“Roughly one-third of students are in favor of banning controversial books”
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- The sentence pg quoted ("Roughly one-third of students are also in favor of banning controversial books from their university library.") is verbatim from the study.
- However, this study must be seen in context. It was deliberately and openly designed to detect anti-free-speech sentiment by looking at a specifically chosen probable "worst case", namely social science students at a traditionally left leaning university in Germany (which houses the "Institut für Sozialforschung" that gave rise to the "Frankfurter Schule" (Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse) of critical theory, a predecessor of (among other things) CRT). That this is the case is revealed right in the title of the study: "Is Free Speech in Danger on University Campus? Some Preliminary Evidence from a Most Likely Case", and further emphasised in the text: "We are certainly not under the impression that our sample is representative of university students in general (or the wider public, for that matter). On the contrary, we purposefully consider the social science studentship at Frankfurt as a most likely case." (my emphasis).
- So, the study succeeded in detecting some moderately illiberal attitudes in a quarter or so of students at one deliberately chosen "worst case" faculty in Germany.
- All the hubbub here about the statistical limitations is overblown, n=501 is not bad for social science and gives a error margin of around 5%, which means the results stand unless there was massive sampling bias.
> Participation was voluntary and incentivized with a lottery of three Amazon gift vouchers to the value of 50 euro each.
> However, the actual net response rate dropped from 14% to 7.5% when we consider only those who completed at least80% of the survey (n= 501), which is clearly poor and has to be kept in mind whendrawing conclusions from the data.
Not really a great sample. All participants are from a rather specific demographic, and a small sample size at that.
The sample size is so small that I don’t think this study is of any use.
"In practice, pollsters need to balance the cost of a large sample against the reduction in sampling error and a sample size of around 500–1,000 is a typical compromise for political polls."
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Our empirical analysis is based on original survey data collected from social science students at Goethe University Frankfurt. We are certainly not under the im- pression that our sample is representative of university students in general (or the wider public, for that matter). On the contrary, we purposefully consider the social science studentship at Frankfurt as a most likely case (George and Bennett 2005; Gerring 2007)
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..a fact that was obviously overlooked by the outraged masses on Twitter.
Here's another study. National, in the US, of fraternity and sorority members.[1] It's not primarily about censorship, more about Greek life and COVID issues.
If a controversy over offensive speech were to occur on your campus, would the administration be more likely to...
- Defend the speaker’s right to express his/her views: 23% - Punish the speaker for making the statement: 38% - Not sure: 39%
Have you personally ever felt that you could not express your opinion on a subject because of how students, a professor, or the administration would respond?
- Yes: 50% - No: 42% - Not sure: 9%
The sample self-identifies as 46% liberal, 33% conservative.
Results differ widely among universities. Not along obvious lines.
[1] https://assets.realclear.com/files/2021/04/1801_RealClear-Co...
So clickbait BS. Is nobody reading the linked study?
I'm just here to get angry at a misrepresentative editorialized title!
This is hacker news... our time is too valuable to waste actually reading the article and making an informed opinion.
500 people gives you an error margin of +/- 4.5% (Variance of a binomial is npq=np(1-p), worst case p=1/2, so n/4, std deviation thus sqrt(n)/2, then take 2 std dev to cover 95%, thus sqrt(n), as a percentage of all responses sqrt(n)/n = 100/sqrt(n)%), which is not amazing, but not BS either. Is nobody aware of basic statistics?
When you have a really poor response rate, don't you worry about how it might have biased your sample?
People talked about this a lot with respect to political polling by phone during the last US Presidential election. Very few people answer phone polls these days and figuring out how different they are from the general population is important.
Many of us went through study size calculations when we were first learning how to run clinical trials (well, probalby not many, but everybody in my cohort did). The general conclusion among quantitative scientists is that social science like this is worse than useless because of how much time you have to spend explaining to people that the world is not a simple uniform random sampling.
Certainly, curating which books are placed in the university library is detrimental to diversity of thought and exposure to various views (even knowing what extreme views are out there is important if you wish to counter them). But it's not really the same as say a government ban of controversial books.
Also, this survey was done in Germany, where you can already go to jail for claiming the holocaust didn't happen.
That sounds very much like someone whose only experience is with large public universities. I don't really know what "quasi-governmental" means, but any reasonable meaning I can assign it is far beyond my small university--and there are way more small universities than big ones.
Historically universities have been the birthplace of various revolutionary movements. It is arguably one of their roles in society.
1. Someone who believes that Islam is incompatible with the Western way of life.
2. Someone who thought there are biological differences in talents between men and women.
3. Someone who is against all forms of immigration to this country.
4. Someone who thinks that homosexuality is immoral and dangerous.
Only for #4 were as low as 66% against removing their works from the university library. For 1, 78% were against, for 2, 81% were against, for 3, 74% were against.
While that may still be troubling, it's clear peoples willingness to have them removed from the library depends significantly on the specific statement, and another way of presenting this is that the more clearly a statement was flat out expressing bigotry, the more willing people were to remove works by that person.
But maybe that sentiment has outlived its purpose now that higher education is so ideologically tilted towards one side.
Does that fit within the ideological narrative you've constructed here for yourself though?
It doesn’t take a majority of a population to get changes made, just a persistent and vocal minority.
But please, do go on about my narrative. Especially when you come to this thread with narratives like “The "extreme left" is not even a fraction as represented as even far right within popular consciousness and, more significantly, political representation.”
Which is farcical when you look at how mainstream and accepted ideas from the left are in the culture of the west. Unless you shift the definitions of what far-left and far-right are.
OK. Far right idea are built on a simple idea. We (our group, nationalist, cultural, religious) are inherently better than the others. This can be proven by Y[0]. But right now, we are feeling inferior to (our neighbours, elites, educated people, [1]). The only rationnal explanation is that (the liberals/the communists/the jew/the illuminati/the deep state) are plotting against us from within. Once those are purged, we will get our rightfull place in the world.
Far left: A class war exist. this can be proven because X[2]. The non-essential properties should be communal. The mean of production should be owned and paid for by the men and women who work them. The undemocratic republic is a tool for the bourgeoisie to keep people content with an illusion of choice and power. Police and armed forces are the other tools of the bourgeoisie to protect their property more than to protect lives[3]. The bourgeoisie must be purged for the working class to thrive again.
I think both are pretty prevalent, one we talk much more about the former than about the later.
Do you think i misrepresented one part? If so, don't hesitate to correct me.
[0] often a racist sentence, hence its often left to the auditor understanding
[1] French, Jews, Africans, mediterranean (including italian for the Nazi). The list was not the same for Fascist Italy/Spain/France, but close enough.
[2] Warren buffet said so/worker are manipulated into de-unionizing/ transversal fights are a diversion by the bourgeoisie
For people realy on the far left reading this: you are behind the fascists and the liberals in the culture war: go to your group and start opening overton windows about the far left culture: violence against property as a mean of expression, street occupation and guns right as a mean of self-defense (rememebr the Black Panthers? Go do the same thing! Or at least talk about it).
But in my own experience all sorts of people who hold views on the Left tend to 1) distance themselves from “the left”, 2) claim that what is perceived as left-wing is actually only barely left wing, and 3) claim that the right has dramatically more power and influence than they really do.
So I’m not really looking for a definition of what the left and the right are. I’m just noting how the person I was responding to must have a radically different definition that convention.
I think a better writer could make a good book, less ironic, even more convincing and less upfront with the idea. If this book existed, would you let young people read it? I mean, you could argue back that heir add value by living and pushing their parent to earn even more money, and killing them would kill their motivation, but now, killing the 3rd generation should not have any influence on the early motivation, yes?
That being said, an individual’s actions may be outlawed or punished, but I see that as distinct from what they read and publish.
It is an absolutely stellar novel. “All right then, I’ll go to Hell” is one of the more courageous bits of writing that young Americans are exposed to about ourselves. How dare we try to pretend otherwise. It is beyond me.
Looking at all of the other topics paints a different picture: approximately 75% of student are consistently against banning books. But that's significantly less easy to hand-wring about.
This is false.
This is presumably about Hitler's "Mein kampf". Which wasn't banned by law in Germany. The province of Bavaria simply inherited the ownership (copyright) of it and decided not to grant anyone permission to print it. Thats why it was not illegal to have the book but it was illegal to print it.
I believe the copyright has now expired in Germany and it is in the public domain.
Mein Kampf itself is legal. But not everything is.
"About a quarter of social science students at a (deliberately chosen left-leaning) university in Frankfurt, Germany, are in favour of removing controversial books about certain topics from their university library."
ETA: And, in fairness to pg, the sentence quoted ("Roughly one-third of students are also in favor of banning controversial books from their university library") is in fact a direct quote from the study.
Beyond that, PG is a public figured with a huge following, not some obscure academic.
My observation is that most twitter replies are pretty low quality across the board. Especially on politics twitter.
- These are data from social science students in Frankfurt, Germany. The city and university is traditionally left-leaning, so not at all representative for anything (not for students, not for Germany, not internationally)
- The total population is ~6600, and the sample is N=501, which is further reduced by some missing values. Note that very few people actually identify as political leanings, espeically hardly anyone on the conservative spectrum. So I would argue that this study has not enough power to draw any serious conclusion (power in the statistical sense as sensitivity to reject a H0 given it is false)
- The measured variables were many more than merely banning books. Some restrictive attitudes were not supported.
Finally, it is immensenly important to remember that countries must pick one of roughly three approaches to dealing with harmful political attitudes (see Ziblatt's "How Democracies Die" for a longer review of this):
- Have all attitudes compete equally (this is the US model of free speech)
- Contain bad attitudes by shunning them and rendering them a taboo
- Exclude bad attitudes by prohibiting them legally (this is the German model, which criminalizes expression of some opinions such as denial of the Holocaust).
In fact, the authors are very explicit about that point: "We are certainly not under the impression that our sample is representative of university students in general (or the wider public, for that matter). On the contrary, we purposefully consider the social science studentship at Frankfurt as a most likely case."
Next, as outlined above, n=500 seems enough to reject the hypothesis that the percentage that wants to ban the books is near 0. In other words, I dispute your notion that the study has not enough power. Strong sampling bias might be a problem, but nobody has made a case for that yet.
In that case, they censored science.
So, what's not science about the origin of a virus? Your comment makes zero sense.
This is what actual science looks like:
Also, it's a third of SOCIAL SCIENCE students, not overall student population, and the study has a terrible response rate of 7.5% which they themselves admit in part 4.1. Also, because it seems like bad faith editorializing by the OP, it's about banning books from the university library, not in general.
In other words, the study is awful and it doesn't prove any point, but because it's easy to spin it into an anti-woke censorship narrative, HN is going to eat this up.
What I'm trying to say with that is that it's not an equal comparison. There is no political mobilization for extreme left ideas that is even remotely comparable to the far-right that align with some narratives that the students obviously consider as dangerous, such as anti-Islam and anti-immigration, anti-LGBTQ, and pro gendered labor division.
I am not in favor of flat out banning such books (even if I personally believe they have no place in an environment of science and learning such as a university), but it's easy to understand why the response of left-leaning students towards right-leaning topics is stronger than the inverse.
A good democratic country will swing between extreme polls but if you look around you'll see many strongly leftist ideas (extreme gun control, censorship, minors consenting to sex reassignment surgery etc.) getting quite a lot of support and becoming laws in many countries. I certainly wouldn't argue that they're being ignored.
However, none of the points you named are anywhere even remotely near "extreme left", even by US standards. Those are all Democrat party talking points, which is anywhere from slightly left of center to center-right.
The "extreme left" (no, US Democrats are not socialists) has no political representation anywhere in the Western world and barely registers in public consciousness at all.
That's false. In France there's a far left party ( France Insoumise, which has or has had stuff like redistribution of wealth and nationalisation of infrastructure, increasing the minimum wage in multiples in their programme, and regularly works with the Communist party for elections ) which is pretty mainstream, and their candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, was 4th with 19.6% in the last presidential elections. ( For reference, 3rd was with 20%, 2nd with 21.4%, first with 24%)
Isn't there a far left party in Spain as well? And Italy?
Western world != US, Canada, UK.
Something I notice is that, whether it's nationalist Italians burning Communist literature, Germany (WWI-era) burning Catholic writings, or the Nazis burning Soviet books, it's...almost exclusively the right-wing that supports censorship, at least on the list for destroying libraries. When I think of who's actually achieved anti-censorship in the United States, I think of people like Allen Ginsberg, the reason the First Amendment actually began to mean something in the US for the first time in its history. Now, I could be wrong, but I think Ginsberg was...a leftist going against the right-wing?
The left seem to have a certain libertarian bent if anything: They seem to want private enterprise to be able to host what they want. It makes sense from a free market perspective.
My understanding was that the "left and right" is more or less orthogonal to the "authoritarian vs libertarian" dimension. The authoritarian forms of both are absolutely terrible, that's why we have democracy: so they can do their best to cancel each other out.
Even in the US, they are, at least some of them, more prominent in the more centrist faction of the Democratic Party than even the Democratic “left”, much less the actual (for the USA) “far left”. Remember that one of the establishment arguments early on against Sanders was that he had a historically weak voting record on gun control.
The American Right tends to confuse the degree to which a position is associated with the Democratic Party with how far “left” it is.
"Extreme gun control" is interesting. By that criteria, Australia is extremely leftist! As is the UK and almost all of europe! Or... maybe the US is the extreme one here.
No. Extreme leftists use guillotines to bring literal class war to the rich. Sieze the means of production and all that. You get the job the state gives you, you get what the state gives you. Collectively somehow even though everybody disagrees with the fundament?
Moderate leftists write laws to tax profits in order to provide infrastructure and services to people to increase the baseline of wellbeing in the state. Biden is actually quite conservative in that regard
In society’s most important institutions of science and learning, ALL ideas must be open to scrutiny, especially unpopular ones.
Shouldn’t we want society to be built on the bedrock of truth via scrutiny, rather than on the mere sand of intellectual fashions?
It is just my personal opinion that anti-science does not have equal value as science and should not be found right alongside it. Given the correct context and time and place, I don't fundamentally have an issue with the books existing or people being able to read them.
I'd argue that this is anti-science. The biological theory "en vogue" is that homosexuality (not the sexual act, the falling in love part) is determined by hormonal balance during pregnancy. I don't think any theory argue that this is dangerous, and well, about immorality, it has nothing to do with science.
So this idea is anti-science, and i don't think is interesting enough to take a spot on a shelf in a science university. Maybe in the reserve. Are you disagreeing with that?
By actual lawmakers.
Florida is demanding ideological surveys of faculty within the state. Laws are being passed banning discussion of "CRT" in a variety of institutional levels. I've got a few friends who receive fairly consistent death threats every time they are mentioned by Fox News or equivalents for being "anti-american ivory tower leftists" for teaching courses on police violence or race and gender in medieval europe. One of the authors of the 1619 project had their position changed from a tenured position to a TT position after interference from the board of a public university.
Heck, the Trump administration published "the 1776 project", which was absolutely ahistorical nonsense (no single historian was involved in the project) explicitly designed to shift history curricula towards a specific ideology.
Especially as it relates to present day & macro-scale social dilemmas, and more importantly a robust history to learn from vs repeat –– Though for this, I'd be more interested in historic psycho- analysis/profiling, present day, and how individual viewpoints evolve to large social disruptions in democratic societies.
It's clear that this is yet another piece to throw on the libertarian heap and to spin it into anti-woke agitprop just as the OP (and linked tweet, to a lesser extent) did with their heavy editorializing. Fuel for the fire for everyone who wants to read the title and extrapolate some greater social trends from this to fit their already established perspectives.
> However, the actual net response rate dropped from 14% to 7.5% when we consider only those who completed at least 80% of the survey (n= 501), which is clearly poor and has to be kept in mind when drawing conclusions from the data. All analyses are based on pair-wise deletion of missing values.
Divisive political issues attract people at the fringes of the political spectrum. If you're getting less than 10% of the sample filling the majority of the survey, it's likely that your sample is just those people interested enough to fill it out because they're on the fringes.
I am skeptical of the results, because in my experience at university (2007-2012, 2017-2020) I never observed "wokeness" or concern over microaggressions or many of the things right wing media reports on. It's a more likely explanation that Conservatives have victim complex, and "university wants to burn books and ban speakers" fills that complex well.
Why? Politics is just business in disguise. My theory is that conservatives don't want government to pay for education, and in the US they are succeeding in this goal [1]. Saying universities are hypocritical is a good excuse.
[1] https://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/state-hig...
Rather, the study is about the opinion of those students on certain topics, and for that, you have to ask them about their opinion.
If you asked my 6th grade classroom whether they should learn more math, they would say no because they never use math in their lives.
In a university in Frankfurt, Germany?
It's in Germany, and has nothing to do with CRT.
how radicalized progressive movements develop — likely not a part of any curriculum anyway vs redefining them as new modern progressive study or hashtag.
If it’s in class, 99% of the kids were going to SparkNotes whatever book they ended up getting anyway.
And my point is that public libraries are simply better stocked than high school libraries to the point of making high school libraries obsolete.