domain:experimental-history.com
crushedoranges
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
1d ago
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.
Goodguy
1d ago
Well, I more or less am one, and for obvious human emotional reasons I enjoy spending time around other ones, so subjectively to me, while I do find them unfortunately much much less common than I would wish, at least to me they don't seem so rare as finding a unicorn.
anon_
1d ago
I'm not really talking about national politics, I'm talking about the petty intradepartmental stuff. Or maybe it's just "all politics is local" again.
Moreover, they can't care about it because the people that do care have infinite time to devote to political games.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1d ago
The leftist war on ideas didn't win
Yet! Growth mindset. (just a joke)
they tried to silence evolution... genetics
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.
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.
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.
anon_
1d ago
Yeah, the kind of person whose opinion matters is only the kind of person with political stature.
anon_
1d ago
Writing some boilerplate doesn't require politics. It's indicative of someone whose political stance is to recite whatever those who care about politics care about in order to do esoteric math.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1d ago
principled liberal
They're so rare, it's like finding a unicorn! Skepticism thereof may be wrong but certainly not surprising.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
When we examine the world and we see a common self-perception bias about one's self and their own groups, one that all those other groups are blind to for themselves it stands to reason we might also have that same bias even if we don't see it.
This is just a fancier way of saying "How can you really know you know anything, maaan??" And if you believe in perceptual bias that severe, you might as well give up on science anyway because you cannot trust any of the observations.
magicalkittycat
1d ago
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.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1d ago
How certain are you that you're actually being attacked
What are the consequences for a NYT or New Yorker journalist, or Yale speaker, or children's book author, that refers to white people as a cancer, as goblins, as a deal with the devil?
What are the consequences for a 14 year old that sang along to the wrong rap song in a Snapchat video and is trying to get accepted to college 4 years later? I assume he got in somewhere, eventually. But not his top choices.
What are the consequences for corporate HR departments putting out there "don't hire white people"?
That the powerful conservatives are attacking everyone and that their left wing censorious behavior is justified in defense. They're just as convinced as themselves as you are.
I hear that kind of thing, but up until Trump's re-election they didn't bother providing any evidence. After, they just point at Trump, which I don't find convincing but it's better than a huffed "obviously!"
At best, one might get complaints of disparate impact, but that's a lot weaker IMO than plain-letter discrimination. Alas, they have different moral foundations than I do, and at this point the conversation hits a dead end.
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.
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?
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.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1d ago
Granted, the wokes were certainly not great for intellectual honesty. They had some topics where they had ideological blinders -- anything related to women, race, DEI.
You are a master of understatement.
Any genuine intellectual had to either learn Kolmogorov complicity (like Scott Aaronson)
With intellectuals like these, who needs anti-intellectuals? While I disagree with Alexander's take on complicity, I can at least understand where he's coming from in theory. Aaronson, with his persecution complex, groveling to people who hate him, and who attributes his desire to have children entirely to spite, does not strike me as someone capable of doing anything worthwhile with that complicity. It is not a matter of convenience or strategy for him.
On the other hand, it is bizarre that the game designers even included a dialog option to criticize Zelenskyy for not wearing a suit.
The best part of the AO with Chris Christie was the anecdote near the end, Chris talking about Trump trying to do his makeup at some campaign event. The man cares about appearances, in his way.
I also do not think any big university will fully suck up to Trump, e.g. giving him a honorary doctorate
Like Trump, the universities that "matter" are way too prideful to do anything so strategic. And to be fair, the big ones are probably correct that they can play out the clock instead. That said, that does suggest exactly where they find their telos these decrepit days.
magicalkittycat
1d ago
Falling back to "How can you really know you know anything, maaan??" is not particularly convincing. Many of the people you have been arguing with have been observing or participating in (voluntarily or otherwise) the culture war for over a decade. And most of the evidence is there, and a good bit of it has been posted.
When we examine the world and we see a common self-perception bias about one's self and their own groups, one that all those other groups are blind to for themselves it stands to reason we might also have that same bias even if we don't see it.
Because of course we wouldn't, all those other groups are blind to their bias and there doesn't seem to be any other exceptions. Why would we be so special?
That doesn't mean we aren't and can't be an exception, but "I don't see it" is a weak response. Of course not, none of the other groups see theirs.
magicalkittycat
1d ago
Organizations like FIRE are a great resource to find ongoing attacks against free speech and free expression by government https://www.thefire.org/
For example the most recent one in the "cumulative theory of harassment" https://www.thefire.org/news/findings-against-harvard-are-blueprint-national-campus-speech-code and the censorship of legal anti-semitic speech.
Another problem with the cumulative theory of harassment is that it holds current speakers responsible for creating a “hostile environment” based on the previous statements and activities of people to whom they may be entirely unrelated. This means anyone can find themselves in the position of perpetrator of hostile environment harassment without himself or herself actually engaging in harassing behavior.
Consider, for example, the following account said to “highlight the hostile environment created for Jewish and Israeli students at Harvard,” according to HHS:
On May 12, 2024, a crudely drawn image of Interim President Garber was also displayed [during an encampment protest] depicting him as a devil with horns and a tail, recalling “medieval antisemitic tropes of Jews as Satan’s minions.
Like posting a political cartoon to Instagram, simply displaying such a picture simply cannot be deemed harassment by any rational measure, let alone be taken as serious enough to deny the person seeing it “equal access to an educational program or activity.” The Supreme Court’s decision in Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education established the standard for peer harassment under Title IX, holding schools liable only when they are deliberately indifferent to harassment that is severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive, and even warns of “the amount of litigation that would be invited by entertaining claims of official indifference to a single instance of one-on-one peer harassment.”
Under the cumulative theory of harassment, that’s out the window. A school like Harvard must consider each individual student’s choice to display this picture as part of a pattern of behavior that consists of everything everyone else is doing on campus during some undefined period of time, whether or not the student knew anything about it.
As they conclude
Real discrimination deserves a real response. True threats, vandalism, and violence are not protected speech and schools should act when they occur. But they must do so with the precision the Constitution requires — punishing conduct, not ideas, and respecting the robust political debate that higher education exists to nurture.
Harvard’s case should be a warning. Unless we properly respect the line between speech and misconduct, Title VI risks becoming not a shield against injustice, but a sword for enforcing the orthodoxy favored by whatever political forces wield it, now or in the future.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1d ago
Man, I donno. Girl Dad to Boy Mom, I don't envy raising boys in this environment. All the same, if he's gonna grow into a man that doesn't want to end up a professional pariah or in jail, he's is going to have to learn to stuff his anger into the seeds of a cardiac event. Just a man's lot in life. Best advice I ever got is "When you have to eat shit, take big bites".
magicalkittycat
1d ago
It's more showing that Conservatives can also destroy them and their ability to do science, similar to their progressive coworkers that force them to add the line of text in order to not be destroyed currently.
I think the history of religious conservatives waging war on evolution, environmental science, and the new embrace of anti vaccine beliefs has shown that already has it not?
And yet, all this seems to have done is just further hurt scientific research instead of counteracting any sort of left wing attacks.
Throwaway05
1d ago
Many major metro areas have big and tall stores, depending on yours they may have something that fits your needs or know how to help you look.
Depending on your social network you can sometimes find athletes who have the hookup or a decent plan that doesn't involve tailoring everything. Trickier to do but you'd be surprised how much of a market exists for "finding a home an NBA player can actually shower in" and how that trickles down.
I just gave up and wear scrubs but that probably doesn't help you.
This is true. Is not the proper response to look at the evidence available and draw one's own conclusions?
I would hope others in a rationalist community are aware of how our own biases can impact our perception. Maybe you haven't read things like the lens that sees it's flaws and other parts of the sequences before, I recommend it
When we examine the world and we see a common self-perception bias about one's self and their own groups, one that all those other groups are blind to for themselves it stands to reason we might also have that same bias even if we don't see it. How sure are you that you're uniquely immune?
crushedoranges
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
1d ago
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.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Universities aligned themselves with one side of the friend-enemy distinction, that side lost, therefore they must suffer.
Sure, since 2000, campuses really doubled down on social justice.
But that is only half of the story. The other half is that MAGA has fully embraced anti-intellectualism.
Granted, the wokes were certainly not great for intellectual honesty. They had some topics where they had ideological blinders -- anything related to women, race, DEI. Any genuine intellectual had to either learn Kolmogorov complicity (like Scott Aaronson) or be an independent and contrary figure (like Scott Alexander).
From what I can tell, MAGA has little use for intellect. Take the previous Republican president, GWB. He was also not an intellectual giant (though likely smarter than his opponents painted him as). But his policies were written by smart people in conservative think tanks. I disagree with a lot of his policies -- mainly his wars and torture prisons, but I would probably also disagree about his tax policy if I read up on it -- but his policies were at least coherent.
Not so with Trump. His tariff announcements were simply some underling of his asking ChatGPT for the trade deficits with various countries. While he certainly has an uncanny ability for showmanship, he does not have a political vision apart from becoming president and getting the peace Nobel. He is against immigrants because that is what his voters want.
A lot of politicians are opportunistic to some degree. But most pick up the spoken and unspoken rules. With Trump, I have the feeling that he is playing president simulator and skipping through all the dialog and ignoring the world-building. Take J6. If he had read the supplemental material, he would have known that the coup game mechanics work different in POTUS2016 than in Tropico, and just telling his followers to "stop the steal" would be futile. But he does not care about the finer points. He wants to be a beloved king, whatever the Americans call him. (He can't be playing a tabletop because any self-respecting DM would have either stopped his character or walked out. On the other hand, it is bizarre that the game designers even included a dialog option to criticize Zelenskyy for not wearing a suit.)
I think that even in the GWB era, the universities were mostly left-leaning. But they also knew that Bush needed the US to keep its technological advantage for his new American century grand strategy or whatever. With Trump, all bets are off. That guy put an anti-vaxxer in charge of the health department, not out of personal conviction or even because it was a big campaign promise, but just on a whim. Whatever research is done in the STEM departments of universities, and however useful it is to either humanity or the US in particular, it is likely less beneficial than vaccine development.
In short, the universities had quite a few bad reasons to be against Trump (e.g. SJ), but they also had a lot of excellent reasons to be against him. I also do not think any big university will fully suck up to Trump, e.g. giving him a honorary doctorate (which would work great -- a pompous celebration of Trump is just what he is waiting for).
It depends!
One thing that most first amendment scholars and libertarians will agree on is that private action and government action are different things. While we should still embrace freedom of speech in private proceedings, there's a difference between say, your boss firing you for your speech criticizing they had an affair and a city council gaveling you down for alleging one of them had an affair.
For a private organization like NYT or New Yorker, the consequences for such speech is on the owners of the private organization. Do they want to fire the employee? They can if they want. Do readers want to boycott over the employee? Also fine.
I would expect the same if someone said blacks were animals or Jews were parasites or anything else. The owner of a private company has editorial control over their company.
For a public university? There should be none. For private universities it's a more difficult question. https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/private-universities
I would hope they hold themselves to the standards of free speech as they often claim they do, and they should be bound to any promises they make regarding such freedoms but ultimately as FIRE puts it
And if you think about it, groups like private Christian/Jewish/Muslim religious universities wouldn't be able to exist if they were legally bound to the same standards as public ones since they would not be able to select off religion as they do.
Again I would hope that private institutions embrace free speech and free expression on their own accord, but they have every right not to.
I can name two pretty big examples of the top of my head, the targeting of evolution and the targeting of climate science.
More options
Context Copy link