Hahaha, it is a bit of a catch-22 though isn't it. In debunking a paper like this you have to understand that your are cutting away the foundation that people built their careers on, and you may be fundamentally damaging their academic trajectory. Doesn't mean you shouldn't do it, just that being a bit of an asshole probably helps.
Hopefully this will make future scientists more wary of building their careers on a foundation of shaky work that could disappear - and thus engage more critically.
There's a time for kindness, and then there's a time for brutal honesty. The Nick Brown story does usually feature another person who was too kind and ended up regretting it:
In his email, Guastello included a list of errors he had found in Fredrickson and Losada’s application of the math. “Ironically,” he wrote, “I did send American Psychologist a comment on some of the foregoing points, which they chose not to publish because ‘there wasn’t enough interest in the article.’ In retrospect, however, I see how I could have been more clearly negative and less supportive of any positive features of the original article.”
So. The people in the end who brought the problem to light were people like Sokal, who freely use terms like "bullshit" to describe what Losada and Fredrickson did. And the people who tried to be polite and kind and balance out their criticism with the positives, were blown off and got nowhere.
