Mandated diversity statement drives Jonathan Haidt to quit academic society

I read the above as a way of saying that names may not necessarily be a good proxy for race specifically. Not as a comment on whether discrimination based on names is right or wrong.

You are of course entirely right that it shouldn’t matter in the decision process, unless the job at hand is “person named John”. But a point to raise is that this holds for positive discrimination as well, if the goal is to increase the number of X minority employees, then you cant optimize for that by selecting for X-sounding names if that’s a bad proxy.

Fascinating document on this, linked by the FIRE group themselves:

https://www.bjpa.org/content/upload/bjpa/4_an/4_Anti-Semitis...

Turns out they didn't have hate speech laws:

> In its application to statements about groups, the German law of insult had a development very similar to the Anglo-American law of libel.1 The Supreme Court had decided at an early date that statements about a class of people were punishable only if it could clearly be established that they were directed against definite individuals. An insulting remark about "Jews generally" was not considered within the statute. This view was reaffirmed in 1931 in a case in which a general attack on the Jews was held to be "not directed in a sufficiently recognizable manner against individual Jews." Similarly, an attack against the "German Jews" was held not to be suffi- ciently restricted, although in a few instances persons were convicted for insulting the Jewish inhabitants of small communities

Even known extremists, posting lies about people who were targetted for being Jewish, were let off, where the same lie about any random person could have led to a year in prison:

> In one of several cases against Julius Streicher, the editor of the Nazi newspaper, Der Stürmer, a fine of 400 marks (then less than $100) was levied for an article which stated that a Jewish attorney, Dr. Wassertriidinger of Nuremberg, had committed perjury. The opinion of the court was that in spite of the seri- ousness of the libel and of a prior conviction of Streicher, no prison sentence be inflicted because "the defendant is a fanatic whose statements cannot be taken too seriously." Similar tenderness in meting out punishment was frequently explained by the characterization of the defendants as zealots.

> Furthermore, the immunity of the members of the Reichstag often protected Nazi depu- ties against criminal prosecution. Those deputies became the so-called re- sponsible editors of many newspapers—frequently one deputy was the editor of several newspapers—and thus made criminal prosecution for many libelous publications impossible. Although the Reichstag could waive the immunity of its members, it did so infrequently and then only after long delays.

So it looks like we tried not censoring them, and suprisingly, it didn't work.

> I'm (still) strongly sympathetic to Baldwin's point of view, but the GP also has a valid point, in that liars have gained most of the benefit of the civil-libertarian point of view since the rise of the Internet. These days, a lie can literally travel around the world before the truth makes it out past the firewall.

That's largely made possible by censorship. When you counter such views in groups that support them, you are likely to be silenced without your knowledge. Social media sites have built a whole suite of tools to aid in the removal of such content [1], and such tools are available to people from all ideologies. You might think that evens things out, but the secretive nature of the tools means that only a handful of people, relatively speaking, know how it all works. That creates a new "us vs. them" mentality, and we need to find our way back to a concept of shared humanity.

> There's a reason we divide history into the time before and after the invention of movable type made mass publication possible. We're living in a similar transitional era now, likely an even-more profound one. The resulting intellectual and political upheaval is so extensive that some things are going to have to change, including minds. Maybe even mine.

Social media today, like the printing press in its infancy, is understood and managed by a small number of people. In that environment you can still take a principled stance to argue against censorship and for transparency.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/reveddit/comments/sxpk15/fyi_my_tho...

> you should have treated them all equally

This is obviously the golden standard we are trying to achieve, but how do we get there? It's theoretically impossible to treat everyone equally and apply affirmative action at the same time. I understand there is a difference between equality and equity, but I'm replying to the words you wrote.

Affirmative action may be the best solution we currently have to deal with systemic racism, but ultimately it's trying to fix prejudice with prejudice - and that is not a perfect solution. It also creates a lot of confusion because sometimes we say to treat people equally (as you say when trying to decide between hiring candidates), and other times we say we should help out the disenfranchised (such as when admitting students to schools). So where do we draw the line for when we want equality versus equity?

I agree with you if you mean that the individuals that first do the targeted group violence are the bad guys. But not if you generalize blame to the group.

Just about any large group of people, whether defined by by race, religion, nationality, or creed, will have bad individuals in it. And so the bad guys can almost always point to people from the other group that "started it".

When someone from the out-group commits an atrocity, it is just more proof of how bad that group is. When someone from the in-group commits an atrocity, it is an exception.