
Philosophers should not be sanctioned for their positions on sex and gender - hirundo
https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2019/07/22/philosophers-should-not-be-sanctioned-their-positions-sex-and-gender-opinion
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pmarreck
I came late to realize the existence of this problem, and discovered it when
someone on Twitter blocked me _simply for asking about_ Jordan Peterson.
¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

I fail to see how sanctioning/blocking/banning/censuring/deplatforming is
compatible with open honest debate (these are all basically the
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_baculum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_baculum)
fallacy, "punishment-as-argument"), in any event, and since I strongly believe
in the latter, I fall on the "strong free speech" side. (My Twitter account
has all of 9 blocked accounts, and those are mostly things like low-signal-to-
noise-ratio businesses with lots of promoted tweets)

There are people who believe that ideas exist that are both bad and that
cannot be defeated rationally, but I think they are wrong. Take racism, for
example (I've argued against racists): They will come at you with supporting
(correlational) data, so you come at them with this:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Height_and_intelligence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Height_and_intelligence)
and then you ask them whether they're shorter than average and still want to
act on these correlations they put so much stock in, because in that case they
need to now act against their own interests (favor preferential hiring of tall
people, etc.), and you just wait and let that sink in because most of them
will go quiet. ;)

~~~
ashton314
Amen: the best way to defeat any bad argument is to subject it to public,
open, and fair scrutiny. If anything is true, it will stand. If it is false,
there is no greater boon to an intellectual community than having publicly
dissected and exposed for what it is.

~~~
tzs
That's probably true in isolation, but I have doubts about whether it scales.

It's generally easier and less time consuming to produce a bad argument than
it is to produce a good argument to refute the bad argument. For the targets
of the arguments, it often is harder and more time consuming to follow the
good argument, too.

Get too many independent sources of bad arguments in your society, and there
simply won't be time and resources to counter them.

~~~
ashton314
You raise a good point. Sure, it can't match the scale. However, I think that
if you can sway the intelligent and conscientious, you've won most of the
battle. You don't need to (and really can't) counter every bad or false
argument or idea. Maybe I'm too optimistic, though.

Trying to scale effective debate is a hard problem. I've run across a few
entities that are trying to make civil, open discourse more commonplace.
Unfortunately I forget the name… Anyone got examples?

~~~
pmarreck
There are sites like procon.org that pit arguments 1-vs-1, but don't really
make allowances for rebuttals, see this one on e-cigs for example:
[https://www.procon.org/headline.php?headlineID=005430](https://www.procon.org/headline.php?headlineID=005430)

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royaltheartist
By the amount of attention this issue gets, one might actually think it were a
real problem and not something that a specific segment of the population
really wants to focus on. Even the open letter itself only mentions
"conversations" and "proposals." No professor at a major university seems to
have actually be sanctioned or punished for what they say on this issue,
despite all the conversation around it.

We can compare that to the 10 trans people murdered (according to Wiki) just
this year alone. And that's just the ones Wiki editors decided merited
inclusion. There are probably more, some unknown, and countless other trans
individuals who face violence and harassment on a near daily basis.

Meanwhile, the hollowness of these arguments and the crocodile tears of the
people who focus on them is laid bare when considers the amount of anti-BDS
legislation that have been passed, with many universities requiring speakers
to sign statements saying they will not and have never engaged in BDS.

These people, these "philosophers", simply want to be allowed to be
transphobic in public without consequences. But that's the real heart of
freedom and free speech. You can say what you what, it's true, but you're not
free from people talking back or deciding they don't want to hear from you.

~~~
brighter2morrow
>We can compare that to the 10 trans people murdered (according to Wiki) just
this year alone.

70x more people will be crushed by soda machines this year.

~~~
royaltheartist
If only there were a difference between murders and freak accidents.

~~~
brighter2morrow
I think we should put things in perspective before going into a moral panic

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drak0n1c
Peter Singer was one of the signers of this letter, a name people outside of
philosophy may recognize.

------
helen___keller
Unlike many HN commenters, I generally fall in favor of the current trend in
social media censorship and stratification. I don't think there's a problem
with individuals choosing to engulf themselves in a "bubble" of reinforcing
opinions. I certainly see no reason why any individual should be forced into
internet debates about their opinions if they are not personally a fan of
internet debates.

That said, academic institutions are not Facebook or Twitter, and academics
rightfully should hold the power to ask questions and make statements that
make others feel uncomfortable. There is no doubt that there should be room at
universities for people who want to muse on the nature of gender, even in a
way that may challenge others' strongly held beliefs.

However, it is immediate and utmost importance to recognize that questions of
gender identity are not just abstract questions. There are members of
universities and of society at large struggling to gain acceptance as queer
and transsexual, and whether or not academics want to deliberate on what it
even means to be of a gender, universities and the people involved with
universities seem to be overwhelmingly in favor of protecting the current
progressive status quo of gender identity.

I think there needs to be an important distinction made. Academic inquiry into
the nature of gender is fine. But oppressing those already struggling to gain
acceptance in society is not okay.

To that end, I'm not sure I understand the bullets listed at the bottom of the
post:

>We affirm the right of transgender and gender-nonconforming individuals to
live free of harassment and abuse, and we welcome them enthusiastically as
fellow participants in the profession of philosophy.

>We reject calls for censuring or deplatforming any of our colleagues on the
basis of their philosophical arguments about sex and gender identity, __or
their social and political advocacy for sex-based rights. __

Is this not a contradiction? If we are looking to protect philosophers '
"social and political advocacy for sex-based rights", it seems implied that
this includes advocacy _in opposition_ to the previously stated "right of
transgender and gender-nonconforming individuals to live free of harassment
and abuse".

Even within academic discourse, there is an Overton window. The window may be
wider for academics but it still exists. I don't know who gets to decide the
Overton window for academics, but there are topics which are certainly out. We
can all agree that sympathizing with genocide or advocating racism, things of
that nature, are outside the Overton window for academics. If a philosopher
muses "maybe killing all Jews is okay", he or she would be removed from the
institution, and rightfully so.

The question here is where the Overton window's edge lies in the realm of
gender identity. My opinion is that the window ends where people's rights
begin. If you want to ask "does gender even exist? Is gender identity a
meaningful form of expression?", fine. If you want to say "gender doesn't
exist, so don't protect transgender folk from discrimination in legislation",
you have gone too far.

Who defines the Overton window in reality? There is no "Board of Acceptable
Philosophy". The process we have now of internet rage mobs and "deplatforming"
is arguably the most democratic way society has ever had of enforcing an
Overton window, but that's not a good thing in the context of academia, which
should rightfully be separate from society at large. I think in the old days,
the outdated ideas would simply die off with the thinkers who hold them,
reflecting the changes in the world in slow motion.

------
jbob2000
Philosophers search for truth and objectivity. A person’s identity (according
to today’s school of thought) is not objective, it’s completely subject to
_their_ needs.

And since you, the academic, don’t fully know their needs, you cannot
understand their identity, and thus you cannot come to some objective truth
about it.

I think this is why philosophers are being called x-phobic; they’re using
their power as academics to enforce some kind of truth.

~~~
jplayer01
I'm not so sure I agree. I don't see anything particularly special about why
people believe Alex Jones or polarize to creationism, racism, nationalism,
etc. These are all well within the ability of science in all it's forms
(biology, history, psychology, sociology) to explain. Their needs are well-
quantified and analyzed in any number of papers that have been published.
There's nothing new there, except the internet reinforcing existing behaviors
in a novel way that wasn't possible before. But the underlying pathologies?
They've always been there.

~~~
zbyte64
Weren't philosophers a decade a go lamenting of how reductionist science has
become? Like I remember going to college and the professors held a forum where
they insisted that science isn't the end-all be-all for human existence. Weird
how I disagreed with their analogies but I find myself agreeing with their
point that human experience is not meant to be reduced to what is already
known.

~~~
jplayer01
And they (as much as one can generalize across an entire discipline) still do
(rightfully so) lament about science and how it pretends to be the answer to
everything. But that doesn't mean we're supposed to throw out everything we do
know about humans through science, such as how they establish their beliefs or
how they manage to persist or how these beliefs get tied up in identity, and
what we continuously find out by applying scientific methods (such as how
presenting facts can lead to reinforcing contradictory pre-existing beliefs).

------
bairrd
What does the continued distractionary tactic by those in power in government
and the media, (especially in the UK relating to trans issues) of wringing
hands over gender and sex have to do with a site ostensibly about hacker news,
especially on a site where it seems wholly heterodox to suggest any sort of
alternative societal structure might be needed to combat climate change, as
that is quickly denoted as off topic, and something that market forces will
eventually solve. I honestly could care less for the hand-wringing of academia
in a field completely non-relevant to "hackers", and this simply feels like
the sort of thing used to distract from broader issues at hand, and a way of
us v them-ing society in order to manufacture consent for an impending climate
catastrophe where those with massive pecuniary hoards will further divide
society on identarian (sex/gender/race/location) lines in order to distract
from the broader issues at hand.

~~~
vorpalhex
Philosophy is absolutely a form of hacking. It's about pulling apart concepts
and the unreal while building and applying systems.

