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...
[0] - https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=RxOuRnMAAAAJ&hl=en [1] - https://hilst.mit.edu/publications/
There was a large protest in 2017. The administration met to discuss the situation. Students prevented the administrators from leaving the meeting room unless they had an escort to ensure the administrators came to a resolution.
The president mentioned his need to use the restroom to one of the protest leaders. The student responded, "Hold it."[0] He finally went to the restroom a couple of minutes later, but he was escorted by some of the protesting students.[1]
After all, what do you think will happen to you if you hold someone prisoner?
"no"
>and if he doesn't step aside I'll inform him that I'll be charging him with kidnapping
You, as an individual can't charge people criminally. Civil suit is an option, but I suspect you won't get much in the way of financial compensation from a broke college student.
>After all, what do you think will happen to you if you hold someone prisoner?
Infliction of violence? Even if the AG doesn't make your life a nightmare, the optics might be bad enough that you'll lose your job.
I can press charges. Violently holding people prisoner is a felony. It's not a joke.
> I suspect you won't get much in the way of financial compensation from a broke college student.
It'll be enough to matter to him. Future wages can be garnished.
> you'll lose your job
I don't want a job where I'm required to be a milquetoast.
https://www.thsh.com/criminal-justice-insider/as-seen-on-tv-...
civil judgements can be discharged via bankruptcy.
>I don't want a job where I'm required to be a milquetoast.
Isn't that the problem? There will always be someone who is willing to be a milquetoast, hence why institutions are caving to the slightest pressure from twitter mobs.
Besides, my goal is not to destroy the person. It's to make it costly for him to commit crimes against me.
That only works if he doesn't think the cost is worth it. If you've already gone through the trouble of planning/executing this, I doubt one of the hostages telling you about the potential financial consequences is going to make you change your mind.
He'll be finding it out, then.
Is what your last sentence essentially says. Every organisation you might work for will care about how things look and how what you do reflects on it.
the raison d'être of most organizations, particularly bureaucracies, is to hide decisions behind a shield of indirection, to deflect individual responsibility elsewhere, which selects for and conditions the spineless. that those folks, when the spotlight shines on them, will cave, is thoroughly unsurprising.
I just realise how similar the Twitter mob and 4chan harassment mobs are. They are basically 2 sides of the same coin. Even using the similar tactics like digging up dirt and more or less organise the same way, as impromptu mobs that just organically form.
Basically modern lynch mobs who never have to face the consequences of their actions protect by semi-anonymity, their numbers, and often their distance from their victims.
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.
Perhaps we are using the word 'administrator' differently.
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.
Could it be that the activists and the administrators believe the same things?
Could it be that the administrators believe in nothing?
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 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.
On one hand, keep the speaker. The potential downside: social media outrage that may escalate and get covered on MSM if it gets big enough. You and your dept / uni get a lot of bad press or if things go really sideways, your job could be on the line.
The potential upside of this decision? People go to a talk and consider some issues, but it’s not like you (the committee / administrator / dean etc) get any real tangible incentive from this outcome. You basically just did your job, if you’re lucky, everyone just moves on.
On the other hand, cancel the speaker. The upside: MSM will congratulate you or ignore it, but regardless, you’ll be seen as making the “right” decision by most people you interact with. Some free speech types (a dying breed it seems) might get upset but they don’t seem to have much power over the general public’s perception or decisions about firing made by the university.
So the decision is obvious and it’s the one that gets made time and time again. And it’s the way the Twitter mobs continue to hold sway, especially because so much of the MSM lives on Twitter.
A similar rubric occurs in a large corporation by the C suite. Once the mob forms, there is everything to lose and almost nothing to lose by taking a stand on an issue seen as unwoke. If this is to change, incentives need to change, mainly creating disincentives for cowardly execs / deans and incentives for those who make principled and/or courageous stands.
(None of this is a carte blanche endorsement against activism, it’s just to say that there are reasons that no one stands up against Twitter mobs and we may want to explore ways to change this dynamic unless we desire a future ruled by mobs)
The problem with cancel culture is a problem with bad employment law, and a problem with cultural institutions without any core ethical beliefs.
Cancel culture serves to highlight the inevitable orthodoxies that arise from proponents of “the paradox of tolerance”. Ultimately people need to ask themselves, “By what standard?”
The ability to get others to do what you want them to is absolutely a form of power.
https://www.newsweek.com/diversity-problem-campus-opinion-16...
Edit: changed the choice of words.
And even with current laws, where there "need not be a just cause", there are protections against unjust causes (e.g. because they found out you're jewish, or you're fat, or whatever) and "because a mob campaigned against one" can be added to that. "But, under current law the business could just say they fired them for their own neutral reasons?" Sure. Let them defend that in a lawsuit, if it happened to coincide with a mob campaign.
I disagree. I think we can all agree the government has a monopoly on violence which it is relatively inclined to use. The US system depends on the idea that someone will challenge the use of that monopoly in their particular instance, which we call precedent. It is true that people not-of-means may be subject to that violence unjustly but it only takes the government messing with the wrong person once to establish precedent. The wrong person could be rich but they could also just be a person who catches public support.
Kind of like the case of police routinely shooting unarmed blacks and getting off scot-free?
This system seems to have worked wonders to prevent this from happening. Or maybe they just haven't messed with the wrong person yet, since Rodney King hardly changed anything, and Derek Chauvin's convinction wont either...
That's not quite the same. Murder didn't need precedent, however, establishing some framework for grading police incidents retroactively does. What gets in the way of that is existing laws which protect police officers wholesale. If you're trying overturn an entire existing law for a new framework, that's a bit outside the bounds of precedent because you're not longer talking about interpretation.
Anti discrimination clauses only overrule the first amendments freedom of association due to the equal protection clause, and there's no reading that suggests that firing someone due to public pressure is implicitly discrimination.
The only time they don’t is when it costs something.
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.
You can, but institutions and businesses won't. That's the entire problem.
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.
"...they dragged me on Twitter. Well I don't give a fuck because Twitter isn't a real place."
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.
The context of this quote is in a speech that is largely anti-riot. It's a warning to the government to not be complacent, but the woke left treats as if he was condoning rioters.
Sometimes. It can also be the language of those who know they're powerful enough to do what they want.
Classic example: Lynchings.
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.
Edit: also, the show where all 24 people ritually condemn the person while everyone fully knows that 14 of them voted "yea" would be absurd enough to make some people think twice.
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.
Currently, Twitter mobs have a lot of power, but none of the responsibility. This is a hellish combination, almost guaranteed to bring out the worst in people.
This needs to be reined in somehow. I am not claiming that utterly callous leaders are the solution - in fact, I made a "may backfire" comment right after my first sentence.
The jury method seems to me more democratic, anyway.
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.
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]
My thought and observation is that there are silent majority on HN who usually dont get into these sort of discussions but are now vaguely aware of the consequences.
Also worth pointing out today is Sunday so on HN it tends to be a quiet day. Just like twitter as if anger only works from Monday to Friday.
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...
Freedom of speech means that the government cannot prevent people from saying something.
I understand that that's what you're saying. But you're responding to my comment implying that I'm disagreeing with that point of view, which I did not.
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.
It does help to think of tolerance as a peace treaty.
The post to which you responded said, “Only cancel the cancellors.”
The Paradox of Intolerance is expecting that you get to be intolerant of others while not expecting others to be intolerant of you.
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).
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.)
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.
It's hilarious that the pure libertarian approach is literally "do nothing".
The libertarian approach absolutely does lead to progressivism because people, broadly defined, want progressivism. You have to take a narrow subset of society for the libertarian approach to be genuinely popular, or you have to abandon the pretense that you're optimizing for the good of all people. Don't take my word for it, listen to one of the most successful libertarians in recent history:
https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...
> The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron. [...]
> The critical question then becomes one of means, of how to escape not via politics but beyond it. Because there are no truly free places left in our world, I suspect that the mode for escape must involve some sort of new and hitherto untried process that leads us to some undiscovered country[...]
Thiel goes on to detail how his only hope of accomplishing libertarian ideals is by escaping to either cyberspace, outer space, or the sea, leaving behind all those people who if asked by libertarian means would reject his ideals. (And he's gone on to invest in companies like SpaceX that are working on bringing this plan to fruition.)
The whole reason you get articles like this is because libertarianism can't survive on the merits, and so (apart from Thiel's approach of escape) they have to argue that people aren't playing by the rules, that somehow universities do not have the liberty to rescind invitations or that if they do it's because they're bad people. But they are playing by the rules and they're exercising their liberties.
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.
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?
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
The purpose of free speech is to prevent the government from punishing people for their views. A similar imposition on citizens would violate their 1st amendment rights.
This may be the case de jure, but de facto, the spirit of the concept of free speech, and why it is important enough to enshrine in amendment, transcends the relationship between the government and the governed. A society where speech is effectively no longer free because of authoritarian-like control of discourse by non-governmental bodies requires the same protections that it would against the government to remain free from authoritarianism. Particularly when censorious or retributive measures by these ostensibly apolitical actors almost all tend to align with the machinations of one political party.
So the fact that social media platforms (and cloud hosts and credit card companies, etc) effectively collude to control the modern, digital public square to preferentially suppress the political views of about 50% of the country is just as much of a threat as government censorship, since the outcome is the same.
It means that a guy can say X. Then twitter mobs can say that guy X is an idiot and should get fired. Both of those are fine. But firing the guy because he said X is where the free speech line is crossed. As long as it all just remains speech it is fine.
> What do I do about {contrived example X}?
What does the government do? The government does a ton of stuff, like hire people, fire people, run a lot of organizations etc. If they can do it without violating the ideal of free speech then so can you.
But firing the guy because he said X is where the free speech line is crossed.
There are people who argue employers have the right to fire anyone for any reason because of their own rights. The current reality in the US is that people are routinely fired for even mentioning the concept of a union in the workplace. I agree that is against the ideal of free speech, but not the law as it exists.
The thing I have noticed over the past year is that many of the same people who think it's great to fire people for collective action suddenly get very imaginative about free speech when it happens to people they agree with.
I openly and intentionally judge people based on their speech/thoughts they express. Say smart, curiosity-invoking things and I think more highly of you. Say closed-minded, racist things, and I think less highly of you. I find it hard to imagine that most other people don't do exactly the same thing (possibly with a different fitness function, but updating their opinion of someone based on thoughts expressed nonetheless).
If I say something that makes you think I'm an asshole, I think you should update your opinion of me in that direction without waiting for me to make some physical action to that effect.
It is so embarrassing to hear fellow Americans quote the First Amendment as being the definition of freedom of speech when even a casual perusal of history points to the First Amendment being inspired from the more general principle of freedom of speech originating in the Enlightenment. We really need to have better education in this country.
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.
There is no other solution.
The solution is to stop signing contracts with integrity clauses.
The solution is to stop working for companies without a backbone.
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.