Tell it early, tell it all, tell it yourself

I think it most important to keep this visible so that prospective students can accurately assess the institutions out there. Wegman will be fine. I’m sure the coming Koch FSU Critical Climate Studies (the first facility with underwater lecture halls!) will hire him, if need be, and I doubt this will “shift the debate” much – the denialistsdeluded have write-only memories on these things.

But I’m pretty sure there are many students who will care quite a bit about such things. (Including, I’m sure, a few who consider it a positive.)

I used to routinely compare university administrators to prostitutes. I stopped doing so after realizing that hard-working sex workers really don’t deserve to be insulted that way.

Steve reminds me of my favourite comment on a Brad Delong post (on his latest deliberations over L’Affaire Yoo).

Delong (quoting Ernst Kantorowicz)

There are three professions which are entitled to wear a gown: the judge, the priest, the scholar. This garment stands for its bearer’s maturity of mind, his independence of judgment, and his direct responsibility to his conscience and his god. It signifies the inner sovereignty of those three interrelated professions: they should be the very last to allow themselves to act under duress and yield to pressure.

Commenter ‘Jerry’:

There is another profession that wears gowns and is in many ways similar to the judge, priest, and scholar except for intellectual honesty in which it is almost always the clear leader.

I used to routinely compare university administrators to prostitutes. I stopped doing so after realizing that hard-working sex workers really don’t deserve to be insulted that way.

This joke is actually so terrible as to be excruciating. Never mind that nobody who makes it probably has ever come within ten feet of a prostitute, and thus has no basis to judge for themselves the degree of strenuousness of the vocation; it’s the complete and glib misidentification of the stigma (no, the reason society stigmatizes prostitution isn’t because the work isn’t strenuous enough), and thus the nonsensicalness of the whole riff, that’s just mystifying.

The next time I see one of those emissions of nonsense I want to grab its emitter by the collar and ask, “who would you prefer to have dinner with, honestly?” Because the aggressive stupidity of the whole analogy, even if merely in jest, is incredibly irritating.

The next time I see one of those emissions of nonsense I want to grab its emitter by the collar and ask, “who would you prefer to have dinner with, honestly?”

Or a beer even.

Among the many stings in the tail from this for GMU (and surely the national political and “funding” aspects are significant components of the deliberations), one that cuts right to the heart of their educational and research mission is the sorry saga of the inclusion of the one grad student’s words in the report to Congress (and other published works). There is only bad, worse and worst. From USA Today</a. (see update at he bottom):

I will also say that Jerry North and Tom Crowley did not bring any glory to academia in general in their poorly-informed and facile speculations about what had occurred (nor maybe John Nielsen-Gammon by publishing their e-mails).

Never mind that nobody who makes it probably has ever come within ten feet of a prostitute, and thus has no basis to judge for themselves the degree of strenuousness of the vocation…

Are you attacking Steve because you believe he doesn’t frequent prostitutes?

Hmmm… maybe we could get the Volokh Conspiracy bloggers on it. After all, they were posting lots of articles critical of Mann, and citing the Wegman report, some years back, so they should be familiar with the material. And academic misconduct’s come up a number of times, there, so they should be keen on bringing known facts to light.

But for some reason, when I look at recent posts, I don’t see anything recent mentioning Wegman, or the retractions and ethical investigation. Do you suppose maybe it’s slipped their minds somehow?

“The next time I see one of those emissions of nonsense I want to grab its emitter by the collar and ask, “who would you prefer to have dinner with, honestly?” Because the aggressive stupidity of the whole analogy, even if merely in jest, is incredibly irritating.”

I’ve had lunch w/ many sex workers over the years, and I’ll hang out with them any day over a college administrator (or a plagiarizing college professor). Who wouldn’t? They got style and kick and hella good stories. Is that the right answer? Or the wrong answer? I can’t tell.

One should have Double-Public-Doubt (DPB) with anything or anyone
involved with GMU to begin with!

May I repeat Tom T.’s question? Did the copying affect the conclusions? Or is this just a bunch of inside-academia glee here?

Yes he’s a thief and yes that’s a big, important, significant credibility torpedo below the waterline, but what about the conclusions? We’ve all known crooks who could reason, and some who could tell the truth.

From the many posts over at Deltoid and RealClimate on the matter, particularly on the matter of conclusions, my sense is that the conclusions came first. The rest of the paper was an exercise in scrambling bits–including the multiple plagarisms–in the attempt to support them.
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2011/05/wegmans_defence_makes_him_look.php
Aussie grammaticians are a fussy bunch.

What we REALLY need is an analysis of the “social network” of Representative Joe Barton, the rest of the clowns on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Senator Jim Inhofe and his buddies, and the petro lobby — as I pointed out over at RealClimate, at that time. I fully demand and expect this new report to be forthcoming from GMU, hopefully before the Rapture, and hopefully some time before a heat-spike destroys world agriculture for a few years and creates real havoc and mayhem. One positive outcome of this was that the good scientists at RealClimate began to appear to understand that through no fault of their own they were, and are, the principals in a political fight and the “denialist” opposition observes no rules regarding scientific facts nor the reportage thereof — as “Climategate” subsequently confirmed.

Yes he’s a thief and yes that’s a big, important, significant credibility torpedo below the waterline, but what about the conclusions?

The social-network paper born of the report was retracted not so much because of the plagiarism, but because when independent peer reviewers were belatedly brought in they thought it was risible. Wegman’s current position on the paper seems to be that he did not contribute anything apart from his imprimatur so its faults should not be held against him. This is hardly reassuring.

[herr doktor bimler] Wegman’s current position on the paper seems to be that he did not contribute anything apart from his imprimatur so its faults should not be held against him.

He was willing to take the credit for others’ work, but not the blame.

Rather the opposite stance from the acknowledgments page at the start of any reasonable book — “I thank X, Y, and Z for these contributions and corrections; any errors that remain are my own.”

At the risk of pointing out the obvious, some sexworkers are also ‘in’ academia.

And not just as students.

Apologies to Skippy, who got there first.

Better advice for Wegman would be “Tell it early, tell it all, tell it in someone else’s words and then blame a student”.

Eli has taken up the term rejectionist to capture the madness of the denial crowd.

BTW, NIH OPR cannot bring criminal charges, but they can bar folk from getting or working on federal grants, or in a very very very bad situation, bar the entire university (nuclear war version). In practice they wait for the completion of the university’s investigation and then impose penalties. Since GMU has not even made it out of the preliminary inquiry stage in over 18 months, there is an argument to be made that OPR simply push them aside. That too would be very unusual.

Really. A bunch of white-bread academicians boasting to each other about how ‘street’ they are because they have met a sex worker and would much prefer to have dinner with said person than with somebody of a very similar cultural, educational and class background?

My credulity, like Substance’s mouse-over, is stretched.

Myles: ‘I would pay to see a video of those above who said they prefer to dine with sex workers actually attempting such a dinner conversation.’

Me: any serious offer considered.

Didn’t I read somewhere on CT that Myles was limited to one written ejaculation, so to speak, per day? (blah blah I bet he gets told something similar by his sexworker as well blah blah etc.)

Yes he’s a thief and yes that’s a big, important, significant credibility torpedo below the waterline, but what about the conclusions?

Kathleen Carley, the senior academic who introduced SNA to Wegman’s group, has stated the paper did not deserve to be published in its current form.

Andrew Gelman, a senior statistician, dismisses it:

As a blog post, the Said et al. manuscript is pretty impressive: they offer opinions and also some data analysis!

John Mashey’s long report also includes comments from social networking expert Garry Robins (p. 151):

In summary, there may or may not be compromised reviewing in various research domains but this network analysis cannot provide sufficient leverage to show it.

The plagiarism just confirms they didn’t know enough to do a real analysis.

This seems roughly to be a mirror image of the UEA (‘Climategate’) affair, which ISTR was claimed by one tribe to be utterly devastating, while other side gave it a pass, indulging in extraordinary intellectual contortions to hold the line and avoid any substantial criticism whatsoever. The last line of defence was irrelevance in the wider scheme of things – though the denialist camp would be keen to exaggerate the wider doubt cast on the integrity of the science in general.

Presumably the uncompromising defence of the UEA lot is to be considered rather a good thing, since it shows the ‘left’ tribe eschewing the naive intellectual honesty and refusal to use agnotological techniques that some here have bemoaned.

(‘Agnotological’ of course problematic here – since it tends to suggest that the fundamental position being defended is incorrect. ‘Opinion management’, ‘noble-cause corruption’, whatever.)

For some even more heartening cases of ‘left’ agnotology, see Colin Danby’s comment on Denis MacShane, who IIRC also does a nice line in anti-racist agnotology (subtype: anti-antisemitism).

Which reminds me, there has also been a pretty encouragingly rampant strand of anti-rape (a noble cause, indeed) agnotology in recent years – outright statistical distortions, not just rank stupidity like the recent uproar about Ken Clarke’s explanation of why the maximum sentence is not also the minimum.

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BTW, in the UK, deficit denier is a right-agnotological term used for those who oppose the Conservative assault on the welfare state.