Fringe positions can be revolutionary and important. More often, they are reactionary and not well thought out. There is nothing wrong with advocating for a fringe position. But you better have the intellectual goods, and not just win arguments by default by suppressing dissent.
The latter is activism. Controversy should mean giving opposing view points a fair shake and judging between them by the strength of the data and arguments supporting them. Not by university administrations unilaterally deciding and declaring dissent as "unsafe" for the students who don't want to be exposed to anything that challenges their world views.
That's different from neutrality, which for me is avoiding expressing opinions at all. I think neutrality is valuable if otherwise dialogue would be misinterpreted or cause conflict. Conversations need a well moderated (safe, welcoming, with vigilance for good-faith discussion) and freely exchanging environment to be productive, otherwise I think neutrality is the best option. Neutrality is also a good option when there are different cultural notions/opinions that can coexist without coming into conflict (this is a case where promoting uniformity and uniform agreement can be harmful, I believe! -- like, we don't need to agree that basketball is superior to football or something like that).
Isn't that what conservatives are actively, openly doing everywhere - suppressing dissent in libraries, universities, business (ESG, DEI, etc.), society, courts, political protest, media - suppressing liberal dissent?
But yes, the ham fisted attempts by conservative politicians to combat purported progressive censorship...with conservative censorship...is equally bad.
"Schools" usually means K-12 schools.
Conservatives have banned books from libraries across Florida and Texas (and other states)
> universities
Conservatives have compelled universities to reverse hiring decisions (at U. NC and one of the TX schools at least), end programs (e.g., Harvard's disinformation program), driven out university presidents (Harvard, Penn), and much, much more. In Florida they've banned certain ideas, they've undermined entire schools where they didn't like the politics.
> business HR programs
Conservatives have caused a huge pullback in DEI programs in the corporate world.
> broad media (excluding some notable explicitly conservative outlets).
That's a major exception: Fox News is by far the most popular news channel in the US; the Wall Street Journal is by far the dominant US publication for business.
> the ham fisted attempts by conservative politicians to combat purported progressive censorship
What does banning books and ideas from education have to do with combating censorship?
I see the problem; I'll fix it. Thanks!
First, dissent is mostly about speech, IMHO, and DEI is only incidentally about speech. But let's look at it as an act that contests the status quo.
The point of DEI is to change the status quo, in which power, status, wealth, and freedom are distributed disproportionately to white males. A widespread belief (that I share, but I'm trying to examine this neutrally) is that it's largely due to racism and sexism that are historic, current, and systemic [0]. The whole point of DEI is to change that.
DEI has been embraced by many in power, making it an odd 'dissent', though maybe that's just a successful dissent - it's an generations-old dissent that people finally came around to. At the same time, it's still a dissent against the many status quo powers that are fighting against DEI.
[0] By 'systemic', I mean it's a product of a system that nobody quite chooses, but as long as everyone keeps operating it, it produces these results. For example, disproportionate hiring of white males could be because hiring is based on your personal network, which is based on who you work with, etc., and it becomes circular. People don't have to be seeking racist outcomes to produce them.
That's not the way I'd phrase it. Bias should aim towards truth.
Unbiased signal treats Young Earth Creationism and the geologically- and astronomically-rooted theory of long time as equivalently valid viewpoints.
The bias should be, for hard sciences, on the scientific method and evidence-based reasoning.
> The bias should be, for hard sciences, on the scientific method and evidence-based reasoning.
That is the opposite of bias.
Eliminating bias is a mu-goal. An unbiased electrical pin isn't a perfect signal; it's a floating input, passing along whatever radio flux slips through it. Our goal is always to seek out the right biases.
We can fool ourselves frequently. Nature cannot be fooled.
Homo sapiens have had access to nature for 160,000 years. We've spent a lot of time thinking we've folded nature when we had no right to. Why should I think now is any different?
My claim is we should bias towards believing things that match to reality. Seeking "unbias" is seeking ignorance.
It might be theoretically possible for people to inch toward objective reality, I've never seen it work in practice. It's a failed ideology and for some reason folks believe that this, the millionth time, it's going to work.
Maybe for math and science you can do this? But history, is bias and indoctrination.
What Germans learned about WWII during the 70's and 80's was significantly different than what, say, Russians or Americans learned about WWII during the 70's and 80's. And what Russians and Americans learned about WWII was slightly different from each other as well.
Even within a nation. In Florida slavery will be taught more as a precursor to legal immigration, in Minnesota it will be taught as an evil and an affront to humanity.
History all depends on what you want to indoctrinate the kids with. Which, in turn, all depends almost totally on your bias.
It is not controversial in academia that the Earth is on the order of billions of years old, animals change over time via evolution, or that carbon dioxide has a greenhouse effect. And yet within the American political context, they are controversial.
Cranks exist across the political spectrum.
That said, I do not believe they would do well in a science/academic role because it shows a clear disregard for many separate academic disciplines at this point. And these religious views are not evenly distributed across the political spectrum.
I don’t think people who believe there are no significant biological sex differences should be in a science/academic role either.
The argument is over what those differences are, how much they matter (i.e. a 1% difference in the mean? Who cares), and how malleable they are given modern medical science.
(And that's before one gets on the topic of whether those differences should imply a societal structure that pigeon-holes people based on their biological sex).
Let me introduce you to the "lab leak hypothesis", which was decried as racist for years by prominent Democrats and scientists. It lost this reputation around the time that another prominent liberal (Jon Stewart) saw fit to mock its detractors on national TV a while back. This was not firmly established science at first, but those on the left made impossible to even discuss in mixed company, which shut down the conversation and any rational investigations.
For other examples, check out Vinay Prasad's writings. He's a Bernie supporter, a UCSF professor, and the rare progressive who is willing to call out hypocrisy and graft even when it appears on the left.
And to me, as a Chinese-American person, it was insulting (and a bit bizarre) to insist that it's "racist" to say the virus leaked from a lab, rather than having spread via an unsanitary wet market. But this was the party line, and many people toe'd it for years.
On the other hand, it seems that there almost zero medical professionals on the left who are interested in debating him and showing how he has been wrong about various topics. He calls for universities to host debates on these topics of public concern, but pretty much no one is willing to do it. This makes me think it is somewhat less likely that he is just completely wrong, and more likely that he is the one saying that various (naked) emperors have no clothes. I'm sure he's not always right, but much of what he says seems quite plausible to me (a fairly well-educated person with some understanding of statistics).
I'd love to know where folks have mounted successful critiques of his work, or if he has any conflicts of interest that he doesn't mention.
This could be a Godsend with respect to stopping the assault on science. Conservatives would be very unlikely, for instance, to get their "studies" independently replicated by non conservatives.
This isn’t my reading of the situation at all. They aren’t seeking to avoid all controversy, but rather to allow students and faculty to discuss even controversial issues from multiple sides.
Can you point to the language that makes you think they’re trying to avoid teaching controversial subjects?
Of course I can imagine that, say, constitutional law might currently be a bit more difficult to teach. But I still do not see what concretely the Yale administration is called upon to stop doing.
That how to compute the determinant of a matrix is not only worth knowing, but worth prioritising over other things. It's an eminently reasonable position, but there's an opportunity cost to learning about determinants.
You mean the wedge product? ;)
This is a really good example of assuming that topics as things in themselves have the essential characteristic of neutrality. Which is itself a position. The opposite of which is that things don't have an essential characteristic of neutrality.[1]
Sorry, but there's no escape hatch in the hard sciences; there's only one level of indirection.
For any topic, I can generate a frame[2] in which it takes a non-neutral position. That's why neutrality doesn't exist.
1. teach the controversy, both sides! (in jest)
2. See Frame Analysis, Erving Goffman
I don't see the phrase "taking a position" in the OP, and your point seems to rest on that phrase.
But to your point, you're interpreting "taking a position" to be so broadly that it's meaningless. There's definitely a phenomenon of activists trying to co-opt prestigious institutions to further their activist goals, but that has a way of debasing the institutions' other goals. It seems like these measures are meant to counter that problem.
Activists tend to have a kind of monomania, where they're so focused on their activist goal that most other good things lose their value in comparison, so they're willing and eager to sacrifice those things. That's often a warped perspective, and the people who value those other good things need to labor to keep the activist impulse in check.
conversion is a primary goal of activism, and education can be counterproductive to this goal.
Selective information, misinformation, and intentional generation of bias are all ways to convert someone to a position. You can often see these tools utilized by activists of all types.
Teachers will always have positions given that they are human. However, not all humans deploy the same intellectual honesty.
For example, if someone is teaching about a subject where they have a position, they can present the strongest or weakest counter position, or none at all.
A classic example of this is how basically every country depict their national history in schools.
Do you mean undermining poorly done science with better science?
There is a movement afoot to eliminate the practice because if it is done the way intended, the bar is too high.
The bar probably is too high, but that's not necessarily a problem. Rather that's the point.
I agree, that particular movement does have at its root an assault on science.
1. by virtue of being an interpersonal interaction