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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29463 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023

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How many potentially brilliant scientists are now working dead end jobs or posting on 4chan from the basement because they made a few socially awkward and politically incorrect jokes early on in life, inadvertently removing themselves from the ability to navigate that system at all?

Not many - neither the physical sciences nor the funded-because-upstream-of-medicine majority of the life sciences are politically sensitive enough to make forensically examining someone's past for hidden wrongthink worth the effort, so people don't do it. To get cancelled, one of three things needs to happen:

  • You ignore prevailing (in the current year, woke, but in Oppenheimer's time anti-Red) social norms so spectacularly that it becomes impossible not to cancel you.
  • You make enemies who find it worth their while to go through your life looking for cancelbait (and with norms as vague as they are, someone who looks hard enough will find something - so this is cancellation for bad luck + having social-media-powerful enemies, not wrongthink).
  • You are prominent enough that people are willing to make an effort to take you down, and find something bad enough that your friends, mentees, collaborators etc. will no longer defend you.

Googling cancelled physicists (and the results are consistent with my own recollection), in the last few years we have

  • John Clauser, who was already 80 and long-since retired at the time he was "cancelled" (taken off a panel at an IMF-sponsored event). This was only newsworthy because it happened the year after he received a belated Nobel prize.
  • Alessandro Strumia, who was fired from CERN for giving a talk that was generally perceived as sexist - although cancelling him was an obvious violation of academic freedom it was the precise opposite of cancelling someone over a youthful indiscretion.
  • Lawrence Krauss, cancelled for weaksauce allegations of sexual harassment that probably would not have stuck had he not been a friend of Jeffrey Epstein.

That isn't many people, and they were all open and notorious heretics as adults. Their being cancelled isn't good (particularly Strumia, who is probably right), but it isn't the kind of cancel culture where a few socially awkward jokes as a teen can be dug up to end a career a decade later.

The attempts to cancel Neil deGrasse Tyson for sexual harassment and James Webb for homophobia failed. Ancient history now, but so did the attempt to cancel Matt Taylor (comet probe shirt guy).

I don't think you've actually grasped the point that I'm making.

You've provided an example of how there are very few prominent physicists getting cancelled - first of all, physics is the department of science I would expect to have the fewest issues along this line(Biology, psychology, anthropology and sociology would be bigger targets). But that's a minor aside compared to the main problem with your reply, which is that it doesn't actually have anything to do with what I was talking about. Notice how I said "early on in life, inadvertently removing themselves from the ability to navigate that system at all" - what this means is that I am talking about the people who never became prominent scientists, and as such the number of physicists who actually get cancelled isn't really relevant to the point I'm making. I'm referring to the chilling effect of social justice culture on the kind of people who could become brilliant scientists, and how the more complicated social demands required to navigate modern academia(not to mention resource conflicts) select against people who could have done great work if they didn't have to navigate the modern morass of invisible rules. To use a metaphor...

"I think that the public burning of witches has a chilling effect on research into sorcery and magic. Many people who could have become fantastic witches have instead been silenced and discouraged by the public treatment of others who take an interest in magic."

"But there aren't that many witches being actively burned - this isn't happening!"

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