Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Medical Student banished from UVA campus for questioning Microaggressions

reason.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 81 posts

Re: Medical Student banished from UVA campus for questioning Microaggressions

#61

Post by rpdillon »

adamcstephens wrote: post #55
kenneth wrote: post #18

Since apparently reason.com gets flagged — I submitted the original lawsuit text which cannot possibly be a biased source. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26737077

I missed the source on this and thought it said Reuters, but partway through I had to look back up because the bias was over there top. Only then did I realize it was Reason which explained the clearly one sided writing I had just read. For example there is no evidence presented that shows he remained calm, yet it was clearly stated that he did multiple times. While I have no reason to doubt it, I have no reason to t…

I sensed the same one-sidedness in the writing. Fortunately, they link to the recording, which I highly recommend listening to if you're curious about all the nuances that can come through at the time that get missed in summaries.

https://soundcloud.com/user-381804527/microagressions-presen...

The relevant bit starts around 28:40 or so.

Re: Medical Student banished from UVA campus for questioning Microaggressions

#62

Post by hellisothers »

silicon2401 wrote: post #59
dsnr wrote: post #2

> On November 26, this suggestion became a mandate: The student was informed that he must be evaluated by psychological services before returning to classes. You know that something’s wrong when someone is forced to be psychologically evaluated for asking uncomfortable questions. This entire story looks like something straight out of a dystopia.

The recent cultural trend towards radical liberalism is inherently dystopian. Fighting free speech, mandating psychological evaluation for questioning the main narrative. These are things that dictatorships and theocracies do

Is it necessarily radical liberalism that tends towards a dystopia? I was curious where this sentiment was coming from (I’ve read it elsewhere) and read some books on conservative philosophy (original post-enlightenment conservatism, not contemporary) and found it there too. It seemed like you could replace “radical liberalism” with “radical $ideology” including conservatism, the problem isn’t liberalism, it’s extremism.

Re: Medical Student banished from UVA campus for questioning Microaggressions

#63

Post by foldr »

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #50
dsnr wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There shouldn’t be any “sensitive” issues in a university context. These “universities” look more like re-education centers than educational institutions. All those “sensitive” issues are plain ideological ideas and some people want those ideas to prevail by suppressing all conversation around them.

I think the discussion about this already over, i.e. it's now a part of the social contract that we don't question certain things, not because they're true or false but because of social cost of challenging them. For example, we know that the distribution of certain psychological traits in both genders is a bit different, but discussing it - either in the social context or the academia - is more or less a taboo in or…

It's not actually taboo at all to discuss variation in psychological traits between genders. There are innumerable academic studies of gender differences in all kinds of domains. No-one, to any significant extent, is stopping these papers from being published, or calling for this kind of research to cease. Similarly, there are endless articles about gender differences in mainstream news publications.

What is controversial is using cherry-picked scientific results to tell just-so stories about why the gender distribution in certain fields is imbalanced.

The study on the facial features of criminals was criticized mainly for its shoddy methodology, not for being unethical (see e.g. https://www.callingbullshit.org/case_studies/case_study_crim...). Of course, people did point out that the research could have unethical applications – which strikes me as an obvious and fairly undeniable point. Your assertion that research of this nature is "forbidden" in the West is trivially refuted by googling: e.g. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/288373839.pdf https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3366989/

Re: Medical Student banished from UVA campus for questioning Microaggressions

#64

Post by imbnwa »

cedilla wrote: post #47
kenneth wrote: post #18

Since apparently reason.com gets flagged — I submitted the original lawsuit text which cannot possibly be a biased source. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26737077

The reason why I personally flagged this story is not because it is outrage porn – I think it obviously is, but that's not why I flagged it. I flagged it because it misrepresented the very source you now linked. Quote: > For the purposes of ruling on Defendants' motion to dismiss, the Court accepts as true the following allegations set forth in the amended complaint and attached exhibits. This court decision did not…

The very fact that this comment has to engage in a theatre of objectivity (I can't know if that's an honest misunderstanding or deception; the post in flagged on some technicality despite intuition) when it is very clear this post is outrage porn is PRECISELY why micro-aggressions are a problem without fully stating it: coded language.

Once coded language is on the table, there is absolutely no statement that can be decided as misunderstanding or deception, and thus the gaslighting retort of "you, the accuser, must be misunderstanding/projecting", but also, the prevalent fear amongst certain non-Black males that "people will just make something up to get me"/"I will be unprotected".

There's no satisfactory resolution to coded language in the legal domain because it is a purely ethical problem. The real problem in America isn't "them/the other side", its that no one, as far as I can tell, actually values or can actually imagine a world where we can and do live together without hegemony.

I'm very reminded of Neil DeGrasse Tyson arguing with Rogan on JRE about tourist litter in the Himalayas: you either value ending and cleaning-up the pollution, and all other solutions flow from this, or you don't. But everyone's just hand-waving the elephant in the room.

Re: Medical Student banished from UVA campus for questioning Microaggressions

#65

Post by TMWNN »

kangnkodos wrote: post #53
thinkingemote wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has happened before. Read The History Man by Bradbury. And what will happen is that being "politically unreasonable" will be unfashionable and the society will swing to an equilibrium once again. The extremists will leave or retire and the people who kept their heads down will say "they were a silly bunch". In the UK they were labelled "The Loony Left" and subject to much comedy. To suggest that it's either one…

@thinkingemote - Thanks for one of the best comments in this thread. Also, part of the way this swinging back to equilibrium will work is by the left tearing each other apart with more and more demands to just accept the liberal orthodoxy handed down from on high. At each step along the way, more and more people will pop out and realize that the whole thing is flawed because it is based on the Appeal to Authority log…

>Also, part of the way this swinging back to equilibrium will work is by the left tearing each other apart with more and more demands to just accept the liberal orthodoxy handed down from on high.

Already happening; see JK Rowling denounced as a "TERF", for example, despite having otherwise impeccable bien-pensant credentials.

Re: Medical Student banished from UVA campus for questioning Microaggressions

#67

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

foldr wrote: post #63
dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the discussion about this already over, i.e. it's now a part of the social contract that we don't question certain things, not because they're true or false but because of social cost of challenging them. For example, we know that the distribution of certain psychological traits in both genders is a bit different, but discussing it - either in the social context or the academia - is more or less a taboo in or…

It's not actually taboo at all to discuss variation in psychological traits between genders. There are innumerable academic studies of gender differences in all kinds of domains. No-one, to any significant extent, is stopping these papers from being published, or calling for this kind of research to cease. Similarly, there are endless articles about gender differences in mainstream news publications. What is controve…

There is a sea of difference between the Chinese paper and the other two you mentioned. The Chinese were very straightforward: can we identify facial traits that are more present in criminals? To a certain degree, they answer positively by saying there is a greater variation in facial traits in criminals than in the rest of the population. Of course there was a lot of criticism of their methodology (to which they answered [0]).

The first article you mentioned describes the bias of eyewitnesses related to stereotyped "criminal look". But the researchers are very clear: "Further research is needed to identify the features that are associated with the criminal stereotype and how they affect lineup decision processes. The specific elements associated with criminal face stereotypes have not yet been identified."

The second article deals with our interpretation of certain traits (which, in this case, are listed) and it's careful not to imply these traits are actually related to criminality. On the contrary: "such evaluations could inappropriately influence decision making in criminal identification lineups. Hence, additional research is needed to discover whether and how people can avoid making evaluations regarding criminality from a person’s facial appearance".

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.04135

Re: Medical Student banished from UVA campus for questioning Microaggressions

#68

Post by foldr »

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #67
foldr wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not actually taboo at all to discuss variation in psychological traits between genders. There are innumerable academic studies of gender differences in all kinds of domains. No-one, to any significant extent, is stopping these papers from being published, or calling for this kind of research to cease. Similarly, there are endless articles about gender differences in mainstream news publications. What is controve…

There is a sea of difference between the Chinese paper and the other two you mentioned. The Chinese were very straightforward: can we identify facial traits that are more present in criminals? To a certain degree, they answer positively by saying there is a greater variation in facial traits in criminals than in the rest of the population. Of course there was a lot of criticism of their methodology (to which they ans…

The Chinese paper is almost certainly wrong. A simple explanation for why other people aren't publishing the same claim is that it's both inherently implausible and unsupported by any of the available evidence. You can find plenty of equally kooky and potentially controversial papers published in Western countries. E.g. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095679761245146... Of course we can play a game where you keep denying that any example I give is exactly parallel to the paper you cited. However, I'm sure that if you do a few Google scholar searches you'll be able to find something that satisfies whatever criteria you have in mind.

Re: Medical Student banished from UVA campus for questioning Microaggressions

#69

Post by DanBC »

cwwc wrote: post #8

I so often wonder with pieces like this: what am I missing? I mean, it’s hard to believe this was so one-sided and that he was a little angel through it all. It could be, I suppose. And I am outraged if it is. But the question that keeps nagging me... is it?

Listening to his questions, and the way he's asking them, he's clearly trying to provoke.

"isn't it out of my control what hurts somebody? I can punch the air, and if that makes somebody mad it's not really my problem or my fault, but if I punch them in the face and it directly hurts them I've incited at them, it's completely different"

"Where are you getting this basis from? How are you studying this, how are you gathering evidence and making presentations on it?"

There are ways to ask guests for more information about their methodology, and he failed.

Also, his core point -- there's no difference between microaggressions and unintentional rudeness -- is fucking stupid. So what if there's no difference? Changing the name from micro-aggression to unintentional rudeness doesn't change anything about how we respond when they happen.

Re: Medical Student banished from UVA campus for questioning Microaggressions

#70

Post by oceanghost »

kenneth wrote: post #12
flyinglizard wrote: post #5

I’m afraid that when the pendulum of public perception inevitably swings away from this insanity, a lot of the social progress we’ve done on discourse and tolerance will be lost. If I’m reading this and saying “what these people are doing is evil, I’d like to affiliate with the opposite group of people”, I won’t have too many outlets that are not far right.

A big reason why the far-right grew is as a rejection of this insanity.

This is such an important point.

You can't tell people they're irredeemable racists and expect them to vote for you.

Post reply on HN