Academics Shouldn't Sell Out Truth for Justice
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
irony
One can easily say that it's just politics and not real science if they're even having that discussion.
(Everyone whose viewpoint was taken into account in the article was from humanities. No-one was from hard sciences.)
https://quillette.com/2018/09/07/academic-activists-send-a-p...
Just think about how much you trust the 'hard' sciences where these points do not hold.. Climate science.. food science.. Quantum physics.. Hell, computer science!
But then in a shockingly short period of time that same Arab world started to place their selected social values above that of the truth, in and of itself. Perhaps one of the major catalysts for this was Al-Ghazali, and his very well received ideology laid out in "The Incoherence of the Philosophers." [1] Formerly a philosopher himself, that work is where Al-Ghazali began to deny all science and reality and replace it with religion. He declared that there was no such thing as causality. When a leaf catches fire it is not because it was exposed to fire - rather god chose to transit the fire from the torch to the leaf at that very moment. And again when it deteriorates into ash - that is once again not a natural process, but rather the explicit and active will of god acting at that very moment.
The implication of this is that there is no truth to be sought, there is no connection in nature, there is nothing except for god. The reason for this is because it answered any sort of inconvenient questions for religion, by attacking the questions (and those that pose them) directly. And in a short period of time the Arabic world was set on the path that sent it away from academic pursuit and knowledge and onto the path that's brought it to where it is today. Imagine what a different place the world would be today had they instead remained focused on the truth, and the golden age of Islam persisted indefinitely.
Social values must never take precedent over truth, no matter how undesirable the truth may be to hear, or how undesirable the speakers of said truth may be.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incoherence_of_the_Philoso...
For example you can boycott, you can badmouth, you can arrest, you can refuse to acknowledge, you can socially ostracize, you can wield professional power (e.g. give a bad grade to), you can disrupt their speaking engagements, you can physically attack, you can sue.
I think we can all agree some mechanisms are reasonable, some are unreasonable, and some are worth debating.
I'm glad this discussion is becoming conscious and deliberate.
Well the article is pretty disingenuous on this point. Prestige in academia is heavily based on citations. It's insane that serial abusers are protected by their institutions and allowed to continue their abuse without suffering a dent in their social standing. If there were other ways to hurt a person's reputation, as there certainly should be, removing citations probably wouldn't be favored by as many people.
I don't need a jury of twelve peers being convinced beyond a reasonable doubt to tell me how I should engage in voluntary collaboration with another person.
If I don't want to cite, or work with assholes, that's my business. Call it mob rule if you want, freedom of speech and assembly means freedom from being compelled to work with someone.
Citations are an endorsement of a person's work, and of a person. You may wish for that to not be the case, but that's how they are perceived.
The problem is now that some of these facts are unique. While you, for example, could ignore measured data points if there are others around (not a good idea), you can not simply replace a theorem etc. by something else. You can not attribute it to someone else either. And you shouldn't use it without citations either, because the chain of proof has to be preserved.
The endorsement of a person's work is a consequence of this. If the findings are more relevant or important, they will be cited more. -> if you are cited more, you do important stuff.
Half of the cited opinions in the article that advise against citing do so in a quantifiable manner.
"Billy's work isn't that important, other contributors have done work of similar importance, without a cloud of unethical behavior around them, you lose little by failing to refer to it, or by citing someone else instead."
Unless Billy is the first, only, and final word of authority on a subject (Which in hard sciences, or mathematics, he may well can be,) you can probably find equivalent results among his peers.
When authorities aren't doing their jobs, we're left with vigilantism or nothing.
> Then think of how much scientific inquiry has been discouraged because people don't want to work under those conditions.
That's an entirely different issue. What we're talking about here is work that exists, but is not cited due to it's authorship. If Adolf Hitler himself had correctly proven Goldbach's Conjecture, is the proof itself so inseparable from his other actions that it should be rejected with them?
Lets make up some estimated numbers that the average resole rate is 8%. Would we be willing to double the police budget to get 16%, assuming falsely that we are lucky enough that double the budget doubles the result. What if we make assumptions of guilt and raises the resolve rate to 20%, but also increase the false accusations by 2000%? What about a camera in every street, testing the case that camera surveillance decrease crime (just like London).
I think authorities are mostly doing their jobs within the limits that we gave them. It can naturally be done more efficient but we are talking about such low resolve rates and that makes it look like they do nothing in most cases.
At the very least there should be a disclaimer "The citations in this article have not been made from scholarly viewpoint. Reader be advised" or something like that. Similar like how google says some results have been censured.
I like to call this the Mangino effect. At my alma mater, the University of Kansas, there is a football program. It is bad. There was a blip in the success of the program: when Mark Mangino, a gargantuan hulk of a man, was hired as the head football coach in 2001. Within two years, the program had a bowl appearance. The program's performance began to increase culminating in back-to-back bowl victories in 2007 and 2008. Everyone loved the jolly fat man.
In 2009, the football team lost all but one of their regular season games. And what do you know? It turns out that Mangino had been physically abusing the players (for example ordering a player to "bear crawl" on asphalt that was literally too hot to touch without suffering burns). Everyone had known this for years and it was an open secret. It was only when Mangino stopped bringing home the bacon that they ousted him, using his transgressions to do so. But not until the point that he stopped delivering results.
To be fair, the administration and boosters enabled and condoned his excesses and behaviors not only because he was delivering victories, but because no single individual could go against the pro-KU-football crowd without facing social penalties themselves. They can't afford to punish or be seen to punish their superstars until their light begins to fade.
Here's a quote exemplifying the Mangino effect:
"The Kansas Jayhawks are softbellied pussies for firing Mark Mangino. He was a great coach--probably the best thing that happened to KU football. In over a century. So what if he ranted and raved, swore like a sailor, belittled players, chest-poked, grabbed facemasks, and instituted unreasonable punishments. Jayhawks football wouldn’t be anything close to the team they are today if Mangino had coached in a kinder more gentle manner. Sheesh. The whole university needs to grow a nutsack."
I imagine there are similar sentiments going on in academic and technological bureaucracies not only in regards to abusers, but to anyone with both power and skeletons in the closet. Utilize their human resources despite their kompromat, then when they've been thoroughly wrung-out and fading, get rid of them because of their kompromat.
"there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically."
That statement kinda embodies the darkest part of this issue. It makes sense, evolutionary differences between peoples extend beyond skin color, eye-shape, etc., but at the same time it is a can of worms that can never be opened (again). It is definitely an issue of science where justice is more important than truth.
My personal take is that we will all inevitably be a light brown shade in ~200 years and we should make that transition as enjoyable and smooth as possible. Hopefully this doesn't get down-voted to heck :o
Justice and truth are aligned here.
When the Khmer Rouge targeted intellectuals in Cambodia, wiping out 10% of the population, how did they fail to alter the population distribution?
Has there been? If the null hypothesis is that populations show identical traits, and to publish a paper rejecting the null hypothesis is career suicide, what have we learned when no one credibly rejects the null hypothesis?
The fact that so many believe such evidence does not exist just further demonstrates the danger of suppressing science due to ideology.
Justice is downstream from truth. Justice cannot be based on feelings or politics, or what Plato called 'the noble lie'. It has to be based on the dispassionate pursuit of truth.
How would a journal editor draw the line between scholars not wanting to cite their rival in the field and not wanting to cite a sexist jerk? Would you have to provide a detailed accounting of the sexism and gender bias to persuade the editor?
In short, trying to avoid citing someone because you don’t like them is impossible if their work is important in your field. Perhaps it’s just adding insult to injury when the guy is a sexist jerk.
“In the case of a sexist jerk, you are often left without recourse: Cite him, or look like you don’t know what you’re talking about to reviewers and readers.”
This is about removing the content, not just the credit.
It probably helps to read the paper https://www.chronicle.com/article/Should-We-Still-Cite-the/2... and maybe her response to TFA https://twitter.com/nikkiusher/status/1058032795803639808
"Do what the editor wanted so that when he sent the revised manuscript back to reviewers, they would see I had followed their instructions and added the requisite citations. Then ... when I got the manuscript back before final publication, surreptitiously remove the citations."
If you don't condone a particular colleagues attitudes or actions or reported actions - by all means please do say so in your footnotes and citations. Make sure your colleagues know of your discomfort and that they should also be discomforted by people like that being in a place where they are enabled to contribute to the field - when they should be driven from it.
However, under no account should one defraud one's editors and/or reviewers - or your colleagues who trust your work has been reviewed and approved by them. To do so is plainly dishonest and deprives those people of their right to autonomy. You aren't forced to cite, but then they don't have to approve - or read - either.
If you have to lie and cheat to people in order to get your way - perhaps what your doing is wrong, because you're certainly doing wrong to those people.
At what point do you opt out of a system with which you disagree? Is it morally acceptable to commit an unjust act to achieve what you believe to be justice? Is it acceptable to venerate vigilantism - to be a vigilante?
I would say that it certainly isn't - in precisely the same way using unjustly or immorally obtained data is unacceptable.
- men not citing radical anything produced by rabid feminists ("why would those men acknowledge the contribution of a man-hater?")
- religious people not citing atheists ("why would those people acknowledge the contributions of an unbeliever?")
- atheists not citing religious people ("why would those people acknowledge the contributions of a sky-fairy theorist?")
- lefties not citing right-wingers ...
- right-wingers not citing lefties ...
- ...
And 'poof', there goes the scientific method.
Don't go down that path, it leads to nothing but destruction.