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Comment by workthrowaway27 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how much of this is an outgrowth of the current university campus climate where opinions that don't fit into the predominant liberal worldview can't be voiced. I don't mean this as a criticism of liberals or liberalism specifically here, since I realize many conservatives would do the same about issues they care about if they had the power and numbers to.

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Maybe I'm old and grumpy, but things seem pretty crazy these days on campuses.

When I entered university in 1989, there was an extremely controversial professor at my school [1]. There was outrage accompanied with generally peaceful protests.

How it was handled at my school back then was that they organized a live TV debate with someone to argue the side against the professor's position.

In other words, we the students (and the public for that matter) were treated like adults and we were expected to be able to hear and process ideas we may not agree with without overreacting or having our heads explode. IIRC, the whole notion of going to university, among other things, was to further develop our critical thinking skills. That seems to be hard to do in an echo chamber.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Philippe_Rushton

It's interesting that the word "liberal" has morphed so much in America to mean the opposite of its original meaning.

Liberalism is rooted in liberty and freedom, and yet here we are in 2017 discussing how non-"liberal" ideas cannot be freely expressed in the most "liberal" cities.

I say we stop calling these people liberal, because they're anything but.

In what world are these opinions not voiced? I don't think this argument stands up to empirical scrutiny -- there's an incredibly robust network of vocally conservative student organizations.

See this list and go to the most recent years: https://www.thefire.org/resources/disinvitation-database/

When the list started it was fairly evenly distributed between right and left leaning speakers being disinvited. Now it's much more commonly right leaning speakers.

That's about speakers being disinvited from campus, not views not being represented. There are a number of problems with that analysis:

1. Several speakers are overrepresented (I see a bunch of Milo invitations), which could well just reflect their aggressiveness at getting themselves invited / the strength of their own PR team. If one political side wants to make persecution their thing, they'll show up more commonly in that database.

2. In recent years, we've had a bunch of new forums for dissemination of ideas, which is a good thing. Twitter didn't exist in 2002. YouTube didn't exist in 2002. Podcasts didn't exist in 2002. Smartphones in people's pockets didn't exist in 2002. Today, anyone who wants to know what any of these speakers' opinions are can find out, easily, what they are, without needing them invited to campus. (And anyone who doesn't will just skip the talk anyway.)

3. In Milo's case specifically, he wanted to out a bunch of undocumented students on-stage. That I think doesn't fit the profile of political views being censored. (I agree that preventing him from speaking technically counts as censorship, but it's a very different discussion.)

4. Fundamentally, this list and the original article here both suffer from a blind belief in the "Great Man" theory. If person X doesn't express an opinion, or publicize their idea, or something, chances are absurdly high that someone else will have the same opinion or idea, too. If Newton were imprisoned for his alchemy, however unjust that might have been for Newton as a person, Leibniz would still have invented calculus. What I'd like to see is if certain types of ideas are being censored, not whether certain individuals who happen to hold those ideas are being censored.

It's true that some speakers are over-represented, but I don't think that changes the trend substantially. I also don't see how you can draw a distinction between disinviting speakers and censoring the ideas they came to talk about.

And yes, there are new forums for dissemination of ideas, but that doesn't mean they are equally open to all ideas. Some things you can't write without being shouted down. This is distinct from criticism of the idea. These are personal attacks on the person who voiced the idea in the first place.

I don't understand your last point. There are absolutely things you can't talk about freely at universities, for example: immigration, gender differences in personality, variations in IQ across races, etc. I don't see how you can take an objective look at university culture and say anything otherwise.

> I also don't see how you can draw a distinction between disinviting speakers and censoring the ideas they came to talk about.

Milo is perhaps the best example here: Milo comes to campuses to cause a spectacle, not to spread new ideas. Sure, he's talking about some ideas. But that's not his primary motivation.

Milo is not an academic. Would he be happy with letting some academic go in his stead and present his same ideas in the form of an academic lecture?

> There are absolutely things you can't talk about freely at universities, for example: immigration, gender differences in personality, variations in IQ across races, etc.

Do you have any evidence for this?

(Note that you can't talk about things like variations in IQ across races as if they existed more strongly than they actually do or mean something they don't, and expect to be taken seriously. But that's not universities censoring dissident politics, that's universities expecting basic scientific literacy instead of people pushing a political agenda in the guise of science. The concept of IQ is an idea that came from the academy and has been refined by the academy; using an old understanding of IQ and what it means is essentially an abandonment of science.)

I believe this evidence is consistent with my point that a robust (and perhaps growing!) network of campus conservatism exists.

Specifically, this evidence could be explained by an increasing rate of conservatism on campuses. The rate of disinvitation could be the same, it's just that there's a greater number of conservative speaker invitations going out from a greater number of conservative students. And right leaning speakers are disproportionately invited by right-leaning student organizations.

I don't have time to find a source right now, but I think conservatism is declining on college campuses. It certainly is among faculty members.

Interesting, attempts to disinvite more left leaning speakers in 2017: 4

Attempts to disinvite more right leaning speakers in 2017: 24

At least on YouTube it does seems like there are more attempts to prevent conservative ideas from being voiced on campuses by rowdy demonstrations that interrupt speakers.

Listen to this debate

https://www.intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/free-speech-th...

plenty of examples by the side arguing for the motion.

I'm rather assuming OP was referring to the sort of culture that produces this sort of discourse:

http://quillette.com/2017/12/11/problematic-poor-taste/

If the US Academic reaction to such a straight forward request was so hostile, then I can imagine many people feeling unable to voice actually difficult opinions

This was in no way a hostile response. The operative sentence from the complaint is "I find the use of the term as the catchy title of an academic conference with no bearing on their situation unfortunate and write to encourage the conference’s organizers to change its name."

"Unfortunate." "Encourage the conference's organizers to change its name."

I'm a researcher. I'm also unusually thin-skinned. Compared to the naked brutality that is the peer review process, that's nothing.

Is your concern that people shouldn't be wasting their time arguing about trivia? I'm afraid academia's definitely guilty of that. Or that you disagree with the complaint? Perfectly fair, but then so did lots of the other people on the list. Or is it something else? I'm finding it hard to parse.

> I wonder how much of this is an outgrowth of the current university campus climate where opinions that don't fit into the predominant liberal worldview can't be voiced.

This does not seem to match the reality at university campuses - only the caricature by people who find it politically expedient to be seen as persecuted.

Results of this debate disagree with you

https://www.intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/free-speech-th...

... pardon my assumption, but those four people don't look like college students. Are they?

The results of a straw poll after a debate are not evidence for anything beyond what the people who saw the debate thought of the debaters. People vote for all kinds of reasons - the underlying merits of the case, the impressiveness of the speakers that they've found to present it, even sympathy for someone who got obviously crushed by their opponent. When I was a debater I've seen some truly outrageous motions get passed simply because one side was funnier.

I understand. I was responding to comment that said its totally baseless caricature.

I think debaters did a good job of presenting evidence for their case. Why not give it a chance instead of saying its "staw poll", isn't any poll "straw poll" by that account?

Also I never said it evidence of anything. What is an example of "evidence" in this particular case for you?

Ah, sorry. You said "results of this debate disagree with you", so I took that to be the debate's results (the vote), not the debate itself.

(And as a side point, no to the straw poll question - there are certain statistical guarantees on the representativeness of polls as long as they're drawn from a random sample of the public, with debates about how far you can deviate from a random sample and still have results that are useful. Self-selected polls, on the other hand, pretty much mean nothing.)

> Self-selected polls, on the other hand, pretty much mean nothing.

Isn't our democracy built upon "self selected polling" , people who chose to go excesrice their right to vote. Its all meaningless?

If few enough people vote, arguably yes (though that's a fairly complex question and depends a lot on what your conception of democracy is). But in essence, an election is a full-population poll: like a random sample with probability 1 of being chosen. So it's statistically maximally valid. We (political scientists) tend to squint a bit and say the opportunity to vote is equivalent to actually voting, so non-voting doesn't harm the legitimacy of elections. I don't personally buy that, but it's a tricky problem to fix.

So if am I reading this correctly.

Previously you said "any self selected polling is meaningless"

Now you are saying "Self selected polling is meaningful when people who didn't self select had the opportunity to do so" .

Ok. So by that definition the poll I linked, everyone had the opportunity to participate in the debate, theoretically. What makes it meaningless ?

PS: Fixing democracy ect is not interesting to me in this context, I want to focus your claim self-selected = meaningless.

Because I, for one, didn't know it was happening and therefore could not participate. My chance of having my opinion count was zero. So pretty much by definition the poll is not representative of the universe of people-who-include-me. And by induction of all the other people who had no chance to participate.

If you want to know more, I recipient looking up the 1936 Literary Digest poll for US President, one of the most famous screwups caused by non-random sampling: https://www.math.upenn.edu/~deturck/m170/wk4/lecture/case1.h...

its the same with US polls, everyone having an opportunity is merely theoretical. Lots of people are unable to votes for all sorts of reasons.

Perhaps explain how you are defining * opportunity to participate* .

If you're arguing that elections with less than 100% turnout are flawed as models of public opinion, I agree with you.

There's a single democracy. There's no shortage of random polling websites. Telling me "You are ruled by this person, who was selected in a process you knew about since childhood" is one thing; telling me "This is likely true because people on this website you've never heard of say it's true" is another.

(And yes, governments where there are ad-hoc rationalizations for who gets to vote or where the procedures aren't publicly announced are in fact illegitmate and widely recognized as such.)

I didn't say it was the "truth" or anything like that. What are you even saying?

I claimed a thing was true. You said that the results of a debate disagree with me. Either you meant that my position was likely to be untrue as a result, and in turn the position advocated by the "winner" of the debate was likely true, or you didn't mean anything relevant at all. Which is it?

It merely meant lots of people were convinced that its true based on the arguments provided by side arguing for the motion.

"Undecided" went from 8% to 24% for the motion.

See my reply to ak_yo.

Just off the top of my head in the last year or so:

Social scientist Charles Murray was censored then physically assaulted at Middlebury because he wrote a book about the correlation between intelligence and success [https://youtu.be/a6EASuhefeI?t=19m25s]

Biology professor Bret Weinstein at Evergreen State College had himself and his family physically threatened because he refused to participate in a protest that asked all white people to leave campus for a day [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xq4Y87idawk]

A professor at Diablo Valley College smashed a dude with a bike lock just because he was on the different side of the political spectrum as he was. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ug34vogS3Fw]

Everything that Jordan Peterson had to go through at University of Toronto because he publicly opposed a draconian bill to forces professors to use specific pronouns when referring to students [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsG71YrB_Nw]

Lindsay Shepard at Laurier University had to face a star chamber from a 'diversity committee' because she showed a video clip of Jordan Peterson in class [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpFUvfAvKs4&t=1m18s]

And then there were the psychos that literally lit University of Berkeley on fire when Milo Yiannopoulos went to give a talk there [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pi_vX0tknJM&t=4m45s]

etc...

Please see my other reply in this thread about censoring people vs. censoring ideas. The only one on this list that's somewhat convincing is the Laurier one, since that was in the course of an academic class. Milo isn't an academic. A professor beating someone with a bike lock might be inappropriate and criminal but isn't about academic discourse unless the other person is a professor, and it seems this person was a former professor, anyway. Jordan Peterson himself has been able to spread his ideas far and wide via his YouTube channel, which as far as I know is not censored on any campus network. etc.

They're being censored because of their ideas though... I'm not sure how you can draw that distinction.

Not necessarily - they're being censored because of their refusal to engage with the scientific community and insistence on presenting their views as scientific when they're not (e.g., Murray) or because their purpose is antics and not ideas (e.g., Yiannopoulos). Both of those are things that a university should disinvite speakers for.

I went to my sisters graduation at Northwestern where Stephen Colbert was the keynote speaker. I don't see a difference between the antics of Colbert and Yiannapoulos other than what tribe they represent. One is a keynote graduation speaker, one has riots that prevent them from speaking on campus.

To be honest, I don't think I can defend inviting Stephen Colbert, either. (Especially if he's in character.)

However, commencement speeches do not have a high reputation for academic rigor to start with, so I think inviting an entertainer to speak at one is sort of different from inviting a speaker with some specific experience (either academic, or political/industrial/etc.) to give a lecture.

All that said, keep that Yiannopoulos wanted to read out the names of students without legal immigration status on stage at Berkeley. That's the sort of thing I mean by "antics." I don't think Stephen Colbert does anything of the sort. His partisanship and his satirical character mean that I have trouble saying that anything of value will be lost if he stops being invited to speak at college campuses, but he seems qualitatively different from Yiannopoulos.

> Yiannopoulos wanted to read out the names of students without legal immigration status on stage at Berkeley.

I don't think this was ever true, and your whole stance on this hinges on it.

> since I realize many conservatives would do the same about issues they care about if they had the power and numbers

This, in fact, happens as the move to criminalize speech against Israel on campuses and eslwhere shows.

At the meta level this is a symptom of the fact that the polarization of our culture is extremely deep. We are polarized on epistemology, metaphysics, and what it means to be human, with the left favoring various forms of scientific or empirical epistemology and a mutable model of human nature and the right favoring revelatory or traditionalist epistemology and an immutable model of human nature.

The latter is true of the secular right as well. Just substitute "evolution" and "history" for God and mystical revelation. The secular right believes that human inborn characteristics are immutable and culture is a product of evolutionary processes that cannot or should not be rationally understood or modified. All the Neo-racists and HBD types are basically evolutionary-historical conservatives or reactionaries who see inequality as a revealed result of a process that is beyond human understanding.

It's getting to the point that it is not even possible for the two sides to communicate because they do not agree on language, logic, or basic rules of discourse. The left and the right are cognitively inhabiting different universes.

Humans subjectively experience extreme cognitive dissonance as actual discomfort. I think this explains the intolerance. People are emotionally reacting to the level of cognitive dissonance this divide generates as if ideas from the opposing side are physical attacks. I agree that the right is no different. Go into one of their bubbles and voice liberal ideas and you'll get the same reaction Milo gets on a Berkeley college campus.

>with the left favoring various forms of scientific or empirical epistemology

What is scientific or empirical about safe spaces and identity politics?

Those things are part of the reaction I describe. The right is also creating its own enclaves.

I would not be surprised to see the United States physically fragment and balkanize in the next 10-20 years. I get the sense that some on the hard-right and possibly also the hard-left have that as a goal.

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