The latest campus cancellation is different • Hacker News Board

Re: The latest campus cancellation is different

#241

Post by jensensbutton » Sun, Oct 10, 2021, 3:04 PM UTC

umvi wrote: post #3

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.

imo the issue is journalists living on Twitter. Journalists are becoming "creators" and trying to build their brands on social media like every else in an effort to parlay name recognition into more money/power.

How do you get more popular on Twitter? Well, you write (in an opinionated way) about Twitter controversies. This we are bombarded by news and articles that are primed to be controversial and that the majority of people in this country don't actually give a crap about.

Re: The latest campus cancellation is different

#242

Post by dang » Sun, Oct 10, 2021, 3:07 PM UTC

civilized wrote: post #111

creata wrote: post #92

Here's what seems to be a follow-up on an MIT webpage: https://orgchart.mit.edu/node/6/letters_to_community/importa... Edit: and for what it's worth, I think many people here are too easily stirred into a frenzy based on astonishingly little information about this incident.

The letter you link is quite clear: MIT doesn't want to hold a scientist up as a role model if progressive activists dislike him. This wouldn't have happened at University of Chicago.

Please don't break the site guidelines by going on about downvotes. Besides doing no good and making boring reading, it ends up being uncollected garbage when the original comment gets corrective upvotes, as yours has.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

Re: The latest campus cancellation is different

#243

Post by teddyh » Sun, Oct 10, 2021, 3:07 PM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #124

civilized wrote: post #61

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.

Trying to remember the source of the quote that basically says that whenever you try to open a "free speech" area to protect from illiberal witch hunts, you end up with a community of like 3 principled libertarians and ten thousand witches. 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…

The quote you are thinking of is from the Slate Star Codex article “Neutral vs. Conservative: The Eternal Struggle” https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservativ...

“The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.”

Re: The latest campus cancellation is different

#244

Post by CodeGlitch » Sun, Oct 10, 2021, 3:07 PM UTC

quadrifoliate wrote: post #109

CodeGlitch wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> made a Third Reich comparison while talking about admissions criteria, I'd be pretty opposed to the lecture going on. Why??

I'm thinking mostly like a business. Nazi comparisons are bad for business. If someone starts bringing up the Nazis in some obscure context during your pizza shop's pepperoni v/s margharita bake-off, what are you going to do? Best thing to do is to move on as quickly as possible, and kick out the person who made Nazi comparisons. Now I already concede, that perhaps this should not happen on a campus. Perhaps we shoul…

> Ninety years ago Germany had the best universities in the world. Then an ideological regime obsessed with race came to power and drove many of the best scholars out, gutting the faculties and leading to sustained decay that German universities never fully recovered from.

I'll highlight the important and relevant bit for you:

"ideological regime obsessed with race came to power and drove many of the best scholars out"

Sounds pretty much what is happening in US / UK Universities right now doesn't it?

Re: The latest campus cancellation is different

#245

Post by zapita » Sun, Oct 10, 2021, 3:08 PM UTC

nradov wrote: post #189

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard to imagine a legal approach that does not impermissibly infringe on the free association rights of all the various participants. The question is whether any other mechanism would be sufficient. If Twitter were interested, they could do something to inhibit the flow of the outrage mechanism, but there are strong free speech arguments against doing this. Also it is of course not in Twitter's own best interest. If…

Twitter management stopped caring about free speech years ago. They are no longer the "free speech wing of the free speech party". Instead they actively promote a particular brand of US progressive politics, and ban anyone who steps out of line. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/05/twitter-steps-down-fre...

This article is about Twitter complying with Russian and Pakistani court orders. What’s the connection to “US progressive politics”?

Re: The latest campus cancellation is different

#246

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Oct 10, 2021, 3:08 PM UTC

nverno wrote: post #202

metagame wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here, I'll give a rebuttal, even though I don't think every internet comment deserves a reply, your comment included. It is an outreach event. The majority of people in developed nations live in progressive cities, and hold center-liberal to outright progressive views. Now, if you're trying to spread propaganda, good or bad, you want to do it in the most efficient way possible. Just as you wouldn't put a radical Sata…

If their goal was good PR, I'd say they have failed quite dramatically. This kind of thing is surprising from MIT and I doubt it has a lot of support among the science/engineering types. It is common to see this behavior in social sciences nowadays, but less so in engineering.

[deleted]

Re: The latest campus cancellation is different

#247

Post by NovemberWhiskey » Sun, Oct 10, 2021, 3:08 PM UTC

dfdz wrote: post #144

> John Carlson Lecture As a disclaimer I am against any censorship of academia and think that even Charles Murray should be allowed to speak at a university (assuming he is invited by an academic department or student group) and that the university should never have veto power. However, I think the example in the Atlantic is actually more mild than past cases: the John Carlson Lecture is a general audience talk that…

I broadly think you're wrong on this.

On the one hand, we have Abbot, who is an academic, being uninvited from a public lecture organized by the department that covers his field based on apparently little more than Twitter outrage.

On the other hand, we have Yiannopoulos, who is an activist, whose event was canceled by the College Republicans due to public safety concerns after 150 protesters blocked access to the venue. The next day, Yiannopoulos returned to UC Davis with supporters and marched across the campus in counter-protest at the cancellation of the event.

Censoring academic freedom of speech has a much more chilling effect on academic freedom than does restricting outside participation in campus speech.

Yiannopoulos has a national platform for his ideas, and indeed this kind of incident only bolsters it. In any case, he was ultimately able to visit the campus and express his message the next day.

Academics, however, depend on being able to publish, speak publicly, receive prizes and so on for their careers; there is truth in publish or perish. If their ability to participate in the academic discourse is going to end up limited for holding unpopular opinions (even unrelated to their work!), then the chilling effect is much larger.

Re: The latest campus cancellation is different

#248

Post by mgraczyk » Sun, Oct 10, 2021, 3:10 PM UTC

jordanpg wrote: post #239

So much hand-wringing as the nature of power mutates and changes hands. I generally agree that the outcomes of "cancel culture" are undesirable, but I am glad to see that in our little democratic experiment, a new form of power has found a voice and is causing those previously in power to quake in their boots. I am confident that a new equilibrium will eventually be reached that won't have such occasional appalling o…

There are lots of problems with this perspective.

  * The loudest voices are typically not minorities
  * Those with the loudest voices aren't experiencing suffering
  * The power they wield isn't being used to reduce suffering
  * The suffering actually being experienced can be reduced better without chilling free speech

I think you're right that we're seeing an upset in power dynamics, but you're wrong about who is becoming more powerful and what they are attempting to accomplish with that power.

Re: The latest campus cancellation is different

#249

Post by dang » Sun, Oct 10, 2021, 3:10 PM UTC

aisengard wrote: post #158

snek_case wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Psychologically this is group bullying without consequences. Very much so. It's mob mentality. The group diffuses the responsibility, shielding everyone, enabling the bullying to be done without consequences. IMO it should be illegal to fire someone based on mob actions. There should be legal repercussions to this. Either against the people who did the firing, or against twitter, for enabling mobs and bullying. The…

[flagged]

Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar, regardless of how bad/wrong another comment is or you feel it is. We're trying to avoid that here (edit: and you've unfortunately been posting like this a lot). If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Re: The latest campus cancellation is different

#250

Post by brightball » Sun, Oct 10, 2021, 3:12 PM UTC

umvi wrote: post #3

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.

I honestly wonder if Twitter mobs don’t walk some line of actual harassment, especially when trying to close a business or get someone fired.