I don't know anything about HA in particular, but:
- I think judging an organization like this by blog posts is the wrong metric. They are much more likely to be doing conferences, networking, surveys, events, etc. If you look at their impact claims ( https://heterodoxacademy.org/impact/ ) it doesn't even mention the blog, and I figure having a blog at all was an afterthought for them.
- I don't think it's beyond the pale for them to choose to reject people who are *too* heterodox. I think the extremely-heterodox people should have spaces and organizations representing them, but that it's also good to have an organization which pushes for change but is still normie enough that they can keep some level of influence and get taken seriously.
- Maybe I've spent too much time in Silicon Valley but it doesn't seem crazy for the CEO of one of the leading nonprofits promoting academic freedom to get paid as much as a mid-level Facebook manager. In general I'm skeptical of arguments for paying people less because that's how you get worse people. John Tomasi seems to have formerly been a tenured Ivy League professor, I assume those people don't come cheap. Yes, if you cut the salary by 75% you could replace him with a random guy with a marketing degree, but I don't think it's obvious that that's a better deal. I agree that at $400K+ somebody should be writing a justification of this somewhere, but I don't think it's impossible for such a justification to exist, and I would expect Haidt to have enough sense not to give his project to a grifter.
I understand. If one makes an actually open to everybody heterodox academy, it will be filled with weirdos immediately. This would be bad for marketing, so one has to limit it somehow. They did this by limiting it to academically-affiliated people, and with some manual review. Someone wrote a good post about this, kinda sorta. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/
So HxA is really trying to gather some people only slightly outside or on the edge of the Overton Window in academia. But this renders their name and talking points pretty hollow, or one might say dishonest. I guess their push for diversity in views wouldn't work so well if their marketing was more honest ("The kinda-heterodox academy", "Slightly edge opinions institute").
You have spent too much time in SV. HxA is a small non-profit and this is a very high salary for running this small time operation. It's also not based in SV, nor does it require tech skills that compete with SV. It's a talking job that an academic with good social and writing skills can do. There are lots of such people around for relatively cheap. Reddit provides some numbers for comparison. https://www.reddit.com/r/nonprofit/comments/10la2ti/salary_range_for_executive_director/ Besides, if you check the prior years, the CEO/ED pay was much lower and I don't see any noticeable change between the years.
Mind you, I think HxA is net positive. I don't think this salary makes sense, and I hate corruption, so I decided to blog it. Whoever pays HxA can decide what to do with this information (probably nothing).
> 57 posts and 130k views. I mean, this is not nothing. However, I am one person writing this blog, and I write about 100 posts a year (and for the last 10 years). This Substack has 2M+ views since 2021, and the Wordpress has 3.8M+ views (I didn't track the stats for all years).
2.8 Million dollars to write 57 blog posts. It never ceases to amaze me how much money is thrown around by people who have no idea how badly they are getting swindled.
Are you familiar with the Constructive Dialogue Institute? It's a HxA / Haidt spin-off, but seemingly directed at schools and non-profits more than specifically higher ed. Nevertheless, it also has a well paid staff with questionable output. I don't doubt the sincerity, but I think it's fair to question if it's not just another .pdf mill / jobs program for the PMC.
The standard litmus test to apply to people or organizations who claim to be pro freedom of speech or scientific inquiry is to ask them whether they will host a talk by Charles Murray. Yes, we get straight to the point. Race and IQ. If Charles Murray is persona non grata at the organization, then that organization is a sham.
I briefly knew well a sociopath con man and he said charities and this sort of thing are a great con. He had an LLC like this. Apparent good cause. They find one or a few rich sponsors who pay for the con man's high salary with fancy title. Real income is trivial. The donors never realize it was a scam
You need to rename your Substack. Something like, 'Emil's nice, caring, honest Substack'. This would convince the soppy people who judge a thing by the label it gives itself to subscribe. By the time they realise it's not just more yadda yadda it will be too late. Their money will already be in your bank account.
I am shocked - shocked! - to learn that yet another "anti-Woke" think-tank is actually just a grift machine set up for the financial benefit of insiders.
Standardized tests are biased against blacks and Hispanics, and Jennifer Randall, black psychometrician and former schoolteacher is on the warpath! The only example I can find of how they plan to un-bias tests is a math word problem where they substitute a stereotypical black given name for a generic name and then make the problem about collecting money for BLM. This is supposed to cause an immediate IQ jump, it seems.
The outfit has six or eight employees. I really want to know the salaries. They are not in the IRS, GuideStar, or New York Secretary of State Entity databases. No 990s pop up. It seems to be a "project" of the National Center for Civic Innovation, itself a nonprofit created by the Fund for the City of New York. The NCCI shows up in the IRS 990 database with a 2021 return. Nothing there about CMJ. But they have two affiliated nonprofits, neither of which sounds related to CMJ. This looks like a Matryoshka doll tactic to bury details in a sort of money laundering hierarchy of organizations. I wonder if the CMJ salaries are available anywhere?
It's not just reported salaries, there are the ohter perks these grifters draw - travel, car, all sorts of expenses, "needed" equipment (pc, phone etc etc).. Probably find they account for much of the diff between total income and reported salaries.
Some time ago I concluded that they are only half heterodox in that some of their authors aren't true believers in the social justice ('woke') faith.
If they were truly 'Het' I would expect some of their members would be threatening to resign due to the awful bigots/fascists/literally Hitlers who have destroyed what was a nice association.
As bigot/facist/literally Hitler is used against almost anyone expressing conservative opinions, the absence of such slurs is the mark of an ideologically captured enterprise.
If I did read their emails would I know why they pay 100,000s for staff & how they get through $3m a year? Because that is currently a mystery to me. Do they do things other than send me emails?
I don't know anything about HA in particular, but:
- I think judging an organization like this by blog posts is the wrong metric. They are much more likely to be doing conferences, networking, surveys, events, etc. If you look at their impact claims ( https://heterodoxacademy.org/impact/ ) it doesn't even mention the blog, and I figure having a blog at all was an afterthought for them.
- I don't think it's beyond the pale for them to choose to reject people who are *too* heterodox. I think the extremely-heterodox people should have spaces and organizations representing them, but that it's also good to have an organization which pushes for change but is still normie enough that they can keep some level of influence and get taken seriously.
- Maybe I've spent too much time in Silicon Valley but it doesn't seem crazy for the CEO of one of the leading nonprofits promoting academic freedom to get paid as much as a mid-level Facebook manager. In general I'm skeptical of arguments for paying people less because that's how you get worse people. John Tomasi seems to have formerly been a tenured Ivy League professor, I assume those people don't come cheap. Yes, if you cut the salary by 75% you could replace him with a random guy with a marketing degree, but I don't think it's obvious that that's a better deal. I agree that at $400K+ somebody should be writing a justification of this somewhere, but I don't think it's impossible for such a justification to exist, and I would expect Haidt to have enough sense not to give his project to a grifter.
I used the blog metric because they highlighted it in their own report for 2023. That's the year with the big salary. https://heterodoxacademy.org/reports/hxa-2023-annual-report/
We can look at other measures. Their X account has 62k subs. https://x.com/HdxAcademy This is not impressive given this funding for many years.
They have a big campus survey. Again useful, but at 21 pages in the white paper, this is work one person can do in a month or less. https://images.heterodoxacademy.org/uploads/The-Where-of-Campus-Expression-Special-Report.pdf
I understand. If one makes an actually open to everybody heterodox academy, it will be filled with weirdos immediately. This would be bad for marketing, so one has to limit it somehow. They did this by limiting it to academically-affiliated people, and with some manual review. Someone wrote a good post about this, kinda sorta. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/
So HxA is really trying to gather some people only slightly outside or on the edge of the Overton Window in academia. But this renders their name and talking points pretty hollow, or one might say dishonest. I guess their push for diversity in views wouldn't work so well if their marketing was more honest ("The kinda-heterodox academy", "Slightly edge opinions institute").
You have spent too much time in SV. HxA is a small non-profit and this is a very high salary for running this small time operation. It's also not based in SV, nor does it require tech skills that compete with SV. It's a talking job that an academic with good social and writing skills can do. There are lots of such people around for relatively cheap. Reddit provides some numbers for comparison. https://www.reddit.com/r/nonprofit/comments/10la2ti/salary_range_for_executive_director/ Besides, if you check the prior years, the CEO/ED pay was much lower and I don't see any noticeable change between the years.
Mind you, I think HxA is net positive. I don't think this salary makes sense, and I hate corruption, so I decided to blog it. Whoever pays HxA can decide what to do with this information (probably nothing).
Next time I have 500k to dedicate to heterodox science, it’s going to Emil.
Not so Emil. Haidt is fully fake heterodox. https://paulawright.substack.com/p/enlightenment-now-out-out-brief-candle
> 57 posts and 130k views. I mean, this is not nothing. However, I am one person writing this blog, and I write about 100 posts a year (and for the last 10 years). This Substack has 2M+ views since 2021, and the Wordpress has 3.8M+ views (I didn't track the stats for all years).
2.8 Million dollars to write 57 blog posts. It never ceases to amaze me how much money is thrown around by people who have no idea how badly they are getting swindled.
Are you familiar with the Constructive Dialogue Institute? It's a HxA / Haidt spin-off, but seemingly directed at schools and non-profits more than specifically higher ed. Nevertheless, it also has a well paid staff with questionable output. I don't doubt the sincerity, but I think it's fair to question if it's not just another .pdf mill / jobs program for the PMC.
Never heard of it, but sure, they are paying 5 people salaries between 123 and 186k.
https://constructivedialogue.org/990s
No. Sounds like a good gig if you can get it.
The standard litmus test to apply to people or organizations who claim to be pro freedom of speech or scientific inquiry is to ask them whether they will host a talk by Charles Murray. Yes, we get straight to the point. Race and IQ. If Charles Murray is persona non grata at the organization, then that organization is a sham.
I briefly knew well a sociopath con man and he said charities and this sort of thing are a great con. He had an LLC like this. Apparent good cause. They find one or a few rich sponsors who pay for the con man's high salary with fancy title. Real income is trivial. The donors never realize it was a scam
You need to rename your Substack. Something like, 'Emil's nice, caring, honest Substack'. This would convince the soppy people who judge a thing by the label it gives itself to subscribe. By the time they realise it's not just more yadda yadda it will be too late. Their money will already be in your bank account.
I agree with this plan. As soon as you wire 500k to the company bank account, we will get started on renaming everything you want!
I am shocked - shocked! - to learn that yet another "anti-Woke" think-tank is actually just a grift machine set up for the financial benefit of insiders.
Check out the Center for Measurement Justice.
https://measurementjustice.org
Standardized tests are biased against blacks and Hispanics, and Jennifer Randall, black psychometrician and former schoolteacher is on the warpath! The only example I can find of how they plan to un-bias tests is a math word problem where they substitute a stereotypical black given name for a generic name and then make the problem about collecting money for BLM. This is supposed to cause an immediate IQ jump, it seems.
The outfit has six or eight employees. I really want to know the salaries. They are not in the IRS, GuideStar, or New York Secretary of State Entity databases. No 990s pop up. It seems to be a "project" of the National Center for Civic Innovation, itself a nonprofit created by the Fund for the City of New York. The NCCI shows up in the IRS 990 database with a 2021 return. Nothing there about CMJ. But they have two affiliated nonprofits, neither of which sounds related to CMJ. This looks like a Matryoshka doll tactic to bury details in a sort of money laundering hierarchy of organizations. I wonder if the CMJ salaries are available anywhere?
Basically they're too lite
It's not just reported salaries, there are the ohter perks these grifters draw - travel, car, all sorts of expenses, "needed" equipment (pc, phone etc etc).. Probably find they account for much of the diff between total income and reported salaries.
I receive emails from them which I never read.
Some time ago I concluded that they are only half heterodox in that some of their authors aren't true believers in the social justice ('woke') faith.
If they were truly 'Het' I would expect some of their members would be threatening to resign due to the awful bigots/fascists/literally Hitlers who have destroyed what was a nice association.
As bigot/facist/literally Hitler is used against almost anyone expressing conservative opinions, the absence of such slurs is the mark of an ideologically captured enterprise.
If I did read their emails would I know why they pay 100,000s for staff & how they get through $3m a year? Because that is currently a mystery to me. Do they do things other than send me emails?
HxA is not very good short hand; how about HetAx?