Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

At an Academic Pressure Cooker, a Setback Turns Deadly

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 62 posts

Re: At an Academic Pressure Cooker, a Setback Turns Deadly

#21

Post by randallsquared »

colah wrote: post #18
maxharris wrote: post #7

What Dr. Bishop did was unjustified, no matter what other facts we may find (excepting force initiated by the victims); justice requires her death. (Because this penalty is irrevocable, and all possible legal systems are fallible, the closest we can get to this ideal is life imprisonment.) Having said that, look at how the system worked. These guys were stringing her along for six years (or so?), while maintaining th…

> justice requires her death. All do respect, but WTF? There's no question that what she did was horrible, but how is it `just' to kill someone in response? Perhaps revenge and barbaric `justice' in the tradition of lex talionis (eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth) would encourage such a response, but I can see no benefit; it won't bring the dead back to life. In fact, it is my opinion that the only valid motivations…

All else being equal, capital punishment is a great deterrent: 100% effective at preventing that person from committing that crime again. Of course, things are rarely equal, and I agree with maxharris that the impossibility of correcting errors means that capital punishment should be off limits for justice systems.

More to your point, though, I think that a justice system which was ultimately based on retribution would have all the positive qualities you speak of as valid motivations. Fitting the punishment to the crime is very difficult unless you have a way to measure how bad the crime was. An eye for an eye, as a default outcome, would provide a quantitative starting point for negotiations between (living) victims and the original aggressor. Of course, this doesn't help much for the dead.

Re: At an Academic Pressure Cooker, a Setback Turns Deadly

#22

Post by nostrademons »

amichail wrote: post #13

Why did she care about tenure? She could have just focused exclusively on the startup, making it more likely to succeed.

Remember that not all people have the same goals as HN readers. We self-select for people whose goal is to found a successful startup. For many other people, their goal in life might be to be a good parent, or to be a professional sports player, or to be a tenured professor. It seems like she was well on the road to success by our standards, but that doesn't mean she was successful by her standards.

Re: At an Academic Pressure Cooker, a Setback Turns Deadly

#23

Post by colah »

randallsquared wrote: post #21
colah wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> justice requires her death. All do respect, but WTF? There's no question that what she did was horrible, but how is it `just' to kill someone in response? Perhaps revenge and barbaric `justice' in the tradition of lex talionis (eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth) would encourage such a response, but I can see no benefit; it won't bring the dead back to life. In fact, it is my opinion that the only valid motivations…

All else being equal, capital punishment is a great deterrent: 100% effective at preventing that person from committing that crime again. Of course, things are rarely equal, and I agree with maxharris that the impossibility of correcting errors means that capital punishment should be off limits for justice systems. More to your point, though, I think that a justice system which was ultimately based on retribution wou…

>All else being equal, capital punishment is a great deterrent: 100% effective at preventing that person from committing that crime again.

Deterrence isn't preventing a person from repeating a crime, but ever doing it. The idea is that they won't do it to avoid the punishment -- a sort of sociopath's substitute for morality. I've yet to see any actual evidence that capital punishment is a more effective deterrent than long-term imprisonment and have heard claims (though no evidence) to the contrary (that the psychology of such large punishments leaves them effectively indistinguishable)... I've never researched it but I probably should.

As for preventing repetition, so do many other things, such as imprisonment.

>More to your point, though, I think that a justice system which was ultimately based on retribution would have all the positive qualities you speak of as valid motivations.

I'm sorry but I have to disagree.

You'll notice I said that I mentioned protecting the perpetrator from society... Killing them kind of defeats that. Also, they can't achieve rehabilitation if we kill them.

Essentially, I want a justice system based off compassion for _all_ parties. Call it naive altruism if you wish. This isn't to say we shouldn't make protecting ourselves from criminals a priority, but after that we should be trying to help them. As we do, in providing counseling, etc.

Re: At an Academic Pressure Cooker, a Setback Turns Deadly

#24

Post by hyperbovine »

"Ms. Bishop, a grant-winning scientist"

That is like saying, "a salary-earning division manager." I don't know of any serious academic scientist who isn't funded by grants. Seems like the writer really wanted to put "award-winning," but there were no awards.

Re: At an Academic Pressure Cooker, a Setback Turns Deadly

#25

Post by amichail »

nostrademons wrote: post #22
amichail wrote: post #13

Why did she care about tenure? She could have just focused exclusively on the startup, making it more likely to succeed.

Remember that not all people have the same goals as HN readers. We self-select for people whose goal is to found a successful startup. For many other people, their goal in life might be to be a good parent, or to be a professional sports player, or to be a tenured professor. It seems like she was well on the road to success by our standards, but that doesn't mean she was successful by her standards.

What gave her the idea that being a tenured professor is better than a founder of a successful startup?

Perhaps this is the result of societal pressure on intelligent people rather than her own thinking?

Re: At an Academic Pressure Cooker, a Setback Turns Deadly

#26

Post by julius_geezer »

maxharris wrote: post #10
houseabsolute wrote: post #9

I find it veeery interesting that she "accidentally" killed her brother when she was twenty. Casts some doubt on that situation too.

Wrong conclusion. I think that she must have been emotionally scarred by the accident. Did the accident make it easier for her to kill those faculty members yesterday? That's really hard to say. Would it be easier for the former first lady to murder someone because of the deadly car accident she was involved in? I'm inclined to say no.

The Braintree police don't seem to think that it was an accident. To be sure, they seem to be operating on "oral history".

Re: At an Academic Pressure Cooker, a Setback Turns Deadly

#27

Post by joe_the_user »

mnemonicsloth wrote: post #2

When a postal worker goes postal, it's going postal. When a PhD from Harvard -- the first detail mentioned, note -- goes postal, they are suffering in an academic pressure cooker. Dumbly applying the nearest pop-psych explanation to hand to explain the inexplicable only makes it more difficult to show respect for the victims and sympathy for the grieving.

Hey, you could combine the abusive terminology and talk about "postal-track professors".

But the need to "help the victims grieve" by labeling every killing "inexplicable" and so casting maximal moral unction on the killer is also just a variety of pop-psychology.

However, this doesn't seem to be an "inexplicable" event. There's probably no single, easy explanation but there seem to be a variety of causal factors we can trace.

"People with a history of violent behavior don't do well in situations of all-or-nothing achievement".

Re: At an Academic Pressure Cooker, a Setback Turns Deadly

#28

Post by anamax »

maxharris wrote: post #7

What Dr. Bishop did was unjustified, no matter what other facts we may find (excepting force initiated by the victims); justice requires her death. (Because this penalty is irrevocable, and all possible legal systems are fallible, the closest we can get to this ideal is life imprisonment.) Having said that, look at how the system worked. These guys were stringing her along for six years (or so?), while maintaining th…

> Because this penalty is irrevocable, and all possible legal systems are fallible, the closest we can get to this ideal is life imprisonment.

Life imprisonment is irrevocable. In fact, many "not life" sentences end up being death sentences. Innocents die in prison infirmaries every day. The death chamber, not so much.

If you're actually worried about killing innocents, you want more death penalty convictions because they typically get decent review. Folks who get other sentences typically get squat.

Re: At an Academic Pressure Cooker, a Setback Turns Deadly

#29

Post by anamax »

neurotech1 wrote: post #11
maxharris wrote: post #7

What Dr. Bishop did was unjustified, no matter what other facts we may find (excepting force initiated by the victims); justice requires her death. (Because this penalty is irrevocable, and all possible legal systems are fallible, the closest we can get to this ideal is life imprisonment.) Having said that, look at how the system worked. These guys were stringing her along for six years (or so?), while maintaining th…

I would suspect Dr Bishop has a personality disorder, such as Borderline Personality Disorder. I find it interesting that they have a 6 year rule, when the average is around 10 years to get tenure. I think that people missed warning signs, that she was feeling stress, and that there is a stigma against seeking help, and people often deny they have a problem. I agree with most of your comments, except the bit about "r…

> I find it interesting that they have a 6 year rule, when the average is around 10 years to get tenure.

Please name some schools at or around that average.

Re: At an Academic Pressure Cooker, a Setback Turns Deadly

#30

Post by mnemonicsloth »

chancho wrote: post #4
mnemonicsloth wrote: post #2

When a postal worker goes postal, it's going postal. When a PhD from Harvard -- the first detail mentioned, note -- goes postal, they are suffering in an academic pressure cooker. Dumbly applying the nearest pop-psych explanation to hand to explain the inexplicable only makes it more difficult to show respect for the victims and sympathy for the grieving.

"Dumbly applying the nearest pop-psych explanation..." If describing this tragedy as "someone going postal" isn't dumbly applying pop-psych, then I don't know what is.

"At an Academic Pressure Cooker, a Setback Turns Deadly," tells a simple little story. She was under great emotional stress, lost her bid for tenure, and snapped under the strain.

"Going postal" is comparatively mum. It's a hybrid of "Going crazy" and "disgruntled postal worker," and suggests only that we think the perpetrator is not sane -- that we can't understand why they would do that. Where is the pop psychology?

Post reply on HN