I had no idea Jim Coyne died, and it was a month ago. I just found out.
In the following, you will not find any trite shit.
I do not ever refer to people as having a ‘complicated legacy’, I am sure everyone is well aware at this point that people ‘contain multitudes’, and I think people being dead is a perfectly serviceable time to speak of them, ill or otherwise, to register an opinion as they were, before they are forgotten.
As we all will be.
I have not shared my experience of this previously because there was no reason to.
But here we are.
Jim
Jim appeared in the mid 2010s, he met a group of Australian researchers who knew me after I moved to the US, and eventually we ended up collaborating on a re-analysis of a positive psychology paper which was bad enough to warrant re-analysis. We emailed a lot, for years, in a little group of people who shared the same concerns.
When we were in the same city, which happened a few times, we would hit the town.
Up close, a decade ago, Jim was riotous. He was funny, he was intensely self-deprecating at times (for instance, he would have found the “Dr. Coyne was designated among the 200 most eminent psychologists of the last 20th century” line of his obit to be hilarious because (a) he was ranked exactly #200 and (b) he thought all the work that got him there was mostly shit anyway), and he had great stories: growing up around the Mob (he grew up rough), people kicking off at conferences, all the old-school ‘tales out of school’ about what famous psychologists got up to for fun, and — most interestingly for me — a tremendous mental catalogue of forty years of dodgy research bullshit.
He showed me famous studies that he was certain were cooked, but couldn’t prove. I looked into them, and it was obvious that he was right, and also that I couldn’t prove it either. It was easy to see how he became radicalized.
And he could drink. Up close, ten years ago, he was every part the charming and disreputable scumbag that you’d always hope he stayed.
Once, after trying every weird beer at Bukowski’s, we went back to a conference hotel bar for ‘one more’, and he switched to whisky. He said he’d pay, until he saw the bill — he looked up over the paper and growled at me: “you’re paying next time”.
I laughed in his face. But I did, in fact, pay next time.
As far as I am aware, Jim never said a single harsh word about me. Not second-hand, and not to my face. He was completely cordial, right to the end.
And there was an end, in 2018.
The End
Two things happened in the same year:
(1) Jim was removed from his position at Groningen, leaving Old Man Gloom high and dry without a PhD supervisor, and
(2) Jim sued Eiko Fried for cyberbullying
It was the last thing that made me flick The Switch.
I know Eiko. Not well, but well enough to know that the entire scenario was wildly unwarranted, and that he was entirely in the right. I read that blog post with the sinking feeling that This Was, in fact, It.
Suing a graduate student over some conspiratorial nonsense?
Mean.
Weird.
Unnecessary.
Crank-ish.
Absolutely unacceptable regardless of context.
There’s no point talking something like this through with people, and we didn’t have the kind of relationship where A Stern Talking-To would have done a damned thing.
I’d already been threatened with legal action myself at that point, and but frankly that additional sensitivity wasn’t even necessary: there was no excuse or explanation good enough to justify whatever the hell this was, even it if was somehow warranted.
(And it definitely WAS NOT. The whole affair was exactly what it looked like, the blog post came with plenty of receipts and documentation. I read all of it. Verify, then trust.)
After that, I hit The Switch.
The Switch is something I should explain. I have always had the emotional ability to cut people off, to remove them completely from my life and my thinking. You are a guest in my reality, and I am taking away your temporary visitor pass. Show yourself out, preferably through a window on the third floor.
It is a quick process, which is why it is called The Switch and not The Drawn Out Agonizing Process With Unnecessary Self Reflection. Plenty of times, people have said things to me, and before they finish their sentence I am aware they are out of my life. Forever. Sometimes, I need a few minutes reflection, but generally not.
I do not piss about when red lines are involved. I don’t think anyone should. That’s why they’re red lines.
I hit The Switch on Jim, therefore, in late 2018. Interactions since then were less than minimal. Messages, replies, and emails on any given platform generally went unopened, or unanswered. If they were answered, they were terse answers to questions that might prove broadly productive. He would pop up from time to time, and I would feel vaguely nostalgic, not engage, and move on. I’m sure he similarly alienated a lot of other people similarly at different points.
If I’d made myself aware, it all would have happened sooner.
There were a few years of online drama that I had ignored completely in the intervening years, in large part because I spent a significant amount of time with Jim holding people to account that genuinely deserved it.
There were a few powerful researchers with good reputations involved, who in actual fact were deeply rotten people. That sort of thing will really colour your perspective — conflict was inevitable.
But!
Inevitable conflict arising from what I still very much think are ‘the right reasons’ sensitized me to making sure such drama and arseache were avoided unless absolutely necessary.
To Jim, it was probably more like… oxygen. It seemed like without a proper dust-up for the right reasons, the wrong ones would do. At some point, maybe slowly, maybe gradually, maybe all at once, he went around holding anyone within arm’s reach to some imagined account. Accurate or otherwise, fair or otherwise. At some point, almost certainly otherwise.
And this could have occurred to me a LOT sooner. I lacked sufficient imagination and/or curiosity to come to this realization.
I’m not sure it even occurred to him. He seemed to dissolve exclusively into perceived slights and bomb-throwing. I’m not even sure how he chose the conflicts he seemed to generate. They were borderline stochastic at some point.
Now, The End
It would be nice to finish this with a nice paen, but I think we both know at this point that would be a lie. I haven’t thought about Jim in years. If he was a different person, I’d probably be very upset. But he wasn’t, so I’m not.
Every idealogue has righteousness, and righteousness is basically chicken pox for the soul — it breaks out everywhere. Having become convinced you are on the side of the angels, you give yourself permission to throw other things out of the moral calculus boat. There is a pretty clear path between ‘I oppose the bad people’ and ‘Everyone who opposes me is a bad person’, and a person with an ounce of self-awareness avoids trying to walk it.
I’ve known other people who thrive on conflict, of course, and they’ve always been similarly disappointing to me. But I’ve always had a bone to pick with the language people choose for them: that ‘drama follows them around’. Drama isn’t a stray puppy, it’s causal — they make it.
And you can’t change them, so walk away and live your life.