I was amused to hear a heckler yelling about false dichotomy toward the end of the video. Haidt wanted a clean vote between christian university, truth university, and social justice university, so he didn't open the ballot to poll for none of the above.
And it's also amusing to consider that the bulk of his complaint is that there is a disparity in representation of conservative views on university campuses that needs to be remedied, a culture of intolerance, a climate of fear, etc, etc, basically the whole micro-aggression argument inverted to make the conservatives the injured minority; but for other minorities he strenuously argues that remedies for disparities in representation are just wrong. I went looking for another opinion of what a university is supposed to be. I went through Schleiermacher to the wikipedia page for the Humboldt University of Berlin, founded 1810. A brit is quoted saying "the 'Humboldtian' university became a model for the rest of Europe [...] with its central principle being the union of teaching and research in the work of the individual scholar or scientist." The great part of that article is the list of notable alumni and lecturers, including Bismarck, the brothers Grimm, Hegel, Marx, Engels, Heisenberg, Planck, Schrödinger, von Neumann, WEB Du Bois, and Angela Davis. Without watching the video, I granted Haidt the possibility of making a good faith argument. Watching the video it was clear that he cannot resist baiting his opponents as often as possible. Yes, he throws in a few left handed compliments here and there, but he's a partisan. He has no interest in or understanding of the arguments of his opponents on this issue. He is quite happy just mocking his cartoon view of their position. The one place where he cites an experimental study about discrimination, he talks about sending cv's applying for positions with male or female names and claims that the results were exactly the opposite of the results of a similar experiment that I read in Science. Granted there might have been another study with the opposite result, but to pretend that the only study worth mentioning supports his view makes a shambles of his credibility. I just read W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz this past week, and I was surprised to learn, at this late stage of my development, that the nazi's weren't just into final solutions as an end in themselves, they actually had a rational economic interest in declaring groups of people sub-human. They seized the assets of the sub-humans, they imprisoned their populations in labor camps, they employed them as slave labor, and they disposed of them when their value was exhausted. It was a radical value creation proposition for the master race, and ownership of some of that created value is still being contested now. -- rec -- On Mon, Dec 5, 2016 at 4:47 PM, glen ☣ <[email protected]> wrote: > I'd like to challenge the core assertion: that conflict will necessarily > happen. Then, even if we can adequately show it will necessarily happen, > I'd like to challenge the children: > > • that it has happened and > • that it will/has happenened so much that it's caused a problem. > > My challenge lays the burden of proof at the feet of those who claim: a) > that truth and social justice are in any way different and _how_ they are > different, b) that the apparent conflicts we've seen have actually been > between truth and social justice, and c) that this alleged conflict is > somehow more critical than others that seem to be successfully navigated > (e.g. between budget and class size or tenure or admission policies or cost > or the peer review crisis, etc.). > > A second type of challenge is to the (again, false binary) idea that there > are only 2 ways to procede: 1) choose a singular priority or 2) handle each > instance case by case. Why not a 1.5) handle some based on a (volatile) > priority and others by case? Or why not any of a large number of > multi-objective optimization algorithms? Why does it have to be one or the > other? > > You'll note that both the above challenges are the same, really. I claim > telos can be multifarious and solutions to problems can be a mix of > rule-based and case-by-case. Haidt says this can be done in an individual > _human_... So, what is it about institutions that _prevent_ it from being > done? Why do you assert that institutions are simple, whereas individuals > are complex? > > It seems reasonable to believe the "manipulation conception of mechanism", > wherein one can only learn or understand some thing by modifying it. > Hence, the dichotomy Haidt sets up (understand vs. change the world) is > obviously suspect. A university _cannot_ be one or the other. It must be > both. Change allows understanding and understanding allows change. To > artificially separate the two seems a bit childish to me. > > > > On 12/05/2016 01:29 PM, Eric Charles wrote: > >> Glen, >> Certainly one can follow more than one telos, and given fairly compatible >> choices one can typically do so for long periods without encountering >> conflict. But eventually they will conflict, if pursued long enough, and >> when that happens, there are various courses of action, and various >> consequences. One course of action is that you can deny the need to pick a >> priority, and thus handle every instance of a conflict on a case by case >> basis. That leads to schizophrenic behavior on the part of an organization, >> with difficult to interpret inconsistencies in the rewards and punishments >> distributed. >> >> Haidt argues that, we have reached such a state in many universities (to >> use Nick's phrase they have "passed a point of no return"). Conflicts >> between truth-seeking objectives and social-justice objectives are so >> frequent as to be ubiquitous, and the institutions are becoming >> schizophrenic trying to fully pursue both. Faculty don't know what to do >> (can we invite a respected expert on a controversial topic?), and >> administrators don't know what to do when faculty act (yes we put out a >> call for two-sides debates, but experts on both sides might lead to >> objections). The students also don't have a principled way to predict when >> the university will or will not agree with them if they voice an objection. >> It has, in many places, become a grand mess. The result isn't as dramatic >> as all this makes it seem, the result is a slow, but steady, decline in the >> intellectual atmosphere, as everything becomes ever more "safe." >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> ----------- >> Eric P. Charles, Ph.D. >> Supervisory Survey Statistician >> U.S. Marine Corps >> <mailto:[email protected]> >> >> On Mon, Dec 5, 2016 at 1:01 PM, Nick Thompson <[email protected] >> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: >> >> Glen, ‘n all, ____ >> >> __ __ >> >> I thought Haidt's point was not universal, but that we had passed >> some point of no return in the current situation. I have to reread it. >> ____ >> >> __ __ >> >> Somebody once wrote a very profound essay on this subject 45 years >> ago. Oh, Wait a Minute! It was ME! <https://www.researchgate.net/ >> publication/261728846_The_Failure_of_Pluralism> I particularly like the >> author portrait on the title page. ____ >> >> __ __ >> >> We’ve been here before. Clark Kerr vs The Free Speech Movement, >> 1964. ____ >> >> __ __ >> >> Nick ____ >> >> __ __ >> >> Nicholas S. Thompson____ >> >> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology____ >> >> Clark University____ >> >> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ < >> http://home.earthlink.net/%7Enickthompson/naturaldesigns/>____ >> >> __ __ >> >> __ __ >> >> -----Original Message----- >> From: Friam [mailto:[email protected] <mailto: >> [email protected]>] On Behalf Of ?glen? >> Sent: Monday, December 05, 2016 10:15 AM >> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group < >> [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> >> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Truth vs. Social Justice on college campuses >> >> __ __ >> >> Is there anything in the study of telos that demands it be unitary? >> Even assuming "truth" and "social justice" are fundamentally disjoint, why >> must a university choose one over the other when they "collide"? The >> epithet "linear thinker" comes to mind.____ >> >> __ __ >> >> Haidt's parenthetical is important: "But an institution such as a >> university must have one and only one highest and inviolable good."____ >> >> __ __ >> >> Institutions are complex, whether more or less so than the >> individuals composing them is debatable. But anyone who sells you with a >> pitch claiming that a university is a simple structure that must have a >> single arching _purpose_ is obviously a huckster of some sort.____ >> >> __ __ >> >> __ __ >> >> On 12/05/2016 07:33 AM, Eric Charles wrote:____ >> >> > Seems like the type of thing this group likes to digest. (Note, >> there ____ >> >> > is an outline of the talk below the video, so you don't need to >> watch ____ >> >> > anything.)____ >> >> > ____ >> >> > http://heterodoxacademy.org/2016/10/21/one-telos-truth-or-so >> cial-justi <http://heterodoxacademy.org/2016/10/21/one-telos-truth-or-s >> ocial-justi>____ >> >> > ce/____ >> >> __ __ >> >> --____ >> >> ␦glen?____ >> >> __ __ >> >> ============================================================____ >> >> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv____ >> >> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe >> http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com < >> http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com>____ >> >> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ < >> http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/> by Dr. Strangelove____ >> >> >> ============================================================ >> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv >> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College >> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com >> <http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com> >> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ < >> http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/> by Dr. Strangelove >> >> >> >> >> ============================================================ >> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv >> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College >> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com >> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove >> >> > -- > ☣ glen > > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com > FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove >
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