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So we just had an emergency lab meeting about the Charlie Kirk situation. Someone screenshotted an instagram story from one of my fellow lab members and sent in anonymous email to my PI (professor/supervisor). The instagram story said basically that Charlie Kirk's death was a good thing, actually. PI didn't name names, and it was also unclear what exactly the anonymous emailer wanted, but did caution us that this is a dangerous environment to be posting this kind of thing. EDIT: He also said that he STRONGLY disagrees with this position, but he's very in favor of free speech and would defend unnamed individual from the university/public if push came to shove, despite disagreeing with their politics.
I have a couple thoughts about this. Firstly, it's legitimately pretty scary that internet posting is now important enough to warrant an emergency lab meeting. It feels like we rapidly are descending into an authoritarian anti-free speech environment (not that universities were bastions of this to begin with). My own social media and blog are extremely clean, but it's trivially easy to link this account with my real name, and I've posted some not kosher things here before.
Secondly, universities/leftists have kind of done this to themselves. This is the old Cory Doctrow/ Freddie DeBoer stick. Trigger warnings, anti-racism and cancel culture have all led to this kind of environment where speech can be policed in this way by the state and doesn't look hypocritical.
Thirdly, and I hate to say this, but whichever one of my colleagues posted this is a fucking idiot, along with most of the left in my generation. I still think of myself as a socialist, perhaps less so recently, and I want to shake this person and ask what good this kind of statement actually does for our cause. Do you want more vigilante killings? The right is going to come up on top with that one, as most lefties in this country are strangely anti-gun. Do you want to win elections? Advocating for murder isn't very popular with most of the electorate. Do you want continued science funding so you can have a job and accomplish the things that you think are so important you dedicated 8-12 hours of your day to, every day? Then stop tarnishing the reputation of universities and science in general with your crazy politics: our stipends come from taxpayer money. As I've written on earlier, scientists are woefully naive about politics. This is not how you win political victories, which makes me think that the goal isn't actually political victory, but some kind of LARP/ in-group signaling game.
There's a specific critique I've seen about smart people on the left, which is something like there's this overabundance of book smart people who have extreme problems modeling second order social effects.
That critique definitely rings true for me with what I've watched up close and personal the last 15 years (being off and on quite close to a lot of professors, grad students, and professional class people especially).
To make an analogy, I think most of us would recognize that when parents get together to talk about their children, you would avoid discussion about whose children are objectively smart, and whose children are objectively homely, for example. You wouldn't do this because it would be impossible to make this case; you would do this because you would have enough theory of mind to recognize that no good can come of such a discussion. Other people are invested in their kids because their kids are theirs, and it is entirely reasonable for parents to be partisans of their kids. I don't think this means embracing a kind of relativism, exactly. You can recognize that some kids are just brighter than other kids, for example. But it's about a recognition of something like a theory of mind. There's a large social system you're a part of, that has iterated cause and effect, and that has certain needs to remain stable and functional.
But a lot of smart professors, grad students, and professional class people I know seem to be totally incapable of a similar line of thought when it comes to politics and larger groups in society. There's this stance I run into a lot which has the general tone of "Those people are dogs who have shit on the floor, and our job is to loudly and performatively rub their nose in it". It's people acting like they're Jesus whipping the money changers out of the temple. And even if you skip over the amount of completely unjustified arrogance and ignorance is often lurking behind the scenes (I know a lot of people who are very smart about a narrow band of specialist knowledge and then extrapolate from there to everything else in the world that someone might know), it's just intensely counterproductive, particularly when waved around in public... but honestly, even in more limited contexts, it's really counterproductive there too.
I think this is especially so when it comes to these theories about oppressor-oppressed dynamics. The public assertion "black people can't be racist" fundamentally doesn't work in game theory terms, if you want "racist" to continue being a powerful social sin and taboo. And that's because of second order dynamics. But the stance I've run into by the kinds of people I'm critiquing is that it is "true", as a universal intellectual matter, that black people can't be racist... just like gravity exists and the earth is round. So other people need to be made to accept that "fact". They need to be called out.
And I feel like that kind of deformed reasoning lurks behind observations like "the oppressed have a right to violent resist their oppressors" and "we should provocatively publicly celebrate violence against our enemies who are still part of the same polity". It's treated as something like a dogma and a provocative "truth". But as far as I am concerned, it betrays a total, pathological collapse of theory of mind.
I don't have any theory about this, but this also rings true to me - that said, I doubt that it's a left-specific thing. It's just that the left, as the progressive party claiming to be better than tradition, has the obligation to actually credibly check that they really are better, and one of the ways we claim to be better is in understanding social, cultural, political systems. Hence all the "educate yourself" about "white supremacy" and such.
It's strange to notice this in multiple parts that seem like they should be disparate from each other, such as no apparent ability to model things like how easily violence can create a feedback loop that escalates, or how setting up rules by which individuals' words are held as truth based on their race/sex can be abused by unscrupulous individuals, who are always present, or how the economy would progress if we took enough of billionaires' money to "solve world hunger" or "solve homelessness" based on naive "$X/person can buy enough to feed them for Y years or build a brand new house for them" or how children will behave when told that whatever they feel about their identity is sacrosanct and to be enforced on others violently if necessary.
Interesting metaphor, not a bad one. This is the kind of behavior that has convinced me that the vast majority of these people don't care about actually accomplishing social justice. Because if you want to actually accomplish something meaningful in a hostile and changing environment like politics/culture wars, you can't just pick a role that you like (and that just so happens to make you feel virtuous while yelling at and denigrating and sometimes even hurting people you dislike) and then ride it off a cliff. You have to model the world, including enemy combatants and innocent bystanders and physics and everything else, accurately and precisely enough to be able to make good enough predictions to allow you to outplay your opponents.
Simultaneously, you also have to make sure that accomplishing the goal you're trying to accomplish is actually successful at accomplishing the goal you want to accomplish. Almost everyone believes that they are motivated by genuinely good things. As such, if you believe that you are motivated by genuinely good things, that should shift the needle almost none on you actually being motivated by genuinely good things - even if you had bad motivations, you would almost certainly take on the belief that your motivations are pure. So you have to actually check that the actions you're taking are accomplishing the good that you want to accomplish. Which necessarily means seriously taking input from people who disagree greatly with you; you and people who agree with you have close to zero credibility with which to judge the goodness of the effects of your actions, because it would make them feel really good to judge you as good.
I don't see a whole lot of either on any side. But, again, I hold my side to a higher standard and am thus more saddened by the left failing so spectacularly at what, to me, seems pretty obvious layups. Like, the left controls so much of academia, it should be possible to at least begin doing good-faith research and modeling that allow them to model second-order effects demonstrably significantly better than the opponents, and also to at least begin setting up credible systems to try to triangulate what the true goodness of the effects of certain policies would be.
Well, maybe it's impossible now due to academia having so harmed its credibility over the past couple decades. Maybe it was never possible. But I do think that at some point in the past 50 years, it was possible at some point, and no one noticed when it became impossible.
Another great comment! Academia is supposed to be this place where these ideas can be debated, which I think is the appeal of it to me. It would be one thing if professors/scientists said: "I don't care what the science says about xyz policy, I believe abc for ideological reasons". That's basically what the right does most of the time, which I find annoying, but not objectionable. It's this twisting of objective truth finding that really grinds my gears. Things like racism is a bigger public health crisis than COVID, denial of a genetic basis for racial differences, and excessive focus on grifting redistributive policies that don't work do a lot to undermine public trust in sense making as a way to tackle problems. Now I don't think right-leaning academia would necessarily be much better (look at all the crap that people come up with about seed oils), but that's not the world we live in.
And maybe it's never really been free from bias (which many posters here will certainly be happy to claim), but I think it's also crazy to deny that science is objectively more corrupt and less effective at changing society (for the better) than 100 years ago.
I actually had a professor who said something like this. He was talking about some differences between countries. Somebody asked whether genetic differences might be a factor, and the professor said "they probably are, but I'm ignoring that because it's against my religion".
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