
The Dangerous Safety of College - frostmatthew
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/11/opinion/sunday/the-dangerous-safety-of-college.html
======
closeparen
Having been physically present at ground zero of this thing, and having spent
quite a bit of time trying to understand it, let me offer one piece of missing
information.

This group is well aware of the prevailing doctrine that truth comes from
dispassionate investigation and rigorous argument.

They just reject it. They reject that it's conducted in good faith, and they
reject that the sacred constructs of the ideology are subject to any
microscope. That intellectual ideal is seen as something by and for the
powerful old white men who control power structures, including and especially
academia. It's seen as just as much a tool of oppression as phrenology,
eugenics, and other racist pseudoscience, and they're hoping to push it
towards the same fate.

Some of the more extreme protestors will tell you that advocating for
traditional academic inquiry is fundamentally white supremacist, in that a
mode of understanding the world favored by the ruling class is seen as more
legitimate than others. There is no objectivity, the reasoning goes, so we
ought to put the traditionally opppressed in control of the narrative for a
while.

The article is spot on that the right way to think about it is as a religion.
There are articles of faith: the world works in terms of identity-based
groups; certain groups hold and actively maintain power over others; it's time
to depose those groups and let others have a turn at authority, particularly
over what constitutes truth. There is testimony: the "lived experiences" \-
anecdotes - of members of oppresssd groups are gospel. Obedience is paramount
- the first and last step of being an Ally is to accept, believe
unquestioningly, and evangelize what you are told.

These people aren't coddled and they aren't weak. Appeals to psychological
safety are attempts to weaponize empathy, not genuine fragility. They are
fierce warriors for what they believe to be justice.

~~~
tomlock
Your characterization made me grin, as someone who is on the _other side_ to
you.

>That intellectual ideal is seen as something by and for the powerful old
white men who control power structures, including and especially academia.

Lets be real here - academia until only very recently in world history - was
virulently exclusionary to people of color and women. Before we dismissed
eugenics as pseudoscience, it was perceived as just science. It is easy in
hindsight to say it was flawed and a tool of oppression - but at the time it
was very much an active area of academic inquiry. Given that in the past
pseudoscience was seen as science, what evidence do we have to believe that we
haven't made some of the same mistakes in classifying pseudoscience in the
present? Given that academia in the past was corrupted by bias against women,
what makes us now think it's truly objectively academic, now?

It takes a lot of faith to believe that this is the one period in history when
bias hasn't tainted "objectivity"/"science"/"academic inquiry".

~~~
closeparen
> what evidence do we have to believe that we haven't made some of the same
> mistakes in classifying pseudoscience in the present?

None. I just think that when we suspect something might be pseudoscientific,
we ought to read and study it really carefully, explore the arguments, and
discredit it by formulating and publicizing well-reasoned counterarguments.
And since the demographics that traditionally practice this sort of thing have
some gaping blindspots, we ought to be actively recruiting a broader set of
perspectives into this pursuit, so that we can generate more good ideas and
discredit more of the bad ones.

We don't need to throw out science to deal with bad ideas put forth by
scientists. Science itself has the mechanisms for this. We just need to do it
better.

Not scream at the author's speaking engagements until he leaves the room.

To be clear, the side I'm on is the liberal/academic/technocratic orthodoxy,
where smart people engage seriously with ideas, arguments, and data (including
devil's-advocating positions they don't agree with) to discover the truth, and
formulate policy prescriptions based on the truth, i.e. what's romanticized on
The West Wing. I do believe in reality's well-known liberal bias and on most
policy questions I am pretty much indistinguishable from an "SJW." As far as
getting to those policy positions, though, it was clear I would not have been
welcome in my campus's left-leaning political scene.

~~~
tomlock
It is clear to me from reading your previous comment that you've made an
effort to understand the arguments made. That's a breath of fresh air.

>Not scream at the author's speaking engagements until he leaves the room.

Student politics just suck. But, I don't think they're representative of some
of the underlying ideas they are based on. I've met some incredibly
intelligent and well-read anarchists - but I wouldn't think anarchy was a
system with that thought behind it if all I'd met was the _loudest_ proponents
of anarchy.

I think one of the problems currently we have in discourse-at-large is its
really easy to find the egregious and ridiculous arguments people make, and
paint the rest of the whole ideology with it. Perhaps the only partisan
movement in politics today? :)

>I just think that when we suspect something might be pseudoscientific, we
ought to read and study it really carefully, explore the arguments, and
discredit it by formulating and publicizing well-reasoned counterarguments.

>We don't need to throw out science to deal with bad ideas put forth by
scientists. Science itself has the mechanisms for this. We just need to do it
better.

I think the problem has been that in the past (and still today) women and PoC
were hampered by their inability to even _get stuff published_. If people
begin in a position where suspicion is immediate, its harder for them to get a
foot in the door, even if the gatekeepers hypothetically would allow in a
person they are suspicious of.

As a result, some people still feel like one of the few levers they can
successfully pull is the protest lever. Some protests suck.

>And since the demographics that traditionally practice this sort of thing
have some gaping blindspots, we ought to be actively recruiting a broader set
of perspectives into this pursuit, so that we can generate more good ideas and
discredit more of the bad ones.

I think we agree on this - and I think we agree that there's the possibility
of bias in science as it stands.

Where I'm going next with this: The idea then is that science internally sucks
at making choices to correct this bias. Therefore establishment science needs
to be externally influenced. That's not a dismissal of the scientific method,
that's a claim that the scientific method never existed in an unbiased form in
the first place.

------
rhapsodic
It has been decades since the political left in the US has relied to any
degree on reason and logic to bring people around to their way of thinking.
It's basically been name-calling (that's RACIST!), public shaming via internet
rage mobs, mockery, and now, physical violence to oppress people with whom
they disagree.

And I think this has made them intellectually soft. Many of the younger ones
don't know how to argue for their views intellectually because they've never
had to.

A now-deceased friend who was an avowed socialist, who came of age in the late
fifties/early sixties, absolutely loved to argue politics and ethics with
avowed free-market capitalists like myself, and I enjoyed arguing with him.
But I've found it impossible to have any discussions with any element of
intellectual rigor with any of the 20- or 30-something Bernie Sanders
supporters I'm acquainted with. Within minutes, they fall back on character
attacks -- "that's racist!", "you're greedy and selfish!", etc.

And it looks like it will get a lot worse before it gets any better.

~~~
mhneu
I find the opposite effect - liberals have thought much more deeply about
their views, and conservatives often just parrot shallow talking points.

For example, a group of my progressive acquaintances has been debating in
depth on the New Yorker's reporting over past few months, including especially
the long piece on Hillary the week before the election. They have framed that
discussion around progressive views on fairness of opportunity and fairness of
wealth distribution.

The leading political progressives have the same depth of argument - listen to
Obama's speeches, the speeches at the DNC, Bernie and Robert Reich, Kander on
voting, Stiglitz.

In contrast the right is intellectually bankrupt. Michael Anton's articles
motivated the right for the past few months and the articles are poorly argued
flimflam. Heritage's chief economist is disingenuous and misguided. The chief
GOP wonk in Congress, Paul Ryan, is a mediocrity who barely understands
healthcare never mind economics. This is what happens when a party goes to war
on expertise[1] (because expertise of course threatens their donors' ability
to make huge amounts of money[2]).

1\. [https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-death-of-
experti...](https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-death-of-
expertise-9780190469412?cc=us&lang=en&)

2\. [http://www.vox.com/science-and-
health/2017/3/10/14871696/sco...](http://www.vox.com/science-and-
health/2017/3/10/14871696/scott-pruitt-climate-denial)

~~~
pottersbasilisk
The gop is soft, but arguing with the alt right is scary. They are extremely
good debaters, very antifragile.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
They've certainly taken rhetoric classes. They just have the slight problem
that they have near-zero facts on their side. Of course, they're decent enough
rhetoricians to shift fully into meta-level philosophical sophistry when that
gets brought up, but that's... not helpful against those of us who recognize
sophistry as such.

------
flashman
That's odd, I'd define "dangerous safety" as being unlikely to experience
racism, sexism or other prejudice, and thus becoming incapable of realising
how those things affect others.

"Dangerous safety" is the kind of environment in which a man like Charles
Murray sees no problem with burning a cross next to a police station.[1]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Murray_(political_scie...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Murray_\(political_scientist\)#cite_note-9)

------
crb002
It's the US Dept of Education's fault. They won't stop lending money to
institutions who trample on student speech the administration disagrees with.
U.S. Dept of Education is a blank check.

