The Left-Right Expertise Gap: Considering the Data

I've mentioned before that I believe that global warming (or healthcare, or illegal immigration, etc) is a problem that will require solutions coming from all sides, as one viewpoint is not likely to have effective answers. So how does science convince conservatives that it is in their best interest to begin listening and participating in these debates (or, conversely, what will convince conservatives that science is not the evil tool of liberals bent on controlling everyone's lives) rather than just opposing the information automatically, without critically considering it?

http://topicfire.com/share/The-Left-Rig ... 53272.html
The Left-Right Expertise Gap: Considering the Data
by Chris Mooney

Please note–I am not arguing that Democrats or liberals are “smarter,” or that conservatives don’t have any expertise. Rather, I’m pointing out that the expertise gap, overall, has grown quite vast–and that this has become closely tied up with party identity.

This is not a good thing–it’s a very divisive thing–but it is nevertheless a truth about America today. And if you want to know why we can’t agree about the facts any longer, and have lost any sense of a shared reality, it’s a crucial ingredient in the explanation. But it is only one ingredient, and I’ll soon discuss others. We have to start on this foundation, though.

For more elaboration, see my Prospect piece , or stand by for further posts.

From the bigger article (more elaboration):
Reality Bites
The science-based community once was split between Democrats and Republicans -- but not anymore.
Chris Mooney | June 14, 2011

In March, it was Kerry Emanuel's turn to do what so many of his colleagues have done before: defend their knowledge and expertise against congressional Republicans. If Emanuel's testimony was at times cutting, it was also impassioned. Addressing the alleged "Climategate" scandal--which he'd served on a British Royal Society committee to investigate--Emanuel noted that "there is no evidence for an intent to deceive" on the part of climate researchers. He continued, his voice rising: "Efforts by some to leverage this into a sweeping condemnation of a whole scholarly endeavor should be seen for what they are."

All of which is what you'd expect to hear from a frustrated climate scientist these days--except, Emanuel is a proud, lifelong Republican. Or at least, he was until recently, when he voted for Barack Obama, the first time he's ever backed a Democrat. In 2008, Emanuel says, he was a "single issue" voter concerned about science and climate change. "I don't like it when ideology trumps reason, and I see that the Republicans are guilty of that in spades at the moment," he says.

Kerry Emanuel's political journey isn't unique. Rather, it reflects a broader shift in the relationship between the U.S. political parties and America's scientific and technical experts, over the past several decades. There's no doubt these two divides are connected, but the relationship between them isn't necessarily straightforward. It's not as if all the brains are on one side, and there's a total lack of them on the other.

How did this happen? Part of the answer is surely obvious: In recent decades, the Republican Party's rightward shift alienated many academics, scientists, and intellectuals. Indeed, that's how Kerry Emanuel accounts for his own political transformation. In the early 1970s, as an undergraduate at MIT, he remembers feeling surrounded by the "liberal excesses" then prevalent in the "People's Republic" of Cambridge, Massachusetts. "I remember hearing fellow students defending Pol Pot and Mao Zedong and Stalin, and I was so horrified," he says. But now Emanuel sees the situation as reversed: The extremes are on the Tea Party right, the Democrats are centrists and pragmatists, and Emanuel--really always a moderate--finds not so much that he has moved but that his party has. "I'm turned off by those people for exactly the same reasons I was turned off by the ideologues of the 1970s," he says.

The growth of conservative think tanks parallels the leftward migration of expertise in general: Call it a countertrend. So it is not as though conservatives lack intelligent and talented experts of their own. Granted, in many of these battles, conservative "experts" don't really end up faring very well. Sniping at climate science from a few D.C. institutes and citing a few sympathetic scientists may turn friendly ears in Congress. But it does nothing to seriously undermine the conclusions and legitimacy of virtually every scientific society that can claim expertise in the subject, or of the national academies of nations around the world. The problem is that with expertise, even if you’re outgunned, you can fight a guerilla war very successfully. The reasons are rooted not only in the way the media now operate but also in human psychology.

There’s been much discussion of late about how we somehow landed in a “post-fact” world--the existence of which former presidential press secretary Robert Gibbs recently acknowledged.

We are now getting to the complicated question of why most academics today are liberal. Surely the rightward movement of the Republican Party has something to do with it, as do the repeated attacks on academia from the conservative movement over the decades. Ironically, though, one key premise of these attacks--the idea that institutions of higher education make one a liberal, through a kind of brainwashing process--is questionable. More and more evidence suggests that for most of us, our political identities are already largely determined well before we reach the point of choosing career paths, and then we select desirable life choices (a doctorate, for one) based in part on those identities. Neil Gross’ research with Fosse and Fresse, for instance, suggests that the expertise gap is likely the result of a “self-selection process,” fueled by the fact that for liberals, academic jobs hold prestige--but for conservatives, they’re not considered attractive nowadays. That’s partly because academia has been repeatedly smeared as a liberal bastion and perhaps also partly because of differing values: Ambitious and smart conservatives would rather work on Wall Street.

However, the researchers admit that their analysis can’t rule out another explanation supported by growing evidence--the idea that conservatives and liberals are just different, in aggregate, when it comes to personality types and moral systems. If true, this would surely affect liberals’ and conservatives’ career choices, too, as well as how they argue about fact-based or expertise-based issues.

SS109 wrote: I can say the same thing about the Left ignoring economic realities. For example providing healthcare with no limits no matter what the cost.
And while more on the Right than you think admit global warming is an issue, they don't think it takes precedence over everything else. Even other enviromental scientists worry that the cries of global warming are taking money and exposure from other, more easily solvable problems.
Negating the effects of global warming would be the biggest effort the world has ever undertaken collectively, and we all know how well the world works together. Not at all.

Would it make you feel better if the Republicans put in their platform that global warming is a concern, but we have more pressing issues right now?

Actually, in the Global Cooling thread I posted a link to a recent survey that shows the high percentages of all political affiliations that agree that AGW is a pressing problem, so I do know that the numbers are higher than the think tanks try to make it out to be - the problem is our representatives who aren't doing what their constituents deem priority. I'm curious as to what other problems "other environmental scientists" think are being ignored in favor of addressing AGW - everything that I've seen points to environmental scientists agreeing that unless we address AGW, everything else will be moot, but you probably have a source that I haven't checked out - can you post it?

Yes, mitigating AGW will be the biggest endeavor we will undertake, but we've demonstrated ample times in the past that we humans unite pretty strongly in the face of a common enemy/threat - this will be no different. The biggest hurdles are getting people educated (look at the poll questions, and where the uncertainties are but shouldn't be), and to get corporations not only on board but ending their influence politicians, or getting the politicians to start acting like leaders and standing up for what's right. No, it wouldn't make me feel better if the Republicans merely glad-handed and patronized the American public - they need to embrace this issue, or they face even further minimalization.

It's starting though: http://www.grist.org/climate-change/201 ... ate-sanity

CriticalBill wrote: I've always said that global warming will bankrupt this country long before we will even have a chance to control it (if it is controllable at at). But at least we'll all be cooler as we wait in line for our scraps.

Not necessarily. As we shift off of what we spend on fossil fuels, that money gets invested in renewables, upgrading our infrastructure, and improving our energy efficiency. For example, as we reach a critical minimum of electric cars plugged into the grid, they can be used as sources of power in acute time of need, for a fee paid to the owner - so they aren't just a drain on the system. The cost of not doing anything will be astronomical (still finding more data on all of this, but here's one estimate) - http://www.help-stop-global-warming.com ... rming.html

http://www.grist.org/list/2011-06-15-go ... anels-free
Google to spend $280 million to give you solar panels—free
by Christopher Mims
15 Jun 2011

http://www.grist.org/solar-power/2011-0 ... eaper-fast
Solar gets cheap fast
by Stephen Lacey
9 Jun 2011

http://www.grist.org/list/2011-05-19-co ... d-has-been
Cost of adding tons of renewables to U.S. electric grid has been almost zero, say studies
by Christopher Mims
19 May 2011

http://www.truth-out.org/renewable-future/1305474409
The Renewable Future
Sunday 15 May 2011
by: Achim Steiner, Helen Clark and Kandeh K. Yumkella, Project Syndicate

pineinthegrass wrote: It's a shame how politics so strongly effects acceptance of climate change science.

I also see many on the left that can't seem to accept that an unborn baby is a living entity and not just a "clump of cells". That seems like denial of science/fact as well.

Absolutely. Selective choosing of which science theory to support, and which to not support, when all are derived from the same methods and criteria for credibility is illogical.