Disclaimer: I'm a PhD academic. History of Technology is one of my specialties, and I know some of the people in this article personally, including have worked for Amy Slaton. My book on the early history of radiation therapy was (favorably) reviewed in T&C.
That out of the way, I (predictably) view this controversy a little bit differently. I think it is emblematic of the problem of claim-creep and "stakes" that has afflicted the humanities throughout my career. This is basically an article about a person who had an interesting story about an understudied group. It would have been an interesting article. But, and this is important, no one would have cared about it, no one on this site would have read it, and it would not have made the news.
So instead this historian reached for a bigger, juicier claim, but one for which the evidentiary basis was much weaker. That claim, as Matt points out, wasn't even that significant: Cort's invention did not make or break the Industrial Revolution, and Cort wasn't that significant of a character in history. But obviously the bigger, juicier claim worked like a charm. Even if Bulstrode's reputation is publicly damaged, she is now a big-name academic that people have heard of. Whatever she publishes next will draw more attention. People on Slow Boring can name her. She will get job interviews from committees that include someone sympathetic to her claims.
My entire career included a non-stop admonition for people to find "stakes" for their claims: your story about early radiation therapy is great and all, but who cares? And my personal take was that it was a dumb question. You can make some stakes claims about the trajectory of bioethics and human experimentation--and I do--but honestly, I don't think the story matters THAT much. I think interesting stories are interesting, and humans have been engaged in storytelling for as long as there are humans, and people read those little plaques on the side of the road and the eleventh John Adams biography for that reason, rather than because every story has world-altering stakes.
But in a world where the humanities are consistently denigrated in favor of STEM--an utterly ridiculous discussion that happens in the comments on this very forum with disappointing regularity even though THE BIGGEST UNDERGRADUATE MAJOR BY FAR IS BUSINESS--it shouldn't surprise you that humanities people, instead of going quietly into that good night, try to elevate the importance of their own thing. Of course claim creep happens. People want to feel relevant and important, and right now their relative position in academia has been systematically down graded. Of course they inflate their work.
I want to be clear: I think this is all dumb. I know a lot of STEM people in academia, since my world has crossed theirs in a few different ways (first my academic work, then my shift into nursing), and the truth is that most STEM academics also aren't doing much of "significance" to the world. That's never how anything works. It's useful to discover that a potential drug molecule doesn't work, but you aren't getting a Nobel, my friend. So I honestly wish we could quit playing Hunger Games on all this. You want to feel significant? I compress people's chests to keep them from dying. Go do that. But the truth is that even that isn't very significant, except to that one person and some people close to them.
So I guess I really think this is a story about people's desire to be important, and humans are funny about that sort of thing. Bulstrode won. Maybe she also lost. It's a stupid game, fueled by comments like the ones made in this very forum that imagine the importance of the humanities department even as the Business School collects more tuition money.
Closing professional note: I haven't read the article--I was kind of busy finishing up nursing school and starting my practice career--so I don't have strong sense of how lousy the evidence is. But, HAVING NOT READ THE ARTICLE, I would say that technological innovations often move through networks of people who see people doing a thing some way or hear a story from a guy who met a guy or whatever, so it's not a strictly implausible claim. But you also can't prove that kind of stuff, and if you are getting over your skis on a hunch, you should probably either drop the claim or just say, "I'm likely over my skis here, but my sense is that one possibility is X because I read Y," or similar. I had to do both for my x-ray and radium tech book because there were some juicy professional fights. Bulstrode kind of covered her tracks by being vague enough to not make strictly disprovable claim, but she should have been more honest about just saying that this is a fun and totally unprovable possibility. On the other hand, maybe then no one on Slow Boring would ever have heard of her...
I think you are correct that Matt is wrong about Bulstrode herself having a political motivation, but the real weird thing is why media cared about this story. Like, if Thomas Edison stole something from black people, obviously that's a story everyone cares about, because Thomas Edison is famous. But no one has ever heard of this guy, nor does anyone even particularly care about the iron industry, metallurgists, or Jamaica. So the only reason to amplify the story is political -- and, indeed, I think these motives strongly influence what stories people care about not just in media but in academia as well. Bulstrode is responding to the incentive environment in a way that is a rational decision for her career, but that incentive environment is structured by a sort of vague and ill-defined political motivations.
I don't think these motivations are even explicitly racial like some other commenters do. I think they are, instead, a strong desire to find stories which validate the overall left-wing frame of mind -- that power is suspect, the things you have been taught are good are often bad and oppressive, and that all history is in some sense awash in grave sin and evil, and only some nebulous break from the past in the future (perhaps as a literal revolution, perhaps as a mere intellectual one) will cleanse us.
I am reminded of the relatively recent effort to revise the importance of Greek philosophy and mathematics in intellectual history. Historians significantly more prominent than Bulstrode argue that the Athenians were in fact merely a polity that managed to create a relatively large leisure class through imperialism and hierarchical oppression, and that this was the fertile ground for philosophy, rather than the more traditional account (that democratic traditions, civic discourse, and a culture of reasoned public debate generated philosophy and mathematics). Often this is accompanied by claims about the lack of a 'Greek miracle' -- that there was, in fact, no real specialness to their innovations. There is, of course, some kernels of truth in all this, but it's almost invariably overstated -- the Athenians were hardly the first polity with a leisure class, and wildly diverse peoples from the Romans to Islamic scholars to Medieval Christians found their works worth preserving, studying, and reproducing. But this is the sort of claim that gets lots of attention from other academics because it feels implicitly validating of a particular worldview and eases some of the dissonance between that worldview and reality
While several news sources picked up that story in July, I think that was basically the flash in the pan that surrounds many initial publications. It was only later that the real hoopla began, when it was picked up by the debunkers and the defenders.
I think it can't be overstated how having even a single news article written about your paper conveys a greater degree of attention than basically anyone working in the humanities typically gets for a paper. Most of these papers are read by no one after being published.
> But no one has ever heard of this guy, nor does anyone even particularly care about the iron industry, metallurgists, or Jamaica.
Necro'ing this thread to remark that Bulstrode is a *British* academic, and this story was picked up by the British press first. While Cort isn't exactly well-known here either, as a nation we're pretty invested in the whole "the Industrial Revolution started here" narrative (witness the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony), and we have a large Jamaican-descended population.
This is good perspective from the side of the academic. It totally makes sense. Thanks for sharing.
I think the journalists are being left off the hook here. The use of shallow social science research to support journalists political views and advocacy is a problem. This creates incentives for the “stakes” hunting. There is a symbiotic relationship between the “respected” academic advancing the body of knowledge and the journalist spreading it to a wider audience. Both parties benefit.
But the academics get motivated to find stakes that fit into journalistic narratives that will be interesting. White people bad and Black people good or marginalized is interesting (it has stakes). That’s a story that sells.
There is this kind of symbiotic relationship in sociology and the science and journalism. Where science said something not that interesting about trans people and then sociology “idea launders” it and then journalists picked it up as truth.
The relationship becomes so strong that the next thing you know the American Medical Association is polluted with politics. It becomes more concerned with the stakes of political narratives than the stakes of human lives.
I see a lot of opportunity for young journalists to double down on rigorously pursuing truth. Digging deep into social science claims. This is interesting to some. Jesse Singal does this kind of work when he’s not goofing around with Katie Herzog. He had a great back and forth with Adam Grant on color blindness related to the Coleman Hughes TED Talk. Good stuff. We need more of that. This is the best way to fight misinformation not the politicized misinformation community that 1/2 the country already does not trust. And they are right not to.
"the humanities are consistently denigrated... it shouldn't surprise you that humanities people, instead of going quietly into that good night, try to elevate the importance of their own thing."
One other point: there's an entire Ph.D thesis for some enterprising sociology graduate student in 2080 about how much this became a vicious cycle of self-fulfilling prophecy.
Humanities academics were primed, after the 1960's, to rate "importance" in frankly revolutionary terms, so when they came under threat and had to justify their value, they set out to prove they could change the world, not that they could understand it.
That quest has consistently *further* discredited them in the eyes of ordinary people, which puts them under more pressure to justify their existence, necessitating still more heroic efforts to prove their value by trying to change and shape the narrative, further discrediting their fields, etc, etc. But at this point the academics are so deeply alienated from what normies, liberals, skeptics of all stripes, and donors want that they don't even understand how little credibility they have outside their own circles.
I can't remember the last time I saw a social sciences paper, the results/claims of which I actually *trusted* without substantial additional digging and verification. It's been a while. History is doing better than this, "X studies" way worse.
Frankly, "X studies" stuff is basically just a series of meditations on unfalsifiable metaphysical claims and has been for some time, if not from the start.
No paper in any subject should be trusted without substantial additional digging and verification. That’s not how the humanities work and that’s not how the sciences work. Most published research findings are false - but hopefully interestingly false, and with a non-trivial number that later turn out to be true.
This is true, but there are varying levels of credibility regarding initial claims IMO, and one of the only metrics by which non-specialists can gauge credibility is the trustworthiness of the field as a whole.
My assumption when I read a new paper in my own field is that composite materials are such a crapshoot that it may or may not be correct, but probably isn't completely made up or falsified.
My assumption when I read any social sciences paper which oh-so-coincidentally aligns with or supports an identitarian-left shibboleth is that it's made up from whole cloth and the methodology is complete bullshit. Even my half-assed, barely-remembered statistics and data analysis courses from a dozen years ago are usually sufficient to eviscerate the "Methods" section of a median social sciences paper.
I suspect a relevant factor here is also that while I know the differences between the journals named “Philosophical Review” and “Philosophia” and “Philosophies” and thus only pay attention to the first, and exceptional articles from the second, you as an outsider might see the median article in the second as the median article in the field, while as an insider you see the median article in the reputable journal as the median article in your own field.
I may be in an optimistic mood (all that vacation time!), but I think the number of academics who *intentionally fabricate* research is actually pretty small. Emphasis on both of those words--lots of people spin their own webs of BS and then fall into them.
That said, there are known to be some thorny cultural issues upon which I don't feel qualified to pontificate.
In general, I think it's a good thought exercise to ask the question, "Could we have arrived here with everyone involved acting in relative good faith?" I feel like the answer is more often yes than people are willing to* give credit for.
I think that's right, but (to try to put my original statement in different words) I think willful and knowing fraud is relatively rare. Researchers definitely invent nonsense and we ought to hold their feet to the fire for it, but I think the *malice* against good methodology is typically absent.
Nikhil Krishnan's new book on the Oxford philosophers of the early-mid 20th century quotes JL Austin reviewing The Concept of Mind: "Not only is the book stimulating, enjoyable and original, but a quite unusually high percentage of it is true, the remainder at least false." False as in interestingly false, as opposed to nonsense.
I'm surprised nobody else mathematically-inclined in the comments leapt on this clause, because in mathematics (my field) this is not true. It is the rare research paper whose theorem is substantively false, in the sense of missing a hypothesis. Instead, a math paper is often filled with definitions that characterize only the few examples the author has tried, and do not add any meaningful generality to the craft. I think that's precisely the same etiology, just with a different final presentation.
I think they likely very well understand how little credibility they have among "normies," but push that aside because that is not what is rewarded in their profession. My husband was an economics professor for many years. Before getting tenure, academics have to focus on tiny slices of research so they can get it done quickly enough to have papers published before tenure review. Even after that, there are more rewards for a bigger quantity of academic papers in prestigious journals, no matter the topic. There was a professor in his department that was quoted with some frequency in mainstream publications like the NY Times, but that didn't count. This professor did have tenure, but he wasn't as valued or given bonuses because his research was more "public interest" stuff, so he moved on to another position.
I agree with a great deal of this. If I may make one quibble however, as the person who first brought the problems with the paper to public attention, the author was not vague and did make a number of claims that are not backed up by the sources she cited. Nor, in the six months since, has any new evidence for her claims been offered.
What concerns me most, however, is not the paper itself but the institutional response. The editors were one thing, but then the British Society for the History of Science decided to weigh in too. If you're interested, I wrote up my full thoughts on that response here (which funnily enough makes some of the same points as you did):
<shrug> Like I said: I haven't read the paper or read your piece or followed the controversy at all, even a little bit. I thought MattY said that the claims were vague, but maybe he was talking about the abstract?
Either way, I just don't think it's a story that matters all that much, as I wrote in my comment.
I agree with the last paragraph; the entire history of the early industrial revolution is "I saw X use Y for Z but I bet it would work for me to do A as well."
That's not theft, it's innovation. The whole problem for this particular instance is in the framing, both as "theft" and in the attempt to "center" the fact that slaves were involved in one location.
I think you're overplaying your hand on the "poor humanities professionals" angle, because people do this sort of stupid grandstanding regardless of status whenever their incentives push them in that direction, and the humanities departments of the world (EDIT: Anglosphere) have developed incentive structures which reward this precise behavior.
You're nuts if you think the STEM academics don't also do this, but the reality of research into physical processes means they get reeled back in by the fabric of the universe much more quickly than humanities' folks BSing does by academia's own immune system.
"..."never," as will likely be the case with the paper...."
Except that Matt's piece documents that the paper has already been debunked by Howes, Jelf, and others. Bulstrode's claim is dead. It was a shorter-lived phenomenon than cold fusion.
It was also a lot less interesting. P&F are well before my time professionally, but the claim would have been so staggeringly important (if true) that it probably got more than its fair share of debunking efforts. Really, nobody cares more than an eight-hour Substack article to discredit what Bulstrode wrote.
> That's not theft, it's innovation. The whole problem for this particular instance is in the framing, both as "theft" and in the attempt to "center" the fact that slaves were involved in one location.
It's worse than that. There's no reason to think that the slaves invented anything like the Cort process, and plenty of reason to think they didn't (Reeder spent the later part of his life trying to get recompense for the loss of his ironworks, but at no point did he try to get money for the process that Cort had supposedly ripped off). There's no reason to think that Cort was even aware of Reeder's ironworks.
Bingo. I completed a history PhD, and also witnessed this claim-inflation imperative. I’d only add something that is possibly obvious - that the drive to find such claims was relentlessly to the left. Very, very few people chased clout by looking for evidence that could debunk left wing shibboleths.
I would disagree with this; I did my doctoral work in Texas, at the University of Houston, so I encountered a lot of more conservative academics. Part of my doctoral work was literally funded by oil companies (Exxon and the defunct Tenneco). Everybody I met more or less plays the same game. If you want a good example, follow Tyler Cowan and his crew over at Marginal Revolution.
And I want to be clear: I like Tyler! I think he's a very smart guy! I was a religious reader of MR for many years. But it's pretty clearly often the same game.
I might have thrown in one “very” too many, but in the departments I was aware of and the AHA panels I saw, to say nothing of prize-winning books and articles, the balance was very heavily tilted toward those with left claim inflation. I’m sure there were and are conservative historians - heck, Newt Gingrich came from somewhere - but I’d be very surprised if a list of prize-winners reflected anything close to balance.
No. I don't think it's the fault of the greasy nerds (of which I am, hilariously, now one). I think it is the fault of a lot of folks outside the academy who think that there is some kind of competition between STEM and the humanities when, in fact, Business is eating the world. Very little of what happens in terms of funding and importance in universities is a product of what people in universities think.
Business schools are usually raided at cash cows that fund the underperforming departments. For this reason, they don’t get caught up in the within university funding disputes as much.
135/109≈125%. Compared to the first two masses of a Zipfian distribution, sure, that's not very much; it suggests an exponent of ≈⅓. But compared to a uniform distribution that's quite substantial variation. Certainly, it's about a 2-standard-deviation difference assuming Poissonian sample error in the counts.
As a fellow academic, I agree with this well reasoned answer. These days in academics there are incentives to get media attention. A random well researched journal paper might get 5 citations and be read by 50 people, and that would be *well above average*. Which is to say, most academic work is very, very, very obscure. But obscure academic papers don't generate attention or fundraising. Controversy generates attention. Not only that, DEI is currently the hot trendy topic, so turning your random obscure history paper into something that generates DEI-adjacent media coverage in general has a lot of career related upside for an academic. Meanwhile the downside of being called out for making dubious claims is probably not as large as people would assume... most academics can "suggest" the letter writers for their tenure review, so all this back and forth, letters from the editor, etc., has shown the author exactly who is "on her side" and would write a favorable letter.
"are academic fields where most papers are read by 50 people economically justified?"
Mathematicians teaching at universities are economically justified by the number of bums in seats in Calc 101. Their papers are likely to be read by their friends, and unlikely to lead to direct economic payoffs.
And that's good! They should keep doing pure research. Figuring out the world is one of the reasons for all the economic activity. We don't figure out the world just to make bucks; we also become a prosperous society in order to contribute to figuring out the world.
They are just as justified as an ecosystem of investment where the majority of start ups go bankrupt in a year. It’s not about the importance of the median creation - it’s about the mean, which is far higher than the median in these skewed contexts where individual huge hits can really be huge.
This seems like an instance in which the divergence between STEM and humanities contributions to EV seems likely to be particularly acute, however.
I *like* history (and history of science especially) but it's extremely difficult for me to see a way for the discipline (or for English) to create any kind of nontrivial increase in Total Factor Productivity.
I view the study of history as more akin to an insurance policy. The more we know about how other people fucked up, and the more widely that's taught, the less likely we fuck up the ongoing improvement in our quality of life by reprising the old errors.
What I tell myself as a philosopher of science is that there’s just a longer and more unpredictable timescale here. Berkeley’s “The Analyst” didn’t change how math was done in his generation, but it was important for Riemann and Weierstrass a century later, whose work didn’t itself change engineering practice in the 19th century, but became important a century later.
Academic productivity, like almost everything else, is defined by the power law. 80% of the research produced by academics is junk. 15% is decent and makes a modest contribution to the field. 5% (or less) will be outstanding and will have incredible value.
The problem is that (a) you really don't know which academics will produce that ~5% and/or (b) even if you could, you really can't run a university with just that ~5%, so carrying the other 95% is a cost so you can have that incredible 5%. And I'd say the ROI is in the end pretty good.
"And I'd say the ROI is in the end pretty good...."
Very good. Including, inter alia, the hardware you're viewing this on, the software that runs it, the infrastructure that brings it to you, and our host who writes these interesting essays. All brought to you by the modern American university system.
Oh, there's very little post-modern in the universities. It's a few loud frustrated people. The rest of the university is still doing what it always has.
I am a fan of high-quality academic writing and this proposition mostly makes sense, but I would like a clearer picture of what people have in mind when they speak of outstanding academic contributions that have incredible value, especially given the negative externalities of junk academic production.
To clarify, I'm not asking you *specifically* to justify that phrase (though if you're game, I'm certainly interested). Rather, I'd like to see people make the case for the value of academic production more clearly and more often when they call for more academic investment.
Justified to whom? Universities, foundations, and think tanks can fund whatever they want. Government grants don't take into account economic justifications, only research justifications, because the government funding agencies already have their appropriated funds.
I don't know what you mean by "economically justified" but it is intellectually justified as a necessary cog in the knowledge ecosystem. Cf. my previous comment on the topic (can't find the link - how does one search for old comments?)
Others have given good answers already about the skewed distribution of citations and the fact that one does not necessarily know in advance how valuable a particular research project will be, but I would add that there is a tremendous push for academics to demonstrate "impact". And that's part of the problem in this case... The paper featured here has objectively made an impact! Whether it's a good impact is of course debatable.
Economic historian here. I agree in part. But it's not just "a juicy story" blown up. It's pretty obviously "you can make overwrought, no pun intended, claims if they support a stereotypical academic left position like Black People Were Actually Great Inventors in the 1700s and The Only Unique Thing About Britain in the IR was Colonization". It's not like there are academics making their name by, like, incorrectly claiming that Malcolm X stole his ideas from some white guy!
What's frustrating here is not Bulstrode's attempt. What's frustrating is that it was cheered on by many powerful people, including the editors in their embarassing note where they basically say they will publish stories rather than evidence if it can help the fight of anti-Blackness. It's a total joke and destroys the credibility of academia.
(I would also push back a little on Matt's claims that Cort is a minor figure in the IR. Not at all!)
Something that struck me about Bulstrode's paper (which I have read) is that she seemed weirdly contemptuous of the actual technology involved, not bothering to understand the difference between Cort's rollers and the sugarcane rollers made at Reeder's ironworks, and not even bothering to learn what "metallurgist" means. Ironworker is an honourable profession! You don't need to use a fancier-sounding title to show respect! And you certainly aren't showing respect by using the name of a completely different job!
I feel like an underappreciated part of history of technology is how much interesting insight and analysis you can develop by really going deep on actual physical processes and objects and how things work at a very specific level. The chapters of my book that I am unquestionably proudest of and think contain the most interesting insights involved me figuring out little nuances of how radiation therapists' own description of what their cold cathode emitters were doing fit imprecisely with what we eventually learned about how they actually function. Once you understand those little mental slips between how the thing worked versus 1) how people thought it worked and 2) basic flaws in human cognitive patterns, like how we struggle with perceiving magnitude of change, suddenly a bunch of stuff opened up.
I think, though, that people don't really get drawn to that kind of analysis. It's the worst kind of thing: once you figure it out and explain it to someone, it seems obvious, rather than "smart." Also, it doesn't fit well into the "stakes" paradigm. Maybe I'm just bad at that part. But I often found that discussion of the physical systems that totally excited me was only exciting to a specific subset of nerds, of which I guess I am one. I found cold cathode emitters to be a wacky and hilarious tech--and I bet that it would be a hoot to discuss rollers over beers with you--but it was definitely not a universally shared sentiment.
Writing in my capacity as a "dad," I feel like you are giving into the haters by not intending the pun. Intending the pun, in my humble opinion, elevates almost any comment. (My wife disagrees.)
I was just about to say exactly this, but you beat me to it and said it far better. I did undergraduate in humanities (Rhetoric, god help me) and fled it for social science in grad school and this was very much my perspective as well. People in the humanities were painfully aware that nobody would pay attention to them if all they were doing was writing about a novel or about some tiny community of people in a distant country. So everywhere there was an immense pressure to prove that the humanities could be relevant to present day issues.
The problem is that textual analysis just isn't all that effective for understanding the social world. And since textual analysis is a study of the symbolic, you end up with a reliance on the symbolic as an explanation for pretty much everything. But symbolism just isn't that important. The entire CS community with some prodding from Github went through the arduous exercise of changing the primary branch of a repository from "master" to "main", and what exactly changed? Nothing as far as I can tell. It seems like all that energy could have been expended in a lot more productive ways, and probably would have been if the main academic driver behind it had come from the social sciences rather than the humanities. If I were a chair of a gender/ethnic studies department and I really wanted to produce research that helped those groups, I'd fire all the cultural critics and hire empirical sociologists, psychologists, historians, and economists instead. But I've been in academia, so I realize the chances of that are basically nil. Once a certain school of thought takes over a discipline, it's almost impossible to dislodge them. See macroeconomic theory.
I think you give a lot of good understanding of Bullstrode's motivations. When it comes to people STEM-shaming others though, I don't know how much of that is really about significance.
Mostly I see people saying other people should get STEM (or business) degrees not because that way people will change the world, but because that way people are most likely to earn enough income to justify them going to college and taking out student loans (especially if they went to one of those expensive, small private colleges that the people in the deepest debt always seem to have attended). Of course, that stereotype is not always true, philosophy degrees seem to lead to pretty good jobs a lot, but I think that's the context of the "more people should get STEM degrees and avoid MFAs" discussion more than societal significance.
Trump has shown how to successfully lie and bullshit a way through life: double-down on the lie when called on it. In doing so, one becomes a hero to some and villain to others, but either way one also becomes notorious and famous. I fear that more hucksters are realizing that all press is good press now, and these grifts won't stop anytime soon.
> Closing professional note: I haven't read the article--I was kind of busy finishing up nursing school and starting my practice career--so I don't have strong sense of how lousy the evidence is.
I have read the article, and it is really, really bad. It uses lots of flowery language to draw attention away from the fact that even if she were correctly stating the contents of her 200-odd citations, none of them actually support her insinuations. However, she *doesn't* correctly state the contents of many of her citations, and in fact they actively undermine her. It's academic malpractice.
This has to make you wonder how much history, sociology, and "X studies" work is just total made up garbage that never gets challenged. I mean, this total made up garbage made headlines around the world, and people anchor their perceptions to the first thing they hear about something so it's likely that Cort's "theft" will become fact to some chunk of the population.
Also I think the motive at work is to deconstruct and deligitimize anything that Europeans did in history and claim/imply that any current disparities in wealth and social status are the result of the greed, rapine, and perfidy of Europeans/people of European descent.
It's like the academic flip side of the wacky made up Nation of Islam history of the world.
Edit: just to be clear I don't mean this in a creepy "how dare they not recognize how amazing Europeans are" way. History should record what happened, not what we think should have happened given our current priors
I think this motive is at work in all of the causes taken up by the leftmost part of the political spectrum. Just as the most extreme MAGA-types want a fundamental change to the USA -- back to a white, WASP majority culture -- I think the extreme left wants to turn the USA into Cuba.
The amount of work the average Cuban puts into making their society function, just one example is the effort put into car maintenance, is too much work for the average extreme leftist.
Given a lot of their reactions to mild inflation and the prospect of paying the service economy workers better, it seems more likely that, to the extent they want anything, Lebanon is more directionally accurate.
But again, and I think this is the case for most people... we're far less conscious of our own biases and blindspots than you're assuming, so let's not overstate the extent to which folks "want" grand outcomes like these.
Yes, thank you. This thread has invented a “leftist” boogeyman and imputed all manner of motivations to “them” awfully quickly, which, being a humanities-inflected social science academic myself, has started to feel...uncomfortable.
And I say that as someone who is decidedly uninterested in revolutions of any kind.
Don't get me wrong, I think this sort of "research" is indefensible, but to ascribe it to some grand conspiracy instead of an unfortunate collision of several disparate circumstances, some of which have afflicted other branches of academia, some of which have not, isn't accurate.
JCW has it close to right IMO; academia's incentive structures are fucked, university administrations are uniquely, almost maliciously feckless in pursuit of student enrollments/acceptance rates/social cache, and financial pressures and a glut of graduates trying to gain perch atop a way-too-small ledge make it worse.
I think my addition that post-1960's humanities professors and academics viewed the value of their discipline to be "make change" rather than "enhance understanding" is the crux of understanding why things are so dysfunctional today, but that's only the glue that binds this mess all together, not the entirety of the substance.
That's not an easy knot to unpick, simpler to find a villain.
100% agreed. I am, of course, agreeing with a take that flatters my understanding of my own profession, so, you know, but being on “the inside” I will say that in a time of austerity in higher education, most people are trying to survive.
The incentives are, indeed, fucked. People have been citing “getting tenure” as the motivation for publishing these kinds of polemical and low-quality takes, but the irony is that in the UK, where the author of the article (as well as I) works, tenure doesn’t exist. At all. The degree to which student recruitment _to my specific program(me)_ is tied to my employment is terrifying. “Maliciously feckless” doesn’t begin to cover it with regard to administrator attitudes towards enrollment. So anything you can do to make yourself indispensable- which unfortunately has nothing to do with being an effective educator or doing solid but uncontroversial research - is a very attractive option.
As for the “make change” culture, I totally agree - but I think what needs to be even further appreciated is that this is a culture that you are tossed into when you begin graduate school. You have no sense that there even _is_ an alternative paradigm. It took me a decade to feel confident moving away from the revolutionary mindset and feeling comfortable in my own scholarly skin - and I’m able to do it in part because I work outside the US, where the atmosphere is more chill.
The boundaries of who belongs in these groups are extremely fuzzy. MAGAs could be 1% of the population or everyone who voted for him in either election, for example. Far-left is also quite context dependent
I think you're right, but part of that project is "problematizing" the past to provide impetus for present day political programs to rectify past wrongs - and every point in the column of "see, see, all current advantage is the result of oppression and dispossession" is a shell in the barrage. So you end up with this sort of made up, politically motivated chum.
To flesh this out a little bit more, if the wish is for equality and the means to get there is political action, then it's necessary to declare the status quo social/economic order as illegitimate and in need of change. The US federal government is not built to provide social and economic equality, it's built to provide equality under the law for all individuals and flexibility for states to pursue their own policies. The Declaration of Independence is a poor document if you're looking for inspiration to create redistributive economic programs.
There are a bunch of legitimating elements of American history that need to be recontextualized or renovated if they're going to support this new project of equality.
The only way to do that effectively is to go back through all the legitimating factors and declare them illegitimate, one by one. It's what every revolutionary movement for social change has done - you tear down the statues, deface the temples, burn the histories, and sculpt/build/write new ones.
Academics have been working with limited success among the general public at this for about 130 years, maybe we could call this Late Stage Academic Marxism, where all the really good critiques have already been made, and people are left scrabbling at the margins for ways to make markets and business seem illegitimate or always tied to slavery and expropriation.
Serious question- is anyone still saying this at the end of 2023? Because this sounds more like a 2020-era thing.
I’m sincerely asking - I’m not on social media, and I’m in the UK, where “Asian” means something very different (and would never be thought of as “white-adjacent”), so this feels like a dug-up relic of the feverish post-Floyd era. But maybe it’s still alive and kicking in the US...?
If it were so, I would be much more supportive of progressive/woke ideology than I am.
I don't want to paint with an overly broad brush here, #notallprogressives etc., but it seems to me that too often woke activists don't want to lift people of color up; they want to drag white people down. When I read stuff like "Punctuality and worship of the written word are hAllMaRKs oF WhiTe SuPrEmAcY," that does not fill me with confidence that "ah yes, this is how non-European people will get to enjoy wealth and power." Wealth and power are racist capitalist colonialist concepts, dontcha know?
If one doesn't believe wealth can be created, only taken, then their approach makes a perverse kind of sense; all the claims of habits and traits that lead to success are secretly just ways to box out certain people. Roderick Hills above already cited this piece from Noah that indicates this is an apparently not uncommonly held belief: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/nations-dont-get-rich-by-plundering
(to be clear, I'm not insinuating that Danny believes this!)
Given that in this thread social sciences academics like me are taking a beating, I appreciate the “not a broad brush approach.” Not all of us are woke ideologues, I assure you, and articles like the topic of this post upset us as much as they upset “the normals.”
I think I may have been using one of those massive calligraphy brushes in some of my other comments, I know this stuff isn't universal but it has felt universal in my interactions with both small liberal arts colleges and state universities (which have all been in New England, so I should remember that those experiences aren't representative of all experiences).
bears more relation to actually accomplishing that goal than whatever the hell these people are doing. Actually, it'd be less harmful for them to lay out trying to find shooting stars every night than writing this dreck.
I'm sure many leftists do want that. But, as Matt is pointing out here, this sort of work does nothing to make progress toward that goal. I think this sort of work is more about taking a certain kind of stance, the sort that people who put some version of the raised fist as their online avatar.
Yes. But the motivation to discover something new which *is* by definition upbending the received wisdom *is* at the heart of the academic endeavor of advancing human knowledge. *To the extent* that “Europeans invented everything” is the current view, challenging that would be good *provided it’s factually substantiated*. Trying and failing to do so would also be good as ot will give us greater confidence in the received wisdom. In either case the exercise is good provided it’s done honestly and rigorously.
In today's essay, though, the paper in question isn't really challenging ... well, much of anything it appears. It is inferring something while deftly avoiding crossing any ethical boundaries.
Can you imagine a similar paper be written & published today that similarly infers something negative about those Jamaican metalworkers?
I agree with the general sentiment, but this paper and the outlets that reported on it have all the intellectual rigor of an episode of Ghost Hunters or Ancient Aliens.
This is definitely the overall ideological agenda at work. The individual author was probably just trying to find something that would get her noticed. Claiming the invention was stolen from some other English guy would not be sexy. It’s the racial politics that make it sexy.
FWIW, studies that are made up garbage are probably over represented in news headlines and TED Talks, since made up garbage is going to be more exciting than studies based in reality.
This is also a good point, no outlet is interested in a study that says "chocolate has a lot of sugar and will make you fat" but everyone wants a "turns out chocolate is a healthy food!" story, and the latter gets way more traction.
There was a similar one of these recently with a paper purported to show that the plague in 14th century London hit black women hardest. Yes, you are reading that right. I think it is fair to simply operate under the assumption that this sort of scholarship is agitprop, or a weird sort of fiction fundamentally uninterested in serious research and verifiable reality.
IIRC the work wasn't even on the level of highly misleading statistical analysis. It was identifying skulls as belonging to people of African descent with a highly dubious methodology (read: modern day phrenology), thereby concluding that there were far, far higher numbers of such people in medieval London than there is any reason to believe was actually the case.
Lol, 14th century London had under 100,000 people and was a major trading center only in the context of the Channel and North Sea.
We know that "Moors" were regarded as exotic in Italy in the time period and their presence in Iberia was mostly as mercenaries in Grenadan armies, who would have been disproportionately Berber and not Sub-Saharan.
The only "black" people who *could* have been in London at this time would be a handful of Malian traders, and given the number of intermediaries involved in cross-Sahara and then trans-Mediterranean trade...
To be frank, our priors on "How many black people were in London in 1340-1380?" should be "zero."
That's actually how I heard about the Bulstrode article and responses to it. The plague claim seemed so insane that I googled for responses and found one from Ian Leslie that was also about this controversy and so then I read more about this one.
Same with me but for the life of me I couldn't remember where I had read it or who the author was! I had been wracking my brain all day trying to remember. Thank you for reminding me! This was the piece:
a lot of academic work in “hard” STEM actually has very similar problems to this paper.
ie it does something interesting, but is sloppy with evidence and argumentation, and then beyond that, insinuates extremely grandiose claims of impact that wouldn’t hold even everything were airtight.
My understanding is that the grandiose claims of impact is often by tacit convention limited to the Conclusion section and included out of obligation, subject to the essentially universal understanding by people actually reading the paper that it's there mostly because it has to be there.
this is true of the papers (keep it out of everything but abstract and conclusion) but the grandiose claims often make their way into university press releases and from there into the media.
It is absolutely a problem in STEM but I'd like to see the reasoning behind "with much more dire consequences."
To my mind, it is potentially a very serious problem that 10% or so of the population now automatically believes identitarian nonsense like this, disproportionately among young professionals and incipient elite-class members who are supposedly well-educated. That seems like more than a bit of a threat to the whole liberal program of equal protection under the law and all the fruits thereof. It also opens the door to a reactionary movement which occasionally successfully skins a normie and wears the skin through the door and then does equally or more batshit things while pointing at left-illiberalism as a defense.
Whereas the STEM fields just piss away a bit of grant money disproving various bad research long before it ever reaches the "widespread application" stage.
The argument would generally be that you take the field of research in the wrong direction for a long time chasing the wrong thing. Like Alzheimer's and beta-amyloid*. You're putting off different research that could come up with a cure for years or decades.
*Note that I haven't read up on this, it's something I remember seeing come out a while back but haven't looked into further.
A few years ago some academics proved this by writing a bunch of sociological papers using made-up garbage and jargon, and got a lot of them published in academic journals.
None of them were published in reputable journals, except the one where the authors actually fraudulently made up data that supported the strange claim they pretended to be making.
This isn't the Sokal affair. This was an off-brand imitation where they got some things rejected by journals and found lower-tier journals that would publish it, and then claimed that this was the same effect that Sokal found.
It’s interesting, I didn’t see this headline anywhere and wouldn’t have known about it at all if I hadn’t seen Matt’s column today. Guess I’m just not that plugged in.
That's also why he got picked, *because* nobody had ever heard of him. You couldn't make a claim like this about, e.g. Watt, or Bessemer, because both of those mens' histories are well known and studied, and anything like "copied the ideas of black plantation workers" would have come out long ago. But some jabroni, well, say whatever you want! If enough people repeat it, then what you said becomes the truth...
I don’t think this story gives any reason to believe that *any* journal article is made-up garbage. You’ll note that Matt didn’t actually provide any evidence that anything in the original article was made-up - it’s only the media that made the made-up claim, while Matt only insinuated that the original article might have made something up. (Though actually he was pretty explicit that the original article just made some minor observations and juxtaposed them in an interesting way designed to be misread - it didn’t make anything up.)
Near the beginning of the article is this claim: "Between 1783 and 1784, British financier turned ironmaster, Henry Cort, patented a process of rendering scrap metal into valuable bar iron that has been celebrated as one of the most important innovations in the making of the modern world.Footnote5 Here, the concern is the 76 Black metallurgists in Jamaica, who developed the process for which Cort took credit."
Does it? Nothing here suggests this is “total made up garbage”. On the contrary, even in the abstract the author took care *not* to state anything factually incorrect or unsubstantiated. It suggest that there may have been a motivation as misleading marketing to bait careless or unethical journalists. If so- it worked. But that’s actually radically different from “made up garbage”. The latter would have been much easier. There is in fact a huge *agreement* by all about what the facts are. You should come out of it with greater epistemically confidence in the radical sense, less so about our media discourse.
So I can provide some context as an economic historian. There has been a movement among some revisionists to assert that all the progress of capitalism is solely due to slavery. This "New History of Capitalism" movement asserts that all the material improvements from the first wave of industrialization were extracted from the enslaved persons. Paul Rhode (U Mich) and Alan Olmsed (Davis) have written extensively on the flawed methods and outright fabrications this ideological movement has thrown out there. It's one reason many historians have issues with the NYT's 1619 Project.
The political project of Bulstrode and company is to reorient a "racial hierarchy," and erase reason, rationalism, and 'empiricism' as cultural values and replace them with a new power hierarchy. By deconstructing narratives that British innovators like Henry Cort contributed to material progress, it creates room for a new paradigm.
My guess it is some weird postmodern-pseudo Marxist worldview they wish to empower, but that is my guess. Lots of times these types of people have very incoherent and contradictory beliefs about society and the world.
And as Matt has written before, the idea that slavery created modern prosperity is kind of perversely an argument in favor of slavery, leaving aside the more important issue of it not being true.
And the thing about the postmodern pseudo-Marxist worldview is that the boring old regular Marxist worldview has the labor theory of value RIGHT THERE to make this legible.
But current academia is at war against legibility just as surely as colonialism or whatever.
It’s a mistake to say current academia is at war against anything. Some segments of academia are - but you’ll note that many other factions of academia are at war with them. Just look at groups like Marxists and critical theorists and decolonial theorists, who are at constant war with each other!
Current academia is a just a pile of perverse incentives, austerity, and arbitrary decisions from a professional managerial class who don't value learning.
I think that academia of 40-50 years ago was much better in most respects. You had a much higher percentage of tenured and tenure-track faculty (more ethical hiring allowing for better research). You had much lower tuitions. You had greater political diversity and free speech climate in most places. I suspect that at least in elite institutions the average undergrad received a more rigorous education, but I may be wrong on that last point (one would really have to research this last question).
Of course some things were worse. I think sexual harassment and exploitation was more rampant, but that wasn't so much an academia thing but academia-as-part-of-society thing.
"You had a much higher percentage of tenured and tenure-track faculty (more ethical hiring allowing for better research). You had much lower tuitions....Of course some things were worse. I think sexual harassment and exploitation was more rampant, but that wasn't so much an academia thing but academia-as-part-of-society thing."
I wonder about this, sometimes. The usual claim for why university finances are so tight is that administrators are taking a much larger portion of the pie. IMHO, Matt's argument (there are proportionately fewer young people to educate, so the competition is harsher) is more convincing, but suppose for a second that administrators were indeed the cause. Then I think we would have to conclude that efforts to eliminate sexual harassment etc. in the university has directly caused the decline in tenure track jobs and the higher tuitions.
I find that conclusion alarming. I'm glad I don't believe in the hypothesis.
So, here's the thing - I don't think there was actually more political diversity. I just think there were more older professors who registered Republican in 1955, but hadn't voted for a Republican since Nixon.
Like, from what I've read, most of the shift in professor self-IDing isn't among the humanities, but among STEM, where scientists who were pretty much, along with businessmen, the prototypical Republican, have moved to the Democrat's over the past few generations because of educational polarization, and well, what the GOP has become.
Do you honestly believe that somebody who knows how to explain calculus can also prevent two motivated eight-year-olds from swordfighting with colored pencils whilst a third attempts to spray glue everywhere?
My hottake: conservatives are wrong that critical theory is some sort of threat to society...but it is still wrong and largely bad (Fanon is largely about the intellectual justification of heinous acts, Foucault is all over the map and largely relies on Motte and Bailey arguments etc) Like Jungian theory its probably best to be put on the shelf and left there as another interesting, but failed, ideological project.
What I suspect Matt knows but doesn't come out and say is that there is a clear political project at work within this research and throughout various parts of academia. It links things like the 1619 project, new histories of capitalism, economic history, and so on. The general point is that the industrial revolution and capitalism originate in colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade, and that western Europe owes its wealth, economic, and technological success to the conquest, exploitation, and enslavement of people around the world. This view, debated within history and economics, is taken up as a foundation for some humanities scholarship in other fields.
The baseline problem is that the European countries that most explicitly developed their wealth from slavery were Spain and Portugal; and were hardly leading lights by the 20th century. Britain developed a lot of wealth from overseas colonies but the Industrial Revolution is what really generated it. And in the U.S. the north was obviously much wealthier than the south as a whole. And the Industrial Revolution is what really generated wealth. So you’re stuck with trying to explain how slavery was the foundation for the Industrial Revolution.
It gets worse. Slavery is basically a universal fact oof life in all societies before the industrial revolution. Not necessarily chattel slavery let alone racialized chattel slavery, but some form of coerced labor is found just about everywhere.
I thought this paper tried to find an interesting third way between the absolutists on either side:
"Our results do not suggest that slavery was essential for Britain’s industrialization; nor do they demonstrate that its effects were largely irrelevant. Instead, our quantitative results mark a middle ground, with slavery significantly accelerating growth and structural change at the height of the Industrial Revolution. The largest impact, according to our model, is on the geography of economic activity and the distribution of income, with towns and cities that are exposed to slave wealth growing faster. As a result, slavery wealth shifted the locus of economic activity to the North and West of the country, and it boosted the income of capitalists and workers at the expense of landowners."
I don’t see that as on point though. That local economic conditions (including slavery or its absence) would affect the parameters of the IR in an individual area (and its winner or losers) doesn’t seem controversial. The question is whether the IR was in any way contingent on slavery (or colonial exploitation). No.
The story of Scottish sheep and the physics of steam is what it is.
In general these contemporary stories all seem to involve confusing potential relationships or correlations with contingency in order to claim an outcome that is only justified by contingency.
“ Instead, our quantitative results mark a middle ground, with slavery significantly accelerating growth and structural change at the height of the Industrial Revolution. The largest impact, according to our model, is on the geography of economic activity and the distribution of income, with towns and cities that are exposed to slave wealth growing faster.”
Didn’t Britain stop the slave trade and emancipate slaves in the West Indies just as the Industrial Revolution got going?
Yeah, the ideological agenda seems pretty straightforward: to undermine the achievements of western civilization (in science, governance, arts, etc.) by claiming they were stolen or arose from slavery and/or imperialism. Viewed charitably, it’s a way of restoring dignity and pride to the conquered peoples and their descendants. There are certainly instances where this is true, but also a lot of bullshit historic claims. I recently had a conversation with someone who claimed that the Europeans learned democracy from the Incas (an absolute monarchy).
My hunch is they mixed up the Iroquois and Inca, which is also wrong but closer to true (I've seen people say that American federalism was likely influenced by Iroquoisan government).
I remember learning about this in elementary school in a very red state. Not exactly forbidden knowledge or anything. Glad these PhDs are half-discovering elementary school curriculum
>> I've seen people say that American federalism was likely influenced by Iroquoisan government
I haven't really studied American history so perhaps there is something to it but I am very very very skeptical. There is very little reason to believe this would be the case and eery reason to believe people would want it to be the case.
I think we had this discussion a couple weeks back. My conclusion from my *very brief* reading was that the founders as well as intellectuals in Europe were at least aware of the Iroquois and their form of governance. It's a gargantuan, unjustified, and motivated leap from there to "that's where democracy comes from" of course.
The first questions I will have should I approach this is how precisely we even know what the Iroquois form of government was, and relatedly, what's the guarnatee that what we're seeing isn't simply European projections of European ideas on the Iroquois, i.e. a "mirrorr" effect rather than any form of genuine inspiration.
The founders from NY and PA might have had some direct contact with the Iroquois but the other founders, the Virginians in particular would have heard things 2nd and 3rd hand.
It could have been an influence, but one among many.
Not a document per se but rather the details of the Iroquois confederacy. This argument is over a 100 years old btw…but relates more to the idea of a dozen loosely affiliated states with a common foreign policy.
Right. Like maybe they used an example close at hand or maybe they used an example from classical education (which would have been most). The claim is that they used the example close at hand without an attribution footnote.
Yeah it’s basically a way to denigrate capitalism in favor of whatever form of anarcho-communism that is being pushed by the academy. They have a real problem which is that if you look around capitalism and free markets have had a bunch of success stories across Asia and Europe (with some obvious problems that could be addressed with boring policy changes). If you want to argue for a glorious revolution, you need to knock those success stories down. The current popular academic argument is that it wouldn’t have happened without slavery/idea theft/whatever so we should tear the whole thing down root and branch. I’m not sure the argument works quite as well as they think (is South Korea going to roll back the last century of progress because you made some argument about slaves in America) but it gets them tenure and isn’t that the most important thing really?
I am a social sciences academic. I personally know literally no anarchists, communists, or anarcho-communists.
Look, I get what you mean - the type you’re describing absolutely exists - but the way you say “they” and attach it to broad generalizations starts to feel annoying, and then uncomfortable. I am appealing to our shared Chris-ness for a bit of perspective here.
I should also note that historians love just-so stories, that history would have been completely different except for this Just One Thing. It’s Great Man Theory (which they claim to hate) but in another form. ACOUP recently made the argument that the Industrial Revolution would have basically never happened except for a very specific set of circumstances around coal mining in Britain. Oh really? Like, never? I guess it’s the STEM in me but I feel like humanity would have figured out steam engines eventually.
I dunno, this seems like an overreaction in the opposite direction.
I am sure there's some timeline where a bunch of folks are discussing industrialization under the Latter Song and someone says, "I'm sure that if they hadn't turned public hydrology works into major sources of industrial power under the influence of noted bureaucrat-engineer [NAME], it wouldn't have taken long for someone to figure it out."
Never is too strong a word, but to assume history would follow an even vaguely similar arc at all in the absence of specific innovations occurring for specific reasons at specific times also seems too strong a presumption.
"What I suspect Matt knows but doesn't come out and say is that there is a clear political project: ...western Europe owes its wealth, economic, and technological success to the conquest, exploitation, and enslavement of people around the world."
THPacis is not moving the goalposts. Let me translate: “your narcissistic belief that your impressions of the world constitute truth does not give you epistemic privilege here.” In other words, you’re committing exactly the same fallacy as the humanities academics you so despise.
By the way, that group includes me. Yes, there are ideological hacks in this business. Yes, some of them are rewarded for spouting ideological nonsense. But your bigoted statements - sorry, “pithy aphorisms” are officially starting to piss me off.
Thanks for writing this, Matt. While I saw the original news stories, I had been completely unaware that there were serious critiques of the underlying paper.
That said, I feel like saying, "there isn’t a discernible political agenda" to this incident is being extraordinarily generous to both the academics and the journalists involved. I mean, Slaton and Saraiva's response almost explicitly endorses, "who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present, controls the past" as editorial policy. (Yes, they denounce outright fabrication of sources, but can anyone believe them at this point?) And, as I've commented before, there's a fraction of American journalists who seemingly sit down at their freshly opened word processors at least subconsciously asking themselves, "How can I foment a race war today?"
Yeah seen through the lens that there seems to be a part of the most extreme "social justice" movements that really tickle the religion part of the brain, and that a huge amount of politics is just in group signaling and not actually caring about any real life outcome, what's going on here comes into focus pretty quick.
I just generally put anything like this is in the "big if true" bin, i.e., "I think you're lying but decline to say that outright because the social cost, right or wrong, is too high".
It's turned out that way so often that it's the safer assumption.
His beat is group narcissism and lately, deep state/bureaucratic infighting. But your words "trying to replace a dying white monoculture with not an emerging multicultural society but a system of ethnic competition mediated through political, economic and cultural institutions..." are basically his central thesis. He's quite a good writer IMO.
On a very different note, did you ever read WhoIsIOZ, or The Last Psychiatrist? Amazing blogs from when blogs were blogs, 2007-2012ish. I recommend finding archives if you haven't.
IOZ and TLP aren't really connected to anything from today, just excellent social commentary. Too bad they both called it quits. IOZ now writes a lot of hohum whatever under his real name, but he used to be fire. TLP disappeared, I don't know if he died or got sick of it or found something better to do, but I love going back to read his old stuff.
This relates somewhat to FDB's now infamous essay about naming the current social justice movement. This is about much more than the Cort controversy. If you boil Matt's critique down many things fall under it. Journalists and academics have been engaged in a wildly unpopular ideological project with no actual stakes or goals. I don't know if you call this wokeness or what but it's very silly and it's been driving people who aren't swept up in it bananas for years. It's the primary reason substack has gotten so large.
The politics here--perhaps in Bulstrode's paper, DEFINITELY in the editors' note defending it--is simple assertion of elite dominance over the discourse. Who are you, plebe, to tell us that our new historical accounts are inaccurate because they don't track your "facts"? We, the academy, the EXPERTS, will tell you what history is and is not.
I think the ideological agenda here is bordering on something that feels like "Academic gatekeepers are having a hard time pushing back against bullshit that's framed in certain progressive terms." It seems here that the article was just a bad article, perhaps motivated by one individual's poor framing and personal drive to publish articles--hey articles are important! But the broader failing is no one was able to say "This is a bad article" without falling into an academic trap of sounding insensitive on racial issues.
Also, part of the problem is that people an all sides of this internet frenzy have incentives to inflate the importance of one article hinting at one claim that may not be well supported.
There's no hinting. Commenter Stephanie even quoted you a relevant passage which says "Near the beginning of the article is this claim: "Between 1783 and 1784, British financier turned ironmaster, Henry Cort, patented a process of rendering scrap metal into valuable bar iron that has been celebrated as one of the most important innovations in the making of the modern world.Footnote5 Here, the concern is the 76 Black metallurgists in Jamaica, who developed the process for which Cort took credit."
That directly states that Cort took credit for someone else's innovation. That's not a hint at a claim, that's a very direct claim that is not challenged or questioned or investigated by any of the media covering the paper originally, which is the topic of this post, not the paper itself.
Dysphemistic posted this link to the NPR story and it's an interesting listen. The reporters repeatedly use the word "stole" to describe what happened, and Bulstrode agrees with it. So while the abstract may have been more oblique, the researcher is definitely not shying away from the media's portrayal of the findings. Just for what it's worth:
How do you know if, for example, climate change is vastly overstated or an existential threat if you can’t believe motivated scientists - everyone is not going to be able to do a deep dive on every subject. Remember recycling and Earth Day and all that? Didn’t it turn out recycling was basically shipping things to foreign landfills? And yet this wasn’t reported for decades? And we’re still doing recycling theater?
I believe in climate change because I’m not seeing the things I’d expect if it were made up.
First, temperature readings are changing. Those are pretty easy to quantify, and for lots of people to check. If the prevailing story was bogus, I’d expect to see the same kind of pile-on this paper got. Also, I wouldn’t expect to see industries making new investments based on climate change (agriculture, flood insurance, e.g.)
Consistent with this are shifts in the argument, as conservatives have almost all moved on from saying “it’s not happening” to either “humans aren’t causing it” or “yes humans are causing it, but taking carbon out of the economy is too expensive or it’s futile because China and India won’t join us.”
There’s also a lot of evidence that a credible scientific debunking of global warming would make its originator very, very rich and famous. Would nobody break ranks for that? There’s more of a truth-seeking, ornery empirical culture in the sciences than in humanities. I’d expect to see some credible climate scientists break ranks, not just a few cranks operating outside their specialities.
Science isn’t a process that makes the average individual paper state only true things - it’s a process that creates incentives for people to say lots of interesting things with bits of evidence for them, most of which are false and under supported, but some of which end up accumulating more evidence as further papers accumulate. It’s only the process writ large that is at all reliable, but it works by being built out of mostly unreliable individual publications.
Perhaps, but I have trouble seeing how that process is at work when papers are cited more because they make interesting claims rather than because of their methodological validity or because speculations made in Discussion sections can be cited as if they were tested and proven in the paper. It’s more like Gresham’s law at work.
"Didn’t it turn out recycling was basically shipping things to foreign landfills?"
Depends on what's being recycled. A lot of plastic used to be shipped overseas (mostly to China), but China stopped accepting it a few years ago, and now much of it ends up in domestic landfills.
Plastic is notoriously hard to recycle and sensitive to contamination. Glass gets recycled in various ways (e.g. [1]). Paper is pretty straightforward and accepting of contamination; it's even ok to recycle greasy pizza boxes [2]. Metals are so straightforward to recycle that I won't link anything.
What a lot of people get wrong is the connection between recycling and climate change: recycling isn't all that important when it comes to global warming. (Can be useful, but it's pretty far down the list of things that can help.) Recycling was historically more about keeping things out of landfills (the Earth Day you remembered), and the global warming angle has been tacked on more recently. Even then, recycling is most of all a feel-good thing. It has always been plan C. E.g. if you go to https://www.epa.gov/recycle , the heading of the page is "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle". Plans A and B are reducing and reusing, respectively, but that doesn't play well with the American consumer.
Some plastic does get recycled. I don’t think I said otherwise. A common use for recycled plastic is building materials; a lot of fake wood used for benches, decks, etc. uses recycled plastic. This is a good use for it because, generally speaking, recycled plastic is lower quality than non-recycled plastic. So, turning recycled soda bottles back into soda bottles is hard (although it can certainly be done). It’s much easier to turn recycled soda bottles into a grey plank for use in a park bench because that plastic doesn’t have to be clear or particularly strong.
Post consumer plastic (for the most part) is unrecyclable, or at least must be well sorted and produces a downgraded plastic. Post manufacturing plastic is recyclable, and is reused. So it's possible, but it's disingenuous to imply these are the same things.
So I think part of the explanation here is mundane. Academics need to write papers to be successful. This is the kind of thesis that the target audience would like, so she chose it as a project. If you do a bunch of research and don't come up with much, then it's difficult to simply not write the paper. You can either write something really boring that no one will like, or you can try to fudge it without literally making stuff up. (Or you can make stuff up, I suppose, though that would be really bad.) She chose to fudge it. Fortunately/unfortunately for her, the thesis fit a popular news template and a bunch of news organizations ran with the story, so the paper didn't just fade into the ether but got the attention of people all over the world.
This was an interesting piece. I particularly liked Matt's restraint and specificity: this kind of thing invites overbroad generalizations and hobby horses. Matt does a good job of asking questions that he has time to address within the space of this essay.
One trivial detail that jumped out at me was the mention of naval paymaster Adam Jellicoe. The only other time I've ever heard that last name was in reading about World War I. Admiral John Jellicoe was First Sea Lord then -- I recall a lot of infighting and controversies involving him and Winston Churchill. I didn't think it could be a coincidence. A little digging turns up (I think) that the latter Jellicoe was a great-grandson of the 18th-century one.
The name is so unique and particularly associated with naval service that I've always presumed the Star Trek character was a deliberate nod to the World War I admiral. (John Jellicoe was the commander of the British Fleet at the Battle of Jutland, which is probably the most famous naval battle of WWI and in the top 10 of most famous naval battles of all time.)
Disclaimer: I'm a PhD academic. History of Technology is one of my specialties, and I know some of the people in this article personally, including have worked for Amy Slaton. My book on the early history of radiation therapy was (favorably) reviewed in T&C.
That out of the way, I (predictably) view this controversy a little bit differently. I think it is emblematic of the problem of claim-creep and "stakes" that has afflicted the humanities throughout my career. This is basically an article about a person who had an interesting story about an understudied group. It would have been an interesting article. But, and this is important, no one would have cared about it, no one on this site would have read it, and it would not have made the news.
So instead this historian reached for a bigger, juicier claim, but one for which the evidentiary basis was much weaker. That claim, as Matt points out, wasn't even that significant: Cort's invention did not make or break the Industrial Revolution, and Cort wasn't that significant of a character in history. But obviously the bigger, juicier claim worked like a charm. Even if Bulstrode's reputation is publicly damaged, she is now a big-name academic that people have heard of. Whatever she publishes next will draw more attention. People on Slow Boring can name her. She will get job interviews from committees that include someone sympathetic to her claims.
My entire career included a non-stop admonition for people to find "stakes" for their claims: your story about early radiation therapy is great and all, but who cares? And my personal take was that it was a dumb question. You can make some stakes claims about the trajectory of bioethics and human experimentation--and I do--but honestly, I don't think the story matters THAT much. I think interesting stories are interesting, and humans have been engaged in storytelling for as long as there are humans, and people read those little plaques on the side of the road and the eleventh John Adams biography for that reason, rather than because every story has world-altering stakes.
But in a world where the humanities are consistently denigrated in favor of STEM--an utterly ridiculous discussion that happens in the comments on this very forum with disappointing regularity even though THE BIGGEST UNDERGRADUATE MAJOR BY FAR IS BUSINESS--it shouldn't surprise you that humanities people, instead of going quietly into that good night, try to elevate the importance of their own thing. Of course claim creep happens. People want to feel relevant and important, and right now their relative position in academia has been systematically down graded. Of course they inflate their work.
I want to be clear: I think this is all dumb. I know a lot of STEM people in academia, since my world has crossed theirs in a few different ways (first my academic work, then my shift into nursing), and the truth is that most STEM academics also aren't doing much of "significance" to the world. That's never how anything works. It's useful to discover that a potential drug molecule doesn't work, but you aren't getting a Nobel, my friend. So I honestly wish we could quit playing Hunger Games on all this. You want to feel significant? I compress people's chests to keep them from dying. Go do that. But the truth is that even that isn't very significant, except to that one person and some people close to them.
So I guess I really think this is a story about people's desire to be important, and humans are funny about that sort of thing. Bulstrode won. Maybe she also lost. It's a stupid game, fueled by comments like the ones made in this very forum that imagine the importance of the humanities department even as the Business School collects more tuition money.
Closing professional note: I haven't read the article--I was kind of busy finishing up nursing school and starting my practice career--so I don't have strong sense of how lousy the evidence is. But, HAVING NOT READ THE ARTICLE, I would say that technological innovations often move through networks of people who see people doing a thing some way or hear a story from a guy who met a guy or whatever, so it's not a strictly implausible claim. But you also can't prove that kind of stuff, and if you are getting over your skis on a hunch, you should probably either drop the claim or just say, "I'm likely over my skis here, but my sense is that one possibility is X because I read Y," or similar. I had to do both for my x-ray and radium tech book because there were some juicy professional fights. Bulstrode kind of covered her tracks by being vague enough to not make strictly disprovable claim, but she should have been more honest about just saying that this is a fun and totally unprovable possibility. On the other hand, maybe then no one on Slow Boring would ever have heard of her...
I think you are correct that Matt is wrong about Bulstrode herself having a political motivation, but the real weird thing is why media cared about this story. Like, if Thomas Edison stole something from black people, obviously that's a story everyone cares about, because Thomas Edison is famous. But no one has ever heard of this guy, nor does anyone even particularly care about the iron industry, metallurgists, or Jamaica. So the only reason to amplify the story is political -- and, indeed, I think these motives strongly influence what stories people care about not just in media but in academia as well. Bulstrode is responding to the incentive environment in a way that is a rational decision for her career, but that incentive environment is structured by a sort of vague and ill-defined political motivations.
I don't think these motivations are even explicitly racial like some other commenters do. I think they are, instead, a strong desire to find stories which validate the overall left-wing frame of mind -- that power is suspect, the things you have been taught are good are often bad and oppressive, and that all history is in some sense awash in grave sin and evil, and only some nebulous break from the past in the future (perhaps as a literal revolution, perhaps as a mere intellectual one) will cleanse us.
I am reminded of the relatively recent effort to revise the importance of Greek philosophy and mathematics in intellectual history. Historians significantly more prominent than Bulstrode argue that the Athenians were in fact merely a polity that managed to create a relatively large leisure class through imperialism and hierarchical oppression, and that this was the fertile ground for philosophy, rather than the more traditional account (that democratic traditions, civic discourse, and a culture of reasoned public debate generated philosophy and mathematics). Often this is accompanied by claims about the lack of a 'Greek miracle' -- that there was, in fact, no real specialness to their innovations. There is, of course, some kernels of truth in all this, but it's almost invariably overstated -- the Athenians were hardly the first polity with a leisure class, and wildly diverse peoples from the Romans to Islamic scholars to Medieval Christians found their works worth preserving, studying, and reproducing. But this is the sort of claim that gets lots of attention from other academics because it feels implicitly validating of a particular worldview and eases some of the dissonance between that worldview and reality
While several news sources picked up that story in July, I think that was basically the flash in the pan that surrounds many initial publications. It was only later that the real hoopla began, when it was picked up by the debunkers and the defenders.
I think it can't be overstated how having even a single news article written about your paper conveys a greater degree of attention than basically anyone working in the humanities typically gets for a paper. Most of these papers are read by no one after being published.
In a NYT column last week, John McWhorter stated that he was aware of one person who has read the book he considers to be his best.
You realize Kenny is a professor of *philosophy*, right? I think he knows how unusual a news story is.
> But no one has ever heard of this guy, nor does anyone even particularly care about the iron industry, metallurgists, or Jamaica.
Necro'ing this thread to remark that Bulstrode is a *British* academic, and this story was picked up by the British press first. While Cort isn't exactly well-known here either, as a nation we're pretty invested in the whole "the Industrial Revolution started here" narrative (witness the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony), and we have a large Jamaican-descended population.
This is good perspective from the side of the academic. It totally makes sense. Thanks for sharing.
I think the journalists are being left off the hook here. The use of shallow social science research to support journalists political views and advocacy is a problem. This creates incentives for the “stakes” hunting. There is a symbiotic relationship between the “respected” academic advancing the body of knowledge and the journalist spreading it to a wider audience. Both parties benefit.
But the academics get motivated to find stakes that fit into journalistic narratives that will be interesting. White people bad and Black people good or marginalized is interesting (it has stakes). That’s a story that sells.
There is this kind of symbiotic relationship in sociology and the science and journalism. Where science said something not that interesting about trans people and then sociology “idea launders” it and then journalists picked it up as truth.
The relationship becomes so strong that the next thing you know the American Medical Association is polluted with politics. It becomes more concerned with the stakes of political narratives than the stakes of human lives.
I see a lot of opportunity for young journalists to double down on rigorously pursuing truth. Digging deep into social science claims. This is interesting to some. Jesse Singal does this kind of work when he’s not goofing around with Katie Herzog. He had a great back and forth with Adam Grant on color blindness related to the Coleman Hughes TED Talk. Good stuff. We need more of that. This is the best way to fight misinformation not the politicized misinformation community that 1/2 the country already does not trust. And they are right not to.
"I think the journalists are being left off the hook here."
Agreed and liked.
This is strange. Why am I getting so many "likes" just for saying that I liked a comment?
Is this some kind of weird f̶l̶y̶- positive feedback mechanism?
I liked your "Agreed and liked" post simply because you subsequently wondered why it was getting so many likes and I wanted to bandwagon.
"...I wanted to bandwagon."
I want to ban a lot of things; dwagons are low on my list.
Wabbits, on the other hand.
Well done, hopefully my keyboard doesn't die.
Damn my employer for deciding to issue a $150 keyboard for me to spew water all over.
Thanks, David R., glad to be of service.
"the humanities are consistently denigrated... it shouldn't surprise you that humanities people, instead of going quietly into that good night, try to elevate the importance of their own thing."
One other point: there's an entire Ph.D thesis for some enterprising sociology graduate student in 2080 about how much this became a vicious cycle of self-fulfilling prophecy.
Humanities academics were primed, after the 1960's, to rate "importance" in frankly revolutionary terms, so when they came under threat and had to justify their value, they set out to prove they could change the world, not that they could understand it.
That quest has consistently *further* discredited them in the eyes of ordinary people, which puts them under more pressure to justify their existence, necessitating still more heroic efforts to prove their value by trying to change and shape the narrative, further discrediting their fields, etc, etc. But at this point the academics are so deeply alienated from what normies, liberals, skeptics of all stripes, and donors want that they don't even understand how little credibility they have outside their own circles.
I can't remember the last time I saw a social sciences paper, the results/claims of which I actually *trusted* without substantial additional digging and verification. It's been a while. History is doing better than this, "X studies" way worse.
Frankly, "X studies" stuff is basically just a series of meditations on unfalsifiable metaphysical claims and has been for some time, if not from the start.
No paper in any subject should be trusted without substantial additional digging and verification. That’s not how the humanities work and that’s not how the sciences work. Most published research findings are false - but hopefully interestingly false, and with a non-trivial number that later turn out to be true.
This is true, but there are varying levels of credibility regarding initial claims IMO, and one of the only metrics by which non-specialists can gauge credibility is the trustworthiness of the field as a whole.
My assumption when I read a new paper in my own field is that composite materials are such a crapshoot that it may or may not be correct, but probably isn't completely made up or falsified.
My assumption when I read any social sciences paper which oh-so-coincidentally aligns with or supports an identitarian-left shibboleth is that it's made up from whole cloth and the methodology is complete bullshit. Even my half-assed, barely-remembered statistics and data analysis courses from a dozen years ago are usually sufficient to eviscerate the "Methods" section of a median social sciences paper.
I suspect a relevant factor here is also that while I know the differences between the journals named “Philosophical Review” and “Philosophia” and “Philosophies” and thus only pay attention to the first, and exceptional articles from the second, you as an outsider might see the median article in the second as the median article in the field, while as an insider you see the median article in the reputable journal as the median article in your own field.
I may be in an optimistic mood (all that vacation time!), but I think the number of academics who *intentionally fabricate* research is actually pretty small. Emphasis on both of those words--lots of people spin their own webs of BS and then fall into them.
That said, there are known to be some thorny cultural issues upon which I don't feel qualified to pontificate.
In general, I think it's a good thought exercise to ask the question, "Could we have arrived here with everyone involved acting in relative good faith?" I feel like the answer is more often yes than people are willing to* give credit for.
This is exactly my feeling and artfully put--I may steal the language word for word.
I think that's right, but (to try to put my original statement in different words) I think willful and knowing fraud is relatively rare. Researchers definitely invent nonsense and we ought to hold their feet to the fire for it, but I think the *malice* against good methodology is typically absent.
Nikhil Krishnan's new book on the Oxford philosophers of the early-mid 20th century quotes JL Austin reviewing The Concept of Mind: "Not only is the book stimulating, enjoyable and original, but a quite unusually high percentage of it is true, the remainder at least false." False as in interestingly false, as opposed to nonsense.
"Most published research findings are false"
I'm surprised nobody else mathematically-inclined in the comments leapt on this clause, because in mathematics (my field) this is not true. It is the rare research paper whose theorem is substantively false, in the sense of missing a hypothesis. Instead, a math paper is often filled with definitions that characterize only the few examples the author has tried, and do not add any meaningful generality to the craft. I think that's precisely the same etiology, just with a different final presentation.
I think they likely very well understand how little credibility they have among "normies," but push that aside because that is not what is rewarded in their profession. My husband was an economics professor for many years. Before getting tenure, academics have to focus on tiny slices of research so they can get it done quickly enough to have papers published before tenure review. Even after that, there are more rewards for a bigger quantity of academic papers in prestigious journals, no matter the topic. There was a professor in his department that was quoted with some frequency in mainstream publications like the NY Times, but that didn't count. This professor did have tenure, but he wasn't as valued or given bonuses because his research was more "public interest" stuff, so he moved on to another position.
I agree with a great deal of this. If I may make one quibble however, as the person who first brought the problems with the paper to public attention, the author was not vague and did make a number of claims that are not backed up by the sources she cited. Nor, in the six months since, has any new evidence for her claims been offered.
What concerns me most, however, is not the paper itself but the institutional response. The editors were one thing, but then the British Society for the History of Science decided to weigh in too. If you're interested, I wrote up my full thoughts on that response here (which funnily enough makes some of the same points as you did):
https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-how-to-be-a-public
You have a new subscriber (me). Hopefully a few others will also subscribe after reading the linked essay.
<shrug> Like I said: I haven't read the paper or read your piece or followed the controversy at all, even a little bit. I thought MattY said that the claims were vague, but maybe he was talking about the abstract?
Either way, I just don't think it's a story that matters all that much, as I wrote in my comment.
Yes, and it's one of the points I agree with and make in the piece too. (But it is a *lot* to read, so I do understand.)
I read the linked piece, and found it well worth the 15 minutes it took.
I'm sorry to hear that your critique was rebuffed by the major dailies, and dismissed by the editors. That is symptomatic of deeper systemic problems.
I agree with the last paragraph; the entire history of the early industrial revolution is "I saw X use Y for Z but I bet it would work for me to do A as well."
That's not theft, it's innovation. The whole problem for this particular instance is in the framing, both as "theft" and in the attempt to "center" the fact that slaves were involved in one location.
I think you're overplaying your hand on the "poor humanities professionals" angle, because people do this sort of stupid grandstanding regardless of status whenever their incentives push them in that direction, and the humanities departments of the world (EDIT: Anglosphere) have developed incentive structures which reward this precise behavior.
You're nuts if you think the STEM academics don't also do this, but the reality of research into physical processes means they get reeled back in by the fabric of the universe much more quickly than humanities' folks BSing does by academia's own immune system.
> but the reality of research into physical processes means they get reeled back in by the fabric of the universe much more quickly
https://xkcd.com/451/
"...they get reeled back in by the fabric of the universe much more quickly...."
On the other hand, Pons and Fleischmann enjoyed a multi-year run.
That's much more quickly than "never," as will likely be the case with the paper that Matt dredged up to discuss.
"..."never," as will likely be the case with the paper...."
Except that Matt's piece documents that the paper has already been debunked by Howes, Jelf, and others. Bulstrode's claim is dead. It was a shorter-lived phenomenon than cold fusion.
The paper is dead, the person will get tenure somewhere after publishing 6-8 more in the same style.
It was also a lot less interesting. P&F are well before my time professionally, but the claim would have been so staggeringly important (if true) that it probably got more than its fair share of debunking efforts. Really, nobody cares more than an eight-hour Substack article to discredit what Bulstrode wrote.
> That's not theft, it's innovation. The whole problem for this particular instance is in the framing, both as "theft" and in the attempt to "center" the fact that slaves were involved in one location.
It's worse than that. There's no reason to think that the slaves invented anything like the Cort process, and plenty of reason to think they didn't (Reeder spent the later part of his life trying to get recompense for the loss of his ironworks, but at no point did he try to get money for the process that Cort had supposedly ripped off). There's no reason to think that Cort was even aware of Reeder's ironworks.
Yea I went and read the thorough set of rebuttals which boil down to “all of this was made up from scratch and is all BS.”
Bingo. I completed a history PhD, and also witnessed this claim-inflation imperative. I’d only add something that is possibly obvious - that the drive to find such claims was relentlessly to the left. Very, very few people chased clout by looking for evidence that could debunk left wing shibboleths.
I would disagree with this; I did my doctoral work in Texas, at the University of Houston, so I encountered a lot of more conservative academics. Part of my doctoral work was literally funded by oil companies (Exxon and the defunct Tenneco). Everybody I met more or less plays the same game. If you want a good example, follow Tyler Cowan and his crew over at Marginal Revolution.
And I want to be clear: I like Tyler! I think he's a very smart guy! I was a religious reader of MR for many years. But it's pretty clearly often the same game.
I might have thrown in one “very” too many, but in the departments I was aware of and the AHA panels I saw, to say nothing of prize-winning books and articles, the balance was very heavily tilted toward those with left claim inflation. I’m sure there were and are conservative historians - heck, Newt Gingrich came from somewhere - but I’d be very surprised if a list of prize-winners reflected anything close to balance.
"Disclaimer: I'm a PhD academic...."
This ought to be top comment today.
(Not the "ought" of prediction, but the normative "ought" of "if we want a well-informed discussion of the real issues.")
If the Substack default sort was "New First" instead of "Top First" it would. They should make that change regardless.
"She did it on purpose to raise controversy because she knows how people get whenever you claim you found Secret Racism!"
yes, quite true
"...and this all the fault of those greasy nerds over in the nerd-stuff departments that everybody says are, like, sooooo important!"
*rolleyes*
No. I don't think it's the fault of the greasy nerds (of which I am, hilariously, now one). I think it is the fault of a lot of folks outside the academy who think that there is some kind of competition between STEM and the humanities when, in fact, Business is eating the world. Very little of what happens in terms of funding and importance in universities is a product of what people in universities think.
Business schools are usually raided at cash cows that fund the underperforming departments. For this reason, they don’t get caught up in the within university funding disputes as much.
From what I can see, the top undergraduate major still appears to be Business–by a lot.
You appear to have a bone to pick with Psych majors, though.
"I wouldn't call 135k vs 109k "a lot" mister."
135/109≈125%. Compared to the first two masses of a Zipfian distribution, sure, that's not very much; it suggests an exponent of ≈⅓. But compared to a uniform distribution that's quite substantial variation. Certainly, it's about a 2-standard-deviation difference assuming Poissonian sample error in the counts.
As a fellow academic, I agree with this well reasoned answer. These days in academics there are incentives to get media attention. A random well researched journal paper might get 5 citations and be read by 50 people, and that would be *well above average*. Which is to say, most academic work is very, very, very obscure. But obscure academic papers don't generate attention or fundraising. Controversy generates attention. Not only that, DEI is currently the hot trendy topic, so turning your random obscure history paper into something that generates DEI-adjacent media coverage in general has a lot of career related upside for an academic. Meanwhile the downside of being called out for making dubious claims is probably not as large as people would assume... most academics can "suggest" the letter writers for their tenure review, so all this back and forth, letters from the editor, etc., has shown the author exactly who is "on her side" and would write a favorable letter.
Looking at this as an outsider - are academic fields where most papers are read by 50 people economically justified?
"are academic fields where most papers are read by 50 people economically justified?"
Mathematicians teaching at universities are economically justified by the number of bums in seats in Calc 101. Their papers are likely to be read by their friends, and unlikely to lead to direct economic payoffs.
And that's good! They should keep doing pure research. Figuring out the world is one of the reasons for all the economic activity. We don't figure out the world just to make bucks; we also become a prosperous society in order to contribute to figuring out the world.
They are just as justified as an ecosystem of investment where the majority of start ups go bankrupt in a year. It’s not about the importance of the median creation - it’s about the mean, which is far higher than the median in these skewed contexts where individual huge hits can really be huge.
This seems like an instance in which the divergence between STEM and humanities contributions to EV seems likely to be particularly acute, however.
I *like* history (and history of science especially) but it's extremely difficult for me to see a way for the discipline (or for English) to create any kind of nontrivial increase in Total Factor Productivity.
I view the study of history as more akin to an insurance policy. The more we know about how other people fucked up, and the more widely that's taught, the less likely we fuck up the ongoing improvement in our quality of life by reprising the old errors.
It's life insurance, not a venture capital fund.
What I tell myself as a philosopher of science is that there’s just a longer and more unpredictable timescale here. Berkeley’s “The Analyst” didn’t change how math was done in his generation, but it was important for Riemann and Weierstrass a century later, whose work didn’t itself change engineering practice in the 19th century, but became important a century later.
"Berkeley’s “The Analyst” didn’t change how math was done in his generation....."
Right. And once the VCs gets their hands on "Tar Water," the biotech world is going to see some *sirius* disruption.
Academic productivity, like almost everything else, is defined by the power law. 80% of the research produced by academics is junk. 15% is decent and makes a modest contribution to the field. 5% (or less) will be outstanding and will have incredible value.
The problem is that (a) you really don't know which academics will produce that ~5% and/or (b) even if you could, you really can't run a university with just that ~5%, so carrying the other 95% is a cost so you can have that incredible 5%. And I'd say the ROI is in the end pretty good.
"And I'd say the ROI is in the end pretty good...."
Very good. Including, inter alia, the hardware you're viewing this on, the software that runs it, the infrastructure that brings it to you, and our host who writes these interesting essays. All brought to you by the modern American university system.
Comin' again to save the motherfuckin' day, yeah.
Oh, there's very little post-modern in the universities. It's a few loud frustrated people. The rest of the university is still doing what it always has.
I am a fan of high-quality academic writing and this proposition mostly makes sense, but I would like a clearer picture of what people have in mind when they speak of outstanding academic contributions that have incredible value, especially given the negative externalities of junk academic production.
To clarify, I'm not asking you *specifically* to justify that phrase (though if you're game, I'm certainly interested). Rather, I'd like to see people make the case for the value of academic production more clearly and more often when they call for more academic investment.
The obvious thing is STEM-related research as dysphemistic ably pointed out, so I'll just give a less obvious example:
https://oyc.yale.edu/history/hist-119
David Blight is a national treasure.
Beware a very spikey tail on that distribution...
Justified to whom? Universities, foundations, and think tanks can fund whatever they want. Government grants don't take into account economic justifications, only research justifications, because the government funding agencies already have their appropriated funds.
I don't know what you mean by "economically justified" but it is intellectually justified as a necessary cog in the knowledge ecosystem. Cf. my previous comment on the topic (can't find the link - how does one search for old comments?)
Fixed.
Others have given good answers already about the skewed distribution of citations and the fact that one does not necessarily know in advance how valuable a particular research project will be, but I would add that there is a tremendous push for academics to demonstrate "impact". And that's part of the problem in this case... The paper featured here has objectively made an impact! Whether it's a good impact is of course debatable.
Of course not, and the market is rendering that judgment with extreme prejudice.
But whether academic disciplines ought to require an economic justification is a different question.
"...this historian reached for a bigger, juicier claim, but one for which the evidentiary basis was much weaker."
This is why I concluded that there was no future in Motte Studies, and I switched to the growth industry of Bailey Studies.
Economic historian here. I agree in part. But it's not just "a juicy story" blown up. It's pretty obviously "you can make overwrought, no pun intended, claims if they support a stereotypical academic left position like Black People Were Actually Great Inventors in the 1700s and The Only Unique Thing About Britain in the IR was Colonization". It's not like there are academics making their name by, like, incorrectly claiming that Malcolm X stole his ideas from some white guy!
What's frustrating here is not Bulstrode's attempt. What's frustrating is that it was cheered on by many powerful people, including the editors in their embarassing note where they basically say they will publish stories rather than evidence if it can help the fight of anti-Blackness. It's a total joke and destroys the credibility of academia.
(I would also push back a little on Matt's claims that Cort is a minor figure in the IR. Not at all!)
Something that struck me about Bulstrode's paper (which I have read) is that she seemed weirdly contemptuous of the actual technology involved, not bothering to understand the difference between Cort's rollers and the sugarcane rollers made at Reeder's ironworks, and not even bothering to learn what "metallurgist" means. Ironworker is an honourable profession! You don't need to use a fancier-sounding title to show respect! And you certainly aren't showing respect by using the name of a completely different job!
I feel like an underappreciated part of history of technology is how much interesting insight and analysis you can develop by really going deep on actual physical processes and objects and how things work at a very specific level. The chapters of my book that I am unquestionably proudest of and think contain the most interesting insights involved me figuring out little nuances of how radiation therapists' own description of what their cold cathode emitters were doing fit imprecisely with what we eventually learned about how they actually function. Once you understand those little mental slips between how the thing worked versus 1) how people thought it worked and 2) basic flaws in human cognitive patterns, like how we struggle with perceiving magnitude of change, suddenly a bunch of stuff opened up.
I think, though, that people don't really get drawn to that kind of analysis. It's the worst kind of thing: once you figure it out and explain it to someone, it seems obvious, rather than "smart." Also, it doesn't fit well into the "stakes" paradigm. Maybe I'm just bad at that part. But I often found that discussion of the physical systems that totally excited me was only exciting to a specific subset of nerds, of which I guess I am one. I found cold cathode emitters to be a wacky and hilarious tech--and I bet that it would be a hoot to discuss rollers over beers with you--but it was definitely not a universally shared sentiment.
"I think, though, that people don't really get drawn to that kind of analysis."
Weird. I find that the coolest history. (But all my history education has been in history of science courses, so I make no claims towards typicality.)
Writing in my capacity as a "dad," I feel like you are giving into the haters by not intending the pun. Intending the pun, in my humble opinion, elevates almost any comment. (My wife disagrees.)
I was just about to say exactly this, but you beat me to it and said it far better. I did undergraduate in humanities (Rhetoric, god help me) and fled it for social science in grad school and this was very much my perspective as well. People in the humanities were painfully aware that nobody would pay attention to them if all they were doing was writing about a novel or about some tiny community of people in a distant country. So everywhere there was an immense pressure to prove that the humanities could be relevant to present day issues.
The problem is that textual analysis just isn't all that effective for understanding the social world. And since textual analysis is a study of the symbolic, you end up with a reliance on the symbolic as an explanation for pretty much everything. But symbolism just isn't that important. The entire CS community with some prodding from Github went through the arduous exercise of changing the primary branch of a repository from "master" to "main", and what exactly changed? Nothing as far as I can tell. It seems like all that energy could have been expended in a lot more productive ways, and probably would have been if the main academic driver behind it had come from the social sciences rather than the humanities. If I were a chair of a gender/ethnic studies department and I really wanted to produce research that helped those groups, I'd fire all the cultural critics and hire empirical sociologists, psychologists, historians, and economists instead. But I've been in academia, so I realize the chances of that are basically nil. Once a certain school of thought takes over a discipline, it's almost impossible to dislodge them. See macroeconomic theory.
It's too bad "interesting for its own sake" isn't a larger market.
I think you give a lot of good understanding of Bullstrode's motivations. When it comes to people STEM-shaming others though, I don't know how much of that is really about significance.
Mostly I see people saying other people should get STEM (or business) degrees not because that way people will change the world, but because that way people are most likely to earn enough income to justify them going to college and taking out student loans (especially if they went to one of those expensive, small private colleges that the people in the deepest debt always seem to have attended). Of course, that stereotype is not always true, philosophy degrees seem to lead to pretty good jobs a lot, but I think that's the context of the "more people should get STEM degrees and avoid MFAs" discussion more than societal significance.
Trump has shown how to successfully lie and bullshit a way through life: double-down on the lie when called on it. In doing so, one becomes a hero to some and villain to others, but either way one also becomes notorious and famous. I fear that more hucksters are realizing that all press is good press now, and these grifts won't stop anytime soon.
"if we still had Hollywood Squares...."
Did you know that Paul Lynde was actually George Santos' grandson?
> Closing professional note: I haven't read the article--I was kind of busy finishing up nursing school and starting my practice career--so I don't have strong sense of how lousy the evidence is.
I have read the article, and it is really, really bad. It uses lots of flowery language to draw attention away from the fact that even if she were correctly stating the contents of her 200-odd citations, none of them actually support her insinuations. However, she *doesn't* correctly state the contents of many of her citations, and in fact they actively undermine her. It's academic malpractice.
This has to make you wonder how much history, sociology, and "X studies" work is just total made up garbage that never gets challenged. I mean, this total made up garbage made headlines around the world, and people anchor their perceptions to the first thing they hear about something so it's likely that Cort's "theft" will become fact to some chunk of the population.
Also I think the motive at work is to deconstruct and deligitimize anything that Europeans did in history and claim/imply that any current disparities in wealth and social status are the result of the greed, rapine, and perfidy of Europeans/people of European descent.
It's like the academic flip side of the wacky made up Nation of Islam history of the world.
Edit: just to be clear I don't mean this in a creepy "how dare they not recognize how amazing Europeans are" way. History should record what happened, not what we think should have happened given our current priors
I think this motive is at work in all of the causes taken up by the leftmost part of the political spectrum. Just as the most extreme MAGA-types want a fundamental change to the USA -- back to a white, WASP majority culture -- I think the extreme left wants to turn the USA into Cuba.
The amount of work the average Cuban puts into making their society function, just one example is the effort put into car maintenance, is too much work for the average extreme leftist.
It's like generations of people somehow never listened to Holiday in Cambodia and thus never became self-aware
Given a lot of their reactions to mild inflation and the prospect of paying the service economy workers better, it seems more likely that, to the extent they want anything, Lebanon is more directionally accurate.
But again, and I think this is the case for most people... we're far less conscious of our own biases and blindspots than you're assuming, so let's not overstate the extent to which folks "want" grand outcomes like these.
Yes, thank you. This thread has invented a “leftist” boogeyman and imputed all manner of motivations to “them” awfully quickly, which, being a humanities-inflected social science academic myself, has started to feel...uncomfortable.
And I say that as someone who is decidedly uninterested in revolutions of any kind.
Don't get me wrong, I think this sort of "research" is indefensible, but to ascribe it to some grand conspiracy instead of an unfortunate collision of several disparate circumstances, some of which have afflicted other branches of academia, some of which have not, isn't accurate.
JCW has it close to right IMO; academia's incentive structures are fucked, university administrations are uniquely, almost maliciously feckless in pursuit of student enrollments/acceptance rates/social cache, and financial pressures and a glut of graduates trying to gain perch atop a way-too-small ledge make it worse.
I think my addition that post-1960's humanities professors and academics viewed the value of their discipline to be "make change" rather than "enhance understanding" is the crux of understanding why things are so dysfunctional today, but that's only the glue that binds this mess all together, not the entirety of the substance.
That's not an easy knot to unpick, simpler to find a villain.
100% agreed. I am, of course, agreeing with a take that flatters my understanding of my own profession, so, you know, but being on “the inside” I will say that in a time of austerity in higher education, most people are trying to survive.
The incentives are, indeed, fucked. People have been citing “getting tenure” as the motivation for publishing these kinds of polemical and low-quality takes, but the irony is that in the UK, where the author of the article (as well as I) works, tenure doesn’t exist. At all. The degree to which student recruitment _to my specific program(me)_ is tied to my employment is terrifying. “Maliciously feckless” doesn’t begin to cover it with regard to administrator attitudes towards enrollment. So anything you can do to make yourself indispensable- which unfortunately has nothing to do with being an effective educator or doing solid but uncontroversial research - is a very attractive option.
As for the “make change” culture, I totally agree - but I think what needs to be even further appreciated is that this is a culture that you are tossed into when you begin graduate school. You have no sense that there even _is_ an alternative paradigm. It took me a decade to feel confident moving away from the revolutionary mindset and feeling comfortable in my own scholarly skin - and I’m able to do it in part because I work outside the US, where the atmosphere is more chill.
I think these two groups are nowhere equal in size or political influence.
The extreme Maga-types punch above their weight electorally.
The extreme left punches above their weight culturally and academically.
Which is bigger?
MAGA is far far bigger than extreme leftists.
The comment said 'extreme MAGA'. I think 'extreme MAGA' is probably equal to 'extreme left'.
"MAGA-types," surely? The "extreme left" just has more influence in media, academia, etc.
The boundaries of who belongs in these groups are extremely fuzzy. MAGAs could be 1% of the population or everyone who voted for him in either election, for example. Far-left is also quite context dependent
Beacon Hill is probably one of the bluest spots in America.
I think you're right, but part of that project is "problematizing" the past to provide impetus for present day political programs to rectify past wrongs - and every point in the column of "see, see, all current advantage is the result of oppression and dispossession" is a shell in the barrage. So you end up with this sort of made up, politically motivated chum.
To flesh this out a little bit more, if the wish is for equality and the means to get there is political action, then it's necessary to declare the status quo social/economic order as illegitimate and in need of change. The US federal government is not built to provide social and economic equality, it's built to provide equality under the law for all individuals and flexibility for states to pursue their own policies. The Declaration of Independence is a poor document if you're looking for inspiration to create redistributive economic programs.
There are a bunch of legitimating elements of American history that need to be recontextualized or renovated if they're going to support this new project of equality.
The only way to do that effectively is to go back through all the legitimating factors and declare them illegitimate, one by one. It's what every revolutionary movement for social change has done - you tear down the statues, deface the temples, burn the histories, and sculpt/build/write new ones.
Academics have been working with limited success among the general public at this for about 130 years, maybe we could call this Late Stage Academic Marxism, where all the really good critiques have already been made, and people are left scrabbling at the margins for ways to make markets and business seem illegitimate or always tied to slavery and expropriation.
Late stage academic Marxism is a useful new term. I expect to see this meme repeated.
Except they don't usually seem especially happy when Asian people are successful. They're almost embarrassed by it
"Asian people are WhiTE AdJaCeNt"
Serious question- is anyone still saying this at the end of 2023? Because this sounds more like a 2020-era thing.
I’m sincerely asking - I’m not on social media, and I’m in the UK, where “Asian” means something very different (and would never be thought of as “white-adjacent”), so this feels like a dug-up relic of the feverish post-Floyd era. But maybe it’s still alive and kicking in the US...?
If it were so, I would be much more supportive of progressive/woke ideology than I am.
I don't want to paint with an overly broad brush here, #notallprogressives etc., but it seems to me that too often woke activists don't want to lift people of color up; they want to drag white people down. When I read stuff like "Punctuality and worship of the written word are hAllMaRKs oF WhiTe SuPrEmAcY," that does not fill me with confidence that "ah yes, this is how non-European people will get to enjoy wealth and power." Wealth and power are racist capitalist colonialist concepts, dontcha know?
If one doesn't believe wealth can be created, only taken, then their approach makes a perverse kind of sense; all the claims of habits and traits that lead to success are secretly just ways to box out certain people. Roderick Hills above already cited this piece from Noah that indicates this is an apparently not uncommonly held belief: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/nations-dont-get-rich-by-plundering
(to be clear, I'm not insinuating that Danny believes this!)
Given that in this thread social sciences academics like me are taking a beating, I appreciate the “not a broad brush approach.” Not all of us are woke ideologues, I assure you, and articles like the topic of this post upset us as much as they upset “the normals.”
I think I may have been using one of those massive calligraphy brushes in some of my other comments, I know this stuff isn't universal but it has felt universal in my interactions with both small liberal arts colleges and state universities (which have all been in New England, so I should remember that those experiences aren't representative of all experiences).
"If you wish upon a star..."
bears more relation to actually accomplishing that goal than whatever the hell these people are doing. Actually, it'd be less harmful for them to lay out trying to find shooting stars every night than writing this dreck.
I'm sure many leftists do want that. But, as Matt is pointing out here, this sort of work does nothing to make progress toward that goal. I think this sort of work is more about taking a certain kind of stance, the sort that people who put some version of the raised fist as their online avatar.
Yes. But the motivation to discover something new which *is* by definition upbending the received wisdom *is* at the heart of the academic endeavor of advancing human knowledge. *To the extent* that “Europeans invented everything” is the current view, challenging that would be good *provided it’s factually substantiated*. Trying and failing to do so would also be good as ot will give us greater confidence in the received wisdom. In either case the exercise is good provided it’s done honestly and rigorously.
In today's essay, though, the paper in question isn't really challenging ... well, much of anything it appears. It is inferring something while deftly avoiding crossing any ethical boundaries.
Can you imagine a similar paper be written & published today that similarly infers something negative about those Jamaican metalworkers?
I agree with the general sentiment, but this paper and the outlets that reported on it have all the intellectual rigor of an episode of Ghost Hunters or Ancient Aliens.
This is definitely the overall ideological agenda at work. The individual author was probably just trying to find something that would get her noticed. Claiming the invention was stolen from some other English guy would not be sexy. It’s the racial politics that make it sexy.
FWIW, studies that are made up garbage are probably over represented in news headlines and TED Talks, since made up garbage is going to be more exciting than studies based in reality.
This is also a good point, no outlet is interested in a study that says "chocolate has a lot of sugar and will make you fat" but everyone wants a "turns out chocolate is a healthy food!" story, and the latter gets way more traction.
"studies that are made up garbage are probably over represented in news headlines and TED Talks"
Great topic for a TED Talk.
There was a similar one of these recently with a paper purported to show that the plague in 14th century London hit black women hardest. Yes, you are reading that right. I think it is fair to simply operate under the assumption that this sort of scholarship is agitprop, or a weird sort of fiction fundamentally uninterested in serious research and verifiable reality.
Well, it killed one out of the two of them. That's a 50% death rate!
* numbers made up
Monday: "New study shows that many extreme outcomes are caused by small denominators!"
Tuesday: "Small denominators: a leading cause of unexplained death."
Wednesday: "Are you at risk from small denominators?"
Thursday: "Tucker Carlson talks about the heartbreak of small denominators"
Friday: "Alex Jones offers new proven cure for small denominators, available on installment plan!"
Saturday: "Donald Trump claims his denominators are very huge, and large"
IIRC the work wasn't even on the level of highly misleading statistical analysis. It was identifying skulls as belonging to people of African descent with a highly dubious methodology (read: modern day phrenology), thereby concluding that there were far, far higher numbers of such people in medieval London than there is any reason to believe was actually the case.
Lol, 14th century London had under 100,000 people and was a major trading center only in the context of the Channel and North Sea.
We know that "Moors" were regarded as exotic in Italy in the time period and their presence in Iberia was mostly as mercenaries in Grenadan armies, who would have been disproportionately Berber and not Sub-Saharan.
The only "black" people who *could* have been in London at this time would be a handful of Malian traders, and given the number of intermediaries involved in cross-Sahara and then trans-Mediterranean trade...
To be frank, our priors on "How many black people were in London in 1340-1380?" should be "zero."
Pretty much.
That's actually how I heard about the Bulstrode article and responses to it. The plague claim seemed so insane that I googled for responses and found one from Ian Leslie that was also about this controversy and so then I read more about this one.
Same with me but for the life of me I couldn't remember where I had read it or who the author was! I had been wracking my brain all day trying to remember. Thank you for reminding me! This was the piece:
https://www.ian-leslie.com/p/the-end-of-history?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
a lot of academic work in “hard” STEM actually has very similar problems to this paper.
ie it does something interesting, but is sloppy with evidence and argumentation, and then beyond that, insinuates extremely grandiose claims of impact that wouldn’t hold even everything were airtight.
My understanding is that the grandiose claims of impact is often by tacit convention limited to the Conclusion section and included out of obligation, subject to the essentially universal understanding by people actually reading the paper that it's there mostly because it has to be there.
this is true of the papers (keep it out of everything but abstract and conclusion) but the grandiose claims often make their way into university press releases and from there into the media.
It is absolutely a problem in STEM but I'd like to see the reasoning behind "with much more dire consequences."
To my mind, it is potentially a very serious problem that 10% or so of the population now automatically believes identitarian nonsense like this, disproportionately among young professionals and incipient elite-class members who are supposedly well-educated. That seems like more than a bit of a threat to the whole liberal program of equal protection under the law and all the fruits thereof. It also opens the door to a reactionary movement which occasionally successfully skins a normie and wears the skin through the door and then does equally or more batshit things while pointing at left-illiberalism as a defense.
Whereas the STEM fields just piss away a bit of grant money disproving various bad research long before it ever reaches the "widespread application" stage.
Not sure what your reasoning is, curious to see.
The argument would generally be that you take the field of research in the wrong direction for a long time chasing the wrong thing. Like Alzheimer's and beta-amyloid*. You're putting off different research that could come up with a cure for years or decades.
*Note that I haven't read up on this, it's something I remember seeing come out a while back but haven't looked into further.
Fair points on the peanut bit and the vitamin D, though I'm unclear on the amounts involved in the latter. Not seen much on the first front?
A few years ago some academics proved this by writing a bunch of sociological papers using made-up garbage and jargon, and got a lot of them published in academic journals.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/new-sokal-hoax/572212/
None of them were published in reputable journals, except the one where the authors actually fraudulently made up data that supported the strange claim they pretended to be making.
That was the entire point of the exercise: make stuff up and try to get it published. It sometimes worked.
But peer review isn't designed to catch out-and-out fake data; that's what replication is for.
This isn't the Sokal affair. This was an off-brand imitation where they got some things rejected by journals and found lower-tier journals that would publish it, and then claimed that this was the same effect that Sokal found.
It’s interesting, I didn’t see this headline anywhere and wouldn’t have known about it at all if I hadn’t seen Matt’s column today. Guess I’m just not that plugged in.
It was on NPR in August:
https://www.npr.org/2023/08/03/1191989712/henry-cort-stole-his-iron-innovation-from-black-metallurgists-in-jamaica
And note the explicit claim "stole", which the abstract refrained from making.
I clicked over to that and interestingly, Bulstrode is quoted saying "It's theft, in fact."! So clearly she decided to run with it.
"I clicked over to that...."
Thanks for checking. I would have done that myself, but it felt too much like research into primary sources.
I myself decided to try something new and read something before opining indignantly on it!
"...read something before opining indignantly on it...."
That would be an existential threat to the takes industry. It's like you're advocating for the literal genocide of takes-artists! Literally!
I stopped listening to NPR regularly a while ago so maybe I would have picked up on it a few years ago.
Albeit more like "refrained."
The original story was massive on Twitter, which is how I would guess it came to Matt's particular attention.
That’s interesting - I’ve only heard about it in the current wave of debunkings.
That's also why he got picked, *because* nobody had ever heard of him. You couldn't make a claim like this about, e.g. Watt, or Bessemer, because both of those mens' histories are well known and studied, and anything like "copied the ideas of black plantation workers" would have come out long ago. But some jabroni, well, say whatever you want! If enough people repeat it, then what you said becomes the truth...
This is a fair point, IIRC I saw it because Google News feed served it to my phone.
I don’t think this story gives any reason to believe that *any* journal article is made-up garbage. You’ll note that Matt didn’t actually provide any evidence that anything in the original article was made-up - it’s only the media that made the made-up claim, while Matt only insinuated that the original article might have made something up. (Though actually he was pretty explicit that the original article just made some minor observations and juxtaposed them in an interesting way designed to be misread - it didn’t make anything up.)
Near the beginning of the article is this claim: "Between 1783 and 1784, British financier turned ironmaster, Henry Cort, patented a process of rendering scrap metal into valuable bar iron that has been celebrated as one of the most important innovations in the making of the modern world.Footnote5 Here, the concern is the 76 Black metallurgists in Jamaica, who developed the process for which Cort took credit."
Does it? Nothing here suggests this is “total made up garbage”. On the contrary, even in the abstract the author took care *not* to state anything factually incorrect or unsubstantiated. It suggest that there may have been a motivation as misleading marketing to bait careless or unethical journalists. If so- it worked. But that’s actually radically different from “made up garbage”. The latter would have been much easier. There is in fact a huge *agreement* by all about what the facts are. You should come out of it with greater epistemically confidence in the radical sense, less so about our media discourse.
A really small chunk of the population, I'd say.
Degrowthers and such do this. It's called idea laundering.
So I can provide some context as an economic historian. There has been a movement among some revisionists to assert that all the progress of capitalism is solely due to slavery. This "New History of Capitalism" movement asserts that all the material improvements from the first wave of industrialization were extracted from the enslaved persons. Paul Rhode (U Mich) and Alan Olmsed (Davis) have written extensively on the flawed methods and outright fabrications this ideological movement has thrown out there. It's one reason many historians have issues with the NYT's 1619 Project.
The political project of Bulstrode and company is to reorient a "racial hierarchy," and erase reason, rationalism, and 'empiricism' as cultural values and replace them with a new power hierarchy. By deconstructing narratives that British innovators like Henry Cort contributed to material progress, it creates room for a new paradigm.
My guess it is some weird postmodern-pseudo Marxist worldview they wish to empower, but that is my guess. Lots of times these types of people have very incoherent and contradictory beliefs about society and the world.
And as Matt has written before, the idea that slavery created modern prosperity is kind of perversely an argument in favor of slavery, leaving aside the more important issue of it not being true.
And the thing about the postmodern pseudo-Marxist worldview is that the boring old regular Marxist worldview has the labor theory of value RIGHT THERE to make this legible.
But current academia is at war against legibility just as surely as colonialism or whatever.
It’s a mistake to say current academia is at war against anything. Some segments of academia are - but you’ll note that many other factions of academia are at war with them. Just look at groups like Marxists and critical theorists and decolonial theorists, who are at constant war with each other!
Current academia is a just a pile of perverse incentives, austerity, and arbitrary decisions from a professional managerial class who don't value learning.
I feel bad for adjuncts.
What period of academia do you see as being better?
I think that academia of 40-50 years ago was much better in most respects. You had a much higher percentage of tenured and tenure-track faculty (more ethical hiring allowing for better research). You had much lower tuitions. You had greater political diversity and free speech climate in most places. I suspect that at least in elite institutions the average undergrad received a more rigorous education, but I may be wrong on that last point (one would really have to research this last question).
Of course some things were worse. I think sexual harassment and exploitation was more rampant, but that wasn't so much an academia thing but academia-as-part-of-society thing.
"You had a much higher percentage of tenured and tenure-track faculty (more ethical hiring allowing for better research). You had much lower tuitions....Of course some things were worse. I think sexual harassment and exploitation was more rampant, but that wasn't so much an academia thing but academia-as-part-of-society thing."
I wonder about this, sometimes. The usual claim for why university finances are so tight is that administrators are taking a much larger portion of the pie. IMHO, Matt's argument (there are proportionately fewer young people to educate, so the competition is harsher) is more convincing, but suppose for a second that administrators were indeed the cause. Then I think we would have to conclude that efforts to eliminate sexual harassment etc. in the university has directly caused the decline in tenure track jobs and the higher tuitions.
I find that conclusion alarming. I'm glad I don't believe in the hypothesis.
So, here's the thing - I don't think there was actually more political diversity. I just think there were more older professors who registered Republican in 1955, but hadn't voted for a Republican since Nixon.
Like, from what I've read, most of the shift in professor self-IDing isn't among the humanities, but among STEM, where scientists who were pretty much, along with businessmen, the prototypical Republican, have moved to the Democrat's over the past few generations because of educational polarization, and well, what the GOP has become.
You also had COLAs. Those disappeared with the Great Recession.
The period where folks got tenure for being good teachers and where publication expectations were not outrageous. Like 20 years ago…
Totally different professions?
Do you honestly believe that somebody who knows how to explain calculus can also prevent two motivated eight-year-olds from swordfighting with colored pencils whilst a third attempts to spray glue everywhere?
Strong, "whoever wins, we lose" vibe in the ending there!
Why think someone wins?
It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game!
Admins.
My hottake: conservatives are wrong that critical theory is some sort of threat to society...but it is still wrong and largely bad (Fanon is largely about the intellectual justification of heinous acts, Foucault is all over the map and largely relies on Motte and Bailey arguments etc) Like Jungian theory its probably best to be put on the shelf and left there as another interesting, but failed, ideological project.
"My hot take: conservatives are wrong that critical theory is some sort of threat to society...but it is still wrong and largely bad"
I think the only "hot take" part of this sentence is the claim that it is a hot take.
What I suspect Matt knows but doesn't come out and say is that there is a clear political project at work within this research and throughout various parts of academia. It links things like the 1619 project, new histories of capitalism, economic history, and so on. The general point is that the industrial revolution and capitalism originate in colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade, and that western Europe owes its wealth, economic, and technological success to the conquest, exploitation, and enslavement of people around the world. This view, debated within history and economics, is taken up as a foundation for some humanities scholarship in other fields.
Yup.
The baseline problem is that the European countries that most explicitly developed their wealth from slavery were Spain and Portugal; and were hardly leading lights by the 20th century. Britain developed a lot of wealth from overseas colonies but the Industrial Revolution is what really generated it. And in the U.S. the north was obviously much wealthier than the south as a whole. And the Industrial Revolution is what really generated wealth. So you’re stuck with trying to explain how slavery was the foundation for the Industrial Revolution.
Which it simply wasn’t.
It gets worse. Slavery is basically a universal fact oof life in all societies before the industrial revolution. Not necessarily chattel slavery let alone racialized chattel slavery, but some form of coerced labor is found just about everywhere.
I thought this paper tried to find an interesting third way between the absolutists on either side:
"Our results do not suggest that slavery was essential for Britain’s industrialization; nor do they demonstrate that its effects were largely irrelevant. Instead, our quantitative results mark a middle ground, with slavery significantly accelerating growth and structural change at the height of the Industrial Revolution. The largest impact, according to our model, is on the geography of economic activity and the distribution of income, with towns and cities that are exposed to slave wealth growing faster. As a result, slavery wealth shifted the locus of economic activity to the North and West of the country, and it boosted the income of capitalists and workers at the expense of landowners."
https://www.princeton.edu/~reddings/papers/SBIR_Paper.pdf
I don’t see that as on point though. That local economic conditions (including slavery or its absence) would affect the parameters of the IR in an individual area (and its winner or losers) doesn’t seem controversial. The question is whether the IR was in any way contingent on slavery (or colonial exploitation). No.
The story of Scottish sheep and the physics of steam is what it is.
In general these contemporary stories all seem to involve confusing potential relationships or correlations with contingency in order to claim an outcome that is only justified by contingency.
“ Instead, our quantitative results mark a middle ground, with slavery significantly accelerating growth and structural change at the height of the Industrial Revolution. The largest impact, according to our model, is on the geography of economic activity and the distribution of income, with towns and cities that are exposed to slave wealth growing faster.”
Didn’t Britain stop the slave trade and emancipate slaves in the West Indies just as the Industrial Revolution got going?
Correct. It appears they only use data before 1833 when Britain abolished their slave trade.
Yeah, the ideological agenda seems pretty straightforward: to undermine the achievements of western civilization (in science, governance, arts, etc.) by claiming they were stolen or arose from slavery and/or imperialism. Viewed charitably, it’s a way of restoring dignity and pride to the conquered peoples and their descendants. There are certainly instances where this is true, but also a lot of bullshit historic claims. I recently had a conversation with someone who claimed that the Europeans learned democracy from the Incas (an absolute monarchy).
My hunch is they mixed up the Iroquois and Inca, which is also wrong but closer to true (I've seen people say that American federalism was likely influenced by Iroquoisan government).
I remember learning about this in elementary school in a very red state. Not exactly forbidden knowledge or anything. Glad these PhDs are half-discovering elementary school curriculum
>> I've seen people say that American federalism was likely influenced by Iroquoisan government
I haven't really studied American history so perhaps there is something to it but I am very very very skeptical. There is very little reason to believe this would be the case and eery reason to believe people would want it to be the case.
I think we had this discussion a couple weeks back. My conclusion from my *very brief* reading was that the founders as well as intellectuals in Europe were at least aware of the Iroquois and their form of governance. It's a gargantuan, unjustified, and motivated leap from there to "that's where democracy comes from" of course.
The first questions I will have should I approach this is how precisely we even know what the Iroquois form of government was, and relatedly, what's the guarnatee that what we're seeing isn't simply European projections of European ideas on the Iroquois, i.e. a "mirrorr" effect rather than any form of genuine inspiration.
A quite erudite point professor!
The founders from NY and PA might have had some direct contact with the Iroquois but the other founders, the Virginians in particular would have heard things 2nd and 3rd hand.
It could have been an influence, but one among many.
The Articles of Confederation arguably were influenced by a similar Iroquoian document (which in turn may have been based on British models).
But of course we ended up with the Constitution.
Not a document per se but rather the details of the Iroquois confederacy. This argument is over a 100 years old btw…but relates more to the idea of a dozen loosely affiliated states with a common foreign policy.
Right. Like maybe they used an example close at hand or maybe they used an example from classical education (which would have been most). The claim is that they used the example close at hand without an attribution footnote.
Ahh, yes that would make more sense at least.
Yeah it’s basically a way to denigrate capitalism in favor of whatever form of anarcho-communism that is being pushed by the academy. They have a real problem which is that if you look around capitalism and free markets have had a bunch of success stories across Asia and Europe (with some obvious problems that could be addressed with boring policy changes). If you want to argue for a glorious revolution, you need to knock those success stories down. The current popular academic argument is that it wouldn’t have happened without slavery/idea theft/whatever so we should tear the whole thing down root and branch. I’m not sure the argument works quite as well as they think (is South Korea going to roll back the last century of progress because you made some argument about slaves in America) but it gets them tenure and isn’t that the most important thing really?
I am a social sciences academic. I personally know literally no anarchists, communists, or anarcho-communists.
Look, I get what you mean - the type you’re describing absolutely exists - but the way you say “they” and attach it to broad generalizations starts to feel annoying, and then uncomfortable. I am appealing to our shared Chris-ness for a bit of perspective here.
I should also note that historians love just-so stories, that history would have been completely different except for this Just One Thing. It’s Great Man Theory (which they claim to hate) but in another form. ACOUP recently made the argument that the Industrial Revolution would have basically never happened except for a very specific set of circumstances around coal mining in Britain. Oh really? Like, never? I guess it’s the STEM in me but I feel like humanity would have figured out steam engines eventually.
I thought this Roots of Progress piece about developing the steam engine was really neat.
https://rootsofprogress.org/steam-engine-origins
I dunno, this seems like an overreaction in the opposite direction.
I am sure there's some timeline where a bunch of folks are discussing industrialization under the Latter Song and someone says, "I'm sure that if they hadn't turned public hydrology works into major sources of industrial power under the influence of noted bureaucrat-engineer [NAME], it wouldn't have taken long for someone to figure it out."
Never is too strong a word, but to assume history would follow an even vaguely similar arc at all in the absence of specific innovations occurring for specific reasons at specific times also seems too strong a presumption.
"What I suspect Matt knows but doesn't come out and say is that there is a clear political project: ...western Europe owes its wealth, economic, and technological success to the conquest, exploitation, and enslavement of people around the world."
That's because he already said it in https://www.slowboring.com/p/slavery-was-bad.
>> humanities academia has a serious problem with allowing ideological valence to be substituted for truth
That's certainly a popular impression. But is it actually substantiated in any rigorous study? Esp. relative to non-humanities fields?
THPacis is not moving the goalposts. Let me translate: “your narcissistic belief that your impressions of the world constitute truth does not give you epistemic privilege here.” In other words, you’re committing exactly the same fallacy as the humanities academics you so despise.
By the way, that group includes me. Yes, there are ideological hacks in this business. Yes, some of them are rewarded for spouting ideological nonsense. But your bigoted statements - sorry, “pithy aphorisms” are officially starting to piss me off.
Thanks for writing this, Matt. While I saw the original news stories, I had been completely unaware that there were serious critiques of the underlying paper.
That said, I feel like saying, "there isn’t a discernible political agenda" to this incident is being extraordinarily generous to both the academics and the journalists involved. I mean, Slaton and Saraiva's response almost explicitly endorses, "who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present, controls the past" as editorial policy. (Yes, they denounce outright fabrication of sources, but can anyone believe them at this point?) And, as I've commented before, there's a fraction of American journalists who seemingly sit down at their freshly opened word processors at least subconsciously asking themselves, "How can I foment a race war today?"
Yeah seen through the lens that there seems to be a part of the most extreme "social justice" movements that really tickle the religion part of the brain, and that a huge amount of politics is just in group signaling and not actually caring about any real life outcome, what's going on here comes into focus pretty quick.
I just generally put anything like this is in the "big if true" bin, i.e., "I think you're lying but decline to say that outright because the social cost, right or wrong, is too high".
It's turned out that way so often that it's the safer assumption.
Paul Ryan's favorite band!
You simply must read Second City Bureaucrat.
https://secondcitybureaucrat.substack.com/
His beat is group narcissism and lately, deep state/bureaucratic infighting. But your words "trying to replace a dying white monoculture with not an emerging multicultural society but a system of ethnic competition mediated through political, economic and cultural institutions..." are basically his central thesis. He's quite a good writer IMO.
On a very different note, did you ever read WhoIsIOZ, or The Last Psychiatrist? Amazing blogs from when blogs were blogs, 2007-2012ish. I recommend finding archives if you haven't.
IOZ and TLP aren't really connected to anything from today, just excellent social commentary. Too bad they both called it quits. IOZ now writes a lot of hohum whatever under his real name, but he used to be fire. TLP disappeared, I don't know if he died or got sick of it or found something better to do, but I love going back to read his old stuff.
This relates somewhat to FDB's now infamous essay about naming the current social justice movement. This is about much more than the Cort controversy. If you boil Matt's critique down many things fall under it. Journalists and academics have been engaged in a wildly unpopular ideological project with no actual stakes or goals. I don't know if you call this wokeness or what but it's very silly and it's been driving people who aren't swept up in it bananas for years. It's the primary reason substack has gotten so large.
The politics here--perhaps in Bulstrode's paper, DEFINITELY in the editors' note defending it--is simple assertion of elite dominance over the discourse. Who are you, plebe, to tell us that our new historical accounts are inaccurate because they don't track your "facts"? We, the academy, the EXPERTS, will tell you what history is and is not.
I think the ideological agenda here is bordering on something that feels like "Academic gatekeepers are having a hard time pushing back against bullshit that's framed in certain progressive terms." It seems here that the article was just a bad article, perhaps motivated by one individual's poor framing and personal drive to publish articles--hey articles are important! But the broader failing is no one was able to say "This is a bad article" without falling into an academic trap of sounding insensitive on racial issues.
The gatekeepers are complicit! They invite, welcome, and champion this stuff.
Also, part of the problem is that people an all sides of this internet frenzy have incentives to inflate the importance of one article hinting at one claim that may not be well supported.
There's no hinting. Commenter Stephanie even quoted you a relevant passage which says "Near the beginning of the article is this claim: "Between 1783 and 1784, British financier turned ironmaster, Henry Cort, patented a process of rendering scrap metal into valuable bar iron that has been celebrated as one of the most important innovations in the making of the modern world.Footnote5 Here, the concern is the 76 Black metallurgists in Jamaica, who developed the process for which Cort took credit."
That directly states that Cort took credit for someone else's innovation. That's not a hint at a claim, that's a very direct claim that is not challenged or questioned or investigated by any of the media covering the paper originally, which is the topic of this post, not the paper itself.
It must be some consolation to Cort’s ancestors that he threw the first brick at Stonewall.
Descendants, dammit.
I thought you were going for a "looking down from Heaven" kind of thing.
Well as long as we’re talking about claims that can’t be supported with evidence.
Dysphemistic posted this link to the NPR story and it's an interesting listen. The reporters repeatedly use the word "stole" to describe what happened, and Bulstrode agrees with it. So while the abstract may have been more oblique, the researcher is definitely not shying away from the media's portrayal of the findings. Just for what it's worth:
https://www.npr.org/2023/08/03/1191989712/henry-cort-stole-his-iron-innovation-from-black-metallurgists-in-jamaica
I agree with Matt that it's a bit sad because it overshadows what is an actually interesting story about the history of metallurgy in Jamaica.
Yep. And she does the same thing here, claiming it is "arguably one of the biggest thefts in the history of intellectual property" before citing her own paper. https://theconversation.com/slavery-stole-africans-ideas-as-well-as-their-bodies-reparations-should-reflect-this-212128
Henry Cort should be called out for taking credit away from the animated community, as Peter Onions is clearly the name of a cartoon character.
How do you know if, for example, climate change is vastly overstated or an existential threat if you can’t believe motivated scientists - everyone is not going to be able to do a deep dive on every subject. Remember recycling and Earth Day and all that? Didn’t it turn out recycling was basically shipping things to foreign landfills? And yet this wasn’t reported for decades? And we’re still doing recycling theater?
I believe in climate change because I’m not seeing the things I’d expect if it were made up.
First, temperature readings are changing. Those are pretty easy to quantify, and for lots of people to check. If the prevailing story was bogus, I’d expect to see the same kind of pile-on this paper got. Also, I wouldn’t expect to see industries making new investments based on climate change (agriculture, flood insurance, e.g.)
Consistent with this are shifts in the argument, as conservatives have almost all moved on from saying “it’s not happening” to either “humans aren’t causing it” or “yes humans are causing it, but taking carbon out of the economy is too expensive or it’s futile because China and India won’t join us.”
There’s also a lot of evidence that a credible scientific debunking of global warming would make its originator very, very rich and famous. Would nobody break ranks for that? There’s more of a truth-seeking, ornery empirical culture in the sciences than in humanities. I’d expect to see some credible climate scientists break ranks, not just a few cranks operating outside their specialities.
Science isn’t a process that makes the average individual paper state only true things - it’s a process that creates incentives for people to say lots of interesting things with bits of evidence for them, most of which are false and under supported, but some of which end up accumulating more evidence as further papers accumulate. It’s only the process writ large that is at all reliable, but it works by being built out of mostly unreliable individual publications.
I wish I could mega-like this comment into the stratosphere.
Perhaps, but I have trouble seeing how that process is at work when papers are cited more because they make interesting claims rather than because of their methodological validity or because speculations made in Discussion sections can be cited as if they were tested and proven in the paper. It’s more like Gresham’s law at work.
"Didn’t it turn out recycling was basically shipping things to foreign landfills?"
Depends on what's being recycled. A lot of plastic used to be shipped overseas (mostly to China), but China stopped accepting it a few years ago, and now much of it ends up in domestic landfills.
Plastic is notoriously hard to recycle and sensitive to contamination. Glass gets recycled in various ways (e.g. [1]). Paper is pretty straightforward and accepting of contamination; it's even ok to recycle greasy pizza boxes [2]. Metals are so straightforward to recycle that I won't link anything.
What a lot of people get wrong is the connection between recycling and climate change: recycling isn't all that important when it comes to global warming. (Can be useful, but it's pretty far down the list of things that can help.) Recycling was historically more about keeping things out of landfills (the Earth Day you remembered), and the global warming angle has been tacked on more recently. Even then, recycling is most of all a feel-good thing. It has always been plan C. E.g. if you go to https://www.epa.gov/recycle , the heading of the page is "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle". Plans A and B are reducing and reusing, respectively, but that doesn't play well with the American consumer.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LR9FtWVjk2c
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lsC0aXyY6g&t=335s
Some plastic does get recycled. I don’t think I said otherwise. A common use for recycled plastic is building materials; a lot of fake wood used for benches, decks, etc. uses recycled plastic. This is a good use for it because, generally speaking, recycled plastic is lower quality than non-recycled plastic. So, turning recycled soda bottles back into soda bottles is hard (although it can certainly be done). It’s much easier to turn recycled soda bottles into a grey plank for use in a park bench because that plastic doesn’t have to be clear or particularly strong.
Post consumer plastic (for the most part) is unrecyclable, or at least must be well sorted and produces a downgraded plastic. Post manufacturing plastic is recyclable, and is reused. So it's possible, but it's disingenuous to imply these are the same things.
So I think part of the explanation here is mundane. Academics need to write papers to be successful. This is the kind of thesis that the target audience would like, so she chose it as a project. If you do a bunch of research and don't come up with much, then it's difficult to simply not write the paper. You can either write something really boring that no one will like, or you can try to fudge it without literally making stuff up. (Or you can make stuff up, I suppose, though that would be really bad.) She chose to fudge it. Fortunately/unfortunately for her, the thesis fit a popular news template and a bunch of news organizations ran with the story, so the paper didn't just fade into the ether but got the attention of people all over the world.
This is not the wierdest academic controversy of the year; it is the most typical.
Right. The strange part about Matt's article is he didn't contextualize it with the fact that this stuff has been going on constantly for years
The weirdest part is that it became a honeypot for people in the media like Matt.
A couple more relevant links to Howes, whose newsletter is excellent:
https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-how-to-be-a-public?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2 - responding to the Slaton and Saraiva defense of the original paper.
https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-does-history-have?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2 - "Does History have a Replication Crisis?" which gets at some of the large issues in play here, particularly when mass media interacts with academic history.
I'm just a random reader, but I highly recommend Howes' work!
Thank you very much!
This was an interesting piece. I particularly liked Matt's restraint and specificity: this kind of thing invites overbroad generalizations and hobby horses. Matt does a good job of asking questions that he has time to address within the space of this essay.
One trivial detail that jumped out at me was the mention of naval paymaster Adam Jellicoe. The only other time I've ever heard that last name was in reading about World War I. Admiral John Jellicoe was First Sea Lord then -- I recall a lot of infighting and controversies involving him and Winston Churchill. I didn't think it could be a coincidence. A little digging turns up (I think) that the latter Jellicoe was a great-grandson of the 18th-century one.
The name also rang a bell for me, but as a Captain in the Federation in Star Trek (and with the e dropped in the intervening 350-400 years):
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Edward_Jellico
Wonder if Star Trek captain is a reference. Anybody know how the Sea Lord felt about four shift rotation?
The name is so unique and particularly associated with naval service that I've always presumed the Star Trek character was a deliberate nod to the World War I admiral. (John Jellicoe was the commander of the British Fleet at the Battle of Jutland, which is probably the most famous naval battle of WWI and in the top 10 of most famous naval battles of all time.)
I immediately noted the name as well.