The Coleman Hughes vs. TED story continues with Hughes putting up a “final response” to his mistreatment by TED.  If you recall (or read my posts here), Hughes gave a full TED talk that was vetted by the organization well in advance. But then his talk was “heterodox,” incorporating Martin Luther King’s mantra into the claim that if you want to improve society, you should do it “color blind” manner. As Hughes emphasized, this doesn’t mean that you ignore color, but you help the underprivileged based on class, not race.

This, of course, didn’t go down well with today’s Authoritarian Leftists, who want race not just to be seen, but to be the dominant characteristic for fixing society. A subgroup of TED employees, ed “Black@TED“, argued that they had been “harmed” by Hughes talk, a ludicrous claim that shouldn’t be taken seriously.

Then TED, via its head Chris Anderson, did several things to try to put an “asterisk” by Hughes’s talk, including asking him to include a “moderated discussion” at the end of his talk’s video, something unique for TED. Hughes quite properly refused. Anderson then agreed to have Hughes’s video go up alone, but that there would be a separately posted video debate with another person; the person turned out to be NYT writer Jamelle Bouie. This condition is again insupportable, further showing TED’s disaffection with Hughes’s views. Finally, according to Hughes, TED did not abide by its agreement to publicize Hughes’s talk like they publicized other talks, resulting in its getting fewer views than comparable talks. That lack of views is important because views are important in boosting the careers of young people (Hughes is just 27).

Finally, as Hughes wrote on The Free Press, he was hit after the talk by a claim from  sociologist Adam Grant, who joined Anderson in a Free Press critique of Hughes’s arguments.  Grant claimed that a meta-analysis of 167 papers showed that “color blind” approaches to alleviating inequality were not as effective as socioeconomic approaches, for color blind methods were apparently were worse at creating “improved intergroup relations.” Hughes didn’t know of this meta-analysis when he wrote his talk, and, apparently, neither did TED, which was supposed to fact-check Hughes’s claims before the talk. Of course pinning blame is not what we need here: we need to know what the meta-analysis actually said (see below).

Well Anderson’s behavior was reprehensible, but what about that meta-analysis? In a new piece at his Substack, “Coleman’s Corner”, Hughes takes up both issues in a pice called ” My last word on TED”. Click below to read it, but subscribe if you read regularly. Hughes also references Jesse Singal, who wrote his own Substack piece on the controversy, strongly defending Hughes.

Re Anderson, Hughes first criticizes the TED-head for not admitting that Hughes’s version of events is right. But there’s more:

Besides that, I have little to say about Chris’s public statements that has not already been said. See Jesse Singal’s substack post, for instance. I will just echo some of Singal’s points here.

Chris seems to view this situation as a dispute between two equally reasonable parties––me on one end and his staff on the other. That is the wrong way to think about this situation.

Here are two key differences between me and his staff:

(1) I believe that there should be all kinds of TED talks: woke ones, anti-woke ones, and apolitical ones. Free speech and viewpoint diversity should reign supreme! But TED’s staff appear to believe that there should be tons of woke talks and zero anti-woke talks. That’s a big difference. I want a bigger tent of allowable ideas, they want a smaller tent.

(2) I believe MLK’s prescription of race-blind, classed-based social policy––as he advocated for in his book Why We Can’t Wait (see point #5 in this post)––is both wise and within the bounds of acceptable opinion. The people on the other side of this appear to believe that anyone who advocates for MLK’s position should be de-platformed. Equally reasonable?

Finally, Chris ought to reframe his view of his staff’s feelings.

For instance, when Chris writes, “Some commenters below just don’t understand how anyone could be upset by a talk arguing for color blindness,” he is straw-manning in spectacular fashion. Sure, somewhere there is probably a person with Asperger’s who truly doesn’t get why someone could get touchy about race. But the vast majority of TED’s critics understand why people get emotional about race––we just don’t think that those emotions should have de facto veto power over what can be argued in a public forum.

Last year, TED had a pro-communism talk (“socialism” is in the title, but “communism” is advocated for in the talk). I bet there was at least one member of the audience who grew up in the Soviet Union or Cuba and was fiercely triggered by this––given the ghastly toll of communism in those nations.

Please realize that this is more than just a contretemps involving a speaker who was ill-treated. It’s about a powerful and influential organization—an organization whose videos may get more views than those from anyplace else—being ideologically captured (partly by Black@TED) in a way that speakers don’t really have freedom of speech. Unless they hew to the approved ideology, speakers may get punished, at Hughes did.  (Remember, though, that TED vets all talks beforehand very carefully.)

Should TED be a mouthpiece for only “progressive” views? I don’t think so, as if you already have those views, a contrary TED talk won’t make you think, which the talks are supposed to do. Of course TED has the right to platform any speaker it wants, but an organization with guts should put on some heterodox talks. (Not by cranks, of course.)

To me the meta-analysis, which I didn’t read, was the more serious criticism. If its results were right, Hughes’s suggestion, while worthy of pondering, wouldn’t be as good as “color-awareness.” But Hughes finds faults with even relying on sociological studies:

My argument didn’t rely on social science––purposely so. For starters, there is a replication crisis in social science. By one estimate almost half of social science findings turn out to be BS, and those BS findings are far more likely to be cited than the real ones. What’s more, combining a bunch of BS studies into a “meta-analysis” doesn’t make them any better. (Kind of like CDOs, as explained by Anthony Bourdain in The Big Short).

So instead of relying on a field of research that’s notoriously unreliable, I relied on other arguments: intellectual history, moral philosophy, and recent real-world case studies. Nobody at TED had a problem with this at the time.

Well, yes, there’s a replication crisis in sociology and psychology (in fact, most everywhere), but I don’t think Hughes should have dismissed sociology in this way. For one thing, the meta-analysis may have included some good work instead of comprising just “a bunch of “BS studies”. Further, relying on “intellectual history, moral philosophy, and case studies” seems to come perilously close to “lived experience”, if not “anecdotal data”. Either way, I think Coleman would have been better served by leaving out these two paragraphs and just analyzes the paper. It looks too dismissive, too petulant.

But Hughes does give his take on the paper, and has two beefs.

There are two levels at which this meta-analysis doesn’t refute my talk. First, as mentioned, you should rate meta-analyses of social psychology studies fairly low on the believability scale to begin with. “A grain of salt” does not begin to approach the attitude we should take towards such studies, given the replication crisis. It is the opposite of “rigorous research”.

But let’s, for the sake of argument, assume that the field of social psychology were super-rigorous. What does this meta-analysis actually claim and do those claims challenge the ones I made in my talk?

The overall structure of the meta-analysis is fairly simple: it examines how four different ideologies–– “color-blindness”, “meritocracy,” “assimilation,” and “multiculturalism”––affect four different outcomes––”prejudice,” “discrimination,” “stereotyping,” and… “support for diversity policies” (like “affirmative action and permissive immigration”, the authors clarify).

Yes, you read that right. In this “rigorous” meta-analysis, one of the ways that success is measured is whether the ideology leads to support for policies like affirmative action. Affirmative Action, in other words, is assumed to be good and treated like an effect rather than a cause. That strikes me as backwards. Shouldn’t the point be to study whether policies like racial affirmative action cause good or bad outcomes? That, certainly, was the point of my talk (or one point of it).

Again, he casts a cold eye on sociological meta-analyses, which he didn’t need to do. His point about affirmative action is correct, but Grant argued in the Free Press that the main effect was on “intergroup relations”, not affirmative action. So here’s Hughes on “intergroup relations.”

 Grant hangs his argument on the paper’s claim that “multiculturalism is more consistently associated with improved intergroup relations than any identity-blind ideology.” In order for me to be right, he argues, I’d have to show the opposite: that the color-blind approach “has greater efficacy than a multicultural approach that acknowledges differences”. And I didn’t do that, so…game, set, match. Right?

Not exactly. It would depend on what this paper means by “multiculturalism”. They define “multiculturalism” as “acknowledging [cultural] differences by learning about, maintaining, or valuing them.” The problem for Grant is that I support this kind of multiculturalism and not a word of my talk suggests otherwise. I’m not against learning about and celebrating cultural differences. I’m against race essentialism and policies that discriminate on the basis of race. I’m not coming for your school assembly on Diwali or Ramadan or Chinese New Year––that stuff is great. I’m coming for your race-based affirmative action, race-based emergency aid, and so forth. (And again, this “rigorous” meta-analysis does not even ask what the effects of those kinds of policies are. A bit strange, no?)

Besides this conceptually-confused and irrelevant meta-analysis, Adam cites some other studies which are paywalled. I don’t want to spend more time on this, so I will not be reading or addressing those here.

And here it seems that Hughes is right IF “multiculturalism” is defined that way. That is, if Grant construes “improved valuing of multiculturalism” as the same as “an improvement in intergroup relations”, then he’s putting one over on the readers. One is a mental construct; the other involves actual behavior.

Jesse Singal has suggested that he might analyze the paper cited by Grant, and I hope he does, as Singal puts his teeth into a paper like a dog attacking a postman’s leg.

We can suspend judgement on the paper until someone does a rigorous dissection of it, but what is clear is that TED treated Hughes abysmally (Hughes didn’t know about this paper), and that the organization shows every sign of having been captured by the Authoritarian Left.

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ADDED NOTE: In comment #3 below, Robert Guttentag, a psychology professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, analyzes the meta-analysis and finds it wanting go read for yourself. It’s longer than comments that I usually allow, but it’s also quite important.

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h/t: Steve

By now most of us know that Coleman Hughes, a heterodox black thinker, got into trouble when he gave a preapproved TED talk echoing Martin Luther King’s “don’t judge a person by their skin color” trope. Hughes’s point wasn’t that we shouldn’t be aware of color, but what we need to do is concentrate on fixing general societal inequalities, and should do that by a form of socioeconomic affirmative action versus pure race-based affirmative action.

As I said, this talk was approved by TED well in advance. I didn’t realize this, but giving a short TED talk involves months of preparation, which includes interacting with TED people so that they know in advance and approve of everything that is going to be said.  So they knew what Hughes was going to say! Then a group called Black@TED, made up of TED employees, objected to the “let’s not concentrate on race but on well being” trope.  As has been described by Hughes and verified by Chris Anderson (TED’s boss), post-talk objections by this group (and others) to what Hughe saids led to TED’s attempt to put video “asterisks” on the talk.

First TED asked Hughes to okay the release of a single video that included both original TED talk as well as a moderated discussion of it. Hughes naturally bridled at this. It’s unheard of!

TED then offered a deal in which Hughes’s talk could be released as a standalone video, but then there would be a long “debate” released separately (it was, with Jamelle Bouie as the interlocutor).  But TED broke its part of the deal by not promoting Hughes’s talk like other TED talks, so it got relatively few views. (TED talks are, of course, very important for young people’s careers, and Hughes, though spectacularly smart and accomplished, is only 27).

As Jesse Singal describes in his analysis of this fracas below (click on screenshot; you may have to subscribe), TED (or at least its head Chris Anderson) screwed up big time. Given that Hughes’s talk was vetted extensively beforehand, there is no excuse for publishing it with post facto conditions.  This was done solely because Black@Ted (which refused to meet with Hughes) said that the talk would cause “harm”, a palpably ridiculous assertion. What it would cause was discussion.

The other issue came from the social scientist Adam Grant, who, after the talk, claimed that Hughes ignored a meta-analysis by Leslie et al. showing that a “color blind” attempt to achieve equality was less effective than one based on racial awareness. I haven’t read that paper yet, but Hughes has. Here’s his reaction, which I present without agreeing or disagreeing:

I read the paper that Grant referenced, titled “On Melting Pots and Salad Bowls: A Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Identity-Blind and Identity-Conscious Diversity Ideologies,” expecting to find arguments against color blindness. I was shocked to find that the paper largely supported my talk. In the results section, the authors write that “colorblindness is negatively related to stereotyping” and “is also negatively related to prejudice.” They also found that “meritocracy is negatively related to discrimination.”

Singal, in his Substack piece below, says he’ll provide an analysis of the Leslie et al.  paper later, and I’ll be sure to call that to your attention. If you want to read it now, be my guest. At any rate, even if Grant is right, his objections came post facto, and why didn’t TED, which is supposed to vet all the empirical claims of a talk in advance, know about it?

Singal is really angry, especially at Anderson, and it shows. I’ll give a few substantial quotes from Singal if you can’t read his site (but do subscribe; he writes about important stuff):

First, Singal on Adam Grant:

Grant is a superstar within psychology, and he claimed that Hughes’s argument was “directly contradicted by an extensive body of rigorous research,” linking to this meta-analysis. I’m hoping to do a more in-depth piece on this particular facet of the controversy soon, if I have time to do enough reading about it. But based on my own knowledge of the field of diversity trainings, I think Grant is badly overstating (1) the strength of the evidence that any one particular approach to framing these issues “works” better than others (though different people define “works” differently, which is part of the problem); and (2) the extent to which that meta-analysis could in any sense “directly contradict” Hughes’s argument.

Singal is good at dissecting papers, so I sure hope he take a look at this one.

But Singal reserves his ire for Anderson, who, he claims, dropped the ball, and that that is irrelevant to what Grant claims. A few quotes:

This was already a ridiculous story, and the available facts suggest Chris Anderson botched it every single step of the way. As anyone who has read about the polished, whirring machine that produces TED Talks knows, the organization does not leave anything to chance in terms of quality and content. TED Talk participants run a bit of a gauntlet, and that includes, obviously, TED knowing exactly what’s going to be said during the talk long before the speaker actually steps onstage. This is far from a poetry slam open mic night.

And then he reveals what I think is the real reason Hughes was given an asterisk:

I can’t say for sure, but based on what we know and the approximately zillion other instances of this sort of dysfunction seizing liberal institutions in the last few years, I would bet that Chris Anderson is far more concerned about an internal revolt, about “Black@TED,” than whether Coleman Hughes’s talk was perfectly in line with a nerdy meta-analysis. And, supporting this theory, his botching continued Wednesday, in a follow-up piece in which The Free Press allowed him and Adam Grant to respond.

Anderson explained that Coleman’s talk “was received with huge enthusiasm by many in the audience. But many others heard it as a dangerous undermining of the fight for progress in race relations. So yes, there was controversy. When people on your own team feel like their identity is being attacked, it’s right to take pause.”

In recent years radical types within liberal organizations have realized that if they utter certain magic phrases, they can extract sympathy and sometimes other concessions from management regardless of the merit of their claim. It has the effect of turning off management’s brain and getting the organization’s leadership instead to react from a fearful, gut-oriented place. A common tactic is to claim that the presence of some person or idea in their workplace constitutes “harm” or makes them less “safe.” In many cases, these claims are on their face ridiculous, but I think the choice of words evolved because some phrases contain implicit threats that whatever the employees are freaking out about could cause legal problems for management. An unsafe workplace summons HR, and once HR is involved, who the hell knows where things could end up?

Yes, it’s the “harm” trope again, a trope that for some reason the Left takes way too seriously.  To think that Hughes’s talk would harm people is ridiculous. In fact, Singal says that if you think you’ve been harmed by that talk, you need therapy. (It’s true unless you’re simply doing performative outrage.) Or, if you don’t want therapy, get another job:

But if these TED staffers aren’t just being strategic in their language — if they genuinely, viscerally feel like “their identity is being attacked” by a black man advocating for a color-blind approach — that’s something they should take up with their therapists.

This is not mean-spirited, for Singal says he’s in therapy, too, partly as a way to dampen his overreactions. He continues:

 . . . If you work for an Ideas organization and you can’t psychologically handle your organization platforming someone expressing a popular view, and you don’t want to seek out therapy to gain more resilience, then you should honestly consider a different line of work. It’s just not a good fit, in the same way journalists who get deeply upset when their colleagues refuse to toe the activist line 100% on some fraught subject should go into PR instead. Jobs like “being a journalist at a major outlet” or “working for TED” are cushy by any sort of international or historical standard, to be sure, but for some people they’re not cushy enough, and such folks should seek out a job that will fully embrace their delicate nature: a big, comfy, plush sofa of a job.

Anyway, back to Chris Anderson. As these employees’ boss, he should obviously not say the mean-sounding things I’m saying.He also shouldn’t suggest his employees go to therapy or find different work. (Though I would reiterate that telling someone who might need therapy to consider it is not, in fact, inherently mean, and the fact that it’s taken as such points to the ongoing stigmatization of mental health care).

But he very easily could have effectively ended this conversation by telling his disgruntled staffers something like this:

We appreciate your feedback and we have heard it, but at the end of the day, as an organization sitting at the intersection of ideas and public speaking, we simply can’t outlaw or restrict speakers’ ability to express popular but contested views — even views some of us disagree with strongly. Heck, for this to be a truly robust and useful and thriving organization, we might have to sometimes platform people expressing certain unpopular views. But this particular case isn’t a close call, frankly. All the available evidence suggests Hughes’s views are popular, his talk was well-researched enough to get a green light from our fact-checking team, and while we seriously value you all as staffers and always welcome your feedback — TED is stronger when you provide that feedback — we simply can’t grant you veto power over individual talks, nor the power to alter preexisting editorial and production processes, especially after an approved talk has already been filmed.

Instead, Anderson appears to have been held hostage by a group of employees making rather hysterical claims — again, sorry for the harsh language, but that’s what this is. And not only did he fail to compassionately but firmly push back against these hysterical claims for the health of his organization (and to prevent the negative PR event that subsequently occurred, which I’m happy to contribute to given how ridiculous this is and how sick I am of these sorts of incidents), he went out of his way, in his response, to reemphasize how seriously he was taking them:

Many people have been genuinely hurt and offended by what they heard Hughes say. This is not what we dream of when we post our talks. I believe real progress can be made on this issue by each side getting greater clarity and insight from the other. We share more in common than we know. We all ultimately want a just world in which all can thrive.

The problem is simply one instantiation of why wokeness has prevailed even though most people aren’t down with it: people are simply too afraid to stand up to accusations of “harm” or “racism”, even if those accusations, like the ones we’re discussing, are ridiculous.

The solution, of course, is what John McWhorter suggested in his anti-racism book: ignore these people and stick up for your principles, which is what Anderson should have done. Singal’s suggested speech for Anderson is right on the money.

In the end, this too will pass, but it’s already besmirched the reputation of TED. And it will only create a Streisand Effect for Hughes, as all the press this kerfuffle is getting can only be good for him,  Even if he got the data wrong about ameliorating equity, which we’ll know soon, he didn’t know about the paper (and TED should have), and the “colorblind” discussion is still relevant in many contexts.