So say you’re out on the street, not in any kind of rush, just steadily making your way somewhere.
And say someone most of a block away catches your eye, for no real reason, except that you seem to have caught theirs.
And say they draw an old-timey revolver. And say they spin it. And say they point it at you.
Or maybe they don’t? They’re pretty far away, and it’s a weird situation, and you haven’t had your coffee. But it sure seems like that’s what’s happening! You might be wrong?
Maybe that’s why you don’t dodge when they seem to pull the trigger.
You really shouldn’t be able to hear it from that far away. But, somehow, you do.
Click. Empty chamber.
Then they nod, and turn, and sprint, faster than you knew a human could move, vanishing into the morning fog.
What do you do? And before that, what do you think?
You could think “no harm no foul”. Or “there might not have been any bullets in the gun, so it’s fine”. Or “I’m busy, don’t want to deal with this”.
I hope it’s obvious how crazy those thoughts are!
I hope it’s obvious the thing you should do, though you’re not exactly obligated to, is drop everything and call the police. Even if you’re confused, even if you didn’t get hurt, even if it means you’ll be late to work, even you end up having to answer “but if they shot at you, where’s the bullet?” from a series of increasingly clueless cops.
Even if looking down the barrel made you radically reprioritize your life, and you’re actually really grateful for the experience!
Even then.
This isn’t academic for me. Or, actually, it is academic for me, because the cleanest and most discussable example of something sorta like it happening to me was in academia.
This one time, I was planning to write an article about something for my blog, and figured I should at least skim a book about the topic before hitting post. So I bought an intro textbook, and started flipping through it.
And one of the homework questions I looked at had a ridiculous mistake. Like, disconcertingly bad! So I emailed the author an explanation of how he’d gone wrong. And his response – I discovered, coincidentally, months later, after I’d finished my skim and posted my post – was to take my explanation, overcomplicate it, and publish the resulting mess under his own name, without telling me.
My reaction, when I found out, was OVERWHELMING JOY. I’d been feeling pretty down on myself, but this perked me right up!
I don’t know why everyone here talks about hero licenses like they’re not real. I got my junior hero license the day I scraped a spot at a world-class college. And I got my intermediate hero license the day an important scholar with half the alphabet after his name decided my work was worth calling his!
Object level, there was no downside for me. I wasn’t trying for an academic career, and the field I’d been writing on had no overlap with my job, and it’s not like the paper got famous or anything. But at the same time, an important guy who people listened to, who got called as an expert witness on court cases, had given me reason to think he might be incompetent or fraudulent.
And yeah, I do mean “might be”. If you’re scratching your head right now, you’ve probably never had to deal closely with anyone who’s kinda important. Very important people get corrupted, but they get corrupted in ways that make sense. Kinda important people get their brains sanded down by pressure from above and below, then end up doing stuff that’s just weird. Stuff that makes you want to believe they’re scamming you or they’re pulling some kind of power play or they’re possessed by evil ghosts, but you can’t, because that wouldn’t make it make sense either. Stuff that makes you ask, sincerely, more confused than hurt, how they could have done that, or forgotten that, or crossed that boundary. And critically, stuff they immediately apologize for and backtrack on when you tell them what they did.
I didn’t tell him what he did. I knew it’d be useless, because there was nothing a good version of him might do that an evil version couldn’t fake to cool his mark and avoid consequences. The “best” outcome would be him putting my name on the mangled version of my explanation, which I actively didn’t want! What mattered wasn’t what he’d done to me, it’s what he might have done to people who cared.
I also didn’t report him to his academic institutions. I didn’t know these people, and I did know institutions in general, and I didn’t trust them to not underreact or overreact. If he was a bad guy, he probably had them in his pocket already, and if he was just an old man who somehow forgot my ideas weren’t his then I didn’t want to be responsible for triggering a witchhunt. Plus, he was richer than me and knew better lawyers: I’d heard what they say about coming at the king. The only thing to do was comb through all his publicly available work looking for a pattern of plagiarism or cluelessness, until I either had an airtight case against him or an airtight case against the idea of ever having an airtight case.
I didn’t do that either. Like, I tried? I did read a couple papers! But I had a career, and hobbies, and friends, and days with the usual number of hours. And there was only so motivated I could get, to hurt someone who had only helped me.
Looking back after most of a decade, I probably should have bit the bullet, emailed his institutions, and explained the situation. And then told them that if they ever used this directly against him – instead of as character evidence for someone else’s accusations – they’d be in trouble with ME for disturbing MY peace of mind. And then gone on with my life.
So yeah, if I didn’t just see an overworked guy make a crazy bad first and second impression, and he actually does suck in general, and you went to jail because a courtroom listened to him, then I’m sorry. And if you should have gone to jail and didn’t, I’m sorry about that too.
What am I trying to say, here?
Well, obviously, “don’t mess up like everyone in the fable and the anecdote I shared”. But more specifically?
I’m not the first person to mention that sometimes people deal with objectively bad things – sometimes really really bad things, way way worse than plagiarizing some nobody to write a bad paper no-one read – and come out the other end fine. Or maybe even better than fine, if they're really lucky? And that pretending that doesn’t happen, insisting every gun always has every chamber loaded, telling people they’re supposed to be angry and broken and there’s something wrong with them if they’re not, probably isn’t great!
But the flipside of that is people walking around having had objectively bad things done to them and having no-sold it. And then needing to decide what to do about the people who didn’t hurt them.
So, if you end up the victim of a victimless crime? Try to do better than me. Don’t unsuffer in silence, not if there’s anyone around worth talking to. Remember, if your bad guy isn’t actually all that bad, that means they should want you to stop them before they hurt someone who gets hurt.
If you’re an institution, or a community leader, or just someone someone might choose to share with? Be aware of this. I don’t know if there’s a right way to deal with this stuff, but “you’re too victimized to realize how victimized you are, you get zero input on how to handle things” is usually a wrong way! As is letting “no harm no foul” be the start and end of things.
And if you’re anyone, anywhere? Take a moment to not accidentally pretend to be evil, so you don’t act as chaff for actual bad actors. Stop pulling the trigger on empty guns! Sooner or later, you might meet someone with a loaded one.
Of course, it’s possible to take this too far. If you lean hard enough on what your culture decided is objectively bad, you can end up saying “I wasn’t hurt by him, and don’t know anyone who was hurt by him, and I don’t know how anyone could be hurt by him, and he did save the world from Nazis, but let’s chemically castrate him anyway”. I don’t know a way around this. Being human is hard, being humans is harder. All you can do is be less wrong.
tw: guns, weird shitty behavior, inadequate responses to weird shitty behavior
So say you’re out on the street, not in any kind of rush, just steadily making your way somewhere.
And say someone most of a block away catches your eye, for no real reason, except that you seem to have caught theirs.
And say they draw an old-timey revolver. And say they spin it. And say they point it at you.
Or maybe they don’t? They’re pretty far away, and it’s a weird situation, and you haven’t had your coffee. But it sure seems like that’s what’s happening! You might be wrong?
Maybe that’s why you don’t dodge when they seem to pull the trigger.
You really shouldn’t be able to hear it from that far away. But, somehow, you do.
Click. Empty chamber.
Then they nod, and turn, and sprint, faster than you knew a human could move, vanishing into the morning fog.
What do you do? And before that, what do you think?
You could think “no harm no foul”. Or “there might not have been any bullets in the gun, so it’s fine”. Or “I’m busy, don’t want to deal with this”.
I hope it’s obvious how crazy those thoughts are!
I hope it’s obvious the thing you should do, though you’re not exactly obligated to, is drop everything and call the police. Even if you’re confused, even if you didn’t get hurt, even if it means you’ll be late to work, even you end up having to answer “but if they shot at you, where’s the bullet?” from a series of increasingly clueless cops.
Even if looking down the barrel made you radically reprioritize your life, and you’re actually really grateful for the experience!
Even then.
This isn’t academic for me. Or, actually, it is academic for me, because the cleanest and most discussable example of something sorta like it happening to me was in academia.
This one time, I was planning to write an article about something for my blog, and figured I should at least skim a book about the topic before hitting post. So I bought an intro textbook, and started flipping through it.
And one of the homework questions I looked at had a ridiculous mistake. Like, disconcertingly bad! So I emailed the author an explanation of how he’d gone wrong. And his response – I discovered, coincidentally, months later, after I’d finished my skim and posted my post – was to take my explanation, overcomplicate it, and publish the resulting mess under his own name, without telling me.
My reaction, when I found out, was OVERWHELMING JOY. I’d been feeling pretty down on myself, but this perked me right up!
I don’t know why everyone here talks about hero licenses like they’re not real. I got my junior hero license the day I scraped a spot at a world-class college. And I got my intermediate hero license the day an important scholar with half the alphabet after his name decided my work was worth calling his!
Object level, there was no downside for me. I wasn’t trying for an academic career, and the field I’d been writing on had no overlap with my job, and it’s not like the paper got famous or anything. But at the same time, an important guy who people listened to, who got called as an expert witness on court cases, had given me reason to think he might be incompetent or fraudulent.
And yeah, I do mean “might be”. If you’re scratching your head right now, you’ve probably never had to deal closely with anyone who’s kinda important. Very important people get corrupted, but they get corrupted in ways that make sense. Kinda important people get their brains sanded down by pressure from above and below, then end up doing stuff that’s just weird. Stuff that makes you want to believe they’re scamming you or they’re pulling some kind of power play or they’re possessed by evil ghosts, but you can’t, because that wouldn’t make it make sense either. Stuff that makes you ask, sincerely, more confused than hurt, how they could have done that, or forgotten that, or crossed that boundary. And critically, stuff they immediately apologize for and backtrack on when you tell them what they did.
I didn’t tell him what he did. I knew it’d be useless, because there was nothing a good version of him might do that an evil version couldn’t fake to cool his mark and avoid consequences. The “best” outcome would be him putting my name on the mangled version of my explanation, which I actively didn’t want! What mattered wasn’t what he’d done to me, it’s what he might have done to people who cared.
I also didn’t report him to his academic institutions. I didn’t know these people, and I did know institutions in general, and I didn’t trust them to not underreact or overreact. If he was a bad guy, he probably had them in his pocket already, and if he was just an old man who somehow forgot my ideas weren’t his then I didn’t want to be responsible for triggering a witchhunt. Plus, he was richer than me and knew better lawyers: I’d heard what they say about coming at the king. The only thing to do was comb through all his publicly available work looking for a pattern of plagiarism or cluelessness, until I either had an airtight case against him or an airtight case against the idea of ever having an airtight case.
I didn’t do that either. Like, I tried? I did read a couple papers! But I had a career, and hobbies, and friends, and days with the usual number of hours. And there was only so motivated I could get, to hurt someone who had only helped me.
Looking back after most of a decade, I probably should have bit the bullet, emailed his institutions, and explained the situation. And then told them that if they ever used this directly against him – instead of as character evidence for someone else’s accusations – they’d be in trouble with ME for disturbing MY peace of mind. And then gone on with my life.
So yeah, if I didn’t just see an overworked guy make a crazy bad first and second impression, and he actually does suck in general, and you went to jail because a courtroom listened to him, then I’m sorry. And if you should have gone to jail and didn’t, I’m sorry about that too.
What am I trying to say, here?
Well, obviously, “don’t mess up like everyone in the fable and the anecdote I shared”. But more specifically?
I’m not the first person to mention that sometimes people deal with objectively bad things – sometimes really really bad things, way way worse than plagiarizing some nobody to write a bad paper no-one read – and come out the other end fine. Or maybe even better than fine, if they're really lucky? And that pretending that doesn’t happen, insisting every gun always has every chamber loaded, telling people they’re supposed to be angry and broken and there’s something wrong with them if they’re not, probably isn’t great!
But the flipside of that is people walking around having had objectively bad things done to them and having no-sold it. And then needing to decide what to do about the people who didn’t hurt them.
So, if you end up the victim of a victimless crime? Try to do better than me. Don’t unsuffer in silence, not if there’s anyone around worth talking to. Remember, if your bad guy isn’t actually all that bad, that means they should want you to stop them before they hurt someone who gets hurt.
If you’re an institution, or a community leader, or just someone someone might choose to share with? Be aware of this. I don’t know if there’s a right way to deal with this stuff, but “you’re too victimized to realize how victimized you are, you get zero input on how to handle things” is usually a wrong way! As is letting “no harm no foul” be the start and end of things.
And if you’re anyone, anywhere? Take a moment to not accidentally pretend to be evil, so you don’t act as chaff for actual bad actors. Stop pulling the trigger on empty guns! Sooner or later, you might meet someone with a loaded one.
Of course, it’s possible to take this too far. If you lean hard enough on what your culture decided is objectively bad, you can end up saying “I wasn’t hurt by him, and don’t know anyone who was hurt by him, and I don’t know how anyone could be hurt by him, and he did save the world from Nazis, but let’s chemically castrate him anyway”. I don’t know a way around this. Being human is hard, being humans is harder. All you can do is be less wrong.