11 ms·

“Roughly one-third of students are in favor of banning controversial books”

109 points by throwkeep 5y ago

hprotagonist 5y ago
My very least favorite horseshoe effect example is, as always, Huck Finn. It is an absolutely stellar novel. “All right then, I’ll go to Hell” is one of the more courageous bits of writing that young Americans are exposed to about ourselves. How dare we try to pretend otherwise. It is beyond me.
caslon 5y ago
Does pg get automatically recommended to all twitter users or something? The replies to his post are pretty low-quality; I'm guessing few people in it have read any of his books (technical or the essay compilation). Why'd he get cursed with such a following?
- sibeliuss 5y ago
  It's the nature of banter constrained by a character count. Beyond that, PG is a public figured with a huge following, not some obscure academic.
- jahlove 5y ago
  > Why'd he get cursed with such a following? My observation is that most twitter replies are pretty low quality across the board. Especially on politics twitter.
- adamors 5y ago
  The tweet is really low quality clickbait so the replies are of same quality. If you actually read the study you'll find that PG's summary has little to do with it. It reads like anti-woke clickbait if anything.
- loeg 5y ago
  He blocks the intelligent critics.
ummonk 5y ago
Well "from their university library" is a pretty important qualifier. Certainly, curating which books are placed in the university library is detrimental to diversity of thought and exposure to various views (even knowing what extreme views are out there is important if you wish to counter them). But it's not really the same as say a government ban of controversial books. Also, this survey was done in Germany, where you can already go to jail for claiming the holocaust didn't happen.
- pmorici 5y ago
  Many if not most universities are publicly funded quasi governmental institutions.
  - JadeNB 5y ago
    > Many if not most universities are publicly funded quasi governmental institutions. That sounds very much like someone whose only experience is with large public universities. I don't really know what "quasi-governmental" means, but any reasonable meaning I can assign it is far beyond my small university--and there are way more small universities than big ones.
  - ummonk 5y ago
    Yes, and? Are you arguing taxpayers should be forced to fund the dissemination of extreme views?
    - pmorici 5y ago
      You said it is different than a government banning books but universities/colleges being publicly funded are effectively the government. I fail to see the difference. Libraries in general to the extent they are publicly funded should be neutral and not pick what materials they put in their collection based on political considerations, or subjective opinions of what material is too extreme.
      - ummonk 5y ago
jimbob45 5y ago
If you live in any moderately large sized city, you’re just going to get your books from the public library anyway. No one used the school library at our school and we were fairly large and fairly successful. If it’s in class, 99% of the kids were going to SparkNotes whatever book they ended up getting anyway.
- spiderice 5y ago
  Not entirely sure you can claim that most university libraries go unused just because yours did.
  - jimbob45 5y ago
    Wait, I was talking about high school. Do universities ban books too? How does that make sense? And my point is that public libraries are simply better stocked than high school libraries to the point of making high school libraries obsolete.
    - thayne 5y ago
      The paper referenced in the original tweet was about banning books from a university library.
kwinten 5y ago
It should come as no surprise that the right-leaning students who ideologically agree with the stated "controversial books" or ideological viewpoints of the hypothetical speakers do not want to remove them from the university library. Also, it's a third of SOCIAL SCIENCE students, not overall student population, and the study has a terrible response rate of 7.5% which they themselves admit in part 4.1. Also, because it seems like bad faith editorializing by the OP, it's about banning books from the university library, not in general. In other words, the study is awful and it doesn't prove any point, but because it's easy to spin it into an anti-woke censorship narrative, HN is going to eat this up.
- seventytwo 5y ago
  > an anti-woke censorship narrative, HN is going to eat this up. Yup.
- swiley 5y ago
  I tend to be right leaning and would flip out if the extreme left was censored. If you can't have a discussion you can't have democracy.
  - kwinten 5y ago
    The "extreme left" is not even a fraction as represented as even far right within popular consciousness and, more significantly, political representation. There's no Marxist-Leninist politicians of note in Germany (where the study was done). There are however plenty of popular politicians and parties with significant power who align with some of the statements and topics the students were asked about. What I'm trying to say with that is that it's not an equal comparison. There is no political mobilization for extreme left ideas that is even remotely comparable to the far-right that align with some narratives that the students obviously consider as dangerous, such as anti-Islam and anti-immigration, anti-LGBTQ, and pro gendered labor division. I am not in favor of flat out banning such books (even if I personally believe they have no place in an environment of science and learning such as a university), but it's easy to understand why the response of left-leaning students towards right-leaning topics is stronger than the inverse.
handelaar 5y ago
"Roughly one third of 501 students at a single university in Frankfurt, in Germany where certain publications are required by the constitution to remain prohibited, are in favour of removing controversial books from a single named library" presumably -- while rather more accurate -- didn't quite make the weaksauce point we were looking for.
- formerly_proven 5y ago
  > in Germany where certain publications are required by the constitution to remain prohibited This is false.
  - jsiepkes 5y ago
    For anyone reading this thinking: "huh?". This is presumably about Hitler's "Mein kampf". Which wasn't banned by law in Germany. The province of Bavaria simply inherited the ownership (copyright) of it and decided not to grant anyone permission to print it. Thats why it was not illegal to have the book but it was illegal to print it. I believe the copyright has now expired in Germany and it is in the public domain.
  - watwut 5y ago
    That is not actually false. Volksverhetzung, as in "incitement to hatred" is censored and includes Holocaust denial. Usage of nazi symbols is restricted too, you can use them in historical context, but not for fun however you wish. Mein Kampf itself is legal. But not everything is.
    - anoncake 5y ago
      And where does the Basic Law mandate this?
- FabHK 5y ago
  That's a pretty accurate summary, though I'd say that the following is more accurate still: "About a quarter of social science students at a (deliberately chosen left-leaning) university in Frankfurt, Germany, are in favour of removing controversial books about certain topics from their university library." ETA: And, in fairness to pg, the sentence quoted ("Roughly one-third of students are also in favor of banning controversial books from their university library") is in fact a direct quote from the study.
vegetablepotpie 5y ago
Why not link to the original paper? https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s11577-020-00713-z.pdf https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s11577-020-007... > However, the actual net response rate dropped from 14% to 7.5% when we consider only those who completed at least 80% of the survey (n= 501), which is clearly poor and has to be kept in mind when drawing conclusions from the data. All analyses are based on pair-wise deletion of missing values. Divisive political issues attract people at the fringes of the political spectrum. If you're getting less than 10% of the sample filling the majority of the survey, it's likely that your sample is just those people interested enough to fill it out because they're on the fringes. I am skeptical of the results, because in my experience at university (2007-2012, 2017-2020) I never observed "wokeness" or concern over microaggressions or many of the things right wing media reports on. It's a more likely explanation that Conservatives have victim complex, and "university wants to burn books and ban speakers" fills that complex well. Why? Politics is just business in disguise. My theory is that conservatives don't want government to pay for education, and in the US they are succeeding in this goal [1]. Saying universities are hypocritical is a good excuse. [1] https://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/state-higher-education-funding-cuts-have-pushed-costs-to-students https://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/state-hig...
thayne 5y ago
> The target population of our study are all current social science students at GoetheUniversity of Frankfurt > Participation was voluntary and incentivized with a lottery of three Amazon gift vouchers to the value of 50 euro each. > However, the actual net response rate dropped from 14% to 7.5% when we consider only those who completed at least80% of the survey (n= 501), which is clearly poor and has to be kept in mind whendrawing conclusions from the data. Not really a great sample. All participants are from a rather specific demographic, and a small sample size at that.
- akudha 5y ago
  I have a request - can we add the sample size to studies like these, in the HN title? The sample size is so small that I don’t think this study is of any use.
  - FabHK 5y ago
    n = 501 is not good enough for you? Seems decent enough. "In practice, pollsters need to balance the cost of a large sample against the reduction in sampling error and a sample size of around 500–1,000 is a typical compromise for political polls." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_poll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_poll
- barry27 5y ago
  Exactly. They say this in the study: --- Our empirical analysis is based on original survey data collected from social science students at Goethe University Frankfurt. We are certainly not under the im- pression that our sample is representative of university students in general (or the wider public, for that matter). On the contrary, we purposefully consider the social science studentship at Frankfurt as a most likely case (George and Bennett 2005; Gerring 2007) --- ..a fact that was obviously overlooked by the outraged masses on Twitter.
- Animats 5y ago
  This is using the easiest sample. Here's another study. National, in the US, of fraternity and sorority members.[1] It's not primarily about censorship, more about Greek life and COVID issues. If a controversy over offensive speech were to occur on your campus, would the administration be more likely to... - Defend the speaker’s right to express his/her views: 23% - Punish the speaker for making the statement: 38% - Not sure: 39% Have you personally ever felt that you could not express your opinion on a subject because of how students, a professor, or the administration would respond? - Yes: 50% - No: 42% - Not sure: 9% The sample self-identifies as 46% liberal, 33% conservative. Results differ widely among universities. Not along obvious lines. [1] https://assets.realclear.com/files/2021/04/1801_RealClear-CollegeGreekLifeReportCard-v3.pdf https://assets.realclear.com/files/2021/04/1801_RealClear-Co...
adamors 5y ago
> We were able to collect a total of n=932 responses in the period from 16 May to 2 July 2018. However, the actual net response rate dropped from 14% to 7.5% when we consider only those who completed at least 80% of the survey (n = 501), which is clearly poor and has to be kept in mind when drawing conclusions from the data So clickbait BS. Is nobody reading the linked study?
- kwinten 5y ago
  Reading? A study? I'm just here to get angry at a misrepresentative editorialized title!
  - heartbreak 5y ago
    A misrepresentative, editorialized tweet written by the founder of this website.
    - dekhn 5y ago
      ... who, over time, has demonstrated he's not particularly keen when it comes to social sciences.
- krapp 5y ago
  >Is nobody reading the linked study? This is hacker news... our time is too valuable to waste actually reading the article and making an informed opinion.
- HWR_14 5y ago
  I know you must have some powerful evidence that only 7.5% or survey requests being responded to makes a survey invalid, right?
- FabHK 5y ago
  How is that clickbait BS? People sometimes poll an entire country by taking a sample of 500 people. 500 people gives you an error margin of +/- 4.5% (Variance of a binomial is npq=np(1-p), worst case p=1/2, so n/4, std deviation thus sqrt(n)/2, then take 2 std dev to cover 95%, thus sqrt(n), as a percentage of all responses sqrt(n)/n = 100/sqrt(n)%), which is not amazing, but not BS either. Is nobody aware of basic statistics?
albanread 5y ago
Back in the day I joined evening classes just to get access to the technical college library. Reading books was a thing then. I do see some value in erasing human history and starting again. We have been so comprehensively vile to each other it might be better to erase it all.
akomtu 5y ago
By "controversial books" they likely mean CRT - it's the number 1 battleground in education facilities today. But banning the books is silly. We shouldn't ban knowledge, even if it's the infamous MeinCampf or CRT - only practicing of certain knowledge should be banned.
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  > it's the number 1 battleground in education facilities today In a university in Frankfurt, Germany?
- disgruntledphd2 5y ago
  Please (not you in specific, but the general you), can everyone at least try to read the abstract before commenting (preferably the article). It's in Germany, and has nothing to do with CRT.
  - akomtu 5y ago
    Oh, my bad then. I've made the common mistake on HN - assumed that anything here is about the US.
ramoz 5y ago
Wonder if that includes books about burning books, struggle sessions, or psychoanalysis within political sociology, and ... how radicalized progressive movements develop — likely not a part of any curriculum anyway vs redefining them as new modern progressive study or hashtag.
- orwin 5y ago
  Well, the fact that they did not ask questions about book on violence against property and space occupation as a mean of democratic manifestation (which is a far left position) but about books on how homosexuality is immoral and should be banned, i'd say this study will pretty much have the result the researchers want.
uniqueuid 5y ago
Well, the summary is of course extremely condensed, and it helps a lot to read the paper. Some very quick observations: - These are data from social science students in Frankfurt, Germany. The city and university is traditionally left-leaning, so not at all representative for anything (not for students, not for Germany, not internationally) - The total population is ~6600, and the sample is N=501, which is further reduced by some missing values. Note that very few people actually identify as political leanings, espeically hardly anyone on the conservative spectrum. So I would argue that this study has not enough power to draw any serious conclusion (power in the statistical sense as sensitivity to reject a H0 given it is false) - The measured variables were many more than merely banning books. Some restrictive attitudes were not supported. Finally, it is immensenly important to remember that countries must pick one of roughly three approaches to dealing with harmful political attitudes (see Ziblatt's "How Democracies Die" for a longer review of this): - Have all attitudes compete equally (this is the US model of free speech) - Contain bad attitudes by shunning them and rendering them a taboo - Exclude bad attitudes by prohibiting them legally (this is the German model, which criminalizes expression of some opinions such as denial of the Holocaust).
- FabHK 5y ago
  Agreed that this does not represent the world, or Germany, or students in general. But it is one datapoint about social science students in Frankfurt, which was deliberately chosen as a "likely worst case" to detect the problem. In fact, the authors are very explicit about that point: "We are certainly not under the impression that our sample is representative of university students in general (or the wider public, for that matter). On the contrary, we purposefully consider the social science studentship at Frankfurt as a most likely case." Next, as outlined above, n=500 seems enough to reject the hypothesis that the percentage that wants to ban the books is near 0. In other words, I dispute your notion that the study has not enough power. Strong sampling bias might be a problem, but nobody has made a case for that yet.
woodruffw 5y ago
Apart from the poor methodology that others have commented on, pg's scare statistic appears to come from just one row of Table C on page 12 (numbered 482), related to one topic. Looking at all of the other topics paints a different picture: approximately 75% of student are consistently against banning books. But that's significantly less easy to hand-wring about.
rawgabbit 5y ago
Well I am in favor of banning misinformation, clickbait, and “studies” conducted against an extremely small sample size intended to promote outrage and justifying bad behavior.
- 0xy 5y ago
  Just like YouTube banning discussion of lab leak theory on the word of a biased professor, banning misinformation is a fool's errand and ends harming more than helping. In that case, they censored science.
  - lamontcg 5y ago
    the lab leak theory has nothing to do with science
    - 0xy 5y ago
      The origins of COVID is not concerned science in your view for what reason? It's a scientific theory. The only proof to the contrary is from biased individuals who in some cases were directly involved in the granting of money for the purposes of extremely controversial gain-of-function research to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. So, what's not science about the origin of a virus? Your comment makes zero sense.
      - lamontcg 5y ago
        You don't get SARS-CoV-2 by combining an RaTG13 backbone with a pangolin spike in a lab -- it is still decades of evolution away form SARS-CoV-2 which you don't get via passing it through a dozen generations of mice. There's no evidence WIV was ever doing GOF research (although they did collaborate with GOF research that happened on US Soil), it is entirely circular logic. The idea that WIV employees were treated for SARS-CoV-2 is entirely evidence free, nobody knows the names of those employees, China has claimed those were 3 samples submitted in Jan from community collection which is rejected out of hand because it comes from China. The whole lab leak theory is that its a coincidence that the pandemic started in the city that had the lab, and the theory that coincidences never happen. This is what actual science looks like: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.22.427830v3 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.22.427830v3 https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(21)00709-1.pdf https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(21)00709-1.pdf
Little_John 5y ago
Any Book, any book is a valid book if the reader has a brain to process it.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
oh_sigh 5y ago
Why would anyone ask students what their opinion on these matters are? The whole point of students is that they are still learning and studying. Should we ask a 2nd grader whether they should do their math homework or not?
- FabHK 5y ago
  But... nobody is asking them to vote on this question, ie nobody is proposing to let the students decide on this. Rather, the study is about the opinion of those students on certain topics, and for that, you have to ask them about their opinion.
  - oh_sigh 5y ago
    Right...my point is why even ask? If you asked my 6th grade classroom whether they should learn more math, they would say no because they never use math in their lives.
    - FabHK 5y ago
      At some point, these students will become adults, and some of them university administrators, and then they make the rules.
- anoncake 5y ago
  Students are adults.
rasz 5y ago
Roughly 90% of teenagers want pizza and ice-cream for dinner. SHOCKING!!!1
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
FabHK 5y ago
Ok, so this is being somewhat misunderstood here, I think. A few observations: - The sentence pg quoted ("Roughly one-third of students are also in favor of banning controversial books from their university library.") is verbatim from the study. - However, this study must be seen in context. It was deliberately and openly designed to detect anti-free-speech sentiment by looking at a specifically chosen probable "worst case", namely social science students at a traditionally left leaning university in Germany (which houses the "Institut für Sozialforschung" that gave rise to the "Frankfurter Schule" (Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse) of critical theory, a predecessor of (among other things) CRT). That this is the case is revealed right in the title of the study: "Is Free Speech in Danger on University Campus? Some Preliminary Evidence from a Most Likely Case", and further emphasised in the text: "We are certainly not under the impression that our sample is representative of university students in general (or the wider public, for that matter). On the contrary, we purposefully consider the social science studentship at Frankfurt as a most likely case." (my emphasis). - So, the study succeeded in detecting some moderately illiberal attitudes in a quarter or so of students at one deliberately chosen "worst case" faculty in Germany. - All the hubbub here about the statistical limitations is overblown, n=501 is not bad for social science and gives a error margin of around 5%, which means the results stand unless there was massive sampling bias.
chewz 5y ago
Only banning not burning?

109 points by throwkeep 5y ago

My very least favorite horseshoe effect example is, as always, Huck Finn. It is an absolutely stellar novel. “All right then, I’ll go to Hell” is one of the more courageous bits of writing that young Americans are exposed to about ourselves. How dare we try to pretend otherwise. It is beyond me.

caslon 5y ago

Does pg get automatically recommended to all twitter users or something? The replies to his post are pretty low-quality; I'm guessing few people in it have read any of his books (technical or the essay compilation). Why'd he get cursed with such a following?

sibeliuss 5y ago
It's the nature of banter constrained by a character count. Beyond that, PG is a public figured with a huge following, not some obscure academic.
jahlove 5y ago
> Why'd he get cursed with such a following? My observation is that most twitter replies are pretty low quality across the board. Especially on politics twitter.
adamors 5y ago
The tweet is really low quality clickbait so the replies are of same quality. If you actually read the study you'll find that PG's summary has little to do with it. It reads like anti-woke clickbait if anything.
loeg 5y ago
He blocks the intelligent critics.

ummonk 5y ago

Well "from their university library" is a pretty important qualifier. Certainly, curating which books are placed in the university library is detrimental to diversity of thought and exposure to various views (even knowing what extreme views are out there is important if you wish to counter them). But it's not really the same as say a government ban of controversial books. Also, this survey was done in Germany, where you can already go to jail for claiming the holocaust didn't happen.

pmorici 5y ago
Many if not most universities are publicly funded quasi governmental institutions.
- JadeNB 5y ago
  > Many if not most universities are publicly funded quasi governmental institutions. That sounds very much like someone whose only experience is with large public universities. I don't really know what "quasi-governmental" means, but any reasonable meaning I can assign it is far beyond my small university--and there are way more small universities than big ones.
- ummonk 5y ago
  Yes, and? Are you arguing taxpayers should be forced to fund the dissemination of extreme views?
  - pmorici 5y ago
    You said it is different than a government banning books but universities/colleges being publicly funded are effectively the government. I fail to see the difference. Libraries in general to the extent they are publicly funded should be neutral and not pick what materials they put in their collection based on political considerations, or subjective opinions of what material is too extreme.
    - ummonk 5y ago

jimbob45 5y ago

If you live in any moderately large sized city, you’re just going to get your books from the public library anyway. No one used the school library at our school and we were fairly large and fairly successful. If it’s in class, 99% of the kids were going to SparkNotes whatever book they ended up getting anyway.

spiderice 5y ago
Not entirely sure you can claim that most university libraries go unused just because yours did.
- jimbob45 5y ago
  Wait, I was talking about high school. Do universities ban books too? How does that make sense? And my point is that public libraries are simply better stocked than high school libraries to the point of making high school libraries obsolete.
  - thayne 5y ago
    The paper referenced in the original tweet was about banning books from a university library.

kwinten 5y ago

It should come as no surprise that the right-leaning students who ideologically agree with the stated "controversial books" or ideological viewpoints of the hypothetical speakers do not want to remove them from the university library. Also, it's a third of SOCIAL SCIENCE students, not overall student population, and the study has a terrible response rate of 7.5% which they themselves admit in part 4.1. Also, because it seems like bad faith editorializing by the OP, it's about banning books from the university library, not in general. In other words, the study is awful and it doesn't prove any point, but because it's easy to spin it into an anti-woke censorship narrative, HN is going to eat this up.

seventytwo 5y ago
> an anti-woke censorship narrative, HN is going to eat this up. Yup.
swiley 5y ago
I tend to be right leaning and would flip out if the extreme left was censored. If you can't have a discussion you can't have democracy.
- kwinten 5y ago
  The "extreme left" is not even a fraction as represented as even far right within popular consciousness and, more significantly, political representation. There's no Marxist-Leninist politicians of note in Germany (where the study was done). There are however plenty of popular politicians and parties with significant power who align with some of the statements and topics the students were asked about. What I'm trying to say with that is that it's not an equal comparison. There is no political mobilization for extreme left ideas that is even remotely comparable to the far-right that align with some narratives that the students obviously consider as dangerous, such as anti-Islam and anti-immigration, anti-LGBTQ, and pro gendered labor division. I am not in favor of flat out banning such books (even if I personally believe they have no place in an environment of science and learning such as a university), but it's easy to understand why the response of left-leaning students towards right-leaning topics is stronger than the inverse.

handelaar 5y ago

"Roughly one third of 501 students at a single university in Frankfurt, in Germany where certain publications are required by the constitution to remain prohibited, are in favour of removing controversial books from a single named library" presumably -- while rather more accurate -- didn't quite make the weaksauce point we were looking for.

formerly_proven 5y ago
> in Germany where certain publications are required by the constitution to remain prohibited This is false.
- jsiepkes 5y ago
  For anyone reading this thinking: "huh?". This is presumably about Hitler's "Mein kampf". Which wasn't banned by law in Germany. The province of Bavaria simply inherited the ownership (copyright) of it and decided not to grant anyone permission to print it. Thats why it was not illegal to have the book but it was illegal to print it. I believe the copyright has now expired in Germany and it is in the public domain.
- watwut 5y ago
  That is not actually false. Volksverhetzung, as in "incitement to hatred" is censored and includes Holocaust denial. Usage of nazi symbols is restricted too, you can use them in historical context, but not for fun however you wish. Mein Kampf itself is legal. But not everything is.
  - anoncake 5y ago
    And where does the Basic Law mandate this?
FabHK 5y ago
That's a pretty accurate summary, though I'd say that the following is more accurate still: "About a quarter of social science students at a (deliberately chosen left-leaning) university in Frankfurt, Germany, are in favour of removing controversial books about certain topics from their university library." ETA: And, in fairness to pg, the sentence quoted ("Roughly one-third of students are also in favor of banning controversial books from their university library") is in fact a direct quote from the study.

vegetablepotpie 5y ago

Why not link to the original paper? https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s11577-020-00713-z.pdf https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s11577-020-007... > However, the actual net response rate dropped from 14% to 7.5% when we consider only those who completed at least 80% of the survey (n= 501), which is clearly poor and has to be kept in mind when drawing conclusions from the data. All analyses are based on pair-wise deletion of missing values. Divisive political issues attract people at the fringes of the political spectrum. If you're getting less than 10% of the sample filling the majority of the survey, it's likely that your sample is just those people interested enough to fill it out because they're on the fringes. I am skeptical of the results, because in my experience at university (2007-2012, 2017-2020) I never observed "wokeness" or concern over microaggressions or many of the things right wing media reports on. It's a more likely explanation that Conservatives have victim complex, and "university wants to burn books and ban speakers" fills that complex well. Why? Politics is just business in disguise. My theory is that conservatives don't want government to pay for education, and in the US they are succeeding in this goal [1]. Saying universities are hypocritical is a good excuse. [1] https://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/state-higher-education-funding-cuts-have-pushed-costs-to-students https://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/state-hig...

thayne 5y ago

> The target population of our study are all current social science students at GoetheUniversity of Frankfurt > Participation was voluntary and incentivized with a lottery of three Amazon gift vouchers to the value of 50 euro each. > However, the actual net response rate dropped from 14% to 7.5% when we consider only those who completed at least80% of the survey (n= 501), which is clearly poor and has to be kept in mind whendrawing conclusions from the data. Not really a great sample. All participants are from a rather specific demographic, and a small sample size at that.

akudha 5y ago
I have a request - can we add the sample size to studies like these, in the HN title? The sample size is so small that I don’t think this study is of any use.
- FabHK 5y ago
  n = 501 is not good enough for you? Seems decent enough. "In practice, pollsters need to balance the cost of a large sample against the reduction in sampling error and a sample size of around 500–1,000 is a typical compromise for political polls." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_poll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_poll
barry27 5y ago
Exactly. They say this in the study: --- Our empirical analysis is based on original survey data collected from social science students at Goethe University Frankfurt. We are certainly not under the im- pression that our sample is representative of university students in general (or the wider public, for that matter). On the contrary, we purposefully consider the social science studentship at Frankfurt as a most likely case (George and Bennett 2005; Gerring 2007) --- ..a fact that was obviously overlooked by the outraged masses on Twitter.
Animats 5y ago
This is using the easiest sample. Here's another study. National, in the US, of fraternity and sorority members.[1] It's not primarily about censorship, more about Greek life and COVID issues. If a controversy over offensive speech were to occur on your campus, would the administration be more likely to... - Defend the speaker’s right to express his/her views: 23% - Punish the speaker for making the statement: 38% - Not sure: 39% Have you personally ever felt that you could not express your opinion on a subject because of how students, a professor, or the administration would respond? - Yes: 50% - No: 42% - Not sure: 9% The sample self-identifies as 46% liberal, 33% conservative. Results differ widely among universities. Not along obvious lines. [1] https://assets.realclear.com/files/2021/04/1801_RealClear-CollegeGreekLifeReportCard-v3.pdf https://assets.realclear.com/files/2021/04/1801_RealClear-Co...

adamors 5y ago

> We were able to collect a total of n=932 responses in the period from 16 May to 2 July 2018. However, the actual net response rate dropped from 14% to 7.5% when we consider only those who completed at least 80% of the survey (n = 501), which is clearly poor and has to be kept in mind when drawing conclusions from the data So clickbait BS. Is nobody reading the linked study?

kwinten 5y ago
Reading? A study? I'm just here to get angry at a misrepresentative editorialized title!
- heartbreak 5y ago
  A misrepresentative, editorialized tweet written by the founder of this website.
  - dekhn 5y ago
    ... who, over time, has demonstrated he's not particularly keen when it comes to social sciences.
krapp 5y ago
>Is nobody reading the linked study? This is hacker news... our time is too valuable to waste actually reading the article and making an informed opinion.
HWR_14 5y ago
I know you must have some powerful evidence that only 7.5% or survey requests being responded to makes a survey invalid, right?
FabHK 5y ago
How is that clickbait BS? People sometimes poll an entire country by taking a sample of 500 people. 500 people gives you an error margin of +/- 4.5% (Variance of a binomial is npq=np(1-p), worst case p=1/2, so n/4, std deviation thus sqrt(n)/2, then take 2 std dev to cover 95%, thus sqrt(n), as a percentage of all responses sqrt(n)/n = 100/sqrt(n)%), which is not amazing, but not BS either. Is nobody aware of basic statistics?

albanread 5y ago

Back in the day I joined evening classes just to get access to the technical college library. Reading books was a thing then. I do see some value in erasing human history and starting again. We have been so comprehensively vile to each other it might be better to erase it all.

akomtu 5y ago

By "controversial books" they likely mean CRT - it's the number 1 battleground in education facilities today. But banning the books is silly. We shouldn't ban knowledge, even if it's the infamous MeinCampf or CRT - only practicing of certain knowledge should be banned.

ceejayoz 5y ago
> it's the number 1 battleground in education facilities today In a university in Frankfurt, Germany?
disgruntledphd2 5y ago
Please (not you in specific, but the general you), can everyone at least try to read the abstract before commenting (preferably the article). It's in Germany, and has nothing to do with CRT.
- akomtu 5y ago
  Oh, my bad then. I've made the common mistake on HN - assumed that anything here is about the US.

ramoz 5y ago

Wonder if that includes books about burning books, struggle sessions, or psychoanalysis within political sociology, and ... how radicalized progressive movements develop — likely not a part of any curriculum anyway vs redefining them as new modern progressive study or hashtag.

orwin 5y ago
Well, the fact that they did not ask questions about book on violence against property and space occupation as a mean of democratic manifestation (which is a far left position) but about books on how homosexuality is immoral and should be banned, i'd say this study will pretty much have the result the researchers want.

uniqueuid 5y ago

Well, the summary is of course extremely condensed, and it helps a lot to read the paper. Some very quick observations: - These are data from social science students in Frankfurt, Germany. The city and university is traditionally left-leaning, so not at all representative for anything (not for students, not for Germany, not internationally) - The total population is ~6600, and the sample is N=501, which is further reduced by some missing values. Note that very few people actually identify as political leanings, espeically hardly anyone on the conservative spectrum. So I would argue that this study has not enough power to draw any serious conclusion (power in the statistical sense as sensitivity to reject a H0 given it is false) - The measured variables were many more than merely banning books. Some restrictive attitudes were not supported. Finally, it is immensenly important to remember that countries must pick one of roughly three approaches to dealing with harmful political attitudes (see Ziblatt's "How Democracies Die" for a longer review of this): - Have all attitudes compete equally (this is the US model of free speech) - Contain bad attitudes by shunning them and rendering them a taboo - Exclude bad attitudes by prohibiting them legally (this is the German model, which criminalizes expression of some opinions such as denial of the Holocaust).

FabHK 5y ago
Agreed that this does not represent the world, or Germany, or students in general. But it is one datapoint about social science students in Frankfurt, which was deliberately chosen as a "likely worst case" to detect the problem. In fact, the authors are very explicit about that point: "We are certainly not under the impression that our sample is representative of university students in general (or the wider public, for that matter). On the contrary, we purposefully consider the social science studentship at Frankfurt as a most likely case." Next, as outlined above, n=500 seems enough to reject the hypothesis that the percentage that wants to ban the books is near 0. In other words, I dispute your notion that the study has not enough power. Strong sampling bias might be a problem, but nobody has made a case for that yet.

woodruffw 5y ago

Apart from the poor methodology that others have commented on, pg's scare statistic appears to come from just one row of Table C on page 12 (numbered 482), related to one topic. Looking at all of the other topics paints a different picture: approximately 75% of student are consistently against banning books. But that's significantly less easy to hand-wring about.

rawgabbit 5y ago

Well I am in favor of banning misinformation, clickbait, and “studies” conducted against an extremely small sample size intended to promote outrage and justifying bad behavior.

0xy 5y ago
Just like YouTube banning discussion of lab leak theory on the word of a biased professor, banning misinformation is a fool's errand and ends harming more than helping. In that case, they censored science.
- lamontcg 5y ago
  the lab leak theory has nothing to do with science
  - 0xy 5y ago
    The origins of COVID is not concerned science in your view for what reason? It's a scientific theory. The only proof to the contrary is from biased individuals who in some cases were directly involved in the granting of money for the purposes of extremely controversial gain-of-function research to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. So, what's not science about the origin of a virus? Your comment makes zero sense.
    - lamontcg 5y ago
      You don't get SARS-CoV-2 by combining an RaTG13 backbone with a pangolin spike in a lab -- it is still decades of evolution away form SARS-CoV-2 which you don't get via passing it through a dozen generations of mice. There's no evidence WIV was ever doing GOF research (although they did collaborate with GOF research that happened on US Soil), it is entirely circular logic. The idea that WIV employees were treated for SARS-CoV-2 is entirely evidence free, nobody knows the names of those employees, China has claimed those were 3 samples submitted in Jan from community collection which is rejected out of hand because it comes from China. The whole lab leak theory is that its a coincidence that the pandemic started in the city that had the lab, and the theory that coincidences never happen. This is what actual science looks like: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.22.427830v3 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.22.427830v3 https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(21)00709-1.pdf https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(21)00709-1.pdf

Little_John 5y ago

Any Book, any book is a valid book if the reader has a brain to process it.

deleted 5y ago
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oh_sigh 5y ago

Why would anyone ask students what their opinion on these matters are? The whole point of students is that they are still learning and studying. Should we ask a 2nd grader whether they should do their math homework or not?

FabHK 5y ago
But... nobody is asking them to vote on this question, ie nobody is proposing to let the students decide on this. Rather, the study is about the opinion of those students on certain topics, and for that, you have to ask them about their opinion.
- oh_sigh 5y ago
  Right...my point is why even ask? If you asked my 6th grade classroom whether they should learn more math, they would say no because they never use math in their lives.
  - FabHK 5y ago
    At some point, these students will become adults, and some of them university administrators, and then they make the rules.
anoncake 5y ago
Students are adults.

rasz 5y ago

Roughly 90% of teenagers want pizza and ice-cream for dinner. SHOCKING!!!1

deleted 5y ago

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FabHK 5y ago

Ok, so this is being somewhat misunderstood here, I think. A few observations: - The sentence pg quoted ("Roughly one-third of students are also in favor of banning controversial books from their university library.") is verbatim from the study. - However, this study must be seen in context. It was deliberately and openly designed to detect anti-free-speech sentiment by looking at a specifically chosen probable "worst case", namely social science students at a traditionally left leaning university in Germany (which houses the "Institut für Sozialforschung" that gave rise to the "Frankfurter Schule" (Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse) of critical theory, a predecessor of (among other things) CRT). That this is the case is revealed right in the title of the study: "Is Free Speech in Danger on University Campus? Some Preliminary Evidence from a Most Likely Case", and further emphasised in the text: "We are certainly not under the impression that our sample is representative of university students in general (or the wider public, for that matter). On the contrary, we purposefully consider the social science studentship at Frankfurt as a most likely case." (my emphasis). - So, the study succeeded in detecting some moderately illiberal attitudes in a quarter or so of students at one deliberately chosen "worst case" faculty in Germany. - All the hubbub here about the statistical limitations is overblown, n=501 is not bad for social science and gives a error margin of around 5%, which means the results stand unless there was massive sampling bias.

chewz 5y ago

Only banning not burning?