SIO304: Are the Woke Left and Alt-Right Alike? Part 2: The Study So Bad It Made Quillette Look Good

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:12 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 304 and this is a part 2. I'm Thomas. That's Dr. Lindsey Osterman is what my brain wanted to say. Can that be your name now? Yeah.

0:00:17 Lindsey: Yeah, that's my name. Mm-hmm.

0:00:25 Thomas: You know, I haven't seen it in about a billion years and I don't know if it holds up, but Brazil really was a great movie. Did you see that one back in the day?

0:00:32 Lindsey: Oh, man, it has been a long time. But yeah, yeah, I did watch that. I

0:00:34 Thomas: But Yeah, There's where like The whoever it is, like, keeps calling his wife the wrong name, and the guy's just like, "That's her name now." You know, you're just like, "Oh, just go with it," you know, kind of thing. Anyway, Dr. Lindsey Asterman, how are you doing?

0:00:49 Lindsey: I am so good. How are you?

0:00:50 Thomas: I'm good. I have been just waiting for part two. We there's so much more, I'm told that it, uh, worked out that we- We did two parts, maybe?

0:00:53 Lindsey: Mm-hm. Yeah, so we left off talking about how it's pretty atrocious that these scales that they're using to measure their main variables, political correctness, liberalism, political political correctness authoritarianism and white identitarianism were not validated. And one of the things that I was criticizing is like, you know, there's a traditional measure of political ideology where people just rate on a single continuum, like where they are between very liberal and very conservative.

0:01:24 Thomas: Hot or not? Oh, no. Okay. Yeah, that one.

0:01:26 Lindsey: Well, that too. And so I have a, it's not exactly a correction, but it's a bit of a concession. And there was a surprise nugget of information. This is just is great. So I think I mentioned last time that these same two authors, Jordan Moss and Peter O'Connor, they published a second article in 2020, that also included these three measures. And they were looking at some relationships with like personality and some other traits. And I went back to that article to check something else, and realized that they did include a traditional measure of political attitudes in that study. So they had a measure that was like a five point scale. And on one end, it said liberal on the other end, so the conservative and people would place themselves on that scale. So they did include it. But then I read what they did with that measure. And they didn't use it to validate the scales.

0:02:16 Thomas: What?

0:02:16 Lindsey: Yeah, all they did was report that this traditional measure of political ideology was normally distributed, and they reported the percentage of people that rated themselves exactly in the middle as moderates. But that's all they reported. However, this is great, I'm so excited. So they published this other article in PLOS One, and it's standard practice for them to provide their dataset publicly in that journal.

0:02:33 Thomas: Yeah, go ahead.

0:02:43 Thomas: Okay.

0:02:43 Lindsey: Journal. So I downloaded their data set. And I ran just some simple correlations with that ideology measure and these PC measures and white identitarianism.

0:02:47 Thomas: So, we looked at the data. Uh-huh. Ooh, let's see how it all holds up, huh?

0:03:00 Lindsey: Yeah. So first of all, the ideology measure does not correlate with the PC authoritarian measure. And once we go over what what the items on that scale are.

0:03:08 Thomas: Yeah, I was going to say, you may have to remind me what that means.

0:03:11 Lindsey: Yeah. So they say that that's like, you know, sort of an authoritarian left-wing extremism, right? Like, so, you Know, really concerned about causing offense to others, but in a, but they think that like aggression and force makes sense as ways to sort of enforce those values. That's what they say it's measuring, but we're going to talk about the scale items in a second. You'll see why that doesn't correlate. So ideology doesn't correlate with the PC authoritarianism. It correlates very weakly with the BC liberalism scale, which again, they call that an extreme left-wing attitude, but it's not authoritarian. They're concerned with the same things, but not with aggression force.

So it's weakly correlated with ideology in the direction you would expect. So people who say that they're more liberal score higher on the PCL. The strongest correlation is between the traditional ideology measure and white white, uh, identitarianism, right? So those two things are correlated such that people who are, uh, called themselves more conservative are also higher on that white identitarianist scale. Okay. So I know, right. So at least, I mean, is, this has one, this piece of the validation that needs to be done, right, which they haven't done. And this is suggesting that like those PC measures probably aren't measuring quite what they say they are, right

0:03:28 Thomas: Right.

0:04:13 Thomas: Shocker.

0:04:26 Thomas: Yeah.

0:04:26 Lindsey: Maybe the white identitarianism.

0:04:27 Thomas: Otherwise, they probably would have, like, released it and done all this, Right? Right.

0:04:30 Lindsey: Right? I mean, yeah.

0:04:32 Thomas: Lindsey Osterman doing people's homework for them since 1990 something, I don't know

0:04:33 Lindsey: I'm very suspicious. Yeah. Yeah, okay. And I've got one more thing to tell you. This is nuts. The PC authoritarian measure, authoritarianism measure, which is supposed to be a measure of left-wing extremism, and their white identarianism measure are positively correlated with one another. So people who are higher on the PC authoritarianism are also higher on white identitarianism.

0:04:41 Thomas: Uh-huh. Huh.

0:04:55 Thomas: Well, That's interesting. I What was the culprit there? Is it that the PC authoritarian measure was just bad, like those questions were bad, or okay,

0:05:01 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, let's let's get into it. And then maybe we can come back to that correlation at the end, because I'm not sure what it means. It's very hard to interpret it because the scale is so bad.

0:05:10 Thomas: Sure. And we already know you already told us that the white identity correlated with being conservative, more so, like, does that mean that the PC authoritarian thing they thought they were capturing is capturing something more conservative?

0:05:27 Lindsey: If it's capturing anything that has to do with ideology, it probably is like I have my doubts as to like, whether the score is really interpretable at all, just because of how bad the scale is, um, yeah

0:05:32 Thomas: Yeah. I could imagine it's pretty easy if you were trying to do data science stuff like this and polling and whatever to just bungle it, like it seems like it'd be pretty easy, if you don't ask the right questions, and if you kind of grab the wrong data, just be like, "Oh, this is a mess, this isn't going to do anything," unless you're maybe, you know, trained scientist, but supposedly

0:05:46 Lindsey: Yeah exactly, yeah yeah, right, which supposedly these people are, I, I don't know, yeah, I don't, what's going on? And the funniest thing is that with that correlation between PC authoritarianism and white identitarianism, they do report that in a table in their paper, but then they just don't talk about it, um, and they, and they still say in their conclusion like, "So we've provided evidence that we've got these extreme attitudes on the left and the right," and it's like, like, no, actually you didn't show that, you very much didn't, uh, anyway, okay.

0:06:00 Thomas: Oh my God, well, you were too excited, you had to share all those revelations and it just goes to show, always slow your expert down so that you're forced to do two parts of something that I don't know if it needed to be two parts, and then therefore we'll have, have more revelations in between part one, part two, it's simple, podcasting is easy, folks, that's how you do it, okay, do I need to squeeze a part three out of you, hold on how slow do we need to go? No, no, we're not doing that. All right, where, so, when, when we last left off, our heroes, or whatever, they

0:06:25 Lindsey: No that that really was that was a happy accident it's entirely possible I don't know yeah yeah so

0:06:56 Thomas: Were, uh, not validating their own scales, and I guess this was kind of directly related to that, seems

0:06:57 Lindsey: Yeah yeah, yes, it is, yeah, and so, not only did they not validate them, but, you know, in looking at this, I think that they are obscuring some of the most problematic aspects of these two PC scales, right? Right, in the way that they present them in their paper. So, like, they give some example items from these in the paper that are just standard Likert-scaled items. We've talked about that before. That's when you, you know, have a scale from like one to seven, and, you know, often the response scale will be something like strongly disagree to strongly agree. So they include example items in their paper that are just normal Likbert-scale items. But in actuality, these scales used a number of item formats, and some of them are super problematic. And they also obscure the fact that the origin of the two PC scales is from an unpublished master's thesis that has not been validated. And so it bothers me that it feels like there's, I don't know if it's intentional or not, but there's definitely some concealing of the quality of the scales that they're using. Okay.

0:07:54 Thomas: Like it, okay.

0:07:55 Lindsey: Yeah. So enough buildup, I guess. Let's talk about the items from the PC liberalism scale. So here's the example item that they give in the research article. So the question question stem is, it's a statement and people are rating agreement with a statement. So the example statement they give is, there are no biologically based differences in the personality, talent, and ability to reason between racial groups. Yeah, right?

0:08:27 Lindsey: And the people will rate their agreement with that. Again, this is from the PC liberalism scale. This is supposed to be a scale of extreme political attitudes, right, and specifically leftist attitudes. This this is just a factual statement that you could maybe know or not know the answer to, right? This is about race science. And we know, like, you know, if I was to read this as a person outside of the area, when I hear biologically based differences, I'm thinking genetic differences, right? I think that's fair to assume that that's the way that people would read that, you know? Immutable differences.

And so if you strongly agree with this item, right? That's evidence of your left-wing extremism, according to them. But really, if you know anything about this research, of course, you would strongly agree with it. Right. There's a few questions that are in a similar vein about gender and racial differences, and whether certain facts about gender or racial differences are biological or whether they're cultural. So they include the statement, "Women are on average more agreeable and more prone to anxiety and emotional pain than men," right? And then people are rating their responses from completely biological to completely cultural. And I'm assuming that,

0:08:26 Thomas: Yeah yeah oh okay

0:09:36 Lindsey: Yeah, yeah.

0:09:37 Thomas: I see, so that, that wasn't an agree or disagree. I like, huh, I'm not sure. Uh, yeah.

0:09:41 Lindsey: Right. Yeah. No, those are documented differences. The question is, you know, what's the origin of them?

0:09:47 Thomas: Well, how the heck does even an expert know precisely that question?

0:09:48 Lindsey: Right. Well, I think that as with most, so I'm not going to pretend that I'm up to date on like the behavioral genetics literature around this question. But if this is like most things, right, then this difference is probably an interaction between biology and culture, somehow, right? It could, it could be completely cultural, right, but I'm, I'm inclined to say most things are an interaction, right, and their rating scale doesn't really allow you to communicate that. So the, the midpoint on the scale is that they are equally biological and cultural, that's not quite

0:09:57 Thomas: Yeah. Right. Yeah. Like, is that the right? Yeah, I don't know. Again. Okay. At least on your, uh, you're on team Thomas in terms of picking apart this, uh. Question. Cause I, you know, this is me with every question, but at least we agree on this one. I. I just like the idea that somehow the question, e, here, the person answering the question has to perfectly, like, pinpoint the percentage interaction between genetics and environment, and if they don't, then they're an extremist of some kind, you know, like, then I mean, that just seems like a bad question. I'll be honest,

0:10:24 Lindsey: Right Oh, yeah, oh, Yeah. Yeah. Right.

0:10:57 Lindsey: Well, and honestly, like, again, they're not very clear about how they score these things. But my assumption is that the more you attribute these things to culture, the higher you are on the PC liberalism scale. And that is ridiculous.

0:11:08 Thomas: Yeah, extreme leftist. Yeah. Yeah, it is ridiculous.

0:11:14 Lindsey: I mean, yeah, like there

0:11:16 Thomas: I mean, are there Not... Look, even from their perspective, are there no better questions to ask to get you to an extreme left thing? Is it that they're trying to do... What's going on here? Is it they're dying to ask questions that have like a scale so that on one side you're extreme right and on one of your extreme left or something? Is that the problem here? I don't know.

0:11:39 Lindsey: Are a lot of problems here. Right. Right. But I will tell you the way that this scale was developed was, so this, again, this was from that unpublished master's thesis. And what she did was start out with a little more than 200 items that she just made up. And then she did something called a factor analysis to sort of pair those questions down to two sort of single factor scales. Right. And so she just sort of trimmed out items that reduced the, what they call like the internal reliability of the scale and internal internal reliability just means the questions hang together, right? People's responses are correlated. So that's how she pared down this particular set of items, right. It didn't have anything to do with sort of like, it didn't, it wasn't from the conceptual place that you're asking about. I don't know if that answered your question.

0:12:28 Thomas: Okay, yeah, I don't know, I just, I still just feel like this is not the best way to measure this, but Okay, I think,

0:12:35 Lindsey: No, I totally agree. This is, again, if I was, so I said last time that I'm thinking about rerunning this, um, I would, I would do a complete overhaul of both of these PC scales, um, and by the way.

0:12:47 Thomas: The problem is They're trying to get, what is the problem they're trying to ask, far lefty questions or whatever that are cast things in a negative light, sort of, is that part of the problem? Like they're Yeah. Because Otherwise what

0:12:57 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah. I agree with that, yeah. And not even not even far left, right, just mainstream progressive stuff, or just, again, knowing things like if you know stuff about these these gender and racial differences you're talking about, like, yes, you're going to give responses on this that are supposedly conclusively politically extreme, but it has nothing to do with being political.

0:13:01 Thomas: Yeah yeah well but here's another thing, capturing in or like shrinking down everything to like is this genetic or not is just such a sloppy way to do it because the way that people on the far right will focus on stuff might be more sinister than someone on the left who's like, okay, well, I'm pretty sure I, I heard, or I know, you know, again, because we're talking about not, not experts in this crap, I think that black people are more susceptible to sickle cell, or you know, like things where you're like, wow, there must be a genetic difference, okay, yeah, sure, genetic differences and things, you know, that's a shitload different than someone who's trying to make like really gross race science claims about black intelligence or something like that and like trying to shrink that all together, as are there genetic differences, is just like a stupid thing to do, yeah.

0:13:30 Lindsey: Yes. Yeah. Yes, yes. No, I totally agree, right? That was the same game that Debra So was playing when it came to... So yeah, no, I think that that's really incisive point about these.

0:14:11 Thomas: Well, thank you, yeah.

0:14:18 Lindsey: Yeah. And speaking of that, so their second question that was on this sort of completely biological to completely cultural scale, was on IQ tests, individuals who identify themselves as white tend to, on average, score higher than individuals of African ancestry. Notice some of the things about that, by the way. So like people who identify as white versus people of African ancestry, right? And then that's not the end of the question stem. So the next part of it is, additionally, individuals of East Asian background tend to score higher than whites. That's one item.

0:14:50 Thomas: You could be you could be far, far left as they come and agree with that because that is like the phenomena that, you know, we're often trying to explain, it's like, okay, but there's other factors that go into it besides, you know, like it's not genetics per se.

0:14:51 Lindsey: Yeah. No,

0:15:08 Thomas: So like how do, how, how are you supposed to answer, like, if you're on the left? How you supposed to answer that, I don't get it. Oh, it's Oh, okay, I'm sorry, I thought it just was a yes or no there, the way he phrased it. Oh, Okay, so that's a genetic, oh, gotcha, all right, well, maybe that one would work.

0:15:08 Lindsey: Oh, Well, that, so, so that's another one that's on that response scale of like, is this a completely biological phenomenon or is this completely cultural? Yeah. Yeah. No, Um, I, I don't think so, like, again, if you, if you know, if you know the stuff about these IQ tests, right, then I, like my response to this would be like, yeah, no, that's, that's completely a product of environment. I do think that. I don't think that genetics actually explains any of these populations or these group differences based on race. So yeah, like unlike the gender question, I would give an extreme response on this item and I would be right.

0:15:44 Thomas: Right oh, no, I know you'd be right, but I'm just saying, at least that would capture the ideological difference, whereas whereas on the other ones it was like, well, you could be either ideology and you wouldn't, you know, it wouldn't necessarily determine your answer on some of those things, like when we talk about genetic differences and you know, like that, I think we agree there, but, but still, like, this this does seem to be a question of are you either correct or far right, I guess is the scale.

0:15:58 Lindsey: Oh, I see. I see, yeah. Yes. Yes. I think that's right. I Think that is right. Yeah, so next question. This is is another disagree to agree question. We should tolerate behavior that runs counter to our personal or cultural moral standards. So if you strongly agree with that item, then you're an extreme, you're extreme on political correctness, liberalism. Right.

0:16:18 Thomas: Cool. Yeah.

0:16:36 Thomas: Is okay, is there, I don't, again, I'm not the scientist, can you, is it possible to just ask more specific things, can you be like, hey, should we let, you know, some extreme behavior be okay just because of moral relativism, and in which case you might be like, all right, that's a, that's a solid measure that someone's far left, like if you're like, yep, you know, I'm totally cool with like, you know, burkas and what, you know, whatever, something like that, where it's like, or you ask something more specific, like, hey, you cool with people, um, worship, you know, practicing other religions and celebrating other holidays, to like, well, yeah, totally, and if you said no, you'd be a far-right asshole, you know, like, fuck, can we, can we get more specific, this is way too broad, mm-hmm.

0:16:46 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah, mm hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah, exactly. Right? This? Well, it would, it is too broad for for a measure of extremism, right, like, I'd say that you could probably include this if you're just trying to measure sort of mainstream progressive thinking.

0:17:26 Thomas: Yeah, sure, Agreed.

0:17:31 Lindsey: Sure, right, that's, that's fine, but yeah, as a measure of extremism this makes no sense, um, okay, um, then there's a, there's a few questions about whether certain certain facts are evidence of systemic sexism or racism, and so the the question stem is rate the degree to which you think each of the following facts is evidence of an unjust system. And then here are the facts that they present. So first, only 5% of the Fortune 500 companies have women as CEOs. So is that an evidence of an unjust systems?

0:17:35 Thomas: Gestures broadly at the world, I hate these questions

0:18:07 Lindsey: I know, it's the worst. In 2011, women accounted for 23% of those who graduated from engineering, and 30% of those who graduated from math and computer science programs. Is that evidence of an unjust system? Take this one, you're gonna like this one. In 2013, the poverty rate for blacks in the US was 27%, while the rate for whites was 10%. Is that evidence of a unjust system?"

0:18:07 Thomas: So fucking much, yeah.

0:18:32 Thomas: Again, are you either correct or right-wing? Those are the, those are two options in this poll.

0:18:34 Lindsey: Exactly. That, that is absolutely correct.

0:18:38 Thomas: Here,

0:18:39 Lindsey: If you know anything about any of these questions, then your response is like, yes, no, that, yeah, I know, I know about these things. I know that these are, this is is evidence of an unjust system. Anybody who knows just even broadly anything about the history of the U.S. knows that the differential poverty rate among different racial groups is evidence of an unjust system. So yes, these are questions relating to just factual knowledge about things or being right-wing, as you say. Okay, now we've got a couple of questions about sexual consent, attitudes towards sexual consent. So first, the existence of a dating relationship between the persons involved or the fact of past sexual relations between them should never by itself be assumed to be an indicator of consent. That's an agree to disagree.

0:19:17 Thomas: We go oh, oh, so again, are you correct or are you far right, this

0:19:26 Lindsey: Yeah. Right. Yeah, so strongly agreeing that this should never, by itself, be assumed be an indicator of Consent is apparently makes you a political extremist. That cool.

0:19:36 Thomas: Is this is absurd, again, I guess if this were just a measure of finding far right people, like, then it would, is that all it is, am I misinterpreting this, because if, if that's what it is, then it's like, oh, okay, sure, like, either you have, you know, you're basically correct on these questions, or you're a far right race scientist who doesn't believe in consent or what, you know, like something like that, right, or are they really trying to position this as, well, on one end of the spectrum, you're far right. On the other, you are far left. God, really?

0:19:52 Lindsey: Mm-hmm. I mean, mean, well, yeah, yeah, that's

0:20:07 Thomas: This is terrible. This is absolutely stupid.

0:20:07 Lindsey: What they claim, that is what they claim, yeah. Here's, here's the second question about sexual consent, yeah.

0:20:13 Thomas: Hold on. Go over that question again. Give me the far extremist left answer to that question. Tell me what that is. You rephrase all that just so we're on?

0:20:14 Lindsey: Okay. Yeah. The the far extreme left answer to that question is to strongly agree with the statement, the existence of a dating relationship between the persons involved or the fact of past sexual relations between them should never, by itself, be assumed to be an indicator of consent, consent.

0:20:36 Thomas: Oh, my God. Let's just rephrase that question, you're either a far leftist, like extreme leftist or you don't believe that marital rape is possible, right? Cool, that's a sign of a great unbiased test here that we're trying to just assess people in an unbiased fashion. Wow,

0:20:39 Lindsey: Yep. Uh-huh. Pretty good. Yeah. Here's the second one. Lack of protest or resistance does not mean consent to intimate behavior, nor does silence mean consent.

0:21:05 Thomas: Again, Correct or far right? Those are two options to these questions. Correct or, I mean, I guess I wouldn't even say far right because, like, not to open that can of worms, but like correct or like regressive when it comes to these, these, uh, these, you know, questions. Yeah.

0:21:19 Lindsey: Yeah, right. Or we're just extremists, Thomas. I mean, I don't know.

0:21:23 Thomas: Yeah. I guess we're extreme. What's

0:21:25 Lindsey: If this is what it means to be an extremist, then I guess I don't have a problem with that. Whatever. Okay. And then there's two sets of items after this that have to do with language use. And yeah.

0:21:35 Thomas: The next one? Like, was it a mistake to integrate the professional sports leagues? Are you a far left extremist who says no, or if you know, like, what? God, come on. Okay.

0:21:45 Lindsey: Mm-hmm. Yeah. So let's talk about offensive language, right? This is probably the closest they get to measuring something that actually resembles political correctness, right, except that it's still not very good, right. Okay. So first, there are five questions about the term that people, quote, prefer to use in in their everyday language, to describe people with various traits, right? And often stigmatized or essentializing traits. So for example, they ask, you know, what would people prefer to call an individual who is very small in stature? And then they give three options, a dwarf, a little person, or a midget, okay? Another example is, what Would you call a person whose job it is to extinguish fires? A fireman or a firefighter? What about someone who is well above one's normal or healthy weight? That's how the question stem reads.

0:21:55 Thomas: What This will

0:22:37 Lindsey: So this one has a bunch of options.

0:22:37 Thomas: Be an interesting one. There's a ton Yeah. There's a ton of debate on these very questions among these very people in these groups who are trying to be considerate. Yeah.

0:22:46 Lindsey: Yes. Yes, there is. And I want to come back to that because that's central. These specific five items, like there's a big problem with them, I think. So the response options here are fat, obese, overweight, plus size, curvy, large, ample figure, person with a portion control problem, person with weight problem. Okay.

0:22:50 Thomas: Yeah. I could not tell you. Look, I feel like I'm pretty much as left extremist as, as this test is going to look for. I don't know what the answers there that correlate with the certain things are on that question. Like I could not tell you.

0:23:15 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah, I don't either. And you know, that's a real problem because I read the master's thesis. I mean, I didn't read the whole thing, but like I have the master's thesis. And I was like, okay, how did they categorize these response options? Which of these were PC and which of these weren't? She doesn't tell you. And here's the way that this is scored. This is very strange, right? So the way this is scored is that if you select the response option that they have categorized as PC, you get a point for that, but you also get points for the non-PC options that you didn't select. So if I select the correct response on the one about people who are above one's normal or healthy weight, then I not only get a point for for picking the PC response, but I get like something like six or seven points at least for all the things I didn't pick that weren't PC and Right? So like, and and you can, as you saw just from the examples I gave, there are varying numbers of response options so Each

0:23:27 Thomas: Yeah. Wow. My God. Yeah, Mike,

0:24:20 Lindsey: Each question is worth different numbers of points. And I was like, wait a second. So like this, this one item about what to call people who are above normal or healthy weight, that one question is potentially having an outsized influence on the, on the scale score.

0:24:35 Thomas: What a worthless poll or whatever. This is not, this is nothing.

0:24:37 Lindsey: Yeah. Right. Yeah, yeah. If I was to revise this, what I would do is essentially break these response options into separate questions. I would say like, how appropriate is this term to refer to someone? How appropriate is each of these options putting that's

0:24:53 Thomas: You know, also how about we shortcut all that? Because I don't, you know, honestly, I don't fucking know on some of these, these things, can we ask a question that is essentially, whose opinion matters most when it comes to what certain people are called, like theirs or someone the fuck else's, you know, like just just use that, yeah or like, an um, overweight person says they prefer to be called fat, do you, you know, is that count for more than, or something, you know, like some way to get a of measure of like whose opinion you care about, because I, I know from, you know, being raised by conservatives that that's a big point of content, that that's like the crux of the matter, it's like they want to be able to, you just call people whatever they want, and then I feel like people more on the left are like, well, why don't we defer to those communities, it doesn't mean that like, you know, exactly what the right answer is all the time, like especially in that, like, very question you're talking about, I actually don't, I don't know, I think there's

0:25:09 Lindsey: That's a good question, not of extremism but it's a good question I don't

0:25:48 Thomas: A lot of disagreement, I've heard people say they just prefer fat, like that's just the, like, honestly, I've, I've seen that I've seen people say they don't want to be called it, like, I, I honestly don't know, but we're, we're all, I think, on the left, a lot of us are just trying to do our best to keep up with maybe the broad consensus of the, the actual community in question, and so that's the important factor, yeah

0:25:48 Lindsey: Either, yeah I Totally agree, I totally disagree with all that, and like, again, I can't, I can't evaluate the way that they were making those categorizations because that information is not provided, which I mean, which, by the way, like as someone who has done a master's thesis, it's like you're supposed to be pretty damn exhaustive in terms of how you, you describe these things, it was a mess reading this thing, like it was very hard, even like she gave the entire pool of items that she originally chose from, it was so difficult to go back and reconstruct the items that actually made it into the, the final scale, it's very bad oh

0:26:19 Thomas: You know, Lindsey you said in part one, I asked you, like, okay, how much of the bad science have we already covered, and you're like, tip of the iceberg, you backed that up, I think you backed up that claim

0:26:50 Lindsey: Hey this is the better of the two PC scales, by the way, yeah yeah

0:26:54 Thomas: Oh man, well we better not run into part three, we better get to the other one, I'm

0:26:55 Lindsey: Nope let's get to it, um, okay, so the last set of items from the PC liberalism scale are just, the question is, how offensive do you find each of the following terms? And then they provide four terms that are racially derogatory, okay? I think I'm going to read these, but I just, I wanted to warn people in advance, like they're not, whatever. It's not the N word or anything, although that does appear in another scale item, but anyway, so these, yeah, these are offensive terms. So, um, how offensive do you find each of the following terms? Uh, Oreo. Um. I guess I should explain what each these means.

0:27:33 Thomas: Gonna learn some new terms, yeah, oh

0:27:35 Lindsey: Yeah. So that refers to a black person who is too white, um. Towelhead. I think people know what that one is. Um but yeah, that's a slur for someone of Middle Eastern descent. This one I've never heard. Irish wheelbarrow?

0:27:40 Thomas: Oh god yeah never

0:27:52 Lindsey: Referring to an ambulance? I'd never heard that. And ghetto when used to refer to someone or something that looks poor or low quality.

0:27:52 Thomas: Heard of that okay Okay. Okay.

0:28:02 Lindsey: So the more offensive that you say these terms are, the more of a political extremist you are. Yeah. Right? What? Yeah. So that's their PC liberalism scale. Right.

0:28:06 Thomas: Extremist. That's so bad.

0:28:15 Lindsey: And, And, you know, I mentioned some of the scoring issues, especially with that one set of language items, which I think adds like some some real error to this test. But more glaringly are the validity concerns with this scale. I am not and I don't think you are either. I am NOT at all persuaded after looking at these items that this is a measure of a political correctness liberalism, but it's not a measure or extreme political attitudes, which is what they keep claiming it is.

0:28:35 Thomas: No, not at all.

0:28:43 Lindsey: No, this is a mix of questions, like, that most people with mainstream progressive values would endorse, as well as, you know, we said, some factual questions that you could fail to be correct about, and you know, maybe that's related to political orientation. Yeah.

0:28:53 Thomas: This is not measuring anything. Yeah. I don't Even know. A lot of them too would measure like how engaged in the questions you are, you know, versus not necessarily on either side. It's like, do you pay it? Because a lot of that stuff is like, okay, how much are you paying attention to these battles? Regardless of which side you're on, if you're not paying attention, you're gonna be like, I, I don't know, like, uh, who knows, with some of those things, sure.

0:28:58 Lindsey: Yeah.

0:29:12 Lindsey: That's a good point. Yeah. No, That's very good point. This, this probably does tap into political engagement a little bit. But yeah, and so a couple of couple of notes about this, because in the master's thesis, even though they don't use measures to validate it, they do look at correlations with personality, as well as some measures of different kinds of intelligence and vocabulary. And some of those relationships were actually kind of interesting. So liberalism was correlated with politeness, compassion, um, openness to ideas, openness to experiences, and it was, yeah, Just not extremism, right? Like Yeah.

0:29:46 Thomas: Well, shoot, maybe they were capturing something, right? Right, right, that makes sense. Yeah, yeah.

0:29:55 Lindsey: Yeah, of these scales are probably tapping into, well, this one more than the other one, the other one's a Mess, um, but like it's just, it's not what they say it is. Um, and the other, this was really interesting, so actually the strongest predictor of scores on the PC liberalism scale was a measure called crystallized intelligence, which is essentially just a test of general factual knowledge. So in other words, people who know more stuff score higher on this scale, which has exactly my contention about, you know, at least half of those items. But anyway, it's not a measure of extreme political attitudes. That's absolutely, absolutely clear, and again, like, none of these papers, not the two papers by Moss and O'Connor, and not the master's thesis, made any attempt to actually justify the claim about what they said these things were measuring, and that, that is egregious. It really is.

0:29:59 Thomas: Newspapers.

0:30:45 Lindsey: So now, political correctness authoritarianism, god, here's, the item. So first of all, there's a few questions, uh, that are supposed to tap into your views about censorship. Okay, so, so here's, here's a question. So, do you believe that works in these categories, and they have like various categories of media, should be screened for offensive, racist, sexist, or otherwise discriminatory language and or ideas? And the two categories that they assess this for are music and newspapers. Newspapers. First, mm-hmm.

0:31:14 Thomas: They're trying to find a racist from 1915 or something. I screened.

0:31:21 Lindsey: First impressions of this question, I could read it again if you'd like. Yeah, screened.

0:31:24 Thomas: I mean, the rating, MPAA, whatever thingy is that does that, count? I guess this is music, so it's not movies.

0:31:32 Lindsey: No, they included just music and newspapers, but the larger set had a bunch of stuff like movies and all kinds of things, but they didn't include those.

0:31:35 Thomas: Okay. Wait, we need to screen music for racism? I don't know, I don't get it. Give me, me a specific. Yeah.

0:31:43 Lindsey: I don't know. I, I don't know. That's, that's one of my main problems with this question. Right? What does screened mean? By whom? Like, does, does this mean, are they trying to tap whether they think that, you know, newspapers should have like editorial oversight about the content of their papers? Or is this a question about whether the government should be regulating the press?

0:31:44 Thomas: Yeah. Which

0:32:02 Lindsey: Like, we don't know, right? And if I interpret the question in the former way, right, about editorial oversight, then I'd be like, yeah, no, I totally agree with that. They should have editorial oversight. They shouldn't, you should be quality control. You Know, if somebody else was to interpret the question to mean something more authoritarian, like the government should regulate what the press is putting out, they might give the same response, but you wouldn't be able to tell us apart from our responses.

0:31:58 Thomas: Is obviously true, yeah, don't know, no idea, so bad, this is terrible.

0:32:28 Lindsey: Yeah, Right? So yeah, I have no idea what this means. And they're doing something that's kind of, it's a pretty basic scale construction mistake in this question, that, like, it's the kind of thing that, you know, in an introductory research methods class, you would give your students, your undergraduate students, an assignment where they, they try to construct a scale that measures some construct, right, and a mistake that they make a lot when they're first learning about this process is to put too much in one question, and that's if you've got, if you're asking two questions in one, they call that double-barreled, right? Yeah.

0:32:28 Thomas: Yeah.

0:32:56 Thomas: That's Funny, it's just like, uh, Opening Arguments, you know, you got, it's not, it's never a good idea to ask when you, when you actually want information, keep it streamlined, keep it, you know, direct and not compound.

0:33:05 Lindsey: Yeah, Yeah, exactly right, and, and, uh, this isn't the worst example of it, but I do think it counts as like a multi-barrel question. There's some other ones that even worse, but, um, so, so, screened for offensive, racist, sexist, and discriminatory language or ideas?

0:33:17 Thomas: That's

0:33:26 Lindsey: Like, that's a lot of things, right? You could break that into at least, you know, two or three questions, right, maybe more. So there's a, there's, There's a whole that's, that wrong with this question. All right, let's keep going.

0:33:26 Thomas: A lot of things, yeah. Yeah. Well, Hold on, one more thing on that. Are we still within the construct of saying yes, screen it, as far as extreme left, and no, don't, as extreme right?

0:33:46 Lindsey: Are you asking whether that's how they're interpreting it?

0:33:49 Thomas: How they are interpreting, how are they doing it? There are they, was that just an authoritarian one, or what were they measuring? Their PC

0:33:50 Lindsey: No, like, they, they don't, they're, they'RE just saying. So all they're inferring from this is that the more you agree with this item, the more PC authoritarian you are. They aren't saying that this is a measure of right wingness at all. Yeah.

0:34:07 Thomas: Authoritarian, so right?

0:34:09 Lindsey: So if you strongly agree that, you know, music should be screened for offensive, racist, sexist or otherwise discriminatory language and or ideas, then you are high on this PC authoritarianism dimension.

0:34:23 Thomas: So it's not like the questions earlier, where it was like kind of extreme left or right.

0:34:24 Lindsey: Yeah. Um, well, so are you talking about the PC liberalism stuff? Yeah. So that's how we were interpreting those questions. That's not how they interpreted them.

0:34:34 Thomas: Or how are they interpreting? I don't understand. I've now I've completely lost it.

0:34:40 Lindsey: So yeah. So the PC liberalism, right, is supposed to only measure extreme leftist attitudes. And so they're just, yeah.

0:34:48 Thomas: Wait a minute, that's even, even worse. Hold on. The stuff earlier that we're like, you're either right or you're, you're neither correct or you are to the right, I guess, was actually the opposite of what they were going for.

0:34:52 Lindsey: Yeah, I know. Well, They just, they did not make the claim that if you were low on the scale, that you were right wing. They didn't talk about that at all. They just said the higher you are in the scale, the more of an extremist leftist you are, yes.

0:35:09 Thomas: Yeah, no. So that is basically the opposite of what you would want it to be. You would, if you were doing that, you would want to start with a baseline of like, well, this is just fact. And then if you stray off into the other side of whatever that is, like non-factual, then you would be straying into to a thing.

0:35:16 Lindsey: Yes.

0:35:27 Thomas: Not like, okay, the stuff that is mainly just getting a factual question correct, that means you're far left. If you get a factual questions wrong, that's just default.

0:35:37 Lindsey: That's right.

0:35:38 Thomas: Oh my God. Okay. So that's even worse than I thought. And so, but this, just to clarify, and apologies, I'm not the scientist, I haven't read the thing, I can't keep this straight, it's kind of hard. This new one is now just measuring any sort of authoritarianism. So, that could could be left or right? No?

0:35:39 Lindsey: Nope.

0:35:55 Lindsey: Just, they say that this is another facet of left, or like extreme leftism, yeah.

0:35:56 Thomas: Oh. My, okay, that's what I wanted to get toward, because this is stupid, all the, so many of the examples of any sort of censorship in our entire history is people trying to keep, you know, the, oh, Harry Potter, yeah, witchcraft, devil, devilry, censor that, you know, like, like, so this could actually be capturing the religious

0:36:03 Lindsey: Yep. I know. I know. Well, Well, and right, like the, I'm, you know, I'm so glad you said that, because, like, okay, so let's go back to their, their, um, their phrase here in this question, offensive, racist, sexist, or otherwise discriminatory language, ideas, so some of those could be, could be like, you know, we should screen out racial epithets or whatever, but like offensive, that's broad enough that if somebody who is sort of like a right-wing evangelical read this, they might like be like, uh, well, I gotta agree with that somewhat, because yes, there's lots of offensive things here.

0:36:22 Thomas: Right. Yeah. Right, right. Yeah. Yep. Totally.

0:36:51 Lindsey: Actually, that converges with the next question too, so this one, this is another agree-to-disagree thing, so the statement is, blasphemous, obscene, and slang statements, as well as racist slurs and epithets, should be, and then the response options are, completely omitted from the dictionary. A second option is included in the dictionary, but with labels, warnings, or usage markers, which is just what a dictionary does, and then the last response option is always included in the dictionary just as any other word, exactly.

0:37:17 Thomas: Yeah. Put in the front of the dictionary. Based, given a prominent place in the dictionary, no, sorry, what was the last one? Sorry, what Was the last one? That was supposed to be like the, in their minds, the normal one, like just in the dictionary in this normal place.

0:37:29 Lindsey: Right, but so, like, there's, oh, yes. Right. Yeah. So, always included in the dictionary, just as any other word, right? Implying that, like, any other word wouldn't use things like labels, warnings, or usage markers, right? Like they give it, yeah.

0:37:36 Thomas: Okay. Right, Very right, like that's different. Yeah. Agreed. So, if you just answer this factually correct, you're some sort of extremist, probably? Yeah.

0:37:50 Lindsey: You're more extremist than if you just say always included, dictionaries, any other words. Yeah, so there's, a there's few problems with this, but I wanted to jump to it real quickly, because they start that list with blasphemous, right? And to the extent that, no,

0:37:59 Thomas: Blasphemous, yeah, so that, again, that's why I assumed, okay, are they trying to take some, you know, left, right, neutral measure of just political correctness? Oh, my

0:38:11 Lindsey: No. They specifically say that these are their extreme measures for the left wing. And it's the white identitarianism that's the extreme measure for the right wing. But, but, but like I said a few minutes ago, the white identitarian as a measure is positively correlated with this authoritarianism measure that we're talking about right now. That seems telling to me.

0:38:18 Thomas: God. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Mm hmm. Looks like they done effed up is what it looks like to me.

0:38:33 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah, so aside from that issue, the other, this is another example of um, a question that needs to be split into three questions at least, right? So Should, should you, could you, could, if you just take the racial slurs part right, let's separate out the blasphemy and obscenity and whatever. So let me, let me revise this question, so the way that I would do it is I would have three agree or disagree statements, and they would, would be as follows. So, racial slurs should be completely omitted from the dictionary. Agree, disagree. Racial slurs should be included in the dictionary, but with labels, warnings, or usage markers. Agreed, disagree. And then racial slur should always be included in the dictionary just as any other word. Agrees, agree. Those would actually tell you something, right? But using these as, like, because again, completely omitting in the dictionary is like your most authoritarianism. The next option is, you know, somewhat authoritarian is authoritarian. And then the third one is, is least authoritarian. That doesn't make any sense.

0:38:43 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, that doesn't make any sense at all.

0:39:32 Lindsey: Nope.

0:39:32 Thomas: This is bad. It's bad science.

0:39:33 Lindsey: Right. Yeah, it's bad. It's bad, next one. Schools should censor words in classic books such as J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye and Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn that has, have racist or offensive terms and ideas. And that's agree to disagree. That's a complicated question, I think, Like my personal opinion on this, but I would probably response, because I really, I don't want to give a yes or no answer to this.

0:39:47 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I agree, yeah, I was just thinking that over myself, yeah. I

0:39:57 Lindsey: But in my opinion, like I don't necessarily think those things could be censored, but I'd be willing to listen to arguments that they should. But when they're taught, they ought to be taught in context, right? And so, you a competent teacher, I think, could do that, could teach those works, you in their original forms and be able to to talk through, through them with students in a way that's constructive. But again, I'm willing to listen to arguments that, that those should be, you censored. I don't know.

0:40:23 Thomas: I, I would express a similar answer where it's like I'm definitely open to what seems to be like, you know, pedagogically the best answer among, or the consensus rather, among people who I think need to have a voice in this, obviously. And so I'm not like super sure either way. But I also think that it may be one of those things where it's like, OK, but we also need to be teaching more damn books from diverse backgrounds, like not just the same, you know, and so like that might be a way that it's It's like, well, I don't mind that if we're teaching these books, like, yeah, put a kind of a warning on it, give a lot of context and history notes, but yeah, you don't need to censor books.

0:40:37 Lindsey: Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

0:41:04 Thomas: Like, to me, that just doesn't seem right. However, not censorship per se, but we need to be choosing these books better, you know? So that's a way that it would still balance it out, but it's not like going to be the extreme. I don't know. I don't know how you would answer that question. You know, I yeah you

0:41:11 Lindsey: Yeah, yeah, that's a tough question. Right. And honestly, right. So the fact that, like, the factthat they included these two specific books kind of of complicates this. But as you were saying a minute ago, like the people who cry about like these, you know, our children should be reading these books are right wing. So it's possible, depending on how people are reading this question, that this is another thing that's driving the positive correlation with their white identitarianism measure, right?

0:41:20 Thomas: Yeah yeah could

0:41:44 Lindsey: Yeah, it could be right. But I do think it's complicated by the fact that their focus, I mean, we know what this this question's about, it's about the N word, right? Like, so, trucking on. So the next, the next four items, uh, ask people to rate how offensive they find each of the following terms. Remember, this is their measure of authoritarianism. Why just being offended by a word would make you authoritarian? I'm not sure. But here are the, here are the four words. So Machiavellianism. I didn't know that this had a racist history, but apparently it does. So it was originally coined as a derogatory descriptor for anything Italian, which I didn'T know.

0:41:43 Thomas: Be yeah

0:42:20 Lindsey: Going Dutch. Apparently that also has kind of a racist history. So the coining was like a derigatory term referencing apparently Dutch people being stingy, I didn't know that stereotype. Yeah and then the third one is flip chart, and I was really taken aback by that, but apparently flip chart, yeah, like a, you know, like on those big notepads that you flip, yeah, so but what I didn't know is that flip is apparently a derogatory term for Filipinos, I don't think so, right yeah

0:42:33 Thomas: Me neither flip chart like just a flip chart yeah but is that the origin of flip charts? Yeah, they flip like the word flip, I don't understand

0:42:55 Lindsey: Yeah but I, I yeah, like, I, I, I don't know, I don know how many people would would agree with this item, but like it's it's apparently a conversation somewhere, right? And and like I could, I could get it like if there was a term that had a different etymology but happened to be the N-word, right? Like, I could see there being a legitimate conversation about that

0:42:57 Thomas: Okay yeah yeah again I mean these. Yeah, These are debates where it's like, okay, it depends on how, you know, how common a usage we're talking. If it's a word like "flip" that literally is used every day in a completely normal fashion that has no connection to a word like that, I feel like for me, that would be a bridge too far. I'd like, all right, like, come on. But I don't know. Maybe I could be wrong. Maybe there'd be another case that's, you knows, more marginal that I might agree with. Yeah, I don't know.

0:43:15 Lindsey: Yeah yeah yeah but again, like, so none of these questions are about authoritarianism, they're not about whether people's language should should be institutionally regulated, whether people should go to jail for saying flip chart, none of that. It's just how offensive do you find the terms,

0:43:50 Thomas: That's a good point. You could even be like, hypothetically, what if you, maybe you're in a certain group of one of these things where you're like, well, I find this deeply offensive, but I'm so dedicated to pluralism that it's like, you know, I would never want to judge anybody else's thing. But due to this question, you would be ranked as like the most authoritarian person because you find it deeply offensive.

0:44:17 Thomas: It doesn't ask like, what should we do about it?

0:44:17 Lindsey: That's right. Nope. Which is, I think, what they should be measuring, right. That's what they said they were measuring. They said that they were, that PC authoritarians think that it's acceptable to use violence and force to enforce their ideological positions. I haven't seen that at all so far, you authoritarian yet

0:44:23 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. I find it offensive that every movie is a superhero movie and every show is a superhero show, but I get that I'm the only one who thinks that and you all love it, so fine. I'm not passing any bills about it. I am not saying I am NOT lobbying, but no, I am just kidding.

0:44:46 Lindsey: Um Yeah, so then the next item is, rate how often you felt offended by things people said in the past month at work or in school. Yeah.

0:44:56 Thomas: Okay. This is a whiteness. Hold on, hold on. This now, we are just whitenESS. Right? This is just measuring how privileged you are, how you know, like, so that now it's not a mystery where we got our uh correlations from, oh wait, no, but that would be the opposite way, wouldn't it? Oh well

0:45:04 Lindsey: Yeah. Well, Well, no, no, I mean, wait, well, why would it be the opposite? Or

0:45:17 Thomas: Oh, sorry, maybe I'm doing a number of steps in my head, let me see where I might have messed up. So before, the problem was, scales that they would have thought should measure leftness were correlating with, or you know, left extreme, whatever the stupid fucking words they're using, should correlate with ended up, when you ran the numbers, correlating with whiteness, white Supremacy, whatever. So that's actually, I take it back, my previous joke, because I was saying that, like, okay, if you're, this would just measure, like, if you're white, then you're never offended, if you know, that kind of thing, like, it would prioritize people who have fewer offensive words about them, just in general, regardless of attitudes about what we should do about that. And so that this would run the opposite direction of that correlation, I think.

0:45:39 Lindsey: White supremacy, yeah.

0:45:55 Lindsey: I see. I see, well Yeah, I don't think that for this specific item, I don't, I it would be correlated because I, because well, think about who cries about offensiveness of, you know, you know, on the basis of people offending their religious beliefs. You know, like there's, there's plenty of things that you could see on both the right and the left that could inflate this item. So I don'T think it'd be correlated at all.

0:46:21 Thomas: That's true. No, you're right. Okay. You're right, it would just be like, confounded. Is that what it is? Yeah, so, it'd just be like, there might be One that's like, well, this is going to capture more right-wing people. This is going capture, you know, I guess, mainly mainly non-white people, probably just because that's the world we live in, that's a country we live in, like there's going to be more offensive terms for people who are not the majority of the society. And saying, hey, how often are you offended or whatever the question was, like, that's not capturing anything useful, that's just capturing. Anyway, that's what I think. But yeah,

0:46:27 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah yeah, Exactly. I totally agree. All right. So then we've got a few just simple agree-disagree statements that are stupid, not about authoritarianism. So quickly, I'm going to run through this because I really want to get to this last one and we're already getting to the end of our time. So first, it is wrong to criticize the status and rights of women under Islam because it is racist and disrespectful of multiculturalism. Think that's a very complicated question that we've touched on before. And it's at least double-barreled. It might be triple-barreled, right? Like, can you criticize these things under Islam because it is racist and disrespectful and multicultural? So there's like three constructs in that question or three attitudes.

0:47:30 Thomas: I'm trying to not say anything so that you can get through. Oh, for

0:47:33 Lindsey: Okay, let's see. So retail stores should avoid using the word Christmas in their November and December advertising campaigns.

0:47:40 Thomas: The love nobody so that measures a thing that no one gives a fuck about. Okay. Yeah.

0:47:45 Lindsey: But also the language is very mild. They should avoid it. It doesn't say that it should be banned. It does whatever.

0:47:48 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. I, I'm a lefty, I like the ones that use all the different ones, whatever. You know, use a bunch of, and by the way, so you sell different shit related different holidays, you know, if you're selling a fucking Santa Claus thing, fine, Merry Christmas, you know, and then you're said selling a menorah and then your selling a whatever, you might use the words that are appropriate for the the things you're selling. This is a war on Christmas that has never existed, it's a completely made up fucking stupid Fox News thing, just putting that in the record.

0:48:18 Thomas: Okay, this is me not talking so that you can finish. Okay.

0:47:55 Lindsey: Yeah, cool. Mm hmm. Yeah. Yep. Yep, absolutely. Yeah. Okay. And so look, now we're two, we've got three more questions on on the scale. And these are the only questions that pertain to the use of force in enforcing these values. Okay. So first one, and this is actually, it's the same stem for two questions. So they say, they're asking people to indicate whether somebody should be punished for using a racist, sexist, or homophobic slur and to what degree, right? And so the two individuals that made it into the final set, they had a pool of many more, but the two that made it in were a professor teaching a class and an individual on a talk show. And here is their scale. They They have seven response options that are supposed to be not at all punished to punish severely. That's how they're conceptualizing it and how it is scored, I think.

0:49:09 Lindsey: But here are the options. So one, not punished. Two, must attend a series of diversity and inclusivity training seminars. Three, given a warning. And then in parentheses, it says three warnings and they are expelled, dismissed, asked to leave the building or business. Four, a monetary fine. Five, fail the class or uh or a demotion or denied tenure. Six, immediately expelled, dismissed, asked to leave the building or business. Seven, court trial determines punishment. And then in parentheses, it says, yeah, I write, and in parentheses it says, fine, community service, prison time, etc. Okay, now again, so the way that they're that they're conceptualizing this is like one, you're the the least authoritarian, seven, you're the most authoritarian, yes.

0:49:09 Thomas: You Try, you have to pick one of them. Oh, That's the dumbest fucking thing I've ever heard.

0:49:54 Lindsey: Yes. It is because, okay, so if I pick three, given a warning, right, then I am, I am two scale points more authoritarian than somebody who says they shouldn't be punished. That's that's the interpretation here, right? Um, this is this is another question that I would split into seven questions, right? Like to what extent you, yes,

0:49:57 Thomas: Yeah.

0:50:15 Thomas: Well, plus and again, it's it's all this collapse where it's like, okay, did someone accidentally, you know, make a slip of the tongue in a thing and then it was like corrected to themselves and was like, oh, whoops, or yeah, is it somebody who's, you know, more sinister, like, I, I don't know.

0:50:26 Lindsey: Yeah, Yeah. Did they call their students a racial slur?

0:50:35 Thomas: Yeah. Or were they like reading from a book and said it and like, you know, made sure to flag that this was, you know, like, I don't, you got to be specific with this stuff. No.

0:50:35 Lindsey: Right. Yeah, yeah, it is. This this is this is a mess of a question. It is it is you can't tell anything from this. And it yeah, it's really stupid. And so then there's one more question that uses that same stem, but instead about racist, instead of being about racist, sexist or homophobic slurs, it's about Holocaust denial. So they say, rate whether somebody should be punished for openly denying the genocide of the Jews in the Holocaust during World War II. And then they have the same response scale. This is a mess like after looking at these items, after looking, like, you know, reconstructing how they they sort of created the the aggregate score, like, I really, it's very hard to tell what exactly the construct is that's being measured here, but I don't think it's political correctness authoritarianism, it's

0:50:50 Thomas: Yeah, this is stupid, but yeah, no, I don't either.

0:51:31 Lindsey: Nonsense. Yeah.

0:51:31 Thomas: It's an absolute mess. Some of those scale items you mentioned were like, it sounded worse depending on the situation. So like it would have been a lower scale number, but it could be worse depending upon if you're talking about like a talk show host or like a teacher, you know, like there's just so many ways that that's a muddled mess.

0:51:45 Lindsey: Yes, it is a muddled mess, right? And again, let me just quote one more time how they talk about PC authoritarianism. They say in their article, quote, "PC adherence, unlike PCL counterparts, embrace the belief that aggression and force are appropriate methods to achieve ideological goals." In what way has this scale measured that? No.

0:52:08 Thomas: None. Almost none. There's one thing that was like kind of about policing people. That's it. This is, uh, this is crap.

0:52:08 Lindsey: Yeah. Kind of, it was nuts. That's, yeah, it is crap. Yeah, and so from that, I looked at the correlates from that master's thesis, and so this scale is negatively correlated with both vocabulary and that crystallized intelligence measure that we talked about. Just saying.

0:52:30 Thomas: I'm not sure I understand that statement. Sorry. You're gonna have to explain.

0:52:33 Lindsey: Yeah, so the higher somebody was on this authoritarianism measure, supposed authoritarianism meter, the lower their vocabulary score and the lower their crystallized intelligence, which, again, was just like a general, like a measure of general knowledge,

0:52:37 Thomas: Okay. Huh. Oh, Like maybe these questions are so fucking confusing that it's like, if you have a lower vocabulary, like, I don't know this one, I guess. I d' t, you know, this answer a

0:52:49 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly, right? It's a mess. To really understand what's going on, I would want to see the individual items. They didn't provide the individual item. In that publicly available data set, so I couldn't do any kind of forensics on this to figure it out. But I have a feeling that there's a lot of problems in the scale, just at a psychometric level. All right, this won't take long. Do you, are you okay with going a few more minutes? Okay.

0:53:18 Thomas: Couple more minutes. Do it. Wow.

0:53:20 Lindsey: Because all right, so the last scale to talk about is their white identitarianism scale, and like I said, they haven't validated this, and I think that it should probably should be called white supremacy, but it doesn't have nearly the same psychometric problems as the PC scales. So here are the seven items on their scale. It's all just a Licorice scale, agree to disagree, right? So, one, race is the foundation of identity. Two, whites are being forgotten and replaced by minorities in this country. So there's your great replacement. Three, there are real and significant differences between races. Four, Western civilization is built upon white ideas. This country should protect its European heritage. Five, there is a progressive conspiracy against white identity. Six, marriage should only be allowed between two people of the same race. And seven, the white race is inherently superior to other races. So I said in part one that I thought that calling this white identitarianism was euphemistic. What do you think of my assessment now that you've heard the items?

0:54:10 Thomas: Well.

0:54:22 Thomas: Are, you still saying that like that term is too, uh, unquote, whitewashed? You're saying like it should be just, yeah, like White supremacist.

0:54:28 Lindsey: White supremacy.

0:54:29 Thomas: Yeah. I guess the only, the only, um, reason I'm hung up on it is like I look at white identity, identity, as inherently sort of white supremacist, you know, like, I think that's kind of where I'm so I don't know, maybe I'll, I Think I think we probably see eye to eye on this. I'm just not I think sometimes it's like, well, yeah, there's not like a healthy white identitarian thing, you know. So, but I don' t know where they're coming from. That's why I'm mixed up. Like, I don't know if they're trying to whitewash it, or if they would agree with me that like any sort of white identarian feelings are pretty much inherently white supremicist.

0:54:30 Lindsey: Yeah. Okay. Yeah, well, that's fair. That's fair, you're right. Right. I get that point, but like, I guess I think of it sort of like, you know, calling something sexual coercion versus rape. It's like sexual coercition is like an accurate thing to call that. There's not a good version of sexual coercation, but it sounds like a little more acceptable than calling something rape.

0:55:15 Thomas: Mm hmm. Mm Mm-hmm. Gotcha. Sure. Yeah, I can see that point for sure.

0:55:24 Lindsey: Um, and so that's kind of the way I see this. It's why, why aren't you just calling this white supremacy? Cause that's what it is.

0:55:28 Thomas: Yeah. Especially with how bad those questions are. Now that you're saying it wasn't just like, so I see what you mean. I think I agree with you. I mean, it's like earlier based on that prior description, I would have expected a little bit less blatant racism in the questions, you know, like, is it okay to be proud of your, you know? I don't know. So something that's a slightly less than like whites are the master. I could

0:55:32 Lindsey: Exactly. Yes. Yeah, exactly. Right. Yeah. Exactly. Right? Yeah. And so so, you know, looking at these items, like, yeah, this is probably what they're measuring. I don't you know, it's this is a face valid scale. So I don'T have this the same level of issues with this as I do with the other one. But at the same time, like they sort of make a big deal in their paper about how like they're measure something new. And in order to make that claim, you need to do some validity work, right?

So like I mentioned last time, like there are lots of scales of different forms of racism. There is a scale of white identity. There's a scale with like social dominance orientation, which could be relevant here. And so if I was to validate this scale, which right, I won't, because they should do that, or maybe I will, I don't know. But if I Was trying to establish validity, I would want to put this measure against all of those measures too, and show like, whether it's actually distinct, The ways in which it's distinct, and so on, they don't do that.

So, anyway, those are the scales, right? And then they they conclude their paper, right, with a couple of statements that I think are worth reflecting on. Short, short things. So, first, in their discussion, they say, quote, "The purpose of this paper was to assess whether dark triad traits and entitlement predict three extreme but increasingly mainstream sets of political attitudes." Right? Do we think that they address that purpose? Don't think so, though. Moving on. Quote, "Given the largely antisocial and violent outcomes these attitudes have been linked to, we investigated their relationship with a dark triad personality traits and entitlement." Did they?

0:57:13 Lindsey: I don't think they did. I don'T think that they have evidence for a single thing in that sentence.

0:57:11 Thomas: Listen to this for every single claim, Lindsay's reaction. Keep going. Keep going, yeah.

0:57:24 Lindsey: And then they go on to conclude that, quote, "although these attitudes are thought to reflect opposing ends of the traditional left versus right political spectrum, those high in white identity and PCA, that's political correctness authoritarianism, are very similar in terms of their dark profile. It is possible, therefore, the dark triad traits do not influence left versus right political orientation, but rather influence the strategies that people use to achieve their ideological goals." Right, that's garbage. Like, they're still claiming even after all this, and they know, they, they have looked at their data, they know that they have this, this correlation indicating that, like, no, what you're measuring with, with the PC authoritarianism does not track with left-right, and if anything it's, it's probably capturing more right-wing stuff. They know that, and they're, they're completely ignoring that, they're completely just passing over that, nope.

0:58:13 Thomas: So if I were to summarize, Lindsay, it's like basically the statement, the coverage is like the left, the far left and the far right, more similar than they might think. And then you look in the study and it's all these ways that they have captured mainly just far right people. So then they're like, wow, so the far right and the far right are more similar than you might think. Is that a good summary?

0:58:25 Lindsey: Yep. That's an excellent summary, I can't do better, this is so this is garbage.

0:58:40 Thomas: Jeez, that really makes you think, doesn't it? The far right is kind of similar to the far right in some ways. Yeah, they're basically the same. Like horseshoe theory, the far right and far right are the same, actually, according to this study. Groundbreaking stuff.

0:58:42 Lindsey: Yeah. Boy, what a revelation. Oh yeah, that's right, that's right, yep.

0:58:59 Thomas: This is very garbage. I stand by even more. Like I thought I went a little, uh, strong with the title of the previous episode, a garbage article about a garbage study. Now, you know what? I'll say this. The study is so garbage that I blame the article less. You know?

0:59:13 Lindsey: Yeah, I think that's fair, actually. Yeah, the I don't think that the Quillette misrepresented it, really

0:59:15 Thomas: Yeah, like I'm... If anything, this makes... This study is so bad it makes Quillette's coverage of it look good. That's all... that's wow. Can't believe I'm saying that. I think it's true. Like, honestly, I think science reporting needs to be better, obviously, but like, I I do not believe Coilette's coverage of this study is, you know that much worse than typical coverage in the media of studies. Like the study says it did a thing that it just did not do. And you have to be a Dr. Lindsay Osterman to figure out how fucking bullshit the study is. So, uh, you know what, I think it's, yeah, I actually, I'm gonna go so far as to say Quillette, not the main baddie here, that, that is unless they were, I don't know, in on the study or something, but yeah,

0:59:44 Lindsey: Correct.

1:00:00 Lindsey: Know, I mean, like, there was like some really minor quibbling I could do with how they represented certain things, but like, no, by and large they are, they are taking away from the study what the authors want people to take away from it, so

1:00:12 Thomas: Wouldn't have thought that going into this, I would not have thought, I'm glad we covered this. Wow, wow, wow. If you see anybody sharing this garbage study or that Quillett article, uh, feel free to reply, feel, feel free to send them our way, you know, cause this is crap. I And hate this too, because this, there's so many people that I still see trying to do this stuff of like, you they'RE the, um, genius centrist and the left right are the ones who are, you KNOW, far left, far right is idiots. And they're th-the, the centrist that has all the right ideas and dah, dah, and then they marshal this evidence.

1:00:28 Lindsey: Mm-hm. Mm-hmm. Yep.

1:00:49 Thomas: And And it's frustrating because those are the very people who try to post as though they're intellectually superior to everybody else because they found that middle position. So frustrating. Gets my goat. Any last words?

1:00:57 Lindsey: Yep. Oh, No, I'm exhausted now, boy, being that angry, it's really takes it out of you.

1:01:11 Thomas: Well, everybody, please share the show. I feel like I learn so much from Lindsay every single time. And please share that out so that everybody can be smarter because of our own Dr. Lindsay Osterman. Great work. Really enjoyed it.

1:01:25 Lindsey: Too kind. Mm-hm.

1:01:26 Thomas: Like I said, share the show, pledge the show if you want to support us and we will see, oh, by the way, I meant to say this, uh, last episode, I should say this every episode, Lindsay, help remind me in the future. If you have any questions about the last episode of episode, any episode, hop onto that Patreon Q and a thread that I put up at the beginning of the each month, because in about a week or so, I'm little less, we're going to be doing the Q and A. Well, actually as normies hear this, it'll be like the same day, but for patrons, who still have a chance to ask questions, you've got some more time to get on that Q&A thread. Patreon Q&H, we'll be recording that pretty soon. So do that. Those are a lot of fun. I think it's great format. Yeah,

1:01:41 Lindsey: Yep. Yeah. Oh, Oh, And actually, speaking of Patreon, I, I think it was on the patron or the Patreon post that somebody said that, uh, maybe I can use stick a palp in it instead of put a pin in it, and I thought that was good, so I'm gonna adopt that officially.

1:02:13 Thomas: That's good. That's good, yep. I think It captures the mindset of the show.

1:02:22 Lindsey: So sweet. Yeah.

1:02:23 Thomas: Yeah, so put a palp in that for later. Spider, and then, I, I guess that's accurate too, yeah, because they break them off, those poor spiders. Wow. But do they save them for later is the question?

1:02:29 Lindsey: That's right. That I do not know. Thank

1:02:36 Thomas: Yeah. Okay, we'll look into it. All right, folks, thanks so much for listening, thanks so mucho por Lindsaying, Lindsey, and we'll see you next time.

1:02:44 Lindsey: You

1:02:53 Clip: Thank you so much for listening to Serious Inquiries Only. If you like the show, the absolute best thing you can do is support us at patreon.com slash SeriousPod. The second best thing you can do, is please share it on social media or by word of mouth. Speaking of social media, follow me on Twitter at Serious Pod. If would like to be Facebook friends, send me a request at facebook.com Thomas podcast. If not up for that level of intimacy, that's fine. Maybe you want to join the discussion at facebook.com slash groups slash SIO members. Thank you again for listening. We'll see you next time.