Category: talk

Why do academics in the humanities read their papers aloud?

August 11, 2025 • 9:30 am

One of the big differences between academics in the humanities and in the sciences is that, at professional meetings or during lectures, humanities scholars read aloud from a paper they are holding, while science people usually speak extemporaneously, though of course they surely outlined what they were going to say beforehand—or practiced their talk.  But you almost never hear a scientist read a paper.

A colleague was complaining to me about this recently, and she had a point.  Here the scientists clearly have an advantage, and for three reasons:

1.) If you’re just going to read your paper, why not just hand it out to the attendees, or put it online? What is to be gained by reading aloud what’s already written? This practice turns the speeches into what could be edited volumes, saving people a lot of time.

2.) Hearing a paper read out is, let’s face it, DEADLY BORING.  Rarely is there any attempt to enliven the reading by changing pace, intonation, or other elements of speech.  A science talk in which the speaker more or less talks to you as if talking to a friend or colleague is simply more interesting. Plus extemporaneous speech affords a chance for off-the-cuff remarks, humor, or other forms of rhetoric that characterize normal conversation.

3.) Let’s face it: written English is not the same as spoken English. This is particularly true in the humanities when papers are written in academic language, which is often deadly dull. Reading a paper uses a different form of speech than speaking extemporaneously, even if you use an outline.

Some caveats: the humanities scholar may say that it’s absolutely important to get the words right, ergo one has to have every word down on paper lest the audience misconstrue your ideas. But this exculpatory claim is unconvincing, for, after all, don’t scientists need to get the data right even more?  To get around that need, we usually use Powerpoint (or 35 mm slides in the old days).  But if you’ve listened to scientists who don’t use slides, they don’t read their talks either, and they’re more interesting. Further, can’t humanities people use Powerpoint? (If they did, they’d probably put the entire text of their talk on the slides!).  They could simply put a few words on each slide to prompt them and to show the audience their main points, and then speak extemporaneously.

I realize that there are exceptions to this rule: humanities scholars who give good talks without reading (Dan Dennett is one) and scientists who simply read the text on their slides (names redacted), which is nearly as boring as hearing a paper.  Still, this divide between humanities and sciences is something that irks me—and other people, too. I really do think that humanities people can pep up their talks by simply practicing them and/or using an outline that they can refer to from time to time.

Now I’m not trying to denigrate the humanities as a whole compared to science, but simply criticizing one difference between these areas that, I think, benefits internecine communication (and interest) more in the sciences than in the humanities.

If you can justify this difference, please do so below. But then you must explain to me why humanities people who read papers can’t simply make their papers available to the audience, either on dead-tree paper or online.

Konstantin Kisin: “The tide is turning”

February 24, 2025 • 10:00 am

Trigger(nometry) warning: semi-conservative video.

I can’t remember who recommended I watch this video, which features satirist, author, and Triggernometry co-host Konstantin Kisin speaking for 15 minutes at a meeting of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC). The group is described by Wikipedia as “an international organisation whose aim is to unite conservative voices and propose policy based on traditional Western values.”

The talk is laced with humor, but the message is serious:  Kisin argues that societies based on “Western values” are the most attractive, as shown by the number of potential immigrants; but they are endangered by the negativity and “lies” of those who tell us that “our history is all bad and our country is plagued by prejudice and intolerance.” To that he replies that people espousing such sentiments still prefer to live in the West. (But of course that doesn’t mean that these factors still aren’t at play in the West!)  Kisin then touts both Elon Musk (for “building big things”) and (oy) Jordan Peterson for “reminding us that our lives will improve if we accept that “honesty is better than lies, that responsibility is better than blame, and strength is better than weakness.”

He continues characterizing the West as special: “the most free and prosperous societies in the history of humanity, and we are going to keep them that way.” To accomplish that, he promotes free speech as the highest of Western values, and rejects identity politics, arguing that “multiethnic societies can work; multicultural societies cannot.” Finally, he claims that human beings are good, denying (as he avers) the woke view that “human beings are a pestilence on the planet.”  Kisin calls for more reproduction and making energy “as cheap and abundant as possible.”

The talk finishes with the most inspiring thing Kising says he’s ever heard: that we’re going to die; ergo, we have nothing to lose. “We might as well speak the truth, we might as well reach for the stars, we might as well fight like our lives depended on it—because they do.”  I’m not exactly sure what he means, nor do I feel uplifted or inspired by these words, which don’t really tell us why he thinks the tide is turning. And, at the end, I could see where this optimistic word salad came from: it’s in Wikipedia, too:

[The ARC] is associated with psychologist and political commentator Jordan Peterson. One Australian journalist identified the purpose of ARC as follows: “to replace a sense of division and drift within conservatism, and Western society at large, with a renewed cohesion and purpose”.

Do any readers get inspired by this kind of chest-pounding?  I have to add that I do like Triggernometry, one of the few podcasts I can listen to, but I’m not especially energized by the co-host’s speech.

Video: Day 1 of the USC “Censorship in the Sciences” conference

January 20, 2025 • 9:45 am

The video of Day 1 of our “Censorship in the Sciences” conference is up (and down below), and this baby is nearly seven hours long.  Few people have the patience to listen to the first day’s sessions all at 0ne go, but I want to single out a few talks. The first is by Jonathan Rauch, author of The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth, an excellent book. His talk begins at 12:01, outlines how knowledge acquisition should work, and is quite eloquent.

Later, the four-member panel on “Examples of Censorship” gives a good account of how ideology has led to suppression of science.  Luana introduces it at 2:43:26 and Lawrence Krauss kicks it off at 2:44:45 via Zoom. His examples are numerous and disturbing—and not just from physics.  He pulls no punches, and even calls out America’s National Academy of Sciences (NAS), the most prestigious honorary organization of scientists in the U.S. It so happened that the NAS President (Marcia McNutt) was in the audience, and heard Krauss call out her organization for identity-based choosing of candidates for a supposedly meritocratic society (see 2:55:45). As Krauss shows, the NAS even admitted this explicitly in a quote from an executive of the organization, and it’s widely admitted by Academy members themselves. (Note that at the end of her later talk, at 4:39:30, President McNutt denies this. accusing Krauss implicitly of ignorance, but her own organization’s stated policies belie her words.)  Finally, Krauss gives evidence that both the NSF and DOE have likewise been captured by ideology in their funding of grants.

If you want to hear about how indigenous peoples are preventing anthropologists and forensic scientists from studying relics likes bones and objects used by Native Americans, Elizabeth Weiss’s short talk in that panel, beginning at 3:23:43,  gives a good idea. She has a new book about these issues.

I heard all the talks, and some of the others engaged me as well, but I’ve just mentioned the ones I enjoyed the most.

Here is the first day’s schedule (from here)

And here’s some of the press as detailed by Heterodox at USC:

Press Coverage

Censorship in the Sciences conference speakers call on peers to organize, defend free speech, writes Jennifer Kabbany in The College Fix.

Rauch’s opening speech highlighted surveys which found that almost half of Americans think that colleges have a negative effect on the country.

“It really is a crisis,” he said, adding a combination of factors are to blame, including students’ emotional fragility, the politicization of hiring, tenure and funding based on ideology, and a newer trend of academic journals refusing to publish findings that allegedly harm some communities.

Kabbany also covered Musa al-Gharbi’s presentation at the conference. Read that article here.

Alice Dreger, managing editor at the Heterodox Academy, wrote a recap on HxA’s Free the Inquiry Substack:

On the issue of censorship of research publication, many speakers at the conference objected to the idea that claims about potential harm to vulnerable populations should be used as a reason to stop, force changes to, or retract research reports. Some raised the question of the harms that arise from alleged-harm-reduction censorship–that is, the harms that arise from stopping valuable research out of fear of harm

In response to a Saturday morning presentation by Nature editor Stavroula Kousta, journalist Jesse Singal, also a speaker at our event, published a critique of some the ideas presented.

Conference organizer and panelist Lee Jussim wrote about the conference (and whether we should just burn academia down).

Panelist Jerry Coyne wrote several dispatches about the conference on his blog Why Evolution is True (which reaches nearly 75,000 readers).

Attendee Zvi Shalem wrote up his take-ways from the conference here.

Panelist Michael Bowen of Free Black Thought reflected on attending conference on his Substack.

Natalya Murakhver wrote about her experience debuting her documentary 15 Days at the conference.

Panel chair Abhishek Saha wrote up excellent Twitter threads (in real time!) detailing conference proceedings. Here is one on the first day of conference.

Douglas Murray speaks in Amsterdam about antisemitism

June 13, 2024 • 12:30 pm

How can Douglas Murray lecture on antisemitism in Amsterdam, the very city that deplatformed several of us simply for having sympathy for Israel, which wasn’t a topic of our scheduled discussion? Maarten Boudry tells me that for the video below “he was invited by a right-wing party, so the rabid anti-Israel activists have no clout there.”

Yes, Murray is a conservative, but on the topic of Israel he’s on both the money and on the morality. That’s why many dislike him, though he’s been demonized for other reasons, like his distaste for immigrants coming to the West. I won’t discuss that here, as the video below doesn’t deal with that.  If you’ve heard Murray on this topic before, there’s not much new, but I listened anyway.

If you click on “notes” at the youTube site after expanding the details, you’ll  get a link to a transcript that goes along with the video. I actually listened to this rather than read it, as I like Murray’s eloquence. The lecture itself ends at 36:15, and then there are 24 minutes of audience questions, which Murray writes down and then answers. Here’s a near-comprehensive list:

Is it possible to defeat Hamas?
How do we get the ball rolling to get rid of antisemitism?
What are the psychological sources of antisemitism?
Should we stop using the word “Palestine” or “Palestinian” or “pro-Palestinian” given that there is not really a Palestinian people or country?
Given that the people of Iran are pro-Israel but its regime is the biggest source of anti-Israel weapons and support, what do we do?”
Why are the countries of Spain and Ireland vehemently anti-Israel while other European countries are more sympathetic to the country?
What can we do to make the silent majority about Israel “rise up”?
What do you think about Europe defending Western values?
What about Russia and China and other countries attacking Western values?

I can’t resist calling attention to his barb about Greta Thunberg, and why she’s the Nordic equivalent of a rōnin, a samurai without a master. The analogy starts at 47:14.

h/t: Bat

Douglas Murray: “Life has to be fought for”

May 31, 2024 • 10:40 am

Here’s another good talk, though not as good as the preceding one.  But it does get better in the last third.

‘Yes, Douglas Murray is a conservative, and yes, the Manhattan Institute is a generally conservative think tank, but Murray is eloquent also sensible on many issues, including the war and (in this case), the courage of Israelis, and it’s worth listening to his 24-minute acceptance speech from May 6, when he was given the Alexander Hamilton Award from the Manhattan Institute for his “unwavering defense of Western values.”  I hate to have to qualify things this way, but yes, I disagree with Murray on several issues, the main one being his consistent opposition to widespread immigration into Britain. (I’m sure many of you will agree with him, though.)

In some ways, including his memory and his eloquence, Murray resembles Hitchens. (When he makes a crack about “Queers for Palestine,” remember that Murray is gay.)

The transcript of this speech is at The Free Press.

Bari Weiss: “Courage is the most important virtue”

May 31, 2024 • 9:20 am

I’m tired today, and also have work to do, so it may turn out that all of my posts have videos in them. Graduation is tomorrow, and I plan to be around to see if it goes smoothly (disruption is threatened).

Bari Weiss is often demonized, but I think her critics are largely mistaken.  She’s a centrist, but leans Left; and those who criticize her for being a member of the “Intellectual Dark Web” (which seems to me to consist largely of people who think for themselves) or for being some kind of right-winger, is simply misguided. In the 16-minute TED talk below, followed by 5 minutes of Q&A moderated by Chris Anderson (the head of TED) Weiss extols what she sees as the highest of virtues: courage.

She begins by laying out a litany of her beliefs, which are quite good (save for one note that we’re all “created in the image of god”), comporting with good liberalism, though some of them might be controversial (she thinks Covid came from a lab, that hiring should be based on merit rather than on “immutable characteristics”, promotes standardized testing, etc.) As she says (the transcript is here):

The point in all of this is that I am really boring, or at least I thought I was. 
I am, or at least until a few seconds ago in historical time, 
I used to be considered a standard-issue liberal. 
And yet somehow, in our most intellectual and prestigious spaces,  many of the ideas I just outlined and others like them,  have become provocative or controversial, 
which is really a polite way of saying unwelcome, beyond the pale. Even bigoted or racist
How?
How did these relatively boring views come to be seen as off-limits?  And how did that happen,  at least it seems to me,  in the span of under a few years?
She then takes on the “progressives,” and finally gives what she sees as the reason for our “culture in crisis”:
My theory is that the reason we have a culture in crisis is because of the cowardice of people that know better. It is because the weakness of the silent, or rather the self-silencing majority. 
So why have we been silent? 
Simple. Because it’s easier. 
Because speaking up is hard, it is embarrassing, it makes you vulnerable. It exposes you as someone who is not chill, as someone who cares a lot, as someone who makes judgments, as someone who discerns between right and wrong, between better and worse.
Among the courageous people she mentions are Natan Sharansky, Masih Alinejad, John Fetterman, Salman Rushdie, Roland Fryer, Alexei Navalny, Coleman Hughes, Jimmy Lai, and others.  You will have your own list of Courageous People. Mine also includes J. K. Rowling, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and, among those no longer living but who inhabited the 20th century, Mohandas Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, James Meredith, Ruby Bridges, and many figures of the American Civil Rights movement who gave their lives pursuing the cause (Medgar Evers, Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney). These people made considerable sacrifice to promote positive change; their activism was not performative. (Yes, Rowling remains wealthy, but she didn’t have to stand up for women in the way she did, and that led to considerable erosion of her reputation.)

Weiss’s ending is lovely, and is followed by a standing ovation.

The freest people in the history of the world seem to have lost the hunger for liberty. 
Or maybe it’s really the will to defend it.
And when they tell me this, it puts me in mind of my hero, Natan Sharansky,  who spent a decade in the Soviet gulag before getting his freedom.
He is the single bravest person that I have ever met in my life.  And a few years ago, one afternoon in Jerusalem, I asked him a simple question.
“Nathan,” I asked him, “is it possible to teach courage?”
And he smiled in his impish way and said, “No.
All you can do is show people how good it feels to be free.”
My comment on that ending: does seeing the benefits of freedom really make people more courageous? Or was Sharansky merely extolling the benefits of what you can get from courage?

The talk:

 

Amsterdam: post 2

May 16, 2024 • 9:15 am

I’ve been fighting a bad cold as well as dealing with the fallout from our cancellation debacle at the University of Amsterdam, so I haven’t gotten out much. This is a great pity as the weather had been good, though now it’s turned rainy.

This evening I will give a talk on science vs. religion at Tilburg University, founded as a Catholic school in 1927. Now it’s only technically Catholic, and is described by Wikipedia as “a public research university specializing in the social and behavioral sciences, economics, law, business sciences, theology and humanities. . . ”

We have had no threats of disruption (Tilburg is a few hours south of Amsterdam), so I’m not worried about that. Tomorrow Maarten Boudry and I, plus perhaps a surprise guest or two, will tape the discussion that was deplatformed at the University of Amsterdam.

At any rate, here are a few snapshots from my limited incursions in Amsterdam.

I’m surprised that this is my third visit to Amsterdam, and up to now I’d missed the “Stolpersteine” (literally, “stumbling stones”) which one encounters from time to time in the pavement in front of houses. They’re easy to miss, which is why I haven’t seen them before. Wikipedia describes them like this:

. . . . a ten-centimetre (3.9 in) concrete cube bearing a brass plate inscribed with the name and life dates of victims of Nazi extermination or persecution. Literally, it means ‘stumbling stone’ and metaphorically ‘stumbling block’.

The Stolpersteine project, initiated by the German artist Gunter Demnig in 1992, aims to commemorate persons at the last place that they chose freely to reside, work or study (with exceptions possible on a case-by-case basis) before they fell victim to Nazi terror, forced euthanasia, eugenics, deportation to a concentration or extermination camp, or escaped persecution by emigration or suicide. As of June 2023, 100,000.Stolpersteine have been laid, making the Stolpersteine project the world’s largest decentralized memorial.

They mostly commemorate Jews, but are also laid for murdered Romani, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, and others persecuted by the Nazis. Here are three I found within two blocks from where I’m staying (there is a pair representing a man and his wife):

It says, “Here lived Elisa Frederika De Jon van Biema, born 1901, abducted 1944 to Westerbork, killed January 27, 1945, Auschwitz.”  Westerbork was the infamous Dutch camp where detainees, including Anne Frank and her family, were kept until they were transferred to the concentration camps (in this case Auschwitz). Elisa was killed at 44.

Below are the stones for a Jewish man and his wife who were deported together; the man died at Westerbork and his wife at Auschwitz.  Prisoners were sent to other camps, too, like Sobibór.  All told, about 98,000 Jews were deported from Westerbork to the camps, and nearly all of them were immediately gassed upon arrival.

Although some people object because these small stones allow people to walk over memorials for dead Jews, I find them moving because, once you look for them, they are easy to find but distressingly common. The houses of the murdered, of course, are still there, so the memorials are ineffably evocative.

Another Jewish man and wife, arrested on April 8, 1943, and gassed at Sobibór only two weeks later.

On a lighter note, here are two pictures from the local “supermarket”, which is a market but much smaller than American supermarkets. Nevertheless, it has a huge supply of cheese, which of course is a speciality of the Netherlands. Look at all the different kinds of cheese!

If you follow this site, you know I always check out the cat food in markets, to see if there’s any local flavor to what they feed the moggies.  Here there was nothing special (France has an array of gourmet-named cat foods), but they did have paté. The label reads, “complete pet food for adult cats.”

And a takeout meal last night from the local Balinese restaurant: rice, beef, chicken, eggplant, beans, and mixed veggies: