The Dangerous Safety of College
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
This group is well aware of the prevailing doctrine that truth comes from dispassionate investigation and rigorous argument.
They just reject it. They reject that it's conducted in good faith, and they reject that the sacred constructs of the ideology are subject to any microscope. That intellectual ideal is seen as something by and for the powerful old white men who control power structures, including and especially academia. It's seen as just as much a tool of oppression as phrenology, eugenics, and other racist pseudoscience, and they're hoping to push it towards the same fate.
Some of the more extreme protestors will tell you that advocating for traditional academic inquiry is fundamentally white supremacist, in that a mode of understanding the world favored by the ruling class is seen as more legitimate than others. There is no objectivity, the reasoning goes, so we ought to put the traditionally opppressed in control of the narrative for a while.
The article is spot on that the right way to think about it is as a religion. There are articles of faith: the world works in terms of identity-based groups; certain groups hold and actively maintain power over others; it's time to depose those groups and let others have a turn at authority, particularly over what constitutes truth. There is testimony: the "lived experiences" - anecdotes - of members of oppresssd groups are gospel. Obedience is paramount - the first and last step of being an Ally is to accept, believe unquestioningly, and evangelize what you are told.
These people aren't coddled and they aren't weak. Appeals to psychological safety are attempts to weaponize empathy, not genuine fragility. They are fierce warriors for what they believe to be justice.
>That intellectual ideal is seen as something by and for the powerful old white men who control power structures, including and especially academia.
Lets be real here - academia until only very recently in world history - was virulently exclusionary to people of color and women. Before we dismissed eugenics as pseudoscience, it was perceived as just science. It is easy in hindsight to say it was flawed and a tool of oppression - but at the time it was very much an active area of academic inquiry. Given that in the past pseudoscience was seen as science, what evidence do we have to believe that we haven't made some of the same mistakes in classifying pseudoscience in the present? Given that academia in the past was corrupted by bias against women, what makes us now think it's truly objectively academic, now?
It takes a lot of faith to believe that this is the one period in history when bias hasn't tainted "objectivity"/"science"/"academic inquiry".
None. I just think that when we suspect something might be pseudoscientific, we ought to read and study it really carefully, explore the arguments, and discredit it by formulating and publicizing well-reasoned counterarguments. And since the demographics that traditionally practice this sort of thing have some gaping blindspots, we ought to be actively recruiting a broader set of perspectives into this pursuit, so that we can generate more good ideas and discredit more of the bad ones.
We don't need to throw out science to deal with bad ideas put forth by scientists. Science itself has the mechanisms for this. We just need to do it better.
Not scream at the author's speaking engagements until he leaves the room.
To be clear, the side I'm on is the liberal/academic/technocratic orthodoxy, where smart people engage seriously with ideas, arguments, and data (including devil's-advocating positions they don't agree with) to discover the truth, and formulate policy prescriptions based on the truth, i.e. what's romanticized on The West Wing. I do believe in reality's well-known liberal bias and on most policy questions I am pretty much indistinguishable from an "SJW." As far as getting to those policy positions, though, it was clear I would not have been welcome in my campus's left-leaning political scene.
>Not scream at the author's speaking engagements until he leaves the room.
Student politics just suck. But, I don't think they're representative of some of the underlying ideas they are based on. I've met some incredibly intelligent and well-read anarchists - but I wouldn't think anarchy was a system with that thought behind it if all I'd met was the loudest proponents of anarchy.
I think one of the problems currently we have in discourse-at-large is its really easy to find the egregious and ridiculous arguments people make, and paint the rest of the whole ideology with it. Perhaps the only partisan movement in politics today? :)
>I just think that when we suspect something might be pseudoscientific, we ought to read and study it really carefully, explore the arguments, and discredit it by formulating and publicizing well-reasoned counterarguments.
>We don't need to throw out science to deal with bad ideas put forth by scientists. Science itself has the mechanisms for this. We just need to do it better.
I think the problem has been that in the past (and still today) women and PoC were hampered by their inability to even get stuff published. If people begin in a position where suspicion is immediate, its harder for them to get a foot in the door, even if the gatekeepers hypothetically would allow in a person they are suspicious of.
As a result, some people still feel like one of the few levers they can successfully pull is the protest lever. Some protests suck.
>And since the demographics that traditionally practice this sort of thing have some gaping blindspots, we ought to be actively recruiting a broader set of perspectives into this pursuit, so that we can generate more good ideas and discredit more of the bad ones.
I think we agree on this - and I think we agree that there's the possibility of bias in science as it stands.
Where I'm going next with this: The idea then is that science internally sucks at making choices to correct this bias. Therefore establishment science needs to be externally influenced. That's not a dismissal of the scientific method, that's a claim that the scientific method never existed in an unbiased form in the first place.
The uncomfortable thing is that this can cut both ways. Things can and do get rejected because it doesn't fit the ideology.
Feynman called it Cargo Cult science:
We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways
we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron
by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know
not to be quite right. It's a little bit off, because he had the incorrect value
for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements
of the charge of the electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of
time, you find that one is a little bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a
little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that,
until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
Why didn't they discover that the new number was higher right away? It's a thing
that scientists are ashamed of--this history--because it's apparent that people
did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's,
they thought something must be wrong--and they would look for and find a reason
why something might be wrong. When they got a number closer to Millikan's value
they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far
off, and did other things like that. We've learned those tricks nowadays, and now
we don't have that kind of a disease.
But this long history of learning how not to fool ourselves--of having utter
scientific integrity--is, I'm sorry to say, something that we haven't specifically
included in any particular course that I know of. We just hope you've caught on by osmosis.
However, all the evidence we have now points to a long history of discrimination.
I don't know if you're saying that "the juice is made with 100% real oranges" (A) or if you're saying that "the juice is 100% made of real oranges" (B).
In our situation, this maps to:
A) Although there exists evidence on both sides, the balance of discrimination has been, through history until now, unquestionably to the favor of white men
B) All the evidence that exists shows discrimination against non-(white men). No evidence of (white men) exists.
Now, if you're saying A, then I agree, except that this seems to entail that in order to legitimately complain about "reverse discrimination" essentially requires that men be confined to the household or that whites be slaves respectively (or some sort of equivalent), for a few hundred years before the complaint can be made.
So, it seems more reasonable to me to assume that you mean B, or at least something closer to B. I don't get what the "long history" part of "all the evidence […] points to a long history of discrimination" is for however, since hypothetically when we get to a point of no discrimination whatsoever, history would still show a tally favoring white men the way I understand the way people tally things up.
Anyway, the truth is that evidence is never that one-sided. Here's[1] for example an article explaining that in veterinary science, over 90% of students are female. The university responded by opening a scholarship favouring men as a group and (some) students responded that this was actually perpetuating male privilege.
The argument here isn't even about male privilege. Even if every single other field of study was 90% male or something like that (for the record, it is not, vet science is not the only female-dominated field), you'd just have a situation where everything is pro-male except veterinary science and one may call that male privilege, sure. But there would still be evidence of (limited) male "discrimination" in vet science.
[1] http://www.smh.com.au/national/education/sydney-university-d...
Discrimination leads to bias. If wage/gender matchups were a total coinflip we'd still expect around 25% in each of the quadrants along the axes of male/female and men have a higher wage/women have a higher wage.
It is totally possible for some fields to have women in higher numbers and with higher wages in the field than the men, and for there to still be discrimination.
If your argument is that there is also discrimination against men, the vast majority of feminists agree. Its just clear in terms of wages and gender ratios in jobs, men have the upper hand :)
What do you mean by bias? As far as I can tell, in the context of gender differences, either the bias IS the discrimination or it is the cause of the discrimination, but I can't make heads or tails of what it'd mean the way you worded it (or, for that matter, why it's relevant here if you just meant the swapped version).
> If your argument is that there is also discrimination against men, the vast majority of feminists agree. Its just clear in terms of wages and gender ratios in jobs, men have the upper hand :)
First, I'm totally confused by the smiley face. Maybe you just meant to imply 'no hard feelings' which makes the display understandable, but it's at any rate a confusing thing to "read" in context.
Now, my argument is not actually that there is discrimination against men. Well, I'm also not saying that there isn't, I'm just saying that my argument is on a different point, but if anything I'm bet there's some sort of evidence of "discrimination" against just about every one characteristic/group.
Actually, I didn't really make a specific argument, but if I had to, it would be something along the lines of: evidence of differing treatment (particularly statistical differences) could actually be evidence of differences between groups.
Like let's suppose that males just don't, on average, care about veterinary science. Maybe it's something that should be incentivized against, maybe not.
But if it's true, one would expect that someone will interpret that hypothetical fact as "males are not good veterinarians" and basically legitimately discriminate against male applicants (and probably there's going to also be people who would believe that males are going into vet science less only because of this discrimination). In this hypothetical world, both of those groups would be anywhere from quite wrong to slightly right, depending on what truth means to the beholder.
At any rate, a corollary of this is that even evidence of discrimination doesn't refute the underlying assumption to the degree that we might expect.
I think if we look through history - there has clearly been a change in treatment of women over time. Why is it that now the treatment is reliably indicative of some underlying quality that has remained static through time? Couldn't it just as easily be that the treatment of women currently isn't indicative of some underlying truth? What would indicate to us that now over other times the differing treatment was in line with underlying qualities and not cultural assumptions?
Your description sounds more like the far-right than anything else:
This is what leads someone like Richard Spencer to voice approval for incidents like one at the University of Ottawa, when a free yoga class for students with disabilities was shut down for “cultural issues of implication.” A Student Federation statement on the matter went as far as to link it to the threat of “cultural genocide.” At the blog for Radix Journal, an alt-right publication he founded, Spencer could barely contain his excitement. He cited the incident as an example of “racial consciousness formation,” and applauded student activists for “engaging in the kind of ideological project that traditionalists should be hard at work on.”
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/01/safety-pin-box-richard-sp...
Generally both extremes of the political spectrum are immune to reason, and these two extremes seem to now have taken over in the US. What remains is a shouting match.
What a friend of mine described from his recent visit to the country really concerns me. Hotels either showing "conservative" or "liberal" media only. People and cars with stickers and pins everywhere. Exactly like two football fan clubs - unconditional support of the own and hatred of the other.
Americans, you need to fix this as quickly as possible. Truly liberal minded should stand guard when conservatives are speaking and vice versa. Go into the details of each argument and find common ground, points of content as well as a synthesis. And stop listening to organisations like the "Southern poverty law center" who go as far as labeling Maajid Nawaz and Ajaan Hirsi Ali "Anti-Muslim extremists". In fact, stop with the labels altogether - if full blown KKK members and even grand dragons can be befriended and turned by a black musician [1], I think it's time for those shouters to stop and think about what they have done personally to mend society.
Our government divides the country into a bunch of districts and forces each one of them to run a first-past-the-post election. Every position is first-past-the-post. The problem is that first-past-the-post seems to have a fixed point, where if parties get too popular they fragment over minor internal differences, or if not popular enough they polarize and demonize to try to suppress third-party turnout and collect those votes for themselves. The fixed point is therefore that 50% of the legislators belong to one party, 50% belong to the other, and everyone is filled with credulity for their own side and hatred for the other. And mathematical fixed-point theorems seem to be general enough to converge on this fixed-point.
It's worth pointing out that you can just look at the presidential election history and see a sequence of these convergences culminating in the US Civil War, and we seem to be falling back into it in the past several election cycles -- not just this last one.
What's even more interesting is that we use proportional methods in the States. The proportional system that you might know as the Sainte-Laguë system, we know as the Webster system and use to allocate House seats among the states. If we used something similar to elect parties to the House, we could probably keep the Senate and the Presidency the same and it would still give a sort of destabilizing effect to the two-party hatred-hegemony.
Actually participating in the front-line reconstruction of truth is too messy and dangerous for me, I'm afraid.
And I think this has made them intellectually soft. Many of the younger ones don't know how to argue for their views intellectually because they've never had to.
A now-deceased friend who was an avowed socialist, who came of age in the late fifties/early sixties, absolutely loved to argue politics and ethics with avowed free-market capitalists like myself, and I enjoyed arguing with him. But I've found it impossible to have any discussions with any element of intellectual rigor with any of the 20- or 30-something Bernie Sanders supporters I'm acquainted with. Within minutes, they fall back on character attacks -- "that's racist!", "you're greedy and selfish!", etc.
And it looks like it will get a lot worse before it gets any better.
For example, a group of my progressive acquaintances has been debating in depth on the New Yorker's reporting over past few months, including especially the long piece on Hillary the week before the election. They have framed that discussion around progressive views on fairness of opportunity and fairness of wealth distribution.
The leading political progressives have the same depth of argument - listen to Obama's speeches, the speeches at the DNC, Bernie and Robert Reich, Kander on voting, Stiglitz.
In contrast the right is intellectually bankrupt. Michael Anton's articles motivated the right for the past few months and the articles are poorly argued flimflam. Heritage's chief economist is disingenuous and misguided. The chief GOP wonk in Congress, Paul Ryan, is a mediocrity who barely understands healthcare never mind economics. This is what happens when a party goes to war on expertise[1] (because expertise of course threatens their donors' ability to make huge amounts of money[2]).
1. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-death-of-experti...
2. http://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/3/10/14871696/sco...
And if you live in a majority red community, people who have left views will be the ones who have thought long and deep about their views.
Its a problem on both sides.
A fair point, however, I think the only way to reverse the trend on the left is for the right to employ the left's own tactics back against them, in spades. The right needs to destroy the lives and careers of, for example, some university presidents who allow this sort of brutish behavior to go unpunished, sometimes even making excuses for it. Or go to war against companies who cave to the SJW demands. It has to be mutually-assured destruction, not one-sided.
The time has come to put conservatism on the back-burner until we later encounter some problem against which it can serve as an effective tool.
And yet the opposition can barely muster the chutzpah to defend the Affordable Care Act, much less to create a 21st-century New Deal!
Worse, what are people focusing on? College students protesting! Can someone explain to me how stricter behavioral policing of college students is going to rebuild rusted bridges or install high-speed passenger rail? Who gets health-insurance out of telling college students to shut up?
Meanwhile, the President of the United States tweets us all "letters from grandpa" material he saw on blogs, while his party plots to realize an ideological utopia that would actually make us all worse-off. Why? Because college students! And fake protesters paid by George Soros!
This is insane. We have real issues that can't be solved with a hashtag, a tweet, or a cardboard sign.
Are you talking about Berkeley? I'm not sure a lot of those were college students. Nor were they protesting...
"Dangerous safety" is the kind of environment in which a man like Charles Murray sees no problem with burning a cross next to a police station.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Murray_(political_scie...