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Comment by geofft | Hacker News Reader

> I wonder how much of this is an outgrowth of the current university campus climate where opinions that don't fit into the predominant liberal worldview can't be voiced.

This does not seem to match the reality at university campuses - only the caricature by people who find it politically expedient to be seen as persecuted.

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Just off the top of my head in the last year or so:

Social scientist Charles Murray was censored then physically assaulted at Middlebury because he wrote a book about the correlation between intelligence and success [https://youtu.be/a6EASuhefeI?t=19m25s]

Biology professor Bret Weinstein at Evergreen State College had himself and his family physically threatened because he refused to participate in a protest that asked all white people to leave campus for a day [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xq4Y87idawk]

A professor at Diablo Valley College smashed a dude with a bike lock just because he was on the different side of the political spectrum as he was. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ug34vogS3Fw]

Everything that Jordan Peterson had to go through at University of Toronto because he publicly opposed a draconian bill to forces professors to use specific pronouns when referring to students [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsG71YrB_Nw]

Lindsay Shepard at Laurier University had to face a star chamber from a 'diversity committee' because she showed a video clip of Jordan Peterson in class [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpFUvfAvKs4&t=1m18s]

And then there were the psychos that literally lit University of Berkeley on fire when Milo Yiannopoulos went to give a talk there [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pi_vX0tknJM&t=4m45s]

etc...

Please see my other reply in this thread about censoring people vs. censoring ideas. The only one on this list that's somewhat convincing is the Laurier one, since that was in the course of an academic class. Milo isn't an academic. A professor beating someone with a bike lock might be inappropriate and criminal but isn't about academic discourse unless the other person is a professor, and it seems this person was a former professor, anyway. Jordan Peterson himself has been able to spread his ideas far and wide via his YouTube channel, which as far as I know is not censored on any campus network. etc.

They're being censored because of their ideas though... I'm not sure how you can draw that distinction.

Not necessarily - they're being censored because of their refusal to engage with the scientific community and insistence on presenting their views as scientific when they're not (e.g., Murray) or because their purpose is antics and not ideas (e.g., Yiannopoulos). Both of those are things that a university should disinvite speakers for.

I went to my sisters graduation at Northwestern where Stephen Colbert was the keynote speaker. I don't see a difference between the antics of Colbert and Yiannapoulos other than what tribe they represent. One is a keynote graduation speaker, one has riots that prevent them from speaking on campus.

To be honest, I don't think I can defend inviting Stephen Colbert, either. (Especially if he's in character.)

However, commencement speeches do not have a high reputation for academic rigor to start with, so I think inviting an entertainer to speak at one is sort of different from inviting a speaker with some specific experience (either academic, or political/industrial/etc.) to give a lecture.

All that said, keep that Yiannopoulos wanted to read out the names of students without legal immigration status on stage at Berkeley. That's the sort of thing I mean by "antics." I don't think Stephen Colbert does anything of the sort. His partisanship and his satirical character mean that I have trouble saying that anything of value will be lost if he stops being invited to speak at college campuses, but he seems qualitatively different from Yiannopoulos.

> Yiannopoulos wanted to read out the names of students without legal immigration status on stage at Berkeley.

I don't think this was ever true, and your whole stance on this hinges on it.

See my reply to ak_yo.

Results of this debate disagree with you

https://www.intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/free-speech-th...

... pardon my assumption, but those four people don't look like college students. Are they?

The results of a straw poll after a debate are not evidence for anything beyond what the people who saw the debate thought of the debaters. People vote for all kinds of reasons - the underlying merits of the case, the impressiveness of the speakers that they've found to present it, even sympathy for someone who got obviously crushed by their opponent. When I was a debater I've seen some truly outrageous motions get passed simply because one side was funnier.

I understand. I was responding to comment that said its totally baseless caricature.

I think debaters did a good job of presenting evidence for their case. Why not give it a chance instead of saying its "staw poll", isn't any poll "straw poll" by that account?

Also I never said it evidence of anything. What is an example of "evidence" in this particular case for you?

Ah, sorry. You said "results of this debate disagree with you", so I took that to be the debate's results (the vote), not the debate itself.

(And as a side point, no to the straw poll question - there are certain statistical guarantees on the representativeness of polls as long as they're drawn from a random sample of the public, with debates about how far you can deviate from a random sample and still have results that are useful. Self-selected polls, on the other hand, pretty much mean nothing.)

> Self-selected polls, on the other hand, pretty much mean nothing.

Isn't our democracy built upon "self selected polling" , people who chose to go excesrice their right to vote. Its all meaningless?

If few enough people vote, arguably yes (though that's a fairly complex question and depends a lot on what your conception of democracy is). But in essence, an election is a full-population poll: like a random sample with probability 1 of being chosen. So it's statistically maximally valid. We (political scientists) tend to squint a bit and say the opportunity to vote is equivalent to actually voting, so non-voting doesn't harm the legitimacy of elections. I don't personally buy that, but it's a tricky problem to fix.

So if am I reading this correctly.

Previously you said "any self selected polling is meaningless"

Now you are saying "Self selected polling is meaningful when people who didn't self select had the opportunity to do so" .

Ok. So by that definition the poll I linked, everyone had the opportunity to participate in the debate, theoretically. What makes it meaningless ?

PS: Fixing democracy ect is not interesting to me in this context, I want to focus your claim self-selected = meaningless.

Because I, for one, didn't know it was happening and therefore could not participate. My chance of having my opinion count was zero. So pretty much by definition the poll is not representative of the universe of people-who-include-me. And by induction of all the other people who had no chance to participate.

If you want to know more, I recipient looking up the 1936 Literary Digest poll for US President, one of the most famous screwups caused by non-random sampling: https://www.math.upenn.edu/~deturck/m170/wk4/lecture/case1.h...

its the same with US polls, everyone having an opportunity is merely theoretical. Lots of people are unable to votes for all sorts of reasons.

Perhaps explain how you are defining * opportunity to participate* .

If you're arguing that elections with less than 100% turnout are flawed as models of public opinion, I agree with you.

There's a single democracy. There's no shortage of random polling websites. Telling me "You are ruled by this person, who was selected in a process you knew about since childhood" is one thing; telling me "This is likely true because people on this website you've never heard of say it's true" is another.

(And yes, governments where there are ad-hoc rationalizations for who gets to vote or where the procedures aren't publicly announced are in fact illegitmate and widely recognized as such.)

I didn't say it was the "truth" or anything like that. What are you even saying?

I claimed a thing was true. You said that the results of a debate disagree with me. Either you meant that my position was likely to be untrue as a result, and in turn the position advocated by the "winner" of the debate was likely true, or you didn't mean anything relevant at all. Which is it?

It merely meant lots of people were convinced that its true based on the arguments provided by side arguing for the motion.

"Undecided" went from 8% to 24% for the motion.

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