Grok notes: “Seminars in academic or professional spheres tend to lean formal unless explicitly billed as interactive. For example, in Western university settings, students usually wait for permission to speak, while some European or informal tech conference talks might tolerate more back-and-forth. If the video shows constant unprompted interruptions and the speaker struggles to maintain control, it’d be unusual for a standard seminar.”
Comments at YT:
* A brilliant and original thinker nearly suffocated by ageing self-sufficient professors who get distracted by details and fail to see he’s on their side and represents the most coherent approach to win this fight.
* Nathan Cofnas presented his theory of Wokeism to the Classical Liberalism Initiative at Stanford University and received a rough ride from the audience, with many hostile questions.
Cofnas’ theory holds that Wokeism follows from Western moral principles (all individuals have an equal right to flourish) plus the “equality thesis” (the scientifically false but near-universally-imposed axiom that there are no genetic differences in ability or preferences across race or gender groups). If we blindly accept the equality thesis plus the moral principle of equal rights, then “wokeism,” which is a near-hysterical witch-hunt to find the sources of remaining group disparities, makes logical sense. That is the Cofnas theory in a nutshell.
Cofnas could not even convince the Classical Liberals of Stanford, an extremely talented group of hard-headed intellectuals, to accept the falsity of the equality thesis. Their harsh reaction to his talk shows that social scientists still have a difficult and important job to do. Social scientists need to explain to the intellectual elite that the equality thesis is no longer scientifically tenable – it has been empirically rejected beyond a reasonable doubt. Even brilliant Stanford students and faculty who identify as classical liberals still cling to the mistaken belief that groups disparities arise from environmental causes.
* I would expect faculty members at a major university to have better etiquette than interjecting so much that the whole line of argument becomes difficult to follow. They even interrupted other audience members’ questions.
* Infuriating that rather than letting him speak, the audience interject meaning the coherence of the argument is lost.
* I don’t see a problem with exerting public, legal pressure to promote your morality. What is the problem with calling for JK Rowling to be dropped by her publisher? What is the problem with boycotts? What, actually, is the problem with ‘canceling’? (If there is a problem, it lies with companies firing people because they care nothing for their employees, and will do any expedient thing for profits, because that’s the economy we chose). Our legal system is not unprepared. It has considered the matter for centuries and has clearly decided that publicly shaming others is a right to be protected.
Because social morality has always worked this way (the only difference now it that technology gives people the power to pile on). You think people weren’t ‘canceled’ in the past? There was never a time when people weren’t being ‘cancelled’. But many older folks are just blind to the way it worked in past decades (when the penalties were actually often much more severe for doing or saying the “wrong things”, btw). Basically, if you agree with the morality being enforced, you probably don’t see it as social enforcement. You think “of course people are doing that, it’s just the right thing to do”. Which is how woke people feel too. The struggle in the public square between wokism and reaction is scary, but it’s the “healthy” way democracy is designed for (even though basically amounts to a daily torrent of complaining). This is how we determine our social morality.
* Is it normal in seminars for the audience to interrupt the lecturer at will without even raising their hand and waiting to be given permission to speak?
