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This forum is very focused on a particular political left/right culture war. However, there are other, deeper culture wars running through society that I find a lot more fascinating.
I think you can see a particularly interesting example hiding in the recent updates to the Francesca Gino affair. If you haven't heard of this, the wiki summary is a good overview: Francesca Gino was a high-flying behavioral science professor at HBS with all the standard TED talk/pop-sci book deal-type accolades. However, there were some statistical issues in her papers that were investigated by a blog Data Colada (run by the researchers who invented the term "p-hacking"!). Data Colada eventually wrote a four-part series of posts arguing that these papers were based on falsified data and the resulting scandal led to Gino losing tenure at Harvard. In between these raw events, there was also some pretty crazy drama; for example, a graduate student being threatened and blacklisted for originally pointing out the inconsistencies.
The most telling piece of the extra drama was that at one point, Gino decided to sue Data Colada for libel instead of directly giving a refutation of their analysis---your interpretation might vary, but this really felt like running to another arena where she could win through discussions of procedure and legal games instead of being confident in her ability to get vindication on scientific merit.
Now for the hidden culture war: while the scientific community seemed pretty convinced that Data Colada's case was ironclad (if you have time to read the full blog posts, you can check this yourself too---the section "Excel files contain multitudes" seems particularly damning), Gino did have many defenders outside science. Like Gino's self-defense, the other defenses are fascinating and, to me, very revealing. As a older representatives, you can see the reporting in the MBA-focused newsletter Poets and Quants (example) or a series of podcasts by Lawrence Lessig. Much more recently, Bill Ackman (relevant to here as a major force behind the removal of ex-Harvard president Claudine Gay) made a long twitter post explaining why he believes Gino is innocent.
If you read these defenses, something strange immediately pops out---instead of actually refuting Data Colada's points about why the data was fraudulent, they're almost completely focused on the process by which Harvard punished Gino/how different it was from the way other behavioral scientists were treated. There's also something more to the off-vibe I feel reading them: see these quotes from Lessig's second podcast interviewing Gino:
The mindset seems to almost be "She was doing all the things she was supposed to do, working so hard playing the academic career game exactly right when suddenly people changed the rules out from under her. Look at how unfair this was!". Nowhere does there seem to be any realization that the point of science is not actually the career game---you're actually supposed to further the project of learning truths about the world. If you actively impede it instead, it doesn't matter how well you were following the game and you should be punished very exceptionally!
This is the deeper culture war I was talking about. To some people, the point of a career is to add value to world, to create something that benefits others, achieve some mission, etc. However, to others, the point is to play a game as best as you can and climb a ladder of credentials and accolades determined by some competitive rules and procedures society pre-decided. The Gino case suggests fitting archetypes for both sides: a research scientist purely interested in their field vs. a careerist MBA or lawyer. Obviously from how I'm framing this, I'm extremely partisan towards one side of this culture war---so much so that I actually feel much more strongly about it than the political one and can't write this post anywhere close to neutrally. The "lawyer"-side viewpoint feels alien and evil, completely incompatible with a thriving society that can actually technologically progress.
What's even more interesting is how this culture war intersects with the political one. For example, there was a post here recently about meritocracy that bothered me much more than what I normally see here. It seems to be exactly the same almost nihilism that I'm reading into the defenses of Gino. The mindset in the comment is so similar: that there's no actual point to the positions you give people, no actual value these positions produce that might vary based on who gets them. Really it's all solely a zero-sum way to assign people status. Just pick the game you're going to have people play to get assigned and then stick to it fairly.
The example post is at +25, so clearly there are a lot of people here who buy the "everything is solely a status game" viewpoint. I'm biased here to the point that I can't even imagine arguments why this viewpoint is at all reasonable, either in the Gino case or in comments like the example---does anyone want to explain? Or maybe I'm just reading too much into this?
As a scientist myself, who has been following this case for a while, and who has been a fan of data colada from before they got involved in this, I might be able to give some context.
The first is the defense of that even admitting that she did wrong, singling her out this way is wrong since everyone else did the same. But looking at the case, this is bullshit. She didn't just engage in bad statistics like everyone else. She is alleged to actually have falsified data. And I find data colada's evidence quite damning, even if it does not rise to the level of ironclad proof to demand damages from her in the court of law (not saying that it doesn't, I'm just not a lawyer so can't judge that), it should make her untrustworthy as a scientist, which effectively ends her career either way. Even the worst examples she and her defenders raise are completely different; Several are about sexual misconduct, which is firstly not about the quality of the research itself and secondly were based entirely on hearsay of the alleged victim. Her case is far, far stronger and directly concerns scientific integrity.
More similar are the cases concerning plagiarism, but again, even that is not nearly as bad as falsification (plagiarism is primarily an issue of status attribution, but generally doesn't erode trust in science itself). It's a lively discussion in itself, but there is a decent faction (which I agree with) that a large part of what we call plagiarism, mostly concerning boilerplate summaries or standard sentences included in many introductions and methods sections, should not be considered an issue at all, even if copied verbatim. Plagiarism accusation thus have among the widest range in science; On one end, you have philosophers copying the central arguments from another author and passing them off as their own, at the other end you hav, say, biomedical researchers paraphrasing the explanation of a toolset they used from a coauthor's paper in the supplemental. Both are technically plagiarism, but they are not even in the same ballpark of severity.
Btw, this also concerns Bill Ackman's creds as "major force behind the removal of ex-Harvard president Claudine Gay"; That removal was imo handled atrociously, even if I'm happy she is gone. She was effectively appointed from primarily political reasons, and she was removed for political reasons. Her plagiarism was a complete sham that nobody cared about, for good reason; For example, Gay used a description of the Voting Rights Act which closely mirrored a description in a 1999 book by David T. Canon. This is, in my experience, what literally everyone is doing when you need to summarize something for which there is already ample literature; You take what you consider the best summary, paraphrase it, maybe add (often even directly from others works, albeit again paraphrased) or remove some parts that you consider missing or unnecessary, respectively. Ironically if you try to do it "the right way", i.e. you read lots of summaries and then try to write a new one based on your own understanding, it can happen even easier to copy verbatim, because that is what's on your mind. So I'd be careful to consider Ackmann trustworthy in respect to upholding academic standards. He is a political actor.
Second, in opposition to @Pongalh and some others here, I think that singling her out for common, even if bad, behaviour, would actually be problematic if it were true. Low standards are bad; Selectively enforcing high standards only on people you have an issue with is worse. It's anarcho-tyranny, having written rules that you allow some people to flout and enforce on others, purely based on your own discretion, i.e. the written laws are in practice mostly irrelevant and it's really just discretion.
This is one of the primary vehicles how ideologies take over institutions in general, and how the left took over academia in particular. Deliberately, overtly organizing a takeover of an institution is difficult, obvious and too easy to thwart. On the other hand, simply engaging in a double standard for new applicants, especially under cover of vague gesturing towards safety and wellbeing, is easy and may only be noticed after it is too late. Again I want to contrast to simple low standards; You still let in plenty of incompetent people, but in addition to incompetence, they are also biased. That's worse, not better.
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I can have such a defense going for it from two angles. First one is selective punishment in corrupt organizations which Harvard arguably is with recent scandals. Everybody is fraudster and everybody knows it. In that sense I was not punished for a fraud itself, but for getting caught or even worse, I was eliminated by internal politicking. It is similar thing to when let's say Xi Jinping or Putin runs another round of anticorruption crusade that for some reason only catches people who fell from grace of existing power structures. This is particularly effective in utterly corrupt organizations, where you have to do some gang-like initiation in order to get there in the first place. Once you are inside, you are never going to betray or you will be exposed and thrown aside.
Another angle is on arbitrariness of merit. Why should it be academic results or IQ tests instead of let's say some form of holmgang, where merit is shown in duel of martial prowess? Does excel pencil pusher in Harvard have more merit than mother of 10 or a small business owner with net worth of $10 million? You say that:
This is not the whole truth, the missing part is that other people value different things. Some people see "equitable racial diversity" as value to be maximized and thus DEI policy is merit based policy in that sense. Bill Ackman maybe values people who are against Hamas or maybe he really is stickler for due process and he sympathizes as he went through something similar. It is just that you have different value and definition of merit.
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I strongly agree with your point of view. The point of science is to increase our understanding of the world, so it is not a zero sum competition to assign status.
Of course, there exists also what Feynman calls cargo cult science. People who occupy fields which make pretenses of scientific rigor but are actually just bullshitting may very well feel that all the application of statistics etc is just performative.
Being a scientist means leading mankind down the path towards truth, typically zero to one baby steps at a time. Falsifying data -- to decide that you would rather make larger steps than walk in the right direction -- is the ultimate defection from that mission. The professor who fucks his students or the doctor who experiments on PoWs may be worse human beings, but the falsifier of data is the worse scientist.
Nobody is forced to compete in a field which makes any pretenses of scientific rigor. If you don't like statistics, publish on art history. But if you use the language of science in your publications while falsifying your data, you should be expelled and disgraced and spend the rest of your days in some menial job where you can do no further harm.
A similar nonchalance is sometimes seen in defense of academics whose ghostwriters copy paste their thesis from other publications. After all, a lot of people did some cheating in school, and can't see what the big deal is. But to the (debatable) degree that an academic title means anything, it means that you sat down on your own ass and wrote your thesis. Take that away, and there is literally nothing left, and we might as well allow parents to christen their infants 'PhD' instead of 'Kevin' or 'Mary'.
Perhaps they are right. Statistics in itself doesn't produce facts. It just transforms detailed data into aggregates. But if the detailed data is bad, the aggregates will be bad too.
There are fields where proper experiments are very hard, and usually the conclusions you can draw from the experiments they can do, are generally very limited. Then actually doing science properly will result in the field correctly being judged as being rather useless and funding being withdrawn. So the only way these fields can exist is by fraud and thus that it what they'll do.
For these fields, fraud is simply an evolutionary adaptation.
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I don't know whether or not she's a fraud, but she's a social psychologist, so I assume so. What I can point out is that, from a lawyer-side viewpoint, and I mean literal lawyers, the process she went through is so staggeringly unjust that even if she's 100% obviously guilty it will still shock and horrify a lawyer. Universities are allowed to essentially act as courts for their employees and students, with far more power over them than a private-sector employer has in almost any field, and have turned that into running deranged kangaroo courts. It's of a piece with how they handle sexual assault allegations, to give an example with an opposite culture war valence (amusingly, Gino is suing under the same Title IX used to justify those star chambers).
Can you explain what you find so egregious here? Coming from industry, not academia, they seem to have gone to much greater lengths to treat Gino fairly than any other employer would have. I could be fired on the spot for falsifying data - Harvard:
I don't think there's any chance I'd remain employed for 2 years whilst credibly accused by peers, and filing lawsuits against my employer. 'Staggeringly unjust' doesn't really seem to fit the process as applied.
Well, most notably, a person of similar prominence in the private sector (Harvard is not the private sector) would have hired a lawyer day one. Harvard supposedly told Gino she was only allowed two "advocates", and that she was not allowed to recruit anyone else in her defense. Now, this is mostly unenforceable bullshit enabled by the psychological and cultural power universities have over people in their world, but it still works on them. I once had to deal with an academic disciplinary proceeding in my old career (innocent, to be clear, but some people had a grudge and made Complaints), and they made it clear that I could not have a lawyer in the room at any time or it would be considered a violation of the Process, and violation of the Process means they will find a way to find against you - but I could have a family member for 'emotional support'. As soon as they realized my chosen family member was also a lawyer, they adjourned, rang up the university's chief counsel, and went into full cover-their-ass drop-the-charges mode.
The thing is, in industry people get fired all the time, and they go on to the next job with often minimal consequences (I've heard some amusing examples of the extreme circumlocutions employers have to go to in references for fired employees to say someone's a bad apple without being caught doing so. Always liked "You'll be lucky if you can get him to work for you"). In academia, someone getting fired for cause destroys their professional, social, and usually emotional life. Decent chance you'll lose your spouse, if you're married. It's more like being defrocked from the priesthood than losing a job. And the university's facade of being a "court" makes it all the more damning if they find against you. Harvard appears to have done a pretty good job with the investigation, but at least according to Gino's defenders it was not an adversarial process where she had a fair chance to defend herself - the Kafkacrats of the university told her to shut up, did their own thing, and came back with a report over a year later without giving her a fair shake to mount her (admittedly, extremely weak) defense.
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The more I hear about university politics, the more I conclude that they have too much power. Their authority needs to be separated into isolated chunks. They should not be teaching courses and then evaluating their own performance by giving exams as well. They should not be setting tuition fees and also collecting them. They should not be both centers of mass-education for undergrads and also the education of the elite few who go on to PhD and Master's courses.
Most of all, the powers they have which resemble the powers of the judicial system in any way need to be taken away. Universities are not courts of law, they do not have the accountability, moral fiber, or training to do law properly, and any incident which requires the intervention of a court should be handled by an actual court of law.
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I don't see how universities have more power over their employees than any other employer. They can fire (and sort of blackball) an employee, but so can any other employer.
Students, on the other hand, lose an insane investment if they get kicked out. So I agree there.
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As a lawyer I just want to mention that not all lawyers adhere to what you call the "lawyer"-side viewpoint. In particular, trial litigation tends to be highly meritocratic because you are constantly going head-to-head against other attorneys in hearings and trials. Being good at your job and having reputation for credibility goes a long way.
I would actually say that Law is one of the most meritocratic fields over the long run, in that while the really elite levels are gatekept behind prestigious degrees, you can still put out a shingle and work and build a base of clientele and advance. There are local lawyers pulling down excellent livings in any region of 100,000 people. Where doing physics research requires being hired by one of a handful of institutions in the world, and if you don't meet their criteria or get unlucky early in your career, tant pis.
A good lawyer who gets bad grades at a mediocre law school probably won't reach SCOTUS, he can still end up a trial judge or a partner at a very profitable law firm. A great chemist who misses out on professional and academic opportunities teaches at the high school.
Do you know if there are any good stats on what percent of lawyers are making excellent livings after they take some time to advance? New lawyer salaries have been scarily bimodal for decades now, but it's hard to tell the extent to which that's a career-long problem rather than something the lower half of the distribution just has to work their way out of over 5 or 10 years.
I'm trying to find data on it but I'm not succeeding quickly. Entry level wages have been bimodal, but the up-or-out nature of big law means that a lot of those highly-paid associates are gone within two to four years, and some for jobs where they (adjusting for inflation) they will never make more than they did early on at biglaw. Surveys report that 20% of associates leave their firms annually, though some are lateral to another firm. And of course a big part of the bimodalism has to do with the strong preference among elite professional degree holders for urban living; too few are willing or able to move to Cleveland, let alone Lancaster or Wyoming, to advance their careers.
But a small percentage of lawyers advancing their careers after failing at earlier prestige games doesn't necessarily mean that the system isn't meritocratic, it might tell us that a small percentage of good lawyers are being "thrown away" by the earlier screening systems.
I can't quantify it easily, but looking around at mid career lawyers, there is a definite path both down and up for lawyers based on talent. There are people I know who made big law and now aren't even practicing, and people I know who are making partner at prominent small town firms and pulling down a decent living now, which will improve considerably when the boomers have the courtesy to die off and free up a lot of work.
Even take a small city local DAs office as an example. Dauphin County, where Harrisburg is located, will hire young ADAs out of schools like Dusquesne and Penn State and Weidner with mediocre grades. The entry level wage is low, probably $60-70k these days. The experienced average is like $175k and the DA makes in the $200k range with a lot of local prestige to go with it. The Dauphin County DA went to Widener, started as an ADA thirty years ago, and now is the DA. There's obviously political elements to becoming DA, both office politics and electoral politics, but for the most part the way you become DA is by having at least some degree of talent for law.
None of this is perfect, there's still a ton of early career gatekeeping and prestige games, especially around the highest end jobs. But we're not comparing it to perfection, just to the example offered by OP: research science. If you're a research scientist without a university or industry affiliation, there's not a very comparable way to advance and revive your career.
I was going to point out the many Striver Merit Badges you're overlooking in your analysis that are needed to approach the highest end legal jobs, but yes, by comparison, it's far more meritocratic than research science at universities.
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I think it does acknowledge the existence of competence; it simply argues that an IQ test would be more cost-effective than years of education (remember that a lot of the use of tertiary degrees and even secondary degrees as proxies for competence is based on education in irrelevant subjects to the actual job requirements), and unlaundered carve-outs (if one chooses to use them for political reasons) would be more cost-effective than laundered ones.
The top line doesn't really represent the rest of the post.
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Its possible for a job to be both meritocratic, and selected by status games. It happens anytime a job can be done to a sufficient degree by a large pool of candidates. There has to be some kind of alternate selection criteria. Some of these jobs might even adopt what look like anti-meritocratic sorting mechanisms.
Imagine a toll booth operator job where you basically just need to watch cars drive by and pay automatically. Maybe sometimes you hit a button to let someone through when the automated payment system gets messed up and should have let someone through. Generally you are doing nothing for 8 hour shifts. Almost anyone could take this job. 100 people apply for the position, you only have one opening to fill. If you were interested in the public good you yourself might implement a restriction like 'no smart people can have this job, they can actually use their brain to help the world instead'. If you were selfish and corrupt you might offer the job up for auction, that some percentage of the pay ends up going to you instead of the actual job candidate, or you just get a flat up front payment. Or maybe you have to sit in the toll booth with this person so you just pick the funniest and most likeable person. Even if you just decide to draw the name out of a hat, the final process for selecting the job candidate is not meritocratic.
So what happens when the job is much harder like "Harvard professor" and there are still 100 candidates for just one position. I'd imagine its much of the same thing, the job candidate is going to be picked on non-meritocratic factors, because the merit based filters have already been applied and they were still left with a large pool of candidates. Its also my belief that the larger the candidate pool left after merit filtering, the less a job will look like it is "merit based", regardless of how strict the merit based filtering was. A million qualified candidates applied for one professorship position and you know whoever gets that position got it because of political connections / nepotism / race favoritism / etc. Three qualified applied candidates for one professorship position, and you feel that they probably gave it to the most qualified person.
I'm not saying you are completely wrong, but I think it's worth pointing out that the difference between a toll collector (in your analogy) who is truly great and one who is merely qualified is not all that noticeable or consequential compared to the difference between a college professor who is truly great and one who is merely "qualified." Probably most of us here have had the misfortune of taking a class with an affirmative action professor and therefore have witnessed just how bad a "qualified" professor can be.
From my experience at university the student preferred professors were not preferred by the university because each group just had a different idea of a good professor. Nothing to do with affirmative action. Teaching quality vs grant proposal quality.
Multiple axis of "merit" just makes the problem worse, because it just means that are more "qualified" people for the position, even if they are only partially qualified.
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Is that true? I'd argue one of the prerequisites for effective meritocracy is a swift and effective method of performance measurement.
In toll collecting and many other private enterprise positions, that kind of measurement is typically easy thanks to revenue. Tollbooths are simple enough that it probably doesn't work for an average and elite performer, but let's say we're comparing bad to good, one of McNamara's morons against a regular high school graduate. In such a situation, the moron would stick out within a month or less and be fired.
But for a professor? If they're bad at teaching, the university won't even care. And the only reason this Gino person was fired wasn't because of bad research, but outright fraud that took decades to unearth.
It certainly can't hurt.
Agreed, but at the same time, it might not even be that easy to swiftly and effectively measure how good the person is at teaching.
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Thank you for this post. It is something that really annoys me about the affirmative action debate. Both sides adopt a fairness approach (ie it is fair to adjust for past sins; how is it fair to punish someone who didn’t engage in any past sin). Both sides seemingly ignore that the position / job isn’t the end goal but the output of the position / job is the end goal. That is, the sides seem to focus on distributional issues while ignoring productivity.
I dont think that is true. Anti-AA folks with say that is both unfair to the candidates, but also unfair to customers and shareholders. Particularly with government positions, anti-AA advocates have long said it is cheating the public. I do think that the sentiment that ignoring the output is a necessary assumption of the pro-AA side, or at least hiding it/ignorance of it.
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The "meritocracy" side makes this point often and is shouted down by claiming the affirmative action hires are "qualified".
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Both groups have reasons why their definition of fairness will not only not harm the purpose of the organization but will enhance its ability to do its job.
It isn't so much ignored as the first thing they needed to provide some answer for.
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You're not wrong, but that's natural IMO.
Your job is perhaps the thing that determines most about your life. What job you have is very very important to you in the short, medium and long terms. The outputs of other people's jobs are only important in an indirect and long term manner.
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There’s takes of different views of academia, but this is really just an iron law story. The interests of the bureaucracy, determined by proper form, come first, and Gino was advancing the interests of the bureaucracy.
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[contemporaneous discussion, more recent]
Caveat: I'm pretty confident that Gino is either guilty as sin or so negligent as to be guilty, and probably both given that she'd signed onto other fraudy-as-fuck research without a care before. A good many of her deflections are not just naked, but often wrong, and those that aren't wrong are meaningless. The lawsuit is, in particular, an indictment of both Gino and her lawyers -- and that the DataColada crew couldn't get legal fees after succeeding an indictment of the courts. Much of her defenders embody of the adage about "If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts; if you have the law on your side, pound the law; if you have neither the facts nor the law, pound the table." and that's a part of it.
So, to be blunt, I'm not a fan.
... but I do notice that she's also unusual, and not in the way I wish she was unusual. Dan Ariely, noted co-author and co-fraud, got a television show, and his sketchy academic behavior is only slightly less obvious. Sam Yoon isn't up a creek until the investigation turns in; it's not hard to list piles of academic misconduct that's just everyday charlatanism, much of which isn't even worth a retraction nevermind direct real punishment. There are other fraudsters that get the hammer, but even there, academia tends to keep the wheel of justice slow, fine, and prone to false negatives: Stapel got got and literally none of his students did, Wansink lost his job and we never even got an answer for what fakes were direct lies rather than p-hacking, yada yada.
It's not enough to say that her fraud is unusual. There are so many rules, and so many ways to do academic misconduct, and so many ways to slice academic misconduct, that it's always possible to explain why one case was vital without lending any predictive power, nor explain why one case was important and the others weren't. And bureaucracies inventing and applying a thicket of rules only to enforce them when desired is absolutely a thing that happens, and something that people like Ackman has seen.
What's relevant is whether these policies are good here, or not. Even if Gino were tots correct about selective prosecution and scapegoating and other bad actors, ultimately, that'd just be an argument in favor of Harvard (or, imo, academia) needing to clean out the rest of the stables.
... which gets rough for 2rafa's take. There's a world where the education and test-taking makes for better decisions, better responses, better actions, and better systems, where elites mean extreme focus in specialized capabilities. There's a world where it's status-farming, or Goodharting, or some very precise games-of-thronesing, where elites are just a class identity for a class that doesn't even pretend to try for its claimed focuses. These worlds aren't even incompatible!
But then you have to run into this world. We're in one where Gino got into, and succeeded at, Harvard for nearly two decades. Dias made it into Harvard and the Time 100 Next before spinning his wheels as one of a dozen lab leaders doing this sort of research on the planet, absolutely wasting it, and another one of those lab leads pretending to replicate part of his tots-real data.
I dunno. I don't want to put words in 2rafa's mouth. If the argument is on whether everything must or should be a status game, I'd agree with you, and find that's not a healthy sort of nihilism to take, and not a healthy reason to want to ignore it all. I don't think that's the position, but if it is, or even if it's a decent read, it's not a good thing.
If the argument is on whether everything is or has become a status game... I'd be stuck having to quibble on the 'everything', and doing so would be a faint defense, or defenders of these approaches to education and academia might feel they have to argue that their output is just better than nothing and I'd have to do the work to believe that. I might be wrong in that pessimism! But I have my reasons, and, thankfully, it's an argument we can have based on facts.
Yeah, the same Ivy league academia that employed literal weather underground terrorists as professors. This is borderline naive, especially as you say that the overall structure of investigation and punishment is as opaque and arbitrary as it gets. Given the current corrupt structure of Academia I think it more likely than not that this prosecution is going to make things even worse.
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Ariely threw Gino under the bus, did he not? Astute, if immoral.
Perhaps. There's a really awkward question about whether he knew, or suspected, or just was in a sufficiently target-rich environment that any finger-pointing would hit a fraudster.
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The argument in the example is broadly that grinding tests for 10+ years is a terrible way to determine merit and rewards parental investment / the capacity of the child to suffer / capacity of the parent to make them suffer almost as much as intelligence.
The arguments are twofold:
If it were possible to do a meritocratic sort that was say 95% accurate instead of today’s method being 98% accurate, but this method took 30 minutes instead of 15 years, wouldn’t it be a straightforward improvement from a utilitarian POV in terms of efficiency and reduced suffering?
Explicit meritocracy’s emphasis on grinding, explicit competition and credentialism does not seem to produce maximally good results. Britain performed better, was more agentic, produced more science and engineering through 1750-1950 when universities were the playgrounds of gentlemen (albeit with rigorous marking), we had a large theoretically idle class, and jobs were largely got through patronage and the old boys’ network. This was unfair to many people, yes, but potentially worked better for reasons like (a) there was more slack in the system and fewer resources wasted grinding for maximum-status occupations, (b) talented people were distributed more evenly throughout the system so eg you would have the head nurse in a hospital being about as intelligent as the head doctor because women weren’t allowed to become doctors, which is unfair to the woman in question but makes hospitals run a lot better, and (c) those at the top were somewhat less selected to be grinders and hustlers. It's a bit like the way that hobbyist stuff can be a lot higher quality before something gets popular and all the big companies enshittify it.
There are other arguments against modern meritocracy but those have more to do with whether it makes people happy rather than whether it makes the country perform better, and I figure you’re more interested in the latter.
EDIT:
Keen to hear more of your thoughts.
95% accurate is pretty horrible. In a country of 348 million that means you have over 17 million people improperly classified.
It's not a death sentence. And the system to move classified people to the right jobs is far from perfect as well.
Arguably, imperfect classification helps solve that issue so jobs that require a high classification, but are really more suitable for the less capable get filled with the proper person, and vice versa.
In our system, we also have no good solution for exceptions, like the union leader who needs to understand the situation of the workers in a way that can only come from having done the job, but who needs to have skills beyond what the job requires. It would be a bad idea to require a standard for all workers far beyond what the job requires, but also to not have any people who can successfully advocate for those people, at the level of the more classified, where decisions get made.
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Point taken, though these are fake numbers in any case and 'properly classified' is not something you can judge with any refinement. More broadly, if you could put in place a program that 'properly' classified 3m more people but required everybody to be whipped every morning, one might conclude it probably wasn't worth it. There are tradeoffs here.
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Every measurement has costs. What if we could go from 98% to 99% accurate by having kids grind for 12 hours a day for grades, every day, while doubling public education spending? That would prevent millions more from being misclassified.
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I think this is key. As I see it, most successful societies historically either had open aristocracies (a small number of exceptionally able outsiders could get in, often by marrying into aristocratic families) or enarchies (my coinage based on the French ENA - the point is that you select down to an aristocracy-sized elite by a single high-stakes exam which is more heavily g-loaded than the modern American meritocratic grind).
"Being from an aristocratic family" is sufficiently g-loaded to select a plausible class of potential elites if the aristocracy is open and not inbred. In the alternative patronage system, so is "sufficiently interesting to attract a patron", providing that patrons actually have to patronise their proteges rather than just writing a note in exchange for a favour from the proteges father (see for example the role of patronage in the Royal Navy when it was the winningest organisation in human history).
I may do an efforpost later on the broader advantages of this approach.
How do you prevent the preparation for this exam from turning into a decade long grind? Most exams like that (including the French ENA entrance exam and stuff like the International Math Olympiad) effectively are.
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I, for one, would like to read that effortpost, should you write it.
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First, to clarify, this seems like agreeing that some idealized meritocratic sorting is actually a good thing, even though modern meritocracy as implemented in western nations isn't (and meritocracy as implemented in South Korea/China is even worse). Unless there's an unspoken justification for a claim like "any attempt to sort by merit will degenerate just as badly"? As far as the topic I was trying to have with this discussion on the "deeper" culture-war relating to cynicism about careers, I'm reading that you agree with me?---that a significant fraction of people have careers that are very positive-sum, producing lots of value for society as a whole. It matters that the people who gets these careers are as qualified as possible to maximize this societal value.
Now, on the (slightly off-topic) general discussion about meritocracy: I think I agree that there are serious problems with modern meritocracy. This is precisely because of examples like Gino---modern meritocracy has serious trouble identifying such strivers (seemingly) focused on career building and accolade collection instead of people actually wanting to accomplish the societally valuable mission of the positions they get (it's still shocking how little shame she displays in her interviews for the damage she did to progress in her field). You want your scientist to be someone good at science, not someone hyperoptimizing test-taking games.
However, there's a big gap between "this has serious problems" and "we need to throw it out" even if "we need to throw it out" comes with an additional "for this alternative". You have to justify the factual claim that the alternative is actually better. For example, while I do agree that 1 is correct, I do not think that "a single IQ test to every child at 10 years old" comes even close to fitting the hypothetical in 1. There are many arguments here, but at the very least you do agree that "You need more than raw intelligence to do good research" is a cliché for a reason? I'm less confident about 2, but I generally think people underestimate just how hard modern science and engineering is compared to what people where doing in the 50's. The sophistication of what we need to do now completely outclasses anything from back then. There's a very good recent pop-science video on EUV lithography that gives a sense of this---Apollo is nothing compared to the engineering problems people needed to solve to get this working!
I also think there are some easy fixes we can make to modern meritocracy, even staying in the framework of "grinding tests". First of all, the tests can be made much more interesting and less based on rote memorization---grinding for challenging IMO/other olympiad-style problems is much more fun then grinding for the SAT. It's also a much more accurate test of actual interest and creativity. Of course, as anyone who actually did grind for such tests can tell you, even this can both be miserable and get goodhearted if taken to an extreme. The solution there is to have a variety of "tests" in very different formats---olympiads, debate tournaments, science fairs, take-home tests, even on-the-spot jeopardy-style contests, etc.---so many that you can't grind for all of them. Meritocratic sorting could be based on performance on some sort of "top-n" of all the possible tests. The optimal strategy then is to do the ones you're most interested in and the variety of needing to be good multiple very different formats keeps it from getting too miserable. This is just some off-the-cuff speculating right now just to give a vague idea of how the details might work.
Sorry for not fully explaining all the points here, it's pretty late where I am right now---I can expand more tomorrow evening on parts that seem sketchy.
I feel confident in claiming that at least 99% of modern science and engineering falls way below that complexity (and the only reason why people didn't give up on EUV despite the complexity was because the stakes are so high). Gino is a good example. Her study on cheating based on whether people sign before they cheat or afterwards, is a kind of study that has been done time and time again. It doesn't require a lot of intelligence to come up with it, just a little creativity (and even then the emphasis is on 'little').
Also note that specialization has increased, so the overall complexity of certain fields may have increased, but that doesn't mean that the complexity of specific jobs has increased as much.
No, the optimal strategy is then to game the top-N that will be selected.
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When the Gino case broke out: “Mr. President—a second exposé of academic fraud has hit a female HBS professor.”
The first being Amy Cuddy and her power poses a few years earlier. This was framed as some stupid men and traitorous pickmes being misogynistic tightasses about “replicability” and “selection bias,” oppressing a brave female professor from living her best life and sharing her Emotional Truth, so Cuddy could still save some face and salvage some plausible deniability.
Then Francesca Gino came around and was like “hold my cosmo.” She took it to a next level by just straight-up falsifying the data. This passage from Wikipedia is a classic:
It reminds me of when Pycelle tries to blame Varys upon Tyrion’s confrontation: “No! Never! It's a falsehood! I swear it! It wasn't me! Ah, Varys. It was Varys, the coauthoorrrr!”
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This reads a lot like the defense of that Christian college student refuting pro-trans arguments. Here on the Motte there was lots of "Her arguments are bad but a score of zero? The teacher is treating her differently, more harshly."
People here posted the actual grading rubric and went through how this wasn't a zero given a reasonable interpretation of the grading guide.
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There's a pretty big difference between actual novel research and some random busywork essay task for undergraduates. Especially since the former shouldn't just be composed to hit a KPI whilst the latter explicitly is.
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Ugh, fine, I didn't read the essay at the time but I did now.
The question is whether the essay, which was bad, was bad enough to earn a 0/25 rather than a higher-but-still-low score like, I dunno, 2/25 or 5/25. "The soft sciences are sufficiently corrupted by ideology that their politically-relevant outputs should asymptote to a low level of Bayesian evidence" is a highly-plausible and highly-relevant proposition to discussing any research article that's come out of them, and she did hint at it; that's better than literally nothing. Grading does need to discriminate between different degrees of badness, after all, and in this specific case we have proof that the instructor was marking down due to taking personal offence at the positions taken:
(AP, emphasis mine)
I will note that, regardless of your opinion of the essay's quality, "writing a bad essay" is not a moral failure in the way that, say, plagiarism would be (even though plagiarism is not actually a crime)... or in the way that scientific fraud is. I'm not actually sure whether this is literally fraud in the legal sense; I don't know whether "you agree to not tamper with your data" was part of the contract to receive a research grant ("you agree to actually do the study" presumably is, but the study does appear to have been performed in all these cases). Nonetheless, it seems obvious to me that a university that allows its scientists to tamper with data would stop getting government grants in a hurry (because, well, the actual state interest in issuing research grants is to uncover scientific truths, not to produce papers full of literal lies; there are of course private funders who want to buy propaganda, but the state shouldn't be doing that) and thus it is reasonable for a university (at least, one that intends to continue performing government-funded research) to fire scientists that have repeatedly performed such tampering (and thus ensure that they don't do more of it).
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There's not much point in trying to (retroactively) change a grading rubric and the paper's score so that the actual outcome, your preferred outcome, and the procedurally-fair outcome all match. As a result, practically nobody had that broad of a conversation.
There is a point to setting scientific research standards and Harvard's employees, so that the actual/preferred/fair outcomes all match (in the future, at least).
Also, getting a zero for a substandard paper is wrong, and getting fired for academic fraud is right. We should be keeping different halves of the double standards from those examples.
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I noticed the same and have absolutely no sympathy for that viewpoint, to the extent that I think anyone advocating for it is some combination of idiot and actively malicious.
You don't believe that random busywork essay tasks for undergrads are marked via rubric?
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"Heh, I compare two incidents that have superficially similar argumentations around one another and so once again I accuse the chuds of hypocrisy, gotcha!"
Go directly to Reddit. Do not pass go, do not collect 200$. There is a world apart between making rhetorically weak arguments and fabricating evidence whole cloth. You know this. But here you are, saying something incredibly foolish, to attempt to reignite a past argument that you had failed to persuade in.
You are shameless, that much I know, but you can try to at least not be stupid at the same time. Now, having bitten into this bait, I will spit it out and go on my way.
You've been warned and banned many times for personal attacks. For someone using "reddit" as an epithet, you are acting like a redditor.
One week ban.
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There is also a world apart between a zero on a single assignment which is 10% of a single course grade and firing a tenured academic in disgrace. Both would be the appropriate punishments in a sane academia for the respective crimes, but are enforced far too rarely.
In both cases, the argument being made is of the form "A fundamentally righteous but rarely-enforced rule was enforced against an obviously-guilty member of a protected group - and discrimination by selective enforcement is worse than the underlying crime" (and the scissor is "Given the history of malign discrimination and current underrepresentation, should conservatives in academia be a protected group?"). The structure is symmetric, even if the relative severity is not.
This is the similarity you're failing to show between the cases. As per the other thread the grading criteria for the assignment do not warrant a 0. Yes, it's a bad essay, but the criteria provided by the professor explicitly allows bad essays. Please show how there were similar rules that actually allow for the penalized conduct in this case.
The essay deserved an F (that is 0 at some schools including this one and, bizarrely, 50 at others). Some of us think that grading rubrics giving F-quality work D and C grades in order to avoid giving earned Fs to protected groups are precisely what's gone wrong with higher education. When the F student isn't politically sympathetic, most Motteposters do.
The rule being selectively enforced here is "Undergraduates should be able to do undergraduate-level work". It isn't the specific rubric.
Your argument about this paper deserving an F is sufficient in a vacuum. However, this did not occur in a vacuum. It was one of many papers, and all prior papers written by this person were graded very generously. Once that pattern is established, a sudden zero requires justification beyond “this paper was bad.” There could've been some plausible deniability had the trans TA given a high F and kept the criticism solely about the paper not adhering to the rubric. The trans TA didn't do that. They gave the paper the lowest grade possible, then wrote a lengthy redditor debate style response directly to Fulnecky denying her appeal, which included how they were offended. That diminishes plausible deniability quite substantially.
Even if that essay did deserve an F per the rubric, then what should be done with all other generously graded essays in that course under said rubric? Fulnecky received full credit on all prior essays in that series of assignments. I'd be willing to bet that her writing quality on this controversial paper was not exceptionally worse than her other papers, or even other papers written by other students in that class. The university's own internal review seems to support that, and the lack of consistency is the most damning bit of evidence that the TA cannot account for.
Fundamentally, I don't care about Fulnecky's cause as much as I do about the culture establishing a counter balance to progressive overreach. This TA receiving a punishment of this severity is worth it in that regard. Not because their crime was severe, but because similar crimes of this nature occur everyday on nearly every campus in the country. I do not want progressive thumbs tipping the scales without fear of repercussion any longer.
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What's bizarre about it? <=50% points is a failing grade in every European country I've been in.
Not according to the grading criteria for the assignment. And if yes, just barely.
What's the evidence that this rule even exists? I can probably pull out a specific rule for the school that prohibits academic fraud, if you admit there isn't one here, you're admitting the cases aren't analogous.
Most motteposters are in favor of high standards. Failing a particular student a teacher doesn't like, but otherwise keeping the low standards isn't particularly popular.
I don't think it's crazy to think that there is a very meaningful distinction between "your rules" and "your rules, applied fairly". Fairness is probably the most important claimed value of both sides of the culture war anyway, there is just disagreement on its interpretation.
I can also entertain the separate thought that standards should be more rigorous, but my elitist sensibilities there there would probably nix a decent chunk of the psychology department's courses as a whole: reading between the likes here suggests to me that "lifespan development" was broadly seen as an easy class and I'd bet half the essays are worse but scored well still.
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No, people on the Motte said "Her arguments are bad, but according to the published grading rubric there's no way it deserved a zero"
Yea? Ok.
Is this an argument? A rebuttal? Or just a low-effort grunt?
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Do you not see any difference between that argument and your strawman of it?
It's not what I remember the argument being here. I recall people here saying an equally shitty form of argument coming to pro-trans conclusions wouldn't have gotten a zero. In any case, in both cases the goal posts are moved away or toward the solidity or veracity of the argument made and away or toward "but given procedural conditions and norms that surround the argument-making, she's being singled out."
I believe her paper was singled out because of its content.
Based on the information above, it was already reasonable to assume that this paper was graded with extra scrutiny because of the topic and the grader's identity.
Then the university reviewed case and decided the TAs grading was arbitrary. The provost agreed with this conclusion.
What do you disagree with here?
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Likewise if the same thing had happened 5 years ago where a mostly off-topic pro-trans argument was submitted to a conservative TA and given a 0, that TA would have been loaded into a cannon and shot into the sun.
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Cool, I can't wait to make you defend an argument you never made, because that's how I "remembered" it.
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