The Monoculture Of Migration Studies

Posted on June 2, 2021 by Luke Ford

Eric Kaufman writes about Peter Gatrell’s The Unsettling of Europe:

The book’s aim is to “make migration normal” by problematizing the native/immigrant distinction while convincing “native” Europeans to stop thinking of themselves as long-settled folk and more as mobile folk who reside in nations of migrants. It’s a ruse that only works because the book is a story-driven account that allows statistical reality to fade into the background. Such an analysis would show that western Europe’s foreign-born share was only around 2 percent in 1900, compared to 10-15 percent today. Globally, about 3 percent of the world was born in another country, but in the West, the share jumped from 7 to 12 percent between 1990 and 2017, with a big rise in long-distance North-South migration. This is new.

Even at the height of Britain’s short period of Jewish immigration at the turn of the twentieth century, no more than 5-10,000 arrived, compared to 200-300,000 net migrants per year in the 2000s. In short, Western Europe’s history from the Dark Ages to the 1950s is overwhelmingly that of long-settled populations, punctuated by a few migration events, and with a steady but low level of long-distance migration. Migration of diverse peoples is the crust on the loaf of Europe’s contemporary history, not the loaf itself.

In addition, while the “unmixing” of Europe through co-ethnic in-migration after both world wars involved large numbers of people, this had a qualitatively different cumulative effect due to ethnic assimilation in destination countries. It is thus far less consequential than recent “mixing” inflows which have had persistent population-level effects in the form of large-scale ethnic change. Only a few inter-ethnic domestic migrations, such as that of the Irish to mainland Britain or Andalusians to Catalonia, are comparable—and these had profound political repercussions.

Assimilation, national solidarity, and the longue durée are conspicuously absent from a book whose author is focused on the human rights of migrants and ethnic diasporas in the present. While the book rightly points out that co-ethnic, rural-urban and inter-regional migrants were othered, it obstinately refuses to point out how successful their ethnic assimilation has been compared to groups which have, to use sociologist Ernest Gellner’s terms, ‘counter-entropic’ traits such as a different religion, which slows down the assimilation process. Only in France, for instance, is there a high rate of intermarriage between Muslim minorities and the ethnic majority. Pew’s projections, which are the most sophisticated we have, show that current migration levels will see Sweden’s Muslim share rise from 8 percent in 2016 to 21 percent in 2050. Britain’s will increase from 6 percent to 17 percent, France’s from 9 to 17 percent. The ethnic majority share will drop below half the population by the end of this century in many of the main immigrant-receiving western countries.

Like other liberal observers, the author’s sympathy for the power of ethnic attachment and community seems to disappear when he switches his focus from dislocated migrants to unsettled natives. Migration events like that of the 2015 Migrant Crisis (yes, it was a crisis) symbolize a loss of identity, which is why they tend to catalyze support for Europe’s surging populist right. When Jean-Marie Le Pen defeated Lionel Jospin in 2002 with 18 percent of the vote, a million people came out on the streets in protest. When Jörg Haider’s Freedom Party won 27 percent of the vote and went into coalition with the mainstream right in 2000, the EU censured Austria. Some 15 years later, the numbers had nearly doubled: Norbert Höfer of the Freedom Party came within a hair of winning the presidency in 2016 with 48 percent of the vote and entered a coalition government soon after. Marine Le Pen won the first round with 34 percent in 2017. Both events were greeted with silence and fear as Anywheres wondered what happened. Since then, they have merely doubled down on their biases, learning nothing. To deride the nation-state and cry ‘xenophobia’ when barriers are erected is to fail to reckon with the possibility that “unsettling” societies, which Gatrell applauds, might not be such a hot idea.

There is also a failure to consider the arguments of liberal nationalist thinkers like David Miller, who point to the way national attachments underpin democracy and the welfare state. By comparison, when a supranational organization without a common identity like the European Union tries to redistribute more than a paltry 2.5 percent of Europe’s wealth, this founders because it lacks the unity that underpins democratic legitimacy. Gatrell also acts as if ethnic identity is completely detached from homeland nationhood. Thus barely a word is spoken about the umbilical connection between migrant diasporas and nationalist movements in their ethnic homelands, from the Irish to the Serbs and Hindus.

The academic field of migration studies is essentially a monoculture when it comes to pro-immigration sentiment. The few who dare to report findings that contravene the pro-migration narrative, like George Borjas of Harvard, David Coleman of Oxford, or Gary Freeman of the University of Texas, largely operate as pariahs whose work is the subject of derision from the open-borders mainstream. In such a milieu, Gatrell’s unevidenced claims that migration is a major driver of prosperity “needed” by countries (as distinct from employers), and which adds nothing but spice to boring societies, goes unchallenged. His belief that if there were better routes for formal migration then border fences, detention, and offshoring wouldn’t be required is gospel in his world but isn’t backed by systematic quantitative analysis.

Posted in Immigration | Comments Off on The Monoculture Of Migration Studies

The Scientific Revolution

Posted on June 2, 2021 by Luke Ford

From the London Review of Books:

* For the great majority of people, believing in the truths of science is unavoidably an act of faith. Most of us neither witness the successful experiments nor would be able to understand them if we did. So we put an extraordinary amount of trust in things we know virtually nothing about…

* The rhetoric of science has, however, acquired such prestige since the 17th century that it has become difficult not to believe that through science the world is finally telling us what it’s really like. That if the world could speak for itself it would speak science. Indeed it can sometimes seem as if scientific descriptions are not made by people at all, especially when these descriptions involve accounts of our cosmic irrelevance. Science often suggests that the most brilliant thing about us is that we invented science. There is something ironic about such persuasive man-made accounts of our own unfreedom and redundancy. It is like God proving that God is dead.

* Science proves that science is true. In other words, scientific criteria of value dictate most of what we are supposed to take seriously, or believe in (or rather, put our money on). It is part of Steven Shapin’s point to explain how we have been prepared – taught, encouraged and sometimes coerced – to put so much of our trust in such things. And that trust is what is at issue. It’s not that Shapin is in any way anti-science: his interest is in what he calls the ‘pervasive stories’ we tend to be told about it. In his view there is no essence to the scientific revolution: what we now call science has always been – despite its will to consensus – the site of a multiplicity of competing social practices. When Shapin states in his Introduction, ‘I take it for granted that science is a historically situated and social activity and that it is to be understood in relation to the contexts in which it occurs,’ the italics are not to be quibbled with. It is the story of this distinction between the scientific and the social, between fact and value – and the fact that we talk in these terms at all – that Shapin tells so incisively.

* When Galileo assembled various eminent fellow practitioners of astronomy to view the moons of Jupiter through his telescope they were mostly disappointed. But when we learned to use such instruments at school, “we belonged to a culture that had already granted the reliability of these instruments (properly used), that had already decided for us what sorts of things authentically existed in the domains of the very distant … and that had provided structures of authority in which we could learn what to see (and what to disregard).”

* We can privilege what we say by claiming it comes from a superior source that we, or some of us, have unique access to – God, the Tradition, the Unconscious, Scientific Method.

“The more a body of knowledge is understood to be objective and disinterested, the more valuable it is as a tool in moral and political action. Conversely, the capacity of a body of knowledge to make valuable contributions to moral and political problems flows from an understanding that it was not produced and evaluated to further particular human interests.”

Posted in Science | Comments Off on The Scientific Revolution

An exploration of Donald Trump’s allegations of massive voter fraud in the 2016 General Election

Posted on June 2, 2021 by Luke Ford

An academic paper from 2017:

* As Republican candidate for president and later 45th President of the United States, Donald Trump has claimed repeatedly and vociferously that the 2016 General Election was tainted by massive voter fraud. Here we use aggregate election statistics to study Trump’s claims and focus on non-citizen populations across the country, state-specific allegations directed at California, New Hampshire, and Virginia, and the timing of election results. Consistent with existing literature, we do not uncover any evidence supportive of Trump’s assertions about systematic voter fraud in 2016. Our results imply neither that there was no fraud at all in the 2016 General Election nor that this election’s administration was error-free. They do strongly suggest, however, that the expansive voter fraud concerns espoused by Donald Trump and those allied with him are not grounded in any observable features of the 2016 election.

* Given the tenor of the Clinton-Trump presidential contest at the time of the Republican and Democratic party conventions, we
anticipated post-election fraud allegations that centered on illegal voters, in particular non-citizens. To prepare ourselves to scrutinize such allegations, we assembled a county-level dataset that included historical election returns, demographics, and economic indicators. We also contracted with the Associated Press so that we would be able to access their national database on county presidential election returns. Our plan was to begin work on fraud allegations on Election Day evening (November 8, 2016), and we were prepared for an intense post-election week or two.

* As Goel et al. (2016) summarize, there are three general classes of voter fraud: impersonation (a voter casts a ballot while claiming to be someone else), double-voting (an individual votes more than once), and ineligible voting (an individual who is not supposed to have access to the franchise in a particular location casts a ballot). A voter casting a ballot out of her jurisdiction is an example of the third type of fraud; this form of fraud would also characterize a citizen ex-felon, who has lost the right to vote due to a state law restricting ex-felon voting rights (Manza and Uggen, 2006), improperly casting a ballot.

Efforts to uncover evidence of widespread voter fraud in American elections have come up empty. Surveys like Levitt (2007) and Minnite (2010) find only a small number of cases of verified voter fraud. Focusing on double-voting and using a database of 129
million individuals records, Goel et al. (2016) conclude that the maximum double-voting rate is approximate 0.02 percent and that “many, if not all, of [such] double votes could be a result of measurement error in turnout records” (p. 30). Christensen and Schultz (2014) conclude that, “if [voter fraud] occurs, [it] is an isolated and rare occurrence in modern U.S. elections” (p. 313).

Posted in Voter Fraud | Comments Off on An exploration of Donald Trump’s allegations of massive voter fraud in the 2016 General Election

The Nudgelords

Posted on June 2, 2021 by Luke Ford

Comments at Andrew Gelman:

* At this point I’m pretty familiar with Cass Sunstein. I’ve participated in a multi-day workshop with him, read some of his books and many of his articles, and have used his writings frequently in my teaching. I don’t plan on reading his new book since I think I already know what he will say about almost any topic.

There are two central legs (stool minus one) to his thinking. The first is that he fully embraces a conception in which the ideal rational actor is counterposed to the empirical actor burdened by nonrational heuristics. His understanding of rationality is not simply abstract in the sense of consequentialist decision theory but operationalized via orthodox welfare economics. All choices are understood as consumption decisions over which each individual has or should have a consistent preference map. Our truest guide to well-being are the consumption choices people make when not under the influence of heuristics, which is most of them. Thus monetization as a framework for cost-benefit analysis of the remaining choices is theoretically grounded. There is also a libertarian bias to welfare economics insofar as it uses individual utility-maximizing as its benchmark, understanding individuality as possession of one’s own preference map. The honoring of individuals as a moral and political value—liberalism—is therefore no more or less than respecting their preferences. I will admit that Sunstein has helped me understand the limitations of welfare economics to the point where I would now do without it altogether.

The other leg, which has made him a frequent subject of this blog, is that he shares the delight that Andrew has recognized in many economists (and economist followers) in showing that people are less rational than they think they are. Sunstein and those of a similar bent regard themselves as experts in rationality, equipped to detect lapses among the less knowledgeable. Identifying such lapses and coming up with policy tweaks to remedy them is how they see their job. (Designing nudges is one strategy but hardly the only one, and Sunstein’s advocacy of cost-benefit analysis goes far beyond nudging.) As Andrew has pointed out, identifying the foibles of others gives people like Sunstein enormous pleasure, so much that they seize on every research paper that claims to have found a new irrationality, whether or not the evidence stands up to scrutiny. I won’t stoop to pointing out the irony here….

* Basically – famous/influential people have an impact because they have optimized, at least in part, for becoming and staying famous and influential. This might necessarily (though I don’t actually know that it must) make them worse at getting things right. There was a recent Scott Alexander post on this that I thought was pretty good:

* WebMD is the Internet’s most important source of medical information. It’s also surprisingly useless. Its most famous problem is that whatever your symptoms, it’ll tell you that you have cancer. But the closer you look, the more problems you notice.

* Dr. Anthony Fauci is the WebMD of people.

At least this is the impression I get from this rather hostile biography. He’s a very smart and competent doctor, who wanted to make a positive difference in the US medical establishment, and who quickly learned how to play the game of flattering and placating the right people in order to keep power. In the end, he got power, sometimes he used it well, and other times he struck compromises between using it well and doing dumb things that he needed to do to keep his position.

* I can’t tell you how many times over the past year all the experts, the CDC, the WHO, the New York Times, et cetera, have said something (or been silent about something in a suggestive way), and then some blogger I trusted said the opposite, and the blogger turned out to be right. I realize this kind of thing is vulnerable to selection bias, but it’s been the same couple of bloggers throughout, people who I already trusted and already suspected might be better than the experts in a lot of ways. Zvi Mowshowitz is the first name to come to mind, though there are many others…

When Zvi asserts an opinion, he has only one thing he’s optimizing for – being right – and he does it well.

When the Director of the CDC asserts an opinion, she has to optimize for two things – being right, and keeping power. If she doesn’t optimize for the second, she gets replaced as CDC Director by someone who does. That means she’s trying to solve a harder problem than Zvi is, and it makes sense that sometimes, despite having more resources than Zvi, she does worse at it.

The way I imagine this is that Zvi reads some papers on whether the coronavirus has airborne transmission, sees the direction they’re leaning, and announces on his blog that it probably has airborne transmission.

The Director of the CDC reads those same papers. But some important Senator says that if airborne transmission is announced, important industries in his state will go bankrupt. Citizens Against Lockdowns argues that the CDC already screwed up by stressing the later-proven-not-to-exist fomite-based transmission, ignoring the needs of ordinary people in favor of a bias towards imagining hypothetical transmission mechanisms that never materialize; some sympathetic Congressman tells the director that if she makes that same mistake a second time, she’s out. One of the papers saying that airborne transmission is impossible comes from Stanford, and the Director owes the dean of Stanford’s epidemiology department a favor for helping gather support for one of her policies once. So the Director puts out a press release saying the evidence is not quite strong enough to say airborne transmission definitely happens, and they’ll review it further.

* Dr. Fauci is able to make decisions that will affect billions of dollars in wealth, Senate seats, Twitter likes, and other extremely valuable resources. Thousands of people who would prefer that they get the dollars and seats and likes will be gunning for him. In order to stay on that throne, Dr. Fauci will need to get and keep lots of powerful allies (plus be the sort of person who thinks in terms of how to get allies rather than being minimaxed for COVID-prediction).

This interferes with his COVID predicting ability, but in the current system there’s no alternative.

* Think of centers of expertise like the CDC or the IGM Economists Panel as giant systems for disentangling corruption and power. Their job is to produce one or two people who can get in front of the population and say something which has some resemblance to reality, even though the entire rest of the economy and body politic is trying to corrupt them. They…actually do sort of okay. Anthony Fauci is neither Attila the Hun nor Trofim Lysenko. He’s a kind of bumbling careerist with a decent understanding of epidemiology and a heart that’s more or less in the right place. The whole scientific-technocratic complex is a machine which takes Moloch as input and manages – after spending billions of dollars and the careers of thousands of hard-working public servants – to produce Anthony Fauci as output. This should be astonishing, and we are insufficiently grateful.

Posted in Andrew Gelman | Comments Off on The Nudgelords

Figureheads, ghost-writers and pseudonymous quant bloggers: The recent evolution of authorship in science publishing

Posted on June 2, 2021 by Luke Ford

According to Wikipedia: “Bruce Graham Charlton is a retired British medical doctor and was Visiting Professor of Theoretical Medicine at the University of Buckingham.[1] Until April 2019, he was Reader in Evolutionary Psychiatry at Newcastle University.[2] Charlton was editor of the controversial and non-peer reviewed journal Medical Hypotheses from 2003 to 2010.”

Charlton co-authored a 2016 book with Edward Dutton — The Genius Famine: why we need geniuses, why they’re dying out, and why we must rescue them.

In 2008, Dr. Charlton published:

* Traditionally, science has been published only under the proper names and postal addresses of the scientists who did the work. This is no longer the case, and over recent decades science authorship has fundamentally changed its character. At one extreme, prestigious scientists writing from high status institutions are used as mere figureheads to publish research that has been performed, analyzed and ‘ghost-written’ by commercial organizations. At the other extreme ‘quant bloggers’ are publishing real science with their personal identity shielded by pseudonyms and writing from internet addresses that give no indication of their location or professional affiliation. Yet the paradox is that while named high status scientists from famous institutions are operating with suspect integrity (e.g. covertly acting as figureheads) and minimal accountability (i.e. failing to respond to substantive criticism); pseudonymous bloggers – of mostly unknown identity, unknown education or training, and unknown address – are publishing interesting work and interacting with their critics on the internet. And at the same time as ‘official’ and professional science is increasingly timid careerist and dull; the self-organized, amateur realm of science blogs displays curiosity, scientific motivation, accountability, responsibility – and often considerable flair and skill. Quant bloggers and other internet scientists are, however, usually dependent on professional scientists to generate databases. But professional science has become highly constrained by non-scientific influences: increasingly sluggish, rigid, bureaucratic, managerial, and enmeshed with issues of pseudo-ethics, political correctness, public relations, politics and marketing. So it seems that professional science needs the quant bloggers. One possible scenario is that professional scientists may in future continue to be paid to do the plodding business of generating raw data (dull work that no one would do unless they were paid); but these same professional scientists (functioning essentially as either project managers or technicians) may be found to lack the boldness, flair, sheer ‘smarts’ or genuine interest in the subject to make sense of what they have discovered. Some branches of future science may then come to depend on a swarm of gifted ‘amateurs’ somewhat like the current quant bloggers; for analysis and integration of their data, for understanding its implications, and for speculating freely about the potential applications.

* Over the past few decades, these ideas of personal responsibility and accountability seem to have broken down – at least in medical science. Scientists’ names no longer guarantee the provenance of the work published under that name, and a specific
name and address no longer implies accountability. Especially has accountability broken down in relation to the highest status scientists.

From numerous informal observations over the past two decades, it seems clear that high status scientists are no longer required to respond to requests for clarification or to published criticism, but can ignore it with impunity. The traditional default that criticism was regarded as correct unless it was refuted, no longer seems to apply to high status scientists when a criticism comes from a lower-status scientist. This applies even when clarification is clearly necessary, when the criticism is potentially devastating, and even when critical communications are published as articles or correspondence in high impact journals. The fact is that, nowadays, high status scientists are seldom sanctioned in any way for ignoring criticism by the scientific community.

The current default assumption seems to be along the lines that high status scientists are always right unless and until conclusively demonstrated otherwise – in other words, high status scientists are now regarded as innocent until proved guilty. So that science published under the name of high status scientists from prestigious institutions is apparently regarded as intrinsically correct until such time as it is proven false. And high status scientists are now placed under no obligation to co-operate with their critics in discovering the truth – in the first place high status scientists usually do not need to acknowledge or respond at all to criticism; if they respond they are not compelled to provide relevant refutation but are allowed to bluster, change the subject, and make ad hominem attacks on their critics; requests for extra methodological detail or raw data can be ignored. Sometimes, criticism is met with legal threats – for example accusations of libel.

* The deep, underlying cause of the immunity to criticism of high status scientists is probably the greater role of peer review in science, and the domination of peer review by a minority (‘cartel’) of high status scientists. Peer review mechanisms are now used not only to evaluate completed science, but pre-emptively in allocating resources. Modern science uses peer review mechanisms at many levels: defining overall research strategies, awarding research grants, granting ethical permission to do research, journal refereeing processes prior to publication, organizing conferences. . . indeed it is hard to find an area of science which is not dominated by peer review. This means that a low status scientist can have their career damaged (perhaps without knowing it) if s/he makes a powerful enemy of a high status scientist who is influential within the all-important peer review system. The problem is that peer review processes are systematically biased to give more weight to negative than positive evaluations (ie. a bad report has a greater impact on the review process than a good report [2]) – so having a high status enemy involved in the peer review system is likely to have a significantly damaging impact on a scientist’s career.

The result is that high status scientists are feared to the extent that the mass of lower-ranked scientists will not call them to account for their errors and misdemeanours in case they provoke reprisals via the peer review systems. Another very important result of the centrality of peer review is that while traditional science was mostly a marketplace of ideas, modern science is dominated by a ‘cartel’ of scientists who are powerful within peer review and have quasimonopolistic power. (In economics a cartel usually refers to a group of persons or organizations who cooperate to act as if a monopoly; to control production
and prices and to protect themselves against competition, for example by lobbying government to introduce favourable regulations.)

* It is a bizarre paradox of modern science that while named high status scientists with postal addresses at prestigious institutions are operating with suspect integrity and minimal accountability; by contrast, science bloggers – of (mostly) pseudonymous and unknown identity, unknown education or training, and writing from unknown addresses – are nonetheless publishing interesting work and having exciting interactions, on the internet. The recent emergence of (frequently pseudonymous) ‘quant bloggers’ and other internet scientists is a phenomenon at the opposite extreme from the high status scientists who seem to be operating as individuals but in fact function as ‘front-men’ (or women) for anonymous teams with inscrutable agendas.

In what follows I provide only a very selective picture of blog science, based on my personal interests and tastes, and noting only the blogs that I have been reading for months or years. Clearly there are many, many other examples – but the blogosphere is now so vast that no individual can experience and evaluate more than a tiny fraction of the output.

The term ‘quant blogger’ (i.e. quantitative analysis blogger) was invented by Steve Sailer [8] who is the practicing ‘blogfather’ of an interconnected group of mostly pseudonymous bloggers that have been in some way inspired by Sailer’s example and his (often distinctly ‘non-PC’) interests in issues such as IQ; immigration; evolution; education; politics and sports – often analyzed by sex, class and race. Sailer has blogged many interesting quantitative analyses, including an influential hypothesis of the relationship between ‘affordable family formation’ and politics in the USA.

The Sailer-influenced quant bloggers include the pseudonymous Razib who hosts GNXP (Gene Expression) which includes several other quant bloggers such as the pseudonymous Agnostic and (his real name) Jason Malloy [9]. Other pseudonymous quant bloggers in this Sailer-descended group include Inductivist [10], Half-Sigma [11] and the Audacious Epigone [12]. Unrelated, not-Sailer-connected, quant bloggers include Engram who posts almost daily quantitative analyses on mainly socio-political or policy topics [13]; and who discovered an inverse relationship between capital punishment and murder rates in four developed nations. La Griffe du Lion has focused on IQ [14] and developed many hypotheses including the ‘smart fraction’ theory of economic development. The Climate Audit blog has been influential in its field, and is associated with discrediting the ‘hockey stick’ graph that was supposed to illustrate climate change over the past millenium [15].

In most of the above examples, typically the blogger presents analysis, tabulations or graphs of already-published data sets – such as population surveys or questionnaires; or does a re-analysis of a published scientific paper; or synthesizes several
studies; or draws out applied implications of published science which are neglected (or obfuscated) by the primary authors. (Of course, quant bloggers usually also post chatty ‘opinion’ pieces and responses to current news.)

Although often the blogger’s true identify and location may be unknown, there is an accountability mechanism via the comments section of the blog which follows the primary blog posting, and potentially also by other blogs linking and critiquing the original blog. Most of the above named bloggers form a broadly-sympathetic network who comment-on and critique each others work. But the crucial point is that a quant blogger must behave such as to earn the trust of their readers – and this typically involves engaging with their critics critics, and refuting relevant criticisms to the satisfaction of their readership.

Presumably, the reason why most of these bloggers are pseudonymous is their subject matter: they are often dealing with population differences in relation to sex, class and race; focusing on controversial matters such as IQ, personality, educational achievement or crime. At present, in USA and Western Europe – and especially in universities – such issues are virtually taboo except when treated using elaborately euphemistic language and reaching politically correct conclusions [16]. This means that mainstream human sciences may err in ignoring robust, but politically-incorrect, interpretations for their data [e.g. 17].

Pseudonyms are used because scientists (and other media commentators) who work in these non-PC ‘taboo’ fields may be subject to the risk of denunciation by the media and to professional or institutional arbiters of coercive political correctness. The sanctions have ranged from the moderate unpleasantness of unpopularity among professional colleagues, up to deliberate misrepresentation and false ascription of opinions or motivations, mob-vilification, hate campaigns, persecution by employers (failure to get academic jobs, failure to get promotion or tenure, sacking etc.), legal sanctions, aggression and personal violence. Even the most distinguished scientists are vulnerable to onslaught: the hugely-influential psychologist Hans Eysenck was one of the earliest victims from the mid 1960s, the sociobiologist E.O Wilson was similarly attacked in the late 1970s, and more recently Harvard President Larry Summers and the great James D. Watson both lost their jobs after transgressing the bound of political correctness. In such a context of endemic intimidation, a scientist’s natural wish to get maximum personal credit
for their research by using their real name and address is often overwhelmed by sheer survival instinct – and pseudonyms and web addresses are regarded as safer. For such reasons, some of the most exciting and potentially important current scientific discourse is forced to be pseudonymous; even though – in a more honest, tolerant and rational world – it would surely be better to have scientific discussion between people using their real identities.

Posted in Blogging, Science | Comments Off on Figureheads, ghost-writers and pseudonymous quant bloggers: The recent evolution of authorship in science publishing