Prediction: This article will get flagged off the front page.
The admins have the ability to turn off flags for specific posts. They would do well to do it here.
Academic Activists Send a Published Paper Down the Memory Hole
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Re: Academic Activists Send a Published Paper Down the Memory Hole
#22I had not heard of Quillette until Tyler Cowen interviewed [0] Claire Lehmann, the founding editor. This article, and the precipitating events, fit perfectly into Quillette’s raison d’etre [1]. [0] - https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/claire-lehmann-t... [1] - https://quillette.com/about/
Indeed. The suspicious part of me wonders if the authors deliberately engineered this situation.
From the publication? Why? The article is self written - it's not all that surprising that an author would seek out a friendly outlet - ensures publishing in full, drives advertising views (money) to 'friendly' places. You can see politicians doing the same thing, even at the national level - Democrats and Republican senators write letters for publishing to different papers, mostly those that agree with them.
Re: Academic Activists Send a Published Paper Down the Memory Hole
#23Wow, I didn't know that academia was getting this bad; what happened to letting the truth be debated a la the Socratic dialogue in the academia of all places!
What happened? I call it valence hijacking. Sometimes, a thing --- a word, an institution, a bit of history --- has cultural power. It's surrounded with an aura (or valence, if you will) of gravitas and mystique, usually accumulated over decades, or millennia. Acrivists notice that these things have cultural power and hijack them, turning them into something useful for the cause while denying that anything has change…
I like that term, "valence hijacking" and I don't disagree. Ultimately I think we as a society are approaching a pivotal point where any body (individual or institution) are so afraid of a drag through the public square for their statements/image that we have created de facto censorship on what is "appropriate" and what "is not", which might have negative repercussions on what is allowed under freedom of expression and free discourse.
Re: Academic Activists Send a Published Paper Down the Memory Hole
#24Direct arxiv link to the preprint in question: https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.04184 Kudos to the author for being brave enough to detail these events. Academia and the process of science has enough blind spots without needing activists in the mix to add their own. >“Several colleagues,” she wrote, had warned her that publication would provoke “extremely strong reactions” and there existed a “very real possibility that th…
> It's as if these people had never heard of the Streisand Effect. What would have been a stuffy publication of no interest beyond a small circle of curious researchers is now a public salacious affair. You're not reading about all the other times articles offensive to a certain point of view got memory holed successfully. Most of the time powerful assholes get away with their behaviour. Note that the only reason thi…
In a similar vein, there's a paper with the fascinating name "Thirty Years of Denying the Evidence on Gender Symmetry in Partner Violence: Implications for Prevention and Treatment".
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233717660_Thirty_Ye...
"Method 7: Harass, Threaten, or Penalize Researchers Who Publish Evidence on Gender Symmetry ... The most extreme example was the experience of Susan Steinmetz. When she was at the University of Delaware and was being reviewed for promotion and tenure, there was an organized attempt to block her appointment through unsolicited letters to her department and the university president. They asserted that Steinmetz was not a suitable person to promote because her research showing high rates of women's perpetration of PV was not believable. In short, they accused her of scientific fraud (Susan Steinmetz, personal communications during the years 1973 to 1988, when we collaborated in research and coauthored two books). An academic version that implies fraud is Pleck and colleagues (1978). Even more extreme, there was a bomb threat at a daughter's wedding.
At the University of Manitoba, a lecturer's contract was not renewed because of protests about her research, which found approximately equal rates of PV by women and men.
I have been repeatedly harassed and penalized. ... Two of my graduate students were warned that they will never get jobs if they do their PhD dissertation with me."
And more examples are given.
Re: Academic Activists Send a Published Paper Down the Memory Hole
#25Direct arxiv link to the preprint in question: https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.04184 Kudos to the author for being brave enough to detail these events. Academia and the process of science has enough blind spots without needing activists in the mix to add their own. >“Several colleagues,” she wrote, had warned her that publication would provoke “extremely strong reactions” and there existed a “very real possibility that th…
It looks like a well written paper with some really cool ideas. Too bad about what happened to it
There is nothing original or subtle about it, and it was blatantly intended by the Mathematical Intelligencer editor to stir shit up.
Re: Academic Activists Send a Published Paper Down the Memory Hole
#26I had not heard of Quillette until Tyler Cowen interviewed [0] Claire Lehmann, the founding editor. This article, and the precipitating events, fit perfectly into Quillette’s raison d’etre [1]. [0] - https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/claire-lehmann-t... [1] - https://quillette.com/about/
Indeed. The suspicious part of me wonders if the authors deliberately engineered this situation.
If the authors got fired would you still suspect they engineered it? In reality this kind of stuff spirals out of control chaotically so it's incredibly risky to do it on purpose.
Re: Academic Activists Send a Published Paper Down the Memory Hole
#27Amie Wilkinson has managed to do many times more harm to the image of women in science then this paper ever could.
Re: Academic Activists Send a Published Paper Down the Memory Hole
#28I had not heard of Quillette until Tyler Cowen interviewed [0] Claire Lehmann, the founding editor. This article, and the precipitating events, fit perfectly into Quillette’s raison d’etre [1]. [0] - https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/claire-lehmann-t... [1] - https://quillette.com/about/
I'm almost wondering whether Quillette should start a scientific publication arm for unsafe research. The open access model has low overhead, and it might be possible to allow researchers to publish under pseudonyms while upholding publication standards.
And why would publishing controversial subjects be "unsafe"? Isn't one of the merits of ones learning is to have an open mind to new ideas? Why is it that when something is published that a specific group disagrees with or has "feelings" that are troubling do we feel the need to appease them to no ends... I find this troubling myself.
Re: Academic Activists Send a Published Paper Down the Memory Hole
#29When opponents think about how 'damaging' papers like this are, they should also consider how damaging things like this are to the field in general, and how they may cause a lot of second-order harm.
Many that I know have begun to distrust areas of academia much more recently, and when they see scenarios like this over and over it doesn't help. We all know that no one will support you for saying the truth if it won't go down well politically. The end result of this is that Academia will only publish the 'right' results, but it will not matter as few will trust them to begin with.
After reading the full article I find it funny they decide to critique the paper by calling it 'pseudoscientific'. I'd like to play the same game back at them and simply call their beliefs 'pseudoscientific' and proceed to pretend like they are discredited and don't warrant further inspection.
If you keep crying wolf, eventually no one will believe you when you really need them to. You can't go against truth forever.
Re: Academic Activists Send a Published Paper Down the Memory Hole
#30This disgraceful behavior from academia is shredding the credibility of the entire enterprise. How is anyone supposed to trust any unintuitive conclusions with expensive implications --- for example, on climate change --- when the academic community has demonstrated a propensity to shriek at and censor unorthodox ideas instead of contest them on the merits?
Science has been hijacked from the inside for a long time now. While it's better than trusting straight up corporate releases, there are thumbs on the scales that push studies to get the results those giving the funding want.
Social science is particularly bad at this, to the point I doubt any research done since the 1950s isn't ideologically tainted, at that time due to the cold war and the need to discredit anything "communist".