Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[faust]

Chapter 6: How to Conquer a College (Part 2)

Just a small bit of progress for now. We got some discussion on colleges always had a progressive bias, but it is getting more pronounced. Feels like Urban taps into the correlation vs causation trap he warned about earlier. There are lots of possible reasons for this to happen: Greater diversity in the student body, the Republicans drifting to the right, lingering effects of McCarthy-era cleansings slowly fading - these are just some that come to my mind. Also this does not necessarily imply ideological conformity - it may well be that the college thought pile is just a broad as the general public one and it's simply that it sits further to the left which causes this appearance. The two-party system makes this hard to determine. I think if you do similar analyses in Germany, you get vastly different distributions of party affiliations than in the general public, but they are not less diverse, just slanted to the left.

We're getting into a bunch of cases where students and/or faculty attempted and/or succeeded to cancel speaking events. Is this bad? It depends. Some of the accounts do sound bad, I believe that some may have happened more or less like this, but it's too much to factcheck in detail. Two names have been mentioned that I immediately recognized: Condoleeza Rice and Christine Lagarde. Urban makes special note of how they are "the only black female secretary of state" and "the first female head of the IMF", respectively -  why? Are you implying that this means that they shouldn't be held to the same standard as men because they are from underprivileged group? Are you doing an identity politics? What's going on, Tim???

Okay, well, so I looked into this. Here's the NYT account of Condoleeeza Rice. Turns out this was not any old lecture in some student seminar, no it was the inaugural address. Not a setting that allows for an exchange of viewpoints really. And by selecting a speaker the university bestows an amount of credibility on the speaker. Plus they would have paid 35000$ to Condoleeza Rice. The protest was due to her involvement in the Iraq war, which is not exactly an SJF issue, so it also seems doubtful to me that that ideology is to blame.

Christine Lagarde also was scheduled to give the inaugural address. Here at least the criticism seems more directly connected to Social Justice. There is no mention of any fee that would have been paid, but I assume that would have been the case.

IDK, neither of these seems particularly egregious to me. It's good to scrutinize whose speech gets upheld and amplified by institutions in situations where there is only limited space. Urban says that other students are denied their right to hear what the speaker had to say, but ignores that they have also previously been denied the right to hear what some potential other speaker would have had to say by the organizers.

[silverspawn]

- no eating before 18:00

So I accidentically ate like one singular flock of oatmeal without thinking, which means I technically failed the commitments. Time to fail with abundance and give up on everything immediately

Actually, I think this was one of the best ideas I've had in a while so I'll stick with it

[silverspawn]

Where are you getting your torrents? On RuTracker, people generally put the languages in the title and include the full MediaInfo in the thread (at the very least they do one if not both), which is incredibly useful given how many of them are dubbed in Russian, and I don't think I have ever had to download something blindly just to discover it's the Russian dub. I don't usually use any other sites for western media because almost always RuTracker has it too, but including the language info in at least the description seems to be a convention on 1337x.to as well and really should be on every reasonable site.

It was just the first site I found; I'll use sth else

RuTracker is in Russian, are you using an auto-translate?

[Awaclus]

RuTracker is in Russian, are you using an auto-translate?

Sometimes, if I need to read something in the torrent description, like installation instructions for software. I can read Cyrillic and have a vocabulary of like maybe 100 or so Russian words, and surprisingly many words are not difficult to guess if you know English and eastern dialects of Finnish, which helps somewhat, but mainly I just navigate the interface without knowing what words mean and this works fine.

[Awaclus]

I probably used a translator to register my account.

[silverspawn]

Saw Leviathan (the Russian movie). Bleak af. A very ugly plot in a very beautiful movie. Another 7/10.

[faust]

Chapter 6: How to Conquer a College (Part 3)

Continuing, here we get to parts that interest me because they are close to my own experiences.

First we discuss campus newspapers. Hey, I have written for a campus newspaper and even got threatened with a lawsuit once for it, so I know something about that. Certainly that people can get pretty mad at you, and I feel that sometimes there is a disconnect between aspiring journalists who want to apply journalistic best practices, and students who get involved in their local university politics but don't feel that this makes them public figures to be scrutinized in a newspaper. It's a problem, and I tend to take the newspaper side but can see the other. Anyways, the central incident discussed here is one in which the Harvard Crimson got criticized for reaching out to ICE for comment after an "abolish ICE rally". Urban makes it sound like the protesters got mad that people with other viewpoints got contacted, but the issue seems to have been that people were scared of facing deportation because ICE got informed about their activities. Now the latter still sounds like a bit of a leap to me, though I don't know what's going on with ICE in detail. It seems like Urban could have at least presented that side of the argument though. As far as I can tell, the newspaper didn't suffer any damage from this either.

There are some weak points (in my opinion) on stuff like "bias response teams" or something like that. Haven't looked into it, and I'm not sure what exactly the bad is that they do. I don't think anyone is mentioned to have been expelled because of bias, and it didn't get clear to me what bad stuff these are accused of precisely, other than existing. Urban complains that universitiesfight against racial and gender discrimination but not discrimination based on political views. There is of course a difference between discrimination based on innate characteristics and discrimination based on changable ones, so that doesn't bother me. (One might argue that religious discrimination is included even though that is also changable, and yes I would agree that that should probably be relegated to the lower tier of badness where political discrimination is.)

We get into Lawrence Summers, former president of Harvard. This is an incident of 2005, which feels like ancient history compared to the other stuff that we're discussing here. He gave a speech in which he said that he doesn't think gender discrimination is as big a problem as it's made out to be, and people got upset. One might question why he felt the need to speak on this topic at a research conference, it doesn't seem like he's an expert. The speech itself is lackluster, he gives three potential causes of underrepresentation of women in STEM and concludes that discrimination is the least important. ; it is not explored how discrimination might also be a factor that can explain the discrepancies in the other two causes, which is probably the weak point of the speech. Following that, he got removed as president (but he had also previously been embroiled in other controversies). Notable that according to Wikipedia, he still got majority support of the student body at time of removal, so I'm not convinced that you can label this a result of SJF culture.

Finally, we get to a math paper, yay! The paper is about the variability hypothesis also mentioned by Summers, and from the timeline the paper may have been in reaction to that incident. As a mathematician, I am already kind of surprised by this choice of topic, it doesn't really have much to do with math research. The paper got pulled after publication, and according to Urban that's bad, because publication means it's thoroughly peer-reviewed and should thus be accepted as truth. And then... he goes on to tell the tale about how some activists managed to get 7 bullshit papers published. And I have to wonder: Shouldn't Urban at this point notice a problem in his reasoning?

The underlying problem here as I see it is really publication culture in academia, not SJF culture.

[silverspawn]

One might question why he felt the need to speak on this topic at a research conference, it doesn't seem like he's an expert. The speech itself is lackluster, he gives three potential causes of underrepresentation of women in STEM and concludes that discrimination is the least important. ; it is not explored how discrimination might also be a factor that can explain the discrepancies in the other two causes, which is probably the weak point of the speech.

This isn't really relevant though, is it?

[faust]

One might question why he felt the need to speak on this topic at a research conference, it doesn't seem like he's an expert. The speech itself is lackluster, he gives three potential causes of underrepresentation of women in STEM and concludes that discrimination is the least important. ; it is not explored how discrimination might also be a factor that can explain the discrepancies in the other two causes, which is probably the weak point of the speech.

This isn't really relevant though, is it?

Why not? I thought the criticism was that he gave a bad and biased speech, and so it's important to check if it was actually bad.

Turns out though this whole episode is completely irrelevant though, because I have now continued some and Urban says later the SJF didn't really start taking hold until the 2010s. Since this is from 2005, it thus couldn't be an example of SJF.

[silverspawn]

because disagreeing with the speech isn't a reason to punish the speaker, I hope

[faust]

because disagreeing with the speech isn't a reason to punish the speaker, I hope

Do you have any evidence that the speaker was punished because people disagreed with the speech?

[silverspawn]

sorry, my brain didn't want to think about politics. Will get back to this

[silverspawn]

Anyway, I've watched Anomalisa -- one of the last three Charlie Kaufman movies I hadn't seen -- and you wouldn't believe it but it's about male loneliness, mortality, and the general idea that you can't ever really be satisfied... he's just so unique every time!

[silverspawn]

No idea why I'm dunking on him lol it was actually fantastic, really powerful and disturbing although I don't completely get it yet

[silverspawn]

Also I can see the future. Watch this. Kaufman has written another movie. He will either not get it produced or he will, and if he does, it'll be about male loneliness, mortality, and the utter unsatisfactoriness of life

[silverspawn]

I don't think I like it as much as his other stuff. Or do I? It's kinda unsatisfying. But who am I kidding of course it's unsatisfying it's a Charlie Kaufman movie. Man I don't know.

[silverspawn]

I have tried to perfect myself
but I'm ugly on the inside
no one is ever satisfied ♫

[silverspawn]

Actually I think I get it more now. Which makes me like it more. I think the thing that bothered me was that it felt cruel for the sake of itself, but now I see what that represents and yeah he's right of course

[silverspawn]

Anyway 9/10 for now might be a 10/10 idk

[silverspawn]

The other thing about -- mb not all his movies, but definitely Synecdoche, this one, and also his novel -- is that yes the main character is dealing with all this emotional baggage, and you feel sorry for them, but they're also selfish pricks. They only ever want to make themselves feel better. I think he's saying that a lot of people's apparent selflessness is a lie, it's to prop up their self image, to signal, they don't actually care about anyone else. And there's definitely something to that, although I don't think people literally only act in their self-interest.

[Awaclus]

I have tried to perfect myself
but I'm ugly on the inside
no one is ever satisfied ♫

Every day, I face torment ♫

[silverspawn]

If you read them as reflections of himself, and they obviously are, then he's so unbelievably hard on himself Jesus

[silverspawn]

Tomorrow I think I'll watch something more lighthearted, like a horror movie. Just torrented It Follows and it looks like it's not in German woo

[Awaclus]

Tomorrow I think I'll watch something more lighthearted, like a horror movie. Just torrented It Follows and it looks like it's not in German woo

Ah yes, the movie about a person who's in a debate and just about to utterly destroy their opponent by debunking the opponent's invalid argument, until the horrifying realization hits.

[silverspawn]

if I got a dollar for every time I read someone Dunning-Kruger-ing the shit out of themselves while talking about consciousness, I wouldn't need the EA grant