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0 pointsdvfjsdhgfv5y ago0 comments

As long as you keep quiet about sensitive issues, you will be fine.

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7 comments · 3 top-level

dsnr5y ago· 4 in thread

There shouldn’t be any “sensitive” issues in a university context. These “universities” look more like re-education centers than educational institutions.

All those “sensitive” issues are plain ideological ideas and some people want those ideas to prevail by suppressing all conversation around them.

dvfjsdhgfvOP5y ago

I think the discussion about this already over, i.e. it's now a part of the social contract that we don't question certain things, not because they're true or false but because of social cost of challenging them. For example, we know that the distribution of certain psychological traits in both genders is a bit different, but discussing it - either in the social context or the academia - is more or less a taboo in order to protect the vulnerable, and in part also because of the expectations of desirable traits in today society [0]. For the same reason, nobody in the right mind would organize a study of IQ differences between races, and if someone was stupid enough, their professional life in the academia (and probably beyond) would be finished.

In general, in the West any study of relationships between the aspect of the body (any inherent traits) and the mind/psyche is forbidden. A few years ago the Chinese published their famous study of facial traits of convinced criminals. [1] The result was that there were more variations from the mean among the convicts than the rest of the population. Of course everybody criticized the study as unethical and minority-reportesque.

The only danger I see is that by effectively renouncing to analyze any links between the body and mind we might lose some important insights, and the vulnerable groups could also greatly benefit from discovering these. But the danger that the result of this kind of research will be used against us is not negligible, as the history shows.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/08/the-science-behind-why-so-ma...

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1611.04135v2.pd

silicon24015y ago

It's a terrible shame that objectivity and knowledge are what society has decided to suppress instead of harmful use of knowledge.

curtisblaine5y ago

But this is... dystopia. Science should be free to research everything.

foldr5y ago

It's not actually taboo at all to discuss variation in psychological traits between genders. There are innumerable academic studies of gender differences in all kinds of domains. No-one, to any significant extent, is stopping these papers from being published, or calling for this kind of research to cease. Similarly, there are endless articles about gender differences in mainstream news publications.

What is controversial is using cherry-picked scientific results to tell just-so stories about why the gender distribution in certain fields is imbalanced.

The study on the facial features of criminals was criticized mainly for its shoddy methodology, not for being unethical (see e.g. https://www.callingbullshit.org/case_studies/case_study_crim...). Of course, people did point out that the research could have unethical applications – which strikes me as an obvious and fairly undeniable point. Your assertion that research of this nature is "forbidden" in the West is trivially refuted by googling: e.g. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/288373839.pdf https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3366989/

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croutonwagon5y ago

There was a time when college was about exploring new ideas and being open to be challenged in your own.

The only rules were to not take offense at a difference of opinions and not devolve into ad hominems and personal attacks.

type05y ago

Please don't spread the lies about "sensitive issues".

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