The allegations that convinced him are not public
Lawrence Krauss has resurfaced on Twitter; his fans are rushing to give him support and air hugs.
Back to tweets. Trigger warning: Some tweets may offend.
— Lawrence M. Krauss (@LKrauss1) March 10, 2018
Jerry Coyne was doubtful at first but looked into it.
I didn’t find the specifics of most allegations fully convincing, yet the fact that there were so many of them that resembled each other meant that they could not be ignored. As I’ve said, the more independent claims there are against a person, and the more they paint a consistent pattern of behavior, the greater the likelihood that the accused is guilty.
After that article appeared, I did some digging on my own, and came up with three cases that have convinced me that Krauss engaged in sexual predation of both a physical nature (groping) and of a verbal nature (offensive and harassing comments). The allegations that convinced me are not public, but the accusers are sufficiently credible that I believe their claims to be true. Further, these claims buttress the general allegation of sexual misbehavior made in BuzzFeed. In my view, then, Krauss had a propensity to engage in sexual misconduct. I therefore disassociate myself from the man. He has, of course, denied every allegation in the BuzzFeed article, but the cases that pushed me to write this post aren’t in that piece. But to me these other cases make it likely that at least some of the allegations in BuzzFeed are true.
Oddly enough, that’s also how the BuzzFeed reporters saw it, which is why they reported on the story. There were a lot of allegations, independent of each other, describing a pattern.
Sam Harris tells a bunch of lies about BuzzFeed.
I’m transcribing the worst bits so I’ll be updating to add more.
At 1:30:
BuzzFeed is, on the continuum of journalistic integrity and unscrupulousness, somewhere toward the unscrupulous side…Salon, Alternet – these are not websites that are especially assiduous in how they fact check.
At 2:24
There were a couple of people cited in the article who I know to be totally unethical and one is probably a psychopath; these are people who’ve made it their full-time job to destroy reputations of prominent atheists. So there are reasons to be cautious in accepting this BuzzFeed piece.
Parenthetical – I hate listening to him. His voice sounds so dead. He sounds so empty of affect. He creeps me out. I don’t think that’s entirely irrelevant to all this – I think his lack of affect is connected to his total inability (unless its refusal) to see things from the women’s point of view. He talks and seems to think like a robot; it’s creepy.
That’s rude, but not half as rude as he was about BuzzFeed.
Interestingly, however, he then goes on to say that though he felt there was good reason to be cautious about the BuzzFeed story, still, where there’s smoke there’s fire, but on the other hand he didn’t think he and Matt should be expected to pronounce on the subject on stage 24 hours later, but on the other other hand his decision not to share the stage with Lawrence that night “was based on a sense that there’s very likely some truth in it, and that it would be bad for me and Matt to be onstage, accepting his blanket denials, and then pretending to move on to other topics.” What’s interesting about that is that it’s not what he said at the time. At all.
That bit ends at 3:40.
Update: Matt Dillahunty says he won’t be working with Krauss in future.
Update: more from the podcast:
4:05 Generically, BuzzFeed is terrible. There were certainly signs of bad faith in the article.
BuzzFeed is not terrible. BuzzFeed broke the story on the Steele dossier, remember? Sam Harris is just throwing mud…the way he claims women are throwing mud when they say Krauss is handsy and obnoxious.
4:25 The fact that there’s this much chatter about how he’s behaved is certainly a cause for concern.
He just can’t help himself, can he. Chatter. Would he have said that if it had been men reporting something men care about? No. It’s stupid women, who can’t talk without chattering.
But then he does admit that he’s heard from people who don’t want to go public but do confirm that this is how Krauss behaves, so he can’t defend him. He can first throw shit at BuzzFeed and express contempt for women, but he can’t defend Krauss.
What he can do, though, is inform us that there are gradations. Oh thank fuck he told us; we had no idea.
At 5:25 he announces that if you’re not going to make the distinctions then it’s very hard to take the allegations seriously.
Then he says again he can’t defend Lawrence but – BUT – BUT – we must be careful, it’s so easy to destroy people’s reputations. He means men’s, not people’s. He doesn’t give a rat’s ass about women’s reputations, or BuzzFeed reporters’ reputations when they’re reporting on sexual harassment.
One more update: he goes on to explain that there are gradations, as if we didn’t know that. At 8:00:
It stretches all the way to cases where had the guy been desirable to the woman his behavior would have totally passed as flattery and successful flirting…but because he was undesirable it was viewed as unwanted attention and in some cases is being classes as a kind of assault, or a kind of harassment.
In other words, women have the audacity to have preferences.
There you go again, Ophelia, acting like women are people! You have a bad habit of doing that…
How quickly do you suppose Harris goes out to discredit the women who accuse Muslim men of sexual predation, or the men who accuse Catholic priests?
I admit I’m reading between the lines a bit, because I suppose it’s possible that some complete strangers contacted Coyne and Dillahunty, but it sounds to me like both men changed their minds because someone they knew personally told them that Krauss is a dirtbag.
If so, that’s (1) a little disappointing — you shouldn’t need to be friends with a Big Name Male Skeptic to be deemed “credible”; and (2) evidence of a vicious cycle where women don’t get deeply involved in the movement because of harassment (and many of those who do are of the “go along to get along” type), and nothing gets done about harassment because they aren’t any prominent women backing up the allegations.
Having said that, it’s still a positive development that Coyne and Dillahunty (and possibly Harris? Can’t quite tell) are willing to speak up, and not sticking to the “believe nothing until there is a conviction in criminal court” nonsense.
It does, though, invite the question of why these gentlemen only bothered to ask their female acquaintances about Krauss until now. Why, it’s almost as if Buzzfeed’s article accomplished something.
Screechy Monkey, as far as I’m aware this is the first time that Jerry Coyne has publically made any statement about Krauss, so he can hardly be said to have changed his mind. He admitted to thinking of individual allegations as dubious but couldn’t dismiss the volume of claims, so rather than make a pronouncement either way he did some checking which confirmed for him the likely veracity of the allegations.
Yes, he can, he’s been expressing contempt for women talking about this stuff for years.
I don’t buy for a second that this has anything to do with new information or evidence coming to light. This is all about covering their backs.
Bjarte, it’s rare that someone else is more cynical than me. From what are they covering their backs? They’ve all been able to ignore this stuff for years, with Krauss specifically as well as in general. Are they really afraid of #metoo? It seems like the fans who spend money to go see the Big Names of Skepticism speak are disproportionately in the “bitches be lyin'” camp.
I am glad that Jerry Coyne got there because, as Ophelia notes, he has been both dismissive and pretty rude to people many a time in the past. So I’ll modify that: I am glad Jerry Coyne got there at last.
It is interesting to think of the interplay here between incident and pattern. We all have examples, either personal or told to us first hand, of describing an event only to be dismissed. We are told that it is minor, that we are making too much of nothing, that we should be flattered by Big Guy’s interest but whichever of those it is we should just shut up and go away.
Start from the other end, then. We describe a pattern of behaviour – I think here of @docfreeride – involving one person, involving many, which disparages us, puts us at a disadvantage, leaves us struggling to restore our own credibility as a functioning human, opting out of activities which we could do perfectly well and might even enjoy.
Remember Rebecca Watson’s video? The take-away message from that was not that she met a gormless oik in an elevator – we meet so many that the tale would not be interesting. It was supposed to be, “Guys, don’t do that.” A general and mildly expressed admonition, except that 50% of the brains on the planet had already blown a fuse. I now think that some of those fuses were blown quite deliberately to avoid addressing the issue, only to be followed by armies of bandwagon jumpers most of whom had no idea who Rebecca is let alone bothering to see the video. It was, though, actively encouraged by the great thinkers who are now coming to the realisation if a little late.
So, when wearing our “scientist” hats, we can argue that this interplay between incident and pattern is what counts. It doesn’t matter in tackling it whether the “incident” is sexual or simply obstructive, though the sexual ones can be truly nasty and will need a different response. Even Darwin, in a quite different era, realised this. He had his theory in the 1830s, remember, and did decades of research to back it up. He soon realised that where he saw repeats or correspondences, that was where he should be asking why. A point lost on one of his more famous devotees!
So we are in limbo. The men insist that the women fail to understand their own experience. I have been told that in so many words though not, of course, on this blog. What, all 75 years of it? Meanwhile, the women have given up on all but the best of men.
Then along comes Harvey Weinstein. Everybody knew but there was nowhere to go. Now suddenly the whole of Hollywood rises up against him.
Now, suddenly it becomes possible to say that people, both men and women, are capable of behaving badly. If they get away with whatever it is, they will probably do it again. I’ve seen it less with women but I do know that men carve those notches on their metaphorical bed heads and that men mimic each other. The question becomes not whether doing such-and-such is a good idea in itself but whether they can get away with it.
Well, now they can’t and it is good to see some of them asking themselves whether all the “rumour” they have so readily dismissed might be telling them something. It has, though, been a very long wait.
Weird that personal anecdotes, in THIS instance, are held more reliable than researched reporting. Doesn’t this undercut claims about ‘needing evidence’ and disparaging ‘chatter?’
Bjarte Foshaug
I don’t think so. It is very difficult to see the stuff that isn’t happening to you – particularly when the person who is doing it is someone you’re inclined to think well of.
When my father was young, he lost his ring finger to a perlemoen. He would have drowned if it wasn’t for his friend diving in and saving him.
For years, after coming to Johannesburg, my father would go to Cape Town and say at his friend’s house, treating it as a sort of base of operations while visiting his other friends.
Until that same friend who had been playing host to him, who had saved his life, was arrested for molesting another of his friend’s kids. My father honestly had no idea – and it had been going on for years. He said when that friend was sentenced that a lot of stuff sort of fell into place, like the distance between him and his other friends that had developed over the years.
This is one of the things I think about whenever I hear someone say, with someone like Lawrence Krauss “Well I never saw anything like that”. I don’t think they’re lying, I think it is easier to not see something than a lot of people realise.
A quote from Coyne.
I don’t like trial by social media, and don’t feel that allegations are always the same as facts. The finders of fact, like Krauss’s employer Arizona State University, will be the ones to determine his professional fate.
So at times allegations are as sure a currency as facts? That won’t buy much at the candy store.
So in the absence of any facts ( Arizona State has yet to uncover any), and against a background of swirling allegations…a pompous term for mere ‘hearsay’… Coyne convicts Krause of sexual misconduct.
Charged at breakfast, convicted at noon, executed at supper.
The life of a rational skeptic is so carefree!
Wow, I had no idea that Jerry Coyne had the power to convict and execute people. I should have been nicer to him.
Sam Harris continues to disappoint—recently, buoyed by the sense he seems to be making with regard to Trump, have his podcast with Niall Ferguson a try, only to be disheartened at Niall’s thoughtless repetition that Trump supporters are the ‘most forgotten people in history’ who’ve been left behind by modernity and failed by postwar liberalism, only to later sneer that Russell Brand had done well for himself and so couldn’t complain or try to reform that system. All while Sam blithely ‘uh-huh’ed and ‘no doubt’ed, without noting the enormous contradiction in that. (The repetition that HRC was a terrible candidate also irked, but it’s difficult to expect otherwise from that set.)
John continues to be a troll.
I’m betting that not a one of Sam’s fans will notice the contradiction here. Any takers?
Anybody have the energy to explain the concept of “inductive reasoning to John? ‘Cause I sure don’t.
[…] Since then several other “leaders” have abandoned him, though Sam Harris took pains to trash women on his way out. […]
“…Trump supporters are the ‘most forgotten people in history’ who’ve been left behind by modernity …”
I think it’s more that they’ve left modernity behind rather than it has left them. Nobody is stopping them from accepting modernity but themselves. They’re pining for a bygone era that never really existed in the first place. The mythical land of a shining, White, Male, Christian America was only there if you ignored or didn’t look too closely at the whole picture of American society. The devaluing and denigration of the contributions and the very existence of the rest of America took a lot of effort and willpower. The unwillingness to expand the definition of what counts as the “real” America has been a losing, rearguard action. That they are only now seeing this more clearly, Trump supporters have none to blame but themselves, and perhaps those who have lied to them. It doesn’t take a lot of effort to change the channel from Fox, to buy a few different papers or magazines. Those other avenues of information outside their comfortable little bubble have always been there.
The export of industrial, manufacturing jobs overseas was done with the blessing of the market forces of corporate capitalism, of which Republicans are the chief worshippers. Trump has followed this logic himself in having his tawdry products made out of country and hiring foreign workers at lower wages to staff his resorts and clubs. He’s not going to be able to bring those industries back, coal or no coal. Trump doesn’t have the power to reverse that exodus. To think that he has passed himself off as one of “the people” is hilarious. Leaving aside matters of taste, intelligence and civility, how much more elite could billionaire boor Trump be?
#11
By which you mean Coyne *gasp* arrived at an opinion of Krauss. Neatly omitting of course that this opinion has no power to do anything to Krauss’ life – no fines, imprisonment, and certainly no execution.
Bruce, quite.
Screechy Monkey #7 Bruce Gorton #10
I stand by my original comment. As Screechy Monkey points out “they’ve all been able to ignore* this stuff for years”, because until now attention around the problem has largely been confined to their own little cult, and any “internal” dissent could easily be drowned out by their army of trolls (like the Slime Pit crowd). Now that that similar cults are exposed, and skeletons are pulled out of closets and into the daylight all over the place, they are no longer confident in their ability to get away with it, and thus feel the need to distance themselves from the most obvious predators before they pulled down with them.
Let me turn the question on its head: What new evidence do you think these people – who are themselves “disproportionately in the “bitches be lyin’” camp” – are suddenly not able to explain away? I’m not absolutely certain about many things, but I’d gladly bet my life that had the same evidence surfaced a year or so ago, they would dismiss it as easily as they’ve dismissed everything else that’s been presented in the 7-ish years since “Elevatorgate”. After everything that’s happened in the mean time, the one possibility that can be safely be ruled out is that they would not dismiss the new evidence if they thought they could get away with it.
At least that “Dear Muslima”** guy was honest enough to (implicitly) admit that the real issue is not whether or not claims of sexual harassment and assault are true but whether or not it’s a problem if they are true. If these people have gone out of their way to prove themselves actively hostile to women’s concerns for years now, it’s not out of an honest concern for the truth, but because they’re actively pro-sexual harassment and assault. I.e. they want predatory monsters like Krauss, Shermer, Radford etc. to have unlimited freedom to seek personal gratification at women’s expense without negative consequences of any kind for themselves, while the women just have to take it forever or face the same treatment as Rebecca Watson. Of course they’re not going to come out and say it like that, but that’s what everything they have said and done for the last few years amounts to in practice.
…And I used to be such a nice person :(
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* Actually “ignore” is not the right word. As others have pointed out, they have themselves been active combatants in this fight for years, on the pro-harassment side.
** As I have previously written elsewhere, the basic message of DM pretty much boils down to: “There is so much sexism and misogyny in the world that it’s unfair if Western men don’t get to enjoy their share”
With respect to the use of “chatter”, after the September 11 attacks, when issuing terrorism threat level changes, they would often cite “background chatter about an impending attack on [whatever]”.
There was a time when I found Sam Harris quite eloquent and persuasive. Of course eloquence can often be a double-edged sword. On the one hand it can help you express a strong argument so clearly that people who might otherwise fail to see your point really get it. As I have previously commented on, I still think he is ulitmately right that the specific contents of specific religious doctrines – not to mention the greater issue of leaving the most important questions in life up to blind faith in the first place – are a problem in themselves, not just the way relgion is instrumentalized (to excuse, or justify things that people would be doing anyway for reasons that have nothing to do with religion).
On the other hand eloquence can make a weak argument seem more persuasive than it should. One example of this could be his argument for moral realism, which presupposes what it’s attempting to show from the very outset*. It’s not by any means a strong argument, but, I suspect in large parts because of his rhetorical skills, he still managed to impress many people who otherwise see themselves as experts on exposing bullshit like James Randi (another person I used to respect and admire).
The first red flag – even before the shitstorm that followed in the wake of “Elevatorgate” – was to learn about his less-than-skeptical views on parapsychology and reincarnation. I remember thinking “Why did it have to be him?!” (I was thinking the same thing about Dawkins after “Dear Muslima”). Then there was the Dunning/Kruger-worthy manner in which he took it upon himself to eduacate an actual expert on the virtues of racial profiling, and his stubborn refusal to admit his own ignorance on the matter. Some of his more infamous statements about muslims I found genuinely disturbing, like the idea that we might sometimes be justified in killing people just for holding certain beliefs. The same goes for his arguments in defense of torture in extreme cases (though I also kind of agree with him that his critics weren’t always entirely honest in terms of acknowledging things like context, conditions, and qualifiers etc.). And then there was the whole “estrogen vibe” crap, which is basically another version of our old friend “more of a guy thing”. Of course anyone who would still touch the likes of Dawkins, Krauss, Shermer etc. with a ten lightyear pole today pretty much has to be a misogynist asshole (or at the very least have an unlimited ability to make excuses for those who are). It’s hardly surprising to find Harris among them.
* Of course a supposedly superior thinker (according to himself) like Richard Carrier could do no better when trying to present a more philosophically respectable argument for the same basic idea on FTB…
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