First, I’m pretty sure it is common lingo to have “controversial” be used in the way it is in this article. If this were a news story in The New York Times, I’d expect it would be much more likely to use the word “controversial” than the word “exclusionary”.
If the New York Times and WSJ both had front-page stories about “Conference draws attention for controversial speakers”, I’d expect this to be more about radical right-wing or left-wing beliefs than I would the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.
Yeah, and I mostly think this is a mixture of confusion and cowardice on their part, frankly. To the extent that they really believe the controversy is itself the problem, I think they’re wrong. To the extent that they’re saying “controversial” because it’s unarguably literally true and allows them to imply “bad” without having to actually say it, I think it’s an attempt to project a false neutrality, to take a side without appearing to take a side. Some react to that by saying “let our neutrality not be false”, some by “let us not project neutrality”. Either way has more respect from me.
But I could imagine many ideas in this category. If there were a speaker talking about how to secure Taiwan, arguably Chinese nationalists would feel uncomfortable attending and argue that that is exclusionary. Many people are uncomfortable with basic ideas in effective altruism and might not attend conferences with prominent EAs—they might argue that that EA is exclusionary.
Yeah, for sure I expect disagreement about what’s exclusionary, and when we should stand by something even though it’s exclusionary. My main point was to point out that lots of disagreements aren’t exclusionary, and choosing how we handle potentially-exclusionary discourse doesn’t need to put any of that at stake. (There’s room to disagree with this distinction, but that’s the distinction I was trying to draw.)
Yeah, and I mostly think this is a mixture of confusion and cowardice on their part, frankly. To the extent that they really believe the controversy is itself the problem, I think they’re wrong. To the extent that they’re saying “controversial” because it’s unarguably literally true and allows them to imply “bad” without having to actually say it, I think it’s an attempt to project a false neutrality, to take a side without appearing to take a side. Some react to that by saying “let our neutrality not be false”, some by “let us not project neutrality”. Either way has more respect from me.
Yeah, for sure I expect disagreement about what’s exclusionary, and when we should stand by something even though it’s exclusionary. My main point was to point out that lots of disagreements aren’t exclusionary, and choosing how we handle potentially-exclusionary discourse doesn’t need to put any of that at stake. (There’s room to disagree with this distinction, but that’s the distinction I was trying to draw.)