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Comment by SpicyLemonZest | Hacker News Reader

Like most religious analogies in this area, I completely agree with it as a framework but don't really follow the conclusions. If it's a religion, surely part of living in a secular society is allowing people to practice it freely, even if that means that some conferences (or professors, or schools) adopt explicit creeds. I do worry, because I think this particular religion is factually wrong in ways that matter a lot, but the idea that academics should never let their core beliefs impact their work isn't really realistic.

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For the most part, DEI is groupthink but there are some that are so passionate you might describe that passion as religious fervor.

Ironically, DEI damages what are ostensibly its objectives.

> the idea that academics should never let their core beliefs impact their work isn't really realistic.

I wanted to explore this a bit. Let's hypothesize that the academic is in some ISIL dominated region and the caliphate says that all research must further the goals of caliphate expansion and the spread of the religion. If an academic were to write an equivalent statement - is it their core belief, or are they simply saying the Emperor's clothes are beautiful?

Given the ideal role of academia in society, isn't the latter possibility quite harmful?

As Haidt says, it's harmful to the extent that it contradicts the core telos of academic research, but I don't think it's so harmful that research becomes impossible. Quite a lot of foundational scientific work comes from medieval Christian and Muslim sources whose religious authorities executed people for heresy.

In terms of some outcomes, yes, the research can continue unhindered if they say "Hallowed are the Ori".

Personally I feel like it makes for a very poor work environment, so I sympathize with many who are put in that position. I would prefer it if they did not feel constrained by this type of environment, so that their best work would emerge.

It would mean, however, that the state should not be explicitly backing the 'religion' in e.g. public universities, even though that's not the immediate issue at hand in the article.

The current events aren't really new though. Universities have been getting steadily more left wing over time, and there's no clear waterline at which point it became 'religion'.

So this can easily be taken as an argument that governments should be divorced from academia. No grants, no student loans, no degree requirements in public sector jobs. Which would be fine, I think. The arguments for why governments should fund academia look very weak these days. It was supposed to be about long range research that the private sector wouldn't fund, but what we see in practice is the private sector funding ultra-long-range research like self driving cars, AI, etc whilst public funding gets guzzled by oceans of non-replicable P-hacked ideology driven pseudo-science. And as for education, well, researchers often don't make the best teachers anyway.

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