This article reads like it is trying to cancel the cancellers, somewhat ironically! Very hard to not become the thing you hate when you get tangled up in this stuff.
Didn’t come across that way at all to me. I read it as general concern at the suppression of ideas. There was no call to action to ban Twitter hashtags or forfeit MIT.
It's free speech 101 - you can say what you like (as long as you're not inciting crime or violence.) But no one owes you a pulpit.
I have far more of a problem with mob farming and Twitter incitement: see also anti-vaxing, organised climate change denial, and political rabble rousing.
Because those are covert rather than free - pretending to be independent and organic while actually being centralised and astroturfed.
There’s clearly a line somewhere, otherwise there’s no point in speech (if it cannot be used to influence others in even the smallest of ways).
While I don’t think MIT made the best call here, I think that Twitter users (mobs or otherwise) should be free to ask MIT to do this. I would have preferred that MIT had professionally yet firmly declined as the controversy is unrelated to the topic. (IMO, they’d be wise to avoid having a flat-Earther present at an EAPS event, but that’s not the analog here.)
At this point over 200 million Americans have been vaccinated. 700k people have died of COVID-19. In the US there is no independent individual who could come to a conclusion other than it is safer to get vaccinated than to get COVID-19. I’m not sure who is spreading the anti-vax nonsense, but at this point it seems like more of a Darwin Award than a conspiracy by the elite.
Those that have had COVID may legitimately feel they have less need for the vaccine. Some of us have other medical reasons not to take one. Or might just be ornery.
No matter how convinced you are that "no independent individual" disagrees with you; it still happens.
It's okay to cancel the cancellers. In fact, the expected outcome of this effort is to 'cancel' the cancellers, by not allowing their complaints to translate into institutional action. They are free to argue others should be canceled, but no one should listen to them. Given that they are currently listened to, preventing that is indeed a form of cancellation, and it's a good one. You cannot and should not expect to benefit from the very policy you denigrate.
You can just stop right there! Either it's okay to cancel, or it isn't. "It's okay to cancel those that I don't like, but not cancel those I do like" is infantile reasoning and not to be taken seriously.
It has nothing to with what I don't like. I don't believe you should extend to people those rights they argue against.
For example, if someone wrote a comme t on hacker news saying "not all people should be able to comment on hacker news", one wonders why it is that they ought to enjoy the very right which they seek to deny.
I have said quite clearly in my comment that those wishing to cancel ought to be heard... They just ought no to be listened to. Perhaps if you read my comment (it's only a few sentences long... There's no need to be thick headed), you would have read that part.
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.
The Internet, and all existing services, is based in physical locations, subject to local and international laws, governed by the decisions of real people with diverse motivations, and capable of influencing real-world outcomes on many scales.
That is missing the point; it's not about you are or aren't on Twitter, it's that they are. Twitter encourages contextless "outrage", and things escalate from there. Sometimes justified, sometimes less so.
You shouldn't. Right up until the point you wrote something that for some reason takes off on Twitter and then you get your unrelated lecture cancelled or your employer gets calls or whatnot.
I do hope we would all move on to better things than those massive social networks. They have impacted really negatively the lives of many around me, and continue to do so.
I thought it was because, if the mob doesn't get their way, they single out the 'admins' as the next target. At least that's what I remember before I cut out on following twitter as a first party platform.
That could be part of it. According to surveys the administrators are very left-wing, even more than the professors who are already almost completely left-wing themselves.
Yeah. Over the years I've seen a number of incidents where (someone in) the Harvard administration assumes that the student body, professors, and alumni universally share their view that Affirmative Action is an unquestionable good and then gets caught off guard when this turns out not to be the case.
I had the same thought. Maybe the mob is just the excuse the administrators can point to to do what they wanted to do already. Perhaps they both understand their role.
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.
On one hand, keep the speaker. The potential downside: social media outrage that may escalate and get covered on MSM if it gets big enough. You and your dept / uni get a lot of bad press or if things go really sideways, your job could be on the line.
The potential upside of this decision? People go to a talk and consider some issues, but it’s not like you (the committee / administrator / dean etc) get any real tangible incentive from this outcome. You basically just did your job, if you’re lucky, everyone just moves on.
On the other hand, cancel the speaker. The upside: MSM will congratulate you or ignore it, but regardless, you’ll be seen as making the “right” decision by most people you interact with. Some free speech types (a dying breed it seems) might get upset but they don’t seem to have much power over the general public’s perception or decisions about firing made by the university.
So the decision is obvious and it’s the one that gets made time and time again. And it’s the way the Twitter mobs continue to hold sway, especially because so much of the MSM lives on Twitter.
A similar rubric occurs in a large corporation by the C suite. Once the mob forms, there is everything to lose and almost nothing to lose by taking a stand on an issue seen as unwoke. If this is to change, incentives need to change, mainly creating disincentives for cowardly execs / deans and incentives for those who make principled and/or courageous stands.
(None of this is a carte blanche endorsement against activism, it’s just to say that there are reasons that no one stands up against Twitter mobs and we may want to explore ways to change this dynamic unless we desire a future ruled by mobs)
They don't have any power, other than to annoy the institution. The only power here is the power that MIT has over the people they book to speak, and since MIT doesn't want to be annoyed, they canceled the speaker.
The problem with cancel culture is a problem with bad employment law, and a problem with cultural institutions without any core ethical beliefs.
I agree. Absolutionistic ethics, of which I am a proponent of, would largely throw out “the paradox of tolerance”.
Cancel culture serves to highlight the inevitable orthodoxies that arise from proponents of “the paradox of tolerance”. Ultimately people need to ask themselves, “By what standard?”
> They don't have any power, other than to annoy the institution. The only power here is the power that MIT has over the people they book to speak, and since MIT doesn't want to be annoyed, they canceled the speaker.
The ability to get others to do what you want them to is absolutely a form of power.
A large number of US universities make signing a DEI statement a precondition for employment. Some also require an annual progress report on DEI targets. Dorian Abbot had the temerity to propose an alternate framework, MFE. Some factions can't tolerate alternative perspectives, and thus Dorian had to be cancelled.
It would be good to pass laws that make it illegal to fire someone over a twitter mob (or any kind of mob action). Anti-mob or anti-bullying laws. And/or initiate class-action lawsuits against twitter for encouraging this kind of behavior or failing to prevent it, resulting in significant damage to people's careers. It's far from being the first time this happens, so there's definitely a case to be made that twitter has known for a long time that this is a problem.
Nobody was lynched here so anti-lynching law would not apply. Given we're discussing mobs getting riled up over the wrongs of the "other", it also seems appropriate to place the actual outcome in a less exaggerated way.
Kind of ironic that people are getting offended over my choice of word here, but we could call these anti-mob or anti-bullying laws instead. The point remains, it might make sense to make it illegal for institutions to fire people over the call of a mob.
>Are you really comparing getting fired from your job to a lynching?
Blacks used to get fired (or not hired) from jobs, or thrown out of towns and establishments for being black on the demand of racist white mobs.
Is that serious enough for someone to make a comparison with a historical issue like lynching, or it should involve a hanging too?
Lynchings didn't always involve death, sometimes it was "just" beatings, not to mention the term has had a metaphorical issue for collective violence/threats, even merely verbal, for a century now.
And the "right to work" (not to mention feed yourself and your family) is as important as the right to live.
Lynching was part of a framework of racial terror that kept (and by its legacies, continues to keep) black people from attaining social and economic equality. I'd say that very few things meet a sufficient standard for comparison with lynching, least of which is the occasional (and generally management-class or higher) white person losing their job.
> And the "right to work" (not to mention feed yourself and your family) is as important as the right to live.
"Right to work," at least in the US, is a series of laws designed to curtail labor rights by weakening unions (i.e., the institutions that usually keep people in their jobs, particularly in at-will countries like the US). Are you sure that's what you meant?
They surely are not equal, but I find them very comparable. When twitter mobs try to get people fired they're trying to prevent them from making a living, what are they after? Do they want the target to kill tthemselves?
Also "comparing" by definition can be done between any 2 things, even if they don't have the same "value". I can compare oranges and dogs if I want to.
I think there some subliminal need for people to mention lynching when it's innapropriate. Happens far too much to be coincidence.
Guy gets protested because he says 'providing support for historically discriminated-against groups in America is just like the Nazi regime' and you can almost guarantee someone is going to call it a lynching. I initially thought people were doing it to be intentionally provocative, but it appears to be some unintended impulse, probably the same 'imp of the perverse' thing that drove the initial guy to bring the Nazis into a discussion about affirmative-action as if that was going to add some clarity to his approach to the topic.
Yes, it is largely a labor law issue. Twitter mob is not just cause for terminating the employment of someone. Using anti-defamation laws against individual bullies is another possibility.
In general, in the US, there doesn't need to be a "just cause." Someone has become a headache or embarrassment for us--for whatever unprotected reason--is sufficient.
In the US sodomy was a crime too. Laws can change. Labour law is not written in stone.
And even with current laws, where there "need not be a just cause", there are protections against unjust causes (e.g. because they found out you're jewish, or you're fat, or whatever) and "because a mob campaigned against one" can be added to that. "But, under current law the business could just say they fired them for their own neutral reasons?" Sure. Let them defend that in a lawsuit, if it happened to coincide with a mob campaign.
But there is than the next obstacle in the US system: You need to have very deep pockets to actually take a case in court. "Justice" is only available to the rich in the US. (And this doesn't seem to be a construction error if you look closer. But that's another topic).
> "Justice" is only available to the rich in the US.
I disagree. I think we can all agree the government has a monopoly on violence which it is relatively inclined to use. The US system depends on the idea that someone will challenge the use of that monopoly in their particular instance, which we call precedent. It is true that people not-of-means may be subject to that violence unjustly but it only takes the government messing with the wrong person once to establish precedent. The wrong person could be rich but they could also just be a person who catches public support.
>but it only takes the government messing with the wrong person once to establish precedent.
Kind of like the case of police routinely shooting unarmed blacks and getting off scot-free?
This system seems to have worked wonders to prevent this from happening. Or maybe they just haven't messed with the wrong person yet, since Rodney King hardly changed anything, and Derek Chauvin's convinction wont either...
> Kind of like the case of police routinely shooting unarmed blacks and getting off scot-free?
That's not quite the same. Murder didn't need precedent, however, establishing some framework for grading police incidents retroactively does. What gets in the way of that is existing laws which protect police officers wholesale. If you're trying overturn an entire existing law for a new framework, that's a bit outside the bounds of precedent because you're not longer talking about interpretation.
And what about twitter mobs that point out legitimate fireable offenses (like police brutality )? Would the fact that a twitter mob raised the issue help prevent the legitimatw firing?
You're arguing for something that in all likelihood requires a constitutional amendment.
Anti discrimination clauses only overrule the first amendments freedom of association due to the equal protection clause, and there's no reading that suggests that firing someone due to public pressure is implicitly discrimination.
It's not that simple. We have a collective action problem. The first mover sticks out like a sore thumb (or tall poppy) and takes all the heat from the mob. If everyone simultaneously became sensible and simultaneously refused to bend to the mob, the problem would go away, but it's difficult for heterogeneous agents to coordinate in this way. Being brave and taking the first step entails a lot of private cost and a lot of public benefit, which is why so few choose to do it.
Exactly. Considering Twitter accounts and likes and retweet’s can be bought amplifying a particular message might only represent less than 10 actual people.
Additionally I’ve never discussed with someone in real life, person to person, about a single Twitter “cancelation” effort. If these issues were truly significant, they would engage the (actual) media, engage (in this case) with official university complaint systems, etc.
These things take more time and effort than retweeting a hashtag though, and most people won’t follow through with it. Which tells me they’re really not all that bothered about it in the first place.
IIRC, Netflix used to have voting until Amy Schumer's special was mass downvoted. Comments wouldn't be practical I guess. But I'd imagine his opinion would be the same, really.
This is a free speech context right so surely the answer is to convince the mobs that this current approach is counter-productive?
Edit: I’m also unsure if this was caused by people on Twitter or staff and students at MIT who are also on Twitter. It seems like the latter is more correct and the Twitter side of things might be a red herring.
I don't think you can really reason with left-wing authoritarians. They're completely morally certain that the other side is evil, their views are reinforced in an echo chamber, and they have a lower than average verbal intelligence and authoritarian personality traits as well as a higher chance of dark triad traits (narcissism mostly but also psychopathy) according to psychology research into them. In my view the only solution is for a brave few to really stand their ground and show to others that the world isn't going to end if they just ignore the mob.
I don’t think it’s been confirmed that these people are left wing authoritarians. It also seems like a dangerous way to think about this as a problem rationally. You’re basically deciding the facts of the matter outside of any actual evidence or argument.
Further writing people off sounds pretty authoritarian.
I regret making such a sweeping statement. I do think there are many decent people that get caught up in the cancel mob who are primarily motivated by genuine egalitarianism, and these people can surely be reasoned with.
However, at the same time I do believe that some (perhaps a small minority) of the agitators are cynically motivated by narcissism and sadism, and there's quite a bit of research which points in this direction. For example, the close connection between virtue signalling and grandiose narcissism. Reasoning with this particular subset (however small they may be) is probably not going to be productive because their actions aren't coming from a place of real egalitarianism.
That's the problem people on all colors of the political spectrum, followers are influenced by minorities with too much rage and anger. Sometimes this rage and anger comes from an important societal issue, but that's not an excuse for shitty behavior you wouldn't like the another political opinonated mob to use.
Companies and institutions just need to realize that Twitter is not the general population. How many TV shows are regularly trending on twitter but have no audience? How many products are vilified but still sell just fine?
Marketing firms have been selling the lie that they analyze twitter to build campaigns, pr, etc. Their customers just need to realize that it's just BS.
Isn't this exactly the world that free speech / pro-liberty advocates want?
I don't have any power to fire someone from their job; I'm not their boss. But I do have the right to make my views about them freely known. That's my right to free speech. And I can also decide whether to patronize their business or not. That's my right to economic freedom - to not be in an authoritarian society where the government tells me what I have to spend my money on. And their boss has the right to decide whether to employ them or not. That's the boss's economic freedom and at-will employment.
If I'm threatening the boss with physical harm (violating the NAP, as some would say), then I'm clearly in the wrong. But if I'm making my opinion known, and their boss agrees, isn't that the intended effect of discourse? What is the point of free speech if there isn't the possibility that people might be influenced by listening to that speech?
I don't see any way to cancel Twitter mobs that doesn't itself uphold cancel culture and destroy liberty.
(In any case, in the article at hand, "Twitter mobs" isn't a fully accurate descriptor. The quoted tweet was from an alum. The ability for alumni to contact their university and make their opinions known - and have their opinions be taken with more weight than those of the general public - has existed long before Twitter and will exist long after.)
I don't disagree with your premise (as a libertarian)
But re:
> I don't see any way to cancel Twitter mobs that doesn't itself uphold cancel culture and destroy liberty.
You'll see many people here are suggesting that we just don't listen to the "mob". That would be a way to "cancel" them that is completely compatible with liberty.
The libertarian approach absolutely does lead to progressivism because people, broadly defined, want progressivism. You have to take a narrow subset of society for the libertarian approach to be genuinely popular, or you have to abandon the pretense that you're optimizing for the good of all people. Don't take my word for it, listen to one of the most successful libertarians in recent history:
> The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron. [...]
> The critical question then becomes one of means, of how to escape not via politics but beyond it. Because there are no truly free places left in our world, I suspect that the mode for escape must involve some sort of new and hitherto untried process that leads us to some undiscovered country[...]
Thiel goes on to detail how his only hope of accomplishing libertarian ideals is by escaping to either cyberspace, outer space, or the sea, leaving behind all those people who if asked by libertarian means would reject his ideals. (And he's gone on to invest in companies like SpaceX that are working on bringing this plan to fruition.)
The whole reason you get articles like this is because libertarianism can't survive on the merits, and so (apart from Thiel's approach of escape) they have to argue that people aren't playing by the rules, that somehow universities do not have the liberty to rescind invitations or that if they do it's because they're bad people. But they are playing by the rules and they're exercising their liberties.
One doesn't need to run to tell a teacher every time another kid is mean to them. This is exactly the same. The solutions isn't always interventionist, I don't see why that is funny. Do you really expect someone to step in and settle all your disputes for you?
> I don't see any way to cancel Twitter mobs that doesn't itself uphold cancel culture and destroy liberty.
An invited speaker could require a signed contract before accepting the invite. At a fairly small expense, some free speech advocate/org could have a contract drawn up that would protect invitees to some degree, pay to have a third party audit the contract (is contract auditing a thing?) to raise the chance that orgs with teams of lawyers find it acceptable, promote and market it, and then make it freely available to all.
That might or might not work, but there are many more ideas in the wings that could be tried.
No institution is going to sign a contract like that. There are more people who would be happy to speak at events like this than speaking slots. If you demand a contract that says "you can't disinvite me," they're just going to move to the next person on the list.
> Isn't this exactly the world that free speech / pro-liberty advocates want?
No. The main consequence of speech that is being opposed should be… speech, not action to get that speaker's speech curtailed, whether by speech or other means.
> I can also decide whether to patronize their business or not
These people didn't have to turn up to the talk. That's not the same as cancelling a talk because someone said they don't want it to happen.
> And their boss has the right to decide whether to employ them or not
> …
> But if I'm making my opinion known, and their boss agrees, isn't that the intended effect of discourse?
Did MIT change its decision to host the speaker because of a well-reasoned argument - as you point out, one of the intended consequences aimed for via free speech - or was it due to some other kind of pressure?
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 religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
The purpose of free speech is to prevent the government from punishing people for their views. A similar imposition on citizens would violate their 1st amendment rights.
>This post, like many in this thread, misrepresents what free speech is. Free speech protects us from government retribution, nothing more
This may be the case de jure, but de facto, the spirit of the concept of free speech, and why it is important enough to enshrine in amendment, transcends the relationship between the government and the governed. A society where speech is effectively no longer free because of authoritarian-like control of discourse by non-governmental bodies requires the same protections that it would against the government to remain free from authoritarianism. Particularly when censorious or retributive measures by these ostensibly apolitical actors almost all tend to align with the machinations of one political party.
So the fact that social media platforms (and cloud hosts and credit card companies, etc) effectively collude to control the modern, digital public square to preferentially suppress the political views of about 50% of the country is just as much of a threat as government censorship, since the outcome is the same.
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 that guy X is an idiot and should get fired. Both of those are fine. But firing the guy because he said X is where the free speech line is crossed. As long as it all just remains speech it is fine.
> What do I do about {contrived example X}?
What does the government do? The government does a ton of stuff, like hire people, fire people, run a lot of organizations etc. If they can do it without violating the ideal of free speech then so can you.
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.
I disagree that free speech is/ought to be free from other people judging you on the contents of that speech.
I openly and intentionally judge people based on their speech/thoughts they express. Say smart, curiosity-invoking things and I think more highly of you. Say closed-minded, racist things, and I think less highly of you. I find it hard to imagine that most other people don't do exactly the same thing (possibly with a different fitness function, but updating their opinion of someone based on thoughts expressed nonetheless).
If I say something that makes you think I'm an asshole, I think you should update your opinion of me in that direction without waiting for me to make some physical action to that effect.
There's free speech in legal term as coded in US constitution which have nothing to do with Non-US citizen like me. Then there's free speech as in universal value that every member of civilized modern society should uphold. I think GP is talking about the later.
I’m not American nor do I live in the US nor am I subject to US law - is free speech impossible for me and all the billions of others in the world who are also in this same group, or is it perhaps you that has misunderstood and misrepresented what free speech is by conflating it with a legal provision in one jurisdiction, designed to help protect it from one entity?
> "Free speech protects us from government retribution."
It is so embarrassing to hear fellow Americans quote the First Amendment as being the definition of freedom of speech when even a casual perusal of history points to the First Amendment originating from the more general principle of freedom of speech. We really need to have better education in this country.
This appears to be driven at a basic level by a desire for justice. Having had some thousands of years of experience with the quest for justice we can say with some level of certainty that effective justice seeking has some particular characteristics without which justice remains elusive.
There must be a clear statement of the injustice which must be corrected. There should be a hearing where all involved can state their view of the situation. The accused should be allowed representation. Judgements should be made by persons who are at some level uninvolved with the conflict and committed to balanced interpretation of evidence. Any punishments should be related to the nature and scale of the injustice. And so on--of course someone with more direct experience could summarize this and make it happen better than I.
The point is that mob justice is not justice and all you have to do is give it some basic rules and constraints and it either gets deflected or gathers up into something that has actual meaning.
This is basically it; the normal mechanisms don't work properly, and nobody in the mob has any faith that engaging with any formal process is going to achieve a result, so they complain in public.
(This specific incident sounds like a storm in a teacup, but there's far more serious and less visible problems with racial discrimination in academia)
Similar to #metoo. Reporting sexual harassment, assault and even rape quite often isn't taken seriously by either employers or the police. And in the entertainment industry there was a tacit understanding that reporting it would be a career-ending move. So the route that people have started taking is to complain publicly, in an attempt to shield themselves from retaliation and compel the system to address the complaint.
Dr. King put it best: "a riot is the language of the unheard."
Some portion of the mob on Twitter is people chasing clout and performing social justice. For example: I've been attacked for "generalizing nonbinary people" by cis people while describing my own experience as a nonbinary person, so I don't doubt people like that drive a lot of the discussion, but the vast majority is sincere if sometimes misdirected anger at genuine powerlessness. A Twitter riot is much like a physical riot: some agitators, but mostly just angry people denied a voice taking one by force.
The context of this quote is in a speech that is largely anti-riot. It's a warning to the government to not be complacent, but the woke left treats as if he was condoning rioters.
What does this have to do with my comment? I didn't express any judgement on riots (online or in-person) one way or the other. I used the quote in a context consistent with the original context.
yep, you need due process. Other replies referencing metoo and MLK make an excellent point - that mass movements are usually a response to 'due process' that is in practice deeply flawed and biased to the point that it is ineffective. But a) Unlike metoo and civil rights, afaik a formal process that even aspires to fairness to decide issues such as speaker cancellation doesn't exist in the first place, b) even in the case of issues like metoo, surely the ideal outcome is to fix the structural biases and flaws in the processes so they work in practice, rather than rely on ad hoc journalistic investigations indefinitely (aside from preventing such crimes from being committed in the first place, of course)
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 disinvited, and that the result is 14:10 to keep him.
The Twitter mob cannot really do anything with such result, if individual voting behavior was anonymous.
Unfortunately that last point is not strictly true so long as the mob can get their hands on the list of 24 people and then badger them to each make a public condemnation of the speaker or be assumed to be a wrongthinkist like the speaker, and hence one of those who voted incorrectly. So you'd better hope that the other 10 will stand strong and not out the 14 wronguns in their mix.
Yes, nothing is foolproof, but badgering 24 people is quite a lot of work. One of the reason why Twitter mobs are so efficient is that they can concentrate on a single target or two without too much effort.
Edit: also, the show where all 24 people ritually condemn the person while everyone fully knows that 14 of them voted "yea" would be absurd enough to make some people think twice.
> Vote in or appoint new leaders who do not give a damn about them. May backfire if too callous people are the winners.
You're literally talking about appointing a group primarily based on their quality of not listening to people; in the ideal case, they're callous.
The trap is that you'll really just appoint a bunch of right-wingers who won't cancel right-wing speakers for not being "politically correct" but will cancel every mildly-left wing speaker for being a terrorist or supporting terrorism.
The "listening vs. not listening to people" is a spectrum and while I think it would be unwise to pull the gauge completely to the side of callousness, more resistance against mob justice might just be necessary.
Currently, Twitter mobs have a lot of power, but none of the responsibility. This is a hellish combination, almost guaranteed to bring out the worst in people.
This needs to be reined in somehow. I am not claiming that utterly callous leaders are the solution - in fact, I made a "may backfire" comment right after my first sentence.
The jury method seems to me more democratic, anyway.
This is actually the first constructive idea I've heard that seems at all likely to address this issue in a just way without infringing on the free speech rights of the people protesting campus speakers. Well done.
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.
I am pretty sure the mob would go after the entire group: those who vote for it for voting for it, and those who didn't for being part of such a group.
This may be part of the solution, though, as other mentioned, juries can also be pressured on Twitter.
Part of the problem is that people with visible status engage in public harassment of their colleagues on Twitter with no consequences. Unless there is a cost for appalling behavior, the problem will continue to degenerate.
the problem is that prestigious institutions are run by bureaucrats wearing its skin. For example this article says "MIT buckled", when in reality some campus admin buckled because to them it's not worth risking their comfy job over a speaker. The bureaucrats have no skin in the game, they don't benefit from thinking about long term damage to MIT or society in general. From their perspective it's logical to bow to Twitter mobs and collect their paychecks
According to the upstream article posted in a sibling comment [1], the decision was made by the department head for EAPS, themselves a scientist AFAICT [2].
That doesn't necessarily change anything (and I'm not weighing in here), but given your assertion it seemed worth pointing out.
That's an odd generalization to apply when we're talking about an individual whose significant academic record is easy to find [0,1]. Many department heads are more senior, taking on organizational responsibilities that would be more of a burden to younger faculty. Perhaps that is what you're referring to. But in the scheme of things EAPS is - and always has been - high on the rigor scale and low on the bureaucracy scale.
A pervasive lack of backbone among individuals in institutions is key to this. The shunning and shaming tactics used by online mobs are a very particular form of human aggression. Speculating on a correlating factor among the people in these institutions who seem so consistently vulnerable to it may be itself, problematic, but it's as though the organizations are missing anyone with the instinct to challenge or deflect hysterical twitter mobbings, and where we are now is a result of that absence of resistance at all.
The most memorable example of "lack of backbone" for myself was Evergreen State College president, George Bridges.
There was a large protest in 2017. The administration met to discuss the situation. Students prevented the administrators from leaving the meeting room unless they had an escort to ensure the administrators came to a resolution.
The president mentioned his need to use the restroom to one of the protest leaders. The student responded, "Hold it."[0] He finally went to the restroom a couple of minutes later, but he was escorted by some of the protesting students.[1]
I'd politely ask the person holding me prisoner for his name, and if he doesn't step aside I'll inform him that I'll be charging him with kidnapping. Regardless of what the AG does.
After all, what do you think will happen to you if you hold someone prisoner?
>I'd politely ask the person holding me prisoner for his name
"no"
>and if he doesn't step aside I'll inform him that I'll be charging him with kidnapping
You, as an individual can't charge people criminally. Civil suit is an option, but I suspect you won't get much in the way of financial compensation from a broke college student.
>After all, what do you think will happen to you if you hold someone prisoner?
Infliction of violence? Even if the AG doesn't make your life a nightmare, the optics might be bad enough that you'll lose your job.
Individuals cannot press charges, only a prosecutor vested with the authority of the state may file charges. This is an extremely common misconception largely generated from popular media. Individuals can report a crime to the police, cooperate with prosecutors, and sue privately.
>It'll be enough to matter to him. Future wages can be garnished.
civil judgements can be discharged via bankruptcy.
>I don't want a job where I'm required to be a milquetoast.
Isn't that the problem? There will always be someone who is willing to be a milquetoast, hence why institutions are caving to the slightest pressure from twitter mobs.
>It's to make it costly for him to commit crimes against me.
That only works if he doesn't think the cost is worth it. If you've already gone through the trouble of planning/executing this, I doubt one of the hostages telling you about the potential financial consequences is going to make you change your mind.
You may call them kidnappers for blocking a door in a public space, they'll accuse you of assault and file a lawsuit too (and unlike you, they'll have many buddies witnesses). The judge will dismiss both suits and tell you to not waste the court's time.
> “A pervasive lack of backbone among individuals in institutions is key to this.”
the raison d'être of most organizations, particularly bureaucracies, is to hide decisions behind a shield of indirection, to deflect individual responsibility elsewhere, which selects for and conditions the spineless. that those folks, when the spotlight shines on them, will cave, is thoroughly unsurprising.
> The shunning and shaming tactics used by online mobs are a very particular form of human aggression.
I just realise how similar the Twitter mob and 4chan harassment mobs are. They are basically 2 sides of the same coin. Even using the similar tactics like digging up dirt and more or less organise the same way, as impromptu mobs that just organically form.
Basically modern lynch mobs who never have to face the consequences of their actions protect by semi-anonymity, their numbers, and often their distance from their victims.
The only way to stop mobs is to reveal each individual in it and hold them accountable. How can we organize to unmask and reveal the individuals of these mobs? I bet we would find some of these accounts are the Russian accounts specifically built to divide Americans.
Why does this sound like, MIT doesn't know how to use rhetoric? Isn't that the point of their job as administration, to be the interface between the public and the institution?
> the problem is that prestigious institutions are run by bureaucrats wearing its skin
Universities are run by their professors. Invited talks are regular academic business. A 'campus admin' does not invite or disinvite anyone to give an academic talk.
As someone who left a job in academic administration recently and who is also faculty at another university, this is not true. Administrators can invite and often can disinvite or make other decisions about talks. This kind of day-to-day running of the university has been largely ceded to administrators.
In most cases the right thing to do is to ignore the intolerant. They benefit from a divided society with lots of hate, the less hate the less power the intolerant instigators have. Sometimes you need to put them into prison to protect others, but as Popper said we should leave that option only as a last resort since ultimately intolerance breeds more intolerance so it isn't a good way to create a tolerant society.
I'm generally very "pacifist" (not that this is violence, but I don't like attacking people in any sense of the word) and "live-and-let-live" on principle, but I also follow the "reverse golden rule" - i.e. I assume others are following the golden rule. Therefore:
Bullies deserve to be bullied (and, yes, let's call out this behaviour by what it is - bullying).
The only way to dampen the toxic impact of social media’s radical vocal minority on the real world is to create tools that help decision makers easily contrast what they are seeing there with overall sentiment in the real world. In this case, 74% of Americans agree with the views that got this speech canceled. Had administrators been able to instantly see this fact when they saw all the angry tweets, perhaps they would have realized that the uproar they were seeing online was incongruous with the views of people in the real world.
I wrote and run a DeFi arbitrage bot for a living. There are hundreds of thousands of “pair” contracts to trade given coins through. The prices in different pairs for the same coin can vary wildly, as pairs only see their own balances, and can thus only make pricing decisions based on the rules and information within their own little silo. Arbitrage bots like mine make a profit by quickly balancing coin ratios among all pairs, which ultimately lowers the risk that a retail trader will pay an outlandish price for a given coin from a given pair.
We need the equivalent of arbitrage bots that can help balance the views of radicals on social media with those in the real world. They have tried this with fact checking, but unfortunately that, too, has been weaponized by biased actors. There has to be a better way that is provably unbiased.
Why Tiktok? 95%+ of these incidents came from Twitter. FB, Tiktok, Instagram, for all their shortcomings, is rarely the place where these incidents happen.
I suspect we've reached Peak Woke already, and the tide has started turning. With Trump out of power, they've lost the unifying hate figure to rally against, and many SV companies (mostly prominently Coinbase, but more quietly the FAANGs as well) are starting to show the loudest extremists the door.
All that said, academia is where this all started and where it's also going to stay on the longest.
Start collecting data projecting the actual harm these people can cause if stood up to. I suspect it's minimal if analyzed rigorously. Then publish it. Promote it to data analysts. Blow away the paper tiger.
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).
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 we rule out government and Twitter's action, the next idea is to convince enough mob participants themselves that it's not a good idea. This actually does seem feasible. I mean cancel culture itself is only five or six years old, at least as we think if it today. Another broad shift in perspective seems possible.
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.
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.
Yes . . . that was my point. There is not a legislatable way to compel Twitter to stop this behavior without violating Twitter's and protestors' free speech rights.
> No. I'm saying nothing that twitter can do would infringe on freedom of speech.
I understand that that's what you're saying. But you're responding to my comment implying that I'm disagreeing with that point of view, which I did not.
People need to learn that the nuts (of any belief system) are always the loudest, and therefore give a distorted impression of actual consensus.
Who are the loudest people on the left? Mobs and trolls who imagine grievances everywhere, which is sort of the leftist equivalent of conspiracy theory.
Who are the loudest on the right? Qanon, Nazis, and theocrats / dominionists who think we should return to Old Testament law.
The nuts on either side aren't the loudest by their own virtue. They are amplified by their opponents. "This is the left," say the right wingers, pointing to the easiest-to-criticize, most ill-informed example of a leftist... and vice versa.
I think Dave Chappelle and Joe Rogan are setting the standard for ignoring cancel culture, and are being rewarded for it. I think most moderate people are sick of cancel culture and will support those that won’t buckle to it.
I only hope these will not be the voices of the opposition of cancel culture. As much as I don't want to see cancellations like that, I found that these two are not elevating the debate either.
Unfortunately, that standard seems to be “you can ignore cancel culture if you are independently wealthy”. You can try and ignore cancel culture as some regular working man/woman, but that won’t get you far when your employer caves and fires you, and no one will hire you, because of the Twitter mob.
The twitter mob in this case could have a legitimate impact on MIT donations. Quoting a tweet included in the article:
As an alum, I’m asking you to fix this—now. Totally unacceptable and sends a message to any student that isn’t a white man that they don’t matter and that EAPS isn’t serious about (and is actively hostile towards) DEI
Presumably MIT cares what it's alums care about since they are a major source of donations. I express no opinion on anything else in the article, just that alums being mad is a negative outcome for MIT.
Or just someone who made a stupid joke or otherwise set off someone with enough followers. The corresponding antibody reaction of a lot of institutions, especially companies, is to make the offending thing go away before the next news cycle--especially if the person involved isn't senior. Easier to fire someone than have to publicly defend their behavior. And, if the organization is going to take any other sort of material action, might as well fire the person anyway as they're done with the organization.
So having a list of people who called for witch burning and distributing social opprobrium might help.
Make the only cancelling appropriate be for cancelling cancellers. So focus cancel energy on itself.
Personally, I will review job applicants social media history and if there is any “Reeeee” I take that into account as part of reference checks and whatnot.
It seems like someone posting “I’m an MIT alum and I demand this speaker be cancelled” would reflect as lack of critical thinking and reasoning.
I fear that this leads to islands of organizations where there are groups that don’t like this Twitter mob tactic and groups that do. God help those in orgs that think Twitter mobbing is a good thing.
May be a precedent for MIT. UCLA [1] already had theirs and many more who didn't get the press coverage.
Luckily the Universities in UK have remain somewhat firm on the issue ( at least as far I am aware ) but are also under similar threat.
I am also glad this is the top upvoted comment. It wasn't that long ago majority of HN were not on the same side, I think the big tech censorship, while often hard to pin point the right and wrong of it, was a wake up call to a lot of people.
This story is only two hours old. You have to wait, at least until the U.S. west coast wakes up and enters the ring. Stories like this often swing wildly.
IIRC the top comment on the "GitHub, fuck your name change" article was reasonable from my point of view for a very long time, until eventually one telling us that using the word master somehow implies subconscious racism "won" (the saving grace is that most of its top replies vehemently disagreed with it).[1]
Yes I deliberately left that point out and try not to provoke some ( or even more ) negative reaction.
My thought and observation is that there are silent majority on HN who usually dont get into these sort of discussions but are now vaguely aware of the consequences.
Also worth pointing out today is Sunday so on HN it tends to be a quiet day. Just like twitter as if anger only works from Monday to Friday.
I wish there was a safe and convenient way for those of us who agree to meet and brainstorm how to improve the situation. But I’m not sure how to accomplish that.
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.
Ignore their demands (as an enterprise, business, institution, government, etc.), mock and derise their members (as a society), and stop publicizing them (as media).
Neuter the power of Twitter mobs by not using Twitter. If you don't like a thing, don't hold your noise while doing it, just stop doing it. For many people, I know Twitter seems like it's an eternal, undying force that will never go away, and we must learn to live with it: it's not. I promise, it will die if you stop feeding it.
The problem is that some amount of people think this is activism. I call it amateur activism. As long as people find this to be an acceptable form of activism it will still go on, and anyone you hold accountable within the mob for their actions will be considered a martyr.
I'm a veteran, there's a ton of outrageous posts I can make on social media that might gain traction. The fact is, those kind of actions don't really fuel any kind of partnership between me and people on the other side of what I perceive as a problem. It does fuel fear though, fear in administrators and representatives that they could be unhirable in a capitalist economy where your desirability as a worker is tantamount to your existence. I don't really desire a paradigm where I'm threatening someones life for my own desires and happiness. So, instead, I pay professional activists to help by being part of the discussions I don't want to have with people, and more importantly remove potentially tenuous discussions and convincing I'd have to do of regular people who don't understand the veteran world or experience. They're called lobbyists.
It would be simple if you would just shadow-ban those mobs.
Then they can go to implode inside their own bubble. Nobody would get hurt.
Giving those people a broad stage and all that publicity gives those mobs power in the first place.
The problem is: Services like Twitter literary make money on any drama those mobs produce.
As long as it's profitable to gather attention of the masses with whatever shit gets thrown at the fan there will be an incentive to give those mobs a big stage.
Let's face it: The incentive to be a drama multiplier needs to disappear. As this won't happen in a natural way regulatory steps need to be taken. The whole business model of FB, Twitter, and Co. is obviously harmful to society so this whole business model needs to disappear. Case closed once and for all. Simple as that…
Are these "mobs" organized (which by definition flirts with not being a mob)? Or do they manifest and are fed by the algorythm? Or a bit of both?
The point being, there seems to be a steady stream things that get a free pass. On the other hand, seemingly random - and often less impactful - things / people get canceled. Mind you, the media is often guilty of the same disconnect. But they too are driven by engagement and profit.
There are a few rich people who's sponsoring this by running "open foundations" that donate (or not donate) to universities and legislatures. MIT's got addicted to recurring donations, so the big contributors can tell MIT how to run things. Same story with mob leaders who are in it for the money. The rank and file mob members do it for free, though (for feeling being right and being part of something big and important).
If the end beneficiaries change their mind, or find another hobby, this "movement" will fold overnight without donations.
Delay showing a public post P form person X to viewer Y until time T has passed, T defined as a time proportional how long a physical letter from X to Y would take to travel.
> 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.
Don’t play the losing game. Just don’t be on Twitter.
Maybe there’s no way to do it. Perhaps Twitter and other social networks were designed this way specifically to be immune to social control (and by consequence, to exerce social control) over well-established institutions.
I hope by blocking everybody they think are in support of other points they will pupate and stay forever in their tight circle, so the problem will solve itself. In the mean time, spend less time on Twitter is also a good idea.
Twitter is a massive echo-chamber, reinforcing their belief in themselves and most people believe them because the internet-oligarchy hides and censors different outlooks on society (not that I necessarily agree with those outlooks, but still).
Best example: All of the twitter-mob was hyping themselves up about the german election, the young generation being all green, all "Generation Greta" as some called it. There was no way that anyone except the greens would get ALL the votes of ALL young or first -voters. Except reality hit and they found out that an equal percentage voted for economic liberalism and less state instead of state intervention and illiberal politics. Somehow, the calls of the left for lowering the voting age have been conspicously absent since then...
It's not really an echo chamber though, or at least it's leaky as hell.
For example, visit from the UK during the Conservative party conference, and you get 'Trending in the UK - #ToryScum' even without logging in, or logging in to a profile that leans right (i.e. that trending 'hashtag' is the opposite of reinforcing an echo chamber for me if I have one) and there's not even anything particular going on that I'm aware of to incite it. It's just a hateful place.
At the Labour conference a week or so ago, an MP referred to Tories as “scum”. Yup, that’s the majority of the voting population, and the ones they are trying to win over, are ‘scum’.
I agree twitter is a hateful place, but so is the political left. But the vast majority of twitter are also very left wing.
1. "Tories" refers to the party members not the people who voted for them.
2. Only 44% voted for the Tories so not a majority.
I can't disagree that twitter is full of hate but I can laugh at your stated impression about the political left and the political leanings of twitter. It's like complaining that environmental scientists are biased in their belief in climate change.
Oh. Well I don't have to look it up to guess who that would be, but I think my point stands - it's not 'people are talking about that she said that', but a 'hashtag' used presumably to echo the sentiment. I wish it were confined to its chamber.
(And fwiw I don't want to see '#LabourScum' either.)
I'm starting to believe internet in general does this. Being in your room leads your thinking to different roads. When closer to other people you aim for something else. Deeper more subtle connection with others.
> MIT buckled, becoming yet another major institution in American life to demonstrate that the commitment to free speech it trumpets on its website
The what?
I'm an MIT alum and I cannot remember anything about a commitment to free speech on the website. I don't see one now, and I can hardly see any relevant search results for `"free speech" site:mit.edu` - a few blogs and research papers, but nothing about a commitment, certainly nothing trumpeted. I certainly did not see one when I applied. I applied to a school that claimed to be good at science and engineering.
If you want to argue that MIT or any other institution or perhaps all institutions should champion free speech, sure. If you want to hold people accountable for promises they did make (cf. a Reddit co-founder claiming that Reddit wasn't intended to be a "bastion of free speech" years after describing it as exactly that, Twitter calling itself the "free-speech wing of the free-speech party"), by all means hold people accountable. But the idea that everyone should be on exactly your side of what is actually a complex and multifaceted question because that particular view is obviously what everyone in our culture believes is, frankly, illiberal.
I agree that it doesn’t seem trumpeted, and the author is really pushing his point quite far, but your point that they don’t seem to take a stand on free speech would appear to be incorrect:
Fair - but my reading of that page is that it's actually not a commitment to free speech (as the author would see it, at least), it's basically saying that insisting on exercising your right to freedom of expression when you know people would be offended is unwise and discouraged in this subculture. If anything, the incident described in the article is pretty consistent with this page.
I think that there's a subconscious belief that US institutions should be loyal to the white race, especially as expressed through the American spirit of our forefathers and their ideals of fair play, and that any cancellation based on expressing the same racial beliefs as the country was built on is basically sedition as a prelude to white liquidation.
Some white people feel like they're going to be forced out of the US like the US was forced out of Vietnam and Afghanistan.
Instead it's a workers' rights issue primarily (it shouldn't be so goddamned easy to fire people), and secondarily it's a problem of the commons that every venue for free speech is managed by an authoritarian institution solely motivated by its own survival and prosperity rather than any animating belief or core ethics. This is your culture on laissez-faire. Whether it's MIT or Facebook managing your culture, you're still free to give your opinion in the shower every morning.
There's also a conscious belief on behalf of immigrant families like my own that the reason we came to this country is for the free speech, so when we see American institutions that do not seem to care, we wonder if America actually lives up to its promises.
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.
I'm a child of immigrants. I grew up watching my non-white parents adopt white mannerisms and cultural norms, join a white church, live in a white neighborhood, etc. in a very racially diverse town because any other choice would put them at a disadvantage. My complaint is not that this country fails to live up to its promises, my complaint is that the promise itself is twisted.
There are many ways you can value "free speech." This author has a particular one in mind, and thinks that everyone should agree with that specific interpretation. I, too, value free speech, and an introductory step there is that people can and perhaps should have different opinions on what exactly that means. As an extreme example, if one person, motivated by a desire to uphold free speech, says that invited speakers may use racial slurs because words shouldn't be censored, and another person, motivated by a desire to uphold free speech, says that speakers may not use racial slurs because they insult people for who they are which is antithetical to meaningful debate, both of those views seem to me like they are valid approaches to "free speech."
What I object to is the view that exactly one of those interpretations is right and that there must not even be debate about it. It's a short step from there to saying that certain racial slurs or (less egregiously but more insidiously) stereotypes or assumptions are within the bounds of free speech and other ones are not, that certain attacks are noble and others are blasphemous, etc.
That's the road that gets us to calls to cancel e.g. the 1619 Project from people who two minutes earlier were complaining about "cancel culture." That's how we get the fundamental dishonesty that makes a lot of people feel like "free speech" is a tool of white supremacy or whatever - because an actual illiberal approach to society is being called "free speech" and nobody is willing to call it what it is.
> both of those views seem to me like they are valid approaches to "free speech
Except they're not. One vision is quite literally very controlled speech. It may be appropriately called 'civil speech' or 'appropriate speech' but it is not free speech.
You cannot take a thing, call another thing that thing, and then attempt to claim the first thing is actually the second thing.
The first view you espoused does not preclude the second view from being discussed within its framework, whereas the second one does preclude the first. This very salient difference means that even by your metrics the first is superior.
The 1619 project should be allowed, it should just be mocked for being completely made up, and the newspaper that published it should be relegated to the garbage bin of history for printing something do devoid of reality. That doesn't mean it should be canceled.
First, MIT isn't Ivy League, which I don't just mean as a pedantic point about a football league - the Ivy League are all liberal arts schools. MIT is a technology school. It makes sense that there are institutions whose purpose is to provide a platform to any speaker. It does not make sense that every institution should do that. That's my complaint - this author who claim to care that distinct points of view are well-represented has rounded off a specific school into Generic University With The Same Classical Liberal Worldview As Every Other University.
Two, please tell me how many times in the history of your Ivy League school, since its founding until your attendance, they invited an African-American speaker.
Twitter had become a powerful mechanism to lodge complaints, vid and invalid.
Companies often will immediately take notice of someone they’d dismissed via traditional channels.
Harassment, racism, juvenile immaturity, etc., are also called out via Twitter. Sometimes they are legitimate grievances, other times not.
But there is almost never any due process and as infrequently are there repercussions for liars, people looking for someone to silence, or simple malicious intent.
This is as bad as “disinformation”. It’s ruining many innocent peoples lives, but Twitter couldn’t care any less.
Psychologically this is group bullying without consequences.
> 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. There's a legit case to be made that twitter has caused significant damage to people's images and careers, that they've known about this problem for a long time and did nothing about it. Victims could get together and do a class action lawsuit.
It's scary because realistically, it might take a long time for things to change. Right now, the mob can crush anyone they feel like crushing with no consequences. Does anyone really want to live in that world? This could get worse if we let it. It might even be possible to weaponize this, pay for a botnet to get someone you don't like fired.
Ah, so the solution to cancel culture is to...cancel more people, using the power of the state to instill your views over everyone else. How the libertarian paradise has decayed.
I'm not sure which part of my comment makes you think of cancel culture.
My general gist was that we should make it illegal to fire someone, penalize someone or withdraw opportunities because an online or real-life mob told you to. Mob "justice" has been a problem humanity has had to deal with for centuries/millenia, but the internet somehow made people think mobs are OK, because participating is risk-free now.
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.
> Right now, the mob can crush anyone they feel like crushing with no consequences.
Not quite. Right now the mob can crush anyone if that "anyone" is at the mercy of an institution that will allow them to be crushed.
Imagine this exact same situation, except that MIT tells the Twitter mob to get lost. What would happen? The Twitter mob would howl for a couple of weeks, and then their attention would turn elsewhere. If nobody at MIT blinks, then the mob can't crush anybody.
That's true. They might even have a hard time even keeping it up for a couple of weeks if said institution doesn't even bother to respond to the twitter mob, just completely ignores them. Social media has a very short attention span, and if nothing new happens, they'll move on to something else to get outraged about.
It's still problematic that many people will lose their livelihood and have their careers damaged by this. Even if your current employer sides with you, having negative twitter mobs write about you might reduce your chances of landing the next job.
In order to make things better, I think we need to be more vocal and forceful in standing up to cancel culture. To actively reject it as a society. Just hoping that your current and future employers will maybe side with you, maybe that's a start, but it isn't enough.
It feels very strange and perhaps kind of contradictory to be presented with an individual who is vehemently against the idea of censorship while also using "the majority of people also hold this view" as their primary justification why censorship in this case is wrong.
If the professor held a view that the minority if Americans supported, would there be more or less reason to support censorship in that case? Would the author had been so quick to defend the professor's beliefs if they had not aligned with the majority's (and, likely, the author's, if I am to judge based on the impassioned editorializing present in the article)?
I'm not certain this sort of appeal to the commons argument has a place in the discussion of ethics and clout-driven censorship--that would boil the entire issue down to a simple.tug.of war between which of the two sides can drum up more/louder supporters. That isn't a question of ethics at all.
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 case where the popularity of something comes in to the argument as a factual statement about the world.)
No, but something being expected is something else that is not inherently tied to the correctness of an argument.
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.
I think you are conflating popularity of an argument with popularity as part of an argument. For the former, it's easy to agree that it does not affect the correctness of the argument. But in the articles case, popularity is part of the argument: That it is especially worrying the speaker is uninvited for an opinion which is held by a majority of people, i.e is popular.
Another example of this would be if we were having an argument about what music to play at some event we are hosting. I might well use the popularity of some songs as an argument.
The popularity of the opinion was not being used to support the truth of that opinion, but to point out the absurdity of censoring an opinion that has that much popular support.
The author clearly states that Abott's position was not relevant to the talk he was to present. Wether his position on admittance us congruent with progress in client science has yet to be adressed.
I blame an administrative class that is either too cowardly to stand up to the mob, or - and I fear this is more likely - actually deranged and in complete agreement with the mob.
I say the latter is more likely because, in this case and so many others, there was so little at stake. There was no imminent risk to MIT's reputation for platforming a climate scientist speaking on climate change... merely because he had elsewhere spoken unfavorably of affirmative action.
The dreadful truth is the administrators think the activists are right.
On second thought - I agree with you. Twitter is only a problem because companies/administrations listen to it as if a few people shouting on the internet were representative of the population in any way. Which in turn empowers those shouting the most.
This has been my experience working alongside University administrators. A sizeable chunk of them (I wouldn't say a clear majority, but in no way a small minority) are exactly the kinds of people who participate in these mobs, and are perfectly happy to use small spats and uproars on Twitter as political cover to legitimize their internal activism.
The people buckling out of fear are less worried about the consequences of upsetting faceless Twitter users than they are about upsetting a semi-organized and ideologically motivated fifth-column within their own organizations.
What exactly did Twitter itself do other than create a unique platform that is arguably valuable in its own right? Are they secretly making it more evil to make more ad money?
Just to be clear - I blame "Twitter" the platform not "Twitter" the corporation. The platform gave voice to people who want to cause outrage, whether the corporation wanted or intended that is only secondary. Maybe it's a distinction without a meaning, but it makes sense in my head.
Their choice of algorithms also maximizes the reach of these people, since they use the same mechanisms that maximize the reach of advertisers (twitters actual client, users are the product).
Well many claimed that Twitter caused the Arab Spring a decade or so ago. That uprushing of democracy in the Arab states. And look how that turned out....hmm.
I must admit, if there was a guy giving a lecture at my institution, and I was informed that he had made a Third Reich comparison while talking about admissions criteria, I'd be pretty opposed to the lecture going on. At the same time, I don't like the idea of succumbing to an online mob of sorts.
It seems like MIT is thinking kind of like a business here.
And perhaps that's the bigger problem – not only are campuses are becoming more like big businesses, but they are big businesses. So they tend to act more like businesses then intellectual centers of speech and thought.
I used to think as you outlined here, and then I realised that I would only care if they made a Third Reich comparison that I disagreed with. If they said Milo is literally Hitler, I'd... well, I would have been very confused because Milo is a tasty chocolate drink. But I wouldn't have considered it an offense... so the offense wasn't actually the use of unspeakable comparisons, it was the sin of doing so while disagreeing with me!
So I try not to judge quite so quickly now, though I probably still fail plenty...
I guess I'll disagree with that, Nazis and Hitler are not some holy or taboo things that must never be compared to anything else, the problem is that comparison between things becomes difficult the more emotionally charged the things being compared are, so if you are going to compare Nazis and Hitler with something else you better be really clever at making comparisons and able to fight when folks come unglued.
and who can do that? Logically what you are saying makes sense, but when applied practically it falls apart. Leading me to suggest a blanket taboo considering how hugely disrespectful and inconsiderate there comparisons are.
> "I must admit, if there was a guy giving a lecture at my institution, and I was informed that he had made a Third Reich comparison while talking about admissions criteria, I'd be pretty opposed to the lecture going on."
I believe that, broadly speaking, Hitler and Nazi references are beyond tired and cliche at this point. However, "disclaimers" such as this one are disappointing. Because silly Nazi references seem to be thrown around by everyone, and yet somehow it's only objectionable or worthy of challenge when the wrong people do it.
I mean, context matters? Nazi comparisons in a comment section is one thing, Nazi comparisons in a opinion piece in a big weekly magazine is a different thing because in the latter case your are supposed to have put actual thought into what you say and how you say it.
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 should explicitly maintain campuses as places where limits might be tested, and have robust responses.
> 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?
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 an illiberal institution, but just with a hard right/conservative bias.
> 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.
Perhaps what we perceive as a 'conservative' bias is just what centrist discourse used to be like before the twitter mobs?
“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.”
I agree but for a different reason: you’re probably gonna get a better education than in most of these football down in the goonies universities. If football is what drives the funding and the students guess what drives the priorities as well?
It can actually be good to go to a football school if its large enough. That wing of the university prints money to support all the other branches that otherwise would be starved of funding. Ironically, its probably disinterest liberal arts students who benefit the most from their school’s football program. Ohio State is very much a football school and it has great academics especially in engineering, business, cancer research, a national leader in agricultural sciences too, with brand new buildings all over its massive campus. Other public schools in the great lakes region that aren’t in the B1G ten football conference look like satellite campuses by comparison.
Weak bureaucrats are going to be the undoing of so many societies until the average person realizes that they do have genuine agency in (and a responsibility to) the world, and that the weak bureaucrat is unnecessary.
Because it is there department that is organizing the talk?
I'm happy to argue about whether they should have decided to cancel the talk, how in general you should decide what speakers to have, and how you should respond to public pushback to your selections. But the general idea that a department gets to decide who they have come and speak seems like it should be uncontroversial?
My point is, for whose benefit was the talk in the first place? I imagine it’s mostly for those who were coming to listen to the talk, right? So what’s the job of the chair of the department in this case? To serve those who are coming to listen to the talk, is it not?
If that’s all true, then were all of those coming to listen to the talk consulted prior to the cancellation?
If not, who was the chair serving?
Do you see where I’m going here with the idea of the “weak bureaucrat”? They’re pervasive in modern politics too. Most such people are supposed to serve others, but inevitably end up unashamedly serving themselves first and foremost.
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.
I mean, not being super familiar with this guy outside of what is presented in the article, there does seem to be a pretty important difference between someone like Milo and an actual academic giving an academic talk. I see why some would worry about cancelling a talk by the former (despite him being utterly repugnant and bringing nothing of substance to the audience), but the latter cancellation seems worse to me.
I think parent is saying that the progressive Twitter mob has been labeling and attacking people who support merit-based admissions policies that ignore race as racists for many years already. This cancellation is not “different” as the author says, they are only now becoming aware of the pervasiveness and wrongness of this type of thinking since it happened to someone they care about and not someone they didn’t.
Would you please stop posting flamewar and/or flamebait comments to HN? We're trying for something else here, and comments like this contribute directly to destroying that possibility. You've done it repeatedly in this thread already. If instead 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.
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.
EDIT: I see plenty of downvotes on this, which is fine, but no rebuttals. Should I have expected better from HN, or is this what we've come to? Downvoting an obvious summary of a short letter?
Your comment is a partial answer to a question I have: are there any universities with any prestige who still, today, uphold the principles of free expression and academic freedom? I thought MIT might still have some institutional self-respect, and am saddened to find out that it does not. Who’s left (in addition to U. of Chicago)?
This fits MIT's historical pattern of buckling under external pressure, like what happened to Aaron Swartz or Star Simpson. Different this time because of the cancel mob aspect, but not too surprising.
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 Satanist in a government role of promoting birth control, you shouldn't have your PR representative be a man who's against the very role he's supposed to be playing. Both the first instance and the last are counterproductive. An advocate for Satan would be just the ammunition someone against birth control could use perfectly, and a PR representative who's against the inclusion of the people he's supposed to play PR for will naturally alienate.
The John Carlson lecture isn't an opportunity to offer the field cutting edge science, it's an opportunity to present to the rest of the world new findings in climate science, and to inspire others to take up the banner. It is science propaganda, in the best way possible.
Just as you wouldn't invite OJ Simpson to give a lecture on sentencing reform despite his innocence because it would alienate the very people you're trying to convince to rally for sentencing reform, you should aim to have the least-offensive and most-captivating candidate give the annual PR speech. This is meritocracy, which is something that many universities aren't big on (being filled with legacy admissions).
My own views are probably not far from the person who was denied the speech, here, but I understand the value in propaganda, and having someone who would set PR back when most of the point is to captivate the public would be a net-negative, and anti-meritocratic. Despite their viewpoint being probably comparable to my own, I'm aware that PR is delicate, and public advocacy plays a large role in changing public opinion, so they should indeed step aside to let someone more publicly-accepted give the speech.
In short: Don't alienate your audience if your goal is to persuade. Go with a safer bet, always. It's not a great idea to fire controversial people, but if the goal is a good speech for PR, go with someone else. They'll probably appreciate the time to do more research.
The activists who demanded this aren't the ones who need to be persuaded on climate change.
MIT just handed the right wing, the actual climate skeptics who need to be persuaded, another free cancel culture publicity 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 thing.
Of course, if the lecture is really just pandering to that audience without any interest in the larger public, then what you say makes perfect sense. It's also in 100% agreement with original comment.
You're actually just agreeing with me and don't realize it because you're lost in your own sea of words.
You ask for a rebuttal and you return with the laziest possible response. I'm starting to think you weren't really interested in hearing one.
It doesn't matter who the activists are. PR is not a game played between the extremist left and right wings, it's a game played with the center of the field. The center of the field is being increasingly filled with people from demographics that could very well be alienated by the professor's public views, and who could be reached, converted, and more importantly, inspired to work in the field, if handled right.
It doesn't matter if a politician gets a more-fervent pre-established base. What matters is the influx of new voters and plausible future scientists. It's hard to change the opinions of people set in their ways, but through making a good first impression you can alter the course of someone who otherwise wouldn't have been interested in the field. Making a bad impression could very well cause apathy or worse. It's absolutely critical to not mess it up, and MIT made the correct, meritocratic response.
As Mounk's essay notes, the vast majority of the public agrees with the professor on affirmative action. MIT just told that public what it thinks of their views.
As I've said multiple times in the thread, my own viewpoints are very close to the professor's! Public opinion of people who are not already in the system, however, is a different game, and you should always go with the safest bet if doing propaganda. It's critical.
You're wording this in a way that's deliberately representing your ideological opponents in the worst possible faith and light, and if nothing else it demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of not only the views of your opponents, but of people who would be sympathetic to your views if you would take ten seconds to apply tact to your words.
This is the exact opposite of a good-faith argument and a demonstration of exactly the reason why having a person with tact give a speech for outreach is critical.
I'm baffled by this response. I've done my best to summarize what you seem to be saying and what I see as the blind spots. I don't even see you as an opponent. We seem to disagree on a particular PR tactic and how it plays with the public.
Why are you ranting at me about my lack of tact? Doesn't it seem a bit ironic?
You guys are both putting too much energy into commenting about the "you" at the other end of the discussion. Not only is it leading you to break the site guidelines, it makes the discussion noisier and more tedious for everybody else.
You both have interesting points to make. If you'd stick to making them substantively, thoughtfully, and respectfully, the thread would be much better. "Respectfully" generally includes avoiding telling people things about themselves that are not likely to land well. There are times when that's necessary, but talking to strangers over the internet is not one of them.
You guys are both putting too much energy into commenting about the "you" at the other end of the discussion. Not only is it leading you to break the site guidelines, it makes the discussion noisier and more tedious for everybody else.
You both have interesting points to make. If you'd stick to making them substantively, thoughtfully, and respectfully, the thread would be much better. "Respectfully" generally includes avoiding telling people things about themselves that are not likely to land well. There are times when that's necessary, but talking to strangers over the internet is not one of them.
Thanks dang. I agree with you completely after seeing the results. If I could edit those comments at this point I would. I've done my best with the ones I still can.
Who cares? With that attitude we wouldn't have ended slavery, woman wouldn't be able to vote, civil rights wouldn't have happened, and hetero marriage would still be the only option.
For those who see race-based preferences as an urgent form of social progress, this does make sense, yes. I don't, and most Americans don't, but that doesn't make us right.
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.
I think you are missing the point that affirmative action, which I am for, is done a disservice when we descend to PR games. Knee jerk reactions serve no one.
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 real science/engineering types. It is common to see this behavior in social sciences nowadays, but less so among people working on real problems.
Nobody who's in the demographic of people who could be attending university in the next ten years is going to see some professor getting knocked from a position as anything noteworthy; there's no viral potential in somebody not doing a speech. But the speech, if it goes well, could have and has historically had great potential to inspire people to going into the field of climate science. Making the best impression is paramount, and you can't do so if the person heading the explicitly public relations-based charge is in a position to alienate a sizeable portion of the perspective candidates.
Meritocracy is paramount to science and engineering, and having someone with such great potential to alienate placed in a public relations role is the exact opposite of meritocratic. Abbot is well-respected in his field, and it could be meritocratic to offer him a reward for his work, but it wouldn't be to put him in a critical social position with the baggage he brings along.
I disagree his ideas of merit-based entry would alienate a sizeable portion of perspective MIT students (the article also shows supporting polls). MIT, not merit-based, are you kidding?
Offering a social, outreach-based task to a man whose views are cause for alienation against prospective students not just prospective MIT students, but the field at large, which is substantially larger than the four-thousand undergrads MIT has, would indeed not be meritocratic.
I'm not going to debate what his views actually are, and I personally agree very heavily with merit-based admission. Like I've said elsewhere in the thread, it's likely I'm not far from the professor's views. However his views have been interpreted in a way significantly different from how you frame them by enough people that MIT saw it fit to not go forward with his speech. It's a PR and outreach game, not an inside baseball conference.
I'm very skeptical that the attitude can be isolated this way. There's a lot of people who genuinely do feel uncomfortable when authority figures don't share their political views, and that discomfort won't go away just because you're no longer in "outreach mode". If you shape your outreach efforts to target them, and you successfully convince them to apply to MIT (or enter the broader field), won't they expect their lecturers to be held to the same standard?
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.
The other angle: University changed plan for a PR event when they were confronted to the fact that the speaker’s public views on diversity were wildly against the people the Uni was trying to reach in the first place.
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.
Then another comment here on HN got me looking at Persuasion: Apparently, Mounk runs a group/community dedicated to protecting the "free society" from threats.
Now, that's all circumstantial stuff, and the story might be as bad as it sounds. But when proponents of US imperialism talk about defending freedom, I get worried.
So, I feel I would need to listen to the other side(s) regarding whether, how, and for what reasons the talk was canceled.
"...the department leadership concluded that the debate over both his views on diversity, equity, and inclusion and manner of presenting them were overshadowing the purpose and spirit of the Carlson Lecture"
"The Carlson Lecture is not a standard scientific talk for fellow scientists. It is an outreach event, open to the public, with a speaker who is an outstanding scientist and role model [...] to inspire young people to consider careers in STEM."
Seems fairly reasonable to me that you wouldn't want someone with divisive views on diversity giving your outreach lecture.
It's really OK for you to agree with someone who doesn't share your entire set of political beliefs. There is no need to be suspicious. It's probably a bad thing for the world to be divided into "us and them", don't you think?
Group affiliation is a decent heuristic. It helps you to know what to look for when identifying whether there are concessions made to forward a larger agenda concealed within the text.
I wouldn't dismiss the document out of hand by virtue of its author's social circles, but I also wouldn't say that suspicion is entirely unwarranted. Though the CFR is such a large organization, I would also be less immediately suspicious of its rank and file.
>Group affiliation is a decent heuristic. It helps you to know what to look for when identifying whether there are concessions made to forward a larger agenda concealed within the text.
That's exactly where the wheels come off. The implication is that individual ideas or policies should be valued based on whether they're part of a platform at the level of party politics or similar.
So what if the idea is part of someone else's larger agenda? What exactly are we threatened by?
>So what if the idea is part of someone else's larger agenda? What exactly are we threatened by?
If you disagree with the broader agenda or find that it is in conflict with your beliefs/interests you may be better served by pursuing alternative framings which don't depend on the priors of the the group with-which you find yourself in opposition.
Just because you agree with the author's conclusion doesn't mean that their line of reasoning is parallel with yours, or that the assumptions and value judgements that they used to reach that conclusion don't logically unfold in an undesirable direction.
Group affiliation can be a trigger and a compass to help you in that process.
This doesn't mean that you have to disagree with them. It just means that you should take some extra time to understand both how and why.
Is there a way to access the Twitter hate sphere that actually contributed to this? This is the first I’ve heard of it and I’m regularly on Twitter. I’d love to actually sit and witness this sort of behavior myself instead of getting it second-handedly through reporting.
It doesn’t help the Twitter interface utterly sucks at collating and quantifying the stuff in a real manner.
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 who is canceled for using a nazi reference as well.
There are really only two analogies he could have used, because there are only two cases in (post-Mongol) history where a nation with the best universities in the world experienced a calamitous fall from grace. One was in Nazi Germany.
The other incident was Napoleon's conquest of France, Italy, and Spain, and the damage that was done by the anti-Church reforms imposed on those universities. This is a closer analogy, since Napoleon's reforms were nominally "liberalizing" in that he had proclaimed the abolition of nobility and its continuation via said institutions. But it's unlikely that the Twitter mobs would have been any happier about being compared to Napoleon instead of Hitler.
> Does anyone have first-hand knowledge of what the mob said on Twitter?
The article contains links to a few Twitter posts.[0][1] Keep in mind that they might not be representative.
Edit: also consider that your use of the word "mob" (which isn't used in the Atlantic article) might be unfair, and that the word might apply to us uninvested, nameless faces better than it does to those students and professors putting their real name down against something that actually involves them.
The period of 1933-1938 offers a wealth of information on how dictatorships are set up, how a war economy is financed (quantitative easing), the march through the institutions, censorship etc.
The other obvious parallel, Stalin, is more messy because a revolution started it all. Germany went from fragile democracy to full dictatorship overnight with the enabling laws (after the Nazis had marched through the institutions for about a decade).
It is a perfect analogy and does not mean that all of the "progressive" left are Nazis (though some of them would have participated in the Nazi movement, too, because they are just power hungry and don't care about the specifics of the cause).
It seemed like the nazi reference was appropriate though. In this case, the university system in Germany was ruined by a move away from merit toward an incorrect and abhorrent philosophy.
I think that doesn’t mean that affirmative action = nazism. It means that focusing on things other than merit has negative consequences and should be avoided.
A recent comedy, Death of Stalin, points this out on the micro level when there are no competent doctors to treat Stalin because all doctors who didn’t pledge political fealty were purged.
Having an academic system based on political or philosophical fealty will result in poorer academics.
It doesn't really matter if the nazi reference was appropriate or not, using nazism as a comparison point is taboo for any kind of serious discussion. Once you compare anything to nazism you pretty much forfeit the discussion, even if it's a valid comparison.
> 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 folks heavily coordinate their dissatisfaction in the most effective place to get their voice heard by institutions: the internet.
Wrong or not... in the current climate I would not be making arguments against affirmative action publicly while expecting to keep my academic speaking arrangements. Especially with Nazi Germany comments thrown in there - way too spicy. I guarantee MIT will find a fine replacement that has less controversy in their recent history, and allowing this guy to talk would have only been risking further public altercation with their students. I would have made the same business decision.
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?
It is a form of perverted sense of fairness. If X gets to skirt the rules, it's only fair that everybody (really, myself, but that sounds too crass) gets to skirt the rules as well.
If you regard affirmative action as more fair than an admission system based on merit, please tell me in what sense you consider it fair that the more qualified person loses out because of their ethnicity? There are literally hundreds of Asian students who completely dedicated their youth to the goal of making it to an elite US university and then you're rejected because your acceptance would violate some quota... that just seems incredibly absurd and cruel to me. Not even speaking of the negative societal repercussions that such actions will have.
This all is in good faith, just sharing my ever-evolving thoughts on the topic to answer the question:
For better or worse meritocracies are exclusive in nature when you take systemic societal issues into consideration like wealth gaps. In America, we've historically done so much to hurt minorities I believe we've arguably held religions/ethnicities/classes/genders back from the same opportunities that I have as a straight middleclass white guy.
Is it the fault of the meritocracy that it is exclusive in this arguably unfair way? Nope - and I don't think that we should get away with meritocracies at all. But I do think we have to take into account external societal conditions when implementing one and I see affirmative action as this measure.
Schools are unique in society that they're a ladder up - my time in college was huge. Arguably, education is one of the most fair ways to lift people out of the non-ideal societal crap I was discussing in the first paragraph... so things like affirmative action are implemented to enhance marginalized people's access to opportunities I often take for granted.
This issue for me is a hard one as I can't exclude the reality of history and systemic societal problems along side a school's unique position to be the ladder up for people who have been crapped on like I haven't.
---
> decisions shouldn't primarily be based on merit anymore?
I think we still need to make decisions based on merit absolutely - and I think we need to strive for the ideals of meritocracy as a society. I just think that active measures are taken to try to balance things out - affirmative action being one of those... for better or worse.
Affirmative action is just a really complex issue. Anecdotally, I admit I am glad that I am in California now where it's illegal in regards to employment - and honestly... selfishly so. In Iowa affirmative action was a thing.
Man I really hope the Diablo 2 auth servers are back online....
It's a horrible look only according to incurious, oversensitive, ideological and closed-minded people. These are the people you want to filter out from your intake. So having such a filter is a good thing for the school.
I interpret this decision one of two ways. Either the admins were violating their agency duty in order to protect their own ass from the mob, or MIT wishes to deflect any scrutiny of their own diversity numbers since that can invite lawsuits on the one hand or activism on the other.
Totally unacceptable and sends a message to any student that isn’t a white man that they don’t matter
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.
No, this is an intentional misdirection by them. The important motivation is to undermine the influence of the majority white population. In that regard, it is always important to make every other ethnic group a victim and never paint anyone but white people as benefactors of systemic racism.
Inconvenient data points, such as the one you describe, are intentionally omitted.
E.g. In the orignal "Women make 70 cents for every dollar a man makes" gov memo, it was also said that Asian men make 115 cents for every dolar a white man makes. That doesn't fit the narrative so it's just ignored.
The gap between white and Asian outcomes is due to immigration policies which make it easier for wealthy people to get in. The US imports rich asians who can afford to send their kids to MIT, the rich get richer ect. The gender pay gap is a different issue and doesn’t need to address immigration policy.
Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar, let alone (god help us) race war. We're trying to avoid that here, for what should be obvious reasons if you've read the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
just for clarification, the speaker has a newsweek peace that rails against diversity, equality, and inclusion as a sinister regime that actually works against diversity and actually hurts the public trust. he then goes on to insist universities are 'diverse' enough, so dont worry about them. his citations are...tentative at best.
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.
How would you respond to this point then by the author?
>If every cringeworthy analogy to the Third Reich were grounds for canceling talks, hundreds of professors—and thousands of op-ed columnists—would no longer be welcome on campus.
It's a weak argument. First, there's a big gap between "canceling talks" and "no longer welcome on campus." Secondly, it's not like it was a recanted off-the-cuff remark or an ill-advised mailing list post dredged up from his grad student days - he published it in a national periodical[1] not two months ago. This at least suggests he's not a good communicator.
[1] With all the usual caveats about Newsweek today being a weird semi-propaganda arm of The Community and not particularly reputable despite its brand and reach. If that's the place you go to get published, maybe that's already a sign you don't have the banger essay you thought you did.
> You'll admit that the category of 'anyone who has compared mainstream American politics to Nazism in a published article' is a pretty wide net though?
No, I won't. "Published an article in a national periodical about mainstream American politics at all" is already a really small net! "Did it in the past two months" vanishingly less so! "And is giving a PR speech for their university" and I bet we're down to population size ~1.
I think universities as a whole would be a lot better off if they stopped considering this body of op-ed-cum-think-tank-writers pretending to be journalists worthy of serious attention at all, Nazi comparisons or no. And I think it says a lot about Mounk's own social circles that he considers this behavior de rigueur.
You're saying university DEI initiatives are "a very similar situation" to the rise of the Nazi party in Germany. Do you really think this? Not only no difference in kind, but close in degree?
You seem to be adding in additional, somewhat frivolous conditions that none of the parties involved even alluded to. So yes that might drive down the number to a conveniently hard-to-research amount.
Let's start with your "2 months" figure. Who cited that as part of the reason for the disinvitation?
The timeframe and forum makes it fair to characterize this as his current, considered, strongly-held opinion. That has bearing on whether we consider this a situation of "we disinvited him because we don't want our PR handled by people currently advancing opinions contra political sensitive aspects of our university admissions policy" vs. "we disinvite everyone who made a cringeworthy analogy to the Third Reich" (Mounk's characterization).
You have moved the goalposts immensely from "is Mounk's conclusion about Nazi comparisons accurate?" to "do you have proof from the horses's mouth that MIT would not have done this had he written this 5 years ago?"
You brought up timeframe (and many other conditions) as a rebuttal to the author. I'm just pointing out that you can't be sure that any of those considerations even entered the minds of MIT's admins. I hope we can at least agree that this opaqueness is an issue and could inspire future, less-careful censors.
If you're taking a position of absolute radical skepticism, you should be asking the same questions of Mounk's claim to know MIT's exact conditions, not using such hearsay as your own argument's starting point.
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 the university holds to boost its public image.
It’s not an academic talk discussing new research or a political perspective, but rather summarizes ideas for the public. If MIT wants to decide who should give such talks I don’t care.
In contrast, if a department or student group wants to invite a specific speaker for a specialized talk about politics, science, math, then the university censoring such discourse is what is truly dangerous.
In this light, the cancellation of Milo Yiannopoulos who was invited by the College Republican club is much worse. Even though personally I do not think Yiannopoulos is anything but a provocateur, if someone (group/department) wants to invite him the university should not block him from speaking.
The article argues, and I agree, that a university is free to not invite someone if they view them as controversial. Where the problem really is is that they invited him and then retracted the invitation in response to a mob. The retraction is what makes this problematic.
EDIT: the other point that the article makes is that this professor's "controversial" views are held by upwards of 70% of the American public. The net result of applying this rule consistently would be that a strong majority of the American public cannot express their opinions on this subject because of a tiny vocal minority.
> this professor's "controversial" views are held by upwards of 70% of the American public.
First of all, who says? Second of all, just because a major believes something doesn't make it right. There was a time when the majority of Americans believed slavery was OK. Times change.
No! Democracy is rule by the people, not 50.1% of the people. "Tyranny of the majority" is the major anti-democratic risk of majority rule systems. That's why free speech is in the Constitution, to defend free speech against majority rule.
I think that every retraction of an invitation to speak in response to a mob is bad, so we are in agreement.
My only point is that this particular "John Carlson Lecture" is itself a public relations event whose purpose is to promote MIT to the local public and enhance its image, they allude to this in the official statement [1].
In my opinion, a PR lecture cancellation is different from telling a student group or department that they are not allow to invite a specific speaker: it is bad, but much less dangerous to academic discourse than previous cancellations (even if in past examples the speakers mentioned in the article had extreme or bizarre views).
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.
There is a lot of focus on the Twitter aspect, but from the article that outrage comes from an article he published in a magazine explaining his views on affirmative action.
It’s not some random comment that got blown out of proportion, nor some accidental miscommunication, and the subject is also not unrelated to universities.
Why is it out of proportion to have a mob wanting this guy out of the university system for controversial views on students hiring he himself widely published ?
Who gets to decide what positions are so controversial (despite being held by a supermajority of the population, and aligned with the US Constitution) that they must prevent a holder from speaking on a wholly unrelated topic?
> In this light, the cancellation of Milo Yiannopoulos who was invited by the College Republican club is much worse.
This isn't how I remember it. Milo thrived off of these confrontations and being "cancelled," but what really made him drop off were his comments on pedophilia. Being hounded by students legitimized him in his followers mind.
It's out of control. Free speech will soon only be allowed for maybe elon musk and a few other billionaire who are literally big and rich enough to own the platform and be financially insulated from the potential backlash. Everyone else will be subjected to arbitrary rules and have their past dredged up against them.
If your member of an underrepresented group, chances are you didn't grow up to develop merit. Affirmative action allows you to access institutions that help you to develop merit.
If someone isn't of MIT-calibre merit (ie competence), then it's no good to them to pop them into an electrical engineering course that they can't handle, and it's especially no good for the ultra smart Asian American who was just racially discriminated against. They'll be better off at an easier institution where they'll have plenty of room to develop, and that unfairly excluded Asian will be better off at MIT.
Wow. Should we let the bar of perfection be lifted so high that noone can meet those standards? No matter how long ago their sins were or whether they have rehabilitated themselves?
Are the people who are lifting that bar really as virtuous as they think themselves to be?
Then the campaign to cancel Abbot’s lecture began. On Twitter, some students and professors called on the university to retract its invitation. And, sure enough, MIT buckled, becoming yet another major institution in American life to demonstrate that the commitment to free speech it trumpets on its website evaporates the moment some loud voices on social media call for a speaker’s head.
Two tweets does not seem like a mob. The quality of The Atlantic has really gone downhill. No different from the rest of the hype-filled media.There are 1000x more tweets about the cancellation than tweets that called for his cancellation.
That's exactly the point that the article was trying to make: a loud minority calling for the cancellation, and the institution buckles and does the cancellation despite of common sense.
I find it helpful to think of prestigious colleges as hedge funds with strong branding and a world class associate pipeline. The reason why they favor legacy students and jocks is that those are the people who are the most likely to write huge checks to their alma mater and otherwise act in its interests continually after graduation. Perhaps that will change, but it hasn’t yet. This professor advocating an end for legacy and athletics admissions is a direct attack on a wildly successful multi-billion dollar business model that’s lasted centuries and still going strong. I wouldn’t be surprised if whoever made this call is using the twitter mob as a convenient fig-leaf for chastising a boat-rocker.
If it wasn’t Twitter it would be Facebook, TikTok, Reddit, or whatever social network is cool tomorrow.
The social media cat is out of the bag. Mob justice is, unfortunately, the purest form of democracy, untempered by government or constitution or other forms of control. The only paths forward are to live with mob justice or to enforce actions against free speech and expression (ie making it illegal to cancel someone on the institution side, or make it illegal to participate in a social media mob on the user side, or make it illegal to host a social media mob on the social network side). I don’t see those happening.
Social Media is not the purest form of democracy because the people using social media, or who have a lot of followers on social media, are not representative
Mob justice is the purest form of democracy (how do the people organize in a land with no laws? They get pitchforks to oust the Bad People)
Social media is a tool that happens to facilitate mob justice particularly effectively. Why? Because you used to have to gather dozens or hundreds of people in the town common before you could yell “Burn the witch!”. Now you just tweet it (or share it, or telegram it, or…)
Dorian Abbot has his own account of the situation. One of the document he links is a dozen different MIT associates and alumni tweeting in support for the talk to be cancelled.
> I forgive the activists who led the campaign against me. Please do not attack them personally. They are fish swimming in a sea of moral confusion. Some of the responsibility for their behavior rests on their elders, who have not helped them form properly.
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 outcomes. In the meantime, I wish those who are constantly apoplectic about "cancel culture" would be a little more self-aware and perhaps even happy to see some minority voices getting some undeserved wins here and there.
After all, the suffering that some of these minority voices have historically experienced is unthinkably bad. Remember that: unthinkably bad. Worst imaginable. And it is absurd to argue that the lingering effects of that are not still with us in uncountable ways, big and small.
* 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.
While some of these observations are literally true to the first approximation, I'll just respond by pointing out that we wouldn't be talking about this were it not for the unthinkable suffering that really did take place (and arguably continues in some ways).
There are definitely some interesting sociological questions about how the power is manifesting, but I emphatically disagree with the proposition that the overreaction of "cancel culture" does not have as its root cause the systematic, historical oppression of minorities. To just make the (perhaps correct) observation that a significant fraction of the loudest voices are not suffering is to ignore how we got here.
If I am being very cynical, I say that people abuse/use the suffering of others for their own gain. PR from corps aligning with progressive aims is what I have in mind. I have seen it working with NGOs, too. Not saying we should not put the pressure on. Obviously institutions need pressure applied. But if it is always 'both barrels', we will alienate the old, the conservatives and the christians. Seeing the destruction of the political left in germany, I doubt the extreme pressure wave will yield anything but reaction. Trump 2.0.
An ex of mine was back stabbed so viciously in a feminist culture producing context funding play (the 1990s), that I have become very sceptical. I used to run around wearing a badge, Ich bin gegen mich, (I am against myself). I have stopped this.
Before Twitter conservative religious groups in the United States had and used such power to get those ideas and people they didn't like censored. This isn't a new thing brought about by Twitter, it is just more noticeable these days.
Which opens the question, is it a good thing that a tool like twitter is able to make these groups voices much more noticably amplified? It was one thing when this stuff was limited to the AM bands of radio or tabloids that everyone knew were nuts. Now we have given these people the equivalent platform of anyone else and there’s no learned cultural knowledge to ignore these voices like we’ve learned to do with AM radio crazies, since its being amplified on the same platform used by even the POTUS and all sorts of official sources of communication which acts as a signal of legitimacy for a lot of people buying into this crap.
With platforms like twitter we’ve in effect removed editors from the paper of record and let anyone contribute articles, which has turned it into a tabloid rag at best and outright propaganda at worst, but guised as where legitimate truths are found since officials and legitimate businesses and professionals have sanctified the platform with their own use.
At what point should this kind of social media bullying be considered as actual harassment? I personally cannot see the difference with the brigading 4chan or some toxic Reddit communities do to attack people. This type of attack always seem wrong, should not be given any weight or power, or tolerated IMHO.
Actually it's not different. University lecturers have been protested or cancelled for decades for reasons unrelated to their topic, usually due to political beliefs or corporate interests that clashed with students' ideals. "Cancel culture" is specifically about "personal" societal reforms, which is what makes it different than the older complaints about general politics.
Back in the day it was "edgy" to protest or cancel a speaker due to their support of the Vietnam war. People were just as angry (or more so!) at Vietnam protesters as people are today about "cancel culture" protesters, and vice versa. At the time, it was those young freaks with the long hair who were clearly nuts and extremists and going to erode the country's moral decency. Counter-culture folk in the 60's and 70's were a tiny but vocal minority of young people who were largely put down for their radical views about war and the environment. It's only in hindsight that protesting the Vietnam war seems socially acceptable.
I get the historical analogy with anti-Vietnam War protesters. I just don't agree that they are actually the moral equivalent of anti-anti-racial-preference protesters. And I definitely don't believe that the majority will see it that way in a few decades.
The moral foundations for Vietnam War opposition are much intellectually deeper and ideologically broader than those supporting racial preferences. A medieval Catholic could have opposed the Vietnam War on grounds of just war theory.
For what it's worth, I'm not trying to draw moral equivalence. I'm hoping to demonstrate that we just don't know what protests will be acceptable or not in the future.
>...much intellectually deeper and ideologically broader than those supporting racial preferences. A medieval Catholic...
Sure, if you narrow the topic of racial preferences down to the literal instantiation of exactly that mechanism, then broaden the topic of the Vietnam War out to historical philosophies of War in general, then of course the latter reads "intellectually deeper" and "broader".
But, these are all just discussions about what is morally just and, when society fails to provide justice, what we consider appropriate remedies.
I have no idea what people are meaning when they say "racial preferences" in this thread but the Vietnam war was objectively awful and gets more awful with every detail you learn.
This is very different from protesting Vietnam war or anything else that is specific. What we are seeing is a pure manifestation and exercise of power.
> University lecturers have been protested or cancelled for decades for reasons unrelated to their topic
I’m not sure this is the case here, it depends whether that means the specific topic they are giving the talk on or topic as in area of claimed expertise. I would say it’s fair game to consider them to be claiming an area of expertise if they are publishing articles on the topic, and this valid to consider the quality and impact of that work when inviting them for talks
Protesting against a war is nowhere comparable to demanding speech (correct pronouns and affirming the original sin of inevitable white racism). In fact, people from that era are marginalized because their brand of wokeness is no longer sufficient and too libertarian.
Back in those days one could also see Chomsky discussing with William Buckley (impossible today) and Enoch Powell discussing with people on the left.
Social media has completely transformed this type of protest. People who have nothing to do with the university can now join a 'cancel mob' to attack a political opponent on the other side of the world.
Oldsters remember when this was a slower process, where people would write angry letters. They would undertake letter-writing campaigns, persuading others to take up the literary torch. They'd write to newspapers and magazines, where "free speech" was subject to the gatekeeping editor. Shorter screeds would appear in classified ads, again, to be censored if the editor didn't want to print what you had to say. It's faster, it's more transparent, the gatekeeping is more often post-facto and more there are more platforms to try if one blocks you. Writing quality and wit has definitely declined, though. But I wouldn't say that this is a complete transformation. My dad would fume over his letters for days before sending them.
I always found Trump-satire a little bit symbiotic. He thrives on non-boring politics, satire only normalizes his actions - i.e. mocking war hero's, regardless of what you make of the war they fought in, is just inhuman and satire only serves to form a grotesque hyperreality which we saw explode at the beginning of this year with all this nonsense over the election.
Was he? I didn't watch all his Trump skits, but the ones I did were not memorable.
Trump should be a gold mine for parody, but SNL muffed it.
Jay Leno was always good and skewering both sides. He never took it seriously, and his targets usually found them funny, too. Perhaps Baldwin's jokes fell flat because they sounded more like a "let's all pile on him because we hate him" form of bullying rather than funny.
FWIW I think that says more about SNL than Trump, just seems a bit crap really from my admittedly non-nostalgic European-elitist perspective.
If you've heard of the private eye, they had some very well observed pieces on trump e.g. Trump likes it when people call him an orange racist because it plays to his base, call him a poor businessman and a fraud and he's not so happy.
P.S. on the subject of trump, Michael Lewis's book "The fifth risk" is very good. It's a good insight into the man, his team, and basically everything you shouldn't do in their shoes.
My favourite piece of trivia from the above book is that Trump never fires anyone personally. The whole "Yuh fired"-schtick from the TV show is just pantomime.
He was also apparently unable to understand that money raised in his name to fund a transition team wasn't his own personally, which didn't exactly surprise me but should shatter any illusion of rationality.
FWIW, I don't think your reply is quite on-topic here. I was talking about wit in letters to the editor in decline in contrast to short-form platforms like Twitter etc., that is, writing by the masses distributed to the masses. SNL is an entirely different beast; 'ordinary folks' don't get a platform there.
Yes, it was slower. And that slower speed gave more time for people to reflect, to calm down, to see if their moral passions had longevity. I think social media has perfect “outrage” because it can be so immediate. There’s no time for cooler heads to prevail. And we are the worse for it.
I’m not sure you’re correct that nothing is different. I saw a lecture recently by someone whose organization does mediation between student groups and universities with regards to free speech. He was saying that a few years ago for the first time his organization was starting to mediate in the opposite direction.
Was a very interesting talk. The speaker had tried to commit suicide and in the process of recovering from that realized that the speech patterns that are associated with sucidal tendencies, extreme consequences to minor events, were being used by student groups. Things like “if so and so comes to campus, people will die”. And they weren’t being hyperbolic, like they were honestly afraid someone would die if a speaker were allowed to speak. So the mediations required finding ways to bring nuance back to the conversation.
I honestly don’t know how different these objections to speakers are than in the past, but I thought it was interesting that there was a shift in the balance of power between university administrations and student groups in the US.
Apologies, I don’t think I can easily find the talk. I did some cursory looking based on what I could remember of the talk before posting. I like to link to things when I can.
Worse, is the topic is a current lightning rod for alt-right, so there’s a lot of garbage to sift through. I will see if I can get lucky and find the talk again.
Edit:
mrosett answered this. Yes it was a lecture by Greg Lukianoff of FIRE. I might have been click-baited to watch it, but he seemed credible enough to quote, and seemed to genuinely care about actual free speech.
Was the talk by Greg Lukianoff by any chance? He has a book called "The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure" that expands on these ideas.
Absolutely. Apologies for poor paraphrasing. I think it was something like instead of students suing to be heard, they were suing to exclude.
Mediation should really be neutral, but the organization is dedicated to free speech. It’s very possible that such an organization, or any organization with an agenda, does not make for good mediators. Would be an interesting topic next time I see my friend who acts as a mediator.
>Please take care researching this topic, it is a large lightning rod for alt-right and heavily conservative view points.
"Be careful to not allow facts, social psychology, and science based approaches get in the way of the narrative! We can't have any conservative view points around, regardless of how correct they are! The spooky alt-right fascism is just around the corner if you don't delude yourself like a good leftist!"
It was wrong then and it is wrong now. The Vietnam war protesters were free to protest, but they can not demand to restrict the freedom of speech of others.
Who in the 60s and 70s was invited to speak at a college or university, then later had their invitation withdrawn due to their support of the Vietnam war or corporate interests?
The original post claimed this, with no substantiation:
> University lecturers have been protested or cancelled for decades for reasons unrelated to their topic ... Back in the day it was "edgy" to protest or cancel a speaker due to their support of the Vietnam war.
I don't think I'm obligated to do anything before asking OP for evidence, but sure, I'll show my work, so to speak.
I've been following free speech issues for about thirty years, which a close interest in academia. Obviously, that doesn't overlap with the period under discussion (I'm too young), but in the course of reading deeply about the issue, I've come across a lot of history covering the 60s and 70s (in the US & Europe, in particular). So I was surprised to learn that cancelations I'd never heard of were common.
It's not easy to figure out the search terms for this - it's not like looking for the ten most popular NPM packages. So I tried searching for a few things.
I tweaked the terms - "1960s"/"1970s" seemed to produce slightly more relevant content, but no examples. Substituting "lecture" for "speaker" and "university" for "campus" didn't improve things either. I dug a couple pages deep in the results and clicked on a few seemingly relevant links, but was always disappointed.
I thought that maybe the ACLU's "Speech on Campus" page might reference an episode, but no. [1] I thought, perhaps FIRE has something on this, but they appear to be more concerned with recent history.
If these events were "extremely googable", I'd expect to have seen something promising by that point, but it wasn't happening. After your second response I thought "Oh, maybe krainboltgreene said googlable but meant duckduckgo or bing", so I tried those, and guess what?
Nothing.
I've got huge gaps in my knowledge. It's possible that OP is right and this is neither new nor different. But I'm not going to take their word for it, and it's ridiculous to expect me or anyone else to spend more than ten minutes searching for (even just) a lead on something that might not even exist, particularly given the confounding ambiguity of the possible search terms and the lack of indexed web resources for the historical era in question.
The problem with affirmative action is - its transitive.
If not the most capable applicant is choosen, instead by another criteria (e.g. race) then all who search the most capable outcome of research or education (for example a capable doctor) are forced to engage in what can only be described a racist filter to find the capable applicant.
Affirmative action ever treated the symptom. What i would recommend, is a proportional study place system.
Every "group" gets places, proportional to its representation in the public population. If this group has not enough capable applicants, due to societal wrongs (bad schools in the inner citys), all other groups are shrunk down by the same percentage, to encourage investment into the source of the problem.
Amusingly, graduates of "elite" universities are the brainpower behind social media and its satellite industries. In turn, those industries are a driving behind the market value of an MIT degree. I sense a symbiosis.
Is it reasonable for institutions to begin retaliation against students for this sort of behavior? Unleash social justice media mob on faculty, risk expulsion.
Some of the language in this article is a little breathless: it makes the claim that this instance is "quantitatively different," but the instance is the same kind we've seen before: a professional or academic having dislikeable views outside of their field.
It's also not clear whether this man (whose name I honestly can't remember after reading the article) has been "cancelled" in any meaningful sense: he now has an article in a leading liberal magazine defending him, written by another highly titled and positioned academic. Oh, and then he ended up speaking on behalf of MIT anyways, except not in a public venue where inviting him could be seen as an endorsement of him qua person.
The Atlantic is an interesting publication. I subscribed and appreciated it for years as an independent-minded outlet, even though it is usually far left of my perspectives.
In 2016, I unsubscribed because, well, the whole media went haywire and The Atlantic went down with them. I thought it was unrecoverable.
But it's nice to see a nuanced piece here that is capable of criticizing an idea while also criticizing the tactics of those who disagree with it. Maybe I should give it another chance.
Now with Trump out of office journalism as a whole has certainly gotten better imo. That man took the air out of the room from any other topic worthy of ink.
Can anyone tell me the problem the mob has with the MFE framework vs AA?
Is it just coming from the wrong person?
Is racism so bad in America that it is worse to be the black son of two wealthy Ivy educated lawyers, who attends private schools in NY, versus a white son with one parent in jail and the other addicted to meth in the backwaters of West Virginia who sometimes attends a broken public school when he isn't raising his 3 year old sister? Because right now affirmative action says the black guy needs the leg up in this scenario.
I'm not sure that you understand the MFE framework proposal.
How do you think it's going to help in your example? It'll clearly favor the black kid in this hypothetical case, because he's rich and well connected. The white kid might have made it in on a sports scholarship maybe, but even that slim hope will be ripped away from him under this proposal.
You have to remember that one of the major activist groups in support of affirmative action is called, in full, the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration & Immigrant Rights, and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary.
By Any Means Necessary.
There really is no way for a bureaucratic institution like a university to win against such a committed, devoted movement. If the university didn't "buckle", the activists would find a target higher up the chain to pressure to punish the university -- grant and endowment sponsors, that sort of thing. Get students to rally on or near the residences of the professors who approved the talk. Send activists to physically blockade the building where the talk is supposed to be given. And on and on. When nothing is off the table -- when there are "no bad tactics, only bad targets" -- there are plenty of fallbacks to employ if your first plan fails.
This is a mixed bag, as is MFE. Getting rid of legacies and sports admissions (and donor's kids) is good, but the supposed meritocratic admissions that are blind to disadvantaged students can be charitably described as naive. Bundling those goals together is also naive if it is not disingenuous.
As another commenter noted "Some cursory searches show that FIRE might not be as neutral as I thought they were." I am guessing I will find the same applies to MFE.
There is a strange paradox I noticed with activists and incentives. Basically they manage to incentivise being "unethical" and punish being "good" unless they are perfect. By being just the stick the relationship becomes adversarial and discourages any actual fixes.
If you concede then that begets more demands as they feel empowered. More radical demands follow and it is never enough.
If they basically tell them to get bent they either get discouraged or wind up background radiation and ignored anyway as they expect that sort of thing. How many scandals have hit say Nestle and Johnson and Johnson? Yet you never see calls to nationalize or break them up.
> In effect, this would create a prohibition on controversial political speech for all academics—and eventually, perhaps, professionals in other highly visible domains.
Traditionally tenured faculty enjoy(ed?) some degree of freedom of thought and expression, in order to prevent the stifling of scholarship, to promote the development and free interchange of ideas, and to enable the discussion of controversial issues.
It makes sense to me for universities to extend that courtesy to faculty of other institutions as well as their own.
Kudos to The Atlantic for publishing this. They have taken a veer to the left under Ms Jobs, but this restores my confidence somewhat.
There needs to be a new coalition for the next presidential election and going forward: a coalition of the sane that excludes the woke left and the anti-vaxxer/Trumpian right. Let's make America American again!
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