Letter on justice and open debate

[ab_grp]

An additional irony: Jenny Boylan tweeted an apology for signing the letter once it became clear to her who else had signed it. Yashca Mounk, Malcolm Gladwell, and J.K. Rowling then took to Twitter to mock and shame her for doing so. "An intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming" indeed.

Yep, that was the apology I was referring to above, although it wasn't just those individuals responding critically to it (they may be some with the largest platforms, though).       

[dismalist]

An additional irony: Jenny Boylan tweeted an apology for signing the letter once it became clear to her who else had signed it. Yashca Mounk, Malcolm Gladwell, and J.K. Rowling then took to Twitter to mock and shame her for doing so. "An intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming" indeed.

More than one person took their names off the list of signatories, on account of the other signatories. That is ironic.

Now, Mounk described this as embarrassing. Gladwell said that he knew that there were other signatories with whom he disagreed. Rowling's twitter list shows attacks on her, but that's all I found.

There is no intolerance here.

[ab_grp]

There is apparently a counterletter being circulated, but I have only found partial text so far.  Anyone come across the full text yet?

[Puget]

Mahaggony, I've heard that example as well, which I believe is usually explained by the need of males in hunter/gather societies to have extreme focus on a single thing (the animal they intend to kill, for example) rather than balance multiple competing interests. (Multiple children under care, for example.)

While there are some sex differences in cognition, this, like most pop science evolutionary psychology, is a load of hokum.

It is true that boys on average are several years behind girls in certain aspects of brain development during adolescence-- this is most likely tied to the fact that a lot of these changes are linked to puberty, which is later on average in boys than girls. Notice I say "on average" in both cases-- there is generally more variation within than between groups on all of these variables.

My broader point is that nothing good comes of non-experts mixing up half-understood and misinterpreted data with an agenda and coming out with things like explanations of why woman are underrepresented in some STEM fields. This is not an "opinion" which deserves equal billing with other "opinions", it is bad science and should be denounced as such. Take the "hear out all sides" argument to its natural conclusion and you have the people who want creationism taught alongside evolution in public schools.

Yup, we want the experts, and only the experts to make decisions for us! Who determines who is expert? The experts, of course!

Who will guard the guardians?

Seriously? Do you want to do some bridge engineering too since who are the engineers to tell you you don't know what you're doing? I'm sorry, but I'm sick and tired of people with no knowledge of neuroscience or psychology thinking they can spout this nonsense, since how hard can it be anyway? Experts are people with actual training and knowledge in a field. Its really not that hard to define.

[mahagonny]

Seriously? Do you want to do some bridge engineering too since who are the engineers to tell you you don't know what you're doing? I'm sorry, but I'm sick and tired of people with no knowledge of neuroscience or psychology thinking they can spout this nonsense, since how hard can it be anyway? Experts are people with actual training and knowledge in a field. Its really not that hard to define.

If only the experts all agreed....

[downer]

An additional irony: Jenny Boylan tweeted an apology for signing the letter once it became clear to her who else had signed it. Yashca Mounk, Malcolm Gladwell, and J.K. Rowling then took to Twitter to mock and shame her for doing so. "An intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming" indeed.

Gladwell's comment was "I signed the Harpers letter because there were lots of people who also signed the Harpers letter whose views I disagreed with. I thought that was the point of the Harpers letter." That is neither mocking nor shaming. It it being critical.

I often agree with the aims of the woke crowd, and for a long time I had little time for complaints about people like that ass Jordan Peterson being given a hard time when they went to campuses to speak. There are times when I'm fully in favor of powerful people with repugnant views and repugnant histories being shouted down and deplatformed.

But over the past few years I have found that the deplatforming and cancel culture is also aimed at anyone who doesn't toe the current woke line, whether they are powerful or not. It certainly has a chilling effect on people exploring ideas. I know I've had discussions about possible academic conference topics, and we have decided to avoid topics that are going to rile up the woke crowd. And while Twitter is a sewer where you basically expect the worst, it is still appalling how people there try to organize campaigns to get others fired for expressing views they disagree with, or even just airing ideas. There is persistent wilful misinterpretation, and people are very quick to accuse others of hate speech for expressing ideas they don't like. I've found that most people on my FB feed don't really care much about the Harper's letter, but some of the people criticizing it just make the usual lazy claims about it being about the mainstream people not liking criticism. I saw the same problems in Jessica Valenti's Guardian piece about it yesterday.

This has the effect of making me less sympathetic with the claims of the woke crowd and much more critical of their causes. Their uncharitability in interpretation and dialog is infectious and divisive. It's am empirical question whether it is a more effective strategy to achieve progress, but I'm pretty sure it is counterproductive.

[dismalist]

Mahaggony, I've heard that example as well, which I believe is usually explained by the need of males in hunter/gather societies to have extreme focus on a single thing (the animal they intend to kill, for example) rather than balance multiple competing interests. (Multiple children under care, for example.)

While there are some sex differences in cognition, this, like most pop science evolutionary psychology, is a load of hokum.

It is true that boys on average are several years behind girls in certain aspects of brain development during adolescence-- this is most likely tied to the fact that a lot of these changes are linked to puberty, which is later on average in boys than girls. Notice I say "on average" in both cases-- there is generally more variation within than between groups on all of these variables.

My broader point is that nothing good comes of non-experts mixing up half-understood and misinterpreted data with an agenda and coming out with things like explanations of why woman are underrepresented in some STEM fields. This is not an "opinion" which deserves equal billing with other "opinions", it is bad science and should be denounced as such. Take the "hear out all sides" argument to its natural conclusion and you have the people who want creationism taught alongside evolution in public schools.

Yup, we want the experts, and only the experts to make decisions for us! Who determines who is expert? The experts, of course!

Who will guard the guardians?

Seriously? Do you want to do some bridge engineering too since who are the engineers to tell you you don't know what you're doing? I'm sorry, but I'm sick and tired of people with no knowledge of neuroscience or psychology thinking they can spout this nonsense, since how hard can it be anyway? Experts are people with actual training and knowledge in a field. Its really not that hard to define.

Well, in engineering it's simple: If their bridges fall down, don't hire them again! Non-experts make the decisions.

How are we to know what is correct in sociology, say? The alternative to a priestly class is competition of ideas. That requires free speech.

[writingprof]

Well, in engineering it's simple: If their bridges fall down, don't hire them again!

That standard sounds like a disparate-impact lawsuit waiting to happen.

[financeguy]

Puget, it would be great to believe "experts" if they didn't have such a long history of selling out to the person with the biggest bank account or gun. There's a great portion of Galbraith's Crash of '29 book that tells of how all of the firms would "get an academic" to promote whatever investment strategy the firm (or assembled "unit trust" at the time) was trying to tout. Sure enough, they were always able to find someone! I'm sure the monetary compensation had no effect on any statements given, just like "expert witnesses" never go along with whatever prosecutor or defense attorney happens to have hired them. Every attorney I've ever known has said 100% of "expert" witnesses were total prostitutes who would say whatever the side hiring them wished, otherwise they wouldn't be there at all to be referred to as experts.

This is before we even get to the field of Psychology which has perhaps one of the most questionable pasts regarding expertise. Wasn't it political pressure rather than field consensus that led to the end of conversion therapy or the fact that gender dysphoria or homosexuality are no longer considered "mental disorders?" You really have no good way to look at this. Either the field's "experts" got it wrong and needed government pressure to change, thus implying that same pressure could be used for ill intent in a field or you believe the entire field of experts got these (and many other things) wrong the entire time, in which case why are we exclusively listening to them?

I don't even think you need to "hear out" all sides. The decision to hear someone is a much different on than the decision to allow or disallow them to speak at all.

[Parasaurolophus]

Gladwell's comment was "I signed the Harpers letter because there were lots of people who also signed the Harpers letter whose views I disagreed with. I thought that was the point of the Harpers letter." That is neither mocking nor shaming. It it being critical.

I agree it's being critical. In context, it's a sharp rebuke. And, as far as I'm concerned, that's OK. But it's pretty clear that many of the signers don't think that's OK when it's directed at them in a public forum, however. Rowling is unhappy that people are critical of her (even mean) on Twitter. But she gives as good as she gets, and to my mind that's perfectly reasonable. It's clearly not how she sees it, however.

Similarly, the "incidents" they oh-so-vaguely refer to don't survive scrutiny--the opposition was perfectly reasonable. For example: "Books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity" sounds bad until you find out it's probably referring to American Dirt which, uh... was not withdrawn and is a bestseller, although the book's POV was criticised and the author came in for some fire for deciding, in 2016, that maybe they were Hispanic after all thank to a distant relative being Puerto Rican. "Editors are fired for running controversial pieces" is probably James Bennet, who ran Tom Cotton's OpEd calling for the military to kill (euphemistically: "crush"; also: "no quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters") BLM protesters. Bennet went on to say he hadn't even read the essay before publishing it. He then resigned. The criticism was sharp, and entirely appropriate. And Bennet's lapse in judgement was a serious one, and the failure to perform his editorial duties at all is staggering. He wasn't fired, but he should have been; the consequence of his actions was entirely apt.

Puget, it would be great to believe "experts" if they didn't have such a long history of selling out to the person with the biggest bank account or gun.

But you and Puget talking about the seriously unsophisticated evolutionary psychology gobbledegook you posted earlier, and the talk of group differences in IQ that preceded it. We know what's what on those scores. It's not a case of two or more equally compelling analyses battling it out. And the people going around parroting them here are pretty clearly seriously misinformed about the results (and consensus) in these fields.

So, for example, group differences in IQ are real; what counts as a "group", however, is problematic, and--counter to the usual assumption--far from homogenous. That's because the way we classify groups has nothing to do with deep genetic structure; it's purely on the basis of phenotypical similarities. Likewise, we know that a significant component of IQ-strength comes from genetics, but that most emphatically does not mean that the genes which control a person's phenotype also control their IQ (in fact, it's pretty preposterous to think so). That's an entirely spurious connection, and yet laypeople tend to think of it that way (and that's been on display in this thread, too).

(With apologies to Puget for bringing it up again, because I'm also not the appropriate expert here, and it's clearly not a discussion they're interested in wading into in their free time. I thought the example might be helpful, but I may well have misjudged.)

This is before we even get to the field of Psychology which has perhaps one of the most questionable pasts regarding expertise.

Different branches of psychology are in different states. Some have a more robust relation to their empirical results, others don't. Even inside one of the more troubled branches, you'll find some results that are quite robust, and others which are dodgier. On the whole, however, even the dodgy areas have done a pretty good job of cleaning up after themselves over the last while.

Regardless, I'm not sure that an expert on finance is best placed to cast these particular stones.

I don't even think you need to "hear out" all sides. The decision to hear someone is a much different on than the decision to allow or disallow them to speak at all.

I think you'll find that the overwhelming majority of the incidents these people are concerned about feature people who were perfectly able to speak their speech, actually. They were just upset that some people took ire. (There are actually a fair few incidents where this hasn't been true, but they don't fit the political narrative at work here so they're ignored.)

[Anselm]

How do open letters like this get passed around to so many different people in different locations?  Is this like a private club or clique?  I suspect that they would have gotten thousands of signatures if there was a wider dissemination.

[mahagonny]

How do open letters like this get passed around to so many different people in different locations?  Is this like a private club or clique?  I suspect that they would have gotten thousands of signatures if there was a wider dissemination.

I would have been happy to sign as long as I wasn't invited to.

[Puget]

Gladwell's comment was "I signed the Harpers letter because there were lots of people who also signed the Harpers letter whose views I disagreed with. I thought that was the point of the Harpers letter." That is neither mocking nor shaming. It it being critical.

I agree it's being critical. In context, it's a sharp rebuke. And, as far as I'm concerned, that's OK. But it's pretty clear that many of the signers don't think that's OK when it's directed at them in a public forum, however. Rowling is unhappy that people are critical of her (even mean) on Twitter. But she gives as good as she gets, and to my mind that's perfectly reasonable. It's clearly not how she sees it, however.

Similarly, the "incidents" they oh-so-vaguely refer to don't survive scrutiny--the opposition was perfectly reasonable. For example: "Books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity" sounds bad until you find out it's probably referring to American Dirt which, uh... was not withdrawn and is a bestseller, although the book's POV was criticised and the author came in for some fire for deciding, in 2016, that maybe they were Hispanic after all thank to a distant relative being Puerto Rican. "Editors are fired for running controversial pieces" is probably James Bennet, who ran Tom Cotton's OpEd calling for the military to kill (euphemistically: "crush"; also: "no quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters") BLM protesters. Bennet went on to say he hadn't even read the essay before publishing it. He then resigned. The criticism was sharp, and entirely appropriate. And Bennet's lapse in judgement was a serious one, and the failure to perform his editorial duties at all is staggering. He wasn't fired, but he should have been; the consequence of his actions was entirely apt.

Puget, it would be great to believe "experts" if they didn't have such a long history of selling out to the person with the biggest bank account or gun.

But you and Puget talking about the seriously unsophisticated evolutionary psychology gobbledegook you posted earlier, and the talk of group differences in IQ that preceded it. We know what's what on those scores. It's not a case of two or more equally compelling analyses battling it out. And the people going around parroting them here are pretty clearly seriously misinformed about the results (and consensus) in these fields.

So, for example, group differences in IQ are real; what counts as a "group", however, is problematic, and--counter to the usual assumption--far from homogenous. That's because the way we classify groups has nothing to do with deep genetic structure; it's purely on the basis of phenotypical similarities. Likewise, we know that a significant component of IQ-strength comes from genetics, but that most emphatically does not mean that the genes which control a person's phenotype also control their IQ (in fact, it's pretty preposterous to think so). That's an entirely spurious connection, and yet laypeople tend to think of it that way (and that's been on display in this thread, too).

(With apologies to Puget for bringing it up again, because I'm also not the appropriate expert here, and it's clearly not a discussion they're interested in wading into in their free time. I thought the example might be helpful, but I may well have misjudged.)

This is before we even get to the field of Psychology which has perhaps one of the most questionable pasts regarding expertise.

Different branches of psychology are in different states. Some have a more robust relation to their empirical results, others don't. Even inside one of the more troubled branches, you'll find some results that are quite robust, and others which are dodgier. On the whole, however, even the dodgy areas have done a pretty good job of cleaning up after themselves over the last while.

Regardless, I'm not sure that an expert on finance is best placed to cast these particular stones.

I don't even think you need to "hear out" all sides. The decision to hear someone is a much different on than the decision to allow or disallow them to speak at all.

I think you'll find that the overwhelming majority of the incidents these people are concerned about feature people who were perfectly able to speak their speech, actually. They were just upset that some people took ire. (There are actually a fair few incidents where this hasn't been true, but they don't fit the political narrative at work here so they're ignored.)

Thanks Parasaurolophus you got that all about right, and I wouldn't have had the patience to explain it all here.

There is a lot more that could be said about all the ways in which group differences in IQ tests have been misconstrued because the misconstruer is ignorant of the genetics, the psychology, or both, or just has an agenda and distorts the data to fit it. I do a whole 50 min of this in class, but I'll just add one thing here.

IQ test are created by humans, and as such are subject to all sorts of (unintentional but often rather obvious) cultural and socioeconomic biases (which are confounded with race). A classic example would be an item asking children to point to the picture of "saucer"-- children from lower SES backgrounds are very unlikely to have encountered cups with saucers, which doesn't make them stupid. The older IQ tests the quack theories rely on evidence from, in particular, are certainly not culture-fair. Since then, there have been good efforts to make more culture-fair tests, but it is important to keep in mind that the testing context (rapport with the tester, comfort in the testing situation, familiarity with standardized tests) also has a big effect. Short version-- differences in performance on IQ tests does not necessarily equal differences in intelligence.

OK, I'm done trying to explain the science, because financeguy, dismalist et al. (if these guys are both economists it explains a whole lot about economic "science") clearly don't care about the science, or science at all. That shows in the suggestion that experts clearly have no expertise if theories and recommendations change over time-- you do realize that's how science works right? Things change as new data becomes available. Do you think Newton was not an expert because physics has advanced past him? Experts are the ones with the best available current knowledge, which is all we can ever have. And I for one certainly don't want to wait for a bridge to fall down to decide that the people building it aren't experts!

[financeguy]

Yet another today.

[dismalist]

OK, I'm done trying to explain the science, because financeguy, dismalist et al. (if these guys are both economists it explains a whole lot about economic "science") clearly don't care about the science, or science at all.

There is no science apart from predicting how bridges DO NOT fall down. Everything else is religion.