Category: Free Speech

Soviets Expelled Math Innovator from High School, When He Denied That Dostoyevsky Was Pro-Communist

(p. A12) Vladimir Voevodsky, formerly a gifted but restless student who flunked out of college out of boredom before emerging as one of the most brilliant and revolutionary mathematicians of his generation, died on Sept. 30 [2017] at his home in Princeton, N.J. He was 51.
. . .
Vladimir was kicked out of high school three times, once for disagreeing with his teacher’s assertion that Dostoyevsky, who died in 1881, was pro-Communist. He was also kicked out of Moscow University after failing academically, having stopped attending classes that he considered a waste of time.
. . .
How do mathematicians know that something they prove is actually true?
This question became urgent for him as mathematicians were discovering — sometimes decades after publication — that proof after proof, including one of his own, had critical flaws.
Mathematical arguments had gotten so complicated, he realized, that other mathematicians rarely checked them in detail. And his stellar reputation only made the problem worse: Everyone assumed that his proofs must be right.
Dr. Voevodsky realized that human brains could not keep up with the ever-increasing complexity of mathematics. Computers were the only solution. So he embarked on an enormous project to create proof-checking software so powerful and convenient that mathematicians could someday use it as part of their ordinary work and create a library of rock-solid mathematical knowledge that anyone in the world could access.
Computer scientists had worked on the problem for decades, but it was territory only a few mathematicians had ever ventured into. “Among mathematicians, computer proof verification was almost a forbidden subject,” Dr. Voevodsky wrote.
The problem was that these systems were extraordinarily cumbersome. Checking a single theorem could require a decade of work, because the computer essentially had to be taught all of the mathematics a proof was built on, in agonizing, inhuman detail. Ordinary mathematicians intent on expanding the borders of the field could not possibly devote that kind of effort to checking their proofs.
Somehow, computers and humans needed to be taught to think alike.
Dr. Voevodsky developed a stunningly bold plan for how to do so: He reformulated mathematics from its very foundation, giving it a new “constitution,” as Dr. Hales put it. Mathematics so reformulated would be far friendlier to computers and allow mathematicians to talk to computers in a language that was much closer to how mathematicians ordinarily think.
Today, Dr. Voevodsky declared in 2014, “computer verification of proofs, and of mathematical reasoning in general, looks completely practical.”

For the full obituary, see:
JULIE REHMEYER. “Vladimir Voevodsky, Dropout Turned Revolutionary Mathematician, Dies at 51.” The New York Times (Sat., OCT. 7, 2017): A12.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date OCT. 6, 2017, and has the title “Vladimir Voevodsky, Revolutionary Mathematician, Dies at 51.”)

Extreme Left Attacks “Enlightenment Values: Reason, Inquiry and Dissent”

(p. A19) The revolution on college campuses, which seeks to eradicate individuals and ideas that are considered unsavory, constitutes a hostile takeover by fringe elements on the extreme left. Last spring at the Evergreen State College, where I was a professor for 15 years, the revolution was televised–proudly and intentionally–by the radicals. Opinions not fitting with the currently accepted dogma–that all white people are racist, that questioning policy changes aimed at achieving “equity” is itself an act of white supremacy–would not be tolerated, and those who disagreed were shouted down, hunted, assaulted, even battered. Similar eruptions have happened all over the country.
What may not be obvious from outside academia is that this revolution is an attack on Enlightenment values: reason, inquiry and dissent.
. . .
In a meeting with administrators at Evergreen last May [2017], protesters called, on camera, for college president George Bridges to target STEM faculty in particular for “antibias” training, on the theory that scientists are particularly prone to racism. That’s obvious to them because scientists persist in using terms like “genetic” and “phenotype” when discussing humans. Mr. Bridges offers: “[What] we are working towards is, bring ’em in, train ’em, and if they don’t get it, sanction them.”

For the full commentary, see:

Heather Heying. “First, They Came for the Biologists; The postmodernist left on campus is intolerant not only of opposing views, but of science itself.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., Oct. 3, 2017): A19.
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed year, added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Oct. 2, 2017, and has the title “U.K. Treasury Chief Defends Free-Market Capitalism Against Resurgent Opposition,”)

“We Liberals” Oppose Diversity of Ideas

(p. 11) We liberals are adept at pointing out the hypocrisies of Trump, but we should also address our own hypocrisy in terrain we govern, such as most universities: Too often, we embrace diversity of all kinds except for ideological. Repeated studies have found that about 10 percent of professors in the social sciences or the humanities are Republicans.
We champion tolerance, except for conservatives and evangelical Christians. We want to be inclusive of people who don’t look like us — so long as they think like us.
I fear that liberal outrage at Trump’s presidency will exacerbate the problem of liberal echo chambers, by creating a more hostile environment for conservatives and evangelicals. Already, the lack of ideological diversity on campuses is a disservice to the students and to liberalism itself, with liberalism collapsing on some campuses into self-parody.
. . .
Whatever our politics, inhabiting a bubble makes us more shrill. Cass Sunstein, a Harvard professor, conducted a fascinating study of how groupthink shapes federal judges when they are randomly assigned to three-judge panels.
When liberal judges happened to be temporarily put on a panel with other liberals, they usually swung leftward. Conversely, conservative judges usually moved rightward when randomly grouped with other conservatives.
It’s the judicial equivalent of a mob mentality. And if this happens to judges, imagine what happens to you and me.
Sunstein, a liberal and a Democrat who worked in the Obama administration, concluded that the best judicial decisions arose from divided panels, where judges had to confront counterarguments.
Yet universities are often the equivalent of three-judge liberal panels, and the traditional Democratic dominance has greatly increased since the mid-1990s — apparently because of a combination of discrimination and self-selection. Half of academics in some fields said in a survey that they would discriminate in hiring decisions against an evangelical.
The weakest argument against intellectual diversity is that conservatives or evangelicals have nothing to add to the conversation. “The idea that conservative ideas are dumb is so preposterous that you have to live in an echo chamber to think of it,” Sunstein told me..

For the full commentary, see:
Kristof, Nicholas. “The Dangers of Echo Chambers on Campus.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., DEC. 11, 2016): 11.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date DEC. 10, 2016.)

Cass Sunstein’s research on the effect of political orientation on federal judges’ decisions, mentioned above, was most fully reported in:
Sunstein, Cass R., David Schkade, Lisa M. Ellman, and Andres Sawicki. Are Judges Political?: An Empirical Analysis of the Federal Judiciary. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2006.

FDR’s Attorney General Warned Black Newspapers That He Would “Shut Them All Up”

(p. 12) . . . as the former Chicago Defender editor and reporter Ethan Michaeli shows in his extraordinary history, “The Defender,” the Negro press barons attacked military segregation with a zeal that set Roosevelt’s teeth on edge. The Negro press warned black men against Navy recruiters who would promise them training as radiomen, technicians or mechanics — then put them to work serving food to white men. It made its readers understand that black men and women in uniform were treated worse in Southern towns than German prisoners of war and sometimes went hungry on troop trains because segregationists declined to feed them. It focused unflinchingly on the fistfights and gun battles that erupted between blacks and whites on military bases. And it reiterated the truth that no doubt cut Roosevelt the most deeply: His government’s insistence on racial separation was of a piece with the “master race” theory put in play by Hitler in Europe.
This was not the first time The Defender and its sister papers had attacked institutional racism. That part of the story begins with Robert S. Abbott, the transplanted Southerner who created The Defender in 1905 and fashioned it into a potent weapon.
. . .
The black press was considerably more powerful and self-assured by 1940, when Abbott died and his nephew John H. Sengstacke succeeded him.
. . .
Things stood thus in 1942, when Sengstacke traveled to Washington to meet with Attorney General Francis Biddle. Sengstacke found Biddle in a conference room, sitting at a table across which was spread copies of black newspapers that included The Defender, The Courier and The Afro-American. Biddle said that the black papers were flirting with sedition and threatened to “shut them all up.”

For the full review, see:
BRENT STAPLES. “‘A ‘Most Dangerous’ Newspaper.” The New York Times Book Review (Sun., JAN. 10, 2016): 12.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date JAN. 4, 2016, and has the title “”The Defender,’ by Ethan Michaeli.”)

The book under review, is:
Michaeli, Ethan. The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016.

Since 1880 North America Is Warmer by One and a Half Degrees Fahrenheit

(p. A23) Anyone who has read the 2014 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change knows that, while the modest (0.85 degrees Celsius, or about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit) warming of the earth since 1880 is indisputable, as is the human influence on that warming, much else that passes as accepted fact is really a matter of probabilities. That’s especially true of the sophisticated but fallible models and simulations by which scientists attempt to peer into the climate future. To say this isn’t to deny science. It’s to acknowledge it honestly.

For the full commentary, see:
Stephens, Bret. “Climate of Complete Certainty.” The New York Times (Sat., APRIL 29, 2017): A23.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date APRIL 28, 2017.)

Under Communism Inventiveness Did Not Yield Economic Benefits

(p. A17) The Soviet Union may have pioneered in space with Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin, but today Russia has less than 1% of the world commercial market in space telecommunications, the most successful commercial product so far stemming from space exploration. Russians may have won Nobel Prizes for developing the laser, but Russia today is insignificant in the production of lasers for the world market. Russians may have developed the first digital computer in continental Europe, but who today buys a Russian computer? By missing out on the multi-billion-dollar markets for lasers, computers and space-based telecommunications, Russia has suffered a grievous economic loss.
Accompanying this technical and economic failure was a human tragedy. Russian achievements in science and technology occurred in an environment of political terror. The father of the Russian hydrogen bomb, Andrei Sakharov, wrote in his memoirs that the research facility in which he worked was built by political prisoners, and each morning he looked out the window of his office to see them marching under armed guard to their construction sites. The “chief designer” of the Soviet space program, Sergei Korolev, was long a prisoner who worked in a special prison laboratory, or sharashka. The dean of Soviet airplane designers, A.N. Tupolev, also labored for years as a prisoner in a special laboratory. Three of the Soviet Union’s Nobel Prize-winning physicists were arrested for alleged political disloyalty. Probably half of the engineers in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s were eventually arrested. In 1928 alone 648 members of the staff of the Soviet Academy of Sciences were purged.
When one looks at these statistics and at the genuine achievements of Soviet science, one is forced to ask basic questions about the relation of freedom to scientific progress.
. . .
Mr. Ings admirable effort to reach nonspecialized readers sometimes leads him to make exaggerated statements. He claims that we have “good agricultural and climate data for Russia going back over a thousand years” when in fact the data is incomplete and unreliable.
. . .
The claim that the Soviet Union was a scientific state brings Mr. Ings close, in his conclusion, to condemning science itself. He sees science and technology as causing a coming global ecological collapse, and he thinks that in some ways the demise of the Soviet Union was a preview of what we will all soon face. In one of his final sentences he says: “We are all little Stalinists now, convinced of the efficacy of science to bail us out of any and every crisis.” “Stalin and the Scientists” deserves attention, but a very critical form of attention. It is based on an impressive amount of study, and most readers will learn a great deal. It is, however, incomplete and overdrawn.

For the full review, see:
LOREN GRAHAM. “BOOKSHELF; No Good Deed Went Unpunished.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., Feb. 21, 2017): A17.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Feb. 20, 2017, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; Science Under Stalin.”)

The book under review, is:
Ings, Simon. Stalin and the Scientists: A History of Triumph and Tragedy, 1905-1953. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2017.

Seeking a “Safe Space” to Protect Taxpayers from Wasteful “Spending on Political Correctness”

(p. A1) WORCESTER, Mass. — A freshman tentatively raises her hand and takes the microphone. “I’m really scared to ask this,” she begins. “When I, as a white female, listen to music that uses the N word, and I’m in the car, or, especially when I’m with all white friends, is it O.K. to sing along?”
The answer, from Sheree Marlowe, the new chief diversity officer at Clark University, is an unequivocal “no.”
The exchange was included in Ms. Marlowe’s presentation to recently arriving first-year students focusing on subtle “microaggressions,” part of a new campus vocabulary that also includes “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings.”
. . .
(p. A3) In August [2016], the University of Wisconsin system, which includes the Madison flagship and 25 other campuses, said it would ask the State Legislature for $6 million in funding to improve what it called the “university experience” for students. The request includes money for Fluent, a program described as a systemwide cultural training for faculty and staff members and students.
But that budget request has provoked controversy. “If only the taxpayers and tuition-paying families had a safe space that might protect them from wasteful U.W. System spending on political correctness,” State Senator Stephen L. Nass, a Republican, said in a statement issued by his office, urging his fellow lawmakers to vote against the appropriation.
Mr. Nass’s objection to spending money on diversity training reflects a rising resistance to what is considered campus political correctness. At some universities, alumni and students have objected to a variety of campus measures, including diversity training; “safe spaces,” places where students from marginalized groups can gather to discuss their experiences; and “trigger warnings,” disclaimers about possibly upsetting material in lesson plans.
Some graduates have curtailed donations, and students have suggested that diversity training smacks of some sort of Communist re-education program.
The backlash was exemplified recently in a widely publicized letter sent to new freshmen at the University of Chicago by the dean of students, John Ellison.
He warned that the university did not “support so-called trigger warnings, we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual safe spaces where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.”

For the full story, see:
STEPHANIE SAUL. “Campuses Cautiously Train Freshmen Against Subtle Insults.” The New York Times (Weds., SEPT. 7, 2016): A1 & A3.
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed year, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date SEPT. 6, 2016, and has the title “Campuses Cautiously Train Freshmen Against Subtle Insults.”)

Muzzled Chinese Historian Dares to Publish Truth of Cultural Revolution

(p. 7) BEIJING — It seemed that China’s censors had finally muzzled Yang Jisheng, the famed chronicler of the Mao era. Last year, he had finished writing a widely anticipated history of the Cultural Revolution. But officials warned him against publishing it and barred him from traveling to the United States, he has said, and he stayed muted through the 50th anniversary of the start of that bloody upheaval.
Now Mr. Yang has broken that silence with the publication of his history of the Cultural Revolution, “The World Turned Upside Down,” a sequel to “Tombstone,” his landmark study of the famine spawned by Mao’s policies in the late 1950s. The 1,151-page book is the latest shot fired in China’s war over remembering, or forgetting, the dark side of its Communist past, a struggle that has widened under the hard-line president, Xi Jinping.
“I wrote this book to expose lies and restore the truth,” Mr. Yang writes in the book, which has been quietly published in Hong Kong, beyond the direct reach of Chinese censors. “This is an area that is extremely complicated and risky, but as soon as I entered it, I was filled with passion.”
Since Mr. Xi took power in 2012, the Communist Party authorities have denounced historians who question the party’s lionization of its past and exhume grim events like the Cultural Revolution, which Mao started in 1966, opening a decade of purges and bloodshed.
Tens of millions were persecuted and perhaps a million or more people were killed in that convulsive time. But officials say dwelling on such events is subversive “historical nihilism” aimed at corroding the party’s authority.

For the full story, see:
CHRIS BUCKLEY. “Historian’s New Mao Book Turns Acclaim in China to Censure.” The New York Times, First Section (Sun., JAN. 22, 2017): 7.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JAN. 21, 2017, and has the title “Historian’s Latest Book on Mao Turns Acclaim in China to Censure.”)

The English translation and condensation of Mr. Yang’s earlier book, is:
Yang, Jisheng. Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962. Translated by Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012.

Dignity and Equality Before the Law Unleashes Creativity in the Poor

(p. A23) We can improve the conditions of the working class. Raising low productivity by enabling human creativity is what has mainly worked. By contrast, taking from the rich and giving to the poor helps only a little — and anyway expropriation is a one-time trick.
. . .
Look at the astonishing improvements in China since 1978 and in India since 1991. Between them, the countries are home to about four out of every 10 humans. Even in the United States, real wages have continued to grow — if slowly — in recent decades, contrary to what you might have heard. Donald Boudreaux, an economist at George Mason University, and others who have looked beyond the superficial have shown that real wages are continuing to rise, thanks largely to major improvements in the quality of goods and services, and to nonwage benefits. Real purchasing power is double what it was in the fondly remembered 1950s — when many American children went to bed hungry.
What, then, caused this Great Enrichment?
Not exploitation of the poor, not investment, not existing institutions, but a mere idea, which the philosopher and economist Adam Smith called “the liberal plan of equality, liberty and justice.” In a word, it was liberalism, in the free-market European sense. Give masses of ordinary people equality before the law and equality of social dignity, and leave them alone, and it turns out that they become extraordinarily creative and energetic.

For the full commentary, see:
DEIRDRE N. McCLOSKEY. “Economic View; Equality, Liberty, Justice and Wealth.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sun., SEPT. 4, 2016): 6.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date SEPT. 2, 2016, and has the title “Economic View; The Formula for a Richer World? Equality, Liberty, Justice.”)

McCloskey’s commentary, quoted above, is related to her book:
McCloskey, Deirdre N. Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital, Transformed the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Peter Thiel Asks “What Happened to the Future?”

(p. B4) Mr. Thiel has been an important player in Silicon Valley since the first dot-com boom, but he has recently taken on a much more public role. He was born in Germany and came to the United States as an infant when his father, a chemical engineer, found work here. He was raised in Silicon Valley and went to Stanford, where he developed the views in his first book, “The Diversity Myth,” about the multiculturalism debate on campuses, written with the entrepreneur David O. Sacks.
In 1998, Mr. Thiel helped found the online payments company PayPal, an immediate success. He was the first outside investor in Facebook. Forbes estimates his net worth at $2.7 billion. Last year, he became a part-time partner at Y Combinator, a loosely defined advisory position.
A handful of others in Silicon Valley have similar investing track records. Where Mr. Thiel really separates himself from his peers is his skepticism that Silicon Valley is building a better world for all. His investment firm, Founders Fund, used to begin its online manifesto with the complaint, “We wanted flying cars; instead we got 140 characters,” a reference to Twitter. Now it says simply, “What happened to the future?”
San Francisco, Manhattan and Washington, D.C., are doing well, but the presidential campaign has laid bare the angst of many other places. Feelings of decline are rampant. “Most of the millennials have lower expectations than their baby boomer parents,” Mr. Thiel said. “Where I differ from others in Silicon Valley is in thinking that you can’t fence yourself off. If it continues, it will ultimately be bad for everybody.”

For the full story, see:
DAVID STREITFELD. “Peter Thiel, Contrarian Tech Billionaire, Defends His Support of Trump.” The New York Times (Mon., OCT. 31, 2016): B1 & B4.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date OCT. 29, 2016, and has the title “Peter Thiel Defends His Most Contrarian Move Yet: Supporting Trump.”)

The book mentioned above, that was co-authored by Thiel, is:
Sacks, David O., and Peter A. Thiel. The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Intolerance at Stanford. Oakland, CA: The Independent Institute, 1995.

Mather and Boylston Risked Much to Fight Smallpox

I enjoyed reading the book reviewed below. From the title, and from reviews, I had the impression that it would mostly be about the smallpox epidemic and the innoculation conflict. I was surprised that of equal, or greater, importance in the book is the role of James Franklin’s newspaper in laying the intellectual groundwork for the American Revolution. I learned from that part of the book too, but some might feel misled from the title about what the book was mainly about. (I think “fever” in the title is intended as a double entendre, referring both to a fever from smallpox, and a fever from the ideas of liberty.)

(p. A11) Inoculation was proposed by Cotton Mather, a figure much diminished in the 30 years since Salem. He had suffered a terrible sequence of tragedies, losing his wife and 10 of his children to accidents and epidemic disease. He had also been marginalized within the religious community by quarrels and scandals. But he had become an assiduous student of science, corresponding with the Royal Society in London and learning from its “Transactions” that inoculation against smallpox had long been practiced in Constantinople. Mr. Coss shows how Mather’s investigations led him to consult a source closer to home. His slave Onesimus, when asked whether he had ever had smallpox, replied “both Yes, and No”: He had been inoculated as a child in Africa, receiving a mild infection and subsequent immunity.

Inoculation was commonplace across swaths of Africa, the Middle East and Asia, Mr. Coss explains, but this inclined the doctors of Enlightenment-era Europe to regard it as a primitive superstition. Such was the view of William Douglass, the only man in Boston with the letters “M.D.” after his name, who was convinced that “infusing such malignant filth” in a healthy subject was lethal folly. The only person Mather could persuade to perform the operation was a surgeon, Zabdiel Boylston, whose frontier upbringing made him sympathetic to native medicine and who was already pockmarked from a near-fatal case of the disease.
“Given that attempting inoculation constituted an almost complete leap of faith for Boylston,” Mr. Coss writes, “he spent surprisingly little time agonizing over it.” He knew personally just how savage the toll could be. On June 26, 1721, just as the epidemic began to rage in earnest, Boyston filled a quill with the fluid from an infected blister and scratched it into the skin of two family slaves and his own young son.
News of the experiment was greeted with public fury and terror that it would spread the contagion. A town-hall meeting was convened, at Dr. Douglass’s instigation, at which inoculation was condemned and banned. Mather’s house was firebombed with an incendiary device to which a note was attached: “I will inoculate you with this.”

For the full review, see:
MIKE JAY. “‘BOOKSHELF; An Ounce of Prevention; When Cotton Mather advocated inoculation during a smallpox outbreak, young Benjamin Franklin helped foment outrage against him.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., March 3, 2016): A11.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date March 2, 2016, and has the title “‘BOOKSHELF; When Ben Franklin Was Against Vaccines; When Cotton Mather advocated inoculation during a smallpox outbreak, young Benjamin Franklin helped foment outrage against him.”)

The book under review, is:
Coss, Stephen. The Fever of 1721: The Epidemic That Revolutionized Medicine and American Politics. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016.