Comment by floatingatoll
4 years ago
This is an indignant rebuttal, not an apology.
No one says "wasted their precious time" in a sincere apology. The word 'precious' here is exclusively used for sarcasm in the context of an apology, as it does not represent a specific technical term such as might appear in a gemology apology.
Your particular criticism is not fair in my opinion. Both researchers went to undergrad outside the U.S., so they may not speak English as a first language. Therefore, it's not fair to assume to intended that connotation.
I also think it's not fair criticism. While "precious" can indeed have sarcastic connotation, I don't detect that tone in the paragraph at all.
That single word alone is enough to alter the tone of the paragraph when read. That the rest of the paragraph is plausible does not excuse it.
I am from outside the US, and it’s perfectly fair to criticise a professionals ability to use language the way its supposed to be; that’s your job, if you can’t do that then don’t take the job.
Their English is perfectly competent, but I just don't think it's fair to assume that they know the connotation of every English turn of phrase, especially when that assumption is being using to castigate them as "sarcastic".
I disagree. The text of their paper and their emails show a firm grasp of english.
That would be considering they can say virtually anything and pretend when criticized that it was just a miscommunication problem because they don't speak English well enough. Which depending on the consequences, can not necessarily absolve from responsibility even if it would give elements for excuses -- well at least for the first time, certainly not if they continue their bullshit after it!
If they have a problem in mastering English, they can take lessons, and make native speaker review their communication in the meantime.
The benefit of the doubt can not stick for ever on people caught red-handed. It can be restored of course, but they are now in a position where they drastically shifted the perception by their own actions, and thus can't really complain of the results of their own doings. Yes, they can not make mistakes anymore, and everything they did in the past will be reviewed harshly, not for further condemning them without reasons, but just to be sure they did not actually break things while practicing their malicious activities.
I’m not inclined to be particularly forgiving, given the overall context of their behaviors and the ethical violations committed. I choose to consider that context when parsing their words. You must make your own decision in that regard.
I think this may be unintended. It is very hard to formulate a message that essentially says both "we recognize your time is valuable" and "we know we waste your time, but we decided it's not very important" at the same time, without it sounding sarcastic on some level. Inherent contradiction of the message would get through, regardless of the wording chosen.
“We determined after careful evaluation of the potential outcomes that the time wasted by kernel maintainers was, in total, sufficiently low that no significant impact would occur over a multi-day time scale.”
If I can come up with the scientific paper gibberish for that in real-time, and I don’t even write science papers, then these people who understand how to navigate an ethical review board process surely know how to massage an unpleasant truth into dry and dusty wording.
I think that they just screwed up and missed the word “precious” in editing, and thus got caught being dismissive and snide towards their experiment’s participants. Without that word, it’s a plausible enough paragraph. With it, it’s no longer plausibly innocent.
The quote is translated to English as "your puny concerns is nothing compared to our Science", so it only covers one of the two bases. To cover both, they had to include some explicit verbiage recognizing the value of time being wasted, and they went a little overboard with "precious", making it sound fake - as it actually was.