Paid Subscription Option 2.0
I Hope to Give You More than You Pay For
I’d like to believe that the biggest benefit of a paid subscription is that you are helping, not just me, but all of us, to resist the extremist turn of academia and maintain islands of integrity in a sea of academic political corruption. Go here for lots of details about the paid subscription option. Among other things, there you will find that, when I first launched a paid option, I committed to using at least 2/3 of it to support the new Society for Open Inquiry in the Behavioral Sciences or student-oriented research. So far, I have not spent a dime, because it is usefully in reserve. Let me explain.
What is “Normal” Work in my Lab?
Front, third from third the left, is Brett Byll, who’s award winning honors thesis was summarized in this article at Free Black Thought. Oversimplifying slightly, he found that authoritarians on both the left and right more strongly support violent protest than do other people. Think Charlottesville, January 6th, and Portland&Seattle, Summer 2020.
My main point is to tell you about Akeela Careem, front, second from the right. She will be examining the role of leftwing authoritarianism (LWA) in willingness to violate democratic norms, such as free speech and counting legitimately-cast votes for her dissertation. This essay is focused on how useful the paid subscriptions are for supporting this research, so I am not going into detail about LWA here, but this is a pretty good overview:
Akeela’s main hypothesis is that the higher people score on measures of LWA, the more willing they are to violate those democratic norms to advance their own political goals (e.g., crush those they see as their political enemies; sound familiar? No? Then go here). She will also be testing the hypothesis about people high in rightwing authoritarianism (RWA), but RWA is well-worn social science ground. The unique contribution here is testing it for those high in LWA.
She is going to need to conduct surveys and these cost money. Hers will probably be at least $2000. She is in the process of applying for grants to fund this, but I have given her the green light to go ahead, even if she does not get the grant. Paid subscribers to Unsafe Science made this possible.
I backstopped the costs of her dissertation work with the subscription income. It ensures that she can do this research. If she gets the grant, great! Then I can deploy the income for another project. But the point is, paid subscriptions enable me to tell Akeela, “Yeah, go for it because if you don’t have the grant, I have the money secured away because of my paid Substack subscribers.”
Of course, I cannot guarantee how her dissertation research will come out. Also, the reasons to do that research are really to understand the relationship between LWA and willingness to violate democratic principles and norms, not to stick it to little baby noveau Lenin wannabees. But if it comes out the way we expect, it will be particularly satisfying.
In the midst of the worst of a mobbing, people often ask me if I am ok (I am fine) and express wanting to do something (the PoPS fiasco is not my first rodeo). This is something super constructive that you can do. The paid subscriptions help give me the independence to not have to rely on ideologically captured organizations to fund the type of research they would never admit to considering political anathema, and instead would have concocted “sciencey” reasons to reject. If you have any doubt about that, see this essay on how I had a grant testing for leftwing political biases rejected on concocted science grounds, and funded when I kept all the sciencey methods identical, took all mention of leftwing biases out and added in denunciations of Charles Murray and Nazis.
Even if you only read a minority of my essays, and even if you only value some of them, I hope you will see this as a purpose worthy of your support. And, even if you decide not, I am still grateful for whatever level at which you do subscribe.
Thank you for listening.
Lee