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Comment by dsnr | Hacker News Reader

> On November 26, this suggestion became a mandate: The student was informed that he must be evaluated by psychological services before returning to classes.

You know that something’s wrong when someone is forced to be psychologically evaluated for asking uncomfortable questions. This entire story looks like something straight out of a dystopia.

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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatr...

They did it in Soviet Union at some point to the intellectuals who questioned their ideology.

They do it everywhere when an ideology takes over the common sense. To intellectuals or not.

Yes - the story appears to be a perfect example of something that is Kafkaesque. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Kafkaesque

Going to university in the USA these days sounds like an absolutely terrifying prospect, and doesn't sound very promising for the future of the country.

This incident is bad, but it's also important not to look back to some imagined golden age of perfect intellectual and academic freedom. Take say the famous case of Bertrand Russell being fired by CUNY for his views on sexuality and religion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bertrand_Russell_Case Or some of the stuff that went on during the McCarthy era: https://www.lib.berkeley.edu/uchistory/archives_exhibits/loy...

Free speech and academic freedom have always been and will always be under threat. It's a constant struggle.

I went back to school to take a couple classes at a public school in a red state. It definitely has changed but it wasn't that bad.

My observations around this:

* Lots more platitudes. Nearly every teacher in the CS department had signs on their doors about being an inclusive zone or standing for social justice. Seems like it would have been easier to just make a big sign that says, "The CS department is inclusive and promotes equity."

* Early in President Trump's tenure they designated an area as a safe-space. This is honestly the first actual safe-space I had run into, despite hearing about them endlessly in culture wars news. I personally don't mind a politics free zone.

* I had to take a mandatory title ix training. It used words I don't normally bump into but have been targets for the right like "trigger warnings" and "microaggressions". I wrote the title ix coordinator (simply because it felt like a waste of time) and asked if I could skip it because I had already done 8 years of college without running afoul of school rules and she told me no.

That was about it. So I'm not sure how endemic the problem is but my anecdata was it's not too much to fret over. My personal sense here is that the media likes to report these stories because they are "man bites dog" stories.

As long as you keep quiet about sensitive issues, you will be fine.

There shouldn’t be any “sensitive” issues in a university context. These “universities” look more like re-education centers than educational institutions.

All those “sensitive” issues are plain ideological ideas and some people want those ideas to prevail by suppressing all conversation around them.

I think the discussion about this already over, i.e. it's now a part of the social contract that we don't question certain things, not because they're true or false but because of social cost of challenging them. For example, we know that the distribution of certain psychological traits in both genders is a bit different, but discussing it - either in the social context or the academia - is more or less a taboo in order to protect the vulnerable, and in part also because of the expectations of desirable traits in today society [0]. For the same reason, nobody in the right mind would organize a study of IQ differences between races, and if someone was stupid enough, their professional life in the academia (and probably beyond) would be finished.

In general, in the West any study of relationships between the aspect of the body (any inherent traits) and the mind/psyche is forbidden. A few years ago the Chinese published their famous study of facial traits of convinced criminals. [1] The result was that there were more variations from the mean among the convicts than the rest of the population. Of course everybody criticized the study as unethical and minority-reportesque.

The only danger I see is that by effectively renouncing to analyze any links between the body and mind we might lose some important insights, and the vulnerable groups could also greatly benefit from discovering these. But the danger that the result of this kind of research will be used against us is not negligible, as the history shows.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/08/the-science-behind-why-so-ma...

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1611.04135v2.pd

It's a terrible shame that objectivity and knowledge are what society has decided to suppress instead of harmful use of knowledge.

It's not actually taboo at all to discuss variation in psychological traits between genders. There are innumerable academic studies of gender differences in all kinds of domains. No-one, to any significant extent, is stopping these papers from being published, or calling for this kind of research to cease. Similarly, there are endless articles about gender differences in mainstream news publications.

What is controversial is using cherry-picked scientific results to tell just-so stories about why the gender distribution in certain fields is imbalanced.

The study on the facial features of criminals was criticized mainly for its shoddy methodology, not for being unethical (see e.g. https://www.callingbullshit.org/case_studies/case_study_crim...). Of course, people did point out that the research could have unethical applications – which strikes me as an obvious and fairly undeniable point. Your assertion that research of this nature is "forbidden" in the West is trivially refuted by googling: e.g. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/288373839.pdf https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3366989/

There is a sea of difference between the Chinese paper and the other two you mentioned. The Chinese were very straightforward: can we identify facial traits that are more present in criminals? To a certain degree, they answer positively by saying there is a greater variation in facial traits in criminals than in the rest of the population. Of course there was a lot of criticism of their methodology (to which they answered [0]).

The first article you mentioned describes the bias of eyewitnesses related to stereotyped "criminal look". But the researchers are very clear: "Further research is needed to identify the features that are associated with the criminal stereotype and how they affect lineup decision processes. The specific elements associated with criminal face stereotypes have not yet been identified."

The second article deals with our interpretation of certain traits (which, in this case, are listed) and it's careful not to imply these traits are actually related to criminality. On the contrary: "such evaluations could inappropriately influence decision making in criminal identification lineups. Hence, additional research is needed to discover whether and how people can avoid making evaluations regarding criminality from a person’s facial appearance".

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.04135

The Chinese paper is almost certainly wrong. A simple explanation for why other people aren't publishing the same claim is that it's both inherently implausible and unsupported by any of the available evidence. You can find plenty of equally kooky and potentially controversial papers published in Western countries. E.g. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095679761245146... Of course we can play a game where you keep denying that any example I give is exactly parallel to the paper you cited. However, I'm sure that if you do a few Google scholar searches you'll be able to find something that satisfies whatever criteria you have in mind.

But this is... dystopia. Science should be free to research everything.

There was a time when college was about exploring new ideas and being open to be challenged in your own.

The only rules were to not take offense at a difference of opinions and not devolve into ad hominems and personal attacks.

Please don't spread the lies about "sensitive issues".

Should we be allowing psychologists to gate-keep academia?

Isn't this how universities become temples?

The recent cultural trend towards radical liberalism is inherently dystopian. Fighting free speech, mandating psychological evaluation for questioning the main narrative. These are things that dictatorships and theocracies do

Is it necessarily radical liberalism that tends towards a dystopia? I was curious where this sentiment was coming from (I’ve read it elsewhere) and read some books on conservative philosophy (original post-enlightenment conservatism, not contemporary) and found it there too. It seemed like you could replace “radical liberalism” with “radical $ideology” including conservatism, the problem isn’t liberalism, it’s extremism.

That's a great point. My point was very specific, I didn't comment on whether or not other ideologies also lead to a dystopian end, or whether radical liberalism is the only one.

It's probably academic/semantic/subjective. Very interesting to think about

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