Unfortunate that the article ignores how Christians are told to prefer giving anonymously because that sends a signal to God that you're not doing it to improve your reputation with people (Matthew 6:3). Seems likely this influences enough people that it should be taken into account.
Maimonides, the Jewish Philosopher, formulated a list of eight levels of giving, correlating to the degree to which the giver is sensitive to the needs and feelings of the recipient.
The second highest level is giving anonymously, where the recipient does not know the giver and vice versa. Receiving mutually anonymous tzedakah takes much of the sting out of being on the receiving end.
The highest level is helping someone become self-sufficient.
But it makes sense, doesn't it? Charity can be used for self promotion and anonymity is seen as a seal of sincerity. This is not restricted to Christians.
It is no judgement on the act itself. Of course charity with self promotion is better than no charity in most cases.
Would be interesting to go in grey territory between signalling theory and psychology.
If you give anonymously, you also send a signal to yourself that you are this kind of person. Christians or others, the image of self can be non negligible in decision making.
Since the Bible has already been mentioned, here is one key word to (mostly) put to rest this idea from a Christian perspective:
"But someone will say, “You have faith, and I have works.” Show me your faith without your works, and I will show you my faith by my works. " James 2.18.
I think from this (and the context) we can conclude that the Bible is very much in favour of putting in the actual work.
That said, a concept that I was introduced to when I was younger is that of "dead works", a concept that is harder to explain in a technical text only forum, but which sounds very much like what you describe based on the explanations I received: "how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?" Hebrews 9.14.
Shortly summarized as far as I remember and understand "dead works" was explained to me as things you will do just because you feel you "have to" to please your conscience, not because of a drive inside you to do what is good and right.
I'd like to elaborate on the Hebrews 9:14 passage. To me it references another concept in the Bible where works alone do not guarantee salvation, but only the blood of Christ. The distinction Paul was making here to the Hebrews was that the old testament rituals weren't enough for salvation. James speaks more generally to all new testament Christians and explains that once you have living faith, the works will emerge naturally.
Go too far down that road, and you're applying it to all altruistic behaviors, claiming there's really no such thing as altruism because it's all in service to the ego, and concluding you might as well act as selfishly as possible.
Personally I think it's ok to do altruistic things, and conclude from the evidence that you're an altruistic person. It is the most simple and straightforward explanation, and Occam's Razor is as sharp as ever. And given the way cognitive dissonance works, even a person who starts out as ego-driven will likely become more altruistic over time, if they do altruistic things with no concrete reward.
Very true, it doesn't mean you aren't doing something for yourself if you donate anonymously. Again, that is nothing restricted to Christians in my opinion, nor should it be, because I believe having a decent conscience is something one should try to hold on to.
What is most important to take into account here is that one of the authors of this paper is Martin Nowak.
Martin Nowak is the same Harvard professor who invited a convicted child rapist by the name of Jeffrey Epstein onto the Harvard University campus and gave him an office and a flattering web page on his program's website for several years until victims of sexual abuse at Harvard forced him to take it down.
This article was probably written to defend MIT president Rafael Reif's decision to mark Epstein's post-conviction donations to MIT as anonymous.
While Epstein was still alive, he was paying Nowak to publish articles about how punishment usually serves "no noble purpose," presumably because Epstein was still scared that he could be indicted on sex-trafficking charges despite attorney Allen Dershowitz' heroic efforts to secure an immunity deal for Epstein that protected him from future prosecution ... as well as all of his co-conspirators (think all of the professors like Prof. Martin Nowak who visited Epstein on "Pedophile Isle" ... some of whom have now also been accused of child rape).
In light of Epstein's "facilitation" of what are widely believed now to have been his own "anonymous" donations to Harvard (after a ban was imposed on accepting money directly from Epstein) through the mega-donations of billionaires Glenn Dubin and Les Wexner, this article is certainly worth reading again:
This is mostly irrelevant. Pretty much every traditional value system values anonymous donations more, but few people actually do it in a completely anonymous way. I.e., the article isn’t about real anonymous donors, it’s about pseudo-anonymous donors which outnumber the real ones.
Many people give money in a functionally anonymous way. Sure, it might be traceable, but if I go online and donate $100 to the red cross:
1) They might know my name, but they don't really know who I am
2) I don't really get any social status bump for doing this, unless I go around telling people that I made this donation (in which case, i'd agree, it's not really anonymous anymore)
Another reason to give anonymously: You will avoid the flood of marketing materials soliciting more donations.
If you make a significant donation to any nonprofit that's big enough to have fundraising staff, you will continue to get mail from them for years. What's worse, some nonprofits share their mailing list with other organizations, so you may also start to get marketing material from other organizations as well.
[US-specific]: If you regularly make any non-trivial donations, it's worth considering setting up a donor-advised fund[1]. Among other benefits, it allows you to make donations anonymously, or to provide only your name, and no contact information.
Research Alert: Martin Nowak is the same Harvard professor who invited a convicted child rapist by the name of Jeffrey Epstein onto the Harvard University campus and gave him an office and a flattering web page on his program's website for several years until victims of sexual abuse at Harvard forced him to take it down.
This article was probably written to defend MIT president Rafael Reif's decision to mark Epstein's post-conviction donations to MIT as anonymous.
While Epstein was still alive, he was paying Nowak to publish articles about how punishment usually serves "no noble purpose," presumably because Epstein was still scared that he could be re-indicted on sex-trafficking charges despite attorney Allen Dershowitz' heroic efforts to secure an immunity deal for Epstein that protected him from future prosecution ... as well as all of his co-conspirators (think all of the professors who visited him on "Pedophile Isle").
In light of Epstein's "facilitation" of the mega-donations from billionaires Glenn Dubin and Les Wexner to Harvard, this article certainly strikes a resonant chord:
Ethics tie directly to the quality of research. Good acting is good acting regardless of whether the actor is acting morally, but research can be manipulated by an unethical actor in myriad ways. It's frankly quite disturbing how much trust there is in the research process and how little that trust is deserved.
There's a broad spectrum of potential bad behavior impacting the results, ranging from straight up faking results on one end to p-hacking to just failing to publish relevant negative results or undesired results. An agenda can affect research in many, many ways, and it's absolutely relevant to whether you should trust a paper.
It shouldn't be that way. Not needing trust is rather the point of the scientific process. But it is.
I agree with your points about trust in the process. However I think the ethics violation needs to be somewhat related to the research (or at least related to dishonesty generally). Getting drunk and beating up your spouse is certainly unethical but would not (by itself) mean your research is unsound.
> This article was probably written to defend MIT president...
...it's just wildly implausible, or is that me? The author of this piece on game theory has written it at the behest of Reif, or to support Reif...somehow? I promise you Reif has no idea about this article.
... and more and more to come for sure as criminal prosecution of Mr. Epstein's most famous "recruiter" gets underway, the daughter of disgraced publishing magnate Robert Maxwell.
It would imply a lack of self-control, a lack of awareness of broader social norms, or both [0]. Either individually means they are at risk of breaking the conventions that good quality work relies on.
[0] with caveats for convoluted circumstances such as a consensual BDSM scene where the drunkenness and the beating was negotiated and agreed to while sober, but didn’t seem to be the sort of thing you were talking about
>It would imply a lack of self-control, a lack of awareness of broader social norms, or both [0]. Either individually means they are at risk of breaking the conventions that good quality work relies on.
Secondly: There’s a reason why I wrote “social norms” — although I’ve honestly never heard of Gentzen, I knew someone would think of something along those lines.
If one is part of a society that does or supports doing things which we consider to be evil, the social norm of that society is inclusive of that evil, and one who openly and enthusiastically supports that evil is still following their society’s social norms when they do so. Social norms are what keeps science healthy — without good social norms, people would’ve responded to p-hacking etc. by saying “great, let’s all do it!” rather than trying to fix anything.
The importance of comparison with social norms is also sort of reason why people aren’t thrown into insane asylums for claiming that the literal creator of the universe has personally ordered them to eat each week a small token of unleavened bread which have been magically transformed into human flesh by a prayer in honour of the last meal the supreme being had with his mates that one time he took human form right before he prearranged his own temporary execution in order to give his non-mortal other self an excuse to not put people’s immortal souls into eternal damnation by default.
Also the broad reason why Washington is not heavily criticised for owning slaves.
None of this is to say that evil social norms are not to be challenged or fought against, just that it’s really really unusual to have someone who can both do that and avoid taking down Chesterton Fences.
No, I'm literally saying what you're advocating: if one has to expunge the research of an individual on the basis of their morals... well take these two examples and good luck with any progress in these fields while keeping them "canceled".
What you're suggesting is quite simple and has been done for as long as humans have been around and it has taken many names like Iconoclasm or Damnatio Memoriae.
The cynical in me suspects it's just a form of group-sycophantry, extreme conformism and virtue signaling.
Sorry mate, you can despise the person without disqualifying their speech a-priory, it's the definition of prejudice.
> No, I'm literally saying what you're advocating: if one has to expunge the research of an individual on the basis of their morals... well take these two examples and good luck with any progress in these fields while keeping them "canceled".
No, you’re not saying what I’m saying. I don’t even know how you can have that take given my 3rd and 5th paragraphs. (My 4th could’ve been clearer even if it was trying to make the same point).
It’s the willingness of someone to violate their social norms which I regard as a problem for quality research, not the fact my moral code is being violated.
Unless you want to suggest that Gentzen and von Braun were violating the social norms of the literal Third Reich by enthusiastically supporting the government of the country they lived in which was also The Third Reich, your claim is totally different to mine.
(That said, I really wish you’d chosen a less emotive example than figures from the Third Reich, as I don’t want to even implicitly compare this situation to that one).
I’ve just looked up the phase “Damnatio Memoriae”: that’s way beyond what I had been thinking of even the worst case scenario — the worst punishment even for literal fraud should never be worse than that which happened to Mr Andrew Wakefield. For violating social norms all I’m advocating is more scrutiny and less trust-by-default, in proportion to the nature of the violation.
I agree with your points, except your reluctance to compare this on any level with the Third Reich.
While of course the nature and the extent of the crimes committed differ drastically from one another, there is still an interesting comparison worth drawing between how the legal process was corrupted in both cases in order to facilitate their respective misdeeds.
At the heart of the Epstein matter is the corruption of the legal process to subjugate a class of persons who is viewed as "less worthy" by denying them basic human rights.
In the case of the Third Reich, it was jews, gypsies, etc.
In the case of "Epstein and his Jewish Enablers" (see the article linked in OP) it was underage white female "trailer park trash," as Ghislaine Maxwell herself liked to call them.
Immorality is a proxy of judgement and poor definitions. The most cogent definition of “Immoral” or argument that someone is “Immoral” would be contrasting how the subject’s definition of “Good” differs from your own or the common view. Very few people go out seeking to do evil. Most seek to do good, but by their own definition (which can be selfish, misguided, or outright vile). Some simply don’t care; Their absence of moral judgement (amorality) can lead to many immoral actions when their desires come into contact with others interests, but for the most part society is organized to promote the idea that your own best interests are best served by acting in the common good. If this sounds circular - It is. There’s no definition of morality from axiom[1].
Studies are (where possible) Double-Blind for a reason. The judgement of a researcher obviously affects study design. The goals of a researcher affect the way data is interpreted and presented in subtle and non-subtle ways. That’s not to mention the possibility of academic misconduct or outright fraud, which is axiomatically related to poor moral behavior.
[1] In actuality, there are many, but most have obvious flaws and contradictions.
I don’t see how this article defends Epstein at all. It’s a simple observation that sometimes being modest with your good deeds pays off better than boasting.
You may not be aware but the issue of anonymous donations has been a hot topic on the MIT campus after MIT president Rafael Reif refused to stop taking anonymous donations in response to students who made this demand during protests that were calling for his resignation.
It has been said by the US Supreme Court that sunlight is the best disinfectant, and there are now a few international organizations out there which are fighting hard for increased transparency ... like GlobalWitness:
Would not be surprised one day to learn that Alex Acosta received, for example, an unrecorded beneficial interest in real estate owned by Mr. Epstein in exchange for that "sweetheart deal," if the appointment by Trump to labor secretary was not reward enough.
MIT shouldn't stop taking anonymous donations, anonymous donations are great. It sounds like you are, or were, at MIT. Remember that being able to refuse free money is indicative of being in a position of great privilege relative to other universities. And that position of privilege is built on lots of money, much of it anonymous. Most people at most institutions would jump at free, anonymous cash to do science. And rightly so.
Actually I think most people would not jump at the opportunity to do science if they knew that their source of funding was a 55 year-old man who had been accused of raping girls as young as 12 years of age, and that the reason why the accused was funding their research was because he was trying to buy special treatment from the criminal justice system.
As many of us already know, three triplets from France were allegedly "overnighted" to Mr. Epstein as a "birthday present" on his island in the Caribbean, where they were forced to perform oral sex on Mr. Epstein before being sent back home the next day, with the excuse being that the three girls were from a poor area of France whose parents desperately needed the money.
There are some out there, including Epstein himself in one of his last interviews with the press, who claim that pedophiles are the next "oppressed sexual minority" that needs to be liberated, comparing their plight to that of homosexuals in decades past.
The liberation that they seek, supported by ex-MIT luminaries like Richard Stallman, is nothing short of a redefinition of the legal notion of "consent."
As Epstein's longtime friend and Harvard law professor Allen Dershowitz argues to justify the "sweetheart deal" that he obtained for Mr. Epstein from US attorney Alex Acosta, if a 14 year-old is old enough to consent to an abortion after being raped, she must have also been old enough to consent to the statutory rape.
And so if you're from that camp, maybe taking money from Epstein is no big deal. It certainly wasn't for folks like Seth Lloyd, Joi Ito, Marvin Minsky, Steven Pinker, Stephen Kosslyn, Benedict Gross, Martin Nowak, Larry Summers, Larry Summers' wife, and countless others. Some even sent the convicted child rapist personally signed thank-you notes like MIT president Rafael Reif.
I know that I would not have taken his money, as well as most of my colleagues who took very unpleasant jobs in industry because they could not obtain funding the "old-fashioned way," which is by earning it through applying for primarily government-funded research grants that are subject to a peer-review process.
This is not to say that all of the research that government is funding is worth taxpayer money, or that there is enough money to fund the work that really needs to get done, for example in the medical domain.
My suggestion to Mr. Reif though is very simple: instead of taking money from convicted child rapists, why not try spending the billions that your university already receives from taxpayers more responsibly, especially at places like MIT Lincoln Laboratory, which he should know a thing or two about since he became president of MIT for his role in the cover-up of missile defense research fraud at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, which some observers believe led Susan Hockfield to unexpectedly resign from her position as president of MIT when the university was forced to enter into a settlement agreement with MIT Prof. Postol under the threat of facing potential criminal obstruction of justice charges, the terms of which are still sealed to this day.
Yep, taking no-strings-attached money from the bad man is no big deal. Taking money from someone is, in fact, a canonical way of punishing that person and diminishing her or his power.
I'll leave the "no strings attached" theory to the string theorists to work out.
What I can't understand is why academics like Martin Nowak or Benedict Gross never recommended chemical or physiological castration to Mr. Epstein in order to prevent their recidivist child molesting friend from re-offending.
The most plausible explanation is the huge amount of money that was likely in play here from Mr. Epstein's estimated $500 million estate, which could have easily incentivized "moral relativists" like Martin Nowak and Benedict Gross to intentionally look the other way.
In any event, Dick Gross once surprised a female graduate student in the Harvard math department by how he let his young children watch rather explicit material on cable television networks.
Combined with the fact that attorneys at Harvard Law School like Allen Dershowitz have argued "on constitutional grounds" that we need to lower the age of consent to 14 in order to accommodate an oppressed sexual minority that includes his pedophile friend, mentor and client Jeffrey Epstein, it's not hard to understand why this former dean of Harvard College would argue to the Harvard administration in 2013 that their convicted child rapist "patron of eugenics," who was also suspected of trafficking hundreds of underage girls to other members of his pedophile ring that allegedly included professors at Harvard and MIT, was "an ideal donor" for Harvard, according to recently released documents by the Harvard administration.
Research should be evaluated on its own merits, not on the character of the person who wrote it. It's the most basic logical fallacy there is: Ad Hominem.
The person you’re replying to didn’t say the article was wrong or try to discredit with an ad hominem attack, I interpreted as questioning if we really want to hear the opinions of someone so unsavoury and untrustworthy. It’s not to say his character invalidates his past research.
There is no general "character". There is nothing stopping a nobel prize winning physicist from also being a pedophile. These things are just not related.
Are you suggesting that we should administer IQ tests to everyone currently serving time in prison in order to identify which "geniuses" should be released so that they can pursue nobel-prize winning careers in physics instead?
"Punishment usually serves no noble purpose" is something that Martin Nowak has argued with members of the press, at a time when Mr. Epstein was scared that he could be re-indicted on the felony sex-trafficking charges, which in his case given the egregiousness of his misconduct would have almost certainly led to serving a life sentence in federal prison.
From your comment, I'm now starting to wonder if the word "noble" was accidentally misspelled in the Science magazine interview quoted above.
You realize people are more than just one thing right? If someone won a Nobel prize for physics, and then murdered someone, the murder doesn't make the physics wrong. You understand that, right? Like, if we discovered tomorrow that Isaac Newton was a pedophile, the theory of gravity is still something important and still works. You can hold people accountable for one action and still recognize that other things they did may have been correct. You don't have to hold an all-or-nothing approach like releasing murderers who might be physics geniuses.
The best way to cancel a person like Nowak is to cite his work by replacing his name with initials only ... after firing him of course and denying him future funding.
Personally I don't think the scientific community would miss him all that much anyway. There are plenty of more decent scientists out there who can fill his size shoes.
I believe that scientific discovery is inevitable ... even if someone like Isaac Newton had died in the plague and not have worked out calculus there were other contemporaries of his caliber like Leibnitz to keep the field moving forward.
Thus I don't think that we need as a society to ignore the cruel behavior of child rapists, or their abettors, in the name of advancing science.
You're missing the point. You don't have to ignore their behavior. The behavior and the work are two separate things, and can be regarded separately. If you require everyone to be a saint to learn anything from them, you'll never learn anything.
A speeding ticket or a disorderly conduct charge is very different from aiding and abetting sex-trafficking of minors.
Epstein was facing a life sentence in federal prison and forfeiture of an estimated $500 million estate for his crimes if you need help understanding the seriousness of them.
The law views aiding and abetting sex-trafficking just as seriously as the crime itself.
Some of us are still holding out hope that Prof. Nowak will serve some hard time behind bars for what he did. He has no shame, but apparently still quite a few apologists.
> A speeding ticket or a disorderly conduct charge is very different from aiding and abetting sex-trafficking of minors.
You're missing the point. The crimes and the research are unrelated.
The fact that you consider this some kind of apologia for Nowak demonstrates that you are either unable or unwilling to understand. If Nowak tells you 2+2=4, are you going to say "No that must not be right, because you hung out with Epstein"?
Given his complicity in Mr. Epstein's heinous crimes against humanity, Mr. Nowak now needs to start following a little of his own advice: donate all future research results to the world "anonymously" to avoid forcing victims of sexual assault to have to relive their traumas from the mere mention of this child rapist enabler's name or the sight of his lying face.
If Nowak committed a crime, he should be tried - with rules of evidence, a jury of his peers and due process, and then punished according to the laws we enacted via our elected representatives. That is the appropriate venue for justice for crimes. Mob justice, shunning, harrassment via anonymous or pseduonymous reports on the Internet are not appropriate. Is that clearer now? You can relinquish your role as a self-appointed judge, jury, and executioner for people that someone told you did something bad. We have a whole system for dealing with that.
I'm sure Nowak is quaking in his boots that two people he's never heard of, nor ever will hear of are debating whether it's necessary to scrutinize a biography of an author in order to discuss their ideas. Truly, a fate worse than death. You sure showed him. I'll bet he thinks twice before committing the atrocious crime of lending someone an office again.
Honestly, I had never heard of who Nowak was, and I probably never would have if you hadn't brought it up. If your goal is to relegate him to obscurity, you're doing the opposite.
Logical arguments don't depend on credibility. If I say All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore Socrates is mortal, I'm not asking you to trust me. It's a logical argument and you can defend or attack its validity based on the argument itself, not whether I have a vested interest in Socrates being mortal.
You seem driven by some personal interest rather than reason. I'm in the field. Nowak's research has been field-changing. The Hoffman et al. paper is an excellent paper. The assertion that this article "was written to defend MIT president Rafael Reif's decision..." is implausible to the point where it clearly indicates you have no idea what's going on.
There is no payoff for making results go one way or another, for anyone here. It's not a study on whether red wine is good for you that's funded by donations from the alcohol industry. Nobody "pays" Nowak to publish anything, though they do fund his work--and to great effect.
What's more, taking money from bad people isn't ipso facto a bad or dangerous thing. Taking Epstein's money is, on basically any reading of the situation, just fine. Epstein gets nothing from these anonymous donations, and the world gets more science. Though pedophiles are one of the last groups in our society it is A-OK to abuse without limits, I would point out that it is possible for Epstein to be both a pedophile and someone genuinely interested in advancing science for the benefit of all, or out of a sense of wonder.
Someone whose wikipedia page now reads: "Nowak played a role in substantiating Epstein's false claims to MIT administrators that he had given tens of millions of dollars to Harvard"
shouldn't be cited as an impartial authority on anonymous donations. It's relevant.
That's just it! Nobody is taking him as an impartial authority on anonymous donations. This is science. Nobody has to take anyone else's word. You do the research, you show your work. Go look at the math. Go look at the data. It's right there. Nowak's most famous paper doesn't even involve any data!
Just so you know, not everyone agrees that Mr. Nowak's contributions to evolutionary biology are all that significant. I'm glad that you do ... but there are highly respected mathematicians who question whether Harvard math should have offered him tenure.
There is often a positive feedback mechanism sometimes at work in these situations whereby the subjective value of an academic's work is often determined as a function of the prestige of the organizations with which he has been associated, which then leads to awards followed by even more prestigious associations.
And accepting almost $7 million from a child rapist like Jeffrey Epstein of course only corrupts this process further.
No, I won't be doing this - my point is that his work is corrupted by his other actions. He publicly lied on the topic of his research, for personal gain, and was caught doing so. Why would I then trust the honesty of his research? There are millions of other researchers who are more deserving of my time.
Science is not completely objective. He can choose what to work on; he can choose how to present it; he can choose what to show and what to hide. It is not worthy just because it is done. Even if I trust that it is correct (and how can I?), it is a biased presentation.
Haha...I think that varies a lot with the circumstance and my emotional state! For the sake of the argument, it would more precisely be "taking money from anyone you or others might label a bad person". We don't need an objective standard, it can be conditional on a time and person.
Citation / proof needed. There are more than a few Christians that take the words on donating[0] as literally as they can. How could this paper possibly make such a claim when the very way such donations are made make them virtually undetectable.
Agree. Perhaps SOMEONE somewhere knows that you gave a donation, but functionally, many donations are as good as anonymous. If I give $300 (or even $3000) to a food bank, no one is calling to give me a congratulations. Do they have my name? Yes. They might send an automated thank you. And they DEFINITELY will reach out for future donations. But it doesn’t have a meaningful effect on my reputation.
For relatively modest amounts, you can certainly hand the person in charge hundred dollar bills and trust them to do the right thing with it without giving your name. You start donating large sums to a school or other non-profit though and they pretty much have to know where the money is coming from. (Though, as you say, you can still be functionally anonymous and can likely even tell them to take you off their charitable pestering list.)
Political donation of small amount should be anonymous to prevent political lash-back. However a larger amount political donation ought to be transparent. Money corrupts politicians.
