Duke University Department of Political Science
6 HN recommenders · recommended in 8 months, 2017–2026
1:06:23 · 772K views · Oct 15, 2016
Jonathan Haidt's Hayek Lecture at Duke argues American universities pursue two potentially incompatible sacred values, truth and social justice. He discusses campus conflict, honor, dignity and victimhood cultures, and viewpoint diversity.
HN cites it heavily in diversity and academia debates as an intellectual analysis of the truth versus social justice conflict.
11 comments from Hacker News
I'm glad you posted this.. I had heard about anti CoC a while back(perhaps from you?) but never really dug into it.. Video game journalism was ruined for me back in 2011 and 2012 for reasons we all know and I was hyper aware of at the time. It went through a very dark time and is hopefully coming out the other side now.. I had not really paid much attention to the infiltration of the tech community. While I had noticed a few things such bikeshedding of issues on Github, as well as the whole node.js trigger word ordeal, my distaste for the whole thing at that point led me to largely ignore it.. I've been on a huge information gathering binge since your post though. Randi Harper, electronconf, USC Legends of Gaming, entryism targeted toward GitHub, shaming and threatening tactics used to seed OSS with CoCs.... Wow. I hadn't realized how out of hand and toxic things had gotten. Luckily, it seems that the industry is somewhat successfully pushing back? I'm getting the sense that the larger community has found its voice and is pushing back against the intellectually bankrupt thinking and tactics.. This is the best intellectual analysis of the situation I've come across so far(I'm still digging though): this video
Somewhat related to the issue at hand and representative of the current, very charged landscape on social issues, is this video: this video The speaker makes the case that current social conflicts at many American universities – though probably representative of the general population as well – arise because people are pursuing two, potentially incompatible goals: truth and social justice. I think it's a highly informative video. Of course, I'd love to watch other videos contradicting or challenging this one, if anyone can provide some links.
Jonathan Haidt does a great job explaining Honor, Dignity, and Victimhood cultures: this video (whole talk is excellent) His take is a little different (that Victimhood culture is a result of a march through time from Honor to Dignity to Victimhood). He's referencing the same paper [1] mentioned in the reason.com article. [1] - Microaggression and Moral Cultures [LINK]
>I've found that lots of people out there seemingly can't handle disagreement at all... This is the second time this week I'll have linked this here on HN but I'm exceptionally happy to do so. Jonathan Haidt has a topical discussion[1] about that and hypothesizes it stems from an utter lack of viewpoint diversity as kids grow up. He states that universities have sought to remove all emotional distress, when they're supposed to be the place where you go to have your ideas challenged and feel a little distressed about it. [1]: this video
Can we already kill the meme that CS or STEM are hostile to women? Correlation does not imply causation. Disparate outcomes do not imply disparate treatment. Nobody in the right mind looks at the 94% of child care services jobs being filled by women and exclaims "Aha! Systemic sexism against men, matriarchal oppression afoot, we must address this social injustice!", yet all common sense falls apart when it comes to STEM. Good talk on the subject here: this video