Posted on by Bonald

What would I do without Steve Sailer finding stuff like this for me?

Although we appreciate several things about the Duarte et al. essay, “Political Diversity Will Improve Social Psychological Science,” including its insistence that social scientists should work to minimize the impact of their political views on their research and its sensitivity to political threats to social science funding, we find their central argument unpersuasive. Contrary to the assertion of the authors, we have seen no evidence that social science fields with more politically diverse workforces have higher evidentiary standards, are better able to avoid replication failures, or generally produce better research…The authors are thus calling for major changes in policy and practice based on sheer speculation. The authors cite some evidence of the benefits of “viewpoint diversity” in collaboration, but there is a scale mismatch between these studies (of small groups) and the field-level generalizations the authors make.

Remarkable. Intellectual diversity directly related to the field of study would seem to be the case where one would have the strongest expectation of a diversity payoff. The case is much easier to make that various social commitments will keep social scientists honest than that female or black engineers provide mysteriously new perspectives. And yet they claim no measurable effect. I salute the authors’ humility in refraining from stepping beyond the data of their specific case to the vast society-wide implications of this result.

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