This is a sad state of affairs where one can't even have a meta discussion about a topic without having to tip toe around ill-defined lines.
In the long run, this has the potential to turn people how want to stay out of politics and draw them in out of necessity, or they may also be cowed into something they disagree with to protect their livelihood.
In either case, it's not a good thing that one may not seek science in academia. The thing that got us to where we are. Without science and inquisitiveness, even into controversial subjects (many normal things were at one time controversial) we would not be where we are today.
This is being undermined by dogmaticism and we can only hope science prevails.
since when is invoking Godwin's law so bad as to prevent a talk about extra solar planets?
Godwin's law remains a jest about ridiculous roads online discussions can go down, its not a means of identifying those that should be silenced on other subjects.
Did he actually lose his job? There's a big difference between your boss or, since he's an academic, someone on the promotion panel saying that and some internet stranger who has no impact on his career.
Contrast that with the Germans in question where “cancellation” had best case outcomes like economic ruin and fleeing the country. I'm not saying I support calls to have him fired — although I don't see people getting this lathered about about, say, all of the retail workers or service reps who get worse for even pettier reasons — but these are simply not remotely comparable situations.
> it’s dishonest and disrespectful the Jewish people
Is it? Bari Weiss, who I think is Jewish, seems not to think so. I happen to be Jewish, and I don't think so. An inopportune comparison, yes, but not malicious. A lot of otherwise highly educated people in STEM lack a broad knowledge of politics and history. The Nazi comparison is quite often literally the only one they have available! Certainly Abbot and his co-author would have been better served by an example that didn't directly precede a genocide – in my opinion, the most apt is what went on in the Soviet Union.
He doesn't, he compared it to the state of German universities shortly before the Nazis came to power and there are certain parallels. I think it is worth listening to him.
> He directly equates DEI efforts to Nazi Germany:
Specifically, he equated active racial, gender, etc. inclusion with active racial exclusion. Like the rest of his piece, it is part of a pile of nonobvious (but with a very high affinity for a particular political tribe, despite the author’s claim to be apolitical) conclusions offered without significant justification; the one place this seems to be noted at all os an invitation to the reader to do research and disprove the conclusion that the author has declined to support.
> he equated active racial, gender, etc. inclusion with active racial exclusion.
I believe this to be correct. Explain the difference. People use it to stick it to some people they don't like. They justify it with oppression. There isn't any technical difference.
The alternative is to not do it. No option for contemporary progressive and national socialists alike.
That's the thing about of posting bare conclusions without support. It appeals to those who already agree with you, while doing nothing to convince those who don't.
> Explain the difference.
One targets a group and excludes them from the institution in question, the other a
seeks to prevent any group from being excluded from the institution.
> People use it to stick it to some people they don't like.
No, DEI isn't about sticking it to people that the advocates don't like.
> They justify it with oppression.
No, German racial exclusion want justified by past oppression it was justified by racial supremacist ideology (in no small part inspired by American White supremacy.)
> seeks to prevent any group from being excluded from the institution
No group is being excluded from the institution. That's been illegal for decades. Many individuals are being excluded because they aren't part of the "right" group.
The victims of that exclusion are mostly Asian and don't matter to "progressives". The author's proposed "academic evaluations based on academic merit" would open elite universities to tens of thousands of Asian students currently being excluded by race-based admissions.
There's no recourse against the mob because the mob doesn't have real power. A mob can't cancel your speaking engagement at MIT. Only MIT can do that.
Also, it's hard to assert that you're ruined. I get that this is an emotional response, just like an angry mob's, but rest assured that time has shown that's it's not really the case. Getting fired from one speaking engagement does not ruin a person. It's more like temporary embarrassment, which happens to everyone. Kevin Spacey, Jeffrey Toobin, Bill O'Rielly, etc. have all been "cancelled", but are back working today.
One solution, at least in America, would be a better social safety net, so that most of your benefits aren't tied to having a job. Losing your job shouldn't be so scary, no matter what the reason (although that wouldn't matter in this specific case, since this person didn't lose their job).
Where is James Damore? He became the celeb du jour. he was correct on most fronts and he was considered toxic.
Google did not want to deal with the mob. Both externally and internally. They came up with a lame reason to let him go.
We are currently seeing people okay with pulling social safety net benefits for choosing not to vaccinate. How can you guarantee that politicos will not buckle similarly.
I think the first step is recognizing that there is a mob and mob behavior. Then, act to disband the mob by not engaging in mob behavior, and convincing others not to engage in mob behavior.
It is probably impossible to disband the mob, but it does not have to be given power. It is up to the leaders of universities and corporations to have the moral courage to stand up to the mob and ignore its outrageous demands.
The only plus side is they aren’t wielding torches and pitchforks. The mob has always been bloodthirsty, readily dispensing “justice” against those in the out group for being in the out group.
this is the same mob that accepts you as 'in' based on how readily your social profile can be mapped to a silhouette template drawn in broad strokes that do not degrade or distort from low bandwidth amplification because it is already in its most reduced form to begin with.
lightweight, irreducible binary properties, such as 'Y does|does not support cause Z' percolate to the surface where they can be accessed by an audience whose members go no deeper than is necessary to splash another with hot takes.
it costs almost nothing to attract the attention (and KPIs) of the broad, shallow audience that values "cancelation." both sides of political spectrum messaging are increasingly (and existentially) optimized to cater to this fraction of their constituency above all else.
I have insider information on MIT, but not on this specific situation.
In general, I would describe much of cancel culture not as a grassroots movement, so much as an astroturf movement. It gives entrenched powers an extrajudicial process to target people.
Abbot spoke out against legacy / alumni / etc. admissions. I suspect that, or something similar, was the real crime. MIT isn't huge into legacy / alumni admissions, so I suspect the mob got kicked off by somebody else (Harvard, just up the river, is big into legacy / alumni, would find this threatening, and leaderships are joined at the hip).
> On September 30 the department chair at MIT called to tell me that they would be cancelling the Carlson lecture this year in order to avoid controversy.
The department chair should be named as there needs to be accountability for such decisions that are derisive for free academic endavors. Don't blame a Twitter mob, the decision to give in to unreasonable demands was made here.
The comments on Twitter demand much without saying anything worthwhile. They are alumni and that allegedly perfectly justifies their propositions. In some contexts that was also a title for a priestly scholar and these initiatives are nothing else than a religion that demands allegiance. They see themselves on an enlightened mission to rid the world of unbelievers. This has to stop, best would be yesterday.
I think holding these chairs accountable is the best start. Here the mistake was made because they know the smarter ones often give in. That is were Poppers magic words so often cited by the disciples of goodness actually become relevant.
Furthermore I don't think Ford wants to be associated with racism and discrimination again.
What are the long term ramifications of Twitter outrage circles canceling people whose ideas don’t exactly align with the mob?
I used to think this trend would fizzle off, or that institutions would learn to ignore a vocal minority, but it seems like neither of these are happening; that the problem is only becoming more perverse.
Is this a predominantly North American thing, do other countries handle challenging discourse better?
I'm far from American culture, discussion, problems etc. but reading around the topics of woke, cancel culture etc. I really get the impression of the actions of mentally ill people (which I mean in the literal, not figurative meaning).
If it's "just" a Twitter mob it's bad enough, but this is interfering with the very creating of national / world elites and shaping of fundamental discussions.
It feels like mass delusion, where otherwise rational, educated, smart people really believe in this woke nonsense in an almost religious manner and would attack you , even physically, if you're to speak against it.
I hate to bring up Godwin's law yet again but i think that's what some people felt in Germany when it was descending to Nazi madness with mobs marching outside.
"Think what we please, and say what we think—how better to sum up the happiness of political freedom? And the reverse is pure tyranny."
- A History of Knowledge, Charles Van Doren.
I'm starting to think that all of this is a weaponization of culture by elites to undermine political movements and stifle opposition to certain business interests.
no, its just an outcome of the age of information (i.e. post internet) where people who want to be activists around a particular subject have it very easy to create both international and inter-generational communities where everything they need is at their fingertips.
A social movement has to form, one that rejects the faceless internet mob, and recognizes only people who exist here and now, physically in the present.
It needs a name. Movements only catch on when they have the right name that instantly conveys the message.
What about internet access only with government issued chipcard ID, two factor authorized, biometrically verified and geocoded via your mandatory smart gadget? Of course no posting at all with bad (social) credit!
This isn't going to end until enough competent people are pushed away from existing institutions to form their own structures. Which is likely to take at least a generation, and quite likely is going to happen in a different country (don't ask me which).
Existing institutions can't be saved because with each successful cancellation, cancellers gain power and remaining opposition loses it.
Question: If someone wanted to do a discussion of race and Phrenology from a "scientific" perspective, is it canceling them to say, "Umm, no, those ideas a fully discredited and you're going to need to do a lot more work than a single paper and a pseudo Ted-talk to attempt to resurrect it."
If someone wanted to do a talk on exoplanets but weren’t allowed to because they also had views on phrenology would that be cancelling? That’s a more accurate analogy than the one you’re giving.
I see the issue now. We have been so inundated with bad actors gaining traction through moderate means to push their extremist agendas that it is inevitable that some people are thought wrongly categorized.
I'm not sure there is a systematic solution to this, each individual must simply do this, appeal the decision to a higher public opinion authority.
> You may agree with some of my positions and disagree with others, but in a free society they cannot be considered beyond the pale.
I think this is a bad take. In a free society people can consider whatever they want in order to judge a person.
I do see the irony in watching those who traditionally used the mob to force conformity of minorities now experiencing it themselves. Saying things like "the threat woke ideology poses to our culture, our institutions and to our freedoms." As if this is some new phenomena that's only now being discovered, and hasn't been leveraged against different groups since the dawn is society.
This is what it looks like when a traditionally dominant social group becomes somewhat relegated.
I never said it was right or wrong, it just is. Like currents in the ocean or solar radiation, we don't debate if those are right or wrong either. I see a lot of "well it matters because it's happening to me now!" in these situations, and I don't feel a lot of sympathy.
Based on what little I’ve read about his situation, and general academic conventions, I don’t think MIT should’ve cut the author’s speaking invitation.
But him getting dragged on Twitter? Yeah, that’s going to happen when you write an op-Ed in Newsweek that oafishly compares DEI efforts to the Nazi purge of Jewish students and scholars:
> Ninety years ago Germany had the best universities in the world. Then an ideological regime obsessed with race came to power and drove many of the best scholars out, gutting the faculties and leading to sustained decay that German universities never fully recovered from.
> I don’t think MIT should’ve cut the author’s speaking invitation.
"Oh but you said 'But' and we should ignore anything said after 'But...'". Sure, but if you could afford the slightest bit of nuance, you'd recognize that "don't cancel an academic lecture" and "making a bad-faith dumb Nazi comparison deserves to be dragged on twitter" are 2 different things? And asserting the former with the latter necessarily implies that academic decisions should not be made on the basis of social media outrage.
Abbot arguing that contemporary DEI campaigns are comparable to Nazism is distasteful on its face, but it's also reflects a shallow level of thinking and knowledge. Can he seriously not think of any other comparison from the last 90 years?
But again, the shallowness of his thinking in this area doesn't pertain to his speaking invitation.
This has been (rightfully, IMO) flagged, so I'm screaming into the void a bit here, but:
- Claiming that you can build a system that is entirely based on merit is equivalent to claiming that you are able to determine merit in a way that is completely objective and free of implicit or systematic bias. This is a BIG claim.
- There is no such revolutionary method of determining merit being proposed - in this case, "merit" seems to be shorthand for "going back to the way things were before all this DEI stuff came along."
Certainly, probably unachievable. I am not really a fan of what some call a meritocracy, it is complete hogwash. If I must chose I prefer it to active racial discrimination however because making admission not factor in some alleged inequality between ethnic demographics is certainly preferable.
Where does ethnic discrimination help? In stoking ethnic conflicts and the deteriorating situation in the US is certainly partially caused by an insistence of said discrimination where undereducated people making decisions that are quite unwise.
> I am not really a fan of what some call a meritocracy, it is complete hogwash. If I must chose I prefer it to active racial discrimination however because making admission not factor in some alleged inequality between ethnic demographics is certainly preferable.
If you agree that meritocracy is hogwash, then what do you propose in its stead? If we know that "meritocracy" as commonly practiced produces results that are not actually representative of the population, then should we not correct for that, at least until we are able to refine our practice of meritocracy such that it does not introduce this error?
> In stoking ethnic conflicts and the deteriorating situation in the US is certainly partially caused by an insistence of said discrimination where undereducated people making decisions that are quite unwise.
Can you clarify, please? It seems like you're making vague allusions here to things "everyone knows" but I can't quite parse your intentions. Can you give an explicit example of what you are talking about?
Not playing that game. The first step is to remove racial discrimination for hiring and education. You don't need to correct for that because it will correct itself after some time, but only if we stop discriminating.
> You don't need to correct for that because it will correct itself after some time, but only if we stop discriminating.
How much time? Do we start counting from the end of the Civil War, or just from the 1960s? It seems like your approach has had plenty of time to prove itself and failed to produce results.
Until the negative effects of discrimination vanishes. That can take multiple generations and we have seen incredible steps in the right direction. The answer is certainly not more discrimination, that would be a ridiculous conclusion.
If you look at the people who have been "cancelled" the vast majority of them are still employed, still selling their books, and often have even more prestige as a result (just amongst a specific group). Most of the internet has never heard of Dorian Abbot, yet not only does he still have a job, and not only is he still being invited to MIT to speak (just at a delayed date apparently), but now he has a bunch of advocates arguing on his behalf.
At this point crying cancellation is just a marketing ploy that specific people do before they launch their next book.
In the long run, this has the potential to turn people how want to stay out of politics and draw them in out of necessity, or they may also be cowed into something they disagree with to protect their livelihood.
In either case, it's not a good thing that one may not seek science in academia. The thing that got us to where we are. Without science and inquisitiveness, even into controversial subjects (many normal things were at one time controversial) we would not be where we are today.
This is being undermined by dogmaticism and we can only hope science prevails.