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Comment by rtpg | Hacker News Reader

This reminds of the that NY Times "intellectual dark web" article, with such obscure figures as Joe Rogan.

The man has one of the most popular podcasts in the world, but still can get the times to write an article about how he's some underground thinker.

If you dig deeper into these kinds of complaints from these kinds of people, it usually turns into "The people _I_ want to like me do not". They expect universal admiration, and when they don't they yell about some sort of conspiracy.

The fact that everyone even knows about the popular people making these complaints disproves the thesis that they can't get out there and make their arguments.

It just turns out that none of these alternative thinkers can handle any sort of criticism against their ideas, and think there's a mass conspiracy. Ocamm's razor suggests otherwise

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Uh, people have their livelihoods destroyed and lives ruined for having unpopular views all the time. James Watson literally had to sell his Nobel prize because he was destitute, Curtis Yarvin was disinvited from Strange Loop, to name two examples. Another example of the difficulty people have in going against the status quo is this article, which was on HN several months ago: https://quillette.com/2018/09/07/academic-activists-send-a-p... .

The problem is not that they can't accept criticism, the problem is other people disenfranchising them for their opinions.

> unpopular views > James Watson literally had to sell his Nobel prize

He's a fairly blatant racist - I think that's a bit more than "unpopular" when it comes to views.

> livelihoods destroyed and lives ruined > Curtis Yarvin was disinvited from Strange Loop

In what way did "not being invited to speak at a conference" destroy his livelihood or ruin his life?

Being disinvited from a conference is the least of it. If he wasn’t the founder of his own company, he would have lost his job. In 2016, security escorted him off the SF Google campus when he visited a friend for lunch. Apparently his name is on a blacklist (along with other conservative & neoreactionary people).

When I met Curtis Yarvin, he told me about some efforts he’d been taking to reduce the risk of violence to him and his family. I disagree with him on pretty much everything, but it saddened me that he had to worry about that.

> security escorted him off the SF Google campus when he visited a friend for lunch

I mean, sure, that's inconvenient but it's really nothing in the grand scheme of things.

> some efforts he’d been taking to reduce the risk of violence to him and his family

If people have threatened him or his family, that definitely sucks and I cannot condone or support those people.

They’re not being disenfranchised for their opinions. It’s nobodys right to give a talk at a conference. It’s just that people don’t want to be friends with bigots.

If you spout bad opinions people like you less. If you show bad judgement people won’t want to hire you.

If you preach an ideology that implicitly concludes that a certain set of people are biologically inferior, it’s not a surprise that people who disagree will fight you about it. What else do you expect? What other outcome? “Oh cool yeah you think I’m subhuman. awesome. Let’s get to work.” In what universe does _that_ align with free association?

Joe Rogan is rare and important because he'll sit down and have an authentic conversation with anyone. Over a span of hours without talking points or a sequence of established rhetoric.

These sorts of conversations contrast mainstream media (TV and headline news) because the participants are free to speak for hours, not minutes, and are not put on their heels the entire time.

What about examples like this? [1] A researcher wanted to do research on gender reassignment reversals and was turned down by his ethics committee. I think is more what the new journal was created for.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/sep/25/bath-spa-u...

Ethics committees generally do not turn down research because they think it's a bad idea, but because the processes in place to protect the subject are sub-standard. In the example linked, that would probably be a heavy-duty human subject study subject to rigorous controls. An MA student has perhaps six months to research, write up and hand in, which (together with being an inexperienced researcher) would certainly raise warning flags.

Also, Bath Spa University is a relatively small, relatively new university with a less established research tradition than most of the UK's universities. It wouldn't surprise me if its ethics committees were less confident too.

None of which is to say that the student isn't right, just that we currently only have his word for it and the university is quite correctly saying nothing. But I'm pretty sceptical.

To reuse and expand upon a comment of mine from elsewhere:

I don't really care whether celebrities feel persecuted or not. (I believe there's too much cult of celebrity already, so I do not feel any more sympathy for them than I do for everyone else.) I'm not really sure why a few different people thought my comment was relevant specifically to that NY Times IDW article.

The danger I was referring to is the danger to _anyone_ and the reason behind an academic journal being created to allow regular academics to publish under pseudonyms. This is a far more serious issue than celebrities feeling unloved and blaming a conspiracy.

For instance I've personally seen multiple people ostracized from their predominantly-left-leaning friend groups for saying something mildly positive about something Trump has done in office, or for arguing that not everyone who voted for Trump is a racist. I'm not sure how rational political discussion can be held when saying such innocuous things as I've mentioned can result in instant ostracization. Fortunately I noticed this happening before I too said something that would end the same way for me. (I already learned not to discuss politics with my very right-leaning dad, so adding "most of my friends" to the do-not-discuss-politics-with-them list was fairly easy.) Although I'm in a very liberal area so I see this primarily happening in fervently left-leaning circles, I understand that similar happens in fervently right-leaning circles as well. I can only imagine how much one has to censor themselves when publishing something that shouldn't be controversial at all in an academic journal! This is seriously not good.

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