The post below addresses a bunch of specifics about Harvard, but for the key point, jump to the last paragraph of the post.
Problems about Harvard
A colleague pointed me to this post by Christopher Brunet, “The Curious Case of Claudine Gay,” and asked what I thought. It was interesting. I’ve met or corresponded with almost all the people involved, at some time or another. Here’s my take:
Interesting. I know almost all the people involved, one way or another (sometimes just by email). Here’s my take:
– There’s a claim that Harvard political science professor Ryan Enos falsified a dataset. I looked at this awhile ago. I thought I’d blogged it but I couldn’t find it in a google search. There’s a pretty good summary here by journalist Jesse Singal here. I corresponded with both Singal and Brunet on this one. As I wrote, “I’d say that work followed standard operating procedure of that era which indeed was to draw overly strong conclusions from quantitative data using forking paths.” I don’t think it’s appropriate to say that someone falsified data, just because they did an analysis that (a) had data issues and (b) came to a conclusion that doesn’t make you happy. Data issues come up all the time.
– There’s a claim that Gay “swept this [Enos investigation] under the rug” (see here). This reminds me of my complaint about the University of California not taking seriously the concerns about the publications of Matthew “Why We Sleep” Walker (see here). A common thread is that universities don’t like to discipline their tenured professors! Also, though, I wasn’t convinced by the claim that Enos committed research misconduct. The Walker case seems more clear to me. But, even with the Walker case, it’s possible to come up with excuses.
– There’s a criticism that Gay’s research record is thin. That could be. I haven’t read her papers carefully. I guess that a lot of academic administrators are known more for their administration than their research records. Brunet writes, “A prerequisite for being a Dean at Harvard is having a track record of research excellence.” I guess that’s the case sometimes, maybe not other times. Lee Bollinger did a lot as president of University of Michigan and then Columbia, but I don’t think he’s known for his research. He published some law review articles once upon a time? Brunet refers to Gay being an “affirmative action case,” but that seems kind of irrelevant given that that lots of white people reach academic heights without doing influential research.
– There’s a criticism of a 2011 paper by Dustin Tingley, which has the line, “Standard errors clustered at individual level and confidence intervals calculated using a parametric bootstrap running for 1000 iterations,” but Brunet says, “when you actually download his R code, there is no bootstrapping.” I guess, maybe? I clicked through and found the R code here, but I don’t know how the “zelig” package works. Brunet writes that Tingley “grossly misrepresented the research processes by claiming his reported SEs are bootstrap estimates clustered at the individual level. As per the Zelig documentation, no such bootstrapping functionality ever existed in his chosen probit regression package.” I googled and it seemed that zelig did have boostrapping, but maybe not with clustering. I have no idea what’s going on here: it could be a misunderstanding of the software on Brunet’s part, a misunderstanding on Tingley’s part, or some statistical subtlety. I’m not really into this whole clustered standard errors thing anyway. My guess is that there was some confusion regarding what is a “bootstrap,” and it makes sense that a journalist coming at this from the outside might miss some things. The statistical analysis in this 2011 paper can be questioned, as is usually the case with anyone’s statistical analysis when they’re working on an applied research frontier. For example, from p.12 of Tingley’s paper: “Looking at the second repetition of the experiment, after which subjects had some experience with the strategic context, there was a significant difference in rejection rates across the treatments in the direction predicted by the model (51% when delta = 0.3 and 63% when delta = 0.7) (N = 396, t = 1.37, p = .08). Pooling offers of all sizes together I find reasonable support for Hypothesis 1 that a higher proportion of offers will be rejected, leading to both players paying a cost, when the shadow of the future was higher.” I’m not a fan of this sort of statistical-significance-based claim, including labeling p = .08 as “reasonable support” for a hypothesis, but this is business as usual in the social sciences.
– There’s a bunch of things about internal Harvard politics. I have zero knowledge one way or another regarding internal Harvard politics. What Brunet is saying there could be true, or maybe not, as he’s relying on various anonymous sources and other people with axes to grind. For example, he writes, “Gay did not recuse herself from investigating Enos. Rather, she used the opportunity to aggressively cover up his research misconduct.” I have no idea what standard policy is here. If she had recused herself, maybe she could be criticized for avoiding the topic. For another example, Brunet writes, “Claudine Gay allowed Michael Smith to get away scot-free in the Harvard-Epstein ties investigation — she came in and nicely whitewashed it all away. Claudine Gay has Epstein coverup stink on her, and Michael Smith has major Epstein stink on him,” and this could be a real issue, or it could just be a bunch of associations, as he doesn’t actually quote from the Harvard-Epstein ties investigation to which he refers. Regarding Jorge Dominguez: as Brunet says, the guy had been around for decades—indeed, I heard about his sexual harassment scandal back when I was a Ph.D. student at Harvard, I think it was in the student newspaper at the time, and I also remember being stunned, not so much that it happened, but that the political science faculty at the time just didn’t seem to care—so it’s kind of weird how first Brunet (rightly) criticizes the Government “department culture” that allowed a harasser to stay around for so long, and then he criticizes Smith for “protecting Dominguez” and criticizes Gay for being “partly responsible for having done nothing to address Dominguez’s abuses”—but then he also characterizes Smith as having “decided to throw [Dominguez] under the bus.” You can’t have it both ways! Responding to a decades-long harassment campaign is not “throwing someone under the bus.” Regarding Roland Fryer, Brunet quotes various politically-motivated people complimenting Fryer, which is fine—they guy did some influential research—but no context is added by referring to Fryer as “a mortal threat to some of the most powerful black people at Harvard” and referring to Gay as “a silky-smooth corporate operator.” Similarly, the Harvey Weinstein thing is something that can go both ways: if Gay criticizes a law professor who chooses to defend Weinstein, then she’s “was driven by pure spite. She is a petty and vicious little woman.” If she had supported the prof, I can see the argument the other way: so much corruption, she turns a blind eye to Epstein and then to Weinstein, why is she attacking Fryer but defending the law professor who is defending the “scumbag,” etc.
It’s everywhere
Here’s my summary. I think if you look carefully at just about any university social-science departments, you’ll be likely to find some questionable work, some faculty who do very little research, and some administrators who specialize in administration rather than research, as well as lots and lots of empirical papers with data challenges and less than state-of-the-art statistical analyses. You also might well find some connections to funders who made their money in criminal enterprises, business and law professors who work for bad guys, and long-tolerated sexual harassers. I also expect you can find all of this in private industry and government; we just might not hear about it. Universities have a standard of openness that allows us to see the problems, in part because universities have lots of graduates who can spill the beans without fear of repercussions. Also, universities produce public documents. For example, the aforementioned Matthew Walker wrote Why We Sleep. The evidence of his research misconduct is right out there. In a government or corporate context, the bad stuff can be inside of internal documents.
Executive but no legislative and no judicial
There’s also the problem that universities, and corporations, have an executive branch but no serious legislative or judicial branches. I’ve seen a lot of cases of malfeasance within universities where nothing is done, or where whatever is done is too little, too late. I attribute much of this problem to the lack of legislative and judicial functions. Stepping back, we could think of this as a problem with pure utilitarianism. In a structural system of government, each institution plays a role. The role of the judicial system is to judge without concern about policy consequences. In the university (or a corporation), there is on the executive, and it’s hard for the executive to make a decision without thinking about consequences. Executives will accept malfeasance of all sorts because they decide that the cost of addressing the malfeasance is greater than the expected benefit. I’m not even just talking here about research misconduct, sexual harassment, or illegal activities by donors; other issues that arise range from misappropriation of grant money, violation of internal procedures, and corruption in the facilities department.
To get back to research for a moment, there’s also the incentive structure that favors publication. Many years ago I had a colleague who showed me a paper he’d written that was accepted for publication in a top journal. I took a look and realized it had a fatal error–not a mathematical error, exactly, more of a conceptual error so that his method wasn’t doing what he was claiming it was doing. I pointed it out to him and said something like, “Hey, you just dodged a bullet–you almost published a paper that was wrong.” I assumed he’d contact the journal and withdraw the article. But, no, he just let the publication process go as scheduled: it gave him another paper on his C.V. And, back then, C.V.’s were a lot shorter; one publication could make a real difference! That’s just one story; the point is that, yes, of course a lot of fatally flawed work is out there.
So, yeah, pull up any institutional rock and you’re likely to find some worms crawling underneath. It’s good for people to pull up rocks! So, fair enough for Brunet to write these posts. And it’s good to have lots of people looking into these things, from all directions. The things that I don’t buy are his claims that there is clear research misconduct by Enos and Tingley, and his attempt to tie all these things together to Gay or to Harvard more generally. There’s a paper from 2014 with some data problems, a paper from 2011 by a different professor from the same (large) department that used some software that does bootstrapping, a professor in a completely different department who got donations from a criminal, a political science professor and an economics professor with sexual harassment allegations, a law professor who was defending a rich, well-connected rapist . . . and Brunet is criticizing Gay for being too lenient in some of these cases and too strict in others. Take anyone who’s an administrator at a large institution and you’ll probably find a lot of judgment calls.
Lots of dots
To put it another way, it’s fine to pick out a paper published in 2014 with data problems and a paper published in 2011 with methods that are not described in full detail. Without much effort it should be possible to find hundreds of examples from Harvard alone that are worse. Much worse. Here are just a few of the more notorious examples:
“Stereotype susceptibility: Identity salience and shifts in quantitative performance,” by Shih, Pittinsky, and Ambady (1999)
“This Old Stereotype: The Pervasiveness and Persistence of the Elderly Stereotype,” by Cuddy, Norton, and Fiske (2005)
“Rule learning by cotton-top tamarins,” by Hauser, Weiss, and Marcus (2006)
“Signing at the beginning makes ethics salient and decreases dishonest self-reports in comparison to signing at the end,” by Shu, Mazar, Gino, Ariely, and Bazerman (2012)
““Jesus said to them, ‘My wife…'”: A New Coptic Papyrus Fragment,” by King (2014)
“Physical and situational inequality on airplanes predicts air rage,” by DeCelles and Norton (2016).
“the replication rate in psychology is quite high—indeed, it is statistically indistinguishable from 100%” (not actually in a published paper, but in a press release featuring two Harvard processors from 2016)
“Hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine with or without a macrolide for treatment of COVID-19: a multinational registry analysis,” by Mehra, Ruschitzka, and Patel (2020).
It’s not Brunet’s job, or mine, or anyone’s, to look at all these examples, and it’s fine for Brunet to focus on two much more ambiguous cases of problematic research papers. The point of my examples above is to put some of his connect-the-dots exercises into perspective. Harvard, and any other top university, will have hundreds of “dots”—bad papers, scandals, harassment, misconduct, etc.—that can be connected in many different ways.
A problem of quality control
We can see this as a problem of quality control. A large university is going to have some rate of iffy research, sexual harassment, tainted donations (and see here for a pointer to a horrible Harvard defense of that), faculty who work for bad people, etc., and it’s not really set up to handle this. Indeed, a top university such as Harvard or USC could well be more likely to have such problems: Its faculty are more successful, so even their weak work could get publicity, their faculty are superstars so might be more likely to get away with sexual harassment (but it seems that even the non-tenure-track faculty at such places can be protected by the old boys’ network), top universities could be more likely to get big donations from rich criminals, and they could also have well-connected business and law professors who’d like to make money defending bad guys (back at the University of California we had a professor who was working for the O. J. Simpson defense team!). I’ve heard a rumor that top universities can even cheat on their college rankings. And, again, universities have no serious legislative or judicial institutions, so the administrators at any top university will find themselves dealing with an unending stream of complaints regarding research misconduct, sexual harassment, tainted donations, and questionable outside activities by faculty, not to mention everyday graft of various sorts. I’m pretty sure all this is happening in companies too; we just don’t usually hear so much about it. Regarding the case of Harvard’s political science department, I appreciate Brunet’s efforts to bring attention to various issues, even if I am not convinced by several of his detailed claims and am not at all convinced by his attempt to paint this all as a big picture involving Gay.
Perhaps Gay and Gino should work on a class action lawsuit against Harvard.
Oh, wait. Gay has other issues to worry about: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/harvard-faculty-rally-around-beleaguered-university-president-claudine-gay-2023-12-11/. I didn’t realize who she was when I wrote my initial comment, so I’m not sure who the class action lawsuit would be against – perhaps the society of methodological terrorists?
According to Andrew,
Brunet writes, “A prerequisite for being a Dean at Harvard is having a track record of research excellence.”
The definitive treatise on becoming and being a successful dean may be found at “To Rise above Principle, the Memoirs of an Unreconstructed Dean [University of Illinois Press, 1988].” Josef Martin is listed as the author, but his real name is Henry H. Bauer, a chemistry professor who was dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University for eight years from 1978 to 1986.
Consider this very practical advice for a dean forced to listen to each side of a professorial dispute:
“Long ago, one of my friends had assured me that administrators could survive
by holding their hands almost as though praying, tips of the fingers together,
periodically nodding the chin towards the hands and never saying anything except
‘I see,’ ‘go on,’ ‘Hmmmm,’ and the like.”
“All the vice-presidents I’ve known are quite intelligent and well meaning. Many
of their blunders could plausibly be ascribed to their having once read a book on
management per se, or to having attended a seminar on that topic, or, at any rate,
to their not bearing in mind that the only proper ‘objective’ of a college is education.”
“The dean may not, for instance, confidentially and in candor speak ill of a chair
or of the V-P to a member of the faculty.”
“A dean has no friends, and a dean qua dean encounters no disinterested people. A dean cannot be a personal friend to any of the department chairs, lest the others suspect favoritism toward that department.
A dean cannot, of course, practice personal friendship with any members of the faculty, because that would make the chairs of those departments nervous.”
“So the dean must tell white lies. Not, of course, to the vice-president, to whom
the dean must justify what he does; but complete openness in that direction, too,
would be a mistake.”
Not to have this blog be left out of the game: “The mathematical scientists are at least three separate tribes: the computer
scientists get more support than is warranted, but they think just the opposite
to be the case; the pure mathematicians get all the support they need or could
use, but think they should ask for more just for equity’s sake; the applied
mathematicians and the statisticians find much of their own support and thus
earn their keep.”
And, many more delightful insights. 1988 was a long time ago but, have things changed much since then?
Paul:
I’ve not studied the history of deans at Harvard, but in general I’ve seen a wide range of academic administrators. Some have records of research excellence; some don’t. Research excellence is not the job of the dean, but there are people with research excellence who are willing to contribute to administration, and some of them become deans. There are some deans with a record of teaching excellence too.
The current Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (Gay’s replacement) is an accomplished researcher. Indeed, my reaction to her appointment was, “That’s too bad– she won’t get much research done anymore.” (I have no knowledge of Gay’s accomplishments.)
On the other hand, it’s probably good for the leader of an endeavor to have actually successfully engaged in that endeavor. The captain of an aircraft carrier is always a naval aviator, not just some guy with an MBA and an interest in ships. It would be nice if academic leadership was held to the same sort of standard– at Harvard it might be, but not at most colleges.
“I guess that a lot of academic administrators are known more for their administration than their research records. ”
And so it should be. Indeed, it should be more so.
The skills required to be an effective administrator overlap with, but differ to an important extent, from those needed to be a good researcher. Over my career I have worked under a variety of department chairs and deans, some with outstanding research reputations, and others with a strong administrative track record but little research. I’ll take the latter every time. I especially recall one chair I worked under who was, in his field, a research star. (This was the 1980’s, we didn’t have “superstars” so much then.) The man could not lead a dog to a fire hydrant! The department was struggling to tread water and morale was terrible under his “leadership.” Good leadership really makes a difference. And a strong research background is, at best, weakly correlated with leadership ability.
Quality control! “It’s faculty are more successful” (“Its”) :-) (This is an example of [sic] Muphry’s Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law )
Typo fixed; thanks.
Going through the history here, it is an interesting counterpoint to the sleuth and lawsuits discussion around Gino and DC. A lot of these statements are clearly defamatory and the author embodies actual malice. The evidence is thin throughout, particularly the IP address bit. The types of mistakes you have to spend hours brushing off of dead cats after swinging them are held up as research integrity violations. If there’s a post child for weaponizing shoddy sleuthing for the purpose of harming someone’s reputation, this seems to be it.
This is an important post, thanks for writing it. Nobody outside universities, and too many people inside them, seem to understand or want to understand what universities actually are: sprawling, barely governable, and fundamentally kind of bumbling institutions dealing with a hundred varieties of stakeholders all making incompatible demands. They’re not run nor capable of being run by evil cabals of conspiratorial masterminds. Let alone evil cabals of leftist professors. Someone should invite Stefanik to a department faculty meeting.
David:
I’m sure that Stefanik, given her experiences as a U.S. government employee in various capacities, is very familiar with “sprawling, barely governable, and fundamentally kind of bumbling institutions dealing with a hundred varieties of stakeholders all making incompatible demands”! No need for her to attend a faculty meeting; she gets to attend committee meetings all the time as part of her day job.
Good point, even if congressional meetings are dysfunctional in a different way than faculty meetings are dysfunctional. (Local planning commission public comment sessions are another class altogether.)
Maybe the real question is why critics outside universities think that universities are somehow not like every other form of large bureaucratic institution. One general tendency is that it’s easy to mistake for malice what’s actually administrative incompetence and ineptitude and we’re better at analyzing the intricacies of our own institutions than of ones to which we’re outsiders.
(This is all separate from whether the current critics of Gay, Magill, and Kornbluth are being malicious opportunists.)
David –
> Maybe the real question is why critics outside universities think that universities are somehow not like every other form of large bureaucratic institution. One general tendency is that it’s easy to mistake for malice what’s actually administrative incompetence and ineptitude and we’re better at analyzing the intricacies of our own institutions than of ones to which we’re outsiders.
“No skin on the game” is what I often see proposed as an answer to your question.
However, the fact that that answer is often proposed seems more to me like a symptom of the fundamental misconception that there’s a there, there. (I specialize in repeating words to make sentences confusing.)
I’m prolly not telling you anything you don’t already know but people in the private sector like to argue that academics suffer no real consequences from mistakes or incompetence, as opposed to some ridiculously glorified portrayal of people in the private sector.
How anyone actually experienced in the private sector can operate under such an obvious delusion seems pretty funny to me.
I suppose a reverse misconception might be that people in the public sector or academia might mistakenly believe that self-interest could be a useful inclusion/exclusion criterion to distinguish what goes on in the private sector?
David, the thing that concerns me most isn’t that universities are big bumbling bureaucracy but rather that they are such things which only vaguely hint at doing their supposed fundamental reason for being supported, which is educating people in the collective knowledge of 8 billion people and their cultural artifacts of books, art, music, etc.
I mean it wouldn’t surprise me given how often I’ve seen people come to Reddit r/learnmath and be told to watch various sets of lectures online if YouTube + Wikipedia does more in total towards educating the populace than all the universities in the US put together.
It’s not just math either, try learning to play an instrument, or something about the history of music as it pertains to the movement towards electrifying instruments, or principles of basic college level classical mechanics or the computer science theory of automata or what continental philosophers of the 1800’s and early 1900’s thought, or the role of the money supply in the Great Depression or whatever…
+1
top universities could be more likely to get big donations from rich criminals ? They already are (and as well threats to withhold or completely halt massive donations unless these universities all start promoting their agenda). From big Hedge Fund founders and Wall Street mouthpieces who are all trying to propagandize and protect their nation state of war criminals in the middle east . . .
> journalist Jesse Singal.
Hmmm. A nit.
I don’t think Singal is exactly a journalist. He’s an issue advocate. Which is fine, but I think of a journalist as someone who at least attempts to interrogate issues from different angles.
I even agree with him on not a few issues, but I don’t kid myself that when I do ageee with him it’s because he’s addressed those issues comprehensively.
“I think of a journalist as someone who at least attempts to interrogate issues from different angles.”
Yes, kind of like CNN, Reuters etc with the claim that Isreal bombed the Palestinian hospital! Ha ha ha, 90% of journalists are cranks.
Hilarious that Amy Klobuchar wrote to Jeff Bezos to complain that Amazon’s bot wasn’t clearing it’s information through the Truth Experts of mainstream media only days before Hamas used CNN to blast it’s hospital bombing propaganda! Ha ha ha!! What a howl. I guess graduating magna cum laude wasn’t enough to protect her from that mistake. Ah, alas, insight into the competence of Our Great Leadership.
Yes, these days all you need to be a journalist is to have watched a few episodes of scooby doo, then you can be one of those heroic meddling kids, it just takes a half hour to right the wrongs of the world!!!
I’m not sure exactly what your point is, except to rant.
Do you have a point?
Chipmunk is pointing out that if your standard to be a journalist is not to be an issue advocate then many mainstream journalists also don’t count.
Singal at least often does exactly what you say and looks at issues from multiple perspectives. See the link Andrew included.
Anonymous –
At their heart these are going to be subjective assessments, for the most part – largely a function of our own “priors” or perhaps better described, biases.
Of course “mainstream journalism” (I’m never exactly sure what that means; how does one define “mainstream” exactly? It always seems to run in both directions and usually essentially boil down to “journalism I don’t like”) will contain some level of issue advocacy. Merge that with our own biases about where the line is drawn on any particular issue between legitimate interrogation and issue advocacy, and you have a kind of amplifying effect.
But I look for some structural signs. For all the shallow journalism I see out there, I do see quite a bit also that even if I think doesn’t hit the nail on the head, at least reflects what looks like a good faith attempt to interrogate issues from multiple sides. At least there is some immediately evident attempt to interrogate a “naysayer” perspective. With someone like Signal, I never see that. All I see is an agenda-advocacy, which I think may or may not be of substance from one angle but never really digs into legitimate alternative views.
At risk of being an old man yelling at clouds about “kids today,” I do think that along with the benefits of a more free-form ecosystem of public engagement on a variety of issues, there’s also been a devolvement where real hard-core investigative reporting done from a view that naysayer engagement as a structural requirement, has diminished. And I think that’s a net loss.
At some point, at a theoretical level, quality issue advocacy on two sides could actually produce a better result than mediocre attempts at multiple angle analysis in a single piece of journalism. You could compare two high quality analytical pieces with all their associated biases against a middle of the road falsely balanced piece and see in the end a more thorough engagement. I’m not closed to that. But I do still have a hard time seeing why people do produce so much biased crap without ever seeming to think it’s important for them to examine their biases.
But regardless of that, in the context of increasingly bitter division and rancor, I think that dueling in-depth but heavily biased “journalism” has a tizic effect of just getting everyone to dig deeper into their own echo-chambers.
As for Chipmunk’s comment, I saw no real engagement; just his standard rant about how much poor conservatives are such victims.
Yes, he’s a journalist. He has been published in mainstream publications, covering stories and not simply advocating a cause. He may be a BAD journalist, but there are plenty of those.
Wonks –
Maybe I need to re-think this, but i reserve the term “journalist” for people who are uncompromising in at least attempting to uphold a consistent journalistic standard.
Everyone fails a lot at being objective. And so in my taxonomy, someone who fails a lot in execution, say through incompetence, would be a bad journalist. But someone who who regularly eschews even the attempt, and in fact who exploits and monetizes poorly-grounded hot takes in furtherance of capitalizing on a clear agenda, imo, isn’t actually a journalist.
I think that Shellenberger and Taibi might be examples who most clearly fall into the “fake-journalist driving an agenda” category.
I know that drawing lines is inherently subjective can be a reflection of my own political biases, and even if we disagree on those two individuals, am I all wrong here even on my basic premise?
“With someone like Signal, I never see that. All I see is an agenda-advocacy, which I think may or may not be of substance from one angle but never really digs into legitimate alternative views.”
I find it curious that you say that, since “It’s complicated” has practically become his catchphrase, and he’s half-jokingly been described as a “pervert for nuance.” For what it’s worth, I’ve defended him before in this old comment: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/05/03/olivia-goldhill-reports-implicit-association-test/#comment-1031766
Back in that old comment, I noticed that one critic had said, “THERE IS NO DISCUSSION OF HOW AFFIRMING ≠ TRANSITION!!!” about an article where he quotes expert named Aron Janssen saying, “Many people misinterpret affirming care as proceeding to social and medical transition in all cases without delay, but the reality is much more complex.” That in itself looks to me like he’s trying to get multiple sides. And that critic seems to be emblematic of how Singal’s been treated. A lot of people are angry at him, but there’s a huge gap between what they claim about him and what he’s actually said and done.
That said, if you’ve got an example of him doing the kind of agenda advocacy where he “never really digs into legitimate alternative views,” feel free to cite it.
J. J. –
Fair enough. My familiarity with his work is far from comprehensive. There may indeed be examples where he’s nuanced and engages investigations from a fully nuanced framework. So I spoke too globally.
But…I’ve watched him interacting a fair amount on social media and some in substack and what I’ve seen is consistent with a phenomenon, imo, of the anti-woke, heterdox, contrarian crap.
That’s a pet peeve of mine. I have no objection to agenda-advocacy per se, and I’m not at all entirely dismissive of the anti-woke political foundation on many issues, but it really annoys me when people dip into such an enormously lucrative model, where they milk outrage-mining and shallow hot takes disguised under a blanket of “journalism.” I think the phenomenon is out of control and really has deliterious effect on society. There’s a long list of perpetrators who seem worse to me (Taibi, Shellenberger, the Weinsteins, Peterson, Kislin, Rogan, Carlson, Weiss) and a long list that are in a somewhat less bad category (Joy Grey, Loury, Mcwhorter, Harris, Yglesias, Sullivan,) and some who fit into kind of niche offshoots (Huberman and others in the bio-hacking group ) and Greenwald is in a kind of unique category of being a serious investigator and also a total POS.
So maybe Signal is in the less bad category and it’s prolly a mistake for me to broadly categorize him based merely on what I’ve seen of his social media profile only. But then again, this is the advertising slogan from his podcast with Herzog:
“Journalists Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal scour the internet for its craziest, silliest, most sociopathic content, part of an obsessive and ill-conceived attempt to extract kernels of meaning and humanity from a landscape of endless raging dumpster fires.
Yikes! That’s pretty much exactly what I’m talking about (do they get credit for missing the irony of being so open about it?)
Anyway, if you have an article that you think is well balanced from a journalistic perspective (and not behind a paywall I don’t have a key for) I’d be interested in reading it.
Singal, obviously.
“do they get credit for missing the irony of being so open about it?”
I’m not entirely sure what the irony is supposed to be here. Maybe you’re assuming that they have a certain agenda and admitting that they “scour the internet for its craziest, silliest, most sociopathic content” somehow runs contrary to whatever that agenda is?
J. J. –
Maybe irony is the wrong word.
I find it notable that they openly acknowledge that part of their schtick is making a big deal out of outrage-mining.
Ironic in the sense that in so doing, it’s an open admission of lowered journalistic standards.
Ie:
I know you’re joking, but let’s not go there.
“I googled and it seemed that zelig did have boostrapping, but maybe not with clustering. I have no idea what’s going on here: it could be a misunderstanding of the software on Brunet’s part, a misunderstanding on Tingley’s part, or some statistical subtlety.”
I had a quick look. It appears to be a mix of all three. Brunet isn’t “wrong” but is so over-the-top in alleging massive fraud and data fabrication that his valid points are diminished.
Some of the functions in zelig do estimate clustered standard errors with bootstrapping. The one used in the R code estimates a probit using generalized estimating equations with clustered standard errors but explicitly does not use bootstrapping. It may or may not be possible to use a bootstrap in this case; zelig documentation mentions the specific cases, but I’d have to look into it more and won’t spend the time.
However, there has been a lot of work on cluster-robust standard errors that does use bootstrapping. Cameron, Gelbach, and Miller (2008) in ReStat and Cameron and Miller (2015) in JHR are good places to start.
This strikes me a as a case where Tingley made a likely innocent mistake out of confusion or sloppiness but not an intent to deceive, and it happened due to him using a canned statistical procedure which was far more flexible than his understanding.
Brunet’s further claims it must be intentional because [paraphrasing] ‘of course you’d know if you coded up a bootstrap from scratch.’ Sure, I guess, but there are plenty of canned procedures for “bootstrapping” (and critics don’t realize that there are many ways of doing bootstraps), and Tingley was using canned procedures.
Anon:
Yes, that makes sense. It’s pretty much what I was thinking here.
If the worst mistake in someone’s oeuvre is a figure caption that says the SEs are from a cluster-robust bootstrap rather than cluster-robust sandwich SEs…
Dean, exactly. It’s a mistake, but probably won’t even kill the results.
Documentation for some of the other methods in zelig do mention using sandwich estimators. This seems like a case where someone mentioned a potential statistical issue to the author who then tried to do the right thing to address it, even if a mistake was made somewhere.
As someone far too familiar with Cameron, Gelbach, and Miller (2008) and who has coded bootstraps from scratch and used canned procedures… there are “better” and “worse” ways of doing things, but results generally seem ‘robust’ across methods (yes, bad stats pun intended).
Maybe I missed it, but this discussion, except for an offhand remark by Andrew,
” There are some deans with a record of teaching excellence too”
would lead one to believe that no teaching, in-person classroom or otherwise, is done. Only publication and administration count towards success. If true, sort of sad but at least honest.
It seems to me that Universities do have a legislative branch: the Faculty Senate. It is supposed to develop new academic policies, amend those that exist, and typically has the authority to approve or disapprove of all sorts of things. It can even censure a university president, although I doubt it can remove one in most organizations. However, the strong impression I have about the Senate at my own university is that it’s actual exercise of power has diminished greatly over time, and is near zero currently. The place is run by the upper administration, and the Senate has become a rubber stamp. I can’t back that up with data – not sure how one might.