'We must be pseudonymous to protect ourselves from professional retaliation so let's grass this dick to his employer'. Good to see that, yes, sometimes it is possible and both sides can lose.
I don't understand the grumpiness. Gee did not say anything privately that is now being revealed, betraying his trust that his confidant wouldn't tell. He publicly outed, on Twitter, someone whom he has disliked for years.
If this was two private citizens simply squabbling about movie reviews, who would care? But Henry Gee is an editor at Nature -- the Nature -- the shiniest journal of all in the science world. He's a man who influences science careers, championing the publishing of some things and not others. He's in a position to know the identities of people on both sides of the (somewhat anonymous) peer-review table.
If you're Henry Gee you can't just out pseudonymous scientists on Twitter without a reaction, just as if you're governor you can't just have a donor pay for your daughter's wedding. (Yeah I know it's a poor analogy. Pre-coffee.) There is the appearance of impropriety because you are in a position of power. No one would give two figs about Gee or this situation if he wasn't a Nature editor.
The "dick" wrote publicly and under in own name in his employer's journal. No one is "grassing" him, no one is retaliating, no one is drawing attention to his gender or suggesting that he is, in fact, a dick.
They are instead commenting on unprofessional and unethical behaviour he has displayed in public, without apparent oversight or forethought or consideration for the likely harm that will arise from his actions.
The article was well thought out, well written, on the mark, and not all ad hominem.
The dick outed her on Twitter. The champion of pseudonymity in the cause of professional freedom wrote an open letter to his employer. I hope this explanation is as embarrassing for you to read as it was for me to write.
Did I err in my original comment? Yup, fact is he tweeted the out - and the ad hominem diss - and did not use his employer's publication as his platform.
That was quite wrong of me.
And really not quite relevant either.
The relevant thread is this: A senior editor with considerable power to influence if not actually establish or derail reputations and careers by a) selecting or rejecting their articles for publication, b) commenting for or against those articles, and, most importantly in this context, c) enlarging his domain beyond its rightful bounds, the work, to focus instead on the personalities and characteristics of the people behind the work, has in fact gone directly to personally directed insult and invective.
I don't give a rat's ass and neither does anyone else if a scientist is a complete dick, provided that he or she confines their being a dick to mere social dickwaddedness whilst doing good work and promoting the careers and training of their students and peers. I've met a few like that, arrogant as fuck, not really nice people, but really, really good at nurturing and developing their students. Odd mix, really.
But a journal editor being a dick and attacking people, setting his or her own agenda that has nothing to do with competence and everything to do with personal politics and one's personal view of the rightness or wrongness of social psychology, that's going over the line.
His tweet may not have been widely read, but the fact of its existence must be, because his influence over his audience and customers is significant, and if his influence is or even appears to be significantly moderated by his opinions of personality and politics and psychology, then he has NO place in his current role and everyone affected by his being in that role deserves to know it.
Frank discussion of scientific ideas, methods and conclusions requires a focus on those subjects, and an absolute ignorance of the personalities behind those subjects.
Where either a scientist or a party whose opinion can significantly influence a scientist's career steps over that bound and focuses on persons and politics, frank discussion of that breach may require anonymity or pseudonymity to prevent further retaliation, etc., by the influencing party or by any of their allies who may be given to the same violation of boundaries.
An influencer of some significance violated those boundaries in a public forum, though one that may not widely followed (twitter may be widely used, but individual accounts vary, of course).
A scientist wrote pseudonymously to the influencer's employer to a) ensure the employer was aware of the breach and b) to ensure that other scientists were aware of the breach, given how that influencer may affect their reputations without their knowing, since the influencer has at least once strayed across the boundary in a most public way.
Might the scientist also have written c) out of petulance? Perhaps. But that ain't relevant, because the scientist's motivation can be explained entirely and reasonably by A and B, and C is neither relevant nor necessary, because other scientists whose careers may be affected by influencer deserve to know that this person has strayed beyond their bounds, and making this known in a letter to the employer is the most effective of achieving this.
That's 9 dicks I've counted now. Serious question - how comfortable would you all be with the casual use of 'cunt' or 'whore' in hackernews comments on gender issues? Really what I'm asking is, are you hypocrites or bigots?
What the Nature employee did on Twitter was a dick move. The pseudonymous blogger's addressing their complaint to the Nature editor was a dick move. I haven't been discussing a gender issue. 11.
With apologies to all the 20th Century man named Richard whose names were spoiled be teenagers of the recent generations, an we please put aside the locker room vocabulary?
What if the finance people in this hypothetical country didn't find it interesting because their research showed them it was a poor investment and that investors in the other hemisphere were often just billionaires playing in semi-retirement?
I can publish anonymously in any number of places. The problem is keeping it published in the face of takedowns and this site seems to be completely silent on the subject.
Really enjoyed this, cheers. Hunt seems to think mp3 players must inevitably displace radios but it's impossible to overstate the way that live radio can bring a sense of connection to a world bigger than yourself. I've used it myself - in better circumstances than any prisoner - to feel less isolated. "I headphone myself" can be as much about escaping outwards as in.
> The intentional breaking of form takes more mental effort than just writing normally.
Perhaps you confuse intentional subversion of form with arrant ignorance of same. Judging from my occasional trawls through the reeking open sewer that is 4chan, I'd call the latter plausible, at the very least.
'Thirty years after the Khmer Rouge declared war on "the Garden of the individual", Silicon Valley was lauding the collective "hive mind" while stealthily dismantling the rights that protect the individual.' A statement at once both ridiculous and true. This article is a pretty good way to provoke discussion about using intellectual property regimes to protect privacy.
