W.D.Clinger
Philosopher
I saw what you did there.
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Merged Arday life and death
- Thread starter Nessie
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smartcooky
Penultimate Amazing
That all sounds like so much philosophical claptrap to me .. My American friend from Show Me Country would call it "just a bunch of hooey".
These elite institutions have spent 100s of years becoming elite and prestigious, only to throw it all away for the sake of woke ideology in less than a couple of decades.
SpuriusMaximus
Penultimate Amazing
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I have actually read all 12 pages of the thread, but sorry if I missed something. So here's what I'd add:
- Students of his also came forth, claiming that he routinely came late, and invariably said just vacuous nonsense. And at least one was accused of "white privilege" for arguing against one of Arday's points. Even without the plagiarism and the incredible claims about his past, that should have been more than enough to raise questions about whether he should be a professor after all. That's neither about race, nor about credentials (much as even those were fake, what with those "visiting professor" claims,) but just a plain old inability to do the job up to par.
I could show my (non-academic) employer a stack of diplomas and certifications and papers published and other actual achievements and prior jobs, but I'd still probably be let go if I can't code something useful and start accusing someone of some privilege if they disagree with my solution. In fact, the latter alone would have been a reason to be called for a chat with the nice HR lady.
- His incredible claims about his youth and education struggles are actually relevant, not extraneous stuff, when the speciality sub-field he's teaching is in EDUCATION. Then actively promoting wrong ideas about that and specifically the problems faced by autists in school becomes very relevant.
- Excusing his plagiarism by his poor autistic brain downright not being able to make sense of ideas without mimicking someone else's text is not an excuse, it's a self-confession of incompetence. A university professor is expected to have higher mental abilities than that.
I mean, for Pete's sake, he just confessed that he could be replaced by an in-house LLM trained on all the papers and dissertations they have. And the AI would probably actually do a better job.
I mean, imagine if a lawyer said his poor autistic brain can't make heads or tails of the law or precedents, without copying someone else's brief.
- Being sent to speech therapy is NOT the same thing as being non-verbal autistic all the way through the first half of middle school. Yeah, I got sent to logopaedics for a couple of weeks myself when I was 6 for pronouncing stuff wrong, and I'm on the autism spectrum. That does NOT mean non-verbal autistic. Non-verbal means not even learning speech. Those kids can at most speak a few words, and even then only around very close people (and many can't even do that,) or usually point at stuff, including images on an image board. Like point at an apple or the image of an apple and themselves if they want an apple. It's not a matter of pronouncing wrong, it's a case of speech being neurologically blocked for some reason or another.
He wouldn't even be in a normal school AT ALL, if he were non-verbal. He'd be a (very) special needs kid under special care at home. I don't even need to know what his classmates said: just the fact that he HAD any classmates in a normal school tells me that that's so much horse manure it could fertilise a hectare.
- As someone who's actually diagnosed with autism (albeit only Asperger's) it pisses me right off when people use some self-diagnosed autism as an excuse for bad behaviour. Cracked coined the term "Assburger Syndrome" for precisely those, and I think it sums it up.
- Students of his also came forth, claiming that he routinely came late, and invariably said just vacuous nonsense. And at least one was accused of "white privilege" for arguing against one of Arday's points. Even without the plagiarism and the incredible claims about his past, that should have been more than enough to raise questions about whether he should be a professor after all. That's neither about race, nor about credentials (much as even those were fake, what with those "visiting professor" claims,) but just a plain old inability to do the job up to par.
I could show my (non-academic) employer a stack of diplomas and certifications and papers published and other actual achievements and prior jobs, but I'd still probably be let go if I can't code something useful and start accusing someone of some privilege if they disagree with my solution. In fact, the latter alone would have been a reason to be called for a chat with the nice HR lady.
- His incredible claims about his youth and education struggles are actually relevant, not extraneous stuff, when the speciality sub-field he's teaching is in EDUCATION. Then actively promoting wrong ideas about that and specifically the problems faced by autists in school becomes very relevant.
- Excusing his plagiarism by his poor autistic brain downright not being able to make sense of ideas without mimicking someone else's text is not an excuse, it's a self-confession of incompetence. A university professor is expected to have higher mental abilities than that.
I mean, for Pete's sake, he just confessed that he could be replaced by an in-house LLM trained on all the papers and dissertations they have. And the AI would probably actually do a better job.
I mean, imagine if a lawyer said his poor autistic brain can't make heads or tails of the law or precedents, without copying someone else's brief.
- Being sent to speech therapy is NOT the same thing as being non-verbal autistic all the way through the first half of middle school. Yeah, I got sent to logopaedics for a couple of weeks myself when I was 6 for pronouncing stuff wrong, and I'm on the autism spectrum. That does NOT mean non-verbal autistic. Non-verbal means not even learning speech. Those kids can at most speak a few words, and even then only around very close people (and many can't even do that,) or usually point at stuff, including images on an image board. Like point at an apple or the image of an apple and themselves if they want an apple. It's not a matter of pronouncing wrong, it's a case of speech being neurologically blocked for some reason or another.
He wouldn't even be in a normal school AT ALL, if he were non-verbal. He'd be a (very) special needs kid under special care at home. I don't even need to know what his classmates said: just the fact that he HAD any classmates in a normal school tells me that that's so much horse manure it could fertilise a hectare.
- As someone who's actually diagnosed with autism (albeit only Asperger's) it pisses me right off when people use some self-diagnosed autism as an excuse for bad behaviour. Cracked coined the term "Assburger Syndrome" for precisely those, and I think it sums it up.
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smartcooky
Penultimate Amazing
Well that might be so for you, but it is not so for me. Say three candidates are "able to the the job", a black man, a woman and a white man, and the white guy is clearly more knowledgeable and a better candidate than the other two. Do you think I should pick the better candidate?
SpuriusMaximus
Penultimate Amazing
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I mean, IDEALLY it should be the best. No arguments there. But to return to the topic it doesn't look like they even cared about someone being able to do a decent job. I mean, come on, even if they're gonna do DEI, they could at least pick someone who isn't obviously incompetent AND a provable pathological liar. Plausible deniability and all that. I'm sure they had at least SOME black students -- many of which even female, for extra points -- who could put in a decent job performance, and be at least seemingly promoted on merit over a few years from TA to professor. I mean, come on, there must be a lot who didn't plagiarise their thesis and didn't make up provably false claims about their qualifications, and can put in an honest day's work as a professor.
(In addition to many who were probably genuinely qualified. They excluded even against genuinely competent blacks to rush to have him skip straight to being a DEI poster kid.)
I mean, it's literally like hiring a guy who's bragging in a pub about how he could coach the UK to victory in the world cup (as half the drunks do) to actually being the coach, just because it fills some DEI quota. One could have picked a recently retired black footballer with good athletic results instead and had plausible deniability as to why. And better results out of them.
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theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
Cambridge sure didn't make that mistake.
angrysoba
Philosophile
I expect different people have different motives. For many, the problem around Arday was a case of straight-up plagiarism and instutional failure. The fact that he also turned the legal guns onto anyone asking questions made things worse for him.
Also, as Sarah Ditum said in her piece, Arday may have ended up having his story amplified by the fact that there were not as many other things in the UK to talk about such as Parliament or the World Cup. Count Binface vs Farage was not quite enough, clearly.
And for some, I would expect race was a big factor. The dreary "woke vs anti-woke" dialectic doesn't even require much thought. All the key concepts and cliches can be pressed into service at a moment's notice: "white supremacists attack Black scholar and ignore white perfidy" vs. "the woke mind virus has meant Cambridged has DEId [see what I did there?]"
There's plenty of evidence that a LOT of academia involves Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype, as Stuart Ritchie has written about here. And not just in the "soft" subjects where it doesn't matter to anyone whether, say, someone plagiarized a book about Thomas Paine and got a load of facts wrong, or even in subjects where we might draw conclusions about people's honesty from papers which were themselves written using fabricated data, as in the case of Dan Ariely and Franscesca Gino. The former is still a professor at Duke University, and Franscesca Gino is involved in a lawsuit with Harvard University. They were already fairly well-known, particularly in certain fields, but most of the blowback to their research issues have been confined to fairly obscure outlets.
But other fraud is much more serious, such as in medical research, which we have talked about here.... Link
It's worth having a look at some of the outrageous cases of fraud in areas such as cancer research, Alzheimer's research, and anaesthesiology.
In the latter cases, numerous deaths may well be attributed to fraud as well as the misuse of millions of pounds or funding given that such medical research is far more expensive than whatever it was that Arday claimed to be researching. I think there was far less publicity for those people. Most would never even have heard their names, still less seen their pictures splashed across the front pages of all the major newspapers.
I think it is fair to say that in Arday's case, it was more than just the "academic work" that people were interested in.
angrysoba
Philosophile
Yeah, the blog seems to be a record of a legitimate challenge he completed.
There are some comments on some of the blog entries as well which suggest earlier marathons were about the same pace.
The archive didn't preserve the photographs. I imagine some must exist somewhere.
SpuriusMaximus
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I mean, maybe, probably even for SOME, but the problem they were complaining about is very real. And one can't even do a proper Genetic Fallacy on it (much as it's a textbook fallacy anyway,) since it didn't come ONLY from those.
Plus, as they say, even a broken clock is right twice a day. In this case it was right. Sometimes even a bona-fide anti-woke racist can point out a real case that IS a real problem.
And we don't even have to take them as a source. His claims are obviously, independently-verifiably false, regardless of any motivation of whoever pointed them out first or the motivations of whoever joined the pile later.
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angrysoba
Philosophile
Of course! I said as much, and it has been shown by plenty of others that he was absolutely guilty of plagiarism and various other forms of fraud.
On the marathon issue, I have run a number of them, including one where I broke 3 hours. Personally, if I knew I couldn’t get under 5 hours (and I think I could even in my 70s) I wouldn’t enter one, because many of Arday’s times don’t involve running, just fastish walking.
The other suspect thing is starting his runs at 3am. Even with walking 42km, you need to get a good night’s sleep, so was he going to bed at 7pm every night? Very doubtful.
He has a history of lying. I don’t believe his marathon claims.
The other suspect thing is starting his runs at 3am. Even with walking 42km, you need to get a good night’s sleep, so was he going to bed at 7pm every night? Very doubtful.
He has a history of lying. I don’t believe his marathon claims.
Rolfe
Adult human female
Maybe he did that to have the roads clear if traffic and other pedestrians. But he'd have been starting in the dark, even in summer. I think he did something, but just what he did is anyone's guess - he's an unreliable narrator.
One thing's for sure. "25-year-old gym teacher walks 27 miles a day, 30 times in 35 days" is a lot less impressive than "university don in his 40s runs 30 marathons in 35 days", which is what a lot of people were taking from that.
One thing's for sure. "25-year-old gym teacher walks 27 miles a day, 30 times in 35 days" is a lot less impressive than "university don in his 40s runs 30 marathons in 35 days", which is what a lot of people were taking from that.
smartcooky
Penultimate Amazing
Indeed. He was a serial liar... but we're supposed to uncritically believe this one thing? In the spirit of Trans-Tasman slang... yeah, nah!!
Serial fantasists like him usually use a kernel of truth in their claims, then exaggerate them.... a few £thousands raised for charity become £millions; a couple of marathons become 30, a few miles run each day become 600.
I’ve been in London several times and always got up early to walk or run, mainly on jet lagged days. You have the roads to yourself even in the centre of the city up to past 6am. But even after that, unless you want to run through Westminster, the roads are easy to navigate for runners. There is absolutely no need to start runs at 3am.
The blog gives answers to that, and many other questions. Whether the answers are reliable is another matter, of course.
Vixen
Penultimate Amazing
Please stop promulgating incorrect information about me.
BTW you need to reevaluate your belief that your degree 'a hard science' is better or harder than what you refer to as 'soft'. Pure mathematicians will argue that this is far more difficult than applied mathematics. History and English are not at all 'easy' subjects. The sheer volume of texts an English student has to get through is staggering, from Beowulf through Chaucer, Shakespeare and not to mention a whole bunch of foreign language stuff. History requires incredible analytical and essay writing skills. Lets not even 'go there' for Philosophy which needs tremendous understanding of abstract ideas and concepts. Yes, your subject is categorised as a' hard science' being as it does based on physical measurable phenomena and needs good spatial skills. It doesn't follow it is 'hard' as in difficult, although it might well be for those without the necessary spatial skills.
Arday was a Sociology professor, specialising in mentoring in trainee PE teachers. Yes, some believe Sociology is a 'Micky Mouse' subject but hey, Arday wasn't claiming to be an airline pilot or a brain surgeon.
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Skeptical Greg
Agave Wine Connoisseur
Really depends on the job.
smartcooky
Penultimate Amazing
Back from your flouncy I see. Looks like @GlennB wins his bet!!
Sauce for the goose lady
No. I don't
Sociology IS a Mickey Mouse degree
SpuriusMaximus
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On the other hand, I can testify first hand that stuff like anthropology is easy street for any BS-er. I actually had a university manual which showed bedouin (arabic muslim) women in a tent, and argue, "see, they're happy in their own way." While arguing cultural relativism. Like... suuure, they were subjected to genital mutilation without anaesthesia as children, got married as children without any choice, have to wear a ninja mask, can be unilaterally divorced, can be stoned (and not in a herbal way) for stuff a male wouldn't even get raised eyebrows for, INCLUDING being raped, can be beaten into submission if they don't spread their legs for their husbands, face brutal discrimination to get a job... but... yeah... suuure... they're "happy" 
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SpuriusMaximus
Penultimate Amazing
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To be fair, it didn't use to be. It used to be pretty much a subset of statistics which is a subset of mathematics. What it BECAME... well, I'm flabbergasted too.