hey academics out there ive got something on my mind and i wondered if you could help me out. question in next tweet
so what im wondering is if your so smart how did you end up seeing your control over your profession stripped from you by mere administrators and how did you end up in a position where speech and thought are more restricted on university campuses than anywhere else in society
thanks ill take my answer offline
follow up question can you say "im living the life of the mind" without wanting to hurl yourself from a precipice to escape the shame you carry and which briefly reemerges when you think abt your forebears before you shove it under the surface when you remember your mortgage
and do you ever think about the millennia of christians who would sooner die than falsify their beliefs and often did and how your profession is a continuation of the medieval clergy and how a high duty of fidelity to conscience might not be doffed quite as easily as a cassock
do you ever wonder about the blood price men paid over centuries to be able to speak and think freely and wonder further at your exemption from having to ever even theoretically make such sacrifices yourself in our enlightened age
no further questions
or perhaps all of this is in keeping with tradition
overall im not sure weve made a good trade here if we judge convictions by the courage with which men hold them
the only real scientists were socrates and archimedes
"what are you talking about robot? why IM an academic and IVE never felt unable to express my opinions"
this thread was actually spurred by recalling that time literally hundreds of economists in positions of national prominence turned on an eminent colleague and denounced him in droves for suggesting riots might be counterproductive archive.is/zDsNS
Challenge to professors who definitely face no limits on their expression:
Go ahead. Post a piece of paper by your office that simply says "It's Okay to Be White"
these are a few prominent examples off the top of my head
because of their prominence they are especially well-documented
i am aware of many other cases some of which i cant discuss because i know the people involved
and there are many, many others none of us have heard of
the other thing is that you dont need to get everyone who things Wrong Things to strangle discussions. you can just make examples of some people and if these heroes break publicly?
well. generally lesser lights will follow
every apology was a failure. better men would've never.
anyway, As You Know
all of this has led to faculty jobs requiring applicants to submit groveling statements affirming their conformity to an ideological regime
@browserdotsys @shieldfoss i was thinking about the problem of how martyrdom and responsibilities to children interact
for students . . . idk. you dont want to screw their careers but if you dont stand firm what lesson are you teaching them, and what kind of profession are you even passing on to them?
@browserdotsys @shieldfoss i dont think i could bear the idea of leaving my toddler without a father irrespective of any cost to my integrity though, so im not sure you should take anything i say seriously
@trivialanalyst and no one at wal mart CLAIMS to be pursing Truth or Knowledge. they are literally trying to make a few bucks
the only reason universities have any authority is that theyre devoted to doing something greater
as I've written before--I can't find the thread--pseudonymy is easily defended. it has had a substantial tradition in american discourse since the founding
and there are very good reasons for maintaining it, even--*especially*--in a political context
the thought foremost in my mind is, education is going to become much more important for our children. not as a means of earning a living but as a means of becoming realized and independent humans in a dehumanizing age
the notion of education in the latter 20th century being wholly a matter of practical knowledge rather than of personal development has always been exaggerated
but set aside practicality; imagine a world where bodily survival and provision are not dependent on such learned skill
there is still a purpose to education in conveying to children the ways of living, thinking and acting and speaking, that we have found worthy
that is, the point of such education is guiding a child to becoming the kind of person who it is worth being for a lifetime
i was curious if or how they might justify any such moves
explicitly calling it "compelled speech" in a public statement is much more assertive than I'd expected
i wonder where this new respect for speech freedom is coming from ha ha
but fr i hadn't expected this and it feels like a big deal
it's the first meaningful rollback of Awokening policy, and MIT doing it in these terms gives significant elite cover to other schools that might _want_ do it
this isnt just netflix or doritos this is every product
the main reason it tends to be more pronounced in tech products is that tech products have vastly better and cheaper telemetry than legacy industries and it's easy to run sufficiently-powered A/B tests on consumers
facebook in particular was when i was there incredibly well-developed in this kind of measurement; their internal tooling and organizational practices in product analytics were afaik the best in the world
it was an exquisite organizational and technical accomplishment
i won't get into details although I don't think it's much of an industrial secret
but basically, the impact of every feature change and every product team could be rigorously measured and tracked and usually were
there was a ton of upside to this but perhaps one major downside