It similar to the bogus fair and balanced media argument. News reporting is about reporting the facts as they lead logically so that if anyone would perform the work of the journalist they would arrive at similar conclusions regardless of their perspective or polity. It's very much like the scientific method. Focusing on opinion diversity is a red herring.

I'm sure all of the students getting faculty and administrators dismissed right now would describe the opposing ideas as "bunk" not worthy of consideration.

I see a few reasons to explicitly address "bunk" ideas.

* Students have already been exposed to the ideas, and many already believe them. Having a discussion explaining why they are bunk might be critical to moving on to more interesting topics.

* Appeals to authority make for bad pedagogy. Sure, evolution is the scientific consensus. But students who just accept it at face value without asking to be shown the evidence are not students capable of scientific thought.

* Ideas you thought were bunk might turn out to have more merit or nuance than you expected, once you start digging deeper. It's easy to see other people's deeply held bunk ideas. But how do you force yourself to see your own?

The author does not advocate validating factually invalid statements - see his anecdote in the second article linked in GP regarding "whether or not the economic collapse was caused by poor black people":

"I gave a quick response about how most experts would disagree with that assumption, that it was actually an oversimplification, and pretty dishonest, and isn't it good that someone made the video we just watched to try to clear things up? And, hey, let's talk about whether that was effective, okay? If you don't think it was, how could it have been?"

In other words - in the case of "bunk" it can be summarily dismissed with a proper basis. Which is entirely different from vilifying and personally attacking a person for their beliefs or thoughts which are doing no actual harm to anyone else. People can have bogus ideas and those bogus ideas can be completely harmless no matter how much you might find them distasteful.

Viewpoint diversity is entirely about bringing different perspectives and experiences to bear on a subject.

It works in the hard sciences: https://www.quantamagazine.org/20151124-kadison-singer-math-...

Why shouldn't it similarly be applied in areas of morality, ethics, social science, etc?

To really understand an argument, one has to start with its subject. Are we talking about viewpoints or people? What the blog post author focuses on is people:

> Me: Now lets try it for politics. How many of you would say you are on the right politically, or that you are conservative or Republican?

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how discourse is conducted and should be conducted. People are not on the right politically, conservative, or Republican. People are people, and each might hold or articulate viewpoints or opinions that are on the right politically or conservative. They might be a member of the Republican Party. All of these are elective and potentially temporary.

The whole point of discourse is that viewpoints, opinions, and memberships can change. So to start by framing those as elements of identity needing protection, feeds directly into a framework for discussion that is conflicted. If a discussion must validate and protect all viewpoints (conservative or liberal), then what is going to be discussed?

IMO the right way to approach this situation is to explore the potential consequences of voicing an unpopular opinion. Often, they are far less scary than teenagers might suppose. We should focus on how to give each individual student the mental tools to effectively evaluate arguments, and to manage their anxiety about going against perceived social norms.

Teaching kids to be brave in speaking up against prevailing opinion can help create positive outcomes throughout their lives. We want citizens who will speak up for what they know is right, even if they know they will face trouble.

I thought your comment was really good, but I don't think this conclusion is quite right. The problem is that lots of different people "know" that lots of different things are "right". In my life experience (read: I have no data on this), we don't seem to have the problem that not enough people will "speak up for what they know is right" because they fear trouble, we instead have the problem that not enough people are willing to challenge themselves on what they "know" is "right".

Sorry for all the scare quotes, but my point is that the entire idea that people can know that things are right, and then speak up for those things, is off-base. Certainly, it's a good thing to have a sense for what you think is right, and to be able to speak up for those things, but it's a much better and much harder thing to be open to being convinced that you are incorrect. That's what I don't see much of in our society, and what all schools, and universities in particular, should do a better of imparting to their students! Instead of teaching people to better manage their anxiety about speaking against perceived social norms, we would be better off improving peoples' skills of hearing things they disagree with, and of structuring their own arguments such that they don't drown out that disagreement (for instance, the all too familiar tactic of yelling and/or ranting continuously).

I guess where I find that I agree with the author is that we could all use to do a better job of really listening to different opinions. But where the author was targeting that advice at the "victims" who shouldn't shout down their "oppressors", in my experience it is more often the case that people with brash opinions that tend to offend people are the ones who "know they are right" and are unlikely to really hear the other side.

But I suppose there is plenty of closed-mindedness, lack of charity, and stubbornness to go around!

Yes this is what I understand, too. Let me say, for the record, I think diversity (race, creed, gender, color, tint or hue) is important. And bias on those things doesn't belong on campus. But campus isn't group therapy, either. It's a place like no other where we're supposed probe the universe and try to find the answers. Diversity in that context should be in the service of that mission, not in the service of balancing faction which is what the OP is all about. Balancing faction is a slippery slope, set it aside.

Dismissing something as a red herring without even bringing it up in a classroom avoids a key responsibility of an educator: students need to be able to recognize red herrings and respond to them as such. Red herrings occur in the real world. The role of the educator is not to dictate accurate information, it's to teach people how to critically process information.

The news, on the other hand, does have the responsibility to dictate accurate information. As such, the only opinions that matter are the opinions of experts, and those should be subservient to data. "Fair and balanced" doesn't often matter because if there are really two sides to the issue, the "information" isn't accurate enough to be presenting to an inexpert public anyway. Debates should happen between experts based on the data, without politicization, and news should report the results.

Very quickly, the proposal that the moon is made of Vince Foster would be dismissed as false. This is critical thinking in action.

The problem today is that students and faculty are self-censoring. This doesn't expand erudition.

No, they shouldn't, and I'll follow-up as to why below.

>Very quickly, the proposal that the moon is made of Vince Foster would be dismissed as false. This is critical thinking in action.

Given sufficient rhetorical skill and sufficiently many appeals to "open thought" or "questioning assumptions" or "viewpoint diversity" - in short, various forms of postmodern denial of the external world and the strict rules for reasoning about it - a sufficiently motivated student or professor will manage to make "the moon is made of Vince Foster" the center of attention.

We are living in the same world, with the same academic institutions, which was fooled by the Sokal Hoax, and we are also dealing with the human psychology of social proof, in which giving time and energy to considering an idea in-detail is considered evidence for the idea's truth (rather than evidence for its vagueness or logical complexity).

We cannot allow academia to be consumed with discussions over whether gravity is a social construction, especially not because right-wing partisans feel that only mostly owning the field of economics means that academia is engaged in conspiracy against them.

The rules of good arguments, good logic, and relevant evidence are the points to emphasize and enforce.

So disallow any and all appeals to social proof, and you eliminate the ability for these people to waste everyone else's time.

If someone wants to argue the Earth is 6,000 years old, let them take a couple of cracks at it. But once it's clear they are deviating from the rules of scientific reasoning in science class, make it clear that is the reason for disallowing their arguments and move on.

"We cannot allow academia to be consumed with discussions over whether gravity is a social construction, especially not because right-wing partisans feel that only mostly owning the field of economics means that academia is engaged in conspiracy against them."

Take this sentence, for example. It's not clear at all how the second clause logically follows from the first.

Discourse and unpopular ideas drive discovery and learning more than memorization ever will. It does not mean that unpopular views are "right" it means that the act of understanding, listening to other perspectives and being able to construct your own beliefs in that discourse is a net win and absolutely core to higher learning; even if the unpopular view is garbage.

In science you'd want to use the scientific method and reject appeals to faith.

Theology, while its foundational principles may be established on the basis of revelation such as scripture, often proceeds from foundational principles by logic.

Please explain how you proceed logically from the position that eating from the tree of knowledge is sin?

This doesn't seem hard. Apologist hat on.

It wasn't the knowledge that was bad, it's that the knowledge was attained by doing what God said not to. Certainly, we can condemn things done in pursuit of knowledge - Mengele being probably the easiest example.

That hat fit kinda funny.

This is merely an interpretation (incidentally, of which all text requires). How do you know it is the correct one?

I interpreted fleitz (in the bit I quoted) as saying "if knowledge is bad, then we shouldn't be using logic to get us more knowledge, so the whole exercise is absurd." I was pointing out that there's at least one out.

=)

But how do we avoid the problem where if I suggest that maybe the moon isn't all Vince Foster all the time, I'm an evil person? (a racist, and oppressor of women?) Can we get to a place, not where we agree that the moon could be made of Vince Foster, but where one can suggest it's not Vince Foster without being literally ostracized, from schools and jobs?

My answer used to be "why, if you have the truth on your side, just prove 'em wrong and move on! so much the better for your standpoint!". However, it can get extremely tedious. A stubborn student can "plausible deniability" his way into extremely metaphysical arguments, about historical revisionism and psychology, and ultimately about epistemology itself.

I think it's important to phrase the argument not as "the students want these topics to not be discussed", but instead as "the students want these topics to be included in the actually already existing list of topics we don't discuss". And then take it topic-by-topic.

This idea that student-activism is largely composed of completely irrational anti-logic zealots is a caricature.

Being able to debunk such looney claims is very valuable for students so they should develop these skills not be shielded from exposure to them.

I had a guy simply insisting that evolution wasn't real. "Ok", I say, "what about (found some reports demonstrating observable changes in a species over time)?". "Oh, well sure, microevolution is real, but big things can't change, like humans." And around we go again and again. (Same guy believes that we can't actually analyze someone's genome and that people become resistant to antibiotics, not diseases, and 9/11 was an inside job.)

Show them video, show them photographs, bring in first-person witnesses, and they'll find a way to dismiss all of it. Either because they truly believe what they're saying, or, like a current coworker, they're just a contrarian asshole. That doesn't mean we shield people from these views, but we have to, at some point, accept that not all viewpoints are equal, some simply have no merit and aren't worth discussing beyond acknowledging that some people believe them (would you really want to engage with a flat-earth believer? I mean, it was fun once, but that was enough for me).

* Flunk them for not learning or engaging with the material.

* Limit their time in class discussions if they are not engaging constructively.

* Have the administration remove them from the class if they become belligerent.

Of course, the third item is the crucial one. It seems at many universities these days, administrations are taking the side of the customer, er, I mean, student, in every dispute, regardless of the merits.

Whenever I had to deal with contentious issues as a chair of a meeting this is exactly how I proceeded, much to the dismay of the people who wanted to argue all day.

The people who cause the most issues usually take their rebuttal early and then the debate can proceed amongst the more reasonable people.

That isn't something that can be argued against with facts. You can't present evidence to counter this, because they didn't use facts to come to the opinion. As the saying goes, "You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into"

There are a certain class of opinions that we need to be able to dismiss with just a "that is just not worthy of even talking about." While I believe this list of things should be very small, it DOES exist.

Yes it can. In the context of a law class, there's tons of laws which clearly state that rape is a crime, so it clearly does matter. That's just as factually incorrect as saying "Fraud does not matter because suckers aren't important." You can't just say: "_______ isn't important." in a law class.

If I were a history professor and someone tried to bring up Holocaust denial in my class, I'd first explain why it's absurd to try and argue that all that evidence is somehow fake, which then shows that anyone who tries to defend this position either:

1. Has legitimately no idea what they're talking about.

2. Has willfully taken up the agenda of bending the truth to support Nazi-ism.

I wouldn't shout them down though. That's counter-productive.

Oh, and now you want to argue meta-ethics and meta-philosophy :-p?

But in your second paragraph, you seem to imply (maybe I'm wrong here) that there is a sense of objectivity inherent in news reporting, because the reporting leads logically from the facts. However, the facts are hand-picked, meaning bias is unavoidably baked into the premise. In which case we are no closer to avoiding "focussing on opinion diversity", as the same opinion diversity arguments apply to choosing the facts on which to report.

edit: RTFA

You can have a "balanced viewpoint" and still have debates about "whether the moon is made of the body of Vince Foster or not." There are certain ideas that just don't belong in a university setting because they are bunk and this has nothing to do with diversity of opinion.

IMHO this concept falls on its own sword. What harm is there debating about the moon being made of Vince's body if there is a question in the forum? Does it harm the people that have solidified beliefs about it being false? The person who believes it to be possible? What is learning beyond discussing the possibilities, informing each other about beliefs, viewpoints and deductive reasoning leading to growth/questioning what is true and false and constructing and reconstructing your closely held beliefs.

Uniform thought begets uniform thought and does not foster growth. I shiver thinking about wonders/discoveries would have been lost if people in our history were afraid to discuss unpopular ideas and constructs; as it stands too many already have been.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance

So, in effect, investigating root causes or nuance is denied because any of that could, in some people's minds, undermine the larger issue(s).

It's sad and unfortunate that discussing things must become personal attacks rather than being viewed as inquiry.

I like it frame it in a less politically correct way and simply ask people if they're up for debating whether or not pedophilia should be legal. If the answer is no, then they necessarily must agree that there are things for which a reasonable person can have a closed mind about and still remain reasonable.

I feel like we already use this pattern in a variety of settings. The legal system comes to mind, where we build this collective body of decisions that either prove useful and are built on, or modified and removed if not. But there is not a sense of anything being "inappropriate" to question. The very core of the legal system is challenged on a regular basis and we don't feel the need to censor those who challenge it. We have a general level of confidence that the system has checks and balances that let justice prevail.

Two observations. One is that this reminds me of eventually consistent systems. The law lags slightly behind reality but we know it catches up eventually. Reality is always changing and so we don't expect the law to always be up to the minute perfect. Perhaps we can embrace this notion of imperfection as a reason to keep discourse constantly open.

Second is that the law is effectively the source code for running society. It has procedures set up around it very similar to how we'd run a successful open source project. Integrators, reviewers, unit testers, engineers, project managers, pull requests …

Perhaps in the case of Yale and other institutions, what is needed is the same level of transparency we have in a well run source repo or legal system.

1) everything is written down somewhere, is properly attributed, and openly discussed. 2) systems are in place to propose changes, understand the impact of those changes, and integrate or reject those changes. 3) there is an understanding that this is an evolving system, it has a past, present, and a future. 4) history is recorded so that present and future discussions can be made with the appropriate context in place.

I feel like this is the solution for incorporating dissenting views, converging on the set of beliefs that identify the underlying priorities and preferences of the participants, and making it clear why certain things are the way they are.

It is entirely possible that institutions may converge around policies that are abhorrent to some, but being clear and transparent about that at least makes people know what they're getting in to. It's possible that a system like this at Yale would result in some students or faculty deciding that their views would not be welcome there, which is better than discovering that after the fact.

It's also worth noting that humans respond better to praise and work more efficiently when we feel safe. So we obviously can't be completely "anti-fragile".

There might have been about a hundred people on campus that were actively interested in protesting things (what things?, all the things). For the most part, everybody else is there to go to class, learn, do their own thing, and drink too much beer on the weekends/Wednesdays/Mondays, etc. This vocal, seemingly-permanently-aggrieved small subset of the population seemed to stir up almost all of the controversy, and seemed hell-bent on ruining everybody else's good time at every opportunity. Increasingly, they seem to be succeeding; I'm glad I graduated when I did.

I'm a bit past college age these days but in the mid/late 90's when I was at university, there were plenty of "causes" that students took up (myself included) to various degrees and in retrospect, a lot of it came down to the newly-found freedom of adulthood combined with the idealism of youth and the lack of wider awareness that comes with a bit more exposure to the world at large.

I think it's a good thing that young people are able to see some of the real injustice in the world that some of us older folks have learned to accept (or at least take for granted) and have the drive to want to improve things. At the same time, cultural attitudes don't change through force or under threat. Additionally, there's still a bit of that youthful naivete where just because something is a huge deal for you, you may not realize the bigger issues at play or know which "battles" to choose yet.

I'm sure my attitudes will keep evolving over time but just between my college years and 20 years later, I think about how some things seemed so important and unfair back then but I've since found that there are usually bigger issues or at least more subtle and effective ways to address the problems you recognize in ways other than shouting matches or mob-mentality public shaming.

[0] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/14/living-by-the-sword/

But I mean cancer mostly in the same way Scott Alexander used it - uncontrolled growth by "all means necessary", not an insult. Cancer happens when some cells eschew cooperation and start promoting their interests at the cost to everyone else. As it grows in size it grows in complexity, and given that it's made of components who tend to disregard cooperation, Scott argues that instead of self-organizing it tends to develop a cancer of its own, which slows the overall growth. Similarly, if the group gains voice by using every dirty trick in the book and then some because it's most effective, they should not be surprised that - as their movement grows in size - they end up fighting each other at some point.

I hear that phrase more on the left lately than right. Which says a lot ...

And do you think that's a random sampling of everyone who believes in similar causes? From where I sit, "the butthurt minority" are such a self-selecting group, and their rage is so completely independent of their actual cause, that they don't constitute evidence for or against any particular idea, cause, or proposition.

After all, the "Yale problem" refers mainly to a short confrontation where an immature student yelled at an administrator over something stupid. That's never been exactly unheard of at any college, the only difference is that it got captured on video and spread around the country.

Also white-trash Yankee hillbillies are rare enough at these sorts of places that I might as well give up any pretenses of online anonymity if I said specifically which one it was.

[1] http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2012...

[2] https://www.quora.com/Why-do-people-who-went-to-Harvard-some...

  > Also, almost all of the censorship calls and nasty behavior /
  > comments came from students on the left.

In this context, it is the left for sure. But I can imagine plenty of situations where it happens on the right in practice.

Edit: I'm looking for specific examples. Otherwise we are just feigning outrage.

I had an ex co-worker who confided in me that he doesn't like gay people. I was very happy that he couldn't say that in public.

* The USA is a moral country.

* The USA is morally superior to most/all other countries.

* A specific member of an in-power "preferred" group can experience unjustified prejudice, oppression, and bullying from members of an out-of-power group.

* Men and women have some neurological differences.

* Some cultures are morally superior to other cultures.

* Christianity's values are moral.

* Conforming gender identities exist for more reasons than culturally enforced gender roles.

* Abortion involves the killing of a baby.

* Poor whites are not a privileged class.

If someone says something unpopular on hackernews, ie "Edward Snowden is a traitor" they will be downvoted into oblivion. You could say that hackernewws censored the person's ideas, but I think the reality is that what they said wasn't very popular with the people they said it to. I think this effect is just as relevant and predictable with online communities as it is with college campuses.

Nope. Totally different. In your example, the poster on HackerNews would only get down-voted and thus, censored. Okay. No big deal.

What's happening at the universities right now is different. It is not censership. At these, universities, a person who says, "Edward Snowden is a traitor" would get fired, because students would force the administrators to fired the person they disagree with, because it's "offensive" to call Edward Snowden a traitor.

So totally different. On HackerNews, it's just a down-vote, a simple censorship. At the universities, the person loses his job/education/livelihood, all because he has a different opinion about Edward Snowden. That's not censorship. That's "ruinning-people's-lives-for-having-a-different-opinion" but trying to pass it off as just a simple censorship.

I just wanted to respond to this because (like a lot of these ideas) I think they represent a response to a strawman. The core point of the discussion of privilege acknowledges that all people have privileges. The question then is defining what they are and how useful they are.

When talking about white privilege, the point is that poor whites are better off than poor blacks, just by virtue of being white. The interesting thing here is that there are privileges only afforded to poor blacks. The problem is that the privileges afforded to poor whites are more useful than those afforded to poor blacks.

Its not clear to me that that that's true; there is complicated intersectionality at play. Poor whites are more likely to have social networks and other advantages that provide things useful to getting out of poverty, and may -- due to racism and the racially unequal distribution of wealth and power -- have better responses from people in power independent of their own social networks.

OTOH, they may also be more likely to have social networks that are less understanding of an accepting of poverty.

Whether this is a net advantage or net disadvantage varies, among poor whites, considerably from individual to individual.

Group privilege exists mostly in terms of average conditions across groups (and may not thus be particularly useful in discussing the positions of individuals.)

Taking White privilege as a given (which I think does accurately reflect reality, in terms of on-average advantage), I'm not sure that poor White privilege (compared to, poor non-White ) is valid; its certainly not a necessary corollary of White privilege.

Edit: this is technically incorrect, see dragonwriter below.

In 2010, 62,593 blacks were victims of white violence, while 320,082 whites were victims of black violence. (Bureau of Justice Statistics). 2013 FBI homicide numbers show a similar ratio, with blacks being about 12 times more likely to kill a white person than whites were to kill a black person [2] (~10 blacks per 100k population kill a white, while ~1 white per 100k kill a black).

Some studies have shown that crime is correlated primarily with poverty, while other studies have found that being black correlates to criminality while controlling for other factors [4]:

"As a means to assess these possibilities, I estimate separate regression equations for the black and white block groups in Atlanta. [...] Consistent with previous research, percent black retains a strong, significant effect on violent crime net of the effects of other controls. [...]" "[...] Although this finding appears to provide partial support for the racial invariance assumption, the fact remains that for a large proportion of the black neighborhoods, the effect of disadvantage on violence is weaker than is the effect evident among all of the white neighborhoods in the analysis" (However this paper is largely inconclusive on the issue overall, and predominately suggests that previous research into the topic is inadequate to understand it)

Why this is the case is an interesting problem that I hope we can tackle, better understand, and attempt to solve as a society (by solve I mean bring violent crime down to zero generally, across all groups)

[1] FBI crime statistics by race for 2010: https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2010/...

[2] FBI homicide statistics by race for 2013: https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/...

[3] http://blogs.channel4.com/factcheck/factcheck-black-american... has additional details and citations.

[4] http://www.udel.edu/soc/faculty/parker/SOCI836_S08_files/McN...

Prosecution figures are simply unreliable as a metric for judging how many crimes are committed by whites vs. blacks. There are many interesting cases that show this. The most interesting one is McCleskey v. Kemp. It's not my favorite in terms of the specifics of the case, but it is my favorite because in the intervening years it has become pretty clearly a bad ruling, to the point that the justice who wrote the majority opinion wishes he could reverse his own vote. The unfortunate thing being that he cannot, and his vote has made it effectively impossible to detect and address racial bias in prosecution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCleskey_v._Kemp

"The UCR and NVCS show similar trends regarding the races of offenders. Generally, the number of minorities identified as offenders is disproportionately high compared to their overall numbers in the population. As Ronald J Berger et al. advise the NCVS, 'Data are consistent with the UCR. The offenders in these types of crimes are disproportionately young, nonwhite, and male.'" (NVCS page 312, can be found by Google search-inside-the-book)

I would be interested to research the topic further. Could you provide more information about the studies you mentioned? I have not previously seen convincing evidence that bias in the justice system is responsible for the racial disparity in these crime statistics. From what I understand, a lot of the murders are black-on-black violence, as well. In 2013, 90% of blacks were murdered by blacks. A majority of people are killed by one of their own race in general (though black-on-white violence is much higher than white-on-black). People are typically murdered by someone who knew them intimately.

  [Updated per correction]
  Blacks killed by blacks: 90% [1]
  Blacks killed by whites: 8%
  Whites killed by whites: 82%
  Whites killed by blacks: 15%

I find it plausible that there are effects along the lines of what you're saying, but I find it hard to believe that it would result in a murder per capita discrepancy of 10:1. It seems more plausible that that kind of bias would result in a discrepancy of much smaller proportions, especially for murder. I would be glad to review whatever evidence is available.

[1] https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2014/...

  Blacks killed by blacks: 90%
  Blacks killed by whites: 8%
  Whites killed by whites: 82%
  Whites killed by blacks: 15%
  Ratio of whites killed by police to blacks killed by police: 1.857

[2] https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2014/...

"For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it." (Thomas Jefferson)

One particularly damning statistic: black people pulled over and searched for drugs are significantly less likely to have drugs than white people.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/us/racial-disparity-traffi...

This is a pretty good digest of the figures, but really read The New Jim Crow:

http://www.naacp.org/pages/criminal-justice-fact-sheet

Edit: missed this line in your comment before:

> Why this is the case is an interesting problem that I hope we can tackle, better understand, and attempt to solve as a society

This is what Black Lives Matter is about. They understand the problem (often by living through it) and are focused on tackling it. Because they don't focus too much on helping other people to understand the problem, this might not be clear to you.

Edit: I was about to respond to your reply, but it looks like you deleted it.

> too many topics seem taboo to reason about objectively

I think the disagreement is about where this reasoning can/should happen. From the perspective of the BLM movement, it is not their job to educate people about race. I think this reasoning has already happened at an academic level and has concluded that (to summarize very broadly) white people have a whole lot of privilege.

> Do we have that evidence?

Yes, I believe so.

[1] http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/bobo/files/2010_racialized_...

[2] Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

[3] Alice Goffman, On the Run (this is an ethnography, so you may need to have an understanding of ethnographic methods to accept the evidence here as "data")

Yes, good to point that out.

My argument (implicitly) was that this is a really huge factor which gives poor whites a "net advantage."

(The first may help in the second, but just as committing a crime is neither necessary nor sufficient to assure incarceration for it, avoiding committing a crime is neither necessary nor sufficient to avoid incarceration for it. It is frequently argued that it is both more necessary and less sufficient for blacks to avoid crime in order to avoid incarceration as compared to whites, for instance.)

No, its hard (but not impossible) to be incarcerated for murder without someone being dead. In a system in which law enforcement, the judiciary, and/or the population from which juries are drawn are biased against people like you -- whether for race or other reasons -- it can be quite easy to be incarcerated (or worse!) for murder without having killed the person who is dead, much less having murdered them (which is legally more specific than merely having killed them.)

> People are not being wrongly incarcerated (wholesale) for violent crimes that dont exist, not being violent is sufficient to avoid incarceration for such crimes.

No, even if the premise was true (that people are not wrongly incarcerated for violent crimes that do not exist), it doesn't justify the conclusion: not being violent would not be sufficient to avoid incarceration based on that premise, you'd have to stop everyone else from being violent, too, since only the existence of the crime, not you actually being the one who committed it, is posited as necessary for the punishment to occur.

That's absurd. You're completely ignoring the face that the FBI invented completely bogus disciplines of forensic science (hair analysis, bite marks) and self-certified experts in those disciplines who then went forth and helped convict scores of people for two decades.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/fbi-overstated-fo...

I'd suggest that the fraction of wrongly convicted people is much higher than the number of those who are/were known to be wrongly convicted.

Yes poor whites are privileged compared to poor blacks, and poor blacks are privileged compared to poor indians living on a reservation. There is almost always someone worse off than you, arguing about who is the most worse off is the wrong fight.

The groups that we divide people into are fairly arbitrary anyway. Why stop at race? Surely you can subdivide any race into smaller groups where some are more privileged than others.

But to most people taking about privilege (especially college students) this issue is purely binary. If you are white you're privileged, if you're black you're not. To them it doesn't matter if you're comparing a middle class black guy and a dirt poor white dude.

1. works of Edward Said

2. works of Mark Twain

3. works of Upton Sinclar

4. works of Maureen Tkacik

5. Ovid's Metamorphoses

6. The movie Avengers

7. Debates about abortion

8. Some "Afrobeat" band that had too many white people in it

9. Some male professor who was "creepy" at a conference

10. Asking harassment victims for proof

And if I recall correctly from pop culture several months back:

11. The comedic act of Jerry Seinfeld

12. The comedic act of Chris Rock

He can still talk about it when he's around other like-minded people though. By not being able to say it in public, isn't he basically ensuring that he'll never have a conversation with someone with a dissenting opinion and never be forced to think through it? These things just reinforce his attitude probably.

Good call. As long as your opinions remain "acceptable" you have nothing to worry about.

Well done.

Note, this coworker in question didn't say "I don't think gay marriage should be an institution of the state" or some other impersonal statement that can actually be evaluated through logic. There is a distinct difference between those two types of statements. Do you think it's reasonable to defend people who say "I don't like gay people."?

As long as he don't act out on it, and go around killing gay people or something.

Just like you have the right to not like George Bush, or football jocks, or goths, or whatever. Nothing wrong with that. As long as you don't try to assassinate George Bush, you have the right to not like him.

I mean, sure, not liking gays make him a homophobic, but as long as he don't continuously go around calling all gays "Faggot" to their faces, harassing them, threatening them, etc.

Let's unpack this.

Are you happy that homophobia is now socially inappropriate? Or are you happy that it is verboten to reveal or express a homophobic opinion?

There is an important distinction to be drawn here. That homophobia is becoming socially backward and marginal is a wonderful thing. That nobody can say something homophobic is not. The way free speech works is, at its most basic: you're allowed to express yourself publicly. The public will then determine how it deals with you. If you say "I don't like gay people" to your co-workers, and your co-workers ostracize you, and/or you are fired for creating a hostile work environment, then you reaped the just results of your decision to speak up. But you should have the freedom to speak up, nevertheless. The choice should be yours.

We should also note that prior restraint and group-self-censorship aren't going to change your co-worker's opinions. Whether or not he's too scared to speak his mind, his mind is made up. Deprive him of the chance to engage in any sort of dialogue about his beliefs, and he'll never get the chance to have them challenged, and they'll remain deeply held.

I don't think this is where I want to draw the argument. If someone makes an insensitive joke, it's true that the social justice movement often reacts disproportionately, but I'm not that worried about people's right to make insensitive jokes. I'm much more worried about the people who are sharing opinions that are perfectly reasonable and necessary to the public discourse and are being squashed. Erika Christakis presented a reasoned argument at Yale for free speech, and people were calling for her and her husband to resign. This isn't a matter of lacking a sense of humor, this is an active campaign to forcibly silence discussion.

Off topic, but you might try Persuasion if you haven't. I've attempted the others but been unable to get past the all-caps-bold-with-flashing-lights SMUG plastered over every page, save for in Emma, which was an excellent first 2/3 of a tragedy ruined by the last 1/3 in which it... isn't a tragedy. Persuasion, though, is snappy and enjoyable, IMO.

I've read that article. At least in the article, the only student ever to actually cause trouble in-class was right-wing, and accused the professor of being a Communist because he doesn't blame the 2008 Global Financial Crisis on black people taking mortgages they couldn't pay. The professor's administration also knew this charge of Communism was utter bullshit.

That doesn't sound to me like the problem is a left-wing regime of censorship and extremism.

Each example he cites subsequently involve those with a moral liberal or left-leaning set of ideas.

There's a fairly non-specific, second-hand example regarding a student which made complaints with an unspecified basis about offensive writings of Mark Twain and Edward Said that preceded the non-renewal of a (different) adjunct professor's contract, which the author relates resulted in the author expunging anything they thought might be perceived as offensive from their syllabus (the author doesn't explain how they "saw" this scenario unfold, and given the usual confidential nature of such contracting decisions, it seems unlikely as someone who was neither the subject nor the decision-maker that the author had the full picture of the discussions or the reason for the decision.)

Everything else is the description of the author's fears about what might happen, and repeating non-specific generalities from other sources.

So, there is one vague subsequent example, but nothing in it actually specifies the basis of the offense and ties it into anything left/liberal (or right/conservative, for that matter). I've seen both left- and right-origin complaints about both Twain and Said (in the latter case, often the exact same complaint, of his perceived-by-some anti-Semitism.)