During some routine maintenance castrati keyword-based research, I accidentally stumbled upon some quality academic put-downs. I consider myself something of a connoisseur of academic pissfights/rapbattles (categorization depends on quality of word play in retorts) and always keep an eye out for them. I shall share it with you. Behold:

Robert Sparrow is definitely a hedgehog. No bad thing that, he is in good company (among many others he shares this intellectual trait with Ronald Dworkin and, more modestly, myself). While foxes know many things, hedgehogs notoriously know one big thing, and the merit of a hedgehogs' intellectual strategy is entirely dependent on the nature and importance of the big thing that he knows.

Unfortunately the big thing that Sparrow knows is that women currently have significantly longer life expectancy than men and he is trying to use this modest piece of knowledge to undermine some major approaches to human enhancement and the understanding of disability and impairment including my own. It would be a good trick if he can pull it off, but the auguries are not good. [...]

Nice work. Hits all the key notes. Backs into the insult New Yorker style, then plays clean by the Queensberry rules by insulting the one thing that academics hold most dear: their intelligence. I tried to explain what they were fighting about to my husband but didn't know where to begin explaining the enhancement vs. disability debate in disability studies. But does it matter? Like a grilled cheese vs. melt food fight, it's enough to know it exists.

Anyway. Anyone else got a favorite citable academic beef they'd like to share?

So I finally started to write a paper I have been thinking for a while - about narrative bias in case studies in history of technology.

Basically, about how our unconscious (and sometimes conscious) desires to craft a gripping story tend to influence the narrative histories we write, and how we can construct very different narratives from the same set of "facts." Furthermore, how - ´a la White's Metahistory - the big story we may want to tell might unduly affect the histories we write.

I know, I know, this is old stuff (although really interesting for an engineer like me) and surely someone else must have done this better already. I'm only intending to append this to my thesis as one essay, maybe publish it in some second-rate journal somewhere. But what's troubling me is that I haven't been able to locate a science & technology studies - or even history of technology - paper or book that discusses this. I'm fairly certain this is because of my poor search-fu though, and if anyone has any ideas I'd be very grateful for some pointers.

As an aside, in my search I came across a paper that reviewed the evidence for the (in)famous Kitty Genovese case. Remember the one where, psychology 101 books claim, 38 witnesses saw a woman being raped and murdered and only one called the cops? And which is used as the perennial example of how people in crowds may fail to help other people in need because their responsibility is diluted?

Turns out there's very little actual evidence to support this narrative, and plenty of evidence to contrary. The most probable explanation seems to be that the reporter who broke the story exaggerated, and the story "went viral" so to speak. But the funny thing is that the story inspired ingenious and solid research in "bystander effect" or the dilution of responsibility in crowds - even though the case itself most probably wasn't really an example of the effect.

The downside, the authors of this paper argue, is that the focus on bystander effect resulted to other, perhaps more pertinent phenomena being crowded out from research. For example, gender relations and violence didn't receive much research attention, although arguably these had more to do with the outcome than the bystander effect.

See here:

Manning, R., Levine, M., & Collins, A. (2007). The Kitty Genovese Murder and the Social Psychology of Helping. American Psychologist, 62(6), 555–567. http://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.62.6.555