Open thread, Dec. 8 - Dec. 15, 2014

Gondolinian

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Are you arguing that sexual harassment doesn't matter? It seems like your comment conflates two separate issues:1) Did MIT overreact and 2) Should sexual harassment be dealt with.

Another question is whether Lewin is actually guilty of sexual harassment. This raises the question of how exactly "sexual harassment" is defined. Given the kind of things feminists have been trying to get away with (and scarily enough frequently succeeding) with calling "sexual harassment", for example see the recent #ShirtStorm incident (or elevatorgate, or DongleGate), my prior is that whatever Lewin did doesn't mater. That is if you call whatever Lewin did "sexual harassment" then "sexual harassment" doesn't m... (read more)

8Kawoomba12y

I don't know which comment you're responding to; I'm not sure it was mine. If it was, please explain how you could possibly get the impression that "sexual harassment doesn't matter" from my comment, or where I was "conflating" anything. If you got caught stealing, and in return your students got barred from using your library, and some of those students protested their lack of access, would a reasonable line of debate be "are you arguing that stealing doesn't matter"? Obviously not. It is not that the punishment doesn't fit the crime in that it is "merely" excessive, it is that it is incongruent in kind. Deleting learning material because of sexual online messages (I'm sorry, sexual harassment, or cyber abuse, or whichever label sounds most dramatic) is simply a non sequitur, it doesn't accomplish anything other than placate the mob, at great cost. These matters can be dealt with internally and aren't worth destroying someone's intellectual heritage over, nor punishing online learners who lose a valuable and non-harassing resource: videos of his lectures. The guy through his teaching of generations has done more for the common good than you and I ever will. To have that legacy publicly marred -- and access to his recorded lectures revoked -- because of inappropriate chat messages is simply bonkers. And yes, the above does imply that I consider grouping his probable transgressions with sexual harassment and then referring to the whole affair by that umbrella term to be a classic case of the noncentral fallacy, which rightly is called The Worst Argument In The World. No, that does not mean that, say, unsolicited online sexual messages "don't matter". Nor was such an extreme and nonsensical position contained in the grandparent comment. If he murdered his student still I would protest his lectures being taken offline. In that case, he should go to jail. There is no need to punish aspiring physics students in either case. The logical analogue of supporting MIT's

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Open thread, Dec. 8 - Dec. 15, 2014

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Open thread, Dec. 8 - Dec. 15, 2014

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