zlacker

>Which leads to the more fundamental question of how society should stop bad ideas leaking out of the professoriate and into the real world.

The consensus on Hacker News has always been that we shouldn't, that any attempt to do so is a slippery slope that leads to tyranny, because free speech must be absolute and non-negotiable, regardless of content, truth or consequence. "I may object to what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it," is the thought-terminating cliche often employed in the myriad other threads where free speech becomes a topic.

If this thread were about controversial right-wing speech, you would be shouted down as a bigot and a fascist for even suggesting that ideas can be "wrong" and "harmful." You would probably be one of the people doing the shouting down, as you've argued for free speech absolutism in other threads, and against deplatforming, cancel culture and other "leftist" and "SJW" attacks on free speech.

If it's not a problem when it's anti-vaxxers, neo-Nazis, racists or QAnon plotting a coup, it shouldn't be a problem here.

>>krapp+(OP)
I wasn't thinking of actual censorship. The bad ideas arise because the people in question are being funded by a government that doesn't really care or have any way to judge whether the ideas are good. Just requiring them to find their own funding would go a long way. It wouldn't stop DiAngelo now because she already gained critical mass and found ways to parlay that into money via training programmes, but would this stuff have arisen without large numbers of bored humanities profs looking for some meaning and purpose, and able to spend so much time on this thanks to grant money?

>>krapp+(OP)
I didn’t take the post above to be advocating censorship. I took it as being about how to make society resistant to destructive cultural fads.