42 Comments

If anything, this is even more damning than the evidence of Gay's plagiarism. Especially in that it seems like it's widely known in the field, and yet King continues to enjoy tenure.

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Should I get ahead of the market and patent the phrase "Morons of Harvard?" I really, really, really want that lakeside estate.

And Chris--don't neglect breakfast, lunch and dinner! You're gonna need your strength.

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Well, great job digging that up. Shows how badly done science is in that field and the need for much greater scrutiny.

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Good post. It did seem odd to me that Claudine Gay's work had an obvious ecological fallacy problem, and I wondered if I missed something, since it seemed like an undergrad mistake. And reading about the robust standard errors here, it sounds like King didn't know that even if there's heteroskedasticity you still get consistent estimates of the most important parameters, the coefficients, even tho the standard errors are wrong--- something you learn in your first econometrics course.

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Wow! It's the Piltdown Man scam all the way down.

Did you know that Gary King's official title is the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor and Director for the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University? I bet Old Man Weatherhead III now rolls his grave because he wasted his fortune on a world-class charlatan.

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Please keep digging - there still may be ways to resuscitate Harvard, but these diseased demons need to be dug up and exposed for the rot they are.

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So, are we to assume that all female or monority heads of universities are ethically challenged intellectual lightweights who are great with pronouns?

The Left sure has been a wonderful benefactor to the formerly oppressed. With friends like that,....

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Claudine Gay’s situation was more objective. This one seems to try to damage King’s character based on some forum discussion.

King may have written bad articles, scientifically wrong ones, but apart from the gossip in the forum, there’s not evidence he persecuted young scholars. No interviews, not a single testimony. He may have tried to destroy young scholars’ careers, but forum discussion doesn’t prove anything.

A journalistic piece of investigation needs to present more concrete evidence or it only fuels Gay’s warning that a war was coming.

In this case, I would say your article is as feeble as King’s ones, some sort of “mean girl” behavior.

If you didn’t have any evidence of King tried to destroy young careers, apart from the forum discussion, it would be better not to publish the article and do more research. It’s not morally correct to launch a witch hunt or a cancellation campaign.

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Another big win for the physiognomy crowd. Just look at the mutational load on that face

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Can't believe Gay got away with plagiarism. It is wrong, one should write one's own articles at all times, it is just disgusting and I say that as both an amateur hereon Substack and as a lover of essays and articles that are continuously posted here.

Fully agree with your comments Mr Brunet, je ne peux pas croire ce qui est arriver aux unis!

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The Harvard “academic ivory tower” may be lacking the ethics and moral standards to be a proper institution of any kind of learning if Gay and King are representative of a feature and not a bug .There can be no trust or respect for or in these institutions if the leadership has no honesty, honor, integrity or has no interest in the truth.

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Glad to see a light being shown on these problems that have been festering for a while and are very widespread, even at "elite" institutions like Harvard.

It's telling that one of the only places you can find frank discussions of these issues is on an anonymous forum, eh? People don't want to make enemies or invite scrutiny of their own works... There's also been a broader trend where vehement argument and criticism has been discouraged. Some refer to this as the "feminization" of academia. Regardless, vigorous criticism, which is essential for progress, is now seen by many as offensive, and that is a big problem. Many assume it is driven by racism or sexism, too.

As I noted recently on Twitter, Peter Thiel has noted that we should be extra skeptical of those fields with "science" in the name:

Political science

Social science

Behavioral science

Environmental science

Computer science

Cognitive science

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Great research--thank you for illuminating the academic cesspool from which Claudine Gay crawled.

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Thanks for that. Hopefully this will only be the beginning of the great debunk of many dogmas in the social sciences. These things need to be thoroughly exposed.

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“Social science”

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