In this case they hadn’t labeled anyone as villains, though. They could have omitted that section entirely.

I happen to agree that labeling them as villains wouldn’t have been helpful to this story, but they didn’t do that.

> It obscures the root causes of why the bad things are happening, and stands in the way of effective remedy.

There’s a toxic idea built into this statement: It implies that the real root cause is external to the people and therefore the solution must be a systemic change.

This hits a nerve for me because I’ve seen this specific mindset used to avoid removing obviously problematic people, instead always searching for a “root cause” that required us all to ignore the obvious human choices at the center of the problem.

Like blameless postmortems taken to a comical extreme where one person is always doing some careless that causes problems and we all have to brainstorm a way to pretend that the system failed, not the person who continues to cause us problems.

I'm not sure the problems we have at the moment are a lack of accountability. I mean, I think let's go a little overboard on holding people to account first, then wind it back when that happens. The crisis at the moment is mangeralism across all of our institutions which serves to displace accountability .

Labeling people as villains used to be effective deterrence against doing villainous things. When did that change?

Questions:

1. Who is responsible for adding guardrails to ensure all papers coming in are thoroughly checked & reviewed?

2. Who review these papers? Shouldn’t they own responsibility for accuracy?

3. How are we going to ensure this is not repeated by others?

Just to add on, armchair quarterbacking is a thing, it’s easy in hindsight to label decisions as the result of bad intentions. This is completely different than whatever might have been at play in the moment and retrospective judgement is often unrealistic.

It is possible that the root cause is an individual person being bad. This hasn't been as common recently because people were told not to be villains and to dislike villains, so root causes of the remaining problems were often found buried in the machinery of complex social systems.

However if we stop teaching people that villains are bad and they shouldn't be villains, we'll end up with a whole lot more problems of the "yeah that guy is just bad" variety.

As with anything, it's just highly subjective. What some call an heinous act is another person's heroic act. Likewise, where I draw the line between an unlucky person and a villain is going to be different from someone else.

Personally, I do believe that there are benefits to labelling others as villains if a certain threshold is met. It cognitively reduces strain by allowing us to blanket-label all of their acts as evil [0] (although with the drawback of occasionally accidentally labelling acts of good as evil), allowing us to prioritise more important things in life than the actions of what we call villains.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect#The_reverse_halo_e...

Bad acts are in the past, and may be situational or isolated.

Labelling a person as bad has predictive power - you should expect them to do bad acts again.

It might be preferable to instead label them as “a person with a consistent history of bad acts, draw your own conclusion, but we are all capable of both sin and redemption and who knows what the future holds”. I’d just call them a bad person.

That said, I do think we are often too quick to label people as bad based one bad act.

The person is inseparable from the root cause.

I'm not a bad person, I just continuously do bad things, none of which is my fault - there is always a deeper root cause \o/

I would argue that villainy and "bad people" is an overcomplication of ignorance.

If we equate being bad to being ignorant, then those people are ignorant/bad (with the implication that if people knew better, they wouldn't do bad things)

I'm sure I'm over simplifying something, looking forward to reading responses.

What if the root cause is that because we stopped labeling villains, they no longer fear being labeled as such. The consequences for the average lying academic have never been lower (in fact they usually don’t get caught and benefit from their lie).

You presumably read the piece. There was no remedy. In fact the lavishly generous appreciation of all those complexities arguably is part of the reason there was no remedy. (Or vice versa, i.e. each person's foregone conclusion that there will be no remedy for whatever reason, might've later been justified/rationalized via an appeal to those complexities.)

The act itself, of saying something other than the truth, is always more complex than saying the truth. ← It took more words to describe the act in that very sentence. Because there are two ideas, the truth and not the truth. If the two things match, you have a single idea. Simple.

Speaking personally, if someone's very first contact with me is a lie, they are to be avoided and disregarded. I don't even care what "kind of person" they are. In my world, they're instantly declared worthless. It works pretty well. I could of course be wrong, but I don't think I'm missing out on any rich life experiences by avoiding obvious liars. And getting to the root cause of their stuff or rehabilitating them is not a priority for me; that's their own job. They might amaze me tomorrow, who knows. But it's called judgment for a reason. Such is life in the high-pressure world of impressing rdiddly.

It’s possible to take two opposing and flawed views here, of course.

On the one hand, it is possible to become judgmental, habitually jumping to unwarranted and even unfair conclusions about the moral character of another person. On the other, we can habitually externalize the “root causes” instead of recognizing the vice and bad choices of the other.

The latter (externalization) is obvious when people habitually blame “systems” to rationalize misbehavior. This is the same logic that underpins the fantastically silly and flawed belief that under the “right system”, misbehavior would simply evaporate and utopia would be achieved. Sure, pathological systems can create perverse incentives, even ones that put extraordinary pressure on people, but moral character is not just some deterministic mechanical response to incentive. Murder doesn’t become okay because you had a “hard life”, for example. And even under “perfect conditions”, people would misbehave. In fact, they may even misbehave more in certain ways (think of the pathologies characteristic of the materially prosperous first world).

So, yes, we ought to condemn acts, we ought to be charitable, but we should also recognize human vice and the need for justice. Justly determined responsibility should affect someone’s reputation. In some cases, it would even be harmful to society not to harm the reputations of certain people.

> Labeling people as villains is almost always an unhelpful oversimplification of reality

This is effectively denying the existence of bad actors.

We can introspect into the exact motives behind bad behaviour once the paper is retracted. Until then, there is ongoing harm to public science.

One thing that stands in the way of other people choosing the wrong path is the perception of consequences. Minimal consequences by milquetoast critics who just want to understand is a bug not a feature.

People are on average both bad and stupid and function without a framework of consequences and expectations where they expect to suffer and feel shame. They didn't make a mistake they stood in front of all their professional colleagues and published effectively what they knew were lies. The fact that they can publish lies and others are happy to build on lies ind indicates the whole community is a cancer. The fact that the community rejects calls for correction indicates its metastasized and at least as far as that particular community the patient is dead and there is nothing left to save.

They ought to be properly ridiculed and anyone who has published obvious trash should have any public funds yanked and become ineligible for life. People should watch their public ruin and consider their own future action.

If you consider the sheer amount of science that has turned out to be outright fraud in the last decade this is a crisis.

That comment sounds like the environment causes bad behavior. That's a liberal theory refuted consistently by all the people in bad environments who choose to not join in on the bad behavior, even at a personal loss.

God gave us free will to choose good or evil in various circumstances. We need to recognize that in our assessments. We must reward good choices and address bad ones (eg the study authors'). We should also change environments to promote good and oppose evil so the pressures are pushing in the right direction.