12 ms·

Extremism Researchers Confront The Unseen Toll Of Their Work

1f60c 7y ago
The link on their full site, which I found a bit easier to read: https://www.npr.org/2019/09/20/762430305/it-gets-to-you-extremism-researchers-confront-the-unseen-toll-of-their-work https://www.npr.org/2019/09/20/762430305/it-gets-to-you-extr...
SolaceQuantum 7y ago
This reminds me of the psychological toll on content moderators at facebook and youtube, and previously was known to happen to police prosecuting specific murders or child sex abuse or in lawyers managing such cases. It takes a toll on these people in a very specific manner. Someday, I hope we can identify the full extent of the harm as its own traumatic exposures, treat it appropriately, and view those showing such videos to be the psychological danger it is turning out to be.
- state_less 7y ago
  I'm sorry folks have to confront this graphic imagery so often. If you could use ML to classify killing in a scene better, you could do the public and the researchers a favor. Use the classifier to limit the impact of a terrorist video before it is spread to social media and give researchers a chance to organize and consent to watching certain sections of the video when and if needed.
  - journalctl 7y ago
    When will this ML-fueled fantasy end? You can’t use machine learning for most of these tasks. Not now, maybe not ever. And the fact is: real people are being paid shit wages to watch ISIS beheading videos right now. Today. As we sit and sip our coffee. So what can we do /right now/ to help solve this problem?
    - reportgunner 7y ago
      So much this. I often wonder if the people clever enough to propose a ML solution in a random comment on the web have an idea of how ML/AI/nested IFs work. (or rather how anything works)
    - state_less 7y ago
      I disagree that there isn't information in those images that could be used to filter out some of these scenes. You have blood, impact wounds, bodies going limp, and other factors. It's something you can work on right now, in addition to other remedies, to reduce the quantity and impact of the trauma.
  - SolaceQuantum 7y ago
    That still would require massive human resources to categorize the training data, and then more human resources to continually quirk the algorithm on identifying traumatic media. I don't personally see a way to avoid using humans here, so it's important that we identify and deal with the damage done to people in an empathetic and humane manner.
    - state_less 7y ago
      Humans (researchers) are already doing the work. What I'm suggesting is that you add a classifier so that in the future, some of the work is done for you by the machine.
      - psychometry 7y ago
        You can rest assured that many people in the ML world are way ahead of you. If ML could be effectively used, it already would be.
        state_less 7y ago
        There are a couple papers from 2017 where they talk about getting some effective results, but there is a lack of datasets around this topic and that the area is less studied. Can you point to the efforts that have been made here? https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rahuls/pub/caip2011-rahuls.pdf https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rahuls/pub/caip2011-rahuls.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1711.02578.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1711.02578.pdf
      - SolaceQuantum 7y ago
        Yes, and I'm responding that that still requires human labor and trauma, therefore it is still important to classify these responses as harm and treat these jobs as dangerous to the psychological wellbeing of the people participating in them now- give them access to healthcare related to their workplace hazard.
deogeo 7y ago
> Charlie Winter, a London-based terrorism researcher, was dining with friends one recent evening when the conversation turned to whether it is ethical to eat meat. Someone brought up slaughterhouse conditions, Winter said, and he instantly grew uneasy. He stayed for a while longer, squirming, and then finally left the room. That word — "slaughterhouse" — had conjured images of one of the most gruesome ISIS videos he'd come across. The militants had filmed a mass execution in a slaughterhouse, casting their prisoners as the animals. I wonder if watching gruesome animal slaughter videos would eventually produce the same reaction. Given how much the industry wants to keep their treatment of animals secret [1], I can't imagine the effect is benign. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ag-gag https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ag-gag "Supporters of ag-gag laws have argued that they serve to protect the agriculture industry from the negative repercussions of exposés by whistleblowers."
- claudeganon 7y ago
  “As often as Herman had witnessed the slaughter of animals and fish, he always had the same thought: in their behaviour towards creatures, all men were Nazis. The smugness with which man could do with other species as he pleased exemplified the most extreme racist theories, the principle that might is right.” Isaac Bashevis Singer
  - deogeo 7y ago
    > in their behaviour towards creatures, all men were Nazis. Which is more than a little ironic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler_and_vegetarianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler_and_vegetarianism
    - eeZah7Ux 7y ago
      Where's the irony?
- psychoslave 7y ago
  Articles that seem relevant to the topic: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L214 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L214 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_Treblinka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_Treblinka
simias 7y ago
That doesn't surprise me at all. I actively try to avoid echo chambers so I go out of my way to find forums and communities of people with very different opinions. I'll go looking for antivax groups, religious forums, flat-earther blogs and try to see how they view the world. Since I'm fairly left-leaning I also often end up reading far-right content. It's not like it's hard to find on the web these days. I often end up incredibly depressed after doing that though. Flat-earthers are wrong but they're often innocuous. Sure, there are conspiracy theories lurking everywhere but they're not really preaching hate or intolerance usually. You have a minority of extremists and then plenty of people who just don't know any better but don't seem to be bad people on their own. The far right stuff is different. It's just dripping with hate and lack of empathy. It's almost always about putting other people down to feel better about themselves. Empathy is weakness, moderation is treachery, the opposition are "degenerates" and "Non Player Characters" who are depersonalized and considered sub-human. The most vile acts will be brushed away if it serves their objectives. It's not people who "don't know any better", it's people who want to feed on hate. It's frankly terrifying to me. And before somebody tries to tell me that the far-left is as bad, I really don't think it is, or at least not nearly at the same scale. I've seen hate speech and calls for violence on communist forums for instance, and of course the atrocities committed by socialist and communist regimes are often downplayed, but it's not nearly at the same scale or with the same violence in my experience.
- krapp 7y ago
  >And before somebody tries to tell me that the far-left is as bad, I really don't think it is, or at least not nearly at the same scale. It isn't politically correct on HN to imply that there is any difference between the extremism of left-wing versus right-wing politics, unless it's to argue that the left is even worse.
  - mieseratte 7y ago
    > unless it's to argue that the left is even worse. That's highly debatable, at best.
- ThomPete 7y ago
dsfyu404ed 7y ago
People do terrible things and being exposed to it in concentrated form will make you less happy by some amount related to what you're exposed to, the concentration and your personal tolerance. Water is wet. More news at 11.
JulianMorrison 7y ago
I think this is part of the answer to free speech absolutists. Even someone who isn't ideologically bought into this stuff is traumatized and damaged simply by exposure as a researcher. It is not possible to treat this content, even the textual hate screed rather than graphic form, as part of "the marketplace of ideas". It has effects.
- lm28469 7y ago
  > I think this is part of the answer to free speech absolutists. You can't argue with them, they'll say "don't like it, don't watch it".
  - JulianMorrison 7y ago
    It's the people who do like it that I worry about.
- Kaiyou 7y ago
  Everything has cause and effect. What's your point, that we should police the content adults are allowed to watch? Call the police on people watching 2girls1cup?
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  We're not gonna throw out one of the core tenants of modern democracy because some people get sick if they get too much exposure to it.
- Hitton 7y ago
  The problem is that pretty much anything can have effect. With your approach you would have to ban everything to the level of people with lowest resistance. First you ban torture videos, then murder videos, then animal slaughter, then violent porn, then violent video games, then violent movies, then all movies where gun is shot (see shooting ar-15 gave me ptsd) and you have banned all action movies. And you still can't be sure if there isn't anything even more benign which would have "an effect" on someone.
- Nasrudith 7y ago
lm28469 7y ago
I always wonder if people were tougher before, when death, blood, violence were much more common (< 100years ago: famines, wars, diseases, life conditions, crimes in general). Surely the average person back then were confronted to a much more difficult life than the modern average first world country inhabitant, did nobody talk about it ? Did they just plow through it all ? Were they less prone to complain ? It seems like today you can't go more than a week without a "x" gave me ptsd article[0]. I used to be on chans back in the days, and I saw my fair share of isis videos, they're awful there is no doubt about that but I never felt any of what these people are describing, anyone with the same experience ? [0] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/new-york-daily-news-journalist-firing-an-ar-15-gave-me-ptsd https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/new-york-daily-news-journ...
- Retric 7y ago
  We keep inventing new names for old problems. Shell shock (WWI), battle fatigue/combat stress reaction (WWII), Gross Stress Reaction (Korea and Vietnam), and soldier's heart (Civil War) continue a long trend. You can even read descriptions of such problems in the Iliad. PS: Nostalgia was apparently the term used in the 1700’s.
  - philpem 7y ago
    The other point worth making is one from the article -- people have varying levels of tolerance and recovery ability. A comment which bounces off one person may well cause serious damage to another.
    - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
      There's some research indicating that being around people who have shared similar experience matters a lot. Basically, it's not trauma if it happens to a big enough % of people. It's just a normal (if unlucky) life experience. When the British went and whacked Argentina they found that the soldiers who hopped on a plane and 12hr later were surrounded by people who will never have to make a life and death decision and are complaining about how they "literally got ptsd" from firing a rifle had PTSD type problems at a much higher rate than soldiers who got a 2wk boat ride surrounded by people who had been through the same stuff.
malicioususer11 7y ago
"lets be extreme about killing extremists before anyone dies." and then employees wonder why they have PTSD. lololol. :3
Damogran6 7y ago
I wonder if this isn't happening, at a much lower volume, to the population at large. I have a single device connected to Twitter, the ipad on my nightstand. I don't know how my personal feed developed, but Twitter is nothing but a violent diarrhea of hate and I frequently pick it up, look at the first page, and move on to something else. It's nowhere near the same thing as watching ISIS videos constantly, but I wonder if we're poisoning ourselves with an unending stream of hate?
MockObject 7y ago
I wonder if the ISIS fighters themselves suffer from PTSD from taking part in such slaughter. Does strong ideology protect against brain trauma?
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  I suspect the answer is no but they rationalize until it either strengthens the ideology to cover up because they refuse to admit mistakes, and they convince themselves that their shaking hands are from fervor or they become disillusioned and break free with PTSD with added rightful guilt. Addrenaline and immediacy of threat do help a bit though - drone piliots apparently have more PTSD from killing compared to cockpit gunners being shot at before they pulled the trigger.
alexis_fr 7y ago
Sorry guys, but I don’t understand. As a society, we are fighting extremism by... censoring it, not addressing their points. Manifestos of killers are always hidden, the reasons why they killed never addressed, and we go as far as banning all authors whose work describes why the extremist became extremist (see Jordan Peterson’s book banned in NZ), thereby ensuring the population never understands the terrorist. Why? “We don’t discuss with extremists” is a fairly strong assertion. It comes from an “us vs them” attitude. For example, men who start being upset with women being promoted about 2,7x fewer experience and men who get upset being managed by women who grossly misrepresent their competency and drives their department to irrelevancy, start researching feminism. They regularly found that most feminist science is bollocks. Studies about rape are manipulated to show rates as high as 650x higher than more decent sources, for example by only using voluntary responses from a non-random group, by conflating rape and the presence of alcohol (so a dinner with one’s boyfriend including wine entered the category that the study reported as “rape... or sex without consent”), by conflating rape and not-woman-initiated-sex, or other techniques to overinflate victimization. Same techniques apply to wage gap (conflate gross gap with same-work gap, conflate full-time-with-overtime vs full-time, conflate the quality of work of people who are passionnate and/or are forced to earn more, vs the quality of work of people who don’t commit to their job), I’ve seen in also in the legal and social domain. A study that concludes that women are victims has like 60% chances of not having been seriously peer-reviewed and 99% chances of having a major, fatal flaw that discredits it. Ok, so can we denounce a bad scientific paper? Can we denounce repeated news articles that are repeatedly false? No, because “it’s fake news”. I was once literally told (by a magistrate friend of mine), “Everyone knows women are oppressed, so if that’s not want your counter-analysis concludes, you are the one who’s wrong”. And we go as far as firing them, which didn’t happen to me because I resigned before they discovered that I had The Doubt. So we have large swathes of people, who were pointing out something entirely correct, who are excluded from society “because we don’t discuss with terrorists”. Some of them commit bombings. Their frequency increases, mostly as a result of the increasing rate of divorce in the 80’s, which means boys are only surrounded by women (mother, teacher, psychologist) who claim literally false science, and who publicly hate men and everything masculine. How are we, as a society, going to sort that out, if there is no place where this can get discussed? Are we voluntarily going to say, “ok, bombings will repeat, because it is very important that nobody knows the motives of bombers, and nobody resolves those problems, and nobody even will resolve the false science that is outright plain false”? Is that seriously the path we are taking? But more important is the pathways: Learning about the absurd mistakes of feminist science is leading most users into neighbour areas (yes, studies on racism), and is procuring a steady stream of new recruits for what you call “extreme movements”. Wouldn’t it be better to tap the leak while it’s still time?

The link on their full site, which I found a bit easier to read: https://www.npr.org/2019/09/20/762430305/it-gets-to-you-extremism-researchers-confront-the-unseen-toll-of-their-work https://www.npr.org/2019/09/20/762430305/it-gets-to-you-extr...

SolaceQuantum 7y ago

This reminds me of the psychological toll on content moderators at facebook and youtube, and previously was known to happen to police prosecuting specific murders or child sex abuse or in lawyers managing such cases. It takes a toll on these people in a very specific manner. Someday, I hope we can identify the full extent of the harm as its own traumatic exposures, treat it appropriately, and view those showing such videos to be the psychological danger it is turning out to be.

state_less 7y ago
I'm sorry folks have to confront this graphic imagery so often. If you could use ML to classify killing in a scene better, you could do the public and the researchers a favor. Use the classifier to limit the impact of a terrorist video before it is spread to social media and give researchers a chance to organize and consent to watching certain sections of the video when and if needed.
- journalctl 7y ago
  When will this ML-fueled fantasy end? You can’t use machine learning for most of these tasks. Not now, maybe not ever. And the fact is: real people are being paid shit wages to watch ISIS beheading videos right now. Today. As we sit and sip our coffee. So what can we do /right now/ to help solve this problem?
  - reportgunner 7y ago
    So much this. I often wonder if the people clever enough to propose a ML solution in a random comment on the web have an idea of how ML/AI/nested IFs work. (or rather how anything works)
  - state_less 7y ago
    I disagree that there isn't information in those images that could be used to filter out some of these scenes. You have blood, impact wounds, bodies going limp, and other factors. It's something you can work on right now, in addition to other remedies, to reduce the quantity and impact of the trauma.
- SolaceQuantum 7y ago
  That still would require massive human resources to categorize the training data, and then more human resources to continually quirk the algorithm on identifying traumatic media. I don't personally see a way to avoid using humans here, so it's important that we identify and deal with the damage done to people in an empathetic and humane manner.
  - state_less 7y ago
    Humans (researchers) are already doing the work. What I'm suggesting is that you add a classifier so that in the future, some of the work is done for you by the machine.
    - psychometry 7y ago
      You can rest assured that many people in the ML world are way ahead of you. If ML could be effectively used, it already would be.
      - state_less 7y ago
        There are a couple papers from 2017 where they talk about getting some effective results, but there is a lack of datasets around this topic and that the area is less studied. Can you point to the efforts that have been made here? https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rahuls/pub/caip2011-rahuls.pdf https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rahuls/pub/caip2011-rahuls.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1711.02578.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1711.02578.pdf
    - SolaceQuantum 7y ago
      Yes, and I'm responding that that still requires human labor and trauma, therefore it is still important to classify these responses as harm and treat these jobs as dangerous to the psychological wellbeing of the people participating in them now- give them access to healthcare related to their workplace hazard.

deogeo 7y ago

> Charlie Winter, a London-based terrorism researcher, was dining with friends one recent evening when the conversation turned to whether it is ethical to eat meat. Someone brought up slaughterhouse conditions, Winter said, and he instantly grew uneasy. He stayed for a while longer, squirming, and then finally left the room. That word — "slaughterhouse" — had conjured images of one of the most gruesome ISIS videos he'd come across. The militants had filmed a mass execution in a slaughterhouse, casting their prisoners as the animals. I wonder if watching gruesome animal slaughter videos would eventually produce the same reaction. Given how much the industry wants to keep their treatment of animals secret [1], I can't imagine the effect is benign. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ag-gag https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ag-gag "Supporters of ag-gag laws have argued that they serve to protect the agriculture industry from the negative repercussions of exposés by whistleblowers."

claudeganon 7y ago
“As often as Herman had witnessed the slaughter of animals and fish, he always had the same thought: in their behaviour towards creatures, all men were Nazis. The smugness with which man could do with other species as he pleased exemplified the most extreme racist theories, the principle that might is right.” Isaac Bashevis Singer
- deogeo 7y ago
  > in their behaviour towards creatures, all men were Nazis. Which is more than a little ironic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler_and_vegetarianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler_and_vegetarianism
  - eeZah7Ux 7y ago
    Where's the irony?
psychoslave 7y ago
Articles that seem relevant to the topic: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L214 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L214 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_Treblinka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_Treblinka

simias 7y ago

That doesn't surprise me at all. I actively try to avoid echo chambers so I go out of my way to find forums and communities of people with very different opinions. I'll go looking for antivax groups, religious forums, flat-earther blogs and try to see how they view the world. Since I'm fairly left-leaning I also often end up reading far-right content. It's not like it's hard to find on the web these days. I often end up incredibly depressed after doing that though. Flat-earthers are wrong but they're often innocuous. Sure, there are conspiracy theories lurking everywhere but they're not really preaching hate or intolerance usually. You have a minority of extremists and then plenty of people who just don't know any better but don't seem to be bad people on their own. The far right stuff is different. It's just dripping with hate and lack of empathy. It's almost always about putting other people down to feel better about themselves. Empathy is weakness, moderation is treachery, the opposition are "degenerates" and "Non Player Characters" who are depersonalized and considered sub-human. The most vile acts will be brushed away if it serves their objectives. It's not people who "don't know any better", it's people who want to feed on hate. It's frankly terrifying to me. And before somebody tries to tell me that the far-left is as bad, I really don't think it is, or at least not nearly at the same scale. I've seen hate speech and calls for violence on communist forums for instance, and of course the atrocities committed by socialist and communist regimes are often downplayed, but it's not nearly at the same scale or with the same violence in my experience.

krapp 7y ago
>And before somebody tries to tell me that the far-left is as bad, I really don't think it is, or at least not nearly at the same scale. It isn't politically correct on HN to imply that there is any difference between the extremism of left-wing versus right-wing politics, unless it's to argue that the left is even worse.
- mieseratte 7y ago
  > unless it's to argue that the left is even worse. That's highly debatable, at best.
ThomPete 7y ago

dsfyu404ed 7y ago

People do terrible things and being exposed to it in concentrated form will make you less happy by some amount related to what you're exposed to, the concentration and your personal tolerance. Water is wet. More news at 11.

JulianMorrison 7y ago

I think this is part of the answer to free speech absolutists. Even someone who isn't ideologically bought into this stuff is traumatized and damaged simply by exposure as a researcher. It is not possible to treat this content, even the textual hate screed rather than graphic form, as part of "the marketplace of ideas". It has effects.

lm28469 7y ago
> I think this is part of the answer to free speech absolutists. You can't argue with them, they'll say "don't like it, don't watch it".
- JulianMorrison 7y ago
  It's the people who do like it that I worry about.
Kaiyou 7y ago
Everything has cause and effect. What's your point, that we should police the content adults are allowed to watch? Call the police on people watching 2girls1cup?
dsfyu404ed 7y ago
We're not gonna throw out one of the core tenants of modern democracy because some people get sick if they get too much exposure to it.
Hitton 7y ago
The problem is that pretty much anything can have effect. With your approach you would have to ban everything to the level of people with lowest resistance. First you ban torture videos, then murder videos, then animal slaughter, then violent porn, then violent video games, then violent movies, then all movies where gun is shot (see shooting ar-15 gave me ptsd) and you have banned all action movies. And you still can't be sure if there isn't anything even more benign which would have "an effect" on someone.
Nasrudith 7y ago

lm28469 7y ago

I always wonder if people were tougher before, when death, blood, violence were much more common (< 100years ago: famines, wars, diseases, life conditions, crimes in general). Surely the average person back then were confronted to a much more difficult life than the modern average first world country inhabitant, did nobody talk about it ? Did they just plow through it all ? Were they less prone to complain ? It seems like today you can't go more than a week without a "x" gave me ptsd article[0]. I used to be on chans back in the days, and I saw my fair share of isis videos, they're awful there is no doubt about that but I never felt any of what these people are describing, anyone with the same experience ? [0] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/new-york-daily-news-journalist-firing-an-ar-15-gave-me-ptsd https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/new-york-daily-news-journ...

Retric 7y ago
We keep inventing new names for old problems. Shell shock (WWI), battle fatigue/combat stress reaction (WWII), Gross Stress Reaction (Korea and Vietnam), and soldier's heart (Civil War) continue a long trend. You can even read descriptions of such problems in the Iliad. PS: Nostalgia was apparently the term used in the 1700’s.
- philpem 7y ago
  The other point worth making is one from the article -- people have varying levels of tolerance and recovery ability. A comment which bounces off one person may well cause serious damage to another.
  - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    There's some research indicating that being around people who have shared similar experience matters a lot. Basically, it's not trauma if it happens to a big enough % of people. It's just a normal (if unlucky) life experience. When the British went and whacked Argentina they found that the soldiers who hopped on a plane and 12hr later were surrounded by people who will never have to make a life and death decision and are complaining about how they "literally got ptsd" from firing a rifle had PTSD type problems at a much higher rate than soldiers who got a 2wk boat ride surrounded by people who had been through the same stuff.

malicioususer11 7y ago

"lets be extreme about killing extremists before anyone dies." and then employees wonder why they have PTSD. lololol. :3

Damogran6 7y ago

I wonder if this isn't happening, at a much lower volume, to the population at large. I have a single device connected to Twitter, the ipad on my nightstand. I don't know how my personal feed developed, but Twitter is nothing but a violent diarrhea of hate and I frequently pick it up, look at the first page, and move on to something else. It's nowhere near the same thing as watching ISIS videos constantly, but I wonder if we're poisoning ourselves with an unending stream of hate?

MockObject 7y ago

I wonder if the ISIS fighters themselves suffer from PTSD from taking part in such slaughter. Does strong ideology protect against brain trauma?

Nasrudith 7y ago
I suspect the answer is no but they rationalize until it either strengthens the ideology to cover up because they refuse to admit mistakes, and they convince themselves that their shaking hands are from fervor or they become disillusioned and break free with PTSD with added rightful guilt. Addrenaline and immediacy of threat do help a bit though - drone piliots apparently have more PTSD from killing compared to cockpit gunners being shot at before they pulled the trigger.

alexis_fr 7y ago

Sorry guys, but I don’t understand. As a society, we are fighting extremism by... censoring it, not addressing their points. Manifestos of killers are always hidden, the reasons why they killed never addressed, and we go as far as banning all authors whose work describes why the extremist became extremist (see Jordan Peterson’s book banned in NZ), thereby ensuring the population never understands the terrorist. Why? “We don’t discuss with extremists” is a fairly strong assertion. It comes from an “us vs them” attitude. For example, men who start being upset with women being promoted about 2,7x fewer experience and men who get upset being managed by women who grossly misrepresent their competency and drives their department to irrelevancy, start researching feminism. They regularly found that most feminist science is bollocks. Studies about rape are manipulated to show rates as high as 650x higher than more decent sources, for example by only using voluntary responses from a non-random group, by conflating rape and the presence of alcohol (so a dinner with one’s boyfriend including wine entered the category that the study reported as “rape... or sex without consent”), by conflating rape and not-woman-initiated-sex, or other techniques to overinflate victimization. Same techniques apply to wage gap (conflate gross gap with same-work gap, conflate full-time-with-overtime vs full-time, conflate the quality of work of people who are passionnate and/or are forced to earn more, vs the quality of work of people who don’t commit to their job), I’ve seen in also in the legal and social domain. A study that concludes that women are victims has like 60% chances of not having been seriously peer-reviewed and 99% chances of having a major, fatal flaw that discredits it. Ok, so can we denounce a bad scientific paper? Can we denounce repeated news articles that are repeatedly false? No, because “it’s fake news”. I was once literally told (by a magistrate friend of mine), “Everyone knows women are oppressed, so if that’s not want your counter-analysis concludes, you are the one who’s wrong”. And we go as far as firing them, which didn’t happen to me because I resigned before they discovered that I had The Doubt. So we have large swathes of people, who were pointing out something entirely correct, who are excluded from society “because we don’t discuss with terrorists”. Some of them commit bombings. Their frequency increases, mostly as a result of the increasing rate of divorce in the 80’s, which means boys are only surrounded by women (mother, teacher, psychologist) who claim literally false science, and who publicly hate men and everything masculine. How are we, as a society, going to sort that out, if there is no place where this can get discussed? Are we voluntarily going to say, “ok, bombings will repeat, because it is very important that nobody knows the motives of bombers, and nobody resolves those problems, and nobody even will resolve the false science that is outright plain false”? Is that seriously the path we are taking? But more important is the pathways: Learning about the absurd mistakes of feminist science is leading most users into neighbour areas (yes, studies on racism), and is procuring a steady stream of new recruits for what you call “extreme movements”. Wouldn’t it be better to tap the leak while it’s still time?