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Comment by brobdingnagians | Hacker News Reader

If people are not equipped to deal with opposing viewpoints and critical thought, then perhaps the social organs of education have failed. Classical Western education prized dissent, debate, and dialectic for thousands of years, but education has changed dramatically in the decades since the 60s. Perhaps it is not for the better. Societies do not always progress upwards towards "more enlightened". Western education has stopped valuing objective truth, dissent, scientific method, and moral integrity. When those are gone, there is very little common ground between those who disagree, because even the method of discourse is gone. That is when force becomes valued by all sides, since they can no longer make any progress by words.

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Im not sure the education has changed -- examples of previously not valuing truth include things like the south teaching that the civil war was about something other than slavery

What has changed is the scale of information though. We used to have small amounts of information and opinions to evaluat, but now there's huge amounts of information to deal with, and those techniques haven't updated to match.

Peer review of scientific publications is an example there - peer review used to involve things like visiting somebody's lab to try and disprove their new type of radiation theories, and now there's so many articles to review that nobody's reading them all, or putting the same level of review in

Education has changed. Our educational institutions used to be a bastion of free speech where tolerance for disagreement was treasured. This is not the case today, where merely speaking disagreement to the majority narrative gets your professorship cancelled and gets students disciplined.

I see this repeated constantly - how many cases have there been? I'm asking genuinely.

Funny you should ask, because I just happened to see Robin Hanson share [0] the exact statistics on this today.

2020: 64

2019: 11

2018: 13

2017: 9

2016: 4

2015: 4

[0] https://twitter.com/robinhanson/status/1346656330149470211

Just glancing at the linked spreadsheet, I see way more than 4 events in 2020 for which termination is pretty clearly justified and necessary, so this trend seems to be driven at least in part by a change in behavior by professors and not just others' responses to that behavior. Also worth mentioning that the majority of the listed professors don't seem to have actually been fired or even disciplined - unsuccessful petitions and the like are included.

it's also the case that some groups have become hyper-vigilant about academic "cancellations" in the last several years, which could account for why so many purported incidents have occurred since more attention is being paid to the issue.

I don't see any evidence that this spreadsheet is the result of someone systematically reviewing every case of a professor or other academic being dismissed, rebuked or whatever since 2014, so I don't really see how it could constitute a trend.

seeing a lot of people in this list "denounced in an open letter", "petitioned for firing" and the like. maybe we have different ideas about what it means to be "cancelled".

Even outside of explicit censorship I think that the US education system has been doing a very poor job lately in terms of promoting critical thinking skills. It's too common to see folks come out of the educational system with too much faith put in "both-sides-ism" it's important to empathize and understand different viewpoints but it is lazy to accept all differing views as being equally valid.

I say batshit insane crazy stuff all the time that in hind-sight I didn't mean at all. Probably, I should work on thinking more before I speak. But - I like to speak my mind - even if it gets me in trouble some times.

I do think it's a problem that a lot of employees can and do get fired over saying dumb stuff - a lot of times that they didn't mean to say. Does this include Trump's famous "Grab them by the p#$$y" comment? Maybe.

However, there's this idea that people should basically be able to send out hate speech memos in a company and not be apprehended for "speaking their mind". These are completely different. One of them is premeditated idiocracy. The other is a mistake. We shouldn't confuse the two.

Now tell me which side destroyed education.

The only examples of this that I know of are literal holocaust deniers. I have never seen a professor with an argument that can be backed up with any amount of facts be disciplined.

"Our educational institutions used to be a bastion of free speech where tolerance for disagreement was treasured."

Do you have a specific citation for that? There was Kent State. Before that they were racially and earlier, sexually, ethnically, and religiously, segregated.

What specific time period are you thinking of?

In what time frame though?

For instance, Galileo was not treated well for going against conventional wisdom, and nobody liked vis viva because it wasnt newton's momentum.

Are there people losing their jobs and being cancelled for going against the Copenhagen interpretation today?

Back in the 50s and 60s, Pete Seeger was banned from performing to anyone but young children by the FBI because he may have been a member of the Communist party -- including at educational institutions. Is that still happening today? Has that changed or something?

What's the difference in analytic technique that has changed since that time period? People are still writing essays, running experiments and measuring p values. These are still the methods being taught, too

I agree that education has changed for the worse in many ways, but might disagree with you on some of the specifics. Being direct, I see the republican party as having a very anti-science, anti-evidence, anti-facts disposition as evidenced by their attitudes toward evolution, gun-violence, COVID, etc.

>I see the republican party as having a very anti-science, anti-evidence, anti-facts disposition as evidenced by their attitudes toward evolution, gun-violence, COVID, etc.

One of my hobbies puts me among people who pretty homogeneously lean right. They say more or less the exact same thing about the left and on the same list of topics no less. I can paraphrase talking points if you would like. There is a fundamental and irreconcilable difference in beliefs between the left and the right when it comes to the what is right and what is wrong.

I think if you expanded your list of issues slightly you would be very hard pressed to find someone who is not a hardcore partisan from either party that does not believe that the "other party" has it right on at least one or two issues.

I think this exposes some of the problem we're discussing though. Your view that one party is anti-evidence, anti-facts, anti-science betrays enormous bias or at least indicates that your information stream is very biased. There are plenty of examples of policy proposals from either party that can be described this way. Facts and evidence are conveniently ignored in the furtherance of policy, routinely. To say that this party or that party is _mostly_ unlike the other in this respect is itself "anti-evidence" or contrary to the objective evidence.

For example?

If people are not equipped to deal with opposing viewpoints and critical thought, then perhaps the social organs of education have failed.

Yes, arguably because certain political elements have made it their business to make damned sure those organs fail.

When educated people consistently vote for one party over the other, it's absurd to expect the losing party to support improvements to education. You'd have to be, well, poorly educated to think that.

And we all know who loves the poorly educated...

What happened since the 60s in your opinion?

If I were to guess, it seems pubic policy in recent decades has often been founded on shaky ground. Anti-communism, anti-drug policy, various health/welfare policies, and so on are often not particularly evidence based. I can see this leading to a broader acceptance of dual-reality "facts" like we're seeing now. Words and truth lose meaning.

But is that new? I have no idea.

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