Hey well named. I really loved the idea of this forum but the given recent actions of the mods on this site I won’t be taking part any more until corrective actions are taken. Best of luck. I am honestly bummed as I thought there was a pretty cool discussion sprouting here.

Sorry to hear that but I understand.

<blog>More than a few times I've joked to Mrs. Well named that I was going to eventually write a digital ethnography of the 2+2 politics forum. Now that it feels like an era that's coming to an end, it made me think of it again. Probably the stuff that fascinates me would seem weird to other people. It does strike me how much everything feels like a microcosm of the larger political situation though. Choices of framing, increasing polarization, a bit of radicalization, etc. If I weren't lazy it does feel like a great dataset. That's the world to me: a good dataset :P

I guess I'll probably return to my regularly scheduled playground schedule by Monday</blog>

In this household we watch Jesus Christ Superstar on Easter, and drink wine.

Looking at the group dynamics of 2+2 forums (and online forums in general), I have often thought these as very good empirical examples how similar we are to chimpanzees (especially as it pertains to tribe dynamics), and how most of our cognitive processes are completely ruled by emotion. Something about the online experience especially seems to strip away the veneer of "humanity" and lay bare our true nature.

Again, I am not attempting to make any value statement with this observation.

Since I may not be able to do some really deep dive on these (or at least not real soon), I figured I'd say a few things. Usually people are asking about whether there's a causal relationship, e.g. does violence in media cause violent behavior. So I assume that's the topic you're asking about. I feel like I've read studies that claim to identify a causal relationship between exposure to violent media and violent behavior, and other studies which claim not to find any. I don't actually know the correct answer. I do know that establishing causality is probably really difficult, and will likely run both ways in a feedback loop. That is, I would guess the most important factor in explaining the existence of violence in media is just that humans are violent. But it also makes sense that violent media contributes in some small way to reinforcing those violent tendencies. But it might only be a small way.

There seems to be a lot of research which focuses on establishing "desensitization" to violence as a result of exposure to violent media, probably because it's easier and more direct to measure changes in people's reactions than changes in their behavior. So for example, The Longitudinal Relationship Between Media Violence and Empathy: Was It Sympathy All Along? investigates "desensitization" in terms of reductions in people's empathy and sympathy for others. The authors are specifically trying to disentangle the concepts of "sympathy" and "empathy" but the literature review is also helpful, and I'm not sure we care about that level of detail here.

Re: causality, the authors say:

My takeaway is that the causality is pretty complicated (duh?), and it's also noteworthy that the correlation found between exposure to media violence and a reduction in sympathy for others in this study is fairly weak (p. 186). The correlation also seems to depend on measuring something pretty specific, e.g. the other measures of empathy they examined showed no correlation at all.

So what's the upshot of all this? I'm not really sure. I also wonder about how one measures the level of violence in media, because it could get fairly abstract. Does the level of realism matter? I often feel that more contemporary TV and movies are a little too violent for my sensibilities, but then I regularly play a video game that is violent, but the violence is more cartoonish and to me the lack of realism makes it feel more abstract, in the same way that I wouldn't think of chess as violent although it simulates battle in some very abstract way. I tend to be skeptical of political interventions aimed at reducing media violence to some extent because of all these questions I have. At the same time, I also lament how violent we are, and wish we could be less so. But I don't know how useful political interventions can be.

By all accounts, it seems the US is extraordinarily violent relative to other developed nations.

This methodology probably isn't particularly scientific, but I think one indirect way to examine the role of depiction of violence in media/TV/movies/video games to this phenomenon is to ask whether other developed nations are less prone to depict violence in these mediums. If they aren't, this is probably a pretty good indirect indication these factors may not have a strong causal link.

I am by no means an expert, but I have had some exposure to Japanese and Korean video games/movies, and it seems in both these nations the depictions of violence are just as extreme in the US, if not moreso. However, these nations have much lower violence, by pretty much any metric you could think of (with the possible exception of self-violence/suicide), leading me to postulate there is probably not a strong direct causal link.

Welp...

According to the 20-Jun-2018 Congressional Research Service "Recent Violent Crime Trends in the US" report (I.e. the research outfit for Congress), violent crimes have trended up in the most recent few years, but are still on an overall downward trend since the early 1990s.

One would have a very difficult time showing a causation of increased violence in the US due to violence in movies, TV, and/or media in general, during a period where some actual data shows that violent crime is trending downward.

https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R45236.pdf

That's a good point. AFAIK there is no widely accepted causal theory about the declining trend in violent crime since the 90s.

Accepted by whom? The 90s were before my time, but the argument I hear all the time is that it was due to a systemic increase in effective, proactive policing and increased incarceration of career criminals.

That is not to say this is necessarily true. I don't know enough to have an opinion one way or another, but that at least is the narrative floating around in the zeitgeist, and there doesn't seem to be a lot of counter-narratives floating around.

Anyways, as a general rule I don't mind comparing time periods to give some perspective; however, I am not a big fan of using this technique as a means to selectively justify/hand-waive away the issues of today.

2 examples of this you come across a lot are:

1. Crime isn't really an issue. It was higher in the 90s.
2. Immigration isn't really a problem. It was higher in the early 2000s.

Maybe crime and immigration are problems today, maybe they aren't. But I don't find the particular technique of comparison to some arbitrary time in the past to make your argument to be very honest or helpful.

Edit: I realize that this is not what Lapidator is doing. This is just a mostly unrelated thought.

Criminologists.

Once upon a time there was a fun theory that it was a result of declining exposure to lead, but that one didn't quite hold up. Mass incarceration may play a role. Changes in policing may play a role. Basically when I say there's no consensus I mean there's not a very compelling argument for any single dominating factor. Some of the reduction trends have also been international, which is interesting.

Sure, although I think it's useful to have context. I agree that the question "is X a social problem?" is not a simple function of recent trends, but often people point out the trends because people arguing that there's a crisis appear to misrepresent those trends, i.e. by implying there's a crisis because there's some dramatically increasing trend which doesn't actually exist.

There has to be a good book on this by now, but I haven't read it. I would like to read it, but first I have to find it.

An intuitively plausible idea which I think is popular has to do with the fact that LGBTQ people were a relatively hidden population. It's possible to be "in the closet" as a gay person in a way that's not possible for an ethnic minority, for example. This had the interesting consequence that as people came out of the closet, lots of heterosexual Americans with negative views of homosexuality suddenly realized that some of their close friends and family members were gay. It's more difficult to maintain an abstractly negative view of "gay" as a social category in the face of your other knowledge about your close friends and family as real people. This dovetails with a common argument that the continuing existence of racial segregation reinforces racial prejudices.

One interesting natural experiment about this theory may be possible in coming years: will atheism become more socially acceptable in a similar way? That is another relatively hidden population. Atheists don't face the same civil rights issues as gay Americans did, so there probably won't be the same kind of social movement, but it may be possible to track changes in attitudes in association with people coming to know that they have close relationships with closeted atheists.

The Gender Gap Is Also a Confidence Gap

I haven't looked at the actual studies in detail, but I thought this was interesting.

I read the abstract of the main paper being discussed. I would love to see the paper and look at the actual numbers. I am a little suspicious that they used “SD” for male over achievers and used % points for female college attendance.

I have done research and played the number game myself, and am familiar with how you cherrypick ways to express data to make your data seem to indicate more than it does.

The conclusions of the paper intuitively make sense. But i always get suspicious when I read abstracts that use unconventional ways to express data.

A lot of social science is now politics driven and a lot of very important topics are off limits because the research gets too close to stereotypes.

I've heard this claim repeated fairly often, but I've never seen any evidence presented to support it. Which "very important topics" are now off limits in which fields, and how have you determined that to be the case?

Differences in preferences driven by biology in different professional fields. Why is teaching, especially teaching younger kids, dominated by women?

Research into why black young men so dramatically underperform other groups (young black women, poor young Hispanic men) is yet another area littered with landmines. There are references to some things people think might be true but people are scared to do research in the space.

Gender equality literature is also literred with unequal treatment of stereotypes. It's okay to say women are more caring and therefore naturally suited to professions like teaching and nursing. But it's not okay to say men may have certain predilections (aggression for example may be helpful in certain professions.) that explain the gender gap in some high paying industries. The flip side is men end up in prison way more often than women but there people are okay with "men are involved in more violent crimes."

Then there are weird spaces where both ends of the political spectrum are weirdly happy to just ignore the reality. Consumption (some version of Euro style high VAT basically) tax is a famous example. There is pretty broad consensus among the tax practitioners (professors and policy makers that literally write our tax codes) that it's not really viable to increase the corporate and income taxes at the top because in the global economy those incomes are just too mobile. Short of some global government fantasy, 21% really is probably about as high as we can go on corporate income tax.

During Obama era, companies and lawyers were literally doing everything they could to move out of the US. That's why even Obama wanted to cut corporate tax rates (Obama's proposals were very similar to the TCJA under Trump with some differences on emphasis). There is consensus, that a consumption tax is really necessary. Republicans don't want it because they don't want more taxes. Democrats don't want it because they think it's regressive. (Democrats are wrong on this, IMO. European experience shows there are ways to work around the regression and VAT is definitely higher for high value luxury goods.)

This is not a new idea. Europe knew this all along. The idea is pretty simple. Tax the employees and consumption because they are much less mobile and we end up with the same revenues anyway.

Another really weird one is busing and school integration. I was positively shocked to learn parents at underperforming and mostly black students at NYC (and some other districts but I read mostly about NYC) schools historically have opposed forced integration almost as much as the white parents. They hold on very dearly to their communities and are very resistant to, to borrow a phrase from right-wingers, basically white SJWs parachuting down and saying they are doing the whole education thing wrong. There is also suspicion their kids will not be treated fairly. There is so little research done on how to convince black parents it's a good idea to send their kids to a potentially hostile (racist if you will) environment in the name of better education it is actually shocking. I looked, I couldn't find much.

That particular line of reading/research really stuck with me because I have felt very strongly that integration and constant contact with different races is a killer app in improving outcomes (there is research to back this up) but when parents ask reformers what it's like to be poor and black in a historically rich and white school, what do we know? (not very much)

I am at the point where I am sure a poor and black child going to a historically rich and white school will, on average, have much better outcomes on traditional measures of success such as education, income, and wealth. But what are the social costs? What hardships do they run up against when they get in schools with, on average, lower academic credentials and, perhaps more importantly, less financial and social support?

And that gets us into yet another area of research that is fraught with weird politics: when students get in via affirmative action, what kind of support do they need? Right wingers say nothing. They shouldn't be there if they need extra support. Left wingers agree with right wingers in a weird way because when people say AA admits need extra help, a lot of left wingers jump up and down and accuse people of racism. "They are just as smart. They are ready. They can handle the work."

Broadly speaking, it seems like the nature of much of criticism is that there does not seem to be a lot of critical analysis of much of the social engineering that has happened recently.

In the medical industry, if a new product/innovation comes out there is an expectation there will be a lot of research to determine the benefits and costs of the product, and the results will be honestly expressed to laypeople through the media.

With social sciences, I feel like there is a perception this isn’t happening. Social engineering innovations such as bias training (an example I gave earlier), affirmative action, and no fault divorce (just a couple examples off the top of my head)— there is a perception that no one is asking the serious questions that should be asked about the effectiveness and costs of such social engineering.

I see an interesting list of research topics and some opinions but I don't think you said anything about how you determined that those research topics are off limits in whatever fields.

Also, it seems like maybe in some cases it wouldn't make sense for the research you are asking about to be social science research, e.g. research into biological causes for phenomena would happen in biology, not in the social sciences. It's pretty much the nature of academic specialization that social scientists are going to investigate social causes of phenomena, but that doesn't imply that those are the only causes, and it's widely accepted in social sciences (and I've posted a little about it in this forum) that the nature vs. nurture dichotomy is flawed, i.e. because both matter and interact in highly complex ways.

Actually I would expect the overwhelming majority of social science gender researchers to think that the statements above about men and women are equally dubious; that they run the risk of over-essentializing gender differences and rely too much on stereotypes. In any case, there's an enormous amount of research on all sorts of contributing factors to gendered occupational sorting, and it's certainly not off limits to publish research which suggests that some differences are probably not entirely socially constructed. See for example this recent article in Science. There also does exist a fair amount of research about men and masculinity. There's a journal with that name, I believe.

This is a comment I've made at least once or twice to kelhus, but I feel like people make a lot of comments about "social science" when they are really just commenting on politics and the beliefs and attitudes of various activists, without having much exposure to what researchers tend to say?

I think there is also a perception that the social scientific community is not doing enough to stand up to activism that is relevant to their areas of expertise, when acitivists portray something as revealed truth that isn’t.

When president trump says some BS on climate change field, there is no shortage of climate change scientists willing to call him out on it.

When Google fires James Damore and denounce his points as unfounded hate and misogyny, when he is actually supporting his arguments with accepted, published social science research, there doesn’t appear to be too many experts willing to point this out.

Off limits is probably too strong. Very strong reluctance is probably better. People are scared to engage in research that looks like gender/racial profiling/stereotyping even though such research can answer important questions.

The predecessors to the paper you linked for example were derided as right wing propaganda and have gotten people fired. Harvard dean citing a well known fact that women’s IQs have lower standard deviations (not lower mean) may partly (he didn’t say it was only thing) explain why certain fields that strongly favor high IQs are dominated by men got him fired.

You’re right some of the comments is more about activists. The thing is activists dominate a lot of social sciences departments now so it’s hard to separate social science and activism sometimes.

The Unifying Moral Dyad: Liberals and Conservatives Share the Same Harm-Based Moral Template. (full text here)

Well Named,

I wanted to comment on this article, but it was moved to a forum I dont currently have access too. Anyways, I generally agree that most peoples political beliefs are more or less arbitrary, based on their environment and emotional need to belong to an in group. But their political temperament and how emotionally invested they are to their specific ideology, especially as it pertains to the strength of their negative emotions towards the "other" outside their tribe, might be based more on intrinsic personality factors, which could be nurture and/or nature related.

For example, in our current political climate it has become in vogue to call someone a "Nazi" for not adhering to the leftist zeitgeist of the day. However, if somehow we were all transported to Germany circa 1930s I think we would be surprised which individuals actually became enthusiastic Nazis and who didn't. I think it might be the exact opposite of who you might expect.

I listen to Jordan Peterson. Most of the critiques of him in the popular zeitgeist are some combination of ad hominem attacks and straw manning. That being said, I personally am skeptical of his willingness to try to assign personality characteristics to people based on their political beliefs. I have read some of the literature he cites to support his arguments, and to me it seems his arguments and inferences go way beyond what the data suggests.

I expected you to be able to post in the new forum. I'll sort it out.

I haven't given up on this playground just yet, but I suspect things will be a lot slower for me now. I have a few more things I'd like to write about if I can sort them out.

In case anyone was wondering :P

nobody addressed my final question. what if somebody runs for political office and promises that half the donations they receive will go to some type of specific "good" cause?