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.
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.
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.