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This was very interesting, thanks for sharing this. I agree it's a real dilemma, but I think you're on the track. Good luck!

Jon - thanks so much! I've couched this in gender terms, but I think it's an issue for everyone.

Frances - well done!

Linda - thanks for commenting, and for reading, and for listening.

Frances,

Not sure how well it would go over in a professional paper, but:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum

Begin a paper agreeing with everything the gentleman adheres to and then extend his own arguments to there illogical conclusion.

I have always been a fan of satire. One of my favorites has always been Johnathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal". It was required reading for a class I took in college on persuasive writing.

As a general rule, I think the best "second opinions" are those who have points of view as dissimilar from our own as possible. Of course, they have to be able to discuss ideas in a logical and non-confrontational manner, but among those who can, the ones different from you are the most useful. Maybe if people looked at the interactions and decisions that you describe from that angle, diversity (or not enforcing a lack of diversity) would seem more valuable.

This is a weird post. I think that keeping things professional usually works best, whereas spreading rumors about "what this guy is like in private" does not strike me as a very professional move. If you think that using Coco Chanel perfume as an example, or treating intra-household bargaining as a black-box, gives a misleading impression of the issue, just raise that point firmly but respectfully, and in a non-moralistic tone (you could even poke some light fun at the choice of Choco Chanel, as your answer suggested) and move on - people in the audience will surely be able to make up their own opinion. You're appealing to the "moral principle" of making better models, which people will almost certainly agree with! This is what the prevailing academic norms dictate in such cases, and this example does not seem to be all that different.

anon:

"I think that keeping things professional usually works best"

This is a serious point, and perhaps one that I should have spent more time talking about. Why don't I suggest raising the point "firmly but respectfully"?

At the talk I did point to the large body of literature that finds, as Hoddinott and Haddad put it, "relative to women, men spend a greater proportion of the income they earn on goods such as alcohol, cigarettes, status consumer goods, and ‘female companionship’. By contrast, women are more likely to purchase goods for children and for general household consumption" And thus it wasn't really meaningful to separate gender-taxation of commodities from broader public health issues (though I probably didn't put it quite that clearly). The response was something along the lines of "men don't spend more than women on alcohol; my daughter has a well stocked liquor cabinet."

In my experience, if a junior person challenges a senior, higher-status-in-the-profession person, one of two things will happen. If they questioner is not not firm enough, they will be ignored and/or firmly put down down. This is the econ seminar culture. If the questioner persists, and tries to be both really firm and really respectful, they will be regarded as difficult, obstructive, shrill, etc.

So, yes, raising the point firmly and respectfully is a good thing to do. It's not going to change the world, but it's still worth doing. You never know who's listening, and who you might convince.

> If the questioner persists, and tries to be both really firm and really respectful, they will be regarded as difficult, obstructive, shrill, etc.

Of course, this is also an area where women are held to a higher standard of collegiality than men. It creates a real Catch-22 in situations such as the one described.

Jonathan: "I think the best "second opinions" are those who have points of view as dissimilar from our own as possible"

A point that's become very relevant over the past few months and will continue to be relevant for the next four or eight years! It's much more comfortable to stay within one's own bubble than to try to find common ground with people who have different views.

Within academia, we have disciplinary bubbles, field bubbles, sub-field bubbles, methodological bubbles, bubbles around little strands of the literature. But we don't see them as bubbles, we see them as specializations. And often it's too much effort to reach out to someone who doesn't understand your modelling assumptions, or how your model works, or what the big bubble-specific issues are. Moreover, the gains from reaching out are not immediately apparent.

Much of the best research is bubble-bursting - but it takes courage and skill and a whole bunch of other stuff to break out of the bubble.

Frank - econ is so much harder to satirize because of the math. It's been done - I remember a paper in the Journal of Irreproducible Results once about "assuming optimally" but haven't been able to find it again. But, yeah, it would be really hard to satirize this stuff. Though perhaps that's just a blog post challenge!

Thanks for all of the feedback so far - I've updated the post a bit to reflect your comments.

"Frank - econ is so much harder to satirize because of the math."

And what, mathematics can't be funny? Ever heard of the statistician that drowned crossing the river - it was three feet deep on average.

And yes, it was a blog post challenge.

> In my experience, if a junior person challenges a senior, higher-status-in-the-profession person, ... If the questioner persists, and tries to be both really firm and really respectful, they will be regarded as difficult, obstructive, shrill, etc.

Well, I think you're right that this is ultimately about status. But the question then becomes - should we _really_ care that this person is so much higher-status than us, despite their rudeness? Yes, this is sad and disappointing, but it's also a common occurrence - almost a stereotype, in all sorts of organizations. The thing is, if you really want to try and change that senior speaker's opinion, the best tactic is to give him a way to 'save face' and keep his own status _unchanged_, by quickly correcting himself or even just minimizing the import of his mistakes. Maybe he'll agree that the Choco Chanel thing was just a funny caricature and not to be taken seriously, or that he should really stop being so unfair to Chinese people in his talks. You might perhaps see this as still being "offensive" and in fact it is, but it's also the best way of genuinely and fully affecting their behavior, beyond that one occurrence.

Use the carrot, not the stick - this is the kind of 'respect' that we should probably have in mind, and it does not at all preclude being firm about the factual/relevant issues.

Anon: "the best tactic is to give him a way to 'save face' and keep his own status _unchanged_,"

Yup, when you want someone to give you something, you have to give them a reason to say yes.

But ultimately even if you can get someone change the way they speak, by giving them a way to save face, it isn't necessarily going to change their view of the world. And this really is the issue that's bugging Quietly Seething - not the unpleasant speech, but the fact that the literature is being moved in an unproductive direction.

Frank - a challenge indeed!

If the questioner persists, and tries to be both really firm and really respectful, they will be regarded as difficult, obstructive, shrill, etc.
Particularly if the questioner happens to be a woman...

Women, know your limits ;-):

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LS37SNYjg8w

Myybe feminism should be left to men. We're impartial...

Oliver - love the link, thank you.

It's not really clear whether the offending person is blocking the requestor's career path in some way, or is merely their *existence* as an editor something that causes the asker to seethe?

In which case, it's better to not look too much out the window as there are all sorts of people in positions of power that the poster is going to be offended by, and she'll need to start a whispering campaign against each one of them to get them fired or removed from her sight of view.

Well I could bring up this concept where the world contains a diversity of opinions, and by definition this means not everyone will agree with everyone else.

Anon: This is a weird post. I think that keeping things professional usually works best, whereas spreading rumors about "what this guy is like in private" does not strike me as a very professional move.

You feel that this post is weird and some other people seem to think it's not so weird. I think that difference in reaction is linked to the concepts that Frances is trying to address. What I mean is that by trying to understand why another person has another reaction, we can broaden our understanding of the world. In this particular case, gender is the salient root of the difference, but it other cases it could be a million other things.

I have a slightly different take. Trying to get along and play the game is fine, but it's defensive. A complete strategy requires offense as well. FWIW, in my experience the usual way of dealing with this sort of person is to engineer their own self-destruction. Invite influential Chinese people to one of his talks, or influential people who 'get' the issues you enumerate, and then bait him with a question you know will illicit a dismissive response.

Eventually he'll annoy or insult a critical mass of the wrong people and he'll be removed.

Plotting death, destruction and other things sounds dumb. Someone might feel moral justified in returning fire in a variety of ways.

If he is doing bad research, ask questions that he will have a difficult time answering without drawing attention to the research failures.

If he's an ass, there's no special need to spread it, but if the subject of "him" comes up, you can just say something like "he's straight out of the 1950s. I can't believe people like that even exist any more".

And if this academic cannot take a direct and frontal critique straight to his face (no need to be mean), then what the hell is he doing in academia in the first place?

Or, if you don't think you will ultimately approach the situation responsibly in a way that will not come back to bite you badly later, then drop it COMPLETELY as a personal issue (probably the best bet anyways) and focus on the more general issues of bad methods and backwards perspectives and never ever even bother with which specific individuals are doing that.

Debate ideas. Debate methods. Don't get personal. imo

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