Wednesday, November 29, 2023

Major brands are not only pausing ads on Elon Musk’s X. They’re stepping away from the platform altogether. By Oliver Darcy


edition.cnn.com

4 - 5 minutes

Editor’s Note: A version of this article first appeared in the “Reliable Sources” newsletter. Sign up for the daily digest chronicling the evolving media landscape here.

CNN — 

The exodus from X is bleeding beyond just major advertisers.

In recent days, a number of prominent media brands have not only paused their paid marketing campaigns on the embattled Elon Musk-owned social platform, but have ceased posting on it altogether, going silent on the once essential site that sought to be the world’s “digital town square.”

The flagship accounts belonging to Disney, Paramount, Lionsgate, Sony Pictures, Universal, and Warner Bros. Discovery (CNN’s parent company) have not posted on the platform in roughly 10 days, following Musk’s disturbing endorsement of an antisemitic conspiracy theory, which he still has not apologized for.

None of the studios commented on the record when CNN reached out for comment. But people familiar with the social media strategies of Paramount and WBD confirmed under the condition of anonymity that it’s no coincidence: the companies have made the active decision to stop posting under certain handles on X due to concerns, including brand safety.

The blackout on X extends beyond these companies’ corporate accounts, in some cases. For instance, the most high profile accounts affiliated with Disney have gone dark on X, such as @StarWars, @Pixar, and @MarvelStudios, which were previously posting multiple times a day on the platform to their millions of followers. Instead, these brands have switched over to the Meta-owned rival Threads, where they have started actively posting.

For instance, when “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” on Monday shared the news that host Stephen Colbert would be off the air this week due to appendicitis, the program did so on Threads. Prior to Musk’s backing of an antisemitic post, Colbert’s show, however, was primarily active on X, regularly posting videos and other content. Now, the inverse is true.

When reached for comment on Monday, a representative for X did not directly address questions on the loss of the media behemoths on the platform, which must be setting off alarm bells inside the social media company. It is already quite bad for the struggling company to be starved of advertising revenue. It’s even worse if it is also starved of content, particularly from household entities that have helped make the platform the center of real-time discussion for years.

It is, of course, possible that these companies will reverse course down the road and resume posting and even advertising on the platform. It would not be the first time that has happened after advertisers have fled an outlet en masse. But it’s also possible that won’t happen.

With Musk at the helm of the platform for the foreseeable future overseeing the critical decisions that have led to a surge in hate speech (while also personally contributing himself to the awful rhetoric), the risk versus reward calculus on whether to engage with the company has taken a sharp nosedive. The situation is not dissimilar to when Tucker Carlson permanently chased most advertisers away from Fox News’ 8pm hour during his time at the network.

And if more companies and other notable figures abandon Musk’s platform for other social networks, it will extinguish the allure it once had, providing yet another reason for average users to ditch the troubled platform.

“Every day, more brands are waking up to the reality that Twitter is dead and X is a cesspool,” Platformer’s Casey Newton said. “The global town square is now dispersed across many different platforms, and increasingly the most relevant conversations are taking place elsewhere.”

Tuesday, November 28, 2023

AI Doomers are worse than wrong - they're incompetent. By Jeremiah Johnson

Read time: 11 minutes

JEREMIAH JOHNSON

NOV 24, 2023


AI Doomers are worse than wrong - they're incompetent

Even judged on their own terms, AI Doomers are terrible and ineffective


Last week one of the most important tech companies in the world nearly self-destructed. And the entire thing was caused by the wild incompetence of a small slice of ‘effective altruists’.


Other sites have reported the exact series of events in greater detail, so I’m going to just run through the basics. OpenAI is an oddly structured AI company/non-profit1 that’s famous for its large language models like GPT-4 and ChatGPT as well as image creation tools like DALL-E. Thanks mostly to the sensational debut of ChatGPT, it’s now valued at around $80 billion and many observers think it could break into the Microsoft/Google/Apple/Amazon/Meta2 tier of tech giants. But last week, with essentially no warnings of any kind, OpenAI’s board of directors fired founder and CEO Sam Altman. The board said Altman was not “consistently candid in his communications” with the board, without elaborating or providing more detail.


The backlash to the board’s decision was nearly immediate. Altman is extraordinarily popular at OpenAI and in Silicon Valley writ large, and that popularity proved durable against the board’s vague accusations. President and chairman Greg Brockman resigned in protest. Giant institutional investors in OpenAI (including Microsoft, Sequoia Capital, and Thrive Capital) began to press behind the scenes for the decision to be reversed. Less than 24 hours after his firing, Altman was in negotiations with the board to return to the company. More than 90% of the company’s workforce3 threatened to resign if Altman wasn’t reinstated. Microsoft basically threatened to hire Altman, steal all of OpenAI’s employees and just recreate the entire company themselves.


There were several embarrassing twists and turns. Altman was back but then he wasn’t, then the board tried a desperation merger with rival Anthropic which was turned down immediately, and the entire time the OpenAI office was leaking rumors like a sieve. Finally on November 21st, four days after Altman was fired, he was reinstated as CEO and the board members who voted to oust him were replaced. In trying to fire Altman, the board ended up firing themselves.


There are dozens of angles you can take to talk about this story, but the most interesting one for me is how this epitomizes the buffoonery and tactical incompetence of the AI doom movement.


AI being firing an employee, office setting, realism

AI-generated prompt: “AI fires a CEO, office setting”

It’s unclear exactly why the OpenAI board decided to fire Altman. They’ve specifically denied it was due to any ‘malfeasance’ and at no point has anyone on the board provided any detail about the supposed lack of ‘candid communications’. Some speculate it’s because of a staff letter warning about a ‘powerful discovery that could threaten humanity’. Some think it stemmed from a dispute Altman had with Helen Toner, one of the board members who voted to oust him. Some think that it’s a disagreement about moving too fast in ways that endanger safety.


Whatever the precise nature of the disagreement, one thing is clear. There were two camps within OpenAI - one group of AI doomers laser-focused on AI safety and one groups more focused on commercializing OpenAI’s products. The conflict was between these two camps, with the board members who voted Altman out in the AI doom camp and Altman in the more commercial camp. And you can’t understand what happened at OpenAI without understanding the group that believes AI will destroy humanity as we know it.


I am not an AI doomer.4 I think the idea that AI is going to kill us all is deeply silly, thoroughly non-rigorous and the product of far too much navel gazing and sci-fi storytelling. But there are plenty of people who do believe that AI either will or might kill all of humanity, and they take this idea very seriously. They don’t just think “AI could take our jobs” or “AI could accidentally cause a big disaster” or “AI will be bad for the environment/capitalism/copyright/etc”. They think that AI is advancing so fast that pretty soon we’re going to create a godlike artificial intelligence which will really, truly kill every single human on the planet in service of some inscrutable AI goal. These folks exist. Often times they’re actually very smart, nice and well-meaning people. They have a significant amount of institutional power in the non-profit and effective altruism worlds. They have sucked up hundreds of millions of dollars of funding for their many institutes and centers studying the problem. They would likely call themselves something like ‘AI Safety Advocates’. A less flattering and more accurate name would be ‘AI Doomers’. Everybody wants AI to be safe, but only one group thinks we’re literally all going to die.


I disagree with the ‘AI Doom’ hypothesis. But what’s remarkable is how even if you grant their premise, for all their influence and institutes and piles of money and effort they have essentially no accomplishments. If anything, the AI doom movement has made things worse by their own standards. It’s one of the least effective, most tactically inept social movements I’ve ever seen.


How do you measure something like that? By looking at the evidence in front of your face. OpenAI’s strange institutional setup (a non-profit controlling an $80B for-profit corporation) is a direct result of AI doom fears. Just in case OpenAI-the-business made an AI that was too advanced, just in case they were tempted by profit to push safety to the side… the non-profit’s board would be able to step in and stop it. On the surface, that’s almost certainly what happened with Sam Altman’s firing. The board members who agreed to fire him all have extensive ties to the effective altruism and AI doom camps. The board was likely uncomfortable with the runaway success of OpenAI’s LLM models and wanted to slow down the pace of development, while Altman was publicly pushing to go faster and dream bigger.


The problem with the board’s approach is that they failed. They failed catastrophically. I cannot emphasize in strong enough terms how much of a public humiliation this is for the AI doom camp. One week ago, true-believer AI safety/AI doom advocates had formal control of the most important, advanced and influential AI company in the world. Now they’re all gone. They completely neutered all their institutional power with an idiotic strategic blunder.


The board fired Altman seemingly without a single thought about what would happen after they fired him. I’m curious what they actually thought was going to happen - they would fire Altman and all the investors in the for-profit corporation would just say “Oh, I guess we should just not develop this revolutionary technology we paid billions for. You’re right, money doesn’t matter! This is a thing that we venture capitalists often say, haha!”.


It seems pretty damn clear that they had no game plan. They didn’t do even basic due diligence. If they had, they’d have realized that every institutional investor, more than 90% of their own employees and virtually the entire tech industry would back Altman. They’d realize that firing Altman would cause the company to self-destruct.


But maybe things were so bad and the AI was so dangerous that destroying the company was actually good! This is the view expressed by board member Helen Toner who said that destroying the company could be consistent with the board’s mission. The problem with Helen Toner’s strategy is that while Helen Toner might have total control over OpenAI, she does not have total control over the rest of the tech industry. When the board fired Altman, he was scooped up by Microsoft within 48 hours. Within 72 hours, there was a standing offer of employment for any OpenAI employee to jump ship to Microsoft at equal pay. And the vast majority of their employees were on board with this. The end result of board’s actions would be that OpenAI still existed, only it’d be called ‘MicrosoftAI’ instead. And there would be even fewer safeguards against dangerous AI - Microsoft is a company that laid off its entire AI ethics and safety team earlier this year. Not a single post-firing scenario here was actually good for the AI doomer camp. It’s hard to overstate what a parade of dumb-fuckery this was. Wile E. Coyote has had more success against the Road Runner than OpenAI’s board has had in slowing dangerous AI developments.


Should We Watch Wile E. Coyote Go Off the Cliff? – The Heartland Institute

Sam Altman (left) watches the OpenAI board (right) attempt to oust him

This buffoonish incompetence is sadly typical for AI doomers. For all the worry, for all the effort that people put into thinking about AI doom there is a startling lack of any real achievements that make AI concretely safer. I’ve asked this question before - What value have you actually produced? - and usually I get pointed to some very sad stuff like ‘Here is a white paper we wrote called Functional Decision Theory: A New Theory of Instrumental Rationality’. And hey, papers like these don’t do anything, but what they lack in impact they make up for in volume! Or I’ll hear “We convinced this company to test their AI for dangerous scenarios before release”. If your greatest accomplishment is encouraging companies to test their own products in basic ways, you may want to consider whether you’ve actually done anything at all.


There’s a sense in which I’m being very unfair to AI doom advocates. They do actually have a huge string of accomplishments - the only problem is that it’s accomplishments in the exact opposite direction from their stated goals. If anything, they’ve made super-advanced AI happen faster. OpenAI was explicitly founded in the name of AI safety! Now OpenAI is leading the charge to develop cutting-edge AIs faster than anyone else, and they’re apparently so dangerous the CEO needed to be fired. AI enthusiasts will take this as a win, but it sure is curious that the world’s most advanced AI models are coming from an organization founded by people who think AI might kill everyone.


Or consider Anthropic. Anthropic was founded by ex-OpenAI employees who worried the company was not focused enough on safety. They decamped and founded their own rival firm that would truly, actually care about safety. They were true AI doom believers. And what impact did founding Anthropic have? OpenAI, late in 2022, became afraid that Anthropic was going to beat them to the punch with a chatbot. They quickly released a modified version of GPT3.5 to the public under the name ‘ChatGPT’. Yes, Anthropic’s existence was the reason ChatGPT was published to the world. And Anthropic, paragons of safety and advocates of The Right Way To Develop AI, ended up partnering with Amazon in the end, making them just as beholden to shareholders and corporate profits as any other tech startup. You will notice the pattern - every time AI doom advocates take major action, they seem to push AI further and faster.


This isn’t just my idle theorizing. Ask Sam Altman himself:



Eliezer Yudkowsky is both the world’s worst Harry Potter fanfiction writer5 and the most important figure in the AI doom movement, having sounded the alarm on dangerous AI for more than a decade. And Altman himself thinks Big Yud’s net impact has been to accelerate AGI (artificial general intelligence, aka smarter-than-human AI).


Even Yudkowsky himself, who founded the Machine Intelligence Research Institute to study how to develop AI safely, basically thinks all his efforts have been worthless. In an editorial for TIME, he said ‘We are not prepared’, and ‘There is no plan’. He advocated for a total worldwide shutdown of every single instance of AI development and AI research. He said that we should airstrike countries who develop AI, and would rather risk nuclear war than have AI being developed anywhere on earth. Leaving aside the lunacy of that suggestion, it’s a frank admission that AI doomers haven’t accomplished anything despite more than a decade of effort.


The upshot of all this is that the net impact of the AI safety/AI doom movement has been to make AI happen faster, not slower. They have no real achievements of any significance to their name. They write white papers, they found institutes, they take in money, but by their own standards they have accomplished worse than nothing. There are various cope justifications for these failures - maybe it would be even worse counterfactually! Maybe firing him and then hiring him back was actually logical by some crazy mental jiu-jitsu! Stop it. It’s embarrassing. The crowd that’s perfectly willing to speculate about the nature of godlike future AIs is congenitally unable to see the obvious thing directly in front of them.


There’s a real irony that AI doom is tightly interwoven with the ‘effective altruist’ world. To editorialize a bit: I consider myself somewhat of an effective altruist, but I got into the movement as someone who thinks stopping malaria deaths in Africa is a good idea because it’s so cost-effective. It pisses me off that AI doomers have ruined the label of effective altruist6. Nothing AI doomers do has had the slightest amount of impact. As far as I can tell they haven’t benefited humanity in any real way, even by their own standards. They are the opposite of ‘effective’. At best they are a money and talent drain that directs funding and bright, well-meaning young people into pointless work. At worst they are active grifters.


C'est pire qu'un crime, c'est une faute


- Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord


I really wish the AI safety/doom camp would stop and take stock of exactly what it is they think they’re accomplishing. They won’t, but I wish they would. I’d love to see them just separated from the EA movement entirely. I’d love for EA funders to stop throwing money at them. I’d love to see them admit that not only do they not accomplish anything with their hundreds of millions, they don’t even have a proper framework from which to measure their non-accomplishments. Their whole ecosystem is full of sound and fury, but not much else.


When Napoleon executed the Duke of Enghien in 1804, Talleyrand famously commented “It is worse than a crime, it is a mistake”. The AI doom movement is worse than wrong, it’s utterly incompetent. The firing of Sam Altman was only the latest example from a movement steeped in incompetence, labelled as ‘effective altruism’ but without the slightest evidence of effectiveness to back them up.


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It’s Time to Name Anti-Palestinian Bigotry. By Peter Beinart


jewishcurrents.org

14 - 17 minutes

IN JUNE, three Republicans in the House of Representatives—Michael Waltz, Jim Banks and Claudia Tenney—introduced a resolution censuring Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Presley, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for, among other things, “inciting anti-Semitic attacks across the United States.” House Democrats accused their colleagues of Jew-hatred as well, just less explicitly. Rep. Ted Deutch did not mention his colleagues by name, but characterized their accusations of apartheid, and Tlaib’s opposition to a Jewish state, as “[a]ttacks . . . against Jews,” that “have led to antisemitism.” Four more House Democrats—Josh Gottheimer, Kathy Manning, Elaine Luria, and Dean Phillips—denounced unspecified members of Congress for calling Israel an apartheid state or claiming it has committed acts of terrorism. “These statements,” they alleged, “are antisemitic at their core.”

Such accusations have dogged Tlaib, Omar, Pressley, and Ocasio-Cortez since they entered Congress. Search for articles alleging that they are antisemitic and Google generates a seemingly endless supply. But if you search for articles suggesting that their critics are “anti-Palestinian,” you’ll find next to nothing. There’s little indication that they’ve ever had to publicly respond to charges of anti-Palestinian bigotry at all. 

That’s strange because the evidence that the Squad’s critics are anti-Palestinian is far stronger than the evidence that the Squad is anti-Jewish. The reason this bigotry goes undiscussed is because, in mainstream American discourse, the word “anti-Palestinian” barely exists. It is absent not because anti-Palestinian bigotry is rare but because it is ubiquitous. It is absent precisely because, if the concept existed, almost everyone in Congress would be guilty of it, except for a tiny minority of renegade progressives who are regularly denounced as antisemites. 

In recent months, as definitions of antisemitism have proliferated—some of which have been used to equate anti-Zionism with Jew-hatred—Palestinian intellectuals have begun mulling a definition of anti-Palestinian bigotry. In a tweet last fall, Mezna Qato, a historian of the Middle East at Cambridge University, defined “anti-Palestinianism” as “Prejudice, hostility or discrimination against Palestinians. Denial of the Nakba. Accusing a Palestinian of ‘latent’ racism(s) without cause. Allowing Palestinian exception to all other held liberal or left values/politics.” 

Lawyers are grappling with the issue as well. This April, Palestine Legal, which defends the civil liberties of Americans who support Palestinian rights, asked the US Department of Education to investigate Florida State University for having “permitted and reinforced a disturbing environment of anti-Palestinian racism” against a student, Ahmad Daraldik, who was viciously harassed for publicizing his experiences under Israeli occupation. It was the first time the Department has been asked to determine that a case of anti-Palestinian bigotry violates Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits institutions that receive federal funds from discriminating based on race, color, or national origin.

There is no consensus among Palestinian intellectuals and activists about whether a specific definition of anti-Palestinianism is wise. Qato told me she worries it could “exceptionalize Palestinian rights as somehow distinct from rights accorded anyone else”—a frequent critique of definitions of antisemitism. Amira Mattar, the Michael Ratner Justice Fellow at Palestine Legal, told me that because the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights does not define other forms of discrimination, Palestine Legal “steered clear of defining anti-Palestinianism” in their complaint. But Mattar suggested that Americans do “need some way to identify the very specific repression that Palestinians and their supporters face for confronting Zionism, to show the very distinct harm that they suffer, which is distinct from larger forms of discrimination like anti-Arabism or Islamophobia.” 

What’s crucial isn’t that anti-Palestinianism gets its own definition. It’s that the concept enters US public discourse, allowing more Americans to recognize the bigotry that afflicts Palestinians—those in Israel-Palestine as well as in the diaspora—and their supporters, who are harassed and penalized in the US. As the recent movements against police violence and sexual harassment have shown, making visible what for many was previously invisible can transform political debates. Naming anti-Palestinian bigotry could help do the same.

RATHER THAN DEFINING “bigotry” or “discrimination,” the federal agencies charged with enforcing Title VI of the Civil Rights Act rely on a series of examples that serve as a standard for evaluating future complaints. But while the government provides no definition, it’s not hard to understand what bigotry means in common speech: It means treating people as inferior because of their group identity.

Applying that standard to the Squad and its critics is revealing. In their joint letter, Gottheimer, Manning, Luria, and Phillips allude to Squad members calling Israel an “apartheid state.” Waltz, Banks, and Tenney want to censure them for, among other things, claiming that Israel has committed “ethnic cleansing” and “promotes racism and dehumanization.” Deutch is outraged that Tlaib doesn’t support a Jewish state. 

But none of these examples—or any others that the critics cite—suggest that Tlaib, Omar, Pressley, or Ocasio-Cortez think Israeli Jews should be treated as inferior. When members of the Squad accuse Israel of apartheid—as Human Rights Watch has done—they are expressing their opposition to what international law defines as an “institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination” by one group over another. It’s that same opposition to Palestinian subjugation that leads Tlaib to oppose a state that, in the words of B’Tselem, Israel’s leading human rights organization, is based on “Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.” Tlaib doesn’t propose replacing a state based on Jewish supremacy with one that favors Palestinians or Muslims; she supports replacing it with a state based on equality under the law. That’s the same principle she supports in the United States, and around the world. It’s the principle that has led her to oppose US aid to Egypt “until they address and are held accountable for their many, ongoing human rights abuses,” and to declare that, “if there was an economic boycott movement around Saudi Arabia, I would be the first to sign up for it.” 

Contrast this with the Squad’s congressional critics, who are comfortable with—if not enthusiastic about—Israel’s treatment of Palestinians as inferior. In 2019, Waltz and Banks, two of the three Republicans who recently tried to censure the Squad, voted against a House resolution supporting “efforts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through a negotiated two-state solution.” (Their co-author, Tenney, was not in Congress at the time.) Since Waltz and Banks oppose a two-state solution, and emphatically oppose one equal state in Israel-Palestine, their clear preference is for some version of the one state that currently exists, in which millions of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip live under Israeli control but without the basic freedoms—citizenship, due process, free movement, and the right to vote—enjoyed by their Jewish neighbors. Waltz and Banks, in other words, support institutionalized anti-Palestinian bigotry.

In slightly more subtle ways, the Squad’s Democratic critics do, too. In theory, Congressional Democrats like Gottheimer and Deutch support a Palestinian state. But what they support in practice is unconditional US backing for the Israeli government—even if it is making a Palestinian state impossible. In 2017, Gottheimer and Deutch voted to condemn a United Nations Resolution that declared West Bank settlements “a violation under international law and a major obstacle to the vision of two States living side-by-side.” The other three Democrats who recently condemned the Squad weren’t in Congress at the time. But this April, all of them, along with Gottheimer and Deutch, signed a letter opposing the imposition of any human rights conditions on US military aid to Israel. That means they support using US aid to help Israel control millions of Palestinians who cannot be citizens of the country in which they live or vote for the government that dominates their lives simply because they are Palestinian. 

The Squad’s Democratic critics might respond that they harbor no animus toward Palestinians; they’re simply defending the security and legitimacy of a Jewish state. But imagine if a foreign government granted full citizenship to its entire gentile population but provided its Jews either second-class citizenship or no citizenship at all. Then imagine if there were members of Congress who demanded that the US arm that government without restrictions and opposed any international pressure to make it change its discriminatory policies. There is no doubt those members of Congress would be deemed complicit in anti-Semitism.

ANTI-PALESTINIANISM is not only commonplace in Congress. It’s commonplace across American society. It’s not just that prominent media, business, and religious figures argue openly that Palestinians under Israeli control be denied elemental human rights. Americans who advocate for those rights are often penalized for doing so. On college campuses, administrators frequently cancel lectures, classes, professorships, and even entire student organizations, because they espouse pro-Palestinian views. Pro-Israel politicians and organizations pressure museums, theaters, and concert halls to deny venues to pro-Palestinian performers. In 2017, the state of Arizona refused to renew its contract with a lawyer who works with incarcerated people because he wouldn’t pledge not to boycott Israel. In 2018, Texas did the same when a speech pathologist who works with developmentally disabled children would not sign a non-boycott pledge.

Why is this widespread anti-Palestinian bigotry so difficult to name? Because until society decides that members of a certain group deserve equality, the bigotry that they and their supporters endure generally remains invisible.

The history of the word “antisemitism” offers a glimpse into how this works. As Professor David Feldman, Director of the Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism at the University of London, explained to me, 19th century English-speakers had no special term for bigotry against Jews until they imported “antisemitism” from Germany, where it had emerged in the1870s. Why did the term “antisemitism” emerge there at that time? Because, Feldman argues in a 2018 essay in the American Historical Review, it was in 1871 that German Jews “decisively” gained “civil and political equality.” In other words, it was only after Jewish equality gained some political legitimacy that opposing it denoted a specific form of bigotry. Before that, treating Jews as inferior didn’t require a special term because it was unremarkable, the normal order of things.

That’s roughly the situation for Palestinians today. For much of the 20th century, mainstream American and Israeli public discourse did not even tolerate the word “Palestinian.” In The Question of Palestine, published in 1979, Edward Said observed that, “merely to mention the Palestinians or Palestine in Israel, or to a convinced Zionist, is to name the unnameable.” That has since changed. Today, fewer American politicians still insist that Palestinians are merely generic Arabs. In 2019, when New York City Councilman Kalman Yeger claimed that Palestinians do not exist, he was stripped of his committee post. 

But what remains largely unnameable is the idea that Palestinians deserve equality, and that denying them equality—or penalizing Americans for advocating their equality—thus constitutes a form of bigotry. This absence carries particular weight because, since the 1970s, when American Jewish leaders coined the term “the new anti-Semitism” to describe criticism of Zionism and Israel, Palestinians and their supporters have faced relentless allegations of Jew-hatred. Israel’s supporters face no similar scrutiny, even when they openly insist that Palestinians live without basic rights.  

The more entrenched Israel’s anti-Palestinian bigotry has become—through relentless settlement growth in the West Bank and the passage of a nation-state law that formalizes legal inequality between Palestinians and Jews even inside Israel proper—the more fervently Israel’s advocates have insisted that questioning Jewish statehood constitutes antisemitism. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which has been adopted by 31 governments, the United States Departments of Education and State, and more than 200 US states, municipalities, universities, and nonprofits, includes among its examples of antisemitism “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.” It’s a striking illustration of the way in which claims of antisemitism seek to silence claims of anti-Palestinian oppression. Under the most widely adopted definition of antisemitism in the world, a Palestinian who calls Israel bigoted is guilty of bigotry against Jews. 

Talking about anti-Palestinian bigotry is not risk-free. As Mezna Qato notes, it can encourage people “to think about Palestine as a question of ethnicity or identity,” and thus may “detract from a necessary focus on Palestine as a political struggle” against a discriminatory state ideology. 

It is up to Palestinians to decide how to wage their struggle for freedom. But since pro-Israel organizations in the US have made it nearly impossible to discuss Israel-Palestine without addressing questions of anti-Jewish bigotry, Americans of all backgrounds have a responsibility to ask why even blatant expressions of anti-Palestinian bigotry pass almost unnoticed. Because anti-Palestinianism is so invisible and so pervasive, introducing the concept could change the way Americans discuss what Israel does to Palestinians, and what America does to those who speak on their behalf. The notion of anti-Palestinianism might force politicians, pundits, and religious leaders who call the Squad bigots to reckon with the fact that the label applies far better to themselves.

Monday, November 27, 2023

The Justice Scalia Mythology that Still Haunts our Politics and our Law. By Eric Segall


www.dorfonlaw.org

9 - 12 minutes

By Eric Segall - August 16, 2021 

Justice Antonin Scalia passed away in 2016 but his legacy and the myths surrounding his jurisprudence still severely impact our politics and our law. Not long after his death, George Mason University received a large sum of money from private donors (including the Koch Brothers) to change the law school’s name to the Antonin Scalia Law School. Recently, Harvard Law School announced that it filled its outside-funded Antonin Scalia Professor of Law position. While running for President, Donald Trump repeatedly used the name Antonin Scalia to signify the kinds of judges he would appoint. There is even a play written about Scalia which was performed in the shadow of the highest Court in the land.

These lavish testaments to the late Justice are deeply insulting to women, people of color, LGBTQ folks, and non-Christians, as well as dangerous perpetuations of the fiction that Scalia was a Justice worth honoring. What Scalia stood for the most was the privileging as a matter of law of antiquated and unjust legal traditions, favoring white males over outsider groups, and allowing the government to treat the religious over the secular under the establishment clause. Mountains of evidence for these claims can be found in Scalia’s written opinions, his questions during oral arguments, and his off-the-court statements.

Before turning to that evidence, however, it is important to discredit one of the most common myths surrounding Justice Scalia. As I have written elsewhere, he was no originalist, despite his oft-repeated claims to the contrary. Scalia often ignored originalism altogether (affirmative action cases); distorted history beyond recognition (Second Amendment and Federalism cases); or just looked at those isolated historical sources that supported the conservative results he wanted to reach (campaign finance regulation). Scalia is often credited by conservatives for voting liberal in criminal procedure cases but he did not vote that way very often and, according to Professor Lawrence Rosenthal, he only voted originalist in 18% of fourth amendment cases. Scalia was in no sense an originalist Justice when it came to his votes.

Apart from his faux originalism, Justice Scalia’s opinions and heated rhetoric in civil rights cases should disturb people of even moderate sensibilities. It must be remembered, of course, that Supreme Court Justices should be judged according to the values of the times in which they lived. There are numerous Supreme Court Justices, maybe most Justices prior to 1954, who we still honor and who undoubtedly held racist, sexist, and anti-LGBTQ views. But Justice Scalia made all of the statements below (and issued all of the votes discussed in this post) in the last 35 years.

In 1996, he was the only dissenter in a case requiring the Virginia Military Institute, an elite state-funded military college, to accept women after it refused to do so for over a century. Scalia argued that courts should defer to all but the most irrational of laws that discriminate against women. Even Chief Justice William Rehnquist, an opponent of civil rights progress for decades, disagreed with Scalia in the VMI case.

At the oral argument in the landmark Shelby County case, which gutted the Voting Rights Act, Justice Scalia responded to the point that a unanimous Senate had passed the law by saying that the Act was a “perpetuation of racial entitlement.” In light of this country’s sordid history of intentional suppression of Black voters through violence and literacy and character tests, this statement unsurprisingly shocked many people. The right to vote is not an entitlement (in the pejorative sense), racial or otherwise.

Scalia voted to strike down every affirmative action law he ever faced and on his way to doing so revealed his true self. At the oral argument in a case involving the University of Texas, Scalia said the following: “There are those who contend that it does not benefit African Americans to get them into the University of Texas where they do not do well…. I’m just not impressed by the fact that that the University of Texas may have fewer [Blacks]. Maybe it ought to have fewer. And …when you take more, the number of blacks, really competent blacks admitted to lesser schools, turns out to be less.”

Not that long ago, the University of Texas was 100 percent white. When the school later used race as “a factor of a factor of a factor,” in the words of Justice Anthony Kennedy, to attain more diversity, Scalia steadfastly voted no, and suggested Blacks did not belong there anyway.

Scalia’s dissents and rhetoric about gays and lesbians bordered on the medieval. Dissenting in a 2003 case striking down a Texas law making it a crime for adults to engage in private, consensual gay sex, Scalia said that “[m]any Americans do not want persons who openly engage in homosexual conduct as partners in their business, scoutmasters for their children [and] teachers in their schools.” These statements, whether true or not, were projections of Scalia’s prejudice.

In another case, Scalia compared homosexual conduct to murder and bestiality. When he was later asked about these statements by a gay Princeton student, he responded, “If we cannot have moral feelings against homosexuality, can we have it against murder? Can we have it against other things? I don’t apologize for the things I raise.”

Justice Scalia also “interpreted” the first amendment’s establishment clause out of the Constitution. He said in several different opinions that legal coercion or compulsion was a requirement that plaintiffs had to establish to show the government violated the clause and relatedly that the government should be allowed to symbolically prefer one religion over others. But the free exercise clause, also in the first amendment, is violated when the government punishes or threatens religious exercise or treats one religion better than others or better than non-religion. Any government behavior that meets Scalia’s establishment clause test would also violate the free exercise clause. There is nothing in the history of the first amendment, however, suggesting that the two clauses should perform identical functions or that the establishment clause has no independent meaning.

Based on this misreading of the establishment clause, Scalia voted to uphold school prayers at graduation ceremonies, sectarian prayers at legislative sessions, teaching “creation science” in public schools, and religious symbols on government property. Furthermore, although Scalia believed strongly in the devil, he did not care for science.

Professor Caroline Corbin has argued persuasively that Scalia’s religion clause jurisprudence is based to a large degree on his inability to see Christian privilege in America, which made Scalia’s views on the establishment clause consistent with his views on race, poverty, civil rights, and many other aspects of American constitutional law. White, male Christians were most often the beneficiaries of Scalia’s jurisprudence while all other groups were marginalized.

It is hard to imagine how the Antonin Scalia Professor of Law at Harvard or the Professors at Antonin Scalia Law School teach their female, Black, non-Christian, and LGBTQ students about these cases. Imagine the students’ shock when they learn that Scalia thought the right to vote, so long denied to Blacks, was just a “racial entitlement,” or that Scalia thought it a good idea to compare homosexual conduct to murder and then to double-down on what he dismissively and insensitively called “a form of argument.” As late as 1996, he had no constitutional problem with a government-owned-and-operated military school limiting its substantial benefits to men. He had no difficulty with the government endorsing Christianity over all other religions and non-religion. How do we expect students to react to these insults when the professor standing in the room or their own school carries the name of the man who made them?

The Republican Party still views Scalia as their hero, but that is what we would expect from a political party either hostile to or indifferent towards the issues facing people of color, women, religious minorities, and the LGBTQ community. But law schools and great universities should know better. Honoring Scalia is a testament to a white-washed 1950’s America when women were expected to be wives and mothers, gays and lesbians had to hide in the closet, racism deeply infected our politics, and Christianity dominated our country.

The myth that Antonin Scalia was a principled, great jurist is one of the most dangerous misconceptions in American politics. He thought nothing of disparaging people unlike him as well as insulting even his fellow Justices. Far from being a role model for our law students, he should be an example of how judges should not act.

The real Justice Scalia can be seen in his dissent in the Court’s landmark decision invalidating state same-sex marriage bans. He compared the reasoning of Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion to the “mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie.” But equality under the law is neither mystical nor an aphorism. It is a constitutional requirement of the Fourteenth Amendment-a requirement Scalia ignored, distorted, and abused during his long career at the expense of most of America’s outsider groups. He should be remembered as a man who often exemplified the worst aspects of our country and our culture, not a great or even a good judge, and certainly not in any sense an American hero.

Friday, November 24, 2023

Your Decision To Cave To Internet Weirdos And/Or Your Youngest And Most Annoying Staffers Is Unlikely To Age Well. By Jesse Singal

 — Read time: 6 minutes

JESSE SINGAL

NOV 23, 2023

PAID

Your Decision To Cave To Internet Weirdos And/Or Your Youngest And Most Annoying Staffers Is Unlikely To Age Well

Think about your legacy!


Last night I got drinks with a friend, let’s call him “Jon,” who is pretty well-connected in politics. He’s had a successful career working for a bunch of politicians, several of whom you have heard of. That’s why, in addition to being a very good guy, he is a fun person to get drinks with. These folks always have stories.


Jon and I both felt, circa 2016, that the whole “man, these college students sure are crazy” thing was overblown. Seven years or so later, there we were, catching up and shaking our heads at just how wrong we’d been. The craziness absolutely spread into liberal institutions and caused countless meltdowns, as documented most comprehensively by Ryan Grim in The Intercept. From 2016 or so on, Jon saw things get worse and worse in progressive politics, and I saw things get worse and worse in mainstream (that is, progressive) journalism, and the similarities. . .  weren’t subtle.


My friend told me that some politicians (including, again, ones you’ve heard of) are now “extremely frustrated and sick of their mostly younger and more radical staffers feeling entitled to dictate the terms of their policy positions and then slam them on social media if they didn't capitulate,” as he summed things up in a follow-up text message. These politicians are being less and less shy about expressing their views about these staffers in various ways. This, he thinks, is a sign of a pendulum swinging back toward relative normalcy after a period of major fervor.


But in some places, the pendulum isn’t quite there yet.


Jon said there’s still a lot of dysfunction in progressive politics, and what frustrated him the most was the extent to which it stymies actual progress out there in the real world. I told him about Freddie deBoer’s “iron law of institutions and the left” idea — in progressive institutions, as in all institutions, people often act in a manner seeking to improve their standing within the organization, rather than in a manner conducive to achieving the organization’s internal goals. Jon certainly had some examples on that front.


I think there’s a basic, important insight here: however pathetic they might act during a moment of panic and recrimination, at the end of the day the leadership of major organizations got where they are because they would like to accomplish things, and because they are capable of playing politics, compromising, and so on. They probably have a limited reserve of patience for staffers demanding these norms be tossed aside in favor of some sort of ill-defined Twitter revolution. That’s particularly true when it comes to younger employees, who have not yet accomplished anything or proven their worth, and who are sometimes — I know this from my conversation with not just Jon but others in the worlds of politics and NGOs — undeniable drags on their organizations that management keenly wishes they could un-hire.


In almost every mainstream organization, in other words, there’s a basic limiting factor on how crazy things can get. It just hasn’t kicked in everywhere yet.


***


On October 27, Helen Lewis wrote in her newsletter, “I’m talking to Hannah Barnes, author of Time to Think, about gender, science and scepticism in Brighton on 9 January.” Specifically, the event was to take place as part of the Brighton Skeptics in the Pub events series, which sounds like it combines several of my leading interests. (I interviewed Barnes about her book here, and we had Lewis on Blocked and Reported here [co-hosting with Katie] and here [joining us for an end-of-year too-online Christmas quiz].)


The event quickly sold out. Which makes sense, because Lewis (The Atlantic) and Barnes (BBC, recently decided to move to The New Statesman) are both big names within journalism, and because Time to Think is a book about a very hot subject (youth gender medicine) that was a Sunday Times Bestseller. And what better subject for an event hosted by a skeptics’ organization?


Except people got very upset, some of them complained, there was an open letter (I will link to it if I can find it, but no luck so far), and this morning — the morning after my conversation with Jon about meltdowns within progressive organizations — well, you can probably see where this was all headed: “Sorry to say that despite selling out immediately, this event has now been cancelled,” wrote Lewis on Twitter, which some people call X, which is a stupid name. “The organiser offered all kinds of compromises—a trans voice on the panel, a separate rebuttal event, even a statement disassociating the Skeptic Society from our views—but it wasn’t enough.” The event page no longer exists. (Update: Here’s an explanation posted by the organizer.)


This organiZer (sorry, Helen — this is America) acted in a really craven way here. I know it’s risky to become enamored with one theory and then use it to explain everything, because usually things are More Complicated Than That(™), but could you imagine a better illustration of the iron law of institutions and the left? Clearly, an event like this would have been good for the skeptics’ movement, given the subject matter. Clearly, the event was a success — it sold out! — that would bring more attention to this particular group due to the celebrity wattage of the invited guests. And yet this organizer was so worried about his standing within the organization and his broader community — or at least I’d bet a significant amount that that was what fundamentally motivated this — that he had to make the ridiculous move of canceling the event, even though that move was always going to cause a cavalcade of criticism from reasonable people everywhere. (“I set up Oxford Sceptics in the Pub 14 years ago,” tweeted (not Xed) Andy Lewis. “Right now, I am thinking of coming out of retirement to take on the utter clowns that have destroyed the whole concept of public critical thinking meetings.” (Lewis got hold of some other, rather colorful details about the campaign to cancel or disrupt the event, which you can read about here.)


I strongly suspect, based on the current trajectory of that great big invisible pendulum, that three or four years hence a cancellation like this will be unthinkable. But in the meantime, leaders of organizations should consider both their futures and their legacies. Is it likely that this man will think back to the time he canceled an event about a best-selling book and say “Yes, that was a good idea! That promoted the cause of skeptical thinking and critical inquiry.” Seems unlikely!


There’s a bigger, fascinating story here about what happened to large segments of the atheist/skeptic communities, albeit one that has been somewhat told already. It has to do with concepts like “Atheism Plus,” and it can partly explain the astonishing meltdowns of once-critically minded online spaces like Science-Based Medicine. Maybe someday a thorough excavation would make for good BARPod or Singal-Minded fodder.


But for now, all I’ll say is that individuals in leadership roles should keep that pendulum in mind, as hard as that might be to do when you are worried your friends and colleagues — particularly the very online, very angry ones — are mad at you, and might take that anger public. If you can’t make the right choice, maybe leadership just isn’t for you?


Questions? Comments? Proposals for a new movement called Atheism Minus-Plus? I’m at singalminded@gmail.com.



Thankful mailbag. By Matthew Yglesias

— Read time: 16 minutes


Thankful mailbag

Argentina, whether news is pointless, and the trouble with the long-term


Happy Black Friday! I hope you find discounts that bring joy to your life and help reduce the rate of inflation. But if you’re trying to get your holiday shopping done early, there’s really no better gift than the gift of content.


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It’s a busy week with lots of travel, so I’m going to keep this intro short and sweet. Onward to the questions.


TheElasticStranger: I find the NYtimes to be irritatingly negative in their coverage of Biden. At the same time much of their other coverage and opinion could be viewed as annoyingly left-leaning.


I understand the structural reasons for this as you’ve laid out before, so I’ll just ask, If your aim was to stop Donald Trump from being elected, and your only instrument wasthe NYtimes, how would you change the coverage vs how it is presently structured for maximum impact? Obviously they could be more positive, but you don’t want to be obvious shills either, and it seems to me they could try broadening their audience to include more moderate voters as well.


Abstracting away a bit from the specifics of the New York Times, I think the key to building an optimal propaganda organ is you really want the content to be incredible normie and down-the-middle.


You want a publication that appeals, fundamentally, to moderate and center-right readers. That means really looking incredibly rigorously at your not-so-political content — movie and book reviews, cooking, science, etc. — to studiously excise any hint of bias or anything that would be off-putting to people with conservative sensibilities. Then you want to basically just ignore any story that is primarily about intra-Dem infighting and do a lot of coverage of any story that generates intra-GOP infighting. And in the specific context of the 2024 race, you want to have lots of articles about abortion rights and health care, with plenty of scrutiny of Trump’s policy positions. You’d want articles where frontline Republicans hand-wring about whether Trump’s legal problems will sink them. You’d want stories in which businessmen say “I’m a 100 percent Republican, but these tariffs will make inflation worse.”


Mainstream media tends to do roughly the opposite, letting demographic factors pull the broad tone of their coverage to the left in a way that alienates center-right readers, but keeping their actual coverage of American partisan politics studiously down the middle.


Just some guy: So uhh... Argentina. How do you see that all playing out?


I don’t really have a handle on Javier Milei, who keeps getting shorthanded in the media as a radical libertarian and also as an Argentinian Trump.


This is maybe my small-minded literalism, but whenever I think about this situation, my brain keeps tripping over the fact that these descriptions are wildly at odds with each other.


Trump’s approach to policy, to the extent you can make any sense of it, has always struck me as basically an American form of Peronism — you sideline market economics while also not doing social democracy and instead just try to direct goodies to your favored constituency. I think people are just drawing the Milei/Trump connection based on vibes, and really he’s a more market-oriented guy in his policy aspirations. But the fact that Milei himself seems to encourage these comparisons confuses me.


At any rate, Argentina really could use a dose of right-wing economics. They need to cut spending, and they need market-oriented reforms to raise productivity in non-agricultural sectors. To my way of thinking, it does not seem helpful or constructive to have the basic case for market reform and fiscal discipline be yoked to hard-core libertarian ideology. Milei seems like an extremist who’d be pushing these ideas in any circumstances and who’s probably a less persuasive salesperson than someone more moderate and pragmatic. That said, he won and I hope he manages to get some constructive stuff done.


Will he? Argentina, like a lot of Latin American countries, has a Madisonian political system, so an inexperienced-but-charismatic president with relatively radical rules is going to be facing off against a congress that his party doesn’t control. In theory, that system is supposed to force compromise and moderation in a way that’s constructive. In practice, that kind of setup frequently leads to constitutional crisis and democratic breakdown. We’ll see what happens.


Aaron: Why engage in Virginia Plan erasure when you talk about “Madisonian” separation of powers? In all seriousness, I do think that broader understanding of the Virginia Plan—which was a parliamentary system and almost certainly closer to Madison’s ideal institutional setup than the Constitution—would make more Americans receptive to the idea that there are other ways to run a democracy.


I didn’t know much about the Virginia Plan until I read this question, but you are correct that it outlines something much more similar to a parliamentary regime.


But I dunno, Madison gets the credit (or “credit”) for the system we ended up with, so that’s why people call it a Madisonian system.


Kyle: You and other pundits will often explain Trump’s appeal as the result of his comfort staking out moderate positions on certain key issues such as Social Security and abortion. I think this explanation amounts to post hoc rationalization and obscures reality. Yes, by moderating on these issues, he makes himself more palatable to secular working-class voters, other things equal. But this explanation elides all the very unpopular things Trump does e.g. inciting insurrections, attempting to repeal Obamacare, cutting taxes on the rich, the access Hollywood tape, etc. It offers no explanation for why these unpopular things don’t move people’s votes much. Any attempt to connect a politician’s success to his actions and stances needs to account for all of them, rather than just cherry-pick the good stances and saying that they explain the outcome, no?


I think it’s important when talking about such things to be clear as to the specific question we’re asking. The starting point with Trump is that this guy is not Modi or AMLO. He’s not even Viktor Orbán in terms of winning elections. There’s mostly nothing to explain about Trump’s “appeal” because he mostly isn’t appealing.


The point that I try to make about the role of his positioning on Social Security and Medicare in the 2016 race is that embracing a nominee who moderated on those stance is sufficient to explain why Republicans were able to beat Hillary Clinton.


A lot of people find it vexing that Mitt Romney, who seems like a smart and honorable guy, lost while Trump, who’s a thug and a scumbag, won. This generates a lot of paradoxical explanations of the true nature of Trump’s appeal, plus a lot of whining about the alleged mistreatment of Romney. The basic truth is that Romney was a much stronger candidate than Trump, but he ran on a much less appealing platform. If Romney had run on Trump’s positions, he would have won; if Trump had run on Romney’s positions, he would have gotten crushed. In general, I think people who talk about American politics are excessively knowledgeable about the micro-details of these campaigns, and they ignore the big picture reality that Democrats have been moving left since 2012 and this drives a lot of changes.


N.N. What do you make of the idea (as seen in this book and this podcast among many other places) that people should stop reading the news because it takes a huge amount of time, is largely pointless, and makes them unhappy?


My main doubt about this thesis is that I think most people actually aren’t reading the news. But I do think that those who do choose to read the news would benefit from being a little more thoughtful and a little more self-critical about their reading.


Is there a topic you are sincerely interested in learning more about? Then by all means, seek out news on that subject. But most people already know whether they are going to vote Democratic or Republican in 2024 (or in 2028 for that matter) and actually don’t need to stay up to speed on the latest developments in the national campaign. You could either try to learn about something that seems objectively important and under-covered (the civil war in Sudan, for example) or you could try to learn about something that’s of idiosyncratic relevance to your local life (education policy in the community where you live, for example). And if you want to follow national partisan politics because you think it’s entertaining, that’s also okay. People consume media content for fun all the time. But be aware that’s what you’re doing.


That said, while entertainment is fine, it’s also good intellectual discipline to try not to develop false beliefs. So you ought to be at least a little suspicious of writers who you enjoy because everything they tell you is psychologically pleasing. There’s a real skill to that. To “explaining” to people in your ideological niche why every passing event in the news demonstrates their basic correctness about everything. And that kind of content, well, it can make people really happy. But it’s likely to be misleading.


Jonathan Hallam: I wish everything weren't about Israel and Palestine, but, this question cannot not be asked to the author of One Billion Americans, so: What are your thoughts on offering Palestinians US citizenship? Would this be politically easy, as both pro-Palestinians and pro-Israeli, a true win-win? Or is the context such that it would be viewed as lose-lose?


In the book I call for “ruthless pragmatism” on immigration — i.e., try to find any means of securing higher levels of legal immigration that are politically viable.


This idea doesn’t sound viable to me, though if someone has evidence I’d be willing to consider it. One idea I have toyed with is the idea of creating a special visa program for Middle Eastern Christians, who suffer from various forms of persecution and who I think might be sympathetic in the eyes of some right-of-center voters and politicians. It wouldn’t need to be all Middle Eastern Christians, but basically the idea would be a special program for some number of them (with some conditions) on top of existing visa programs. There is a substantial Christian minority in Palestine (a minority that is disproportionately likely to want to emigrate), though the larger numbers are in Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon. I dunno if there’d be any juice in that, but I could imagine it.


As a solution to Israel/Palestine, of course “Palestinians should emigrate and enjoy better lives in other wealthier places” is a solution that many people on the far-right of Israeli politics believe in. And it’s clearly true that in concrete material terms, Palestinians could go live in the United States or the in the immigrant-heavy Gulf states and be better off than they currently are. But the way the parameters of the conflict are defined, that would be a total defeat for the Palestinian cause, so it’s wildly unacceptable.


Scottie J: I’m partially repulsed at my own earnestness here but I was hoping you could expound on your frequent contention that “doing the right thing is overrated.” My assumption is that being politically expedient leads to better long term outcomes is essentially what you’re getting at here. Are there any unpopular things that are worth doing because they move the proverbial ball forward? Is there criteria that should be used to evaluate when the policy or vote is worth the political hit?


“Doing the right thing is overrated” ≠ “never do the right thing.”


loubyornotlouby: Can you break down what you feel the public reaction Open AI Board's decision will likely mean for the Effective Altruist / Rationalist movements long term?


Here I think it’s really worth distinguishing between Good Old-Fashioned Effective Altruism (which is about trying to be more effective and empirically rigorous in charitable giving) and the effort to build a movement around “long-termism.”


The idea that we should consider the interests of the future, not just the interests of the present, predates the EA movement and comes up in a wide variety of contexts. A big part of the debate over how to set the social cost of carbon for regulatory purposes, for example, comes down to what “discount rate” you should use when considering the long-term costs of climate change. The standard environmentalist move is to argue for low (or even zero) discount rates while business interests favor higher ones. As a philosophical argument, I think the case for a very low discount rate is pretty ironclad. But as anyone who has ever kicked this idea around in an ethics seminar can tell you, it’s challenging to draw out the practical consequences. One very boring technical issue relates to OMB calculations for cost-benefit analysis, and the Biden administration is, in fact, issuing a new Circular A4 that mandates less discounting. So in that sense, long-termism is triumphing in the seat of power like never before.


But the problem that you see not just with the recent OpenAI board drama, but with the whole lifecycle of OpenAI, is that it’s really hard to say what the long-term consequences of your actions will be.


OpenAI was originally founded as a nonprofit with heavy EA influence, on the theory that AI would be central to the future of humanity and it was important to develop this technology in an “open” way.


OpenAI’s team then decided that openness was actually bad for the cause of AI safety and ditched that founding commitment to openness.


OpenAI’s team then decided that the nonprofit structure was too limiting and they needed to commercialize to gain access to the level of computing resources they needed, so they did a big restructuring and strategic pivot.


A bunch of OpenAI people and other EAs disagreed with the way OpenAI was handling things and founded Anthropic as a rival, even-more-EA AI lab.


Then a while after that schism, a new internal schism emerged at OpenAI between the CEO and the board (I really recommend this summary of events as superior to what you’ll read in the business press), which led to the dramatic showdown.


The board ultimately decided that reconstituting OpenAI with Sam Altman still in charge and a new board would be better, all things considered, than letting Altman and his team walk to Microsoft.


I think you can make the case that not just the board drama, but every step along this ladder — from founding OpenAI to the Anthropic schism etc — has been counterproductive from the standpoint of AI safety. But I also think Altman is completely sincere in his own belief that empowering Sam Altman is the best way to usher in an AI utopia. These questions are just not tractable in the way that trying to estimate which global health programs are most cost-effective are.


Meanwhile, over on the Good Old-Fashioned Effective Altruism side, things seem to be going well. Open Philanthropy just announced a few new programs in areas like developing country lead poising that are badly underfunded and neglected. This is good, important stuff. Obviously if a rogue AI kills everyone in 2037, nobody is going to care very much whether we promoted best practices around car battery recycling. But we have a very high degree of certainty that lead toxicity kills tons of kids and harms many more. And we know that the recycling of car batteries is a big source of that lead. And we know what the best practices are. So if we try to promote policies ensuring safe recycling of car batteries, we may fail, but we will probably make at least some progress and almost certainly not make things worse.


John E: Paul refuses the power to implement the Golden Path, while Leto accepts.


Given the choice, which one would you choose?


Per the above, if I were in Paul’s situation I would talk myself into doubting my prescience and not do it.


Greg Packnett: Are there any policy stakes to the debate about whether the economy is actually good or the stats are misleading? That is, if the anti-Stancil hypothesis is correct (ie the economy is actually bad and data showing that people think it's bad are capturing something normal economic statistics are missing), what sorts of errors are policy makers who think the Stancil hypothesis is correct (ie the economy is good but people think it's bad because of some combination of partisanship, ideology, and regular every day ignorance) likely to make?


As a separate question, usually when a false belief about the economy is widely held, there's a lot of money to be made being among the few who are right. So how should an anti-Stancilite invest? For that matter, how should a Stancilite who wants to make money betting that the economy's strength is underrated invest?


I wish that people would talk more clearly in terms of the policy stakes. To a lot of people on the left, it’s clear that they perceive the policy stakes to be that if we admit the current economy is terrible, then we will see the need for dramatic expansion of the welfare state. That’s fine as a thing to believe, but it doesn’t do anything to explain why perceptions of the economy were so much better in 2018 or even 2013 — it’s not like the country had a more robust welfare state back then.


Conversely, conservatives want to say things are terrible and this shows we need to bring back Trump. But they won’t explain why higher tariffs and a much larger budget deficit would make food prices go back down. Mass deportations would clearly make food more expensive.


So in all these cases, it would be more constructive to just talk about which things are problems right now (interest rates) and which are not (unemployment), and try to say why your proposed ideas would be helpful.


In terms of investing, here’s some back-of-the-napkin technical analysis I did, just drawing a big ol’ line from the stock market peak before the Great Recession to today. These numbers are adjusted for inflation.



It seems to me that the investment community, when voting with its money, thinks the economy is basically fine. Stancilism triumphs. If you think people are really suffering out there much worse than Stancil admits, you should probably bet on a recession coming soon and short the market.


EC-2021: How should the liberal arts argue for their value? Arguing for economic value seems probably true, but (1) it's unclear that will remain true, (2) seems to concede that college is about job training which they don't really want to do and (3) doesn't seem to be believed, regardless of truth.


I've said a couple of times that we need more “public intellectuals” to argue for/demonstrate the value proposition of the liberal arts, but I'm wondering if this is actually true.


I’ve said this before, but I think there’s just a big divergence between what most people see as potentially valuable in the liberal arts and what most humanities faculty think is valuable and important.


But any modern society has a lot of educated professionals. Many of them are technical specialists (engineers, scientists, doctors) and some of them aren’t (lawyers, teachers, middle managers), but they form a sort of collective social elite. And I think it’s not that hard to persuade people that over and above the specific skills members of this elite need to do their jobs, it’s good for them to be inculcated with a sense of the values of American civilization. That involves understanding our American political history, but also the history of proto-constitutionalism in England and the classical republics than the founders looked to as inspiration. A particular sense of religious freedom is an important part of the story of America, and while that’s not a sectarian point (the point is religious freedom!), the fact is also that as a historical matter, the American concept of religious freedom develops out of the specific circumstances of the Protestant Reformation.


So you have an important sequence of historical events — from Greece to Rome to “the Dark Ages” and the Renaissance and Reformation and the founding of America. You have a philosophical lineage from Plato and Aristotle to Hobbes and Locke and Mill and Rawls.


And you have literary and artistic cultures that were informed by these historical and intellectual trends and that also informed them. And you have traditionally had a belief that it is important for important people to be broadly educated in these themes. But while I think that kind of traditional broad liberal education would of course involve some exposure to radical critics of Anglo-American liberal capitalism (it’s good to be well-informed) and perhaps even a smattering of instructors who endorse the radical critiques (it’s good to sit in rooms and listen to smart people with ideas you don’t agree with), the current trends on campus are toward an atmosphere where the radical criticism predominates. And as the critical theories themselves would tell you, there’s no way Anglo-American liberal capitalist society is going to sustain generous financial support for institutions whose self-ascribed mission is to undermine faith in the main underpinnings of society.



Thursday, November 23, 2023

Danielle Haas’ farewell email to her colleagues at Human Rights Watch

Danielle Haas’ farewell email to her colleagues @hrw: 

Dear Human Rights Watch,

Because we live in dangerous times and this is a human rights organization dedicated to free speech, open dialogue, and rights for all, I’m sending a final email before leaving HRW. I’m hopeful, but wary, that an organization with a mission to “Expose. Investigate. Change” can do just that when it comes to its own practices regarding its Israel work, with authenticity and without retaliation.

When I joined Human Rights Watch over 13 years ago as senior editor, I did so with years of experience in journalism covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and time in academia.

Human Rights Watch seemed to be a good blend of both; a leading human rights organization dedicated to rigorous research, focused on international law and human suffering, with a mandate to bring about change. I believed in, and stayed for, the broader mission.

But as the organization grew and its composition shifted, so too did the focus, tone, and framing of its Israel-Palestine work. Following the Hamas massacres in Israel on October 7, years of institutional creep culminated in organizational responses that shattered professionalism, abandoned principles of accuracy and fairness, and surrendered its duty to stand for the human rights of all.

HRW’s initial reactions to the Hamas attacks failed to condemn outright the murder, torture, and kidnapping of Israeli men, women, and children. They included the “context” of “apartheid” and “occupation” before blood was even dry on bedroom walls. These responses were not, as some have since characterized it internally, a messaging misstep in the tumult after the Hamas assault. It was not the failure of a few to follow robust internal mechanisms of editing and quality control, as others have claimed.

It did not happen in a vacuum.

Rather, HRW’s initial response was the fruition of years of politicization of its Israel-Palestine work that has frequently violated basic editorial standards related to rigor, balance, and collegiality when it comes to Israel.

It was the expression of years of select historical and political framing that could always contextualize and “explain” why Jewish Israeli lives were lost in Palestinian violence.

And it was the domination of HRW’s Israel-Palestine work by some voices that drown out others to the point where those who feel uncomfortable with HRW’s approach and processes – and they do exist – feel silenced.

To be clear: focus on, and criticism of, Israeli policies and actions is valid for a human rights organization.

But what I know from over 13 years at HRW is:

* Israel has featured in the World Report annual global review of human rights I oversaw for more than a decade almost as extensively as world powers including China, Russia, and the United States, and that the Israel-Palestine chapter has always been longer than those of rights-abusing goliaths such as Iran and North Korea.

* The 2021 “Apartheid” report, hailed internally in its goal to affect “narrative change,” sealed the slide. HRW knew its careful, legal argument would rarely be read in full. And there is little doubt it has not been by those – including Hamas supporters – who now bandy about the term with appalling ease. It’s a one-word gift to those who want to characterize Israel in as few words as possible with as little nuance as possible, a go-to “context” for any fate that befalls Israel and Jewish Israelis; 120 HRW researchers recently signed a petition calling for its inclusion in a press release about Israeli hostages.

* Internal fora nominally dedicated to both Israel and Palestine were, in practice, mostly dedicated to expressions of outrage over Israeli abuses and their consequences, both real and speculated. The focus on Israel dominated those spaces both before and after October 7, including the links shared; the space given to colleagues to articulate their lived realities and trauma; and ultimately advocacy.

* Some types of Israeli-Palestine expertise were valued more than others. There was no value placed on having a Jewish Israeli staff member who spoke Hebrew, had covered the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for international media, a rich academic background, and 17 years’ immersion in the country. The profile of those entrusted with HRW’s-related work is different. The only contact I had with Israel-Palestine content over the years, despite working on virtually every other area of the world, was as World Report editor. I received thinly veiled insinuations and pushback when I highlighted factual inaccuracies in the Israel-Palestine chapter that were later corrected.

* HRW has so little credibility for most Israelis they do not even trust it with their corpses. Zaka, the emergency responder group that collected body parts after the Hamas massacres, said it did not want to talk to HRW because its members did not have faith the organization would not misuse and distort their eyewitness accounts of the carnage they had seen.

* When I named the constellation of my experiences over years to a senior manager as feeling a lot like antisemitism, he replied: “You are probably right.” He did not ask or do anything further.

Three weeks after the October 7 massacres, Human Rights Watch told staff it was “proud” of its response to the crisis.

The self-affirmation failed to address output that included, but is not limited to:

HRW’s first matter-of-fact announcement following the October 7 massacres that barely addressed what had happened, contrasting starkly with its thousands of statements over the years condemning a range of human rights abuses:

“Palestinian armed groups carried out a deadly assault on October 7, 2023, that killed several hundred Israeli civilians and led to Israeli counterstrikes that killed hundreds of Palestinians,” Human Rights Watch said in releasing a questions and answers document about the international humanitarian law standards governing the current hostilities.”

An early press release that could easily be construed as blaming the victim:

“The unlawful attacks and systematic repression that have mired the region for decades will continue, so long as human rights and accountability are disregarded.”

A piece on Israeli attacks on Gaza being devastating for Palestinians with disabilities that failed to mention the devastating impact of Hamas’ attacks on Israelis with disabilities. They included those murdered on October 7, among them a 17-year-old girl with muscular dystrophy and cerebral palsy killed at a music festival; those who are now disabled because of the attacks; and Israeli hostages with pre-existing health conditions ranging from heart problems to diabetes.

Lack of context when using controversial figures that came from a Hamas-run ministry:

“[Washington Post] Reporter Adam Taylor quoted Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch Omar Shakir, who said, “Everyone uses the figures from the Gaza Health Ministry because those are generally proven to be reliable. In the times in which we have done our own verification of numbers for particular strikes, I’m not aware of any time which there’s been some major discrepancy.”

It is not logical, not possible, and not the case that everyone at HRW agrees with its pre- and post-October 7 Israel work or feels safe. Instead, it is a deeply worrying indication that staff are self-censoring because they fear isolation if they speak and that nothing will be done even if they do. It is a warning that they are cowed by the way in which critics of Human Rights Watch are talked about internally, and by the tone and content of banter before and during meetings, in listservs, and in message chats.

Maybe they’re also not reassured by responses like the one senior management sent me regarding a recent email I sent them, in which they said they “appreciate” my “feedback” and “learn” from it.

I hope so, but I doubt it.

The serious professional concerns I raised over the years with the Program Office, General Counsel, and MENA managers never went anywhere. They were always received – it appeared – through a filter of me being a Jew and/or Israeli, even though Muslim and Arab staff and those with overt political backgrounds are trusted as advocates and to oversee research.

Also, my comments are not “feedback.”

Rather, they amount to a charge and a challenge to Human Rights Watch: tackle the long-standing issues infecting your Israel work and the hostile internal climate that Hamas’ attacks brought into sharp relief but did not birth. Face down the conscious and unconscious biases that inform them. Address inaccuracies by omission.

Do so not because you are under pressure to be seen to be listening, but because you respect the professionalism and expertise of your many thoughtful, serious colleagues from diverse backgrounds who cannot do their work without fear of stigma and retaliation if they speak.

Do so because you care about the health of the organization, upholding your internal standards, and ensuring human rights advocacy is not a fig leaf for political beliefs, or worse.

Do so because you want not just to claim your mantle of moral authority, but to earn it.

Dani

Tuesday, November 21, 2023

Dear Administrators: Enough With the Free-Speech Rhetoric!


Dear Administrators: Enough With the Free-Speech Rhetoric!
It concedes too much to right-wing agendas.


By Richard Amesbury and 
Catherine O’Donnell
November 16, 2023

A
cademics are losing the support of the public. We read it in newspapers, we see it in surveys, we feel it in our bones. There are many dimensions to this problem. One is the claim that colleges restrict speech and lack intellectual diversity. Earlier this fall, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression ranked colleges in terms of their commitment to free speech, praising a few but concluding that “the free-speech climate at even these campuses has room to improve.” The American Bar Association is considering a proposal that would require law schools to adopt written free-speech policies that “protect the rights of faculty, students, and staff to communicate ideas that may be controversial or unpopular.”
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These concerns have attracted the attention of lawmakers here and abroad. The United Kingdom has just created a director for freedom of speech and academic freedom position under the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023. The newly appointed “free-speech tsar,” Arif Ahmed, a professor of philosophy at the University of Cambridge, has promised to defend free speech “for all views and approaches — postcolonial theory as much as gender-critical feminism.” And recently, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce released a report on “Freedom of Speech and Its Protection on College Campuses.” Citing the philosopher John Stuart Mill, the report begins with the claim that “a ‘marketplace of ideas’ is necessary to seek truth effectively” and concludes that “the First Amendment is under threat on college campuses across the nation, and the federal government must step in and provide protection for students and faculty.” Perhaps sensing a cultural opening, Princeton’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions has released the “Princeton Principles for a Campus Culture of Free Inquiry,” which alleges that “many of our nation’s colleges and universities are failing to maintain cultures of free and vigorous inquiry,” and calls on administrators to “allocate resources to promote intellectual diversity.”

Whether and by whom free speech is under threat on campuses are hotly debated questions. Less commonly examined, however, are the assumptions that free speech is a cardinal virtue of higher education, and that colleges should aspire to a diversity of opinions. Are these goals in their own right, as college administrators often seem to think, or means for achieving something else altogether?

Our contention is that calls for greater freedom of speech on campuses, however well-intentioned, risk undermining colleges’ central purpose, namely, the production of expert knowledge and understanding, in the sense of disciplinarily warranted opinion. Expertise requires freedom of speech, but it is the result of a process of winnowing and refinement that is premised on the understanding that not all opinions are equally valid. Efforts to “democratize” opinion are antithetical to the role colleges play in educating the public and informing democratic debate. We urge administrators toward caution before uncritically endorsing calls for intellectual diversity in place of academic expertise.

T
he function of higher-ed institutions is not to mirror public opinion but to inform it. A diversity of opinion — “intellectual diversity” — isn’t itself the goal; rather, it is of value only insofar as it serves the goal of producing knowledge. On most unanswered questions, there is, at least initially, a range of plausible opinions, but answering questions requires the vetting of opinions. As some opinions are found wanting, the range of opinion deserving of continued consideration narrows. On some fundamental questions, a diversity of defensible doctrines — what the political philosopher John Rawls called “reasonable pluralism” — may persist, as it does, for instance, with respect to certain philosophical questions. All of these are worthy of analysis and debate. But colleges are under no obligation to balance warranted, credible, true opinions with unwarranted, discredited, false ones. The purpose of considering differing opinions about disputed questions is precisely to sort the wheat from the chaff. Only those opinions that survive scrutiny deserve to be treated as authoritative, and only until something better comes along.
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    The function of higher-ed institutions is not to mirror public opinion but to inform it.

It is true that the production of expert knowledge is not the college’s only purpose. Colleges also offer themselves as places where students explore the world beyond the direct guidance of faculty. Student clubs invite speakers for all kinds of reasons, most of which have nothing to do with academic expertise. Colleges volunteer themselves as neutral hosts to students’ enormous range of views and pursuits, but this neutrality isn’t neutral: There is a moral or civic purpose to it, an implicit or explicit goal of civility. Colleges prepare students for citizenship in pluralistic societies.

Students, for their part, don’t always care: They shout down others’ speakers and invite speakers solely to provoke hostile responses. Exercises of hecklers’ veto, along with the awkward ways in which colleges vacillate between encouraging exploration and seeking civil discourse, lead to concern over whether students value free speech. They also raise questions about how free expression might itself be limited by the goods it subserves. These are important questions. But it’s also important to distinguish between students’ expression and colleges’ production of knowledge. Administrators can declare that students’ meaningful engagement with the challenges of diverse civic life requires that student clubs face as little regulation as possible. But faculty research, teaching, and sponsorship of college programming are rendered meaningful — made useful to the public — only through the application of expertise.

That expertise is cultivated within academic disciplines, battle-tested traditions of research and analysis, which are safeguarded by quality controls like peer-review and tenure. The distinctive value in such contexts isn’t free speech but academic freedom — that is, the protection, against interference, of the methods through which knowledge and understanding are reliably generated. What academic freedom seeks to safeguard are not primarily the utterances of individual faculty members, but the procedures governing their disciplined production and assessment.

Put another way, academic freedom, as distinct from free speech, entails intellectual responsibilities. Far from a license to voice just any opinion, it protects the processes by which scholars distinguish what is warranted, credible, and true from what is not. Moreover, it is worth noting that even in a legal context, First Amendment appeals to free speech carry little weight where professional expertise is at stake, such as in expert-client relationships, or where the public is entitled to reliable information, such as with respect to commercial speech. As the constitutional-law scholar Robert C. Post has pointed out, “free speech” is no defense against the charge of malpractice or fraud. Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes enjoyed free speech, but it did not indemnify her against the charge that she had misled investors about the company’s blood-testing devices. Although the First Amendment safeguards the rights of speakers, it has also been interpreted as protecting the rights of audiences outside public discourse. Post argues that, notwithstanding important distinctions between commercial information and expert knowledge, they are alike in being addressed to audiences who have a right to rely, within limits, on what they are told, and that “constitutional protections for the dissemination of expert knowledge should therefore be roughly analogous to those applicable to the circulation of commercial information.” Insofar as colleges have a fiduciary responsibility to students and the wider communities they serve, faculty, when speaking as experts, are similarly obliged to abide by the professional norms on which their expertise is grounded.
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The truth-seeking function of colleges and the social value of scholarly expertise are, it would seem, reasonably well understood with respect to the natural sciences, medicine, engineering, and certain of the social sciences. Few would expect a biology department to hire a creationist or a geography department to host a flat-earther. In these contexts, a premium is placed on getting it right, in part because the social costs of getting it wrong are significant. Structural engineering is seldom described as a “marketplace of ideas.” Even in the sciences, though, expertise can be met with skepticism, and fields that adjoin the public sphere, and which thus might be expected to inform public opinion (what the sociologist Gil Eyal calls “regulatory sciences”) — climate science and epidemiology, for instance — are often framed by hostile parties as “political.” The effect of such a framing is to create the impression that they are “mere opinion,” which is another way of saying that, when it comes to these subjects, there is no such thing as expertise; all opinions are equal.

The humanities and the more-humanistic social sciences, perhaps because they frequently make claims about matters also hotly debated in the public sphere, and perhaps because their practitioners often argue for the reconsideration of texts, events, and social processes, have particularly struggled to resist being cast, even by college administrators, as simply a speaker’s corner in which every perspective should somehow be accommodated. Here, one is told, colleges should seek a diversity of opinion, and every opinion deserves to be heard. Accepting this role for the humanities and social sciences, however, means that their faculties risk losing the ability to judge any ideas (or proposed curricula or public programming) unworthy of sponsorship. Offering up the humanities and social sciences as the realm of free speech deprives those faculty of academic freedom and deprives the public of the faculty’s expertise.

Suggesting that faculty activities are different from student clubs, and that academic freedom is distinct from free speech, is not radical. Yet administrators choose again and again to accept a free-speech framing that undermines colleges’ central role of knowledge creation. Why? We academics tend to want to understand ourselves as egalitarians, and it can feel awkward — undemocratic, even — to claim authority based on expertise. Facing increasing skepticism from the public, we are loath to seem elitist. But we’re not claiming a universal expertise, just a limited scholarly expertise, and it’s for the public to judge how much that kind of expertise matters. For our part, we either stake our claim to the expertise our training and experience provide us, or we stake no claim at all. Nor is it elitist to insist that scholars are best suited to judging whether curricula should be adopted, or speakers sponsored as part of academic programming. Our workplace is not the world, nor even the republic. Speakers can hold forth in all kinds of forums (including student clubs at the college itself), even if faculty don’t sponsor them. Ideas and values can be shared and vetted outside the college if their proponents don’t think that scholarly vetting and scholarly audiences are needed or desired. Administrators, in short, can more robustly defend colleges if they take a more modest view of what colleges are. Only by disavowing pretensions to be the public sphere can colleges perform their critical role in relation to it.

T
here is another reason that administrators accept — or at least, struggle openly to reject — a free-speech framing. Free-speech claims have opened the door to well-funded campaigns to inject particular points of view into college curriculums and teaching, even when these opinions have not undergone or survived the critical scrutiny that the college is meant to provide. In this way, the rhetoric of free speech is deployed to level opinion, reducing a regime of expertise to a freewheeling market of ideas, some of which enjoy the competitive advantage of intellectual venture capital. “Free speech” and “intellectual diversity” are the gates through which pours funding from donors, foundations, and state legislatures keen to align teaching and even research with ideological, often right-wing, agendas. It is no surprise that foundations like Koch and Bradley claim to be promoting the seemingly noble goal of “free speech.” Nor is it surprising that many colleges have rolled out the welcome mat, creating externally funded centers and schools that purport to provide “intellectual diversity.” Yet there has also been considerable unease, with some faculty, students, and public stakeholders deploring these centers and schools as beholden not to truth-seeking, but to the representation of particular interests.

    Only by disavowing pretensions to be the public sphere can colleges perform their critical role in relation to it.

The Princeton Principles, whose name implies an endorsement the university has not granted, are a case in point. They set out to offer a rationale for substituting legislative and donor wishes for faculty stewardship of curriculum and programming. They do so, not surprisingly, under the banner of free speech and intellectual diversity, and they serve both as an open invitation to monied interests to interfere in faculty governance of the curriculum and as a retroactive benediction for decisions long since made.
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The Principles assert that “government and private donors may fund programs devoted to fields of inquiry that they think would enhance intellectual diversity and therefore contribute to the vigor of inquiry on campus, provided they specify and justify intellectual or pedagogical reasons for the effort.” Whereas, on a traditional understanding of academic freedom, the curriculum is the collective responsibility of the faculty, the Princeton Principles state, “If there is clear and convincing evidence that faculty members and administrators are not adequately fulfilling their responsibilities to foster and defend a culture of free inquiry on campus, other agents including regents, trustees, students, and alumni groups in the wider campus network may and indeed should become involved.” Notably, the document does not specify to whom evidence of an alleged dereliction of duty must be “clear and convincing,” or by whom “intellectual or pedagogical reasons” for new program funding are to be assessed. Since faculty are imagined to be the root of the problem, however, this formulation appears to place these decisions outside faculty control.

Lots of research is externally funded, and many faculty members hold endowed chairs or work in buildings named for donors. What is the difference here, and what is the harm? Why can’t these parts of the college, whether free-standing schools or programs that reside within older departments, simply add to the breadth and appeal of the college as a whole? After all, the claim that a unit’s value resides in providing “intellectual diversity” does not in theory preclude that unit, once founded, from participating in the production of expert knowledge nor from joining the ongoing processes of faculty governance.

In practice, however, legislators — for instance, in Arizona, Florida, Tennessee, and Texas — are increasingly willing to demand detailed yearly accounting of such units’ offerings, with the implicit or explicit threat of withdrawing money should the units’ purposes differ from their own. Ironically, units funded in this way tend to lack intellectual diversity: They don’t aspire to offer diversity but only to be it. Centers such as the University of Tennessee’s Institute of American Civics, the University of Florida’s Hamilton Center, and the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, along with the free-standing Jack Miller Center, declare themselves devoted to exploring America’s founding principles and institutions. Supporters of these institutions describe them — as Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a Republican of Texas, and other donors did of the Civitas Institute, and Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican of Tennessee, did of the Institute of American Civics — as ways to bring intellectual diversity to colleges that have become closed-minded clubs. But the institutions themselves are peopled by faculty who serve on each other’s boards, invite and re-invite each other to give talks, appeal to the same funders, and even publish in each other’s journals and book series. The Jack Miller Center touts itself as an antidote to colleges’ “ideological monoculture.” The phrase instead perfectly describes the ecosystem of which the center is a part.

Moreover, the simple fact that a unit is being funded because it ostensibly provides intellectual diversity means that its resources depend on its insistence that it does not fit into the college — and that the rest of the college is possessed of a fatal homogeneity. The need to demonstrate difference from the rest of the faculty and adherence to the views of funders makes it terribly difficult for these units to avoid conflicts of interest when participating in the processes through which scholars pursue truth and make decisions about curricula and programming. In short, although such efforts are frequently portrayed as making colleges democratically accountable to the wishes of the public and their elected representatives, the logic of intellectual diversity arguments is toward ever greater mistrust between colleges and the public they serve.

Administrators’ reluctance to challenge the emphasis on free speech and intellectual diversity leaves them poorly suited to defending colleges against this kind of encroachment. After all, a donor or politician is not having professors silenced; the goal is instead to make professors’ voices indistinguishable from those of people without scholarly expertise. That goal is unobjectionable outside the college: The extent to which scholarly expertise matters should absolutely not be a subject on which only scholars expound. But if that goal is achieved within the college, the college ceases to be. How do we proceed?
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I
n his Democracy, Expertise, Academic Freedom: A First Amendment Jurisprudence for the Modern State, Post argues that free speech is important not because every idea is worth taking seriously, but because it makes possible a public sphere within which everyone may contribute. An accessible public sphere is necessary for democracy, because democracy rests on public opinion. Post calls this value, recognized in the United States by First Amendment jurisprudence, democratic legitimation. For democratic government to be legitimate, the public must be able to understand itself as the author of its laws. The ability of citizens to contribute to public discourse is a prerequisite for the legitimacy of the state. Unlike a university, the public sphere is thus in many respects a marketplace of ideas, and a prudent principle is caveat emptor. Left to its own devices, a marketplace of ideas is under no necessity to converge on the truth. Taken alone, that account of the First Amendment’s understanding of free speech is in tension with expert knowledge, the acquisition of which requires discrimination. The creation of knowledge through academic disciplines would be undermined by a jurisprudence that insisted on content neutrality in this context. The question for Post is, thus, how the conditions required for expert knowledge might be reconciled with the comparatively permissive standards of the public sphere.

    When free speech drowns out expert speech, we all suffer.

Post argues that a First Amendment jurisprudence of academic freedom, as distinct from a First Amendment jurisprudence of free speech, takes its bearings from a constitutional value he calls democratic competence. Democratic competence is “the cognitive empowerment of persons within public discourse, which in part depends on their access to disciplinary knowledge.” Insofar as truth matters, democracy benefits when public opinion is informed by expert knowledge. This is one of the central roles of any college, and it is in terms of the value of democratic competence that academic freedom — the freedom of experts to employ disciplinary standards to distinguish knowledge from mere opinion — can be justified and understood. Democratic competence is a different value than democratic legitimation, but the latter needs the former.

As Post notes, however, a jurisprudence of democratic competence requires the courts to take up a position with respect to which putative disciplines are reliable in the production of knowledge. This is because courts defer to experts and thus have to decide which disciplines (homeopathic medicine, astrology?) produce expertise. He writes, “Insofar as the value of democratic competence safeguards the circulation of expert knowledge, it must necessarily also incorporate the disciplinary methods by which expert knowledge is created and certified. A constitutional sociology of knowledge is thus inevitable.”

Post doesn’t pursue this point, but perhaps a way of understanding our present moment is as one in which that sociology of knowledge is itself increasingly contested. (Does critical race theory produce knowledge? Gender theory? “Patriotic education”?) So it might be the case that, while democratic legitimation depends on democratic competence, as Post convincingly argues, the public recognition of competence cannot escape the public sphere; it is a matter, ultimately, of public opinion. And at the moment, the public sphere is fractured and restive. We don’t mean that it is simply a matter of public opinion which claims constitute knowledge (whether this or that claim is true or justified) — just that knowledge also needs to be recognized as such if it is publicly to be accorded a status different than that of mere opinion. As Émile Durkheim put it:

    Opinion, a preeminently social thing, is … a source of authority, and we can even speculate whether all authority is not the daughter of opinion. Some will object that science is often the combative antagonist of opinion, rectifying its errors. But science can succeed in this task only if it has sufficient authority, and it can draw this authority only from opinion itself. All the scientific demonstrations in the world would have no influence if a people had no faith in science.

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At the moment, a lot of knowledge, particularly (though not exclusively) in the humanities, while the product of rigorous and reliable disciplines, isn’t publicly perceived as authoritative. In many cases, experts enjoy no special public esteem.

No doubt much of this is deliberate, the result of political efforts to delegitimize certain disciplines, as is evident in the study of race and gender. But well-meaning administrators contribute to the problem when they portray the college — or the part of the college that includes the humanities — as a public sphere, speaker’s corner, or marketplace of ideas. To insist that the college function as a public sphere is to collapse the distinction between expert knowledge and mere opinion. Democracy, ironically, is ill-served by the democratizing of all opinion. Far from safeguarding academic freedom, calls for greater freedom of expression in academe work to relativize the disciplined conclusions of scholars. This is why we call on administrators to take a more critical approach to the rhetoric of free speech. Essential though it is, free speech is only one ingredient for democracy. When free speech drowns out expert speech, we all suffer.

To be sure, the public often has good reasons to distrust the pronouncements of “experts,” and the foundations of knowledge are subject to disagreement within the academy itself. Properly understood, academic freedom is compatible with robust debate in both the college and the public sphere about the central problems of epistemology — what we know, and how we know it. The public also is right to demand academics be able to explain not only what they know and how they know it, but why what they know matters to anyone but themselves. Academic freedom is also compatible, therefore, with robust debate about what kinds of knowledge should inform decision-making in the public sphere. In short, public scrutiny of academic conduct must be welcomed, even now, when it can feel hostile. Perhaps especially now.

If that’s right, however, it suggests that embattled academics cannot simply fall back on academic freedom. That concept is, to be sure, indispensable, but, as Durkheim observed, it has to be undergirded by public trust in academics, or, more broadly, by disciplines whose status as disciplines isn’t itself a matter of public dispute. Otherwise we end up where we find ourselves now: with a lack of public support not simply for the claims of certain scholars, but for the value of the disciplines and departments of which they are part — the very disciplines within which these claims might be knowledgeably assessed. Or a sense, at any rate, that these are just further opinions — a dissolving of expertise into a flattened-out theory of knowledge. “Free speech” is what we are left with when we recognize no experts.
We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
Free SpeechAcademic Freedom
Richard Amesbury
Richard Amesbury is a professor of religious studies and philosophy at Arizona State University.
Catherine O'Donnell
Catherine O’Donnell is a professor of history at Arizona State University.