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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

>> Which ideas, if any, are beyond the pale? Is it a mistake to “normalize” some speakers? When?

Untruth. Lies. Total fiction mascaraing as fact. Such things should be denied the dignity of a university podium. People who want to poke holes in climate models are one thing, people who believe the earth is getting warmer due to a giant dragon hiding behind the moon are another. People who believe Obama was a lizard-person sent by Bin Laden to undermine gun rights ... such "alternative facts" deserve no place on a campus dedicated to learning.

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Assuming the students have been appropriately educated, wouldn't they just laugh at the speakers talking about lizard people? Why would they need to be protected from that kind of nonsense?

>> wouldn't they just laugh

I laughed. Back in 1998 I attended a lecture that I though was about evidence of aliens messing with our DNA. What I got was intelligent design as proof that the bible was literally correct. Most laughed, but many did not. Students believe what they are told. Not all of them all of the time, but a significant percentage will believe anything they hear so long as it reinforces their world view.

Educated or not, framing is an important part of any arguement. Time and attention is limited so who is allowed to speak in a venue and how long they're given is an implicit endorsement. There's an appeal to authority there in all future arguments ("well I spoke here, what have you done") and regardless of how much education you have refuting a false claim is always an order or magnitude harder than making one.

It's not so much protecting people, is ensuring their mental energies can be put toward productive measures rather than swimming through falsehoods for the sake of it.

Those students will spread the idea as a joke until it reaches a bunch of people who take it seriously and start to organize.

That sounds like a different problem. If people are so weak-minded that they can't be trusted to hear obviously ridiculous ideas, isn't that equivalent to asserting that democracy is doomed to failure? That the majority will only "do the right thing" if some "better" people "guide" their opinions "for their own good"?

Well now you've moved away from criticizing echo chambers and gone to full-blown censorship.

Untruths and lies are rarely black and white. There was a time when the heliocentrism was considered a lie. A time when men & women being equal was considered an untruth.

If sufficient people are interested in a speaker/idea, isn't it best to let them speak and trust people to draw their own conclusions based on the information presented?

this is a persuasive argument, in a vacuum, but to the degree which some subjects are based on objective argument, I can't say I agree. In scientific academia, the expectation is that if someone is making a claim, they also have experimentation and/or logical reasoning that can be explained which supports their claim, and is verifiable with repeated tests by secondary sources. now, some of the examples you pose fall under the murkier realms of subjective reasoning and frankly, moral relativism. Geocentrism died with the rise of societies value for objective thought, in the enlightenment. So too has the idea of the value of an individual's humanity and sentience slowly eroded away the perceived legitimacy of ideas such as racism and sexism. To many, there is the perception that granting legitimacy to ideas that run counter to the concepts of objective truth and inherent human value by giving those ideas platform is not good for society. How people determine which arguments fall under those criteria is the sticking point.

>How people determine which arguments fall under those criteria is the sticking point.

Yes, and whoever is making that determination gains great power. It is very easy to use this power of censorship to push an agenda. Arguments have many nuances and are rarely completely true or completely false.

Until we have a benevolent oracle that can determine whether an argument represents objective truth, free and open speech is our best option.

When any bar is set for what is considered "acceptable" inquiry in areas dedicated to research, we set boundaries that will inevitably be twisted to constrain research and free inquiry when reactionaries or revolutionaries are in power. They will use those boundaries as gameable dogma to expel and ostracize minorities. The reason academic freedom both exists and is largely value-agnostic is to preserve those norms and precedents should ideologues that aren't on your side assume power over you.

Meanwhile the people you're mockingly referring to here are running your country. Just this fact must be enough for you to tolerate what they have to say. If not, you're demonstrating exactly the problem this article is talking about.

Lol, not my country. Canada's leadership is imperfect but remains on the side of sanity. And we keep bulwarks against such things. It's actually a large part of the current NAFTA negotiations. Trump goes on about trade and money, we are concerned about protecting our culture and our politics. The "Canadian content" rules, our limitations on foreign ownership of media outlets, such things are to protect us from the raging dumpster fire.

> Obama was a lizard-person sent by Bin Laden to undermine gun rights

Telling that you're so quick to hyperbole here - of course nobody has actually been invited to speak at a college who believed that Obama was a "lizard person". People like Ben Shapiro, Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, Alex Jones and Jordan Peterson have been invited and subsequently disinvited due to backlash, though, and I'm pretty sure those are the people you're backhandedly referring to. But they don't say that Obama was a lizard person. They do say that he was born in Kenya rather than Hawaii, that he's a muslim rather than a Christian, and that he's a socialist rather than a capitalist. Ironically, because these things are, at least, believable, when you say that they're no longer up for debate and won't even discuss whether or not their up-for-debate status is up for debate, you actually make it look like they _are_ true. Suppressing plausible conspiracy theories makes them seem more plausible, which is doubly distressing when they're conspiracy theories that are so easily debunked.

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