Hacker News Reader

In the student letter published to defend him, there's a couple of paragraphs that at least allude to what appears to have been the underlying controversy: https://www.dukechronicle.com/article/2018/05/in-defense-of-...

"Because of this, Professor Charney often takes on positions that are not his own in order to illustrate perspectives from across the spectrum. For example, in 2016 during the peak of the Allen building protests, he spent a whole class discussing the motivations and tactics of the protestors and challenging his students to argue cogently in favor of or against the movement. Though in some cases this put the burden on protesters in his class to justify their actions, it also exposed the unsavory and borderline racist opinions of others. His rationale is clear: without confronting new ideas, students go through Duke unchallenged and are unable to evaluate the merits of competing claims.

To be sure, Charney’s courses elicit a discomfort inherent to any situation that requires students to re-evaluate their most deeply held convictions. In presenting differing perspectives on sensitive topics, some are concerned that his class reproduces systems and structures of inequality involving notions of class, privilege and power. The concern here is that, in the name of “diversity of opinion,” the class becomes a staging ground for perspectives that reinforce the negative racial, class, and gender power dynamics that exist in society and on this campus. In recognition of this, he makes sincere and intentional efforts to reach out to students who might feel hurt or offended by the class discussions. In these cases, he seeks to address the offense and listens genuinely to recommended changes to the ways in which he teaches sensitive subject matter."

(While searching for that, I also came across this: https://www.dukechronicle.com/article/2017/04/student-conduc... which is unrelated, but also fairly unflattering.)

That second link doesn't flatter anyone at Duke. The former professor displays the unwavering certainty of the completely ignorant, but the whole process is capricious. If you want to administer a quiz, then administer a quiz. Duke can afford computer labs, or if not they can afford paper. ("Electronic Blue Book" salesmen wouldn't be kicking back those sweet bribes to administrators for paper quizzes, though...) This BS with hacking students' laptops so they theoretically can't search for answers using their browsers was certain to lead to a situation like that. Given the suspension rates described, it probably has done many times already. Presumably those students weren't wealthy enough to afford lawyers and multiple summer journeys to Duke in order to defend their innocence, so fuck them.

If you've read 4 or 5 articles already, maybe it signifies a trend?

Another common theme in these threads are comments attempting to dismiss and marginalize these victims because it doesn't align with one's political ideologies. I'm surprised you didn't mention that. If you've read these threads, I'm sure you've noticed the support for censorship and the sneaky attempts to justify censorship for political ideology.

Yes, you are right, if a professor teaches that the sun orbits the earth, that should be questioned. And if it was that blatant, then we would know about it already. But what if a professor teaches that biological sex exists? Should they be censured? What if a professor says there aren't anything such as biological sex? Should they be censured?

How many of these censorships are because a physics professors claimed that the sun orbits the earth? None. If you've really paid attention to this issue, you know that most of these censorship are due to political reasons - whether it is Evergreen professors or the CERN scientist and everyone in between.

I can understand the support for censorship in the media, but I can't understand any support for it on a hacker news site. Even for ideological reasons.

his research publications help to provide a fuller picture:

https://sites.duke.edu/evancharney/files/2014/09/Liberal-bia...

Did you read the linked docs? They're pretty compelling.

You cannot say it doesn't discuss specifics.

Can you perhaps be more specific about which document you think answers the question: what position or opinion caused Charney to be censured?

I've taken an admittedly brief look through them and, while I see some hints as to the general subject of discussion, I haven't yet found specific details about what got him in trouble.

In itself that seems to be one of Charney's complaints - that he had difficulty figuring out what the administrators didn't like. Very hard to defend yourself when nobody is quite sure what the attack is. And particularly in ethics where students really aren't learning anything unless they are a bit bothered and uncomfortable about having untested beliefs tested - although for a compulsory course the expectations are a bit different and that might not be appropriate.

Not being specific is a really nasty trick. All the more so because it makes it impossible to say if the problem is one of malicious intent or blinkered thinking from either of the two involved parties. But, critically, if the waters are muddy then the bureaucracy is going to win.

No, there is nothing specific in linked docs. It seems administration decided to get rid of him, appointed two faculty members to form committee and didn't followed their own bylaws. The tiny glimpse in the doc is that there were some low student ranking in 2018 and few people had negative experience interacting with him - but nothing specific. As per the doc, no one has made any formal complaints.

It's however quite apparent that Prof Charney had issues with liberalism. He, for example, asks why people bowing down to "scientific authorities" are considered open-minded but people bowing down to religious authority are considered closed minded. I think it's a clever twist of the word "authority" in to forcing people to think that religion and science are the same thing. If this is his "research", I don't feel too bad for him.

He was an ethics professor. I bet a good amount of money that the point he was making pertained to blindly trusting authority rather than doing your own research. Or in other words:

https://youtu.be/Zgk8UdV7GQ0?t=153

> I think it's a clever twist of the word "authority"

There is overwhelming evidence that established science is correct, and the scientists are using objectively powerful techniques to establish truth.

However, the mechanisms society at large uses to test and assimilate that knowledge are exactly the same as those used for religious authority. The major difference is that rituals invoking science tend to correlate much more closely with getting the outcome we expect than rituals invoking the gods.

Picking on doctors as representatives of the scientific establishment, there isn't much difference from an average person's perspective going to a doctor or a faith healer. Person has a problem, they go to an authority figure, things they don't understand happen, and then hopefully they get a good outcome - no guarantee though. From the perspective of the patient's decision making process, there is no difference.

What is different is the advice from the social network will (hopefully) be 'don't see the faith healer; see the doctor'. That is the only difference in practice between the two decisions.

Monitoring and criticising how the underlying mechanisms work is a perfectly reasonable line of inquiry and place to dissent. There are interesting ethical questions here about who needs to do what to fulfill their ethical requirements between what the patient's responsibilities are given their limited understanding, the social network's responsibility given their third-party status and the authority figure's role in how to represent themselves.

I agree with the point you're trying to make, but perhaps doctors aren't the best representatives of the scientific establishment. Medical practice today is still as much art as science. There is a significant amount of underlying science but many areas are still poorly understood. So doctors rely heavily on customs, guesswork, and intuition in areas where no reliable scientific data exists.

And the situation in medicine is exposed to additional confounding factors - the placebo effect exists (for both faith healers and doctors) and (at least for doctors) has been getting stronger: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/placebo-effect-gr...

So the effect of the ritual of seeing the doctor and undergoing treatment has increased in strength, possibly as people have grown to trust doctors more.

Fully agree (I am a mathematician). People believe scientists based on authority arguments. The alternative would be to believe them because they validated their work. Even among scientists, this is a very hard thing to do. Among mathematicians is close to impossible. The solution agreed since some decades is peer review, but peer review != validation.

As an extreme example about what people believe based on authority arguments, consider the case of a deep mathematician (Dan Barbilian) who was also a great hermetic poet (pen name Ion Barbu). I used Google Translate :) (and some pondering) to turn one of his most famous poems into English.

The literary authority claims that the poem is about the poetic art, while a mathematician would think it is about a Fourier transform (noncommutative, see the "groups of water", SL(2)?).

Here is the translation of the poem Ion Barbu, Din ceas dedus:

From the clock, down the depth of this calm peak,

Passed through the mirror into blessed azure,

Tailoring on the crushing of the aggressive herds

In groups of water a second, purer game.

Latent nadir! The poet raises the sum

Of spreading harps lost into reversed flight.

The song exhausts: as deep as the sea bears

Its jellies, from under the green bells.

Science and religion are not comparable. A key difference is that science is stronger when people question its authority. Science does not require faith but scepticism. That is the whole point of the scientific method! Meanwhile religion requires faith.

This sounds like a good question that should promote a good discussion and would probably end with a cohort of people far better equipped to argue the case for science in a way that shows how the science vs religion debate is not even worth having rather than people who engage pointlessly in a a faith based discussion.

Of course they're comparable, and you just compared them. Like all pairs of things, they have similarities and differences. You're claiming that they're very different, which is fine, but you're dressing it up in language that suggests it's not even possible to disagree, which is silly.

I guess I am saying that the intrinsic nature of the two topics are so different that arguing about them is a matter of deep philosophy rather than right vs wrong and point scoring.

He did not choose a good argument in that case, but, speaking as someone with liberal leanings, I think that overall he has a point here. I was taken aback by how the quoted questions from the Personality Inventory all take a nuanced issue and reduce it to a simple up/down score.

These questions were, of course, picked for discussion by the author himself, but as they are apparently 50% of the questions evaluating the Values facet of the Openness trait, I do not have to accept the author's claim, that the rest are like it, to think that at least this facet is not being well evaluated.

What matters is not the correctness of the information but the way people come to believe it.

If you’re some kind of dogmatic zealot who blindly believes scientists (because how could the scientists possibly be wrong), you’re as closed-minded as the deeply religious who cite the Bible as infallible truth

Actually, rather than having issue with liberalism, he seems to be defending it. His argument seems to be questioning the "bowing down" to "authority". All "authority" - scientific, religious, etc - should be questioned and we shouldn't be "bowing down" to them.

Religion and science are not the same thing ( thought social science is far closer to religion than science ), but authoritarianism and appeal to authority are the same thing.

After all, "scientific authority" was the basis of white supremacy and nazism ( social darwinism ). It was "settled science" not too long ago supported by every scientific authority that white people were superior and non-whites are inferior.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism

You should feel bad for anyone who is a victim of censorship. Being happy that someone is oppressed because they don't align with your political ideology isn't any better than enjoying seeing someone suffer because they aren't part of your race.

And if you are a true "liberal", then you should be against "bowing down" to any form of authority.

I share your observations and raise it with another one - has anybody noticed that these sorts of things only happen at elite institutions? I never hear about this sort of thing (about “chilled free speech”) at my alma mater

https://www.carolinajournal.com/opinion-article/meanwhile-fr...

These sorts of things only happen at elite universities because they can drive headlines. As a graduate of a mid tier university over a decade ago, I assure you they were suppressing faculty speech even more and with a whole lot less fanfare.

You didn't follow the Evergreen scandal [1]?

Bret Weinstein, who is as progressive as they come, was driven out of the university because he ventured to say that having a day where whites were to be excluded from attending school was a bad idea.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evergreen_State_College#2017_p...

I see your point but Evergreen isn't exactly a mainstream institution for this sort of thing.

What radical idea he was teaching?

If you read his work: that religion is as epistemologically valid as the physical sciences.

I assume this is why he was dismissed from the tenure track early in his career there.

That is discussed in every philosophy department. Epistemology isn't a "settled topic" and open to debate and discussion. Claiming that religion is just epistemologically valid as physical science isn't controversial. No more than saying mathematics is just as epistemologically valid as physical science. Or art is just as epistemologically valid as physical science.

Why would anyone be dismissed from a tenure track for that? Pretty much every philosophy professors argues for that position.

That's not what he said at all. From the paper linked above:

https://sites.duke.edu/evancharney/files/2014/09/Liberal-bia...

Statement 1 of the "open to experience" section of a popular personality test is the following:

>1. I believe that we should look to our religious authorities for decisions on moral issues. (Agree: Openness score goes down)

He claimed this introduced a political bias, stating:

>Statement 1 reflects a liberal ideological bias against religion. Is reliance upon scientific authorities, for example, close-minded? Granted, the question concerns moral decisions (so let us assume that science cannot resolve questions of right and wrong). Why, then, is reliance upon religious authorities as opposed, for example, to philosophical or ethical authorities or, simply, moral experts, singled out as an instance of close-mindedness? Academics often rely upon authorities when making decisions on moral issues (e.g., the authority of John Rawls when considering matters of distributive justice), although they would likely be uncomfortable characterizing this as reliance upon an authority (even if it is)

This is how I interpret his statement “Statement 1 reflects a liberal ideological bias against religion. Is reliance upon scientific authorities, for example, close-minded?”

And in fact it’s a false dichotomy as the term “authority” in religious contexts (catholic and Protestant Christianity, non-orthodox Judaism, hinduism, Islam and Buddhism at least and likely others)has an assertive meaning utterly different from the same term used for scientists (not that such a term is particularly used in the sciences anyway)

I don’t know enough to say whether dropping his contract might be legit or not, I was simply answering the op question.

Given how conservative his employer is, there are quite likely more problems than he alluded to.

Why should specifics of what is said matter if the point is free speech?

Free speech is necessary, but not sufficient. It isn't simply that the speech has to be free; it also must be worth exploring.

To use my analogy, the Earth-centered model is free speech, but it isn't worth much, because it is wrong.

> Earth-centered model is free speech, but it isn't worth much, because it is wrong.

And yet in schools around the world people are taught that electricity flows from positive to negative, and everyone is happy. xD

(slightly disingenuous, but I'd say wrong and not useful are merely correlated rather than 1-1 linked)

> And yet in schools around the world people are taught that electricity flows from positive to negative,

Seriously? I have never encountered this

Anecdotally, I was taught this in lower grades and taught that it was actually the opposite in higher grades. It wouldn't surprise me if people receiving a more basic education even in the same country would never be taught how it actually is.

Understanding that current is a convention because it doesn’t matter if you have positive or negative charge carriers in many applications is not wrong in any way. Given the nature of electric charge (not to mention specific applications like semiconductors) even if you align the direction of conventional current and flow of electrons, it will still be a convention. That’s the cost of having an abstraction for net change in electric charge (which is a useful and insightful abstraction). Don’t believe schools are teaching anything different than this.

Before people learned that the geocentric model is wrong, how do you suppose they discuss, learn, and share ideas to arrive at the truth? How do they know what is “worth exploring” and who decides that?

Furthermore, once the facts are established, I personally believe it’s important for people to express their ideas even if it’s out of ignorance because then we can know to edify. Not everyone will be willing to listen, learn, and change but without free speech and exchange of ideas I find it hard to see how people will grow effectively.

Actually discussing things that are wrong is just as important as discussing things that are right. Going through what's wrong is one of the ways to get to the what's right.

"It must be worth exploring" is the dangerous authoritarian ideology that is the basis of censorship. It's why free speech is a right. Not the "right to explore those worth exploring".

"What is worth exploring" is entirely subjective.

If we applied your logic, then things like LGBT rights, civil rights, physics, biology, etc are all left to the whims of authority. If people truly thought like you, then heliocentrism wouldn't have been explored because "it wasn't worth exploring" 500 years ago. Actually, it was blasphemy.

You do realize that "everything worth exploring" was pretty much banned, taboo or attacked throughout history? It's why the founders enshrined free speech into the constitution.

Things that are wrong are just as important to discuss as things that are right. It's part of the learning process and part of progress.

Because his position is not one in which free speech is the aim. It is a means to an end, and that end is teaching. The specifics of what he said, and in which context he said it, allow discussion about the quality of his teaching - which is relevant to whether or not his contract should have been renewed.

He is claiming that this is a free speech issue. That doesn't make it true. He alludes to the complaints of a few students but we don't know what that complaint actually is. It could be free speech or it could be that he is an asshole. We don't know.