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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   35165 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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New from me: Viral "Racism in Academia" Story Deleted When I Started Asking Questions

I noticed a suspicious-looking viral Twitter thread yesterday, so I started poking around a bit and, to my surprise, watched its author first reply to my question, then delete his reply and hide my question, then lock the thread, then delete the thread and nuke his whole account.

In this article, I tell that story and examine my takeaways from it. Highlights below:

“So I did an experiment, I am looking for a postdoctoral position and decided to check to what extent racism in science could be. I took my CV and changed the name to a more western one. I'd send it out with my real name, then a few days later (or before) with the western name.”

So began a viral Twitter thread from Mohamad, a PhD student with a small online presence and a remarkable and troubling story of racial bias in academia. When he applied to a postdoc using his real name, he got seventeen responses to a hundred applications, all negative. Changing nothing but his name, he experienced a remarkable transformation of fortunes: eighty-seven replies, including fifty-four scientists willing to apply for a fellowship with him. Not only that, but he reported harrowing harassment from the universities, with messages like “If we can keep lowering the barrier for entry, science will become a joke.”

The thread exploded in popularity, reaching well over 40000 likes and 10000 retweets. Millions of people saw it. Commenters rushed to extend their sympathies. Professors and researchers encouraged him to publish the experience, called for more implicit bias training in the field, and shared the story as an example of the grim reality academics must deal with. It began to spread around the internet, rising quickly to the front page of Hacker News and elsewhere.

Now the thread is gone, his account is renamed and private, and it looks increasingly likely the whole story was a fabrication.

In the replies to the original thread, there were a good handful of confused or uneasy responses, but none of them got much traction. One person pointed out that institutions should notice two copies of a CV with different names. Another asked how he could change his name on the scientific papers that would be included in the application. A third commented that most institutions would require letters of recommendation with others vouching for the individual under their real name.

There were other incongruities. Who would put in the work to send out two hundred applications under two different names, then provide no visible evidence? Who would design a precise experiment like that, with a hundred applications at once, in the middle of a high-pressure academic job search? What’s the likelihood that he could even find a hundred institutions with open postdoc positions exactly matching his niche academic field?

How could the results flip so dramatically, from nothing but rejections to half of the responders eagerly looking to apply with him? And what of the rude remarks? Any academic who harassed him as he described would be committing career suicide and opening themself up for lawsuits as soon as the harassment was publicized. (Link)

Look: none of this guarantees something fishy. There could be good answers to any or every one of these questions. But they’re odd, aren’t they? They demand explanations, they demand answers. At the very least, they demand curiosity.

None of these were the smoking gun that made him nuke his whole account, mind. That smoking gun came from a reddit thread shared on /r/MensRights a few days beforehand, pointed out most prominently by Stuart Ritchie.

In the end, this sort of self-nuke is about the best outcome I could really hope for. Someone with more sinister intent could have dodged my question, ignored people pointing out incongruities, and left the story up to let it keep spreading. Now, no news stories will be written to amplify it further. Nobody will keep the thread in their back pocket to add to a list of stories about racism in academia. No stubborn contrarians need to chase it around the internet begging people to remember that it probably didn’t happen.

All that’s left? A million people nodding vaguely and saying “Oh, yeah, I read something about that once. People with western names get like ten times as many callbacks as others. Hm, can’t find it now. You know how it goes.”

Just the vibes.

Nice work there.

What strikes me about the whole ordeal is how eager people are to consume this type of content, how eager they are to be lied to in just the way the suites them. Also, I'm surprised that we don't see more of this type of content produced. Given the demand, it seems there's a some good money to be made here, especially if you use something like GPT-3 to just generate twitter reports like this.

It shouldn't be that surprising, and for the same reason I'm not overly updating on this post. I'm not going to independently verify this and it conforms to my prior, if I took it too seriously I'd be making the same mistake as the people who fell for the other post, although I do trust trace more than some random. I also wouldn't put it past trace for this to be a double hoax to show how easily people who call out hoxes are hoaxed.

I recently got a youtube ad for an AI social media post generator. I googled it and I guess there’s more, but here’s the first result:

https://postello.ai/

Keep in mind that the “business” they’re advertising for also includes “influencer”.

I'm not too shocked. It's just confirmation bias. If you have a belief, you'll search out information that confirms it in order to feel justified.

If I hate a film, I'll look for reviews that also rated it poorly. I already know what I believe, what joy do I get from reading stuff that disagrees with me?

I think there's a difference: I'm not very cautious about film reviews. If I don't like a film, I'll happily get on the bandwagon of those bashing it.

But when I'm evaluating ideas about how the world works, then I'm going to use a much higher standard. It's more uncomfortable, both because the issues are more complicated and more important, but it seems the struggle is worth it.

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