I've taught at two colleges and based on my (purely) anecdotal experiences and attention to the climate, I'd say that the number of students and faculty interested in stifling or censoring ideas is small but also very, very noisy. They also have no sense of humor and college administrators as a group have no sense of humor or perspective, and they're chronically worried about accusations of indifference or insensitivity (which are themselves as good as convictions). There is a strong economic and career incentive for administrators to take everything seriously and to keep their heads down as much as possible.
Brew this up and one gets a majority of students who are reasonable but a small minority who drive all the discourse.
I don't teach at Yale and have never taught at Yale or schools with similar cultures, so I can't speak to the environment there, but William Deresiewicz did, and his book Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life came out of that and I recommend it. His book A Jane Austen Education (http://jakeseliger.com/tag/a-jane-austen-education-how-six-n...) is also very good, even for someone like me who does not love Jane Austen.
Edit: Also, almost all of the censorship calls and nasty behavior / comments came from students on the left. Vox's "I'm a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me" (http://www.vox.com/2015/6/3/8706323/college-professor-afraid) is congruent with my experiences.
The problem with "balancing viewpoints" argument is that it isn't based on a critical ethos and so it cannot progress on the basis of logos. You can have a "balanced viewpoint" and still have debates about "whether the moon is made of the body of Vince Foster or not." There are certain ideas that just don't belong in a university setting because they are bunk and this has nothing to do with diversity of opinion.
It similar to the bogus fair and balanced media argument. News reporting is about reporting the facts as they lead logically so that if anyone would perform the work of the journalist they would arrive at similar conclusions regardless of their perspective or polity. It's very much like the scientific method. Focusing on opinion diversity is a red herring.
"There are certain ideas that just don't belong in a university setting because they are bunk and this has nothing to do with diversity of opinion."
I'm sure all of the students getting faculty and administrators dismissed right now would describe the opposing ideas as "bunk" not worthy of consideration.
I see a few reasons to explicitly address "bunk" ideas.
* Students have already been exposed to the ideas, and many already believe them. Having a discussion explaining why they are bunk might be critical to moving on to more interesting topics.
* Appeals to authority make for bad pedagogy. Sure, evolution is the scientific consensus. But students who just accept it at face value without asking to be shown the evidence are not students capable of scientific thought.
* Ideas you thought were bunk might turn out to have more merit or nuance than you expected, once you start digging deeper. It's easy to see other people's deeply held bunk ideas. But how do you force yourself to see your own?
You're missing the thrust of the argument entirely.
The author does not advocate validating factually invalid statements - see his anecdote in the second article linked in GP regarding "whether or not the economic collapse was caused by poor black people":
"I gave a quick response about how most experts would disagree with that assumption, that it was actually an oversimplification, and pretty dishonest, and isn't it good that someone made the video we just watched to try to clear things up? And, hey, let's talk about whether that was effective, okay? If you don't think it was, how could it have been?"
In other words - in the case of "bunk" it can be summarily dismissed with a proper basis. Which is entirely different from vilifying and personally attacking a person for their beliefs or thoughts which are doing no actual harm to anyone else. People can have bogus ideas and those bogus ideas can be completely harmless no matter how much you might find them distasteful.
Viewpoint diversity is entirely about bringing different perspectives and experiences to bear on a subject.
I think the parent is on to something about the implications of the argument, although it is not how the post's author would look at it, of course.
To really understand an argument, one has to start with its subject. Are we talking about viewpoints or people? What the blog post author focuses on is people:
> Me: Now lets try it for politics. How many of you would say you are on the right politically, or that you are conservative or Republican?
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how discourse is conducted and should be conducted. People are not on the right politically, conservative, or Republican. People are people, and each might hold or articulate viewpoints or opinions that are on the right politically or conservative. They might be a member of the Republican Party. All of these are elective and potentially temporary.
The whole point of discourse is that viewpoints, opinions, and memberships can change. So to start by framing those as elements of identity needing protection, feeds directly into a framework for discussion that is conflicted. If a discussion must validate and protect all viewpoints (conservative or liberal), then what is going to be discussed?
IMO the right way to approach this situation is to explore the potential consequences of voicing an unpopular opinion. Often, they are far less scary than teenagers might suppose. We should focus on how to give each individual student the mental tools to effectively evaluate arguments, and to manage their anxiety about going against perceived social norms.
Teaching kids to be brave in speaking up against prevailing opinion can help create positive outcomes throughout their lives. We want citizens who will speak up for what they know is right, even if they know they will face trouble.
> We want citizens who will speak up for what they know is right, even if they know they will face trouble.
I thought your comment was really good, but I don't think this conclusion is quite right. The problem is that lots of different people "know" that lots of different things are "right". In my life experience (read: I have no data on this), we don't seem to have the problem that not enough people will "speak up for what they know is right" because they fear trouble, we instead have the problem that not enough people are willing to challenge themselves on what they "know" is "right".
Sorry for all the scare quotes, but my point is that the entire idea that people can know that things are right, and then speak up for those things, is off-base. Certainly, it's a good thing to have a sense for what you think is right, and to be able to speak up for those things, but it's a much better and much harder thing to be open to being convinced that you are incorrect. That's what I don't see much of in our society, and what all schools, and universities in particular, should do a better of imparting to their students! Instead of teaching people to better manage their anxiety about speaking against perceived social norms, we would be better off improving peoples' skills of hearing things they disagree with, and of structuring their own arguments such that they don't drown out that disagreement (for instance, the all too familiar tactic of yelling and/or ranting continuously).
Replying to myself, because I've found that my comment ended up supporting the original article, at least in part, which I didn't particularly like or find myself nodding along to.
I guess where I find that I agree with the author is that we could all use to do a better job of really listening to different opinions. But where the author was targeting that advice at the "victims" who shouldn't shout down their "oppressors", in my experience it is more often the case that people with brash opinions that tend to offend people are the ones who "know they are right" and are unlikely to really hear the other side.
But I suppose there is plenty of closed-mindedness, lack of charity, and stubbornness to go around!
>Viewpoint diversity is entirely about bringing different perspectives and experiences to bear on a subject.
Yes this is what I understand, too. Let me say, for the record, I think diversity (race, creed, gender, color, tint or hue) is important. And bias on those things doesn't belong on campus. But campus isn't group therapy, either. It's a place like no other where we're supposed probe the universe and try to find the answers. Diversity in that context should be in the service of that mission, not in the service of balancing faction which is what the OP is all about. Balancing faction is a slippery slope, set it aside.
I don't think the comparison of balancing viewpoints in a classroom is really comparable to the fair and balanced media argument. In a classroom, you're dealing with a classroom full of a limited number of people who need to be able to state and defend their ideas. It's unlikely that someone in such a classroom will bring up whether the moon is made of the body of Vince Foster, but if they do, students should be able to make a reasonable decision on how to respond (in that case, it requires little response beyond polite derision).
Dismissing something as a red herring without even bringing it up in a classroom avoids a key responsibility of an educator: students need to be able to recognize red herrings and respond to them as such. Red herrings occur in the real world. The role of the educator is not to dictate accurate information, it's to teach people how to critically process information.
The news, on the other hand, does have the responsibility to dictate accurate information. As such, the only opinions that matter are the opinions of experts, and those should be subservient to data. "Fair and balanced" doesn't often matter because if there are really two sides to the issue, the "information" isn't accurate enough to be presenting to an inexpert public anyway. Debates should happen between experts based on the data, without politicization, and news should report the results.
> But in a classroom setting, the students should feel free to debate the composition of the moon.
No, they shouldn't, and I'll follow-up as to why below.
>Very quickly, the proposal that the moon is made of Vince Foster would be dismissed as false. This is critical thinking in action.
Given sufficient rhetorical skill and sufficiently many appeals to "open thought" or "questioning assumptions" or "viewpoint diversity" - in short, various forms of postmodern denial of the external world and the strict rules for reasoning about it - a sufficiently motivated student or professor will manage to make "the moon is made of Vince Foster" the center of attention.
We are living in the same world, with the same academic institutions, which was fooled by the Sokal Hoax, and we are also dealing with the human psychology of social proof, in which giving time and energy to considering an idea in-detail is considered evidence for the idea's truth (rather than evidence for its vagueness or logical complexity).
We cannot allow academia to be consumed with discussions over whether gravity is a social construction, especially not because right-wing partisans feel that only mostly owning the field of economics means that academia is engaged in conspiracy against them.
But I think you have indirectly hit upon the solution.
The rules of good arguments, good logic, and relevant evidence are the points to emphasize and enforce.
So disallow any and all appeals to social proof, and you eliminate the ability for these people to waste everyone else's time.
If someone wants to argue the Earth is 6,000 years old, let them take a couple of cracks at it. But once it's clear they are deviating from the rules of scientific reasoning in science class, make it clear that is the reason for disallowing their arguments and move on.
"We cannot allow academia to be consumed with discussions over whether gravity is a social construction, especially not because right-wing partisans feel that only mostly owning the field of economics means that academia is engaged in conspiracy against them."
Take this sentence, for example. It's not clear at all how the second clause logically follows from the first.
Yes, because it is imperative to teach and learn by rote. If any idea is commonly held to be true, there is no reason to have any discourse. Even for ideas that seem to be binary this is just ridiculous -- you will note that this position would preclude discussing topics and discoveries regarding a round earth, DNA, electricity, and many other understood "truths" over human history.
Discourse and unpopular ideas drive discovery and learning more than memorization ever will. It does not mean that unpopular views are "right" it means that the act of understanding, listening to other perspectives and being able to construct your own beliefs in that discourse is a net win and absolutely core to higher learning; even if the unpopular view is garbage.
The epistemological method in use in the class, so for instance in theology appeals to faith or words written thousands of years ago would be acceptable, while you'd probably want to reject appeals to logic/rationality.
In science you'd want to use the scientific method and reject appeals to faith.
> The epistemological method in use in the class, so for instance in theology appeals to faith or words written thousands of years ago would be acceptable, while you'd probably want to reject appeals to logic/rationality.
Theology, while its foundational principles may be established on the basis of revelation such as scripture, often proceeds from foundational principles by logic.
"Please explain how you proceed logically from the position that eating from the tree of knowledge is sin?"
This doesn't seem hard. Apologist hat on.
It wasn't the knowledge that was bad, it's that the knowledge was attained by doing what God said not to. Certainly, we can condemn things done in pursuit of knowledge - Mengele being probably the easiest example.
Personally? I've no idea if it's the correct one. Not subscribing to a school of thought that admits supernatural origin of these stories, I'm not really sure what "the correct one" would mean for me.
I interpreted fleitz (in the bit I quoted) as saying "if knowledge is bad, then we shouldn't be using logic to get us more knowledge, so the whole exercise is absurd." I was pointing out that there's at least one out.
Indeed. Some stuff is really clearly not true, and we shouldn't need to work to make space and provide representation for it in schools and such.
But how do we avoid the problem where if I suggest that maybe the moon isn't all Vince Foster all the time, I'm an evil person? (a racist, and oppressor of women?) Can we get to a place, not where we agree that the moon could be made of Vince Foster, but where one can suggest it's not Vince Foster without being literally ostracized, from schools and jobs?
How do you think a history class should handle a student who wants to discuss Holocaust as a hoax? How about a law student who thinks rape is a victim-less crime?
My answer used to be "why, if you have the truth on your side, just prove 'em wrong and move on! so much the better for your standpoint!". However, it can get extremely tedious. A stubborn student can "plausible deniability" his way into extremely metaphysical arguments, about historical revisionism and psychology, and ultimately about epistemology itself.
I think it's important to phrase the argument not as "the students want these topics to not be discussed", but instead as "the students want these topics to be included in the actually already existing list of topics we don't discuss". And then take it topic-by-topic.
This idea that student-activism is largely composed of completely irrational anti-logic zealots is a caricature.
I think a history class that can't make a strong argument that the holocaust wasn't a hoax and a law class that can't make the argument that rape victims exist are in VERY serious trouble.
Being able to debunk such looney claims is very valuable for students so they should develop these skills not be shielded from exposure to them.
In general I agree with you, but having dealt with (less severe) examples of this with some coworkers, it's really, really annoying. When someone simply states their (contrary or contrarian) viewpoint and refuses to admit any evidence presented is valid, you can't win. It's an exercise in futility.
I had a guy simply insisting that evolution wasn't real. "Ok", I say, "what about (found some reports demonstrating observable changes in a species over time)?". "Oh, well sure, microevolution is real, but big things can't change, like humans." And around we go again and again. (Same guy believes that we can't actually analyze someone's genome and that people become resistant to antibiotics, not diseases, and 9/11 was an inside job.)
Show them video, show them photographs, bring in first-person witnesses, and they'll find a way to dismiss all of it. Either because they truly believe what they're saying, or, like a current coworker, they're just a contrarian asshole. That doesn't mean we shield people from these views, but we have to, at some point, accept that not all viewpoints are equal, some simply have no merit and aren't worth discussing beyond acknowledging that some people believe them (would you really want to engage with a flat-earth believer? I mean, it was fun once, but that was enough for me).
If it's an academic setting and you are the instructor, you can
* Flunk them for not learning or engaging with the material.
* Limit their time in class discussions if they are not engaging constructively.
* Have the administration remove them from the class if they become belligerent.
Of course, the third item is the crucial one. It seems at many universities these days, administrations are taking the side of the customer, er, I mean, student, in every dispute, regardless of the merits.
Run your meetings / classes according to Roberts rules, move to set out a time limit for each person to make their point, limit each person to 1 rebuttal, and then vote on the issue.
Whenever I had to deal with contentious issues as a chair of a meeting this is exactly how I proceeded, much to the dismay of the people who wanted to argue all day.
The people who cause the most issues usually take their rebuttal early and then the debate can proceed amongst the more reasonable people.
You're not going to convince everyone to agree with you, or even just with what you think is most important. That's ok. You can agree to disagree. Especially if this is an acquaintance at a party, or a coworker, and the topic is not at all related to what you're doing.
At one point in our history, it was contrary to known and upheld belief that the world was round. Given your position would we have ever had the debate and changed popular belief considering it was absurd by its very nature?
What about someone who argues "Rape victims don't matter because they are just women, and women's feelings are not important"
That isn't something that can be argued against with facts. You can't present evidence to counter this, because they didn't use facts to come to the opinion. As the saying goes, "You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into"
There are a certain class of opinions that we need to be able to dismiss with just a "that is just not worthy of even talking about." While I believe this list of things should be very small, it DOES exist.
>That isn't something that can be argued against with facts.
Yes it can. In the context of a law class, there's tons of laws which clearly state that rape is a crime, so it clearly does matter. That's just as factually incorrect as saying "Fraud does not matter because suckers aren't important." You can't just say: "_______ isn't important." in a law class.
If I were a history professor and someone tried to bring up Holocaust denial in my class, I'd first explain why it's absurd to try and argue that all that evidence is somehow fake, which then shows that anyone who tries to defend this position either:
1. Has legitimately no idea what they're talking about.
2. Has willfully taken up the agenda of bending the truth to support Nazi-ism.
I wouldn't shout them down though. That's counter-productive.
I agree that artificially imposing a "fair and balanced" framework onto news/discourse is a bogus concept as, like you say, the centre of gravity can be shifted in favour of nonsense ideas just by posing the question.
But in your second paragraph, you seem to imply (maybe I'm wrong here) that there is a sense of objectivity inherent in news reporting, because the reporting leads logically from the facts. However, the facts are hand-picked, meaning bias is unavoidably baked into the premise. In which case we are no closer to avoiding "focussing on opinion diversity", as the same opinion diversity arguments apply to choosing the facts on which to report.
The issue with this stance is that history has shown many times that unpopular views and lively debate leads to growth, understanding and knowledge.
You can have a "balanced viewpoint" and still have debates about "whether the moon is made of the body of Vince Foster or not." There are certain ideas that just don't belong in a university setting because they are bunk and this has nothing to do with diversity of opinion.
IMHO this concept falls on its own sword. What harm is there debating about the moon being made of Vince's body if there is a question in the forum? Does it harm the people that have solidified beliefs about it being false? The person who believes it to be possible? What is learning beyond discussing the possibilities, informing each other about beliefs, viewpoints and deductive reasoning leading to growth/questioning what is true and false and constructing and reconstructing your closely held beliefs.
Uniform thought begets uniform thought and does not foster growth. I shiver thinking about wonders/discoveries would have been lost if people in our history were afraid to discuss unpopular ideas and constructs; as it stands too many already have been.
Thank you, you've summed up the question of balanced journalism far better than I ever could. The current approach of sticking someone with an opposite opinion on the news, even if that opinion is clearly utter horseshit, really gets to me, but I wasn't able to properly describe why.
However, I think the approach of sticking someone with an opposite opinion, then tearing their argument apart with debate, insightful questions, or merciless satire are wonderful approaches to dealing with this problem. Stewart and Colbert, of course, mastered this art in the U.S., and many British journalists seem to have a knack for it as well.
The problem with focusing on the focus of balanced viewpoints is that it focuses on obvious chaff. People will say, well, we don't want to give holocaust/climate/secondamendment/etc. deniers equal voices, or rather equal imprimatur, the problem is actually the censoring of thoughts so that people feel compelled to toe the received and accepted thought on a given topic.
So, in effect, investigating root causes or nuance is denied because any of that could, in some people's minds, undermine the larger issue(s).
It's sad and unfortunate that discussing things must become personal attacks rather than being viewed as inquiry.
I like it frame it in a less politically correct way and simply ask people if they're up for debating whether or not pedophilia should be legal. If the answer is no, then they necessarily must agree that there are things for which a reasonable person can have a closed mind about and still remain reasonable.
This is perceptive. As a society we must tolerate a diversity of opinions. Everything must be open to question and debate. But after questioning and debate, there must be a final disposition that lets us move on to other challenges. How we reached that disposition should be so clear that it invites renewed debate only in circumstances where new insights have been made.
I feel like we already use this pattern in a variety of settings. The legal system comes to mind, where we build this collective body of decisions that either prove useful and are built on, or modified and removed if not. But there is not a sense of anything being "inappropriate" to question. The very core of the legal system is challenged on a regular basis and we don't feel the need to censor those who challenge it. We have a general level of confidence that the system has checks and balances that let justice prevail.
Two observations. One is that this reminds me of eventually consistent systems. The law lags slightly behind reality but we know it catches up eventually. Reality is always changing and so we don't expect the law to always be up to the minute perfect. Perhaps we can embrace this notion of imperfection as a reason to keep discourse constantly open.
Second is that the law is effectively the source code for running society. It has procedures set up around it very similar to how we'd run a successful open source project. Integrators, reviewers, unit testers, engineers, project managers, pull requests …
Perhaps in the case of Yale and other institutions, what is needed is the same level of transparency we have in a well run source repo or legal system.
1) everything is written down somewhere, is properly attributed, and openly discussed.
2) systems are in place to propose changes, understand the impact of those changes, and integrate or reject those changes.
3) there is an understanding that this is an evolving system, it has a past, present, and a future.
4) history is recorded so that present and future discussions can be made with the appropriate context in place.
I feel like this is the solution for incorporating dissenting views, converging on the set of beliefs that identify the underlying priorities and preferences of the participants, and making it clear why certain things are the way they are.
It is entirely possible that institutions may converge around policies that are abhorrent to some, but being clear and transparent about that at least makes people know what they're getting in to. It's possible that a system like this at Yale would result in some students or faculty deciding that their views would not be welcome there, which is better than discovering that after the fact.
Agreed. It strikes me that "balanced viewpoints" are actually antithetical to the anti-fragile philosophy Haidt promotes. We need to be malleable in our viewpoints so that we are both free to express them and should be expected to change them when we encounter evidence against them. A "balanced viewpoint" means keeping viewpoints safe from the world (a "fragile" viewpoint!).
It's also worth noting that humans respond better to praise and work more efficiently when we feel safe. So we obviously can't be completely "anti-fragile".
Yup, that parallels my experience pretty closely, as an undergraduate at an Ivy League college that was in the news recently.
There might have been about a hundred people on campus that were actively interested in protesting things (what things?, all the things). For the most part, everybody else is there to go to class, learn, do their own thing, and drink too much beer on the weekends/Wednesdays/Mondays, etc. This vocal, seemingly-permanently-aggrieved small subset of the population seemed to stir up almost all of the controversy, and seemed hell-bent on ruining everybody else's good time at every opportunity. Increasingly, they seem to be succeeding; I'm glad I graduated when I did.
My wife went to one of the 7 sisters. She said 'This happens every 3-5 years with regularity. Just wait for the cocaine to run out. Things will quiet down after that'
Amusing joke and I've run across similar ones (South Park, for one, had two old guys grumbling about how long it took "PC" to run its course last time) but on a more serious note, I wonder how much of it is just the nature of young, relatively wealthy/privileged people to want to "change the world" and find a cause.
I'm a bit past college age these days but in the mid/late 90's when I was at university, there were plenty of "causes" that students took up (myself included) to various degrees and in retrospect, a lot of it came down to the newly-found freedom of adulthood combined with the idealism of youth and the lack of wider awareness that comes with a bit more exposure to the world at large.
I think it's a good thing that young people are able to see some of the real injustice in the world that some of us older folks have learned to accept (or at least take for granted) and have the drive to want to improve things. At the same time, cultural attitudes don't change through force or under threat. Additionally, there's still a bit of that youthful naivete where just because something is a huge deal for you, you may not realize the bigger issues at play or know which "battles" to choose yet.
I'm sure my attitudes will keep evolving over time but just between my college years and 20 years later, I think about how some things seemed so important and unfair back then but I've since found that there are usually bigger issues or at least more subtle and effective ways to address the problems you recognize in ways other than shouting matches or mob-mentality public shaming.
The biggest failure of such people is that their own conduct serves as a terrible advertisement for the sort of worldview they promote. Look at these people: do you see happy, healthy, mindful, compassionate, self-confident, well-adjusted human beings? I don't. I see bitter, spiteful, demanding, insecure, Us-vs-Them types, perpetually searching for the next perceived slight. Are these the sort of people I'm supposed to want to emulate? They are so caught up in making me a good person that they have not made good people of themselves. And everyone suffers for it.
That's actually our biggest hope of getting rid of SJW phenomenon. The underhanded methods they use means also that as they grow, they start to turn on each other. The cancer gets cancer, and dies before it can grow too much. I think the general population will slowly realize that being evil is not the best strategy for making others better people.
The post you replied to described "bitter, spiteful, demanding, insecure, Us-vs-Them types." I think there are people in various leftist movements that can fairly be described in that way. But I also think it's a good description for anyone who describes a desire for social justice as a cancer.
Temporal was referencing what's remembered as the Whale Cancer post [0]. The metaphor is meant to (rather than insult) describe a social dynamic by analogy of a biological mechanism.
Yes, I was referencing that post; the phrasing of "cancer getting cancer" stuck with me. I admit that I might have sprinkled a little bit of hidden insult, because it's hard to filter out the feeling of anger at uncivil behaviour so that it doesn't show up in writing.
But I mean cancer mostly in the same way Scott Alexander used it - uncontrolled growth by "all means necessary", not an insult. Cancer happens when some cells eschew cooperation and start promoting their interests at the cost to everyone else. As it grows in size it grows in complexity, and given that it's made of components who tend to disregard cooperation, Scott argues that instead of self-organizing it tends to develop a cancer of its own, which slows the overall growth. Similarly, if the group gains voice by using every dirty trick in the book and then some because it's most effective, they should not be surprised that - as their movement grows in size - they end up fighting each other at some point.
Here is a good litmus test if someone is hurting the society with the participation in said society - they have seriously written or said the phrase - "I support free speech, but ..."
I hear that phrase more on the left lately than right. Which says a lot ...
And the problem now is that if you say something like that the response will range from being told to "check your privilege" to sensitivity training. You may be told your speech is violently aggressive and creates an unsafe environment.
>Look at these people: do you see happy, healthy, mindful, compassionate, self-confident, well-adjusted human beings? I don't. I see bitter, spiteful, demanding, insecure, Us-vs-Them types, perpetually searching for the next perceived slight.
And do you think that's a random sampling of everyone who believes in similar causes? From where I sit, "the butthurt minority" are such a self-selecting group, and their rage is so completely independent of their actual cause, that they don't constitute evidence for or against any particular idea, cause, or proposition.
This is basically true. A lot of what's going on is a result only of the new ubiquity of recording devices.
After all, the "Yale problem" refers mainly to a short confrontation where an immature student yelled at an administrator over something stupid. That's never been exactly unheard of at any college, the only difference is that it got captured on video and spread around the country.
Same here.
Except replace the drinking with lab research and homework.
I will admit it left a extremely strong negative impression of certain groups methodologies.
It's not something I like to trumpet out. I dealt with enough toolbags at said institution of higher learning who tended to have little personality beyond exclaiming how they got a 2400 on the SAT, that they were the valedictorian of their class, how hard corporate recruiting was, and how sick it was that they got that internship at McKinsey, or Bridgewater.
Also white-trash Yankee hillbillies are rare enough at these sorts of places that I might as well give up any pretenses of online anonymity if I said specifically which one it was.
It's not uncommon for people who went to Harvard to avoid mentioning it right away, because of the way it can derail conversations or create weird expectations. (It's sometimes referrred to as, "Dropping the H-bomb.")
I don't think specifying exactly which school, or even which "group of three" schools is really germane to the point being made. Probably "Ivy League" wasn't even especially relevant, but is a way to quickly state what probably was relevant, a "top school."
Here are some. Note that I do not necessarily believe these ideas, just that they are considered taboo to the point that they cannot be tolerated or seriously discussed in certain circles.
* The USA is a moral country.
* The USA is morally superior to most/all other countries.
* A specific member of an in-power "preferred" group can experience unjustified prejudice, oppression, and bullying from members of an out-of-power group.
* Men and women have some neurological differences.
* Some cultures are morally superior to other cultures.
* Christianity's values are moral.
* Conforming gender identities exist for more reasons than culturally enforced gender roles.
There are just tenants of liberal vs conservative philosophy. If you hang out with a certain group of people, half of those things will be unspeakably taboo. If you hang out with the Young Republicans, the other half will be just as unthinkable. That's just culture and world view, not censorship.
If someone says something unpopular on hackernews, ie "Edward Snowden is a traitor" they will be downvoted into oblivion. You could say that hackernewws censored the person's ideas, but I think the reality is that what they said wasn't very popular with the people they said it to. I think this effect is just as relevant and predictable with online communities as it is with college campuses.
>I think this effect is just as relevant and predictable with online communities as it is with college campuses.
Nope. Totally different. In your example, the poster on HackerNews would only get down-voted and thus, censored. Okay. No big deal.
What's happening at the universities right now is different. It is not censership. At these, universities, a person who says, "Edward Snowden is a traitor" would get fired, because students would force the administrators to fired the person they disagree with, because it's "offensive" to call Edward Snowden a traitor.
So totally different. On HackerNews, it's just a down-vote, a simple censorship. At the universities, the person loses his job/education/livelihood, all because he has a different opinion about Edward Snowden. That's not censorship. That's "ruinning-people's-lives-for-having-a-different-opinion" but trying to pass it off as just a simple censorship.
I just wanted to respond to this because (like a lot of these ideas) I think they represent a response to a strawman. The core point of the discussion of privilege acknowledges that all people have privileges. The question then is defining what they are and how useful they are.
When talking about white privilege, the point is that poor whites are better off than poor blacks, just by virtue of being white. The interesting thing here is that there are privileges only afforded to poor blacks. The problem is that the privileges afforded to poor whites are more useful than those afforded to poor blacks.
> When talking about white privilege, the point is that poor whites are better off than poor blacks, just by virtue of being white.
Its not clear to me that that that's true; there is complicated intersectionality at play. Poor whites are more likely to have social networks and other advantages that provide things useful to getting out of poverty, and may -- due to racism and the racially unequal distribution of wealth and power -- have better responses from people in power independent of their own social networks.
OTOH, they may also be more likely to have social networks that are less understanding of an accepting of poverty.
Whether this is a net advantage or net disadvantage varies, among poor whites, considerably from individual to individual.
Group privilege exists mostly in terms of average conditions across groups (and may not thus be particularly useful in discussing the positions of individuals.)
Taking White privilege as a given (which I think does accurately reflect reality, in terms of on-average advantage), I'm not sure that poor White privilege (compared to, poor non-White ) is valid; its certainly not a necessary corollary of White privilege.
Because (at least in part) they commit crime at far higher rates per capita. Black men commit about half of all murders in the USA, despite being about 13% of the population. The statistics are similar for many other crimes. 39% of people arrested for murder, manslaughter, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault were black from 2011-2013 per FBI statistics [1] [3].
In 2010, 62,593 blacks were victims of white violence, while 320,082 whites were victims of black violence. (Bureau of Justice Statistics). 2013 FBI homicide numbers show a similar ratio, with blacks being about 12 times more likely to kill a white person than whites were to kill a black person [2] (~10 blacks per 100k population kill a white, while ~1 white per 100k kill a black).
Some studies have shown that crime is correlated primarily with poverty, while other studies have found that being black correlates to criminality while controlling for other factors [4]:
"As a means to assess these possibilities, I estimate separate regression
equations for the black and white block groups in Atlanta. [...] Consistent with previous research, percent black retains a strong, significant effect on violent crime net of the effects of other controls. [...]" "[...] Although this finding appears to provide partial
support for the racial invariance assumption, the fact remains that for a large proportion of the black neighborhoods, the effect of disadvantage on violence is weaker than is the effect evident among all of the white neighborhoods in the analysis" (However this paper is largely inconclusive on the issue overall, and predominately suggests that previous research into the topic is inadequate to understand it)
Why this is the case is an interesting problem that I hope we can tackle, better understand, and attempt to solve as a society (by solve I mean bring violent crime down to zero generally, across all groups)
It's important to note the distinction between "blacks commit 50% of the murders in the US" and "50% of the murder convictions in the US are black people." It's well-documented that 40 years ago a white person could openly kill a black person and they would not be convicted. I've read a lot of studies, reviews of court cases, and court judgements about the subject, and it is clear that prosecutors are far less likely to charge a white person with a crime than a black person.
Prosecution figures are simply unreliable as a metric for judging how many crimes are committed by whites vs. blacks. There are many interesting cases that show this. The most interesting one is McCleskey v. Kemp. It's not my favorite in terms of the specifics of the case, but it is my favorite because in the intervening years it has become pretty clearly a bad ruling, to the point that the justice who wrote the majority opinion wishes he could reverse his own vote. The unfortunate thing being that he cannot, and his vote has made it effectively impossible to detect and address racial bias in prosecution.
Other data support these ratios. For example, in surveys of crime victims such as the National Crime Victimization Survey, the race reported by victims of their attacker reflects the proportion of conviction rates:
"The UCR and NVCS show similar trends regarding the races of offenders. Generally, the number of minorities identified as offenders is disproportionately high compared to their overall numbers in the population. As Ronald J Berger et al. advise the NCVS, 'Data are consistent with the UCR. The offenders in these types of crimes are disproportionately young, nonwhite, and male.'" (NVCS page 312, can be found by Google search-inside-the-book)
I would be interested to research the topic further. Could you provide more information about the studies you mentioned? I have not previously seen convincing evidence that bias in the justice system is responsible for the racial disparity in these crime statistics. From what I understand, a lot of the murders are black-on-black violence, as well. In 2013, 90% of blacks were murdered by blacks. A majority of people are killed by one of their own race in general (though black-on-white violence is much higher than white-on-black). People are typically murdered by someone who knew them intimately.
[Updated per correction]
Blacks killed by blacks: 90% [1]
Blacks killed by whites: 8%
Whites killed by whites: 82%
Whites killed by blacks: 15%
In what way are these murder statistics going wrong? White people are committing murder and getting away with it? Whites are committing murder, but it's falsely attributed to blacks? There are single examples of all sorts of crazy things happening in individual cases, but I haven't seen evidence or argument supporting that this happens systematically to a degree anywhere near enough to explain the discrepancy. Murder is a very serious thing, and it's hard for me to believe that prosecution bias is responsible for statistics saying that blacks commit ~4-5x as much crime as whites, and 10x as much murder as whites.
I find it plausible that there are effects along the lines of what you're saying, but I find it hard to believe that it would result in a murder per capita discrepancy of 10:1. It seems more plausible that that kind of bias would result in a discrepancy of much smaller proportions, especially for murder. I would be glad to review whatever evidence is available.
Those statistics are just false. More reliable numbers are:
Blacks killed by blacks: 90%
Blacks killed by whites: 8%
Whites killed by whites: 82%
Whites killed by blacks: 15%
Ratio of whites killed by police to blacks killed by police: 1.857
You're right, that table was inaccurate. I've corrected it to use your numbers. That's more consistent with the other data I was reviewing, which suggested that most homicide was intra-racial rather than inter-racial.
"For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it." (Thomas Jefferson)
Read "The New Jim Crow" by Michelle Alexander. I'd suggest starting with chapter 2 since the introduction as well as the first chapter are more of a manifesto, the data which thoroughly demonstrate the point are in chapters 2-5.
One particularly damning statistic: black people pulled over and searched for drugs are significantly less likely to have drugs than white people.
The UCR aren't independent data that confirm conviction-based statistics, they are based on law-enforcement reporting, and share the same biases as prosecutions do.
Policing perpetuates poverty and thus crime by forcing poor, black men to deal with the criminal justice system from an early age. Court fees, court appearances, civil asset forfeiture, jail time, and property damage from police searches are all burdens that poor, black, law-abiding people bear, not to mention wrongful conviction.
Edit: missed this line in your comment before:
> Why this is the case is an interesting problem that I hope we can tackle, better understand, and attempt to solve as a society
This is what Black Lives Matter is about. They understand the problem (often by living through it) and are focused on tackling it. Because they don't focus too much on helping other people to understand the problem, this might not be clear to you.
Edit: I was about to respond to your reply, but it looks like you deleted it.
> too many topics seem taboo to reason about objectively
I think the disagreement is about where this reasoning can/should happen. From the perspective of the BLM movement, it is not their job to educate people about race. I think this reasoning has already happened at an academic level and has concluded that (to summarize very broadly) white people have a whole lot of privilege.
[2] Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
[3] Alice Goffman, On the Run (this is an ethnography, so you may need to have an understanding of ethnographic methods to accept the evidence here as "data")
Poor whites and poor blacks are both subject to mass incarceration; though poor blacks are incarcerated at even higher rates. This is clearly among the factors that, on average, favors poor whites over poor blacks. I certainly did not deny the existence of such factors (I even enumerated some of them.)
An aggregate advantage maybe, however the individual who decides to not put themselves in the position to be incarcerated is confused why you are calling them privileged.
Avoiding committing crime and avoiding being incarcerated for crime are not the same thing.
(The first may help in the second, but just as committing a crime is neither necessary nor sufficient to assure incarceration for it, avoiding committing a crime is neither necessary nor sufficient to avoid incarceration for it. It is frequently argued that it is both more necessary and less sufficient for blacks to avoid crime in order to avoid incarceration as compared to whites, for instance.)
Its hard to be incarcerated for murder without someone actualy being murdered. Therefore the most effective way to avoid incarceration for murder is to stop murdering. People are not being wrongly incarcerated (wholesale) for violent crimes that dont exist, not being violent is sufficient to avoid incarceration for such crimes.
> Its hard to be incarcerated for murder without someone actualy being murdered.
No, its hard (but not impossible) to be incarcerated for murder without someone being dead. In a system in which law enforcement, the judiciary, and/or the population from which juries are drawn are biased against people like you -- whether for race or other reasons -- it can be quite easy to be incarcerated (or worse!) for murder without having killed the person who is dead, much less having murdered them (which is legally more specific than merely having killed them.)
> People are not being wrongly incarcerated (wholesale) for violent crimes that dont exist, not being violent is sufficient to avoid incarceration for such crimes.
No, even if the premise was true (that people are not wrongly incarcerated for violent crimes that do not exist), it doesn't justify the conclusion: not being violent would not be sufficient to avoid incarceration based on that premise, you'd have to stop everyone else from being violent, too, since only the existence of the crime, not you actually being the one who committed it, is posited as necessary for the punishment to occur.
>People are not being wrongly incarcerated (wholesale) for violent crimes that dont exist, not being violent is sufficient to avoid incarceration for such crimes.
That's absurd. You're completely ignoring the face that the FBI invented completely bogus disciplines of forensic science (hair analysis, bite marks) and self-certified experts in those disciplines who then went forth and helped convict scores of people for two decades.
Of all murder cases in a period of time what % of cases are effected by these issues with these types of forensic science (you arent suggesting all forensic science is bunk are you?), I never said the justice system is infallible, however are you suggesting that the majority people who are convicted of murder are innocent?
So its a subjective claim then not something that can be looked quantitatively? There are around 13,000 murders per year in the US, how many of these murders per year result in the wrong person being convicted? I would be surprised if its greater than 4%
I'm certain that poor whites are better off than poor blacks, but both are much worse off in most respects than wealthier people of all races. The problem is that poor and lower middle class people of all races are fighting among themselves for scraps.
Yes poor whites are privileged compared to poor blacks, and poor blacks are privileged compared to poor indians living on a reservation. There is almost always someone worse off than you, arguing about who is the most worse off is the wrong fight.
The groups that we divide people into are fairly arbitrary anyway. Why stop at race? Surely you can subdivide any race into smaller groups where some are more privileged than others.
But to most people taking about privilege (especially college students) this issue is purely binary. If you are white you're privileged, if you're black you're not. To them it doesn't matter if you're comparing a middle class black guy and a dirt poor white dude.
> I had an ex co-worker who confided in me that he doesn't like gay people. I was very happy that he couldn't say that in public.
He can still talk about it when he's around other like-minded people though. By not being able to say it in public, isn't he basically ensuring that he'll never have a conversation with someone with a dissenting opinion and never be forced to think through it? These things just reinforce his attitude probably.
Does HN really think telling a person that you don't like them because of orientation/gender/race/religion doesn't contribute to a hostile work environment? That's kind of disturbing.
yeah, but if he felt free to say publicly that he didn't like them because they're homosexual, then he might feel free to harass them, as has been the custom.
There's a difference between discussing much a person hates a group of people and discussing why people hate people; There's a difference between discussing why racist halloween costumes are offensive (and perpetuate subconscious hate) and discussing whether or not hate speech has a place on college campuses.
The line I quoted says "doesn't like" not "hate" but by equating the two and then banning "hate speech" you are succeeding in your goal of shutting down ideas and discussion.
Distilling one's "like" of a person down to their sexual preference [or skin color/religion/take on abortion/etc.] isn't exactly the best way to promote ideas and discussion, either. I am not sure if someone saying "I don't like gay people" is the best person to defend in the debate of "what is free speech?", which is what it seems like you are trying to sarcastically do here.
Note, this coworker in question didn't say "I don't think gay marriage should be an institution of the state" or some other impersonal statement that can actually be evaluated through logic. There is a distinct difference between those two types of statements. Do you think it's reasonable to defend people who say "I don't like gay people."?
He has the right to no like gay people. Just like you have to right to not like [insert whatever it is that you don't like]
As long as he don't act out on it, and go around killing gay people or something.
Just like you have the right to not like George Bush, or football jocks, or goths, or whatever. Nothing wrong with that. As long as you don't try to assassinate George Bush, you have the right to not like him.
I mean, sure, not liking gays make him a homophobic, but as long as he don't continuously go around calling all gays "Faggot" to their faces, harassing them, threatening them, etc.
It's just as reasonable as defending someone who says "I don't like pumpkin pie", "I don't like racists" or "I don't like project managers". Nobody's obligated to like anyone or anything else, and you're not a bad person for not doing so.
"I had an ex co-worker who confided in me that he doesn't like gay people. I was very happy that he couldn't say that in public."
Let's unpack this.
Are you happy that homophobia is now socially inappropriate? Or are you happy that it is verboten to reveal or express a homophobic opinion?
There is an important distinction to be drawn here. That homophobia is becoming socially backward and marginal is a wonderful thing. That nobody can say something homophobic is not. The way free speech works is, at its most basic: you're allowed to express yourself publicly. The public will then determine how it deals with you. If you say "I don't like gay people" to your co-workers, and your co-workers ostracize you, and/or you are fired for creating a hostile work environment, then you reaped the just results of your decision to speak up. But you should have the freedom to speak up, nevertheless. The choice should be yours.
We should also note that prior restraint and group-self-censorship aren't going to change your co-worker's opinions. Whether or not he's too scared to speak his mind, his mind is made up. Deprive him of the chance to engage in any sort of dialogue about his beliefs, and he'll never get the chance to have them challenged, and they'll remain deeply held.
> They also have no sense of humor and college administrators as a group have no sense of humor or perspective, and they're chronically worried about accusations of indifference or insensitivity (which are themselves as good as convictions).
I don't think this is where I want to draw the argument. If someone makes an insensitive joke, it's true that the social justice movement often reacts disproportionately, but I'm not that worried about people's right to make insensitive jokes. I'm much more worried about the people who are sharing opinions that are perfectly reasonable and necessary to the public discourse and are being squashed. Erika Christakis presented a reasoned argument at Yale for free speech, and people were calling for her and her husband to resign. This isn't a matter of lacking a sense of humor, this is an active campaign to forcibly silence discussion.
> His book A Jane Austen Education is also very good, even for someone like me who does not love Jane Austen.
Off topic, but you might try Persuasion if you haven't. I've attempted the others but been unable to get past the all-caps-bold-with-flashing-lights SMUG plastered over every page, save for in Emma, which was an excellent first 2/3 of a tragedy ruined by the last 1/3 in which it... isn't a tragedy. Persuasion, though, is snappy and enjoyable, IMO.
>Edit: Also, almost all of the censorship calls and nasty behavior / comments came from students on the left. Vox's "I'm a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me" (http://www.vox.com/2015/6/3/8706323/college-professor-afraid) is congruent with my experiences.
I've read that article. At least in the article, the only student ever to actually cause trouble in-class was right-wing, and accused the professor of being a Communist because he doesn't blame the 2008 Global Financial Crisis on black people taking mortgages they couldn't pay. The professor's administration also knew this charge of Communism was utter bullshit.
That doesn't sound to me like the problem is a left-wing regime of censorship and extremism.
I don't see any more subsequent examples. He appears to cite other people who claim to have data showing there's a "social justice problem", but if his citations have such data, he doesn't present it.
There's a fairly non-specific, second-hand example regarding a student which made complaints with an unspecified basis about offensive writings of Mark Twain and Edward Said that preceded the non-renewal of a (different) adjunct professor's contract, which the author relates resulted in the author expunging anything they thought might be perceived as offensive from their syllabus (the author doesn't explain how they "saw" this scenario unfold, and given the usual confidential nature of such contracting decisions, it seems unlikely as someone who was neither the subject nor the decision-maker that the author had the full picture of the discussions or the reason for the decision.)
Everything else is the description of the author's fears about what might happen, and repeating non-specific generalities from other sources.
So, there is one vague subsequent example, but nothing in it actually specifies the basis of the offense and ties it into anything left/liberal (or right/conservative, for that matter). I've seen both left- and right-origin complaints about both Twain and Said (in the latter case, often the exact same complaint, of his perceived-by-some anti-Semitism.)
These people act this way because they are elitist. They think they know what should be better than anyone else and therefore there is no need for debate or for rights like free speech.
I find that quite ironic because presumably, these people subscribe to left leaning ideologies. But maybe there isn't so much of a contradiction. They are simply more elitist than they are anything else.
They don't really stand for equality because they do not possess the humbleness to bring themselves to the level of the common person. They believe themselves to be intellectually and morally superior to the common Joe. And yet they want to dupe the common Joe into thinking that they will safeguard his interests while at the same time thinking so poorly of him!
I think "vanguardist" is a better term than "elitist". "Elitist" connotes a passive enjoyment of privilege, whereas these people see themselves much more as the enlightened few bringing the orthodox[1] to the unwashed masses by any means necessary. They share far more in common with Communists who viewed it as their duty to shepherd the proletariat towards social consciousness than with the Oxbridge set who merely take what's "rightfully" theirs without a second thought.
True, but this discussion is being used as a lens for the greater social justice movement, where it would be hard to make the same generality (especially when their uniting quality is that they denounce privilege).
Exactly. The people often complaining about 'privilege' are some of the most privileged individuals out there, yet they don't see that their huge class based advantages kind of make the others a tad moot. But hey, got to complain about the attitudes of those from a worse background, because otherwise they'd have to see their own issues and the holes in their own belief systems.
Sure. I'm not sure how that addresses the topic at hand, though. We were talking about what drives these kids to behave in the way they do. The GP described their ideology as elitist, whereas I view it more as vanguardist. I'm not sure how these kids' privilege relates to that discussion.
> these people subscribe to left leaning ideologies.
Might as well call them extreme-left, which is just as bad as extreme-right and the extreme ideologies that come with it. The left / right spectrum aren't polar opposites either, but it tends to be horseshoe-shaped, so you'll find some ideas that are dangerously close to those on the other side (#KillAll(White)Men is literally calling for ethnic / gender purging. Somehow it's not causing as much as an outrage as #KillAllJews would).
The key takeaway isn't so much that the left/right spectrum is a horse shoe, but that in fact there are (at least) two independent axes, and authoritarian attitudes don't necessarily correspond neatly to left/right distinctions.
Although the book spends a lot of time looking at authoritarians on the far right, there's an interesting and useful coda about left wing authoritarians.
I've found it much more useful to ignore the traditional spectrum and look instead at the degree of scorn, hatred, support for social violence and exclusion, and/or support for direct physical violence.
Non-authoritarians don't support harm of others. Even revenge is uncomfortable.
Authoritarians make a point of conspicuous identification with power and authority - however defined - and reliably support verbal, social, emotional, and physical violence.
Self-identified political groupings are much less relevant than tone and behaviour.
Their argument is demonstrative rather than persuasive (although there is a persuasive component, but they expect interlocutors to be familiar with structuralist theory, which is not unreasonable in an academic setting). I'm not sure this is the most effective way to communicate their ideas, but the frustration and discomfort they are causing to other people is something that they have a lifetime's experience of, which is why they are able to push people's button's so effectively. They are showing people what it feels like to be unexpectedly and unjustly placed into an out-group.
> Their argument is demonstrative rather than persuasive (although there is a persuasive component, but they expect interlocutors to be familiar with structuralist theory, which is not unreasonable in an academic setting).
I think this is spot-on.
> They are showing people what it feels like to be unexpectedly and unjustly placed into an out-group.
But I don't think this is the intent. Rather, the goal is to create a place where the structures they oppose are weaker/nonexistent. A consequence may be that people with privilege are made uncomfortable and/or put in an out-group, and that is fine because as you said this "is something that they have a lifetime's experience of." And that discomfort is even seen positively as a sign that the culture is going in the right direction, but it is just a symptom, not the goal.
This is the most interesting part of the whole phenomenon. I think the answer is that everyone is scared to confront them. The modus operandi of this movement is to personally attack the character of anyone who disagrees with them. They've toppled university presidents, CEOs, and politicians. They got Rolling Stone to publish a completely unsubstantiated article falsely accusing a bunch of young men of a vicious gang rape. No one wants to be next.
Its interesting to see where these horrible tactics come from.
It certainly frightening to see things like rule 13
“Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.
This is horrifying to see codified, and what I assume being practiced on purpose, like what those yale students did to their professor, or at least tried too.
I am strangely relieved that their perception of power is this basic:
“Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.” Power is derived from 2 main sources – money and people. “Have-Nots” must build power from flesh and blood.
I think they're winning because the overall premise is just correct. Black death and torture is one of the most serious moral issues the U.S. faces today.
There are some people with poor impulse control who get in the news a lot. The opposition promotes the hell out of those people (as we are doing right now) in order to try to discredit the leaders. The fact that the movement is still winning despite the countercampaign is because so many of the other people in the movement are extraordinary, grounded people speaking for truth.
Generational poverty and crime are definitely serious issues, but that's not the movement's "overall premise". The movement's philosophical underpinning is a complete abdication of personal agency and responsibility. They perceive themselves to be part of a powerless and oppressed group (which is false, especially for some of these 'victims' that are Ivy League students with many open doors). To support that, they've built a revisionist narrative of Western civilization, espoused in works like "A People's History of the United States", that centers on oppression of these out-groups and on the evils on capitalism. They have a paranoid sense that everything is an act of oppression, see "microaggressions" and "cultural appropriation". They are hostile to freedom because their goals of changing how individuals relate to each other socially cannot be achieved without coercion.
>I think the answer is that everyone is scared to confront them.
Yep. They're winning because people are too afraid to confront them. And people are too afraid to confront them because this is what happens when you confront them...
At Work: They complained to HR that you sexually harass them. You get fired.
As an Administrator at Universities, Schools: They accused you of being racist, and you get fired.
As a Student at Campus: They and their 100 mob of students surround you. They are clearly angry. 100 people. Surrounded you. Angry. Anything goes. You will obviously have to apologize for having a different view than them, if you want to get out of there in one piece.
Online: They accuse you of doxxing them. The mods bans you.
Because certain parts of the media have a disturbing attachment to such beliefs (despite their jobs being closely tied to freedom of speech and expression) and these types appealed to their views perfectly. Perhaps because of a certain 'holier than thou' attitude towards the general public.
It might also be because for an authority figure, this sort of thing is a great distraction. It takes the focus away from wealth inequality and corporatism and aims it at other normal people with the 'wrong' opinions.
Because until recently no one has had the balls to stand up to sjw/radfem kids. What worries me the most is that in the process of fixing this social misalignment the far right could gain ground. Which is replacing one evil with the other...
Looks like they are winning on university campuses, and there is a counter-movement led by Trump appealing to non-college-educated whites. Many of the people supporting Trump cite "saying things other people aren't willing to say" as their reason for supporting him.
These seem to be the two extremes driving political discourse in the USA right now.
The "Oh My God We Must Punish You for Saying Anything We Suspect of Maybe Possibly Being Construed by Some as Racist/Sexist" crowd, and "I'm Going to Say Racist/Sexist Things Constantly, and You Can't Stop Me" crowd.
They're winning because, while their tactics can be terrible, immature, and oppressive, their moral thrust is correct. Most women and minorities do face obstacles in American society--even today--that most white men don't. This is evidenced in a wide variety of population statistics, at confidence levels that would be high enough to make headlines if they were risks in a medical study.
I don't see how getting an administrator, who support a women's right to freedom of speech, freedom of expression (the ability to wear a nurse outfit for Halloween, the ability to wear a Native American outfit for Halloween, since she loves Native Americans). I don't see how getting an administrator, who support a women's right to freedom of speech and freedom of expression, fired is going to help women become less oppressed.
I read a post on reddit the other day that left vs right is really a horse shoe. That the far left and far right are very close to each other. I thought it was fairly intuitive.
So if Common Joe's views on gender can be summarized as "Women should stay in the kitchen", is it elitist to not take that idea seriously? It has nothing to do with people's relative social or intellectual standing, and no one should have to bring themselves down to anyone else's level. Bad ideas are bad ideas, and should be labelled as such.
It's hard to tell if someone making a controversial statement is doing so to learn and participate in discussion, or if they're just trolling. And with ol' Common Joe the latter can be just as likely as the former. So sometimes people err on the side of caution, and prefer to avoid outright controversial topics that are difficult to discuss and articulate. I don't think it's an issue of anyone looking down on anyone else.
I have never seen a single person take the position you a suggesting with any real seriousness, this is a caricature of a real discussion, the problem is who gets to decide on what the current brand of "band ideas" are. At the moment its who ever is the biggest bully.
It depends on whether you don't take that idea seriously because you have thought seriously about whether women should stay in the kitchen and have concluded that they shouldn't, or whether it's just because that's what Common Joe thinks.
The fact that other people are free to speak against you does not mean that you can't speak freely.
Free speech does not mean freedom from having your speech acts criticized (quite the opposite; it includes freedom of others to criticize your speech acts.) And, yes, it means that your speech acts may affect your ability to hold a job where you are one of the major public faces of an organization (such as its CEO) and are not capable of dealing with the PR resulting from the association of those speech acts with a public face of the corporation (the same as it would if you couldn't deal with any other PR issue affecting the corporation, even if it wasn't resulting from your speech acts.)
While their behavior was entirely legal and protected by the First Amendment, the problem lies elsewhere. It's in the utter lack of tolerance to the views not conforming to the group's, not unlike the reaction religious extremists would display.
Can't help but quote:
--
The Emperor summons before him Bodhidharma and asks: “Master, I have been tolerant of innumerable gays, lesbians, bisexuals, asexuals, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, transgender people, and Jews. How many Tolerance Points have I earned for my meritorious deeds?”
Bodhidharma answers: “None at all”.
The Emperor, somewhat put out, demands to know why not.
Bodhidharma asks: “Well, what do you think of gay people?”
The Emperor answers: “What do you think I am, some kind of homophobic bigot? Of course I have nothing against gay people!”
And Bodhidharma answers: “Thus do you gain no merit by tolerating them!”
Why is it necessary to "come down hard" on people who express morally wreak (or even stupid) viewpoints?
Surely, putting forth a better argument or, at least, ignoring them is a far more morally superior response than suppressing their speech?
I've recently read about Bobby Sands (who was a IRA member who starved himself to death) and am reminded of that monk who lit themself on fire in protest.
I think an interesting question about these two people is why did their action have any impact? The authorities were against them and killing themselves doesn't "oppress" those authorities.
I think the opening paragraph of this book http://www.jstor.org/stable/3750951 is an interesting angle: martyrs against a cause illegitimize a cause.
If that is true, as I think it is, then it is crucially important to not victimize people no matter how wrong they may be. I think that the way to do that is, as I said above, to tolerate wrong viewpoints but respond to them or ignore them.
You think it's OK for a majority to say that racial Jews should not have property rights and then make it so? Eich achieved hos goal of writing oppression into the state constitution. Ignoring or tolerating promotion of oppression doesn't make it go away. (That's exactly the fair and balanced horseshit I was talking about.) Tolerating morally neutral actions is entirely different from tolerating morally bad actions.
Pretending that Eich's treatment for promoting oppression (or even the downvotes I've received for stating my views or you may have received for stating yours -- I've seen a lot of handwringing in this thread about maintaining multiple HN accounts and self-censoring themselves on HN as if that was some great horror) are in any way equivalent to actually taking away rights is another form of fair and balanced horseshit.
Suppose that everyone in the world (except Jews perhaps) believed that it WERE OK for them not to have property rights, then what would protect their property rights?
The truth is that what is right is decided by how well the arguments for it can convince people.
If you look back far enough, the arguments were: my army is stronger than you. As you get closer to the present, we tend to like using better arguments (the veil of ignorance for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_of_ignorance).
It's based on notions like the veil of ignorance that we can say maybe every human should have property rights lest the group we're part of today lose it when the balance of power shifts.
That's why I believe that jews should have property rights, but don't believe that advocating against what I believe should be stifled. I am confident enough that my argument is better than theirs to not need to prevent their speech if you prefer. I also don't believe that we should stifle: climate change denial, flat earthers, religious people, pro-life people and a host of other people that I believe are wrong.
You make a nonsense point (nobody is arguing for morality by majority rule) then refute it by pointing out that you have good arguments for advocating a certain morality. Then you make a straw man (nobody is arguing for stifling anybody).
At the core, you seem to agree with me that there are certain actions that we should be intolerant of. Things like murder we should not tolerate forcefully, and things like oppression, we should argue against strongly until they go into effect, in which case, other action is sometimes better.
Hmm, I thought thinking about my initial question would be enough to see my point from your perspective. Maybe it is.
You were, in your now flagged comment, arguing for stifling (or censoring if you prefer) people who, you believe, hold that kind of opinion.
The point I am making is that morality is only part of it. In practice, it doesn't matter that you're right if you're dead. You say that
> tolerating promotion of oppression doesn't make it go away
I'll answer that arguing with words without understanding the process that allows for people to agree to "fight" with words rather than weapons is even less likely to make bad ideas go away.
This won't convince you, I know, the tone of your replies shows an adversarial reading of my comments. But maybe one day you'll have a more skeptical approach to your own beliefs.
My now-flagged comment said absolutely nothing about censorship or stifling. It said bad actions shouldn't be tolerated. Again, what is bad isn't up for vote. It can be deduced logically -- see my other posts. Otherwise, why do people not follow the "extremes" in their religious texts?
You seem to hold a revisionist historical view that the civil rights movement was entirely unproductive, even though it was unpopular at the start (again, morality doesn't depend on the majority). Loudly pointing out bad actions works.
The funny thing about that now-flagged comment is that it was up to +5 points before it dropped fast. There must be an unwritten rule against calling out superstitions.
What do you mean by not tolerating if not stifling? If you look at the Mizzou and Yale things, stifling is exactly the right word: "we're just walking forward", "we can't hear you" and others.
> You seem to hold a revisionist historical view that the civil rights movement was entirely unproductive, even though it was unpopular at the start (again, morality doesn't depend on the majority).
My argument isn't that it didn't work, but that you fail to understand why it worked.
It worked because the arguments were convincing, not inherently because people pointed to something and said "this is stupid".
It has nothing to do with being loud (in the literal sense that I understand you to mean it).
Perhaps a better way to say what I'm trying to is: I think that the reason you arrive at the "right" conclusion is coincidental. The approach is flawed and it does and will lead to nonsense sometimes.
Another way to show what I mean is by counter-example: if someone advocated for, say, racial tolerance because they argued that we can't know who's a Christian based on race, I don't care if we agree on the conclusion, the process is a big problem.
Once again, you're pretending I said things that I didn't actually say. I said that certain bad actions should not be tolerated. Where you get stifling from this, I don't know. In particular, your first post claimed that we shouldn't be intolerant of people implementing (not merely talking about) Biblical punishments on gays, which is what I claimed that our society rightfully would very harshly not tolerate, just as our society wouldn't tolerate government-sanctioned mass lynchings of blacks
Yes you did say actions in that last post. I'm fairly certain your flagged post argued for "coming down hard" on people advocating for certain things rather than doing things. I'm fairly sure, given the tone, that I would still disagree with whatever you mean by "coming down hard"/"not tolerating", but this is getting speculative so I think this is a moot point.
> Biblical punishments on gays
Where does that come from? Was that what Eich wanted?
As far as I know, there was no advocacy for violence (something we do punish but in a due process, legal manner).
Are you arguing that you see no difference between 'death to the sinners' and whatever notion of 'sanctity of marriage' Eich might have espoused?
> just as there are certain hamburgers that are better than others
There's nothing that objectively makes a hamburger better than another. It's all subjective, just as views are subjective. Some people like bread a lot, so they may want a really thick bun which could be overpowering to another person. Some people are vegetarian, while others cringe in disgust at a black bean burger. It doesn't make those hamburgers any better or worse than others, though.
This is very true. I knew a guy who only ate fast food, and he could not (or would not) eat at better restaurants. He simply did not like anything but the fast food hamburgers.
It's exactly like hamburgers. At the top, there are actions that are hard to distinguish morally, just as there are hamburgers that are hard to distinguish quality-wise.
But we can all agree that a hamburger with actual shit in it is worse than a hamburger from Smashburger, just as there are certain actions that are clearly morally wrong and don't need to be evaluated with some false fairness.
> But we can all agree that a hamburger with actual shit in it is worse than a hamburger from Smashburger
I'm sure that out of the 7 billion people living on our planet, at least one person genuinely likes the taste of shit. To them, this wouldn't necessarily be true (I've never had a Smashburger and I don't like the taste of shit, so I couldn't possibly make this comparison myself). Which is why it's not objectively worse. It's all based on the person eating the burger, because everyone has different likes and tastes. That's why there's never one burger option; everyone shockingly doesn't like the same things.
Eating a burger with shit in it will likely kill you. Should I have said cyanide instead to get the point across? The point is that there are some burgers that are clearly worse than others (use your own imagination if cyanide doesn't work for you), just as there are certain actions that are clearly morally worse than others.
I can't help it of you don't understand the concept of an analogy. The form of this one is good X:bad X::good Y:bad Y. We're not dealing with GRE-level stuff here.
> Eating a burger with shit in it will likely kill you.
Preferences for death or risk of death are not exactly unknown, so, while that may be true, it isn't sufficient to establish the universal preference you've offered it to support.
> Should I have said cyanide instead to get the point across?
No, for the same reason. The problem isn't the example, the problem is that the point is wrong; whether or not one believes that an absolute morality exists (in whatever sense of "exists" makes sense for morality), you aren't going to any of its contents through universally-extent preferences, just as you won't for food, because preferences aren't universals.
Under the framework of cold rational logic. In what ways could Eich's actions be construed as morally positive without resorting to superstitions and other faulty logic?
You're absolutely right that my ideas are self-serving though. I am neither gay, nor black, nor a descendant of Abraham, but I am a human living in society. As such, I want to live as long as possible, and oppressing people to the point of ingesting cyanide is not going to help grow a scientific community large enough to keep me alive as long as I would like.
> Under the framework of cold rational logic. In what ways could Eich's actions be construed as morally positive without resorting to superstitions and other faulty logic?
Yeah that isn't an ethical framework. You were judging his actions under the framework of moral utilitarianism. The flaws with this can be found in a google search.
His actions could be construed as moral under a rule-utilitarian moral framework and a kantian virtue ethic framework. (The virtues being participating in politics and standing up for what you believe.)
> and oppressing people to the point of ingesting cyanide is not going to help grow a scientific community large enough to keep me alive as long as I would like
This is a straw man. Oppression of gays in the US amounted to not giving them the right to marriage and not having them be protected in the work place for their sexuality. Neither of which amount to "oppressing people to the point of ingesting cyanide".
Hilariously, the two justifications for Eich as you've presented them would paint Hitler as moral. As Feynman was fond of reiterating, there is a vast difference between naming something and understanding something, and you've illustrated his point perfectly.
As you're no doubt well aware, marriage rights encompass many other legal rights, and denying those rights is granting gays a form of second-class citizenship. This official form of discrimination combined with the private sector hate they receive for not being in a protected class causes gays ti have a higher rate of suicide than the rest of the population, continuing Turing's tradition.
>Hilariously, the two justifications for Eich as you've presented them would paint Hitler as moral.
First of all, neither are justifications. It was simply analyzing Eich's actions under a different moral framework as yours.
Second of all, yes, you could argue (this is the key word) Hitler's actions as moral (even though everyone would almost
Hilariously (not really actually) using your reasoning and your ethical framework you could also argue that paedophiles should not be discriminated against and that they deserve the right to sleep with and marry minors.
As society we don't want this so we choose to discriminate against child predators. Discrimination in this case is a pretty good thing.(I don't actually believe child predators should have this "right")
>As you're no doubt well aware, marriage rights encompass many other legal rights, and denying those rights is granting gays a form of second-class citizenship. This official form of discrimination combined with the private sector hate they receive for not being in a protected class causes gays ti have a higher rate of suicide than the rest of the population, continuing Turing's tradition.
I don't really understand what you are trying to say here. Yes, I'm aware of these things. They don't matter in the scope of this argument. You say that reason and logic drive your believes about what is moral but this entire section of the post I quoted is just an appeal to emotion.
Also don't you find it ironic that you can justify discriminating against someone because of their beliefs but you can't justify discriminating against someone because of their sexual identity?
And before you respond with an argument telling me you can choose what you believe. Can you really?
I think you're missing the point of the story. The point is, that unless you're tolerating something that you consider morally wrong or unethical, you can't really claim you're tolerant.
You're missing the point of my reply. Tolerance isn't good for tolerance's sake, and claiming that tolerating something that actively harms people is the same as tolerating something that is morally neutral is just fair and balanced horseshit that leads to Jews losing property rights and Gays losing rights in the state constitution.
Secular morals. Owning slaves obviously doesn't pass the test.
As a secular person, your main purpose is to live a long healthy life because that's all there is -- secular people don't get brownie points in the afterlife for the bodycount of heathens they've racked up. You will live a longer life if you live in a society of educated people who can do the science to keep you healthy and don't want to kill you (because you've oppressed them in slavery, because they have no money, or because they're brain-damaged from lead poisoning).
You're at best begging the question here. In the South there were (horribly wrong) people who honestly and truly believed (incorrectly) that not only was it morally permissible to own slaves, but that it was morally necessary. They (wrongly, racistly) believed that the only way the "African race" could be saved from "savagery" was to be in captivity.
This argument is clearly stupid and wrong from a 21st century perspective. But it was honestly believed. Under your framework, a slave owner in 1800 would be correct to "come down hard" on an abolitionist. After all, the abolitionist would be promoting "clearly wrong" morals.
The idea that a majority should "come down hard" on dissenting ideas is inherently a conservative (if not reactionary) move. In the 1950s, a vast majority of the country (wrongly) thought that homosexuality was a toxic sin that could (stupidly) infect children who were exposed to it. If you gave that majority the power to "come down hard" on dissenting views, the gay rights movement would never have happened. (Yes, I'm aware that lots of people in the gay rights movement were punished by the majority -- that was bad and we shouldn't encourage it).
So long as you get to decide what's right and wrong it's easy. But imagine George Bush got to decide. Or ISIS. Or some other group you don't like.
Well said. Crude majoritarian morality has hole after hole that even its most thoughtful adherents can do nothing to defend. Why people continue to invoke it is beyond me.
Revisionism with some sloppy relativism mixed in. For you to believe your argument, you must honestly believe that at some point in the future, it will be secularly moral to remove rights for gays, remove property rights from racial Jews, enslave blacks, and conquer, kill, and rape.
The truth is that nobody believed it was morally right to keep slaves who wasn't benefiting from it and using your type of relativism to sloppily justify it to themselves.
Ah, so killing isn't bad? You can call it morality or whatever other name you have for it, but there are actions that society shouldn't tolerate for entirely secular reasons.
But, IMHO, the threshold for taking arguments outside the political arena and into the realm of boycotts and demands for resignations should be a lot higher than it seems to be today. Otherwise vibrant, productive arguments don't happen, since everyone's concentrating on bankrupting the other side of money, "platforms", or legitimacy.
This is the reason I keep two HN accounts - I fear that any political comments I make here could jeopardize my professional life (about which I contribute fairly often).
Online, that's a fairly easy thing to manage. In real life, it means I really have to walk on eggshells a lot, and I seldom participate in voicing my opinions (or supporting certain causes) in which I'd otherwise participate, solely out of fear. In many cases, you can keep your personal views and professional life isolated, but not always. Maybe it's an irrational fear, but then again, in today's political climate it seems foolish not to worry about that.
And if that need to self-censor isn't cause for concern, I don't know what is.
I do this too. I found it almost impossible to post on my account under my own name, on any topic about psychology, politics, economics, or diversity because I am too afraid of what I've said being taken out of context later, or used against me in ways I can't anticipate now. I found myself frequently writing a post, only to delete it shortly afterward, worrying that it was somehow too risky.
In today's climate, you can't really even propose a thought experiment or discuss a hypothetical without being accused of holding that position yourself, and criticized as such. I don't even really have strong convictions about most of the things I discuss, except the desire to analyze them rationally and objectively, and the willingness to challenge both conventional wisdom and new radical positions.
Even while posting under an anonymous username, I still find myself self-censoring because of the risk that my identity could someday be connected. HN administrators can certainly trivially connect me, since they see the origin of my traffic for my two accounts, and I have not taken pains to anonymity the traffic for this one. However, HN admins themselves like pg have been posting under alts (and probably still do, for the same reasons), and seem to support this.
I have been wanting to propose that HN or some site like it offer a feature where you can switch your post to "Anonymous Coward" later, if it proves to be too controversial. Or post as "Anonymous Coward", and later assign the post to your name if you feel OK about how the discussion turned out. I think this would be better than having people feel like they can't post at all, or that they need alts to post. Having an alt is kind of like Anonymous Coward, except that you can't claim credit for just a single post that you turn out to feel OK about later.
The thing is, I think, that humans "try on" ideas like they try on clothes. We don't necessarily mean everything we say all the time (unless we take great pains to ensure it). The public discourse seems to expect that people have their minds firmly made up about everything, and a completely firm viewpoint that can be understood and criticized, but the reality is much more fluid. Or to put it differently: writing something that you can firmly stand behind requires a lot of time and energy, and a bar of quality and thoughtfulness and judgment that can rarely be met for Internet forum comments. Sometimes I'd just like to have a conversation, without fearing that something I say can be taken out of context and used against me years later when random-topic-of-the-day becomes a hot-button issue.
"I have been wanting to propose that HN or some site like it offer a feature where you can switch your post to "Anonymous Coward" later, if it proves to be too controversial. Or post as "Anonymous Coward", and later assign the post to your name if you feel OK about how the discussion turned out."
1. I've thought about this too.
2. I don't think it's possible because Google indexes these comments at lightning speed.
3. I used to wonder why HN only allows a user to delete for a specified period of time(a few minutes?). I think it's because of Google?
4. I have never used my real name on the Internet. Wait, I did have a Facebook account, but changed my real name years ago. I would like to use my real name, but just don't want to be taken out of context. Or, never forgiven fir having a bad day.
5. I would like to see the day where the IP owner can delete anything indexed by Google, or any database, but that will probably never happen.
6. People on here know the risks of posting under your real name, but the average person doesn't have a clue. They post away with a false sense of impunity.
7. What scares me most about the Internet never forgetting is what if a website decided to post your IP to your house number?
8. Then again 99.99 percent of the stuff I say, I believe strongly. It's just we need to play the phoney game in real life.
I view HN as a forum for professionals so I don't make comments that could negatively impact my professional life here. In that way I think self censure is fine. If you don't agree with my assessment thats fine as well of course.
Of course most of the sparse comments I make here are dumb jokes...
The point is, thanks to Social Justice Warriors, you never know what comment could affect your career. Expressing opinion about merits of Angular.js is probably safe. But anything that involves gender - a study, or a remark about distribution of men and women in tech industry - is not to be touched with a ten foot pole if you value your employability. It takes very little to become a victim of a Twitter outrage.
Bingo. Let's say that I wanted to argue that -- just for the sake of argument, not necessarily as a true belief -- that discrimination is not a significant problem in tech hiring with respect to diversity, and that the key problem is that there aren't qualified candidates from special-interest-group-in-question applying in the first place, and so the majority of the problem is upstream when you consider tech companies.
Is that something I'm allowed to say, even as a hypothetical? It seems like anyone saying that could be viciously attacked. Yet if we want to reason about the world objectively we need to consider all shades of truth and possibility, not blindly latch on to one particular idea and walk on eggshells while talking about it. The victimhood culture is completely stifling to any kind of discussion about such things.
Now, maybe we shouldn't have discussion about that on HN. I don't know. A lot of them have sure been interesting though. For example, I've found contributions by yummyfajitas particularly thought-provoking to read. He frequently challenges the "popular wisdom" and gets downvoted for it despite making what seem to me like reasonable, fair, respectful arguments that go against the popular activist narrative and victimhood culture. I don't know where I really land on these issues, but I've not been satisfied that there is adequate thoughtful analysis of them in mainstream culture (even arguably on HN).
I am hoping that this victimhood thing, and that attempts at social justice by creating privileges for special interest groups, are phenomena that are ultimately temporary as our society evolves to a greater level of egalitarianism and liberty. That is, I hope that what we're seeing now are the growing pains as old prejudice is put down, as we as society we eventually move past this (in whatever subdivision you care to name). We've seen huge strides for equality in recent years such as with recent US Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage. But it feels like for every two positive strides, we take a step back with victimhood culture or by fighting injustice with more injustice (e.g., changes to Mormon Church doctrine on gays, to pick a totally random example).
The problem with starting these hypothetical-filled discussions is that they're not helpful. People can and have been positing many hypotheses about the pipeline issue in tech (and of course many other issues) and the discussions have been mostly heat and very little light.
What would be helpful, is if you would post actual objective findings--studies, analyses, etc. Cold hard facts. Otherwise you're just adding to the heat. Even my reply is not adding much right now, being primarily opinion.
It's hard to post actual objective findings, beacuse scientists themselves are seriously affected by the culture around those issues. Just like people are afraid of saying something contrary to the mainstream narrative, scientists are afraid to publish it too. On the other hand, a lot of studies - even completely unrelated to the issue - are having their conclusions purposefully and forcefully fitted to match the narrative, to score cheap popularity points. The topic is so politicized, that you can't rely even on studies to tell you anything at the moment.
I'm willing to admit that all I think about various minorities is completely wrong. I'll be happy to, when presented with evidence (and I've been adjusting my views every time I stumbled upon something that looked even little like legit research). Personally, I'm not arguing for any side of the issue. I'm arguing against using bad methodology, bad science, logical fallacies, lies and propaganda. I'm arguing for civility and detached behaviour in discussion. Only when people calm the fuck down we'll be able to figure out where the truth lies and how much we have to adjust at personal and societal level.
Still, people are not that insane yet to make expressing opinions about frameworks a danger to your employability. I've frequently been a part of flamew^H^H^H^H^H^Hcivilized discussions about obvious superiority of Emacs over IDEs, or Lisp over everything, and never for a second felt I'll get fired for it, or that I'll lose my career, my home, or that I'll get into national news over it.
This is a frequently repeated argument and I find it less and less convincing. It is true that America's constitution only guarantees the congress will not abridge the freedom of speech. However, an argument could be made that in a free society there's a fundamental right to have a dissenting opinion or voice; a right that is not codified by the constitution because it's simply irrelevant to a constitution. It seems to me that it's up to all of us to tolerate non-extreme dissenting voices, even if we disagree with them.
> However, an argument could be made that in a free society there's a fundamental right to have a dissenting opinion or voice
Of course, there is a fundamental right to have (and express) a dissenting opinion or voice.
There is also a fundamental right to have (and express) displeasure with an opinion or voice, whether dissenting or not.
And there is no fundamental entitlement to a job whose responsibilities include managing the public image of a corporation, and if you are unable to do that in the real circumstances and public image problems the corporation faces, whether or not your own speech acts are the source of that PR problem, you shouldn't expect to continue to have that job.
I mean, yes, you're right, but surely, if voicing a dissenting opinion will damage or outright destroy your career, then unless you're extremely privileged and can afford to take the hit, you can't really do it, even if technically you have the right, can you?
Technological advances such as social media make vilifying dissenting views (and the people who express them) cheaper and more effective than ever before. There must be some kind of a balance between the right to dissent and the right to "have a displeasure with an opinion" as you said, and I feel like the way things are going now, it doesn't look like we have found that balance. Ultimately a healthy society will need both.
The problem is that the current system in practice legally protects certain opinions. E.g. If Eich was pro gay marriage and vocally so, firing him on that basis would have been very risky legally. Especially if he was gay, it would probably be impossible to fire him without losing an expensive lawsuit afterwards.
I don't think legally but more politically and PR wise. There a difference between firing someone for making donations to pro-X groups and firing someone for being X. In this hypothetical scenario, Eich would have to prove he was fired for being gay instead of for making a public donation that support a group and leads to potential blowback against the company. It's bad either way. Mozilla had a no win situation here. They got bad PR from both sides.
Forget about whether it has blowback against the company- It's totally legal AFAIK to fire someone for their "off the clock" speech for any or no reason at all.
In reality, though, I think a jury would be very skeptical of a company's claims that someone was fired for promoting the gay agenda (which would be legal) and not for being a gay person.
> However, an argument could be made that in a free society there's a fundamental right to have a dissenting opinion or voice
Since we're not talking about the constitution, which strictly relates to government and public property, then we're talking about private entities and private property.
You do not have the right to speak on my property. Forcing that is in direct contradiction to a free society that has a concept of private property.
I am all for fostering tolerance to offensive speech, but not at the expensive of destroying the concept of private ownership. It is absolutely not a fundamental right. It should be a social norm, but that's all it should be.
> It seems to me that it's up to all of us to tolerate non-extreme dissenting voices
Who gets to define what is and is not extreme?
Freedom of expression means tolerating something offensive by definition. If it's not offensive, it doesn't need to be tolerated.
>Since we're not talking about the constitution, which strictly relates to government and public property, then we're talking about private entities and private property.
Except a lot of private entities receive a lot of money from the federal government - either as subsidies, tax breaks or programs. So they should abide by the rules of the government too. Giving public money to entities that not view the first amendment as obligatory for them - that is wrong for me.
A way to address this might be to add "political opinions" to the list of protected classes. It is undeniably bad for a democracy (I know I know, we aren't technically a democracy) where people aren't free in practice to discuss contentious issues.
As currently stands, you can stand in the town square and promote affirmative action it would be very risky legally to fire you. But if you get up and argue for the repeal of some affirmative action legislation you can be safely fired with no objection from legal.
> As currently stands, you can stand in the town square and promote affirmative action it would be very risky legally to fire you. But if you get up and argue for the repeal of some affirmative action legislation you can be safely fired with no objection from legal.
Legally, promoting either of those opinions is subject to exactly the same degree of protection. The willingness of a particular employer to accept the legal risk maybe different between them, but that's a different issue than the law itself.
That in practice it does not work as intended means it is bad law and needs tweaked. One way would be to say that all behavior "off the clock" and all attributes of a person not related to the job are protected. Another way would be to say nothing is protected. Right now we have a middle ground that plays favorites.
> That in practice it does not work as intended means it is bad law and needs tweaked.
In what specific, concrete ways does it not work out the way you think it is intended?
> One way would be to say that all behavior "off the clock" and all attributes of a person not related to the job are protected. Another way would be to say nothing is protected.
Those are obviously potential rules, but I don't see that either of them is closer to any reasonable interpretation of the intended result that antidiscrimination laws are intended to serve.
In what specific, concrete ways does it not work out the way you think it is intended?
I think we are starting to go in circles, but: It has the effect of cancelling out free discourse which is important to a functioning "democracy". A trivial example is that a business owner cannot be vocally anti-same sex marriage, because if she is, and a gay employee is fired for a "legitimate" reason, her behavior will go a long way towards convincing a jury.
Where this is going is why we are expanding the number of protected classes over time is that the real "intended result" is that you should not suffer at work for attributes that have nothing specifically to do with the job you are hired for.
The point is that calling for his resignation was grossly disproportionate.
Depends where you draw the line. Many people feel that when Eich chose to support groups that were running bigoted TV ads (beyond simply expressing an opinion as to a ballot issue) he effectively crossed that line.
...I know some will be skeptical about this, and that words
alone will not change anything. I can only ask for your support
to have the time to "show, not tell"; and in the meantime
express my sorrow at having caused pain. ...
and who has never even been accused of discrimination, harassment, or abuse of any kind in his professional capacity (or otherwise AFAIK) should be given the chance to prove himself.
I'm pretty sure they didn't send the ads out for the approval of every campaign contributor before they aired them.
Eich's statement in that posting is indeed a valid, mitigating factor in his favor.
He could have done more, by addressing the issue of the TV ads directly. By not doing so, people had reason to believe he was sidestepping that key issue (and that he may not really understand why people were offended by those ads).
What can I say, that is just not the world I want to live in. A world in which your defeated [1] political opponents must repent, wear sackcloth, and cast ashes in their hair or else be professionally destroyed.
[1] Proposition 8 had been struck down by the time of Eich's appointment to CEO
It's now about repenting and wearing sackcloth. And it isn't even about Eich.
People had just gotten very, very, VERY tired of the pseudo-tolerant stance he was endorsing [1], and didn't want to feel that they were lending credibility to it, by having him at the head of an organization they were a part of. The message they were trying to send was simply, "we're really tired of this shit, and we want it to stop."
[1] "Love the sinner, hate the sin". Those aren't his words, but that's the gist of the religious-based opposition to gay marriage. You have to understand that at some point, people just get sick of hearing it -- or being a party to it.
It was the activists who dragged Eich's donation from years ago into the spotlight, made it an issue, and demanded that he apologize. The "pseudo-tolerant stance" people are/were "sick of hearing" or "being a party to" would never have seen the light of day if the activists just left Eich's personal political beliefs alone. This is precisely a demand for repentance.
Eich's stance was "pseudo-tolerant" because the activists were demanding that he renounce his religious beliefs. At least he had the stones not to say something he didn't believe just to keep his job. So instead he was cast out. Should a Catholic CEO be subjected to the same treatment if they personally oppose abortion? A Republican one for opposing Affirmative Action?
It's right there in your comment. You said "Love the sinner, hate the sin" was not considered an acceptable viewpoint for him to hold.
But even removing that point from my comment the rest stands. You wrote that people were "sick of hearing" about his views on gay marriage. Well all they had to do to stop hearing about it was to stop asking him about it.
You said "Love the sinner, hate the sin" was not considered an acceptable viewpoint for him to hold.
No, that's not what I said. Or even close to what I said.
I'd continue with you further on this, but it seems there's been a lot of gratuitous word-bending and insinuation in what you've been saying of late. That's not my style of communicating, and I don't see what I can learn from it -- but if you want to continue to feel the way you feel about the issue, that's fine with me.
People had just gotten very, very, VERY tired of the
pseudo-tolerant stance he was endorsing [1], and didn't
want to feel that they were lending credibility to it,
by having him at the head of an organization they were a
part of.
[1] "Love the sinner, hate the sin".
Can you please explain how this could possibly mean anything other than "The CEO of Mozilla must not hold the viewpoint 'Love the sinner, hate the sin' because then it is implied that the members of the Mozilla community endorse that view". Because the logical consequence of that position is that Eich must either 1) renounce his view or 2) be removed.
Nobody protested Eich for privately "holding" a particular point of view. Their concern was around his donating money (and implicitly, legitimacy) to groups they felt were engaged in various harmful activities (running TV ads with derogatory rhetoric, for example).
The two phenomena are very different. You understand this - yes?
And so then we're back to demanding that a defeated political opponent repent. "Here is our political issue, you advocated against it, you lost, so now you must beg our forgiveness or lose your job which is completely unrelated to the issue."
Like I said, that's not the world I want to live in. If others like it they are welcome to it, but then they shouldn't start complaining if abortion-rights advocates are fired from their jobs in the American South.
Do you think that this corporate executive will be hired in a similar role from which he was let go? If not, how is this functionally different from a blacklist (or "conspiracy in restraint of trade")?
Since he is currently CEO of a technology company, I don't think it's anything like an industry blacklist, in effect (obviously, its nothing like it in structure, either.)
Being forced to leave one of the most influential software developers, and go start a new small startup is comparable to being forced out of the major studios and starting your own. I fail to see any significant difference between what happened at Mozilla and the Hollywood blacklist.
I'm not a master enough of this subject to form a detailed argument, but I hope we can agree there is a line somewhere between civil criticism and a lynching.
Especially, IMO, in the case of a ballot issue. Are we trying to coerce people to vote the way we want them to? That's unconscionable to me.
> I'm not a master enough of this subject to form a detailed argument, but I hope we can agree there is a line somewhere between civil criticism and a lynching.
Yes, there is, and what Eich experienced was not only not a lynching [0], it was quite far from the line that separates criticism from lynching.
Other people in this thread have already expressed my opinion far more eloquently than I could have. But I am wondering, do you think the protests that lead to the resignation of Claremont McKenna's dean is appropriate (besides the legalistic sense)? And if not, why is it different from the pressure that lead Brandon Eich to resign?
If you're a CEO and you're purposely creating a toxic work environment by continuously saying racist things to your workers, then obviously, you deserve to get fired.
But hell no you should not deserve to get fired for donating to the Republican Party. You have the right to donate to whichever LEGAL organization you want.
As an individual you are free to say whatever you please.
As the CEO of a large organization, you are not. You are the face and voice of an organization. You speak for its employees and you are accountable to its shareholders. You are held to a higher standard and your every word/action is scrutinized. If your shareholders are afraid that your speech/actions will hurt the bottom line of the company, you will be removed from your position.
The conversations about Brandon Eich and his views regrettably died down before the Donald Sterling incident. I am still curious today where defenders of Eich fall in the controversy over Sterling.
Will anyone who defends Eich or is critical of his detractors come out and say that Sterling should not have received the wrath of the media and public and should not have been punished for expressing his views?
Or does your position shift based on the opinion being expressed by either man? Are there materialistic differences between these men and their beliefs?
Donald Sterling, 80 year old man in the early stages of Alzheimer's, has a private one-on-one conversation with a "trusted" person secretly recorded by that person, which results in his being banned for life from the NBA and forced to sell his team. To me that's literally one step away from thought-crime. If we had magical mind-reading technology that could prove Donald Sterling was prejudiced against black people, but he never took any actions[1] or spoke any words based on that, should we strip him of his team?
[1] I know about the housing discrimination lawsuit; I'm leaving it out of this analysis because the NBA clearly didn't care about it until the secret recording made Sterling a pariah.
Now don’t be silly
Who the fuck gon' bully me if I got a billi?
If I got a billi and they're recording me I’m like who cares
What I wouldn’t be is on TV stutterin' ta-ta-talkin' scared
Money is not speech, it's money. People were angry at Eich because he spent money opposing a cause they supported.
Brandon Eich is not an example of anything this article is about. It's much more straightforward: if you do things people don't like, those people won't like you.
Brandon Eich episode speaks volumes, esp. since he was at the winning side of the Popular Vote. Tinder did not walk away for CA after Prop 8 was won. I really do not know a single state including CA and OR, where gay marriage actually garnered Popular majority. Now the debate about whether something like that should be up for Vote is different and one I have no much domain knowledge. The fact was Brandon Eich's political belief were not fringe or extremist and more alignment to the times, is the case for NOT bullying him out of his Executive Office in Mozilla. For a organization that wants to stand up against Big Bad Governments and Corporations, Mozilla capitulated to a PC vocal minority. This has emboldened "Crybullies" of all shapes and forms including the ones in Yale.
note:I am for Gay Marriage but I am against bullying people who are not for it.
"I really do not know a single state including CA and OR, where gay marriage actually garnered Popular majority."
It's interestingly how strong your opinion is when it could be easily improved upon by just reading wikipedia[3]. Here are states that actually passed SSM by popular referendum:
I also disagree with how the Brendon Eich was handled and it's important to have a diversity of views within an organization. Ultimately I think if Eich had been a stronger leader he would have been able to move past the incident, but there were already issues of confidence in his leadership BEFORE the incident happened.[5]
"On March 24, 2014, Eich was promoted to CEO of Mozilla Corporation. Gary Kovacs, John Lilly and Ellen Siminoff resigned from the Mozilla board after the appointment, some expressing disagreements with Eich's strategy and their desire for a CEO with experience in the mobile industry."
Not OP, but I read his remark to mean "at the time Prop 8 was passed". To that argument, if that was indeed his intent, I believe he would have been correct.
Post Prop 8, we've seen some massive enlightenment on the subject.
You are correct. In my argument I was pointing out about how things were at the time of Prop 8, which I think is around 2008. The gay marriage debate got much needed momentum in 2012. In 2008 even Barack Obama was not for Gay Marriage.
Yea, sorry for the snark, comes naturally. I also think that if Eich had the same change of heart he would still have been booted. I really think the people protesting him didn't have as much influence as it seemed. Btw, Obama was against Prop 8 in 2008 for what it's worth[1].
I was of the opinion that people should have at least given him a chance, he stated that he would respect the Mozilla policies of openness and put his personal beliefs aside and I would have liked to at least see him try.
The "PC vocal minority" were Mozilla's own employees and contributors. You can say what you like about the California electorate as a whole but to be against gay marriage in San Francisco is to be an asshole. Eich should have known he was endangering Mozilla's ability to attract and retain talent and outside contributions.
Q: Was Brendan Eich forced out by employee pressure?
A: No. Mozilla employees expressed a wide range of views on Brendan’s appointment as CEO: the majority of them positive and in support of his leadership, or expressing disappointment in Brendan’s support of Proposition 8 but that they nonetheless felt he would be a good leader for Mozilla. A small number (fewer than 10) called for his resignation, none of whom reported to Brendan directly. However media coverage focused disproportionately on the small number of negative comments — largely ignoring the wide range of reactions across the Mozilla community.
Mozilla’s culture of openness extends to encouraging our staff and community to be candid about their views on Mozilla’s direction, including during and after Brendan’s appointment as CEO. We’re proud of that openness and how it distinguishes Mozilla from most organizations.
I guess that's something I don't grok. How are his personal beliefs some reason to not work at Mozilla? He is not Mozilla. Do you refuse to work for companies where someone has differing opinions? You must not work then. Now, if he was using his position to proselytize to his fellow Mozilla employees, then I could see the point. But he wasn't.
Ugh. The Brendan Eich issue was about freedom of association -- in particular, the right of Mozilla employees and stakeholders not to be associated with the bigoted groups (and their hateful TV ads) Eich was supporting -- rather than freedom of speech.
People hate to have their heroes torn down, even if their hero is just the creator of a fifth-rate programming language that nobody would willingly use if it weren't the only available zero-compile option on Berners-Lee's juggernaut of an application platform.
I can't remember where I heard this, but someone once said that defending your actions by citing freedom of association is sort of the ultimate concession; you're saying that the most compelling thing you can say for what you do is that it's not literally illegal to do so.
I'm not saying that the sanction against him was the best course of action, or that it was even necessary.
Just that people who think that his "freedom of speech" was in some way violated -- or that the anger directed against him was simply about his being on the wrong side of a ballot issue -- are at least very misinformed about certain things.
Not just his freedom. There is a chilling effect that makes people more afraid of expressing their opinions for fear of losing their jobs.
Of course, I'm not arguing about the legal definition of freedom of speech, I'm making a moral argument.
>the anger directed against him was simply about his being on the wrong side of a ballot issue
What was it about? If his opinions on gay marriage make everyone involved in Mozilla look bad, then certainly the reputational effects of firing someone for his political opinions have to be taken into account as well. People might start being less enthusiastic about working for Mozilla if they feel they have to walk on eggshells all the time.
I was originally going to lump this article in with other "men's rights movement" stuff until I saw the author was Jonathan Haidt. I had the honor to take Psyc 101 with Prof. Haidt years ago at the University of Virginia. He was a wonderful teacher who expected the best out of his students. He struck me as a very intelligent man who had put a lot of thought into both what he taught as well as his opinions. When he bring up his own beliefs in class he was very open to letting others voice dissenting opinions. More importantly, he always seemed willing to consider alternative views.
I know this is all anecdotal, but I put a lot of trust in his opinions and pay attention when he says something.
It is anecdotal, but as someone who disagrees with Haidt on most things political, his TED talks and books are, to my ears, spot on, and comprised of very rigorous science, which I previous did not think possible in psych fields.
I confess that I liked the article before I noticed the author, though I honestly kept expecting it to devolve into some kind of MRA tirade which would likely have lost me, but after finishing the article and having found no such vitriol, I scrolled up and saw that it was Haidt, which I wish I'd seen earlier as it might have assuaged the tension I felt.
Or more charitably, the grandparent comment author found a way to do the admirable (and for almost all of us, all-too-rare) task of reevaluating with renewed respect something previously dismissed.
And vice versa! Biggest problem the internet currently has around these social justice issues is that the loudest voices are often extremists on one side or the other completely lacking empathy for anyone different from themselves.
That exact quote is part of the current problem - dismissal of a serious and concerning issue. Nowadays you'd never see someone going "I was originally going to lump this article in with other "black people's rights movement" stuff", except maybe on the more extremist parts of the internet.
Normally if I read an article about the men's right movement, it ends up being slightly malicious or dismissive of other movements like feminism. I don't disagree with a lot of their points, but there often seems to be a thread of misogyny just under the surface which makes me less likely to take them seriously.
When disagreeing with a particular popular liberal thought is so taboo, the people who want to vocalize their dissent will find strange bedfellows. In this case the unabashedly misogynistic.
Without carefully measured responses, the larger moment will steamroll the dissent with guilt by association (the last many years) until it becomes unavoidable (the last year-ish?) when the ideas are presented in non-hitpeices by The Atlantic and Vox.
> When disagreeing with a particular popular liberal thought is so taboo, the people who want to vocalize their dissent will find strange bedfellows. In this case the unabashedly misogynistic.
That's not something I'm going to do. I don't subscribe to "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" and I want nothing to do with misogyny. We're not doing ourselves any favors by associating with terrible people just because they agree with us on some issues.
When that happens, I'll be malicious and dismissive toward feminism. But that hasn't happened yet. There are more feminists who are reasonable people than there are vocal crazies.
Some things said by feminists:
* "Men weren’t really the enemy — they were fellow victims suffering from an outmoded masculine mystique that made them feel unnecessarily inadequate when there were no bears to kill." -- Betty Friedan
* "Women and men communicate differently, often on entirely different planes. But just as men have failed us, we have failed them. It has been one of our great collective female shortcomings to presume that whatever we do not perceive simply isn't there, or that whatever is not communicated in our language is not intelligible speech." ― Norah Vincent
* I can't find the reference, but I seem to remember that the first person to widely spread the idea that it's possible for men to be raped was a feminist.
Remember that the college kids at Yale are exactly that: kids. I remember a time shortly after I became an atheist where I was angry at everyone religious for wronging me. It took me a while to realize that many religious people weren't horrible people, they were just humans, who were doing the wrong thing while trying their best to do the right thing. College students who are newly finding their voices are defining the conversation here, but they're not bad people, they just haven't realized yet that the people who they're attacking are just humans, too.
And then you get people who promote the Duluth Model, which declares men guilty until proven innocent. No, feminism has turned into an anti-male movement. Prominent exceptions aside, feminism is the excuse the current illiberal generation is using to curtail the rights of men. "Bitch" is profane, but the word "mansplain" is apparently respectable vocabulary.
Tell me all you want that feminism isn't a harmful force in society today. That idea is not consistent with my experience. When modern feminists hear that boys are doing worse in school than they used to, they just say "good; it's about time". These days, every time I hear someone arguing against equal treatment, against free speech, against due process, and again diversity of opinion, that person is a self-proclaimed feminist.
Modern feminists really believe that today's men, especially white men, should suffer for imagined crimes of our ancestors. It's perfectly fine to have women-only conferences and events, but if we even think of a men-only club, that's backwards and sexist. Feminism is about double standards and about setting the genders against each other. The idea that feminism benefits men too is a lie.
> No, feminism has turned into an anti-male movement.
If you're incapable of recognizing that feminism isn't one set of ideas, but a diverse set of ideas, you're just as bad as those who espouse the Duluth model. You accuse all feminists of declaring men guilty until proven innocent, but in doing so, you're declaring all feminists guilty even despite the fact that I've already shown some of them to be innocent. And what's more, you're alienating a lot of feminists who would be on your side.
> That idea is not consistent with my experience.
Which is why I tried to expand your experience by quoting major feminist writers. Do you not realize that your experience is limited?
> These days, every time I hear someone arguing against equal treatment, against free speech, against due process, and again diversity of opinion, that person is a self-proclaimed feminist.
Every time I see a rapist on the news that person is a self-proclaimed man. If you're going to (correctly) complain about being judged by a few poor examples of our gender, you should recognize the hypocrisy of judging all feminists by a few poor examples of their movement.
The feminists you are dismissing as irrelevant have every bit as much social currency and power as the ones who are vocal, they just aren't using it as often, which is why it's so short-sighted of you do dismiss them. The public debate on this isn't going to be won by men dismissing feminism: that's just going to radicalize more feminists. And even if it could be won that way, that is that what you want: for men to control the public discourse and women be trivialized? That's not what I want. I want actual equality.
More likely, the path to reason is for reasonable feminists to hear how important this issue is from reasonable men, and start taking our side.
It's political suicide for a man to publicly stand against radical feminism. It's not political suicide for a moderate feminist to stand against radical feminism.
> It's political suicide for a man to publicly stand against radical feminism
Standing against feminism is becoming more and more viable. The amazing thing about these radicals is that they only have the power you give them. If you refuse to resign, refuse to apologize, and refuse to listen, they just go pound their fists uselessly, and you can get on with your life. Is your ideology beach body ready?
> for men to control the public discourse and women be trivialized? That's not what I want. I want actual equality.
Strawman, and you know it. I want equal treatment for all. Today's feminist errors in assuming that unequal outcome implies unequal treatment. That's the part where feminism diverges from reality.
It's not useful to suggest that I must either support feminism (whatever you say it means) or support male superiority.
> If you refuse to resign, refuse to apologize, and refuse to listen, they just go pound their fists uselessly, and you can get on with your life.
Or, you can get fired. You don't have to look far for examples of this happening. I don't support radical feminism, but I'm also not ready to martyr myself over it if that can be avoided. Losing your job and social standing does nobody any good.
> > for men to control the public discourse and women be trivialized? That's not what I want. I want actual equality.
> Strawman, and you know it.
You literally said:
> > feminism isn't one set of ideas, but a diverse set of ideas
> Irrelevant. What matters is the people who have social currency and power today, and they're the toxic variety of feminist.
You literally said that all the feminists who are not the feminists you're railing against are irrelevant. If that's a strawman, it's a strawman that you said, and I can only respond to what you say.
> Today's feminist errors in assuming that unequal outcome implies unequal treatment. That's the part where feminism diverges from reality.
"Today's feminist" as you claim, a single entity, does not exist.
> It's not useful to suggest that I must either support feminism (whatever you say it means) or support male superiority.
That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that it is equally not useful to suggest that women either give up the title and role of feminism or support female superiority.
Dr. Christina Hoff Sommers has done some interesting research, and given many eye opening talks regarding this matter. Reading this article made my morning. It's time we step back and reevaluate the way we are raising the youth. This war on boys is wrong, and could have disastrous effects on our society in the future.
Agreed. It is baffling to me that nobody seems to seriously consider that this war on men/boys is what creates this weird and uncomfortable social dynamic. Masculinity is not something to be feared or ashamed of, teaching that is what creates dysfunctional men.
- you're not allowed to show emotion (unless it's anger)
- you must get all of your emotional needs met through first your mother, and then your girlfriend / wife
As a tall, large framed man, I often get very strong negative reactions when I am physically fit. And I mean fit not weightlifting bulk. Keeping short hair and a clean shave while swimming regularly is a very utilitarian choice, but you get even stronger negative reactions. The way out? Growing long hair transformed rather negative skin head connotations with a far more teasing Fabio.
Our culture really looks down on the strong male archetype.
PS: Don't believe me? Try growing a natural aka full beard.
For one thing it lowers the bar before people think your indigent. Depending on industry it can often make it harder to find a job. On the whole it's generally viewed as a low status symbol.
Granted this is mostly from the east coast of the US (DC). And having a styled bearded seems to make a large difference.
All I can say is that I and my friends in the NYC and Philly region working (mostly) in pharmaceutical and financial industries do not generally experience this. But obviously that would be anecdotal.
This is going to sound worse than I mean it to be, but I'm not familiar with NYC.
Is Philly a "hipster" region?
A full (groomed) beard in SanFran will be seen completely differently than full (groomed) beard in Los Angeles. You'll fit right in with the SF hipsters but you'll be seen as a bum/idiot in LA.
There is a drastic difference in perception against say.. the Dollar Beard Club [0] and "manly-men" beards. The difference in perception is a source of comedy [1].
The source of this perception difference is that people "allowed" to grow beards for work were/are typically blue-collar workers. Blue-collar work is associated with those of lesser intelligence (sorry to any hard working blue-collars out there....) while white-collar professions are seen as "more intelligent" and have typically required being clean shaven. As it follows, facial hair = blue collar worker = less intelligent. That's just how things are currently.
Obviously this is changing, but more-so in "hipster" areas where people do white-collar work and grow their beards out. As the requirement/stigma against facial hair dies out.
Required. I'm in graduate school right now and you won't get a call back for 2nd rounds if you have a beard. It's some sort of irrational proxy for discipline.
It's not just a question of grooming. Short but sparse beards can look unkempt. This is probably self selecting as men who have issues growing a thick beard are more likely to shave if there well off.
I'm in the southeast, here a shaved (or nearly shaved) head and a full beard (if the guy can grow it, goatees otherwise) are incredibly common, and (mostly) disjoint from the skinhead crowd.
And the current anti-men fad the article speaks about is only enforcing that, only extending it with "You're not allowed to have an opinion because you are a (white) (non-transsexual) (straight) man. The SJW movement isn't making the world a better place, it's trying to take political correctness to its extremes, which is its own form of oppression with the side-effects of people in certain demographics becoming afraid to speak up (see article).
You're oversimplifying "social norms" to the point where you completely neglect the emotional outlets that males DO use.
Outlets (like male-only spaces for one, or sports, for another) that have been demonized by those same people who create this generalized talking point. Many of our boys have lost that outlet. Or don't even know it exists anymore.
Even if we posit what you say is true, there are no alternate expression and communication toolboxes presented as a set of life skills. The only thing society has offered are signals that society wants men to cry more, and only in the situations they're socially cued to cry.
The comment you're replying to says "Masculinity is not something to be feared or ashamed of, teaching that is what creates dysfunctional men."
What other impression do you expect men to get when they're told the problem with masculinity is that it's too masculine? For them to act LESS stoic? Is society going to accept with open arms an entirely new form of expression?
Especially when the people who fancy themselves able to understand the problems with masculinity cue men to be more stoic while pretending to want the opposite. (The more degenerate form of it from people that get all their philosophy from blogs with Fox News levels of bullshit even has a cute little hastagh for it #MasculinitySoFragile)
There was recent article on some big media house about transplant uterus implanted into woman. And she delivered a healthy baby. There was some hint that completely artificial uterus could be possibility in the future.
The shitstorm from women was huge. "Think about the children not adopted." It's illogical argument, made for logical reasons.
Young women are potential mothers, then they are mothers, and then they get to be grandmothers. That's their special value to society and their privileges are based on that capability. When someone hint's about losing that special status, women get really defensive.
It's easy to joke about fragility of masculinity, when status of femininity is hard coded to bodies of women. Women talk about femininity a lot, but they have not had to really question it yet.
That being said, humor seems to be so integral part of masculinity that it's only fitting to laugh about it.
It could be both; that when young men have "traditional masculinity" exposed as bullshit (which I agree with) and pulled out from under them, they have difficulty understanding themselves in a world without such a framing device.
"Traditional masculinity" is the kind of masculinity that have enabled humanity to survived for millions of years.
It includes traits such as:
- Protecting women and children
- Not crying when a tiger attack
- Attacking the tiger instead, and to do so, requires
- Forming a group of hunters, to go and kill that tiger, aka leadership
- This also requires some amount of muscles, and aggression
- because you can't kill a tiger with love and passivity
- Declaring war on other men who want to rape your wife and daughter
- Not wanting to, but having to fight wars against other group of men who want to rape your wife and daughter
- Letting your son fight, and practice fighting with friend, so that they can defend themselves against enemies, who want to rape your wife and daughters, and... tigers, who wants to eat your wife and daughters
- Also, if a tiger attacks, the brother has to save the sister, and if necessary, sacrifices himself to make sure the sister survives
- Most important of all, a guy must be able to acquire resources in some form (food, woods, money, cows, etc) to provide for his family (without complaining, whining, crying, or any other emo bullshit that doesn't help him in his goal of acquiring resources)
- etc. etc.
You know. The traditional traits that a woman look for in a man. Obviously, as we have found out, these traits are bullshit and toxic and men MUST get rid of these traits that helped humanity survived for millions of years, because, like they said, they're all toxic.
Well, rape culture is a huge problem on campus these days.
Also, just look at ISIS. Whenever they conquered a new place, they rape and sold all the women/girls into slavery. You seriously don't think rape exist anymore?
As a student at Dartmouth, I find this article to be extremely accurate and representative of the culture I've encountered amongst the protests here and (through conversations with friends) at other places across the country. As a white male, my friends and I are too intimidated by the Black Lives Matter protesters and their actions to try to initiate any sort of discussion on the matter in fear that we'll only provoke more anger and protest.
If people are angry about X and you go up to them and try to tell them how much you like/support X, isn't that what you'd expect? To make people want to engage you in a thoughtful discussion, it's important to demonstrate humility and open-mindedness to their opinions.
I recently tried to engage a BLM protester about the issues, hoping to have a thoughtful discussion about some policies and ways forward to improve the situation. 3 paragraphs latter, I was being told that my white privilege should exclude me from even participating in the discussion, let alone informing decisions about policy - ostensibly because I do not have a shared experience of discrimination.
While I agree with most of the article, the author tries to politicize it at points, which I think is a mistake. This is not an issue of liberals trying to silence opposition, indeed when we see the most vehement efforts at shaming differing views the language is not ideological but personal: "X was hurtful" "He/she felt threatened".
I'm a true blue leftist not long out of a famously liberal liberal university and I would have raised my hands on the eggshells questions. I vividly recall a student proposing a test on candidates' general positions at polls and being literally shouted down before he could finish speaking. Despite its ugly history in the US it's not of liberals vs conservatives, at least not in the way we use those terms in the US.
We have a problem with limiting discourse in schools but trying to shoehorn it into the usual political framework frankly alienates those of us in the left who are having to choose between apologizing for zealots on our side of the spectrum or aligning with groups that seem to inevitably take on repulsive undertones of intolerance and a whole other host of positions that have nothing to do with our own beyond being marginalized by the same extremely vocal group.
One thing that I haven't seen anyone mention is that this sort of walking on eggshells culture tends to build higher walls around the privileged and powerful group. How often do you think these privileged rich white boys go on to become employers and refuse to higher someone from an out group (consciously or unconsciously) due to fear that the slightest misinterpreted off hand remark could bring hell down on them, but if they hire the other privileged white guy they can comfortably be themselves without risk.
I think even if you have the most leftist SJW views and objectives, you have to see this as counter productive.
I'm pretty sure some leftist SJW really can't see this as counter productive. It's not just employment, this shit cuts through everything. I can't imagine how this crowd could side with the white supremacists knowingly.
Thank you so much for posting this. It articulated a lot of the angst I was feeling in college that I felt like I couldn't express without sounding insensitive or offensive.
This drove me out of the humanities completely when I was in college. The topic of discussion in a class freshman year was whether natural selection still or ever applied to humans. I said no, because decisions on how many kids you have tends to vary from culture to culture, and I mentioned specifically Catholicism and the 1 child law in China. And I was called racist.
HN suffers from this problem, and I have found it increasing over time. Sometimes I am afraid to upvote certain stories or comments as I fear the hidden moderators can see what people are voting on and punish them accordingly. I know that this is irrational but still those feelings creep in. Every time the hate mob takes someone down professionally and the more ridiculous the circumstances the more people self censor. The silent majority is the biggest political and social problem of our time. People forget that far left political movements have been just as bloody and hateful as far right. This stuff is dangerous.
I've never liked appeals to a "silent majority" because it groups everyone who doesn't make their voice heard into a vague group that's assumed to be on the same page. I'm generally silent on these issues, for example, but my stance isn't as simple as "I disagree with those stupid college kids" or "all of you people are so privileged and ignorant."
You definitely got at the thrust of the issue, though. I don't really want to present an opinion that's going to trigger an avalanche of hate that might not even relate to what I'm saying. I don't post the vast majority of the comments I start typing.
Sorry I didnt mean to suggest that the silent majority has the same views more that the majority is silent, and I wanted to link that maybe they are silent because of the climate of going after people so aggressively for having the wrong brand (problematic) of views/beliefs.
I prefer a society where people can be challenged on their beliefs, when people refuse to have a rational discussion using logic and real facts they are exposing themselves for what they are, hateful.
Actually, as soon as I saw the original post, I wanted to say exactly what you said. (and actually, I didn't because I know that HN is mostly a politically-correct crowd) HN does suffer from leaning to a 'politically correct' narrative.
As a technologist, I absolutely love debates about (for instance) whether a startup should adopt Scheme or Haskell as a competitive advantage.
But any kind of debate that veers off the liberal politically-correct agenda on HN gets downvoted or hellbanned into oblivion. What you've said is absolutely true: "The silent majority is the biggest political and social problem of our time." HN, despite its enormous contribution to Silicon Valley, is a blue-pill population.
Kudos to you for saying it. The emperor wears no clothes.
The concept presented here of "seeking justice by appeal to the majority" reminds me of the Twitter phenomenon in which people learned that the only way to get customer service from Google/Ubisoft/Bank of America/(insert giant faceless company) was to tweet a grievance publicly. It seems to work well, at least in a few high-profile cases. At least, it worked a few times when private requests failed. Perhaps people are learning by example?
The old-fashioned ("culture of honor/dignity"?) style of one-on-one negotiation is often futile when you are dealing with a company.
Well yes, they're learning by example. People are getting fired or ostracised by mobs on sites like Twitter based on things like this. It's an unfortunate pattern where instead of countering arguments or having a debate, a lot of people (especially in these SJW groups) tend to try and destroy someone's livelihood instead.
And because a lot of companies seem to care more about their 'reputation' then any sort of principles, you end up in a situation where people are too scared to talk out in case a social media mob destroys their life.
Girl A: I like apples.
Girl B: I don't like what you're saying. Hey everybody, she's a witch!
Mob deals out punishment.
You can clearly see that the mob is being played, being used like a pawn, by Girl B. The mob doesn't actually benefit form this. Girl B benefits from this because she got rid of her competitor.
The same way those students protesting are being used by the person at the top. The students don't actually benefits. Meanwhile, the person calling the mob to action is actually the person that benefits (law suit settlement, patronage, donations, government funding, etc).
For a while now I've thought that 4-year residential college is a dying model. Here's how I view the value proposition of college and how it is being replaced by tech:
* Validation of raw talent by a third party (admissions office) --> can be done by technology today in ways impossible 10 years ago and hard to imagine 30 years ago
* Socialization around other people in the top decile (or higher) of book-smarts --> can largely be done by online communities (not a full replacement for interpersonal interaction but better than what was available before)
* Access to top-tier employers who didn't have time to look through every candidate out there, so economized their recruiting efforts at places where smart young people are concentrated --> this model made largely obsolete by internet
* Access to lots of obscure books at college library --> made completely obsolete by internet
* Access to great lectures --> made obsolete by internet / MOOCs
* Access to a diversity of opinions, the exposure to which will make you a better and more informed person --> these days only applicable if you come from a very sheltered conservative background....otherwise college just reinforces existing biases
If I had to choose between two candidates with the same proficiency in a testable skill set (JavaScript, GAAP accounting, laying brick, whatever else), at this point I'd probably prefer someone who spent four years working on a fishing boat, or trying to make it as a musician, or on a church mission, or hiking the PCT / CDT / AT, or in the Marines, or something else challenging, over someone who went to an elite undergrad institution. They just seem more and more like indoctrination mills that crank out entitled little whiners.
If I had to choose between two candidates with the same proficiency in a testable skill set (JavaScript, GAAP accounting, laying brick, whatever else), at this point I'd probably prefer someone who spent four years working on a fishing boat, or trying to make it as a musician, or on a church mission, or hiking the PCT / CDT / AT, or in the Marines, or something else challenging, over someone who went to an elite undergrad institution.
I reach the exact opposite conclusion. Give me a student who has spent four years learning how to learn. Someone who has had forced exposure to a whole lot of different disciplines. Who was forced to study things they don't much care about, because the value in doing so is so high.
Spending four years pursuing a passion, or working on a boat.. is.. great I suppose. But a well-rounded college graduate is something the tech crowd really doesn't value enough these days.
I actually agree strongly with your point, I just think that the pursuits named above are better at teaching people how to learn than many colleges are these days.
I liked the following comment.
The speaker himself is probably biased as to what happened to him:
As a student of ‘centerville high school’ as well, I can assure you this comment is completely true. While multiple questions were phrased as attacks towards Haidt personally, many of them were completely rational. In response to one question (about his annoyance towards people who are pushing women to be in more stem positions) he stated a very vague position on how women, no matter their environmental conditions in childhood, are still predisposed to not be in stem positions (genetically).
This was not the only ‘sketchy’ point he made. The question about his condoning of rape, while completely unnecessary, was founded on his insensitivity towards the subject (which continued into many subjects, including race and gender).
His careful picking of data allowed his points to made clearly and succinctly in his mind. Questions that were too long or that had follow ups were completely ignored. In response to one of the first (albeit angry and unnecessary) questions, Haidt’s response was to tell the audience that in order to fully look at an argument, one had to look at both sides, something I (as someone who did believe in a large amount of what Haidt was saying) had to scoff at. His entire argument was founded on the idea that everyone being free to say whatever they want is the best thing possible for American schools, while being politically correct in all scenarios is the worst thing possible for American schools. Obviously there are positive and negative aspects to both. This completely contradicts his belief to look at both sides of an argument dispassionately, not to mention being hard, as students who do care about their education, to listen to.
Haidt’s talk was difficult to listen to. Even though I believe in almost all of his points (despite being part of many, although not all, of the minority groups mentioned) his inability to speak to us effectively (in a way that didn’t seem like he condoned rape) made it so that his argument was not relayed to us clearly. His blatant misunderstanding of his audience put him in the position to be attacked.
One can say that he did that on purpose, to prove his point about shaking those who do walk on eggshells. But that doesn’t work. Telling defensive people their wrong doesn’t work. Sorry.
The one thing that perplexes me more than anything is nobody ever thought free speech allows us to monitor the people who have radical ideologies and ideas that threaten our country. When you silence opposition simply because it offends somebody or some group, you lose the opportunity to monitor these people and their ideas.
I want to know if there's skinheads who want to start a race war or the black panther party leader who advocates violence against non-whites. Sure it's offensive to me, but I want to KNOW these people are out there and know what they're thinking.
This is one of the reason governments and police forces aren't trying to complete wipe terrorists groups and extremists off the internet. Because if their posts are publically viewable, then it's easier to watch what they're up to and stop anything dangerous occurring as a result. If they take them down, then these people simply go 'underground' and becomes it a lot more difficult to check whether they're planning anything.
Of course, there's also a downside (that a certain few people might be inspired or encouraged by extremist content they see online), but it's better for security to let such people give themselves away before anything can happen.
Thank you for posting this article. I've often felt the "walking on eggshells" phenomenon you describe, but I've never even felt able to call it out without risking being labeled an "enemy" of a cause. Seems you found a great way to do so.
as long the definition of the word 'safety' has been expanded to include removing any risk of emotional distress from day-to-day life, we might as well call the current campus climate 'unsafe' for anyone who doesn't hold the prevailing views. i know i certainly didn't feel 'safe' to express the occasional disagreement with the majority opinion while at wesleyan, even though i was 99% in agreement with those prevailing views. i felt paranoid about (either accidentally or deliberately) saying the wrong thing and therefore provoking mob justice. 'walking on eggshells' was an understatement. that paranoia felt more than justified when people who had expressed contrary opinions were the subject of campus-wide mockery, derision, and ostracism.
being reflexively deferential to every conceivable sensitivity causes us to disproportionately look out for the safety of some at the expense of the overall atmosphere of civility, dignity, respect, and yes, 'safety,' of the campus. it really hit home when recently Wesleyan's campus newspaper lost a good portion of its funding because it dared to publish an op-ed criticizing the Black Lives Matter movement on effectiveness grounds [1]. After all, students no longer felt "safe" knowingly attending the same school as someone who disagrees with them (rightly or wrongly). i am completely embarrassed.
An excellent article. I hope people actually read it instead of dismissing it because someone influential on twitter doesn't like the fact that it doesn't fit a specific narrative. I'm glad academia is starting to wake up on that very specific issue. Good luck to its author, he is going to need it, because some people will be out eager to destroy his career.
I have extremely mixed feelings about all of this.
On the one hand, I think the whole point of university is debate, discourse, critical thought. The apparent trend away from liberalism is very distressing.
On the other, I sympathize with the notion that liberalism can often be a way for the privileged to entrench their privilege, and that unprivileged voices don't benefit from it equally. If you're black and you believe that black americans are owed reparations, you probably can't say that freely without expecting some negative repercussions in your future life: you'll be judged and categorized, marked as "uppity". Liberalism doesn't exist in a vacuum: we have to take into account other societal truths when we're evaluating its effects.
I don't have a great handle on how to reconcile all of this.
The problem is that this also goes on in adulthood and even in board meetings. Even if you have the majority on your side they will sit quietly and watch you take a beating!
Then think about what happens if you try to have a discussion about something that is not "politically correct".
The problem with not allowing discussion about extreme topics is that the extremists will end up only discussing among themselves. And that's where it can become dangerous.
There's nothing wrong with what is being said here. Except that there are just as many "climate" issues that woman and people of color have to face, if not more. This person is cherry-picking discussions about race and gender and saying "it's horrible that climate issues are making it difficult for these white/male students from participating" but the same level of outcry doesn't exist even though in almost every other field you can say the same kind of thing: "it's horrible that climate issues in computer science are making it difficult for these students of color" and the same people are silent.
And I realize I am doing a form of derailing right now, because the matter at hand is white boys being heard. But we're actually talking about white boys being heard during advanced discussions of race and gender. And honestly I feel a little bit the same about it that I feel about girls being heard during advanced discussions of parallel CPU architectures. I wish there were more women who were in those discussions, but I don't think the solution is "just let them participate even if what they say is totally ignorant".
Frankly, most white boys are not skilled enough to participate in discussions about race and gender. It's not that there's anything inherently wrong with them, the pipeline is just letting us down completely. Most of us get almost no education in race and gender, while girls and people of color get it for free just because of their gender or race.
The solution in my mind is the same as the solution to getting more women and other disenfranchised groups into computer science. Everyone just needs to take a little bit of responsibility for the part of the pipeline that's one step upstream from them. You can't just have boys who have never thought about what colonialism actually feels like diving right into university-level gender politics classes. But as a university professor I think you can support summer programs for teenage boys to help them do really basic level gender analysis stuff so that when they do get to college, they can actually participate meaningfully with the girls, and not be seen as second-class citizens just because they have less direct experience.
We shouldn't think of these boys as "bad gender theorists" we need to broaden our understanding of what gender theory is, and make sure we are creating opportunities for disenfranchised novices to get involved.
But this naive affirmative action approach OP is advocating, of "just make sure the boys participate equally" is not taking the problem seriously. Proper affirmative action requires you to get in and take responsibility for your recruitment process and the social issues surrounding it.
>You can't just have boys who have never thought about what colonialism actually feels like
And now, you're just assuming that white boys have no empathy. Wow.
>Proper affirmative action requires you to get in and take responsibility for your recruitment process and the social issues surrounding it...
If everybody just stop fighting, there would be world peace. BUT, the reality is, not everybody will stop fighting. And there is nothing we can do to change that. We can make fighting illegal. BUT, nothing can change the reality. The reality is, people will still fight.
>Proper affirmative action requires you to get in and take responsibility for your recruitment process and the social issues surrounding it...
I know of a way to solve the economic problem we're facing. If we just make all CEOs of all companies competent...
>Proper affirmative action requires you to get in and take responsibility for your recruitment process and the social issues surrounding it
You may be responsibility in your recruitment process, but that doesn't mean others will be.
>But if everybody just be more responsible in their recruitment process...
Again, if the world just stop fighting wars, there would be no wars.
But really, I don't see how that is an implementable solution. How are you going to implement something like that? How are you going to implement "world-stop-fighting-wars"? How are you going to implement "everyone-is-more-responsible-when-recruiting"?
My stock retort always is "Well, I find your narrow-mindedness offensive". Questions, logical and calmly asked, also swiftly dismantle those flapping on about misplaced social concerns.
Almost feel sorry for them, like these views are thinly-veiled insecurities about some aspect of themselves or trauma experienced.
It's also a lie. Try engaging the "I'm only intolerant of intolerance" crowd on, say, climate change, abortion, or the death penalty. It takes tortuous logical contortions to frame any of these issues in terms of "intolerance," and yet you'll likely be met with vitriol nonetheless.
It's even more dishonest to take all of the opinions held by individuals of some ill-defined cohort, and pretend that any inconsistencies between different individuals means that all members of the group are irrational and should be ignored.
It is dishonest but it's how political conversation has worked for a while now.
1. Create a label.
2. Demonize that label.
3. Associate people with that label.
That is the extent of political conversation. You see it pop up whenever you try to have a discussion on a topic and people start lashing out at things you haven't even thought about much less discussed. They're not having a conversation with you, they've having a conversation with a caricature.
The group I mentioned is precisely defined, and 100% opt-in—it's the set of all people who say "I'm only intolerant of intolerance."
all members of the group are irrational and should be ignored
Are you accusing me of thinking that? Because I didn't say that, and I don't think that. Reread my comment: saying "you'll likely be met with vitriol" implies that the converse—that you won't be met with vitriol—is also possible.
Great post. We have the same thing in Brazil. But I am unsure with this problem really starts in high school.
Actually, I think this problem starts on Facebook...
I didn't downvote you, but I think other people are because the article's central thesis is that this social phenomenon is at its core neither radical politics nor anti-school protests. Rather, the article claims that it's merely a new coat of paint on the same old gang bullying/identity politics/being mean to outsiders to increase one's own social status.
I did downvote you, because this isn't at all what the article was about. Dismissiveness is annoying anyway, but it's especially useless when you completely miss the subject.
This directly relates to us in tech. Specifically, there is a huge push to reach out to women and girls in CS. I am not opposed to females in CS at all. I will encourage males and females alike to pursue it, because I see CS as the great equalizer; the only thing that matters is what you produce.
What I can't stand are these "Women in technology" conferences and workshops to "close the (gender) gap". Why? Because if you focus on one group, then you are actively not focusing on another. Given the dichotomy defined by their stated purpose, they are actively dismissive of men (boys). That is wrong.
I don't care about the men/women ratio. People will choose whatever path they enjoy and want to work at. I do care very strongly, though, about treating people equally.
If I say this publically, then I, too, will be ostracized. That is why this article is so very important!
>What I can't stand are these "Women in technology" conferences and workshops to "close the (gender) gap". Why? Because if you focus on one group, then you are actively not focusing on another.
That's the problem though. Sometimes you need to give special attention to a group to ensure that their abilities and accomplishments are seen. You may not personally have this problem, but there are members of the "old guard" that do. I surmise solely from this comment that you do your best to ensure that members of your team are the best regardless of physical differences. Again, this is why you aren't inherently the problem.
The problem is people like a professor I had. He has published papers, an incredible work history, and he has rubbed elbows with a few CS people renown for their work. He made off-handed comments like, "First exam is in two weeks. Ladies, please don't wait until the day before to cram." He probably doesn't mean anything malicious by the comment, but that its an off-putting comment nonetheless. Another parallel would be the military. There are lots of females in the military, but one of the gross sentiments among males when encountering staff NCO females is, "How many people did she have to blow to pick up staff?" It's comments like those, some of the "bro culture", and general "CS is for guys" attitude that gives reason for women's conferences.
The majority is always in focus on a grand scale. It's easy to feel like certain people are getting special treatment when Group-X Conference specifically targets a group. The purpose, though admittedly they can miss the mark, is to avoid systematic exclusion or opposition that prevents entry or ignores their contribution.
> That's the problem though. Sometimes you need to give special attention to a group to ensure that their abilities and accomplishments are seen
But this would imply that they actually possess these abilities and are accomplishing things with them. The problem isn't that we have droves of women programmers who are being systematically overlooked by potential employers - it's that there simply aren't very many women even interested in becoming programmers in the first place.
In my 10 years of software development I've never been in an environment where anybody cared about someone beyond how their code was written and how well they communicated with others. Women, at every place I've worked, have always been treated as equals. I personally wish there was more women in Tech but for completely selfish reasons - I like interacting with women. But as I mentioned down below, I just wish we had more people in tech in general, regardless of who they are.
For whatever reason, though, women 10-20 years ago weren't very interested in tech. The medical field and the hard sciences, sure, where they are actually very well represented. But not tech. But I'm guessing that's going to change on its own because of the one great equalizer - money.
This was what my closing statement was about: sometimes these initiatives have good intentions but miss the mark.
I personally feel like the lack of women due to the culture is more of an engineering thing than a CS thing. I could be wrong, of course, but my experience compared to peers in engineering agrees with your sentiment. Regardless, I think the initiative exists to ensure that the same exclusionary culture doesn't propagate in an already male-dominated field. This may not be the correct execution, but I at least applaud the efforts to make women feel welcomed.
I'm a grad student (already have my masters, 3rd year into PhD). I've only had one CS prof make a gender-related disparaging comment, and he was talked to privately, and his contract was not renewed at the end of the semester (that was not his only indiscretion). I have never seen anyone question (publicly or privately) a student's or professor's abilities and achievements, regardless of gender, unless they were otherwise underperforming. Furthermore, in those situations, sexual activity was never implied, but nepotism was.
As for these "women" conferences, I have a colleague who has attended 3 conferences in the past year (on the University's dime) just because of her gender (she was not presenting). I have attended 0 conferences. I was not even able to attend a conference in which my paper was accepted (my advisor presented in my place) because there was not enough funds for travel.
I agree completely, and am publicly willing to do so because I'm not willing to live in a future where I can't publicly disagree with someone. Why is it technology, specifically, that needs to be equalized? Because it's currently trendy? Because there's a lot of money in it? Is money all that matters? Why aren't we as interested in getting, say, more men into nursing, considering there a lot of underemployed, undereducated men in the US who have to work blue collar or service industry jobs to scrape by while women dominate that very lucrative and stable field? It makes absolutely no sense to me and I agree with the parent commenter that CS is intriguing to me precisely because it's such a great equalizer. Your code speaks for you, not your gender, race, or creed. I also don't see a lot of "Women in Pro Football" groups, either, even though that's an incredibly lucrative and prestigious profession. The whole thing is bonkers, and this is coming from someone who has two daughters (who are free to pursue whatever profession they like).
> Why aren't we as interested in getting, say, more men into nursing
I take it from this comment that you don't work in nursing or know anyone who does. There is an active movement to get more men into nursing, though I don't follow nursing statistics closely enough to characterize its success.
Well, I'm not in the profession, but my partner has and she has seen a focus on male students at her school, as well as a preference for male nurses in hiring. These are completely anecdotal, of course, so what do we get if we google "men in nursing"?
I just thought male nurses was a particularly poor example, as people are interested in increasing the number of male nurses, and looking at the census report they have been having steady success.
I guess I don't see nearly as much in the mainstream media about the gender disparity in nursing as I do for tech, and certainly not on Hacker News. I can come up with other examples though. There aren't big pushes to get more women into construction, the military, emergency services, and other less topical fields just like there aren't pushes to get more men into interior design, event planning, human resources, and other female dominated fields. Could it be that people are just choosing what they would like to do for a living rather than being told what they should like to do?
They're probably talking about "Are you man enough to be a nurse?" which briefly grabbed attention over a decade ago.
Want more men in nursing? Discourage them from being competitive and choosing to become doctors. Male doctors outnumber female doctors nearly 2 to 1. Men become physicians and surgeons. Women become obstetrics and pediatrics. As a general rule of thumb, most fields that show a gender difference lean heavily towards social bias and differences between gender preferences than discrimination against anyone. I don't know when it became so socially unacceptable to have different preferences than someone else.
Disclaimer:
I don't work in nursing. My grandmother was a nurse for 35 years. I'd hardly call it an "active movement". I don't closely follow the statistics (frankly, I don't care) but it is easy to see that it has not been successful by any significant margin.
>Why aren't we as interested in getting, say, more men into nursing... I also don't see a lot of "Women in Pro Football" groups
This is seriously your argument? That's so fatalistic: this is the way things are, so this is the way things will be. You're also arguing a very "us" vs "them" mentality, which is what makes professions gendered to begin with.
>CS is intriguing to me precisely because it's such a great equalizer
You're ignoring the social aspect. Women are often discouraged from tech early on, which makes the profession more male-dominated, which makes women feel less comfortable, etc.
> This is seriously your argument? That's so fatalistic: this is the way things are, so this is the way things will be. You're also arguing a very "us" vs "them" mentality, which is what makes professions gendered to begin with.
Yeah, seriously. It's my argument. Did I not sound serious enough? Are you addressing the content within my argument or the tone of my argument?
I'm not being fatalistic, I'm genuinely asking those questions. I have a lot of male friends who didn't go into tech or nursing who are really struggling. One might go as far as to say they were "actively discouraged from nursing early on" while my female acquaintances happily slid into comfy and lucrative nursing positions. Yet, not once have I heard of or seen advertisements for Men in Nursing conferences or groups. I'm not making this "us" vs "them" as much as you want to frame my argument that way, and even if I did you'd have to explain why you think that leads to gendered professions.
> You're ignoring the social aspect. Women are often discouraged from tech early on, which makes the profession more male-dominated, which makes women feel less comfortable, etc.
Again, I could make the same (bad) argument by replacing "women" with "men" and "tech" with "nursing". Unless you're also willing to admit the problem exists there and needs to be dealt with, then I'm not sure we have much more to discuss.
If however, you do think the gender imbalance in the field of nursing is a problem, then I need to be educated as to why it's a problem. I've heard arguments about why we need to get more women in tech, but they've never made a whole lot of sense to me.
You know what we need more of in tech? People. Period. Far too few people chose CS as their field of study and as such there's a huge mismatch between supply and demand. If your mission is to increase the volume of people in tech, regardless of their race, gender, age, or creed, then count me in and how can I help?
Discussing nursing isn't relevant, and even if it is two wrongs don't make a right, which is the logical fallacy you keep making here. But if you want to hear me say it: there's a shortage of nurses and the fact that men aren't going into it due to social pressures is an issue.
>You know what we need more of in tech? People
Lowest hanging fruit: actively do something about the fact that half the population isn't going into tech. And this is what you're arguing against, even though you may not realize it. Those conferences and reach-out efforts are explicitly active attempts at solving the problem in a positive way. They aren't meant to exclude men (I was a member of the women in tech club in college), they're usually meant to undo harmful biases in society.
> Discussing nursing isn't relevant, and even if it is two wrongs don't make a right, which is the logical fallacy you keep making here. But if you want to hear me say it: there's a shortage of nurses and the fact that men aren't going into it due to social pressures is an issue.
As long as we're pointing out fallacies, you're attacking a straw man here. I'm not saying two wrongs make a right; I'm saying neither wrong is actually a wrong. They are simply outcomes, neither negative nor positive. The overarching point I'm trying to make is that if we both agree we need more nurses, and we both agree we need more techies, and we both agree that men tend toward tech and women tend toward nursing, and operating under the assumption that it's a zero sum game (hint: it's not), then there's nothing wrong with women staying in nursing to keep the overall number of nurses high and men staying in tech to keep the overall number of techies high.
I simply do not see the need for the fields of nursing and tech to swap genders until they both hit some gender equilibrium. The goal should be to increase the overall volume of both nurses and techies (and decrease, perhaps, the number of lawyers ;-).
And by the way, the other day my 3 year old daughter told me she wants to be a nurse when she grows up. It would feel wrong to discourage her by pushing her toward a career in programming, but maybe that's just me.
edit: grammar and added the bit about increasing overall volume of nurses and techies
You are wrong that there is a shortage of nurses and possibly programmers, but maybe the shortage of nurses is because men who would be good nurses don't want to become nurses for whatever reason.
Convincing more people who have good nurse-aptitudes that becoming a nurse is worthwhile is a legitimate strategy for increasing the number of nurses. Same for people who have good programmer-aptitudes and have been discouraged from playing with computers and stuff because of their gender.
The point, though, is that's not what these tech equality conferences are about - they are about equalizing the gap, i.e. it is the gap that is important, not the value of the work being done (or otherwise).
There's so many fields out there, so why should ALL women goes into tech?
You may say, "But why doesn't more women goes into tech?"
Well, let me ask this then, "So 80% of women goes into nursing. Why don't MORE women goes into nursing? Why not 90%? Why not 97.2% Or heck, why NOT less women? Why not some other arbitrary number?"
There are many fields out there. Each fields has it's own arbitrary number of men and women working in it. Why must a specific field have a specific quota of women?
You would say, "Because there's not enough women in tech."
And I would say, "Why is that not enough? What would be consider enough for women in tech? For women in other fields? For women in each and every fields? Why must there be 50% women and 50% men in tech? Why must there be 50% women and 50% men in any field? In every fields? How can there even possible be 50% men and 50% women in all fields?"
So you see, when you really start thinking about it, all these quotas just become nonsensical. In fact, I remember in history, a form of government where the government enforced quotas. And it's call Communism.
I might agree that "CS is the great equalizer" if everyone is given an equal opportunity to pursue it. But I don't think they are. Boys are given the focus by default: just watch any Hollywood movie with a "hacker" -- are they a man or a woman? I believe girls are taught from a young age that CS isn't for them.
How many potentially brilliant female computer scientists are we missing out on as a society because our media and culture barrages them with images of male programmers? It's in my selfish interest as a white male to promote CS among underrepresented groups -- because one of them might come up with the next innovation that changes my life. But they don't get the chance, because they're told they can't be programmers.
That's why I think outreach focused on young minorities & girls is important.
What movies/tv shows are you watching? Try Supernatural. Try the old movies from the 90's like Hackers and The Net. Even the Matrix. All of them featured women hackers as well as men.
I was not given "the focus" by default. My Jr. High and High School did not have a CS program at all. I taught myself how to program (Pascal and Assembly) by READING BOOKS, because we lived in a rural area and dial-up internet is slow!
Is it so wrong to believe that if I can do it, so can others, regardless of their gender? Maybe I have a higher confidence in women than they do!
I was the only kid at my school who was interested in computers and was actively bullied because of it, I will never understand this narrative of privilege and encouragement, it really doesn't fit with my experiences or the experiences of my peers.
Movies about hackers came after hackers had existed for a while. They were mostly male and so it makes sense that that is who would be cast to play those roles.
Anyway, Acid Burn and Trinity are iconic Hollywood hacker characters.
>How many potentially brilliant female computer scientists are we missing out on as a society because our media and culture barrages them with images of male programmers?
Something very wrong with this. Why do those potentially brilliant computer scientist have to be female? Why can't they be male? Are you saying that males are not as brilliant as females? In fact, why does the gender of those potentially brilliant scientists even matter? As long as those scientists are brilliant, why does their gender matter?
I see CS as the great equalizer; the only thing that matters is what you produce.
Say's law does not apply to CS, which is largely a demand-side field with strictly ordinal utility functions and evaluation criteria that are not necessarily technical. As such, what you produce is not innately "the great equalizer".
I'm not referencing Say's law. I'm referring to the very real phenomenon that I experienced as a freelancer, in which nobody cared to know anything about me other than whether or not I could get the job done. It was about skill. And, since many of my jobs were entirely remote, I assume that they never knew my gender (or whether or not I was wearing pants on Friday, but that is another discussion).
In the Open Source community, most interactions are online through forums, issue queues, etc. Gender is rarely implied. In this situation, all that matters is what you produce.
In academia, publishing does not rely on gender. Many times, the reviews of your work are double-blind, so that there is no identifying information at all.
Therefore, I stand behind my statement, that CS is the great equalizer, and the only thing that matters is what you produce.
Look at your upvotes, HN will not ostracize you. People here are predominately male and white. No need to have a victim complex.
However, I encourage you to understand why women attend these conferences. It's easy to write off everyone else as being irrational, but that just makes us narrow minded.
My university has about 60/40 split between women and men, so yea women are the majority by a lot. In our CS department though it is something like 70/30 men to women. I kid you not that I get emails every week discussing the next fundraiser/meeting on promoting women in tech. We even have a "focus on women in technology" committee. And no there is not a single peep about promoting men in any of the other faculties.
For some reason the gender gap in technology is way more important then any other gender gap but no one ever gives a reason as to why.
I don't care about clothing styles, but if you dress very strangely, I'll judge you just the same. You know why? It's because dressing strangely means you do care about style, and even though I don't care about style, I do care about priorities, and I might find your prioritizing of style to be counter-productive and off-putting.
So yeah, I actually do care about style, because it matters.
>What I can't stand are these "Women in technology" conferences and workshops to "close the (gender) gap". Why? Because if you focus on one group, then you are actively not focusing on another. Given the dichotomy defined by their stated purpose, they are actively dismissive of men (boys). That is wrong.
And right now, you are not focussing on technology, but on gender issues. So you're a hypocrite. You care enough about gender to voice an opinion, but only to lash out at others who dare to have an opinion?
People have different priorities from you. Some people want a safe, encouraging work/hobby community. Some people want role models. Who are you to say they shouldn't work to create those, and instead work to get what you want?
And what do you care that someone holds a conference you wouldn't even go to?
>If I say this publically, then I, too, will be ostracized.
Have you considered the possibility that you are actually wrong about what you believe? How do you know you're not rationalizing where your feet are by measuring where your shoes are?
>I don't care about clothing styles, but if you dress very strangely, I'll judge you just the same.
That is a direct contradiction. You acknowledge as much right after. What's even the point of writing this and posting it?
>And right now, you are not focussing on technology, but on gender issues. So you're a hypocrite. You care enough about gender to voice an opinion, but only to lash out at others who dare to have an opinion?
You either ignored his point or completely misunderstood it. I can't tell which. Then you also made a strawman.
>People have different priorities from you. Some people want a safe, encouraging work/hobby community. Some people want role models. Who are you to say they shouldn't work to create those, and instead work to get what you want?
Ok, I'm wondering if maybe English isn't your first language and something is getting lost in translation here. Your points just...make absolutely no sense. It's like you're responding to a fictitious argument that you've constructed in your mind.
Anyways, responding to that bit: So different priorities means, to you, that it's fair to disenfranchise a group? You think that it's preferable to raise one group up at the expense of another, as opposed to striving for equality? I get very serious "your rights end where my feelings begin" vibes from your way of writing.
>Have you considered the possibility that you are actually wrong about what you believe?
>That is a direct contradiction. You acknowledge as much right after. What's even the point of writing this and posting it?
Umm... to SHOW that it's a contradiction. To demonstrate the absurdity of making statements that betray one's behavior. It's easier to know how dumb you're being if you see someone else doing it.
Let me rephrase this for you.
I don't care about anime. When someone throws an anime conference, I don't care. I won't be going. What I'm not going to do is jump on the internet and start saying "I have a problem with anime conferences!"
I might have a problem with, say, a Nazi conference; their goals and premises are fundamentally objectionable to me. What is fundamentally objectionable about a women in tech conference? More women in tech?
> >Have you considered the possibility that you are actually wrong about what you believe?
> Have you?
Yes. All the time. You see, I'm not complaining about people ostracizing me for my stupid ideas. They are free to do that, and I deserve it when it happens. That's how stupid ideas die.
>I don't care about anime. When someone throws an anime conference, I don't care. I won't be going. What I'm not going to do is jump on the internet and start saying "I have a problem with anime conferences!"
Apples and oranges, you're allowed to go to anime conferences.
This is literally what you think:
"You're opposed to gender-exclusive conferences, and you think that the prioritization of one gender over another is counter-intuitive in regards to attaining gender equality, that means that you object to women in tech".
There is something horribly wrong with your way of thinking if that is your interpretation.
A. I'm not talking about gender-exclusive conferences, nor was the person I responded to (as far as I can tell), nor have I ever heard of such a thing.
B. If you think my English is so poor that I'm unable to properly express myself, then maybe you shouldn't pretend to know what I'm thinking. You only have access to a few of my words, and you've already (actually, literally) indicated that you don't understand them.
So don't be an ass. And maybe take a step back and look at how your behavior supports your broader point.
1. I care about people, and believe that they have unlimited potential. If anything, this fundamental belief is the core of all of my interactions with my students.
2. I do not believe in bias against someone else because of something they cannot control. We call that discrimination.
3. What, then, do we call bias in favor of someone, also because of something they cannot control? By definition, it is equally a bias against everyone else who does not have that same attribute (again, something that they cannot control). Therefore, it, too, is discrimination.
4. I abhor discrimination, because it invalidates the accomplishments of everyone involved. This is true both those whose achievements were marginalized by the discrimination, as well as those whose achievements were enhanced by it.
5. I do not argue that people come from unequal backgrounds. What I am arguing, however, is that CS is the equalizer, based on your accomplishments, and your accomplishments ARE NOT limited by your starting position. This is true regardless of gender, race, sexuality, disability, or familial history.
6. Any single-issue outreach (like gender) is insulting, in that it ignores the rest of the person. It reduces them to a number as it relates to that issue. It is demeaning to the individual, and I refuse to participate in it. It is not just that I dislike it, but that I fundamentally disagree with the nature of its being.
When I praise my students, it is because they earned it and they deserve it. If I were to suggest that perhaps CS is not right for them (which I have never done to any of the ~200 students that I have taught), it would also be because that was the right advice for that individual.
This is why I disagree with these types of conferences. And yet, still, I am perceived as the bad guy...
You're not the bad guy for expressing that discrimination is a problem, you're the bad guy for not doing so eloquently and revealingly.
But discrimination is not inherently a problem, it is only a problem when it leads to bad decision-making, especially in the long term. If I were very short (a factor I cannot control) and I was responsible for reaching high places, it would be discriminatory to deny me the position, but it wouldn't be a problem. There's no mistake reaching such a rational decision, if it is in fact, rational. Which in this case, would imply there is no access to height-boosting equipment or reach-extending tools.
>What I am arguing, however, is that CS is the equalizer, based on your accomplishments, and your accomplishments ARE NOT limited by your starting position.
CS can be an equalizer, but your accomplishments ARE limited by your starting position. Discrimination invalidates accomplishments precisely because it limits your starting position.
>Any single-issue outreach (like gender) is insulting, in that it ignores the rest of the person.
I don't see how that follows. If I build a ladder for short people, am I insulting tall people? Am I ignoring them? Am I reducing them to a number? Or would a tall person be reducing themselves to a number by objecting (needlessly) to the construction of ladders?
>If I build a ladder for short people, am I insulting tall people? Am I ignoring them? Am I reducing them to a number?
The problem is that, you're not just building a ladder. You're purposely not hiring the tall peoples. Instead, you purposely hire the short people, because you perceived the short people to have a disadvantage in height. Then after you hired them, you build each and everyone of them a ladder, to make them as tall the the tall people in the first place, who, you could have hired in the first place, and wouldn't have needed the ladder in the first place if you hired the tall peoples in the first place. And not only that, the short people understands that this job require reaching high places, so most of them have already decided to go for another job, a job that they love that doesn't required them to reach high places with their hands. And then you're wondering, why don't short people comes for hire? I must enforce quote and force all jobs that require tall peoples to hire short peoples, instead of just letting things fall where they fall, naturally.
If you came to me looking for a job, and we've had this exact conversation, here's what I'd want to say to you:
"My goal is to hire competent people. Technically competent and socially competent people. That means getting along with others and understanding their perspectives and priorities. I don't care how well you know some piece of software; you can learn that in a book. I can buy you a book. You can't learn basic human decency from a book.
As someone who presumably cares about this company, I'm aware that we do not only sell products, but also culture, and if you cannot produce valuable culture, then you will not serve this company well. I will not hire you. Not because I have some quota to meet, but because I have standards to meet, and you do not meet them. If you want to be so myopic as to ignore gender issues (or any other issue that actually matter to people in this world,) then go do that on your own time."
On the other hand, if you come to my company, and every decision you make, you make because of a person's specific gender, then that's sexist, and I would no hire you either.
All workers need to be treated the same (aka, professionally) no matter the gender. I don't need my workers to go around making decision based on whether the other work is male or female. That's sexist.
People need to stop treating people differently base on their gender, and need to start treating all people the same, no matter their gender. When you do something because of a specific gender, that's sexism.
> And right now, you are not focussing on technology, but on gender issues. So you're a hypocrite. You care enough about gender to voice an opinion, but only to lash out at others who dare to have an opinion?
When two unrelated fields clash (say science and religion to illustrate the point with different topics), you have to "take a stand" on both even if you want to care only about one of them.
In the specific case of the previous poster, I think that what he means is that he wants the most important criteria to be about technology. Inevitably, that means that gender ratios are only secondary considerations to those.
Maybe that stance is to focus on gender issues in your view. But in that case, what would a stance that focuses only on technology?
They're not really unrelated fields. No two fields are unrelated, especially to sociology and psychology.
HTTPS was invented to solve a security problem -- a completely social issue that wouldn't exist if people just could be trusted with your data. Unicode was invented to solve the problem that not everybody writes with the Latin alphabet, a problem caused only because people don't agree to fix it. Neither of those would have meant anything if someone didn't convince everybody to use them -- another purely social problem. In fact, almost all computer science issues are attempts to solve or make irrelevant certain classes of social problems. They're not unrelated fields at all. Communication and technology are practically the same thing.
>I think that what he means is that he wants the most important criteria to be about technology
The most important criteria for what? For what conferences people should have? For establishing what a given human wants out of life? For determining whether an industry is prejudiced?
The cases you give are good examples of places where technology was harnessed to solve social problems.
But it is possible to not "care" about these issues: either by working on solutions to other problems or by focusing only on making the technology better.
That is what I meant by "unrelated", maybe I should have used "independent".
> The most important criteria for what? For what conferences people should have? For establishing what a given human wants out of life? For determining whether an industry is prejudiced?
The most important criteria for technological pursuits, not social ones. People who disagree on political issues can still pursue technology progress together on issues that don't involve those political issues for example (not that this is the case here, I'm speaking generally).
Do "Women in Tech" conferences and workshops help to close the gender gap by actively working against the legacy of a male-dominated industry, the same way affirmative action works against the historical disadvantage of minorities?
I find the underlying premise of this article and the claim that there is a "war on boys" absurd. It's a old argument from the same old set of people who have the same old intolerant (and dying) paradigm.
Not sure why it is on HN at all as the content has nothing to do with tech...
The school (teachers and students together) recognizes an ideology (patriarchy) that they see as a problem and responds by creating a culture that opposes that ideology, in order to reduce the power of that ideology. I don't see any way to take a neutral stance on this issue, as ``doing nothing'' is supporting the status quo (patriarchy), so if you agree that patriarchy is a problem, then the school should be celebrated for picking the right side of the issue. If you like patriarchy, that's a different issue.
In isolate, this is an absurd sentence. If I said "I don't think we should [do horrible thing to group x]", then you could easily retort with "yeah, but if I disagree with you I'm against group x?" in a "screw you" sort of way, and, well, it'd be true, wouldn't it?
I'm not saying anything either way about the GP, but I'd suggest it'd be better to tackle the point, rather than have such a knee-jerk reaction.
Well, if racism and sexism are real (they are) and person A believes that these are bad, then if person B disagrees with person A, that means person B believes racism and/or sexism are not bad.
Language like "racist/sexist" suggests that it's a binary, that each person is either racist or not racist. It's more useful to recognize that the dominant culture in the US is racist and that people benefit from/support that culture to varying degrees. Person B supports it.
Perhaps the premise that the school's actions successfully (does the policy work?), appropriately (is the policy ethical?), and accurately (does the policy have negative side effects?) counters that ideology.
I'm pretty disappointed in the article and the comments, and how like Reddit this website is turning out to be. I'm not going to make any judgements (though I really really am), but this same article has been posted to 10 subreddits, among them such gems as: SJWsAtWork, ThisIsNotASafeSpace, sjsucks, and sjwhate.
If you've progressed to the point where you can dismiss that guy without a thought, given his credentials and accomplishments, I submit to you that alarm bells ought to be going off in your head that you might have epistemologically closed yourself too far.
I'm not saying you're obligated to agree with him. I'm saying if you can't even engage with his arguments, it may be you that has the problem.
Not affiliated (except that I follow him on Twitter), but the author, Jonathan Haidt, is one of America's pre-eminent social psychologists. He is (or at least was) a liberal who has engaged in some very serious social psychology that gives massive insight into how people tick, especially where those ticks are related to or concerning political party affiliations.
If the idea is to dismiss him as an anti-SJW, or anti-free speech, then I would posit that you're simply inclined to dismiss no matter what. If the complaint is that his work is spreading to, or being adopted by the anti-SJW crowd, that's hardly his fault.
He may not be right, or he may not have done appropriate research, or he may be based (his own studies would suggest that it's inevitable that he is), but any dismissal predicated in part on that he's trolling is almost certainly knee-jerk.
My complaint was more to your second point, that "If the complaint is that his work is spreading to, or being adopted by the anti-SJW crowd, that's hardly his fault." I do see a problem with how one-sided the comments on the page (Heterodox Academy) are, and I do think that he should have stepped in. Then, when I came to Hacker News, I saw similar comments, and that was disheartening.
My distaste really came from comments like these, on the main page: "My white male sons are now 30 and 28. I’m so happy they escaped public high school relatively unscathed, but I could see the beginnings of the nonsense, led by a faculty of activist females and male eunuchs. Public schooling in this country may have begun with noble intent; kids are now truly being inculcated rather than educated." and "You state this like it is an article of faith that women would be totally rad in STEM if only men would stop holding them back. What makes this “sketchy”? There is an abundance of evidence that men and women are different and think differently. There is almost no evidence that women will change that position based on upbringing." and then on hnews itself: "#KillAll(White)Men is literally calling for ethnic / gender purging." (though it was downvoted).
It would be great to have a conversation with Dr. Haidt, but I was turned off by how both Heterodox and Hacker News turned into "amen" forums. There were two students who posted on Heterodox, and they had some interesting points, some of which disagreed with Dr. Haidt.
The commentators are self selecting - if they strongly agree, they comment, which they have. You're still trying to dismiss the article based on people having opinions different than yours, rather than critiquing the article itself.
Would you agree with me in saying that the comments are at least disappointing?
In terms of the article itself, I agreed with this part, "High schools and colleges that lack viewpoint diversity should make it their top priority" which seems like a pretty progressive viewpoint. Let's make sure everybody's voice is heard, and let's make sure that voices that are usually silenced outside the classroom have equal footing inside. But a sentence later, bam - "Schools that value freedom of thought should therefore actively seek out non-leftist faculty."
I'm not sure how exactly that flows, and that's what led me to be disappointed. Moreover, the idea that students and faculty are living in "fear" and we have to accommodate their fears is also just a tad hypocritical.
I also have a problem with victimhood culture being a thing, but that's a whole different argument.
> "Schools that value freedom of thought should therefore actively seek out non-leftist faculty."
Any argument that can be made in favor of cultural diversity should necessarily extend to left-right diversity as well.
FWIW, as I stated earlier, Haidt is leftist. Perhaps less so now than 7-8 years ago, but he is indeed a leftist, but one who appreciates that non-leftists are not evil, but who have different gradients of right/wrong, and different associations with which to be entrenched.
If you want children to have freedom of thought, then you should try to accurately present a range of ideas to students wherever possible. Students learn that 2+2=4, at least in some small part, because teachers say that it does. They later learn how and why 2+2=4, which mitigates the need for teacher acceptance as canon, but regardless, they learn that teachers ideas are to be given weight at the least, and that their expressions, even not necessarily strictly academic ones, are right.
Would you find fault with your children's education if every teacher were a Rush Limbaugh clone, or would you prefer them be exposed to a variety of thoughts and given the tools and knowledge to inform themselves and form their own viewpoints? If the answer is the latter, then you should reject the notion of your children being subscribed to any narrow ideological view, and adding non-leftist ideologies can only broaden it.
Edit: And yes, I would agree that if the comments are as you say they are, that is disappointing. I caught this article shortly after it was posted, and there weren't any other comments at the time, so I thankfully did not have those comments color my opinion of the article itself.
There are a lot more comments now than when you first looked, and I think the viewpoints expressed there go both ways now, so I don't see any issue there.
Non-leftist faculty would bring their own different worldview and perspective, increasing viewpoint diversity. I think it's a fairly logical statement.
And yes, we are accommodating their "fears". Rightfully so. They "fear" overzealous pushback for expressing their dissenting opinions. We should not accommodate those who "fear" opinions that differ from their own. That is not accommodation, that is censorship.
But the core of the article is about how there is a problem about polarized opinions: the core problems with the Mizzou, Yale and al. situations are not related to the opinions expressed themselves: the initial email was that opinion (in the specific case discussed in the article) and the administrator wanted to meet with that student to discuss it.
The problem is that the conversation is not about the concerns expressed in that email anymore, but about the use of one word in the response.
Is that the more important conversion you talk about wanting to have?
Glad I could accommodate. His research impacted me pretty profoundly too, quantifying with study a lot of what I'd felt, but been extremely uncertain of. I've since followed him around the net like a puppy consuming everything he puts out.
Since you enjoyed it so much, here are some more of his links:
How is the fact that the article has been posted to less than agreeable subreddits an indication of it's quality or the validity of the arguments and opinion in it?
The extreme of both sides of this debate, as illustrated in your post and in the actions of the most egregious student complaints at Yale, lack the nuance needed to find a healthy compromise. Those subreddits are "less than agreeable" because they advocate outlandish responses to perhaps slightly less outlandish beliefs.
> Those subreddits are "less than agreeable" because they advocate outlandish responses
Do they? What "outlandish responses" might those be? You're smearing by implication. What specifically do you find so "outlandish"? As far as I can tell, people making claims like yours think that creating a consistent set of rules for all, promoting free expression of all views, and countering group libel are thoughtcrimes. What's "disagreeable" is countering the idea that I might be guilty of something because of my gender and ancestry.
I don't have to do much "smearing by implication" when the upvoted comments speak for themselves. I think there are people that do this sort of "bullying" and unproductive rabble-rousing on both sides of the debate. I personally agree with the principles of "a consistent set of rules for all, etc.," but I don't think that the road to productive debate begins with including "hate," "sucks", "fuck them", etc., as a means to evoke an emotional response.
Specific instances of outlandishness:
SJWsAtWork -- low comment traffic, a bit more agreeable than the rest.
Perfectly appropriate informal language that means "You won the argument convincingly"
> It's sad that a bunch of raving lunatic SJWs can have this effect. Useless self-absorbed maniacs with no purpose in life but to pester those that have.
Many SJWs are, in fact, saving lunatics who have no purpose in life but to heckle and protest everything
> Fuck that piece of shit
Very common language when talking about public figures --- and I'd be willing to bet you used similar language about Bush, or Cameron, or Harper, or anyone else on the wrong side.
You're demonstrating exactly the kind of militarized hypersensitivity and craven hypocrisy that's turned colleges (and increasingly, workplaces) into zones for political indoctrination.
I'm not demanding hypersensitivity, I'm simply claiming that the path towards better debate is one where emotional invective is left off the table. If you can clearly explain why classifying people as "raving lunatics" adds insight on how to mediate the state of open ("free") college campus discourse, then I'll keep an open ear as to the value of such comments.
Also, I find it hard to believe that "fuck that piece of shit" was ever acceptable as college-level discourse. In fact, I think that even high school level L-D style debate shies away from that tone and temperament.
If you sincerely believe that using language that appeals to emotion, over logic and evidence, is a means to an end, then we probably will not get much further on this topic. (And I really don't see how this stance is hypocritical, or indoctrinated/pushing a doctrine in any way. It applies equally to both ends of the spectrum.)
> I'm not demanding hypersensitivity, I'm simply claiming that the path towards better debate is one where emotional invective is left off the table.
You're taking the standards of a debate hall, applying them to an internet community, and then using the predictable and inevitable discrepancy to call the internet community hateful when, in fact, that's the normal level of discourse for _any_ internet community.
> I really don't see how this stance is hypocritical
Do you excuse the other side's casual use of "kill all men"? What about explicit statements that I am literally unqualified to hold an opinion because of my chromosomal makeup and the color of my skin? Those come across as equally hateful to me.
Calling /r/SJWhate and /r/SJSucks hateful are calling spades, spades. I've said nothing about the moral compass of the movement as a whole. To go way back upthread, I was responding strictly to the point that "those subreddits are disagreeable" and I've evaluated that claim for all of the instances provided. However, If you want your points to be taken seriously, I'd suggest that you not make /r/SJWhate the cross that you hang on. Likewise, I would hope that people espousing pro-[women's/minority/abortion/etc.] rights viewpoints wouldn't make "kill all [men/cops/priests/etc.]" their rallying cry.
I wouldn't and don't excuse "kill all men," and I personally think that opinions should be evaluated on their own merits, and not by [x] feature possessed by they who come up with it. You're projecting these beliefs on to me because I've called out certain subreddits as being stomping grounds for emotionally charged, rather than fact based, content. I think both sides of this debate have salient points, but neither side benefits from the content coming out of /r/*hate subreddits.
Calling something or someone "disappointing" or "problematic" is how these people evade enumerating arguments while still attempting to establish themselves as intellectually superior to those they are criticizing. They assume to have the correct position and condescend to anyone who demurs.
Any sort of work should always be judged based on the actual content, not who likes it or where it has been shared.
To reduce this argument to absurdity, let's say I create a recipe for pecan pie. People love it, including the people at stormfront or other white power sites. Let's say I created this recipe back in the 1920s, and it happens to be Hitler's favorite pie.
Is there anything wrong with that pie?
People with extreme viewpoints will often like things that are a more moderate version of their own viewpoints. Just because you don't agree with the extremists doesn't mean that you should also disagree with the moderates.
Just for everyone's awareness, there is a broad astroturf and professional political push that has been happening for over a year by FIRE, a right leaning think tank. This is a concerted effort to bring controversy around campus free speech into the news.
My perception is that this is an effort to weaken student's ability to speak freely, but is coded as a "free speech" issue. Similar to how many churches coded marriage equality as trampling on their freedom of religion.
Just to remind everyone how free speech works: You are free to say whatever you want. I am free to choose to speak out against you or even pull my support from you if I disagree with what you say. My freedom extends to let me voice my opposition to you just as loudly as you voice your opinions. That is not censorship.
A summary of some of the universities and cases they've dealt with. They seem to be fitting their self-described role of a civil liberties group more than your ascribed role as a "right leaning think tank". Civil libertarians fit on both ends of the traditional right/left spectrum, see the ACLU for another group that ends up (not always, but at least on many issues) on both sides of the left/right spectrum in an effort to defend civil liberties.
Brew this up and one gets a majority of students who are reasonable but a small minority who drive all the discourse.
I don't teach at Yale and have never taught at Yale or schools with similar cultures, so I can't speak to the environment there, but William Deresiewicz did, and his book Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life came out of that and I recommend it. His book A Jane Austen Education (http://jakeseliger.com/tag/a-jane-austen-education-how-six-n...) is also very good, even for someone like me who does not love Jane Austen.
Edit: Also, almost all of the censorship calls and nasty behavior / comments came from students on the left. Vox's "I'm a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me" (http://www.vox.com/2015/6/3/8706323/college-professor-afraid) is congruent with my experiences.