The War at Stanford - The Atlantic
A few interesting things about this article:
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The author is a sophomore student-journalist, and it's really good writing, by any standard. It turns out his parents are both top journalists. Nature vs nurture (vs high-status parents faking achievements by their kids to make them look good) is ambiguous, yet again!
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One observation he makes that I hadn't seen in other reporting on campus protests, is that college admissions select for people who are "really good at looking really good," which includes strategic political posturing. This reminded me of my own experience at a high school that hyper-optimized for college admission, where I quickly became jaded by classmates openly-performative "activism." Are the elite student protestors my former classmates' gen-z counterparts? If so, how do my elite "betters" actually go on to do good things? Or, if the elite students are genuinely better than me, why are the people who are the best at looking the best mounting their (electrically conductive material, as required by this deliberately mixed metaphor) flagpole to the third rail? Or, is the sophomore student-journalist's observation true, but irrelevant, making this is just a really well-written, yet redundant, article about campus protests?
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The Stanford administration banned calls for genocide, in response to the House hearing, but acknowledged to the reporter that this is illegal, due to a California statute requiring all universities to adhere to the First Amendment, not just public universities. I'm curious what the PR and legal discussions leading to this "ban" were, and what may result from it.
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28d ago
If "fifty Stalins" is original to Scott, I love the irony that one of his best insights is from his presentation of a viewpoint he opposes, but that is not it; it was him justifying skepticism of social scientists, by listing examples of social scientists openly stating they were ideologically motivated.
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29d ago
Apologies. I'm rushed, but hopefully describing the basic idea and the prior idea it implicitly contrasts is a sufficient explanation of why it's worth discussing.
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29d ago
I checked the ones with seemingly relevant titles, but no, it was a list of examples of social scientists saying they were ideologically motivated. But perhaps Scott removed it.
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29d ago
Do you remember what belief?
Some social justice thing, the implication being that they were doing pseudoscience in bad faith.
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29d ago
Shouldn't this username be relatively dyslexic-friendly, as the two symbols have a spacial displacement and alternate 1-1, as opposed to a random string of p and q?
I assumed it'd be least bad for a question with culture war implications to go in the culture war thread.
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30d ago
I (possibly mis-)remember an SSC post, in which Scott linked examples of social scientists stating that the purpose of social science was to prove a such-and-such belief, but I couldn't find it. Anyone know which post this is, or have their own examples of social scientists stating this?
(I know this is a suspicious comment by the standards of the Motte, but it can't be asked at all in /r/slatestarcodex)
I meant I was curious about the PR and legal reasoning of Stanford announcing a "ban" they acknowledge is illegal to enforce.
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