A testimony of “guilt-by-association” harassment in astronomy
hxstem.substack.com
hxstem.substack.com
There is a (very small) number of people I refuse to have anything to do with, despite them not being convicted of anything. I mean, I'd still hit the brakes if they stepped in front of my car. But I wouldn't invest in a startup they were a co-founder of, which seems analogous to publishing a paper they're a co-author of.
Scientists sometimes talk as if certain journals have such a monopoly on a field that being banned from them is fatal to their career (and even to The Science.) But IDK, I've never felt like I can't read a paper if it wasn't published in a prestigious journal. The author should upload the paper to their website and email the link to colleagues, who can decide whether to read it or not.
The purpose of scientific journals is to provide an editorial process and peer review, not only to disseminate findings. In this regard, I don't believe author websites and Twitter compares.
Say you are editor of a CS journal and receive a valid proof that P=NP. You also get demands that you shouldn't publish it because the author is the worst person imaginable. What is best for society?
I believe intellectual creations should be evaluated independently of their origins, and I don't see a way to find common ground with those who don't.
https://www.science.org/content/article/astronomer-geoff-mar...
Seems perfectly reasonable people in academia would no longer wish to associate with his work. The author of this article is saying this should not be the case because it was never criminally investigated, but I'm very certain you can find plenty of real world examples of people's careers being ruined without incidents being criminally investigated, or even the incidents being criminal themselves - that seems like a complete strawman on her part.
One may reasonably debate whether someone who did something bad in the past should be ostracized, but I think you are rather mischaracterizing the author’s argument.
This is what the OP literally said in the opening paragraph.
On the contrary, having never been found guilty of anything, the bar for forgiveness / rehabilitation should be even lower. If it is a basic human right to be rehabilitated back into society even if they have been criminally convicted, it should certainly be a human right if they were merely "convicted" by an academic kangaroo court.
Society hasn't exiled him into the woods, people are just rightfully exercising their right not to be associated with him.
No, they are harassing a person who is exercising their right to associate with whomever they want.
To associate with, that is the part that matters. Not "to be associated with", which is what people in a mob think is what matters, even though it does not, certainly not enough to give them license.
Harassing is carrying a _ton_ of load, way above its capacity, in the essay. I'm very curious for your perspective on what incidents were harrassment.
There's a certain motte-and-bailey aspect in my read, the narrow claims are their talk on Geoff's work was not accepted at an academic conference and someone removed Geoff's name from their paper.
The broader claims range as petty as the conference added a non-standard tricky clause to harrass them and engineer the denial of their proposal, before their proposal was made (?, also, it's a bog-standard morals clause in my read) and as vast as you must allow anyone to associate with you & it's immoral to decide who you associate with unless they've been convicted of a crime by a jury in the United States.
It suffers from its rigidness and righteousness.
EDIT, I am rate limited so I can't reply:
The specific phrase was "found guilty" and the specific wrong being alleged is sexual assault, which is a criminal offense for which people can go to prison. University HR can fire him if they like, but they cannot find him guilty of a sexual assault any more than they can find him guilty of fraud or manslaughter.
People are innocent of all crimes until they are proved guilty in a fair trial, in a real court with a real judge and a real jury.
> Did the university send him to prison, or are you collapsing multiple different connotations of "guilty" into one?
Excuse me, am I collapsing multiple definitions here? It seems to me the parent commenter is pivoting on two different connotations of "sexual assault" and "guilty", so as to have it both ways: ostracize this person as one would an actual sex offender, without needing to go through the awkward formality convicting him of a sexual offense.
No, the author isn't saying everybody must work with this person, they are saying someone who is working with the person should not be harassed for that.
> I'm very certain you can find plenty of real world examples of people's careers being ruined without incidents being criminally investigated
So what? As if that makes it okay, this medieval going after the totality of one's person and livelihood. Any and all people involved in such mobs are guilty of worse than whatever they use as excuse for their stonings.
He was openly laughed at (not with) during addresses to the UN, for example.
More officially, the EU has been in crisis about building its own security since it became clear Trump seemed to hold a different meaning for “ally” than every president before him.
No it's not.
It's a basic human right not to be formally condemned by a government or government-like body without legal due process.
It's not a basic human right to be free from all judgement by your peers without due process. If I think my neighbor's a dick, I don't need to hold a trial by jury to decide if I'm allowed to disinvite him from my BBQ.
In this case, it seems like a number of people in this community think Geoff is a first-rate asshole for publicly-known reasons. I have no knowledge of whether that's true or not - I've not reviewed the evidence. But a lot of people believe it, and those people don't want papers authored, co-authored, or believed to be authored, by Geoff in their conference. That seems reasonable, at least for people who believe the original allegations against Geoff.
(Disclaimer: there's some other bad stuff mentioned, like harassment of the author and some shitty assumptions that her own work was secretly Geoffs, and that's to be condemned, but that's separate from the main thrust of this post.)
True, but libel is also a civil tort.
And according to the article, the blacklist doesn't only affect Marcy, it affects people who continue to work with him. I would say that's going too far.
Finally, I'm not sure what we gain by systematically excluding Marcy from astronomy research. Maybe a 5 year ban would be enough or perhaps we could go with a restorative justice approach here.
Do these guilt-by-association injustices against the author of the article give you any pause when it comes to the same people passing judgement against this Geoff? I, like you, have no real knowledge of this case. It maybe be the case that Geoff is guilty of all of it, or was bullied into a false confession; I don't know. My gut says that he's a slimeball but I see injustice against the author of the article and I don't think the two are as independent as you suggest. If the mob is using guilt by association in one case,that gives me some doubt as to the mob's ability to fairly pass judgement in the related case.
In this case you are exempt from that principle because following it will cost you disproportionally more than the possible damage done if you're wrong. Not because universal justice principles somehow become inapplicable outside of courtroom.
No, it doesn't.
A scientific conference is not your backyard BBQ. The reasonable thing to do is to judge submissions on their scientific merit and relevance.
(Your proposed norm is how things used to be, and still are to a large extent. This is bad and a failure of society, not a success.)
Letting shitty people gain prevalence in your field will have a negative effect on the future of your field, just like hiring shitty managers will have a detrimental effect on your company's turnover rate. It makes sense to want to limit the influence of shitty people.
A moral defense of social practices shouldn't rely on a dubious analogy between a major scientific conference and someone's backyard soirée. Human affairs do not separate cleanly into "governance" and "private".
>there's some other bad stuff mentioned, like harassment of the author and some shitty assumptions that her own work was secretly Geoffs, and that's to be condemned, but that's separate from the main thrust of this post.
I don't think it's at all fair to the author to reduce harassment directed at her to a parenthetical in a post discussing her experience in research. It is very important and speaks to the prevailing cultural norms.
It sounds like you're advocating that the results of the scientific process should have no effect on policy-making, because otherwise then "social condemnation" of the kind that you're describing becomes part of the government policy-making process.
I don't like that idea. I like having climate-change science feed into policymaking.
For a rather long take from someone within the astronomy research community, I can recommend Dr. Angela Collier's video on the topic of sexual harassment and assault in Astronomy and Physics [1].
"Here's 26 people who decided it was fine to author a paper with this serial sexual harasser ... How can I see a future in a field where people are just fine working with sexual harassers. They don't care about the women, the victims, they just care about how this person can help their career."
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DNRBa39Iig She discusses Geoff Marcy at ~35:30 btw.
"How can you write a mentoring statement when 66% of your students have left Astronomy directly because of you?"
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For a much more extreme historical example, see the tragic life of Nobel laureate Fritz Haber. A man who arguably saved billions of lives with the invention of the Haber process, but who was ostracized by many fellow scientists for his work on chemical weapons during WWI.
I also think that it is bad that there is no path to rehabilitation. Well, there is no single path to rehabilitation, because the world contains many people with a variety of points of view.
But remember that it is bad to harass and assault people. That should not be ignored. The linked post does not seem to cover that very much, or to show any action that the person has taken that would make them more welcome in a professional setting.
> History has many examples of the negative impacts of excommunicating individuals according to questionable standards that are analogous to what happened to Geoff Marcy. Over the past century we have seen numerous such examples across the political spectrum, in the name of moral virtue.
I must disagree in the strongest terms to this section. This does not acknowledge any harms or any balance of responsibility on the part of Marcy.
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Also, the title is just plain wrong. It is not guilt by association, it is disgust at including a person who has caused harm. Every objection listed from the scientific community was because Marcy was directly attached, either to a paper, a group, or a meeting.
Passive voice. Who watches the watchers, who accounts for the accountability-bringers?
Does this mean that Sweden is a good place for people who are, like the author, critical of the wokeness and "cancel culture"? I used to think they're the ones setting the trend there. I don't understand anything now.