The Institute for Quantitative Social Science seeks to solve society's greatest challenges by helping to create, preserve, and disseminate social science knowledge. We build infrastructure and community so social scientists can work at unprecedented speed, scale, and levels of collaboration, often with high potential for societal impact. We support social science research regardless of the nature of the inquiry, the results it might yield, or the conclusions one might draw from the findings.
The faculty, students, and staff associated with IQSS, our research subjects, and those to whom we distribute knowledge, take widely varying viewpoints on numerous political, policy, and scientific issues. Indeed, for science to advance, we require contrarians among us — those who think they can gather the evidence necessary to change prevailing beliefs about the world or to teach us how to do what once seemed impossible.
Representing such diverse opinions with ex cathedra proclamations of where, or with whom, we all stand is almost logically impossible. Indeed, trying to do so may well damage the relationship we have with our research subjects, who provide us personal information with the expectation of impartiality. Our faculty, students, and staff have many political opinions, but the institution of IQSS does not itself have, represent, or stand for any one political position on issues of the day. IQSS leadership will thus not make statements supporting any political view, or attempt to speak for individuals in the IQSS community, except in rare situations where it directly and immediately impacts our mission to create, preserve, and disseminate social science knowledge.
At the same time, we strongly support the rights of all individuals in their personal capacities, including those associated with IQSS, to speak out publicly about any issue on which they care to be heard. Although IQSS communication forums are not the place for espousing your own political views, IQSS faculty, students, staff, and affiliates should feel free to express themselves however they think appropriate in other public places. Indeed, the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, which is trying to advance these issues, is one of the many groups that has been incubated at IQSS. IQSS has also developed an Extraordinary Claims, Extraordinary Evidence program to reduce barriers to rigorous investigation of research questions that might otherwise be ignored due to reputational or professional risks, and a Peer Pre-Review program to get fast feedback and speed publication on all types of research.
As always, if you have any thoughts or questions about any of this, please feel free to stop by.