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Comment by trentnix | Hacker News Reader

Students at Portland State are not being taught to think. Rather, they are being trained to mimic the moral certainty of ideologues.

They have been taught the magnitude of their outrage makes them righteous. And their outrage is never satiated. These people are toxic and sometimes evil. They'll eventually come for you too no matter how much you generally agree with them.

Some of them are certainly sincere. But as Milton Friedman once said, "sincerity is an overrated virtue". The damage they cause is the same irrespective of how sincere they might be.

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> They'll eventually come for you too no matter how much you generally agree with them.

Reminds of the Maoism movement in European universities (such as in France) a few decades ago, where people critical of Mao were harassed and treated as fascists. With some universities would make Maoism a de-facto precondition to be accepted as researcher.

This seems to share the same mechanism: very few righteous people having no longer any morale compass due to ideology, and cowardliness of the rest of the herd (including the administration) that refuse to stand for reason and logic.

Taleb calls this Minority Rule in his book Skin in the Game. The most intolerant wins because of asymmetry:

"The minority rule will show us how it all it takes is a small number of intolerant virtuous people with skin in the game, in the form of courage, for society to function properly. "

We're getting way too close to struggle sessions.

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

The original post mentioned physical violence towards him including being spit upon and having feces thrown.

I think one key difference is that the violences are not physical but I wonder if it's not on purpose so that people can easily accept them.

We're well past struggle sessions.

I'm asking as an outsider who wants to learn: do you mean people in european universities got harassed because they were against Mao? do you have any articles about this that I can read?

This really depended on the university. Some of them were not affected at all, some other had sections where you could not do any research or teaching without being from the "right obedience" (communist, Maoist, etc.)

The most extreme being (in French - https://www.deepl.com/fr/translator) the Vincennes university: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centre_universitaire_de_Vincen...

[ TL;Dr: The most Maoist university at that time, with communists fighting (with violence) against Maoists inside the university ]

Note that this was a more "experimental" university, aimed to attract the most radical teachers (!)

There are plenty of research for the years between 65-75

Don't even need to go that far back in history, here's a wonderful example from BLM:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jCpUMUezzY

At this point it's a protection racket; agree with them or get brutally cancelled.

Few years ago it was contained to humanities but as of recently, it started spreading in technical fields. See how AI researchers got cancelled [0]

[0] https://syncedreview.com/2020/06/30/yann-lecun-quits-twitter...

And as Thomas Sowell said, "The problem isn't even that Johnny can't think. The problem is that Johnny doesn't know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling."

My other favorite Sowell: "Intellect is not wisdom." My hope is that Sowell's work will see a groundswell of support and he'll finally be appreciated for what he has contributed. My fear is that we won't be on this earth when it happens.

Then one of his other famous quotes will apply:

“there are only two ways of telling the complete truth — anonymously and posthumously.”

Sowell is truly great. His theory of conflicting visions was the first time I felt I truly understood the deep nature of political disagreement.

Hilariously from the pov of this forum, Sowell is pretty much a hero of the right wing, having been formally trained as a Marxist at UofChicago only to reason his way out of that position back to sanity and then make a career of trying to educate the rest of the world to do the same.

>Hilariously from the pov of this forum, Sowell is pretty much a hero of the right wing, having been formally trained as a Marxist at UofChicago only to reason his way out of that position back to sanity and then make a career of trying to educate the rest of the world to do the same.

A big contributor to said reasoning out was his observing the antics of late-1960s black Cornell students (mostly admitted via affirmative action and, Sowell said, unqualified for the university's rigors), their takeover of university buildings, and their justifying doing so by claiming various outrages against themselves that were foreign to the day-to-day life that Sowell, a fellow Cornellian and Ithaca resident, experienced.

I've heard this phenomenon being called a "purity spiral".

It makes sense intuitively - nothing productive is really being done when a group just engages in ever-escalating virtue signalling.

But since I'm not an expert, is there more material about this that one can access? Would love to read/hear someone who studies this.

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

— C. S. Lewis

>his cupidity may at some point be satiated

Will it, though?

Bill Gates is giving away a lot of money. Warren Buffet, too. And a lot of billionaires aren't.

So, yes, it may.

Check their net worth. It's only going up.

To a cynic like me it just seems like they're buying good PR, and it's relatively cheap.

It’s possible for both to be true. Humans are complex. Motivations are often a mix of factors. Why would billionaires be different?

You would like to read more on this?

Read "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" and pay attention to how Delores Umbridge defines a set of ideas that must not be questioned. Her role of Inquisitor is similar to the role of a modern Diversity Council.

The author appears to me to be one of the contributors to that lesson. His posts consist exclusively of him being outraged about something or other.

Edit: sorry, thought you were talking about Bari.

Your statement proves their point.

The defining of ideas can be contentious, difficult, jarring, and uncomfortable. That they are to one but not another doesn't disqualify them as debatable topics or make the arguer less qualified to make them.

Defending yourself rigorously with evidence and rhetoric was a skill people went to good colleges to learn. Bari argues that universities now reinforce not engaging in debate with or challenging the ideas of anyone who doesn't already believe what you believe (or their signals) but toeing an unspoken line, and that there's no room for nuanced discussion of the ideologies.

It's like a loyalty test where recognizing it openly for what it is is an instant fail.

How so? His story is one in which he was relentlessly harassed, and in which his attempts to tolerate and reason with his opposition resulted in him being illegitimately forced out of the university. Despite that, his "outrage", if you can call it that, is hard to spot: his letter describing the reasons for his resignation explains why he's doing it, but is low on invective.

Your comment reminds me of the rhetoric from people against gay marriage. "Well you're not tolerating my position. That's not very tolerant of you!"

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