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21/ I know well over 10 professors who have explicitly told me that they self-censor. I am sure there are many many more. Scientists are terrified to posit certain causal forces, even to broach certain topics.
22/ Of course, if you are a scientist who doesn't care about those topics, then you don't feel the tight walls of orthodoxy. And that's fine. Not everybody should challenge orthodoxy. And not every researcher needs to study human variation or sex differences.
23/ BUT, they should take the time to talk to the many people who have suffered massive consequences for challenging orthodoxy. And they should probably ask themselves if it's ok to inhabit a system in which people who challenge orthodoxy have to fear for their jobs.
24/ I'm deeply pessimistic about the state of the social sciences, for a variety of reasons. But I hope that if we keep drawing attention to these problems, we will eventually succeed in mitigating the worst of the biases.
25/ In the meantime, our field will suffer, for a science that refuses to entertain an entire category of causal hypotheses for extra-scientific reasons is not really a science anymore, but an ideology.
