[flowerthoughts]

> This doesn’t mean that the authors of that paper are bad people!

> We should distinguish the person from the deed. We all know good people who do bad things

> They were just in situations where it was easier to do the bad thing than the good thing

I can't believe I just read that. What's the bar for a bad person if you haven't passed it at "it was simply easier to do the bad thing?"

In this case, it seems not owning up to the issues is the bad part. That's a choice they made. Actually, multiple choices at different times, it seems. If you keep choosing the easy path instead of the path that is right for those that depend on you, it's easier for me to just label you a bad person.

[layer8]

Labeling people as villains (as opposed to condemning acts), in particular those you don’t know personally, is almost always an unhelpful oversimplification of reality. It obscures the root causes of why the bad things are happening, and stands in the way of effective remedy.

[Aurornis]

In this case they hadn’t labeled anyone as villains, though. They could have omitted that section entirely.

I happen to agree that labeling them as villains wouldn’t have been helpful to this story, but they didn’t do that.

> It obscures the root causes of why the bad things are happening, and stands in the way of effective remedy.

There’s a toxic idea built into this statement: It implies that the real root cause is external to the people and therefore the solution must be a systemic change.

This hits a nerve for me because I’ve seen this specific mindset used to avoid removing obviously problematic people, instead always searching for a “root cause” that required us all to ignore the obvious human choices at the center of the problem.

Like blameless postmortems taken to a comical extreme where one person is always doing some careless that causes problems and we all have to brainstorm a way to pretend that the system failed, not the person who continues to cause us problems.

[mjburgess]

I'm not sure the problems we have at the moment are a lack of accountability. I mean, I think let's go a little overboard on holding people to account first, then wind it back when that happens. The crisis at the moment is mangeralism across all of our institutions which serves to displace accountability .

[lo_zamoyski]

It’s possible to take two opposing and flawed views here, of course.

On the one hand, it is possible to become judgmental, habitually jumping to unwarranted and even unfair conclusions about the moral character of another person. On the other, we can habitually externalize the “root causes” instead of recognizing the vice and bad choices of the other.

The latter (externalization) is obvious when people habitually blame “systems” to rationalize misbehavior. This is the same logic that underpins the fantastically silly and flawed belief that under the “right system”, misbehavior would simply evaporate and utopia would be achieved. Sure, pathological systems can create perverse incentives, even ones that put extraordinary pressure on people, but moral character is not just some deterministic mechanical response to incentive. Murder doesn’t become okay because you had a “hard life”, for example. And even under “perfect conditions”, people would misbehave. In fact, they may even misbehave more in certain ways (think of the pathologies characteristic of the materially prosperous first world).

So, yes, we ought to condemn acts, we ought to be charitable, but we should also recognize human vice and the need for justice. Justly determined responsibility should affect someone’s reputation. In some cases, it would even be harmful to society not to harm the reputations of certain people.

[the_arun]

Questions:

1. Who is responsible for adding guardrails to ensure all papers coming in are thoroughly checked & reviewed?

2. Who review these papers? Shouldn’t they own responsibility for accuracy?

3. How are we going to ensure this is not repeated by others?

[direwolf20]

Labeling people as villains used to be effective deterrence against doing villainous things. When did that change?

[hexbin010]

I'm not a bad person, I just continuously do bad things, none of which is my fault - there is always a deeper root cause \o/

[andy99]

Just to add on, armchair quarterbacking is a thing, it’s easy in hindsight to label decisions as the result of bad intentions. This is completely different than whatever might have been at play in the moment and retrospective judgement is often unrealistic.

[michaelmrose]

One thing that stands in the way of other people choosing the wrong path is the perception of consequences. Minimal consequences by milquetoast critics who just want to understand is a bug not a feature.

People are on average both bad and stupid and function without a framework of consequences and expectations where they expect to suffer and feel shame. They didn't make a mistake they stood in front of all their professional colleagues and published effectively what they knew were lies. The fact that they can publish lies and others are happy to build on lies ind indicates the whole community is a cancer. The fact that the community rejects calls for correction indicates its metastasized and at least as far as that particular community the patient is dead and there is nothing left to save.

They ought to be properly ridiculed and anyone who has published obvious trash should have any public funds yanked and become ineligible for life. People should watch their public ruin and consider their own future action.

If you consider the sheer amount of science that has turned out to be outright fraud in the last decade this is a crisis.

[nickpsecurity]

That comment sounds like the environment causes bad behavior. That's a liberal theory refuted consistently by all the people in bad environments who choose to not join in on the bad behavior, even at a personal loss.

God gave us free will to choose good or evil in various circumstances. We need to recognize that in our assessments. We must reward good choices and address bad ones (eg the study authors'). We should also change environments to promote good and oppose evil so the pressures are pushing in the right direction.

[praxulus]

It is possible that the root cause is an individual person being bad. This hasn't been as common recently because people were told not to be villains and to dislike villains, so root causes of the remaining problems were often found buried in the machinery of complex social systems.

However if we stop teaching people that villains are bad and they shouldn't be villains, we'll end up with a whole lot more problems of the "yeah that guy is just bad" variety.

[regenschutz]

As with anything, it's just highly subjective. What some call an heinous act is another person's heroic act. Likewise, where I draw the line between an unlucky person and a villain is going to be different from someone else.

Personally, I do believe that there are benefits to labelling others as villains if a certain threshold is met. It cognitively reduces strain by allowing us to blanket-label all of their acts as evil [0] (although with the drawback of occasionally accidentally labelling acts of good as evil), allowing us to prioritise more important things in life than the actions of what we call villains.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect#The_reverse_halo_e...

[josfredo]

The person is inseparable from the root cause.

[shermantanktop]

Bad acts are in the past, and may be situational or isolated.

Labelling a person as bad has predictive power - you should expect them to do bad acts again.

It might be preferable to instead label them as “a person with a consistent history of bad acts, draw your own conclusion, but we are all capable of both sin and redemption and who knows what the future holds”. I’d just call them a bad person.

That said, I do think we are often too quick to label people as bad based one bad act.

[rolymath]

I would argue that villainy and "bad people" is an overcomplication of ignorance.

If we equate being bad to being ignorant, then those people are ignorant/bad (with the implication that if people knew better, they wouldn't do bad things)

I'm sure I'm over simplifying something, looking forward to reading responses.

[circus1540]

What if the root cause is that because we stopped labeling villains, they no longer fear being labeled as such. The consequences for the average lying academic have never been lower (in fact they usually don’t get caught and benefit from their lie).

[jbreckmckye]

> Labeling people as villains is almost always an unhelpful oversimplification of reality

This is effectively denying the existence of bad actors.

We can introspect into the exact motives behind bad behaviour once the paper is retracted. Until then, there is ongoing harm to public science.

[rdiddly]

You presumably read the piece. There was no remedy. In fact the lavishly generous appreciation of all those complexities arguably is part of the reason there was no remedy. (Or vice versa, i.e. each person's foregone conclusion that there will be no remedy for whatever reason, might've later been justified/rationalized via an appeal to those complexities.)

The act itself, of saying something other than the truth, is always more complex than saying the truth. ← It took more words to describe the act in that very sentence. Because there are two ideas, the truth and not the truth. If the two things match, you have a single idea. Simple.

Speaking personally, if someone's very first contact with me is a lie, they are to be avoided and disregarded. I don't even care what "kind of person" they are. In my world, they're instantly declared worthless. It works pretty well. I could of course be wrong, but I don't think I'm missing out on any rich life experiences by avoiding obvious liars. And getting to the root cause of their stuff or rehabilitating them is not a priority for me; that's their own job. They might amaze me tomorrow, who knows. But it's called judgment for a reason. Such is life in the high-pressure world of impressing rdiddly.

[abanana]

People are afraid to sound too critical. It's very noticeable how every article that points out a mistake anywhere in a subject that's even slightly politically charged, has to emphasize "of course I believe X, I absolutely agree that Y is a bad thing", before they make their point. Criticising an unreplicable paper is the same thing. Clearly these people are afraid that if they sound too harsh, they'll be ignored altogether as a crank.

[1dom]

> Clearly these people are afraid that if they sound too harsh, they'll be ignored altogether as a crank.

This is true though, and one of those awkward times where good ideals like science and critical feedback brush up against potentially ugly human things like pride and ego.

I read a quote recently, and I don't like it, but it's stuck with me because it feels like it's dancing around the same awkward truth:

"tact is the art of make a point without making an enemy"

I guess part of being human is accepting that we're all human and will occasionally fail to be a perfect human.

Sometimes we'll make mistakes in conducting research. Sometimes we'll make mistakes in handling mistakes we or others made. Sometimes these mistakes will chain together to create situations like the post describes.

Making mistakes is easy - it's such a part of being human we often don't even notice we do it. Learning you've made a mistake is the hard part, and correcting that mistake is often even harder. Providing critical feedback, as necessary as it might be, typically involves putting someone else through hardship. I think we should all be at least slightly afraid and apprehensive of doing that, even if it's for a greater good.

[mike_hearn]

That's a legitimate fear though - it's exactly what happened in this case. "The reviewers did not address the substance of my comment; they objected to my tone".

[mgfist]

In general Western society has effectively outlawed "shame" as an effective social tool for shaping behavior. We used to shame people for bad behavior, which was quite effective in incentivizing people to be good people (this is overly reductive but you get the point). Nowadays no one is ever at fault for doing anything because "don't hate the player hate the game".

A blameless organization can work, so long as people within it police themselves. As a society this does not happen, thus making people more steadfast in their anti-social behavior

[CoastalCoder]

> I can't believe I just read that. What's the bar for a bad person if you haven't passed it at "it was simply easier to do the bad thing?"

This actually doesn't surprise much. I've seen a lot of variety in the ethical standards that people will publicly espouse.

[shrubby]

I was just following orders comes to mind.

Yes, the complicity is normal. No the complicity isn't right.

The banality of evil.

[boelboel]

It's interesting to talk about 'banality of evil' in the comment section about flawed papers. Her portrayal of Eichmann was very wrong, Arendt had an idea in her head of how he should be and didn't care too much about the facts and the process. Not that I totally disagree with the idea.

[macleginn]

I guess he means that the authors can still be decent people in their private and even professional lives and not general scoundrels who wouldn't stop at actively harming other people to gain something.

[chrisjj]

Hmm. I wonder how he knows these bad-doers are good people.

[Panoramix]

I'd rather if the article would stick to the facts

[bell-cot]

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PragmaticVillain...

[dilawar]

There are extremely competent coworkers I wouldn't like them as neighbours. Some of my great neighborhoods would make very sloppy and annoying coworkers.

These people are terrible at their job, perhaps a bit malicious too. They may be great people as friends and colleagues.

[perching_aix]

> What's the bar for a bad person if you haven't passed it at "it was simply easier to do the bad thing?"

When the good thing is easier to do and they still knowingly pick the bad one for the love of the game?

[dullcrisp]

It feels good to be bad.

[criddell]

I think the writer might enjoy Vonnegut's Mother Night.

> Vonnegut is not, I believe, talking about mere inauthenticity. He is talking about engaging in activities which do not agree with what we ourselves feel are our own core morals while telling ourselves, “This is not who I really am. I am just going along with this on the outside to get by.” Vonnegut’s message is that the separation I just described between how we act externally and who we really are is imaginary.

https://thewisdomdaily.com/mother-night-we-are-what-we-prete...

[mekoka]

Connecting people's characters to their deed is a double edged sword. It's not that it's necessarily mistaken, but you have to choose your victories. Maybe today you get some satisfaction from condemning the culprits, but you also pay for it by making it even more difficult to get cooperation from the system in the future. We all have friends, family and colleagues that we believe to be good. They're all still capable of questionable actions. If we systematically tie bad deeds to bad people, then surely those people we love and know to be good are incapable of what they're being accused. That's part of how closing ranks works. I think King recognizes this too, which is why he recommends that Penalties should reflect the severity of the violation, not be all-or-nothing.

[ambicapter]

The entire point of recognizing bad people is to make it harder for them to work with or affect you in the future.

> If we systematically tie bad deeds to bad people, then surely those people we love and know to be good are incapable of what they're being accused.

A strong claim that needs to be supported and actually the question who’s nuances are being discussed in this thread.

[aidenn0]

Some people want to avoid labeling individual people without admitting that they don't want to avoid labeling people. They don't seem to be aware that they are doing it either; I've had people tell me to my face that all of these are true:

1. There are bad people

2. We know bad people are bad because they do bad things

3. There does not exist any set of bad actions that one could do to qualify one for the label of "bad person."

I've just come to the conclusion that a "bad person" is just a term for someone who does bad things, and for whom their extenuating circumstances don't count because they are the member of the wrong tribe.

[Propelloni]

It is like in organisational error management (aka. error culture), there are three levels here:

1) errors happen, basically accidents.

2) errors are made, wrong or unexpected result for different intention.

3) errors are caused, the error case is the intended outcome. This is where "bad people" dwell.

Knowing and keeping silent about 1) and 2) makes any error 3). I think, we are on 2) in TFA. This needs to be addressed, most obviously through system change, esp. if actors seem to act rationally in the system (as the authors do) with broken outcomes.

[nathan_compton]

I guess there isn't much utility in categorizing people as "good" and "bad," arguably. Better to think about the incentives/punishments in the system and adjust them until people behave well.

[locknitpicker]

> I can't believe I just read that. What's the bar for a bad person if you haven't passed it at "it was simply easier to do the bad thing?"

For starters, the bar should be way higher than accusations from a random person.

For me,there's a red flag in the story: posting reviews and criticism of other papers is very mundane in academia. Some Nobel laureates even authored papers rejecting established theories. The very nature of peer review involves challenging claims.

So where is the author's paper featuring commentaries and letters, subjecting the author's own criticism to peer review?

[pfortuny]

Never qualify the person, only the deed. Because we are all capable of the same actions, some of us have just not done them. But we all have the same capacity.

And yes, I am saying that I have the same capacity for wrong as the person you are thinking about, mon semblable, mon frère.

[irl_zebra]

> Because we are all capable of the same actions, some of us have just not done them

> And yes, I am saying that I have the same capacity for wrong as the person you are thinking about...

No one is disputing any of this. The person who is capable, and who has chosen to do, the bad deed is morally blameworthy (subject to mitigating circumstances).

[tdb7893]

I think calling someone a "bad person" (which is itself a horribly vague term) for one situation where you don't have all the context is something most people should be loath to do. People are complicated and in general normal people do a lot of bad things for petty reasons.

Other than just the label being difficult to apply, these factors also make the argument over who is a "bad person" not really productive and I will put those sorts of caveats into my writings because I just don't want to waste my time arguing the point. Like what does "bad person" even mean and is it even consistent across people? I think it makes a lot more sense to label them clearer labels which we have a lot more evidence for, like "untrustworthy scientist" (which you might think is a bad person inherently or not).

[knallfrosch]

"It was easier for me to just follow orders than do the right thing." – Fictional SS officer, 1945. Not a bad person.

/s

[readthenotes1]

But he shoveled the neighbor sidewalks when it snowed.

I have a relative who lives in Memphis, Tennessee. A few years ago some guy got out of prison, went to a fellow's home to buy a car, shot the car owner dead, stole the car and drove it around until he got killed by the police.

One of the neighbors said, I kid you not, "he's a good kid"

[Hasnep]

Focusing on criticising people's actions and being lenient and not judging the person's character is literally centuries old, I don't think you can say it's because of woke.

[deadbabe]

If you defend a bad person, you are a bad person.

[pdpi]

It's 2026, and social media brigading and harassment is a well-known phenomenon. In light of that, trying to preemptively de-escalate seems like a Good Thing.

[psychoslave]

Seems fair in the frame of what is responded.

But there is a concern which goes out of the "they" here. Actually, "they" could just as well not exist, and all narrative in the article be some LLM hallucination, we are still training ourself how we respond to this or that behavior we can observe and influence how we will act in the future.

If we go with the easy path labeling people as root cause, that's the habit we are forging for ourself. We are missing the opportunity to hone our sense of nuance and critical thought about the wider context which might be a better starting point to tackle the underlying issue.

Of course, name and shame is still there in the rhetorical toolbox, and everyone and their dog is able to use it even when rage and despair is all that stay in control of one mouth. Using it with relevant parcimony however is not going to happen from mere reactive habits.