Mathematicians are obviously angels, spilling out onto our land after their spaceship crashed.https://twitter.com/joshuagrochow/status/1249010998842765312?s=20 …
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(More seriously, I think mathematicians come off pretty well—nobody tried to cancel us for that explosive proofs paper! There’s a kind of tragic humility to the ones I meet that I really love. Maybe they’re Cordelia!)
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Simon DeDeo Retweeted Sarah Grynpas
Yes! The analogy would be the people who say “we can’t be screwed up—they have taboos, but we don’t. Look at all the messed up things we do.”https://twitter.com/SarahGrynpas/status/1249061750793789442?s=20 …
Simon DeDeo added,
Sarah Grynpas @SarahGrynpasReplying to @SarahGrynpas @SimonDeDeoAnd then isn’t there a metapurpose to the taboo? Community, the feeling of having secret knowledge, of peeking behind the curtain, stays within your group. Believing the taboo can help adherence to achieve ideal behaviours, so its valuable to believe in a taboo that doesn’t exist1 reply 0 retweets 3 likesShow this thread -
Simon DeDeo Retweeted Arbutus Tree
Harvard University, 1996: "We're here on merit". Not true, untrue, or really anything in between—but it was something many people believed or thought, but weren't allowed to say. It was declassé.https://twitter.com/aphercotropist/status/1249088826221432834?s=20 …
Simon DeDeo added,
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Replying to @SimonDeDeo
I am pretty sure we can rustle up both statements of pride in Harvard meritocracy and statements that deeply question it, from within Harvard in 1996?
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Replying to @Plinz
Yes, *but*—very group dependent. Obviously the anti-affirmative action people were very into the meritocracy. And the administration too, in a different way. My memory of the student left back then neither questioned nor affirmed it at that time (changes came quickly.)
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Replying to @SimonDeDeo
Wrt your main point: did Harvard's internal culture effectively enforce the same totalitarianism as it does today [in public]? Or was Harvard a more liberal place in 1996? Your main thesis seems to be that a normative totalitarianism on political opinions is an immutable default.
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Replying to @Plinz
Eek! Joscha, this one-on-one psychoanalysis is rather off the mark. Obviously I miss our sessions, though—let's pick that all up in person?
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Replying to @SimonDeDeo
Argh sorry I said a thing I was not supposed to say again :)
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I just meant to express that it appears to me that there is a kind of brilliant intellectual that in other times would have positioned themselves comfortably as a dissident instead of an audience pleaser. I think I have observed this quite a few times.
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Replying to @Plinz
Another rule of '96, possibly via Fukuyama: "You're not world-historical".
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Replying to @SimonDeDeo @Plinz
Simon DeDeo Retweeted Simon DeDeo
(Hence this response.)https://twitter.com/SimonDeDeo/status/1249095052548354051?s=20 …
Simon DeDeo added,
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