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Comment by leereeves | Hacker News Reader

What the hell does that have to do with white supremacy? Rationality is available to anyone regardless of race, and isn't exclusively a creation of white people either.

You called it a "Western" tradition of thought and I was merely echoing your words. In truth, "the East" contributed a lot, many people in "the West" don't value rationality, and many people elsewhere do. Our rational view of the world is a shared achievement and inheritance by and for anyone who chooses to contribute.

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[this comment was written in response to the parent, which was [flagged] while I was typing]

I find the backlash Joscha receives (also in this talk) from the Social Justice community surprising, given that afaik he never took a stand on the issue. Let me attempt an explanation, using ideas from this talk. If a god is a virtual entity that 'runs' next to your consciousness with properties of being omnipotent (knows all your thoughts) and that it judges you for your behavior, you can also have a Beelzebub as a virtual entity that is not quite as omnipotent, but tries to inject 'bad' thoughts into your brain. But since it is not omnipotent, you can fight it.

Now for these kind of entities to be successful they need to have additional properties to protect themselves, similar to biological organisms. Any thought questioning it is a threat to such virtual entity and therefore for such entity to be successful, it must have the property that any thought questioning it must be evil. They also need additional properties to encourage spreading and to avoid mutations.

Rationality has proven to be a good antidote to such entities, so it's just natural that new entities will evolve that have developed properties that give them immunity to that.

I think 'patriarchy' is such a Beelzebub. To simplify it: Rationalist arguments were mostly developed by white men, and thus are thoughts connected to the Beelzebub.

Either your view of patriarchy is misconstrued, or you've heard about it from a source unfamiliar to me or indeed social science researchers who take the concept very seriously. Before talking about it being an idea which cannot be challenged, I'd also draw your attention to the very challenging debates in social science and philosophy which do question it. Their inaccessibility to laypeople (including me) is something to be improved on, perhaps, but I don't think we can say it's such a concept as you are describing it to me, short of a mass academic conspiracy.

The understanding of this current rationality as purely an antidote to pernicious ideas and mysticism is a relatively new one; in fact, in the 60s and 70s a big argument in critical theory was that by deplacing religion as a bearer of objective rationality, science took up a semi-religious role itself, and questions of morality or things that natural science (as opposed to the science of philosophy) could not answer were brushed aside as too mystical to be worthy of consideration, and consigned to the same dustbin us 'rational' people dumped religion in. This is also shown in the anti-positivism controversy, that is to say to what extent we can apply the methods of natural science to the social sciences. Your characterisation of patriarchy (which seems to stem from positivist ideology) seems incomplete in the face of the debate. Are there any scientists who agree with your characterisation?

I hadn't even heard of Joscha Bach before viewing the link, so I can't comment on his case in particular.

"A mass academic conspiracy" is precisely what we see in the social sciences. Any social scientist who publishes a heretical view is excommunicated. The evidence is never considered; the mere idea, indeed merely a few heretical words, is enough to end a career.

I could name a number of examples but I'm confident you're familiar with a few of them.

Does this conspiracy exist despite the fact that there are both more libertarian and more Marxist philosophers than you can shake a stick at? And are you sure that you intended to say a conspiracy (as in, a coordinated movement among researchers) rather than peer pressure against challenging prevailing orthodoxies? Either way, the "orthodoxy" of patriarchy isn't one of them.

In fact, the presence of positivist and liberal philosophers in academic philosophy is far, far greater than the presence of heterodox economists (think Marxians, neo-Ricardians post-Keynesians and Sraffians) in economics. The rejection of certain ideas actually seems to be much more of a problem in public media in which figures such as Slavoj Zizek can no longer write for papers like The Guardian.

I was referring to "patriarchy" and related ideas, where political pressure trumps science and ends academic careers if anyone expresses unpopular ideas.

And you claim "the orthodoxy of patriarchy is not one of them"?

I find it hard to believe you aren't familiar with stories from Google, CERN, Harvard, etc, etc where people were driven out for questioning the theory that patriarchy is solely responsible for the differences in careers between men and women.

People being kicked out from their jobs for questioning orthodoxies in society isn't nearly the same problem as philosophers being ejected from the field for questioning it. I'd also be cautious about saying the stories from Google for instance (all I can think of is Damore) were simply trying to spark genuine debate on the matter. Phrasing is, of course, also important, just as a professor saying "I'll give you an A if you sleep with me" to a student is different from him saying (in a news op-ed or such) "I don't think it's wrong to sleep with students in exchange for grades". Even most libertarians draw some line between locutionary and illocutionary freedoms of speech.

So while it may be a problem (though I'm skeptical), it's not the problem I was discussing. Academia rightfully tries to hold itself to the standard of free inquiry (if in good faith), but Google and Harvard have no such obligation, even to themselves. I think we probably disagree on whether there should be such an obligation.

I never said philosophers. They're free to say what they want because few people pay much attention to what they say. You included social science in your earlier comment and I was discussing that field specifically. The overlap between "orthodoxies in society" and orthodoxies in that field is so complete that research is largely agenda-driven and dictated by politics.

And isn't Harvard academia? Isn't Google in a position to restrict free inquiry both inside and outside academia?

Perhaps we do disagree about whether there should be an obligation to allow free expression. You may have found its restriction temporarily comfortable; perhaps you're even glad that people who disagree with you weren't allowed to speak in those cases. But the backlash against such restriction helped lead to the election of Trump. When we abandon liberal values we return to the chaos of no-holds-barred fights for power.

Simply because an area of study and society share the same orthodoxies, I wouldn't say that's sufficient to qualify as research being agenda-driven, though maybe you could say there's a pressure to operate under a certain agenda, all sciences face the same in that scientists must first decide what to study before they study it, and as such based on the probabilities they can reckon with (being clever people) they can tell if something will lead to a "good" or a "bad" result. In fact, a recent study of submissions in Nature found that very few actually began with a hypothesis, and instead the research was exploratory.

So I don't think there's a direct causal connection, and in fact it could also be said that results from social sciences have influenced the political climate in turn, though the education system. It's clearly a dialectical relationship.

Harvard may be academia, but I got the impression you were talking about people being ejected not for coming out with a paper that challenges the orthodoxies of social justice (of which there are many, just yesterday I read part of a PhD which argued that many forms of hate speech should not be restricted in a liberal state) but rather something else outside of the academic process.

I can't say I'm very much in favour of liberalism in general, and I don't think that restrictions on some speech lead to tyranny as it's frequently alleged they would. One need not be a trusting citizen to hold this position, and I see no reason why the state (or an organization, of course) should not be very opinionated about what it allows and what it does not. The question "what if they start banning the kind of things you say?" is a moot point when I'm not arguing for such a ban. Just as any restriction on speech might be uncomfortable for you, only some are uncomfortable for me. You will protest when Harvard starts kicking people out for left-wing or right-wing views, but I'll only protest when they start kicking people out for left-wing views. I make no secret of this bias, and I think the obsession with being as abstract and neutral in general has taken a lot of force out of arguments for how we ought to run society.

Upvoted!.

Did you edit your comment to remove the condescending remark about my new HN account? Wow.

Well I’m glad to hear that “the East” had something to contribute too!

Please, it's quite obvious your intent is in part to generate emotion and not purely 'informed exchange'. Your tone is not appropriate to this community. Some things I've learned here: give your fellow conversationalists as much benefit of the doubt as you can. It's wise to avoid tactics of rhetoric such as reductio ad absurdum. Try explain your thoughts in such a way that we do not have to guess.

I'm actually quite sure you have something interesting to contribute, but please, politeness is important here.

Apologies for the sarcasm. I felt that the previous comment was very much ad hominem and the edit was particularly insidious. But you’re right, no excuse for bad form here :)

Do you not feel your initial comment was ad hominem? "Listening to Joscha Bach is like listening to the screams of computer scientists as they are slowly squeezed to death."

I initially reacted to that and replied more harshly than I should have, so I edited the comment slightly to remove the emotion. What's insidious about that?

Or he edited it out because after reflection he realised t didn’t add anything useful? That often happens to me — I write something more snarky than I meant to and only realise after the fact and then edit my comment to remove it. My intent, when I do this, is not one of malice.

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