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Comment by garmaine | Hacker News Reader

Why should specifics of what is said matter if the point is free speech?

He is claiming that this is a free speech issue. That doesn't make it true. He alludes to the complaints of a few students but we don't know what that complaint actually is. It could be free speech or it could be that he is an asshole. We don't know.

Free speech is necessary, but not sufficient. It isn't simply that the speech has to be free; it also must be worth exploring.

To use my analogy, the Earth-centered model is free speech, but it isn't worth much, because it is wrong.

> Earth-centered model is free speech, but it isn't worth much, because it is wrong.

And yet in schools around the world people are taught that electricity flows from positive to negative, and everyone is happy. xD

(slightly disingenuous, but I'd say wrong and not useful are merely correlated rather than 1-1 linked)

> And yet in schools around the world people are taught that electricity flows from positive to negative,

Seriously? I have never encountered this

Anecdotally, I was taught this in lower grades and taught that it was actually the opposite in higher grades. It wouldn't surprise me if people receiving a more basic education even in the same country would never be taught how it actually is.

Understanding that current is a convention because it doesn’t matter if you have positive or negative charge carriers in many applications is not wrong in any way. Given the nature of electric charge (not to mention specific applications like semiconductors) even if you align the direction of conventional current and flow of electrons, it will still be a convention. That’s the cost of having an abstraction for net change in electric charge (which is a useful and insightful abstraction). Don’t believe schools are teaching anything different than this.

Before people learned that the geocentric model is wrong, how do you suppose they discuss, learn, and share ideas to arrive at the truth? How do they know what is “worth exploring” and who decides that?

Furthermore, once the facts are established, I personally believe it’s important for people to express their ideas even if it’s out of ignorance because then we can know to edify. Not everyone will be willing to listen, learn, and change but without free speech and exchange of ideas I find it hard to see how people will grow effectively.

Actually discussing things that are wrong is just as important as discussing things that are right. Going through what's wrong is one of the ways to get to the what's right.

"It must be worth exploring" is the dangerous authoritarian ideology that is the basis of censorship. It's why free speech is a right. Not the "right to explore those worth exploring".

"What is worth exploring" is entirely subjective.

If we applied your logic, then things like LGBT rights, civil rights, physics, biology, etc are all left to the whims of authority. If people truly thought like you, then heliocentrism wouldn't have been explored because "it wasn't worth exploring" 500 years ago. Actually, it was blasphemy.

You do realize that "everything worth exploring" was pretty much banned, taboo or attacked throughout history? It's why the founders enshrined free speech into the constitution.

Things that are wrong are just as important to discuss as things that are right. It's part of the learning process and part of progress.

Because his position is not one in which free speech is the aim. It is a means to an end, and that end is teaching. The specifics of what he said, and in which context he said it, allow discussion about the quality of his teaching - which is relevant to whether or not his contract should have been renewed.

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