I am not sure if “antti rasinen” is suggesting that disciplines such as philosophy, language studies, and economics are “less technical or theoretical” but if this is the case, we have a failure to communicate. Literary theory, linquistic philosophy, etc. are some of the most arcana filled theoretical fields imaginable. Sometimes i wish semioticians were more willing to engage physicists, only to suggest that when forced to use (in this case) the English language one really should know what it is.

It’s interesting to reminisce about undergrad…I kind of exercised some ideological demons then, I think, and by the time I graduated I had a belly full of politics and was quite happy to make myself miserable with something else…like graduate school. As that pretty much ate my life, I didn’t spend much additional time debating the merits or deficits of anarchosyndicalism with a contact high and a five-beer buzz.

That said, my core political instincts really haven’t changed one bit since I had my head screwed on straight enough to discern them. Meanwhile, some of the things that come out of my Dad’s mouth make me want to ask him, “C’mon…who’s the guy who fathered me really?” I know he does it mostly because it tickles him to watch me make that “I’m going to have an aneurysm” face. Still, since my mother never spoke to me about politics, I’m at a loss to explain how upbringing shaped my political views.

Being “aloof” does not necessarily mean that one does not hold a strong political belief though. It just means they rather prefer not to talk about it openly. At this moment in time, I think it’s hard to find someone who is “apolitical”.

How did things change? A bit all over the place, though always with a left tendency. I guess it is natural that as we grow older our opinions become more sophisticated and fit less and less into the left/right spectrum.
Did Profs/Uni play a role? Not one bit. Then again University in Germany is quite a different beast from the UK/US so that’s perhaps unsurprising.

All in all, I’d say my political stance was never directly influenced by professors either in physics or other classes. I was never taken in by a charismatic professor spewing objectivist rhetoric; I tried to analyze the issues myself and with friends. While I agree with most people in my department on political issues, I find the blatant jokes at the expense of the right to be inappropriate at times because it marginalizes these views. I can imagine the same sort of jokes being made at Bob Jones University at the expense of us “lefties”. The UCLA alumni hunt for liberals is discouraging and wrong, but I can understand how people who hold those views can feel persecuted.

Prof. Emeritus John Stachel, whose focus is General Relativity, can always be counted on to start off a talk with a call to arms against political foes. He is an academic marxist, so a bit expected. Another prof during our advanced lab class groused about how the money we spend in one month in Iraq could have gotten the SuperConducting SuperCollider built and running.

Scientists want to do science, and I don’t believe any practicing researcher likes the beaucracy that comes with grant requests, federal agencies, and university deans. Also, as a question to those science students and professionals here, does it seem the government or the American public appreciates or cares about the work of scientists other then how it can advance their mobile or tv or health?

And to end on a historical note, let scientists remember the moral incredulity of Heisenberg, Planck and Von Weiszacker during WWII, where they colluded with an obhorent regime premised on the grounds of saving Physics in Germany and that they were apolitical.

One detest politics, but no scientist should resign himself to being “apolitical!”

Anyway, getting back to the born-and-bred Americans, I’d be very curious to see how many people could not be counted in the poll because they answered “none of the above” or “don’t know and/or care”.

Here engineering has somewhat of a Right bias and other (less technical or theoretical) fields are seen somewhat more leftist, sort of confirming the numbers presented above. It doesn’t really matter, though. Most people spend their youth by being young and quite apolitical.

But how I’ve changed during the years? Ah, that’s a difficult question. As a freshman, I was a bleeding heart leftie. I must now admit that it was mostly due to not thinking about the issues. With some friends we had debates and discussions and all that stuff, and slowly we gained a better understanding of the Big Picture.

If you’d try to guess my orientation by my values, I’d be very decidedly a liberal. After all, I am an atheist, I support equality of all people fully, I care for the environment and so on. Yet when talking about fiscal policies, I am often a mirror image of what the left views should be. (But not to the point of being an actual American Republican — My government would need at least a small bay to be drowned in.)

In all fairness, the political spectrum should be at least a plane. Otherwise it is impossible to map at least my trajectory in a satisfactory manner.

“It’s heartless to be a righty when you’re young, but irrational to be a lefty when you’re old”