SPSP Censorship 2.0: "We Are Above the Rules"

And Academics Gone Wild on Twitter

Part I: The Rules for Retraction Do not Apply to SPSP

In this post, I first describe how SPSP violated the only a priori rules governing retraction at their own conference. They were not their rules, and they do not need to abide by them, but they are the only rules out there. In the second part, I document how SPSP failed to take down a poster that was in clear violation of its rules, and the many “justifications” for doing so that could be found on Twitter among academics.

People who think they are above the rules or better than the rules or that the rules don’t apply to them are usually dangerous and corrosive to a reasonably well-functioning society or organization. This is why rule of law (as opposed to rule by a king, dictator, aristrocracy, or oligarchy) is a central feature of liberal democracy. Individuals can break rules here and there without breaking an organization but as soon as those in power permit their “allies” but not their opponents to break the rules, you have a corrupt authoritarian organization. You be the judge of whether that is what is going on here.

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SPSP took down a duly accepted poster by John Gaski that reviewed international Pew surveys finding majorities or near majorities in many Muslim-majority countries supported at least some violence directed at civilians. I reviewed that situation here. Why did they take it down? Well, the trigger was that it was denounced on Twitter as “Islamophobic” and “bad science.” Some even claimed it had no data, which was absurd, if one actually looked at the poster rather than, say, the deepfake¹ presented on Twitter. Here is the deepfake. Note that the deepfake has no data.

There is No Data! (In the Deepfake Tweet)

It is amazing to me that people with phds take seriously something they see on Twitter as if that is automatically the whole story.

Not Counting the Data!

This was not part of the Tweet, but it was part of the actual poster, where presentation of data from 9 separate studies is blisteringly obvious.

Pew data is certainly not beyond criticism or skepticism. But its not “not data.” One might even argue that, in at least some ways, these Pew studies are better than most social psychology studies, because they are: 1. International so both more “inclusive” and 2. based on representative samples, so vastly more generalizable than typical social psych studies which often use convenience samples. Pew often addresses similar topics but in very different ways than do most social psychologists so, denunciations aside, many might actually learn something from their surveys.

Of course, even if there was data, it was still an “Islamophobic” poster:

As I described in my prior post on this, the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) has clearly articulated a priori grounds for retraction. These involve fraud, massive error, plagiarism and the like. “Denounced on social media” and “bad science” are not among them. Implicit in those grounds for retraction are that one does not retract if those grounds are not met. If the law says “it is illegal to drive your car faster than 30mph here,” then it is not illegal to drive 29 or 30. If the rules says “retract for fraud, massive error or plagiarism” and there is none, the paper should not be retracted, no matter how bad or bigoted someone thinks it is.

No one even accused Gaski’s poster of meeting COPE standards for retraction. Of course, SPSP does not need to be bound by COPE, but, as far as I can tell, they have articulated no other grounds for retractions. So, whatever their grounds are for removing the poster, they are making it up after the fact to justify imposing their “values” via censoring the poster. To be sure, SPSP is formally a private organization. They have the right to impose anything legal they like on those who present at their conference, no matter how delusional, bizarre, paranoid, irrational, antithetical to social science, or corrosive of public trust in academia others might believe it to be.

Thus, we have Part 1 of We Are Above the Rules: “We are not bound by COPE guidelines for retraction.” In fact, I am having trouble seeing how this means anything other than, “We have every right to retract for reasons we make up after the fact. We can make up grounds to retract any time a paper offends our sensibilities or evokes a social media denunciation! We can call a paper ‘bad science’ and retract it, even though it passed peer review and no one even accused it of violating COPE guidelines.”

Sure, this isn’t censorship, its “correcting peer review.” Just like Claudine Gay did not engage in plagiarism. She engaged in “duplicative language without appropriate attribution.”

Part II: SPSP Rules Do Not Apply to Those on the Right Side of History

SPSP seems to have failed to take down another poster with no discernible scientific value and which was not even the one accepted for presentation. Its just a political rant. Now this is a data-free poster.

I discussed this previously at some length, so I want to get quickly to the response to this poster by academics on Twitter. This poster was not what was accepted. It was sneakily slipped in (whether by the person who had a bona fide research presentation accepted or someone else remains unclear). Regardless, it is against SPSP’s own rules to present something very different than what was accepted. And yet, the paper on Pew surveys of Muslims was removed but this was not. What’s next? Getting a poster accepted because it reports new studies of the role of Bayesian reasoning in political judgments and replacing it with Lock Up Trump posters?

Regardless, many social psychologists on Twitter were all about defending this poster. These kinda speak for themselves. Tage Rai is a former editor of the apex journal, Science. Chew on that as you read this.

There is a lot going on here. Rob Henderson has an excellent article in Persuasion on his experiences with social justicey students at Yale in 2015, many of whom are probably professionals now. One quote here seems to apply well beyond his particular experience:

They viewed themselves as morally righteous and were surprisingly myopic about the virtuous image they held of themselves.

These people have as much right as anyone to spew extremist nonsense, but they are psychologists, not experts in war, international law, or human rights. Pontificating in a self-righteous manner using extremist rhetoric regarding topics about which one has no actual expertise, and then treating those who view things differently as “maniacs” or other forms of evil is emblematic of some of the dominant rhetoric within academia. A lot more could be said about this, but I am going to return to my main point:

Just as SPSP refuses to apply COPE retraction guidelines when its notables find something offensive, these psychologists are lobbying SPSP to not follow its own rules (“you can’t present something that was not actually accepted”) on the grounds that, in this case, in their opinions, it is morally/politically justified.

SPSP definitely seems to be moving in the political activist direction; as such, it will be doing its part to help delegitimize academia. Politicizing science and social science in this way reduces trust and credibility among the public, and this is true even when the public sympathizes with the politics.

So you have both SPSP refusing to abide by COPE professional guidelines for retraction; and you have academics trying to justify sneaking in a political rant to a poster session because they endorse its politics. I mean, in some ways, all this makes a sort of sordid sense. Consider a society comprised of people who make rules that they selectively apply depending on whether “values” they endorse are advanced. If you advance their values, you can do what you like. If you oppose their values, you are at heightened risk of punishment. Of course the constituents who embrace this society will believe the rules should not apply to their allies who advance their political values. One of the very purposes of this professional society is to impose its “values” on others.

Two Edifying Clips

The prior reading material may have left you feeling like you have entered a surrealistic dystopian novel. And maybe you have. But that does not mean all is lost. Far from it. This is a brilliant 3 minute excerpt from a longer talk by Jon Haidt. “This [the day Presidents of Harvard, Penn & MIT testified before Congress] was a day of national humiliation for American universities. And then it got worse.”

Over a year ago, I put it this way: It Will Get Worse Before it Gets Worse. But even that very pessimistic essay ended on an upbeat note. Can academia recover from its day of, as Haidt put it, national humiliation? It can, but the type of academic social media stuff in this essay suggests it is not going to happen anytime soon.

And just in case Haidt’s brilliance did not quite lift you out of the pit that is academic Twitter, let’s end with this. “Somewhere I read of the freedom of the speech.”²

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Footnotes:

1. Deepfake involves taking things out of context and piecing them together to say something very different than what was said (or written) in the original. A simple example might go something like this:

Me: “Hitler believed the Jews should be exterminated.”

Deepfake=screenshot or audio quote of me saying “the Jews should be exterminated” as part of denouncing me as a Nazi.

2. It is beyond the scope of this essay, but free speech advocates everywhere owe a huge debt and thanks to the civil rights movement of the 1940s-1960s for the robust legal protections of speech that we now enjoy. This includes but goes well beyond this one speech.