Comment by circus1540
14 hours ago
What if the root cause is that because we stopped labeling villains, they no longer fear being labeled as such. The consequences for the average lying academic have never been lower (in fact they usually don’t get caught and benefit from their lie).
Actually the risks for academic misconduct have never been higher. For quite a while now there's been borderline activism to go out and search the literature for it - various custom software solutions have been written specifically to that end. We're also rapidly approaching a reality in which automated cross checking of the literature for contradictions will be possible.
Unfortunately academia as a pursuit has never had a larger headcount and the incentives to engage in misconduct have likely never been higher (and appear to be steadily increasing).
Are we living on the same planet?
Surely the public discourse over the past decades has been steadily moving from substantive towards labeling each other villains, not the other way around.
But that kind of labeling happens because of having the wrong political stances, not because of the moral character of the person.
Most people seem to think that holding the "wrong" political stance is a failure of moral character so I'm having difficulty making sense of your point.
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For activist, politicians scientists, civilians? be specific