Degrees of Humour

"There are no contradictions, only degrees of humour." (Deleuze & Guattari)

—Did you say it?
—Yes, but I meant it ironically.
—That’s a "yes" then?
—I was kidding.
—But you said it, right? You’re confirming you said it.
—I didn’t mean it seriously.
—I think we know what you meant. We just need you to confirm the quote.
—But it’s been taken out of context!
—Sure it was: out of the context in which you said it, right? That's why we need you to confirm you said it.
—But it was meant in jest.
—I think we’ll let our readers decide how funny you are.
—But you’ll tell them I was kidding, right?
—We’ll tell them what you said. That’s why you’ve got to confirm that we’ve quoted you accurately.
—This is ridiculous. I’m not going to confirm it then.
—So now you deny saying it?
—I'm telling you, I was joking.
—Tell you what. Why don’t we just say you "couldn’t be reached for comment"?

The Stakes

I was happy to have an exchange of views with Jane Carnall yesterday and today about the various forces that are currently arraigned against Tim Hunt's reputation as a scientist, a man, and, I suppose, a human being. I had reacted to a retweet by an anonymous "Bill" of a tweet by Carnall asking us to "consider what damage Louise Mensch may have done to Tim Hunt's reputation" with her ongoing (and very vocal) investigations into the debacle in Seoul. Interestingly, Bill (who I generally take to be on the side of the forces arraigned against Hunt) suggested that Hunt's reputation has "recovered completely" but that his "legacy" was now being put at risk by Mensch continuing to push the point.

There were lots of ways to read this. Many observers, I would think, would grant that if Hunt has indeed completely recovered his ethos from the disaster in Seoul, then Mensch can take a good deal of the credit. But the interesting possibility that Bill and Jane are raising is that Mensch is now overplaying her hand and risking the gains she's made, investing her winnings badly, if you will. What struck me, however, was that this entire line of thinking must, at least for the sake of argument, be predicated on a shared concern for Hunt's reputation, a shared "value", if you will, a belief that Hunt's good image is good for science. (That's my view.) So I tried to probe them a bit about what they thought Tim Hunt's reputation should be at this point. How much "damage" or "recovery" does the man, finally, deserve?

I didn't get a very clear sense of exactly what they think Tim Hunt should be known for. Carnall did say, I think, that she thought it would be fitting if Hunt was, as he himself has said he may well be, "finished" as what I call "a face of science", i.e., as a public image of the ideal scientist. But Bill, of course, thinks that his image is doing much better than that, which made me wonder why Carnall was even worried about Mensch's harmful influence. Carnall, it seems, still wants to take Hunt down a notch from where Bill thinks he is. Why not let Mensch do the dirty work?

But as we talked about it, something more interesting came up. Carnall countered my concern for Hunt's reputation with a concern for the reputations of the journalists who broke the story and the organizers who demanded he apologize. After all, Mensch is quite deliberately going after the people who smeared Hunt. Specifically, she's convincingly showing that St Louis, Blum and Oransky are yellow journalists, and that Hee Young Paik, the president of KOFWST, is a sort of spineless pawn, or possibly a mendacious opportunist. If that bears out, I think we can all agree, it's clearly "damaging" to their reputations. And Carnall asked whether I didn't think Mensch should feel as bad about that consequence as she thinks they should feel about what they've done to Hunt.

This sort of "moral equivalence" argument is, I think, highly misplaced in this situation. After all, journalists stake their reputations on their reporting as a matter of course. The idea is that they uncover facts, source them as a well as they can, and publish them with the confidence that they will stand the test of time. If they are wrong, they know they will have the integrity to retract and apologize, and it is that integrity that takes them into their next story, where both their sources and their readers will trust them enough to let them report it. Likewise, it is simply the job of presidents (like Paik) to stake their reputations on their collective actions as a federation (like KOFWST). Also, as I pointed out long ago, these people took deliberate and coordinated action to humiliate another person in public. They had time to reflect and to plan. So whatever judgments we arrive at about their integrity and competence on the basis of their actions are not unfounded. Those actions really do reveal what kinds of people we're dealing with.

By contrast, Hunt's remarks were improvised on short notice. He spoke for two or three minutes off the top of his head. He, I am quite certain, was not staking his reputation—as a scientist, a man or a human being—on whatever happened to come out of his mouth at that moment. He was just trying to be entertaining among intelligent people. To suggest that Hunt is "responsible", not just for the opinions that the people in the room that day formed about his relative charm as a public speaker, but also the opinion that the global readership of, say, the Guardian formed about his absolute "views" about women in science, based on what was made of a decidedly half-assed tweet by Connie St Louis, is entirely out of proportion. We're talking about two minutes of extemporaneous speech. If his words were poorly chosen they should have fallen flat, not gone down in infamy.

A stake is, literally, "that which is put up". "Weekley suggests 'there is a tinge of the burning or baiting metaphor' in this usage. Hence, 'an interest, something to gain or lose'." I don't think Tim Hunt actually staked anything on his remarks in Seoul. But Connie St Louis, Deborah Blum, Ivan Oranksy and Hee Young Paik did, we can reasonably insist, stake their reputations on the fire they lit beneath him after they tied him to a stake of their own contrivance.

Waddell and Higgins Jump the Shark

"The narrative seems to have shifted."
Paula Higgins and Dan Waddell*

This morning I noticed a puzzling tweet by Dan Waddell that made me have a closer look at the piece about Tim Hunt that he and Paula Higgins recently published at Byline. They argue that the December 2 correction of a June 10 Guardian story does not weaken, but actually strengthens, the case against Hunt: "far from exonerating Hunt, The Guardian statement appears to reinforce ... the idea that he was speaking about women in the lab generally." I happen to disagree with them about this point, but that disagreement isn't the subject of this post. What puzzled me was an exchange on Twitter that Waddell had with Fred Wyropiquet, which ended with the following tweet by Waddell:

@wyropiquet so his shortcomings are his inability to keep his hands off the lasses in his lab?

— Dan Waddell (@danwaddell) December 4, 2015

As far as I can tell it's supposed to be a sort of reductio ad absurdum of Wyropiquet's reading of Hunt's comment to the Guardian. But it feels more like a non sequitur. Nothing in what Wyropiquet said seems to me to imply it, even at a stretch, but since literally no one has accused Hunt of having this kind of "trouble with girls" it can only be taken as a way of following out a line of argument to its most absurd conclusion.

I had already found myself smiling a little at Higgins and Waddell's condescending suggestion that Hunt's defenders are "shifting" the "narrative" about what he had meant in Seoul. After all, the burden of a plausible narrative about his remarks falls not to his defenders but his accusers. And if there's a narrative that's been "shifting" since Connie St Louis' original tweet, it is the narrative that tries to make a scandal of his toast. It has gone from being an earnest statement of his views about women to an inappropriate sexist joke, from a clear expression of his misogyny to a bungled manifestation of his stupidity. The idea seems to be that if you keep spinning the story it'll remain upright. To defend Hunt, meanwhile, we don't need a coherent narrative at all, just a little charity of interpretation. Because of the absolute paucity of evidence, we just have to propose a plausibly innocuous intention and give him the benefit of the doubt.

Even Hunt's attackers, I thought, now mostly grant that Hunt isn't much of a an actual sexist. His remarks were, at worst, an unfortunate expression of ambient sexism in Hunt's environment, and he could at most be accused of not properly restraining his poor taste in front of an audience of apparently very vulnerable women that might be "harmed" by his words. So this suggestion that an argument in defense of Hunt might commit one to the idea that Hunt's actual and admitted failing in the lab was "his inability to keep his hands off the lasses in his lab" came out of left field for me. Was there something I had missed about the current state of the case against Hunt? Had the narrative, if you will, shifted again?

So I returned to Higgins and Waddell's piece and did indeed find a rather stronger condemnation of Hunt than I thought was current among his attackers. At the end of their piece they suggest the following interpretation:

It seems clear, from both Hunt’s BBC Today interview and his statement to The Guardian, that among the 'shortcomings' about which he was ‘being honest’ in his Seoul toast, is his belief that women in the lab are more likely to cry when faced with this type of criticism, thus bolstering the damaging sexist stereotype that they are over emotional, and his view of the lab as a highly sexualised or emotionalised space that is terrible for science.

I don't agree with Higgins and Waddell that it's "clear" that Hunt believes that women are likely to cry when criticized, but I recognize and understand the argument for interpreting his toast in Seoul that way. (I think the balance of the evidence shows that he's not seriously concerned about the ability of women, as a gender, to deal with criticism.) I think the idea that he traffics in "damaging sexist stereotypes", by contrast, is directly contradicted by his record of respectful collaboration with women throughout his career. I thought maybe the word "bolster" was supposed allow that his toast only unintentionally offered support to those stereotypes, but the next part of the sentence unmistakably attributes a "view" to Tim Hunt that is so ridiculous that I think we have to conclude that Higgins and Waddell have, as they say, jumped the shark.

Actually, the sentence is a bit difficult to parse. It's not clear whether they are saying that (a) Hunt's view (that labs are "highly sexualised or emotionalised spaces") is "terrible for science" or that (b) Hunt's [the] view is that highly sexualized and emotional spaces are terrible for science and that labs with women (and therefore much sex and emotion) in them are therefore terrible places to do science. Both interpretations are of course utterly ridiculous.

[If I'm not mistaken, they are here attributing to Hunt the view that highly sexualized and emotional spaces are terrible for science, which is of course not too controversial. But they are also saying that Tim Hunt believes that merely putting women (with all their sexiness and emotion) in labs turns them into such unscientific spaces. And this is of course utterly ridiculous.]**

To defend Hunt against these charges would, indeed, be almost as ridiculous as defending him against the charge that Hunt chose to use his toast in Seoul to admit that he has trouble "keeping his hands of the lasses in the lab". If this is where the prosecution has decided to stand, if this is where their narrative has shifted, the defense can safely rest. But I think it's really just an indicator that Waddell and Higgins do not represent the strongest case that can be made against Hunt and are therefore not worth paying much attention to. I've suspected this for some time.

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*Out of habit (and no doubt some latent misogyny someone is about to explain to me I suffer from), an earlier version of this post mistakenly reversed the order of the authors. Waddell and Higgins have worked as a team on the Tim Hunt case and I put them in the order I had them in when talking about their "Saving Tim Hunt". I know Higgins is a bit touchy about standing in Waddell's shadow, so I've ensured that she comes first in this post now in all cases where I'm referring to the Byline piece. When talking about them simply as the Hunt-smearing duo they are in general, I've put Waddell's name first by, I guess, tradition.

**Update: I don't think the sentence is as ambiguous as I first thought. I've rewritten the paragraph to reflect what I think is the most plausible interpretation.

Let it Blede

”If it leads it bleeds [sic].”
Connie St Louis

“Don’t bury the lede,” is familiar advice to journalists. But the recent correction to Rebecca Ratcliffe’s early coverage for the Guardian of Tim Hunt’s infamous toast in Seoul demonstrates the effectiveness, even viciousness, with which the technique can also be deployed to further an ideological agenda. It turns out the Guardian didn’t just bury the lede—they murdered it.

The basic facts around which Ratcliffe’s article is written are stated in the first three paragraphs:

Scientists should work in gender-segregated labs, according to a Nobel laureate, who said the trouble with “girls” is that they cause men to fall in love with them and cry when criticised.

Tim Hunt, an English biochemist who admitted that he has a reputation for being a “chauvinist”, said to the World Conference of Science Journalists in Seoul, South Korea: “Let me tell you about my trouble with girls … 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.”

Hunt said he was in favour of single-sex labs, adding that he didn’t want to “stand in the way of women”.

This is what (especially American) journalists refer to as the “lede”, which establishes the situation that the story is about. Let me emphasize the most salient "facts", which are of course also those that made Sir Tim so famous this summer. Ratcliffe informs her readers that “according to” Tim Hunt, “scientists should work in gender-segregated labs.” She repeats this again to be sure we’ve got it: “Hunt said he was in favour of single sex labs” (my emphasis). She also notes in passing that Hunt “admitted that he has a reputation for being a chauvinist’” (my emphasis, again).

With those facts established, we’d be forgiven if we thought “You must be joking?” would have been a rhetorical question. And a sufficiently curious or outraged reader is entitled to know what Hunt said when the journalist writing this curiously outrageous story contacted him for comment. Until two days ago, the reader was being told that he “could not be reached for comment”.

Now, Ratcliffe had, in fact, tried to get a comment from him. Here’s how the reader’s editor at the Guardian put it when Louise Mensch asked him about it:

Rebecca Ratcliffe was asked to cover the story by the news desk, which had seen it on other new websites and the front page of The Times. She emailed Prof Hunt at 00.55 on June 10 and got his out of office message. She then filed her story, which was scheduled for launch on the site at 6.53 later that morning. By the time she got home she saw an email from Prof Hunt timed at 01.55 … She sent that to the night news desk to append to her story scheduled for launch at 06.53 and went to bed.

But the night news desk missed it, it seems, and by the time anything could be done about it, Tim Hunt’s explanation was or would soon be public anyway, so they didn’t deem a correction of the article necessary. Until now, at Louise’s urging, when the “could not be reached” formulation has been replaced with the following:

Hunt, who won the Nobel Prize for discovering protein molecules that control the division of cells, said when contacted for a comment: “I’m very sorry that what I thought were light-hearted ironic remarks were taken so seriously, and I’m very sorry if people took offence. I certainly did not mean to demean women, but rather be honest about my own shortcomings.”

In other words, this is the story that Ratcliffe and the Guardian would have liked to publish and which only an “editing error” prevented from seeing the light of day. Given that Hunt’s version of events would come out within hours anyway, the Guardian did not think the difference very great.

I sort of agree with them. The "corrected" version is as misleading as the one they originally published. Once they knew that Hunt’s account contradicted the “facts” stated in the lede, they should have buried not the lede but the story, or at least put its publication on hold pending further investigation. If you cannot confidently assert that Hunt said labs should be sex-segregated, nor that he admitted he was a known chauvinist, but must report that he claims to have been kidding, then you’ve got some research to do before you print any of these things. (It's important here to remember that all reasonable people today agree that he was, in fact, kidding, at least about the segregated labs.) The paragraph that Ratcliffe wanted to have "appended" to the article simply belies the claims made in the lede.

I believe journalists used to say “Stop the presses!” Some stories, in any case, should be stopped before they're published. When that fails, they should be corrected. And some corrections should really just be retractions, i.e., admissions that the paper got the story wrong.

Nowadays, it seems, journalists are happy to let their stories bleed as long as they lead. Maybe I just have too high expectations of journalism, but I thought that if you’re working on a story about someone who (you think) “admitted” he was a chauvinist, and, when you reach out for comment, he says, “I was being ironic,” surely you can’t print “he admitted he’s a chauvinist” in the lede and just also print “he says he was being ironic” in the last paragraph. Surely, you now have to either abandon the story, or, at “best”, write that "it was rumoured on Twitter that he had admitted..."? (I think we can all agree that this would be a pretty unsensational story.) A news article isn’t a chronological record of the things you heard while researching it, letting you say what you thought was true until you get to the last paragraph and say that it turned out to be false. A news story is a presentation of the current facts as best as you’ve been able to determine them. Right?

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.