[patagurbon]

This push to force ideological “balance” on universities is incredibly dangerous. The pursuit of truth is difficult and has its pitfalls but it naturally leads to the dominance of certain viewpoints, which hopefully approximate the truth.

What the Feds are doing here is just a hop skip and a jump from forcing universities to hire young Earth creationists alongside archaeologists, climate change deniers alongside climate scientists, etc.

Universities and the research they do must inform politics, but the reverse risks destroying the research enterprise all together.

[nine_k]

The push to mandate an "ideological balance" is indeed a wrong move; allowing the state to determine such matters always leads to rot, examples abound.

It sadly does not mean that universities are laser-focused on seeking truth, and are free from ideological biases, often very obvious. Regarding truth, one of the leading theories in humanities is that of Michel Foucault, which states that there cannot be any objective truth, and what is considered true is determined by power structures.

I'm glad to see though that the four universities are making a stand, and value independence above whatever "federal benefits" the administration may offer. It's sad that these are only 4 out of 9.

[insane_dreamer]

> are free from ideological biases,

you're missing the point.

Universities are free to have their own ideological biases. Some will certainly be biased in one direction. Others in another. Students aren't forced to go to a given university -- there any many to choose from.

But when the gov forces its ideological biases on Universities, then it begins to remove choice for students. It might start with only a dozen, but if successful, it will push on others, until it becomes the de-facto requirement to get government funding.

That is totalitarianism.

[nine_k]

Having a bias and pursuing truth can interfere with each other, that was my point.

[baubino]

University research is conducted in pursuit of knowledge not truth. While there are overlaps, there is a distinction. The pursuit of knowledge allows us to question, consider, discuss, analyze, critique, etc, even if (and especially when) we are unsure of the truth or if there isn’t a “truth”to be attained. The pursuit of knowledge also allows us to study why and how something is false.

[patagurbon]

None of the other universities have agreed yet.

What do you mean by laser focused? Do you have specific policies to address this? If not then this is a natural part of the unfocused nature of knowledge work, and the natural weakness of human organizations.

University research and knowledge work in general is backtracking search, not gradient descent in a friendly loss landscape.

[nine_k]

> What do you mean by laser focused?

I mean that universities, like any large organizations, are very not free from internal politics and peer pressure. Also, like any large group of people, they are subject to irrational but powerful phenomena like the intellectual fashion, or religious zeal (which does not take an established religion). These all are impediments on the way of truth-seeking, but are inevitable due to human nature.

[Levitz]

A top-down exertion of ideological power like this is terrible, it can't be the case that universities are bullied into toeing the line of whoever is in power at the moment, that much should be evident.

But surely it also can't be the case that colleges demand what are basically declarations of political allegiance in the form of DEI statements, institutional trust is nosediving and ideological capture is to blame in large part. I hope this push from the administration fails, but I also hope something changes because otherwise the result is going to be worse than if universities actually submitted to these demands.

[patagurbon]

I am not in favor of mandated DEI statements outside of basic respect for students and colleagues, I’m not sure why that’s relevant or why you responded to me about it.

Most universities have moved away from those.

[Levitz]

>I’m not sure why that’s relevant or why you responded to me about it.

Because while I agree that

>The pursuit of truth is difficult and has its pitfalls but it naturally leads to the dominance of certain viewpoints

I'm certain that demanding essays from which you could perfectly predict voting patterns is not the mark of viewpoints that prioritize the pursuit of truth.

[patagurbon]

Again, I am not in favor of those things. I am perfectly happy for interviewees to be filtered for basic respect for people of all walks of life. I hope the reasoning there is obvious.

Regardless governments must let the natural academic process handle these institutional issues.

[IncreasePosts]

Is approval of affirmative action or DEI policies a mark of basic respect for people of all walks of life?

[baubino]

In the institutions I’m familiar with, DEI is basically a statement about respect for people from diverse backgrounds and the DEI committee is a couple of people who organize an annual cultural fair or something similar. It’s crazy to me how blown out of proportion that simple acronym has become over the last few years.

[quotemstr]

> Most universities have moved away from those.

Whatever the mechanism, they remain echo chambers and continue to present, as the only truth, systems of thought that diverge from objective reality and that poison the public discourse.

[patagurbon]

> whatever the mechanism

Is straining to carry the rest of this sentence. I responded to an assertion that a policy by certain limited universities was attempted and deemed unfit by the natural process was still active. This is how institutions grow and evolve.

> echo chambers

Publish your papers, rebut the research. This is actively happening every day in every field of science. It is happening in everything from gender studies to particle physics.

> poison the public discourse

What on Earth are you talking about. What public discourse are you frequenting which is driven primarily by this boogeyman of the university system rather than the attention driven rat race of national fear politics.

[bawolff]

I'm opossed to what trump is doing, its abhorent.

But i still think its possible for academics to get into echo chambers. They are human just like the rest of us. Especially in fields not easily subject to direct experimental verification. I think its important not to put researchers on a pedestal as if they are above folly. (After all, the saying "science advanced one funeral at a time" didn't come from nowhere)

[patagurbon]

Sure, that’s why I said the process is an approximation of truth and only then in the limit.

This is known in the scientific, philosophical, and research communities. It is a reality that is only solved by the slow inexorable application of the scientific process and exchange of ideas, not by outside political influence.

We should never put researchers on pedestals, but the process of science is the most prized accomplishment of humanity. It is a farcical weaponization of the slow and often backtracking nature of science by the anti-intellectuals of the world which we are witnessing now. Not a real crisis

[somenameforme]

I don't think it's the "process" of science that achieved much of anything. You could go back thousands of years ago, teach everybody the scientific method in excruciating detail and it's unlikely much of anything would change. And vice versa the researchers in modern times producing work that has basically 0 ability to be replicated or those overtly pursuing their own biases are equally well aware of the scientific method.

It's actually somewhat hard to say what did change. Einstein, for instance, went to his grave rejecting the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics simply because he felt, solely due to his own personal biases, that the world must be deterministic and rational. His famous quotes like 'spooky action at a distance' or 'god doesn't play dice' were essentially sardonic mocking of the Copenhagen Interpretation, the interpretation we hold to be most accurate to this very day. That's not exactly the behavior of some guy able to step outside the normal ideological biases and bounds that constrains us all, to say the least.

But nonetheless something did change. And similarly, in modern times I think it's very arguable that science has again regressed. Trust in science and scientists isn't declining because of Facebook or Trump or whatever. It's declining because politics and science have once again become deeply intertwined - like they have been for about 99.99% of humanity's entire history, the overwhelming majority of which we achieved essentially 0 from a scientific perspective.

[jemmyw]

Einstein didn't outright reject the Copenhagen interpretation. We like a story, but such a story glosses over all the nuance and messy chaos of real life. The physicists of the time were friends and friendly rivals. We probably get the same for any story: there's the simple story most people believe, then several more complex stories and interpretations, then a chaotic and nuanced mess of data, then the actual goings on that weren't written, actions and thoughts and so forth. So we should always be very suspicious of pat stories about historical figures that are used for an argument about behavior.

[bawolff]

Also, its not like Einstein was rejecting the data, as far as i understand he just felt the theory was unsatisfying and was hoping to come up with a better one.

Something physicists are still trying to do to this day. Science is never done. There is no "final" theory.

[somenameforme]

I probably should have placed my other comment [1] as a response to yours in order to continue our discussion, as it won't appear when you view 'threads' on the HN UI. You can't really reject data (though you can reject how it is measured), but you can reject attempts to explain data - and that is precisely what he did, til his death, with quantum mechanics. That comment is a full-context letter from Einstein, in his own words, on this topic. His comments against it were harsh and highly prejudiced. He was, and remained, completely convinced of his own rightness, even though he had absolutely no justification for it, and every bit of evidence that existed seemed to falsify such a perspective.

And I'm not using this to argue that Einstein was somehow flawed. Rather I'm using it to argue that he was a human, and we all behave the same way. Putting scientists, or even science, on a pedestal is turning it into a cargo cult. Einstein's success was not driven by any systematically replicable method or anything of the sort. Rather he was an extremely intelligent human who happened to have biases for ideas that turned out to be completely correct in one dimension, and [probably] completely wrong in another.

This is also why increasing the number of physicists by 100x won't increase the rate of advances in physics by 100x, or even remotely close. There's even an argument it could viably reduce it by some sort of Malthusian crowding effect. Everybody scrapping for limited publication and attention pushes science more and more towards high brow click bait and vast sums of plausible sounding noise (which is easier than ever in modern times due to LLMs) can make it difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45640321

[somenameforme]

Yes, he did reject it, completely. In his own words:

----

"We have become Antipodean in our scientific expectations. You believe in the God who plays dice, and I in complete law and order in a world which objectively exists, and which I, in a wildly speculative way, am trying to capture. I firmly BELIEVE [emphasis original], but I hope that someone will discover a more realistic way, or rather a more tangible basis than it has been my lot to find. Even the great initial success of the quantum theory does not make me believe in the fundamental dice-game, although I am well aware that our younger colleagues interpret this as a consequence of senility. No doubt the day will come when we will see whose instinctive attitude was the correct one."

Einstein, 1944

----

He rejected it based on his instincts. He felt it was wrong. Einstein in general poses a major problem to many of those of a certain mindset of what drives success in science and academia, because he was arguably the greatest scientist to have ever lived, yet he was no less possessed of the demons of bias, prejudice, and 'feels' than anyone else - if anything he seems to have suffered them perhaps even more greatly than average. As you can see in his own words, not only did he reject it - but he actively mocked the entire idea, repeatedly.

There's no nuance to be had there. The only issue is that Einstein's behavior, character, and even history largely contradicts the idealized view of science and scientists that many like to try to imagine, or push, now a days. It also again largely contradicts the ideal that science, in and of itself, is what drove such rapid progress. I think the truth is that we don't know what drove such rapid progress, but we can use people like Einstein (and many other great scientists it turns out...) to falsify most hypotheses.