sort of diversity, diversity of ideas, that ought to matter to a university.
Are you sure about that? It seems like a function of universities can/should be to filter out as many terrible ideas as possible so people can spend time exploring and exchanging worthwhile ideas without spending too much overhead on epistemic hygiene.
A good restaurant with a diverse menu won't put spam-and-mustard-cake on the menu, even though it would certainly up the diversity.
It turns out that different people mean different things by "diversity".
Some people make the argument that diversity of participants' social, economic, or cultural backgrounds is good for truth-seeking inquiry. If everyone in the discussion is from similar backgrounds, they are more likely to have correlations among their biases and areas of ignorance, and the results of their inquiry will reflect these.
(However, there may be particular cultural views which are incompatible with participating in diverse inquiry because they manifest intolerance of diverse inquiry. One example: views which instruct the adherent to kill people who disagree with them, or to kill people of particular cultural backgrounds. The problem with having a Khmer Rouge partisan in your conversation is not that he keeps saying Khmer Rouge things; it's that he keeps trying to kill the intellectuals.)
Some people make the argument that culturally non-diverse organizations are more likely to do things which are harmful to the unrepresented people; so underrepresented people should seek representation to avoid harm. For instance, ceteris paribus, a government consisting only of white people (as in apartheid ...
This type of argumentation isn't really what I want posted. Too much straw, not enough subtlety.
For more good examples of many of your points, see Hitchens e.g. 4:30. If you feel like reading something taboo today, I would recommend the old apologetics for American slavery. Some of them are really good: will black people be better off as somebody's valuable property or as a competing source of poor labor? Who here really likes black people? How do you think they'll do when they are "free"? We can give a half-shrug to the paternalistic crap, but we can't shrug away what happened after Reconstruction ended.
All that said, David Friedman is disastrously wrong.
Should we never hire a slavery apologist for a professor? No, we should still require ourselves to think. Should it be counted against an applicant? Yes, and heavily. I promise to explain, but first, "diversity".
If you can't recognize the distinction between "let's not fill the room with old white dudes" and "any diversity is good for its own sake", I can't help you. (If you really need me to, I will argue why the examples of diversity in the first paragraph here matter.) Not all representation is good. We all know it isn't good to have "both sides" present. It'...
It's perfectly reasonable to marginalize viewpoints that are really, really stupid or really, really abhorrent.
Like there's no God, and mankind wasn't a special creation of the Lord, but shares common ancestry with chimps, rodents, and slime mold. How abhorrent!
Hitchens had it right in his comments that you point to, and you'd do better to attempt to refute them than ignore them. Hitchens in other venues has defended David Irving as "probably one of the 3 or 4 necessary historians of the Third Reich". People who question your fundamental premises are extremely useful for helping to clarify why you believe what you do.
Having the state disqualify people for employment based on the moral repugnance of their ideas is the mark of theocracy. Out with the blasphemers!
Is it diversity to hire a creationist to teach evolution? Should we get a few faculty with no higher education? Perhaps some that are illiterate?
I think, implicitly, there are things we want to be diverse about (backgrounds, religions, genders, races) and things we want to be non-diverse about (ability to communicate, ability to teach, commitment to communication and teaching at University level, commitment and ability to treating students and colleagues with respect.) Beyond that, I believe we had an easier time attracting females in to engineering...
The idea of an illiterate professor is intriguing. If someone illiterate is an excellent teacher of dance, a visual art, story-telling, or something else which doesn't require writing, why not?
I'll point out that a major component of why universities seek "diversity" is not because of an expected value in a broad assortment of perspectives, but to ensure that parts of the population aren't locked out of the academic system in a self perpetuating cycle. Affirmative action supporters generally look forward to a day when the groups favored by affirmative action policies will be able to break the cycle and compete evenly with other applicants purely on the basis of qualifications. The policies are more for the sake of the minorities, who t...
If you're presuming that I support the policies as practiced, you would be incorrect. I think that the argument has some merits in theory, but the implementation is not well devised to realize them.
That said, while I don't doubt that the rate of university dropouts among target minorities is higher than it would be without affirmative action, I would be interested and surprised if this led to a net decrease in university graduations among target minorities, which would be an allegation I haven't heard before.
How could I be intelligent enough to make what seemed like convincing arguments for positions he knew were wrong, and yet stupid enough to believe them?
This... makes so much sense for the human hardware, actually.
"How can you be smart enough to discuss the topic X intelligently, and yet dumb enough to not notice that the tribe X is losing the fight and you could have easily joined the winning side instead? How can a person so epistemically rational be so instrumentally irrational?"
By the way, how much of the tension between 'diversity of peopl...
I offered my standard example. Imagine that a university department has an opening and is down to two or three well qualified candidates. They learn that one of them is an articulate supporter of South African Apartheid. Does the chance of hiring him go up or down? If the university is actually committed to intellectual diversity, the chance should go up—it is, after all, a position that neither faculty nor students are likely to have been exposed to. In fact, in any university I am familiar with, it would go sharply down.
I would argue that this is a go...
If that's the only question these heuristics and arguments get wrong, I'd say that's pretty darn effective heuristics and perhaps I should base everything I believe on what they say.
In some cases actually yes. [laymen will have more accurate beliefs than experts]
In some cases, maybe, but you have not named names so I remain skeptical, and in some of the cases I would expect you or people like you to produce, I would still disagree.
I will give a specific example which I hope establishes the general form of my argument on this topic (that however warped or incorrect one believes the expert or academic consensus or elites to be, that the general layman beliefs in the general population are even more outdated, partial, warped, or ill-informed; the average person is... well, average, and one would think things like Snopes.com would caution against too high a belief in the accuracy of hoi polloi's beliefs), and if I'm lucky it'll both be a convincing demonstration and also one of the examples you would have picked if pressed for specifics.
Take IQ; my impression is that you would cheerfully cite IQ-related topics as a great example of how the experts are systematically worse than random, but my own impression is actually the opposite: laymen are more likely to get IQ completely wrong by claiming it is meaningless or arbitrary or irrelevant or less important than...
The response was that that he considered himself very open minded, getting along with people across the political spectrum, but that that position was so obviously beyond the bounds of reasonable discourse
Unfortunately, Freidman picked apartheid. He could just as well have picked Citizens United, the 2nd amendment, opposition to racial quotas, and the desire to enforce immigration laws. My guess is that these would equally be held to be "beyond the bounds or reasonable discourse".
Years ago, I dated a woman in a graduate english department wh...
Out of curiosity, How much support for Apartheid does the Articulate supporter of Apartheid have to show?
For instance, when Margaret Thatcher died recently, I found out that she considered by some to be a supporter of Apartheid and I remembered that I had just read this David Friedman point recently.
If I am reading the wikipedia link correctly, it contains a fair portrayal of Margaret Thatcher's Apartheid Policies that doesn't summarize well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premiership_of_Margaret_Thatcher#Apartheid
However, if I were to attempt to summarize it...
Not sure what to say about the post, but just as a random association, one of Moldbug's posts has a funny argument that mixing decreases diversity:
...There's a fun experiment in diversity that you can try in your own home. All you need is a blender, a spoon, and about $30. Take the $30, go to Safeway, and buy four or five pints of ice cream, preferably ultra-premium (Ben & Jerry's works well), of all different flavors. Chocolate, strawberry, Cherry Garcia, Funky Monkey, and so on. Using the spoon, scoop some ice cream from each of the pints into the ble
They certainly exist, but it's certainly the kind of thing that would be held against an applicant.
I'm not talking about rare, exceptional cases for those examples. In many areas, right-wing ideas are overrepresented, e.g. libertarians in economics. But I think that has more to do with how relatively interested libertarians are in economics.
I've also stated somewhere else in this comment section that there are examples of unwarranted exclusion of non-left views by academic leftists. (I'm a huge Orwell nut, by the way.) If this is a huge problem, I want to see it in terms of base rates, not particular examples. I will also add that I do count being right-wing against a source. Right or wrong, I live in Tennessee and I'm surrounded by a majority of evangelical, Christian Republicans who fill the local opinion pages with letters about how they're never represented by the press. I've heard these people cry "persecution" too often for it to have much effect. Again, this might best be considered damage that ought to be repaired, but you should at least know that it is there.
From the National Review post:
As with the “debate” on fossil-fuel divestment at Harvard, no student prior to that vote mounted a challenge to the fundamental premises of the movement: that fossil-fuel producers are “public enemies” every bit as contemptible as South African apartheid, that catastrophic levels of global warming are imminent, and that America’s fossil-fuel industry can be effectively shut down by government fiat without massive social harm.
I would like the author to name someone, anyone, who says all that.
Posters advertizing the lecture were promptly covered or ripped down, and widespread campus ridicule followed.
Perfectly believable. The first part is bad. The second part is not.
Hassan says that at this point, his room lock was broken. Who broke it or why is unknown, yet the timing is curious. Hassan now had legitimate concerns for his safety.
Actual break-in or not, this is not what a campus climate denialist can reasonably expect to happen to him or her.
I am far from taking the divestment campaign’s founder and leader, Bill McKibben as my guide in such matters, but if even McKibben was willing to respectfully debate Epstein at Duke University, why shouldn’t Vassar students hear from Epstein as well?
Was bringing Epstein free? I have other reasons, if you like.
And if Vassar’s Political Science, Sociology, and International Studies Departments can serve as official co-sponsors of a teach-in on behalf of the extremist and openly anti-capitalist Occupy Wall Street movement, how is inviting an libertarian defender of American industry to Vassar out of bounds?
I protested with Occupy. If you need some of the important differences between an Occupy protestor and a "libertarian defender of American industry" explained, I will be happy to do so.
In all my years of reporting on campus conflicts, this is the most appalling instance of political correctness I can recall.
My overall reaction to this most appalling thing ever is a "meh," with a few ideas about how things might have been better. If this is about the worst we're dealing with, I think we're OK.
On the College Insurrection article:
The title: Western Civilization driven off campus at Hamilton College. This one's got to be good. The problem is that I'm having trouble understanding it. There was an "Alexander Hamilton Institute" spearheaded by a guy named Robert Paquette to focus on American history and ideals. It gets initial support, but opposition arises and the idea is shot down. Paquette goes to press blaming left-ideologues and political correctness, his complaints being picked up by outlets willing to outrageously title selected snippets and then cite the school's diversity policy - successfully establishing that Hamilton College practices affirmative action.
We're obviously missing big parts of the story here. It could be a real and serious example of something wrong, but I haven't figured that out yet. But from Paquette:
Leaders of this movement had brought or attempted to bring to campus Susan Rosenberg, former member of the Weather Underground and a convicted felon, to teach writing; and Ward Churchill, the academic charlatan, to speak about prison reform. Even more bizarrely, Brigette Boisselier was brought to the campus. She is in charge of cloning for the Raelian sex cult, which believes humans are descended from aliens. She claimed to have produced a baby through cloning, though no non-Raelian has reported seeing the child. Boisselier was installed at Hamilton as a visiting assistant professor of chemistry.
Sounds like he and I might agree about some things. I don't know Boisselier's skill as a chemist, though she did come to Hamilton recently after being fired for being a Raelian. Rosenberg was a convicted felon, but not on any crime related to writing skills. Churchill was invited to speak.... back in 2005, before his university determined misconduct. Paquette seems to interpret all of these events and his own experience as a weird whole: "they'll tolerate anything leftist!"
[Edit: Paquette may be referencing a later attempt at invitation, but I haven't found it. Google is swamped by the controversy surrounding the '05 visit]
Look at their previous guest speakers. We got Condie and everything!
Paquette doesn't mention another interesting former guest: ex-Porn Star Annie Sprinkle. Here is Paquette-friendly account of that episode:
Hamilton College provided an instructive illustration of this procedure at work. Robert Paquette attempts to have Miss Sprinkle’s performance cancelled but is told that doing so would be a violation of the First Amendment and academic freedom. He then arranges for the college’s audio-visual department to tape Miss Sprinkle’s performance, having previously obtained her signature on a waiver that, among other things, authorized “unrestricted access” to and copying of the tape. David Paris, the dean of the faculty at Hamilton, learns of the tape and intercepts it. In response to a request from Professor Paquette, Dean Paris responds that he will release the tape, but only if it is agreed that it will not be copied or made publicly available. But why? Doesn’t Professor Paquette enjoy the same freedoms that the Womyn’s Center and Annie Sprinkle enjoy? Or perhaps Dean Paris believes that Professor Paquette’s freedom of expression is less important than theirs?
I recommend reading that source. Because
Academic freedom for me but not for thee
is the header to an article which laments Paquette's failure to boot Sprinkle and rages at the Dean's initial - and later reversed - refusal of Paquette's request to make public a taping of her talk.
Rosenberg was a convicted felon, but not on any crime related to writing skills.
Is still feels strange to me that people who participate in terrorist groups, rob banks, etc. are welcome at universities; while people who suggest that maybe women have less mathematical geniuses than men are unwelcome.
Just to make sure, is it important whether the terrorism is left-wing or right-wing? Would that university be OK to hire Anders Breivik for writing lessons? I mean, he did some crazy stuff, but none of that is related to writing skills.
Related: Heuristics for Evaluating the Soundness of the Academic Mainstream, Admitting to Bias, The Ideological Turing Test