Bubba isOriginally Posted by Bubba
the type of person I've interacted with many times over the years in university settings. He is an experienced
researcher.
How do I know? Because I can tell from a paragraph of him speaking. Without a doubt. He wouldn't
have said "self-selection bias" in the middle of a normal, boring sentence otherwise, for example. That's normal,
everyday scientific conversation to me. That's my language. He talks with others how I am used to talking with
other scientists. He is the first one I can remember. Specifically, he is talking the language of someone who
designs, conducts and writes up studies. He understands research from the inside-out.
JVK is literally not
anywhere remotely close to that kind of person with that expertise, education, or training. Nothing wrong with that
whatsoever, but that's the way it is. I admire anyone who is able to participate in a field being essentially self
taught, but it ain't the same thing.
I've met lots of Bubbas. Bubba is the kind of guy, like a prof, that
would have kicked my butt in grad school a thousand times if I had tried to pass BS off as science, scientific
thinking, or scientific talking. So I learned to be scientific over the ten years I was in grad school. Bubba
recognized that from one paragraph as well.
I'd like to assume everybody that talks science, especially if they
are claiming authority, would act like that. No biggie.
JVK comes across as something very, very different; not
a scientist in the way I and most others would define it. He knows a lot of current facts about pheromones, maybe
more than anybody, and has written a number of good literature reviews; some with theoretical importance; but is a
scientific technician (associates level lab tech by education and training, IIRC), who compensates in Napoleanic
fashion with extreme, escalating appeals to ego and authority. If he could just learn to be who he is, he'd be
fine. But that won't happen any day soon, sad to predict, because there is no insight into his own condition. The
ego gets even bigger when threatened.
From day one, I was more than willing to give credit where due to JVK, and
a lot is due. The problem is he oversteps his bounds so often, in so many areas, (e.g., pontificating about human
psychology, a field he has no training in whatsoever, while playing the expert card) you end up spending most of
your time dealing with hollow arrogance. (I was the only one trying to confront this, along with juggling my other
roles.)
It ends up feeling like disrespect/contempt to the forum and its members, though I assume no malicious
intent. Forum members deserve the same care with our words as conference participants, university scientists, or
anyone else. If you're that good, you should be able to be that good here. I've never seen a good scientist have
any trouble with it, maybe because they spend so much time teaching.
I've never been able to speak completely
frankly in these situations because of my historic "helping person" (if you will) role here, (the mods are in a
similar situation) and as a person selling a product. I never wanted to come across as having conflicting roles, as
having another agenda. Plus, I was the only one here with a backround in research methods/psychology (still am, as
far as psych), and there was no one to triangulate off of. It's just your word against someone else's -- and if
the other person is willing to pull out all the stops, say things to mess with people, never admit they're wrong,
and disrespect rules of scientific conversation, you can only do so much.
Even if you have them where you want
them, which I did with JVK many times, they just change the rules of the conversation.
That happened with this
conversation a lot too, the attentive reader will notice. Even when JVK is "dead to rights" wrong for all the
universe to see, he simply changes the rules; says something obscure, technical and confusing; diverts the topic;
and plays the authority card; among other sophisticated tricks (e.g., "I'm right because a Nobel winner links to my
web page"; "how dare you presume your opinion is as important as mine", etc.).
But one thing that impresses me
about Bubba is his ability to get to the meat of it in one sentence. I think that is from dealing with it every day,
and probably from teaching it to grad students every day, etc. You get good at disposing of pseudoscientific jargon
(like the redundant, "cognitive thought" from JVK's paper extract above) very quickly, for example. My hat is off
to him.
An outside person who is clearly a competent scientist coming in to add another person to the mix was
always the thing we needed here. Now you have more than one scientific person in the conversation, and the less
scientific person can't get away with creating an alternate reality, becoming a bully, and relying on enough
impressionable newbies and laypeople in the audience to buy the unscientifc fertilizer. The ethics of it are sad,
frankly, but that's why they teach you scientific ethics in grad school.
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