That doesn't follow from what I said. And family members for better or worse have been on-limits since at least Billy Carter. And what did I say that led you to infer that I was admitting anything? Or is "basically" supposed to provide some kind of justification for what you said. Lastly, I was being descriptive. Slow down there, cowboy.
I'm sorry, Claudine Gay didn't just "criticize Israel", she testified before congress that calling for genocide against Jews was okay under the Harvard speech codes. I guess you could technically argue that she's just a hardcore free speech absolutist, but then you'd have to ignore literally everything else you know about Harvard's attitude towards controversial free speech.
Mostly just come on, we know she would never say that with another group. If someone with a track record of being a principled free speech supporter (like Scott) said the same thing I'd hear him out, but given Gay's track record...
I guess she might be okay with saying that about ex-colonial powers/European powers... :)
I am not saying she's intellectually honest. I am saying her position was not idiotic or automatically antisemitic. Basically, what Silverax said - she handled terribly but her answer is technically correct.
Yes, I agree that she herself likely doesn't care much about Jews one way or the other and is just appeasing the political blocs around her, and her antisemitism is just downstream of antisemitism being the net consensus of those blocks (some of which actively like it and most of which don't care either way).
Despite not being Jewish, I disagree with your position. Gay came out against hypothetical speech against specific groups earlier. That she places context around speech about Jews, but not around the same speech concerning other groups is the troubling part.
I believe we should allow contextual speech of all stripes: Nazis, Klansmen, etc. But to place a limit on the monsters is troubling, favoritism.
Agreed. If Gay had had a consistent history of treating apologists for Hamas and apologists for the KKK in the same way - either permitting both, in which case she could have claimed that free speech trumped other concerns, or banning both, in which case she could have claimed that maintaining civility trumped other concerns, then she would have been honorable. She was not.
I'm not happy with using the selective enforcement of plagiarism rules against her. Targeting reminds me too much of Cardinal Richelieu's "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." I prefer that laws and other rules either be uniformly enforced or repealed - though I recognize that this will never happen, and selective enforcement is something the powerful regularly use.
I agree her answer wasn't antisemitic, in the sense of expressing hate for Jews. But it wasn't just a misstep either. Her statements, compared to Harvard's usual stance on these topics, reveals that she *doesn't mind* antisemitism. At least, she doesn't mind it enough to act against students who really are antisemitic. That's not exactly antisemitism, but it's still very concerning and below the standard that I hold for leaders of our institutions.
If it depends on context, and you're testifying before Congress, and you don't say "it depends on context," that's perjury
You're acting like she wrote Harvard's code of conduct herself, or endorsed it, instead of accurately describing it when asked
I'm pretty sure she did ansolutely nothing wrong *in the specific moment you're referring to*. I am in no way a supporter of Gay. I'm actually immune to political bias here because I'm too dumb to understand how it all fits in the big picture and can only take individual claims on their individual merits. Yours seems to lack merit
"I'm pretty sure she did ansolutely nothing wrong *in the specific moment you're referring to*."
I disagree, but I'm not sure my position is coherent. I would appreciate a gut check if you have a moment:
The moment in congress was exactly where she errored. She as the president of Harvard represents the establishment. Her job is to beg money from the 0.001% to keep an institution that is 140 years older then the republic (for which I stand) rich. She's a sales-person; there's no shame in that, they are the folks who make the checks show up, but still that's her vocation.
The aforementioned establishment heard some things it didn't like coming from a college campus like direction. It then called three of it's officers to the mat and demanded an oath of fealty. Claudine didn't feel inclined to bow, whether out of pride or ignorance. So it became clear to the persons (committee?) that assigns / removes presidents at Harvard that Miss Gay is no longer capable of doing her job well.
QED she found herself moved to the Harvard equivalent of special projects; you know, same plush salary, same shiny lab, none of the responsibility to deliver. She even gets a pious martyrdom in trade for all the power she lost. Let us all bask in the knowledge that if you play your cards right sometimes the system hands out $878,000 a year for failure, wow, go Claudine!
As to the establishment hearing something it didn't like, yes the establishment is still very much committed to 1 the state of Israel's existence and 2 the idea that we ostracize people who won't kowtow to congress. The state of Israel is supported cynically now but it is supported. The US has many entanglements in the middle east but can't trust any of them to back us whenever we call like the Israelis will. If the Palestinians 1 had a leader who controlled them, 2 had the economic or military power to hold land and feed themselves and their army and 3 would honor deals made with said leader then, only then things might be different. But they don't, they can't, and they won't.
It does not matter how powerful the radical left gets or how loudly they yell things these are the facts. We ally with the partners that exist not the partners we would like to exist.
Now the hard part:
I hate the establishment. It tells me how to think and I must suffer this in silence or risk losing everything and leading a life in prison. But I do love to watch it eat it's own, I see Claudine Gay as deserving what she got because she forgot that to get the benefits of power she has to pay the price. I hate that the establishment wields it's terrible corrupt power but I love to see it cutting it's officers down when they step out of line. I understand what happened and why but I am troubled by being happy about a cynical hatchet job committed against a genocide agnostic sales woman. Everything here is sad... what do what do /holds head and starts rocking back and forth in corner....
I disagree with this reading that she refused to kiss the ring
She was not offered a ring to kiss. She was walked off a plank, and her options were to drown or be stabbed
Because the fact is that some students have called for genocide (in the eyes of many) but they have not, in fact, violated the code of conduct. If she says that they didn't call for genocide, everyone is angry. If she says they have but doesn't violate the code, everyone is angry. If she says they have called for genocide and it's not allowed, the next question is "why haven't you expelled them" and we're back at square one. If she tries to explain that it's nuanced and while calling for genocide certainly can violate the code, there may be instances where it wouldn't (which is exactly what she said), then nobody will listen and everyone will be angry (because that's exactly what happened).
Once the question was asked, the game was lost
Now, it's possible the backlash was deserved, in the grand scheme. I actually do not know how she responded to any of the other questions, I literally haven't seen the rest of the hearing and I know zero things about this person. I'm only referring to that one question
To say 'context' means that we can study say Nazis and Klansmen, and read their speeches without condoning their meaning. But Gay placed limits around studying the speech of select groups.
If students had recently called for genocide of Africans in a manner which factually did not violate the code of conduct, she'd have no choice
She can't expell all the students who call for genocide, many of them don't deserve expulsion or any discipline. She can't claim they haven't called for genocide, the people who interpret their words as calls for genocide would be incensed and call her an lying idiot. As long as those two facts are true, she can't claim that calls for genocide violate the code of conduct, she'd just get the obvious follow-up question and be back where she started
Now, maybe if it were Africans instead of Jews she would have been more forceful in explaining that the school doesn't approve of such things and they shouldn't be tolerated etc. Did she say those things forcefully in this hearing about Jews? I have no idea, I haven't seen it. If you have seen it and think she failed to support her Jewish students, say that. Make that claim if it's true. So far, we're only discussing the one piece of evidence, and it's bad evidence
Guys, c'mon, she literally said exactly that in the hearing. People are only pissed at her because Ackman and others straw-manned her position (insinuating that she didn't condemn genocide) and because most people have tyrannical hearts and want to see speech they don't like suppressed: https://www.c-span.org/video/?c5097070/user-clip-claudine-gay-free-speech-hero
Academics and activists can and do say genocidal-sounding things about white people fairly often and get away with it.
The confusion or debate (whatever you want to call it) basically seems to revolve around the question: should the rules for what you can say about Jews be the rules applied to ‘marginalized groups’ (women, black people, gay people) which are very restrictive, or should they get the treatment given to oppressor/perpetrator groups (men, white people, most specific European ethnicities or nationalities) which permit a great deal of hostility.
Some people like myself would like a consistent etiquette that regards broad derogation of ethnic groups or nationalities to be in bad taste in general rather than based on some stratification of victim/oppressor groups, but I think this position isn’t the most popular one.
I mostly agree. An asterisk here about Jews specifically is that they kinda get the worst of both worlds: most white people (and most leftist activists are white) are at least sane enough to realize the problems with calling for violence against white people as a group since it includes them. But Jews are in the uncomfortable position of being (mostly) classified as an oppressor group but also being enough of a minority that you don't have a large class of people protecting them out of self interest.
The point is not that calling for genocide is OK. It's whether the speech is calling for genocide or not.
That was basically them setting her up for a gotcha where if she says "no", then they say she has to stop people from saying "from the river to the sea...".
They she should just have said, "Calling for genocide is always against Harvard's speech codes. Whether 'From the river to the sea...' counts as a call for genocide depends on the context in which it's said."
The river in the couplet is the Jordan River, Israel's western border. The sea is the Mediterranean Sea, Israel's eastern border. "Will be free" is not a call to freedom, but free of Jews. "From Israel's western border to Israel's eastern border, the territory will be Judenfrei" isn't as catchy, but conveys the same meaning.
It is, at minimum, a call for ethnic cleansing, if it is not a call for genocide.
Do you think every single person who has ever said "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" has meant "Palestinians will ethnically cleanse all Jews in Greater Israel"? That not one has meant, just for example, "There will be a singular liberal democratic state between the river Jordan and the Mediterranean, called Palestine, with people living there more-or-less being the same as right now"? I mean, do you ACTUALLY think that?
She does not want to take a position on "From the river to the sea," because she knows full well that if she says it either is or is not a call for genocide (in any circumstance), then pro-Israel partisans will accuse her of saying it's sometimes okay to get rid of Jews "from the river to the sea."
Do you think she would have had any trouble responding to the question "Is it ok to call for the genocide of Palestinians?"
And if she says "no" she doesn't have to stop people from speaking their mind. The only reason she couldn't answer that way is because they have stopped people from speaking their mind. It was a trap of her own making.
It is absolutely relevant and it's part of the "nuance" you are hanging your hat on. Seriously.
While it is unfortunate that the game today is played as "if you aren't against something you must be for it", but that is reality. This tack is used against conservatives with glee and regularity. A good example of that is when Trump said "There are good people on both sides." and that was reported as "Trump supports racism."
I disagree on the "nuance" issue. She twisted herself in knots trying to provide a non-answer because she knew an honest answer would bite her. It's a fairly easy question to answer: "Genocide is never ok, but free speech is always ok." The trouble is, if she would have provided that answer, she would have been called out on the obvious.
The problem is that there is nuance which might exist here, but any such nuance would be a lie coming from her.
This is just a matter of semantics. If there's nuance, but the nuance is a lie, does that count as having nuance? Maybe on a strictly logical level it would, but that's not what most people mean by "does it have nuance". It doesn't have truthful nuance. And the fact that she wouldn't say the same thing about calling to genocide Palestinians indicates that the nuance wouldn't be truthful.
I think I remember a CEO losing his job b/c he used the n word while trying to make the case that his employees should be sensitive and not use bad/taboo language.
So he used the taboo word as example and got (iirc) summarily fired? That's a case of context not being taken into account.
Pedantically, he didn't use the n word, he mentioned it. This was an obvious distinction to our wiser forebears like... ten years ago, and we've somehow lost it. (For another case, Donald McNeil at the Times.) Mentioning "from the river to the sea," as I did just now, is okay regardless of context.
Calling for genocide is okay. It's free speech. It's legal unless it's both intended to and likely to incite imminent lawlessness.
The problem is that Harvard couldn't say that, because Harvard knows it doesn't support free speech. It routinely punishes people for speech that falls squarely within 1A protections. It revoked admissions to people who said dumb things on Twitter years before they were admitted. It fired a law professor for defending a client it didn't like. So Harvard can't turn around and say what it should have said "Yes, calling for genocide is generally protected speech. Even things we *really really don't like* can be protected speech, and Harvard will not punish or penalize students or faculty for protected speech just because we find it distasteful or even disgusting. That is what the First Amendment specifically and more broadly freedom of expression mean, and it is Harvard's mission as a place of learning to protect and nurture such ideals."
It couldn't say that, so it had to blather about context.
She wasn't asked if it was "ok", she asked if it was "harassment" under Harvard's policy, and harassment always depends on context; who are you saying it to, under what circumstances, etc.
It's very easy to. Imagine someone writes a paper for their "Law, Human Rights, and Social Justice in Israel-Palestine" class. In this paper, they argue that, long-term, Palestinian birthrates are high enough that, unchecked, the increase in Arab population between Israel and the occupied territories will lead to political instability and violence. As such, they argue that slavish adherence to traditional human rights law leads to suboptimal outcomes, and Israel should begin instituting concrete population control measures to cut down on the Palestinian Arab population. In addition, they advise Israel work out deals with surrounding Arab regimes and adopt ethnically-targeted financial incentives to encourage Palestinians to emigrate to them.
This paper constitutes a textbook call for genocide. Should the student be subject to disciplinary action for writing it?
It depends on what you mean by "genocide". For example, if you say something like "The Anti-Defamation League is a terrible organization that does terrible things", you may or may not be correct; however, in this case you are definitely *not* calling for genocide. However, an argument can (and has) been made that since the ADL's primary goal is to prevent genocide, by speaking out against them you are implicitly endorsing genocide, and therefore you should be silenced.
You can call for the eradication of a group like Al Qaida and Hamas and Nazis…and so a group like the Nazis was pretty large although probably not large enough to characterize their eradication as “genocide”. What about WW2 Japanese? Was dropping the bomb on them getting close to “genocide”?
She was caught between a rock and a hard place of her own ideological making. It was shocking that someone like her who had existed within this ideology her entire life could not formulate an appropriate answer in this context, given the lead time she had to prepare. Even at this moment right now, the obvious answer is something along the lines of: “This is is a complicated issue as our previous stances on free speech were formed in the context of protecting an oppressed class. However, now we are in a situation where we have two oppressed classes at war, and we don’t feel that it’s our place to pick a side. While we absolutely cannot allow the advocacy of violence, we have to balance that with not silencing an oppressed group. Calling for genocide is absolutely not allowed by our student code, but in the interest of the protestors, we will be very fluid as we determine what statesmen’s rise to the level of “violent speech” and we’ll encourage our students to make sure that as they protest, they don’t speak flippantly, and imbue their words with nuance and respect as students at our esteemed university have been trained to do.”
She can't, unless they change the written policies of Harvard. The written policies protects free speech, their actions show they don't care about those, but she can't admit it directly, or she would be contravening her written policies.
"An oppressed class (as I define it) can say or do whatever they want, including calls for genocide and violence against an oppressor class. Jews (like whites) are not an oppressed class."
If pressed, she could have elaborated about oppressor classes!
"An oppressor class (such as Jews or whites) are not allowed to say or do anything unless every single member of an oppressed class explicitly gives permission to speak or act."
It would still have endeared her to the psychopaths on the authoritarian left, so she probably should have said something like this.
The Harvard students never called for genocide against the Jews, and President Gay never supported a call for genocide.
Sample quotes from the internet.
What do you think about Harvard President Claudine Gay's apology for her remarks about calling for the genocide of Jews?
Do you agree with Harvard President Claudine Gay that calling for the genocide of Jews on campus depends on the "context"?
After witnessing the Congressional testimony of Claudine Gay, the President of Harvard, I am ashamed of my alma mater. How should Harvard respond to a call for the genocide of Jews on its campus?
When asked if calling for the genocide of Jews would violate Harvard's code of conduct, Gay wouldn't give a yes or no answer. Harvard constitutional law scholar Laurence Tribe called her testimony hesitant, formulaic and evasive. But he was among hundreds of faculty members who rallied behind Gay, urging Harvard to keep its president.
So exactly what was the testimony?
ELISE STEFANIK: It’s a yes or no question. Let me ask you this. You are president of Harvard, so I assume you’re familiar with the term intifada, correct?
CLAUDINE GAY: I’ve heard that term, yes.
ELISE STEFANIK: And you understand that the use of the term intifada in the context of the Israeli Arab conflict is indeed a call for violent armed resistance against the state of Israel, including violence against civilians and the genocide of Jews. Are you aware of that?
CLAUDINE GAY: That type of hateful speech is personally abhorrent to me.
ELISE STEFANIK: And there have been multiple marches at Harvard with students chanting quote, “there is only one solution intifada revolution.” And quote, “globalize the intifada.” Is that correct?
CLAUDINE GAY: I’ve heard that thoughtless, reckless and hateful language on our campus, yes.
ELISE STEFANIK: So, based upon your testimony, you understand that this call for intifada is to commit genocide against the Jewish people in Israel and globally, correct?
CLAUDINE GAY: I will say again that type of hateful speech is personally abhorrent to me.
ELISE STEFANIK: Do you believe that type of hateful speech is contrary to Harvard’s code of conduct or is it allowed at Harvard?
CLAUDINE GAY: It is at odds with the values of Harvard. But our values also —
ELISE STEFANIK: Can you not say here that it is against the code of conduct at Harvard?
CLAUDINE GAY: We embrace a commitment to free expression, even of views that are objectionable, offensive, hateful. It’s when that speech crosses into conduct that violates our policies against bullying, harassment —
ELISE STEFANIK: Does that speech not cross that barrier? Does that speech not call for the genocide of Jews and the elimination of Israel?
CLAUDINE GAY: When —
ELISE STEFANIK: You testify that you understand that it’s the definition of intifada. Is that speech according to the code of conduct or not?
CLAUDINE GAY: We embrace a commitment to free expression and give a wide berth to free expression even of views that are objectionable —
It's worth mentioning that she was specifically being asked about Harvard's "harassment policy". The definition of "harassment" usually depends a great deal on context, and it should.
The entre question was a setup; they were trying to make her either say something they could blacklist her for or get her to lie under oath so they could hit her with perjury charges. She was never asked what she thought, and that was deliberate.
I don't have a lot of sympathy for her or for Harvard here, but this is basically McCarthyist tactics from Congress.
Trying to get someone to tell the truth, in the knowledge that if they tell the truth it would reflect unfavorably on them, isn't a setup, it's just questioning.
This is untrue. She gives a straightforward answer on when it would constitute harassment. Posting on facebook that all jews should be exterminated is not harassment. Posting a sign in a jewish student's window is harassment. You can disagree with this definition or with the policy, but she was not unclear.
If you need to use a word "technically" while explaining somebody's position on genocide of Jews, chances are it's not a good position. It's not some hard, hotly contested question where both sides have good arguments and you need to get deep into technical intricacies to get it right. Or at least it shouldn't be. And she wouldn't go for "context" if she were asked about whether anti-gay, anti-black or anti-trans statements - even not raising to the level of genocidal calls - are agains Harvard policy. She'd drop on it like a hawk on a mouse. So *for her* it's a complex question, which shows how far she - and American academia - has fallen.
But context still matters. OK, let's say I'm comparing the outcome for American colonizers and, say, the fate of the colonizers in Algeria or South Africa or Zimbabwe. I could easily end up saying something like "genociding Native Americans seems to have been a pretty positive step for the colonizers".
Am I supporting Native Americans' genocide? No. There are no moral grounds for invading and murdering people in order to steal their stuff/their lands. But historically it happened a lot. And that's the context that allows me to discuss it without being branded a warmonger, or wannabe war criminal etc.
Nobody disputes that context matters. But the action the context is attached to also matters! There could be millions of scenarios where it's hard to tell. Genocide of Jews is not one of them. She was asked if calling to genocide is against the Harvard policy. And if there was no *"of Jews"* attached to it, I am absolutely confident she wouldn't spent more than a second on it - she'd clearly and forcefully answer it, that yes, this is unacceptable and against every policy. But "in context" - specifically in context of significant share of her party and her peer circle being openly antisemitic or extremely-thinly-velied antisemitic (like "we don't support murder of Jews, we only support Hamas and too bad some people did something to Jews, but it's their own fault") - she is not able or does not want to exercise the same moral clarity that she would if "of Jews" were omitted from the question. Yes, we all know this context, and this context is exactly the reason her behavior is so appalling. Not that she "technically" misquoted some policy. The problem is not that she said "context" - the problem is we understand perfectly what kind of "context" she means, and how it is applied, and that is exactly the problem.
I'm under the impression that their (the university presidents') controversial response was to "is calling for genocide of Jews harassment", saying "no, unless it's [legal definition of harassment]". I guess this is technically(??) correct but I don't know why they chose to frame it in this way, especially since at least at MIT the administration has not been sympathetic to pro-Palestine protestors (and I'd assumed the situation was approximately the same at Harvard). Maybe because otherwise, under some interpretation of protest calls, they'd have to discipline literally hundreds of students.
> they'd have to discipline literally hundreds of students.
So, they are afraid to apply the anti-harassment policy because too many of their students engage in harassment? And that's somehow an *excuse* for them, not the reason for deep soul searching and mass layoffs of those responsible? It's like a bank robber would say "well, obviously I can't stop robbing banks because they I wouldn't have the money!".
If there's any good thing to come out of the whole mess in Israel... well, it's the in-progress eradication of Hamas. That's been sorely needed for a long time. But if there's *another* good thing to come out of it, it's been the clear exposure for all to see, of just how much of modern academia and journalism plays by "rules" that are nothing more than Calvinball. A lot of people have been claiming this for a good while, but now it's become impossible to ignore or deny.
I have to disagree as IIRC both Calvin and Hobbes could change the rules whenever they wanted so it was fair in that regard. Whereas the rules that Scott is talking about are basically we can do or say anything to protect the in group and hurt the out group.
The technique that is working for Rufo and others right now is breaking past the obfuscation and attempted chaff of racism/sexism accusations and make them explicitly state a rule (almost any rule really) and then show that they flout it.
The amorphous rules are sort of a defense from the Alinsky technique of "make your opponent follow their own rules" and this is a counter to that defense.
I always liked that particular story, but I just now realized that the moment Rosalyn bonded with Calvin was in the one arena where he had complete control. And he let her end the game on her own terms, instead of making up a new rule to counter "the baby-sitter flag".
To clarify, it would not be if she were a known free speech absolutist, or even showed any signs of valuing free speech that would harm other oppressed minorities, but she isn't and doesn't.
Yeah, it seemed to me that her answer was the right one, but didn't track with her actions in power or the actions of Harvard wrt speech they didn't like for the last couple decades.
2. It's got to fall into 1 because of a group's' protected status
3. It's got to be "objectively offensive"
4. It's got to be "create a work, educational or living environment that a reasonable person would consider intimidating, hostile or abusive"
5. It's got to "den[y] the individual an equal opportunity to participate in the benefits of the workplace or the institution's programs or activities."
It looks like it will satisfy 1 and 2, assuming 1 is subjective. I'm not sure 3 is a coherent idea. I'd come down on the side of 4 and 5 being a "no," but I think the criteria for satisfying them is "I reasonably believe that a substantial portion of my classmates hate me." Probably not in practice, but I'm basing that on contextual assumptions that different people would make different calls on.
I kind of wish she was someone with a long legacy of free speech defense, and that it had protected her. But yeah, she tore down all the traditional protections around her and then got eaten when she finally said something awful. Hard to feel sympathetic but wish there was some integrity in those places.
It's dead-on the scene from A Man for All Seasons, really.
"And, when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you – where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast – man’s laws, not God’s – and, if you cut them down – and you’re just the man to do it – d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake."
Mind explaining to slowly why that quote applies given I'm an outcast who skipped applying for jobs because they said "antivaxx need not apply" while she's a diversity hire who's *still employed* of whats considered to be the worse university for free speech, and she did just factually and obviously commit plagiarism?
I will need it to be very slow since Im very very dumb, but the way I see it its not me, not my community, and not in my power to effect.
You have to honor principles even when they are unpopular because popularity changes and principles are eternal.
Editing this to be nicer:
You have a right to bodily autonomy because in principle everyone has the right to make their own health choices. Not sure what I wrote made you think I would not support that.
My position on abortion swaped when it became painfully clear that "my body my choice"/medical privacy was a way to extract my compliance while giving nothing in return shortly before the supreme court re opened the issue.
While I will never intend to force people to take alex johns approved pills, I'm not sheading any tears over calling 9-mouth abortions murder, because its always been a grey area and difficult position to hold.
I don't have a simple answer of how to hold principals in the face of a political enemy. But I'm damn sure its not a naive assume your endless goodness will convince everyone, and something towards letting grey areas go while your weak. While fascism is gaining power I do not wish to allow fascists to speak at the "jews sending their children to america" meeting, kernels of power and decision making must be immune form outsiders, somehow, and in-power and hostile ones especially.
It has nothing to do with whether you feel sympathetic for her. A win against her was a win by people whose goal is to restrict speech targeting Israel. She stood up for that sort of speech in her testimony, and her opponents got her scalp for it, and every university president in the country took notice. "These are the stakes for allowing free speech on Israel." The next time they address this issue on their own campuses, they will be less likely to defend students protesting Israel.
I am aware. While I see the concrete and practical reality, there is a human reality where people will always cheer to see someone subjected to the consequences of their own actions.
I agree. I just think it's odd that, on this issue, I keep seeing commentary in the form of, "Well, she's right on the issues, but she didn't put her best foot forward in those hearings," or "It's definitely a loss for free speech, but it's hard to defend someone so unsympathetic." People should have the strength of their convictions. If people disagree with what happened, they should say that, not act like jaded PR people, tut-tutting about their candidates performance in front of the cameras.
I think the unspoken truth there is that personal integrity is the first bulwark to these principles being compromised. People won’t live with hypocrisy so if you’re hypocritical on a bedrock principle you’re a severe danger.
It exposed different rules for different identity groups and no amount of graduate level obfuscation was going to get her out of it. Nobody believes that calls for genocide against favored identity groups would have gone unpunished in the age of microaggressions, preferred pronouns, bias response teams, and trigger warnings. This so called trap was laid by the incoherent ideology and has little to do with Israel itself.
It's not really even that she said calling for genocide against Jews was okay. It's that Harvard isn't (or isn't seen as) consistently in favor of free speech. They are in favor of free speech when it comes to genocide against Jews, but not so much on other controversial positions.
> Fortunately the ICJ ruling indicates that era is ending.
What are you talking about? The ICJ hasn't reached a verdict on whether Israel's military operation constitutes genocide, and it probably won't for several years.
I think words have power if people care about them. Israel doesn't care because they have the US backing them up, and the US doesn't care because it is by far the most powerful country in the world. The governments have no practical obligation to give a single shit about calls of genocide.
Sorry, but she was specifically asked about "calling for the genocide of Jews" and she refused to say that was a violation of the Harvard code of conduct. See the transcript:
I don't mean to be rude. I'm just trying to simulate the pressure Dr. Gay was under.
Back up a step. She had aleady agreed (by silence) that intifada means genocide. (Which I strenuously dispute.) The students were clearly calling for intifada and global support for intifada. So in Stefanik's mind they were calling for genocide. This was the immediate context at the hearing where Stephanik asked her question about the Harvard code of conduct. Given that framing, agreeing that calling for genocide violates the Harvard code of contact immediately implies that these students should be disciplined. (Do you think the student should be disciplined?) Dr Gay didn't want to agree that they should be disciplined.
That's the first reason to resist answering the question. Now let's say she actually does want to answer the question. And what if the truth is that it depends on the context. Imagine that in a classroom discussion a student contends that the world would be better off without Israel. Has that student violated the code of conduct? I'm no expert, but my gut tells me not. This is an abstract idea and protected speech.
Is there a way to advocate eliminating Israel that does violate the code of conduct. Probably so. So the truth is: it depends on the context.
It was that statement, "depends on the context," that infuriated millions of ignorant simple-minded people.
That's ridiculous. She was repeatedly asked whether calling for genocide of Jews is necessarily against the code of conduct. She refused to say that it was. I don't know what Harvard's policy is, but if I were setting policy I would have no difficulty in immediately saying that calling for genocide of any group is unacceptable. (For the record, calling for genocide is a crime against humanity under the Genocide Convention, which has been ratified by the US and thus is also US law.) If Gay's position was "calling for genocide is a violation of the code of conduct, but calling for intifada is not calling for genocide", she should have said so. She had many chances to say that, and refused to.
Harvard College strives to maintain a safe and secure environment for all members of the
community and thus does not tolerate physical violence or threats of physical violence used by or against the members of the community. Students are expected to avoid all physical conflicts, confrontations, and altercations unless their own safety or that of another is at extreme jeopardy. Failure to do so will ordinarily result in disciplinary action, including, but not limited to, requirement to withdraw from the College.
Here is the link. I quoted the section on physical violence.
What do you say? Does calling for genocide violate the Harvard code of conduct?
I think a possibility here is that you care about what Claudine Gay said about Israel and Jewish people, and you support actions that hold her accountable for that, but the truth is, those actors holding her accountable could care less about Israel, and are just using your morals (and everyone who thinks like you) as a weapon against Claudine Gay to disempower her.
You are sincere, the accusers are not. To me, that wouldn't feel right.
It could be any number of things, but usually when I've been proximate to these situations, it more petty than you would think. Do you think that Chris Rufo and Chris Brunet do not benefit professionally from this, by getting more money, deals, recognition or power? They could be interested in scoring points for their side or personal brand - whether or not they personally care about the issues they are yelling about.
I do not think these people give a wild hoot about plagiarism. They are using public outrage about plagiarism to target an enemy to win, for either personal advancement or tribal thinking reasons. They are leveraging public outrage about Israel to target a Black woman in a position of power as an avatar of DEI. Theoretically, all they had to do was wait for the right kind of uproar to attack their favorite targets.
Just like Claudine Gay didn't care about academia when she plagiarized. And she didn't care about freedom of speech in a number of cases before the Israel controversy - she's been wildly inconsistent in applying this principle.
Both sides selectively use morality to advance their agendas. The public cares about these morals a lot, and the leaders leverage that power for their own gain.
Why do you think there is public outrage about plagiarism in the first place? Because it's a kind of cheating or stealing, no? Is it so hard to believe Chris Rufo doesn't like cheating any more than the next guy?
I didn't say cheating wasn't bad. Most people think that. I think the leaders you follow say that in public, but their actions show they are hypocrites. That's the whole point of Scott's piece, about the dishonesty and lack of character of powerful leaders that leverage moral accusations (that the general public cares very much about) to win culture wars points, when those leaders do not consistently apply those principles (which shows they don't really care).
That's the whole thing about Neri Oxman. The team that accused Claudine Gay of plagiarism had a known plagiarist in their midst, and they didn't care.
Which totally checks out.
I think something that sucks about power dynamics - I don't know if this is new or if its always been this way - but you can't be in power and not play this way, at least sometimes.
But in the bottom line, this bad publicity is an assymetric weapon that only worked against Gay because she genuinely was bad enough for people who were neutral in whatever personal dispute she has with Chris Rufo to come down against her. In a sense Rufo doesn't matter here - anyone in a high profile position like that will have some people who are interested in making her look bad, and what we want is to have it only succeed when she actually is bad. In this case this was the system working as intended.
I edited to say: I think your take here is one without integrity. Either academic honesty and Israel mean something, or they do not. Letting a figurehead manipulate your earnest morals for their own personal gain to get an outcome that you are both aligned with is, I think, a selling out of the value of your own morality.
I truly believe that until the majority of US citizens can get beyond this thinking, and support leaders that have actual values, we will be stuck in a endless loop of ineffectual governments, lackluster politicians, and vapid culture wars.
I think Shaked's point is that the specifics of who found dirt on Gay are irrelevant. It could have been a graduate student studying her work or a friendly news outlet, or her political enemies as appears to be the case. What we, those reading about this story on the outside, should care about is whether she broke a rule/norm/cultural expectation/whatever that is relevant to us. If we do not doubt that the accusations are true, then the messenger is almost meaningless (I care a lot about the messenger when I have to consider whether the accusations are accurate in the first place).
Will this norm result in a lot of people losing their positions in society? Potentially - but that's where we consider whether the sanctions for bad behavior are properly calibrated. Getting fired for a 10+year old mild to moderate offense does not seem to be properly calibrated, but that's where society seems to be at the moment.
In the interest of making explicit things that are obvious to everyone, as Scott says ... this isn't motivated by concern for the Jews in general. It's motivated by the idea that Universities don't crack down on criticism of/protest against Israel in the name of fighting anti-Semitism.
It's like when all the people who care oh-so-much about anti-Semitism, rallied to Elon Musk's defense when he agreed with someone who said "Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them". It's not about concern for Jews, it's about concern for Israel.
That blatantly ridiculous, it's that people take "guy who constantly shitposts liked a random offensive tweet" less seriously than "mobs marching down the street calling for genocide against the Jews while the leaders of elite institutions support them".
"it's that people take 'guy who constantly shitposts liked a random offensive tweet' less seriously"
There's a question of "how seriously should you take Elon Musk's tweets", one response might be to take it very seriously, and one response might be to treat him the same as a random nobody.
But people (including in this case Bill Ackman) weren't treating him as a random nobody - they were actively defending him!
"less seriously than 'mobs marching down the street calling for genocide against the Jews while the leaders of elite institutions support them'."
Don't have time to write more right now, but again, I don't think "calling for genocide against the Jews" is actually what the people involved here found objectionable. It was the question that was asked at the Congressional hearing, but not the actual motivation.
In fact, I don't think she criticized Israel at all in that Congressional testimony. She did defend calling for genocide against Jews. And so do I, because I'm close to a free speech absolutist! But as you said, Gay is very much not, at least on woke issues.
It *is* okay under the free speech codes. You're accusing her of *NOT* lying to Congress
Or rather, it's a complicated question, which is what she said. I'm pretty sure lying to Congress is a crime, if she had said anything other than what she did say, she'd be in jail
The underlying issue of whether or not Harvard should have stronger/less strong free speech protections is a fair point of contention, but I honestly can't tell what exactly your real issue is, and the thing you mention explicitly is... absolutely not a bad thing that Gay did
Look, we all know if she'd been asked the same thing about, say, black people or trans people, she would have replied differently. I do know she has excuses constructed after the fact to try to make her statement sound reasonable.
Yes, and would you support her answers in that case? If not, maybe just admit that your actual position on free speech is "I'm against it when being against it benefits my preferred causes and for it when being for it benefits my preferred causes."
Okay, since you're not a hypocrite, then my assumption is that you your long-held position must be that Harvard should crack down on anti-Black rhetoric, anti-trans rhetoric, and so on. This is very good to know.
The thing is that all three presidents were coached by the same lawyers and they all parsed essentially in the same way presumably based on how they were legally prepped.
The questioning was a minefield and they all stepped on the same mine in following their legal coaching.
I don’t think anything Gay said was about her personal opinion. She was being an institutional mouthpiece in the same way they all were.
Notice how this is irrelevant to anything I said, and doesn't change the truth of the emotionally-related-but-distinct claim the original commenter was making
It's not at all irrelevant. Harvard's free speech codes obviously don't prevent it cracking down on speech it doesn't like, so it absolutely could crack down on calls for Jewish genocide, if it wanted to.
It's wild hearing people describe these issues who have only heard about them filtered through a few layers of propaganda. There were of course no calls for genocide against Jews at Harvard, that is nuts.
You're quoting Harvard's Hillel house's characterization of the word "intifada," which means, quite literally, "revolution." Saying that the Arabic word for "revolution" is necessarily a call for genocide is totally unserious.
If someone chants about how Palestinians should have a violent uprising right after October 7th happened, it's not hard to understand what they actually mean.
There is no "Palestinian definition of 'Intifada.'" 'Intifada' is an Arabic word. It is the word for revolution. When Palestinian students learn about the Warsaw Uprising, their textbooks call it the انتفاضة وارسو, aka the "Warsaw Intifada."
What you're actually arguing, implicitly, is that any call for armed Palestinian resistance to the Israelis is a de facto call for genocide. This is difficult to square with both logic and international law, but also with the fact that the First Palestinian Intifada resulted in the most dramatic and effective push for Palestinian/Israeli peace that has ever occurred.
Yeah I'm sure the people shouting that *right after* Palestinians went on a rampage of murdering babies and grandmas, raping women to death and carving out people's eyes were advocating for peaceful resistance.
The organisers (including the guy who led the chant) quite directly explained, in the article you linked, how they were using the word - to denote "liberation" and "the right to resist."
Had they desired the actual genocide of Jews (which is a desire several orders removed from a territorial modification of the state of Israel), surely there were plenty of punchier slogans available.
I do wonder whether Gay would have fared better if she went fully to the mat with Stefanik on the linguistic/previous usage question of intifada instead of giving her "depends on context" reply. My hunch is yes.
I'm aware they later tried to pretend they said something else to avoid getting in trouble. I took once got in trouble in elementary school for calling someone a bitch and then tried to explain that actually I was just talking about her dog.
The only reference to genocide in that article is in an email from a campus group claiming that chants that included the word "intifada" were genocidal, which in the next paragraph the article explains is a clearly incorrect interpretation of those chants.
Calling for a violent uprising against the Jews right after a terrorist group started one which killed hundreds of people and abducted hundreds more is absolutely genocidal. You don't get to go "oh it's just an Arabic word for struggle" any more that you get to say that about me in kampf. I mean you can say it if you want to pretend to pretend to mean something else, but the real meaning isn't ambiguous.
I'm having a hard time understanding how you could believe that. Surely you get that even to the very arguable extent that the chant implies support for the 10/7 attack, that doesn't imply any endorsement of genocide?
How is supporting attempted genocide different than supporting genocide? "I support attempts at X" does, in general, imply that you actually want X to happen, it's not some unreasonable conclusion to jump to.
She did not testify to this. You're adopting a partisan framing which deliberately misunderstands her words in a way you would not do for any other issue.
There's a difference between debating the validity of her words (and the right of people to use them against her) and engaging in the culture war. The This thread has devolved into the latter.
It's not unrelated dirt. On the contrary, the theory is that Gay was appointed as a result of a 'woke' agenda, which prioritizes ideology, specifically the oppressor / oppressed narrative, over merit. Her anti-Semitism responses go directly to the first of the theory and her plagiarism (and more broadly weak academic credentials) go to the second half. The two parts of the theory are closely linked, as an important part of the anti-woke argument is that merit is being sacrificed in the name of ideology.
The president of Harvard isn't a name chosen out of a hat. Presumably they checked out her credentials and found them adequate. She wasn't a distinguished scholar (or anywhere close), but presumably she was what they were looking for.
> Would anyone have investigated the weak academic credentials if she hadn't made anti-Semitic responses?
Yes they would have. The accusations of plagiarism came from before the hearing. Jesse Singal talks about getting an email about it on 12/4, the day before the hearing.
I don't mean to nitpick, but I have heard this brought up several times by other people covering this story and I really wish they would stop. I'm not saying her academic credentials are good -- I'm in no position to judge them one way or the other. But I don't think they are very relevant to her role as an administrator. Some of the world's best academics might make terrible college presidents, while they best college presidents might have pretty mediocre academic records. If there is any correlation at all, I suspect it is pretty weak. I do think a college presidents needs to have a very good understanding of academia -- the culture, the research and teaching process, the accompanying bureaucracy -- but they don't have to have a stellar h-index. And, of course, the academic aspects of college are just one of the broad categories of things that college presidents have to manage. There's also donors, relationships with local/state/federal governments, student life, physical infrastructure, safety and security, personnel management....the list goes on.
While I totally agree that academic credentials aren't necessarily relevant for the President's actual job functions, in a university environment, scholarship buys a lot of political currency. Basically, if you want a bunch of tenured Harvard professors to really respect your leadership, it's necessary to have some academic status.
In the case of Gay, I think a (over)simplified way to think of it is: she lost her reputation with the public with the antisemitism business, and lost her reputation with the academe for the plagiarism. She couldn't survive losing both.
1. Even if that were true, her own academic merit being questionable wouldn't hurt the argument any more than any other minority elite's academic merit being questionable. Going after her specifically instead of any other, possibly more egregious target, or just doing the work of finding statistics, isn't a *stronger* knock against her argument. It's just dramatic irony.
2. As Scott touched, there's no evidence that her plagiarism was unrepresentative for people in her position. The reason you use statistics instead of cherry-picked anecdotes is that an anecdote like this provides no evidence that minorities have worse academic records; white men could plagiarize much more and no one ever bothers to investigate. The fact that the target was chosen for reasons of making a satisfying narrative, rather than chosen at random or w/e, is pretty strong evidence of this just being a cherry-picked anecdote that shouldn't reflect on the larger argument, rather than the reverse.
>The reason you use statistics instead of cherry-picked anecdotes is that an anecdote like this provides no evidence that minorities have worse academic records; white men could plagiarize much more and no one ever bothers to investigate.
Maybe AI could help? If we could automate doing forensic scholarship at scale, perhaps
a) We would have accurate statistics (and could adjust the penalties in light of them)
b) If we caught this _early_ in someone's life, maybe we could dissuade them from doing it frequently?
I feel like that just incentivizes the creation of an AI for 'rephrase this without changing its meaning so it passes the AI plagiarism filter', which probably already exists or if not is less than a year away anyways.
Which, you might think, 'ok, so it's an arms race between paraphrasing AIs and plagiarism-detecting AIs, that's fine.'
But I think that pretty quickly has us running up against the rocks of confronting the fact that people very often need to say the same thing that someone else has said previously, a million different phrasings that communicate the exact same concept are still the same unit of communication, and forcing academics to spend their time paraphrasing sentences to try to convey the same information using different words has always been kind of a dumb waste of time.
When you have children write 'scientific' papers in class, a large part of your objective is to make sure they can write well at all, so having them copy sentences would defeat the purpose. But hopefully we're not trying to prove that actual scientists know how to write well; plagiarizing results and conclusions would undermine their actual job description, but copying sentences needed in the introduction to explain background concepts to the audience? How does that make their science worse?
So, yeah, AI systems like that might drive us into confronting how dumb our ideas about plagiarism are to begin with. If your filter can detect an AI just rephrasing the same concept someone else uses, we'll have to admit that this is all humans were ever doing anyway, and humans can't ever beat that filter without making the text itself less coherent and useful.
Many Thanks! That's a good point. I wasn't thinking in terms of paraphrasing, but just in terms of direct copying. As you pointed out, there are potential arms races, and murky question of when it stops being plagiarism, and wasted effort in doing the paraphrasing.
I certainly agree with your point re
>but copying sentences needed in the introduction to explain background concepts to the audience? How does that make their science worse?
( though presumably they _could_ do this in a transparent way by putting the copied text in a quote and attributing it to the original author )
This starts to sound like some very muddy issues in IP law, where trying to disentangle what ideas are "generally known to someone skilled in the art", what are ideas that are specifically protected as someone else's patent claim, and what ideas are novel, can get to be _more_ work than coming up with the novel ideas and debugging the complex mixture into something actually useful.
I’m reminded of how dramatically coverage of Elon Musk changed between pre buying Twitter and post. Headlines about him used to be “Eccentric Tech Guy Successfully Launches Rocket,” now they’re “Hateful Billionaire Is Actually Conspiracy Theorist And Anti Semite.” And now apparently they’re going after him for him for being too successful at Tesla, ugh.
That's kind of surprising; I vaguely recall people turning against him for the whole birther thing. Having said that, I can't remember when people started saying "white supremacist" by default instead of "racist."
After decades of targeted propaganda and harassment by leftist media and institutions, and "principled conservatives" not reciprocating in kind due to the nature of their beliefs in the "marketplace of ideas" and "independent institutions", both of which turned out to be illusions, kvetching about exposing egregious cases like Claudine Gay is rich.
The time of controlled opposition has come and passed.
I think media converge on a narrative wrt people and movements and industries, and the almost every news story sticks to the narrative, omitting contradictory facts and quotes, and digging for supporting facts and quotes. Thus, once the narrative was established that W was a dimwitted good old boy, it almost didn't matter what they did-if W was reading Dostoyevsky in the original Russian, it was going to somehow be spun into the narrative that he was a dimwitted overpromoted good old boy. You could see this in the way the shooting of Michael Brown was reported--the initial narrative was innocent black kid murdered by a racist cop, and by God, the recalcitrant facts of the case were going to be hammered into that narrative. And most people still think Brown was an innocent kid murdered by a racist cop, and always will think that, so mission accomplished.
Do you have any specific examples of this? It seems pretty normal for coverage of someone to focus a lot more on their political views once they start running for president.
It’s normal for coverage to increase but pre 2015 everyone thought of Trump as an ego driven real estate billionaire/TV personality/embodiment of the American Dream. It makes sense for his flaws to be more exposed in the setting of his presidential run - he’s certainly an egomaniac - but the spin that he’s somehow racist (Scott wrote about this) or wants to start World War 3 (extensively claimed pre 2016, he was the most peaceful president of this century) or collaborated with Russia or committed impeachable offences in the phone call with Ukraine… I believed it all at the time and now looking back I can see that it was BS. Which significantly lowers my trust in the media.
Nah, that's just CNN taking one tweet completely out of context which then gets amplified across all the media platforms and leads to reasonable people getting confused. It's weaponisation of the media against Elon. Actually what he said was, if anything, Islamophobic, CNN should get its claims of racism straight. He was saying that the Jewish Anti Defamation League should be more concerned with Islamists than with European whites. Which is just very straightforwardly true.
If you listen to what Elon actually says, he's the least anti-Semitic it's possible to be (and I say this as someone of Jewish heritage who listens to a lot of what Elon has to say.) At least half of his friends are Jewish. He recently visited Auschwitz with Ben Shapiro. He describes himself as "philosemitic" (Greek for likes Jews a lot).
Let's separate the concepts of saying antisemitic things and being antisemitic. For example, an AI that says maximally offensive things might say antisemitic things, but would not be antisemitic.
Musk has said antisemitic things, endorsing conspiracy theories. However, it seems like he's more of a troll than a serious antisemite, so resembles that AI.
I think Musk was shitposting on Twitter for many years before buying it. He would be far better off handing off his Twitter account to some social media manager and never touching it again. But then, so would most other people, and maybe as owner of Twitter Musk would rather not say so....
Yeah; I would say the inflection point was roughly late 2015 or so, with an acceleration of that trend around 2017. Before that he really wasn’t notable for being that weird or that publicly contrarian.
Yeah. Something like Futurism seems to have utterly change the tone of its coverage.
That said, you could argue that acquiring Twitter further outed Elon's... err... personality quirks. I personally think it actually accentuated them but hey that's close to being a distinction without a difference ...
He is definitely a weird dude, but in his own words, "I founded six companies and I'm sending rockets to Mars, did you really expect me to be a chill, normal guy?"
The back an forth coverage of Musk and his companies went on before then. You can see this in how people freaked out when he smoked a joint on Joe Rogan, which I believe was before the Twitter buy.
Yeah, Elon caught a lot of flack before Twitter because he ruffled feathers in the auto industry with Tesla. The UAW wasn't happy that he had no union representation in his factories, and the dealerships were gunning for him because he does direct vehicle sales. Both of those groups STILL hate him, even more so now that he has two very successful vehicle models. I don't think that passion has anything to do with his penchant for saying things that fall outside the Overton window. Their biggest nightmare is if his truck is popular enough to cannibalize sales in the top-selling vehicle category in the US.
Are those groups politically influential? Obviously the UAW are, but so are the dealerships. It is illegal to buy a Tesla in 13 states (including Tesla's headquarters in Texas!), and in three of those states they're not even allowed to have service centers to fix your car. Plus 9 other states place limits on how many stores Tesla can have. If dealerships have enough political power to keep Tesla from selling in Texas - with its massive Texas-sized factory stoking the Texas economy - they have the power to ensure Elon gets bad press.
I think it had been on its way down for a while, but I don't know why. Around 2019ish, I recall hearing some fairly-left friends mention him and roll their eyes, as though there was common knowledge that rendered him ridiculous and pathetic. Of note, one of them owned a Tesla. But I didn't ask what the story was, and mostly I remember it because I didn't follow his doings, so to me he was just the guy behind Tesla's mass production and SpaceX, who also started the much more dubious Boring Company and hyperloop ... thing. And it was a clear illustration of how disconnected I'd become from the "public narrative".
You're right of course that the Twitter acquisition made it a lot worse, but I think it was already underway.
That could be the effect, yeah. But my impression was that it had something to do with Elon specifically, some pattern of things he in particular did. Maybe the media was just focusing on him at the time, I dunno. He certainly seems to have "Kanye West spectrum disorder".
As I recall, a year or so ago, Kelsey Tuoc commented on Twitter about the NYT's editorial decision to be hostile to tech companies, and several other prominent journalists (I think Matt Yglesias was one) agreed that this had happened and had influenced coverage across the media ecosystem.
And Scholars Stage has talked about how the NYT specifically is a newsroom that decides on their narrative and then goes out and tries to find stories to fit it
"We were occasionally asked to map a narrative for our various beats a year in advance, square the plan with editors, then generate stories that fit the pre-designated line. "
I really really wish people would analyze more culture war through the lens of Tech v. Media rather than Red v. Blue. It's a lesser battle to be sure, but still a *really* big driver of IMO blue-tinted bad behavior that doesn't reduce to conventional politics.
> The plagiarism was discovered by conservative journalists Chris Rufo and Chris Brunet. It would be quite a coincidence for them to find it at exactly the moment Gay was already under attack for her anti-Semitism testimony.
We know the NY Post found the plagiarism earlier than that. They contacted Harvard back on October 24th, before she was national news due to her testimony (or even before she was called before congress), and got back a letter threatening to sue them for defamation if they published (while in the background they started their own investigation). https://nypost.com/2023/12/22/news/claudine-gay-said-plagiarism-claims-were-created-by-chatgpt/
And we're talking about someone who took office in July 2023.
In appears to be a coincidence because of the direction Scott is looking from. In fact the plagiarism, the antisemitism, and the, let’s say, inconsistent support for free speech all stem from the corruption of liberalism by the new philosophy of DEI/CRT, which is explicitly opposed to liberalism. Adherence to the narrative trumps every other consideration.
No no, you’re misunderstanding Scott’s original claim. I’m not claiming (in response to Scott) that the existence of Gay’s plagiarism and tolerance of antisemitism are coincidental; I’m claiming that the *timing of their public revelation* was coincidental.
Fair enough. But it still seems that the public revelations didn’t even coincide at all. It’s not surprising that the plagiarism news would have gained salience after the Congressional debacle, but it wasn’t dug up in response to it.
Kind of. To be precise, allegations of Gay's plagiarism weren't publicly known before her Congressional testimony, but non-public investigations into the matter by both the Post and Harvard itself had already begun *before* said testimony, which contradicts Scott's core claim:
> The plagiarism was discovered by conservative journalists Chris Rufo and Chris Brunet. It would be quite a coincidence for them to find it at exactly the moment Gay was already under attack for her anti-Semitism testimony.
My claim is that yes, there was actually a coincidence of timing here! The plagiarism investigations did just so happen to begin in the month or two prior to Gay's congressional testimony. The main reason the coincidence is not particularly remarkable is because, as Cristophe mentioned, she had only been Harvard president since July. The chance of these two events happening within a month of each other is not all that low when both take place within a six-month timeframe in the first place.
It's really unfortunate when someone has what seems like a valid argument to make but instead says something completely clownishly bombastic like this.
The plagiarism was noticed by more than one person because it was egregious, but that doesn't mean the push to oust Gay is solely based on her (poor) scholarship.
Rufo is definitely doing the "motivated digging" thing. But the process to find problems with Gay's scholarship started prior his involvement and prior to Gay becoming a target of the right. He just beat the others to the punch.
I came here to make exactly the same point. Rufo and Brunet investigated the plagiarism case well before Gay’s testimony and Harvard threatened the NY Post with legal action if it published the story. Gay’s plagiarism was reasonably well-known for some time. However, in the aftermath of her dreadful performance before Congress, Harvard’s threats of legal action lost their force.
Yes. What changed is that Gay lost her bulletproof status after she pissed off the donors. The plagiarism was always there, but she was (rightly) perceived as untouchable as a token DEI hire and so her opponents didn’t pull out the knives until they knew she had fallen from favour with the powers that be.
This, sadly, is the world now. Nobody on earth thought that Gay was a serious candidate for that post — her appointment was a symptom of the academy’s corruption and decline. And her ouster was an opportunistic attack when her position was compromised. I agree with Scott that it’s unfortunate that people attack and counterattack their political enemies. But was it ever any different?
The DEI cultists really don’t seem to understand the injury they’re doing to ambitious people from minority groups by elevating these eminently unqualified token hires to prominence (eg, Gay). Or even elevating arguably qualified candidates, but doing so as part of a transparently identity-based process (eg, Justice Jackson’s appointment to SCOTUS by Biden). They seem not to understand (pretend not to understand?) that this will result in rational, objective, non-biased observers coming to the conclusion that anyone from the minority group who serves in such a position is unlikely (or at least less likely) to be qualified for that position. If gay people, transgender people, non-white (and non-Asian) people, and women are all held to lower standards than their cisgender straight white (or Asian) male counterparts, then the rational, objective observer would be correct to prefer a cisgender straight white (or Asian) male to perform any task that requires actual competence. And ambitious women, non-whites, etc will get overlooked in the search for merit because nobody will be able to trust their credentials. I have stated this as a hypothetical, but of course we’re 50+ years into this experiment.
Isn’t that even worse? Journalists can investigate anyone, but they can only publish plagiarism cases about unpopular people who’ve lost the backing of their institutions, because of fear of court proceedings? It makes this example less directly relevant to Scott’s and EA’s cases, but if journalists have learned that they can’t go after popular targets within institutions until they become unpopular, it’s a much smaller shift to avoid targeting other people until they do something their publisher would consider unpopular.
They did it to Donald Trump in the first election; they had those sexual assault allegations on tape for years and held onto them until the last couple of months of the election so there wouldn't be time to clear them up. They've been nakedly pushing agendas for decades.
I love how the response to a claim that the journalists are biased is a claim that everyone who claims that is a narcissist. I'm sure they poured a lot of time and effort into investigating that claim before they made it.
Same. This Spiers lady seems to want everyone to believe that the entire industry consists of nothing but hyper-professional, impartial observers employed at centuries old, reputation-focused, Guardians of Democracy type institutions, when most people over the age of 16 are well aware of the existence of The Daily Mail, the NY Daily News, Fox, MSNBC, etc.
Yet it was Clinton, not Trump, who received a flood of negative coverage the week before the 2016 election on the basis of old information. The media nakedly pushes an agenda, and in 2016 the agenda was to get Trump elected.
Wow. A good reminder that two people can look at the same events and see totally different things. Just wow.
It’s really, really hard for me to imagine somebody with open eyes believing that the media wanted Trump to be elected in 2016, but I’ll take your word that that’s how it looked to you.
It looked that way to me as well, for the record. I happened to be stuck in front of a TV that was tuned to CNN for about ten minutes, the morning before the elction, and ALL they could talk about was HER EMAILS. This is, remember, the network Repubs think is on Team D. Fox News was all-in for Trump. The rest of the media hated Hillary. They hate Trump now! A lot! But they hated Hillary then, even more than they hated Trump.
My impression was that that was the last gasp of "if it's news, we report it, regardless of its effects on politics". They didn't want Trump elected, and blamed themselves for the result, and so decided never to do that again. Of course, using post-2016 standards, it can look like they wanted Trump, because otherwise they would never say anything bad about his opponent. But I never got the mpression that they actually did, back then.
That's right. They didn't want Trump, but they also believed there was no way he would win the election. The Guardian even claimed Hillary had 98% chance of winning!
So they pretended to be fair and covered Hillary's emails and other scandals. When she actually lost, it was a major shock. Everybody looked for an explanation (e.g. Vance's "whiplash", or the idea that democrat voters were so confident they didn't show up to the booths, etc.). The explanation that stuck was that the media were responsible.
From that point on, it was "never again", and all pretense of fairness was dropped.
I don't think the emails thing can be explained by "if it's news, we report it"
There were similar revelations about trump officials doing official electronic communications through channels other than government emails - the exact Hillary scandal in the first place. Reported on very briefly by some media but treated as a non-story.
If they were following the news wherever it went, or if they were trying to "get" trump, then why would that happen?
I dunno. Maybe they disagreed with you about how serious it was. Or maybe they were trying to get eyeballs and clicks, and that's where it led. I'm not saying that the media were paragons of fair and balanced investigative journalism before Trump was elected, just that they weren't as nakedly partisan as they are now. They still flocked like vultures to whatever roadkill seemed tastiest.
“Another reason that I’m going to win another four years is because newspapers, television, all forms of media will tank if I’m not there because without me, their ratings are going down the tubes,” Mr. Trump said, then invoked one of his preferred insults. “Without me, The New York Times will indeed be not the failing New York Times, but the failed New York Times.”
He added: “So they basically have to let me win. And eventually, probably six months before the election, they’ll be loving me because they’re saying, ‘Please, please, don’t lose Donald Trump.’ O.K.”
The media received a pretty substantial financial benefit benefit from Trump and you'd have to take a pretty optimistic view of their character to think this wouldn't affect their coverage choices!
I don't have an optimistic view of their character but rather of their self-importance: they believe they are the arbiters of what's good rather than the reporters of what's true.
It is genuinely difficult to come up with a meaningful, objective measure of what "The Media" wants at any given point in time - it's too large and internally conflicted. There are plenty of easy metrics that don't ultimately mean much, like "which candidates do cable news broadcast hosts personally donate to" and "positive/negative coverage of which candidates is best for this revenue on this particular website" but I've lost any confidence I might have had that the choice of which of those metrics to use doesn't bake-in the conclusion.
Assuming this is in reference to the Access Hollywood tape ... nothing was ever "cleared up", people just decided they don't care enough to not support trump.
This quibble about 'targeting' reads to me like a huge sidestepping of the real issue here. The real issue is this: is it - or is it not - the case that American (and Western world) universities have become dominated by Leftist partisan groupthink for half a century and more? DEI (and DEI hires like Gay) are just the tip of that civilisation-destroying iceberg.
US universities have largely been taken over by whatever the academic-intellectual version of wokism/successor ideology is, but I think the more relevant point for this discussion is that media outlets have also largely been taken over by the same ideology. This is basically why Substack is a widely-known company instead of being another Wordpress--a bunch of top-tier journalists and writers like Bari Weiss, Andrew Sullivan, Matt Yglesias, Freddie DeBoer, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, etc. got pushed out of more established media outlets and came to Substack. Basically all the readers who are subscribing to those substacks represent readers that their original publications shed in order to stay within the newly required ideological lines.
Yes that's all true. But something that is vital to grasp here is that the ROOT of all this has been in academia. Media-wokeness, institutional-wokeness, professional, managerial, administrative-wokeness...all are DOWNSTREAM of the academy because all these people will have emerged (at an impressionable age) from the Leftist academia sheep-dip. And this root-and-branch understanding is STILL poorly understood by most conservative-leaning commentary.
Really? Seems to me that academia-is-the-root-cause-of-wokism has long been the core conservative belief, not to mention a correct one. What conservatives lack is understanding that those horrible leftists actually have a point, buried under tons of obscurantist pomo bullshit. Or rather that Nietzsche had it and they inherited it without most of them understanding it either.
Some conservative intellectuals have long understood it Yes....myself included. But the point I was making is no less valid nonetheless. The Western world's conservative political and media classes did not make nearly enough of this as an issue, preferring to focus their firepower on other issues. Issues that were far less important in the long-term to the health of our civilisation.
That's because they are fundamentally incapable of fixing this problem. They still have no answer to Nietzsche's point, other that sticking their heads into the sand and praying that it would go away.
Well, yes, the traditional journalism market is shrinking and drying up more and more every year and you've got a crab bucket situation going on as they all scrabble over dwindling resources. Firm ideological commitments that aren't strictly aligned with one of the ascendant tribes can only hurt you in that situation.
I do think that Metz led you on about the positive tone of the eventual article. He had initially adopted this tack to get people friendly to you talking, but when the evidence of juicy heresy came to light he likely decided to reorient that way. When NYT genuinely likes people being profiled it doesn't have a problem allowing them to keep their pseudonymity.
In general, reporters doing a story on you are not your friends. They're like a policeman questioning you about a crime--no matter how friendly and nice they seem, you need to recognize that this is an adversarial interaction and they may very well end up wrecking your life as a result of what you say in their presence.
Yes, this. I'd extend the analogy - not even a police officer questioning you about a crime, but talking to you *at all.*
There is in general a class of people - cops, journalists, Grand Inquisitors, adversarial lawyers, Richelieu, certain exes some people can think of - who are just monitoring whatever you're saying to seize upon any opportunity, any potential weakness, to dive in and try to wreak havoc on you. It's a fully adversarial game, and the winning move is not to play, or if you're forced to play, play maximally defensively, and try to arrange your affairs and life so you don't enter into any of these interactions again.
Why hello! Is this some subtly arch allusion to the fact that some commenters (psuedonymous or no) may be in this class of people also? Too true, too true. :-)
Metz had a book on AI/Silicon Valley coming out, and my view is that he used the article to drum up publicity for it, and the best way to get publicity is "you'll never believe the shocking revelations!" teaser article.
My thought is that an article that started as a piece on Scott's impact with him as a positive center figure later morphed into a piece on Scott's following among all the groups of people attacking me, Cade Metz, respectable journalist. I'm shooting from my biases here, but it is not at all interestingly nefarious for a journalist either to take a shot at nefarious techy types or to write their own experience into a story. In the absence of unexpected behavior, my opinion didn't really shift.
"Do not wrestle with pigs, you will both get dirty, and the pig likes it". Famous quote, attribution unclear, pretty appropriate to the situation.
If you have found some connection that gives you the sense of doing something good in the world, go ahead and do it. If not, then living an honest life within your means and trying your best to be supportive to people around you is plenty enough. In either case, pig-wrestling is strictly optional and not recommended unless you happen to enjoy it.
I think this is the wrong approach in general. In general, any prominent figure is going to have people digging for dirt on them. The correct place to deal with it should be after hearing it, to figure out objectively how bad this thing is conditional on there being a bias to dig up dirt on them (e.g. if it was dug up that someone wrote a racist email thirty years ago, adjust for the fact that this is probably the worst thing they've done and slightly raise your opinion on them).
This isn't going to 100% work, because people aren't great at making this adjustment and will probably still end up unfairly judging any targeted person, which rounds to anyone who becomes prominent. But otoh this helps counteract an incumbency advantage elites have from positive name recognition bias, so I think it's still done overall.
As individuals, this is more or less manageable. I've operated on this principle for a long time, and I can recognize even for individuals I already dislike that negative reporting on them may be weaker than I would have expected on priors.
But on a societal level, this isn't something we can expect to solve by putting the onus on the general population of recognizing how reporting is distorting their informational landscape. The general population doesn't even recognize how their own media choices distort their informational landscape.
I agree, but I think this applies even more strongly to targeting happening in the first place. To stop targeting from working, we need to win over a simple majority of people (more or less). To stop anyone from using targeting in the first place, we need to win over almost everyone.
I think the point Desertopa is making is getting individuals to "figure out objectively how bad this thing is conditional on there being a bias" won't win over a majority. It will win over a tiny fringe minority at best. Maybe 5% of people will manage to do this.
It's important that we keep pushing that message to keep whatever percent of careful readers we've got, but we are probably already at peak effectiveness for individuals making healthy reading choices, and it's only a few percent of people.
Nearly 9 years ago (!), you expressed cautious optimism that we might soon see a deescalation of hostilities in the culture war, once progressives realised that their preferred weapons for destroying their political opponents (cancellation, social shaming etc.) are NOT asymmetric, and can just as effectively be wielded against progressives as against conservatives. (https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/14/fearful-symmetry/)
I highly doubt that Chris Rufo has some principled opposition to academic plagiarism as a concept - if someone on his team was accused of precisely the same infractions Gay was accused of, I'm sure he'd come rushing to their defense. Pointing out Gay's plagiarism was a transparent attempt to work the refs, destroying someone you dislike for political reasons by finding some unrelated transgression they're guilty of and signal-boosting it.
On the other hand, Gay herself used precisely the same tactic, attempting to destroy the career of the Harvard academic Roland Fryer (who published research which was not exactly favourable to the standard BLM narrative about police violence) using some trumped-up sexual harassment accusation as a pretext (https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/01/07/claudine-gays-tyranny-of-dei/).
It's very difficult for me to feel sorry for a would-be canceller who subsequently finds herself on the receiving end of a cancellation attempt, ESPECIALLY when she was actually guilty of the trumped-up pretext infraction she was accused of (unlike Fryer). Live by the sword, die by the sword.
Like you in 2015, I longed for a future in which people of all political stripes would recognise that cancellation and social shaming are bad tactics and we should collectively sign a disarmament agreement. Every time a progressive finds themselves on the receiving end, a part of me hopes that your 2015 prediction will belatedly come true: that progressives will look at Claudine Gay or Bud Light or whatever and think "damn, this really sucks when it happens to someone we like, maybe we should stop doing it".
But it's hard for me to maintain my optimism. It seems like every cancellation just seems to incense hostilities further, and people get ever more deeply embedded in a tit-for-tat, "no bad tactics, only bad targets" mindset. Comparisons to civil war seem apt.
Yeah, as desirable as it might be, I don't see any possibility of a truce or de-escalation of the cancel-culture wars without some kind of enforcement mechanism, where, say, the New York Post or Chris Rufo takes the reputational hit for trying to expose someone's plagiarism rather than Gay herself, and that's not going to happen for a variety of reasons. I guess if there's a silver lining, it's that Claudine Gay and Bill Ackman aren't terribly sympathetic characters to begin with.
That's unfortunately how war works, and how it ends - it escalates until one side can't sustain the fight any more, and then the other side gets to dictate terms. There _is_ cause for hope in that, since the war _will_ end. Eventually.
Until then, the only thing you can do is do everything in your power to ensure that your side dies more slowly than the other and gets to dictate the terms of surrender in the end. This of course means sustaining and escalating the war. The alternative is to allow the opponent to dictate terms, which is even worse.
When people say war is hell, now you know why. Thank God this war is one of ruined careers and reputations and friendships instead of one of bullets and bombs and chemicals.
>That's unfortunately how war works, and how it ends - it escalates until one side can't sustain the fight any more, and then the other side gets to dictate terms.
That's how it almost never works, either in real wars or in cultural ones.
Instead, a new equilibrium is reached, with most people learning what will and what won't cause issues, and go along with it, grudgingly or enthusiastically. The boundaries of acceptable/unacceptable behaviour shift - and issues rise and fade in significance.
For example, #metoo seems to have resulted in a new equilibrium in talking about consent, complaining about it, and interactions in sexual situations. The terms of the new equilibrium are pretty well understood, as are the edge cases ("believe women" has morphed into "give more weight to what women say in this area"). LGB issues seem to be heading that way, though trans issues have a way to go. Mostly, people remain remarkably polite when talking about religion (even Christianity, the majority religion). The USA has a "respect for your service" with the military (that the rest of the world finds weird) that is rarely dissented from. Communism is no longer much of an issue (though complaining about socialism seems to have a make a small comeback).
Anyway, this is how terminology wars go - issues rise and fall, conventions change, most people go along with the rough consensus, and there are always edge cases, unclear norms, abuses of power, and a whole lot of hypocrisy (hypocrisy and power issues are necessary for people to feel out the edges of the acceptable).
Pretty much. As Hanania said, #metoo combines chivalry with feminism to give women advantages.
Many men have already starting avoiding them in work situations, from what I hear. After all, who wants to be a martyr for a movement that hates you? Others might be to claim non-binary status or similarly escape being 'male'.
"""should collectively sign a disarmament agreement"""
This phrase suggests a depressing (but maybe useful or compelling) frame of reference.
If, instead of disarmament treaties, we'd had ten years of somehow low grade nuclear war, where would we be? In the nuclear post apocalypse.
Mutual cancellation and other adversarial tactics, especially ones that compromise institutions from the inside or destroy their credibility from the outside, these rhetorical nuclear weapons we've been using more and more for twenty or thirty years, have put us where?
In the epistemological post-apocalypse.
I don't know how old you are, but if you are old, and grew up in the West, you *probably* feel like there was a time in your life when you at least *thought* it was easy to find ground truth information from reputable groups. Hasn't felt like that at all for five or ten years.
All that stuff got blown up, and you're kind of on your own, scrounging up valid information, and any time you share it in a disagreement, find that all the information shared on both sides quickly becomes suspect.
Will it? I mean, one analogy is a physical war, which starts and ends within months, years, or occasionally decades.
Another analogy is a religious schism. The Christian and Islamic schisms have persisted, actively and bitterly, for centuries, and continue even now that those religions themselves are in rapid terminal decline in the first world. This situation could be like that one.
During the rise of Southern US evangelicalism, it always had a distinctly personal flavor, which it largely maintains. Read the Bible yourself, worry about your personal relationship to God, etc. The counterpart up North was more institutional, and rallied around top-down progressive ideas to remake the world. There was no schism there, just two very different worldviews that were both coated with a shared iconography. Removing the religious drapery reveals that they remain very different people, and I do not expect them to reconcile.
I’d be curious if there were vast cultural gaps when Islam spread that caused some to adopt one flavor or another? From my limited understanding it was mostly about who conquered what, but maybe that’s an oversimplification.
This seemed like quite a compelling argument prior to, "trumped-up sexual harassment." I have no idea if it was trumped-up. I suspect you don't either. That kind of accusation ought to demand additional rigor. "Spiked-online," no I won't be following that link, doesn't qualify.
Why don't you? As reported by Quillette (https://quillette.com/2022/04/15/why-did-harvard-university-go-after-one-of-its-best-black-professors/), Harvard's internal investigation found that Fryer had never touched or sexually propositioned anyone, and he was only guilty of telling a few off-colour jokes and flirting with a colleague. Of the 38 complaints raised against him, the internal investigation determined that 32 should be dismissed out of hand as obvious lies (https://aneconomicsense.org/2023/02/21/roland-fryer-his-life-story-his-work-on-education-and-on-police-use-of-force-and-harvard/ - section D "Consequences"). One of the complainants against Fryer later withdrew her complaint entirely, as reported by the Harvard Crimson (https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2019/4/23/fryer-mcad-investigation-concluded/). Quillette also notes that there are previous cases of Harvard professors who investigators determined committed far more severe sexual infractions than Fryer, but who got off much more lightly than Fryer's two-year suspension. For the crime of Fryer telling some off-colour jokes and persistently flirting with a colleague, Claudine Gay was calling for his tenure to be revoked, something Harvard has never done in the past century. There is no part of this story which doesn't sound like a trumped-up and ideologically motivated accusation of sexual harassment.
But I suppose next you'll tell me that Quillette, the Crimson and An Economic Sense don't meet your lofty standards of "legitimate news outlets". If you can present compelling evidence that the accusations against Fryer were well-founded, or that he is in fact guilty of far more serious sexual infractions than the internal investigation determined, I would love to see it. But we both know you can't and you won't.
Again, I don't know. And you don't know. And "persistently flirting with a colleague" is the definition of creating a hostile work environment, and thus harassment (if she was not appreciative). Had you said, "questionable" or "marginal," your argument would have been stronger. My critique was of your presentation. As I said, I found it compelling prior to....
I don't KNOW, but I've yet to see any compelling evidence to suggest that Fryer is actually a sex pest - ergo, I'm assuming he isn't. That's how null hypotheses work. The ethical standard of "assume that everyone accused of being a sex pest is in fact a sex pest, even in the absence of any compelling evidence to suggest that they are" is preposterous and unworkable.
When an interval investigation determines that, of the 38 complaints raised against an individual, 84% are out-and-out lies, it doesn't say much for the complainant's credibility.
>"persistently flirting with a colleague" is the definition of creating a hostile work environment
Unless you are actually part of HR at Harvard, or a high ranking administrator, you have not actually seen any evidence supporting either side. Instead, you are picking headlines which support the position you favor. I tend to think you may be correct. But you are not actually certain and if you pretend you are in your writing, then you deserve exactly as much eye-rolling as the NYT opinion section.
And having taken courses at 5 different companies (including ones with 30,000 and 10,000 employees), on how not-to find yourself on the wrong end of a sexual harassment lawsuit which will likely fuck your career, I can assure you that persistently flirting with a colleague who doesn't want it, qualifies.
No one is ever "certain" of anything. This is a silly isolated demand for rigour.
To reiterate: I have yet to see any compelling evidence that Fryer is a sex pest. If evidence to that effect is presented to me, I will update my opinion accordingly. Until such time as said evidence is presented to me, I'm sticking with my initial opinion. I really don't see what's so difficult about this.
How did Ackman's wife's behavior point out his hypocrisy? I don't have any idea if my wife cheated on her PChem final. If I accuse someone of cheating should my wife's behavior before we got married have any effect on my argument or would bringing it up be just to shut me up?
Yeah, I don't see the hypocrisy argument. To be sure, Ackman wound up *making* a hypocrite of himself in defense of his wife, but what was he supposed to do? His marriage is not a business relationship.
If you bash someone for fraud it should be relevant if your wife committed fraud. If you bash someone for being an illegal immigrant it should be relevant that your wife is an illegal immigrant. If you bash someone for doing porn it should be relevant that you married a porn star.
Agreed. This is my only quibble with Scott's piece. The action against Ackman's wife was very much a "what goes around comes around" message - different phenomenon than the broad dirt-digging against Gay and as described elsewhere in the post.
Chris Rufo has been working the refs for a while. He is an expert on getting a story or a definition of a term into the media ecosystem and then having it become the standard.
The "revenge" wouldn't be for Gay. It would be for his success in getting his hobby horses out into the world.
Clearly, Rufo also needs the lady who told Scott he was paranoid for feeling targeted by Metz' NYT piece to explain to him that worrying that some Guardian journalist was going to write a smear article about him is just him being silly.
Rufo is not a "civilian" Like he has publicly talked about how he wanted to make "critical race theory" a bogeyman and a catch all term for Americans to refer to if there is something they don't like about race relations.
He is a public figure and an impassioned advocate for policy. He should have articles written about him.
True, though those articles should probably try to engage with his ideas instead of trying to do guilt-by-association to rule him out of bounds. At least, if the articles are going to be any good.
Why? It is perfectly reasonable to impugn the motives of public people pushing for certain goals. Bob Menendez being on the take from Egypt sheds a very different light on his advocacy for Egypt in Congress.
That's interesting. Rufo has recently been pitted against Hanania and Aporia Magazine ilk as the *non* eugenecist side of the new school of the right, being informed by Christianity rather than Nietzschian HBD.
But yeah sure, from a Guardian perspective surely he's close enough. They would think so, wouldn't they.
I feel like Scott is being characteristically too generous to the journalist by not emphasing the point that "if someone publicly challenges/protests you, this may make you less charitable to them and motivate you to try to get some retribution" is a truistic statement of human psychology and journalists would have to have saintlike/superhuman moral character and discipline to be immune to this.
Pretensions of professional sanctity are like core to the journalistic identity, to the point of being a fictional trope. How many times have you seen a story of the form "so and so may be a wretched guy in his personal life, but BY GOD he will never compromise his desire to tell the TRUTH to the PEOPLE"?
It is how journalists are seen, and I think how they want to see themselves. Elizabeth Spiers was probably not gaslighting. She is probably a true believer in the sanctity of journalism despite all evidence to the contrary.
Journalism has sucked forever. I was reading Alice Hamilton's autobiography, "Among the Dangerous Trades". This is over a century ago when people were totally cool with racists but were scared of, wait for it, anarchists.
Anyway, apparently there was a house-charity thing where people hard up could get a room living aside the more affluent (a "settlement house"). After a twitchy cop shot a Russian Jewish Anarchist, the house management was interviewed whether they would accept any anarchists - not whether there were any, mind you, but only if thet would let them attend the evening classes. The organiser said, "Sure, we don't ask anyone their political beliefs". The papers ran with the headline:
FEMINIST BUSIBODY ADMITS SHE LETS ANARCHISTS ATTEND HER CLASSES
I heard a version of that where, after the boy said that he'd keep crying "wolf", the next time he tried it, he was found dead the next morning. Everyone in town agreed, "a wolf did it", but not all of them kept a straight face.
Over a century ago, anarchists weren't moody teenage boys in parkas.
Conrad's "The Secret Agent" is a story set in 1886 about an agent provocateur being ordered to carry out a bombing in order to foment public outrage so that there will be a crackdown on anarchists and revolutionaries in another country:
"The most effective fact in oratory is an unexpected change in the voice. Mr. Gabriel Syme evidently understood oratory. Having said these first formal words in a moderated tone and with a brief simplicity, he made his next word ring and volley in the vault as if one of the guns had gone off.
“Comrades!” he cried, in a voice that made every man jump out of his boots, “have we come here for this? Do we live underground like rats in order to listen to talk like this? This is talk we might listen to while eating buns at a Sunday School treat. Do we line these walls with weapons and bar that door with death lest anyone should come and hear Comrade Gregory saying to us, ‘Be good, and you will be happy,’ ‘Honesty is the best policy,’ and ‘Virtue is its own reward’? There was not a word in Comrade Gregory’s address to which a curate could not have listened with pleasure (hear, hear). But I am not a curate (loud cheers), and I did not listen to it with pleasure (renewed cheers). The man who is fitted to make a good curate is not fitted to make a resolute, forcible, and efficient Thursday (hear, hear).”
“Comrade Gregory has told us, in only too apologetic a tone, that we are not the enemies of society. But I say that we are the enemies of society, and so much the worse for society. We are the enemies of society, for society is the enemy of humanity, its oldest and its most pitiless enemy (hear, hear). Comrade Gregory has told us (apologetically again) that we are not murderers. There I agree. We are not murderers, we are executioners (cheers).”
So specified, but 1) none of the people attending evening classes had done any of that, and 2) how many self proclaimed anarchists did that? Would we be okay for evening classes to exclude Muslims?
I'm not sure what the percentages of "radicalized" anarchists were, but the main leaders were loudly calling for lethal violence, and within a few short years their followers had assassinated the President of the US, the President of France, the Prime Minister of Spain, the King of Italy, the Empress of Austria, and were also indiscriminately slaughtering random citizens around the world. It wasn't just the conservatives who noticed.
I thought the latest chapter in the Claudine Gay saga was that Harvard's Chief Diversity Officer was reported to have engaged in 40 instances of plagiarism, including duplicate publication with her husband and a third co-author, effectively republishing a piece that the husband had written solo two years earlier.
In some sense that's also targeting, but isn't it also newsworthy that an organization like Harvard is consistently failing to uphold for its senior leaders the standards that it requires of undergraduates?
In this case, it appears that plagiarism is more characteristic of the DEI types. The questionable scholarship of the grievance studies "scholars" makes them much more likely to cheat in their publications.
While I personally agree that that is probably the case, I think it is *very important* not to let a public case like this affect your sense of whether that view is true or not. The whole point of this article is we're looking at cases selected for outrage and manipulation, not representative cases selected dispassionately on merit.
And, as ridiculous as I think DEI is (slightly more ridiculous than all the uproar against it), I suspect it directly has little to do with plagiarism and cheating. If engineering studies involved repeatedly writing hundreds of pages of tosh that would never be used in your actual future work, I suspect there would be a lot more plagiarism there as well.
ummm...every journalistic effort revolves around people. So I guess every news story is targeting.
Just like obituaries of famous people are written well before they die, I am sure journalists keep information at the ready for use at opportune times. Prior to Gay's testimony, do you think anyone would have paid attention to a story about an unqualified president of Harvard committing plagiarism?
"I suppose one could retreat even further: journalists are only human, and like to join on pile-ons against unpopular things. This is certainly a little true, and inherently sympathetic - we are all only human. Still, this one scares me most of all."
The Girardian scapegoat mechanism in a nutshell! Everyone bows as Jesus enters Jerusalem, then they crucify him by the end of the week.
When they brought him the woman caught in adultery he deliberately halted "the first stone". Once that one is thrown, a hundred others automatically follow.
It’s a strange bit of human behavior. I remember getting caught up it in myself when I was in grade school. Someone was the object of derision and I jumped in. Fortunately it didn’t take very long to realize just how fucked up that was.
The NYT and other MSM outlets play up fair and objective, but their journalists aspire to Fleet Street brazenness. The cruelty of newspapers, when mixed with some wit, can be unwholesomely entertaining. The Sun, The Daily Mail and The New York Post sometimes still pull it off. Think how boring a strictly rationalist newspaper would be: "No Material Trends Discernible from Latest Data." "Curry Reverts to Mean in Second Half." "Critics Dismiss Ad Hominem Attacks Irrelevant to Policy Debate."
That would look like those Pew Center or BJS reports where they summarize public opinion data or crime statsitics. It would have *dozens* of regular readers.
"Headless Body Found in Topless Bar" >> "Null Hypothesis Fails to be Rejected by Latest Anecdote"
I definitely think the next Trump administration should be given full control of the regulated media. We can call the rollout the Program for Regulation And Verity in Data Analysis
I don’t think Spiers would disagree that investigative journalists sometimes have an ax to grind in culture wars, especially overtly political people like Rufo. I read her argument as more specific to tech people (Scott included) who she perceives as not important enough to journalists to attract meaningful ire. This is why she accuses you of egotism/an inflated sense of self import. Uncle Chico, by contrast, is erroneously evaluating commentary on Trump by the standards of reporting, as well as envisioning a grandiose conspiracy of leftist journalists that (Spiers thinks) doesn’t exist. She wouldn’t accuse uncle Chico as wrongly perceiving Trump as important enough to occupy journalist headspace (I don’t think; she never says this outright though).
Journalism is, by definition, a progressive institution -- or at least it should be. That is, reporters are on the lookout for changes to the status quo and especially dynamically shifting power structures. Whatever their personal beliefs, serious journalists will be equally eager to tackle lies by Hillary Clinton as Trump. Which is why the general public is so often confounded by their work product. Who's side are they on anyway?! If they are serious, they are attempting to embody societal mirrors crucial to the egalitarian movement that humanity has been cooperatively pursuing for centuries. That's the "side" they have chosen. Hopefully.
No, it's not a perfect system, especially in today's swamp of media, but one thing is clear: attempts to smear the profession writ large as agenda-driven are part and parcel of today's sweeping attempts to weaken democracy itself. These are perilous times, when average people no longer discern the quantum difference between Fox News and the NYT. Democracy is messy, but I predict even the MAGAts will miss it when it's gone.
It's kind of of hilarious how there are two intersecting fights going on here:
A) the original dispute over Gaza
B) a sciences versus humanities one, where regardless of their position on Gaza, the scientists think both Gay's and Oxman's degrees are fake, and are cheering on the imminent collapse of their respective departments
P.s. I assume this post is exempt from the usual rule on Gaza-related fights being confined to a sub thread, as mentioning it a key part of the original post...
The latest news is a bunch of revelations of fraud in the hard sciences, so if scientists are getting excited about Gay/Oxman, and think it shows some fundamental difference between the two cultures, I'd suggest they calm down.
The fraud there is many times more relevant for the world than whether Gay or Oxman copy-pasted something in papers they wrote that nobody was ever going to read, tbh.
There are two salient facts about Claudine Gay’s case:
1) She, as (now former) president of the country’s most prestigious university, is clearly a Public Figure
2) Her wrongdoing was relevant to her role as a public figure (she was an academic leader who had plagiarized the academic work that served as her qualifications for her role).
Claudine Gay (and her employers at Harvard) should absolutely expect her academic bonafides to receive scrutiny. The problem with them coming out right after a very public foot-in-mouth performance in front of Congress is not that they came out at all, but that they hadn’t come out *sooner*.
I think the farther away you get from those two characteristics (Public Figure, relevance), the less justifiable “journalistic targeting” becomes.
In your case, I think the answer to 2 was absolutely “no” - the “true name” of the blogger known as Scott Alexander was not relevant to the story, not relevant to the thing that makes you newsworthy (nobody has a general interest in the names of random Bay Area psychiatrists). 1 is a harder question, because Scott Alexander the Blogger is obviously a public figure, but Dr. Siskind, Bay Area Psychiatrist is clearly not.
So I’d say the targeting of you was much worse than Claudine Gay, but not as bad as plucking some random person out of a hat (or your Instagram feed) and just digging up and publishing the worst thing you can find about them.
> 2) Her wrongdoing was relevant to her role as a public figure (she was an academic leader who had plagiarized the academic work that served as her qualifications for her role).
Well, that's obviously false. Nobody knew or cared about her academic work; it had no significance to anyone. Her qualifications were elsewhere.
Academic work is how you become a professor, not an administrator.
University Presidents are generally expected to be themselves professional academics (certainly that’s the path Gay took), professional academics (especially those promoted to higher roles) are expected to output quality academic work, and plagiarizing one’s academic work calls into question one’s credentials as a professional academic.
They are variably true. The first one is true. The third one is sort of ambiguous in practice. The second one is hazy. There was never any pretense that Claudine Gay had produced any quality academic work. She produced enough work to satisfy a pro forma requirement. As I said above, nobody knew or cared what was in her papers. If you believe that a university president is supposed to be (or have been) an influential researcher, she has always been obviously unqualified, and would still be obviously unqualified if all of her work was unimpeachably original to her.
Note, among other things, that of all of the arguments for why academic plagiarism should be frowned upon, none of them apply to plagiarizing your acknowledgements.
> she has always been obviously unqualified, and would still be obviously unqualified if all of her work was unimpeachably original to her
You're right, but I suspect what happened is that before the publicity of the plagiarism, people could at least maintain the pretense she was a good scholar. Now they can't pretend anymore.
Eh, she's not just an "administrator". She's got staff for that. The President is the public face of the university, and the human interface between the university and the outside world.* She doesn't actually need great academic work for that, but she does need the perception that her academic work is "good enough". Plus she needs to only be controversial in ways that her university and general milieu will defend.
* The President is also the sacrifical lamb, for when sufficiently grievous sins require expiation.
> Eh, she's not just an "administrator". She's got staff for that.
Having staff for that is... what makes you an administrator? Administrators are the people who give the commands, not the people who carry them out.
I was going to cite a relevant dictionary gloss, but this turns out to be the only sense of the word (recognized by wiktionary), outside of a couple of special technical uses of the word that have a lot of overlap with the normal sense. So here's the entire wiktionary entry:
> administrator
> 1. One who administers affairs; one who directs, manages, executes, or dispenses, whether in civil, judicial, political, or ecclesiastical affairs; a manager
> 2. (law) A person who manages or settles the estate of an intestate, or of a testator when there is no competent executor; one to whom the right of administration has been committed by competent authority
> (computing) One who is responsible for software installation, management, information and maintenance of a computer or network
I'm saying that she (and all other university presidents) have probably delegated almost everything that they can delegate? Whereas there's a lot of social tasks where the status of "the president" is required, and no substitutes will do.
That Spiers article bugged me for other reasons, particularly the idea that Metz was just such hot stuff that a controversy that led to a meta-article in the New Yorker would scarcely register in his consciousness amidst all of other the important articles he was writing. Maybe she's too much of a snob to imagine a NY Times writer caring what an influential blogger thinks, but how many Cade Metz articles led to critical coverage in the New Yorker?
On another note, has anyone done a baseline analysis to see what % of (e.g. Harvard) scholars' works contain plagiarism of Gay's severity? I have definitely had the experience of trying to rephrase something in my own words, coming up with the perfect phrasing, and then realizing I had copied half a sentence word for word. That's why when, for example, Lawrence Tribe was found to have copied a boring 19 word sentence I was pretty sure this was just the kind of thing that could happen if you read something and then wrote about the same topic a few hours later. Gay's plagiarism seemed too common for that, but I'm not sure and I wish someone would just run the numbers.
An obvious guess is that a lot of people probably got lazy and did some copy-paste stuff on obscure papers nobody was going to read or on their dissertation which nobody but their advisor and maybe their committee would ever read. And so probably a great many prominent academics are vulnerable to an accusation of plagiarism, and this will inevitably be used both to blackmail/shut up some people and to pry some annoying rivals out of their posts over the next few years. Eventually, it will lose most of its sting and people will not respond so much.
Students are aware when they write the thesis that no one is going to read it, so I can believe that behaviour on theses, but academics take papers more seriously. They're like our whole raison d'être. "Only five people will ever read this stuff" is what you hear from people who leave academia, not from the people who become profs.
While I agree with the overall point of not searching for every bad thing a person ever did as retaliation, I'm kinda OK with doing this because of plagiarism.
Honestly, we have too many academics. Science is in a crisis where its inundated with bullshit, no one reads a paper unless it's from someone famous, and scientific writing is just used as a prop to get prestige and a better role in universities.
We are in a point where we have too much science and too little quality. If eviscerating people for plagiarism raises the quality (while decreasing the quantity) of science, I'm happy with the tradeoff.
The replication crisis is certainly a thing, but the underlying problem behind the replication crisis isn't "too much research," in a way where it could be mitigated by tighter controls against plagiarism. The problem is that gathering enough positive evidence for a proposition to genuinely overcome prior unlikelihood is a more difficult task than meeting the standards for publication.
Answering you and "None of the Above" below (heh).
I don't think this kind plagiarism is the central issue with science today. But it is a symptom of the general sloppiness and low standards of publication.
I assume that a paper (or scientist) that doesn't have time or integrity to write original content, also won't put the necessary effort into the main results.
Replication crisis is rather caused by high standards of publication (along the wrong axis). Speaking of effort into the main result, yeah, the effort going into the main result is not always about making it a better representation of reality (well OK, I am talking about the fields where existence of the underlying reality in principle is more or less accepted). I would expect plagiarism in definitions not claimed as contributions to be a small net positive, and even the same for related work overviews.
The specific case of plagiarism in question is none of the above, although the same things that caused the replication crisis bring us this, too…
I think the problems with the replication crisis and scientific fraud have very little to do with the kind of plagiarism claimed against Gay and Oxman.
Yes, let's start another crab bucket situation, that is obviously going to select and reward scientists with integrity, just like it's doing with journalism. /s
Yes, if we didn't have the current incentive structure that only rewards novel findings and research, more scientists would be free to pursue study replication so that we could have a more solid foundation to work from.
I work in engineering, and I do in fact read papers from those dirty academics. Most of them are not remotely famous.
The replication crisis sure sounds like the kind of dramatic event Scott is talking about here. Do you have actual data telling you that we’re doing too much low-quality science? Or are you just going with the vibe?
An engineer here. I read papers relevant to my work all the time, and couldn’t care less about how famous the authors are. Some papers are indeed crap, but it’s a small fraction.
Things may be different outside of STEM fields though.
> If I ran the world, I would want newspapers to do the opposite of that - comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, that kind of thing. I would want it to find dirt on people who were puffed up way too high riding the top of the popularity wave, and find reasons to defend and stand up for people who were vulnerable and getting piled on. Still, it seems like in real life people do the opposite.
Scott, you should look into the kind of investigative reports that short sellers, like eh Hindenburg, put out.
They don't earn any money from piling on companies (and people) who are already down. They earn a better profit, if they can bring highflyer down.
You can probably estimate for yourself how unpopular that makes them.
> If I ran the world, I would want newspapers to do the opposite of that - comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, that kind of thing. I would want it to find dirt on people who were puffed up way too high riding the top of the popularity wave, and find reasons to defend and stand up for people who were vulnerable and getting piled on. Still, it seems like in real life people do the opposite.
I think the first half of this is definitely happening (it's the whole business model of e.g. tabloids) though not the second half. This makes sense because humans have a negativity bias, so negative coverage gets more clicks.
There needs to be a referee system in place to impose some norms of fairness. I don’t think anyone likes being in a system totally devoid of honor and considered laughable by most of the public. I have long spergy posts on this on my substack, but basically, of course people do this stuff because there’s no impartial judge to stop them from doing it and they pay no price for doing it. And worse, they don’t even get a proportionate reward for behaving honorably.
I wonder if there is a deeper question here, which might be: "Is there a better way to do "reputational work"?
Politics, media, the arts, business and Academia are filled with people doing "reputational work", that is, spending time and effort promoting a particular view of reputations, burnishing their own, that of mentees, allies, groups, schools of thought; and also slurring and diminishing those of rival individuals, groups, and schools of thought.
All this work stands as a proxy for the really needed work, which is to discover which politicians, experts, up and coming researchers or startups, advisors, schools of thought, etc are really worth placing credit in, and which are full of shit.
Although this has all gone on since time immemorial, it clearly in many cases is ineffective at doing the needful work. The best way to stop something which is doing harm, is to figure out a replacement which is better. Are there ways of doing this better?
This is why I think the simulacra levels are better thought of as a square or diamond. Going from 1 to 3 has a tendency to cause drift in the direction of 2, leading eventually to 4 (=2+3). (Maybe they'd also be better represented in binary, and starting from 0. Plus then there'd be Spinal Tap jokes.)
It seems you are assuming some context that I don't have. Googling, I think you may be referring to Baudrillards "Simulacra", but I am not familiar with this theory. Could you elucidate?
Oh, sorry. Yes, it's that, but it's been bouncing around the rationalist sphere for a while, so it may also have subtly shifted in meaning in this context. Here's a good summary:
I wrestled with it a few weeks ago and came up with an internal model that, while probably unlike Baudrillard's, is at least something that proves useful to me.
In particular there's a sort of shared symmetry between the difference between 1 and 2, and between 3 and 4, and so I've been conceptualizing them as layers, like so:
I think the problem with 4 is that the description is about people who have given up on any form of epistemic diligence because they find it works for them not to bother. But, most people reading this blog will have spent 10,000 hours on some kind of 'scholarly work' (extremely broadly defined), but there are a much larger number of people who have not done this, who some of the time may thus be doing 4 even if they actually wanted to do 1.
I liked Zvi's explanation using the children of the Seder; somehow it made sense of two things that had previously confused me.
Off the top of my head, I think of it like this (not the greatest example, still a bit grounded at 4):
1) what's the best policy?
2) what policy should I advocate to gain power?
3) what's the best policy to strengthen my political coalition?
4) what policy should I advocate to help my political coalition gain power?
By 4, not only has the person given up on getting stuff done, and is just mouthing words to manipulate people, the words don't even refer to things that would have a practical effect, they're just the slogans of the day, designed to energize the base.
Everyone whose political activity is going online and "owning the ____s". Or those who think that political advocacy is joining a march and chanting the same thing everyone else does, without trying to directly physically improve the world or even thinking about what the slogans mean.
The only right way of doing it is doing it yourself. Sift through all the bullshit to find the truth, if that's even possible. You can't trust anyone in this world.
Fortunately it's not a binary distinction, and we can build up predictive knowledge about how often and how reliable particular people are about particular things.
> Neri Oxman is a Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, but nobody in history has ever cared about Media Arts and Sciences.
Context: the MAS program at MIT is the program run by the MIT Media Lab, an institution whose reputation has suffered of late due to its association with Jeffrey Epstein but which was before that the darling of the tech press, the subject of hundreds if not thousands of fawning, breathless articles since the 1980s about the groundbreaking research coming out of the lab. And to be fair, if you’ve ever used a computer or a computer network (eg, the internet) to do anything other than academic research — read a news feed customized to you, chat with friends, take a course, participate in a shared virtual world — you are enjoying the fruits of research groups like the Social Media group (the origin of that term, for what it’s worth) or the Epistemology and Learning group (anyone ever learn to program using LOGO?) or the Electronic Publishing Group.
I have very mixed feelings about the Media Lab’s legacy, but to say that nobody cares about their research couldn’t be farther from the truth. The history of the MIT Media Lab is the history of the adoption of computers and the internet by ordinary people in their day to day lives; the history of our culture in 2024 doesn’t make any sense without it.
Yeah, there’s always been a lot of fluff at the ML, but it’s always been mixed with serious science and engineering research by the top-notch faculty the place manages to attract.
Like I said, I have very mixed feelings about the place.
I was just correcting Scott on a narrow point about the notoriety of the MAS program at MIT (that, to be fair, was entirely tangential to the theme of his essay as a whole).
The lesson I learned long ago, and why I spend much more time on ACX than on news outlets: Everyone has an agenda. If someone has unique data (e.g. news sites), take the data only and preferably from opposing sides; if no unique data is needed, seek sources that are either explicit in their agenda or ideally those who put objective truth as their agenda (and usually these places can be identified via if they truly steel-man the opposing side, separate between facts and opinions, etc.).
> and usually these places can be identified via if they truly steel-man the opposing side
I don't think this is as worthwhile as you seem to. I've seen it attacked from several directions that all aim at the same point: if you want to refute someone's argument, you need to refute the argument that they actually made. This applies whether you're trying to persuade them, bystanders, or yourself, though there's not generally much cause for concern on that last front.
I am pretty sure that Scott recently wrote about how nice it was to see people addressing what he said he was talking about rather than what they thought he should be talking about, which amused me.
I didn't mean actually steel-manning. I agree with you - a good steel-man in my eyes can be an honest and deep understanding of the other's side arguments.
The test is simple in my eyes: If I feel like the person can pass an Ideological Turing Test of the other side, he has truly thought about something deeply.
> The lesson I learned long ago, and why I spend much more time on ACX than on news outlets: Everyone has an agenda.
Unfortunately, ACX has been growing more and more of an agenda. I'm not saying it's a bad one, but it's still an agenda: promoting and defending EA, raising alarm about AI, and now attempting to weigh in to low level journo-political food fights.
Back in SSC times Scott was all about the excitement of figuring stuff out in the world, for the sheer beauty of uncovering nuggets of insight and truth. Now it seems he grew a sense of responsibility and feels the need to try and steer change instead. Not only is it much more boring, but IMO he's much better at his original goal than at this. I guess I'll have to wait for his next piece of fiction!
I remember back in 2014 he had a bit of an agenda, but he seemed to eventually let it merge into the rest of his worldview. Possibly the same is going to happen with this "low level journo" stuff, once the trauma from the NYT article fades into the background.
Maybe this is what happens when someone finds a bit of what they think is the truth? He can still go around finding good arguments and taking down bad arguments, but once enough of those good arguments lead to the same place, it looks like an agenda and quacks like an agenda. It's all well and good to talk about the beauty of rational truth-seeking, but I'd be disappointed if it never got him anywhere. And I haven't picked up any sense that he couldn't be talked out of it if someone had a good enough argument.
The NYT trauma was mirrored pretty closely by college cancellation trauma that led to all those feminism-Voldemort rants. Which is great, because otherwise I likely wouldn't have stumbled on the blog, but it terms of truth-seeking those were of noticeably lesser value.
Compared to the normal level of discourse on the internet on such topics it was of course miles better, but even so it was significantly below Scott's standard for subjects without a traumatic emotional attachment.
“The secret to reading critically? Ask yourself this:
Why am I reading this article NOW?
Just do that. You’re not saying that the article is a lie. You’re not saying that the article isn’t important. You’re saying that there is a metagame at play here with the author and the sources of that article. You’re saying that you are aware of that metagame and you’re going to take that into account before deciding your behavior in reaction to that article.”
Rufo and Brunet went after Gay because of her complete hypocrisy on free speech matters. If she had been a principled free-speech absolutist the whole time, there are plenty of pro-Israel people who would've been upset by her congressional testimony (probably including Ackman), but some right-wing investigative journalists probably wouldn't have cared that much. They care because academia/media/etc. will go after people (including tenured academics) who say things like "There's no such thing as a woman with a penis" or "Maybe the under-representation of black Americans in (insert prestigious field here) has something to do with having an average IQ one standard deviation below the IQ of white Americans" or "The gender pay gap is sufficiently explained by various factors that have nothing to do with sexist bosses."
Regarding Elizabeth Spiers, I see she is folding her tent and leaving Substack to we deplorables:
"We’re moving to a different platform. It’ll probably be Ghost or Wordpress with some kind of email integration, but I want to potentially start this newsletter up again and I don’t want to do it on a platform that keeps openly promoting racists and transphobes."
Wordpress? Ye gods and small fishes, why? Ask your good buddy Cade The Tech Writer Guy for advice, Lizzy!
Maybe it's because this is a nest of scum and villainy, or maybe it's because she's dropping subscribers and moving to what was the Cool New Joint has not worked out for her in terms of making cash money off her writing - I see by the linked early post that she was boasting 3k subscribers but now she's down to "over 2k". Probably why she needs the side-gig teaching would-be journos how to write op-eds:
"I’m teaching an opinion writing workshop on Zoom on August 9th and 16th from 7pm to 9pm ET. The structure for participants: On August 1st, you'll receive a reading list and an assignment to be completed before the first session. Between the first and second sessions, you'll have a revision assignment and I'll review your first assignment with you individually. The week after the second session, I'll give you a final edit on a completed opinion column and if you aim to get your piece published, some suggestions about where to pitch it.
Since this is a first run, I'm pricing it at $350.00. I'll increase the price once I'm sure I've worked out any potential kinks, but haven't settled on a number yet. You can register/sign up here."
Well, good luck with the move, Liz, don't strain your back lifting any heavy furniture, and I'm sure Wordpress (giggle) will be just the ticket to draw in the huge audience craving a NYT writer's words of worldly wisdom! Barbenheimer memes, really got her finger on the pulse there!
"I wrote about Barbenheimer memes for The New York Times. Here’s a gift link if you’re not a subscriber. As I mention in the column, my vibe is more Oppenheimer than Barbie, but I saw both last weekend, in that order. It was like enjoying a tasting menu at a restaurant, where it’s amazing but maybe a little exhausting, and ending the meal with an ice cream sundae laced with THC."
(If you just wait long enough, you get to see your enemies pulling themselves down).
Fortunately for her, Wordpress has never been used by any bad people ever, so she's moving away from this wretched hive of scum and villainy to a much cleaner and safer platform.
I do have to incline towards a wry smile, when the piece rebuking Scott was all "journalism is Serious Business" and then later on she's "yeah I jumped on the clickbait five minute pop sensation bandwagon with Barbieheimer".
Wordpress (which hosts my blog*) genuinely is better. You can leave comments with hypertext tags rather than having to dump a raw url when you want to link!
I'm not sure how you discuss "targeting" with mentioning Trump. Is it "chilling" that there has been a search for dirt on him for years, even producing garbage like the Steele Dossier?
But if you want to keep this focused on Gay: Why not mention her role in ousting Roland Fryer, who went from Golden Child to outcast and was ousted by Gay herself? Or, why not mention that plagiarism is the cardinal sin in academia. Perhaps the reason it was not found before is because who would suspect someone would so lazy as to plagiarize something as mundane as their acknowledgements? In any case, she did stuff that would land an 18-year-old freshman in the hottest of waters. That she heads the most important university in the US, and perhaps the world, makes it important.
And regarding "The message is clear: go after an important Ivy League leader, and we’ll go after your family." Is this surprising? Academia is a toxic, nasty place. It is not the least bit surprising that Harvard, the epitome of "it's a big club and you ain't in it", would go after its enemies using its allies in contemporary journalism.
You expect journalists to dig up dirt on prominent politicians (and hey, some if it's even true!), but usually not to dig up dirt on random people with blogs or whatever.
The funny think about the Spiers piece is that approximately every normal human being understands that having the NYT write a profile about you has a substantial chance to go really badly for you.
Actually Karlstack (Brunet) investigated Gay over a year ago and found all kinds of damning stuff that isn't plagiarism, including apparent coverups of data forgery.
So there was no holding stuff in reserve. They were attacking Gay from the start. Yet nobody cared. The entire thing did not go viral, did not collect $100, did not pass go. That's why you don't know about it and are over-thinking their strategy.
I think it's established beyond all possible doubt now that journalists do the bidding of academics, and the only crime academics care about is plagiarism. People can literally photoshop images and make up tables of data, entire fields can be based on nonsensical premises, and nobody anywhere gives a damn. But the moment someone copies a few sentences from another paper they absolutely ape-shit.
In this context it's entirely expected and reasonable that the Gay thing revolves around plagiarism. What was Ackman going to do, accuse her of scientific fraud, diversity hiring, incompetence and coverups? That's de rigour in academia and journalists never report on it, with the notable exception of Nature's news department (!!). But plagiarism? That gets noticed in the halls of power.
Well-stated. The plagiarism stuff is related to maintaining stature. Our precious words. Reading over a few of the examples reminded me of the school chore of changing or rearranging a word here or there that teachers explained was "making it your own". It didn't seem very significant! It didn't feel like "one's own". It seemed rather a waste of time. Much like the obsession with "using a different word" than the plain and suitable one, to make your writing "sparkle"!
Still, someone tripped up somewhere that they let it pass in her case, she should have gotten that in sixth grade. Unless teachers have become less pedantic.
I think you have the causality backwards. Academics definitely care a lot about whether research is shoddy, in technical fields they care a lot more about that than whether someone plagiarized a definition from Wikipedia or whatever. The reason _plagiarism_ accusations specifically seem to stick is because they are (1) a lot easier to prove and (2) a lot easier to understand by the broader public.
I guess that's true, although photoshopping and forgery are often quite easy to show too. Of course you can always plead incompetence, but that's also true for plagiarism.
There are tools that detect internally inconsistent numbers in papers for example. Nobody cares.
When people report bugs in academic models, also nobody cares. See Ferguson's COVID models for an extreme example.
In the end, I don't see any evidence that academics care about whether research is shoddy. If they did there'd be less of it and we'd see people get fired for it. In practice they only seem to get fired for plagiarism, or violating left-wing ideology.
What a long way to say "I don't understand hypocrisy"
Also wild that the wife of a literal billionaire is categorized as afflicted here. "Comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable" is what is happening in the media when they do things like write critical stories about powerful institutions. Personally think the better explanation of why stories critical of EA started happening was that it turned out to be a bunch of powerful people a lot of whom were "Just Some Guy" doing dumb "Just Some Guy" stuff. I'm not the biggest fan of the media but the Oxman story was good, partly on account of being hilarious.
Literal billionaires and their wives can still suffer psychologically from being widely hated (or from a media attack making it seem as if they are, or might soon be, widely hated).
The exact opposite! Billionaires finding themselves subject to as much pain as the median citizen means only that our society has a minimally functional system of laws and institutions. If a billionaire hasn't suffered more than the average citizen for their position, status and wealth then the society is most likely sick or stagnant.
Not malice at all! A society in which billionaires expect to face a similar lifestyle to the median citizen and experience discomforts similar to those experienced by a median citizen is a society which will have an extremely high standard of living and solid, continuing efforts behind ameliorating the discomforts that remain.
Those who expect solutions to flow directly from leveraging their relative personal purchasing power are both naive and the truly unhealthy ones.
Being a billionaire inherently involves having the power to avoid at least some of the pain and suffering that other people suffer. If billionaires nonetheless suffer all of the pain and suffering of other people, it seems to me one of three things must be true:
1. Billionaires must be absolutely flawlessly altruistic
2. Someone must be blocking billionaires in their efforts to alleviate their own pain and suffering
3. Someone must be targeting billionaires for extra, compensatory pain.
#1 is unlikely, while #2 and #3 are at least locally malicious.
1) Your assumption is wrong; billionaires have no special ability to avoid pain and suffering commensurate with their wealth but they can purchase many more distractions than the average human.
2) The status of having accumulated billions of dollars is inherently incompatible with the concept of altruism. Full stop.
3) We outlaw sale of human organs and other tissues as much as possible in civilized countries specifically so billionaires can't use their wealth to alleviate their own pain & suffering. Not immoral, in fact the exact opposite!
4) Progressive taxation is a system that targets people, billionaires among them, for extra compensatory pain. You may not like systems like it, but your dislike has no bearing on the morality of the system.
I think it's all what nonprofit types and interested actors feed in, but the Oxman case seemed unusually purely negative polarization based. If she was the head of an academic institution, that would've screwed that up big time; as it is, is he supposed to, I dunno, divorce her?
Well the cliche is that conservatives only find compassion about abortion, trans rights, gay rights, drug abuse when it is their family member. When it is just something out in the ether, then fentanyl users, for example, are a plague upon the country, but, when it comes out that their daughter has been checked into rehab, then they have compassion for a family member who made some bad decisions and is in recovery.
A good example is Dick Cheney. His daughter has been gay publicly since at least the 90's. While the Bush administration was not LGBTQ friendly, Dick Cheney left the actual speechifying against it to others because he probably didn't want to implicitly badmouth his daughter.
Oxman went and threw some very specific stones without checking to see if he lived in a glass house.
I agree with the sentiment that generally the media piles on to people falling from grace. I think it’s because it’s safer to criticize people in numbers. The Claudine Gay example is a bad one since although the allegations were republished at a convenient time, the original reporting was there. I also think in the specific circumstances, establishment media types were in between a rock and a hard place regarding defending their general ideology and Claudine Gay’s tenure in light of that. I think the plagiarism served as a seemingly unique and novel way to circumvent the issue of whether affirmative action overpromotes poor quality individuals
> The plagiarism was discovered by conservative journalists Chris Rufo and Chris Brunet. It would be quite a coincidence for them to find it at exactly the moment Gay was already under attack for her anti-Semitism testimony. More likely, they either:
> Found it a while ago, and kept it in reserve for a time when Gay was in the news
> Or were angry about Gay’s testimony, looked for dirt on her, and found it.
> I think this is obvious to everyone, but I hadn’t seen anyone make it explicit, and I think it should be.
Definitely targeting, but you left out what I see as a fairly significant third option:
They noticed that Gay was under assault from other quarters, so they looked for dirt on her (while she was weak anyway), and found it.
In order to take down someone you hate while they're under attack, it's not actually necessary that you care about whatever it is they're under attack for. No more than it is that what takes them down be related to whatever it is they're under attack for.
(In fact, a story from when I was in high school: one year, everyone hated the chemistry teacher. Partway through the year he got fed up and called a friend of mine an idiot. This would have offended nobody. But, because everyone hated him anyway, maybe a dozen students went to the administration to file a complaint. He got fired.)
Rufo doesn't seem to particularly care about Israel or Gaza. He cares about defeating DEI/Woke. A major DEI proponent had upset some powerful and wealthy people with the Gaza stuff and was looking vulnerable, so he piled on and fed them some more ammunition to help bring her down.
A lot of power struggles to bring someone down have two layers -- the proximal, punishable offense and the actual, unrelated reason their enemies hate or otherwise want to destroy them. In the case of Gay, there were three layers: the actual punishable offense, the unrelated reasons conservatives hated her and therefore dug up that offense, and the only vaguely-related reasons ultra-wealthy donors hated her and put her on the defensive in the first place.
> A major DEI proponent had upset some powerful and wealthy people
The case for Rufo taking her down is much stronger than that; she's also a major DEI beneficiary. So if she fumbles, angers everyone important, and loses a huge chunk of money, that serves as an accessible example of DEI practices causing harm to their host institutions.
Points 3 onward I understand. I think you're wrong about points 1 and 2.
"Assuming that many important people have skeletons in their closets (or can be believably accused of such in ways hard for them to disprove)..."
That is a very generous way of characterizing Gay's plagiarism (Rufo's "dirt"). It wasn't a shadowy, unfalsifiable smear. It was a verifiable violation of the core principles of her field. And unlike Oxman, Gay remained visible and relevant in the field.
Comparing Gay's experience to yours is inaccurate.
I think this is right. Gay’s position is a prestigious one for which there’s predictably a high bar. She may have done nothing “wrong,” but doing nothing wrong isn’t enough to secure the position. She had the spotlight understandably turned on her for making statements that lacked some deftness at the very least. Then an activist-journalist with an agenda looked into whether she had demonstrated some questionable behavior in her past. The degree to which her past behavior was questionable is debatable, but the behavior wasn’t a plus.
The fallout is she no longer occupies this incredibly coveted, competitive position. People lose far less prestigious positions for more minor transgressions all the time.
People in the spotlight are highly scrutinized and it’s because people in the spotlight can have outsized effects on their community.
The first segment here is insulting to the reader because it shows you put absolutely no effort toward looking into the matter. Rufo is extremely transparent about what he does, outlining the step by step process in the Wall Street Journal, and Brunet has literally written a timeline on this on his own Substack, including when he first got the anonymous tip regarding Gay. These are two activists widely known for their belief in "narrating the scandal" as it happens -- informing ideological allies and foes alike of what they intend to do and how they intend to do it. You apparently were too busy to even look at what they said about this question, which would have shown you the answer.
Yes, you probably should rewrite this Codex post, after looking at Brunet's timeline. He is known for explaining, in exhaustive overdetail, how he finds things out and what documentation he is using, tho he's learning to be mor like a journalist and just say stuff. And here, he has for years been talking about Claudine Gay, without anybody outside of academia listening. I doubt Gay's plagiarism is a real surprise to anyone in the small world of Political Science.
I agree, it's like a bit of the replication crisis in miniature. Fortunately, here, the actual data still supports the broad thesis, but requires a slightly more involved and nuanced model.
Brunet responded below, so hopefully that will help speed the process along.
I think you're confusing 'maliciously target' with 'get curious about something you've heard abou/wonder what you've missed when new information becomes available.' Someone who didn't check their priors after something like FTX or ask 'hang on, is your concern really plagiarism, or something else in the Harvard issue' well, doesn't strike me as very rational...
I wonder how numbers of skeletons in the closet varies with quality of person/leader/ideas. Is it random or not. It is a bit like the general factor of correctness.
My guess is that people with lots of skeletons in their closet especially around fraud are significantly less good at their job.
I'm not sure if I'm really contradicting you in any way, but I wouldn't have put it the way you put it. I think the way you put it ignores two factors.
1) The clumpiness of random distributions. For example, these allegations against Gay weren't held back. They were reported on before. They just didn't gain traction before. The skeletons in everyone's cupboards are found at normal random intervals, and as a result often appear in clumps that look like a pile-on, even though they are in fact just normal clumpiness.
2) When you use the word targeting, this suggests individual journalists bear in mind specific targets. But in reality it's all just pile-on, isn't it? There was something else going on with Gay in the media, so an old story about her plagiarism was more likely to attract clicks for those few days. None of the journalists involved need have any animus against Gay; they just need to follow the rules of the news game like good little automata, chase the clicks, and the avalanche of bad news forms naturally.
Read like this, it is certainly worth knowing: if you ever get into the media, it will not rain on you it will pour. But this doesn't imply "targeting," I don't think.
Were they reported on before? I know people had dug this up at places like the EJMR board, and that it would pop up in that context, but my understanding was that this didn't hit a mainstream/major digital outlet until then. Open to correction.
I think there's specific targets, fwiw. It made sense for Rufo (actually the best work was by Aaron Sibarium, but no matter) et al to target Gay; it made sense to target Oxman, though her case is funny since it's far from obvious what the consequences are supposed to be. It's true outlets want the clicks but I think the mechanisms there are more targeted, yes.
I thought Gay did better than the other lady president, the one who had a smirk we haven't seen since that kid stood outside the Washington Monument being harrassed by the weird wooden Indian/imposter veteran.
I don't know if her smirk was defiant - because she knew she was doomed - or if it was just her natural mien, over which she has little control ... An interesting difference between men and women. The men in those sinecures generally know how to look the part. Women get into those positions without needing to master that particular skill; we've all experienced that. Odd how it came home to roost though.
As for Gay, sure, somebody diligent and unqueasy about such things had to dig - but the CONTEXT was this: progressives elevate someone like that, for reasons of ideology and skin color, but they don't trouble to do it well. They don't trouble to find someone legitimate enough to withstand scrutiny. Because somewhere in their heart of hearts, their gossip-y, back-biting, judgmental hearts - they don't want anyone more solid. They like to reserve that power. They're perfectly happy for everyone to guess/know that she didn't have the goods, academics-wise. Partly it's to clearly demonstrate what it's all really about - pointing back to *them* (be afraid, be very afraid). Partly it's to make sure everyone knows that the job is in their gift, that they are the puppetmasters.
I guess I can see that. Curiously I'm a bit of a smirker myself, but only in private, when I'm alone and reading something that raises my ire. Or occasionally in response to a deranged driver, or someone who litters. I'm a natural hater.
But if there's ever a time to will your facial muscles into neutrality, a discussion that touches on "genocide", however cynically, is surely that time.
Especially as, there can be little question the president of an Ivy would make use of the term "genocide" freely - and very likely loosely - at any other time, for her own purposes, or at the behest of others.
Overpromoted women as university presidents aren't even good at faking it. Among poential male fakes, only the best fakes get the job, the ones who are good actors.
I think there's less here than there seems to be. Journalists are literally attention seekers. They want their stories read to enhance their reputation and their owner's profit. Stories which get read are man bites dog stories. "Harvard professor may be plagiarist' is a dog bites man story until outside factors promote it to man bites dog. If they had run the story before it became interesting, no one would have read it, it would have been easier to refute, and people would now be saying"look at the mud slinging journalists dragging up this tired old story."
As for the EA professor, thirty years ago he was a (possibly not yet even professorial) author of racist emails. There's at least the possibility that he has not completely changed his views over 30 years even if he says he has. If he remains racist, this is front and centre to EA (does he think dollars spent on Africa are comparatively wasted?) If he is who I think it's even more central to AI ethics. How can you think clearly about machine rights when you don't believe in universal human rights? His prominence changes the email from dog bites man to man bites dog. The moral is, don't be racist even if you are obscure.
I don't claim he is, nor that such rights exist or are capable of existence. I am simply saying that this is a type of question on which he is likely to be listened to, and that evidence of potential bias on his part is therefore relevant and legitimate.
It's notable that the Time hit piece on EA did not name any of the alleged sexual abusers in the article. It said that some of the victims requested their abusers not be named, but it's unlikely everyone did. A sign the libel laws are working.
A sign that libel laws have an effect. But is it a good effect? If the accusations are false, then the laws cause diffuse libel over individual libel. Is that good? Is that even the intent of the laws?
Good piece - and yes, my sense is, if someone comes into the crosshairs for whatever reason, it's going to result in people digging on dirt to use at you, and this does not necessarily have to grow naturally out of the story that brought you to prominence in the first place.
This is pretty standardized and has been for decades - for political campaigns. What you're seeing here is essentially opposition research tactics - digging for needles in the hay stack, putting together mild quotes and off-hand comments, finding the thing you said in 2006 that juxtapositions itself poorly against the situation in 2024 - being extended into basically anyone who runs afoul of what a properly funded nonprofit cares about.
That a lot of media outlets don't even bother with the pretense they're doing something else (did anyone really think Business Insider was some sort of bastion of journalistic ethics before this?) makes it easier for the era of the "nonprofit newsroom." These situations emerge, someone good at Lexis-Nexis or TurnItIn or whatever's relevant runs up a pitch, and then some journo writes down the material they've been provided.
It absolutely is targeting, but I think you're conflating different things here.
Gay was in a very important, very public position with (we thought) very high standards. She failed to live up to those standards. It is absolutely true that people didn't look until she took some crazy positions, but arguably the sort of person who would pass the high standards required of a Harvard President would never be so careless as to make the statements she made. She signaled through her professional behavior that something wasn't quite right, some people looked into it, and something wasn't quite right. Beyond anything she did, her position makes her subject to targeting. There are legal standards about this. She's clearly a public figure.
The Oxman targeting was unpleasant and clearly retaliation. But academics are also fair-game for targeting about their work. The reasons don't really matter.
Overall, I'd argue this is all a net positive; a lot of academics are very sloppy, and targeting for deeper review on the basis of political activism seems like a reasonable enough process. I'd prefer a more comprehensive, systematic external review system (new non-profit opportunity?). Academia's internal controls are badly broken, and outside review is a good thing.
Your case isn't comparable. You didn't do anything wrong. You're not an academic making claims of expertise based on your past work. You were involved with a group that was in the news, and you'd been a successful writer for a while. Nowhere near public-figure enough to justify invasion of privacy, but clearly the NYT disagreed. Targeting you wasn't justified.
There was also an element of retaliation, although more the standard journalistic kind (not talking huh? would be a real shame if this article was to be more negative and if we mentioned your name for no reason). Which is unpleasant, but also part of the way journalism works. Fear of negative press gets people to talk who might not otherwise talk. On net, I think that's also a positive, although it can be abused. Although I grant I might be less willing to take the greater-good position if something similar happened to me.
I don't think the timeline on Claudine Gay is right. I am sure I had heard about the plagiarism allegations about her well before Fall 2023 and I think they just didn't gain any traction until the congressional hearings.
Unfortunately, I can't find a link to support this, as I can't seem to filter out current news from the search. I guess it is possible I'm misremembering. It may have been from around the time she was hired as there was some controversy about her qualifications and criticisms that her appointment was mainly for DEI reasons.
If you don't know about it, you should use google's "search tools" (only on desktop, not mobile). Do a search, click the search tools button and more options come up, such as restricting to old pages (on mobile you can only restrict to new pages). You still get lots of false hits, but I found one real hit.
The earliest accusation of plagiarism against Gay I could find is from about when she became president. It didn't include any details, but claimed that the board had heard the accusations. It could easily be lies that just lucked out. The poster then switches to quoting Brunet's earlier and much more serious complaints.
"But it’s the sort of thing that you can imagine having chilling effects. Imagine if, every time someone let their students/employees/whatever criticize Israel, journalists searched really hard for unrelated dirt on them. "
It ain't just journalists and it ain't just Israel. The criminal laws in the United States are far-reaching enough and broad enough in scope that an aggressive prosecutor can always find a pretext to bring charges against anyone. Even if they cannot make the charges stick, the legal fees alone are enough to bankrupt most people. I am in the 1%, and I could not afford to pay expensive lawyers for very long.
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." - Cardinal Richelieu
For that matter, the Scientologists have been known to do something similar in the civil litigation area.
Yes, this is a huge problem and I've been trying to figure out a solution but it's not clear what that would be.
The modern world is a complex place and even if you try to reduce the number of criminal laws you still need to be able to prosecute things like bribery even when it's done pretending to be payments for other things or blackmail -- but this inevitably means you end up with grey areas or fact/interpretation intensive questions that an aggressive prosecutor can use to ruin people.
So sure, fewer laws and an aggressive application of both the rule on lenity and the doctrine that the accused must have clear notice of the behavior to be avoided can help but it's not enough.
This was the original purpose of grand juries and I think we need to reinvigorate that idea. Require that prosecutors enpanel a jury of citizens who would get to see all the cases prosecutors want to bring -- or at least historical records of what has and hasn't been brought -- and let them hear some degree of response from the accused before deciding if the case should be brought.
The Harvard students never called for genocide against the Jews, and President Gay never supported a call for genocide.
Sample quotes from the internet.
What do you think about Harvard President Claudine Gay's apology for her remarks about calling for the genocide of Jews?
Do you agree with Harvard President Claudine Gay that calling for the genocide of Jews on campus depends on the "context"?
After witnessing the Congressional testimony of Claudine Gay, the President of Harvard, I am ashamed of my alma mater. How should Harvard respond to a call for the genocide of Jews on its campus?
When asked if calling for the genocide of Jews would violate Harvard's code of conduct, Gay wouldn't give a yes or no answer. Harvard constitutional law scholar Laurence Tribe called her testimony hesitant, formulaic and evasive. But he was among hundreds of faculty members who rallied behind Gay, urging Harvard to keep its president.
So exactly what was the testimony?
ELISE STEFANIK: It’s a yes or no question. Let me ask you this. You are president of Harvard, so I assume you’re familiar with the term intifada, correct?
CLAUDINE GAY: I’ve heard that term, yes.
ELISE STEFANIK: And you understand that the use of the term intifada in the context of the Israeli Arab conflict is indeed a call for violent armed resistance against the state of Israel, including violence against civilians and the genocide of Jews. Are you aware of that?
CLAUDINE GAY: That type of hateful speech is personally abhorrent to me.
ELISE STEFANIK: And there have been multiple marches at Harvard with students chanting quote, “there is only one solution intifada revolution.” And quote, “globalize the intifada.” Is that correct?
CLAUDINE GAY: I’ve heard that thoughtless, reckless and hateful language on our campus, yes.
ELISE STEFANIK: So, based upon your testimony, you understand that this call for intifada is to commit genocide against the Jewish people in Israel and globally, correct?
CLAUDINE GAY: I will say again that type of hateful speech is personally abhorrent to me.
ELISE STEFANIK: Do you believe that type of hateful speech is contrary to Harvard’s code of conduct or is it allowed at Harvard?
CLAUDINE GAY: It is at odds with the values of Harvard. But our values also —
ELISE STEFANIK: Can you not say here that it is against the code of conduct at Harvard?
CLAUDINE GAY: We embrace a commitment to free expression, even of views that are objectionable, offensive, hateful. It’s when that speech crosses into conduct that violates our policies against bullying, harassment —
ELISE STEFANIK: Does that speech not cross that barrier? Does that speech not call for the genocide of Jews and the elimination of Israel?
CLAUDINE GAY: When —
ELISE STEFANIK: You testify that you understand that it’s the definition of intifada. Is that speech according to the code of conduct or not?
CLAUDINE GAY: We embrace a commitment to free expression and give a wide berth to free expression even of views that are objectionable —
It’s been said before, but the issue isn’t so much that Claudine Gay adheres rigidly to the principles of free speech even for claims she strongly disagrees with - that’s actually noble - but that if you look at actual Harvard policy, they do the opposite of this for every other issue. You can call for violence against Zionists, but heaven forbid you say that there two genders!
Yes, I realize my analysis is narrowly focused. But if you glance at the four examples that I pulled out of the internet, none of them are mentioning inconsistent application of free speech. All four are reacting passionately to the claim of advocacy of genocide.
I would say she doesn't perform well under pressure.
But, consider this. What if she had said, 'Intifada means 'resistance to occupation', and the Palestinians have the right to resist their 75-year occupation. Furthermore Harvard students have the right to support the Palestinians in their just cause."
What would have been the result? Total uproar! "The president of Harvard is an anti-semite!" Etc.
I'll dialogue all day long with people who disagree with me thoughtfully and accurately. The ones who use inflammatory, inaccurate arguments go in the trash.
How did you block someone? I'm super-interested in blocking you, but cannot find the UI element to make it happen. I assumed I'd just have to tolerate your obtuse and persistent refusal to see reality for what it was forever.
I wouldn't focus on the precise words used, quite so much. Consider that advocating for "a certain kind of traditional values" can be interpreted as calling for a return to Jim Crow or even black slavery. Would you truly defend someone who used those words, if they gave every other indication of being a racist? If they looked right in your face and smirked?
IMO, Gay correctly accepted that the chants were a call for genocide. But she got in trouble because of her incredibly clumsy attempts at equivocation, of trying to distinguish between what she personally thought and what the speech code allowed. And even if she could have skillfully navigated the distinction, she probably would have faltered once she was questioned about the historical context of Harvard speech code enforcement. There'd be no way around it - the speech code has been interpreted in different ways for different groups.
Do you actually think Harvard would have supported a white supremacist march calling for a revolution to free America from [insert slurs here]?
>>Gay correctly accepted that the chants were a call for genocide<<
So you believe that the meaning of the word "intifada" always includes the intent of genocide. What word should a Palestinian use if they just want an end to occupation?
No. But when used in certain contexts it can have that meaning. For one thing, when people are marching and chanting stuff, I'm inclined to interpret things more loosely. But in a wikipedia page about the "second intifada", I'd read that more literally.
How about "End the occupation"? "Stop the killing" would work.
"Free Palestine" is a lot better than "Palestine should be free", because the word "free" has muliple meanings in English, but the first version is clear about which meaning is being used. (Not "Judenfrei".)
If the march is in support of Palestinans, doesn't it seem natural to use their word?
I'm quite suspicious of a "loose" interpretation which means that the President of Harvard must resign. Seems to me that a very serious consequence requires some rigor.
For example, some documented examples where Palestinian shouts of INTIFADA clearly meant that they wanted to commit genocide. It's an Arabic word. I'm skeptical that non-Arabic speakers definitely understand the meaning. Particularly when the dictionaries don't support their claims.
Israel has killed 25,000 Palestinians (plus thousands "missing") and most supporters of Israel deny that this proves genocidal intent.
Not your fault, but this conversation is depressing me, so I'm going to stop after this. I'll outline what I was going to say, and feel free to respond, and I'll read it at some point.
1) Going back to my first comment, I think it'd be better to focus on Gay's equivocation, rather than the exact words used. I don't think she'd have been as accepting about white supremacists calling for a violent revolution and the expulsion of all black people from the US, even if no one specifically mentioned "killing" black people.
2) Official definitions don't capture what makes words meaningful. It's ultimately about what meaning your audience takes from what you say, and it's going to be slightly different for each person. It's incredibly fascinating that we understand each other despite that.
3) Israel's potentially-genocidal actions have no bearing on whether the pro-Palestinian protestors were also calling for genocide. In fact, the opposite: if they think Israel is genocidal, wouldn't that make them more likely to call for genocide in return?
My focus is on the people deciding that the protestors were calling for genocide with zero evidence. In other words they reached that conclusion practically instantly.
These same people would also argue that genocide is NOT PROVEN in the case of Israel flattening Gaza and killing 25-30K Palestinians. They are extremely slow to come to any such conclusion.
> ELISE STEFANIK: And you understand that the use of the term intifada in the context of the Israeli Arab conflict is indeed a call for violent armed resistance against the state of Israel, including violence against civilians and the genocide of Jews. Are you aware of that?
To be clear, I think this is not nuanced enough. Although these days, people seem to have broader definitions of "genocide" than I do, so maybe it's accurate.
I think most everyone is very interested in hearing an enemy talk about a return to a certain kind of traditional values and interpreting that as a call for a return to Jim Crow or slavery or some other evil thing. But I think that kind of interpretation is usually just putting words into someone else's mouth to try to win an argument.
Most people chanting about "from the river to the sea" have no desire to mass murder Jews in Israel, even if that would be the result of that policy. (Similarly, the often-highly-educated dimwits who talk about banning the internal combustion engine or the use of fossil fuels have no desire for the mass die-off of humanity that would result. This is partly ideologically-driven blindness, but mostly honest lack of brains.
There are people who use it in an innocuous way, and people who mean the bad thing. Part of what lets it work as meaning the bad thing, is that there **are** people who use it in an innocuous way. A not-quite-parallel example is that the Confederate flag can mean the bad thing of "slavery was good" or a more innocuous "fuck the government". I do not like the current trend of banning expression because some people interpret it as meaning a bad thing, but my side (our side?) appears to have lost that battle, so I'm trying to live in the new world.
Look what happened to the "OK" hand sign. From what I can gather, some Internet trolls created a fake rumor that it was a white supremacist gesture, and then the left-wing media took the bait and ran wild with it, and then people started deliberately using it to antagonize the left, and eventually some actual white supremacists read about it and started using it unironically. What does it actually mean? Who knows, it's in the eye of the beholder. But I'm certainly not going to flip it out at a random person anymore, especially a black person, when I can just give a "thumbs up" instead. (As with certain other things, if I were black I would not have this problem, because as long as my skin were visible, it would dramatically lower the chances of me being interpreted to mean the bad thing.)
Similarly, if I were to voice support for Palestinians, I'd use "stop the occupation" and "stop the killing" and "stop the violence", instead of something which I know has been used to mean genocide, and which at the very mildest means violent revolution. The use of violence to redress current and past grievances is precisely the problem here.
That is not the relevant part of the testimony. This is:
Stefanik: Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard's rules of bullying and harassment? Yes or no?
President Gay: It can be depending on the context.
Congresswoman Stefanik: What's the context?
President Gay: Targeted at an individual targeted, as at an individual?
Congresswoman Stefanik: It's targeted at Jewish students, Jewish individuals. Do you understand your testimony is dehumanizing them? Do you understand that dehumanization is part of antisemitism? I will ask you one more time. Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard's rules of bullying and harassment? Yes or no?
President Gay: Antisemitic rhetoric when it crosses into conduct, that amounts to bullying, harassment, intimidation, that is actionable conduct, and we do take action.
Congresswoman Stefanik: So the answer is yes. That calling for the genocide of Jews violates Harvard Code of Conduct. Correct?
President Gay: Again, it depends on the context.
(The rest of your comment is tying yourself in knots trying to justify mass-murder of all Jews in Israel. It's not ambiguous at all what those slogans mean.)
I suspect she was thinking about the way the first amendment deals with calls for violence. As I understand it (not all that well), the rule is that a general call for violence ("we should overthrow the government and install Trump as dictator") is protected, but a specific call for imminent violence ("there's that traitor Pence now, let's get him!") is not.
Now, Harvard doesn't restrict its rules to the first amendment, and doesn't have to--they are a private university. But that seems like the distinction she's thinking of.
Assume for a moment that the students were NOT CALLING FOR GENOCIDE. Is Stefaniks question relevant? Would a fair judge intervene, and say, "The witness does not need to answer the question."
Of course I believe the students were calling for intifada.
Whether any students were calling for genocide is immaterial to the question of whether calls for genocide violate Harvard's rules of bullying and harassment.
I think it was fairly common practice among Sports Journalists for decades to look the other way as long as the player was performing on the field, but quick to cite off-field incidents when the performance started lacking. A few different factors at play for sports like wanting to ensure continued access to the player and team, but not surprising that most journalists have agendas that can be manipulated.
That's not great but preferentially critisizing poorly performing athletes doesn't have the same social costs. If it's an equal opportunity thing it might not matter, but the concern is that this can effectively serve as a kind of ideological blackmail to push certain views into/out of the Overton window and that there is therefore a social cost.
Not sure it's true when applied to university presidents but I get the concern in other circumstances.
> it’s always easy to notice and critique power, except when you’re it
I’m curious whether this power has increased over the past decade or not. On the one hand before social media, journalism had a lot of power. It brought down Nixon during the Watergate scandal. It strong-armed the US government into war during the Spanish-American war. But on the other hand, these targeted attacks on semi-prominent individuals might not have been very effective anytime before social media when it was more difficult to socially shame everybody. It’s not like I could’ve named Claudine Gay or Oxman before this time. I guess I'm wondering if part of journalism’s power is an artifact of how social media makes people more susceptible to public shame.
A concern I have about the Gay scandal is that we seem to have forgotten the purpose of norms about plagarism and are just jumping through arbitrary hoops. Academia isn't a game or more school it's about producing valuable research and if you can save time by copying some text describing a methodology then that should be allowed.
Ok, but we need to have norms and she violated them right? Not so fast...these norms are less clear than you think. Recently on an academic Facebook group someone asked, in light of the Gay scandal, about the acceptability of using word for word suggestions from your partner about how to word paragraphs without attribution[1]. About half the responses said: duh ofc it's fine why would you even ask while about a quarter said it's obviously plagarism. A surprising number even said it's not plagarism **because** those suggestions didn't appear in print so no one will find out.
So the norms aren't as clear as people think and to the extent they are we might want to ask if they are the appropriate ones.
1: In some male coded fields some women worry that if you include the thanks you'll be accused by some of just having your partner write your papers. And it can be awkward in multi-author papers.
I don't mean to claim she didn't do something that existing norms don't forbid -- just that those norms seem relatively arbitrary and kinda divorced from the underlying concerns. I I think the clarity issue goes to seriousness but my concern here isn't defending Gay but about creating better norms for plagarism in the future and clearly communicating them.
I will say, to that end, those guidelines aren't really written with dissertations in mind and are less clear in practice than you might think, eg, it's common in mathematics to repeat common definitions without citing to a specific source -- often in what's essentially word for word identical text. So it's just not true that they really expect literally every idea from someone else to be cited or in quotes. If discipline specific norms mean it's not confusing than in practice it's fine. So let's not pretend the rule is actually always cite or quote.
And it's unclear exactly where the dividing line between proofreading help and suggesting exact wording lies.
But yes this doesn't cover her case...Im just saying that maybe the norms should allow this kind of sharing of wording amoung fellow grad students for technical descriptions.
Norms for academic publishing are extremely clear, laid out in detail by every university and impressed into undergraduates under threat of expulsion. Gay obviously violated them.
First we aren't talking about the rules for ug coursework but for a thesis which is generally expected to adhere to academic norms in the field. And everyone agrees those are clear -- they just don't agree on what they say. It's like asking people about what the 2nd amendment means -- though at least there people know others disagree. But I agree Gay did something that isn't within the scope of ambiguity (though how serious it is may be) but I'm just not concerned about Gay but about the norms for academic work going forward.
I've seen repeated discussion of whether certain practices are acceptable on academic groups and while everyone involved says it's obvious they then give different answers.
The problem is that the norms are virtually never discussed or talked about so everyone applies their interpretation and assumes it's the same one everyone else has.
Unfortunately, the rules weren't written or applied by mathematicians and everyone else understands rules in light of what they understand the purpose behind them to be so it seems blinding clear to everyone what they say and yet they get different answers just like with the 2nd amendment.
--
Not saying this extends to the Gay case. I think everyone agrees that's not ok but there is disagreement about the seriousness and there isn't agreement about what about the Gay case makes it different than the example above but my concern isn't with Gay but about the norms and rules going forward for academia.
And this is made worse, not better, by published rules by universities for ug work and journals. For instance, self-plagarism just isn't an academic ethical concern -- it's a copyright issue that worries journals and the goals of UG coursework differ from academic goals. Reusing work in multiple courses gives an unfair advantage in grading while reusing work in academia is being efficient.
> In some male coded fields some women worry that if you include the thanks you'll be accused by some of just having your partner write your papers. And it can be awkward in multi-author papers.
Are you saying that's the actual norm or it should be the norm? The disagreement amoung academics about it I observed shows that it's at least not clearly the norm now. Moreover, I don't see much of a case for it being a good norm.
You aren't stealing anything without permission. And this isn't some school assignment or pointless game, what matters is producing the research so who cares? It's like those dumb arguments that academics shouldn't get to use Adderall because it gives them an unfair advantage -- you aren't given a job because you deserve it, lots of other people are more deserving, but to produce output society sees as valuable.
Now maybe you suggest that it's a problem because it might mean that their current work is an inaccurate predictor of future work because they might break up but that's not a good argument. I mean tons of things affect productivity we don't ask people to cite or reveal from health events, to changes in their prescription meds to the inspiring conversations they have with a partner. There is a philosopher who is famous for always jumping into the subject their current romantic partner studies. All of these are easily much larger factors impacting future productivity but we don't think those should be reported.
Indeed, I'd argue it doesn't reduce the reliability of current work as a signal of future productivity at all. It doesn't really matter what the reason is your work would fall apart in the event of a divorce and science doesn't really care if John Doe names an individual, couple, polycule or a dog with an AI assistant.
That doesn't make any sense. If everyone agrees: yup that's a fine way to do attribution in what way can it be immoral?
Do you think God gave Elseveir the one true universal rule for assigning authorship and all cultures must follow it?!?
Saying it's wrong is like saying that it's wrong to use your book or notes during a test...that may be what you are used to doing but obviously a society can adopt whatever rule they feel like as long as everyone is told what that rule is.
One rule may be more efficient or practical but the norm is what makes the thing right or wrong not vice versa.
> Do you think God gave Elseveir the one true universal rule for assigning authorship and all cultures must follow it?!?
What I think is that it is unlikely to be productive to engage further with someone who makes such bizarre strawman statements and attributes them to me. Goodbye.
>if you include the thanks you'll be accused by some of just having your partner write your papers.
...I mean they ARE having their partner write the paper. I'm not super sympathetic to the concern that it'll look like they're doing what they're actually doing.
But no, it isn't plagiarism because the phrase was given for the specific purpose of being used in that particular paper. If you say "I'm writing a report, how do you think I should word this," it's extremely obvious that any answer you give will end up in that report, and thus giving any answer at all is permission to use it. If they were desperate for credit they would have negotiated terms.
If on the other hand this was originally a quote from some other topic around the dinner table or something, not meant to be repeated, then cite your sources.
If that is really your concern, your chief concern is that Gay received a Ph.D at all, and indeed, examined this whole nonsense Ph.D process that seems to dominate the culture in liberal arts departments. Should you really get a Ph.D just because you hung around long enough either paying tuition or receiving a paltry stipend? That doesn't seem right.
I appreciate your point, but I think the status of a university president is essentially that of a congress member or politician. Your job is as much about projecting a certain image as anything else.
I have some quibles about the norms Gay was accused of violating but it's not crazy to say that we hire a certain group of people to be, in part, figureheads and that their high pay and status is in part compensation for the need to be relatively free of this kind of scandal.
This wasn't some professor or blogger dragged out of psuedo-anonymity but someone who fought to take a very public politically charged position knowing she'd be subject to increased scrutiny. So even if I'm not thrilled about the lack of scrutiny of our norms about plagarism, becoming a university president and complaining about this kind of attack is a bit like becoming an MMA fighter and then trying to file assault charges.
This is obviously correct and I've seen it repeatedly. My first exposure was Cosby, who is obviously a monster, but had been a monster for decades, and nobody cared until he started having unpopular positions. The solution can't be "stop investigating people with unpopular opinions" because that's never going to happen and also we should in fact investigate bad people. Instead journalists need to introduce processes for finding stories that also, occasionally, implicate popular people. Imagine.
There's a difference, obviously, between that case and the media's treatment of the grey tribe. There isn't even smoke here, for the most part. SBF was both very bad and took advantage of particular silicon bro weaknesses, and got deserved scrutiny. But media has an axe to grind against west coast tech guys, took it too far, there was a bit of a backlash, and they backed off.
FWIW I don't think that media folks see their actions as targeting. I think instead that they're increasingly bad at examining biases, to the point they're unaware entirely that they have them.
1. Journalists target people using a random number generator over the broadest possible distribution
2. Journalists develop a utilitarian calculus for investigating journalism which allows them to attack the people who are doing the Most Bad.
Consider also this recent bit of investigative journalism, triggered by a dismissive twitter reply, which showed that there's extremely low hanging fruit in the investigative journalism area:
Broadly, people don't object to investigative journalism. If it targets you and yours it's bad. If it targets people you don't care about with mud you don't care about it's "bad". But it's going to target someone, and they wouldn't write it unless they thought someone would care about the mud.
Journalists, amateur and professional, are going to target people according to their feelings about said people. Whether the targeted fall depends how strong their coalition is and how much it divides the coalition.
Conceptually, it seems like this should just be considered a force of nature and your coalition should simply develop good defenses against it. If your coalition can't stand up to your opposition's accusations maybe it's time for introspection.
I do understand that individual people (typically leadership) of these organizations tend to bear the brunt of these attacks. But what's the solution, really?
Was going to comment on how Gay would never say that about other groups, and Ackman never denied digging up dirt, but the last time I commented I got death threats...
"Compare to the hypothetical situation about Israel above. Investigative journalists have credibly signaled that if you go after their allies in academia, they’ll go after you and your loved ones"
I don't think this is equivalently 'chilling' to the Claudine Gay case. Rufo's attack on Gay's plagiarism wasn't really in any way directly related to the nature of the controversy Gay was in, however poorly you think of her answers to the questions at the Congressional committee. The criticism of Oxman, meanwhile, was over the very same wrongdoing about which Ackman was crusading. In this light, 'go after prominent academics/administrators and we'll go after your family' is a very uncharitable characterisation of Business Insider's coverage. A more reasonable interpretation, to my mind, is 'if you're going to go after someone for plagiarism, you should probably hold those close to you to the same standards', which, having very publicly gone to bat for his wife, Ackman has failed to do.
Specifically, I have been an early and committed financial supporter of developing investigative reporter Chris Brunet. I encourage readers not to sweep Brunet in with some partisan witch hunters. To do so is to misunderstand his integrity, in my opinion.
Scott, I strongly recommend reading Brunet's articles before surmising his intentions, though the impact can of course be discussed without understanding his work.
Brunet's focus is fraud, primarily academic fraud, although his exposure of brilliant crypto fraudster Avraham Eisenberg through Discord is intriguing. Brunet began with raw anger powering his investigations, and continues to develop into a deeper thinker.
You describe Brunet as conservative. That is accurate given what is called conservative today, yet it also adopts framing designed to discount moderate views. Brunet is not dedicated to promoting conservative positions, though his X posts might give that impression. In his Karlstack, Brunet is dedicated to combating deceit and hypocrisy with a fervor for truth and accuracy.
Brunet first wrote about concerns with Claudine Gay in April 2022. Clearly her fair or unfair targeting of data-respecting, conservative black scholar Roland Fryer was motivation to look into her own comparative scholarship. What was the source of her power to crush a black scholar, arguably for countering the DEI party line, using what many consider to be a trumped up witch hunt?
It was remarkable that of the many serious research problems in her markedly thin publication record, the omitting of and altering of data, the questionable statistical approaches, racial promotion of an otherwise unqualified candidate, it was the least of the issues, the lazy cut-and-paste plagiarism hyped by Rufo, that stuck.
It was her comments regarding antiSemitism that lit the fire, and Scott has, as always, interesting observations regarding the implications. Yet there had long been smoke.
Just as an aside: I think describing someone on a one-dimensional political access is almost never very accurate if they are at all an independent thinker.
Brunet likes to investigate academic scandals. He encouraged my analysis of the most famous paper by Lisa D. Cook, a Biden nominee to be Governor of the Federal Reserve Board. I didn't find any fraud, but I did find that her best known paper was a complete fiasco, as I explained in 2022:
We all want journalists on Simulacrum Level 1, but they are all lvl 2 at best and more often lvl 3 or 4. They don't just want you to know about plagiarism, they want you to know about THIS or THAT plagiarism, ONLY because of the effect it'll have on your opinions - namely your stance in the red-blue culture war and how confidently you hold that stance.
How cool it would be to have an AI model that measures something like the "culture war magnitude" of an article. To preemptively answer the question: "If we strip out the culture war component of this story, how much of a 'story' is left?" And then filter your news by that metric.
I think journalism is just returning to its historical roots. I would suggest that the 1920s journalistic ideal of "objectivity, neutral POV, higher standards" journalism was in fact a business decision by several publishers who were attempting to distinguish themselves from the "yellow journalism" era of the 1890s-1910s. Over time that standard became less important as a business differentiator, but it was culturally locked in (more or less) until the Internet forced another rethinking of cultural communication.
That supposed ideal was always a lie, and journalism was never anything other than what it is; the only change that is being exposed because of recent technological developments lowering institutional barriers to information and increasing connectivity .
I disagree: I think everyone having access to the truth is better than otherwise, even if that means everyone also has access to lies they prefer instead.
If one is hunting for dirt on one person then one can't be hunting for dirt on another.
This is the same problem that the Stasi (and KGB and FBI) had back in the day: They would LIKE to keep tabs on everyone. But because of limited resources they couldn't.
The good news (?) is that by automating this sort of thing I expect in the future there will be folks who have let computers trawl through Twitter and Intagram and academic publications and they will have databases of this sort of thing for everyone with any sort of on-line presence. When they choose to release the findings will be another matter.
> You shouldn’t base it on one very dramatic data point, because the generation of dramatic data points involves a lot of noise.
I’d missed this article. Now that I’ve read it, I found it convincing, but I wouldn’t use the term “noise” to summarize. It implies a problem with detection rather than estimation.
In radar detectors, noise is the thermal contribution to measured power. It doesn’t change based on the presence of the target.
If measured power is analogous to media attention, then noise would be the background level of coverage in the absence of a dramatic event. Once an event has actually happened, coverage is not noise, but *signal*.
That’s all well and good up until such a signal is used as a proxy for something, at which point the usual map/territory distinction applies. The radar equivalent would be assuming signal corresponds to physical target size. Yeah, it does, but much like media coverage of bombings, that effect is completely dominated by distance to the target.
The generation of dramatic data points doesn’t involve any more noise than usual. It’s just decoupled from the thing people *assume* it’s measuring.
@Scott Alexander the comparison between Gay and the other cases seems to overlook major points of difference.
First, elite university presidents should plagiarize less, not “not more” than others! Damning with faint praise indeed.
But beyond that, Gay’s record was supposed to be scrutinized twice before the scandal hit- when she was being nominated for her position, and when previous accusations were made (another detail Scott overlooks). The lack of any actual scrutiny and the obvious hypothesis for it are a big part of the scandal.
Finally, and I don’t think this point is made enough, Gay’s academic record is abysmal. You can quibble about the count, but 11 publications with 2-3k citations, all in a narrow field, is simply pathetic for a serious researcher- and had to be even worse when she was getting accepted for tenure and elected dean. If that is not even high-quality and integrity research- then it’s not clear to what extent is she an academic at all. One may think that it’s fine to have non-academics lead universities- but guess which side strongly opposes this!
As a nitpick- the latest development is in fact that the chief diversity officer at Harvard is accused of massive plagiarism too.
Is there any good explanation for how she got tenure at Harvard with that publication record? It seems unlikely that being a black woman explains all that much of it--it seems like there are a lot of black female professors, many of them with way more impressive publication records, who'd love to be offered tenure at Harvard.
First, let me justify my description of Gay's record, at least a bit. I won't deny my biases, so having facts is important.
So depending on what you count and where you look, she has 2-3K citations for 11 publications. For comparison, Sally Kornbluth (whatever else might be said about her) has ~14K citations when I checked. Alan Garber, Harvard's interim president, has ~20K citations for 300 publications. I understand that different fields are different, but those two did research involving cells growing and whatnot - doesn't seem like an obviously "easier"/"quicker" domain. For further comparison, Larry Summers has 115K citations and 1076 publications! Metrics can always be misleading and I'm certainly not an expert on academic evaluation nor on Gay's domain, so I'd be happy to learn more. Still, Gay's record cannot be called anything but lackluster, objectively. Just to be on the safe side, I looked up a random professor of political science - named Alan Gerber! He has 25K citations and 228 publications. I rest my case.
Now to your actual point. There are many considerations in hiring beyond looking at a number or two (as there should be, I guess). Who were the candidate's advisors, which connections have they forged, who wrote their recommendation letters and how warm were those, how good are they at presenting their ideas, how well does their research vision and program fit into that of the faculty. The list goes on.
I'm perfectly willing to acknowledge that Gay may have been strong along some of these axes. For instance, she graduated from Harvard (possibly giving her an advantage there), her advisor was Gary King whom Wikipedia describes as one of '25 professors with "Harvard's most distinguished faculty title"' - couldn't hurt her. Her thesis (not fully reflected in her publications, perhaps) won a prize - though I have no way of assessing how prestigious it actually is and the money seems to be 150$. (and of course this makes the plagiarism charges regarding the thesis even more relevant). By all accounts she's highly agreeable in person.
So if someone says "hey, all these statistics are biased and discriminatory and she's a wonderful academic in all ways but publishing", I don't think this is an impossible case to make. But it has to be made! Instead all we get is how her record is actually great and any claims to the contrary are racist and evil. Similarly, the plagiarism accusations were first called "demonstrably false", before being considered inaccurate, or biased, or irrelevant, or "targeting" (e.g. right here).
BTW, looking deeper into all this, I found this:
"Harvard Law School professor and Winthrop House faculty dean Ronald Sullivan faced student protests in spring 2019 after joining the legal defense team for Harvey Weinstein, who was on trial for rape. Gay called Sullivan's response to the controversy "insufficient," citing his "special responsibility" as house dean for the well-being of Winthrop residents."
Special responsibility indeed.
Finally, the premise of your question is that there are many more qualified black female candidates. Are there, though? Perhaps not many "survive" the filtering by the PhD, post-doc and tenure track stages. Perhaps they tend to be in different fields. Perhaps they do in fact get good positions elsewhere. Indeed, one of sources Gay allegedly plagiarized is Carol Swain, a black female professor of political science at Vanderbilt.
Is it a bit like keeping an obituary ready for really old famous people ? If they die, the paper that has that ready can publish a great obit faster than others.
There's certainly a disturbing trend here, a mean-spiritedness. One side seems more righteous than the other though of the two you compare. Oxman's wife was just the innocent wife of the guy they were going after. If he continues what they did, using their logic, he'd have to go after the BI editors' spouses!
What was done to you is chilling. That's how I heard about your blog and found it though! SSC was retired then and ACT was what I found.
>The plagiarism was discovered by conservative journalists Chris Rufo and Chris Brunet. It would be quite a coincidence for them to find it at exactly the moment Gay was already under attack for her anti-Semitism testimony. More likely, they either:
>Found it a while ago, and kept it in reserve for a time when Gay was in the news
>Or were angry about Gay’s testimony, looked for dirt on her, and found it.
I don't think either option is correct.
I first read about Claudine Gay in a post by Christopher Brunet on April 17th, 2022. It sure said quite a bit about her, including attempting to tie her to Jeffery Epstein, Harvey Weinstein, and three other misc. academic scandals at Harvard, but if you scroll down far enough you get to "Gay’s Scholarly Merit (or lack thereof)", which does call her out for lack of replicability and low academic qualifications.
Researching academic fraud is basically his bit, mostly via the Econ Job Market Rumors website, so it's definitely right up his wheelhouse and I am skeptical it was just opportunistic/precipitated by the congressional testimony.
Not very complicated, IMO. Gay shouldn't be president of Harvard (because plagiarism) and Ackman shouldn't have used something ("plagiarism is really bad") as a means to an end ("get rid of Gay") if he wasn't willing to have that belief pressure tested. Should Ackman's strategic behavior get a pass because proving his hypocrisy meant digging up dirt on his wife? I dunno but it feels to me as though Ackman was playing with fire, and Gay wasn't sufficiently vetted.
Hello, I am the Brunet mentioned at the start of this article.
When speculating on my motives, you say that perhaps I was ''angry about Gay’s testimony, looked for dirt on her, and found it.'' You are not the first to draw this conclusion! However, the truth is -- not to minimize the Israel/Palestine thing -- I never cared about her testimony. I have been writing about Claudine Gay for over 2 years, before any issues related to her congressional testimony came to light.
I wrote this on October 21, 2022, back when she was still a Dean:
''I can’t stress enough how much of a tragedy a Claudine Gay presidency would be — this musn’t be allowed to come to pass. She will ruin Harvard.''
On my Substack my main beat is academic integrity, and that was my only motivation for writing about her all along, although other people (the person who sent me the plagiarism tip?) clearly had their own motivations, and other actors had their own motivations to further weaponize my research. It is what it is. I can't control other people, I can only put the truth out there, and then it takes on a life of its own.
Sometimes people (not you) accuse me of being motivated by race, that is also false. I have written roughly 200 articles about academic malfeasance, and they are mostly about economics, finance, accounting -- stuff that has nothing to do with race. To me, this was just another corrupt academic that had committed academic fraud, and that is all I had to point out.
"I can only put the truth out there" is what scummy journalists say when they're targeting their political enemies. Using that as an explanation doesn't distinguish you from them.
but my primary motivation was the truth and academic integrity"
The first statement makes it really, really, really hard for me to believe the second.
"i take down tons of frauds who i have no clue what their politics are"
Sure, but do you target the ones who are explicitly on your side? If not, then you're engaging in precisely the sort of behavior that Scott is complaining about.
I would be happy to target any conservative professor that is explicitly on my side, if you know any conservative academics who have committed fraud, please email me a tip at chrisbrunet@protonmail.com
Here is an article where I shit on Republicans:
Maryland Congressional Race Reveals Glimpse into GOP Slime Machine
>Sure, but do you target the ones who are explicitly on your side? If not, then you're engaging in precisely the sort of behavior that Scott is complaining about.
Leftists are vastly, vastly overrepresented on college campuses, especially in positions of power and prestige. Claudine Gay specifically only has a career because she's a left-wing black woman.
In a world like this, why the hell would not expect someone concerned with academic integrity to spend almost all of their time talking about left-wingers?
Intuitively, I would expect conservative professors to be much cleaner in general than liberal professors, just because they're an unpopular minority. People with more enemies have to be more cautious.
Similarly, I would expect politically more palatable research results in the social sciences to be shakier than politically less palatable research results. In one case, the reviewers are asking "may I believe it," in the other they're asking "must I believe it."
Claudine Gay's shoddy scholarly credentials and the disgrace of her tenure at Stanford and hiring by Harvard were well known years before the general public found out. It wasn't really that she was targeted-- more that "little people" were screaming about her for years, but nobody listened until her Congressional testimony. That's why the Harvard Trustees thought they could get away with making her President.
In general, a billionaire's wife with her own company is probably one of the harder cancellation targets there is. You'll disclose the places where she copy-pasted Wikipedia for a definition in her dissertation, and she will have a bad couple weeks of ruined sleep and ruined digestion. And then, she'll go back to being a billionaire's wife with her own company.
I think Scott is conflating four different phenomena.
1. Personal malice, of one individual for another. "That Scott Alexander is giving me a hard time, dammit!" Journalists feel this but do not admit it. Ie I would never write a piece that "gets" Scott because I am annoyed at him. But, lo and behold, my piece on him turned out negative, for what I fool myself into thinking are sound reasons. This does happen.
2. Institutional blindness, or what the French call "deformation professionelle." This is when you acquire the groupthink of your trade and no longer see obvious facts because your profession trained you to discount them and you want to be a good practitioner, not an amateur.
I noticed in the Scott v NY Times brouhaha that the reporter justified himself by saying, in effect, "Scott's name isn't a secret, anyone could find it with a little Googling, so what is the big deal?" He was (I bet sincerely) incapable of seeing the difference between being semi-findable with effort vs being named in the fucking New York Times.
This is how journalists are trained to think: If it is possible to do X to you, then it is not my fault if I do X to you.
And this is a feature, not a bug. If I thought "oh, dear, when I write that this study does not hold up, the researcher will be mad, boo hoo," then I could never write anything critical about anyone. A problem arises, though, when you mix Item 1 in my list with Item 2.
3. Institutional structure. This is where many smart people go wrong talking about "the media." People, we are not well-organized! A newspaper, like a brain, consists of many different parts that communicate imperfectly with one another. There is no central guiding homunculus.
Instead, we go by explicit and implicit learned guidelines about what constitutes a good story and what merits public attention. Those guidelines don't permit anyone to say, to themselves or anyone else, "hey, let's 'get' X for our own selfish reasons." When people are making judgments according to their own interpretations of codes that have different versions, there is plenty of room for self-deception. But there is no room for explicit decisions to target people as punishment.
Of course we can speak of institutional decisions. A story like the Neri Oxman piece involves more than one person -- it needs a reporter to hear a tip or rumor, and editors to say, "whoa, yeah, that's fair game." And the judgment of those people can be fucked up by items 1,2 and 4 (below). But that is not a central institutional decision to "get" the hedge fund guy.
Instead, the chain of thought is this: Powerful guy drives an official out of office, in part by saying a single standard for plagiarism should apply to all, be they students or administrators or anything else. But if a single standard should apply to all, then why can't we ask about his own spouse's infractions? Are they minor? Sure, but so were a lot of the official's whom he targeted? Are they unimportant in the great scheme of things (no one cares about Media Arts)? Yes, but that is irrelevant. The captivating story is the powerful guy proclaiming a standard his own family can't uphold.
My point is not to defend this argument (though I could if I had to). My point is simply that people who sincerely think this is correct are not out to "get" Oxman's spouse. They are pursuing a story that passes the two criteria journalists actually care about: Is this going to interest the reader? And, is this good for society? My guess is they answered yes because, jeez, it was interesting and because anything that slows down the attempt of billionaire money wizards to lord it over higher education is good for society.
4. Media groupthink. After FTX "everyone knew" that everything associated with SBF was bad. Very bad! So now we are open to stories about the badness of everything he believed. Media people are as susceptible as anyone else to this.
TL;DR -- Journalism is a welter of interacting psychic and cultural drives in which coherent and explicit decisions to punish individuals don't happen. A lot of bad things DO happen in journalism, but Spiers' quote is correct. We don't sit around deciding to "get" people.
You say "We are not well organized" but I imagine a journalist sees something about X published in a paper (of the same political slant) she doesn't work for, and still takes a message from it : "Our" side needs to amplify this thing about X. I'll do it too. And writes about it in her paper. And this continues.
Though activism is pervading journalism these days, our professional ethos remains that we don't have a side. So I don't think any real journalist thinks about "our side."
I don't mean we try for a humanly impossible neutrality (the "view from nowhere," as if we didn't have lives situated in one part of society and another). I mean that even when we wear our hearts on our sleeves we regard our independence as inalienable.
Suppose I am writing about an organization that I and people in my circles all think is doing great things for society. In reporting I discover that the director is using official funds to buy himself a summer house. That makes him and the organization look bad. Do I keep quiet because I don't want to harm "our side"? If I do, I am no journalist.
This is the single most important thing non-journalists misunderstand. Even if you are "on my side," even if you are counting on me to help advance the cause, I am not deciding what to write with reference to "is it good for our side?" (Of course, as always, there is a lot of room for self-deception, but this is the principle.)
Seeing something in another publication is a complicated event. On the one hand, it says, "people care about this and we aren't being heard on the subject." But it also says, "this other publication has the story, so there is no need for us to imitate it -- we will look like we're just following." A journalist might say we have to do our version and add something new. Or she might say well, that's out in the world now, so we can't do our version (even if it is in the works). I've never found any rhyme or reason in such decisions.
What you say seems the opposite of what I see everywhere in media. Every single media outlets seems to be the mouthpiece for a certain political ideology. Within that outlet, they have a token journalist from the "other side".
They are so self-righteous about it all too, as a majority of their readers will unsubscribe if they say the "wrong" thing.
So we have media outlets preaching to mostly their own flock.
It feels like things were not always this extreme. Ppl didn't hate the "other side" this much say two decades ago.
No question polarization is much more acute now. When I was a kid most people said they would not mind if their child married someone of the other political party. Now the numbers of people who would not mind are, what, 8 percent?
And, you're right, when people's identity is wrapped up in their political affiliation, they are much more resistant to contrary news. The classic journalism model of reporting "without fear or favor" depends on a level of trust among all social groups that we are losing.
News and other sections related to politics, such as economics, have all become pieces meant to keep the faithful happy. They need constant reinforcement that they're right.
While the political polarization among the general populace deserves some of the blame, it did not occur in a vacuum. Rather, it is the result of a runaway positive feedback loop. Newspapers need more clicks to survive, so they pivot to writing more articles that generate clicks -- and the best way to do that is to write polarizing articles. People read them, and become more polarized, so now the newspapers need to come out with even more articles that are even more polarized... and so on. It would be nice if journalists as a professional whole were able to resist this process more effectively, but as @Deepa says, they can't; so it might indeed be best to tune out mass media entirely (or at least to attenuate its importance in one's daily life).
Is there a reason to get the news daily? For most of us, no. Once a week is plenty. And we can tune our Twitter feed or something else, to get it from sane sources.
Aside: Is there some kind of conservation law of outgroupness here? As we all stopped being upset about our daughters marrying a black man, instead we shifted to being upset about our daughters marrying a Republican?
>Every single media outlets seems to be the mouthpiece for a certain political ideology.
While I can only speak for what I see from the NYT (I don't follow other media outlets enough to have an informed opinion on them), I basically agree. It doesn't _quite_ read as a pure organ of the Democratic Party, but that is a pretty good approximation most of the time. The slant on how stories are spun is very very consistent.
>I noticed in the Scott v NY Times brouhaha that the reporter justified himself by saying, in effect, "Scott's name isn't a secret, anyone could find it with a little Googling, so what is the big deal?" He was (I bet sincerely) incapable of seeing the difference between being semi-findable with effort vs being named in the fucking New York Times.
How do you distinguish between "journalist believes this" and "journal says this because it gives him some plausible deniability"?
I think it's generally wise to take people at their word when they describe their beliefs. Of course everyone is prone to motivated reasoning, but few of us are good at being depraved cynics, who consciously decide to lie. People who believe this of journalists haven't met many. I've met a lot in 40 years in the field, so I trust my intuitions on this.
If you're going to say "journalists don't consciously lie", that ship has already sailed. Nobody could have written that article without consciously lying.
And if he's going lie about Scott in the article, why wouldn't he also lie when making justifications about releasing Scott's name?
As a retired journalist who took the craft to heart for decades, I suspect you still haven't grasped Spier's main point. Not that your theories lack any validity (journalists are human, etc), but you seem to under-appreciate the creation of the journalist's professional self, which is every bit as fulsome as, say, a psychiatrist's. The same way you navigate within a thick structure of training, experience, ethics, etc, the journalist has far bigger things on her mind (and ego and superego) than how to manipulate the current assignment.
Sure, I get pissed at the NYT when I think a reporter's missing an important perspective, but what civilians assume to be stubborn obtuseness (or whatever) usually comes from a deep sense of obligation to telling stories knowing you'll piss people off. Assuming you don't work for Fox News, you leave things out or put things in, not for the sake of manipulation, but because you believe your job requires you to do so, damn the torpedoes. If you take your role seriously, you are always open to shifting your perspective.
Plus, everything is messier now because civilians tend to bunch bloggers, opinion writers, and untrained, unqualified "reporters" in the same basket as the dedicated journalists who absolutely believe their profession is essential to a democratic society. So, while I can't opine on Spier's supposed infractions, I can pretty much guarantee you are under-appreciating all the reasons she (and her editors) published what she wrote.
You're either being disingenuous (more likely), or journalism has changed dramatically since you've retired. I don't doubt that they've got a high opinion of their work, but the "dedicated journalists" at, say, the New York Times are really no different than, to use your examples, those at Fox News.
Now I hate journalism as much as the next man, but holy cow accusing this commentor of being disingenuous exactly obfuscates what's actually wrong with journalism and journalists.
You clearly don't hate it enough: you are being too charitable. While I can see how that might once have been reasonable, it is no longer, and anyone who scorns 'untrained, unqualified "reporters"' (especially with the sneer quotes) in favor of journalists (with their supposed ethics and "deep sense of obligation" or some other self-congratulatory bullshit) … I think any genuine delusions of that kind have been thoroughly dispelled, and anyone who still says things like that knows better.
Noam Chomsky's famous clip is apposite here, the one in which he patiently explains to some interviewer that he wouldn't be in his job if he didn't already sincerely hold the right positions. Journalism is itself by nature a bias engine. That the highly intelligent people who do their jobs for frankly not much financial compensation aren't aware of this isn't relevant, though it is interesting.
Chomsky made a compelling case, especially with regard to the nearly unavoidable bias traps in market-based journalism. But such critical arguments should be embraced as road-signs for safeguarding an imperfect institution -- not as wholesale indictments of the effort.
The same dynamic is happening now with regard to democracy itself, with far too many critics glibly badmouthing its downside in the service of lurking fascists. Journalism is indispensable to democracy, so to give up on it, or to minimize its highest purpose, is to support the movement toward authoritarianism. This is one of the worst consequences of Fox News et al -- they've trashed and mocked the whole ideal of "fair and balanced" journalism in the eyes of the public. It's the same way the GOP's constant bomb-throwing has sullied the whole notion that the government is beholden to the people. This is intentional: nihilism is actually a political position. Its impact is anti-democratic.
I agree with you whole-heartedly up to and including the line that ends with 'towards authoritarianism'. The problem doesn't just pre-date Fox News, and it doesn't just predate Hearst and "remember the maine!" -- it's structural. Democracy can't exist without some amount of education of the electorate, but there is no way to educate them that isn't inherently misleading and destructive. As I suspect even Plato himself noted privately by the end of his life, it's not possible to educate the electorate even if there's only one in that class and he's the king.
The defense that democracy and therefore journalism are the best we have isn't a defense of either. Both are execrable. What we see today -- what you hate, today -- are the fruit of the tree itself, not foreign additions thereto.
Your last graf sounds like an argument for anarchy, if not something worse like fascism. But if you agree with much of my comment I have to assume you believe democracy is worth preserving (along with institutions like the 4th estate) -- even if execrable.
What I think we need now is more right-wingers to say the quiet part out loud: that they hate democracy and want to install their preferred strongman, damn the consequences to future generations (and damn the past generations who sacrificed for us to have ever-increasing agency and equality). People need to vote with full awareness that this is actually what's on the ballot. But of course fascists are rarely honest about their true intentions until it's too late.
"Blow the whole system up" might sound appealing to voters in a cynical era, but the Trumps, Flynns, and Bannons of the world are playing cutesy with democracy itself -- which voters need to know so they can make deadly serious decisions. That's why prominent, know-nothing dabblers in politics (like Musk and Rogan) inflict so much damage -- by endlessly ridiculing and undermining fundamental structures of progressive society. It may be pure hubris on their part, but they are the ones who make fascism appear banal.
If I misread you, I hope you'll let me know, and offer your suggested alternative to democracy.
I hold out no alternatives -- not that could be enacted, not that could be better if enacted. Humanity does not appear capable of anything better, if it exists. I don't expect AGI in the full sense, either, but if I did and I thought the alignment problem had somehow been solved, I'd say the only actual possible improvement would be rule by benevolent AI (probably in some form that left everyone the illusion that his voice mattered).
I do, however, insist that your hostile focus on Trump (and Musk) is a symptom of precisely the problem with journalism. They aren't who or what you've been led to think they are. Sure, your biased perspective is much cleverer than that of someone who thinks Hillary Clinton personally murdered Vince Foster, but you're both victims of 'news' bubbles. Most voters (whether right or left) who appear to favor totalitarianism actually believe that they support democracy (as you do) and that it's the other side that wants to destroy it. Both think of themselves as the demos in question, with the others being some weirdly powerful fringe group. Both sides believe they are in favor of a free press (as you do). Musk thinks that Twitter itself is the closest thing we have to a free press now, where citizen journalists can surface news stories of real interest and importance. I don't have an opinion about whether or not he's right, because I don't believe in the project he claims to be engaged in.
Although we have some areas of agreement, you won't be surprised by my extremely high level of confidence that your blind spot is way, way bigger than mine. My speculation is that yours is nourished by the disdain for the institutions we're discussing -- which leads you to avoid digging into the ugly, often banal, truths that are currently facing us. It's all in front of us, quite clearly, in legal, political, and moral terms, if only we have enough curiosity to really look. But curiosity is what Joe Rogan snuffs out by making it seem uncool to care about these ancient teetering structures.
To say that Trump believes in democracy is mind-numbingly ludicrous. Your comment seems to reveal a susceptibility to the totalitarian tactic of obliterating everyone's discernment with a constant flood of pure bullshit. Times like these -- when populism embraces destruction -- are precisely the times we are most vulnerable, since Rogan et al make it sound so naïve and quaint and hyperbolic to care. If you want to sound clever, be like Joe with his catholic disdain for all "cathedrals," gatekeepers, and educated experts. Journalism certainly has erred, not because it covered Trump too much, but because it treated him like an ordinary politician for far too long. It wasn't until the end of his reign that anyone from a reputable source even had the courage to simply call his endless lies "lies."
You're a smart guy. That's why I'm confident you have not done the legwork on who these people really are. Because the only other reason to claim that Trump and Musk believe in democracy is that you're part of the project to destroy it, and I doubt that's true (even though few will openly admit it). "Free speech" in today's context is not a righteous argument for democracy. It has become a lever to open the rightwing floodgates of disinformation and hatred, as per the greater project of wearing everyone down.
I won't bore you with a reading list, etc, because such arguments never go anywhere, but I will remind you that a pathological sociopath and malignant narcissist like Trump doesn't believe in anything besides himself -- so it's not like he has to share Steve Bannon's ideological vision to be an effective tool of fascism. Hitler was a bumbling idiot too, with hurt fee-fees in a jail cell, until he was allowed to wield total power, with US right-wing approval and a cynical world mood that kept the majority of people disinterested and uninterest in the grotesque details of his miserable project until it was too late.
> If I misread you, I hope you'll let me know, and offer your suggested alternative to democracy.
*sheepishly raises hand* Since you mentioned cathedrals, you've surely heard this pitch before. But, hear me out... are you familiar with moldbug? I try not to bring this up on Scott's blog too often, but it seems especially relevant ITT.
The common rebuttal against moldy goes something like "isn't he the guy who hates democracy and loves genocidal authoritarian dictators like Hitler? Yikes." But this is an egregious (though understandable) misreading of his position. He dislikes Nazis and Communism even more so than Democracy. His preferred alternative is Elizabethan England (at least to a first approximation; for example, he thinks the hereditary aspect is unnecessary).
The root of this particular misunderstanding is that he often uses the term "democracy" in a nonstandard way. We think of "democracy" as meaning "fair and free elections". But Moldy is using the term "democracy" in the more archaic sense of "nationalism", which sired the Big 3 modern ideologies of Democracy, Communism, and Fascism. In this model, the 4th estate isn't just indispensable to Modern Liberal Democracy, it's the grandparent of Modern Liberal Democracy.
Many critics, however, are unable to look past a surface-level interpretation of "democracy bad". And since the liberal worldview directly juxtaposes democracy with fascism/authoritarianism/totalitarianism and cannot imagine another alternative, they often assume he's advocating for Hitler 2.0.
Maybe if I had heard of moldbug I'd follow your thoughts better. I'm not sure who "he" is in your story, but if it's anyone like Trump, then, yeah, no, he has most definitely demonstrated a most unholy attraction toward dictators. The copy of Hitler's speeches he kept beside his bed might well have been the only book he's ever read. And have you ever heard him say a kind word about a single world leader who wasn't authoritarian?
I also think democracy is gravely undervalued if you are conflating it with populism/nationalism in your Big 3. Godwin points out the obvious: democracy is most vulnerable when "democracy is bad" starts to look like conventional wisdom -- this is precisely the time to fight for it on all flanks. Its basic structure relies on shared good will, which is easy to mock in cynical times.
By contrast, fascism has no actual structure outside the circles of the power-hungry vultures trying to pick up the scraps of disillusion. So, I'm trying to say, it really doesn't matter if you "believe" in fascism (or a monarchy or whatever) in any coherent sense. You are on its side by default when you attack and belittle the cooperative functions of democracy, which is inherently dynamic and fragile. No, I'm not saying there's no room for criticism or change. But if you fundamentally do not believe that democracy affords a crucial degree of citizen agency, then you are fundamentally anti-democratic.
WRT cathedrals I am reminded of Kanye, who likes to say we shouldn't even care about history itself -- arguably the most important of all cathedrals. These narcissistic sociopaths have convinced themselves they're fighting some sort of zen battle that only the fiercest warriors can see clearly. Even dipshits like Rogan seem to believe their own "straight-talking" mythology. So structures and institutions that have taken decades and centuries and blood and treasure to construct, to preserve, and improve should be tossed out like trash?
I'm telling you, these are precisely the times we are at genuine risk of blowing up an entire trajectory of humanistic progress -- and it will happen in part thanks to banal, snarky comments on Shitter, on blogs, and in podcasts. Our grandchildren will look back in horror when they realize we lost it because it was uncool in the era of social media. Germany was not lost to the Nazis because of a deep widespread fascist philosophy. The Nazis just made cruelty and hatred cool again -- which is exactly what Musk is trying to do. If, on the other hand, we make it through this period, it will be thanks to those like Liz Cheney who weren't too afraid of being mocked or losing power to shout from the rooftops the gravity of the situation.
I'm quite sure I misunderstood plenty of your comment, but I'll keep an eye out for more on moldbug.
Generally you are right-ish that journalists aren't, like, morally pure, and that some of the stuff they do is scummy especially when it's like working backwards from the conclusion "how shall I prove this person is bad" and then finding the arguments to justify it. What the NYT did to you is clearly scummy. You're right about that. Sorry that it happened to you. Sounds traumatic. (Although not quite as right as you think you are, I'd say, because of the bias of your position? But mostly right anyway as far as I can tell?)
That said there are a few key responses. One is, what did you expect? Personally I grew up hearing about journalists "taking people down" for good and bad reasons --- sometimes raking people through the muck or starting wars on fictional premises to make money for big interests. Sometimes attacking countercultural leaders for being supposed communists. Sometimes running a million stories on the same transgression until the one person is excised from society and/or kills themselves. Did you forget all that? Journalism is one of those levers of power in the society and that goes every which way; it feels like you forgot about all that and then were surprised to rediscover it in personal experience when your own person/people/movement got attacked.
Second,
> The message is clear: go after an important Ivy League leader, and we’ll go after your family
The message is not clear! Perhaps the messages is "they were pissed that someone went after the ivy league leader in such a partisan and apparently-motivated way, so they did what pissed people did and retaliated". You're reading this as a "shadowy cabal" narrative when it is entirely explainable by a "shit-slinging playground fighting" narrative. Like yeah Bill Ackman or whatever attacked someone with their power in what seemed like an unfair away and how do you get back at someone with that much power and money? I don't know, look for weaknesses? See if their wife is guilty of the same bullshitty charge? It probably wasn't even the same people! Even if it was, the shadowy-cabal narrative is dumb.
And by the way, duh, it's front-page news *because of the hypocrisy*, not because of the plagiarism. Like, of course. Who would give a crap if it wasn't part of a narrative of "powerful person turns out to be (attached to) hypocrite"?
Third, your writing on issues like social justice and journalism has always been tinged by excessive bitterness. You alluded in a recent post to a traumatic experience of cancellation in college, maybe that's the reason for the former. If not maybe it's any of the other thousand shitty stories we all heard in the 2010s. The NYT piece and other attacks on EA perhaps explains the latter. But, and I can't emphasize this enough, bitterness *doesn't work* at persuading people to your side. It rallies your allies and alienates your skeptics. You are not going to take down journalism by, essentially, whining about how unfair it is. Especially when your whining... is clearly skimming over important details? Such as your entirely brushing off the criticisms of EA over and over and over and never, not once, seeming to understand *what* people don't like about this movement or some of the people in it.
More importantly, bitterness is not an effective or useful stance for a person in a position of leadership, which you are, and although your grievances with the world are mostly legitimate you are not going to fix them or lead anyone the right direction when your stance on what has hurt you is aggrieved whining about it. That is, or leads to, destructive reactionaryism. You win by being better than them, not being bitter and especially not by compromising your own credibility when you do by, say, glossing over every single criticism as unfounded or trumped-up or confused.
Which brings me to a final point, sorry for the long-windedness.
> It might seem like a weird coincidence that - after years of unrelenting positive coverage - investigative journalists would take two 10+ year old cases and try to turn them into big scandals within three weeks of each other. But I’ll stop teasing you now - the obvious proximal cause was that FTX had just imploded, and suddenly people hated effective altruism.
People did not "suddenly hate" EA when FTX imploded, just like journalists didn't go digging up dirt on random EA people when it imploded. People were always cautiously skeptical of EA because it is a creepy replacement morality that implies circumventing society's moral code in favor of a new and possibly self-serving one (well, that's what I believe, but we can agree that they were cautiously skeptical). And then when the weight of evidence went "you know that thing you were nervous might be true? It's true" everyone's brain's updated to "right, EA is bad, like it seemed" and then they did what people do when they figure out that groups of people are bad and threatening, which is attack them.
It is all a prediction-error thing: there's no grounds to attack when EA "might" be threatening, but once the prediction error is removed ("a-ha, EA does in fact cultivate evil greedy misanthropists") then yep, let em have it, this shit is scary. Even the language "hate EA" reveals how emotionally warped your thinking on the subject is, because people *don't* "hate EA", there's not a giant institution of hateful people trying to destroy you. There is the institution of the "normal world" perceiving danger in a corner and telling it to shape up or back the fuck off. Instead of receiving that criticism and synthesizing it and making your own movement better you are degenerating into us-versus-them outgroupy thinking, which is toxic and childish and reactionary anyway, but also just unproductive, ineffective you might say, towards any of your goals (unless your goal is starting a reactionary movement like trump's idiots? in which case yeah fuck it carry on).
>That said there are a few key responses. One is, what did you expect? Personally I grew up hearing about journalists "taking people down" for good and bad reasons --- sometimes raking people through the muck or starting wars on fictional premises to make money for big interests. Sometimes attacking countercultural leaders for being supposed communists.
The left consider journalists completely above criticism as a group, and have gone so far as to call the growing distrust of journalists, supposedly precipitated by the likes of Donald Trump, as as some gravely concerning issues of civilizational scale that is a prelude to "fascism" or whatever.
So no, journalists need to be criticized MORE, not less. Anyone who doesn't criticize journalists is an ideologue who is happy with ideological aims and asshole tactics of journalists today.
There's criticism of journalists or news orgs for bad practices, and then there's what Donald Trump has done. If you defend Trump's message on journalism, then you're clearly no better than those who would never criticize journalism.
No president in history has ever been lied about in the media as much as Trump. His criticism is warranted.
But the left want the government to be literally able to decide what news orgs can and can't say - this is vastly bigger threat to journalism than anything Trump has said or done, it's just that most journalists are already on their side.
I doubt this is literally true--I think newspapers were a lot less concerned with factual accuracy in the past than now.
But also, the main dynamic I noticed during the Trump years was making everything into a Trump Does Horrible Thing X scandal for clicks. The headline looked the same whether the "horrible thing" Trump had done was eat breakfast or kick a puppy. This had the effect of drowning out the occasional legit scandal (firing the inspectors general for a couple federal agencies) because every day there were two or three nothingburger Trump scandals ("Breaking News: Trump is a big asshole on Twitter again!")
I definitely take your overall point/concern. As a former newspaper journalist myself as well as a close relative to a lifer in that sector, I absolutely agree that (a) journalism should not be weaponized in the manner of your examples, and (b) Elizabeth Spiers slung plenty of self-righteous crap in her response to you.
All that said -- the Gay situation is not the same as any of that.
Some of what Gay turns out to have done was plagiarism; some of it was just sloppy. Neither is acceptable from a college president. (I would argue that the former is not acceptable from a tenured professor though apparently Harvard has decided otherwise.)
Academic plagiarism is clearly a central concern in academia as long proclaimed by academia itself. As many have accurately noted a Harvard student who was found to have done what Gay did would have quickly become a former Harvard student, and plenty have over the years.
It is also highly relevant that a sizeable fraction of the credentials of a high official at a top university turn out to be things other than original scholarship. Gay's resume for such a job was frankly not super impressive even if half of it _didn't_ turn out to have been cut-and-pasted from the work of others.
If modern digital tools enable a wave of revelations about plagiarism in academia -- good. If that results in a wave of high-profile "gotchas", well then perhaps that can be a first step towards some long-overdue self-reflection across our academic sector.
>If modern digital tools enable a wave of revelations about plagiarism in academia -- good. If that results in a wave of high-profile "gotchas", well then perhaps that can be a first step towards some long-overdue self-reflection across our academic sector.
Hmm...
I'm not happy with academia's performance, but I'd choose priorities differently.
If I could wave a wand and either make fraudulent data vanish, or make plagiarism vanish, I'd make the fraudulent data vanish. Data fraud causes academia to damage the accuracy of our knowledge of how the world works. Plagiarism damages our accuracy of who to credit for ideas. I, personally, view the former as more important.
I didn't suggest any priority ranking between the two (plagiarism and fraudulent data).
Regarding plagiarism, it has a different pernicious effect which to me is the more consequential one: theft of credentials. If we can't be sure that a scholar's claimed academic output is in fact theirs then we lose the ability to choose wisely in granting tenure, or choosing academic leaders or in some cases institutional leaders.
>If I ran the world, I would want newspapers to do the opposite of that - comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, that kind of thing. I would want it to find dirt on people who were puffed up way too high riding the top of the popularity wave, and find reasons to defend and stand up for people who were vulnerable and getting piled on. Still, it seems like in real life people do the opposite.
I don't know if I'd go so far as to say real life is the opposite - counterintuitive stories about how someone you think is great actually sucks or someone you think is bad is actually good or at least human are also popular. The big thing is less than pile on and more the need to write about whatever people are talking right now regardless of what take you're presenting.
It seems to me like the "obvious" explanation is that the Harvard board got rid of her because the Congressional testimony looked absolutely horrible to anyone outside the academic bubble, but needed a veneer of justification to give to the other academics that wasn't that. The accusations of plagiarism are, allegedly, kind of weaksauce; here's how Wikipedia describes them:
> In response, Gay said she stood behind the integrity of her work and requested an outside review of it.[77][76] The Harvard Corporation reported that the review found "a few instances of inadequate citation" and "duplicative language without appropriate attribution" in her work, but "no violation of Harvard's standards for research misconduct."[77][78][74] Analyses by The Harvard Crimson and CNN contested Harvard's statement, finding that Gay had likely violated the university's policies on plagiarism and academic integrity.[79][80][81] Gay requested seven corrections to add citations and quotation marks to her dissertation and two of her articles.[71][82][75] Academic Joseph Reagle opined that media reports that Gay "plagiarized", implied that she had stolen the central ideas in her work, saying "I don't think this is the case" but that the work "contain plagiarized prose. This is a lesser but still significant infraction."
These all seem like they are either fairly minor or are highly subjective, and I would be shocked if they were the kind of thing to incur more than the most minor of penalties under most circumstances. And according to https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/1/3/claudine-gay-resign-harvard/, Gay is still a faculty member, so clearly whatever did happen, Harvard doesn't think it merits removing her as faculty, even though plagiarism in an old paper would seem to weigh much more directly on her position as an academic than on her position as an administrator. On the other hand, failing to give a Congressional hearing proper consideration, answering their questions in a way seemingly maximized to justify opposition to Harvard, and acting like anyone opposed to her in any way is just a racist, all make sense as a reason not to have her as president, but are much less important for an academic.
Anyway, the reason this hypothesis is important, is because it means that most of the time, you're going to have to work a lot harder if you want an academic to suffer any sort of consequences due to plagiarism accusations.
A few years ago, the President of Hobart and William Smith resigned amid allegations of plagiarism in his thesis, kind of a small-scale version of the Gay/Harvard scandal.
I remember when the President of Hamilton College resigned after using unattributed Amazon book reviews in a commencement speech. It seemed pretty excessive IMO, but it demonstrates that presidents do indeed resign over such matters.
Of course people in the limelight will receive more attention, by investigative journalists and by everyone else. Is that really a bug we need to fix?
I agree with your argument that we should keep in mind that issues being reported might not be as unique as they seem, since journalists might be focusing on some prominent figure. But you go all the way to the other extreme by suggesting 'everyone has a similar distribution', and journalists are doing nothing more than choosing some people to pick on.
I spent enough time in academia to be thoroughly sick of getting lectured about plagiarism by people who were not themselves particularly dedicated to originality that I find it difficult to care about "targeting". I see it more as "wow, someone actually enforced the rules for once, and I get to feel a little less like a schmuck for following the rules myself." If I can't plagiarize while BSing the same paper on the same topic that undergrads in a particular university course have been doing for thirty years, absolutely no way should *any* university president or department head get a pass for their *thesis*. It's bad enough how they overlook it for the international students because they don't want to lose the out-of-state tuition fees.
Should it be less targeted and more properly enforced across the board? I *guess* so, but if I can't have that then I'll settle for a chilling effect on academics doing plagiarism. If these academics didn't want dirt dug up on them, they could've not had the dirt in the first place. This wasn't a victimless crime they did - all dirt is not created equal.
For those who read this piece and wondered about the origins of the phrase "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable," the maxim comes originally from journalist and humor columnist Finley Peter Dunne, who wrote for and edited various Chicago newspapers around the turn of the twentieth century. In a 1902 column, Dunne wrote:
> Th newspaper does ivrything f'r us. It runs th' polis foorce an' th' banks, commands th' milishy, controls th' ligislachure, baptizes th' young, marries th' foolish, comforts th' afflicted, afflicts th' comfortable, buries th' dead an' roasts thim aftherward.
I think most people (including Scott and most journalists) do a really poor job of thinking through the financial incentives of journalists.
I take journalists at their word that they are not consciously chasing clicks (and, indeed, at the better places, only editors and up have access to those metrics) but that’s not the only way they could be chasing them. It probably feels really good to have your piece talked about on Twitter/threads a log and that’s directly correlated with clicks. Journalism is mostly not a financially lucrative enterprise these days and it’s natural for the editors to lay off the reporters who bring less traffic. Those mechanisms clearly guide a newspaper towards optimizing for traffic which, in practice, means towards the tastes of high-SES western (or westernized) people.
The critiques of individual journalists as click-chasers in this context are stupid: you’re mad at the paper as an institution, not individual journalists. On the flip side, I wish more individual journalists were conscious about why they still have jobs and their former peers don’t.
Fine, you might say, I’m only mad at the bosses of newspapers, let’s replace them with people that match my preferences.
This runs straight into journalism not being very lucrative. There is not a lot of profits to reallocate into coverage that matches most readers of this blog’s preferences. I love publications like Works in Progress and would be happier with a news industry that looked more like it but I kind of doubt Works in Progress is or could be a profitable business.
There’s nothing wrong about complaining a for-profit business doesn’t have the impact on the world that you want but there’s a weird way in which folks feel entitled to a vote on how news business work. It’s particularly striking because often these same people are some of the staunchest defenders of free enterprise.
The above is why I think the smarter people who dislike the news industry (Thiel, Musk, etc) have concluded that the only meaningful way to act on that is to burn it all down. Frankly, I think this is childish. There’s a lot of things I don’t like about news coverage but I think it’s obviously a net positive to the world. Unfortunately, the bad seems bundled with the good in a way that’s would be hard to unbundle.
>I take journalists at their word that they are not consciously chasing clicks (and, indeed, at the better places, only editors and up have access to those metrics)
Their editors are chasing clicks and will tell them to what they think will get clicks or re-write/scrap anything they think won't.
>The critiques of individual journalists as click-chasers in this context are stupid: you’re mad at the paper as an institution, not individual journalists. On the flip side, I wish more individual journalists were conscious about why they still have jobs and their former peers don’t.
AH YES, the "just following orders" defense. How wonderful!
>There’s nothing wrong about complaining a for-profit business doesn’t have the impact on the world that you want but there’s a weird way in which folks feel entitled to a vote on how news business work. It’s particularly striking because often these same people are some of the staunchest defenders of free enterprise.
He's not calling for regulation, so there's no contradiction.
Journalists want to be above criticism - they're not. THE END.
Additionally, the left *absolutely* wants to be able to regulate private businesses to the point of regulating what news orgs can say. Directing your criticism towards those who *aren't* doing this is reveals your ideological bias.
>Frankly, I think this is childish.
Nope, your ideology just aligns with journalists so you're okay with it. That's literally all that's happening here.
If they acknowledged they were selling simply entertainment that people want to read/watch, sure. But they pretend to be something more, arbiters of truth vs. "misinformation," "guardians of democracy" or whatever, and if you put yourself on a pedestal above others, and then use that position to fling shit at those below, it is just and reasonable for them to try to tear you down.
I DON'T in fact think the news industry as it exists today is a "net positive to the world," and would wholeheartedly endorse any attempt to burn it to the ground.
I don’t think I’ve read a full throated defense of the burn it down movement. Can you give one? My perspective is that it would be obviously crazy to get rid of things like NYT’s many international bureaus (does anyone think we’d know more about the Ukraine or Gaza contingencies without the news media?), reviews of media and physical devices that have pragmatic utility, and coverage of various government machinations because the NYT op-ed board and their “analysis” section (which I view as just another opinion section) suck.
I should clarify that I don't believe the New York Times is entirely negative or worthless: my dad enjoys the daily Wordle. And yes, there do exist articles that aren't terrible: it's only a NET detriment to the world.
Not only is anything of value they provide easily replaced, in most cases, the replacements ALREADY EXIST. There are hundreds of perfectly reasonable independent sources for information and perspectives about Ukraine/Gaza, government machinations (and thousands for media/tech reviews), and many dozens of them are engaging and well-produced. If the New York Times (or the Washington Post, or any of the other traditional news sources; my criticism isn't particularized) were just one of them, I wouldn't actually have any real complaint; there are plenty of blogs with equally abhorrent political views and a similar casual disregard for the truth. But they aren't: they pretend to be BETTER, and they leverage their institutional power to impose their views, working to suppress differing perspectives as "misinformation." It is precisely this power I wish to see broken.
Further, I don't believe this supposed distinction everyone seems to make between opinion and news is actually meaningful: it's the same newspaper! If they were printed and sold separately, were hosted on different websites, and were basically different companies under the same corporate umbrella, there might actually a reasonable argument that they were separate. They don't do this. Of course, I can disagree with people's opinions and still believe some other things they say, but I would think it absurd if they claimed their opinions were held by some different, wholly separate part of their brain. The same applies to institutions: pretending otherwise leads one to say things like "ignore the headline, and only read the body," or "every third sentence is misleading, and every fifth sentence is a lie, but other than that … "
Are you asking if I have a source of literally infallible information and objectively correct opinions? Yes to the latter, but, as you might expect, no to the former. For most topics, one would need to look at a few different sources and synthesize them into a single cohesive and correct whole, usually filling in a few blanks on one's own.
"does anyone think we’d know more about the Ukraine or Gaza contingencies without the news media?"
How is knowing anything about these conflicts relevant to 99% of Americans? Even the 1% know affected people can do ~0 with additional information. Ditto to your other examples.
While I agree with everything Scott said, one additional takeaway from all these recent hit pieces is that, apparently, digging up substantial dirt on anyone in academia is trivially easy. You just pick a target whom you dislike, and boom, you can easily uncover instances of plagiarism, data falsification, and other academic sins. Shouldn't *this* part be front-page news -- i.e. not that Harvard hired some unqualified person, but that apparently everyone at the top tier of the every academic institution is a data-falsifying plagiarist ?
Alternatively, the standard for what gets called "plagiarism" might be stupid. I don't know precisely what Gay or Oxman did, but I have seen the standards for what counts as "rape" or "sexual abuse," and it's more likely it's something like that than what you're imagining.
I don't disagree with your assessment here but I would add a factor: it's easier to gather dirt on unpopular people and journalists are as lazy as anyone else. When a bunch of people are mad at someone they're more likely to contact journalists with tips and info about them. it's easy to report on stuff you don't have to dig hard for.
Jesse Singal says he got a tip about Gay's plagiarism on 12/4, before the testimony, from someone who claims they were sending it to 5 different journalists, so someone who was not Rufo would have tipped him off and Rufo ran with the story. Jesse talks about this starting at 29:40 in the Blocked and Reported episode 197: Gay Gets Got
I'll add my vote to the issue being that this was not about "criticising Israel," this was about saying that calling for genocide against Jews was okay. I completely reject any notion that it is "technically true" that it depends on context and to say otherwise is some kind of perjury. We're talking about a situation where missing persons posters were torn down because talking about missing Jews is somehow against Palestine. Where NYC College had that situation where Jewish students ended up locking themselves in the library as "Palestine supporters" banged on the windows. What do Jewish students have to do with Israel? Even if they were Israeli, what power do they have to affect policy? If blessed context is so important, maybe we should take note of the broader national situation, and what specifically is being taken as "protest", and what everybody should know about how this would be taken if it was some other cause.
On the other hand, yes, this was targeting, but not in the way Scott thinks. If I remember correctly, Claudine Gay had been a known plagiarist for a long time. Nobody picked up the story. Chris Rufo was given the story and ran with, and it happened to matter now because of the situation. The context, if you will.
Chris Rufo and also a sizable number of Conservatives' goal is to take down as much of the University system as possible. I happen to agree with this sentiment. Claudine Gay was exposed by a weak point. Somebody unrelated wanted everybody to know Claudine Gay was a plagiarist, and wanted this the whole time.
And I have to take issue again with this nonsense about the recent blog post, "Against Learning from Dramatic Effects." That was maybe the worst post Scott has ever made. This may be a kind of heresy to some, but events are not drawn from a distribution. Distributions are identified after plotting events on a graph. Which somebody human somewhere did, which means the events themselves had to be interpreted and categorised first. Events don't just happen. The distribution does not cause events to happen. To some people this may seem like some weird beside the point quibble, but no. The entire basis of the argument acts as if the blessed context we are otherwise so worried about with Claudine Gay, doesn't exist around events, only the dots matter. Actually it's a bit worse, it's flat out reading things backwards.
> This may be a kind of heresy to some, but events are not drawn from a distribution. [...]
Hm. Would you tell me if I understand your argument correctly? I feel like I can see part of it, but also like I'm still missing something.
Let's say we've got a data set - a bunch of data points representing events - and we see an event happen that's on an extreme end of the distribution, as measured somehow. First we should notice that the data set is just what's been noticed (imperfectly), and recorded (imperfectly), and categorized (imperfectly), and perhaps reduced to a simple equation. But even with those caveats aside, each data point represents an actual event that was caused by actual real-world factors, and by investigating individual events we can learn what factors caused it to turn out that way. We might find out that some factors tend to produce more extreme results (meaning that the next time someone analyzes the data set, they should pay attention to these factors). And when we see an extreme event, we can actually learn a lot by looking at all the factors that went in to creating such an outlier. And the more factors we understand, the more "gears" we have in our model, and the less we need to rely on a distribution for prediction. Which can be important if something in the environment changes and the distribution no longer predicts future events accurately.
So, did everything magically change after 9/11? If we'd changed nothing about our security, yeah, there probably would have a lot more kamikaze hijackings: it was a simple idea and anyone could have done it at any time. But by actually studying what happened, we can cut off the factors that let it happen. And one thing to notice was that the US military presence in Saudi Arabia after the 1st Irag War had gotten under the skin of some religious fundamentalists, thus changing the environment.
It sounds like, from my understanding of your perspective, that Scott's arguing "we shouldn't panic and freak out about space flight just because the Challenger blew up", while you're arguing for detailed fault analysis to figure out what exactly happened, and how the existing safety procedures let it happen? And the same thing goes for, say, SBF.
You've really put a nice Rationalist bow on my thoughts, and I mean that as a compliment. I would never describe it this way, but I think this mostly right.
The only point that's missing is say, if the Challenger blew up from sabotage or extreme negligence. If that were the case, saying that "we shouldn't panic or freak out about space flight just because the Challenger blew up," sounds a lot like you're trying to hide something by sidestepping the actual issue, the specifics of why the Challenger blew up. In this case, sabotage or extreme negligence. If you then say that you have a vested interest in this issue, but by "this issue" you mean "space flight", that sounds even more like you're hiding something because "space flight" isn't the point of failure.
>I would want it to find dirt on people who were puffed up way too high riding the top of the popularity wave, and find reasons to defend and stand up for people who were vulnerable and getting piled on.
Isn't there an object-level layer missing here? It's not all a popularity contest all the time. Sometimes people get puffed up because they're genuinely doing good work, and others get piled on because they have recently did or said something heinous. Dissenting voices and devil's advocates are valuable, but they're supposed to be the alternative, not the mainstream. I wouldn't want the media to constantly dig dirt on Nobel prize winners and defend convicted rapists.
Does it even matter what the actual motivations of journalists are? People are going to always act in their self-interest, and I seriously do not understand why you expect otherwise. The only thing you can do is not have any dirt on you on the first place. Don't plagarize. Don't antagonize people unless necessary. Don't espouse blatantly controversial opinions using an identity that can be traced back to your real one. Like seriously, what the hell did you expect to happen? The world owes you nothing.
"But it’s the sort of thing that you can imagine having chilling effects. Imagine if, every time someone let their students/employees/whatever criticize Israel, journalists searched really hard for unrelated dirt on them"
Or... you could be a person that adds value to your organization, and who doesn't commit rampant plagiarism in an already shoddy, weak, and illegitimate publishing 'career'.
We all like you here, obviously, but I think you're barking up the wrong tree on this one.
These attacks worked on Claudine Gay because she didn't add value to her organization, she had 0 management and PR skills, and she had no publishing career. She was a fraud who shouldn't have been in her position in the first place - that's why the attacks worked.
1. How many of the pro-Palestinian activists crying over being punished for being anti-israel have EVER condemned people being punished for having "right wing" political beliefs, or even the persecution of scholars whose research contradicts liberal narratives (such as intelligence researchers)? Any, literally any in history?
2. How many of these pro-palestinian activists were outraged when so-called "journalists" showed up unannounced at the door of the mother of 'Libs of TikTok'? Imagine if journalists showed up to the house of the family of pro-palestinian people - we would never hear the end of end of this being "harassment" and "intimidation tactics". But no, actually, the pro-palestinian types were 𝘢𝘱𝘱𝘭𝘢𝘶𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 this and defending the journalists. This is of course simply the first example that came to mind, but there's many more.
So, remind me again why I'm supposed to care? You don't get points for being "morally principled" here. You get beaten, politically. If you allow your opponents to intimidate and abuse their way into censoring you, and you in response take the "principled" route, all it means is that your views get censored and your opponent's don't. So they can go to hell.
>I don’t believe that woke college presidents...are more likely to plagiarize than other groups.
Claudine Gay is not simply a "woke" college president.
She's a black female college president from a wealthy Haitian family whose career at Harvard is 𝘢𝘣𝘴𝘰𝘭𝘶𝘵𝘦𝘭𝘺 𝘪𝘯𝘦𝘹𝘱𝘭𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦 except in the light of extremely aggressive affirmative action.
There's literally no president of a prestigious university who we should suspect LESS of plagiarism than her.
I think that it looks unrelated, but that's precisely what anti-wokes are saying. There is no clear and direct link between antisemitism from an oppressor/oppressed perspective, and being an unmeritocratic institution that hires serial plagiarists. The idea is that wokeness, or race marxism, or social justice liberalism, has values that are at times unrelated or contradictory but are melded together - is frequently called intersectionality.
The gist as I understand it, and this scans as correct to me, is that Harvard as an institution will be more tolerant of speech that has an anti-white or conservative valence (Israel is just and good) while also elevating an unqualified black woman as its figurehead to make those values clear. That Rufo and co can immediately find dirt on the nearest powerful person in that institution and demonstrate that the emperor-has-no-clothes is not surprising to me.
Harvard was in the exact opposite situation years ago with Summers, a noteworthy figure and influential economist who has worked in the white house, who was ousted for saying that men and women were different. It all seems like a cornucopia of unrelated facts and situations, but if you looks closely has a cultural through-line that snaps all participants into focus.
A friend of mine with a phd in education shared the following: "Investigating non-stem academics for scholarly misconduct is like drug testing truckers for speed. It mostly isn't done or the whole industry would collapse, but its very useful when you need to get rid of someone."
2 minutes (2 minutes!) of digging would have shown you that Brunet has been talking about Claudine Gay for YEARS and that his involvement in this has literally nothing whatsoever to do with israel or palestine. How can you try and hold journalists to account when you yourself smear someone with integrity out of your own laziness?
Obviously her plagiarism and abject lack of academic merit was well known before this. But except in a shitstorm involving jews and israel that made Harvard look extremely bad, when else would raising these concerns ever have gotten anywhere or done anything but get you shouted down as a "white supremacist"?
Scott, um, of course the cases you mention are targeting. If anyone disputes this, they're gaslighting you, and you should laugh at them. (To be explicit, I take Elizabeth Spiers to have been lying.)
I feel funny even saying this. I take it as obvious that this is how our media environment works. More specifically, I would say it is true, obvious, and disputed only in bad faith.
In the case of Claudine Gay, the allegations of plagiarism were definitely known previously. Harvard had even "investigated" them, in a laughable manner, only to dismiss/whitewash them. Rufo pursued the matter further after her Congressional testimony, and because of it. I don't think he would deny that. Nor do I see why he should be at all ashamed of it.
The other cases are similar. Journalists investigate things when they have a reason to, not at random. The reason may not immediately relate to the thing investigated. That's "targeting." Yes, of course. Duh.
I discovered Scott and his wonderful writing because of that NYT hit piece. I've since learned so much from him and subsequent rationalist-adjacent sources. In this case targeting is a good thing?
I"m a journalist and I think the clicks / pile-on theory is best. Truth is a necessary input; you can't justfiy yourself publishing false things. But the world is extremely full of true facts that aren't in the media.
How do we choose what to publish? editors want stories on popular topics, journalists want to be read. Going too far in this direction is "tabloid". Whereas not going far enough is "academic publishing that makes you go broke".
There's a constant tension for any masthead between "getting clicks today" and "preserving reputation for the future." Since we went online the balance between these has been pulled in the direction of the former and trust in media has fallen. But revenue for media has also fallen so there's much less point in having a trusted masthead nobody much reads.
Hot take: plagiarism isn't worth reporting on, period. If someone takes credit for another's *work*, that's one thing. But if someone takes credit for another's *writing about their work*, the appropriate response is "please put this in quotes kthx", not "please spend more time rephrasing and reinterpreting these words and consequently less time doing actual productive work to advance the field", and certainly not "let's revoke this person's credentials and obliterate their credibility so they *can't* do any more productive work". Mathematicians have been plagiarising Pythagoras for millennia. Physicists have been plagiarising Aristotle for nearly as long. If it's good work, it's *worth sharing and reusing in any form*, even more so if it's underappreciated enough that you have to hear about it through someone who isn't the original author.
Wow. I’ve been drilled in academia for so long that copying is bad but you’re so right what an interesting view. Don’t reinvent the wheel to explain complex topics we already know but Copy paste and come up with something new!
From my understanding, a lot of econ writing functions this way; it’s generally acceptable to extensively quote existing explanations of models since the important bit is the new work done, not redescribing an old model.
I am not an expert, but I think that putting other people's descriptions in quotes is called citation (and is considered a good thing), not plagiarism.
The problem with plagiarism is not "you used someone else's words instead of reinventing the wheel", but "you pretended that you figured out something, when actually someone else did".
One of the accusations of plagiarism was literally that they reused the phrasing in the acknowledgements section. People are in fact treating "you used someone else's words" as a sin.
I get your point, but I think one of the core accusations is that Gay was incredibly lazy and perhaps didn't introduce anything worthwhile in her entire dissertation, as evidenced by her willingness to copy and paste even her acknowledgements section - which is typically very personal and specific to the person writing it.
Author of the twitter thread about Oxman's dissertation here, appreciate the link.
While the general point about the chilling effects of mutually assured destruction is well-taken, I'm more of a single-issue *BS Out Of Academia* voter than an anti-Ackman partisan. In fact, inasmuch as I was pleased to see Gay go, conventional culture war rules would have put me on Ackman's team and therefore on Oxman's. So if you're inclined to view allegations of academic misconduct through a Schmittian lens, the entire thread should be read as an admission against interest (and hence more likely to be accurate). But my whole point is that I don't want people like Oxman on "my team", even if their spouses sometimes do things I appreciate.
> I don’t believe that woke college presidents, or the wives of bigshot investors, are more likely to plagiarize than other groups.
Ok, but if you consider Gay and Oxman to be more or less random samples from the set of high-profile PhDs, isn't it really weird that *both* of them turned out to be guilty? My point of concern is not how bad woke college presidents and billionaires' wives are, but how compromised academia in general has become, such that these people were able to get away with it for so long. And would have gotten away with it too, had they not accidentally come to attention of a bunch of bored internet randos who reviewed their work more thoroughly out of curiosity than their nominal peers who were supposed to do it for a living.
"I don’t believe that woke college presidents, or the wives of bigshot investors, are more likely to plagiarize than other groups."
I do think that cargo cult scientists like Claudine Gay are much more likely than real scientists to copy-paste stuff like "this is how the statistical method I'm using works" or "here are the strengths and weaknesses of my statistical method", as Claudine Gay did.
It's the publicly legible tip of the iceberg of her field's dysfunction.
Andrew Gelman wrote a post recently, implicitly in response to this affair, saying "at least regarding academics, plagiarism is a sign of lack of understanding." I think Andrew Gelman is worth bringing up because of his demonstrated concern with bad social science research, as opposed to fighting wokeness. I think the examples in his post are worth looking at, to get a sense of who's more likely to commit plagiarism.
Chris Rufo and Chris Brunet are, of course, not Andrew Gelman. But their enemy came to her position through intellectual authority, the appearance of being a scientist. They are making use of the fact that their enemy's claim to intellectual authority rests on such shaky ground.
Anyway, perhaps it's targeted (edited from "yes, it's targeted" after reading Chris Brunet's comment). That tells us something about how journalists work. But in this case the targeted attack was with a weapon that works much better on cargo cult scientists than real ones. If only journalists always appealed to equally reasonable standards.
I think you're wrong about the implosion of FTX being the start of when the media switched narratives on EA and that it would have happened without that. In 2022, EA started spending money on politics, mostly due to SBF. That's a direct challenge to the establishment and their ability to set a narrative and define what people think is important. That's the sort of thing that makes people start looking for attack points. The FTX collapse certainly didn't help that, but it was already underway before.
To support this, here is eigenrobot predicting negative coverage of EA in September 2022 (I think this is a reasonable paraphrase of what he's getting at)
> If I ran the world, I would want newspapers to do the opposite of that - comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, that kind of thing. I would want it to find dirt on people who were puffed up way too high riding the top of the popularity wave, and find reasons to defend and stand up for people who were vulnerable and getting piled on.
I wonder if from the journalist’s perspective this is precisely what they think they’re doing. Since by definition it’s when you become “newsworthy”, used as a shorthand for attention, that the negative stories become salient. [Not justifying the current methods, but trying to explain it]
is there any categorical difference between rufo and the journalists who uncovered oxman's plagiarism, that makes the former "investigative journalism uncovering a scandal" but the latter only motivated targeting? rufo was also joining a pile-on on gay, and he also elevated a fifteen-year-stale peccadillo into front page news. both seem equally like targeting to me, and while the tit-for-tat dynamic is unfortunate, it's not clear why one is privileged over the other.
(this is half-joke, half-serious) Sure, he's a feminist and they're not. He's attacking a woman for things she did herself for her own reasons, but they're attacking a woman because of things her husband did. He treats his target like an independent person, but they treat their target like a mere extension of her man. How many movies and TV shows have been criticized for having a plot where a woman is hurt just to affect a man? That's exactly what they're doing.
it’s true that Rufo went after Gay herself whereas the journalists uncovering Oxman’s plagiarism only did so because of her husband. but why does that make Rufo’s journalism less like targeting? i don’t see why. if i cross the mafia and they kill my wife, that seems like the same level of targeting as if they’d killed me.
Yeah, sorry, that doesn't make it less "targeting", it just makes it more ethically acceptable on an axis which Gay and her allies profess to care about.
An actual difference is that there's a good argument that Rufo didn't engage in any "targeting", himself, per se. The targeting was set up by Brunet a year and a half earlier, and Brunet had repeatedly tried to pull the trigger, but no one cared and it kept bouncing off her diamond-hard scales. Rufo happened to notice that it was all set up, filed that knowledge away, and when Gay popped up in the public light and exposed the gap in her armor, he pulled the trigger. Whereas Oxman was stalked and hunted down for revenge on someone else, the way a particularly persistent person might get annoyed by someone who cut them off in traffic, follow them home, and run over their dog.
So leftists like Gay are subject cancel culture, ans I am supposed to be upset. Nope. I don't care. The left has conjured demons and now they must live with the consequences.
It is not a world I like, but I did not make it and I cannot control it. I can however be grimly amused when the inventors of an ugly trend get ensnared in it. I think that is mere poetic justice.
Is targeting a good thing of a bad thing? It seems normal for bad actors to get their comeuppance during a moment when they are particularly vulnerable. If you think you have caught a student cheating and that it needs to be reported, is it wrong to look for archival evidence that would strengthen your case? Does anyone think that you should only look through the archival evidence for those students who have not been caught cheating??
The current issue and the archival evidence should be related.
If someone is accused of plagiarism, then checking for plagiarism in the past is relevant.
If someone is accused of e.g. sexual harassment, then checking for plagiarism in the past is irrelevant.
In other words, you should be searching for evidence of "is this the kind of a thing that this person does?", not "is there anything in their past that could put them in bad light?".
Your reaction sure does seem logical, yet I don't think it is logical. When a student is suspended or expelled from a university, do we really want to exclude evidence relevant to the decision?? In a petty theft case, for example, would we ignore if the student had also been judged guilty of plagiarism, cheating on an exam, and trying to intimidate instructors?
In Dr. Gay's case, Rufo et al. were bringing forward the evidence of her plagiarism not so that the public could be convinced that Gay was antisemitic or "too PC" in her thinking, but to convince the public that Gay should not be president of Harvard.
Well the obvious lesson that the moralists will want to take is "don't fuck up; we can't find anything if there's nothing to find". Clearly that's untenable.
A part of me had hoped that we as a society would reach a tenor of cancellation and outing of the misdeeds of others that would be so unsustainable that at some point everyone would stop caring about the misdeeds of others and the doxxing/outing would lose its power. But it seems that the tenor of cancel culture and "malevolent investigation" has abated slightly from the frenzy of 5 or 6 years ago and turned into a more refined check on people in power and authority, which is perhaps not the worst turn of events.
Everything you say is true, but none of it is breaking news. Journalists need clicks to stay employed, especially in these times when ad money is dwindling. They're going to throw red meat to the whatever masses are inclined to read their outlet, though the high-toned press won't admit it. Anything that raises your profile attracts people willing to attack you for whatever you've done that might be attacked. (An example is Paul Manifort; his business dealings were so dodgy that friends advised him to stay out of politics, as prosecutors looked over the activities of politically-involved people more carefully than that of others.) If you are going to get involved in something controversial, it helps to keep your nose clean regarding everything else you do. And yes, reporters have no compunctions about lying.
Journalists remind me of intelligence officers, in several ways.
As professions, both are deemed necessary and useful for the public good. Both have historically been able to credibly claim that they use humint/investigative sources and methods to collect otherwise unseen intelligence - with a goal of bringing troubling topics to the fore for the greater good.
But clandestine intelligence officers have no hope of being even slightly effective unless they are very intentionally lying repeatedly every day, and juggling a series of different narrative universes that are lies. All for the greater good, in theory, to uncover true intelligence that they then summarize and report on objectively, truthfully. Intelligence officers don’t make policy, they merely inform policy makers. Never mind the process, especially the selection of who and what gets summarized and who and what does not.
The parallels with the ideals of investigative journalism are too obvious to ignore. There are obviously some major differences, journalists aren’t required by editors to repatriate every 18-36 months to re-Americanize in immersive ‘civic therapy’ to recover from the damage to their psyches. It would probably be better if journalist did immersive re-Americanization every couple years.
But when I think of Kara Swisher et al, I’m reminded of Michael Steele. People with axes and grindstones.
There is another way that journalists are like intelligence officers: As a career, it ceased to be a growth opportunity about 25 years ago, because of tech. And that frustrates the hell out of them, watching opportunities and money flow into tech that supersedes more and more of the work they used to do. If the New York Times = the CIA, WaPo = Mossad, but Google = the NSA. The last reliable metric that I heard from someone I trust is that the NSA and portions of the other ~10 intelligence agencies that are partially subsumed by NSA “coordination” is 22x the size of the CIA. And that multiple is inexorably growing, just like newsmedia revenue is inexorably shrinking.
We’re probably at the point now where most events that might be legitimately newsworthy could be aggregated by a custom GPT from open access data sources, and curated + summarized according to the preferences of individual users.
“aggregated by a custom GPT from open access data sources, and curated + summarized according to the preferences of individual users” this is an interesting idea with lots of variants to explore. One would be to get people from different camps to agree on a GPT arbiter.
Although we have some areas of agreement, you won't be surprised by my extremely high level of confidence that your blind spot is way, way bigger than mine. My speculation is that yours is nourished by the disdain for the institutions we're discussing -- which leads you to avoid digging into the ugly, often banal, truths that are currently facing us. It's all in front of us, quite clearly, in legal, political, and moral terms, if only we have enough curiosity to really look. But curiosity is what Joe Rogan snuffs out by making it seem uncool to care about these ancient teetering structures.
To say that Trump believes in democracy is mind-numbingly ludicrous. Your comment seems to reveal a susceptibility to the totalitarian tactic of obliterating everyone's discernment with a constant flood of pure bullshit. Times like these -- when populism embraces destruction -- are precisely the times we are most vulnerable, since Rogan et al make it sound so naïve and quaint and hyperbolic to care. If you want to sound clever, be like Joe with his catholic disdain for all "cathedrals," gatekeepers, and educated experts. Journalism certainly has erred, not because it covered Trump too much, but because it treated him like an ordinary politician for far too long. It wasn't until the end of his reign that anyone from a reputable source even had the courage to simply call his endless lies "lies."
You're a smart guy. That's why I'm confident you have not done the legwork on who these people really are. Because the only other reason to claim that Trump and Musk believe in democracy is that you're part of the project to destroy it, and I doubt that's true (even though few will openly admit it). "Free speech" in today's context is not a righteous argument for democracy. It has become a lever to open the rightwing floodgates of disinformation and hatred, as per the greater project of wearing everyone down.
I won't bore you with a reading list, etc, because such arguments never go anywhere, but I will remind you that a pathological sociopath and malignant narcissist like Trump doesn't believe in anything besides himself -- so it's not like he has to share Steve Bannon's ideological vision to be an effective tool of fascism. Hitler was a bumbling idiot too, with hurt fee-fees in a jail cell, until he was allowed to wield total power, with US right-wing approval and a cynical world mood that kept the majority of people disinterested and uninterest in the grotesque details of his miserable project until it was too late.
"This is another reason to trust priors, surveys, and studies, instead of updating your estimate of a distribution really hard based on one dramatic event that you heard about."
An interesting conclusion in a piece that cites zero studies and several dramatic events. Generally I expect better arguments here.
The question for me is whether Gay's level of plagiarism is the kind of thing that most academics do - officially frowned upon, sure, but otherwise tolerated - or whether it's particularly bad even by the usual standards of academia. Is it more like "smoked weed as a teenager once" or like "was a sub-boss in the Cosa Nostra" type of crime? Maybe there's also a subquestion whether university presidents should be held to higher standards than academics in general.
Presumably university presidents set the tone and are the ultimate authority enforcing the rules. If the president broke rules, such as about academic honesty, then it makes it far less likely they can or will enforce those rules.
1. It was a proxy battle over Israel. Some people in and around Harvard want there to be more censorship related to Israel so they went after her to make a point: if you don't do this properly, we'll come after your career.
2. Someone else who wants to be president of Harvard or just didn't like Gay exploited the moment to go after her.
It's not clear whether it's #1 or #2 but I really doubt there's just a lot of sticklers for MLA or APA style out there trying to do this on behalf of ethics in college journalism.
Of course the culture war part is worth discussing, the social/journalistic norms are worth discussing, but my biggest reaction to this was "What? Why is there so much plagiarism in academia?" YOU SHOULDN'T BE ABLE TO BECOME PRESIDENT OF HARVARD WITH A PLAGIARIZED DISSERTATION!!! I think we can all agree that's objectively a bad outcome and the sign of a flawed system, and it completely crushes my faith in academia (not that I had much faith before now, considering the replication crisis and how partisan some universities are). Academia needs to do better than this if we want the average person to "trust the experts". If I ever meet another arrogant Harvard grad, I'm rubbing this in their face.
I would hope that at least one person reads the dissertation of each and every Harvard professor that gets hired - and that a whole committee reads the important writings of anyone in higher administration. My faith that this was happening and that even basic checks for plagiarism were being conducted is very low.
This substantially lowers my estimation of Harvard and by extension Harvard grads. Not that they are now low status in my mind, but much lower than before.
The media's main job is to point the bone at people on behalf of the interests of their benefactors and their allies. It exists as a form of mass amplification and communication of the elite's messaging. From the King's crier who went from town to town, no difference exists. A few attempts were made and some minor forms exist of the less powerful coopting these tools for their own use, but most were driven out of business as the majority of large circulation union and worker focused papers have gone under.
Structurally this is the entire point of the media to empower the voices of the powerful and it brings to mind the phrase 'the greatest trick of the devil is to convince you he doesn't exist'. Often this plays out as court politics and intrigue. Manufacturing consent, etc. applies as well as them not alwasy having a particular point to amplify and serving a wide range of topics held in the backburenr in order to insert their preferred narrative control mechanisms later.
You my good sir have been very very very badly gaslit by a liar. Often gaslighting is a seemingly overused term, but this is a pretty clear cut case of it by a corporate self-styled 'mainstream' journalist telling you they have no power, no coordination, and are not infested with intelligence plants. Liars are going to liar about everything, including their role as liars who deceive, distract, and misinform.
They are unwilling to accept any form of criticism as it exposes them. This is why nearly 100% of true media critique is in independent media, not the silly sports team style fake rivalry from the two sides of the same coin known as the uniparty.
Scott, have you read Nellie Bowles' (former NYT journo and wife of Bari Weiss) reflections on her career in the media? She openly says that she wrote hit pieces on people, arguably the most prominent of whom was none other than Jordan Peterson, and that she was rewarded for doing so.
> And so on and so forth for another thirty-odd paragraphs listing all of my various psychological flaws.
I like it when people talking about my psychological traits, I think anyone who got some psychological education likes it too. But I didn't experience journalists doing that. Probably it is much less fun, because you cannot troll them.
Not just journalists! This kind of behaviour is also quite common in the legal system. This is why having rules on the books that criminalize a lot are so dangerous - it's all fine until someone is out to get you, and then suddenly you get busted for "tax-evasion" or "non-compliance" or whatever.
I think the counter view is not that journalists are truth seekers - it's that they are busy professionals looking to write stories that a large public would be interested in. So the reason they dig up dirt on Ackman's wife isn't that he went after their allies - it's that he is in the news for making an accusation of plagiarism, so the story about his wife committing plagiarism would sell.
On this account, the source of the problem is that the public is interested in reading stories that play like an episode of the Jerry Springer show. And in a competitive journalism market, there will always be media outlets who would satisfy this taste.
From a higher point of view, this is a bit like Hanlon's Razor. What seems like conspiracy or malice is often better explained by some less dramatic human weakness.
I mostly agree with you, but there's also an angle of why a particular journalist would pick a particular story amongst the many possible for investigating. It's not like Oxman's plagiarism was obvious and already known but just not shared. People had to do real research to match up her writing with her sources, without knowing that they would find anything (unless there's an assumption that everyone in academia plagiarizes, which seems like a much bigger thing to share if you're just looking for clicks).
My guess is that some woke academic knew about Oxman and the plagiarism and gave the journalist a tip. The point is that mainline journalists are not some sort of cabal with evil intentions, but are simply interested in writing stories that get a lot of hits. They would at least try to write much more fair, balanced and deeply researched stories if such stories were more popular. But, unfortunately, negative and unfair stories tend to get a lot more hits, so that's what they mostly do. Technology has accelerated this process, since you can now easily measure reader engagement with individual stories.
I think that we need to acknowledge that in today's Western society journalists are essentially weapons of stochastic violence, due to our leaders refusal to hold social media lynch mobs accountable for their actions.
That's not necessarily a bad thing, when the stochastic violence is deserved. Speaking truth to power is important, even if said truths destroy those in power. The problem is that increasingly journalists are speaking falsehoods FROM power. Many of them have willingly allowed themselves to be slaves of our oligarchs.
I think it's important to recognize that just as journalists routinely inflict stochastic violence towards their enemies, we have every right to inflict stochastic violence towards then. If journalists want to actively take sides in the culture war, they aren't neutral bystanders: they are enemy soldiers, and we need to start taking some of their scalps.
There needs to be a return to the journalistic standards of neutrality, fairness, and diligence. And the best way to accomplish that is to target journalists for harassment when they DON'T live up to these principles.
There was a nice t-shirt with "Some Assembly Required" I've liked ever since I saw it.. I think of its uplifting message from time to time.
Which type? x86?
"Rope. Tree. Journalist." https://jeffcarlson.com/2016/11/06/rope-tree-journalist/
Ackman is a public figure, though, and he was among those attacking Gay.
That doesn't follow from what I said. And family members for better or worse have been on-limits since at least Billy Carter. And what did I say that led you to infer that I was admitting anything? Or is "basically" supposed to provide some kind of justification for what you said. Lastly, I was being descriptive. Slow down there, cowboy.
Neri Oxman is definitely a public figure.
I'm sorry, Claudine Gay didn't just "criticize Israel", she testified before congress that calling for genocide against Jews was okay under the Harvard speech codes. I guess you could technically argue that she's just a hardcore free speech absolutist, but then you'd have to ignore literally everything else you know about Harvard's attitude towards controversial free speech.
She didn't say it was okay, she said it depended on context.
Technically, it's true. Everything always depends on context. But she was utterly unable to elaborate further or make the case that context matters.
Anyhow, none of that is central to Scott's point.
Mostly just come on, we know she would never say that with another group. If someone with a track record of being a principled free speech supporter (like Scott) said the same thing I'd hear him out, but given Gay's track record...
I guess she might be okay with saying that about ex-colonial powers/European powers... :)
I am not saying she's intellectually honest. I am saying her position was not idiotic or automatically antisemitic. Basically, what Silverax said - she handled terribly but her answer is technically correct.
Yes, I agree that she herself likely doesn't care much about Jews one way or the other and is just appeasing the political blocs around her, and her antisemitism is just downstream of antisemitism being the net consensus of those blocks (some of which actively like it and most of which don't care either way).
Oddly enough I agree, and I'm even (technically) Jewish. But she really did handle the answer in the worst way possible.
Despite not being Jewish, I disagree with your position. Gay came out against hypothetical speech against specific groups earlier. That she places context around speech about Jews, but not around the same speech concerning other groups is the troubling part.
I believe we should allow contextual speech of all stripes: Nazis, Klansmen, etc. But to place a limit on the monsters is troubling, favoritism.
Agreed. If Gay had had a consistent history of treating apologists for Hamas and apologists for the KKK in the same way - either permitting both, in which case she could have claimed that free speech trumped other concerns, or banning both, in which case she could have claimed that maintaining civility trumped other concerns, then she would have been honorable. She was not.
I'm not happy with using the selective enforcement of plagiarism rules against her. Targeting reminds me too much of Cardinal Richelieu's "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." I prefer that laws and other rules either be uniformly enforced or repealed - though I recognize that this will never happen, and selective enforcement is something the powerful regularly use.
Intellectual dishonesty IS THE DEFINITION of idiotic.
I agree her answer wasn't antisemitic, in the sense of expressing hate for Jews. But it wasn't just a misstep either. Her statements, compared to Harvard's usual stance on these topics, reveals that she *doesn't mind* antisemitism. At least, she doesn't mind it enough to act against students who really are antisemitic. That's not exactly antisemitism, but it's still very concerning and below the standard that I hold for leaders of our institutions.
I don't see your issue
If it depends on context, and you're testifying before Congress, and you don't say "it depends on context," that's perjury
You're acting like she wrote Harvard's code of conduct herself, or endorsed it, instead of accurately describing it when asked
I'm pretty sure she did ansolutely nothing wrong *in the specific moment you're referring to*. I am in no way a supporter of Gay. I'm actually immune to political bias here because I'm too dumb to understand how it all fits in the big picture and can only take individual claims on their individual merits. Yours seems to lack merit
"I'm pretty sure she did ansolutely nothing wrong *in the specific moment you're referring to*."
I disagree, but I'm not sure my position is coherent. I would appreciate a gut check if you have a moment:
The moment in congress was exactly where she errored. She as the president of Harvard represents the establishment. Her job is to beg money from the 0.001% to keep an institution that is 140 years older then the republic (for which I stand) rich. She's a sales-person; there's no shame in that, they are the folks who make the checks show up, but still that's her vocation.
The aforementioned establishment heard some things it didn't like coming from a college campus like direction. It then called three of it's officers to the mat and demanded an oath of fealty. Claudine didn't feel inclined to bow, whether out of pride or ignorance. So it became clear to the persons (committee?) that assigns / removes presidents at Harvard that Miss Gay is no longer capable of doing her job well.
QED she found herself moved to the Harvard equivalent of special projects; you know, same plush salary, same shiny lab, none of the responsibility to deliver. She even gets a pious martyrdom in trade for all the power she lost. Let us all bask in the knowledge that if you play your cards right sometimes the system hands out $878,000 a year for failure, wow, go Claudine!
As to the establishment hearing something it didn't like, yes the establishment is still very much committed to 1 the state of Israel's existence and 2 the idea that we ostracize people who won't kowtow to congress. The state of Israel is supported cynically now but it is supported. The US has many entanglements in the middle east but can't trust any of them to back us whenever we call like the Israelis will. If the Palestinians 1 had a leader who controlled them, 2 had the economic or military power to hold land and feed themselves and their army and 3 would honor deals made with said leader then, only then things might be different. But they don't, they can't, and they won't.
It does not matter how powerful the radical left gets or how loudly they yell things these are the facts. We ally with the partners that exist not the partners we would like to exist.
Now the hard part:
I hate the establishment. It tells me how to think and I must suffer this in silence or risk losing everything and leading a life in prison. But I do love to watch it eat it's own, I see Claudine Gay as deserving what she got because she forgot that to get the benefits of power she has to pay the price. I hate that the establishment wields it's terrible corrupt power but I love to see it cutting it's officers down when they step out of line. I understand what happened and why but I am troubled by being happy about a cynical hatchet job committed against a genocide agnostic sales woman. Everything here is sad... what do what do /holds head and starts rocking back and forth in corner....
I disagree with this reading that she refused to kiss the ring
She was not offered a ring to kiss. She was walked off a plank, and her options were to drown or be stabbed
Because the fact is that some students have called for genocide (in the eyes of many) but they have not, in fact, violated the code of conduct. If she says that they didn't call for genocide, everyone is angry. If she says they have but doesn't violate the code, everyone is angry. If she says they have called for genocide and it's not allowed, the next question is "why haven't you expelled them" and we're back at square one. If she tries to explain that it's nuanced and while calling for genocide certainly can violate the code, there may be instances where it wouldn't (which is exactly what she said), then nobody will listen and everyone will be angry (because that's exactly what happened).
Once the question was asked, the game was lost
Now, it's possible the backlash was deserved, in the grand scheme. I actually do not know how she responded to any of the other questions, I literally haven't seen the rest of the hearing and I know zero things about this person. I'm only referring to that one question
To say 'context' means that we can study say Nazis and Klansmen, and read their speeches without condoning their meaning. But Gay placed limits around studying the speech of select groups.
So she would say calls to genocide africans are only banned depending on the context?
If students had recently called for genocide of Africans in a manner which factually did not violate the code of conduct, she'd have no choice
She can't expell all the students who call for genocide, many of them don't deserve expulsion or any discipline. She can't claim they haven't called for genocide, the people who interpret their words as calls for genocide would be incensed and call her an lying idiot. As long as those two facts are true, she can't claim that calls for genocide violate the code of conduct, she'd just get the obvious follow-up question and be back where she started
Now, maybe if it were Africans instead of Jews she would have been more forceful in explaining that the school doesn't approve of such things and they shouldn't be tolerated etc. Did she say those things forcefully in this hearing about Jews? I have no idea, I haven't seen it. If you have seen it and think she failed to support her Jewish students, say that. Make that claim if it's true. So far, we're only discussing the one piece of evidence, and it's bad evidence
Perhaps watch the damn testimony before commenting
Not in casual conversation, but under oath she wouldn't be allowed to claim otherwise
Guys, c'mon, she literally said exactly that in the hearing. People are only pissed at her because Ackman and others straw-manned her position (insinuating that she didn't condemn genocide) and because most people have tyrannical hearts and want to see speech they don't like suppressed: https://www.c-span.org/video/?c5097070/user-clip-claudine-gay-free-speech-hero
Academics and activists can and do say genocidal-sounding things about white people fairly often and get away with it.
The confusion or debate (whatever you want to call it) basically seems to revolve around the question: should the rules for what you can say about Jews be the rules applied to ‘marginalized groups’ (women, black people, gay people) which are very restrictive, or should they get the treatment given to oppressor/perpetrator groups (men, white people, most specific European ethnicities or nationalities) which permit a great deal of hostility.
Some people like myself would like a consistent etiquette that regards broad derogation of ethnic groups or nationalities to be in bad taste in general rather than based on some stratification of victim/oppressor groups, but I think this position isn’t the most popular one.
I mostly agree. An asterisk here about Jews specifically is that they kinda get the worst of both worlds: most white people (and most leftist activists are white) are at least sane enough to realize the problems with calling for violence against white people as a group since it includes them. But Jews are in the uncomfortable position of being (mostly) classified as an oppressor group but also being enough of a minority that you don't have a large class of people protecting them out of self interest.
She said it earlier in the same hearing about black people
I have a very hard time coming up with an example of context where calling for genocide is ok.
The point is not that calling for genocide is OK. It's whether the speech is calling for genocide or not.
That was basically them setting her up for a gotcha where if she says "no", then they say she has to stop people from saying "from the river to the sea...".
They she should just have said, "Calling for genocide is always against Harvard's speech codes. Whether 'From the river to the sea...' counts as a call for genocide depends on the context in which it's said."
Fine. I don't think anyone disagrees that she handled that terribly.
I'm just giving an example of the context.
I haven’t watched her entire testimony but I imagine the out of context part she said was itself taken out of context.
The river in the couplet is the Jordan River, Israel's western border. The sea is the Mediterranean Sea, Israel's eastern border. "Will be free" is not a call to freedom, but free of Jews. "From Israel's western border to Israel's eastern border, the territory will be Judenfrei" isn't as catchy, but conveys the same meaning.
It is, at minimum, a call for ethnic cleansing, if it is not a call for genocide.
Do you think every single person who has ever said "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" has meant "Palestinians will ethnically cleanse all Jews in Greater Israel"? That not one has meant, just for example, "There will be a singular liberal democratic state between the river Jordan and the Mediterranean, called Palestine, with people living there more-or-less being the same as right now"? I mean, do you ACTUALLY think that?
"Will be free" is not a call to freedom, but free of Jews.
False.
She does not want to take a position on "From the river to the sea," because she knows full well that if she says it either is or is not a call for genocide (in any circumstance), then pro-Israel partisans will accuse her of saying it's sometimes okay to get rid of Jews "from the river to the sea."
Well, that could be one way of looking at it.
Do you think she would have had any trouble responding to the question "Is it ok to call for the genocide of Palestinians?"
And if she says "no" she doesn't have to stop people from speaking their mind. The only reason she couldn't answer that way is because they have stopped people from speaking their mind. It was a trap of her own making.
That's irrelevant. I don't care about Gay, whether she's a raging antisemite or persecuted or whatever. Seriously.
It's just plain obvious that there's more nuance to what she said than she's saying genocide is OK depending on context.
ACX is supposed to have high standards of discourse, so it annoys me that people don't actually make decent arguments against Gay.
I just keep reading the same old bullshit "she thinks genocide is OK depending on context".
There's obviously more nuance than that. Make an actual intelligent argument against her (or in favour!). Don't repeat the same old vacuous bullshit.
It is absolutely relevant and it's part of the "nuance" you are hanging your hat on. Seriously.
While it is unfortunate that the game today is played as "if you aren't against something you must be for it", but that is reality. This tack is used against conservatives with glee and regularity. A good example of that is when Trump said "There are good people on both sides." and that was reported as "Trump supports racism."
I disagree on the "nuance" issue. She twisted herself in knots trying to provide a non-answer because she knew an honest answer would bite her. It's a fairly easy question to answer: "Genocide is never ok, but free speech is always ok." The trouble is, if she would have provided that answer, she would have been called out on the obvious.
The problem is that there is nuance which might exist here, but any such nuance would be a lie coming from her.
This is just a matter of semantics. If there's nuance, but the nuance is a lie, does that count as having nuance? Maybe on a strictly logical level it would, but that's not what most people mean by "does it have nuance". It doesn't have truthful nuance. And the fact that she wouldn't say the same thing about calling to genocide Palestinians indicates that the nuance wouldn't be truthful.
> an example of context where calling for genocide is ok.
a)
One teenager telling it to another as a joke in private (but someone else overheard).
In my opinion, not something that authorities should investigate.
b)
Something that according to some people is a "dog whistle" for calling for genocide, and according to other people it is not.
That's another good one.
I think I remember a CEO losing his job b/c he used the n word while trying to make the case that his employees should be sensitive and not use bad/taboo language.
So he used the taboo word as example and got (iirc) summarily fired? That's a case of context not being taken into account.
Pedantically, he didn't use the n word, he mentioned it. This was an obvious distinction to our wiser forebears like... ten years ago, and we've somehow lost it. (For another case, Donald McNeil at the Times.) Mentioning "from the river to the sea," as I did just now, is okay regardless of context.
As I said, I couldn't recall the details but remembered it seemed wrong - given the context... :)
Calling for genocide is okay. It's free speech. It's legal unless it's both intended to and likely to incite imminent lawlessness.
The problem is that Harvard couldn't say that, because Harvard knows it doesn't support free speech. It routinely punishes people for speech that falls squarely within 1A protections. It revoked admissions to people who said dumb things on Twitter years before they were admitted. It fired a law professor for defending a client it didn't like. So Harvard can't turn around and say what it should have said "Yes, calling for genocide is generally protected speech. Even things we *really really don't like* can be protected speech, and Harvard will not punish or penalize students or faculty for protected speech just because we find it distasteful or even disgusting. That is what the First Amendment specifically and more broadly freedom of expression mean, and it is Harvard's mission as a place of learning to protect and nurture such ideals."
It couldn't say that, so it had to blather about context.
Exactly.
Nobody believes Harvard is concerned with free speech for ideas they dislike.
She wasn't asked if it was "ok", she asked if it was "harassment" under Harvard's policy, and harassment always depends on context; who are you saying it to, under what circumstances, etc.
But everyone suspects context doesn’t matter at Harvard if you were talking much less inflammatory speech about protected classes.
It's very easy to. Imagine someone writes a paper for their "Law, Human Rights, and Social Justice in Israel-Palestine" class. In this paper, they argue that, long-term, Palestinian birthrates are high enough that, unchecked, the increase in Arab population between Israel and the occupied territories will lead to political instability and violence. As such, they argue that slavish adherence to traditional human rights law leads to suboptimal outcomes, and Israel should begin instituting concrete population control measures to cut down on the Palestinian Arab population. In addition, they advise Israel work out deals with surrounding Arab regimes and adopt ethnically-targeted financial incentives to encourage Palestinians to emigrate to them.
This paper constitutes a textbook call for genocide. Should the student be subject to disciplinary action for writing it?
This is getting away from the topic, but that is not what genocide means. At all.
It is, quite literally, the definition of genocide as defined under international law.
It depends on what you mean by "genocide". For example, if you say something like "The Anti-Defamation League is a terrible organization that does terrible things", you may or may not be correct; however, in this case you are definitely *not* calling for genocide. However, an argument can (and has) been made that since the ADL's primary goal is to prevent genocide, by speaking out against them you are implicitly endorsing genocide, and therefore you should be silenced.
You can call for the eradication of a group like Al Qaida and Hamas and Nazis…and so a group like the Nazis was pretty large although probably not large enough to characterize their eradication as “genocide”. What about WW2 Japanese? Was dropping the bomb on them getting close to “genocide”?
She was caught between a rock and a hard place of her own ideological making. It was shocking that someone like her who had existed within this ideology her entire life could not formulate an appropriate answer in this context, given the lead time she had to prepare. Even at this moment right now, the obvious answer is something along the lines of: “This is is a complicated issue as our previous stances on free speech were formed in the context of protecting an oppressed class. However, now we are in a situation where we have two oppressed classes at war, and we don’t feel that it’s our place to pick a side. While we absolutely cannot allow the advocacy of violence, we have to balance that with not silencing an oppressed group. Calling for genocide is absolutely not allowed by our student code, but in the interest of the protestors, we will be very fluid as we determine what statesmen’s rise to the level of “violent speech” and we’ll encourage our students to make sure that as they protest, they don’t speak flippantly, and imbue their words with nuance and respect as students at our esteemed university have been trained to do.”
She can't, unless they change the written policies of Harvard. The written policies protects free speech, their actions show they don't care about those, but she can't admit it directly, or she would be contravening her written policies.
That's a pretty good answer, tbh. Maybe you want to apply for university president? I've been hearing there's a couple of openings... :)
That's a lot of words. Let's simplify it.
"An oppressed class (as I define it) can say or do whatever they want, including calls for genocide and violence against an oppressor class. Jews (like whites) are not an oppressed class."
If pressed, she could have elaborated about oppressor classes!
"An oppressor class (such as Jews or whites) are not allowed to say or do anything unless every single member of an oppressed class explicitly gives permission to speak or act."
It would still have endeared her to the psychopaths on the authoritarian left, so she probably should have said something like this.
This is not in any way, shape or form a “simplification” or summary of what I wrote.
Of course not.
It is, however, an accurate and complete characterisation of Harvard's free speech policy.
The Harvard students never called for genocide against the Jews, and President Gay never supported a call for genocide.
Sample quotes from the internet.
What do you think about Harvard President Claudine Gay's apology for her remarks about calling for the genocide of Jews?
Do you agree with Harvard President Claudine Gay that calling for the genocide of Jews on campus depends on the "context"?
After witnessing the Congressional testimony of Claudine Gay, the President of Harvard, I am ashamed of my alma mater. How should Harvard respond to a call for the genocide of Jews on its campus?
When asked if calling for the genocide of Jews would violate Harvard's code of conduct, Gay wouldn't give a yes or no answer. Harvard constitutional law scholar Laurence Tribe called her testimony hesitant, formulaic and evasive. But he was among hundreds of faculty members who rallied behind Gay, urging Harvard to keep its president.
So exactly what was the testimony?
ELISE STEFANIK: It’s a yes or no question. Let me ask you this. You are president of Harvard, so I assume you’re familiar with the term intifada, correct?
CLAUDINE GAY: I’ve heard that term, yes.
ELISE STEFANIK: And you understand that the use of the term intifada in the context of the Israeli Arab conflict is indeed a call for violent armed resistance against the state of Israel, including violence against civilians and the genocide of Jews. Are you aware of that?
CLAUDINE GAY: That type of hateful speech is personally abhorrent to me.
ELISE STEFANIK: And there have been multiple marches at Harvard with students chanting quote, “there is only one solution intifada revolution.” And quote, “globalize the intifada.” Is that correct?
CLAUDINE GAY: I’ve heard that thoughtless, reckless and hateful language on our campus, yes.
ELISE STEFANIK: So, based upon your testimony, you understand that this call for intifada is to commit genocide against the Jewish people in Israel and globally, correct?
CLAUDINE GAY: I will say again that type of hateful speech is personally abhorrent to me.
ELISE STEFANIK: Do you believe that type of hateful speech is contrary to Harvard’s code of conduct or is it allowed at Harvard?
CLAUDINE GAY: It is at odds with the values of Harvard. But our values also —
ELISE STEFANIK: Can you not say here that it is against the code of conduct at Harvard?
CLAUDINE GAY: We embrace a commitment to free expression, even of views that are objectionable, offensive, hateful. It’s when that speech crosses into conduct that violates our policies against bullying, harassment —
ELISE STEFANIK: Does that speech not cross that barrier? Does that speech not call for the genocide of Jews and the elimination of Israel?
CLAUDINE GAY: When —
ELISE STEFANIK: You testify that you understand that it’s the definition of intifada. Is that speech according to the code of conduct or not?
CLAUDINE GAY: We embrace a commitment to free expression and give a wide berth to free expression even of views that are objectionable —
https://rollcall.com/2023/12/13/transcript-what-harvard-mit-and-penn-presidents-said-at-antisemitism-hearing/
So what IS the definition of "intifada"?
>>intifada
noun
: UPRISING, REBELLION
specifically : an armed uprising of Palestinians against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip<<
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/intifada
>>The right to resist is a human right<<
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_resist
"Intifada" means armed resistance to occupation. It does not mean "genocide". When Dr. Gay accepted Stefanik's definition, she was trapped.
Stefanik maneuvered Gay into declarating that support for a human right is:
"thoughtless, reckless and hateful language"
So sad.
You posted this twice. That's not the relevant part of the testimony, and your posting it is very clearly a deliberate attempt at misleading people.
(My response, including a transcript of the actual relevant statements from the testimony, is at https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/seems-like-targeting/comment/48562195 )
agree the claims against her don't seem to be made in good faith
Pretty good. I would add "and we will protect the right to protest of people who want to protest against Hamas".
But she would not be able to say that without being run out of her job by the faculty senate.
It's worth mentioning that she was specifically being asked about Harvard's "harassment policy". The definition of "harassment" usually depends a great deal on context, and it should.
The entre question was a setup; they were trying to make her either say something they could blacklist her for or get her to lie under oath so they could hit her with perjury charges. She was never asked what she thought, and that was deliberate.
I don't have a lot of sympathy for her or for Harvard here, but this is basically McCarthyist tactics from Congress.
Trying to get someone to tell the truth, in the knowledge that if they tell the truth it would reflect unfavorably on them, isn't a setup, it's just questioning.
You reap what you sow.
This is untrue. She gives a straightforward answer on when it would constitute harassment. Posting on facebook that all jews should be exterminated is not harassment. Posting a sign in a jewish student's window is harassment. You can disagree with this definition or with the policy, but she was not unclear.
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=1jBHvx7POz8 (Harvard Section begins @ 1:30)
If you need to use a word "technically" while explaining somebody's position on genocide of Jews, chances are it's not a good position. It's not some hard, hotly contested question where both sides have good arguments and you need to get deep into technical intricacies to get it right. Or at least it shouldn't be. And she wouldn't go for "context" if she were asked about whether anti-gay, anti-black or anti-trans statements - even not raising to the level of genocidal calls - are agains Harvard policy. She'd drop on it like a hawk on a mouse. So *for her* it's a complex question, which shows how far she - and American academia - has fallen.
That's a fair point and I don't really disagree.
But context still matters. OK, let's say I'm comparing the outcome for American colonizers and, say, the fate of the colonizers in Algeria or South Africa or Zimbabwe. I could easily end up saying something like "genociding Native Americans seems to have been a pretty positive step for the colonizers".
Am I supporting Native Americans' genocide? No. There are no moral grounds for invading and murdering people in order to steal their stuff/their lands. But historically it happened a lot. And that's the context that allows me to discuss it without being branded a warmonger, or wannabe war criminal etc.
Nobody disputes that context matters. But the action the context is attached to also matters! There could be millions of scenarios where it's hard to tell. Genocide of Jews is not one of them. She was asked if calling to genocide is against the Harvard policy. And if there was no *"of Jews"* attached to it, I am absolutely confident she wouldn't spent more than a second on it - she'd clearly and forcefully answer it, that yes, this is unacceptable and against every policy. But "in context" - specifically in context of significant share of her party and her peer circle being openly antisemitic or extremely-thinly-velied antisemitic (like "we don't support murder of Jews, we only support Hamas and too bad some people did something to Jews, but it's their own fault") - she is not able or does not want to exercise the same moral clarity that she would if "of Jews" were omitted from the question. Yes, we all know this context, and this context is exactly the reason her behavior is so appalling. Not that she "technically" misquoted some policy. The problem is not that she said "context" - the problem is we understand perfectly what kind of "context" she means, and how it is applied, and that is exactly the problem.
I'm under the impression that their (the university presidents') controversial response was to "is calling for genocide of Jews harassment", saying "no, unless it's [legal definition of harassment]". I guess this is technically(??) correct but I don't know why they chose to frame it in this way, especially since at least at MIT the administration has not been sympathetic to pro-Palestine protestors (and I'd assumed the situation was approximately the same at Harvard). Maybe because otherwise, under some interpretation of protest calls, they'd have to discipline literally hundreds of students.
> they'd have to discipline literally hundreds of students.
So, they are afraid to apply the anti-harassment policy because too many of their students engage in harassment? And that's somehow an *excuse* for them, not the reason for deep soul searching and mass layoffs of those responsible? It's like a bank robber would say "well, obviously I can't stop robbing banks because they I wouldn't have the money!".
If there's any good thing to come out of the whole mess in Israel... well, it's the in-progress eradication of Hamas. That's been sorely needed for a long time. But if there's *another* good thing to come out of it, it's been the clear exposure for all to see, of just how much of modern academia and journalism plays by "rules" that are nothing more than Calvinball. A lot of people have been claiming this for a good while, but now it's become impossible to ignore or deny.
Seriously
I have to disagree as IIRC both Calvin and Hobbes could change the rules whenever they wanted so it was fair in that regard. Whereas the rules that Scott is talking about are basically we can do or say anything to protect the in group and hurt the out group.
The technique that is working for Rufo and others right now is breaking past the obfuscation and attempted chaff of racism/sexism accusations and make them explicitly state a rule (almost any rule really) and then show that they flout it.
The amorphous rules are sort of a defense from the Alinsky technique of "make your opponent follow their own rules" and this is a counter to that defense.
Indeed, Calvinball is such a scrupulously fair game, that *Rosalyn* was allowed to change the rules, once she figured out how to play!
I always liked that particular story, but I just now realized that the moment Rosalyn bonded with Calvin was in the one arena where he had complete control. And he let her end the game on her own terms, instead of making up a new rule to counter "the baby-sitter flag".
They shouldn't have had to go for plagiarism. Testifying that calling for genocide against Jews is okay is dirt, or at least it should be.
To clarify, it would not be if she were a known free speech absolutist, or even showed any signs of valuing free speech that would harm other oppressed minorities, but she isn't and doesn't.
Well said! If Gay were a consistent free speech absolutist she would be honorable, but she is not.
Yeah, it seemed to me that her answer was the right one, but didn't track with her actions in power or the actions of Harvard wrt speech they didn't like for the last couple decades.
Actually looking at the Harvard Speech Code, I think she was right but it's a hard call: (https://www.thefire.org/colleges/harvard-university/harvard-university-non-discrimination-policy-discriminatory-harassment - I'm assuming FIRE's version is right and was in force at the time). The elements are:
1. It's got to be unwelcome and offensive
2. It's got to fall into 1 because of a group's' protected status
3. It's got to be "objectively offensive"
4. It's got to be "create a work, educational or living environment that a reasonable person would consider intimidating, hostile or abusive"
5. It's got to "den[y] the individual an equal opportunity to participate in the benefits of the workplace or the institution's programs or activities."
It looks like it will satisfy 1 and 2, assuming 1 is subjective. I'm not sure 3 is a coherent idea. I'd come down on the side of 4 and 5 being a "no," but I think the criteria for satisfying them is "I reasonably believe that a substantial portion of my classmates hate me." Probably not in practice, but I'm basing that on contextual assumptions that different people would make different calls on.
I would think that any call for genocide would be "objectively offensive" if anything is.
I kind of wish she was someone with a long legacy of free speech defense, and that it had protected her. But yeah, she tore down all the traditional protections around her and then got eaten when she finally said something awful. Hard to feel sympathetic but wish there was some integrity in those places.
It's dead-on the scene from A Man for All Seasons, really.
"And, when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you – where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast – man’s laws, not God’s – and, if you cut them down – and you’re just the man to do it – d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake."
Lots of people too dumb to see the simple wisdom in this. What an age.
hello Im too dumb
Mind explaining to slowly why that quote applies given I'm an outcast who skipped applying for jobs because they said "antivaxx need not apply" while she's a diversity hire who's *still employed* of whats considered to be the worse university for free speech, and she did just factually and obviously commit plagiarism?
I will need it to be very slow since Im very very dumb, but the way I see it its not me, not my community, and not in my power to effect.
You have to honor principles even when they are unpopular because popularity changes and principles are eternal.
Editing this to be nicer:
You have a right to bodily autonomy because in principle everyone has the right to make their own health choices. Not sure what I wrote made you think I would not support that.
> bodily autonomy
My position on abortion swaped when it became painfully clear that "my body my choice"/medical privacy was a way to extract my compliance while giving nothing in return shortly before the supreme court re opened the issue.
While I will never intend to force people to take alex johns approved pills, I'm not sheading any tears over calling 9-mouth abortions murder, because its always been a grey area and difficult position to hold.
I don't have a simple answer of how to hold principals in the face of a political enemy. But I'm damn sure its not a naive assume your endless goodness will convince everyone, and something towards letting grey areas go while your weak. While fascism is gaining power I do not wish to allow fascists to speak at the "jews sending their children to america" meeting, kernels of power and decision making must be immune form outsiders, somehow, and in-power and hostile ones especially.
It has nothing to do with whether you feel sympathetic for her. A win against her was a win by people whose goal is to restrict speech targeting Israel. She stood up for that sort of speech in her testimony, and her opponents got her scalp for it, and every university president in the country took notice. "These are the stakes for allowing free speech on Israel." The next time they address this issue on their own campuses, they will be less likely to defend students protesting Israel.
I am aware. While I see the concrete and practical reality, there is a human reality where people will always cheer to see someone subjected to the consequences of their own actions.
I agree. I just think it's odd that, on this issue, I keep seeing commentary in the form of, "Well, she's right on the issues, but she didn't put her best foot forward in those hearings," or "It's definitely a loss for free speech, but it's hard to defend someone so unsympathetic." People should have the strength of their convictions. If people disagree with what happened, they should say that, not act like jaded PR people, tut-tutting about their candidates performance in front of the cameras.
I think the unspoken truth there is that personal integrity is the first bulwark to these principles being compromised. People won’t live with hypocrisy so if you’re hypocritical on a bedrock principle you’re a severe danger.
It exposed different rules for different identity groups and no amount of graduate level obfuscation was going to get her out of it. Nobody believes that calls for genocide against favored identity groups would have gone unpunished in the age of microaggressions, preferred pronouns, bias response teams, and trigger warnings. This so called trap was laid by the incoherent ideology and has little to do with Israel itself.
It's not really even that she said calling for genocide against Jews was okay. It's that Harvard isn't (or isn't seen as) consistently in favor of free speech. They are in favor of free speech when it comes to genocide against Jews, but not so much on other controversial positions.
She never supported a call for genocide because THERE WAS NEVER A CALL FOR GENOCIDE. The call was for INTIFADA which means "resistance to occupation."
A resistance which is exercised via genocide.
I can tell immediately that you give Israel a pass. Fortunately the ICJ ruling indicates that era is ending.
> Fortunately the ICJ ruling indicates that era is ending.
What are you talking about? The ICJ hasn't reached a verdict on whether Israel's military operation constitutes genocide, and it probably won't for several years.
The ICJ spoke. Do you know what they said?
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-importance-of-the-icj-ruling-on-israel
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/01/gaza-icj-ruling-offers-hope-protection-civilians-enduring-apocalyptic
> Do you know what they said?
I do. I also know what they didn't say. Which is why this claim:
> "Fortunately the ICJ ruling indicates that era is ending."
is misleading.
Okay come on, surely even you don't believe that the ICJ or UN or other international courts actually have any meaningful power.
Clearly no enforcement power. Do you believe words have power?
Many MSM publications have previously banned the use of the word "genocide" in regard to Israel. That's a little harder to do now.
I think words have power if people care about them. Israel doesn't care because they have the US backing them up, and the US doesn't care because it is by far the most powerful country in the world. The governments have no practical obligation to give a single shit about calls of genocide.
Advocating a Third Intifada is incitement to imminent violence.
So is a call for a violent response to the October 7th attack. Actually calls for violence are old hat in the US.
"Imminent", as in encouraging your audience to become violent then & there.
Of the two cases, only Intifadans meet that criterion.
So the Harvard students were encouraging (who ?) to get guns and start shooting...
Don't be obtuse.
Sorry, but she was specifically asked about "calling for the genocide of Jews" and she refused to say that was a violation of the Harvard code of conduct. See the transcript:
https://rollcall.com/2023/12/13/transcript-what-harvard-mit-and-penn-presidents-said-at-antisemitism-hearing/
Is it?
Please tell me, Mark, is it a violation? Right now! Yes or no!
I'm waiting...
I don't mean to be rude. I'm just trying to simulate the pressure Dr. Gay was under.
Back up a step. She had aleady agreed (by silence) that intifada means genocide. (Which I strenuously dispute.) The students were clearly calling for intifada and global support for intifada. So in Stefanik's mind they were calling for genocide. This was the immediate context at the hearing where Stephanik asked her question about the Harvard code of conduct. Given that framing, agreeing that calling for genocide violates the Harvard code of contact immediately implies that these students should be disciplined. (Do you think the student should be disciplined?) Dr Gay didn't want to agree that they should be disciplined.
That's the first reason to resist answering the question. Now let's say she actually does want to answer the question. And what if the truth is that it depends on the context. Imagine that in a classroom discussion a student contends that the world would be better off without Israel. Has that student violated the code of conduct? I'm no expert, but my gut tells me not. This is an abstract idea and protected speech.
Is there a way to advocate eliminating Israel that does violate the code of conduct. Probably so. So the truth is: it depends on the context.
It was that statement, "depends on the context," that infuriated millions of ignorant simple-minded people.
That's ridiculous. She was repeatedly asked whether calling for genocide of Jews is necessarily against the code of conduct. She refused to say that it was. I don't know what Harvard's policy is, but if I were setting policy I would have no difficulty in immediately saying that calling for genocide of any group is unacceptable. (For the record, calling for genocide is a crime against humanity under the Genocide Convention, which has been ratified by the US and thus is also US law.) If Gay's position was "calling for genocide is a violation of the code of conduct, but calling for intifada is not calling for genocide", she should have said so. She had many chances to say that, and refused to.
https://studenthandbook.summer.harvard.edu/student-conduct
Physical Violence
Harvard College strives to maintain a safe and secure environment for all members of the
community and thus does not tolerate physical violence or threats of physical violence used by or against the members of the community. Students are expected to avoid all physical conflicts, confrontations, and altercations unless their own safety or that of another is at extreme jeopardy. Failure to do so will ordinarily result in disciplinary action, including, but not limited to, requirement to withdraw from the College.
Here is the link. I quoted the section on physical violence.
What do you say? Does calling for genocide violate the Harvard code of conduct?
Dr Gay said "It depends on the context."
Was she wrong?
Yes. Clearly. A call to genocide is a threat of physical violence against members of the community.
>>She should have said so.<<
Yes, I agree. That was my original point.
https://www.facebook.com/reel/1100439661108725?mibextid=jaSYs6&s=yWDuG2&fs=e
I think a possibility here is that you care about what Claudine Gay said about Israel and Jewish people, and you support actions that hold her accountable for that, but the truth is, those actors holding her accountable could care less about Israel, and are just using your morals (and everyone who thinks like you) as a weapon against Claudine Gay to disempower her.
You are sincere, the accusers are not. To me, that wouldn't feel right.
What, in your theory, do they actually care about?
It could be any number of things, but usually when I've been proximate to these situations, it more petty than you would think. Do you think that Chris Rufo and Chris Brunet do not benefit professionally from this, by getting more money, deals, recognition or power? They could be interested in scoring points for their side or personal brand - whether or not they personally care about the issues they are yelling about.
I do not think these people give a wild hoot about plagiarism. They are using public outrage about plagiarism to target an enemy to win, for either personal advancement or tribal thinking reasons. They are leveraging public outrage about Israel to target a Black woman in a position of power as an avatar of DEI. Theoretically, all they had to do was wait for the right kind of uproar to attack their favorite targets.
Just like Claudine Gay didn't care about academia when she plagiarized. And she didn't care about freedom of speech in a number of cases before the Israel controversy - she's been wildly inconsistent in applying this principle.
Both sides selectively use morality to advance their agendas. The public cares about these morals a lot, and the leaders leverage that power for their own gain.
Why do you think there is public outrage about plagiarism in the first place? Because it's a kind of cheating or stealing, no? Is it so hard to believe Chris Rufo doesn't like cheating any more than the next guy?
I didn't say cheating wasn't bad. Most people think that. I think the leaders you follow say that in public, but their actions show they are hypocrites. That's the whole point of Scott's piece, about the dishonesty and lack of character of powerful leaders that leverage moral accusations (that the general public cares very much about) to win culture wars points, when those leaders do not consistently apply those principles (which shows they don't really care).
That's the whole thing about Neri Oxman. The team that accused Claudine Gay of plagiarism had a known plagiarist in their midst, and they didn't care.
Which totally checks out.
I think something that sucks about power dynamics - I don't know if this is new or if its always been this way - but you can't be in power and not play this way, at least sometimes.
Hmm...okay, well suffice to say my reading was rather different than yours.
But in the bottom line, this bad publicity is an assymetric weapon that only worked against Gay because she genuinely was bad enough for people who were neutral in whatever personal dispute she has with Chris Rufo to come down against her. In a sense Rufo doesn't matter here - anyone in a high profile position like that will have some people who are interested in making her look bad, and what we want is to have it only succeed when she actually is bad. In this case this was the system working as intended.
Until its your guy.
I edited to say: I think your take here is one without integrity. Either academic honesty and Israel mean something, or they do not. Letting a figurehead manipulate your earnest morals for their own personal gain to get an outcome that you are both aligned with is, I think, a selling out of the value of your own morality.
I truly believe that until the majority of US citizens can get beyond this thinking, and support leaders that have actual values, we will be stuck in a endless loop of ineffectual governments, lackluster politicians, and vapid culture wars.
I think Shaked's point is that the specifics of who found dirt on Gay are irrelevant. It could have been a graduate student studying her work or a friendly news outlet, or her political enemies as appears to be the case. What we, those reading about this story on the outside, should care about is whether she broke a rule/norm/cultural expectation/whatever that is relevant to us. If we do not doubt that the accusations are true, then the messenger is almost meaningless (I care a lot about the messenger when I have to consider whether the accusations are accurate in the first place).
Will this norm result in a lot of people losing their positions in society? Potentially - but that's where we consider whether the sanctions for bad behavior are properly calibrated. Getting fired for a 10+year old mild to moderate offense does not seem to be properly calibrated, but that's where society seems to be at the moment.
In the interest of making explicit things that are obvious to everyone, as Scott says ... this isn't motivated by concern for the Jews in general. It's motivated by the idea that Universities don't crack down on criticism of/protest against Israel in the name of fighting anti-Semitism.
It's like when all the people who care oh-so-much about anti-Semitism, rallied to Elon Musk's defense when he agreed with someone who said "Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them". It's not about concern for Jews, it's about concern for Israel.
That blatantly ridiculous, it's that people take "guy who constantly shitposts liked a random offensive tweet" less seriously than "mobs marching down the street calling for genocide against the Jews while the leaders of elite institutions support them".
"it's that people take 'guy who constantly shitposts liked a random offensive tweet' less seriously"
There's a question of "how seriously should you take Elon Musk's tweets", one response might be to take it very seriously, and one response might be to treat him the same as a random nobody.
But people (including in this case Bill Ackman) weren't treating him as a random nobody - they were actively defending him!
"less seriously than 'mobs marching down the street calling for genocide against the Jews while the leaders of elite institutions support them'."
Don't have time to write more right now, but again, I don't think "calling for genocide against the Jews" is actually what the people involved here found objectionable. It was the question that was asked at the Congressional hearing, but not the actual motivation.
In fact, I don't think she criticized Israel at all in that Congressional testimony. She did defend calling for genocide against Jews. And so do I, because I'm close to a free speech absolutist! But as you said, Gay is very much not, at least on woke issues.
It *is* okay under the free speech codes. You're accusing her of *NOT* lying to Congress
Or rather, it's a complicated question, which is what she said. I'm pretty sure lying to Congress is a crime, if she had said anything other than what she did say, she'd be in jail
The underlying issue of whether or not Harvard should have stronger/less strong free speech protections is a fair point of contention, but I honestly can't tell what exactly your real issue is, and the thing you mention explicitly is... absolutely not a bad thing that Gay did
Look, we all know if she'd been asked the same thing about, say, black people or trans people, she would have replied differently. I do know she has excuses constructed after the fact to try to make her statement sound reasonable.
Yes, and would you support her answers in that case? If not, maybe just admit that your actual position on free speech is "I'm against it when being against it benefits my preferred causes and for it when being for it benefits my preferred causes."
"you only oppose my hypocrisy because you're hypocritical in the opposite direction" is something people who can't imagine having integrity say.
Okay, since you're not a hypocrite, then my assumption is that you your long-held position must be that Harvard should crack down on anti-Black rhetoric, anti-trans rhetoric, and so on. This is very good to know.
The thing is that all three presidents were coached by the same lawyers and they all parsed essentially in the same way presumably based on how they were legally prepped.
The questioning was a minefield and they all stepped on the same mine in following their legal coaching.
I don’t think anything Gay said was about her personal opinion. She was being an institutional mouthpiece in the same way they all were.
Harvard was recently named the worst university in America for free speech: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/harvard-is-named-worst-school-for-free-speech-scoring-zero-out-of-possible-100/ar-AA1gjVdf
Notice how this is irrelevant to anything I said, and doesn't change the truth of the emotionally-related-but-distinct claim the original commenter was making
It's not at all irrelevant. Harvard's free speech codes obviously don't prevent it cracking down on speech it doesn't like, so it absolutely could crack down on calls for Jewish genocide, if it wanted to.
It's wild hearing people describe these issues who have only heard about them filtered through a few layers of propaganda. There were of course no calls for genocide against Jews at Harvard, that is nuts.
Yes there were, per Harvard's own newspaper
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/12/4/pro-palestine-week-of-action/#:~:text=The%20chant%20%E2%80%9Cintifada%2C%E2%80%9D%20which,as%20%E2%80%9Cabhorrent%20antisemetic%20calls.%E2%80%9D
You're quoting Harvard's Hillel house's characterization of the word "intifada," which means, quite literally, "revolution." Saying that the Arabic word for "revolution" is necessarily a call for genocide is totally unserious.
No, I'm quoting the Palestinian definition of it (which is what the organizers there used)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Intifada?wprov=sfla1
If someone chants about how Palestinians should have a violent uprising right after October 7th happened, it's not hard to understand what they actually mean.
There is no "Palestinian definition of 'Intifada.'" 'Intifada' is an Arabic word. It is the word for revolution. When Palestinian students learn about the Warsaw Uprising, their textbooks call it the انتفاضة وارسو, aka the "Warsaw Intifada."
What you're actually arguing, implicitly, is that any call for armed Palestinian resistance to the Israelis is a de facto call for genocide. This is difficult to square with both logic and international law, but also with the fact that the First Palestinian Intifada resulted in the most dramatic and effective push for Palestinian/Israeli peace that has ever occurred.
Yeah I'm sure the people shouting that *right after* Palestinians went on a rampage of murdering babies and grandmas, raping women to death and carving out people's eyes were advocating for peaceful resistance.
The organisers (including the guy who led the chant) quite directly explained, in the article you linked, how they were using the word - to denote "liberation" and "the right to resist."
Had they desired the actual genocide of Jews (which is a desire several orders removed from a territorial modification of the state of Israel), surely there were plenty of punchier slogans available.
I do wonder whether Gay would have fared better if she went fully to the mat with Stefanik on the linguistic/previous usage question of intifada instead of giving her "depends on context" reply. My hunch is yes.
I'm aware they later tried to pretend they said something else to avoid getting in trouble. I took once got in trouble in elementary school for calling someone a bitch and then tried to explain that actually I was just talking about her dog.
The only reference to genocide in that article is in an email from a campus group claiming that chants that included the word "intifada" were genocidal, which in the next paragraph the article explains is a clearly incorrect interpretation of those chants.
Calling for a violent uprising against the Jews right after a terrorist group started one which killed hundreds of people and abducted hundreds more is absolutely genocidal. You don't get to go "oh it's just an Arabic word for struggle" any more that you get to say that about me in kampf. I mean you can say it if you want to pretend to pretend to mean something else, but the real meaning isn't ambiguous.
I'm having a hard time understanding how you could believe that. Surely you get that even to the very arguable extent that the chant implies support for the 10/7 attack, that doesn't imply any endorsement of genocide?
How is supporting attempted genocide different than supporting genocide? "I support attempts at X" does, in general, imply that you actually want X to happen, it's not some unreasonable conclusion to jump to.
She did not testify to this. You're adopting a partisan framing which deliberately misunderstands her words in a way you would not do for any other issue.
Do we need to start having a Middle East quarantine subthread for non-Open-Thread posts as well?
its *the* debate its why she was in the news
There's a difference between debating the validity of her words (and the right of people to use them against her) and engaging in the culture war. The This thread has devolved into the latter.
People are grouping the testimony of the 3 together. She was by far the least bad but still bad.
Another example of targeting in this case is me. I wrote a critique of Claudine Gay's research, which I think is quite strong. (https://x.com/jonatanpallesen/status/1749546447811277119 and https://x.com/jonatanpallesen/status/1740324971430154471)
And for this I was attacked by the Guardian for things completely unrelated, such as my views on immigration, and previous coauthors.
It can obviously have a chilling effect if you write a critique of a scientific paper, you risk being called racist by a major newspaper.
I think I actually wrote a post of about the Guardian article in question for the culture war thread of the motte here:
https://www.themotte.org/post/832/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/179451?context=8#context
It's not unrelated dirt. On the contrary, the theory is that Gay was appointed as a result of a 'woke' agenda, which prioritizes ideology, specifically the oppressor / oppressed narrative, over merit. Her anti-Semitism responses go directly to the first of the theory and her plagiarism (and more broadly weak academic credentials) go to the second half. The two parts of the theory are closely linked, as an important part of the anti-woke argument is that merit is being sacrificed in the name of ideology.
I think it's unrelated. Would anyone have investigated the weak academic credentials if she hadn't made anti-Semitic responses?
It speaks to the Harvard investigative initiatives that they never looked closer at her actual academic credentials.
"Wokeness" is SUPPOSED to sacrifice merit, in the name of equality. See affirmative action, etc.
The president of Harvard isn't a name chosen out of a hat. Presumably they checked out her credentials and found them adequate. She wasn't a distinguished scholar (or anywhere close), but presumably she was what they were looking for.
> Would anyone have investigated the weak academic credentials if she hadn't made anti-Semitic responses?
Yes they would have. The accusations of plagiarism came from before the hearing. Jesse Singal talks about getting an email about it on 12/4, the day before the hearing.
"weak academic credentials"
I don't mean to nitpick, but I have heard this brought up several times by other people covering this story and I really wish they would stop. I'm not saying her academic credentials are good -- I'm in no position to judge them one way or the other. But I don't think they are very relevant to her role as an administrator. Some of the world's best academics might make terrible college presidents, while they best college presidents might have pretty mediocre academic records. If there is any correlation at all, I suspect it is pretty weak. I do think a college presidents needs to have a very good understanding of academia -- the culture, the research and teaching process, the accompanying bureaucracy -- but they don't have to have a stellar h-index. And, of course, the academic aspects of college are just one of the broad categories of things that college presidents have to manage. There's also donors, relationships with local/state/federal governments, student life, physical infrastructure, safety and security, personnel management....the list goes on.
Being a serial liar is far worse than weak credentials as an academic and it's in fact a huge failing in an administrator.
While I totally agree that academic credentials aren't necessarily relevant for the President's actual job functions, in a university environment, scholarship buys a lot of political currency. Basically, if you want a bunch of tenured Harvard professors to really respect your leadership, it's necessary to have some academic status.
In the case of Gay, I think a (over)simplified way to think of it is: she lost her reputation with the public with the antisemitism business, and lost her reputation with the academe for the plagiarism. She couldn't survive losing both.
Two points:
1. Even if that were true, her own academic merit being questionable wouldn't hurt the argument any more than any other minority elite's academic merit being questionable. Going after her specifically instead of any other, possibly more egregious target, or just doing the work of finding statistics, isn't a *stronger* knock against her argument. It's just dramatic irony.
2. As Scott touched, there's no evidence that her plagiarism was unrepresentative for people in her position. The reason you use statistics instead of cherry-picked anecdotes is that an anecdote like this provides no evidence that minorities have worse academic records; white men could plagiarize much more and no one ever bothers to investigate. The fact that the target was chosen for reasons of making a satisfying narrative, rather than chosen at random or w/e, is pretty strong evidence of this just being a cherry-picked anecdote that shouldn't reflect on the larger argument, rather than the reverse.
>The reason you use statistics instead of cherry-picked anecdotes is that an anecdote like this provides no evidence that minorities have worse academic records; white men could plagiarize much more and no one ever bothers to investigate.
Maybe AI could help? If we could automate doing forensic scholarship at scale, perhaps
a) We would have accurate statistics (and could adjust the penalties in light of them)
b) If we caught this _early_ in someone's life, maybe we could dissuade them from doing it frequently?
I feel like that just incentivizes the creation of an AI for 'rephrase this without changing its meaning so it passes the AI plagiarism filter', which probably already exists or if not is less than a year away anyways.
Which, you might think, 'ok, so it's an arms race between paraphrasing AIs and plagiarism-detecting AIs, that's fine.'
But I think that pretty quickly has us running up against the rocks of confronting the fact that people very often need to say the same thing that someone else has said previously, a million different phrasings that communicate the exact same concept are still the same unit of communication, and forcing academics to spend their time paraphrasing sentences to try to convey the same information using different words has always been kind of a dumb waste of time.
When you have children write 'scientific' papers in class, a large part of your objective is to make sure they can write well at all, so having them copy sentences would defeat the purpose. But hopefully we're not trying to prove that actual scientists know how to write well; plagiarizing results and conclusions would undermine their actual job description, but copying sentences needed in the introduction to explain background concepts to the audience? How does that make their science worse?
So, yeah, AI systems like that might drive us into confronting how dumb our ideas about plagiarism are to begin with. If your filter can detect an AI just rephrasing the same concept someone else uses, we'll have to admit that this is all humans were ever doing anyway, and humans can't ever beat that filter without making the text itself less coherent and useful.
Many Thanks! That's a good point. I wasn't thinking in terms of paraphrasing, but just in terms of direct copying. As you pointed out, there are potential arms races, and murky question of when it stops being plagiarism, and wasted effort in doing the paraphrasing.
I certainly agree with your point re
>but copying sentences needed in the introduction to explain background concepts to the audience? How does that make their science worse?
( though presumably they _could_ do this in a transparent way by putting the copied text in a quote and attributing it to the original author )
This starts to sound like some very muddy issues in IP law, where trying to disentangle what ideas are "generally known to someone skilled in the art", what are ideas that are specifically protected as someone else's patent claim, and what ideas are novel, can get to be _more_ work than coming up with the novel ideas and debugging the complex mixture into something actually useful.
I’m reminded of how dramatically coverage of Elon Musk changed between pre buying Twitter and post. Headlines about him used to be “Eccentric Tech Guy Successfully Launches Rocket,” now they’re “Hateful Billionaire Is Actually Conspiracy Theorist And Anti Semite.” And now apparently they’re going after him for him for being too successful at Tesla, ugh.
Not to mention (dare I say it) how dramatically coverage of Donald Trump changed pre and post launching presidential runs.
It’s almost like the mainstream media has an agenda other than providing the truth and letting the viewer decide.
That's kind of surprising; I vaguely recall people turning against him for the whole birther thing. Having said that, I can't remember when people started saying "white supremacist" by default instead of "racist."
After decades of targeted propaganda and harassment by leftist media and institutions, and "principled conservatives" not reciprocating in kind due to the nature of their beliefs in the "marketplace of ideas" and "independent institutions", both of which turned out to be illusions, kvetching about exposing egregious cases like Claudine Gay is rich.
The time of controlled opposition has come and passed.
"almost"? nah..."definitely"
I think media converge on a narrative wrt people and movements and industries, and the almost every news story sticks to the narrative, omitting contradictory facts and quotes, and digging for supporting facts and quotes. Thus, once the narrative was established that W was a dimwitted good old boy, it almost didn't matter what they did-if W was reading Dostoyevsky in the original Russian, it was going to somehow be spun into the narrative that he was a dimwitted overpromoted good old boy. You could see this in the way the shooting of Michael Brown was reported--the initial narrative was innocent black kid murdered by a racist cop, and by God, the recalcitrant facts of the case were going to be hammered into that narrative. And most people still think Brown was an innocent kid murdered by a racist cop, and always will think that, so mission accomplished.
Yeah, coupled with the fact that people will go after you if you disagree with the narrative, this is very alarming
Do you have any specific examples of this? It seems pretty normal for coverage of someone to focus a lot more on their political views once they start running for president.
It’s normal for coverage to increase but pre 2015 everyone thought of Trump as an ego driven real estate billionaire/TV personality/embodiment of the American Dream. It makes sense for his flaws to be more exposed in the setting of his presidential run - he’s certainly an egomaniac - but the spin that he’s somehow racist (Scott wrote about this) or wants to start World War 3 (extensively claimed pre 2016, he was the most peaceful president of this century) or collaborated with Russia or committed impeachable offences in the phone call with Ukraine… I believed it all at the time and now looking back I can see that it was BS. Which significantly lowers my trust in the media.
Sure, this makes sense if you ignore the fact that his behavior also changed after buying twitter ... like, he mostly wasn't doing this sort of thing pre buying twitter? https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/15/media/elon-musk-antisemitism-white-people/index.html
Behavior of the subjects involved is a BIG driver of coverage, even though it's fair to say other factors can come into play...
Nah, that's just CNN taking one tweet completely out of context which then gets amplified across all the media platforms and leads to reasonable people getting confused. It's weaponisation of the media against Elon. Actually what he said was, if anything, Islamophobic, CNN should get its claims of racism straight. He was saying that the Jewish Anti Defamation League should be more concerned with Islamists than with European whites. Which is just very straightforwardly true.
If you listen to what Elon actually says, he's the least anti-Semitic it's possible to be (and I say this as someone of Jewish heritage who listens to a lot of what Elon has to say.) At least half of his friends are Jewish. He recently visited Auschwitz with Ben Shapiro. He describes himself as "philosemitic" (Greek for likes Jews a lot).
Let's separate the concepts of saying antisemitic things and being antisemitic. For example, an AI that says maximally offensive things might say antisemitic things, but would not be antisemitic.
Musk has said antisemitic things, endorsing conspiracy theories. However, it seems like he's more of a troll than a serious antisemite, so resembles that AI.
This term 'antisemitic' has gotten really weird.
I think Musk was shitposting on Twitter for many years before buying it. He would be far better off handing off his Twitter account to some social media manager and never touching it again. But then, so would most other people, and maybe as owner of Twitter Musk would rather not say so....
Yeah; I would say the inflection point was roughly late 2015 or so, with an acceleration of that trend around 2017. Before that he really wasn’t notable for being that weird or that publicly contrarian.
Yeah. Something like Futurism seems to have utterly change the tone of its coverage.
That said, you could argue that acquiring Twitter further outed Elon's... err... personality quirks. I personally think it actually accentuated them but hey that's close to being a distinction without a difference ...
He is definitely a weird dude, but in his own words, "I founded six companies and I'm sending rockets to Mars, did you really expect me to be a chill, normal guy?"
Yeah. For my money, so far, I'd rather have a world with Elon than one without.
But, yeah, if someone could tell him to fucking drop his phone and stop twitting, it'd do wonder for his mental state...
The back an forth coverage of Musk and his companies went on before then. You can see this in how people freaked out when he smoked a joint on Joe Rogan, which I believe was before the Twitter buy.
Yeah, Elon caught a lot of flack before Twitter because he ruffled feathers in the auto industry with Tesla. The UAW wasn't happy that he had no union representation in his factories, and the dealerships were gunning for him because he does direct vehicle sales. Both of those groups STILL hate him, even more so now that he has two very successful vehicle models. I don't think that passion has anything to do with his penchant for saying things that fall outside the Overton window. Their biggest nightmare is if his truck is popular enough to cannibalize sales in the top-selling vehicle category in the US.
Are those groups politically influential? Obviously the UAW are, but so are the dealerships. It is illegal to buy a Tesla in 13 states (including Tesla's headquarters in Texas!), and in three of those states they're not even allowed to have service centers to fix your car. Plus 9 other states place limits on how many stores Tesla can have. If dealerships have enough political power to keep Tesla from selling in Texas - with its massive Texas-sized factory stoking the Texas economy - they have the power to ensure Elon gets bad press.
I would believe there's a lot of bots with fake negative views of Tesla on social media.
I think it had been on its way down for a while, but I don't know why. Around 2019ish, I recall hearing some fairly-left friends mention him and roll their eyes, as though there was common knowledge that rendered him ridiculous and pathetic. Of note, one of them owned a Tesla. But I didn't ask what the story was, and mostly I remember it because I didn't follow his doings, so to me he was just the guy behind Tesla's mass production and SpaceX, who also started the much more dubious Boring Company and hyperloop ... thing. And it was a clear illustration of how disconnected I'd become from the "public narrative".
You're right of course that the Twitter acquisition made it a lot worse, but I think it was already underway.
A few years ago he posted this
https://nypost.com/2022/04/29/elon-musk-says-woke-progressive-extremists-make-him-look-right-wing/
That could be the effect, yeah. But my impression was that it had something to do with Elon specifically, some pattern of things he in particular did. Maybe the media was just focusing on him at the time, I dunno. He certainly seems to have "Kanye West spectrum disorder".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPcEqA9wS4Y
One should also probably not underestimate the influence of editorial staff in these sorts of investigative reports.
As I recall, a year or so ago, Kelsey Tuoc commented on Twitter about the NYT's editorial decision to be hostile to tech companies, and several other prominent journalists (I think Matt Yglesias was one) agreed that this had happened and had influenced coverage across the media ecosystem.
And Scholars Stage has talked about how the NYT specifically is a newsroom that decides on their narrative and then goes out and tries to find stories to fit it
"We were occasionally asked to map a narrative for our various beats a year in advance, square the plan with editors, then generate stories that fit the pre-designated line. "
Screenshot:
https://twitter.com/DaCaveOfWonders/status/1366168277676920832
Original Post:
https://scholars-stage.org/the-framers-and-the-framed-notes-on-the-slate-star-codex-controversy/
I really really wish people would analyze more culture war through the lens of Tech v. Media rather than Red v. Blue. It's a lesser battle to be sure, but still a *really* big driver of IMO blue-tinted bad behavior that doesn't reduce to conventional politics.
> The plagiarism was discovered by conservative journalists Chris Rufo and Chris Brunet. It would be quite a coincidence for them to find it at exactly the moment Gay was already under attack for her anti-Semitism testimony.
We know the NY Post found the plagiarism earlier than that. They contacted Harvard back on October 24th, before she was national news due to her testimony (or even before she was called before congress), and got back a letter threatening to sue them for defamation if they published (while in the background they started their own investigation). https://nypost.com/2023/12/22/news/claudine-gay-said-plagiarism-claims-were-created-by-chatgpt/
And we're talking about someone who took office in July 2023.
So I'm not sure that's a good example.
Yes, good point.
Came to these comments to make the same point. This example really was coincidence!
In appears to be a coincidence because of the direction Scott is looking from. In fact the plagiarism, the antisemitism, and the, let’s say, inconsistent support for free speech all stem from the corruption of liberalism by the new philosophy of DEI/CRT, which is explicitly opposed to liberalism. Adherence to the narrative trumps every other consideration.
This.
No no, you’re misunderstanding Scott’s original claim. I’m not claiming (in response to Scott) that the existence of Gay’s plagiarism and tolerance of antisemitism are coincidental; I’m claiming that the *timing of their public revelation* was coincidental.
Fair enough. But it still seems that the public revelations didn’t even coincide at all. It’s not surprising that the plagiarism news would have gained salience after the Congressional debacle, but it wasn’t dug up in response to it.
(Maybe that’s what you’re saying.)
Kind of. To be precise, allegations of Gay's plagiarism weren't publicly known before her Congressional testimony, but non-public investigations into the matter by both the Post and Harvard itself had already begun *before* said testimony, which contradicts Scott's core claim:
> The plagiarism was discovered by conservative journalists Chris Rufo and Chris Brunet. It would be quite a coincidence for them to find it at exactly the moment Gay was already under attack for her anti-Semitism testimony.
My claim is that yes, there was actually a coincidence of timing here! The plagiarism investigations did just so happen to begin in the month or two prior to Gay's congressional testimony. The main reason the coincidence is not particularly remarkable is because, as Cristophe mentioned, she had only been Harvard president since July. The chance of these two events happening within a month of each other is not all that low when both take place within a six-month timeframe in the first place.
Completely agree. A couple of months is short enough to count as a coincidence, but not the sort of coincidence that Scott finds suspicious.
It's really unfortunate when someone has what seems like a valid argument to make but instead says something completely clownishly bombastic like this.
Thank you for sharing.
Anytime.
Few people have publicly detailed their Culture War goals with as much clarity as Chris Rufo has.
https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1371540368714428416
The plagiarism was noticed by more than one person because it was egregious, but that doesn't mean the push to oust Gay is solely based on her (poor) scholarship.
Rufo is definitely doing the "motivated digging" thing. But the process to find problems with Gay's scholarship started prior his involvement and prior to Gay becoming a target of the right. He just beat the others to the punch.
I came here to make exactly the same point. Rufo and Brunet investigated the plagiarism case well before Gay’s testimony and Harvard threatened the NY Post with legal action if it published the story. Gay’s plagiarism was reasonably well-known for some time. However, in the aftermath of her dreadful performance before Congress, Harvard’s threats of legal action lost their force.
Yes. What changed is that Gay lost her bulletproof status after she pissed off the donors. The plagiarism was always there, but she was (rightly) perceived as untouchable as a token DEI hire and so her opponents didn’t pull out the knives until they knew she had fallen from favour with the powers that be.
This, sadly, is the world now. Nobody on earth thought that Gay was a serious candidate for that post — her appointment was a symptom of the academy’s corruption and decline. And her ouster was an opportunistic attack when her position was compromised. I agree with Scott that it’s unfortunate that people attack and counterattack their political enemies. But was it ever any different?
Some on point satire on Gay’s appointment and plagiarism
https://babylonbee.com/news/harvard-announces-new-dean-kanye-west
https://babylonbee.com/news/investigators-beginning-to-suspect-claudine-gays-novel-larry-potter-and-the-sorcerers-rock-may-have-been-plagiarized
And also plagiarism seems common among these DIE fanatics, er, academics.
https://freebeacon.com/campus/not-just-claudine-gay-harvards-chief-diversity-officer-plagiarized-and-claimed-credit-for-husbands-work-complaint-alleges/
It’s almost like they got their jobs for their skin color and thinking the same as everyone else, and being lazy on the academic side to boot.
The DEI cultists really don’t seem to understand the injury they’re doing to ambitious people from minority groups by elevating these eminently unqualified token hires to prominence (eg, Gay). Or even elevating arguably qualified candidates, but doing so as part of a transparently identity-based process (eg, Justice Jackson’s appointment to SCOTUS by Biden). They seem not to understand (pretend not to understand?) that this will result in rational, objective, non-biased observers coming to the conclusion that anyone from the minority group who serves in such a position is unlikely (or at least less likely) to be qualified for that position. If gay people, transgender people, non-white (and non-Asian) people, and women are all held to lower standards than their cisgender straight white (or Asian) male counterparts, then the rational, objective observer would be correct to prefer a cisgender straight white (or Asian) male to perform any task that requires actual competence. And ambitious women, non-whites, etc will get overlooked in the search for merit because nobody will be able to trust their credentials. I have stated this as a hypothetical, but of course we’re 50+ years into this experiment.
Isn’t that even worse? Journalists can investigate anyone, but they can only publish plagiarism cases about unpopular people who’ve lost the backing of their institutions, because of fear of court proceedings? It makes this example less directly relevant to Scott’s and EA’s cases, but if journalists have learned that they can’t go after popular targets within institutions until they become unpopular, it’s a much smaller shift to avoid targeting other people until they do something their publisher would consider unpopular.
They did it to Donald Trump in the first election; they had those sexual assault allegations on tape for years and held onto them until the last couple of months of the election so there wouldn't be time to clear them up. They've been nakedly pushing agendas for decades.
I love how the response to a claim that the journalists are biased is a claim that everyone who claims that is a narcissist. I'm sure they poured a lot of time and effort into investigating that claim before they made it.
Same. This Spiers lady seems to want everyone to believe that the entire industry consists of nothing but hyper-professional, impartial observers employed at centuries old, reputation-focused, Guardians of Democracy type institutions, when most people over the age of 16 are well aware of the existence of The Daily Mail, the NY Daily News, Fox, MSNBC, etc.
Yet it was Clinton, not Trump, who received a flood of negative coverage the week before the 2016 election on the basis of old information. The media nakedly pushes an agenda, and in 2016 the agenda was to get Trump elected.
Wow. A good reminder that two people can look at the same events and see totally different things. Just wow.
It’s really, really hard for me to imagine somebody with open eyes believing that the media wanted Trump to be elected in 2016, but I’ll take your word that that’s how it looked to you.
It looked that way to me as well, for the record. I happened to be stuck in front of a TV that was tuned to CNN for about ten minutes, the morning before the elction, and ALL they could talk about was HER EMAILS. This is, remember, the network Repubs think is on Team D. Fox News was all-in for Trump. The rest of the media hated Hillary. They hate Trump now! A lot! But they hated Hillary then, even more than they hated Trump.
Amazing.
My impression was that that was the last gasp of "if it's news, we report it, regardless of its effects on politics". They didn't want Trump elected, and blamed themselves for the result, and so decided never to do that again. Of course, using post-2016 standards, it can look like they wanted Trump, because otherwise they would never say anything bad about his opponent. But I never got the mpression that they actually did, back then.
I agree with this
That's right. They didn't want Trump, but they also believed there was no way he would win the election. The Guardian even claimed Hillary had 98% chance of winning!
So they pretended to be fair and covered Hillary's emails and other scandals. When she actually lost, it was a major shock. Everybody looked for an explanation (e.g. Vance's "whiplash", or the idea that democrat voters were so confident they didn't show up to the booths, etc.). The explanation that stuck was that the media were responsible.
From that point on, it was "never again", and all pretense of fairness was dropped.
I don't think the emails thing can be explained by "if it's news, we report it"
There were similar revelations about trump officials doing official electronic communications through channels other than government emails - the exact Hillary scandal in the first place. Reported on very briefly by some media but treated as a non-story.
If they were following the news wherever it went, or if they were trying to "get" trump, then why would that happen?
I dunno. Maybe they disagreed with you about how serious it was. Or maybe they were trying to get eyeballs and clicks, and that's where it led. I'm not saying that the media were paragons of fair and balanced investigative journalism before Trump was elected, just that they weren't as nakedly partisan as they are now. They still flocked like vultures to whatever roadkill seemed tastiest.
Note that Trump himself understands this dynamic pretty well (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/us/politics/trump-interview-mueller-russia-china-north-korea.html?smid=tw-share):
“Another reason that I’m going to win another four years is because newspapers, television, all forms of media will tank if I’m not there because without me, their ratings are going down the tubes,” Mr. Trump said, then invoked one of his preferred insults. “Without me, The New York Times will indeed be not the failing New York Times, but the failed New York Times.”
He added: “So they basically have to let me win. And eventually, probably six months before the election, they’ll be loving me because they’re saying, ‘Please, please, don’t lose Donald Trump.’ O.K.”
The media received a pretty substantial financial benefit benefit from Trump and you'd have to take a pretty optimistic view of their character to think this wouldn't affect their coverage choices!
I don't have an optimistic view of their character but rather of their self-importance: they believe they are the arbiters of what's good rather than the reporters of what's true.
It is genuinely difficult to come up with a meaningful, objective measure of what "The Media" wants at any given point in time - it's too large and internally conflicted. There are plenty of easy metrics that don't ultimately mean much, like "which candidates do cable news broadcast hosts personally donate to" and "positive/negative coverage of which candidates is best for this revenue on this particular website" but I've lost any confidence I might have had that the choice of which of those metrics to use doesn't bake-in the conclusion.
Yeah, Comey screwed up their game plan by rehashing the email thing even later in the cycle.
"so there wouldn't be time to clear them up"
Assuming this is in reference to the Access Hollywood tape ... nothing was ever "cleared up", people just decided they don't care enough to not support trump.
This quibble about 'targeting' reads to me like a huge sidestepping of the real issue here. The real issue is this: is it - or is it not - the case that American (and Western world) universities have become dominated by Leftist partisan groupthink for half a century and more? DEI (and DEI hires like Gay) are just the tip of that civilisation-destroying iceberg.
US universities have largely been taken over by whatever the academic-intellectual version of wokism/successor ideology is, but I think the more relevant point for this discussion is that media outlets have also largely been taken over by the same ideology. This is basically why Substack is a widely-known company instead of being another Wordpress--a bunch of top-tier journalists and writers like Bari Weiss, Andrew Sullivan, Matt Yglesias, Freddie DeBoer, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, etc. got pushed out of more established media outlets and came to Substack. Basically all the readers who are subscribing to those substacks represent readers that their original publications shed in order to stay within the newly required ideological lines.
Yes that's all true. But something that is vital to grasp here is that the ROOT of all this has been in academia. Media-wokeness, institutional-wokeness, professional, managerial, administrative-wokeness...all are DOWNSTREAM of the academy because all these people will have emerged (at an impressionable age) from the Leftist academia sheep-dip. And this root-and-branch understanding is STILL poorly understood by most conservative-leaning commentary.
On the subject of Substack - whilst I cannot claim to be in the top-tier - my own steadily growing Slouching Towards Bethlehem is also part of what you have described: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/slouching-towards-my-substack-anniversary
I love your calling it a sheep-dip.
Thank you.
Really? Seems to me that academia-is-the-root-cause-of-wokism has long been the core conservative belief, not to mention a correct one. What conservatives lack is understanding that those horrible leftists actually have a point, buried under tons of obscurantist pomo bullshit. Or rather that Nietzsche had it and they inherited it without most of them understanding it either.
Some conservative intellectuals have long understood it Yes....myself included. But the point I was making is no less valid nonetheless. The Western world's conservative political and media classes did not make nearly enough of this as an issue, preferring to focus their firepower on other issues. Issues that were far less important in the long-term to the health of our civilisation.
That's because they are fundamentally incapable of fixing this problem. They still have no answer to Nietzsche's point, other that sticking their heads into the sand and praying that it would go away.
Maybe so....I'm enough of a Spenglerite pessimist to be inclined to go along with you on that.
But I still think putting it high up on conservative political party electoral agenda rhetoric over the last 50 years would have made some difference.
Since you are making so much of Nietzsche on this, you should explain more clearly what you mean. Not everyone is steeped in what Nietsche had to say.
Well, yes, the traditional journalism market is shrinking and drying up more and more every year and you've got a crab bucket situation going on as they all scrabble over dwindling resources. Firm ideological commitments that aren't strictly aligned with one of the ascendant tribes can only hurt you in that situation.
I do think that Metz led you on about the positive tone of the eventual article. He had initially adopted this tack to get people friendly to you talking, but when the evidence of juicy heresy came to light he likely decided to reorient that way. When NYT genuinely likes people being profiled it doesn't have a problem allowing them to keep their pseudonymity.
In general, reporters doing a story on you are not your friends. They're like a policeman questioning you about a crime--no matter how friendly and nice they seem, you need to recognize that this is an adversarial interaction and they may very well end up wrecking your life as a result of what you say in their presence.
Yes, this. I'd extend the analogy - not even a police officer questioning you about a crime, but talking to you *at all.*
There is in general a class of people - cops, journalists, Grand Inquisitors, adversarial lawyers, Richelieu, certain exes some people can think of - who are just monitoring whatever you're saying to seize upon any opportunity, any potential weakness, to dive in and try to wreak havoc on you. It's a fully adversarial game, and the winning move is not to play, or if you're forced to play, play maximally defensively, and try to arrange your affairs and life so you don't enter into any of these interactions again.
Hello, fellow pseudonymous commentator!
Why hello! Is this some subtly arch allusion to the fact that some commenters (psuedonymous or no) may be in this class of people also? Too true, too true. :-)
Nah, just an appreciation of this:
> play maximally defensively, and try to arrange your affairs and life so you don't enter into any of these interactions again
Dunno if that applies to you, too, but let's just say that the sentiment sounds quite familiar. :-)
Ah yes, the infamous exes. Let us celebrate the fact that we are free from Inquisitors, be they grand or petite! :-D
"Befriend and betray" I've heard it called.
Metz had a book on AI/Silicon Valley coming out, and my view is that he used the article to drum up publicity for it, and the best way to get publicity is "you'll never believe the shocking revelations!" teaser article.
https://books.google.ie/books/about/Genius_Makers.html?id=dLWPEAAAQBAJ&source=kp_author_description&redir_esc=y
My thought is that an article that started as a piece on Scott's impact with him as a positive center figure later morphed into a piece on Scott's following among all the groups of people attacking me, Cade Metz, respectable journalist. I'm shooting from my biases here, but it is not at all interestingly nefarious for a journalist either to take a shot at nefarious techy types or to write their own experience into a story. In the absence of unexpected behavior, my opinion didn't really shift.
"Do not wrestle with pigs, you will both get dirty, and the pig likes it". Famous quote, attribution unclear, pretty appropriate to the situation.
If you have found some connection that gives you the sense of doing something good in the world, go ahead and do it. If not, then living an honest life within your means and trying your best to be supportive to people around you is plenty enough. In either case, pig-wrestling is strictly optional and not recommended unless you happen to enjoy it.
Right, stop paying attention to the news. (And congressional hearing are political theater, pay attention if you like, but realize it's a show.)
I think this is the wrong approach in general. In general, any prominent figure is going to have people digging for dirt on them. The correct place to deal with it should be after hearing it, to figure out objectively how bad this thing is conditional on there being a bias to dig up dirt on them (e.g. if it was dug up that someone wrote a racist email thirty years ago, adjust for the fact that this is probably the worst thing they've done and slightly raise your opinion on them).
This isn't going to 100% work, because people aren't great at making this adjustment and will probably still end up unfairly judging any targeted person, which rounds to anyone who becomes prominent. But otoh this helps counteract an incumbency advantage elites have from positive name recognition bias, so I think it's still done overall.
As individuals, this is more or less manageable. I've operated on this principle for a long time, and I can recognize even for individuals I already dislike that negative reporting on them may be weaker than I would have expected on priors.
But on a societal level, this isn't something we can expect to solve by putting the onus on the general population of recognizing how reporting is distorting their informational landscape. The general population doesn't even recognize how their own media choices distort their informational landscape.
I agree, but I think this applies even more strongly to targeting happening in the first place. To stop targeting from working, we need to win over a simple majority of people (more or less). To stop anyone from using targeting in the first place, we need to win over almost everyone.
I think the point Desertopa is making is getting individuals to "figure out objectively how bad this thing is conditional on there being a bias" won't win over a majority. It will win over a tiny fringe minority at best. Maybe 5% of people will manage to do this.
It's important that we keep pushing that message to keep whatever percent of careful readers we've got, but we are probably already at peak effectiveness for individuals making healthy reading choices, and it's only a few percent of people.
Nearly 9 years ago (!), you expressed cautious optimism that we might soon see a deescalation of hostilities in the culture war, once progressives realised that their preferred weapons for destroying their political opponents (cancellation, social shaming etc.) are NOT asymmetric, and can just as effectively be wielded against progressives as against conservatives. (https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/14/fearful-symmetry/)
I highly doubt that Chris Rufo has some principled opposition to academic plagiarism as a concept - if someone on his team was accused of precisely the same infractions Gay was accused of, I'm sure he'd come rushing to their defense. Pointing out Gay's plagiarism was a transparent attempt to work the refs, destroying someone you dislike for political reasons by finding some unrelated transgression they're guilty of and signal-boosting it.
On the other hand, Gay herself used precisely the same tactic, attempting to destroy the career of the Harvard academic Roland Fryer (who published research which was not exactly favourable to the standard BLM narrative about police violence) using some trumped-up sexual harassment accusation as a pretext (https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/01/07/claudine-gays-tyranny-of-dei/).
It's very difficult for me to feel sorry for a would-be canceller who subsequently finds herself on the receiving end of a cancellation attempt, ESPECIALLY when she was actually guilty of the trumped-up pretext infraction she was accused of (unlike Fryer). Live by the sword, die by the sword.
Like you in 2015, I longed for a future in which people of all political stripes would recognise that cancellation and social shaming are bad tactics and we should collectively sign a disarmament agreement. Every time a progressive finds themselves on the receiving end, a part of me hopes that your 2015 prediction will belatedly come true: that progressives will look at Claudine Gay or Bud Light or whatever and think "damn, this really sucks when it happens to someone we like, maybe we should stop doing it".
But it's hard for me to maintain my optimism. It seems like every cancellation just seems to incense hostilities further, and people get ever more deeply embedded in a tit-for-tat, "no bad tactics, only bad targets" mindset. Comparisons to civil war seem apt.
Yeah, as desirable as it might be, I don't see any possibility of a truce or de-escalation of the cancel-culture wars without some kind of enforcement mechanism, where, say, the New York Post or Chris Rufo takes the reputational hit for trying to expose someone's plagiarism rather than Gay herself, and that's not going to happen for a variety of reasons. I guess if there's a silver lining, it's that Claudine Gay and Bill Ackman aren't terribly sympathetic characters to begin with.
That's unfortunately how war works, and how it ends - it escalates until one side can't sustain the fight any more, and then the other side gets to dictate terms. There _is_ cause for hope in that, since the war _will_ end. Eventually.
Until then, the only thing you can do is do everything in your power to ensure that your side dies more slowly than the other and gets to dictate the terms of surrender in the end. This of course means sustaining and escalating the war. The alternative is to allow the opponent to dictate terms, which is even worse.
When people say war is hell, now you know why. Thank God this war is one of ruined careers and reputations and friendships instead of one of bullets and bombs and chemicals.
>That's unfortunately how war works, and how it ends - it escalates until one side can't sustain the fight any more, and then the other side gets to dictate terms.
That's how it almost never works, either in real wars or in cultural ones.
Instead, a new equilibrium is reached, with most people learning what will and what won't cause issues, and go along with it, grudgingly or enthusiastically. The boundaries of acceptable/unacceptable behaviour shift - and issues rise and fade in significance.
For example, #metoo seems to have resulted in a new equilibrium in talking about consent, complaining about it, and interactions in sexual situations. The terms of the new equilibrium are pretty well understood, as are the edge cases ("believe women" has morphed into "give more weight to what women say in this area"). LGB issues seem to be heading that way, though trans issues have a way to go. Mostly, people remain remarkably polite when talking about religion (even Christianity, the majority religion). The USA has a "respect for your service" with the military (that the rest of the world finds weird) that is rarely dissented from. Communism is no longer much of an issue (though complaining about socialism seems to have a make a small comeback).
Anyway, this is how terminology wars go - issues rise and fall, conventions change, most people go along with the rough consensus, and there are always edge cases, unclear norms, abuses of power, and a whole lot of hypocrisy (hypocrisy and power issues are necessary for people to feel out the edges of the acceptable).
Pretty much. As Hanania said, #metoo combines chivalry with feminism to give women advantages.
Many men have already starting avoiding them in work situations, from what I hear. After all, who wants to be a martyr for a movement that hates you? Others might be to claim non-binary status or similarly escape being 'male'.
"""should collectively sign a disarmament agreement"""
This phrase suggests a depressing (but maybe useful or compelling) frame of reference.
If, instead of disarmament treaties, we'd had ten years of somehow low grade nuclear war, where would we be? In the nuclear post apocalypse.
Mutual cancellation and other adversarial tactics, especially ones that compromise institutions from the inside or destroy their credibility from the outside, these rhetorical nuclear weapons we've been using more and more for twenty or thirty years, have put us where?
In the epistemological post-apocalypse.
I don't know how old you are, but if you are old, and grew up in the West, you *probably* feel like there was a time in your life when you at least *thought* it was easy to find ground truth information from reputable groups. Hasn't felt like that at all for five or ten years.
All that stuff got blown up, and you're kind of on your own, scrounging up valid information, and any time you share it in a disagreement, find that all the information shared on both sides quickly becomes suspect.
Will it? I mean, one analogy is a physical war, which starts and ends within months, years, or occasionally decades.
Another analogy is a religious schism. The Christian and Islamic schisms have persisted, actively and bitterly, for centuries, and continue even now that those religions themselves are in rapid terminal decline in the first world. This situation could be like that one.
Are you replying to yourself?
During the rise of Southern US evangelicalism, it always had a distinctly personal flavor, which it largely maintains. Read the Bible yourself, worry about your personal relationship to God, etc. The counterpart up North was more institutional, and rallied around top-down progressive ideas to remake the world. There was no schism there, just two very different worldviews that were both coated with a shared iconography. Removing the religious drapery reveals that they remain very different people, and I do not expect them to reconcile.
I’d be curious if there were vast cultural gaps when Islam spread that caused some to adopt one flavor or another? From my limited understanding it was mostly about who conquered what, but maybe that’s an oversimplification.
This seemed like quite a compelling argument prior to, "trumped-up sexual harassment." I have no idea if it was trumped-up. I suspect you don't either. That kind of accusation ought to demand additional rigor. "Spiked-online," no I won't be following that link, doesn't qualify.
>I suspect you don't either.
Why don't you? As reported by Quillette (https://quillette.com/2022/04/15/why-did-harvard-university-go-after-one-of-its-best-black-professors/), Harvard's internal investigation found that Fryer had never touched or sexually propositioned anyone, and he was only guilty of telling a few off-colour jokes and flirting with a colleague. Of the 38 complaints raised against him, the internal investigation determined that 32 should be dismissed out of hand as obvious lies (https://aneconomicsense.org/2023/02/21/roland-fryer-his-life-story-his-work-on-education-and-on-police-use-of-force-and-harvard/ - section D "Consequences"). One of the complainants against Fryer later withdrew her complaint entirely, as reported by the Harvard Crimson (https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2019/4/23/fryer-mcad-investigation-concluded/). Quillette also notes that there are previous cases of Harvard professors who investigators determined committed far more severe sexual infractions than Fryer, but who got off much more lightly than Fryer's two-year suspension. For the crime of Fryer telling some off-colour jokes and persistently flirting with a colleague, Claudine Gay was calling for his tenure to be revoked, something Harvard has never done in the past century. There is no part of this story which doesn't sound like a trumped-up and ideologically motivated accusation of sexual harassment.
But I suppose next you'll tell me that Quillette, the Crimson and An Economic Sense don't meet your lofty standards of "legitimate news outlets". If you can present compelling evidence that the accusations against Fryer were well-founded, or that he is in fact guilty of far more serious sexual infractions than the internal investigation determined, I would love to see it. But we both know you can't and you won't.
Again, I don't know. And you don't know. And "persistently flirting with a colleague" is the definition of creating a hostile work environment, and thus harassment (if she was not appreciative). Had you said, "questionable" or "marginal," your argument would have been stronger. My critique was of your presentation. As I said, I found it compelling prior to....
I don't KNOW, but I've yet to see any compelling evidence to suggest that Fryer is actually a sex pest - ergo, I'm assuming he isn't. That's how null hypotheses work. The ethical standard of "assume that everyone accused of being a sex pest is in fact a sex pest, even in the absence of any compelling evidence to suggest that they are" is preposterous and unworkable.
When an interval investigation determines that, of the 38 complaints raised against an individual, 84% are out-and-out lies, it doesn't say much for the complainant's credibility.
>"persistently flirting with a colleague" is the definition of creating a hostile work environment
No it isn't.
Unless you are actually part of HR at Harvard, or a high ranking administrator, you have not actually seen any evidence supporting either side. Instead, you are picking headlines which support the position you favor. I tend to think you may be correct. But you are not actually certain and if you pretend you are in your writing, then you deserve exactly as much eye-rolling as the NYT opinion section.
And having taken courses at 5 different companies (including ones with 30,000 and 10,000 employees), on how not-to find yourself on the wrong end of a sexual harassment lawsuit which will likely fuck your career, I can assure you that persistently flirting with a colleague who doesn't want it, qualifies.
No one is ever "certain" of anything. This is a silly isolated demand for rigour.
To reiterate: I have yet to see any compelling evidence that Fryer is a sex pest. If evidence to that effect is presented to me, I will update my opinion accordingly. Until such time as said evidence is presented to me, I'm sticking with my initial opinion. I really don't see what's so difficult about this.
"The message is clear: go after an important Ivy League leader, and we’ll go after your family."
This is one way to read it.
I read it to be more about pointing out the hypocrisy.
It was like how many journalists mysteriously stopped really caring about official email and documents security retention after the 2016 election.
How did Ackman's wife's behavior point out his hypocrisy? I don't have any idea if my wife cheated on her PChem final. If I accuse someone of cheating should my wife's behavior before we got married have any effect on my argument or would bringing it up be just to shut me up?
It was obviously targeted at Ackman as retaliation. OTOH, if anyone can take care of himself in such a battle, surely Ackman is the guy.
Yeah, I don't see the hypocrisy argument. To be sure, Ackman wound up *making* a hypocrite of himself in defense of his wife, but what was he supposed to do? His marriage is not a business relationship.
If you bash someone for fraud it should be relevant if your wife committed fraud. If you bash someone for being an illegal immigrant it should be relevant that your wife is an illegal immigrant. If you bash someone for doing porn it should be relevant that you married a porn star.
I don't think that applies unless there is good reason to suspect that you knew about it and didn't say anything.
Agreed. This is my only quibble with Scott's piece. The action against Ackman's wife was very much a "what goes around comes around" message - different phenomenon than the broad dirt-digging against Gay and as described elsewhere in the post.
Coincidentally, the Guardian just published an attack on Rufo as a eugenicist that seems like revenge for the Gay stuff: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/31/rightwing-activist-christopher-rufo-ties-scientific-racism-journal
Chris Rufo has been working the refs for a while. He is an expert on getting a story or a definition of a term into the media ecosystem and then having it become the standard.
The "revenge" wouldn't be for Gay. It would be for his success in getting his hobby horses out into the world.
Clearly, Rufo also needs the lady who told Scott he was paranoid for feeling targeted by Metz' NYT piece to explain to him that worrying that some Guardian journalist was going to write a smear article about him is just him being silly.
Rufo is not a "civilian" Like he has publicly talked about how he wanted to make "critical race theory" a bogeyman and a catch all term for Americans to refer to if there is something they don't like about race relations.
He is a public figure and an impassioned advocate for policy. He should have articles written about him.
True, though those articles should probably try to engage with his ideas instead of trying to do guilt-by-association to rule him out of bounds. At least, if the articles are going to be any good.
Why? It is perfectly reasonable to impugn the motives of public people pushing for certain goals. Bob Menendez being on the take from Egypt sheds a very different light on his advocacy for Egypt in Congress.
That's interesting. Rufo has recently been pitted against Hanania and Aporia Magazine ilk as the *non* eugenecist side of the new school of the right, being informed by Christianity rather than Nietzschian HBD.
But yeah sure, from a Guardian perspective surely he's close enough. They would think so, wouldn't they.
I feel like Scott is being characteristically too generous to the journalist by not emphasing the point that "if someone publicly challenges/protests you, this may make you less charitable to them and motivate you to try to get some retribution" is a truistic statement of human psychology and journalists would have to have saintlike/superhuman moral character and discipline to be immune to this.
Pretensions of professional sanctity are like core to the journalistic identity, to the point of being a fictional trope. How many times have you seen a story of the form "so and so may be a wretched guy in his personal life, but BY GOD he will never compromise his desire to tell the TRUTH to the PEOPLE"?
It is how journalists are seen, and I think how they want to see themselves. Elizabeth Spiers was probably not gaslighting. She is probably a true believer in the sanctity of journalism despite all evidence to the contrary.
Journalism has sucked forever. I was reading Alice Hamilton's autobiography, "Among the Dangerous Trades". This is over a century ago when people were totally cool with racists but were scared of, wait for it, anarchists.
Anyway, apparently there was a house-charity thing where people hard up could get a room living aside the more affluent (a "settlement house"). After a twitchy cop shot a Russian Jewish Anarchist, the house management was interviewed whether they would accept any anarchists - not whether there were any, mind you, but only if thet would let them attend the evening classes. The organiser said, "Sure, we don't ask anyone their political beliefs". The papers ran with the headline:
FEMINIST BUSIBODY ADMITS SHE LETS ANARCHISTS ATTEND HER CLASSES
(I paraphrase only slightly)
https://www.smbc-comics.com/?db=comics&id=1623#comic
Ain't it the truth...
I heard a version of that where, after the boy said that he'd keep crying "wolf", the next time he tried it, he was found dead the next morning. Everyone in town agreed, "a wolf did it", but not all of them kept a straight face.
Anarchists killed several heads of state and were involved in significant bombing campaigns against civilians, it wasn't a strange fear.
Over a century ago, anarchists weren't moody teenage boys in parkas.
Conrad's "The Secret Agent" is a story set in 1886 about an agent provocateur being ordered to carry out a bombing in order to foment public outrage so that there will be a crackdown on anarchists and revolutionaries in another country:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Agent
From "The Man Who Was Thursday":
"The most effective fact in oratory is an unexpected change in the voice. Mr. Gabriel Syme evidently understood oratory. Having said these first formal words in a moderated tone and with a brief simplicity, he made his next word ring and volley in the vault as if one of the guns had gone off.
“Comrades!” he cried, in a voice that made every man jump out of his boots, “have we come here for this? Do we live underground like rats in order to listen to talk like this? This is talk we might listen to while eating buns at a Sunday School treat. Do we line these walls with weapons and bar that door with death lest anyone should come and hear Comrade Gregory saying to us, ‘Be good, and you will be happy,’ ‘Honesty is the best policy,’ and ‘Virtue is its own reward’? There was not a word in Comrade Gregory’s address to which a curate could not have listened with pleasure (hear, hear). But I am not a curate (loud cheers), and I did not listen to it with pleasure (renewed cheers). The man who is fitted to make a good curate is not fitted to make a resolute, forcible, and efficient Thursday (hear, hear).”
“Comrade Gregory has told us, in only too apologetic a tone, that we are not the enemies of society. But I say that we are the enemies of society, and so much the worse for society. We are the enemies of society, for society is the enemy of humanity, its oldest and its most pitiless enemy (hear, hear). Comrade Gregory has told us (apologetically again) that we are not murderers. There I agree. We are not murderers, we are executioners (cheers).”
So specified, but 1) none of the people attending evening classes had done any of that, and 2) how many self proclaimed anarchists did that? Would we be okay for evening classes to exclude Muslims?
And I am about as anti-Islam as can be found.
Also: Chesterton and Conrad were, respectively, conservative and very conservative
I'm not sure what the percentages of "radicalized" anarchists were, but the main leaders were loudly calling for lethal violence, and within a few short years their followers had assassinated the President of the US, the President of France, the Prime Minister of Spain, the King of Italy, the Empress of Austria, and were also indiscriminately slaughtering random citizens around the world. It wasn't just the conservatives who noticed.
Isaac?
Good guess!
I thought the latest chapter in the Claudine Gay saga was that Harvard's Chief Diversity Officer was reported to have engaged in 40 instances of plagiarism, including duplicate publication with her husband and a third co-author, effectively republishing a piece that the husband had written solo two years earlier.
In some sense that's also targeting, but isn't it also newsworthy that an organization like Harvard is consistently failing to uphold for its senior leaders the standards that it requires of undergraduates?
In this case, it appears that plagiarism is more characteristic of the DEI types. The questionable scholarship of the grievance studies "scholars" makes them much more likely to cheat in their publications.
While I personally agree that that is probably the case, I think it is *very important* not to let a public case like this affect your sense of whether that view is true or not. The whole point of this article is we're looking at cases selected for outrage and manipulation, not representative cases selected dispassionately on merit.
And, as ridiculous as I think DEI is (slightly more ridiculous than all the uproar against it), I suspect it directly has little to do with plagiarism and cheating. If engineering studies involved repeatedly writing hundreds of pages of tosh that would never be used in your actual future work, I suspect there would be a lot more plagiarism there as well.
ummm...every journalistic effort revolves around people. So I guess every news story is targeting.
Just like obituaries of famous people are written well before they die, I am sure journalists keep information at the ready for use at opportune times. Prior to Gay's testimony, do you think anyone would have paid attention to a story about an unqualified president of Harvard committing plagiarism?
"I suppose one could retreat even further: journalists are only human, and like to join on pile-ons against unpopular things. This is certainly a little true, and inherently sympathetic - we are all only human. Still, this one scares me most of all."
The Girardian scapegoat mechanism in a nutshell! Everyone bows as Jesus enters Jerusalem, then they crucify him by the end of the week.
When they brought him the woman caught in adultery he deliberately halted "the first stone". Once that one is thrown, a hundred others automatically follow.
It’s a strange bit of human behavior. I remember getting caught up it in myself when I was in grade school. Someone was the object of derision and I jumped in. Fortunately it didn’t take very long to realize just how fucked up that was.
It's a survival mechanism. You're either the one stoning or the one being stoned. Neutrality only results in you ending up as the latter.
Same here.
The NYT and other MSM outlets play up fair and objective, but their journalists aspire to Fleet Street brazenness. The cruelty of newspapers, when mixed with some wit, can be unwholesomely entertaining. The Sun, The Daily Mail and The New York Post sometimes still pull it off. Think how boring a strictly rationalist newspaper would be: "No Material Trends Discernible from Latest Data." "Curry Reverts to Mean in Second Half." "Critics Dismiss Ad Hominem Attacks Irrelevant to Policy Debate."
That would look like those Pew Center or BJS reports where they summarize public opinion data or crime statsitics. It would have *dozens* of regular readers.
"Headless Body Found in Topless Bar" >> "Null Hypothesis Fails to be Rejected by Latest Anecdote"
> "Headless Body Found in Topless Bar"
Nothing has ever beaten "Iraqi Head Seeks Arms".
"Prostitutes Appeal to Pope"
"Red Tape Holds Up New Bridge"
"Kids Make Nutritious Snacks"
"Bank Drive-Thru Blocked By Board"
That would be a sensational headline indeed. I've never known a kid to make a nutritious snack. They generally choose ice cream and candy.
(Yes, I know what you're going to say if you didn't chuckle at my response.)
"Milk Drinkers Are Turning To Powder"
https://www.craftyourcontent.com/ambiguity-in-writing/
Well, I do like "Bank Drive-Thru Blocked By Board".
'Ike beats Tina to death'.
Not “Foot Heads Arms Body”?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Michael_Foot#Foot_Heads_Arms_Body
I still giggle when I think of “Weak Dike Threatens City”.
One little woman brought Ft Wain, Indiana to It’s knees
That one's not great; it's only ambiguous if read aloud. Which works for many jokes, but not for newspaper headlines.
I know. Homonym. It still cracks me up. I’m remembering reading aloud to friends.
This is an excellent pointer to why For-Profit news should be as banned and regulated as For-Profit universities (used to be, sigh).
A competitive market for eyeballs produces toxic information, enough to completely kill the information ecosystem.
Because a heavily regulated news eco-system would obviously give you nothing but the truth
I am skeptical as well but I think it deserves more discussion than this pointless dismissal.
I definitely think the next Trump administration should be given full control of the regulated media. We can call the rollout the Program for Regulation And Verity in Data Analysis
I don’t think Spiers would disagree that investigative journalists sometimes have an ax to grind in culture wars, especially overtly political people like Rufo. I read her argument as more specific to tech people (Scott included) who she perceives as not important enough to journalists to attract meaningful ire. This is why she accuses you of egotism/an inflated sense of self import. Uncle Chico, by contrast, is erroneously evaluating commentary on Trump by the standards of reporting, as well as envisioning a grandiose conspiracy of leftist journalists that (Spiers thinks) doesn’t exist. She wouldn’t accuse uncle Chico as wrongly perceiving Trump as important enough to occupy journalist headspace (I don’t think; she never says this outright though).
Journalism is, by definition, a progressive institution -- or at least it should be. That is, reporters are on the lookout for changes to the status quo and especially dynamically shifting power structures. Whatever their personal beliefs, serious journalists will be equally eager to tackle lies by Hillary Clinton as Trump. Which is why the general public is so often confounded by their work product. Who's side are they on anyway?! If they are serious, they are attempting to embody societal mirrors crucial to the egalitarian movement that humanity has been cooperatively pursuing for centuries. That's the "side" they have chosen. Hopefully.
No, it's not a perfect system, especially in today's swamp of media, but one thing is clear: attempts to smear the profession writ large as agenda-driven are part and parcel of today's sweeping attempts to weaken democracy itself. These are perilous times, when average people no longer discern the quantum difference between Fox News and the NYT. Democracy is messy, but I predict even the MAGAts will miss it when it's gone.
> Which is why the general public is so often confounded by their work product. Who's side are they on anyway?!
Who is confounded? It has been well known for a long time that journalists are overwhelmingly on one side.
It's kind of of hilarious how there are two intersecting fights going on here:
A) the original dispute over Gaza
B) a sciences versus humanities one, where regardless of their position on Gaza, the scientists think both Gay's and Oxman's degrees are fake, and are cheering on the imminent collapse of their respective departments
P.s. I assume this post is exempt from the usual rule on Gaza-related fights being confined to a sub thread, as mentioning it a key part of the original post...
The latest news is a bunch of revelations of fraud in the hard sciences, so if scientists are getting excited about Gay/Oxman, and think it shows some fundamental difference between the two cultures, I'd suggest they calm down.
The fraud there is many times more relevant for the world than whether Gay or Oxman copy-pasted something in papers they wrote that nobody was ever going to read, tbh.
Quite possibly. Make sure to bring popcorn.
There are two salient facts about Claudine Gay’s case:
1) She, as (now former) president of the country’s most prestigious university, is clearly a Public Figure
2) Her wrongdoing was relevant to her role as a public figure (she was an academic leader who had plagiarized the academic work that served as her qualifications for her role).
Claudine Gay (and her employers at Harvard) should absolutely expect her academic bonafides to receive scrutiny. The problem with them coming out right after a very public foot-in-mouth performance in front of Congress is not that they came out at all, but that they hadn’t come out *sooner*.
I think the farther away you get from those two characteristics (Public Figure, relevance), the less justifiable “journalistic targeting” becomes.
In your case, I think the answer to 2 was absolutely “no” - the “true name” of the blogger known as Scott Alexander was not relevant to the story, not relevant to the thing that makes you newsworthy (nobody has a general interest in the names of random Bay Area psychiatrists). 1 is a harder question, because Scott Alexander the Blogger is obviously a public figure, but Dr. Siskind, Bay Area Psychiatrist is clearly not.
So I’d say the targeting of you was much worse than Claudine Gay, but not as bad as plucking some random person out of a hat (or your Instagram feed) and just digging up and publishing the worst thing you can find about them.
> 2) Her wrongdoing was relevant to her role as a public figure (she was an academic leader who had plagiarized the academic work that served as her qualifications for her role).
Well, that's obviously false. Nobody knew or cared about her academic work; it had no significance to anyone. Her qualifications were elsewhere.
Academic work is how you become a professor, not an administrator.
University Presidents are generally expected to be themselves professional academics (certainly that’s the path Gay took), professional academics (especially those promoted to higher roles) are expected to output quality academic work, and plagiarizing one’s academic work calls into question one’s credentials as a professional academic.
All of those things are obviously true.
They are variably true. The first one is true. The third one is sort of ambiguous in practice. The second one is hazy. There was never any pretense that Claudine Gay had produced any quality academic work. She produced enough work to satisfy a pro forma requirement. As I said above, nobody knew or cared what was in her papers. If you believe that a university president is supposed to be (or have been) an influential researcher, she has always been obviously unqualified, and would still be obviously unqualified if all of her work was unimpeachably original to her.
Note, among other things, that of all of the arguments for why academic plagiarism should be frowned upon, none of them apply to plagiarizing your acknowledgements.
> she has always been obviously unqualified, and would still be obviously unqualified if all of her work was unimpeachably original to her
You're right, but I suspect what happened is that before the publicity of the plagiarism, people could at least maintain the pretense she was a good scholar. Now they can't pretend anymore.
Eh, she's not just an "administrator". She's got staff for that. The President is the public face of the university, and the human interface between the university and the outside world.* She doesn't actually need great academic work for that, but she does need the perception that her academic work is "good enough". Plus she needs to only be controversial in ways that her university and general milieu will defend.
* The President is also the sacrifical lamb, for when sufficiently grievous sins require expiation.
> Eh, she's not just an "administrator". She's got staff for that.
Having staff for that is... what makes you an administrator? Administrators are the people who give the commands, not the people who carry them out.
I was going to cite a relevant dictionary gloss, but this turns out to be the only sense of the word (recognized by wiktionary), outside of a couple of special technical uses of the word that have a lot of overlap with the normal sense. So here's the entire wiktionary entry:
> administrator
> 1. One who administers affairs; one who directs, manages, executes, or dispenses, whether in civil, judicial, political, or ecclesiastical affairs; a manager
> 2. (law) A person who manages or settles the estate of an intestate, or of a testator when there is no competent executor; one to whom the right of administration has been committed by competent authority
> (computing) One who is responsible for software installation, management, information and maintenance of a computer or network
I'm saying that she (and all other university presidents) have probably delegated almost everything that they can delegate? Whereas there's a lot of social tasks where the status of "the president" is required, and no substitutes will do.
I don't get the claim. She's not an administrator because she's an administrator?
You're obviously wrong. Plagiarism is a signal that your integrity is questionable. This is very much of importance to an administrator
That doesn't make her work a qualification for her role. By that standard, she could be disqualified by anything.
That Spiers article bugged me for other reasons, particularly the idea that Metz was just such hot stuff that a controversy that led to a meta-article in the New Yorker would scarcely register in his consciousness amidst all of other the important articles he was writing. Maybe she's too much of a snob to imagine a NY Times writer caring what an influential blogger thinks, but how many Cade Metz articles led to critical coverage in the New Yorker?
On another note, has anyone done a baseline analysis to see what % of (e.g. Harvard) scholars' works contain plagiarism of Gay's severity? I have definitely had the experience of trying to rephrase something in my own words, coming up with the perfect phrasing, and then realizing I had copied half a sentence word for word. That's why when, for example, Lawrence Tribe was found to have copied a boring 19 word sentence I was pretty sure this was just the kind of thing that could happen if you read something and then wrote about the same topic a few hours later. Gay's plagiarism seemed too common for that, but I'm not sure and I wish someone would just run the numbers.
An obvious guess is that a lot of people probably got lazy and did some copy-paste stuff on obscure papers nobody was going to read or on their dissertation which nobody but their advisor and maybe their committee would ever read. And so probably a great many prominent academics are vulnerable to an accusation of plagiarism, and this will inevitably be used both to blackmail/shut up some people and to pry some annoying rivals out of their posts over the next few years. Eventually, it will lose most of its sting and people will not respond so much.
Students are aware when they write the thesis that no one is going to read it, so I can believe that behaviour on theses, but academics take papers more seriously. They're like our whole raison d'être. "Only five people will ever read this stuff" is what you hear from people who leave academia, not from the people who become profs.
While I agree with the overall point of not searching for every bad thing a person ever did as retaliation, I'm kinda OK with doing this because of plagiarism.
Honestly, we have too many academics. Science is in a crisis where its inundated with bullshit, no one reads a paper unless it's from someone famous, and scientific writing is just used as a prop to get prestige and a better role in universities.
We are in a point where we have too much science and too little quality. If eviscerating people for plagiarism raises the quality (while decreasing the quantity) of science, I'm happy with the tradeoff.
> Science is in a crisis where its inundated with bullshit, no one reads a paper unless it's from someone famous
I work in science (I'm an academic at a prestigious university).
This isn't remotely true.
This isn't "remotely" true? Maybe we can argue over the level, or whether I'm being too uncharitable.
But the replication crisis is a thing that's still ongoing.
There's been recent high profile scientific fraud stories breaking recently.
The replication crisis is certainly a thing, but the underlying problem behind the replication crisis isn't "too much research," in a way where it could be mitigated by tighter controls against plagiarism. The problem is that gathering enough positive evidence for a proposition to genuinely overcome prior unlikelihood is a more difficult task than meeting the standards for publication.
Answering you and "None of the Above" below (heh).
I don't think this kind plagiarism is the central issue with science today. But it is a symptom of the general sloppiness and low standards of publication.
I assume that a paper (or scientist) that doesn't have time or integrity to write original content, also won't put the necessary effort into the main results.
Replication crisis is rather caused by high standards of publication (along the wrong axis). Speaking of effort into the main result, yeah, the effort going into the main result is not always about making it a better representation of reality (well OK, I am talking about the fields where existence of the underlying reality in principle is more or less accepted). I would expect plagiarism in definitions not claimed as contributions to be a small net positive, and even the same for related work overviews.
The specific case of plagiarism in question is none of the above, although the same things that caused the replication crisis bring us this, too…
I think the problems with the replication crisis and scientific fraud have very little to do with the kind of plagiarism claimed against Gay and Oxman.
Agreed.
Yes, let's start another crab bucket situation, that is obviously going to select and reward scientists with integrity, just like it's doing with journalism. /s
Would you believe the inverse of the argument that's hiding underneath your potshot?
Do you think that if we protected all scientists of critisism, regardless of the validity of it. We'd end up with more integrity?
Yes, if we didn't have the current incentive structure that only rewards novel findings and research, more scientists would be free to pursue study replication so that we could have a more solid foundation to work from.
I agree with that. But how is this in any way related to my question of
> we protected all scientists of critisism, regardless of the validity of it. We'd end up with more integrity?
No, I don’t think we are.
I work in engineering, and I do in fact read papers from those dirty academics. Most of them are not remotely famous.
The replication crisis sure sounds like the kind of dramatic event Scott is talking about here. Do you have actual data telling you that we’re doing too much low-quality science? Or are you just going with the vibe?
An engineer here. I read papers relevant to my work all the time, and couldn’t care less about how famous the authors are. Some papers are indeed crap, but it’s a small fraction.
Things may be different outside of STEM fields though.
> If I ran the world, I would want newspapers to do the opposite of that - comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, that kind of thing. I would want it to find dirt on people who were puffed up way too high riding the top of the popularity wave, and find reasons to defend and stand up for people who were vulnerable and getting piled on. Still, it seems like in real life people do the opposite.
Scott, you should look into the kind of investigative reports that short sellers, like eh Hindenburg, put out.
They don't earn any money from piling on companies (and people) who are already down. They earn a better profit, if they can bring highflyer down.
You can probably estimate for yourself how unpopular that makes them.
> If I ran the world, I would want newspapers to do the opposite of that - comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, that kind of thing. I would want it to find dirt on people who were puffed up way too high riding the top of the popularity wave, and find reasons to defend and stand up for people who were vulnerable and getting piled on. Still, it seems like in real life people do the opposite.
I think the first half of this is definitely happening (it's the whole business model of e.g. tabloids) though not the second half. This makes sense because humans have a negativity bias, so negative coverage gets more clicks.
There needs to be a referee system in place to impose some norms of fairness. I don’t think anyone likes being in a system totally devoid of honor and considered laughable by most of the public. I have long spergy posts on this on my substack, but basically, of course people do this stuff because there’s no impartial judge to stop them from doing it and they pay no price for doing it. And worse, they don’t even get a proportionate reward for behaving honorably.
Reviewer #2 wants to see a more thorough literature review in your blog post calling your political outgroup a bunch of knuckle-dragging wife-beaters.
Something like that, but basing it on consensus across groups. Similar to Community Notes.
I wonder if there is a deeper question here, which might be: "Is there a better way to do "reputational work"?
Politics, media, the arts, business and Academia are filled with people doing "reputational work", that is, spending time and effort promoting a particular view of reputations, burnishing their own, that of mentees, allies, groups, schools of thought; and also slurring and diminishing those of rival individuals, groups, and schools of thought.
All this work stands as a proxy for the really needed work, which is to discover which politicians, experts, up and coming researchers or startups, advisors, schools of thought, etc are really worth placing credit in, and which are full of shit.
Although this has all gone on since time immemorial, it clearly in many cases is ineffective at doing the needful work. The best way to stop something which is doing harm, is to figure out a replacement which is better. Are there ways of doing this better?
Thank you for highlighting the meta problem here.
More affirmative action will help.
This is why I think the simulacra levels are better thought of as a square or diamond. Going from 1 to 3 has a tendency to cause drift in the direction of 2, leading eventually to 4 (=2+3). (Maybe they'd also be better represented in binary, and starting from 0. Plus then there'd be Spinal Tap jokes.)
You really need to go to 11 for those.
:-)
It seems you are assuming some context that I don't have. Googling, I think you may be referring to Baudrillards "Simulacra", but I am not familiar with this theory. Could you elucidate?
Oh, sorry. Yes, it's that, but it's been bouncing around the rationalist sphere for a while, so it may also have subtly shifted in meaning in this context. Here's a good summary:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hLzwNuPyEvR4mfAce/simulacra-levels-summary
I wrestled with it a few weeks ago and came up with an internal model that, while probably unlike Baudrillard's, is at least something that proves useful to me.
In particular there's a sort of shared symmetry between the difference between 1 and 2, and between 3 and 4, and so I've been conceptualizing them as layers, like so:
3 4
1 2
Or in 0-based binary:
10 11
00 01
Ah, that's interesting.
I think the problem with 4 is that the description is about people who have given up on any form of epistemic diligence because they find it works for them not to bother. But, most people reading this blog will have spent 10,000 hours on some kind of 'scholarly work' (extremely broadly defined), but there are a much larger number of people who have not done this, who some of the time may thus be doing 4 even if they actually wanted to do 1.
I liked Zvi's explanation using the children of the Seder; somehow it made sense of two things that had previously confused me.
Off the top of my head, I think of it like this (not the greatest example, still a bit grounded at 4):
1) what's the best policy?
2) what policy should I advocate to gain power?
3) what's the best policy to strengthen my political coalition?
4) what policy should I advocate to help my political coalition gain power?
By 4, not only has the person given up on getting stuff done, and is just mouthing words to manipulate people, the words don't even refer to things that would have a practical effect, they're just the slogans of the day, designed to energize the base.
Everyone whose political activity is going online and "owning the ____s". Or those who think that political advocacy is joining a march and chanting the same thing everyone else does, without trying to directly physically improve the world or even thinking about what the slogans mean.
Here's another one:
1) critically examining the available candidates and choosing the one you think is best
2) lying about who you voted for in order to get into someone's pants
3) passionate twitter warriors who retweet the Good Things and report the Bad Things as misinformation
4) Alliance vs. Horde
(replying to both)
Thanks, these are useful examples.
The only right way of doing it is doing it yourself. Sift through all the bullshit to find the truth, if that's even possible. You can't trust anyone in this world.
Fortunately it's not a binary distinction, and we can build up predictive knowledge about how often and how reliable particular people are about particular things.
This piece is the single best example of the midwit meme I've ever seen.
It's targeting.
"I don't know there could be any number of reasons"
It's targeting
> Neri Oxman is a Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, but nobody in history has ever cared about Media Arts and Sciences.
Context: the MAS program at MIT is the program run by the MIT Media Lab, an institution whose reputation has suffered of late due to its association with Jeffrey Epstein but which was before that the darling of the tech press, the subject of hundreds if not thousands of fawning, breathless articles since the 1980s about the groundbreaking research coming out of the lab. And to be fair, if you’ve ever used a computer or a computer network (eg, the internet) to do anything other than academic research — read a news feed customized to you, chat with friends, take a course, participate in a shared virtual world — you are enjoying the fruits of research groups like the Social Media group (the origin of that term, for what it’s worth) or the Epistemology and Learning group (anyone ever learn to program using LOGO?) or the Electronic Publishing Group.
I have very mixed feelings about the Media Lab’s legacy, but to say that nobody cares about their research couldn’t be farther from the truth. The history of the MIT Media Lab is the history of the adoption of computers and the internet by ordinary people in their day to day lives; the history of our culture in 2024 doesn’t make any sense without it.
I completely agree.
Also, future Nobel prize winner Ed Boyden is a "Professor of Media Arts and Sciences."
Yeah, there’s always been a lot of fluff at the ML, but it’s always been mixed with serious science and engineering research by the top-notch faculty the place manages to attract.
The Media Lab is mixed in quality. See the Food Compute Hoax-- outright fraud, followed by firing of the whistleblower, who is suing. https://www.whistleblowers.org/whistleblowers/dr-babak-babakinejad/
Like I said, I have very mixed feelings about the place.
I was just correcting Scott on a narrow point about the notoriety of the MAS program at MIT (that, to be fair, was entirely tangential to the theme of his essay as a whole).
So Ladyballers wasn't the best film, but I did enjoy their treatment of journalists.
The lesson I learned long ago, and why I spend much more time on ACX than on news outlets: Everyone has an agenda. If someone has unique data (e.g. news sites), take the data only and preferably from opposing sides; if no unique data is needed, seek sources that are either explicit in their agenda or ideally those who put objective truth as their agenda (and usually these places can be identified via if they truly steel-man the opposing side, separate between facts and opinions, etc.).
> and usually these places can be identified via if they truly steel-man the opposing side
I don't think this is as worthwhile as you seem to. I've seen it attacked from several directions that all aim at the same point: if you want to refute someone's argument, you need to refute the argument that they actually made. This applies whether you're trying to persuade them, bystanders, or yourself, though there's not generally much cause for concern on that last front.
I am pretty sure that Scott recently wrote about how nice it was to see people addressing what he said he was talking about rather than what they thought he should be talking about, which amused me.
I didn't mean actually steel-manning. I agree with you - a good steel-man in my eyes can be an honest and deep understanding of the other's side arguments.
The test is simple in my eyes: If I feel like the person can pass an Ideological Turing Test of the other side, he has truly thought about something deeply.
> The lesson I learned long ago, and why I spend much more time on ACX than on news outlets: Everyone has an agenda.
Unfortunately, ACX has been growing more and more of an agenda. I'm not saying it's a bad one, but it's still an agenda: promoting and defending EA, raising alarm about AI, and now attempting to weigh in to low level journo-political food fights.
Back in SSC times Scott was all about the excitement of figuring stuff out in the world, for the sheer beauty of uncovering nuggets of insight and truth. Now it seems he grew a sense of responsibility and feels the need to try and steer change instead. Not only is it much more boring, but IMO he's much better at his original goal than at this. I guess I'll have to wait for his next piece of fiction!
I remember back in 2014 he had a bit of an agenda, but he seemed to eventually let it merge into the rest of his worldview. Possibly the same is going to happen with this "low level journo" stuff, once the trauma from the NYT article fades into the background.
Maybe this is what happens when someone finds a bit of what they think is the truth? He can still go around finding good arguments and taking down bad arguments, but once enough of those good arguments lead to the same place, it looks like an agenda and quacks like an agenda. It's all well and good to talk about the beauty of rational truth-seeking, but I'd be disappointed if it never got him anywhere. And I haven't picked up any sense that he couldn't be talked out of it if someone had a good enough argument.
The NYT trauma was mirrored pretty closely by college cancellation trauma that led to all those feminism-Voldemort rants. Which is great, because otherwise I likely wouldn't have stumbled on the blog, but it terms of truth-seeking those were of noticeably lesser value.
I mean, I wouldn't call them "truth-seeking", as much as "truth-sharing"?
Compared to the normal level of discourse on the internet on such topics it was of course miles better, but even so it was significantly below Scott's standard for subjects without a traumatic emotional attachment.
I suppose we'll have to disagree on that.
Epsilontheory writes about this all the time.
“The secret to reading critically? Ask yourself this:
Why am I reading this article NOW?
Just do that. You’re not saying that the article is a lie. You’re not saying that the article isn’t important. You’re saying that there is a metagame at play here with the author and the sources of that article. You’re saying that you are aware of that metagame and you’re going to take that into account before deciding your behavior in reaction to that article.”
https://www.epsilontheory.com/why-am-i-reading-this-now/
I haven't thought of that in that way, but I completely agree.
Rufo and Brunet went after Gay because of her complete hypocrisy on free speech matters. If she had been a principled free-speech absolutist the whole time, there are plenty of pro-Israel people who would've been upset by her congressional testimony (probably including Ackman), but some right-wing investigative journalists probably wouldn't have cared that much. They care because academia/media/etc. will go after people (including tenured academics) who say things like "There's no such thing as a woman with a penis" or "Maybe the under-representation of black Americans in (insert prestigious field here) has something to do with having an average IQ one standard deviation below the IQ of white Americans" or "The gender pay gap is sufficiently explained by various factors that have nothing to do with sexist bosses."
Rufo went after Gay because they're on opposite sides.
Yeah Rufo went after Gay because he’s a political activist and that’s what political activists do. Dog-bites-man and all that.
Agreed.
Agreed, in substantial part.
And if she’d been a free-speech absolutist, they would not have been on opposite sides.
Exactly agreed. She used free speech as a fig leaf to support her side, not as a free speech proponent supporting the speech of all sides.
Regarding Elizabeth Spiers, I see she is folding her tent and leaving Substack to we deplorables:
"We’re moving to a different platform. It’ll probably be Ghost or Wordpress with some kind of email integration, but I want to potentially start this newsletter up again and I don’t want to do it on a platform that keeps openly promoting racists and transphobes."
Wordpress? Ye gods and small fishes, why? Ask your good buddy Cade The Tech Writer Guy for advice, Lizzy!
Maybe it's because this is a nest of scum and villainy, or maybe it's because she's dropping subscribers and moving to what was the Cool New Joint has not worked out for her in terms of making cash money off her writing - I see by the linked early post that she was boasting 3k subscribers but now she's down to "over 2k". Probably why she needs the side-gig teaching would-be journos how to write op-eds:
"I’m teaching an opinion writing workshop on Zoom on August 9th and 16th from 7pm to 9pm ET. The structure for participants: On August 1st, you'll receive a reading list and an assignment to be completed before the first session. Between the first and second sessions, you'll have a revision assignment and I'll review your first assignment with you individually. The week after the second session, I'll give you a final edit on a completed opinion column and if you aim to get your piece published, some suggestions about where to pitch it.
Since this is a first run, I'm pricing it at $350.00. I'll increase the price once I'm sure I've worked out any potential kinks, but haven't settled on a number yet. You can register/sign up here."
Well, good luck with the move, Liz, don't strain your back lifting any heavy furniture, and I'm sure Wordpress (giggle) will be just the ticket to draw in the huge audience craving a NYT writer's words of worldly wisdom! Barbenheimer memes, really got her finger on the pulse there!
"I wrote about Barbenheimer memes for The New York Times. Here’s a gift link if you’re not a subscriber. As I mention in the column, my vibe is more Oppenheimer than Barbie, but I saw both last weekend, in that order. It was like enjoying a tasting menu at a restaurant, where it’s amazing but maybe a little exhausting, and ending the meal with an ice cream sundae laced with THC."
(If you just wait long enough, you get to see your enemies pulling themselves down).
Fortunately for her, Wordpress has never been used by any bad people ever, so she's moving away from this wretched hive of scum and villainy to a much cleaner and safer platform.
I do have to incline towards a wry smile, when the piece rebuking Scott was all "journalism is Serious Business" and then later on she's "yeah I jumped on the clickbait five minute pop sensation bandwagon with Barbieheimer".
Wordpress (which hosts my blog*) genuinely is better. You can leave comments with hypertext tags rather than having to dump a raw url when you want to link!
* https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/
I had to add a space after the '*' there because otherwise the link would start with that character instead of 'h'.
You're written a farrago of assumptions "maybe" "maybe" "probably" "I'm sure". Not really valuable.
Oh, no, a *farrago*? Let me hang my head down and weep, weep, weep!!!!
That would be a better use of your (and my) time, although perhaps equally cathartic.
Don't worry - you might have written a farrago, but there are four men with whom you're in good company.
I'm not sure how you discuss "targeting" with mentioning Trump. Is it "chilling" that there has been a search for dirt on him for years, even producing garbage like the Steele Dossier?
But if you want to keep this focused on Gay: Why not mention her role in ousting Roland Fryer, who went from Golden Child to outcast and was ousted by Gay herself? Or, why not mention that plagiarism is the cardinal sin in academia. Perhaps the reason it was not found before is because who would suspect someone would so lazy as to plagiarize something as mundane as their acknowledgements? In any case, she did stuff that would land an 18-year-old freshman in the hottest of waters. That she heads the most important university in the US, and perhaps the world, makes it important.
And regarding "The message is clear: go after an important Ivy League leader, and we’ll go after your family." Is this surprising? Academia is a toxic, nasty place. It is not the least bit surprising that Harvard, the epitome of "it's a big club and you ain't in it", would go after its enemies using its allies in contemporary journalism.
You expect journalists to dig up dirt on prominent politicians (and hey, some if it's even true!), but usually not to dig up dirt on random people with blogs or whatever.
The funny think about the Spiers piece is that approximately every normal human being understands that having the NYT write a profile about you has a substantial chance to go really badly for you.
Actually Karlstack (Brunet) investigated Gay over a year ago and found all kinds of damning stuff that isn't plagiarism, including apparent coverups of data forgery.
https://www.karlstack.com/p/the-curious-case-of-claudine-gay
So there was no holding stuff in reserve. They were attacking Gay from the start. Yet nobody cared. The entire thing did not go viral, did not collect $100, did not pass go. That's why you don't know about it and are over-thinking their strategy.
I think it's established beyond all possible doubt now that journalists do the bidding of academics, and the only crime academics care about is plagiarism. People can literally photoshop images and make up tables of data, entire fields can be based on nonsensical premises, and nobody anywhere gives a damn. But the moment someone copies a few sentences from another paper they absolutely ape-shit.
In this context it's entirely expected and reasonable that the Gay thing revolves around plagiarism. What was Ackman going to do, accuse her of scientific fraud, diversity hiring, incompetence and coverups? That's de rigour in academia and journalists never report on it, with the notable exception of Nature's news department (!!). But plagiarism? That gets noticed in the halls of power.
A very important point
Well-stated. The plagiarism stuff is related to maintaining stature. Our precious words. Reading over a few of the examples reminded me of the school chore of changing or rearranging a word here or there that teachers explained was "making it your own". It didn't seem very significant! It didn't feel like "one's own". It seemed rather a waste of time. Much like the obsession with "using a different word" than the plain and suitable one, to make your writing "sparkle"!
Still, someone tripped up somewhere that they let it pass in her case, she should have gotten that in sixth grade. Unless teachers have become less pedantic.
I think you have the causality backwards. Academics definitely care a lot about whether research is shoddy, in technical fields they care a lot more about that than whether someone plagiarized a definition from Wikipedia or whatever. The reason _plagiarism_ accusations specifically seem to stick is because they are (1) a lot easier to prove and (2) a lot easier to understand by the broader public.
I guess that's true, although photoshopping and forgery are often quite easy to show too. Of course you can always plead incompetence, but that's also true for plagiarism.
There are tools that detect internally inconsistent numbers in papers for example. Nobody cares.
When people report bugs in academic models, also nobody cares. See Ferguson's COVID models for an extreme example.
In the end, I don't see any evidence that academics care about whether research is shoddy. If they did there'd be less of it and we'd see people get fired for it. In practice they only seem to get fired for plagiarism, or violating left-wing ideology.
Thank you, I was worried that I was going to have to look up the reference myself.
Came here to make the same point about Brunet’s earlier coverage of Gay. He wrote about that backstory here: https://www.karlstack.com/p/for-me-this-was-personal
"What was Ackman going to do, accuse her of scientific fraud, diversity hiring, incompetence and coverups?"
He accused her of all of those things first. His criticisms were in order 1) Israel 2) She is unqualified 3) Oh, hey some plagiarism as well.
You are right that #3 got more play, but he started with the first 2.
Hole in one - I manage to be both wrong and right simultaneously :)
What a long way to say "I don't understand hypocrisy"
Also wild that the wife of a literal billionaire is categorized as afflicted here. "Comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable" is what is happening in the media when they do things like write critical stories about powerful institutions. Personally think the better explanation of why stories critical of EA started happening was that it turned out to be a bunch of powerful people a lot of whom were "Just Some Guy" doing dumb "Just Some Guy" stuff. I'm not the biggest fan of the media but the Oxman story was good, partly on account of being hilarious.
Literal billionaires and their wives can still suffer psychologically from being widely hated (or from a media attack making it seem as if they are, or might soon be, widely hated).
Good, and may they always be subject to at least as much, if not more pain and suffering, as the rest of us would be.
Agreed. We really just ought to have different laws for different classes of people, in my opinion.
The exact opposite! Billionaires finding themselves subject to as much pain as the median citizen means only that our society has a minimally functional system of laws and institutions. If a billionaire hasn't suffered more than the average citizen for their position, status and wealth then the society is most likely sick or stagnant.
What are you, some kind of Kulak?
This kind of malice isn't psychologically healthy.
Not malice at all! A society in which billionaires expect to face a similar lifestyle to the median citizen and experience discomforts similar to those experienced by a median citizen is a society which will have an extremely high standard of living and solid, continuing efforts behind ameliorating the discomforts that remain.
Those who expect solutions to flow directly from leveraging their relative personal purchasing power are both naive and the truly unhealthy ones.
Being a billionaire inherently involves having the power to avoid at least some of the pain and suffering that other people suffer. If billionaires nonetheless suffer all of the pain and suffering of other people, it seems to me one of three things must be true:
1. Billionaires must be absolutely flawlessly altruistic
2. Someone must be blocking billionaires in their efforts to alleviate their own pain and suffering
3. Someone must be targeting billionaires for extra, compensatory pain.
#1 is unlikely, while #2 and #3 are at least locally malicious.
1) Your assumption is wrong; billionaires have no special ability to avoid pain and suffering commensurate with their wealth but they can purchase many more distractions than the average human.
2) The status of having accumulated billions of dollars is inherently incompatible with the concept of altruism. Full stop.
3) We outlaw sale of human organs and other tissues as much as possible in civilized countries specifically so billionaires can't use their wealth to alleviate their own pain & suffering. Not immoral, in fact the exact opposite!
4) Progressive taxation is a system that targets people, billionaires among them, for extra compensatory pain. You may not like systems like it, but your dislike has no bearing on the morality of the system.
I think it's all what nonprofit types and interested actors feed in, but the Oxman case seemed unusually purely negative polarization based. If she was the head of an academic institution, that would've screwed that up big time; as it is, is he supposed to, I dunno, divorce her?
Well the cliche is that conservatives only find compassion about abortion, trans rights, gay rights, drug abuse when it is their family member. When it is just something out in the ether, then fentanyl users, for example, are a plague upon the country, but, when it comes out that their daughter has been checked into rehab, then they have compassion for a family member who made some bad decisions and is in recovery.
A good example is Dick Cheney. His daughter has been gay publicly since at least the 90's. While the Bush administration was not LGBTQ friendly, Dick Cheney left the actual speechifying against it to others because he probably didn't want to implicitly badmouth his daughter.
Oxman went and threw some very specific stones without checking to see if he lived in a glass house.
I agree with the sentiment that generally the media piles on to people falling from grace. I think it’s because it’s safer to criticize people in numbers. The Claudine Gay example is a bad one since although the allegations were republished at a convenient time, the original reporting was there. I also think in the specific circumstances, establishment media types were in between a rock and a hard place regarding defending their general ideology and Claudine Gay’s tenure in light of that. I think the plagiarism served as a seemingly unique and novel way to circumvent the issue of whether affirmative action overpromotes poor quality individuals
> The plagiarism was discovered by conservative journalists Chris Rufo and Chris Brunet. It would be quite a coincidence for them to find it at exactly the moment Gay was already under attack for her anti-Semitism testimony. More likely, they either:
> Found it a while ago, and kept it in reserve for a time when Gay was in the news
> Or were angry about Gay’s testimony, looked for dirt on her, and found it.
> I think this is obvious to everyone, but I hadn’t seen anyone make it explicit, and I think it should be.
Definitely targeting, but you left out what I see as a fairly significant third option:
They noticed that Gay was under assault from other quarters, so they looked for dirt on her (while she was weak anyway), and found it.
In order to take down someone you hate while they're under attack, it's not actually necessary that you care about whatever it is they're under attack for. No more than it is that what takes them down be related to whatever it is they're under attack for.
(In fact, a story from when I was in high school: one year, everyone hated the chemistry teacher. Partway through the year he got fed up and called a friend of mine an idiot. This would have offended nobody. But, because everyone hated him anyway, maybe a dozen students went to the administration to file a complaint. He got fired.)
Yes, this.
Rufo doesn't seem to particularly care about Israel or Gaza. He cares about defeating DEI/Woke. A major DEI proponent had upset some powerful and wealthy people with the Gaza stuff and was looking vulnerable, so he piled on and fed them some more ammunition to help bring her down.
A lot of power struggles to bring someone down have two layers -- the proximal, punishable offense and the actual, unrelated reason their enemies hate or otherwise want to destroy them. In the case of Gay, there were three layers: the actual punishable offense, the unrelated reasons conservatives hated her and therefore dug up that offense, and the only vaguely-related reasons ultra-wealthy donors hated her and put her on the defensive in the first place.
> A major DEI proponent had upset some powerful and wealthy people
The case for Rufo taking her down is much stronger than that; she's also a major DEI beneficiary. So if she fumbles, angers everyone important, and loses a huge chunk of money, that serves as an accessible example of DEI practices causing harm to their host institutions.
Good point.
Other commenters have mentioned them having already found and posted the dirt on her a while back, but it didn't go viral until she lost popularity.
Points 3 onward I understand. I think you're wrong about points 1 and 2.
"Assuming that many important people have skeletons in their closets (or can be believably accused of such in ways hard for them to disprove)..."
That is a very generous way of characterizing Gay's plagiarism (Rufo's "dirt"). It wasn't a shadowy, unfalsifiable smear. It was a verifiable violation of the core principles of her field. And unlike Oxman, Gay remained visible and relevant in the field.
Comparing Gay's experience to yours is inaccurate.
I think this is right. Gay’s position is a prestigious one for which there’s predictably a high bar. She may have done nothing “wrong,” but doing nothing wrong isn’t enough to secure the position. She had the spotlight understandably turned on her for making statements that lacked some deftness at the very least. Then an activist-journalist with an agenda looked into whether she had demonstrated some questionable behavior in her past. The degree to which her past behavior was questionable is debatable, but the behavior wasn’t a plus.
The fallout is she no longer occupies this incredibly coveted, competitive position. People lose far less prestigious positions for more minor transgressions all the time.
People in the spotlight are highly scrutinized and it’s because people in the spotlight can have outsized effects on their community.
The first segment here is insulting to the reader because it shows you put absolutely no effort toward looking into the matter. Rufo is extremely transparent about what he does, outlining the step by step process in the Wall Street Journal, and Brunet has literally written a timeline on this on his own Substack, including when he first got the anonymous tip regarding Gay. These are two activists widely known for their belief in "narrating the scandal" as it happens -- informing ideological allies and foes alike of what they intend to do and how they intend to do it. You apparently were too busy to even look at what they said about this question, which would have shown you the answer.
Yes, you probably should rewrite this Codex post, after looking at Brunet's timeline. He is known for explaining, in exhaustive overdetail, how he finds things out and what documentation he is using, tho he's learning to be mor like a journalist and just say stuff. And here, he has for years been talking about Claudine Gay, without anybody outside of academia listening. I doubt Gay's plagiarism is a real surprise to anyone in the small world of Political Science.
I agree, it's like a bit of the replication crisis in miniature. Fortunately, here, the actual data still supports the broad thesis, but requires a slightly more involved and nuanced model.
Brunet responded below, so hopefully that will help speed the process along.
I think you're confusing 'maliciously target' with 'get curious about something you've heard abou/wonder what you've missed when new information becomes available.' Someone who didn't check their priors after something like FTX or ask 'hang on, is your concern really plagiarism, or something else in the Harvard issue' well, doesn't strike me as very rational...
I wonder how numbers of skeletons in the closet varies with quality of person/leader/ideas. Is it random or not. It is a bit like the general factor of correctness.
My guess is that people with lots of skeletons in their closet especially around fraud are significantly less good at their job.
I'm not sure if I'm really contradicting you in any way, but I wouldn't have put it the way you put it. I think the way you put it ignores two factors.
1) The clumpiness of random distributions. For example, these allegations against Gay weren't held back. They were reported on before. They just didn't gain traction before. The skeletons in everyone's cupboards are found at normal random intervals, and as a result often appear in clumps that look like a pile-on, even though they are in fact just normal clumpiness.
2) When you use the word targeting, this suggests individual journalists bear in mind specific targets. But in reality it's all just pile-on, isn't it? There was something else going on with Gay in the media, so an old story about her plagiarism was more likely to attract clicks for those few days. None of the journalists involved need have any animus against Gay; they just need to follow the rules of the news game like good little automata, chase the clicks, and the avalanche of bad news forms naturally.
Read like this, it is certainly worth knowing: if you ever get into the media, it will not rain on you it will pour. But this doesn't imply "targeting," I don't think.
Were they reported on before? I know people had dug this up at places like the EJMR board, and that it would pop up in that context, but my understanding was that this didn't hit a mainstream/major digital outlet until then. Open to correction.
I think there's specific targets, fwiw. It made sense for Rufo (actually the best work was by Aaron Sibarium, but no matter) et al to target Gay; it made sense to target Oxman, though her case is funny since it's far from obvious what the consequences are supposed to be. It's true outlets want the clicks but I think the mechanisms there are more targeted, yes.
I thought Gay did better than the other lady president, the one who had a smirk we haven't seen since that kid stood outside the Washington Monument being harrassed by the weird wooden Indian/imposter veteran.
I don't know if her smirk was defiant - because she knew she was doomed - or if it was just her natural mien, over which she has little control ... An interesting difference between men and women. The men in those sinecures generally know how to look the part. Women get into those positions without needing to master that particular skill; we've all experienced that. Odd how it came home to roost though.
As for Gay, sure, somebody diligent and unqueasy about such things had to dig - but the CONTEXT was this: progressives elevate someone like that, for reasons of ideology and skin color, but they don't trouble to do it well. They don't trouble to find someone legitimate enough to withstand scrutiny. Because somewhere in their heart of hearts, their gossip-y, back-biting, judgmental hearts - they don't want anyone more solid. They like to reserve that power. They're perfectly happy for everyone to guess/know that she didn't have the goods, academics-wise. Partly it's to clearly demonstrate what it's all really about - pointing back to *them* (be afraid, be very afraid). Partly it's to make sure everyone knows that the job is in their gift, that they are the puppetmasters.
My assumption is that those kinds of smirks are frightened defensiveness, other than Dick Cheney's which seems to be semi-permanent.
I guess I can see that. Curiously I'm a bit of a smirker myself, but only in private, when I'm alone and reading something that raises my ire. Or occasionally in response to a deranged driver, or someone who litters. I'm a natural hater.
But if there's ever a time to will your facial muscles into neutrality, a discussion that touches on "genocide", however cynically, is surely that time.
Especially as, there can be little question the president of an Ivy would make use of the term "genocide" freely - and very likely loosely - at any other time, for her own purposes, or at the behest of others.
Overpromoted women as university presidents aren't even good at faking it. Among poential male fakes, only the best fakes get the job, the ones who are good actors.
I think there's less here than there seems to be. Journalists are literally attention seekers. They want their stories read to enhance their reputation and their owner's profit. Stories which get read are man bites dog stories. "Harvard professor may be plagiarist' is a dog bites man story until outside factors promote it to man bites dog. If they had run the story before it became interesting, no one would have read it, it would have been easier to refute, and people would now be saying"look at the mud slinging journalists dragging up this tired old story."
As for the EA professor, thirty years ago he was a (possibly not yet even professorial) author of racist emails. There's at least the possibility that he has not completely changed his views over 30 years even if he says he has. If he remains racist, this is front and centre to EA (does he think dollars spent on Africa are comparatively wasted?) If he is who I think it's even more central to AI ethics. How can you think clearly about machine rights when you don't believe in universal human rights? His prominence changes the email from dog bites man to man bites dog. The moral is, don't be racist even if you are obscure.
"How can you think clearly about machine rights when you don't believe in universal human rights?"
What right is he arguing be violated?
I don't claim he is, nor that such rights exist or are capable of existence. I am simply saying that this is a type of question on which he is likely to be listened to, and that evidence of potential bias on his part is therefore relevant and legitimate.
It's notable that the Time hit piece on EA did not name any of the alleged sexual abusers in the article. It said that some of the victims requested their abusers not be named, but it's unlikely everyone did. A sign the libel laws are working.
A sign that libel laws have an effect. But is it a good effect? If the accusations are false, then the laws cause diffuse libel over individual libel. Is that good? Is that even the intent of the laws?
Good piece - and yes, my sense is, if someone comes into the crosshairs for whatever reason, it's going to result in people digging on dirt to use at you, and this does not necessarily have to grow naturally out of the story that brought you to prominence in the first place.
This is pretty standardized and has been for decades - for political campaigns. What you're seeing here is essentially opposition research tactics - digging for needles in the hay stack, putting together mild quotes and off-hand comments, finding the thing you said in 2006 that juxtapositions itself poorly against the situation in 2024 - being extended into basically anyone who runs afoul of what a properly funded nonprofit cares about.
That a lot of media outlets don't even bother with the pretense they're doing something else (did anyone really think Business Insider was some sort of bastion of journalistic ethics before this?) makes it easier for the era of the "nonprofit newsroom." These situations emerge, someone good at Lexis-Nexis or TurnItIn or whatever's relevant runs up a pitch, and then some journo writes down the material they've been provided.
Remember the campaign to try to cancel Joe Rogan via the n-word tape?
C,C -> C,D -> D,D (-> C,C?)
C,C -> C,D -> D,D ... -> D,C -> C,C ...
It absolutely is targeting, but I think you're conflating different things here.
Gay was in a very important, very public position with (we thought) very high standards. She failed to live up to those standards. It is absolutely true that people didn't look until she took some crazy positions, but arguably the sort of person who would pass the high standards required of a Harvard President would never be so careless as to make the statements she made. She signaled through her professional behavior that something wasn't quite right, some people looked into it, and something wasn't quite right. Beyond anything she did, her position makes her subject to targeting. There are legal standards about this. She's clearly a public figure.
The Oxman targeting was unpleasant and clearly retaliation. But academics are also fair-game for targeting about their work. The reasons don't really matter.
Overall, I'd argue this is all a net positive; a lot of academics are very sloppy, and targeting for deeper review on the basis of political activism seems like a reasonable enough process. I'd prefer a more comprehensive, systematic external review system (new non-profit opportunity?). Academia's internal controls are badly broken, and outside review is a good thing.
Your case isn't comparable. You didn't do anything wrong. You're not an academic making claims of expertise based on your past work. You were involved with a group that was in the news, and you'd been a successful writer for a while. Nowhere near public-figure enough to justify invasion of privacy, but clearly the NYT disagreed. Targeting you wasn't justified.
There was also an element of retaliation, although more the standard journalistic kind (not talking huh? would be a real shame if this article was to be more negative and if we mentioned your name for no reason). Which is unpleasant, but also part of the way journalism works. Fear of negative press gets people to talk who might not otherwise talk. On net, I think that's also a positive, although it can be abused. Although I grant I might be less willing to take the greater-good position if something similar happened to me.
I don't think the timeline on Claudine Gay is right. I am sure I had heard about the plagiarism allegations about her well before Fall 2023 and I think they just didn't gain any traction until the congressional hearings.
Unfortunately, I can't find a link to support this, as I can't seem to filter out current news from the search. I guess it is possible I'm misremembering. It may have been from around the time she was hired as there was some controversy about her qualifications and criticisms that her appointment was mainly for DEI reasons.
If you don't know about it, you should use google's "search tools" (only on desktop, not mobile). Do a search, click the search tools button and more options come up, such as restricting to old pages (on mobile you can only restrict to new pages). You still get lots of false hits, but I found one real hit.
The earliest accusation of plagiarism against Gay I could find is from about when she became president. It didn't include any details, but claimed that the board had heard the accusations. It could easily be lies that just lucked out. The poster then switches to quoting Brunet's earlier and much more serious complaints.
https://www.econjobrumors.com/topic/claudine-gay-plagiarized-several-sources-nearly-verbatim
added: similar assertion from 1 year ago:
https://www.econjobrumors.com/topic/claudine-gay-faked-her-results-in-apsr-article-and-theres-proof
"But it’s the sort of thing that you can imagine having chilling effects. Imagine if, every time someone let their students/employees/whatever criticize Israel, journalists searched really hard for unrelated dirt on them. "
It ain't just journalists and it ain't just Israel. The criminal laws in the United States are far-reaching enough and broad enough in scope that an aggressive prosecutor can always find a pretext to bring charges against anyone. Even if they cannot make the charges stick, the legal fees alone are enough to bankrupt most people. I am in the 1%, and I could not afford to pay expensive lawyers for very long.
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." - Cardinal Richelieu
For that matter, the Scientologists have been known to do something similar in the civil litigation area.
Yes, this is a huge problem and I've been trying to figure out a solution but it's not clear what that would be.
The modern world is a complex place and even if you try to reduce the number of criminal laws you still need to be able to prosecute things like bribery even when it's done pretending to be payments for other things or blackmail -- but this inevitably means you end up with grey areas or fact/interpretation intensive questions that an aggressive prosecutor can use to ruin people.
So sure, fewer laws and an aggressive application of both the rule on lenity and the doctrine that the accused must have clear notice of the behavior to be avoided can help but it's not enough.
This was the original purpose of grand juries and I think we need to reinvigorate that idea. Require that prosecutors enpanel a jury of citizens who would get to see all the cases prosecutors want to bring -- or at least historical records of what has and hasn't been brought -- and let them hear some degree of response from the accused before deciding if the case should be brought.
This seems reasonable, but I'd like to see how it works out in practice a few places.
Ohh that's just a shot in the dark at maybe a way to make things better...it's a really hard problem and that's the best I've got.
The Harvard students never called for genocide against the Jews, and President Gay never supported a call for genocide.
Sample quotes from the internet.
What do you think about Harvard President Claudine Gay's apology for her remarks about calling for the genocide of Jews?
Do you agree with Harvard President Claudine Gay that calling for the genocide of Jews on campus depends on the "context"?
After witnessing the Congressional testimony of Claudine Gay, the President of Harvard, I am ashamed of my alma mater. How should Harvard respond to a call for the genocide of Jews on its campus?
When asked if calling for the genocide of Jews would violate Harvard's code of conduct, Gay wouldn't give a yes or no answer. Harvard constitutional law scholar Laurence Tribe called her testimony hesitant, formulaic and evasive. But he was among hundreds of faculty members who rallied behind Gay, urging Harvard to keep its president.
So exactly what was the testimony?
ELISE STEFANIK: It’s a yes or no question. Let me ask you this. You are president of Harvard, so I assume you’re familiar with the term intifada, correct?
CLAUDINE GAY: I’ve heard that term, yes.
ELISE STEFANIK: And you understand that the use of the term intifada in the context of the Israeli Arab conflict is indeed a call for violent armed resistance against the state of Israel, including violence against civilians and the genocide of Jews. Are you aware of that?
CLAUDINE GAY: That type of hateful speech is personally abhorrent to me.
ELISE STEFANIK: And there have been multiple marches at Harvard with students chanting quote, “there is only one solution intifada revolution.” And quote, “globalize the intifada.” Is that correct?
CLAUDINE GAY: I’ve heard that thoughtless, reckless and hateful language on our campus, yes.
ELISE STEFANIK: So, based upon your testimony, you understand that this call for intifada is to commit genocide against the Jewish people in Israel and globally, correct?
CLAUDINE GAY: I will say again that type of hateful speech is personally abhorrent to me.
ELISE STEFANIK: Do you believe that type of hateful speech is contrary to Harvard’s code of conduct or is it allowed at Harvard?
CLAUDINE GAY: It is at odds with the values of Harvard. But our values also —
ELISE STEFANIK: Can you not say here that it is against the code of conduct at Harvard?
CLAUDINE GAY: We embrace a commitment to free expression, even of views that are objectionable, offensive, hateful. It’s when that speech crosses into conduct that violates our policies against bullying, harassment —
ELISE STEFANIK: Does that speech not cross that barrier? Does that speech not call for the genocide of Jews and the elimination of Israel?
CLAUDINE GAY: When —
ELISE STEFANIK: You testify that you understand that it’s the definition of intifada. Is that speech according to the code of conduct or not?
CLAUDINE GAY: We embrace a commitment to free expression and give a wide berth to free expression even of views that are objectionable —
https://rollcall.com/2023/12/13/transcript-what-harvard-mit-and-penn-presidents-said-at-antisemitism-hearing/
So what IS the definition of "intifada"?
>>intifada
noun
: UPRISING, REBELLION
specifically : an armed uprising of Palestinians against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip<<
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/intifada
>>The right to resist is a human right<<
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_resist
"Intifada" means armed resistance to occupation. It does not mean "genocide". When Dr. Gay accepted Stefanik's definition, she was trapped.
Stefanik maneuvered Gay into declarating that support for a human right is:
"thoughtless, reckless and hateful language"
So sad.
Do you mean considering the actual meaning of words is problematic?
Stefanik wanted her to punish the students calling for intifada (for breaking the Harvard code of conduct). Do you disagree?
It’s been said before, but the issue isn’t so much that Claudine Gay adheres rigidly to the principles of free speech even for claims she strongly disagrees with - that’s actually noble - but that if you look at actual Harvard policy, they do the opposite of this for every other issue. You can call for violence against Zionists, but heaven forbid you say that there two genders!
Yes, I realize my analysis is narrowly focused. But if you glance at the four examples that I pulled out of the internet, none of them are mentioning inconsistent application of free speech. All four are reacting passionately to the claim of advocacy of genocide.
Agreed!
Is Claudine Gay just dumb, then? Is that the case you're making?
I would say she doesn't perform well under pressure.
But, consider this. What if she had said, 'Intifada means 'resistance to occupation', and the Palestinians have the right to resist their 75-year occupation. Furthermore Harvard students have the right to support the Palestinians in their just cause."
What would have been the result? Total uproar! "The president of Harvard is an anti-semite!" Etc.
I blocked P_O after this remark. I don't waste my time with people who argue in this manner.
Blocking everyone who disagrees with you - very good. You’ll be hired by the NYT in no time.
EDIT - this post initially said "censoring" instead of blocking. Turtle regrets the error.
I'll dialogue all day long with people who disagree with me thoughtfully and accurately. The ones who use inflammatory, inaccurate arguments go in the trash.
Blocking means I stop listening to you.
Censoring means I keep anyone from listening to you.
These are very different things, and confusion about them is one of the things making the world a worse place wrt free speech discussions.
How did you block someone? I'm super-interested in blocking you, but cannot find the UI element to make it happen. I assumed I'd just have to tolerate your obtuse and persistent refusal to see reality for what it was forever.
LOL!
I'm super tempted to say, "Sorry, deal with it." ;-)
Click on my icon. On a mobile you should see 3 vertical dots in the upper-right corner. Click there.
More likely, she is a smart person whose constraints were not compatible with answering those questions in a sensible way.
I wouldn't focus on the precise words used, quite so much. Consider that advocating for "a certain kind of traditional values" can be interpreted as calling for a return to Jim Crow or even black slavery. Would you truly defend someone who used those words, if they gave every other indication of being a racist? If they looked right in your face and smirked?
IMO, Gay correctly accepted that the chants were a call for genocide. But she got in trouble because of her incredibly clumsy attempts at equivocation, of trying to distinguish between what she personally thought and what the speech code allowed. And even if she could have skillfully navigated the distinction, she probably would have faltered once she was questioned about the historical context of Harvard speech code enforcement. There'd be no way around it - the speech code has been interpreted in different ways for different groups.
Do you actually think Harvard would have supported a white supremacist march calling for a revolution to free America from [insert slurs here]?
>>Gay correctly accepted that the chants were a call for genocide<<
So you believe that the meaning of the word "intifada" always includes the intent of genocide. What word should a Palestinian use if they just want an end to occupation?
No. But when used in certain contexts it can have that meaning. For one thing, when people are marching and chanting stuff, I'm inclined to interpret things more loosely. But in a wikipedia page about the "second intifada", I'd read that more literally.
How about "End the occupation"? "Stop the killing" would work.
"Free Palestine" is a lot better than "Palestine should be free", because the word "free" has muliple meanings in English, but the first version is clear about which meaning is being used. (Not "Judenfrei".)
If the march is in support of Palestinans, doesn't it seem natural to use their word?
I'm quite suspicious of a "loose" interpretation which means that the President of Harvard must resign. Seems to me that a very serious consequence requires some rigor.
For example, some documented examples where Palestinian shouts of INTIFADA clearly meant that they wanted to commit genocide. It's an Arabic word. I'm skeptical that non-Arabic speakers definitely understand the meaning. Particularly when the dictionaries don't support their claims.
Israel has killed 25,000 Palestinians (plus thousands "missing") and most supporters of Israel deny that this proves genocidal intent.
Not your fault, but this conversation is depressing me, so I'm going to stop after this. I'll outline what I was going to say, and feel free to respond, and I'll read it at some point.
1) Going back to my first comment, I think it'd be better to focus on Gay's equivocation, rather than the exact words used. I don't think she'd have been as accepting about white supremacists calling for a violent revolution and the expulsion of all black people from the US, even if no one specifically mentioned "killing" black people.
2) Official definitions don't capture what makes words meaningful. It's ultimately about what meaning your audience takes from what you say, and it's going to be slightly different for each person. It's incredibly fascinating that we understand each other despite that.
3) Israel's potentially-genocidal actions have no bearing on whether the pro-Palestinian protestors were also calling for genocide. In fact, the opposite: if they think Israel is genocidal, wouldn't that make them more likely to call for genocide in return?
I'm only going to respond to 3) at this point.
My focus is on the people deciding that the protestors were calling for genocide with zero evidence. In other words they reached that conclusion practically instantly.
These same people would also argue that genocide is NOT PROVEN in the case of Israel flattening Gaza and killing 25-30K Palestinians. They are extremely slow to come to any such conclusion.
> ELISE STEFANIK: And you understand that the use of the term intifada in the context of the Israeli Arab conflict is indeed a call for violent armed resistance against the state of Israel, including violence against civilians and the genocide of Jews. Are you aware of that?
To be clear, I think this is not nuanced enough. Although these days, people seem to have broader definitions of "genocide" than I do, so maybe it's accurate.
I shudder to think that Elise Stefanik could be Vice President of the United States in less than a year.
Huh. This is the first time I've heard of her. It doesn't look like she would have Pence's backbone, but I doubt any potential VP pick would. :-(
Keep your ears peeled. I think you will hear her name again in reference to a possible running mate for Trump.
I think most everyone is very interested in hearing an enemy talk about a return to a certain kind of traditional values and interpreting that as a call for a return to Jim Crow or slavery or some other evil thing. But I think that kind of interpretation is usually just putting words into someone else's mouth to try to win an argument.
Most people chanting about "from the river to the sea" have no desire to mass murder Jews in Israel, even if that would be the result of that policy. (Similarly, the often-highly-educated dimwits who talk about banning the internal combustion engine or the use of fossil fuels have no desire for the mass die-off of humanity that would result. This is partly ideologically-driven blindness, but mostly honest lack of brains.
There are people who use it in an innocuous way, and people who mean the bad thing. Part of what lets it work as meaning the bad thing, is that there **are** people who use it in an innocuous way. A not-quite-parallel example is that the Confederate flag can mean the bad thing of "slavery was good" or a more innocuous "fuck the government". I do not like the current trend of banning expression because some people interpret it as meaning a bad thing, but my side (our side?) appears to have lost that battle, so I'm trying to live in the new world.
Look what happened to the "OK" hand sign. From what I can gather, some Internet trolls created a fake rumor that it was a white supremacist gesture, and then the left-wing media took the bait and ran wild with it, and then people started deliberately using it to antagonize the left, and eventually some actual white supremacists read about it and started using it unironically. What does it actually mean? Who knows, it's in the eye of the beholder. But I'm certainly not going to flip it out at a random person anymore, especially a black person, when I can just give a "thumbs up" instead. (As with certain other things, if I were black I would not have this problem, because as long as my skin were visible, it would dramatically lower the chances of me being interpreted to mean the bad thing.)
Similarly, if I were to voice support for Palestinians, I'd use "stop the occupation" and "stop the killing" and "stop the violence", instead of something which I know has been used to mean genocide, and which at the very mildest means violent revolution. The use of violence to redress current and past grievances is precisely the problem here.
That is not the relevant part of the testimony. This is:
Stefanik: Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard's rules of bullying and harassment? Yes or no?
President Gay: It can be depending on the context.
Congresswoman Stefanik: What's the context?
President Gay: Targeted at an individual targeted, as at an individual?
Congresswoman Stefanik: It's targeted at Jewish students, Jewish individuals. Do you understand your testimony is dehumanizing them? Do you understand that dehumanization is part of antisemitism? I will ask you one more time. Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard's rules of bullying and harassment? Yes or no?
President Gay: Antisemitic rhetoric when it crosses into conduct, that amounts to bullying, harassment, intimidation, that is actionable conduct, and we do take action.
Congresswoman Stefanik: So the answer is yes. That calling for the genocide of Jews violates Harvard Code of Conduct. Correct?
President Gay: Again, it depends on the context.
(The rest of your comment is tying yourself in knots trying to justify mass-murder of all Jews in Israel. It's not ambiguous at all what those slogans mean.)
I suspect she was thinking about the way the first amendment deals with calls for violence. As I understand it (not all that well), the rule is that a general call for violence ("we should overthrow the government and install Trump as dictator") is protected, but a specific call for imminent violence ("there's that traitor Pence now, let's get him!") is not.
Now, Harvard doesn't restrict its rules to the first amendment, and doesn't have to--they are a private university. But that seems like the distinction she's thinking of.
Assume for a moment that the students were NOT CALLING FOR GENOCIDE. Is Stefaniks question relevant? Would a fair judge intervene, and say, "The witness does not need to answer the question."
Of course I believe the students were calling for intifada.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/intifada
Whether any students were calling for genocide is immaterial to the question of whether calls for genocide violate Harvard's rules of bullying and harassment.
Stefanik wants Dr. Gay to agree that THESE STUDENTS have violated the code of the conduct. It's not an abstract question.
What Stefanik wants is also immaterial to the question of whether calls for genocide violate Harvard's rules of bullying and harassment.
In a court of law immaterial questions are not allowed. Yet, a President of a major university was fired as a consequence of this hearing.
Relevant: https://www.leefang.com/p/the-secret-dossier-behind-claudine
I think it was fairly common practice among Sports Journalists for decades to look the other way as long as the player was performing on the field, but quick to cite off-field incidents when the performance started lacking. A few different factors at play for sports like wanting to ensure continued access to the player and team, but not surprising that most journalists have agendas that can be manipulated.
That's not great but preferentially critisizing poorly performing athletes doesn't have the same social costs. If it's an equal opportunity thing it might not matter, but the concern is that this can effectively serve as a kind of ideological blackmail to push certain views into/out of the Overton window and that there is therefore a social cost.
Not sure it's true when applied to university presidents but I get the concern in other circumstances.
> it’s always easy to notice and critique power, except when you’re it
I’m curious whether this power has increased over the past decade or not. On the one hand before social media, journalism had a lot of power. It brought down Nixon during the Watergate scandal. It strong-armed the US government into war during the Spanish-American war. But on the other hand, these targeted attacks on semi-prominent individuals might not have been very effective anytime before social media when it was more difficult to socially shame everybody. It’s not like I could’ve named Claudine Gay or Oxman before this time. I guess I'm wondering if part of journalism’s power is an artifact of how social media makes people more susceptible to public shame.
A concern I have about the Gay scandal is that we seem to have forgotten the purpose of norms about plagarism and are just jumping through arbitrary hoops. Academia isn't a game or more school it's about producing valuable research and if you can save time by copying some text describing a methodology then that should be allowed.
Ok, but we need to have norms and she violated them right? Not so fast...these norms are less clear than you think. Recently on an academic Facebook group someone asked, in light of the Gay scandal, about the acceptability of using word for word suggestions from your partner about how to word paragraphs without attribution[1]. About half the responses said: duh ofc it's fine why would you even ask while about a quarter said it's obviously plagarism. A surprising number even said it's not plagarism **because** those suggestions didn't appear in print so no one will find out.
So the norms aren't as clear as people think and to the extent they are we might want to ask if they are the appropriate ones.
1: In some male coded fields some women worry that if you include the thanks you'll be accused by some of just having your partner write your papers. And it can be awkward in multi-author papers.
I don't mean to claim she didn't do something that existing norms don't forbid -- just that those norms seem relatively arbitrary and kinda divorced from the underlying concerns. I I think the clarity issue goes to seriousness but my concern here isn't defending Gay but about creating better norms for plagarism in the future and clearly communicating them.
I will say, to that end, those guidelines aren't really written with dissertations in mind and are less clear in practice than you might think, eg, it's common in mathematics to repeat common definitions without citing to a specific source -- often in what's essentially word for word identical text. So it's just not true that they really expect literally every idea from someone else to be cited or in quotes. If discipline specific norms mean it's not confusing than in practice it's fine. So let's not pretend the rule is actually always cite or quote.
And it's unclear exactly where the dividing line between proofreading help and suggesting exact wording lies.
But yes this doesn't cover her case...Im just saying that maybe the norms should allow this kind of sharing of wording amoung fellow grad students for technical descriptions.
Norms for academic publishing are extremely clear, laid out in detail by every university and impressed into undergraduates under threat of expulsion. Gay obviously violated them.
First we aren't talking about the rules for ug coursework but for a thesis which is generally expected to adhere to academic norms in the field. And everyone agrees those are clear -- they just don't agree on what they say. It's like asking people about what the 2nd amendment means -- though at least there people know others disagree. But I agree Gay did something that isn't within the scope of ambiguity (though how serious it is may be) but I'm just not concerned about Gay but about the norms for academic work going forward.
I've seen repeated discussion of whether certain practices are acceptable on academic groups and while everyone involved says it's obvious they then give different answers.
The problem is that the norms are virtually never discussed or talked about so everyone applies their interpretation and assumes it's the same one everyone else has.
Unfortunately, the rules weren't written or applied by mathematicians and everyone else understands rules in light of what they understand the purpose behind them to be so it seems blinding clear to everyone what they say and yet they get different answers just like with the 2nd amendment.
--
Not saying this extends to the Gay case. I think everyone agrees that's not ok but there is disagreement about the seriousness and there isn't agreement about what about the Gay case makes it different than the example above but my concern isn't with Gay but about the norms and rules going forward for academia.
And this is made worse, not better, by published rules by universities for ug work and journals. For instance, self-plagarism just isn't an academic ethical concern -- it's a copyright issue that worries journals and the goals of UG coursework differ from academic goals. Reusing work in multiple courses gives an unfair advantage in grading while reusing work in academia is being efficient.
> In some male coded fields some women worry that if you include the thanks you'll be accused by some of just having your partner write your papers. And it can be awkward in multi-author papers.
Poor excuses. They should do it anyway.
Are you saying that's the actual norm or it should be the norm? The disagreement amoung academics about it I observed shows that it's at least not clearly the norm now. Moreover, I don't see much of a case for it being a good norm.
You aren't stealing anything without permission. And this isn't some school assignment or pointless game, what matters is producing the research so who cares? It's like those dumb arguments that academics shouldn't get to use Adderall because it gives them an unfair advantage -- you aren't given a job because you deserve it, lots of other people are more deserving, but to produce output society sees as valuable.
Now maybe you suggest that it's a problem because it might mean that their current work is an inaccurate predictor of future work because they might break up but that's not a good argument. I mean tons of things affect productivity we don't ask people to cite or reveal from health events, to changes in their prescription meds to the inspiring conversations they have with a partner. There is a philosopher who is famous for always jumping into the subject their current romantic partner studies. All of these are easily much larger factors impacting future productivity but we don't think those should be reported.
Indeed, I'd argue it doesn't reduce the reliability of current work as a signal of future productivity at all. It doesn't really matter what the reason is your work would fall apart in the event of a divorce and science doesn't really care if John Doe names an individual, couple, polycule or a dog with an AI assistant.
I would not presume to comment on whether it is the norm, but I think it should be the norm because it's the right thing to do.
That doesn't make any sense. If everyone agrees: yup that's a fine way to do attribution in what way can it be immoral?
Do you think God gave Elseveir the one true universal rule for assigning authorship and all cultures must follow it?!?
Saying it's wrong is like saying that it's wrong to use your book or notes during a test...that may be what you are used to doing but obviously a society can adopt whatever rule they feel like as long as everyone is told what that rule is.
One rule may be more efficient or practical but the norm is what makes the thing right or wrong not vice versa.
> Do you think God gave Elseveir the one true universal rule for assigning authorship and all cultures must follow it?!?
What I think is that it is unlikely to be productive to engage further with someone who makes such bizarre strawman statements and attributes them to me. Goodbye.
>if you include the thanks you'll be accused by some of just having your partner write your papers.
...I mean they ARE having their partner write the paper. I'm not super sympathetic to the concern that it'll look like they're doing what they're actually doing.
But no, it isn't plagiarism because the phrase was given for the specific purpose of being used in that particular paper. If you say "I'm writing a report, how do you think I should word this," it's extremely obvious that any answer you give will end up in that report, and thus giving any answer at all is permission to use it. If they were desperate for credit they would have negotiated terms.
If on the other hand this was originally a quote from some other topic around the dinner table or something, not meant to be repeated, then cite your sources.
If that is really your concern, your chief concern is that Gay received a Ph.D at all, and indeed, examined this whole nonsense Ph.D process that seems to dominate the culture in liberal arts departments. Should you really get a Ph.D just because you hung around long enough either paying tuition or receiving a paltry stipend? That doesn't seem right.
I appreciate your point, but I think the status of a university president is essentially that of a congress member or politician. Your job is as much about projecting a certain image as anything else.
I have some quibles about the norms Gay was accused of violating but it's not crazy to say that we hire a certain group of people to be, in part, figureheads and that their high pay and status is in part compensation for the need to be relatively free of this kind of scandal.
This wasn't some professor or blogger dragged out of psuedo-anonymity but someone who fought to take a very public politically charged position knowing she'd be subject to increased scrutiny. So even if I'm not thrilled about the lack of scrutiny of our norms about plagarism, becoming a university president and complaining about this kind of attack is a bit like becoming an MMA fighter and then trying to file assault charges.
This is obviously correct and I've seen it repeatedly. My first exposure was Cosby, who is obviously a monster, but had been a monster for decades, and nobody cared until he started having unpopular positions. The solution can't be "stop investigating people with unpopular opinions" because that's never going to happen and also we should in fact investigate bad people. Instead journalists need to introduce processes for finding stories that also, occasionally, implicate popular people. Imagine.
There's a difference, obviously, between that case and the media's treatment of the grey tribe. There isn't even smoke here, for the most part. SBF was both very bad and took advantage of particular silicon bro weaknesses, and got deserved scrutiny. But media has an axe to grind against west coast tech guys, took it too far, there was a bit of a backlash, and they backed off.
FWIW I don't think that media folks see their actions as targeting. I think instead that they're increasingly bad at examining biases, to the point they're unaware entirely that they have them.
100% agreed.
Consider some possible alternatives:
1. Journalists target people using a random number generator over the broadest possible distribution
2. Journalists develop a utilitarian calculus for investigating journalism which allows them to attack the people who are doing the Most Bad.
Consider also this recent bit of investigative journalism, triggered by a dismissive twitter reply, which showed that there's extremely low hanging fruit in the investigative journalism area:
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-a-quick-overview
Broadly, people don't object to investigative journalism. If it targets you and yours it's bad. If it targets people you don't care about with mud you don't care about it's "bad". But it's going to target someone, and they wouldn't write it unless they thought someone would care about the mud.
Journalists, amateur and professional, are going to target people according to their feelings about said people. Whether the targeted fall depends how strong their coalition is and how much it divides the coalition.
Conceptually, it seems like this should just be considered a force of nature and your coalition should simply develop good defenses against it. If your coalition can't stand up to your opposition's accusations maybe it's time for introspection.
I do understand that individual people (typically leadership) of these organizations tend to bear the brunt of these attacks. But what's the solution, really?
Was going to comment on how Gay would never say that about other groups, and Ackman never denied digging up dirt, but the last time I commented I got death threats...
"doxxing my real name"
Not sure it's fair to conflate your "real" (whatever that is) with your state name.
Haven't you read your Vernor Vinge? The state **is** the Great Enemy who can control you if they ever find out your True Name.
(That was meant to be joking, tongue-in-cheek. Sorry if it came out differently.)
You’re good!
"Compare to the hypothetical situation about Israel above. Investigative journalists have credibly signaled that if you go after their allies in academia, they’ll go after you and your loved ones"
I don't think this is equivalently 'chilling' to the Claudine Gay case. Rufo's attack on Gay's plagiarism wasn't really in any way directly related to the nature of the controversy Gay was in, however poorly you think of her answers to the questions at the Congressional committee. The criticism of Oxman, meanwhile, was over the very same wrongdoing about which Ackman was crusading. In this light, 'go after prominent academics/administrators and we'll go after your family' is a very uncharitable characterisation of Business Insider's coverage. A more reasonable interpretation, to my mind, is 'if you're going to go after someone for plagiarism, you should probably hold those close to you to the same standards', which, having very publicly gone to bat for his wife, Ackman has failed to do.
Valid points.
Specifically, I have been an early and committed financial supporter of developing investigative reporter Chris Brunet. I encourage readers not to sweep Brunet in with some partisan witch hunters. To do so is to misunderstand his integrity, in my opinion.
Scott, I strongly recommend reading Brunet's articles before surmising his intentions, though the impact can of course be discussed without understanding his work.
Brunet's focus is fraud, primarily academic fraud, although his exposure of brilliant crypto fraudster Avraham Eisenberg through Discord is intriguing. Brunet began with raw anger powering his investigations, and continues to develop into a deeper thinker.
You describe Brunet as conservative. That is accurate given what is called conservative today, yet it also adopts framing designed to discount moderate views. Brunet is not dedicated to promoting conservative positions, though his X posts might give that impression. In his Karlstack, Brunet is dedicated to combating deceit and hypocrisy with a fervor for truth and accuracy.
Brunet first wrote about concerns with Claudine Gay in April 2022. Clearly her fair or unfair targeting of data-respecting, conservative black scholar Roland Fryer was motivation to look into her own comparative scholarship. What was the source of her power to crush a black scholar, arguably for countering the DEI party line, using what many consider to be a trumped up witch hunt?
It was remarkable that of the many serious research problems in her markedly thin publication record, the omitting of and altering of data, the questionable statistical approaches, racial promotion of an otherwise unqualified candidate, it was the least of the issues, the lazy cut-and-paste plagiarism hyped by Rufo, that stuck.
It was her comments regarding antiSemitism that lit the fire, and Scott has, as always, interesting observations regarding the implications. Yet there had long been smoke.
Yeah, Brunet has been on Gay for a while, as he explained: https://www.karlstack.com/p/for-me-this-was-personal
Just as an aside: I think describing someone on a one-dimensional political access is almost never very accurate if they are at all an independent thinker.
Brunet likes to investigate academic scandals. He encouraged my analysis of the most famous paper by Lisa D. Cook, a Biden nominee to be Governor of the Federal Reserve Board. I didn't find any fraud, but I did find that her best known paper was a complete fiasco, as I explained in 2022:
https://www.takimag.com/article/half-cooked-data/
We all want journalists on Simulacrum Level 1, but they are all lvl 2 at best and more often lvl 3 or 4. They don't just want you to know about plagiarism, they want you to know about THIS or THAT plagiarism, ONLY because of the effect it'll have on your opinions - namely your stance in the red-blue culture war and how confidently you hold that stance.
How cool it would be to have an AI model that measures something like the "culture war magnitude" of an article. To preemptively answer the question: "If we strip out the culture war component of this story, how much of a 'story' is left?" And then filter your news by that metric.
I think journalism is just returning to its historical roots. I would suggest that the 1920s journalistic ideal of "objectivity, neutral POV, higher standards" journalism was in fact a business decision by several publishers who were attempting to distinguish themselves from the "yellow journalism" era of the 1890s-1910s. Over time that standard became less important as a business differentiator, but it was culturally locked in (more or less) until the Internet forced another rethinking of cultural communication.
That supposed ideal was always a lie, and journalism was never anything other than what it is; the only change that is being exposed because of recent technological developments lowering institutional barriers to information and increasing connectivity .
Well, yeah. Now we can get whatever flavor of information suits our palate. This probably is not a good thing.
I disagree: I think everyone having access to the truth is better than otherwise, even if that means everyone also has access to lies they prefer instead.
I wonder if Scott has updated his position on [Conflict vs Mistake](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/).
Good point!
Attention is a scarce resource.
If one is hunting for dirt on one person then one can't be hunting for dirt on another.
This is the same problem that the Stasi (and KGB and FBI) had back in the day: They would LIKE to keep tabs on everyone. But because of limited resources they couldn't.
The good news (?) is that by automating this sort of thing I expect in the future there will be folks who have let computers trawl through Twitter and Intagram and academic publications and they will have databases of this sort of thing for everyone with any sort of on-line presence. When they choose to release the findings will be another matter.
> You shouldn’t base it on one very dramatic data point, because the generation of dramatic data points involves a lot of noise.
I’d missed this article. Now that I’ve read it, I found it convincing, but I wouldn’t use the term “noise” to summarize. It implies a problem with detection rather than estimation.
In radar detectors, noise is the thermal contribution to measured power. It doesn’t change based on the presence of the target.
If measured power is analogous to media attention, then noise would be the background level of coverage in the absence of a dramatic event. Once an event has actually happened, coverage is not noise, but *signal*.
That’s all well and good up until such a signal is used as a proxy for something, at which point the usual map/territory distinction applies. The radar equivalent would be assuming signal corresponds to physical target size. Yeah, it does, but much like media coverage of bombings, that effect is completely dominated by distance to the target.
The generation of dramatic data points doesn’t involve any more noise than usual. It’s just decoupled from the thing people *assume* it’s measuring.
@Scott Alexander the comparison between Gay and the other cases seems to overlook major points of difference.
First, elite university presidents should plagiarize less, not “not more” than others! Damning with faint praise indeed.
But beyond that, Gay’s record was supposed to be scrutinized twice before the scandal hit- when she was being nominated for her position, and when previous accusations were made (another detail Scott overlooks). The lack of any actual scrutiny and the obvious hypothesis for it are a big part of the scandal.
Finally, and I don’t think this point is made enough, Gay’s academic record is abysmal. You can quibble about the count, but 11 publications with 2-3k citations, all in a narrow field, is simply pathetic for a serious researcher- and had to be even worse when she was getting accepted for tenure and elected dean. If that is not even high-quality and integrity research- then it’s not clear to what extent is she an academic at all. One may think that it’s fine to have non-academics lead universities- but guess which side strongly opposes this!
As a nitpick- the latest development is in fact that the chief diversity officer at Harvard is accused of massive plagiarism too.
Is there any good explanation for how she got tenure at Harvard with that publication record? It seems unlikely that being a black woman explains all that much of it--it seems like there are a lot of black female professors, many of them with way more impressive publication records, who'd love to be offered tenure at Harvard.
That's a great question!
First, let me justify my description of Gay's record, at least a bit. I won't deny my biases, so having facts is important.
So depending on what you count and where you look, she has 2-3K citations for 11 publications. For comparison, Sally Kornbluth (whatever else might be said about her) has ~14K citations when I checked. Alan Garber, Harvard's interim president, has ~20K citations for 300 publications. I understand that different fields are different, but those two did research involving cells growing and whatnot - doesn't seem like an obviously "easier"/"quicker" domain. For further comparison, Larry Summers has 115K citations and 1076 publications! Metrics can always be misleading and I'm certainly not an expert on academic evaluation nor on Gay's domain, so I'd be happy to learn more. Still, Gay's record cannot be called anything but lackluster, objectively. Just to be on the safe side, I looked up a random professor of political science - named Alan Gerber! He has 25K citations and 228 publications. I rest my case.
Now to your actual point. There are many considerations in hiring beyond looking at a number or two (as there should be, I guess). Who were the candidate's advisors, which connections have they forged, who wrote their recommendation letters and how warm were those, how good are they at presenting their ideas, how well does their research vision and program fit into that of the faculty. The list goes on.
I'm perfectly willing to acknowledge that Gay may have been strong along some of these axes. For instance, she graduated from Harvard (possibly giving her an advantage there), her advisor was Gary King whom Wikipedia describes as one of '25 professors with "Harvard's most distinguished faculty title"' - couldn't hurt her. Her thesis (not fully reflected in her publications, perhaps) won a prize - though I have no way of assessing how prestigious it actually is and the money seems to be 150$. (and of course this makes the plagiarism charges regarding the thesis even more relevant). By all accounts she's highly agreeable in person.
So if someone says "hey, all these statistics are biased and discriminatory and she's a wonderful academic in all ways but publishing", I don't think this is an impossible case to make. But it has to be made! Instead all we get is how her record is actually great and any claims to the contrary are racist and evil. Similarly, the plagiarism accusations were first called "demonstrably false", before being considered inaccurate, or biased, or irrelevant, or "targeting" (e.g. right here).
BTW, looking deeper into all this, I found this:
"Harvard Law School professor and Winthrop House faculty dean Ronald Sullivan faced student protests in spring 2019 after joining the legal defense team for Harvey Weinstein, who was on trial for rape. Gay called Sullivan's response to the controversy "insufficient," citing his "special responsibility" as house dean for the well-being of Winthrop residents."
Special responsibility indeed.
Finally, the premise of your question is that there are many more qualified black female candidates. Are there, though? Perhaps not many "survive" the filtering by the PhD, post-doc and tenure track stages. Perhaps they tend to be in different fields. Perhaps they do in fact get good positions elsewhere. Indeed, one of sources Gay allegedly plagiarized is Carol Swain, a black female professor of political science at Vanderbilt.
Is it a bit like keeping an obituary ready for really old famous people ? If they die, the paper that has that ready can publish a great obit faster than others.
There's certainly a disturbing trend here, a mean-spiritedness. One side seems more righteous than the other though of the two you compare. Oxman's wife was just the innocent wife of the guy they were going after. If he continues what they did, using their logic, he'd have to go after the BI editors' spouses!
What was done to you is chilling. That's how I heard about your blog and found it though! SSC was retired then and ACT was what I found.
>Is it a bit like keeping an obituary ready for really old famous people?
Well this is just demanding the old SNL "pre-taped news" skit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tX6jdoruH8
>The plagiarism was discovered by conservative journalists Chris Rufo and Chris Brunet. It would be quite a coincidence for them to find it at exactly the moment Gay was already under attack for her anti-Semitism testimony. More likely, they either:
>Found it a while ago, and kept it in reserve for a time when Gay was in the news
>Or were angry about Gay’s testimony, looked for dirt on her, and found it.
I don't think either option is correct.
I first read about Claudine Gay in a post by Christopher Brunet on April 17th, 2022. It sure said quite a bit about her, including attempting to tie her to Jeffery Epstein, Harvey Weinstein, and three other misc. academic scandals at Harvard, but if you scroll down far enough you get to "Gay’s Scholarly Merit (or lack thereof)", which does call her out for lack of replicability and low academic qualifications.
https://www.karlstack.com/p/the-curious-case-of-claudine-gay
Researching academic fraud is basically his bit, mostly via the Econ Job Market Rumors website, so it's definitely right up his wheelhouse and I am skeptical it was just opportunistic/precipitated by the congressional testimony.
Not very complicated, IMO. Gay shouldn't be president of Harvard (because plagiarism) and Ackman shouldn't have used something ("plagiarism is really bad") as a means to an end ("get rid of Gay") if he wasn't willing to have that belief pressure tested. Should Ackman's strategic behavior get a pass because proving his hypocrisy meant digging up dirt on his wife? I dunno but it feels to me as though Ackman was playing with fire, and Gay wasn't sufficiently vetted.
Hello, I am the Brunet mentioned at the start of this article.
When speculating on my motives, you say that perhaps I was ''angry about Gay’s testimony, looked for dirt on her, and found it.'' You are not the first to draw this conclusion! However, the truth is -- not to minimize the Israel/Palestine thing -- I never cared about her testimony. I have been writing about Claudine Gay for over 2 years, before any issues related to her congressional testimony came to light.
I wrote this on October 21, 2022, back when she was still a Dean:
''I can’t stress enough how much of a tragedy a Claudine Gay presidency would be — this musn’t be allowed to come to pass. She will ruin Harvard.''
On my Substack my main beat is academic integrity, and that was my only motivation for writing about her all along, although other people (the person who sent me the plagiarism tip?) clearly had their own motivations, and other actors had their own motivations to further weaponize my research. It is what it is. I can't control other people, I can only put the truth out there, and then it takes on a life of its own.
Sometimes people (not you) accuse me of being motivated by race, that is also false. I have written roughly 200 articles about academic malfeasance, and they are mostly about economics, finance, accounting -- stuff that has nothing to do with race. To me, this was just another corrupt academic that had committed academic fraud, and that is all I had to point out.
"I can only put the truth out there" is what scummy journalists say when they're targeting their political enemies. Using that as an explanation doesn't distinguish you from them.
she is indeed my political enemy, my enemies deserve to be taken down a peg
and i targeted her for that, but it was secondary
but my primary motivation was the truth and academic integrity
i take down tons of frauds who i have no clue what their politics are
"i targeted her for that, but it was secondary
but my primary motivation was the truth and academic integrity"
The first statement makes it really, really, really hard for me to believe the second.
"i take down tons of frauds who i have no clue what their politics are"
Sure, but do you target the ones who are explicitly on your side? If not, then you're engaging in precisely the sort of behavior that Scott is complaining about.
I would be happy to target any conservative professor that is explicitly on my side, if you know any conservative academics who have committed fraud, please email me a tip at chrisbrunet@protonmail.com
Here is an article where I shit on Republicans:
Maryland Congressional Race Reveals Glimpse into GOP Slime Machine
https://www.karlstack.com/p/maryland-congressional-race-reveals
>Sure, but do you target the ones who are explicitly on your side? If not, then you're engaging in precisely the sort of behavior that Scott is complaining about.
Leftists are vastly, vastly overrepresented on college campuses, especially in positions of power and prestige. Claudine Gay specifically only has a career because she's a left-wing black woman.
In a world like this, why the hell would not expect someone concerned with academic integrity to spend almost all of their time talking about left-wingers?
Intuitively, I would expect conservative professors to be much cleaner in general than liberal professors, just because they're an unpopular minority. People with more enemies have to be more cautious.
Similarly, I would expect politically more palatable research results in the social sciences to be shakier than politically less palatable research results. In one case, the reviewers are asking "may I believe it," in the other they're asking "must I believe it."
That's interesting to know you have been writing about her for so long, hope this comment gets more notice.
Thank you for posting here to clear this up.
Claudine Gay's shoddy scholarly credentials and the disgrace of her tenure at Stanford and hiring by Harvard were well known years before the general public found out. It wasn't really that she was targeted-- more that "little people" were screaming about her for years, but nobody listened until her Congressional testimony. That's why the Harvard Trustees thought they could get away with making her President.
Burnet discovered Gays plagiarism years ago but it went nowhere. I think it was a leak by a political rival in academia.
I followed the Oxman/Ackman drama on Twitter, and Oxman is actually NOT at MIT. She left to start a company in 2020.
Ackman described talking to the BI reporter who clearly thought this could get Oxman fired from the job she no longer has.
In general, a billionaire's wife with her own company is probably one of the harder cancellation targets there is. You'll disclose the places where she copy-pasted Wikipedia for a definition in her dissertation, and she will have a bad couple weeks of ruined sleep and ruined digestion. And then, she'll go back to being a billionaire's wife with her own company.
I think Scott is conflating four different phenomena.
1. Personal malice, of one individual for another. "That Scott Alexander is giving me a hard time, dammit!" Journalists feel this but do not admit it. Ie I would never write a piece that "gets" Scott because I am annoyed at him. But, lo and behold, my piece on him turned out negative, for what I fool myself into thinking are sound reasons. This does happen.
2. Institutional blindness, or what the French call "deformation professionelle." This is when you acquire the groupthink of your trade and no longer see obvious facts because your profession trained you to discount them and you want to be a good practitioner, not an amateur.
I noticed in the Scott v NY Times brouhaha that the reporter justified himself by saying, in effect, "Scott's name isn't a secret, anyone could find it with a little Googling, so what is the big deal?" He was (I bet sincerely) incapable of seeing the difference between being semi-findable with effort vs being named in the fucking New York Times.
This is how journalists are trained to think: If it is possible to do X to you, then it is not my fault if I do X to you.
And this is a feature, not a bug. If I thought "oh, dear, when I write that this study does not hold up, the researcher will be mad, boo hoo," then I could never write anything critical about anyone. A problem arises, though, when you mix Item 1 in my list with Item 2.
3. Institutional structure. This is where many smart people go wrong talking about "the media." People, we are not well-organized! A newspaper, like a brain, consists of many different parts that communicate imperfectly with one another. There is no central guiding homunculus.
Instead, we go by explicit and implicit learned guidelines about what constitutes a good story and what merits public attention. Those guidelines don't permit anyone to say, to themselves or anyone else, "hey, let's 'get' X for our own selfish reasons." When people are making judgments according to their own interpretations of codes that have different versions, there is plenty of room for self-deception. But there is no room for explicit decisions to target people as punishment.
Of course we can speak of institutional decisions. A story like the Neri Oxman piece involves more than one person -- it needs a reporter to hear a tip or rumor, and editors to say, "whoa, yeah, that's fair game." And the judgment of those people can be fucked up by items 1,2 and 4 (below). But that is not a central institutional decision to "get" the hedge fund guy.
Instead, the chain of thought is this: Powerful guy drives an official out of office, in part by saying a single standard for plagiarism should apply to all, be they students or administrators or anything else. But if a single standard should apply to all, then why can't we ask about his own spouse's infractions? Are they minor? Sure, but so were a lot of the official's whom he targeted? Are they unimportant in the great scheme of things (no one cares about Media Arts)? Yes, but that is irrelevant. The captivating story is the powerful guy proclaiming a standard his own family can't uphold.
My point is not to defend this argument (though I could if I had to). My point is simply that people who sincerely think this is correct are not out to "get" Oxman's spouse. They are pursuing a story that passes the two criteria journalists actually care about: Is this going to interest the reader? And, is this good for society? My guess is they answered yes because, jeez, it was interesting and because anything that slows down the attempt of billionaire money wizards to lord it over higher education is good for society.
4. Media groupthink. After FTX "everyone knew" that everything associated with SBF was bad. Very bad! So now we are open to stories about the badness of everything he believed. Media people are as susceptible as anyone else to this.
TL;DR -- Journalism is a welter of interacting psychic and cultural drives in which coherent and explicit decisions to punish individuals don't happen. A lot of bad things DO happen in journalism, but Spiers' quote is correct. We don't sit around deciding to "get" people.
You say "We are not well organized" but I imagine a journalist sees something about X published in a paper (of the same political slant) she doesn't work for, and still takes a message from it : "Our" side needs to amplify this thing about X. I'll do it too. And writes about it in her paper. And this continues.
Could this be kinda right?
Though activism is pervading journalism these days, our professional ethos remains that we don't have a side. So I don't think any real journalist thinks about "our side."
I don't mean we try for a humanly impossible neutrality (the "view from nowhere," as if we didn't have lives situated in one part of society and another). I mean that even when we wear our hearts on our sleeves we regard our independence as inalienable.
Suppose I am writing about an organization that I and people in my circles all think is doing great things for society. In reporting I discover that the director is using official funds to buy himself a summer house. That makes him and the organization look bad. Do I keep quiet because I don't want to harm "our side"? If I do, I am no journalist.
This is the single most important thing non-journalists misunderstand. Even if you are "on my side," even if you are counting on me to help advance the cause, I am not deciding what to write with reference to "is it good for our side?" (Of course, as always, there is a lot of room for self-deception, but this is the principle.)
Seeing something in another publication is a complicated event. On the one hand, it says, "people care about this and we aren't being heard on the subject." But it also says, "this other publication has the story, so there is no need for us to imitate it -- we will look like we're just following." A journalist might say we have to do our version and add something new. Or she might say well, that's out in the world now, so we can't do our version (even if it is in the works). I've never found any rhyme or reason in such decisions.
What you say seems the opposite of what I see everywhere in media. Every single media outlets seems to be the mouthpiece for a certain political ideology. Within that outlet, they have a token journalist from the "other side".
They are so self-righteous about it all too, as a majority of their readers will unsubscribe if they say the "wrong" thing.
So we have media outlets preaching to mostly their own flock.
It feels like things were not always this extreme. Ppl didn't hate the "other side" this much say two decades ago.
No question polarization is much more acute now. When I was a kid most people said they would not mind if their child married someone of the other political party. Now the numbers of people who would not mind are, what, 8 percent?
And, you're right, when people's identity is wrapped up in their political affiliation, they are much more resistant to contrary news. The classic journalism model of reporting "without fear or favor" depends on a level of trust among all social groups that we are losing.
News and other sections related to politics, such as economics, have all become pieces meant to keep the faithful happy. They need constant reinforcement that they're right.
This is everywhere. Best to tune out the media.
While the political polarization among the general populace deserves some of the blame, it did not occur in a vacuum. Rather, it is the result of a runaway positive feedback loop. Newspapers need more clicks to survive, so they pivot to writing more articles that generate clicks -- and the best way to do that is to write polarizing articles. People read them, and become more polarized, so now the newspapers need to come out with even more articles that are even more polarized... and so on. It would be nice if journalists as a professional whole were able to resist this process more effectively, but as @Deepa says, they can't; so it might indeed be best to tune out mass media entirely (or at least to attenuate its importance in one's daily life).
Is there a reason to get the news daily? For most of us, no. Once a week is plenty. And we can tune our Twitter feed or something else, to get it from sane sources.
Aside: Is there some kind of conservation law of outgroupness here? As we all stopped being upset about our daughters marrying a black man, instead we shifted to being upset about our daughters marrying a Republican?
>Every single media outlets seems to be the mouthpiece for a certain political ideology.
While I can only speak for what I see from the NYT (I don't follow other media outlets enough to have an informed opinion on them), I basically agree. It doesn't _quite_ read as a pure organ of the Democratic Party, but that is a pretty good approximation most of the time. The slant on how stories are spun is very very consistent.
>I noticed in the Scott v NY Times brouhaha that the reporter justified himself by saying, in effect, "Scott's name isn't a secret, anyone could find it with a little Googling, so what is the big deal?" He was (I bet sincerely) incapable of seeing the difference between being semi-findable with effort vs being named in the fucking New York Times.
How do you distinguish between "journalist believes this" and "journal says this because it gives him some plausible deniability"?
I think it's generally wise to take people at their word when they describe their beliefs. Of course everyone is prone to motivated reasoning, but few of us are good at being depraved cynics, who consciously decide to lie. People who believe this of journalists haven't met many. I've met a lot in 40 years in the field, so I trust my intuitions on this.
If you're going to say "journalists don't consciously lie", that ship has already sailed. Nobody could have written that article without consciously lying.
And if he's going lie about Scott in the article, why wouldn't he also lie when making justifications about releasing Scott's name?
As a retired journalist who took the craft to heart for decades, I suspect you still haven't grasped Spier's main point. Not that your theories lack any validity (journalists are human, etc), but you seem to under-appreciate the creation of the journalist's professional self, which is every bit as fulsome as, say, a psychiatrist's. The same way you navigate within a thick structure of training, experience, ethics, etc, the journalist has far bigger things on her mind (and ego and superego) than how to manipulate the current assignment.
Sure, I get pissed at the NYT when I think a reporter's missing an important perspective, but what civilians assume to be stubborn obtuseness (or whatever) usually comes from a deep sense of obligation to telling stories knowing you'll piss people off. Assuming you don't work for Fox News, you leave things out or put things in, not for the sake of manipulation, but because you believe your job requires you to do so, damn the torpedoes. If you take your role seriously, you are always open to shifting your perspective.
Plus, everything is messier now because civilians tend to bunch bloggers, opinion writers, and untrained, unqualified "reporters" in the same basket as the dedicated journalists who absolutely believe their profession is essential to a democratic society. So, while I can't opine on Spier's supposed infractions, I can pretty much guarantee you are under-appreciating all the reasons she (and her editors) published what she wrote.
You're either being disingenuous (more likely), or journalism has changed dramatically since you've retired. I don't doubt that they've got a high opinion of their work, but the "dedicated journalists" at, say, the New York Times are really no different than, to use your examples, those at Fox News.
Now I hate journalism as much as the next man, but holy cow accusing this commentor of being disingenuous exactly obfuscates what's actually wrong with journalism and journalists.
You clearly don't hate it enough: you are being too charitable. While I can see how that might once have been reasonable, it is no longer, and anyone who scorns 'untrained, unqualified "reporters"' (especially with the sneer quotes) in favor of journalists (with their supposed ethics and "deep sense of obligation" or some other self-congratulatory bullshit) … I think any genuine delusions of that kind have been thoroughly dispelled, and anyone who still says things like that knows better.
Substack notifications are trash, so you probably didn't see my comment to JKPaw and our follow-up discussion.
I hadn't. Thanks.
Noam Chomsky's famous clip is apposite here, the one in which he patiently explains to some interviewer that he wouldn't be in his job if he didn't already sincerely hold the right positions. Journalism is itself by nature a bias engine. That the highly intelligent people who do their jobs for frankly not much financial compensation aren't aware of this isn't relevant, though it is interesting.
Chomsky made a compelling case, especially with regard to the nearly unavoidable bias traps in market-based journalism. But such critical arguments should be embraced as road-signs for safeguarding an imperfect institution -- not as wholesale indictments of the effort.
The same dynamic is happening now with regard to democracy itself, with far too many critics glibly badmouthing its downside in the service of lurking fascists. Journalism is indispensable to democracy, so to give up on it, or to minimize its highest purpose, is to support the movement toward authoritarianism. This is one of the worst consequences of Fox News et al -- they've trashed and mocked the whole ideal of "fair and balanced" journalism in the eyes of the public. It's the same way the GOP's constant bomb-throwing has sullied the whole notion that the government is beholden to the people. This is intentional: nihilism is actually a political position. Its impact is anti-democratic.
I agree with you whole-heartedly up to and including the line that ends with 'towards authoritarianism'. The problem doesn't just pre-date Fox News, and it doesn't just predate Hearst and "remember the maine!" -- it's structural. Democracy can't exist without some amount of education of the electorate, but there is no way to educate them that isn't inherently misleading and destructive. As I suspect even Plato himself noted privately by the end of his life, it's not possible to educate the electorate even if there's only one in that class and he's the king.
The defense that democracy and therefore journalism are the best we have isn't a defense of either. Both are execrable. What we see today -- what you hate, today -- are the fruit of the tree itself, not foreign additions thereto.
Your last graf sounds like an argument for anarchy, if not something worse like fascism. But if you agree with much of my comment I have to assume you believe democracy is worth preserving (along with institutions like the 4th estate) -- even if execrable.
What I think we need now is more right-wingers to say the quiet part out loud: that they hate democracy and want to install their preferred strongman, damn the consequences to future generations (and damn the past generations who sacrificed for us to have ever-increasing agency and equality). People need to vote with full awareness that this is actually what's on the ballot. But of course fascists are rarely honest about their true intentions until it's too late.
"Blow the whole system up" might sound appealing to voters in a cynical era, but the Trumps, Flynns, and Bannons of the world are playing cutesy with democracy itself -- which voters need to know so they can make deadly serious decisions. That's why prominent, know-nothing dabblers in politics (like Musk and Rogan) inflict so much damage -- by endlessly ridiculing and undermining fundamental structures of progressive society. It may be pure hubris on their part, but they are the ones who make fascism appear banal.
If I misread you, I hope you'll let me know, and offer your suggested alternative to democracy.
I hold out no alternatives -- not that could be enacted, not that could be better if enacted. Humanity does not appear capable of anything better, if it exists. I don't expect AGI in the full sense, either, but if I did and I thought the alignment problem had somehow been solved, I'd say the only actual possible improvement would be rule by benevolent AI (probably in some form that left everyone the illusion that his voice mattered).
I do, however, insist that your hostile focus on Trump (and Musk) is a symptom of precisely the problem with journalism. They aren't who or what you've been led to think they are. Sure, your biased perspective is much cleverer than that of someone who thinks Hillary Clinton personally murdered Vince Foster, but you're both victims of 'news' bubbles. Most voters (whether right or left) who appear to favor totalitarianism actually believe that they support democracy (as you do) and that it's the other side that wants to destroy it. Both think of themselves as the demos in question, with the others being some weirdly powerful fringe group. Both sides believe they are in favor of a free press (as you do). Musk thinks that Twitter itself is the closest thing we have to a free press now, where citizen journalists can surface news stories of real interest and importance. I don't have an opinion about whether or not he's right, because I don't believe in the project he claims to be engaged in.
Although we have some areas of agreement, you won't be surprised by my extremely high level of confidence that your blind spot is way, way bigger than mine. My speculation is that yours is nourished by the disdain for the institutions we're discussing -- which leads you to avoid digging into the ugly, often banal, truths that are currently facing us. It's all in front of us, quite clearly, in legal, political, and moral terms, if only we have enough curiosity to really look. But curiosity is what Joe Rogan snuffs out by making it seem uncool to care about these ancient teetering structures.
To say that Trump believes in democracy is mind-numbingly ludicrous. Your comment seems to reveal a susceptibility to the totalitarian tactic of obliterating everyone's discernment with a constant flood of pure bullshit. Times like these -- when populism embraces destruction -- are precisely the times we are most vulnerable, since Rogan et al make it sound so naïve and quaint and hyperbolic to care. If you want to sound clever, be like Joe with his catholic disdain for all "cathedrals," gatekeepers, and educated experts. Journalism certainly has erred, not because it covered Trump too much, but because it treated him like an ordinary politician for far too long. It wasn't until the end of his reign that anyone from a reputable source even had the courage to simply call his endless lies "lies."
You're a smart guy. That's why I'm confident you have not done the legwork on who these people really are. Because the only other reason to claim that Trump and Musk believe in democracy is that you're part of the project to destroy it, and I doubt that's true (even though few will openly admit it). "Free speech" in today's context is not a righteous argument for democracy. It has become a lever to open the rightwing floodgates of disinformation and hatred, as per the greater project of wearing everyone down.
I won't bore you with a reading list, etc, because such arguments never go anywhere, but I will remind you that a pathological sociopath and malignant narcissist like Trump doesn't believe in anything besides himself -- so it's not like he has to share Steve Bannon's ideological vision to be an effective tool of fascism. Hitler was a bumbling idiot too, with hurt fee-fees in a jail cell, until he was allowed to wield total power, with US right-wing approval and a cynical world mood that kept the majority of people disinterested and uninterest in the grotesque details of his miserable project until it was too late.
> If I misread you, I hope you'll let me know, and offer your suggested alternative to democracy.
*sheepishly raises hand* Since you mentioned cathedrals, you've surely heard this pitch before. But, hear me out... are you familiar with moldbug? I try not to bring this up on Scott's blog too often, but it seems especially relevant ITT.
The common rebuttal against moldy goes something like "isn't he the guy who hates democracy and loves genocidal authoritarian dictators like Hitler? Yikes." But this is an egregious (though understandable) misreading of his position. He dislikes Nazis and Communism even more so than Democracy. His preferred alternative is Elizabethan England (at least to a first approximation; for example, he thinks the hereditary aspect is unnecessary).
The root of this particular misunderstanding is that he often uses the term "democracy" in a nonstandard way. We think of "democracy" as meaning "fair and free elections". But Moldy is using the term "democracy" in the more archaic sense of "nationalism", which sired the Big 3 modern ideologies of Democracy, Communism, and Fascism. In this model, the 4th estate isn't just indispensable to Modern Liberal Democracy, it's the grandparent of Modern Liberal Democracy.
Many critics, however, are unable to look past a surface-level interpretation of "democracy bad". And since the liberal worldview directly juxtaposes democracy with fascism/authoritarianism/totalitarianism and cannot imagine another alternative, they often assume he's advocating for Hitler 2.0.
Maybe if I had heard of moldbug I'd follow your thoughts better. I'm not sure who "he" is in your story, but if it's anyone like Trump, then, yeah, no, he has most definitely demonstrated a most unholy attraction toward dictators. The copy of Hitler's speeches he kept beside his bed might well have been the only book he's ever read. And have you ever heard him say a kind word about a single world leader who wasn't authoritarian?
I also think democracy is gravely undervalued if you are conflating it with populism/nationalism in your Big 3. Godwin points out the obvious: democracy is most vulnerable when "democracy is bad" starts to look like conventional wisdom -- this is precisely the time to fight for it on all flanks. Its basic structure relies on shared good will, which is easy to mock in cynical times.
By contrast, fascism has no actual structure outside the circles of the power-hungry vultures trying to pick up the scraps of disillusion. So, I'm trying to say, it really doesn't matter if you "believe" in fascism (or a monarchy or whatever) in any coherent sense. You are on its side by default when you attack and belittle the cooperative functions of democracy, which is inherently dynamic and fragile. No, I'm not saying there's no room for criticism or change. But if you fundamentally do not believe that democracy affords a crucial degree of citizen agency, then you are fundamentally anti-democratic.
WRT cathedrals I am reminded of Kanye, who likes to say we shouldn't even care about history itself -- arguably the most important of all cathedrals. These narcissistic sociopaths have convinced themselves they're fighting some sort of zen battle that only the fiercest warriors can see clearly. Even dipshits like Rogan seem to believe their own "straight-talking" mythology. So structures and institutions that have taken decades and centuries and blood and treasure to construct, to preserve, and improve should be tossed out like trash?
I'm telling you, these are precisely the times we are at genuine risk of blowing up an entire trajectory of humanistic progress -- and it will happen in part thanks to banal, snarky comments on Shitter, on blogs, and in podcasts. Our grandchildren will look back in horror when they realize we lost it because it was uncool in the era of social media. Germany was not lost to the Nazis because of a deep widespread fascist philosophy. The Nazis just made cruelty and hatred cool again -- which is exactly what Musk is trying to do. If, on the other hand, we make it through this period, it will be thanks to those like Liz Cheney who weren't too afraid of being mocked or losing power to shout from the rooftops the gravity of the situation.
I'm quite sure I misunderstood plenty of your comment, but I'll keep an eye out for more on moldbug.
Canary Mission is relevant.
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/canary-mission-israel-covert-operations/
Generally you are right-ish that journalists aren't, like, morally pure, and that some of the stuff they do is scummy especially when it's like working backwards from the conclusion "how shall I prove this person is bad" and then finding the arguments to justify it. What the NYT did to you is clearly scummy. You're right about that. Sorry that it happened to you. Sounds traumatic. (Although not quite as right as you think you are, I'd say, because of the bias of your position? But mostly right anyway as far as I can tell?)
That said there are a few key responses. One is, what did you expect? Personally I grew up hearing about journalists "taking people down" for good and bad reasons --- sometimes raking people through the muck or starting wars on fictional premises to make money for big interests. Sometimes attacking countercultural leaders for being supposed communists. Sometimes running a million stories on the same transgression until the one person is excised from society and/or kills themselves. Did you forget all that? Journalism is one of those levers of power in the society and that goes every which way; it feels like you forgot about all that and then were surprised to rediscover it in personal experience when your own person/people/movement got attacked.
Second,
> The message is clear: go after an important Ivy League leader, and we’ll go after your family
The message is not clear! Perhaps the messages is "they were pissed that someone went after the ivy league leader in such a partisan and apparently-motivated way, so they did what pissed people did and retaliated". You're reading this as a "shadowy cabal" narrative when it is entirely explainable by a "shit-slinging playground fighting" narrative. Like yeah Bill Ackman or whatever attacked someone with their power in what seemed like an unfair away and how do you get back at someone with that much power and money? I don't know, look for weaknesses? See if their wife is guilty of the same bullshitty charge? It probably wasn't even the same people! Even if it was, the shadowy-cabal narrative is dumb.
And by the way, duh, it's front-page news *because of the hypocrisy*, not because of the plagiarism. Like, of course. Who would give a crap if it wasn't part of a narrative of "powerful person turns out to be (attached to) hypocrite"?
Third, your writing on issues like social justice and journalism has always been tinged by excessive bitterness. You alluded in a recent post to a traumatic experience of cancellation in college, maybe that's the reason for the former. If not maybe it's any of the other thousand shitty stories we all heard in the 2010s. The NYT piece and other attacks on EA perhaps explains the latter. But, and I can't emphasize this enough, bitterness *doesn't work* at persuading people to your side. It rallies your allies and alienates your skeptics. You are not going to take down journalism by, essentially, whining about how unfair it is. Especially when your whining... is clearly skimming over important details? Such as your entirely brushing off the criticisms of EA over and over and over and never, not once, seeming to understand *what* people don't like about this movement or some of the people in it.
More importantly, bitterness is not an effective or useful stance for a person in a position of leadership, which you are, and although your grievances with the world are mostly legitimate you are not going to fix them or lead anyone the right direction when your stance on what has hurt you is aggrieved whining about it. That is, or leads to, destructive reactionaryism. You win by being better than them, not being bitter and especially not by compromising your own credibility when you do by, say, glossing over every single criticism as unfounded or trumped-up or confused.
Which brings me to a final point, sorry for the long-windedness.
> It might seem like a weird coincidence that - after years of unrelenting positive coverage - investigative journalists would take two 10+ year old cases and try to turn them into big scandals within three weeks of each other. But I’ll stop teasing you now - the obvious proximal cause was that FTX had just imploded, and suddenly people hated effective altruism.
People did not "suddenly hate" EA when FTX imploded, just like journalists didn't go digging up dirt on random EA people when it imploded. People were always cautiously skeptical of EA because it is a creepy replacement morality that implies circumventing society's moral code in favor of a new and possibly self-serving one (well, that's what I believe, but we can agree that they were cautiously skeptical). And then when the weight of evidence went "you know that thing you were nervous might be true? It's true" everyone's brain's updated to "right, EA is bad, like it seemed" and then they did what people do when they figure out that groups of people are bad and threatening, which is attack them.
It is all a prediction-error thing: there's no grounds to attack when EA "might" be threatening, but once the prediction error is removed ("a-ha, EA does in fact cultivate evil greedy misanthropists") then yep, let em have it, this shit is scary. Even the language "hate EA" reveals how emotionally warped your thinking on the subject is, because people *don't* "hate EA", there's not a giant institution of hateful people trying to destroy you. There is the institution of the "normal world" perceiving danger in a corner and telling it to shape up or back the fuck off. Instead of receiving that criticism and synthesizing it and making your own movement better you are degenerating into us-versus-them outgroupy thinking, which is toxic and childish and reactionary anyway, but also just unproductive, ineffective you might say, towards any of your goals (unless your goal is starting a reactionary movement like trump's idiots? in which case yeah fuck it carry on).
>That said there are a few key responses. One is, what did you expect? Personally I grew up hearing about journalists "taking people down" for good and bad reasons --- sometimes raking people through the muck or starting wars on fictional premises to make money for big interests. Sometimes attacking countercultural leaders for being supposed communists.
The left consider journalists completely above criticism as a group, and have gone so far as to call the growing distrust of journalists, supposedly precipitated by the likes of Donald Trump, as as some gravely concerning issues of civilizational scale that is a prelude to "fascism" or whatever.
So no, journalists need to be criticized MORE, not less. Anyone who doesn't criticize journalists is an ideologue who is happy with ideological aims and asshole tactics of journalists today.
There's criticism of journalists or news orgs for bad practices, and then there's what Donald Trump has done. If you defend Trump's message on journalism, then you're clearly no better than those who would never criticize journalism.
No president in history has ever been lied about in the media as much as Trump. His criticism is warranted.
But the left want the government to be literally able to decide what news orgs can and can't say - this is vastly bigger threat to journalism than anything Trump has said or done, it's just that most journalists are already on their side.
One shouldn't conflate what some people in a group say with what everyone in a group believes.
I doubt this is literally true--I think newspapers were a lot less concerned with factual accuracy in the past than now.
But also, the main dynamic I noticed during the Trump years was making everything into a Trump Does Horrible Thing X scandal for clicks. The headline looked the same whether the "horrible thing" Trump had done was eat breakfast or kick a puppy. This had the effect of drowning out the occasional legit scandal (firing the inspectors general for a couple federal agencies) because every day there were two or three nothingburger Trump scandals ("Breaking News: Trump is a big asshole on Twitter again!")
I definitely take your overall point/concern. As a former newspaper journalist myself as well as a close relative to a lifer in that sector, I absolutely agree that (a) journalism should not be weaponized in the manner of your examples, and (b) Elizabeth Spiers slung plenty of self-righteous crap in her response to you.
All that said -- the Gay situation is not the same as any of that.
Some of what Gay turns out to have done was plagiarism; some of it was just sloppy. Neither is acceptable from a college president. (I would argue that the former is not acceptable from a tenured professor though apparently Harvard has decided otherwise.)
Academic plagiarism is clearly a central concern in academia as long proclaimed by academia itself. As many have accurately noted a Harvard student who was found to have done what Gay did would have quickly become a former Harvard student, and plenty have over the years.
It is also highly relevant that a sizeable fraction of the credentials of a high official at a top university turn out to be things other than original scholarship. Gay's resume for such a job was frankly not super impressive even if half of it _didn't_ turn out to have been cut-and-pasted from the work of others.
If modern digital tools enable a wave of revelations about plagiarism in academia -- good. If that results in a wave of high-profile "gotchas", well then perhaps that can be a first step towards some long-overdue self-reflection across our academic sector.
>If modern digital tools enable a wave of revelations about plagiarism in academia -- good. If that results in a wave of high-profile "gotchas", well then perhaps that can be a first step towards some long-overdue self-reflection across our academic sector.
Hmm...
I'm not happy with academia's performance, but I'd choose priorities differently.
If I could wave a wand and either make fraudulent data vanish, or make plagiarism vanish, I'd make the fraudulent data vanish. Data fraud causes academia to damage the accuracy of our knowledge of how the world works. Plagiarism damages our accuracy of who to credit for ideas. I, personally, view the former as more important.
I didn't suggest any priority ranking between the two (plagiarism and fraudulent data).
Regarding plagiarism, it has a different pernicious effect which to me is the more consequential one: theft of credentials. If we can't be sure that a scholar's claimed academic output is in fact theirs then we lose the ability to choose wisely in granting tenure, or choosing academic leaders or in some cases institutional leaders.
Many Thanks! Fair enough. Yes, plagiarism damages our accuracy in choosing people.
>If I ran the world, I would want newspapers to do the opposite of that - comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, that kind of thing. I would want it to find dirt on people who were puffed up way too high riding the top of the popularity wave, and find reasons to defend and stand up for people who were vulnerable and getting piled on. Still, it seems like in real life people do the opposite.
I don't know if I'd go so far as to say real life is the opposite - counterintuitive stories about how someone you think is great actually sucks or someone you think is bad is actually good or at least human are also popular. The big thing is less than pile on and more the need to write about whatever people are talking right now regardless of what take you're presenting.
It seems to me like the "obvious" explanation is that the Harvard board got rid of her because the Congressional testimony looked absolutely horrible to anyone outside the academic bubble, but needed a veneer of justification to give to the other academics that wasn't that. The accusations of plagiarism are, allegedly, kind of weaksauce; here's how Wikipedia describes them:
> In response, Gay said she stood behind the integrity of her work and requested an outside review of it.[77][76] The Harvard Corporation reported that the review found "a few instances of inadequate citation" and "duplicative language without appropriate attribution" in her work, but "no violation of Harvard's standards for research misconduct."[77][78][74] Analyses by The Harvard Crimson and CNN contested Harvard's statement, finding that Gay had likely violated the university's policies on plagiarism and academic integrity.[79][80][81] Gay requested seven corrections to add citations and quotation marks to her dissertation and two of her articles.[71][82][75] Academic Joseph Reagle opined that media reports that Gay "plagiarized", implied that she had stolen the central ideas in her work, saying "I don't think this is the case" but that the work "contain plagiarized prose. This is a lesser but still significant infraction."
These all seem like they are either fairly minor or are highly subjective, and I would be shocked if they were the kind of thing to incur more than the most minor of penalties under most circumstances. And according to https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/1/3/claudine-gay-resign-harvard/, Gay is still a faculty member, so clearly whatever did happen, Harvard doesn't think it merits removing her as faculty, even though plagiarism in an old paper would seem to weigh much more directly on her position as an academic than on her position as an administrator. On the other hand, failing to give a Congressional hearing proper consideration, answering their questions in a way seemingly maximized to justify opposition to Harvard, and acting like anyone opposed to her in any way is just a racist, all make sense as a reason not to have her as president, but are much less important for an academic.
Anyway, the reason this hypothesis is important, is because it means that most of the time, you're going to have to work a lot harder if you want an academic to suffer any sort of consequences due to plagiarism accusations.
A few years ago, the President of Hobart and William Smith resigned amid allegations of plagiarism in his thesis, kind of a small-scale version of the Gay/Harvard scandal.
I remember when the President of Hamilton College resigned after using unattributed Amazon book reviews in a commencement speech. It seemed pretty excessive IMO, but it demonstrates that presidents do indeed resign over such matters.
Her infractions are neither minor nor subjective. A student would be expelled for them
Of course people in the limelight will receive more attention, by investigative journalists and by everyone else. Is that really a bug we need to fix?
I agree with your argument that we should keep in mind that issues being reported might not be as unique as they seem, since journalists might be focusing on some prominent figure. But you go all the way to the other extreme by suggesting 'everyone has a similar distribution', and journalists are doing nothing more than choosing some people to pick on.
I spent enough time in academia to be thoroughly sick of getting lectured about plagiarism by people who were not themselves particularly dedicated to originality that I find it difficult to care about "targeting". I see it more as "wow, someone actually enforced the rules for once, and I get to feel a little less like a schmuck for following the rules myself." If I can't plagiarize while BSing the same paper on the same topic that undergrads in a particular university course have been doing for thirty years, absolutely no way should *any* university president or department head get a pass for their *thesis*. It's bad enough how they overlook it for the international students because they don't want to lose the out-of-state tuition fees.
Should it be less targeted and more properly enforced across the board? I *guess* so, but if I can't have that then I'll settle for a chilling effect on academics doing plagiarism. If these academics didn't want dirt dug up on them, they could've not had the dirt in the first place. This wasn't a victimless crime they did - all dirt is not created equal.
I couldn't agree with this more. Academia has a deep rot, and doing anything clean it up is better than nothing (for the most part)
For those who read this piece and wondered about the origins of the phrase "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable," the maxim comes originally from journalist and humor columnist Finley Peter Dunne, who wrote for and edited various Chicago newspapers around the turn of the twentieth century. In a 1902 column, Dunne wrote:
> Th newspaper does ivrything f'r us. It runs th' polis foorce an' th' banks, commands th' milishy, controls th' ligislachure, baptizes th' young, marries th' foolish, comforts th' afflicted, afflicts th' comfortable, buries th' dead an' roasts thim aftherward.
It’s not clear that Scott read that, of course.
I think most people (including Scott and most journalists) do a really poor job of thinking through the financial incentives of journalists.
I take journalists at their word that they are not consciously chasing clicks (and, indeed, at the better places, only editors and up have access to those metrics) but that’s not the only way they could be chasing them. It probably feels really good to have your piece talked about on Twitter/threads a log and that’s directly correlated with clicks. Journalism is mostly not a financially lucrative enterprise these days and it’s natural for the editors to lay off the reporters who bring less traffic. Those mechanisms clearly guide a newspaper towards optimizing for traffic which, in practice, means towards the tastes of high-SES western (or westernized) people.
The critiques of individual journalists as click-chasers in this context are stupid: you’re mad at the paper as an institution, not individual journalists. On the flip side, I wish more individual journalists were conscious about why they still have jobs and their former peers don’t.
Fine, you might say, I’m only mad at the bosses of newspapers, let’s replace them with people that match my preferences.
This runs straight into journalism not being very lucrative. There is not a lot of profits to reallocate into coverage that matches most readers of this blog’s preferences. I love publications like Works in Progress and would be happier with a news industry that looked more like it but I kind of doubt Works in Progress is or could be a profitable business.
There’s nothing wrong about complaining a for-profit business doesn’t have the impact on the world that you want but there’s a weird way in which folks feel entitled to a vote on how news business work. It’s particularly striking because often these same people are some of the staunchest defenders of free enterprise.
The above is why I think the smarter people who dislike the news industry (Thiel, Musk, etc) have concluded that the only meaningful way to act on that is to burn it all down. Frankly, I think this is childish. There’s a lot of things I don’t like about news coverage but I think it’s obviously a net positive to the world. Unfortunately, the bad seems bundled with the good in a way that’s would be hard to unbundle.
>I take journalists at their word that they are not consciously chasing clicks (and, indeed, at the better places, only editors and up have access to those metrics)
Their editors are chasing clicks and will tell them to what they think will get clicks or re-write/scrap anything they think won't.
>The critiques of individual journalists as click-chasers in this context are stupid: you’re mad at the paper as an institution, not individual journalists. On the flip side, I wish more individual journalists were conscious about why they still have jobs and their former peers don’t.
AH YES, the "just following orders" defense. How wonderful!
>There’s nothing wrong about complaining a for-profit business doesn’t have the impact on the world that you want but there’s a weird way in which folks feel entitled to a vote on how news business work. It’s particularly striking because often these same people are some of the staunchest defenders of free enterprise.
He's not calling for regulation, so there's no contradiction.
Journalists want to be above criticism - they're not. THE END.
Additionally, the left *absolutely* wants to be able to regulate private businesses to the point of regulating what news orgs can say. Directing your criticism towards those who *aren't* doing this is reveals your ideological bias.
>Frankly, I think this is childish.
Nope, your ideology just aligns with journalists so you're okay with it. That's literally all that's happening here.
A literate person would read the critiques of journalists in my comment and change their model of me to reflect that.
If they acknowledged they were selling simply entertainment that people want to read/watch, sure. But they pretend to be something more, arbiters of truth vs. "misinformation," "guardians of democracy" or whatever, and if you put yourself on a pedestal above others, and then use that position to fling shit at those below, it is just and reasonable for them to try to tear you down.
I DON'T in fact think the news industry as it exists today is a "net positive to the world," and would wholeheartedly endorse any attempt to burn it to the ground.
I don’t think I’ve read a full throated defense of the burn it down movement. Can you give one? My perspective is that it would be obviously crazy to get rid of things like NYT’s many international bureaus (does anyone think we’d know more about the Ukraine or Gaza contingencies without the news media?), reviews of media and physical devices that have pragmatic utility, and coverage of various government machinations because the NYT op-ed board and their “analysis” section (which I view as just another opinion section) suck.
I should clarify that I don't believe the New York Times is entirely negative or worthless: my dad enjoys the daily Wordle. And yes, there do exist articles that aren't terrible: it's only a NET detriment to the world.
Not only is anything of value they provide easily replaced, in most cases, the replacements ALREADY EXIST. There are hundreds of perfectly reasonable independent sources for information and perspectives about Ukraine/Gaza, government machinations (and thousands for media/tech reviews), and many dozens of them are engaging and well-produced. If the New York Times (or the Washington Post, or any of the other traditional news sources; my criticism isn't particularized) were just one of them, I wouldn't actually have any real complaint; there are plenty of blogs with equally abhorrent political views and a similar casual disregard for the truth. But they aren't: they pretend to be BETTER, and they leverage their institutional power to impose their views, working to suppress differing perspectives as "misinformation." It is precisely this power I wish to see broken.
Further, I don't believe this supposed distinction everyone seems to make between opinion and news is actually meaningful: it's the same newspaper! If they were printed and sold separately, were hosted on different websites, and were basically different companies under the same corporate umbrella, there might actually a reasonable argument that they were separate. They don't do this. Of course, I can disagree with people's opinions and still believe some other things they say, but I would think it absurd if they claimed their opinions were held by some different, wholly separate part of their brain. The same applies to institutions: pretending otherwise leads one to say things like "ignore the headline, and only read the body," or "every third sentence is misleading, and every fifth sentence is a lie, but other than that … "
Are you asking if I have a source of literally infallible information and objectively correct opinions? Yes to the latter, but, as you might expect, no to the former. For most topics, one would need to look at a few different sources and synthesize them into a single cohesive and correct whole, usually filling in a few blanks on one's own.
"does anyone think we’d know more about the Ukraine or Gaza contingencies without the news media?"
How is knowing anything about these conflicts relevant to 99% of Americans? Even the 1% know affected people can do ~0 with additional information. Ditto to your other examples.
While I agree with everything Scott said, one additional takeaway from all these recent hit pieces is that, apparently, digging up substantial dirt on anyone in academia is trivially easy. You just pick a target whom you dislike, and boom, you can easily uncover instances of plagiarism, data falsification, and other academic sins. Shouldn't *this* part be front-page news -- i.e. not that Harvard hired some unqualified person, but that apparently everyone at the top tier of the every academic institution is a data-falsifying plagiarist ?
Alternatively, the standard for what gets called "plagiarism" might be stupid. I don't know precisely what Gay or Oxman did, but I have seen the standards for what counts as "rape" or "sexual abuse," and it's more likely it's something like that than what you're imagining.
No, she is unambiguously a plagiarist.
Salience bias controls everything around us but I think it's weird to downplay something because you only recently had it made salient to you.
I don't disagree with your assessment here but I would add a factor: it's easier to gather dirt on unpopular people and journalists are as lazy as anyone else. When a bunch of people are mad at someone they're more likely to contact journalists with tips and info about them. it's easy to report on stuff you don't have to dig hard for.
Jesse Singal says he got a tip about Gay's plagiarism on 12/4, before the testimony, from someone who claims they were sending it to 5 different journalists, so someone who was not Rufo would have tipped him off and Rufo ran with the story. Jesse talks about this starting at 29:40 in the Blocked and Reported episode 197: Gay Gets Got
I'll add my vote to the issue being that this was not about "criticising Israel," this was about saying that calling for genocide against Jews was okay. I completely reject any notion that it is "technically true" that it depends on context and to say otherwise is some kind of perjury. We're talking about a situation where missing persons posters were torn down because talking about missing Jews is somehow against Palestine. Where NYC College had that situation where Jewish students ended up locking themselves in the library as "Palestine supporters" banged on the windows. What do Jewish students have to do with Israel? Even if they were Israeli, what power do they have to affect policy? If blessed context is so important, maybe we should take note of the broader national situation, and what specifically is being taken as "protest", and what everybody should know about how this would be taken if it was some other cause.
On the other hand, yes, this was targeting, but not in the way Scott thinks. If I remember correctly, Claudine Gay had been a known plagiarist for a long time. Nobody picked up the story. Chris Rufo was given the story and ran with, and it happened to matter now because of the situation. The context, if you will.
Chris Rufo and also a sizable number of Conservatives' goal is to take down as much of the University system as possible. I happen to agree with this sentiment. Claudine Gay was exposed by a weak point. Somebody unrelated wanted everybody to know Claudine Gay was a plagiarist, and wanted this the whole time.
And I have to take issue again with this nonsense about the recent blog post, "Against Learning from Dramatic Effects." That was maybe the worst post Scott has ever made. This may be a kind of heresy to some, but events are not drawn from a distribution. Distributions are identified after plotting events on a graph. Which somebody human somewhere did, which means the events themselves had to be interpreted and categorised first. Events don't just happen. The distribution does not cause events to happen. To some people this may seem like some weird beside the point quibble, but no. The entire basis of the argument acts as if the blessed context we are otherwise so worried about with Claudine Gay, doesn't exist around events, only the dots matter. Actually it's a bit worse, it's flat out reading things backwards.
> This may be a kind of heresy to some, but events are not drawn from a distribution. [...]
Hm. Would you tell me if I understand your argument correctly? I feel like I can see part of it, but also like I'm still missing something.
Let's say we've got a data set - a bunch of data points representing events - and we see an event happen that's on an extreme end of the distribution, as measured somehow. First we should notice that the data set is just what's been noticed (imperfectly), and recorded (imperfectly), and categorized (imperfectly), and perhaps reduced to a simple equation. But even with those caveats aside, each data point represents an actual event that was caused by actual real-world factors, and by investigating individual events we can learn what factors caused it to turn out that way. We might find out that some factors tend to produce more extreme results (meaning that the next time someone analyzes the data set, they should pay attention to these factors). And when we see an extreme event, we can actually learn a lot by looking at all the factors that went in to creating such an outlier. And the more factors we understand, the more "gears" we have in our model, and the less we need to rely on a distribution for prediction. Which can be important if something in the environment changes and the distribution no longer predicts future events accurately.
So, did everything magically change after 9/11? If we'd changed nothing about our security, yeah, there probably would have a lot more kamikaze hijackings: it was a simple idea and anyone could have done it at any time. But by actually studying what happened, we can cut off the factors that let it happen. And one thing to notice was that the US military presence in Saudi Arabia after the 1st Irag War had gotten under the skin of some religious fundamentalists, thus changing the environment.
It sounds like, from my understanding of your perspective, that Scott's arguing "we shouldn't panic and freak out about space flight just because the Challenger blew up", while you're arguing for detailed fault analysis to figure out what exactly happened, and how the existing safety procedures let it happen? And the same thing goes for, say, SBF.
You've really put a nice Rationalist bow on my thoughts, and I mean that as a compliment. I would never describe it this way, but I think this mostly right.
The only point that's missing is say, if the Challenger blew up from sabotage or extreme negligence. If that were the case, saying that "we shouldn't panic or freak out about space flight just because the Challenger blew up," sounds a lot like you're trying to hide something by sidestepping the actual issue, the specifics of why the Challenger blew up. In this case, sabotage or extreme negligence. If you then say that you have a vested interest in this issue, but by "this issue" you mean "space flight", that sounds even more like you're hiding something because "space flight" isn't the point of failure.
"Never pick a fight with anyone who buys ink by the barrel and paper by the ton."
>I would want it to find dirt on people who were puffed up way too high riding the top of the popularity wave, and find reasons to defend and stand up for people who were vulnerable and getting piled on.
Isn't there an object-level layer missing here? It's not all a popularity contest all the time. Sometimes people get puffed up because they're genuinely doing good work, and others get piled on because they have recently did or said something heinous. Dissenting voices and devil's advocates are valuable, but they're supposed to be the alternative, not the mainstream. I wouldn't want the media to constantly dig dirt on Nobel prize winners and defend convicted rapists.
Does it even matter what the actual motivations of journalists are? People are going to always act in their self-interest, and I seriously do not understand why you expect otherwise. The only thing you can do is not have any dirt on you on the first place. Don't plagarize. Don't antagonize people unless necessary. Don't espouse blatantly controversial opinions using an identity that can be traced back to your real one. Like seriously, what the hell did you expect to happen? The world owes you nothing.
>If I ran the world, I would want newspapers to do the opposite of that - comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, that kind of thing.
As a reasonably well off bay area resident, you are the comfortable.
"But it’s the sort of thing that you can imagine having chilling effects. Imagine if, every time someone let their students/employees/whatever criticize Israel, journalists searched really hard for unrelated dirt on them"
Or... you could be a person that adds value to your organization, and who doesn't commit rampant plagiarism in an already shoddy, weak, and illegitimate publishing 'career'.
We all like you here, obviously, but I think you're barking up the wrong tree on this one.
These attacks worked on Claudine Gay because she didn't add value to her organization, she had 0 management and PR skills, and she had no publishing career. She was a fraud who shouldn't have been in her position in the first place - that's why the attacks worked.
1. How many of the pro-Palestinian activists crying over being punished for being anti-israel have EVER condemned people being punished for having "right wing" political beliefs, or even the persecution of scholars whose research contradicts liberal narratives (such as intelligence researchers)? Any, literally any in history?
2. How many of these pro-palestinian activists were outraged when so-called "journalists" showed up unannounced at the door of the mother of 'Libs of TikTok'? Imagine if journalists showed up to the house of the family of pro-palestinian people - we would never hear the end of end of this being "harassment" and "intimidation tactics". But no, actually, the pro-palestinian types were 𝘢𝘱𝘱𝘭𝘢𝘶𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 this and defending the journalists. This is of course simply the first example that came to mind, but there's many more.
So, remind me again why I'm supposed to care? You don't get points for being "morally principled" here. You get beaten, politically. If you allow your opponents to intimidate and abuse their way into censoring you, and you in response take the "principled" route, all it means is that your views get censored and your opponent's don't. So they can go to hell.
>I don’t believe that woke college presidents...are more likely to plagiarize than other groups.
Claudine Gay is not simply a "woke" college president.
She's a black female college president from a wealthy Haitian family whose career at Harvard is 𝘢𝘣𝘴𝘰𝘭𝘶𝘵𝘦𝘭𝘺 𝘪𝘯𝘦𝘹𝘱𝘭𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦 except in the light of extremely aggressive affirmative action.
There's literally no president of a prestigious university who we should suspect LESS of plagiarism than her.
I think that it looks unrelated, but that's precisely what anti-wokes are saying. There is no clear and direct link between antisemitism from an oppressor/oppressed perspective, and being an unmeritocratic institution that hires serial plagiarists. The idea is that wokeness, or race marxism, or social justice liberalism, has values that are at times unrelated or contradictory but are melded together - is frequently called intersectionality.
The gist as I understand it, and this scans as correct to me, is that Harvard as an institution will be more tolerant of speech that has an anti-white or conservative valence (Israel is just and good) while also elevating an unqualified black woman as its figurehead to make those values clear. That Rufo and co can immediately find dirt on the nearest powerful person in that institution and demonstrate that the emperor-has-no-clothes is not surprising to me.
Harvard was in the exact opposite situation years ago with Summers, a noteworthy figure and influential economist who has worked in the white house, who was ousted for saying that men and women were different. It all seems like a cornucopia of unrelated facts and situations, but if you looks closely has a cultural through-line that snaps all participants into focus.
A friend of mine with a phd in education shared the following: "Investigating non-stem academics for scholarly misconduct is like drug testing truckers for speed. It mostly isn't done or the whole industry would collapse, but its very useful when you need to get rid of someone."
2 minutes (2 minutes!) of digging would have shown you that Brunet has been talking about Claudine Gay for YEARS and that his involvement in this has literally nothing whatsoever to do with israel or palestine. How can you try and hold journalists to account when you yourself smear someone with integrity out of your own laziness?
Obviously her plagiarism and abject lack of academic merit was well known before this. But except in a shitstorm involving jews and israel that made Harvard look extremely bad, when else would raising these concerns ever have gotten anywhere or done anything but get you shouted down as a "white supremacist"?
Scott, um, of course the cases you mention are targeting. If anyone disputes this, they're gaslighting you, and you should laugh at them. (To be explicit, I take Elizabeth Spiers to have been lying.)
I feel funny even saying this. I take it as obvious that this is how our media environment works. More specifically, I would say it is true, obvious, and disputed only in bad faith.
In the case of Claudine Gay, the allegations of plagiarism were definitely known previously. Harvard had even "investigated" them, in a laughable manner, only to dismiss/whitewash them. Rufo pursued the matter further after her Congressional testimony, and because of it. I don't think he would deny that. Nor do I see why he should be at all ashamed of it.
The other cases are similar. Journalists investigate things when they have a reason to, not at random. The reason may not immediately relate to the thing investigated. That's "targeting." Yes, of course. Duh.
My understanding is that Brunet had been writing about Gay for a long time beforehand, but nobody cared until she testified about anti-semitism.
Yes. https://www.karlstack.com/p/for-me-this-was-personal
I discovered Scott and his wonderful writing because of that NYT hit piece. I've since learned so much from him and subsequent rationalist-adjacent sources. In this case targeting is a good thing?
I"m a journalist and I think the clicks / pile-on theory is best. Truth is a necessary input; you can't justfiy yourself publishing false things. But the world is extremely full of true facts that aren't in the media.
How do we choose what to publish? editors want stories on popular topics, journalists want to be read. Going too far in this direction is "tabloid". Whereas not going far enough is "academic publishing that makes you go broke".
There's a constant tension for any masthead between "getting clicks today" and "preserving reputation for the future." Since we went online the balance between these has been pulled in the direction of the former and trust in media has fallen. But revenue for media has also fallen so there's much less point in having a trusted masthead nobody much reads.
Hot take: plagiarism isn't worth reporting on, period. If someone takes credit for another's *work*, that's one thing. But if someone takes credit for another's *writing about their work*, the appropriate response is "please put this in quotes kthx", not "please spend more time rephrasing and reinterpreting these words and consequently less time doing actual productive work to advance the field", and certainly not "let's revoke this person's credentials and obliterate their credibility so they *can't* do any more productive work". Mathematicians have been plagiarising Pythagoras for millennia. Physicists have been plagiarising Aristotle for nearly as long. If it's good work, it's *worth sharing and reusing in any form*, even more so if it's underappreciated enough that you have to hear about it through someone who isn't the original author.
Wow. I’ve been drilled in academia for so long that copying is bad but you’re so right what an interesting view. Don’t reinvent the wheel to explain complex topics we already know but Copy paste and come up with something new!
From my understanding, a lot of econ writing functions this way; it’s generally acceptable to extensively quote existing explanations of models since the important bit is the new work done, not redescribing an old model.
I am not an expert, but I think that putting other people's descriptions in quotes is called citation (and is considered a good thing), not plagiarism.
The problem with plagiarism is not "you used someone else's words instead of reinventing the wheel", but "you pretended that you figured out something, when actually someone else did".
One of the accusations of plagiarism was literally that they reused the phrasing in the acknowledgements section. People are in fact treating "you used someone else's words" as a sin.
I get your point, but I think one of the core accusations is that Gay was incredibly lazy and perhaps didn't introduce anything worthwhile in her entire dissertation, as evidenced by her willingness to copy and paste even her acknowledgements section - which is typically very personal and specific to the person writing it.
Just don't pay attention to the news media, pick who you listen to. And if the zombie apocalypse happens, someone will let you know.
Author of the twitter thread about Oxman's dissertation here, appreciate the link.
While the general point about the chilling effects of mutually assured destruction is well-taken, I'm more of a single-issue *BS Out Of Academia* voter than an anti-Ackman partisan. In fact, inasmuch as I was pleased to see Gay go, conventional culture war rules would have put me on Ackman's team and therefore on Oxman's. So if you're inclined to view allegations of academic misconduct through a Schmittian lens, the entire thread should be read as an admission against interest (and hence more likely to be accurate). But my whole point is that I don't want people like Oxman on "my team", even if their spouses sometimes do things I appreciate.
> I don’t believe that woke college presidents, or the wives of bigshot investors, are more likely to plagiarize than other groups.
Ok, but if you consider Gay and Oxman to be more or less random samples from the set of high-profile PhDs, isn't it really weird that *both* of them turned out to be guilty? My point of concern is not how bad woke college presidents and billionaires' wives are, but how compromised academia in general has become, such that these people were able to get away with it for so long. And would have gotten away with it too, had they not accidentally come to attention of a bunch of bored internet randos who reviewed their work more thoroughly out of curiosity than their nominal peers who were supposed to do it for a living.
"I don’t believe that woke college presidents, or the wives of bigshot investors, are more likely to plagiarize than other groups."
I do think that cargo cult scientists like Claudine Gay are much more likely than real scientists to copy-paste stuff like "this is how the statistical method I'm using works" or "here are the strengths and weaknesses of my statistical method", as Claudine Gay did.
It's the publicly legible tip of the iceberg of her field's dysfunction.
Andrew Gelman wrote a post recently, implicitly in response to this affair, saying "at least regarding academics, plagiarism is a sign of lack of understanding." I think Andrew Gelman is worth bringing up because of his demonstrated concern with bad social science research, as opposed to fighting wokeness. I think the examples in his post are worth looking at, to get a sense of who's more likely to commit plagiarism.
Chris Rufo and Chris Brunet are, of course, not Andrew Gelman. But their enemy came to her position through intellectual authority, the appearance of being a scientist. They are making use of the fact that their enemy's claim to intellectual authority rests on such shaky ground.
Anyway, perhaps it's targeted (edited from "yes, it's targeted" after reading Chris Brunet's comment). That tells us something about how journalists work. But in this case the targeted attack was with a weapon that works much better on cargo cult scientists than real ones. If only journalists always appealed to equally reasonable standards.
I think you're wrong about the implosion of FTX being the start of when the media switched narratives on EA and that it would have happened without that. In 2022, EA started spending money on politics, mostly due to SBF. That's a direct challenge to the establishment and their ability to set a narrative and define what people think is important. That's the sort of thing that makes people start looking for attack points. The FTX collapse certainly didn't help that, but it was already underway before.
To support this, here is eigenrobot predicting negative coverage of EA in September 2022 (I think this is a reasonable paraphrase of what he's getting at)
https://twitter.com/eigenrobot/status/1567970765177499651
> If I ran the world, I would want newspapers to do the opposite of that - comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, that kind of thing. I would want it to find dirt on people who were puffed up way too high riding the top of the popularity wave, and find reasons to defend and stand up for people who were vulnerable and getting piled on.
I wonder if from the journalist’s perspective this is precisely what they think they’re doing. Since by definition it’s when you become “newsworthy”, used as a shorthand for attention, that the negative stories become salient. [Not justifying the current methods, but trying to explain it]
I like this take. Who’s to say they don’t really believe they are being neutral? We have to consider their priors more than everyone else’s.
is there any categorical difference between rufo and the journalists who uncovered oxman's plagiarism, that makes the former "investigative journalism uncovering a scandal" but the latter only motivated targeting? rufo was also joining a pile-on on gay, and he also elevated a fifteen-year-stale peccadillo into front page news. both seem equally like targeting to me, and while the tit-for-tat dynamic is unfortunate, it's not clear why one is privileged over the other.
> is there any categorical difference
(this is half-joke, half-serious) Sure, he's a feminist and they're not. He's attacking a woman for things she did herself for her own reasons, but they're attacking a woman because of things her husband did. He treats his target like an independent person, but they treat their target like a mere extension of her man. How many movies and TV shows have been criticized for having a plot where a woman is hurt just to affect a man? That's exactly what they're doing.
it’s true that Rufo went after Gay herself whereas the journalists uncovering Oxman’s plagiarism only did so because of her husband. but why does that make Rufo’s journalism less like targeting? i don’t see why. if i cross the mafia and they kill my wife, that seems like the same level of targeting as if they’d killed me.
Yeah, sorry, that doesn't make it less "targeting", it just makes it more ethically acceptable on an axis which Gay and her allies profess to care about.
An actual difference is that there's a good argument that Rufo didn't engage in any "targeting", himself, per se. The targeting was set up by Brunet a year and a half earlier, and Brunet had repeatedly tried to pull the trigger, but no one cared and it kept bouncing off her diamond-hard scales. Rufo happened to notice that it was all set up, filed that knowledge away, and when Gay popped up in the public light and exposed the gap in her armor, he pulled the trigger. Whereas Oxman was stalked and hunted down for revenge on someone else, the way a particularly persistent person might get annoyed by someone who cut them off in traffic, follow them home, and run over their dog.
So leftists like Gay are subject cancel culture, ans I am supposed to be upset. Nope. I don't care. The left has conjured demons and now they must live with the consequences.
It is not a world I like, but I did not make it and I cannot control it. I can however be grimly amused when the inventors of an ugly trend get ensnared in it. I think that is mere poetic justice.
Is targeting a good thing of a bad thing? It seems normal for bad actors to get their comeuppance during a moment when they are particularly vulnerable. If you think you have caught a student cheating and that it needs to be reported, is it wrong to look for archival evidence that would strengthen your case? Does anyone think that you should only look through the archival evidence for those students who have not been caught cheating??
The current issue and the archival evidence should be related.
If someone is accused of plagiarism, then checking for plagiarism in the past is relevant.
If someone is accused of e.g. sexual harassment, then checking for plagiarism in the past is irrelevant.
In other words, you should be searching for evidence of "is this the kind of a thing that this person does?", not "is there anything in their past that could put them in bad light?".
Your reaction sure does seem logical, yet I don't think it is logical. When a student is suspended or expelled from a university, do we really want to exclude evidence relevant to the decision?? In a petty theft case, for example, would we ignore if the student had also been judged guilty of plagiarism, cheating on an exam, and trying to intimidate instructors?
In Dr. Gay's case, Rufo et al. were bringing forward the evidence of her plagiarism not so that the public could be convinced that Gay was antisemitic or "too PC" in her thinking, but to convince the public that Gay should not be president of Harvard.
Brunet has been writing about this for a long time, it's not true that he only picked up on Gay after her testimony. This is from April 2022.
https://www.karlstack.com/p/the-curious-case-of-claudine-gay
Well the obvious lesson that the moralists will want to take is "don't fuck up; we can't find anything if there's nothing to find". Clearly that's untenable.
A part of me had hoped that we as a society would reach a tenor of cancellation and outing of the misdeeds of others that would be so unsustainable that at some point everyone would stop caring about the misdeeds of others and the doxxing/outing would lose its power. But it seems that the tenor of cancel culture and "malevolent investigation" has abated slightly from the frenzy of 5 or 6 years ago and turned into a more refined check on people in power and authority, which is perhaps not the worst turn of events.
why are you so quick to defend Claudine Gay?
Everything you say is true, but none of it is breaking news. Journalists need clicks to stay employed, especially in these times when ad money is dwindling. They're going to throw red meat to the whatever masses are inclined to read their outlet, though the high-toned press won't admit it. Anything that raises your profile attracts people willing to attack you for whatever you've done that might be attacked. (An example is Paul Manifort; his business dealings were so dodgy that friends advised him to stay out of politics, as prosecutors looked over the activities of politically-involved people more carefully than that of others.) If you are going to get involved in something controversial, it helps to keep your nose clean regarding everything else you do. And yes, reporters have no compunctions about lying.
Journalists remind me of intelligence officers, in several ways.
As professions, both are deemed necessary and useful for the public good. Both have historically been able to credibly claim that they use humint/investigative sources and methods to collect otherwise unseen intelligence - with a goal of bringing troubling topics to the fore for the greater good.
But clandestine intelligence officers have no hope of being even slightly effective unless they are very intentionally lying repeatedly every day, and juggling a series of different narrative universes that are lies. All for the greater good, in theory, to uncover true intelligence that they then summarize and report on objectively, truthfully. Intelligence officers don’t make policy, they merely inform policy makers. Never mind the process, especially the selection of who and what gets summarized and who and what does not.
The parallels with the ideals of investigative journalism are too obvious to ignore. There are obviously some major differences, journalists aren’t required by editors to repatriate every 18-36 months to re-Americanize in immersive ‘civic therapy’ to recover from the damage to their psyches. It would probably be better if journalist did immersive re-Americanization every couple years.
But when I think of Kara Swisher et al, I’m reminded of Michael Steele. People with axes and grindstones.
There is another way that journalists are like intelligence officers: As a career, it ceased to be a growth opportunity about 25 years ago, because of tech. And that frustrates the hell out of them, watching opportunities and money flow into tech that supersedes more and more of the work they used to do. If the New York Times = the CIA, WaPo = Mossad, but Google = the NSA. The last reliable metric that I heard from someone I trust is that the NSA and portions of the other ~10 intelligence agencies that are partially subsumed by NSA “coordination” is 22x the size of the CIA. And that multiple is inexorably growing, just like newsmedia revenue is inexorably shrinking.
We’re probably at the point now where most events that might be legitimately newsworthy could be aggregated by a custom GPT from open access data sources, and curated + summarized according to the preferences of individual users.
“aggregated by a custom GPT from open access data sources, and curated + summarized according to the preferences of individual users” this is an interesting idea with lots of variants to explore. One would be to get people from different camps to agree on a GPT arbiter.
Although we have some areas of agreement, you won't be surprised by my extremely high level of confidence that your blind spot is way, way bigger than mine. My speculation is that yours is nourished by the disdain for the institutions we're discussing -- which leads you to avoid digging into the ugly, often banal, truths that are currently facing us. It's all in front of us, quite clearly, in legal, political, and moral terms, if only we have enough curiosity to really look. But curiosity is what Joe Rogan snuffs out by making it seem uncool to care about these ancient teetering structures.
To say that Trump believes in democracy is mind-numbingly ludicrous. Your comment seems to reveal a susceptibility to the totalitarian tactic of obliterating everyone's discernment with a constant flood of pure bullshit. Times like these -- when populism embraces destruction -- are precisely the times we are most vulnerable, since Rogan et al make it sound so naïve and quaint and hyperbolic to care. If you want to sound clever, be like Joe with his catholic disdain for all "cathedrals," gatekeepers, and educated experts. Journalism certainly has erred, not because it covered Trump too much, but because it treated him like an ordinary politician for far too long. It wasn't until the end of his reign that anyone from a reputable source even had the courage to simply call his endless lies "lies."
You're a smart guy. That's why I'm confident you have not done the legwork on who these people really are. Because the only other reason to claim that Trump and Musk believe in democracy is that you're part of the project to destroy it, and I doubt that's true (even though few will openly admit it). "Free speech" in today's context is not a righteous argument for democracy. It has become a lever to open the rightwing floodgates of disinformation and hatred, as per the greater project of wearing everyone down.
I won't bore you with a reading list, etc, because such arguments never go anywhere, but I will remind you that a pathological sociopath and malignant narcissist like Trump doesn't believe in anything besides himself -- so it's not like he has to share Steve Bannon's ideological vision to be an effective tool of fascism. Hitler was a bumbling idiot too, with hurt fee-fees in a jail cell, until he was allowed to wield total power, with US right-wing approval and a cynical world mood that kept the majority of people disinterested and uninterest in the grotesque details of his miserable project until it was too late.
This looks like a response to different article.
"This is another reason to trust priors, surveys, and studies, instead of updating your estimate of a distribution really hard based on one dramatic event that you heard about."
An interesting conclusion in a piece that cites zero studies and several dramatic events. Generally I expect better arguments here.
The question for me is whether Gay's level of plagiarism is the kind of thing that most academics do - officially frowned upon, sure, but otherwise tolerated - or whether it's particularly bad even by the usual standards of academia. Is it more like "smoked weed as a teenager once" or like "was a sub-boss in the Cosa Nostra" type of crime? Maybe there's also a subquestion whether university presidents should be held to higher standards than academics in general.
Presumably university presidents set the tone and are the ultimate authority enforcing the rules. If the president broke rules, such as about academic honesty, then it makes it far less likely they can or will enforce those rules.
I think with Gay one of two things was possible:
1. It was a proxy battle over Israel. Some people in and around Harvard want there to be more censorship related to Israel so they went after her to make a point: if you don't do this properly, we'll come after your career.
2. Someone else who wants to be president of Harvard or just didn't like Gay exploited the moment to go after her.
It's not clear whether it's #1 or #2 but I really doubt there's just a lot of sticklers for MLA or APA style out there trying to do this on behalf of ethics in college journalism.
Of course the culture war part is worth discussing, the social/journalistic norms are worth discussing, but my biggest reaction to this was "What? Why is there so much plagiarism in academia?" YOU SHOULDN'T BE ABLE TO BECOME PRESIDENT OF HARVARD WITH A PLAGIARIZED DISSERTATION!!! I think we can all agree that's objectively a bad outcome and the sign of a flawed system, and it completely crushes my faith in academia (not that I had much faith before now, considering the replication crisis and how partisan some universities are). Academia needs to do better than this if we want the average person to "trust the experts". If I ever meet another arrogant Harvard grad, I'm rubbing this in their face.
I would hope that at least one person reads the dissertation of each and every Harvard professor that gets hired - and that a whole committee reads the important writings of anyone in higher administration. My faith that this was happening and that even basic checks for plagiarism were being conducted is very low.
This substantially lowers my estimation of Harvard and by extension Harvard grads. Not that they are now low status in my mind, but much lower than before.
however much you hate journalists, it's not enough
am I the only one who thinks the statue of limitations for plagiarism should be much longer than that for off-color remarks?
The media's main job is to point the bone at people on behalf of the interests of their benefactors and their allies. It exists as a form of mass amplification and communication of the elite's messaging. From the King's crier who went from town to town, no difference exists. A few attempts were made and some minor forms exist of the less powerful coopting these tools for their own use, but most were driven out of business as the majority of large circulation union and worker focused papers have gone under.
Structurally this is the entire point of the media to empower the voices of the powerful and it brings to mind the phrase 'the greatest trick of the devil is to convince you he doesn't exist'. Often this plays out as court politics and intrigue. Manufacturing consent, etc. applies as well as them not alwasy having a particular point to amplify and serving a wide range of topics held in the backburenr in order to insert their preferred narrative control mechanisms later.
You my good sir have been very very very badly gaslit by a liar. Often gaslighting is a seemingly overused term, but this is a pretty clear cut case of it by a corporate self-styled 'mainstream' journalist telling you they have no power, no coordination, and are not infested with intelligence plants. Liars are going to liar about everything, including their role as liars who deceive, distract, and misinform.
They are unwilling to accept any form of criticism as it exposes them. This is why nearly 100% of true media critique is in independent media, not the silly sports team style fake rivalry from the two sides of the same coin known as the uniparty.
Scott, have you read Nellie Bowles' (former NYT journo and wife of Bari Weiss) reflections on her career in the media? She openly says that she wrote hit pieces on people, arguably the most prominent of whom was none other than Jordan Peterson, and that she was rewarded for doing so.
Check it out here: https://chosenbychoice.substack.com/p/learning-how-to-and-how-not-to-kill
> And so on and so forth for another thirty-odd paragraphs listing all of my various psychological flaws.
I like it when people talking about my psychological traits, I think anyone who got some psychological education likes it too. But I didn't experience journalists doing that. Probably it is much less fun, because you cannot troll them.
Not just journalists! This kind of behaviour is also quite common in the legal system. This is why having rules on the books that criminalize a lot are so dangerous - it's all fine until someone is out to get you, and then suddenly you get busted for "tax-evasion" or "non-compliance" or whatever.
I think the counter view is not that journalists are truth seekers - it's that they are busy professionals looking to write stories that a large public would be interested in. So the reason they dig up dirt on Ackman's wife isn't that he went after their allies - it's that he is in the news for making an accusation of plagiarism, so the story about his wife committing plagiarism would sell.
On this account, the source of the problem is that the public is interested in reading stories that play like an episode of the Jerry Springer show. And in a competitive journalism market, there will always be media outlets who would satisfy this taste.
From a higher point of view, this is a bit like Hanlon's Razor. What seems like conspiracy or malice is often better explained by some less dramatic human weakness.
I mostly agree with you, but there's also an angle of why a particular journalist would pick a particular story amongst the many possible for investigating. It's not like Oxman's plagiarism was obvious and already known but just not shared. People had to do real research to match up her writing with her sources, without knowing that they would find anything (unless there's an assumption that everyone in academia plagiarizes, which seems like a much bigger thing to share if you're just looking for clicks).
My guess is that some woke academic knew about Oxman and the plagiarism and gave the journalist a tip. The point is that mainline journalists are not some sort of cabal with evil intentions, but are simply interested in writing stories that get a lot of hits. They would at least try to write much more fair, balanced and deeply researched stories if such stories were more popular. But, unfortunately, negative and unfair stories tend to get a lot more hits, so that's what they mostly do. Technology has accelerated this process, since you can now easily measure reader engagement with individual stories.
There is a lot of intellectualizing on this topic in this thread, and some of it is thought provoking as an academic exercise.
But sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
I think that we need to acknowledge that in today's Western society journalists are essentially weapons of stochastic violence, due to our leaders refusal to hold social media lynch mobs accountable for their actions.
That's not necessarily a bad thing, when the stochastic violence is deserved. Speaking truth to power is important, even if said truths destroy those in power. The problem is that increasingly journalists are speaking falsehoods FROM power. Many of them have willingly allowed themselves to be slaves of our oligarchs.
I think it's important to recognize that just as journalists routinely inflict stochastic violence towards their enemies, we have every right to inflict stochastic violence towards then. If journalists want to actively take sides in the culture war, they aren't neutral bystanders: they are enemy soldiers, and we need to start taking some of their scalps.
There needs to be a return to the journalistic standards of neutrality, fairness, and diligence. And the best way to accomplish that is to target journalists for harassment when they DON'T live up to these principles.