If you want to get a job providing safety equipment for workplaces, you should probably not proclaim that you believe that workplaces are too safe.
It looks like here you have inadvertently provided a good argument for the opposite of what you wanted. Namely, what you write applies even if your belief that workplaces are too safe is correct. (Workplaces can certainly be too safe by any reasonable metric, at least in principle. Imagine if office workers were forced to wear helmets and knee pads just in case they might trip over while walking between the cubes. Then imagine a thriving industry of office helmets, an ever expanding bureaucracy for regulating and inspecting them—and august academic experts getting grants to study them and issue recommendations for their use.)
If your stated beliefs are misaligned with the institutional incentives in the business or bureaucracy in which you work, it will indeed be very bad for your career. And what reason do you have to believe that the institutional incentives in the contemporary academia are aligned with the truth on all (or even on most) ideologically charged matters?
It looks like here you have inadvertently provided a good argument for the opposite of what you wanted.
That’s odd, it looks to me as if you’re taking a rather loose analogy in a direction somewhere away from the topic. Getting back on topic:
My point was that “conservatism” isn’t a thing — it’s a label, and that people’s responses to that label have to do with what they take it as referring to.
It’s been noted elsethread that the survey has serious problems. One of them is that it doesn’t ask what the surveyed psychologists think they are talking about when they say “conservative”. If you ask someone, “What do you think about conservatives?” you will get different answers based not only on what that person’s values are, but what they think “conservative” means.
If scientists use “conservative” to mean “a person who values religious doctrine over scientific results”, then you are ill-advised to represent yourself as “conservative” when trying to get a job from a scientist. Especially if you don’t mean that when you say “conservative”!
Note the difference between “scientists use ‘conservative’ to mean ‘a person who values religious doctrine over science’” and “scientists think that conservatives value religious doctrine over science”. The latter implies that scientists are referring to an objective class of “conservatives” whereas the former considers that scientists may not be referring to the same set of people when they say “conservative” that someone else refers to by that word.
It looks like here you have inadvertently provided a good argument for the opposite of what you wanted. Namely, what you write applies even if your belief that workplaces are too safe is correct. (Workplaces can certainly be too safe by any reasonable metric, at least in principle. Imagine if office workers were forced to wear helmets and knee pads just in case they might trip over while walking between the cubes. Then imagine a thriving industry of office helmets, an ever expanding bureaucracy for regulating and inspecting them—and august academic experts getting grants to study them and issue recommendations for their use.)
If your stated beliefs are misaligned with the institutional incentives in the business or bureaucracy in which you work, it will indeed be very bad for your career. And what reason do you have to believe that the institutional incentives in the contemporary academia are aligned with the truth on all (or even on most) ideologically charged matters?
That’s odd, it looks to me as if you’re taking a rather loose analogy in a direction somewhere away from the topic. Getting back on topic:
My point was that “conservatism” isn’t a thing — it’s a label, and that people’s responses to that label have to do with what they take it as referring to.
It’s been noted elsethread that the survey has serious problems. One of them is that it doesn’t ask what the surveyed psychologists think they are talking about when they say “conservative”. If you ask someone, “What do you think about conservatives?” you will get different answers based not only on what that person’s values are, but what they think “conservative” means.
If scientists use “conservative” to mean “a person who values religious doctrine over scientific results”, then you are ill-advised to represent yourself as “conservative” when trying to get a job from a scientist. Especially if you don’t mean that when you say “conservative”!
Note the difference between “scientists use ‘conservative’ to mean ‘a person who values religious doctrine over science’” and “scientists think that conservatives value religious doctrine over science”. The latter implies that scientists are referring to an objective class of “conservatives” whereas the former considers that scientists may not be referring to the same set of people when they say “conservative” that someone else refers to by that word.
I think we have a problem of sneaking in connotations here.