MIT Abandons Its Mission. and Me (opens in new tab)

This is a sad state of affairs where one can't even have a meta discussion about a topic without having to tip toe around ill-defined lines.

In the long run, this has the potential to turn people how want to stay out of politics and draw them in out of necessity, or they may also be cowed into something they disagree with to protect their livelihood.

In either case, it's not a good thing that one may not seek science in academia. The thing that got us to where we are. Without science and inquisitiveness, even into controversial subjects (many normal things were at one time controversial) we would not be where we are today.

This is being undermined by dogmaticism and we can only hope science prevails.

What people haven’t grasped yet is you can’t fight the mob.

There’s no recourse, no appeal, no tribunal, no council of wise learned people you can go to when the mob sets out to destroy you.

You’re just simply fucked and have to accept you’ve been cancelled, your reputation is ruined and you’re “out”.

That’s all there is to it and no-one has come up with a solution.

I have insider information on MIT, but not on this specific situation.

In general, I would describe much of cancel culture not as a grassroots movement, so much as an astroturf movement. It gives entrenched powers an extrajudicial process to target people.

Abbot spoke out against legacy / alumni / etc. admissions. I suspect that, or something similar, was the real crime. MIT isn't huge into legacy / alumni admissions, so I suspect the mob got kicked off by somebody else (Harvard, just up the river, is big into legacy / alumni, would find this threatening, and leaderships are joined at the hip).

> On September 30 the department chair at MIT called to tell me that they would be cancelling the Carlson lecture this year in order to avoid controversy.

The department chair should be named as there needs to be accountability for such decisions that are derisive for free academic endavors. Don't blame a Twitter mob, the decision to give in to unreasonable demands was made here.

The comments on Twitter demand much without saying anything worthwhile. They are alumni and that allegedly perfectly justifies their propositions. In some contexts that was also a title for a priestly scholar and these initiatives are nothing else than a religion that demands allegiance. They see themselves on an enlightened mission to rid the world of unbelievers. This has to stop, best would be yesterday.

I think holding these chairs accountable is the best start. Here the mistake was made because they know the smarter ones often give in. That is were Poppers magic words so often cited by the disciples of goodness actually become relevant.

Furthermore I don't think Ford wants to be associated with racism and discrimination again.

What are the long term ramifications of Twitter outrage circles canceling people whose ideas don’t exactly align with the mob? I used to think this trend would fizzle off, or that institutions would learn to ignore a vocal minority, but it seems like neither of these are happening; that the problem is only becoming more perverse. Is this a predominantly North American thing, do other countries handle challenging discourse better?

I'm far from American culture, discussion, problems etc. but reading around the topics of woke, cancel culture etc. I really get the impression of the actions of mentally ill people (which I mean in the literal, not figurative meaning).

If it's "just" a Twitter mob it's bad enough, but this is interfering with the very creating of national / world elites and shaping of fundamental discussions.

Because apparently we've devolved to this:

ITT we flag a post not because it breaks guidelines, but because we disagree with it.

"Think what we please, and say what we think—how better to sum up the happiness of political freedom? And the reverse is pure tyranny." - A History of Knowledge, Charles Van Doren.

I'm starting to think that all of this is a weaponization of culture by elites to undermine political movements and stifle opposition to certain business interests.

The only solution to this sort of thing is if institutions only accept formal, in person complaints from members of that institution.

To do this they’d have to specifically recognize the problem of mob cancellation and decide to listen only to their own members.

Of course this is flagged.

The mob has arrived.

This isn't going to end until enough competent people are pushed away from existing institutions to form their own structures. Which is likely to take at least a generation, and quite likely is going to happen in a different country (don't ask me which). Existing institutions can't be saved because with each successful cancellation, cancellers gain power and remaining opposition loses it.

Question: If someone wanted to do a discussion of race and Phrenology from a "scientific" perspective, is it canceling them to say, "Umm, no, those ideas a fully discredited and you're going to need to do a lot more work than a single paper and a pseudo Ted-talk to attempt to resurrect it."

> You may agree with some of my positions and disagree with others, but in a free society they cannot be considered beyond the pale. I think this is a bad take. In a free society people can consider whatever they want in order to judge a person.

I do see the irony in watching those who traditionally used the mob to force conformity of minorities now experiencing it themselves. Saying things like "the threat woke ideology poses to our culture, our institutions and to our freedoms." As if this is some new phenomena that's only now being discovered, and hasn't been leveraged against different groups since the dawn is society.

This is what it looks like when a traditionally dominant social group becomes somewhat relegated.

It’s never the mob. It’s left-wing activists and their liberal enablers, cowardly or enthusiastic. Always is, always has been.

(Ok not quite, avowed zionist Bari Weiss will happily have you cancelled if you say mean things about Israel.)

Not at all a new thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fire_Raisers_(play)

Why is this flagged? What is wrong with merit?

Based on what little I’ve read about his situation, and general academic conventions, I don’t think MIT should’ve cut the author’s speaking invitation.

But him getting dragged on Twitter? Yeah, that’s going to happen when you write an op-Ed in Newsweek that oafishly compares DEI efforts to the Nazi purge of Jewish students and scholars:

https://www.newsweek.com/diversity-problem-campus-opinion-16...

> Ninety years ago Germany had the best universities in the world. Then an ideological regime obsessed with race came to power and drove many of the best scholars out, gutting the faculties and leading to sustained decay that German universities never fully recovered from.

This has been (rightfully, IMO) flagged, so I'm screaming into the void a bit here, but:

- Claiming that you can build a system that is entirely based on merit is equivalent to claiming that you are able to determine merit in a way that is completely objective and free of implicit or systematic bias. This is a BIG claim.

- There is no such revolutionary method of determining merit being proposed - in this case, "merit" seems to be shorthand for "going back to the way things were before all this DEI stuff came along."

If you look at the people who have been "cancelled" the vast majority of them are still employed, still selling their books, and often have even more prestige as a result (just amongst a specific group). Most of the internet has never heard of Dorian Abbot, yet not only does he still have a job, and not only is he still being invited to MIT to speak (just at a delayed date apparently), but now he has a bunch of advocates arguing on his behalf.

At this point crying cancellation is just a marketing ploy that specific people do before they launch their next book.