds of times self-censoring in social situations is the obviously correct choice (political or not).
Think about it, from disallowing words like "hell", to talking about death, to discussing sex, to oversharing, there actually is a very small percentage of combinations of words that are appropriate conversation.
"Did Giordano Bruno die for his astronomical discoveries or his atheism? False dichotomy: you can’t have a mind that questions the stars but never thinks to question the Bible. The best you can do is have a Bruno who questions both, but is savvy enough to know which questions he can get away with saying out loud. And the real Bruno wasn’t that savvy."
There are consequences in every choice.
But in a professional setting, particularly amongst scientists and academics, it seems essential that difficult conversations can be had openly.
They might as well have done the same study on tarot card readers
IMO psychology became a lot less interesting when it tried to become more scientific.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/17456916241252...
I'm most impressed that they had the temerity to recruit that figure as 'support' for their conclusions.
"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."
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:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095679761989791...
I agree with many of the "taboo" conclusions, so just like the paper I am not commenting on their veracity when I say these are common beliefs held in many righter leaning academic circles. There's nothing wrong with polling people about these ideas, but I would have rather the respondents be given more open ended prompts about what they thought were taboo ideas vs what the researcher wanted them to think about.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Things that are untrue but you can't question for the sake of societal cohesion are called "religion", not "science".
I think taboos exist for a reason, and it's mostly good for us as a species to collectively wall-off certain categories of behavior/thought/speech.
Example: From a 2018 open letter by an eminent geneticist, "How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of 'Race" <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/opinion/sunday/genetics-r...>:
>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.