duncan-jones.andrew
Aug 9, 2017 · 2 min read

Dear Professor Taleb, You seem to have taken exception to a broadcast you are unlikely ordinarily to have seen, which drew the support of Professor Beard to suggest that Black or at least Swarthy Roman soldiers were to be found in Roman Britain. Because of Medium’s limitations, I am going to comment in successive posts.

In your blog post above you make some points which I find worrying.

  1. You seem to consider the BBC as the embodiment of scholarship in the UK (“The BBC was effectively applying quotas retroactively … Any dissent from the statistical errors made by the politically correct police is treated as apostasy. Effectively, scholarship is dead in the U.K.”). I think even you will accept that this is over-stated, and that the BBC is not a scholarly organization. Your real quarrel is, perhaps, with Professor Beard — but even on that basis, you can scarcely dismiss all UK academic work because you find fault with one of its members.
  2. 1b. To finish with this point, the only other example you cite is of Tim Hunt’s resignation from an honorary position at University College London.
  3. - In the first place, he is not an example of “a wuss, with a renewable 5 year contract, and, like the middle class, in a state of insecurity and constant fear of being caught breaking rules” — indeed you point out that he is a Nobel prize winner, and his post, an honorary one, was not comparable to the uncertainty you instance. To go further, you may have noticed the increasing uncertainty in US academe: it seems unlikely that the UK is much different in that respect, and it might be thought accordingly difficult to single it out as a locus of academic failure. However the simple facts are that Hunt made a foolish and slightly unpleasant joke, and the reaction was probably overstated — there are however good grounds for thinking that the attitude that joke conveyed remain far too widely maintained (as his wife suggests, maybe even by Hunt himself), in academe as elsewhere; and a more positive attitude to advancing women’s careers at all levels would be welcome. (I accept that Hunt also said “Science needs women, and you should do science, despite all the obstacles, and despite monsters like me.”.)

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