Oh, man, Abbie Smith just melted down over Jen McCreight, sniping at her fellow grad student in a public display of petty, malicious, and false accusations, among them the ironic claim that Jen was unprofessional, wasting her time in internet drama, and of being immature. Self-awareness is not her strong suit, I guess.
Jen has responded with a calm and thorough takedown.
It’s a shame and it’s all so unnecessary. I don’t even know what triggered the outburst from Abbie — near as I can tell, a recent post about misogynistic messages (which didn’t mention Abbie!) just put her on Abbie’s ever-expanding hate list.
Brace yourself for another exploding comment thread…I’m just hoping it’s on Jen’s blog, not mine.
BLAH BLAH BLAH I AM ANGRY
Actually I have no idea what this is about, just wanted to be the first one to comment
Cheers
Firsters are lame.
Anyway, I don’t get this. Before the meltdowns (plural) Abbie’s blog was sane.
Yeah, it’s been puzzling. I used to rather enjoy ERV. You can find squirmy things when you turn over even the nicest rock, I guess…
I’ll just have to take y’all’s word that there was something interesting about ERV, because I never heard of Abbie Smith until after her reactionary misogynist slow-motion meltdown. A damn shame, really.
Abbie’s decline is doubly sad; not only has she indulged in the sunk-cost fallacy, but the capital she sunk was her respectability (her credibility being a collateral loss).
Ah well, ’tis what it is.
Abbie is sane and her writing indicates this.
She is a person good at holding grudges. She is mean. She blames Rebecca for the fact that people are talking about things she doesn’t want to talk about. If Rebecca would just go away, shit would be less stressful and more fun for Abbie.
This is of course an unfair and unreasonable request. As I said, Abbie is mean. There’s no amount of therapy or pills that will make her tolerable. It’s simply not a matter of sanity.
On the other hand I learned about a blog of interest, so somebody got something good out this. :)
and once again, she whines at people who do a lot of their work on the internet. how very 20th century of her.
That’s the troubling thing about Abbie’s reaction: Jen has not been trash-talking her. Rebecca Watson hasn’t made multiple posts inventing weird permutations of Abbie’s name and calling her talents into question. Yet somehow Abbie takes their existence as a personal affront and makes these direct attacks on them — misguided and wrong attacks.
There’s something just plain wrong with that woman. She’s smart and a good communicator, but for some reason she’s compelled to go on these vendettas against other smart and communicative people.
Something’s coming out of Abbie. Whatever it is I have no idea. I’m studying to be a Cultural Anthropologist, not a Psychologist, or Psychiatrist, so I’m not about to make any guess and psychoanalyze her or anything, but we are seeing something here.
What it is I have no frickin’ clue (it may just be that she’s a plain old bully), but it’s something…
I too used to read ERV. I don’t know why Abbie Smith went off the way she did and I really don’t care because nothing could excuse her appalling attacks. I just had to unsubscribe, it would have been too much effort to retain my equanimity while reading a blog whose host indulged in such disgusting behaviour.
In general I do not understand at all why there have been so many quite savage attacks on skeptical women bloggers of late. I’ve watched the entire video that is supposed to have triggered it (the one in which a blogger says she doesn’t like being creeped out in a lift by her male fellow skeptics, and would they please not do that kind of thing) and I see nothing there that could even begin to explain the ugliness and stupidity that has followed.
Tony Sidaway…
What ticks me off about it is that Abbie’s blog was/is so damn useful when it comes to getting info about ERVs… but I can’t justify reading anything she posts anymore. Which sucks, because I’d appreciate a good layman’s blog about ERVs.
Are there any others?
Yeah, I dunno. It’s been weirding me out. I liked reading Abbie at ERV. Good stuff. Now, I don’t even
The explanation for the ugliness and stupidity is a desperate need to cling to any shred of privilege, or in Abbie’s case, perhaps the desire to ride privilege’s coattails. It’s not right, it’s not rational, and it’s *certainly* not skeptical, but it is something of an explanation.
Oh please, don’t throw me in the briar patch…
Wow, vitriol is right!
Uh… Abbie’s virology blogs are no less relevant or informative even if she’s a big meanie.
I don’t recall hearing complaints about her coming up with permutations of Chris Mooney’s or Casey Luskin’s name.
If you’re in any way familiar with Abbie’s blog style, you come to expect a certain amount of trash talk levied against people she disagrees with. The stronger the disagreement, the more trash. Doesn’t matter if it’s Michael Behe or Rebecca Watson.
Wait, but isn’t posting Facebook wall posts (which the original poster must have posted with the understanding that it is going to stay within their friend circles) on your publicly read blog, with identifying information just plain wrong?
I don’t understand this attitude. Will you, for example, stop studying Classical Mechanics and Calculus because Issac Newton gleefully sent several people to the gallows for faking coins, or because, paraphrasing his own words, he loved it very much to “break Leibnitz’s heart” over the matter of who first found (what we call today) the fundamental theorem of calculus?
I tend to have knee-jerk reactions, and this may be one.
However, I also feel justified. Abbie’s attacks are unjustified, disgusting, and downright hateful. They sully her in my eyes. Not to say that she was ever “perfect”, but her breakdown since Elevator-gate has made it hard for me to read her blog any more or take it seriously.
Sorry.
With Isaac Newton, the answer is yes, because the truth is I stopped studying all that a while ago. Indeed, I never studied Calculus (with the possible exception of what you might learn in general maths classes) because I always hated math, so I stuck with the core, and once that was over, I simply refused to take anything else. I’m a Cultural Anthropology student (with a minor in Commercial Music [that would be Music Business]), so I’m not entirely sure how Classical Mechanics and Calculus apply to me, anyways.
I knew you couldn’t (couldnt) trust someone who won’t (wont) use apostrophes! I kwew it!
…as for people who don’t proof read – dammit, should be ‘knew.’
ERV has shown herself to be a bully a long time ago. That she would call Jen MacCreight a loser shouldn’t come as surprise to anyone who has visited her blog in the past months.
@zacharymoore #17
There’s such a thing as solidarity. Saying we don’t care what she says about people like RW and Jen, because she has relevant things to say about virology, is like saying we don’t care about Jen and RW enough to care about the hatefest she’s hosting towards them. Maybe you don’t care. But I’m sure if you yourself got the same treatment from her, you’d find it difficult to enjoy the virology stuff.
I think the difference between ERV’s attitude about the creationists and her implosion about women is that she was attacking ideas more before. Now she’s just attacking people, and anyone who doesn’t agree with her.
Maybe she’s simply been in Oklahoma too long.
Or maybe she’s just a vindictive asshole.
Tough to say.
In Abbie’s defense I can see where she is coming from. She is running gels until her eyes bleed to successfully get funded and be respected professionally based on her scientific achievements. She probably thinks, with justification, that she deserrves recognition from her peers in the skeptical movement based on her achievements and blog.
But who gets notoriety? The speak pretty people without degrees that trump themselves up within the skeptical movement with unscientific ideologies.
I’d be a little pissed and frustrated too.
No, it is not unethical for Jen, who has been blogging on this exact subject, to out someone who is attempting to bully her into silence via a public facebook post.
I can empathize with Abbies obvious distress, but she should deal with her issues in an adult professional manner. Lashing out at a fellow student is not worthy of respect.
I’ve mentioned it before, I believe, but my past dealings with Abbie clued me in that something was amiss, which is why I disassociated myself from her and her blog way before Elevatorgate happened.
Also, her reaction to EG and now Jen’s post pisses me off, but more than anything it makes me sad. Her behavior reminds me of the kind of people we all knew in school that desperately wanted to fit in with the cool kids. They’d do shit like steal beer or loan them their cars and the cool kids would tolerate them, but they never actually belonged. That whole situation is pretty much what’s going on with Abbie and her misogybag trolls, in my opinion.
@Somite of 25
…you mean ideologies that are not conservative enough? Least that’s how I’ve seen the climate denialist use that phrase. Just saying.
There is no defense, really, besides, “I was hacked.”
Life is pretty challenging when you’re a grad student, so I’ve heard. Yet the majority of people in Abbie Smith’s position don’t end up launching vicious personal vendettas. I think ahs has a better understanding of where she’s coming from than you do, because if you were correct, then there’d be a lot more grad students initiating campaigns of vitriolic personal attacks lasting months against people who really never did anything to them except contradict part of their worldview.
…Are you signing on to Abbie Smith’s utter distortions of reality then? That would indeed explain how you can understand where she’s coming from, though as I said, it still doesn’t explain why more stressed out biology grad students DON’T lash out this way. The people who read her blog regularly before all seem to say that she is a good writer and communicator, so excluding her from the “speak pretty people” club is erronious.
And then there’s the “unscientific ideology.” It’s a pretty common tactic of male supremacists and misogynists to posit, without evidence or explanation, that feminism is an “unscientific ideology” that true skeptics should disdain. This claim has been made repeatedly here on this blog and has never been born out. So if you are endorsing this point of view, kindly present your evidence that the body of scholarship underpinned by the basic idea that women are people is systemically flawed. If you’re not endorsing this point of view, then I fail to see why it makes Abbie Smith’s actions any more defensible.
This is a common result when one’s model of reality conflicts sharply with reality, yes. The cure is to get a better model.
If that’s what she thinks, she’s an ass. She doesn’t “deserve” any more recognition among skeptics than she already had. You’re either an interesting blogger or you’re not. Recognition she might claim within her scientific field is separate from recognition among skeptic blog-readers.
Oh, we have to have degrees to be skeptics now? And never discuss politics because that would be “unscientific”, I suppose.
Abbie isn’t the boss of skepticism. I suspect she’d like to be, but she isn’t.
Somite:
Perhaps. But she’s also done her darndest to be known in the skeptic/atheist blogosphere as the person who named a thread with 2000+ comments dedicated to the abuse of a fellow skeptic a monument to everything she holds dear. A lot of people had not even heard about Abbie Smith or her career in science before that. If she really wants to be respected based on her scientific achievements, she’s doing it wrong.
@25:
That’s really no excuse to act like a nasty little kid. If her arguments had ANY logic or basis in reality, I’m sure she’d get a lot more sympathy. But in a grown woman, a professional no less, that behavior is just embarrassing. From what I’ve seen, maybe if she didn’t act that way she’d get a little more respect? It is a wrong assumption to make that nobody has worked as hard as you, and thus no one deserves more recognition than you. People pay attention to people who make sense, not to people who make bitchy rants.
/end bitchy rant ;)
Name names. Who is being unscientific, and what are you basing this opinion off of? Cite to an example. Are you referring to Ms. McCreight? if not, why bring this up to rationalize Abbie’s unacceptable treatment of Ms. McCreight? If so, again, cite to examples of this “unscientific ideology”.
Abbie’s petty, spiteful, and untruthful rant does not need defending. It needs criticism directed at it.
Wow, and I really used to like her blog. I hate that this had to happen.
SallyStrange, Spawn of Cthulhu says inpart:
“This is a common result when one’s model of reality conflicts sharply with reality, yes. The cure is to get a better model.”
…or least she should be on better meds.
Newton’s dead and has no awareness of how much of an audience he does or does not have, let alone the capacity to be encouraged by his audience or possibly given pause by the fact that people are backing slowly away from him with disgusted looks on their faces. He also doesn’t get traffic statistics or ad-related revenue when people read textbooks.
Poor analogy.
Somite @ 25
What – for running gels? Thousands of people do that every day. What she’s gotten recognition for in the skeptical community is her ability to communicate science ideas in an understandable way, which in my opinion is being undermined by her reactionary misogynist attacks on other skeptical women and her commiseration with trolls.
The skeptical community /= science. I was actually a feminist before I was a full-blown skeptic and I think feminism helped me discover it. Feminism is a system of examining extant power structures with a critical eye, much like science does to religions and religious claims. As far as the other part of your complaint, I don’t see Rebecca or Jen getting undue credit in the skeptical community for things they haven’t done. I’m pretty sure Rebecca’s not saying much about virology, so she’s not stepping on Abbie’s turf.
Abbie, on the other hand, thinks her own twisted interpretation of feminism is correct and every other person is wrong and they have to be viciously attacked: not professionally, not on the merits of their arguments, but personally. That’s why we have a problem with it.
I quit reading ERV shortly after Elevatorgate. I thought the threads there would be reasonable. Posted a few “what’s the bigh deal with what Rebecca said?” comments and gout pounded. Never went back.
What I really want to see is Elevator Guy step forward and go public.
for some reason she’s compelled to go on these vendettas against other smart and communicative people.
This goes back long before “Elevatorgate” too.
Remember the whole Pepsi coming to sciblogs affair?
yeah.
I have one word to describe Abbie:
Petty.
But who gets notoriety? The speak pretty people without degrees that trump themselves up within the skeptical movement with unscientific ideologies.
bullshit.
Abbie’s blog was MORE popular when she focused on solely on educating people about ERVs.
Her takedown of Michael Behe was legendary.
this has nothing to do with jealousy on her part… she actually has some serious issues just dealing with people who disagree with her.
Until Abbie Smith shows otherwise, I am going to continue to believe that she COULD accurately perceive reality if she chose to. Unlike people who are genuinely mentally ill, she has a choice. I’d like to break this association between being crazy and being a petty vindictive asshole. Even if Abbie Smith does have some kind of mental disorder, it doesn’t excuse or explain how comfortable she is with outright cruelty and vitriolic personal attacks.
“I’d like to break this association between being crazy and being a petty vindictive asshole. Even if Abbie Smith does have some kind of mental disorder, it doesn’t excuse or explain how comfortable she is with outright cruelty and vitriolic personal attacks.”
^THIS!
in/b/4 she must be off her meds. <– that shit ain't funny.
You mean like James Randi? Banachek? Penn Jillette? Adam Savage? Or does that only apply to female skeptics who you think are “speak pretty people”?
Yeah and I feel like an asshole about it. Mooneytits and Kirchenballs is fucking childish and idiotic. I thought it then and I think it now. I just never said anything because I was arguing with a class A douchebag over at Thoughts from Kansas and was way to proud of an asshole to admit he had a point.
Anyway, I don’t see what this has to do with anything. Abbie Smith is no less of a bully because we happen to have overlooked her behavior in the past.
Also, Jen McCreight is a graduate student engaged in genetics research. She is not Abbie’s inferior in terms of education, nor is what she is promoting unscientific.
You dishonest little rat turd.
Oops. Blockquoted another comment responding to Somite’s blather below:
The rat turd was meant for Somite.
@17
Sounds unproffessional. And like it takes a lot of time away from work.
Meh
Lots of people are petty. We bristle under the mildest criticism and refuse to forget the smallest slights. We still, somehow, try to keep this shit to a minimum though.
@SallyStrange, Spawn of Cthulhu of 41
And I have to say, I absolutely agree with you. Especially about the part of having no excuse for this. Thanks for explaining this.
@djfav of 42
I was being serious, though I may have jumped the gun a bit. My experience with the mental health profession suggests there maybe something up, but it is NOT evidence that something is up. This is where I was wrong and I take that back.
@julian
I think he is more referring to the fact that Smith’s pettiness is of a higher level than most people’s.
“Too much internet drama.” I thought that was what the internet is *for*? For all us socially inept people who don’t have any drama in real life..
But seriously if it hadn’t been for things like Elevatorgate I would not have been aware of the depth and breadth of misogyny and social privilege (including my own) online, or within the skeptical/atheist community. I feel I’ve learned a lot just through the “drama”.
I don’t think it would be helpful. An apology to RW and acting less entitled would suffice.
I would really like to see a long public apology to Rebecca from Mr. Dawkins. It would be the single most helpful action he could take if he truly wants to make women feel valued within the skeptic community.
Oh, fuck, I remember that.
It was the intellectual dishonesty that got me, there. I mean…okay, I’m not gonna judge her for liking straw men. Everyone’s got their kinks. But, for fucks sake, get a room if you’re going to attach yourself to them like that. O.O
For the sake of argument, a *personality disorder* might (and her behavior is ringing a lot of bells based on a friend whose shit suddenly became explicable in hindsight when I stumbled across a description of Histrionic symptoms, though that’s speculation), but they’re not really medicable. :/
@utakata #49
Sorry, I’m a little hypersensitive.
I should probably add that when I said there was something “amiss” with Abbie, I meant her personality, not that she had some kind of mental illness. I don’t actually think that there’s anything “wrong” with Abbie in a medical or psychological sense, and even if there is they aren’t related; as SallyStrange pointed out, there isn’t an association between mental illness and being a vindictive asshole.
Azkyroth @ 54
You may or may not be aware, but armchair diagnosis isn’t really a good idea, especially for psychological issues.
I’m not a psychologist, and even though I studied some psych in school I don’t claim any special knowledge of it, but what I do remember is that when diagnosing personality disorders as opposed to simply recognizing different personality types, we were taught that a primary indicator is functioning. For instance, if you have anti-social tendencies, like you’re a little shy, then you’re most likely fine. You’d only have Antisocial Personality Disorder if, say, you hadn’t left your home in five years.
In this case, Abbie seems to be very high functioning, as she maintains her blog, does her graduate work, and occasionally does talks at cons. Like I said, I think her being a vindictive asshole is either due to her personality or maybe something that’s happened in her past that I wouldn’t speculate on, as it’s her business.
I’m sorry, was some part of “but that’s speculation” unclear?
Also, err, that’s not what “antisocial” means as a psychology term of art.
Also, I think it’s about time to say this.
I am wrong occasionally.
But so are other people.
So why the FUCK does pretty much everyone around here blatantly talk down to me, specifically every time it seems like I might be? I don’t see other regulars getting this treatment….
It seems like we are, culturally, more comfortable with explaining away cruelty and meanness with a “crazy/off her meds” diagnosis than we are with a simple grappling with the truth that some people just don’t care, don’t mind being jerks, enjoy hurting people, etc.
It gives less offense and offers the chance that the person is involuntarily acting like an asshole, because their link to reality is just that tenuous. However, the arrow of causality runs the other way as well: it’s possible that their link to reality is thin BECAUSE they are an asshole and see the world as being made up of people like them, i.e., assholes. In that case, there’s not much you can do about it except try to make it clear that the costs the asshole will incur by hurting people will exceed the enjoyment s/he gets from it.
I dunno. Just speculation, but sometimes it really seems like the whole “AHH, s/he must be crazy” thing is a really good way to avoid confronting reality. Ironical, isn’t it?
@58
Nope, I just think it’s unseemly to speculate on anyone’s mental health status.
@59
You’re right, I was thinking of avoidant, but as you see even I just made the same fallacious connection between the colloquial use of antisocial and the psychological usage, and I’ve studied this crap. It’s easy for laypeople to make such connections, too.
I wasn’t aware I was talking down to you, I’m sorry. I was just pointing out that speculating on people’s mental health isn’t a good idea. I’ve made that mistake myself in the past.
@djfav of 55
No, don’t be.
I post here very rarely. Most of the things the regulars say here I agree with…so there isn’t much for me to add. And when I have, it hasn’t been my most brightest moments. So I need reminding when I go off the rails a bit myself.
I guess though this has touched on my nerves a bit. Because Abby’s tirades first on Watson now on McCreight seem to border on open harrassment. They are vile and irrational in everyway, but seem use every trick of someone who is highly educated. I’m not sure I could withstand same attacks without feeling I’m melting down myself. So this fires me up a bit and also makes me misfire on my commentary. Thus I needed to be brought back line. :)
Alpha female behavior is a bit foreign to primates, hence the confusion.
@utakata #63
Okay then, I’m not sorry! Muahahahahaha! :p
aw this shit again!
@djfav of 65:
<3
I p
romised never again to ride an elevator until this ended. Does anyone know a good knee replacement doctor?
This is ghastly stuff from both participants and I wish it would just stop. You can’t have a “calm and thorough takedown” when there’s some personal and particular squabble involved, with the why-didn’t-whose-proposal-get-accepted-into-Harvard or whatever that’s about.
You can do calm and thorough takedowns of people who are wrong on the facts and on the issues — but not of this skeevy, personal, middle school nonsense of “bitch, please” and “I used to like your blog” and who thinks what about the requirements for which study program.
I read the Facebook post-as-image from ERV and I found it entirely fitting. I see people arguing that ERV is being hypocritical, but whether or not that is true is independent of whether or not the post is accurate. If Alice tells Bob not to be such a clown, we scrutinize the clown claim by examining Bob, not by examining Alice.
Vrai X, the issue is malevolence, not hypocrisy.
Don’t be such a clown, Vrai.
(I’m immune from scrutiny now? ;) )
benwalsh:
Oh yes. The “both sides are equally bad” -trope. Like when one kid pantses another kid and the pantsed kid says that the pantser is a bully. They should both just stop!
SallyStrange:
One thing this long-running mess has brought home to me is that I’m more likely to do this splaining about women. If some guy is being a jerk online, I’m likely to conclude that he’s just an unpleasant person, but if a woman is behaving in that way, I’m more likely to indulge in armchair psychoanalysis (though I keep it to myself). I suppose this is another aspect of male privilege: on some level, I’m granting men a wider range of permissible behaviour before they cross the “there’s something wrong with this person” line. I should work on that.
Thank you, Ben. The important thing is that you’ve found a way to feel superior to both “sides” and you haven’t had to sully your pristine self with making an ethical judgment. Plus 1, dude!
@scooterskutre
There has already been a *comedian who has attempted to wade into this and has horribly failed. I don’t even consider you your attempt even remotely as funny.
*Source: http://skepchick.org/2011/11/kurt-metzger-totally-pwned-me/
Francisco Bacopa @ #38:
Why? It isn’t necessary because I am that guy! (or was)* That part of Rebecca’s video was specifically addressed to the guys like me who objectify women. Not to anyone else except, possibly, as an example of what women experience every single day, even without leaving home.
I am quite sure by now that the real ‘elevator guy’ has gotten the message. Well, unless he is living under a rock or Rebecca disintegrated him with her glowering death ray stare and left nothing but a tiny green globule on the floor of the elevator. ‘Elevator guy’ now has a sort of celebrity status but I doubt he wants to celebrate it.
The most interesting thing happened when Rebecca released that video. It was as if she had added a drop of litmus solution to the internet and instead of, what I would have expected, a slight tinge of pink, the internet reacted by turning a deep garnet red. The internet reacted even where on might expect it to not react at all. It reacted everywhere. In other words… you don’t need to look very far or hard to find ‘elevator guy.’
* No I am not the ‘elevator guy’ but as soon as I saw Rebecca’s video I knew exactly what she was talking about because I certainly have been exactly like that ‘elevator guy’. I would like to think I am over and done with that aspect of my privileged existence. It isn’t easy because it is difficult to be aware of it. Kinda like noticing on has bad breath. Hard to tell if one is not noticing people wince when you talk to them or a friend says something about it. Rebecca Watson and all the other people that expanded on it are my ‘friends’ because they spoke up.
This all appears to be based upon more than what someone unfamiliar with the writings of Abbie Smith (me) can fully grasp, but let’s be fair about the Internet quip. I have often personally heard people make negative comments about how I spend too much time engaging people online via Facebook and my own blog, but I don’t usually give much of a response to that. So what if I enjoy writing and debating and the Internet provides an excellent method for doing that? More importantly, let’s be honest: unless Smith devotes a comparable portion of her free time to criticizing others on the Internet, she isn’t being hypocritical. Saying someone does a particular activity too frequently via the Internet is not made invalid by virtue of using the Internet to say it.
All that said, Jen’s response is obviously superior. Of course, it isn’t superior because Smith has been so “malicious” in her “outburst”. Who cares if she’s being mean? That will probably be ineffective in getting Jen to consider Smith’s point of view at all, but that doesn’t in and of itself make Jen’s response superior. What makes the Blag Hag post better is the fact that it addresses all the points in detail. Smith loses by virtue of being wrong on the facts.
Thank you, Michael, for explaining that to us.
@Moggie of 73:
I see where you are coming from…but for the record, my original regretable comment of “should be on better meds” comes from the fact (without getting into any personal details), that my “neighbor” is targetting me for harrassment and abuse is certifiably insane according to those I know in the medical profession. This person is also male.
Yes, I was overly connecting this with Smith’s rants…but I was stating that in the strictest gender nuetrality. My apologies if my comment was not being conveyed as such. Though I can’t speak for others who have used this.
And yes, Michael, Abbie was actually malicious in her outburst (notice the lack of scare quotes. It was a real, actual outburst). There is a difference between snark and malice. Most people take malice to mean an unjustified and overriding contempt for another, so unhinged that it colors one’s ordinarily level-headed judgment. It is not a synonym for “acid commentary.”
One should care when it reaches the level of public bullying and leads to the promotion of misogyny in the science/skeptical community.
This reminds me of a Jerry Springer episode:
Walk in on a dramatic public conflict, read up a little to understand that I don’t know the persons involved and am not interested in reading multiple past posts to get up to speed on it.
And walk out again.
..now the virology stuff sounds interesting, but the drama? Not so much.
PZ writes:
Was the “that woman” part necessary? I don’t think gender is relevant here.
@78 Josh,
PZ and many of the commenters here seem to think Jen’s post was superior for being so much more calm. The irony of that surely cannot be lost on the atheist community.
@Josh again,
I wasn’t using quotation marks to necessarily indicate disapproval of those terms. (When I want to do that, I use the single scare quotes.) I was actually quoting PZ because he appears to be an anger troll here. I agree that Smith was being vitriolic, malicious, bullying, and plain mean. Other than in pointing out the irony about her comment on immaturity, I just don’t think it’s that important – especially considering the fact that the majority of Jen’s post was on the substance of what was said. Really, unless everyone here just wants to lament the personal split between two people on the Internet, cruel wording isn’t the issue.
@81 Alex,
Seems to me one should care about the substantial issues you mentioned and just ignore the meanness. Or be equally mean right back, provided the big issues get addressed. Really, if Jen wanted to talk about what a big dumb failure Smith was while still saying all the other things she wrote, I don’t see my opinion of her post changing. This is all just anger trolling.
The emotion in Smith’s response appears to be premised more in a personal dislike of Jen than anything else. I don’t see why anyone here cares except insofar as within that emotion Smith has said false things.
The whole “unprofessional” attempted slam has always seemed a bit odd to me. It’s as if the person using it is trying to imply there’s some external standard of behavior that the target is not adhering to, without establishing what that standard is. Wouldn’t “professional” behavior be rather different depending on whether you’re talking to a doctor, a blogger, or a ratcatcher? And, of course, there’s the whole question of what “professional” means – do you have to make a certain percentage of your living at something to be a professional? Or is it a question of whether it’s a field that has a professional certification or a well-defined educational program? I can see how a field like journalism, for example, has “professional standards” that you might be expected to follow, but finger-wagging at a blogger who’s obviously doing it for fun, who’s studying a different field for their career, is missing some kind of point.
While I’m rambling on this topic, perhaps we can reclaim the term “amateur” and polish it up a bit. “Amateur” is someone who loves what they are doing – who is engaged in (whatever it is) out of the pleasure they get from doing so. Compared to a “professional” who is doing it as a career. When we used to say someone’s work was “amateurish” we meant that they were taking advantage of the fact that they weren’t doing it as a career and that allowed them to do it badly. We weren’t saying that “all amateurs are hacks” as much as that an amateur can adopt a “take it or leave it” stance and has less vested interest in “acting like a professional.” After all, we’ve all seen professionals that suck at their field, and amateurs that are top-notch!
When someone starts to finger-wag about another person’s “professionalism” what they’re really doing is demonstrating cowardice. Because they’re trying to give their opinion more weight than it deserves by implying that there’s an existing external standard that the other person has violated. If a doctor is violating well-understood professional ethics we might say they are “acting unprofessional” but it’d be clearer to say that they are “violating medical ethics” – that would be more specific. When you finger-wag at a blogger and call them “unprofessional” is the implication that there are some standards of proper bloggery out there? If so, it would be good to reference them. By claiming someone is “unprofessional” without being able to tie it back to what profession or code that person is supposed to follow, one is really showing that they don’t actually have an argument.
[meta]
Marcus:
Abbie is a woman, and since he is using grammatical gender in the rest of the comment, it would seem quaint to say ‘that person’ in that phrase — so, neither necessary nor inappropriate.
You are being hyper-vigilant here.
Michael Hawkins:
Your purported irony arises because you’re confused about the attribution of merit; it goes to the poster, not to the post.
Oh, she’s getting exactly the recognition she deserves.
And this thread is a fine example of that recognition.
Abbie placed ERV at the sleazy heart of a campaign to smear and hurt many prominent bloggers in the wake of Elevatorgate.
She may not miss the ad revenue now that I don’t visit her site, I’m sure that the constant patronage of the shit-flinging brigade more than makes up for it, but she isn’t getting my clicks for her trouble.
Is she is satisified by the possibility that plausibly more comments have been made on the pair of threads devoted to hate and loathing, than on the entirety of her scientific blogging output?
It is a shame that an interesting (female) voice in scientific blogging has become so tainted, and that the person behind that voice has turned out to be so badly flawed.
… or murdered and/or abducted and replaced by an evil changeling space alien.
… come to think of it, I think I may save that one for me. Nice, all-purpose quality, it has. I could use something like that for some of the more regrettable moments in my life.
(/My daughter, looking at a picture of me from the 80s: ‘Wow… Why are you dressed like that?’ Me: ‘Yeah, see, well, there was this evil changeling space alien…’)
@ julian 44: The point is that apparently the in-group doesn’t mind someone “acting childish” as long as that behavior is directed only towards people in the perceived out-group.
Abbie Smith is simply appalling.
Re: professionalism
Most people would regard standards of behavior in basic research-oriented science to be fairly lax*. Abbie Smith isn’t behaving in a way that is especially unprofessional. She is just an asshole.
*Maybe with the exception that we are never to lie about our findings. Good luck sticking to that one, corporate stooges!
[meta]
Zack @91, your revisionism is noted, though your new claim is actually sillier. You did yourself no favour, there.
(Your mindset is mildly amusing, however)
It’s pretty clear that Abby has lost a lot of subscribers. That might be part of what she is so pissed about. Taking it out on Jen or anyone else is just making her problem worse.
@John Morales 94: Is it? I don’t recall comments like “Abbie Smith is simply appalling” dropping here when she was calling Michael Behe a “massive douche.”
Ms. Smith isn’t perfect. So what? She’s brilliant and that’s good enough for me.
Another example: I’m a chess player and I’m a big fan of Bobby Fischer. I’ve played over several of his games because they are interesting and because they’re educational and because he was the best chess player ever. Nobody living today or who lived in the past came close to his skill at chess.
However, unfortunately, Bobby Fischer was a bit of nutjob. Actually he was a world class nutjob. Does that change the quality of his countless masterpieces? No, of course not. His games will be studied for the next thousand years or longer and nobody will care about his many problems.
I’m certainly not going to care if a brilliant person like Ms. Smith is sometimes mean or unreasonable. I still can learn quite a bit from her blog so why should I or anyone else care about complaints she has with some other brilliant people, whether those criticisms are justified or not.
@ Otrame 95: It’s possible that she’s lost subscribers, but her monthly visits have doubled since Elevatorgate.
Human Ape, unfettered by human concerns
This is such a tempting opportunity to godwin this thread, but I’m going to resist.
Behe is a massive douche. What’s your point?
Maybe she is, but I don’t have evidence of it. In any case, this isn’t about Abbie Smith’s purported brilliance, but her appalling behavior.
Abbie Smith is being compared to various flawed geniuses, as though her information and arguments (as useful and informative as I found them) are not available elsewhere.
If we overlook the flaws of incredible people who blaze a trail with their particular insight or ability, then it is because their notable achievements are also outstanding because of their uniqueness.
Abbie is a talented and intelligent writer in many respects, but she has little unique talent which might cause me to overlook her disgraceful behaviour.
I can choose to consume other more honest and sympathetic sources for the same information. Ethical consumption is perfectly possible where the same products are available elsewhere.
[meta]
Zach, you’re still imagining group thinking, and this is colouring your perception.
(And your points remain either otiose or just plain silly)
—
Human Ape, Fisher was doubtless among the best chess players ever (I reckon Kasparov was better), but to compare Abbie’s brilliance (at what?) with his at chess is ludicrous.
This is what happens when civility gets thrown out the window.
One of the worst things about los internets is how people feel free to behave in socially repulsive ways, in ways they would not face to face with others. Some may view this as an advantage. I strongly disagree.
@ John Morales 102: I don’t think I’m imagining it. And even if I was, why would that be “silly?”
Human Ape – your comfort with and apathy toward psychotic misogyny and harrassment is duly noted. Go back to the slimepit.
So either, this is true and she’s decided that continuing her campaign of unhinged misogyny and egging on psychotic posters who post rape threats about Smith’s “enemies”, because this is the sort of crowd she wants to be associated with.
Or, she’s a fucking liar who has lost credibility and readers and is now flailing around in desperation trying to remain relevant and on the radar.
Either way, doesn’t look good for her.
I remember when Human Ape decided to share his disturbingly violent fantasies about torturing Catholic priests, and topped it all off with a nasty dose of homophobia. Perhaps he now regrets these comments – I’m all for forgiving – but if he does, he should say so. His posts on this thread suggest to me that his attitude may not have changed all that much.
Well for starters there’s nothing malicious about calling someone who spends their days trying to undermine evolution and takes it all the way to a circuit court a ‘massive douche.’ Massive douche is an entirely accurate way to describe them.
Jeering at someone about their proposal because you don’t like them and want to remind them yours is soooo much better? Yeah I know who the massive douche is in that scenario.
This is another florescent raccoon moment. Guy invents PCR changes world. Believes aliens talk to him as a raccoon and denies HIV and makes other insane or biggoted statements. Does he get a pass for shapeing biochemistry ? Or do we realize that he is a fucking crank, a dangerous harmful ignorant moronic crank who did some work of undeniable brilliance?
I mean reallh is humanape saying Hitler would be aok if his art hadn’t sucked?
+1
That’s exactly what Human Ape is saying, whether he is honest enough to admit or not. If we’re not supposed to pay attention to what the person does, except for when we should pay attention, then why is it that unhinged bigotry and incitement of harassment, rape threats, etc what we’re supposed to ignore?
Because misogyny.
What Bernard said. Especially given that Pepsigate was the same kind of attitude earlier, I simply don’t see that there is such a fabulous constellation of awesomeness that was ERV that should give her any kind of pass for this kind of behavior. Her good points are outweighed by the bad, in my mind. I can see where other people might put that fulcrum elsewhere, but my opinion is that they would be wrong in doing so (and I get to make my own value judgments on that). I think it’s a sad thing, but yeah. I can easily see Abbie getting a job after she finishes, but I wonder how well her subsequent annual reviews would go if she treats people she works with like she treats people on the internet.
That won’t happen, because he has been slurred as the “potential rapist.”
Sad but true.
Bobby Fischer ended his life as a raving, incoherent, anti-semitic and anti-american nutjob (there is much irony in both of these), as well as an internationally wanted criminal, if not arguably a war criminal.
That will, rightfully, forever color his legacy. His games will indeed be continued to be studied, but in any compilation of games that has even the smallest bit of mention of the lives and histories of the players involved, this WILL be mentioned (and indeed already is). In compilations that do not discuss the actual human beings who produce the games, it will not be, but then in these, the players’ names a but an afterthought.
But to compare Abbie Smith with Robert Fischer is only a valid analogy if her other work, be it science publications or other blog posts, is universally recognized by her peers to be both unique and the absolute best in the entire world for the time period.
In short, the comparison is an insult to Fischer.
Then I am happly wrong. I had never heard of her before Elevatorgate. And now . . . LOL. I’d like to try to rid myself of Unhinged Bigot Kooties, not acquire more.
Translation: Can I slip a blatant lie in here? I need some attention.
You don’t? I do. And in at least one case the complaints came from gnus. I can try googling them up if you want.
This reeks of high school drama at its worst.
A flaw in the analogy: it’s entirely possible today to study calculus without ever reading anything by Newton, and it’s entirely possible today to teach calculus without mentioning Newton. He is irrelevant to the topic of mathematics per se. (He is only relevant to a different topic, the history of mathematics.)
Likewise, if it is of similar difficulty to learn about retroviruses with or without Abbie’s help, then there is no argument to support your stance. Anyone who wants to avoid her for any reason should do so.
Where this gets interesting to me: it seems (if I’m reading correctly) that some people are suggesting that Abbie’s writing on retroviruses for the layperson is currently unparalleled, thus it is relatively difficult for these people to understand the topic without her help.
Well, those who find that their interest in retroviruses is overshadowed by their disgust with Abbie are still justified in avoiding her; they are weighing their preferences rationally.
But what of those who do not find their interest in retroviruses overshadowed, but are still considerably disgusted with Abbie? Here are the very interesting cases.
If it’s worth the effort, then I would suggest that the best thing to do is steal her words: set up a blog in a TLD with less copyright regulation, and repost everything worthwhile she’s written, while stripping her name from and giving her no credit for the writing.
Calculus was discovered by Leibniz anyway.
All I can say about this is that Abbie Smith seems to have a completely wrong idea about what constitutes appropriate professional behavior. If I were on a hiring committee, I wouldn’t be interested in hiring anyone (even Isaac Newton) who repeatedly made such illogical, immature, and (most importantly) utterly unwarranted public attacks. It would not be reasonable to subject the other people in the department to that. And isn’t that what “unprofessional” means?
By contrast, Jen McCreight and her supposedly “unprofessional” activity of “attending and speaking at conferences” would bring a lot of positive publicity to my department without hurting anyone.
ahs ॐ @119 said:
I can’t judge whether or not her writing is “unparalleled”, because her blog is the only one I know of that had a focus on ERVs. Admittedly, it’s because once I found ERV, I didn’t bother searching anywhere else. I was, at the time, happy with her stuff. I “settled”, if you will, and got comfy with it.
So, for all I know, she could be the worst when it comes to blogging about ERVs, and I just never bothered to compare her ERV blog with other people’s ERV blog because I’ve not found another ERV blog.
I simply can’t justify visiting her site anymore, but would sincerely like to continue learning about ERVs from a layman’s perspective. Hence, I’m on the hunt for other blogs that are similar, but without all the vitriolic childishness.
(I should note: I somehow missed her stuff on the whole Pepsi fiasco. Wow… had I seen that, I would have dropped her then. I had no idea…)
—————————————————————-
Also… I replied to Circe at #20. Where is Circe and why has (s)he(?) not noted it (yes, I’m insecure about being the internet’s resident ghost… at least I admit it!)?
Lots of graduate students get NIH and NSF grants. While this is certainly an accomplishment of sorts, it isn’t necessarily an indicator of brilliance in the field.
I would applaud Abbie Smith for her pre-Monument writing at ERV (if I could get my palm unglued from my face), not because it is brilliant, but because she recognizes the importance of the interaction between science/skepticism and the public that it serves. But it should be noted that Jen McCreight is doing that also, as are a billion other graduate students. Good for them and good for all of us.
None of this changes the perception that many of us have: namely, that Smith has been an active supporter of mysogyny and a grade A bunghole.
ahsOM:
This seems unneccessary. I can understand Principia without believing that Newton wasn’t a flwaed human being. Or at least I used to could.
What? That would be a very bad thing to do. That’s plagiarism, and it’s stealing, and it’s erasing an entire person and pretending that the information sprang from the head of Zeus or something rather than coming from an individual. That’s pretty despicable, really.
illuminata – I should have clarified I’d disagree with putting the fulcrum so that the good weighs heavier, not with putting it further than I do along the line that the bad is the heavier side.
Two things:
I don’t know if I was the only one who brought the Facebook mess to Jen’s attention, but I was at least one of the ones, as I actually (up until last night) had Abbie on my friends list. Probably for too long, but I digress. I’m not apologizing for that; Facebook is public record and it’s not like it happened in a closed group.
Second, there’s a difference between Abbie mocking Mooney and Luskin on the one hand and Watson and McCreight on the other. Mooney was making common cause with the pointlessly conciliatory Matt Nesbitt (I’d argue Mooney has probably gotten better, but that’s neither here nor there at the moment) and generally came off as someone who cared less about the facts and more about half-assed compromise, which is especially depressing given that Mooney had written a major book on the subject of antiscientific corruption. As for Luskin… well, Casey Luskin. What more needs be said.
But with Watson and McCreight, this is something different. She’s attacking people with standing in the community and a general sense of integrity, in Watson’s case because of a perceived sleight against a third party (IMHO invoking a somewhat artificial distinction between online and real life in the process) and Jen for… um… yeah, let me get back to you on that. She’s also aligned herself with a particularly deranged group of people who have no business calling themselves part of the skeptical movement, and as Pepsigate demonstrated, Abbie seems to not really get the concept of “appearance of impropriety” to begin with.
Marcus Ranum? I doubt it. He’s probably playing games.
Somite, I’m curious as to how many gels you think it takes to make someone’s ‘eyes bleed’. My personal record for (concurrent) gels is 16, the lab record is 30 (she had to borrow tetracells from every lab we’re friends with!). I’m currently routinely doing 8-12 gels at a time, about twice a week.
Having to work stupid hours is no excuse for acting the way Abbie has. Being in the final year of a UK PhD (4 years, overrun without good reason and you fail at my Uni) I am routinely working 12-14 hour days, no weekends off in months tho I do work shorter hours at weekends so I have time to go home and cook vats of soup and stew that I take into work and live off during the week. A good day is one where I’ve managed to get a good night’s sleep. The main effect on my internet life is that I’m a very, very infrequent commenter. So I can’t say I have a great deal of sympathy for someone who has time to post mean and hateful shit about other people on her blog. I’m another person who used to really like ERV, her blog was part of what convinced me that viruses are amazing enough to study for PhD (I originally wanted to work on parasites), but her behaviour in the past few months means I rarely go back to her blog now.
(Yes, I know I may give myself a stress-related illness by doing the hours I’m doing. The upside is a stress-related illness would be one of the few valid reasons i could get an extension. Shit not working for a long time apparently isn’t reason enough)
It’s definitely plagiarism, arguably stealing (also arguably not stealing), and sure, it’s approximately erasing an entire person and pretending that the information sprang from the head of Zeus, although readers will implicitly invent an anonymous human agent as the source.
I dunno. I don’t see anything despicable about any of that. I’m very much in favor of plagiarism as an ethical good, and the other objections seem minor to me.
Well, it seems unneessary to me too, but I suppose that’s because I’m not terribly interested in Abbie’s writing. Back in the BE (before elevator), I made a note on TET once to the effect that hey I just found some good resources on ERVs over at ERV. But I never went back to read them again, because knowledge of ERVs is useful to me only for one thing, arguing with creationists, which I don’t do very often.
I was trying to imagine a solution for those who find Abbie’s writing much more valuable than I do and are also disgusted with her behavior.
Look at what NateHevens says above your comment. Now, if Nate were to unknowingly stumble upon a plagiarized partial mirror of ERV, and started reading that site, finding it an adequate replacement for the original, this would be a net good for Nate and others who feel similarly.
We’re dealing with a person who, for no known reason, is being unbelievably rude to someone.
Are you really proposing that a good way to handle this problem is to be unbelievably rude right back, by copying that person’s writing without attribution and posting it on another website, so that she doesn’t get the credit?
How the hell is that a solution?
Are you really asking for clarification? I am really proposing that.
Are you really asking for clarification? I said: “it seems (if I’m reading correctly) that some people are suggesting that Abbie’s writing on retroviruses for the layperson is currently unparalleled, thus it is relatively difficult for these people to understand the topic without her help.
Well, those who find that their interest in retroviruses is overshadowed by their disgust with Abbie are still justified in avoiding her; they are weighing their preferences rationally.
But what of those who do not find their interest in retroviruses overshadowed, but are still considerably disgusted with Abbie? Here are the very interesting cases. …
Look at what NateHevens says above…. Now, if Nate were to unknowingly stumble upon a plagiarized partial mirror of ERV, and started reading that site, finding it an adequate replacement for the original, this would be a net good for Nate and others who feel similarly.”
+++++
TL;DR: It is a possible solution because it provides a positive outcome for some people. That’s what solutions do.
Seeing as how the identity of these “some people” is very much in doubt, then I would suggest you have a friend go and copy-paste Abbie’s posts on ERVs, and e-mail them to you personally.
Also you know, Newton’s math was fairly free of his personal opinions. You can check it and stuff.
Like wise Van Braun contributed greatly to the study of aerospace and rocketry…that doesn’t mean that that sanctimonious self righteous hypocritical, holier than thou, slave driving Nazi fuck should get any consideration in regards to his opining.
Watson and Crick also stole huge chunks of their research, we can note their technical achievements, but it is marred by the fact that the two of them acted like flaming sexist assholes.
Also I was under the impression that the identity of Otis Elevatorguy was known but not publicized by Watson and others? I thought I read murmurs that the guy was involved in CSI or something?
That’s just one of my lines in the sand. It doesn’t matter how awful a person is, you don’t steal their work.
In the more specific case, a simple search for endogenous retrovirus gives almost two and a half million results. I doubt that Abbie’s discussions of ERVs are that far above all the other two and a half million possibilities that her writings must be preserved and disseminated at all costs.
Yeah don’t steel Abby’s work. There’s some things good people typically don’t do even to those outside of their ingroup. Inciting rape threats and stealing credit is up there.
Well, there are some things really happy and successfull people have in common:
-They don’t spend much time bragging about how truely brilliant they are
-They don’t try to shine by tainting other people
-They don’t tell other people how they have to spend their lives
-They don’t pass judgement on other people’s entirely normal life-choices
They simply shine on their own.
Abbie Smith does all of the things above and there’s one kind of people who do that:
Unhappy, jealous people who need to take others down to elevate themselves.
I think she’s doing herself a big disfavour. Unless you’re already at the very top, workplaces hardly tolerate such vicious behaviour.
Herrta @ #31 mentions “she(Smith)’s also done her darndest to be known in the skeptic/atheist blogosphere as the person who named a thread with 2000+ comments dedicated to the abuse of a fellow skeptic a monument to everything she holds dear.”
Just to be particular for a moment, if I have the turn of events right, content aside that thread is supposedly a ‘monument’ to free speech and one in the eye to PZ for censoriously closing threads and banning people. It was even mooted that he closes threads as a censorship tactic entirely and there was little technical reason for doing so (he was lying, basically).
I’m not too sure, but memory has it that was their take on it. So setting up a /b of scienceblogs was the reaction, where all the thrilling permutations of their hatred of feminism, Rebecca Watson and PZ (and anyone who sides with them) could be thoroughly expressed.
No, it was Abbie herself who called it a monument to everything she holds dear. She didn’t specify free speech, and given the “everything” it pretty much has to include all the vicious name-calling.
Which isn’t just lies but absurd lies. Getting banned on here requires blatant assholery. I’ve been banned from far stricter places for opinions on comic books for Christ sake. And there is a technical reason, long threads were OBVIOUSLY blogging the blog down! Everyone fucking noticed it. back on science blogs it at times took upwards of 15 min to load a certain threads
Which is what free speech meant for them. They get to call for rape and slander people as much as they want and act all butthurt and martyred when people don’t want them to do it in their house. If Abby wants to let them piss all over her rug that says a lot more about her poor social hygiene than it does about anyone else’s censorship.
A little perspective.
I don’t watch Tom Cruise or John Travolta movies anymore because I don’t want to knowingly support anyone who acts as a spokesperson for Scientology. Nor do I watch anything with Jim Carrey or Jennie McCarthy in it because I don’t want to support anti-vaccination lunatics. Mel Gibson movies are another thing to avoid because I definitely don’t want to support a hyper-religious, bigoted, violent asshole. The Twilight books could have a reputation for being extremely well written and I still wouldn’t buy them or watch the movies because 10% of Stephanie Meyer’s considerable income goes to the Mormon church.
And while Abbie Smith is hardly a celebrity, it’s the same impulse of not wanting to support someone who facilitates social harm (in this case, in the form of perpetuating misogyny) that now keeps me away from her blog. I don’t flatter myself that can effect anything with my one-woman boycotts, but I could not respect myself if I pretended that was an excuse to compromise my principles.
Ophelia
Oh absolutely. The vicious name calling would fall under the rubric of free speech to the erv gang though. Politeness and decorum are thought police-esque tone arguments in disguise.
I’m not trying to get anyone of the hook. I think the desire to slur Watson is at the heart of it. But, if I recall and/or impressions are correct, it was some weird anti-PZ solidarity where it had its genesis. So, though it isn’t said, it’s not a monument to hating Rebecca Watson et al in her/their eyes, even thought that’s what it is made of.
Particular, pointless and perhaps wrong, but that’s how I remember it.
#129 ahs thingymabob:
I wasn’t so much asking for clarification as trying to make sure that I hadn’t made a mistake in reading your post. You were quite clear the first time, but my interpretation of your suggestion was so wildly awful that it was more likely that I had made a mistake in interpreting it.
I guess not.
While I see how this solves the problem you mention, that does not mean it is a good solution. Plagiarizing someone’s stuff isn’t justified by the fact that the person also writes incoherent, unjustified rants.
What are you talking about, Rey Fox? There are people here in this thread who are indicating they liked Abbie’s work about ERVs but don’t want to read her now.
Why would I do that? You are apparently talking to me about myself, and in doing so, indicating that you haven’t understood what I’m saying. I don’t find her writing valuable enough to plagiarize.
If I did, I would set up automated filters based on her tags, and plagiarize the good stuff myself, unapologetically.
Please don’t obliquely imply that I want to plagiarize her but am afraid to say so outright. This does not *ahem* give me proper credit for my ethical stance: I am wholly in favor of plagiarism. Plagiarism is an ethical net good for humanity. I would plagiarize anyone who I found worthy of plagiarizing.
What I’m trying to do here is normalize plagiarism in general, as well as show moral support if anyone feels like taking up my specific suggestion about ERV and doing the work themself.
I’m not saying I want someone to do this for me; I personally wouldn’t find the new plagiarized site any more useful than I found the old one. But it appears some people would.
+++++
To get a sense of where I’m coming from: in a thread from August, I said Watson should be denied public recognition of his work because of his racist statements. My argument then was like my argument about Newton now: it is completely unnecessary to study Watson qua Watson to understand DNA in 2011. Precisely what I said at the time:
“in 2011, it is possible to learn everything necessary about DNA without ever quoting James Watson.
Contemporary study of DNA has no need to quote Watson. So why should textbooks? It’s irrelevant who wrote about it the 1950s. What’s relevant for science at any moment is what we know from the last ten years or so, twenty tops.
If someone’s writing a ‘history of biology’ book, and needs to talk about Watson, they can respect the reader by informing them that Watson is a racist.”
If for some hypothetical reason it was important to read Watson’s own writing—like he was just the best writer on the subject—then I would instead say he should be plagiarized.
+++++
Well, that’s fine. I understand your position. You understand mine. I doubt it’s worth our time to argue if there are no misconceptions.
+++++
Ing, no. Denying another person credit for their work is nothing like inciting rape threats. That’s actually a despicable comparison, right there.
Oh. Gosh. Duelling internet narcissists. What a surprise.
wut
You’re probably right about that.
My argument was taking for granted the “[suggestions] that Abbie’s writing on retroviruses for the layperson is currently unparalleled, thus it is relatively difficult for these people to understand the topic without her help.”
+++++
Bernard Bumner said “I can choose to consume other more honest and sympathetic sources for the same information.”
I wonder if those who know of other good sources for info on endogenous retroviruses would share them in this thread? This appears to be a fairly common desire, but I haven’t yet seen any alternatives mentioned.
Ratcheting up the hysteria and hate is a great way to draw in a certain crowd. Just ask Rupert Murdoch.
Oh, what a sniny, sniny mirror.
Chas, generally speaking it contributes to more widespread knowledge, which I consider more worthwhile than any individual’s personal credit.
The best plagiarism is when a work can be efficiently redistributed under the profit motive in an area or among a demographic where it was not otherwise being distributed.
I do understand why universities and academic presses need to have their own methods of discouraging plagiarism within their ranks, and I don’t yet have any good argument that they should do otherwise. I should have been clear on that from the beginning, since so many readers here will consider it within the context of their academic background. I see nothing morally wrong with flunking a student or firing an academic for plagiarism. These institutions have their own particular needs.
Well then! Hello eigenperson, it’s a pleasure to meet you.
Muzz:
For that she could have chosen any thread on her blog she chooses not to moderate.
Feeling left out?
Gosh golly, a douchebag being above everything. What a surprise.
@A. Noyd –
It doesn’t affect your point, but just so you’re aware, the books are some of the most poorly-written drek I’ve ever seen, and the story is misogynist and vile. The reputation must come from people that have never read other books.
I think your aim is poor.
I sincerely doubt that narcissism can be fairly counted among my many faults.
How does it contribute more to widespread knowledge than to widespread bullshit? At least when there’s an author associated with some text somebody can be held responsible for it.
samizdat. I get that.
I don’t see why such distribution need exclude the author’s identity. Illegal bootleg publishing is not the same as plagiarism (to me; we may be arguing about different things).
And I was going to say something like “just stay the fuck away from my students” but then I read the rest of your comment.
I know I should be angrier at Abbie’s constant misogyny and attempts to smear people who don’t think her Special Female/One of The Guys schtick is cool. But she just is the written equivalent of a drunk who’s thrown up on themself repeatedly and and demanding another drink. I should be offended, but all I manage is nose-wrinkled pity.
You DO realize that’s only coming from one of the parties, right?
@A. Noyd-
Or I could have had a giant reading failure and missed the word that indicated you were speaking hypothetically. *facepalms and goes back to lurking*
Being familiar enough with Bob to find the clown claim wanting, we are now scrutinizing Alice. Yeah, we got to that point already. Not everyone is as “slow” as you are.
It is something like it in that it is unacceptable behavior.
It appears you’re making unwarranted assumptions about some people.
I’m trying to understand – I can usually follow your arguments pretty well, but I’m hitting a blank spot. What good is it to promulgate ideas while actively stripping away the attribution from it? It seems that taking attribution away can make things worse, by not giving any context to it – knowing who an idea came from can give you a lot of information about the potential bias in the statements.
@Ahs
Frankly, your argument seems the same as someone saying that we should start sending rape threats to Abby to see how she likes it.
chigau: have a nice day.
julian (do I know you?): have a nice day.
Look, all you people expressing great surprise and consternation about Abbie Smith’s supposed change: You have not been paying attention. I’ve said this many many times before. She has always been one of the most egregious narcissists in the blogosphere, and that’s saying something. Whatever she’s talking about, it’s about her glorious Self. Every single time, every single topic, every single post and comment. This shit is nothing but par for the erv course. No surprise whatsoever.
Jen McCreight I know much less about, but I detect some inflated ego over there too. This is my opinion. Nevertheless of course I agree that she has exhibited a hell of a lot more class than Smith has in the present teacup-tempest.
Both of them are graduate students. Neither has yet accomplished shit in science. They have no credentials other than the self-regard necessary to prop oneself up as a Blogger.
*shrug*
Odd, I’m not seeing a link to your blog
Dude, I don’t blog. I have a Blogger account where maybe once a month I post something to be able to link to it directly or more often just to amuse myself. That lack-of-drawing-attention-to-it you noticed there? That’s precisely the not-narcissism I’m talking about. Have a nice day.
Chas @163
“Neither has yet accomplished shit in science.”
You fail. Both have had their work published in respected, peer-reviewed journals. You are not the arbiter of who has and has not “accomplished shit in science.”
Even if they hadn’t, what exactly are these “credentials” you refer to? Must every hopeful blogger submit a resume to you to be judged for worthiness?
I was not aware that by now you need a PhD to be entitled to have an opinion.
Seriously.
What either of them has or hasn’t accomplished in their respective fields has zilch to do with what this is about.
Chas:
A fair point. Many issues with unknown authorship can be dealt with by assigning a unique identifier (like a Gravatar, not just an easily spoofable pseudonym) in place of the author. A URL is generally sufficient; the unique author of pseudo-ERV could be critiqued on the merits of what pseudo-ERV appears to write.
Illegal bootleg publishing solves many problems, and is often sufficient, you’re right.
Plagiarism solves those problems and more: it also circumvents bias against certain sources. Let’s say the writings of certain famous communist authors are categorically dismissed by some well-meaning youths who were taught that these authors are enemies of the nation, and by extension enemies of the youths’ own ingroup. Strip off the names and certain well-known phrases like “dictatorship of the proletariat”, and these writings can be judged on their own merits by a new generation.
Or let’s say someone just wants to read ERV on ERVs but they get stressed just thinking about what a mean person Abbie is. Strip off Abbie’s name, and her personality is no longer salient to the reader.
Obviously I disagree. But hey, failing to pay a parking ticket one can afford to pay? I find that to be unacceptable behavior. Let’s pretend that’s worth mentioning in the same breath as inciting rape threats.
No it doesn’t, Ing. You are deliberately exaggerating in order to say something maximally hurtful to me. You know it’s not in the same category.
(Does anyone think this extreme degree of Ing’s attack is acceptable behavior here?)
+++++
I don’t think I am. I just articulated an argument for how it would be useful to someone like Nate. Perhaps you’d care to address that argument instead of making unwarranted assumptions about me.
+++++
Cross-posted: I think I addressed this now in my comment to Chas. Sufficiently?
It can. But then it has other benefits. It’s a mixed bag.
My unscientific opinion is that I have gotten pretty good at recognizing biases—and influences—in a piece of writing without knowing who wrote it. People are generally terrible at hiding their biases.
ahs – but eliminating attribution makes it impossible to trace things like essays that are part of astroturf efforts. Following the trail of who wrote what and who they were in the pocket of is a big part of determining credibility.
@71 Morales,
Whether we are talking about hypocrisy or malevolence does not matter in the least. Neither have anything to do with whether or not the post is accurate.
It’s similar in that you’re saying that Abby deserves to have certain civilities and decencies denied to her because she denies those to others. That is the height of hypocrisy.
Oh please.
@Ahs
If you wanted to help in the way you’re saying without hurting Abby, you would track down and compile her citations for those interested in EVR to find. It’s what she already sourced and cited for her articles so it has the raw data and you can bypass her entirely.
Chas
Since your comment was 140+ into the thread, it was difficult to know which two narcissists.
and bless your heart.
Don’t be vague. Presenting your opinion without evidence or a reference to what leads you to hold it is lame. What specifically are you talking about? general, hand-waving at Ms. McCreight and a bald assertion of an “inflated ego” is quite uninformative.
Is an “inflated ego” necessary to be a blogger? That seems silly to me.
You seem pretty proud of yourself for not being narcissistic. Ironic no?
@ahs
I’m not attacking you, I’m arguing that what you’re arguing is unethical and amounts to a fair-game doctrine.
I guess? But how likely is it that astroturf essays are going to redistributed via plagiarism anyway? Maybe I’m naive, but this seems like an objection that will remain theoretical.
+++++
On the contrary, that is the basis of our entire justice system. And if you take this complaint seriously, then I suggest you take it over to the threads where people have suggested droping dox on Hoggle because he denies certain civilities and decencies to others.
You owe me an apology, Ing. If you simply wanted to make a case about “unacceptable behavior”, you could have compared my suggestion to putting bologna on Abbie’s car, or toilet-papering her house. You’d still be wrong, but you could at least be given the benefit of the doubt.
Instead, you have deliberately chosen a maximally hurtful comparison. This was unwarranted, and you should be ashamed of yourself.
I don’t.
Yes, and every.single.goddamn.topic of conversation too. If chas isn’t interested, we get to hear all about it how bored he is, how everyone should stop talking. 73,000 times. But he’s not a narcissist. No, not at all.
Actually, I’m pretty sure that’s not true of Smith. Go ahead and set me straight with a citation.
Looks like it is true of McCreight however, and there I stand corrected. Publishing an undergraduate research project is indeed an accomplishment.
What? Of course I am–for me. I am clearly and obviously stating an opinion. My opinion only. Disagree with it if you can, but I certainly have every right in the world to state the results of my internal arbitrage here.
wtf?
Did you read the comment from Smith that we’re talking about here? Go ahead, go back and do so. See the condescension? The bullshit
dickclit-waving bragadocio sprinkled among the mean-girl put-downs?That’s what I was referring to.
Smith has no standing to be lording it over McCreight. (The reverse would also be true.)
But, then, I guess actually my real point was ‘who cares? and here’s why.’
Have a nice day.
Or with torturing prisoners?
I could have, but I didn’t. I owe you no apology because you’re being vindictive and irrational and nasty. And because if you wound up convincing me, I would be justified by your standard. You are arguing for something unethical therefore it’s ok according to you to be an unethical dick back to you. The reason why some things are not done by decent folks is because it makes them like Abby and other scumy sleazebags.
See, that’s my point? Why not send her rape threats then. That’ll hurt her! It’s not about solving any problem but at getting back at Abby, which is childish and inane.
No one likes a militant apathist
@ahs
And then read what Walton said. Since my stance seems to have changed do you think it’s at all possible he convinced me?
And again, if you don’t care about her being upset you would want to do the cruelest things possible, such as sending threats. In fact since you’re arguing for vindictive justice that would be the MOST just thing since it’s giving her what she’s dishing out (indirectly but still)
It is narcissistic to think other people give a fuck about what topics interest or do not interest you.
OK, fair enough. I thought her whole public-complaining-about-the-informal-reviewers’-comments-on-her-NSF-proposal telling in that regard. The whole boobquake thing as well. And just lots of grilled-cheese-for-lunch kinds of posts about the author’s activities featuring pictures of the author, shit like that. Again, this is mostly an impression. I really haven’t read her much, hence the vagueness.
Really? It seems empirical to me.
No. Can you suggest another way to respond to such accusations?
lol. This is such fucking bullshit. Those were jokes. Obvious (I would think) attempts at sarcastic humor. I have never seriously told anybody on the internet to shut up about anything afaicr.
And I’m pretty sure you’re exaggerating the number of incidents by at least 72,997.
But whatev. Get your stupid digs in.
Whatever this is supposed to mean. Hey, if that’s worth the comparison, go tell those who are talking about outing Hoggle that they’re doing something similar to torturing prisoners. Do you understand that’s what you’re saying? The whole backlash against Hoggle is because he denies certain civilities and decencies to others. Your argument thus far can be used to say that outing Hoggle is hypocritical.
Do you believe outing Hoggle is hypocritical? If not, then you need to formulate your argument more carefully.
Because, as I already said: I don’t believe that plagiarism and making rape threats are of similar magnitude. I would be willing to plagiarize someone without regard to how I “hurt” them, but I consider rape threats to be intolerable treatment of an enemy. Rape threats against prisoners, for instance, probably constitute human rights violations under international law, and for good reason. Plagiarism is simply not worth mentioning in the same breath.
Of course it solves a problem; cf. #142. It may also be childish and inane. I don’t think so. But it does solve a problem.
But if I don’t convince you, then you’re being a hypocrite, because you are justifying your treatment of me on the basis that I am denying certain civilities and decencies to others.
Yeah, so I heard. Please, don’t mind me. I’ll leave you to your very important conversation about Abbie ‘n’ Jen.
Good. Fuck off. We don’t need people minimizing bullying here.
And did he in fact convince you? When? The last comment I see from you on the subject was #528, where you endorsed keeping a page of some kind on her, which was still entirely against her wishes. So it appears he did not convince you.
No, that does not follow. If I don’t care about how upset someone is over plagiarism, it does not follow that I don’t care how upset they are over threats.
I don’t accept your premise that plagiarism is a harm worth caring about. Are you capable of arguing honestly with someone who does not share your moral foundations? You have never demonstrated such an ability before. It’d be delightful for everyone if you could start now.
@John Morales #87,
That’s pathetic hair-splitting. You must also think theists are criticizing atheists for who they are, not the content of what we write.
That was backwards. It should say, “You must also think theists aren’t criticizing atheists for who we are, but for the content of what we write.”
Meanwhile, if I may interrupt for a second – Abbie has responded. On Ed Clint’s Facebook post. I responded back.
Meanwhile – Abbie posted a new comment on Ed Clint’s post at Facebook. (Also: Chris Stedman is posting there, cheering on Ed Clint. Mr Nice Guy.) I just replied. That will earn me a new batch of “you ugly cunt” and all the rest of it, but it had to be done.
Abbie: *shrug* No arrogance, and I have nothing against Jen either. Im rooting for her, as a fellow scientist. I hoped she had only bought her ticket to Loser Town. Maybe she wouldnt cash it in. But it is apparent at this point she has already gotten on the train, ordered a Coke, and gotten comfy in her seat. She does not take her job seriously (grad school is not undergrad where you can skip out now and then to go to conferences, much less at the frequency she attends them). She does not take writing grant proposals seriously (it was horrible). She does not take her colleagues seriously (on what planet is it a good idea to take pics of a visiting professors presentation and put them online making fun of them? on what planet is it a good idea to bitch about your professors and classmates online?).
And any/all criticism is ‘OMFG WHY MEEE??? WHYYYYYYYYYYY POOOOOR MEEEEEEEEE!!!! OH GAAAAAAAAAAAWD!!!!’ (eg her posts on me)
I feel bad for her. She has no one around her to say ‘Hey, you need to refocus if this is what you want to do with your life’ (including PZ, who is enabling her self-destructive behavior) except apparently me, and I *really* dont give a fuck. Sad, but it looks like this is what she wants.
*shrug* Whatevs. Like I said, Im not her mother, and shes not my problem.
Me: What nonsense, Abbie. If you really had “nothing against Jen” you could have just given her all this helpful advice *in private*. You posted it on your blog *and* here, complete with repeatedly calling her a loser. That’s not “rooting for her,” it’s trying to shame her.
So, taking for granted your claim that Walton convinced you, there was still a time when you were making that argument I quoted.
At that time, Ing, would it have been fair to say to you that because you supported keeping a snarky article as is, you must therefore not care about inciting rape threats? Would it have been fair to say to you, “There’s some things good people typically don’t do even to those outside of their ingroup. Inciting rape threats and writing snarky articles is up there.” Would you feel you’d been treated fairly, Ing, if someone had leveled those criticisms at you?
This is why you owe me an apology.
Ophelia @193
Thanks for posting that.
Could Abbie at least pick a position and stick to it? She says she doesn’t care about Jen, then she slags her. That she feels sorry for Jen (for whatever bullshit reasons), but that she’s not her problem. Depending on which sentence you pick out of her response, she either really really cares, or really really doesn’t.
Abbie,
hahahahahahaha. I don’t know what is funnier. The claim that Abbie’s rant did not display rampant arrogance, or the claim that she has “nothing against Jen”.
Abbie must really think her followers are stupid if she thinks they will buy this response. Sadly, looking at the denizens of the slimepit, she may be right.
Pure fucking bullshit. You didn’t read the fucking proposal so you are talking out your ass.
Oh. Of course.
(Irony works so well in text-only.)
;)
Oh dear, who died and made Abbie Smith god?
How much insight does she have into Jen McCreight’s life to decide how many conferences she can/cannot attend?
Obviously none, but that doesn’t stop her from judging from her blog-posts that Ms. McCreight is failing.
That’s commonly called arrogance.
Cuz the town ain’t big enough fer the both of ya?
@199
Giliell, I think that post is very revealing because I think that’s mostly what this is about. Jen’s doing grad work like Abbie is, but since Jen dares to go to conferences once in awhile, Abbie thinks she must be a terrible researcher, because to Abbie (and it may very well be true in her department) you have to practically live in your lab and never stop working. I think maybe Abbie resents Jen for being able, or at least willing, to do more things than Abbie does.
I don’t know how Abbie justifies her position of “my level of activity is the baseline and any amount of activity past it means you must be fucking up” is anything other than arrogant.
Is it possible she’s just used to talking to people like this and thinks there’s nothing wrong with it?
And yet, she blogs.
Related to the “everyone driving slower than me is a moron and everyone going faster is a maniac” mentality.
Well, being mean I could wonder if there is much life outside of the lab waiting for Abbie. Might explain why she thinks people shouldn’t be allowed to have any.
Thanks Maggie, Sally Strange & difav:
I posted over on BlagHag about this, but I’ll say it here: we do a good job of taking down comments & lines of thought that indulge in sexism. However, we don’t do the same thing with regards to people blaming jerkwad behavior on teh Crazy.
Why, when people make crazy-blaming comments like this do we not arm our porcupines in the way that we do for a casual, one time use of gendered insults?
I am not saying utakata has no redeeming value. Nor am I saying that the comment utakata made had no mental connection to utakata’s neighbor in violation of what was asserted. I don’t want anyone to think I’m accusing someone of lying.
However, I seriously doubt that utakata’s own life experience includes more examples of jerkwad behavior from someone “certifiable” (and utakata got confidential medical information where? or was this someone with a medical degree speculating based on utakata’s version of events?) than examples of jerkwad behavior from someone NOT “certifiable”…
…UNLESS utakata had a similar age sibling who was/is “certifiable”.
The point is not that there are no cases of crazy people acting like total jerks. The point is that the use of this is completely unjustified AND contributes to oppression at the same time. (If the statement was true/justified and happened to contribute to oppression, we would just have to deal with the fallout of the truth, not suppress it: this is not that case).
In general, there is no one alive in the US that gets more crap from someone who isn’t a sibling than from someone who is, unless that person is (or was raised as) an only child.
If reality was coloring utakata’s comments and not stereotyping & prejudice, utakata would have said something like, “does Abbie think she’s Jen’s sister separated at birth?” But, no. Despite the endless crap siblings give to each other & despite the truly minimal crap that crazy people give to non-crazy people (not to mention the constant crap that crazy people get from non-crazy people), the go-to place for utakata is meds.
Now, utakata is the one that went there in this thread, but a number of people did it on Jen’s post about this, and still more did it on other posts (Ophelia Benson’s, I think, had a couple), but the point is not that utakata is one awful individual. If he were, there wouldn’t be the problem that there is. No, utakata’s reaching for “meds” is a result of a much larger pattern that can’t fail to influence anyone who interacts with the US culture that dominates FTB. Maggie even talks about how the crazy blaming is itself sexist in how it operates (at least for Maggie, but I think she’s unlikely to be on her own in this).
If we don’t want to set our porcupines on “kill” for this – at least until the Horde has dealt with this enough times that we expect everyone to be fully aware of the consequences for crazy-blaming – we still need to set them on stun. We shouldn’t be, “maybe, could you, would you possibly decline to…” We know how to deal harshly with an idea without dismantling a person. So why don’t we see, “I’m sure you were just a bit careless, but X is crazy-blaming, & if you do that around here, someone is sure to drop a porcupine on your chair after the next comment or two,” type warnings? Why are we so much more reluctant to confront crazy-blaming head on than we are to confront sexism head on?
I ask the latter in non-rhetorical fashion, however, I also wish to encourage a peregrination towards clear and certain denunciation of such tactics/ expressions/ ideas and away from the level of unconcern that we currently exhibit.
That is all. Please continue to denounce Abbie for the behavior for which she, herself, is actually and fully responsible.
If Ed Clint had wanted it to stay private, he could have posted it with a “friends” setting instead of a “public” setting. You can see it still. It’s still on the first page of his wall. http://www.facebook.com/ed.clint?sk=wall
I find the title of this post interesting. While what ERV wrote would be, in my opinion, describable as a meltdown was this exchange of correspondence “internet drama” before Blaghag and Pharyngula wrote posts about it?
You mean…like PZ here on Pharyngula? O_o
PZ, quick! You have to give back your degrees. You’re not living down to expectations!
What I get from this entire craptastic mess is that pointing out why certain actions and activities are harmful, irrational, and completely contrary to actual skeptical thought will put you on the Misogynist Shit List. As far as I can tell, there’s some sort of master (heh) list that everyone refers to, and they start slamming new people each time it gets updated. Or something.
Oh, the inanity.
Not any more. Thanks for reading along, Ed!
In defense of just that, fb is fucking stupid with regard to privacy settings, and changes them often enough that it’s hard to keep up with.
Can’t speak for Abbie, and have no interest in psychoanalysing her – what goes on inside her head is no-one’s business but hers.
Speaking from the outside, the pattern of events looks like:
1) Atheist community member: OH WOE! DRAMA! SKY FALLING!
2) Abbie: look, this is the atheist community, we’re not here for fluffy posturing. Also, go !”£$ yourself.
3) Atheist community: OH WOE! DRAMA! ABBIE ATTACKED SOMEONE!
Step #2 usually involves more broad-spectrum vitriol than I’d use unless I’d had a really bad day. But it’s not beyond the limits of my imagination to see why someone might get worked up.
There is an element of political posturing to this, as is quite thoroughly demonstrated by the Ten-Minute Hate going on in this comment thread. Even if it’s in a good cause, it’s still political posturing. To some folks (myself included) this is nails-down-a-blackboard stuff – we’re interested in skepticism because by and large it gets down to brass tacks and doesn’t engage in that sort of crap.
The object of discussion for us is supposed to be cold hard reality. When the object of discussion becomes someone’s interpretation of someone else’s psyche, and when the resulting media circus becomes more important or prominent than the science we all (?) love, that’s an epic fail.
More interesting to me is: we always used to think coffee rust only reproduced asexually, because all we ever saw it do was throw off spores. However, new research shows that actually there is sexual reproduction going on inside the apparently asexual spores. I guess it makes sense for the fungus cells to make good use of the “alone time”.
The extra genetic recombination has been a major factor in coffee rust’s success. So if we can figure out a line of attack based on this research then that will make an awful lot of poor farmers very happy.
Public posts on Facebook are considered public knowledge, and it has recently been ruled by the ombudsman that the IRS are allowed to use info obtained that way to review taxpayers. (False flag and entrapment are still a no-no.)
Carlie @210 said:
Fascinating. I can *still* see it.
I posted this over on Jen’s blog, but I’ll post it here, too. I sent a message to Abbie, saying this:
Although now I’m wondering if I do share a friend with Ed, especially if some of you really can’t still see the wall post:
https://www.facebook.com/ed.clint/posts/2656140760136
Ing, it seems clear that ahs wasn’t advocating plagiarism as any sort of harm or revenge. He was talking about it in the case of political writers to spread their ideas when people have prejudices against them.
***
You’ve acknowledged that you don’t really know how big a narcissist McCreight is, and you haven’t really shown that narcissism has anything to do with her participation in this, so that’s really a pointless throwaway comment.
Which you’d have known if you’d read her post. :)
***
“on what planet is it a good idea to”
…say an established scientist in your field whom you’ve previously called a mentor is sniffing smelly snatch?
…host and participate in a misogynistic hatefest on your public blog?
…make false and dangerous claims about a subject on which you’re supposed to be knowledgeable, and fail to correct them when this is pointed out to you repeatedly?
I could go on.
@Corckscrew
well we’ve got another douchebag who’s above all the silliness. Fuck you, shit stain.
Hahahahhahahah! Only if ‘original poster’ is incredibly naive.
Which is why I was confused about the accusation of unprofessionalism. Ms. Smith has gone out of her way to insult and demean others she doesn’t agree with for months now and she’s going to accuse others of being unprofessional? WTF?!?!?!
NateHevens – I get a “you must log in to see that page” page when I try to click the link. When I go to Ed’s main page, it says I have to be friends with him to see anything.
Corkscrew:
That’s quite the melodramatic reading of “guys, don’t do that.”
No, that’s not what happened at all. If that was what happened, Abbie wouldn’t be purposely fueling her misogyny train as she has continued to do. It is rather obvious that Abbie is seriously enjoying all this attention and will say anything to keep it going at this point. That’s drama.
Carlie @218 said:
It must be open only to “friends of friends”. Like I said… it turns out that I do share one friend with Ed, so that must be why I can still see it… for now…
Perhaps Ed will see this and change the privacy setting again… though, if he knows anything about Facebook, he knows that even the strictest privacy settings are no guarantee that the stuff won’t be put out.
NateHevens:
I’m not on fb at all, and I get a login page for fb if I click the link.
I believe in the last incarnation of fb fucks with privacy, they decided that the default setting on everything would be “Friends of friends”, and that you’d have to go in and change it for every portion if you didn’t want it that way.
Oof… actually, I didn’t say here. I mentioned it over at Blaghag.
But yeah… I *do* share a friend with Ed.
Caine, Fleur du Mal:
I mean… yeah… you kinda have to be a member of Facebook… at least, for this one…
So why don’t you go off and fucking read a blog post that is about science. If you’re not interested in this conversation, I don’t see why you are partaking in it.
I’m not much interested in Nascar, that is why you won’t find me on a Nascar blog. I certainly won’t show up in a conversation that i was not invited to, simply to say that i am not interested in having said conversation.
Mmm.
I wasn’t advocating it for revenge because I don’t consider it a harm. Even if people don’t want it done to them, I think their objections are probably irrational.
I was offering an idea for circumventing the stress that comes with Abbie Smith. This is possibly unkind to Abbie? But I think she causes and experiences enough stress that everybody would be better off with something like that. It’s all unnecessarily hypothetical, though, since I don’t find the task worth my effort and probably no one else wants to do it.
By not thinking about it and thus not realizing it needs to be justified.
Crip Dyke would you mind if I removed the name of the person you’re referencing in #206 and generalized some of the argument for pharyngula.wikia.com? This means licensing: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
Mmm.
I’m not sure what you’re talking about. I was saying Ing’s suggestion that you’re saying something like “She’s done bad things, so we should do this bad thing to her” doesn’t make sense in light of the fact that you’re advocating it in cases in which there’s a bias against the source, to get their ideas out. It wasn’t a comment on the morality of your broader position or narrower positions on plagiarism, or on whether it does or doesn’t in fact harm the source in whatever circumstances. I was simply pointing out that Ing’s reading doesn’t make sense in light of your arguments. Your overriding interest is in the dissemination and fair evaluation of information. I admit that it was kind of shorthand.
She also does some sort of martial arts, spends time with her dog (and writes about dogs), and speaks at events.
Hmmm. I guess it depends on the purpose of the source material, and whether it had been made freely available or not. If I were working on a novel, and sent a portion of it to a friend who later published it under their own name, it would prevent me from incorporating it into further work , unless I took the effort of exposing the fraud—an inconvenience to say the least.
When I write something, I have a reason for doing so*, and could see how my writing repurposed and unacknowledged could be used toward some end that I hadn’t intended, to the detriment of my own goals. Objecting in such an instance is completely rational.
Maybe this is trivial in that it involves only cases in which my own work had not yet been attributed to me.
*Except apparently now.
Except that one’s actually true, given the safety calculations that go into setting speed limits.
Please note the phrase “even in a good cause” in my original post. I agree that men being assholes to women is a problem in our community (and various others). I agree that the extent of the problem is typically underestimated by other blokes for a variety of reasons ranging from cognitive biases to differential exposure to some fairly scary social conditioning. I agree that applying negative feedback (ranging from gentle correction to social ostracism) is an appropriate response.
What don’t I agree on?
Firstly, that the discussion/debate/flamewar should descend into citation-free chest-thumping. We know how to argue with idiots, remember? We do it all the time with creationists, anti-vaxxers, religious believers and assorted others. If someone says “the universe is only 6000 years old” you point out that, if that were the case, astronomers wouldn’t be able to see anything more than 6000 light-years away. If someone says “women are stupid”, point out that the world’s first computer programmer was a woman. Then give them a brief run-down of current thinking on sex-driven IQ variation (or apparent lack thereof). Then call them a shit-stain.
Secondly, that we should let this discussion take precedence over the science and the skepticism. To everyone who has said they’ll stop reading ERV over this: WTF are you smoking? The parts of ERV that discuss science are excellent, and are clearly delineated from the miscellaneous rants. I would carry on reading them if Abbie was a homophobic neo-Nazi Scientologist. If you stop reading them because you don’t like her style or grammar, fair enough. If you stop reading them because of her views on gender politics… who the hell do you think you’re punishing?
Thirdly, that any of this is anywhere near as interesting as the coffee rust thing. Seriously, they are using “computer-assisted DNA image cytometry” – this is a very cool technique for spotting patterns in the DNA expression of large groups of cells, which I’d never come across before. Apparently it also get used a lot in tumour research.
Erk.
Not true.
I don’t know if you’ve seen libertarian skeptics go off about communism.
Politics ain’t off-topic for skepticism anyway, so I’m not sure even libertarian scum should be held guilty for it.
Good for you for not having any principles. As others have said here, the science Abbie writes about is not solely her domain; the information is available from other sources. Sources that don’t also sustain a community of misogynists. Not reading her blog is an informed choice some of us make, and it’s our right to do so, not yours.
And now that I’ve established how you’re factually wrong, I can call you a shit-stain, right?
You’re a shit-stain.
Corkscrew @ #233
Good for you. Other people may have second thoughts about supporting a homophobic neo-Nazi Scientologist, and therefore choose to find information regarding ERV topics somewhere else. Last I checked, ERV wasn’t the only science blog online.
Now can you tell why your coffee rust thing is unwelcome in this discussion?
Corkscrew, go write a blog post about coffee rust. Again, no one is making you comment here and read this thread that doesn’t interest you. If you are in the mood for some science, go read some fucking science. When i want to read about social issues like the misogyny in our current culture, I don’t go to a post about science and complaint that they are not talking about what i want them to. I go find a thread that is about what i want to read about.
Well, a woman who keeps reading her might actually be punishing herself by doing so. Above and beyond the simple unpleasant sensation, see stereotype threat.
It might not be as big a deal for men.
@ ahs, #228 –
Please do exactly that. I’d be very happy to have a discussion of crazy-blaming on pharyngula.wiki
You’ve probably already considered this, but to be explicit, I like to keep credit where credit is due – for myself and for others. You’re probably more aware of traditions for crediting people. If it’s appropriate to cite people, feel free to do so. If it’s not tradition to cite people on there, then feel free to use my ideas without citing. The important thing is the discussion.
and, for the record, I appreciate you asking.
If it’s useful, what I said on blag hag is here:
https://proxy.freethought.online/blaghag/2011/11/a-bully-plain-and-simple/#comment-60148
take care…
–)->
I can still see it. It’s about 6 or 7 posts down, it’s a link to blaghag and the FTB logo. He probably set it to “Friends of Friends” – we have Ophelia and Greta Christina in common. But it’s not friends only, anyway.
I should elaborate. There might not be any stereotype threat for someone unfamiliar with Abbie Smith’s views (yay plagiarism) but a woman already familiar with her is likely to experience salience of gender, and stress surrounding that salience, while reading even her retrovirus writing.
Regarding the Facebook posts:
I am not friends with any of these people on Facebook, but I can see Ed’s wall and posts…or at least some of them. His obsession with Rebecca is rather repulsive.
I’m concerned this isn’t true, in the most important sense. For the past few years, I’ve seen her personal animosities and vendettas interfere with her reading and evaluation of arguments and evidence and capacity to correct her errors, including in science-related contexts. I don’t think there’s any intentional dishonesty, but I also don’t think I’d be able* to rely on her claims in contexts in which she’s hostile toward her interlocutor(s).
*(if I read her work, which I don’t)
The CC licenses require an author be attributed according to nym or name at their preference. The wiki thing is at minimum to write this into the page history. I figure Crip Dyke is your stable nym but anything is good.
Actually I was mostly thinking of the PepsiCo thing. IIRC, the argument there was between people who didn’t want a corporation having a blog, and people who didn’t give a monkey’s uncle as long as the blog contained actual science.
As far as I can recall from “ElevatorGate”, Abbie didn’t go all-in until after it had become a media circus. Happy to be corrected on this if I’ve misremembered – just cite the relevant blog-posts so I can get the chronology straight.
In law, if someone files suit against you, it is possible to file a response that says, not that they’re wrong, but that the entire premise of the discussion is flawed (for example because the venue is wrong).
That’s kinda where I’m going with this: I’m interested insofar as I’m deeply irritated by the premises of a fair number of comments on this thread. For example, #5, #6 and #14 are having great fun psychoanalysing someone without giving any reasons or data in support of their rather far-reaching conclusions.
Unless PZ has ruled otherwise recently without me noticing, this is supposed to be a skeptical blog. So I guess I was mostly protesting that the debate seemed to be becoming divorced from evidence.
To clarify: if you say “Abbie is mean”, I have no problem with that. If you say “Abbie has specific psychological issue xyz because posts abc and def match the diagnostic criteria described at reputable source pqr”, I have no problem with that. If you say “Abbie is clearly having a nervous breakdown” and leave it at that, you’re embarrassing at least one other member of the skeptical community.
Crip Dyke is fine.
Thanks for information on traditions, etc. I know wikipedia, but I didn’t know what would apply here. I figured you knew more about attribution than I did – and lo! And behold! I was correct.
Why is it that ” and lo! And behold!” is punctuated like that, anyway? King James thing? Hmph. Now the grammar nerd in me is going off on a tangent of a tangent of a tangent of a tangent (if I’ve counted correctly). Sheesh. Sometimes I wonder if there is a brain exchange program available somewhere.
Maybe post something in TET or somewhere when you finish? I’d like to look at what you did, out of curiosity.
–)->
I’d appreciate an example here, so I can confirm whether or not you’re correct. If so, I would probably need to stop reading ERV too. That’d be a shame, so I’d rather make the decision based on actual evidence.
okies nm
Sure, except that that’s not what this situation is like at all. The topic isn’t a lawsuit from one person to another, and this isn’t a courtroom. The original posts and the comments thereafter were not addressed to you, and you had no obligation to respond to them other than your apparently dire case of SIWOTI Syndrome.
The impression I’m left with is that ahs has no understanding of people, and the complex relationship we have with property and the pride of ownership.
I produce something original and worthy of notice (don’t laugh, it might happen) I’m going to be proud of it. I’ll want people to know who produced it, and getting some sort of remuneration for my work would be nice.
That’s the thing, my work. Somebody creates something it’s going to be the product of hard work, of gainful labor. Taking and claiming something that is the product of another’s hard work is tantamount to theft that is what plagiarism is, theft of another’s hard work.
The fact I write for free on the intarwebz does not mean I have no interest in what I produce. It’s still my work, and how it is received is still of interest to me. I write for free because I know I’m not a good enough writer to get paid, unless I find somebody who assesses my work highly enough to send me money.
Keeping this short, ahs’ goal is not workable, not unless people go through some serious changes, leading to an equally momentous change is society. No, you can’t have my writing, and I’m going to oppose your stealing the work of others.
Corkscrew (#233)
See #140. But if you don’t understand the concept of having principles, I don’t know what to tell you.
In case you’re not aware of this: it is possible to view only posts on a blog that are tagged as being related to a certain subject. On ERV, interesting topics are ervs and creationism. The rants tend to get filed under BLAG – if you avoid those posts you’re unlikely to come across anything that could be described as misognyist.
Let me know if you find any counterexamples.
Fair point, I’ll lay off the fungi. (Take that how you will.)
Well, I didn’t actually hypothesise about what I thought they were smoking… But you’re right that that was poorly worded.
Simpleton. You have no understanding of scientific or journalistic independence/credibility. This suggests that examples I offer below will be read similarly stupidly, but I’ll provide them anyway.
Do your own research. You can go to her first post on the subject.
1) Her various posts, including on this blog, about GMOs.
2) Quite recently, her claim about the HPV vaccine’s effectiveness. When I corrected her, I was mocked and her false claim remained uncorrected. This appears to be due to her hostility towards me, the potentially dangerous effects of her false claim be damned.
Her reading of the arguments of the opponents of a Pepsi blog at Sb and her responses were, quite simply, bizarre. More generally, I don’t know if I’ve ever seeen her reevaluate her position in response to criticism. She seems far more likely to, as someone put it recently, double down. This is not a quality that makes a scholar trustworthy, in my view.
Ha! That would suck. That includes a personal betrayal of trust though. I’m not sure it’s the plagiarism per se which is the wrong.
I’m going further off topic but Crip Dyke reminded me. The 3.0 versions of these licenses include a “recognition” of so-called moral rights. It’s a legal protection of what you emphasize here, a control against others distorting your message beyond some breadth of meaning. You like?
I agree. You have graceful intellectual aesthetics, by the way.
Regardless of where you write, it’s your work and you have the right to insist on your name being associated with it and to have people ask you for permission to reuse your work if they’re doing more than quoting a few lines or paragraphs.
If something is posted on the internets, that doesn’t make it any less your work.
Actually, SC, I think Abbie’s been pretty good about GMOs — GMO fear is drastically over the top and needs to be educated out of existence. The Pepsi thing, however, was an example of aggressively missing the point.
@ Circe -#18 who said:
Premise fail: “must have posted with the understanding that it is going to stay within their friend circles”.
I am a public figure in certain circles. This isn’t particularly by choice, tho’ I have chosen to give lectures & keynotes, etc., in my discipline. To the extent that I am a public figure, it is because people have indulged in speculation based on stereotypes that, despite my work, I am secretly in it to harm the movement (which movement I’ll decline to say).
Sigh. It’s sad that people indulge in this. But if I said, “Y’know, some people are indulging in conspiracy theories. Here’s the truth: …,” I’m self-centered. If I say, “Clearly we have a problem with supporting each other, because earlier today at this very conference, a group of people sitting in a circle in the lobby said, ‘X,’ ” then I am engaging in addressing actual, verifiable problems in the movement about which I care so much. It is not magically inappropriate to make that criticism just because the people sitting in a circle in the lobby were all friends and none of them knew that someone in the circle was also a friend of mine and/or disagreed that it’s a good idea to people doing work & research that is otherwise helpful b/c of some stigma that has nothing to do with either a) general honesty/credibility, or b) actual work/research in the movement.
In fact, the comparison works even better if they’d heard crap about me but didn’t know my face and *I* was in the circle. This is what was happening on facebook. Jen was in the circle, but now, Circe, you are saying it’s inappropriate to have our own circle in the lobby because while the first circle was open to anyone who wandered over and sat down, the second circle is not only open to anyone who wanders over to sit down, but they also **invited** people to wander over and sit down.
This just doesn’t cut it.
Ultimately, you’re saying that since you thought everyone present would agree with your sexist joke, you shouldn’t be called out on telling sexist jokes. (generic “you” there, not saying that you, Circe, tell sexist jokes.)
The problem with telling sexist jokes is not that it involves the intent to make a particular woman feel bad. Nor should the people involved be immune from criticism just because they didn’t actively intend to make Jen feel bad when they publicly called her a loser.
The other side of your criticism, “but your blog is much more popular than X’s FB page,” is similarly groundless. If it were true, then the more successful one is at making intelligent arguments that people like to read, the less you would have the right to speak out about things.
Bwuh?
I don’t know what this means.
***
I have the impression that you’re trying to make some transcultural, transhistorical (and therefore unsociological/unanthropological) argument about people that is invalid.
The original post wasn’t actually addressed to any of us, except insofar as it was published on a public blog and the comments left open. Same for most of the comments.
I freely admit that I have a terrible case of SIWOTI Syndrome. If I didn’t have that impulse, I’d probably be a Methodist.
I can understand why you might not want to quote her, comment on her posts, or otherwise give people the impression that you like her site. But unless someone is watching your web-browsing over your shoulder, just reading the site cannot possibly be taken as an endorsement. And as far as I’m aware (correct me if I’m wrong), the SciBlings don’t get paid for their blogging, so you’re not supporting her financially by visiting.
As such, I honestly can’t see how having principles => not reading interesting, scientifically informative, factually accurate information. Can you please explain this to me?
Oh, I have all that stuff myself. I just think it’s totally irrational and we’ll all be better off without it.
I’ll want people to know who produced it,
Right but if you show it to your friends and say “look what I made” they’re going to know and be happy for you. Who else do you really care about? BookTV? Okay, but even in a world of totally legal plagiarism, art geeks are going to have their methods of keeping track of who made what, because that’s part of the art geek scene. It’s just what they do.
Good luck to you. It’s piracy that’s going to hit your pocketbook if anything does, not plagiarism.
It’s something. We even have a word for it: plagiarism.
Theft ought to be understood as when the original disappears. That has its own specific problems.
I am rather trying to get society ready for what is happening anyway.
The thing is there’s effectively nothing you can do about it. It’s kind of awesome in that way, like one of those elitist old sci-fi stories where the technocrats win, and whoever opposes them loses. Fun stuff. Nothing much you or I could do about it if we wanted.
“okay, never mind”
You’re seriously not getting this. The blog post was about a specific topic and the comments are intended to be a discussion on that topic, not the fucking merits of having the discussion at all, which is not something you get to decide. Coming into the comment section to scold everyone about not talking about what you want to talk about is fucking rude.
She hasn’t been good about GMOs at all. By no means is every contrary argument is based on irrational fear, though she seems to make this silly assumption. You can read her comments here (the Sb site). EwanR – for his many faults – makes actual arguments* that respond to other people’s; he’s wrong and often desperately grasping, and his evaluations of evidence are often warped for specific reasons, but I don’t have the same sense of personal animosity interfering with his ability to argue scientific points. I wouldn’t trust his information on this specific subject, but I wouldn’t trust hers on any topic in which she exhibits personal animosities.
*You can read Jeff Harvey demolishing them over at Deltoid, and some of us doing so here. :)
Oh. Do you mean that you didn’t understand that which followed what you quoted, or that you did? That you quoted this sentence suggests the former, but I didn’t think my elaboration was all that unclear.
@ SC re PepsiCo
Well for a start I know that independence and credibility are two different things. That is why it’s OK for pharmaceutical researchers to publish papers on their own companies’ products, as long as they disclose the relationship. There is likely to be publication bias wrt their papers, even if they’re honest, but we’ll at least know to look for it.
Journalistic integrity can be somewhat different – there’s more of an emphasis on being seen to be independent. So I guess you could boil the argument down to those who saw ScienceBlogs as primarily a science site (in which case it didn’t matter who a blogger was as long as they were scientifically rigorous) and those who saw it as primarily a journalism site (in which case it did).
Actually I can’t research the ElevatorGate thing. For various boring reasons I’m currently stuck using a three-year-old browser, and it crashes every time I try to view the “Kyle’s mom” thread. :(
Thank you for the specific examples, very much appreciated. Regards GMOs, in the absence of contradiction I’m happy to take your word for it – will be careful when reading Abbie’s comments on them.
Regards HPV, the only comments I can find from her are very positive about the vaccine, which seems to accord with the mainstream scientific view on the subject. What am I missing here?
That one. :)
@Crip Dyke of 206
*Pulls porcupine needles out of my ass*
Point taken…
…as I said, I’ll be more careful about saying stuff like that in future. Like considering the evidence before I draw to that knee jerk conclusion. It was crass of me to do so otherwise. My apologies again to those I’ve offended. :(
Different is not the same as inseparable in this context.
There is a publication bias. It’s well established (see Ben Goldacre). There’s that pesky inseparability. In the absence of a genuine editorial separation between content and advertising, there’s no way to maintain site independence or credibility.
We don’t have to look for it. We assume it’s there. Reviewers and editors are supposed to correct for it, but for a number of reasons that doesn’t happen. It’s certainly not going to happen with a corporate-sponsored blog.
See my open letter, for example.
@utakata -#269:
I did see your follow up. I’m not outrageously pissed or anything. I hope you got that. (I also am not always outrageously pissed when someone drops a sexist insult – depends on the degree: I have a tolerance for a certain amount of sexism built up over time.) Individual insults aren’t the problem. It’s societal patterns that are the problem.
So, I just think that overall it’s harmful and I **am** going to say something about it if someone else hasn’t already. In this case, you & SallyStrange had already hashed it out, so I wouldn’t have said anything (and wasn’t trying to say anything about *you* in particular, or even your comment in particular) except that I wanted to make the point that the community as a whole treats such comments differently & I wanted to talk about whether we, as the Horde, wanted to change that.
I think it will take time. I think even the people who agree that phasers on stun is an appropriate response will want to give people a chance to adjust to a new normal before pulling the trigger. Once it’s clear that this is a community norm, then it can be enforced like one. I hope it becomes a community norm, but it isn’t yet.
Finally, thanks for your attention & willingness to consider your comments. Not everyone is able to gracefully remove a porcupine. Some have trouble acknowledging one is even there!
–)->
Same here. FWIW, I am not friends with anybody involved nor do we have any friends in common (I did double-check). Seems these FB posts can be viewed by anyone with a FB account.
okies nm :)
@ahs
I am wholly in favor of plagiarism. Plagiarism is an ethical net good for humanity. I would plagiarize anyone who I found worthy of plagiarizing.
What I’m trying to do here is normalize plagiarism in general…
Let me speak you as someone who has been plagiarised. Not in a deserving-of-major-publicity kind of way, but…a few years ago, I was reading some threads in an interesting forum, when I stumbled across someone quoting a few paragraphs that I recognised. They were marked as a quote, they were attributed to someone else, and I was extremely confused, because they were paragraphs that I had written myself for an analysis essay assignment about a year earlier, and had never used elsewhere. I contacted the person who wrote the post, said “where did you see that”, and then swung my Google-fu/emailing powers into question. I was not happy at what I found.
What I found was that my analysis essay had somehow (and to this day, I honestly don’t know how, since these places infuriate the hell out of me) ended up as an offering in one of those “essays for sale/give us £60 and we’ll do your homework for you” sites, and someone had bought it, submitted it as their own work, and was blogging it and taking credit for it.
Someone stole my work. They stole my work and sold it, making profit off my work. And they sold it to someone for the purposes of cheating and lying about work that they had not, in fact done; and they took credit for my work.
Let me put this in one syllable words again:
They stole from me.
That was my hard work, my property, someone else took it, made money off it, and someone else claimed that it was theirs all along.
Plagiarism is vile. And you are not just wrong in your “ethical” stance, you are deeply, offensively wrong. And you need to be stomped on hard.
I don’t like Abbie Smith either. But it is just as wrong and bad and creepy and detestable to steal her work as it would be to steal her car or break into her apartment and steal any of her other belongings. I don’t suppose you would be very happy if someone came along and took your things, especially if those things happened to include some piece of craftsmanship that you had spent time and effort creating.
So basically, No. And additionally, you’re an ass.
Corkscrew (#261)
I did explain it, in #140. Perhaps you could actually read it this time and, if you’re still confused, specify what part you think doesn’t make sense. Do try to keep in mind that principles aren’t things that magically stop counting when no one else is watching.
Just checking: does “sponsored” mean that money was changing hands, or just that Pepsi was going to give its employees a bit of free time to work on it? I’ve been searching but every source I’ve found just says “sponsored” and assumes everyone knows what that means.
If Pepsi were paying to run a blog then I’d agree that that is right off. But if they were effectively just encouraging their scientists to share the epistemological wealth, I would not see that as necessarily being any more problematic than PZ encouraging his students to blog. Of course, a lot would depend on the implementation.
Out of curiosity, did the Pepsi blog actually say anything you considered biased, or was your objection purely on principle?
Thanks!
OK, looking at this, I think you’re both right. FWIW I prefer your wording, at least on any site that could conceivably be stumbled across by laypeople. But I can understand how a virologist would not bother to suffix every use of “100% effective” with “against the targeted virus, and assuming they’re not yet exposed” when chatting with other scientifically-minded people.
It’s rare for vaccines to work post-exposure and practically unheard-of for them to work on viruses other than the targeted one, so you wouldn’t need to say that explicitly when talking to virology geeks.
Haha!
Sucks though. I’m sure I wouldn’t be happy if I was in your position.
ahs:
:)
No, that’s not possible. Abbie specifically said that there is no problem with page loading when there is an overly long thread, and set up the Kyle’s mom thread specifically to prove it, which she has since said that she did and that there are not any problems at all with that post and its loading. You must be simply wrong, and being mean to Abbie in the process, and you’re probably also a loser who should be doing something important rather than trying to load a page on the internet in the first place.
Oh, come on.
Again, I think people are missing ahs’ point. For him, this doesn’t have anything to do with like or dislike for the source.
It’s much more complicated than that. (And I say that as someone quite stupidly obsessed with “credit” for my ideas, despite the fact that I’ll have more in a few minutes. Unfortunately, I can’t write myself a Jeep….)
I suppose he’d be cool with that, digitally. He’s also saying it’s a fact, and there’s no turning back, even if people want to.
I did read it, twice. In particular, I noted your comment about “not wanting to support someone who facilitates social harm”.
As far as I’m aware, reading Abbie’s blog quietly and anonymously does not support her in any way, in terms of either money or reputation. It’s not a donation, it’s not an endorsement, and to the best of my knowledge it’s not tracked in any way that could boost her apparent popularity. This is why I was surprised you brought it up.
As I said, I can fully understand why you might want to e.g. avoid quoting from her blog. But I can see no connection between what you’re trying to achieve and what you’re proposing to do. What am I missing?
NateHevens: Just saw your comments. I wasn’t trying to be judgmental there, and I don’t think there was any need for any apology: I apologize if I came across that way.
However, I still do not see the point of some other people finding mostly technical faults such as “Newton is dead doesn’t get money if they reed his works” with my analogy. Here is an example which might be closer home: should I refuse to read Francis Collins’s papers because of his religious beliefs? or Darwin’s “The Origin of Species” on the grounds that he was a typical Victorian racist? I think not. I believe that scientific contributions (even those of an expository nature) should probably be treated on their own merits rather than those of the author. Of course, other people might think otherwise, and are welcome to do so.
Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist &c:
I agree with you mostly, but I think you miss my point. For example, suppose you wrote me an angry (but not threatening) email, and I exposed it to the public without your permission: I don’t think that would be considered par for the course. Look for example at PZ’s notice about mails he would publish with identifying information: he says he will do that only if they contain threats of violence; that is, (I hope) in general he would not. I always thought online communication was afforded the privacy, of being understood to be only for the intended recipients, even in the Facebook era.
Sili:
Thanks for the information about the legal status of the privacy of Facebook posts. But is the IRS allowed to look at people’s (e)mails in the course of an investigation?
@Carlie
Well, I’m also reading up on coffee rust. But I’m not supposed to talk about that.
@Corkscrew
Last I checked, it would in fact be a donation because the blogs are paid, I believe on the basis of page hits.
I don’t read ERV any more for the same reason that I don’t buy Orson Scott Card books any more. I don’t want money to flow in that direction.
@SC
Of course it happens. That doesn’t mean it is right or should be supported or even endorsed through apathy. Given that this also applies to racism and sexism, I should think you would understand that this is a crap excuse….
Corkscrew:
You’re ignorant, then.
Abbie gets paid by SB based on page-views (support) and similarly acquires ranking (internet reputation).
OK, in that case A. Noyd’s comment makes sense. I couldn’t see any mention of money->bloggers on the ScienceBlogs website (I did at least try to check). I assume PZ has mentioned it or something?
Thanks for the info.
You’re joking, right? “Encouraging their scientists [“their scientists”! Oops!] to share the epistemological wealth” is master corpspeak, though. Congratulations. And *puke*.
No. We are not both right. You’re not getting it. It’s not a question of exposure. The vaccine relates to two of many HPV strains, and those cause about 70% of cervical cancers. The strains that cause the remaining 30% are not prevented – even under the best of circumstances and expectations – by the vaccine. The vaccine is under no expectations or conditions virtually 100% effective against cervical cancer. She was factually, dangerously wrong in claiming that the vaccine is (virtually) 100% effective against cervical cancer.
Are you going to acknowledge this?
@Corkscrew
I don’t think that it is explicitly mentioned on any info page, but many of us became aware of it when there was a period where the SB bloggers weren’t getting paid the money they were owed by the Seed management, and a number of them made posts about it.
@Circe -282:
I got what you meant, but intent is not magic.
If I intend to e-mail something to just you & instead e-mail it to everyone in my address book, it’s simply no longer a private deal, even if I **intended** to make it private between us.
Thus with FB. They may have entirely forgotten that they were posting for the whole world to see, but they nonetheless did post for the whole world to see. At that point, we don’t have a private discussion being made public by others, we have our private thoughts being made public by our own carelessness.
Now that the thoughts have been made public by our carelessness, is the rest of the world bound by our intent that even we, ourselves, did not consider important enough to make sure was carried through?
Is it possible that they weren’t really trying to be private about hating on Jen? Is it possible that if others had posted on their own FB walls that they agreed and added that Jen is a credulous, shiftless traitor to science that they would have been concerned not at all? If so, then they intended to have a public discussion…they just didn’t intend for anyone to criticize them for it.
At that point, you’re talking about not an intent to be private, but an intent not to be held accountable.
So…I’m saying I totally agree with you about the e-mail (or, rather, I mostly agree with you about the e-mail: although I think it’s polite to not make such comments & identifying info public, when you write a letter to someone you have no control over the number of people with whom that person shares the content. If you aren’t okay with the content being shared, best not send it… your recipient is polite not to publicize things, but they aren’t required not to).
However, and this is important, posting something on your blog isn’t the same thing as sending a private e-mail. And a facebook wall is, frankly, more public than a blog because of the way it pushes content at others: it is not statically waiting for people to come choose to read it. The content announces itself. The fact that BlagHag or Pharyngula doesn’t make it “more public”. That would be like saying something published in the Washington Post is more public than something published in the Washington Times. One may be more well read, but they are equally “public”.
Does that bridge us the rest of the way? Or do you still disagree with something?
@Corkscrew
Also, just so this is clear, PepsiCorp bought the blog on SB with a payment to Seed, and I believe that their scientists were instructed to contribute to this blog. This isn’t really the same thing as the scientists going out and joyfully sharing their expertise on their own time, which is what the rest of the scientists blogging on SB did.
She wasn’t discussing it with virology geeks. They were, for the most, layfolks much like myself (probably a little better educated. I’s gots no college) In fact, several of the people who defended her seemed to think her statement was 100% accurate and needed zero qualifiers.
Personally I never read ERV before this and I do not plan to read ERV now (for the same reasons I don’t plan to visit InMalaFide) but if I see a link to an interesting piece about HIV I wouldn’t be above looking it over. I’m told she’s a good science communicator and I’m always looking for more information to help combat AIDS denialism.
[I’m going to preface this with another caveat: I’m not really commenting about any specific examples of or general arguments about copying.]
I agree that “it happens” is no moral justification, and would never argue that. I don’t think that’s what’s going on here. I think the argument is about how technological changes are contributing to the breakdown of an immoral social order in a way that makes it hard to resist (maybe the morning after pill is a similar technology?). I remember having a discussion with ahs about this post…
I don’t at all think (and ahs doesn’t either, it appears) that because the system/culture are rotten that this excuses any “poaching” in any form. Far from it. But I’m trying to work out my thoughts on this.
Corkscrew (#281)
Page views. Thread activity. Ad revenue. Yes, SciBlogs is/was supposed to be paying its bloggers, but even if it doesn’t, someone’s still getting that money, and how much they get probably affects which blogs they give a platform to. It’s not just money; it’s that being visited by lots of people generally makes bloggers feel good about what they do (like box office sales figures make actors feel good, etc.), and I don’t want to help Abbie feel good.
For one, a brain that can wrap itself around the concept of principles. For another, the fact that I’m talking about supporting or not supporting individual people, and that individual people cannot be broken down into who they are when addressing one topic and who they are when addressing another topic. And the realization that no one is anonymous to herself, for yet another. (See my last sentence in #140 if you don’t know what I’m talking about.)
Posts on the Internet live forever. Departments want to hire new colleagues that won’t make their lives a living hell. Put the two of those together, and I see a tough job search coming up.
No. We are not both right. You’re not getting it.
I want to be clear about what I was getting at: People are wrong all the time. I don’t remember the specific comment she was responding to when she made the false and dangerous claim, and it may well have been stupid andor ignorant. But, first, she made her claim hyperbolically and without fact-checking; and, second, she did not correct even a dangerously false claim in her field of alleged extpertise because someone she doesn’t like pointed out the error.
It’s not that the claim was false. It’s that its hyperbolic and entrenched falseness resulted from characteristics that don’t, to me, make a scholar trustworthy.
Circe @282 said:
Understood. Water under the bridge. :)
I know next to nothing about Francis Collins outside of BioLogos, but I am not at all a fan of BioLogos, mainly because I believe it is a failed cause.
This is a particularly pernicious myth and I’d be quite happy to see it stamped out. It’s well-known that “race” in the biological context refers to species, and it did back then, as well. Darwin was an advocate for the then-rather-unpopular view that there was only one human species, Homo Sapiens Sapiens, and that the color of a person’s skin does not have a biological construct. Darwin was an abolitionist, and vehemently against ill-treatment of native peoples.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Darwin#endnote_Fnone
So do you think that we could forgive, say, Ken Ham’s beliefs if he were to, by some miracle, generate a scientific paper that was actually good? I wouldn’t. Not even a little bit.
I have absolutely no knowledge of Abbie’s scientific output outside of her blog, but I can’t justify going to her blog anymore because she is paid by the click, and I simply don’t want to add to her wallet anymore. It’s that simple.
I’m certainly saying that I’d be irrational to get worked up about it.
It’s only just been a little while that humans could even imagine this issue. As manufactured controversies go, it’s one of the older ones, but still.
+++++
Do his religious beliefs decrease your quality of life? If the answer was yes (I doubt it in this case), then that would be an argument for avoiding him.
Why do you want to read the Origin? It’s a historical book. What you can learn from it today is relatively limited compared with the 1800s. If you want biology you would prefer Almost Like a Whale or any other of numerous modern bio books. If you want history of biology, then you may want these primary sources. Or you may want secondary sources; there’s other ways of picking it up.
It seems like you’re suggesting something is necessarily being lost by avoiding this book. In reality, there’s only a very limited set of circumstances when there’s a loss. Say, if you’re trying to write a paper on the early history of discussion of evolution. Then you’d better read Origin.
I’m never going to read the book because I have other shit to do which is more interesting to me, like watching C-SPAN. If someone else prefers to read Your Inner Fish instead of Origin, because Darwin was a man of the 19th century, or they don’t like his beard, then I don’t see how they’re missing out on anything.
ahs, #262
You really don’t understand people do you?
Honestly I think I understand more kinds of people than most do.
Stop with the “people” bullshit, already.
@ahs
I’m certainly saying that I’d be irrational to get worked up about it.
Plagiarism is taking someone else’s work without attribution.
It does not allow for a proper understanding of background, as others have pointed out.
It allows other people to profit from the work, without the original author/artisan being recompensed.
It allows other people to lie and claim that the work is their own, when it isn’t.
None of this is an “ethical good.”
And there have been several thousand pages and blog posts by authors, both professional and amateur, about the difference between “Creative Commons licencing”, and “anonymization”, and “plagiarism.” I will say that from what you have written, you are clearly either not familiar with any of it, or it has slid off of you like water off a totally frictionless surface.
Either way, deeming it “irrational” to get too worked up about this has nasty uncomfortable echoes of guys telling women it is “irrational” to get so worked up about [some issue of sexism that they have never experienced].
Honestly I think I understand more kinds of people than most do.
That kind of overconfidence stands in the way of ever learning what it is that you clearly don’t understand at the moment.
Says the guy who thought liberals made up the sexual allegations against Herman Cain because they secretly want him to be President because he’s black (yes, you read that correctly; follow the link).
@SC
When ahs makes statements like I don’t see anything despicable about any of that. I’m very much in favor of plagiarism as an ethical good, and the other objections seem minor to me. or I am wholly in favor of plagiarism. Plagiarism is an ethical net good for humanity. I would plagiarize anyone who I found worthy of plagiarizing. What I’m trying to do here is normalize plagiarism in general or The best plagiarism is when a work can be efficiently redistributed under the profit motive in an area or among a demographic where it was not otherwise being distributed. and that I consider [this] more worthwhile than any individual’s personal credit.
…then it is very difficult to see how he is doing anything other than advocating the theft of other people’s work, and thinks it is perfectly ok for the people who were not involved in any way in that work to profit from the theft. Gosh, gee, as long as other people get to read it, what does it matter if the work is disseminated without permission, without correct attribution, and without recompense to the author???
That is Not. Fucking. OK.
@Sallystrange
I can accept I may have read it wrong, except where they said that they weren’t interested in any way of doing so that wasn’t cruel to Abby.
@Ahs
I’ve gotten as bad or worse before. If I misread your argument I’ll apologize for that but it still seems incredibly unethical.
Hm. I think it’s very difficult to see theft, akin (leaving all else aside) to physical theft in this circumstance. I think it boils down to complex questions about art and “ownership” and legacies and culture and so on…
That was I. :)
No it wasn’t.
I wouldn’t say that. She’s basically the antimatter version of the “OH MAH GARWRDS TEH FOODS SI UNNACHURAL!” dumbfucks – she correctly recognizes them as dumbfucks but responds in a pretty much mindlessly pro-corporate fashion (like with the Pepsi thing) that whitewashes over the non-irrational concerns about testing, health effects of unexpected protein expression, price abuse, and invasive/abusive intellectual property issues.
NateHevens:
Yes, I relaize that (and I agree I wasn’t right in calling him a “typical” Victorian racist). But anyone who refers to Europeans only as “civilized” and other ethnicities (such as mine) as “savages” would be considered racist by today’s standards. Surely, however, Darwin was much more liberal (and correct) about this issue than most of his contemporaries.
On the other hand, I seem to have failed to put my point about “merit of the contribution rather than the author”. Sure, we can’t forgive Ken Ham for all teh harm he has done to education. But if he does produce an article on a scientific matter, I hope that the article is judged on the merits of the article, rather than on the merits of Ken Ham. That is why many fields in science have double-blind reviewing: to ensure that it is the contribution and not the author that is being judged.
Oh sorry. To everyone involved.
FFS.
Just admit it. It’s ok to fuck her over because she’s a horrible person.
@SC
I have a post caught in moderation due to number of links. Hopefully it will appear by tomorrow. If you don’t see how plagiarism is theft, then you need to find out more about the real issues of it. The links are places to start.
You know, page ad reveneues and traffic statistics WERE mentioned upthread…
…if you’re really pignorant enough to be unfamiliar with those concepts on y our own…
[OT]
Luna_the_cat:
No.
It’s presenting someone else’s work as being your own work.
Specifically, presenting someone else’s work without attribution is plagiarism IFF you claim it as your own, else it’s merely unattributed dissemination.
Interesting point. Is there a meaningful distinction.
Ing, I’m at a loss to respond to you.
ahs isn’t arguing this. It has nothing to do with her personally. He was trying to develop a solution for people who want information (assuming hers is solid) but are appalled by her other behavior.
I’m a writer and artist and also a political theorist. I don’t think anyone should be fucked over. These are complicated issues concerning the ethics of art and the legacy of capitalism.
Hmm… This calls for some art… :)
@John Morales
“Scraper” sites used to get big business by lifting pieces (especially journalism) from other people’s blogs and websites, and publishing it in collected form — without any attribution at all. With the standard caveat IANAL, this was still regarded as a form of plagiarism.
I think that taking someone else’s work and claiming it as your own is probably worse, but even if you consider it nothing more than “unattributed dissemination” it still strips the authors of rights and credits regarding their work.
Already-available technical solution for the problem you experienced: put all your writing on publicly indexed webpages, then if some TA tries to sell your writing, it’ll be of less or no value, already available to those various teachers’ products which aid in determining plagiarism.
I understand all these things fairly well, particularly in that order.
CC licensing has nothing to do with what I said earlier in the thread. Legally I have to ask someone about that before I put their words up on wikia. It is no more relevant than if I had said aside to someone, “do you mind if I sleep on your couch while you’re gone?”
I’m pretty sure this part can often be an ethical good, like outright stealing can be, but more readily. And when it’s not clearly good I don’t think it’s very bad. If it was very hurtful I don’t think so many tons of people would be volunteering for it. People tend to volunteer for minor annoyances at worst.
Yeah, but, big deal really. It’s already possible with software to determine when someone is plagiarizing, and I don’t think the worlds’ art scenes are going to be often fooled. This technical ability is only become to become more available. I’d be surprised if there isn’t already a phone app, tbh.
The lie will live in back alley bookstores.
Anonymous and lots of pseudonymous writing has this feature already. This part is really not something that can fully addressed, although there is also now software that can indicate authorship of anonymous works.
Some things are irrational, though.
I would regard it a problem if a woman’s writing was presented without indication that it was a woman’s. If we want a less sexist world, that’s something we should rationally get worked up about.
Plagiarism per se? Nah.
It takes tremendous overconfidence on your or mm’s part to claim that I don’t understand “people”. It’s silly. I do. I understand the things that people are saying and why they are saying them. I disagree with many of these things.
you_monster: have a nice day.
yeah, kind of a drag for the terminally ironic.
SC:
I guess.
*shrug*
Should I be sorry?
And I suggested compiling any citations she had from blog posts would be a more ethical way of doing so and AHS said he wasn’t interested in any way that didn’t harm Abby.
@SC
Just to pick up on one salient point:
I think it’s very difficult to see theft, akin (leaving all else aside) to physical theft in this circumstance.
If you are depriving me of the credit I would otherwise receive for having created something, are you not taking something away from me? Something that I would otherwise have?
Is the credit for having been the one to do a certain piece of work valueless, in your eyes? Considering how such credit often plays into future opportunities being offered, it is very hard for me to see it as valueless.
Ing
Your desensitization is of course not what I asked about. I asked whether it would be fair to treat you that way.
We might be talking about different things. To the extent that we’re not, we might agree. To some extent.
(By the way, I dealt with academic plagiarism for several years as a graduate assistant, instructor, and professor. I doubt you’re going to educate me about the important issues, and ahs has clarified his position above.)
And for all your confidence in your arguments, ahs,
…this part can often be an ethical good, like outright stealing can be, but more readily. And when it’s not clearly good I don’t think it’s very bad. If it was very hurtful I don’t think so many tons of people would be volunteering for it. People tend to volunteer for minor annoyances at worst.
— that is one of the most stupid fucking arguments I have ever heard.
And, your whole thing seems to boil down to “well, I don’t get bothered and I don’t see why other people should get bothered, and I don’t think it’s any big deal, so therefore it isn’t a big deal.” Considering just how often the various pages here have dealt with exactly that attitude regarding sexism or anti-science sentiment, I would have hoped that you might pick up on the fact that “I don’t see it, therefore it isn’t” is not an answer to the fact that actually, it is a demonstrably real thing which affects real people in real ways, even if not you, and your opinion does not automatically trump all that.
[meta + sarcasm]
Echo-chamber, this is.
@ahs,
Just to follow this up with a thought which occured to me the moment I hit “submit” —
Yes, there ARE people who are fine with their content being disseminated anonymously or, more rarely, claimed by other people. And as long as they volunteered for it or are ok with that, I’m not about to tell them they can’t. Your argument skirts dangerously close to “since it doesn’t bother those people it shouldn’t bother you” — the parallels here:
“It doesn’t bother other people to get propositioned in the street, it shouldn’t bother you.”
or even
“You had sex before, how can you claim it was rape this time.”
Just because other people volunteer for something, does not mean that it is ok to take it from everyone and anyone whenever, whatever.
Hah. Wow.
This could only be a massive misunderstanding. Surely you would not intentionally attempt such a level of distortion in the very same thread where the statement was made.
1) I don’t want to help in the way I’m saying. As I’ve repeatedly indicated, even setting up an automated system that sorts by tag would be more of my effort than I find it to be worth. I would only clap for someone who does.
2a) I don’t accept the premise that what I’m talking about is “hurting” someone.
2b) If I’m wrong about 2a, then I’m pretty sure it’s a very minor hurt, and I just CBF.
+++++
If you need another hint, I’ve bolded the incongruence between your statements. Start there.
For mastering the passive-aggressive *shrug*?
Or has Abbie out-pa-*shrug*ged you?
@SC
I freely admit I don’t know that much about your background. I can only go by what I see here, which is people saying “actually, it isn’t that bad (or it is perfectly ok) if people take what you have written and use it without attribution, credit, consent or payment.”
You haven’t offered me any justification for that, and nothing that I’ve seen ahs say has “clarified” it to mean anything other than that, as far as I can tell.
Ok wow. Yes misread then. But come on that was a vague response.
Really? That last comparison is one you feel comfortable making? Seriously?
Well, this being the second time in 3 days I’ve been accused of passive-aggressiveness, I guess I’ll just go ahead and cop to it.
Other complaints?
(actually I picked up the ‘*shrug*’ from a guy who used to post at Panda’s Thumb and over at AtBC; I think he’s dead now–
Sir ToIchthyic remembers him for sure–Rev. Lenny Flack? Or something like that?)@AHS
I read you wrong but I don’t think my reading was an unreasonable one, so communication broke down there, and I apologize for attacking you for a stance you didn’t have.
I still think you’re grotesquely wrong about plagiarism, but that’s different from what I was arguing which was the idea that it’s ok to plagiarize against her because she’s so awful.
@SC
“Other people give it, maybe you have given it yourself in the past, so if it is taken from you without your consent now you have no reason to complain about it.”
Is rape worse? Absolutely. Out of the ballpark worse. Do you understand the concept I am trying to convey using the metaphor, at all?
“Glad to be of service” is all I can say, if you aren’t even going to explain why.
Actually, no, this is not a serious reading of what I’ve said. Try working with these statements:
“Oh, I have all that stuff myself. I just think it’s totally irrational and we’ll all be better off without it.”
“Sucks though. I’m sure I wouldn’t be happy if I was in your position.”
No, it doesn’t. What I’m in fact saying is that many tons of people don’t generally enthusiastically volunteer for something that is worse than a minor annoyance. The rare hardcore political volunteers usually go for no more than medium annoyances. Therefore it is probable that the worst we’re talking about here is subjecting people to minor annoyances. And sometimes, not even that much is justified! What annoyances are justified and when is a matter of considerable dispute.
There are radical propertarian arguments available for you to rely on against many of these justifications, if you’re so inclined.
I agree. It’s got nothing to do with anything I said, but I agree.
You haven’t offered any justification against that. There are (debatable) concrete ones – given current realities – but that doesn’t seem to be your issue. [This is, again, a strange position for me. My ideas aren’t settled. But I’m not convinced by some of the arguments that are.]
@ahs, Dude,
You are advocating plagiarism as a norm, including the plagiarism of unwilling people.
It’s got nothing to do with anything I said
How the hell not? You are advocating taking credit and the results of intellectual effort away from people who did not consent to giving it to you.
Ing
Well that’s cool, but by the time I made that statement at #177, I was already requesting an apology for the degree to which you attacked me for something else:
If for the sake of argument we accept the premise that I’m suggesting something just plain vindictive to Abbie, I think bologna-on-the-car is more appropriate a comparison than “inciting rape threats.”
Lenny Flank. I hadn’t heard anything about him being dead.
He was also kind of an asshole.
No, that’s all for today. And more an observation than a complaint.
:)
***
Not me.
Jumping fucking green jesus on a lilypad.
SC, the issues with it have been highlighted in numerous posts above. Stripping people of credit for their work. Profiting off other people’s work. Lack of background and context. The simple fact that people who go to the work of creating something deserve to have some say over how it is used. The fact that other people can lie and claim credit for something that they have not, themselves, done.
That’s all fucking unimportant? Not justification against plagiarism?
And yes, ahs’s justification, aside from “information should be freeeeee“, does seem to boil down to “it doesn’t bother me and other people do it, so what is your problem”, and if you can’t see the problem with that then it seems you are for some reason dead set against seeing the very obvious parallels with the whole elevatorgate bullshit in the first place.
It’s so late that it’s early here, and I’m sadly beginning to think you are all idiots.
@SC in #341, I was responding to your “Really? That last comparison is one you feel comfortable making? Seriously? in #332. WTF is “Not me” supposed to mean?
yes but
not because other people volunteer for such.
I’d say it was the lesser of many evils if everybody was all up in arms against this and there were no volunteers.
The volunteering stuff is just a method of measurement: we can infer the general degree of harm for anything by how many people volunteer for it, or (if it’s considerably harmful) how much payment people demand for it in a labor-scarce economy.
I would be much more hesitant about telling people they have to put up with something almost nobody wants to volunteer for.
Some of these comparisons are silly in other ways too. Women have always objected to rape. Other apes object to rape. Rape is plausibly considered intrinsically illegal, if you accept any arguments for intrinsic illegality (the other typical intrinsic crime being murder). But plagiarism is not something medieval humans would have understood your complaints about. By constrast, they sure did understand theft.
Luna_the_cat:
Were you supposed to be quoting me @ #335?
[meta]
Luna_the_cat:
Datum: you’re referring to Mollies, here.
(Something to consider, perhaps when it’s not so late where you are)
@ahs
When there are plenty of women defending being propositioned in the street as a “compliment”, does that mean, then, that there’s no real harm since plenty of people volunteer for it?
Also, last I checked, literacy was not widespread in medieval times. There were very few written works, and yes, morals regarding their use were different. So because taking someone else’s words wasn’t regarded as bad then, we shouldn’t regard it as bad now?
Badger and bear-baiting weren’t regarded as bad then either, and there are plenty of cultures who don’t even regard them as bad now. So I guess they aren’t bad either, huh?
And finally, I refer you to my post at #322. If you are taking credit for my work away from me, credit that I would have if my work were only disseminated under my own name, how are you not taking something from me?
“Radical propertarianism.” Wow, that is serious post-modernist bullshit. Gosh, I want credit for my own work! How terribly radical and priggish of me!!
At this point your statement becomes a lie.
Try working with these statements:
“Oh, I have all that stuff myself. I just think it’s totally irrational and we’ll all be better off without it.”
“Sucks though. I’m sure I wouldn’t be happy if I was in your position.”
@John Morales
I really don’t care what people have written in the past, if what they are writing at the moment is stupid and wrong.
A commenting aware is not a get-out-of-jail-free card.
That that – in quotation marks – wasn’t a quote from me.
It also didn’t characterize any argument I’d made.
@ahs
It comes across as completely trivialising the issue, and “oh, I don’t think it should bother you.” (“totally irrational”)
If that is not what you mean to convey, then perhaps you should look again at how you are conveying it.
@SC
No, I wasn’t purporting to quote you. I’m sorry if that is how it came across. I was paraphrasing me in that set of quotes.
In such cases I can argue how these women are factually wrong about their perception of individual or social harm. I doubt that similar arguments are possible against what I’m saying.
As your example suggests, it’s not a wholly reliable measurement. There are times when it’s grossly miscalibrated. Patriarchy contributes a tremendous amount of miscalibration to people’s harm detection sensors, especially their long-range sensors.
Not what I said either. By the by, is that a rhetorical shotgun you have there? It seems to have a distressingly strong recoil.
No, the fact that medieval people wouldn’t recognize the complaint means it’s not an intrinsically illegal act, like rape, therefore the comparison to rape is an unwarranted stretch. How did you miss that part?
I’m tempted to stop here until you can at least handle this last point clearly.
I’m dizzyingly confused.
Well, it is totally irrational, and I don’t think it should bother you. Or me.
Although I explicitly acknowledge it probably would.
This is of course very different from your previous claims:
I thought it was a misunderstanding the first time. Now it just looks irresponsible of you.
@SC
I think we have a simple miscommunication there, down to my poor phrasing.
In #327, I said
“You had sex before, how can you claim it was rape this time.”
Just because other people volunteer for something, does not mean that it is ok to take it from everyone and anyone whenever, whatever.
In #332, you quoted that and said Really? That last comparison is one you feel comfortable making? Seriously?
In #335, the bit that I put in quotes, “Other people give it, maybe you have given it yourself in the past, so if it is taken from you without your consent now you have no reason to complain about it.” — that was where it went wrong, as I should have made clear at this point, I was NOT quoting you — I was rephrasing my own statement of “You had sex before, how could you claim it was rape this time.”
I see now why it was confusing. But I was merely trying to ask you, do you understand this metaphor.
[meta + internet drama + pedantry]
Azkyroth:
You assign zero significance to it?
—
Luna_the_cat:
You stated you were beginning to think they were all idiots, not that they were writing idiotic comments. These are different claims.
(Apparently I found a contrary temptation.)
I don’t know. It’s an ambiguous word, taking. I’m not terribly concerned if it applies.
What I said was there are radical propertarian arguments you can rely on which will help you assert that no annoyances are justified regarding property broadly construed.
I sincerely doubt you’d hold to such arguments in other cases, though they’re available if you need them. But I should warn you I am skilled at debating against libertarianism.
What a day! John, I’m happy for you, and maybe a little envious.
@ahs
All I can understand from you is that you DON’T regard depriving people of credit for their work as theft, and you think that people being upset over their work being taken without attribution, permission, or recompense is “wildly irrational.” Oh yes, and not particularly harmful and “not intrinsically illegal”, and you are making the judgement that people shouldn’t be bothered by it. And you actually defended this on the grounds that not every culture regarded it as illegal, and (you claim) “many” people volunteer for it.
Again, if that isn’t what you mean to convey, then why don’t you try restating your position more plainly.
I have also posed you a number of questions above, and you have not responded directly to any of them. I will ask you one again, please stop wrapping yourself in your mantle of enlightened superiority long enough to address it:
How is depriving someone of credit for their work not taking something from that person, especially since credit for one’s work has value?
You really do seem to equating this with sexual assault. I find that disturbing. Probably best to have this discussion without those comparisons.
@ahs
It’s an ambiguous word, taking. I’m not terribly concerned if it applies.
Ah, so you’re a fuckwit who handwaves away concerns and won’t answer questions directly.
Done here.
@SC
I’m sorry that metaphor disturbs you. Can you please try to deal with the content of the argument:
The fact that other people have volunteered to give something does not mean that there is any justification for taking without permission.
You haven’t addressed that anywhere that I can see.
Yeah fuck it. I will check back later. If I’m lucky, at this point I might get a whole three hours sleep before I have to get up in the morning.
I think that’s right. I think theft is probably best reserved for cases where the original disappears.
Attribution and permission, wildly irrational.
Recompense, a core economic concern, not irrational. But! As I said before, it’s piracy that’ll pick the pocket if anything will, not plagiarism. If somebody is selling your work on the black market, you’re shit out of luck whether your name is on it or not.
Er, not by “not intrinsically illegal”. You clearly misunderstood my meaning there. Perhaps a third time?
It’s silly to compare plagiarism to rape because rape is easily argued to be intrinsically illegal, while plagiarism is not. Thus people can reasonably disagree about whether plagiarism is something which people ought to be expected to put up with, while people cannot reasonably disagree about something which is intrinsically illegal.
Again, no. What I said was we can generally measure the harm of something by how many people volunteer for it, or what payment they demand, in a labor-scarce economy.
Again, this indicates to me that what we’re talking about is probably a minor inconvenience at worst.
Again, “And sometimes, not even that much [minor annoyance] is justified! What annoyances are justified and when is a matter of considerable dispute.
There are radical propertarian arguments available for you to rely on against many of these justifications, if you’re so inclined.”
I guess I didn’t notice. Too concerned about being understood about what I’ve said so far, before I’m eager to put anything else out there for misunderstanding.
G’night, Luna.
What is wrong with you?
The argument is about a science blog that is allegedly useful [debatable] and its reproduction for those who value the content but despise the source. You’re comparing this to rape. Stop and think about this.
Sure, it might, in this specific context. Don’t try to extend it in your incredibly perverse way. Really. Don’t.
Anyway, if I don’t get another chance:
I’ve always* respected you, Luna. It’s nice to get to spar with you.
*internet time. probably a couple years
people confuse self with property all the time; capitalist culture indeed.
anyway, I’m really surprised at the massive inability to comprehend the concepts ahs and SC are talking about; are people really that convinced that intellectual property is some sort of natural universal human right that’s instinctively felt by all people, comparable to the concept of bodily integrity?
intellectual property is a very young and even today not universally accepted concept; and in the internet era, it’s also becoming a severely antiquated model (and I say that as someone who earns money by with creative work, and as such is stuck with earning a living through this antiquated and inadequate intellectual property model of compensation for creative work)
intellectual provenance is a concept separate from intellectual property; the latter is often important in assessing reliability. That however means that a well-cited but anonymous piece of popular writing is more reliable than an attributed but citation-free piece of writing. Hence the difference between a non-attributed blog-post and plagiarizing in academia.
delurking, re ahs:
How is this not merely a circular definition of “intrinsically illegal” ?
I don’t think that metric is very useful, because it’s oversimplified. People generally volunteer on a cost-benefit analysis including intangibles and personal values, not just the lack of significant harm; see for instance the entire Occupy movement, or parenting.
As far as plagiarism is concerned, I think you’re dismissing the value of reputation, particularly in an information-based social economy, or whatever the proper term is.
Did I say that?
Here’s my poem:
he’s making the difference between a basic human right and a cultural norm. property, intellectual or otherwise, is a cultural norm; bodily integrity is a basic human right.
I’m not going to venture to guess why he’s explaining it the way he does; I’ve got some vague idea. But anyway, for purposes of this conversation, the difference between cultural norm and basic human right should suffice as an explanation.
Not just the presence or lack of significant harm, no, but that factor is present and does impose limits on what people are more often willing to do.
We might exempt parenting from the analysis since we know of major genetic biases influencing that, being the “vehicles for selfish genes” that we are.
I wouldn’t dismiss the whole suggestion that reputation has value.
I might be unclear. It’s not my invention. Google will have definitions.
Yeah, me neither. For whatever reason, it’s what sprang to mind when I needed some handle for a concept in that vicinity.
Azkyroth @372, if it’s not insignificant, it must be significant; if it’s significant, it is not irrelevant; if it’s not irrelevant, it must be meritorious (shall I go on? :) ).
You characterising a datum offered for consideration as a putative “get-out-of-jail-free card” was implicitly a claim that said datum was not of significance (in that it could not be the difference between “being jailed” and “being pardoned”, to use your own allegorical idiom), and your current evasion is tantamount to a concession.
for what it’s worth, it hasn’t so far. Searching for “intrinsically illegal” just gives me a list of miscellaneous legal quotes, and there doesn’t appear to be a searchable definition. Can you define it or give a quick source for how you’re using it? (I didn’t want to get bogged down in this, just to figure out what you’re getting at.)
You’re equivocating between having been given a Molly being “significant” in a general sense (which I would agree it is), and it being significant in the context of whether a person’s current statements could justly be described as stupid, which is facially absurd. I had somehow thought you were smarter than that.
Or, to put it another way, the fact that a Molly award is “significant” in a general sense does not mean that having received one is a defense against criticism of one’s statements.
…I mean, no shit…
No, I’m pretty sure you know perfectly well what I meant and are just trying to fuck with me.
Someone get this man a porcupine.
Aw, well, shit. As I’ve read it used in theory of jurisprudence, it refers to basic, ancient and ubiquitous crimes which people everywhere demand the legal handling of, thus prompting the formation of legal systems wherever they do not exist (in prehistory as well as upon modern breakdowns of existing systems). There is ubiquitous demand for legal handling of murder, for example, such that ad hoc jurisprudence will arise as needed to handle it; thus murder can be said to be intrinsically illegal.
What it means in my argument is that reasonable people are not expected to disagree about the general legality of murder, or rape. It is to be expected that you can rhetorically shake someone while yelling “it’s perfectly obvious that that’s wrong”. People have not agreed about plagiarism since before speciation, so it’s not something one can insist is obviously wrong like rape.
[OT]
Azkyroth @1:10 am:
Apparently, you missed my comment from yesterday @11:33 pm, where I noted that my comment was a response to the claim that they were being stupid, not that their statements were stupid — just as you misapprehended my original claim.
The conceit that a number of Molly recipients have all become stupid people in a short period of time is a rather unlikely one, facially. :)
(That they are all making stupid claims simultaneously, not-so-much so, but still unlikely)
—
* You mean prima facie, I know — but I did find that funny.
I’ve been resisting jumping in, but now I must:
Someone orders a Salad a la Crip Dyke. The large/deluxe version of the salad of the same name includes not merely a larger size, but a few extras, including a scattering of crushed peanuts. Assume that the person in question orders the regular version, but a few crushed peanuts were added before the person realized this was not Deluxe Crip Dyke, but merely a regular (obviously still a highly desirable commodity, however). A server brings the salad out & says, “We know you ordered a regular, but a few crushed peanuts were added anyway – not as many as if it had really been the deluxe version, but some nonetheless. Would you volunteer to eat this, or should we make you a new salad that has not touched crushed peanuts?”
Now say this happens quite a number of times over the years that Cafe Crip Dyke operates. More than 99% of people volunteer to eat the modified salad. In fact, many are even happy about getting a little something extra. So CCD stops asking people their opinion when this occurs. About a year after this change in policy, someone up & dies from anaphylactic shock due to peanut allergy & CCD is sued.
CCD goes to court and argues that they are willing to pay the estate of the person 3 times the cost of the salad, but anything more than that is ridiculous. The reason? We have data here, and it conclusively shows that most people don’t object to this behavior. In fact, most people volunteer to eat the modified salad, and people wouldn’t volunteer for something that caused major harm! They would only volunteer for something that causes very mild harm. Therefore, we have evidence that the person who died of anaphylactic shock was only harmed “very mildly” by our peanut-adding. Very mild harm is not the sort of harm for which we would pay out thousands and thousands of dollars, much less, as plaintiffs ask, 1.7 million. We also ask for sanctions on the plaintiffs for engaging in abusive litigation given that the harm was so self-evidently mild.
……
ahs: are you down with this? Do you take CCD’s side in court? Do you really believe that the dead patron suffered only “mild harm” because so many other people volunteered to “suffer” the same harm, i.e. eating unasked-for peanuts?
Many Persons in Question (PiQs) may be willing to suffer plagiarism of their ideas. A PiQ may even smile if the PiQ hears something the PiQ’s own words on the news coming out of the mouth of a spokesperson who is a friend of a friend. Then there’s the writer who makes a living writing & lecturing, but not much of one. Any notoriety that person can manage makes a material difference to economic security, access to health care, & other important issues. Such a PiQ can be harmed tremendously by plagiarism and would never volunteer for it.
Your argument is, in part, “As evidenced by the fact that many people wouldn’t mind, I assert that plagiarism causes no or minimal harm. Given that it causes no or minimal harm, it should not be forbidden.” (Unless I misunderstand your argument.)
But the truth is that even if many people would willingly allow themselves to be plagiarized, that doesn’t prove that plagiarism causes little harm. It proves that plagiarism’s harm is **unevenly distributed through a society**. Given that free distribution of ideas ultimately does have positive effects for a society, and that the human condition normally includes a minimal amount of narcissism that triggers positively when others find our words/ideas important enough to investigate (as evidence, it feels good to be asked about our own work/ theories/ ideas/ or even day), much less quote. So most people get a petty gain and suffer a petty loss. In fact, for most people who have no way of translating ideas into money and don’t have lives that depend on the ability to do this, the petty loss is actually significantly more petty than the petty gain – a cool story, an ego boost, and the admittedly difficult-to-measure benefits of a society that advances with free information.
Given this, it’s not at all surprising that so many would volunteer. However it doesn’t prove that the total harm is petty. What if society was going to gain by banning Okra? Say that a mutation of the okra plant created a rare variety that was lethal to humans. Say further that this mutant plant produces seeds that easily desiccate and are blown on the wind into nearby crops. Some of these crops were canned. We pass a law that creates special forces teams with high tech scanners to enter people’s houses & scan through tin to determine if anyone has lethal cans of food. Because of the stakes, a life sentence in prison is given to those who don’t allow the teams into their homes. Many people would be willing to vote for the law, even tho’ the chances that someone in their own home would die would be extremely low (low benefit) because they’d have very low cost. But severe agoraphobes and immuno-compromised folk who have no canned food don’t want to have to let the troops in and suffer whatever harm might occur, nor do they want to go to prison. They argue the law is unethical.
Is the law unethical? How is this different from your arguments around plagiarism?
Do you see how uneven costs are not the same as “low” costs? Do you understand that proof that an action’s costs are uneven is not proof that an action is actually likely to be ethical?
@John Morales #382:
Facially is not necessarily inappropriate in this case, and may even make more sense than “prima facie”. If you aren’t familiar with how “facial” and “facially” and “on its face” are used in legal reasoning, see:
http://books.google.com/books?id=35dZpfMmxqsC&pg=PA345&lpg=PA345&dq=legal+dictionary+%22facially%22&source=bl&ots=k9qVVzp9Fc&sig=L55dBIMWSOY96lFNXHoWlf_8krM&hl=en&ei=bLjETtnVOcngiALa9fDKBQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=10&ved=0CGgQ6AEwCQ#v=onepage&q&f=false
sorry for the hideously long link.
[slowly and with very clear enunciation]…or, by extension, the impression drawn from the “integral,” so to speak, of immediately accessible comments observed to be consistently stupid.[/explaining things to petulant child] And no, I don’t posit that having received an award in the past should override that immediate impression. Why should it? That’d be somewhat like arguing that Sandusky couldn’t have abused children because he founded a charity that helped children. Even if imperfections in the analogy can be weaseled out.
Also, Google the phrase “facial challenge.”
Since I know you aren’t REALLY that obtuse, that’s a big “yes” to the “just fucking with” interpretation. I’m not going to bother with you further on this thread.
we can now add crip dike to the list of people who don’t know that there’s a qualitative difference between property and body
it really disturbs me that people keep using analogies involving harm to a body, which is objectively real, in a conversation about harm to property, which is normative and constructed reality
Azkyroth:
Only somewhat less-so, right? ;)
Heh.
Because people are independent entities, and therefore the odds of multiple people becoming stupid are multiplied accordingly (as independent events).
(Unless you think the award is granted to stupid people)
No, it would be like noting that multiple people accused of abusing children have a history of combating child abuse.
—
Basically, you interpreted a datum as an argument, in fact as a supposedly compelling one, and responded accordingly. I’ve tried to allude to the fact that this is not the case, but obviously allusion is insufficient, in your case.
—
Crip Dyke, your link leads to a rather uninformative book review.
What I do know is that the term refers to ‘pertaining to the face’, and I further suspect if such terminology is routinely employed in legal reasoning, it derives from the Latin term I mentioned (meaning ‘at first glance; on the face of it).
@ahs
ahs, I have a question. I’ve been trying to follow your argument and so far I’m a bit lost on one bit. As I understand it, you’re advocating a kind of edited version of Abbie’s blog where the scientific wheat would be culled from the misogybag chaff, so to speak. I get that and don’t really have a huge problem with it. What I’m still trying to get is would Abbie still be attributed as the original author of her own blog posts on this edited version or not?
If I missed where you addressed the issue of attribution, sorry. It’s been a long and messy argument.
in fact, i’d say that an accurate comparison would be if we replaced the peanuts with bacon bits, and the customer didn’t die but rather was an observing Jew/Muslim
if i understand him correctly, it would not be attributed, because her reputation alone at this point is likely to trigger stereotype threat
[meta]
Jadehawk, FYI: ahs’s relevant comment:
(Note he boldly considers it’s stealing, but also note I dispute that it constitutes plagiarism, since he doesn’t mention giving credit for it to others. ‘Pirating’ would, I think, be a more appropriate term)
@390
Reposting the work of someone that a lot of readers have been trying to avoid seems dishonest. Wouldn’t it be more useful, and more honest to the readers, to be up front about this? The edited version could have a disclaimer, like:
She still gets attribution; the offending content is removed; the readers can make an informed choice on which blog to read, or whether to read it at all. That disclaimer is just an example, of course, but it might help reduce stereotype threat; as far as my understanding, just explaining the existence of stereotype threat can reduce its effects.
Luna_the_cat #313:
If you want those links to appear, you’ll have to post them again, just fewer links at a time. (I think the limit is six, but it may be less.)
ahs:
What makes you think lots of people volunteer to be plagiarized? This is a very strange claim to me, so a citation or two would definitely be helpful.
I can imagine in certain specific contexts, some want others to use their work without attribution, but these would be specific forms of plagiarism in specific cases, obviously in which those involved are consenting to it. If someone isn’t willing to do that or isn’t even in that kind of situation, then the fact that others would consent doesn’t seem to be of any relevance to me. These people are in different situations, so the effect of plagiarism isn’t comparable between them as you do so casually. Crip Dyke already explained it very well above, so I don’t feel like I need to elaborate.
I don’t think it’s so easy to disentangle these. If someone has removed attribution to the author and assumed a work for oneself, they can profit from the material at the expense of the author. Sure, the author can also try to sell the work under his or her own name, but there is a finite demand in any market for a given product, so any sales to the plagiarist do not go to the author as they would’ve without the plagiarism. Also, by not gaining that additional recognition in a particular field or for a particular form of work, an author’s future sales or career could be jeopardized to that extent as well. It’s not easy to measure, I’ll grant you that; but you can’t very well claim it’s “irrational” to value that, or that it isn’t a real economic concern for many people.
@JadeHawk #386:
So it’s long, but there are two versions in there and, yes, “harm” in each is physical harm.
The point, as was stressed over and over, is that the harm is distributed unevenly. I did not compare the type of harm I compared the **distribution** of harm through a society.
If you like, you can take the same examples & say that the restaurant customer could only be saved by a medicine that cost US$7 million. Fortunately, the customer was next door to a pharmacy, which provided the med on credit. The suit is now to cover purely economic damages since the med was taken in time to prevent real harm from anaphylactic shock.
Happy?
Your bacon bits thing could also work, but better if it was a Hindu-observant person: the cleansing ritual for Hindus cannot be done anywhere: certain sects require the washing to be performed in the Ganges, which is a much bigger deal than what an observant Jew might go through.
The second example can similarly be modified. In this case, merely consider the agoraphobes only and not the immuno-compromised.
But I find your objection rather silly and almost deliberately misleading, given that the question at the end was the following:
Do you see how uneven costs are not the same as “low” costs? Do you understand that proof that an action’s costs are uneven is not proof that an action is actually likely to be ethical?
Nowhere do I try to imply that physical harm is analogous to non-physical harm.
What I argue is that non-harm is not analogous to unevenly distributed harm.
I do this because the argument was the fact that “most people” wouldn’t object to being plagiarized was taken as proof that any harm done must, at most, be minor. Since death is the most major harm I can imagine, the example proves that rare harm is not the same as minor harm.
I would think that the reason for using death in the anecdote was obvious. Is it possible that you are trolling or deliberately obtuse? Where in what I said did I write anything that argued physical harm and copyright violation are directly comparable? What concepts were expressed that could only be expressed by someone “who do[es]n’t know that there’s a qualitative difference between property and body”?
Perhaps you should back off that statement a bit.
@John: I checked the link. it opens GoogleBooks to a specific page of a legal dictionary that begins the F section and has , “Face, on its,” “Face,” and “Facial” entries, the last having “Facially” subsumed. If you don’t accidentally change the page of the dictionary through scrolling, I don’t see why it wouldn’t work for you. Did you perhaps look at another part of the page?
@JadeHawk: A dike is an earthen dam, not a person.
No, I haven’t slept, but whatever, I have to get up and go to work now anyway.
@SC
What.?
No, SC. That is not actually the argument. This is your misunderstanding, but it is one that I am NOT gong to take responsibility for; this is the result of you ignoring what is being written (except for the part you were morally outraged by) and not following what is going on.
I point you again to posts #127, “it’s approximately erasing an entire person and pretending that the information sprang from the head of Zeus” and “I don’t see anything despicable about any of that. I’m very much in favor of plagiarism as an ethical good, and the other objections seem minor to me.”
or #143, “This does not *ahem* give me proper credit for my ethical stance: I am wholly in favor of plagiarism. Plagiarism is an ethical net good for humanity. I would plagiarize anyone who I found worthy of plagiarizing.
What I’m trying to do here is normalize plagiarism in general…”
or #148, “The best plagiarism is when a work can be efficiently redistributed under the profit motive in an area or among a demographic where it was not otherwise being distributed.” [emphasis here mine]
The argument is not simply that ahs wants to strip bits of Abbie Smith’s work of her identity; from reading what he has actually written, he wants to make plagiarism in general, as a phenomenon, a social norm because he doesn’t think it’s right for people to get so het up about property and he doesn’t deem it theft because after all you still have the content of the work too.
In an information-based economy, where people’s work is their value and where reputation is currency, he deems attribution “irrelevant”, ignores/handwaves away material loss from other people claiming credit to your work, and dismisses people getting upset about it as “wildly irrational.”
THIS is what you are defending. Gosh, I guess you’ll be fine then if I take stuff from your blog and pass it off as my own. You seem to be saying that ahs has a point, after all, and it’s not like you have a huge market in the NE of Scotland anyway.
To paraphrase, What is wrong with you?
Now, fine. I shouldn’t have used the rape metaphor. Everyone seems to get hung up on the idea that I am comparing violation of property to violation of bodily integrity. I’m sorry. I apologise. I have rephrased it for you. The whole point I was trying to make about “taking without permission shouldn’t bother you, other people give it” seems to be getting lost.
Could
you
please
deal
with
the
CONTENT
of
this
argument.
All you are doing is ignoring everything but this one metaphor, and it’s like I haven’t written anything else. If you don’t want to deal with the arguments presented and you aren’t going to read anything else of what I’ve written, could you do me a favour and let me know now so that I can stop wasting my time, please?
But I am incredibly disappointed. I expected better of you, I honestly did.
you can’t compare socially constructed harm with objectively existing harm, no matter what your point is; because the latter can only be avoided/minimized by avoiding those things that cause the harm, the former can be similarly avoided/minimized, or it can be deconstructed so that the perception of harm disappears from a culture, rendering the actions harmless.
not comparable.
P.S.: I apologize for misspelling your handle
and it hasn’t occurred to you that the problem is with the way creative work is remunerated, not with artificially trying to turn it into a rivalrous and excludable good?
that’s because that’s not a point actually made by ahs. who cares what you have against a strawman/misinterpretation?
@ahs
I said this to SC, too: in an information-based economy, where your work is your value and reputation is currency, you have deemed attribution “irrelevant.” It is apparently, according to you, not something that it is “rational” for someone to get upset about, if their work is not credited to them — even if it means that they don’t get further opportunities because no-one knows that a given work is theirs, or worse, thinks that the work belongs to someone else who has cheated and lied about it being theirs.
And you will simply ignore the fact of lost opportunities through lack of knowledge of who the author is; apparently, according to you, only selling work without license (i.e. piracy) costs. But in one of your posts above (#148) you seem to be defending even that, by saying that it’s just fine if other people take your work based on a profit motive.
Well isn’t that just special of you.
Newsflash, genius: You don’t get to make that determination.
And with you sitting around going “well, I don’t think it is rational to get upset about this, after all it doesn’t hurt anyone that much”, when you are demonstrably bad at gauging that hurt and are handwaving away other people’s objections, then yes, you have definitely put yourself in the position of the guy telling women that they are irrational to be upset about catcalling and propositions in the street. After all, it is only a minor inconvenience, they aren’t physically hurt by it (no, obviously, it isn’t an attack on bodily integrity), it isn’t some obvious, “natural” crime like rape.
I say again: Well isn’t that just special of you.
I have no idea where we might have crossed paths before or what I have done that makes you “admire” me, but it would be awfully nice if you weren’t being so engaged in what appears to be a smug dismissiveness and responded directly to justify your statements, as opposed to arguing over, say, what “is” is. So far, nothing you have said here makes me think you have engaged much with the real world and trying to make a living.
[OT + meta]
Crip Dyke, nope, I don’t see any content on looking again (all scriprting and hosts enabled).
However, a little follow-up brings up Garner’s Dictionary of Legal Usage (By Bryan A. Garner) wherein it states that “The adverb facially is almost as common as the adjective facial. Though it might appear to mean “in a facial manner”, facially means “on its face”.”
So I grant that it’s usage of which I was unaware (jargon, evidently), but it’s irrelevant to other than my sniggering, since it was that very interpretation that I addressed above.
@Jadehawk
If I am trying (for example) to get a job as a science communication journalist or liaison officer, and I bring in a portfolio of my work, and the interviewer says “I’ve seen this before, but it wasn’t attributed to you” and I am then in a position of having to prove that it IS my own work, or I never even get the interview in the first place because I don’t have the visibility because I am an “unkown” because I have not gotten the credit for my work…
Yes, that harms me.
And that is not something that “making creativity less rivalrous” will fix.
And, yes, finally, ahs is advocating taking people’s work when they do not give permission for that.
Get the fuck over it.
luna, stop. you have missed and misunderstood every single point ahs has made, and thus nothing you write is actually relevant as a response to his statements; which means that it’s not very likely anyone is going to engage your arguments against these misunderstandings
creativity doesn’t need to be made rivalrous; in the digital age, most of it already is non-rivalrious, by its very nature.
seriously, stop. now you’re also arguing against misunderstandings and tangents of what I’m saying, never actually addressing any of the relevant points. that means that nothing you say is going to be responded to as you’d like, because the people you’re responding to will simply continue to try to make you understand what they’re saying. well, i won’t. i have deadlines.
FFS, that doesn’t mean it causes no real harm to people right now; which, if I’m not mistaken, is what this is about.
@John Morales
Harking back some messages ago: There is also a difference between “I’m beginning to think you’re all idiots” and “you are all idiots”…since you want to be pedantic about it. After all, I am only making a statement about my estimation, not their genuine intelligence levels. Since you want to be pedantic about phrasing.
When people are disingenuously (apparently) repeating what seem to be blatantly wrong and stupid things, though, one’s estimation of them does drop, despite any admiration of them in the past. Plus, I freely admit to being tired and cranky.
[OT]
Luna_the_cat:
But the conditional proposal which occasioned this discussion (the source of which I reposted @391) was to re-post ERV’s output without attribution; existing net infrastructure will easily indicate upon examination what its source was (unless it’s furthermore deliberately munged, which was not part of the proposal).
(IOW, attribution is not overt, but not unfindable, either — and you’re therefore arguing a problem that is not implicit in the proposal)
@Jadehawk
Then why don’t you or ahs please tell me what part of the quotes that I have provided from ahs’s own posts do not mean what they seem to mean. Why don’t you pretend that I am stupid, and explain this clearly, what ahs means that I have so evidently missed.
AGAIN, John:
ahs is not proposing this just for ERV.
He has made the blanket statement:
“I am all in favor of plagiarism.” Plagiarism is good. He wants to see it become more normalised, while we ditch our archaic notions of “theft” and “property.” I provided the fucking quotes.
So tell me how my objections are irrelevant.
@ John:
Sorry it doesn’t work for you. Don’t know why. Glad you found another law dictionary.
yes, it’s jargon, and yes it has specific meaning that is different from prima facie, and no, I didn’t intend for my critique of that mistake on your part to affect anything else. You don’t have to defend the other bits from me. I didn’t attempt to contest them (which doesn’t mean I agree or disagree, just that there’s no reason to be defensive or point out that critiquing that mistake means more than it means: I don’t dismiss a page because a clause contains a typo; I don’t dismiss a person because a thought was proved incorrect.)
I would just like to take this opportunity to point out two very dubious assertions that ahs’s argument is based on, as well:
1. That “many people volunteer” to be plagiarised. I would like to join with consciousness razor in asking for some citations. Evidence, please.
2. The idea that only bodily harm is universally recognised as criminal, and not cheating. Actually, I think that it has been demonstrated that even chimps punish cheaters. And when someone takes somebody else’s work to profit from, that is cheating. I would argue that even medieval artists would recognise that.
Now, I have to go. Back later.
@JadeHawk #397 –
Then it’s a good thing that I didn’t compare them. It makes as much sense for you to be hung up on that as it does for you to say that peanuts are not now, nor ever will be, intellectual property, and that it is impossible to compare things with physical existence to things without physical existence.
yes. Peanuts are physical. Poems are not.
yes. Death is a physical harm. Plagiarism is not.
Again: I have been very clear that what was being compared was the distribution of harm, not the type of harm. Why are you still even attempting to argue that I was comparing the type of harm?
You do get it that I wasn’t saying that peanuts are intellectual property, don’t you? Then why is it so hard to understand that I wasn’t saying that death-by-mutant-invisible-flying-okra-seeds-invading-canned-food isn’t a socially-constructed, intellectual-property crime?
ack:
Then why is it so hard to understand that I wasn’t saying that death-by-mutant-invisible-flying-okra-seeds-invading-canned-food **IS** a socially-constructed, intellectual-property crime?
FTFM – sorry about the accidental negative.
Luna,
I can’t dispute you, though your quote is imprecise (but not misleading).
They’re not irrelevant in a general sense, but you’re taking him at his word that the specific proposal which was intended to be defended by his blanket statement constituted plagiarism; I dispute that it does and I think he (and others) are misusing the term.
Plagiarism
—
Crip Dyke, :)
No worries.
As someone who works in a university, and has to mark assignments, the idea of plagiarism being ‘normalised’ makes me very sad and tired.
Yes, yes someone said that in universities we can use our own rules. But the problem is that if you ‘normalise’ plagiarism, then it’s going to be that much harder to get students to correctly attribute the content of their work.
Certainly in Australia taking someone’s work without attribution is illegal under the copyright act (moral rights – The right of attribution).
Also, the Middleman doesn’t approve. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anIjZ3zst5k
Sorry, should have provided link for Australian copyright/moral rights bit. http://www.ag.gov.au/www/agd/agd.nsf/Page/Copyright_IssuesandReviews_Moralrights
We get them automatically in Australia but I understand that in other places they have to be asserted.
I think that one aspect bad of plagiarism in the digital and for free internet aera is completely overlooked:
People might stop producing the free content.
Hardly anybody does anything really for the sake of philantropy. Most people do it to get some kind of compensation, which does not have to be in the form of money. Recognition, reputation are forms of compensation.
People who sell hand-knitted scarves get paid for their work. Some people will knit you a scarf for free. They donate their work. They might do so because you’re a wonderful model who might get them many more customers for paid scarves.
They might do so because they simply like knitting and find joy in your joy, find joy in being recognized as a talented knitter.
That is their compemsation.
If you take the gift, but when being asked about where you got it tell people “you don’t know”, remove the label they added to it, or even tell people that you yourself made it, you’re pretty sure to have received the last gift from that person.
Now you might argue that the knitter is irrational and that they shouldn’t bother, other people are OK with that, but the simple fact is:
You want something from them for free. The person who passes off the writing, the tutorial, the pictures, the music without attribution or even as their own won’t produce any original content.
If you want the person who produces the original content to keep doing so you have to play by their rules.
Giliell,
That’s too obvious to be overlooked (and why do you assume it’s free content? One can plagiarise non-free content too!).
Also, as noted above, it’s pretty easy to establish prior claim to content, merely by publishing it.
—
PS Anyone wanting to plagiarise my comments, feel free. :)
John Morales
That is, obviously, true.
But the discussion started with Abbie Smith’s writings on her blog, which are free. And the fact that lots of people are ok with having their stuff copied for free.
If it’s too obvious to be overlooked, why has nobody mentioned it so far? Why were only the positive aspects of plagiarizing mentioned?
So, Abbie Smith has something people want, which is information on ERVs. She’s willing to share that, provided people come to her blog and read it there. To my knowledge, she hasn’t made any statement like you just made and said “feel free to copy and distribute as you see fit, I only want to spread the knowledge”. There’s probably even something on her page that says the oposite. I’m not going there to look for it. I won’t give her trafic. I don’t want to support her.
If I want information on ERVs I’m going to look elsewhere.
To be honst, this “it’s digital and therefore not stealing” puzzles me.
Nobody would assume it OK if somebody booked two hours of learning Spanish with me and then left without paying or only paying me 1/10. But if I spend two hours typing up a lesson and then put it behind a paywall, lots of people would assume it OK to circumvent the paywall or just pay once and then share it with 10 friends.
That doesn’t mean I support ridiculous copyright restrictions. If John Doe wants to write an 8th Harry Potter novel und his name he should be free to do so.
I’m still trying to understand. From what I can see reading everything up to now, the only benefit for widespread attribution removal is to allow people to read things they’d otherwise be pre-biased against due to the authorship. But people who worry about others being bigoted against them already use pen names, and has anything ever been said by someone so perfectly that people can’t find the same information and ideas elsewhere? I guess I see this as solving a problem that has mostly been solved in other ways, and something that could do real harm to people on top of it. There are a lot of people whose entire economic output is their own ideas; if that gets freely used, they lose their ability to make a living.
Except that Harry Potter is an Intellectual Property and IP is one of those things that is vital to producing a universe. If any damn fool could take IP then any damn fool can destroy IP.
IP is one of the main reasons some things are excellent… I mean a simple example is Mass Effect…
Both 1 and 2 are excellent games. Judging by the pedigree and the fact they know what they want to do with the plot, so will 3. Three will be exceptionally good too.
If someone came in and made Mass Effect 3 before the actual company with the vision, then the entire franchise and the effort put into creating such a world could be destroyed in one single stroke. Likewise, Harry Potter’s world is for the most part a well thought out world. But if you had people tinkering in it then you would have a terrible world filled with Mary Sue writing and Terrible Plot and everything that makes bad writing bad. This kills IP. This actually spoils the drive to make an excellent world.
Sure you can do something like GW whose IP is so large that even crappy stories theoretically could happen. That there are indeed instances where a single guardsman holds off a dozen chaos space marines (It would be like a human child holding off a dozen rangers). Bad fluff doesn’t harm it, but good ones build on it but it only works because the IP is ludicrous enough to let it happen. It’s a world where genetically modified humans in super armour punch sentient fungi… This is not a world where carefully thought out logic prevails…
However the best example is Twilight… Would you really ever trust Stephanie Myers with a franchise such as Buffy? It would kill it faster than you can say Arrested Development.
In Short, I think IP and protection of IP is a good thing. Making a profit off someone else’s invention should only be allowed with the IP owner’s consent. This can be bad (Eg. a company can buy an IP and sit on it for years) or good (The owner of an IP can give permission to ensure the IP stays alive. Eg. the Wheel of Time series)
*shrug*
Only of course that it isn’t. And that’s coming from somebody who loves HP
Well, that is already out there. There are probably more pages of bad HP fan-fiction than there are pages of HP books.
That’s why I’m focussing on the importance of attribution.
I want JK Rowling’s Harry Potter. You want Mass Effect 3 by *insert company name here*. If I buy HP by John Doe and you buy Mass Effect 3 by Johnny’s Garage Emporium, we both know we don’t buy the “real thing”.
That’s why Hollywood bothers to tell me what movied a director/actor/costume designer has worked on before: I can make a decission based on their good name, their previous work.
WTF happened here?
Okay… do me a favor. Don’t plagiarize her posts for me, okay?
Is that good enough? Is this over, now?
I was hoping for suggestions for another blog/source for good, layman ERV info. They exist… right?
Jumpin’ Jeebus on a pogo stick.
This entire discussion about plagiarizing/reusing content without permission is ridiculous. It’s illegal. End of story.
Cookssource. Look up the fucking scandal that erupted when a magazine republished a recipe THAT WAS POSTED ONLINE without requesting the author’s permission. They even told the author that she should be HAPPY they republished her recipe because it gave her more exposure than she’d have gotten on her own.
It became a fucking meme.
And for everyone’s reference:
If you come across a web site that’s plagiarized content from another site, you CAN get them into legal trouble.
Sorry, meant to include the link for:
‘How to Deal With Content Thieves’
I second Luna on this one, ahs. I’ve been trying to figure out what the hell your point was, then I googled radical propertarianism. Ah! I’m guessing you advocate the position that the only thing that belongs to you is your own body?
Jadehawk:
Why not? Doesn’t something that I created belong to me? One could argue that my creations are an extension of me and thus protecting my creations is a basic human right.
The ability to mass-produce someone’s work is a fairly new concept; does it mean that it’s right to do so? Advocating plagiarism as a ‘low-harm’ activity seems to be an extension of ‘it’s only the internets, why u mad?’ in referring to cyberspace bullying.
It’s awesome being a centrist as opposed to a radial propertarian vs. anarcho-communist.
I think this is the crux of the problem. People want to transform the system and culture into a different one, and to make information more widely available. But we shouldn’t forget about the people who’ll be harmed in the transition or affected by the free or unattributed dissemination of their work. The old system won’t survive the changing technology, but we can try to promote ways of doing things that don’t hurt people.
This discussion seems to have gone off the rails in part because the word “plagiarism” has connotations of claiming authorship, especially in an academic context, but the examples ahs is talking about aren’t really related to that. In fact, claiming authorship is contrary to notions of a shared intellectual commons.
Do you believe everyone throughout human history and in every culture thinks like this? Do you think it’s necessarily a good thing for people to think of intellectual and artistic creation in this way?
I don’t know that every single culture throughout history has thought like this, but I would hazard a guess that most of them do/did. Even the Bushmen highlighted in “The Gods Must Be Crazy” had personal property, and shared small kill only with their immediate family. OTOH, has every single culture considered bodily autonomy to be a basic human right? Is that how we determine universal human rights?
Why yes, yes I do.
You guess wrong.
First, I assume you’re aware that that’s a fiction film. Second, contrary to your suggestion with the “even the Bushmen” wording, that some societies have a concept of personal property is not a valid basis for generalizations. Third, I didn’t ask about personal property in general but specifically about considering artistic and intellectual products in this manner.
You show a remarkable lack of facility for overcoming your ethnocentrism. You might want to think about the accuracy of your claim in light of the fact that people create in societies that educate them, provide artistic and intellectual traditions and knowledge bases, and offer them the tools and technologies to work. You might also want to think about the effects on the advance of scientific knowledge of this propertarian mentality.
Oh, man, PZ melted down and tried to ban someone for calling him on his and his sycophants’ bullshit, sniping at the commenter in a public display of petty, malicious, and false accusations, ironically enough in a discussion about a person who was falsely charged and put to death for a crime he didn’t commit.
:snort:
No and in the current climate yes though not absolutely.
No shit
It’s a very strange claim that I did not make. See:
I said lots of people volunteer to allow others to profit from their work without being compensated. In addition to a dozen well known licenses more typically used for computer code, this is true of art-centric ones like those CC licenses without the NC clause, as well as the GFDL.
The conversation has gotten so twisted that I’ve been finding it more worth my time to simply take credit for the misconstruals, and defend things I did not say, rather than trying to correct the same person over and over. You’re new, so I’m trying again.
+++++
There are a lot of interesting objections now. I don’t know if I have the energy to answer all of them. If I have any good sense, I’ll limit myself to correcting misreadings which require only a couple sentences to right, ignoring more complex misreadings and well-read objections.
No. That’s a stupid conclusion, ildi. It does not speak well of you.
(With opponents like these, how am I supposed to put down my enlightened superiority? ;)
SC:
Indeed. I know I do, but I’m tempted to ask, “Do you believe everyone throughout human history and in every culture thinks like this?”
Next I should probably ask: does that matter? I get that you’re trying to get people to think outside the box, but I mean does it matter ethically? As you note, there is still the box to contend with.
Right, that’s my biggest concern. I’m still curious as to what ahs has in mind, when he claims many people volunteer to be plagiarized. I don’t understand why that would be relevant anyway, but I’m curious.
That sounds like a pretty strong prediction. I don’t think everything about “the old system” won’t survive; and if that were the goal, I’m not sure I’d support it. As I said, I do want to encourage ways of distributing some information which don’t unnecessarily restrict people’s access to it. We should try to reduce the imbalance between those who can afford certain kinds of information and those who can’t.
But we still have to operate within the real world, as it is now. So we should promote those efforts — though if they’re as inevitable as some make it out to be, it won’t take much — but we shouldn’t advocate stealing from people who aren’t able to work in that sort of system, because it is effectively stealing in those cases.
This implies you have the information at your disposal; I’m sure you are willing to share? I realize that the movie was fiction, and inaccurate at that, which is why I used that example. According to A. J. G. M. Sanders, personal property included ornaments and musical instruments. True, personal property is not the same as intellectual property, but do you have evidence that, for example, herbal knowledge or the ability to weave a basket in a certain pattern or construct tools in a certain way wasn’t considered intellectual property? The concept of a shaman seems to support this…
You haven’t demonstrated that my position is ethnocentric.
Just because a society provides people the ability to create doesn’t automatically mean that the creation belongs to every single individual in that society. There can be other ways of reciprocating. Creating something is a very personal thing; people pour themselves into the process. It could be considered a violation to say that now it belongs willy-nilly to everybody.
ahs
Well, again, I don’t think you can compare these situations to actual plagiarism where the person hasn’t released their work under such a license.
The student is only as good as the teacher…
What I responded to was essentially about a problem inherent in piracy, misconstrued as a specific problem in plagiarism.
There is the unrecompensed distribution of one’s work, and then on top of that there’s the issue of attribution or plagiarism. The issue of unrecompensed distribution occurs whether or not attribution is present, and adding attribution does not bring about compensation.
I think what you’re telling me is that my reply doesn’t answer an issue I didn’t intend it to answer.
You said your teacher was google, and I’m pretty sure the problem wasn’t serverside.
Of course not. What a bizarre question in this context. When I asked it I was responding to this:
This argument rests on a false empirical basis and is very silly (and very Ayn Rand). It’s one thing to point out that in the current cotext people having to work within the existing system can be harmed by having their work copied or distributed without attribution or payment. It’s quite another to argue that intellectual property is a transhuman notion, a positive concept, or a human right.
I’m not suggesting that because most cultures haven’t had this notion that’s a better system. I’m suggesting that it’s more conducive to human well-being to have a different sort of system/culture of creation, and that it more accurately and ethically reflects the reality that creation doesn’t take place in a social vacuum but is a collective enterprise. If there’s a human right involved here, it’s the one that’s already recognized: the right to enjoy the artistic and intellectual products of our culture.
That wasn’t my claim.
People are talking in big generalities, and it’s difficult to get a handle on where, if anywhere, specific disagreements lie. I suspect that I want to see more radical change than you do.
Does it? To make that claim, you could try to show that when a shaman gives another person advice on how to combat a witchcraft attack, this person is not permitted to share that advice with a third person who is also troubled by witchcraft.
Am I totally invisible here or do people just not want to comment on the fact that copyright law actually does apply to content on the internets?
Hm? Sorry. Yeah I’m talking about violating current law. Your point about having stuff taken down does apply when the content is not well distributed.
the Ys,
At the very least, I don’t think you will find that it being illegal translates into people agreeing that it should be. I am late to this discussion and not really sure how I feel about it, but I don’t know as that particular aspect sways me.
I have the information in books on the anthropology and history of art, which are not currently at my disposal but are available to you via the internet.
This makes no sense at all.
In what culture? When? In what sense?
This is a tiresome line of discussion in any case. The challenge to you given the evidence of many cultures that don’t have comparable notions of personal artistic property (it is the majority historically, but that isn’t necessary to show) is to demonstrate that these cultures violate the human rights of people who create artistic or intellectual things.
Are you sure? What if people in a culture, including artists, think it does? Are you saying that they’re violating one another’s human rights?
It’s also a very social thing. Have you read Art Worlds by any chance?
Sure, I agree. We just have to ensure there will still be something for people to enjoy. There are probably lots of better systems, but among those we have to find some that will actually work.
Perhaps so, and that’s okay. :) I’m a musician, so obviously I have an interest in trying to make a living as a musician however I can. I very much doubt that a particular model will work for everyone, at least until the revolution comes. I guess that makes me a pluralist.
I think people were being kind by not responding to you. You appear to believe “It’s illegal” constitutes some sort of knockout argument. Abortion, homosexuality, and blasphemy are illegal in many places. Would you make the same point in discussions about them?
Okay…
I’m an anthropology student, and y’all are discussing something I have to study.
SC is absolutely right that, historically, cultures did not have any type of “copyright” notions. Small bands used to be, by nature, “communistic”, in that they shared everything, including creative outputs.
This is also true of today of the smaller, tribal cultures throughout the world. The notion of “intellectual property” and the idea of “copyright” is a decidedly modern, absolutely Western invention.
Of course, that’s not a justification for ignoring the idea. As someone who aspires to be a recording musician, as well as a written and published ethnomusicologist (I wish to study modern Western music culture and it’s relationship to the modern music industry, and perhaps attempt to cover what I see a huge gap between the two with a bridge) and “ideological” anthropologist (I want to try and create a more detailed, less stereotypical picture of the roots and pernicious existence of ideological fanaticism in all its forms), I like the idea of intellectual property. I would like credit for my work, thank you very much, and I’d like to make money off of my work. And what’s more, I would prefer that if people use my work, they credit me properly. I do, after all, need to earn a living.
If that makes me selfish or greedy, then so be it, but in modern Western cultures, it is nigh impossible to live a decent life without some sort of income.
So I’ll say it again… please don’t plagiarize Abbie’s blogs on ERVs for people like me. There have to be other blogs that offer similar layouts and discuss endogenous retroviruses for laymen without all the other stuff.
I am still vacillating, but my inclination is that people make money off of work they are doing, not work they have done. This is hardly a surprising position for me given that my work is very definitely paid for on a per basis and cannot be reproduced and then sold in manufactured form, but that leads me to wonder what I am missing on the part of others perspective.
I’m not ignoring it. I’m arguing against it.
So do I. That’s because we’re modern Westerners. That it’s our culture at the moment doesn’t make it a good thing. And credit and intellectual property are not identical.
This is the complication I was talking about above for those who want to move toward a different system or just recognize that the old one is crumbling in the face of newer technologies. But we can appreciate that without embracing existing system.
SC:
Are you seriously comparing laws based on religious bullshit to laws that recognise that people have a right to receive recognition for their work and to have some say over whether it reappears in other forms?
Seriously?
Go plagiarize Dawkins and see how fast he responds to it – and what means he uses to do so. And then ask him why he’s all for following some laws while encouraging people to get rid of others.
I laughed my ass off when Tom Petty told Bachmann’s campaign to stop using “American Girl”. Should they have the right to ignore the artist’s declaration that he does not want his song to be associated with her campaign?
Dhorvath –
I make next to nothing when I write something. However, when I write something considered to have rare, unusual, or insightful content, then people “rediscover” me and I get to go on another round of lecturing. Each round of lecturing takes place primarily over a period of 8 months or so, with a low background level that occurs between major clusters of interest.
Although work that I “have done” and not work that I “am doing” is not what I get paid for, work that I “have done” is how people know that I’m intelligent & insightful enough to come up with stuff others haven’t heard before. When others repeat what I say without attribution, it appears that my ideas are quite common (which is, in fact, not true: in my field I am quite the innovator and even the most noted and celebrated of my peers often feel they learn quite a lot from the time we spend in conversation). If my ideas are common, then there is no need to have me, in particular, come and consult with an organization or give a speech before a body. The fact that ideas are common implies to people that they are easily understood and/or naturally flow from previous work. Thus, any person competent in my field should be able to explain how & why these ideas develop & what benefit they hold for changing current thinking & practice.
The truth is that they can’t. But unattributed distribution makes it appear as if they can. Moreover, unattributed repetition of these ideas or phrases makes it harder for someone on the internet to track down who, specifically, pushed thinking down a particular direction. People often do this when attempting to book speakers (do you know who came up with X? I’d love to hear that idea discussed!), and often fail when origins are obscured.
The long and short of this is that my ideas advertise my competence and value. When my ideas are no longer mine, they no longer speak to my competence and value & I get much less work.
Honestly, I wouldn’t really publish in journals or periodicals (or, heck, even anthologies) if it were only a matter of money. Recompense is sometimes nothing and always less than a significant contribution to the household finances.
I do it for 2 reasons: 1) to get the ideas out there at all, b/c I care about what I do…and 2) to get my name out, b/c I care about paying rent & buying food. One can argue that 1 is increased at a cost to 2, but I have seen people who read and passed on my ideas flail when attempting to any more than regurgitate them. To really be able to answer questions about implications and project next steps often requires a deep understanding, which some smart people can get from reading a couple articles and thinking deeply, but which most people can’t extrapolate for themselves.
Think of how many people were competent to read Einstein’s early work on special relativity and understand it to the point of being able to write a paraphrase… and how many people understood it enough to predict the questions and thinking that led to general relativity. The latter is a much smaller group, but, if one can’t get Einstein, one would at least want someone from the latter group if one was going to have a lecture on special relativity back in the 1900’s. And how would one even make clear that one was in that latter group? By publishing an insightful paper.
This lack of attribution seriously hinders my ability to pay for basic goods AND it seriously hinders the ability of people who could benefit from an insightful discussion of X from finding someone who can generate such a discussion and not just paraphrase X in front of strangers in a good speaking voice.
The ideas *might* spread a little further, but they wouldn’t spread *better* in that they wouldn’t penetrate as deeply into the right communities.
anyway, does that answer your question, Dhorvath?
I know. I’ve read your posts. And I guess I don’t understand why. IMO, it’s a damn good idea. People who create something are, I believe, entitled to recognition that they created it and, perhaps, some form of compensation for their effort.
I don’t understand how it’s not a good thing.
Did I say they were? But the idea of intellectual property exists because we believe that people deserve credit for their work.
I… um… don’t understand.
It seems simple to me. Music my brother and I have written is our music. Shouldn’t we put our names on it? Shouldn’t we be given due credit and compensation for our work? Or do you honestly believe that once it’s written and released, people should be allowed to do whatever they hell they want with it without proper accreditation, and to hell with the livings my brother and I are trying to make?
@ the Ys:
who said:
No. SC wasn’t. You were.
I think what SC’s trying to say here is that you said, “It’s illegal,” and that’s it. You didn’t say, “It’s illegal, and this is not a case of religious bullshit, but of laws based on …………….”
If religious bullshit laws are not to be respected, then laws are not to be respected **because they are laws**. They are to be respected because of some deeper reason, in your language, “[to] recognise that people have a right to receive recognition,” is the deeper reason here. If you say that something should be respected because it’s a law, and leave your argument at that, then you are arguing that blasphemy laws should be respected because they are laws. “Because it’s illegal,” doesn’t stop working as an argument when you switch categories of illegal behavior.
If you want to argue something else, that **in this case** the laws were enacted to protect a fundamental right or interest, then you’ll have to argue that a fundamental right or interest exists and that the law actually protects it.
Look, I’m on your side in giving more protection for attribution than the level for which ahs argues. But “It’s illegal,” is not a substantive argument in some cases and a ridiculous argument in others. Either embrace that “it’s illegal,” is a great argument for respecting blasphemy laws or change your argument (as you seem to be in the process of doing) to something else. But please don’t (as you also seem to be doing) argue that you never made the simplistic, “It’s illegal,” argument. You did. Let’s back off that argument & move on to more productive ones.
Nate Havens said: ” the idea of intellectual property exists because we believe that people deserve credit for their work.”
No. It really doesn’t. You could have a law that says that other people must give you credit when using your invention/creation. We don’t. We have a law that says you must contract with the creator for permission to use an invention/creation.
We have this law because as a society we thought we could use capitalism to increase the origination, accumulation, & spread of ideas. Curiously, intellectual property rights were not embraced til long after the civil war and long after corporate personhood was established law. I don’t know how much CP affected the cultural drift toward legitimating IP, but it’s something that I think ought to be investigated by a competent historian (I am not one).
We do not have this law because we thought that credit was important. If credit were the important thing in our culture, then every browser today would carry a tag, “inspired by Netscape,” but no one would have ever paid a dime in patent violation litigation settlements.
There is a vast difference between the maternity of an idea and the ownership of an idea. We absolutely do not need the latter to have the former.
Copyright and patent law, and why we have it.
1) The Earth was spun together about 5 billion years ago.
2) ?????
3) Profit!!!!
This subject infuriates me.
If someone spends their time building a chair or growing food, do you just take these things from them if you want them? Or do you actually stop and either negotiate, pay for them, or request them as gifts?
Why on Earth would anyone think that stealing an article that took hours to write (or adapt as necessary for writing music, etc.) is somehow acceptable when it’s not acceptable to take a bag of carrots without asking or paying, or to take other material objects?
It is theft.
Yes, I have a strong opinion on this because I think people should be recompensed in some fashion for their time and work. Does anyone here think they should be expected to work for free? If you think you have the right to use other people’s material without attribution or recompense, you are asserting that other people must work for free and in total anonymity. Let’s see you do that too.
“From an economic point of view, granting an exclusive right ensures that the author will receive an economic reward for the exploitation of the work for a certain period and hence constitutes an incentive for creativity. According to justifications based on natural law, on the other hand, each person has a natural right of property to the products of her labour. It is argued that this must also apply in the case of intellectual creations.”
Source
Crip Dyke has already responded fully to your other “point,” but I have to ask about this:
Why on earth are you bringing Dawkins into this? I simply can’t imagine.
Oh, is it because the examples I offered of laws related to religiously inspired laws? You’re missing the point. I could have offered some from the Soviet Union instead. The laws we’re talking about now are capitalist laws, and there are many capitalist laws that I think are actively bad.
You know this completely undercuts your “It’s illegal. End of story” argument, right?
Thank you!
I want to make money off of my work. If people want to use my work in a free or educational capacity, then fine. Just note that it comes from me. If they want to profit off of my work, however, then I want a little of that compensation, as it is my work, and not theirs.
Is there really a problem with this?
The Ys:
Is it really?
When you take someone’s material objects, they no longer have those objects, but when you copy someone’s ideas, they still retain them.
I reckon that’s a rather significant difference.
By your current claim, if I use an expression I like that I’ve heard someone else use, that constitutes theft.
(Clearly, your claim is too broad)
NateHevens:
Possibly.
If you could not have profited from that work (for whatever reason) and didn’t, but they can and do, then any profit-garnering is their work, not yours.
Why (on your own basis) would you deserve compensation for their work? :)
CripDyke,
I was thinking more specifically of payment when I made my comment. I do like the idea of credit or attribution, how else to pursue the specific talents who are best equipped to perform a function? Such as yourself producing writings for marketing purpose or a musician making albums to draw more people to live performances. These are some of the things that are done to market a personality and with any of them I expect some degree of cost is always associated, but that the actual value is the personality, not the marketing.
I pay for my recorded music, my recorded movies, my printed books, and other succh media, because I have some resources to do so and I want to promote the production of more things that I like. But I see no problem with borrowing them from the library or reading them on site. Is it stealing to read a chapter of a book at my local store? Is it theft to hear a song on friend’s stereo? I don’t feel it to be so. On the other hand, sneaking into a live performance feels wrong to me. Akin to taking concrete material from a store.
Do you think that doesn’t affect the value of the original “copy”? How do you reckon that distinction is relevant, in terms of the actual economic impact it has?
In theory, both parties could make such copies forever*, but don’t you think at some point no one will want anymore? And exactly how is a person, whose career depends on releasing the information they produced, supposed to do that kind of work if there are free or cheaper “copies” floating around everywhere?
*Presumably with the help of a spherical cow which produces infinite resources on a frictionless plane. But, sadly, the real world is a little more complicated.
John Morales:
You’re setting up a false dichotomy, because NateHevens said this:
There’s no profit without the original work. There’s also (little or) no profit without the profit-garnering of which you speak. Along with less attributable factors such as publicity and luck. Therefore, both sides benefit.
Are you going to honestly argue that ONLY the profit-maker’s contribution deserves any compensation whatsoever?
Because it’s not their work, maybe?
Let me give you an example of what I think you’re talking about and how I disagree with you.
Led Zeppelin is my all-time favorite band. I am obsessed with them… to the point that I have at least one source of all of their live shows that have ever been recorded (including 15 audio sources and 3 video sources of their 2007 reunion) as well as every studio session/outtake that has leaked of the band in the studio in the 70’s (including unreleased tracks like “Jennings Farm Blues”).
I am also on a mission to purchase every officially released source of every official release by the band. I already own the original vinyl pressings, the first CD pressings, and the 1990’s box set of their studio albums. I also have the original CD releases of BBC, The Song Remains the Same (the original and the recent remaster), How the West Was Won, Early Days/Latter Days, and Mothership. And I have The Song Remains the Same original on VHS and DVD as well as the remaster on DVD (special edition that came with the t-shirt which I’m wearing right now), as well as the 2-disc DVD set that was released with How the West Was Won.
What’s more, there is literally not a single Led Zeppelin song I do not like. I can listen to every single song they put out without fail or boredom. And, since I was born in May of 1987, I sadly never got to see them live (I was unable to go to their 2007 reunion, which was and is particularly depressing for me because it looks like that will never happen again… my one chance, and I missed it because the system for purchasing tickets was completely fucked up… a lottery? Really?).
About three years ago, I started a project called “The Complete Roots of Led Zeppelin”. I finished the studio version, but have yet to embark on the live version.
So allow me one very famous example:
“Dazed and Confused”
We are all, I’m sure, aware of Led Zeppelin’s version:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G23WO9S5F-s
What you might not be aware of is that Jimmy Page first did it with the Yardbirds:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsjo92lJ9vg
And what’s more, he didn’t actually write it. The original artist was an “acid folk” artist named Jake Holmes (if you’ve ever heard the army jingle “be all that you can be”, then you’ve heard a little bit of Jake Holmes’s work):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTsvs-pAGDc
Of course, Jake Holmes was never credited. He has never received any royalties.
Now, I absolutely adore Led Zeppelin’s version. In fact, as much as I like Jake’s version (and I absolutely love it… I even covered it for YouTube and have performed it for open mics), I think Zeppelin’s is far superior. Zeppelin took this song and turned it into a freakin’ epic.
However, as far as I’m concerned, Jimmy Page stole from Jake Holmes, and Jake deserves better. Jake should be receiving a royalty check for every copy of Led Zeppelin 1, Early Days/Latter Days, the remasters box set, BBC Sessions, The Song Remains the Same, the 2-Disc DVD, How the West Was Won, and Mothership that’s sold. Instead, he’s largely ignored, and most people are utterly unaware of his contribution to arguably one of Led Zeppelin’s greatest songs.
To me, this is horribly unfair.
But I’m assuming you disagree… right? Or do you agree with me?
The Ys,
If I make a chair, yes I would expect payment for that chair in some fashion before relinquishing it to a new owner. What I would not expect is payment from them should they proceed to copy that chair and sell versions they manufactured themselves. Likewise if I sold a vegetable or fruit to someone and they grew it into a new crop I would expect no payment from them for that new crop, merely for the original item they purchased. I don’t think material goods compare well to ideas though, so this doesn’t really help me much.
I need to expand here. I’m not saying that Jimmy Page and Robert Plant shouldn’t list themselves are writers their version of “Dazed and Confused”. Obviously there are lots of differences between Zeppelin’s version and Jake’s original. However, Jake should have part of the credit. The credits on Zeppelin I and all the other releases which include “Dazed and Confused” should say “Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, and Jake Holmes”.
Because without Jake Holmes, there would be no “Dazed and Confused” to begin with.
And that’s the whole point.
Then you should be more careful with your wording. You alluded to me and then followed that with the comment about ignoring. I don’t know to whom that was referring.
OK. That’s a different question.
But you believe that because you’re a product of a particular culture. As am I. I’ve mentioned in the past here that I have issues with credit, to the extent that family and friends tease me about it. But it’s attenuated over the years, and depends on the purpose of the work. For some pictures or writing, I prefer to use a pseudonym or that people could approach them without knowing who produced them. If it involves information that I want to be shared as widely as possible, I don’t care at all.
(This doesn’t mean I accept people claiming others’ work as their own. That’s dishonest, and, as I said above, promotes a culture I don’t like.)
Monetary compensation is often necessary in a capitalistic society. If we had a system in which people’s survival wasn’t tied to individual pieces but artistic and scientific work were publicly funded, this wouldn’t be an issue.
You wrote: “…I like the idea of intellectual property. I would like credit for my work, thank you very much, and I’d like to make money off of my work.” You seemed to be implying that they were the same thing.
No, it exists because of capitalism (and who’s “we”?). It also rests on the claim that people will be encouraged to produce more if they have “rights” to what happens with their creations. I think that in art and certainly science this system has had contrary effects – limiting the sharing of information, minimizing the collective nature of these enterprises while promoting the false notion of the artist or scientist as lone genius, spending resources on finding and punishing violators, and pushing production toward areas of profit-making rather than serving human needs. It also should be noted that intellectual property is very often not that of the individual people who created it but the corporations that funded, bought, or stole it.
I don’t think it’s an ethical question. It depends on your purpose in writing it. (Of course it isn’t entirely “your music” – you didn’t invent music or the musical tradition(s) you’re working in.)
With regard to credit, again, that depends on what you mean and the purpose. With regard to compensation, that’s needed if you’re making a living from it in a capitalist system. But I don’t think art and science should be funded by piecework through the market.
First, the dilemma for you is that the technology as it advances makes this extremely likely, whatever the laws or notions of morality. Second, as I’ve been saying, this is the problem with trying to encourage movement away from the current system while having to deal with the realities of the current system. But what I meant was that you can argue that this sort of copying and dissemination means that you can’t make enough money from your music and so harms you while still rejecting the system that puts you in this position. I don’t want marine parks to have any more captive orcas, but I understand that those that have lived in captivity for many years or were born there can’t be released into the wild, so I have to take this into account. But I still reject captivity and want it to end.
Nate,
I agree that some credit is due, but I think that is where I end. I am not convinced that albums should have any monetary value.
Depends on what you mean by “value.”
***
More like capitalist law.
consciousness razor:
It is not an original “copy”, it is an original.
As for ‘value’, you should specify in what sense you ask that.
(Does the Pythagorean theorem lose value each time it is taught?)
—
Pteryxx:
I’m arguing nothing other than under certain circumstances, it’s possible that there is a problem with Nate’s stance; to illustrate this, I asked a question the answer to which would clarify the situation.
—
NateHevens,
Hard to say, without knowing more — but I incline to your own view based on what you’ve written.
BTW: If the case is so clear-cut, why does Jake not take legal action via a plagiarism suit?
[meta]
I was away, and composed my previous having read only to #469.
Dhorvath:
how do you make the distinction between the “marketing” and the “personality”. (I would also argue that “personality” is a terrible name for what I’m marketing, but that’s another thing.) If they plagiarize my work, my personality has less value.
I don’t know if there’s a specific ethical term that would describe this, but the legal term in play is, “nuisance.” If a WonderBread plant gets built next to my house and doesn’t install appropriate filters, then a mist of gluten gets spread all around. It gets everywhere. My kitchen countertops get gluey and attract more filth. My lungs take in this crap. And, reasonably, no one wants to live in my neighborhood, lowering my property values. In law, we have a concept that accounts for this. The right to manufacture is not impeded, but the damage done to me is not ignored because of the right to manufacture: I still have rights to “enjoy” (also used as a legal term here) my property that are also unimpeded. Thus even though the right to manufacture is unimpeded, the actual process of manufacturing may be, if the plant owner cannot pay for the damage to property and person caused by plant operation. (This is taken from a situation in which I was a tenant, but yes, gluten mist did all that. Yuck, is all I can say. Oh, and, no I didn’t personally suffer health problems: the plant shut down about 20 months after I moved in & I worked away from home enough that I didn’t have health problems from it.)
So you seem to want to say that the “marketing” of “me” can be stolen, but the “me” can’t. Well, property wasn’t stolen in the above example, but legal enjoyment was. My value is less. I literally have less food on the table because of those actions. What is the legal, moral, or ethical resolution, in your scheme? What is the equivalent of “enjoyment” rights?
Or, maybe a more straightforward example: Nike feels that they’ve sufficiently branded a slogan that they don’t need to do anything in their ads other than repeat it with an eye-catching image. They create billboards just like that. An entrepreneur comes along & adds to the billboards a logo including the words: “Buy the new Earthshaker shoe!”
Nike got to say everything that they wanted. Nothing was “stolen” from Nike. and yet, now people are buying Earthshaker shoes, and most of those who do are not buying them in supplement to a pair of Nikes, but in place of another pair of Nikes.
Has a wrong been committed? Nike still has their “personality”. They still have their brand. They still have their reputation. However, they spent time and effort (effectively if not also actually money) that now will not have a return solely because of the actions of Earthshaker.
Yes… and the idea that someone who created something should be recognized for their work.
“We” is the current society in which you (I’m assuming) and I live.
Which I think is generally true. If I’m planning on depending on my music and other published work to survive, then I’m be obliged to produce a good amount of unique, wanted material to bring in the money I need to live in this society.
I might agree with you in science, except that scientists should be able to earn a living at what they do, quite frankly.
I do not at all agree about art, though. Exactly what needs does art fulfill? Art fulfills wants/aesthetics. Outside of the creator, art will not feed anyone (it will not solve world hunger), nor will it bridge the gaps between the various classes. Art will not end world bigotry, not will it cure disease.
Art serves an aesthetic purpose only. Science is functional. Art is not.
As such, artists should get compensated for their work, and they should be compensated whenever someone else attempts to make money of their work.
Here we have no argument. This is something I find disgusting and believe desperately needs to be changed, with the art of making music itself put back into the hands of the artists, with the labels being moved back to their rightful place as a support system for the artist (as opposed to a prison for the artist, which is what they currently are).
We write songs because it’s something we want to do and we want to share that with the rest of the world… but we also want to make some money off of our music.
And? The songs are still ours, and ours alone (with the exception of my version of “Nobody’s Fault but Mine”, which is a derivative work, and I’m still trying to figure out who to properly credit since this song has a very long and rather convoluted history).
Tell me then… as an aspiring musician, how do you suggest I be compensated for my work?
Oy yeah, Nate’s answer:
But I predicated that the only reason profits exist at all was due to the profiteer’s work — i.e so that which creates profit is their work, contrary to your response.
(Not a convincing answer)
PS If Andy Warhol Painted His Campbell’s Soup Paintings Today, How Fast Would The Cease & Desist Arrive?
This is probably one of the most generous comparisons to a captive orca that’s ever been made about me. ;)
Of course. I meant monetary value.
Grrr. The whole issue makes me angry, because I’m pretty much stuck in the middle of this argument, and I don’t see any good alternative.
Sorry… missed this:
He did.
http://www.turnmeondeadman.com/index.php?option=com_myblog&show=jake-holmes-finally-sues-jimmy-page-over-dazed-and-confused-.html&Itemid=5
Of course, that was last year. I don’t know if it was dropped, settled out of court, or is currently in limbo. Most people think it’s in court limbo, but I’m waiting to find out.
Admittedly, Jake would be fighting a decidedly uphill battle. He is a very successful writer of commercial jingles (writing the vast majority of every commercial jingle you’ve ever heard, hear now, and will probably hear well into the future), but nothing like Led Zeppelin. He won’t be able to spend anywhere near as much money on it as Led Zeppelin will. So it’s possible he may have dropped it as a lost cause. I have no idea.
CripDyke,
It may take me a moment or three to understand, not ignoring you in favour of this.
_
Nate,
I want musicians to have a livelihood. I have several in my family who play for a living, but that playing is what makes money, not the cds they have pressed as well. It takes a fair amount of infrastructure to support the recording industry and a huge amount of the money spent on cds just goes into that.
Well, I perform now and then, but mainly I’m a composer/arranger. Please don’t forget about us.
Doesn’t something that I created belong to me?
Often, no. It belongs to your employer, and it is work for hire, like the code I write at work. Or it belongs to the purchaser, or the person or organisation that you gave it to.
Also, in some other cultures, even claiming *attribution* for it is not your right, and doing so would show that you are some kind of silly puffed-up egotist. Buddhist religious art and historical Turkish/Persian miniature painting would be examples. Traditional Aboriginal art, too – it’s a community thing, the art works are retouched as needed, and no creator’s name is attached. (Until recently, when part of it changed to fit with western art dealerships. Canvases instead of sand paintings and rock walls, artists names attached.)
I don’t have a strong position on where we should go with this, as a culture, and I don’t intend to follow this topic much more. But I do recognise that the idea of intellectual property is cultural, not universal. Plagiarism and piracy are modern western ideas.
That’s not to say we should reject them immediately out of hand. We’re not anti-western contrarianists here. These rules serve a very useful purpose in our culture. Some aspects of IP laws are seriously problematic; some are good; it’s a debatable area.
Actually, that infrastructure is not as big as we’re led to believe. In fact… you know how, at the subatomic levels, solid matter is mostly empty space? The record labels specifically are a lot like that. In other words, there’s a lot that could be cut without a) damaging the industry and b) losing any jobs.
So let’s say an artist writes a good 17 original songs and records them. He then releases them on CD, but through a major label like, say, Atlantic Records. Did you know the label will take over 75% of the royalties (at the end of the day, the artist is lucky if [s]he sees 5% of those royalties)? The funny thing is, a major label (especially one like Atlantic) could not only survive, but make a nice profit with just 20% of the royalties. Granted, the CEOs wouldn’t be bring home multi-million-dollar weekly paychecks, but the industry isn’t supposed to be about them.
Minor, “independent” labels do a better job. They are much smaller, yes, but will also take much less of an artist’s royalties… more like 20%, sometimes 15% or even 10%, and still make enough to pay their employees a salary. And, of course, an artist can release without a label at all, and bring in 100% of the royalties, using them to pay for the studio, technician, and producer, and still have enough for themselves to live on.
And, thankfully, this is the trend of the music industry, which is partly why the major labels are pushing MP3 singles so heavily right now… because, due to the nature of the trend, it’s easier for a major label to make money off the MP3 singles than it is off a major-released album. This is also a small part of the reason I’m not a big fan of MP3…
There was a time when tickets to a major concert ran between $2 and $10. This was partly because musicians were actually making a ton of money off their records. This is no longer the case because the labels cracked down and demanded larger slices of the royalty pie. This is why major musicians demand so much more for tickets to their live shows these days (depending on the artist, a shit seat could be as much as $500!). The lives shows are now their only way to actually make a living, which, IMO, is fucking pathetic because it screws both the artist and the fan.
Consciousness Razor,
I have little doubt I am treading all over countless people, so thanks for the heads up.
___
CripDyke,
Nike is an abomination. I won’t go down that path any further.
I most certainly agree that your house should not be a repository for baking detritus, and if that is how I am coming across I am doing a piss poor job of making any kind of connection between my thoughts and my words. My apologies as well for ‘personality’, I am ill equipped with effective terms to engage in this discussion.
You are, if I recall, involved in pedagogy and advancing it? So you do writing and lectures then? When does an idea pass from you to someone else in terms of value? That is, when does something cease to be chargeable and become free to broadcast? I think that is where we are differing and has some resonance I think with CR’s point as well.
Nate,
It is sure that recording industry executives make more than is seemly off of other people’s work. I am not particularly comfortable with anyone making a living off of not generating something themselves.
As you may notice, I can also see that I have missed much more of the picture than I initially thought. As I entered this I knew there was some difference between my thoughts and those of others and that a great deal of that difference relates to how I am compensated for my talents. What I wasn’t seeing is how varied production is nor the lack of avenues for many producers to generate livelihood out of their work.
No. That is not why intellectual property law exists.
That is a cultural notion, as you’ve acknowledged. But simply repeating that it is a common existing belief is not the same as providing an argument for why it should be.
Speculation.
This rests on the assumption that artists are in a society in which art is a capitalist commodity. That does not have to be the case. It ignores the many other motivations people have for creating art and doing science. I also don’t want to live in a society in which art is created under threat of personal ruin.
So should artists. What are you talking about?
Obviously some of the points in my list apply to some areas more than others. But – aside from the fact that art can serve many important purposes beyond basic aesthetic enjoyment – this seems a strange argument for someone going on about how artists should be recognized for their creations. (By the way, I’d say art has a better chance of ending world bigotry than science.)
So not because you feel obliged to to get paid for them? Interesting. This also doesn’t seem to have much to do with credit/recognition.
But that has nothing to do with the issue of credit. You could make money writing music while receiving no credit and vice versa.
Except that they’re not, as I’ve said.
*chokes down cuss words* … I dispute this.
Art’s closely related to self-expression, communication, comprehension, creativity and memory. Art can help abuse victims recover. Art can improve the intellectual performance of students. Music and poetry assist memory, seen most spectacularly in some dementia patients. And real-world problem-solving often happens via creative assistance… recent comments, which I can’t find now, mentioned how artistic training has helped chemists visualize molecular structures, for instance.
So I think it’s incorrect to presume that quantifiable advances as in science and social justice somehow happen in an art-free void.
/derail
I don’t think anyone’s doing that, or rejecting them for that reason.
You should not have choked down those cuss words. I’m really mad that I even wrote that and even angrier that I can’t edit it. As such, I fall on my knees begging for forgiveness.
You are absolutely, 100% right. The issue here is that I used that broad term “art”. Partly it’s an issue because, actually, I consider science itself to be an art.
I was talking about specific “artistic expressions”, such as songs like the Black-Eyed Peas’ “My Humps”, which I’m quite sure contribute absolutely nothing of value to the world at large.
I have to pop off for a while, possibly not to return. I’ll try to let others have the last word.
:)
I assume you’re referring to this game for finding better protein-folding algorithms.
(It’s almost cliché to mention that PZ doesn’t think games are art, but what can I say? He’s a poopyhead. But otherwise a lovable and friendly poopyhead.)
But hey, if they hadn’t released that song, we wouldn’t have been treated to Alanis Morrisette’s hilarious cover.
ah, NateHevens, then I’ll store the cuss words for a more deserving purpose. *nodnod*
re “My Humps”:
youtube link to “My Hump” Calculus version
Lyrics in the description. you’ve been warned. ~;>
backtracking…
I think he’s dead now
Lenny’s dead?
If so, that’s too bad.
I disagree with PZ. Lenny wasn’t an asshole, a pain in the ass sometimes, but not an asshole.
He did some excellent stuff on reptiles, and wrote a decent book on anti-creationism.
can anyone confirm this?
Ichthyic:
Is your search finger broken? He seems to be fine and well, as according to this, he’s published an e-book on OWS this month and there’s a post from him here, from October this year.
Is your search finger broken?
evidently so, since that didn’t pop up for me search his old haunts.
I will skip most of the stuff in this thread since I left, as most of it is simply based on people’s sudden loss of reading comprehension and ability to think when it comes to property-rights, apparently. some points I feel like responding to:
yep; so completely overlooked was the issue of recompense that it was mentioned by both me and ahs before you made this post.
FIFY
that’s because the former is naturally rivalrous and excludable, making it a natural private good; while the latter is naturally non-rivalrous and non-excludable, making it a natural public good.
And since people are having some serious brain-fails in this conversation, I’d like to remind everyone that creation of public goods and services generally IS recompensed; just in completely different ways than the creation of private goods and services.
You mean people like me, who as a result get to experience on a daily basis how broken the current system is? A ridiculous amount of time and money is being used to artificially create rivalry and excludability for digital content, and trying to enforce them; and despite all these expenses, it still fails very regularly. It’s a broken, antiquated system of compensating the making of digital creative content, and it harms the creators of said content, too.
no one was going to do it for you or for anyone else. it was a suggestion to you.
“it’s illegal” has never been an argument for or against the ethical or practical value of something.
O.o
I’m sorry, but that’s a deranged and harmful notion; body-rights and property-rights are qualitatively different and should never be combined like that. It weakens the usefulness of both to link them like that.
your simplistic strawman has been duly noted and laughed at.
QFT
I should note though that people are already being harmed, by insisting on doing things the old way: not just because the artificial creation and enforcement of rivalry and excludability is expensive and inefficient, but because it also often results in false positives: a number of my most talented “co-workers” have had their work rejected because the reviewers wouldn’t believe them that they were as talented as that, and insisted on seeing source-material for their illustrations that simply didn’t exist.
QFT. In my case, the work for which I’m credited is never financially compensated, and the work for which I’m financially compensated is never credited to me. They really are two completely separate issues.
that reminds me: the German Piratenpartei wants to make all information free, and also has stated that every person in a country is entitled to a stipend, since everyone is entitled to basic means of survival (money), and “job creation” is an inefficient way to go about this.
I could live with that + a system for compensation of creative work similar to the system of compensation for scientific work; but it would have to be implemented in the right order, which is of course never guaranteed.
of course it does; in fact, for digital work, it completely invalidates the very notion of an “original”. That’s what makes the system of compensating for “copies” and “originals” of digital work inane. We really need to stop thinking in these antiquated terms and realizing that what we are paying for is not the finished product, which once it’s out there is easily reproducible and obtainable; we are paying for the act of creating it, which is what’s valuable.
@SC:
I didn’t say that anyone had. It was a stray thought, not an accusation.Sorry if it came across badly.
I was mulling it over a bit, and wondering if our collective anti-woo habits tend to lead to a knee-jerk pro-western bias. Do we sometimes accidentally deny anthropology, just because we’re so sick of alt-medders pushing their supposedly ancient oriental wisdom against Evil Western allopathy?