His story is a cautionary tale about real life vs idealism. The two come into conflict frequently, and sometimes violently. Nothing is more difficult or dangerous than holding power to account; the mechanisms we imagine are in place to hold power accountable exist purely in that imagination. The personal feelings of shame, guilt, or ethical responsibility we imagine there to be, or the social pressure brought to bear on those who demonstrate a lack of those qualities, is missing when push comes to shove. Being an idealist, really believing in these things, is the setup for great tragedy. The fundamental mistake is to believe that others think like you do or value the same things you value. Of course I know nothing of this particular situation, but the shape of it is all too familiar - an idealistic, inspirational collegue forced out after speaking truth to power. How many tens of such people do we know? How many of them do not actually get back on their feet? How many of them did we speak up for?
Yep. I often reflect on some of my career mistakes, especially when evaluating current decisions within the context of a job or interacting with other institutions, and what I wish I'd learnt earlier would be to "read a room".
Sure, there is technically a process for reporting wrongdoing, but there's no process for reporting wrongdoing and keeping your job, and keeping your job is more important. What isn't your job is taking moral stances on things, having political opinions, provoking what others might see as unnecessary conflict, in any form.
Sure, you could spend some time ensuring accessibility standards are being met, but really you shouldn't unless someone complains, because although you think it's good practice, you're being paid to put visible results on the screen, unless you can make a business case for it that's sufficiently compelling and rewarding that it's worth pursuing. You'll lose your job for not getting the thing shipped, but probably won't for it not being theoretically good enough, unless you're a real doctor or real engineer
Don't stick your neck out unless you control the outcome (for positive or negative), and figure out what you're really being told to do or asked to do, and keep your effort to that. Don't go above and beyond, it's out of scope and you're better off sleeping. Not joking. If you can't do that, you might struggle to stay employed, and it's not worth your personal risk.
At work, keep your opinions to yourself, nearly all the time, they're rarely important, just get the work done and go home, work isn't that important either, don't pretend like you're saving the world.
>Sure, there is technically a process for reporting wrongdoing, but there's no process for reporting wrongdoing and keeping your job, and keeping your job is more important. What isn't your job is taking moral stances on things, having political opinions, provoking what others might see as unnecessary conflict, in any form.
Up to a certain point. That answer didn't hold up well at the Nuremberg trials. After a point there's also dignity and morality, not just "keeping the job".
That only happened because they needed some show trials to pacify people. A few were picked to take the fall and the rest were quietly brought to universities and government labs all across western powers. The United States has a proud tradition of totally ignoring all the agreements that came out of those trials.
Given that this highly improbable outcome involves two separate coalitions of countries invading yours from both sides, “read the room” is a safe bet for all parties to make, including last minute flights to Argentina
What modern corporate employee wouldn't (haven't?) sleepwalk into perpetuating horrors on innocent people and then really and truly believe it when they say "I was just doing my job..." I am not excluding myself, we have not magically solved the social/political circumstances that lead to the second world war, and we are doomed to repeat those mistakes if we take for granted that those structures just fizzled away because we blood sacrificed millions of people and then the victors did a rain dance over the burial mound.
Not trying to troll here, but, what does something like Nuremberg trails matter in a country where someone who can incite an insurrection and then become president again, or a world where international criminal court orders are ignored?
> what does something like Nuremberg trails matter in a country where someone who can incite an insurrection and then become president again, or a world where international criminal court orders are ignored?
Nuremberg had nothing to do with insurrections and revolutions. It also judged the Nazis according to standards that didn't exist when they committed their crimes; the ICC was created after Nuremberg as an imperfect system. Imperfect, however, is still better than nothing.
> Don't stick your neck out unless you control the outcome (for positive or negative), and figure out what you're really being told to do or asked to do, and keep your effort to that. Don't go above and beyond, it's out of scope and you're better off sleeping. Not joking. If you can't do that, you might struggle to stay employed, and it's not worth your personal risk.
Generally good advice but I would caveat it. Sometimes the org doesn’t know it wants something, or doesn’t know that you are the right person to ask. For example, I’ve had good success when finding ways to save millions of dollars. And other, more domain-specific things that make management happy.
> What isn't your job is taking moral stances on things, having political opinions, provoking what others might see as unnecessary conflict, in any form.
This is wrong, and how you end up with flying drone face recognizing skullpopping murderbots. "I just work here" is an abdication of adult responsibility to self, family, and society.
It's not some idealistic stance, it's the truth. It's how we ended up with concentration camps in the USA multiple times, and why many companies are gearing up to build more right now.
It’s more nuanced then that. People don’t want others pretending to be superior to them, if they are not actually that much better.
e.g. A literal supergenius can behave very erratically nearly every week of the year, 40 years straight, and still achieve notable successes in life, such as Kurt Godel
But a regular genius pretending to be a literal supergenius and trying to do the same, is well at best going to be perceived as a clown.
And it gets even more lopsided as you go down. Someone merely very smart pretending to be a literal genius is never going to earn anyone’s respect around the table.
Lets be honest, most faculty members eventually become simple Ectoparasites on student work, or ruminate on problems they stopped making progress on for decades.
As someone prone to idealism, you need to careful of the external consequences of work that runs into conflict with institution politics, government goals, and foreign/domestic intelligence services (professional thieves.)
I am probably just a clown, but often had to consider the escalation of coercion stages in the context of personal resolve. You will be evil one day too... Best of luck =3
<< Yep. I often reflect on some of my career mistakes, especially when evaluating current decisions within the context of a job or interacting with other institutions, and what I wish I'd learnt earlier would be to "read a room".
While I agree and even accept this answer in theory, I have a hard time putting it in practice. Just today it seems I unnecessarily ruffled some executive feathers by pointing out some -- otherwise clear -- issues no one dares to mention and I am wondering now if that was even worthwhile. After all, I am not paid for extra for it. Regardless of the choice made by executives, the only thing that would change is the amount of support work I would do for it.
I know for a fact that 9 out of 10 it is better for me ( and my career ) to stay quiet, but sometimes I just can't stay out of my way.
how about not being a coward being enough of a reason to stand up for what you believe in. no where is it written that being brave entails success. sometimes though it is said that success entails being brave
"cautionary", "real life vs", "Nothing is more difficult or dangerous", "exist purely in that imagination".
You're claiming that real life is always as in this episode; and so, I guess, that you should never oppose someone at an higher position? Or with more power?
It's healthy to be aware of the possibility that things could go this way, but it's definitely not a guarantee that they will; in some environments it's more likely to happen, in others more likely to not happen.
But if we always acted as selfish cynics, then yeah, real life would be guaranteed to be what you describe
Economists and auction theorists have a term of art: “revealed preference”. It’s typically not applied to society in the large, but I think it’s useful to zoom out from time to time.
Our society, whatever the internal dynamics, has a revealed preference in the extreme, a preference so forceful it’s an idee fixe, a singular objective.
We will sacrifice anything: arbitrary loss of life, arbitrary suffering and indignity, arbitrary damage to the planet to transfer wealth upwards constantly to the maximum extent that we can blow past the feeble speed bumps that our institutions represent.
This upwards wealth transfer is in two senses of the word “up”: from poor to rich, and from young to old. We openly advertise targets for the economy like “the stock market” (US equities overwhelming held by boomers and rich people), or GDP growth (real wages at the median, go back to Venezuela commie). We don’t even pretend we’re optimizing for anything else.
Lina Khan is trying to enforce laws already on the books and is deemed dangerously radical.
You think these sociopaths won’t kill people? They’ll kill millions of people if they have to, they’ve done it before.
> We will render arbitrary people homeless to constrain the supply and push up real asset prices for homeowners
Yes. Because from the homeowner's perspective, they're maintaining their real standard of living.
Crafting good policy requires being very careful about whose relative standard of living you're sacrificing for the greater good. Because no matter how privileged you think someone is, for them, it's the baseline.
> We’ll tolerate flagrant cartel monopoly and flagrant securities fraud and all manner of evil to drive equities up?
No, not really. Shareholders win in the aftermath of antitrust action and trusted equity markets. We tolerate those things, the first much more than the second, but not for the reasons you presume.
I’m not sure what the theme of your contention is: it sounds like you’re basically saying everyone will fight as hard as possible with whatever means at their disposal to be maximally selfish.
But that tired toy example from game theory shows that everyone loses if both grass the other up. Countless studies of both human beings and computer programs in the iterated prisoner’s dilemma show that the wining strategy is not in fact to drive housing prices so high that the homeless problem eventually wrecks your property value.
This smash and grab, “how much can you carry” mafia capitalism has been tried before and the result was a guillotine.
> everyone will fight as hard as possible with whatever means at their disposal to be maximally selfish
No, I'm saying loss aversion is often misunderstood [1]. Both in its existence and strength. And the fact that it operates in relative terms, i.e. someone who is materially better off than they were 10 years ago may still throw their toys out of the pram if their neighbor is much better.
> the wining strategy is not in fact to drive housing prices so high that the homeless problem eventually wrecks your property value
Sure. The point is you also can't drive home prices down, because that hurts homeowners and activates them as a political bloc. (The solution is real home price growth as close to zero as possible amidst rising real incomes.)
I’m aware of the concept of loss aversion, but I think it as an explanatory factor for macro economics is a red herring: one of a long list of diversions in the grand company of all trickle-down economics.
People say that the without arbitrary incentives for arbitrary wealth that hard work and innovation won’t happen. Demonstrably false! The Internet that the current cartel is looting was a public private partnership! The best software these days is done substantially by passionate hobbyists!
People point to Silicon Valley and say “this wouldn’t be possible in Europe”. Then they point to the market capitalizations of the vampire megacorps that the world would be far better without as the success story.
People make other arguments slightly craftier: punitive taxes on the mega wealthy wouldn’t raise enough revenue to matter. True, but that’s not the point of a punitive wealth tax: the point of a punitive billionaire tax is to deprive billionaires of godlike power to restructure society in their own interest.
Anyone outside a few narrow bubbles can see that this is going very badly.
I’ll agree with you this far: it’s going to be a tall hill to climb to get people with homes worth 20 times what they paid and 401ks to vote for a sane future. But this is a comparatively recent phenomenon: older people used to be obsessively concerned with the prospects of younger people for trivial biological reasons.
These days? That “blood boy” transfusion thing Thiel is always on about? It’s a terrifying metaphor for the bigger picture. The procedure was pioneered so a father could keep his daughter alive at great risk to himself.
For some reason we now tolerate if not celebrate the vampire ideal of running that backwards.
Creative idealists tend to abstract away the social politics of power and are often suprised by the result of their actions. They do not have enough fear of others and what they are capable of. The response is not only a personal surprise, but an epistemological shock. The solution is to remain aware of the reality of your situation. This is particularly difficult for thinkers and dreamers because their attention is often elsewhere; but one must make the effort or bad abstraction will hit you like a freight train. The other solution is to ally yourself with other less pragmatic principled idealists such that you can help them assess the situation and take mutually beneficial action. One must understand the battle to come, you must feel the fear of failure and the possibility of success. The worst thing you can do is be unaware of the game entirely, or be aware and disdain it, and so play it like a fool. Finally, if you are extremely talented and recognized for it, the de facto situation is that you acquire advocates to play the game for you. But this is a rare position, and not without its drawbacks.
In the case of the GP I changed my wording to be softer and refer directly to the site guidelines. (Originally it said "Please don't take HN threads on political flamewar tangents. Nothing good's going to come of it, whichever way you lean.")
Lots of people in this thread alluding to similar experiences "speaking truth to power" or "failing to read a room" or "not playing politics" and suffering the fallout from it. But as someone at the start of their career I'm kind of interested in the specifics--what kinds of ethical concerns? What forms of retaliation? Everyone's being pointedly vague and I guess that's necessary to an extent to preserve internet anonymity (or maintain a reputation, if your professional work is tied to your HN account) but it is frustrating as someone trying to figure out how to "read the room."
This story really hits home for me. My dad was a physics teacher, and these complaints sound all too familiar—especially this part:
"I did what the University told me to do, and then these administrators ruined my life for it."
It’s frustrating how often dedicated educators are forced to navigate politics instead of focusing on teaching. The best educators are usually the least political, while those who thrive in politics often end up as administrators.
> The best educators are usually the least political, while those who thrive in politics often end up as administrators.
The lady he accused of ethics violations was named Dept Head around the same time he made the complaint. An "old head" raising an issue against a new rising star...
My Dad was a university professor in mathematics. He loved his field! But the math department he worked in was taken over by someone who loved playing politics and maintaining power by playing favorites. My Dad refused to kiss the ring, and paid the price for that in his career advancement. He had tenure so it was never as bad as what happened to Marshal Brain.
Now we have n == 2, this could be a pattern. Of course it's a similar situation outside of academia too.
Workplace HR “ethics” or “whistleblower” policies and processes are set up to protect the organization, not the person making the complaint. It’s you against the power structure in these situations, so you better have all your ducks in a row. Consulting with a very trusted advisor or attorney is probably a good idea.
I met Marshall a few times. He was a good teacher and someone who had a positive impact on several successive classes of students who wanted to start companies and build meaningful products + technologies on that campus.
And I trust (quite a bit) that whatever he brought to light should be followed up on - if no other reason than to respect his memory. I hope it is taken seriously and those who retaliated find themselves w/o their positions of responsibility and power over other faculty.
> “My career has been destroyed by multiple administrators at NCSU who united together and completely ignored the EthicsPoint System and its promises to employees,” Brain wrote.
Well, lesson learned. Take your ethical concerns to the public/press instead. The retaliation would be just as swift as it is with The Process. Or: abandon ship and leave the system to consume itself.
He probably cared more about losing a job he loved, the startup community he was fostering in NC, and his https://ecoprt.com/ project than about publicly fighting a battle over a minor ethical complaint about a shady hire... at least in the early days before it snowballed.
> Take your ethical concerns to the public/press instead
Or at least above the heads of the people who are fucking around. Press might be seen as vindictive. But a sharp letter to the trustees of the university, possibly even some political offices, would not be out of place.
I received my engineering masters from NC State, but not this department (I was in the Industrial & Systems Eng. dept, in the IMSE program: https://imsei.ncsu.edu/). That said, my program was intentionally broad & flexible because students seeking higher ed in manufacturing engineering might be EEs, MEs, CS undergrads, or something entirely different and could be pursuing any sort of leadership role in a manufacturing environment. Because of that, the program often referred students to Brain's program, and it was always common knowledge that one of the bigger differentiators at NCSU's engineering school was the focus on entrepreneurialism (especially compared to most other regional unis in the southeast, except perhaps GATech and maybe UFlorida).
Even if the loss of Brain and/or the scandal around the circumstances seem fairly inconsequential to most of you, it's a big deal for NC State's engineering program and the students there. It's also likely going to be a big deal for large donors like John Sall (co-founder of the SAS Institute, which is HQ'd in Raleigh).
My son wants to be a mathematician. I told him never go into academia because it's a pit of poisonous vipers, administrators and professors both. I'm going to send him this article to hopefully re-indoctrinate him in case he forgot my previous message.
> Kashani said Brain submitted numerous complaints through the EthicsPoint system and said tensions arose because Brain didn’t “play the political game” through his questioning of higher-ranking administrators.
This right here is why I scoff at “anonymous reporting systems” or stuff like EthicsPoint, for the simple reason that the only ethics that ultimately matter in an organization are those of everyone above you, and those individuals have a vested interest in preserving their political capital over acting or behaving ethically.
It’s disgusting and reprehensible if true, but it’s sadly not surprising. Those of us who behave ethically are little more than prey to those whose moral compasses are fungible.
Organizations create these reporting systems to make themselves look good to outsiders, but they will punish you severely if you actually try to use them.
It's kind of like your grandmother's good china: Look at it all you want but don't you dare use it.
Stuff like this is incredibly confusing to people on the autism spectrum.
I'm autistic and, despite being aware of their perverse use, am still perplexed by the reality. That said, I've had a few shitty managers now and have used these systems and processes. It has surprised me how effective they've been at getting those managers off of my back, at the least.
> Stuff like this is incredibly confusing to people on the autism spectrum.
Upvoted for this alone. We thrive in clearly defined systems, but the powers that be are careful to hide the actual systems of power from us. It’s infuriating to find out we’ve been playing the wrong “game”.
It doesn't sound like the process was anonymous, as it implies she found out it was him pretty quickly and worked to close ranks against him. Kinda defeats the purpose but I guess in any small organization it's probably easy to figure out who it is.
There's no such thing as an anonymous reporting system in a company that owns the reporting infrastructure.
Some companies contract out such systems to a third party to reinforce the illusion of anonymity. But what do you think happens when the CEO says to the contractor "Tell me who wrote this or we won't hire you again"?
sounds like typical high school bullying except by adults and so-called professionals. how does a disagreement between two turn into multiple departments jumping in for one side?
> Brain’s complaint contained allegations of wrongdoing... regarding repurposing the Engineering Entrepreneurs Program meeting space to accommodate a new hire.. “What came back was a sickening nuclear bomb of retaliation the likes of which could not be believed”
This is funny because it's so accurate. I worked a year or two in college doing IT support for the College of Business in my final years of school. The prior boss who had actual experience in running IT departments was run out (fired) and replaced by an economics professor who had no idea what he was doing. The economics professor lead the charge in running out his predecessor. I don't know the reason but it was pretty ugly and everyone in IT support had zero respect for the economics professor. I came in after the fact so I had no skin in that game.
As an aside, every professor got a brand new $4000 Dell every year because if the college didn't spend its budget, it would get less money the next year. Most of these professors just used Office to do their lesson plans and that's it. This was in the 1990s and it was a huge waste of money. I would imagine it's much worse now. That probably had something to do with it.
I recently read a quote that paraphrased went like, "bureaucracies care about following procedure over outcomes."
I hope US universities get fixed. Their current state is a great disservice to the future of the country.
It's sad to see a group of engineering professors having political squabbles involving unethical behavior in response to an ethics complaint.
Ethics are supposed to be a core part of engineering, not too dissimilar from medicine. Good thing those folks are in academia where they can't hurt the rest of us.
Engineering ethics is completely different from classroom ethics. Engineering ethics is all about compliance. If you build a missile to kill people, you better make sure it works as described. Who it kills is none of your business but if it doesn't work as described then it's a breach of "engineering ethics". It's funny when people on HN call for the "professionalisation" of software engineering. The only person who benefits is management who will happily throw the poor engineers under the bus the moment a self driving car hits somebody. Hold the entire organization responsible, starting from the top, not the lowly engineer.
The article suggests he was let go for "submitting numerous ethical complaints" but it is utterly unclear to me what these ethical complaints could have possibly been about, and the only source in this article is a starry-eyed protege. I am wondering if Brain was (perhaps unintentionally) abusing the complaint system as a way of adjudicating political disputes: "this person is stubborn and wrong" elevates to "this person is behaving unethically." My suspicion is that the numerous ethical complaints evidenced a pattern of unstable behavior.
I don't like speaking ill of the recently deceased. But I also don't like jumping into conspiracy theories based on platitudes about "the system," when there are more obvious explanations: his last email is a work of unhinged paranoia and resentment, not truth-telling in the face of oppression. It is obvious that Brain was mentally unwell in his last few hours; I wonder how long that was going on.
There is a stark divide emerging between the sorts of people that in my view speak truth to power, even if they speak poorly or strangely or are entirely unable to read the room, and the kinds of people that have internalized the ideology that nothing is wrong and anyone that complains, especially more than once, is most likely mentally unstable, paranoid, delusional, and so on.
I don't know why so many people want to go into academia these days.
Tenure is a multi-year rat race with worse hours than a seed stage startup (to be fair to the startup, at least you have feedback in the form of sales and VC fundraising). The pay is bad and the politics are incredibly petty. Tick off the wrong person and your career is torched.
Having worked with some ex-academia people I can feel this. They often seem to bring that bitterness (and in all honesty a certain level of masochism) with them to the workplace even after escaping.
His story is a cautionary tale about real life vs idealism. The two come into conflict frequently, and sometimes violently. Nothing is more difficult or dangerous than holding power to account; the mechanisms we imagine are in place to hold power accountable exist purely in that imagination. The personal feelings of shame, guilt, or ethical responsibility we imagine there to be, or the social pressure brought to bear on those who demonstrate a lack of those qualities, is missing when push comes to shove. Being an idealist, really believing in these things, is the setup for great tragedy. The fundamental mistake is to believe that others think like you do or value the same things you value. Of course I know nothing of this particular situation, but the shape of it is all too familiar - an idealistic, inspirational collegue forced out after speaking truth to power. How many tens of such people do we know? How many of them do not actually get back on their feet? How many of them did we speak up for?
Yep. I often reflect on some of my career mistakes, especially when evaluating current decisions within the context of a job or interacting with other institutions, and what I wish I'd learnt earlier would be to "read a room".
Sure, there is technically a process for reporting wrongdoing, but there's no process for reporting wrongdoing and keeping your job, and keeping your job is more important. What isn't your job is taking moral stances on things, having political opinions, provoking what others might see as unnecessary conflict, in any form.
Sure, you could spend some time ensuring accessibility standards are being met, but really you shouldn't unless someone complains, because although you think it's good practice, you're being paid to put visible results on the screen, unless you can make a business case for it that's sufficiently compelling and rewarding that it's worth pursuing. You'll lose your job for not getting the thing shipped, but probably won't for it not being theoretically good enough, unless you're a real doctor or real engineer
Don't stick your neck out unless you control the outcome (for positive or negative), and figure out what you're really being told to do or asked to do, and keep your effort to that. Don't go above and beyond, it's out of scope and you're better off sleeping. Not joking. If you can't do that, you might struggle to stay employed, and it's not worth your personal risk.
At work, keep your opinions to yourself, nearly all the time, they're rarely important, just get the work done and go home, work isn't that important either, don't pretend like you're saving the world.
>Sure, there is technically a process for reporting wrongdoing, but there's no process for reporting wrongdoing and keeping your job, and keeping your job is more important. What isn't your job is taking moral stances on things, having political opinions, provoking what others might see as unnecessary conflict, in any form.
Up to a certain point. That answer didn't hold up well at the Nuremberg trials. After a point there's also dignity and morality, not just "keeping the job".
That only happened because they needed some show trials to pacify people. A few were picked to take the fall and the rest were quietly brought to universities and government labs all across western powers. The United States has a proud tradition of totally ignoring all the agreements that came out of those trials.
> they needed some show trials to pacify people
Which people? The Europeans were occupied or liberated under effectively caretaker governments. Americans didn't need pacification.
> the agreements that came out of those trials
The trials inspired some agreements. It didn't create any, other than the precedent of holding leaders accountable for crimes against humanity.
No.
> That answer didn't hold up well at the Nuremberg trials.
that's just winners were punishing losers.
In alternative reality, those who dropped nukes were facing trial in Nuremberg.
Given that this highly improbable outcome involves two separate coalitions of countries invading yours from both sides, “read the room” is a safe bet for all parties to make, including last minute flights to Argentina
What modern corporate employee wouldn't (haven't?) sleepwalk into perpetuating horrors on innocent people and then really and truly believe it when they say "I was just doing my job..." I am not excluding myself, we have not magically solved the social/political circumstances that lead to the second world war, and we are doomed to repeat those mistakes if we take for granted that those structures just fizzled away because we blood sacrificed millions of people and then the victors did a rain dance over the burial mound.
Not trying to troll here, but, what does something like Nuremberg trails matter in a country where someone who can incite an insurrection and then become president again, or a world where international criminal court orders are ignored?
> what does something like Nuremberg trails matter in a country where someone who can incite an insurrection and then become president again, or a world where international criminal court orders are ignored?
Nuremberg had nothing to do with insurrections and revolutions. It also judged the Nazis according to standards that didn't exist when they committed their crimes; the ICC was created after Nuremberg as an imperfect system. Imperfect, however, is still better than nothing.
> Don't stick your neck out unless you control the outcome (for positive or negative), and figure out what you're really being told to do or asked to do, and keep your effort to that. Don't go above and beyond, it's out of scope and you're better off sleeping. Not joking. If you can't do that, you might struggle to stay employed, and it's not worth your personal risk.
Generally good advice but I would caveat it. Sometimes the org doesn’t know it wants something, or doesn’t know that you are the right person to ask. For example, I’ve had good success when finding ways to save millions of dollars. And other, more domain-specific things that make management happy.
IDK, that seems like a pretty unfulfilling job. A lot of jobs are like that, but not all of them are. Staying in your own lane is boring.
> What isn't your job is taking moral stances on things, having political opinions, provoking what others might see as unnecessary conflict, in any form.
This is wrong, and how you end up with flying drone face recognizing skullpopping murderbots. "I just work here" is an abdication of adult responsibility to self, family, and society.
It's not some idealistic stance, it's the truth. It's how we ended up with concentration camps in the USA multiple times, and why many companies are gearing up to build more right now.
It’s more nuanced then that. People don’t want others pretending to be superior to them, if they are not actually that much better.
e.g. A literal supergenius can behave very erratically nearly every week of the year, 40 years straight, and still achieve notable successes in life, such as Kurt Godel
But a regular genius pretending to be a literal supergenius and trying to do the same, is well at best going to be perceived as a clown.
And it gets even more lopsided as you go down. Someone merely very smart pretending to be a literal genius is never going to earn anyone’s respect around the table.
Lets be honest, most faculty members eventually become simple Ectoparasites on student work, or ruminate on problems they stopped making progress on for decades.
As someone prone to idealism, you need to careful of the external consequences of work that runs into conflict with institution politics, government goals, and foreign/domestic intelligence services (professional thieves.)
I am probably just a clown, but often had to consider the escalation of coercion stages in the context of personal resolve. You will be evil one day too... Best of luck =3
<< Yep. I often reflect on some of my career mistakes, especially when evaluating current decisions within the context of a job or interacting with other institutions, and what I wish I'd learnt earlier would be to "read a room".
While I agree and even accept this answer in theory, I have a hard time putting it in practice. Just today it seems I unnecessarily ruffled some executive feathers by pointing out some -- otherwise clear -- issues no one dares to mention and I am wondering now if that was even worthwhile. After all, I am not paid for extra for it. Regardless of the choice made by executives, the only thing that would change is the amount of support work I would do for it.
I know for a fact that 9 out of 10 it is better for me ( and my career ) to stay quiet, but sometimes I just can't stay out of my way.
how about not being a coward being enough of a reason to stand up for what you believe in. no where is it written that being brave entails success. sometimes though it is said that success entails being brave
"cautionary", "real life vs", "Nothing is more difficult or dangerous", "exist purely in that imagination".
You're claiming that real life is always as in this episode; and so, I guess, that you should never oppose someone at an higher position? Or with more power?
It's healthy to be aware of the possibility that things could go this way, but it's definitely not a guarantee that they will; in some environments it's more likely to happen, in others more likely to not happen.
But if we always acted as selfish cynics, then yeah, real life would be guaranteed to be what you describe
Economists and auction theorists have a term of art: “revealed preference”. It’s typically not applied to society in the large, but I think it’s useful to zoom out from time to time.
Our society, whatever the internal dynamics, has a revealed preference in the extreme, a preference so forceful it’s an idee fixe, a singular objective.
We will sacrifice anything: arbitrary loss of life, arbitrary suffering and indignity, arbitrary damage to the planet to transfer wealth upwards constantly to the maximum extent that we can blow past the feeble speed bumps that our institutions represent.
This upwards wealth transfer is in two senses of the word “up”: from poor to rich, and from young to old. We openly advertise targets for the economy like “the stock market” (US equities overwhelming held by boomers and rich people), or GDP growth (real wages at the median, go back to Venezuela commie). We don’t even pretend we’re optimizing for anything else.
Lina Khan is trying to enforce laws already on the books and is deemed dangerously radical.
You think these sociopaths won’t kill people? They’ll kill millions of people if they have to, they’ve done it before.
> to transfer wealth upwards constantly
This is overly simplistic. Truer: we will sacrifice a lot to maintain our relative standard of living.
Who’s standard of living?
We will render arbitrary people homeless to constrain the supply and push up real asset prices for homeowners.
We’ll tolerate flagrant cartel monopoly and flagrant securities fraud and all manner of evil to drive equities up?
Qui bono? Not the working person at the median.
> Who’s standard of living?
Each person's. It's an individual determination.
> We will render arbitrary people homeless to constrain the supply and push up real asset prices for homeowners
Yes. Because from the homeowner's perspective, they're maintaining their real standard of living.
Crafting good policy requires being very careful about whose relative standard of living you're sacrificing for the greater good. Because no matter how privileged you think someone is, for them, it's the baseline.
> We’ll tolerate flagrant cartel monopoly and flagrant securities fraud and all manner of evil to drive equities up?
No, not really. Shareholders win in the aftermath of antitrust action and trusted equity markets. We tolerate those things, the first much more than the second, but not for the reasons you presume.
I’m not sure what the theme of your contention is: it sounds like you’re basically saying everyone will fight as hard as possible with whatever means at their disposal to be maximally selfish.
But that tired toy example from game theory shows that everyone loses if both grass the other up. Countless studies of both human beings and computer programs in the iterated prisoner’s dilemma show that the wining strategy is not in fact to drive housing prices so high that the homeless problem eventually wrecks your property value.
This smash and grab, “how much can you carry” mafia capitalism has been tried before and the result was a guillotine.
> everyone will fight as hard as possible with whatever means at their disposal to be maximally selfish
No, I'm saying loss aversion is often misunderstood [1]. Both in its existence and strength. And the fact that it operates in relative terms, i.e. someone who is materially better off than they were 10 years ago may still throw their toys out of the pram if their neighbor is much better.
> the wining strategy is not in fact to drive housing prices so high that the homeless problem eventually wrecks your property value
Sure. The point is you also can't drive home prices down, because that hurts homeowners and activates them as a political bloc. (The solution is real home price growth as close to zero as possible amidst rising real incomes.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion
I’m aware of the concept of loss aversion, but I think it as an explanatory factor for macro economics is a red herring: one of a long list of diversions in the grand company of all trickle-down economics.
People say that the without arbitrary incentives for arbitrary wealth that hard work and innovation won’t happen. Demonstrably false! The Internet that the current cartel is looting was a public private partnership! The best software these days is done substantially by passionate hobbyists!
People point to Silicon Valley and say “this wouldn’t be possible in Europe”. Then they point to the market capitalizations of the vampire megacorps that the world would be far better without as the success story.
People make other arguments slightly craftier: punitive taxes on the mega wealthy wouldn’t raise enough revenue to matter. True, but that’s not the point of a punitive wealth tax: the point of a punitive billionaire tax is to deprive billionaires of godlike power to restructure society in their own interest.
Anyone outside a few narrow bubbles can see that this is going very badly.
I’ll agree with you this far: it’s going to be a tall hill to climb to get people with homes worth 20 times what they paid and 401ks to vote for a sane future. But this is a comparatively recent phenomenon: older people used to be obsessively concerned with the prospects of younger people for trivial biological reasons.
These days? That “blood boy” transfusion thing Thiel is always on about? It’s a terrifying metaphor for the bigger picture. The procedure was pioneered so a father could keep his daughter alive at great risk to himself.
For some reason we now tolerate if not celebrate the vampire ideal of running that backwards.
I mean can you offer any suggestions as to solutions to get out of this situation? Feels intractable
Creative idealists tend to abstract away the social politics of power and are often suprised by the result of their actions. They do not have enough fear of others and what they are capable of. The response is not only a personal surprise, but an epistemological shock. The solution is to remain aware of the reality of your situation. This is particularly difficult for thinkers and dreamers because their attention is often elsewhere; but one must make the effort or bad abstraction will hit you like a freight train. The other solution is to ally yourself with other less pragmatic principled idealists such that you can help them assess the situation and take mutually beneficial action. One must understand the battle to come, you must feel the fear of failure and the possibility of success. The worst thing you can do is be unaware of the game entirely, or be aware and disdain it, and so play it like a fool. Finally, if you are extremely talented and recognized for it, the de facto situation is that you acquire advocates to play the game for you. But this is a rare position, and not without its drawbacks.
The right answer for most people is to simply leave and pursue their ideals in a more favorable venue.
How could that more favorable venue be made, and have been made visible to him and to people like him?
It’s been the way of society since pre-history. Finding a solution would probably bring about utopia.
[flagged]
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
dang do you normally edit w/o leaving history of it? feels like this is the first time i’ve noticed.
I'm not punctilious about it; I usually add "Edit:" if the information materially changes the meaning of the comment. (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)
In the case of the GP I changed my wording to be softer and refer directly to the site guidelines. (Originally it said "Please don't take HN threads on political flamewar tangents. Nothing good's going to come of it, whichever way you lean.")
Lots of people in this thread alluding to similar experiences "speaking truth to power" or "failing to read a room" or "not playing politics" and suffering the fallout from it. But as someone at the start of their career I'm kind of interested in the specifics--what kinds of ethical concerns? What forms of retaliation? Everyone's being pointedly vague and I guess that's necessary to an extent to preserve internet anonymity (or maintain a reputation, if your professional work is tied to your HN account) but it is frustrating as someone trying to figure out how to "read the room."
This story really hits home for me. My dad was a physics teacher, and these complaints sound all too familiar—especially this part:
"I did what the University told me to do, and then these administrators ruined my life for it."
It’s frustrating how often dedicated educators are forced to navigate politics instead of focusing on teaching. The best educators are usually the least political, while those who thrive in politics often end up as administrators.
> The best educators are usually the least political, while those who thrive in politics often end up as administrators.
The lady he accused of ethics violations was named Dept Head around the same time he made the complaint. An "old head" raising an issue against a new rising star...
My Dad was a university professor in mathematics. He loved his field! But the math department he worked in was taken over by someone who loved playing politics and maintaining power by playing favorites. My Dad refused to kiss the ring, and paid the price for that in his career advancement. He had tenure so it was never as bad as what happened to Marshal Brain.
Now we have n == 2, this could be a pattern. Of course it's a similar situation outside of academia too.
Workplace HR “ethics” or “whistleblower” policies and processes are set up to protect the organization, not the person making the complaint. It’s you against the power structure in these situations, so you better have all your ducks in a row. Consulting with a very trusted advisor or attorney is probably a good idea.
I met Marshall a few times. He was a good teacher and someone who had a positive impact on several successive classes of students who wanted to start companies and build meaningful products + technologies on that campus.
And I trust (quite a bit) that whatever he brought to light should be followed up on - if no other reason than to respect his memory. I hope it is taken seriously and those who retaliated find themselves w/o their positions of responsibility and power over other faculty.
howstuffworks.com in the 1990's was an amazing website
I just went to it and had a look. Turned to junk now by the looks of things.
Here’s a fun story about HSW and Marshall in the 90s
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kpwebb_like-scot-wingo-ive-sp...
> “My career has been destroyed by multiple administrators at NCSU who united together and completely ignored the EthicsPoint System and its promises to employees,” Brain wrote.
Well, lesson learned. Take your ethical concerns to the public/press instead. The retaliation would be just as swift as it is with The Process. Or: abandon ship and leave the system to consume itself.
He probably cared more about losing a job he loved, the startup community he was fostering in NC, and his https://ecoprt.com/ project than about publicly fighting a battle over a minor ethical complaint about a shady hire... at least in the early days before it snowballed.
> Take your ethical concerns to the public/press instead
Or at least above the heads of the people who are fucking around. Press might be seen as vindictive. But a sharp letter to the trustees of the university, possibly even some political offices, would not be out of place.
> lesson learned
I get your (good) point but it could be better put considering he's dead.
I received my engineering masters from NC State, but not this department (I was in the Industrial & Systems Eng. dept, in the IMSE program: https://imsei.ncsu.edu/). That said, my program was intentionally broad & flexible because students seeking higher ed in manufacturing engineering might be EEs, MEs, CS undergrads, or something entirely different and could be pursuing any sort of leadership role in a manufacturing environment. Because of that, the program often referred students to Brain's program, and it was always common knowledge that one of the bigger differentiators at NCSU's engineering school was the focus on entrepreneurialism (especially compared to most other regional unis in the southeast, except perhaps GATech and maybe UFlorida).
Even if the loss of Brain and/or the scandal around the circumstances seem fairly inconsequential to most of you, it's a big deal for NC State's engineering program and the students there. It's also likely going to be a big deal for large donors like John Sall (co-founder of the SAS Institute, which is HQ'd in Raleigh).
My son wants to be a mathematician. I told him never go into academia because it's a pit of poisonous vipers, administrators and professors both. I'm going to send him this article to hopefully re-indoctrinate him in case he forgot my previous message.
The website is geoblocked in the EU.
Mirror: https://archive.ph/R39hz
One thing I wonder: It says it's geoblocked because of GDPR.
Have they geoblocked California too because of the CCPA?
No. I am able to read it from California.
> Kashani said Brain submitted numerous complaints through the EthicsPoint system and said tensions arose because Brain didn’t “play the political game” through his questioning of higher-ranking administrators.
This right here is why I scoff at “anonymous reporting systems” or stuff like EthicsPoint, for the simple reason that the only ethics that ultimately matter in an organization are those of everyone above you, and those individuals have a vested interest in preserving their political capital over acting or behaving ethically.
It’s disgusting and reprehensible if true, but it’s sadly not surprising. Those of us who behave ethically are little more than prey to those whose moral compasses are fungible.
Organizations create these reporting systems to make themselves look good to outsiders, but they will punish you severely if you actually try to use them.
It's kind of like your grandmother's good china: Look at it all you want but don't you dare use it.
Stuff like this is incredibly confusing to people on the autism spectrum.
I'm autistic and, despite being aware of their perverse use, am still perplexed by the reality. That said, I've had a few shitty managers now and have used these systems and processes. It has surprised me how effective they've been at getting those managers off of my back, at the least.
> Stuff like this is incredibly confusing to people on the autism spectrum.
Upvoted for this alone. We thrive in clearly defined systems, but the powers that be are careful to hide the actual systems of power from us. It’s infuriating to find out we’ve been playing the wrong “game”.
These systems must be used in conjunction with public media.
It doesn't sound like the process was anonymous, as it implies she found out it was him pretty quickly and worked to close ranks against him. Kinda defeats the purpose but I guess in any small organization it's probably easy to figure out who it is.
There's no such thing as an anonymous reporting system in a company that owns the reporting infrastructure.
Some companies contract out such systems to a third party to reinforce the illusion of anonymity. But what do you think happens when the CEO says to the contractor "Tell me who wrote this or we won't hire you again"?
Reading the names of people who targeted him it seems like a case of cronyism in academia
sounds like typical high school bullying except by adults and so-called professionals. how does a disagreement between two turn into multiple departments jumping in for one side?
I wish he took more time to heal emotionally. He might have seen this was not a place he wanted to work.
Nepotism is a well documented phenomenon
Sounds like there’s a lot more to this story…
> Brain’s complaint contained allegations of wrongdoing... regarding repurposing the Engineering Entrepreneurs Program meeting space to accommodate a new hire.. “What came back was a sickening nuclear bomb of retaliation the likes of which could not be believed”
"Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre's_law
This is funny because it's so accurate. I worked a year or two in college doing IT support for the College of Business in my final years of school. The prior boss who had actual experience in running IT departments was run out (fired) and replaced by an economics professor who had no idea what he was doing. The economics professor lead the charge in running out his predecessor. I don't know the reason but it was pretty ugly and everyone in IT support had zero respect for the economics professor. I came in after the fact so I had no skin in that game.
As an aside, every professor got a brand new $4000 Dell every year because if the college didn't spend its budget, it would get less money the next year. Most of these professors just used Office to do their lesson plans and that's it. This was in the 1990s and it was a huge waste of money. I would imagine it's much worse now. That probably had something to do with it.
I recently read a quote that paraphrased went like, "bureaucracies care about following procedure over outcomes."
I hope US universities get fixed. Their current state is a great disservice to the future of the country.
My thoughts exactly. It was all about campus real estate! A room with a view.
Is there anyone here on HN who has non-news-article knowledge of what the situation was, around him, at NCSU?
It's sad to see a group of engineering professors having political squabbles involving unethical behavior in response to an ethics complaint.
Ethics are supposed to be a core part of engineering, not too dissimilar from medicine. Good thing those folks are in academia where they can't hurt the rest of us.
On the contrary, in academia they can do lots of damage by encouraging the same behavior in new engineers.
Engineering ethics is completely different from classroom ethics. Engineering ethics is all about compliance. If you build a missile to kill people, you better make sure it works as described. Who it kills is none of your business but if it doesn't work as described then it's a breach of "engineering ethics". It's funny when people on HN call for the "professionalisation" of software engineering. The only person who benefits is management who will happily throw the poor engineers under the bus the moment a self driving car hits somebody. Hold the entire organization responsible, starting from the top, not the lowly engineer.
The site doesn't let me in because of GDPR.
Link to ethics complaints?
The article suggests he was let go for "submitting numerous ethical complaints" but it is utterly unclear to me what these ethical complaints could have possibly been about, and the only source in this article is a starry-eyed protege. I am wondering if Brain was (perhaps unintentionally) abusing the complaint system as a way of adjudicating political disputes: "this person is stubborn and wrong" elevates to "this person is behaving unethically." My suspicion is that the numerous ethical complaints evidenced a pattern of unstable behavior.
I don't like speaking ill of the recently deceased. But I also don't like jumping into conspiracy theories based on platitudes about "the system," when there are more obvious explanations: his last email is a work of unhinged paranoia and resentment, not truth-telling in the face of oppression. It is obvious that Brain was mentally unwell in his last few hours; I wonder how long that was going on.
There is a stark divide emerging between the sorts of people that in my view speak truth to power, even if they speak poorly or strangely or are entirely unable to read the room, and the kinds of people that have internalized the ideology that nothing is wrong and anyone that complains, especially more than once, is most likely mentally unstable, paranoid, delusional, and so on.
I don't know why so many people want to go into academia these days.
Tenure is a multi-year rat race with worse hours than a seed stage startup (to be fair to the startup, at least you have feedback in the form of sales and VC fundraising). The pay is bad and the politics are incredibly petty. Tick off the wrong person and your career is torched.
Having worked with some ex-academia people I can feel this. They often seem to bring that bitterness (and in all honesty a certain level of masochism) with them to the workplace even after escaping.
Was he murdered?
Wonder if he ever read Stoner.
Related Marshall Brain has died (322 points, 2 days ago, 157 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42228759
Yes - at that time, the ethics complaint and retaliation allegations weren't public yet. This new article adds a lot to the story.
Previous submission link is dead, too. After two days.
https://web.archive.org/web/20241124180243/https://www.wral....
It disappeared from HN front page within a couple of hours, even with over 150 points, and I couldn't find it again in first 5 pages before I gave up.
HN ranking algo is really weird that way. You'd expect things to slide downwards, but they just teleport to page 10 or whatever.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42228759 spent 9 hours on HN's front page.
The reasons why posts drop in rank are explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.
That's weird, the link to wral.com now redirects to 404 page.
From what I remember, it didn't say much.