Starting from a machine-learning analysis of Diet records, this essay examines groupthink within political parties, the political tendencies of newspaper editorials, ideological bias across academic fields at elite universities, and even the political coloration present within the natural sciences.
Through objective AI-based analysis, it offers a highly suggestive critique of distortions in academia, the media, and politics.

2019-04-13
There are not a few researchers who obtain research budgets by advertising natural energy as environmentally friendly, but because of its low energy density, making natural energy a major power source would require.

This is the chapter I published on 2018-05-05 under the title:
The highest accuracy rate was for the Communist Party at 93%, while the lowest accuracy rate was for the Democratic Party at 65%.
What follows is a continuation of the previous chapter.

When a classification system obtained by machine-learning the minutes of the National Diet from 1999 to 2008 was asked to determine, from five choices — the Liberal Democratic Party, Komeito, the Democratic Party of Japan, the Social Democratic Party, and the Communist Party — which party each lawmaker belonged to, the highest accuracy rate was for the Communist Party at 93%, while the lowest accuracy rate was for the Democratic Party at 65%.

In other words, the Communist Party’s lawmakers had the most uniform opinions, making it easiest for the artificial intelligence to identify them as “Communist Party,” whereas the Democratic Party’s lawmakers had the greatest diversity of opinion and the fewest easily identifiable common features, and this can be interpreted as the reason why the accuracy rate declined.
The fact that the opinions of lawmakers belonging to the Communist Party were uniform also means that the party had the strongest tendency toward groupthink.
Conversely, the diversity of opinion among Democratic Party lawmakers can also be taken to mean that it was a party prone to splitting, and that prediction proved strikingly correct in the later split of the Democratic Party’s successor organization.

The Liberal Democratic Party had the next lowest accuracy rate after the Democratic Party, at 70%.
Based on these objective data, the criticism that the Liberal Democratic Party is a party of groupthink is not correct.

Based on these research results, I considered whether this same system might be able to measure the political bias of discourse in society.
That is because it can numerically indicate which party’s lawmakers’ statements a given kind of discourse most closely resembles.

The first application was to newspaper editorials.
When the five papers — Asahi Shimbun, Mainichi Shimbun, Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Yomiuri Shimbun, and Sankei Shimbun — were analyzed, the result was a natural one in line with general perception: Asahi Shimbun showed the greatest similarity to the three opposition parties of the time, namely the Democratic Party, the Social Democratic Party, and the Communist Party, while Sankei Shimbun showed the lowest.
However, all five newspapers showed greater similarity to the opposition than to the ruling parties.
This result can be understood from the fact that newspaper editorials are generally written from a critical stance toward something.

Comparing the bias of elite universities.

The next attempt was an analysis of texts published on university homepages [3].
We collected and analyzed texts such as messages from university faculty members and statements of educational philosophy from graduate schools and departments, classifying them by academic field.
The universities and texts collected and analyzed were the University of Tokyo, with 44 texts in the humanities and social sciences, 51 in science and engineering, and 38 in life sciences; Kyoto University, with 72, 37, and 40 respectively; the University of Tsukuba, with 51, 32, and 32; Waseda University, with 55 in the humanities and social sciences and 29 in science and engineering; and Keio University, with 47 and 32 respectively.
As for life sciences at Waseda and Keio, the relevant organizations were too few and it was not possible to collect a sufficient number of texts, so they were excluded from the analysis.

The collected texts were divided into three fields — humanities and social sciences, science and engineering, and life sciences — and the results showing which party’s statements each university’s texts most closely resembled are presented in Figures 1 through 3 on the left.
That all were judged to lean toward the ruling parties is due to the fact that the texts collected were intended to promote the universities, and therefore contained more positive expressions than critical or negative ones.
Even so, it was found that all academic fields at Kyoto University and the humanities at Keio University showed higher similarity to the opposition parties, and that by academic field, science and engineering were the most ruling-party-oriented while life sciences were the most opposition-party-oriented.

However, whether a text resembles ruling-party statements or opposition-party statements is also affected by the balance between positive and negative expressions, and therefore in many respects remains insufficient as a basis for judging whether a way of thinking is conservative or progressive.
For that reason, research into the ideological bias of universities had once stalled, but the previously mentioned “Scholars’ Association Opposing the Security-Related Laws” provided excellent material for overcoming that obstacle.

Political bias in the natural sciences.

As already stated, all disciplines bearing the name of science — the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences alike — aim to construct systematic knowledge with predictive power.
To achieve that purpose, scholarship must be politically neutral.
For example, scholars with a pro-China political inclination claimed that once China became a member of the international community through WTO accession and the like, it would begin to respect intellectual property rights and would no longer display territorial ambitions.
But that prediction was completely wrong.
If one had objectively analyzed the history and political institutions of the Chinese Communist Party, such an outcome could have been fully anticipated.

Regrettably, political bias exists in the natural sciences as well.
Among scholars promoting nuclear power, there were those who said that nuclear power generation was absolutely safe, but there is no such thing as absolute safety in science.
In reality, the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant suffered an accident.
On the other hand, there are not a few researchers who obtain research budgets by advertising natural energy as environmentally friendly, but because of its low energy density, making natural energy a major power source entails environmental destruction through the development of vast areas [4].
Recently, destruction of nature by mega-solar facilities has begun to be recognized as a problem, but such developments could easily have been predicted if viewed without the colored lenses of any particular politics or ideology.
To be continued.