Progress In Iraq Continues...

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In my opinion a midwestern dairy farmer is more likely to hold a realistic political view than is a professor of political science on one of the coasts.

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This baffles me. In political science you have a bunch of very intelligent people who have steeped themselves in the study of the actual empirical world. Further, they tend to take fairly seriously the problem of inference. What does it take to make a causal claim about social processes? What kind of evidence would you need?

In contrast, it seems likely that your average midwestern dairy farmer has very little clue about empirics beyond their immediate environs and a rather simplistic view about things like causality.

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I'm judging the tree by the fruit it bears. My take (which might be off, admittedly) is that the type(political science professor) typically believes in far-leftist fallacies, in the myth of multiculturalism, in hate-crime laws, in speech code rules on campus, in other such misguided things, and might well make excuse for Castro; whereas type(plain farmer) generally understands that leaving others alone and less laws and lower taxes/lower spending is good, that free enterprise is better than every other system, that Castro is doing evil in restricting free speech and in holding political prisoners, etc.

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Are you positing some kind of innate "natural intelligence" that is only perverted by seriously studying the social world?

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Not exactly. But unlike in the hard sciences, I do think that the lofty maze of ideas must somehow confuse some in the social "sciences" who then find trouble bringing those ideas down to earth in a practical manner. Of course, that doesn't apply to all. But the impression I have, of type(political science professor) as being from fairly Left to radically Left, suggests to me that they understand theory a lot better than they understand reality. Which, of course, is somewhat ironic because ultimately that which they study is very much intended for application in the real world.