Why are so many social scientists left-liberal?

reprise wrote: »

An opinion piece based on this:

Political Diversity Will Improve Social Psychological Science

https://journals.cambridge.org/images/fileUpload/documents/Duarte-Haidt_BBS-D-14-00108_preprint.pdf

An opinion piece nonetheless. Oh, and he doesn't seem so interested in political diversity as he is with people in social science being 'left-liberal' whatever that reductive term might mean. Surely political diversity would include communists, anarchists, leftist-authoritarians, fascists and all sorts from the political spectrum?

Venus In Furs wrote: »

So far, kings and a bishop have posted. I await pawns, queens, knights and rooks.

Im actually a Time Lord if that helps.

Environmentalists and the old school left - which was very much pro growth -- are not the same ideology.

Steady state economies won't ever work.

KomradeBishop wrote: »

Steady state economies (no-growth economies) are pretty much an inevitability, if we're to avoid long-term climate change and eventual destruction of a habitable planet.

As explained well here by an ex-NASA physicist, economic growth is inextricably tied to growth in energy production, and the laws of thermodynamics dictate that increased energy production leads to an increase in waste heat being put into the atmosphere - driving global warming.

To give an idea of how utterly absurd the idea of neverending growth is - paraphrased from that article:
At the current rate of economic growth, the increase in waste-heat being put into the atmosphere, means the Earth's surface would reach 100°C in 400 years - obviously this is unsustainable, and the world economy/environment would come apart long before then.

Unsurprisingly, mainstream economists think that they can just ignore physical-laws/reality once again.

so finished the link.

It's a socratic dialog between a physicist and an economist. Since the physicist is writing the socratic dialog, unsurprisingly he won. Unfortunately there are three major errors.

1) Mathematical. Basically he's just extrapolating.
2) Logic. He assumes economic and energy growth are eternally coupled.
3) Science: He gets the first law wrong.

Not surprisingly therefore, we can grow and won't get to 100 degrees centigrade in 400 years.

Heres why in detail.

1) Misuse of Extrapolation: He says energy growth at 3% a year will double in about 23 years. Thats true but the percentage really matters when you extrapolate: At 1% energy usage will double every 70 years. At .5% it takes about 140 years. 0.1% growth takes 700 years to double. Historically energy growth in the US has been 3% per year, in the future it won't be as we will see in the next answer.

2) The US is a particularly disingenuous example because the USA grew it's population from about 1M or fewer ( he starts in 1650 so he starts with the colonies) to about 340M now. This is clearly higher than the rest of the world, or we would have a few trillion persons on the planet.

The big step change per capita in energy usage is in going to a technological society from a pre-industrial society. The US both did that and grew it's population exponentially.
In technological societies energy and GDP per capita are weakly coupled, or not coupled at all. Don't believe me? Google this phrase: energy usage U.S.. So when he says So even if population stabilizes, we are accustomed to per-capita energy growth: total energy would have to continue growing to maintain such a trend, its wrong or a lie.

3) he then says

Second, thermodynamic limits impose a cap to energy growth lest we cook ourselves. I’m not talking about global warming, CO2 build-up, etc. I’m talking about radiating the spent energy into space. I assume you’re happy to confine our conversation to Earth, foregoing the spectre of an exodus to space, colonizing planets, living the Star Trek life, etc.

.. Earth has only one mechanism for releasing heat to space, and that’s via (infrared) radiation. We understand the phenomenon perfectly well, and can predict the surface temperature of the planet as a function of how much energy the human race produces. The upshot is that at a 2.3% growth rate (conveniently chosen to represent a 10× increase every century), we would reach boiling temperature in about 400 years. [Pained expression from economist.] And this statement is independent of technology. Even if we don’t have a name for the energy source yet, as long as it obeys thermodynamics, we cook ourselves with perpetual energy increase.

The 2.3% is incorrect as we have seen from 1 and 2 but this is just wrong. He's not talking about carbon buildup ( which is an issue) but lets take him at his word and ignore the trapping of energy caused by extra carbon. I think he's probably wrong about how efficiently the Earth loses heat anyway, but he is treating all human "created" energy, including from renewables, as endogenous and additional to the energy from the Sun. Thats ludicrous. If we have an economy based on solar, or wind for instance we are just using energy which is already coming in.

for example the wind gets it's energy from the difference in heat and pressure around a world heated by the Sun (his infrared), it imparts energy to turbines amongst other things and loses some energy in the process, the turbines turn that energy gained from the wind to electricity and some heat. Nothing has been created or destroyed, the account balances. The same amount of energy needs to be released as if humans were not on the planet at all. Thats true of all energy which uses the power of the Sun ( solar, wind and Hydro - hydro because the energy used to evaporate water is infrared, it overcomes gravity as evaporate thus gains potential gravitational energy, the water falls as rain and doesn't lose all of its potential energy if it doesn't fall to sea level, so we use trap the potential energy as kinetic energy when the water joins a river and down hills). It looks like he's ignoring renewables and is assuming a new endogenous energy source which adds energy not already here. Maybe Fusion.

We can have very large finite growth with renewables even if energy was growing as fast as he claims ( the limit is the limit of the Suns energy hitting the Earth*), but given there is little or no coupling between economic growth and energy in technologically advanced societies, and we use renewables, we could say almost infinite. First law.


Which is good because the only steady state economies which have ever worked are feudalist.


* of course utopian technologist think we don't have to stop there. We can trap Sun's rays external to the Earth and redirect them.

Eramen wrote: »

The right can be the same (notably in the US), but at least they can be reasoned with, adhere to decent standards of sociability and politeness and have the tendency to be in long-term employment.

To many leftists these notions are foreign are completely foreign. Try to engage them with reason and it won't be long until they single you out as a fascist or bigot. AH is replete with examples. Leftists just want to be liked, I get it, they get with what's 'trendy', but it's very damn tiresome when you're repeatedly dealing with the Borg collective who aren't capable of rationalising beyond their own emotions.

This is why 'feelings' and 'sensitivity' have replaced hard facts and responsibility in our society. Emotional drivel now comes first.

Which is exactly my point. Everything you said can switched around or directly applied to the right.

As an example. one of the popular arguments against SSM is that they just dont agree with it, falling into you "This is why 'feelings' and 'sensitivity' have replaced hard facts and responsibility in our society. Emotional drivel now comes first." which would be a more popular opinion on the right.

Being left or right doesnt make you a special snowflake, just 2 different borg collectives.