I Became the Scapegoat in the Jason Arday Affair | Hacker News Reader

I Became the Scapegoat in the Jason Arday Affair

wsj.com

If your opinion of Cofnas is based mainly on what other people have said about him, or based on quotations from things he's written, I'd highly recommend you:

- read this paper: https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2019.1697803

- read the Harvard data behind the famous "0.7%" quote

- watch his interview with David Starkey

I do not believe Cofnas is racist or that his exposure of Arday was motivated by racial animus.

But, even if it were, he still did a service to the public by exposing the governance failures at Cambridge.

On your recommendation, I have just (fairly quickly) read the paper. I'm not impressed. It appears to assume that "some philosophers and scientists" have objections to race-based intelligence classifications based upon a belief that environmental factors alone are responsible for individual variation - then argues that this is false.

The reason why I object to group-based arguments about intelligence is specifically because the intra-group differences are bigger than the inter-group differences (though I also agree with some - though not all - of the critique made by the addendum/critique/reply linked under the abstract).

"Men are taller than women" is sometimes used to teach introductory ANOVA, sometimes to argue for a diversity of crash test dummies, but also to argue at "women" are less good for something because "they" are shorter. The first is trivial. The second would mostly be better dealt with by dealing with the broad range of human heights (5th/95th percentiles?) rather than merely adding an "average woman" to the existing average man one. The third is bogus because When many men are shortarses and many women are taller than me. So we're again generally better measuring people's actual height for things where it matters. Whichever group differences in intelligence are found, you're going to end up with overlapping distributions, making the groups a crappy proxy for individual variation in any case. But that's exactly what the author advocates doing in their section 4.

If you want to establish which genes are linked to intelligence then go ahead. It's not particularly important or glamorous work as far as I can see, but whatever - the academy has always had plenty of heterodox interests in it. But people jumping from nucleotide polymorphisms to grand social policy (that just happens to echo a century's worth of rightly-discredited eugenics advocacy) deserve the scepticism they get in my view.

When you wrote this sentence, were you referring to Cofnas?

"But people jumping from nucleotide polymorphisms to grand social policy (that just happens to echo a century's worth of rightly-discredited eugenics advocacy) deserve the scepticism they get in my view."

If so, what is the 'grand social policy' that Cofnas advocates or has advocated?

As far as I can tell from the paper, the only thign that seems like a policy proposal is that educational programs should be tailored to different ability profiles (and what he said about Head Start). But him saying that maybe we should fund different educational interventions isn't eugenics, or abouyt treating individuals differently depending on their race/ancestry. The paper argues against using group differences to blame or rank anyone. (See section 5.2 as it's the main point there.)

The overlapping-distributions point makes sense: even if group differences turned out to be partly genetic, group mean/median IQ or whatever isn't a good proxy for individuals from that group. So if you have a policy that is based on group membership (not individual assessment), it's going to be poorly targeted and end up wasting resources.

Section 4 endorses 'tailored' programs and doesn't explain how they'll be targeted. He doesn't say they'd be targeted by group membership, though. He references Jensen 1969 (https://gwern.net/doc/iq/1969-jensen.pdf) and in that paper Jensen advocated individual testing, not assignment based on race/ancestry. From page 78:

  The important distinction between the individual and the population must always be kept clearly in mind in any discussion of racial differences in mental abilities or any other behavioral characteristics. Whenever we select a person for some special educational purpose, whether for special instruction in a grade-school class for children with learning problems, or for a "gifted" class with an advanced curriculum, or for college attendance, or for admission to graduate training or a professional school, we are selecting an individual, and we are selecting him and dealing with him as an individual for reasons of his individuality.

Similar to when GitHub removed their meritocracy rug - it's fundamentally about a view of the world and less about the action. Most universities have signed up to a charter [1] that says that "racism is an everyday facet" of life and needs to be fought against by concrete actions. These universities get official ratings from bronze, silver or gold based on how they do. This current issue is less about the facts and more about a view of the world that's being challenged. People on one side are viewing the world and explaining things through one lens and others are viewing it through another. One problem in this discourse is that on one side they don't know how and why academic institutions operate and the other side sees criticism as justification for and reinforcement of their world view.

The basis for conflict resolution is to encourage people to see their opponents as human similar to themselves and to put themselves in the others shoes to acknowledge common grounds for agreement. It's possible an official inquiry by those experienced in conflict resolution may help this.

[1] https://advance-he.ac.uk/membership/equality-charters/race-e...

Our university has an AI portal where different models are offered (e.g. ChatGPT 5.5). They set a default system prompt which is full of the usual DEI buzzwords. The result is, that you sometimes don't get an answer at all. Albeit the question is of valid academic interest. If the system prompt is cleared -- luckily not locked --, the models answer as expected and oneself s able to decide about the issues of that answer.

I have no idea who Nathan Cofnas is and what he's said or done, except for what was reported in the press, particularly in Retraction Watch (where I first read about Jason Arday, following a link from HN).

What I can tell with some certainty is that, once again, in UK academia, the person blowing the whistle on plagiarism is the one facing consequences whereas the plagiarist has the full support of the academic establishment.

It is an enduring scandal of British academia that misconduct goes unpunished, swept under the rug, ignored and whitewashed. Liverpool John Moores University which had awarded Jason Arday's PhD carried out an investigation that found that copying another academic's work and submitting it under his own name was nothing but an "honest and reasonable error", not deliberate plagiarism, and "well within the accepted range of compliance with the academic standards of the time" [1].

It is also typical that Jason Arday himself did not contest the fact of plagiarism: he only sought to excuse it by shifting the blame to others: "Arday did not dispute the allegations of plagiarism, but said he had not received adequate supervision given his autism and learning disabilities, and described the allegations against him as being part of an "insidious and relentless" strategy to undermine black academics." (ibid).

This, too, is a recurring pattern with plagiarists: because the facts of the matter are often so blatantly obvious for all to see that pretending they didn't happen is too much even for academic integrity panels to ignore, the plagiarists tacitly accept the facts but seek to contest their meaning. And academia, ever fearful of scandal, duly complies.

The first victim of all this is nothing else but the quality of scholarship. If plagiarism is normalised, always treated with impunity, what else can be the result? Second-hand, stolen scholarship is shoddy scholarship.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Arday#Initial_concerns

> "Arday did not dispute the allegations of plagiarism, but said he had not received adequate supervision given his autism and learning disabilities, and described the allegations against him as being part of an "insidious and relentless" strategy to undermine black academics." (ibid).

A classic DARVO response, ending in his (unfortunate) narcissistic collapse once he was exposed.

Cambridge is at least partly at fault for this fiasco, they were so entranced at appointing him that no-one ever checked all the stories he'd created about himself. We had something similar here, someone was running for office with a set of achievements so impressive you'd wonder how the world ever got along without him. It took about ten minutes with Google to reveal that almost everything he'd claimed was either made up, unverifiable but highly unlikely, or severely distorted from what really happened. And yet Cambridge made Arday a full professor without, apparently, doing any kind of fact-checking.

What the media did was to actually fact-check him, that's what good journalism is about, and report on the discrepancies in his story. It wasn't a pile-on, it just looks that way when it's put against Cambridge's complete absence of any fact-checking.

I've long said the problem with the term racism is that real, proper, professional racists like this guy don't think they're treating other races (or women) differently based purely on race (or gender).

They fundamentally believe those people are inferior and so it's totally logical to treat them as inferior. To them it would only be racist if a black or female academic was capable of being as good as a white man. Since he strongly believes they can't, then it's not racist/sexist to treat them as inferior.

Read his own words, it's the manifesto of a madman who thinks the elites in the 1950s were too woke:

https://ncofnas.com/p/a-guide-for-the-hereditarian-revolutio...

Quote:

> White children are brainwashed to despise themselves because of their skin color. Anecdotally, white children are sometimes driven to transgenderism in an attempt to escape the shameful status of oppressor.

> The humanities and much of the social sciences have been slain on the altar of DEI. Meaningful art of any kind has become almost impossible. In short, wokism is ruining everything that matters except (for the time being) GDP.

Being fired from a postdoc in Sociology at the University of Ghent is hardly a punishment.

Why did the WSJ give space to this loathsome man?

His hit piece on Arday casts doubt on many claims that have been verified to true since Arday's death

Amongst other things Confas also promoted views that intelligence is related to race https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cevmrjd9lj1o

This is an emperor's new clothes moment for academia. Arday was heralded as a messiah. It's heretical and blasphemous to broach the subject that the messiah may be a dishonest fraud.

What Arday did was bad but he didn't deserve the death penalty for it.

We live in a society were rape gets you 6 months and a small article in the local newspaper.

Maybe take that up with the guy who killed him.

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