The core of the OP’s argument as I see it is that the RS requires its fellows to treat other scientists with curtesy. Elon clearly doesn’t feel bound by that, but the OP does.

This is something I’ve noticed more and more: there are essentially two very different ways to look at rules of various kinds (including laws).

Some people focus on consequences, and have a mental model along the lines of “if I do X, Y could realistically happen to me”. When they read the Statutes and Code of Conduct of the RS they see literally nothing of note, because there are no realistic consequences.

Other people essentially see rules as expressions of the will of some abstract entity, in this case the RS, and feel honor-bound to comply with them or at least take them into account. The consequences are not very important to them. When they read the CoC of the RS they come way with a lot of limits on their behavior.

We used to live in a world where most people who could aspire to be a FRS were clearly in the latter category. We don’t any more. IMHO we therefore need to adjust the rules so that the two categories of people come way with similar mental models of them.

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roenxi 7 months ago | parent [-]

Yeah, I'd class that as high- and low- status behaviour. One of the things that high-status people have to deal with is that they basically create the rules by their behaviour and actions. That leads to a certain disregard for what is written on-paper because they can write different things on it if they want to.

I'd imagine the RS people actually probably tended more towards the former in the early days. There was more of an aristocratic bent and the more vigorous a scientific body is the less respect it has for established rules - more than one of the good scientists from back when were also legit heretics (I've been reading the wiki page for Newton, for example - or the grave robbing doctors).

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bjornsing 7 months ago | parent [-]

> Yeah, I'd class that as high- and low- status behaviour.

Interesting. You mean it’s high-status to disregard rules that don’t have formal consequences?

I guess I’m a bit confused, in that we clearly used to have a society that operated much more on rules without formal consequences. E.g. here in Sweden our law books are absolutely filled with them. Obviously there must have been high-status people that took them seriously in the past, otherwise we wouldn’t have been a well functioning society.

	▲	roenxi 7 months ago \| parent [-]
		Being high-status means someone can just ignore rules and frequently avoid consequences. Generally that seems to be true and historically it has been very true. Happens all the time if you keep your eyes peeled; and the converse - on sometimes formal consequences are forced on someone with high status regardless and they are shocked and confused because that has never happened to them before and they didn't realise that it was an option. The formal consequences or lack thereof are often not a factor for people with very high status because they operate on the assumption that they can just ignore the consequences should they exist. That doesn't mean they ignore the rules - frequently the high-status types are the ones writing them so they typically agree with them in principle. But laws without formal consequences are about as effective as laws with formal consequences because the consequences aren't the major factor. Loss of status would be though, so things that are technically allowed can have major consequences (which IMO is part of why high status means someone eventually starts ignoring the rules - power corrupts as they say - the rewards and punishments are just different for someone with high status and eventually the feedback causes them to orient to that truth).