The Anodyne Alternative

"...in accordance with the Fascist policy of intellectual freedom and free expression of opinion by those who are qualified to hold it..." (From the announcement at the beginning of each of Ezra Pound's radio broadcasts from Rome during WWII.)

Philip Moriarty has been challenging me to consider alternative situations, in which it would be clearer that Tim Hunt's infamous 39 words would be inappropriate. In the comments to my earlier post he writes:

If I were to stand up in front of an audience of applicants for our physics courses -- and let's just say that they're mature students applying for our Foundation Year (so we can avoid any silly patronising counter-arguments about students not being adults) --- and start off with "My trouble with girls..." and say exactly what Hunt said (those precise 39 words) and follow it up with "But seriously...", would that be fine with you?

[...]

When it comes to being tolerant of different views, how about we replace "girls" with any other group -- "gays", "Irish", "Jews", "blacks" etc. --- and repeat Hunt's 'joke' word for word. And again, remember that I fully appreciate the idea that it was meant to be self-deprecating. We can dream up many scenarios/'gedankenexperiments' where I could well be making a similar 'joke' in a self-deprecating fashion, particularly when it comes to the Irish. (As you know, I'm Irish). It still doesn't make it witty or anything more than cringe-makingly naff.

The pre-emption of my "silly patronising counter-arguments" stems from a Twitter exchange about a scenario he suggested on his blog:

I’m undergraduate admissions tutor for the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Nottingham. A couple of weeks ago I stood up in front of hundreds of potential applicants and their parents for two days running at our open days and gave talks about the teaching and research we do in the School and the various aspects of the physics courses available at Nottingham.

Let’s say that I made the following “gag” at some point during my open day talk (or, indeed, opened up with it):

“Let me tell you about my trouble with girls in physics courses. Three things happen when they are in the lab: you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them they cry. Perhaps we should make separate labs for boys and girls taking our courses?

Now, seriously, I’m impressed by the strides made by girls in our physics courses over the years I’ve been at Nottingham. Science needs women, and you should do science, despite all the obstacles, and despite monsters like me.”

Then, when asked by a student during the Q&A session at the end of my talk to clarify my comments, I say:

“I’m really sorry if I have caused any offence. I was only being honest.”

Would my Head of School be justified in calling me into his office, explaining why my comments weren’t entirely appropriate for that audience, and asking me to stand down from the Admissions Tutor aspect of my job?

I agree that there'd be something here for the Head of School to look into. What Philip thinks is "silly" is my intuition that, in the case of prospective students, the remarks become less appropriate (and a reprimand therefore more appropriate) because the audience is less "adult". I think the presence of the parents is what makes that example so clear. I thought that's why he put them there, actually.

In any case, there's an important thing to keep in mind when comparing it to the Hunt case. However we re-imagine the situation, we have to remember that Hunt spoke about his "trouble with girls in the lab" well-aware that he was talking at a luncheon to honour "women in science". That shared understanding of why he was speaking was part of his context. It contextualizes the specific irony of calling himself a chauvinist in a way that is entirely absent when talking to either coming undergraduates or graduate students.

To see what I mean, consider two examples where this relationship between the joke and the audience is maintained. Instead of making it a joke told about women in the lab to any audience, make it a joke about Tim's trouble with the audience itself. I'm going to try to construct a context in which it would be almost certainly innocent, and perhaps even witty, and one in which it would just as certainly fail, and indeed, would come off utterly vile unless it was exceptionally funny.

Suppose Hunt was speaking to an audience of children (something he apparently does often and well.) Suppose he said, "Let me tell you about my trouble with children in the lab..." Remember that he's talking directly to the children as an adult, even an "old man" (from their point of view). He's probably going to invoke some stereotypes about how, say, "curious" the children are and how much "mischief" they therefore cause, and he might play those off against some "ageist" stereotypes about himself and how children befuddle, even "distract" him. And he might end with the punchline that "maybe that's why we have altogether separate labs, one for children (in school) and one for adults." It would be natural to go on from here saying, "But seriously, we actually need you children in the lab because, however distracting and disruptive you are, it's that curiosity that drives the whole thing. So I really, really, really hope grumpy old monsters like me don't hold you back."

Now, to pick a group off Philip's list, imagine Hunt being invited to speak at an NIH Black Scientists Association luncheon. It's almost impossible to imagine a "my trouble" joke here that could conceivably be in good taste, and that is of course Philip's point. But I stress the almost. Suppose Neil deGrasse Tyson had spoken immediately before him. And suppose we gave Louie C.K. and Chris Rock a week, working together, to come up with a toast that started with "You know, it's surprising that a white supremacist like me should be invited to speak here today. Let me tell you about my trouble..."** The difficulty setting, if you will, on this one is really high. In fact, there's a good reason I'm not even trying to imagine a punchline here. It's above my pay grade, as they say. And above Tim Hunt's, I'm sure. But, like I say, it's not* completely inconceivable that Louie or Rock could come up with a stereotype-dismantling joke that conforms to the terms of Philip's challenge.

I think the appropriateness of Hunt's infamous 39 words lies somewhere between the entirely innocuous bantering with children and the dangerously incendiary BSA situation. I thought the joke was worth trying and, if it fell flat, that should not have made the news.

Pay grade is actually an interesting notion here. After all, Tim Hunt is not a professional comedian but a professional scientist, and in the BSA example we need serious professional help. (Philip's challenge, i.e., the "set up", doesn't call so much for constructing a joke here as dismantling a bomb.) In his comments, Philip adduces as evidence of his own sense of humour that he finds Rowan Atkinson funny in Black Adder. That's a pretty high bar, if you ask me, for a luncheon toast. But there's something telling about this comparison. The occasion to denounce Tim Hunt's joke as "stupid" and "unfunny" seems to be that he stepped out of his professionally assigned role of speaker of scientific truths about cell division. He was not duly qualified to make a joke, certainly not one involving women. It's interesting that the "free expression of opinion by those who are qualified to hold it" is an actual Fascist policy.

What we might call the Seoul Incident, which sounds like a Robert Ludlum novel about a precipitating event that puts the world on the brink of global fascism, suggests that science journalists fancy themselves enforcers of a similar policy. As Connie St Louis put it, Hunt was not to think he would "get away with it". In a recent interview, Hunt suggested that, to avoid all this trouble (!), he could have just offered some "anodyne" remarks about the ERC's policy on gender equality. I think a lot of people do exactly that, in part for fear of being "Hunted". Let's call it the Anodyne Alternative, which also sounds like a Robert Ludlum novel. A thriller, to be sure. Unlike the luncheons that conform to the policy.

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*OOPS. Missed this word in the original posting.

**Update (02/12/15 at 16:15): I intentionally left off a cognate of "black people" here in order to give our two experts some freedom about how to make the shift that would be analogous to the one from "women" to "girls". Hunt's use of the latter has been interpreted by some as a slur, though I think it's plausible that he just means to invoke "boys and girls". It's important to me to point out that I've chosen this scenario, not just because the joke would almost certainly appear racist, but because, in the context of a BSA luncheon, that context would be the only saving grace, the only element that could make the joke work. Without that (i.e., imagine the context to be an AAAS luncheon), the problem is not difficult but, I would think, impossible to solve.

A Delicate Bias

"There are divergences of humor that cannot be reconciled." (William Carlos Williams)

I generally approach the Tim Hunt affair as a game played on what Rosmarie Waldrop called "the lawn of excluded middle", a space of ambiguity not governed too much by the "venerable old law of logic" it puns. Nabokov said that "a good formula to test the quality of a novel is, in the long run, a merging of the precision of poetry and the intuition of science", and, to my mind, following the story of Tim Hunt's "trouble with girls" is increasingly like following the plot of a novel. Those who still continue to roll their eyes at my interest in it, don't, I think, really understand the pleasure of this kind of exploration, the delight one can take in understanding the details.

Nor do they understand, I think, the ethical imperative of taking a detailed interest in the fall (and possible rise) of a man you have intentionally humiliated. Anyone who participated in the public shaming of Tim Hunt, should, out of decency, occasionally revisit the story and ask, What did finally happen to Sir Tim? Did he get the punishment he deserved? Was he treated fairly, in the long run? It is to that end that I'm applying my intuition and my precision.

Waldrop tells us that "the four points of the compass are equal on the lawn of excluded middle where full maturity of meaning takes time the way you eat a fish, morsel by morsel, off the bone." It's this "full maturity" of the meaning of Hunt's improvised remarks that I am after and that I believe his public shaming entirely neglected. Connie St Louis hastily tweeted her misunderstanding of his remarks. Deborah Blum and Ivan Oransky rashly lent her their support. But no one had really heard what he actually said, it seems, and were only hurt by it in so far as they didn't understand him.

A recent example on Twitter reveals the humorless logic of his accusers. When KOFWST made their "final statement" strongly censuring "foreign commentators" for their "serious distortions" of events, Deborah Blum of course promoted it with a tweet. Retweeting Blum, Bill Hooker commented, "Right. So. All you shitweasels who lied and twisted the story and spread disinformation can EAT A BAG OF DICKS," which Blum, in turn, interpreted as directed at her, retweeting with the note, "Another classy supporter of #tim hunt speaks up." But Hooker, it turns out, was merely paraphrasing KOFWST and was therefore acting as "another classy" attacker of Tim Hunt, and one of Deborah Blum's many classy supporters. (People who call Tim Hunt a "rat fucking bastard", for example.) The wonderful irony of this is that the whole affair, of course, begins with Blum misunderstanding Hunt's improvised, lighheartedly supportive remarks about women as an "ingrained" sexist joke. It's pretty clear, now, how the misunderstanding arose.

As I was thinking about this, I happened to be flipping through William Carlos Williams' Improvisations and found the following paragraph.

There are divergences of humor that cannot be reconciled. A young woman of much natural grace of manner and very apt at a certain color of lie is desirous of winning the good graces of one only slightly her elder but nothing comes of her exertions. Instead of yielding to a superficial advantage she finally gives up the task and continues in her own delicate bias of peculiar and beautiful design much to the secret delight of the onlooker who is thus regaled by the spectacle of two exquisite and divergent natures playing one against the other. (XXV, 2)

It's not of course entirely clear what is going on here. But it seems to me that Blum would prefer to live in a world in which such situations were entirely done away with. After all, someone could get hurt, right? She probably wants a world in which not even our poets are allowed to speak of young, desirous women who are "apt at a certain color of lie". Such a "disparaging", as KOFWST might put it, tone must never go un-policed, if you will. In Blum's utopia the lawn of excluded middle is the scorched earth of political correctness. There are no broken windows here. No ambiguous gestures. No jokes.

In promoting KOFWST's "final statement", I think Deborah Blum is trying to exploit what will turn out to be a superficial advantage. As did Connie St Louis's original tweet. This "foreign commentator", in any case, intends to keep talking. In what Nabokov calls "the long run", working with precision and intuition, I think we'll one day be able to actually imagine what happened. It takes time, as Waldrop reminds us. We have to pick this story off the bone, morsel by morsel. It's delicate work. I do it for the simple pleasure it affords. I will make no secret of the delight I take in watching the spectacle.

A Note on KOFWST and Tim Hunt

[This post is occasioned by the Korean Federation of Women's Science and Technology Associations's new statement about the Tim Hunt affair.]

Back in July, when I was first writing about Tim Hunt, I reached out to KOFWST for comment about their puzzling behavior. I was not able to get them to go on record, but I did manage to find a woman scientist who had attended the luncheon and was familiar with the inner workings of KOFWST. On condition of anonymity, she told me that the public scandal first became known to KOFWST on the last day of the conference. Koreans, she told me, are generally polite and courteous and tend not to complain or blame someone openly, especially one of their guests. My sense was that they would have preferred not to embarrass Tim Hunt but felt unable to ignore the issue once it had become public.

As I said back then, I think they handled the matter rather badly. And the latest statement they've issued doesn't improve my opinion of the organization. Like Connie St Louis and Deborah Blum, who were representatives of WFSJ and WCSJ respectively, I think Hee Young Paik, as the president of KOFWST, went public with concerns that should have been taken to Sir Tim, their guest, in private first.* As in the case of St Louis' tweet, it is easy to imagine a much more dignified response from KOFWST.

After contacting him, and sharing with him their embarrassment over the unfortunate coverage of his remarks, KOFWST could have accepted his apology and issued a simple press release:

KOFWST has been in contact with Sir Tim, who has expressed his deep regrets over the way his remarks were interpreted. He assures us that he meant no offense and has offered a complete apology for his own part in the affair, which KOFWST is happy to accept. We are satisfied that his intention was to praise the many accomplishments of women in science, of which he has been a lifelong supporter, and we consider the matter closed.

Maybe a PR person could find an even better way of putting it, but something like this would, to my mind, be more fitting than the baroque two-page jeremiad of a "call for apology" that they published "on behalf of all women scientists in Korea and the world" after receiving Hunt's gracious and contrite apology.

It showed very little of that famous Korean politeness and courtesy. That is why I've always suspected that KOFWST's intervention was instigated by either St Louis or Blum, who, at the time, needed a more "official" statement of outrage than their own (already disintegrating) perception of what had happened at the luncheon.

As I read their "final" statement, KOFWST almost denies this, but only almost. They could have denied any contact with St Louis and Blum, but instead confine themselves to a somewhat guarded denial "that KOFWST’s request to Sir Hunt was influenced by foreign journalists." (I.e., maybe they talked to them, but they didn't let them "influence" their course of action.) Somewhat weirdly, KOFWST thinks that "such allegations ignore undeniable facts and evidence and demonstrate a lack of regard for KOFWST’s autonomy and integrity." It would be more accurate to say that, while there is perhaps little evidence to prove it, many undeniable facts do in fact suggest it, and it of course calls KOFWST's autonomy and integrity into question. That is, [on the face of it,] they have something to answer for.

Like I say, for me, their behavior was suspect from the moment they publicly entered the fray. It seemed ill-tempered and out of proportion. Also, it's not the proper role of a sponsor. They should have taken their concerns, not to Tim Hunt, a guest of the conference and the luncheon, but to WCSJ, the host that had invited him [to the conference] and, presumably, also had invited him to speak [at the luncheon]. Like any sponsor, their only "pull" was the funding they had presumably contributed. The embarrassment wasn't really on them, but on the conference. They needlessly embarrassed both themselves and Sir Tim and the only reason I can imagine is that they were doing St Louis and/or Blum a favor. It certainly did help their "journalistic" case, at least in the short term.

On a personal note, let me say that if KOFWST interprets this post as a defiance of their "warning" to "foreign commentators", so be it. Just as I found their original demand for an apology from Tim Hunt distasteful, I find this statement of their "official and final position" pompous and absurd. They've got questions to answer, and people should be free to draw whatever conclusions help to make sense of their rather bizarre antics.

They're not the only ones who have questions to answer. I've said this many times before, but we STILL have not heard from WCSJ or WFSJ. We've been waiting for a long time.

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*Update (7/12/15): Jane Carnall is puzzled by this criticism. Didn't KOFWST precisely contact Sir Tim by private email first and only afterwards publish his apology along with their request for it? I'm not privy to the correspondence itself, but as I understand it, the "call for apology" was sent to Hunt, including the 24 hour deadline stated in the version that was subsequently made public. If I had received such a mail I would not have seen it as an attempt to resolve the issue privately with a view to making a public statement that saved face on both sides (of the kind I propose in this post). Rather, it seems very clearly to contain the implicit threat that if an apology is not forthcoming, that fact, along with the call, would be released to the press. I may have hoped that my apology would be published without that jeremiad enumerating the outraged misunderstanding that occasioned the whole thing, but when it did all get out, I don't think I'd have been surprised. In any case, I don't see the approach that KOFWST took as an especially "private" one.

A Brief History of Tim's Trouble with Girls

(Some texts are written mainly to make their titles possible. This is arguably one of them. It is an extract from a longer piece—perhaps one day a book—that I'm writing about or around the Tim Hunt affair. But I post it now with a specific purpose. I imagine it expresses some "casual" or "ingrained" views about gender, perhaps even about women. These are, of course, wholly my own, and neither those of Hawking nor Hunt. My point is that if these were their views they would, in my opinion, have nothing to be ashamed of. Nor am I at all ashamed of the views I express here. I am, however, willing to discuss them seriously with Dan Waddell and* Philip Moriarty. If they find that my position is not offensive, we can go on to the next step, namely, to attempt to persuade them that Hunt may well have meant nothing more than I'm suggesting here. If they find this way of talking about the opposite sex "offensive" and "damaging", we can take the discussion there. A world in which I should not say these things for fear of hurting people strikes me as a very frail one. As I've said before, I hope Hamlet wasn't right about the name of frailty.)

In early October of 2015, the answers to an “Ask Me Anything” session at Reddit with Stephen Hawking were made public. The questions and answers focused mainly on the the prospects and dangers of artificial intelligence—an issue that Hawking has been making a great deal of lately—but one answer of a more personal nature found itself making headlines.

“What mystery do you find most intriguing,” he was asked, “and why?” He offered a one-word answer: “Women,” and then elaborated: “My PA reminds me that although I have a PhD in physics, women should remain a mystery.”

The reaction on social media was not, if you will, a titter, but, if I may, a shudder. Reporting the remark on her Washington Post blog, Rachel Feltman offered the following note: “Ugh, Hawking, really? No. Women aren’t a mystery, we’re just people.” Similar sentiments were expressed elsewhere. Tweeting Feltman’s post to her 30,000+ followers, Katie Mack, who describes herself as an “astrophysicist [and] occasional freelance science writer,” explained her dismay at Hawking’s answer. “It’ll be great,” she said, “when it’s no longer a cute joke for prominent male scientists to pretend women are alien creatures.” That is, she interpreted his remark as a sexist joke.

Mack and Feltman, it seems, could not read Hawking's remark as expressing a sentiment that could also be shared by women, and here just happened to be expressed by a man. Hawking could have said, “The opposite sex,” but that would have been a bit less pithy, if perfectly gender neutral. Moreover, it seems pretty clear that he meant mainly his attraction to the opposite sex, or, still more neutrally, the attraction between sexes. The most intriguing mystery in the universe, for many men and women, is the profound importance and difficulty of dealing with sexual attraction—or what in polite company is called romance. That, surely, is mainly what he was saying.

Indeed, the lack of charity among those who chose to take offense at what he said is really quite remarkable. Here is a physicist whose passion is to understand the very universe that, one might argue, has undertaken humiliate him in the most thorough way imaginable; by striking him with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, it has taken away his ability to control all but a few muscles in his body. Even under this extreme privation, he has the generosity to acknowledge the mystery of the very process that brought him, bodily, into being, through an act that he now presumably enjoys, if at all, only with the greatest of difficulty, and under conditions of enormous compassion. That he would find the kindness, and, let’s suppose, the occasional cruelty, of women “mysterious” under these conditions does not surprise me. That some women would have him keep this sense of wonder to himself, however, is mysterious indeed.

The mild reprimands by feminists like Mack and Feltman were ultimately all that Hawking had to suffer for his honesty about the limits of his understanding. But he was in an important sense lucky to get off so easy. The previous four months had clearly demonstrated how dangerous it can be for scientists when feminist “science writers” on the internet don’t share either their sense of humor or their sense of wonder. I am, of course, thinking of the case of Sir Tim Hunt, the Nobel laureate who was publicly humiliated for remarks he made at an informal luncheon in Seoul in June.

When discussing this case, it has become customary to stipulate that he did, in fact, speak at least 39 words about his "trouble with girls". Most of that trouble was explicitly mutual: he falls in love with them and they fall in love with him. (I know that kind of trouble; and it is, indeed, all that.) He then said something that made a number of people shudder or cringe or perhaps gag or otherwise upset them. He said that, when you criticize them, these women cry. To put a button on it, he said that perhaps, given this trouble, we should consider separate labs for men and women (he may have said "boys and girls"; it is his wont.) That last was, of course, a joke, as reasonable people on both sides have come to acknowledge.

I think the story I just told about Sir Tim's remarks is uncontroversial on points of fact. The controversy is about the consequences of his remarks. In the first instance, it is about about how "damaging" the remarks were. I.e., there is some disagreement about how much damage Tim Hunt caused by saying what he said to about a hundred people in Seoul after lunch. After that, it's a bit of a mess. Hunt's remarks were tweeted and then reported in the media as though he seriously suggested segregated labs, and with the strange spin that he'd said that he found women in the lab sexually distracting (i.e., #distractinglysexy; this early piece in the Guardian by Rebecca Ratcliffe is indicative of the framing that caused the outrage.) Many people, myself included, also initially thought he was saying all or most women cry simply when criticized, not when someone they are in love with, or who is in love with them, criticizes them. We were relieved to find out he was joking, and then everything began to make sense.

As I see it, Sir Tim was trying to talk about gender equality to women as though they were his equals. He was trying to find a comical angle on the serious problem that the phrase "women in science" unfortunately sometimes denotes. Under the circumstances, he was no doubt painfully conscious of being a man. He thought he'd found just the way to put it. (For the record, I think it is a very good way to put it.) The trouble with girls, friends, whether in a lab or anywhere else ... and, yes, yes, damn blast yer intellex, only from a heterosexual man's point of view, of course ... The trouble with girls is love.

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*Update: Dan Waddell and I have agreed to stop debating this topic. Apparently, my decision to address myself to him alone, and not Paula Higgins as well, who had not engaged with me personally on this matter, and who Dan had told me he was "consulting" with to see whether, and how, she wanted to engage, was taken as an attempt to "marginalize" his specifically female co-author. (Please note that we're talking about ideas now, not texts, and I don't like to engage with people in teams if they've addressed themselves to me directly.) Anyway, Dan has respectfully declined my challenge, as far as I can tell for the reasons I just stated. I personally think it's a ridiculous excuse not to discuss these issues, and of course (it shouldn't be necessary to say this) reject his accusation that it had anything to do with Paula Higgins' gender.

On the Fear of Being Hunted, part 2

[Read Part 1.]
[Read Phil Moriarty's response.]

One thing that Tim Hunt's critics and supporters, and even Tim Hunt himself, can at times agree on is that telling a room full of science journalists in Seoul about his "trouble with girls" was a stupid thing to do. What I've been calling "the fear of being Tim Hunt", then, is, in part, the fear of being severely punished for a momentary lapse of reason. After all, many of his critics say that if we grant that his toast was, as Hunt himself[Mary Collins] put it, "an unbelievably stupid thing to say," then surely he had whatever he got coming to him.

I've recently had a couple of exchanges on (and one off) Twitter with Phil Moriarty, who has come down pretty hard on Hunt since this controversy began. I have found Phil to be intelligent and thoughtful (that's not a redundant thing to say) and I must say that, now that I know him a little better, I don't understand how he ended up on the "wrong" side of the Tim Hunt issue. So, at a deeper level, the fear of being Tim Hunt is the fear of having otherwise intelligent and thoughtful people come down on you for being, for a moment, less intelligent and thoughtful than you normally are. In a sense, it's the fear of letting your guard down.

I put it this way for a reason. In one of his earlier posts, Phil points out that the Tim Hunt that was savagely denounced in the media was not the Tim Hunt that he thought he knew. Phil had

met Prof. Hunt and attended meetings with him (and others) in the context of challenging the damaging focus of the research councils on near-term and near-market socioeconomic impact in science funding. In those discussions, Tim came across as a modest, insightful individual who passionately advocates the value of curiosity-driven science. I found him to be personable, likable, and, indeed, often inspiring, as this BBC4 programme from a few years back amply demonstrates.

But for some reason, and for a reason I simply don't understand, Phil chose not to give Hunt the benefit of the doubt. (Indeed, even in this very paragraph Phil seems to identify a possible reason that Hunt might have some powerful enemies who'd like to take him down a notch.) Instead, he simply sets aside this powerful "prior" (as statisticians put it) and concludes that "what [Hunt] said in that conference in Seoul was beyond dumb. It was crass. And immensely damaging."

Now, what Hunt was reported to have said was indeed crass and beyond dumb. Reportedly, i.e., according to Connie St Louis' soundly discredited but still not retracted report, Hunt seriously suggested that women are such an emotional nuisance in the lab that it would be best if they were given a lab of their own. (I like that play on Virginia Woolf's famous title. Remind me to pick it up some other time.) But when Hunt "admitted" that it was "stupid" to say it, he didn't mean that he had actually said that. He meant that it was stupid to say something that could be misconstrued that badly in front of an audience that, it seems, has a powerful incentive to thus misconstrue it.

In fact, I would put the point a bit more sharply against the science journalists. It was stupid to think that he was in a room full of intelligent and thoughtful people who would be able to understand [and appreciate] the "reductio ad absurdum" (25:27ff) with which he, jokingly, concluded his lighthearted reminiscences about the joys (and inevitable pains) of working with intelligent women. After all, he was in a roomful of people who had just elected the likes of Connie St "if it bleeds it leads" Louis to the executive board of their global professional federation. This same Connie St Louis still sits on the board of her national professional association, which continues to defend her work on the "highest standards" of British science writing.

Speaking candidly to that lot was, indeed, an unbelievably stupid thing to do. I'm sure he won't do it again. (Nor will I.) In fact, I suspect it was just naive and ignorant, i.e., not so much ill-advised as ill-informed. He didn't know who he was dealing with.

But this post isn't really about the work of a hack like Connie St Louis. The fear of being "Hunted" is the fear that sincere and intelligent people, people who've met you, people who know you in person to be "a modest, insightful individual who passionately advocates the value of curiosity-driven science", will suddenly for political reasons turn against you on the counsel of an execrably written tweet. What I don't understand, I guess, is how someone like Phil Moriarty could be turned against Hunt so efficiently, so effectively, so viciously. Why didn't Phil trust his experience-based personal opinion of Hunt and assume that the quote had been taken out of context and distorted?

That, then, is what this post is intended to probe. What happened, Phil?

[Read Phil Moriarty's response.]