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Mandated diversity statement drives Jonathan Haidt to quit academic society

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Re: Mandated diversity statement drives Jonathan Haidt to quit academic society

#641

Post by ajdegol »

hackerlight wrote: post #360
pessimizer wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, they also need a platform to make people aware of their existence, their views, and to recast their censorship to be in their favour. The whole point of no-platforming individuals is to make a statement that their views are seen as reprehensible and to stop them from being able to air those views to an audience. The only way that this works is to exert total control of the content of all communications. Otherwi…

Quoted post unavailable.

Censorship is not the best disinfectant at all;it had a fundamental issue: who decides what should be censored.

Now you and I, hey we know what’s good and morale so that’d be fine. But when it’s someone else who is in control, as it will be, then the “wrong” things get censored.

Re: Mandated diversity statement drives Jonathan Haidt to quit academic society

#642

Post by akomtu »

pas wrote: post #489
HyperSane wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ibram X Kendi does.

I haven't read anything from him (except that one line, I assume, you quoted a few comments back), but now I'm interested. Can you cite the relevant parts?

His name is Ibram Rogers Kendi, and under this name he has published books that make his "anti-racism" a moderate view. He's switched to this X pseudonym to make readers forget what kind of extremist he had been.

Re: Mandated diversity statement drives Jonathan Haidt to quit academic society

#643

Post by bluescrn »

naasking wrote: post #615
yummypaint wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once one realizes that tolerance follows the model of a peace treaty rather than a moral precept, these apparent dilemmas resolve themselves. Treaties only protect parties who abide by their terms. There is no contradiction in being intolerant of intolerance.

> There is no contradiction in being intolerant of intolerance. There is, because literally every viewpoint is an implicit repudiation of some set of values, ie. aka intolerance. The whole point of tolerance is the recognition of this fact and that resolving such differences requires dialogue (edit: resolving them without violence that is). As Popper said, only those views that directly incite violence or cannot be k…

> As Popper said, only those views that directly incite violence or cannot be kept in check by public opinion should be silenced

But these days, it's become commonplace to equate words (or sometimes even silence) with violence.

Re: Mandated diversity statement drives Jonathan Haidt to quit academic society

#644

Post by ponow »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #599
brightball wrote: post #572

He’s right to do so. Statements that your research must be presented with a filter based on how it will advance political goals calls into question the integrity of all research. When people don’t “trust the science” this will be why. But further, I’d never seen the statement from antiracist before…wow. The idea that the only cure for discrimination is discrimination is akin to saying the only cure for violence is vi…

> The cure for discrimination is forgiveness. Too handwavy, the cure for discrimination is at the very minimum adequate public funding for primary and secondary education _everywhere_ (with adequate student to teacher ratios _everywhere_). Although the discussion is at NYU this problem is not limited to the US. The issue with this and other societal problems is that state governance is operated in 4 year cycles (much…

> the cure for discrimination is at the very minimum adequate public funding for primary and secondary education _everywhere_

So how does increasing the funding of poor white students advance Kendi's "anti-racist" program, precisely?

Clearly there's no logical link between the two concepts of discrimination and government school funding, at best a historical one and where I live, government schools get way more funding per pupil ($10k more) than private school tuition. But that doesn't make the government schools good, as a rule.

Re: Mandated diversity statement drives Jonathan Haidt to quit academic society

#645

Post by ovao »

gadflyinyoureye wrote: post #542
hackerlight wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this relevant to the question of whether censorship is effective?

Because one measure of effectiveness can be equality of application.

Another measure might be the extent to which it leads to an unequal distribution of knowledge. Censorship can be seen as means of preventing misinformation, and sometimes quite effective at that, but a potential negative byproduct is limiting the output of (interpretable) factual information.

Re: Mandated diversity statement drives Jonathan Haidt to quit academic society

#646

Post by rhaksw »

jdlshore wrote: post #400
rhaksw wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, I like the voting system on social media because it surfaces good comments. But I don't like when the vote ranks stifle good retorts, which is what has now happened here. Logged out users won't see this entire thread of replies because the comment to which you are replying is marked "dead". What's the solution?

If you have sufficient HN karma, you can click the time stamp and then the “vouch” link. It will bring the comment back from the dead.

Thanks, I did so in this case, though in general I'm wary of that button. The system could count against me if I "vouch" for something that people later downvote. We don't knowfor sure what happens because they don't tell us how it works.

Re: Mandated diversity statement drives Jonathan Haidt to quit academic society

#647

Post by beowulfey »

meowtimemania wrote: post #630
beowulfey wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me try again. You receive three resumes for a job application, for three humans of three different races. They have the exact same credentials. You immediately assume one of the three is the brightest of them, because your understanding of Affirmative Action Policies says this particular race has the highest likelihood of having higher overall test scores. One of the other two could have had the highest possible…

I think what GP said was logical. Imagine Harvard has 3 entrance criteria, and the criteria a student receives depends on the first letter of their first name: * A name: must be in top 1% of test scores * B name: must be in top 5% of test scores * C name: must be in top 10% of test scores The following 3 students are admitted: * Allison (is in top 1%) * Brian (is in top 4%) * Caitlin (is in top 1%) We can only safely…

Yes, I understand that affirmative action can have this consequence. I am not arguing for or against affirmative action. I am pointing out that it should not matter whether someone has an A, B, or C name when applications are being triaged. Because Allison, Brian and Caitlin all have the same credentials, they should be viewed as equally likely candidates.

Making assumptions about them based on probabilities is exactly the problem here, and it is one that we can easily avoid.

Re: Mandated diversity statement drives Jonathan Haidt to quit academic society

#648

Post by ponow »

sweetheart wrote: post #604
brightball wrote: post #572

He’s right to do so. Statements that your research must be presented with a filter based on how it will advance political goals calls into question the integrity of all research. When people don’t “trust the science” this will be why. But further, I’d never seen the statement from antiracist before…wow. The idea that the only cure for discrimination is discrimination is akin to saying the only cure for violence is vi…

> The only way anything stops is for people to have the humility and wisdom to say “this will stop with me.” You mean like when people decide to highlight issues with diversity and representation in academia by requiring it to be addressed?

Representation is a significant goal post move past equality of opportunity. Typically what is meant is that unequal representation is evidence of discrimination. Academia has bent over backwards for a long time now to attempt to admit people of all groups. Blaming academia's admission and hiring processes for the numbers not being the way representationalists would prefer completely ignores the practices of decades.

Re: Mandated diversity statement drives Jonathan Haidt to quit academic society

#649

Post by BurningFrog »

curioushacking wrote: post #465

My understand for how we measure systemic racism issues seems to typically be predicated on assumed outcomes. For example that if the distribution of employees race does not match the general population then there must be a systemic cause for this. What I don’t understand is why that is assumed true. If we want to encourage many different cultures to live together wouldn’t it naturally make sense that different cultu…

> if the distribution of employees race does not match the general population then there must be a systemic cause for this.

A foundational belief here is that correlation is causation!

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