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naraburns  nihil supernum  3yr ago (text post)   17961 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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Fascinating article on the apparent controversy of naming a telescope after James Webb, former head of NASA throughout the 60s (content warning: NYT).

Broadly speaking, Webb is accused of anti-gay bigotry. There does not appear to be any dispute that the US government, as part of investigating federal employees who were suspected of being Communists during the red scare, also fired employees accused of being gay (estimated to be around 5k-10k total over 20 years). The origin of tying the accusation directly to Webb appears to have been borne out of a misreading:

But as the telescope neared completion, criticism flared. In 2015, Matthew Francis, a science journalist, wrote an article for Forbes titled “The Problem With Naming Observatories for Bigots.” He wrote that Mr. Webb led the anti-gay purge at the State Department and that he had testified of his contempt for gay people. He credited Dr. Prescod-Weinstein with tipping him off, and she in turn tweeted his article and attacked Mr. Webb as a “homophobe.” Those claims rested on misidentification and that portion of Mr. Francis’ article has been deleted without notice to the reader. Mr. Francis declined an interview. As Dr. Oluseyi discovered and NASA’s report confirmed, it was not Mr. Webb but a different State Department official who oversaw the purge and spoke disparagingly of gay Americans.

So someone made a claim and someone else looked into that claim and conclusively found the evidence lacking. Research isn't easy and it's reasonable to expect some mistakes, and I find nothing embarrassing or humiliating about just admitting error. But instead of just conceding their belief rested on a faulty premise, the Webb-is-a-bigot crew refused to let go of their favored conclusion and went searching for other reasons why they were right all along.

In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed an executive order that essentially barred gay Americans from federal employment. It applied to all federal agencies and remained in effect throughout the 1960s, when Mr. Webb led NASA. In 1963, police arrested a NASA budget analyst, Clifford Norton, in an anti-gay sting in Washington. He was forced out of his job. Critics say Mr. Webb stood silent. Mr. Odom’s report for NASA, however, found no evidence Mr. Webb knew of this case in an agency of many thousands. In any event, he would have had no good option, said James Kirchick, author of Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington. “It is unimaginable that a high-level functionary would have stepped in and blocked a broad federal law that applied to every agency,” he said.

And of course, people tried to come up with other reasons why a telescope should not be named after Webb:

Sarah Tuttle, an astrophysicist at the University of Washington, characterizes the question of whether Mr. Webb was a homophobe as unanswerable and a distraction. The point, she said, is that the bar should be set higher. Previous telescopes were named after physicists and astronomers — Edwin Hubble and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. Why not name in that tradition? “This controversy should restart the discussion about why on earth this telescope is named after him,” said Jason Wright, a Penn State astrophysicist who signed the critics’ petition.

Things got especially dark for Oluseyi, the guy who fact-checked the original claim. First they claimed his fact-check was an ill-disguised attempt to justify historical homophobia, then rumors spread around academia of some sexual harassment and mishandling federal funds. And so on.

So that story is entertaining on its own right, but it's also an interesting examination of the best ways to respond when someone points out an error of yours. Speaking for myself as someone who jumps at the opportunity to self-label as an egotistical narcissist, it seems like adopting a regular habit of admitting mistakes is plainly self-serving. It's almost a cheat code for how well it can bolster one's credibility, and I don't understand why it's not more common.

The basic contours of being motivated to save face are obvious enough, sure, but the part that continues to be absolutely bewildering to me is that dogged stubbornness only makes you look worse! I'm guessing there must be some other benefit here (assuming, of course, people who refuse to admit error are behaving remotely rationally) but I can't understand it.

There was some contemporaneous discussion in the old BLR here. Good to see the denouement, to what extent anything like this ever ends.

In 2015, Matthew Francis, a science journalist, wrote an article for Forbes titled “The Problem With Naming Observatories for Bigots.” He wrote that Mr. Webb led the anti-gay purge at the State Department and that he had testified of his contempt for gay people. He credited Dr. Prescod-Weinstein with tipping him off, and she in turn tweeted his article and attacked Mr. Webb as a “homophobe.” Those claims rested on misidentification and that portion of Mr. Francis’ article has been deleted without notice to the reader.

This part's pretty funny: the current page for that article gives a blank editor's note, but comparing the original 2015 version to the one from from 2016: removing the troublesome paragraph leaves the story referencing "the party line" it doesn't actually establish or define.

("misidentification" is a bit euphemistic: the original allegations depend on a mess of wikipedia citogenesis.)

The basic contours of being motivated to save face are obvious enough, sure, but the part that continues to be absolutely bewildering to me is that dogged stubbornness only makes you look worse! I'm guessing there must be some other benefit here (assuming, of course, people who refuse to admit error are behaving remotely rationally) but I can't understand it.

The steelman is that a lot of the anti-Webb position never cared specifically on the alleged memo Senate testimony. And that seems pretty well backed up by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, one of the people Francis was using as a source and who later joined the campaign at length on twitter, on her substack, which doesn't seem to even be trying to argue the facts on the ground for the specific acts there. The point is the system, and it's hard to pretend Webb bucked the trends; even where he took the moral route, it's no coincidence it happened to overlap with LBJ's political goals.

The... less overtly charitable analysis's that many of these people get the same or better career boost from papers like this mess) than from her 'classical' work (which, tbf, she does do!); there's a reason they've gotten lots of coverage in the culture war threads, whether for those papers or for the EO Wilson kerfluffle. So I'm not sure that her framework for 'face' is the same as yours or mine.

At a deeper level, from seeing lesser versions of this sort of drama in other environments, my impression's that it's a social thing, somewhat related to how social animals evaluate trust. The point of someone taking this role isn't to evaluate any specific claim's accuracy, or even whether a person's act was right or wrong, but to evaluate whether the person is Good or Bad. Retreating from claims about memos or congressional testimony aren't retreating from central claims, it's just different evidence for the actual matter on trial, that Webb Shouldn't Be Celebrated. That's not specific to 'woke' witch-hunts (or to, for another 'easy' Blue Tribe parallel, harassment allegations that start at rape and reduce down to someone 'being sketchy' before they get booted); I'm sure you've seen it from prosecutors that want to push the horns-and-halos effect as far as a judge will let them go before excluding testimony as 'character', and the Red Tribe equivalents in religion or sexual misbehavior are not exactly far off.

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