a_throwaway_6

I don't know if you've listened to any of Wagner's music? Most of it is long stretches of impossibly delicate melodies, almost lullaby-like, but these are occasionally interrupted by sudden spasms of noise, great blaring horns, thumping drums and men an women vocalising at the top end of the human volume range. I remember a caricature of Wagner drilling into a human ear with a hand-cranked drill.

What I mean to say by this is that when you hear Wagner's music, the impression is of powerful, loud music. Accordingly, when you read an artcile that spends most of its time in a low-key "measured" register but starts off with a big, splashy accusation of deliberate data manipulation, the impression is one of an article written to provoke.

Regarding "researcher", the author could have identified himself as an "ex graduate research assistant", but he identifies himself as a "resarcher", which sounds more important and experienced. This is the tactic of people who want to embiggen the impression of themselves and claim more expertise from themselves. Even if such embiggenment is not necessarily the purpose of calling oneself a "researcher" when one is not a professional researcher, anyone who really really wanted to avoid giving the impression that they are trying to make themselves sound more knowledgeable than what they are, would have shied away from calling themselves a "reseacher".

Finally, "researcher" on its own means absolutely nothing at all. "Biology researcher", "computer science researcher", "neuroscience researcher", "geology researcher" etc, give precise information. The author of the article calls himself an unqualified "researcher" and he is, indeed, unqualified to do so. That is a typical tactic of charlatans the world over and it should give you and everyone else who thinks the author has any expertise to discuss what he's discussing, pause. That goes for the economist blogger also, I don't think he has payed as much attention to the article and its author as I think you assume.

As I've argued at the start of this thread, it is important to understand who is writing the article we are reading. In Ideal Science World it doesn't make a difference who says something, only what they say. In the real world it's not that simple. Because academic integrity is valued extremely highly, accusing someone of academic fraud immediately places the accuser opposite the accused in moral standing. For an academic, his or her reputation (of being a good scientist) is everything. Therefore, when making such accusations, the character of the person making them is important to scrutinise carefully, because simply making an accusation of academic fraud can destroy an academic's career and an accuser may have no other goal than to destroy the accused person's reputation.

When the accusations come from a professional critic (another academic) with a good standing in academia, the chance that accusations of fraud are only made to destroy the other persons' career are harder to accept. But when it's some guy on the internet with a blog, that changes the maths very much indeed. Anyone can throw mud on the internet. Because it's the internet, you need to understand who it is who's speaking, before you look at what they are saying.

I do not care about splitting hairs. A person legitimately calling themselves a researcher would also not need to do so. They would simply point to their research, not to blog posts. Anyone can write a blog post and publish it on their blog.

If you are the only person calling yourself a "researcher" (or it's only you and your dear friends and blog readers) then you are misrepresenting yourself.

I could perhaps see a charitable interpretation if the author of the blog post (Guzey) did not accuse the author of the book (Walker) of "deliberate data manipulation", gave the opportunity to the target of the accusation to explain himself, did not misrepresent himself as a "researcher" (pointing to his blog posts as examples of his "research"), did not link to a friend's blog post for "UC Berkeley’s official response", etc, etc.

The author of the blog post is not leaving a lot of room for charitable interpretations.

But in any case, what charitable interpretation do you propose?

"Researcher" isn't synonymous with "academic", but it's not synonymous with "blogger" either.

Part of my point is that an actual researcher, i.e. a professional, would have followed due procedure, contacting the author of the book privately and asking for clarifications, and generally giving the other person an opportunity to examine and respond to criticism.

Academics criticise each other's work constantly but this is acceptable because the purpose is to improve one another's work, not to tarnish each other's reputation and drag their name through the mud.

As things are, it is clear to me the blog post above is meant to kick up an internet storm with accusations of "deliberate data manipulation" and the misleading statements about an "official response" from Berkeley etc. These are the actions of a scandal-monger, not a researcher.

You don't see any problem with someone selectively quoting from what they claim is "UC Berkeley's official position", while not pointing to an actual source of that "official position" in UC Berkeley itself, or the entire conversation?

How are we to know that Yngve Hoiseth did not make up the entire conversation, or that they didn't simply choose the passages of the email exchange that support their view, only?

If this is an "official" exchange, why the lack of transparency?

The lack of transparency "suggests an effort to misrpresent".

What you link to is not "research" but "opinion" published in your blog. It identifies you as a "blogger", but not as a "researcher".

At most I could see what you have written as "study" of others' research but presenting yourself as a "researcher" and what you do as "research" is misrepresenting yourself and comes across as an attempt to claim for yourself greater expertise than you seem to have.

You should make clear your level of experitse and your knowledge about different matters that you like to discuss in your blog.

Unfortunately, I have no way to tell what is a "logical internal contradiction in the text", because I am not knowledgeable in the subject matter of the text and so cannot follow its internal logic.

I disagree that a "researcher" is a loose label that anyone can assign to themselves without qualifications. For example, a reiki healer could claim themselves to be a "researcher" but this would be misleading.

Writing an article arguing that an author of a book has perpetrated academic fraud is evidence against any claim of careful research. Claming academic fraud is really the nuclear option. The first thing to do when one finds fault with someone else's work is to contact the other person and ask for clarification. If things get to the point where one feels the only way forward is to "go public" with an exposition of the other person's work faults, then one should include the other person's explanations or reactions, if any were given, or details of the attempts made to contact that other person.

As I say above, this was not done to any reasonable degree and the only attempt at anything like it is misleading and links to an email conversation claimed to be an "official response" by UC Berkeley (rather than the book's author) but that is impossible to verify.

The overall impression is of a one-sided argument, lack of transparency, attempts at deception and misrepresentation and overall disreputable and underhanded tactics. Such actions by the article author do not suggest they are a "researcher" of any repute, except maybe in their imagination.

Also, since I have you here, can I please enquire as to what you mean when you say that you are a "researcher" in your about page?

What is listed in the post you link are exerpts of the email conversation, selected by Yngve Hoiseth. The link I mention is broken should lead to the entire, unredacted, unexcerpted email conversation, but fails to do so. This makes it impossible to determine to what extent Yngve Hoiseth edited the email exchange to force his interpretation of the exchange on a reader.

Your post and Yngve Hoiseth's post claim that the email exchange presented in Yngve Hoiseth's post is an "official response" from UC Berkeley. To determine the veracity of this claim it is necessary to know who was contacted, in UC Berkeley.

The name of the person (as in first name and family name/s) is not necessary for this, but it is necessary to name their office. For example "dean of such-and-such" or "director of so-and-so". That this information is not provided makes the claim of an "official response" impossible to verify. For example, nobody can contact the person Yngve Hoiseth claims they have contacted, or the person currently holding the same office, and ask them to verify that they or their office have, indeed, been contacted by Yngve Hoiseth.

That, together with the absence of the entire conversation makes it impossible to know whether Yngve Hoiseth really did have this email exchange, to what extent they presented it fairly and to what extent what was said by the other person was edited.

The person Yngve Hoiseth claims to have contacted allegedly said the following:

  My understanding is that my university email communication is a matter of
  public record, and I try always to communicate with that standard in mind.
  There is no prohibition that I know of against publication of my emails with
  you, in other words. I would just ask that you contextualize my communications
  in a transparent and accurate way.

This is absolutely not what was done in Yngve Hoiseth's post and your linking to it claiming it is an "official response" to your post.

Assuming the exchange was real, it seems that the person at the other end didn't ask for their identity to be withheld for any reason. It sounds as if they fully expected for their identity to be made public instead. There seems to be no reason why Yngve Hoiseth's post ommits this detail.

Given all the above your post and Yngve Hoiseth's post are misleading and suggest an effort to misrepresent at the very least UC Berkeley's position.

It matters because I don't have the knowledge to verify the accusations and the fact that the person that makes accusations of academic fraud is misrepresenting himself as a "researcher" means that they are not a trustworthy source of academic criticism.