I'm a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me
vox.com
vox.com
The problem with today's liberals is that they think political correctness is more important than factual data. Any rational argument requires dealing with cold hard facts, however brutal and hurtful they might be. There is no place for emotions in objective observation, exploration, research.
For more info on this perspective watch this video: Why So Many Americans Don't Want Social Justice and Don't Trust Scientists https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b86dzTFJbkc
TL;DR: Political correctness...aka too many pussies in the real world.
Also, this definition of 'far' left or right (at least here in the states) is not all that far, historically speaking. Far right would be a return to religious law, banning of contraception, a return to a theocracy, etc. There are countries like that, and we view them as nuts and places you dont want to live in. Far left would be a total communist state (I think) and we all know those are equally as bad. Yet, people do live, love, have families, die, fight for, and defend those countries. Something else must be going on, right?
Again, there is a trap of viewing politics as a 1-D continuum. Granted this is better than a 1-D binary, but politics has as many dimensions as there are people, if not more. We all have opinions, or have the idea that our ideas are not important.
What is most important is that we VOTE. If we think these people are too far right or left, the best way to do something about that is to VOTE and participate in your community.
https://www.opencongress.org/people/zipcodelookup
http://www.civiced.org/resources/curriculum/lesson-plans/456...
https://www.gop.com/get-involved/
https://www.democrats.org/projects
and many more.
I ask these questions because the more I see people throw the term PC on such issues, it's really the person who's offended is the person who basically wants to be rude or otherwise anti-social.
The expectation that every single individual knows everything about her history and should call her by her first name (instead of who she is best identified with...a transgender) is PC.
In return, I'd ask you this. Why do you think I'm insulting her by calling her a transgender? I'm genuinely saying this in a respectful way. It is you who thinks that I am insulting her. You are the one at fault...I'm the genuine person here.
I would in fact call a person asking me to be PC as being deceptive. You are the one totally ignoring that person's individuality. I, on the other hand, am fully accepting of her being a transgender....accepting her as an individual.
Who's the one at fault?
The use of adjectives like "transgender" as nouns to label people is fairly widely viewed as demeaning.
> I'm genuinely saying this in a respectful way.
Er, no. If you were saying it in a "respectful way", it wouldn't be followed by this:
> You are the one at fault...I'm the genuine person here.
Moving on,
> I would in fact call a person asking me to be PC as being deceptive.
No one has asked you to "be PC"; grandparent asked you several questions about what you considered to be PC, which you then responded to with several misrepresentations of what they asked.
> Who's the one at fault?
The one who is saying that someone else is "at fault" based on a number of things that were never actually said (leaving aside the question of whether or not, had they been said, they would have supported the assignment of fault.)
Exactly my point. In the quest for PC, we cannot speak the truth (the truth here being that she is a transgender) just because it is "widely perceived as hurtful". So, how do I do an objective study (say, census count of transgenders) without being "hurtful"?
(transgender = person whose self-identity does not conform unambiguously to conventional notions of male or female gender....not one time was I being hurtful).
No, the truth is she is a transgender person/woman/individual.
Its not the use of the adjective, in contexts where it is germane, that is demeaning, it is its use as a noun, separating the descriptor from the humanity of the person to whom it applies.
> So, how do I do an objective study (say, census count of transgenders) without being "hurtful"?
By using "transgender" as an adjective. Its not that hard to do.
Do you realize how stupid and trivial this argument is? Any statistical analysis needs generalization. The generalization was not done in spite. It was for an objective study.
People should stop trying to enforce something that does not seem to be a problem. Use that energy on things that are real problems.
I don't understand this. If ideas are judged in a vacuum, then by definition, their perceived correctness is not influenced by race and gender. If those ideas are perceived differently based on race or gender, then they're not being judged in a vacuum. Or am I missing something here?
Ideas are not judged in a vacuum - humans are rubbish at doing that. We allow various factors to influence how we evaluate ideas, even when those factors have nothing to do with the idea itself. Race and gender being very obvious ones.
Example: In a meeting, a woman comes up with an idea. Everyone ignores her. Thirty seconds later, a man says the exact same thing, and suddenly everyone is in awe about how amazing this idea is.
And yes, that does happen. A lot.
However, most of us believe that we aren't doing this. We believe that we're evaluating ideas on merit alone, and are therefore completely blind to the fact that we're not. Humans are rubbish at being objective, but very good at fooling ourselves into believing that we are.
The only way to approach evaluating ideas on merit is to be aware of one's own biases, one's own point of view, various power imbalances, systemic discrimination, and all that stuff. Once you're aware of what you're actually doing, you can try to factor that into how you evaluate ideas.
Could this simply be people exercising Bayesian reasoning? If we postulate that men come up with more out-of-band good ideas (which I don't find hard to believe, as they come up with more out-of-band everything, including bad ideas), then people's priors will change to reflect that.
What I am saying is that this may in fact be rational, whatever your (or my) opinions on its rightness.
Men are more likely to pipe up with ideas - good or bad - because they are culturally encouraged to do so. Women are discouraged from sharing their ideas, and are frequently either ignored, or possibly even punished for it.
In addition, people tend to interpret the same behavior differently between men and women. For example, I saw a debate recently with a few men and one woman. After the debate, people (both men and women) were complaining about the woman, claiming the kept interrupting, and that she was rude, and wasn't listening.
Funny thing - she interrupted once, out of sheer desperation because her opponent wouldn't allow her to speak, was polite, and listened to everything her opponent had to say. Her opponent, on the other hand, had been praised for being more mature and rational, despite constantly interrupting, talking over the top of his opponent, and being extremely condescending.
These kinds of biases actually color our perceptions, without us realizing.
That's what's insidious about these kinds of rationalzations. They superficially seem reasonable, but they pretty much just reduce to either "men are just better than women at X", or "that's just the way things are, deal with it", and they do not hold up to scrutiny. However, they are intuitively rational-feeling enough to convince people that there's not a problem anymore. There is, but they just don't want to confront it.
Basically, in the scenario you've described, if the "meeting" is instead a discussion on, say, an IRC channel, then as long as the participants are anonymous, there shouldn't be any reason for bias to occur (and even when they aren't anonymous, I'd hypothesize that - due to the lack of stimuli reinforcing those biases, like visual confirmation of race or gender - bias will be significantly diminished).
Potentially, yes. It certainly can happen, but it can also go horribly wrong for a whole variety of reasons.
In online discussions, people's ideas tend to be judged based on how well the person proposing them conforms to the norms of the group. Which is part of the reason most online communities tend to develop a kind of hive mind - everyone who sticks around shares the same opinions as the group, because the group chases off anyone who dissents, either by making the environment unwelcoming, or outright harassing people.
It's part of the reason the hacker subculture isn't as egalitarian as it likes to believe. Even if everyone's anonymous (or at least using a pseudonym), it's still composed almost entirely of nerdy, reasonably well off straight white guys, mostly from the US. The reason for that is a reflection of external social forces which don't exactly exist inside hacker subculture, but strongly influenced who was able to participate in it. That creates an extremely homogenous group, which is reflected in the way hacker culture developed.
It's not deliberate, but it can feel like a hostile environment to outsiders. Which can make outsiders avoid it like the plague. Since there are no outsiders, members of the group never hear their perspective, nor do they ever realize that there's a problem, because they assume that they're being egalitarian.
That's not universal, and it's much less common in groups that have always been diverse from the very beginning. If you have a group with significant numbers of women, for example, they will tend to object (much more loudly than in real life) when someone says something sexist. The group culture that develops tends to be one that does not tolerate sexism.
In that kind of environment, you tend to be able to have discussions where everyone is listened to, and their ideas judged on merit, for precisely the reasons you suggest. It's all text based, and there's no stimuli to re-enforce your biases that you carried with you from the outside world.
However, that can only be done if you don't allow the group's culture to become a reflection of the outside world's culture. Which is what happens if you just ignore it.
You don't seem to have a grasp of the real world here. What actually happens is that people will take credit or get credit from other's ideas regardless of gender. That's what happens a lot. It's only your own bias that you think it's noticeably women being the victims. Welcome to the world of equal opportunity.
I don't doubt some women have had the experience BlackAura is referring to. But I don't believe it is universal either, since my partner does not report having that experience. As to what percentage of women have experienced this: I don't know, and no one in this conversation has produced an answer to that question.
I have watched this happen to women who were oblivious - who behave as though men stealing women's ideas is the proper way of reality, and yet they will loudly voice an objection when a woman does the same.
In Germany it seems to be more of a conservatives (CDU) and socialists (SPD) "battle". Interestingly I had the feeling the liberals (FDP) are more on the side of the conservatives (most of the time in german history FDP and CDU worked together). So when I read about US politics it feels like they are only debating on details. Like socialism isn't even an option.
Although it is always a question of one's own standpoint. Where I (a somewhat social-democratic german) stand, both CDU and SPD look like parties of the right today. :(
Freemium gaming is one element. Aggregating and slanting news for a specific demographic is another. Giving a voice to ignorance in the case of vaccination discussion is yet another. I could go on and on, because these things are real, visible, and frankly horrible deviations from intellectual and societal progress.
This is why trolling has become such a bloodsport and, quite frankly, one of the counter-balances to the trend. In a primal sense, trolling online is akin to purposefully challenging a person's worldview through their feelings, using drastic / hyperbolic / inflammatory rhetoric. People like Mark Twain and Hunter S. Thompson were masters, and I've studied them extensively.
For those who think this article might be a non-starter, fine, go bury your head in the sand a little deeper. It will only be a matter of time before a co-worker, an underling, or a family member exhibits this contagious mental rot and throws you for a loop. After all, if you don't feel that it's a problem, then it's not a problem, right?
No, The definition of trolling is attempting to get a reaction out of people by any means possible. Trolls aren't interested in having an actual conversation, educating, or changing anyone's view, in fact they thrive off of the opposite.
Depends very much on your intended and hoped for outcome for doing this? A genuine discussion and a meeting of minds or to laugh at the ignorant sheeple? If you find that you're getting more of the latter than the former, do you double down or change your approach?
Why not get someone who's actually been harmed by this change in culture to write about that?
Cynical answer: because anyone actually harmed will be told to check their privilege.
Suspicious, realistic answer: because authority figures are always more scared of disruptions to their power than is warranted by actual conditions.
On top of that, also, the groundless complaint that went nowhere in 2009 was from a student accusing the professor of "communistical sympathies" for not validating right-wing talking points on the housing crisis, and the result is that the professor is especially scared of his liberal students.
I think that the rather spurious grounds that he identifies for the fear motivating those changes is also important, particularly, it is important in identifying the source of the problem -- which is not, contrary to the headline, his liberal students, or even his students more generally.
> being silenced
Nobody is being silenced by the students. What the students want is for professors to stop being assholes towards anyone that's not just like them, and are (correctly) pointing out various kinds of systemic bias, subjective opinions masquerading as objectivity, and instances where you have material that is disturbing or emotionally difficult for absolutely no good reason other than "it doesn't bother me, so it shouldn't bother you either".
When confronted with that, this professor's response is basically denial, writing off these complaints as irrelevant, trivial, or "pandering" (ignorant of how much society in general panders to his own perspective).
So, given that bringing this up directly will result in either being ignored, or being belittled or insulted, and the conversation shut down immediately... students don't actually have any choice but to complain.
At that point, the university overreacts because they're paranoid about being sued. Which is part of a larger cultural issue that has nothing at all to do with the students.
Funny that student activism that happened decades ago is considered a good thing (now), but activism by today's students is considered to be some kind of scary monster that threatens the whole of society...
> I once saw an adjunct not get his contract renewed after students complained that he exposed them to "offensive" texts written by Edward Said and Mark Twain. His response, that the texts were meant to be a little upsetting, only fueled the students' ire and sealed his fate.
As Judith Shulevitz wrote in the New York Times, these refusals can shut down discussion in genuinely contentious areas, such as when Oxford canceled an abortion debate.
More often, they affect surprisingly minor matters, as when Hamsphire College disinvited an Afrobeat band because their lineup had too many white people in it.
He [Chait] cites an anonymous professor who says that "she and her fellow faculty members are terrified of facing accusations of triggering trauma."
Consider that tweet I linked to earlier, from critic and artist Zahira Kelly, in which she implies that the whole of scientific inquiry is somehow invalid because it has been conducted mostly by white males.
In another instance, two female professors of library science publically outed and shamed a male colleague they accused of being creepy at conferences, going so far as to openly celebrate the prospect of ruining his career.
By the way, you seem to be the sort of person that scares him.
Rebecca Reilly Cooper, a political philosopher at the University of Warwick, worries about the effectiveness of a politics in which "particular experiences can never legitimately speak for any one other than ourselves, and personal narrative and testimony are elevated to such a degree that there can be no objective standpoint from which to examine their veracity."
Why not get someone who's actually been harmed by this change in culture to write about that? -You
I see why you think I would do that, but when I say that I don't think his fears are justified by the evidence presented and we should seek better evidence of a problem (presumably from someone else), I'm doing the opposite of "elevating personal narrative and testimony".