This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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 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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link