The latest campus cancellation is different
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Not a healthy precedent to set. We will regret this later if we continue down this path.
That doesn't necessarily change anything (and I'm not weighing in here), but given your assertion it seemed worth pointing out.
[1]: https://orgchart.mit.edu/node/6/letters_to_community/importa...
Universities are run by their professors. Invited talks are regular academic business. A 'campus admin' does not invite or disinvite anyone to give an academic talk.
Stop listening to them?
EDIT: That's especially effective since the Twitter mobs keep moving targets every couple of weeks anyway. They don't have any patience.
I’d like to see some data on whether a Twitter storm in a teacup has any measurable negative consequences for a typical large organization, and whether they need to listen as often as they do.
The problem with cancel culture is a problem with bad employment law, and a problem with cultural institutions without any core ethical beliefs.
Edit: changed the choice of words.
The only time they don’t is when it costs something.
The goal for many orgs now is not to make customers happy anymore, it's to avoid the ire of a small group, and keep rent seeking.
As we move towards post-capitalism this will only get worse.
Additionally I’ve never discussed with someone in real life, person to person, about a single Twitter “cancelation” effort. If these issues were truly significant, they would engage the (actual) media, engage (in this case) with official university complaint systems, etc.
These things take more time and effort than retweeting a hashtag though, and most people won’t follow through with it. Which tells me they’re really not all that bothered about it in the first place.
Could it be that the activists and the administrators believe the same things?
"...they dragged me on Twitter. Well I don't give a fuck because Twitter isn't a real place."
Just because you have a Twitter account doesn’t mean your ideas or opinions are well thought out, rationale or even coherent.
The problem is that once in a while, the twitter mobs becomes the yellow jackets.
So you need a way to jauge how likely it is that the keyword-activists will get up over a particular topic.
You can, but institutions and businesses won't. That's the entire problem.
There must be a clear statement of the injustice which must be corrected. There should be a hearing where all involved can state their view of the situation. The accused should be allowed representation. Judgements should be made by persons who are at some level uninvolved with the conflict and committed to balanced interpretation of evidence. Any punishments should be related to the nature and scale of the injustice. And so on--of course someone with more direct experience could summarize this and make it happen better than I.
The point is that mob justice is not justice and all you have to do is give it some basic rules and constraints and it either gets deflected or gathers up into something that has actual meaning.
(This specific incident sounds like a storm in a teacup, but there's far more serious and less visible problems with racial discrimination in academia)
Similar to #metoo. Reporting sexual harassment, assault and even rape quite often isn't taken seriously by either employers or the police. And in the entertainment industry there was a tacit understanding that reporting it would be a career-ending move. So the route that people have started taking is to complain publicly, in an attempt to shield themselves from retaliation and compel the system to address the complaint.
Some portion of the mob on Twitter is people chasing clout and performing social justice. For example: I've been attacked for "generalizing nonbinary people" by cis people while describing my own experience as a nonbinary person, so I don't doubt people like that drive a lot of the discussion, but the vast majority is sincere if sometimes misdirected anger at genuine powerlessness. A Twitter riot is much like a physical riot: some agitators, but mostly just angry people denied a voice taking one by force.
Another method, create a formal method for processing complaints from Twitter that diverts the hateful energy from individuals towards a larger decision-making body. Let us say that a random 24 people jury of MIT peers had to decide by secret ballot whether the researcher in question gets approved or disinvited, and that the result is 14:10 to keep him.
The Twitter mob cannot really do anything with such result, if individual voting behavior was anonymous.
The one question I have here is whether the average member of MIT faculty would now thing that an anti-affirmative action essay would be beyond the pale. It doesn't seem too surprising to me if 50%+1 members of such a committee would still vote to withdraw an invitation from this guy. But at least you would be defocusing the external outrage campaign a little, which does not seem like a bad thing.
Part of the problem is that people with visible status engage in public harassment of their colleagues on Twitter with no consequences. Unless there is a cost for appalling behavior, the problem will continue to degenerate.
You're literally talking about appointing a group primarily based on their quality of not listening to people; in the ideal case, they're callous.
The trap is that you'll really just appoint a bunch of right-wingers who won't cancel right-wing speakers for not being "politically correct" but will cancel every mildly-left wing speaker for being a terrorist or supporting terrorism.
I'm a veteran, there's a ton of outrageous posts I can make on social media that might gain traction. The fact is, those kind of actions don't really fuel any kind of partnership between me and people on the other side of what I perceive as a problem. It does fuel fear though, fear in administrators and representatives that they could be unhirable in a capitalist economy where your desirability as a worker is tantamount to your existence. I don't really desire a paradigm where I'm threatening someones life for my own desires and happiness. So, instead, I pay professional activists to help by being part of the discussions I don't want to have with people, and more importantly remove potentially tenuous discussions and convincing I'd have to do of regular people who don't understand the veteran world or experience. They're called lobbyists.
Then they can go to implode inside their own bubble. Nobody would get hurt.
Giving those people a broad stage and all that publicity gives those mobs power in the first place.
The problem is: Services like Twitter literary make money on any drama those mobs produce.
As long as it's profitable to gather attention of the masses with whatever shit gets thrown at the fan there will be an incentive to give those mobs a big stage.
Let's face it: The incentive to be a drama multiplier needs to disappear. As this won't happen in a natural way regulatory steps need to be taken. The whole business model of FB, Twitter, and Co. is obviously harmful to society so this whole business model needs to disappear. Case closed once and for all. Simple as that…
I also enjoyed this recent article from The Atlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/10/disinforma...
I wrote and run a DeFi arbitrage bot for a living. There are hundreds of thousands of “pair” contracts to trade given coins through. The prices in different pairs for the same coin can vary wildly, as pairs only see their own balances, and can thus only make pricing decisions based on the rules and information within their own little silo. Arbitrage bots like mine make a profit by quickly balancing coin ratios among all pairs, which ultimately lowers the risk that a retail trader will pay an outlandish price for a given coin from a given pair.
We need the equivalent of arbitrage bots that can help balance the views of radicals on social media with those in the real world. They have tried this with fact checking, but unfortunately that, too, has been weaponized by biased actors. There has to be a better way that is provably unbiased.
May be a precedent for MIT. UCLA [1] already had theirs and many more who didn't get the press coverage.
Luckily the Universities in UK have remain somewhat firm on the issue ( at least as far I am aware ) but are also under similar threat.
I am also glad this is the top upvoted comment. It wasn't that long ago majority of HN were not on the same side, I think the big tech censorship, while often hard to pin point the right and wrong of it, was a wake up call to a lot of people.
This story is only two hours old. You have to wait, at least until the U.S. west coast wakes up and enters the ring. Stories like this often swing wildly.
IIRC the top comment on the "GitHub, fuck your name change" article was reasonable from my point of view for a very long time, until eventually one telling us that using the word master somehow implies subconscious racism "won" (the saving grace is that most of its top replies vehemently disagreed with it).[1]
How do you get more popular on Twitter? Well, you write (in an opinionated way) about Twitter controversies. This we are bombarded by news and articles that are primed to be controversial and that the majority of people in this country don't actually give a crap about.
If we rule out government and Twitter's action, the next idea is to convince enough mob participants themselves that it's not a good idea. This actually does seem feasible. I mean cancel culture itself is only five or six years old, at least as we think if it today. Another broad shift in perspective seems possible.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/05/twitter-steps-down-fre...
If you're in Twitters house you play by their rules.
https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/mit-abandons-its-mission-an...
https://www.newsweek.com/diversity-problem-campus-opinion-16...
Edit: I’m also unsure if this was caused by people on Twitter or staff and students at MIT who are also on Twitter. It seems like the latter is more correct and the Twitter side of things might be a red herring.
It’s almost as though we should reserve cancellation for those seeking to exclude people from society.
I'm generally very "pacifist" (not that this is violence, but I don't like attacking people in any sense of the word) and "live-and-let-live" on principle, but I also follow the "reverse golden rule" - i.e. I assume others are following the golden rule. Therefore:
Bullies deserve to be bullied (and, yes, let's call out this behaviour by what it is - bullying).
It does help to think of tolerance as a peace treaty.
These opinions are not new - they existed before Twitter was a thing. Just now the opinions have a platform that amplifies their visibility.
As the quote goes, the only winning move is not to play.
Ignore their demands (as an enterprise, business, institution, government, etc.), mock and derise their members (as a society), and stop publicizing them (as media).
I don't have any power to fire someone from their job; I'm not their boss. But I do have the right to make my views about them freely known. That's my right to free speech. And I can also decide whether to patronize their business or not. That's my right to economic freedom - to not be in an authoritarian society where the government tells me what I have to spend my money on. And their boss has the right to decide whether to employ them or not. That's the boss's economic freedom and at-will employment.
If I'm threatening the boss with physical harm (violating the NAP, as some would say), then I'm clearly in the wrong. But if I'm making my opinion known, and their boss agrees, isn't that the intended effect of discourse? What is the point of free speech if there isn't the possibility that people might be influenced by listening to that speech?
I don't see any way to cancel Twitter mobs that doesn't itself uphold cancel culture and destroy liberty.
(In any case, in the article at hand, "Twitter mobs" isn't a fully accurate descriptor. The quoted tweet was from an alum. The ability for alumni to contact their university and make their opinions known - and have their opinions be taken with more weight than those of the general public - has existed long before Twitter and will exist long after.)
No. The main consequence of speech that is being opposed should be… speech, not action to get that speaker's speech curtailed, whether by speech or other means.
> I can also decide whether to patronize their business or not
These people didn't have to turn up to the talk. That's not the same as cancelling a talk because someone said they don't want it to happen.
> And their boss has the right to decide whether to employ them or not > … > But if I'm making my opinion known, and their boss agrees, isn't that the intended effect of discourse?
Did MIT change its decision to host the speaker because of a well-reasoned argument - as you point out, one of the intended consequences aimed for via free speech - or was it due to some other kind of pressure?
An invited speaker could require a signed contract before accepting the invite. At a fairly small expense, some free speech advocate/org could have a contract drawn up that would protect invitees to some degree, pay to have a third party audit the contract (is contract auditing a thing?) to raise the chance that orgs with teams of lawyers find it acceptable, promote and market it, and then make it freely available to all.
That might or might not work, but there are many more ideas in the wings that could be tried.
But re:
> I don't see any way to cancel Twitter mobs that doesn't itself uphold cancel culture and destroy liberty.
You'll see many people here are suggesting that we just don't listen to the "mob". That would be a way to "cancel" them that is completely compatible with liberty.
Consider the situation where someone else is making their views about you known to your boss.
We probably only hear the stories where they succeed, or nearly so, which may be anywhere from almost all the attempts to only a tiny number.
Second, if this is a which hunt, then we should treat it as such and immediately lob accusations at those who start the accusations.
Make the only cancelling appropriate be for cancelling cancellers. So focus cancel energy on itself.
Personally, I will review job applicants social media history and if there is any “Reeeee” I take that into account as part of reference checks and whatnot.
It seems like someone posting “I’m an MIT alum and I demand this speaker be cancelled” would reflect as lack of critical thinking and reasoning.
I fear that this leads to islands of organizations where there are groups that don’t like this Twitter mob tactic and groups that do. God help those in orgs that think Twitter mobbing is a good thing.
Marketing firms have been selling the lie that they analyze twitter to build campaigns, pr, etc. Their customers just need to realize that it's just BS.
Don’t play the losing game. Just don’t be on Twitter.
The point being, there seems to be a steady stream things that get a free pass. On the other hand, seemingly random - and often less impactful - things / people get canceled. Mind you, the media is often guilty of the same disconnect. But they too are driven by engagement and profit.
If the end beneficiaries change their mind, or find another hobby, this "movement" will fold overnight without donations.
All that said, academia is where this all started and where it's also going to stay on the longest.
Yuri Bezmenov warned us decades ago, and somehow nobody listened to him.
Who are the loudest people on the left? Mobs and trolls who imagine grievances everywhere, which is sort of the leftist equivalent of conspiracy theory.
Who are the loudest on the right? Qanon, Nazis, and theocrats / dominionists who think we should return to Old Testament law.
Ignore them. They have no power except the one you allow them to have on you.
As an alum, I’m asking you to fix this—now. Totally unacceptable and sends a message to any student that isn’t a white man that they don’t matter and that EAPS isn’t serious about (and is actively hostile towards) DEI
Presumably MIT cares what it's alums care about since they are a major source of donations. I express no opinion on anything else in the article, just that alums being mad is a negative outcome for MIT.
Back in the day it was "edgy" to protest or cancel a speaker due to their support of the Vietnam war. People were just as angry (or more so!) at Vietnam protesters as people are today about "cancel culture" protesters, and vice versa. At the time, it was those young freaks with the long hair who were clearly nuts and extremists and going to erode the country's moral decency. Counter-culture folk in the 60's and 70's were a tiny but vocal minority of young people who were largely put down for their radical views about war and the environment. It's only in hindsight that protesting the Vietnam war seems socially acceptable.
Was a very interesting talk. The speaker had tried to commit suicide and in the process of recovering from that realized that the speech patterns that are associated with sucidal tendencies, extreme consequences to minor events, were being used by student groups. Things like “if so and so comes to campus, people will die”. And they weren’t being hyperbolic, like they were honestly afraid someone would die if a speaker were allowed to speak. So the mediations required finding ways to bring nuance back to the conversation.
I honestly don’t know how different these objections to speakers are than in the past, but I thought it was interesting that there was a shift in the balance of power between university administrations and student groups in the US.
Edit: Thanks to mrosett for pointing out this was Greg Lukianoff who is with FIRE. Please take care researching this topic, it is a large lightning rod for alt-right and heavily conservative view points. Some cursory searches show that FIRE might not be as neutral as I thought they were.
FIRE were actually big fans of Obama. Yeah, they're all about free speech on college campuses -- that's their thing. But "alt-right" is a bit much.
Mediation should really be neutral, but the organization is dedicated to free speech. It’s very possible that such an organization, or any organization with an agenda, does not make for good mediators. Would be an interesting topic next time I see my friend who acts as a mediator.
"Be careful to not allow facts, social psychology, and science based approaches get in the way of the narrative! We can't have any conservative view points around, regardless of how correct they are! The spooky alt-right fascism is just around the corner if you don't delude yourself like a good leftist!"
Worse, is the topic is a current lightning rod for alt-right, so there’s a lot of garbage to sift through. I will see if I can get lucky and find the talk again.
Edit: mrosett answered this. Yes it was a lecture by Greg Lukianoff of FIRE. I might have been click-baited to watch it, but he seemed credible enough to quote, and seemed to genuinely care about actual free speech.
The moral foundations for Vietnam War opposition are much intellectually deeper and ideologically broader than those supporting racial preferences. A medieval Catholic could have opposed the Vietnam War on grounds of just war theory.
Sure, if you narrow the topic of racial preferences down to the literal instantiation of exactly that mechanism, then broaden the topic of the Vietnam War out to historical philosophies of War in general, then of course the latter reads "intellectually deeper" and "broader".
But, these are all just discussions about what is morally just and, when society fails to provide justice, what we consider appropriate remedies.
I concur. The skewering of Sarah Palin "I can see Russia from my house!" by SNL was brilliant. SNL's skewering of Trump just wasn't funny.
Edit: Ok, if you disagree, note that everyone recognizes the SNL "I can see..." quote. Any memorable ones from SNL's Trump skits?
I’m not sure this is the case here, it depends whether that means the specific topic they are giving the talk on or topic as in area of claimed expertise. I would say it’s fair game to consider them to be claiming an area of expertise if they are publishing articles on the topic, and this valid to consider the quality and impact of that work when inviting them for talks
Who in the 60s and 70s was invited to speak at a college or university, then later had their invitation withdrawn due to their support of the Vietnam war or corporate interests?
Back in those days one could also see Chomsky discussing with William Buckley (impossible today) and Enoch Powell discussing with people on the left.
As a disclaimer I am against any censorship of academia and think that even Charles Murray should be allowed to speak at a university (assuming he is invited by an academic department or student group) and that the university should never have veto power.
However, I think the example in the Atlantic is actually more mild than past cases: the John Carlson Lecture is a general audience talk that the university holds to boost its public image.
It’s not an academic talk discussing new research or a political perspective, but rather summarizes ideas for the public. If MIT wants to decide who should give such talks I don’t care.
In contrast, if a department or student group wants to invite a specific speaker for a specialized talk about politics, science, math, then the university censoring such discourse is what is truly dangerous.
In this light, the cancellation of Milo Yiannopoulos who was invited by the College Republican club is much worse. Even though personally I do not think Yiannopoulos is anything but a provocateur, if someone (group/department) wants to invite him the university should not block him from speaking.
EDIT: the other point that the article makes is that this professor's "controversial" views are held by upwards of 70% of the American public. The net result of applying this rule consistently would be that a strong majority of the American public cannot express their opinions on this subject because of a tiny vocal minority.
My only point is that this particular "John Carlson Lecture" is itself a public relations event whose purpose is to promote MIT to the local public and enhance its image, they allude to this in the official statement [1].
In my opinion, a PR lecture cancellation is different from telling a student group or department that they are not allow to invite a specific speaker: it is bad, but much less dangerous to academic discourse than previous cancellations (even if in past examples the speakers mentioned in the article had extreme or bizarre views).
[1] https://orgchart.mit.edu/node/6/letters_to_community/importa...
First of all, who says? Second of all, just because a majority believes something doesn't make it right. There was a time when the majority of Americans believed slavery was OK. Times change.
On the one hand, we have Abbot, who is an academic, being uninvited from a public lecture organized by the department that covers his field based on apparently little more than Twitter outrage.
On the other hand, we have Yiannopoulos, who is an activist, whose event was canceled by the College Republicans due to public safety concerns after 150 protesters blocked access to the venue. The next day, Yiannopoulos returned to UC Davis with supporters and marched across the campus in counter-protest at the cancellation of the event.
Censoring academic freedom of speech has a much more chilling effect on academic freedom than does restricting outside participation in campus speech.
Yiannopoulos has a national platform for his ideas, and indeed this kind of incident only bolsters it. In any case, he was ultimately able to visit the campus and express his message the next day.
Academics, however, depend on being able to publish, speak publicly, receive prizes and so on for their careers; there is truth in publish or perish. If their ability to participate in the academic discourse is going to end up limited for holding unpopular opinions (even unrelated to their work!), then the chilling effect is much larger.
It’s not some random comment that got blown out of proportion, nor some accidental miscommunication, and the subject is also not unrelated to universities.
Why is it out of proportion to have a mob wanting this guy out of the university system for controversial views on students hiring he himself widely published ?
This isn't how I remember it. Milo thrived off of these confrontations and being "cancelled," but what really made him drop off were his comments on pedophilia. Being hounded by students legitimized him in his followers mind.
https://orgchart.mit.edu/node/6/letters_to_community/importa...
Edit: and for what it's worth, I think many people here are too easily stirred into a frenzy based on astonishingly little information about this incident.
This wouldn't have happened at University of Chicago.
Not all of these schools have a perfect history of supporting free expression, but this is a big positive indicator.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
How often is the community broadly consulted on MIT climate science lecturers ?
"Its not a campus cancellation, this was off campus aaaand this Professor is actually still invited and now to an on campus event!"
uhhh ok.
My takeaway is that there is some silver lining here that communication was done between parties instead of a unilateral kneejerk cancellation. But they should have still ignored detractors and held that "off campus" outreach event. Let the detractors embarrass themselves when trying to interrupt the Professor's speech or ask irrelevant questions at the end.
Companies often will immediately take notice of someone they’d dismissed via traditional channels.
Harassment, racism, juvenile immaturity, etc., are also called out via Twitter. Sometimes they are legitimate grievances, other times not.
But there is almost never any due process and as infrequently are there repercussions for liars, people looking for someone to silence, or simple malicious intent.
This is as bad as “disinformation”. It’s ruining many innocent peoples lives, but Twitter couldn’t care any less.
Psychologically this is group bullying without consequences.
Very much so. It's mob mentality. The group diffuses the responsibility, shielding everyone, enabling the bullying to be done without consequences.
IMO it should be illegal to fire someone based on mob actions. There should be legal repercussions to this. Either against the people who did the firing, or against twitter, for enabling mobs and bullying. There's a legit case to be made that twitter has caused significant damage to people's images and careers, that they've known about this problem for a long time and did nothing about it. Victims could get together and do a class action lawsuit.
It's scary because realistically, it might take a long time for things to change. Right now, the mob can crush anyone they feel like crushing with no consequences. Does anyone really want to live in that world? This could get worse if we let it. It might even be possible to weaponize this, pay for a botnet to get someone you don't like fired.
Not quite. Right now the mob can crush anyone if that "anyone" is at the mercy of an institution that will allow them to be crushed.
Imagine this exact same situation, except that MIT tells the Twitter mob to get lost. What would happen? The Twitter mob would howl for a couple of weeks, and then their attention would turn elsewhere. If nobody at MIT blinks, then the mob can't crush anybody.
It's still problematic that many people will lose their livelihood and have their careers damaged by this. Even if your current employer sides with you, having negative twitter mobs write about you might reduce your chances of landing the next job.
In order to make things better, I think we need to be more vocal and forceful in standing up to cancel culture. To actively reject it as a society. Just hoping that your current and future employers will maybe side with you, maybe that's a start, but it isn't enough.
In 2016, I unsubscribed because, well, the whole media went haywire and The Atlantic went down with them. I thought it was unrecoverable.
But it's nice to see a nuanced piece here that is capable of criticizing an idea while also criticizing the tactics of those who disagree with it. Maybe I should give it another chance.
By Any Means Necessary.
There really is no way for a bureaucratic institution like a university to win against such a committed, devoted movement. If the university didn't "buckle", the activists would find a target higher up the chain to pressure to punish the university -- grant and endowment sponsors, that sort of thing. Get students to rally on or near the residences of the professors who approved the talk. Send activists to physically blockade the building where the talk is supposed to be given. And on and on. When nothing is off the table -- when there are "no bad tactics, only bad targets" -- there are plenty of fallbacks to employ if your first plan fails.
Is it just coming from the wrong person?
Is racism so bad in America that it is worse to be the black son of two wealthy Ivy educated lawyers, who attends private schools in NY, versus a white son with one parent in jail and the other addicted to meth in the backwaters of West Virginia who sometimes attends a broken public school when he isn't raising his 3 year old sister? Because right now affirmative action says the black guy needs the leg up in this scenario.
How do you think it's going to help in your example? It'll clearly favor the black kid in this hypothetical case, because he's rich and well connected. The white kid might have made it in on a sports scholarship maybe, but even that slim hope will be ripped away from him under this proposal.
Does anyone have first-hand knowledge of what the mob said on Twitter? I'm curious if they differentiated between the two.
For anyone who hasn't seen it, Netflix's fiction THE CHAIR satires cancel culture in liberal institutions and their story includes someone who is canceled for using a nazi reference as well.
The other incident was Napoleon's conquest of France, Italy, and Spain, and the damage that was done by the anti-Church reforms imposed on those universities. This is a closer analogy, since Napoleon's reforms were nominally "liberalizing" in that he had proclaimed the abolition of nobility and its continuation via said institutions. But it's unlikely that the Twitter mobs would have been any happier about being compared to Napoleon instead of Hitler.
The article contains links to a few Twitter posts.[0][1] Keep in mind that they might not be representative.
Edit: also consider that your use of the word "mob" (which isn't used in the Atlantic article) might be unfair, and that the word might apply to us uninvested, nameless faces better than it does to those students and professors putting their real name down against something that actually involves them.
[0]: https://twitter.com/henrifdrake/status/1445520653830930438
[1]: https://twitter.com/NMGasparini/status/1444688917001801730
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/19-the-new-yorker-the-writers...
I think that doesn’t mean that affirmative action = nazism. It means that focusing on things other than merit has negative consequences and should be avoided.
A recent comedy, Death of Stalin, points this out on the micro level when there are no competent doctors to treat Stalin because all doctors who didn’t pledge political fealty were purged.
Having an academic system based on political or philosophical fealty will result in poorer academics.
The other obvious parallel, Stalin, is more messy because a revolution started it all. Germany went from fragile democracy to full dictatorship overnight with the enabling laws (after the Nazis had marched through the institutions for about a decade).
It is a perfect analogy and does not mean that all of the "progressive" left are Nazis (though some of them would have participated in the Nazi movement, too, because they are just power hungry and don't care about the specifics of the cause).
Which in the current political climate is a horrible look for the school. I get why they dropped him - for better or worse lots of people are fed up with the promise of an ideal meritocracy... especially younger folks. And, for better or worse, those younger folks heavily coordinate their dissatisfaction in the most effective place to get their voice heard by institutions: the internet.
Wrong or not... in the current climate I would not be making arguments against affirmative action publicly while expecting to keep my academic speaking arrangements. Especially with Nazi Germany comments thrown in there - way too spicy. I guarantee MIT will find a fine replacement that has less controversy in their recent history, and allowing this guy to talk would have only been risking further public altercation with their students. I would have made the same business decision.
If the professor held a view that the minority if Americans supported, would there be more or less reason to support censorship in that case? Would the author had been so quick to defend the professor's beliefs if they had not aligned with the majority's (and, likely, the author's, if I am to judge based on the impassioned editorializing present in the article)?
I'm not certain this sort of appeal to the commons argument has a place in the discussion of ethics and clout-driven censorship--that would boil the entire issue down to a simple.tug.of war between which of the two sides can drum up more/louder supporters. That isn't a question of ethics at all.
His argument is strengthened by, but doesn’t rely on, that fact.
At best popularity serves as a useful heuristic for when you don't have the means to carefully confirm the correctness yourself.
(There is a fairly uninteresting special case where the popularity of something comes in to the argument as a factual statement about the world.)
Another example of this would be if we were having an argument about what music to play at some event we are hosting. I might well use the popularity of some songs as an argument.
Are the people who are lifting that bar really as virtuous as they think themselves to be?
Res ipsa loquitur: 'The thing speaks for itself.'
With platforms like twitter we’ve in effect removed editors from the paper of record and let anyone contribute articles, which has turned it into a tabloid rag at best and outright propaganda at worst, but guised as where legitimate truths are found since officials and legitimate businesses and professionals have sanctified the platform with their own use.
I say the latter is more likely because, in this case and so many others, there was so little at stake. There was no imminent risk to MIT's reputation for platforming a climate scientist speaking on climate change... merely because he had elsewhere spoken unfavorably of affirmative action.
The dreadful truth is the administrators think the activists are right. Not threatening. Morally right.
The administrators and the activists believe in the same ideology. They are enlisted in the same cause. They are on the right side of history, mowing us down with a joyful song of resistance in their hearts.
And still we praise and support these institutions.
The people buckling out of fear are less worried about the consequences of upsetting faceless Twitter users than they are about upsetting a semi-organized and ideologically motivated fifth-column within their own organizations.
It's also not clear whether this man (whose name I honestly can't remember after reading the article) has been "cancelled" in any meaningful sense: he now has an article in a leading liberal magazine defending him, written by another highly titled and positioned academic. Oh, and then he ended up speaking on behalf of MIT anyways, except not in a public venue where inviting him could be seen as an endorsement of him qua person.
If you concede then that begets more demands as they feel empowered. More radical demands follow and it is never enough.
If they basically tell them to get bent they either get discouraged or wind up background radiation and ignored anyway as they expect that sort of thing. How many scandals have hit say Nestle and Johnson and Johnson? Yet you never see calls to nationalize or break them up.
Searching twitter for Dorian Abbot, I couldn't find much else.
I think this is old people not understanding Twitter and thinking that a single alumni email will lead to thousands of people calling for their jobs.
I’m waiting for “cancel as a service” operators who will seo cancellations for $50 to help winnow down job applicant fields.
https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/mit-abandons-its-mission-an...
https://drive.google.com/file/d/13Xd01jH1UAJ4yQ2Xt5pyOFwjRcy...
Please also note Dorian express wish:
> I forgive the activists who led the campaign against me. Please do not attack them personally. They are fish swimming in a sea of moral confusion. Some of the responsibility for their behavior rests on their elders, who have not helped them form properly.
The what?
I'm an MIT alum and I cannot remember anything about a commitment to free speech on the website. I don't see one now, and I can hardly see any relevant search results for `"free speech" site:mit.edu` - a few blogs and research papers, but nothing about a commitment, certainly nothing trumpeted. I certainly did not see one when I applied. I applied to a school that claimed to be good at science and engineering.
If you want to argue that MIT or any other institution or perhaps all institutions should champion free speech, sure. If you want to hold people accountable for promises they did make (cf. a Reddit co-founder claiming that Reddit wasn't intended to be a "bastion of free speech" years after describing it as exactly that, Twitter calling itself the "free-speech wing of the free-speech party"), by all means hold people accountable. But the idea that everyone should be on exactly your side of what is actually a complex and multifaceted question because that particular view is obviously what everyone in our culture believes is, frankly, illiberal.
When I was a student many many years ago, it was such an accepted truism, that it didn't even need to be mentioned.
Two, please tell me how many times in the history of your Ivy League school, since its founding until your attendance, they invited an African-American speaker.
Consider getting your education at a place with values you can respect.
Mission-driven schools: this is your moment.
Difficult for me to imagine some sort of "mission driven school", especially advertised as a counterpoint to elite University cancel culture, didn't just turn into just as much of an illiberal institution, but just with a hard right/conservative bias.
“The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.”
It's a diverse mix of state universities and a few elite private ones. No right-wing captured institutions as far as I can tell.
Being right-wing is not even a positive indicator for liberal values and support of free speech, IMO. Right wingers just cancel people for different reasons. Liberal values are not on the left-right spectrum in 2021, if they ever were.
Perhaps what we perceive as a 'conservative' bias is just what centrist discourse used to be like before the twitter mobs?
It doesn’t help the Twitter interface utterly sucks at collating and quantifying the stuff in a real manner.
Traditionally tenured faculty enjoy(ed?) some degree of freedom of thought and expression, in order to prevent the stifling of scholarship, to promote the development and free interchange of ideas, and to enable the discussion of controversial issues.
It makes sense to me for universities to extend that courtesy to faculty of other institutions as well as their own.
As another commenter noted "Some cursory searches show that FIRE might not be as neutral as I thought they were." I am guessing I will find the same applies to MFE.
If not the most capable applicant is choosen, instead by another criteria (e.g. race) then all who search the most capable outcome of research or education (for example a capable doctor) are forced to engage in what can only be described a racist filter to find the capable applicant.
Affirmative action ever treated the symptom. What i would recommend, is a proportional study place system. Every "group" gets places, proportional to its representation in the public population. If this group has not enough capable applicants, due to societal wrongs (bad schools in the inner citys), all other groups are shrunk down by the same percentage, to encourage investment into the source of the problem.
There needs to be a new coalition for the next presidential election and going forward: a coalition of the sane that excludes the woke left and the anti-vaxxer/Trumpian right. Let's make America American again!
Fascinating. I would call this another indicator of qualitative change in the cancel phenomenon. "Classic" cancel culture was driven by highly informed activists, who in this case would've known race-agnostic acceptance benefits Asian people and is at best neutral toward white people if not harmful. Today's mobs are obviously not being led by people of the same caliber.
Best example: All of the twitter-mob was hyping themselves up about the german election, the young generation being all green, all "Generation Greta" as some called it. There was no way that anyone except the greens would get ALL the votes of ALL young or first -voters. Except reality hit and they found out that an equal percentage voted for economic liberalism and less state instead of state intervention and illiberal politics. Somehow, the calls of the left for lowering the voting age have been conspicously absent since then...
For example, visit from the UK during the Conservative party conference, and you get 'Trending in the UK - #ToryScum' even without logging in, or logging in to a profile that leans right (i.e. that trending 'hashtag' is the opposite of reinforcing an echo chamber for me if I have one) and there's not even anything particular going on that I'm aware of to incite it. It's just a hateful place.
At the Labour conference a week or so ago, an MP referred to Tories as “scum”. Yup, that’s the majority of the voting population, and the ones they are trying to win over, are ‘scum’.
I agree twitter is a hateful place, but so is the political left. But the vast majority of twitter are also very left wing.
Where should this merit come from for underrepresented groups if not from affirmative action?
Perhaps a system that just looks at your economic underpriviligedness instead of skin color could work?
My reasoning is:
If your member of an underrepresented group, chances are you didn't grow up to develop merit. Affirmative action allows you to access institutions that help you to develop merit.
https://www.newsweek.com/diversity-problem-campus-opinion-16...
The guy also made a godwin claim about race and college admissions earlier in his career, so its probably fair to say that no matter how insightful any of your research is on climate change no one wants to give you the platform because your comprehension of social sciences is antithetical to the reason we care about climate change in the first place.
>If every cringeworthy analogy to the Third Reich were grounds for canceling talks, hundreds of professors—and thousands of op-ed columnists—would no longer be welcome on campus.
[1] With all the usual caveats about Newsweek today being a weird semi-propaganda arm of The Community and not particularly reputable despite its brand and reach. If that's the place you go to get published, maybe that's already a sign you don't have the banger essay you thought you did.
The social media cat is out of the bag. Mob justice is, unfortunately, the purest form of democracy, untempered by government or constitution or other forms of control. The only paths forward are to live with mob justice or to enforce actions against free speech and expression (ie making it illegal to cancel someone on the institution side, or make it illegal to participate in a social media mob on the user side, or make it illegal to host a social media mob on the social network side). I don’t see those happening.
Social media is a tool that happens to facilitate mob justice particularly effectively. Why? Because you used to have to gather dozens or hundreds of people in the town common before you could yell “Burn the witch!”. Now you just tweet it (or share it, or telegram it, or…)
And we can call them out on it in the interim which seems to have some impact.
https://newrepublic.com/article/158401/problem-yascha-mounks...
It's free speech 101 - you can say what you like (as long as you're not inciting crime or violence.) But no one owes you a pulpit.
I have far more of a problem with mob farming and Twitter incitement: see also anti-vaxing, organised climate change denial, and political rabble rousing.
Because those are covert rather than free - pretending to be independent and organic while actually being centralised and astroturfed.
But whatever reason is to forbid inciting crime or violence is equally valid to forbid inciting firing or un-inviting someone isn’t it?
Just "everybody you disagree with"? or is your side also controlled by conspiracies of the elites dictating the opinions of their followers?
You can just stop right there! Either it's okay to cancel, or it isn't. "It's okay to cancel those that I don't like, but not cancel those I do like" is infantile reasoning and not to be taken seriously.
Two tweets does not seem like a mob. The quality of The Atlantic has really gone downhill. No different from the rest of the hype-filled media.There are 1000x more tweets about the cancellation than tweets that called for his cancellation.
The Council for Foreign Relations, of which Mounk is a member, is a highly-problematic US foreign policy think tank:
https://monthlyreview.org/product/wall-streets-think-tank/
Then another comment here on HN got me looking at Persuasion: Apparently, Mounk runs a group/community dedicated to protecting the "free society" from threats.
Now, that's all circumstantial stuff, and the story might be as bad as it sounds. But when proponents of US imperialism talk about defending freedom, I get worried.
So, I feel I would need to listen to the other side(s) regarding whether, how, and for what reasons the talk was canceled.
I wouldn't dismiss the document out of hand by virtue of its author's social circles, but I also wouldn't say that suspicion is entirely unwarranted. Though the CFR is such a large organization, I would also be less immediately suspicious of its rank and file.
"...the department leadership concluded that the debate over both his views on diversity, equity, and inclusion and manner of presenting them were overshadowing the purpose and spirit of the Carlson Lecture"
"The Carlson Lecture is not a standard scientific talk for fellow scientists. It is an outreach event, open to the public, with a speaker who is an outstanding scientist and role model [...] to inspire young people to consider careers in STEM."
Seems fairly reasonable to me that you wouldn't want someone with divisive views on diversity giving your outreach lecture.
I generally agree that the outcomes of "cancel culture" are undesirable, but I am glad to see that in our little democratic experiment, a new form of power has found a voice and is causing those previously in power to quake in their boots.
I am confident that a new equilibrium will eventually be reached that won't have such occasional appalling outcomes. In the meantime, I wish those who are constantly apoplectic about "cancel culture" would be a little more self-aware and perhaps even happy to see some minority voices getting some undeserved wins here and there.
After all, the suffering that some of these minority voices have historically experienced is unthinkably bad. Remember that: unthinkably bad. Worst imaginable. And it is absurd to argue that the lingering effects of that are not still with us in uncountable ways, big and small.
* The loudest voices are typically not minorities
* Those with the loudest voices aren't experiencing suffering
* The power they wield isn't being used to reduce suffering
* The suffering actually being experienced can be reduced better without chilling free speech
There are definitely some interesting sociological questions about how the power is manifesting, but I emphatically disagree with the proposition that the overreaction of "cancel culture" does not have as its root cause the systematic, historical oppression of minorities. To just make the (perhaps correct) observation that a significant fraction of the loudest voices are not suffering is to ignore how we got here.
It seems like MIT is thinking kind of like a business here.
And perhaps that's the bigger problem – not only are campuses are becoming more like big businesses, but they are big businesses. So they tend to act more like businesses then intellectual centers of speech and thought.
Edit: After reading the letter linked in another thread [1], the support for my understanding of this as an action against "stuff that's bad for business" seems to be strengthened. To quote:
> The Carlson Lecture is not a standard scientific talk for fellow scientists. It is an outreach event, open to the public, with a speaker who is an outstanding scientist and role model. Typically held at a major venue away from campus, it is geared to build public understanding of and appreciation for climate science, and to inspire young people to consider careers in STEM. Each year students from local high schools are invited...while all of us can agree that Professor Abbot has the freedom to speak as he chooses on any subject, the department leadership concluded that the debate over both his views on diversity, equity, and inclusion and manner of presenting them were overshadowing the purpose and spirit of the Carlson Lecture.
Translation: We don't someone who compares DEI efforts to their Third Reich as our public spokesperson.
As someone who is pretty much never invited to be a public spokesperson for various reasons like physical appearance et cetera, I am A-okay with this.
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[1] https://orgchart.mit.edu/node/6/letters_to_community/importa...
Why??
If someone starts bringing up the Nazis in some obscure context during your pizza shop's pepperoni v/s margharita bake-off, what are you going to do? Best thing to do is to move on as quickly as possible, and kick out the person who made Nazi comparisons.
Now I already concede, that perhaps this should not happen on a campus. Perhaps we should explicitly maintain campuses as places where limits might be tested, and have robust responses.
So I try not to judge quite so quickly now, though I probably still fail plenty...
[Edit: some people think it is reasonable, but they don't want to explain themselves]
I believe that, broadly speaking, Hitler and Nazi references are beyond tired and cliche at this point. However, "disclaimers" such as this one are disappointing. Because silly Nazi references seem to be thrown around by everyone, and yet somehow it's only objectionable or worthy of challenge when the wrong people do it.