Jump to content
Washington Football Team Logo
Extremeskins

Minding the Campus: A Conversation with Jonathan Haidt


nonniey

Recommended Posts

A long read but I think illuminating on how political correctness has gotten out of control on campus. (and no this guy is not a Conservative or Republican).

"....... Look, I graduated from Yale in ’85. Yale is very devoted to social justice. It’s very devoted to affirmative action. Now no place is perfect. But it’s probably among the best places in the country. And to have protesters saying it’s such a thoroughly racist place that it needs a total reformation – they call the protest group ”Next Yale”– they demand “Next Yale”!

JOHN LEO: Everybody saw that.

JONATHAN HAIDT: And these were not requests. This was not a discussion. This was framed as an ultimatum given to the president – and they gave him I think six days to respond, or else. And I am just so horrified that the president of Yale, Peter Salovey, responded by the deadline. And when he responded, he did not say, on the one hand, the protesters have good points; on the other hand, we also need to guarantee free speech; and, by the way, it’s not appropriate to scream obscenities at professors.

JOHN LEO: Or the threat to one professor: “We know where you live”?

JONATHAN HAIDT: I didn’t even know about that. The president was supposed to be the grown-up in the room. He was supposed to show some wisdom, some balance, and some strength. And so we’ve seen, basically what can really only be called Maoist moral bullying – am we saw it very clearly at Claremont McKenna. The video is really chilling–the students surrounding this nice woman who was trying to help them, and reducing her to tears. As we’ve seen more and more of this, I’ve begun calling it, “the Yale problem,” referring to the way that left-leaning institutions are now cut off from any moral vocabulary that they could use to resist the forces of illiberalism. As far as I’m concerned, “Next Yale” can go find its own “Next Alumni.” I don’t plan to give to Yale ever again, unless it reverses course.......

Click link for entire article.

http://www.mindingthecampus.org/2016/02/a-conversation-with-jonathan-haidt/

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This is interesting. Thanks for the OP.

This is a topic that needs (and is starting to get) more attention (although I wouldn't necessarily frame it as a conservative/liberal issue as the OP does). I've been thinking a lot about these sorts of questions myself (dogmatic thinking in the academy, identity politics, political correctness, lack of critical inquiry, threats to intellectual and academic freedom, etc).

I'll try to share some thoughts as the thread gets going.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Teaching chemistry, this isn't something that I have a lot of interactions with.

 

But I do think it should be pointed out that the Yale President didn't exactly cave to the students demands.  He did issue a statement by the deadline, and he did announce some new initiatives.

 

But he didn't, for example, remove the people that sent the Halloween e-mail from their position as leaders of the residential halls, which was on the demands.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Teaching chemistry, this isn't something that I have a lot of interactions with.

I don't think the hard sciences are above this sort of criticism. For example, who would dare question Darwinism? What consequences might you face if you did?

Or put it another way: imagine you get a room full of chemists and biologists and conduct a poll like the one described at the beginning of that interview, only instead of political affiliation make the question about God. What percentage do you think would identify as atheist?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Ideology mobs.  We've seen them throughout history.  They rise up all full of rage and righteousness claiming to be standing for something grand while threatening anyone that disagrees with them.  The demands they make of others never apply to them of course. 

 

But don't worry someone will be along shortly to tell you this is nothing, that's it's a manufactured scare tactic to generate click by the media.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I don't think the hard sciences are above this sort of criticism. For example, who would dare question Darwinism? What consequences might you face if you did?

Or put it another way: imagine you get a room full of chemists and biologists and conduct a poll like the one described at the beginning of that interview, only instead of political affiliation make the question about God. What percentage do you think would identify as atheist?

 

This depends on how rigorously you define Darwinism.  The idea that epigenetics and horizontal gene transfer are important to evolution and not strictly Darwinian processes is widely accepted (there is some debate over how important they are).

 

From there, right now, if you wanted to question Darwinism from a scientific stand point, you would get laughed at.

 

And you should be.  The science/data doesn't support you.

 

In terms of religious in science, I've written here before, but I think a lot of people would be surprised.  I came up through non-religious institution (public undergrad, public/private grad school, private post doc institution) and each case without trying to or knowing the person's religious affiliation, I ended up with a religious adviser.

 

It is true if you look at something like the National Academy of Sciences, it tends to run very atheist, but I think you have to reach the very upper levels until you start to see that sort of thing.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This depends on how rigorously you define Darwinism. The idea that epigenetics and horizontal gene transfer are important to evolution and not strictly Darwinian processes is widely accepted (there is some debate over how important they are).

From there, right now, if you wanted to question Darwinism from a scientific stand point, you would get laughed at.

And you should be. The science/data doesn't support you.

We could debate what the data suggests (it is certainly consistent with NeoDarwinism), but that would be to miss my point. My point is that dissenters are "laughed at," as you concede, and I don't think that kind of reaction to heterodoxy is good for science. The author in the OP uses the term "monoculture" to describe the social sciences, and I think that term can be fairly applied to the hard sciences as well, biology in particular.

The attitude that any hypothesis is "settled science" is all too common. If you don't like the Darwin example, consider the way Wegener was treated when he proposed the theory of continental drift (he was also "laughed at"), or the way the Big Bang theory was ridiculed by the establishment when it was first proposed (arguably because of its religious implications).

In all fields, it is essential to tolerate heterodoxy. Either the working mainstream hypothesis is right or it is wrong. If right, then there is no need to fear dissent, and if wrong, then only by allowing dissent will we be able to discover the error.

In terms of religious in science, I've written here before, but I think a lot of people would be surprised. I came up through non-religious institution (public undergrad, public/private grad school, private post doc institution) and each case without trying to or knowing the person's religious affiliation, I ended up with a religious adviser.

It is true if you look at something like the National Academy of Sciences, it tends to run very atheist, but I think you have to reach the very upper levels until you start to see that sort of thing.

There are certainly many religious scientists, but it is as certain that scientists are disproportionately irreligious when compared to the general population. And this is just a hunch, but I bet you'd find more atheists in biology than in physics.

Anyway, I'm not all that concerned to contend this point, my primary claim is that academic science too suffers from monoculture, and this is not a good thing.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

We could debate what the data suggests (it is certainly consistent with NeoDarwinism), but that would be to miss my point. My point is that dissenters are "laughed at," as you concede, and I don't think that kind of reaction to heterodoxy is good for science. The author in the OP uses the term "monoculture" to describe the social sciences, and I think that term can be fairly applied to the hard sciences as well, biology in particular.

The attitude that any hypothesis is "settled science" is all too common. If you don't like the Darwin example, consider the way Wegener was treated when he proposed the theory of continental drift (he was also "laughed at"), or the way the Big Bang theory was ridiculed by the establishment when it was first proposed (arguably because of its religious implications).

In all fields, it is essential to tolerate heterodoxy. Either the working mainstream hypothesis is right or it is wrong. If right, then there is no need to fear dissent, and if wrong, then only by allowing dissent will we be able to discover the error.

There are certainly many religious scientists, but it is as certain that scientists are disproportionately irreligious when compared to the general population. And this is just a hunch, but I bet you'd find more atheists in biology than in physics.

Anyway, I'm not all that concerned to contend this point, my primary claim is that academic science too suffers from monoculture, and this is not a good thing.

 

Well, if you break it down, I think high level physics is probably pretty athestic.  I think biology is probably actually pretty evenly spread.

 

Engineering and material science fields are probably more theistic than physics and biology.

 

I think Wegener is actually a good example of being bad science even though he ended up being right.  Wegener's argument at some level boiled to a correlation resulting in a conclusion well beyond the correlation almost correlation proving causation.

 

That's generally bad and dangerous science, even though it isn't always wrong. You can do bad science and still end up being right.

 

Wegener had a set of observations and strongly settled on possible conclusion despite having no mechanism by which the continents could move and there being other possible (and based on the existing data even more likely) explanations.

 

To take it to an extreme and more general, everybody that asserts that a correlation is strong evidence of a causation should be laughed at, but they aren't all going to be wrong because sometime correlation is the result of causation.

 

So some people that are right are going to end up being laughed at.  Just because they happened to pick the right pair to assert the correlation is strong evidence of causation doesn't make it better science then the people that did it and were wrong.

 

I think Big Bang is a bit different because while people weren't especially receptive to the idea, people weren't overly rejectionary in nature either.  Einstein was reportedly at least supportive of the idea, while not be accepting.  That seems to have fallen more into the range of healthy skepticism.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Ideology mobs. We've seen them throughout history. They rise up all full of rage and righteousness claiming to be standing for something grand while threatening anyone that disagrees with them. The demands they make of others never apply to them of course.

But don't worry someone will be along shortly to tell you this is nothing, that's it's a manufactured scare tactic to generate click by the media.

Yup nothing to see here

Generation Like=.. generation drama queen attention whoring pussies

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I think Wegener is actually a good example of being bad science even though he ended up being right. Wegener's argument at some level boiled to a correlation resulting in a conclusion well beyond the correlation almost correlation proving causation.

. . .

Wegener had a set of observations and strongly settled on possible conclusion despite having no mechanism by which the continents could move and there being other possible (and based on the existing data even more likely) explanations.

It's true Wegener didn't have a plausible mechanism, but then again neither did Darwin, so it doesn't seem that alone will suffice to explain why Wegener was ridiculed (in a way Darwin wasn't). Wegener was ridiculed because his theory would require lots of scientists across disciplines to admit their work was wrong, something that scientists don't like to do, despite the mythology about science's impartiality.

Wegener and his Critics

Since his ideas challenged scientists in geology, geophysics, zoogeography and paleontology, it demonstrates the reactions of different communities of scientists. These reactions eventually shut down serious discussion of the concept. The geologist Barry Willis summed it up best:

"further discussion of it merely incumbers the literature and befogs the mind of fellow students."

The students' minds would not be befogged. The world had to wait until the 1960's for a wide discussion of the Continental Drift Theory to be restarted.

Why the extreme reaction? Wegener did not even present Continental Drift as a proven theory. He knew he would need more support to convince others. His immediate goal was to have the concept openly discussed. These modest goals did not spare him. His work crossed disciplines. The authorities in the various disciplines attacked him as an amateur that did not fully grasp their own subject. More importantly however, was that even the possibility of Continental Drift was a huge threat to the authorities in each of the disciplines.

Radical viewpoints threaten the authorities in a discipline. Authorities are expert in the current view of their discipline. A radical view could even force experts to start over again. One of Alfred Wegener's critics, the geologist R. Thomas Chamberlain, suggested just that :

"If we are to believe in Wegener's hypothesis we must forget everything which has been learned in the past 70 years and start all over again."

He was right.

And Wegener did have lots of good empirical evidence, which his critics either ignored or invented absurd ad hoc theories (like lots of land bridges for which there was no evidence) to explain:

In spite of all the criticism, Wegener was able to keep Continental Drift part of the discussion until his death. He knew that any argument based simply on the jigsaw fit of the continents could easily be explained away. To strengthen his case he drew from the fields of geology, geography, biology and paleontology. Wegener questioned why coal deposits, commonly associated with tropical climates, would be found near the North Pole and why the plains of Africa would show evidence of glaciation. Wegener also presented examples where fossils of exactly the same prehistoric species were distributed where you would expect them to be if there had been Continental Drift (e.g. one species occurred in western Africa and South America, and another in Antartica, India and central Africa).

http://www.scientus.org/Wegener-Continental-Drift.html

I think Big Bang is a bit different because while people weren't especially receptive to the idea, people weren't overly rejectionary in nature either. Einstein was reportedly at least supportive of the idea, while not be accepting. That seems to have fallen more into the range of healthy skepticism.

I hope you'll forgive me quoting Wikipedia for convenience, but this is pretty much in line with what I've always read, the vast majority of scientists rejected Big Bang theory, one speaking for the majority called it "repugnant," largely because of the obvious theological implications of the fact that universe began to exist (and that the theory was being advanced by a Catholic, the horror!):

In the 1920s and 1930s almost every major cosmologist preferred an eternal steady state universe, and several complained that the beginning of time implied by the Big Bang imported religious concepts into physics; this objection was later repeated by supporters of the steady state theory.[49] This perception was enhanced by the fact that the originator of the Big Bang theory, Monsignor Georges Lemaître, was a Roman Catholic priest.[50] Arthur Eddington agreed with Aristotle that the universe did not have a beginning in time, viz., that matter is eternal. A beginning in time was "repugnant" to him.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It's true Wegener didn't have a plausible mechanism, but then again neither did Darwin, so it doesn't seem that alone will suffice to explain why Wegener was ridiculed (in a way Darwin wasn't).

But Darwin wasn't widely accepted until people found Mendel's laws too (as well as work by people like Weismann). While the mechanism still wasn't clear that still created direct evidence for inheritance.

Lamarckism didn't die over night with the publication of Origin of Species.

I think you are overly influenced by what happened in England where it was really an argument between the scientific community and the theist community and not the conversation within the wider scientific community.

Huxley wasn't arguing for Darwinism over other scientific/naturalistic arguments for origins of species. He was arguing for a naturalistic/scientific explanation for origins of species vs. a theistic origin of species. Most of Huxley's points would have been equally true for Lamarckism. He did put things in the basis of Darwinism, and I would presume that Darwin being English that he was most familiar with Darwinism, but I don't honestly know what would have happened if somebody would have presented a naturalistic Lamarkian argument to Huxley.

In the England, Darwinism was used to attack theist concepts related to the origins of species and evolution. The English Darwinian community was not really attacking other scientific/naturalistic concepts related to origins of species (e.g Lamarckism).

 

Wegener was ridiculed because his theory would require lots of scientists across disciplines to admit their work was wrong, something that scientists don't like to do, despite the mythology about science's impartiality.

And Wegener did have lots of good empirical evidence, which his critics either ignored or invented absurd ad hoc theories (like lots of land bridges for which there was no evidence) to explain:

The idea of land bridges was not more absurd than the continents moving.

To us today where platetechtonics is widely accepted, it seems unreasonable.

Neither were things like miss identification of species based on fossils. Identification of distinct species based on fossils is very difficult even today.

There are multiple explanations for all of the Wegener's evidence that seemed more likely

Prominant scientists like George Gaylord Simpson rejected both the idea of continent drift and the overland bridge theories.

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

https://books.google.com/books?id=Jd0yGJ3nF9EC&pg=PA206&lpg=PA206&dq=Evolution+and+geography:+an+essay+on+historical+biogeography+with+special+reference+to+mammals&source=bl&ots=ri8m3NZGgD&sig=m6O1jcrS7leTQ1Ok6XCYQFI5KTM&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiCzdq2nejKAhVIdD4KHREwALsQ6AEIPTAH#v=onepage&q=Evolution%20and%20geography%3A%20an%20essay%20on%20historical%20biogeography%20with%20special%20reference%20to%20mammals&f=false

"In 1943 George Gaylord Simpson wrote a vehement attack on the theory (as well as the rival theory of sunken land bridges) and put forward his own permanentist views"

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

And if you don't like wiki here's an essay of him attacking the land bridge idea.

http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/simpson-george.pdf

And a more general modern reflection of where the field actually stood at the time (that's actually relatively pro-Wegener):

http://www1.umn.edu/ships/db/simpson.pdf

In terms of the teaching, I'm not sure what you teach, but if somebody came to you and told you to teach something that you didn't consider good philosophy, how would your respond?

If you taught a relevant subject and somebody told you to teach the Unabombers manifesto as a philosophical document that should be taken seriously rather than badly flawed reasoning, how would you respond?

Most teachers that I know have an attitude that there is so much good stuff to teach that teaching garbage is a waste of time and confusing to the students (at the grad levels, I'll have students read and discuss papers, and I'll go out of my way to find some papers that I consider flawed so that we can talk about their flaws, but not at the undergrad level, and even there, the discussion is what's wrong with this work. I can imagine presenting Wegner's work as a flawed work where his evidence doesn't strongly enough support his conclusion to actually draw his conclusion based on what was known.).

And scientists SHOULD BE slow to let go everything they know in the face of an argument that requires something to happen that there is no mechanism for and there are other explanations for.

You don't get to rewrite the knowledge base of multiple different fields based on few observations that has other explanations.

 

I hope you'll forgive me quoting Wikipedia for convenience, but this is pretty much in line with what I've always read, the vast majority of scientists rejected Big Bang theory, one speaking for the majority called it "repugnant," largely because of the obvious theological implications of the fact that universe began to exist (and that the theory was being advanced by a Catholic, the horror!):

Certainly that was an issue, but I think largely it is an over played issue.

I don't mind if you quote from wiki, if I'm allowed to do the same:

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

"This proposal met with skepticism from his fellow scientists at the time. Eddington found Lemaître's notion unpleasant. Einstein found it suspect because he deemed it unjustifiable from a physical point of view. On the other hand, Einstein encouraged Lemaître to look into the possibility of models of non-isotropic expansion, so it is clear he was not altogether dismissive of the concept. He also appreciated Lemaître's argument that a static-Einstein model of the universe could not be sustained infinitely into the past.

In January 1933, Lemaître and Einstein, who had met on several occasions—in 1927 in Brussels, at the time of a Solvay Conference, in 1932 in Belgium, at the time of a cycle of conferences in Brussels and lastly in 1935 at Princeton—traveled together to the U.S. state of California for a series of seminars. After the Belgian detailed his theory, Einstein stood up, applauded, and is supposed to have said, "This is the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation to which I have ever listened."[17] However, there is disagreement over the reporting of this quote in the newspapers of the time, and it may be that Einstein was not actually referring to the theory as a whole but to Lemaître's proposal that cosmic rays may in fact be the leftover artifacts of the initial "explosion". Later research on cosmic rays by Robert Millikan would undercut this proposal, however."

Einstein wasn't accepting of the idea, but he wasn't outright rejectionary. He was (appropriately) skeptical.

We've taken the this thread very far from its intended direction so I think I'm going to bow out here.

I think this is a case where I will just agree to disagree, but I'll allow you to have the last word.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...