Liberals Gearing Up to Dox Dissenters In Academia

Top economists want to monitor how we behave when we think no one can see us

Note: This story expands upon the excellent exposé posted by Christopher Brunet at

Karlstack

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Econ Job Market Rumors (EJMR) is an anonymous online forum for PhD candidates in economics. It serves as a platform for them to share information and related job market rumours. With an impressive 2.5 million monthly visits in 2022, EJMR's popularity is undeniable. However, like all anonymous boards, a small percentage of posters share content that is perceived as racist, misogynistic, or xenophobic, earning EJMR the moniker ‘4chan for economists’.

EJMR also serves as a safe haven for whistleblowers within the economics academia to expose misconduct and fraud, such as plagiarism and questionable hiring practices, as well as to air unpopular or politically incorrect opinions. This aspect of the site has become a thorn on the side of some prominent economics academics who wish to identify and punish the posters, and even shut down the site.

For years, the left has been trying to close EJMR. One example is a petition launched by the Institute for Women's Policy Research, urging the American Economic Association (AEA) to address concerns about the “inappropriate and sexist comments” made on the site. Petitioners lament that “no one can shut down the EJMR site” and demand the AEA to provide an alternative, they even have a name for it, “AEA Job Market Data.”

The petition, supposedly signed by over 1,000 high-ranking academics, doesn't propose a self-driven solution. It's striking that none of the signatories have considered launching such an alternative themselves, revealing a lack of entrepreneurship, initiative, and skin in the game; revealing a blatant sense of entitlement and reliance on the established authorities.

Geolocating the Dissenters

As bureaucratic efforts to shut down EJMR fell short, three researchers from Yale and Boston universities decided to devote precious resources and grants to what they view as the most urgent questions in American economics today. These questions aren't related to the cost of living crisis or ballooning public debt. No, such topics don’t keep our strong, fierce and brave researchers up at night. Instead, they focused on answering the following two research questions in a paper presented yesterday at the prestigious National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER):

— How do economists behave when they think they are anonymous?
— How widespread is toxic speech in economics? Who engages in such speech?

Ederer, Florian, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham and Kyle Jensen, “Anonymity and Identity Online”

To answer these questions, they reverse-engineered the IDs that EJMR assigns to anonymise users' IPs by computing over 3 quadrillion hashes to crack the code and obtain the original IPs. Even though the techniques they used are not extraordinary, they still require significant resources and expose the researchers to a host of legal problems. This raises the question: who is backing them?

In their paper, they present indisputable evidence that monitoring the speech of PhD candidates is indeed a paramount issue for academia in economics. After all, among the millions of posts on EJMR, they have identified instances of racism (a user posted that the fastest route to get published by the Quarterly Journal of Economics was “to grift and be Black”) and misogyny (another user insinuated that their department's new assistant professor is an “affirmative action hire” who knows how “to play that card well”).

However, these are not the researchers' only concerns. According to their presentation at NBER, livecast to over 7,000 people, they are also deeply troubled by “gossip about senior faculty” and “personal attacks” on EJMR. But do these concerns exhaust their list of issues with EJMR?

No. According to research conducted by Karlstack, one of the authors (Goldsmith-Pinkham) was previously exposed by EJMR for committing plagiarism. Another author (Ederer) recently failed to secure tenure at Yale, which led to speculation that the “hard time” he receives on EJMR, where he is viewed as a “showboat who wants to be the center of attention and prefers frivolous stunts to serious, low-key research”, contributed to his reputation as not just a “mediocre economist, but also an extraordinarily insufferable person.” As a form of retaliation, one could imagine, he writes a paper doxxing all the site's users.

Interestingly, their research reveals that most of the ‘hate speech’ posted on EJMR can be traced to some of the top universities in the country, with liberal strongholds like UCLA and Yale leading the charge:

Censorship is a Drug

Anyone believing this is just a paper ruffling feathers within the economics academia bubble misses the broader implications. This represents a significant step that will reverberate throughout academia and beyond, with those doxxed being marginalised, demonised and dehumanised in mainstream media, renowned for its disdain for free speech.

Censorship, you see, is a drug. Initially applied topically for criminal cases: libel, slander, false public alarms, threats of violence and pedophilia. At this dosage, surely no rational person would dispute its beneficial use.

Next, it extends to common sense cases: racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia... You begin to feel like the voice of reason, the adult in the room. After all, even if it's not against the law, who would want to associate with those expressing such views?

Under reasonable leadership like yours, censorship can serve the greater good. And you're not shy about using it:

"Do you oppose policies defined along racial lines? Well, that's now racist.

Do you believe that men and women have different capabilities based on their sex? That's sexist now.

Fancy a more stringent immigration policy? Last Wednesday's meeting deemed that xenophobic..."

At this point, you start losing friends, family tiptoes around you, afraid of stepping on a conversational landmine. But you're no Stasi or KGB. You run an efficient system that categorises opinions into protected and prohibited speech, preserving public safety. So why not dial up censorship a notch and venture into compelled speech?

"Sceptical of climate change? Shame on you! I'll brand your post as fake news. You question vaccine efficiency? Anti-vaxxer, COVID-denier for you!

How dare you think you can think? Don’t you know your opinions might be criminal now?"

So why stop at banning speech? Why not preemptively ban people before they can engage in prohibited speech? So you introduce de-platforming as a preventative measure. Strangers start viewing you as unhinged, recognising the potential danger of your censorship machine.

De-anonymisation is another tool in the de-platforming toolkit, which can be used to make people stop voicing contradictory opinions. When banning your speech from the polite society of the ivory towers isn't enough, they will hunt you in the woods and shoot you on sight.

Epimetheus Unbound

The responses from academia to this looming scandal have been predictable, yet still intriguing. Charles Crabtree, Assistant Professor of Government at Dartmouth, openly demands retribution against EJMR, posting “Locate and shame all those who defame”; while Chris Blattman, Professor of Global Conflict Studies at the University of Chicago, wryly questions the relevance of the research with his remark, “Paper 2 is going to be economist video preferences on PornHub by department.”

One of the ringleaders in the attack on EJMR stands out, however. Kurt Mitman, a convicted child rapist (these individuals always seem to be at the heart of Leftist schemes). According to Karlstack, Mitman is the Managing Editor of the Review of Economic Studies — one of the “top 5” economics journals in the world, “where a single publication can guarantee tenure at most good schools for most professors. If you want to publish in this top 5, you have to pretend to be his friend on Twitter.”

One of the few liberals who still defends freedom of speech, George Mason University Professor Tyler Cowen, raises an interesting point: “What about posters from Turkey, China, Russia and elsewhere, who have expressed political opinions?  Isn’t this point enough on its own to settle the matter?” His liberal peers don't seem to care, of course. All that matters is scoring points in the culture wars, irrespective of collateral damage.

At the end of the day, it could be that the liberal horde persecuting EJMR have their noble reasons (combating racism and misogyny) as well as their own concealed motivations. The ensuing fiasco might be a blend of both. But above all, it is an indictment of the state of American academia.

In his Protagoras, Plato contrasts the titan Prometheus (the “forethinker”) with his dim-witted brother Epimetheus (the "afterthinker"). Epimetheus, trusted by Zeus with distributing abilities and qualities on all the newly formed animals, forgets to save any qualities for humans, leaving them naked and defenceless.

Prometheus, seeing that humans have been forgotten, steals fire from the gods (an idea closely associated with free will) to aid humans, providing them with the means to survive and prosper. For his actions, Prometheus was famously punished by Zeus, who chained him to a rock where an eagle would eat his liver daily, only for it to regrow and be consumed again the next day.

Epimetheus, in his continued folly, was later responsible for accepting Pandora as a gift from Zeus (as part of a revenge scheme against mankind), ignoring his brother Prometheus's warning not to accept any gifts from the gods. Much like Epimetheus, liberal academics today, hopefully unknowingly, continue to abet schemes that undermine one of our most precious gifts, our freedom of speech. Despite conservative warnings against censorship, which are often dismissed as ‘afterthoughts’ in the face of the greater good of ‘social justice.’

The problem is that the most effective censorship not only silences the censored but also those who support them (out of fear) and those who oppose them (out of convenience). It's important to pay attention to who is who.

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A quick message: I will be taking a couple of weeks off for a holiday. During this period, I may re-post some older posts, perhaps with a few updates. My plan is to work on completing the initial chapters of my fiction book, which I aim to start posting for paid subscribers on 1st September. Thank you for reading!