Science Doesn't Care Who You Are

A few months ago I sat in the audience for a PhD student’s talk that was, well, not great. The student was clear and articulate. They were prepared. The talk was not great because the ideas weren’t fully worked through, had internal inconsistencies, and failed to account for obvious alternative explanations.

Several professors in the audience shared my concerns and asked tough but respectful questions that gave the student pause. The student’s advisor probably should have pushed them harder before the talk, but in the room itself, other professors did what academia is supposed to do: they productively challenged a student to think more carefully about their work. A normal day at a university. And I’m glad to see normal days again, because for a while there, they weren’t.

In recent years, a strange norm took hold. Critical feedback from someone with more power directed at someone with less became suspect, an example of punching down. Critiquing student work was a professor’s job, sure, but doing it publicly, especially online, became fraught.

Thankfully the worst of this has receded, and most of us seem willing again to evaluate ideas on their merits regardless of who’s offering them. But plenty of folks still treat punching down as immoral, and I want to defend the practice. Scratch that. I want to defend the practice of punching, full stop. Up, down, sideways.

I wrote about this last year as a paid post. Below is an edited version of that essay, now free for all. Punch back in the comments.

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The principle of “not punching down” has become sacrosanct in academic spaces, holding them together like a rug ties a room together (sorry, couldn't resist). The idea seems noble enough: those with more power shouldn't attack those with less. The privileged shouldn't criticize the marginalized, white people shouldn't challenge people of colour, the wealthy shouldn’t mock the poor. You get the picture; it's about protecting the vulnerable. But like many well-intentioned principles, this one deserves unpacking.

I recently learned that sports writers coined the term “punching down” in the mid-20th century to describe boxers fighting above or below their weight class. It wasn't until the early 2000s that the term morphed into what we know today, a metaphor about power dynamics and protecting marginalized groups from abuse by the powerful.

A few years ago, my friend, UofT colleague, and podcast co-host Yoel Inbar found himself in hot water for criticizing a psychology paper on Twitter and on our Two Psychologists Four Beers podcast. The paper claimed that attractive women don't feel cold outside of nightclubs on cold winter nights even when they're barely dressed. Some hot women, apparently, don't get cold. Yes, you read that right. And, yes, this was a real published article.

Yoel did what scientists are supposed to do: he scrutinized the methods and raised concerns about the analysis and conclusions. But instead of sparking a healthy scientific debate, something else happened instead. Because the paper's lead author was a graduate student and a woman, the response was a swift: "How dare you punch down!"

I saw very little engagement with what Yoel actually said. Instead, there was a rush of condemnation that Yoel’s criticism was inappropriate, even immoral. I even saw one histrionic post from someone who not only defended the paper but then accused the entire open science community of bad faith, questioning the motives of a group he previously identified with. He might as well have said: Shameless little bullies.

Here's another example from academic Twitter. A Latino postdoc published a qualitative study about Black and Latino people's experiences with policing and discovered that even without handcuffs or sirens, the police leaves behind trauma, paranoia, and the constant feeling of being watched. A white professor, doing what professors are supposed to do, pointed out something pretty basic: every single person interviewed for this study came from an organization dedicated to police abolition and political activism. In other words, maybe, just maybe, the findings tell us more about how police abolitionists experience the police than about how the average young person of colour does.

Instead of engaging with this pretty reasonable point, though, the postdoc played the power dynamics card, complaining about a senior scholar publicly criticizing a junior scholar. Before long, the whole thing devolved into a mess of accusations about white tenured professors attacking scholars of colour. The actual scientific question—you know, the one about selection bias—got buried under an avalanche of takes about power, privilege, and who has the right to criticize whom. The Dude would not abide.

Here's one final example that really got under my skin. The flip side of "don't punch down" is what we might call "sycophancy down" the tendency to shower excessive praise on people with less power, say, from marginalized groups, regardless of merit.

I witnessed this firsthand a few years ago, and honestly, I'm still cringing about it. I attended a talk where a professor of colour gave what I'd call a perfectly fine talk—the kind that might land in a decent journal, nothing earth-shattering. But you wouldn't know that from the reaction. A bunch of white audience members practically fell over themselves praising it, treating pretty standard observations like they were tablets brought down from Mount Sinai. I kid you not, someone actually used the word genius. For a talk that was... fine. Just fine. The whole thing felt patronizing as hell, and I kept thinking about how uncomfortable this must have made the speaker feel.

So why do I have a problem with any of this? Am I just nutpicking, picking extreme examples to discredit an otherwise noble principle? Maybe. But I hope not.

My main objection is that the prohibition against punching down violates something fundamental about how science works. I'm talking about universalism, one of the core principles laid out by sociologist Robert Merton back in 1942 when he was trying to explain what makes science... well, science. Merton argued that scientific claims should be evaluated based on universal criteria, regardless of who makes them. Your race, gender, status, institutional affiliation—none of that should matter. A brilliant insight from a grad student should carry the same weight as one from a Nobel laureate. And crucially, this applies not just to doing science, but to critiquing it, too. The moment we start saying certain people can't question certain findings because of who they are (or aren't), we're not doing science anymore; we're doing something else.

One reason the principle of universalism is so important is that it actually does a better job of protecting marginalized scholars than a “don’t punch down” maxim. If we say we shouldn't critically engage with work from students or junior scholars because they have less power, we're undermining their standing as serious scholars. Being taken seriously in science means having your work scrutinized, questioned, and yes, sometimes criticized. When we place someone's work beyond criticism because of their status, we're paradoxically saying their work isn't worth engaging with rigorously. In trying to protect less powerful scholars, we end up infantilizing them. We're saying, “Look, that Indigenous postdoc is doing science. Aw, how cute!” Instead, we should treat them like the serious scholars they are and want to be.

How exactly do we figure out who has power in these academic exchanges anyways? On paper, sure, a professor outranks a postdoc. But what happens when that postdoc has double the social media following and posts ten times as often? Or when they're aligned with powerful political movements that can mobilize support at the click of a hashtag? These are not just hypothetical questions. Remember that dustup between the Latino postdoc and white professor I mentioned? That's exactly what played out there. Power isn't a simple up-down thing anymore. A dean might control your tenure case, but an activist scholar can shape your reputation with a single viral thread. This makes the whole concept of “don’t punch down” not just problematic but incoherent. This is exactly why Merton's principle of universalism is so brilliant in its simplicity: evaluate the ideas, not the person's position in whatever power hierarchy we're obsessing about this week.

But even if we embrace universalism, even if we agree to evaluate ideas on their merits rather than their source, we still need to talk about how we receive criticism, because this is where things often go sideways. There's a tendency in academia to conflate scholarly critique with personal bullying. I get it: criticism hurts. But when we reflexively cry foul about power differentials instead of engaging with substance, we sacrifice growth for comfort. Good science requires us to separate criticism of our work from attacks on our person. It requires us to assume good faith, at least initially.

To be sure, there's a world of difference between criticism and humiliation. The Babylonian Talmud got this right: it considered public humiliation tantamount to shedding blood, understanding that when you humiliate someone in public, you wound their sense of self. The lesson here isn't that we should avoid criticizing; it's that we should deliver it with kindness and care. And I'll be the first to admit I haven't always gotten this balance right—there have been times when my eagerness for debate trumped my consideration for how and where to deliver criticism. The Talmudic scholars would probably have some choice words for me about that.

But even as I work to do better, I still believe in choosing sunlight over shadows. When it comes to personal matters, hashing things out privately makes sense. But intellectual disagreements? We all benefit from having those in the open. That said, if we’re going to air them publicly, we owe it to each other to be civil and kind. The goal isn't to protect people from criticism; it's to create spaces where ideas can be challenged thoughtfully while preserving everyone's dignity.

Treating certain groups as too delicate for critique isn't protection; it's condescension. I get why "don't punch down" feels right—it comes from a desire to protect the vulnerable. But if we want real equity in academia, we need to hold everyone's ideas to the same rigorous standards: careful criticism delivered with respect, regardless of who's giving or receiving it. Maybe instead of worrying about which direction we're punching, we could focus on having better fights; maybe we can speak to each other, even when we’re criticizing, with more kindness.

Then again, I could be wrong about all this. Feel free to criticize this take, regardless of your status relative to mine.