Other professions don’t tolerate public rudeness. Why do academics?

The license taken in peer review is particularly immoral. Editors ought to remove rude and unsubstantiated remarks.

I couldn't agree more. I have observed for a while how Twitter outrage about findings sometimes causes editors to retract articles. It's against the scientific spirit of discovering truth if we let bullies dictate whose findings are allowed to be published. If you disagree with a conclusion or analysis, write a rejoinder or publish follow-up research that proves the original authors wrong. You can get proper credit for it in terms of citations, and the original (potentially flawed) analysis is not erased from our collective scientific record. We also need to learn from mistakes, and maintaining the "version history" of science is important in this endeavour. And as the author points out, it is also what good manners dictate.

I agree, if they don't like your conclusions they should have the confidence to explain why clearly and as publicly as they have made their disagreement.

Academia does seem to be a useful shelter for those who are clever but have poor social skills, and so would fin a job elsewhere less satisfying and more challenging. This does come out in situations such as the one described. On the other hand, I suspect that the tolerance for inappropriate behaviour is different in different disciplines. I have attended hundreds of conference presentations over 25 years, in mathematics, computing, engineering, psychology, and physics. I have never once had the experience of someone shouting out in the middle of a presentation and only occasionally have the Q&As gone off the rails. Indeed, of the three times (in 25 years!) we have had aggressive Q&As, in two of the cases it was the speaker who was inappropriately aggressive in response to questions that they did not want to hear, and those Q&A sessions are remembered as cautionary tales within the community as "when answering questions after your talk, do not behave like Dr X did at the 2010 conference".

In 50 years of attending conferences on cell and developmental biology, neurobiology and mathematical modelling, I have never experienced anything approaching rudeness, save for speakers going overtime! As editor for a number of journals, the standard of the reviews has been, in my view, variable but outright unfair or rude reviews have been rare - though they do occur. Memorably, one manuscript reviewer, a very senior figure in the field, described the author (even more senior) as being paranoid. There were other highly unusual aspects to the review so my thought was "it takes one to know one", and I deleted this intemperate person from the recommended reviewer list. And one early paper of mine was described as "a turkey" although the reviewer candidly admitted that they couldn't say why, other than that its conclusions differed in part from the current opinions -- and it was published and was highly cited.

As I said to the commenter above - I think it very much depends upon the field, and even the sub-discipline, and the culture that has developed in it. Sometimes I have considered moving out of my particular sub-discipline for this reason. I do papers at times in different areas (corporate law, consumer law, animal law, construction law, Asian law) to remind myself that others regard my work as worthwhile even when they throughly disagree with it. I had some reviewer say one of my papers was “not worth publishing” - I wasn’t sure why, except that like yours, it had conclusions which were unusual and not in keeping with the dominant school. Fortunately I persisted and had a similar experience - it’s been well received once it’s out there.

An interesting development of social media has been academics insulting academics from other disciplines, yet still trying to pretend the 'argument' is academic rather than personal or political.

The argument is self-defeating, it claims that there is a problem with impoliteness but accepts that it is only in a minority of cases. If a politeness police were set-up it'd only make the Academy more narrow-minded, self-congratulatory and career-oriented than it already is.