Without academic freedom, we might never see the truth. Here’s why. | Nicholas Christakis
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- Опубликовано: 18 сен 2019
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The way we communicate is dictated in part by the setting that that communication takes place in. You're supposed to tell your doctor everything; on the other hand, you wouldn't tell your business competitor much at all.In academia, communication is supposed to be somewhat provocative. The reaction to a provocative idea can't be to silence the one expressing it, but to approach it from the other side of the argument. One way to think about this is that if you don't understand the other side of an issue, then you can't claim to understand the issue.The opinions expressed in this video do not necessarily reflect the views of the Charles Koch Foundation, which encourages the expression of diverse viewpoints within a culture of civil discourse and mutual respect.
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NICHOLAS CHRISTAKIS
Nicholas A. Christakis is a physician, sociologist, and director of the Human Nature Lab at Yale University, where he is the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science. His most recent book is Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society (March 2019). Follow him on Twitter @NAChristakis
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TRANSCRIPT:
NICHOLAS CHRISTAKIS: So when we think about academic freedom, we might ask the question, "Well, what's so special about academia?" Why might we have special rules of communication and openness within academia? I think in approaching this, one might think about other parts of our economy or other activities that we engage in in a society in which we outline special rules of communication. So think about, for example, healthcare. When you go to your doctor, you have a couple of expectations about how it is that you're going to communicate with your doctor. And special rules apply to those kinds of interactions. For example, rules of privacy. Doctors are supposed to keep things secret. When you tell your doctor something, those aren't supposed to be broadly advertised. Similarly, you have a kind of expectation of openness. I mean, one of the principle ideas about how you communicate effectively in a healthcare system is that you're supposed to tell your doctor anything that's bothering you.
How could a doctor diagnose and treat you properly if you lied to your physician? So you're supposed to reveal your secrets. You're supposed to have the expectation that that's the right thing to do. In fact, it's necessary for you to do that and furthermore that the doctor will guard those secrets properly. Or think about, for example, in industry. There are certain industries that are engaged in very competitive markets, let's say, high-tech industries. And in those types of firms there's an expectation that things will be kept secret and private. Here, in fact, there's not supposed to be a lot of communication. Different groups within the firm aren't supposed to talk to each other. They're supposed to work privately on their own as they advance the technology. So in this situation we might have a different kind of expectation about communication. Well, what about academia? What's the mission of a university? The mission of a university is the preservation, production, and communication of knowledge. The whole point of a university is to get smart people talking to each other in the most unfettered ways so that they might stumble on, discover, or co-create new ideas and new concepts.
And furthermore, communicate them liberally to outsiders, to everyone. The whole point of a university is to discover new ideas and to disseminate them. And for that to take place optimally, we need some kinds of rules that foster those activities. And this is, I think, the deepest origin of the principle of academic freedom. We want people working in universities not to feel constrained by any existing ideas. We want them to be open. We want them to talk to each other so that their ideas get checked. If we're really going to discover the truth, we need me, when I say something stupid or foolish, to have someone else say wait a minute, that's not right. Have you thought about this fact, or have you thought about this flaw in your argument. And that person needs to be at liberty to say that to me without fear of losing their job, for example, or other kinds of severe sanctions. We want to foster fluid communication so that we can discover this knowledge, we can discover the truth and then communicate it, model that for the broader society of which a university is a part.
Any...
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A smart mind is the most dangerous weapon
I think it is the opposite, as the thoughts ripen the mind becomes less dangerous and more corroborative in a logical sensibility as well. Unless you mean something differently by dangerous weapon.
@@1p6t1gms Well, who build the first firearm?
The nerd or the muscle?
@@1p6t1gms Agree with you AND OP. Both y'all make sense in different ways. 😅
You're right, some people are so damn smart they can break you from within. Sociopaths aren't dangerous just because they are willing to sacrifice others for their own personal gain, because a lot of people try that. Sociopaths are dangerous because they are actually smart enouph to get away with it.
fgreger so you are trying to say that EVERY smart person has the potential to become DANGEROUS because of their crazy ability to invent weapons?? If that's not what you mean to say then maybe you should have said, "oh, not ALL smart people are dangerous, only few!" But if you assume that every smart person IS indeed dangerous because of machinery invention capacities, then tell me how. You do know there's smart people out there that can control there thoughts the right way, but how often do we see a nerd developing a new bomb, or a gun??
Beautiful, I wish it was applied rigorously in most fields
Can we start with giving free access to academic information? I shouldn't have to pay for a psych study in order to study it in more detail than the abstract. Science currently has a very strained relationship with society, we rly need to fix this asap.
You can access every major journal/paper for free. Check out Sci-Hub and combine it with Google Scholar. The latter helps you find papers and their DOI, the former allows you to access the paper by using the DOI.
@@nal8503 Correction: you can access most for free. It really helps if you have a University library login.
@@merbst You do not need any accounts to access journals via Sci-Hub. It logs in using donated academia accounts in the background.
So far I haven't found a single paper that it wouldn't let me access given a DOI, but perhaps that was just a lucky streak that I hope you haven't jinxed for me now.
library genesis and scihub
I started up my own repository drive for this very issue for math and physics
drive.google.com/open?id=0B9XbEQh3jB9pNkhSVzVoYmRtTHM
@Homo Quantum Sapiens this is a great man!
As an academic I totally agree. But I add the condition that evidence and argument from evidence needs to be in place to engage the rights. Otherwise you have mere opinion and that's no better than one of Trumps or Kellyanne's alt facts. Even informed opinion is still only opinion. One spouts it subject to the usual social constraints and norms.
I am inclined to think that academic freedom might not be strongly defended for someone acting outside their area of expertise. But this is not straight forward. Obviously if they rely on their expertise in a non-relevant area, then you have a fallacy at play, namely appeal to authority. But that is not the main issue. The question is whether the arguments in support apply across any and all subjects a member f campus community cares about, or only to their field(s).
@Russell Spears That is a hypothesis that can be examined. But it is not well formed as it stands. It is false on its face as it stands. Just look at the 60s. It was not labor and unions and Wall Street financiers in the streets over the US in Viet Nam. They are not in the streets now to protest guns in america. They are not in the streets in growing numbers to protest inaction on global warming. You need to adjust your thesis to account for the facts. Sorry you did not learn this in school like you should have.
@Russell Spears Ok Russell. I think it's time you had your meds and took your nappie. Your paranoia is showing pretty strongly today.
@Russell Spears oh you started it buddy when you laid on the poor white male being picked on buy (haha) women bs. that's just dog whistle and your cry baby tears don't help you one bit. It's not subtle, nor funny. But your delusions certainly are. Enjoy your bubble.
Thanks for pointing out that you need evidence to make a claim - what a world we would live in if people ignored the facts that are not followed by any justification..
The biggest problem in academics is that it's about improving yourself though learning and not learning.
About getting qualifications and not the skills they are intended to pertain to.
About being a "good scholar" instead of doing scholarly work.
About following procedures instead of spontaneous action.
About teaching to the exam instead of examining what was taught.
The systems of control that have allowed us to standardize and education an implement it on a large scale has led to mediocrity, a misalignment of talent to skill, and a curriculum so inflexible in could only hope to elicit engagement from a robot.
The old way of educating people was dynamic. The teacher, who was most likely also your parent, taught and interacted with the student in a way that was human and specific to the needs of the situation.
The obvious problem was that it was marred by nepotism and didn't share the benefits of a global academic establishment that could integrate all of the available pedagogical resources. But the core issue now is the machine is so massive and unwieldy it can only hope to keep track of the student by approximation. like a subatomic particle.
Is there a way to get the best of both worlds?
The fact that the world hasn't broken down completely in the absence of competent educated people alone shows that we're getting by and the wider world that schools are intended to simulate to a degree has a way of straightening things out.
But it's imperfect and leads to a great deal of suffering.
If there is a way to get the ideal educational system (and I'm going to say right now that the answer is essentially, "no") it will be a system that accepts it's own limitations and encourages the student not to accept it's authority blindly and to seek their own path in life however they come to it. Such as system would support their development wherever possible, but would not seek to restrain it.
It would prioritize that a student give just as much weight to their sense of interest and engagement as their grades. A student should not be satisfied with a high grade if the subject didn't intrigue them them, nor discouraged by a low grade if the task was enjoyable.
All either of these outcomes imply is that the test can't adequately get at the question, "What makes a good student?"
And that's really the crux of what I'm getting at.
The key to knowledge is the acceptance and recognition of our ignorance; of both the necessity of defining the student's ability so that he can be graded at all, but also it's futility. There are ways of evaluating a student's progress and how they are to improve, but this is just using arbitrary measures to discuss arbitrary measures just as a dictionary can only define words in terms of other words. All it does is circumambulate the real issue because the procedure of analysis simply doesn't know when it's computations are beaten.
The intuition of an individual can do a much better job on a case by case basis, but his opinion will nessessarily be subjective and it's impossible for Mr. So-and-So to be in a thousand different schools or universities at the same time.
You cannot find the good student by subjecting him to a test because tests can only measure concepts and a "good student" is not a concept. It's a living, breathing, thinking reality.
So that means that the only solution to the problem is that there is no solution because the problem is...well...let's see if whoever's reading this can figure that one out for themselves...
The problem is in the whole education system, and we are becoming more like a rat and playing rat race and enjoying it and also encouraging the next generation also to enjoy it and so do the teachers . If I'm wrong then please correct me!!
By the way, very nicely written.
Wow, talking about the importance of diversity of opinions? Sound, logical, and planned talking points?
Did I accidentally wander into bizarro Big Think?
Awesome! 😃
Healthy conflict. Crucial to healthy communities.
It always comes down to who decides what is true.
no
That’s not how the scientific community works.
@Russell Spears No you jest, Oh Lord of the Flies.
Only math provides truth. Science tries to approach certainty, but never claims truth without a degree of uncertainty or margin of error. Engineering tries to apply these to the real wold but has no truth claims in any sense you mean. Religion offers myth and legend, Winners decide what is history. That leaves little for these mysterious others in your vague but cute sounding conspiracy to decide much of importance that anyone would call true or false Is that a pot hole? If it's on your street, no. On mine, you bet! There's a truth lol
Sounds great. Doesn't work for 2/3 spines.
What do you mean by Truth, what is truth?
what do you mean by "what do you mean?"
When you believe a lie long enough, eventually it becomes the truth
@@BumbleBeeBeeRock More deepities. Wonderful!
I think truth is something that is not proven but believed by most. And, something that has high probability of being right. That's how I would differentiate between truth and a fact.
@@RandomGuy-hh4dk I've found that truth is best thought of as a property of statements. The degree to which a statement maps to reality maps to the probability you mention. Absoute truth is onlhy found in statements of logic and it's nephew, math. I'm not reall comfortable when you say truth is a belief. But I understand the psychology of what you're saying. To this end you might ad faith, and create a continuum.
Prager U comes to mind...
For academic freedom to work there is one important rule left out in the video, integrity. Arguments and counter arguments must be honest; dishonest arguments need to be policed.
The answer to bad speech is a counter to that bad speech. Blocking that speech doesn't help in the long run and will be used against all sides when someone in power is pushing a narrative. Policing the speech is a bad idea and it will be used against everyone.
@@cybersekkin Not every argument, especially opinion, is valid but treating them as such is counter productive. Example, if the forum is scientific, entertaining religious belief is a distraction. At this point we should not be wasting resources debating whether the earth is flat, creationism, global warming is a hoax.
Peter Thomas And who gets to do the policing to determine what is a dishonest argument? Better to allow free expression of all ideas. Bad ideas will be exposed and countered.
@@karagi101 I think all would agree an academic who falsifies data should be disciplined. But what about bad arguments that are disproven are being constantly remade over and over again, eg. flat earth. At some point a moderator, professor, dean, etc. needs to exclude those arguments so real debate can occur. The dishonest arguments add nothing and waste resources.
Peter Thomas Some arguments are conjectures that haven’t been proven to be true or false. They are ripe for debate. For other arguments we have incontrovertible empirical proof that they are true or not. In the later case those arguments will be ignored, ridiculed and countered by facts. They will eventually die a natural death without resorting to banning or limiting free speech. Keep in mind that in non-scientific fields there is often limited evidence for anyone to be able to say they have proven something conclusively. (And yes, falsifying data and dishonesty should not be tolerated. There should be severe consequences.)
1:43 No, it's to teach young people what the correct things to believe are, and allowing wrong ideas to be expressed hinders that mission.
Quantum theory was very offensive in the beginning.
_James Watson has entered the chat._
And no far left opinions that want censorship?
Truth truth truth.... I don't want truth.... A noble lie is better ...
@Russell Spears that is well said... You can't have your cake and eat it too... If everyone is told truth then social order would brake in a second .... That's how the society is designed....
👍👍 Tough times never last, but tough people do. A money maker @evenkingsfall (his insta) has always said you have to THINK BIG to WIN BIG! Always keep that mindframe! Don't stop the hard work ☝️
Look at what Jorden Peterson has been going through. He didn’t actually insult people with a LGBT background, what did do was write an article about his concerns over Canada’s new ‘compelled speech’ laws. He was trying to warn about the danger of the government forcing people to only use specific words when referring to people’s identified gender. Peterson always showed respect to individuals in both is clinical practice and classroom and honored their preferred terms on an individual basis. However this was totally misreported by the media. 20 years ago Peterson would have been considered moderate or a liberal however in the last few years the academic community has polarized and he is considered hard right and being pushed out because he dares to question the system.
Many icons of the Left are now considered enemies to many self-identified Liberals. Christopher Hitchins, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Fry, George Carlin, the list goes on and on.
Homo Quantum Sapiens he didn’t say to disrespect the LGBT community, far from it. What he stated is that we need to think before we let the government intervene in our speech or things could get dicey. Decent people will tell a racist or homophobe off immediately and let them know disrespect of diversity isn’t acceptable. Bringing government into the situation only weakens our constitutional rights.
Homo Quantum Sapiens You’re not a liberal.
The truth just is and no teaching can explain it. It has to be felt.
Nobody wants to be criticized but only those who can exercise their power upon others may extinguish critical thinking. That's why a real democracy is so important. One human, one vote...
The discussion should be about non-affordable college costs...The hell is he talking about??
Technically the only thing a University is good for is the Social Network because it gives you access to people with resources which therefor enable opportunity. The benefit of the education itself is extremely limited in comparison. It's never been what you know, it's always about who you know first. And even then, if you know the right people, they will pay to teach you what you need to know. In this Age of the Internet however, the value of that education is even further diminished to background noise. It plays no significant part in achieving success.
you meet pretty girls physically though
At the moment, the internet if more free to express opinion then University campusses are. Which is the other way around.
But universities lead to better arguments, information, and facts that internet opinions. Internet opinions are based on academic thoughts.
@Homo Quantum Sapiens I assume you're talking to Naci Rema?😂
@Homo Quantum Sapiens No, there is to much I don't understand yet, and there is much I'll never understand. However, I'm educated, I'm curious, and I try to base my opinions on facts, as far as we can define those at least.
@Homo Quantum Sapiens However, I don't understand where all your toxicity is coming from?
Please stop taking Koch money.
There's a gap between universities and the public and societies, until the gap been filled, the Academic arguments will be useless!!!
Cheers :)
@Homo Quantum Sapiens
That's why Academic arguments could be useless if we start thinking about how much the IQ we neet in public rather than thinking of creating new ideas or trying out to solve problems in societies to make people's lives better!!!
Thank you for providing my point so quickly :)
@Homo Quantum Sapiens
The subject about freedom of speech and all you do is attacking me rather than arguing about the main idea!!!
Your comments is really a good example about what going on this days!!! 😂
Without Jesus, you'll never KNOW truth...
Male Michelle
Hahah all the anti-intellectualism in the comments.
Nigga, who is the patient here? Who the fuck is this guy talking to?
"Smart" people? Or those that have the luxury of a formal education? Expensive education is the fastest way to create an elitist society. Do you really want the elite dictating our speech freedoms? Off topic but very important.
True. So stop pandering to politicians and the mainstream flavour of the time and start speaking out against horseshit like "97% of scientists agree on anything" and the fact that scientists pander to grant money and careers instead of doing real science.
I don't think he's talking about real science like climate research, he's talking about soft sciences like social science. Anthropogenic climate change is supported by all major science institutes on the planet, not just those in US academia.
@@toobnoobify Real science would be analyzing the cause of a claimed "97% consensus" on a topic as complex as the climate.
It's also no secret that academics tend to play the career and grant chasing game. As such their studies will tend towards whatever narrative gets funded.
Furthermore, statistical methods *can not* extrapolate as far in the future as MSM tries to make people believe.
The error of estimation propagates and grows exponentially into the future.
Indeed, if anybody could predict the climate with such accuracy they would become the wealthiest person on earth within a matter of months, if not days, as the same methods could be reapplied to trading financial assets far more efficiently than anybody can today.
And none of that even takes into account overfitting, underfitting or deliberate manipulation of data and models. A child could create hundreds of climate models by just altering some parameters or variables and a lot of them will look plausible. Doesn't mean that they are worth a damn though.
It is a matter of fact that nobody knows a damn about what will happen to the climate even within one generation.
There are far too many variables to make any sincere and rigorous scientific claims in that direction and anybody who does is either not a scientist at all or a genius that has found the holy grail of statistics as well as a way to measure, store and process orders of magnitude more data than currently possible.
Given my field I'd be both shocked and very pleased if I just haven't heard of such a marvelous breakthroughs yet.
None of this is to say that climate change isn't real. It obviously is, the climate is literally changing by the second.
But how much of that is man-made and how the climate will be changing in the future becomes exponentially further out of the scope of mankind's current abilities the further the prediction is supposed to reach.
@Homo Quantum Sapiens I have neither said that I like academia nor claimed any flat earth like conspiracy theories.
Come back when you've become literate.
P.S. I don't like what academia has become very much at all. However, I do love science.
This piece of information has not been part of my post though, so perhaps you might want to get examined for schizophrenia or quit holding monologues in public instead of calling yourself a moron.
@@nal8503 _"analyzing the cause of a claimed "97% consensus" on a topic as complex as the climate"_
That's an irrelevant statistic that I really hate, it makes science look like a popularity contest which does more damage to science than you science deniers. A better statistic would be the entire body of the scientific literature (100%) supports the theory of climate change.
_"statistical methods can not extrapolate as far in the future as MSM tries to make people believe."_
The MSM today, especially the leftist MSM, are complete hacks who get caught lying every week and you should never believe what they say. That has nothing to do with the fact that every real science institution has reviewed the literature and determined that anthropogenic climate change is real.
_"A child could create hundreds of climate models by just altering some parameters or variables"_
I have to stop you here. Not trying to be a dick, but you don't even seem to have a grade school understanding of how science works.
_"the climate is literally changing by the second."_
That is called 'weather,' not 'climate.' Again, not trying to be a dick, but this topic seems way over your head.
At this point I would typically ask what your alma mater is, then I would link that college's page explaining climate change. But clearly you are not done grade school let alone college. Let's talk again when you can grow facial hair.
@@toobnoobify "Not trying to be a dick, but you don't even seem to have a grade school understanding of how science works."
"But clearly you are not done grade school let alone college. Let's talk again when you can grow facial hair."
Ad hominems and baseless assumptions paired with hypocrisy and logical inconsistency. Thank you for providing a prime example of what is wrong with academics today. You're not a scientist, you're a career academic at best.
"That has nothing to do with the fact that every real science institution has reviewed the literature and determined that anthropogenic climate change is real."
I'm not going to get impressed by reviews when in social sciences the majority of studies were irreproducible garbage. And based on all the evidence it would be senseless to assume that the interpretation of data in "hard sciences" wouldn't keep following a similar trend. Some of the greatest minds of all time were shunned by the scientific mainstream of their time. And when your career literally depends on pleasing your grant-givers you're probably not going to try and get into trouble.
Academia is selecting for confirmation bias, plain and simple. Show me a significant effort to control for this fact and I might be impressed.
"That is called 'weather,' not 'climate.'"
The two are inextricably linked.
""A child could create hundreds of climate models by just altering some parameters or variables"
I have to stop you here. Not trying to be a dick, but you don't even seem to have a grade school understanding of how science works."
Ad hominem and no argument made. Again, you evidently are not a scientist. Hint: A PhD is insufficient. Especially when you're too innumerate to not shoot yourself in the foot.
In reality a model is a set of equations that due to the probabilistic nature of the climate is not going to perfectly depict reality anytime in the foreseeable future. As such you will always have as many models as there are real numbers, that is an uncountable infinite amount. And you can very easily get arbitrarily many models by altering the parameters or introducing or removing variables. With some effort you can create arbitrarily many models that will have equivalent behaviour on a chosen scale while showing vastly different behaviours on another.
This is so pathetically simple to do that social sciences can print garbage like toilet paper often without even realizing what they are doing because they are insufficiently educated on probability theory, statistics, logic and philosophy of science. And so far you've just demonstrated that this is likely to extend into "hard" sciences as well.
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Sad video
Thanks Charles Koch
Only god can judge you now