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[Link] Diversity and Academic Open Mindedness
Related: Heuristics for Evaluating the Soundness of the Academic Mainstream, Admitting to Bias, The Ideological Turing Test
I had an interesting recent conversation with a fellow academic that I think worth a blog post. It started with my commenting that I thought support for "diversity" in the sense in which the term is usually used in the academic context—having students or faculty from particular groups, in particular blacks but also, in some contexts, gays, perhaps hispanics, perhaps women—in practice anticorrelated with support for the sort of diversity, diversity of ideas, that ought to matter to a university.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.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 that refusing to hire the candidate was the correct response.The question I should have asked and didn't was whether he had ever been exposed to an intelligent and articulate defense of apartheid. Having spent my life in the same general environment—American academia—as he spent his, I think the odds are pretty high that he had not been. If so, he was in the position of a judge who, having heard the case for the prosecution, convicted the defendant without bothering to hear the defense. Worse still, he was not only concluding that the position was wrong—we all have limited time and energy, and so must often reach such conclusions on an inadequate basis—he was concluding it with a level of certainty so high that he was willing to rule out the possibility that the argument on the other side might be worth listening to.An alternative question I might have put to him was whether he could make the argument for apartheid about as well as a competent defender of that system could. That, I think, is a pretty good test of whether one has an adequate basis to reject a position—if you don't know the arguments for it, you probably don't know whether those arguments are wrong, although there might be exceptions. I doubt that he could have. At least, in the case of political controversies where I have been a supporter of the less popular side, my experience is that those on the other side considerably overestimate their knowledge of the arguments they reject.Which reminds me of something that happened to me almost fifty years ago—in 1964, when Barry Goldwater was running for President. I got into a friendly conversation with a stranger, probably set off by my wearing a Goldwater pin and his curiosity as to how someone could possibly support that position.We ran through a series of issues. In each case, it was clear that he had never heard the arguments I was offering in defense of Goldwater's position and had no immediate rebuttal. At the end he asked me, in a don't-want-to-offend-you tone of voice, whether I was taking all of these positions as a joke.I interpreted it, and still do, as the intellectual equivalent of "what is a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?" 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?
Yup. (Q_Q)
Follow up post: Academic Orthodoxy: Official Lies
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Comments (148)
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 the universities have nothing against and would like to see able to compete on even footing, than for the universities themselves. It doesn't follow that this sort of favorable treatment should extend to a diversity of ideas that the universities actually do have something against.
Some previously despised minority groups, such as Asian immigrants, have not only broken the self-perpetuating cycle, they've gone so far out of its orbit that their population in universities are actually being actively limited by these policies.
Given that affirmative action is by some accounts responsible for higher university drop-out rates in target minorities, are you sure (I'm presuming you support the argument you're forwarding, my apologies if you're merely presenting it as an alternative line of argument raised by those who support the policies) that such policies aren't merely reinforcing the self-perpetuating cycle?
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.
The theory is that due to affirmative action target minorities get mismatched with schools. Thus they wind in in tougher schools then they should be and thus drop out.
I get the concept, but as I said, I would be surprised if the actual result is a lower level of college graduates in target minorities.
I have no doubt that the system does push in some such underqualified students. But it also does push in candidates who grow into their environment, who become quite good students. It's not necessarily easy to tell in advance which will be which.
Well, the dropout rate among target minorities is certainly higher.
As I understand it, the change in peoples' view of Asian immigrants is partly because the immigrants have changed. A greater proportion of recent Asian immigrants to the US (compared with early waves of Asian immigrants) were of high socioeconomic status in their home country, and are coming for professional careers or to go to school, rather than to be factory or other low-status workers.
(And depending on how you define caught in the cycle, the descendants of early Asian immigrants might still be - even if race isn't against them anymore (which it might be in some cases - I don't know), social mobility is still difficult.)
Also worth noting that social stigma and material/academic success often coexist.
They could compete evenly now, if by evenly we mean objective standards for winning the competition.
It seems that "compete evenly" means instead "win just as often", and the rules of the game will include deliberate biases until that occurs. In fact, it will include such biases even when they win more often, as is the case with women in higher education.
Not necessarily. The intended-case scenario for affirmative action recipients are individuals with aptitude just as high as other candidates, but with lower performance due to lower prior opportunities (lower quality education, less ability to afford tutors and SAT prep, etc.) who quickly catch up to the more advantaged students.
Even a best-case implementation of affirmative action would probably end up going to a significant number of students who turned out not to be such, but the existing-case system does turn out such students.
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 South Africa) is more likely to do harmful things to nonwhite people than a government that represents the diverse racial and cultural backgrounds of that country. Moreover, this is in part because in order to maintain an all-white government in a not-all-white country, the government must actively resist admitting any non-white people.
(In other words: People rationally seek representation in organizations that can help them achieve their goals. Mixing of people from diverse backgrounds happens naturally as a consequence of people trying to achieve their goals through organizations. When we notice that mixing isn't happening, that means that someone is expending energy excluding others and keeping them from achieving their goals.)
Some people make the argument that institutions (such as governments or universities) are morally obligated to correct for a history which has given advantages to some groups of people at the expense of others; as a matter of justice. This view is often founded on something like Rawlsian maximin ethics.
Some people also make the related but distinct argument that where that mixing isn't happening within organizations that are particularly well-suited to achieving goals, that means unrepresented communities don't have access to that organization's goal-achieving power, and to the extent that we value equal access to that power by all communities it means we're failing to implement that value, and that all of this is independent of whether anyone is expending energy to exclude anyone, or has any desire or intention to exclude anyone, or whether we notice it.
In some cases it could be the specific background which prevents people from using a specific organization. For example if there is a religion saying that making cars is a sin, then the lack of those people in car factories does not necessarily mean that the car factories are expending energy to keep them out.
Even if "someone" expends the energy, it does not have to be always the obvious suspect.
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 people' and 'diversity of ideas' is "natural", and how much is a self-fulfilling prophecy? I mean, was it always true that if you allow people to say opinion X, then people P will avoid your group? Or is it something that we actually taught them recently; by speading the idea that people P should be offended by hearing the opinion X, and should avoid any group which tolerates expressing such opinion (even if it is a minority opinion within the group), and that the group should then feel guilty because these people made this choice?
Imagine that there is a group you would like to belong to. Then you hear some people in the group saying X, and you personally don't like the opinion X. You also notice that those people are in a minority within the group, but they are a tolerated minority; nobody sends them away for saying X. You have two options: 1) Join the group, because the non-X side is already stronger, and your presence will make it even stronger. You will get some utility from being a member, and lose some utility by being occassionally exposed to the opinion X. Or: 2) Openly refuse to join the group, and tell them that you consider X offensive; that the group originally made a good impression on you, but by tolerating this opinion, they made you not join them. You lose some utility from not being a member of the group, but there is a chance that you win a lot of utility if you succeed to make the group change its policy towards X.
Now the question is, what makes either of these choices more likely? Let's assume that you prefer being a member to not being a member; but if you choose and publicly announce the latter option and the group refuses to change its policy towards X, you will probably remain consistent and avoid the group.
Seems to me that an important factor is the probability that a group will change its policy towards its subgroup. More precisely, your estimate of this probability. If you felt certain that the group will not change its policy, the first option is clearly better. On the other hand, if you feel certain that the group will change its policy if you precommit to avoid them otherwise, the second option is clearly better. So, game-theoretically, a group which signals that it really wants you, encourages you to blackmail them.
Another interesting question is what happens if we have two people; one of them strongly wants to join the group, the other one only has a mild preference for joining. Both dislike X equally, and both assume equal probability of the group changing its policy according to their requests. Which one is more likely to choose the second option? The one who cares less about the membership. So, game-theoretically, a group which signals that it really wants people from some specific set, encourages those among the set who care least about the group to blackmail it most.
If these assumptions are correct, when someone tells you that you should change a group policy to not tolerate opinion X, because that offends them, you should assume that the person probably does not care strongly about joining your group (they only strongly dislike X), and that you have invited this situation on yourself because you showed too much willingness to supress your members just to make hypothetical members happy. And if you accept the complaint, you should actually expect more similar complaints in the future, because you showed that complaining about X works.
Short version: If you change the rules to make whining the winning strategy... expect a lot of whining.
I doubt that such a calculation is in any way conscious, but behind the scenes, something like that is probably happening. Truth detectors for "socially advantageous" are probably stronger than those for "predictively accurate".
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's perfectly reasonable to marginalize viewpoints that are really, really stupid or really, really abhorrent. Yes, we have all sorts of biases that make such assessments risky, but that doesn't make such assessments worthless.
Sometimes going far out of one's way to really understand the opposition makes you much better than never trying the exercise. Since we typically do too little of this, we should emphasize it. But it is almost always a complete waste of time. I would be better if I could articulate the arguments for 911 truth as well as any truther could. I would be better if I had memorized James Randi's library of quacks and cranks. But not much.
Modern diversity efforts do lead to unwarranted censorship. Duh. But if anyone here thinks that academia is less open and diverse now than it was 50 years ago, please recommend a source.
Saying terrible and false things should count against you. I don't like racism. Racism is bad. Marginalization in media, social life, and institutions is effective against it.
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!
And you'd do better to pay attention. You'll notice I never argued against Hitchens. Step back, breathe, and come back to me with some thoughts. Trust me, I've read more of his work than you have.
An exercise for the reader: how did you get from "really bad/stupid views - our judgment of which being flawed - are a negative that should count against a potential faculty member" to theocracy?
Some people will say anything.
Breathing just fine. You may have read more of Hitchens than I have. I've likely watched more than you. I guess we could play whose got the biggest swinging Hitchens phallus, but I don't see the point.
I note that you left out the relevant part of what you originally wrote:
Yes, those with ideas you "abhor" shouldn't be hired. In what way do you find this materially different from shunning blasphemers?
Well you notice that I put the two different things side by side in the same sentence to make it really really easy for you. Let's do it again with "theocracy" and "shunning blasphemers." You're shifting.
Here's a hint: at no point have I said that faculty who come out with horrible views should be fired. I also haven't said that people with horrible views should be fined, imprisoned, or banned from publishing. I just don't think they should have an easy time finding a major publisher to air their horrible views or a major newspaper willing to run a holocaust-denying opinion column, a state of affairs which it is left to the owners and editors of such outlets to induce - not the state.
I think being nasty and stupid should cost you. I think we should minimize the nastiness and stupidity and time wasted by such people.
I think what you are saying here is "We should not precommit to not hiring slavery apologists." Is that right?
Rather, the commitment to not hiring slavery apologists isn't absolute. It should be treated like a real decision with costs and benefits, with the slavery apologetics considered a serious cost. If you could hire Bob or Steve, where Bob is politically "usual" and Steve is holocaust denialist, you should hire Steve only if he is a considerably better choice than Bob on "usual" grounds.
Edit: I would also add that hiring a slavery apologist when you already have one is a heavier cost still. These are not vacuum decisions. Similarly, if every one of your faculty has political views acceptable to either liberals or conservatives, you should reduce the "nasty cost" of hiring a fascist or a Stalinist.
The thing is current universities are perfectly willing to hire Stalinists.
Yeah, current universities are dominated by Stalinism. Obviously.
"dominated by X" is not the same as "willing to hire X"
Most universities in my country would be perfectly OK to hire a Stalinist, as long as the person does not spend their whole day speaking about it. (Your country may be different.)
What is your evidence for this?
I certainly encountered at least one Stalin apologist in my college years, but that's hardly evidence of an institutional permissiveness, particularly towards Stalinist, which would be somebody who supports Stalin's tactics.
Anybody have any ideas on how to test the theory? Google seems utterly useless; all it comes up with is somebody named Grover Furr. Which may be proof that is can happen, but since AFAICT he was tenured -before- he caused controversy (in 2012), it's at best weak evidence that universities would in fact -hire- a Stalinist. Additionally, I'm not sure his claim qualifies as Stalinism, per se, as it is, in effect, denying that -Stalin- was a Stalinist, but rather a Neo-Stalinist.
Well, not quite a Stalinist, but look at all the eulogies for Soviet apologeticist Eric Hobsbawm by "mainstream" papers and accademics.
Who was almost universally recognized as a great historian and exactly the sort of person I would encourage universities to hire, despite his apologetics for Soviet communism.
I know, Viliam. I was responding to the obvious implication. I've been seeing a lot of signs of the sketchy Right in here.
How do you know the thing is false if you systematically censor any arguments for it?
Taboo "racism".
How do you know the thing is true if you would have promoted anybody that would say it?
Do you know all the arguments for marginalized positions with which you disagree? If not, would you say you do not know that some of them are really false?
Internet people are weird. I read Mill and Orwell all day and have no idea where they get their ideas of liberty from. They might talk like liberals when it comes to beating up gay kids. Ok, obviously good stuff is obvious. But then they start saying they same things about kids who beat up gay kids...
They'll talk like liberals when it comes to Klansmen and fascists and other nasty folk, and they'll talk like conservatives when it comes to black people and women. That makes sense: the principle is inexpensive when we're talking about the genuinely, completely marginal. But "other" groups that have a real shot at having a decent share of power...
I don't think anyone is calling for promoting anyone merely for being willing to say controversial things.
Here's an idea: try looking at the logic of their argument and not simply whether the conclusion feels repugnant to you for not.
You may want to start by figuring out what you mean by "racism", here are some questions (from one of my comments in another thread) to help guide the process:
I can repeat myself all day, but I'll do it just this once: I want administrators and faculty to think. I want them to think of Mr. Tilbert's white-robed weekends as a real cost before they make him Dr. Tilbert. Mr. Tilbert could be a perfectly decent economist. Don't hire him. Or he could be really good. Then hire him.
We could talk about what's been important here all along. Or I can restart by carefully explaining what I mean by "racism". But then, I'm not your pet monkey.
What do you think is important here? Shunning people whose opinions you abhour or aquiring true beliefs.
People tend to mean different things by "racism". I what to know what you mean by it.
I thought sticking to the original topic would be important, and I don't shun people whose opinions I abhor. I live in the South, and that would be a lonely life. With relevance in mind, we move onto
I'm not a university administrator or faculty member or newspaper editor. We're talking about those people. On this topic, those people are the ones responsible for recognizing false and nasty beliefs, e.g. racism. It's important to know how they evaluate it. And they will evaluate it, even if you want them to pretend that they aren't doing it. They'll notice what David Irving has done even if you very politely ask them to not do so. (I'll put this out there: I would hire Irving, assuming he was only to teach advanced students, were it not for his history of suing critics.)
As for what I mean by "racism", I suppose I wasn't clear before, so here it is: you're not Socrates, and I am not your pet monkey.
Addendum: If you want people to answer your questions, I suggest answering theirs.
So you won't say what you mean by "racism" but insist that it's false and nasty. I've heard different definitions of "racism", a number of those definitions wind up including making certain statements that are in fact true, or at least likely to be true.
Which question in particular were you refering to?
Ok, I can do give and take. First, an inadequately answered question:
To which you said
Where the opening paragraph of the article in this thread states a defender of Apartheid should given diversity have an increased likelihood of being hired by that virtue. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I somehow believe that telling our prestigious institutions to select for cranks will make it even harder for laymen to sort out the truth than it is already and undermine trust in those same institutions. It will also skew scientific consensus even when that consensus is deserved.
Second, a far more important and entirely unanswered question:
Give these items a good effort, and I will return in kind.
I'm looking forward to the give and take, so out of impatience I'm going to add another question. In return I'll give a rough idea of where I am concerning racism. From a different area of the comments:
You can change the "and" to an "or", if you like. I'm interested if you would say something like, "no, but significantly less open than it would have been were it not for X." We might agree.
Racism: I'd make some boilerplate noises about inherent tribalism and group psychology as general background. Then I'd make some more boilerplate noises about the particulars of racial history in America. For the conceptual work, I would avoid any bother with necessary and sufficient conditions and go straight to fuzzy categories and representatives, along with some type distinctions. As a Less Wrong resident, you should know why I'd prefer this approach to what non-nerds typically do when asked what they mean by something: try to give a precise definition. If you try to do that, you'll probably include some true things that should be believed and doesn't make you a racist in any significant sense. For example, "judging people by the color of their skin." That's a terrible definition, but I bet it's a common answer. I can very accurately infer quite a lot about a person using skin color. When I meet a Korean or American-Korean, I've met something locally rare: somebody who knows what I mean when I say I watch professional Starcraft.
I use several heuristics to decide which ones are worth my time. Most of them are the ones mentioned by Paul Graham in his essay What you can't say.
Mission accomplished!
Your comment could be read two ways: it could mean that it is now taboo to actually practice racism, or it could mean that it is now taboo to accuse someone of doing so.
This type of argumentation isn't really what I want posted. Too much straw, not enough subtlety.
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.
A restaurant achieves this by promoting good recipes though, not by delving into unfiltered recipe space and then removing the bad recipes. The filtering-out step occurs way before anyone considers putting the recipe on a restaurant menu, at the stage where someone with a reasonable amount of cooking knowledge and common sense considers the question of what might taste good.
A professor candidate who holds non-mainstream views relevant to their teaching which are sufficiently transparently wrong, should be able to be eliminated on grounds of simple competency, as would a chef candidate who has somehow come by the misapprehension that spam-and-mustard-cake would be a tasty dessert.
It is a question of timing.
If you want to research a problem, first you consider alternative hypotheses, then you test them experimentally, and then you throw away the ones which did not pass the experimental test.
At the moment of generating hypotheses, you want diversity. Of course, your time is limited, so you shouldn't bother with hypotheses with huge complexity and epsilon prior probability, so you do some filtering anyway. But you want to have a few competing hypotheses. (You want to keep the hypothesis that the 2-4-6 rule could work for odd numbers too.)
Only later, when some hypotheses are experimentally disproved, you can safely ignore them. (More precisely, there is always a probability that the experiment was wrong. But a good experiment, or many repeated experiments, can move the hypothesis to the epsilon zone.)
So the question is which opinions are unwelcome in universities because they were experimentally disproved, and which opinions are unwelcome, because they are already unacceptable at the hypothesis generating phase.
To which category would the hypothetical supporter of South African Apartheid belong? What exactly are his claims, and which of them have been tested?
Should we apply that principal to the library as well? Remove all the books with "terrible ideas"?
Same principle. I wouldn't advise wasting library funds on creationist textbooks, and I would recommend removing factually-inaccurate items from the non-fiction section.
But books are still a better place to hedge against the possibility that my idea-quality-metric is seriously broken, as a matter of economics. I'd still prioritize good ideas over terrible in book acquisition, but with an added component for diversity as judged by my quality metric (aiming for a long-tail distribution as judged by my personal idea-quality metric, for example). You can have many-more books than faculty, so this is a good, economically-efficient way to purchase idea diversity without wasting your very-limited-resource of faculty spots.
Throwing out books has cost (in time and effort to judge quality), so I'd only throw out terrible books if there was some constraint on shelf space or something (and then I'd rather sell or give away than simply toss).
I don't think that the principle is the same. "Book existing in a library" isn't a privileged position like "tenured faculty" or "column in a major newspaper" or "book promoted by a major publisher."
The trouble here is that if you don't observe a taboo on exercising judgment over which ideas are acceptable or worthwhile in presenting to the public, then people with fundamental disagreements with you on such matters, given a position of power, are unlikely to observe it either.
I tend to assume that people with disagreements that fundamental are sufficiently different from me that coordinating on something like this is extremely unlikely in the first place.
Also note that everyone exercises judgment in this regard; even the most self-proclaimed "open-minded" person won't endorse teaching Time Cube in schools. Usually. I hope.
The trouble here is that if you do observe a taboo on exercising judgment over which ideas are acceptable or worthwhile in presenting to the public, then people with fundamental disagreements with you on such matters, given a position of power, are unlikely to observe it anyways.
On a side note, I think that libraries typically stock in accordance with demand and costs, not merit. Am I wrong about this, or am I right yet mistaken in also believing that librarians do a satisfactory job?
I think at this point in history, libraries are irrelevant. In the far past, books etc. were expensie and libraries kept whatever they could get. They were, collectively, the waybackmachine.org of the world. More recently, they would buy what their customers might find most useful for research. A collection of books and especially years and years of journal subscriptions. These would be local copies, with no real archival purpose in holding these, these would always be available somewhere else. Now, I don't know what they do. I have gotten a few books from university libraries in the last few years, so they served to save me some money and/or allow me to read things I wouldn't have spent the money on.
Personally, I've been had at least one nonfiction book checked out of the library at all times for the past several months, and it's allowed me to spend a lot of my transportation time (I read while walking, and while taking public transit) reading up on things that aren't online, which I wouldn't have paid retail price for.
Libraries receive a lot of books by donation, so many books in their stock are not vetted in terms of demand or cost, but they'll sometimes clear out books in a section which aren't being borrowed in order to make room for other books.
Yes, undergrads should be taught good and useful ideas. Graduate students however need to be taught both the good ones and the bad ones because professors need to be able to examine ideas from outside and make coherent arguments about whether or how they are good or bad. When I have met people who complain that graduate schools waste their time on things that they don't want to learn, I have explained to them that they don't really want a graduate degree, or more to the point, they don't really want a graduate education, they clearly do want the degree.
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 anyway, It would be something along the lines of: "I'm not Pro-Apartheid, it's just that I refuse to institute Economic Sanctions on the Apartheid government, reject the Anti-Apartheid movement several times because they include many Violent Terrorists, and don't mind inviting the president of the Apartheid government to meet with me over the objections of Anti-Apartheid as a way of encouraging reform."
In the press, this gets abbreviated to: "Margaret Thatcher ... famously labeled Nelson Mandela a "terrorist" while backing South Africa’s apartheid regime."
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/4/8/margaret_thatcher_1925_2013_tariq_ali
So if someone comes up to me and has on their resume "I worked in the Margaret Thatcher administration as a policy writer." And it comes up in the interview that they agree with all of Margaret Thatcher's policy decisions, and I hire them for intellectual diversity because I don't have a supporter of Thatcherism on staff, am I hiring a articulate supporter of South African Apartheid as per the Friedman hypothetical, or not? It seems the press would say yes, and the person themselves would say no.
I'm still having a hard time actually answering the question because I feel like I don't have enough details about the remaining candidates or the makeup of my university, but thinking of a specific type of person does help make the question less vague.
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 with at least one woman on our faculty, attracting immigrants with an immigrant on the faculty (actually it is very difficult to have an engineering faculty without immigrants), attracting black students with black faculty, etc.
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?
Because they couldn't handle all the education-related bureaucracy.
:D
Friedman on this in the comment section:
and:
For what department would the wrong view on apartheid be "immediately relevant"? Even in political science, why is the preference for one system over another relevant to truth claims about those systems?
So you can have diversity of moral views, but not when those views would be relevant to the subject at hand? We couldn't let morally icky views into discussions where they are relevant, though Friedman would still allow them to be employed where their icky moral views would not infringe on the topic they're hired for. The new flavor in academic tolerance, theocrat lite. I suppose it's an improvement, but we've got a long way to go.
Friedman doesn't seem to consider apartheid a moral view, but an empirical one:
And in general, he didn't seem to be saying about moral views.
What empirical facts do you see in the quote? The most I see are implications about recommendations.
And I can't parse
Sorry, that's missing a word: "he didn't seem to be saying anything about moral views". This was in reference to your earlier comment,
in which you seemed to be saying that Friedman would be saying that we could sometimes reject people based on their moral views, and sometimes not. My response was that Friedman didn't seem to be saying anything about rejecting or accepting people based on their moral views. He only said that people could be rejected if they held positions which the discipline they were being hired for had considered and rejected as clearly untrue, indicating that the people were actually incompetent for that discipline.
As for the empirical facts that I see in the quote, it seems to be implying that various policies have different consequences and that the observed empirical consequences of apartheid aren't necessarily worse than those of the policy that South Africa actually ended up with, as measured on some generally accepted moral criteria (not being familiar with the arguments, I can't say anything more specific than that).
The original faculty applicant under consideration was a "supporter of South African Apartheid." He hasn't committed to any fact that could be untrue, he has a preference. Most people would classify it as a moral (or immoral) preference.
For the empirical facts you see, you've projected a utilitarian viewpoint on the guy which he just may not have. But let's even go with that. Aren't judgments of whether apartheid is better or worse than other systems still moral judgments?
Looking back at the quote, Friedman is just so wrong about the Marxist. He's saying that a Marxist would be an asset in a physics department but not an economics department. Wrong. I'm opposed to Marx and his theories, but given intellectual history, of course a Marxist would be an asset in an economics department.
(And yes, he didn't literally say the Marxist wouldn't be an asset, only that they didn't "need" to hire him. But interpreted that way, the Marxist as asset versus Marxist not strictly needed is an apples to orange comparison with little point.)
I think he overestimates what is possible for creationism. Sometimes, indefensible ideas are actually indefensible.
As a physicist, I don't think a creationist works, at least not as a general expert in Physics. Cosmology, planet and solar system and galaxy formation, all these are pretty senseless if you believe the universe was created 7000 or so years ago. If I were interviewing a talented researcher for physics faculty and they expressed a belief in creationism I"d tell them I didn't want to hire them because I would never want a full professor of physics suggesting to students that a semi-literal interpretation of a text compiled over a thousand years ago should trump billions of dollars worth of more recent research and analysis. It is plausible that they could give me an answer that would put my concerns to rest, but I think unlikely based on my previous experience with creationists and non-creationist physicists.
To be fair, of course there are billions of non-creationists I would not want to hire as a physics professor as well.
I doubt apartheid is anywhere as disabling to a physicist as is creationism. I would be concerned it would be associated with an inability to teach blacks as well as whites, and to be fair in grading blacks as well as whites. It is a bit ridiculous to claim to believe political rights should be apportioned to people based on their race, but that university education and grading should somehow be race-blind. He'd have to be a heck of a good candidate otherwise for me to consider taking the risk that he would somehow be crazy enough to be racist in his politics but not in his professional life. And again, I can't imagine what he could tell me that would assuage me, but I"m not ruling out there might be something.
Fair point, though not all creationists are young-Earthers.
Are there any creationists who don't overweight their interpretation of the bible compared to the billions of dollars worth of research and analysis done since the bible was written?
Are there any atheist creationists? Any creationists who get there based on the billions of dollars worth of research and analysis done in the last 1000 years?
Yes. Being a creationist wouldn't preclude someone from making correct and valuable critiques of evolutionary theory. You can be wrong about elements of a field but still make valuable contributions to it.
Earlier somewhere in here, we talked about Christopher Hitchens defending David Irving, a holocaust denier. I pointed out that Hitchens described him as "probably one of the 3 or 4 necessary historians of the Third Reich".
Creationism is a real and interesting problem. Last I heard, Ventner is creating life one base pair at a time. He's written water marks into the dna of his creatures. He's making it easy to see the design, but in general, how would one tell the difference between an evolved creature and an "intelligently designed" one? How would we tell the difference between some intelligently designed panspermia dna and dna that naturally evolved? I don't know. But I'd like someone to take a real stab at the problem.
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 who would wear a Politically Incorrect button. She was basically a progressive, but unlike much of her department, not explicitly Marxist, and therefore "politically incorrect". Going beyond the progressive consensus to the right isn't politically incorrect, it's beyond the pale. Going beyond it to the left is being "principled" but "too extreme".
The range of "reasonable discourse" is generally held as the people who share the same unquestioned premises. Being consistent in them means being extreme, but rejecting them is " beyond the bounds of reasonable discourse".
Racial quotas are unconstitutional by a 2003 Supreme Court decision. That decision matches legal opinion. I don't think you'll find a hard time finding academics who support conservative interpretations of the 2nd amendment. I also don't think you'll have trouble finding academics who support Citizens United. I think you'll have relatively more trouble finding people who want to enforce immigration laws, since very few people want to.
I'm assuming you're only talking about English departments?
They certainly exist, but it's certainly the kind of thing that would be held against an applicant. It's hard to show what caused hiring decisions, but here are two examples that I happened to come across today of just how welcome right-of-center ideas can be on college campuses.
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:
I would like the author to name someone, anyone, who says all that.
Perfectly believable. The first part is bad. The second part is not.
Actual break-in or not, this is not what a campus climate denialist can reasonably expect to happen to him or her.
Was bringing Epstein free? I have other reasons, if you like.
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.
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:
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:
I recommend reading that source. Because
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.
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.
First, the bar for "guest speaker" is lower than for "tenured faculty." Yes, importance comes in degrees.
Second, I will admit to flippancy, though not on the order of suggesting an equivalence with Breivik. My comment was getting too long as it was, and I sacrificed seriousness for concision and out of impatience. Mea culpa.
Regardless of leftist or rightist motives, Rosenberg was a dangerous criminal and deserved to spend time in jail, though I think her sentence was too harsh. People who suggest that there are fewer mathematical geniuses amongst women than men don't go to prison, and in fact, I doubt that many would disagree with that statement. That was a specific example of gender differences in intelligence given in my high school psychology textbook. They're quite welcome, actually. More controversial is the proposition that this is a result of an essential gender difference, but people on both sides of that question are (typically) quite welcome. I know some exceptions here, but correct me if I'm mistaken in the typical case.
Let's return to what I've been saying all along: I have a problem with privileging bad ideas, but bad ideas are not to be automatically criminal. Yet there should be a cost associated with espousing those non-criminal bad ideas. Rosenberg's ideas were very seriously criminal: she faced a very serious cost. The cost of her past deeds in evaluating whether to invite her as a guest speaker has been reduced - though it still exists.
(Tangent: If holocaust denialism were to be banned here as it has been in France and Austria, I would be encouraging universities to fill Irving's schedule.)
Returning to the context, I took Paquette's list of "look who they'll invite!" as insinuating that there are no standards when it comes to the left, while implying that center-right ideas are verboten. That remains false.
Ok, what about Kathy Boudin or Bill Ayers?
The question is who determine which ideas are bad.
A high burden of proof for both.
The answer is that about everybody makes this determination whether you want them to or not.
Specifically, my question was "who determines which ideas are officially considered 'bad' for purposes of not being institutionally privileged?"
All of us, to some extent, though publishers, administrators, corporate boards, managers, faculty, and editors have much more say. Is there some interesting followup to the obvious here?
I would argue that this is a good heuristic for a number of reasons:
He may not know all the arguments in favor of the apartheid, but he knows that the issue has been examined over the decades in various cultures and the expert opinion is against it.
Unless the person is a subject matter expert, he or she ought not to be discounting the prevailing wisdom (which may torn out to be wrong, but in most cases you have to become an expert to show it).
A person willing to be a vocal critical dilettante about someone else's area of expertise is bad for the smooth functioning of the department of a faculty
That's a wrong question to ask. He is not an expert. The right one would be
And the answer would likely to be yes.
Anyway, upvoted for bringing up an interesting issue, downvoted for being taken by bad logic, overall a wash.
For a thousand years and more, you could say that about the existence of God.
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.
I don't think that's an honest response. Are you really incapable of identifying other questions that thees heuristics and arguments get wrong? Really, that's the only one you can think of that fits the pattern?
You chose to name only one example. 'Experts say so' is a fantastic heuristic, which definitely increases the probability of being true. I sincerely doubt you can name enough examples to drive the likelihood ratio down to 1, much less to <1.
That depends on the field in question. There are a lot of fields full of "experts" whose predictions are notoriously unreliable.
As opposed to the laymen in those fields?
In some cases actually yes. At best listening to the "experts" will give you a false sense of certainty, at worst the "experts" really are being worse than random. At least the laymen may have local knowledge "experts" lack.
Edit: Also it depends on the layman, as you yourself observed here.
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 'emotional intelligence' or something, even though these are all things that the experts accept, even the hardcare environmentalist types. An example of this was the Nisbett et al consensus summary published a year or two ago, or Gottfredson's consensus summary published in response to The Bell Curve back in the '90s; in between the endless material on possible environmental interventions, misleadingly optimistic discussion of dual n-back, downplaying of genetics results etc, you will find that they accept all the basic facts of IQ that most laymen reject like it being repeatable, general, highly predictive of all sorts of life outcomes, not generally trainable!
Specifically, look at the Bell Curve response, "Mainstream Science on Intelligence". Here is what Gottfredson had to say about public beliefs on IQ, discussing what motivated her to organize it:
Or better yet, look at the points enumerated in the statement and try to imagine how shocked most people would be to learn that there is no serious controversy about the claims made and that their lay beliefs are considered, by psychologists and psychometricians and social scientists, to be about as scientific as Creationism:
'Sure, professor! But I knew a kid who was great at math and had no idea what was going on. You keep thinking that.' 'But but but - "multiple intelligences"!'
"My niece spent all summer cramming for the SAT and her score went up 200 points! Tests are tests, anyone, like an Asian, can just grind to improve their scores. You must be very naive to think such things."
"Everyone knows tests are biased against minorities, like that IQ test that asked about yachts! Besides, all they measure is book learning."
"Everyone I know seems pretty smart, and are you seriously claiming at least 3% of the population is retarded? I don't know any retards at all!"
'You say they're not biased, but they obviously are, and besides, look at Africa - the IQ tests say the average IQ there is like in the 70s, which you just said implied that they were retarded. How can an entire continent be retarded? You are a bad person who should feel bad, and your beliefs obviously wrong.'
'It doesn't seem that hard to me. Everyone knows the average person uses only 5% of their brain, so to get smarter you just need to use more of it!'
I could go on, but I think I've made my point. (All of these are real arguments I have seen in the past either online or in person, if you were wondering.) If you go point by point, this rebuttal is itself pretty shocking stuff; it's extremely shocking for any liberals, of course, (who are a nontrivial fraction of that population which we call "laymen") but given the anti-intellectualism rampant in conservative circles outside the marginal communities interested in IQ like HBD, I believe the claims will also come as a shock there too. What Paul Krugman once said of intellectuals can apply to laymen more so, since they aren't acquainted with the topic in any detail:
An example of the nearly universal belief in the general public, from the GSS: http://humanvarieties.org/?attachment_id=1691
Can you name other questions that this heuristic got wrong for thousands of years?
In other words, are we arguing about the process of finding truth, or the final results? "Believe what the experts believe" is a terrible process for society to implement in trying to discover what is truth, but it works pretty well for individuals at particular moments in time.
Shouldn't his arguments screen off his authority? Isn't that the whole point of arguments?