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alienist comments on Open thread, Dec. 8 - Dec. 15, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion

6 Post author: Gondolinian 08 December 2014 12:06AM

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Comment author: alienist 15 December 2014 12:28:25AM 7 points [-]

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 matter, and if you define "sexual harassment" to only include things that matter then Lewin isn't guilty.

Now you might ask how exactly I can be this confident without knowing what exactly Lewin is supposed to have done. Well, Im basing my prior on a combination of two things:

1) We are in the middle of a witch hunt against "rapists" and "sexual harassers", especially on campus, with respectable columnists arguing that we shouldn't let mere facts get in the way of fighting "rape culture".

2) The reason I don't know what Lewin is supposed to have don't is because MIT hasn't seen fit to inform the public of any details. To see how big a red flag this should be, imagine if the authorities had accused Lewin of terrorism, but without even describing the plot he was supposedly involved in, much less any actual details. Would you take the official account at face value?