It may well be true that phishing scams can be easy to fall for, but it is not relevant to this story. Razdan tweeted that she was joining the Harvard's Faculty of Arts & Sciences as an Associate Professor. Regardless of how convincing the phishing attempt was, this is incredibly naive; Razdan does not have a PhD or any publications and Harvard's FAS does not have any professors in journalism.
Not to mention that universities typically don't hire people at the associate professor level. The first rank is called "assistant professor," followed by "associate professor," and then "full professor." Associate and full are tenured ranks, which is why there isn't much hiring at that level.
Also, one would expect any open position at a US university to be advertised, most likely in The Chronicle of Higher Education. This is something perhaps only someone who's got a little familiarity with the academic job market may know, so, I suppose one could be forgiven for not knowing it, but I would assume that one would at least google for open positions at Harvard to find out if it really exists.
That said, naïve or not, I also don't think victim blaming is a productive thing to do here. All it does is discourage people from speaking out about their experiences, which means we can't learn from them. It may also discourage people from seeking help when they think they might be getting phished.
As others have pointed out on Twitter, I am not sure who is the victim here; Nidhi Razdan apparently had multiple speaking engagements where she was introduced as Harvard faculty:
I don’t understand. Are you saying people are claiming she made the whole thing up and was just going around saying she was an associate professor at Harvard?
To be honest, NDTV is one of the top English channels in India and Nidhi Razdan is a very well respected and recognized journalist.
It makes no sense for her to fake all of this for some "clout" as some on twitter suggested - she does not need it. Unfortunately there is a lot of cynicism for anything media (and in turn politics) related in India and people love to speculate.
What you are suggesting here makes this already interesting story even more interesting. Perhaps there are holes in her story but if she really knowingly faked the whole thing, why would she resign from her job?
It's possible there's an innocent explanation but Occam's Razor does suggest she just made up her Associate Professor at Harvard title and, when called out for it, concocted a story about it really being Harvard Extension School and phishing. Which was vaguely plausible so long as you don't think too deeply about it and ignore that, if this were the case, the initial Twitter post was deceptive.
By “resigned” I am assuming you mean she was fired. If she were fired why would her previous employer allow her to use their website to publish this story?
Who knows? Maybe the Occam's Razor conclusion isn't in fact the right one. Maybe the publication thinks it saves them face as well as her. (Journalists who lie look bad for news publications even if they're fired.)
Ok? I never said anything about PhDs. What I said was that people typically aren't hired in at the associate level. Those that are would typically be professors who have tenure at another institution, meaning that they're already at the associate level or higher. People who are denied tenure at their current institution and want to continue in academia would apply to an assistant professor job and negotiate a shortened tenure clock, meaning that they would be assessed for tenure in fewer than the standard 6 years that a brand new, never held a professorship of any type assistant professor would have.
Again, this is a lot of esoterica about the academic job market that not many people outside of those circles is going to know, so I don't blame anyone for not knowing it.
As I responded elsewhere, that's not what she wrote in the post that people are responding to. I would agree that if it were the case that she was offered a full faculty position after a 90 minute remote interview, that wouldn't pass the sniff test. But that's not what she claims in this post. It's very plausible that a working journalist would teach at Harvard Extension School. Though it's at least a bit of a stretch that Harvard would relocate someone from India to do so. And it does seem that her story is changing.
ADDED: And, yes, there seem to be different claims on twitter than what is stated in this post.
I am not sure how much more clear I can be with you. Nidhi Razdan claimed on Twitter that she was joining the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences as an Associate Professor. The Harvard Extension School has absolutely nothing to do with any of this. Here is the original tweet:
Again, this is irrelevant. I find it hard to believe how often I have to repeat this. The Harvard Extension School does not hire tenured professors. You do not become a tenured faculty, let alone an associate professor, at Harvard's FAS if you have no research background. The story should fail a minimal scrutiny test from a layperson, let alone a journalist with more than 20 years of experience. This just doesn't add up.
Why do you repeatedly say "I can't believe I have to repeat this" and then say something you haven't mentioned in this thread?
What an "associate professor" is isn't common knowledge, even for a journalist. It both means something different in Commonwealth countries and the definition of "associate" is "entry level" which doesn't fit either version of an associate professor.
I'd absolutely expect an experienced American journalist to have a pretty good idea of how academia operates in the US. I do and I don't have a research background. I have no idea though how things operate in India.
The title is still fishy though even if she (as a journalist!) took some liberties in implying she was a professor at Harvard University (and what that implies) even though she wasn't. Just as if I said I graduated from Harvard when I got a degree of some sort from HES, that's clearly misleading. If you look through the faculty directory of HES, it doesn't look as if HES generally gives titles; most of the titles given are the faculty's positions at other institutions where applicable. (There are a few Lecturers in Extension.)
You don't need to have a PhD to be a professor in a "creative" field like journalism/art/writing/etc. For example Jamaica Kincaid is a professor at Harvard and if I recall correctly I don't think she even graduated from high school.
This is ridiculous. This journalist doesn't even have a PhD or any publications.
To those who are downvoting this because of the misleading comment below, note that she claimed on Twitter to be joining the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, not the Harvard Extension School. Nobody becomes an Associate Professor at the Harvard FAS without a PhD.
I’m not here to debate this specific claim of phishing, but this is just factually false, _especially_ for applied / practiced humanities. Here are two examples of well respected authors / journalists who are more senior than associate prof at Harvard’s FAS...and this was on just the first link in my first search:
HBS likewise has business practitioners without phds on faculty. Their expertise is of value regardless of on-paper credentials.
These are two very well respected writers. Often, in more research oriented disciplines, the “experts” have phds, by necessity. But especially for applied humanities like creative writing and journalism, the experts w the most experience quite often _do not_ have doctorates, and that does nothing to diminish their expertise or professional credentials.
This was Harvard Extension School. You're not talking a tenured Harvard professor position. One of my mentors undergrad was a former Newsweek editor who lectured a couple days a week and also didn't have a PhD or academic publications. (He had written books.)
This is just misleading. Razdan claimed on Twitter that she was joining the Harvard Faculty of Arts, not the Harvard Extension School. Harvard FAS does not have any journalism professors or offer degrees in journalism, and if it did, you would certainly need a PhD.
I’m not here to debate this specific claim of phishing, but this is just factually false, _especially_ for applied / practiced humanities. Here are two examples of well respected authors / journalists who are more senior than associate prof at Harvard’s FAS...and this was on just the first link in my first search:
HBS likewise has business practitioners without phds on faculty. Their expertise is of value regardless of on-paper credentials.
These are two very well respected writers. Often, in more research oriented disciplines, the “experts” have phds, by necessity. But especially for applied humanities like creative writing and journalism, the experts w the most experience quite often _do not_ have doctorates, and that does nothing to diminish their expertise or professional credentials.
All I know is what she wrote in the post: "Contrary to what many are tweeting, Harvard has a school called the Extension School offering a Journalism Degree Programme. The actual programme is called the Master of Liberal Arts, Journalism degree. The Extension School lists 500 faculty of whom 17 are categorised as journalism faculty. A number of these people are working journalists. I believed I fit this profile."
ADDED: It certainly seems as if the story has changed from something implausible to something vaguely understandable.
I know, and it is irrelevant and misleading. This is what she tweeted in the first place:
"After 21 years at NDTV, I am changing direction and moving on. Later this year, I start as an Associate Professor teaching journalism as part of Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences."
Nobody is joining Harvard's FAS as as an Associate Professor without a PhD.
I’m not here to debate this specific claim of phishing, but this is just factually false, _especially_ for applied / practiced humanities. Here are two examples of well respected authors / journalists who are more senior than associate prof at Harvard’s FAS...and this was on just the first link in my first search:
HBS likewise has business practitioners without phds on faculty. Their expertise is of value regardless of on-paper credentials.
These are two very well respected writers. Often, in more research oriented disciplines, the “experts” have phds, by necessity. But especially for applied humanities like creative writing and journalism, the experts w the most experience quite often _do not_ have doctorates, and that does nothing to diminish their expertise or professional credentials.
For those not familiar with Harvard’s Extension School, it provides classes to the general public (you have to register and pay but they are open to anyone)
I realize this is uselessly pedantic, but Harvard's Division of Continuing Education (Extension School + Summer School) is technically under the FAS umbrella, alongside Harvard College (undergrad) and GSAS (graduate arts + sciences). ~15 years ago I worked for FAS as a web developer, and the software my org developed was used by all 3 of these schools. Wikipedia confirms FAS is still organized in this way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Faculty_of_Arts_and_Sc...
That said, yes it's extremely misleading for a DCE instructor to call themselves an FAS professor. This sort of thing does happen at all top tier schools' extension programs, though far more often it's done by students rather than instructors.
I am unconvinced that "first-principles thinking" is the problem here. Surely one can refute the original argument without having to debunk axiomatic logic itself.
For example, one could argue something like this: Even though increased access to other people's money can cause founders to make irresponsible decisions, raising money has other advantages that tend to offset this.
I think the idea is, when you argue from first principles, you are implicitly assuming that you know all of the relevant first principles. Since you're human and imperfect, there is always a chance that you don't. How to know?
Well, empirically, check whether the conclusions you get, seem to hold up to reality. The author's experience was that taking investment $$ was necessary (or at least often useful) in a startup, so this put him on the lookout for what missing first principle would explain this.
It doesn't mean axiomatic logic isn't useful, it means that just because the logic seems sound, doesn't mean the conclusion is reliable, because there could be missing axioms (in this case, that profitability is the objective of a company, when cash flow is a more fundamental fact and profit is often either present or not depending on how you do the accounting).
The logic isn't sound though, that's the issue. Let me try to simplify it even more and annotate
1. Not raising money give you more skin in the game (valid observation)
2. Skin in the game is an advantage (valid observation)
3. There exists at least one advantage of not raising money (valid conclusion)
4. You should not raise money (NOT VALID conclusion)
You can't go from a single argument in favor of something to that thing being favorable overall.
Let me just add to this. Discovering new information (or new "axioms") will not change the truth of your previous conclusions if you did everything correctly, but you may find that the information you believed before was incorrect. In general, I believe it will be better to use a probabilistic model for most real-world cases since it is very difficult to find "axioms" for almost anything.
Thanks Ross for the reply. I believe that this is a misunderstanding of how propositional logic works. If the propositions or axioms that you start with are sound, and if you correctly apply all inference rules, then the propositions that you derive will also be sound. "Missing axioms" that you did not use do no matter, regardless of their soundness.
Of course they matter. We're discussing arguments that apply in the real world, not in math theory.
In math, if you have this axiom:
f(x) > 5 for all x >= 20
you are not then allowed to change it with a later axiom
except when x is divisible by 240
However, in real life this happens a lot. I have a company that is taxed a fixed amount per year... except for the years where I make over 100k euros, in which case things become quite complicated. If I omit the second part (which is not impossible, given that I never made over 100k euros a year with that company), and suddenly get a big payout from someone, the result will be very different from my initial estimation - as sound as it was WITHOUT that additional axiom / assumption / rule.
A "missing" axiom, in my experience, is not truly a missing axiom that otherwise has no impact on other axioms. A "missing" axiom is one that exposes a bad assumption in another axiom currently being relied upon.
For instance. Socrates is a man, all men are mortal, therefore Socrates is mortal.
But then you discover that a couple of eons have passed and Socrates is still alive. Clearly there must be a "missing" axiom. And after some investigation you realize that Socrates is a Venusian man, and Venusians are immortal.
"Socrates is Venusian" is a missing axiom, but really the problem is that "All men are mortal" is actually false, since it had implicit assumptions that "All men are human" (false) and "All humans are mortal" (true).
Again, I am sorry for being direct, but this does not make sense. If a Venusian man is immortal, then the "axiom" (preposition) that all men are mortal is false. In other words, the issue is not that the preposition "Socrates is Venusian" was missing but that the preposition "all men are mortal" is false.
It is possible to develop significant mathematical theory without using some axioms. For example, mathematicians sometimes choose not to use the "axiom of choice" when working with Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory. That does not mean that mathematical theorems proven without using the axiom of choice are invalid, even if you later assume that this axiom is true (or false).
The point is that the axiom that all men are mortal was thought to be true, and then was later discovered to be false. My comment was actually in agreement with your previous comment.
I think this is the difference between a valid argument and a sound argument. A valid argument means the conclusion follows from the premise, kinda like the quoted argument in the article which seems to be valid.
A sound argument is one whose premises are also true. This is where the quoted argument in the article fails. The premises either are false or don't apply to all startups. This is basically what the author means by a argument that is missing premises. It's not really that a premise is missing, but that without additional into it may seem like the argument is sound,but with additional into you realize it is not sound and therefore leads to a different conclusion instead.
Isn't it sort of like Gödel's incompleteness theorem, there's no way to prove your first-principle was a correct axiom to start from. Experience will guide this.
>debunk axiomatic logic itself
He's not though. Your assumptions can be wrong, even if your incremental logic is correct according to the first principle. He's saying the correctness of axiomatic logic will lead you down the wrong path.
No, he is saying that he agrees with the assumptions and the way they are used to construct other propositions, but disagrees with the outcome, and therefore there must be something wrong on a higher level with the logical system itself that is being used here. I think what's actually happening here is much more banal.
>Isn't it sort of like Gödel's incompleteness theorem
Forgive me for being curt, but no, this is absolutely nothing like either of Gödel's incompleteness theorems.
He's saying there's something wrong with getting fooled by a series of valid logical assertions into thinking the original axiom applied to the context in which one is making it... there are "unknown unknowns". There's something wrong with trusting that principled thinking will always hold because it held before, in what might have been a different context.
He's not debunking the validity of the chain of truth statements, but "first principles thinking"...letting this logic guide one down a path that doesn't comport with reality (which might have context one is unaware of).
I think it matches up with incompleteness quite well.
Any set of axioms can never tell you for sure if you're in a context that has other missing and more valid axioms.
You can modify your axioms with experience, but then you're back in the position of not knowing if this is the final set of axioms that will always comply with reality.
I think it's very difficult to come up with accurate objective measurement methods (nobody's done it well yet). The best assessments tend to be subjective teacher-based assessments (for similar reasons as to why hiring tends to be done by subjective personal assessment - it's hard if not impossible to define the criteria for "good" upfront. Someone may approach things in a completely different way that nobody had thought to measure). And this is before you get into the biases of the people drawing up the assessment criteria etc.
Edit: https://twitter.com/ruchirsharma_1/status/135006726628985651...
It seems that this may not even have been a phishing attempt.