zlacker

I can't seem to figure out the incentives behind [2], the idea that during door-to-door canvassing only gay people can be effective at changing non-gay people's minds about same-sex marriage seems like an odd narrative for someone to want to push.

Other than encouraging employment of gay individuals by political campaigns/canvassers or maybe a general superiority complex, by stating that only gay people are capable of changing people's minds on the subject.

I have noticed a general pattern on Twitter, from people who push this sort of social science stuff, that they believe only people who are in the in-group (ie, race, gender, class, etc) are allowed to have opinions or engage in research about the group itself. Which always seemed anti-intellectual and borderline dangerous, as it actively discourages the wider population not only from doing useful research but also helping overcome ignorance in their day-to-day conversations, writing books, political projects, etc and generally engaging in issues.

It just makes everyone even more scared, careful, and closed off to the subject(s). Which is the opposite incentive structure for 'producing a cascade of opinion change' (as the study claims).

This just seems to be a punitive approach to change/progress, where oppressed groups, or people representing the groups, are just in it to collect an endless amount of things to shame other people for "not getting it", which ties back into the superiority thing. Assuming the actual goal is ending oppression, this is taking a totally backwards approach by providing ever more ways to minimize and degrade the opinions and personhood of other groups. And when this (self-)destructive strategy is challenged it's met with a bunch of hand-wavy stuff about privilege to justify everything.

Meanwhile the average person on the outside is just trying to live there life and aren't heavily invested. This punitive approach, particularly via social media, would seem to me to make them more likely to just avoid, ignore, or even resent such talk of change.

>>dmix+(OP)
If you are talking about the seeming 'wokeness' of this research well yes, that is probably a fair comment. But that would be fine if they actually did a proper experiment. I don't think it is a coincidence that particularly woke research may be of poor quality. I agree with you that a strong idealogical bias is a hazard to generating truth. This is most pertinent in preventing certain types of research from being performed or results from being released. This is mostly a problem for psychology and sociology, which among their other merits have limited impact on actual life.

>>dmix+(OP)
> I can't seem to figure out the incentives behind [2]

If I recall from discussion at the time, the reason the false finding was so welcome (and therefore so rewarding to the con man who wrote it up) was that it purported to show that making a large change to public opinion was cheap and easy to do.