NYT: When the Revolution Came for Amy Cuddy As a young social psychologist, she played by the rules and won big: an influential study, a viral TED talk, a prestigious job at Harvard. Then, suddenly, the rules changed.

New York Times:

Cuddy felt ill when Simmons and Simonsohn published the post with the headline: “Reassessing the Evidence Behind the Most Popular TED Talk.” As illustration, they used a picture of Wonder Woman. Cuddy felt as if Simmons had set them up; that they included her TED talk in the headline made it feel personal, as if they were going after her rather than the work.

The post, which Simonsohn distributed to his email list of hundreds, quickly made the rounds. “People were sending me emails like I was dying of cancer,” Cuddy says. “It was like, ‘We send our condolences,’ ‘Holy crap, this is terrible’ and ‘God bless you; we wish we could do something, but obviously we can’t.’ ” She also knew what was coming, a series of events that did, in fact, transpire over time: subsequent scrutiny of other studies she had published, insulting commentary about her work on the field’s Facebook groups, disdainful headlines about the flimsiness of her research. She paced around, distraught, afraid to look at her email, afraid not to. She had just put together a tenure package and worried that the dust-up would be a continuing distraction.

Cuddy did not like seeing her work criticized in a non-peer-reviewed format, but she wrote a bland statement saying, essentially, that she disagreed with their findings and looked forward to more research on “this important topic.” Carney reassured Cuddy in the months after the Data Colada post that their paper would eventually be vindicated — of course the effects were real; someone would prove it eventually.

Eventually, the Data Colada post caught the eye of another influential blogger, Andrew Gelman, a professor of statistics and political science at Columbia University, whose interest in Cuddy’s work would prove durable, exacting and possibly career-changing for Cuddy. Gelman wields his sizable influence on the field from afar, on his popular blog andrewgelman.com, where he posts his thoughts on best statistical practices in the sciences, with a frequent emphasis on what he sees as the absurd and unscientific. Gelman, who studied math and physics at M.I.T. before turning to statistics, does not believe that social psychology is any more guilty of P-hacking than, say, biology or economics. But he has devoted extensive attention to the field, especially in more recent years, in part because of the way the media has glorified social-psychology research. He is respected enough that his posts are well read; he is cutting enough that many of his critiques are enjoyed with a strong sense of schadenfreude.

Four months after the Data Colada post, Gelman, with a co-author, published an article in Slate about Carney and Cuddy’s 2010 study, calling it “tabloid fodder.” Eventually, Cuddy’s name began appearing regularly in the blog, both in his posts and in comments. Gelman’s writing on Cuddy’s study was coolly dismissive; it bothered him that Cuddy remained fairly silent on the replication and the Data Colada post. For all he knew, Cuddy was still selling the hormone effect in her speaking gigs and in her best-selling book, “Presence,” which he had not read. Had he looked, he would have been annoyed to see that Cuddy did not include a mention of the Ranehill replication. But he might have been surprised to see how little of the book focused on power posing (just a few pages).

On his site, Cuddy’s name, far from the only one he repeatedly invoked, became a go-to synecdoche for faulty science writ large. When he saw that Cuddy had been invited to speak at a conference, he wondered why the organizers had not invited a bunch of other famous figures he clearly considered bad for science, including Diederik Stapel, who had been accused of outright fraud.

His site became a home for frequently hostile comments from his followers. “She has no serious conception of ‘science,’ ” one posted. Another compared Cuddy to Elizabeth Holmes, the Theranos chief executive under investigation for misleading investors. Though Gelman did encourage his readers to stick to the science, he rarely reined anyone in. In one exchange in July 2016, a commenter wrote, “I’ve wondered whether some of Amy Cuddy’s mistakes are due to the fact that she suffered severe head trauma as the result of a car accident some years ago.” Gelman replied, “A head injury hardly seems necessary to explain these mistakes,” pointing out that her adviser, Fiske, whom he has also criticized, had no such injury but made similar errors.

Gelman, whom I met in his office in late June, is not scathing in person; he is rather mild, soft-spoken even. Gelman was vague when asked if he felt there was anything unusual about the frequency of his comments on Cuddy (“People send me things, and I respond,” he said). He said it was Cuddy who was unrelenting. He later emailed me to make sure I was aware that she attacked him and Simmons and Simonsohn on a private Facebook page, without backing up her accusations with evidence; he was still waiting for a clear renunciation of the original 2010 paper on the hormonal effects of power posing. “I would like her to say: ‘Jeez, I didn’t know any better. I was doing what they told me to do. I don’t think I’m a bad person, and it didn’t get replicated’ — rather than salvaging as much as she can.”

Gelman considers himself someone who is doing others the favor of pointing out their errors, a service for which he would be grateful, he says. Cuddy considers him a bully, someone who does not believe that she is entitled to her own interpretation of the research that is her field of expertise…

On Sept. 26, 2016, Amy Cuddy woke up and checked her phone to find a chilling text from a friend. “I’m so sorry,” it said. “Are you O.K.?” She felt a familiar dread, something closer to panic. For the past year, she had mostly stopped going to social-psychology conferences, feeling a chill from her community. Another social psychologist had told her that a graduate student asked if she really was friends with Cuddy. When she responded, “Yes,” the young woman asked, “Why?”

It was the kind of information Cuddy wished she did not have; her closest friends were told to stop passing on or commenting about that kind of thing, but acquaintances still did it. She felt adrift in her field. She worried about asking peers to collaborate, suspecting that they would not want to set themselves up for intense scrutiny. And she felt betrayed, not just by those who cut her down on social media, in blog posts, even in reviews (one reviewer called her “a profiteer,” not hiding his contempt), but also by some of those who did not publicly defend her. She was not wrong to think that at least in some cases, it was fear, rather than lack of support for her, that kept people from speaking up. Two tenured psychology professors at Ivy League universities acknowledged to me that they would have publicly defended some of Cuddy’s positions were they not worried about making themselves targets on Data Colada and elsewhere…

If Amy Cuddy is a victim, she may not seem an obvious one: She has real power, a best-selling book, a thriving speaking career. She did not own up fully to problems in her research or try to replicate her own study. (She says there were real hurdles to doing so, not least of which was finding a collaborator to take that on.) But many of her peers told me that she did not deserve the level of widespread and sometimes vicious criticism she has endured. “Amy has been the target of mockery and meanness on Facebook, on Twitter, in blog posts — I feel like, Wow, I have never seen that in science,” Van Bavel says. “I’ve only been in it for 15 years, but I’ve never seen public humiliation like that.”

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THE SECRETIVE FAMILY MAKING BILLIONS FROM THE OPIOID CRISIS

These guys reminds me of the 19th Century Sassoon family.

From Esquire:

To a remarkable degree, those who share in the billions appear to have abided by an oath of omertà: Never comment publicly on the source of the family’s wealth.

That may be because the greatest part of that $14 billion fortune tallied by Forbes came from OxyContin, the narcotic painkiller regarded by many public-health experts as among the most dangerous products ever sold on a mass scale. Since 1996, when the drug was brought to market by Purdue Pharma, the American branch of the Sacklers’ pharmaceutical empire, more than two hundred thousand people in the United States have died from overdoses of OxyContin and other prescription painkillers. Thousands more have died after starting on a prescription opioid and then switching to a drug with a cheaper street price, such as heroin. Not all of these deaths are related to OxyContin—dozens of other painkillers, including generics, have flooded the market in the past thirty years. Nevertheless, Purdue Pharma was the first to achieve a dominant share of the market for long-acting opioids, accounting for more than half of prescriptions by 2001…

By any assessment, the family’s leaders have pulled off three of the great marketing triumphs of the modern era: The first is selling OxyContin; the second is promoting the Sackler name; and the third is ensuring that, as far as the public is aware, the first and the second have nothing to do with one another.

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Variety: ‘A TV Executive Sexually Assaulted Me: A Critic’s Personal Story’

Maureen Ryan writes:

I told a lie in 2015. A lie to save my life.

I wrote a post in May of that year telling people I was taking two months off to deal with family issues. It wasn’t entirely a falsehood. My father had died about a year earlier and my mother was dying (she passed away last fall). The last few years were a difficult, grindingly draining time that changed me enormously.

Still, my parents’ illnesses and deaths didn’t break me. The television executive who sexually assaulted me in 2014 broke me.

And that was the real reason I took that leave in 2015: I needed to heal, mentally and spiritually, and I had to think about whether I even wanted to stay in this industry…

The television executive who assaulted me was the boyfriend of someone I’d known in the industry for some time. I did not think the boyfriend of someone I knew would assault me. I did not think he would do it at an industry-adjacent event. I did not think he would make a sexually crude, harassing remark about me in front of dozens of people, which was extremely embarrassing.

I did not think that, a short time later, he would put his hands on me and say utterly disgusting things. I did not think he would come after me again, and then, when I’d moved away, grope me again, and hiss more even more crude, humiliating things into my ear. He came after me three times in total. He hunted me. The word predator works on so many levels.

This guy is not friendless. Before he attacked me, I thought he seemed like a reasonable, regular guy. Just know that he is not some outlier, not someone whose demeanor or cocktail-party chatter would indicate that anything was amiss. He seemed utterly normal.

I know what it’s like to be shocked by what a fellow human is capable of, because that night, and for so long after, I was stunned into disbelief. After I finally got away from him, we exited the venue together — me, the guy, his girlfriend. I’m not much of an actress, but my performance as “Person Who Is Holding It Together As If Everything Is Fine” was credible. The process of falling apart was a long one.

It took me weeks to accept that what he did that night fit the definition of sexual assault. I looked up legal codes online for months. An old draft of this piece — I’ve written so many versions of this story — called it sexual harassment. That was part of it. But when someone puts their hands on you, certainly in areas in which you do not want and have not invited their hands, that’s assault.

I reported him to his company. Spoiler alert: Nothing happened.

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A Night at the Garden

Youtube: * In 1939, New York’s Madison Square Garden was host to an enormous—and shocking—gathering of 22,000 Americans that has largely been forgotten from our history.

* I believe after this disgusting spectacle in the Garden as they exited a crowd of loyal Jewish Americans attacked them and gave them a thorough ass whupping which they most definitely deserved. This rally looked very much like the many rallies Trump had during his campaign and continues to have. Eventually this alcoholic Kuhn was discovered to have embezzled something like fifteen thousand dollars from the coffers of this disgraceful German-American Bund and was deported to Germany where he died in ignominy from the alcoholism he was plagued by.

* Reading the comments on here, I assume that Marshall Curry got exactly what he wanted. This is by no means a “documentary” as there is zero history of what is going on other than a rally. No mention of the protests outside, only the footage of the plumbers helper trying to say “death to Hitler”

This is all about attacking Trump and trying to tie him into a Nazi movement that is NOT happening. I guarantee you there were more Nazi’s in the USA pre WWII than there are now.

Trump may attack the media that are attacking him, HOWEVER he does not call them “the Jewish controlled media” and in fact, he does not want to divide this country between the races, he wants us to all live in peace.

It is the liberal agenda to bash Trump any way they can. Associating him with racism is just one of the ways they are doing it.

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Does Dodger Pitcher Yu Darvish Infuriate WNs?

Every WN I know admires the Japanese, sees Japan as a model, perhaps the model for an ethnic state, and has more positive views on Iran than the average American. So no, Yu Darvish, doesn’t infuriate WNs.

I notice that at the end of his performance last night, Yu Darvish saluted the umpire. This is the sort of good manners that cultured people appreciate. I wish more Americans had the good manners and good looks of Yu Darvish.

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