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And what would they do? Move to China, lol? They're too self-interested for that, and China censors even more things they'd be inclined to make noise about. Move to allied nations, maybe Australia in Tao's case? It's not such a strategic loss given their political alignment with the US. Just hate conservatives? Don't they already? If you're going to be hated, it's common sense that there's an advantage in also being feared and taken seriously. For now, they're not taking Trump and his allies seriously. A DEI enforcer on campus is a greater and more viscerally formidable authority. It will take certain costly signals to change that.
I think it's legitimate to treat them with disdain and disregard. Americans can afford it, and people who opportunistically accepted braindead woke narratives don't deserve much better treatment. The sanctity of folks like Tao is a strange notion. They themselves believe in equity more than in meritocracy.
Oh so what you're saying is that the Dems should go nuclear next election and cut funding for all conservatives unless they go woke and we should go into an arms war of being the Serious Threat each time one group is in power?
Or are only conservatives morally justified in destroying science for culture war issues?
This like when the governor of Massachusetts threatened to gerrymander her state. Can't threaten much when you've already fired all of your ammo.
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Uh, what conservative science gets government grants?
Army stuff I guess?
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You seem to think that there is a tit for tat MAD argument to be made for restraint. Uh, no, there isn't. A politician promising to punish the hicks for having the audacity to touch the academy is less a political platform and more the hysterical overreaction of a crazy person. There's a popular thread of argument that goes 'but imagine if it was happening to you'. In this case, I don't have to imagine: conservatives have been driven out of everything from literature to knitting to table-top RPG games. Your consequences have already happened. Deterrence doesn't work if the opposing side uses the imagined bad end as a frequently-executed goal that often succeeds.
So yes, we are justified. Oderint dum metuant.
This really does seem to be the basic "it's ok when I do it, crazy when the enemy does it" statement. Not uncommon, but as a principled person who has fought against censorship from all directions I disagree with it.
No, I want to go further then that. I fully hated it when it was done to me: and no amount of principled pleading ever got them to stop. What is happening right now is wrong and you know what? I'm not going to lose any sleep over it.
Certainly, my enemies never did.
So I abandoned the principles. "If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?" Having principled people like you on my side amounted to jack and squat in the past two decades. So why should I care?
I don't want to make peace with them. I don't want to return to 'neutrality', whatever that means. I want to make peace with the dust and the ash, with the sand of the desert: with desolation and ruin. I am Hulegu sacking Baghdad: let the rivers run black with the knowledge I am destroying. Better my rules enforced unfairly, because the ideal neutral is impossible.
This is the compromise you are seeing, a game of defunding and well-written lawfare. What I actually want is the books burned and the scholars that wrote them alongside. Anyone who even knows who Foucault is should have their frontal lobes lobotomized. But I can take what I can get. If my intellectual enemies live in fear and deprivation that is good enough.
Your attempts to appeal to liberal sensibilities fall on deaf ears because I don't have them. Not anymore.
Because there are such things as moral imperatives which you should follow even if they do not bring you material benefits; indeed, even if following them costs you dear. Having been persecuted does not give you a license to persecute in turn, any more than having been raped give you a license to rape your rapist. It's not about what it gets you - it's about right and wrong.
If you are in fact devoid of moral principles (on this topic), then so it goes. No arguing with demons. But don't say that you used to have principles, and now you don't have them "anymore" because they got you nothing tangible. If your moral principles were conditional on beneficial outcomes for you, then you never had any in the first place.
This seems to be claiming that following principles deontologically are better than doing so consequentially. Which may be the case, but not really argued for. I do think there's a strong argument for it, in that consequentialist calculations are irredeemably fraught with bias in such a way as to be meaningless, since people will always, in good faith, calculate the consequences in a way that is biased in their favor.
But the case for taking principles consequentially isn't weak, either. If naively following some principle in a deontological way provably/reliably/logically/etc. reduces [Good Thing], then how do we justify calling the principle "Good?" Well, we don't need to follow it in some naive deontological way, but rather by following consequences.
Let's say a doctor has a personal principle that he will endeavor to make his patients no worse than the counterfactual of if they never saw him. Counterfactuals are intrinsically hard to predict and fraught with bias. So he might decide to avoid his personal bias and just take the deontological position that any action that harms the patient's health is out of bounds for him. Puncturing someone's skin certainly harms the patient's health, even if it's nearly trivial, and so he never draws blood for tests or gives his patients IV (or allows his staff to). This doctor would be less effective than a doctor who follows the exact same principle, but thinks in longer time horizons and figures that the harm of a syringe prick on a patient is outweighed by the benefits of what it enables, in terms of leaving his patient no worse off than otherwise. And in society at large, people who believe in the same principle would commonly prefer the latter consequentialist doctor as fulfilling their principles better than the former deontologist one.
So we could follow the principle of free speech by just never punishing anyone for saying anything (with rare exceptions, etc.) and let the chips fall where they may. I would prefer this, personally. We could also follow it by checking how certain behaviors affect people's ability to exercise free speech in society and then take the action that seems most likely to increase it (or not reduce it or maximize some metric or etc.). I would prefer not this, personally, because, again, this sort of prediction is so fraught with bias that I don't know that there's a way to do it credibly. But I think it's perfectly reasonable to disagree with me on that.
No, not really. As I saw it, the question was more like whether moral principles like "don't persecute people for their speech" are instrumental or axiomatic. My claim was that for a commitment to free speech/intellectual freedom/etc. to count as a "moral principle", it must be an axiomatic belief, not a context-dependent one. You must believe that all else being equal, it is wrong to suppress speech, in and of itself. You can't just believe that it's inadvisable to do so if you want a certain kind of society; and you certainly can't just believe that being pro-free speech will lead to good life outcomes for you personally. You have to believe, consistently, that censorship is in itself an evil which you should try to minimize.
Indeed, you can approach that premise just as easily from a consequentialist framework (ie you may be willing to trade some censorship against a greater good) as a deontological one (ie you will hold yourself to a rule of never, under any circumstance, suppressing speech). I will recognize it as a moral principle you hold in either case.
It is not impossible to justify short-term right-wing censorship based on a consequentialist pursuit of freedom of speech. For example, we have "culture war acceleriationists" mounting arguments of that kind elsewhere in the thread, talking about the need to demonstrate MAD to return to a stable equilibrium later down the line. I'm perfectly willing to believe that they hold free speech as a moral principle, even as they advocate to suppress it in one particular context. But this is not what @crushedoranges was saying. crushedoranges was saying that he'd abandoned his (so-called) principles because holding them had "amounted to jack and squat in the past two decades" for his political tribe. That's not an argument that suppressing some speech now is the best way to maximize free speech later. That's an admission that guaranteeing intellectual freedom was never a goal he believed in for its own sake, just a means to secure unrelated goods for his "side", who naturally ditched it when it failed in that task.
Fair enough, crushedorange's comment indicates pretty clearly that in his specific case, he abandoned his principles. An excessively charitable reading would be that he learned that his naive implementation of free speech principles actually harmed free speech and, as such, abandoned those principles and replaced them with ones that would increase free speech. But there's no way to actually figure out if he's upset that following his previous principles meant that free speech as a principle was being failed, or he's partisanly upset that following those meant that his side was losing, and though the former would be charitable, the latter seems far more likely.
But on this:
This seems like a straightforward way of restating what I said:
If a commitment to free speech doesn't count as a "moral principle" if you implement it by taking action that leads to more people being more free to express themselves instead of taking action that leads to any particular instance of someone you observe speaking being unpunished, then that's just straightforward supremacy of deontology over consequentialism as a way of doing morality.
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By this standard no one except dead martyrs have moral principles.
No, that doesn't follow. You can still exercise good faith, ie trust that people's stated moral principles as real unless proven otherwise, no martyrdom necessary.
To put it another way, it's fine to hold moral principles that do bring you material benefits as a bonus. It's just that if the benefits dry up, and you give up on the principles, then we can state pretty confidently that you never held them for moral reasons in the first place.
I overstated, then. I think your definition of moral principle requires a willingness to be martyred, literally or metaphorically (say, career, social life, tolerating being the acceptable target of hatred, etc), and exceedingly few people hold any principle that strongly.
There's a significant gap between benefits drying up and 'costing you dear,' though.
Let's take two moral principles that I think we might agree the average "normie liberal" of 2008 could have been said to hold: free speech is good, and racism is bad. As it turns out, both of these were quite ideologically constrained for most people- only some free speech is good, and only some racism is bad.
On one hand, I still think both are good principles to have. On the other, holding them in the social climate of the last 15 years makes one into something of a punching bag. If saying "free speech is good" plays a role in making it so academics and journalists have no repercussions for calling people that look like me cancerous goblins that made deals with the devil, my willingness to think free speech is good dwindles rapidly.
Does this mean that my thought of "free speech is good" is not a true moral principle? So be it, it's not a moral principle. I think it is good in theory but the tradeoff cost can and has been reached.
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Well if you no longer believe in freedom, ironically that's your free right to do so. American society is powerful enough to withstand anti-American values such as yours as we have been since the foundation of our country.
Far more powerful threats to freedom have tried to take down the constitutional rights, the freedom fighters who don't give up keep pushing it back up.
lol, lmao even like, you can have that self-narrative for yourself, and that's cool but where were you in the past twenty years? you haven't done anything. Now the right has the stick of power and you retreat to principled liberalism? I don't buy it for a second. Show me your scars. Your medals. Your badges of honor that would have made you a pariah for twenty years. You don't get to claim stolen valor to defend the parasites of academia. You haven't fought for shit.
Do you have any reason to think that @magicalkittycat is not, in fact, just a principled liberal? You are going on these highly emotional and extremely militant rants and assuming that this person is retreating to liberalism for tactical reasons rather than, you know, just being a liberal.
Leftists have, indeed, done some real damage. For example, by supporting soft-on-crime policies. I'm no fan of such delusional ideas. But it seems to me that you are just lashing out blindly. You might do better if you describe specific leftist policies that have damaged you, and if you also do not automatically assume that people who criticize you are part of what to you is the enemy tribe.
Sure. Principled liberals have battle scars from running into reality, and magicalkittycat is neither indicating or claiming any, while repeatedly rejecting other people's observations on sophistic grounds in ways that classical liberals aren't exactly known for, even as he denies or ignores historical dynamics that principled liberals were publicly conceding for decades.
MKC speaks as a leftist assuming the mantle of a liberal, which has been a standard dynamic for decades, not as a classical liberal.
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You can only be a principled liberal if you've been oblivious to the progress of the discourse of the past decade or so. (And indeed, I was right: they were just too young to have lived through the events of the oughts.)
And although their lack of exposure to these seminal events may give them a belief in liberal idealism, it doesn't incline me to take them seriously. When you start going on about 'we freedom fighters' there's a lot of 'who, whom' to be asked about.
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They're so rare, it's like finding a unicorn! Skepticism thereof may be wrong but certainly not surprising.
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Interesting enough, I get the same exact sort of thing from censoring leftists! I was constantly hated on and accused of secret hypocrisy and conservatism for pushing back on things like cracking down on protestors in colleges for saying that people who do crime while protesting should be arrested while people who don't do crime shouldn't be.
It's interesting I've held the same belief and had people on both sides get angry at me.
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20 years ago I was a young child, I'm not sure what I could have done. Too busy with stuff like Pokemon ya know, but I don't think I can blame kid me for not paying attention to the greater world much.
But if you're asking what I've done before about leftist censorship, it's the same thing I'm doing here. Encouraging my fellow Americans (assuming you are one) to embrace free speech and free expression even of ideas they don't like.
Censorship doesn't make dissent go away, it just makes it hide in the shadows. The leftist war on ideas didn't win, and if you have a right wing war on ideas you won't be winning in the long run either. The censors tried to silence heliocentrism, they tried to silence evolution, germ theory, genetics, atomic theory, etc, they lost. The books can burn yet ideas can always be reborn.
Well, good luck with that. It won't work. If you're young as you say, you haven't yet experienced the crushing disappointment of realizing that the institutions that ostensibly protected these things have all been hollowed out and taken over by illiberal enemies. There's no going back. It sucks.
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Yet! Growth mindset. (just a joke)
The shifts on this one over time are fascinating and not addressed well enough that the ostensibly pro-evolution side shifted to anti-genetics. The original ostensibly anti-evolution side hasn't really changed much though.
I appreciate your optimism and will try to adopt some of it as my own, rather than my knee jerk pessimism. Thank you for taking on the challengers and not getting irate in this thread.
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That argument would be a lot stronger if the dems hadn’t already done this, multiple times. There is a reason that all of the conservative leaning talent leaves for industry (it isn’t just about money)
The world isn't only made up of "allies" and "enemies", there's lots of people who have been fighting against censorship from the left who are fighting against it now too. You're always free to join us and keep your principles.
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I mean, I'm assuming Dase is Republican or anti-Dem, and I'd guess they'd be absolutely for this, though I'm not sure "should" is the right term to use. As a Democrat, I would say they absolutely shouldn't do it, at least from a completely cynical and selfish perspective. Woke ideas are unpopular enough nationally that Dems adopting an undeniable "any government function that's not woke must be destroyed" policy would severely hamper their electoral prospects nationally.
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Are you referring to conservative academics? Then sure, let them cut federal funding for the approximately n=0 research universities that are as institutionally aligned to conservatism as the current targets are to progressivism.
If you’re referring to cutting federal funding to conservatives in other domains, though, then that’s a more complex story. Let’s say that the U.S. military is just as conservative as academia is progressive (even though I do not believe that this is actually the case): should Dems cut all federal funding to the military then as retaliation? Clearly not, since by protecting global trade alone, the U.S. military already earns its keep (and I say this as someone opposed to all its interventionist adventures). You may disagree, but I think that the effect of cutting all federal funding to any universities was cut tomorrow would be far less ruinous than doing the same to the military.
Now, since I can’t think of any other institutions that receive federal funding that are as conservative as universities are progressive, the only remaining targets would be governments of red states (which, as we are often reminded by progressives, take in more federal dollars than they give). So do we cut infrastructure funding to these states? Do we cut Medicare and Medicaid? This does seem crueler to me than cutting funding to universities. This is because the telos of federal funding to state governments is (or at least, seems to me, to a first approximation) to be to improve the quality of life of their citizens. If a Dem government would cut funding to red states, that seems tantamount to saying “We want to make the lives of all conservatives significantly worse off.” It’s essentially a declaration of total culture war, an action against “civilians”. In contrast, the telos of universities (or at least, what they say to justify their receipt of my taxpayer money) is something more like “we produce knowledge that benefits the country and the world”. If a Republican government says “no, we don’t think that you’re producing knowledge that benefits the country, but rather, primarily fighting ideological battles” and turns off the spigot of funding, then continuing the previous analogy, this is more akin to attacking a military target like a munitions factory or an airstrip.
To make the point even clearer: even if funding is cut to all universities, there’s still a story that can be told that goes like “Universities currently aren’t serving the best interests of Americans as a nation, so we are no longer giving the money earned by Americans to these institutions.” The equivalent story when cutting funding to all red states would be “Conservative states currently aren’t serving the best interests of Americans as a nation, so we are no longer giving the money earned by Americans to them.” It’s hard for me to see how that isn’t an implicit declaration that conservatives aren’t American, and thus, as a prelude to civil war!
So it's wrong to cut funding to conservative areas for wrongthink because it's a prelude to civil war but in your example where the right wing literally attacks the left in a war analogy it's okay?
There’s already a war going on, one that the universities have been waging since long before the funding cuts. The difference here is whether that war should be a limited war or a total one. Even putting aside the fractions of people implicated—conservatives are ~50% of the U.S. population, while academics are a fraction of a percent (or maybe slightly larger)—there’s a difference in the purpose of cutting funding to progressive universities versus cutting funding to conservative Americans.
Even if I want funding to these universities to be cut, I still don’t want some PhD student, writing their thesis on the inescapable legacy of white male oppression or whatever, to be unable to find a job, or to be unable to be treated for disease. I just don’t want to pay money for the purpose of letting people who hate me spread that hate. They can do that on their own time, with their own money, and even if taxpayer-funded infrastructure helps them do that on their own time better because money is fungible, so be it; it still is qualitatively different from me directly funding their Hate Whitey theses.
[EDIT: I realize that this might seem like a bit of a motte-and-bailey, since there are lots of people whose funding is getting cut whose research is not the maximally-inflammatory Hate Whitey thesis. Here we’d have to get into specifics about whether we’re talking about funding cuts for specific projects or funding cuts for the entire university. The former seem entirely defensible to me. The latter does seem a bit more morally fraught, since there’s more “collateral damage”, but only a bit, in part because there is far less collateral damage than targeting literally all American conservatives, and in part because the collateral damage is not the whole point (whereas it is in the case of targeting literally all American conservatives).]
Can’t you see how that’s qualitatively different from me saying “I don’t want these people to be happy, work, or live at all”?
(P.S. This whole discussion is assuming that we should be funding things federally at all. If you want to argue that we should end all federal taxes, then that’s a whole other story.)
Why? Why is this belief more justifiable in your eyes than the notion that turnabout is fair play, or that the woke memeplex is an existential threat that must be suppressed by any means necessary, or that it's just funny to watch libs cry?
I largely oppose the above notions, but they are clearly memetically superior - more attractive, more consistent, more vital - than the desire for (")neutrality(") that still lives on in the vestiges of the liberal right. I sympathize with your view, but I'd bet that there will be no graceful ending to this conflict.
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Quality > quantity.
Is there a reason to believe a cross-section of the society that has been causing the replication crisis for the professional careers of most of its members is 'quality?'
Who would you rather live next to, a randomly chosen elite college faculty member, or a randomly chosen MAGA?
Having lived next door to both, I can assure you the random MAGA was a far better and more pleasant neighbor than the elite college professor. The MAGA person was fun, invited people to barbecues, always offered to help out, always had his kids running around playing outside. The professor hardly ever interacted with the community other than to harangue someone for some petty slight. Most college professors I've met have been either awkward and socially stunted or actively unpleasant to be around.
IQ is not the only measure of quality.
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Why not 'neither is quality?'
The question of a reason is neither answered or addressed by pointing to a boo group. Even if we were to agree that the boo group is not [good quality], it does not imply that the alternative is thus [good quality]. They can both be [bad quality].
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For years, classical liberals, right-wingers, and classical liberals thrown into the right-wing pit of deplorables have been making that argument -- "what if they did the same to you?". For years, it has fallen on deaf ears. For that argument to work, when the deterrent fails the reprisals must be taken.
The laws are flat and this IS the devil rounding on the left.
Anyway, what are they going to do, revoke tax-exempt status for conservative universities until they bend the knee? Or maybe require Catholics to pay for abortions?
So do you think there should be a censorship arms war or do you want more academic freedom?
You left out a third option: I want a magical pink unicorn who shits gold and whose farts cure cancer. I genuinely see that as more plausible than getting our current university system to support academic freedom.
It's all quite unfortunate, and I suspect there is some genius way to get from where we are to a healthy higher education system without use of a flamethrower. But, no one, and certainly not Trump, knows that genius way, so this is maybe the best of a bunch of bad options.
If the main observable action when in power is to further the downward trend against academic freedom, why should anyone trust the claims being made? Actions speak louder than words after all.
If we want academic freedom we should make moves towards academic freedom, not be indistinguishable from the censors.
If. Notably, that is not the main observable action, since academic freedom isn't being suppressed by defunding academic organizations that violate civil liberties law or by defunding academics that support explicitly anti-academic ideologies. Even if academic freedom were being suppressed, most people don't observe academic freedom as some sort of scalar value that increases when the sum of all academics practicing their academic freedom goes up or something. These are vectors where the specifics matter, and, as such, to say that this is the "main observable action" - even presuming that it were an observable action in the first place, which it isn't - is wrong.
I don't think most people have a difficult distinguishing between the behavior of Trump and his ilk in this context and the behavior of the censors that have been running roughshod throughout academia's veins. Notably, this does make moves towards academic freedom, by punishing organizations and people who have demonstrated and/or made commitments to suppressing academic freedom. If we want academic freedom, we should punish such people so as to provide an incentive not to do it further.
And empirically, one method that has absolutely not worked at all for increasing academic freedom - in fact, it has only resulted in things getting worse and worse over time until today, when academics not being free has become so common knowledge that academia has substantially discredited itself as a source for truth - is to not punish these people when you have power.
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Yes, exactly. This is why current complaints about the lack of academic freedom cannot be taken seriously.
If Ukraine wants peace, they should make moves towards peace, not shoot missiles into Russian territory.
Do you think the only complaints about academic freedom come from the same people who were censoring before?
I hope you are aware there are tons of free speech and first amendment advocacy groups, left and right leaning libertarians, and other stuff like that who opposed left censorship before and are opposing right censorship now.
Yeah, I think most people complaining about this now were either directly participating in the censorship, approving of it, or at most not all that bothered by it.
Sure, there were some pro-free speech groups, I think FIRE is the most prominent. Libertarians are non-entities though, and it would be an odd one if they complained about government grants being cut.
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The ACLU shit the bed ages ago and their top lawyer is in favor of burning books.
FIRE exists and has expanded their purview, yes. I am glad there is one organization that actually has principles.
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What are you positing as the mechanism to get from here to there?
It doesn't seem to have been an option of the last several decades. Supreme Court cases do nothing, black-letter civil rights law does nothing, hitting them in the wallet might have an effect.
There were probably better ways to do it than this, I would agree. But if the alternative is doing nothing and letting progressives keep degrading the institutions, so be it
The mechanism is that instead of limiting free speech and punishing academics for wrongthink, we win at free speech by fighting for the principle. This is what principled libertarian first amendment groups like FIRE are doing.
Allowing shitflinging competitions and "you started it" accusations to consume our freedoms will not restore our freedoms, it just creates a downward spiral. As we can see right now, we're even creating new theories of legal harassment.
We're downward spiraling already when principles are abandoned for revenge grievances. Defending freedom is not and never will be easy.
They failed. Utterly.
Don't confuse not having perfect and permanent success with a failure, or you'll let your free speech rights keep slipping further and further away.
As I said, they failed, utterly. Their protests fell on deaf ears and the academy became more and more exclusive of any opposing views. It turns out that a key part of enforcing ones free speech rights is force.
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Then it is never won. And that is fine! I admire Tolkien's long defeat, but we should not confuse it with something winnable.
It's been winning for a long time in the US! We have slip ups but don't confuse not attaining a permanent perfection with a complete failure. Each time a would be censor is prevented from censoring, a win is had. Sometimes it will fail, but when no one tries to fight for what is right then nothing good will come.
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War is preferable to the one-sided "academic freedom" that previously prevailed.
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I'm fairly sure most top hard-science academics are in favour of meritocracy. The relevant belief they have is instead in blank-slatism: as a matter of faith, they do not accept heredity of merit, especially as correlated with visible social/ethnic group belonging. From this they conclude that apparent differences of outcome between groups must not be due to differences in merit, and a proper meritocracy would not generate them.
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Most who choose to leave will move to Europe, but a few (early career, mostly foreign-born) will find what China can offer them appealing. There's an outside chance that the EU will get off its ass and become a geopolitical rival to the US, but even if they remain aligned it's risky to outsource your brainpower and key industries, TSMC being the most obvious example.
That doesn't make him any worse at math. Such beliefs are common in people like Tao from living in a high-IQ bubble their whole lives. You can listen to Richard Feynman claiming that anyone can do physics at his level through hard work alone (apologies for the silly background music). If we were to fire every professor who believed in the blank slate and replace them with true believers in meritocracy, we'd end up with just the inhabitants of this forum. And while the folks here are pretty bright and may include the vice president, I don't think any of us are solving the great mysteries of theoretical physics anytime soon.
Vance has referenced Scott Alexander's essays indirectly and is familiar with other ratsphere memes and terminology, not sure if there's anything more specific than that.
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It's an old joke from a while back; people started speculating that Vance was secretly commenting on the Motte.
The irony when Vance is on the Motte explaining why people think Vance is on the Motte :P
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Are you saying we might actually get doctors and engineers this time?
European academics doing a stint in the US could come back, sure. Could American academics come here? I'm a bit dubious on that. I'm not that plugged into the university system, but don't exactly have the impression that they're awash in cash, and kicking off a rat race between foreign and domestic academics might be just what we need to get the local libs to start seeing the issues with immigration.
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Europe at this point has been so thoroughly captured by US propaganda that the chances of it breaking with the US geopolitical line are basically nil; ergo, an American academic who moves to Europe will just be serving the same camp in the clash of civilisations for less money.
Ironically, though, European academia is actually less captured by US-style DEI; we can broadly still fail students for being bad with no regard to disparate impact or whatever, and I haven't seen explicit political allegiance tests in hiring. The truest of true believers in the US might therefore find Europe unsatisfactory, and get concentrated further in the US by evaporative cooling.
Maybe not on the Continent, but there is some limited demand for this American export in the UK. This guy found space at the University of Edinburgh and got to work Confronting The University of Edinburgh's History and Legacies of Enslavement and Colonialism.
I don't think anywhere is going to welcome a significant influx of Very American academics. "They're taking our jobs!"
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Nobody is firing professors yet. And no, they'll go to industry, not China. Might actually help with productivity.
At the end of the day this is all a massive, embarrassing bluff, a shit test. A bunch of true believer wokesters in the humanities, with lukewarm STEM intellectuals in tow, are pretending to be the irreplaceable brain of the United States, basically holding the nation hostage. Well, as Lenin said, «intelligentsia is not the brain of the nation, it's its shit», and for all the evils of the Soviet Union it did go to space, and failed through its retarded economic theory (endorsed by many among this very American intelligentsia, surprisingly), not Lenin's anti-meritocratic views.
This movement has, through manipulating procedural outcomes, appropriated funds for (garbage) research that gave their mediocre allies jobs and their commissars more institutional power, delegitimized (potentially very useful) research they didn't like, canceled White and "White-adjacent" academics they didn't like, created a hostile atmosphere and demoralized who knows how many people whose views or ethnicity they didn't like, and now they are supposed to have infinite immunity for their exploitation of the norms of academic freedom and selective enforcement of regulations, because they might throw a hissy fit. And they aren't even delivering! US universities have been rapidly losing their dominance for over a decade! Of top 10 academic institutions, 8 are Chinese already! (Here's a more rigorous, in my view, ranking from CWTS Leiden).
Come to think of it – as a distant echo of these folks' institutional dominance, even I've been permabanned from /r/slatestarcodex of all places, because I've been too discourteous commenting on Kevin Bird's successful cancellation of the "eugenicist" Stephen Hsu (Trace was there too, hah; gave me a stern talking to, shortly before the ban). Now Stephen Hsu is doomposting 24/7 that the US will get brutally folded by China on science, industry and technology. At worst, you might accelerate this by a few months.
It is known I don't like Trump. I don't respect Trump and Trumpism. But his enemies are also undeserving of respect, they are institutionalized terrorists (and many trace their political lineage to literal terrorists), and I can see where Americans are coming from when they say "no negotiation with terrorists". And even then, this is still a kind of negotiation. It's just the first time this academic cabal is facing anything more than a toothless reprimand. Let's see if they change their response in the face of this novel stimulus.
If anything, it is disappointing to me that this pendulum swing is not actually motivated by interest in truth or even by some self-respect among White Americans, it's a power grab by Trump's clique plus panic of Zionists like Bill Ackman who used to support and fund those very institutions with all their excesses and screeds about white supremacy – before they, like the proverbial golem, turned on Israel in the wake of 10/7. But if two wrongs don't make a right, the second wrong doesn't make the original one right either. I have no sympathy for the political culture of American academia, and I endorse calling their bluff.
Oh, I thought you were banned for using Russian punctuation, ((saying something like this.))
There was an automatic suspension for «quotation marks» on /r/TheMotte already, near the end of its life cycle. But manual permaban on /r/slatestarcodex preceded that.
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I don't think this is true. They believe in a different kind of meritocracy, specifically one that focuses on the skills needed for social climbing rather than the nominally productive goals that meritocracy usually implies. "Equity" and "equality" are mere tools to be used to gain social standing, whether by elevating oneself or eliminating one's competition.
If you want to be a social climber act like a normal sociopath and become a politician or a corporate executive.
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