sort of diversity, diversity of ideas, that ought to matter to a university.
Are you sure about that? It seems like a function of universities can/should be to filter out as many terrible ideas as possible so people can spend time exploring and exchanging worthwhile ideas without spending too much overhead on epistemic hygiene.
A good restaurant with a diverse menu won’t put spam-and-mustard-cake on the menu, even though it would certainly up the diversity.
A restaurant achieves this by promoting good recipes though, not by delving into unfiltered recipe space and then removing the bad recipes. The filtering-out step occurs way before anyone considers putting the recipe on a restaurant menu, at the stage where someone with a reasonable amount of cooking knowledge and common sense considers the question of what might taste good.
A professor candidate who holds non-mainstream views relevant to their teaching which are sufficiently transparently wrong, should be able to be eliminated on grounds of simple competency, as would a chef candidate who has somehow come by the misapprehension that spam-and-mustard-cake would be a tasty dessert.
If you want to research a problem, first you consider alternative hypotheses, then you test them experimentally, and then you throw away the ones which did not pass the experimental test.
At the moment of generating hypotheses, you want diversity. Of course, your time is limited, so you shouldn’t bother with hypotheses with huge complexity and epsilon prior probability, so you do some filtering anyway. But you want to have a few competing hypotheses. (You want to keep the hypothesis that the 2-4-6 rule could work for odd numbers too.)
Only later, when some hypotheses are experimentally disproved, you can safely ignore them. (More precisely, there is always a probability that the experiment was wrong. But a good experiment, or many repeated experiments, can move the hypothesis to the epsilon zone.)
So the question is which opinions are unwelcome in universities because they were experimentally disproved, and which opinions are unwelcome, because they are already unacceptable at the hypothesis generating phase.
To which category would the hypothetical supporter of South African Apartheid belong? What exactly are his claims, and which of them have been tested?
Yes, undergrads should be taught good and useful ideas. Graduate students however need to be taught both the good ones and the bad ones because professors need to be able to examine ideas from outside and make coherent arguments about whether or how they are good or bad. When I have met people who complain that graduate schools waste their time on things that they don’t want to learn, I have explained to them that they don’t really want a graduate degree, or more to the point, they don’t really want a graduate education, they clearly do want the degree.
Same principle. I wouldn’t advise wasting library funds on creationist textbooks, and I would recommend removing factually-inaccurate items from the non-fiction section.
But books are still a better place to hedge against the possibility that my idea-quality-metric is seriously broken, as a matter of economics. I’d still prioritize good ideas over terrible in book acquisition, but with an added component for diversity as judged by my quality metric (aiming for a long-tail distribution as judged by my personal idea-quality metric, for example). You can have many-more books than faculty, so this is a good, economically-efficient way to purchase idea diversity without wasting your very-limited-resource of faculty spots.
Throwing out books has cost (in time and effort to judge quality), so I’d only throw out terrible books if there was some constraint on shelf space or something (and then I’d rather sell or give away than simply toss).
I don’t think that the principle is the same. “Book existing in a library” isn’t a privileged position like “tenured faculty” or “column in a major newspaper” or “book promoted by a major publisher.”
Same principle. I wouldn’t advise wasting library funds on creationist textbooks, and I would recommend removing factually-inaccurate items from the non-fiction section.
The trouble here is that if you don’t observe a taboo on exercising judgment over which ideas are acceptable or worthwhile in presenting to the public, then people with fundamental disagreements with you on such matters, given a position of power, are unlikely to observe it either.
I tend to assume that people with disagreements that fundamental are sufficiently different from me that coordinating on something like this is extremely unlikely in the first place.
Also note that everyone exercises judgment in this regard; even the most self-proclaimed “open-minded” person won’t endorse teaching Time Cube in schools. Usually. I hope.
The trouble here is that if you don’t observe a taboo on exercising judgment over which ideas are acceptable or worthwhile in presenting to the public, then people with fundamental disagreements with you on such matters, given a position of power, are unlikely to observe it either.
The trouble here is that if you do observe a taboo on exercising judgment over which ideas are acceptable or worthwhile in presenting to the public, then people with fundamental disagreements with you on such matters, given a position of power, are unlikely to observe it anyways.
On a side note, I think that libraries typically stock in accordance with demand and costs, not merit. Am I wrong about this, or am I right yet mistaken in also believing that librarians do a satisfactory job?
I think that libraries typically stock in accordance with demand and costs, not merit
I think at this point in history, libraries are irrelevant. In the far past, books etc. were expensie and libraries kept whatever they could get. They were, collectively, the waybackmachine.org of the world. More recently, they would buy what their customers might find most useful for research. A collection of books and especially years and years of journal subscriptions. These would be local copies, with no real archival purpose in holding these, these would always be available somewhere else. Now, I don’t know what they do. I have gotten a few books from university libraries in the last few years, so they served to save me some money and/or allow me to read things I wouldn’t have spent the money on.
Personally, I’ve been had at least one nonfiction book checked out of the library at all times for the past several months, and it’s allowed me to spend a lot of my transportation time (I read while walking, and while taking public transit) reading up on things that aren’t online, which I wouldn’t have paid retail price for.
Libraries receive a lot of books by donation, so many books in their stock are not vetted in terms of demand or cost, but they’ll sometimes clear out books in a section which aren’t being borrowed in order to make room for other books.
Good point: books have utility beyond accuracy and immediate usefulness—it’s useful to know about historical ideas, for example. But it’s important to know about them as historical facts—these aren’t really useful sources of ideas in and of themselves (at least not in the present—there are a lot of useful ideas here that have since been picked out and refined in more useful forms).
Not every book is there to provide good ideas, just as not every staff member at a university is there to curate and develop them. I’m not too concerned about the the academic opinions of he architect, or the IT manager—they are there for different reasons.
There may be many reasons to keep a book around, but “contains terrible ideas dismissed for really good reasons” is not one of them. Each of the books you list has a significance beyond the (often horrible) ideas contain, making it worthy of shelf space. If they had no such historical import, then no, they would not be a great use of shelf space.
There may be many reasons to keep a book around, but “contains terrible ideas dismissed for really good reasons” is not one of them.
Actually, even that is. “Really good reasons” are things you want to keep track of. When they’re really good reasons against something, you want to keep track of the thing they’re against to fully understand the good reasons.
Intellectual history is a series of arguments. If any institution should remember and analyze the bad arguments, it’s academia. Consigning them to the memory hole loses information about the good arguments as well as the bad. That goes beyond the historical argument—that’s an argument based on information loss regardless of historical circumstances.
Would keep all of those books, would probably not put in modern defenses of them though. There is a difference between historical data and present-day argument. Also the inclusion of The Wealth Of Nations on that list is a bit odd.
Furthermore, in the case of the Communist Manifesto, the awfulness is not actually in the book.
I threw in a variety of books in the list, knowing that different people would find different ones horrible. I don’t find them all horrible, and which ones I find horrible weren’t really the point of the comment.
Yes, there is a difference between historically relevant books and just bad ideas, and I believe later in the thread we discuss that, but I was responding to the “filter out terrible ideas” policy. That’s a terrible idea.
Are you sure about that? It seems like a function of universities can/should be to filter out as many terrible ideas as possible so people can spend time exploring and exchanging worthwhile ideas without spending too much overhead on epistemic hygiene.
A good restaurant with a diverse menu won’t put spam-and-mustard-cake on the menu, even though it would certainly up the diversity.
A restaurant achieves this by promoting good recipes though, not by delving into unfiltered recipe space and then removing the bad recipes. The filtering-out step occurs way before anyone considers putting the recipe on a restaurant menu, at the stage where someone with a reasonable amount of cooking knowledge and common sense considers the question of what might taste good.
A professor candidate who holds non-mainstream views relevant to their teaching which are sufficiently transparently wrong, should be able to be eliminated on grounds of simple competency, as would a chef candidate who has somehow come by the misapprehension that spam-and-mustard-cake would be a tasty dessert.
It is a question of timing.
If you want to research a problem, first you consider alternative hypotheses, then you test them experimentally, and then you throw away the ones which did not pass the experimental test.
At the moment of generating hypotheses, you want diversity. Of course, your time is limited, so you shouldn’t bother with hypotheses with huge complexity and epsilon prior probability, so you do some filtering anyway. But you want to have a few competing hypotheses. (You want to keep the hypothesis that the 2-4-6 rule could work for odd numbers too.)
Only later, when some hypotheses are experimentally disproved, you can safely ignore them. (More precisely, there is always a probability that the experiment was wrong. But a good experiment, or many repeated experiments, can move the hypothesis to the epsilon zone.)
So the question is which opinions are unwelcome in universities because they were experimentally disproved, and which opinions are unwelcome, because they are already unacceptable at the hypothesis generating phase.
To which category would the hypothetical supporter of South African Apartheid belong? What exactly are his claims, and which of them have been tested?
Yes, undergrads should be taught good and useful ideas. Graduate students however need to be taught both the good ones and the bad ones because professors need to be able to examine ideas from outside and make coherent arguments about whether or how they are good or bad. When I have met people who complain that graduate schools waste their time on things that they don’t want to learn, I have explained to them that they don’t really want a graduate degree, or more to the point, they don’t really want a graduate education, they clearly do want the degree.
Should we apply that principal to the library as well? Remove all the books with “terrible ideas”?
Same principle. I wouldn’t advise wasting library funds on creationist textbooks, and I would recommend removing factually-inaccurate items from the non-fiction section.
But books are still a better place to hedge against the possibility that my idea-quality-metric is seriously broken, as a matter of economics. I’d still prioritize good ideas over terrible in book acquisition, but with an added component for diversity as judged by my quality metric (aiming for a long-tail distribution as judged by my personal idea-quality metric, for example). You can have many-more books than faculty, so this is a good, economically-efficient way to purchase idea diversity without wasting your very-limited-resource of faculty spots.
Throwing out books has cost (in time and effort to judge quality), so I’d only throw out terrible books if there was some constraint on shelf space or something (and then I’d rather sell or give away than simply toss).
I don’t think that the principle is the same. “Book existing in a library” isn’t a privileged position like “tenured faculty” or “column in a major newspaper” or “book promoted by a major publisher.”
Here’s another comment for my reflexive down-voters.
The trouble here is that if you don’t observe a taboo on exercising judgment over which ideas are acceptable or worthwhile in presenting to the public, then people with fundamental disagreements with you on such matters, given a position of power, are unlikely to observe it either.
I tend to assume that people with disagreements that fundamental are sufficiently different from me that coordinating on something like this is extremely unlikely in the first place.
Also note that everyone exercises judgment in this regard; even the most self-proclaimed “open-minded” person won’t endorse teaching Time Cube in schools. Usually. I hope.
The trouble here is that if you do observe a taboo on exercising judgment over which ideas are acceptable or worthwhile in presenting to the public, then people with fundamental disagreements with you on such matters, given a position of power, are unlikely to observe it anyways.
On a side note, I think that libraries typically stock in accordance with demand and costs, not merit. Am I wrong about this, or am I right yet mistaken in also believing that librarians do a satisfactory job?
I think at this point in history, libraries are irrelevant. In the far past, books etc. were expensie and libraries kept whatever they could get. They were, collectively, the waybackmachine.org of the world. More recently, they would buy what their customers might find most useful for research. A collection of books and especially years and years of journal subscriptions. These would be local copies, with no real archival purpose in holding these, these would always be available somewhere else. Now, I don’t know what they do. I have gotten a few books from university libraries in the last few years, so they served to save me some money and/or allow me to read things I wouldn’t have spent the money on.
Personally, I’ve been had at least one nonfiction book checked out of the library at all times for the past several months, and it’s allowed me to spend a lot of my transportation time (I read while walking, and while taking public transit) reading up on things that aren’t online, which I wouldn’t have paid retail price for.
Libraries receive a lot of books by donation, so many books in their stock are not vetted in terms of demand or cost, but they’ll sometimes clear out books in a section which aren’t being borrowed in order to make room for other books.
Same principle. Wonderful. “Filter out terrible ideas”.
Throw out Mein Kampf.
Are throwing out the Bible and Koran yet? The Wealth of Nations? The Communist Manifesto? The Little Red Book?
The history of mankind is a history of bad ideas. Into the dumpster and burn them. Better idea—we can use them for power generation.
Good point: books have utility beyond accuracy and immediate usefulness—it’s useful to know about historical ideas, for example. But it’s important to know about them as historical facts—these aren’t really useful sources of ideas in and of themselves (at least not in the present—there are a lot of useful ideas here that have since been picked out and refined in more useful forms).
Not every book is there to provide good ideas, just as not every staff member at a university is there to curate and develop them. I’m not too concerned about the the academic opinions of he architect, or the IT manager—they are there for different reasons.
There may be many reasons to keep a book around, but “contains terrible ideas dismissed for really good reasons” is not one of them. Each of the books you list has a significance beyond the (often horrible) ideas contain, making it worthy of shelf space. If they had no such historical import, then no, they would not be a great use of shelf space.
Actually, even that is. “Really good reasons” are things you want to keep track of. When they’re really good reasons against something, you want to keep track of the thing they’re against to fully understand the good reasons.
Intellectual history is a series of arguments. If any institution should remember and analyze the bad arguments, it’s academia. Consigning them to the memory hole loses information about the good arguments as well as the bad. That goes beyond the historical argument—that’s an argument based on information loss regardless of historical circumstances.
Would keep all of those books, would probably not put in modern defenses of them though. There is a difference between historical data and present-day argument. Also the inclusion of The Wealth Of Nations on that list is a bit odd.
Furthermore, in the case of the Communist Manifesto, the awfulness is not actually in the book.
I threw in a variety of books in the list, knowing that different people would find different ones horrible. I don’t find them all horrible, and which ones I find horrible weren’t really the point of the comment.
Yes, there is a difference between historically relevant books and just bad ideas, and I believe later in the thread we discuss that, but I was responding to the “filter out terrible ideas” policy. That’s a terrible idea.