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Comment by jsmcgd | Hacker News Reader

I think that's why an education has to be broad. A selective education can be tantamount to brainwashing/propaganda. Give the students as many perspectives and hope that they will do something sensible as they process the information; knowing that not all will, but most.

I believe that the more perspectives you are aware of, the less likely you are to be dogmatic and extreme in your beliefs and actions. You will be reminded how dissimilar real life is to simple ideas and rhetoric, that it is a shifting ocean of nuances and caveats.

Or society can go the other route, assume you cannot trust the people and create a tyranny of disinformation and control.

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Perspectives are important and so is a humble study of history as way to understand human nature. We are so in love with your technological prowess that we forget it all sits on top of wetware that is very close to what it was 10000 years ago. Recognizing we are driven largely by instinct, some of which we can inhibit some we cannot, would help all of understand what works and what does not in a human society.

> Give the students as many perspectives and hope that they will do something sensible as they process the information

I don’t know if you’ve gone to college recently but that was not my impression. It’s a woke monoculture. Discourse is gone.

Discourse is narrower than you'd like; that doesn't mean it's "gone". When someone makes extraordinary claims like "Discourse is gone," that is a red flag that they are not viewing the situation objectively.

Precisely demonstrating my point: a hyper-sensitivity and censorious attitude against any advocacy for unmitigated debate.

You are calling my disagreement a "censorious attitude." Sorry, but I am allowed to disagree with you.

So perhaps a better claim would be that the new discourse is unduly confined and the older modes of discourse are gone.

That's a better starting point for a productive discussion, but still hyperbolic.

Moreover, do you notice that my comment is being grayed out as people who disagree are downvoting it? A lot of people who claim to value discussion really don't; not on Hacker News, and not elsewhere.

You're being downvoted because discourse should never be narrowed, period.

Ideas should be thrown into the public square, in the full light of day, and judged on their merits.

Hopefully you realize the hypocrisy of graying out my comment in the name of promoting discourse, but I doubt it.

Ideas should absolutely be judged on their merits; here we agree. Too bad that's not how humans work. Instead, they tend to choose whichever truth they like best based on how it makes them feel; politicians know this, which is why they don't bother crafting logically sound arguments backed with evidence. They play on peoples' emotions.

Moreover, the university is not a public square. You attend as a student, which means you are there to learn, not to share your thoughts like it's a real-life HN thread. Don't want to learn the material? That's completely fine. The solution is to not sign up for the class, not to whine about how "discourse is gone" just because the teacher doesn't want to waste time on every edgy kid's opinions. People didn't pay massive sums of money to hear you talk. They paid to learn from experts.

Don't think of your comment as being grayed out, think of your discourse as being narrowed.

It turns out we are both fine with narrowing discourse, just as I suspected.

The discourse has always been unduly confined. We never discussed whether it was a good thing to slaughter all the Native Americans, and we're not discussing whether all our stupid wars nowadays are good, either. War is off-topic in the USA "discourse". I'm sure other important things about which I'm less concerned are also "unduly" left out.

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