Interesting Articles

[benji]

This was pretty hot, I got off often:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/09/they-studied-dishonesty-was-their-work-a-lie

They Studied Dishonesty. Was Their Work a Lie?

Dan Ariely and Francesca Gino became famous for their research into why we bend the truth. Now they’ve both been accused of fabricating data.

Haaretz once called Ariely “the busiest Israeli in the world.” I met him several times in the past year, although he agreed to speak on the record mostly in writing. A stimulating and slightly unnerving interlocutor, he has coarse black bangs, tented eyebrows, and the frank but hooded aspect of an off-duty mentalist or a veteran card-counter. “Predictably Irrational” considerably expanded his sphere of influence. He started a lab at Duke called the Center for Advanced Hindsight, which was funded by BlackRock and MetLife. He had a wife and two young children in Durham, but spent only a handful of days a month in town. In a given week, he might fly from São Paulo to Berlin to Tel Aviv. At talks, he wore rumpled polos and looked as though he’d trimmed his hair with a nail clipper in an airport-lounge rest room. He has said that he worked with multiple governments and Apple. He had ideas for how to negotiate with the Palestinians. When an interviewer asked him to list the famous names in his phone contacts, he affected humility: “Jeff Bezos, the C.E.O. of Amazon—is that good?” He went on: the C.E.O.s of Procter & Gamble and American Express, the founder of Wikipedia. In 2012, he said, he got an e-mail from Prince Andrew, who invited him to the palace for tea. Ariely’s assistant had to send him a jacket and tie via FedEx. He couldn’t bring himself, as an Israeli, to say “Your Royal Highness,” so he addressed the Prince by saying “Hey.”

Ariely seemed to know everything and everyone. “What an amazing life to lead,” a former doctoral student in his lab said. “It was like ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel.’ ” He told people that he’d climbed Annapurna and rafted down the Mekong River. But he was also attentive. “Every single time I went into the room and interacted with Dan, it was unbelievably enjoyable,” the student said. At one talk, he auctioned off a hundred-dollar bill, with the stipulation that the second-highest bidder would also have to pay. The winner owed a hundred and fifty dollars; the loser owed a hundred and forty-five dollars for nothing. Both might have felt like idiots, but Ariely wasn’t scornful; he sympathized. His knowledge of human behavior could be burdensome. “It makes daily interactions a little difficult,” he said. “I know all kinds of methods to convince people to do things I want them to do.” He told me, “Just imagine that you could separate the people who are your real friends from the people who want something from you. . . . And now ask yourself if you really want to know this about them.”

One of his frequent collaborators was Francesca Gino, a rising star in the field. Gino is in her mid-forties, with dark curly hair and a frazzled aspect. She grew up in Italy, where she pursued a doctorate in economics and management. Members of her cohort remember her dedication, industry, and commitment. She first came to Harvard Business School as a visiting fellow, and, once she completed her Ph.D., in 2004, she stayed on as a postdoc. She later said that she went to Harvard for a nine-month stint and never left. This story elides a few detours. By the end of her postdoc, in 2006, she had yet to publish an academic paper, and Harvard did not extend an offer. One of her mentors at Harvard, a professor named Max Bazerman, helped make introductions; she eventually landed a postdoc at Carnegie Mellon. A senior colleague who knew her at the time told me, “That entire experience could plausibly have left her with a keen sense of the fragility and precariousness of academic careers.” At last, she seemed to find her footing, and it soon looked as though she could get almost any study to produce results. She secured a job at U.N.C., where she entered a phase of elevated productivity. According to her C.V., she published seven journal papers in 2009; in 2011, an astonishing eleven.

Ariely and Gino frequently collaborated on dishonesty. In the paper “The Dark Side of Creativity,” they showed that “original thinkers,” who can dream up convincing justifications, tend to lie more easily. For “The Counterfeit Self,” she and Ariely had a group of women wear what they were told were fake Chloé sunglasses—the designer accessories, in an amusing control, were actually real—and then take a test. They found that participants who believed they were wearing counterfeit sunglasses cheated more than twice as much as the control group. In “Sidetracked,” Gino’s first pop-science book, she seems to note that such people were not necessarily corrupt: “Being human makes all of us vulnerable to subtle influences.” In 2010, she returned to Harvard Business School, where she was awarded an endowed professorship and later became the editor of a leading journal. She dispensed page-a-day-calendar advice on LinkedIn: “Life is an unpredictable journey. . . . The challenge isn’t just setting our path, but staying on it amidst chaos.” She was a research consultant for Disney, and a speakers bureau quoted clients between fifty and a hundred thousand dollars to book her for gigs. In 2020, she was the fifth-highest-paid employee at Harvard, earning about a million dollars that year—slightly less than the university’s president.

Gino drew admiring notice from those who could not believe her productivity. The business-school professor said, “She’s not just brilliant and successful and wealthy—she has been a kind, fun person to know. She was well liked even by researchers who were skeptical of her work.” But she drew less admiring notice, too—also from people who could not believe her productivity. As one management scholar told me, “You just cannot trust someone who is publishing ten papers a year in top journals.” Other co-authors, as collateral beneficiaries, weren’t sure what to think. One former graduate student thought that she caught Gino plagiarizing portions of a literature review, but tried to convince herself that it was an honest error. Later, in a study for a different paper, “Gino was, like, ‘I had an idea for an additional experiment that would tie everything together, and I already collected the data and wrote it up—here are the results.’ ” The former graduate student added, “My adviser was, like, ‘Did you design the study together? No. Did you know it was going to happen? No. Has she sent you the data? No. Something off is happening here.’ ” (Gino declined to address these allegations on the record.)

In late 2010, Gino was helping to coördinate a symposium for an Academy of Management conference, on “behavioral ethics,” which listed Ariely as a contributor. At the time, Gino and Bazerman were researching moral identity. Ariely’s findings with the car-insurance company remained unpublished, but his talks had made the rounds, and his field study seemed like the perfect companion piece for joint publication. “I suggest we add them as co-authors and write up the paper for a top tier journal,” Gino later wrote, by e-mail.

The paper, which was published in 2012, became an event. Signing the honesty pledge at the beginning, Ariely found, reduced cheating by about ten per cent. The Obama Administration included the paper’s findings in an annual White House report. Government bodies in the U.K., Canada, and Guatemala initiated studies to determine whether they should revise their tax forms, and estimated that they might recoup billions of dollars a year. Kahneman told me that he saw no reason to disbelieve the results, which were clearly compatible with the orientation of the field. “But many things that might work don’t,” he told me. “And it’s not necessarily clear a priori.”

[benji]

The dark legacy of Carlos Castaneda
The godfather of the New Age led a secretive group of devoted followers in the last decade of his life. His closest "witches" remain missing, and former insiders, offering new details, believe the women took their own lives.

If this name draws a blank for readers under 30, all they have to do is ask their parents. Deemed by Time magazine the "Godfather of the New Age," Castaneda was the literary embodiment of the Woodstock era. His 12 books, supposedly based on meetings with a mysterious Indian shaman, don Juan, made the author, a graduate student in anthropology, a worldwide celebrity. Admirers included John Lennon, William Burroughs, Federico Fellini and Jim Morrison.

Under don Juan's tutelage, Castaneda took peyote, talked to coyotes, turned into a crow, and learned how to fly. All this took place in what don Juan called "a separate reality." Castaneda, who died in 1998, was, from 1971 to 1982, one of the best-selling nonfiction authors in the country. During his lifetime, his books sold at least 10 million copies.

Castaneda was viewed by many as a compelling writer, and his early books received overwhelmingly positive reviews. Time called them "beautifully lucid" and remarked on a "narrative power unmatched in other anthropological studies." They were widely accepted as factual, and this contributed to their success.

Castaneda, who disappeared from the public view in 1973, began in the last decade of his life to organize a secretive group of devoted followers. His tools were his books and Tensegrity, a movement technique he claimed had been passed down by 25 generations of Toltec shamans. A corporation, Cleargreen, was set up to promote Tensegrity; it held workshops attended by thousands. Novelist and director Bruce Wagner, a member of Castaneda's inner circle, helped produce a series of instructional videos. Cleargreen continues to operate to this day, promoting Tensegrity and Castaneda's teachings through workshops in Southern California, Europe and Latin America.

At the heart of Castaneda's movement was a group of intensely devoted women, all of whom were or had been his lovers. They were known as the witches, and two of them, Florinda Donner-Grau and Taisha Abelar, vanished the day after Castaneda's death, along with Cleargreen president Amalia Marquez and Tensegrity instructor Kylie Lundahl. A few weeks later, Patricia Partin, Castaneda's adopted daughter as well as his lover, also disappeared. In February 2006, a skeleton found in Death Valley, Calif., was identified through DNA analysis as Partin's.

Some former Castaneda associates suspect the missing women committed suicide. They cite remarks the women made shortly before vanishing, and point to Castaneda's frequent discussion of suicide in private group meetings. Achieving transcendence through a death nobly chosen, they maintain, had long been central to his teachings.

All four books were lavishly praised. Michael Murphy, a founder of Esalen, remarked that the "essential lessons don Juan has to teach are the timeless ones that have been taught by the great sages of India." There were raves in the New York Times, Harper's and the Saturday Review. "Castaneda's meeting with Don Juan," wrote Time's Robert Hughes, "now seems one of the most fortunate literary encounters since Boswell was introduced to Dr. Johnson."

In 1972, anthropologist Paul Riesman reviewed Castaneda's first three books in the New York Times Book Review, writing that "Castaneda makes it clear that the teachings of don Juan do tell us something of how the world really is." Riesman's article ran in place of a review the Times had initially commissioned from Weston La Barre, one of the foremost authorities on Native American peyote ceremonies. In his unpublished article, La Barre denounced Castaneda's writing as "pseudo-profound deeply vulgar pseudo-ethnography."

After 1973, the year of the Time exposé, Castaneda never again responded publicly to criticism. Instead, he went into seclusion, at least as far as the press was concerned (he still went to Hollywood parties). Claiming he was complying with don Juan's instruction to become "inaccessible," he no longer allowed himself to be photographed, and (in the same year the existence of the Nixon tapes was made public) he decided that recordings of any sort were forbidden. He also severed ties to his past; after attending C.J.'s junior high graduation and promising to take him to Europe, he soon banished his ex-wife and son.

And he made don Juan disappear. When "The Second Ring of Power" was published in 1977, readers learned that sometime between the leap into the abyss at the end of "Tales of Power" and the start of the new book, don Juan had vanished, evanescing into a ball of light and entering the nagual. His seclusion also helped Castaneda, now in his late 40s, conceal the alternative family he was starting to form. The key members were three young women: Regine Thal, Maryann Simko and Kathleen "Chickie" Pohlman, whom Castaneda had met while he was still active at UCLA. Simko was pursuing a Ph.D. in anthropology and was known around campus as Castaneda's girlfriend. Through her, Castaneda met Thal, another anthropology Ph.D. candidate and Simko's friend from karate class. How Pohlman entered the picture remains unclear.

In 1973, Castaneda purchased a compound on the aptly named Pandora Avenue in Westwood. The women, soon to be known both in his group and in his books as "the witches," moved in. They eventually came to sport identical short, dyed blond haircuts similar to those later worn by the Heaven's Gate cult. They also said they'd studied with don Juan.

According to Wallace and Jennings, one of the witches' tasks was to recruit new members. Melissa Ward, a Los Angeles area caterer, was involved in the group from 1993 to 1994. "Frequently they recruited at lectures," she told me. Among the goals, she said, was to find "women with a combination of brains and beauty and vulnerability." Initiation into the inner family often involved sleeping with Castaneda, who, the witches claimed in public appearances, was celibate.

In "Sorcerer's Apprentice," Wallace provides a detailed picture of her own seduction. Because of her father's friendship with Castaneda, her case was unusual. Over the years, he'd stop by the Wallace home. When Irving died in 1990, Amy was living in Berkeley, Calif. Soon after, Castaneda called and told her that her father had appeared to him in a dream and said he was trapped in the Wallace's house, and needed Amy and Carlos to free him.

Wallace, suitably skeptical, came down to L.A. and the seduction began in earnest. She recounts how she soon found herself in bed with Castaneda. He told her he hadn't had sex for 20 years. When Wallace later worried she might have gotten pregnant (they'd used no birth control), Castaneda leapt from the bed, shouting, "Me make you pregnant? Impossible! The nagual's sperm isn't human ... Don't let any of the nagual's sperm out, nena. It will burn away your humanness." He didn't mention the vasectomy he'd had years before.

The courtship continued for several weeks. Castaneda told her they were "energetically married." One afternoon, he took her to the sorcerer's compound. As they were leaving, Wallace looked at a street sign so she could remember the location. Castaneda furiously berated her: A warrior wouldn't have looked. He ordered her to return to Berkeley. She did. When she called, he refused to speak to her.

The witches, however, did, instructing Wallace on the sorceric steps necessary to return. She had to let go of her attachments. Wallace got rid of her cats. This didn't cut it. Castaneda, she wrote, got on the phone and called her an egotistical, spoiled Jew. He ordered her to get a job at McDonald's. Instead, Wallace waitressed at a bed and breakfast. Six months later she was allowed back.

Aspiring warriors, say Jennings, Wallace and Ward, were urged to cut off all contact with their past lives, as don Juan had instructed Carlos to do, and as Castaneda had done by cutting off his wife and adopted son. "He was telling us how to get out of family obligations," Jennings told me. "Being in one-on-one relationships would hold you back from the path. Castaneda was telling us how to get out of commitments with family, down to small points like how to avoid hugging your parents directly." Jennings estimates that during his four years with the group, between 75 and 100 people were told to cut off their families. He doesn't know how many did.

For some initiates, the separation was brutal and final. According to Wallace, acolytes were told to tell their families, "I send you to hell." Both Wallace and Jennings tell of one young woman who, in the group's early years, had been ordered by Castaneda to hit her mother, a Holocaust survivor. Many years later, Wallace told me, the woman "cried about it. She'd done it because she thought he was so psychic he could tell if she didn't." Wallace also describes how, when one young man's parents died soon after being cut off, Castaneda singled him out for praise, remarking, "When you really do it, don Juan told me, they die instantly, as if you were squashing a flea -- and that's all they are, fleas."

Long after Castaneda had been discredited in academia, Korda continued to insist on his authenticity. In 2000, he wrote: "I have never doubted for a moment the truth of his stories about don Juan." Castaneda's books have been profitable for Simon and Schuster, and according to Korda, were for many years one of the props on which the publisher rested. Castaneda might have achieved some level of success if his books had been presented, as James Redfield's "Celestine Prophecy" is, as allegorical fiction. But Castaneda always insisted he'd made nothing up. "If he hadn't presented his stories as fact," Wallace told me, "it's unlikely the cult would exist. As nonfiction, it became impossibly more dangerous."

To this day, Simon and Schuster stands by Korda's position. When asked whether, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the publisher still regarded Castaneda's books as nonfiction, Adam Rothenberg, the vice president for corporate communication, replied that Simon and Schuster "will continue to publish Castaneda as we always have." Tensegrity classes are still held around the world. Workshops were recently conducted in Mexico City and Hanover, Germany. Wagner's videos are still available from Cleargreen. According to the terms of Castaneda's will, book royalties still help support a core group of acolytes. On Simon and Schuster's Web site, Castaneda is still described as an anthropologist. No mention is made of his fiction.

[Besticus Maximus]

That Casteneda story is a lot like a 60s version of Helena Blavatasky

[benji]

https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wikipedia-admin

Reliable Sources: How Wikipedia Admin David Gerard Launders His Grudges Into the Public Record

In Gerard’s frame, and in Wikipedia’s, if something is not cited by a Reliable Source, it may as well not exist. As Gerard puts it: “if it's in [a Reliable Source]1 use the [Reliable Source], and if it's not in [a Reliable Source] then the real world didn't care.”

Unsurprisingly, Gerard’s slash-and-burn, no-questions-asked policy has led to more than a few conflicts on Wikipedia. Editors who object to his indiscriminate removals have raised the issue multiple times to Wikipedia administrators, on talk pages, and elsewhere around the site. Each time, Gerard defends the approach of indiscriminately removing everything from Unreliable Sources, generally carrying on with removals as the disputes carry on. Each time, the arguments peter out with nothing in particular changing. In one case, another Wikipedia administrator, Sandstein, pushed to ban a user for repeatedly criticizing Gerard’s judgment on the matter.

In other words, whatever Wikipedia’s written policy, the practical day-to-day reality is that Gerard will remove Unreliable Sources en masse with terse explanations and with little consideration for actual content, digging in with elaborate justification when pressed. Given that, it’s worth examining the reliability battles Gerard picks.

Wikipedia’s job is to repeat what Reliable Sources say. David Gerard’s mission is to determine what Reliable Sources are, using any arguments at his disposal that instrumentally favor sources he finds agreeable. The debate, to be clear, is not between tabloids and the New York Times, a battle the Times cleanly wins. In Gerard’s world, scientists and academics who publish in Quillette or Reason are to have even their opinions discarded entirely, while to cast any doubt on the reliability of the word of Huffington “the truth is not in them” Post and PinkNews is absurd.

From there, it’s simple: Wikipedia editors dutifully etch onto the page, with a neutral point of view, that Huffington Post writers think this, PinkNews editors think that, and experienced Harvard professors who make the mistake of writing for The Free Press think nothing fit for an encyclopedia.

The article for Mozilla cofounder Brendan Eich, one of Gerard’s quiet focuses, provides an illustration. Gerard had made his article, after all, back when Gerard was just a tech nerd and Eich a force in building out the software infrastructure he relied on. But in 2008, Eich donated against gay marriage. After another user added mention of that donation to the Wikipedia page in 2012, Gerard guarded it repeatedly against deletion13. In March 2014, when Mozilla appointed Eich its CEO, Gerard’s social circles erupted in fury. Eich stepped down quickly. Immediately, Gerard entered the talk page and the article to ensure Eich’s opposition to gay marriage became central to his Wikipedia narrative. In the first few months of 2014, Gerard edited Eich’s article nineteen times, fleshing out details about the controversy and removing older external links more focused on Eich’s technical work. Between 2019 and 2020, Gerard repeatedly fought to make the “Known for” box on Eich’s page mention opposition to same-sex marriage and avoid any mention of Eich’s projects beyond JavaScript.14 After all, Gerard pointed out as he added a PinkNews reference to the claim—it was in a Reliable Source.

Hold on, you might be thinking. Surely you’re not saying he got around Wikipedia’s ban on citing his original research by feeding all his obsessions to his old friend before citing his friend.

No, of course not. That would be crass.

They got another friend to review the book when it came out, and he cited that.

In February 2021, after Scott rearranged his life and quit his job in order to minimize the disruption from his name being revealed, then doxxed himself, the New York Times finally published its article. Off of Wikipedia, Gerard was thrilled, bragging about how much he had been able to land in a Reliable Source:

i sent Metz SO MUCH material for that NYT SlateStarCodex article, i can see the ghosts of what i sent

every phrase is firmly backed up by multiple sources - but it was run through the NYT mealymouthed centrist filter

In particular, he noted that he had encouraged Metz to use Scott’s real name. “[I]t isn't the article we wanted,” he noted on his favorite snark page, “and I suspect Cade wanted it stronger too. But it's good enough.”

Good enough indeed, and he quickly got to work fending off critical responses to the NYT article on Scott’s Wikipedia page. After someone pointed out a long list of critical responses from The Hill, Reason, Quillette, Vox co-founder Matthew Yglesias, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, journalist Cathy Young, and others, Gerard shrugged: “Zero of those are [Reliable Sources], so we can’t use them.”

Policy, you see. Hands were tied.

This time, though, people were paying attention, and Gerard had a problem: While you can get away with a great deal when people aren’t looking, Wikipedia does not actually want to be known as the site where people spend decades compiling dossiers against their personal enemies.

Gerard defended himself gamely for a while when people escalated the dispute up the Wikipedia bureaucracy. “Stop casting aspersions,” he told people who claimed he had a conflict of interest. “You’re making a bizarre claim.” “Do you have diffs22 from Wikipedia” demonstrating a conflict of interest?

When someone pointed out that Wikipedia explicitly prohibited the sort of edits Gerard was doing, noting that “an editor who is involved in a significant controversy or dispute with another individual—whether on- or off-wiki—or who is an avowed rival of that individual, should not edit that person's biography or other material about that person, given the potential conflict of interest,” Gerard shot back with “It's more of a no-evidencer. Supply on-wiki diffs that you consider show this, and how.” He knew the policy, of course—he helped write the policy! It was an elaborate sort of game he invited people into: You know this, I know you know it, but do you have the patience to outlast me on it?

Then an uninvolved admin, Wugapodes, caught wind of what Gerard was doing. His rant is full of Wikipedia jargon and awkwardly long to insert into what is already a behemoth of an article, but I cannot possibly do it justice without including it in full.

“Seriously, everyone, what the [f---] is wrong with us? … Reading through this discussion it seems that David has called the subject a neo-nazi, has significantly contributed to a NYT article described by other sources as a “hit piece”, disingenuously used Wikipedia to push his [point of view] despite a [conflict of interest] obvious to anyone with eyes, and we as a community are incapable of doing anything other than a warning? What the [f---] is wrong with us?”

After seven years, someone finally saw what was going on.

[killamajig]

Since I was shitting on Ed, I figured I would post one archaeological article. This is old news 2018 but I thought it was pretty cool. 

https://www.sciencealert.com/medieval-lombard-man-amputated-arm-knife-prosthesis
https://www.isita-org.com/jass/Contents/2018vol96/Micarelli/Micarelli.pdf

This Medieval Italian Man Replaced His Amputated Hand With a Weapon

The skeleton in question was found in a Longobard necropolis in the north of Italy, dating back to around the 6th to 8th centuries CE.

On closer examination, the ends of the bone showed evidence of biomechanical pressure - reshaping of both bones to form a callus, and a bone spur on the ulna. These are consistent with the sort of pressure that might have been applied by a prosthesis.

Further evidence on the skeleton supports this hypothesis. The man's teeth showed extreme wear - a huge loss of enamel, and a bone lesion. He'd worn his teeth so far down on the right side of his mouth that he'd likely opened the pulp cavity, causing a bacterial infection.

He was probably using his teeth to tighten the straps that held it in place.

He's like some badass fantasy character. Or maybe his job was to cut a da pizza.

[benji]

https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-distortions-of-joan-donovan
https://archive.ph/ZqOqV

Joan Donovan, one of the world’s leading experts in misinformation, was dying to set the record straight. On a brisk November night, she told me a story about why she’d left Harvard University. It was captured, she claimed, by a corporation she had loudly criticized, one with far too much power over our democracy: Meta.

Her document was not a lawsuit, but a first-person declaration of how the world’s wealthiest university, hamstrung by its “significant conflict of interest,” allegedly mistreated her up to her departure last summer. It had, she claimed, taken the copyright to her book. Stolen her plans to publish confidential Facebook documents. Blocked an event she was required to host. And jeopardized the livelihoods of her staff, the now-disbanded Technology and Social Change Project, which was part of the Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy.

“I would be complicit if I kept my mouth shut.”
Joan Donovan

The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, NBC, NPR, and dozens of other outlets (including this one) carried her claims, along with Harvard’s insistence that the team ended for a purely administrative, only-in-academe reason: She was a staff member, not a faculty member, so as a matter of policy, she could not lead research indefinitely. Laurence H. Tribe, the Harvard constitutional-law scholar, declared that the university “has to be investigated from top to bottom.” This, Donovan told CNN, was “a knock-down, drag-out fight for my academic freedom.” Her eyes welled with tears.

When the moderator opened up the floor for questions, according to Donovan’s disclosure, Schrage “monopolized the discussion by accusing me that my reading of the documents was inaccurate and that he disagreed with all prior discussion about Facebook.” Donovan claims that she “tried to answer Mr. Schrage’s allegations, but he kept speaking out angrily.” His conduct was “so overwhelming and disruptive,” she claims, that someone else “was forced to raise her voice in an attempt to try and calm Mr. Schrage.” The mood was “tense, awkward, and embarrassing for everyone involved.”

But a recording of the meeting contradicts that account. In a video the Kennedy School shared with me, Schrage is called on to ask a question, and begins by saying, “I disagree with a tremendous amount of the characterization and analysis that’s been provided, but that’s not the topic here.” He does not bring up the leaked Facebook files. He does ask Donovan how she defines misinformation, and whether television-news networks should be punished for reporting it. He also asks whether a company like Facebook should be obligated to take down a media outlet if the Philippine government considers it to be spreading falsehoods. In all, Schrage speaks for three minutes. Donovan responds uninterrupted for five-and-a-half, mostly to his first two questions.

“Thank you, Joan,” another council member says, then asks Donovan to discuss the subject of social media’s financial incentives. Two other attendees go on to raise questions that she also answers. Schrage does not speak again before the session ends, the recording shows.

This was the exchange that Donovan says jeopardized her career. That night, “I was worried I was going to lose my job based on Mr. Schrage’s anger,” her declaration says, and nearly a year later, when she learned that her team would be ending, she would think back to “when Elliot Schrage became enraged over my statements and possession of the Facebook files.”

During that meeting with the dean, Donovan’s declaration says, Elmendorf told her that Harvard would “exercise its ownership of my book,” Meme Wars, because, unlike faculty, “all staff’s research was owned by the University.” Late last year, over dinner in Boston, she told me, “It is what it is: Someone can own my shit. I still know how to work a copy machine.” And in December, she tweeted, “The truth is H took everything from me,” including “my book,” and added, “I truly have nothing left to lose.”

But Harvard does not own the copyright to Meme Wars. By March of last year, the three authors and the provost had signed an agreement that “Harvard hereby irrevocably transfers and assigns to the Authors, in perpetuity and throughout the world, all of its right, title, and interest in the copyright” to Meme Wars, according to documents I obtained. (One exception: Harvard got a royalty-free license to use it “for Harvard’s research, educational, and other scholarly purposes.”) In Donovan’s declaration, the only reference to this agreement is a vague mention of the book being “settled.”

Elmendorf told me that transferring the copyright “seemed the fair thing to do.” And when I asked Donovan if it was misleading to not mention the agreement, she insisted that it was irrelevant because “to me, it is still very true that Harvard laid claim to my book.”

Meme Wars isn’t the only thing Donovan says Harvard took. She has made a series of accusations — at times ambiguous — that her ex-employer is “holding on to my intellectual property,” which the university broadly disputes. She recently asserted to me that Harvard has refused to negotiate with her lawyers over this issue since December (though she declined to put me in touch with them, saying that they do not want to talk to the media). According to Harvard, that is false. “We asked Joan a number of times before she left to tell us what IP she seeks,” a spokesperson told me. “Harvard’s counsel has welcomed conversations with her counsel since then, and has repeated our requests for Joan to identify what she is seeking. We have not heard back.”

Of these allegations, the most-detailed is that FBarchive — Harvard’s online trove of the leaked Facebook documents — was stolen from her by Latanya Sweeney, a professor of the practice of government and technology.

Elmendorf told me that he isn’t aware of any other university that’s built a site like FBarchive. “I don’t understand an argument that the Kennedy School is somehow trying to protect Facebook when we have done that,” he said.

But Donovan says that the dean isn’t a reliable narrator, and that she wasn’t the only one with that opinion. “Dr. Sweeney once told me that she had attended a dinner at Ms. Sandberg’s home along with Dean Elmendorf,” her declaration says. “She was so struck by the closeness of their decades-long friendship that she confided in me her own concerns about Dean Elmendorf’s close, personal relationship with Ms. Sandberg and the potential conflict of interest with the work we were doing.”

Sweeney said that in April 2019, she did dine at Sandberg’s mansion in Silicon Valley, where a Harvard alumni-association representative had invited her to chat about her work with tech executives. But the dean told me that he wasn’t there. And Sweeney confirmed: “I’ve never been at a dinner with Sheryl and Doug. I’ve never been with the two of them at the same time ever.” She added, “I don’t know anything about Doug’s relationship with Sheryl Sandberg.” This story, she says, is a “lie.” (Donovan acknowledges that she “may have inferred” that Elmendorf was at the gathering, but she maintains that Sweeney expressed concern about the pair’s friendship.) Having now read Donovan’s whistle-blower disclosure, Sweeney told me, “I wouldn’t be able to trust her going forward at all.”

In April 2023, Nkonde herself texted Donovan seemingly by accident. “Joan has no money to take [to] her new institution and is demanding tenure,” she wrote, adding a string of laughing emojis. “So far everyone has said no.”

Donovan mulled whether to hit back in ways that she, as a media-manipulation expert, intimately understood. “What do I do?” she asked Collins-Dexter, sharing the screenshot with her. “I want to post it to twitter.”

“That could backfire,” her colleague cautioned.

But later that day, Donovan reported: “I made good gains with academics that follow me on Instagram after I posted the screenshots. Lots of them were wondering what had really happened.”

Donovan then raised the idea of publicizing details of the dispute — anonymously. She asked Collins-Dexter: “Do you have any sock puppet accounts?”

All the while, Donovan’s declaration says, she was “terrified for my staff, who were in need of contract renewals, stable employment and healthcare.”

But throughout last spring, according to texts, emails, and people who worked with her, Donovan was talking to her donors about ending their funding commitments — even though doing so would put her staff out of work even faster than anticipated. (Donovan denied approaching funders about pulling their money, saying, “All of my funders contacted me.”)

After the Crimson reported in February 2023 that their team would be eliminated, Collins-Dexter told me, Donovan asked her to arrange calls and meetings with some of their donors to discuss its future. She organized one such dinner with employees from two foundations, at a French restaurant in New York City, after Donovan initiated contact with them, emails show. Based on conversations beforehand, Collins-Dexter says, she assumed that her boss was going to reassure them that their money was safe until June 2024, the end date publicized in the news. That would’ve been just fine with Collins-Dexter and some of her colleagues, who were telling Donovan that they wanted to stay on the payroll as long as possible, according to texts from the time.

Instead, Collins-Dexter recalls, Donovan told funders to reroute their grants into a nonprofit that she wanted to start, to continue her research post-Harvard. “I was really shocked when I heard Joan start asking funders to pull their funding,” Collins-Dexter told me. She believes that after she tried to push back, she stopped getting invited.

Two major donors, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, had together given or planned to give about $1.8 million to the team. On March 3, 2023, when Donovan texted a teammate about a new funder interested in the nonprofit, she added, “We will get it started with that Hewlett $$ and I’m seeing if MacArthur will divert funds.” She made it official in an internal email days later: “I spoke to MacArthur and Hewlett and they are both going to end their grants early.” By the end of the month, MacArthur was canceling a planned $150,000 payment and Hewlett was canceling an expected $300,000, according to an internal budget document.

Five months after we met in Boston, I confronted Donovan with the findings in this story. Over a call that lasted nearly three-and-a-half hours, she responded to each claim against her, at times in tears.

I ended with the question that had become impossible to ignore: Had she — the famed misinformation researcher — been spreading misinformation?

She was silent at first. “I do stand by what’s in the declaration,” she finally said, “and what I’ve said to you and how I’ve presented what happened to me. I didn’t make up anything. If I had, it would be easy to disprove.” Her voice broke. “I’m merely one woman in the world,” she went on, “and that’s it. And to go up against corporations like Harvard and Facebook is very scary. But that is my truth. That is what I know to be true — that I was on top of it one day, and I was under it the next.”

We hung up. Starting that night and over the following four days, Donovan texted me 88 times. She forwarded me emails, texts, screenshots, voice mails. Each, she insisted, showed the facts to be on her side.

Her messages grew longer, darker. Unprompted, she began to refer to shadowy forces working against her. “There are people who do want me dead,” she wrote. “This line of work is wild and I don’t wish it on anyone. I am looking into changing my legal name so that it’s difficult to hack or find out where I live, by socially engineering access to my banking or property records.” She wrote that she was afraid of being assaulted, of being murdered.

“Harvard and Meta want negative press about me,” she wrote, “and that could get me killed, especially if one person gets it in their head that I’m illegitimate in some way.”

Two powerful institutions were out to discredit her, and my article was just more proof.

“This shows me,” she wrote, “that Harvard and Meta chose you.”

The person considering changing their legal name to be "difficult to hack" is a public professor at Boston University: https://www.bu.edu/ciss/profile/joan-donovan/

Joan believes that your social media feeds should be forced by the government to include news you aren't getting:

Quantifying the effect of misinformation is even harder than defining it. In the debate over why people fall for conspiracies, some scholars say that too much attention is paid to social media’s role and not enough to other factors, like government officials who make false claims on prime-time TV. Studies have failed to reliably find a direct causal relationship between viewing online misinformation and changing specific behaviors, such as switching voting positions. But to Donovan, Facebook’s ability to disseminate falsehoods at unprecedented scale has obvious consequences. When vigilantes take up arms in the wake of online rumors about “antifa” invaders, when people read on their feeds that vaccines are microchipped and voting is rigged, other members of the public — law-enforcement officials, doctors, journalists, election workers — spend time debunking and reassuring. “There are millions of resources lost to mitigating misinformation-at-scale, where the cost of doing nothing is even worse,” Donovan has written. She is among those advocating for “a public-interest internet,” one where social-media feeds would be required to contain “timely, relevant, and local” news curated by librarians.

Enjoy this interview from last year where Joan falsely claims that Sweeney's FBArchive was something only she had and that she personally released and it was what got her "fired" at ~10 minutes:


Note that Sweeney (a Black woman) is still employed at the Kennedy School and her profile openly links to the FBArchive: https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty/latanya-sweeney

[Uncle]

is it discriminatory or something that when I see what she looks like, something triggers in my lizard brain, I've known plenty of people who look like her...something about the way you live and relate the world influences the way you look, and I already know her without even hearing her speak

the kind of thing where you see her after the article and you say "ohhh yep"

[benji]

On Nepenthe:

The Crusade of Indignation
James Baldwin
The article originally appeared in the July 7, 1956, issue of The Nation.

“The love of money,” St. Paul once wrote, with a fairly typical lack of precision, “is the root of all evil.” This formulation seems to leave a great many evils out of account, and it does not even raise the question of just why the human heart, in which this love of money lives, should be so base. Nor does it raise the question of what money is, what is its power, what it means to people or states. With so many knotty questions thus neatly disposed of, people who share Paul’s attitude about money can also believe—as he, being bigoted in quite another direction, did not—that people will be made better as their economic state improves. It is an extremely attractive theory, and most of us have at one time or another espoused it.

Only—in order to bring about this economic utopia, one needs a band of people who do not care about money—or power?—who will carry out the necessary operation of taking the money from those who now have an abundance of it and distributing it among those who have too little.

In this operation—the love of money persisting so tenaciously—blood is likely to be shed. And the shedding of blood will probably prove to be the operation’s most real achievement. When things go back to what may be called normal, it will be seen that the people who were to be made better still persist in loving money and in trying—no matter what it may do to themselves, their neighbors, or their children—to make it.

...

The love of money thesis is the thesis of Daniel Guerin’s Negroes on The March, and, since I find it impossible to take the thesis seriously, I find it rather difficult to discuss the book—which is, anyway, less a discussion of the American Negro’s situation than a rather shrill diatribe against the capitalist system. No one with any pretension to intellectual honesty claims that the capitalist system is perfect, or is likely to be made so. It may indeed be doomed, and we may all be the slothful and pussy-footing creatures Mr. Guerin says we are. But his own tone is so extremely ungenerous that I cannot avoid a certain chill when I think of the probable fate of dissenters in his varicolored brave new world. Here he is on Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish social scientist whose An American Dilemma Mr. Guerin finds "feeble in interpretation". (All italics are Mr. Guerin’s). "…it does not explain how, by whom, and why race prejudice was brought into being." (It certainly does not; I, too, should like to read the book which does.) But Myrdal’s feebleness, it turns out, is blacker than mere incompetence: “Without calling into question Myrdal’s good faith, we must nevertheless make the observation that his method is quite in harmony with the concerns of those who subsidized his work and serves their interests quite well. For what did the trustees of the Carnegie Foundation actually want?” What they didn’t want was a “cause-and-effect relationship…established between capitalist oppression and race prejudice.” Bright students, or people who have heard this song before will already have guessed the reason, as follows: “…victims of race prejudice would be likely to draw conclusions dangerous to the established order.” Nor would the awakened white workers have taken long to realize that their best interests lay in black-white solidarity. Myrdal’s real task, according to Mr. Guerin, was to avoid saying anything which, by leading to such a holocaust, would displease and possibly destroy the Carnegie Foundation.

A man whose vision of the world remains as elementary as Mr. Guerin’s can scarcely be trusted to help us understand it. It is true enough, for example, as far as it goes, that slavery was established and then abolished for economic reasons; but slavery did not come into the world along with capitalism any more than race prejudice did; and it need scarcely be said, at this late date, that where capitalism has been abolished slavery and race prejudice yet remain. It is also true—again, as far as it goes —that, as Mary McLeod Bethune said, “The voice of organized labor has become one of the most powerful in the land and unless we have a part in that voice our people will not be heard.” But “our people” are then speaking as a part of organized labor. Labor’s interests may often be identical with the Negro’s interests; but Mr. Guerin fads to understand that, in the light of the white worker’s desire to achieve greater status, his aims and those of the Negro often clash quite bitterly.

All this is changing, to be sure, but so very, very slowly, and in such unexpected ways that only a madman would dare to predict the final Issue—if one can speak, in human affairs, of a final Issue. The world in which people find themselves is not simply a vindictive plot imposed on them from above; it is also the world they have helped to make. They have helped to make, and help to sustain it by sharing the assumptions which hold their world together. Mr. Guerin’s book, so far from having broken with any of the assumptions which have helped to cause such agony in the world—so far from being revolutionary or even “modern”—is a desperate cliche, is painfully, stiflingly old-fashioned. It is certainly not revolutionary today to suggest, that, whereas it was wrong for capitalists to murder workers, it is right for workers to murder capitalists; whereas it is wrong for whites to murder Negroes, Negroes may be pardoned for murdering whites. Mr. Guerin is unable to recognize a sadly persistent fact: the concepts contained in words like “freedom,” “justice,” “democracy” are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply. Since Mr. Guerin lacks any sense of history, except as something to be manipulated, and has really no respect whatever for the human personality, he is unable to give us any sense of the perpetual interaction of these forces on one another. Without this sense all states become abstractions, and lawless ones at that.

Mr. Guerin wants us all to go out right away and begin preparing for the equitable new state which will succeed to the present inequitable one; and should the present state seem reluctant to wither away, he has no objection to setting it to the torch. One of his heroes, John Brown, is one of the minor villains in J. C. Furnas’ admirable Goodbye To Uncle Tom. Mr. Furnas’ attitude can be gathered from his comment that “What Mrs. Stowe and John Brown did was not to create the forces that would free the slave but to make sure that North and South went into their crisis in the least promising state of mind.” In view of the enormous bitterness the Civil War has left us, this statement seems disquietingly close to the truth. It suggests that indignation and goodwill are not enough to make the world better. Clarity is needed, as well as charity, however difficult this may be to imagine, much less sustain, toward the other side. Perhaps the worst thing that can be said about social indignation is that it so frequently leads to the death of personal humility. Once that has happened, one has ceased to live in that world of men which one is striving so mightily to make over. One has entered into a dialogue with that terrifying deity, sometimes called History, previously, and perhaps again, to be referred to as God, to which no sacrifice in human suffering is too great.