Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

Cannot begin to describe how short-sighted and frankly stupid a human being needs to be to join a pile-on for a timely & well-publicized retraction, regardless of how little they might think of the publication. Take 30 seconds to think through the implications, ffshttps://twitter.com/clairlemon/status/1159614691385040896 …

If you can't think of the last time you saw anyone in the media try to draw anywhere near the same attention to a retraction as they regularly do for their articles, take a second to ponder why that might be & then try to behave as though you weren't dropped on your head

The timely retraction was an unalloyed good, but, publishing that article in the first place is completely worth calling out. They skipped all the fact checking because the article stroked every single one of their ideological priors.

100% valid criticism. While they deserve credit for the retraction itself and drawing attention to that retraction, a proper mea culpa about the serious editorial mistake would be nice.

Congrats on making it all the way to "we're going to admit that we *shouldn't* be using this retraction as an opportunity to punish, because that's awfully stupid, but... we're sort of going to do it anyway; it's just so much easier once you've already got an admission of error."

I don’t admit that at all. And I don’t think expecting Quillette to do some soul searching in the wake of being hoaxed is a “punishment” — it’s what we ask of academia post Sokal Squared. And to you great point up top, it’s what we should ask of mainstream press.