In the world of astrophysics, one failed cancel campaign led to another
quillette.com
quillette.com
It is very serious for this lady to start making sexual assault allegations against colleagues. Things like this taint reputations for a lifetime since there will always be someone who hears about the allegation but not about the supporting data or the end conclusions.
For the reasons you laid out, the people who consciously and falsely accuses someone of a crime should be charged with the same crime, but double the penalty (for they tried to both ruin a life, and deceive/abuse the system). Obviously malice needs to be proven in this case too.
In past years the damages to reputations could be a lot more local and shorter duration when the false charges are refuted with facts. Local people would know the full story and would be less inclined to hold something like this against a person once charges were proven false. The accuser would take the reputational hit.
Today you make charges like this online on social media and there is no way to scrub that from the record. Those allegations will persist like an incurable disease and will be accessible to anyone locally or internationally who searches for info about the accused. That reputational hit will persist on the accused for their lifetime and into their children's lifetime. Penalties for false allegations like this should be very harsh.
> Ultimately, the discourse about the quantum gravity model of string theory provides an example of how white supremacist racial prestige asymmetry produces an antiempiricist epistemic practice among physicists, white empiricism. In string theory, we find an example wherein extremely speculative ideas that require abandoning the empiricist core of the scientific method and which are endorsed by white scientists are taken more seriously than the idea that Black women are competent observers of their own experiences. In practice, invalidating Black women's standpoint is an antiempirical disposal of data, in essence turning white supremacist social structures into an epistemic practice in science. Therefore, while traditionally defined empiricism is the stated practice of scientists, white empiricism -- where speculative white, male testimony is more highly valued than reality-based testimony from Black women -- is the actual practice of scientists.
> Quantum chromodynamics is a colorful name for a theory that uses color as an analogy for physical properties that have nothing to do with color. Unfortunately, QCD came of age in a time when Black people were still using a moniker given to us by white people -- "colored" -- and to this day, textbooks still sometimes call it "colored physics". A Black feminist physicist working in the 1960s would never have used this language, which -- though it lacks the same social meaning -- recalls for me the Third Reich-era phrase "Aryan physics"... What I'm saying is, I love the idea of QCD, but the language is a hot mess.
> Black thought can help us free science from the white supremacist traditions of scientists.
Pay close attention, because truth is our only defense against runaway power.
A lot of today's "truth" is simply what powerful people say it is. If you disagree, tough.
Guilt by association is a dangerous precedent.
> [George Mason University astronomy professor Peter] Plavchan said that in July 2021, as word circulated in academia that Dr. Oluseyi might win an appointment at George Mason, he heard from a professor at a different university who claimed that Dr. Oluseyi had mishandled a federal grant and sexually harassed a woman. [..] They found nothing to substantiate these charges
This initially started off as typical slacktivism 101. But slacktivism seems to be evolving to become something much more serious and effective.
It's the easiest thing in the world is to sit on Twitter whine about words and labels used for a science project.
Just like it was probably the easiest option for 1950s congressmen to run a giant purity test, accuse people of being communists, and get them blacklisted... instead of focusing on actually doing a better job with the country than communism.
Social media used to just be whining part but now we're seeing backroom blacklisting tactics getting refined and expanded to more and more places.
In the end, it's little more than a high school cafeteria, replete with mean girls.
I'm suspicious of any scientist or researcher that has a very active Twitter account. It means their priorities are not straight.
> Based on the available evidence, the agency does not plan to change the name of the James Webb Space Telescope. However, the report illuminates that this period in federal policy – and in American history more broadly – was a dark chapter that does not reflect the agency’s values today. Understanding this history will help to guide NASA in its work to advance full equality for LGBTQI+ Americans, and equal opportunities for LGBTQI+ NASA employees. By sharing these findings, we also hope to promote public understanding of the history of discrimination against LGBTQI+ employees throughout the federal government and strengthen our efforts to confront the barriers that LGBTQI+ Americans continue to face.
It is disappointing that most of the pro-change activists continue to waste their breath arguing semantics instead of letting it go. It must sting for the engineers and scientists working on JWST to see so many non-stakeholders still complaining about the name.
It is more disappointing that so many new members of the conversation seem happiest to tear down and bully the individuals who asked for change. Eternal September, yet again.
[0] If you are trying to decipher the intimidating username, it is explained here: https://medium.com/@chanda/why-i-took-a-break-from-twitter-e...
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/nasa_hi...
[2] https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-shares-james-webb-history-...
Personally the most compelling accounting of this matter I've seen is in the internal emails exchanged within NASA discussing the naming, which were made public by FOIA [1 & 2]. I would especially draw your attention to the analysis of an external historian (whose name is redacted) beginning on page 301 of [1], which rightly emphasizes Webb's direct, personal involvement in Oval Office discussions with President Truman about these matters. NASA chose to ignore this information and retain the JWST name. After substantial community pressure a more detailed historical report was released [3], which in my view clarifies that Webb was not the motive force behind the efforts at State but in no way exonerates him.
At the end of the day, the telescope was named by a NASA administrator for another NASA administrator. Was Webb personally a bigot? Unclear. Was Webb a person of his time and a practitioner of realpolitik? Seems likely. Did the actions taken under his direction make life worse for gays and lesbians? Definitely. Would it have been better if NASA had chosen to honor someone else with the naming of a $10B telescope? Indisputably.
[1] https://media.nature.com/original/magazine-assets/d41586-022... [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00845-6 [3] https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-shares-james-webb-history-...
Exonerates him of what, specifically?
> Did the actions taken under his direction make life worse for gays and lesbians? Definitely.
Were they actually under his direction? Because it seems like it was a federal law, so why exactly does that qualify as "his direction"?
> Would it have been better if NASA had chosen to honor someone else with the naming of a $10B telescope? Indisputably.
I dispute it. Not because Webb is a "better" candidate than anyone else, but because I dispute the core implication that merely existing in a time and place and following the law, with no actual evidence of wrongdoing, by itself implicates a person in some kind of wrongdoing that should disqualify their contributions from being recognized.
> There are a few blog posts--none of which are written by archivists or historians--that use circular, strawman arguments to attempt to exculpate Webb of his involvement in the Lavender Scare. These arguments focus on misprints in non-peer-reviewed sources. These blog posts fail to engage any of the existing peer-reviewed historical research and archival evidence regarding the period that positions Webb in a leadership role regarding the LGBTQ firings as early as 1950. I would like to imagine that these bloggers have their hearts in the right place--that they aren't intentionally trying to erase LGBTQ history--and that their errors simply stem from their lack of training in historical and archival research.
Well, these blog posts engage with the arguments made in major newspapers and articles, I don't think that's a "strawman argument" at all. If these arguments are bad then the fault is entirely with the people making the bad arguments, not the people replying to them.
I don't really have the time – or interest – to dig deeper in the matter to find out if the gist of the email is correct or not (there's a lot of information and not everything is easily accessible), but I found this a very curious paragraph which needlessly and unfairly attacks people. Also not a huge fan of the credentialism and rather patronizing language. This makes it pretty hard to have honest respectful conversations, and in that sense the author of the email is "part of the problem" (that is, the problem it's so darn hard to have reasonable honest conversations about this).