3 ms·

Cheers for scientific revolutions being gentler than political ones. Cuddy lost her reputation rather than her head. But losing a reputation hurts more, or at l

Cheers for scientific revolutions being gentler than political ones. Cuddy lost her reputation rather than her head. But losing a reputation hurts more, or at least longer. More civility could have helped, but there's no painless way to lose status. The scandal is that Cuddy's work met the standard of the bulk of published social science until lately. She studied the same phlogiston with the same tools as her colleagues. But when the revolution that comes for them, gently, is an epistemic advance, their pain is our gain. Join the revolution, comrad Cuddy!

throwawayjava 9y ago
The tragedy of the ordeal is that she tried and was lined up against the wall regardless, mostly due to lack of civility and poor communication: > But the email that Simmons and Simonsohn had sent was, in fact, ambiguous: They had explicitly told her to drop the P-curve and yet left the impression that the paper was otherwise sound. At my request, Simmons looked back at his original email. I watched as he read it over. “Oh, yeah,” he said quietly. He had a pained look on his face. “We did say to drop the graph, didn’t we?” He read it over again, then sat back. “I didn’t remember that. This may be a big misunderstanding about — that email is too polite.” Cuddy and Carney had taken their advice literally.
- conistonwater 9y ago
  "lined up against the wall", really? I think you would be more convincing if you toned it down a bit on the metaphors.
  - throwawayjava 9y ago
    It was parent's metaphor, not mine. The substance holds.
    - conistonwater 9y ago
      I don't see it in that comment. Where? I only see "Cuddy lost her reputation rather than her head.", which is not at all similar. (I don't see it in NYT either.)
      - throwawayjava 9y ago
        Is there really a substantive difference between losing your head to a guillotine and being lined up and shot? (The NYT begins the metaphor with "revolution", parent extends it with "violent revolution", and I switched out one form of violence with another).
    - hirundo 9y ago
      It was the New York Time's metaphor, not mine. But your substance does hold. Cuddy may have lessened her punishment, though, had she denounced the bourgeoisie with more fervor.
- matt_morgan 9y ago
  This is really the key point of the article (or maybe one of two, the other being Cuddy's unwillingness to accept change in favor of continuing to survive on her unsupported results); and the overall message is that we all do dumb things, directed toward our own benefit, under pressure. (E.g. Carney saying there's no ninth planet, when in fact they only did not show there is a ninth planet). Gelman is actually the only primary player in the piece who mostly escapes this; he does some nerdy things but in no case says something other than what he means, or actively deceives (as Simmons appears to have done here) or self-deceives (Cuddy).
VLM 9y ago
Perhaps the meta lesson is we massively overproduce academics, making the stakes and competition insane. In the cutthroat world of academic soft sciences you're not getting tenure unless you make a breakthru and you're allowed zero mistakes. Its up or out. She made her one mistake, and she's out. And there's 10, 50, 5000 people equally qualified without opportunity to cheer on her demise. One of hundreds or thousands of equally qualified researchers now gets a chance at tenure, good for them bad for her. On the other hand in the commercial software development world, we usually don't blacklist software devs from the field after their first bug because 1) we're low on supplies of software devs plus or minus propaganda, at least we don't have the excess of her field 2) the experience of having a software bug makes a better dev. You can't expect non-pathological behavior from a pathological situation. Until the supply/demand hiring issues in academia are fixed, stories about academia are going to read like an insane elementary school playground version of Lord of the Flies. You can't produce 10 to 100 times as much product (new grads) as the market can adsorb without behavior for the few good positions being viciously cutthroat and extremely dramatic.

throwawayjava 9y ago

The tragedy of the ordeal is that she tried and was lined up against the wall regardless, mostly due to lack of civility and poor communication: > But the email that Simmons and Simonsohn had sent was, in fact, ambiguous: They had explicitly told her to drop the P-curve and yet left the impression that the paper was otherwise sound. At my request, Simmons looked back at his original email. I watched as he read it over. “Oh, yeah,” he said quietly. He had a pained look on his face. “We did say to drop the graph, didn’t we?” He read it over again, then sat back. “I didn’t remember that. This may be a big misunderstanding about — that email is too polite.” Cuddy and Carney had taken their advice literally.

conistonwater 9y ago
"lined up against the wall", really? I think you would be more convincing if you toned it down a bit on the metaphors.
- throwawayjava 9y ago
  It was parent's metaphor, not mine. The substance holds.
  - conistonwater 9y ago
    I don't see it in that comment. Where? I only see "Cuddy lost her reputation rather than her head.", which is not at all similar. (I don't see it in NYT either.)
    - throwawayjava 9y ago
      Is there really a substantive difference between losing your head to a guillotine and being lined up and shot? (The NYT begins the metaphor with "revolution", parent extends it with "violent revolution", and I switched out one form of violence with another).
  - hirundo 9y ago
    It was the New York Time's metaphor, not mine. But your substance does hold. Cuddy may have lessened her punishment, though, had she denounced the bourgeoisie with more fervor.
matt_morgan 9y ago
This is really the key point of the article (or maybe one of two, the other being Cuddy's unwillingness to accept change in favor of continuing to survive on her unsupported results); and the overall message is that we all do dumb things, directed toward our own benefit, under pressure. (E.g. Carney saying there's no ninth planet, when in fact they only did not show there is a ninth planet). Gelman is actually the only primary player in the piece who mostly escapes this; he does some nerdy things but in no case says something other than what he means, or actively deceives (as Simmons appears to have done here) or self-deceives (Cuddy).

VLM 9y ago

Perhaps the meta lesson is we massively overproduce academics, making the stakes and competition insane. In the cutthroat world of academic soft sciences you're not getting tenure unless you make a breakthru and you're allowed zero mistakes. Its up or out. She made her one mistake, and she's out. And there's 10, 50, 5000 people equally qualified without opportunity to cheer on her demise. One of hundreds or thousands of equally qualified researchers now gets a chance at tenure, good for them bad for her. On the other hand in the commercial software development world, we usually don't blacklist software devs from the field after their first bug because 1) we're low on supplies of software devs plus or minus propaganda, at least we don't have the excess of her field 2) the experience of having a software bug makes a better dev. You can't expect non-pathological behavior from a pathological situation. Until the supply/demand hiring issues in academia are fixed, stories about academia are going to read like an insane elementary school playground version of Lord of the Flies. You can't produce 10 to 100 times as much product (new grads) as the market can adsorb without behavior for the few good positions being viciously cutthroat and extremely dramatic.