“Whistleblowers always get punished” | Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science
The corollary to all this, and closely related to Javert’s paradox, is the social law: Whistleblowers always get punished. The Javert paradox, as regular readers will recall, goes like this: Suppose you find a problem with published work. If you just point it out once or twice, the authors of the work are likely to do nothing. But if you really pursue the problem, then you look like a Javert, that is, like an obsessive, a “hater,” someone who needs to “get a life.” It’s complicated, because some critics