Arguments for being more responsible with data sure do tend to lead people to be irresponsible with data.

From There is No Such Thing as a Takedown by Freddie deBoer.  Covering a controversy by people whom I do not know about a book I have not read.  But still with some pertinent observations.

There is no such thing as a damning review of a book in tweet form. Such a thing is beyond the affordances of the medium. A longform book review can do more, but has limits of its own. A book review can be cutting, if it’s rigorous enough - and yes, a certain length is a prerequisite for rigor. A book review can be informative and humorous and generative and entertainingly mean. I write some myself and hope to achieve such goals. But no review alone can rebut an argument expressed over hundreds of words. It might be better, or at least easier, if it were so. But we live in a world of irreducible complexity, and our efforts to wrestle it into digestible chunks to match diminishing attention spans - well, that last part is exactly the contentious issue at hand - don’t magically make life simple enough to understand through maxims or fortune cookies or tweets. It doesn’t work that way.

I’m sure Dr. Sweet would admit that you can’t refute a book with tweets; to his credit, his thread as much as says so. In fact he specifically invites Hari into deeper conversation, which is humane and responsible. Sadly, if you dig around in the replies to the thread you’ll find many people who very much believe that a bunch of 280-character missives can dismiss Hari’s entire argument, that a collection of excerpts from a book they’ll never read have been debunked by references to studies they’ll never understand. We could have a whole conversation about this phenomenon, where people become convinced that a particular argument has been exposed as misrepresenting studies despite the fact that they read nothing of the given studies themselves. (Arguments for being more responsible with data sure do tend to lead people to be irresponsible with data.) But even in a simpler sense, I would hope that we could all understand that everything we might see on social media is limited and contextual, and that such spaces serve the public intellect when they point to more reading and work against it when they function as substitutes for more reading.

[snip]

Let’s talk Hanya Yanahigara.

The T magazine impresario and novelist received a mostly-sympathetic profile in The New Yorker. Then she was represented in a decidedly less rosy light in New York. Neither could be called dispositive, if we’re thinking carefully and with charity. But many people seem to think that any negative essay, any “takedown,” can gather up untold thousands of words, entire identities, and cut them up like deli meat, so that we all can consume their basic essence in a form that’s tasteless, unthreatening, and safe. Some appear to believe that Andrea Long Chu’s pan of, well, Yanahigara’s entire being has cancelled her, ethered her, settled the Hanya Yanahigara question. A few thousand words is sufficient to annul a career.

[snip]

The dollar store version here is that if you think that a bunch of people (who are just like you) deciding communally on Twitter that something or someone has been “taken down” has any real-world salience, you’re a useful idiot for the Silicon Valley mentality you probably claim to hate. That whole project is to miniaturize the entire world so that they can better sell it back to us for a profit, after all, and this rancid little ideology seems to spill out into more and more of our intellectual spaces. There’s something totalitarian about the insistence that everything in life be digestible, so that the people who occupy our Smart Person class can derive all the right positions between Instagram breaks. The arc of literary history may bend towards a culture that writes less, reads less, considers less, and sees the purpose of commentary as decomposing every piece of writing into its constituent parts. But god, what a sad future.

Good points.  An alternate way to put it is that many of our new social media platforms have a middle-school mean-girl culture in which beta performers are constantly trying to take down alpha performers,  indirectly and through passive aggressive sotto voce mob action.  

I had the same visceral response to a piece by Razib Khan, Setting the record straight: open letter on E.O. Wilson's legacy: Response to Scientific American's "The Complicated Legacy..."  Scientific American published a Woke hit-piece on E.O. Wilson on his demise last week.  The piece was ideological and ignorant and Khan and dozens of others felt it needed to be addressed.  They submitted a rebuttal piece to Scientific American to set the record straight.  

The hit-piece was by Monica R. McLemore, professor of Nursing and Reproductive Health at the University of California, San Francisco and betrayed an astonishing ignorance.  I read of it at the time due to McLemore's incomprehension of basic statistics and did not bother to read the piece itself.  If you don't understand normal distribution in statistics, it becomes exceedingly unlikely that you have anything relevant to say about E.O. Wilson's work.  An uncharitable view, perhaps, but in a world of near infinite information, you have to have some useful filters to sort the wheat from the chaff.  

The mean-girls covering for one another vibe is unmistakeable in the Scientific American editor's response.

Today, after sitting on our rebuttal to Scientific American’s prominent reappraisal of Wilson for eight days (curious given that the original article was rushed out within three days of his death) editor-in-chief Laura Helmuth wrote to officially reject it. Scientific American avoids, she explained, “running direct rebuttals of earlier articles. This is a standard practice in most magazines to avoid being too self-referential, and so each article stands on its own.” 

The We want to spout punishing nonsense and don't want to hear any of your empirical, logical and rationalist counter-points message is reasonably clear.  Mean-girls gotta mean-girl.