My university sacrificed ideas for ideology, so today I quit
bariweiss.substack.com
bariweiss.substack.com
They have been taught the magnitude of their outrage makes them righteous. And their outrage is never satiated. These people are toxic and sometimes evil. They'll eventually come for you too no matter how much you generally agree with them.
Some of them are certainly sincere. But as Milton Friedman once said, "sincerity is an overrated virtue". The damage they cause is the same irrespective of how sincere they might be.
Reminds of the Maoism movement in European universities (such as in France) a few decades ago, where people critical of Mao were harassed and treated as fascists. With some universities would make Maoism a de-facto precondition to be accepted as researcher.
This seems to share the same mechanism: very few righteous people having no longer any morale compass due to ideology, and cowardliness of the rest of the herd (including the administration) that refuse to stand for reason and logic.
"The minority rule will show us how it all it takes is a small number of intolerant virtuous people with skin in the game, in the form of courage, for society to function properly. "
The most extreme being (in French - https://www.deepl.com/fr/translator) the Vincennes university: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centre_universitaire_de_Vincen...
[ TL;Dr: The most Maoist university at that time, with communists fighting (with violence) against Maoists inside the university ]
Note that this was a more "experimental" university, aimed to attract the most radical teachers (!)
There are plenty of research for the years between 65-75
Few years ago it was contained to humanities but as of recently, it started spreading in technical fields. See how AI researchers got cancelled [0]
[0] https://syncedreview.com/2020/06/30/yann-lecun-quits-twitter...
“there are only two ways of telling the complete truth — anonymously and posthumously.”
A big contributor to said reasoning out was his observing the antics of late-1960s black Cornell students (mostly admitted via affirmative action and, Sowell said, unqualified for the university's rigors), their takeover of university buildings, and their justifying doing so by claiming various outrages against themselves that were foreign to the day-to-day life that Sowell, a fellow Cornellian and Ithaca resident, experienced.
It makes sense intuitively - nothing productive is really being done when a group just engages in ever-escalating virtue signalling.
But since I'm not an expert, is there more material about this that one can access? Would love to read/hear someone who studies this.
— C. S. Lewis
Will it, though?
So, yes, it may.
To a cynic like me it just seems like they're buying good PR, and it's relatively cheap.
Read "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" and pay attention to how Delores Umbridge defines a set of ideas that must not be questioned. Her role of Inquisitor is similar to the role of a modern Diversity Council.
Your statement proves their point.
The defining of ideas can be contentious, difficult, jarring, and uncomfortable. That they are to one but not another doesn't disqualify them as debatable topics or make the arguer less qualified to make them.
Defending yourself rigorously with evidence and rhetoric was a skill people went to good colleges to learn. Bari argues that universities now reinforce not engaging in debate with or challenging the ideas of anyone who doesn't already believe what you believe (or their signals) but toeing an unspoken line, and that there's no room for nuanced discussion of the ideologies.
It's like a loyalty test where recognizing it openly for what it is is an instant fail.
Some of his experimental papers where he talks of "dog rape" were perhaps borne out of his outrage at his situation - I am not sure if they are wise decisions on his part - instead seen as extreme measures to prove a point.
A liberal college by definition should allow diversity of opinion. A literal interpretation of the word "liberal college" reflects the reality that many places are liberal bubbles of thought, where there won't be a safe space for researchers to pick apart and look closely at conservative views of a subject. It's the sad reality that the authorities are not remotely ready to be proven wrong - the anti-thesis of rational inquiry in an educational setting.
Outrage Politics has pervaded everything. But his outrage is real and maybe justified, where he seems to be the victim (being 'coached' i.e. akin to a PIP )
You may have misunderstood the whole Grievance Studies affair. The papers were not experimental, they were deliberately and visibly fake in order to point out the ridiculousness of the whole field.
It is called tenure. And it is available to all departments, as true research is by definition “edgy”. However, somehow tenure system nowadays encourages groupthink. The shortest path to tenure if by conformism.
Isn't that the opposite of what he is complaining about? He criticised illiberalism and picked apart a subject in an unorthodox way, which resulted in his critics harassing him. There were not any liberal bubbles/safe spaces that could protect him from the harassers.
He had a large following in the "anti-PC" and "anti-SJW" online subculture a few years back. It's been a long time since I've seen that name, interesting that I'm seeing it now where "PC" and "SJW" are largely swapped out with "woke" in discourse.
In the article it clearly states that he was surrounded by these illiberal ideologues and being harassed by them even before he started publishing these papers, simply for using critical thinking.
Not only get through but later on get cited in 'legit' papers.
I think you missed the point.
> The work is largely in the same vein as what you'll see out of Project Veritas.
I'm not sure what you're point is here?
> "PC" and "SJW" are largely swapped out with "woke" in discourse.
Again - not sure what point you are trying to make here. Words and meanings change over time.
>I'm not sure what you're point is here?
The point is that Boghossian has built his brand over the past decade as an "anti-SJW" thought-leader and has used methods like the Sokal hoax to create stories that seem scandalous on the surface, and fall somewhere on the spectrum of dishonesty upon closer inspection, like Project Veritas often does (e.g. getting one of hundreds of your submissions published in an obscure open access journal doesn't prove what your readers think it proves on the surface.)
>Again - not sure what point you are trying to make here. Words and meanings change over time.
PC and SJW fell out of favor as time went on. The dishonesty in the discourse in the so-called "anti-PC" crowd around trigger warnings, "safe spaces", and gay rights is plainly obvious at this point, to the degree that it's hard to be taken seriously using these talking points, and terms like "PC" and "SJW" fell out of fashion accordingly. The discourse around so-called "wokeness" seems to also suffer from some of the same issues, though it may take time for that to become as obvious as it is now with the former.
No, it doesn't seem scandalous "on the surface." If you are in a field with so called "peer reviewed research" and someone can publish complete made up bullshit, then your entire field of study is garbage. You see these morons complain about his tactics, but you never see them fight back in kind. That's because you would never be able to get bullshit through the peer review process in physics, because it's, you know, real.
The problem is, that's simply not what's happening. Boghossian isn't getting published in any large or reputable journals. He's getting articles published in tiny obscure open access journals. His paper has repeatedly, consistently failed peer review in academic journals.
If I published a logically incorrect math proof in some obscure journal no one has ever heard of, I haven't "disproved math." To claim I did so would be deeply dishonest.
For the reasons explained in the article and plain monetary interests.
- "Gender, Place and Culture" - Open Access - IF 1.5 - https://genderplaceandculture.wordpress.com/about/
- "Hypatia" - Open Access - IF 0.781 - https://hypatiaphilosophy.org
- "Fat Studies" - Open Access - IF 1.13 - https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/ufts20/current
- "Cogent Social Sciences" - Open Access - IF 1.0 - https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/oass20/current
So yes, it appears he published his papers in small open access journals with little impact.
He got published in journals that are used to teach at his school.
> If I published a logically incorrect math proof in some obscure journal no one has ever heard of, I haven't "disproved math."
Yet another strawman. Nowhere in the article did the professor claim to have disproved an entire field of study.
are you sure about that?[1]. Some journal accepting a bullshit paper proves exactly one thing, that likely one individual or a small group of people had bad judgement. I'm not sure how one publicity stunt is supposed to destroy an entire field of research. That's just your own preconceived bias talking, and it's actually why these hoaxes are just stupid.
[1]https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/oct/22/nonsense-pap...
My kids will be doing a combination of apprenticeships and online learning instead of universities in the US.
They were enslaved then, many died an awful death, then technically freed, but still living as an underclass for decades, arguably still today. It never ceases to amaze me how many societal statistics in the US - education levels, wealth, teenage pregnancies, crime and incarceration rates - are explained by something as superficial as skin colour.
So you see this every day, poor neighbourhoods are full of Black people, and you know why they are there - because White people enslaved them, brought them to America, then gave them a very sub-standard freedom. There is a hypocritical narrative of how we're all equal, but we're not (affirmative action?), but we ought to be, but really you know the society is so unequal, based on race. So what do you do?
Most people cannot do anything of major practical impact. Maybe there are charities you can donate to or work with. Maybe you can vote for the right political candidates - but that's so indirect and diluted, it doesn't feel real.
So the least you can do is be very vocal about how guilty and outraged you feel about the whole situation. It probably feels very genuine, it may be 100% genuine, just not actually productive. You put the sticky tape on the crack in the wall so it looks less bad.
I don't know how that massive historical injustice can be fixed, but I think it should. I don't think Woke inc. is doing anything productive towards that though, and I understand the OP's frustration. But that's my best guess as to what the root cause is.
I hope none of this comes as disrespectful to Black people. My point is they were very badly mistreated, and the consequences of that last until today too, not to posit that one race is better than another.
Based on 2 trips to America, some reading and some very unwoke thinking. But I care about it a lot, not just for its own sake, but also as Woke is being exported, with some success, as the new prevailing ideology to shape the Western world.
One timeline I like to refer to is how long it took France to transform from an absolute monarchy to a stable republic; by my count 81 years, from the French revolution of 1789 to the Third Republic of 1870. Yeah, these things take time.
I suspect some things could be done more proactively, just not easily or cheaply. Suppose state schools got some really beefy funding, to attract better teachers, have less kids per teacher, had more fun activities for kids to keep them out of trouble. Would that tip the scales in favour of poor kids, many of whom are, I believe, Black?
Maybe that's not the best use of the money for the cause, who knows, but it's doable. You "just" need the money and the political will to make it happen.
Keith B. Richburg (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Richburg>) of The Washington Post wrote in 1995: (<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/richburg...>)
>Somewhere, sometime, maybe 400 years ago, an ancestor of mine whose name I'll never know was shackled in leg irons, kept in a dark pit, possibly at Goree Island off the coast of Senegal, and then put with thousands of other Africans into the crowded, filthy cargo hold of a ship for the long and treacherous journey across the Atlantic. Many of them died along the way, of disease, of hunger. But my ancestor survived, maybe because he was strong, maybe stubborn enough to want to live, or maybe just lucky. He was ripped away from his country and his family, forced into slavery somewhere in the Caribbean. Then one of his descendants somehow made it up to South Carolina, and one of those descendants, my father, made it to Detroit during the Second World War, and there I was born, 36 years ago. And if that original ancestor hadn't been forced to make that horrific voyage, I would not have been standing there that day on the Rusumo Falls bridge, a journalist -- a mere spectator -- watching the bodies glide past me like river logs. No, I might have instead been one of them -- or have met some similarly anonymous fate in any one of the countless ongoing civil wars or tribal clashes on this brutal continent. And so I thank God my ancestor made that voyage.
>Does that sound shocking? Does it sound almost like a justification for the terrible crime of slavery? Does it sound like this black man has forgotten his African roots? Of course it does, all that and more. And that is precisely why I have tried to keep the emotion buried so deep for so long. But as I sit before the computer screen, trying to sum up my time in Africa, I have decided I cannot lie to you, the reader. After three years traveling around this continent as a reporter for The Washington Post, I've become cynical, jaded. I have covered the famine and civil war in Somalia; I've seen a cholera epidemic in Zaire (hence the trucks dumping the bodies into pits); I've interviewed evil "warlords," I've encountered machete-wielding Hutu mass murderers; I've talked to a guy in a wig and a shower cap, smoking a joint and holding an AK-47, on a bridge just outside Monrovia. I've seen some cities in rubble because they had been bombed, and some cities in rubble because corrupt leaders had let them rot and decay. I've seen monumental greed and corruption, brutality, tyranny and evil.
>But even with all the good I've found here, my perceptions have been hopelessly skewed by the bad. My tour in Africa coincided with two of the world's worst tragedies, Somalia and Rwanda. I've had friends and colleagues killed, beaten to death by mobs, shot and left to bleed to death on a Mogadishu street.
>Now, after three years, I'm beaten down and tired. And I'm no longer even going to pretend to block that feeling from my mind. I empathize with Africa's pain. I recoil in horror at the mindless waste of human life, and human potential. I salute the gallantry and dignity and sheer perseverance of the Africans. But most of all, I feel secretly glad that my ancestor made it out -- because, now, I am not one of them.
I assume you're British.
Difference is, descendants of slaves have a voice in America. But those of colonized Africans by the British? They got independence, then puppet government and borders drawn to make sure to divide ethnicities and keep them infighting. And of course, no hope of ever making it in the UK (after all, it's not "their" country).
That's kind of part of my point by the way. They all have slightly different sins that need their own debate and atonement, certainly not copying US Woke.
If so, I don't agree.
The Linux kernel is not too different from an emergency service. Interfering with its operation/development is dangerous to a large number of people on the planet, maybe almost all of them.
A shitty journal article that got accepted to peer review in an academic journal is not really affecting most people's day-to-day life, just academics and philosophers, and we (the collective we, maybe HN) don't really care as much about that as we do the Linux kernel, or at least care proportionately to the importance of the target of that human experimentation.
It’s like mandating code review. You don’t let the programmer who made the code decide it doesn’t need code review this one time, and you don’t let researchers decide they can experiment on unconsenting humans this one time.
Nevertheless the penis paper proved a point and we use it in our teaching as an example how peer review sometimes "works".
If that researcher actually got a change into millions of user's linux systems, he would look like a genius, new checks would be put in place to catch his techniques, and everyone would be auditing every past commit on various open projects looking for other similar attacks. But instead, the system worked as intended, and now you can't go back and say "lol just kidding, it's a social experiment bro!" It's a risk you'd better be willing to take.
As I pointed out in another thread, the journals he published his work to were low tier, open access journals. Anyone can start a journal, and these journals will accept almost any research that's on topic.
So if I were to stretch the metaphor, it's more like he found some fork of the official Linux repository, he submitted a patch that the maintainer just merged in without thinking, and then he used this to show how easy it is to get malicious code into the official Linux repo.
The "investigator" was trying to frame him on that. It's amazing how low some people are willing to go for a few bucks and a pat in the back.
Ex. "When did you stop beating your wife?"
We need to educate more people against logical fallacies, and we need to educate and arm people with better critical thinking skills.
Definitely! And train them on how to identify and fend this sort of abuse, particularly on students (and youth in general) who often find themselves in situations where there is a huge power imbalance playing against them.
While I was studying at KAUST (Saudi Arabia's flaghship university), my daughter was kidnapped by the staff there and held hostage for a few weeks, all of this to try to get me to sign some documents I didn't want to [1]. Aside from other things, they were desperately trying to get some dirt on me using such tactics, so that part of the post resonated with me very well.
I am in the process of writing a book about this whole ordeal with the intent of letting other people learn from my experience and how to get out of this sort of thing in time, or better yet, never fall into it in the first place.
Here's a documentary that touches on the panel with James Damoore that he mentions.
He was also a member of the Grievance Studies Affair[1]. They got a chapter from Mein Kampf published, rewritten in a feminist manner. I think that shows how rigorous the gender studies field is in practice.
He was indeed reprimanded for social experiments on people.
Then again, how come a university isn't reacting when its personnel is spit upon and finds feces in front of their office door.
You might remember the moral outrage on a noose that was found in the garage of a black racing driver[2]. It's the asymmetry that is the problem.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair [2] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/nascar-releases-photo-n...
Which goes to the very point of having hard discussions about these topics that we aren't having.
A bunch of programmers kvetching on a forum doesn't do anything. It isn't politics, it won't solve any of these "hard discussions," and everyone will continue to talk past one another. These discussions are entirely cultural at this point--it's comparing batman to superman.
Going solely off the assumption this is true, which I don't entirely believe, the fact of the matter is: this is still not politics. We are a small profession operating on a small forum and for any of the discussion to be any more than farming engagement, the discussions have to escape the internet--leading to your next point.
> Google engineers can push back on this fundamentalist ideology instead of continuing to implement it.
At which point they could be fired and replaced with someone willing to do so. It's self replicating.
Not all posts here are done by entry level junior engineer. This place has a disproportionate amount of C levels and high profile people who can make policy and impactful changes.
Insofar as the value outweighs the negatives, someone's going to do it. What google does is valuable, what they offer is valuable, and that's why it's going to be self replicating. Even if Alphabet closes tomorrow, we'll find it all patched up in the future.
EDIT: I take the downvotes as entirely proving the point.
It is an oddity of the current crop of authoritarians that they in one breath manage to claim that there is no absolute truth but a multitude of 'lived experiences' while at the same time decrying anyone who dares to speak outside of the desired narrative. Of course the same people deny the validity of logic by calling it an example of 'white supremacy' so its application to their behaviour is a losing proposition.
Once enough people have been pushed out of those parts of academia which have been infected by critical theory it stands to reason that they will end up creating new venues for academic research structured in such a way that they can not be taken over - as to what this structure would look like is still up for grabs. Given that those new institutions can be assumed to be based on meritocracy where identity politics and 'diversity initiatives' are driving factors in their previous institutions it is likely that the former will end up producing higher-quality research than the latter - which will promptly be labelled as the result of some combination of *-isms/*-phobias by the authoritarians.
The amount of projection in this thread regarding the collective motivations of the HN Hive Mind is fascinating.
For me the desired outcome of these discussions is that those who have been supportive of the introduction of indentitarian policies in academia realise the deleterious effects these have on institutional and, lately, societal cohesion - more or less in the same way that Marxists in the 20's of the previous century started to realise that the Soviet Union did not develop into the workers and farmers paradise they were told it would. This can only happen if the subject can be discussed in those places where it matters, in other words in places frequented by people who have been part of or are still part of academia. HN is one of those places.
I do realize that politics is sometimes ok on Hn. I’m just saying I think that degrades the quality of the forum, and dilutes the topics I prefer.
Each unto their own.
Had the problem been limited to academia - and, more specifically, the humanities - I would have concurred. Now that it escaped out into the wild where it is wreaking havoc with societal institutions and commercial entities it has become something which directly concerns the areas of interest for this board and as such should be dealt with.
One of the best ways for dealing with these authoritarians is for people to just say "no, I will not be bullied into submission". As long as there are only a few people doing so they can be singled out, demonised and de-platformed by the authoritarian 'new puritans' but this becomes ineffective in the face of growing resistance. Once they can no longer scare people into submission they will lose their power, once they lose power the problems they created can be dealt with and true academic freedom can return. Once true academic freedom returns there will still be space in academia for critical theory and related 'grievance studies' [1] but they will no longer be able to force their ideologies upon the institutions.
Resistance is not futile, we will not be assimilated.
[1] ...although I suspect they will not be able to find enough funding to keep going nor will there be many employment opportunities for those with a degree in one of these fields - which will eventually lead to their demise.
I'd choose another term, but those seem to all be used (and abused) by those kind of people when they talk about their ideological opponents.
Neoliberals downvote anything that disagrees with their superior worldview and are identity politics proponents because it's an effective way to disrupt class and labor movements.
Progressives are the ones who want things like universal healthcare, a federal voting holiday, an end to private prisons, and for their taxes to go towards safety nets for their neighbors and communities instead of corporate bailouts and forever wars.
Neolibs want global trade agreements, stable monopsonies, and to have wage workers pay for their own healthcare, benefits and retirement on top of all of their taxes out of the same paycheck. They're largely coastal elites and other class signalers that punch hard left against any platform that might benefit their idea of a "deplorable" even if it helps other people.
I’m not sure that this proves it’s the university that’s intolerant (although I’m sure some faculty and staff are). Or that he’s capable of enough self-reflection that he should be teaching reflection to others.
Plenty of blame to go around. Resignation letters are attempts to write history, but as he himself should be teaching, there are surely differing views here.
Yup, that's pretty much how things work everywhere nowadays. This guy gets it.
Poisons are bad for your health but they exist, how do you deal with them? One strategy is to remove poisons from your environment. If someone brings poisons into your environment you make them take the poison away and criticize the person for bringing it. Hopefully the person doesn't bring any more in the future.
Another strategy is to learn the procedures necessary for safe handling of poisons. You put on protective gear, you ensure proper ventilation, you put up warning signs, you make sure people who arn't trained don't get near the poisons.
Both of these strategies can work. For most people the former is the better strategy, for professionals the later may be necessary.
So if this prof and the SJWs agree that some points of view are bad how do you deal with those ideas? The prof wants to use the second strategy, and teach people how to safely handle potentially harmful ideas. The SJWs don't want anyone near the ideas, especially in public forums or around impressionable minds.
Personally I find the SJW proposition insulting, but then again I've had explicit training in critical thinking, persuasion, rhetoric, the propagation of ideas and sufficient life experience to be confident in my ability to wade into toxic environments and come out relatively unscathed. Still, I think of the SJWs as fundamentally (and ironically) paternalistic.
That said there are plenty of myopic professors who believe that people won't be influenced by exposure to ideas, or believe that you can provide a venue without conveying the impression of support. Naive ivory tower BS. They don't recognize, or believe in, the need for caution.
Then there are the counter-activists, and this prof could be one. They know how to influence people and recognize the power of providing a forum and are "teaching the controversy" in an intentional gambit to spread ideas with which they agree. There are enough of these that for the SJWs a few ivory tower casualties are acceptable losses. The reactionary intellectual is the enemy.
So how to judge the current mood, the current movement? As a fascinating and effective marriage of the ideological purification tactics long employed by the ultra conservative set, now wielded by a sufficiently powerful amalgam of historically marginalized groups. Continual harassment, slander, character assassination and public ridicule work. This prof is just another battle won.
If you've heard this guy's name before, it's probably from this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair
"I invited Hermann Goerring and Martin Luther King to the dinner party, not because I like both of them, but because I dislike both equally and I am trying to expand my intellectual horizons"
The purpose of the sentence is to put them all in to the same category and create a false equivalence.
Don't get me wrong. It's fine if you like Hermann Goerring. It's fine if you dislike Martin Luther King. But you don't get to say they're both the same, then insist on being able to invite both to the dinner party, and then when the dinner party guests complain about Goerring you don't get to tun around and say "see! look at the violence inherent in the system. Help! Help! I'm being repressed!" in a way that makes the entire thing a massive narcissistic cry for attention where you are the victim, you're the centre of the story, only your feelings matter and only your needs have to be respected.
Because that sort of stuff is just flat-out far-right-wing trolling.
But maybe you're visiting from an alien planet and aren't familiar with what's going on here on Earth?
In which category do you think Boghossian was trying to put Flat-Earthers, Christian apologists, global climate skeptics, and Occupy Wall Street advocates?
My understanding is that they are all in the category of guest lecturers. That doesn't seem like a false equivalence if they were all guest lecturers.
It's a far-right extremist tactic to normalize their belief systems.
The tactic is to put everyone together into a "diversity rainbow" of political beliefs where whatever strand of basic human decency you oppose, you can find someone else who is so extreme, vigorous, and pernicious in their beliefs that even fascism seems moderate.
For example, in the status quo of early 20th century America, a racist might say:
"Well, some radical negro extremists even think that black men ought to be allowed to marry white women. But on the other hand, some people think all the negroes should just be exterminated. As a liberal, I think everyone should be free to speak their minds and hold rallies for whatever viewpoint they like, as long as they uphold all the public order laws."
So the racist occupies an important position, sat in the middle, defending liberal democracy from two extremes. Power stays where it is, thank you very much. And if people try to get racist rallies banned, then I can fend that off by claiming it to be a fundamental attack on freedom of speech, rather than what it actually is: upholding law and order.
The fact to be obscured is that there is a fundamental dissimilarity between the "two extremes". One is just a call for basic human needs and rights to be respected, the other demands a license for some people to run roughshod over the needs and rights of others.
Edit: So yes, in that sentence he is trying to put them in to the category of "guest lecturers." But he is doing that not as a banal exercise in set-comprehension, it's part of a political argument / narcissistic tantrum.
What is the second categorization implied by the quote from the author?
"I’ve invited a wide range of guest lecturers to address my classes, from Flat-Earthers to Christian apologists to global climate skeptics to Occupy Wall Street advocates. I’m proud of my work. I invited those speakers not because I agreed with their worldviews, but primarily because I didn’t."
It can work to create a positive or negative connection, but the connection is still implied
We are in a horrible time where people are espousing them either for profit or outside motive, not from any core belief structure. It is unbelievably frustrating to watch, from my perspective.
In other words, people are being paid to weaponize things like "free speech" on campuses, but they don't really believe in it, they are just tools. And let me be more succinct here - it's almost all coming from the "right wing"
Kids see through this bs, at least ones I have talked to about it. "Woke"ness, to what I can process, is the push back from decades of inaction on "lets not be assholes to certain classes of people", which is largely driven by companies wanting to sell to everyone, no matter how out of sync their, and I don’t know the term for this, prejudice externalities (that is, when ones prejudices effect someone rather than just being a thought) are with “regular” society.
This was of course facilitated by the internet. Without a way to communicate outside the gated walls of mass media in the past, this would probably not have happened.
Is there some over-reaction? Sure, but it’s a massive correction to how human history has worked forever.
People who use woke, triggered, without any disambiguation or nuance are to me just not handling the massive cultural change facilitated by things like the internet. Either they hate it, or can’t understand it, or do not like the results (imo)
Many of the responses he has gotten would be criminal outside the institutional process. It's a specious comparison.
I mean, I'm all in favor of the pendulum swinging back, and I think it will. But I didn't notice it happening yet...
When I first read about their research I was actually was actually thinking, about possible repercussions they may face. It turns out, that he did face a repercussion for exposing the flaw.
A serious question I have: where do all these people end up? Stories like this come up often recently, and it is not limited to liberal arts schools. Is there a business opportunity here? A private school not beset by any particular ideology, except truth seeking?
It is very easy to identify because proponents use certain vocabularies and put up certain arguments. I am not even a native speaker to be able to identify this, although there are similar negative developments in my country, it is not restricted to the anglosphere.
Kudos to her for staying strong to the principle of free and real education.
Global Diversity & Inclusion is looking for a thorough beating.
The more interesting question is who's funding this show - you don't get this sort of organized and superficial activity without a command & control center.
>>> [Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies] McLellan stated in a Nov. 27 letter to Boghossian, “The Committee unanimously agreed that the ‘dog park’ article represents an unambiguous example of research data fabrication.”
Doing a little digging, he also appears to have a EdD instead of a PhD: https://pdx.smartcatalogiq.com/en/2017-2018/Bulletin/Directo...
The thing that really stands out to me is he got it from PSU, and I'm wondering what the backstory was that led PSU to hire him back, six years later, in a different department (and college).
The committee’s finding is damning of the journals, not him.
I don't generally trust people to think critically. The last ten years have showed us all how easy it is for people to be manipulated and misled at scale if the belief is accepted by their respective communities. This was shown scientifically decades ago[1]. And we all know some anti-vaxxers and/or cult followers.
Of course, most attempts to repress misinformation inevitably cause bigger problems than any alternative, including doing nothing. Attempts to repress opinions based on misinformation sow divisions which are even worse.
There is a tension between efforts towards a weak form of "prior restraint" and a belief that people are smart enough to discern truth from fiction. But don't fool yourself -- no matter your feelings here, everyone including you is subject to in-group favoritism.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments
Edit: Then again, usually you can filter out these posts just by the topic and not click on them, which is what I usually do. But the title of this one could have gone either way so I got fooled in to clicking on it. So maybe judging by this post would give a misleading impression about the whole community on HN. I think these people just end up infecting whatever internet forums don't have the moderator capacity to get rid of all the trolls
people on the far right fringe on the internet have that. its like when you train dogs to sniff out drugs. its not the subject, its how its presented.
Is it an automated title edit triggered by many people clicking the "flag" link? Or does it show that a moderator reviewed the article and deemed it inappropriate for HN? Or something else?
What does [flagged] mean?
It means that users flagged a post as breaking the guidelines or otherwise not belonging on Hacker News.
Moderators sometimes also add [flagged] (though not usually on submissions), and sometimes turn flags off when they are unfair.
so I guess it could be either?
* breaking the guidelines:
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
"Most stories about politics" - perhaps this one? Although there are plenty of "political" stories that don't get flagged. This definitely won't get covered on TV.
That appears to be obviously appropriate for HN, and is not about "politics"; it's about institutions of higher education.
Mods, if you are reading: does it not look rather as if a contingent of HN readers are abusing the "flagged" link to flag content that they don't agree with (as opposed to flagging content that violated guidelines)? Presumably this contingent must be substantial if it has resulted in automated insertion of the string "[flagged]" in the title. Is this abuse of flagging a topic that has been addressed / written about?
(I don't mean in the "everything is political" sense. If everything is political, then nothing is. But I also don't mean just in the "Red v Blue" sense, either. I mean political in the sense of "our tribe's standing and prominence compared to your tribe". "Academic politics" is used in this sense.)
I agree with you: they are. But that's not what we're discussing; we're discussing the fact that rationality and free enquiry are under attack in our public universities, and we're discussing one of the consequences of those politically-motivated attacks (the resignation of an academic). Just because the attacks themselves are politically motivated does not make their consequences any less worthy of attention, or appropriate to HN. Indeed, that would be worthy of attention and appropriate content for HN whatever the underlying reasons (e.g. if it were financially powerful interests silencing inconvenient voices in academia, rather than a political movement).
To take it to an extreme to make the point absolutely clear: imagine that a crazy cult of rabbit-worshippers commit some murders in the course of a rabbit-worshipping ceremony. We would not dismiss the deaths as "just rabbit cult stuff"; a serious breach of human rights has occurred and questions need to be asked about whether the public are adequately protected from the rabbit worshippers: i.e. the normal considerations of everyday life still apply, regardless of how batty the original motivations may have been.
Behold the current woes of California. Too much of one side, not enough of the other will lead to over-reach and decay. Academia is on the same path.
On the other hand, i think it was latent. It seems to be as extreme as Baudrillard postulated, years ago. So i guess victory for the postmodernists, if their theory could predict that.
Edit: Downvotes for expressing an opinion contrary to the thread. Very fitting.
Not a likely catalyst for the recent departure.
Well, there would be the swastikas and the bags of feces. These aren't traditional welcoming gifts anywhere I know of. Let's see, pulling fire alarms, pulling speaker wires, being spit on, more investigations ...
It's all right there, in the article. In case you are still not sure why he's quitting.
But by putting that into question in Title IX investigation, it is about destroying credibility. Nobody is accusing him of anything, but a slanderous thought is being put into minds of his students.
Witch or heretic burning is a terrible part of a human history, that should never repeat again.
Companies should start hiring based on aptitude rather than degrees. Most roles don’t need a degree. Students can learn the ability to think and reason without an insane amount of money and time spent at these indoctrination factories.
People say, “But what about the social experience?” It seems to me that creating groups and meeting up has never been easier with the internet. If people can online date than the stigma of meeting in person after coordinating online can be lost too.
Overall I think universities through their neverending price hikes, focus on grievance over education, and the lack of actual teaching is sowing the seeds of their irrelevancy.
A not unreasonable statement. Companies tend to be too lazy to bring in bright high school students and run a proper training systems, but you can certainly push for certification programs without degrees like the California Bar Exam.
Given the amount of OJT (self-taught) I did at first plus the real lack of value of college, I'd have to say that in my case the degrees and time spent were of no value.
> With Title IX investigations there is no due process, so I didn’t have access to the particular accusations, the ability to confront my accuser, and I had no opportunity to defend myself. Finally, the results of the investigation were revealed in December 2017. Here are the last two sentences of the report: “Global Diversity & Inclusion finds there is insufficient evidence that Boghossian violated PSU’s Prohibited Discrimination & Harassment policy. GDI recommends Boghossian receive coaching.”
> Not only was there no apology for the false accusations, but the investigator also told me that in the future I was not allowed to render my opinion about “protected classes” or teach in such a way that my opinion about protected classes could be known — a bizarre conclusion to absurd charges. Universities can enforce ideological conformity just through the threat of these investigations.
Didn't know there was a "Portland State University" in Cuba.