Political Affiliation and Scientific Knowledge Levels

Previously on this blog, I've talked about differing intelligence levels and knowledge levels of different political groups. I've also decried the extreme anti-science and anti-intellectual views that have been articulated by conservative spokespersons in the United States. Thus, I was interested in some recent work which suggests that by some metrics the political right is more pro-science than the left. Audacious Epigone showed that GSS data demonstrated that, on average, Republicans are more pro-science and scientifically literate than Democrats. Epigone made no effort to control for variables, such as income, education and race.

Epigone's statement prompted Razib Kahn to do a similar, more detailed analysis focusing on science knowledge and attitudes. Kahn organized the data by political self-identification along the conservative-liberal continuum rather than by an individual's party affiliation. Razib's analysis suggests shows that conservatives and liberals are almost indistinguishable in overall knowledge level. However, when one removes the questions that discuss specific pet issues of the modern right-wing (i.e. those related to evolution and the age of the Earth), conservatives arguably pull ahead slightly in terms of scientific knowledge. At the same time, the data shows that moderates are less scientifically literate and less science-friendly than both conservatives and liberals. On all of the 19 variables that Razib examined, political moderates never come out on top. That is, for each question, sometimes conservatives perform best, and sometimes liberals, but never moderates. This is consistent with other results that show that in general moderates are less intelligent and less educated than other groups. For example, moderates have lower vocabulary scores than the general population. Razib performed additional analysis to try to control for other variables and his piece is worth reading.

This data suggests that there is a significant and underappreciated disconnect between right-wing leaders and self-identifying conservatives. If the individuals on the right right aren't statistically distinguishable from the left when it comes to science issues why do so many conservative politicans go out of their way to make anti-science remarks? There are a variety of possible explanations, but none of them are satisfactory.

First, many of these anti-science comments have been directed towards biology and matters related to biology (e.g. John McCain's remarks about bear DNA and Sarah Palin's remark about fruit fly research.) It is possible that the religious right's negative attitude towards evolution is carrying over to biology as a whole. However, this doesn't explain the remarks about other scientific areas (such as Bobby Jindal's remark about volcano monitoring). Moreover, although the human evolution question is by far the one with the most extreme difference between liberals and conservatives, (The percentages that accept human evolution according to the GSS are 69% for liberals, 52% for moderates and 39% for conservatives), the other questions suggest that conservative attitudes about evolution have not spread to other areas of biology. For example, when asked if the statement "Antibiotics kill viruses as well as bacteria" is true or false such as understanding that antibiotics cannot harm viruses 60% of liberals answered correctly while 63% of conservatives answered correctly. (The statement is false.)

Second, right-wing leaders may understand that most conservatives are not anti-science but think that the more active conservatve base is heavily anti-science. Without more data, it is hard to test if the active conservative base is substantially more anti-science than rank-and-file conservatives. Eeven if this is the case, it seems there are more effective ways of energizing the conservative base than anti-science rhetoric.

Third, right-wing politicians mayhave erroneously bought into the false stereotypes about their own constituents. Given the prevalence of such stereotypes, this seems most likely. This hypothesis is also difficult to test because politicians aren't going to admit that they've been pandering to rubes. Unfortunately, this belief among the right-wing leaders that conservatives are anti-science could easily act as a self-fulfilling prophecy if it causes pro-science conservatives to either stop being conservative, or causes some conservatives to become more anti-science to fit their tribal allegiance. However, this possibility does have a bright side: If this explanation is correct, then right-wing politicians are likely to be more pro-science in practice than they appear to be in public. Moreover, conservative politicians may act pro-science if they can be convinced that their constituents really aren't as anti-science as the politicians them to be.

The AFA, Youtube, Christine O’Donnell, and Yale: A Rant About The Modern Right Wing

For a long time, I've believed that the anti-intellectualism of the modern right-wing in the United States is a fringe phenomenon.

However, over the last few months, I have become increasingly convinced that anti-intellectualism is not just a fringe phenomenon but a general trend of the modern conservative movement. The leaders of the movement are either ignorant, anti-intellectual buffoons, or they believe that their base is composed of ignorant, anti-intellectual buffoons.

Prior to coming to this conclusion, I had seen much evidence for this claim that did not convince me. The GSS data show that people who self-identify as liberal on average have larger vocabularies than those who self-identify as conservative. However, this did not convince me. Among other problems, the overall trends in that data are complicated. Vocabulary is correlated not just with increased liberalism but with general political extremism. That is, people more likely to identify with extreme political views are more likely to have a large vocabulary. Moreover, having a small vocab does not mean that one is anti-intellectual. It just means one is less likely to be intellectual.

Moreover, as I've discussed before, by some metrics of political knowledge, Democrats perform on average more poorly than Republicans.

However, the evidence for widespread anti-intellectualism among the American right-wing has now reached proportions which are difficult to deny. It is easy to dismiss Sarah Palin's comments about fruit flies as simple ignorance. And it is easy to dismiss Bobby Jindal's remarks about volcano monitoring as an isolated incident. However, these are not isolated incidences and one can point to many similar instances. Two of the most glaring that I've seen recently are remarks by the American Family Association's head Tim Wildmon and remarks made by Delaware senate candidate Christine O'Donnell.

The American Family Association is a right-wing Christian political group most known for organizing the boycotts that the right-wing periodically directs against companies that they have decided are too gay-friendly. I happen to be on their mailing list and received an email recently which contained the following:

A few months ago, AFA commissioned Christian songwriter/singer Eric Horner to write a moving patriotic song to honor our national motto, "In God We Trust."
Without any fanfare, we posted it on YouTube. The response was so overwhelming that YouTube called us to find out what was going on!

The fact is, the video is patriotic and inspiring, and it shares the message of faith. People love it!

YouTube has told us that if we can get 20,000 people to watch the video, they will feature it on their front page. That means that the tens of millions of people who visit YouTube's website each day will be offered the opportunity to watch the video - a video with a Christian message!

(fonts and formatting as in in original)

So much about this claim is strange that it is difficult to figure out where to start. The text contains outright lies. Youtube does not in general contact people for making popular videos to “find out what was going on!” It is conceivable that there is some threshold where such contact would occur. But that threshold is surely far beyond 20,000 views. In comparison for example, this video of Christopher Hitchens has around 35,000 hits and it is not the most popular such interview with Hitchens. Or to use a more amusing comparison, this extremely NSFW tribute video to Ray Bradbury has around a million views. 20,000 views is not much on Youtube. And anyone who gave minimal thought would realize this. My conclusion must be that the AFA lied . This is nothing less than political conmen fleecing a mark.

The other example was Christine O’Donnell’s recent attack on my alma mater. The Senate candidate, fresh from her prior remarks about scientists engineering ultra-intelligent rats , has now decided that Yale is a bad thing. She tweeted:

My opponent wants to bring Yale values to US Senate. I want to bring liberty, limited government, fiscal sanity.

Now, in fairness, she included a link to an article in the American Spectator which seemed to prompt her remark. That article didn’t criticize her opponent Chris Coon for going to Yale or for Yale values, but for his statement that he wants to bring the values of the Yale Divinity School to the Senate. That article is an attack piece, but like many attack pieces, it does have some truth to it and points out correctly that the Yale Divinity School is more left-wing than the general American population. That’s not the same thing as complaining about Yale in general. But, apparently to Christine O’Donnell, the problem as a whole is “Yale” values. According to O’Donnell, the values of one of the best universities on the planet are inherently bad values. It is difficult to imagine a more anti-intellectual stance short of book-burning. And yet, O’Donnell won the GOP primary for the U.S. Senate against Mike Castle. Castle is reasonable, well-educated and experienced. He has a law degree from Georgetown. He has demonstrated competence for over 20 years in political offices. And yet, he lost in the primary.

Anti-intellectualism is not at all limited to the GOP. It is becoming increasingly clear that the Obama administration actively interfered with government scientists telling the public how bad the the BP spill really was. Moreover, the Huffington Post, a mainstay of the liberal blogosphere, is filled with proponents of pseudoscience. And they have recently branched out from making absurd medical claims to denying evolution. But even these problems are small compared to the scale and pervasiveness of anti-intellectualism among the current conservative movement.

I don’t know what has happened to the GOP. At this point, the party seems to be engaging in a spiral of anti-intellectualism. There may be a positive feedback loop in that the more intellectuals grow disgusted with the Republican Party, the less incentive Republican candidates have to care about intellectuals. But that cannot be the whole story. Many people who are not intellectuals are not anti-intellectuals. So, I don’t understand what is happening to the Republican Party. But it disturbs me greatly. I’d like to be able to reasonably vote for multiple candidates including moderate Republicans. But as long as these trends continue, I will be forced to keep giving my money, my time, and my vote to Democratic candidates. And when I need to mark down what my politics are in a little box, I’ll answer “liberal” or “progressive” because in the United States right now, putting down anything else is becoming perilously close to writing “I support willful stupidity.”

Health Care, Death Panels and GPFM

Recently, Sarah Palin and other prominent Republicans have repeated claims that the proposed health care legislation would result in the creation of so called "death panels."This claim was quickly determined to be an egregious falsehood. However, the damage was already done and all elements of the proposed legislation that dealt with end-of-life issues were removed. My father has a piece up at the Oxford University Press Blog arguing that in fact death panels aren't such a bad idea. Essentially, the point is that one of the major reasons our health care costs are so high in the United States is because we go through tremendous effort to extend life during the last few months of life for many elderly. It is an issue very much worth discussing.

However, there are two related matters I'd like to mention. First, we should not lose track of how incredibly mendacious Palin and her compatriots have been about this matter. The fact that Bush's earlier proposed health care legislation had nearly identical end-of-life provisions is just one of the many ways in which Palin has simply become divorced from anything resembling reality. At this point, one must wonder if reality has taken out a restraining order on Palin.

Second, as someone who grew up with a very Jewish ethic about end-of-life issues it is emotionally very hard to agree to actively deciding that we will no longer provide health care to certain people. In classical Jewish thought, every effort must be made to continue to sustain life, regardless of cost. However, this view was constructed when medical technology was very different. Two-thousand years ago we didn't have the option to add a few painful months of life to someone at the cost of millions of dollars. We do now. This different situation may require serious reexamining of this sort of belief. This probably isn't an issue for most people in the US or at least the form it will take will be very different. Catholicism for example has for a long time tried to make a distinction between ordinary and extraordinary standards of medical care. In event, as medical technology becomes even more advanced, more and more value systems are going to need to serious think about these issues. Go read his piece here.

Sarah Palin and Wikipedia, part II

It appears that both the New York Times and I missed the real story about Sarah Palin and Wikipedia. Shortly after I posted my previous post, I received an anonymous tip to look at the edits to the article from August 21st. Those edits, by an anonymous IP address, are much more interesting than the edits by Young Trigg.

The edits appear to be done by what may be a professional PR person.

The editor’s IP address, 71.138.164.23, which most likely corresponds to a home DSL line, has no other edits to the English Wikipedia. Using a home address to make edits is something that the smarter PR people have engaged in after repeated scandals in the press made clear to them that using IP addresses corresponding to their organizations was a bad idea.

Now, the individual edits in question:

First, the editor toned down the wording on the Monegan incident, replacing discussion of Monegan being fired with a statement that he had been “dismissed.”[1] The editor then also removed material disputing Palin’s version of events and removed material noting the ongoing investigation.[2]

The editor also changed the section on Palin’s approval ratings so that the headline was “High approval ratings” and similarly toned down a section header that had the word “controversy” in it.[3]

Now, one aspect of the edits is subtle and can be easily missed: The editor downplayed the later articles about the Monegan incident so that if one followed the links one would go to the less negative material in an earlier newspaper article. This is more obvious if you look at the entire set of changes: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sarah_Palin&diff=233280080&oldid=233206699

There are two other points that suggest that these edits were made by a PR individual: When changing section titles, the individual capitalized the entire section title. For example, “Matanuska Maid Dairy controversy” became “Matanuska Maid Dairy Closure.” Similarly, “Approval ratings” became “High Approval Ratings.” Now, a regular Wikipedian would be familiar enough with the Wikipedia manual of style not to do this. Moreover, the edits all occurred in an eight minute span. That speed of editing for someone who is not a regular Wikipedian, including the addition new sources to an article, would be difficult without prior planning. That is most consistent with a PR person having a set plan and then implementing it.

Finally, the individual in question made one other edit, also on the 21st. This is the individual’s only edit aside from the Palin article. The editor moved Palin to the top of the list of rumored Republican vice-presidential candidates.[4] This edit is particularly interesting, because as of the 21st, there was very little noise about Palin as a candidate at all. While we must speculate, it is quite possible that these edits were made by an insider to the McCain campaign, a possibility that both the Times and I missed.



[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sarah_Palin&diff=233279156&oldid=233206699
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sarah_Palin&diff=next&oldid=233279397 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sarah_Palin&diff=next&oldid=233279635
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sarah_Palin&diff=prev&oldid=233279830 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sarah_Palin&diff=prev&oldid=233279830
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Republican_Party_(United_States)_vice_presidential_candidates,_2008&diff=prev&oldid=233280302

Sarah Palin, Wikipedia, and The New York Times

The New York Times had a recent article on edits to Sarah Palin’s Wikipedia biography that appeared to clean up and expand the article a few hours before her selection as the Republican vice-presidential candidate was announced.

The New York Times article is inaccurate. There is one minor inaccuracy, one factual error, and one serious omission.

First, the minor inaccuracy: The Wikipedia user’s name in question was not “YoungTrigg” but “Young Trigg” with a space. This isn’t as trivial as it might seem: Wikipedia user names are very sensitive and someone trying to follow-up on the article might have difficulty finding the pages discussed in the New York Times article if they did not know this and were not familiar with navigating Wikipedia. Furthermore, this shows sloppy reporting. I could understand how a copy-editor might change “YoungTrigg” as one word to “Young Trigg” as two words but I am at loss to find an explanation other than sloppiness for going in the other direction.

Second, the factual error: The New York Times claims that Young Trigg’s edits to the Palin article were “all positive.” This is false. As Trigg pointed out on his talk page after the matter blew up on Wikipedia, Trigg expanded the section concerning the state-trooper controversy. The addition, while not negative, is not positive either. Indeed, the overall thrust of the edit is to add more negative material about Wooten, the state trooper who Palin is accused of trying to get fired due to familiar disputes. The edits in question also contain some minor elements which could be construed as making the section more positive for Palin. However, the expansion in general makes the section more prominent in the article and does not make Palin look good. From the timestamps, it appears that the New York Times writer, Noam Cohen, read Trigg’s talk page after this comment was made.[1]

Third, the omission: What happened to the article overall shows how well the system on Wikipedia works. Young Trigg’s edits that were well-sourced and relevant (most of them) stayed in. Edits that were slanted towards Palin or otherwise not-neutral were removed. Most of Trigg’s edits have stayed for the simple reason that most of them were good edits. So even if Trigg was an operative sent by the McCain campaign (which frankly, I doubt), this shows Wikipedia triumphing over that.

This quick self-correction is connected to a general point that I’ve tried to make before that seems to often get lost: people often say that Wikipedia is fine for non-controversial topics but is bad for controversial ones. The almost exact opposite is true. Controversial topics have many more editors looking at them and thus will be more likely to be neutral and well-sourced.

One final remark: in Wikipedia and Wikimedia circles Noam Cohen is considered to be be one of the more accurate reporters on Wikipedia matters. This article is about average for him. As far as I can tell, the primary reason that Cohen is highly regarded is not that he is a such an accurate reporter, but that almost everyone else is far worse.

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[1] The New York Times article notes that the Young Trigg account retired. The retirement announcement on the page was added in the same edit that Trigg made his comment that he had not made only positive edits.