Evolutionary biology benefited from two things: the correct side (vis-a-vis Creationism) was absolutely correct—could not possibly have been more correct—and the incorrect side was culturally identified, both by themselves and academia, as outsiders to the mainstream intellectual tradition.
As it happens, all the evidence points to life on earth arising by completely natural processes. The amount of supernatural involvement that apears to be there is: 0% (and negative rates aren’t possible.) Compare with a question like “what is the marginal effect of tax rates on labor supply?” Whatever the correct answer to that question is in that time and place, there are different social groups that benefit from governments acting on relatively higher and relatively lower estimates, and there’s no logical bound on where it could lie, independent of empirics. (Most people’s intuitive guess is that it moderately reduces labor supply in some sense, but perhaps that’s just because that’s where the political balance of power lies right now. Rand wrote novels where modest taxes lead the captains of industry to actively destroy output; a clever grad student could show microeconomic pathways leading from higher taxes to higher labor supply.)
And: pretty much everyone in the left-right economics debate, from Austrians to neoclassicals to Keynesians to Marxists, thinks of themselves as operating within the mainstream Western intellectual tradition, even if they don’t have the dominant position in economics at the moment. Bias affects all humans, but they all at least like to self-conceptualize as principled followers of evidence. Creationists tried to put on that garb late in the game and no one bought it anyway; since for cultural reasons they would never become dominant in the academy, few presumably felt the need to twist academic interpretations around to prevent Creationists from gaining ground.
On occasion, there have been ideologically-charged debates within mainstream materialist biology. I’m no expert on the technical issues involved, but it doesn’t seem that those who can credibly claim to be arrived at a clear consensus either (as they did on “is the diversity of life on Earth the result of natural processes?”)
And: pretty much everyone in the left-right economics debate, from Austrians to neoclassicals to Keynesians to Marxists, thinks of themselves as operating within the mainstream Western intellectual tradition, even if they don’t have the dominant position in economics at the moment. Bias affects all humans, but they all at least like to self-conceptualize as principled followers of evidence.
While they are within the Western philosophical tradition, it’s my impression that neither Austrians nor Marxists can be described as strictly “followers of evidence”, leading me to wonder whether the others can really, either.
The Austrian notion of praxeology, and the Marxist notion of dialectical materialism, are non-empirical. Von Mises insisted on praxeology being an “a-priori science”, like mathematics, rather than an empirical science. Marxist dialectics similarly attempts to begin from axiomatic principles (“laws of dialectics”) rather than measurement.
It’s true that the claims of various schools of thought to be principled followers of the evidence is exceedingly likely to be an exaggeration, if it holds any connection to reality at all. But that doesn’t impugn the claims’ sincerity - or their function as cultural ingroup markers, which is what matters here. (Of course, there are other cultural barriers between them, but none as extreme as that between Creationists ans mainstream biologists, I think.)
“Evidence” can be rationalist as well as empiricist; if the Austrians are right that the laws of economics are discoverable by deduction, then everyone else is wrong to look to the physical world. (Recall the mathemetician’s joke about the physicist who proved all odd numbers are prime: “3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 - measurement error, 11 is prime, 13 is prime, viola!”) I think it’s pretty silly for them to think this, of course, but.. For their part I’ve never really seen a western Marxist invoke dialectics except in some very trivial way. What Marxists, Keynesians, and neoclassicals do do (and Austrians also do, although they’d deny they’re doing it) is adopt simplifying assumptions to construct models around. Plausibility limits what one can assume, of course, but choosing the right assumptions is a sufficiently subtle task that each can just as plausibly accuse the others (and, probably more often, their intra-school rivals) of adopting whatever assumptions lead to their preferred conclusions. (My ex ante guess is that the highest proportion of good research takes place within neoclassical and to a lesser extent Keynesian, but only because its status gives it better access to talent and funding, and scrubs away any ideology-signaling effects of working within the discipline.)
Evolutionary biology benefited from two things: the correct side (vis-a-vis Creationism) was absolutely correct—could not possibly have been more correct—and the incorrect side was culturally identified, both by themselves and academia, as outsiders to the mainstream intellectual tradition.
As it happens, all the evidence points to life on earth arising by completely natural processes. The amount of supernatural involvement that apears to be there is: 0% (and negative rates aren’t possible.) Compare with a question like “what is the marginal effect of tax rates on labor supply?” Whatever the correct answer to that question is in that time and place, there are different social groups that benefit from governments acting on relatively higher and relatively lower estimates, and there’s no logical bound on where it could lie, independent of empirics. (Most people’s intuitive guess is that it moderately reduces labor supply in some sense, but perhaps that’s just because that’s where the political balance of power lies right now. Rand wrote novels where modest taxes lead the captains of industry to actively destroy output; a clever grad student could show microeconomic pathways leading from higher taxes to higher labor supply.)
And: pretty much everyone in the left-right economics debate, from Austrians to neoclassicals to Keynesians to Marxists, thinks of themselves as operating within the mainstream Western intellectual tradition, even if they don’t have the dominant position in economics at the moment. Bias affects all humans, but they all at least like to self-conceptualize as principled followers of evidence. Creationists tried to put on that garb late in the game and no one bought it anyway; since for cultural reasons they would never become dominant in the academy, few presumably felt the need to twist academic interpretations around to prevent Creationists from gaining ground.
On occasion, there have been ideologically-charged debates within mainstream materialist biology. I’m no expert on the technical issues involved, but it doesn’t seem that those who can credibly claim to be arrived at a clear consensus either (as they did on “is the diversity of life on Earth the result of natural processes?”)
While they are within the Western philosophical tradition, it’s my impression that neither Austrians nor Marxists can be described as strictly “followers of evidence”, leading me to wonder whether the others can really, either.
The Austrian notion of praxeology, and the Marxist notion of dialectical materialism, are non-empirical. Von Mises insisted on praxeology being an “a-priori science”, like mathematics, rather than an empirical science. Marxist dialectics similarly attempts to begin from axiomatic principles (“laws of dialectics”) rather than measurement.
It’s true that the claims of various schools of thought to be principled followers of the evidence is exceedingly likely to be an exaggeration, if it holds any connection to reality at all. But that doesn’t impugn the claims’ sincerity - or their function as cultural ingroup markers, which is what matters here. (Of course, there are other cultural barriers between them, but none as extreme as that between Creationists ans mainstream biologists, I think.)
“Evidence” can be rationalist as well as empiricist; if the Austrians are right that the laws of economics are discoverable by deduction, then everyone else is wrong to look to the physical world. (Recall the mathemetician’s joke about the physicist who proved all odd numbers are prime: “3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 - measurement error, 11 is prime, 13 is prime, viola!”) I think it’s pretty silly for them to think this, of course, but.. For their part I’ve never really seen a western Marxist invoke dialectics except in some very trivial way. What Marxists, Keynesians, and neoclassicals do do (and Austrians also do, although they’d deny they’re doing it) is adopt simplifying assumptions to construct models around. Plausibility limits what one can assume, of course, but choosing the right assumptions is a sufficiently subtle task that each can just as plausibly accuse the others (and, probably more often, their intra-school rivals) of adopting whatever assumptions lead to their preferred conclusions. (My ex ante guess is that the highest proportion of good research takes place within neoclassical and to a lesser extent Keynesian, but only because its status gives it better access to talent and funding, and scrubs away any ideology-signaling effects of working within the discipline.)