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One, perhaps the only, problem with freedom of speech in academia is that can be very actively exploited by bad faith actors, i.e., people who are not intereste

One, perhaps the only, problem with freedom of speech in academia is that can be very actively exploited by bad faith actors, i.e., people who are not interested at all in truth and merely abuse the university system as a platform for furthering political goals and "whitewashing" their position. These people are surprisingly easy to spot, by the way. They often come from a non-academic background, have a party or "think-tank" background with some obvious political agenda, and their funding also comes from corresponding organizations. Some of them are even just politicians. The problem with these kind of speakers is not that they speak at a university. The audience is smart enough not to fall for bullshit and to separate politics from science. The problem is that these people use events to give their name and their agenda some credibility and make it easier for the public to confuse their opinions with science. It's a branding problem, political talks can give a university a seriously bad reputation. Since it would be inconvenient and undemocratic to ban all political speeches and events from universities, I think a trade-off has to be made and some cut-off points are necessary, even if that means that a few interesting talks get lost due to being identified as false positives. It's perfectly fine and reasonable to ban all political speakers from the political fringes (both far right and far left) unless an event clearly serves a scientific purpose and the speaker also has the fitting credentials in terms of actual publications. I understand this goal is hard to reach in the US, though, since many universities there are private and lobbyism has extended its reach to them. But it's an ideal to strive for. The point is not to keep politics out of universities, there is no reason for that, but to keep bad faith actors out of them.

roenxi 4y ago
> The point is not to keep politics out of universities, there is no reason for that, but to keep bad faith actors out of them. When we talk about these obviously bad actors, are we talking people like Socrates and Galileo? Or are we keeping to strictly political undesirables like Assange, Snowden and the whiny pacifists who nobody likes? The words you use are dangerously vague and you aren't calling for observable, thoughtful standards.
- spywaregorilla 4y ago
  Everyone you've just mentioned has a highly politically charged position, but is not associated with being a bad faith actor.
  - roenxi 4y ago
    "In 399 BC, Socrates went on trial for corrupting the minds of the youth of Athens, and for impiety." [0] I dunno, that sounds like the sort of thing that might be considered bad faith. I suppose the exact charge might not have survived translation. How do we think about heretics who corrupt people in good faith? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socrates#Trial_of_Socrates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socrates#Trial_of_Socrates
    - spywaregorilla 4y ago
      No, that would be heretical, which is a different concept. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_faith https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_faith
      - roenxi 4y ago
        Socrates claimed that he was not, in fact, corrupting the youth. Given that a group of Athenians then found him guilty of that to the point where he felt obliged to kill himself it seems fairly likely that his peers suspected him of arguing in bad faith. A bad-faith heretic! Double the crimes that I initially thought. Maybe we do need to keep his dangerous ilk out of universities, he would no doubt have been harshly judged on HN at the time if they'd had HN back in the good old days. More seriously, the academics have perfectly fine standards - to be an academic you need to have studied something deeply and make logical arguments. To speak on campus you need to be sponsored by an academic. That really is all that is needed and they're reasonably objective bars to meet. None of this "oh no he's got bad faith!" stuff that is trotted out for politics. Argue about the outcomes of policies, not the unobservable mental state of the people putting the policies.
tomcam 4y ago
> These people are surprisingly easy to spot, by the way. Excellent. So let them say what they want and demolish them with reason instead of suppression.
- RHSeeger 4y ago
  I'm quoting what I said in anther comment here, but it applies, so... > it takes orders of magnitude more effort to fight against lies and misinformation than it does to create them. As such, letting everyone say whatever they want and expecting the lies to be exposed/countered by the truthspeakers is destined to fail. We've seen this exact thing play out on every social network.
  - tomcam 4y ago
    Sorry free speech is hard for you. Unfortunately, it beats all of the alternatives.
- cool_dude85 4y ago
  This doesn't work in some situations. Hitler would not have been DEMOLISHED by facts and logic, to use a youtube-ism.
  - quantumwannabe 4y ago
    Hitler went to prison and came out stronger and more popular. Oppressing him didn't work, but there was a chance that the German people could have been convinced that National Socialism wouldn't improve the economy and restore Germany to its pre-WWI glory.
    - tomcam 4y ago
      Well he took everyone’s weapons away and imprisoned everyone who spoke against him. So a robust constitution like ours would’ve had a much better chance of standing up to him.
- contrast 4y ago
cool_dude85 4y ago
>One, perhaps the only, problem with freedom of speech in academia is that can be very actively exploited by bad faith actors, i.e., people who are not interested at all in truth and merely abuse the university system as a platform for furthering political goals and "whitewashing" their position. Strong disagree. The problem with "freedom of speech in academia" is that it's a polite fiction. What happens when an MIT professor puts out a press release saying that the US deserved 9-11 and that more attacks are justified? Or that the Charlottesville protestors didn't go far enough, and more lefties need to be run down in the street like dogs? Will MIT be hiring Holocaust denier history professors? Does anyone truly believe that, if a professor publicly expresses views well outside of mainstream acceptability, there will be no professional consequences? "Free expression" at a place like MIT still means you need to keep well within the standards of acceptability, just that we want to make sure that the standards include certain things that are now considered beyond the pale.
hirundo 4y ago
People think they can easily identify bad faith, since they hear arguments that sound incomprehensible and assume no one could hold them in good faith. It is common to believe that large swaths of the population carry their convictions in bad faith. As a life long atheist I have suffered from this misconception. The idea of a god seems so absurd to me that I honestly don't understand how people can have faith in one. Never the less it is true, they do, and in good faith. I've had enough deep conversations with believers to establish that. And it's true no matter how many instances of their hypocrisy you collect. The same is true of political opponents.
- prottog 4y ago
  Exactly. One man's bad faith actor is another's torchbearer. I personally know some reasonable people who would call AOC a bad faith actor, and also some other reasonable people who would call Tom Cotton a bad faith actor; it's glib to say that they are easily identifiable and widely agreed upon as such.
2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
> people who are not interested at all in truth This is a good summation of what makes a bad actor but requires information only the bad actor has access to (motive). I agree with you though. A good faith actor should be as open minded as they expect their audience to be. A good faith actor asks probing questions and cedes when shown to be incorrect? Has the ability to admit when incorrect? Bad actors tend to lack the openness that they expect others to have.
naasking 4y ago
> The problem is that these people use events to give their name and their agenda some credibility and make it easier for the public to confuse their opinions with science. Then this is a failure of public education and science journalism. Science journalism has indeed been failing the public for decades now, and have arguably been a big factor in the public's distrust of scientific institutions, so that's not surprising. You don't solve this problem by banning speakers or restricting speech, you solve it by improving journalism and public education.

roenxi 4y ago

> The point is not to keep politics out of universities, there is no reason for that, but to keep bad faith actors out of them. When we talk about these obviously bad actors, are we talking people like Socrates and Galileo? Or are we keeping to strictly political undesirables like Assange, Snowden and the whiny pacifists who nobody likes? The words you use are dangerously vague and you aren't calling for observable, thoughtful standards.

spywaregorilla 4y ago
Everyone you've just mentioned has a highly politically charged position, but is not associated with being a bad faith actor.
- roenxi 4y ago
  "In 399 BC, Socrates went on trial for corrupting the minds of the youth of Athens, and for impiety." [0] I dunno, that sounds like the sort of thing that might be considered bad faith. I suppose the exact charge might not have survived translation. How do we think about heretics who corrupt people in good faith? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socrates#Trial_of_Socrates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socrates#Trial_of_Socrates
  - spywaregorilla 4y ago
    No, that would be heretical, which is a different concept. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_faith https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_faith
    - roenxi 4y ago
      Socrates claimed that he was not, in fact, corrupting the youth. Given that a group of Athenians then found him guilty of that to the point where he felt obliged to kill himself it seems fairly likely that his peers suspected him of arguing in bad faith. A bad-faith heretic! Double the crimes that I initially thought. Maybe we do need to keep his dangerous ilk out of universities, he would no doubt have been harshly judged on HN at the time if they'd had HN back in the good old days. More seriously, the academics have perfectly fine standards - to be an academic you need to have studied something deeply and make logical arguments. To speak on campus you need to be sponsored by an academic. That really is all that is needed and they're reasonably objective bars to meet. None of this "oh no he's got bad faith!" stuff that is trotted out for politics. Argue about the outcomes of policies, not the unobservable mental state of the people putting the policies.

tomcam 4y ago

> These people are surprisingly easy to spot, by the way. Excellent. So let them say what they want and demolish them with reason instead of suppression.

RHSeeger 4y ago
I'm quoting what I said in anther comment here, but it applies, so... > it takes orders of magnitude more effort to fight against lies and misinformation than it does to create them. As such, letting everyone say whatever they want and expecting the lies to be exposed/countered by the truthspeakers is destined to fail. We've seen this exact thing play out on every social network.
- tomcam 4y ago
  Sorry free speech is hard for you. Unfortunately, it beats all of the alternatives.
cool_dude85 4y ago
This doesn't work in some situations. Hitler would not have been DEMOLISHED by facts and logic, to use a youtube-ism.
- quantumwannabe 4y ago
  Hitler went to prison and came out stronger and more popular. Oppressing him didn't work, but there was a chance that the German people could have been convinced that National Socialism wouldn't improve the economy and restore Germany to its pre-WWI glory.
  - tomcam 4y ago
    Well he took everyone’s weapons away and imprisoned everyone who spoke against him. So a robust constitution like ours would’ve had a much better chance of standing up to him.
contrast 4y ago

cool_dude85 4y ago

>One, perhaps the only, problem with freedom of speech in academia is that can be very actively exploited by bad faith actors, i.e., people who are not interested at all in truth and merely abuse the university system as a platform for furthering political goals and "whitewashing" their position. Strong disagree. The problem with "freedom of speech in academia" is that it's a polite fiction. What happens when an MIT professor puts out a press release saying that the US deserved 9-11 and that more attacks are justified? Or that the Charlottesville protestors didn't go far enough, and more lefties need to be run down in the street like dogs? Will MIT be hiring Holocaust denier history professors? Does anyone truly believe that, if a professor publicly expresses views well outside of mainstream acceptability, there will be no professional consequences? "Free expression" at a place like MIT still means you need to keep well within the standards of acceptability, just that we want to make sure that the standards include certain things that are now considered beyond the pale.

hirundo 4y ago

People think they can easily identify bad faith, since they hear arguments that sound incomprehensible and assume no one could hold them in good faith. It is common to believe that large swaths of the population carry their convictions in bad faith. As a life long atheist I have suffered from this misconception. The idea of a god seems so absurd to me that I honestly don't understand how people can have faith in one. Never the less it is true, they do, and in good faith. I've had enough deep conversations with believers to establish that. And it's true no matter how many instances of their hypocrisy you collect. The same is true of political opponents.

prottog 4y ago
Exactly. One man's bad faith actor is another's torchbearer. I personally know some reasonable people who would call AOC a bad faith actor, and also some other reasonable people who would call Tom Cotton a bad faith actor; it's glib to say that they are easily identifiable and widely agreed upon as such.

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago

> people who are not interested at all in truth This is a good summation of what makes a bad actor but requires information only the bad actor has access to (motive). I agree with you though. A good faith actor should be as open minded as they expect their audience to be. A good faith actor asks probing questions and cedes when shown to be incorrect? Has the ability to admit when incorrect? Bad actors tend to lack the openness that they expect others to have.

naasking 4y ago

> The problem is that these people use events to give their name and their agenda some credibility and make it easier for the public to confuse their opinions with science. Then this is a failure of public education and science journalism. Science journalism has indeed been failing the public for decades now, and have arguably been a big factor in the public's distrust of scientific institutions, so that's not surprising. You don't solve this problem by banning speakers or restricting speech, you solve it by improving journalism and public education.