Texas A&M bans part of Plato's Symposium
dailynous.comOne thing we know is that few of the people debating this have actually read Plato's Symposium
A thing you can right now do is read it (1-2 hours): https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1600/1600-h/1600-h.htm#link2...
Or just the two sections in question:
Aristophanes’ myth of split humans (7 minutes): https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/eros/platos-other-half
Diotima’s ladder of love (20 minutes) https://people.wku.edu/jan.garrett/103/jowett_symp_A.htm
True, but I think it's rather beside the point. Administrators shouldn't be censoring materials from professors' syllabi.
Nah that is fine.
The issue is only when professor suspect of being liberal changes assigned reading in any way. That is the only possible big issue
/s
Core curriculum is always controlled by the university. The professor can sometimes make requests and get them approved.
At the university level, this is patently false. Professors have wide latitude to pick the texts for their classes except in lower division classes that might be taught by a TA.
This is more nuanced than “controlled by the administration or not”.
Universities that have accreditation (typically regional accreditation for nonprofit and private research universities) have to meet certain standards for certain curriculum design. Within those requirements there is wide latitude.
That doesn't seem more nuanced between controlled by administrators or not.. An accreditation may have a minimum number of hours for Greek Classics and could expect the topic of Classical Greek Cultural norms to be compared/contrasted with modernity or it may not be mandatory to cover. That's a bit short of an accreditation telling an administration to ensure the topic is never covered or to police every unlisted topic a professor may cover.
Nah, university approves learning objectives for a course, but how the objectives are achieved is up to the professor.
Imagine fearing the consequences of "people are not gay by choice, but because they are each halves of a eight limbed cartwheeling sphere". Young minds cannot handle such dangerous rhetoric
Don't forget the extremely loaded context surrounding Alcibiades.
I have no idea what this context is.
presumably it has to do with the gay
cuz even alluding to it makes texans uncomfortable. doth protest too much i think
I haven't looked, but I imagine that Wikipedia gives a reasonable account of Alcibiades.
I've heard an uptick in derogatory terms being thrown around recently and while unsurprising, it sure is sad.
Recent events...
- Went to a concert, an underage kid with a fake ID couldn't get a beer, turned to me and goes "Isn't this guy a f----"
Uh... well, he may be making your night less enjoyable, but I don't see why gay people have to catch strays cause of it...
"I don't think I'd call anyone that" was my response, and "it's okay to be gay" was a follow up
- My boss said something was retarded. I'm a bit wishy washy on the r-word myself as, while I'm friends with people with Down Syndrome and other maladies, it never occurred to me to relate the word to them (especially since they're generally really very nice people)
It's similar to how I never associated the word spaz with... I dunno what it is... multiple sclerosis or whatever, apparently that's a very common association in the UK, but I'd never heard of it (the association)
But now I've stopped using it entirely, although in this case I did not correct my boss (who I respect as a person and enjoy working for very much)
- One of my other friends called something "gay" recently
"Don't call things gay bro" was my response. As my mom explained to me in sixth grade "even though you don't really even have an idea what it means to be gay, when you say that negative things are gay, you're implying that being gay is negative, but gay people just are themselves and don't deserve that"
I became the "don't say gay kid" at school after that and I'm damned proud of it
All these losers trying to turn back the times to put gay people back in the closet give me "peaked in middle school" vibes, and it's sad to see that it's also slowly becoming normalized with people who I don't even think have that inclination or care to say prejudiced shit again too
> I never associated the word spaz with... I dunno what it is... multiple sclerosis or whatever
Usually cerebral palsy, I think, or (less commonly) epilepsy. I'm not sure it's still that common in the UK; I don't think I've heard it in the wild since the 80s [1], though some of that may just reflect the people I talk to as I get older.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joey_Deacon#Blue_Peter_and_cul...
Yea that's it... definitely wasn't on our minds when we were 14 in middle school in America lol
> It's similar to how I never associated the word spaz with... I dunno what it is... multiple sclerosis or whatever, apparently that's a very common association in the UK, but I'd never heard of it (the association)
It is a shortening of spastic.
Something I've noticed under Trump is how a country's leadership does actually affect the behavior of the people under that leadership.
Trump's openly crude behavior is normalizing such behavior amongst the impressionable.
And society will be worse for it for a long time to come.
Yeah people in positions of power and leaders model what acceptable behavior is for the rest of the group.
Yep. One of the things that is appealing about Trump to his voters is that he gives them license to be mean in public.
Language police are extremely uncool; going around telling people which words they are allowed to use mostly just hurts your own cause. It has the exact same effect that an old Christian woman scolding kids not to use swear words has. Eventually people realize that your magic words give them power and it becomes cool and useful to start using them in the exact opposite way you want them to.
The only way for you to achieve the goal of making sure nobody’s feelings are hurt by words is to take away the power of the words. You only give the words MORE power by reacting to them.
There are no "language police".
I think about this quote from Ricky Gervais a lot. He's had more than a few controversies, which you may or may not agree with but I think his take here is apt.
"Please stop saying 'You can't joke about anything anymore'. You can. You can joke about whatever the fuck you like. And some people won't like it and they will tell you they don't like it. And then it's up to you whether you give a fuck or not. And so on. It's a good system."
OP said:
>I became the "don't say gay kid" at school after that
Making a point of trying to control which words other kids are using counts as policing language in my opinion.
If you want to make fun of bartender who is strict their, a prude calling them a homosexual is just a non sequitur not an insult. Its not policing language its someone calling you out and saying your a fuckwit for being unable to inteligentlly insult someone or describe a sitution. That's way I don't like insulting people by calling them gay its just not saying what i want to convey maybe thats the "don't say gay kid" but i think its just indicitive that the people who say that didn't get the point of what was being said to begin with. Aka up your insult game there are ton of insults that are way weightier than calling someone a homosexual.
I’m sorry we’re not allowed to tell people they’re a stupid piece of shit or even that you disagree with their hateful rhetoric. Only the people saying the worst things should be protected and have free speech, we should limit our speech out of respect for theirs
Not that I really care, but I've got to ask the question:
Is telling people that they can't tell other people which words they use a form of language policing?
(In a thread concerning Plato, I thought this question needed to be asked.)
I'm not telling anyone they can't clutch their pearls and tell other people what to do. All I'm saying is that you will never win the cultural battle that way. Building a culture that does things like getting people fired from their jobs for using magic words, even if there is obviously no intentional malice in those words, is a great way to lose elections.
OP is not looking to get people fired for using particular words. OP doesn't appear to be fighting any sort of political battle. OP is telling people to be nice, and that's as much his right as it is yours to use the wrong words.
And I don't think elections or "the culture" should have anything to do with it. If that's how we made every decision, life would only improve for whoever exists in the overall majority. What if we each chose to have some integrity and do the right thing, even when there's nothing measuring it? It wouldn't kill us, I don't think.
That's only true of people who overreact or use offense as an excuse to let off some righteous anger. Most people don't react that way, even if that is what you'll most often see surfaced on social media because it's the most exciting and engaging sort of reaction. Most people will just tell you it's not a good thing to say and let you quietly reflect on it, or just exit the conversation.
tbh politely saying it bothers you is totally fine. That's not my argument.
All I'm saying is that making it your personal mission to make sure nobody uses the words in any context has lead us to where we are now, where we have a big backlash and young people are using gay and retarded more than they ever would have if we maybe just chilled out a little bit with the language policing.
We have taken this magic word mindset so far that we created a broad set of words that were so taboo you could get fired for using them in ANY context, even if you are talking about the word itself (like the case with the Papa Johns guy). And we had institutions like Stanford coming up with inane things like the "Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative" where they wanted to police words like "crazy" and "dumb".
Huge eyeroll.
Who said anything about scolding anyone lol. I responded very calmly.
I'm sorry, but you'll never win me over that the world be a better place if only we could bring back overtly prejudiced speech.
Actions have consequences. You can say whatever the hell you want, but doesn't mean you deserve respect, or not to be corrected, or not to face the consequences of saying overtly bigoted words.
The fact is... calling negative things gay implies being gay is bad, and therefore we should stop calling negative things gay if we want to support all the good people in the LGBTQ community.
OP’s words exactly:
>I became the "don't say gay kid" at school after that
Making a point of trying to shame other people for using words you don’t like is a losing game in the long run.
The “actions have consequences” argument is what lead us to where we are now where you can see an obvious backlash.
Heck the papa John’s pizza guy got fired for using a magic word in an obviously non-derogatory way, and it was the same “actions have consequences” mentality even though basically nobody would be genuinely offended by his usage of it.
If you continue to make a big deal out of every usage of gay and retarded those words will only grow in power and popularity because you are showing someone that they have the power to get you to freak out if they use them.
You can see the opposite effect with traditional swear words, which are so used in popular media that they have lost almost all of their power.
Do you think that racial slurs will lose their power if people stop objecting to their use?
Ah yes... sixth graders and human adults have so much in common.
In fact, the culture at the school changed, and people stopped saying gay so much. It was very cool.
You should try standing up for something you believe in sometime, maybe you'd like it.
Out of curiosity, what about calling someone a racist, a fascist, a Nazi, a bigot, etc.? Are those all fine too and better to just put out there so no one is, I guess, disempowered? Should we let everyone throw around racist and hateful slurs casually, and also label people using them with the traditional labels for those who engage in that kind of behavior?
Those words you listed are an example of exactly what I’m talking about. Words like Nazi, bigot, etc have lost most of their power now because they have been used so much. 5-10 years ago those labels could ruin your life and people in the US would trip over themselves to prove how those labels didn’t apply to them. Now a great number of young people don’t care at all about being labeled as those things, and being labeled as one of those things is much less likely to ruin one’s life/career.
That is some impressively convoluted doublethink. Good luck straightening your head out someday.
I’m just saying that words have the power they are given by people. If you don’t want to be offended by a special word you then just don’t give it the power to hurt you.
“Queer” is another example. It used to be a slur, gay people decided collectively that they were going to take the word back, and it worked. Go ahead and call someone queer as a slur in San Francisco, it doesn’t really work the same as if you had called someone queer in the Midwest in 1990.
It’s not doublethink, it’s a provable phenomenon.
Not a great example, as many gay people, including myself, still consider it to be a slur.
Many of the people who have supposedly took it back and use it to describe themselves aren't even gay.
I've only realized this somewhat recently, and it happens passively, but the way people use some of these magic words helps me to categorize the person who said it.
Sure, use whatever derogatory or offensive words you want, I don't really mind, but I am damn sure going to judge you based on it.
I don't tend to be the "don't use that word" type of person though. But I'm absolutely the "get the fuck out of this 'will make me dumber' conversation" type of person.
I tend to agree, the words someone chooses tell you about the kind of person they are. Context is usually obvious, you can tell if someone is trying to be edgy, if someone normally uses the word in their vocabulary with their friends, or if they are genuinely using it in a hateful way.
The genuine hateful usage is the actually bad thing that people want to stop, but many people mistakenly think they are fighting hatred by policing other people’s vocabulary.
Genuinely hateful usage is of course important to stop but let's not pretend that hearing negative things called something you are all day isn't damaging to people.
The idea that gay people walk around and hear "Oh that's gay as hell!" whenever someone stubs their toe, or loses in a game or whatever and don't have that affect them is silly and it clearly progresses into a culture where people don't feel comfortable being themselves.
It's a good thing that since I've grown up we don't say "oh you're not acting black enough", or "oh that's so Jewish", or any other variation of things that may not seem harmful at the time but end up perpetuating a "right" and a "wrong" whether intentional or not.
I am a former student and graduate of this department at Texas A&M. I just called The Association and informed them that I consider this completely unacceptable and will not consider donations to the university unless this policy is reversed.
I would encourage fellow like-minded Aggies to do the same.
Drs Austin and McDermott are surely spinning in their graves right now.
I would say that the most respectable universities are traditionally institutions of higher learning.
It's always been possible for any of them to decline into lesser institutions of not-as-much-higher-learning as they started out with.
Wouldn't leadership integrity and actual scholarship make the big difference between those that are able to strive higher each generation compared to those who strive lower?
Who is it that wants to aggressively devalue Aggie degrees that have already been earned, especially in the eyes of the world, along with any to be granted in the future anyway?
It's not only "The Eyes of Texas" that are upon this.
> It's not only "The Eyes of Texas" that are upon this.
Referencing the University of Texas (Austin) school song in a reply to an Aggie, them fightin' words
More related, with A&M generally being traditionally conservative* and also being a research university that values higher learning -- yet still a public school -- they are going run up on these issues given the current state of "conservative" (maga) politics. UT is getting the same pressure, but being a traditionally liberal leaning school with a rich history of protest leading to change, they are able to resist a bit more -- which I always respected (except for Thanksgiving rivalry games) -- but even they are slowly caving-in. Texas use to mind its own business, scoff at whatever ideology the federal government was pushing and, for the most part, let people and institutions be. How we became a maga lapdog is truly baffling.
*Has the George H.W. Bush library and a Corps of Cadets (student military organization) that deeply intergraded into school tradition, for starters. Also, oil money.
Speaking of Austin, anyone wishing to admire the art of the Gerrymander ought to look at the multiple electoral districts covering the state capital.
PS. Hook'em Horns :)
It really begs the question of, how much is this obsession with controlling others' gender actually going to end up negatively impacting the US's competitive edge in higher education? Between this and firing qualified TAs who did their job, we're well beyond just impacting gender studies majors at Evergreen College. How much longer until it cuts into mathematics, merely because an author was part of the reigning administration's monster of the week?
It’s an issue, but a small part of it. The funding cuts and immigration barriers have already laid foundations for a massive harm to the US’s edge in research and education.
The US got the bomb in large part because the Nazi intelligentsia didn't like Jewish physics. If the person who unifies the four forces is transgender, will the US recognize and teach it?
The US got a lot of things in a lot of fields because the sort of people who were smart enough to make those advances were also smart enough to get far away from the Reich while the getting was still good.
Similarly, I believe the Renaissance was not so much a "rebirth" of culture as it was italian port cities suddenly benefiting from a sudden influx of highly educated people bugging out from Constantinople; more a translation than a reappearance.
> italian port cities suddenly benefiting from a sudden influx of highly educated people bugging out from Constantinople; more a translation than a reappearance.
in particular the big trade cities like Venezia had been pulling out anything and everything as the ottomans closed in; had been going on for a while before Constantinople fell.
but broadly speaking, yeah the collapse of the Byzantines and their stores of classical history is what drove the rediscovery and later the Renaissance
Want to know what a retreat from the Renaissance and scientific Enlightenment back into medieval mindlessness looks like? This is what it looks like.
I'm a bit peeved at this caricaturization of earlier eras. In fact, significant fields of modern philosophy received great innovation by churchmen, and they were of course constantly attempting to reconcile Christian dogma with Greek and especially Aristotelian thought.
One prominent example was formal logic, which was significantly developed in the middle ages, but received scant attention in the Renaissance.
They developed a great deal of formal logic, but looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baroco#:~:text=In%20the%20term... (with the hindsight from Boolean logic, admittedly!) it seems more like they were mostly slathering on the tech debt. How am I mistaken?
Speaking of reconciliation, might I interest you in a reconciliation of Aquinas and Spinoza, by way of Galois Theory?
> Speaking of reconciliation, might I interest you in a reconciliation of Aquinas and Spinoza, by way of Galois Theory?
This is kind of bad faith.
> They developed a great deal of formal logic... it seems more like they were mostly slathering on the tech debt. How am I mistaken?
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abelard/
> Abelard was the greatest logician since Antiquity: he devised a purely truth-functional propositional logic, recognizing the distinction between force and content we associate with Frege, and worked out a complete theory of entailment as it functions in argument (which we now take as the theory of logical consequence). His logical system is flawed in its handling of topical inference, but that should not prevent our recognition of Abelard’s achievements.
and you might be more familiar with Ockham's Razor. There are others, but you can do your own research if you're interested. There was a lot of work that needed to be done in between Aristotle's incomplete Syllogisms and the incomplete understanding of propositional logic that Sophists used, that helped birth Frege's Begriffsschrift.
OK, so so far I think I can use a similar application of Galois Theory to relate Abelard's exstinctiva square of opposition and his separativa square.
I haven't quite figured out how Alberic's argument goes through in Abelard's logic. but can clearly see that as the latter denies ex impossibili quodlibet something has to break. (for eiq merely observes that if False is True, then everything at least as true as False —ie everything— is True. In other words you have a degenerate situation, in which False == True)
Have I understood his logic so far?
Ok I think I see what you mean, you think these philosophers describe systems that partly capture a fully elaborated system, and you can draw imperfect correspondences between them. But I don't see why you want to shoehorn them into being Galois correspondences under... what exactly.
The what exactly is under https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41258636
Does it make sense?
[almost all Galois correspondences are imperfect; they're just the "best" imperfect correspondence, in some sense. (the ones that actually are bijections are the perfect ones, in that not only are R=RLR and L=LRL, but RL=1=LR)]
> But I don't see why
For fun? Because "Algebraic Theology" is a grammatical english noun phrase that up until recently seems to have been uninhabited? To create a model in which Spinoza is not Pantheist? All of the above?
A couple thoughts:
1. in your original statement, you just name-dropped philosophers' names assuming that I'd understand what aspect of their work you were thinking of. Similarly, you can't say "use Galois theory" when you are actually thinking of drawing Galois correspondences between lattice-like structures.
2. Don't forget that notions like and Galois connections are today well-defined notions in terms of modern-day mathematical objects in turn relying on first-order logic or similar... whereas they were just beginning to explicate parts of logic.
Right, I'm not saying they should've come up with it; I'm just saying that knowing what we know now it's possible to reconcile them.
(in my original statement, I didn't want to go into detail in case you weren't interested; typing costs my time, and the last two times I've attempted to discuss this on HN it's been crickets)
> [Aquinas reconciled with Spinoza] is kind of bad faith.
How so? I'm dead serious; Algolia will confirm — and you sound like part of the small audience that would actually know what the differences to be reconciled are.
Be back after (making a few other replies and) reading up on Abelard. Is this the same Abelard as Sic et Non?
Thanks for the substantial reply!
That must have been a great consolation to illiterate peasants dying in their 20's from mysterious plagues.
How is this an appropriate rejoinder? Inequality in education and the variability of fortunes persisted throughout Imperial and post-Medieval times. Rather, if we acknowledge that the rural person in Italy was still illiterate during the Enlightenment, then my point still stands; the rural laity was just as "mindless".
In the case of the Black Death, an appropriate characterization of it did not gain currency until well after the heyday of the Enlightenment.
This has little bearing on the argument I was making, but I'd like to note that religion had a great incentive to teach abstract notions to the laity (and they did) as the Christian God and its dogma are extremely abstract in contrast to most agrarian notions.
On the abstraction front, I'll confirm that if you go back far enough in just about any line on the Mathematics Genealogy Project, you get to DDs (some Christian, some Islamic).
Example: starting from Frege, we can get from:
https://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=46166
to
https://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=125658
and then
Not to minimize the significance of this but prohibiting a portion of a reading is like slapping a "parental warning" on a Rap CD in the 90s -- if I was an undergrad, I'd only want to read those excerpts more.
The real barrier to students reading Plato has historically (and correctly) been the dismal quality of translations available. I always hated reading plato because the translations available to me were significantly more concerned with carrying into the modern day the wonky syntax and sentence structure of ancient Greek philosophical writing, and less concerned with translating the underlying ideas into language understandable by a 19 year-old engineering major who can barely spell their own name.
I think that it would be easier to get younger people to study Quenya to be able to read fragments of Tolkien in the "original" than it would be to somehow get them to learn to read classical Greek. But it's not that hard to learn to just read Attic and Homeric Greek, and then there's a lifetime of really great stuff that opens up for one to enjoy.
>it's not that hard to learn to just read Attic and Homeric Greek
I studied Attic, Koine, and Homeric, as well as a few other dialects for 10 years through college until I left my PhD program in Classics. Learning Greek was _very_ hard and even after that time I still had many gaps.
It's not all-or-nothing, though, and free sources like Attikos provide word definitions at a tap. Since I'm old, I also have a shelf of Loebs, and have no shame about skimming the dull bits by reading the trots.
Tell me about a complicated man. That's a translation!
I read an excellent parallel Greek and English translation when I was a kid, probably the one in the Loeb Classical Library.
They probably had this attitude, but I didn't find it objectionable at all, and I'm not a native English speaker. If a 19-year old engineering student can't read that, even in his own language, what's the point? The guy's a bore.
I think it's probably better to just read them having picked them off a bookshelf than in a class though.
You act as if there are not companion or derivative works ad-nauseam. The barrier is hermeneutic, not grammatical, which is a fundamental constraint on shared meaning. Thus the "real barrier" is innate and your particular fixation only serves artificial ones. But please do add more than a complaint to our canon of meaning, I do not mean to devalue the act you are advocating, just the notion of neglect in this respect.
I mean to say that the only time I've ever needed to diagram a sentence to figure out what was being said was while taking Philosophy 1010, because the cheapest translations available of e.g. The Republic was a bit too opaque for me.
There's certainly a lot to be said about the manifold interpretations of Platonic Idealism; what I'm saying is that when we've historically introduced new philosophy students to things like Jowett's translations ("But tell me, Zeno, do you not further think that there is an idea of likeness in itself, and another idea of unlikeness, which is the opposite of likeness, and that in these two, you and I and all other things to which we apply the term many, participate-things which participate in likeness become in that degree and manner like; and so far as they participate in unlikeness become in that degree unlike, or both like and unlike in the degree in which they participate in both?"), there's also a grammatical issue. Yes, I can deconstruct that and reassemble it in more colloquial terms. The problem is that for a lot of students, they don't develop interest enough to engage in the deconstruction until after they've gone through the arduous process of reading that and thinking "WTF?!"
I had only the Jowett translation and probably gave up on passages like that. What got my attention was diagramming. I diagrammed Koine Greek sentences every time in assignments with Apostle Paul or Luke. Greek is intensely inflected (different word endings for subject, object, for starters) A lot of meaning is packed in which makes word order very flexible.
I want to go try some Plato in Greek. Do you have the reference for that passage? (Thankfully I got the unabridged Liddell and Scott lexicon which encompasses Attic not just New Testament words so I’ve been able to read Homer.)
I’m speaking from my own informal reading of the Cooper edition, which I genuinely enjoyed for its prose. Even so, it took me years to work through the whole thing, and I trace my difficulty quite easily to gaps in my earlier education and reading habits.
I’m not convinced that better translations are doing much to fix the deeper issue in most readers: the lack of broad exposure to the Western canon which seems to cultivate a real preference for rigor over comfort.
The difference is people wanted to listen to Eminem or whatever because it's enjoyable, trendy music that's played on the radio and all their friends were listening to.
Plato is not exactly burning up the airwaves right now. Most likely the only exposure most people will have to this work (or any of the libraries of work that's been banned in this manner) would be at college, assigned to them for a class.
I think the point was more Streisand Effect than commentary on the popularity.
The undergrads won't hear about it. The material will just silently not be on the syllabus and they'll never know. In this case the interference has broken containment, but this won't be the norm.
Similar vein: reading in general is down, overall. Especially among young people. "Banning" a book isn't affecting anyone, it just gets a bunch of people riled up on two political tribes.
Now, if they actually banned a book, like "you will go to jail for having this" I would be concerned.
It's wild how there's so much overlap between the faction that wants to champion "European culture" and "Western civilization" and the faction that will do things like this.
For them European culture means colonial culture, not modern liberal culture. So there is no dissonance.
Plato is not exactly modern culture of any kind.
it means Texas Protestant Christian culture
I thought we were broadly against colleges and universities banning politically incorrect speech. Wasn't that a huge talking point 2-3 years ago? Didn't we bring back freedom of speech?
It's really depressing how the popular discourse around these topics so consistently fails to address any kind of bad-faith reasoning on topics like this.
Politicians complaining about free speech almost uniformly are referring to speech they don't like. Just like when they say they want to be "moral" its their morals, and when they say they want safety it's safety for a certain kind of person.
But the media (institutional AND social) ends to just accepting their stated motivations at face value. And at this point it's making us all look like idiots.
Freedom of speech is now defined as the person with the most power or who screams the loudest has the final say. That is what happens when you elect a dictator.
It has been that way in the US since the supreme court decided that money is equivalent to speech. And the effects have been ramping up ever since. If there is only so much bandwidth in communication, then using money to monopolize airwaves directly reduces the speech of those who cannot afford the excessive cost that results. Monopolize here is used in the sense of dominating the available supply (of bandwidth) and bidding up the price.
Citizens United must be overturned.
> elect a dictator
Who is "we" here? I can't count how many times I've argued against just an apparently broadly-held view that free speech ends at the first amendment and isn't a general principle that should be practiced at, eg., universities. Looks like when I argued that here, I was told that I should pick a different term for the principle of free speech in order to disambiguate from the first amendment (they recommended calling it 'my personal content preferences').
Likewise uncountable is the number of times I've said normalizing free speech restrictions against the other side will come back to bite you once they're (inevitably, especially given these tactics) in power.
I can see how 'pro-speech' might have appeared to be a right-leaning position when violations were typically against right-leaning expression, but I never got the sense that either side really gave a damn.
Majority of that was bad faith argument designed to create exactly this situation. And it succeeded.
For those like me wondering what in this syllabus they should be looking at, the key bit is the required reading in the middle of the second page: "Plato, excerpts from Symposium" instead of just "Plato's Symposium".
Edit: weird. On the app I'm using ("Harmonic") it redirects to a syllabus PDF. But when I open in a browser it opens to an article.
“ Dr. Peterson said he would reluctantly alter the course and replace the disputed modules with “lectures on free speech and academic freedom.” But he was angry, he said, as well as bothered by the sense that students would receive a less rigorous, challenging education in his classroom. ”
Quite sad to see the school administration get compliance here.
server seems to be hugged.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260107085450/https://dailynous...
Let the king decide what to read in his universities and you are good. It's also hard to stomach how the professor said he doesn't teach "ideology" but the administration doesn't even bother to refute this or anything. They just stubbornly repeat their allegations and confront him with an ultimatum.
It's almost like the bullying is trickling down, right?
I'm sure some philosopher somewhen had something to say about whether or not being alternately servile and arrogant constitutes living the good life?
Falling in line.
When even an old independently wealthy dude whose favourite pupil thought some people are slaves by nature is too "woke", who can we teach? Dick and Jane?
(oh, I see the problem now; they're supposed to be implied to be, by strategic omission, old independently wealthy slave-owning dudes who were into the flute girls?)
PHILOSOPHY 101 by Gray and Sharp See Dick. Dick thinks about people. See Jane. Jane thinks about events. See Spot. Spot keeps a close eye on the two intellectuals.
Woke vs MAGA, education is the victim.
This is where MAGA leads.
I'm gradually tuning out Hacker News, because it persistently tries to ignore the politics that are destroying the United States and freedom of enquiry.
There is a dead comment below that tries to raise an argument but was killed instead. This is no longer a place to go to discuss ideas.
Given sufficient historical context, this should not be surprising; Paul Graham's influence on Hacker News is foundational, as he created the platform to foster an intellectual community, personally shaping its culture, design, and moderation policies.
For me, at least, this is one of his most important essays and worth re-visiting from time to time - https://paulgraham.com/identity.html
"I think what religion and politics have in common is that they become part of people's identity, and people can never have a fruitful argument about something that's part of their identity. By definition they're partisan."
Academics absolutely do have fruitful arguments about religion and politics. Pretending that there is nothing to learn is just anti-intellectualism.
You’re right, and I agree wholeheartedly: academics absolutely do have fruitful arguments about religion and politics.
I read Graham’s point as narrower than “there’s nothing to learn.” He explicitly says: “There are certainly some political questions that have definite answers.”
The warning label is about identity capture. Once a view becomes part of who you are, the odds of real updating drop: “people can never have a fruitful argument about something that’s part of their identity.” Or, put positively: “you can have a fruitful discussion … so long as you exclude people who respond from identity.”
So the issue isn’t the topic. It’s what happens when belief turns into a kind of badge.
Once big tech, and VC and investment firms behind them, went from “don’t be evil” to jumping in feet first into manipulating politics, that argument became at best pointless and at worst a cover to fuck around in politics and then kill discussion around it.
Billionaires are frightened by politics because it can generate revolutionary thought that threatens their mountains of gold. They think "why can't you shut up and be a good source of labor for me to extract."
they don't just think that, they say it, regularly.
Ellison basically said, repeatedly, that we need AI to keep the poors in line and prevent "bad behavior"
Project 2025 never says it loudly but its unambiguous in those aims
> This is no longer a place to go to discuss ideas.
No longer? Flagging comments isnt a new feature, and if anything, the site has been getting more political as time goes on, not less.
I hate this kind of politicizing... it was wrong when the left was doing it to force mandatory "diversity statements" and it's wrong now when the right is forcing removal of specific course content.
Professors should be free to teach whatever they want that's relevant to their courses. Students are adults and can make up their own minds.
> I'm gradually tuning out Hacker News, because it persistently tries to ignore the politics that are destroying the United States and freedom of enquiry.
There are many places that focus on, allow, or encourage political content. Hackernews is not one of them, as by express design, it deems politics as off topic:
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
Professors being told they can't teach some parts of Plato in philosophy class because the ideas are too dangerous is indeed an interesting new phenomenon.
We have always discussed politics here. I agree with your point that HN shouldn't just be a forum for political content, I regularly flag posts about 'President posts insane thing on Truth Social' or 'Congressperson votes in ways people don't like,' but the intersection of economic, technological, intellectual, and political power is always going to throw up challenging ethical issues.
I think people's definition of "politics" aren't universal. And a lot of people just take all the things they don't like and say "well they're 'politicial' therefore they aren't allowed here." Using the site guidelines as their own personal eraser.
This essay also likely influenced the "what are things appropriate for HN":
https://paulgraham.com/identity.html
I finally realized today why politics and religion yield such uniquely useless discussions. ... Then it struck me: this is the problem with politics too. Politics, like religion, is a topic where there's no threshold of expertise for expressing an opinion. All you need is strong convictions. Do religion and politics have something in common that explains this similarity? One possible explanation is that they deal with questions that have no definite answers, so there's no back pressure on people's opinions. Since no one can be proven wrong, every opinion is equally valid, and sensing this, everyone lets fly with theirs.> Do religion and politics have something in common that explains this similarity? One possible explanation is that they deal with questions that have no definite answers, so there's no back pressure on people's opinions. Since no one can be proven wrong, every opinion is equally valid, and sensing this, everyone lets fly with theirs.
Well, even Republicans accepted that an insurrection was a bad thing:
> There is nothing patriotic about what is occurring on Capitol Hill. This is 3rd world style anti-American anarchy.
* https://twitter.com/marcorubio/status/1346909901478522880
* https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/marco-rubio-2021-tweets-...
Are insurrections, now five years later, a good thing?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_6_United_States_Capito...
> Well, even Republicans accepted that an insurrection was a bad thing:
Just not THIS insurrection?
Rubio thought that the insurrection was bad when it happened (see his tweet), but now… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Typical paulg overgeneralization from his bubble. Just because many political opinions are legitimately debatable doesn’t mean that every opinion about every topic you call political is equally valid. That’s just silly.
I don’t see Paul acting like every opinion is equally valid when it directly affects something he cares about. He seems to happily participate in “useless” political discussions when he has a strong opinion.
My read of it isn't about if it's legitimately debatable, but if it's productively discussable (in an online setting).
Topics about someone's identity aren't things that one can easily change - and certainly not from text on a screen from some stranger on the internet.
Discussions about things that are core to someone's identity (in that setting) aren't useful.
Religion and politics in that context extend beyond one's claims about a soul or which end of the political spectrum is more soulless. Asking about how to maintain an F150 in /r/fuckcars is similarly not going to be a useful discussion since the identity of the people in that subreddit is in conflict about something that is quite legitimately discussable.
Keeping one's identity small (and topical to the subject matter at hand) given that it isn't in conflict with one's identity makes for a place that is much easier to moderate and keep a civil discussion.
One can discuss the impact of Section 174 or ZIRP without invoking politics. However, once politics (or religion) is involved in a comment everything downthread of it becomes more difficult to moderate.
So it's not the "ignoring politics" that's at issue - many topics in today's world are intimately intermingled with politics. However, discussing that politics directly makes this an environment that people tend to not want to participate in.
Turn on showdead and look at the comments in this post to see the types of things people don't want to participate in... and how much worse the site would be if those were acceptable topics.
There are many places where one can discuss those topics. Not every site has to be all things for all people. This one is thankfully one of the places where discussion on politics and the related identities doesn't happen.
I don't know what site you're thinking of that avoids politics...maybe lobste.rs? Here are some of today's top HN stories that I would certainly categorize as "discussion on politics".
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46550912 - European Commission issues call for evidence on open source (356 points)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46550777 - Do not mistake a resilient global economy for populist success (198 points)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46547303 - Iran Protest Map (170 points)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46544625 - The Trump Administration Says It's Illegal to Record Videos of ICE (65 points)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46546188 - Texas first state to end American bar association oversight of law school (63 points)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46378818 (and the related links) would be the long form authoritative answer on that.
There is a difference between discussing politics and political discussions. Things done by political bodies that have impact can be reasonably discussed.
Yes, DanG has written a lengthy, nuanced piece on the subject, because he has to deal with the reality that there is in fact no bright line between discussing politics and political discussion.
PaulG simply asserted that "no one can be proven wrong, every opinion is equally valid". Which is neither true, nor useful.
Also, some of us are amenable to changing our opinions when presented with strong evidence/arguments. I suppose the larger questions ("what do we want society to be like", "which values are most important to us") tend to be baked into ourselves so there's a limit to how much someone will change. However, there's examples of people leaving cults etc. and dramatically changing their opinions and personality.
Indeed, some discussion topics are more about being confident than being right, since there's no objective way to determine the latter.
"Until we know we are wrong, being wrong feels exactly like being right." - Kathryn Schulz
> There are many places that focus on, allow, or encourage political content. Hackernews is not one of them, as by express design, it deems politics as off topic:
That's all very fine and well in theory, but it's like saying the topic of the ship taking on water is not allowed to be discussed when you're on a Star Trek cruise:
* https://startrekthecruise.com
Sure: a gash in the haul doesn't cover things like Kirk, Picard, Sisko, or Janeway, but it's kind of a prerequisite that nothing is happening to hull integrity before the others topics can be entertained.
The shutdown goes far beyond TV news-style topics. But whether by design or by fiat, Hacker News is no longer a place for intelligent discussion.
Yet geopolitics gets discussed.
You cannot isolate technology from forces that shape and harness it. It is fine to restrict political discussion lest it overwhelm other more fruitful discussions, however burying one's head in sand while the society is being "engineered" is not the mark of a curious person.
Funny that conservatives want people to read the classics.
I'm pretty sure they still do, actually. What I suspect happened is that someone high up the food chain put out a broad directive to remove "gender ideology" without thinking too hard about the consequences, and then some relatively unimaginative admins lower down decided to implement it Consistently With No Exceptions. Just doing their jobs "fairly". I expect they'll fix the glitch, frankly, at least the immediate glitch.
This smells of malicious compliance to me. Similar to removing the Bible when given a directive to remove texts containing sexual material.
Could be. That would be funnier, for sure. Actually, the Bible definitely contains gender ideology, so I guess they do have to ban it.
Genuinely confused here: are you saying that those who are on the side of the professor are conservatives?
For a different professor, there's Dr. Bob Altemeyer, who wrote a book in 2006 (after 40 years of research) that includes a section on evidence-based deradicalisation[0] of authoritarian followers, pp240-245: https://theauthoritarians.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/The... (for objections, see [1])
That's nonfiction, and anachronistic. As far as fiction in the correct setting goes, I'm drawing a blank, and I even had to read things like "At the Bridge" and "The Tin Drum" in school (as well as watch dokus like "The White Rose" and "Triumph of the Will"[2]).
Most stories I know are of the unrepentant[3]; maybe I can dig some repentant ones up later?
[0] dereactionalisation?
[1] some discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24786278
[2] if I am overly paranoid, maybe it's because it's difficult to see anyone's GOAT propaganda these days and not compare it with Riefenstahl; she made the https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TropeCodifier ?
[3] including, but not limited to:
Oberleutnant (as he was then) "Kongo" Müller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siegfried_Müller_(mercenary) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGAUW1ZF2xI
Generalmajor Reinhard Gehlen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinhard_Gehlen#Gehlen_Organiz... https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/bnd-bundesnachrichtendienst-n...
SS-Sturmbannführer Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr von Braun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun#American_car... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zcU85O82XE ("doctor were-ner von brawn")
(see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38759207, and elsewhere on HN, for wholesale vs retail sellers)
lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro
EDIT: (haven't been using that Gemini, sorry)You too may be a big hero Once you've learned to count backwards to zero "In German, und Englisch, I know how to count down Und 我学习中文!" says Wernher von BraunSchwarzenegger's neighbours retreated into the bottle[4]:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_P-0I6sAck
[4] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/85221-atticus-said-naming-p...
Ps: Repentance is one of the things that sell better as science fiction.. (Linebarger?)
Not to be dismissive, just "providing" another perspective while I take a walk to think about that:
In the other bidirection..
If Steve and Ive grokked each others' Jobs..
(You could complete the couplet but I may or may not recommend it)
Edit: Atticus would have been more convincing (to me) if he was more ex-Confederate officer and less Mary Sue
Ps2: deprogramming (ie something that could be applied to Scott Locklin.. I have read his Optiksy takes while thinking about his quasiracist ones.. & tentatively conclude that the Buxton [e: dissonance] angle^W ansatz is in the realm of.. plausibility)
Ps3: there's the Peenemuende slave Labor museum^W monument. Compare German (P/Tin Drum) and Japanese (??? sporadic priests^W Buddhist chaplains I guess) tatemae?
Ps4: maybe one could leave it up to American initiative/dynamism* to uncover more of these living [prep]aradoxes.. I highly doubt it could scale (even after defocusing from ORs)
U: not chaplain-trainee in question but a sizeable pctage of the paradoxes do seem to come from the upper middle/lower upper (more than directly explicated by Linebarger)
Not: Magpie* regurgitation of mixed Confucianist/Supply side precepts
https://youtu.be/bJ_lfBmlScs?t=3m11s
"皈依者狂热" in the comments
https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%9A%88%E4%BE%9D
(GoogAI is currently serving a different origin from https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E9%BB%84%E9%9B%80%E5%9C%A8%E5%...
Is this Confucianist Propaganda :)
I was actually surprised that baike.baidu gives pretty much the same story for the CR as en.wikipedia.
The chengyu pretty much summarises what is called "2nd intention" in fencing.
I guess if foxes know they're getting extracted no matter what happens, 狐假虎威 ?
Re: 皈依者狂热 I was surprised to find there actually was a joke:
"Q. What did capitalism accomplish in one year that communism could not do in seventy years?"
because I had figured that it took 70 years of communism for the people to decide the capitalists had been right about communism, and 10 years of capitalism for the people to decide the communists had been right about capitalism, so now they're trying feudalism...
Re: 斩杀线, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e2igZexpMs
Re: Atticus, arguably he's allowed to be, because we see him through Scout's eyes? (there is a fan theory that the family characters in Big Bang Theory and Young Sheldon are exactly the same, only in BBT we see them as Sheldon perceives them, and in YS we see them as they perceive themselves?)
Hmm not sure what chengyu I mentioned?
Fencing chengyus should be a thing!
Koryū arts should have had tonne of it tho that you could transplant wholesale?
Placeholder for the wisdom of making exceptions for Atticus (in the name of Harper's stand-in-- so precluding cognizance of any sort of repentance?)
Cicada <- Mantis <- Oriole <- Courtier <- Pond, of which only the first three are explicit...
I did once run across some nice phrases at the end of a karate book, which (judging by the lack of hiragana) had been lifted, unattributed, from a chengyu-style source.
If we take 4-word to be the equivalent of 4-character:
(hmm, that worked better than I thought it might!)Parry? Wait 'til late Your lunge surprises yourself Champion with two techniquesNote that Szeto Wah had more of a pastor/frontman persona than a Besserwisser persona => the meme (lunge?) exceeded his plunge (scheme?)
https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%BB%83%E9%9B%80%E8%A1%8C%E5...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Szeto_Wah#:~:text=Under%20his%...
Cao Zhi must've been normally diploid; he only got one "Cao" from his famed father, "Double Cao"...
What a joke