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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (90622)	5/7/2014 8:33:09 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 90947

At 10:23 AM, February 27, 2014, Tibor Mach said.. .I think this is an issue in a lot of topics other than global warming as well...the more political the topic is, the more it is an issue. One very important "life lesson" that was repeatedly told me at the faculty of mathematics and physics in Prague and that which also the mathematicians at the Institute for Mathematical stochastics in Göttingen seem to adhere to is Never trust authorities. In other sense, think for yourself, don't believe something automatically just because this guy is an esteemed author with a lot of reputation. One professor (in a bachelor level course) even put it like this:"I could be your grandfather and you should trust your grandfathers...but don't trust me on anything" :) I even learned it first hand during the writing of my MS thesis. I compared some of my and my advisors work to a book by two esteemed English mathematicians...and we found out a mistake in one of their statements which we then managed to correct so that the statement held under slightly less general conditions (the way it was stated it was false). On the other hand.... I had the misfortune of having to attend a "diversity competence" lecture today, which is mandatory for all PhD students in Germany and while the lecturer kept covering a wide array of unrelated (and very very left wing) opinions (e.g. she showed us a video of a former Clinton advisor from Davos who spoke about how the state is weak and the big business is very powerful and consists of just "old white men" and how we need to increase the power of the state), all of her arguments were mentions of authorities. "This is true, because this person says that and she has won a Nobel prize". When I tried to mention opposing arguments, she basically cut me out and did not allow any disturbance in her entirely one sided talk (and since I could not stand it and sighed from time to time she then called me offensive and threatened me not to award me credits for the course...I told her I did not like this being so preachy with no chance at a discussion, which I would have probably even enjoyed, while having to be there as it was a mandatory course, but agreed not to show apparent disagreement during the course of her talk and so we at least agreed that the idea that this was mandatory was a bad thing for all of us). It was particularly funny as she kept talking about the importance in diversity, but seemingly she meant superficial diversity of ethnicities and gender and could not stand a diversity of opinions. Nothing like this has ever happened to me at a university before. If this is what most US liberal arts colleges are like, then that is rather worrying. Here, at least, 3 people (including me) told her that they would have spent the time differently had the course not been mandatory when she asked for our evaluation and some people at least criticized it to a point...On the other hand a lot of people did criticize it much more during the lunch break but they simply did not want to enter a conflict, which makes me a little bid sad (even though I admit that whatever my reaction to her had been, it would have not changed anything and so perhaps one could say I was only doing it for my ego and could have simply sat through that without any arguments...still, this was too close to a political indoctrination for me to stay above the whole thing). http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2014/02/a-climate-falsehood-you-can-check-for.html#c6420445344121564366