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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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