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Comment by maxerickson | Hacker News Reader

At any rate, I think my point is a response to your question about "interacting with universities" (you didn't ask me, but my point is that doing exactly that won't exactly convince one the claim the other poster made is entirely wrong).

But that's just my point with the scare quotes. How does a single person go about gaining experience with the thousands of individuals that comprise a given university?

And then there's ~10 million undergraduate students in the USA. Extrapolating from a few thousand people that choose to speak loudly isn't going to paint a meaningful picture of their views.

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I think one has to see populations as distributed along a normal distribution (a bell curve) or some other probability distribution rather than somehow coalescing to a single "representative individual".

Protesters represent one tail of the distribution on some measure (e.g. "belief in social justice"). The fact that protests get more intense and/or more frequent and/or more populous are indications of a shift in the distribution (picture a normal distribution being shifted along the x axis).

That's what I am pointing to. I don't think everyone has to be in lockstep to be able to talk about what a given group does or believes or what not.

Even if you do something like assume a bimodal distribution with small variance, the mere presence of protests doesn't tell you much.

It's not even particularly clear to me that protests have gotten more frequent. When I was in school 15 years ago there were enough protests; I just ignored them...

Well, yes, if you're asking are there more or less of those things we'd call "protests", then it's not clear at all that there are any more or less than at some other point in time. I mean, I saw a protest on the street the other day: it was two guys and a policeman…

You'll notice however that is a far cry from a representative summary of my point.

Anyway, there are people who've researched this, notably Jonathan Haidt. They created a website to talk about the problem here: https://heterodoxacademy.org/ . And they think that there is a problem of shrinking viewpoint diversity in the social sciences. My experience is that it's gotten worse, but we don't seem to be able to agree on that.

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