It's often been remarked on that Gen Z is the first generation to come of age on the internet, but I think a lot of what explains this backlash from the "Republic of Letters" as you call it is that Gen X is the first generation to get old on the internet. Previous "intellectuals" that saw themselves as members of this republic got old surrounded by yes men and ass-kissers. Now via Twitter/other social media people can just call them dilettantes with outdated ideas to their faces and they just can't psychologically cope.
Completely with you on this. It drives me nuts that someone like Pamela Paul can champion an essay like this that she plainly hasn't read, without having any idea what the basic standard of quality and rigor is in scholarly publishing. The article is profoundly shabby--the authors declare their loyalty to a vision of science that they don't even remotely enact in the essay itself. Here's my dissection of the essay. https://timothyburke.substack.com/p/academia-sleight-of-hand
Excellent piece! As a retired academic librarian, I'm sort of bemused thinking about the impact on the citation counts for these guys & their crappy article of all the people responding to them and Pamela Paul.
Excellent. These advocates of "meritocracy" have no clue about how much social pressures & subjective choices have to do with their own success or the entire culture of science & academia as a whole.
"There are probably more meritorious projects out there than my middle-aged-white-dude-reads-a-gigantic-stack-of-magazines-and-thinks-lots-of-thoughts proposal." LOL.
I hadn't heard about the Haidt thing. That being said, I am a bit skeptical about requiring DEI statements (even if the statement is "no DEI impact") for academic work. What's the material impact there?
It signals that the institution (either university, conference host, or grant maker) values that type of contribution. The material impact is that, over time, researchers will respond to that signal by incorporating that value into the research questions they pursue.
If we begin by presuming that science as it currently exists fits our ideals, then this seems like a deviation away from the pursuit of objective truths. But if we being by presuming that science as it currently exists already has a wide range of biases and structural incentives that shape the questions researchers pursue, then it is a modest adjustment to existing practices.
I think there's the hint of a contradiction here. You said that the DEI contribution requirement was a "box-checking exercise," but here it seems like you think it has more impact than that. Obviously it doesn't have to be all one thing or all another, but I do think there's some tension in these claims.
edit: thinking about this a bit more, I think this is a genuine contradiction. When I think of a box-checking exercise I think of something that is bureaucratically necessary but that doesn't really matter other than that you checked the box; they're generally pretty low impact. If that's the case then Haidt's resignation seems indeed to be a tantrum.
But you're also claiming that it will materially impact the way in which scientific inquiry is conducted, which I assume will necessarily have downstream impact in terms of research programs, methodology, and etc. If that's the case then it seems to me that the DEI requirement ought to be the subject of legitimate discussion, and if someone feels strongly enough about it a resignation isn't unwarranted. You might disagree with the substantive reason for questioning the requirement, but to dismiss it as "status loss" to me seems to be a bit in bad faith.
I see what you mean, but don't think it's a contradiction. A box-checking exercise has some small moral force. Every year, when I fill out my annual report, there's a section where you're supposed to list (non-academic) volunteer service roles that you've played in the broader DC/MD/VA area. I have a moment of thinking "huh. Am I supposed to be doing that? Maybe I should be doing that." Then I write "n/a" and carry on. Realistically, the answer there isn't affecting my status in the university. No one is promoting me/disciplining me/giving me a raise based on whether I join the local PTA. It's just a little nudge.
Haidt's complaint was akin to a box-checking exercise. Another example I mentioned in the piece -- the grant-maker that has a section on DEI impacts of your research -- is more substantive, because they are giving some real weight to your answers in determining who gets these grants.
I mentioned that science isn't under threat here, but it could be. IF we ended up in a situation where institutions with power started dictating "no funding for any research that doesn't focus on XYZ," then that would be a real concern. We are nowhere close to that scenario.
There are at least a half-dozen much bigger threats to academic research that are routinely ignored while the same set of elite actors focus on DEI statements and the like. The constant drumbeat of articles about this largely fictitious problem have an agenda-setting effect: it makes "In Defense of Merit" the center of conversation, rather than the curriculum-banning or the adjunctification of the university. Agenda-setting choices matter, and they ought to be contested. That's what I'm doing here -- drawing attention to this agenda-setting effect in the hopes of contesting it.
Surely researchers should be aware of the structural biases which affect hypothesis generation. But DEI statements ASSUME that they have on obligation to change their research aims to address unequal representation of individuals from reified racial categories. I think you know that this is a bigger deal than you make it out to be, which is why you don’t actually defend it.
“IF we ended up in a situation where institutions with power started dictating "no funding for any research that doesn't focus on XYZ," then that would be a real concern. We are nowhere close to that scenario.”
There are clearly points before this point where science is being corrupted. Again I think it noteworthy that your defense is not on the merits but instead on the fact that “it’s not a big deal yet.”
FFS, I stay up late on a Friday night to write a critique of an article, the critique is nearly 3,000 words, and your response is "but why didn't you write another ~500-800 words about *this other* thing?"
I very much think this is not a big deal. The way you can tell is that I say so, repeatedly. If I come to believe we have reached a point where I think these institutions are actually detracting from the pursuit of scientific knowledge, I will say so. (hell, I said something in a similar vein two months ago -- https://davekarpf.substack.com/p/george-packer-is-kind-of-right-about )
Also, read some Latour. Or basically anything in the Science and Technology Studies literature. It isn't my field of expertise, but I've benefited a lot from reading it over the years. (Or, hell, read Kuhn and Lakatos if you prefer.) Science does not and has never fit your imaginary ideal of a pure, uncorrupted pursuit of knowledge. When medical research is conducted overwhelmingly by white men, it ends up displaying huge empirical flaws by overemphasizing some findings and dismissing other findings. This has been so well documented by so many researchers that, if you are active in the research community and unaware of it, you are telling on yourself.
I’ve read plenty STS, but do see how my comment about corruption could imply a sanitized version of science. Not my intention. My point is that requiring DEI statements, and generally the current focus on “diversity” in science, is an important influence that should be open to debate rather than assumed. This is regardless of what magnitude of impact it’s currently having.
The thing is that few scholars (besidesPinker etc..) from the left is taking on the job to clean up the mess off the left. They all go with the present iinstitutionalist ideology or bow their heads and think it will pass. Of cours we have to oppose the Trumpists and the re-election of him. But we have to do to clean the ideological woke stuff because it will radicalize the right and create more polarization ending up in civil war.
Shame on you ! this is a terrible post misrepresenting our article. Look on the authors they are not cranks, and you have among them leading scientists. Many of us are concerned about the future of the left ! Look on Susan Neiman’s recent book « the left is not woke »!
We are aware that Trumpists try to get hold about the whole issue of wokism. I am despising them as you would. But first we need to clean our own house ! The issue of right wing identerianism will also be addressed in a future article.
I read your substack and I am bewildered by its tone and argumentation. How a college history Professor is looking up to first rate scientists among the authors in this very condescending tone ? How dare are you giving advice and commenting that we do not know the litterature on that subject ? Did you look up their bio before writing your little rant ? In any case most of the criticism comes from peoples from the humanities who have very little pratical knowledge what the scientific method is all about. I am collecting all the criticisms and will provide a global refutation.
Not the content but the form (condescending tone in the writings looking down on leading scientists and treat them like ignoramuses). For the content, i will respond in a few weeks when I collected all the criticism.
Ah, so you're saying that what bothers you is that there is a *status hierarchy*, and you feel Timothy and I are not showing sufficient deference within it.
You do not get it. His tone is condescending and should not be used with ANY person of ANY status (who are not cranks of course). Looking up the Bios should have made him even more able to understand that he is not dealing with cranks.
Just taking your guilt ridden paper to its logical conclusion.
From one of your responses below,"science as it currently exists" what does that even mean? Having a hypothesis, conducting experimentation and drawing conclusions from results that can be reproduced has nothing to do with "currently exists"
"Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance. I was first made aware of this during an accounting class. We were discussing the subject of accounting for stock options at technology companies. There was a live debate on this subject at the time. One side (mainly technology companies and their lobbyists) held that stock option grants should not be treated as an expense on public policy grounds; treating them as an expense would discourage companies from granting them, and stock options were a vital compensation tool that incentivised performance, rewarded dynamism and innovation and created vast amounts of value for America and the world. The other side (mainly people like Warren Buffet) held that stock options looked awfully like a massive blag carried out my management at the expense of shareholders, and that the proper place to record such blags was the P&L account.
Our lecturer, in summing up the debate, made the not unreasonable point that if stock options really were a fantastic tool which unleashed the creative power in every employee, everyone would want to expense as many of them as possible, the better to boast about how innovative, empowered and fantastic they were. Since the tech companies' point of view appeared to be that if they were ever forced to account honestly for their option grants, they would quickly stop making them, this offered decent prima facie evidence that they weren't, really, all that fantastic."
"There is much made by people who long for the days of their fourth form debating society about the fallacy of "argumentum ad hominem". There is, as I have mentioned in the past, no fancy Latin term for the fallacy of "giving known liars the benefit of the doubt", but it is in my view a much greater source of avoidable error in the world. "
It's often been remarked on that Gen Z is the first generation to come of age on the internet, but I think a lot of what explains this backlash from the "Republic of Letters" as you call it is that Gen X is the first generation to get old on the internet. Previous "intellectuals" that saw themselves as members of this republic got old surrounded by yes men and ass-kissers. Now via Twitter/other social media people can just call them dilettantes with outdated ideas to their faces and they just can't psychologically cope.
Completely with you on this. It drives me nuts that someone like Pamela Paul can champion an essay like this that she plainly hasn't read, without having any idea what the basic standard of quality and rigor is in scholarly publishing. The article is profoundly shabby--the authors declare their loyalty to a vision of science that they don't even remotely enact in the essay itself. Here's my dissection of the essay. https://timothyburke.substack.com/p/academia-sleight-of-hand
Oh this is fantastic work. Really well done.
Excellent piece! As a retired academic librarian, I'm sort of bemused thinking about the impact on the citation counts for these guys & their crappy article of all the people responding to them and Pamela Paul.
Excellent. These advocates of "meritocracy" have no clue about how much social pressures & subjective choices have to do with their own success or the entire culture of science & academia as a whole.
Terrific column...
"There are probably more meritorious projects out there than my middle-aged-white-dude-reads-a-gigantic-stack-of-magazines-and-thinks-lots-of-thoughts proposal." LOL.
Writers like Pamela Paul would never survive having her material peer-reviewed, like academics do.
I hadn't heard about the Haidt thing. That being said, I am a bit skeptical about requiring DEI statements (even if the statement is "no DEI impact") for academic work. What's the material impact there?
It signals that the institution (either university, conference host, or grant maker) values that type of contribution. The material impact is that, over time, researchers will respond to that signal by incorporating that value into the research questions they pursue.
If we begin by presuming that science as it currently exists fits our ideals, then this seems like a deviation away from the pursuit of objective truths. But if we being by presuming that science as it currently exists already has a wide range of biases and structural incentives that shape the questions researchers pursue, then it is a modest adjustment to existing practices.
I think there's the hint of a contradiction here. You said that the DEI contribution requirement was a "box-checking exercise," but here it seems like you think it has more impact than that. Obviously it doesn't have to be all one thing or all another, but I do think there's some tension in these claims.
edit: thinking about this a bit more, I think this is a genuine contradiction. When I think of a box-checking exercise I think of something that is bureaucratically necessary but that doesn't really matter other than that you checked the box; they're generally pretty low impact. If that's the case then Haidt's resignation seems indeed to be a tantrum.
But you're also claiming that it will materially impact the way in which scientific inquiry is conducted, which I assume will necessarily have downstream impact in terms of research programs, methodology, and etc. If that's the case then it seems to me that the DEI requirement ought to be the subject of legitimate discussion, and if someone feels strongly enough about it a resignation isn't unwarranted. You might disagree with the substantive reason for questioning the requirement, but to dismiss it as "status loss" to me seems to be a bit in bad faith.
I see what you mean, but don't think it's a contradiction. A box-checking exercise has some small moral force. Every year, when I fill out my annual report, there's a section where you're supposed to list (non-academic) volunteer service roles that you've played in the broader DC/MD/VA area. I have a moment of thinking "huh. Am I supposed to be doing that? Maybe I should be doing that." Then I write "n/a" and carry on. Realistically, the answer there isn't affecting my status in the university. No one is promoting me/disciplining me/giving me a raise based on whether I join the local PTA. It's just a little nudge.
Haidt's complaint was akin to a box-checking exercise. Another example I mentioned in the piece -- the grant-maker that has a section on DEI impacts of your research -- is more substantive, because they are giving some real weight to your answers in determining who gets these grants.
I mentioned that science isn't under threat here, but it could be. IF we ended up in a situation where institutions with power started dictating "no funding for any research that doesn't focus on XYZ," then that would be a real concern. We are nowhere close to that scenario.
There are at least a half-dozen much bigger threats to academic research that are routinely ignored while the same set of elite actors focus on DEI statements and the like. The constant drumbeat of articles about this largely fictitious problem have an agenda-setting effect: it makes "In Defense of Merit" the center of conversation, rather than the curriculum-banning or the adjunctification of the university. Agenda-setting choices matter, and they ought to be contested. That's what I'm doing here -- drawing attention to this agenda-setting effect in the hopes of contesting it.
Surely researchers should be aware of the structural biases which affect hypothesis generation. But DEI statements ASSUME that they have on obligation to change their research aims to address unequal representation of individuals from reified racial categories. I think you know that this is a bigger deal than you make it out to be, which is why you don’t actually defend it.
“IF we ended up in a situation where institutions with power started dictating "no funding for any research that doesn't focus on XYZ," then that would be a real concern. We are nowhere close to that scenario.”
There are clearly points before this point where science is being corrupted. Again I think it noteworthy that your defense is not on the merits but instead on the fact that “it’s not a big deal yet.”
FFS, I stay up late on a Friday night to write a critique of an article, the critique is nearly 3,000 words, and your response is "but why didn't you write another ~500-800 words about *this other* thing?"
I very much think this is not a big deal. The way you can tell is that I say so, repeatedly. If I come to believe we have reached a point where I think these institutions are actually detracting from the pursuit of scientific knowledge, I will say so. (hell, I said something in a similar vein two months ago -- https://davekarpf.substack.com/p/george-packer-is-kind-of-right-about )
Also, read some Latour. Or basically anything in the Science and Technology Studies literature. It isn't my field of expertise, but I've benefited a lot from reading it over the years. (Or, hell, read Kuhn and Lakatos if you prefer.) Science does not and has never fit your imaginary ideal of a pure, uncorrupted pursuit of knowledge. When medical research is conducted overwhelmingly by white men, it ends up displaying huge empirical flaws by overemphasizing some findings and dismissing other findings. This has been so well documented by so many researchers that, if you are active in the research community and unaware of it, you are telling on yourself.
I’ve read plenty STS, but do see how my comment about corruption could imply a sanitized version of science. Not my intention. My point is that requiring DEI statements, and generally the current focus on “diversity” in science, is an important influence that should be open to debate rather than assumed. This is regardless of what magnitude of impact it’s currently having.
The thing is that few scholars (besidesPinker etc..) from the left is taking on the job to clean up the mess off the left. They all go with the present iinstitutionalist ideology or bow their heads and think it will pass. Of cours we have to oppose the Trumpists and the re-election of him. But we have to do to clean the ideological woke stuff because it will radicalize the right and create more polarization ending up in civil war.
Shame on you ! this is a terrible post misrepresenting our article. Look on the authors they are not cranks, and you have among them leading scientists. Many of us are concerned about the future of the left ! Look on Susan Neiman’s recent book « the left is not woke »!
We are aware that Trumpists try to get hold about the whole issue of wokism. I am despising them as you would. But first we need to clean our own house ! The issue of right wing identerianism will also be addressed in a future article.
I could write another entire essay on all the reasons why "but first we need to clean our own house" is wrongheaded even if it is well-meaning.
I'll put it on my to-do list for this summer.
Whatever the intent, however sincere, it's a very poorly argued article with a lot of incredibly weak empirical claims.
Incredible weak empirical claims ??????
I read your substack and I am bewildered by its tone and argumentation. How a college history Professor is looking up to first rate scientists among the authors in this very condescending tone ? How dare are you giving advice and commenting that we do not know the litterature on that subject ? Did you look up their bio before writing your little rant ? In any case most of the criticism comes from peoples from the humanities who have very little pratical knowledge what the scientific method is all about. I am collecting all the criticisms and will provide a global refutation.
<eyeblink>
Doctor Bikfalvi, did you *really* just insist that the quality of your article should be judged on the basis of evaluating the authors' biographies?
Not the content but the form (condescending tone in the writings looking down on leading scientists and treat them like ignoramuses). For the content, i will respond in a few weeks when I collected all the criticism.
Ah, so you're saying that what bothers you is that there is a *status hierarchy*, and you feel Timothy and I are not showing sufficient deference within it.
Well that's very interesting indeed.
You do not get it. His tone is condescending and should not be used with ANY person of ANY status (who are not cranks of course). Looking up the Bios should have made him even more able to understand that he is not dealing with cranks.
You're doing a marvelous job of proving that meritocratic status arises from the rigor and quality of scholarly inquiry.
should be looking down........
Someone is feeling guilty for being white. Curse God for NOT creating you as a black woman.
Um, what?
You feeling okay, man? You just started rambling incoherently in a comment thread. Is there someone we should call?
Just taking your guilt ridden paper to its logical conclusion.
From one of your responses below,"science as it currently exists" what does that even mean? Having a hypothesis, conducting experimentation and drawing conclusions from results that can be reproduced has nothing to do with "currently exists"
How is it guilt-ridden? You might be having some reading comprehension problems. Would you like me to recommend a tutor?
Insults are the sure sign of a mental midget.
I notice you didn’t explain how the piece is guilt-ridden. Take your time. All of us are waiting.
- Reader gets triggered
- Reader insults author
- Author meets reader with same energy
- Reader: Why are you insulting me? 👉 👈
"Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance. I was first made aware of this during an accounting class. We were discussing the subject of accounting for stock options at technology companies. There was a live debate on this subject at the time. One side (mainly technology companies and their lobbyists) held that stock option grants should not be treated as an expense on public policy grounds; treating them as an expense would discourage companies from granting them, and stock options were a vital compensation tool that incentivised performance, rewarded dynamism and innovation and created vast amounts of value for America and the world. The other side (mainly people like Warren Buffet) held that stock options looked awfully like a massive blag carried out my management at the expense of shareholders, and that the proper place to record such blags was the P&L account.
Our lecturer, in summing up the debate, made the not unreasonable point that if stock options really were a fantastic tool which unleashed the creative power in every employee, everyone would want to expense as many of them as possible, the better to boast about how innovative, empowered and fantastic they were. Since the tech companies' point of view appeared to be that if they were ever forced to account honestly for their option grants, they would quickly stop making them, this offered decent prima facie evidence that they weren't, really, all that fantastic."
"There is much made by people who long for the days of their fourth form debating society about the fallacy of "argumentum ad hominem". There is, as I have mentioned in the past, no fancy Latin term for the fallacy of "giving known liars the benefit of the doubt", but it is in my view a much greater source of avoidable error in the world. "
https://blog.danieldavies.com/2004_05_23_d-squareddigest_archive.html?m=1