New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Brian Leiter Behaving Badly, Part the Umpteenth

So Brian has decided, in his latest “issues in the profession” thread, to recognize the following question as worthy of note and discussion:

AnonUntenured said...

Can someone explain the Leigh Johnson mystery:  http://www.readmorewritemorethinkmorebemore.com/p/curriculum-vitae_16.html
How do you go from apparent tenure denial at one obscure college to a tenure-track job at another obscure college with almost no publications? (She seems to mostly blog and tweet.)

This is a moderated thread. So there can be no question that Leiter at least had to deliberately press ‘publish’ on this comment.  It is less clear, as his own comment further down indicates, that he had fully thought through the implications of doing so.   

Brian Leiter said...

Yes, I suppose I should not have approved #2, but I've been approving almost everything. On the other hand, Johnson is a very public and rather noxious presence in philosophy cyberspace, so I'm not surprised there is interest.

I’m sure we’re all glad to know that Brian has some standards (he didn’t approve everything, after all). Still, what he did approve seems to merit some comment. 

1. The speculation about the reasons for Leigh’s ability to secure a second job in professional philosophy is untoward, given that she is a) non-tenured, b) not in any way credibly accused or even suspected of professional misconduct, and c) the characterization of her current position is inaccurate. Publishing this comment and thereby generating a public sense that Leigh does not deserve her current employment is at very least an obvious instance of bullying on Brian’s part (and fits his by now well established pattern of directing this sort of attention toward junior, precariously employed members of the profession). 
2. In what has to be one of the great whoppers of his entire blogging career, Brian goes on to justify leaving such a comment up by validating a more general interest in the question of why someone who is, in his view, a "a very public and rather noxious presence in philosophy cyberspace” should have a job. 

To say that the implicit standard in 2) risks implicating Brian himself is rather obvious. More interestingly, it seems to be perhaps as candid an admission as we are likely to get from Brian that he sees nothing wrong with harassing people he doesn’t like if he can possibly pull it off.  And so we find him abusing the pretext of discussing ‘issues in the profession’ to pursue his own petty little vendetta.

 

Jeff Bell

Helen De Cruz

Lisa Guenther

Gordon Hull

Carolyn Jennings

Ed Kazarian

Eric Winsberg

Time capsule from 1958: Women in Physics

After a recent move and going through my storage facility, I came across the following memo (below the fold--click to enlarge) among some of my late mother’s things.   The date is February 19th, 1958, and the author is Nobel Prize winner Polykarp Kush.  My mother was then a graduate student in Physics at Columbia University.  Do read it for yourself in all its blue mimeographed glory, but the money line is, of course, “If your personal lives are of such complexity that they require a continuing contact with family and friends in time that should be devoted to a serious concern with physics, I very much doubt that you have the makings of a good physicist.”  I heard my mother joke about seeing this memo posted in her lab at least a half-dozen times, but I never knew she kept a copy of the memo for fifty years!  She left physics with a Masters degree and returned to graduate school to get her PhD in data analysis in the late 70s.  She always told the memo-story as if it were a knee-slapper (“Physicists in those days were such characters!”) and she never really mentioned the climate for women as a reason why she left Physics.

Consumer Risk, Producer Risk, and the politics of commercialized science

I thought I would make my inaugural post on NewAPPS a follow-up to Roberta's post about the retraction of the article in Food and Chemical Toxicology.  I don't want to continue the debate about whether the retraction was justified; that debate can continue in the original thread.   Here, I want to discuss one of the reasons why we should be paying vigilant attention to events such as these, and why their importance transcends the narrow confines of the particular scientific hypotheses being considered in the articles in question.  What I worry most about is the extent to which pressures can be applied by commercial interests such as to shift the balance of “inductive risks” from producers to consumers by establishing conventional methodological standards in commercialized scientific research. 

Inductive risk occurs whenever we have to accept or reject a hypothesis in the absence of certainty-conferring evidence.  Suppose, for example, we have some inconclusive evidence for a hypothesis, H.  Should we accept or reject H?   Whether or not we should depends on our balance of inductive risks—on the importance we attach, in the ethical sense, of being right or wrong about H.   In simple terms, if the risk of accepting H and being wrong outweighs the risk of rejecting H and being wrong, then we should reject H.  But these risk are a function not only of the degree of belief we have in H, but also of negative utility we attach to each of those possibilities.   In the appraisal of hypotheses about the safety of drugs, foods, and other consumables, these are sometimes called “consumer risk” (the risk of saying the item is safe and being wrong) and “producer risk” (the risk of saying the item is not safe and being wrong.)