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Comment by bikezen | Hacker News Reader

Have you considered that it's not filtering for conservatives, but conservatives are self-selecting out or can't cut it at all? Isn't liberal arts degree a literal punchline to so many on the right, yet you cant figure out why that might skew left?

> maybe there isn’t hard data, but it’s pretty obvious to a lot of people, so I would say this is something that need to be disproven, not proven

Huh, wonder why this world view doesnt jive with academia.

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> Have you considered that … conservatives are self-selecting out or can't cut it at all?

When the ingroup is underrepresented the question is “how can we get more ingroup in”.

But when the outgroup is underrepresented it’s met with “maybe outgroup just isn’t as good”.

Eg. women in tech, men in nursing; conservatives vs liberals in academia.

It’s worth thinking about why you’re wrong, because it explains why those comparisons aren’t valid. Modern conservatism is defined by rejecting ideas like objective truth or pluralism which are the core of academia. There’s no way to have conservatives more represented in science when conservatives refuse to allow people who practice science to be part of their movement: you used to be able to find Republicans who wanted to do something about climate change, for example, but anyone who wants to apply scientific principles there now has been purged from the party. Vaccines aren’t quite there yet but it’s trending in that direction and the percentage of doctors who are Republican have been declining since the pandemic.

Contrast that with women in tech or men in nursing and it becomes obvious why the comparison isn’t valid: women want to be good technologists, not to reject the validity of technology or say we should all go back to the Amish lifestyle (that desire is common to senior developers of both genders). Male nurses want to be good nurses, not claiming that their gender means they can commit medical malpractice.

Well if “I can only act until there is hard data” is a principle in academia then maybe academia deserves what it’s getting. We live in a Bayesian world after all.

Also the whole idea that they are self selecting out is absurd. There are many flavors of conservative, not just the ones you see on Ali G show or whatever.

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