Let's see how this pans out but, if I were a student and deciding between MIT or Standford I'd likely choose MIT if Standford didn't have the equivalent of this. However, I don't have much faith in this actually happening or being implemented without carveouts or exceptions.
I honestly don't think statements like these mean that much, nor do I think speech policing quite takes the form people expect. Columbia's president Lee Bollinger is well known as being a free speech advocate and scholar, but Columbia usually strikes people as having a more social-justice sort of climate (if I'm not mistaken Latinx as a term originates from Columbia).
Usually, I believe that undergrads are typically the source of protest and these sort of policies. These policies really just indicate whether the university will formalize student demands, but de jure doesn't really do much when you'll still have tenured faculty doing their own thing and students protesting regardless.
Additionally, I don't know if many students will share your convictions. Chicago has long had a free-speech policy, but even though they're probably the most academically serious/legitimate institution alongside Princeton and Caltech, I think their usnews ranking has done more for their applications than free speech.
Still a good thing, but I'd think it'd be more meaningful if MIT brought back stallman
Anecdotal only - when I was in university (20 years ago) a lot of the student protest stuff was coming from the student equivalent of professional politicians. They were undergrad mostly (a few grad students) but usually had been in university for like 8 years and were ideologically motivated to stick around pursuing political aims, rather than just be there to advocate for their fellow students.
I was marginally involved in student government, and there was a big difference between the (majority) that were there to make sure their faculty/department got representation, and those that were trying to co-opt student government for some broader political aim. Unfortunately, there is rarely enough of an opposing force on these people, and inevitably they have an outsized influence.
So I wouldn't really think of it as undergrads as a whole, more like some 30 years old taking 1/4 course load and pushing their politics.
I’ve encountered a few… obsessive people like what OP describes. College costs too much to maximize your time in it, but between taking a bare minimum number of courses and staying below the retake limit there were some really strange people who managed to stick around longer than 4 years. One guy was a personal thorn in my side for my entire tenure as president of a hobby student org because he had some beef with a previous administration years prior of whom all were long graduated. Found out later he was like 9 years into his degree yet spent most of his time trying to be influential among hobby student orgs.
I would encourage you to read why Stallman resigned from MIT [1]. The emails that were “leaked” were not private discussions. They were sent to email lists that included everyone in CSAIL and to be frank, were awful.
He apologized for all this, though. His initial comments read, to me, as basically someone who is pretty clueless about those topics. But this is the exact kind of speech that should be protected- he wasn't trying to offend or antagonize people, but voicing his philosophy/opinions. He then heard other people's perspectives and they seem to have led him to him reassessing his own, which is how this sort of thing should work, instead of publicly shaming or what have you.
As long as we're talking career impact, I'm pretty sure Stallman's net effect on peoples' careers has been massively positive. In all likelihood, GNU, Emacs, and the FSF have materially increased world GDP.
Personally, I wouldn't require or expect an apology either, but as the OP said, the discussion was sent out to CSAIL mailing lists which hardly seems like the proper venue. I don't think social graces are Stallman's strong suit, but most people would know blunt discussion of pedophilia/sexual assault in that manner would probably offend a number of people in this public setting - nobody signs up for those lists expecting this sort of discussion - so I think an apology was in order [but shouldn't have been a requirement to keep his position].
He was hypothesizing their motives, and definitely down-playing the severity of the abuses, which understandably could offend people who have been in similar situations. I think part of his message was "don't jump to conclusions" which is good, but he went a lot further than that. In a leadership role, he should strive to be as unoffensive as possible imho - he doesn't want to alienate people.
That makes sense. Then perhaps a "retraction" would be better with a statement it wasn't the correct forum for such a discussion.
On your second point however I must disagree.
I'm afraid being inoffensive is a losing battle. If people see you try to avoid offense they simply start nitpicking harder. Desire to not offend should never stifle academic speech.
No, I agree with you in general, and from an ideological point of view, but from a practical standpoint, you have to choose your battles - I think it's usually worth the effort, even when it seems tedious, to go out of your way to not offend people you're working with in order to reach your goals.
Plus, once you've offended someone, you have very little chance of influencing them. Once you've established mutual respect, people won't take things you say in bad faith, so discussing controversial topics can actually be a discussion instead of a heated argument.
People shouldn't, in general, have to resign for their mis-steps, even if somebody gets offended. Who benefits from a society where a mistake or unpopular view ends your career?
That depends heavily on the severity of the mistake or the nature of the unpopular view.
I personally like Google's approach to this internally: mistakes are to be expected and are often a sign of bad process, not faulty people. But egregious repetition of mistakes of the same kind indicates a failure to learn and grow that can slate someone for dismissal, and treating one's coworkers as less than human is also a short path to the door.
(There are some outliers also. Crafting yourself into a walking Title VII violation ties the company's hands regardless of whether they'd be willing to let an employee grow and change, because the law isn't structured that way).
But what if their unpopular views are rooted in evidence, yet goes against what's morally fashionable (at present)? Who would adjudicate this and why should we trust their judgement, especially when bad optics could become a concern?
For instance, biological sex is binary/bimodal for all intents and purposes. It is discrete, and very much not a spectrum. However, there are activists who are trying to override empirical findings to justify their ideas about gender (I have no horse in this race). Furthermore, their voices have found a home in organisations like big tech. In such a case, and given the zeal of these activists, wouldn't someone who remark that sex is binary (in a casual conversation about biology) be punished? Or to put it more precisely, how can we trust those in authority to fairly judge that the innocent remark made isn't a "mistake"?
In a climate where "speech is violence" and "intent doesn't matter", people are free to project their views onto others and accuse them of tall crimes. Without free speech, the case I've mentioned above seems likely to end up in unjust persecution. Unfortunately, my hypothetical scenario isn't theoretical, but has happened in academia already. The system you proposed doesn't seem immune to this.
> For instance, biological sex is binary/bimodal for all intents and purposes. It is discrete, and very much not a spectrum.
This is such an interesting example for why free speech protections are important, but good faith discussion culture is even more important.
The first sentence is correct, the second isn't, when taken literally. The overall thrust of the statement still has merit, but it pays to be careful about one's phrasing.
To be clear, biology is messy and there are exceptions, which is why biological sex is not literally discrete in the sense that, say, binary logic is discrete. But it's also fairly reasonable to say that this is one of those cases where the exceptions confirm the time: There is a spectrum, it's just incredibly focused around two points.
The two extreme groups around this discussion both completely distort this nuanced observation. On the one side, you've got people that pretend that because the bimodality isn't perfect, it doesn't matter at all (and saying that it matters is hate!). On the other side, you've got people who pretend that there is no nuance to the bimodality (and many of them do actually hate people who don't fit perfectly into the binary).
It's pretty frustrating (to put it mildly), and free speech or lack of it has nothing to do with why it's frustrating.
> The two extreme groups around this discussion both completely distort this nuanced observation.
AFAIU one group think gender should be a social construct, rather than a biological one. I don't this whole debate has even been about the 0.1%(?) who are not XX or XY.
> AFAIU one group think gender should be a social construct, rather than a biological one.
No, one group, pretty much without exception, recognizes that gender always has been a social construct, and that it has historically been socially constructed differently in different culture. The other side may or may not recognize that; that’s not actually the point of disagreement. The point of disagreement is that the first side things that the proper social construction of ascribed gender is to align it with the subject’s gender identity. The other side, whether they frame it in terms of “gender isn’t real, only biological sex is”, “gender should reflect biological sex”, or in any of a variety of other terms, believes that the correct social construction of ascribed gender is that it should be based on some aspect or combination of aspects of biological sex (often based on a stereotype that elides the fact that choosing different aspects of biological sex for this purpose would result in different assignments.)
[Members of the first group may, in fact, view gender identity as a biological sex trait, in which case their disagreement with the second group can be viewed as a disagreement over which aspect of biological sex should be the basis.]
> I don’t this whole debate has even been about the 0.1%(?) who are not XX or XY.
Not being XX or XY isn’t the only biological divergence from simplistic stereotypes of biological sex that occurs.
I can tell which group you identify with by the bias in your comment. ;)
I have been on the fence about this whole subject, and I have read quite extensively. At least, get the facts straight.
Large groups of people classify people by their gender at birth, and 1) would disagree that this distinction is social in nature (eg. all religions identify the gender thus, and the source [at least from the POV of the adherents] is not social. 2) Would also disagree that it has historically been socially constructed differently in different culture. You won't find any example where such a norm became dominant, and you won't find any society which lasted more than 50 years after such ideas became even speakable in public.
More than that, many will disagree whether "identifying" with something (such as being a girl) is any more "real" than liking ice cream; They definitely do not consider it to be a legitimate source of defining an identity. (As legit as saying a girl is someone who identifies with Pecan ice cream - its not "which aspect of biological sex should be the basis", but "does this aspect even exist?")
> Large groups of people classify people by their gender at birth, …
Strictly speaking, they did - but then for a time in the West (70s to about ten years ago) they just observed sex at birth and indoctrinated against the social imposition of normative gender expectations … but then all of a sudden people were born ‘gendered’ again, albeit with the novel twist that innate gender was no longer necessarily tied to their biological sex.
It’s a bit of a puzzle, as it appears that forty years of individual liberalisation (“See the person, not the stereotype”) something which transformed the lives of half the population is being reversed in order to please a small group of trans gender / gender non-conforming people for whom identifying as a one or other specific stereotype is apparently at the core of their identity.
> Strictly speaking, they did - but then for a time in the West (70s to about ten years ago) they just observed sex at birth and indoctrinated against the social imposition of normative gender expectations …
Nope, that didn’t happen. Socially ascribed gender, with important social consequences (most importantly, ones coercively imposed by, or with support of, the power of government), did not go away.
If it had, though, the grounds for the dispute would be somewhat different, but the overall character would be the same, since the side opposing ascribing gender in accord with identity is also fairly universally in favor of coercive discrimination and/or segregation on the basis of (their preferred form of) ascribed gender, which is a fairly central point of their argument.
You're right, socially ascribed gender didn't go away across society, but there was a string conscious effort by many - still is, by the way - to make it go away or at least make it significantly less impactful.
Importantly, the normative consensus among progressives was as GP describes. The trans activism movement is a move backwards in that regard, since it tries to shift the normative consensus back towards gender being important and that gender should be impactful. It's no wonder they clash with some feminists.
> Large groups of people classify people by their gender at birth, and 1) would disagree that this distinction is social in nature
The disagreement is not over the factual physical observation. “Was born with (or without) a penis” is not a social distinction, but is also not the source of the disagreement.
The social weight given to it, OTOH, is. “Gets addressed in a particular way, is allowed in certain shared spaces and banned from others, etc.,” are, factually and indisputably, social distinctions, and are the focus of the disagreement.
> 2) Would also disagree that it has historically been socially constructed differently in different culture
This is just factually wrong; systems with more than two gender roles, and/or where one or more of the most closely corresponding to the supposedly universal binary defended by the side that claims one exists can be ascribed on bases other than the physical traits that faction demands should control ascription of gender have, in fact, existed (before now.)
> You won't find any example where such a norm became dominant, and you won't find any society which lasted more than 50 years after such ideas became even speakable in public.
This is, simply false; there are, for instance, very many examples in the indigenous cultures of the Americas.
> The other side, […] believes that the correct social construction of ascribed gender is that it should be based on some aspect or combination of aspects of biological sex (often based on a stereotype that elides the fact that choosing different aspects of biological sex for this purpose would result in different assignments.)
Gender distinguishes men from women, male-like thoughts, acts, emotions, capabilities and appearances from female ones. Other than for the direct purposes of reproduction, why would we want or need to classify individuals into the social groups of men and women?
You see, there’s a third group that flatly denies the desirably of socially constructing something called ‘gender’ at all.
> Other than for the direct purposes of reproduction, why would we want or need to classify individuals into the social groups of men and women?
Because men and women behave and think differently on average and treating them the same is going to cause a lot of problems in life. I mean sure, there's overlap and some men will behave in a feminine way only on one particular axis and vice versa, but ignoring the information gender gives is a very bad idea.
Couldn’t disagree more - I think those differences are primarily the result of socialisation, and dare I say it, socialisation historically designed to make females subordinate to male interests ie to be sexually desirable, good mothers, good housewives and good carers.
If you consider a definition of feminine (prettiness, gracefulness, gentleness, empathy, humility, and sensitivity) it’s not someone who acts to make their mark on the world as a man might - it’s someone who at best achieves that by supporting a masculine partner. What a terrible vision of the world that is, and what an incredible waste of individual human talent.
I think you're both kind of wrong. So much time is spent on worrying about the 'thinking' part of 'are women and men different?' (Or AFAB and AMAB if we want to use the language usually used in spaces dedicated to gender discussions). To me, the purpose of differentiating women and men is just down to efficiency, improving design of society and the items in it, and giving outliers (such as myself) language for why we feel so weird and don't fit in.
For example, men being so much physically stronger and larger than women does impact a fair amount of basic things in life. Car design is a pain in the ass (it's super fun that if I adjust the steering wheel in my car I can't see the speedometer), office chairs and tools are only made for men's bodies (my hands are small and I'm short), etc. Erasing sex just means things get designed for the average and large swaths of the other sex are ignored. (I'm not male, but I'd imagine large men have similar issues with things like sewing machines, bottles, diaper changing stations, etc. being designed for females only).
I also have a hard time fitting in in female-dominated spaces because so much of it is based around mollification/preventing conflict. Which makes sense because if you're female, starting shit with the other half of the population doesn't end well for you. Het and bi women generally live lives where they spend their time being aware that they will not win physical confrontations. (Aside: I'd guess this is why DV is more of an issue in lesbian relationships: The risk of being an abusive prick isn't being offset by the fact that your victim could pin you to the floor and punch you until you pass out). Being aware of this means I can place my own assertiveness/aggression in context and be like 'ah I feel out of place here because I am a statistical anomaly for my sex, not because anybody is wrong'.
> If you consider a definition of feminine (prettiness, gracefulness, gentleness, empathy, humility, and sensitivity) it’s not someone who acts to make their mark on the world as a man might - it’s someone who at best achieves that by supporting a masculine partner. What a terrible vision of the world that is, and what an incredible waste of individual human talent.
This I find really interesting, as I spent a lot of my life fighting any parts of myself that were traditionally feminine. I'm a more masculine than usual cis woman; bordering on butch but not quite there. And in my 30s I'm unlearning a lot of messiness around that and starting to accept the part of myself that likes teaching and nurturing + has a very strong passion for making sure the next generation is armed for the world we're sending them into. After all, surely wanting to pursue an academic career creating digital skills and history curricula for K-12 (mostly K-8) education is a 'waste of my individual human talent' when I could be writing new algorithms, isn't it?
I submit that the only people who get to determine whether something is an incredible waste of human talent are the people possessing the talent.
> I submit that the only people who get to determine whether something is an incredible waste of human talent are the people possessing the talent.
I think that's an excellent way to consider the topic as long as we remember the protections like title VII and title IX were put into place to bar obstacles to employment and education such as "We don't think it would be worth our time and effort to train you because people like you don't succeed here."
Why is being famous in history important? Why isn't raising strong, morale children important? Ensuring good relationships in the community? Defusing tensions? These are traditionally feminine things.
If gender is separate from biological sex then what meaning does it have for someone to say they identify as a man or a woman? What is a man? What is a woman? Are they a grouping of mannerisms? If we engineered ourselves to have no sex and then we all selected our genders, how would we quantify what those genders represent without any biological context?
“Gender” in the broad sense is one of several possible social constructions of divisions of people into groups and associated distinct expectations and roles; it is a feature of the social context. While there is considerable variation in between social milieus, it is always grounded, to a greater or lesser degree, in current or historical stereotypes associated with some subset of anatomical sex traits; in fact, that’s part of what we use to identify which of the many socially constructed divides in a society is gender.
“Ascribed gender” is how other people treat a person with regard to gender.
“Gender identity” is how a person sees themselves and prefers to be treated with regard to gender.
None of these things are disconnected, in either practice or the theory of the major factions, from biological sex (the last is arguably itself either a biological sex trait, a set of biological sex traits, or an interaction of biological sex traits with the social context; for it to be anything else either requires dualism, or an arbitrarily restrictive definition of “sex”), except that maybe the side opposing recognizing gender identity as the basis for ascribed gender thinks gender identity is divorced from biological sex.
It depends on who is doing the identifying. When a woman identifies as a woman, or a man identifies as a man, they are making a statement about their sex, on whether they are female or male.
When a man identifies as a woman, he is expressing his desire to be a woman, based on his ideal of what a woman is. Similarly, when a woman identifies as a man, she is expressing her desire to be a man, based on her ideal of what a man is. Neither have any direct experience of actually being the opposite sex, of course, so this ideal is based around gendered stereotypes and superficial cosmetic traits, particularly those related to sexual attraction.
> AFAIU one group think gender should be a social construct, rather than a biological one.
No, gender critical people very much don’t want gender to be a biological construct - they find the idea of innate biological masculinity or femininity appallingly regressive. They prefer to think of men and women as primarily unique individuals, ones who are incidentally sexed purely for reproductive purposes ie not for social ones.
If gender is a social construct (an idea which I'm sympathetic to), shouldn't it just go away entirely? I'm happy to move towards a society where we abandon stereotypes of masculine and feminine behaviour, I just don't understand how that's compatible with saying 'I wish to identify as a different gender because my behaviours match the stereotype of that gender.'. Doesn't that just reinforce those stereotypes?
I agree. I wish to go away from traditionalist views “Alice should stop playing with trucks and play with dolls because she is a girl” to “Alice can with trucks if she wants”. But I was shocked to find that instead, some people now believe “Alice is really a boy if she likes playing with trucks”
Then why the fuss about transgender people? It's all about treating them as a different gender, no-one seems to care about adults getting bottom surgery on their own dime.
Mostly because some places - prisons, for example - need to be segregated by sex, and the transactivists want to abolish that.
And because they're also pushing a large-scale redefinition of the terms "woman" and "man", and trying to make it law, which most people don't agree with.
> AFAIU one group think gender should be a social construct, rather than a biological one
Gender is a social construct by definition.
This all starts with the purely descriptive observation that when you analyze the informal man/woman distinction that exists de facto in society, there is a component that is inherently biological (visible traits, hormonal differences, etc.) and a component that is arbitrary social convention (clothing, color schemes, etc.). Having different terms for those components helps, and so the first one is called sex and the second is called gender.
This is all purely descriptive and I don't think anybody reasonable has major disagreements about it on either side of this topic.
The question is whether and what kind of normative conclusions one can or should draw from the observation.
For example, very conservative folks would make the normative statement that gender expressions must align with sex (women can't wear pants, men can't wear dresses, that sort of thing). There are two major strikes against this position as far as I'm concerned: first, it's clearly very illiberal; second, even ignoring the illiberalism, it doesn't leave room for the few people who, through no fault of their own, don't fall neatly into the sex binary. Those folks are left in a Kafkaesque situation of having no real way of complying with such a rule.
Some trans activists also make questionable normative statements, such as "transwomen are women". That's a normative statement because it implies that the word "woman" should be used to refer to a person's gender instead of a person's sex. It's no wonder they clash with some feminists who point out that, while there may be significant overlap, the life experiences of transwomen are generally not the same as those of women (in the sex sense), and there are situations where the distinction matters.
It's not just about XX or XY. It is about many other biological features that are correlated with XX and XY, but not 100% correlated.
Besides the big one (penis vs vagina) there are things like the rest of the reproductive system, breast size and functionality, brain structures, muscle function, bone structure, facial features, and others.
These develop at different times during fetal development, and don't have to all come out "male" or "female".
In programming terms it is like XX/XY is a master setting for a complex distributed system, and then there are a bunch of flags that control implementation of that master setting in various subsystems of the distributed system which are "supposed" to all be set if the master setting is XX and all clear if it is XY, but sometimes you end up with some set and some clear.
>
It is discrete, and very much not a spectrum. However, there are activists who are trying to override empirical findings to justify their ideas about gender (I have no horse in this race).
"Lysenko's assertion that all science is class-oriented in nature."
Stalin Russia had Lysenko's Science. We have Critical Race Theory. Though not to the same extreme, we are seeing seeds of Ideology taking root in the west.
It sounds like you may be alluding to Damore's situation.
I had a side-row seat to that event, and that's what I meant by "Walking Title VII violation." For American law, the question of the capabilities of men and women is settled and a workplace is not the venue to question it.
Believe me, there were plenty in Google who were willing to give Damore a second chance, but (a) being offered that second chance, he refused to step back from his position and (b) the lawyers made it very clear the consequences for the company would be... Unfortunate, in the courts, if they were perceived to be supporting him.
(And, to be clear... None of that implies he was right, either. Sometimes, there are things you "can't" say because they're both wrong and hurtful, not because they're secret taboo wisdom.)
That sounds nice, but then look at James Damore. I don't think he treated anyone less than human. He had an unpopular opinion and Google cowered to activists
Due to the nature of Google's approach to self-management, his "unpopular opinion" immediately constituted creation of a Title-VII hostile work environment. Google didn't have a lot of options when he chose not to back down.
He can certainly support his opinion, but he can't do it in the context of an American workplace by law.
We don't have to guess because while a final NLRB ruling on the topic was not given (due to Damore withdrawing his labor complaint for unlawful termination), the published memorandum from Jayme Sophir regarding the case suggests strongly that judges would have ruled Damore's speech unprotected and, therefore, the termination legal.
"""
[] statements about immutable traits linked to sex—such as women’s heightened neuroticism and men’s prevalence at the top of the IQ distribution—were discriminatory and constituted sexual harassment, notwithstanding [] effort to cloak [] comments with “scientific” references and analysis, and notwithstanding “not all women” disclaimers... Once the memorandum was shared publicly, at
least two female engineering candidates withdrew from consideration and explicitly named the memo as their reason for doing so. Thus, while much of the Charging Party’s memorandum was likely protected, the statements regarding biological differences between the sexes were so harmful, discriminatory, and disruptive as to be unprotected.
"""
We are not talking about if the termination was legal or not, we are talking about title vii. Damore's opinion does not meet the criteria of a hostile work environment
I see what you mean. I think I'd say "correct, kind of." Also from the memo:
"""In furtherance of these legitimate interests, employers must be permitted
to “nip in the bud” the kinds of employee conduct that could lead to a “hostile
workplace,” rather than waiting until an actionable hostile workplace has been
created before taking action."""
In essence, the memo from Mr. Sophir does not claim Damore had already created a hostile work environment. It does not have to consider that question one way or the other, because it is legal for Google to fire Mr. Damore on the expectation that his conduct would lead to a hostile work environment. The fact Google had already lost two candidates in the pipeline who cited Damore's memo as their reason for withdrawing was evidence enough of the risk.
(This reminds me of the rule of thumb regarding forum moderation: the line for when content can be curtailed and users can be banned is well away from the actual line of legality, because the goal of such policies is to not end up in court in the first place).
Agreed, though that is what I am criticizing Google for (being overzealous). As unfortunate as it is to lose 2 candidates, I would value employees who can tolerate people with opinions they don't like
But whether Damore's were valuable or not isn't really up to Google, as an American company. Title VII carves out several opnions as, by law, not "valuable" in the sense that expressing them constitutes either harassment or creation of a hostile work environment. And doing business in America means complying with that law; debating the philosophy underpinning such a law is not the purpose of an American workplace.
> Title VII carves out several opnions as, by law, not "valuable" in the sense that expressing them constitutes either harassment or creation of a hostile work environment. And doing business in America means complying with that law...
Yeah, but the thing is that what Damore did was nowhere near the criteria of title vii hostile work environment. You're making it sound as if there was some legal obligation for Google (or any other American business) to let him go, but there was not. It was cowering to activists which lead to the termination, not any legal obligation for doing business. The argument that it had anything to do with title vii holds no water for me
Google's not obligated to figure out exactly where the line of legality is. Especially when they've already lost two candidates. They're not in the business of protecting the Damores of the world (nor should they be).
The title VII argument may hold no water for you. If you find a way into the NLRB board of judges, that may matter to companies.
> Google's not obligated to figure out exactly where the line of legality is.
Sure, but it is in their business interests to have a good approximation for where the line is, hence why they have lawyers. My point is that from everything I have read about it, it doesn't even seem like they were close to said line
Both of those links straight up lie about what Stallman said. The first even accurately quotes him and then proceeds to directly lie about what it just quoted.
Still now I fail to see how these emails could be intrepreted any other way than someone being pedantic with legal terms. Not good timing, yes. But there is no trace of malice. You'll read this as a defense of epstein or child trafficking if you want to read it as such, not if you're reading what's written. Are people incapable of keeping their heads cool and holding off their a priori judgments when reading something?
>Usually, I believe that undergrads are typically the source of protest and these sort of policies.
Statements like this one probably serve to discourage some of the more censorious undergrad applicants though. Basically telling undergrads what they can expect and what they're signing up for.
I, too, am suspicious of this statement. It brings to mind the context of the similar one issued by the University of Chicago a few years ago. While the administration was publicly affirming its commitment to free speech, individual departments and organizations within the university were unobstructed in contravening it. My sense is that, at the time, a number of wealthy private schools had made the national news for the nonsense in which their students were engaging. Rich parents started balking at sending their kids to them, so enrollment (and thus vast sums of tuition money) declined. The University of Chicago put out that statement to buttress its public reputation as an elite, exclusive private school without ever enforcing it.
My sense is that this MIT statement serves a similar purpose in that it panders to the sensibilities of parents paying the tuition bills. However, if their conviction is, in fact, sincere, I think there is one good way to demonstrate it --- officially sanction professors and students engaging in behavior contrary to the free expression of their peers. Has MIT ever done this? If not, I cannot think of this announcement as little more than an advertising stunt.
>While the administration was publicly affirming its commitment to free speech, individual departments and organizations within the university were unobstructed in contravening it.
This is really interesting, do you have a source for this?
> Rich parents started balking at sending their kids to them, so enrollment (and thus vast sums of tuition money) declined
This is almost certainly not correct. Top schools get far more applications than they have seats, and so can choose their enrollment. If some rich people don’t want to send their kid to school, there are other rich people to take their place. There’s really no shortage of them.
A few days ago Stanford published some guide on words you can't say like "American" and "grandfather", so it seems the universities are total opposites in their stances now.
Given it was still published by the Stanford (not "Standford") admin and the link you posted doesn't do much to disavow its contents, I'd say it's pretty clear that the spirit of the guide is still very aligned with the political spirit of the university.
If Stanford wanted to do the right thing, they could very easily distance themselves and say that this kind of language policing isn't something they support. Instead, they double down.
"Its aspiration, and the reason for its development, is to support an inclusive community"
The document says it’s about education, not policing. Insofar you can consider it to police anything, it would apply to the Stanford IT department, not Stanford students or faculty. All departments that communicate with the outside world police their language, whether explicitly or implicitly. That a department has a list of words they don’t want to use in their communications is not surprising or interesting.
It seems like you're explaining something everyone's already very aware of. Nobody's under the impression these policies were made for Stanford students to abide by. That said, it's perfectly reasonable to cast judgement on an institution for the actions of one department, it'd be strange for one to suggest the two be conceptually separated. If Stanford is happy to employ language-policing for its IT department, it's not hard imagine similar policies creeping into place elsewhere in the institution. Decisions like this don't happen in a vacuum.
> Nobody's under the impression these policies were made for Stanford students to abide by.
This is not the impression I’ve gotten in the discussions I’ve had regarding the document.
> If Stanford is happy to employ language-policing for its IT department, it's not hard imagine similar policies creeping into place elsewhere in the institution.
To be clear, Stanford has always policed the language on its websites. Like I said, any department (in any org) that communicates with the public will police its language. The only thing notable here is that some people disagreed with the particular list of words when it was made public.
They don't need to distance from anything, as noted, it was never part of any policy, it was a discussion-piece / list of suggestions within a single department
To disavow such discussions would be to disavow free speech and expression.
And even if it was a suggested form of "policing", Free speech does not become stronger by obsessing about shaming and ostracizing those who disagree with its concepts.
It's a strange premise that a department should operate in complete autonomy from its parent institution. Is that your mental model of all departments at Stanford? That they can do, say, and publish arbitrarily, and any action on the institution side is a disavowment of free speech?
the premise is that a couple of people (more accurately, the CIO council) in the IT department said "I think future changes to the site should consider these points". And academia generally does have websites per department.
- - -
Realistically, almost anyone at any university can put content onto university websites / servers. This isn't some crazy notion of website usage: the same applies to this very site too.
We need an equivalent to the "secession of the plebs" in universities as a way to protest against this kind of administrator tyranny. The administrators alone are useless and don't produce anything of value.
Are you sure? I think while there are a lot of vocal "woke" students, there is still a large but less vocal group of students who would support freedom of expression when given a chance to do so.
Given the amount of demand for MIT they can afford to shed the students that don't support freedom of expression (then again, MIT is not Oberlin so I doubt there are many pro-censorship student).
Yeah. If there aren't enough top American students, there would be a lot more foreign students who would cherish their freedoms more, having experienced the consequences of the lack of freedom in their home country such as China, Russia, or Iran.
We've banned this account because it has been using HN primarily for ideological battle. That's not allowed here, regardless of which ideology you like/dislike. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. Past explanations here: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....
Of the people who authored or voted for this statement, whom would you consider abject racists or Nazis (or something else that, in your opinion, justifies them getting canceled)?
Ah yes, Nazis like the Chrstiakises[1]. Or maybe Nazis like Klaus Fiedler[2]?
[1] Professor Nicholas Christakis lives at Yale, where he presides over one of its undergraduate colleges. His wife Erika, a lecturer in early childhood education, shares that duty. They reside among students and are responsible for shaping residential life. And before Halloween, some students complained to them that Yale administrators were offering heavy-handed advice on what Halloween costumes to avoid.
Erika Christakis reflected on the frustrations of the students, drew on her scholarship and career experience, and composed an email inviting the community to think about the controversy through an intellectual lens that few if any had considered. Her message was a model of relevant, thoughtful, civil engagement.
For her trouble, a faction of students are now trying to get the couple removed from their residential positions, which is to say, censured and ousted from their home on campus. Hundreds of Yale students are attacking them, some with hateful insults, shouted epithets, and a campaign of public shaming. In doing so, they have shown an illiberal streak that flows from flaws in their well-intentioned ideology.
[2] The editor in chief of one of the world's most prestigious psychology journals, Perspectives on Psychological Science, resigned on Tuesday after the board of directors of the journal's publisher demanded he step aside—or be fired—for soliciting academic criticism of a black psychologist.
The editor, the prominent German psychologist Klaus Fiedler, stirred up controversy by agreeing to publish trenchant critiques of a 2020 article by Steven Roberts, a black psychologist at Stanford University, who had argued, among other things, that "color-blind leadership" promotes "structural inequality."
> For her trouble, a faction of students are now trying to get the couple removed from their residential positions
The “Halloween costume” controversy happened in 2015, and the Christakises resigned from their undergraduate college role in 2016. You are talking about events which happened 6-7 years ago as if they are current.
Academic freedom is basically a fundamental tenet of the university system. But the usual crowd thinks their agenda trumps fundamental principles of free society and only wants certain views to get any airtime, which places limits on academic enquiry. It's the modern equivalent of disallowing any research that conflicts with the bible, for example.
People like the sister commentor (now flagged/dead) that think anyone with a view different than their own is a Nazi want to insert themselves into what should be free inquiry, and have devised all sorts of mental gymnastics to explain why constraining thought is actually a good thing. University administrators who only care about preserving their power and want to take the most risk adverse path get onboard, and faculty get held hostage by an entitled minority that thinks their agenda is more important than anything else. (When the agenda is really just power anyway, not the causes they use as wedge issues)
And so the faculty has symbolically signed a statement that shouldn't need to exist, saying their business is their business and they should be left unmolested to free enquiry. And a few culture warriors call it culture war bullshit to try and give it the usual smug dismissal treatment that's the only form of rhetoric they know because they don't actually have a point
>It's the modern equivalent of disallowing any research that conflicts with the bible, for example.
It's ideology being put above all else. It can be religious or non-religious. You don't need to look much further than Stalin's Russia.
Lysenkoism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism?wprov=sfla1 ) was the nonsense hoops that academics had to jump in order to align with the Ideology of the Russian state.
Those who aligned their work efforts to the ideology were rewarded, promoted and those who didn't ended up much worse.
We don't have this extreme level here in Western countries, but we are starting to see the seeds of it. It's nice to see MIT standing up against this. Stanford seems to be all for ideology.
Sound like virtue signaling to me. I wish this works out.
I was watching Funky Town mix and thinking how much freedom and joy we lost from those times to now. Things are seriously messed up.
We have fantastic computers, but we have app stores to "protect us" from software. People stopped building software for fun (mostly), now you can't even buy software, you have to subscribe...
MIT already seemed to have much more narrow-experience libertarians than other schools I've been around.
If the bulk of the prestigious schools are perceived as "woke", are the angriest opposition to that going to disproportionately go to the prestigious schools perceived as "non-woke"?
Even if a school is more re-embracing a traditional university marketplace of ideas and collegial dialogue, while also learning to be much better than in the past wrt treating people fairly and being open to everyone... will there ironically be disproportionate applications (and admission) of students who're especially resistant to those aspirations?
Analogues that might be familiar from recent years: anonymous forums attracting the worst behavior, and "free speech" claimed as a battle cry by those who don't seem to have the lofty ideals behind that.
(To be clear, I think some of what I called "the angriest opposition" should be in a university marketplace of ideas. And that, ideally, their thinking evolves during a college journey, at the same time that their input helps evolve everyone else's thinking. The risk I'm concerned about is whether there will be so much "the angriest opposition" that it breaks the marketplace.)
I don’t think so. Unlike online forums, people attend MIT for considerations far more important to them than politics. MIT students are also typically less politically minded than other top schools
Both your points seem true to me. But the hypothetical effect I'm wondering about isn't as much due t the typical students, as to the disproportionate number of "angriest opposition" individuals who did select because "non-woke" was a big factor in their decision.
So, imagine typical students being non-political, but still a lot of students who are political, and specifically on the side of really stamping-out anything they perceive as woke (or not according to market principles, or oppressing generational-wealth white males, or whatever). And maybe not enough people around who are able and willing to engage them with counterpoints. To the extent that political action does happen, that sounds to me like it could push MIT culture in a bad direction.
Scary that this even needs to be stated.
Universities are supposed to be places of dialogue and disagreement, but too many students these days are “offended” by speech they don’t agree with and administrations cave in
There's little chance this will ever be supported by the administrative class at MIT or any other institution. By expanding protected speech it limits their power. They have fewer punitive options and less dominion over campus activities.
Looks promising, but let's see how this is interpreted in practice: we unfortunately live in a world where the statement "I like Harry Potter" can be weaponized into the "direct threats, harassment" excluded from freedom of expression. (Why? Because JK Rowling doesn't think transwomen are real women, so if you support her writing, you are clearly denying that that trans people have the right to exist.)
"can be weaponized" - not "has been" - is a pretty big disclaimer. Threats & harassment are (sadly) quite common on-line. And "speaker getting cancelled"is your criteria, not rippercushions'.
In any case, a "Looks promising, ... in practice." sounds like a pretty reasonable reaction, these days.
That claim is a strawman of your invention, but here's the backstory on Rowling, complete with a long list of Hollywood celebrities including Harry Potter stars dissociating themselves from her:
I wasn't too fond of the books when they were first published (showing my age here), and I don't feel a need to reread them. But here's the fun thing about stories: you can find whatever you'd like in them. As a reader, you are allowed to put part of yourself into the story; it is no longer just the author.
If you want Harry Potter to be a story about queerness, it is yours to make it so. If you want it to be a story about the problems of British education, it is just as much.
What I got from your reply is that even you don't believe your previous statement we unfortunately live in a world where the statement "I like Harry Potter" can be weaponized.
Without linking, there’s no value to that statement as the reader can’t evaluate whether those statements are true, leaving out significant details, or representative of some trend.
Pedantry would be trying to make some kind of unnecessarily fine distinction like arguing that the situation was totally different because the person claimed to be a Harry Potter super-fan.
This is basic media literacy of the type taught to school children. Without a source, we don’t know whether anyone is even talking about the same thing or evaluate how trustworthy it is. People write lots of things on the internet and since search engines customize results there’s no guarantee that anyone will get the same result.
This matters because someone who is confident that they’re honestly representing the facts rarely needs to be evasive. When you see so many people commenting about something which they assert is true but won’t even name, it’s usually an in-group shibboleth which they are not confident will stand up to scrutiny.
A billboard she offered to fund, but in the end did not. Not that it matters, a selfie of herself smiling in front of it was sufficient evidence of thoughtcrime.
Doesn't reject the fact that attempts were made to do so. The threat of cancellation is very real regardless [0], and not everyone is able to make it out unscathed like JK Rowling.
Boycott used to be a necessary and lauded aspect of American democracy and free markets.
Now it’s been relabeled “cancel culture” and the public are fascists for denying a person here and there oodles of figurative prestige.
A minority of elites sure have the masses convinced “canceling” a rich person is the true threat to democracy.
The end of a society is nigh when the elites are fighting to preserve their power to exploit the masses carte blanche. We grow their potatoes; not the other way around, and don’t you forget it!
JK Rowling was not cancelled in any way. Gawker Media however, was, by a deranged billionaire who abused the legal system to exact revenge on a gossip-oriented news site and its entire media conglomerate. "Cancel culture" to the degree that it exists as any kind of actual threat to free speech is squarely a right-wing endeavor.
> Gawker Media however, was, by a deranged billionaire who abused the legal system to exact revenge on a gossip-oriented news site and its entire media conglomerate.
Gawker Media wasn't cancelled; they intentionally violated a direct court order.
Maybe you should be arguing that the court should not have ruled against Gawker in the first place, or arguing that the court should not have directed Gawker to cease the publication of nonconsensual nudes, or that the court should not have brought the hammer down when Gawker continued its publication of nonconsensual nudes.
> I'm curious why you think it is okay to publish nudes of someone against their will.
I in no way stated or implied that that is OK in any way. such practices are vile and disgusting as was the outing of Thiel.
However, a "first amendment violation" , neither incident was.
"free speech" means, as we are reminded constantly by right wingers when they are denouncing "cancel culture", "speech that we despise is also free". Gawker in no way violated the first amendment. Right wing billionaires who claim to be things like "free speech absolutists" are full of it and will use any tools at their disposal to silence and "cancel" speech they don't like, including using their billions to abuse the justice system, launching torrents of frivolous lawsuits against media companies that published a story they didn't like (but had no legal basis to challenge).
Again, "a free speech violation occurred" is not my point.
my point is, billionaires saying "At last! free speech!" like PG did when he retweeted this MIT annoucement are completely full of it. They would like right-wing speech, ideas like "Black people are less intellectually capable" to be "free", which means "welcomed into the discourse without constraint", whereas any media company they don't personally like should be sued into oblivion. Gawker's fate only began when Peter Theil decided to target tens of millions of dollars at suing them into oblivion, waiting for something to stick. It quite plainly set a precedent that such actions can be taken by any billionaire whenever they want. Billionaires like Theil, PG and quite plainly Musk do not give a flying f** about "free speech". it is their speech they care about. And they should be widely challenged on this.
Gawker was not fined $140 million for violating a court order. They were sued for damages by Hulk Hogan and Hogan could have sued for the same things even if they had complied with that order, and I am not familiar with what basis there is to claim this lawsuit would not have been brought or successful if they had complied; even if unsuccessful, Theil's goal was to continue flooding Gawker with lawsuits until they went out of business, and this is most certainly an abuse of the legal system.
I did not say she was cancelled (in a successful sense), I said there were attempts to get her cancelled. Again, while her attempted cancellation wasn't successful, the fact that such an attempt even happened in the first place is mortifying. We live in the 21st century, witch hunts should not be a thing anymore.
Furthermore, I get the sense that your dismissal of JK Rowling's attempted cancellation is a thinly veiled attempt to dismiss or minimise the notion that "cancellation" is an actual phenomenon. People have their lives physically harmed and their livelihoods threatened because of this. People have committed suicide because of this (if you did actually bother to read the comment you were responding to). If that were your intent, you should take a good look as to whether you're consumed by the culture wars or not.
The notion that cancellation is exclusively a right-wing phenomenon is bollocks as well. Countless leftist academics have been successfully cancelled for their views. Oftentimes, their views were (mis)interpreted and misrepresented by their attackers in a fashion that requires the complete obliteration of reasoning. In fact, if you actually check the statistics from FIRE, 60% of the cancellation in academia came from the left, although 40% from the right is non-trivial as well. As such, the threat to free speech is indeed real, regardless of your political affiliation.
Lastly, I'm not based in the US or any part of the anglosphere. From my outsider's point of view however, the imminent threat to free speech in the "1984" sense is coming from the left. I spent two years of my time watching how Donald Trump and the republicans made a complete joke out of the US. I watched in utter shock at the atrocities and lunacy that they were capable of. In the next two years however, I observed an equivalent form of lunacy that was emerging from the left. This is no thanks to the influence of big tech, academia, and the left-wing media, whose global reach is far more prevalent than that of Fox News. From then on, I watched as more institutions in the west were ideologically captured, sacrificing their function for "social justice". While they are not the government, they are the cumulation of every power aside from the government. We've seen how big tech can rival the power held by congress. That, plus the media, academia, public and private institutions combined, is capable, and is exercising that power in a manner that is starting to look 1984-esque. What seems to be successfully driving this trend is the left's inability to discern social justice from "critical social justice". In other words, my calculus assignment easily runs circles around Robin DiAngelo's entire academic career and intellect. However, her books are selling like hotcakes. Make what you want out of what I've written.
As a non-American these SJW movements terrify me. Because like spreading democracy these movements will be used to justify invading other countries. Hollywood and the woke media apparatus will prime the American suburban class how the regime needs to be changed to protect your favorite oppressed minority class. Or at the very least Americans will be provided opporunities to feel good about themselves. Your country, America, is killing innocent people in other countries; but don't worry, feel good about yourself by using proper pronouns for the new they/them celebrities.
Fortunately, Rowling is uncancellable in practice, so she can keep on fighting to maintain the rights of women to have single-sex spaces without worrying about what a bunch of anti-women activists think.
As eloquent as she is, JKR isn't just talk - she recently founded an Edinburgh-based centre to help women who have been sexually assaulted, giving them a safe, female-only space for support in a crisis. It's heroic work, and alongside her many other charitable contributions, I'm glad she's doing such good in the world.
While I've been happy to see the MIT Free Speech Alliance come alive I'm disappointed that their web site doesn't list a specific set of current or past free speech issues and the advocacy they would have adopted for each.
Key people involved in some issues might include e.g.
* The MIT Chinese Student and Scholar Association, its funding sources, and its key advocacy areas
> "A much-anticipated report on MIT’s actions in relation to the case of Aaron Swartz, a young computer programmer and Internet activist who committed suicide in January, finds no wrongdoing on MIT’s part."
No, he made some far fetched statements that people (rightly) objected to. But since the consequences were not satisfying to some, he was falsely accused of sexual harassment on account of his views. Yes, saying that minors should be able to consent to sex with adults is something that a lot of people, including myself, are disturbed to hear. That said, calling this sexual harassment is unambiguously a false accusation.
Lindzen doesn't raise any. He's retired, and speaks only for himself. He's an embarrassment, but there are no issues there.
Ito? No attempt has been made to silence him.
Stallman isn't a speech matter either. His behavior was off putting enough that women were choosing to change their careers to avoid having to deal with him, so now he and his FSF have to do their thing off campus.
Two things can be true at once: you can abhor the beliefs of others and support their right to express those beliefs. This is because limiting the expression of beliefs will inevitably cause broader global harm to a society as a whole down the road.
It seemed to me like the actual problem was not intolerance of free expression per se, but rather that the administration had adopted a position of submission with respect to student activism. As soon as students raised a hue and cry over some issue — any issue — the administrators just rolled over, as though they were not actually in charge of the institutions they nominally oversaw. Frankly, as though they were terrified of their own students. The loss of academic freedom follows from that, but only as a consequence of the administration losing their grip and being unable (or unwilling) to sustain it. Others in this thread are, I think, safely predicting that this declaration will turn out to be toothless — if so, I think the explanation will be that you can't drive from the back seat.
Right. The fact that the administration, like so many others, has simply given the loudest radical students carte blanche — is definitely crucial to understand and to acknowledge. I am encouraged though to see language in this statement that they won't disallow speech even if it "may be harmful to some." I feel like this is a direct blow to the safetyism and "words are violence" that has taken over some college campuses. They seem to be preemptively taking the legs out of attempts to quash speech by claiming it's "harmful."
> The fact that the administration, like so many others, has simply given the loudest radical students carte blanche
I don’t think it is purely about how loud and radical some students are, it is also about how they align with the pre-existing ideological dispositions of the average university bureaucrat. Imagine, hypothetically, that the loudest and most radical students on campus were right-leaning rather than left-leaning: somehow, I doubt the same university administrators would be so quick to give in to their demands.
I disagree. Bureaucracy as an institution is psychopathic and only cares about power. If the establishment was right wing (as it had been in the past and still is in some places) the bureaucrats would line up behind it. It's about power, institutional power, not about ideology.
Let me put it this way: assuming the current situation in which most university bureaucrats lean centre-left, I think they are far more likely to resist the demands of loud and radical right-leaning students than loud and radical left-leaning students.
Now, if we are talking about a different situation, in which most university administrators were centre-right, then it could well be the other way around.
Bureaucrats respond much better to activists who (in broad outline) agree with their ideology, but who claim they are failing to live up to it, than to activists who are promoting a very different ideology instead.
Many of the demands which radical left-wing students make - such as cancellation of events, or that academics be fired - could also in principle be made by radical right students, just with different individual targets and justifications
For example, right-wing students might demand an art exhibition at the university be cancelled because they believe it to be “blasphemous” or “obscene”. Or they might object to a Marxist being allowed to deliver a guest lecture on the grounds that it is insensitive to the victims of communism.
I guess that makes sense. I don't think of there being a lot of prominent marxists or whatever in economics circles, but surely they're around somewhere.
There are some prominent Marxist academics – just off the top of my head, Adolph L. Reed Jr (professor emeritus of political science at the University of Pennsylvania). Although he is probably one of the Marxist academics right-wingers are least likely to want to cancel, because he's actually very critical of the contemporary "social justice" left. Reed (who is African-American) attacks Black Lives Matter as making the fundamental mistake of viewing race-based oppression as more fundamental than class-based oppression, when in his view it is actually the other way around.
I knew of Reed but didn't know he was a Marxist. I guess it's not terribly surprising. The closest thing I could think of would have been David Graeber, but he's dead now.
I don’t think Graeber identified as a Marxist. He identified as an anarchist, and Marx and the anarchists were opponents of each other. I’ve read an interview with him in which he expresses sympathy for some aspects of Marxism, but also says Marx and his later followers got some fundamental things wrong (which is pretty much what you’d expect a left-anarchist to say)
Thinking of contemporary academic Marxists - how did I forget Slavoj Žižek. Another is the Marxist feminist Nina Power (although I’m not sure if she still identifies as a Marxist). Both, however, like Reed, are the kind of contrarian leftists who are probably more useful to the right uncancelled.
Surely that statement admits the possibility that some words are 'violence'. It just specifies that the signatories think that harm is a necessary cost of the speech. If the signatories instead thought that words were incapable of violence, there would be no worry of speech which is "harmful to some". I would also argue that that view severely downplays the power of speech, both for good and evil.
That's the problem with bureaucracy- risk aversion wins because the administrators end up only caring about their own jobs and power and lose sight of the original point of their jobs. It's happened everywhere in society. Once you're number one priority is minimizing risk, you've failed the core mission.
This happens when titles, prestige or unfairly high compensation gets attached to any otherwise easy job. People hold on for dear life, because they know they're getting out way more than they're putting in.
Let’s not forget that administrators who allow views unpopular to some are attacked and harassed with some who will try to destroy their livelihoods and future.
MIT admin specifically have repeatedly shown themselves to be cowards who don't care about students/values/etc on issues other than free speech, so it's not like they're being inconsistent here. (the aaronsw situation, drinkordie, war on student life after the scott krueger alcohol death, etc.)
If the students are united against this statement, and only the administration and current faculty are for it, then the battle is already lost. Because the students of today are the faculty of tomorrow, making this statement a temporary patch that masks how bad things have gotten.
I don't think that's necessarily true. Some of the students of today are the faculty of tomorrow; in my experience the students that eventually become profs are not representative of the student body as a whole.
For example, much of the funding available in US physics is DoD funding. Many students (and grads / postdocs) have ethical issues with working on DoD projects. However, refusing DoD funding is not a good move for early-career researchers. So in my experience successful new profs tend to be more "hawkish" than grad students in general.
> As soon as students raised a hue and cry over some issue — any issue — the administrators just rolled over, as though they were not actually in charge of the institutions they nominally oversaw. Frankly, as though they were terrified of their own students.
How familiar are you with the students and the faculty of MIT? Are the students even pressuring faculty enough on any given issue that we could characterize this statement from MIT as capitulation?
This seems so opposite to me to the only example of student activism at MIT that I'm aware of, which was against the closing of Senior House. Administration didn't care about students raising an issue. Students felt totally unheard and disrespected.
What's the difference here? Different, better-connected students? A campaign that better aligns with the broader zeitgeist in our society? Something administration _wanted_ to capitulate over?
Admin just doesn't care that much which speakers are allowed on campus. Like many progressive things students loudly champion, it's pretty immaterial and easy to just give in. It's not like it affects MIT's status or funding as a world-leading research institute.
By contrast, Senior House was a significant legal liability due to large, public parties with a habit of sending people to the hospital for more interesting reasons than booze. That, the institute has financial, practical, concrete reasons to care about.
It's unclear to me that SH created more liability than frats and alcohol, but maybe, and it was certainly the perception.
>By contrast, Senior House was a significant legal liability due to large, public parties with a habit of sending people to the hospital for more interesting reasons than booze. That, the institute has financial, practical, concrete reasons to care about.
Did they think about putting Senior House on probation or something like that?
I honestly forget. I don't think they were ever on probation per se, but it's not like SH was blindsided. There was plenty of awareness that admin was increasingly unhappy. What I won't claim to understand is what pushed them over the line to actually doing it. I think it was more slow, evolutionary decreasing of tolerance for everything than any particular incident.
I'm bitter about the whole thing, and also the upcoming [renovation of EC](https://www.reddit.com/r/mit/comments/nfpumq/east_campus_is_...) (the next dorm over, physically and culturally). The building is realistically past due for some TLC, but it's hard not to feel like it's motivated from more than that.
I suggest you hit 'em where it hurts: Refuse all alumni donation requests, and give your money to impoverished people in Africa instead. https://www.givedirectly.org/
It’s all about incentives. The downside to more drinking deaths if the university did nothing is much worse than the downside to killing off Senior House. In the latter case, students are annoyed. In the former case, there’s a probability of expensive litigation.
In the case of cancelling speakers, there’s a bit of outrage and annoyance on the part of free thinking folks and fascists (who are two separate groups with a bit of overlap on the Venn diagram on this issue). But those groups don’t tend to form effective mobs on campus and aren’t terribly litigious compared to the vocal cancellers on the left.
> It seemed to me like the actual problem was not intolerance of free expression per se, but rather that the administration had adopted a position of submission with respect to student activism.
Contrast this "capitulation" to activism to, say, UC's lengthy reluctance to capitulate to the grad student union's wage demands. Even more instructive: compare it to UC Davis' outright refusal to allow a handful of students to camp out on a grassy area in front of the dining hall on a Friday.
Student activists barely have sufficient solidarity and numbers to successfully demand something as universally desired as a higher wages. And they didn't have sufficient leverage to even complete a successful sit-in at Davis (and similar "occupy" groups got easily shut down at other universities).
Yet in your assessment, there are enough students in lock-step against free speech to terrify the admin into working against its own professed principles. How did that organizing prowess happen-- seemingly without any struggle-- in the latter case but not in the former cases? This doesn't pass the smell test IMO.
Alternative explanation: an administration vastly prefers less chance of unpredictable controversy over a dissident speaker, less chance of run-ins between dissident students and law enforcement, less chance of lawsuits over a prof's material, etc. It's not capitulating-- rather, the admin would naturally support any student move that limits the kind of speech that could potentially cause problems for the university.
If it were my first day fresh out of college admin boot camp, that's the first thing I would do to try to rise up the ranks. It's a no-brainer.
Alternative explanation. They are happy to fall over to student demands about issues related to "social justice" and the culture war because it costs them nothing and they don't care and they know there is nothing to be lost or effort on their part. In contrast things like grad student wages becomes a very painful thorny issue that actually bothers them and would inconvenience them so then they'll put the foot down.
Basically rainbow capitalism or focusing and elevating issues that are less likely to have a direct impact in order to divert us from meaningful change.
>Yet in your assessment, there are enough students in lock-step against free speech to terrify the admin into working against its own professed principles. How did that organizing prowess happen-- seemingly without any struggle-- in the latter case but not in the former cases? This doesn't pass the smell test IMO.
I think you want to consider the admin as individual agents, and think about their career downside risk.
Remember how James Bennet had to resign after publishing the Tom Cotton editorial in the NY Times? Imagine if L. Rafael Reif had taken a stand on the Dorian Abbot lecture. Students start calling for his head, fellow admin say "you're on your own bud". He goes the way of James Bennet. Then just like Bennet, his personal brand is tarnished. He struggles to find further work in academia.
The report from the MIT faculty working group on freedom of expression, who originally proposed this statement, touches on this topic:
"Recommendation 5: The chair of the MIT faculty should explore how to develop a
faculty-governed resource for the MIT community when contested matters of speech arise. "
The faculty-governed aspect seems to be a counterpoint to the administrators. Though in this proposal they clarify that this would just be a resource and wouldn't have "adjudicatory responsibilities".
It isn't that they're terrified of their own students, but rather that the free expression things are easier to just surrender on instead of having it potentially blow up, since usually there isn't enough opposing sentiment (either because students don't want to risk their careers or because they're just busy trying to move on to paying back their loans).
I've noticed similar behavior at my own university over the years. There are always several emails from the university president and the mental health office promising assistance when anything even slightly likely to matter to some of the student body happens anywhere in the world. IIRC some time ago they sent out an email to the entire student body about something scrawled on the wall of a bathroom stall.
Yet it took a lot of protesting and boycotting to get fair action taken back when Covid was just getting started (IIRC they tried to kick everyone out of the dorms without refunds and without enough time to arrange for alternative housing, which was especially bad given the large international student body and lack of clarity on student visa handling at the time). Similarly, the graduate student union has been gradually dialing up its activism just to get the university to pay enough to keep up with local cost of living with no acknowledgement from the university.
> As soon as students raised a hue and cry over some issue — any issue — the administrators just rolled over, as though they were not actually in charge of the institutions they nominally oversaw.
If the students and their parents pay the administrators' salaries, they are in charge. These clashes between students and faculty tend to be much more maintainable in countries with free public education, because the students aren't customers.
It’s content moderation all the way down. The statement acknowledges there is no freedom in speech but the status quo. The bounds of content moderation are set by enforcement not statement. The driver of enforcement is power. For so long as any org protects its prestige it will serve whatever interests threaten prestige and thus wield power.
> We cannot prohibit speech that some experience as offensive or injurious.
They are giving credence to the idea that words can injure. I would have rather seen this phrased as "that some believe to be offensive or injurious". But I imagine this sentence was heavily negotiated.
Good point. There is a degree of injury and I would have, prior to several years ago, assumed the general public at large to understand the difference. Given that social engineering has steered empathy into being weaponized politically, I now unfortunately think this is either explicitly codified or roundly dismissed. Gradations of judgement left entirely to those offended whether present or not is an untenable society. Which, may actually be the intention. My perspective comes from having listen to a talk from Alan Watts on false virtue.
Gatekeeping abuse is something I did not expect to see here today. Suffering is suffering, and we should aim to end it, not categorize in greater and lesser pains and categorically claim people with "lesser pains" are "pushing agendas" and should "stay the f*k out" or whatnot.
As someone who has experienced both, I can provide my anecdata to say that words hurt. Maybe they're not the same type of pain, but they do.
If you are a victim of verbal and mental abuse, do not let the above comment convince you that your suffering is somewhat lesser and thus not worthy of empathy.
Now think of what a gay man thinks when he's minding his own business and a group of people start slinging slurs at him. Have you ever been in that position? Do you know what it's like, wondering if you make the wrong move that they might change from jeering to violence?
I don't know how you got that at all from my statement, but I don't think you've been in a position like that to understand that the jeering comes with the implicit threat of violence, and how trying to navigate/defuse situations like that place a huge burden on the person defending themselves.
> Think of what an assault victim thinks when she hears that words are violence.
Think of what a Jewish person thinks when they hear insert Kanye West tweet here. The reason speech such as that is restricted is because it inevitably precedes physical violence. Historical victims of violence have learned to identify that through trial and error, while others can safely pretend that words never hurt anybody.
Ben Shapiro talking about it, I'll transcribe part of it here.
> I feel bad for Ye. There are people who are bipolar in my family, like when people are in manic episodes, which he _clearly_ is in a manic episode, they say things that are insane and they think that nobody can tell them what to do and the more insane it is and the more people disapprove the more they do it. And they do crazy stuff and when he comes out of the manic episode it's ... it's going to be really really bad for him.
Someone then asked Shapiro, "would you debate with him [Ye]" and his response was "I won't debate with people who are mentally ill".
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That seems like a pretty rational, reasoned response, and I'm not sure why you think he was harmed in some way.
Furthermore, what you're trying to argue here is that victims of rape should be protected from the word rape. No, the need to be protected from the _ACT_ of rape, how does one do that without talking about rape?
If a victim of rape feels harm from the very utterance of the word rape, that's a mental problem that should be dealt with through therapy, not by making it more difficult to protect from the _ACT_ of rape by making it more difficult to speak about it.
We have 100's of years of common law to better vet out what types of speech have a tendency to result in violence, and there's a reason why the things you're claiming result in violence are not found on that list.
> Furthermore, what you're trying to argue here is that victims of rape should be protected from the word rape.
No, that seems to be either an incredibly biased reading of my comment or an attempt at a bad faith argument. I am claiming: rallies that announce "all trans people are child molesters" are inevitably followed by physical violence against some trans person for "molesting children". More often than not, people who hold such rallies are aware of such implications, and are intentionally holding such rallies to cause harm. Thus, words, for all intents and purposes, can be a direct cause of physical violence and thus should be regarded as such in very extreme cases.
> there's a reason why the things you're claiming result in violence are not found on that list.
Sometimes the laws simply have not caught up with the times. Quick example: how long have gay marriage been federally legal in the United States? Law follows common sense and consensus, not the other way around, which is why I do not agree with your suggestion that we should forsake common sense and consensus to blindly follow the letters of the law.
In case you are genuinely concerned, let me try to change your mind.
Did you know that among transgender community, rate of attempted suicide is 40%? [0,1] If being inclusive of people regardless of their identity can help us mitigate that number, I believe we should do so, even if it lets three "perverts" mask their intentions. Citing three cases happening in the prison system and asking all trans women to be banned from all women's restrooms everywhere is... quite a strong ask.
Moreover, the three cases you mentioned all happened in prison, where you are already locked up and under tight supervision (supposedly). How many cases are there where such a thing happened in a general gender neutral bathroom? To argue that "we should not be respectful of people's gender identity because there is harm in to negate the overwhelming positive impacts of it", you have to show the proofs.
I admit I am quite sceptical that providing carte blanche access to women's spaces to males who identify as transgender will have a significant impact on reducing suicide rates amongst this population, such that it outweighs the negative impacts on women. I've not yet seen anything that convinces me this is an appropriate policy direction, but I appreciate the opportunity to consider arguments that may change my mind.
My view is that with something as complex and multifactorial as suicide, we have to be cautious in ascribing a particular cause or mitigation, and the available data must be examined with caution.
The first abstract you linked describes a 41% attempted suicide rate, but I'm not clear how this was determined or exactly which population it applies to. It seems to be for a poster at a psychiatry conference, the full copy of which isn't available online, as far as I can see. Do you know how this figure was arrived at? I would be interested to see the original source.
In the second paper you linked, which concerns transgender people in India, it sounds like there are many other correlative factors that involve poverty and lack of access to education and employment, with many living in slums, begging and working as prostitutes. Access to the bathroom of their choice or other opposite sex spaces seems to be the least of their issues, and it's not mentioned in this paper. The section discussing resiliency sounds promising though, with correlations to higher income, better support structures, and being employed in a mainstream job. Perhaps these are the factors best addressed by policy, in India at least?
It's important to realize that debating the definition of "injure" is almost entirely unsubstantive.
I prefer the generally-accepted definition of "harm physically", as I assume you do, but clearly some people try to generalize the idea in order to emphasize other types of harm.
It's a debatable topic, there might be a little bit to learn from hashing it out, but it's mostly fluff. It's better to explore if this illuminates any actual disagreement on some concrete issue.
This sort of taking umbrage about word definitions is a factor in pretty much all major political spats, and I don't think it's going away by arguing about each term. You just have to define the terms in some way for the purposes of mutual understanding for an individual discussion. If the debate ends up just being bikeshedding the definition, walk away and find a better conversation.
If you want to freak out the MIT administration and see just how much 'freedom of expression' is allowed, then start a movement to open-source / free-license all of MIT's patents and other intellectual property (all of which were funded at least in part with taxpayer dollars).
That's a lot more significant - and at the heart of what's gone wrong with American academics, i.e. the corporatization and privatization of public resources that's erased long-standing traditions of open sharing of research results - than any of this social justice warrior hysteria stuff that the media likes to talk about.
Really, try to get Lex Fridman, noted MIT-based podcaster/Twitterer, to invite on a guest to discuss the corporatization of the university system - and the related exclusive licensing of MIT patents - in the United States, in which institutions like MIT and the University of California have played a leading role.
I've seen instances of wealthy or powerful individuals publicly calling for private platforms to deregulate speech not because of a dedication to the ideals of free speech (the ostensible reason) but as a tactic to achieve some political goal, e.g. in order to promote confusion about anthropogenic climate change to benefit the fossil fuel industry.
I've also seen instances of individuals defending free speech because they hold unpopular (or sometimes even hurtful) opinions and want to be taken seriously, or want a megaphone – both of which they are free to demand but which no one is obligated to give them.
I signed the MIT Free Speech Alliance's petition and signed up for its newsletter because I agree with the aims of the movement, but I had the impression that some of the alumni leading the alliance have political motives, or are less angry about the loss of freedom at universities [1] than they are about the social opinions of the rising generation, which worries me somewhat.
[1] which IMO ought to be the paragons of free speech.
Ignoring the abhorrent treatment of women in Iran, using the current protest as a measure of popularity would be as faulty as using the Occupy Wall Street protests as a measure of popularity, or in Canada, the Convoy Protests.
Unfortunately, as far as most of what I can find on the subject, most Iranians (who live in Iran) are either indifferent or opposed to the people currently protesting in Iran and Iran has a majority population that is highly religious and loyal to the current government.
It's mostly in the big cities, like Tehran or Shiraz where the protests enjoy support and the population is more liberal, but outside of the big cities in more rural areas people are much more religious and supportive of the regime.
I am certainly welcome to be corrected on this though.
I don't think it's unlikely that there's more people in the big cities in Iran than there are outside, and that the people inside those cities should get laws that they agree with, well, even if the people outside the cities disagree with them
True! I was just pointing out that this is different from defending free speech; it's simply wanting people to listen to you. (And so it may be deceptive to claim your goal is free speech when, in reality, you will only fight for free speech while your opinion is the unpopular one.)
If the powerful have no protections then they won’t be the powerful for long and then the shoe will be on the other foot and a new powerful elite will be created (ostensibly what is happening right now as a certain group of elite have largely taken control of both the media system and the school system).
Free speech as a concept means that the unpowerful, unpopular ideas are protected by the same laws that protect powerful unpopular ideas. If you want to protect only the latter, you need to convince your culture that they want free political speech with exceptions. The whole point of lumping all speech together for the purposes of making it free is that the powerful can't make exceptions. Once you've said one kind of speech is coming from "the powerful," you've said that they are the ones deciding which ideas get to be exceptions! Surely we know better than to give the powerful more power as a means of protecting the powerless from them. Is it not contradictory to imagine that "the powerful" will not write these laws and decide how they are interpreted and enforced, when their ability to do those things is the definition of the set we, in this thought experiment, identify them as?
In fact, the point you are making about unequal protection under imbalances of power is perhaps even an argument for maintaining an absolutist stance against reasonable exceptions - because that's an effective tactic for protecting something in a flawed political world that can turn those exceptions into things you didn't imagine when voicing support for them.
The "Free Speech" movement started on American campuses as a reaction to the red scare. At the core it was anti-war and a lot of college students who wanted to talk about the little red book without ending up on a list. College students died in some of these protests
Kinda similarly, the "right to bear arms" interpretation of the 2nd amendment didn't really happen until the Black Panthers. Everybody talks about the "right to bear arms" part of the amendment but for some reason we no longer bring up how that sentence starts: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State"
It's kind of a confusing amendment in general. For most of it's history it was basically treated like 3rd Amendment (about soldiers not having to be quartered). It seemed kinda odd and in fact was the second least often cited amendment behind the 3rd amendment because of this.
It was actually the Black Panthers, a bunch of young hip highly educated commies (mostly), that strongly pushed for this interpretation.
Both "right to bear arms" and "free speech" are much more recent in American politics/history than most people realize. Yes the original amendments had those words, but the meanings of them weren't really hashed out until rather recently.
Your interpretation of this is pretty popular today, but is completely historically false on both the first and second amendments.
On the second, privately owned ordnance weapons and warships were extremely common in the 1800s, and the definition of "well-regulated" was closer to "well-equipped" than to the modern word "regulated." In fact, the earliest "gun control" laws were about when and where you could fire your cannons. It took until the really 1920s to start thinking of the second amendment as a "collective" right which allowed any restrictions.
On the first amendment, it has been under societal attack since the founding of the country. The laws against sedition were some of the first laws ever passed, and were an attack on speech. In the early 1900s, it was all about preventing protests from labor groups and women who wanted to vote. The red scare was a very recent instance. Thankfully, the judiciary, since 1800, has been very good at striking down governmental attempts to control speech, and created the strongest legal regime around free speech that has ever existed. This regime had its last great test with the red scare. Twitter-FBI "state-informed" moderation and these ridiculous speech codes are just another attempt, in a 200 year old tradition, of the powerful to control other people's speech.
You are looking at a narrow slice of American history and generalizing from it. The whole history of the country is quite encouraging in terms of the rights of the individual, and I think we will see a turnaround on the current situation around speech, as we have every other time.
By "pretty popular" you must mean the majority of historians, right? Here's Britannica's take:
> Despite the Supreme Court’s rulings in Heller and McDonald, many constitutional historians disagreed with the court that the Second Amendment protected an individual right to “keep and bear Arms” for the purpose of self-defense in the home. Indeed, for more than two centuries there had been a consensus among judges as well as scholars that the Second Amendment guaranteed only the right of individuals to defend their liberties by participating in a state militia. However, by the late 20th century the “self-defense” interpretation of the amendment had been adopted by a significant minority of judges.
It was certainly the popular consensus view among historians (registering about 95% democrat) at the time of Heller, but that does not in any way mean that it is or was the consensus view of notable legal scholars, Supreme Court justices, or anyone else who is actually well-informed on the issues and history of the second amendment. And also facts, which matter a lot more than "consensus."
If you would like to back up your argument from authority with actual evidence, can you pull out a gun control law from before 1900 that bans anything close to the weapons that are banned today?
Where can I read about the Black Panthers starting the contemporary Second Amendment movements? As I'm sure you know, it's an especially right wing movement.
There is often a wide gap between a popular opinion, perhaps softly or unspoken, and what is widely accepted and popular expression. Often popular opinions have few protections, and it leads to double-speak and coded or indirect language. Assuming that what is freely expressed is a reflection of popular opinion can lead to important misunderstandings.
It is entirely normal and correct that a free society harbors many diverse and even rancorously disagreeing and opposed political agendas.
Of course we disagree with our political opponents and feel that the policies they advocate are not optimal. It might be convenient to your politics if your opposition’s voice is dampened, but your opposition feels the same of your voice and does so for reasons no less sincere than your own.
That’s the fundamental bargain. You are neither obligated to hand anyone a megaphone, nor obligated to confiscate theirs.
Your comment has made me realize that I could have written my original comment more clearly; my dissatisfaction in re the MIT Free Speech Alliance (if my impression was accurate) isn't about political agendas, but about deception – promoting free speech for the moment as a tactic rather than out of a dedication to the ideal, while claiming the latter.
Indeed, when people say "let's keep politics out of it", they're in effect trying to quell any challenge to the status quo, which arguably is inherently political, and this should probably be called out more often.
For sure. E.g., MLK was seen as outrageously political for challenging a status quo that in retrospect we can see as obviously political ("let's use state violence and unequal treatment to oppress black people").
"You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations." From "Letter from a Birmingham Jail", which everyone should read: https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham....
> Indeed, when people say "let's keep politics out of it", they're in effect trying to quell any challenge to the status quo, which arguably is inherently political, and this should probably be called out more often.
This is a pretty uncharitable take, and one that I see too often.
I could just as easily say that people pressure others into turning every space political because they feel entitled to dominate every space with their politics, and they cannot tolerate any kind of truce or neutral ground. It's just another tactic to control the conversation.
And I think you're right! It seems very likely to me that that happens.
Playing devil's advocate for myself, however: the comment was not uncharitable because it did not attribute intent. Someone saying "let's keep politics out of it" may be trying to avoid conflict or simply be respectful, but unknowingly in effect quashing challenges to the status quo.
The comment was meant to be an observation of unwitting outcomes rather than secret intentions, but maybe that's in fact what you're objecting to ("it's easy to be pessimistic about the aggregate effects of small, inoccuous actions, and that attitude deserves some pushback").
Your last paragraph reminds me of a line of thought I once had:
Libertarianism works better without libertarians. It works better with collectivists than individualists. It works better with people who care about other people's freedoms than with those who care about their own freedoms.
Freedom of speech as a negative liberty means that the government does not criminalize speech. Some people would like to extend that to other powerful entities banning / limiting speech, but then the government would be suppressing those entities' other liberties.
The freedom of speech people care about is a positive liberty. It's about being entitled to have a platform for your speech. Maybe even a platform with an audience, or a platform you feel safe to use. In order for your opponents to have freedom of speech – a platform – your liberties must be suppressed. Either by an authority by force, or by yourself voluntarily.
Ultimately, freedom of speech is about you being obligated not to confiscate the megaphone.
Exactly. I’d rewrite that last paragraph as: You are neither obligated to hand anyone a megaphone, nor [delete: obligated] permitted to confiscate theirs.
It's a curious analogy because in many contexts, use of a megaphone is quite abusive warranting confiscation.
If I attend a political rally and the speaker uses a megaphone, that's fine, I have consented to it's use.
However other places I have witnessed their use has questionable legality due to breach of the peace because the audience has not consented e.g. getting heckled when entering a University site or getting assailed by someone promoting their batshit Christian cult when trying to do some shopping. I don't think anyone would assume a universal right to make unwanted amplified noise.
> "I've also seen instances of individuals defending free speech because they hold unpopular (or sometimes even hurtful) opinions and want to be taken seriously, or want a megaphone – both of which they are free to demand but which no one is obligated to give them."
Convenient that we're only doing that because "we have unpopular opinions". But did it ever occur to you that they're unpopular because we're not allowed to speak our minds fully and rationally convince others of our ideas' merits?
The observation has nothing to do with the correctness or goodness of the opinion. The intention of the comment was to point out that this is different from defending free speech; it's simply wanting people to listen to you. (And I don't think that's inherently a wrong desire!)
> But did it ever occur to you that they're unpopular because we're not allowed to speak our minds fully and rationally convince others of our ideas' merits?
Bold claims have a heavy burden of proof. One could quickly retort with the opposite, i.e. perhaps they are unpopular because they have been refuted many times but the proponents believe the 97th time will be the charm. Who's right?
It's possible, but if, say, pro-pinapple speech and reesearch is effectively and heavily suppressed, then even if the lone nutters who are pro-pinapple (and you'd have to be a bit of a nutter to be pro-pinapple in an anti-pinapple world, both due to lack of exposure to anti-pinapple resources and for social reasons) speak up they are probably not going to make a good case, not having had the opportunity to explore the idea with a large number of different people helping them figure out the arguments and doing the experiments.
That retort does not work when the suggested policies work every single time as promised when they have been implemented and their primary reason for failure is that they have been made illegal and brought to court.
Also, the refutals that supposedly make them unpopular seemingly have no impact in reality. That kind of suggests that either the models used for refutal are grossly incomplete or big errors have been made due to political reasoning.
If you believe you have the best ideas with the best evidence backing them and find you can’t reach and convince people with the plethora of modern communications tools, I’d spend at least as much time examining possible faults in your beliefs as I would the possible faults in communications.
> But did it ever occur to you that they're unpopular because we're not allowed to speak our minds fully and rationally convince others of our ideas' merits?
Notwithstanding my ignorance of the particular unpopular opinion you hold, did it ever occur to you that no matter how fully you express your mind, and no matter how rationally you believe your points, the popular resistance to your unpopular ideas may simply be proof that they do not have merit?
If history shows us anything it’s that intelligent people can become convinced by unintelligent ideas.
History has also shown us, that it doesn't matter how many people say you're wrong, you could be right. In fact, this is usually how major progress was made in science.
The whole "popular opinion" game is very one-sided from the start, especially in a setting where only a few people have immediate access to reach others like today. I've seen popular, but ultimately wrong, news travel around and solidify often enough to conclude, at least for myself, that "resistance to your unpopular ideas" is not sufficient to make any statement about its quality.
Given all information that has ever been observable, absolutely not… and while that doesn’t mean they should be silenced, it absolutely means they shouldn’t be allowed to present their idiot ideas as facts, absent opposition and loud disclaim.
People are free to hold stupid ideas, and they’re free to state those ideas in public, and the rest of us are free to jeer them for doing so… freedom of speech does not imply freedom from being laughed at and abused for holding on to such manifestly stupid ideas.
That’s just it: I believe they must be allowed to present their (manifestly stupid) ideas as facts. The rest of us must also be allowed to present evidence and data to prove their ideas are wrong, but they have to, in moments and mediums they choose, be able to say “yup, the earth is definitely flat.”
Not to their children, or to anyone else’s, in any context in which there isn’t an overwhelming voice of opposition always present. Allowing someone infected with stupidity to willfully infect those who cannot consent in an informed manner is unethical in the extreme.
Are you proposing that we interfere with parents teaching their children their beliefs? That is more unethical and fraught with peril than the alternative, IMO.
If someone believes in a powerful sky wizard who oversees all of humanity, they can teach their children of this magical being. They can even take them once a week to a place of education about this belief. IMO, it’s none of my or your business or right to be constantly present to present alternative points of view.
In every part of the world that has developed public education standards the public good already interferes with parents teaching kids their beliefs about physics, math, basic world history, economics, etc, and for a very good and entirely ethical reason… a basically functioning and employable human being must be capable of basic arithmetic and the usage of technology that rises above simple machines in order to survive within a modern society. That’s why home-schooled children raised to hold their parents non-falsifiable beliefs — ie belief in particular sky wizard(s) — still have to be able to pass qualification tests that demonstrate that they have sufficient exposure to the facts that belie their falsifiable ones — ie belief that they live on a constantly accelerating disk, possibly atop elephants and a turtle — to at least handle the minimum cognitive dissonance required to both actually live on an oblate spheroid around which satellites travel and promote their parents’ fictional ideas using technology that depends in its entirety on the entirely self-evident and easily observable fact that the world isn’t flat.
Personally I’d go further… teaching children that the world is flat should be considered criminal child abuse, as you’re intentionally impairing a child’s ability to function in any society, including your own echo chamber.
I don’t mind (and in fact come close to insisting that we) have adequate public education to help mold our future society members.
What I do object to is insisting that there is never a time when parents can teach their children arbitrary topic X without always having someone from the societal ministry of truth to be there to fact-check/align it.
Depends in its entirety on the specifics of arbitrary topic X… for instance, if X involves putting ethic group Y in to gas chambers, then send in the ministry, post haste.
This does go both ways, doesn't it?
Especially since a ministry was the main proponent of putting people into gas chambers once. They even killed anyone that would advocate for peace or provide help in this case.
There seems to be a significant power imbalance between the ministry and a parent.
That particular ministry was, of course, composed of those who’d been infected by rightly unpopular ideas that were allowed to grow and fester until the Overton Window had shifted to the far right, encouraged by parents and not sufficiently discouraged by the state.
A state of affairs that’s now pretty much been replicated, about a century after we first tried to learn the lesson that Fascism is a bad idea.
Should we lock parents up for "abusing" children because they lie about the existence of Santa Claus too? Or do you think it's possible that those children might grow up one day and become capable of forming their own conclusion in whether Santa exists or not?
If you're answer to that question is, "no, because those children were abused by others lying about Santa, they will never be capable of overcoming that lie and will continue to propagate that lie" then it begs the question: what right does anyone have to tell anyone anything since all of us have experienced some sort of indoctrination at some point? Are we not all "broken" in that sense?
Those are, indeed, historically unusual beliefs… though the rise in their popularity being directly coincident with the spread of more-than-minimal literacy and the slow degradation of traditional and institutional obstacles to higher education does imply that inequality and religiosity are even worse proxies for “truth”.
>the popular resistance to your unpopular ideas may simply be proof that they do not have merit?
No matter how many people believe the earth is flat or the sun circles around the earth, it won't make it true. We have day and night cycles because earth is a sphere that is rotating so that only one side of earth is exposed at the same time.
No matter how unpopular this opinion is and no matter how big the mob's desire to lynch me is, it is still closer to the truth than the potentially popular opinion of earth being flat and the sun circling around the planet.
In all the thousands of years of recorded human history there has never been a time where you could find enough people who actually believe the Earth is flat to fill a room sufficiently large to constitute “popular” opinion.
That is, not until after the advent of the Internet and YouTube… both of which, ironically, depend on the Earth being non-flat to function.
Sheesh it entirely works both ways. 70 years ago most didn’t want to hear about equal rights for homosexuals. But after 70 years of discussion, celebrity, pop culture, expiration of the issue, society has basically done a 180.
The Majority is very often simply wrong.
In fact is, look at all progressive movements (those that you’d have to be pretty insane to dispute today). They all began with the majority opposing them. Women’s suffrage, civil rights, homosexual rights, etc.
Each of the movements responsible for those achievements went directly against the grain. You were crazy to side with any of those at certain dates in the past.
The most fascinating part is to think which movements haven’t occurred yet. Which topics are we all collectively wrong about. Whatever they are it’s the first amendment that will enable them to be rectified.
I have many ideas what these will turn out to be, but that’s another topic.
If you don't have any unpopular opinions you're not a very interesting person. And if you can't even argue as a devil's advocate for the other side, you're not a very skilled thinker. And institutions that don't foster and protect divergent thinkers do not produce interesting science or engineering.
> For most people, another person doesn’t need to be contrarian to be interesting.
I’d go one further and say that contrarians are intrinsically uninteresting. They are very predictable and tedious in their inability to accept ideas just because they are accepted by others. Being systematically opposed to ideas because they are perceived as mainstream is just as much of a fallacious reasoning than the other way around.
They didn't deny anything. They stated that the issue isn't so black and white as you'd like it to be. You responded in kind by simply labeling them a "denier" even though nowhere in their response did they deny anything.
There are perfectly acceptable, even scientific arguments against CO2-induced climate change theory. Not only that, but even if we accept the premise that CO2 is inducing climate change, we can debate about to what degree, and whether or not it is "an existential crisis" as some have argued. Further still, if we accept that it's a crisis, we can also debate on the trade-offs civilization should make in order to contend with it. All of those positions should be perfectly acceptable to take up. We do not know with anywhere close to 100% confidence what the climate will do over the next few decades. It is a non-linear, dynamic, chaotic system that by definition becomes exponentially unpredictable as a function of time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory
Institutions are intentional normalizers. That’s the definition of the word “institution”; an entity that exists to service an idea. To build consensus around its attributes and parameters.
Corporations normalize utilitarian agency. Government social policing. University thinking.
Institutions never produced interesting science or engineering; people did. Institutions took all the credit.
The problem is that being justifiably critical of laws and policies that eradicate female-only spaces is now being framed as a bigoted and intolerant anti-trans viewpoint, and this reframing is being used to suppress such critical speech.
The megaphone analogy is limited in applicability. It only applies where the recipient never opted to hear the message, but it is forced upon them.
Free speech issues are about interfering with speech where there is a willing audience. Even in cases where someone is offended by a message, often it's not that they don't want to hear the message; it's that they don't want others to hear the message.
Universities are agency normalizing agents of government.
We’re not talking launching some professor from a cannon but doing as humans have done for years and updating colloquial language models. This is freaking out the establishment as it does and has, and of course the establishment labels it as anti-freedom to teach them anything, because of course it’s the establishment; it teaches us not the other way around!
MIT is like a rack of Twitter servers; we could unplug it and society will keep going because it’s not immutably reliant on society. Many thousands of workers are though and only “essential workers” have an obligation to output real results.
> both of which they are free to demand but which no one is obligated to give them.
I think the university is trying to find a middle ground here: The university - as institution and administrative body - is acting as the entity that "gives free speech to them" here: They are permitting those arguments be made in public events, on flyers, posters, etc. Of course they can't force students to listen to that speech. So I'd imagine that calls to boycott certain classes still remain valid. However, what they do is forbidding people from blocking others from listening, e.g. by demanding that certain people don't speak at all, blocking entrances to lecture halls, etc. That seems like a reasonable approach to me.
More generally: I've seen the "free speech does not apply to private entities/free speech is no right to be listened to/free speech is not freedom from consequences" arguments online a lot - they seem to be the standard counter arguments of some groups - and I've always found them deeply problematic.
First of all, I think there are a lot of authoritarian states who would be more than happy to adopt the "public only" definition of free speech without any substantial loss of control: "Yes of course, dear dissident, you're perfectly in your legal rights to accuse me of human rights violations on your website. But I'm afraid, I won't be able to help you if the country's ISP makes a private decision to block your site, if your employer spontaneously exercises its right to fire you the next day and if a crowd of concerned private citizens with privately-owned baseball bats will gather in front of your house tonight. Consequences!"
Secondly, the arguments rely on a situation where most services that faciliate discussion in a society - i.e. the media sector - are provided by private companies and are not subject to democratic decision making. So basically they rely on a weak state. That's originally a right-libertarian vision of society and I don't think anyone who calls themselves "left" should be comfortable adopting that vision.
> That's originally a right-libertarian vision of society and I don't think anyone who calls themselves "left" should be comfortable adopting that vision.
Indeed, but right leaning libertarianism with a weak state is where conservatives have been leading the country for decades. Now it’s the right leaning libertarians like the Freedom Caucus who are are the loudest that private platforms should be forced to carry certain speech, which is what they’ve been fighting against this whole time (at least if you take them at their word).
I don’t think many leftists are arguing that the status quo is okay. At least what I’ve argued is that today it’s wrong to force Twitter or any private entity to carry speech they don’t want to. By doing so I’m not adopting a right-leaning libertarian worldview, because that doesn’t preclude public options that would carry all speech.
Also in the Soviet Union most people publishing and spreading unsanctioned works, did so because they did not propagate the blessed and (therefore) popular views of the party. How strange.
The next twist of free speech is trying to distinguish between "real" speech and shills (and worse, bots). If you allow free speech on your platform, do you allow freedom of dishonest speech? Do you allow freedom of automated speech? If you do, you won't have a platform that humans care about.
I have seen very very good arguments that climate change is happening, but human's impact on it is most likely miniscule.
If this is the indeed the truth, then the trillions we currently invest in "reversing man made climate change" would be better invested in "preparing for the inevitable".
Even if powerful people rally for free speech in order to achieve an (maybe evil) political goal, THATS OBVIOUSLY BETTER THAN using censorship to achieve a (probably evil) political goal.
I find it unbelievable that this is such a hard concept to grasp.
If powerful people use free speech to spread nonsense, then just present your counter arguments, god damnit.
I know that it "takes more time to refute bullshit than to produce bullshit", sadly, that's just how it is. The bitcoin community has spent more than 12 years now to refute bullshit and people still fall for all the debunked FUD. This just means that we need a better tool to refute bullshit faster and more efficiently.
Wikipedia was a good first try, but of course since it succumbed to the woke mind virus, it is no longer viable.
There is a civilisation altering opportunity here to produce a new tool like it. I don't know how such a tool would look like.
> I have seen very very good arguments that climate change is happening, but human's impact on it is most likely miniscule.
How do you know it's not disinformation? My understanding, from many years of reading, is that those questions were settled long ago and there is not even somehwat evidence or arguments.
> The bitcoin community has spent more than 12 years now to refute bullshit and people still fall for all the debunked FUD.
Cryptocurrencies are an example of credible, true information?
> woke mind virus
Pejoritives are a signal that there are no facts or reason to support the claim.
The original statement was proposed in a September report by the Ad Hoc working group on free expression. The report is much more interesting since goes into quite a bit of detail on MIT's current de facto policies and proposes real steps for moving forward. The cancelled 2021 lecture by Dorian Abbot is discussed. Their recommendation #6 explicitly says that "Rescinding an invitation to deliver protected speech, as defined and explained in this report, conflicts with freedom of expression." . Their full report, including the original proposed statement and their recommendations, is here: https://facultygovernance.mit.edu/sites/default/files/report...
Can anyone say what this section means in practice?:
>A commitment to free expression includes hearing and hosting speakers, including those whose views or opinions may not be shared by many members of the MIT community and may be harmful to some. This commitment includes the freedom to criticize and peacefully protest speakers to whom one may object, but it does not extend to suppressing or restricting such speakers from expressing their views.
I'm interested in hearing how the process for selecting speakers currently works, as well as how the signatories would like it to be changed. If a single faculty member wishes to invite a speaker, does that give that speaker the right to talk in an official capacity? What if a speaker has no support on campus? Are they entitled to be hosted by MIT? If not, are they being 'restricted from expressing their views'?
> I'm interested in hearing how the process for selecting speakers currently works, as well as how the signatories would like it to be changed.
I think any student or faculty member can invite a speaker. The policy is about when it’s acceptable for the university to step in and say that an event (or protest) can’t happen.
> If a single faculty member wishes to invite a speaker, does that give that speaker the right to talk in an official capacity?
I think that currently a speaking event can be canceled on the basis that the speaker promotes harmful ideas. The signatories want to remove this from the list of acceptable reasons for cancelling an event that someone wants to happen.
But Free Speech does end with speech - vandalism and terrorism are already illegal, do we really need to prohibit everything that could potentially be a step on the path to illegal acts?
That’s getting darned close to precognitive law enforcement…
Also, a person with crazy ideas with no one to talk to but other similar people due to restrictions on speech and debate is not likely to become MORE sane or LESS resentful.
Free speech can be used as the crowbar to motivate enough people to commit acts of vandalism and terrorism. Yes, those are illegal. Do you need something that can prohibit that? If you don't want to have a '6th of January' groundhog day every couple of years then that might make some sense. Let's see what the final outcome of that is. My prediction: if it isn't dealt with forcefully the only thing that will happen is that it will continue until they get it done.
~200 years of American history disagrees with your premise that Jan 6th is inevitable ‘every few years’.
The problem with deciding that ‘nazis’ don’t deserve free speech is that you won’t always get to decide who is a ‘nazi’ or what ‘nazi’ speech looks like.
In case you failed to notice: the last 8 years have been a very serious departure from the last 200 years as a baseline.
Note that the parties that are arguing hardest for free speech are exactly the ones that are the subject of discussion. You might wonder if they have a stake in the outcome of that debate. Personally, I'm not at all concerned that 'the state' will meaningfully abridge my speech (in part because there is no history of them doing that without a very good reason and in part because NL never had absolute free speech to begin with though we do have the concept of 'freedom of opinion'). But I am concerned with the speed with which wannabe Nazi groups and actual Nazi groups are able to convert people en masse to their cause, including voting them into public office where they are already doing damage. If you haven't noticed that then you're forgiven but realize that in many countries this is not just a theoretical debate but harsh reality.
It rarely ends with anything else. Most people are all talk and will back down if confronted in a nonphysical way. If they are going to resort to fisticuffs they are going to wind up in jail for it.
Not when they are in groups. And that's the first thing these people do: get organized so they're not longer just by themselves when aiming for confrontation.
That’s where the whole metaphor breaks down. Those are actions that law enforcement is supposed to deal with. Any aforementioned bar patron who just let “the Nazis” at the bar exist is in no way culpable for not having stopped them somehow.
Preventing literal fascists from seizing power is a collective responsibility that cannot be offloaded - both morally and practically - to any single institution. Especially law enforcement.
Me and my friends are not interested in finding a new bar just because of some stranger’s abstract belief that we’re the ones who should leave when a loudmouth Nazi shows up.
There’s a difference between being able to speak and being offered common platforms even when they’re available, versus someone loudly disturbing everyone around them repeatedly who did not choose to attend an event, and which is not in a public or semi-public space.
The proprietor of the bar isn't required to let them use it as a platform for their ideas, and given that Nazi is not a protected class, they're not required to even let them inside. They can turf this hypothetical Nazi out on the street and let them rant out there.
What? Of course there is, in the United States and many other countries. Protected classes are explicitly defined by the Civil Rights Act, Americans with Disabilities Act, and others. The bar owner can't refuse entry to a person because they are of a certain ethnicity, for example. But they absolutely can refuse entry to them for being a Nazi, or for any other attribute not protected in law.
Sure. What's your point? Your original comment seemed like you were trying to rebut my point that the Nazi (for literally any definition of Nazi you care to use) can just be removed from the bar. But it seems like you are not trying to rebut that, so I'm confused what this subthread is actually about.
> One could set up a dress code or any other arbitrary policy as a proxy to refuse entry to any group, without explicitly doing so.
Not in the US you can't. If a policy, even when applied equally, unduly affects a protected class, it's unconsitutional.
For example, if a restaurant enacts a "no headwear" policy it's still unconstitutional because by and large this is primarily going to affect the muslim population (and a segment of the jewish population), but will have very little effect on anyone else.
If the policy was instead "no headwear with words on it" the policy would NOT be unconstitutional because it does NOT unduly affect a specific group of people.
There are other exceptions, of course, generally around security. You can imagine a bank not allowing the full covering of ones face for security reasons even if that does appear to target people who wear burka's day to day.
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so long story short is that it's not super simple, but in the US you absolutely cannot try and get around it by proxy and there is established law on how to identify this.
Responses to this argue that when obnoxious nazis show up, we should just act like the nazi, using violent speech if necessary (tell him to "fuck off").
I don't know about you all, but personally I'm interested in participating in civil society most of the time. I don't want to have to get into a violent debate with swearing with fucking nazis, the same I don't want to breath toxic fumes or drive a car to work. I vote for bus stops, I vote for carbon taxes, and I similarly want to leverage our societal mechanisms to not have to act as an individual agent in the ideological war against fascism every single day.
I've learned that obnoxious nazis have an advantage by violating the peace treaty terms of civil society and tolerance, because by definition they don't hold themselves by such rules. Meanwhile those of us that are just trying to live our lives still have these rules and values and are hesitant to abandon them to deal with the nazi for many reasons, not the least of which being we don't want to sink to their level. Not to mention, it's exhausting. For whatever reason the nazis get their rocks off to it, and thus it's less exhausting and more exhilarating. Fine. But the whole point of society is to rubber-band away things like that to create a community of people who at some basic level maintain a level of civility.
When nazis show up, they violate the civility, they violate the peace treaty, and the solution shouldn't be "let them keep walking in and doing it and re-doing the fuck-off debate every time," but rather, close and lock the doors to them, because they've already told us who they are and what they're about.
An oversimplified example: your carpet shop has a rule: no shoes on in the shop. You come in with shoes, you get thrown out. A guy shows up with a shirt on that says "My value is to track as much mud on as many carpets as I can in my life." Do you let him in the door?
>>An oversimplified example: your carpet shop has a rule: no shoes on in the shop. You come in with shoes, you get thrown out. A guy shows up with a shirt on that says "My value is to track as much mud on as many carpets as I can in my life." Do you let him in the door?
The problem isn't that there's a line at which it becomes ok to remove yourself from, or them, forcibly.
The problem is that line has to be very very extreme, which is why you're using the Nazi example, but it's being applied to very non-extreme things, which is why so many people disagree with you.
People say "paradox of tolerance" when I bring this up but I don't understand the purpose. Yes, And?
> The problem is that line has to be very very extreme, which is why you're using the Nazi example, but it's being applied to very non-extreme things,
It's being applied to the intolerant, as intended. There are intolerable philosophies being openly discussed on mass media (tucker Carlson restating great replacement theory, matt walsh calling for police to kick down the doors of drag performers). Openly white nationalist and fascist people are showing up in towns to harass and intimidate people. In this environment, when the system is failing to not tolerate these intolerant beliefs, or in the case of white nationalism especially, actively enforcing the intolerant "right" to promote their viewpoint, the peace treaty of tolerance has been broken, and those of us you'd describe of "tolerant" stop applying the rules of civil society to the people breaking them in front of all of our faces.
And at WORST the outcomes for these intolerants is they have to change venues for a university talk, or, get a Twitter ban, for which capitalist society handsomely rewards them with talk show appearances and podcast shows.
> People say "paradox of tolerance" when I bring this up but I don't understand the purpose. Yes, And?
It has a name and using that name allows for more succinct communication. It's also a way for those who are unfamiliar with the paradox of tolerance to realize it's a thing so they can look further into it if they so choose.
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For the rest, it's just a lot of rationalization for why you think you should be able to prevent people from saying things. And you try to hang it on the paradox of tolerance as a justification.
But it's not really, the lesson from the paradox of tolerance isn't that the tolerant must become absolutely intolerant to protect themselves, it's that they cannot be absolutely tolerant.
The line where intolerance needs to kick in for protection shouldn't be "someone said a thing", but should instead be "someone did a thing". Those like yourself who try to use the paradox of tolerance to rationalize your views are treating tolerance/intolerance as a binary rather than a spectrum.
And finally,
I'm a minority myself and have been called racial epithets. I remember the KKK coming into a nearby town and holding a rally back in the 90's. People were pissed off, but even then I defended their right to have the rally. My recommendation to everyone was just don't go. Imagine if they held a KKK rally and no one showed up, how hilarious would that be?
I would be no more ok with minorities attacking KKK members than I would be with KKK members attacking minorities. There's an equilibrium and fairness there that doesn't exist with words. If it's not ok for KKK members to tell a black person they're inferior, is it not ok for a black person to tell a KKK member they're inferior?
This obviously won't convince you as you're not thinking rationally, but that doesn't make the above any less true.
I think there are two fundamental approaches to the highly objectionable views questions. Either: ensure the space is free of nazis by removing the Nazis from the space, or: ensure the space is free of Nazis by convincing people not to be Nazis. The first requires no engagement, the second requires engagement. The first has guaranteed results, the second is uncertain.
If there are enough of them the Nazis may end up removing you. The idea is to reduce the spread of Nazism not only by convincing those that have already been corrupted but also to limit their ability to do the same to others. Without that second component it's a losing battle, new converts will be made faster than you can convince existing ones to drop their mental garbage.
There's no law that says Nazism will spread until it is stopped any more than there is a law that says Anti-nazism will spread until it is stopped. There is probably a maximum mass that can sustain such a dumb ideology.
Yes, probably a continental landmass the size of Russia, or the USA represents its physical limit. Philip Dick presented a couple of dystopia visions of it, not all of which have been filmed yet. Yevgeny Zamyatin another. Although more correctly a totalitarian police state, than Lindbergh's or Henry Ford's vision of judenrein.
> There is probably a maximum mass that can sustain such a dumb ideology.
I've read my grandmothers' diary, she had quite a bit to say about the previous time people underestimated the size of that maximum mass. There are very large numbers of people that will be happy to sustain such a dumb ideology if it is presented to them in such a way that it presses the right buttons. Fear is a very powerful motivator, as are frustration and jealousy and clever people will be more than happy to take advantage of these facts to push their revolting ideologies.
There’s no evidence anything can stop Nazism. Trying to stop it through enforced speech could very well accelerate it.
More effective than fear of government punishment is shame. Few care about pissing off the government in this country so that seems like a non-starter.
Oh, we have plenty of evidence that some things can stop Nazism. The question is if you want to dedicate another couple of 10's of thousands of acres to war graves.
It certainly didn't work in Europe, where most countries have anti-extremist speech laws, and many specifically persecute open manifestations of Nazi ideology and symbolism.
But, well, there's still a neo-Nazi march in Berlin pretty much every year. And it's larger than Charlottesville one was.
I wonder, why is the focus always on Nazis and not on say, Communists who also have a history of creating violence, death, and destruction? Why do we not equally focus on shutting down voices calling for enforcing absolute economic equality, or dividing people up into classes? Why is free speech less important in only one of these cases?
Usually because the participants in these debates are not from countries where communism is right now a major issue. Though if that were the case I'm pretty sure they'd be worried about that too. And the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive either.
There seem to be more people calling themselves communists and supporting communist ideas in the USA, than there are who promote violence toward minorities. And I do mean actual or very-near communists, not people who want a social safety net and health care.
Although of course, attempts are made to associate broader and broader statements with extremism, such that even having an immigration policy at all is interpreted as racism, so the number of supposed racists is dramatically inflated.
If the right similarly broadened it’s interpretation of statements, 80-90% of the country could be claimed to be communists, for supporting the most minimal state assistance of the poor, which almost everyone does support at some level.
> There seem to be more people calling themselves communists and supporting communist ideas in the USA, than there are who promote violence toward minorities.
Because there are no modern Nazis, so they're a perfect straw man / boogeyman.
But most Western countries still have actual, real communist parties so you can't paint completely crazy pictures of them, because their members will simply raise their hand and say "no we're not like that at all".
> The first requires no engagement, the second requires engagement
(1) people are innocent until proven guilty
(2) if one group is judge, jury, and executioner that's a problem
(3) authoritarians seek to quell dissent by censoring
(4) removal/ejection/ostracism from group is censorship
(5) contrary to your assertion removal/ejection/ostracism is a form of engagement
(6) in fact within the realm of free speech r/e/o is the most extreme form of engagement
(7) this is because it is the quashing of that ejected person's ability to freely express themselves
> The first has guaranteed results, the second is uncertain.
(8) hard disagree, the first is guaranteed to generate all sorts of backlash (perhaps not the results wished for)
(9) the second is guaranteed to generate debate, exactly what authoritarians and the censorious dislike
(10) ps: (quibble) the “Nazis” were terminated with extreme prejudice in 1945, any variants thereof nowadays are neo-Nazis
===
All the above is transparently obvious to me. It concerns me that in a so-called liberal society many clearly are either unwilling or are unable to see that everything I have outline is true in all cases. The fruits of this ignorance are all around us.
show me the point in my chain of reasoning where i defended "free speech at all costs"
to my mind i made a very reasonable defense of "free speech even for speech i find objectionable and disagree with but ultimately must tolerate in the interests of the inviolable principle of freedom of expression for all not just for my bubble" – that's the position i'm arguing for and nothing more.
"at all costs" != "free speech even for speech i find objectionable […]"
"at all costs" goes far further and is not something i am arguing for
> is unlikely to work.
i'll go one stronger – “free speech at all costs” cannot work. but that's fine because that's not what i'm arguing for. what i'm arguing for ("free speech even for speech i find objectionable […]") must work because that's the foundation a free society is built on. otherwise, all bets are off and the spoils go to those most willing to use covert and/or draconian measures to achieve their ends
Generally, you let them get drunk and then throw them out.
This “Nazis are everywhere” thing is a manifestation of busybody administrators and isn’t a real problem. Even if it were, it doesn’t require Byzantine declarations about approved speech.
People need to grow up and not get offended so easily.
At my university there was a "Free Speech Club" that put on a panel of eugenicists and alt-right people who advocate for fascist actions. While the amount of noise Nazis make is disproportionate to their population, it doesn't take that many people to create a social change, for better or worse.
> it doesn't take that many people to create a social change, for better or worse.
It doesn't, but this brings up an interesting question. Is it legitimate to limit speech to prevent social change? I'm sure there were a lot of pro-segregationists that would have loved to prevent the social changes of the 60s and 70s. Would you legitimize their attempts, in exchange for having more tools to fight nazis?
I have never understood this type of statement. If you view some speech as a problem then you're just not for free speech.
If you're all for free speech, the "nazi at the bar" problem isn't a problem because free speech would allow you to battle it out in a propaganda (the neutral definition) war.
I don't think a whole lot of people are actually pro free speech, but I think a lot of people are afraid to admit that.
The war of ideas is a game where the goal is to get the most amount of people to adopt that idea. No part of this is removing someone's ability to speak, but they may not be listened to by the masses that don't like their ideas.
Supporting free speech doesn't mean that you support absolute free speech without any limitation. We all have a lot of rights, and exercising those rights can impinge on the rights of others. Why would freedom of speech be somehow special and trump every single other right?
I don't know in English, but in French we have a saying: the freedom of some begins where the freedom of others ends.
I assume it would be obvious, but perhaps I'm mistaken.
Free speech in the USA is (supposed) to mean the freedom to do political speech without state ramifications (I'm not sure how well this constitutionally works for private companies). This obviously doesn't count credible threats, telling people to riot or be violent, etc.
Basically you have a right to offend people short of targeted harassment.
*This is obviously an oversimplification but I'm giving the HN the benefit of the doubt here, however misguided that may be.
> Free speech in the USA is (supposed) to mean the freedom to do political speech without state ramifications
I hear this a lot, and it's not actually true. That's what the first amendment means. The first amendment protects freedom of speech, but it does not define the concept of free speech as a whole, it just protects a form of it.
It annoys me when people assert that being silenced by a private entity doesn't actually limit freedom of speech, because they argue that the freedom isn't being restricted unless a government is doing it. I'm not necessarily for unrestricted free speech (because it often ends up being loud and obnoxious, and often silences other speech when it becomes a shouting contest, especially on the internet), but this very specific interpretation that the US Constitution's first amendment actually defines free speech has always bugged me as something logically unsound.
>If you view some speech as a problem then you're just not for free speech.
I strongly disagree. Support for freedom of speech means being anti-censorship. It's perfectly coherent to believe that particular speech does harm, and also should not be censored.
Suppose you and I are top medical researchers, and we disagree about the best way to treat a disease. It's perfectly coherent for me to believe that your speech is killing people by promoting a treatment which is suboptimal/counterproductive, and also believe that your speech should not be censored.
I don't believe that your example is what the first amendment exists to protect, in fact if your hypothetical researcher is causing physical harm to people with their treatment, that's probably a criminal offense that has nothing to do with political speech.
Scientists and doctors regularly disagree with each other about which treatments are best for patient, how much heavily to regulate pharmaceuticals, etc. And who is right in those debates have far reaching consequences for human life. Thousands of people live or die every year based on those disagreements.
Ignaz Semmelweiss's life is the perfect example of this phenomenon in action, with extreme consequences:
He realized doctors were killing their patients by not washing their hands and cleaning their instruments. He devised simple solutions to this problem. The doctors of his day laughed him out of the room and had him committed to an insane asylum where he was effectively tortured to death.
The consensus of medical practitioners at the time was that he was a crank. But he was right. Should he have been imprisoned? Certainly the doctors of his day would have had him banned from social media for "misinformation" if they could have, and they did far worse.
We abide by the principle of free expression not because it causes the least harm in every instance, but because it causes the least harm in expectation. The value of minority viewpoints that are right about important things that the majority is wrong about will always outweigh the harm of harmful speech, in aggregate. And one thing is clear from all of human history: We are not responsible enough to tell the difference ex ante.
If person A's lies have clearly and demonstrably hurt person B's reputation, relationships, livelihood, and personal safety, should they have any recourse?
Semmelweis's lies demonstrably (according to contemporary experts) hurt the reputation of the entire medical establishment of his day. Fortunately, back then, they had the recourse to put him in an insane asylum.
I just did a bit of reading on wikipedia about Semmelweis, and I think there is an interesting wrinkle which is normally left out of the Semmelweis tale. The effect size from handwashing was huge, but even Semmelweis couldn't explain why it worked. Handwashing only ended up catching on later once we had the germ theory of disease.
I wonder if a good modern analogy for Semmelweis would be if we did a study on crystal healing or Reiki, and the crystal healing/Reiki was found to vastly outperform placebo pills. (Actually something like this sort of did happen with parapsychology. The effect sizes were pretty small I believe, though.)
Obviously in hindsight, other docs still should've listened to Semmelweis. What I'm trying to get at here is that sussing out the truth can actually be a pretty tricky thing. Even if the docs had somewhat good reason to accuse Semmelweis of spreading medical misinfo, it was still a catastrophic mistake in retrospect.
That's exactly my point though. Figuring out the truth is very hard, and often our best experts are wrong about extremely important things. If our best experts can't get such critical things right, who can we possibly put in charge of censoring misinformation?
I don't necessarily mean to indict the scientists of Semmelweis's day too much. I mean, they fucked up, to be sure. However it's understandable (somewhat) why they didn't listen to him.
But a society that allows those presently in power to censor information they consider to be false is a society that helps cement its present ways of doing things for eternity. I don't think that's a good thing.
A modern example of this might be the plaque theory of Alzheimer's disease. I don't know enough to know whether this is a fair description of the state of the science, but there is certainly a growing view that, a "cabal" of believers in this theory suppressed alternative views for a long time. It may end up being that the cabal is right! But it seems to me like there's enough uncertainty that a diversity of viewpoints should probably be heard.
I was talking about speech in the context of exchanging ideas, but you bring up a very good point. In an ideal world, lying would only damage the reputation of the lier.
One indicator of the quality (or lack thereof) of a society is how easy is to damage one's reputation without evidence. That's why the whole "Believe women" movement is complete and utter bullshit.
This problem has always existed, and the social standing of person A and the social standing of person B typically determined the outcome. Platforms such as Twitter where an unfounded claim can be spread so rapidly and to such a vast number of people are also a modern thing. There's no easy answer, but having the state as arbiter of truth is never the solution.
This is the second time I've seen this specific example in this context. Where are people getting this from? And why is it being used to counter "we shouldn't tolerate Nazis?"
I don't understand in real life how it would arise that two medical experts could be looking at data that contradicts each other so strongly that one could believe the other's treatment is suboptimal to fatal lengths without the recommended treatment being resolvable in a single conversation (research so inconclusive on either as to make both treatments suspect imo). Why would either professional be presenting a treatment as "recommended" without the strong caveat of "but others of my caliber think this recommended treatment will kill you." If said caveat isn't included, surely we don't want doctors going around giving such blatantly misinformative advice?
And again why is the "free speech " blanket always cast so wide as to include this? We aren't allowed to not have Nazis around without risking restricting medical debate? Smacks of slippery slope.
> how it would arise that two medical experts could be looking at data that contradicts each other so strongly that one could believe the other's treatment is suboptimal to fatal lengths
It's happening right now (has been for 2 years) with COVID vaccines. Also permanent gender surgery performed on minors -- doctors performing them say they are saving lives, opponents say they are mutilating children below the age of consent.
I wasn't using that example to counter "we shouldn't tolerate Nazis". I was using it to counter the sentence I quoted: "If you view some speech as a problem then you're just not for free speech." There's an important distinction to be made between speech I think causes harm, and speech I think should be censored. That's all I wanted to say with my thought experiment.
I actually do not believe all speech should be always be protected. I agree with the MIT statement that harassment shouldn't be protected. And it seems to me that e.g. expressing support for Hitler could credibly be regarded as harassment. (Same for e.g. labeling someone as a "Nazi" because they say the US should have stronger border security.) More details on my position here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34135283
And in other contexts, you can imagine supporting the right of Communists to speak and organize even if you find Communism abhorrent and misguided.
Note too the benefits of allowing/supporting the right of [insert disliked political group] to speak:
1) You find out who is in that group when they speak (as opposed to them remaining anonymous/hidden online) and potentially address them directly
2) You might be able to question them to find out what led them to that position to prevent more people from going in that direction
3) You can be aware of the message that they are trying to send and counter it with more speech
In contrast, doing something like banning support for the Communist party is likely to lead to 1) more sympathy for Communism as an oppressed outgroup; 2) a lack of understanding of how extensive support for Communism is and what might be causing it; 3) the use of "Communism" as something that people can use to denounce each other as part of petty/unrelated feuds.
It seems to me that far too few "have the courage to use [their] own understanding," and that many would willingly abdicate intellectually to external authorities, provided the opportunity to do so without incurring social costs. A culture of open, potentially adversarial, discourse is incompatible with systems of thought which devalue the individual's capacity to reason, and so that culture itself is routinely undermined.
Almost no notion of free speech considers an absolute freedom to say whatever. Almost all conceptions of free speech deny the freedom to promote manifestly false and/or terroristic ideas (promoting killing a specific person, for example, almost no one considers protected speech). Always the problem is not whether there is a line, but where to draw it.
Ironically the US explicitly noted this problem when the German constitution (in the part occupied by the allies) was drawn up. So they basically introduced free*
*no nazis or similar.
Seems entirely reasonable and this whole "it isn't free if there isn't anarchy" sounds very naive.
> 1,600 of these German scientists (along with their families) were brought to the United States to work on America’s behalf ... Von Braun later became director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and the chief architect of the Saturn V launch vehicle, which eventually propelled two dozen American astronauts to the Moon.
Free speech at a university is important. Sure it opens the door to regressive ideas, but it also opens the door to progressive ideas, which may be equally counter-establishment. A university is a place where these all ideas can, and should, be discussed and debated.
Free speech in a bar, or any other business environment, though is out of place. Because the primary goal of a business is to make money, and creating disharmony and antagonism seldome leads to better business.
In other words free speech is useful, but there's a time and a place.
Bars for example like to attack a hermogenous crowd. Happy people drink more, break less. If 10% of the patrons start spouting off racism, or mysogeny, or whatever, then the rest won't fight it, they'll just leave. If it happens a couple more times they'll stop coming back.
So bars are typically quick to remove people, or ban people, with a history of strife. You don't have to go as far as Nazis, all you need is a few guys being obnoxious about, say, eating meat.
Free speech is not "saying whatever I want, wherever I want, to whomever I want." there's a time and a place. A university campus is a great place, and also (for typical college age people) a good time.
Devil's advocate; MIT and many other universities are technically businesses. And they have become more and more like businesses with each passing year.
So in this case, would complete free speech be out of place by your metrics?
In the case of MIT, which is a 501(c)(3), but also sits on a multi-billion 'endowment'.
There are very few universities that hit this mark. That being said, MIT might actually be one of them.
My understanding of the situation is that most universities accept federal funds, which have a bunch of strings attached. One of these strings is allowing freedom of speech. This is why communists couldn't be banned from campuses back in the 50s and 60s, or the speech codes of the 80s and 90s failed.
This doesn't apply to universities like Harvard or Brigham Young that take zero federal funds, but the vast majority of them aren't going to pass up the money.
Clearly universities have "personality" (as do all business's) and that factors a lot in which university I choose to attend. I expect a different world-view in say Alabama compared to say California.
I might steer clear of Berkley as being too hippy, and choose Alabama or Mississippi instead.
But I also expect that a business in the business of sharing ideas is open to new ideas. If I want to discuss a gun-free society at Alabama State, then i might be in the minority. As a professor my students won't appreciate it in my physics lecture, but I might form a student group against guns etc.
So yes a university is a business, but the business of ideas, and censoring some ideas seems like that makes it a bad business.
Generally you'll want to head them off at Normandy before they make it down to the pub.
To put it another way, the problem of Nazis is not a problem of free speech. It's a problem of people who are actively violating other people's boundaries.
Nazis love it when you make it about speech because then everyone starts arguing tautologies instead of investigating and prosecuting criminal behavior.
But the definition of Nazi is fleeting, since there is no more National Socialist party in Germany and american problems are different.
In France we do limit free speech legally, especially around anti semitism and walk a fine line. For instance a man said "Islam is the stupidest religion on Earth" and was found innocent in court: he can insult a religion or a God, as long as he didnt call for people to be hung. But another said "Heil Israel" in a comedy piece to mock, in his view, how Israel was behaving like its former oppressor. He was censored and it started a long list of sentences in court as he persevered on that line of thought. He's considered by his supporters as a victim of political correctness.
It's hard to decide what to do: on one hand, it's interesting to express views that challenge common acceptance, on the other, it's not a big cost to shut up and move on when society decides the cost of letting you speak is too great a threat considering our history.
To avoid that Nazi at the bar "problem", first decide what the problem is: that people speak or that people listen. If you cant accept they speak, you must define limits to speech (that s the French model and we are clear some things simply cant be said, period, so shut up and move on). If you can, then you must educate your population so that merely listening to hate speech doesnt trigger hate. That's been the american model, and we never believed it can actually work: after all, you elected a man who was against elections, for instance.
The statement says "MIT does not protect direct threats, harassment, plagiarism, or other speech that falls outside the boundaries of the First Amendment." So if the nazi at the bar starts threatening or harassing people, they're out.
If I were writing the statement, I probably would've added "intimidation" in that sentence. Then I'd kick the nazi out if they're using slurs, or if they self-identify as a nazi (e.g. wearing a swastika).
It gets tricky though, because if you add "intimidation" then someone can say "people who disagree with me are intimidating me". (I suppose they can also say "people who disagree with me are harassing me" with the current policy.)
My basic approach for dealing with this problem would be to utilize the fact/value distinction. Free expression of fact statements is much more important than free expression of value statements, because knowing the truth is important.
The threshold for censoring a value statement, like "The lives of <X people> don't matter" or "<X people> should be enslaved", should generally be lower. If someone claims that such a statement intimidates or harasses them, their claim will often be credible.
But for a fact statement, if someone's notion of "harassment" is so broad as to make it impossible to express a particular factual claim without engaging in "harassment", I'd say they're not complaining in good faith.
It's OK to argue that a particular delivery of a factual claim constitutes harassment (e.g. if the delivery is peppered with slurs). But the complainer should always be able to re-express the factual claim in a way that makes it no longer "harassment" to them.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 326 ms ] threadUsually, I believe that undergrads are typically the source of protest and these sort of policies. These policies really just indicate whether the university will formalize student demands, but de jure doesn't really do much when you'll still have tenured faculty doing their own thing and students protesting regardless.
Additionally, I don't know if many students will share your convictions. Chicago has long had a free-speech policy, but even though they're probably the most academically serious/legitimate institution alongside Princeton and Caltech, I think their usnews ranking has done more for their applications than free speech.
Still a good thing, but I'd think it'd be more meaningful if MIT brought back stallman
Anecdotal only - when I was in university (20 years ago) a lot of the student protest stuff was coming from the student equivalent of professional politicians. They were undergrad mostly (a few grad students) but usually had been in university for like 8 years and were ideologically motivated to stick around pursuing political aims, rather than just be there to advocate for their fellow students.
I was marginally involved in student government, and there was a big difference between the (majority) that were there to make sure their faculty/department got representation, and those that were trying to co-opt student government for some broader political aim. Unfortunately, there is rarely enough of an opposing force on these people, and inevitably they have an outsized influence.
So I wouldn't really think of it as undergrads as a whole, more like some 30 years old taking 1/4 course load and pushing their politics.
Here is a link to the emails [2].
[1] https://selamjie.medium.com/remove-richard-stallman-fec6ec21... [2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/9ke3ke/famed-computer-scient...
If your organisation believes that it knows which topics should be talked and thought about it's a church not a university.
He was hypothesizing their motives, and definitely down-playing the severity of the abuses, which understandably could offend people who have been in similar situations. I think part of his message was "don't jump to conclusions" which is good, but he went a lot further than that. In a leadership role, he should strive to be as unoffensive as possible imho - he doesn't want to alienate people.
On your second point however I must disagree. I'm afraid being inoffensive is a losing battle. If people see you try to avoid offense they simply start nitpicking harder. Desire to not offend should never stifle academic speech.
No, I agree with you in general, and from an ideological point of view, but from a practical standpoint, you have to choose your battles - I think it's usually worth the effort, even when it seems tedious, to go out of your way to not offend people you're working with in order to reach your goals.
Plus, once you've offended someone, you have very little chance of influencing them. Once you've established mutual respect, people won't take things you say in bad faith, so discussing controversial topics can actually be a discussion instead of a heated argument.
I personally like Google's approach to this internally: mistakes are to be expected and are often a sign of bad process, not faulty people. But egregious repetition of mistakes of the same kind indicates a failure to learn and grow that can slate someone for dismissal, and treating one's coworkers as less than human is also a short path to the door.
(There are some outliers also. Crafting yourself into a walking Title VII violation ties the company's hands regardless of whether they'd be willing to let an employee grow and change, because the law isn't structured that way).
For instance, biological sex is binary/bimodal for all intents and purposes. It is discrete, and very much not a spectrum. However, there are activists who are trying to override empirical findings to justify their ideas about gender (I have no horse in this race). Furthermore, their voices have found a home in organisations like big tech. In such a case, and given the zeal of these activists, wouldn't someone who remark that sex is binary (in a casual conversation about biology) be punished? Or to put it more precisely, how can we trust those in authority to fairly judge that the innocent remark made isn't a "mistake"?
In a climate where "speech is violence" and "intent doesn't matter", people are free to project their views onto others and accuse them of tall crimes. Without free speech, the case I've mentioned above seems likely to end up in unjust persecution. Unfortunately, my hypothetical scenario isn't theoretical, but has happened in academia already. The system you proposed doesn't seem immune to this.
This is such an interesting example for why free speech protections are important, but good faith discussion culture is even more important.
The first sentence is correct, the second isn't, when taken literally. The overall thrust of the statement still has merit, but it pays to be careful about one's phrasing.
To be clear, biology is messy and there are exceptions, which is why biological sex is not literally discrete in the sense that, say, binary logic is discrete. But it's also fairly reasonable to say that this is one of those cases where the exceptions confirm the time: There is a spectrum, it's just incredibly focused around two points.
The two extreme groups around this discussion both completely distort this nuanced observation. On the one side, you've got people that pretend that because the bimodality isn't perfect, it doesn't matter at all (and saying that it matters is hate!). On the other side, you've got people who pretend that there is no nuance to the bimodality (and many of them do actually hate people who don't fit perfectly into the binary).
It's pretty frustrating (to put it mildly), and free speech or lack of it has nothing to do with why it's frustrating.
AFAIU one group think gender should be a social construct, rather than a biological one. I don't this whole debate has even been about the 0.1%(?) who are not XX or XY.
No, one group, pretty much without exception, recognizes that gender always has been a social construct, and that it has historically been socially constructed differently in different culture. The other side may or may not recognize that; that’s not actually the point of disagreement. The point of disagreement is that the first side things that the proper social construction of ascribed gender is to align it with the subject’s gender identity. The other side, whether they frame it in terms of “gender isn’t real, only biological sex is”, “gender should reflect biological sex”, or in any of a variety of other terms, believes that the correct social construction of ascribed gender is that it should be based on some aspect or combination of aspects of biological sex (often based on a stereotype that elides the fact that choosing different aspects of biological sex for this purpose would result in different assignments.)
[Members of the first group may, in fact, view gender identity as a biological sex trait, in which case their disagreement with the second group can be viewed as a disagreement over which aspect of biological sex should be the basis.]
> I don’t this whole debate has even been about the 0.1%(?) who are not XX or XY.
Not being XX or XY isn’t the only biological divergence from simplistic stereotypes of biological sex that occurs.
I have been on the fence about this whole subject, and I have read quite extensively. At least, get the facts straight.
Large groups of people classify people by their gender at birth, and 1) would disagree that this distinction is social in nature (eg. all religions identify the gender thus, and the source [at least from the POV of the adherents] is not social. 2) Would also disagree that it has historically been socially constructed differently in different culture. You won't find any example where such a norm became dominant, and you won't find any society which lasted more than 50 years after such ideas became even speakable in public.
More than that, many will disagree whether "identifying" with something (such as being a girl) is any more "real" than liking ice cream; They definitely do not consider it to be a legitimate source of defining an identity. (As legit as saying a girl is someone who identifies with Pecan ice cream - its not "which aspect of biological sex should be the basis", but "does this aspect even exist?")
Strictly speaking, they did - but then for a time in the West (70s to about ten years ago) they just observed sex at birth and indoctrinated against the social imposition of normative gender expectations … but then all of a sudden people were born ‘gendered’ again, albeit with the novel twist that innate gender was no longer necessarily tied to their biological sex.
It’s a bit of a puzzle, as it appears that forty years of individual liberalisation (“See the person, not the stereotype”) something which transformed the lives of half the population is being reversed in order to please a small group of trans gender / gender non-conforming people for whom identifying as a one or other specific stereotype is apparently at the core of their identity.
Nope, that didn’t happen. Socially ascribed gender, with important social consequences (most importantly, ones coercively imposed by, or with support of, the power of government), did not go away.
If it had, though, the grounds for the dispute would be somewhat different, but the overall character would be the same, since the side opposing ascribing gender in accord with identity is also fairly universally in favor of coercive discrimination and/or segregation on the basis of (their preferred form of) ascribed gender, which is a fairly central point of their argument.
Importantly, the normative consensus among progressives was as GP describes. The trans activism movement is a move backwards in that regard, since it tries to shift the normative consensus back towards gender being important and that gender should be impactful. It's no wonder they clash with some feminists.
The disagreement is not over the factual physical observation. “Was born with (or without) a penis” is not a social distinction, but is also not the source of the disagreement.
The social weight given to it, OTOH, is. “Gets addressed in a particular way, is allowed in certain shared spaces and banned from others, etc.,” are, factually and indisputably, social distinctions, and are the focus of the disagreement.
> 2) Would also disagree that it has historically been socially constructed differently in different culture
This is just factually wrong; systems with more than two gender roles, and/or where one or more of the most closely corresponding to the supposedly universal binary defended by the side that claims one exists can be ascribed on bases other than the physical traits that faction demands should control ascription of gender have, in fact, existed (before now.)
> You won't find any example where such a norm became dominant, and you won't find any society which lasted more than 50 years after such ideas became even speakable in public.
This is, simply false; there are, for instance, very many examples in the indigenous cultures of the Americas.
Gender distinguishes men from women, male-like thoughts, acts, emotions, capabilities and appearances from female ones. Other than for the direct purposes of reproduction, why would we want or need to classify individuals into the social groups of men and women?
You see, there’s a third group that flatly denies the desirably of socially constructing something called ‘gender’ at all.
Because men and women behave and think differently on average and treating them the same is going to cause a lot of problems in life. I mean sure, there's overlap and some men will behave in a feminine way only on one particular axis and vice versa, but ignoring the information gender gives is a very bad idea.
If you consider a definition of feminine (prettiness, gracefulness, gentleness, empathy, humility, and sensitivity) it’s not someone who acts to make their mark on the world as a man might - it’s someone who at best achieves that by supporting a masculine partner. What a terrible vision of the world that is, and what an incredible waste of individual human talent.
For example, men being so much physically stronger and larger than women does impact a fair amount of basic things in life. Car design is a pain in the ass (it's super fun that if I adjust the steering wheel in my car I can't see the speedometer), office chairs and tools are only made for men's bodies (my hands are small and I'm short), etc. Erasing sex just means things get designed for the average and large swaths of the other sex are ignored. (I'm not male, but I'd imagine large men have similar issues with things like sewing machines, bottles, diaper changing stations, etc. being designed for females only).
I also have a hard time fitting in in female-dominated spaces because so much of it is based around mollification/preventing conflict. Which makes sense because if you're female, starting shit with the other half of the population doesn't end well for you. Het and bi women generally live lives where they spend their time being aware that they will not win physical confrontations. (Aside: I'd guess this is why DV is more of an issue in lesbian relationships: The risk of being an abusive prick isn't being offset by the fact that your victim could pin you to the floor and punch you until you pass out). Being aware of this means I can place my own assertiveness/aggression in context and be like 'ah I feel out of place here because I am a statistical anomaly for my sex, not because anybody is wrong'.
> If you consider a definition of feminine (prettiness, gracefulness, gentleness, empathy, humility, and sensitivity) it’s not someone who acts to make their mark on the world as a man might - it’s someone who at best achieves that by supporting a masculine partner. What a terrible vision of the world that is, and what an incredible waste of individual human talent.
This I find really interesting, as I spent a lot of my life fighting any parts of myself that were traditionally feminine. I'm a more masculine than usual cis woman; bordering on butch but not quite there. And in my 30s I'm unlearning a lot of messiness around that and starting to accept the part of myself that likes teaching and nurturing + has a very strong passion for making sure the next generation is armed for the world we're sending them into. After all, surely wanting to pursue an academic career creating digital skills and history curricula for K-12 (mostly K-8) education is a 'waste of my individual human talent' when I could be writing new algorithms, isn't it?
I submit that the only people who get to determine whether something is an incredible waste of human talent are the people possessing the talent.
I think that's an excellent way to consider the topic as long as we remember the protections like title VII and title IX were put into place to bar obstacles to employment and education such as "We don't think it would be worth our time and effort to train you because people like you don't succeed here."
Its important to separate three things:
“Gender” in the broad sense is one of several possible social constructions of divisions of people into groups and associated distinct expectations and roles; it is a feature of the social context. While there is considerable variation in between social milieus, it is always grounded, to a greater or lesser degree, in current or historical stereotypes associated with some subset of anatomical sex traits; in fact, that’s part of what we use to identify which of the many socially constructed divides in a society is gender.
“Ascribed gender” is how other people treat a person with regard to gender.
“Gender identity” is how a person sees themselves and prefers to be treated with regard to gender.
None of these things are disconnected, in either practice or the theory of the major factions, from biological sex (the last is arguably itself either a biological sex trait, a set of biological sex traits, or an interaction of biological sex traits with the social context; for it to be anything else either requires dualism, or an arbitrarily restrictive definition of “sex”), except that maybe the side opposing recognizing gender identity as the basis for ascribed gender thinks gender identity is divorced from biological sex.
When a man identifies as a woman, he is expressing his desire to be a woman, based on his ideal of what a woman is. Similarly, when a woman identifies as a man, she is expressing her desire to be a man, based on her ideal of what a man is. Neither have any direct experience of actually being the opposite sex, of course, so this ideal is based around gendered stereotypes and superficial cosmetic traits, particularly those related to sexual attraction.
No, gender critical people very much don’t want gender to be a biological construct - they find the idea of innate biological masculinity or femininity appallingly regressive. They prefer to think of men and women as primarily unique individuals, ones who are incidentally sexed purely for reproductive purposes ie not for social ones.
And because they're also pushing a large-scale redefinition of the terms "woman" and "man", and trying to make it law, which most people don't agree with.
Gender is a social construct by definition.
This all starts with the purely descriptive observation that when you analyze the informal man/woman distinction that exists de facto in society, there is a component that is inherently biological (visible traits, hormonal differences, etc.) and a component that is arbitrary social convention (clothing, color schemes, etc.). Having different terms for those components helps, and so the first one is called sex and the second is called gender.
This is all purely descriptive and I don't think anybody reasonable has major disagreements about it on either side of this topic.
The question is whether and what kind of normative conclusions one can or should draw from the observation.
For example, very conservative folks would make the normative statement that gender expressions must align with sex (women can't wear pants, men can't wear dresses, that sort of thing). There are two major strikes against this position as far as I'm concerned: first, it's clearly very illiberal; second, even ignoring the illiberalism, it doesn't leave room for the few people who, through no fault of their own, don't fall neatly into the sex binary. Those folks are left in a Kafkaesque situation of having no real way of complying with such a rule.
Some trans activists also make questionable normative statements, such as "transwomen are women". That's a normative statement because it implies that the word "woman" should be used to refer to a person's gender instead of a person's sex. It's no wonder they clash with some feminists who point out that, while there may be significant overlap, the life experiences of transwomen are generally not the same as those of women (in the sex sense), and there are situations where the distinction matters.
Besides the big one (penis vs vagina) there are things like the rest of the reproductive system, breast size and functionality, brain structures, muscle function, bone structure, facial features, and others.
These develop at different times during fetal development, and don't have to all come out "male" or "female".
In programming terms it is like XX/XY is a master setting for a complex distributed system, and then there are a bunch of flags that control implementation of that master setting in various subsystems of the distributed system which are "supposed" to all be set if the master setting is XX and all clear if it is XY, but sometimes you end up with some set and some clear.
This isn't the first time something like this has happened. Take a look at Lysenkoism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism?wprov=sfla1
"Lysenko's assertion that all science is class-oriented in nature."
Stalin Russia had Lysenko's Science. We have Critical Race Theory. Though not to the same extreme, we are seeing seeds of Ideology taking root in the west.
I had a side-row seat to that event, and that's what I meant by "Walking Title VII violation." For American law, the question of the capabilities of men and women is settled and a workplace is not the venue to question it.
Believe me, there were plenty in Google who were willing to give Damore a second chance, but (a) being offered that second chance, he refused to step back from his position and (b) the lawyers made it very clear the consequences for the company would be... Unfortunate, in the courts, if they were perceived to be supporting him.
(And, to be clear... None of that implies he was right, either. Sometimes, there are things you "can't" say because they're both wrong and hurtful, not because they're secret taboo wisdom.)
He can certainly support his opinion, but he can't do it in the context of an American workplace by law.
https://www.nlrb.gov/case/32-CA-205351
""" [] statements about immutable traits linked to sex—such as women’s heightened neuroticism and men’s prevalence at the top of the IQ distribution—were discriminatory and constituted sexual harassment, notwithstanding [] effort to cloak [] comments with “scientific” references and analysis, and notwithstanding “not all women” disclaimers... Once the memorandum was shared publicly, at least two female engineering candidates withdrew from consideration and explicitly named the memo as their reason for doing so. Thus, while much of the Charging Party’s memorandum was likely protected, the statements regarding biological differences between the sexes were so harmful, discriminatory, and disruptive as to be unprotected. """
"""In furtherance of these legitimate interests, employers must be permitted to “nip in the bud” the kinds of employee conduct that could lead to a “hostile workplace,” rather than waiting until an actionable hostile workplace has been created before taking action."""
In essence, the memo from Mr. Sophir does not claim Damore had already created a hostile work environment. It does not have to consider that question one way or the other, because it is legal for Google to fire Mr. Damore on the expectation that his conduct would lead to a hostile work environment. The fact Google had already lost two candidates in the pipeline who cited Damore's memo as their reason for withdrawing was evidence enough of the risk.
(This reminds me of the rule of thumb regarding forum moderation: the line for when content can be curtailed and users can be banned is well away from the actual line of legality, because the goal of such policies is to not end up in court in the first place).
But whether Damore's were valuable or not isn't really up to Google, as an American company. Title VII carves out several opnions as, by law, not "valuable" in the sense that expressing them constitutes either harassment or creation of a hostile work environment. And doing business in America means complying with that law; debating the philosophy underpinning such a law is not the purpose of an American workplace.
Yeah, but the thing is that what Damore did was nowhere near the criteria of title vii hostile work environment. You're making it sound as if there was some legal obligation for Google (or any other American business) to let him go, but there was not. It was cowering to activists which lead to the termination, not any legal obligation for doing business. The argument that it had anything to do with title vii holds no water for me
The title VII argument may hold no water for you. If you find a way into the NLRB board of judges, that may matter to companies.
Sure, but it is in their business interests to have a good approximation for where the line is, hence why they have lawyers. My point is that from everything I have read about it, it doesn't even seem like they were close to said line
This is why the primary responsibility to protect free speech lies with the faculty. And as we know, they often fail miserably at this.
Statements like this one probably serve to discourage some of the more censorious undergrad applicants though. Basically telling undergrads what they can expect and what they're signing up for.
https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/opinion/2022/12/21/sta...
My sense is that this MIT statement serves a similar purpose in that it panders to the sensibilities of parents paying the tuition bills. However, if their conviction is, in fact, sincere, I think there is one good way to demonstrate it --- officially sanction professors and students engaging in behavior contrary to the free expression of their peers. Has MIT ever done this? If not, I cannot think of this announcement as little more than an advertising stunt.
This is really interesting, do you have a source for this?
This is almost certainly not correct. Top schools get far more applications than they have seats, and so can choose their enrollment. If some rich people don’t want to send their kid to school, there are other rich people to take their place. There’s really no shortage of them.
A few days ago Stanford published some guide on words you can't say like "American" and "grandfather", so it seems the universities are total opposites in their stances now.
https://itcommunity.stanford.edu/news/update-elimination-har...
It took only a couple of minutes to find this out.
If Stanford wanted to do the right thing, they could very easily distance themselves and say that this kind of language policing isn't something they support. Instead, they double down.
"Its aspiration, and the reason for its development, is to support an inclusive community"
It took only a couple minutes to find this out :)
This is not the impression I’ve gotten in the discussions I’ve had regarding the document.
> If Stanford is happy to employ language-policing for its IT department, it's not hard imagine similar policies creeping into place elsewhere in the institution.
To be clear, Stanford has always policed the language on its websites. Like I said, any department (in any org) that communicates with the public will police its language. The only thing notable here is that some people disagreed with the particular list of words when it was made public.
To disavow such discussions would be to disavow free speech and expression.
And even if it was a suggested form of "policing", Free speech does not become stronger by obsessing about shaming and ostracizing those who disagree with its concepts.
That's a take on academia I'm unfamiliar with.
- - -
Realistically, almost anyone at any university can put content onto university websites / servers. This isn't some crazy notion of website usage: the same applies to this very site too.
And an even bigger question is, will professors and administrators at other elite schools follow MIT's example?
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/20/us/dorian-abbot-mit.html
The usual pro-censorship “safe space” crowd doesn’t want to anyone else to say anything the censors disagree with.
[1] Professor Nicholas Christakis lives at Yale, where he presides over one of its undergraduate colleges. His wife Erika, a lecturer in early childhood education, shares that duty. They reside among students and are responsible for shaping residential life. And before Halloween, some students complained to them that Yale administrators were offering heavy-handed advice on what Halloween costumes to avoid.
Erika Christakis reflected on the frustrations of the students, drew on her scholarship and career experience, and composed an email inviting the community to think about the controversy through an intellectual lens that few if any had considered. Her message was a model of relevant, thoughtful, civil engagement.
For her trouble, a faction of students are now trying to get the couple removed from their residential positions, which is to say, censured and ousted from their home on campus. Hundreds of Yale students are attacking them, some with hateful insults, shouted epithets, and a campaign of public shaming. In doing so, they have shown an illiberal streak that flows from flaws in their well-intentioned ideology.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/the-new...
[2] The editor in chief of one of the world's most prestigious psychology journals, Perspectives on Psychological Science, resigned on Tuesday after the board of directors of the journal's publisher demanded he step aside—or be fired—for soliciting academic criticism of a black psychologist.
The editor, the prominent German psychologist Klaus Fiedler, stirred up controversy by agreeing to publish trenchant critiques of a 2020 article by Steven Roberts, a black psychologist at Stanford University, who had argued, among other things, that "color-blind leadership" promotes "structural inequality."
https://freebeacon.com/campus/prestigious-psychology-journal...
The “Halloween costume” controversy happened in 2015, and the Christakises resigned from their undergraduate college role in 2016. You are talking about events which happened 6-7 years ago as if they are current.
People like the sister commentor (now flagged/dead) that think anyone with a view different than their own is a Nazi want to insert themselves into what should be free inquiry, and have devised all sorts of mental gymnastics to explain why constraining thought is actually a good thing. University administrators who only care about preserving their power and want to take the most risk adverse path get onboard, and faculty get held hostage by an entitled minority that thinks their agenda is more important than anything else. (When the agenda is really just power anyway, not the causes they use as wedge issues)
And so the faculty has symbolically signed a statement that shouldn't need to exist, saying their business is their business and they should be left unmolested to free enquiry. And a few culture warriors call it culture war bullshit to try and give it the usual smug dismissal treatment that's the only form of rhetoric they know because they don't actually have a point
It's ideology being put above all else. It can be religious or non-religious. You don't need to look much further than Stalin's Russia. Lysenkoism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism?wprov=sfla1 ) was the nonsense hoops that academics had to jump in order to align with the Ideology of the Russian state. Those who aligned their work efforts to the ideology were rewarded, promoted and those who didn't ended up much worse.
We don't have this extreme level here in Western countries, but we are starting to see the seeds of it. It's nice to see MIT standing up against this. Stanford seems to be all for ideology.
I was watching Funky Town mix and thinking how much freedom and joy we lost from those times to now. Things are seriously messed up.
We have fantastic computers, but we have app stores to "protect us" from software. People stopped building software for fun (mostly), now you can't even buy software, you have to subscribe...
MIT already seemed to have much more narrow-experience libertarians than other schools I've been around.
If the bulk of the prestigious schools are perceived as "woke", are the angriest opposition to that going to disproportionately go to the prestigious schools perceived as "non-woke"?
Even if a school is more re-embracing a traditional university marketplace of ideas and collegial dialogue, while also learning to be much better than in the past wrt treating people fairly and being open to everyone... will there ironically be disproportionate applications (and admission) of students who're especially resistant to those aspirations?
Analogues that might be familiar from recent years: anonymous forums attracting the worst behavior, and "free speech" claimed as a battle cry by those who don't seem to have the lofty ideals behind that.
(To be clear, I think some of what I called "the angriest opposition" should be in a university marketplace of ideas. And that, ideally, their thinking evolves during a college journey, at the same time that their input helps evolve everyone else's thinking. The risk I'm concerned about is whether there will be so much "the angriest opposition" that it breaks the marketplace.)
So, imagine typical students being non-political, but still a lot of students who are political, and specifically on the side of really stamping-out anything they perceive as woke (or not according to market principles, or oppressing generational-wealth white males, or whatever). And maybe not enough people around who are able and willing to engage them with counterpoints. To the extent that political action does happen, that sounds to me like it could push MIT culture in a bad direction.
In any case, a "Looks promising, ... in practice." sounds like a pretty reasonable reaction, these days.
https://www.glamour.com/story/a-complete-breakdown-of-the-jk...
If you want Harry Potter to be a story about queerness, it is yours to make it so. If you want it to be a story about the problems of British education, it is just as much.
I believe it’s just the “T” in this case, snotrockets.
This is basic media literacy of the type taught to school children. Without a source, we don’t know whether anyone is even talking about the same thing or evaluate how trustworthy it is. People write lots of things on the internet and since search engines customize results there’s no guarantee that anyone will get the same result.
This matters because someone who is confident that they’re honestly representing the facts rarely needs to be evasive. When you see so many people commenting about something which they assert is true but won’t even name, it’s usually an in-group shibboleth which they are not confident will stand up to scrutiny.
https://www.newsweek.com/nurse-being-investigated-i-love-jk-...
[0] https://www.thefire.org/news/blogs/eternally-radical-idea/pr...
Now it’s been relabeled “cancel culture” and the public are fascists for denying a person here and there oodles of figurative prestige.
A minority of elites sure have the masses convinced “canceling” a rich person is the true threat to democracy.
The end of a society is nigh when the elites are fighting to preserve their power to exploit the masses carte blanche. We grow their potatoes; not the other way around, and don’t you forget it!
Gawker Media wasn't cancelled; they intentionally violated a direct court order. Maybe you should be arguing that the court should not have ruled against Gawker in the first place, or arguing that the court should not have directed Gawker to cease the publication of nonconsensual nudes, or that the court should not have brought the hammer down when Gawker continued its publication of nonconsensual nudes.
I'm curious why you think it is okay to publish nudes of someone against their will. https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/824/503/e53...
I in no way stated or implied that that is OK in any way. such practices are vile and disgusting as was the outing of Thiel.
However, a "first amendment violation" , neither incident was.
"free speech" means, as we are reminded constantly by right wingers when they are denouncing "cancel culture", "speech that we despise is also free". Gawker in no way violated the first amendment. Right wing billionaires who claim to be things like "free speech absolutists" are full of it and will use any tools at their disposal to silence and "cancel" speech they don't like, including using their billions to abuse the justice system, launching torrents of frivolous lawsuits against media companies that published a story they didn't like (but had no legal basis to challenge).
Entity ordered by a court to cease publishing nonconsensual nudes, Entity refused, then told the court they would never agree, then fined punitively.
What about this do you consider is a free speech violation?
my point is, billionaires saying "At last! free speech!" like PG did when he retweeted this MIT annoucement are completely full of it. They would like right-wing speech, ideas like "Black people are less intellectually capable" to be "free", which means "welcomed into the discourse without constraint", whereas any media company they don't personally like should be sued into oblivion. Gawker's fate only began when Peter Theil decided to target tens of millions of dollars at suing them into oblivion, waiting for something to stick. It quite plainly set a precedent that such actions can be taken by any billionaire whenever they want. Billionaires like Theil, PG and quite plainly Musk do not give a flying f** about "free speech". it is their speech they care about. And they should be widely challenged on this.
Gawker was not fined $140 million for violating a court order. They were sued for damages by Hulk Hogan and Hogan could have sued for the same things even if they had complied with that order, and I am not familiar with what basis there is to claim this lawsuit would not have been brought or successful if they had complied; even if unsuccessful, Theil's goal was to continue flooding Gawker with lawsuits until they went out of business, and this is most certainly an abuse of the legal system.
Furthermore, I get the sense that your dismissal of JK Rowling's attempted cancellation is a thinly veiled attempt to dismiss or minimise the notion that "cancellation" is an actual phenomenon. People have their lives physically harmed and their livelihoods threatened because of this. People have committed suicide because of this (if you did actually bother to read the comment you were responding to). If that were your intent, you should take a good look as to whether you're consumed by the culture wars or not.
The notion that cancellation is exclusively a right-wing phenomenon is bollocks as well. Countless leftist academics have been successfully cancelled for their views. Oftentimes, their views were (mis)interpreted and misrepresented by their attackers in a fashion that requires the complete obliteration of reasoning. In fact, if you actually check the statistics from FIRE, 60% of the cancellation in academia came from the left, although 40% from the right is non-trivial as well. As such, the threat to free speech is indeed real, regardless of your political affiliation.
Lastly, I'm not based in the US or any part of the anglosphere. From my outsider's point of view however, the imminent threat to free speech in the "1984" sense is coming from the left. I spent two years of my time watching how Donald Trump and the republicans made a complete joke out of the US. I watched in utter shock at the atrocities and lunacy that they were capable of. In the next two years however, I observed an equivalent form of lunacy that was emerging from the left. This is no thanks to the influence of big tech, academia, and the left-wing media, whose global reach is far more prevalent than that of Fox News. From then on, I watched as more institutions in the west were ideologically captured, sacrificing their function for "social justice". While they are not the government, they are the cumulation of every power aside from the government. We've seen how big tech can rival the power held by congress. That, plus the media, academia, public and private institutions combined, is capable, and is exercising that power in a manner that is starting to look 1984-esque. What seems to be successfully driving this trend is the left's inability to discern social justice from "critical social justice". In other words, my calculus assignment easily runs circles around Robin DiAngelo's entire academic career and intellect. However, her books are selling like hotcakes. Make what you want out of what I've written.
As eloquent as she is, JKR isn't just talk - she recently founded an Edinburgh-based centre to help women who have been sexually assaulted, giving them a safe, female-only space for support in a crisis. It's heroic work, and alongside her many other charitable contributions, I'm glad she's doing such good in the world.
Key people involved in some issues might include e.g.
* The MIT Chinese Student and Scholar Association, its funding sources, and its key advocacy areas
* Richard Lindzen (climate views)
* Joi Ito (Epstein, OpenAg)
* Ted Postol (missile defense)
* Richard Stallman
I can think of a bunch more.
> "A much-anticipated report on MIT’s actions in relation to the case of Aaron Swartz, a young computer programmer and Internet activist who committed suicide in January, finds no wrongdoing on MIT’s part."
https://news.mit.edu/2013/mit-releases-swartz-report-0730
Lindzen doesn't raise any. He's retired, and speaks only for himself. He's an embarrassment, but there are no issues there.
Ito? No attempt has been made to silence him.
Stallman isn't a speech matter either. His behavior was off putting enough that women were choosing to change their careers to avoid having to deal with him, so now he and his FSF have to do their thing off campus.
Why would a free-speech advocacy group support LGBT rights? They "coincidentally" don't support nuclear disarmament or tax reform either.
> They're an entirely right-wing organization pretending to be unbiased. Their actions speak for themselves.
Actions like condemning UNC for denying Nikole Hannah-Jones tenure or suing Florida over the Stop Woke Act?
Free speech covers all of that. To be free speech it must.
I don’t think it is purely about how loud and radical some students are, it is also about how they align with the pre-existing ideological dispositions of the average university bureaucrat. Imagine, hypothetically, that the loudest and most radical students on campus were right-leaning rather than left-leaning: somehow, I doubt the same university administrators would be so quick to give in to their demands.
Now, if we are talking about a different situation, in which most university administrators were centre-right, then it could well be the other way around.
Bureaucrats respond much better to activists who (in broad outline) agree with their ideology, but who claim they are failing to live up to it, than to activists who are promoting a very different ideology instead.
For example, right-wing students might demand an art exhibition at the university be cancelled because they believe it to be “blasphemous” or “obscene”. Or they might object to a Marxist being allowed to deliver a guest lecture on the grounds that it is insensitive to the victims of communism.
https://daily.jstor.org/adolph-reed-jr-the-perils-of-race-re...
Thinking of contemporary academic Marxists - how did I forget Slavoj Žižek. Another is the Marxist feminist Nina Power (although I’m not sure if she still identifies as a Marxist). Both, however, like Reed, are the kind of contrarian leftists who are probably more useful to the right uncancelled.
I'm curious if there are examples of extant organizational structures at any universities that successful push back against these tendencies.
For example, much of the funding available in US physics is DoD funding. Many students (and grads / postdocs) have ethical issues with working on DoD projects. However, refusing DoD funding is not a good move for early-career researchers. So in my experience successful new profs tend to be more "hawkish" than grad students in general.
How familiar are you with the students and the faculty of MIT? Are the students even pressuring faculty enough on any given issue that we could characterize this statement from MIT as capitulation?
What's the difference here? Different, better-connected students? A campaign that better aligns with the broader zeitgeist in our society? Something administration _wanted_ to capitulate over?
By contrast, Senior House was a significant legal liability due to large, public parties with a habit of sending people to the hospital for more interesting reasons than booze. That, the institute has financial, practical, concrete reasons to care about.
It's unclear to me that SH created more liability than frats and alcohol, but maybe, and it was certainly the perception.
Did they think about putting Senior House on probation or something like that?
I'm bitter about the whole thing, and also the upcoming [renovation of EC](https://www.reddit.com/r/mit/comments/nfpumq/east_campus_is_...) (the next dorm over, physically and culturally). The building is realistically past due for some TLC, but it's hard not to feel like it's motivated from more than that.
I suggest you hit 'em where it hurts: Refuse all alumni donation requests, and give your money to impoverished people in Africa instead. https://www.givedirectly.org/
In the case of cancelling speakers, there’s a bit of outrage and annoyance on the part of free thinking folks and fascists (who are two separate groups with a bit of overlap on the Venn diagram on this issue). But those groups don’t tend to form effective mobs on campus and aren’t terribly litigious compared to the vocal cancellers on the left.
Contrast this "capitulation" to activism to, say, UC's lengthy reluctance to capitulate to the grad student union's wage demands. Even more instructive: compare it to UC Davis' outright refusal to allow a handful of students to camp out on a grassy area in front of the dining hall on a Friday.
Student activists barely have sufficient solidarity and numbers to successfully demand something as universally desired as a higher wages. And they didn't have sufficient leverage to even complete a successful sit-in at Davis (and similar "occupy" groups got easily shut down at other universities).
Yet in your assessment, there are enough students in lock-step against free speech to terrify the admin into working against its own professed principles. How did that organizing prowess happen-- seemingly without any struggle-- in the latter case but not in the former cases? This doesn't pass the smell test IMO.
Alternative explanation: an administration vastly prefers less chance of unpredictable controversy over a dissident speaker, less chance of run-ins between dissident students and law enforcement, less chance of lawsuits over a prof's material, etc. It's not capitulating-- rather, the admin would naturally support any student move that limits the kind of speech that could potentially cause problems for the university.
If it were my first day fresh out of college admin boot camp, that's the first thing I would do to try to rise up the ranks. It's a no-brainer.
Basically rainbow capitalism or focusing and elevating issues that are less likely to have a direct impact in order to divert us from meaningful change.
I think you want to consider the admin as individual agents, and think about their career downside risk.
Remember how James Bennet had to resign after publishing the Tom Cotton editorial in the NY Times? Imagine if L. Rafael Reif had taken a stand on the Dorian Abbot lecture. Students start calling for his head, fellow admin say "you're on your own bud". He goes the way of James Bennet. Then just like Bennet, his personal brand is tarnished. He struggles to find further work in academia.
"Recommendation 5: The chair of the MIT faculty should explore how to develop a faculty-governed resource for the MIT community when contested matters of speech arise. "
The faculty-governed aspect seems to be a counterpoint to the administrators. Though in this proposal they clarify that this would just be a resource and wouldn't have "adjudicatory responsibilities".
Link to the full report and all their recommendations is here: https://facultygovernance.mit.edu/sites/default/files/report...
I've noticed similar behavior at my own university over the years. There are always several emails from the university president and the mental health office promising assistance when anything even slightly likely to matter to some of the student body happens anywhere in the world. IIRC some time ago they sent out an email to the entire student body about something scrawled on the wall of a bathroom stall.
Yet it took a lot of protesting and boycotting to get fair action taken back when Covid was just getting started (IIRC they tried to kick everyone out of the dorms without refunds and without enough time to arrange for alternative housing, which was especially bad given the large international student body and lack of clarity on student visa handling at the time). Similarly, the graduate student union has been gradually dialing up its activism just to get the university to pay enough to keep up with local cost of living with no acknowledgement from the university.
If the students and their parents pay the administrators' salaries, they are in charge. These clashes between students and faculty tend to be much more maintainable in countries with free public education, because the students aren't customers.
https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
They are giving credence to the idea that words can injure. I would have rather seen this phrased as "that some believe to be offensive or injurious". But I imagine this sentence was heavily negotiated.
As someone who has experienced both, I can provide my anecdata to say that words hurt. Maybe they're not the same type of pain, but they do.
If you are a victim of verbal and mental abuse, do not let the above comment convince you that your suffering is somewhat lesser and thus not worthy of empathy.
Think of what a Jewish person thinks when they hear insert Kanye West tweet here. The reason speech such as that is restricted is because it inevitably precedes physical violence. Historical victims of violence have learned to identify that through trial and error, while others can safely pretend that words never hurt anybody.
Ben Shapiro talking about it, I'll transcribe part of it here.
> I feel bad for Ye. There are people who are bipolar in my family, like when people are in manic episodes, which he _clearly_ is in a manic episode, they say things that are insane and they think that nobody can tell them what to do and the more insane it is and the more people disapprove the more they do it. And they do crazy stuff and when he comes out of the manic episode it's ... it's going to be really really bad for him.
Someone then asked Shapiro, "would you debate with him [Ye]" and his response was "I won't debate with people who are mentally ill".
---
That seems like a pretty rational, reasoned response, and I'm not sure why you think he was harmed in some way.
Furthermore, what you're trying to argue here is that victims of rape should be protected from the word rape. No, the need to be protected from the _ACT_ of rape, how does one do that without talking about rape?
If a victim of rape feels harm from the very utterance of the word rape, that's a mental problem that should be dealt with through therapy, not by making it more difficult to protect from the _ACT_ of rape by making it more difficult to speak about it.
We have 100's of years of common law to better vet out what types of speech have a tendency to result in violence, and there's a reason why the things you're claiming result in violence are not found on that list.
No, that seems to be either an incredibly biased reading of my comment or an attempt at a bad faith argument. I am claiming: rallies that announce "all trans people are child molesters" are inevitably followed by physical violence against some trans person for "molesting children". More often than not, people who hold such rallies are aware of such implications, and are intentionally holding such rallies to cause harm. Thus, words, for all intents and purposes, can be a direct cause of physical violence and thus should be regarded as such in very extreme cases.
> there's a reason why the things you're claiming result in violence are not found on that list.
Sometimes the laws simply have not caught up with the times. Quick example: how long have gay marriage been federally legal in the United States? Law follows common sense and consensus, not the other way around, which is why I do not agree with your suggestion that we should forsake common sense and consensus to blindly follow the letters of the law.
Did you know that among transgender community, rate of attempted suicide is 40%? [0,1] If being inclusive of people regardless of their identity can help us mitigate that number, I believe we should do so, even if it lets three "perverts" mask their intentions. Citing three cases happening in the prison system and asking all trans women to be banned from all women's restrooms everywhere is... quite a strong ask.
Moreover, the three cases you mentioned all happened in prison, where you are already locked up and under tight supervision (supposedly). How many cases are there where such a thing happened in a general gender neutral bathroom? To argue that "we should not be respectful of people's gender identity because there is harm in to negate the overwhelming positive impacts of it", you have to show the proofs.
[0] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/european-psychiatry/... [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5178031
My view is that with something as complex and multifactorial as suicide, we have to be cautious in ascribing a particular cause or mitigation, and the available data must be examined with caution.
The first abstract you linked describes a 41% attempted suicide rate, but I'm not clear how this was determined or exactly which population it applies to. It seems to be for a poster at a psychiatry conference, the full copy of which isn't available online, as far as I can see. Do you know how this figure was arrived at? I would be interested to see the original source.
In the second paper you linked, which concerns transgender people in India, it sounds like there are many other correlative factors that involve poverty and lack of access to education and employment, with many living in slums, begging and working as prostitutes. Access to the bathroom of their choice or other opposite sex spaces seems to be the least of their issues, and it's not mentioned in this paper. The section discussing resiliency sounds promising though, with correlations to higher income, better support structures, and being employed in a mainstream job. Perhaps these are the factors best addressed by policy, in India at least?
I prefer the generally-accepted definition of "harm physically", as I assume you do, but clearly some people try to generalize the idea in order to emphasize other types of harm.
It's a debatable topic, there might be a little bit to learn from hashing it out, but it's mostly fluff. It's better to explore if this illuminates any actual disagreement on some concrete issue.
This sort of taking umbrage about word definitions is a factor in pretty much all major political spats, and I don't think it's going away by arguing about each term. You just have to define the terms in some way for the purposes of mutual understanding for an individual discussion. If the debate ends up just being bikeshedding the definition, walk away and find a better conversation.
That's a lot more significant - and at the heart of what's gone wrong with American academics, i.e. the corporatization and privatization of public resources that's erased long-standing traditions of open sharing of research results - than any of this social justice warrior hysteria stuff that the media likes to talk about.
Really, try to get Lex Fridman, noted MIT-based podcaster/Twitterer, to invite on a guest to discuss the corporatization of the university system - and the related exclusive licensing of MIT patents - in the United States, in which institutions like MIT and the University of California have played a leading role.
https://president.mit.edu/speeches-writing/federal-funding-p...
I've also seen instances of individuals defending free speech because they hold unpopular (or sometimes even hurtful) opinions and want to be taken seriously, or want a megaphone – both of which they are free to demand but which no one is obligated to give them.
I signed the MIT Free Speech Alliance's petition and signed up for its newsletter because I agree with the aims of the movement, but I had the impression that some of the alumni leading the alliance have political motives, or are less angry about the loss of freedom at universities [1] than they are about the social opinions of the rising generation, which worries me somewhat.
[1] which IMO ought to be the paragons of free speech.
Well, popular opinion needs no protections.
Unfortunately, as far as most of what I can find on the subject, most Iranians (who live in Iran) are either indifferent or opposed to the people currently protesting in Iran and Iran has a majority population that is highly religious and loyal to the current government.
It's mostly in the big cities, like Tehran or Shiraz where the protests enjoy support and the population is more liberal, but outside of the big cities in more rural areas people are much more religious and supportive of the regime.
I am certainly welcome to be corrected on this though.
The unpowerful, unpopular ideas don't even get calls for protection
In fact, the point you are making about unequal protection under imbalances of power is perhaps even an argument for maintaining an absolutist stance against reasonable exceptions - because that's an effective tactic for protecting something in a flawed political world that can turn those exceptions into things you didn't imagine when voicing support for them.
Kinda similarly, the "right to bear arms" interpretation of the 2nd amendment didn't really happen until the Black Panthers. Everybody talks about the "right to bear arms" part of the amendment but for some reason we no longer bring up how that sentence starts: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State"
It's kind of a confusing amendment in general. For most of it's history it was basically treated like 3rd Amendment (about soldiers not having to be quartered). It seemed kinda odd and in fact was the second least often cited amendment behind the 3rd amendment because of this.
It was actually the Black Panthers, a bunch of young hip highly educated commies (mostly), that strongly pushed for this interpretation.
Both "right to bear arms" and "free speech" are much more recent in American politics/history than most people realize. Yes the original amendments had those words, but the meanings of them weren't really hashed out until rather recently.
On the second, privately owned ordnance weapons and warships were extremely common in the 1800s, and the definition of "well-regulated" was closer to "well-equipped" than to the modern word "regulated." In fact, the earliest "gun control" laws were about when and where you could fire your cannons. It took until the really 1920s to start thinking of the second amendment as a "collective" right which allowed any restrictions.
On the first amendment, it has been under societal attack since the founding of the country. The laws against sedition were some of the first laws ever passed, and were an attack on speech. In the early 1900s, it was all about preventing protests from labor groups and women who wanted to vote. The red scare was a very recent instance. Thankfully, the judiciary, since 1800, has been very good at striking down governmental attempts to control speech, and created the strongest legal regime around free speech that has ever existed. This regime had its last great test with the red scare. Twitter-FBI "state-informed" moderation and these ridiculous speech codes are just another attempt, in a 200 year old tradition, of the powerful to control other people's speech.
You are looking at a narrow slice of American history and generalizing from it. The whole history of the country is quite encouraging in terms of the rights of the individual, and I think we will see a turnaround on the current situation around speech, as we have every other time.
Meet the new puritans, same as the old puritans.
> Despite the Supreme Court’s rulings in Heller and McDonald, many constitutional historians disagreed with the court that the Second Amendment protected an individual right to “keep and bear Arms” for the purpose of self-defense in the home. Indeed, for more than two centuries there had been a consensus among judges as well as scholars that the Second Amendment guaranteed only the right of individuals to defend their liberties by participating in a state militia. However, by the late 20th century the “self-defense” interpretation of the amendment had been adopted by a significant minority of judges.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Second-Amendment/Origins-an...
If you would like to back up your argument from authority with actual evidence, can you pull out a gun control law from before 1900 that bans anything close to the weapons that are banned today?
Can you address the claims with facts and reason? Resorting to ad hominen attacks seems to indicate the facts and reason are lacking.
I'm not sure that's true. The record is mixed, afaik. For example, political repression of the left has been repeatedly allowed.
> Twitter-FBI "state-informed" moderation
AFAIK, the evidence amounted to very little or nothing happening in that regard?
Of course we disagree with our political opponents and feel that the policies they advocate are not optimal. It might be convenient to your politics if your opposition’s voice is dampened, but your opposition feels the same of your voice and does so for reasons no less sincere than your own.
That’s the fundamental bargain. You are neither obligated to hand anyone a megaphone, nor obligated to confiscate theirs.
Your comment has made me realize that I could have written my original comment more clearly; my dissatisfaction in re the MIT Free Speech Alliance (if my impression was accurate) isn't about political agendas, but about deception – promoting free speech for the moment as a tactic rather than out of a dedication to the ideal, while claiming the latter.
Indeed, when people say "let's keep politics out of it", they're in effect trying to quell any challenge to the status quo, which arguably is inherently political, and this should probably be called out more often.
"You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations." From "Letter from a Birmingham Jail", which everyone should read: https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham....
This is a pretty uncharitable take, and one that I see too often.
I could just as easily say that people pressure others into turning every space political because they feel entitled to dominate every space with their politics, and they cannot tolerate any kind of truce or neutral ground. It's just another tactic to control the conversation.
And I think you're right! It seems very likely to me that that happens.
Playing devil's advocate for myself, however: the comment was not uncharitable because it did not attribute intent. Someone saying "let's keep politics out of it" may be trying to avoid conflict or simply be respectful, but unknowingly in effect quashing challenges to the status quo.
The comment was meant to be an observation of unwitting outcomes rather than secret intentions, but maybe that's in fact what you're objecting to ("it's easy to be pessimistic about the aggregate effects of small, inoccuous actions, and that attitude deserves some pushback").
Libertarianism works better without libertarians. It works better with collectivists than individualists. It works better with people who care about other people's freedoms than with those who care about their own freedoms.
Freedom of speech as a negative liberty means that the government does not criminalize speech. Some people would like to extend that to other powerful entities banning / limiting speech, but then the government would be suppressing those entities' other liberties.
The freedom of speech people care about is a positive liberty. It's about being entitled to have a platform for your speech. Maybe even a platform with an audience, or a platform you feel safe to use. In order for your opponents to have freedom of speech – a platform – your liberties must be suppressed. Either by an authority by force, or by yourself voluntarily.
Ultimately, freedom of speech is about you being obligated not to confiscate the megaphone.
What’s the paradox there?
If I attend a political rally and the speaker uses a megaphone, that's fine, I have consented to it's use.
However other places I have witnessed their use has questionable legality due to breach of the peace because the audience has not consented e.g. getting heckled when entering a University site or getting assailed by someone promoting their batshit Christian cult when trying to do some shopping. I don't think anyone would assume a universal right to make unwanted amplified noise.
Convenient that we're only doing that because "we have unpopular opinions". But did it ever occur to you that they're unpopular because we're not allowed to speak our minds fully and rationally convince others of our ideas' merits?
Bold claims have a heavy burden of proof. One could quickly retort with the opposite, i.e. perhaps they are unpopular because they have been refuted many times but the proponents believe the 97th time will be the charm. Who's right?
Also, the refutals that supposedly make them unpopular seemingly have no impact in reality. That kind of suggests that either the models used for refutal are grossly incomplete or big errors have been made due to political reasoning.
Notwithstanding my ignorance of the particular unpopular opinion you hold, did it ever occur to you that no matter how fully you express your mind, and no matter how rationally you believe your points, the popular resistance to your unpopular ideas may simply be proof that they do not have merit?
If history shows us anything it’s that intelligent people can become convinced by unintelligent ideas.
The whole "popular opinion" game is very one-sided from the start, especially in a setting where only a few people have immediate access to reach others like today. I've seen popular, but ultimately wrong, news travel around and solidify often enough to conclude, at least for myself, that "resistance to your unpopular ideas" is not sufficient to make any statement about its quality.
After all both opinions are or were popular so which one are we supposed to pick among the popular options?
People are free to hold stupid ideas, and they’re free to state those ideas in public, and the rest of us are free to jeer them for doing so… freedom of speech does not imply freedom from being laughed at and abused for holding on to such manifestly stupid ideas.
If someone believes in a powerful sky wizard who oversees all of humanity, they can teach their children of this magical being. They can even take them once a week to a place of education about this belief. IMO, it’s none of my or your business or right to be constantly present to present alternative points of view.
Personally I’d go further… teaching children that the world is flat should be considered criminal child abuse, as you’re intentionally impairing a child’s ability to function in any society, including your own echo chamber.
What I do object to is insisting that there is never a time when parents can teach their children arbitrary topic X without always having someone from the societal ministry of truth to be there to fact-check/align it.
There seems to be a significant power imbalance between the ministry and a parent.
A state of affairs that’s now pretty much been replicated, about a century after we first tried to learn the lesson that Fascism is a bad idea.
If you're answer to that question is, "no, because those children were abused by others lying about Santa, they will never be capable of overcoming that lie and will continue to propagate that lie" then it begs the question: what right does anyone have to tell anyone anything since all of us have experienced some sort of indoctrination at some point? Are we not all "broken" in that sense?
No matter how many people believe the earth is flat or the sun circles around the earth, it won't make it true. We have day and night cycles because earth is a sphere that is rotating so that only one side of earth is exposed at the same time.
No matter how unpopular this opinion is and no matter how big the mob's desire to lynch me is, it is still closer to the truth than the potentially popular opinion of earth being flat and the sun circling around the planet.
That is, not until after the advent of the Internet and YouTube… both of which, ironically, depend on the Earth being non-flat to function.
The Majority is very often simply wrong.
In fact is, look at all progressive movements (those that you’d have to be pretty insane to dispute today). They all began with the majority opposing them. Women’s suffrage, civil rights, homosexual rights, etc.
Each of the movements responsible for those achievements went directly against the grain. You were crazy to side with any of those at certain dates in the past.
The most fascinating part is to think which movements haven’t occurred yet. Which topics are we all collectively wrong about. Whatever they are it’s the first amendment that will enable them to be rectified.
I have many ideas what these will turn out to be, but that’s another topic.
For most people, another person doesn’t need to be contrarian to be interesting.
I’d go one further and say that contrarians are intrinsically uninteresting. They are very predictable and tedious in their inability to accept ideas just because they are accepted by others. Being systematically opposed to ideas because they are perceived as mainstream is just as much of a fallacious reasoning than the other way around.
Corporations normalize utilitarian agency. Government social policing. University thinking.
Institutions never produced interesting science or engineering; people did. Institutions took all the credit.
Except that there are many types of unpopularity that you have conflated.
Having intolerant views about trans people for example does not in my opinion make you interesting.
It just makes you intolerant.
Unfortunately, those are nowhere near universally unpopular views at this point in our human journey.
Sure, if both parties already agree on the meaning of "intolerance", but what qualifies as intolerance is exactly the dispute.
The megaphone analogy is limited in applicability. It only applies where the recipient never opted to hear the message, but it is forced upon them.
Free speech issues are about interfering with speech where there is a willing audience. Even in cases where someone is offended by a message, often it's not that they don't want to hear the message; it's that they don't want others to hear the message.
Universities are agency normalizing agents of government.
We’re not talking launching some professor from a cannon but doing as humans have done for years and updating colloquial language models. This is freaking out the establishment as it does and has, and of course the establishment labels it as anti-freedom to teach them anything, because of course it’s the establishment; it teaches us not the other way around!
MIT is like a rack of Twitter servers; we could unplug it and society will keep going because it’s not immutably reliant on society. Many thousands of workers are though and only “essential workers” have an obligation to output real results.
I think the university is trying to find a middle ground here: The university - as institution and administrative body - is acting as the entity that "gives free speech to them" here: They are permitting those arguments be made in public events, on flyers, posters, etc. Of course they can't force students to listen to that speech. So I'd imagine that calls to boycott certain classes still remain valid. However, what they do is forbidding people from blocking others from listening, e.g. by demanding that certain people don't speak at all, blocking entrances to lecture halls, etc. That seems like a reasonable approach to me.
More generally: I've seen the "free speech does not apply to private entities/free speech is no right to be listened to/free speech is not freedom from consequences" arguments online a lot - they seem to be the standard counter arguments of some groups - and I've always found them deeply problematic.
First of all, I think there are a lot of authoritarian states who would be more than happy to adopt the "public only" definition of free speech without any substantial loss of control: "Yes of course, dear dissident, you're perfectly in your legal rights to accuse me of human rights violations on your website. But I'm afraid, I won't be able to help you if the country's ISP makes a private decision to block your site, if your employer spontaneously exercises its right to fire you the next day and if a crowd of concerned private citizens with privately-owned baseball bats will gather in front of your house tonight. Consequences!"
Secondly, the arguments rely on a situation where most services that faciliate discussion in a society - i.e. the media sector - are provided by private companies and are not subject to democratic decision making. So basically they rely on a weak state. That's originally a right-libertarian vision of society and I don't think anyone who calls themselves "left" should be comfortable adopting that vision.
Indeed, but right leaning libertarianism with a weak state is where conservatives have been leading the country for decades. Now it’s the right leaning libertarians like the Freedom Caucus who are are the loudest that private platforms should be forced to carry certain speech, which is what they’ve been fighting against this whole time (at least if you take them at their word).
I don’t think many leftists are arguing that the status quo is okay. At least what I’ve argued is that today it’s wrong to force Twitter or any private entity to carry speech they don’t want to. By doing so I’m not adopting a right-leaning libertarian worldview, because that doesn’t preclude public options that would carry all speech.
If this is the indeed the truth, then the trillions we currently invest in "reversing man made climate change" would be better invested in "preparing for the inevitable".
Even if powerful people rally for free speech in order to achieve an (maybe evil) political goal, THATS OBVIOUSLY BETTER THAN using censorship to achieve a (probably evil) political goal.
I find it unbelievable that this is such a hard concept to grasp.
If powerful people use free speech to spread nonsense, then just present your counter arguments, god damnit.
I know that it "takes more time to refute bullshit than to produce bullshit", sadly, that's just how it is. The bitcoin community has spent more than 12 years now to refute bullshit and people still fall for all the debunked FUD. This just means that we need a better tool to refute bullshit faster and more efficiently.
Wikipedia was a good first try, but of course since it succumbed to the woke mind virus, it is no longer viable.
There is a civilisation altering opportunity here to produce a new tool like it. I don't know how such a tool would look like.
How do you know it's not disinformation? My understanding, from many years of reading, is that those questions were settled long ago and there is not even somehwat evidence or arguments.
> The bitcoin community has spent more than 12 years now to refute bullshit and people still fall for all the debunked FUD.
Cryptocurrencies are an example of credible, true information?
> woke mind virus
Pejoritives are a signal that there are no facts or reason to support the claim.
And here's final ratified statement which had only minor edits: https://facultygovernance.mit.edu/sites/default/files/report...
Also there's this note at the bottom of the final statement suggesting more clarity on how this manifests itself as policy could be coming:
"Note: A motion is pending before the Faculty to refer the statement to a committee that would edit the statement for clarity."
>A commitment to free expression includes hearing and hosting speakers, including those whose views or opinions may not be shared by many members of the MIT community and may be harmful to some. This commitment includes the freedom to criticize and peacefully protest speakers to whom one may object, but it does not extend to suppressing or restricting such speakers from expressing their views.
I'm interested in hearing how the process for selecting speakers currently works, as well as how the signatories would like it to be changed. If a single faculty member wishes to invite a speaker, does that give that speaker the right to talk in an official capacity? What if a speaker has no support on campus? Are they entitled to be hosted by MIT? If not, are they being 'restricted from expressing their views'?
I think any student or faculty member can invite a speaker. The policy is about when it’s acceptable for the university to step in and say that an event (or protest) can’t happen.
> If a single faculty member wishes to invite a speaker, does that give that speaker the right to talk in an official capacity?
I think that currently a speaking event can be canceled on the basis that the speaker promotes harmful ideas. The signatories want to remove this from the list of acceptable reasons for cancelling an event that someone wants to happen.
On the other hand, how do we avoid nazi-at-the-bar problems?
That’s getting darned close to precognitive law enforcement…
The problem with deciding that ‘nazis’ don’t deserve free speech is that you won’t always get to decide who is a ‘nazi’ or what ‘nazi’ speech looks like.
Note that the parties that are arguing hardest for free speech are exactly the ones that are the subject of discussion. You might wonder if they have a stake in the outcome of that debate. Personally, I'm not at all concerned that 'the state' will meaningfully abridge my speech (in part because there is no history of them doing that without a very good reason and in part because NL never had absolute free speech to begin with though we do have the concept of 'freedom of opinion'). But I am concerned with the speed with which wannabe Nazi groups and actual Nazi groups are able to convert people en masse to their cause, including voting them into public office where they are already doing damage. If you haven't noticed that then you're forgiven but realize that in many countries this is not just a theoretical debate but harsh reality.
Stalin-ism should not be a case study so you can do it right the next time, it should be a warning that you can't, even with the best of intentions.
I hope we can take some lesson from Neville Chamberlain; that some ideologies are not worth arguing or negotiating over.
And British, Canadian and many other countries besides.
you mean like dumping tea into the ocean to protest taxes and standing up a militia to rebel in order to establish a new government?
we definitely wouldn't want that to happen!
A 10 second detour through Wikipedia to have a look at what Nazism is would have saved you typing that out.
You're trying to say "people I agree with".
One could set up a dress code or any other arbitrary policy as a proxy to refuse entry to any group, without explicitly doing so.
I suspect you're not happy with that either, and that's my point.
Not in the US you can't. If a policy, even when applied equally, unduly affects a protected class, it's unconsitutional.
For example, if a restaurant enacts a "no headwear" policy it's still unconstitutional because by and large this is primarily going to affect the muslim population (and a segment of the jewish population), but will have very little effect on anyone else.
If the policy was instead "no headwear with words on it" the policy would NOT be unconstitutional because it does NOT unduly affect a specific group of people.
There are other exceptions, of course, generally around security. You can imagine a bank not allowing the full covering of ones face for security reasons even if that does appear to target people who wear burka's day to day.
---
so long story short is that it's not super simple, but in the US you absolutely cannot try and get around it by proxy and there is established law on how to identify this.
I don't care about the US, and I don't think the laws there should be an example for the rest of the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_group
I don't know about you all, but personally I'm interested in participating in civil society most of the time. I don't want to have to get into a violent debate with swearing with fucking nazis, the same I don't want to breath toxic fumes or drive a car to work. I vote for bus stops, I vote for carbon taxes, and I similarly want to leverage our societal mechanisms to not have to act as an individual agent in the ideological war against fascism every single day.
I've learned that obnoxious nazis have an advantage by violating the peace treaty terms of civil society and tolerance, because by definition they don't hold themselves by such rules. Meanwhile those of us that are just trying to live our lives still have these rules and values and are hesitant to abandon them to deal with the nazi for many reasons, not the least of which being we don't want to sink to their level. Not to mention, it's exhausting. For whatever reason the nazis get their rocks off to it, and thus it's less exhausting and more exhilarating. Fine. But the whole point of society is to rubber-band away things like that to create a community of people who at some basic level maintain a level of civility.
When nazis show up, they violate the civility, they violate the peace treaty, and the solution shouldn't be "let them keep walking in and doing it and re-doing the fuck-off debate every time," but rather, close and lock the doors to them, because they've already told us who they are and what they're about.
An oversimplified example: your carpet shop has a rule: no shoes on in the shop. You come in with shoes, you get thrown out. A guy shows up with a shirt on that says "My value is to track as much mud on as many carpets as I can in my life." Do you let him in the door?
Is he wearing shoes?
The problem isn't that there's a line at which it becomes ok to remove yourself from, or them, forcibly.
The problem is that line has to be very very extreme, which is why you're using the Nazi example, but it's being applied to very non-extreme things, which is why so many people disagree with you.
> The problem is that line has to be very very extreme, which is why you're using the Nazi example, but it's being applied to very non-extreme things,
It's being applied to the intolerant, as intended. There are intolerable philosophies being openly discussed on mass media (tucker Carlson restating great replacement theory, matt walsh calling for police to kick down the doors of drag performers). Openly white nationalist and fascist people are showing up in towns to harass and intimidate people. In this environment, when the system is failing to not tolerate these intolerant beliefs, or in the case of white nationalism especially, actively enforcing the intolerant "right" to promote their viewpoint, the peace treaty of tolerance has been broken, and those of us you'd describe of "tolerant" stop applying the rules of civil society to the people breaking them in front of all of our faces.
And at WORST the outcomes for these intolerants is they have to change venues for a university talk, or, get a Twitter ban, for which capitalist society handsomely rewards them with talk show appearances and podcast shows.
It has a name and using that name allows for more succinct communication. It's also a way for those who are unfamiliar with the paradox of tolerance to realize it's a thing so they can look further into it if they so choose.
---
For the rest, it's just a lot of rationalization for why you think you should be able to prevent people from saying things. And you try to hang it on the paradox of tolerance as a justification.
But it's not really, the lesson from the paradox of tolerance isn't that the tolerant must become absolutely intolerant to protect themselves, it's that they cannot be absolutely tolerant.
The line where intolerance needs to kick in for protection shouldn't be "someone said a thing", but should instead be "someone did a thing". Those like yourself who try to use the paradox of tolerance to rationalize your views are treating tolerance/intolerance as a binary rather than a spectrum.
And finally,
I'm a minority myself and have been called racial epithets. I remember the KKK coming into a nearby town and holding a rally back in the 90's. People were pissed off, but even then I defended their right to have the rally. My recommendation to everyone was just don't go. Imagine if they held a KKK rally and no one showed up, how hilarious would that be?
I would be no more ok with minorities attacking KKK members than I would be with KKK members attacking minorities. There's an equilibrium and fairness there that doesn't exist with words. If it's not ok for KKK members to tell a black person they're inferior, is it not ok for a black person to tell a KKK member they're inferior?
This obviously won't convince you as you're not thinking rationally, but that doesn't make the above any less true.
I've read my grandmothers' diary, she had quite a bit to say about the previous time people underestimated the size of that maximum mass. There are very large numbers of people that will be happy to sustain such a dumb ideology if it is presented to them in such a way that it presses the right buttons. Fear is a very powerful motivator, as are frustration and jealousy and clever people will be more than happy to take advantage of these facts to push their revolting ideologies.
More effective than fear of government punishment is shame. Few care about pissing off the government in this country so that seems like a non-starter.
Oh, we have plenty of evidence that some things can stop Nazism. The question is if you want to dedicate another couple of 10's of thousands of acres to war graves.
But, well, there's still a neo-Nazi march in Berlin pretty much every year. And it's larger than Charlottesville one was.
Although of course, attempts are made to associate broader and broader statements with extremism, such that even having an immigration policy at all is interpreted as racism, so the number of supposed racists is dramatically inflated.
If the right similarly broadened it’s interpretation of statements, 80-90% of the country could be claimed to be communists, for supporting the most minimal state assistance of the poor, which almost everyone does support at some level.
Citation badly needed. Really.
But most Western countries still have actual, real communist parties so you can't paint completely crazy pictures of them, because their members will simply raise their hand and say "no we're not like that at all".
(1) people are innocent until proven guilty
(2) if one group is judge, jury, and executioner that's a problem
(3) authoritarians seek to quell dissent by censoring
(4) removal/ejection/ostracism from group is censorship
(5) contrary to your assertion removal/ejection/ostracism is a form of engagement
(6) in fact within the realm of free speech r/e/o is the most extreme form of engagement
(7) this is because it is the quashing of that ejected person's ability to freely express themselves
> The first has guaranteed results, the second is uncertain.
(8) hard disagree, the first is guaranteed to generate all sorts of backlash (perhaps not the results wished for)
(9) the second is guaranteed to generate debate, exactly what authoritarians and the censorious dislike
(10) ps: (quibble) the “Nazis” were terminated with extreme prejudice in 1945, any variants thereof nowadays are neo-Nazis
===
All the above is transparently obvious to me. It concerns me that in a so-called liberal society many clearly are either unwilling or are unable to see that everything I have outline is true in all cases. The fruits of this ignorance are all around us.
to my mind i made a very reasonable defense of "free speech even for speech i find objectionable and disagree with but ultimately must tolerate in the interests of the inviolable principle of freedom of expression for all not just for my bubble" – that's the position i'm arguing for and nothing more.
"at all costs" != "free speech even for speech i find objectionable […]"
"at all costs" goes far further and is not something i am arguing for
> is unlikely to work.
i'll go one stronger – “free speech at all costs” cannot work. but that's fine because that's not what i'm arguing for. what i'm arguing for ("free speech even for speech i find objectionable […]") must work because that's the foundation a free society is built on. otherwise, all bets are off and the spoils go to those most willing to use covert and/or draconian measures to achieve their ends
This “Nazis are everywhere” thing is a manifestation of busybody administrators and isn’t a real problem. Even if it were, it doesn’t require Byzantine declarations about approved speech.
People need to grow up and not get offended so easily.
It doesn't, but this brings up an interesting question. Is it legitimate to limit speech to prevent social change? I'm sure there were a lot of pro-segregationists that would have loved to prevent the social changes of the 60s and 70s. Would you legitimize their attempts, in exchange for having more tools to fight nazis?
If you're all for free speech, the "nazi at the bar" problem isn't a problem because free speech would allow you to battle it out in a propaganda (the neutral definition) war.
I don't think a whole lot of people are actually pro free speech, but I think a lot of people are afraid to admit that.
How would that be distinguished from "cancellation", exactly?
The war of ideas is a game where the goal is to get the most amount of people to adopt that idea. No part of this is removing someone's ability to speak, but they may not be listened to by the masses that don't like their ideas.
I don't know in English, but in French we have a saying: the freedom of some begins where the freedom of others ends.
Because speech doesn’t cause physical harm or loss to others.
Nope, that is trivially wrong with the obvious counter examples being slander and libel.
Free speech in the USA is (supposed) to mean the freedom to do political speech without state ramifications (I'm not sure how well this constitutionally works for private companies). This obviously doesn't count credible threats, telling people to riot or be violent, etc.
Basically you have a right to offend people short of targeted harassment.
*This is obviously an oversimplification but I'm giving the HN the benefit of the doubt here, however misguided that may be.
I hear this a lot, and it's not actually true. That's what the first amendment means. The first amendment protects freedom of speech, but it does not define the concept of free speech as a whole, it just protects a form of it.
It annoys me when people assert that being silenced by a private entity doesn't actually limit freedom of speech, because they argue that the freedom isn't being restricted unless a government is doing it. I'm not necessarily for unrestricted free speech (because it often ends up being loud and obnoxious, and often silences other speech when it becomes a shouting contest, especially on the internet), but this very specific interpretation that the US Constitution's first amendment actually defines free speech has always bugged me as something logically unsound.
I strongly disagree. Support for freedom of speech means being anti-censorship. It's perfectly coherent to believe that particular speech does harm, and also should not be censored.
Suppose you and I are top medical researchers, and we disagree about the best way to treat a disease. It's perfectly coherent for me to believe that your speech is killing people by promoting a treatment which is suboptimal/counterproductive, and also believe that your speech should not be censored.
Ignaz Semmelweiss's life is the perfect example of this phenomenon in action, with extreme consequences:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis
He realized doctors were killing their patients by not washing their hands and cleaning their instruments. He devised simple solutions to this problem. The doctors of his day laughed him out of the room and had him committed to an insane asylum where he was effectively tortured to death.
The consensus of medical practitioners at the time was that he was a crank. But he was right. Should he have been imprisoned? Certainly the doctors of his day would have had him banned from social media for "misinformation" if they could have, and they did far worse.
We abide by the principle of free expression not because it causes the least harm in every instance, but because it causes the least harm in expectation. The value of minority viewpoints that are right about important things that the majority is wrong about will always outweigh the harm of harmful speech, in aggregate. And one thing is clear from all of human history: We are not responsible enough to tell the difference ex ante.
Are people free to make untrue statements?
Are people free to make “falsified” statements?
Are statements inducements?
Yes
Yes
No
I wonder if a good modern analogy for Semmelweis would be if we did a study on crystal healing or Reiki, and the crystal healing/Reiki was found to vastly outperform placebo pills. (Actually something like this sort of did happen with parapsychology. The effect sizes were pretty small I believe, though.)
Obviously in hindsight, other docs still should've listened to Semmelweis. What I'm trying to get at here is that sussing out the truth can actually be a pretty tricky thing. Even if the docs had somewhat good reason to accuse Semmelweis of spreading medical misinfo, it was still a catastrophic mistake in retrospect.
I don't necessarily mean to indict the scientists of Semmelweis's day too much. I mean, they fucked up, to be sure. However it's understandable (somewhat) why they didn't listen to him.
But a society that allows those presently in power to censor information they consider to be false is a society that helps cement its present ways of doing things for eternity. I don't think that's a good thing.
A modern example of this might be the plaque theory of Alzheimer's disease. I don't know enough to know whether this is a fair description of the state of the science, but there is certainly a growing view that, a "cabal" of believers in this theory suppressed alternative views for a long time. It may end up being that the cabal is right! But it seems to me like there's enough uncertainty that a diversity of viewpoints should probably be heard.
One indicator of the quality (or lack thereof) of a society is how easy is to damage one's reputation without evidence. That's why the whole "Believe women" movement is complete and utter bullshit.
This problem has always existed, and the social standing of person A and the social standing of person B typically determined the outcome. Platforms such as Twitter where an unfounded claim can be spread so rapidly and to such a vast number of people are also a modern thing. There's no easy answer, but having the state as arbiter of truth is never the solution.
I don't understand in real life how it would arise that two medical experts could be looking at data that contradicts each other so strongly that one could believe the other's treatment is suboptimal to fatal lengths without the recommended treatment being resolvable in a single conversation (research so inconclusive on either as to make both treatments suspect imo). Why would either professional be presenting a treatment as "recommended" without the strong caveat of "but others of my caliber think this recommended treatment will kill you." If said caveat isn't included, surely we don't want doctors going around giving such blatantly misinformative advice?
And again why is the "free speech " blanket always cast so wide as to include this? We aren't allowed to not have Nazis around without risking restricting medical debate? Smacks of slippery slope.
It's happening right now (has been for 2 years) with COVID vaccines. Also permanent gender surgery performed on minors -- doctors performing them say they are saving lives, opponents say they are mutilating children below the age of consent.
I came up with the example myself. You and I actually discussed it here on HN the other week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33998494
I wasn't using that example to counter "we shouldn't tolerate Nazis". I was using it to counter the sentence I quoted: "If you view some speech as a problem then you're just not for free speech." There's an important distinction to be made between speech I think causes harm, and speech I think should be censored. That's all I wanted to say with my thought experiment.
I actually do not believe all speech should be always be protected. I agree with the MIT statement that harassment shouldn't be protected. And it seems to me that e.g. expressing support for Hitler could credibly be regarded as harassment. (Same for e.g. labeling someone as a "Nazi" because they say the US should have stronger border security.) More details on my position here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34135283
Note too the benefits of allowing/supporting the right of [insert disliked political group] to speak: 1) You find out who is in that group when they speak (as opposed to them remaining anonymous/hidden online) and potentially address them directly 2) You might be able to question them to find out what led them to that position to prevent more people from going in that direction 3) You can be aware of the message that they are trying to send and counter it with more speech
In contrast, doing something like banning support for the Communist party is likely to lead to 1) more sympathy for Communism as an oppressed outgroup; 2) a lack of understanding of how extensive support for Communism is and what might be causing it; 3) the use of "Communism" as something that people can use to denounce each other as part of petty/unrelated feuds.
*no nazis or similar.
Seems entirely reasonable and this whole "it isn't free if there isn't anarchy" sounds very naive.
If they can build rockets—Paperclip, https://www.history.com/news/what-was-operation-paperclip
> 1,600 of these German scientists (along with their families) were brought to the United States to work on America’s behalf ... Von Braun later became director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and the chief architect of the Saturn V launch vehicle, which eventually propelled two dozen American astronauts to the Moon.
Free speech in a bar, or any other business environment, though is out of place. Because the primary goal of a business is to make money, and creating disharmony and antagonism seldome leads to better business.
In other words free speech is useful, but there's a time and a place.
Bars for example like to attack a hermogenous crowd. Happy people drink more, break less. If 10% of the patrons start spouting off racism, or mysogeny, or whatever, then the rest won't fight it, they'll just leave. If it happens a couple more times they'll stop coming back.
So bars are typically quick to remove people, or ban people, with a history of strife. You don't have to go as far as Nazis, all you need is a few guys being obnoxious about, say, eating meat.
Free speech is not "saying whatever I want, wherever I want, to whomever I want." there's a time and a place. A university campus is a great place, and also (for typical college age people) a good time.
So in this case, would complete free speech be out of place by your metrics?
In the case of MIT, which is a 501(c)(3), but also sits on a multi-billion 'endowment'.
My understanding of the situation is that most universities accept federal funds, which have a bunch of strings attached. One of these strings is allowing freedom of speech. This is why communists couldn't be banned from campuses back in the 50s and 60s, or the speech codes of the 80s and 90s failed.
This doesn't apply to universities like Harvard or Brigham Young that take zero federal funds, but the vast majority of them aren't going to pass up the money.
I might steer clear of Berkley as being too hippy, and choose Alabama or Mississippi instead.
But I also expect that a business in the business of sharing ideas is open to new ideas. If I want to discuss a gun-free society at Alabama State, then i might be in the minority. As a professor my students won't appreciate it in my physics lecture, but I might form a student group against guns etc.
So yes a university is a business, but the business of ideas, and censoring some ideas seems like that makes it a bad business.
That's called "not actually being for free speech".
Yes, it does protect nazis. It is also our best bet against nazis, and a great many Minister-of-Truth-wannabes have a hard time understanding it.
To put it another way, the problem of Nazis is not a problem of free speech. It's a problem of people who are actively violating other people's boundaries.
Nazis love it when you make it about speech because then everyone starts arguing tautologies instead of investigating and prosecuting criminal behavior.
In France we do limit free speech legally, especially around anti semitism and walk a fine line. For instance a man said "Islam is the stupidest religion on Earth" and was found innocent in court: he can insult a religion or a God, as long as he didnt call for people to be hung. But another said "Heil Israel" in a comedy piece to mock, in his view, how Israel was behaving like its former oppressor. He was censored and it started a long list of sentences in court as he persevered on that line of thought. He's considered by his supporters as a victim of political correctness.
It's hard to decide what to do: on one hand, it's interesting to express views that challenge common acceptance, on the other, it's not a big cost to shut up and move on when society decides the cost of letting you speak is too great a threat considering our history.
To avoid that Nazi at the bar "problem", first decide what the problem is: that people speak or that people listen. If you cant accept they speak, you must define limits to speech (that s the French model and we are clear some things simply cant be said, period, so shut up and move on). If you can, then you must educate your population so that merely listening to hate speech doesnt trigger hate. That's been the american model, and we never believed it can actually work: after all, you elected a man who was against elections, for instance.
If I were writing the statement, I probably would've added "intimidation" in that sentence. Then I'd kick the nazi out if they're using slurs, or if they self-identify as a nazi (e.g. wearing a swastika).
It gets tricky though, because if you add "intimidation" then someone can say "people who disagree with me are intimidating me". (I suppose they can also say "people who disagree with me are harassing me" with the current policy.)
My basic approach for dealing with this problem would be to utilize the fact/value distinction. Free expression of fact statements is much more important than free expression of value statements, because knowing the truth is important.
The threshold for censoring a value statement, like "The lives of <X people> don't matter" or "<X people> should be enslaved", should generally be lower. If someone claims that such a statement intimidates or harasses them, their claim will often be credible.
But for a fact statement, if someone's notion of "harassment" is so broad as to make it impossible to express a particular factual claim without engaging in "harassment", I'd say they're not complaining in good faith.
It's OK to argue that a particular delivery of a factual claim constitutes harassment (e.g. if the delivery is peppered with slurs). But the complainer should always be able to re-express the factual claim in a way that makes it no longer "harassment" to them.