"The filing raises questions about the potential conflict of interest created by Big Tech’s influence at research institutions that are called upon for their expertise on the industry."
The individual is using the same reasoning as the headline. They weren't getting the fund they wanted and noticed there was a donation recently. They are speculating that that's the cause of their lack of organization support.
"whistleblower" is a journalism word meant to imply who the good guy is and endow them with credibility. Rewriting the story with "employee files complaint" doesn't hit the same.
> They weren't getting the fund they wanted and noticed there was a donation recently. They are speculating that that's the cause of their lack of organization support.
Sure, it's all anecdotal -- it is testimony, after all -- but much of it is backed up by email and text conversations. On the topic of a potential conflict of interest, what do you think about the personal relationship between Doug Elmendorf and Elliot Schrage?
A casual reader may infer the same for both words, but "following" is much stronger. If I may take some liberties with usage: Following someone to a faraway place is much more likely to involve causation than going to that same place after they do.
That’s an astute observation. Without having any insight in the matter, statements like “the most important documents in the history of the internet” have me questioning how self-assured this team have been when assessing why Harvard put up a line of defence.
It could be read that way; but it could be read as a simple temporal sequence, no? In either case, this is a press release from an organization which is advocating for the aggrieved party. I suppose any journalist who wanted to pickup this story would have to decide for themselves whether the language used in the press release goes too far or not when writing their story.
If you're concerned about it, TFA and linked materials go into the potential casual connection. I don't think you can simply dismiss this without a critical examination because all the facts aren't in yet and the story isn't finished. Usually, a whistleblower complaint is really the start of things, not the end.
Hopefully, we'll see over time how much merit this has. It certainly seems worth investigating because we'd all really want to know if/how big donations to prestigious academic institutions can buy their research.
> In sending the lawful whistleblower disclosure to the President and General Counsel of Harvard University, the U.S. Department of Education, and subsequently to the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office, Dr. Donovan and Whistleblower Aid are calling for an urgent and impartial investigation into inappropriate influence at the Harvard Kennedy School.
"Following" is also a very common and well-understood English word which means that one thing happened after another, which is probably why journalists use it. Implying a suspected causal relationship by talking about a temporal relationship also happens very frequently in non-journalistic speech. Nobody is trying to trick you with this headline.
From regulatory capture through revolving doors and lobbying, to media capture through purchase, and now academic capture through donation, it seems no activity is safe from large concentrations of wealth.
what if we had laws that prevented people from obtaining disproportionate amounts of wealth? Seems like it'd be a lot harder to buy a school if being a multi-billionaire is impossible.
Loopholes will be found, wealth will be concentrated in new ways, and then the wealth will be used to revert laws to benefit the wealthy. The laws won't change in the first place since money has captured most political systems as well.
Yes, give up and don't try, on the scale of things you will be dead and forgotten anyways - a failure in every sense of the word regardless of what you do.
Even people famous in their time are forgotten in short order. A good lesson for those deluding themselves into thinking they'll be an exception. Better to be remembered as a decent human being to your loved ones.
That would tip the balance of power to another corrupting influence. Corporations, say. Or professional associations representing highly-educated high earners like doctors or lawyers. Or to politically savvy deca-millionaires who use their money with more focused attention. And that's setting aside the question of how and whether you could prevent the existence of billionaires, which would lead to offshoring and (plausibly at least) dramatic unintended changes in what kinds of social and technological change happens. But either way, coalitions corrupting institutions is not a soluble problem generally. It gets solved with acts of effort and courage like this one, and by discussions like this.
> That would tip the balance of power to another corrupting influence. Corporations, say. Or professional associations representing highly-educated high earners like doctors or lawyers.
Even if what you say is true, which I do not grant, your implication is akin to "we should not punish criminals, because some other criminals will rise to take their place." It's a defeatist meme that mainly serves to protect the interests of the already-powerful.
Some work is never done, but that is not a reason to give up on it.
This is such a naive viewpoint. Let's say that people are not allowed to have more than 10 million dollars, but corporations are. Then it wouldn't be Zuckerberg's money, it would simply be Facebook's, wielded by Zuckerberg.
I hope you can see the ridiculousness is saying that corporations should be limited in wealth as well, but even if you can't, let's assume they are limited the same. Now it becomes easier to buy them off, because they are comparably smaller.
The only logical solution is to allow both corporations and individuals to accumulate as much wealth as they are able to. Rich people aren't the problem, corrupt people are. Instead of trying to make rich corrupt people less rich, why don't we try to make them less corrupt instead?
Foreign entities? Of course, we should ban that as long as we’re at it. Next you’ll have people using vastly superior foreign products, we better ban that as well. And if people decide to leave the country en masse because they’re too morally weak and desire wealth, we can’t have that either, so better build a wall.
> We should just tax income over $10 million at 90% for both people and corporations.
People - maybe. But why corporations? Isn’t that double taxation? The only way money leaves a corporation is through people which will be taxed eventually.
As for the healthcare system, it doesn’t need more money. It needs an extreme regulation and red tape shake up. We could have vastly better healthcare today for the same amount of money that’s already there if not for the bureaucratic mess and an army of administrators tending to it.
It is very good and useful to actually ignore a reasonable question and engage in any discussion they might contradict your way of thinking and instead point and yell at things that literally aren’t representative of what was posed.
What a joke. It didn’t used to be this way in the US and we weren’t North Korea then, but okay. Point at a bogeyman and accept the status quo (to the benefit of those with unimaginable wealth by the way, of which they aren’t going to give you any for defending them.) instead of I considering how to make a world where things are better for everyone.
>> From regulatory capture through revolving doors and lobbying, to media capture through purchase, and now academic capture through donation, it seems no activity is safe from large concentrations of wealth.
> And it never will be. This is a human problem. No amount of laws and regulations will ever solve it.
Come on. Wealth is literally a creature of "law and regulations," and changes to them can definitely "solve it." That's trivially shown by the through a thought experiment where we imagine legal changes that lead to Zuckerberg having his wealth confiscated and Facebook being placed under the control of some person or entity who is not its ally and is not allowed to profit from it.
I think I need to make extra-clear that my example is an extreme one to clearly disprove your point, not the only regulatory option available or a policy proposal. Don't get distracted by irrelevant details.
Defeatist memes like what you said circulate widely to encourage paralysis, but they're propaganda or its derivatives, not truth.
We shouldn't sit on our hands or whatever but wealth isn't a creation of laws, it's a bit of the inverse. Some laws can remove wealth and some laws are gonna take a lotta of guns and manpower (resources ==wealth) to implement.
> We shouldn't sit on our hands or whatever but wealth isn't a creation of laws, it's a bit of the inverse.
Huh? Maybe in the deep, deep past; but definitely not now. Even back then, where there were no states and little social organization, there was still custom within groups that worked like law.
> Some laws can remove wealth and some laws are gonna take a lotta of guns and manpower (resources ==wealth) to implement.
Zuckerberg and Facebook have no army and no means to raise one, despite the wealth they have. They are totally, utterly at the mercy of laws and regulations.
Mark Zuckerburg's wealth is absolutely a creation of laws. Almost all of his wealth comes from his ownership of a corporation. The corporation only exists because of laws. It is only a sale-able asset because of laws.
That’s not the point. Corruption (which is what this is) is NOT binary, it’s a problem that exists on spectrum.
We don’t solve spectrum problems, we reduce and minimize them. Just because they exist to a degree and never are remediated doesn’t mean we shouldn’t seek to minimize them.
Corruption can lead to tax evasion, poor tax administration, and exemptions that disproportionately favor the well-connected and wealthy population groups in society and must be rallied against if we seek civil societies.
We’ll never get rid of it. As you say. But if we don’t act against it these problems will grow like cancer and become insidious, infecting every aspect of society, so it’s deeply important not to embrace an apathetic approach or present them as inevitable.
They are intrinsic, but the level we tolerate — the “degree of corruption” — which I would argue is pretty high in this case, is most certainly counterable and definitely can be reduced.
Well, you can prevent the concentration of wealth in the first place.
Thomas Jefferson wrote, "But the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property....Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise"[0].
The good old "we have always been that way". If perhaps hard to imagine for you, there are tons of social structures where wealth cannot be used to purchase power (ie where currency buys you some stuff but not labor from other humans). See the recent book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_of_Everything. Very much a perspective changing book.
I’m going to guess that not many of those social structures achieved things like low infant mortality, not dying from randomly stubbing your toe, the internet, space travel, and the like. If I was presented with a choice, I’d pick a modern Western state any time, flawed as they may be.
Your argument is a straw-man. You're conflating taking inspiration from something and adopting it verbatim (your first two examples are particularly hilarious in this regard). Also i've yet to find a compelling argument defending that western capitalism is a necessity for high-tech (you second two examples). In particular schools, academia and software are fields where not commercial-centric relationships are thriving and deemed superior by a fair share of practitioners.
Politics (as in the game of power) and corruption are human nature. Pushing back against these are equally human nature. The worse it gets the more intense the push back. The push back seems to be at moment taking the shape of voting in far right or trump like politicians accross the world. They won't solve the issue. Therefore the next level of intensity may very well be revolution.
imho, you're wrong:
it may not be "human nature" as much as it is prisoner's dilemma.
few, but some, humans are just as inherently averse to corruption as someone may be inherently prone to it. it's a matter of "if I don't take this bribe, someone else will"
That is still human nature. Not everyone will exhibit those traits, but when looking at the entirety of humanity, these traits are certainly part of our nature.
And the prisoner's dilemma is a way of exploring/explaining these traits (though I expect these aren't exclusive to humans).
hmm. I suppose a sentient ant may not reach a Nash equilibrium, but the best equilibrium. Then through that lens, yeah. I can see how you see it as human nature.
Clarify what do you mean by "revolution", because to me that words means either a coup, civil war, acts of terrorism, or, worse than that, a massacre like China's "cultural revolution".
Any of those I imagine, perhaps all. When things reach boiling point pressure has to be released somehow. And as it stands things are under quite some pressure as of recently.
Universities have been dirty since they embraced price gouging on tuition in the 90's. There is no way what they are providing can be considered fair or reasonable.
I don't think tuition is the problem (in this case!); it's the endless need for "fundraising". If you need to get huge gifts, inevitably you will be corrupted by the needs/wants of the gift givers.
Huh, and where does that big amount come from? By taking huge donations. Its like saying Apple can sell iPhone for free since they are insanely rich. They are reach because they charge large amount of money for a fucking phone. Money either increases or decreases its not gonna stay at same level.
> since they embraced price gouging on tuition in the 90's.
(Caveat that the following is US-centric.) I'd love to see the data showing actual price gouging, because the data I've seen has generally suggested that per-student spending hasn't even increased at a pace equivalent to inflation; rather, funding didn't increase with enrolment, leading to students paying for an ever-higher share of their education.
(As for private universities... fine, I'm okay calling it price gouging.)
I used to work in Institutional Research at a state university and at least for state school's tuition tracks pretty closely to the cost of education. In my time working there, our funding from the state was reduced by 30%.
Generally Non-resident tuition is the cost it takes to educate a student. Resident tuition is cheaper because it's subsidized by the state. Every year we would get less and less funding from the state and would have to shift more burden to the student. We implemented furlough days, and cut admin staff compensation to attempt to reduce the tuition burden on students. We still had to raise Tuition faster than inflation in the end.
There is no reason why my adjunct professor spending 45 minutes a week, twice a week for a few months, in some old building, should cost me and 70 other people $3000 each. The tuition problem is one of bloat and greed.
That's nearly a quarter million dollars, of which the professor is probably getting a few thousand. where is the other $200k+ going?
I worked as an adjunct about 10 years ago and ~$2k per class was the pay. With a full class load that came out to a little over $2k per month. Definitely more work than 90mins per week per class though. 4 courses per term was definitely a full-time job.
So yeah, not a lot of tuition is making it to the low rung teachers.
I just read that this morning. I'm interested enough in the outcome that I put a calendar reminder 6 months out to check what happened. Doing so made me wonder if there's a service that would email me updates about legal cases like this that I would like to follow.
Random people like you and me wouldn't pay for something they're gonna use twice in their lifetime, and lawyers surely have something like this, possibly integrate with all the other tools they use.
I do love it when people say "I am not familiar with this situation at all but" and then proceed to speculate about it having made clear they have no basis for their speculation.
Hadn't considered the role that AI could play in such a service. But now think that it could be a great application.
Speaking to my AI: "computer, please create me a Google Doc that gets updated with new results related to the legal case of Joan Donovan vs Harvard, and notify me via email with updates."
I'd probably do something like that a few times a week. It's really a missing link to my news experience.
There are services that monitors changes on webpages so you could plug the "official" page where legal/official information about that case lives and wait for a change, maybe it would even work with a search engine results page.
I set up cron to run urlwatch[1] once a day on a vps, and it emails me updates to pages. It supports CSS selectors, various filters (like html2text) and so on. Combined with a little elisp to diff highlight emails in Emacs, this has one of the highest usefulness/maintenance ratio of things I self-host.
There are plenty of mailing list services that associates of large law firms sign up for. I haven't been around people in that world for a while so I don't know the names, but I'm sure you can find them if you spend time looking.
Anything that provides a calendar and/or timed TODO/list items. Just set calendar item or the TODO item's due date 6 months out. Any OS you're using whether mobile or desktop probably has an app for this shipped with it.
this is how many rich people get their kids into Harvard too, the only reason parents got caught up in the varsity blues scandal was that they were too explicit... old money donates the new library and "hopes" for the best
> this is how many rich people get their kids into Harvard too
That's the entire point and feature of these elite institutions (more specifically, their undergraduate division and business schools), to connect wealth with brilliant people. They are the traditional social institutions of innovation and entrepreneurship before incubators like YC were a thing. If you remove the wealth aspects, then the Ivies are no different than any other research state school.
If you wanted to make money, you would choose business over academia. I know one brilliant math/physics researcher who wanted to go to China because they have better scientific research equipment.
New money means wealth that was mostly based on efforts (not due to passive investments) by the current holder.
micromacrofoot1 was trying to distinguish “a lot of money” from “a little bit of money”, but old money is not the correct term for that.
From Wikipedia, the varsity blues scandal was about 33 sets of parents paying ~$25M total. That is chump change compared to donating a whole building, which new or old money can do, because they would have access to tens of millions of dollars.
fair, though I was thinking the context that "old money" is usually old because there's a lot of it... but new/old signaling quantity is probably less true now than ever
there's also some behavior involved, traditionally it would be a major social faux pas to ask for special treatment in a traceable way
The linked blog doesn't actually include any details and is instead just a vitriolic series of paragraphs from what sounds like an angry fired employee.
It's hard to actually believe anything about this without having specific examples of what was done.
500MM to avoid Harvard scrutiny - not a bad deal on 40MMM quarterly profit. It probably doubles as a tax deduction as well. Free market capitalism at its finest.
I can't speak to the other green users, but I'm a long time poster who recently created a new account because I decided I didn't want my contributions here tied to my real name anymore, after some real-life concerns about harassment (not from HN, but still trying to play it safer online now).
Three valid reasons. Person is genuinely new. Person wants to post but not link to original identifiable id. Third someone is posting in official capacity and wants separate work id.
To sum up the first few pages after skimming it, Facebook tried to bribe her (well "fund" her research), she refused. Later she had a meeting with the former head of comms at Facebook, who was now on the Dean's council, where he became incredibly angry with her research (page 4, 13). Following this, she got an email from the Dean of the Kennedy school which sounds very much like someone tattled to them and they now want to "review" her research (see page 5, 15). It continues from here.
If you're familiar with this woman's past research, you'd realize she is quite.... biased politically.
She strongly believes in increased content moderation by "fact checkers".
She's spread misinformation herself like
- Suggesting Russian disinformation on Facebook shifted the 2016 election (anyone who's run a facebook ad in their life knows how absurdly ridiculous this is)
- Advocating for increased censorship of information during COVID on lab leak hypothesis
This is just off a few minutes of reading her past work.
I'm not a fan of Facebook (in the slightest) but also am really not a fan of the type of censorship this person wants.
Not sure why I decided to spend so much time on this on a Monday morning but I've read to page 35, and the picture is much more muddled.
It looks like the FB Archive project gains momentum and launches but Dr. Donovan and the TASC get sidelined along the way (which understandably is very upsetting, you can feel the pain on every page). It does seem clear that the Dean doesn't approve of Dr. Donovan/TASC and he eventually shuts the group down, but if he allows the Facebook project to move forward under other groups that are also within the Kennedy school, then the title of this post is pretty misleading. (Oh, maybe why the actual article title says "initial team" instead of just "team".)
BTW, not a particular fan of Meta, no feelings about Harvard/Kennedy school, never heard of any of these people before except Frances Haugen and Dr. Latanya Sweeney.
> Dr. Donovan and the TASC get sidelined along the way
this is described dismissively and in the passive voice, but it's an active action, and quite damning.
who sidelined them, and why?
it seems the answers are: the school, because the researchers upset facebook, who was giving the school money
> if he allows the Facebook project to move forward under other groups that are also within the Kennedy school, then the title of this post is pretty misleading
this is misleading: if the research is allowed to continue, it should continue under the researchers who did the research, unless there's a good reason otherwise
"The school" is not a person with motive. Dr. Donovan's report strongly implicates the Dean, who maintains a personal friendship with Sheryl Sandberg, as the driver behind these actions. The remaining actors appear to be interest in saving their own necks.
I think sidelining the lead researcher and giving the project to another group is accurately described at "gutting a team". No, they didn't end the project, but the series of events described seems to be insinuating that she could have led the project if she was willing to have her work funded by Facebook, listen to one of their former people, etc. So if that was their goal, and they just got someone else to do the work, is that any better?
Fair, but it raises the question of the motives behind it. It would seem they didn't necessarily have a problem with the research, but rather with the lead researcher. There's complicated issues of academic freedom to parse here, but in principle, if you aren't happy with the work someone is doing, it's not entirely unreasonable that you'd let them go and have someone else pick up the work.
> It would seem they didn't necessarily have a problem with the research, but rather with the lead researcher
This is the entire crux of the issue; do they have a problem with the lead researcher because she isn't good at her job or because she is finding things that their large donor doesn't like?
Universities don't work that way. There's generally very little oversight over the PI of projects. The university generally wants more projects leading to more publications and grants, not less. Administrators understand that removing a PI generally means abandoning their lab's projects, so it usually doesn't happen.
That's not quite what I imagine when I hear the term "gutting a team." Gutting a team is when then very significantly reduce its size and priority. Simply switching leadership of a project isn't gutting a team, it's normal university politics and infighting.
If they are forcing funding by Facebook/Meta, then that does seem like a conflict of interest, but is a quite a different headline.
The sidelining is to show damages to her reputation etc. Page 50 or so starts the description alleging how the administration and the dean gutted her department by blocking, reallocating funds, stopping hiring, and refusing to extend contracts when funds are available.
From what I gathered, they didn't simply switch leadership, they removed it entirely, along with the person doing the most work, replacing them with nothing, which effectively shut down the project.
According to the complaint, "the project" was FB Archive, which Dr. Donovan came up with the idea for and was the only person in the room with the actual source material. The Public Interest Tech Lab was the organization actually tasked with building out FB Archive, which they did, and it shipped: https://fbarchive.org
I think Dr. Donovan's complaint is not that it didn't happen, so much as she was not allowed to play a larger role in it despite having the desire, the people, the funding, and the right--as the person who came up with the idea and the person who provided the material, without which there would be no project. (And then worse, history rewritten to exclude her contributions)
An academic team isn't the same as a team in a company though, right? My understanding (which could be incorrect) is that a PI is almost like the CEO of a startup which happens to have the goal of doing research, and operates in the context of a university. A PI is not like a team lead in a company . Each PI-led team is doing research independently of the rest of the department. I have the impression it's not even expected to outlive the PI's employment there.
> but if he allows the Facebook project to move forward under other groups that are also within the Kennedy school,
Move forward in the direction the dean and Facebook want, or in the direction the original team wanted to explore?
Because it doesn't seem - at all - that the two are equivalent. And it is not misleading to call out replacing a non-bribe-able PI with a susceptible or even already bribed one.
I was not nearly clear or explicit enough in my comment, apologies for that. In sections 25 and 26 (page 14), the whistleblower report talks about the origins of the project. Dr. Donovan acquired the entire archive of the Facebook Files, and reached out to Dr. Latanya Sweeney, who she calls her "most trusted colleague":
> I chose to work with Dr. Sweeney because she was the shoulder I leaned
on when I needed to decode the politics of HKS. I regard Dr. Sweeney to be brilliant at
computer science, the foremost authority on privacy in technology, and had a vision to build the
FB Archive on the base of a data sharing platform that she had designed previously.
Donovan's vision was to build "a searchable archive of these documents for the public interest" and hold training workshops for other researchers. So Dr. Sweeney's lab built it, as was the plan; and held training workshops, which was a little hurtful to Donovan as she was not invited into that process.
After the fact, Sweeney summed up her view of their respective contributions in a private email to Donovan:
> The technological IP (design, architecture, and implementation) in FBarchive belongs to the Lab [i.e. Sweeney] alone. No one can claim IP over the original content of course, but the Lab also has IP in the redaction strategy used. Your team contributed the citation reference used to identify each image and document, and of course, you were part of the original concept. This is the kind of details that we will document on the history page.
And implies, like it's not even worth asserting directly, that TASC's contributions are historical, not current. A couple of responses later, Donovan says:
> TASC made many contributions including getting the documents and categorizing them, as well as promoting the archive in public forums, and having my team write testimonies and 1pagers, reviewing abstracts and holding office hours with students and so many meetings.
Dr. Donovan's complaints with the project as delivered seem to mostly NOT be that she wanted it to be different than it was, but rather, that the history page contains blatant lies that minimize Dr. Donovan and TASC's contributions. And also that it is incredibly unjust that she brought this highly valuable asset to the table, and without cause was not only shut out, but basically fired, and her historical contributions scrubbed. (Section 42.)
(To be clear, this is a sad and frustrating tale and if I was Donovan I'd be pissed too.)
Going out and getting Washington Post, New York Times articles about your issues through "Whistleblower Aid" - it brings to mind Barack Obama's great line:
When some activists at that meeting said they felt that their voices were not being heard, Mr. Obama replied, "You are sitting in the Oval Office, talking to the president of the United States."
I don't work in PR, the issues I am politically active over are very local. This researcher paints a big target on her back, in an issue as amply documented as an academic firing, it isn't surprising that things are not cut and dried.
The picture becomes much more clear later on. The Dean sidelined and reallocated the very generous funding which donors provided specifically for her, while also lying to the donors about this. And then winds down her research even though there is obviously demand for and interest in it. All while stringing her along. She should have been able to take her funding elsewhere if the dean didn't want her around, there is ample precedent for that. The degree of manipulation is unprecedented and amounts to the dean stealing her funding from her/her donors.
So, coming from a country where universities are either non-profit or owned by the state… how does this work? Like, surely Harvard isn’t paying anyone dividends? It’s not actually a literal for-profit entity, is it?
Basically the only thing a US nonprofit can't do is give dividends to investors. The nonprofit has to funnel any unspent profit to itself as an endowment, but can also have obscenely high salaries for administrative staff.
> One: Reward and Punishment Superresponse Tendency
> I place this tendency first in my discussion because almost everyone thinks he fully recognizes how important incentives and disincentives are in changing cognition and behavior. But this is not often so. For instance, I think I’ve been in the top five percent of my age cohort almost all my adult life in understanding the power of incentives, and yet I’ve always underestimated that power. Never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes a little further my appreciation of incentive super-power.
It's fascinating how we've come to this, where we've let our society be influenced so profoundly by social media platforms and the men who run them. It's bad and I hope we can eventually diffuse the power that's been concentrated in their hands.
But they're not the same, these men. Only one of them really scares me. What scares me about Zuck is observable in his public behavior. He knows EXACTLY what he's doing and saying at all times. That's why when stuff like this comes out, you can be assured it was no coincidence, and you have to face the fact that he doesn't care.
I agree with the sentiment, but don't think "let our society come to this" is the right framing.
This is how the USA has always been run, except in the past the billionaire class created the whole university to shape society. Like JD Rockefeller and the University of Chicago, which continues to have a profound political influence on the entire field of Economics.
It's absolutely pernicious and we normal people do need to fight it every way we can.
I agree with you that he is at best seemingly being indifferent, which is the same act as not caring; inaction is an act too; the origin story of TheFacebook lays a firm foundation for a continuation of similar behaviours even nearly two decades later.
If he hears about this - and he should if he's being caring, careful, and keeping his eye on the "empire"- and takes actions against this seeming cover up and suppression attempt, then that would bode well for him. That doesn't seem to fit into his character though, unlike Elon Musk standing up to the advertising industrial complex (and the parties it's aligned with who want to suppress truths and control the narrative) who very publicly will tell bad actors to go fuck themselves; "Hi Bob!"
I think or hope we're yet to see the consequences of controlling founders and boards of directors of these mammoth Fortune 500 companies that a small handful of individuals are wielding to control, whether solely for profit motive or evil, and arguably captured or corrupt institutions within the US government - of which the Twitter Files showed them working together to interfere with elections, suppress voices that countered the desired mainstream narrative talking points (propaganda) from top institutions from Harvard, etc.
The Nuremberg Code and punishment didn't exist prior to the Nuremberg Trials, where "I was just following orders" wasn't adequate justification, and it was concluded that "they should have known better."
The "power" and profits that come from these scalable systems are immense-unfathomable - and why you have to work from first principles, ethics as a foundation of that, to at least attempt to reduce and limit the externalized or collateral damage.
I personally believe the ad industrial complex needs to go, allowing people to be too cheaply-shallowly manipulated - where consumers are then paying a higher price for products and services to be manipulated; Tesla's vehicles would be ~6% more expensive if Tesla advertised - their success otherwise being attributed to mostly creating a good product that people wanted.
I've started to wonder if advertising being allowed in society should be considered a form of unnecessary-harmful inflation-inflammation, driving up prices, as well as lowering access to higher quality of products that everyone - as economies of scale for cheap products will not only them more readily available but also make better quality products more expensive due to lower quantities being in demand, etc.
But it's tricky because a high quality product that doesn't advertise could relatively quickly be surpassed by a low quality "good enough" product that's willing to advertise and flood the market with it, and trickier yet when it's an attention economy and reminding people you exist is part of the current competitive landscape especially for certain product types; the problem being people aren't accounting for to include the externalized costs - but where a simple mechanism of "don't buy from any brands that advertise" could counter all of that.
Why was Harvard dedicating resources to investigate Facebook in the first place? What kind of academic research was it conducting? "Our hypothesis is that Facebook censored right-wing disinformation campaigns" doesn't have academic value.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 391 ms ] thread<link rel="canonical" href="https://live-whistleblower-aid.pantheonsite.io/joan-donovan-...">
"whistleblower" is a journalism word meant to imply who the good guy is and endow them with credibility. Rewriting the story with "employee files complaint" doesn't hit the same.
If this is really the evidence you think they're using I'd be willing to bet you didn't read their report: https://live-whistleblower-aid.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/up...
Sure, it's all anecdotal -- it is testimony, after all -- but much of it is backed up by email and text conversations. On the topic of a potential conflict of interest, what do you think about the personal relationship between Doug Elmendorf and Elliot Schrage?
Hopefully, we'll see over time how much merit this has. It certainly seems worth investigating because we'd all really want to know if/how big donations to prestigious academic institutions can buy their research.
That's literally the point here.
Yes, you are correct, it's a word.
> journalism... is meant to imply causality without demonstration
That's not true at all.
It's easy to make claims when you are selective about what you read, ignore context, and make up lies.
> Either make it clear you are speculating about two events being connected, or get evidence that links them.
Says the person speculating about the definition of following used in this context.
Even if what you say is true, which I do not grant, your implication is akin to "we should not punish criminals, because some other criminals will rise to take their place." It's a defeatist meme that mainly serves to protect the interests of the already-powerful.
Some work is never done, but that is not a reason to give up on it.
I hope you can see the ridiculousness is saying that corporations should be limited in wealth as well, but even if you can't, let's assume they are limited the same. Now it becomes easier to buy them off, because they are comparably smaller.
The only logical solution is to allow both corporations and individuals to accumulate as much wealth as they are able to. Rich people aren't the problem, corrupt people are. Instead of trying to make rich corrupt people less rich, why don't we try to make them less corrupt instead?
Of course doing something halfway would not accomplish much.
People - maybe. But why corporations? Isn’t that double taxation? The only way money leaves a corporation is through people which will be taxed eventually.
As for the healthcare system, it doesn’t need more money. It needs an extreme regulation and red tape shake up. We could have vastly better healthcare today for the same amount of money that’s already there if not for the bureaucratic mess and an army of administrators tending to it.
Double taxation already happens today.
What a joke. It didn’t used to be this way in the US and we weren’t North Korea then, but okay. Point at a bogeyman and accept the status quo (to the benefit of those with unimaginable wealth by the way, of which they aren’t going to give you any for defending them.) instead of I considering how to make a world where things are better for everyone.
We also tried not doing it and it had even worse consequences so I don't see what you are trying to say.
Now, tell me more about the fantastic results of
- North Korea
- Soviet Union
- Chinese Communist Party
- Venezuela
- Argentina
- Cuba
- India (under socialism)
> And it never will be. This is a human problem. No amount of laws and regulations will ever solve it.
Come on. Wealth is literally a creature of "law and regulations," and changes to them can definitely "solve it." That's trivially shown by the through a thought experiment where we imagine legal changes that lead to Zuckerberg having his wealth confiscated and Facebook being placed under the control of some person or entity who is not its ally and is not allowed to profit from it.
I think I need to make extra-clear that my example is an extreme one to clearly disprove your point, not the only regulatory option available or a policy proposal. Don't get distracted by irrelevant details.
Defeatist memes like what you said circulate widely to encourage paralysis, but they're propaganda or its derivatives, not truth.
Without laws you don't have anarchy, you just have rule of strongest. Anarchy can have laws but no authority that enforces them.
Huh? Maybe in the deep, deep past; but definitely not now. Even back then, where there were no states and little social organization, there was still custom within groups that worked like law.
> Some laws can remove wealth and some laws are gonna take a lotta of guns and manpower (resources ==wealth) to implement.
Zuckerberg and Facebook have no army and no means to raise one, despite the wealth they have. They are totally, utterly at the mercy of laws and regulations.
Clearly there are plenty of extreme "solutions".
I interpret GP's point being an attempt to provide their insight into human condition, which is an interesting one.
Is graft a necessary condition of human civilization?
We don’t solve spectrum problems, we reduce and minimize them. Just because they exist to a degree and never are remediated doesn’t mean we shouldn’t seek to minimize them.
Corruption can lead to tax evasion, poor tax administration, and exemptions that disproportionately favor the well-connected and wealthy population groups in society and must be rallied against if we seek civil societies.
We’ll never get rid of it. As you say. But if we don’t act against it these problems will grow like cancer and become insidious, infecting every aspect of society, so it’s deeply important not to embrace an apathetic approach or present them as inevitable.
They are intrinsic, but the level we tolerate — the “degree of corruption” — which I would argue is pretty high in this case, is most certainly counterable and definitely can be reduced.
Thomas Jefferson wrote, "But the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property....Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise"[0].
0. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-08-02-0...
And the prisoner's dilemma is a way of exploring/explaining these traits (though I expect these aren't exclusive to humans).
Nice way to say nothing of substance.
(Caveat that the following is US-centric.) I'd love to see the data showing actual price gouging, because the data I've seen has generally suggested that per-student spending hasn't even increased at a pace equivalent to inflation; rather, funding didn't increase with enrolment, leading to students paying for an ever-higher share of their education.
(As for private universities... fine, I'm okay calling it price gouging.)
Generally Non-resident tuition is the cost it takes to educate a student. Resident tuition is cheaper because it's subsidized by the state. Every year we would get less and less funding from the state and would have to shift more burden to the student. We implemented furlough days, and cut admin staff compensation to attempt to reduce the tuition burden on students. We still had to raise Tuition faster than inflation in the end.
That's nearly a quarter million dollars, of which the professor is probably getting a few thousand. where is the other $200k+ going?
So yeah, not a lot of tuition is making it to the low rung teachers.
kick out the administrators, schooling would cost less without them
Random people like you and me wouldn't pay for something they're gonna use twice in their lifetime, and lawyers surely have something like this, possibly integrate with all the other tools they use.
Not a lawyer and not familiar with their systems but based on my knowledge of other industries I’d say it’s not guaranteed they have a solution.
Could be good ol sticky notes and manual calendar events.
> based on my knowledge of other industries
:)
I might not be aware of other services though so if anyone is – please enlighten me!
Speaking to my AI: "computer, please create me a Google Doc that gets updated with new results related to the legal case of Joan Donovan vs Harvard, and notify me via email with updates."
I'd probably do something like that a few times a week. It's really a missing link to my news experience.
[1] https://urlwatch.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
[1] https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/4815696?hl=en
They might try to call and email you though.
There are plenty of mailing list services that associates of large law firms sign up for. I haven't been around people in that world for a while so I don't know the names, but I'm sure you can find them if you spend time looking.
Sounds like something that anyone claiming to practice Journalism should be doing already.
this is how many rich people get their kids into Harvard too, the only reason parents got caught up in the varsity blues scandal was that they were too explicit... old money donates the new library and "hopes" for the best
That's the entire point and feature of these elite institutions (more specifically, their undergraduate division and business schools), to connect wealth with brilliant people. They are the traditional social institutions of innovation and entrepreneurship before incubators like YC were a thing. If you remove the wealth aspects, then the Ivies are no different than any other research state school.
Aside from their football programs, none of these other schools have gotten as comfortable with looking the other way for The Greater Good.
I think you meant "people who'd like to join the wealthy ones, or maybe already have."
Harvard, breaking rules for people donating new buildings?! Surely not Harvard.
they weren't rich enough to use the route that they used.
New money means wealth that was mostly based on efforts (not due to passive investments) by the current holder.
micromacrofoot1 was trying to distinguish “a lot of money” from “a little bit of money”, but old money is not the correct term for that.
From Wikipedia, the varsity blues scandal was about 33 sets of parents paying ~$25M total. That is chump change compared to donating a whole building, which new or old money can do, because they would have access to tens of millions of dollars.
there's also some behavior involved, traditionally it would be a major social faux pas to ask for special treatment in a traceable way
I'm quite sure Old Money would disagree with your definition of Old Money.
It's hard to actually believe anything about this without having specific examples of what was done.
The title is pretty farcical given this.
But it isn't metric, it appears to be a perversion of roman numerals.
But you can give them to the birds and bees
I want money.
https://live-whistleblower-aid.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/up...
To sum up the first few pages after skimming it, Facebook tried to bribe her (well "fund" her research), she refused. Later she had a meeting with the former head of comms at Facebook, who was now on the Dean's council, where he became incredibly angry with her research (page 4, 13). Following this, she got an email from the Dean of the Kennedy school which sounds very much like someone tattled to them and they now want to "review" her research (see page 5, 15). It continues from here.
She strongly believes in increased content moderation by "fact checkers".
She's spread misinformation herself like
- Suggesting Russian disinformation on Facebook shifted the 2016 election (anyone who's run a facebook ad in their life knows how absurdly ridiculous this is)
- Advocating for increased censorship of information during COVID on lab leak hypothesis
This is just off a few minutes of reading her past work.
I'm not a fan of Facebook (in the slightest) but also am really not a fan of the type of censorship this person wants.
It looks like the FB Archive project gains momentum and launches but Dr. Donovan and the TASC get sidelined along the way (which understandably is very upsetting, you can feel the pain on every page). It does seem clear that the Dean doesn't approve of Dr. Donovan/TASC and he eventually shuts the group down, but if he allows the Facebook project to move forward under other groups that are also within the Kennedy school, then the title of this post is pretty misleading. (Oh, maybe why the actual article title says "initial team" instead of just "team".)
BTW, not a particular fan of Meta, no feelings about Harvard/Kennedy school, never heard of any of these people before except Frances Haugen and Dr. Latanya Sweeney.
this is described dismissively and in the passive voice, but it's an active action, and quite damning.
who sidelined them, and why?
it seems the answers are: the school, because the researchers upset facebook, who was giving the school money
> if he allows the Facebook project to move forward under other groups that are also within the Kennedy school, then the title of this post is pretty misleading
this is misleading: if the research is allowed to continue, it should continue under the researchers who did the research, unless there's a good reason otherwise
This is the entire crux of the issue; do they have a problem with the lead researcher because she isn't good at her job or because she is finding things that their large donor doesn't like?
* - The researcher being removed without any good cause evident
If they are forcing funding by Facebook/Meta, then that does seem like a conflict of interest, but is a quite a different headline.
Is there someone continuing it that I missed?
I think Dr. Donovan's complaint is not that it didn't happen, so much as she was not allowed to play a larger role in it despite having the desire, the people, the funding, and the right--as the person who came up with the idea and the person who provided the material, without which there would be no project. (And then worse, history rewritten to exclude her contributions)
Who remains at the university doing the research halted by the dismissal* of the lead researcher?
* – whether overtly or via constructive dismissal
Move forward in the direction the dean and Facebook want, or in the direction the original team wanted to explore?
Because it doesn't seem - at all - that the two are equivalent. And it is not misleading to call out replacing a non-bribe-able PI with a susceptible or even already bribed one.
> I chose to work with Dr. Sweeney because she was the shoulder I leaned on when I needed to decode the politics of HKS. I regard Dr. Sweeney to be brilliant at computer science, the foremost authority on privacy in technology, and had a vision to build the FB Archive on the base of a data sharing platform that she had designed previously.
Donovan's vision was to build "a searchable archive of these documents for the public interest" and hold training workshops for other researchers. So Dr. Sweeney's lab built it, as was the plan; and held training workshops, which was a little hurtful to Donovan as she was not invited into that process.
After the fact, Sweeney summed up her view of their respective contributions in a private email to Donovan:
> The technological IP (design, architecture, and implementation) in FBarchive belongs to the Lab [i.e. Sweeney] alone. No one can claim IP over the original content of course, but the Lab also has IP in the redaction strategy used. Your team contributed the citation reference used to identify each image and document, and of course, you were part of the original concept. This is the kind of details that we will document on the history page.
And implies, like it's not even worth asserting directly, that TASC's contributions are historical, not current. A couple of responses later, Donovan says:
> TASC made many contributions including getting the documents and categorizing them, as well as promoting the archive in public forums, and having my team write testimonies and 1pagers, reviewing abstracts and holding office hours with students and so many meetings.
Dr. Donovan's complaints with the project as delivered seem to mostly NOT be that she wanted it to be different than it was, but rather, that the history page contains blatant lies that minimize Dr. Donovan and TASC's contributions. And also that it is incredibly unjust that she brought this highly valuable asset to the table, and without cause was not only shut out, but basically fired, and her historical contributions scrubbed. (Section 42.)
(To be clear, this is a sad and frustrating tale and if I was Donovan I'd be pissed too.)
I don't work in PR, the issues I am politically active over are very local. This researcher paints a big target on her back, in an issue as amply documented as an academic firing, it isn't surprising that things are not cut and dried.
https://live-whistleblower-aid.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/up...
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/10/20/tech-billionaire-ai...
I wonder what the grand total spent was here? "PR expenses"
> I place this tendency first in my discussion because almost everyone thinks he fully recognizes how important incentives and disincentives are in changing cognition and behavior. But this is not often so. For instance, I think I’ve been in the top five percent of my age cohort almost all my adult life in understanding the power of incentives, and yet I’ve always underestimated that power. Never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes a little further my appreciation of incentive super-power.
https://fs.blog/great-talks/psychology-human-misjudgment/
But they're not the same, these men. Only one of them really scares me. What scares me about Zuck is observable in his public behavior. He knows EXACTLY what he's doing and saying at all times. That's why when stuff like this comes out, you can be assured it was no coincidence, and you have to face the fact that he doesn't care.
This is how the USA has always been run, except in the past the billionaire class created the whole university to shape society. Like JD Rockefeller and the University of Chicago, which continues to have a profound political influence on the entire field of Economics.
It's absolutely pernicious and we normal people do need to fight it every way we can.
I agree with you that he is at best seemingly being indifferent, which is the same act as not caring; inaction is an act too; the origin story of TheFacebook lays a firm foundation for a continuation of similar behaviours even nearly two decades later.
If he hears about this - and he should if he's being caring, careful, and keeping his eye on the "empire"- and takes actions against this seeming cover up and suppression attempt, then that would bode well for him. That doesn't seem to fit into his character though, unlike Elon Musk standing up to the advertising industrial complex (and the parties it's aligned with who want to suppress truths and control the narrative) who very publicly will tell bad actors to go fuck themselves; "Hi Bob!"
I think or hope we're yet to see the consequences of controlling founders and boards of directors of these mammoth Fortune 500 companies that a small handful of individuals are wielding to control, whether solely for profit motive or evil, and arguably captured or corrupt institutions within the US government - of which the Twitter Files showed them working together to interfere with elections, suppress voices that countered the desired mainstream narrative talking points (propaganda) from top institutions from Harvard, etc.
The Nuremberg Code and punishment didn't exist prior to the Nuremberg Trials, where "I was just following orders" wasn't adequate justification, and it was concluded that "they should have known better."
The "power" and profits that come from these scalable systems are immense-unfathomable - and why you have to work from first principles, ethics as a foundation of that, to at least attempt to reduce and limit the externalized or collateral damage.
I personally believe the ad industrial complex needs to go, allowing people to be too cheaply-shallowly manipulated - where consumers are then paying a higher price for products and services to be manipulated; Tesla's vehicles would be ~6% more expensive if Tesla advertised - their success otherwise being attributed to mostly creating a good product that people wanted.
I've started to wonder if advertising being allowed in society should be considered a form of unnecessary-harmful inflation-inflammation, driving up prices, as well as lowering access to higher quality of products that everyone - as economies of scale for cheap products will not only them more readily available but also make better quality products more expensive due to lower quantities being in demand, etc.
But it's tricky because a high quality product that doesn't advertise could relatively quickly be surpassed by a low quality "good enough" product that's willing to advertise and flood the market with it, and trickier yet when it's an attention economy and reminding people you exist is part of the current competitive landscape especially for certain product types; the problem being people aren't accounting for to include the externalized costs - but where a simple mechanism of "don't buy from any brands that advertise" could counter all of that.