121–130 of 520 posts
Fascinating. I would call this another indicator of qualitative change in the cancel phenomenon. "Classic" cancel culture was driven by highly informed activists, who in this case would've known race-agnostic acceptance benefits Asian people and is at best neutral toward white people if not harmful. Today's mobs are obviously not being led by people of the same caliber.
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Having read the article, that seems like a nonsense take. Care to explain?
Mounk is famous for writing exactly this piece, over and over again, with only the names changed. As long as the person getting “canceled” is in some way conservative, Yascha Mounk (and Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi) will be there to write this article.
How do we neuter the power of Twitter mobs? Seems like they can bully and intimidate any organization from universities to corporations to GitHub projects to kowtow to their demands. Their demands are usually to fire, boycott, or boot people with opinions that run afoul of the mob. Not a healthy precedent to set. We will regret this later if we continue down this path.
It is time for talented teenagers to stop going to illiberal institutions. Consider getting your education at a place with values you can respect. Mission-driven schools: this is your moment.
Difficult for me to imagine some sort of "mission driven school", especially advertised as a counterpoint to elite University cancel culture, didn't just turn into just as much of an illiberal institution, but just with a hard right/conservative bias.
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Popularity absolutely does not impact the logical correctness of an argument: an argument is true by virtue of its own structure, if you say popularity somehow affects its correctness you've basically jettisoned logic in favour of subjective opinion. At best popularity serves as a useful heuristic for when you don't have the means to carefully confirm the correctness yourself. (There is a fairly uninteresting special…
Is it so surprising that useful heuristics might be used in lieu of careful thinking for a short mass media essay?
As a concrete example: wikipedia has a long list of common but incorrect beliefs, all of which one should not be surprised to hear being said but will remain incorrect regardless.
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The power they have isn’t over us, it’s over institutions and businesses who seem to bend to the will of the mob. I’d like to see some data on whether a Twitter storm in a teacup has any measurable negative consequences for a typical large organization, and whether they need to listen as often as they do.
The more decoupled an organization's or its leaders' incentives are from the "market" - the more risk averse they become. Everything is about keeping your head down and avoiding controversy. The goal for many orgs now is not to make customers happy anymore, it's to avoid the ire of a small group, and keep rent seeking. As we move towards post-capitalism this will only get worse.
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> How do we neuter the power of Twitter mobs? Stop listening to them? EDIT: That's especially effective since the Twitter mobs keep moving targets every couple of weeks anyway. They don't have any patience.
The power they have isn’t over us, it’s over institutions and businesses who seem to bend to the will of the mob. I’d like to see some data on whether a Twitter storm in a teacup has any measurable negative consequences for a typical large organization, and whether they need to listen as often as they do.
https://www.newsweek.com/diversity-problem-campus-opinion-16...
The guy also made a godwin claim about race and college admissions earlier in his career, so its probably fair to say that no matter how insightful any of your research is on climate change no one wants to give you the platform because your comprehension of social sciences is antithetical to the reason we care about climate change in the first place.
If you tolerate this, then your children will be next....
My children are at no risk of having their MIT speaking gigs canceled because of their public positions on race-influenced admissions policies.
How do we neuter the power of Twitter mobs? Seems like they can bully and intimidate any organization from universities to corporations to GitHub projects to kowtow to their demands. Their demands are usually to fire, boycott, or boot people with opinions that run afoul of the mob. Not a healthy precedent to set. We will regret this later if we continue down this path.
Vote in or appoint new leaders who do not give a damn about them. May backfire if too callous people are the winners. Another method, create a formal method for processing complaints from Twitter that diverts the hateful energy from individuals towards a larger decision-making body. Let us say that a random 24 people jury of MIT peers had to decide by secret ballot whether the researcher in question gets approved or…
The one question I have here is whether the average member of MIT faculty would now thing that an anti-affirmative action essay would be beyond the pale. It doesn't seem too surprising to me if 50%+1 members of such a committee would still vote to withdraw an invitation from this guy. But at least you would be defocusing the external outrage campaign a little, which does not seem like a bad thing.