Questions:

1. Who is responsible for adding guardrails to ensure all papers coming in are thoroughly checked & reviewed?

2. Who review these papers? Shouldn’t they own responsibility for accuracy?

3. How are we going to ensure this is not repeated by others?

I'm not sure the problems we have at the moment are a lack of accountability. I mean, I think let's go a little overboard on holding people to account first, then wind it back when that happens. The crisis at the moment is mangeralism across all of our institutions which serves to displace accountability .

As with anything, it's just highly subjective. What some call an heinous act is another person's heroic act. Likewise, where I draw the line between an unlucky person and a villain is going to be different from someone else.

Personally, I do believe that there are benefits to labelling others as villains if a certain threshold is met. It cognitively reduces strain by allowing us to blanket-label all of their acts as evil [0] (although with the drawback of occasionally accidentally labelling acts of good as evil), allowing us to prioritise more important things in life than the actions of what we call villains.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect#The_reverse_halo_e...

I would argue that villainy and "bad people" is an overcomplication of ignorance.

If we equate being bad to being ignorant, then those people are ignorant/bad (with the implication that if people knew better, they wouldn't do bad things)

I'm sure I'm over simplifying something, looking forward to reading responses.

Just to add on, armchair quarterbacking is a thing, it’s easy in hindsight to label decisions as the result of bad intentions. This is completely different than whatever might have been at play in the moment and retrospective judgement is often unrealistic.

It’s possible to take two opposing and flawed views here, of course.

On the one hand, it is possible to become judgmental, habitually jumping to unwarranted and even unfair conclusions about the moral character of another person. On the other, we can habitually externalize the “root causes” instead of recognizing the vice and bad choices of the other.

The latter (externalization) is obvious when people habitually blame “systems” to rationalize misbehavior. This is the same logic that underpins the fantastically silly and flawed belief that under the “right system”, misbehavior would simply evaporate and utopia would be achieved. Sure, pathological systems can create perverse incentives, even ones that put extraordinary pressure on people, but moral character is not just some deterministic mechanical response to incentive. Murder doesn’t become okay because you had a “hard life”, for example. And even under “perfect conditions”, people would misbehave. In fact, they may even misbehave more in certain ways (think of the pathologies characteristic of the materially prosperous first world).

So, yes, we ought to condemn acts, we ought to be charitable, but we should also recognize human vice and the need for justice. Justly determined responsibility should affect someone’s reputation. In some cases, it would even be harmful to society not to harm the reputations of certain people.

The person is inseparable from the root cause.

> Labeling people as villains is almost always an unhelpful oversimplification of reality

This is effectively denying the existence of bad actors.

We can introspect into the exact motives behind bad behaviour once the paper is retracted. Until then, there is ongoing harm to public science.

What if the root cause is that because we stopped labeling villains, they no longer fear being labeled as such. The consequences for the average lying academic have never been lower (in fact they usually don’t get caught and benefit from their lie).

I'm not a bad person, I just continuously do bad things, none of which is my fault - there is always a deeper root cause \o/

> Clearly these people are afraid that if they sound too harsh, they'll be ignored altogether as a crank.

This is true though, and one of those awkward times where good ideals like science and critical feedback brush up against potentially ugly human things like pride and ego.

I read a quote recently, and I don't like it, but it's stuck with me because it feels like it's dancing around the same awkward truth:

"tact is the art of make a point without making an enemy"

I guess part of being human is accepting that we're all human and will occasionally fail to be a perfect human.

Sometimes we'll make mistakes in conducting research. Sometimes we'll make mistakes in handling mistakes we or others made. Sometimes these mistakes will chain together to create situations like the post describes.

Making mistakes is easy - it's such a part of being human we often don't even notice we do it. Learning you've made a mistake is the hard part, and correcting that mistake is often even harder. Providing critical feedback, as necessary as it might be, typically involves putting someone else through hardship. I think we should all be at least slightly afraid and apprehensive of doing that, even if it's for a greater good.

That's a legitimate fear though - it's exactly what happened in this case. "The reviewers did not address the substance of my comment; they objected to my tone".

In general Western society has effectively outlawed "shame" as an effective social tool for shaping behavior. We used to shame people for bad behavior, which was quite effective in incentivizing people to be good people (this is overly reductive but you get the point). Nowadays no one is ever at fault for doing anything because "don't hate the player hate the game".

A blameless organization can work, so long as people within it police themselves. As a society this does not happen, thus making people more steadfast in their anti-social behavior

I'd rather if the article would stick to the facts

Hmm. I wonder how he knows these bad-doers are good people.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PragmaticVillain...

It feels good to be bad.

Focusing on criticising people's actions and being lenient and not judging the person's character is literally centuries old, I don't think you can say it's because of woke.