I do want to point out in addition to Bob Sutton's research, there's Adam Grant's research he writes about in "Give and Take." One of the main takeaways, yes there are a LOT of jerks at the top, and nice people at the bottom, but there are some really pretty amazingly nice people at the top as well, and a large portion of the book is citing studies as to why certain nice people are doormats, and certain nice people can make it past all the "takers." Bob Sutton and Adam Grant's work complement each other nicely.
"If asshole behaviour is a route to power, those who already have positions of power in the hierarchy and are widely acknowledged to be clever, have less reason to use it."
I've noticed this a lot in my academic career. The nicest people to talk to at computer architecture conferences are usually those with Eckert-Mauchly awards.
I suspect that there's also a phase of life factor too. People tend to chill out when they get older. Especially those that are successful enough to where they have a comfortable life. Generally you start getting awards and such when your career is pretty well established.
I think the asshole behavior as expressed by the author (i.e. rude, dismissive, passive aggressive or even outright hostile behavior) is not the source of the benefits but are often seen together.
"Assholes" don't care what other people think and they don't seek validation from them. As a corollary they don't tone down their opinions nor do they mind confrontation. Since they express their opinions with confidence, they seem smarter.
Assholes can take advantage of people, since most people want to please others to some degree. There are also people who don't try please people, but don't engage in the anti-social behavior assholes do. It's not the Nice vs the Assholes.
In my opinion too much niceness can be a hindrance. Taking delicate care that you express your opinions in a way that doesn't upset or offend anybody is great for that warm good-feel between everybody but doesn't pave the way for real progress. People should learn to take harsh critique and not let it affect them too much personally. Likewise they should learn to give straight-up, even harsh critique.
There is a pretty well documented bias that people tend to think that negative people are smarter than positive ones. I think the critical/dismissive breed of assholes are playing into that. I agree with the author that if left unchecked, this can result in a toxic culture.
I disagree. There is no correlation between "real progress" and "not upsetting people".
There is clear, documented evidence that toxic teams and cultures are less productive than teams with high diversity that listen to each other and are safe to express opinions in. I would link it but you're probably not going to read it or listen to anyone else's opinions so you can google it yourself.
It's Tragedy of Commons stuff: there are marginal benefits to the individual of behaving like an asshole, but the group suffers.
I'd be interested in reading about that. A brief search yielded research about effects of diversity on team performance, but I couldn't find articles on toxic or hostile cultures.
> People should learn to take harsh critique and not let it affect them too much personally.
Well, my straight-up critique is that you're trying to pass your personal preference off as some sort of broad rule, and I think that's bunk. If you like being a jerk, godspeed. But other people get to think that you're a jerk and ignore you if they want.
> Taking delicate care [...] but doesn't pave the way for real progress.
That's the opposite of my experience. My simple model for it is "trust credit". If I'm generally kind and respectful, if I usually work to create good feelings, then I slowly build up trust credit. The more trust credit I have, the more people are willing to listen to difficult truths from me.
Today at work we did a project retrospective covering more than a year of work. There were a lot of difficult things to say. But what got us through was all the effort we put into building strong relationships as we worked together.
You can only build up trust credit over extended periods of time.
In modern, globalised science, you often have to deal with people you've never met before, and may never meet again. This requires a different approach critique. What counts as an acceptable critique is part of the core methodology of each scientific discipline, and differs with subject matter. In mathematically oriented fields one can often come up with clearcut counterexamples as a way to criticise a statement. This is not so simple in humanities. One may wonder if the dismissal of critique as AH-behaviour may also be a social strategy to dismiss criticism.
It is not surprising that the author of the original article has a humanities background.
I'm not sure what position you're arguing here. But if it is that chest-puffing confrontational behaviour is less common or less effective at "winning fights" in areas which lack clear-cut standards of proof I think the opposite is the case.
It seems to me that the reason you spend time accruing trust credit is to maintain your likability among people when you're obligated to do things that are unlikable. That's fine. But how much does that improve performance or enable progress? What is the optimal amount of likability for healthy workplace that performs well?
Let's take military bootcamp as a counter-example. People form strong friendships in a high stress environment where they might actively dislike their superiors. Their skills, abilities and tasks progress in leaps and bounds. Obviously this doesn't directly apply to normal workplaces, but provides an example of a situation where disregard for likability doesn't result in a bad work environment.
I believe the sense of belonging is a core human need, and people go to different lengths in making sure they have that. We all do at some level. What you do with "trust credit" probably makes your workplace a nicer environment, but I don't know how much it matters for performance.
Military bootcamp is a very specific experience that is not meant to represent the general life of being in the military, but is meant to prepare you for the differences.
It is a very poor example for any functional workplace because it really isn't one, even for elsewhere in the military.
The military is a terrible example. It is literally illegal to leave. If you leave during war, they can execute you. Boot camps are meant to deeply change how humans behave so that they can survive war, a deeply traumatic experience that often results in lasting psychological damage. When people apply boot camp models in civilian contexts, abuse is widespread:
> but I don't know how much it matters for performance.
Sure, we can agree that you don't know. Maybe you should try it and find out. But I'm saying that in my experience it has mattered a great deal, and as recently as yesterday.
You're saying that you want people to be different, to learn to take harsh criticism and subtract the harshness. I prefer to work with people as they are, which is as human beings who are sensitive to harshness, people who have a much easier time listening to people that they trust than people who are assholes to them.
I'm not particularly good at it. I'm arrogant and self-centered enough that I'd rather just say what I want in a fashion that is convenient and emotionally satisfying to me. But if I am going to work with other people, I often have to choose between the thing that is easy for me and the thing that makes change easy for them. Even if I didn't want people to generally do well and be happy (which I do), I just won't get very far in having the real-world effects I want if other people are indifferent or hostile to me.
> Well, my straight-up critique is that you're trying to pass your personal preference off as some sort of broad rule, and I think that's bunk.
Ehhh. I think it's just a consequentialist statement. "Everyone will be more effective at achieving their goals if they don't get offended by criticism." This says nothing about whether the other person is offensive; they probably are! But allowing that to determine to what degree you absorb the factual statements of their critique is a suboptimal game-theoretic strategy. No general ever won a war by ignoring information he didn't like the tone of. (But he still probably tried to get the source to be less offensive, both for the sake of that person's effectiveness at interacting with others who aren't as pragmatic, and for the sake of his own mental energy spent putting up with the offense.)
This sounds good when you say it. It also completely ignores reality: there's never clear factual content to anything, especially in tech.
Quite literally, unless your critique is coming from a presentation, with an outlined testing method, summary of results and a chart showing the problems with some method and the benefits of another, then you are almost certainly injecting a heavy amount of bias.
But wait you say, this is about someone's approach to a prob...let me stop you right there. If the criticism is now about how someone works and you think you're being or sound objective...
If people were independently operating, weakly interacting game theoretical robots of very modest capacity, this might make some sense.
But humans are enormously complex animals evolved to live in a highly intertwined society. Critique is used for all sorts of things besides helping other people do better at their jobs. No human motivation is rational; rationality just constrains and informs action. [1] It would be an interesting world where people could just turn off social and emotional response. But it's not the world we live in.
That means that people will (and should) evaluate every personal interaction in terms of what the other party's motivations are. Is this person critiquing me because they want to help? Because they are cranky and want to lash out at somebody? Because they want to discourage me? Because they want me to change behavior they they find inconvenient or aesthetically displeasing? Etc, etc, etc.
That doesn't mean they might not also later say, "Well, he is an asshole, but I guess he has a point." That's not easy and it takes work. So if I am going to take the time to tell somebody a hard truth that I really want them to hear, I might as well help do the work that lets them really hear it. If I'm not willing to do the work, I might as well just keep my mouth shut, because there's nothing particularly rational about me taking the time to say things that people won't listen to.
I get that wishing other people would be more rational seems pretty rational. But it's an irrational stance. People are people. If I'm going to work with 'em, I have to work with the actual thems, not the thems that in some ideal world would be convenient for me.
I couldn't help but think, although the article is focused on academia, that doesn't mean these issues don't exist in industry or even other groups of people (families, friend groups, etc). I don't necessarily think the answer is always 'niceness,' although on some level everyone is deserving of respect, in my opinion. However, I also respect myself enough to leave situations that are not healthy for me (sometimes that is easy to do, sometimes not).
I could imagine in academia it could get especially tricky, if one was in a tenured position, working towards an career in academia, several years into a PhD program, etc and essentially facing a decision to possibly lose an opportunity for some academia goal or to continue to work with some dysfunctional person or group until the goal has been met (finishing degree, getting tenure, not giving up a hard-won tenured position). I mean, there are problems in industry too I guess, but the nature of the academia career track seems to make 'just leaving the dysfunctional situation' a much more meaningful decision, that could essentially end one's academic career or reduce its trajectory. If I don't like the dynamics at a company outside academia, it is relatively straightforward to find a new company to work at with minimal consequences (in fact, the move could help my career).
This could be like specializing in a technology used professionally by a couple of shops only, with many prominent individuals already working there. If a somewhat abusive culture develops over time, how much would you be willing to put up with it, or even embrace it, knowing that resigning could mean never working with that hard-learned technology again?
Academia is particularly political. I've worked in industry and seen a lot of politics there too, but in academia the problem is much worse. I think that this article is just examining one consequence of the politics in academia, which is that people sometimes come across as assholes. The article doesn't get to the root cause of the problem.
For a while now, I've been trying to understand why there is so much political behaviour in academia, as I really don't like it and I'm not interested in participating. Recently, I found the answer perfectly summarised in this essay by Ben Horowitz:
What put me off academic research was essentially the utter lack of "genuine" teamwork - when a lot of interactions with a colleague become negotiations about whether your name goes on their paper and if so in what place it all becomes a bit tedious.
That might have been the lab I was in - while everyone was nice there was a distinct weird cutthroat element to it that I haven't encountered anywhere else.
Edit: I should correct that - this was in the UK so everyone appeared nice, I know there was a bit of back stabbing from on high directed at anyone who looked likely to be too successful.
I've also seen this, and it is explained by the essay I mentioned.
You _do_ get genuine teamwork in academia in the UK, essentially I've had to identify like-minded people who are principally here to do great work rather than further their own career. I've found lots of people like that, and have collaborated with them and found it a very pleasant experience.
I've also experience people as you describe, and I generally just stay away from them as much as possible. Life's too short to associate with people like that, leave them to their agenda and get on with doing research.
> What put me off academic research was essentially the utter lack of "genuine" teamwork - when a lot of interactions with a colleague become negotiations about whether your name goes on their paper and if so in what place it all becomes a bit tedious.
At least the "in what place" problem is solved quite elegantly in mathematics, where the names on a paper are simply in alphabetical order. Being a mathematician I'd wish that other sciences would also apply this practice.
As an entrepreneur I believe everybody should be an asshole when necessary, and nice when necessary.
What happens is that we have "nice people by default" that can't be assholes even if they want, and assholes that could not be nice even if they want.
For example, I have managed people controlling machines that could squash a person against the wall if you are not careful, or rip your hand or strangulate you(industrial lathes or mills or motors with your own scarf).
I was the manager with less accidents or deaths(none of course) in the company, by far, because every single time I saw someone was doing stupid things that could harm them or someone else I could become an asshole if they don't listen to me the first time I told them.
With an industrial press you need to press two buttons at the same time at the side for the press to go down. If you leave people alone, they will put wood sticks on them so they could be faster and earn more.
People don't want naturally to wear masks or put safety goggles because they believe they are in control, and they are 99.5% percent of the time, but this 0.5% could change your life for bad forever.
When you do what you should most people will consider you an asshole, because they don't see what you can see.
I had several people thank me years after managing them!! and telling me something like: "Thank you for doing X. At the time I though your response was excessive, but now that I have seen what happened to coworker Y(lost a limb, the eye or whatever) I could see how important it was what you tell us to do."
Being nice has its limits, death or important stuff like environmental waste or corruption are some of them.
I have seen nice people not denounce corruption when they saw it because of fear of facing the corrupt. Yes men that always smile.
This statement makes the unfortunate assumption that people will change their behaviour following your treating them poorly (or worse punishing them). It would be on you to substantiate that claim and no, your anectodal experience doesn't provide valid evidence.
For evidence of otherwise I recommend reading Thinking fast and slow by Daniel Kahneman. It's a great read regardless of this issue.
That's all fine and good in an environment where people can actually come to physical harm, but this article is about academia. I think we need to stop excusing asshole behavior in academia and IT.
>The budding asshole has learned, perhaps subconsciously, that other people interrupt them less if they use stronger language.
But there should be some underlying reason why stronger language warrants more airtime.
I have another hypothesis why assholes seem smart.
Sometimes I catch some error that people around me spread. But I can't quite articulate it at first. Then it reappears and becomes somekind of norm. At this point I get frustrated.
Then something happens which to me shows how fucked up things have gone. I finally articulate what I felt was wrong. Also all that bottled up frustration surfaces. This is probably when I appear most "smart", because well thought out stuff goes public suddenly. It has actually nothing to do with how smart I actually am. It's just that certain assholiness and talking smart stuff happens at the same time.
Extrapolate and people who are assholes all the time seem inherently smart.
We are herd animals. Teams competing with teams is usually perceived as empowering. Individuals competing with individuals is usually perceived as grueling. Assholes are not the problem, they are a symptom.
I truly don't understand this article, or the comments on it:
Jerks step on, belittle or otherwise sabotage their academic colleagues. The most common method is by criticising their opinions in public, at a conference or in a seminar and by trash talking them in private.
Criticizing their opinions in public? How is this being a "jerk"? This is what academia is supposed to be all about - you publish, others criticize, you repair or you accept that you were wrong. That's how we approach truth. Trash talking in private might be jerky behavior, though given the prior statement the author might just mean "I think XXX's theory is incorrect because of [reason]" rather than "XXX has sex with goats, plagiarizes his students and forges all his data".
Most theories are just wrong. The point of academia is not to be a polite mutual admiration society providing easy and stable work for people who loved college, it's to get closer to truth.
The comments provide better examples of jerky behavior. For example, a female professor called the "IR Hulk" was privately supportive of someone's work, but then she publicly ambushed them with criticisms she presumably did not share in private.
I also don't even know what to make of comments like this: Academia in general is very hostile to forms of communalization and cooperation and champions the rational individual (read: male)... The issue of favoring those who provide valid rational criticism is "indeed feminist one"? Can someone steelman this for me?
>> ... by criticising their opinions in public, at
>> a conference or in a seminar ...
>
> How is this being a "jerk"? This is what academia is
> supposed to be all about - you publish, others
> criticize
Criticizing people's results and conclusions in an argumented way in an article is perfectly "academical". Asking them question after their presentation is OK too. Criticizing them harshly in public when they presents their work and asking them to answer immediately to your objections is maybe not the best way to approach truth.
I'm not sure why. If you don't raise the question immediately, other viewers might be misled by the flawed presentation. Once you stand in front of your colleagues and present something, you should be really sure you are right.
Look, I've attempted to publish things that were wrong. I fully understand the negative emotions associated with having your work evaporate in front of your eyes. But it's a necessary part of the search for truth.
37 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 68.3 ms ] threadI've noticed this a lot in my academic career. The nicest people to talk to at computer architecture conferences are usually those with Eckert-Mauchly awards.
"Assholes" don't care what other people think and they don't seek validation from them. As a corollary they don't tone down their opinions nor do they mind confrontation. Since they express their opinions with confidence, they seem smarter.
Assholes can take advantage of people, since most people want to please others to some degree. There are also people who don't try please people, but don't engage in the anti-social behavior assholes do. It's not the Nice vs the Assholes.
In my opinion too much niceness can be a hindrance. Taking delicate care that you express your opinions in a way that doesn't upset or offend anybody is great for that warm good-feel between everybody but doesn't pave the way for real progress. People should learn to take harsh critique and not let it affect them too much personally. Likewise they should learn to give straight-up, even harsh critique.
http://www.wired.com/2014/11/be-mean-online/
http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=7402
There is clear, documented evidence that toxic teams and cultures are less productive than teams with high diversity that listen to each other and are safe to express opinions in. I would link it but you're probably not going to read it or listen to anyone else's opinions so you can google it yourself.
It's Tragedy of Commons stuff: there are marginal benefits to the individual of behaving like an asshole, but the group suffers.
Well, my straight-up critique is that you're trying to pass your personal preference off as some sort of broad rule, and I think that's bunk. If you like being a jerk, godspeed. But other people get to think that you're a jerk and ignore you if they want.
> Taking delicate care [...] but doesn't pave the way for real progress.
That's the opposite of my experience. My simple model for it is "trust credit". If I'm generally kind and respectful, if I usually work to create good feelings, then I slowly build up trust credit. The more trust credit I have, the more people are willing to listen to difficult truths from me.
Today at work we did a project retrospective covering more than a year of work. There were a lot of difficult things to say. But what got us through was all the effort we put into building strong relationships as we worked together.
In modern, globalised science, you often have to deal with people you've never met before, and may never meet again. This requires a different approach critique. What counts as an acceptable critique is part of the core methodology of each scientific discipline, and differs with subject matter. In mathematically oriented fields one can often come up with clearcut counterexamples as a way to criticise a statement. This is not so simple in humanities. One may wonder if the dismissal of critique as AH-behaviour may also be a social strategy to dismiss criticism.
It is not surprising that the author of the original article has a humanities background.
Let's take military bootcamp as a counter-example. People form strong friendships in a high stress environment where they might actively dislike their superiors. Their skills, abilities and tasks progress in leaps and bounds. Obviously this doesn't directly apply to normal workplaces, but provides an example of a situation where disregard for likability doesn't result in a bad work environment.
I believe the sense of belonging is a core human need, and people go to different lengths in making sure they have that. We all do at some level. What you do with "trust credit" probably makes your workplace a nicer environment, but I don't know how much it matters for performance.
It is a very poor example for any functional workplace because it really isn't one, even for elsewhere in the military.
https://www.google.com/search?q=boot+camp+abuse
> but I don't know how much it matters for performance.
Sure, we can agree that you don't know. Maybe you should try it and find out. But I'm saying that in my experience it has mattered a great deal, and as recently as yesterday.
You're saying that you want people to be different, to learn to take harsh criticism and subtract the harshness. I prefer to work with people as they are, which is as human beings who are sensitive to harshness, people who have a much easier time listening to people that they trust than people who are assholes to them.
I'm not particularly good at it. I'm arrogant and self-centered enough that I'd rather just say what I want in a fashion that is convenient and emotionally satisfying to me. But if I am going to work with other people, I often have to choose between the thing that is easy for me and the thing that makes change easy for them. Even if I didn't want people to generally do well and be happy (which I do), I just won't get very far in having the real-world effects I want if other people are indifferent or hostile to me.
Ehhh. I think it's just a consequentialist statement. "Everyone will be more effective at achieving their goals if they don't get offended by criticism." This says nothing about whether the other person is offensive; they probably are! But allowing that to determine to what degree you absorb the factual statements of their critique is a suboptimal game-theoretic strategy. No general ever won a war by ignoring information he didn't like the tone of. (But he still probably tried to get the source to be less offensive, both for the sake of that person's effectiveness at interacting with others who aren't as pragmatic, and for the sake of his own mental energy spent putting up with the offense.)
Quite literally, unless your critique is coming from a presentation, with an outlined testing method, summary of results and a chart showing the problems with some method and the benefits of another, then you are almost certainly injecting a heavy amount of bias.
But wait you say, this is about someone's approach to a prob...let me stop you right there. If the criticism is now about how someone works and you think you're being or sound objective...
If people were independently operating, weakly interacting game theoretical robots of very modest capacity, this might make some sense.
But humans are enormously complex animals evolved to live in a highly intertwined society. Critique is used for all sorts of things besides helping other people do better at their jobs. No human motivation is rational; rationality just constrains and informs action. [1] It would be an interesting world where people could just turn off social and emotional response. But it's not the world we live in.
That means that people will (and should) evaluate every personal interaction in terms of what the other party's motivations are. Is this person critiquing me because they want to help? Because they are cranky and want to lash out at somebody? Because they want to discourage me? Because they want me to change behavior they they find inconvenient or aesthetically displeasing? Etc, etc, etc.
That doesn't mean they might not also later say, "Well, he is an asshole, but I guess he has a point." That's not easy and it takes work. So if I am going to take the time to tell somebody a hard truth that I really want them to hear, I might as well help do the work that lets them really hear it. If I'm not willing to do the work, I might as well just keep my mouth shut, because there's nothing particularly rational about me taking the time to say things that people won't listen to.
I get that wishing other people would be more rational seems pretty rational. But it's an irrational stance. People are people. If I'm going to work with 'em, I have to work with the actual thems, not the thems that in some ideal world would be convenient for me.
[1] See, e.g., http://www.amazon.com/dp/014303622X/ and a lot of other things
I could imagine in academia it could get especially tricky, if one was in a tenured position, working towards an career in academia, several years into a PhD program, etc and essentially facing a decision to possibly lose an opportunity for some academia goal or to continue to work with some dysfunctional person or group until the goal has been met (finishing degree, getting tenure, not giving up a hard-won tenured position). I mean, there are problems in industry too I guess, but the nature of the academia career track seems to make 'just leaving the dysfunctional situation' a much more meaningful decision, that could essentially end one's academic career or reduce its trajectory. If I don't like the dynamics at a company outside academia, it is relatively straightforward to find a new company to work at with minimal consequences (in fact, the move could help my career).
For a while now, I've been trying to understand why there is so much political behaviour in academia, as I really don't like it and I'm not interested in participating. Recently, I found the answer perfectly summarised in this essay by Ben Horowitz:
http://www.bhorowitz.com/how_to_minimize_politics_in_your_co...
Ben also explains how to solve this problem, and I couldn't agree more.
This essay is included in his book, "The Hard Thing about Hard Things," which gets a lot of mentions on here and is definitely worth a read.
That might have been the lab I was in - while everyone was nice there was a distinct weird cutthroat element to it that I haven't encountered anywhere else.
Edit: I should correct that - this was in the UK so everyone appeared nice, I know there was a bit of back stabbing from on high directed at anyone who looked likely to be too successful.
I've also seen this, and it is explained by the essay I mentioned.
You _do_ get genuine teamwork in academia in the UK, essentially I've had to identify like-minded people who are principally here to do great work rather than further their own career. I've found lots of people like that, and have collaborated with them and found it a very pleasant experience.
I've also experience people as you describe, and I generally just stay away from them as much as possible. Life's too short to associate with people like that, leave them to their agenda and get on with doing research.
At least the "in what place" problem is solved quite elegantly in mathematics, where the names on a paper are simply in alphabetical order. Being a mathematician I'd wish that other sciences would also apply this practice.
What happens is that we have "nice people by default" that can't be assholes even if they want, and assholes that could not be nice even if they want.
For example, I have managed people controlling machines that could squash a person against the wall if you are not careful, or rip your hand or strangulate you(industrial lathes or mills or motors with your own scarf).
I was the manager with less accidents or deaths(none of course) in the company, by far, because every single time I saw someone was doing stupid things that could harm them or someone else I could become an asshole if they don't listen to me the first time I told them.
With an industrial press you need to press two buttons at the same time at the side for the press to go down. If you leave people alone, they will put wood sticks on them so they could be faster and earn more.
People don't want naturally to wear masks or put safety goggles because they believe they are in control, and they are 99.5% percent of the time, but this 0.5% could change your life for bad forever.
When you do what you should most people will consider you an asshole, because they don't see what you can see.
I had several people thank me years after managing them!! and telling me something like: "Thank you for doing X. At the time I though your response was excessive, but now that I have seen what happened to coworker Y(lost a limb, the eye or whatever) I could see how important it was what you tell us to do."
Being nice has its limits, death or important stuff like environmental waste or corruption are some of them.
I have seen nice people not denounce corruption when they saw it because of fear of facing the corrupt. Yes men that always smile.
For evidence of otherwise I recommend reading Thinking fast and slow by Daniel Kahneman. It's a great read regardless of this issue.
Tolerating repeated serious safety violations absolutely, positively does not make you nice.
Only by replacing "an asshole" with "confrontational" and "nice" with "non-confrontational" does your comment make sense.
But there should be some underlying reason why stronger language warrants more airtime.
I have another hypothesis why assholes seem smart.
Sometimes I catch some error that people around me spread. But I can't quite articulate it at first. Then it reappears and becomes somekind of norm. At this point I get frustrated.
Then something happens which to me shows how fucked up things have gone. I finally articulate what I felt was wrong. Also all that bottled up frustration surfaces. This is probably when I appear most "smart", because well thought out stuff goes public suddenly. It has actually nothing to do with how smart I actually am. It's just that certain assholiness and talking smart stuff happens at the same time.
Extrapolate and people who are assholes all the time seem inherently smart.
We are herd animals. Teams competing with teams is usually perceived as empowering. Individuals competing with individuals is usually perceived as grueling. Assholes are not the problem, they are a symptom.
Jerks step on, belittle or otherwise sabotage their academic colleagues. The most common method is by criticising their opinions in public, at a conference or in a seminar and by trash talking them in private.
Criticizing their opinions in public? How is this being a "jerk"? This is what academia is supposed to be all about - you publish, others criticize, you repair or you accept that you were wrong. That's how we approach truth. Trash talking in private might be jerky behavior, though given the prior statement the author might just mean "I think XXX's theory is incorrect because of [reason]" rather than "XXX has sex with goats, plagiarizes his students and forges all his data".
Most theories are just wrong. The point of academia is not to be a polite mutual admiration society providing easy and stable work for people who loved college, it's to get closer to truth.
The comments provide better examples of jerky behavior. For example, a female professor called the "IR Hulk" was privately supportive of someone's work, but then she publicly ambushed them with criticisms she presumably did not share in private.
I also don't even know what to make of comments like this: Academia in general is very hostile to forms of communalization and cooperation and champions the rational individual (read: male)... The issue of favoring those who provide valid rational criticism is "indeed feminist one"? Can someone steelman this for me?
Look, I've attempted to publish things that were wrong. I fully understand the negative emotions associated with having your work evaporate in front of your eyes. But it's a necessary part of the search for truth.