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At an Academic Pressure Cooker, a Setback Turns Deadly

nytimes.com

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

#41

Post by narag »

timr wrote: post #5
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.

"Going postal" is hardly a tactful way of describing that situation. I don't think it's pop psychology to acknowledge that a small percentage of people in extremely stressful situations lose control, and end up doing awful things. It's impossible to have sincere sympathy and respect without a healthy dose of empathy. And to have empathy, you have to be able to acknowledge truths about situations that may not be polit…

...or simply because her superiors were assholes

Really? I've had some of this kind, and even when I was in a very stressful personal situation, I've never even thought of resorting to any kind of violence, even less shooting anyone.

These cases seem to be caused by mental illness. I agree with the person you're answering to that trying to "explain" a shooting this way is plainly wrong.

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

#42

Post by narag »

joe_the_user wrote: post #39
mnemonicsloth wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"help the victims grieve"... maximal moral unction... When an event like this touches your life, very few stimuli from outside your own personal bubble of pain and confusion have any chance of registering with you [1]. But having the national paper of record print headlines half-excusing your friend or family member's killer [2] because she's the right kind of people would definitely do it. [1] Some people express su…

What does "half-excusing" mean? Or... In what way was does describing the factors influencing a person's behavior excuse it?

In a pressure cooker the vapour has not many options: going through the security valve or making the cooker to explode. I don't think that's an accurate "description of factors", unless you take into account the killer is crazy, in which case the most important factor is precisely that.

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

#43

Post by amichail »

scott_s wrote: post #37
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.

Are you really incapable of understanding that other people may value something like tenure more than you do?

She found out that academia isn't really for her, so why would she want to stay anyway?

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

#44

Post by scott_s »

amichail wrote: post #43
scott_s wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you really incapable of understanding that other people may value something like tenure more than you do?

She found out that academia isn't really for her, so why would she want to stay anyway?

I'm not her; I can't tell you. But most people don't immediately devalue a goal the moment they realize they can't reach it.

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

#45

Post by colah »

maxharris wrote: post #20
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…

From John Galt's speech in Atlas Shrugged: "Justice is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake the character of men as you cannot fake the character of nature, that you must judge all men as conscientiously as you judge inanimate objects, with the same respect for truth, with the same incorruptible vision, by as pure and as rational a process of identification — that every man must be judged for what he is a…

>

>That's the moral case; note what I said in the parent comment about the practicality of capital punishment.

All I can say is that I'm ideologically opposed to this. Most people who know me in person describe me as naive and it's probably true. But I'm not able to look at people that way, and quite frankly I don't want to.

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

#46

Post by colah »

randallsquared wrote: post #36
colah wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 tha…

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. You focus on the single exception I mentioned to a retribution-based system as though I had not mentioned it as an exception at all. Why is that?

Because edge cases and extreme cases often reveal the difference between approaches/strategies/philosophies/ideologies/etc.

Our approaches lead us to different conclusions in this case, except for the fact that you look at reality and say that yours shouldn't be applied because in reality mistakes can happen. This is a perfectly valid stance, but it doesn't mean that the point shouldn't be looked at to analyse the differences in our approaches, as this is the most obvious case where they diverge.

There's also the fact that capital punishment is where this discussion began.

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

#48

Post by Eliezer »

scott_s wrote: post #44
amichail wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She found out that academia isn't really for her, so why would she want to stay anyway?

I'm not her; I can't tell you. But most people don't immediately devalue a goal the moment they realize they can't reach it.

Actually, most people do. The official term is cognitive dissonance, and the unofficial term is sour grapes.

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

#49

Post by scott_s »

Eliezer wrote: post #48
scott_s wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not her; I can't tell you. But most people don't immediately devalue a goal the moment they realize they can't reach it.

Actually, most people do. The official term is cognitive dissonance, and the unofficial term is sour grapes.

There is a difference between sour grapes and rationally deciding that your prior goal has no value.

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

#50

Post by scott_s »

hyperbovine wrote: post #24

"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.

There are academic scientists who don't get grants. They are denied tenure outright. Since she was denied tenure, it's worthwhile to note that she did have grants. If she had no grants and expected to get tenure, then that would tell us something. This also tells us she met some requirements for tenure. (But not much, because we don't know how much money these grants were, and how much her department expects.)
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