MIT Cancel’s Geophysicist’s Prestigious Carlson Lecture Because of his View on DEI

The following Tweets tell the story of Dorian Abbot's recent cancelation:

What were the ideas of Dorian Abbot that got him canceled at MIT. They appear in Newsweek. He expressed his belief that DEI is unfair and that we ought to be hiring purely on merit. Here are some of his excerpts from his August 12, 2021 Newsweek article:

American universities are undergoing a profound transformation that threatens to derail their primary mission: the production and dissemination of knowledge. The new regime is titled "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion" or DEI, and is enforced by a large bureaucracy of administrators. Nearly every decision taken on campus, from admissions, to faculty hiring, to course content, to teaching methods, is made through the lens of DEI. This regime was imposed from the top and has never been adequately debated. In the current climate it cannot be openly debated: the emotions around DEI are so strong that self-censorship among dissenting faculty is nearly universal.

The words "diversity, equity and inclusion" sound just, and are often supported by well-intentioned people, but their effects are the opposite of noble sentiments. Most importantly, "equity" does not mean fair and equal treatment. DEI seeks to increase the representation of some groups through discrimination against members of other groups . . .

DEI undermines the public's trust in universities and their graduates. Some on campus might be surprised to learn that, according to a recent Pew poll, 74 percent of Americans think only qualifications should be taken into account in hiring and promotion, even if this results in less diversity. . . .

We propose an alternative framework called Merit, Fairness, and Equality (MFE) whereby university applicants are treated as individuals and evaluated through a rigorous and unbiased process based on their merit and qualifications alone. Crucially, this would mean an end to legacy and athletic admission advantages, which significantly favor white applicants, in addition to those based on group membership. Simultaneously, MFE would involve universities investing in education projects in neighborhoods where public education is failing to help children from those areas compete. These projects would be evidence-based and non-ideological, testing a variety of different options such as increased public school funding, charter schools and voucher programs.

I have enchanted many people who completely agree with Professor, but they are afraid to express their views because they would risk damage to their careers (the exact kind suffered by Professor Abbott). The result is that a critically important topic (whether we should be hiring solely based on merit) is not being debated. Another professor, Gordon Klein, recently expressed similar views in a lawsuit he filed against his employer, UCLA. He has alleged that he was punished for refusing to discriminate. On Sept 30, 2021, his article appeared at Common Sense with Bari Weiss. Here are a few excerpts from Why I am Suing UCLA:

My saga — which nearly led to my firing — began on the morning of June 2, 2020, when a non-black student in my class on tax principles and law emailed me to ask that I grade his black classmates with greater “leniency” than others in the class. “We are writing to express our tremendous concern about the impact that this final exam and project will have on the mental and physical health of our Black classmates,” the student wrote. (There was no project in this class, and it was unclear to me who the “we” in this case was. . . . I suspected the student simply used a form letter he found online and neglected to change the subject.) “The unjust murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, the life-threatening actions of Amy Cooper and the violent conduct of the [University of California Police Department] have led to fear and anxiety which is further compounded by the disproportionate effect of COVID-19 on the Black community. As we approach finals week, we recognize that these conditions place Black students at an unfair academic disadvantage due to traumatic circumstances out of their control.” To try to make his case, the student drew on UCLA’s “Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion” agenda, which directs professors to grant preferential “equity” to students belonging to “underrepresented groups.”

I wholeheartedly support these principles as most of us understand them. I think all human beings should be treated the same. I welcome — I celebrate — a diversity of opinions and arguments. And, to say the least, I believe in making room for anyone with the grades and gumption to study at one of the nation’s most competitive universities. But academia has so corrupted these words that they are now hollowed out corpses devoid of their original meaning. Today, “diversity” means ideological homogeneity. And “inclusion” means the exclusion of some from a taxpayer-supported university to favor others deemed more deserving of an educational springboard to prosperity.

Shocked by the student’s email, which struck me as deeply patronizing and offensive to the same black students he claimed to care so much about, I collected my thoughts and, 20 minutes later, emailed back: “Are there any students that may be of mixed parentage, such as half black half-Asian? What do you suggest I do with respect to them? A full concession or just half? Also, do you have any idea if any students are from Minneapolis? I assume that they are probably especially devastated as well. I am thinking that a white student from there might possibly be even more devastated by this, especially because some might think that they’re racist even if they are not.”

I wrapped up my reply by citing Martin Luther King’s vision of a colorblind world where people are judged solely by the content of their character — making it clear that I had no intention of treating any students differently on the basis of their skin color.

By that evening, students were calling for my job. Soon after, they circulated a petition demanding I be fired; within a day or two, nearly 20,000 had signed — without knowing anything about me or taking into account, as far as I could tell, the implications of non-color-blind grading. I was attacked for being a white man and “woefully racist.” On June 5, three days after I was first emailed, I was suspended amid a growing online campaign directed at me.

Here is the federal complaint spelling out Gordon Klein's detailed allegations pertaining to the misconduct of UCLA.

We need to be able to discuss ideas freely, especially controversial ideas, especially at universities, the mission of which has long been to expose students to controversial ideas. In the current climate, however, many people are being threatened and punished for expressing or attempting to discuss important issues of the day. This trend blatantly violates the three prerequisites set forth by Jonathan Rauch (in his new book, The Constitution of Knowledge) for enabling us to determine what is true and what is not true. We are nudging month by month closer to a new national principle: Declaration of Truth by Edict.

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The Best System for Determining What is True

I'm reading The Constitution of Knowledge by Jonathan Rauch (2021). Rauch has written an extraordinary book offering a detailed airtight case for why we need each other in order to determine what is true. We need a mediated social system in order to filter out the despots and crackpots, but who will mediate such a system? The incredible answer is no one in particular. The system powers the process, but the system cannot function in the absence of three prerequisites. The following passage sums up what we need to get the job done:

An epistemic regime—that is, a public system for adjudicating differences of belief and perception and for developing shared and warranted conclusions about truth—should provide three public goods.

First, knowledge. The system should be competent at distinguishing reality from non-reality, and at building on previous discoveries so that knowledge accumulates, thereby generating even more knowledge.

Second, freedom. The system should encourage rather than repress human autonomy, creativity, and empowerment. It should welcome and exploit human diversity, especially diversity of opinion, and it should not allow any person or faction to use force or intimidation to control what others say or believe.

Third, peace. The system should reward social conciliation, maximize the number of disagreements which are resolvable, and compartmentalize and marginalize disagreements when it cannot resolve them. It should inculcate intellectual values which abhor violence and bullying, and it should establish institutions and norms which tolerate and even embrace disagreement and doubt.

No one should expect any knowledge-producing system to be perfect, or close to it. Still, many centuries of history show that the liberal system—the reality-based community—comes closer to perfection than any other human social invention.

Next, we need two rules (p. 89):

The fallibilist rule: Ho one gets the final say. You may claim that a statement is established as knowledge only if it can be debunked, in principle, and onlyinsofar as it withstands attempts to debunk it. That is, you are entitled to claim that a statement is objectively true only insofar as it is both checkable and has stood up to checking, and not otherwise. In practice, of course, determining whether a particular statement stands up to checking is sometimes hard, and we have to argue about it. But what counts is the way the rule directs us to behave: you must assume your own and everyone else’sfallibility and you must hunt for your own and others’errors, even if you are confident you are right. Otherwise, you are not reality-based. The Constitution of Knowledge

The empirical rule: No one has personal authority. You may claim that a statement has been established as knowledge only insofar as the method used to check it gives the same result regardless of the identity of the checker, and regardless of the source of the statement. Whatever you do to check a proposition must be something that anyone can do, at least in principle, and get the same result. Also, no one proposing a hypothesis gets a free pass simply because of who she is or what group she belongs to. Who you are does not count; the rules apply to everybody and persons are interchangeable. If your method is valid only for you or your affinity group or people who believe as you do, then you are not reality-based.

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Being “Smart” Does Not Protect You from Being Duped.

Jonathan Rauch has written an excellent new book, "The Constitution of Knowledge" (2021). His analysis is deep and unrelenting. Here's a passage that provides a warning: Being "smart" does not protect a person from being duped:

On the more abstract moral and intellectual questions which so often preoccupy and divide us, reasoning, argues Haidt, is like a press secretary whose goal is to justify whatever position her boss has already taken. “Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second,”writes Haidt. Moreover, in conversations about matters which arouse strong moral reactions, “people care a great deal more about appearance and reputation than about reality.”They care more about looking right than being right. “Our moral thinking,”says Haidt, “is much more like a politician searching for votes than a scientist searching for truth.” Maybe Socrates would rather be right than popular, but most of us prefer to maintain our good standing with our tribe, a reasonable call when one considers that Socrates was executed by his fellow citizens.

Besides being useful for persuading others, the ability to construct reasons is useful for persuading ourselves. Persuading others is easier, after all, if we believe what we say. The old political saw holds that if you can fake sincerity, you’ve got it made; but that is not quite right, because the best way to seem sincere is to be sincere. Detecting trustworthiness is a basic life skill in small groups which depend on sharing and reciprocity, and so people have developed good bullshit detectors. The best way around other people’s bullshit detectors is to believe what you say. If your social reputation and group identity depend upon believing something, then you will find a way to believe it. In fact, your brain will help you by readily accepting and recalling congenial information while working to bury and ignore uncongenial information.

That is why intelligence is no defense against false belief. To the contrary, it makes us even better at rationalizing. Super-smart people, as Haidt notes in The Righteous Mind, are more skilled than others at finding arguments to justify their own points of view. But when they are asked to find arguments on the opposite side of a question, they do no better than anyone else. Brainpower makes people better press secretaries, but not necessarily better at open-minded, self-critical thinking.

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