“It Has Come to My Attention…” How Institutional Complaints Procedures are Being Weaponized (article in Quillette)

Woolie

Woolie

Senior Member
Came across this article on twitter, and noticed its been retweeted by Michael Sharpe. I suppose he thinks this is the best he can do right now as far as support for his "cause" goes.

https://quillette.com/2018/05/24/come-attention-institutional-complaints-procedures-weaponized/

This author of this article - Adam Perkins - is aggrieved by the tactics used by the "left" to discredit his research.
My cardinal sin was to publish a book three years ago called The Welfare Trait that summarised data linking personality and welfare dependency.
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What he complains about in this article:
But the public campaign against me is fluff compared to the tactics deployed in private. The self-appointed guardians of permitted thought are always on the lookout for better ways to silence dissenting scientists and in institutional complaints procedures, they have found one. This tactic might seem boring, but it’s a more powerful and lasting type of harassment than a public attack because it hijacks the power of institutional processes to hit you in your bank account and your CV.
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Then this bit:
Perhaps the highest-profile target of this tactic is Sir Simon Wessely, once a leading researcher of chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). A less deserving target it would be hard to imagine: Sir Simon is a wonderful man who has devoted his life to healing others (and was my head of department for several years which is almost as saintly). Nevertheless, the campaign against him was so vicious that in 2001 he decided to stop studying CFS. Not that this stopped the complaints, as he explained to the Times in 2011:

"If I’m giving a scientific conference they will write to people who are sharing a platform with me to tell them how terrible I am. Or they will send e-mail circulars to my university. You can see on their website that they know the most remarkable details of my personal life. They know most of my diary, I don’t know how but they do. They use — abuse — the Freedom of Information Act. They make frequent complaints to my principal, to my Dean, to regulatory bodies, to ethics committees, to misconduct committees. I mean it’s just a constant litany."
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Too bad then that Drs Wessely, Sharpe and Co have taken to using exactly these tactics to contact employers of those who have annoyed them. Talk about pots and kettles.

I was talking to someone recently who said that Ben Goldacre goes in for this sort of thing quite a lot -writing to editors about papers he doesn't like, even writing books about them!

Poor Mr Perkins seems to have made a right fool of himself here. No doubt his book summarised some fairly uninterpretable data.
 
Maybe this narrative accurately conveys this guy's experience - who knows, given the subject matter, it's at least plausible. There probably is some sort of useful point to be extracted from this.

-But for me, all of this BPS stuff has strong ties to the irrational (aka 'progressive' when used pejoratively) left. Although it's also in an unholy alliance with insurance interests and people trying to reduce spending on benefits, so it's not so easy to classify.
-In any case the people behind it have enjoyed outsized institutional influence and support - what with setting treatment standards across the world and gaining knighthoods and whatnot. Hardly underdogs.
-There is a core of damning scientific criticism.
-Criticism doesn't seem to be coming from any particular political direction - mostly just from people affected in some way. (Hopefully the [reasonable] 'left' picks up the issue more because advocating for people with illnesses and disabilities is part of it's natural role.)
-To the extent that the campaign against BPS is political, it is because it is fighting against entrenched policies backed by powerful interests. It's a political issue as well as scientific, and it's a very worthy issue.

It feels great to play victim when you aren't one. It's all the rage now but it looks like the BPS crew figured it out before it really took off.
 
Perhaps this demonstrates the problem with so called 'social science' research which is so easily distorted to find what the researcher wants to find, and which, at least in psychology, has a reproducibility crisis.

I think the whole enterprise of reducing complex psychological and sociological situations to numbers derived from questionnaires is so unrealistic as to be dangerous.
 
Perkins said Wessely said in the Times in 2011 said:
They know most of my diary, I don’t know how but they do. They use — abuse — the Freedom of Information Act.
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Does diary have some kind of other meaning in UK?

To me it means a private book that some people (usually women--men would generally keep a journal, although women might keep a journal, too) keep about their thoughts, personal record of happenings, and so forth.

I have heard it used especially from UK authors to refer to a book of dates/ one's calendar. But that also is not meeting minutes and study data. And if people are giving conferences, that is often public knowledge and it's not mysterious how the general public would know this.

Diary would not typically refer to lab notebooks, meeting minutes, and other work-related things which are processed under FOI (or one's entire schedule; law enforcement might ask that if they had a reason to, but I can't see why they would release it to the public, or why anyone would want to ask). You cannot request and receive something under FOI which is not considered public data.

That's a pretty baffling statement.
 
Diary is a book of dates coming up that you need to remember (although can also be a written record of what you did - ie personal stories)

A journal, to me, is more the lengthy writing type of diary.

A Calendar - to me is the 12 sheets of paper that hangs on the wall with pretty pictures of Northern Ireland, it's an abbreviated diary!
 
Woolie said:
Linking welfare dependence to personality type. I can't see any problems with that.
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I'd have to read it and related materials before passing judgment. I think it's fair to be skeptical about this sort of thing given that (a) it's hard to know what psychological/sociological findings are actually legitimate, as @Trish mentioned, and (b) the history of scientific racism, as you alluded to. But there are legitimate questions to ask and important issues at stake, and we could use quality research to guide policy rather than feelings and dispositions. I mean, I'm a big proponent of the 'welfare state' and safety nets and all that, so I want it to work as well as possible for people and stay solvent and such.

The fact that the author is a blatant connoisseur of self-pity and ad hominem prejudices me against him as a source of good answers, however. I'm not going to read his book, in any case.

Woolie said:
Now let me get back to my research into the effects of race on IQ.
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What was your university again? Somebody (definitely not me) will be letting them know that it has come to my, I mean their, attention, that...
 
WillowJ said:
Does diary have some kind of other meaning in UK?
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In this quote 'my diary' simply means my schedule - where I am going to be when and what for. I suspect he is referring to the fact that people are mentioning conferences he is posted to talk at or concerts where he might have been seen on the terrace or ... photoshoots with members of the Royal Family?
 
I posted this quote on another thread but think it appropriate here also:
"
Martin J Walker, who has written about other illnesses such as Gulf War Syndrome, which he also
claims have been inappropriately psychiatrised, describes this process:

'You get ill, you are accused of being mentally ill, denied effective treatment, then
when you campaign for ‘real science’, you are accused of terrorising those who do not
believe in your illness...after all, if your message is that people who say they are
suffering from ME or CFS are mentally ill, then accusing them of irrational attacks
adds strength to your case' (Walker 2003: 225)
 
James Morris-Lent said:
I'd have to read it and related materials before passing judgment. I think it's fair to be skeptical about this sort of thing given that (a) it's hard to know what psychological/sociological findings are actually legitimate, as @Trish mentioned, and (b) the history of scientific racism, as you alluded to. But there are legitimate questions to ask and important issues at stake, and we could use quality research to guide policy rather than feelings and dispositions. I mean, I'm a big proponent of the 'welfare state' and safety nets and all that, so I want it to work as well as possible for people and stay solvent and such.
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My feeling is: if you ask a stupid question you will get a stupid answer. This is a stupid question, because you can't infer causation. Of course people on welfare will respond differently on personality questionnaires than those at the top of their game. And of course, people with psychiatric problems will be overrepresented in the welfare group. And people in the welfare group will, in general, have more deprived backgrounds, be more distressed, and have experienced more early adversity, etc. etc.

The central problem here is not the politics; its the assumption that personality is an invariant trait that has causal primacy in anything you study. People forget what "personality" actually is - its just a pattern of responding on a bunch of questionnaires, and we choose the questions, based on our current notions of what we think personality is.

This in fact identical to the reasoning that's been used against PwMEs - they score differently from healthy people on some psyc measure, and the inference is that this feature plays a causal role in their illness.
 
The most remarkable thing about Prof. Sir Simon Wessely is his successful decades-long portrayal of himself as both the victim and the hero of the whole shitty farce.

The truth is that he has profited handsomely from our suffering, while delivering only pain and grief and despair for us in return.

A quarter century after first becoming acquainted with his work, the callous arrogance and raging narcissism of the man is still breathtaking. :grumpy:
 
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