Merged Arday life and death

[Emily's Cat]

Not true at all. All hard sciences are highly abstract at the higher theoretical level. As for being objectively black or white: not so! My ex-SO did double Philosophy and Physics (as a science). He specialised in Quantum Theory. There is a HUGE amount of fierce debate, disagreement and controversy at the Quantum Physics level because it is so abstract.

Not because it's abstract. Because a whole lot of it is unfalsifiable. It's not even a hypothesis, as we don't even know how to test the idea. The math works, absolutely. And the pieces hang together logically. And what has been tested has had results that are remarkably close to the predicted outcome. All of that makes it likely correct. And maybe it will be. But a lot of the focus right now is on figuring out how to test some of those ideas in the first place.

Don't forget that the geocentric theory of the solar system was accepted as true because what we could observe and test at the time was in very close alignment to what the theory predicted... within the degree of accuracy available at the time. Then the heliocentric model came along, and it became the accepted theory. For a while. Until we start started measuring more and more accurately and found that the orbits weren't nice neat circles, and there are comets on long orbits, and all sorts of other weird stuff out there and then we came up with orbital mechanics. Which led to relativity. Which led to dark matter and string theory and mirror world theory and all the rest that we don't yet have a way to measure and test.

There have been a lot of wrong theories out there that gained ground and debate for a while. And ultimately, they were proven to be wrong by better and more accurate methods of testing the predictions that those wrong theories made. They were falsifiable. And the ones that have stood the test of time and become the accepted theory (for now) are those that 1) made observations of a real phenomena and found a pattern in it then 2) came up with a relational premise that predicted the next observations well (within the means of measurement of the time), and 3) was independently replicated by someone else, preferably many times over.

That means of measurement is a really important part of all of this. The entire reason that there is so much debate and controversy over those theories is that we don't have a way to test and measure them. And there are multiple ideas out there that have some observations that didn't jive with the current framework, and came up with some math that explains it to within some degree of tolerance... but we don't have a way of measuring the proposed predictions to see if they fail.

All of which is interesting, but also arguably off topic. Meh. The point is that even the hard sciences have their soft spots. Soft sciences aren't better or worse than hard sciences, they're just more exposed to cultural pressures due to the different expectation of proof and evidence.

 

[theprestige]

well they could have and they didn't, and there are people who are and should be genuinely concerned that, and then there's people that aren't. if it was a boring stem guy that lied and cheated and made up stories, a lot of people wouldn't give a ◊◊◊◊ about it, and people will pretend they're not doing that when they are. and it's not a mystery when that's going on.

Give me a boring stem person who lied and cheated in their academic career, and had plenty of evidence of such lies and got hired into a position they were unqualifed for, then were boosted by the university that hired them and lauded as a great academic mind, who then tried to intimdate and silence people who said "hey, they're a cheat and here's the evidence", and we'll see whether or not I give a ◊◊◊◊ about it.

Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos.

 

[Emily's Cat]

I can't see he's done anything wrong.

Arday lied about the work they did. They took someone else's idea and words, and presented it in a manner that other people without prior knowledge were likely to assume where his own product. That's the entire point of plagiarism being unethical in the first place, and in some cases subject to civil or criminal charges of reckless disregard or fraud.

Then Arday used the results of that unethical behavior in order to secure a prestigious and lucrative position. Very likely (but still speculatively) due to other back-story embellishments and/or fabrications intended to deceive the hiring committee.

Then leveraged that prestige and the reputation of the school in order to further gain some degree of minor celebrity within academic circles, in addition to increasing their own financial gain.

You don't see anything wrong with that? Like nothing at all?

I could contact you, say I'm a journalist for THE WASHINGTON POST and that I have found out things about you from when you were a student, which I am about to publish as a major scandal. How would you feel? Would you not go into a panic when you remember that time you were given too much change at the donut store and you failed to hand it back or a hundred and one things go through your mind, when you said on a dating site you were 6'2" but are really one foot shorter, or what about that time you made a clever quote in a dissertation without giving credit because you thought the source would be obvious to the examiner...but now you are a leading professor at Harvard; your whole reputation could be ruined, and you are asked to resign or be sacked. So you start panicking, have a nervous breakdown. Your academic friend tells me to lay off because you can't cope with my queries. So you think I have a greater right to badger you based on a self-righteous hunch and the sniff of a scoop, than your right to not be contacted?

Vixen, buddy. This reads as almost personal for you. If that's the case, I'm sorry.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Seriously, the GUARDIAN reporters, one of whom is said to have exchanged bad feelings between himself and Arday in the past, set about joining the mainstream media pile-on, claiming to check the various stories disseminated by the likes of Cofnas et al, decided erroneously that where they could not establish something happened, then it followed - is their poor logic - that Arday lied. So, they asked the local butcher if they had sold a pig's head at the alleged time. They said, no. This led to a conclusion Arday fantasised it. Dreadful rubbish! Another investigator found that a hog had been sold or found at around the date concerned. Whether or not there was a pig's head delivered to his family home can't be determined by asking the nearest butcher! Rolfe claims this story can't be true because Brits are well-disposed to immigrants who behave themselves and are polite, and in any case, it's Muslims who are targeted by pork. But many Africans are also Muslim. So you can't prove something by stating that it's opposite is more likely. The GUARDIAN's most damning claim is that Arday asked them, "Why don't you just believe me?" which to my mind is an absolutely fair question. Why automatically disbelieve everything the dreadlocked Cambridge Professor tells you as though it is a given he should not be in that post? To add insult to injury, after Arday died, Katherine Viner, GUARDIAN editor, doubled down and made out it was their duty to investigate him.

You can't possibly be serious.

You seem to be accepting an incredibly shocking and movie-esque claim with no shred of evidence at all... because they can't prove it's not true?
Furthermore, you seem to be suggesting that because Arday is black... we shouldn't even be allowed to seek proof?

This isn't a religion, and even if it were, I have no problem being an atheist.

 

[Emily's Cat]

University of California, Berkeley:

In 1957, a group of faculty members, most of them from the departments of Mathematics and Philosophy, initiated a pioneering interdisciplinary graduate program leading to the degree of Ph.D. in Logic and the Methodology of Science. [....]​

​

Ph.D. work in logic can also be carried out entirely within one of the departments of Mathematics, Philosophy, Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (see Graduate Study in Logic at UC Berkeley). The program in Logic and the Methodology of Science is intended for students whose interests lie in more than one of these fields.​

Carnegie Mellon University, Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences:

Bachelor of Science in Logic and Computation​

And there are many, many departments of philosophy and departments of mathematics and departments of computer science that award undifferentiated BA, BS, MS, or PhD degrees to students whose course work and research focus upon logic.

A freshman-level philosophy course on logic for poets does not cover the entire field of logic.

That doesn't make much difference though. Do you have any idea how much other philosophy branches and applications there are? Seriously, neither of those is even relevant to the suggestion Hans made, which was regarding a PhD in Logic alone. Your examples are all Logic as applied to something, not logic in and of itself.

 

[Emily's Cat]

And there are many other kinds of logic, including a few (such as intuitionistic logic) that have important practical applications.

It's a "method" of mapping a person's ideas and beliefs onto "propositions" and then mathematically manipulating those "propositions" to "solve" for "truth".



It's assumes truth in the premise. It begs the question.

 

[Emily's Cat]

I'm sorry, Hans, but you are completely out of your depth here.

Simple counterexample: Take A to be an event with probability 1/2. Take B to be the same event as A. Then P(A∧B) = 1/2, but P(A)*P(B) = 1/4.

Okay, I'm well out of my depth here...

 

[Emily's Cat]

Am I the only one horrified by the idea that Arday may have had a large impact on his peers in academia? Referencing him in your own work can't possibly be good for your work

I honestly hadn't made it that far down the chain. I got stuck at the overall impact it will have for other similarly aged black people across the board. Not because they individually have done anything to merit such scrutiny and questioning... but because trust in the system that is supposed to backstop their expertise has been weakened.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Semantic Scholar shows 30 publications, 751 citations, and an h-index of 12. So yes, a number of people were citing him.

(ETA: Something's screwy with Semantic Scholar. The link above reports the numbers shown. A second search on the same name came up with a different summary for the same author, reporting only 5 publications, 15 citations, and an h-index of 15. That second search came up with papers that weren't listed by the first search. This screwiness isn't unique to Arday. A search on "W D Clinger" came back with 22 papers I wrote or co-authored, but clicking on my name as they listed it for those papers brought up a web page that says I have only 4 publications, of which only one was cited more than 11 times.)

Well aren't you special.

I actually mean that, you have an impressive background.

 

[Emily's Cat]

The Jason Arday delusion - UnHerd

archived 20 Aug 2026 11:19:15 UTC

archive.ph

This hits hard:

Or perhaps commentators are illustrating a wider thesis: that it is a bad idea to let impressions of a person’s abilities be swayed by facts about their skin colour, black or white.

Sadly so does this:

Admittedly, this is a Right-wing position now, to the great shame of the Left; but it only counts as viciously racist if you are nuts.

Excellent article.

 

[smartcooky]

Do you think his subsequent work radically improved from his thesis writing? That would actually be rather remarkable, if true.

I doubt it.

There are also plenty of commenters who have said his output since his degree is not not exactly stellar.

 

[Emily's Cat]

For the umpty-ninth time, discrimination on the grounds of race, sex, sexuality, religion, disability or pregnancy is illegal in the UK, under Employment Law. Employers are not allowed to discriminate, except under limited circumstances.

... and therefore they never do?

... because nobody ever breaks the law?

 

[Emily's Cat]

Utter nonsense. As mentioned before, once you get in at entry level, your previous qualifications no longer matter. For example, one of my bosses in Insolvency Practice left school at fifteen, failed his eleven-plus, yet went on to be one of the highest earning Insolvency Practitioners in the industry. Nobody cared he had no O-Levels, never mind a good degree or a chartered accountancy like his peers. (I should say, regulations have now tightened up and you have to pass the tough JIEB exams.). The point is, Arday WAS a PhD and he was a Professor. He became a Professor at Glasgow Uni in 2022. He was not taken on 'because he was a black dude'.

You really don't get it, I don't think. I'm pretty sure that most of us who are unhappy about this are upset about the damage this does to academia and the entire educational system, and we're also upset about the very high likelihood that this will cast doubt on the qualifications of other people of a similar age and educational background, including and especially minorities.

It's not about Arday specifically. It's about the consequences of this. And the fact that the consequences would have been completely avoidable with just the basic standards of academic ethics.

But the frustration with you, and others who hold similar views, is a completely different thing. It's independent of the anger about the above. The frustration with people defending Arday so strenuously is that they're effectively defending and trying to normalize ethical breaches. That youse are trying to normalize ethical breaches being disregarded on the basis of race is actually offensive.

 

[Emily's Cat]

This is just hyperbole. Losers also write history. There are plenty of books about the Vietnam War written by American scholars. The Crusades have been written about by European writers. Besides, while popular films and books aimed at a general audience will pander to their expectations, a lot of academic history is not meant to be written as rah-rah jingoism, although failure to do so is what often leads to accusations of historians and academics being commie bastards.

Of course people have different interpretations. But that doesn’t mean we have to assume there is no truth of the matter. It just means, as I said before, that this truth is hard to get at. It is not a license to just make ◊◊◊◊ up.

Sure! I said as much. You and I are agreeing. But again, it doesn’t mean there’s no fact of the matter just because we have to be provisional about our conclusions.

Whether or not there is a fact of the matter is irrelevant if there's no way to test and demonstrate whether it is or is not a fact in the first place.

Again, there is value and use in soft sciences. But there is a meaningful difference between them and hard sciences that is almost entirely due to scientific method, falsifiability, and replicability of the proposed theory. Two things can be different, without one being superior or inferior to the other - you know that right?

I have not said otherwise. But again, you are making a kind of error that postmodernists make. They point to trivially true things like the fact we approach things from a perspective and assume that this makes truth and falsehood relative. What next “lived experience”? “My truth”?

In what way do you think I'm doing this? Because I very strongly believe I am absolutely NOT doing that. I despise moral relativism as a philosophy. It's a destructive and self-serving view of society.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

Honest to reason, the fact that there's even such a thing as a professor of "Sociology of Physical Education" is the heart of the damned problem. It's an inane and insane thing to make a whole class about. It's self-indulgent poppycock. It's academic onanism.

Honestly, I was wondering the same. Sociology is -- or should be -- about statistics including demographics. How much can one even research when it's limited to the narrow slice of PE in school. How many people need a course in specifically that? I mean, it's not even the sociology of sports, or even school sports, but about the even narrower slice of PE. Like, ok, you can make it the subject of a thesis or a paper or two, but after that what else is even left to study there?

 

[Emily's Cat]

...Try Cyril Burt. What do you have to say about him? (Well, he did die before being disavowed.)

Oh look, a psychologist misusing statistics to justify their foregone conclusion!

More seriously... I hadn't heard of Burt, and frankly I'm pissed off that I haven't. The heritability of intelligence and behavioral correlation between twins are both concepts that still underpin a whole lot of "what we accept as known truth". It calls into question every bit of research - and the conclusions propagated from that research - that has relied on either of those concepts axiomatically.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Archaeology is actually very practical. It's rolling up your sleeves and going on digs. Those bits of ceramic over time and as compared to other excavations eventually lead to the ability to differentiate say, Comb Ware culture from, say, Stone Age. It's not guess work, it's fine cataloguing. It is no more or less scientific than Chemistry.

Okay? Why do you persist in thinking that I'm bad mouthing archaeology or sociology or other soft sciences in some general way?

Although to be candid, I am unable to see any practicality in being able to differentiate comb ware culture from stone age. I don't know what comb ware culture even is, and I don't know what relevance stone age culture has any of our lives. There may well be some... but I have no idea what it would be.

 

[d4m10n]

For the umpty-ninth time he was CLEARED.

As a skeptic, you're not going to independently check whether that was a good call?

Entire sentences were copy pasted, IIRC.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

Okay, I'm well out of my depth here...

Well, let me explain in simple terms what I'm doing with probabilities there. You know how people commonly say "that's probably true"? Well, in binary logic that "probably" is either 0% or 100%. There is no such thing as a half-true proposition. If I say that my cat is female, that's 100% true. If I say that my cat is male, that's 0% true. If I say all cats are female, that's also 0% true, aka, false. I'm not talking about "what's the probability that a mackerel tabby cat is female?"

I'm simply mapping "true" to "1.0" and "false" to "0.0". Then you can use the same maths that works for other probabilities, and get binary logic. By using maths not philosophy.

Granted, that's taking the harder way, but just to illustrate a point: we're already perfectly able to prove logic by just maths. Same as we no longer have to go to philosophy to figure out how fast an apple falls.

 

[W.D.Clinger]

That doesn't make much difference though. Do you have any idea how much other philosophy branches and applications there are?

Yes.

And there are many other kinds of logic, including a few (such as intuitionistic logic) that have important practical applications.

It's a "method" of mapping a person's ideas and beliefs onto "propositions" and then mathematically manipulating those "propositions" to "solve" for "truth".



It's assumes truth in the premise. It begs the question.

You don't know what you're talking about.

When both of us were in high school or undergraduates at the University of Texas, I counted Allen Emerson as a friend of mine. In 2007, he was one of three computer scientists given a Turing Award (the most prestigious award available to computer scientists) for using a specific variety of temporal logic (which is a modal logic) to analyze nondeterministic computations. That logic has been used to analyze many network protocols, proving the correctness of some and discovering the incorrectness of others.

Ridiculing logic while unknowingly using network protocols that were developed using logic is amusing.

Sadly, Allen died two years ago. I didn't know of that until I was writing this spoiler.

Okay, I'm well out of my depth here...

True.

Well aren't you special.

I actually mean that, you have an impressive background.

I have a solid background in logic (three different research universities have assigned me to teach logic at all levels ranging from freshman through PhD). My knowledge of philosophy, however, is shallow outside of logic and related subjects. (As an undergraduate, I took one sophomore-level course in symbolic logic (for which the prerequisite was the sort of freshman-level course in logic taken by @HansMustermann, but that prerequisite was waived for math students) and three upper-division philosophy courses (philosophy of logic, logic and set theory, and philosophy of mathematics). I also graded for Woody Bledsoe's PhD-level course on automatic theorem proving. (University rules would not allow a graduate student to grade work done by other graduate students, but I was an undergraduate.) As a graduate student, I took several PhD-level courses in logic and related subjects such as decidability, recursion theory, set theory, and set-theoretic topology; that decidability course was taught by Michael Rabin, a beautiful man and wonderful teacher who (as I just now learned) died earlier this year. Logic was one of the three specific areas emphasized in my oral qualifying exam. Michael Sipser was a member of my thesis committee. ETA: My thesis advisor, Carl Hewitt, had a fair claim to being one of those who invented logic programming; he died in 2022.)