Science relies on constructive criticism. How to keep it useful and respectful
sciencemag.org
sciencemag.org
1. You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.”
2. You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).
3. You should mention anything you have learned from your target.
4. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.
[0] https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/03/28/daniel-dennett-rapo...
1. Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.
2. Do not think it worth while to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.
3. Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.
4. When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.
5. Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.
6. Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.
7. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
8. Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.
9. Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.
10. Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool’s paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.
The Best Answer to Fanaticism—Liberalism: https://docdro.id/V5pgUbH
The subtitle of the piece you link to is "The essence of the liberal outlook is the belief that men should be free to question anything... if they can support their questioning by solid arguments". The ellipses are mine, because that "if" is such a big if. Much of the failure of discourse today is not just failure to craft solid arguments, but to question even what it means for an argument to be solid.
This thread is in the context of science and constructive criticism, and that should look more like the faculty club than the Internet. But very little of HN constitutes "constructive criticism of science": we're not in that faculty club room, and we're not experts in the domain intimately familiar with the state of the art as well as how we got there.
These are good maxims to hold when seeking the truth for ourselves. But I'm not so sure they'll apply to persuasion of others, especially in a hostile environment.
If possible, then, the best thing to do is to make the environment less hostile, so that an actual conversation can happen. Maybe ask an individual on the other side, one-on-one, to give you the five-minute version of what they think and why they think that, and then really listen. See if a dialog can happen. It may be that, if you engage in good faith, the other person also will.
As I said, if possible.
Often uttered by people who should know better - or probably do but don't care because it's a politically expedient statement.
Not a bad article, but the real elephant in the room these days is how to have a dissenting viewpoint and NOT get your carrier ruined.
If science journalists are serious about wanting peace, they can adopt a zero tolerance policy for politics in their content, including the passive aggressive writing that attempts to sneak in political attacks inside other content. But they won't because ultimately the politics are far more important than the science. If it were otherwise, they wouldn't have gotten into this situation in the first place.
It’s quite scary what’s happening in the west due to the media and public. Not just in science.
[1] https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/letters/criticism-of-ideas-i...
[0] https://www.chronicle.com/article/when-academic-bullies-clai...
Huh. This phrasing suggests to me that the response article (OP) is pretty on point, maybe even more than the author explicitly mentions: rather than there being ideologies that are beyond reproach or criticism, "experts" are not to be questioned.
1) “Academic freedom” should include the ability to speak truths that may be politically unpopular, regardless of format, and this includes critique of any academic content, ideologically-driven or not
2) Harassment or deliberate inducement of harassment, or actions that are likely to result in harassment, are not ok, and this includes both Twitter mobs doxxing and academic harassments
These really parallel the whole “free speech” values: say whatever you want, but don’t yell fire in a crowded theater.
In neither case should anyone be forced to listen to you if they don’t like what you say.
It’s hard to tell from these two opinion pieces alone what actually happened here (at least, without some serious reading-between-the-lines, as the two accounts appear to reflect entirely different universes), but I’m curious where (if at all) people disagree on these principles.
But what if the theatre is actually on fire?
Or what if you whisper something quietly and people still react like you screamed 'Fire!'?
And that's the whole point: we're not worried about people arguing over most things. We're worried when they are arguing over truthful things that are sensitive, and often ideological. Like 'identity' etc..
The war is real.
Hugely respected academics have had to come out and make public statements about it. They are not saying 'oh this is a non-issue' they are betting their public identities on it.
I really don't much in the way of academics yelling 'fire' in theatres i.e. things that are meaningfully offensive on an academic level. I only see people people reacting to those they disagree with in oppressive ways.
> And that's the whole point: we're not worried about people arguing over most things. We're worried when they are arguing over truthful things that are sensitive, and often ideological. Like 'identity' etc..
I'm not worried about people arguing about anything, truthful or not, and I don't have a problem with respectful conversation around ideology, large-scale protest, or any other communicative action that respects individual humans.
I am worried about harassment, sending death threats, suicide requests, showing up at someone's house uninvited, etc.
Not many academics are doing this personally, but are they complicit in this harassment if they're tweeting out-of-context remarks to groups of followers who have engaged in this harassment in the past? At least, that's the complaint in piece I posted above, without endorsement, and I repeat that I do not know the facts in question there.
(I am also worried about echo chambers that deceive people into holding beliefs through mere repetition, but that's another conversation.)
> I only see people people reacting to those they disagree with in oppressive ways.
You and me both -- isn't harassment one of these ways?
questioning is good.
claiming academic freedom to drive targeted Harassment of people you do not like is not criticism.
The first article is talking about what is and is not criticism, it is not talking about who is and who is not allowed to perform critique.
If you and I disagreed in a meeting, even if we had a serious argument, I'll accept that as critique. If I followed it up by convincing all our coworkers to write you emails telling you to kill yourself, that isn't criticism thats harassment.
The broader cancel culture debate, including here on HN, made me realize how few people actually understand that threats and harassment do not fall under the rubric of criticism. Similarly, many people seem to think it's only harassment if convicted in a court of law, and if the law doesn't bother to pursue cancellers then what they are doing must not be harassment. It seems that we free speech advocates are not doing a very good job of educating people about what is and isn't free speech, or at least I thought we had been doing a better job.
Harassment is not a criticism of ideas.
I work in academia, there are good ideas and bad ideas. There are good and bad discussions of good and bad ideas. There are well formed and also poorly formed critiques. Rarely can you simply categorize something into only one category.
All of these are separate from bad faith actors and asshole colleagues. My general rule is if someone feels the need to end their 'critique' by explicitly stating it is a criticism not harassment, its probably harassment. If it wasn't, the criticism would speak for itself and stand on its own.
The simplified and mythicized narratives of how scholarship works and the increasing esotericism of some fields discourse leave them increasingly open to bad faith attacks.
To the letter you posted, you can easily find signs of what I am talking about:
>"First, if there’s an institutionalized rule that criticism of academic work is harassment, how would Critical Theory, which is entirely predicated on criticizing existing systems, have emerged? "
This is a straw man, no such idea was proposed in the original article. Instead, what the original author did was draw clear bounded lines between critique and sicking the twitter verse on academics you disagree with and noting that Prof. Boghossian did the later and claimed it as the former.
>"Ruth’s article criticizes my use of Twitter, but criticism of academic ideas should not be locked wholly behind the paywalls of scholarly journals because ideas coming out of the academy affect everybody. Beyond the academic merits of open inquiry and free discourse, the public has a right to know what’s happening in universities — especially in public universities like Portland State. One reason I use Twitter is to inform the public of what is going on in university classrooms and in what counts these days as academic scholarship."
Subtle but critical in here is a shift from critiquing ideas in academia, in the first sentence, to this entirely different idea of 'revealing the truth' in the last one. If he was engaged in sincere critique, this paragraph wouldn't end the way it does. It is a transition from purporting to criticize ideas and engage in scholarly work to trying to shame universities for treating certain people's work as scholarship in the first place. Its gatekeeping as opposed to critique.
In other words, reading this as an academic, this is weaponized and knowing bad faith that relies on the (often unfortunate) simplifications that academics have allowed to perpetuate about what is and is not scholarship. Put it this way, the original article only mentioned people by name once, and used their full name. The response used the original authors first name repeatedly. That is an intentional slight, especially when deployed against female academics, and the author knows it.
[X] for doubt. Getting rid of unwanted criticism by reframing it as harassment is an efficient bad faith tactics.
For example, dive into any flamewar about sexual identity and you will find someone yelling "so you deny my right to exist" as a reply to someone who very clearly does not.
Or dive into any flamewar about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and count all the labels of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.
And the academia seems to be one of the worst offender zones.
Yes, there are those who harass and call it criticism. That's wrong, and needs to stop. And there are those who receive criticism and call it harassment. That's also wrong, and also needs to stop.
And, one layer deeper, on both sides there are people who just can't take disagreement, whether because they're thin-skinned, or because they are more committed to a position then they are to truth.
It takes training and practice to write useful reviews / critiques. Mentors should take the time to do this for their trainees.
I do see some folks dress up intolerance in the trappings of criticism and then feign injury when the academics or others refuse to engage with their 'critiques'.
A concrete example is how many folks will use the expression "gender critical" to dress up intolerance towards trans and non-binary people. There are legitimate discussions to have about gender, and there are legitimate critiques of positions that can be levied against different viewpoints. But that doesn't mean that all criticisms are valid or brought forward in good faith.
Some of those criticisms are bullying and harassment and it's important to understand that criticism is a nuanced topic and we can't just say, "All criticism good" or "all criticism bad" and be done.
But let's look at some concrete ways this could break down. I'm going to use HN as an analogy, but swap in whitepapers, emails, etc.
Example 1: If I specifically open your comment history, and raise critique against only your comments, methodically going through them and finding specific things to be critical of, is that harassment? I don't do this to anyone else, just you. Is it reasonable to feel uncomfortable that someone is laser focused on critiquing only your work?
Example 2: It is much easier to offer critique than to address critique -- if I intentionally respond to your comments/papers with loads of hard to answer but relatively meaningless questions, thereby slowing you down, is that harassment? An author's time is a limited resource, and if I'm deliberately trying to cause them to spend it dealing with me, is that harassment? In debate, this is called the Gish Gallop and it's widely effective.
Example 3: If I respond to your comments with disingenuous questions or criticisms that I know will prompt an emotional response in you in an effort to get you to respond in a frustrated way, is that harassment? Humans are not emotionless automata, and even when we try to maintain barriers between ourselves and our ideas, a sufficiently needling criticism can eventually get under someone's skin.
Example 4: What if there's a significant power imbalance? Let's say you are a tech celebrity and you go onto twitter and post, "Look at this person's HN post, can you believe this? Hey, everyone, please go write one critical reply to their post." You are brigading someone, and sure, a lot of the questions might be critical, but the volume and intent might not be critical. Is that harassment?
Like many things in engineering, scale and intent matters. There's a lot of malicious behavior that can be dressed up as "I'm just asking questions". These behaviors can be intentional or unintentional and they can make people reasonably feel pretty strong emotions like fear, anxiety, etc.
Perhaps, in a perfect world, we'd be able to use axioms and construct arguments and no one would malaiciously engage with the scientific process, but we don't live in that world. We live in a world where humans are involved and it's messy and emotional and we try to do the right things, but there are people who, for whatever reason, think it is fun or gain some benefit from stalling those whose ideologies differ.
> The point I was making was that people in the CRT circle in particular are arguing that by definition, criticism of their ideas or theories is bullying/harassment/etc.
Can you demonstrate this is a widely held belief somehow? It reads like a bias you might hold but can't back up with data?
Usually, if you're delivering a criticism, the intent is to inform the other party of some type of flaw that exists that you've observed or experienced. If you hope they fix that flaw, you're bound to get better results delivering the criticism politely than rudely ("you get more bees with honey than vinegar").
Sometimes you do have to deliver the information in a more abrasive fashion because you've painfully exhausted all polite approaches and the criticism has to be conveyed (usually because time sensitivity), but it should not be the first approach, it should be a last resort. Personally I argue that should only be done if there is a imminent danger of some sort (e.g. no, you're wrong the house will explode if we don't turn the gas off and put the fire out), otherwise you should simply agree to disagree before that point and try again another time or hope the other party may think about your argument more.
There's a lot of words in this larger comment thread about reasoned criticism of some of the more difficult to prove ideas being championed by those in the CRT camp as being harassment, and a lot of people trying to paint those putting forward that criticism as being disrespectful assholes. But rather, history paints a different picture of the types of research that endures harassment. As an example, take the case of the doctor who first pushed for other doctors to wash their hands. [1].
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/03/23/ignaz-semme...
If I were to understand this correctly (ignore if I misinterpret), you are saying out of hand criticism is fine since we would gain something, be it necessary correction or the undeniable truth. But if you were to criticize and suggest an alternative path to the truth, why say it harshly? Why bring in unnecessary shame to the person behind all the hard work? There is no reason be to so arrogant.
As for the second part, I will reuse an answer I've given before: I am tired of the lying, and I do consider politeness to be lying. "Yes, your children are smart and beautiful" and "that dress doesn't make you fat" (your fat does) can only be repeated so many times.
A lot of people disagree with me :)
Here's a few hypotheticals:
- you're a Christian trying to politely explain to a Satanist that you dislike sacrificing children to Moloch
- you're a transgender trying to politely explain to a rabid transphobe that maybe you have a right to live your life as you see fit
- you're a doctor explaining to someone that vaccines are not a conspiracy to kill the population
- you're someone genuinely scared of the possibility of raised water levels in a few decades talking to the owner of a 3 mpg monster truck
Now, how long do you think you can last being polite? More to the point, WHY?
Difficult, I admit. I don't have tons of patience with the clearly-wrong-but-backed-by-spurious-arguments-and-willing-to-argue-forever types.
> More to the point, WHY?
At least in the case of the doctor, because if the person is your patient, it's part of your job. And even if they aren't, it's still a health concern. Reach them if you can.
Now, there's a place for a verbal smackdown if you're at a party, say, and this person starts telling the room their anti-vax baloney. It's important that the room not believe this person. But still, be as polite as you can.
I have seen few complete nutcases in a scientific context, though. But sometimes decent people have strange opinions about, say, vaccines, in which case I tend to change subject or walk away.
Someone 'genuinely scared' of raised water levels in a few decades is as nutty as someone who's 'genuinely scared' of QAnon or vaccines.
A 3 mpg monster truck owner might have chosen to not have any children, so are not raping the planet like breeders.
If I'm - "you're someone genuinely scared " then I'm pretty close to mentally ill. If my brain is malfunctioning generally it'll be much harder to deal with conflict. Why not just chat to someone who owns a truck, for my own mental health reasons.
Also, you don't have to comment on other people children at all. What is even the point of judging whether someone kids look beautifully or not? I doubt people comment on your beauty either.
As someone who has experienced some of this, the criticism isn't being dismissed because its disrespectful. It is being dismissed because the disrespect is the point, and the only point in many cases. It is not criticism, the criticism is a bad faith label to immunize the disrespect from consequences.
Being in a field means you are familiar with the content and style of discourse. You speak the language, even if the language is always English. You know how to communicate ideas within group norms. That is useful because it aids shared meaning making in any form of communication.
If I stood up as an educator at a ACM conference and started talking about 'normalizing to C+' there is serious potential for misunderstanding that I'm talking about grading whereas y'all might think I'm talking about programming languages. We make meaning of information in context as human beings, some of that context is local (e.g., the rest of what I'm reading) some of it is regional (dialectic, people who ask me at restaurants in my area 'do you want a coke' and then clarify what kind because coke is a euphemism for soda not Coca Cola)...some of it is even broader. The key thing is not all of it is shared, and context is key to inferring or constructing shared meaning.
You should not dismiss outsiders a priori. Not all of them are crackpots.