A collection of 105 posts
It’s easy to decry cancel culture, but hard to turn it back. Thankfully, recent developments in my area of academic specialty—artificial intelligence (AI)—show that fighting cancel culture isn’t impossible.
The fallout has been intense and has gripped the professional commentariat.
In American First-Amendment jurisprudence, Brandenburg’s name is now a byword for the test that is used in assessing the validity of laws against inflammatory speech—especially speech that can lead to the sort of hateful mob activity that played out at the US Capitol last Wednesday.
Expowering is a transitional measure since you cannot fire your way to equity.
The disrupters rely on rhetorical devices such as replacing the passive “under-represented” with the active “marginalized,” “erased,” and “excluded.”
But painting the world as a struggle between victims and oppressors leaves little room for a careful discussion of costs and benefits, the unforeseen consequences of intervention, and potential government failure.
Tech companies are not equipped to rule on messy and complex disputes over truth.
Not so long ago, one might have been able to count on the naturally oppositional reflexes of young adults as a counterbalance to this kind of crowdsourced social panic.
People who don’t actively seek out books or articles inevitably lead more restricted lives because extended prose remains the most effective means of communicating complex ideas.
The project provided a unique and occasionally profound experience and a new perspective with which many of its fans had not engaged before—and all that from a YouTube channel!
Two components make up an availability cascade: an informational cascade and a reputational cascade.
Van Leeuwen and Herschbach wrote a statement on Facebook reiterating that the review process had been carried out properly, and declaring, “Efforts to silence unwelcome opinion… are doing a disservice to the community.”
The correct response to the cancellers is not simply to say that they should respect free speech. Rather, one must say to them that you are attacking people for stating things which are true, while you are stating things which are false.
What’s different now is that the current strain of social-justice ideology presents itself as a totalizing creed—which means that it isn’t enough for CEOs to accede to the idea of social justice as a mere boundary check on the company’s profit-seeking activities.
The fierce onslaught she received has served as a wake-up call, even for those who have not been following the debate closely.