Heterodox Academy

On the topic of intellectual openness, a nonprofit doing great work in this area is Heterodox Academy (https://heterodoxacademy.org/). Their definition of the problem evident in Western academia (particularly the US) is worth checking out: https://heterodoxacademy.org/the-problem/

I believe greater job security would improve many aspects of society, this argument implies that people with very high job security designed to promote risky speech would promote more viewpoint diversity. Yet tenured faculty seem to be part of cancel culture. Heterodox Academy https://heterodoxacademy.org, its members, and peers are trying to reverse the trend away from diverse views among academics, but they, or as a member I should say we, are a minority in academia and swimming against a strong current. That current undermines this article's argument.

> Since people are notoriously bad at being self-skeptical, the best way to learn what is actually true is by encouraging viewpoint diversity: https://heterodoxacademy.org/ I don't know if this is because of my European point-of-view but that site seems to be exactly the opposite. It seems to identify changes in opinion on universities as an inherent problem and that the former ratio should be promoted. Furthermore it clumps together far-left & liberal in some absurd common pool "proving" the lack of diversity of opinion. I mean a lot of European "diversity of opinion" is in precisely that single pool.

> Researchers should ask these questions to determine if the correlation is actually caused by anything real, or if it's better explained by some other underlying factor. Yes, absolutely! But this only works if people apply the same skepticism towards the theories they find more politically palatable. See: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor… Since people are notoriously bad at being self-skeptical, the best way to learn what is actually true is by encouraging viewpoint diversity: https://heterodoxacademy.org/

I agree. These three points you raise are discussed at length in this blog post constructed around a letter written by Judge Flemming in 1969 which accurately predicted how a quota system, or using different standards for different groups, would result in these types of negative outcomes: https://heterodoxacademy.org/blog/the-amazing-1969-prophecy-that-racia… Undermining the credibility of existing, properly qualified players in the field is one of the most pernicious aspects of a quota system.

I will provide the following as it sums up the issue better than I can. https://heterodoxacademy.org/political-firings-left-leaning-faculty/

This was said in a glib manner, which may be the reason for the downvotes, but it is completely true. This is how the Heterodox Academy defines itself: >Heterodox Academy is a group of 4,100+ educators, administrators, & graduate students who believe diverse viewpoints & open inquiry are critical to research & learning. [1] Does anyone think that a person who joins a group focusing on promoting "diverse viewpoints" is going to have a representative view of sharing controversial opinions? This is a wildly biased population of people to be answering this question. [1] - https://heterodoxacademy.org/

A related theory is the Greater Male Variability Hypothesis - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesis The idea being that males tend to have flatter/wider distributions of traits, leading to higher populations at the extremes of those traits. This can include aggression, risk aversion, etc. More at the Heterodox Academy - https://heterodoxacademy.org/the-greater-male-variability-hypothesis/

Obligatory plug for https://heterodoxacademy.org/ However, lately I've come to wonder if the solution isn't simply to defund all non-STEM academic subjects. It seems likely that subjects that aren't strongly tied down to some sort of objective utility function will always drift towards some sort of strange and extreme agendas.

I'm not sure about that anymore (atleast in practice). There's a lot of subtle speech policing that happens especially in academic circles and there's some amount of counter movements too (e.g. https://heterodoxacademy.org/)

If you believe in reason I suggest reading the Quilette [1] and if you have an academic background you can join the Heterodox Academy [2]. [1] http://quillette.com [2] https://heterodoxacademy.org

Here is an article from Heterdox academy that attempted to do a metanalysis of studies to determine if Damore was correct in saying there are certain traits that men display a wider distribution on. They conclude he was. I have not personally looked at any of this data, nor vouch for it or Damore's or their conclusion. It could be wrong, either because the current best science is wrong or because the summary is unfair or inaccurate. My only point is that it appears to be a statement with some scientific support, not something that can easily be dismissed as false. http://heterodoxacademy.org/the-greater-male-variability-hypothesis/

I agree. This error has a pretty happy ending, but I think more political and ideological diversity in academia and journalism would help to spot these errors sooner and improve the overall quality of science and science journalism. In particular, in this case, a progressive research firm was trusted by academics who were trusted by journalists. Mistakes will happen regardless, but I wonder if a more skeptical eye somewhere in the pipeline would have caught this error sooner. Fortunately, there are bipartisan organizations like [Heterodox Academy][0] which are working to correct this. [0]: https://heterodoxacademy.org

That used to be the tendency, yes, but according to Jonathan Haidt at https://heterodoxacademy.org, "the left" has caught up to "the right"/conservatives in the number of scientific topics they deny outright, and it has happened in the last 5 years. So very recently, and unless you've been to college in those years, you won't be aware of it. I forget where he said it, or I would link to it. It might have been in a recent conversation he had with Jordan Peterson.

Here is a follow-up article written by one of the 33 members of the University of Pennsylvania Law School faculty to sign a letter criticizing Amy Wax: Don’t Care if Amy Wax Is Politically Incorrect; I Do Care that She’s Empirically Incorrect https://heterodoxacademy.org/2017/09/03/i-dont-care-if-amy-wax-is-poli…

Well, yes, if you're asking are there more or less of those things we'd call "protests", then it's not clear at all that there are any more or less than at some other point in time. I mean, I saw a protest on the street the other day: it was two guys and a policeman… You'll notice however that is a far cry from a representative summary of my point. Anyway, there are people who've researched this, notably Jonathan Haidt. They created a website to talk about the problem here: https://heterodoxacademy.org/ . And they think that there is a problem of shrinking viewpoint diversity in the social sciences. My experience is that it's gotten worse, but we don't seem to be able to agree on that.

Violence" is always somehow brought into the mix by conservatives. Antifa's aggression is the fault of conservatives? Sounds like victim-blaming to me. Ann Coulter is the same way, and the sheer craziness of saying a woman on the New York Times best seller list, on talk shows everyday, somehow is having her right to free speech stopped by not being able to give a lecture on campus at the most crazy liberal college in the nation. The issue isn't Ann Coulter and her right to speak at Berkley. The issue is what it says about Berkeley and leftists in general: Namely, that they have no interest whatsoever in listening to or engaging with ideological opponents, and would rather just shut them up. If this was an isolated incident, people would not care so much. But it's not. http://heterodoxacademy.org/2016/10/21/one-telos-truth-or-social-justi…

> Several times he references the Stevens/Haidt results, but doesn't seem to acknowledge this finding from Stevens/Haidt (https://heterodoxacademy.org/2017/08/10/the-google-memo-what...): Excellent citation. I think it overreaches a little in attributing the position that women don't perform as well as men at software engineering, ie. they label many claims red which people have attributed to Damore, but he didn't make those claims; I believe Damore said the exact opposite actually, that women absolutely can perform at the same level, but that women simply aren't interested in CS careers. Your cite covers this in the conclusions, so it's pretty fair overall. As your citation explains, in societies with greater gender equality, women have so many other choice of careers that CS just isn't an attractive option. Perhaps it's not attractive for reasons that can be changed, but those reasons should be investigated, not simply assumed to be driven by sexism.

> Postmodern thinkers are not preventing anyone from speaking, are they? You don't have to like Derrida today, and it's perfectly fine to disagree with Deleuze, Guattari or Fanon... Depends on who you include under the definition of "postmodern thinkers". I don't hear a whole lot of noise coming from Academic Philosophers per se, but the intellectual heirs of the postmodernists as expressed in the social sciences and various intersectional "studies" programs certainly seem to make a big deal of deplatforming people these days. > This sounds to me that Peterson is pissed because people in humanities tend to oppose capitalism. No. he tells you why he is mad, why invent reasons? He is mad because of the lack of gratitude at the improvements in absolute standard of living (even though he admits that relative inequality is a problem). As a clinical counselor for many years he has seen the harms caused by persistent resentment. He is mad because his colleagues in the humanities and social sciences have, in recent decades, consistently opposed the free exchange of ideas on college campuses. He is far from the only academic to voice such concerns[0]. He is mad because of the dearth of good scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. [0]https://heterodoxacademy.org/

I completely agree, which is precisely why I think believe the role of the employment process ought to be to screen everyone by fair (in a way that everyone agrees on) and transparent metrics. 'All fronts' hopefully means fixing every issue encountered simultaneously at the local level. If instead we're adding a 'fudge factor' based on race, gender, or other measure of 'privilege', we're just hoping that fudge factor in hiring makes up for problems elsewhere, and it can paradoxically make things even worse. Think about a lot of the (often very well justified) complaints that minority and other hires have with the current situation: they feel like, or they feel that other people believe, that they are simply a 'diversity hire' that doesn't deserve to be there. They feel constantly pressured to 'prove themselves' under the suspicion that the bar was 'lowered to let them in'. And the entire structure of un-blinded affirmative action exacerbates the situation, because nobody is allowed to know how big the fudge factors are, neither the minorities nor the dominant group. Under that situation, how can there anything but suspicion and mutual distrust? Under a provably blinded hiring process, none of those should be an issue, because the process is completely transparent and agreed to ahead of time. Other people have said this much more eloquently than me: https://heterodoxacademy.org/2016/05/12/the-amazing-1969-prophecy/

Evolution has been proven experimentally, so I'm not sure why you're picking on that specifically. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_evolution Archaeology isn't a science either, even though I've studied it myself and ancient civilisations are a particular favourite area of study for me. Archaeologists and historians in general frequently do things that wouldn't match the usual understanding of the scientific process: that doesn't mean we shouldn't study history, but comparing the fields credibility to that of physics is really problematic. But to clarify, when I said "social science" I was referring to people who explicitly call themselves that. Archaeology and even psychology wouldn't count under that definition - but if someone actually says they are a professor of social science, to me that's an immediate red flag because the "research" produced by such people is in my experience usually just a complicated and expensive form of personal politics blogging. Jonathan Haidt has done a lot of good talks on this topic. There's a paper here: http://heterodoxacademy.org/2015/09/14/bbs-paper-on-lack-of-political-…

smart enough to see the illogic of religious belief A lot of religious people don't take their beliefs literally. It's more stories that they know are just stories (or just don't care if they're literally true or not), but that illustrate some important point and provide a shared context for talking about it. Like how it doesn't matter if the "640k should be enough for anybody" quote is actually true or not, or Paul Bunyan and John Henry and the rest of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_civil_religion , or the Story of Mel the Real Programmer, or the 500 mile email, etc. They illustrate important principles and shared cultural values, and strict historical accuracy isn't actually that important to their usefulness. . hold more complex thoughts than simple prejudices. The annoying thing about prejudices, is they're often not so much flat wrong as deliberately under-fitting the data for performance reasons or bootstrapping a model for a new environment with data from an old environment. For example, there's a lovely article about how affirmative action quotas encourage racism here: http://heterodoxacademy.org/2016/05/12/the-amazing-1969-prophecy/ .

I have no great love of conservative politics, but there's a convincing argument to be made that their ideas and views are routinely suppressed by media outside of explicitly partisan media outlets (i.e. Fox News or talk radio). There are a number of studies that back up this claim. A 2008 study[0] found that 88% of journalists donate to the Democratic party. Jonathan Haidt has shown[1] that non-economics social sciences skew more than 14-1 liberal to conservative (and that universities have not always been so skewed). For anyone who believes these statistics are not based on overt discrimination based on political viewpoint, a recent study[2] showed that discrimination by party is stronger than that of race. The study did so by reproducing a landmark study that demonstrated the existence of unconscious racial bias (the implicit association test), but instead using political indicators. They found that partisan political positions triggered implicit associations 50% stronger than that of racial biases. There is also a recent book called "Passing on the Right"[3] which provides some personal narratives of conservative academics. If you're relying on academic knowledge to provide you a sense of reality, you're viewing reality through a lens that is biased to a 93% degree towards one political pole, and then receiving that knowledge through a media system which is biased to an 88% degree towards that same political pole. Even if you, like me, generally believe that the…

It's a version of a motte and bailey argument (named after a medieval castle defense system): > "...philosopher Nicholas Shackel coined the term 'motte-and-bailey' to describe the rhetorical strategy in which a debater retreats to an uncontroversial claim when challenged on a controversial one." -- https://heterodoxacademy.org/blog/the-motte-and-the-bailey-a-rhetorica…

There's lots of info about academic far leftism out there. This article is a decade old now (the problem is surely now far worse) but the trend in the graph is clear: https://heterodoxacademy.org/blog/professors-moved-left-but-country-di… That's an average of self reported views, in a culture where everyone tells each other they're totally moderate and neutral. The problem is less serious in engineering subjects. In non-engineering subjects, far leftism is pretty much homogenous.

Glancing at the top results I think this one has a solid view on how the connection gets close, even if I think it's too nice to him. https://heterodoxacademy.org/blog/social-science-jordan-peterson-alt-r…

https://heterodoxacademy.org/blog/coddling-of-the-american-mind/ Historically, students had consistently opposed administrative calls for campus censorship, yet recently Lukianoff was encountering more demands for campus censorship, from the students.

True, I can see how “weighty evidence” overstated the weak case presented by the author. In the examples of Newport and Ferriss, the author ironically cites the cure for EFT as the problem. At a high level, net value of any task is gross value - effort value. Newport’s point isn’t to not do small tasks but make time for big ones, and if less important tasks fall by the wayside, then better those than significant work. Ferriss’ point is that of Ricardoian economics at a micro level: not all tasks can be done with equal efficiency by different people, thus route tasks to where they are most efficiently performed. Irony aside, the essay could be categorized as reverse-CBT. Read more about Lukianoff’s idea at the link below: https://heterodoxacademy.org/resources/the-coddling-of-the-american-mi…

Check out ratings by FIRE [1] and the Heterodox Academy [2]. 1: https://www.thefire.org/news/just-released-2022-2023-college-free-spee… 2: https://heterodoxacademy.org/library/10-colleges-where-you-wont-have-t…

Perhaps better to use the non-paywalled original source: https://heterodoxacademy.org/blog/the-two-fiduciary-duties-of-professo…