Early studies of Non-Specific Characterological Assholism (N-S CA), originally denominated the AH-Factor, focused on its chromosomal provenance. Later studies have tended to examine particular sociocultural applications, as in the question posed here: How long, and to what effect, do specific instances of N-S CA linger? If, for example, a subject is a notorious asshole in 2014, will he suffer measurable consequences roughly a decade later?
II
A recent tenure denial at Harvard University offers a suggestive case.
In 2014 Benjamin Edelman, an untenured Harvard prof
ordered take-out from Sichuan Garden, a family-run restaurant in Brookline…
[Edelman] also has a consulting business, for which Bloomberg Business reports [he] charges clients $800 an hour.
The food cost $4 more than he had calculated, because prices on the website had not been updated. The professor complained in an email. Ran Duan, whose family owns the restaurant, apologized and ultimately offered to return $4.
Widely reported at the time, the incident generated strikingly negative attention, and two limericks.
III
Professor Edelman, in suing Harvard for the tenure denial, identifies as root cause the 2014 incident.
In a civil lawsuit against Harvard filed Tuesday in the Suffolk County Superior Court, Edelman alleges that the 2014 email correspondence — for which he later apologized at the Business School’s request — resurfaced when he was being evaluated for tenure, among other concerns of misconduct…
Edelman said he believes the negative publicity from the Sichuan Garden incident was a key reason for his tenure denial, adding there is “some fundamental truth to the centrality of that media disaster.”
“Had it not been for those stupid restaurant emails, I would have been just fine,” he said.
IV CONCLUSION
Evidence here points to the possibility that, in particular institutional settings, and under particular rule-bound circumstances, fulminating N-S CA may indeed impede personal advancement over the course of a lifetime. These results however are very preliminary and somewhat vitiated by their association with Harvard, unusually sensitive to being perceived as full of assholes.
Pool stammered and said he disagreed with the implication that Jews control the media.
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[Alex Jones] … seemed uncharacteristically rattled as Ye began talking favorably about Hitler.
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Physicians are starting to see a subvariant of aphasia which they are calling afascia: The sudden inability to articulate your fascism, typically occurring when publicly confronted by a more vehement fascist speaker.
In two recent cases, recounted here, fascist adherents “stammered,” and were “rattled,” in the face of a fellow fascist who failed to disguise – as both of the adherents have learned to do – his murderous antisemitism.
Afascia robs its victims of the capacity to speak their fascism only in the specific circumstance of overpowering homicidal verbal challenge; so the good news is that it is highly treatable by the simple expedient of avoiding the most blatant and articulate fascists. Researchers are also looking into identifying fascists of this sort and subjecting them to The Soros Method: a short course of treatment during which they learn to reference the name George Soros whenever they want to say We need to bring back Hitler to kill all the Jews.
Well, no one better than University of North Carolina Professor Anita Louise Jackson to do that. She herself, in contemplating unique funding opportunities within the United States Medicare system, has earned many millions in personal compensation.
It was easy: She simply performed hundreds of unnecessary procedures on hundreds of hapless patients … some of whom must really have wondered why she felt the urge to stick balloons, repeatedly, up their perfectly healthy nasal passages.
But one has to pay through the nose for a megaMcMansion on a country club golf course… uh, I mean we the taxpayers have to pay through the nose for Anita Louise Jackson to live in a megaMcMansion on a country club golf course; and if it weren’t for those pesky lawyers at the Justice Department wondering why a dinky rural practitioner is “the nation’s top-paid provider of a special sinus-relief procedure,” all would be well: Our hard-earned tax dollars would go to maintain Jackson’s lifestyle, and the farmers of northeast central Carolina would continue to boast the clearest nasal passages in the world.
Dude seems, among other things, to have taken a bunch of way, way old people and convinced them they should have demanding, elaborate surgery because you know they have so many more quality years of life ahead!
Dude is accused of having
regularlyperformed as many as three complex surgical procedures at the same time, failed to participate in all of the “key and critical” portions of his surgeries, and forced his patients to endure hours of medically unnecessary anesthesia time as he moved between operating rooms and attended to other patients or hospital matters.
Or golf game or whatever. What the hell did they care? Most of them had dementia anyway.
The point was to “increase surgical volume, maximize UPMC and UPP’s revenue, and/or appease [the dude].” Appease cuz he’s apparently one hell of a greedy egomaniac/control freak who, it says here, “endangered patients and cost the government millions in false billings.”
But look. If you could immobilize hundreds of people for hours and now and then hack away at them while at the same time fielding calls from patients also interested in having their last days destroyed through unnecessary surgery, wouldn’t you do it?
PIttsburgh loves him cuz he brings in SOOO much money. Like Lady Bracknell, it has for years ‘decided entirely to overlook’ his sick and vile behavior.
In January 2015, when Dr. Luketich [that’s the dude] had left the OR while a patient was under anesthesia and couldn’t be found for more than an hour, [the head of surgical oversight] emailed him and said such behavior was “irresponsible,” the [federal] suit said.
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SHORT-HANDED
On one particular day in 2015,
‘Dr. Luketich was scheduled to perform five surgeries in five operating rooms. In OR 26 and 27, he was listed as the primary surgeon. In ORs 12, 16 and 25, he was listed as the assistant. In OR 27, the patient was undergoing a “substernal gastric pullup” that should have taken six to eight hours. Instead, the patient was on the operating table for 12-and-a-half hours. Residents performed critical parts of the surgery and then waited, with the patient under anesthesia, for Dr. Luketich, as he required them to do.
“The patient was left with unsupervised surgical trainees while Luketich was involved with four other procedures in four different operating rooms and not immediately available,” Dr. D’Cunha’s suit said.
As a result, according to the complaint, the patient suffered complications, including an inflammatory response that led to the loss of her hand.
“Luketich explained to the patient’s family (as he did with many families) that this was an unfortunate but possible risk from surgery,” Dr. D’Cunha’s lawsuit said. “However, it is not a risk when the surgery is completed within the expected time and when a surgeon is attentive to a patient and does not unnecessarily prolong the procedure.”‘
Onaccounta they’re real anti-vax there and that’s so fucking stupid.
Montana: Land o’ Guns (highest rate of ownership in the country), Suicide (second only to Alaska), Alcoholism (highest rate of alcohol-rated traffic fatalities in the country), Covid, and All Other Conceivable Forms of Early Death .
I’m not good at remembering very old days, but I do recall a picnic lunch at the country house of Brigid Balfour, a scientific colleague of my father’s in London and, yes, related to the Balfour of the Declaration. She was also related to Gladstone! It was a sunny day, and we ate out on the grass, on a very big blanket.
Beset by accusations of research fraud, Duke professor and public intellectual Dan Ariely has held his ground, admitting a bit of sloppiness but nothing like making up data. Yet an analysis of details in a 2012 paper he wrote about honesty (!) suggests that he may well be responsible for bogus numbers in one of his influential psychological experiments.
And this is not the first time questions have been raised about Ariely’s research in particular. In a famous 2008 study, he claimed that prompting people to recall the Ten Commandments before a test cuts down on cheating, but an outside team later failed to replicate the effect. An editor’s note was added to a 2004 study of his last month when other researchers raised concerns about statistical discrepancies, and Ariely did not have the original data to cross-check against. And in 2010, Ariely told NPR that dentists often disagree on whether X-rays show a cavity, citing Delta Dental insurance as his source. He later walked back that claim when the company said it could not have shared that information with him because it did not collect it.
Ariely is also up against his field’s now-notorious “replication crisis” — a nice way of saying that SCADS of psychological experimental results sure look a whole lot like bullshit. Go here for details.
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A photograph in this article features Ariely hanging with Jonah Lehrer at a 2008 science festival. Much like Ariely, Lehrer was a much-celebrated brainiac with frenetic entrepreneurial energy until he went pffff.
Jonah Lehrer’s 2012 book Imagine: How Creativity Workswas pulled from shelves after it was demonstrated to contain fabricated quotes purportedly from Bob Dylan and WH Auden. He subsequently admitted to plagiarising the work of others in his blogposts, while critics noted apparent plagiarism and disregard for facts throughout his published work.
UD’s got nothing against operators. America is Land O’ Operators. He’s an operator/He’s a real player, as Fountains of Wayne puts it, and we got ’em growing on trees around here. But don’t believe anything they tell you.
Particles must decay, Large, large, hadroon. Beauty quarks fade away, Large, large, hadroon. ‘Lectrons are sacked in war, muons are scattered far, Truth is a fixed star, large, large hadroon.
… is going to collide more and more dramatically with this administration. The people who run the country are getting desperate, while their scientific advisors – like Tony Fauci – stubbornly do the only thing they can do: hang tough on behalf of empirical method. Utterly random figures like trade advisers can throw all of the enthusiastic hydroxychloroquine newspaper articles they want at Fauci; Fauci will never do anything other than point out the way science works and hope this will get through to most of the people in the room.
Trials of BCG, which UD‘s father championed in the 1970’s to treat early stage bladder cancer (‘BCG remains the gold standard treatment for patients with intermediate- and high-risk [non-muscle invasive bladder cancer.]’), are now ongoing in several countries.
