You ask for a rebuttal and you return with the laziest possible response. I'm starting to think you weren't really interested in hearing one.
It doesn't matter who the activists are. PR is not a game played between the extremist left and right wings, it's a game played with the center of the field. The center of the field is being increasingly filled with people from demographics that could very well be alienated by the professor's public views, and who could be reached, converted, and more importantly, inspired to work in the field, if handled right.
It doesn't matter if a politician gets a more-fervent pre-established base. What matters is the influx of new voters and plausible future scientists. It's hard to change the opinions of people set in their ways, but through making a good first impression you can alter the course of someone who otherwise wouldn't have been interested in the field. Making a bad impression could very well cause apathy or worse. It's absolutely critical to not mess it up, and MIT made the correct, meritocratic response.
civilized should have taken out the "sea of words" swipe and you should have edited out the swipes from your comment here, as well as in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28819420. Someone else breaking the site guidelines doesn't make it ok for you to do so. Please do a better job of sticking to them.
As Mounk's essay notes, the vast majority of the public agrees with the professor on affirmative action. MIT just told that public what it thinks of their views.
As I've said multiple times in the thread, my own viewpoints are very close to the professor's! Public opinion of people who are not already in the system, however, is a different game, and you should always go with the safest bet if doing propaganda. It's critical.
I get what you're saying and it's reasonable. I think you greatly overestimate the objective rigor and correctness of your analysis, but I get it.
Sanctioning widely-held views as not meritorious alienates a lot of people too. They don't seem to figure into your calculations.
Based on your other posts, you seem to think that the most important audience for the talk is prospective climate change researchers, who you believe would be alienated by opposition to race-based admission preferences.
Again, you seem to be ignoring that this could go in the other direction, and in fact we'd expect it to, based on the overwhelming and diverse opposition to race-based preferences that we see in public polling.
A possible way forward is to thoroughly vet any potential public speaker to verify they have never said anything controversial. It's sad that we could be reduced to this, but it's understandable.
You're wording this in a way that's deliberately representing your ideological opponents in the worst possible faith and light, and if nothing else it demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of not only the views of your opponents, but of people who would be sympathetic to your views if you would take ten seconds to apply tact to your words.
This is the exact opposite of a good-faith argument and a demonstration of exactly the reason why having a person with tact give a speech for outreach is critical.
You guys are both putting too much energy into commenting about the "you" at the other end of the discussion. Not only is it leading you to break the site guidelines, it makes the discussion noisier and more tedious for everybody else.
You both have interesting points to make. If you'd stick to making them substantively, thoughtfully, and respectfully, the thread would be much better. "Respectfully" generally includes avoiding telling people things about themselves that are not likely to land well. There are times when that's necessary, but talking to strangers over the internet is not one of them.
Thanks dang. I agree with you completely after seeing the results. If I could edit those comments at this point I would. I've done my best with the ones I still can.
I'm baffled by this response. I've done my best to summarize what you seem to be saying and what I see as the blind spots. I don't even see you as an opponent. We seem to disagree on a particular PR tactic and how it plays with the public.
Is "I get what you're saying and it's reasonable" something that a person who is deliberately trying to represent your ideas in the worst possible light would say?
You guys are both putting too much energy into commenting about the "you" at the other end of the discussion. Not only is it leading you to break the site guidelines, it makes the discussion noisier and more tedious for everybody else.
You both have interesting points to make. If you'd stick to making them substantively, thoughtfully, and respectfully, the thread would be much better. "Respectfully" generally includes avoiding telling people things about themselves that are not likely to land well. There are times when that's necessary, but talking to strangers over the internet is not one of them.
Who cares? With that attitude we wouldn't have ended slavery, woman wouldn't be able to vote, civil rights wouldn't have happened, and hetero marriage would still be the only option.
For those who see race-based preferences as an urgent form of social progress, this does make sense, yes. I don't, and most Americans don't, but that doesn't make us right.
I think you are missing the point that affirmative action, which I am for, is done a disservice when we descend to PR games. Knee jerk reactions serve no one.
If their goal was good PR, I'd say they have failed quite dramatically. This kind of thing is surprising from MIT and I doubt it has a lot of support among the science/engineering types. It is common to see this behavior in social sciences nowadays, but less so in engineering.
Nobody who's in the demographic of people who could be attending university in the next ten years is going to see some professor getting knocked from a position as anything noteworthy; there's no viral potential in somebody not doing a speech. But the speech, if it goes well, could have and has historically had great potential to inspire people to going into the field of climate science. Making the best impression is paramount, and you can't do so if the person heading the explicitly public relations-based charge is in a position to alienate a sizeable portion of the perspective candidates.
Meritocracy is paramount to science and engineering, and having someone with such great potential to alienate placed in a public relations role is the exact opposite of meritocratic. Abbot is well-respected in his field, and it could be meritocratic to offer him a reward for his work, but it wouldn't be to put him in a critical social position with the baggage he brings along.
I disagree his ideas of merit-based entry would alienate a sizeable portion of perspective MIT students (the article also shows supporting polls). MIT, not merit-based, are you kidding?
Offering a social, outreach-based task to a man whose views are cause for alienation against prospective students not just prospective MIT students, but the field at large, which is substantially larger than the four-thousand undergrads MIT has, would indeed not be meritocratic.
I'm not going to debate what his views actually are, and I personally agree very heavily with merit-based admission. Like I've said elsewhere in the thread, it's likely I'm not far from the professor's views. However his views have been interpreted in a way significantly different from how you frame them by enough people that MIT saw it fit to not go forward with his speech. It's a PR and outreach game, not an inside baseball conference.
I'm very skeptical that the attitude can be isolated this way. There's a lot of people who genuinely do feel uncomfortable when authority figures don't share their political views, and that discomfort won't go away just because you're no longer in "outreach mode". If you shape your outreach efforts to target them, and you successfully convince them to apply to MIT (or enter the broader field), won't they expect their lecturers to be held to the same standard?
