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mwengler comments on [Link] Diversity and Academic Open Mindedness - Less Wrong Discussion
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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.