Your IP addresses have been logged and sent to Feminist Philosophers
Just kidding. Enjoy the April Open Thread.
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309 thoughts on “Your IP addresses have been logged and sent to Feminist Philosophers”
Just a warning to the threadmasters: IF you threaten this AND I am mentioned again and again (as is with the posting previously), people will start to think u r “FemTrolling”! Why is this word used so many times? Also why did I still get talked about in the other post even though I demanded not to feed the pretender(s) anymore?
These and much more I hope can be answered this evening.
Haha, it would work, too. “Hey, I was just visiting to, uh, see all the misogyny to help the good sisters fight the patriarchy! Wow, what misogyny it was! I’m a victim, see? Group hug! Everyone start petitioning the APA to help me through the crisis of viewing the metametametablog!”
Ha. One of my female friends in grad school, speaking of our local rampaging feminists, once told me: they merely hate you as the enemy…*me* they see as an apostate…and that’s waaaaay worse…
So you may have some camouflage…but if you *do* get found out…you’re toast my friend
I guess Leiter’s attempt to compile a ‘dossier’ on Lance’s bullying has come to nothing. Seems pretty likely we would have seen it by now. Too bad. I was curious as to what Leiter was willing to count as bullying that he did not engage in himself on a thoroughly regular basis.
Of course nothing would come of it. Leiter is a little bitch who loves to use his huge platform to actually bully people (blast from the past anyone). It’s why I am always glad to jump on whatever bandwagon that seeks to minimize his participation in the profession.
ok I will give you that “Justice Whineberg” would be funny, but it has drowned in the sea of all the others. there is nothing more unfunny than a whole string of them in a sentence. stop trying so hard guys.
“Hey, I was just visiting to, uh, see all the misogyny to help the good sisters fight the patriarchy! Wow, what misogyny it was! I’m a victim, see? Group hug! Everyone start petitioning the APA to help me through the crisis of viewing the metametametablog!”
Group hugs are out. Some “unemployed meta-bro” might accidentally lance your kukla.
It oozes from everything Catherine Pojman writes that she thinks it is good when innocent people die due to bullying and false accusations. It’s not important to cite examples and evidence for this belief, let alone make analogies that are relevantly similar.
And this case relevant to philodaria’s preponderance of the evidence posts, because…. if only he had been facing a beyond reasonable doubt standard instead of a preponderance of evidence one?
Oh wait, he was.
Way to try to exploit a young man’s suicide to try to make an unrelated point. You’re disgusting.
I’m sorry but it is actually spelled “Katherine” Pogin. For the dense bros who want to be philosophers, that’s Kathryn but with an “i” and an “e,” not a “y” without an “e.”
I’m sorry but Cathryn has ALREADY had MORE than a bit of fun with this case. After all, this case is exactly what the FP posts are about. I mean just read them. She’s writing about this case – literally, the FP post mentions this case multiple times.
ALSO faced a beyond reasonable doubt standard, because ALSO a criminal complaint, and “What Mayfield did not know as he mounted the bridge that morning was that police had cleared him of wrongdoing.”
…i.e. the system worked.
but keep on misrepresenting real tragedies to smear a philosophy blogger. you’re clearly on the moral high ground here.
“Blogger”? I’m sorry but the person in question is much more than a blogger. Ever seen Lord of the Rings? Ever seen the Eye of Sauron? Basically if you combine feminism with the Eye of Sauron you have this person. The Ring of Power is Title IX.
Frodo is…
Philippe Lemoine.
David Wallace would have gone with him to the end…
Another example. How much evidence is needed before feminists like Philodaria learn to treat other human beings with respect and understand that harassing innocent people to death is morally outrageous?
“Lawsuit: Sex abuse claims against deceased former educator were false: The parents of a Uintah County educator who committed suicide in 2013 after being accused of child sex abuse have filed a federal lawsuit against the police detective and the DCFS caseworker who investigated the case.”
Sorry but the “beyond a reasonable doubt standard” just isn’t relevant here. It simply has nothing to do with philodaria’s posts. It’s not even mentioned in either post or in the discussions of those posts. Obvi what philodaria is writing about is simply how it’s good to find innocent people and try to get them to commit suicide. If I’m not mistaken the titles of the posts in question basically say this as well.
Another example of the kind of bullying to death that Philodaria supports. Here, the systemic bullying of schoolkids to death with disproportionate and unfair disciplinary action.
“Suicide turns attention to Fairfax discipline procedures … Fairfax parents tell stories of going into the process without an attorney and finding their children under fire at adversarial hearings. These families contend there is no impartial judge but instead a presumption of guilt. They say there is little discussion of a student’s well-being, psychological state or the cause of the misconduct.”
Look, these cases are clearly tragic. But why do people keep saying that Philodaria from FP supports bullying people to death in this way? What comment/s of hers are you guys referring to?
I’m not sure why you are asking this, because surely it’s obvious – what’s tragic is that in all of those cases, a person committed suicide. Losing someone close to you to suicide is always a tragedy.
The innocent person commits suicide because they have been harassed, bullied, or had their life ruined, with extremely serious false allegations. The harassment of an innocent person to death is not a “tragedy”. The family of the victim will not call it a “tragedy” – they will say that their brother, son, etc., is a victim of being bullied to death.
It’s precisely the level of irreparable harm suffered by victims of false allegations that mandates a judicial requirement of a high standard of proof in responding to any kind of serious allegation. And this is why, in a campus setting, any such allegation should be always referred to the police force, and never to someone who is politically-motivated to treat the innocent as guilty and to protect the institution’s public persona.
Now Philodaria, who is promoting the harassment to death of innocent people, is a vicious and disgusting human being. Contrary to Philodaria’s disgusting views, harassing innocent people to death is not ok. It is evil.
Can you fucking read? This student was at risk of expulsion for buying a legal marijuana analogue, literally NOTHING TO DO WITH RAPE COMPLAINTS.
Not only are you manipulating the stories of men who were the subjects of criminal rape complaints, you’re portraying a student who was NEVER ACCUSED OR RAPE as though he was. Completely disgusting.
And frightening. If Cathrynn has her way, there will be no more men or innocent humans left in philosophy. First they came for Colin McGinn, and I did not speak out.
You’ve made a mistake in your conclusion. Promoting a thing that sometimes does or causes X is not the same thing as promoting X. For example, peanuts sometimes kill people. But it does not follow that an ad agency which puts together a peanut butter campaign promotes killing people. So even if your second premise were true, the conclusion wouldn’t follow.
If a variable X is positively correlated with another Y, then promoting X does promote Y. For example, Trump rallies are positively correlated with violence. So, promoting Trump rallies promotes violence. Doing so without recognizing or taking into account the potential conflict is reckless. This is why such events might be, and have been, cancelled and is why Trump has been criticized sternly, including by both the left and the right. Concerning the harm caused by peanut allergy, in principle, a company might be held legally liable if it promoted peanut butter in a situation where a harmful or lethal outcome were possible (e.g., at a school).
Now back to that feminist bully and harasser, Philodaria.
Philodaria promotes false accusations. But false accusations are positively correlated with destructive and suicidal outcomes for the innocent victims. Therefore, Philodaria promotes destructive and suicidal outcomes.
This is correct moral/practical reasoning. It remains correct, despite aggression from feminist bullies. In the literature on psychological abuse and violence, this attempt to invert who is being violent and aggressive – it is feminists who are violent and aggressive – is called psychological projection.
eet eez not true. for example, ze Beernie zupport eez positively correlated vit ze men, but promoting ze Beernie zupport eez not promoting being ze men. bon?
Standards of evidence are a compromise between the interests of the accused and accuser. Even the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard will result in some false convictions. Is somebody who promotes a beyond a reasonable doubt standard therefore also promoting false accusations? I don’t think so. The debate is about whether college quasi-judicial processes lean too far in favor of the accuser, not whether somebody is “promoting” destructive outcomes.
“Is somebody who promotes a beyond a reasonable doubt standard therefore also promoting false accusations?”
No, that’s a black and white fallacy. This is a scale, and not a black and white issue. Such a person would be promoting an *increase*, not a decrease, and therefore would be aiming to *reduce* miscarriages, injustice, harassment, etc.
Promoting a *reduction* in evidence standard promotes miscarriages of justice, the success of false accusations and public shaming and harassment campaigns. It also promotes the consequences of those shaming and vilification campaigns: the ruination of people’s lives and sometimes even suicide. This is precisely what Philodaria is promoting: false accusations, miscarriages, injustice, the ruination of people’s lives and the harassment of innocent people to death.
And similar points have been made repeatedly by many opponents of these abuses, including many prominent lawyers writing recently about the miscarriages and debacle over Title IX.
Put it this way: raising the evidential standard increases the chances that a guilty party will escape punishment. But it would not be reasonable for somebody to accuse you of promoting rape! We are just talking about whether there should be a civil standard or a criminal standard (as it happens, I don’t think universities should be in this business, but if they are, then the standard should be reasonable doubt).
As for the trolling comment below, 6:36 is in a dreamworld if he thinks the reasonable doubt standard will not be restored very soon. People outside of feminist dance therapy departments are realizing this is the only responsible way forward.
False accusations cause horrific outcomes, including death.
Philodaria is promoting false accusations.
Promoting something positively correlated with X is promoting X.
Therefore, Philodaria is promoting horrific outcomes, including death.
Someone might explain again why this reasoning is “incorrect”? Which premise is false? The first premise has been established above, with real cases. It is therefore presumably not in dispute. The second premise is presumably also not in dispute, as reducing evidence standards promotes false accusations, and Philodaria is openly advocating the reduced standard.
Is it therefore the third premise which is disputed? Why?
I ‘av alreedy eesplain eet to you. Ze premise three, eet iz not true. Ze Beernie zupport eez positively correlated vit ze men, but promoting ze Beernie zupport eez not promoting being ze men. bon? bon BOn!
An’ if ze third premise is not true, ze second premise iz not true. Oo covertly use ze third premise een getting ze second premise. Zneeky boy! No no!
The correlation is causal, yes. That’s a mistake. It should say that in both premises.
“Tylenol (I think its that one – it is one of the common painkillers anyway) can cause death if you take too much of it. It doesn’t follow that promoting Tylenol is promoting death.”
Well, it does. Tylenol causes fatal liver damage in overdose levels, unless treated quickly. This is why its sale is regulated and there are health warnings. Promoting a change in these regulations to a lower standard of protection may indeed count as promoting death, and could even be legally actionable. (E.g., if a politician were bribed by its manufacturers to legislatively repeal the regulatory powers.)
The equivocation objection is the strongest objection.
Giving one case in which we might say that promoting something which causally correlates with X is not the same as demonstrating that it follows that promoting something that causally correlates with X is the same as promoting X. One case is enough for a counterexample, but one case doesn’t establish a general claim.
men are more likely to be supporters of bernie or bernie’s supporters are mostly men is not equivalent to “Ze Beernie zupport eez positively correlated vit ze men” …
and what’s the definition of `causally correlated’?
o! o! But “men are more liklee to zupport ze beernie,” eet eez eequivalent to “ze beernie zupport eez positively correlated vit ze men.” Back to ze stats class vit you! rapide! rapide!
Well, for a start you need to change either the first premise or the third, because you switch from ’causes’ to ‘is positively correlated with’ – you need to be consistent throughout. But either version of premise three seems like it would be false. You’ve already been given several examples in which it is clear that promoting something which causes X (or which correlates with X) doesn’t imply that the person promotes X. Here’s yet another example – lots of common over-the-counter drugs have side effects. Tylenol (I think its that one – it is one of the common painkillers anyway) can cause death if you take too much of it. It doesn’t follow that promoting Tylenol is promoting death.
Woah. You actually haven’t given any evidence at all for the second premise. And as pointed out, the second premise is only true if the third premise is true, and the third premise is not true.
There’s an equivocation over “promotes”. If it means: “does something that increases the likelihood”, then the argument is sound, but its conclusion is totally irrelevant, since (in that sense) all of us promote horrific outcomes many times every day. (I promote more more people cycling to work; this is correlated with more people dying in bicycle accidents; so in that sense I promote more people dying in bicycle accidents. But so what?) If it means: “is in favor of”, then premise 3 is obviously false, because we can be in favor of X and not in favor of things that X is positively correlated with.
You are doing the Lord’s work in trying to reason with this one anonymous. He is so caught up in his own fervor that he’s barely thinking at all. That or it’s satire. Either way, the Lord’s work.
1. False accusations are causally correlated with horrific outcomes, including death.
2. Philodaria is promoting false accusations.
3. Promoting something causally correlated with outcome X is promoting outcome X.
Therefore, Philodaria is promoting horrific outcomes, including death.
It seems to me it addresses them all, except perhaps the equivocation objection on “promotes”. Other than that, it’s valid; if sound, it establishes the truth of the conclusion. The first two premises are true. The first is based on empirical evidence given above. The second is based on Philodaria’s public advocacy of reduced evidential standards, which promote false accusations. Furthermore, as Canadian lawyers – indeed, feminist lawyers – have pointed out, in connection with Jian Ghomeshi’s recent acquittal, prominent false accusations harm not only the falsely accused but also genuine victims.
Only the third premise is in some dispute. However, the third premise, or something very similar to it, is standardly assumed in all social and public policy decision-making. Promoting a cause of an effect X is promoting that effect X.
The second premise is in dispute because your justification for it assumes the truth if the third premise, which is in dispute. And I’m surprised by the claim that the third premise is assumed in public policy decision making. Do you have any evidence for this? (Though even if you do, I don’t think that would warrant accepting the claim).
It also clearly doesn’t address the equivocation problem at all, and as has been pointed out several times, this objection is pretty serious. I can’t see how you could resolve it.
There are further problems with the second premise. Firstly, it is not clear that Philodaria is advocating a ‘reduced’ standard. Isn’t it the case that most universities currently use preponderance of evidence, and she is advocating that this should remain as it is? Also, you haven’t actually produced any actual evidence for the claim that reducing the standard of evidence increases false accusations. It may seem simply common sense to you, but it is an empirical claim and as such requires evidence to substantiate. I understand it would be difficult to do so, but in order to establish premise 2 you would ar least need to make some kibd of attempt ( for example look at reported rates of false accusations in civil as opposed to criminal cases – thoufb one problem with that is obviously that a defendant winning at trial does not establish that the initial accusation was in fact false – it jyst establishes that there was not enough evidence to prove the accusation). Even if we grant you the second premise though, the argument still has serious – I would say fatal – flaws.
1. Our core sense of fairness and justice always errs on the side of not erroneously punishing an innocent person.
2. The combination of a low standard of proof and flimsy adjudicative procedures is a recipe for disaster; in particular, punishing an innocent person.
3. We have evidence that universities, due to external pressures, do not always uphold basic fairness in adjudicative procedures.
4. Preponderance of evidence standard is not in proportionality to the harm someone endures if wrongly convicted or found responsible for sexual assault.
5. Someone promoting preponderance of evidence under the reality of 3. is willfully abetting disaster.
6. Philodaria is willfully abetting disaster.
(1) is false. We could avoid punishing innocent people altogether if we simply never punished people. We don’t always err on the side of not erroneously punishing an innocent person, but instead balance the need for justice for victims with the risk of erroneously punishing an innocent person with the severity of punishment. At least one of the justifications for a lower standard of evidence in civil cases is that the severity of the punishment is less. We could have a higher standard of evidence here, but we don’t. We could even have a higher standard of evidence in criminal cases (we could go with ‘beyond any doubt whatsoever’ if we wanted to). But we don’t, because while avoiding erroneously punishing the Innocent is an important consideration, it’s not the only consideration.
I take your point about the letter of (1). Replace (1) with: Our core sense of fairness and justice proceed under the presumption of innocence of the accused and the burden of proof on the complainant. This doesn’t really add anything to the argument, though I don’t see how the rest of the argument depend essentially on (1) anyway. The real issue is with 4 or something like it.
Your main problem is that you are only focusing on one of the negative consequences. Everyone agrees that it is a bad thing when innocent people suffer as a result of wrongful conviction. But it is also bad when people get raped, and when the rapist gets away with it. Moving to a higher standard of evidence may have the result of increasing the number of rapes, seeing as people are more likely to do things if they think they can get away with it. Being raped often has exactly the devastating circumstances you are worried about – suicide, a life destroyed. According to your reasoning, then, people who advocate for a higher standard of proof are also wilfully abetting disaster. Hopefully this helps you to see why your argument is a bad one. Almost every policy decision involves increasing the likelihood of certain harms in order to decrease the likelihood of others – your own proposal doesn’t escape this problem.
I doubt that rapists are engaged in practical reasoning concerning the likelihood their potential victims will pursue justice via one avenue vs. another where standards of evidence differs. There is no parity of reasoning here.
There is. I’ve produced just as much evidence for the claim that going with the higher standard of evidence will increase the number or rapes as you have for the claim that going with a lower standard of evidence will increase the number of false accusations (i.e. none at all).
Nowhere did I rely on or mention the bearing of standard of evidence on the number of false accusations. You introduced the numbers game and the notion of `getting away with or not getting away with something’ in your reply. Unless you want to affirm “The combination of beyond reasonable doubt (or ‘clear and convincing’, as the case may be) standard and fair adjudicating procedures is a recipe for disaster,” I don’t see the parity. But I agree. there is the harm of false accusation and conviction and the harm of false acquittal.
The third premise is not “in some dispute.” The third premise is obviously false, as anyone competent in social and public policy decision making will tell you. If the options are A and B, and BOTH are causally correlated with X, promoting A-over-B is not promoting X if A causes LESS X than B. And that’s exactly what’s at stake here. Maybe actually read the Philodaria posts….
are you an undergrad that just learned about deductive reasoning
Premise 2 needs some justification. Maybe this has just drifted off into some theoretical exercise, so it doesn’t matter, but otherwise, the whole thread reads as if there is some a priori reason for wanting to assert the conclusion, and the premises are being constructed and tweaked with the hopes of arriving at that outcome. As opposed to just reading the fp article/discussion thread and trying to understand what is really being argued for and why.
Somewhat poor choice, there, m8.
Laura Kipnis’s great aunt survived the Holocaust.
FP contributor Kathryn Pogin (Philodaria) made false Title IX accusations against Kipnis, trying to get Kipnis fired.
So I’m not clear what all the fuss is about. Philodaria and others think that we should treat the burden of proof for accusations of sexual misconduct at universities as preponderance of the evidence, as in civil cases. But in an age of google and social justice activism, having been found at fault of sexual misconduct at college destroys one’s reputation both professionally and publicly. Those opposed to Philodaria’s position maintain that this consequence is sufficiently unlike the repercussions that come from being adjudged at fault over damage to a neighbor’s fence (say) that the lowering of the standard of fault to that of civil court is not justified. What am I missing?
As far as “what am I missing”, I’d only say that a more apt infractions to compare to (at a college) than damaging a neighbor’s fence: plagarism, cheating on tests, etc. Infractions that are serious enough to get you kicked out of school (or fired) should, perhaps, have similar standards of evidence requirements.
Your point about googling is really important, I think. Companies keep these kind of things private pretty well as personnel matters. There’s no reason universities can’t do the same. If there’s fear that a serial assaulter (or plagerizer) will continue that elsewhere, there are things that universities can do to severely limit that (like what public school systems do)
Two things. First that Philodaria promotes false accusations because Philodaria has a track record of false accusations – for example, against Kipnis. Second, that Philodaria doesn’t care about the appalling suffering inflicted on others by distributing false accusations.
The dispute as to whether reducing evidence standard causes a higher number of false positives (Type 1 errors) has got to be one of the stupidest things I’ve ever seen on the internet. The sensitivity of a redness detector is the percentage of red things judged red (positive decision). The specificity of a detector is the percentage of non-red things judged non-red. The false positive rate is the percentage of non-red things incorrectly judged red. The false positive rate of a detector is 1 minus its specificity.
Suppose Philodaria is a reduced evidence standard detector for redness. Suppose Leiter is high evidence standard detector for redness. Then the specificity of Philodaria will be *lower* that the specificity of Leiter. Therefore, Philodaria’s false positive rate will be *higher* than Leiter’s false positive rate.
May I add that the Brandeis decision (linked at BL’s place) shows why there are procedural issues which go far beyond this narrow debate about evidential standards. It makes for interesting reading. To call their process Stalinesque is probably unfair to the Soviet Union. What they had going more resembled the legal system of the Tang Dynasty.
“Being raped often has exactly the devastating circumstances you are worried about”
Perhaps tell Jennifer Saul that? Saul said in 2014 that rape is “incredibly complicated”.
Admittedly, this was when Saul’s feminist colleague Anna Stubblefield raped a disabled man; so we need to remember that, on Saul’s view, it’s ok when a man is raped by a feminist.
Come off it. Saul said that a specific rape case was incredibly complicated, and everyone on both sides of the issue knows that some cases of rape are incredibly complicated.
Stubblefield raped a disabled man, AND there’s reason to think that she genuinely cared about his consent and believed he was consenting. I agree that that’s a complicated case, and I would feel exactly the same about a case where a man raped a woman but genuinely cared about her consent and believed she was consenting.
Mostly, though, just move on. This topic has come and gone.
Feminists think that a feminist raping a diaper-wearing non-verbal disabled man with the mental age of a toddler is “complicated” (and the rapist is now convicted)?
It’s as if your mind belongs to a different moral universe, out of touch with ethical duties. The topic has not gone, and it will not go.
and the diaper wearing thing is obviously irrelevant. continence has little to do with ability to consent. As you should know, since you seem to consider yourself informed enough to comment on this, FC advocates think that many people cannot communicate because they can’t control their bodies but have normal intelligence, though they cannot prove it in unfacilitated IQ testing because of their motor skill problems.
Read more about FC. There’s plenty of evidence that practitioners really are convinced that they’re not the one’s typing. Read Boynton 2012 “Facilitated Communication—what harm it can do: Confessions of a former facilitator” and some of the other articles in the special issue, it has good discussion of the psychology going on with facilitators. It’s similar phenomenon to what goes on with ouija boards and automatic writing, where, by following a process unfortunately similar to FC (ex. begin by focusing on your hand being outside of your control) people can start writing increasingly complex sentences that they feel they have no conscious control over. It turns out people have really bad access to whether they’re the one moving their limbs when their attention is focused elsewhere.
And there’s a REALLY bad situation with the group beliefs around FC: “assume competency,” skeptics are ableist and just don’t believe disabled people can be competent, rigorous validity testing is too stressful and disadvantages nonverbal autistic people who don’t get the normal opportunities to develop message passing skills, only Bad Facilitators who don’t follow the standards make mistakes… Stubblefield’s own belief that doubting authorship in FC was hate speech.
Stubblefield should have known better was incredibly irresponsible even by FC standards, but there’s little reason to doubt that she believed in FC, hook line and sinker. Her mom is a prominent advocate. She’s been around it her entire life. Who other than a true believer would claim that a man who had been treated as severely intellectually disabled his entire life could write http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/1717/1765 (fully fluent in academ-ese) only a year after his intelligence was “discovered”?
It’s stupid because there’s a solid point to be made relevant to other metabro concerns—it’s one of the clearest cases of “identity politics” anti-____-ism groupthink hurting people very badly. And instead of discussion of the real point there, we just get metabros saying “FEMINIST PHILOSOPHERS SUPPORT RAPE” over and over and over again, until we’re all dead. RIP philosophy
Hey, meta blogger: if it’s not too much trouble, would you entertain this request: could you please use a recent comment widget that gives a bit more info, eg, a snippet of the comment? That was a nice feature on earlier incarnations, making it easier to drop into the right part of a conversation. WordPress seems to have such widgets.
Thanks for the suggestion (suggestions about the site are always welcome). Unfortunately since this is a free wordpress site I can’t use external plugins, so we’re stuck with the stock comment widget, as inadequate as it is.
“Violence in Chicago is soaring to levels not seen for almost two decades as the police retreat from the streets for fear of being accused of unfairly targeting young black and Hispanic men.”
This is by social psychologist and feminist Carol Tavris. Recall back in December ’14 that a blogger at Fem Philers reaffirmed that she regarded Emily Yoffe as a “rape apologist” for her articles for Slate discussed here…
“Why should boys bother? They’ve got it made. We have to push for all we’re worth to avoid pink-collar shit work. Guys just have to be mediocre to get decent jobs and decent lives. Life still sucks for women. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJsw9NHxIPY&feature=youtu.be ”
Not only was this in response to one of the rare occasions pervasive male underachievement in education has been discussed, but it illustrates just how people like Harriet Barber really think about half the population.
As one commentator notes: “If attitudes like hbaber’s are common enough among teachers, little wonder many boys have a problem with school.”
And remember, Harriet Barber IS a teacher. Would you be comfortable as a male student with your professor expressing views like that?
Black working-cass boys do *better* than white working-class boys, as a matter of fact. But do not expect the wealthy women at FP to show any knowledge of the world outside their privileged existence.
That seems surprising, given things like the high incarceration rates of black men. What dimension are you talking about here – earning power, educational achievement, or…?
“White boys from working-class backgrounds are falling further behind other social and ethnic groups at school, according to the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC). In its new five-yearly report, the EHRC, the equalities watchdog, found that white boys from poor families achieved GCSE grades that fell below every other ethnic group. Just 28.3 per cent of white boys who were eligible for free school meals achieved five GCSEs at grade A to C.”
“If the options are A and B, and BOTH are causally correlated with X, promoting A-over-B is not promoting X if A causes LESS X than B. And that’s exactly what’s at stake here. Maybe actually read the Philodaria posts….”
It is not a matter of dispute that harm to innocent victims of false accusations of criminal sexual conduct vastly outweighs harm to victims of failed or not-even-begun prosecutions of the guilty. At least not by anyone with elementary understanding of ethical duties. It has also been at the basis of the criminal justice system for hundreds of years, as in Blackstone’s formulation: “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer”.
Philodaria doesn’t merely promote this suffering of others at the FP cesspool. Philodaria actually is a false accuser, having falsely accused Laura Kipnis.
It remains alarming that simple points about evidence gathering and statistical analysis are lost on those trying to promote the “women leave undergraduate philosophy” myth. To demonstrate such an effect, one needs:
1. To measure X, the f:m ratio for those who apply to study philosophy.
2. To measure Y, the f:m ratio for those who complete degrees in philosophy.
3. To measure Z, the f:m ratio for those who apply to/enrol in graduate degrees in philosophy.
4. Show that X > Y > Z and that this conclusion is statistically significant (i.e., the null hypothesis is rejected with p Y > Z. The evidence, if anything, tends to support the claim that X = Y = Z, with X < 50%. It is logically irrelevant saying "almost no one studies philosophy at high school". Usually almost no one studies medicine, psychology and law at high school. However, in each of these, women outnumber men.
If by ‘leave undergraduate phiolosophy’ you mean drop out after declaring an intention to major in it (either before arriving, as in the British system, or after a year or so in college, as in the us system) then you may be right – I haven’t seen evidence either way. But there is clear evidence that in the US, there is a statistically significant drop off in women’s representation between intro and majoring (and that there are no other statistically significant drop offs). This is from the Paxton, figdor and Tiberius study. They do exactly what you want, except that their x is women who take intro courses. But this seems a reasonable x to take in a system where people usually don’t declare a major until after taking an intro course.
Also, I’d be interested to see the study where you get the X equals 50% statistic from. Is it 50% of those applying to take philosophy in the UK system are women? In the UK is it also the case then that 50% of undergraduate majors and doctoral students in philosophy are women?
“there is a statistically significant drop off in women’s representation between intro and majoring”
That is no evidence of this. No significance attaches to statistics for a mere course which people take for countless *reasons*. One needs to establish this *reason* to draw an inference. It may measure bunching of course requisites. It may measure a tendency, given one is *not* studying subject S, to find out about it anyway, out of curiosity.
“They do exactly what you want, except that their x is women who take intro courses”
To repeat – they do not. Paxton, Figdor & Tiberius measured the wrong thing.
I’ll explain this only one more time. The US system is an outlier in higher education in its internal structure. A mere course in the US system indicates nothing. Under the US system, people may take a course for all kinds of reasons, sometimes because they are compelled to by overall requirements. For all we know, the majority of students who take an Intro Psych course or Intro Jurisprudence course are men. However, the subjects of medicine and law are female dominated, if you examine application, enrolment and completion statistics. All this should be completely obvious.
The three quantities which need to be measured are:
X: the f:m ratio of students who applied to or were enrolled into philosophy undergraduate degrees.
Y: the f:m ratio of students who completed philosophy degrees.
Z: the f:m ratio of students who applied to/enrolled into philosophy graduate degrees.
Paxton, Figdor & Tiberius did not measure X. They measured something else, whose functional relation to X is completely unknown. What they measured may anti-correlate with X, for all we know. It may be true that X > Y > Z. However, no one has shown this is true. It may also be true that X = Y = Z and no one has shown this is true either. Or perhaps X > Y > Z, but the effect is small. Or perhaps X < Y Y > Z, when no one has given evidence for it.
philosophers are shit when opining about statistics. witness the idiotic debate by some authorities over the ‘correlation’ of Venetian sea levels/Britain bread prices.
“Is it 50% of those applying to take philosophy in the UK system are women? In the UK is it also the case then that 50% of undergraduate majors and doctoral students in philosophy are women?”
No, X < 50%. I know some figures; some from about ten years ago, and some more recent. Those I saw lie in the range 30-40%. Cambridge publishes its figures. X is 39.9% averaged over the last four years. It is not top secret to any department administrator what X, Y and Z are. These numbers could be collected in probably a few days, by someone sufficiently curious, by emailing the administrator and asking that person what X,Y and Z are. They will have a database and the information would be easily obtained.
The beebee and Saul study has some of the relevant numbers. 43/47% take honours or joint honours (I’m assuming that is equivalent to majoring). 31% of doctoral students are women. So the claim above that x equals y equals z, where x is greater than 50%, looks like it is mistaken – its clearly not the case that y, at least, is anywhere near 50%.
First, this is a political document, written by a pair of politically-motivated individuals. Obviously, we must tread very carefully in trusting claims made by those who are not primarily interested in truth. Second, it does state, “46% of single and joint honours undergraduates are women”. However, this is a figure from HESA which aggregates “philosophy and historical studies”.
This does not automatically imply that Beebee and Saul were being dishonest. But their assertion is misleading, because HESA because it aggregates philosophy and history (possibly classics too).
To repeat, the figures I have seen for X for applications are in the range 30-40%. One can calculate it for Cambridge, based on its published figures. It is 39.9%, for 2011-2014. It is possible that other universities are higher and that others are lower. It’s also possible that application rates differ from acceptance rates. (If acceptance rates for women are higher, does that indicate anti-male prejudice?)
However, that X 50%, Bio > 50%, Law > 50%, Hum > 50% and US = 57%.
Do these imply discrimination against men? If not, why not?
If you go to table 2.1, you will see the numbers I am talking about (43/47 majoring at undergrad, 31% enrolled at PhD level. This is not HESA data, it is BPA data. The information was gathered from philosophy departments and is about philosophy students.
Also, where does it say that HESA aggregates history and philosophy? This doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense seeing as the section that uses the HESA data compares the HESA data on philosophy with the HESA data on history.
Yes, my mistake. The earlier part of the paragraph mentioned HESA, so I looked at some HESA spreadsheets, which do aggregate “Philosophy and Historical studies”. But what is says there as its evidence remains unclear – “BPA questionnaire data” – completed by whom? Academic administrators?
Sorry, I messed up the last part of that – the relevant thing that those numbers show us is that y (proportion of those majoring in philosophy who are women) does not equal z (proportion of those enrolled in doctoral programmes who are women). So the evidence doesn’t seem to support the claim that x equals y equals z, as claimed above.
Has anybody here violated the rule forbidding multiple submissions, or followed the letter but not the spirit of the rule by submitting a section of a larger paper to a different journal, or a substantial rewording of the paper that maintains the same argumentative moves? What kind of practical fallout can one expect if one gets caught doing this?
Your university might consider it academic dishonesty; you can get banned from the journal; it will give you a bad reputation (especially in a small discipline); the journals would both reject your paper if they discover it before publication, and might retract it if they discover after publication.
There are a lot of ways this can be discovered. Both journals might send your paper to the same reviewer. If it’s published, the reviewer from the other journal might read it (relatively likely, since they’re in your subfield). By the time it would be accepted in one, the other’s likely to be fairly far along. You need the editor’s approval to actually withdraw it, which they might refuse if the reviews are close to being done. If they both get accepted and you have to push one of the journals to let you withdraw, they’ll know what’s up. It’s not like you can say you found a problem in your data.
Submitting paper with a section or reworded arguments from a paper submitted elsewhere isn’t following the letter of the rule, because repeating work in another paper without citing the first is self-plagarism. I think this might be even riskier, since it’s much more likely to look like you’re trying to get away with double publication.
Is it really self plagiarism to submit a section of a paper submitted elsewhere to a different journal? The paper from which the shorter paper was excerpted has not been published. If you wrote a paper that you left to moulder in your desk drawer and then submitted a section of that paper somewhere, you would not be guilty of self plagiarism. So why does it become self plagiarism if you try (against the odds) to get the larger paper published?
I’ve seen self plagiarism in someone who at the time that I saw the papers had a really prestigious tenured position and later on had/has an even more prestigious position. Two different titles in two different journals but the same thesis and the same arguments presented in the same order. I wonder how often it happens.
I have also seen some of my own work stolen by someone and published. I haven’t seen anything else published under the name of the person who took the main idea of one of my papers and wrote it much tidier than I did.
We should not make changes to the curriculum to accommodate the feminidiots. If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. (Or should I say: go back to the kitchen? We’re talking about girls, after all.)
A cliché: the once great man, who got a bit too cocky with one too many women who were just a little bit too young. Now he lives alone, his power and influence have vanished, and nobody reads his once widely discussed writings. So he is left to call out online to whoever might listen. There but for the grace of God…
Yeah, pretty clearly not my point (I’m 12.42). But even if it had been — everyone knows that a lot of Putnam’s later work is crap? This is one of those occasions — they’re quite frequent — when something’s being true — if it’s true — doesn’t settle the question of whether it’s an appropriate thing to say. What is it with the bellicose swaggering and sneering about others’ work around here? Furthermore, Putnam in his prime contributed more to philosophy in a week than I –or, I’ll wager, 10.29 — will contribute in an entire career. Show some fucking respect, peasants.
Latest fad among the Moral Majority: producing syllabi for courses in phil mind, phil sci etc, using only readings by women. Of course, as the authors of these syllabi would be the first to complain, women are seriously underrepresented in these areas. The probability of these readings being anywhere near consistently the best work available is about zero. But what better way to demonstrate one’s commitment to feminism, than preparedness to do serious pedagogical harm in its name?
The best thing about your post is the brilliantly apt use of the (descriptive) name “the Moral Majority”. I propose that the old name “the New Infantilism” be dropped in favor of “the Moral Majority”.
Granted, I am a man, but when I read a paper and check who authored it, I do not make a mental notice to myself about the sex of the author. Things that interest me are his/her other work, and, if I want personal information, his/her institutional affiliation and the institution where they received their graduate education, and their supervisor.
Suppose I read an interesting paper by an, say, Asian philosopher whose name I cannot identify as male or female. I then check their webpage which does not have any information about the sex of the person but all the other relevant info I listed above. That is all I want and all I need. At no time I feel the need to know more about the sex of the author. That is just irrelevant.
Who skims through a reading list, notices a sex-imbalance of the listed authors against his own sex and then feels insecure? By that logic female philosophers should be massively underrepresented in the historical fields of philsophy. Not knowing the numbers, I believe that it is in those areas where their numbers are comparatively high.
On another note, if female philosophers want to be taken seriously as a whole they should reject being spousal hires or daddy’s girls. On both the East and West coast there are plenty of other institutions surrounding the highest-profile universities that are in search of philosophers. You cannot have it both ways, ride on the success of your spouse/family-ties and then complain about you and other women not getting the deserved attention. I mean seriously, do they really think that those big institutions just happened to show an interest in hiring them when they started dating the well-known male philosopher?
Every spousal hire is a kick in the teeth for accomplished female philosophers who deserve where they are. And that generalizes to all other disciplines.
Yes!
Spousal hires are female. Males are not hired merely because they are married to someone the department wants. They are hired on their merits. That’s why a spousal hire is a kick in the teeth for accomplished *female* philosophers.
Since I am male, my teeth are not kicked even though I’m accomplished. I am glad you pointed out that females are the ones whose teeth are kicked by spousal hires. That’s why we really need the metametametablog, to help us remember the proper place of women.
David Owen at University of Arizona, married to Julia Annas.
Douglas Maclean at University of North Carolina, married to Susan Wolf.
Bernhard Nickel at Harvard, married to Susanna Siegel.
Dale Jamieson at NYU, was married to Beatrice Longuenesse when hired.
Baron Reed at Northwestern, married to Jennifer Lackey.
Off the top of my head, I can think of at least five so far unnamed cases of male spousal hires — my knowledge comes from inside information. I won’t name them since I like most of the people involved. It would take about 30 minutes to come up with very likely examples for yourself by looking at CV’s.
There are lots more. It’s kind of mean to post them — though under the circumstances I don’t blame you, and those are all so obvious I can’t imagine the trailers would feel disrespected.
(I thought K. Healy was a bit of a superstar in his own right, no? Eh, what do I know from sociology.)
The most recent study, posted at DN, about why female undergraduates do not continue on to the PhD stage notes that syllabus composition had almost nothing to do with it. So if you’ve lost the argument that an all female syllabus is necessary for diversifying the discipline, what else have you got, except simplistic identity politics?
For a variety of reasons I do want to see more women and minorities in the discipline, but the discussion on this topic has now become just a bunch of idiotic posturing, due to all of the kicking and screaming of the “moral majority” folks. There are some basic but necessary steps we can take to improve the discipline, but none of them are likely to involve removing due process protections for various parties, “occupying” the syllabus, or bringing in poetry and dance, as was so memorably suggested by Justin Windbag.
Wait, someone suggested we include poetry and dance in philosophy courses? My next project: a proof of the completeness of first order-logic via interpretive dance.
I don’t think bringing poetry into philosophy classes is ridiculous. Where ever possible, I try to open classes with a anecdote (sometimes even a very short story) or a bit of media relevant to what we’re discussing to get students interested. I could see using a poem if I was better versed in it.
JW’s suggestion was not that we should incorporate works that aren’t strictly philosophical into class, papers, whatever. Nor was it that sometimes poetry and other works have or express philosophical content. I don’t think anyone can really disagree with either point.
His suggestion was that we “count as philosophy” poetry, dance, reports of our feelings, ideological arguments without allowing for objections, and more. Check it out if you don’t believe me:
I didn’t believe you, and I checked it out, and I was right not to believe you. He doesn’t ‘suggest’ that those count as philosophy. He was asked for some examples of the people he had in mind when he mentioned “people who want to change the rules of the game” and he replied with a list of examples of things he has seen both praised as philosophy and criticized for not doing philosophy. (The list includes, by the way, “the applied use of classical logics.” But he doesn’t, as you imply, endorse the view that any of these should count as philosophy, nor does he ‘suggest’ that we count these things as philosophy. This is immediately clear to anyone who actually reads the post.
I know of some cases where the “spousal hire” was clearly the more impressive philosopher. Here’s how this can happen. The Department of Philosophy at 2nd-tier University (2TU) is searching in Political Philosophy makes an offer to Smith. Smith is married to Jones, who just happens to be an extremely visible and distinguished untenured Philosophers of Mind, and who already has a TT job at Leiterific University (LU). 2TU knows perfectly well that Jones would normally be out of their league, but they are hoping that Smith and Jones would like to solve the two-body problem. So they make an offer to Smith with a spousal offer to Jones, and the offers are accepted.
So that’s what feminist looks like? Feminist philosopher rapes a disabled, diaper-wearing man with the mental age of a toddler, with whom she communicates using a ouija board, and the response is “read more about FC”, because it’s “complicated”?
Everyone else can read, 11:23. The response was not “read more FC” because “it’s complicated”. You cherry picked three words from a post in which the author was explaining that a. it appears that a lot of people who engage in FC sincerely believe that the people who they are helping are really communicating and b. this is a problem. Your continued attempts to deliberately misrepresent people by cherry picking quotes is starting to get really annoying. And it is really stupid to try to pull this trick when the passage you’re deliberately misrepresenting is on the same thread.
Zagzebski got Sartwell fired, with libel (based on his posting a country music song). I think we can safely assume the chances of “outrage” from the Moral Majority are nil. After all, it is they who enjoy the swarming and firings.
I have to admit I was a bit surprised by the “how can I grab more for myself” as a grad student thread at DN. Not very New Consensus: you turn up to find that other graduate students are being paid more for the very same work (or as is more likely, the same for less work). How can they square this with their principles?
Catastrophic presupposition failure. The only principle that New Consensus types abide by in practice, and without deviation, is to grab as much for themselves as possible.
A day may come when people have forgotten about the Stubblefield case and some feminist philosophers smugly announce that no woman in philosophy have ever acted inappropriately toward her students. When that happens, please bring up the Stubblefield case to embarrass them.
Until then, I think we’ve all heard enough about Stubblefield. It’s getting really dull, listening to the same thing over and over again for months.
Oh, and I know the best way to do something about it! Repeatedly misrepresent what some other people have said about another case involving a woman raping someone who wasn’t her student. Bring it up in every single conversation. That’ll show ’em.
Yes, but process is simply an abstract principle, and it exists in liberal democratic societies to protect real living people from arbitrary punishment. What they don’t care about is *people*. After all, they are intellectuals, and wish to signal their intellectual and moral/progressive status to others, often by social networking or draconian punishments. Real human beings are dispensable. In other words, they oppose well-established liberal protections of the innocent.
This pattern – KKK mobs lynching black men falsely accused by white women, Stalin’s purges and Show Trials in the 1930s, and Senator McCarthy’s Red Scare witch hunts are all classic examples – repeats itself so many times in history it seems futile trying to point out again the obvious to the social justice warriors.
I know, right?! ‘Well, it does sound like he’s kind of a difficult character…’. Insofar as these unconscionable comments are coming from Moral Majority types, it’s an interesting indication that their cluelessness about the non-negotiability of ideas like due process (i.e. their entire point) isn’t just coming from the usual desire to appear as committed as is logically possible to opposing sexual harassment / assault — unless Zagzebski is being cast as an oppressed damsel, but that looks a bit of a stretch, even for them.
I know Crispin from way back. Although it’s totally irrelevant to the due process issue, it might be worth mentioning that he’s no more a ‘difficult’ character than many philosophers, or indeed than many people; he is deeply committed to philosophy; and he is imbued with the philosophical spirit. I wish there were many more philosophers like him. The suggestion on that DN thread that Crispin’s openness about his past struggles with addiction somehow makes his employers’ betrayal more understandable is beyond belief, beneath contempt, and epitomizes the pursed-lips Puritanism that poses an increasingly deadly danger to the culture of US philosophy and makes ‘Moral Majority’ much more than just a wiseass dig.
History will judge philosophy’s current ‘Moral Majority’ (everyone knows who the little hitlers are at DN, FP and NewAPPS) much as it now judges other past attacks on fairness and freedom.
Leiter comes out swinging against the “Faculty Against Rape” letter.
I guess that means he’s a rape apologist. Who else could possibly be against faculty against rape? I know how to eliminate double-negation.
“Faculty Against Rape” – a bold stance! Perhaps if they combine forces with “Faculty Against Murder” and “Faculty Against Torturing the Innocent” we can all make some real moral progress!!!1
The signatories were mercifully predictable: none made me think ‘What?Him (her) now as well?!!’
Presumably there are quite a few moderate MM types who want nothing to do with pushing back against due process or defending the complaints against Kipnis. The letter might lead to some intra-MM squabbling, which is always amusing. No comments yet at FP, and no proper post at DN. DN is usually so quick; when there’s a delay it’s often easy to see why JW might be reluctant to post before determining wind speed and direction among the MM.
Except I’ve got a job and I’m a woman. But you’re right, I am angry. And I’m kind of surprised more people in the profession aren’t. Especially women, it degrades us all.
I am afraid that you do not understand the metaphysics of oppression. “AYMWAJ” is a *functional* property, defined in terms of its functional location within a system of privilege, and not in terms of essentialist features, such as sex – you sexist!
No point being angry about it: the dissertation sounds cool and there are some papers under review. If the papers are any good they’ll be out soon, the CV will be fine for the career stage, and there’ll be bigger injustices in the world.
Still, for someone not fucking a senior colleague, the role played by spousal or partner positions in early-career hiring must be depressing. The three highest-ranked placements from my department in recent years have all been impressive, productive people, but their tenure-track jobs are all at institutions where their spouses had already been in place for years (different departments in each case). These were all nationally advertised jobs, and these were the only hires from those searches.
Is it fair to say that ~10% of tenure-track hiring in the humanities is just a marriage market? More than that in both my own department’s recent hires and our students’ placement record, so I feel like that’s a conservative guess.
Would you rather have no search than a search dictated by the business prof’s wish to have his wife live in the same city? Would you rather have one less faculty position than someone’s awkward husband teaching a couple of the intro classes and having 75% of his tenure case assessed on service? I’m honestly not sure.
Wow, has anyone else taken the trouble to read the FAR letter alongside the AAUP statement? It really is an embarrassing tissue of fallacy and obfuscation. Can’t go through it all here, but a tiny sample:
FAR: ‘When the OCR does initiate an investigation independently of a complaint, though, they do so for good reason.’ Evidence: Quotation from May 2014 HuffPo article: ‘Compliance reviews are not random audits of schools — they are selected based on various sources of information, including statistical data, news reports and information from parents, advocacy groups and community organizations.’
Sounds reassuring; but inspection of the article reveals the quote is actually from one Dorie Nolt, a spokesperson for the Department of Education – responding on behalf of the DoE’s OCR to allegations made by a number of universities against that Department, that the investigations were random! It would be surprising if a DoE spokesperson did not assert that allegations against the DoE were unfounded. Such an assertion does not count as evidence for its own truth. FAR’s only other evidence is a rather detailed account of OCR investigations of a single institution (from more than a hundred), the University of Notre Dame.
But, amazingly, even if FAR had substantiated all this, it would still have no bearing on what the AAUP says! A great deal of the FAR letter besides this is devoted to refuting the claim that the recent increase in the number of investigations indicates punitive intent on the part of the OCR. But the AAUP report never comes close to making any such allegation. It says only that the OCR has been punitive in the adversarial and threatening character of its investigations, and the latter has been ‘fuelled’ by the increase in the number of its investigations, and the scope of each (22). Thus the reasons for the increase have no bearing on what the AAUP says about it. There may be good and compelling reasons for the increase; it may indeed be (as FAR claim) entirely a result of an increase in complaints, which the OCR is obliged to investigate: it would remain true that the increase exacerbates any threatening environment generated by the OCR in virtue of other aspects of its behavior. However threatening the OCR might sound, they can’t generate a generally threatening environment if they investigate few enough institutions to make the prospect of an investigation of any given institution extremely unlikely. As very many advocates for victims of sexual harassment have said very often, it is the effect that matters, not the intention.
CDJ published her analysis of data about placement. Don’t know if it is any good or useful – I have on energy to read through it and I suspect most undergrads will just stare at it. But I find it odd how people go out of their way to thank her for all the work…i do not recall people publicly thanking Sir Ranksalot for all the work he has done…
Still the best analysis, “The statistical findings, at least as far as philosophy job hiring in 2012 and 2013 were concerned, indicate the existence of both prestige and gender bias in philosophy job hiring: Against lower prestige male applicants. For high prestige female applicants.”
The idea that CDJ is a numbers person is ludicrous. She regularly fucks up publicly, like when she just *gave up* trying to defend herself against David Wallace’s (characteristically well-mannered) criticisms.
She also failed to distinguish between different minority groups when trying to look at the racial composition of various programs. As it turns out, you might not want to just lump every non-white person together! Nice work everyone.
“I think we should be appreciative of the hard work and countless hours that Brian Leiter has put into both the PGR and Leiter Reports over the years. Both have been, and may continue to be, valuable resources for the profession.”
From the example discussed above: listing workshops of your papers with fellow grad students at your own department in order to make your conference talks section look longer; “Professional Service: Graduate Student at Large”; “Honors: [non-competitive] Travel Grant.”
Also seen, for someone with multiple interviews and now top-20 job: listing editorial in newsletter of small professional organization under “Journal Articles.”
Jesus Christ, don’t get me started. But now that you have…here is a small list I’ve compiled, all from recent experience. I’m very tempted to name-and-shame.
– Listing book reviews or encyclopedic entries in venues like Analysis or Phil. Review in the “Publications” section as if they are full-blown, anonymously reviewed research articles. (This seems to be one of the most common abuses.)
– Listing drafts as ‘under review’ or even ‘revise and resubmit’ at a particular journal, when they’re not. (Yes, this happens, and I’ve been tempted to notify the journal editors.)
– Listing any drafts as ‘under review’ at a particular journal, or in the “Publications” section.
– Listing an absurd number of unsubstantiated items in the “AOS/AOC” section.
– Listing jobs you have been shortlisted for, and which you obviously didn’t get.
What are encyclopedic entries in Analysis or Phil Review?
But yeah. The last is a real jaw-dropper. There’s a well-known philosopher who actually lists jobs he was offered and turned down, and prizes or lecture invitations he was offered but didn’t take. I think this is more narcissism than anything else — what is your diagnosis?
Wait, I get it — you mean, book reviews in Analysis or Phil Review.
And the thing is, you just have to realize that it doesn’t make your CV look better. Nobody is fooled. Are they actually thinking, “Heh, now it looks like I published several articles in Phil Review“?
I think perhaps the original poster had in mind “encyclopedic” literature review articles like this one: http://philpapers.org/rec/MORRWO-2
Please note that I’m not posting the above article to denigrate its author. Indeed, it’s a perfectly fine literature review. I just happen to have read it recently so it was the first member of its class to come to my mind.
That’s exactly the kind of article I had in mind, Lysias — thanks for that.
And same here: I generally like these! What I absolutely hate is when people list them in a misleading way. In the case I have in mind, the author lists it as “forthcoming in Analysis“. Given that it’s not yet published, and the title doesn’t begin with “Recent Work in…” or give any other indication that it’s a mere literature review, a search committee could be easily duped.
What about a Stanford Encyclopedia article or the like? Should those be in a a separate section? (Most that I’ve seen list them alongside other articles.) What about articles in the X Companion/Handbook to Y? Again, most people seem to list them alongside other articles. Likewise Philosophy Compass articles. I do agree that in those cases the venue makes it clear what the article is–so if it’s in Analysis, it’s best to say something like “review article in Analysis xx, etc.”.
Another classic in this genre is listing a book proposal as “under consideration” somewhere. From the CV I’ve seen this on (about 5 items listed), I get the sense that people treat something as “under consideration” so long as it hasn’t been rejected yet.
I have no problem with people listing things as under consideration, as long as the clarification comes before any of the other details, and there’s no attempt to glean reflected glory by naming the journal.
So:
“Response to a Counterexample.” Journal of Pedantry. Summer 2016. Under Consideration.
is bad faith.
*under consideration* “Response to a Counterexample”
is fine.
But really, even very early-career people should have their publications divided into type: book, peer reviewed article, non-peer-reviewed full-length, book reviews and other short non-peer-reviewed pieces. Four sections, no confusions, work under consideration listed under the relevant heading with a clear clarification.
Add to the anathematic list: including conferences you’ve merely attended or at which you chaired a panel but to which you contributed nothing else under “Conference Participation.”
These seem to be in various edited volumes. Presumably, the editor has accepted the paper for the volume, but the volume has not yet undergone peer review. I have no problem with someone listing these on their CV. I know of others who simply list such papers as forthcoming. Those who list them as “forthcoming pending review” are just being more scrupulous and don’t merit mockery for that.
I’m genuinely sorry that you have no actual peer reviewed publications, and the internal anxiety to defend yourself is so great that you defend your CV puffery anonymously on blogs. Truly sorry.
Nope, I have a modest but adequate number of peer-reviewed publications, and nothing in edited collections at all. It’s just that you’re wrong. Listing something that’s been accepted by the editor of Oxford Studies in Metaethics or Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility, but that hasn’t yet gone through final peer review, simply is not the same as listing something that’s only been submitted to a journal. (Those are just the first two examples from running the Google search suggested above.)
The mental gymnastics on display here are astounding. Apparently a paper can be accepted before it has gone through the review process to determined whether it should be accepted!
There’s an important difference between peer review at a selective journal and peer review of a volume of a selective edited series (where the papers have already been approved by the editor). In the former case maybe 5% will ultimately appear; in the latter case probably 95% will ultimately appear. If you don’t think that’s relevant to how one should treat the two cases on a CV, then I don’t know what to tell you.
“Presumably, the editor has accepted the paper for the volume, but the volume has not yet undergone peer review.” If the volume has not yet undergone peer review, then the editor is not in a position to responsibly accept the paper for the volume. I suspect that with some publishers, the editor does not even have the authority to accept a paper before the volume has undergone peer review.
Granted, the chances of an invited paper getting accepted is much higher than the chances than a paper submitted to a journal with blind refereeing. But even if I submit a paper to a journal with a 95% acceptance rate, I shouldn’t put “forthcoming pending review.”
Finally, putting a paper on your CV as “forthcoming pending review” makes you look like a dick. Anyone can see right through it. If you’re applying for a job, it decreases your chances of getting it. (I’ve been on about 15 search committees in my career, and I’ve seen people lose points for puffing up their CVs.)
I was the original poster calling attention to this phrase. I didn’t mean to suggest that people shouldn’t find some way of drawing attention to the fact that they have papers contributed to edited volumes/special editions currently under review. Indeed, it seems perfectly reasonable to distinguish these papers, mostly because their chances of coming out are far, far higher than your typical journal submission. I just find it amusing/mildly presumptuous when people describe them as “forthcoming pending review”.
Still the best analysis. You know it’s true folks …
“This data reveals two statistical biases and an intriguing negative correlation:
– Women hired had published less than men did, in fact about half as much.
– Having a prestigious background—for example, a PhD granted by a high Leiter-ranked department—benefits jobseekers.
– Prestige and publication rates are negatively correlated: those hired from high prestige departments had lower publication averages.
The data therefore suggests two statistical biases in philosophy job hiring: a gender bias towards women and a prestige bias against applicants from departments with lower prestige ranking.”
That’s true. But this refers to bias in the statistical sense (a measurable correlation), rather than a normative sense. There is a cohort with same achievement level (311 first-time hires over two years). This is analysed relative to a fixed performance measure (= average number of publications) and a fixed prestige measure (= Leitericity of department). Then the data gives statistical significant effects: performance negatively correlates with both prestige and gender (being female).
In the normative sense, agreed: it may well be reasonable to prefer job seekers from stronger departments, since the hiring of lower performing high prestige applicants can be made sense of (training, potential, etc.). Prestige bias may therefore be sensible (though unfair in some more lugubrious sense).
But the other bias – the gender/performance correlation – is not reasonable: it’s unreasonable to prefer under-performing female candidates over better performing males ones. Also, the bias effect here in job hiring is strong: over-performing lower prestige males perform *three times better* on average than under-performing high-prestige females.
Publications is *a* performance measure. The claim that publications is not a performance measure is to claim that there is no positive correlation between the successful performance of an academic and their publication record. This is preposterous.
No-one is claiming that it isn’t *a* performance measure. But the fact that it is one doesn’t mean that it’s the only measure, which it would need to be in order to claim that it is true all things considered that someone with fewer publications is under performing relative to someone with more.
I don’t see this. What would need to be true is that *on average* people with fewer publications are under-performing compared to people with more publications. We aren’t talking about one particular person here. It’s a fairly large group. So the averages do mean something.
Sure, a big joke. So funny! Did I miss the open letter from FAR demanding apologies, a retraction, and changes in editorial practices at Disability Studies Quarterly for publishing a delusional rationalization of abuse in the victim’s own name, authored by his rapist? The MM crowds’ selective silence is appalling though also instructive. We are to be reassured that DSQ is “reviewing” the attacker’s articles and someday might get back to us. This is totally normal. Don’t worry about it.
What is there to say about that response to the AAUP report? “Faculty Against Rape” is a group that includes philosophy graduate students calling themselves “faculty” and taking the lead in writing this response to the AAUP. The response shows that these students do not know much about the law. Leiter is surely correct in his assessment of the response and its authorship. The only comment worthy fact is that some otherwise reputable faculty signed on to the response. I do not know if this means they personally endorse the claims and reasoning in the document or if they were signing on as some sign of general solidarity only.
Well, it’s not just ignorance of law. There’s also a fair amount of — shall we say — motivated misinterpretation of the AAUP document, which makes a lot of the FAR response argumentatively flimsy or irrelevant.
Traditionally, signing a letter signifies endorsement of its contents. The only name I recognized at which I was even slightly surprised was J Saul’s, as I had thought her a better assessor of argument than that. Her motive may have been mere solidarity, but now she has to own it.
Presumably the only comments on the FP post about it were negative, since they surely would have published positive ones. I think the appetite even among the MM for unqualified Title-IX zeal is waning; its implementation has been too obviously catastrophically unjust in too many cases and its OCR architects/enforcers have been too clearly exposed as cowardly and dishonest equivocators. I suspect that this campaign is headed the way of the equally disastrous site-visit program (remember that?). The problem is that the general lesson is never learned: we will have barely caught our breath before the next bright shiny lunatic MM scheme is upon us. And with every iteration, the cause of opposing the relevant kinds of actually bad behavior is further discredited by being associated with a bunch of narcissistic douches whose highest priority is sustaining a fantasy of being in the heroic moral vanguard, and more and more people of good will are insulted and alienated.
Still the best analysis of gender bias in philosophy job hiring – at genderandprestige.com – tested the idea (currently mooted at DN by a commenter and sensibly disputed by Lemoine) that maybe there is a quality effect here; maybe, women’s articles, though fewer, are *better* than men’s. Apparently, there are various “obstacles”, “barriers”, etc. No evidence for these UFOs (Unobservable Feminist Obstacles) is provided; and everyone knows the truth is the reverse but is much too polite to say so. To test the hypothesis, one sharpens the performance indicator to average publication rate in the higher quality journals and then checks if the difference of means on this sharper performance indicator between the two groups increases or decreases. This test has been done,
“One can redo the calculations based on the highest ranking philosophy journals. …
The results for publication rates in the Top 15 journals are even more striking. For the Top 15 journals, 27% of men hired had at least one such publication, while only 11% of women hired had at least one. For these journals, the average publication rate for men hired was 0.42 publications, while for women hired it was only 0.14 publications.”
So when one introduces a *quality* measure on top of the mere average publication count, the gender bias effect becomes even stronger. When hired from no prior position, men published about twice as much on average as women had done; but men published *three times* as much on average in the 15 highest quality journals.
Here’s the thing. For familiar reasons in the philosophy of science, it’s impossible to outright refute the feminist view that women face substantial discrimination in the discipline. (Women get jobs over men despite having fewer publications? Their publications must be better. Their publications don’t get as many citations as men? There must be bias in the citation process. Etc etc.) What we have here is a Lakatosian research program, whose hard core is that women are discriminated against and which is willing to adopt any auxiliary hypotheses, no matter how implausible or undermotivated, in order to protect that hard core against refutation. Fortunately it’s pretty clear that it’s a degenerating research program.
Too many have never experienced life outside the classroom.
They think they’re clever people who know something. There’s so much they don’t know. So much. What do they know, really? They wake up every day and know there’s nothing in the world to trouble them. They go through their ordinary little days. At night, they sleep their ordinary sleep, filled with peaceful, stupid dreams. They live in dreams. They’re sleepwalkers, blind.
I think philosophers are particularly bad for a couple of different reasons. The usual academic blinders: we interact with a lot of atypical people and forget how different things look outside that bubble; we have expertise in one thing and think it applies everywhere. But also philosophy-specific: we’re used to dealing with deductive arguments and conceptual claims, and a lot of political issues (both policy and prognostication) involve empirical claims, knowledge of nuts-and-bolts political process, and so on. “I can imagine a counterexample” is f’ing useless in that realm.
In four years NYU has given the Bersoff Faculty Fellowship to three female Stanley proteges. Obviously this is no coincidence.
Between the three of them, they currently (April 2016) have exactly two peer-reviewed articles, plus a third one co-authored. This is in spite of all the feedback and advice from which they benefited at Rutgers and at NYU.
I think I know who you’re talking about. From a quick look at their websites, they seem to have more than two peer reviewed articles between them. That is not to say that the NYU-Rutgers nexus is not corrupt.
I can only id two of the three. (I admit I didn’t try very hard.) Between them they do seem to have two peer reviewed publications. I guess I don’t see what the problem is — they just finished postdocs, so why is it scandalous that they don’t have many publications? (Although some of the other Bersoffs have impressive lists already, it’s true.) I feel like there’s some additional element that is not being mentioned out of politesse or something.
I also have no idea what the “NYU-Rutgers nexus” is, so, yeah, I’m pretty far out of the loop.
Does “Stanley protoge” just mean Rutgers grad student who at some point discussed work with Jason Stanley? Because as far as I can tell, only one of the students you’re talking about was primarily advised by Stanley.
This is worthy of a new post. Metablogmoderator, what say you?
Presumably the only comments on the FP post about it were negative, since they surely would have published positive ones. I think the appetite even among the MM for unqualified Title-IX zeal is waning; its implementation has been too obviously catastrophically unjust in too many cases and its OCR architects/enforcers have been too clearly exposed as cowardly and dishonest equivocators. I suspect that this campaign is headed the way of the equally disastrous site-visit program (remember that?). The problem is that the general lesson is never learned: we will have barely caught our breath before the next bright shiny lunatic MM scheme is upon us. And with every iteration, the cause of opposing the relevant kinds of actually bad behavior is further discredited by being associated with a bunch of narcissistic douches whose highest priority is sustaining a fantasy of being in the heroic moral vanguard, and more and more people of good will are insulted and alienated.
Philosophymetametametablog 
Just a warning to the threadmasters: IF you threaten this AND I am mentioned again and again (as is with the posting previously), people will start to think u r “FemTrolling”! Why is this word used so many times? Also why did I still get talked about in the other post even though I demanded not to feed the pretender(s) anymore?
These and much more I hope can be answered this evening.
Lol. I jumped.
Me too! Ooooh, it was a good trick!
Me too, even though I’m a nobody female grad student who could pretend to be on their side in a pinch.
Haha, it would work, too. “Hey, I was just visiting to, uh, see all the misogyny to help the good sisters fight the patriarchy! Wow, what misogyny it was! I’m a victim, see? Group hug! Everyone start petitioning the APA to help me through the crisis of viewing the metametametablog!”
Ha. One of my female friends in grad school, speaking of our local rampaging feminists, once told me: they merely hate you as the enemy…*me* they see as an apostate…and that’s waaaaay worse…
So you may have some camouflage…but if you *do* get found out…you’re toast my friend
I guess Leiter’s attempt to compile a ‘dossier’ on Lance’s bullying has come to nothing. Seems pretty likely we would have seen it by now. Too bad. I was curious as to what Leiter was willing to count as bullying that he did not engage in himself on a thoroughly regular basis.
Of course nothing would come of it. Leiter is a little bitch who loves to use his huge platform to actually bully people (blast from the past anyone). It’s why I am always glad to jump on whatever bandwagon that seeks to minimize his participation in the profession.
Yes, RM! We know there’s no depth you won’t stoop to.
Just want to take this opportunity to remind everyone of how lame the punny nicknames are.
I get that it’s fun to have ingroup markers and puns seem like a way to demonstrate how clever you are, but oh god, they’re not.
Not entirely. I like Daily Nous, and the guy who runs it, but “Justice Whineberg” is really inspired. Hats off to whoever came up with it.
Thank you.
ok I will give you that “Justice Whineberg” would be funny, but it has drowned in the sea of all the others. there is nothing more unfunny than a whole string of them in a sentence. stop trying so hard guys.
“Sir Ranksalot” is also good.
A lot of them are good.
I mean, it’s an aesthetic, you either get it or you don’t.
YOu spelled whiny bitch wrong.
Rage Machine.
47 million Korean teenagers driven out of the Wisconsin Philosophy Department by while males, and Weinberg refuses to say anything about it.
#whatisitliketobeakoreanteenagerinphilosophy
This is hilarious! You should really quit your *job* as an unemployed meta-bro and go into comedy.
“… an unemployed meta-bro …”
What happened to “Distinguish yourself by being kind”?
It got truncated. It was supposed to be “distinguish yourself by being kind of a dick”.
lol
“Hey, I was just visiting to, uh, see all the misogyny to help the good sisters fight the patriarchy! Wow, what misogyny it was! I’m a victim, see? Group hug! Everyone start petitioning the APA to help me through the crisis of viewing the metametametablog!”
Group hugs are out. Some “unemployed meta-bro” might accidentally lance your kukla.
whenever you decide to stop by the metablog and see what’s up it’s like http://imgur.com/atjnhgl guyzzzz 🙄😘💎💁
Philodaria defending harassing innocent people to death, as per usual, at FP blog.
“‘Kind, funny and bright’ student, 17, hanged himself after being falsely accused of rape and finding it ‘difficult to cope with the investigation’.”
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3256157/Student-17-hanged-falsely-accused-rape.html
What FP comment are you referring to? I didn’t see anything on FP about that case…
Philodaria thinks it is a good thing to harass innocent people to death.
Where are you getting this from, though?
It oozes from everything Catherine Pojman writes that she thinks it is good when innocent people die due to bullying and false accusations. It’s not important to cite examples and evidence for this belief, let alone make analogies that are relevantly similar.
Who is Catherine Pojman?
I am so lost.
It’s tragic when young people commit suicide.
And this case relevant to philodaria’s preponderance of the evidence posts, because…. if only he had been facing a beyond reasonable doubt standard instead of a preponderance of evidence one?
Oh wait, he was.
Way to try to exploit a young man’s suicide to try to make an unrelated point. You’re disgusting.
+1. The person who wrote that comment – and the similar ones below – should be ashamed of themselves.
Use Philodaria’s real name, Kathryn Pogin.
I’m sorry but it is actually spelled “Katherine” Pogin. For the dense bros who want to be philosophers, that’s Kathryn but with an “i” and an “e,” not a “y” without an “e.”
I have no idea what you are talking about.
Perhaps Philodaria would like to have a bit of fun with this suicide, of 23 year old Luke King, caused by a false accusation,
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/tragedy-luke-king-reminds-us-rape-suspects-are-always-innocent-until-proven-guilty-1474310
And King was *also* facing a beyond reasonable doubt standard, because it was *also* a criminal complaint.
Manipulating people’s suicides = DISGUSTING
I’m sorry but Cathryn has ALREADY had MORE than a bit of fun with this case. After all, this case is exactly what the FP posts are about. I mean just read them. She’s writing about this case – literally, the FP post mentions this case multiple times.
Philodaria might try to explain the moral justification for harassing the innocent to death. Another example,
“His reputation sullied, teacher commits suicide. False accusation leads to tragedy in Virginia city”
http://archive.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/02/15/his_reputation_sullied_teacher_commits_suicide/?page=full
ALSO faced a beyond reasonable doubt standard, because ALSO a criminal complaint, and “What Mayfield did not know as he mounted the bridge that morning was that police had cleared him of wrongdoing.”
…i.e. the system worked.
but keep on misrepresenting real tragedies to smear a philosophy blogger. you’re clearly on the moral high ground here.
“Blogger”? I’m sorry but the person in question is much more than a blogger. Ever seen Lord of the Rings? Ever seen the Eye of Sauron? Basically if you combine feminism with the Eye of Sauron you have this person. The Ring of Power is Title IX.
Frodo is…
Philippe Lemoine.
David Wallace would have gone with him to the end…
…into the very fires of Mordor.
Another example. How much evidence is needed before feminists like Philodaria learn to treat other human beings with respect and understand that harassing innocent people to death is morally outrageous?
“Lawsuit: Sex abuse claims against deceased former educator were false: The parents of a Uintah County educator who committed suicide in 2013 after being accused of child sex abuse have filed a federal lawsuit against the police detective and the DCFS caseworker who investigated the case.”
https://www.ksl.com/?sid=32140403
Also faced a beyond reasonable doubt standard, also not relevant to anything philodaria is saying.
Sorry but the “beyond a reasonable doubt standard” just isn’t relevant here. It simply has nothing to do with philodaria’s posts. It’s not even mentioned in either post or in the discussions of those posts. Obvi what philodaria is writing about is simply how it’s good to find innocent people and try to get them to commit suicide. If I’m not mistaken the titles of the posts in question basically say this as well.
Another example of the kind of bullying to death that Philodaria supports. Here, the systemic bullying of schoolkids to death with disproportionate and unfair disciplinary action.
“Suicide turns attention to Fairfax discipline procedures … Fairfax parents tell stories of going into the process without an attorney and finding their children under fire at adversarial hearings. These families contend there is no impartial judge but instead a presumption of guilt. They say there is little discussion of a student’s well-being, psychological state or the cause of the misconduct.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/19/AR2011021904528.html
Look, these cases are clearly tragic. But why do people keep saying that Philodaria from FP supports bullying people to death in this way? What comment/s of hers are you guys referring to?
What is “tragic” about harassing a falsely accused innocent person to death?
I’m not sure why you are asking this, because surely it’s obvious – what’s tragic is that in all of those cases, a person committed suicide. Losing someone close to you to suicide is always a tragedy.
The innocent person commits suicide because they have been harassed, bullied, or had their life ruined, with extremely serious false allegations. The harassment of an innocent person to death is not a “tragedy”. The family of the victim will not call it a “tragedy” – they will say that their brother, son, etc., is a victim of being bullied to death.
It’s precisely the level of irreparable harm suffered by victims of false allegations that mandates a judicial requirement of a high standard of proof in responding to any kind of serious allegation. And this is why, in a campus setting, any such allegation should be always referred to the police force, and never to someone who is politically-motivated to treat the innocent as guilty and to protect the institution’s public persona.
Now Philodaria, who is promoting the harassment to death of innocent people, is a vicious and disgusting human being. Contrary to Philodaria’s disgusting views, harassing innocent people to death is not ok. It is evil.
Wait, but – what is so bad about suicide, death, and harassment? You have not unpacked this sufficiently.
On the internet you need to say explicitly when you’re sarcastic. Otherwise people could mistake you for an SJW.
Can you fucking read? This student was at risk of expulsion for buying a legal marijuana analogue, literally NOTHING TO DO WITH RAPE COMPLAINTS.
Not only are you manipulating the stories of men who were the subjects of criminal rape complaints, you’re portraying a student who was NEVER ACCUSED OR RAPE as though he was. Completely disgusting.
False accusations kill people.
It is you that is “completely disgusting”.
Sorry no it is actually Katherine Pogge who is completely disgusting.
And frightening. If Cathrynn has her way, there will be no more men or innocent humans left in philosophy. First they came for Colin McGinn, and I did not speak out.
Speaking of which, whatever became of the suit against McGinn, Miami, et al? Was that resolved, dropped, or what?
False accusations kill people.
Philodaria promotes false accusations.
Therefore, Philodaria promotes killing people.
You’ve made a mistake in your conclusion. Promoting a thing that sometimes does or causes X is not the same thing as promoting X. For example, peanuts sometimes kill people. But it does not follow that an ad agency which puts together a peanut butter campaign promotes killing people. So even if your second premise were true, the conclusion wouldn’t follow.
People have gotten so crazy about peanuts that I wonder if Skippy employees aren’t given the side-eye when picking their children up from school.
Yeah but I wasn’t writing about peanuts.
Right, but I suffer from peanuts envy.
Sorry but how is this syllogism relevant to Trump’s claim that Mexico will pay for the wall? Did I miss something?
where are we supposed to put the bad women if not on the other side of a wall
Send them to the cornfield.
She was a bad woman. A bad, bad woman.
It’s hard to tell if this comment was left by a proponent distilling a case or a detractor exposing its baldfaced badness
Or its badfaced baldness.
If a variable X is positively correlated with another Y, then promoting X does promote Y. For example, Trump rallies are positively correlated with violence. So, promoting Trump rallies promotes violence. Doing so without recognizing or taking into account the potential conflict is reckless. This is why such events might be, and have been, cancelled and is why Trump has been criticized sternly, including by both the left and the right. Concerning the harm caused by peanut allergy, in principle, a company might be held legally liable if it promoted peanut butter in a situation where a harmful or lethal outcome were possible (e.g., at a school).
Now back to that feminist bully and harasser, Philodaria.
Philodaria promotes false accusations. But false accusations are positively correlated with destructive and suicidal outcomes for the innocent victims. Therefore, Philodaria promotes destructive and suicidal outcomes.
This is correct moral/practical reasoning. It remains correct, despite aggression from feminist bullies. In the literature on psychological abuse and violence, this attempt to invert who is being violent and aggressive – it is feminists who are violent and aggressive – is called psychological projection.
eet eez not true. for example, ze Beernie zupport eez positively correlated vit ze men, but promoting ze Beernie zupport eez not promoting being ze men. bon?
kees kees! 😘😘 geet better zoon!
yall numbnuts.
Poe’s Law in full effect here!
Standards of evidence are a compromise between the interests of the accused and accuser. Even the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard will result in some false convictions. Is somebody who promotes a beyond a reasonable doubt standard therefore also promoting false accusations? I don’t think so. The debate is about whether college quasi-judicial processes lean too far in favor of the accuser, not whether somebody is “promoting” destructive outcomes.
“Is somebody who promotes a beyond a reasonable doubt standard therefore also promoting false accusations?”
No, that’s a black and white fallacy. This is a scale, and not a black and white issue. Such a person would be promoting an *increase*, not a decrease, and therefore would be aiming to *reduce* miscarriages, injustice, harassment, etc.
Promoting a *reduction* in evidence standard promotes miscarriages of justice, the success of false accusations and public shaming and harassment campaigns. It also promotes the consequences of those shaming and vilification campaigns: the ruination of people’s lives and sometimes even suicide. This is precisely what Philodaria is promoting: false accusations, miscarriages, injustice, the ruination of people’s lives and the harassment of innocent people to death.
And similar points have been made repeatedly by many opponents of these abuses, including many prominent lawyers writing recently about the miscarriages and debacle over Title IX.
not everything is solely about u and the men bb sorry
You think bullying Jay Cheshire to death is ok?
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/6670518/Teens-suicide-after-false-rape-claim.html
yeah the fact that Cheshire DID face a beyond reasonable doubt standard hasn’t changed in the last 12 hours. still not relevant. 🙄
lol man u reaching
Put it this way: raising the evidential standard increases the chances that a guilty party will escape punishment. But it would not be reasonable for somebody to accuse you of promoting rape! We are just talking about whether there should be a civil standard or a criminal standard (as it happens, I don’t think universities should be in this business, but if they are, then the standard should be reasonable doubt).
As for the trolling comment below, 6:36 is in a dreamworld if he thinks the reasonable doubt standard will not be restored very soon. People outside of feminist dance therapy departments are realizing this is the only responsible way forward.
nah 4:46 just needs to remember that the accused are only half of the equation.
do you think all civil cases are going to switch to a beyond reasonable doubt standard too? weird!
False accusations can cause horrific harm, including death.
Is this point actually in dispute? It has been demonstrated to be true above, by multiple real cases.
No. No one is disputing it. No one is saying that it is a good thing either, though some butter is attempting to make out as though people are.
Do you think the reasonable doubt standard used to apply to all civil cases? Weird!
The topic is the harm and suffering, sometimes fatal, caused by false accusations of rape and similar crimes. I do hope that’s clear.
False accusations cause horrific outcomes, including death.
Philodaria is promoting false accusations.
Promoting something positively correlated with X is promoting X.
Therefore, Philodaria is promoting horrific outcomes, including death.
Someone might explain again why this reasoning is “incorrect”? Which premise is false? The first premise has been established above, with real cases. It is therefore presumably not in dispute. The second premise is presumably also not in dispute, as reducing evidence standards promotes false accusations, and Philodaria is openly advocating the reduced standard.
Is it therefore the third premise which is disputed? Why?
I ‘av alreedy eesplain eet to you. Ze premise three, eet iz not true. Ze Beernie zupport eez positively correlated vit ze men, but promoting ze Beernie zupport eez not promoting being ze men. bon? bon BOn!
An’ if ze third premise is not true, ze second premise iz not true. Oo covertly use ze third premise een getting ze second premise. Zneeky boy! No no!
The correlation is causal, yes. That’s a mistake. It should say that in both premises.
“Tylenol (I think its that one – it is one of the common painkillers anyway) can cause death if you take too much of it. It doesn’t follow that promoting Tylenol is promoting death.”
Well, it does. Tylenol causes fatal liver damage in overdose levels, unless treated quickly. This is why its sale is regulated and there are health warnings. Promoting a change in these regulations to a lower standard of protection may indeed count as promoting death, and could even be legally actionable. (E.g., if a politician were bribed by its manufacturers to legislatively repeal the regulatory powers.)
The equivocation objection is the strongest objection.
Giving one case in which we might say that promoting something which causally correlates with X is not the same as demonstrating that it follows that promoting something that causally correlates with X is the same as promoting X. One case is enough for a counterexample, but one case doesn’t establish a general claim.
men are more likely to be supporters of bernie or bernie’s supporters are mostly men is not equivalent to “Ze Beernie zupport eez positively correlated vit ze men” …
and what’s the definition of `causally correlated’?
o! o! But “men are more liklee to zupport ze beernie,” eet eez eequivalent to “ze beernie zupport eez positively correlated vit ze men.” Back to ze stats class vit you! rapide! rapide!
Well, for a start you need to change either the first premise or the third, because you switch from ’causes’ to ‘is positively correlated with’ – you need to be consistent throughout. But either version of premise three seems like it would be false. You’ve already been given several examples in which it is clear that promoting something which causes X (or which correlates with X) doesn’t imply that the person promotes X. Here’s yet another example – lots of common over-the-counter drugs have side effects. Tylenol (I think its that one – it is one of the common painkillers anyway) can cause death if you take too much of it. It doesn’t follow that promoting Tylenol is promoting death.
Woah. You actually haven’t given any evidence at all for the second premise. And as pointed out, the second premise is only true if the third premise is true, and the third premise is not true.
There’s an equivocation over “promotes”. If it means: “does something that increases the likelihood”, then the argument is sound, but its conclusion is totally irrelevant, since (in that sense) all of us promote horrific outcomes many times every day. (I promote more more people cycling to work; this is correlated with more people dying in bicycle accidents; so in that sense I promote more people dying in bicycle accidents. But so what?) If it means: “is in favor of”, then premise 3 is obviously false, because we can be in favor of X and not in favor of things that X is positively correlated with.
You are doing the Lord’s work in trying to reason with this one anonymous. He is so caught up in his own fervor that he’s barely thinking at all. That or it’s satire. Either way, the Lord’s work.
1. False accusations are causally correlated with horrific outcomes, including death.
2. Philodaria is promoting false accusations.
3. Promoting something causally correlated with outcome X is promoting outcome X.
Therefore, Philodaria is promoting horrific outcomes, including death.
Better, but this doesn’t address a bunch of objections that have already been raised.
It seems to me it addresses them all, except perhaps the equivocation objection on “promotes”. Other than that, it’s valid; if sound, it establishes the truth of the conclusion. The first two premises are true. The first is based on empirical evidence given above. The second is based on Philodaria’s public advocacy of reduced evidential standards, which promote false accusations. Furthermore, as Canadian lawyers – indeed, feminist lawyers – have pointed out, in connection with Jian Ghomeshi’s recent acquittal, prominent false accusations harm not only the falsely accused but also genuine victims.
Only the third premise is in some dispute. However, the third premise, or something very similar to it, is standardly assumed in all social and public policy decision-making. Promoting a cause of an effect X is promoting that effect X.
The second premise is in dispute because your justification for it assumes the truth if the third premise, which is in dispute. And I’m surprised by the claim that the third premise is assumed in public policy decision making. Do you have any evidence for this? (Though even if you do, I don’t think that would warrant accepting the claim).
It also clearly doesn’t address the equivocation problem at all, and as has been pointed out several times, this objection is pretty serious. I can’t see how you could resolve it.
There are further problems with the second premise. Firstly, it is not clear that Philodaria is advocating a ‘reduced’ standard. Isn’t it the case that most universities currently use preponderance of evidence, and she is advocating that this should remain as it is? Also, you haven’t actually produced any actual evidence for the claim that reducing the standard of evidence increases false accusations. It may seem simply common sense to you, but it is an empirical claim and as such requires evidence to substantiate. I understand it would be difficult to do so, but in order to establish premise 2 you would ar least need to make some kibd of attempt ( for example look at reported rates of false accusations in civil as opposed to criminal cases – thoufb one problem with that is obviously that a defendant winning at trial does not establish that the initial accusation was in fact false – it jyst establishes that there was not enough evidence to prove the accusation). Even if we grant you the second premise though, the argument still has serious – I would say fatal – flaws.
1. Our core sense of fairness and justice always errs on the side of not erroneously punishing an innocent person.
2. The combination of a low standard of proof and flimsy adjudicative procedures is a recipe for disaster; in particular, punishing an innocent person.
3. We have evidence that universities, due to external pressures, do not always uphold basic fairness in adjudicative procedures.
4. Preponderance of evidence standard is not in proportionality to the harm someone endures if wrongly convicted or found responsible for sexual assault.
5. Someone promoting preponderance of evidence under the reality of 3. is willfully abetting disaster.
6. Philodaria is willfully abetting disaster.
(1) is false. We could avoid punishing innocent people altogether if we simply never punished people. We don’t always err on the side of not erroneously punishing an innocent person, but instead balance the need for justice for victims with the risk of erroneously punishing an innocent person with the severity of punishment. At least one of the justifications for a lower standard of evidence in civil cases is that the severity of the punishment is less. We could have a higher standard of evidence here, but we don’t. We could even have a higher standard of evidence in criminal cases (we could go with ‘beyond any doubt whatsoever’ if we wanted to). But we don’t, because while avoiding erroneously punishing the Innocent is an important consideration, it’s not the only consideration.
I take your point about the letter of (1). Replace (1) with: Our core sense of fairness and justice proceed under the presumption of innocence of the accused and the burden of proof on the complainant. This doesn’t really add anything to the argument, though I don’t see how the rest of the argument depend essentially on (1) anyway. The real issue is with 4 or something like it.
Your main problem is that you are only focusing on one of the negative consequences. Everyone agrees that it is a bad thing when innocent people suffer as a result of wrongful conviction. But it is also bad when people get raped, and when the rapist gets away with it. Moving to a higher standard of evidence may have the result of increasing the number of rapes, seeing as people are more likely to do things if they think they can get away with it. Being raped often has exactly the devastating circumstances you are worried about – suicide, a life destroyed. According to your reasoning, then, people who advocate for a higher standard of proof are also wilfully abetting disaster. Hopefully this helps you to see why your argument is a bad one. Almost every policy decision involves increasing the likelihood of certain harms in order to decrease the likelihood of others – your own proposal doesn’t escape this problem.
I doubt that rapists are engaged in practical reasoning concerning the likelihood their potential victims will pursue justice via one avenue vs. another where standards of evidence differs. There is no parity of reasoning here.
There is. I’ve produced just as much evidence for the claim that going with the higher standard of evidence will increase the number or rapes as you have for the claim that going with a lower standard of evidence will increase the number of false accusations (i.e. none at all).
Nowhere did I rely on or mention the bearing of standard of evidence on the number of false accusations. You introduced the numbers game and the notion of `getting away with or not getting away with something’ in your reply. Unless you want to affirm “The combination of beyond reasonable doubt (or ‘clear and convincing’, as the case may be) standard and fair adjudicating procedures is a recipe for disaster,” I don’t see the parity. But I agree. there is the harm of false accusation and conviction and the harm of false acquittal.
1. is false.
The third premise is not “in some dispute.” The third premise is obviously false, as anyone competent in social and public policy decision making will tell you. If the options are A and B, and BOTH are causally correlated with X, promoting A-over-B is not promoting X if A causes LESS X than B. And that’s exactly what’s at stake here. Maybe actually read the Philodaria posts….
are you an undergrad that just learned about deductive reasoning
Premise 2 needs some justification. Maybe this has just drifted off into some theoretical exercise, so it doesn’t matter, but otherwise, the whole thread reads as if there is some a priori reason for wanting to assert the conclusion, and the premises are being constructed and tweaked with the hopes of arriving at that outcome. As opposed to just reading the fp article/discussion thread and trying to understand what is really being argued for and why.
Premise 1: anything any FP contributor does is worse than the holocaust.
Premise 2: FP contributor X did something this week.
Conclusion: What FP contributor X did this week is worse than the holocaust.
Wriggle out of that one, femtroll.
Somewhat poor choice, there, m8.
Laura Kipnis’s great aunt survived the Holocaust.
FP contributor Kathryn Pogin (Philodaria) made false Title IX accusations against Kipnis, trying to get Kipnis fired.
Or “The metametametametablogs: rendering deduction an expressivism since 2012”
So I’m not clear what all the fuss is about. Philodaria and others think that we should treat the burden of proof for accusations of sexual misconduct at universities as preponderance of the evidence, as in civil cases. But in an age of google and social justice activism, having been found at fault of sexual misconduct at college destroys one’s reputation both professionally and publicly. Those opposed to Philodaria’s position maintain that this consequence is sufficiently unlike the repercussions that come from being adjudged at fault over damage to a neighbor’s fence (say) that the lowering of the standard of fault to that of civil court is not justified. What am I missing?
As far as “what am I missing”, I’d only say that a more apt infractions to compare to (at a college) than damaging a neighbor’s fence: plagarism, cheating on tests, etc. Infractions that are serious enough to get you kicked out of school (or fired) should, perhaps, have similar standards of evidence requirements.
Your point about googling is really important, I think. Companies keep these kind of things private pretty well as personnel matters. There’s no reason universities can’t do the same. If there’s fear that a serial assaulter (or plagerizer) will continue that elsewhere, there are things that universities can do to severely limit that (like what public school systems do)
“What am I missing?”
Two things. First that Philodaria promotes false accusations because Philodaria has a track record of false accusations – for example, against Kipnis. Second, that Philodaria doesn’t care about the appalling suffering inflicted on others by distributing false accusations.
You’re not adding anything to the conversation at this point buddy. Have a seat and cool off for a minute.
The dispute as to whether reducing evidence standard causes a higher number of false positives (Type 1 errors) has got to be one of the stupidest things I’ve ever seen on the internet. The sensitivity of a redness detector is the percentage of red things judged red (positive decision). The specificity of a detector is the percentage of non-red things judged non-red. The false positive rate is the percentage of non-red things incorrectly judged red. The false positive rate of a detector is 1 minus its specificity.
Suppose Philodaria is a reduced evidence standard detector for redness. Suppose Leiter is high evidence standard detector for redness. Then the specificity of Philodaria will be *lower* that the specificity of Leiter. Therefore, Philodaria’s false positive rate will be *higher* than Leiter’s false positive rate.
May I add that the Brandeis decision (linked at BL’s place) shows why there are procedural issues which go far beyond this narrow debate about evidential standards. It makes for interesting reading. To call their process Stalinesque is probably unfair to the Soviet Union. What they had going more resembled the legal system of the Tang Dynasty.
“Being raped often has exactly the devastating circumstances you are worried about”
Perhaps tell Jennifer Saul that? Saul said in 2014 that rape is “incredibly complicated”.
Admittedly, this was when Saul’s feminist colleague Anna Stubblefield raped a disabled man; so we need to remember that, on Saul’s view, it’s ok when a man is raped by a feminist.
Come off it. Saul said that a specific rape case was incredibly complicated, and everyone on both sides of the issue knows that some cases of rape are incredibly complicated.
Stubblefield raped a disabled man, AND there’s reason to think that she genuinely cared about his consent and believed he was consenting. I agree that that’s a complicated case, and I would feel exactly the same about a case where a man raped a woman but genuinely cared about her consent and believed she was consenting.
Mostly, though, just move on. This topic has come and gone.
Feminists think that a feminist raping a diaper-wearing non-verbal disabled man with the mental age of a toddler is “complicated” (and the rapist is now convicted)?
It’s as if your mind belongs to a different moral universe, out of touch with ethical duties. The topic has not gone, and it will not go.
As you know, Stubblefield believed he was not nonverbal and that his mental age had been misevaluated.
and the diaper wearing thing is obviously irrelevant. continence has little to do with ability to consent. As you should know, since you seem to consider yourself informed enough to comment on this, FC advocates think that many people cannot communicate because they can’t control their bodies but have normal intelligence, though they cannot prove it in unfacilitated IQ testing because of their motor skill problems.
Read more about FC. There’s plenty of evidence that practitioners really are convinced that they’re not the one’s typing. Read Boynton 2012 “Facilitated Communication—what harm it can do: Confessions of a former facilitator” and some of the other articles in the special issue, it has good discussion of the psychology going on with facilitators. It’s similar phenomenon to what goes on with ouija boards and automatic writing, where, by following a process unfortunately similar to FC (ex. begin by focusing on your hand being outside of your control) people can start writing increasingly complex sentences that they feel they have no conscious control over. It turns out people have really bad access to whether they’re the one moving their limbs when their attention is focused elsewhere.
And there’s a REALLY bad situation with the group beliefs around FC: “assume competency,” skeptics are ableist and just don’t believe disabled people can be competent, rigorous validity testing is too stressful and disadvantages nonverbal autistic people who don’t get the normal opportunities to develop message passing skills, only Bad Facilitators who don’t follow the standards make mistakes… Stubblefield’s own belief that doubting authorship in FC was hate speech.
Stubblefield should have known better was incredibly irresponsible even by FC standards, but there’s little reason to doubt that she believed in FC, hook line and sinker. Her mom is a prominent advocate. She’s been around it her entire life. Who other than a true believer would claim that a man who had been treated as severely intellectually disabled his entire life could write http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/1717/1765 (fully fluent in academ-ese) only a year after his intelligence was “discovered”?
It’s stupid because there’s a solid point to be made relevant to other metabro concerns—it’s one of the clearest cases of “identity politics” anti-____-ism groupthink hurting people very badly. And instead of discussion of the real point there, we just get metabros saying “FEMINIST PHILOSOPHERS SUPPORT RAPE” over and over and over again, until we’re all dead. RIP philosophy
Hey, meta blogger: if it’s not too much trouble, would you entertain this request: could you please use a recent comment widget that gives a bit more info, eg, a snippet of the comment? That was a nice feature on earlier incarnations, making it easier to drop into the right part of a conversation. WordPress seems to have such widgets.
Thanks for the suggestion (suggestions about the site are always welcome). Unfortunately since this is a free wordpress site I can’t use external plugins, so we’re stuck with the stock comment widget, as inadequate as it is.
Discuss: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XB5fG7gbZ0
Marie Henein: “Hashtag ‘I believe’ is not a legal principle.”
Lol! She’s pretty pissed.
“Violence in Chicago is soaring to levels not seen for almost two decades as the police retreat from the streets for fear of being accused of unfairly targeting young black and Hispanic men.”
http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/world_news/Americas/article1684415.ece
Seems hashtag activism has done its job in Chicago
#BlackLivesMatter
🙄
This is by social psychologist and feminist Carol Tavris. Recall back in December ’14 that a blogger at Fem Philers reaffirmed that she regarded Emily Yoffe as a “rape apologist” for her articles for Slate discussed here…
THE DELICATE DILEMMA OF DEFINING RAPE
http://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/the-delicate-dilemma-of-defining-rape/
This should be fun:
https://www.thefire.org/fire-aims-to-challenge-legality-of-federal-sexual-misconduct-mandate/
I think we really need to discuss Harriet Baber’s comments on FP: https://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/2016/04/04/gender-stereotypes-and-the-gender-gap-in-higher-education/ Where she says of male underachievement in secondary education:
“Why should boys bother? They’ve got it made. We have to push for all we’re worth to avoid pink-collar shit work. Guys just have to be mediocre to get decent jobs and decent lives. Life still sucks for women. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJsw9NHxIPY&feature=youtu.be ”
Not only was this in response to one of the rare occasions pervasive male underachievement in education has been discussed, but it illustrates just how people like Harriet Barber really think about half the population.
As one commentator notes: “If attitudes like hbaber’s are common enough among teachers, little wonder many boys have a problem with school.”
And remember, Harriet Barber IS a teacher. Would you be comfortable as a male student with your professor expressing views like that?
If life is so easy for men, one wonders why their suicide rates are 4 times higher?
It must be incredibly hard being among the 57% of undergraduates and postgraduates who are female.
I’m glad someone made the point about black boys in schools. A group that does not, by any stretch, “have it made.”
Black working-cass boys do *better* than white working-class boys, as a matter of fact. But do not expect the wealthy women at FP to show any knowledge of the world outside their privileged existence.
That seems surprising, given things like the high incarceration rates of black men. What dimension are you talking about here – earning power, educational achievement, or…?
“White boys from working-class backgrounds are falling further behind other social and ethnic groups at school, according to the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC). In its new five-yearly report, the EHRC, the equalities watchdog, found that white boys from poor families achieved GCSE grades that fell below every other ethnic group. Just 28.3 per cent of white boys who were eligible for free school meals achieved five GCSEs at grade A to C.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/the-filter/11965045/White-working-class-boys-are-the-worst-performing-ethnic-group-at-school.html
Thanks – I didn’t realize you were talking about Britain.
lol it is completely misleading to respond to someone talking about high incarcerations (i.e. US) with something about the UK, unacknowledged.
It’s the ARG’s latest trick. He’s been pulling it all over the place this week.
“If the options are A and B, and BOTH are causally correlated with X, promoting A-over-B is not promoting X if A causes LESS X than B. And that’s exactly what’s at stake here. Maybe actually read the Philodaria posts….”
It is not a matter of dispute that harm to innocent victims of false accusations of criminal sexual conduct vastly outweighs harm to victims of failed or not-even-begun prosecutions of the guilty. At least not by anyone with elementary understanding of ethical duties. It has also been at the basis of the criminal justice system for hundreds of years, as in Blackstone’s formulation: “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer”.
Philodaria doesn’t merely promote this suffering of others at the FP cesspool. Philodaria actually is a false accuser, having falsely accused Laura Kipnis.
“Thanks to several readers for passing this on” means “I read about it on Daily Nous.”
“I’m popular, guys. I’m powerful. People tell me things. People value my input. Guys? …Guys?”
It remains alarming that simple points about evidence gathering and statistical analysis are lost on those trying to promote the “women leave undergraduate philosophy” myth. To demonstrate such an effect, one needs:
1. To measure X, the f:m ratio for those who apply to study philosophy.
2. To measure Y, the f:m ratio for those who complete degrees in philosophy.
3. To measure Z, the f:m ratio for those who apply to/enrol in graduate degrees in philosophy.
4. Show that X > Y > Z and that this conclusion is statistically significant (i.e., the null hypothesis is rejected with p Y > Z. The evidence, if anything, tends to support the claim that X = Y = Z, with X < 50%. It is logically irrelevant saying "almost no one studies philosophy at high school". Usually almost no one studies medicine, psychology and law at high school. However, in each of these, women outnumber men.
(should say “the null hypothesis is rejected with p < 0.05")
If by ‘leave undergraduate phiolosophy’ you mean drop out after declaring an intention to major in it (either before arriving, as in the British system, or after a year or so in college, as in the us system) then you may be right – I haven’t seen evidence either way. But there is clear evidence that in the US, there is a statistically significant drop off in women’s representation between intro and majoring (and that there are no other statistically significant drop offs). This is from the Paxton, figdor and Tiberius study. They do exactly what you want, except that their x is women who take intro courses. But this seems a reasonable x to take in a system where people usually don’t declare a major until after taking an intro course.
Also, I’d be interested to see the study where you get the X equals 50% statistic from. Is it 50% of those applying to take philosophy in the UK system are women? In the UK is it also the case then that 50% of undergraduate majors and doctoral students in philosophy are women?
“there is a statistically significant drop off in women’s representation between intro and majoring”
That is no evidence of this. No significance attaches to statistics for a mere course which people take for countless *reasons*. One needs to establish this *reason* to draw an inference. It may measure bunching of course requisites. It may measure a tendency, given one is *not* studying subject S, to find out about it anyway, out of curiosity.
“They do exactly what you want, except that their x is women who take intro courses”
To repeat – they do not. Paxton, Figdor & Tiberius measured the wrong thing.
I’ll explain this only one more time. The US system is an outlier in higher education in its internal structure. A mere course in the US system indicates nothing. Under the US system, people may take a course for all kinds of reasons, sometimes because they are compelled to by overall requirements. For all we know, the majority of students who take an Intro Psych course or Intro Jurisprudence course are men. However, the subjects of medicine and law are female dominated, if you examine application, enrolment and completion statistics. All this should be completely obvious.
The three quantities which need to be measured are:
X: the f:m ratio of students who applied to or were enrolled into philosophy undergraduate degrees.
Y: the f:m ratio of students who completed philosophy degrees.
Z: the f:m ratio of students who applied to/enrolled into philosophy graduate degrees.
Paxton, Figdor & Tiberius did not measure X. They measured something else, whose functional relation to X is completely unknown. What they measured may anti-correlate with X, for all we know. It may be true that X > Y > Z. However, no one has shown this is true. It may also be true that X = Y = Z and no one has shown this is true either. Or perhaps X > Y > Z, but the effect is small. Or perhaps X < Y Y > Z, when no one has given evidence for it.
u seem confused about statistical significance.
philosophers are shit when opining about statistics. witness the idiotic debate by some authorities over the ‘correlation’ of Venetian sea levels/Britain bread prices.
Merle Haggard has a posse.
“Is it 50% of those applying to take philosophy in the UK system are women? In the UK is it also the case then that 50% of undergraduate majors and doctoral students in philosophy are women?”
No, X < 50%. I know some figures; some from about ten years ago, and some more recent. Those I saw lie in the range 30-40%. Cambridge publishes its figures. X is 39.9% averaged over the last four years. It is not top secret to any department administrator what X, Y and Z are. These numbers could be collected in probably a few days, by someone sufficiently curious, by emailing the administrator and asking that person what X,Y and Z are. They will have a database and the information would be easily obtained.
The beebee and Saul study has some of the relevant numbers. 43/47% take honours or joint honours (I’m assuming that is equivalent to majoring). 31% of doctoral students are women. So the claim above that x equals y equals z, where x is greater than 50%, looks like it is mistaken – its clearly not the case that y, at least, is anywhere near 50%.
Perhaps you could say what “beebee and Saul study” you are referring to.
Women in philosophy in the UK swip study – if you google that and their names you should get a link to the PDF.
First, this is a political document, written by a pair of politically-motivated individuals. Obviously, we must tread very carefully in trusting claims made by those who are not primarily interested in truth. Second, it does state, “46% of single and joint honours undergraduates are women”. However, this is a figure from HESA which aggregates “philosophy and historical studies”.
This does not automatically imply that Beebee and Saul were being dishonest. But their assertion is misleading, because HESA because it aggregates philosophy and history (possibly classics too).
To repeat, the figures I have seen for X for applications are in the range 30-40%. One can calculate it for Cambridge, based on its published figures. It is 39.9%, for 2011-2014. It is possible that other universities are higher and that others are lower. It’s also possible that application rates differ from acceptance rates. (If acceptance rates for women are higher, does that indicate anti-male prejudice?)
However, that X 50%, Bio > 50%, Law > 50%, Hum > 50% and US = 57%.
Do these imply discrimination against men? If not, why not?
Where are these figures published?
HESA publishes the figures for Biological sciences, Medicine, Law, Humanities, Education, …
If you go to table 2.1, you will see the numbers I am talking about (43/47 majoring at undergrad, 31% enrolled at PhD level. This is not HESA data, it is BPA data. The information was gathered from philosophy departments and is about philosophy students.
Also, where does it say that HESA aggregates history and philosophy? This doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense seeing as the section that uses the HESA data compares the HESA data on philosophy with the HESA data on history.
The 46% figure is actually from the BPA data (see the start of section 2.3)
Yes, my mistake. The earlier part of the paragraph mentioned HESA, so I looked at some HESA spreadsheets, which do aggregate “Philosophy and Historical studies”. But what is says there as its evidence remains unclear – “BPA questionnaire data” – completed by whom? Academic administrators?
It says that the questionnaires were sent to Heads of Department (the departments surveyed are listed in a footnote).
The sample size is about 1000; so the error is +-3%. The BPA questionnaire says the enrolments are:
Undergrad: 44%.
MA: 33%.
PhD intake: 31%.
🙄
Sorry, I messed up the last part of that – the relevant thing that those numbers show us is that y (proportion of those majoring in philosophy who are women) does not equal z (proportion of those enrolled in doctoral programmes who are women). So the evidence doesn’t seem to support the claim that x equals y equals z, as claimed above.
Has anybody here violated the rule forbidding multiple submissions, or followed the letter but not the spirit of the rule by submitting a section of a larger paper to a different journal, or a substantial rewording of the paper that maintains the same argumentative moves? What kind of practical fallout can one expect if one gets caught doing this?
Your university might consider it academic dishonesty; you can get banned from the journal; it will give you a bad reputation (especially in a small discipline); the journals would both reject your paper if they discover it before publication, and might retract it if they discover after publication.
There are a lot of ways this can be discovered. Both journals might send your paper to the same reviewer. If it’s published, the reviewer from the other journal might read it (relatively likely, since they’re in your subfield). By the time it would be accepted in one, the other’s likely to be fairly far along. You need the editor’s approval to actually withdraw it, which they might refuse if the reviews are close to being done. If they both get accepted and you have to push one of the journals to let you withdraw, they’ll know what’s up. It’s not like you can say you found a problem in your data.
Submitting paper with a section or reworded arguments from a paper submitted elsewhere isn’t following the letter of the rule, because repeating work in another paper without citing the first is self-plagarism. I think this might be even riskier, since it’s much more likely to look like you’re trying to get away with double publication.
Is it really self plagiarism to submit a section of a paper submitted elsewhere to a different journal? The paper from which the shorter paper was excerpted has not been published. If you wrote a paper that you left to moulder in your desk drawer and then submitted a section of that paper somewhere, you would not be guilty of self plagiarism. So why does it become self plagiarism if you try (against the odds) to get the larger paper published?
I heard that medical journals use plagiarism checkers to check for double submissions. Has anyone heard of this happening in philosophy?
You might get tenure at Princeton.
I’ve seen self plagiarism in someone who at the time that I saw the papers had a really prestigious tenured position and later on had/has an even more prestigious position. Two different titles in two different journals but the same thesis and the same arguments presented in the same order. I wonder how often it happens.
I have also seen some of my own work stolen by someone and published. I haven’t seen anything else published under the name of the person who took the main idea of one of my papers and wrote it much tidier than I did.
We should not make changes to the curriculum to accommodate the feminidiots. If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. (Or should I say: go back to the kitchen? We’re talking about girls, after all.)
…Governor Kasich, is that you?
No, just a feminist troll.
No, you are a feminidiot troll. If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.
A cliché: the once great man, who got a bit too cocky with one too many women who were just a little bit too young. Now he lives alone, his power and influence have vanished, and nobody reads his once widely discussed writings. So he is left to call out online to whoever might listen. There but for the grace of God…
Lol Sir R condescending to Putnam.
What?
Leiter is 10x the philosopher Putnam ever was. Please revise your tone.
You don’t have to be half as good as Putnam in his prime to see that a lot of his later work was crap. Even a metablogger can see that!
Yeah, pretty clearly not my point (I’m 12.42). But even if it had been — everyone knows that a lot of Putnam’s later work is crap? This is one of those occasions — they’re quite frequent — when something’s being true — if it’s true — doesn’t settle the question of whether it’s an appropriate thing to say. What is it with the bellicose swaggering and sneering about others’ work around here? Furthermore, Putnam in his prime contributed more to philosophy in a week than I –or, I’ll wager, 10.29 — will contribute in an entire career. Show some fucking respect, peasants.
Can you give an example of some of Putnam’s crappy work? Surely if it’s easy to spot you can give an example.
Everything after Reason, Truth & History? And even that wasn’t very good.
Agree.
His Journal of the APA article is a good example.
Interestingly the most-read article published by JAPA is by a physicist. I wonder what impact it’s having on Aristotle scholarship.
Latest fad among the Moral Majority: producing syllabi for courses in phil mind, phil sci etc, using only readings by women. Of course, as the authors of these syllabi would be the first to complain, women are seriously underrepresented in these areas. The probability of these readings being anywhere near consistently the best work available is about zero. But what better way to demonstrate one’s commitment to feminism, than preparedness to do serious pedagogical harm in its name?
The best thing about your post is the brilliantly apt use of the (descriptive) name “the Moral Majority”. I propose that the old name “the New Infantilism” be dropped in favor of “the Moral Majority”.
Granted, I am a man, but when I read a paper and check who authored it, I do not make a mental notice to myself about the sex of the author. Things that interest me are his/her other work, and, if I want personal information, his/her institutional affiliation and the institution where they received their graduate education, and their supervisor.
Suppose I read an interesting paper by an, say, Asian philosopher whose name I cannot identify as male or female. I then check their webpage which does not have any information about the sex of the person but all the other relevant info I listed above. That is all I want and all I need. At no time I feel the need to know more about the sex of the author. That is just irrelevant.
Who skims through a reading list, notices a sex-imbalance of the listed authors against his own sex and then feels insecure? By that logic female philosophers should be massively underrepresented in the historical fields of philsophy. Not knowing the numbers, I believe that it is in those areas where their numbers are comparatively high.
On another note, if female philosophers want to be taken seriously as a whole they should reject being spousal hires or daddy’s girls. On both the East and West coast there are plenty of other institutions surrounding the highest-profile universities that are in search of philosophers. You cannot have it both ways, ride on the success of your spouse/family-ties and then complain about you and other women not getting the deserved attention. I mean seriously, do they really think that those big institutions just happened to show an interest in hiring them when they started dating the well-known male philosopher?
Every spousal hire is a kick in the teeth for accomplished female philosophers who deserve where they are. And that generalizes to all other disciplines.
Yes!
Spousal hires are female. Males are not hired merely because they are married to someone the department wants. They are hired on their merits. That’s why a spousal hire is a kick in the teeth for accomplished *female* philosophers.
Since I am male, my teeth are not kicked even though I’m accomplished. I am glad you pointed out that females are the ones whose teeth are kicked by spousal hires. That’s why we really need the metametametablog, to help us remember the proper place of women.
Apart from Itchy, name me one male spousal hire.
David Owen at University of Arizona, married to Julia Annas.
Douglas Maclean at University of North Carolina, married to Susan Wolf.
Bernhard Nickel at Harvard, married to Susanna Siegel.
Dale Jamieson at NYU, was married to Beatrice Longuenesse when hired.
Baron Reed at Northwestern, married to Jennifer Lackey.
Also LA Paul and Kieran Healey, though that’s across disciplines.
Exceptions to the norm.
Off the top of my head, I can think of at least five so far unnamed cases of male spousal hires — my knowledge comes from inside information. I won’t name them since I like most of the people involved. It would take about 30 minutes to come up with very likely examples for yourself by looking at CV’s.
There are lots more. It’s kind of mean to post them — though under the circumstances I don’t blame you, and those are all so obvious I can’t imagine the trailers would feel disrespected.
(I thought K. Healy was a bit of a superstar in his own right, no? Eh, what do I know from sociology.)
The most recent study, posted at DN, about why female undergraduates do not continue on to the PhD stage notes that syllabus composition had almost nothing to do with it. So if you’ve lost the argument that an all female syllabus is necessary for diversifying the discipline, what else have you got, except simplistic identity politics?
For a variety of reasons I do want to see more women and minorities in the discipline, but the discussion on this topic has now become just a bunch of idiotic posturing, due to all of the kicking and screaming of the “moral majority” folks. There are some basic but necessary steps we can take to improve the discipline, but none of them are likely to involve removing due process protections for various parties, “occupying” the syllabus, or bringing in poetry and dance, as was so memorably suggested by Justin Windbag.
Wait, someone suggested we include poetry and dance in philosophy courses? My next project: a proof of the completeness of first order-logic via interpretive dance.
I don’t think bringing poetry into philosophy classes is ridiculous. Where ever possible, I try to open classes with a anecdote (sometimes even a very short story) or a bit of media relevant to what we’re discussing to get students interested. I could see using a poem if I was better versed in it.
JW’s suggestion was not that we should incorporate works that aren’t strictly philosophical into class, papers, whatever. Nor was it that sometimes poetry and other works have or express philosophical content. I don’t think anyone can really disagree with either point.
His suggestion was that we “count as philosophy” poetry, dance, reports of our feelings, ideological arguments without allowing for objections, and more. Check it out if you don’t believe me:
http://dailynous.com/2016/02/05/deeper-diversity-and-the-game-of-professional-philosophy/
I didn’t believe you, and I checked it out, and I was right not to believe you. He doesn’t ‘suggest’ that those count as philosophy. He was asked for some examples of the people he had in mind when he mentioned “people who want to change the rules of the game” and he replied with a list of examples of things he has seen both praised as philosophy and criticized for not doing philosophy. (The list includes, by the way, “the applied use of classical logics.” But he doesn’t, as you imply, endorse the view that any of these should count as philosophy, nor does he ‘suggest’ that we count these things as philosophy. This is immediately clear to anyone who actually reads the post.
I know of some cases where the “spousal hire” was clearly the more impressive philosopher. Here’s how this can happen. The Department of Philosophy at 2nd-tier University (2TU) is searching in Political Philosophy makes an offer to Smith. Smith is married to Jones, who just happens to be an extremely visible and distinguished untenured Philosophers of Mind, and who already has a TT job at Leiterific University (LU). 2TU knows perfectly well that Jones would normally be out of their league, but they are hoping that Smith and Jones would like to solve the two-body problem. So they make an offer to Smith with a spousal offer to Jones, and the offers are accepted.
When you think about an argument without knowing the author’s gender, what pronouns do you use?
“Read more about FC.”
So that’s what feminist looks like? Feminist philosopher rapes a disabled, diaper-wearing man with the mental age of a toddler, with whom she communicates using a ouija board, and the response is “read more about FC”, because it’s “complicated”?
Everyone else can read, 11:23. The response was not “read more FC” because “it’s complicated”. You cherry picked three words from a post in which the author was explaining that a. it appears that a lot of people who engage in FC sincerely believe that the people who they are helping are really communicating and b. this is a problem. Your continued attempts to deliberately misrepresent people by cherry picking quotes is starting to get really annoying. And it is really stupid to try to pull this trick when the passage you’re deliberately misrepresenting is on the same thread.
Do not rapists generally believe that have “consent”, or does this exception only apply to rapists who are feminist philosophers?
I don’t know what I expected engaging with you, but this is disappointing.
Leiter is right on Sarwell. Would people sign a petition of the sort so many signed regarding the Mount St. Mary fiasco.
Zagzebski got Sartwell fired, with libel (based on his posting a country music song). I think we can safely assume the chances of “outrage” from the Moral Majority are nil. After all, it is they who enjoy the swarming and firings.
Sartwell.
I have to admit I was a bit surprised by the “how can I grab more for myself” as a grad student thread at DN. Not very New Consensus: you turn up to find that other graduate students are being paid more for the very same work (or as is more likely, the same for less work). How can they square this with their principles?
“How can they square this with their principles?”
Catastrophic presupposition failure. The only principle that New Consensus types abide by in practice, and without deviation, is to grab as much for themselves as possible.
I found the new FP post “Teach feminist philosophers not to rape disabled men” quite interesting.
To the poster who’s obsessed with the Stubblefield case: we all think her actions were deplorable, but you really need to get some help.
Agreed.
A day may come when people have forgotten about the Stubblefield case and some feminist philosophers smugly announce that no woman in philosophy have ever acted inappropriately toward her students. When that happens, please bring up the Stubblefield case to embarrass them.
Until then, I think we’ve all heard enough about Stubblefield. It’s getting really dull, listening to the same thing over and over again for months.
Women in philosophy routinely act inappropriately towards students.
Huh?
If “inappropriate” means chasing/fucking students, then women in philosophy fuck students. It’s not a secret.
It’s just a damn shame. All those women, fucking their students. We have to do something about this. Only men should fuck their students!
Oh, and I know the best way to do something about it! Repeatedly misrepresent what some other people have said about another case involving a woman raping someone who wasn’t her student. Bring it up in every single conversation. That’ll show ’em.
Sex and Social Justice
um, i think it’s “routinely” that needs justification
Isn’t this a matter of Sex and Social Justice?
The DN thread on Sartwell is excruciating. Amazing how many people don’t care about process when it’s not their asses on the line.
Yes, but process is simply an abstract principle, and it exists in liberal democratic societies to protect real living people from arbitrary punishment. What they don’t care about is *people*. After all, they are intellectuals, and wish to signal their intellectual and moral/progressive status to others, often by social networking or draconian punishments. Real human beings are dispensable. In other words, they oppose well-established liberal protections of the innocent.
This pattern – KKK mobs lynching black men falsely accused by white women, Stalin’s purges and Show Trials in the 1930s, and Senator McCarthy’s Red Scare witch hunts are all classic examples – repeats itself so many times in history it seems futile trying to point out again the obvious to the social justice warriors.
I know, right?! ‘Well, it does sound like he’s kind of a difficult character…’. Insofar as these unconscionable comments are coming from Moral Majority types, it’s an interesting indication that their cluelessness about the non-negotiability of ideas like due process (i.e. their entire point) isn’t just coming from the usual desire to appear as committed as is logically possible to opposing sexual harassment / assault — unless Zagzebski is being cast as an oppressed damsel, but that looks a bit of a stretch, even for them.
I know Crispin from way back. Although it’s totally irrelevant to the due process issue, it might be worth mentioning that he’s no more a ‘difficult’ character than many philosophers, or indeed than many people; he is deeply committed to philosophy; and he is imbued with the philosophical spirit. I wish there were many more philosophers like him. The suggestion on that DN thread that Crispin’s openness about his past struggles with addiction somehow makes his employers’ betrayal more understandable is beyond belief, beneath contempt, and epitomizes the pursed-lips Puritanism that poses an increasingly deadly danger to the culture of US philosophy and makes ‘Moral Majority’ much more than just a wiseass dig.
History will judge philosophy’s current ‘Moral Majority’ (everyone knows who the little hitlers are at DN, FP and NewAPPS) much as it now judges other past attacks on fairness and freedom.
His posts use terms like “bitch”…
Nurse! The smelling salts!
I wonder how the Moral Majority would feel if, upon entering a safe space, they heard something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSrTnWDTdwI
*gasp* A RAP SONG?
🙄
*gasp* a solid loyalty anthem? quick, the smelling salts!
Funny how Justice Whineberg, who worked hard to take down BL and the PGR on behalf of his friend Carrie, is now concerned that the PGR is off line!
http://reason.com/blog/2016/04/06/this-university-cleared-a-male-student-o
“Innocence is sexist.” Discuss.
No wonder he’s popular at DN!
Are you an angry young man without a job?
I’m Irish now.
Leiter comes out swinging against the “Faculty Against Rape” letter.
I guess that means he’s a rape apologist. Who else could possibly be against faculty against rape? I know how to eliminate double-negation.
The “Faculty Against Fairness and Due Process” letter?
“Faculty Against Rape” – a bold stance! Perhaps if they combine forces with “Faculty Against Murder” and “Faculty Against Torturing the Innocent” we can all make some real moral progress!!!1
You forgot ‘Faculty Against Genocide’.
The signatories were mercifully predictable: none made me think ‘What? Him (her) now as well?!!’
Presumably there are quite a few moderate MM types who want nothing to do with pushing back against due process or defending the complaints against Kipnis. The letter might lead to some intra-MM squabbling, which is always amusing. No comments yet at FP, and no proper post at DN. DN is usually so quick; when there’s a delay it’s often easy to see why JW might be reluctant to post before determining wind speed and direction among the MM.
So one co-authored chapter from 2009 and you swan into a Research Fellowship at St Andrews. God, it’s alright for some…
You are hereby an “Angry Young Man Without a Job”.
AYMWAJ, go away!
Except I’ve got a job and I’m a woman. But you’re right, I am angry. And I’m kind of surprised more people in the profession aren’t. Especially women, it degrades us all.
I am afraid that you do not understand the metaphysics of oppression. “AYMWAJ” is a *functional* property, defined in terms of its functional location within a system of privilege, and not in terms of essentialist features, such as sex – you sexist!
Or classist features such as not having a job. Yuk!
No point being angry about it: the dissertation sounds cool and there are some papers under review. If the papers are any good they’ll be out soon, the CV will be fine for the career stage, and there’ll be bigger injustices in the world.
Still, for someone not fucking a senior colleague, the role played by spousal or partner positions in early-career hiring must be depressing. The three highest-ranked placements from my department in recent years have all been impressive, productive people, but their tenure-track jobs are all at institutions where their spouses had already been in place for years (different departments in each case). These were all nationally advertised jobs, and these were the only hires from those searches.
Is it fair to say that ~10% of tenure-track hiring in the humanities is just a marriage market? More than that in both my own department’s recent hires and our students’ placement record, so I feel like that’s a conservative guess.
Would you rather have no search than a search dictated by the business prof’s wish to have his wife live in the same city? Would you rather have one less faculty position than someone’s awkward husband teaching a couple of the intro classes and having 75% of his tenure case assessed on service? I’m honestly not sure.
Wow, has anyone else taken the trouble to read the FAR letter alongside the AAUP statement? It really is an embarrassing tissue of fallacy and obfuscation. Can’t go through it all here, but a tiny sample:
FAR: ‘When the OCR does initiate an investigation independently of a complaint, though, they do so for good reason.’ Evidence: Quotation from May 2014 HuffPo article: ‘Compliance reviews are not random audits of schools — they are selected based on various sources of information, including statistical data, news reports and information from parents, advocacy groups and community organizations.’
Sounds reassuring; but inspection of the article reveals the quote is actually from one Dorie Nolt, a spokesperson for the Department of Education – responding on behalf of the DoE’s OCR to allegations made by a number of universities against that Department, that the investigations were random! It would be surprising if a DoE spokesperson did not assert that allegations against the DoE were unfounded. Such an assertion does not count as evidence for its own truth. FAR’s only other evidence is a rather detailed account of OCR investigations of a single institution (from more than a hundred), the University of Notre Dame.
But, amazingly, even if FAR had substantiated all this, it would still have no bearing on what the AAUP says! A great deal of the FAR letter besides this is devoted to refuting the claim that the recent increase in the number of investigations indicates punitive intent on the part of the OCR. But the AAUP report never comes close to making any such allegation. It says only that the OCR has been punitive in the adversarial and threatening character of its investigations, and the latter has been ‘fuelled’ by the increase in the number of its investigations, and the scope of each (22). Thus the reasons for the increase have no bearing on what the AAUP says about it. There may be good and compelling reasons for the increase; it may indeed be (as FAR claim) entirely a result of an increase in complaints, which the OCR is obliged to investigate: it would remain true that the increase exacerbates any threatening environment generated by the OCR in virtue of other aspects of its behavior. However threatening the OCR might sound, they can’t generate a generally threatening environment if they investigate few enough institutions to make the prospect of an investigation of any given institution extremely unlikely. As very many advocates for victims of sexual harassment have said very often, it is the effect that matters, not the intention.
There is broad underreporting of campus sexual assault by universities.
Therefore
It is not plausible that the OCR might in any way be ‘overreaching’ in its mission or ‘abusing’ Title IX.
CDJ published her analysis of data about placement. Don’t know if it is any good or useful – I have on energy to read through it and I suspect most undergrads will just stare at it. But I find it odd how people go out of their way to thank her for all the work…i do not recall people publicly thanking Sir Ranksalot for all the work he has done…
Still the best analysis, “The statistical findings, at least as far as philosophy job hiring in 2012 and 2013 were concerned, indicate the existence of both prestige and gender bias in philosophy job hiring: Against lower prestige male applicants. For high prestige female applicants.”
http://genderandprestige.blogspot.com
The idea that CDJ is a numbers person is ludicrous. She regularly fucks up publicly, like when she just *gave up* trying to defend herself against David Wallace’s (characteristically well-mannered) criticisms.
She also failed to distinguish between different minority groups when trying to look at the racial composition of various programs. As it turns out, you might not want to just lump every non-white person together! Nice work everyone.
“I think we should be appreciative of the hard work and countless hours that Brian Leiter has put into both the PGR and Leiter Reports over the years. Both have been, and may continue to be, valuable resources for the profession.”
Can you guess who said that without googling?
Egregious CV puffing offenses of the successful.
From the example discussed above: listing workshops of your papers with fellow grad students at your own department in order to make your conference talks section look longer; “Professional Service: Graduate Student at Large”; “Honors: [non-competitive] Travel Grant.”
Also seen, for someone with multiple interviews and now top-20 job: listing editorial in newsletter of small professional organization under “Journal Articles.”
What else is out there?
Jesus Christ, don’t get me started. But now that you have…here is a small list I’ve compiled, all from recent experience. I’m very tempted to name-and-shame.
– Listing book reviews or encyclopedic entries in venues like Analysis or Phil. Review in the “Publications” section as if they are full-blown, anonymously reviewed research articles. (This seems to be one of the most common abuses.)
– Listing drafts as ‘under review’ or even ‘revise and resubmit’ at a particular journal, when they’re not. (Yes, this happens, and I’ve been tempted to notify the journal editors.)
– Listing any drafts as ‘under review’ at a particular journal, or in the “Publications” section.
– Listing an absurd number of unsubstantiated items in the “AOS/AOC” section.
– Listing jobs you have been shortlisted for, and which you obviously didn’t get.
What are encyclopedic entries in Analysis or Phil Review?
But yeah. The last is a real jaw-dropper. There’s a well-known philosopher who actually lists jobs he was offered and turned down, and prizes or lecture invitations he was offered but didn’t take. I think this is more narcissism than anything else — what is your diagnosis?
Wait, I get it — you mean, book reviews in Analysis or Phil Review.
And the thing is, you just have to realize that it doesn’t make your CV look better. Nobody is fooled. Are they actually thinking, “Heh, now it looks like I published several articles in Phil Review“?
I think perhaps the original poster had in mind “encyclopedic” literature review articles like this one: http://philpapers.org/rec/MORRWO-2
Please note that I’m not posting the above article to denigrate its author. Indeed, it’s a perfectly fine literature review. I just happen to have read it recently so it was the first member of its class to come to my mind.
That’s exactly the kind of article I had in mind, Lysias — thanks for that.
And same here: I generally like these! What I absolutely hate is when people list them in a misleading way. In the case I have in mind, the author lists it as “forthcoming in Analysis“. Given that it’s not yet published, and the title doesn’t begin with “Recent Work in…” or give any other indication that it’s a mere literature review, a search committee could be easily duped.
What about a Stanford Encyclopedia article or the like? Should those be in a a separate section? (Most that I’ve seen list them alongside other articles.) What about articles in the X Companion/Handbook to Y? Again, most people seem to list them alongside other articles. Likewise Philosophy Compass articles. I do agree that in those cases the venue makes it clear what the article is–so if it’s in Analysis, it’s best to say something like “review article in Analysis xx, etc.”.
Another classic in this genre is listing a book proposal as “under consideration” somewhere. From the CV I’ve seen this on (about 5 items listed), I get the sense that people treat something as “under consideration” so long as it hasn’t been rejected yet.
I have no problem with people listing things as under consideration, as long as the clarification comes before any of the other details, and there’s no attempt to glean reflected glory by naming the journal.
So:
“Response to a Counterexample.” Journal of Pedantry. Summer 2016. Under Consideration.
is bad faith.
*under consideration* “Response to a Counterexample”
is fine.
But really, even very early-career people should have their publications divided into type: book, peer reviewed article, non-peer-reviewed full-length, book reviews and other short non-peer-reviewed pieces. Four sections, no confusions, work under consideration listed under the relevant heading with a clear clarification.
Add to the anathematic list: including conferences you’ve merely attended or at which you chaired a panel but to which you contributed nothing else under “Conference Participation.”
Oh, here’s another one: listing the places where your articles have been cited.
– Listing a paper as “forthcoming pending review”.
Hah, I think I know who you’re referring to.
If you Google,
“forthcoming pending review” philosophy cv
you get six examples right off the bat.
These seem to be in various edited volumes. Presumably, the editor has accepted the paper for the volume, but the volume has not yet undergone peer review. I have no problem with someone listing these on their CV. I know of others who simply list such papers as forthcoming. Those who list them as “forthcoming pending review” are just being more scrupulous and don’t merit mockery for that.
In that case, I guess I have papers in Phil. Review, J. Phil., and Noûs “forthcoming pending review” to add to my C.V., hooray!
Not with those reading skills you don’t.
I’m genuinely sorry that you have no actual peer reviewed publications, and the internal anxiety to defend yourself is so great that you defend your CV puffery anonymously on blogs. Truly sorry.
Nope, I have a modest but adequate number of peer-reviewed publications, and nothing in edited collections at all. It’s just that you’re wrong. Listing something that’s been accepted by the editor of Oxford Studies in Metaethics or Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility, but that hasn’t yet gone through final peer review, simply is not the same as listing something that’s only been submitted to a journal. (Those are just the first two examples from running the Google search suggested above.)
The mental gymnastics on display here are astounding. Apparently a paper can be accepted before it has gone through the review process to determined whether it should be accepted!
There’s an important difference between peer review at a selective journal and peer review of a volume of a selective edited series (where the papers have already been approved by the editor). In the former case maybe 5% will ultimately appear; in the latter case probably 95% will ultimately appear. If you don’t think that’s relevant to how one should treat the two cases on a CV, then I don’t know what to tell you.
“Presumably, the editor has accepted the paper for the volume, but the volume has not yet undergone peer review.” If the volume has not yet undergone peer review, then the editor is not in a position to responsibly accept the paper for the volume. I suspect that with some publishers, the editor does not even have the authority to accept a paper before the volume has undergone peer review.
Granted, the chances of an invited paper getting accepted is much higher than the chances than a paper submitted to a journal with blind refereeing. But even if I submit a paper to a journal with a 95% acceptance rate, I shouldn’t put “forthcoming pending review.”
Finally, putting a paper on your CV as “forthcoming pending review” makes you look like a dick. Anyone can see right through it. If you’re applying for a job, it decreases your chances of getting it. (I’ve been on about 15 search committees in my career, and I’ve seen people lose points for puffing up their CVs.)
I was the original poster calling attention to this phrase. I didn’t mean to suggest that people shouldn’t find some way of drawing attention to the fact that they have papers contributed to edited volumes/special editions currently under review. Indeed, it seems perfectly reasonable to distinguish these papers, mostly because their chances of coming out are far, far higher than your typical journal submission. I just find it amusing/mildly presumptuous when people describe them as “forthcoming pending review”.
Listing ‘reading group organizer’ in the “Professional Service” section
Huh. I guess I would think that organizing a reading group actually does count as some kind of service to one’s department.
Listing blog posts in a “Public Outreach” section, or in the “Publications” section (yes, I’ve seen this recently).
I’m thinking of listing my blog comments.
For hiring/tenure/promotion (as well as for showing that AAUP are misogynists), one shouldn’t forget Facebook “updates” and “likes”.
Still the best analysis. You know it’s true folks …
“This data reveals two statistical biases and an intriguing negative correlation:
– Women hired had published less than men did, in fact about half as much.
– Having a prestigious background—for example, a PhD granted by a high Leiter-ranked department—benefits jobseekers.
– Prestige and publication rates are negatively correlated: those hired from high prestige departments had lower publication averages.
The data therefore suggests two statistical biases in philosophy job hiring: a gender bias towards women and a prestige bias against applicants from departments with lower prestige ranking.”
http://genderandprestige.blogspot.com
Except one of those isn’t a bias. One should, all else equal, prefer job seekers from stronger departments. They get better training.
That’s true. But this refers to bias in the statistical sense (a measurable correlation), rather than a normative sense. There is a cohort with same achievement level (311 first-time hires over two years). This is analysed relative to a fixed performance measure (= average number of publications) and a fixed prestige measure (= Leitericity of department). Then the data gives statistical significant effects: performance negatively correlates with both prestige and gender (being female).
In the normative sense, agreed: it may well be reasonable to prefer job seekers from stronger departments, since the hiring of lower performing high prestige applicants can be made sense of (training, potential, etc.). Prestige bias may therefore be sensible (though unfair in some more lugubrious sense).
But the other bias – the gender/performance correlation – is not reasonable: it’s unreasonable to prefer under-performing female candidates over better performing males ones. Also, the bias effect here in job hiring is strong: over-performing lower prestige males perform *three times better* on average than under-performing high-prestige females.
You’re assuming that publications is the relevant fixed performance measure: it isn’t.
Publications is *a* performance measure. The claim that publications is not a performance measure is to claim that there is no positive correlation between the successful performance of an academic and their publication record. This is preposterous.
No-one is claiming that it isn’t *a* performance measure. But the fact that it is one doesn’t mean that it’s the only measure, which it would need to be in order to claim that it is true all things considered that someone with fewer publications is under performing relative to someone with more.
I don’t see this. What would need to be true is that *on average* people with fewer publications are under-performing compared to people with more publications. We aren’t talking about one particular person here. It’s a fairly large group. So the averages do mean something.
We are talking about on average. Obviously.
Nearly three days, and still not a single comment on the FP post about the ‘Faculty Against Rape’ response to the AAUP Title IX report. So weird.
Teach Feminist Philosophers Not to Rape.
Long Live Stubbleghazi! It’s been such an excellent recruiting tool, putting the PMMMB in the best light possible, who could ever want it to stop?
Sure, a big joke. So funny! Did I miss the open letter from FAR demanding apologies, a retraction, and changes in editorial practices at Disability Studies Quarterly for publishing a delusional rationalization of abuse in the victim’s own name, authored by his rapist? The MM crowds’ selective silence is appalling though also instructive. We are to be reassured that DSQ is “reviewing” the attacker’s articles and someday might get back to us. This is totally normal. Don’t worry about it.
I wish you’d be a bit more selective with your silence.
Wait till Rutgers has to, deservedly, pay a huge settlement to the Stubblefield family. That will be another occasion for “selective silence.”
That should have been, when Rutgers settles with the family of “D.J.”, the patient and victim.
What is there to say about that response to the AAUP report? “Faculty Against Rape” is a group that includes philosophy graduate students calling themselves “faculty” and taking the lead in writing this response to the AAUP. The response shows that these students do not know much about the law. Leiter is surely correct in his assessment of the response and its authorship. The only comment worthy fact is that some otherwise reputable faculty signed on to the response. I do not know if this means they personally endorse the claims and reasoning in the document or if they were signing on as some sign of general solidarity only.
Leiter is definitely in the “Faculty for Rape” camp. Can’t say I’m surprised.
Teach Feminist Philosophers not to rape.
Well, it’s not just ignorance of law. There’s also a fair amount of — shall we say — motivated misinterpretation of the AAUP document, which makes a lot of the FAR response argumentatively flimsy or irrelevant.
Traditionally, signing a letter signifies endorsement of its contents. The only name I recognized at which I was even slightly surprised was J Saul’s, as I had thought her a better assessor of argument than that. Her motive may have been mere solidarity, but now she has to own it.
Presumably the only comments on the FP post about it were negative, since they surely would have published positive ones. I think the appetite even among the MM for unqualified Title-IX zeal is waning; its implementation has been too obviously catastrophically unjust in too many cases and its OCR architects/enforcers have been too clearly exposed as cowardly and dishonest equivocators. I suspect that this campaign is headed the way of the equally disastrous site-visit program (remember that?). The problem is that the general lesson is never learned: we will have barely caught our breath before the next bright shiny lunatic MM scheme is upon us. And with every iteration, the cause of opposing the relevant kinds of actually bad behavior is further discredited by being associated with a bunch of narcissistic douches whose highest priority is sustaining a fantasy of being in the heroic moral vanguard, and more and more people of good will are insulted and alienated.
Still the best analysis of gender bias in philosophy job hiring – at genderandprestige.com – tested the idea (currently mooted at DN by a commenter and sensibly disputed by Lemoine) that maybe there is a quality effect here; maybe, women’s articles, though fewer, are *better* than men’s. Apparently, there are various “obstacles”, “barriers”, etc. No evidence for these UFOs (Unobservable Feminist Obstacles) is provided; and everyone knows the truth is the reverse but is much too polite to say so. To test the hypothesis, one sharpens the performance indicator to average publication rate in the higher quality journals and then checks if the difference of means on this sharper performance indicator between the two groups increases or decreases. This test has been done,
“One can redo the calculations based on the highest ranking philosophy journals. …
The results for publication rates in the Top 15 journals are even more striking. For the Top 15 journals, 27% of men hired had at least one such publication, while only 11% of women hired had at least one. For these journals, the average publication rate for men hired was 0.42 publications, while for women hired it was only 0.14 publications.”
So when one introduces a *quality* measure on top of the mere average publication count, the gender bias effect becomes even stronger. When hired from no prior position, men published about twice as much on average as women had done; but men published *three times* as much on average in the 15 highest quality journals.
I like the “UFO” term.
Here’s the thing. For familiar reasons in the philosophy of science, it’s impossible to outright refute the feminist view that women face substantial discrimination in the discipline. (Women get jobs over men despite having fewer publications? Their publications must be better. Their publications don’t get as many citations as men? There must be bias in the citation process. Etc etc.) What we have here is a Lakatosian research program, whose hard core is that women are discriminated against and which is willing to adopt any auxiliary hypotheses, no matter how implausible or undermotivated, in order to protect that hard core against refutation. Fortunately it’s pretty clear that it’s a degenerating research program.
Why are decent philosophers such idiots when it comes to political issues (both prognostication and policy)?
Discuss.
Too many have never experienced life outside the classroom.
They think they’re clever people who know something. There’s so much they don’t know. So much. What do they know, really? They wake up every day and know there’s nothing in the world to trouble them. They go through their ordinary little days. At night, they sleep their ordinary sleep, filled with peaceful, stupid dreams. They live in dreams. They’re sleepwalkers, blind.
Bernie supporters in my Facebook feed the past few months: “Superdelegates are oh so undemocratic!”
Bernie supporters in my Facebook feed this morning: “Superdelegates are awesome, because we’re going to convince them to vote for Bernie!”
Idiots.
I think philosophers are particularly bad for a couple of different reasons. The usual academic blinders: we interact with a lot of atypical people and forget how different things look outside that bubble; we have expertise in one thing and think it applies everywhere. But also philosophy-specific: we’re used to dealing with deductive arguments and conceptual claims, and a lot of political issues (both policy and prognostication) involve empirical claims, knowledge of nuts-and-bolts political process, and so on. “I can imagine a counterexample” is f’ing useless in that realm.
In four years NYU has given the Bersoff Faculty Fellowship to three female Stanley proteges. Obviously this is no coincidence.
Between the three of them, they currently (April 2016) have exactly two peer-reviewed articles, plus a third one co-authored. This is in spite of all the feedback and advice from which they benefited at Rutgers and at NYU.
It’s hard to find a clearer example of nepotism.
By the way, they got tenure-track jobs at Duke, Pennsylvania, and Columbia.
I think I know who you’re talking about. From a quick look at their websites, they seem to have more than two peer reviewed articles between them. That is not to say that the NYU-Rutgers nexus is not corrupt.
I can only id two of the three. (I admit I didn’t try very hard.) Between them they do seem to have two peer reviewed publications. I guess I don’t see what the problem is — they just finished postdocs, so why is it scandalous that they don’t have many publications? (Although some of the other Bersoffs have impressive lists already, it’s true.) I feel like there’s some additional element that is not being mentioned out of politesse or something.
I also have no idea what the “NYU-Rutgers nexus” is, so, yeah, I’m pretty far out of the loop.
Does “Stanley protoge” just mean Rutgers grad student who at some point discussed work with Jason Stanley? Because as far as I can tell, only one of the students you’re talking about was primarily advised by Stanley.
This is worthy of a new post. Metablogmoderator, what say you?
Presumably the only comments on the FP post about it were negative, since they surely would have published positive ones. I think the appetite even among the MM for unqualified Title-IX zeal is waning; its implementation has been too obviously catastrophically unjust in too many cases and its OCR architects/enforcers have been too clearly exposed as cowardly and dishonest equivocators. I suspect that this campaign is headed the way of the equally disastrous site-visit program (remember that?). The problem is that the general lesson is never learned: we will have barely caught our breath before the next bright shiny lunatic MM scheme is upon us. And with every iteration, the cause of opposing the relevant kinds of actually bad behavior is further discredited by being associated with a bunch of narcissistic douches whose highest priority is sustaining a fantasy of being in the heroic moral vanguard, and more and more people of good will are insulted and alienated.