Students at Portland State are not being taught to think. Rather, they are being trained to mimic the moral certainty of ideologues.
They have been taught the magnitude of their outrage makes them righteous. And their outrage is never satiated. These people are toxic and sometimes evil. They'll eventually come for you too no matter how much you generally agree with them.
Some of them are certainly sincere. But as Milton Friedman once said, "sincerity is an overrated virtue". The damage they cause is the same irrespective of how sincere they might be.
> They'll eventually come for you too no matter how much you generally agree with them.
Reminds of the Maoism movement in European universities (such as in France) a few decades ago, where people critical of Mao were harassed and treated as fascists. With some universities would make Maoism a de-facto precondition to be accepted as researcher.
This seems to share the same mechanism: very few righteous people having no longer any morale compass due to ideology, and cowardliness of the rest of the herd (including the administration) that refuse to stand for reason and logic.
Taleb calls this Minority Rule in his book Skin in the Game. The most intolerant wins because of asymmetry:
"The minority rule will show us how it all it takes is a small number of intolerant virtuous people with skin in the game, in the form of courage, for society to function properly. "
I'm asking as an outsider who wants to learn: do you mean people in european universities got harassed because they were against Mao? do you have any articles about this that I can read?
This really depended on the university. Some of them were not affected at all, some other had sections where you could not do any research or teaching without being from the "right obedience" (communist, Maoist, etc.)
And as Thomas Sowell said, "The problem isn't even that Johnny can't think. The problem is that Johnny doesn't know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling."
My other favorite Sowell: "Intellect is not wisdom." My hope is that Sowell's work will see a groundswell of support and he'll finally be appreciated for what he has contributed. My fear is that we won't be on this earth when it happens.
Hilariously from the pov of this forum, Sowell is pretty much a hero of the right wing, having been formally trained as a Marxist at UofChicago only to reason his way out of that position back to sanity and then make a career of trying to educate the rest of the world to do the same.
>Hilariously from the pov of this forum, Sowell is pretty much a hero of the right wing, having been formally trained as a Marxist at UofChicago only to reason his way out of that position back to sanity and then make a career of trying to educate the rest of the world to do the same.
A big contributor to said reasoning out was his observing the antics of late-1960s black Cornell students (mostly admitted via affirmative action and, Sowell said, unqualified for the university's rigors), their takeover of university buildings, and their justifying doing so by claiming various outrages against themselves that were foreign to the day-to-day life that Sowell, a fellow Cornellian and Ithaca resident, experienced.
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
Read "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" and pay attention to how Delores Umbridge defines a set of ideas that must not be questioned. Her role of Inquisitor is similar to the role of a modern Diversity Council.
The defining of ideas can be contentious, difficult, jarring, and uncomfortable. That they are to one but not another doesn't disqualify them as debatable topics or make the arguer less qualified to make them.
Defending yourself rigorously with evidence and rhetoric was a skill people went to good colleges to learn. Bari argues that universities now reinforce not engaging in debate with or challenging the ideas of anyone who doesn't already believe what you believe (or their signals) but toeing an unspoken line, and that there's no room for nuanced discussion of the ideologies.
It's like a loyalty test where recognizing it openly for what it is is an instant fail.
How so? His story is one in which he was relentlessly harassed, and in which his attempts to tolerate and reason with his opposition resulted in him being illegitimately forced out of the university. Despite that, his "outrage", if you can call it that, is hard to spot: his letter describing the reasons for his resignation explains why he's doing it, but is low on invective.
I think university departments that teach Philosophy, esp where edgy ideas are discussed should have some protection where the teacher is not harassed.
Some of his experimental papers where he talks of "dog rape" were perhaps borne out of his outrage at his situation - I am not sure if they are wise decisions on his part - instead seen as extreme measures to prove a point.
A liberal college by definition should allow diversity of opinion. A literal interpretation of the word "liberal college" reflects the reality that many places are liberal bubbles of thought, where there won't be a safe space for researchers to pick apart and look closely at conservative views of a subject. It's the sad reality that the authorities are not remotely ready to be proven wrong - the anti-thesis of rational inquiry in an educational setting.
Outrage Politics has pervaded everything. But his outrage is real and maybe justified, where he seems to be the victim (being 'coached' i.e. akin to a PIP )
> Some of his experimental papers where he talks of "dog rape" were perhaps borne out of his outrage at his situation
You may have misunderstood the whole Grievance Studies affair. The papers were not experimental, they were deliberately and visibly fake in order to point out the ridiculousness of the whole field.
> should have some protection where the teacher is not harassed.
It is called tenure. And it is available to all departments, as true research is by definition “edgy”. However, somehow tenure system nowadays encourages groupthink. The shortest path to tenure if by conformism.
> A literal interpretation of the word "liberal college" reflects the reality that many places are liberal bubbles of thought, where there won't be a safe space for researchers to pick apart and look closely at conservative views of a subject
Isn't that the opposite of what he is complaining about? He criticised illiberalism and picked apart a subject in an unorthodox way, which resulted in his critics harassing him. There were not any liberal bubbles/safe spaces that could protect him from the harassers.
Immediately after reading the title, I knew Peter would be involved in its contents in some shape or form. Was not surprised when the first thing I saw was a picture of him pop up after clicking on the link. Took a philosophy class with him during my freshman year of undergrad before transferring to another university. Really cool guy that had a massive part in enabling my critical thinking skills.
Boghossian is well-known for Sokal Hoaxes where he submits bogus papers to hundreds of journals (where it seems only obscure open access journals seem to actually publish) to discredit "feminism" and "the left" when they get published. The work is largely in the same vein as what you'll see out of Project Veritas.
He had a large following in the "anti-PC" and "anti-SJW" online subculture a few years back. It's been a long time since I've seen that name, interesting that I'm seeing it now where "PC" and "SJW" are largely swapped out with "woke" in discourse.
The fact that hoax papers can so easily get through makes a mockery of the process. It shows there is next to no rigor on what is being submitted and it is just an echo chamber where ridiculous topics like “canine trans community discrimination” can masquerade as philosophy or science.
If you think that’s crazy, you would be surprised at the kind of stuff that can get into almost any journal on any subject. The point is that research fraud and poor vetting are a problem for many fields, not just the ones that you or I may dislike… so you have to wonder what would motivate someone to only point out their ideological enemies flaws.
He's in the social sciences. It makes sense he'd focus on that. It is possible to publish nonsense papers in STEM journals too, hence the stories about "tortured phrases" that cropped up a few weeks ago. However there's no particular reason a philosophy professor would be aware of those journals or have any motivation to explore their integrity; naturally he will focus on journals about subjects he understands better than e.g. electronics or medicine.
I hope that's not his reasoning, because it is rather lazy. In order to know whether or not a phenomenon is a problem that matters you need to get an understanding of what is "normal" or not. Fraud is common in all fields in life. Someone who obsesses over the fraud present in one ideological wing of their field and nothing else would not be someone that I take seriously, personally.
> so you have to wonder what would motivate someone to only point out their ideological enemies flaws.
In the article it clearly states that he was surrounded by these illiberal ideologues and being harassed by them even before he started publishing these papers, simply for using critical thinking.
The point is that Boghossian has built his brand over the past decade as an "anti-SJW" thought-leader and has used methods like the Sokal hoax to create stories that seem scandalous on the surface, and fall somewhere on the spectrum of dishonesty upon closer inspection, like Project Veritas often does (e.g. getting one of hundreds of your submissions published in an obscure open access journal doesn't prove what your readers think it proves on the surface.)
>Again - not sure what point you are trying to make here. Words and meanings change over time.
PC and SJW fell out of favor as time went on. The dishonesty in the discourse in the so-called "anti-PC" crowd around trigger warnings, "safe spaces", and gay rights is plainly obvious at this point, to the degree that it's hard to be taken seriously using these talking points, and terms like "PC" and "SJW" fell out of fashion accordingly. The discourse around so-called "wokeness" seems to also suffer from some of the same issues, though it may take time for that to become as obvious as it is now with the former.
> methods like the Sokal hoax to create stories that seem scandalous on the surface
No, it doesn't seem scandalous "on the surface." If you are in a field with so called "peer reviewed research" and someone can publish complete made up bullshit, then your entire field of study is garbage. You see these morons complain about his tactics, but you never see them fight back in kind. That's because you would never be able to get bullshit through the peer review process in physics, because it's, you know, real.
> If you are in a field with so called "peer reviewed research" and someone can publish complete made up bullshit, then your entire field of study is garbage.
The problem is, that's simply not what's happening. Boghossian isn't getting published in any large or reputable journals. He's getting articles published in tiny obscure open access journals. His paper has repeatedly, consistently failed peer review in academic journals.
If I published a logically incorrect math proof in some obscure journal no one has ever heard of, I haven't "disproved math." To claim I did so would be deeply dishonest.
I believe the point he is making, is that any old BS can be published, which is then picked up by the "woke" crowd and used in their citations...therefore highlighting that their citations are generally nonsense.
To show their citations are generally nonsense he would have had to do some analysis to prove this. Having fraudulent papers accepted to low impact, open access journals doesn’t exactly prove much of anything in a general sense.
I believe there are some hints that towing certain ideological lines is more important for a successful submission in some academic journals than the merit of the paper itself.
For the reasons explained in the article and plain monetary interests.
>That's because you would never be able to get bullshit through the peer review process in physics,
are you sure about that?[1]. Some journal accepting a bullshit paper proves exactly one thing, that likely one individual or a small group of people had bad judgement. I'm not sure how one publicity stunt is supposed to destroy an entire field of research. That's just your own preconceived bias talking, and it's actually why these hoaxes are just stupid.
Did you read the article you linked? It has nothing to do with peer-reviewed publication in physics journals. It’s just another fake conference that automatically prints submitted abstracts (as do many real conferences). I get a different invitation every week or two to submit papers to these things. This week it’s some energy conference in Turkey (today was my “last chance” after ignoring their five previous emails). It means nothing.
their point is that a university hasn't really any reason to accommodate someone who publishes low quality research, which seems pretty straight forward.
Alan Sokal is well known for the Sokal Affair, which happened in the 90s, they copied the methodology. The media called it "Sokal Squared", which is a dumb name.
The university system has turned into some combination of a credentialing racket, an indoctrination camp, and a country club. The sooner the whole thing collapses under its own weight the better.
Re >> credentialing racket - I agree. This is an aspect of higher education that's made me sad for some time. I've seen too many college-aged kids who's perception of University is that it's simply the way "to get a good job with good pay". I've known the engineers who gripe about taking a history class, or history students who gripe about taking a math class, etc... Not everyone, but more than I'd hope.
Excellent point! The problem is that systems like this that received government funding never die... Too many politicians support them in return for votes.
My kids will be doing a combination of apprenticeships and online learning instead of universities in the US.
Knowing very little about the US educational system, I wonder if this is somehow a symptom of unresolved trauma of the historical crimes against African slaves.
They were enslaved then, many died an awful death, then technically freed, but still living as an underclass for decades, arguably still today. It never ceases to amaze me how many societal statistics in the US - education levels, wealth, teenage pregnancies, crime and incarceration rates - are explained by something as superficial as skin colour.
So you see this every day, poor neighbourhoods are full of Black people, and you know why they are there - because White people enslaved them, brought them to America, then gave them a very sub-standard freedom. There is a hypocritical narrative of how we're all equal, but we're not (affirmative action?), but we ought to be, but really you know the society is so unequal, based on race. So what do you do?
Most people cannot do anything of major practical impact. Maybe there are charities you can donate to or work with. Maybe you can vote for the right political candidates - but that's so indirect and diluted, it doesn't feel real.
So the least you can do is be very vocal about how guilty and outraged you feel about the whole situation. It probably feels very genuine, it may be 100% genuine, just not actually productive. You put the sticky tape on the crack in the wall so it looks less bad.
I don't know how that massive historical injustice can be fixed, but I think it should. I don't think Woke inc. is doing anything productive towards that though, and I understand the OP's frustration. But that's my best guess as to what the root cause is.
I hope none of this comes as disrespectful to Black people. My point is they were very badly mistreated, and the consequences of that last until today too, not to posit that one race is better than another.
Based on 2 trips to America, some reading and some very unwoke thinking. But I care about it a lot, not just for its own sake, but also as Woke is being exported, with some success, as the new prevailing ideology to shape the Western world.
There are historical aspects that the US must contend with, even some 150+ years on after the official end of slavery (the American Civil War) and 50+ years on after the practical end of slavery (Civil Rights bill). Many injustices will take generations to work through. It's not something that will just happen naturally over night - humans are messy creatures. However there are people, mainly of the progressive left, that are pushing for these changes to happen much faster than they naturally would and that's fine up to a point. Many, many of them, driven mostly by ideology and internet points, have forced the pendulum of reconciliation completely off it's course in favor of their own power grabs. It is no longer about putting everyone on equal footing. It's about moving perceived power structures away from some and towards themselves. The US education system is a pivotal battleground because that's where many young minds are molded and formed. It's actually kind of brilliant that the secondary education system was one of the first institutions to be captured by these radicals. But now that the public at large is starting to wake up and realize what's going on the radicals are using the other tools at their disposal (censorship, shaming, rioting, attacking other normed institutions) they are being called out and brought to light. Boghossian did just this and on their turf, and is currently being ostracized for it.
> There are historical aspects that the US must contend with, even some 150+ years on after the official end of slavery (the American Civil War) and 50+ years on after the practical end of slavery (Civil Rights bill). Many injustices will take generations to work through.
One timeline I like to refer to is how long it took France to transform from an absolute monarchy to a stable republic; by my count 81 years, from the French revolution of 1789 to the Third Republic of 1870. Yeah, these things take time.
I suspect some things could be done more proactively, just not easily or cheaply. Suppose state schools got some really beefy funding, to attract better teachers, have less kids per teacher, had more fun activities for kids to keep them out of trouble. Would that tip the scales in favour of poor kids, many of whom are, I believe, Black?
Maybe that's not the best use of the money for the cause, who knows, but it's doable. You "just" need the money and the political will to make it happen.
>So you see this every day, poor neighbourhoods are full of Black people, and you know why they are there - because White people enslaved them, brought them to America, then gave them a very sub-standard freedom.
>Somewhere, sometime, maybe 400 years ago, an ancestor of mine whose name I'll never know was shackled in leg irons, kept in a dark pit, possibly at Goree Island off the coast of Senegal, and then put with thousands of other Africans into the crowded, filthy cargo hold of a ship for the long and treacherous journey across the Atlantic. Many of them died along the way, of disease, of hunger. But my ancestor survived, maybe because he was strong, maybe stubborn enough to want to live, or maybe just lucky. He was ripped away from his country and his family, forced into slavery somewhere in the Caribbean. Then one of his descendants somehow made it up to South Carolina, and one of those descendants, my father, made it to Detroit during the Second World War, and there I was born, 36 years ago. And if that original ancestor hadn't been forced to make that horrific voyage, I would not have been standing there that day on the Rusumo Falls bridge, a journalist -- a mere spectator -- watching the bodies glide past me like river logs. No, I might have instead been one of them -- or have met some similarly anonymous fate in any one of the countless ongoing civil wars or tribal clashes on this brutal continent. And so I thank God my ancestor made that voyage.
>Does that sound shocking? Does it sound almost like a justification for the terrible crime of slavery? Does it sound like this black man has forgotten his African roots? Of course it does, all that and more. And that is precisely why I have tried to keep the emotion buried so deep for so long. But as I sit before the computer screen, trying to sum up my time in Africa, I have decided I cannot lie to you, the reader. After three years traveling around this continent as a reporter for The Washington Post, I've become cynical, jaded. I have covered the famine and civil war in Somalia; I've seen a cholera epidemic in Zaire (hence the trucks dumping the bodies into pits); I've interviewed evil "warlords," I've encountered machete-wielding Hutu mass murderers; I've talked to a guy in a wig and a shower cap, smoking a joint and holding an AK-47, on a bridge just outside Monrovia. I've seen some cities in rubble because they had been bombed, and some cities in rubble because corrupt leaders had let them rot and decay. I've seen monumental greed and corruption, brutality, tyranny and evil.
>But even with all the good I've found here, my perceptions have been hopelessly skewed by the bad. My tour in Africa coincided with two of the world's worst tragedies, Somalia and Rwanda. I've had friends and colleagues killed, beaten to death by mobs, shot and left to bleed to death on a Mogadishu street.
>Now, after three years, I'm beaten down and tired. And I'm no longer even going to pretend to block that feeling from my mind. I empathize with Africa's pain. I recoil in horror at the mindless waste of human life, and human potential. I salute the gallantry and dignity and sheer perseverance of the Africans. But most of all, I feel secretly glad that my ancestor made it out -- because, now, I am not one of them.
Difference is, descendants of slaves have a voice in America. But those of colonized Africans by the British? They got independence, then puppet government and borders drawn to make sure to divide ethnicities and keep them infighting. And of course, no hope of ever making it in the UK (after all, it's not "their" country).
I'm not in fact British. But you're right, every country has its own sins, UK, and Poland, my homeland, do too, there's no pretending it is different. Also I'm not saying US is worse: maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but it is orthogonal to my point.
That's kind of part of my point by the way. They all have slightly different sins that need their own debate and atonement, certainly not copying US Woke.
I feel compelled to point out that the outrage regarding “human experimentation” was nearly universal here when it was researchers making intentionally bad commits to the Linux code base.
I assume (and I don't want to assume too much) you are saying the reaction here is hypocritical?
If so, I don't agree.
The Linux kernel is not too different from an emergency service. Interfering with its operation/development is dangerous to a large number of people on the planet, maybe almost all of them.
A shitty journal article that got accepted to peer review in an academic journal is not really affecting most people's day-to-day life, just academics and philosophers, and we (the collective we, maybe HN) don't really care as much about that as we do the Linux kernel, or at least care proportionately to the importance of the target of that human experimentation.
That would be fine to not care as much and this human experimentation would likely pass the bar for being ethical. The point is that it’s a line in the sand to not cross ever.
It’s like mandating code review. You don’t let the programmer who made the code decide it doesn’t need code review this one time, and you don’t let researchers decide they can experiment on unconsenting humans this one time.
That's a fair point. I may not fully understand who he experimented on, but it seems like the target of experimentation for the professor here was the reviewers and the journals, but he didn't experiment on people to write the paper, just that submitting the paper was the experiment. I feel that is maybe one layer removed from sending bad commits to real people then publishing the results, but I guess after thinking it all out they are close enough to pass a smell test and be critiqued along side each other! Thanks for your example.
I think it is always wise to get ethics (/institutional) review board clearance if you have people participating in your experiments and particularly they do not consent in advance. I understand from our own experience that one avoids those boards sometimes, but IHMO one needs to accept criticism if one hasn't done. I hope he would have got clearance anyways. He could have complained I guess if not.
Nevertheless the penis paper proved a point and we use it in our teaching as an example how peer review sometimes "works".
That's a fair point. I guess any time you try to unofficially exploit a system's weaknesses to prove a point, and you fail, you should expect to be treated like any other person who was busted trying to exploit the system. Otherwise, the system still failed.
If that researcher actually got a change into millions of user's linux systems, he would look like a genius, new checks would be put in place to catch his techniques, and everyone would be auditing every past commit on various open projects looking for other similar attacks. But instead, the system worked as intended, and now you can't go back and say "lol just kidding, it's a social experiment bro!" It's a risk you'd better be willing to take.
Research being published in any old journal is not the same as merging a patch into main.
As I pointed out in another thread, the journals he published his work to were low tier, open access journals. Anyone can start a journal, and these journals will accept almost any research that's on topic.
So if I were to stretch the metaphor, it's more like he found some fork of the official Linux repository, he submitted a patch that the maintainer just merged in without thinking, and then he used this to show how easy it is to get malicious code into the official Linux repo.
Of course it’s not criminal and you know it. It’s just bad taste to keep using it in the context of slavery, segregation and ongoing institutionalized oppression.
And, you can keep using it. All that changed was the default on GitHub.
I don't think that guy had any reason to point out the "master" thing, but now that we're down here, I don't think that version control has any context of slavery, segregation, or ongoing institutionalized oppression. Glad to be proven wrong though.
I get abandoning master/slave terminology, but on its own the word "master" has nothing to do with slavery.
In general, I get being sensitive towoard ongoing social injustice, but on the other hand I want to be careful not to fall victim to a 4chan psyop baiting people into irrational levels of "wokeness".
My workplace recently recommended against using the terms "tipping point" and "chop chop" without giving any context. I had to google them to find out why they were problematic. Turns out that "chop chop" and "chopstick" have the same (possibly insensitive) origin. But I don't know what else to call a chopstick! Luckily they didn't ban it...for now...
I'm not saying this whole "master" thing was "masterminded" by anyone, but if I were a troll with nothing better to do but "own the libs", I would spend my time coming up with ways to cancel random things by linking them to racist pasts. Which would be pretty easy because, turns out, everything that existed 100+ years ago probably had a run-in with overt racism.
I did a deep dive on the origin of "master" in git a while ago when it came up on HN. In that thread, it was often argued that "master" is taken from the recording industry (i.e. a master recording), where there are no connections to slavery. Unfortunately, the use of the word "master" recording in the recording industry is usually paired with a "slave" recording, so there does in fact does seem to have a direct origin referencing the history of chattel slavery in the United States if the origin of the term is from the recording industry. Here's that thread:
While it's still a mystery to me exactly the origin of master in git, what I do know is that the term carries enough weight that my students appreciated me renaming our course repositories from master to main, so I will keep doing it no matter what the origin, as it's really not much of an ask at all, and the result is it makes people feel better.
May I recommend this wonderful podcast on Cancel Culture? Basically the term is so distorted that it’s meaningless. The podcast is very well researched and if you haven’t heard “You’re Wrong About” you’re in for a treat.
As for “master” - nothing wrong with the word. It’s the context that shifts. No one lives in isolation and acknowledging the context shifts sometimes makes sense.
Insinuating that people sensitive to the context are somehow criminalizing the ones who deny it’s existence is absurd.
Don't forget that there were people like Rich Salz who took their ball and ran home crying[0] because of a freaking word. Was this just a fit of temporary 2020-insanity that was going around? Nope - apparently 1 year on, it's still intolerably reeecist to have a "master key" in cryptography.[1]
>We need to educate more people against logical fallacies
Definitely! And train them on how to identify and fend this sort of abuse, particularly on students (and youth in general) who often find themselves in situations where there is a huge power imbalance playing against them.
While I was studying at KAUST (Saudi Arabia's flaghship university), my daughter was kidnapped by the staff there and held hostage for a few weeks,
all of this to try to get me to sign some documents I didn't want to [1]. Aside from other things, they were desperately trying to get some dirt on me using such tactics, so that part of the post resonated with me very well.
I am in the process of writing a book about this whole ordeal with the intent of letting other people learn from my experience and how to get out of this sort of thing in time, or better yet, never fall into it in the first place.
Unfortunately, I see this same trend happening on HN too. Every post about an accomplishment, a novel business, a new approach, is filled with comments on the inadequacies of social justice and woe-is-mes.
From one extreme, everything appears to be at the other. The highest-ranked comment on this story right now is an utterly predictable concurrence with the article's claim that students are being taught to "mimic the moral certainty of ideologues" and it even quotes Milton Friedman to banish any uncertainty about where the commenter is coming from. To you it might seem like HN is dominated by wokeness. To me it seems quite otherwise. The truth is probably somewhere in between.
Every HN comment section has a different audience than the next. My hypothesis is that a large chunk of the audience of a given article is people that are irked by the title and join in to express their discontent. This explains the 'top comment is the antithesis of the article' phenomenon.
Dismaying if true...but I would be curious to hear from anyone who knows more about the situation, especially if they are in attendance at Portland State University. Any HN readers out there who fit that description? Does this sound like an accurate depiction of Portland State, in your experience?
I've been following the situation around Peter for a few years now.
Here's a documentary that touches on the panel with James Damoore that he mentions.
He was also a member of the Grievance Studies Affair[1].
They got a chapter from Mein Kampf published, rewritten in a feminist manner.
I think that shows how rigorous the gender studies field is in practice.
He was indeed reprimanded for social experiments on people.
Then again, how come a university isn't reacting when its personnel is spit upon and finds feces in front of their office door.
You might remember the moral outrage on a noose that was found in the garage of a black racing driver[2]. It's the asymmetry that is the problem.
In many universities in eastern europe, Philosophy and Logic is a required subject regardless of your major (and so was some form of PE). At least it was when I briefly studied there a decade ago. I think its great but it requires you not to look at university education as a product sold in exchange for better shot at jobs, but as a form of bettering yourself. This goes very much against how western universities are run (where I also studied).
It was mandatory when I studied at Wageningen University (an agricultural university in the Netherlands) in the 90's, the subject was called 'wetenschapsfilosofie' (philosophy of science). It was not taken seriously by most students since the way the subject was taught and tested was not very inspiring, to pass the test it seemed to be enough to intersperse dense prose with the names of some well-known philosophers - Popper being the king here.
Very scary. History gives us many examples showing what self-righteous people with strong convictions and a belief that the end justifies the means can do. It's not pretty.
> Which goes to the very point of having hard discussions about these topics that we aren't having.
A bunch of programmers kvetching on a forum doesn't do anything. It isn't politics, it won't solve any of these "hard discussions," and everyone will continue to talk past one another. These discussions are entirely cultural at this point--it's comparing batman to superman.
Some of it is that, but engineers tend to be more pragmatic and willing to change their mind with new evidence. Plus they have real power. Google engineers can push back on this fundamentalist ideology instead of continuing to implement it.
> Some of it is that, but engineers tend to be more pragmatic and willing to change their mind with new evidence
Going solely off the assumption this is true, which I don't entirely believe, the fact of the matter is: this is still not politics. We are a small profession operating on a small forum and for any of the discussion to be any more than farming engagement, the discussions have to escape the internet--leading to your next point.
> Google engineers can push back on this fundamentalist ideology instead of continuing to implement it.
At which point they could be fired and replaced with someone willing to do so. It's self replicating.
I seem to remember eastdakota (ceo of cloudflare) deplatforming the daily stormer (neonazi news aggregator) after comments made on HN.
Not all posts here are done by entry level junior engineer. This place has a disproportionate amount of C levels and high profile people who can make policy and impactful changes.
Cloudflare dropped the Nazis because they started to claim Cloudflare was agreeing with them. The value produced by hosting Nazis is pretty low which is why they have had issues ever since. If, however, they were a lucrative clientele, rest assured their free speech rights would be purchasable.
Insofar as the value outweighs the negatives, someone's going to do it. What google does is valuable, what they offer is valuable, and that's why it's going to be self replicating. Even if Alphabet closes tomorrow, we'll find it all patched up in the future.
That's why it needs to be engineers, plural. Not just one that can be easily smeared and ostracized as the rest cower in fear. Stand up for your fellow engineers when they are being culled from the herd!
For the same reasons that people like Boghossian and anyone else who dares to speak outside of the desired narrative gets harassed by the mob: to quell dissent.
It is an oddity of the current crop of authoritarians that they in one breath manage to claim that there is no absolute truth but a multitude of 'lived experiences' while at the same time decrying anyone who dares to speak outside of the desired narrative. Of course the same people deny the validity of logic by calling it an example of 'white supremacy' so its application to their behaviour is a losing proposition.
Once enough people have been pushed out of those parts of academia which have been infected by critical theory it stands to reason that they will end up creating new venues for academic research structured in such a way that they can not be taken over - as to what this structure would look like is still up for grabs. Given that those new institutions can be assumed to be based on meritocracy where identity politics and 'diversity initiatives' are driving factors in their previous institutions it is likely that the former will end up producing higher-quality research than the latter - which will promptly be labelled as the result of some combination of *-isms/*-phobias by the authoritarians.
Personally, I find it rather uninteresting and not the kind of article that raises the standard of HN comments, which are the reason I visit. I perceive these types of threads as not-useful flame wars supported by opinions presented as insights.
The amount of projection in this thread regarding the collective motivations of the HN Hive Mind is fascinating.
The subject is dear to heart for many, if not most people who frequent HN. Boghossian is a well-known author in this context who was instrumental in bringing these issues up for discussion outside of academia. He was the last of the authors of the grievance studies hoax articles who was still employed in academia so his resignation is sort of a milestone, in what direction remains to be seen. The discussions around these issues often do end up in polarised factional disputes but that is part and parcel of the problem and not something which can be avoided by not discussing it in the first place.
For me the desired outcome of these discussions is that those who have been supportive of the introduction of indentitarian policies in academia realise the deleterious effects these have on institutional and, lately, societal cohesion - more or less in the same way that Marxists in the 20's of the previous century started to realise that the Soviet Union did not develop into the workers and farmers paradise they were told it would. This can only happen if the subject can be discussed in those places where it matters, in other words in places frequented by people who have been part of or are still part of academia. HN is one of those places.
Fair perspective, I grant you. I just don’t think it’s particularly well suited to the HN that I want to see. It seems more fitting for a philosophy board than a startup/technology board.
I do realize that politics is sometimes ok on Hn. I’m just saying I think that degrades the quality of the forum, and dilutes the topics I prefer.
> I just don’t think it’s particularly well suited to the HN that I want to see. It seems more fitting for a philosophy board than a startup/technology board.
Had the problem been limited to academia - and, more specifically, the humanities - I would have concurred. Now that it escaped out into the wild where it is wreaking havoc with societal institutions and commercial entities it has become something which directly concerns the areas of interest for this board and as such should be dealt with.
One of the best ways for dealing with these authoritarians is for people to just say "no, I will not be bullied into submission". As long as there are only a few people doing so they can be singled out, demonised and de-platformed by the authoritarian 'new puritans' but this becomes ineffective in the face of growing resistance. Once they can no longer scare people into submission they will lose their power, once they lose power the problems they created can be dealt with and true academic freedom can return. Once true academic freedom returns there will still be space in academia for critical theory and related 'grievance studies' [1] but they will no longer be able to force their ideologies upon the institutions.
Resistance is not futile, we will not be assimilated.
[1] ...although I suspect they will not be able to find enough funding to keep going nor will there be many employment opportunities for those with a degree in one of these fields - which will eventually lead to their demise.
Within the unversity cluster that Boghossian worked, this activity is predominantly progressive liberal because that describes the makeup of the campus. There is a very different orthodoxy if you visit conservative colleges.
Sorry, got a chuckle at that. Liberal Progressive is a pretty big oxymoron.
Neoliberals downvote anything that disagrees with their superior worldview and are identity politics proponents because it's an effective way to disrupt class and labor movements.
Progressives are the ones who want things like universal healthcare, a federal voting holiday, an end to private prisons, and for their taxes to go towards safety nets for their neighbors and communities instead of corporate bailouts and forever wars.
Neolibs want global trade agreements, stable monopsonies, and to have wage workers pay for their own healthcare, benefits and retirement on top of all of their taxes out of the same paycheck. They're largely coastal elites and other class signalers that punch hard left against any platform that might benefit their idea of a "deplorable" even if it helps other people.
So, he’s stirred the pot over and over, including bringing in people who’s main claim to fame is grievance, but he still had a job at the university, and he quit, for amongst other things, too much grievance.
I’m not sure that this proves it’s the university that’s intolerant (although I’m sure some faculty and staff are). Or that he’s capable of enough self-reflection that he should be teaching reflection to others.
Plenty of blame to go around. Resignation letters are attempts to write history, but as he himself should be teaching, there are surely differing views here.
The weird thing is that this prof and the SJWs attacking him are ostensibly fighting the same fight with different strategies. Let's take the analogy from poisons.
Poisons are bad for your health but they exist, how do you deal with them? One strategy is to remove poisons from your environment. If someone brings poisons into your environment you make them take the poison away and criticize the person for bringing it. Hopefully the person doesn't bring any more in the future.
Another strategy is to learn the procedures necessary for safe handling of poisons. You put on protective gear, you ensure proper ventilation, you put up warning signs, you make sure people who arn't trained don't get near the poisons.
Both of these strategies can work. For most people the former is the better strategy, for professionals the later may be necessary.
So if this prof and the SJWs agree that some points of view are bad how do you deal with those ideas? The prof wants to use the second strategy, and teach people how to safely handle potentially harmful ideas. The SJWs don't want anyone near the ideas, especially in public forums or around impressionable minds.
Personally I find the SJW proposition insulting, but then again I've had explicit training in critical thinking, persuasion, rhetoric, the propagation of ideas and sufficient life experience to be confident in my ability to wade into toxic environments and come out relatively unscathed. Still, I think of the SJWs as fundamentally (and ironically) paternalistic.
That said there are plenty of myopic professors who believe that people won't be influenced by exposure to ideas, or believe that you can provide a venue without conveying the impression of support. Naive ivory tower BS. They don't recognize, or believe in, the need for caution.
Then there are the counter-activists, and this prof could be one. They know how to influence people and recognize the power of providing a forum and are "teaching the controversy" in an intentional gambit to spread ideas with which they agree. There are enough of these that for the SJWs a few ivory tower casualties are acceptable losses. The reactionary intellectual is the enemy.
So how to judge the current mood, the current movement? As a fascinating and effective marriage of the ideological purification tactics long employed by the ultra conservative set, now wielded by a sufficiently powerful amalgam of historically marginalized groups. Continual harassment, slander, character assassination and public ridicule work. This prof is just another battle won.
"I’ve invited a wide range of guest lecturers to address my classes, from Flat-Earthers to Christian apologists to global climate skeptics to Occupy Wall Street advocates. I’m proud of my work. I invited those speakers not because I agreed with their worldviews, but primarily because I didn’t."
Yes, thank you, I did manage to find the words. The quote you reproduced does not “compare Occupy Wall Street activists to flat-Earthers and climate change deniers” in any way, even remotely.
"I invited Hermann Goerring and Martin Luther King to the dinner party, not because I like both of them, but because I dislike both equally and I am trying to expand my intellectual horizons"
The purpose of the sentence is to put them all in to the same category and create a false equivalence.
Don't get me wrong. It's fine if you like Hermann Goerring. It's fine if you dislike Martin Luther King. But you don't get to say they're both the same, then insist on being able to invite both to the dinner party, and then when the dinner party guests complain about Goerring you don't get to tun around and say "see! look at the violence inherent in the system. Help! Help! I'm being repressed!" in a way that makes the entire thing a massive narcissistic cry for attention where you are the victim, you're the centre of the story, only your feelings matter and only your needs have to be respected.
Because that sort of stuff is just flat-out far-right-wing trolling.
But maybe you're visiting from an alien planet and aren't familiar with what's going on here on Earth?
"The purpose of the sentence is to put them all in to the same category and create a false equivalence."
In which category do you think Boghossian was trying to put Flat-Earthers, Christian apologists, global climate skeptics, and Occupy Wall Street advocates?
My understanding is that they are all in the category of guest lecturers. That doesn't seem like a false equivalence if they were all guest lecturers.
It's a far-right extremist tactic to normalize their belief systems.
The tactic is to put everyone together into a "diversity rainbow" of political beliefs where whatever strand of basic human decency you oppose, you can find someone else who is so extreme, vigorous, and pernicious in their beliefs that even fascism seems moderate.
For example, in the status quo of early 20th century America, a racist might say:
"Well, some radical negro extremists even think that black men ought to be allowed to marry white women. But on the other hand, some people think all the negroes should just be exterminated. As a liberal, I think everyone should be free to speak their minds and hold rallies for whatever viewpoint they like, as long as they uphold all the public order laws."
So the racist occupies an important position, sat in the middle, defending liberal democracy from two extremes. Power stays where it is, thank you very much. And if people try to get racist rallies banned, then I can fend that off by claiming it to be a fundamental attack on freedom of speech, rather than what it actually is: upholding law and order.
The fact to be obscured is that there is a fundamental dissimilarity between the "two extremes". One is just a call for basic human needs and rights to be respected, the other demands a license for some people to run roughshod over the needs and rights of others.
Edit: So yes, in that sentence he is trying to put them in to the category of "guest lecturers." But he is doing that not as a banal exercise in set-comprehension, it's part of a political argument / narcissistic tantrum.
Of course it does. It's an ancient rhetorical trick. I could say, "famous world leaders like Joseph Stalin, Adolph Hitler, Pol Pot and Barack Obama." It's technically true, but it implies a second categorization which is false.
> "it implies a second categorization which is false"
What is the second categorization implied by the quote from the author?
"I’ve invited a wide range of guest lecturers to address my classes, from Flat-Earthers to Christian apologists to global climate skeptics to Occupy Wall Street advocates. I’m proud of my work. I invited those speakers not because I agreed with their worldviews, but primarily because I didn’t."
How does this have anything to do with what ‘mizza said? I also took this as comparing flat earthers and occupy Wall Street. Grouping together a bunch of similar things and then adding in another dissimilar item as part of that group is a backhanded way of making connections between the items in readers minds.
It can work to create a positive or negative connection, but the connection is still implied
The connection is that they're highly controversial views from different groups. The professor is saying he was giving his students a chance to critically engage with various controversial ideas to sharpen their reasoning skills, and to get them used to dealing with views that might be quite contradictory to their own or to the mainstream.
We are in a horrible time where people are espousing them either for profit or outside motive, not from any core belief structure. It is unbelievably frustrating to watch, from my perspective.
In other words, people are being paid to weaponize things like "free speech" on campuses, but they don't really believe in it, they are just tools. And let me be more succinct here - it's almost all coming from the "right wing"
Kids see through this bs, at least ones I have talked to about it. "Woke"ness, to what I can process, is the push back from decades of inaction on "lets not be assholes to certain classes of people", which is largely driven by companies wanting to sell to everyone, no matter how out of sync their, and I don’t know the term for this, prejudice externalities (that is, when ones prejudices effect someone rather than just being a thought) are with “regular” society.
This was of course facilitated by the internet. Without a way to communicate outside the gated walls of mass media in the past, this would probably not have happened.
Is there some over-reaction? Sure, but it’s a massive correction to how human history has worked forever.
People who use woke, triggered, without any disambiguation or nuance are to me just not handling the massive cultural change facilitated by things like the internet. Either they hate it, or can’t understand it, or do not like the results (imo)
This thread has some serious brigading going on. University man doesn't like changing cultural norms, engages in bad faith actions to make those norms look ridiculous. People treat him like a pariah for doing it, and his work satisfaction suffers.
It seems to me, not knowing this man personally, that he has taken the example of Socrates to heart. Believe so completely in an ideal, that you seal your own fate.
I think he’s pointing out that cultural norms are getting out of control, and sometimes absurd. Not enough critical thinking is taking place. In it’s place is knee-jerk outrage.
Which norms are you referring to here specifically? Students today are very unsure about what values they still need to fight for and the message of some activists seems unclear.
For a moment there it sounded like you were equating his inflammatory research with the feces left by his office and the vandalism of sound equipment during his sessions.
Many of the responses he has gotten would be criminal outside the institutional process. It's a specious comparison.
Don't worry. The pendulum swung backwards this year and now the establishment has learned not to tolerate SJW without questioning their motives and logic.
When I first read about their research I was actually was actually thinking, about possible repercussions they may face. It turns out, that he did face a repercussion for exposing the flaw.
A serious question I have: where do all these people end up? Stories like this come up often recently, and it is not limited to liberal arts schools. Is there a business opportunity here? A private school not beset by any particular ideology, except truth seeking?
I have the same impression because the results of said "educations" pours out into public places.
It is very easy to identify because proponents use certain vocabularies and put up certain arguments. I am not even a native speaker to be able to identify this, although there are similar negative developments in my country, it is not restricted to the anglosphere.
Kudos to her for staying strong to the principle of free and real education.
The woke are easy to understand. They are those nonconformant people who were dismissed, mocked or even bullied in schools. Now they're having a field day and directing their anger at the archetype of their bullies - a white male. Blacks are here just incidentally - the woke aren't in business of helping blacks or latinos, they're actually trying to put a wedge between blacks and whites.
The more interesting question is who's funding this show - you don't get this sort of organized and superficial activity without a command & control center.
I wonder how much of the bad decision-making that led to the US's wasting more than 2 trillion dollars failing to effect any permanent change in Afghanistan can be ascribed to the fact that it is career suicide to imply that the people of Afghanistan were any less capable of democratically governing themselves than the people of, e.g, Germany and Japan were in 1945.
>>> [Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies] McLellan stated in a Nov. 27 letter to Boghossian, “The Committee unanimously agreed that the ‘dog park’ article represents an unambiguous example of research data fabrication.”
The thing that really stands out to me is he got it from PSU, and I'm wondering what the backstory was that led PSU to hire him back, six years later, in a different department (and college).
I believe a significant component of this division, in academia at least, concerns whether people can or can't generally be trusted to think critically, for example, about subtly incoherent and/or morally repugnant viewpoints that Prof. Boghossian may have publicly interrogated (e.g. James Damore's). "Does giving him a platform to speak do more harm than good?"
I don't generally trust people to think critically. The last ten years have showed us all how easy it is for people to be manipulated and misled at scale if the belief is accepted by their respective communities. This was shown scientifically decades ago[1]. And we all know some anti-vaxxers and/or cult followers.
Of course, most attempts to repress misinformation inevitably cause bigger problems than any alternative, including doing nothing. Attempts to repress opinions based on misinformation sow divisions which are even worse.
There is a tension between efforts towards a weak form of "prior restraint" and a belief that people are smart enough to discern truth from fiction. But don't fool yourself -- no matter your feelings here, everyone including you is subject to in-group favoritism.
I think it's just the overwhelming trend on HN. You can see from the top comments on this post that HN is a hive of far-right edge-lordism and LARPing outrage about imagined injustices.
Edit: Then again, usually you can filter out these posts just by the topic and not click on them, which is what I usually do. But the title of this one could have gone either way so I got fooled in to clicking on it. So maybe judging by this post would give a misleading impression about the whole community on HN. I think these people just end up infecting whatever internet forums don't have the moderator capacity to get rid of all the trolls
Moderators: would you mind taking this opportunity to explain to us what it means when we see "[flagged]" in a title?
Is it an automated title edit triggered by many people clicking the "flag" link? Or does it show that a moderator reviewed the article and deemed it inappropriate for HN? Or something else?
I'm struggling to see which ones of those it fits into:
* breaking the guidelines:
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
"Most stories about politics" - perhaps this one? Although there are plenty of "political" stories that don't get flagged. This definitely won't get covered on TV.
Yes, this story is about a mainstream US academic quitting his post, making serious allegations of anti-intellectual behavior against a mainstream US public university.
That appears to be obviously appropriate for HN, and is not about "politics"; it's about institutions of higher education.
Mods, if you are reading: does it not look rather as if a contingent of HN readers are abusing the "flagged" link to flag content that they don't agree with (as opposed to flagging content that violated guidelines)? Presumably this contingent must be substantial if it has resulted in automated insertion of the string "[flagged]" in the title. Is this abuse of flagging a topic that has been addressed / written about?
Not at all. It's about attacks on rationality and free enquiry at a US public university. The modern tendency to use the word "politics" to mean "people disagreeing" is lazy, and allows people to avoid confronting, and play down, real problems.
You don't think those attacks on rationality and free enquiry are political?
(I don't mean in the "everything is political" sense. If everything is political, then nothing is. But I also don't mean just in the "Red v Blue" sense, either. I mean political in the sense of "our tribe's standing and prominence compared to your tribe". "Academic politics" is used in this sense.)
> You don't think those attacks on rationality and free enquiry are political?
I agree with you: they are. But that's not what we're discussing; we're discussing the fact that rationality and free enquiry are under attack in our public universities, and we're discussing one of the consequences of those politically-motivated attacks (the resignation of an academic). Just because the attacks themselves are politically motivated does not make their consequences any less worthy of attention, or appropriate to HN. Indeed, that would be worthy of attention and appropriate content for HN whatever the underlying reasons (e.g. if it were financially powerful interests silencing inconvenient voices in academia, rather than a political movement).
To take it to an extreme to make the point absolutely clear: imagine that a crazy cult of rabbit-worshippers commit some murders in the course of a rabbit-worshipping ceremony. We would not dismiss the deaths as "just rabbit cult stuff"; a serious breach of human rights has occurred and questions need to be asked about whether the public are adequately protected from the rabbit worshippers: i.e. the normal considerations of everyday life still apply, regardless of how batty the original motivations may have been.
I agree. I won't say that I dislike politics, so much as that's generally not what I'm coming here for ~ I go elsewhere for my politics. (Then again, here I am in these comments...); I mostly come here to scratch my nerd-itch. But yes - politics being off topic is a ship that sailed long ago...
No matter your politics, this is a very bad thing. Imbalance in the political arena (i.e. the academic political arena) leads to over-reach and eventual decay.
Behold the current woes of California. Too much of one side, not enough of the other will lead to over-reach and decay. Academia is on the same path.
This guy is just another Trumpian conman and magnet for boomers that are experiencing empty-nest syndrome. He's cut straight from the typical right-wing cloth of claiming false victimhood (i.e. leaving on his own accord but implying otherwise) while he himself is victimizing others (a track record of deliberately trying to hijack the peer review process to prove a political point, and failing miserably).
Yes, when I was going to school one of my teachers said political correctness is the new facism. And with the actions that people are taking now with the destruction of statues in the US by erasing history. And with the resignation of this great man. I realise that that teacher was completely right in his depiction of what political correctness has turned into, cancel culture.
You can't just look at the end result of a socially proscribed action or crime, the motive is important. Examine this: why do we sanction research fraud? Because we want to discourage people from abusing the process to gain a personal advantage, like having an academic title that confers material wealth and social status without putting the corresponding work in. Having fake magisters in our midst dilutes the value of real magisters and undermines the concept of trust in our society as a whole.
Was that Boghossian's plan? No, he did not do that to advance the career. He did it to expose the anti-scientific ideology through the journals of the illiberal elements of culture, which in my view is a positive idea.
I understand the argument that disrupting an institution to make a point is a bad thing, c.f. <http://enwp.org/WP:POINT>. I assume he came to the conclusion that mere speech would not achieve the same result and risked a small harm to prevent a greater harm.
And you are completely against that... So these are the inevitable rules of mankind so he has to go too?
Well, look at that, questioning mass surveillance and releasing inside information so the public can judge it for themselves would actually be something worth fighting for...
How is it possible to submit fraudulent research in bogus fields? Just like you can't build a stable home on quicksand it is not possible to do valid research in fields based on false premise like the various 'grievance studies' fields. It would be the same for e.g. flat earth studies or astrology studies, to name a few more bogus fields.
The field isn't bogus just because you don't like it.
I'm a mathematician by training, and if you're going to dismiss an entire field just because Boghossian managed to get some obviously-fake papers published, I'm afraid you'll have to dismiss mine as well due to, for example, things like this : https://thatsmathematics.com/blog/archives/102
(As an aside, I don't know if Eldredge sought IRB approval for this, but he absolutely should have and if he hadn't it's probably not too late for Northern Colorado to investigate).
Mathematics is not a bogus field, that does not mean it is not possible to submit bogus papers to mathematics journals nor does it suggest that it isn't possible to create bogus derivatives of mathematics - the recent rumblings around mathematics being related to 'whiteness', 'white or European supremacy' or 'racism' [1,2] and the related desire to create a 'new mathematics' based on 'indigenous ways of knowing' would create such a derivative [3].
True there. By example, all germans of a certain generation paid a price after Hitler's crimes, unjustly or not.
Racism and other injustices in the system have been perpetrated for centuries. When the tide turns, there is a blanket application of outrage on everyone, regardless of involvement.
There was a time when any act by a colored person was subject to abuse by authorities (and indirectly by a silent majority). The blacks couldn't do a thing right - if they weren't being a slave, under that system. The same yardstick is being applied now on the other side - blindly. I am not for one moment saying revenge is OK or anything is justified.. its just the nature of mobs.
We had an (orderly) mob rule (masquerading as the rule of law) over blacks then, and we have a kind of a mob rule now (the beginnings of ..) . Its too much to ask a mob to analyze.
Ok, i thought this was overblown, i did not know that this was as extreme as this.
On the other hand, i think it was latent. It seems to be as extreme as Baudrillard postulated, years ago. So i guess victory for the postmodernists, if their theory could predict that.
Whoa.... Pretty big left turn from education free speech to "I was accused of stuff". It seems like this grandstanding might really be about the latter.
Edit: Downvotes for expressing an opinion contrary to the thread. Very fitting.
You are not sure why he is quitting. After all, it was just a little Title IX boogie.
Well, there would be the swastikas and the bags of feces. These aren't traditional welcoming gifts anywhere I know of. Let's see, pulling fire alarms, pulling speaker wires, being spit on, more investigations ...
It's all right there, in the article. In case you are still not sure why he's quitting.
A few of those things listed are crimes and should be (and probably were) investigated. There's no guarantee he should feel 'welcomed'. He wants a safe space to spout his views and is complaining when others speak out about him. He's a whining hypocrite.
That's basically what the woke types are doing: they are whining about being oppressed, that they need a safe space to spout their views, but complain when others speak out about them. They're whining hypocrites.
If it was the latter, there would be criminal investigation and he officially would know, what he is accused of.
But by putting that into question in Title IX investigation, it is about destroying credibility. Nobody is accusing him of anything, but a slanderous thought is being put into minds of his students.
According to him. And even if that were true. So what? The university should investigate claims. They seemed to find that he shouldn't be fired based on the findings. What's the problem? He's just whining. And now he's trying to get a bigger stage.
We have due process for a reason, and part of it is an investigation, that has to meet certain standard of evidence, without committing another crimes in the process.
Witch or heretic burning is a terrible part of a human history, that should never repeat again.
There are some subjects that require lots of capital equipment to properly learn, like chemistry. But the majority of subjects like English, Computer Science, philosophy, etc. do not need anything more than knowledge, discussion, and a laptop to properly learn.
Companies should start hiring based on aptitude rather than degrees. Most roles don’t need a degree. Students can learn the ability to think and reason without an insane amount of money and time spent at these indoctrination factories.
People say, “But what about the social experience?” It seems to me that creating groups and meeting up has never been easier with the internet. If people can online date than the stigma of meeting in person after coordinating online can be lost too.
Overall I think universities through their neverending price hikes, focus on grievance over education, and the lack of actual teaching is sowing the seeds of their irrelevancy.
>Companies should start hiring based on aptitude rather than degrees. Most roles don’t need a degree. Students can learn the ability to think and reason without an insane amount of money and time spent at these indoctrination factories.
A not unreasonable statement. Companies tend to be too lazy to bring in bright high school students and run a proper training systems, but you can certainly push for certification programs without degrees like the California Bar Exam.
Given the amount of OJT (self-taught) I did at first plus the real lack of value of college, I'd have to say that in my case the degrees and time spent were of no value.
> Early in the 2016-17 academic year, a former student complained about me and the university initiated a Title IX investigation. (Title IX investigations are a part of federal law designed to protect “people from discrimination based on sex in education programs or activities that receive federal financial assistance.”) My accuser, a white male, made a slew of baseless accusations against me, which university confidentiality rules unfortunately prohibit me from discussing further. What I can share is that students of mine who were interviewed during the process told me the Title IX investigator asked them if they knew anything about me beating my wife and children. This horrifying accusation soon became a widespread rumor.
> With Title IX investigations there is no due process, so I didn’t have access to the particular accusations, the ability to confront my accuser, and I had no opportunity to defend myself. Finally, the results of the investigation were revealed in December 2017. Here are the last two sentences of the report: “Global Diversity & Inclusion finds there is insufficient evidence that Boghossian violated PSU’s Prohibited Discrimination & Harassment policy. GDI recommends Boghossian receive coaching.”
> Not only was there no apology for the false accusations, but the investigator also told me that in the future I was not allowed to render my opinion about “protected classes” or teach in such a way that my opinion about protected classes could be known — a bizarre conclusion to absurd charges. Universities can enforce ideological conformity just through the threat of these investigations.
Didn't know there was a "Portland State University" in Cuba.
They have been taught the magnitude of their outrage makes them righteous. And their outrage is never satiated. These people are toxic and sometimes evil. They'll eventually come for you too no matter how much you generally agree with them.
Some of them are certainly sincere. But as Milton Friedman once said, "sincerity is an overrated virtue". The damage they cause is the same irrespective of how sincere they might be.