“Whistleblowers always get punished”

In one of our comment threads about how scholars and journalists should be thanking, not smearing, people who ask for replications, Allan Stam writes:

The corollary to all this, and closely related to Javert’s paradox, is the social law: Whistleblowers always get punished.

The Javert paradox, as regular readers will recall, goes like this: Suppose you find a problem with published work. If you just point it out once or twice, the authors of the work are likely to do nothing. But if you really pursue the problem, then you look like a Javert, that is, like an obsessive, a “hater,” someone who needs to “get a life.” It’s complicated, because some critics really do obsess over unimportant details.

On the other hand, details that are unimportant in themselves can be important as indicating bigger problems. For example, the Nudgelords hyped some junk science. In one way, that’s no big deal: everybody makes mistakes. But their lack of interest in their mistakes and their willingness to memory-hole these errors suggests a deeper problem, in that their workflow is lacking that important feedback loop that can allow themselves to identify places where their model for the world has failed. A lack of interest in confronting the failure of one’s model: that’s something that bothered me with so many Bayesians back in the early 1990s, motivating much of my work on posterior predictive checking, and it bothers me today.

The point is, sometimes to find the problems you have to look at the details in detail, which takes the sort of extra effort that can make you look obsessive—heck, maybe it is obsessive. But, so what? And, sure, sometimes a critic will be obsessive and also just be mistaken, and that’s annoying, but there’s little we can do except to try our best to respond to those mistaken criticisms when they arise.

Now back to Stam’s point.

I pretty much agree with what he’s saying: whistleblowing just about always seems to be a bad career move. The clarification I’d like to make is that the “punishment” received by a whistleblower is not necessary anyone directly trying directly trying to punish anyone.

Here’s how it goes. Scholar A does something wrong—maybe it’s flat-out cheating, maybe it’s just bad work that the scholar doesn’t want anyone to re-examine, which, OK, that attitude is a form of cheating too (Clarke’s law!). Scholar B points out the problem.

At this point, no “whistleblowing” has happened. “Whistleblowing” occurs following two more steps: (1) Scholar A, instead of behaving properly by acknowledging and considering the criticism, instead evades it or flat-out lies about it; (2) Scholar B, instead of just letting this be the end, keeps on about it. I guess that even this is not necessarily whistleblowing. Also the whistleblower has to be on the inside.

OK, so at this point it’s a negative-sum game. Scholar A can get the reputation of someone who does bad work and refuses to learn from mistakes. Scholar B can get the reputation of not being a team player. The more this goes on, the more that both scholars are hurt. Even if final consensus if close to Scholar B’s position, so that Scholar B has “won” the intellectual and social argument, it’s still likely to be a net loss in that Scholar B gets some reputation as a difficult person. Conversely, even if Scholar A “wins” in the sense of there being a consensus judgment that the criticism was misguided, there can still be a vague cloud that hangs over Scholar A’s head.

Part of this whole net-loss thing arises because most academics get no negative coverage at all. In politics, any success brings some negative coverage, and getting into a fight can be worth it, by helping you stand out from the crowd. In academia, you want to be known for positive contributions. At least, in science academia. Humanities and some of social science seem different: there, I guess it’s more common for scholars to make their names through controversy.

Anyway, here’s my point. A scientific dispute involving claims of unethical behavior can easily end up hurting both sides. Even if nobody’s trying to punish a whistleblower, there are negative social consequences, and in that sense I think Stam is correct.