Let he who is without Science Denial cast the first stone

The Washington Post recently ran an article on how political affiliation and level of religious belief affect support for, or suspicion of, the scientific consensus on various subjects. In it they refer to research by Dale Kahan to argue/imply that opposition to science is primarily driven by conservative ideology.

For example, they have these three very attractive charts, showing that the difference between people of high and low religiosity is small compared to the difference between conservatives and liberals when it comes to global warming,

evolution,

.

and Stem Cell research:

However, as so often happens, their article on causes of political bias ends up displaying some pretty impressive political bias. Unsurprisingly, this bias tends to be flattering towards those who share their political beliefs, and damning of those who don’t.

Firstly, look at those charts again. When looking at on the left-right axis, your eye is naturally drawn to compare the two extremes – to compare the most right wing to the most left wing (especially as the line is monotonic). You note the large difference in height between the leftmost data points and the rightmost, compare it to the relatively small difference between the high and low religiosity lines. The former difference is bigger than the latter difference, so political opinions must be more important than religious ones.

… or so the chart leads us to believe. However, this is hugely deceptive. As you can see, there are 5 tick marks on the horizontal axis, the measure was created from questions using 5 and 7 options, and there are a very large number of little vertical lines. This means they’re using a relatively fine measure of political ideology: they differentiate moderate conservatives from ordinary conservatives from highly conservative people. By doing this, they increase how extreme the extremes are, which increases that vertical difference our eye is naturally drawn to. With religion, however, they only admit of two categories, high and low. Perhaps if they had disambiguated more, so the categories ranged from “More religious than the Hasidim” to “More atheist than Dawkins”, we would have seen more spread between those two lines. As it is, the charts suppress these differences, reducing the apparent effect of religiosity.

That’s not the only problem with the article. The climate change and evolution questions seem pretty good, but the stem cell question does not show what they think it does.

“All in all, do you favor or oppose federal funding for embryonic stem cell research”

Now, in general opposing research for science does seem like prima facie evidence that you’re in some sense anti-science. But not here! There are two other factors at play which conflate the issue.

The first is that this is as much a moral issue as a scientific one. Thinking that stem cell research is immoral doesn’t necessarily mean you disagree with any of the scientific findings, due to the is-ought gap. In the same way that opposing nazi research on cancer (which used a variety of immoral techniques) doesn’t mean you think their conclusions were factually wrong, you can think stem cell research is morally wrong but the conclusions factually correct. Or, to use a clarifying contemporary example, suppose the question instead asked,

“All in all, do you favor or oppose federal funding for methods of treating homosexuality”

My intuition, which I suspect you share, is that the line would slope in the opposite direction – lefties would be more opposed than righties. This isn’t necessarily be because they are anti-science – maybe they simply think we are better off not knowing how to treat homosexuality, or better off not even thinking about the possibility. This moral belief doesn’t, however, mean they disagree with conservatives and scientists on any factual issue.

But there is another, even bigger, problem with this question. It doesn’t just ask about the morality of stem cell research – it asks about federal funding for that research. Conservatives are well known for opposing federal funding of things in general. Yet this research suggests that consistently applying the conservative rule “oppose federal funding of things in general” is suddenly evidence of being anti-science. You would be branded anti-science by this question even if your thought process was

“I think the federal government is very bad at research – it will be inefficiently run, overly politicized, and poorly directed – so I don’t want it to mess up stem cell research. Stem cell research is far too useful and exciting to trust to the government.”

Yet surely such a person should be considered pro-science, not anti-science!

Indeed, it seems that overlooking this issue, and conflating opposition to the state with opposition to science, is a clear sign of political bias on the part of the author. They choose a question which almost by design proved conservatives were anti-science, not by actually measuring the truth, but by simply re-defining opposition to science to include the political opinions they oppose. David Friedman once wrote about something similar – a study which, while claiming to prove that right-wing people were authoritarians, really just defined authoritarianism as ‘respects right-wing authorities’.

Ok, so their choice of data visualization technique was perhaps misleading, and the stem cell funding question was awful. But the other two questions look pretty solid, right?

Perhaps not. It’s well known – or at least widely believed – that conservatives disproportionately disbelieve in evolution and global warming. So if you wanted to prove that conservatives were anti-science, you’d pick those two questions, confident that your prejudices would be confirmed.

Yet there is much more to science than evolution and global warming. There many issues where there’s a scientific consensus at least as strong as that on global warming, yet some people still disagree. For example,

1. Astrology is nonsense
2. Lasers are **not** condensed sound waves
3. The earth orbits the sun

In fact, I would say that science is far more unequivocal on these issues than on global warming – probably around as certain as that evolution is true.

Yet on all these issues, Republicans are more likely to hold the scientific view that Democrats. And there are many more similar examples. If I wanted to make the same charts, but make Democrats look bad, I could easily “prove” that Democrats are morons who believe the sun orbits the earth.

The Washington Post article does contains a homage to data:

But why opine on all this an un-grounded way — we need data.

Unfortunately we need more than data – we also need rigorous statistical techniques.

It would be unfair to blame the original researcher. In his article, he also includes a chart on nuclear power, where conservatives have the more scientific view. Mysteriously, the chart that was flattering to conservatives doesn’t make it into the Washington Post article. Ironically, it turns out the Washington Post article was right – politics really is the mindkiller. It’s just hard to spot when you’re the one getting killed.

Diseased reporting about Africa

The Giving What We Can facebook group recently linked to a Washington Post article called ‘The long and ugly tradition of treating Africa as a dirty, diseased place.’ GWWC didn’t actually write the piece, but they did share it, and described it as ‘a warranted critique’, so we’ll assume they basically agree with the contents.

The article had many interesting parts on Ebola, where they said basically exactly what you would expect them to say on the basis of their political views. But I’m not an expert on ebola, so I shan’t address that.

They have a section on phrenology, where they attack the idea that ‘the size, shape and other physical characteristics of a person’s skull determine that individual’s intelligence.’ Well-known example of scientific misconduct notwithstanding, in truth it appears that skull size does positively correlate with intelligence.. Perhaps one could excuse Seay and Dionne (the authors) by saying that correlation is not the same as determination – there are still clever people with small heads, and idiots with big heads. But at the very least they were extremely misleading.

But the really interesting thing is the accusation that westerns have unfairly portrayed Africa as being a ‘diseased place’. Strangely, nowhere in the article do the authors actually argue that Africa does not suffer from a heavy burden of disease. Perhaps this is one of those things that are wrong to say, even though they’re true?

Yet if so, how strange for GWWC to share it! After all, GWWC recommends Against Malaria Foundation, which combats malaria in Africa. True, AMF also has operations in Asia and South Africa – but when called upon to describe AMF’s good work, GWWC describe it as saving “primarily African children who have been unable to develop immunity. It is one of Africa’s biggest killers.”

GWWC also recommends Deworm the World, which also operates in Africa. As does Project Healthy Children, another GWWC top pick. And SCI, a long-standing GWWC favorite, only operates in Africa.

Why does GWWC recommend these charities? Because they tackle diseases that are very cheap to treat, so we can easily do a lot of good by funding their treatments. They’re so cheap that they’ve been irradicated from western countries.

So GWWC should be well aware that Africa suffers from many diseases unknown in the west. Indeed, much of GWWC’s public relations work involves educating people about the opportunity for improvement these diseases represent. GWWC spends a lot of time talking about diseases prevalent in Africa, but absent in the west. So isn’t GWWC basically guilty of representing Africa as a ‘diseased place’?

Sure, GWWC could argue that there’s nothing wrong with saying this. It is, after all, true. But they why are we representing the Washington Post’s article as ‘warranted’?