The latest campus cancellation is different • Hacker News Board

Re: The latest campus cancellation is different

#321

Post by ggreer » Sun, Oct 10, 2021, 4:38 PM UTC

tasogare wrote: post #114

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.

> How do we neuter the power of Twitter mobs? Ignore them. They have no power except the one you allow them to have on you.

I ignore them but my employer doesn't.

Re: The latest campus cancellation is different

#322

Post by vmception » Sun, Oct 10, 2021, 4:39 PM UTC

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 additional context is providing us pretty useless information that nobody except him would care about

"Its not a campus cancellation, this was off campus aaaand this Professor is actually still invited and now to an on campus event!"

uhhh ok.

My takeaway is that there is some silver lining here that communication was done between parties instead of a unilateral kneejerk cancellation. But they should have still ignored detractors and held that "off campus" outreach event. Let the detractors embarrass themselves when trying to interrupt the Professor's speech or ask irrelevant questions at the end.

Re: The latest campus cancellation is different

#323

Post by rootusrootus » Sun, Oct 10, 2021, 4:40 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...

Given the amount of right-wing tripe I find in my twitter feed, I'm going to say that Twitter doesn't ban people who don't agree with progressive politics. I think the only ideology they really have is money.

Re: The latest campus cancellation is different

#324

Post by dang » Sun, Oct 10, 2021, 4:41 PM UTC

metagame wrote: post #206

civilized wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The activists who demanded this aren't the ones who need to be persuaded on climate change. MIT just handed the center and right-of-center, full of actual climate skeptics who need to be persuaded, another cancel culture event. Your whole post hinges on the assumption that the prospects of fighting climate change hinge on the approval of college town progressives. In reality, their approval is the least important thi…

[flagged]

civilized should have taken out the "sea of words" swipe and you should have edited out the swipes from your comment here, as well as in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28819420. Someone else breaking the site guidelines doesn't make it ok for you to do so. Please do a better job of sticking to them.

Re: The latest campus cancellation is different

#325

Post by FiberBundle » Sun, Oct 10, 2021, 4:41 PM UTC

peterangular wrote: post #317

mawise wrote: post #118

Seems like there were two things Abbot did "wrong", one was to argue against affirmative action, and the other was to use a nazi reference to make his point. Does anyone have first-hand knowledge of what the mob said on Twitter? I'm curious if they differentiated between the two. For anyone who hasn't seen it, Netflix's fiction THE CHAIR satires cancel culture in liberal institutions and their story includes someone…

> Seems like there were two things Abbot did "wrong", one was to argue against affirmative action, and the other was to use a nazi reference to make his point. Which in the current political climate is a horrible look for the school. I get why they dropped him - for better or worse lots of people are fed up with the promise of an ideal meritocracy... especially younger folks. And, for better or worse, those younger f…

I don't understand the argument of people who partly justify affirmative action in college admissions with the lack of a perfect meritocracy. So just because the ideal of a perfect meritocracy is illusive, decisions shouldn't primarily be based on merit anymore?

Re: The latest campus cancellation is different

#326

Post by ahefner » Sun, Oct 10, 2021, 4:42 PM UTC

Is it reasonable for institutions to begin retaliation against students for this sort of behavior? Unleash social justice media mob on faculty, risk expulsion.

Re: The latest campus cancellation is different

#327

Post by bluescrn » Sun, Oct 10, 2021, 4:42 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #108

xyzzy21 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter et al. need to be eliminated. That simple. They can't moderate/regulate well enough even if they were unbiased. And they aren't. The other angle is to track down every member of every Twitter mob and dox them. Then attack their attacks one-on-one and personal (not violence - just pull everyone they do out of any type of anonymity and lack of consequences).

Good to see HN is in favour of free speech today.

Twitter has been quite harmful to the idea of free speech.

Re: The latest campus cancellation is different

#328

Post by foogazi » Sun, Oct 10, 2021, 4:43 PM UTC

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.

> Professor van der Hilst, after broadly consulting his community

How often is the community broadly consulted on MIT climate science lecturers ?

Re: The latest campus cancellation is different

#329

Post by yummypaint » Sun, Oct 10, 2021, 4:43 PM UTC

Jensson wrote: post #210

yummypaint wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This post, like many in this thread, misrepresents what free speech is. Free speech protects us from government retribution, nothing more. I agree that it's bad form to lobby the university directly, but it's their right to do so, and the university has a right to change which speakers it invites. Having it any other way would be an attack on free speech. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of reli…

Free speech is an ideal where you are judged by what you do and not by what thoughts you express. USA named one of its laws after that ideal, but the American law isn't what the ideal is. The ideal would be that the first amendment applied to everyone, so nobody could punish anyone for views they express. But that is in no way enforceable so it doesn't exist. It means that a guy can say X. Then twitter mobs can say t…

The government, by definition, holds the monopoly on legal violence. This is the fundamental difference. It isn't a big corporation.

But firing the guy because he said X is where the free speech line is crossed.

There are people who argue employers have the right to fire anyone for any reason because of their own rights. The current reality in the US is that people are routinely fired for even mentioning the concept of a union in the workplace. I agree that is against the ideal of free speech, but not the law as it exists.

The thing I have noticed over the past year is that many of the same people who think it's great to fire people for collective action suddenly get very imaginative about free speech when it happens to people they agree with.

Re: The latest campus cancellation is different

#330

Post by LeoNatan25 » Sun, Oct 10, 2021, 4:44 PM UTC

iammisc wrote: post #233

LeoNatan25 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spoiler: it doesn’t, and it hasn’t for a very long time.

Okay that's great, but it doesntm mean we ought to abandom those values out of some made up historical notion that only white people want such things.

Of course not. But that’s what the wave of woke left wing Twitter mobs (and the likes of AOC, etc.) are pushing for. You have authoritarians on the left and authoritarians on the right, and an ever shrinking center. Not sure how we get out of this predicament.