Kulturkampf

[Eric Cartman]

TED guy wrote an essay on Twitter about that racist speech:

As with your previous post, it is difficult to comprehend why you believe these comments will improve the situation.

First, I agree that it is unfortunate you dragged Adam Grant into this. I use the active voice here, because unlike the passive "got dragged into this", the reason Grant is now implicated is because you felt it necessary to subject Coleman's talk to pseudo-scientific verification. That was your choice. By appealing to him for verification, you are implicitly suggesting Adam Grant is either an equal or more authoritative source on this topic than Coleman Hughes. That is on you, not the internet. The internet is merely responding to your appeal to authority.

On the subject of authority itself, a tweet is a difficult place for a debate about whether organizational psychology is a functioning science, and whether it has achieved the kind of institutional competence necessary to vet a race-relations talk. In brief, replication in psychology journals is generally abysmal. It was recently found to be 50% or less for several prominent journals. It is the field whose poor performance made the term "replication crisis" a household word.

If you are asking us to take the citation of a meta-analysis - an aggregation of studies in the field - seriously, my mouth is agape. Aggregating information with 50% or less verifiability means you are effectively getting noise. A psychology meta-analysis today is the scientific equivalent of a subprime mortgage-backed security from the 2008 financial crisis. You don't get accurate research by combining lots of inaccurate research. You might as well have told us you consulted a coin to see if Coleman's talk was scientifically sound, and it came up tails.

Furthermore, calling Grant's remarks a "nuanced summary of the evidence" is thoroughly confusing, unless you are referring to private remarks you have yet to publish. All I have seen from Grant thus far is a few brief comments on a meta-analysis - which is paywalled - with links to 3 other papers, all of which are paywalled. There is no discussion about why we should believe these particular papers, or these particular authors. There is no explanation of what makes these findings credible in a field already widely discredited for its lax standards, small sample sizes, poor controls, overinterpretation of results and unacceptably low replication rates. There is no enumeration from Grant of why the studies comprising the meta-analysis are likely to be accurate or trustworthy. In short, actually determining if any of these citations supports Grant's conclusion is left completely as an exercise for the reader - a reader who must then pay hundreds of dollars in journal access fees to not only buy these papers, but the papers they meta-analyze and reference.

You also spend a paragraph discussing the assertion that, "Some commenters below just don’t understand how anyone could be upset by a talk arguing for color blindness". I'm sure we can find a few commenters among the thousand that fit that characterization. You can find anything in a big enough comments thread. But read the bulk of the comments more carefully and you will find this is not their complaint. Rather, they don't understand how an institution could be more upset about a color blindness talk than a color-conscious talk, of which TED has had several. In fact, you helpfully cited one right in your post (TED 2014's “Color blind or color brave?”).

Where was the pseudo-scientific vetting then? Where was the required debate? Where were the outraged employees? Where were the internal machinations to scuttle the VOD?

Overwhelmingly, that is what the comments are actually about. Nobody would even know about this incident, let alone complain, if the only thing that had happened was that some employees watched the talk and didn't personally like it. Presumably that happens all the time, with all kinds of TED talks. That is not the gravamen here. Why pretend it is?

You then assert that the reason people might feel this way is due to "their own lack of immersion in the rich debate that has swirled on this topic in recent years". If I may hyperbolize for a moment: every news source, every social network, every political podcast in America has been having nothing but this debate for the past five years or more. Is your argument really that the people critical of TED's behavior have heard none of this? That they are unaware of what the arguments are? Is that how you are drawing the dividing line? You believe that people demanding equal treatment for Coleman Hughes simply "don't understand" the debate?

You closed with, "I see a growing number of people yearn for something better than having our conversations dominated by the angry and the judgmental. What if we tried giving each other the benefit of the doubt?" I will close with that as well: TED failed precisely this mission statement. That is why people are upset. TED's employees dominated the conversation we wanted to have with Coleman by being angry and judgmental. They in no way gave his talk the benefit of the doubt.

TED's employees tried to prevent his talk from being published. TED's "town hall" attendees took to the microphone and called him "dangerous", "irresponsible", and "racist". They implicitly accused him of supporting Plessy vs. Ferguson. You apparently had no problem with any of this. You have not apologized for TED's behavior. You didn't admonish the hostile attendees for their tone, and I imagine they are more than welcome back next year.

Nobody believes your platitude because they saw how Coleman Hughes was treated by TED and by its attendees. You're chastising the chorus for lack of harmony, but your section was the one loudly singing in discord. Your organization participated in and facilitated something deeply offensive to the tenets of open, honest intellectual exchange. Stop trying to recontextualize it. Own your mistake. Publicly apologize to Coleman Hughes, institute policies for TED to ensure this never happens again, and move on.

Anything less is not a serious response.