Here is a list of the referred critiques in the show notes:

The Miseducation of Free Speech (https://www.virginialawreview.org/articles/miseducation-free...)

College and the “Culture War”: Assessing Higher Education’s Influence on Moral Attitudes (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00031224211041...)

The Myth of the Campus Coddle Crisis (https://academeblog.org/2018/12/28/the-myth-of-the-campus-co...)

What ‘Safe Spaces’ Really Look Like on College Campuses (https://www.chronicle.com/article/what-safe-spaces-really-lo...)

Are College Campuses Really in the Thrall of Leftist Censors? (https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/03/hypersensitive-camp...)

Speaking Freely: What Students Think about Expression at American Colleges (https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/student-attitudes-fre...)

‘Not all cultures are created equal’ says Penn Law professor in op-ed (https://www.thedp.com/article/2017/08/amy-wax-penn-law-cultu...) How

Right Wing Media Has Tried to Stifle Student Speech at Evergreen State College (https://psmag.com/education/the-real-free-speech-story-at-ev...)

I'm a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me (https://www.vox.com/2015/6/3/8706323/college-professor-afrai...)

In College and Hiding From Scary Ideas (https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/22/opinion/sunday/judith-shu...)

It's not much easier to engage with ten articles of varying quality and varying levels of disagreement than with a podcast.

>The Miseducation of Free Speech

Does not focus on Haidt.

>College and the “Culture War”: Assessing Higher Education’s Influence on Moral Attitudes

Does not focus on Haidt.

>The Myth of the Campus Coddle Crisis

"This is not one of those laudatory reviews. Although I agree with many things they write, and share their general outlook in opposition to safetyism (protecting people from any possible harms, including offensive ideas) and in favor of free speech, I want to focus on my disagreements because dissent is more interesting and more important."

Dissents on specific political implications while agreeing with the wider point.

>What 'Safe Spaces' really look like on college campuses

Does not mention Haidt at all; focuses mostly on "safe spaces" in the narrow sense of support groups.

>Are College Campuses Really in the Thrall of Leftist Censors?

Tabloid piece; focuses primarily on political bias and not overall censorship; does not mention Haidt.

>Speaking Freely: What Students Think about Expression at American Colleges

From FIRE, whose leadership worked with Haidt on the book; presumably not that critical of Haidt. Skipped.

>Not all cultures are created equal’ says Penn Law professor in op-ed

Focuses on Amy Waxman, an infamously racist professor whom even "anti-woke" firebrand Norman Finkelstein has denounced. A bit of a strawman.

>Right Wing Media Has Tried to Stifle Student Speech at Evergreen State College

Does not focus on Haidt; essentially agrees by highlighting censorship on college campuses, but disputes whether it is primarily leftist.

>I'm a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me

Skipped. You know why.

>In College and Hiding from Scary Ideas

Paywall; title indicates that it agrees with Haidt.

Nowhere in this Gish gallop of links is there a serious critique of the analysis in The Coddling of the American Mind, except in the third link, where the author is explicitly saying he agrees with Haidt on most points. Using this to discredit Haidt as he discusses a completely different subject is not a very helpful contribution to the overall discussion.

The Amy Waxman point was explicitly used by The Coddling Of The American Mind to prove its point, while the book completely ignored the context that Amy Waxman was racist, which is why it's referenced here. It's clear you haven't even read the book you're trying to defend here, so why are you doing this?

Edited to add: A gish-gallop? I'm just linking a set of references that the podcast uses because of the critique that podcasts are apparently bad to listen to? Do you want a transcript or something? I'm just wanting to let folks have some context to this article dude, that isn't coming from a source without its own biases and to keep that in mind when reading. Why are you being weird about this, man?

Excited to go through the links to see Haidt deflated only to walk away thoroughly disappointed...

Haidt's book argues that students and faculty denouncing Amy Wax is stifling a culture of freedom of speech, while purposefully not addressing what the students and faculty were denouncing. This is one of the few examples he provides.

> I'm very intrigued to hear how the cuddling that's happening college campuses isn't happening, since anyone can see it in real time

They were saying the same things when I was in college 30 years ago.

It can be argued that it's been getting steadily worse over that entire period of time.

I agree. It's a natural condition of the human world and not directly attributable to any one specific cause. Life goes on.

Cuddling on campus sounds like a good idea and has been par for the course for generations. But coddling is a problem

I know you're jokingly responding to GP, but I seriously wonder if there's a deeper point here.

I feel like casual hookups are replacing cuddling and could be part of the issue but who knows.

Interesting reading this sentiment, after first reading the recent thread about Stanford's "war" on students. The prevailing attitude there seemed to be that Stanford was in fact antagonizing their students by banning drinking, when in fact they should be providing an environment that is insulates students from real-world consequences to allow for experimentation. Now I guess this opinion is that doing so would be coddling, and that is a problem in itself. Seems like a complex issue where people can have a reasonable difference of opinion. So maybe it's not that people are denying the coddling, but they just think it's not a problem.

I agree with you about ad hominems but unfortunately your account has been using HN primarily for political/ideological battle, and also is arguably breaking the rule against trollish usernames here (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...). I've therefore banned it. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future - they're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. If you want to do that, we'll happily rename your account to something less trollish.

(If you didn't intend your username to be trollish, I apologize, but I'm seeing signs that other people are taking it that way.)

This is pretty lame, given that there's a good amount of users who are basically only commenting to say "capitalism bad, mhkay", yet for some reason that's not "primarily for political/ideological battle".

Applying rules evenly makes the rules seem better.

We've been applying the rules evenly for years, or at least have put in years' worth of conscientious effort to do so. The problem is that no matter how evenly one applies the rules, people with strong ideological passions still feel like we are biased against their side and secretly favor the other side. I think this is because everyone is more likely to notice and place greater weight on the cases that they happen to dislike.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870

If you're aware of accounts using HN primarily for ideological battle who we haven't asked to stop, the likeliest explanation is that we haven't seen them. We don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here. You can help by flagging such posts or, in egregious cases, emailing us at [email protected].

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

I find the "both extremes are mad at me so I must be doing something right" defense not really useful, as it really doesn't say much about how evenly you apply moderation. You could be a hair's width away from being a fascist, and some full on fascist would complain that you're too left wing, and both a centrist and a leftist would complain that you're too right wing.

I don't want to complain about people doing it (but I have commented on it, and taken the punishment), I'd just prefer the moderation to be "either there's none or we keep our hands off".

I understand that it's not an easy position to be in, as you have to keep people happy, and enforcing the rules sometimes doesn't vibe with everyone, but I do believe that Facebook got that right (one of the few things!): if you say that you can't make sexist comments, you also can't make sexist comments about men. Twitter and Reddit got that wrong, and I believe you've got it wrong as well, as you'll ban someone like the person here, but you wouldn't bane someone who is the opposite.

> "both extremes are mad at me so I must be doing something right"

I haven't said that and try to be careful never to imply it. Rather, my point is that these complaints about moderation bias (which come in from all political angles) are so isomorphic that there must be a common mechanism underlying them. (People sometimes interpret this as an argument in favor of centrist politics but that's a misunderstanding. It's an argument about social psychology on the internet.)

> I believe you've got it wrong as well, as you'll ban someone like the person here, but you wouldn't bane someone who is the opposite.

That's quite false—we've banned countless accounts on both sides of that divide—so I think you're kind of making my point here. You've assumed something that isn't true, for reasons that have nothing to do with our actual practice. Moreover the users with opposite politics to yours make exactly the same false assumption, just with one bit flipped.

I'm sure you've banned others, too. I read with showdead on, and I'm seeing a pretty clear bias in who's banned and who's not. Sure, it may be that right-wingers just can't behave, and I certainly see some of those. But others are perfectly fine comments, and checking their comment list, they write plenty of those, yet they still got banned. The communists don't get banned, and I can't recall seeing an obviously left-wing comment that was reasonable (aka not "you and all other rich people should be shot") and dead by default.

Maybe there's a secret part of HN where they're posting and they're all banned, but I doubt it. Your house, your rules, but it certainly looks like these rules are a bit bendy, and having banned some crazy person with a Bernie quote on his profile makes you believe that you're applying them evenly when you also ban someone like this here, who just comments from a somewhat right-wing position and is rejected by some part of the community because of it.

Can you link me to specific examples of accounts that you think should be banned and haven't been? or of accounts that have been banned, which shouldn't be? I'd like to take a look.

I'd also look at links to specific comments either way (i.e. dead and shouldn't be, or live and shouldn't be). But that's less relevant because we have to evaluate these things at account level, not post level. For example, banned accounts do post good comments (and we hope users will vouch for those - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cvouch, and we unkill them whenever we see them), but it doesn't follow that the account should be unbanned. That depends on the overall behavior of the account.

I can't imagine how anyone thinks that HN has a left bias, I've seen open transphobia that doesn't so much as get flagged, when doing it on even centrist platforms would earn you a permaban.

First of all, I'm sorry I didn't know my meme!

Second, you've linked to a photo that says something about Netflix, Twitter, Airbnb, Apple, Stripe, Lyft, Google, Salesforce, Facebook, Tesla, eBay, PayPal, and Microsoft. It's not clear to me what that's supposed to have to do with Hacker News moderation.

It's not at all true that ideological battles are fine here for one side but not the other, as anyone can see for themselves if they want to look back through the thousands of moderation comments I've posted. You feel that way, not because you're perceiving moderation accurately, but for the same reason that led https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35238927 to say "Literally anything left-of-right-of-centre immediately gets flagged (if not outright banned by the mods)".

> 95% of HN is comprised of people that work in the same or similarly biased companies

You don't know that and I don't believe it's true.

Your example is cherry-picked. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34625001 is by the same author on the same topic and spent 12 hours on HN's front page.

>You don't know that and I don't believe it's true.

You have no data that proves even suggests it isn't. I have data that suggests a extremely strong correlation, corroborated with suppression of dissent by downvotes and flagging.

>Your example is cherry-picked. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34625001 is by the same author on the same topic and spent 12 hours on HN's front page.

...of course it's cherry picked. That's my whole fucking point. Are you really this dense?

Discussion by a talented researcher showing cool things about ChatGPT: "spent 12 hours on HN's front page"

Discussion by the same talented researcher proving that ChatGPT has a political bias, and one with an equal but opposite bias can be created: flagged in minutes, and effectively shadowbanned.

Can't have that! It challenges the notion of "reality having a liberal bias", a belief the that Rozado's first analysis would seem to the naïve to confirm: https://davidrozado.substack.com/p/political-bias-chatgpt

Yet when the same researcher proves that it's the bot, and not reality, something that challenges HN's confirmation bias: THE COGNITIVE DISSONANCE HURTS, HIDE THE HURTY WORDS

Rozado draws an underline under it:

>As I have explained before, the low cost of customizing the political alignment of AI and the potential proliferation of AI systems customized to manifest different political biases, could make the problem describe above even worse as people might come to trust AIs as the “ultimate sources of truth” while gravitating towards those AI systems providing confirmation for their pre-existing beliefs.

To HN, an AI can only be "the ultimate source of truth" if it shares their biases, as it demonstrated by flagging his proof that it doesn't almost instantly.

>This renders the two groups almost unable to communicate with each other and therefore condemned to mutual incomprehension (as Jonathan Haidt has argued previously). <- https://davidrozado.substack.com/p/wo

And you personally exacerbate the problem by not letting people talk.

Hilariously, twitter has become the only social media worth a fuck. Which HN loathes because it was freed it from the woke cult's control. Ideology pushing is perfectly allowed here. But only one. Just like any other church.

It's fair to say that this falls under the current "culture war". Any criticism may or may not be politically motivated. Any support may or may not be politically motivated.

The results of this data gathering exercise is alarming regardless.

He's also known for hinging a lot of what he says on the concept of rapid onset gender dysphoria (the idea that kids are spontaneously turning trans with no previous indicators due to a "social contagion"). The original study for it is a survey of posts from parents who don't want their kids to be trans. It shouldn't surprise anyone that those parents weren't in the best position to catch any hints when their kids might have caught on to the idea that their parents might not like them being trans.

You are way overstating this. Haidt might have been one of the early ones raising alarm bells, but it's well established now that the cohort of people declaring themselves to be trans has shifted dramatically to young girls very recently [1].

[1] https://www.bmj.com/content/380/bmj.p382

Your article doesn't seem to be quite authoritative: It shows there's actually a lot of debate about this subject. There's even a responses section that shows there's some significant issues with the article and claiming it's not neutral, leaving out significant statistics like a less than 1% regret rate of trans affirming procedures (less than a knee surgery). I think it's still up in the air, frankly.

What is authoritative is the evidence. The cohort WPATH was familiar with before 2010 and for which we have considerable data was older male-to-female transitioners. This cohort has changed significantly per the article, which is why some people are raising concerns about the lack of quality safety data for minors.

Furthermore, only the US has really pushed gender affirming care for minors to this degree. Every other country has backed away from it due to low quality evidence. You know what else those countries have that the US doesn't? Universal healthcare that creates wildly different healthcare priorities. Consider that when when evaluating neutrality.

> leaving out significant statistics like a less than 1% regret rate of trans affirming procedures (less than a knee surgery)

The article and the responses make clear that transitioners are not followed consistently, so this evaluation is based on very spotty data. The fact is we don't know how common regret is.

Even the responses that are pro-gender affirming care acknowledge that the data supporting long-term quality of life improvements is poor.

I'm just saying it's still up in the air it seems.

I'm not sure what you're claiming is up in the air. My first claim was about the changing cohort, so if that's what you're referring to, the statistics are clear. Here's how it breaks down in Canada:

https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/220427/cg-b0...

Transgender women were dominant and stable for a long time, as I said (male to female transitioners), and then trans men and non-binary cohort have shot past those levels like a rocket over the past few years.

Some of the increases are doubtless more acceptance of trans people, but it's not clear why that would affect the genders differentially in such a dramatic fashion.