[dragonwriter]

> Our understandings of intelligence, social dynamics, genetic influences on behavior, sexually dimorphic psychology and performance, climate change, et al. are mired by unspoken taboos

Perhaps, but all the spoken taboos—that is, the concrete examples of things which are cited as being supposedly taboo to address in research—are, it turns out, actually quite well covered in the literature (sometimes, they are things one side would like to be true that are consistently refuted by empirical research, sometimes, as is the case with race/IQ correlation, they are facts both opposing sides acknowledge but each side prefers a different explanation for, and where one side, rather than acknowledging the dispute over the explanation, prefers to pretend the other side denies the phenomenon, and sometimes there is some other dynamic at work, but its pretty much never that the research either isn't done or is suppressed.)

[thu2111]

Well covered relative to what?

The problem is you don't know how much research into taboo topics would exist in an academic environment where freedom of speech was actually respected. It could be double, triple or 10x what we see today. Or it could be equal.

However, it would be strange to assume it's equal given the very public mob mentality and academic "executions" for conservative thought, the many testimonies from academics saying they're afraid to even voice conservative ideas in academia let alone apply for grant funding for them, and the work of people like Jonathan Haight who showed fields like psychology are dominated by one political ideology.

To me it's obvious there are areas that are under-researched by academia. To name just two:

1. Climate change skepticism. All the research I've seen here is done by academic outsiders. They find real problems, publish papers and get real retractions or changes made in the field, but none of it is done by academia itself. When you read the various emails showing how academics try to block people who disagree with them from getting published, it's obvious what's going on.

2. Men's rights. Academia churns out vast amounts of "research" into various feminist and intersectionalist topics. I've seen very few papers on anything approximating the male opposite. The small amount that does exist tends to come out of psychological research into education in the context of why boys are falling behind at school (they find some worrying things about teacher bias). But it's an occasional dot compared to the torrent of government-funded feminist thought.

The problem with areas of inquiry like these is that leftists attack them as not only illegitimate to study at all, but to even talk about. This is despite the fact that they're both completely mainstream sets of views.

[speedplane]

> To me it's obvious there are areas that are under-researched by academia. ... Climate change skepticism.

Why would anyone research "climate change skepticism" and not just "climate"? The very idea of a discipline with "skepticism" in it's name suggests that there is an existing answer that someone is looking for, whereas the whole point of science is to keep an open mind. Nobody researches "physics skepticism", they research physics.

If you presuppose an outcome, you're not really doing science.

[makomk]

That's sort of the trouble - mainstream climate change research seems to be lacking skepticism when it comes to claims that we're all doomed. For example, there was a paper in Nature which claimed the oceans were soaking up 60% more heat than previously thought, which implied CO2 caused much more warming than previously estimated. This made it onto most of the world's news and HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18352506 It should've caused skepticism, since it used a weird indirect method to estimate something that was measured directly and contradicted both the direct measurements and the models. It didn't. It took some of those academic outsiders to spot that they'd screwed up the error bounds and, in fact, this weird method wasn't able to measure ocean heating accurately enough to contradict the existing measurements. The researchers did at least admit some of their errors, which is not something that can be relied on in any field.

The HN comments are quite amazing in retrospect too. Lots of comments proclaiming our doom, with tthe topmost one starting "yet more bad news on the climate change front", one not-particularly-insightful downvoted comment at the bottom suggesting that a 60% change in an important measurement shouldn't inspire confidence in climate science's accuracy.

[speedplane]

> mainstream climate change research seems to be lacking skepticism when it comes to claims that we're all doomed.

That isn't enough. Mainstream physics research lacks skepticism about the laws of thermodynamics. Mainstream biology lacks skepticism about cell division.

When evidence for a proposition is strong, skepticism is weak.

If you want to argue for climate change skepticism, you have to provide evidence for to raise that skepticism. Yet every time someone does so, it gets shot down.

[thu2111]

Yes, I agree. That was poorly phrased by me.

What I mean is that academia finds it structurally impossible to do research that ends with the conclusion that maybe there's enough research done into something for now, that perhaps there's no problem that requires this sort of academic attention, or perhaps we lack the tools to make useful predictions in a field at the moment. There are no feedback loops.

Imagine you go into a very small, very closed field like climatology or economics, do some research, and your conclusion is this: "climate is too complex for us to model with any certainty, our data sets are corrupted and low quality, we really have no idea what's going on and can't fix this any time soon". Or even "the climate is changing but not in any actually problematic way, there's nothing to do here".

This may well be a legitimate or correct conclusion (for any field of science), but it's also a career-terminating one. Research into the question of how effective research can be just doesn't get done by academia because there's no ground truth end goal - research isn't a means to an end, as in the private sector. In academia research is itself the end.

This is what I'm trying to get at. To leave climatology for a moment, look at how long it took for replication studies in psychology to start at any scale, and how much science - for decades - has been found to be completely bogus. It's a staggering amount. Every time I read something about the replication crisis I'm stunned by the enormous scale, and how much more there seems to be to uncover. Academia has simply not been funding "psychology skepticism" and to a large extent still isn't. The production of large amounts of nonsensical research is guaranteed by the incentive structure of academia, in which research is entirely self-justifying and in which it doesn't pay to shoot down colleagues in your own field.

[whatthesmack]

You’re presenting as argument a non-issue and distracting from the real issue. They are researching climate. What GP seems to be referencing is that they’re coming to a different conclusion and are being assaulted for it.

[dragonwriter]

> Academia churns out vast amounts of "research" into various feminist and intersectionalist topics. I've seen very few papers on anything approximating the male opposite.

Have you looked? Because there's at least two competing fields devoted directly to the topic (“men’s studies” and “male studies”.)

[speedplane]

> leftists attack them as not only illegitimate to study at all, but to even talk about.

Conservatives love raising freedom of speech issues, if it aligns with their viewpoint. Where were the conservatives when extreme leftists were getting jailed for burning the american flag? Where were they when in the middle of the century when a bunch of music was considered being banned?

Conservatives don't care about free speech, they care about their own speech.

[whatthesmack]

s/conservatives/leftists/ and you get the same thing. It’s another non-argument.

The point GP seems to be making is that it is only conservative thought that is assailed as illegitimate to study or even discuss. As a conservative-turned-libertarian, I was frightened to even speak my conservative thoughts in college 15 years ago lest my grade be impacted. I can’t imagine what modern conservatives must endure in college.

Many reasonable people don’t want any particular side to have the upper hand. That applies to all of my conservative and libertarian friends. My leftist friends seem to have a self-righteousness about them that I can only conclude they gain from their empowerment on a campus lacking intellectual diversity.

[speedplane]

> My leftist friends seem to have a self-righteousness about them that I can only conclude they gain from their empowerment on a campus lacking intellectual diversity.

Conservatives are plenty self-righteous, you only hear ad-hominems like "anti-American", "hates freedom", and "naive" from the right.

[neekleer]

It sounds like you are sending the all clear even as science is being polluted by toxic politics and some chilling effects spread.