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

Proposed Free Expression Statement for MIT

president.mit.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 124 posts

Re: Proposed Free Expression Statement for MIT

#51

Post by RHSeeger »

stickyricky wrote: post #36
RHSeeger wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Given the choice between "let everyone speak even if someone might be lying" and "let only approved speakers speak even if the approval process may be corrupt", I'll take the former pretty much every time. While I tend to agree with this sentiment, it's worth noting that it takes orders of magnitude more effort to fight against lies and misinformation than it does to create them. As such, letting everyone say whate…

> it's worth noting that it takes orders of magnitude more effort to fight against lies and misinformation than it does to create them How could this possibly be true. If that were the case then you could simply lie to a person until they accept a more reasonable position. Instead of using facts and evidence to support your position just lie to them and make stuff up. The fact that you cling to evidence in your argum…

To give a minor example of this...

You want to get people to vote for your candidate. So you create social media posts saying the opponent voted against funds that would go to veterans. You don't need to look anything up, you just need to create the post. It's almost certainly true, because EVERY candidate has done this. However, it's extremely misleading...

Your opponent wants to make sure people understand the truth. The truth is that there were several bills that would fund veterans with a small amount of money, but they were all "add-ons" to other bills that did major things that the candidate did not approve of (for example, something like saying no state may provide a drivers license to anyone that is an ex-con). Now, in order make sure people understand the truth, you have to find the cases where the candidate in question voted against money for veterans, explain what the situation behind it was, and why there was "something bigger to consider" in each case.

Vs you, who only had to create a simple post.

The level of effort is in no way balanced.

Re: Proposed Free Expression Statement for MIT

#52

Post by yanderekko »

RHSeeger wrote: post #23
yanderekko wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The words you use are dangerously vague and you aren't calling for observable, thoughtful standards. Which of course is arguably the point. There's just another type of "bad faith actor" who is lurking in the shadows with these arguments: Someone who wants to leverage censorship against disfavored viewpoints regardless of their truth value. Given the choice between "let everyone speak even if someone might be lying"…

> Given the choice between "let everyone speak even if someone might be lying" and "let only approved speakers speak even if the approval process may be corrupt", I'll take the former pretty much every time. While I tend to agree with this sentiment, it's worth noting that it takes orders of magnitude more effort to fight against lies and misinformation than it does to create them. As such, letting everyone say whate…

Even if this were true, insinuating that this necessitates that we need a Ministry of Truth to create diktats for us is pure Nirvana Fallacy. Platforms have been experimenting with all sorts of mechanisms to combat misinformation that do not involve the naked suppression of "harmful" perspectives, thankfully.

Re: Proposed Free Expression Statement for MIT

#53

Post by tablespoon »

stickyricky wrote: post #50
tablespoon wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> it's worth noting that it takes orders of magnitude more effort to fight against lies and misinformation than it does to create them > How could this possibly be true. If that were the case then you could simply lie to a person until they accept a more reasonable position. Instead of using facts and evidence to support your position just lie to them and make stuff up. The fact that you cling to evidence in your ar…

You have reduced my capacity for action and I am disengaging from this conversation. Because of this thread I no longer recognize Plate Tectonics and now believe in Expanding Earth Theory.

> You have reduced my capacity for action and I am disengaging from this conversation. Because of this thread I no longer recognize Plate Tectonics and now believe in Expanding Earth Theory.

That didn't come off as clever, BTW.

Re: Proposed Free Expression Statement for MIT

#54

Post by spywaregorilla »

roenxi wrote: post #44
spywaregorilla wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that would be heretical, which is a different concept. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_faith

Socrates claimed that he was not, in fact, corrupting the youth. Given that a group of Athenians then found him guilty of that to the point where he felt obliged to kill himself it seems fairly likely that his peers suspected him of arguing in bad faith. A bad-faith heretic! Double the crimes that I initially thought. Maybe we do need to keep his dangerous ilk out of universities, he would no doubt have been harshly…

> None of this "oh no he's got bad faith!" stuff that is trotted out for politics. Argue about the outcomes of policies, not the unobservable mental state of the people putting the policies.

I don't think you understand the difference in these two concepts. You can "corrupt the youth" without resorting to bad faith arguments. This quote of yours makes no sense.

Re: Proposed Free Expression Statement for MIT

#55

Post by customkitchen »

tablespoon wrote: post #40
yucky wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand, if he wrote an op-ed uncovering racial discrimination in academia, why would people who are (presumably) against racial discrimination want to cancel his lecture?

Quoted post unavailable.

If by "the DEI people" you mean "students who were only able to be there because someone made a conscious effort to do diversity outreach" then yes. They would be opposed to someone suggesting that they should stop the outreach so that people like them could no longer be there.

His piece (you can read it here: https://www.newsweek.com/diversity-problem-campus-opinion-16...) is more of the same intellectually dismissive rhetoric that we've seen a thousand times before. As usual it's got all the same nonsensical discriminatory suggestions that don't actually help people, like "support charter schools" and "we should use a process based on merit and qualifications alone" and "we should build a system that uses merit and qualifications alone but is also unbiased". And just for fun he suggests at the end that any university even considering how to approach race issues is somehow comparable to nazism. This is just bad writing, I don't blame the students for being upset. Have you noticed how very few students who are actually underprivileged would ever share these views?

Re: Proposed Free Expression Statement for MIT

#56

Post by stickyricky »

RHSeeger wrote: post #51
stickyricky wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's worth noting that it takes orders of magnitude more effort to fight against lies and misinformation than it does to create them How could this possibly be true. If that were the case then you could simply lie to a person until they accept a more reasonable position. Instead of using facts and evidence to support your position just lie to them and make stuff up. The fact that you cling to evidence in your argum…

To give a minor example of this... You want to get people to vote for your candidate. So you create social media posts saying the opponent voted against funds that would go to veterans. You don't need to look anything up, you just need to create the post. It's almost certainly true, because EVERY candidate has done this. However, it's extremely misleading... Your opponent wants to make sure people understand the trut…

> When are you going to be affected by this theory? Are you swayed by lies and misinformation? Do you cling to beliefs in the face of fact and evidence? Are you undeserving of the right to speak because of it?

Re: Proposed Free Expression Statement for MIT

#57

Post by buescher »

Zigurd wrote: post #12
neilv wrote: post #9

One of my favorite incidents involving free speech happened several years ago, and had an MIT connection. Some alt-right people organized a big so-called "Free Speech Rally" in Boston, perhaps as a Trump-emboldened show of force, or publicity effort. But a massive number of counter -demonstrators turned out (including many students and staff from MIT), dwarfing the alt-right people by orders of magnitude, and basical…

Are you implying the alt right employs bad faith trolling? Cry bullying? Way too often, free speech debates are hijacked to normalize a fascistic movement in American politics. The left is feckless because they don't think like Peter Thiel or Steve Bannon. Certainly there are days when the mass of normal opinion outweighs the straussian tactics of the right because the position of the right has gone ridiculously too…

> Way too often, free speech debates are hijacked to normalize a fascistic movement in American politics.

The fun thing about this statement is that it's just as true, but much more clear, if you consider "fascistic" to be "anything to the right of Angela Davis".

Re: Proposed Free Expression Statement for MIT

#58

Post by RHSeeger »

stickyricky wrote: post #56
RHSeeger wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To give a minor example of this... You want to get people to vote for your candidate. So you create social media posts saying the opponent voted against funds that would go to veterans. You don't need to look anything up, you just need to create the post. It's almost certainly true, because EVERY candidate has done this. However, it's extremely misleading... Your opponent wants to make sure people understand the trut…

> When are you going to be affected by this theory? Are you swayed by lies and misinformation? Do you cling to beliefs in the face of fact and evidence? Are you undeserving of the right to speak because of it?

I am generally not affected by this type of lie/misinformation, because I specifically look for it. That's not to say I'm never affected by it, just that I keep an eye out for that type of thing.

But I know for a fact that people I know and care about _are_ affected by it, and on a regular basis. Plus it's used to sway people I don't know, and those people vote. And I find it concerning that they will base their vote on incorrect information.

Re: Proposed Free Expression Statement for MIT

#59

Post by superb-owl »

akomtu wrote: post #32
tablespoon wrote: post #19

> We saw this last fall with the wide range of views around the Carlson lecture. If anyone else was wondering what was being referenced above, I'm guessing it's this: https://thetech.com/2021/10/14/carlson-lecture-cancellation : > Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) Department Head Robert van der Hilst canceled the department’s annual John Carlson Lecture due to controversy surrounding the invited speak…

"University of Pisa has canceled the Prof. Galileo's lecture on celestial bodies due to the controversy surrounding his views on heliocentrism, after continued protests by the students who reject the unholy idea that the planet they live on isn't the center of the Universe. Department of Heresy and Inquisition has temporarily suspended Galileo and referred him to Church."

This is a false equivalence. Galileo was concerned with physical fact, whereas this professor's controversial opinions are sociological and fairly subjective--they boil down to a value judgement.

That's not to condemn (or defend) the professor. This just isn't a fair characterization of the debate.

Re: Proposed Free Expression Statement for MIT

#60

Post by RHSeeger »

yanderekko wrote: post #52
RHSeeger wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Given the choice between "let everyone speak even if someone might be lying" and "let only approved speakers speak even if the approval process may be corrupt", I'll take the former pretty much every time. While I tend to agree with this sentiment, it's worth noting that it takes orders of magnitude more effort to fight against lies and misinformation than it does to create them. As such, letting everyone say whate…

Even if this were true, insinuating that this necessitates that we need a Ministry of Truth to create diktats for us is pure Nirvana Fallacy. Platforms have been experimenting with all sorts of mechanisms to combat misinformation that do not involve the naked suppression of "harmful" perspectives, thankfully.

Oh, I'm with you on this point. I was merely pointing out that "let everyone speak their minds however they want and the truth will come out" is not realistic.
Post reply on HN