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The Slow Death of the University

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Re: The Slow Death of the University

#91

Post by click170 »

derefr wrote: post #86
click170 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When specifically did you gain the right to not be offended? As far as I'm aware, nobody has any such right. If you don't like what someone is saying, walk away.

Not being offended , and not entering a dissociative fugue state and shaking and screaming and muttering for 30 minutes and quite disrupting the speech in the process, are very different things. PTSD is not Tumblr-fairy disease; it's the thing you get from being interned in a POW camp or locked in someone's sex dungeon for months/years. People do have a right to avoid reliving that sort of experience. Which, like I s…

To clarify, I didn't mean to disagree with you about the severity or suffering of PTSD patients.

> PTSD is not Tumblr-fairy disease; it's the thing you get from being interned in a POW camp or locked in someone's sex dungeon for months/years. People do have a right to avoid reliving that sort of experience.

It doesn't even take something that severe, I have a friend who was working at a convenience store at the time when he got PTSD after going through two robberies in two nights, both times from people he knew. My understanding is that PTSD is triggered by episodes of severe, debilitating stress.

PTSD sufferers deserve the freedom of not reliving those episodes, and there are treatments available to help them. They don't have to avoid going to university altogether, they don't even have to wait until they're better thanks to the many online education options available these days.

> But making an allowance for rape survivors to leave the room when there's going to be a live screening of Salò isn't all that hard, is it?

Perhaps there was a miscommunication, but I agree with you on that. That's what I meant in my previous comment when I said 'if you don't like what someone is saying, walk away'.

Re: The Slow Death of the University

#92

Post by grayclhn »

paganel wrote: post #70
ForHackernews wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the risk of being overly confrontational, the things that make humanities people believe that they are capable of critical thinking (in contrast to STEM types) are comments like yours. > Just at the beginning of the article he states that humanities are only good for rich students to pass their time Where in the article does the author state or imply this? The section beginning "When I first came to Oxford 30 year…

> Universities, which in Britain have an 800-year history, have traditionally been derided as ivory towers, and there was always some truth in the accusation. (...) Across the globe, that critical distance is now being diminished almost to nothing, as the institutions that produced Erasmus and John Milton, Einstein and Monty Python, capitulate to the hard-faced priorities of global capitalism. I never looked at Oxfor…

> I never looked at Oxford people with the same eyes again after reading Giordano Bruno's works and about how the professors in there treated him.

Dude, you are going to be bummed when you find out how the rest of humanity has treated everyone

Re: The Slow Death of the University

#93

Post by derefr »

reality_czech wrote: post #87
derefr wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not being offended , and not entering a dissociative fugue state and shaking and screaming and muttering for 30 minutes and quite disrupting the speech in the process, are very different things. PTSD is not Tumblr-fairy disease; it's the thing you get from being interned in a POW camp or locked in someone's sex dungeon for months/years. People do have a right to avoid reliving that sort of experience. Which, like I s…

Yes, they are very different things, which is why you are arguing against a strawman. You know perfectly well that letting someone voice his conservative political opinions is not going to trigger PTSD. Pretending to be offended in order to stop the debate is the left's version of invoking terrorism in ridiculous contexts. The biggest irony, which you probably can't even see, is that your own comment is an example of…

I... didn't claim to hate anything? I was making an argument that some people will get sick from some speech. It's a medical issue, and there are several solutions. I'm not sure you read my comment charitably.

Now, I'm not from the US, haven't been to a university for quite some years, and so am not personally experienced with what these "safe zones" are about in practice, the politics surrounding them, etc.—but I was trying to say that, if they had any justification at all as a theoretical construct, it was in giving people with PTSD a way to get away from "broadcast all over campus" things like graduation speeches, if and when a planned speech is found to have content that might trigger specific kinds of traumatic stress attacks.

Not because it might offend someone. Not with voluntary ability to leave for any reason one might like. Just a medical excuse from attendance, like a person with acrophobia would get from a field trip to the roof of a skyscraper.

And again, even then, it might be better for those people to just leave the university campus, or avoid coming in the first place.

Re: The Slow Death of the University

#94

Post by xienze »

derefr wrote: post #79
protomyth wrote: post #46

"It would also seek to restore the honorable lineage of the university as one of the few arenas in modern society (another is the arts) in which prevailing ideologies can be submitted to some rigorous scrutiny." Then the battle is lost, because universities, at least in the USA, are the home of "free speech areas" and not letting people speak who a group disagrees with. When people are talking about "safe areas" to p…

> When people are talking about "safe areas" to protect students from words spoken by a speaker, then criticism is dead. I understand what you're getting at, but some people really do have PTSD, and some speeches really do contain things like graphic recountings of abuse. Should those people just not attend university? (I'm actually undecided.)

> I understand what you're getting at, but some people really do have PTSD, and some speeches really do contain things like graphic recountings of abuse. Should those people just not attend university?

Perhaps don't attend that speech then? Life at a university doesn't involve dodging "pro rape" speeches blasted over the PA system multiple times a day.

The recent article about the "safe spaces" full of coloring books and toys notes that people were fleeing to those rooms simply because _someone was on campus giving a speech that challenged their beliefs / "triggered" them_. If universities are catering to folks that simply can't handle the thought of someone with a conflicting viewpoint talking on campus then the ideals of the university truly are dead.

Re: The Slow Death of the University

#95

Post by eli_gottlieb »

ForHackernews wrote: post #49
marcosdumay wrote: post #23

What's it with humanities people that make them believe that only them, of all people, are able to do critical thinking? Anyway, the author is part of the problem. Just at the beginning of the article he states that humanities are only good for rich students to pass their time. Until the professors themselves stop thinking this way, no government will prioritize them. (And no, I don't agree that humanities are useles…

At the risk of being overly confrontational, the things that make humanities people believe that they are capable of critical thinking (in contrast to STEM types) are comments like yours. > Just at the beginning of the article he states that humanities are only good for rich students to pass their time Where in the article does the author state or imply this? The section beginning "When I first came to Oxford 30 year…

>Again, where in the article does the author suggest this course of action? If anything, he seems to be suggesting the opposite, that the humanities should be returned to their traditional place in the public square, questioning and criticizing the prevailing ideologies of the day:

Ok. Questioning and criticizing on which grounds? Either there's a right thing to do, and anyone informed can point out that the public is ignoring it (in which case, universities are useful for such), or, as the humanities academics tend to say these days, there is no right answer, in which case they really have given up grounds for criticism.

What I'm bloody fed up with their doing is claiming the sole ground to make normative claims, and then asserting no such claims at all!

Re: The Slow Death of the University

#96

Post by derefr »

click170 wrote: post #91
derefr wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not being offended , and not entering a dissociative fugue state and shaking and screaming and muttering for 30 minutes and quite disrupting the speech in the process, are very different things. PTSD is not Tumblr-fairy disease; it's the thing you get from being interned in a POW camp or locked in someone's sex dungeon for months/years. People do have a right to avoid reliving that sort of experience. Which, like I s…

To clarify, I didn't mean to disagree with you about the severity or suffering of PTSD patients. > PTSD is not Tumblr-fairy disease; it's the thing you get from being interned in a POW camp or locked in someone's sex dungeon for months/years. People do have a right to avoid reliving that sort of experience. It doesn't even take something that severe, I have a friend who was working at a convenience store at the time…

> That's what I meant in my previous comment when I said 'if you don't like what someone is saying, walk away'.

Ah. See, I figured that with something like a graduation speech, 'just walking away' might be a bit fraught:

- First, you won't know what the content is until you're already there and hearing the things that could be PTSD-triggering, and by that point you already might be mentally "gone" and unable to escape; it would be preferrable to catch such things before then, which is what all that "Trigger Warning: pictures of torture" stuff is about;

- And second, things like grad speeches are usually put on loudspeakers and carried along across the internal campus PA and video-channel to PA speakers and TVs in various places, etc. It's hard to get away from such a thing, even when warned that it will contain something that might trigger your condition, especially if your life is effectively isolated to the campus (you live in the dorms, etc.)

It was under those two requirements that I saw the idea of a "safe space" as being possibly useful: it gives such people a place to go where they know the content won't follow them.

Under any other conditions, it's a horrible idea. :)

Re: The Slow Death of the University

#97

Post by xkcd-sucks »

bilbo0s wrote: post #58
marcosdumay wrote: post #23

What's it with humanities people that make them believe that only them, of all people, are able to do critical thinking? Anyway, the author is part of the problem. Just at the beginning of the article he states that humanities are only good for rich students to pass their time. Until the professors themselves stop thinking this way, no government will prioritize them. (And no, I don't agree that humanities are useles…

"...What's it with humanities people that make them believe that only them, of all people, are able to do critical thinking?..." The same thing that is with everyone else. If you look around our societies today it seems almost a matter of course that the first argument deployed in any debate is a dismissal of the opposing view holder's ability to think critically. Not to put too fine a point on it... but you can see…

Reasoning in "humanities" needs to be internally consistent, i.e. to sound good. Reasoning in "sciences" needs to be externally consistent, i.e. consistent with the "observable reality" of the "natural world."

Of course, "humanities people" are in the business of programming human beings, which is pretty useful for getting things done.

Re: The Slow Death of the University

#98

Post by ams6110 »

derefr wrote: post #96
click170 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To clarify, I didn't mean to disagree with you about the severity or suffering of PTSD patients. > PTSD is not Tumblr-fairy disease; it's the thing you get from being interned in a POW camp or locked in someone's sex dungeon for months/years. People do have a right to avoid reliving that sort of experience. It doesn't even take something that severe, I have a friend who was working at a convenience store at the time…

> That's what I meant in my previous comment when I said 'if you don't like what someone is saying, walk away'. Ah. See, I figured that with something like a graduation speech, 'just walking away' might be a bit fraught: - First, you won't know what the content is until you're already there and hearing the things that could be PTSD-triggering, and by that point you already might be mentally "gone" and unable to escap…

Are we not really reaching here with the graduation speech examples? Every graduation speech I've heard has been little more than encouraging platitudes. Hardly likely to trigger PTSD. When was the last time graphic torture or rape was recounted in a graduation speech?

Re: The Slow Death of the University

#99

Post by russellallen »

AngrySkillzz wrote: post #76
eternauta3k wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So law is in a way programming?

It's writing (legal) code that you can run on judges.

Lol.

For most lawyers out drafting contracts, we're still in the days of mainframes. We write code by hand which will probably never be run on a real judge, but we hope we haven't made any bugs.

Re: The Slow Death of the University

#100

Post by derefr »

ams6110 wrote: post #98
derefr wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's what I meant in my previous comment when I said 'if you don't like what someone is saying, walk away'. Ah. See, I figured that with something like a graduation speech, 'just walking away' might be a bit fraught: - First, you won't know what the content is until you're already there and hearing the things that could be PTSD-triggering, and by that point you already might be mentally "gone" and unable to escap…

Are we not really reaching here with the graduation speech examples? Every graduation speech I've heard has been little more than encouraging platitudes. Hardly likely to trigger PTSD. When was the last time graphic torture or rape was recounted in a graduation speech?

I guess I am reaching. But like I said, I'm looking for a "steelman argument"[1] in favor of the idea of a "safe zone"—a worst-case one-off emergency scenario where it might be warranted to have one.

If we can agree that it's warranted in that case, then it becomes a matter of agreeing exactly when it becomes unwarranted—which is a much more fact-based debate to have than one where one side just shouts "Freedom of Speech!" and the other side just shouts "Freedom from Persecution!" and neither side believes the other's bullshit one iota.

[1] http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Steel_man

(Also, I think this is the most I've ever been downvoted for speaking in the classical hacker-vulnerability-probing "but what if a tornado of Hitlers hit the school?" style on HN. I'm not even using any inflammatory language or anything, whereas all the replies to me are acting as if I was some social-justice type spouting off about "my right to not hear some white cis male talk about the time he went to Vegas" or somesuch. It's interesting; is this one of those "if you try to take an orthogonal position then you're supporting neither side, so both sides see you as supporting their opponent and hate you" effects?)

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