An Inconvenient Tweet

"There is no decent place to stand in a massacre, but if a woman takes your hand then go and stand with her." (Leonard Cohen)

In "Lost in Translation", Sue Nelson approaches the Tim Hunt story much like I did back in July. I called it a "train wreck" at the time, and it continued in the months that followed. "So far the fallout from Hunt’s unscripted comments," says Nelson as she surveys the scene, "has caused death threats, Twitter trolling and online abuse, most often targeted at women. It has caused academics and journalists, both male and female, to withdraw from the debate for reasons of health or sanity." I agree with her terse judgment at the end of the piece: "It is a mess."

I'm not going to argue about whether the abuse has been equally or fairly distributed, but I would like to emphasize some other "fallout". In the days immediately after the story broke, Tim Hunt lost an honorary post at UCL, and resigned both from the ERC and an awards committee at the Royal Society. Presumably his contributions had been valued up until then by these institutions, but they would no longer be able to draw on his experience. He had been scheduled to participate in a webinar for the AAAS, but the participants here, too, would have to do without his advice about how to "persevere in science". That webinar had been organized in conjunction with this year's Lindau meeting, which Hunt also decided against attending because of the scandal. Then, in July, things got downright terrible. Hunt's appearance at a conference in Ferrara was cancelled because of what appears to be a threat of violence. It may be true that the vitriol of the conversation caused many people to "withdraw"; but the first person to be browbeaten into a corner was surely Tim Hunt himself.

This is not an attempt to "weigh up" or "balance" the damage that the Seoul Incident has wrought. I would prefer simply to add the damage that was done to Tim Hunt's life and career, however temporarily I may hope it will turn out to be, along with the associated "collateral damage" that has been done to the lives and careers of the young researchers who, for a time, have had to do without his advice, and the imponderable damage to the course of science that removing him from influence on the direction of research in STEM fields, to the total accounting of the damage that this debacle of a story caused, including, of course, the distress that the backlash against the story appears to have caused those who chose to take a side.

And then, for perspective, let's note the very mild formulation Sue Nelson uses to assess the actual effect of Tim Hunt's actual words: "Hunt’s unscripted and thoughtless words dismayed many women in science." Please pause for a moment to consider what Nelson is saying. Hunt said something that "dismayed many women". And the result was the "fallout" Nelson and I have only just sketched above. "Hell hath no fury," indeed!

How did this happen? Nelson in fact answers this question in the sentences immediately before and after the sentence I just quoted:

All journalists should be free to report the facts — no matter how inconvenient they may be. Hunt’s unscripted and thoughtless words dismayed many women in science. If his comments hadn’t been in front of journalists, it would have simply passed the world by.

That's roughly my assessment of the situation as well, though I would question the meaning of the word "many" in this context. The actual amount women that Hunt dismayed was determined mainly by the Twitter campaign that followed, not the dozens of women he was actually speaking his words to. In any case, is it really true that the "inconvenience" that was caused to Hunt, his colleagues, his students, his family, his research networks, his waiting audiences, as well as the "inconvenience" that was caused to the many women dismayed, who now posted "sexy" pictures of themselves to regain their dignity, as well as the "inconvenience" that was caused by all those who had to endure abusive language in their Twitter timelines, directed either at them or at their friends, is it really true, I ask you, that all this could have been avoided if only Tim Hunt had realized there were journalists in the room? If true, what does that tell us about journalists?

As it happens, I think Sue Nelson is wrong about how the mind of a journalist works when it is functioning properly. It is simply not true that, faced with a fact, the reporting of which might be as inconvenient as what happened here, a journalist is compelled to tweet it to the world within three hours. This entire inconvenience would have "passed the world by", not so much if Hunt had kept his mouth shut, but if Connie St Louis had considered more carefully the possible "fallout" of tweeting his words utterly devoid of context along with an interpretation that was bound, I think we must agree, to "dismay". A good journalist might have nosed a story, sure. But a good journalist would then have reported it carefully enough to ensure that it wouldn't still be a shambles of fact and unfact, littered with lies and insults, six months later.

It's not even true, of course, that journalists are "free" to report any fact, no matter how inconvenient. A journalist has a duty of care to report (especially very inconvenient) facts accurately. Nelson insists that "Hunt must take responsibility for how this all began." I think, in fact, that he has. He acknowledged that he said (at least some) of the offending words and apologized for the offence they had caused. What Tim Hunt is not responsible for is the damage that resulted from publishing an egregiously under-researched and over-geared "news story". And that damage was much, much greater. Indeed, it accounts for all of the damage we would consider serious. After all, if the "story" had been simply left unreported, literally nothing would have happened.

It was not Tim Hunt's words that caused the damage; it was Connie St Louis' tweet. It was inconvenient, indeed. Unlike Hunt, however, she has not publicly acknowledged the enormity of her error. Nor does Sue Nelson seem to think that would be necessary.

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.

__________
*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?