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Proposed Free Expression Statement for MIT

president.mit.edu

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Re: Proposed Free Expression Statement for MIT

#81

Post by naasking »

contrast wrote: post #68
tomcam wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These people are surprisingly easy to spot, by the way. Excellent. So let them say what they want and demolish them with reason instead of suppression.

Do you have any evidence to support your assertion here? It seems to me that promoting well practiced liars has rarely resulted in reasoned discussions. Nor does compelling people to promote bad faith actors seem to me anything other than another method of suppression. Compelled speech is not free speech. Let individuals and individual institutions apply some judgement, as if they were living, breathing human beings…

You've implicitly assumed that "hosting" implies "promoting". Rather, hosting liars is in fact the best way to expose their lies.

Re: Proposed Free Expression Statement for MIT

#82

Post by RHSeeger »

prottog wrote: post #79
RHSeeger wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Being worried that they will base their vote on incorrect information is really, really close to being worried that they will vote incorrectly, period. Very few things in politics are so cut and dry that there's one "correct" fact.

But there is a big difference between "voted against X because it was a minor add-on to a bill that was overwhelmingly bad" and "voted against X when it was the focus of a bill; because the candidate is against X". The post in question implies the later, when the former is the actual truth (in my example).

I'm not trying to say someone is voting "wrong", because voting is a matter of opinion. But one should be able to base their opinion on actual truth, not lies. At the end of the day, if their opinion is based on lies they have been told, then it's really no different than secretly switching out the labels on the candidates in the voting machine.

Re: Proposed Free Expression Statement for MIT

#83

Post by Manuel_D »

customkitchen wrote: post #80
Manuel_D wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're still not not getting the point Abbot is making. > They already tried to build a system that uses merit and qualifications alone, and the complaint is how doing that has led to extremely biased results. How did it produce "extremely biased results"? You're being vague here, but I suspect by "biased results" you mean they produced a racial (and perhaps gender) makeup you don't like. Abbot rejects the id…

>You're being vague here, but I suspect by "biased results" you mean they produced a racial (and perhaps gender) makeup you don't like. No, you are completely and utterly wrong on that. This is more of the same intellectually lazy assumptions, please stop this. And I get his point perfectly, it is still insulting and dismissive. When someone starts talking about school vouchers and "merit" in the context of this then…

> No, you are completely and utterly wrong on that. This is more of the same intellectually lazy assumptions, please stop this.

Then can you explain what was biased about an admissions process that does not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, and other identity characteristics, if it wasn't the demographics of the student body? It's still vague how a race-agnostic admissions process would be biased.

> The fact is, they already cannot accepts all students who pass based on academic merit alone. Your chart even demonstrates that is the case with Harvard, the issue is explicitly not that racial makeup is being considered over academic achievement.

I'm not sure how one arrives at this conclusion. An African American student in the 4th decile (as in, is scoring above 40% of students and below 60% of students) has the same chances at admission at an Asian student in the top decile. Even at that top of the academic performance an Asian applicant has a ~15% chance at admission while an African American student at the same academic performance has nearly a 60% chance at admission. There is nowhere near equal chances at admission between racial groups at the same academic performance.

The fact that they have many more qualified applicants doesn't make their admission practices any less discriminatory. If I have 500 qualified white applicants and 5,000 qualified Asian applicants and I admit 100 whites and 100 Asians have I not discriminated against Asians? Just because I'm picking both from the same qualified pool doesn't change the fact that I'm making a 10x disparity favoring whites.

Re: Proposed Free Expression Statement for MIT

#84

Post by prottog »

hirundo wrote: post #29
jonathanstrange wrote: post #6

One, perhaps the only, problem with freedom of speech in academia is that can be very actively exploited by bad faith actors, i.e., people who are not interested at all in truth and merely abuse the university system as a platform for furthering political goals and "whitewashing" their position. These people are surprisingly easy to spot, by the way. They often come from a non-academic background, have a party or "th…

People think they can easily identify bad faith, since they hear arguments that sound incomprehensible and assume no one could hold them in good faith. It is common to believe that large swaths of the population carry their convictions in bad faith. As a life long atheist I have suffered from this misconception. The idea of a god seems so absurd to me that I honestly don't understand how people can have faith in one.…

Exactly. One man's bad faith actor is another's torchbearer. I personally know some reasonable people who would call AOC a bad faith actor, and also some other reasonable people who would call Tom Cotton a bad faith actor; it's glib to say that they are easily identifiable and widely agreed upon as such.

Re: Proposed Free Expression Statement for MIT

#85

Post by jaywalk »

redeux wrote: post #73
jaywalk wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The DC v. Heller decision meant that there always had been an individual right to bear arms in the US, and that laws against it were unconstitutional. It's an important distinction.

That’s a revisionist perspective, even if it’s one that’s held by the court to justify their decision and set a new precedent. Previous SCOTUS rulings found that there was a collective, not individual right to bear arms. That means despite the court insisting that it didn’t just create a right from thin air, history disagrees. By the logic you proposed, in any decision SCOTUS makes they can state that this is the way…

And by your logic, once a SCOTUS decision is made it can never be revisited.

Every 2A decision is interpreting the same, unchanged text. So any decision that goes against a previous one by definition means they believe the previous decision was incorrect. The fact that it was interpreted as a collective right before Heller doesn't mean that it was a collective right. It's just how the court (incorrectly) chose to interpret it in the past.

Re: Proposed Free Expression Statement for MIT

#86

Post by prottog »

redeux wrote: post #73
jaywalk wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The DC v. Heller decision meant that there always had been an individual right to bear arms in the US, and that laws against it were unconstitutional. It's an important distinction.

That’s a revisionist perspective, even if it’s one that’s held by the court to justify their decision and set a new precedent. Previous SCOTUS rulings found that there was a collective, not individual right to bear arms. That means despite the court insisting that it didn’t just create a right from thin air, history disagrees. By the logic you proposed, in any decision SCOTUS makes they can state that this is the way…

Supreme Court decisions can be wrong; it doesn't make later decisions "revisionist". Nobody would say Brown v. Board of Education created a right from thin air that disagrees with the history of Plessy v. Ferguson and Dred Scott v. Sanford and the historical fact behind those cases, or that Trump v. Hawaii revised the history of Korematsu v. United States and the historical fact behind it. The Supreme Court is just saying that the government has been doing things wrong this whole time.

I'm not sure why you feel that the Second Amendment is so clearly a matter of a collective right? If you read a sentence that said "A well stocked library being necessary to the education of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Books, shall not be infringed", you would say this is about the right of state-owned librarians to have books, and not the everyman?

Re: Proposed Free Expression Statement for MIT

#87

Post by AbrahamParangi »

superb-owl wrote: post #72
AbrahamParangi wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A fact not yet widely verified and an opinion cannot, in general, be distinguished

I disagree. We can judge the falsifiability of statements without knowing whether or not they're false. E.g. "red is a better color than blue" is obviously a subjective opinion, where as "ʻOumuamua is made of frozen nitrogen" is obviously a falsifiable statement.

Right, there are specific instances of opinions which cannot be verifiable facts, but the verifiability of a fact is not, in general, itself verifiable!

Re: Proposed Free Expression Statement for MIT

#88

Post by prottog »

nightpool wrote: post #38
zajio1am wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see that difference between these statements can be minimal for collectivists, who consider benefit of society as the most important value. But for individualists, the former does not implies the latter. It is more like: All X are good for nothing leaches on society, but their individual rights and freedom are inalienable and that is more important that their negative effect on society.

I can see where you're coming from theoretically, but at least in America, the vast majority of the people who complain about "leaches on society" are right-wing individualists. They see the undesirable elements as being supported by a welfare state and believe that without the welfare state, their "leaches" would die. It's a gross and dehumanizing view that absolutely abdicates any responsibility for society's role…

This is a gross and dehumanizing view because you built a gross and dehumanizing strawman. Do you connect on a personal level with American conservatives in real life? The many I know are compassionate people at an individual level, and you might argue better and have a better chance of convincing people of your viewpoint if you charitably[0] interpreted their position as something like: welfare benefits should be temporary (for those who are able to work and are looking, but are temporarily unemployed) and minimal (for those who either aren't capable of working or choose not to); welfare should not "pay" better than work; and the government should prove that the redistribution of wealth they enforce to pay for welfare is in fact doing what it set out to do, instead of creating a class of permanent welfare beneficiaries who could actually be gainfully employed instead.

Very few people are actually wanting "undesirable elements" to "die".

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity

Re: Proposed Free Expression Statement for MIT

#89

Post by prottog »

hirundo wrote: post #37
zajio1am wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see that difference between these statements can be minimal for collectivists, who consider benefit of society as the most important value. But for individualists, the former does not implies the latter. It is more like: All X are good for nothing leaches on society, but their individual rights and freedom are inalienable and that is more important that their negative effect on society.

People from the individualist perspective almost always argue for its overall social utility, that the benefits of invididual rights and freedoms have negative and positive social effects that net positive. I've never heard one (and I've heard many) argue that the net social effects are negative but that the policy is still preferrable.

I suppose nobody would argue that, but in practice it happens all the time, because the people who benefit from the policy aren't directly paying for the costs of those negative net social effects.

Re: Proposed Free Expression Statement for MIT

#90

Post by redeux »

prottog wrote: post #86
redeux wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a revisionist perspective, even if it’s one that’s held by the court to justify their decision and set a new precedent. Previous SCOTUS rulings found that there was a collective, not individual right to bear arms. That means despite the court insisting that it didn’t just create a right from thin air, history disagrees. By the logic you proposed, in any decision SCOTUS makes they can state that this is the way…

Supreme Court decisions can be wrong; it doesn't make later decisions "revisionist". Nobody would say Brown v. Board of Education created a right from thin air that disagrees with the history of Plessy v. Ferguson and Dred Scott v. Sanford and the historical fact behind those cases, or that Trump v. Hawaii revised the history of Korematsu v. United States and the historical fact behind it. The Supreme Court is just s…

You've mistaken my argument. If you follow the thread from the beginning, I'm merely using DC v. Heller as an example of how the court can set precedent to reinterpret a fundamental right under the constitution despite a 200+ year history of the opposite. This was in response to being told

> Hundreds of years of case law in the Anglosphere contradict your view

While that is true currently, it doesn't mean SCOTUS can't come along and decide things differently. It also doesn't change history if they were to do so.

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