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Comment by pdonis | Hacker News Reader

I don't see it as a religious war between believers and non-believers, so much as a sectarian war between different sects of believers. The academics who wrote this open letter are still quite happy to arrogate to themselves the power to decide what constitutes "scientific research" that should be freely debated, and what constitutes "unacceptable opinions" which can be freely suppressed. In other words, all of the believers agree that some speech should be suppressed; the various sects just disagree on exactly where the line should be drawn.

The non-believers are just unlucky enough to be within the blast radius.

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> The academics who wrote this open letter are still quite happy to arrogate to themselves the power to decide what constitutes "scientific research" that should be freely debated, and what constitutes "unacceptable opinions"

Could not find that part of the letter—mind quoting the passage supporting this claim?

> Could not find that part of the letter

If they were really for free speech, period, that's what they would say. But they don't say that. They say they are for "the free and unfettered conduct of scientific research and debate". But who gets to decide what counts as "scientific research and debate" and what doesn't? They do.

I read that as picking one battle at a time.

Also: who says they do decide what’s scientific research and debate?

> who says they do decide what’s scientific research and debate?

Because that is how academia works. And they're all academics.

The letter is from academics to an academic organization (ACM), so yes: its scope is the rules of engagement in academic institutions. The issues you are bringing up are out of scope.

> The issues you are bringing up are out of scope.

No, they're not. Scientific research and debate are not the only topics that get discussed at academic institutions; in fact no topic should be off limits for discussion at academic institutions. Nor should the institutions themselves have any privileged position in deciding what counts as relevant for a particular topic, whether it's scientific research and debate or anything else.

It isn't really "picking one battle at a time" when this is a valid counterpoint.

Do you think that these same scientists would claim that researching, say, eugenics, is an acceptable use of an academic institution's resources and brand name? If not, who's drawing the line and what is the line?

Because if they were outright for free speech, their position would be even more offensive and unacceptable for the pro-woke than it already is (“oh, so you support the nazis?!”)

I see this particular dustup as just a regional conflict between sects on opposite sides of the wider conflict - but the wider cold war going on is motivated by people who have strong, largely un-falsifiable beliefs about how the world works, and who are acting with a unilaterial goal of re-structuring society around these assumptions and eliminating views in conflict with them (and eliminating those who hold them from the public sphere, or creating a sufficient chilling effect such that they censor themselves.)

Once you see it as a religious war it's by far the best analogy to understand the dynamics, at least to me. It's also potentially more than an analogy to the point where the underlying belief system ought to be treated as a religion from a legal standpoint, for the benefit of everyone involved, including the believers.

> Once you see it as a religious war it's by far the best analogy to understand the dynamics, at least to me

If "religious war" means a sectarian war, in which both sides are believers, just believers in different sects (often different only in details so minor that outsiders can't even see what the fuss is about), then I agree. I'm not aware, historically, of anything called a "religious war" that wasn't a sectarian war in that sense.

This might just be a difference in terminology. However, it might not. If you think one of the sides in the "religious war" we are talking about is "unbelievers", then we disagree on something of substance. "Unbelievers" in this context would mean people who just think we should have free speech, period; that nobody should be suppressed simply because of what they are saying. But, as I said in my previous comment, I don't think either side in the current "religious war" meets this criterion; both sides agree that some speech should be suppressed, they just disagree on exactly which speech.

Note that this applies not just to the particular "dustup" referenced in the open letter, but to the larger "cold war" you describe. Nobody is fighting for free speech, period. The different sides are just fighting for different rules about what can be suppressed. One side's rules currently seem a lot more draconian than the other's, but both sides want some such rules.

The specific religious war going on is between people who believe all human interactions are orchestrated through oppression and artificially constructed social constructs which ought to be deconstructed, and those who think that explains at best a subset of interactions, and (generally speaking) a decreasing number of the problematic ones.

In this specific back-and-forth in academia, the underlying difference once you get past superficialities and rhetorical tricks to pull people into one side or the other by glossing over fundamental premises, is not about what speech is permissible or not. Both sides have their views on that claim emerge from their underlying worldviews around how racism, discrimination, gender stereotypes, and things inject themselves into human interactions and what levers exist for affecting those influences.

My use of 'sects' in this example was a bit of a misnomer, I consider the situation going on here to just be a conflict that's emerging due to these divergent worldviews that is localized around a specific community and domain, and the rift is cast in stark relief when situations like this finally manifest.

Who is fighting for the second point of view (the "explains at best a subset" one)? It doesn't seem to me that that's what the people who wrote this open letter are fighting for.

It's not articulated directly in this letter but you have to glance at it sideways a bit to see the bear they are poking - it's not just free speech advocacy:

"Scientific work should be judged on the basis of scientific merit, independent of the researcher's identity or personal views"

This stands in direct opposition to the (increasingly common) belief that scientific merit is at best just one aspect, at worst a complete myth, and that the "lived experience" of the author (particularly through their racial and gender experience) contributes as much, if not more, to the validity and weight one ought to give to their scientific contributions and the conclusions they draw from them.

This may sound ridiculous and you may think "surely they don't actually mean what it sounds like they are saying" but indeed they do, strongly. This is why it ought to be treated as a religion.

The reason it ties back to the worldview I mentioned is if you believe that all human experience is merely an expression of oppressive forces and cultural constructs then "lived experience" ought to be the primary determinant of truth, since the scientific method itself is one such cultural construct, and likely a tool of oppression at that given its Euro-centric origins, and hence deeply flawed and broken in comparison to the "truth" of the collective experiences of diverse people.

> "Scientific work should be judged on the basis of scientific merit, independent of the researcher's identity or personal views"

Yes, I get what the writers of the letter say they are arguing for. I'm just not buying it.

What is this "scientific merit"? What it turns out to mean, on closer inspection, is "consensus of people who have scientific credentials in the applicable fields". Which is just as much of an "artificial social construct" as the BS they are complaining about.

In other words, the problem is actually much worse than these letter writers realize. As I said: the problem is not that a bunch of "unbelievers" who just want to decide things rationally are fighting against religious zealots. The problem is that all of the sides who are fighting are religious zealots--just of different religious sects. In science, for example, nobody is fighting for "scientific merit is judged by predictive track record, and nothing else--if your theory makes wrong predictions it is wrong, period, no matter how many credentials you have or how many papers you have published or how many other scientists agree with you".

Note that this is not directly articulated in the letter either; but if you look at how science is being done today, including the science these letter writers are doing, that's what you'll see. At least, that's what I see.

I mean, if that's truly the underlying belief system with regards to science of the signatories, I agree with you. But I think it's worth leaving open the possibility that what you highlight is an effect of the fallability of humans (which science is designed to help protect us against) and the "merit" stated in the letter is in fact the platonic ideal science sets out to attain - I would hope many scientists would acknowledge that the gap between this ideal and the reality is a problem, as you have.

> the fallability of humans (which science is designed to help protect us against)

Which science as an institution is supposed to help protect us against, yes. But science as an institution as it currently exists, which is the institution that all these academics are working in, does not do that. And these academics are simply not talking about that at all; I doubt if they even realize it.

>> the "lived experience" of the author

It's interesting that the "lived experience" of artists is fully factored into the personal branding and marketing of those artists. I wonder if academics just have an expectation that this is what diversity inclusion looks like.

We can still quantify how much freedom of debate they allow and rank them. Would you still rate them the same?

How do we measure "freedom of debate"? Who gets to decide the ranking? That's just another sectarian squabble.

Percentage of the populace who would be excluded.

The ranking is simply a comparison of that number.

That does not work. You need to be familiar enough with an issue to debate it, otherwise it’s just uninformed noise. It’s not because a subject is interesting only a small niche that there is no freedom of “debate”. Conversely, 80% of a population shouting at one another on Twitter is no debate at all.

So you’d first have to define the relevant part of the population, which is hopeless. And then you have debates about who should be part of the debate, which is not much better than what we have now.

> It’s not because a subject is interesting only a small niche that there is no freedom of “debate”.

Did I suggest otherwise?

It may be hard to do accurately, but that doesn't make it hopeless. If both sides want to exclude "crackpots" and people who's contributions lack technical quality, that is simply accounted for in the estimate. Whether you think that's fair to therefore characterize everyone as "intolerant" is another matter . I certainly wouldn't characterize them that way, though I get the impression the parent poster might, though perhaps only as a way to claim moral equivalence between all sides. I would expect there to remain quantifiable differences between those who claim they want a "healthy debate from all sides" and those who want to achieve social progress by limiting access to the debate.

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