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Comment by emmelaich | Hacker News Reader

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

You cannot say it doesn't discuss specifics.

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.

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.

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