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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   15677 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.

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!

To people who care about the truth, maybe. But surely you've also heard the advice, sometimes given to celebrities caught up in PR nightmares, to "never apologize?" Sure, if you discover your own mistake or your own agenda requires that you change course, "I was wrong" looks like a cheat code for credibility. But if someone demands an apology, or catches your mistake, owning up looks like an act of submission rather than contrition.

These people are, in other words, treating arguments as soldiers. They're waging a culture war. The original goal of the bad research was never truth to begin with; definitively establishing the falsehood of the initial claim has no bearing whatsoever on the project.

In short: there will be no apology because no one is sorry--or so it seems to me!

Never apologize works well when the issue is one of morality (eg you said x which is y). I don’t think it applies to facts.

Never apologize works well when the issue is one of morality (eg you said x which is y). I don’t think it applies to facts.

Setting aside the complicated fact that I do think there are moral facts, I mean... Jussie Smollett? Or on a weirder scale, there is Rebecca Jones, Forbes Technology Awards 2020 Person of the Year for generating what Ron DeSantis (as far as I can determine, accurately) called "defamatory conspiracy theories." She went on to run for Congress and... well, long story short, this is a woman who definitely never apologizes for the many, many factual distortions for which she is clearly responsible. Or on a smaller scale, but recently in professional philosophy, Carol Hay lied about a presentation she was attending and has steadfastly declined to recant despite attempts by Brian Leiter to shame her into it.

Even setting aside peculiar cases like Shaun King (who appears, to the best of my understanding, to factually just be a white man pretending to be black), there are loads of people who steadfastly maintain expressions of belief in total contravention of obvious facts. And yes, some people do call them out on it, but eventually the people calling for apologies have to move on with their lives.

But has it worked for people like Rebecca Jones? She lost her congressional

Bid, has faced criminal issues, and just generally appears unhinged.

I also get the impression that most people find Shaun King gauche. He had cachet at one time. But now seems like a fake.

Also what makes Jussie S situation a moral fact? The facts are the incident never happened and it was a set up to try to prop up Jussie’s career. The moral implication is that Jussie should be in jail for a very long time (mores the pity that he won’t be).

But has it worked for people like Rebecca Jones? She lost her congressional [b]id, has faced criminal issues, and just generally appears unhinged.

I guess that depends on what you mean by "worked." She lost her bid, but she still got the Democrat nod well after her dismal character was widely and publicly grasped. She successfully raised money for that bid. She's not in jail, somehow.

I also get the impression that most people find Shaun King gauche. He had cachet at one time. But now seems like a fake.

Having a net worth of probably a couple million dollars seems like a decent definition of "worked" to me. YMMV! Besides, it doesn't matter what "most" people think, as long as a couple tens of thousands of them are still buying your books, subscribing to your newsletter, paying you to give speeches, etc.

I take it from the absence of objection that you also admit that the Smollett and Hay cases are also obviously examples of refusing to apologize on factual errors leading to "success," so I regard this point as made.

Regarding moral facts: all I meant there is that you separated "issues of morality" from "facts" in a way that I don't buy. For example, I regard it as a fact that Jussie Smollett's perfidy is a moral failing--he is a blameworthy person, and "the sky is blue" and "Jussie Smollett is blameworthy" are both statements with truth values of "true." This is a meta-ethical position, and not a simple one, so I won't develop it further here, but I did just want to note that you were drawing a distinction that I don't regard as sensible.

Hasn’t it backfired for Smollet? Haven’t followed him closely but I thought he was done as an actor?

Hasn’t it backfired for Smollet? Haven’t followed him closely but I thought he was done as an actor?

Last I heard, he was out on bail while appealing a jail sentence of 150 days. Pretty tough to sign on to film deals with that hanging over your head. He may or may not be "done as an actor" in the long term, but if he is, it's not because he failed to apologize--it's because he perpetrated a criminal hoax. His failure to apologize may well be a part of his appeal strategy. Actually, the extent to which he has demanded, and continues to demand, his day in court seems almost as unhinged as the hoax itself, but I'm not a criminal defense lawyer so maybe there's something I'm missing.

Might the prosecution have gone easier on him if he'd owned up in the first place? Sure, I agree that it's possible. Prosecutors have been known to show their appreciation for honesty (and simplicity) by making sweetheart plea deals. But my limited experience with prosecutors suggests to me that you would not want to bet any large sums of money on such inclinations.

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