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Academics Shouldn't Sell Out Truth for Justice
- cafard 8y agoAn article long ago in The New Republic by Richard Rorty remarked that most of Bertrand Russell's better philosophical ideas came from Frege, whose non-philosophical opinions were not of a nature to please Russell's admirers.
- Zuider 8y agoTo be specific, Frege, was quite anti-Semitic in his private writings.
- i_am_nomad 8y agoIt takes a certain level of maturity and nuance to understand that people are complex, multidimensional beings of often contradictory impulses and principles, and as such, one’s academic contributions can be separated from whose ass they grabbed. Sadly, maturity and nuance were killed and buried years ago.
- cowpig 8y ago> Sadly, maturity and nuance were killed and buried years ago. irony
- writepub 8y agoI can't believe this question is even getting asked in 2018. History has tried ignoring the truth in favor of religion in the past, that gave us the dark ages. The tenets of social justice and intersectionality place more weight on feelings than the truth. What is religion, if not a lie to make you feel better. Social justice is 2010's religion, that eclipses all others and argues for the decimation of the scientific process, if said process doesn't make one feel good. But, truth has a funny way of catching up. For humanity's sake, please choose the truth, academicians.
- creaghpatr 8y agoYou have to read the full article, if you believe in scientific advancement you will be absolutely terrified.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- crimsonalucard 8y agoThere's a fine line between truth and justice. Nothing illustrated this more than the movie, The Dark Knight.
- purplerabbit 8y agoDid you mean to be hilarious here or was that unintentional?
- crimsonalucard 8y agoI'm 100% srs.
- gweinberg 8y agoShouldn't have edited "social" out of the title. "Social justice" and "justice" are unrelated concepts.
- thetrumanshow 8y agoThe article never uses the standalone word "justice", and it is always preceded by "social". Therefore, your suggestion that the title is incorrect is spot on.
- weberc2 8y agoDoesn't help that "social justice" refers both to the abstract concept and a particular ideology (progressivism, postmodernism, intersectionality, critical theory, conditional racism/sexism, etc).
- Folcon 8y agoI might be being dense here, but how is this different to plagiarism?
- weberc2 8y agoThe idea is that plagiarism should be permitted in cases where the plagiarizer believes the plagiarizee is guilty of violating social justice norms. You're not missing anything; it's just a terrible idea.
- sp332 8y ago“If you can avoid teaching/discussing [Searle’s work], that may be the best strategy.” “In the case of a sexist jerk, you are often left without recourse: Cite him, or look like you don’t know what you’re talking about to reviewers and readers.” This is about removing the content, not just the credit.
- modzu 8y agotell me this "usher" person is not an actual academic, please. they sound 12...
- sp332 8y agoDr. Usher received her Ph.D. and MA from the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication and her AB from Harvard (magna cum laude) https://media.illinois.edu/nikki-usher https://media.illinois.edu/nikki-usher It probably helps to read the paper https://www.chronicle.com/article/Should-We-Still-Cite-the/244450 https://www.chronicle.com/article/Should-We-Still-Cite-the/2... and maybe her response to TFA https://twitter.com/nikkiusher/status/1058032795803639808 https://twitter.com/nikkiusher/status/1058032795803639808
- modzu 8y agoouch. didn't help (but thank you for the references)
- 8y ago
- Alex3917 8y agoWhy don't academics just create their own version of a nofollow link?
- sp332 8y agoOr a variant of impact factor that incorporates how many of a person's co-workers actually hate their guts.
- ummonk 8y agoYeah, that seems like it would be ideal. Both for this sort of issue and also the issue where for example a paper is debunking a shoddy previous paper but has to cite that previous paper in the process.
- weberc2 8y agoThe appropriate solution is to make sure that sexism and racism factor into an academic's evaluations (not sure, but I would guess this is already the case given how many departments demand faculty pledges to 'diversity' and 'inclusivity'), rather than polluting scholarship. It seems like what these academics really want is a sort of impunity for their vigilantism. This is bad for the regular reasons vigilantism is bad--someone can visit their view of "justice" on another person without due process--but also because it hurts scholarship.
- sp332 8y agoThis is considered by Usher in her article. How would a journal editor draw the line between scholars not wanting to cite their rival in the field and not wanting to cite a sexist jerk? Would you have to provide a detailed accounting of the sexism and gender bias to persuade the editor? In short, trying to avoid citing someone because you don’t like them is impossible if their work is important in your field. Perhaps it’s just adding insult to injury when the guy is a sexist jerk.
- sp332 8y ago> But no substantive imperative to cite people based on their social cachet exists. Well the article is pretty disingenuous on this point. Prestige in academia is heavily based on citations. It's insane that serial abusers are protected by their institutions and allowed to continue their abuse without suffering a dent in their social standing. If there were other ways to hurt a person's reputation, as there certainly should be, removing citations probably wouldn't be favored by as many people.
- maceurt 8y agoI mean, the shame of the abuse or the justice of law should be the one that handles punishment of crimes. To try and shame people not to cite or use scholarly work from people with controversy sourrounding them is sinister in its very nature. It is falling to mob rule instead of logic and reason. Science should be subject to logic and reason and not be infected with social, political, and culutural. Obviously science does not exist in a vacuum, but still.
- vkou 8y ago> I mean, the shame of the abuse or the justice of law should be the one that handles punishment of crimes. I don't need a jury of twelve peers being convinced beyond a reasonable doubt to tell me how I should engage in voluntary collaboration with another person. If I don't want to cite, or work with assholes, that's my business. Call it mob rule if you want, freedom of speech and assembly means freedom from being compelled to work with someone. Citations are an endorsement of a person's work, and of a person. You may wish for that to not be the case, but that's how they are perceived.
- davrosthedalek 8y agoAt least in hard sciences, citations are more. The real reason fore citations is to a) show that you know the subject matter and, more importantly b) make use of established facts. The problem is now that some of these facts are unique. While you, for example, could ignore measured data points if there are others around (not a good idea), you can not simply replace a theorem etc. by something else. You can not attribute it to someone else either. And you shouldn't use it without citations either, because the chain of proof has to be preserved. The endorsement of a person's work is a consequence of this. If the findings are more relevant or important, they will be cited more. -> if you are cited more, you do important stuff.
- sharpneli 8y agoConsidering that the humanities sometimes have hard time to be taken seriously at sciences this does not help at all. One can easily say that it's just politics and not real science if they're even having that discussion. (Everyone whose viewpoint was taken into account in the article was from humanities. No-one was from hard sciences.)
- media_obsvr 8y agoIt's a decent article. But in general conservatives have an incentive to attack universities (since they are independent arbiters of truth). More here, including how the Koches and other libertarians spend money to attack universities. https://psmag.com/education/conservative-media-is-waging-a-war-on-the-humanities-and-its-succeeding https://psmag.com/education/conservative-media-is-waging-a-w... So there's often a bit of selective reporting. Universities spend a lot of time debating opinions, and the few times something like this gets discussed, it gets amplified by conservatives. I generally like Friedersdorf, but he's a self-professed libertarian and does a lot of writing about university speech. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/06/libertarians-arent-all-selfish-jerks/240757/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/06/liberta... "Libertarians Aren't All Selfish Jerks" CONOR FRIEDERSDORF
- Zuider 8y agoThis kind of controversy is intruding on the hard sciences. For one example, a highly abstract math paper on the greater male variability hypothesis was blocked from publication and the authors subjected to uncollegial harassment for purely ideological reasons. https://quillette.com/2018/09/07/academic-activists-send-a-published-paper-down-the-memory-hole/ https://quillette.com/2018/09/07/academic-activists-send-a-p...
- cam_l 8y agoI propose changing the name of the 'hard' science to 'easy' science. Because there are definitive answers, because the answers don't change when you ask the question, and because political input is rarer. Just think about how much you trust the 'hard' sciences where these points do not hold.. Climate science.. food science.. Quantum physics.. Hell, computer science!
- ummonk 8y agoI'm usually anti-SJW, but if someone is a sexist ass who doesn't acknowledge women's contributions to the field, why should those women acknowledge his contributions either?
- justinjlynn 8y agoBecause academia shouldn't be a tit-for-tat game played by people who wish to score points against each other in a game of judge-jury-executioner. If you don't condone a particular colleagues attitudes or actions or reported actions - by all means please do say so in your footnotes and citations. Make sure your colleagues know of your discomfort and that they should also be discomforted by people like that being in a place where they are enabled to contribute to the field - when they should be driven from it. However, under no account should one defraud one's editors and/or reviewers - or your colleagues who trust your work has been reviewed and approved by them. To do so is plainly dishonest and deprives those people of their right to autonomy. You aren't forced to cite, but then they don't have to approve - or read - either. If you have to lie and cheat to people in order to get your way - perhaps what your doing is wrong, because you're certainly doing wrong to those people. At what point do you opt out of a system with which you disagree? Is it morally acceptable to commit an unjust act to achieve what you believe to be justice? Is it acceptable to venerate vigilantism - to be a vigilante? I would say that it certainly isn't - in precisely the same way using unjustly or immorally obtained data is unacceptable.
- manfredo 8y agoFor one, it would further erode society's respect for academia. People already widely suspect that social-justice minded academics see their position to be more like a soapbox from which to preach rather than an means to carry out an objective pursuit of understanding. A deliberate campaign of exclusion of people they don't like would only serve to confirm this view.
- Yetanfou 8y agoFollow your line of reasoning to its logical conclusion and you'll end up with... - men not citing radical anything produced by rabid feminists ("why would those men acknowledge the contribution of a man-hater?") - religious people not citing atheists ("why would those people acknowledge the contributions of an unbeliever?") - atheists not citing religious people ("why would those people acknowledge the contributions of a sky-fairy theorist?") - lefties not citing right-wingers ... - right-wingers not citing lefties ... - ... And 'poof', there goes the scientific method. Don't go down that path, it leads to nothing but destruction.
- TangoTrotFox 8y agoIt's sometimes peculiar how quick we are to aim to repeat history, blisteringly awful history, seemingly with no concern or regard for what we are doing. The Arab world was once near the top of the world in scholarship and academic pursuit. Algebra, for instance, being a reference to Ilm al-jabr wa'l-muḳābala, by Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī. Or there was the House of Wisdom in Baghdad where scholars were consigned with the responsibility of translating cultural and scientific works from across the world into Arabic. But then in a shockingly short period of time that same Arab world started to place their selected social values above that of the truth, in and of itself. Perhaps one of the major catalysts for this was Al-Ghazali, and his very well received ideology laid out in "The Incoherence of the Philosophers." [1] Formerly a philosopher himself, that work is where Al-Ghazali began to deny all science and reality and replace it with religion. He declared that there was no such thing as causality. When a leaf catches fire it is not because it was exposed to fire - rather god chose to transit the fire from the torch to the leaf at that very moment. And again when it deteriorates into ash - that is once again not a natural process, but rather the explicit and active will of god acting at that very moment. The implication of this is that there is no truth to be sought, there is no connection in nature, there is nothing except for god. The reason for this is because it answered any sort of inconvenient questions for religion, by attacking the questions (and those that pose them) directly. And in a short period of time the Arabic world was set on the path that sent it away from academic pursuit and knowledge and onto the path that's brought it to where it is today. Imagine what a different place the world would be today had they instead remained focused on the truth, and the golden age of Islam persisted indefinitely. Social values must never take precedent over truth, no matter how undesirable the truth may be to hear, or how undesirable the speakers of said truth may be. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incoherence_of_the_Philosophers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incoherence_of_the_Philoso...
- alexandercrohde 8y agoThere are unlimited mechanisms to try to "punish" somebody who violates your moral code. Each mechanism has a certain effectiveness, a certain fallibility, and a certain inconvenience. For example you can boycott, you can badmouth, you can arrest, you can refuse to acknowledge, you can socially ostracize, you can wield professional power (e.g. give a bad grade to), you can disrupt their speaking engagements, you can physically attack, you can sue. I think we can all agree some mechanisms are reasonable, some are unreasonable, and some are worth debating. I'm glad this discussion is becoming conscious and deliberate.
- mar77i 8y agoFor this comment I'll pretend I'm writing this on a Linux installed on ReiserFS. You get the idea.
- ericmcer 8y agoAfter reading this I looked into James Watson (discoverer of DNA) more. He was blacklisted for some statements in an interview, many display his implicit biases, but one part was: "there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically." That statement kinda embodies the darkest part of this issue. It makes sense, evolutionary differences between peoples extend beyond skin color, eye-shape, etc., but at the same time it is a can of worms that can never be opened (again). It is definitely an issue of science where justice is more important than truth. My personal take is that we will all inevitably be a light brown shade in ~200 years and we should make that transition as enjoyable and smooth as possible. Hopefully this doesn't get down-voted to heck :o
- UncleMeat 8y agoThe problem is that this statement presupposes that no research has been done. Yes, if we were starting fresh we wouldn't want to assume that all populations evolved identically. But we aren't starting fresh. There has been decades of quality research on race both from a biological and social setting. What we observe through evidence rather than conjecture is that the hypothesis that people of certain races are genetically less intelligent than other people is not supported by evidence. Justice and truth are aligned here.
- SamReidHughes 8y agoWhat is the evidence that rules out the hypothesis that the population distributions aren't the same? When the Khmer Rouge targeted intellectuals in Cambodia, wiping out 10% of the population, how did they fail to alter the population distribution?
- Zuider 8y agoIn their pursuit of 'intellectuals' Khmer Rouge targeted anyone wearing spectacles. Do the Cambodians have better eyesight than comparable populations?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]