who is best described as “normie”. He’ll make noises about the excesses of wokeness, but expresses full-throated support for affirmative action and the notion of “systemic racism”. A case in point is his latest podcast with Stephon Alexander. We lack the background to evaluate Alexander’s stature as a physicist, or his individual contribution to his multi-authored papers. Early on in the podcast, he grated on us with the remark that people resent affirmative action because they don’t understand how it really works. On the contrary, I think they understand perfectly well: lesser-qualified candidates get admitted ahead of better-qualified ones on the basis of race, sex, and other jellybean flavors. He described how his fellow postdocs looked down on him, suspecting him to be an AA admit. To us, this seems like a perfect reason to abolish AA, but Alexander chose to nurse racial grievances.
Once again, we have no idea how good of a physicist Alexander is. He may well be a decent one in the end. But here is an ironclad pattern we’ve observed, with literally zero exceptions. We’ve encountered our share of women and minorities in STEM. The good ones just do research and never air grievances. The bad ones can’t shut up about where, when, how, and by whom they were microaggressed.
Update 18-Nov-2022. A commenter here had made a valid point, one to which we had initially replied to. It later turned out that the commenter was impersonating a real person’s name and url, so we took the unusual step of deleting the comment. The valid point does stand, however: Isabella Laba is a counterexample to the claim in the last paragraph above.
posttenuretourettes 