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ChristianKl comments on Open thread, Dec. 21 - Dec. 27, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion

2 Post author: MrMind 21 December 2015 07:56AM

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Comment author: gjm 23 December 2015 08:29:28PM -2 points [-]

Note that the person on your last link, despite professing to be terrified of his students, seems to have been happy enough to publish that article with his real name on it. Note also that he links to a number of other pieces by other academics expressing similar opinions, all also apparently not so terrified as to avoid publishing such opinions with their names attached.

So far as I know, no academic has in fact got into any sort of trouble for expressing opinions like those, or like the (milder) ones expressed in James's article.

People died in the Cultural Revolution. This is not in any useful sense "basically the Cultural Revolution". Nor does it bear anything like the same resemblance to the Cultural Revolution as Louis Napoleon's assumption of power did to his uncle's. Calling someone courageous for daring to say openly that the idea of "safe spaces" may have gone too far is like calling someone courageous for daring to say "Merry Christmas". Can we get a bit of perspective here?

Comment author: ChristianKl 23 December 2015 09:29:51PM *  6 points [-]

Note that the person on your last link, despite professing to be terrified of his students, seems to have been happy enough to publish that article with his real name on it.

Vox: Edward Schlosser is a college professor, writing under a pseudonym.

Comment author: gjm 24 December 2015 05:34:11PM *  0 points [-]

Ha. I actually checked for that, but obviously not carefully enough. My apologies.

[EDITED to add:] OK, so I went back and searched the page, and it doesn't say that anywhere. (Though buried in the middle of the article is a statement along the lines of "all controversial things I write, like this article, are anonymous or pseudonymous", so I still should have known.) Perhaps it's because I'm reading on a mobile device?

Comment author: ChristianKl 25 December 2015 12:00:36AM 0 points [-]

You get that line if you click on the author's name.

The article starts by saying: I'm a professor at a midsize state school. If you read between the lines that's a decision against revealing the name of the school and thus a decision to protect anonymity.

In general the media likes to use pseudonyms when it can't use the real name, so the fact that you have a name on the top is no good evidence that the article isn't written anonymously or under a pseudonym.

Comment author: gjm 25 December 2015 04:05:07PM 1 point [-]

That's why I looked for a statement at the start or end that the name was pseudo. I think not finding such a thing genuinely was evidence of non-pseudonymity, though clearly not enough evidence was it turned out. I didn't think of clicking on the name because I'm an idiot.