15 ms·

Academic Activists Send a Published Paper Down the Memory Hole

510 points by alexmat 8y ago

jfoutz 8y ago
Reminds me of https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/vl/notes/dijkstra.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/vl/notes/dijkstra.html
- rule_follower 8y ago
  The rabble are now inside the walls and even ensconced in its offices.
DanAndersen 8y ago
Direct arxiv link to the preprint in question: https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.04184 https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.04184 Kudos to the author for being brave enough to detail these events. Academia and the process of science has enough blind spots without needing activists in the mix to add their own. >“Several colleagues,” she wrote, had warned her that publication would provoke “extremely strong reactions” and there existed a “very real possibility that the right-wing media may pick this up and hype it internationally.” It's as if these people had never heard of the Streisand Effect. What would have been a stuffy publication of no interest beyond a small circle of curious researchers is now a public salacious affair.
- jostmey 8y ago
  It looks like a well written paper with some really cool ideas. Too bad about what happened to it
  - AlexCoventry 8y ago
    There is nothing original or subtle about it, and it was blatantly intended by the Mathematical Intelligencer editor to stir shit up.
    - barry-cotter 8y ago
      All of that can be true and Amie Wilkinson's campaign of harassment would still be vile and disgusting behaviour, unworthy of an adult of any kind. She got the paper withdrawn from two different journals, and got Dr Tabachnikov to withdraw his name from the paper. What do you think of Dr Wilkinson's behaviour? Because that’s what the article is about, a campaign of harassment from a woman in a position of power.
      - mirimir 8y ago
        What's relevant here is her unprofessional and harassing behavior. If she were a man, the behavior would be no less vile, nor more so.
      - AlexCoventry 8y ago
        > What do you think of Dr Wilkinson's behaviour? I'd need a more authoritative account of it to form a view.
        aunasdfuyb 8y ago
        And what authoritative accounts have you used to dismiss the paper and the journal editor? If you believe the editor when they say "I am happy to stir up controversy" why not also believe them when they say "we could make a real contribution here"?
        AlexCoventry 8y ago
        > what authoritative accounts have you used to dismiss the paper and the journal editor? I read the paper and drew my own conclusion. > why not also believe them when they say "we could make a real contribution here"? That snippet in context: "After the Middlebury fracas, in which none of the protestors had read the book they were protesting, we could make a real contribution here by insisting that all views be heard." That's just fancy language for "stir shit up." There's nothing there about the intellectual merit of Hill's paper, just an unobtainable value that "all views be heard." People should read the paper to make up their own minds, though. I'm with her, there.
  - UncleMeat 8y ago
    Why do you feel qualified to evaluate the paper? This is the risk. It is difficult for laypeople to properly evaluate a paper, so any nonsense when presented well can convince people.
- barry-cotter 8y ago
  > It's as if these people had never heard of the Streisand Effect. What would have been a stuffy publication of no interest beyond a small circle of curious researchers is now a public salacious affair. You're not reading about all the other times articles offensive to a certain point of view got memory holed successfully. Most of the time powerful assholes get away with their behaviour. Note that the only reason this article is even on the internet is that one of the original two co-authors is retired and beyond the reach of professional threats.
  - waterhouse 8y ago
    In a similar vein, there's a paper with the fascinating name "Thirty Years of Denying the Evidence on Gender Symmetry in Partner Violence: Implications for Prevention and Treatment". https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233717660_Thirty_Years_of_Denying_the_Evidence_on_Gender_Symmetry_in_Partner_Violence_Implications_for_Prevention_and_Treatment https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233717660_Thirty_Ye... "Method 7: Harass, Threaten, or Penalize Researchers Who Publish Evidence on Gender Symmetry ... The most extreme example was the experience of Susan Steinmetz. When she was at the University of Delaware and was being reviewed for promotion and tenure, there was an organized attempt to block her appointment through unsolicited letters to her department and the university president. They asserted that Steinmetz was not a suitable person to promote because her research showing high rates of women's perpetration of PV was not believable. In short, they accused her of scientific fraud (Susan Steinmetz, personal communications during the years 1973 to 1988, when we collaborated in research and coauthored two books). An academic version that implies fraud is Pleck and colleagues (1978). Even more extreme, there was a bomb threat at a daughter's wedding. At the University of Manitoba, a lecturer's contract was not renewed because of protests about her research, which found approximately equal rates of PV by women and men. I have been repeatedly harassed and penalized. ... Two of my graduate students were warned that they will never get jobs if they do their PhD dissertation with me." And more examples are given.
    - orangecat 8y ago
      Wow. That's especially amazing considering that the claim of similar domestic violence rates actually supports the progressive axiom that there are no innate psychological differences between men and women.
- mirimir 8y ago
  Yes, and it's still there. If it goes away, I'll be happy to provide copies. Or put it up somewhere secure. And FYI: > At this point, faced with career-threatening reprisals from their own departmental colleagues and the diversity committee at Penn State, as well as displeasure from the NSF, Sergei and his colleague who had done computer simulations for us withdrew their names from the research. Fortunately for me, I am now retired and rather less easily intimidated—one of the benefits of being a Vietnam combat veteran and former U.S. Army Ranger, I guess. So, I continued to revise the paper, and finally posted it on the online mathematics archives.
- leibwiht 8y ago
  >It's as if these people had never heard of the Streisand Effect. It's not that they don't know about it, it's that the quote in question is an overt threat and the entire point of it is that the person it is said to will give up and stop trying out of fear, which would certainly prevent any sort of Streisand effect from happening.
exolymph 8y ago
Prediction: This article will get flagged off the front page.
- commandlinefan 8y ago
  Memory holed off of hacker news too, you say?
- quotemstr 8y ago
  The admins have the ability to turn off flags for specific posts. They would do well to do it here.
  - commandlinefan 8y ago
    OP is flagged already.
    - yorwba 8y ago
      The post dropped off the front page a few hours ago, but then suddenly jumped up again, so I guess the mods intervened. Currently it does not appear to have been flagged by a large enough number of people to kill it.
      - jtbayly 8y ago
        It's gone again.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
moneytide 8y ago
The female body is our only means of citizen production. Genetic and resource input is all that's required of the male. As such, the female mind is wired to instinctually minimize risk, so as to set the stage for a healthy womb in the time leading up to conception and for the 9 months following. That's my two cents. Otherwise, I'm concerned why people are apparently getting funded to research these sorts of things.
traject_ 8y ago
Wow, I didn't know that academia was getting this bad; what happened to letting the truth be debated a la the Socratic dialogue in the academia of all places!
- lucio 8y ago
  >what happened to letting the truth be debated a la the Socratic dialogue in the academia of all places! https://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1038&context=rrgc https://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi...
  - thyrsus 8y ago
    The Bailey paper proposes three steps: 1. Women have been historically discriminated against. 2. Women are currently discriminated against by people using the Socratic dialog. 3. The Socratic dialog discriminates against women. The leap from 2. to 3. is reminiscent of "Hitler was a vegetarian. Therefore vegetarians are Nazis."
- quotemstr 8y ago
  What happened? I call it valence hijacking. Sometimes, a thing --- a word, an institution, a bit of history --- has cultural power. It's surrounded with an aura (or valence, if you will) of gravitas and mystique, usually accumulated over decades, or millennia. Acrivists notice that these things have cultural power and hijack them, turning them into something useful for the cause while denying that anything has changed. Consider, for example, how many people claim, in all earnestness, that disagreement is "literal violence". Disagreement is obviously not violence, but by using this word, activists can "steal" some of the emotion attached to the word "violence" and weild it for their cause. This hijacking works for a while, until people catch on. At that point, activists, like locusts, move on to areas not yet stripped bare of meaning. The same mechanism that at micro scale operates on words operates at macro scale on institutions. Academia in particular has been ravaged by this process: huge parts of the academy no longer practice anything resembling science. Their studies do not reproduce. Their papers go unread. Their lectures become diatribes. Their students become zealots. The forms are present, but the substance is gone. This article describes the early stages of such a hijacking.
scythe 8y ago
Interesting. I strongly disagree with the author's attempt to connect his experience with the Damore fracas. Damore's "manuscript" comprised a number of weakly-justified claims on a variety of subjects in psychology and sociology, reaching far beyond the GMVH, and was furthermore directly critical both of the hiring policies of his employer (!!) and of inclusiveness initiatives in the technology industry more generally. By contrast, the paper by Hill et al provides a single argument about a specific topic and downplays the political implications (to the extent it mentions them at all). The paper is not without at least one obvious mistake: > If gender differences in selectivity have been decreasing and are now less significant in some species than they were in prehistoric times, then this theory could also predict that the gender difference in variability in those species has also been decreasing. One recent meta-analysis found empirical evidence of exactly that trend in humans, reporting “The gender difference in variability has reduced substantially over time within the United States Gender variability over the 240 years of the existence of the United States is probably not a good proxy for gender variability over the 5000 years from the beginning of literate societies to the present.
octonion 8y ago
Isn't Quillette a right-wing propaganda outlet? I have them blocked on Twitter.
- ignoramceisblis 8y ago
  Extraordinary. "I don't know a particular thing, but I'm censoring it anyway and (because?) I heard it was "right-wing"." Read their (succinct) about page to find out more (http://quillette.com/about/ http://quillette.com/about/), and consider reading their articles for yourself, especially before echoing any disinformation you've acquired from your trusty sources. Your comment adds nothing to the discussion. Mine only serves to help guide you in thinking for yourself.
quotemstr 8y ago
This disgraceful behavior from academia is shredding the credibility of the entire enterprise. How is anyone supposed to trust any unintuitive conclusions with expensive implications --- for example, on climate change --- when the academic community has demonstrated a propensity to shriek at and censor unorthodox ideas instead of contest them on the merits?
- zeth___ 8y ago
  Science has been hijacked from the inside for a long time now. While it's better than trusting straight up corporate releases, there are thumbs on the scales that push studies to get the results those giving the funding want. Social science is particularly bad at this, to the point I doubt any research done since the 1950s isn't ideologically tainted, at that time due to the cold war and the need to discredit anything "communist".
  - daodedickinson 8y ago
    There's way too much unmet need to discredit socialism right now. There was a failed meager attempt circa 1950 that ended with McCarthy's character successfully assassinated and socialists in charge of the schools so they could slowly take power even as their ideas obviously destroy wherever they gain it quickly.
- briandear 8y ago
  This is specificly why I am a climate skeptic. Not a denier, mind you, but a skeptic when it comes to anything purporting to be “settled science.” It’s specifically because there is a strong resistance to anything damaging to the status quo, as supported by grant funding and, to a lesser extent, political agenda. Frankly, it’s hard to trust academia on controversial topics.
  - fnordsensei 8y ago
    With climate change though, it seems that the academic consensus is that humanity has an effect on the climate, while (some significant portion of) media seems to regularly depict it as more of a 50/50 up-in-the-air situation. In this article, it's not about media depiction vs academic consensus, but friction within academic sciences itself.
oflannabhra 8y ago
I had not heard of Quillette until Tyler Cowen interviewed [0] Claire Lehmann, the founding editor. This article, and the precipitating events, fit perfectly into Quillette’s raison d’etre[1]. [0] - https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/claire-lehmann-tyler-cowen-political-correctness-social-norms-australian-culture-e52e2c08c629 https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/claire-lehmann-t... [1] - https://quillette.com/about/ https://quillette.com/about/
- quotemstr 8y ago
  I'm almost wondering whether Quillette should start a scientific publication arm for unsafe research. The open access model has low overhead, and it might be possible to allow researchers to publish under pseudonyms while upholding publication standards.
  - ratsmack 8y ago
    And why would publishing controversial subjects be "unsafe"? Isn't one of the merits of ones learning is to have an open mind to new ideas? Why is it that when something is published that a specific group disagrees with or has "feelings" that are troubling do we feel the need to appease them to no ends... I find this troubling myself.
    - waterhouse 8y ago
      I'm guessing quotemstr used "unsafe" to mean "unsafe to your career as a researcher if you try to publish it in conventional universities".
    - mirimir 8y ago
      From the article: > At this point, faced with career-threatening reprisals from their own departmental colleagues and the diversity committee at Penn State, as well as displeasure from the NSF, Sergei and his colleague who had done computer simulations for us withdrew their names from the research. That strikes me as pretty damn "unsafe".
    - 8y ago
userbinator 8y ago
The suppression of uncomfortable truths is not new; it seems almost like a religion and reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_affair
opwieurposiu 8y ago
Amie Wilkinson has managed to do many times more harm to the image of women in science then this paper ever could.
- mirimir 8y ago
  Well, that's going too far, I think. She comes off as extremely unprofessional, but there are lots of unprofessional men, as well.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- mathprof 8y ago
  She is an ideologue who persecutes scientists because their Research doesn't fit her life's narrative. Oppressive Mob mentality at its best and least reflected.
ve55 8y ago
When opponents think about how 'damaging' papers like this are, they should also consider how damaging things like this are to the field in general, and how they may cause a lot of second-order harm. Many that I know have begun to distrust areas of academia much more recently, and when they see scenarios like this over and over it doesn't help. We all know that no one will support you for saying the truth if it won't go down well politically. The end result of this is that Academia will only publish the 'right' results, but it will not matter as few will trust them to begin with. After reading the full article I find it funny they decide to critique the paper by calling it 'pseudoscientific'. I'd like to play the same game back at them and simply call their beliefs 'pseudoscientific' and proceed to pretend like they are discredited and don't warrant further inspection. If you keep crying wolf, eventually no one will believe you when you really need them to. You can't go against truth forever.
- whatshisface 8y ago
  At least the controversy about string theory has been in the public eye for a while now. It seems like physics hit the worst of it in the 90s and the public trust we have now is relatively sturdy.
  - nopinsight 8y ago
    The public trusts most areas of physics because we use them to build many artifacts, some quite amazing, we interact with everyday and also because there are solid experiments that repeatedly confirm them. Some may extend this trust to the most modern areas yet without experimental confirmations, but not everyone does. The situation is quite different for many softer sciences for which neither of the above conditions is true. If the public found out they have been misled by a whole field for decades, the trust in that field could be shaken to a great extent. Even adjacent fields could be affected as collateral damage.
- api 8y ago
  It's a tough issue because both sides are right. Recent political and social events show that the general public is not yet able to discuss issues like this rationally and maturely. Yet at the same time science must be free to inquire without political restriction. I do not have an answer.
brenschluss 8y ago
The paper seems to have some egregious and basic errors. Take a look at the paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.04184.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.04184.pdf On page 2, it says (in discussing Special Case 1): "If sex A is relatively selective and will mate only with the top most desirable quarter of sex B, then all of the next generation will be offspring of the more variable subpopulation B1" However, if you look at the histogram in Figure 1, it's clear that if sex A mates with the top most desirable quarter of sex B, then sex A is choosing most desirable mates who happened to be part of the subpopulation B1. That is, as diagrammed in the histogram, variability is not a function of the population any more, since the red rectangle noting 'B1' with desirability 3 to 4 is no longer variable. It would be absolutely incorrect to say that "all of the next generation will be offspring of the more variable subpopulation B1". In other words, it's like saying: "In Sack 1, I have a mix of of blueberries and watermelons. Sack 1 is varied in fruit size, and has a high variability. I've sorted them by size, and taken the most largest fruit and put them in Sack 2. Now Sack 2 is full of variable sizes of fruit, since it came from Sack 1, which had high variability." (EDIT: to be clear, I think the above sack example is incorrect; I'm illustrating the logic in which the paper seems to be incorrect, according to my understanding.)
- zeth___ 8y ago
  You misunderstand the argument. It's like having a bag 1 filled with equal quantities of capsicums, cherries, and apples, then selecting the top reddest 25% of bag 1 and moving them to bag 2. You will have much less variability of fruit type in bag 2 because you used color selection to fill it (apples and capsicums come in three colors at will be selected 1/3rd the rate of cherries). That's the whole point of sexual vs natural selection.
  - quotemstr 8y ago
    I'm glad the OP posted his comment, since it presents a window into the kind of thinking that will go on to form the narrative scar tissue surrounding this affair. By now, the response pattern from the activist camp to inconvenient manuscripts should be clear to anyone who has been paying attention. If attempts to silence authors pre-publication don't work, and if post-publication censorship ends up being ineffective, the activist rhetorical tactic of last resort is blatant misrepresentation of a manuscript's contents. They're loathe to use this tactic, since it costs them massive credibility every time they plainly lie about something everyone can read, but it's still better (from their POV) than cognitive dissonance.
jancsika 8y ago
> Half his board, he explained unhappily, had told him that unless he pulled the article, they would all resign and “harass the journal” he had founded 25 years earlier “until it died.” Half a board of academics skulking to avoid controversy, ok. But becoming a hive of killer bees threatening to attacking their own hive? That doesn't pass the smell test.
- daodedickinson 8y ago
  Sounds exactly like standard academic politics to me.
- mirimir 8y ago
  Do you argue that the author is lying?
- shard972 8y ago
  Seems about right to me. Have you turned on a television in the last few years? People are out for blood these days.
DINKDINK 8y ago
And yet it still ~~moves~~ distributes.
jonnybgood 8y ago
This is a one-sided story pushing a "Us vs Them" narrative. I can see nothing productive coming out of this.
- pelario 8y ago
  I'm not sure if this is pushing a "us vs them"; and yes, it obviously is a one-sided story. So, yes, I would really like to read a reply to this article but any of the other parties mentioned there.
- nervlord 8y ago
  ofcourse not, it's not talking about anything you want to hear. If it was an article about something you cared about though, or that would offer some advancement of your pet cause, i'm quite sure you'd be out there with your placards and the silly chants
  - dang 8y ago
    We've banned this account for violating the site guidelines. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- lolc 8y ago
  The weird thing is that the paper was accepted at two journals. Which says something about it's quality. It doesn't mean the author is right! But at that point (if you assume scientifc honesty) you'd expect critics to distill their disagreements in a paper and publish that. That hasn't happened however. All that's happened has happened behind the scenes. Unless the article we read is dishonest in this regard.
another-cuppa 8y ago
I don't even understand why this is controversial. I've explained this to a number of women before and none of them have felt hurt. On the contrary, in fact, it makes them feel better. Humans always fixate on extremes. Men and women. It's a problem in our society. We always want to see the very best and we're not interested in others who are still way above average. There are thousands of women doing great science, engineering, programming etc., but the very best are almost always men, and it's our fault that we only care about the very best.
- kupiakos 8y ago
  It may have made the women you've talked to feel better, but personally, I'm not a fan of the idea that I'm simply less biologically capable than men in any way.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - js8 8y ago
    "the idea that I'm simply less biologically capable than men in any way" Nobody (serious) is saying that. First, when this is talked about, it's always about averages, which are meaningless from individual perspective. Second, there are obvious biological traits where women are less capable than men on average, like weightlifting. There are also traits where women are more capable, like having kids. These are facts though. You might also not be a fan of idea that "Earth revolves around Sun", but that's how it is. On the other hand, I can understand your feeling. I am for example not a fan of idea that many humans are xenophobes.
    - Zanni 8y ago
      Weightlifting is an excellent example. It's not controversial in the least to say that men (on the whole) are stronger than women. And the strongest man will almost certainly be stronger than the strongest woman. But that doesn't mean a particular woman can't out lift a particular man. I see this all the time at my CrossFit box, where there are women who regularly put more weight on a barbell than I can manage. I'm not even talking about pound for pound of bodyweight either. I'm talking about women who are 50 pounds lighter than I am who can still deadlift 50 pounds more than I can. Some of these CrossFit women are strong.
abecedarius 8y ago
This seems new, and passed over in all the comments so far: > None of them had ever heard of a paper in any field being disappeared after formal publication. Rejected prior to publication? Of course. Retracted? Yes, but only after an investigation, the results of which would then be made public by way of explanation. But simply disappeared? Never. If a formally refereed and published paper can later be erased from the scientific record and replaced by a completely different article, without any discussion with the author or any announcement in the journal, what will this mean for the future of electronic journals? I'd had the impression online journals normally had some plan for archiving. So insiders were left out of the threat model?
- mirimir 8y ago
  Looks like there's no hard copy. It's totally online.[0] I checked https://web.archive.org/ https://web.archive.org/ but the 2017/10/23 snapshot ends at p. 1539,[1] and the 2017/12/01 snapshot has the substitute paper.[2] Ajay Kumar, Niteesh Sahni, and Dinesh Singh Invariance under finite Blaschke factors on BMOA 1641 So unless someone grabbed it, it's toast. Except for the preprint, anyway. 0) http://nyjm.albany.edu/nyjm.html http://nyjm.albany.edu/nyjm.html 1) https://web.archive.org/web/20171027011421/http://nyjm.albany.edu/j/2017/Vol23.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20171027011421/http://nyjm.alban... 2) https://web.archive.org/web/20171201163957/http://nyjm.albany.edu/j/2017/Vol23.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20171201163957/http://nyjm.alban...
  - jaccarmac 8y ago
    It's still available on the site, AND I've grabbed it. http://nyjm.albany.edu/j/2017/23-72v-orig.pdf http://nyjm.albany.edu/j/2017/23-72v-orig.pdf
- jessriedel 8y ago
  > Retracted? Yes, but only after an investigation, the results of which would then be made public by way of explanation. Just to clarify: when papers are retracted, they are not normally erased from the database and replaced with an explanation. See this Nature paper for an example; the entire paper is kept available online, just as before, except that the words "RETRACTED" is stamped on each PDF page https://www.nature.com/articles/nature10167 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature10167 Likewise, nothing published to the arXiv is ever removed. A retraction notice can be added as an update, but the complete version history is always available. Articles are much more likely to be "un-published" (wiped from the archives) in journalism than scientific publications.
tasubotadas 8y ago
I just love this new concept of inclusivity by exclusivity. And what are those people thinking? They are seriously undermining their credibility in the long term. Imagine this in 50 years - whenever you would mention something about gender-inequality you would be taken as a tin-foiled freak.
- jey 8y ago
  > whenever you would mention something about gender-inequality you would be taken as a tin-foiled freak. Are you sure? We won't be allowed to acknowledge differences in average adult height or differences in the ability to carry children?
rebuilder 8y ago
Does anyone have an outside source on this? The writeup linked seems pretty one-sided, and the whole naive-surprise-meets-hardnosed-doggedness tone doesn't seem very genuine. So I'm left wondering how accurate a portrayal of events this is.
- zebraflask 8y ago
  Exactly. It's quite a story, but something in it doesn't ring true.
n4r9 8y ago
> Google engineer James Damore suggested that several innate biological factors, including gender differences in variability, might help explain gender disparities in Silicon Valley hi-tech jobs. Did he? I read it when it came to light and briefly again just now and cannot see any mention of higher variability amongst men. Psychological differences, yes, but mostly in the slightly vague "women like people, men like things" or "women are more neurotic" sense. I'd also question the premise that Damore was fired merely for bringing up psychological differences. He also bridged the is/ought gap by making several demands of Google's hiring practices.
- darawk 8y ago
  > I'd also question the premise that Damore was fired merely for bringing up psychological differences. He also bridged the is/ought gap by making several demands of Google's hiring practices. I don't think he made demands. He called for open discussion, and a reconsideration of aggressive recruitment of women.
  - n4r9 8y ago
    Fair point, demand is too strong a term. He specifically attacked funding for programs for minorities or women, and any hiring practises with emphasis on diversity, as being "based on false assumptions generated by our biases" (supposedly the creeping "leftist" ideology that's taking over Google) and that they "can actually increase race and gender tensions" without backing this up. I'm not going to argue against that in this post, but I think imo he went beyond simply highlighting biological differences.
    - darawk 8y ago
      What he was saying was that if these biological differences are real, then we ought to expect unequal representation in engineering of women. And therefore, diversity programs that aim for equal representation are misguided and doomed to failure.
      - n4r9 8y ago
leiroigh 8y ago
Skim the preprint https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.04184 https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.04184 , especially section 7. The article is not fit for publication in a mathematical journal, it is cosplaying as math. To cite: > The following simple proposition may be well known, but since no reference is known to the author, a proof is included for completeness. >Proposition 7.1. N(µ, σ1) is more variable than N(µ, σ2) if and only if σ1 > σ2. >Proof: [lots of lines] In a real mathematical paper, this claim would not be glorified into a numbered proposition, and it would not merit a proof; this amount of mathematical work is the distance between one line and the next. I would not even expect students to provide a proof for such utter trivialities in a homework assignment. Author should have submitted to PNAS instead, or written a blogpost.
- quilletteThrow 8y ago
  There are different notions of variability used in the paper, and he is showing one is equivalent to the other. It doesn't seem ridiculous to me to include the proof, even though it is simple. Lots of simple proofs are included in papers and books.
- alexandercrohde 8y ago
  Can we separate the discussion of whether this paper has a superfluous proof in it from whether its conclusion is true? Additionally, the main point of the article is that that Mr. Hill feels his paper was pushed out of publication because of a political agenda. Let's also acknowledge the claim of political motivations corrupting academics is independent of the "superfluous proof" claim.
  - quilletteThrow 8y ago
    The paper doesn't have a conclusion, really. It describes a model and is supposedly intended to spur greater discussion. This is probably part of the reason the paper is written as it is: meant to be simple and easily accessible to people in other fields. The parent will need to work harder to dismiss the author...
    - 8y ago
geofft 8y ago
> “Our concern,” [the NSF] explained, “is that [this] paper appears to promote pseudoscientific ideas that are detrimental to the advancement of women in science, and at odds with the values of the NSF.” I think this is a rational position to take. In particular I would argue that whether or not this paper is one of them, I can conceive of some papers that the NSF should distance itself from quite rationally. Suppose someone had written a paper showing that, say, scientific reaearch itself was harmful, that the more research was done, the more we angered the gods, or something, and so we should limit our research. The authors have actual evidence to this effect (increasing natural disasters in countries with nationwide science programs, etc.) and apart from the intuitively-bizarre hypothesis, nothing is obviously nonsensical with their methods. Still, almost all scientists think the hypothesis is far-fetched enough that this evidence isn't nearly strong enough to even put the hypothesis into play. Also the hypothesis happens to align with a political plank of the Yellow Party, one of the major political parties that believes in not angering the gods and reducing NSF funding. I think the NSF would be justified in quashing this paper early instead of letting it play out in the marketplace of ideas, because of the risks to the marketplace of ideas itself if the paper is put to the debate it otherwise deserves and becomes popular on Yellow-leaning non-scientific media. At that point we are just trying to figure out where the line is. Science, in the sense of the project of humanity to do research about the world, does have values of its own; it is not inherently unscientific for the NSF to ever object to a paper that is at odds with its values.
- tbrownaw 8y ago
  That sounds like the same basic idea as the usual misapplication of Popper's Paradox of Tolerance. It's not supposed to be that you ban ideas that might be harmful, it that you ban pushing ideas by means other than rational argument.
- haberman 8y ago
  > I think the NSF would be justified in quashing this paper early instead of letting it play out in the marketplace of ideas, because of the risks to the marketplace of ideas itself if the paper is put to the debate it otherwise deserves What about the risk to the marketplace of ideas if certain ideas can be quashed by authorities for being distasteful? Galileo being the canonical example of this. > it is not inherently unscientific for the NSF to ever object to a paper that is at odds with its values. Science investigates empirical facts about the world. How can a fact be at odds with a value? Facts describe the world as it is. Values describe what we think is important, and how we ought to act. Discovering a fact about the natural world does not inherently say anything about what is right, moral, or good.
Quanttek 8y ago
I have to issues with it: The write-up seems very one-sided as can already be noticed in the language (1) and the paper, as others have pointed out, is not much of a good scientific paper (2). It seems like the whole controversy was engineered or, at least, he deliberately tried to provoke/"troll" the academic community with his paper. 1) Certain parts of the post ring my alarm bells when it comes to the language used: For example: "Fortunately for me, I am now retired and rather less easily intimidated—one of the benefits of being a Vietnam combat veteran and former U.S. Army Ranger, I guess." Also, certain parts don't really seem to pass a smell test: > Half his board, he explained unhappily, had told him that unless he pulled the article, they would all resign and “harass the journal” he had founded 25 years earlier “_until it died._” Faced with the loss of his own scientific legacy, he had capitulated. “A publication in a dead journal,” he offered, “wouldn’t help you.” I also find it highly suspicious that so many statisticians, fellow mathematicians etc seem to think of the paper as pseudoscientific. When even the NSF and editorial boards, institutions traditionally very conservative, are unhappy, there is probably a reason why 2) I'm not mathematician but a cursory glance at the text reveals a few very surprising assumptions. The paper's hypothesis is this: > SELECTIVITY-VARIABILITY PRINCIPLE. In a species with two sexes A and B, both of which are needed for reproduction, suppose that sex A is relatively selective, i.e., will mate only with a top tier (less than half ) of B candidates [1]. Then from one generation to the next, among subpopulations of B with comparable average attributes, those with greater variability will tend to prevail over those with lesser variability. Conversely, if A is relatively non-selective, accepting all but a bottom fraction (less than half ) of the opposite sex, then subpopulations of B with lesser variability will tend to prevail over those with comparable means and greater variability. [1] As the author points out himself, this presupposes that there is an absolute scale of attractiveness. However, he hides that fact (and its facial controversy) in a bit more convoluted writing: "it will be assumed that to each individual (or phenotype) in each sex is assigned a numerical desirability value which reflects its desirability to the opposite sex". There is only a larger group of people in the top bracket, e.g. 9s, if that is an absolute value on an universal, absolute scale (i.e. if you pick a set, numerical point on this graph https://i.stack.imgur.com/JWWuw.png https://i.stack.imgur.com/JWWuw.png). If attractiveness is relative and based on the average for example, your contextual situation and "top bracket" corresponds to e.g. top 10%, than the group size doesn't change and the subpopulation with greater variability doesn't have an advantage. And there is evidence for that when we recall that most people date people from a similar social background and that ideas of attractiveness are (partially) based on your background. Additionally, looking at statistical evidence, we can see that, while there is a difference in childless partners, - which would imply that one groups dates more selectively - that difference is not as large as the authors allude to: https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2010/27/more-childless-men https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2010/27/more-childless-men. And that is only one crude statistic, best would be number of children per partner. From the way he writes the paper (and especially this write-up), despite disclaimers to the contrary, he clearly tries to apply his theory to humans with women being the selective sex.
aldoushuxley001 8y ago
Well that's a fine indication of how corrupt our scientific institutions are these days. Damn shame.
verylongname 8y ago
Assuming the basic facts claimed by the author are correct, this is really bad. I'm not referring to the behavior attributed to the U Chicago professor and her husband, either. That might be exaggerated by the author (the account is only one side of the story) and, even if it isn't, strong feelings are not uncommon when it comes to controversial topics. Systems should work even when individuals or small groups of people behave badly. The scandal here is the journal editors deviating from their standard procedures. There are procedures in place for re-evaluating articles which have been published or accepted for publication, and for retracting them if they don't meet proper standards. If the members of editorial boards don't think those procedures are proper, they should work to change them, or, barring that, resign. What they did instead undermines the credibility of the journals. How do we know that usual procedures are followed in other cases when they clearly weren't in this one (assuming the facts are as stated in the post)? Are there articles that are accepted for publication because of external pressure, over the objection of reviewers and editors? Are there other papers which have been disappeared without the expected retraction notices? What a disgrace.
- thraway180306 8y ago
  The process, as told by the author, was that one of the editors invited to submit, and three weeks later it was published upon which the rest of the editorial board took notice and threatened resignation. By that telling it was published practically on the spot, especially for mathematics where things are famously glacially slow. Browsing through the journal one mostly sees submission and publication dates separated by many months. Last published paper in the current volume was received over a year before. But this paper made it in three weeks. So it was fast tracked by an editor. Editorial board could take issue with that, arguing it haven't gone by the review properly or whatever the usual procedures before publication are. It might have been put up on the web by the managing editor (since on leave and replaced in the interim) or whomever had the admin password, but editorial board to whom the journal's reputation really belongs hasn't deemed it to be their publication. Of the timeline, author says he's uploaded to ArXiv in September, while by that time he was on revision 3 of https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.04184 https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.04184 uploaded in March. What was added in September however was a piece of journalism in an appendix, that then disappeared in most recent revisions. Last revision was posted just 2 weeks ago, apparently there still were arguments to strengthen (or journalism to remove) before Quillette ran the story. There he paints his work as "science" and some people including the editorial board as "activists". By Google however appears the same Ted Hill founded a site "to promote campus activism in general" and "to serve as a focal point for organizing activists" where he chronicles his long history of activism http://www.motherfunctor.org/CompleteHistory2013.php http://www.motherfunctor.org/CompleteHistory2013.php
epx 8y ago
I have observed empirically GMVH in cats. Female cats were more "standard" in behavior, and held their own much more consistently. (This is NOT to say that they were run-of-the-mill; every one of them had pretty different personalities. I still miss Maria, my Siamese cat. Hope reincarnation exists.) The male cats varied from totally dumb to extremely intelligent. One cat "Negro" was almost like a monkey, he managed to walk on my shoulders around my head, while most cats are afraid of being held this high. But he ran the wrong gay when my dad was parking the car and was run over ;( Pretty dumb error for a cat that was so intelligent. An idiot-savant cat, perhaps?
- YuriNiyazov 8y ago
  You are getting downvoted because you included the name of your cat which to an American-native audience means something quite different than a Portuguese- or Spanish- native audience.
  - epx 8y ago
    Oh... damn. But I won't edit.
jmmcd 8y ago
My main problem with the paper is that it's about groups, not individuals. Groyp selection has been debunked. There are better ways to think about the wider variance that don't involve groups. Think instead about each individual "gambling" in its embryology and development.
- yorwba 8y ago
  Selection in the paper operates at the individual level. The groups are only a convenient abstraction to determine outcomes at the population level. You can think of group membership being determined by carrying a specific allele. Then the number of individuals in a group is just the frequency of that allele.
no_identd 8y ago
Here's a blog post discussing this: https://gowers.wordpress.com/2018/09/09/has-an-uncomfortable-truth-been-suppressed/ https://gowers.wordpress.com/2018/09/09/has-an-uncomfortable... Here's a "Statement addressing unfounded allegations." by the Mathematical Intelligencer: https://math.uchicago.edu/~wilkinso/Statement.html https://math.uchicago.edu/~wilkinso/Statement.html And here's a "Statement in response to Ted Hill's unfounded allegations." by the New York Journal of Mathematics: https://www.math.uchicago.edu/~farb/statement https://www.math.uchicago.edu/~farb/statement

510 points by alexmat 8y ago

Reminds me of https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/vl/notes/dijkstra.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/vl/notes/dijkstra.html

rule_follower 8y ago
The rabble are now inside the walls and even ensconced in its offices.

DanAndersen 8y ago

Direct arxiv link to the preprint in question: https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.04184 https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.04184 Kudos to the author for being brave enough to detail these events. Academia and the process of science has enough blind spots without needing activists in the mix to add their own. >“Several colleagues,” she wrote, had warned her that publication would provoke “extremely strong reactions” and there existed a “very real possibility that the right-wing media may pick this up and hype it internationally.” It's as if these people had never heard of the Streisand Effect. What would have been a stuffy publication of no interest beyond a small circle of curious researchers is now a public salacious affair.

jostmey 8y ago
It looks like a well written paper with some really cool ideas. Too bad about what happened to it
- AlexCoventry 8y ago
  There is nothing original or subtle about it, and it was blatantly intended by the Mathematical Intelligencer editor to stir shit up.
  - barry-cotter 8y ago
    All of that can be true and Amie Wilkinson's campaign of harassment would still be vile and disgusting behaviour, unworthy of an adult of any kind. She got the paper withdrawn from two different journals, and got Dr Tabachnikov to withdraw his name from the paper. What do you think of Dr Wilkinson's behaviour? Because that’s what the article is about, a campaign of harassment from a woman in a position of power.
    - mirimir 8y ago
      What's relevant here is her unprofessional and harassing behavior. If she were a man, the behavior would be no less vile, nor more so.
    - AlexCoventry 8y ago
      > What do you think of Dr Wilkinson's behaviour? I'd need a more authoritative account of it to form a view.
      - aunasdfuyb 8y ago
        And what authoritative accounts have you used to dismiss the paper and the journal editor? If you believe the editor when they say "I am happy to stir up controversy" why not also believe them when they say "we could make a real contribution here"?
        AlexCoventry 8y ago
        > what authoritative accounts have you used to dismiss the paper and the journal editor? I read the paper and drew my own conclusion. > why not also believe them when they say "we could make a real contribution here"? That snippet in context: "After the Middlebury fracas, in which none of the protestors had read the book they were protesting, we could make a real contribution here by insisting that all views be heard." That's just fancy language for "stir shit up." There's nothing there about the intellectual merit of Hill's paper, just an unobtainable value that "all views be heard." People should read the paper to make up their own minds, though. I'm with her, there.
- UncleMeat 8y ago
  Why do you feel qualified to evaluate the paper? This is the risk. It is difficult for laypeople to properly evaluate a paper, so any nonsense when presented well can convince people.
barry-cotter 8y ago
> It's as if these people had never heard of the Streisand Effect. What would have been a stuffy publication of no interest beyond a small circle of curious researchers is now a public salacious affair. You're not reading about all the other times articles offensive to a certain point of view got memory holed successfully. Most of the time powerful assholes get away with their behaviour. Note that the only reason this article is even on the internet is that one of the original two co-authors is retired and beyond the reach of professional threats.
- waterhouse 8y ago
  In a similar vein, there's a paper with the fascinating name "Thirty Years of Denying the Evidence on Gender Symmetry in Partner Violence: Implications for Prevention and Treatment". https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233717660_Thirty_Years_of_Denying_the_Evidence_on_Gender_Symmetry_in_Partner_Violence_Implications_for_Prevention_and_Treatment https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233717660_Thirty_Ye... "Method 7: Harass, Threaten, or Penalize Researchers Who Publish Evidence on Gender Symmetry ... The most extreme example was the experience of Susan Steinmetz. When she was at the University of Delaware and was being reviewed for promotion and tenure, there was an organized attempt to block her appointment through unsolicited letters to her department and the university president. They asserted that Steinmetz was not a suitable person to promote because her research showing high rates of women's perpetration of PV was not believable. In short, they accused her of scientific fraud (Susan Steinmetz, personal communications during the years 1973 to 1988, when we collaborated in research and coauthored two books). An academic version that implies fraud is Pleck and colleagues (1978). Even more extreme, there was a bomb threat at a daughter's wedding. At the University of Manitoba, a lecturer's contract was not renewed because of protests about her research, which found approximately equal rates of PV by women and men. I have been repeatedly harassed and penalized. ... Two of my graduate students were warned that they will never get jobs if they do their PhD dissertation with me." And more examples are given.
  - orangecat 8y ago
    Wow. That's especially amazing considering that the claim of similar domestic violence rates actually supports the progressive axiom that there are no innate psychological differences between men and women.
mirimir 8y ago
Yes, and it's still there. If it goes away, I'll be happy to provide copies. Or put it up somewhere secure. And FYI: > At this point, faced with career-threatening reprisals from their own departmental colleagues and the diversity committee at Penn State, as well as displeasure from the NSF, Sergei and his colleague who had done computer simulations for us withdrew their names from the research. Fortunately for me, I am now retired and rather less easily intimidated—one of the benefits of being a Vietnam combat veteran and former U.S. Army Ranger, I guess. So, I continued to revise the paper, and finally posted it on the online mathematics archives.
leibwiht 8y ago
>It's as if these people had never heard of the Streisand Effect. It's not that they don't know about it, it's that the quote in question is an overt threat and the entire point of it is that the person it is said to will give up and stop trying out of fear, which would certainly prevent any sort of Streisand effect from happening.

exolymph 8y ago

Prediction: This article will get flagged off the front page.

commandlinefan 8y ago
Memory holed off of hacker news too, you say?
quotemstr 8y ago
The admins have the ability to turn off flags for specific posts. They would do well to do it here.
- commandlinefan 8y ago
  OP is flagged already.
  - yorwba 8y ago
    The post dropped off the front page a few hours ago, but then suddenly jumped up again, so I guess the mods intervened. Currently it does not appear to have been flagged by a large enough number of people to kill it.
    - jtbayly 8y ago
      It's gone again.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

moneytide 8y ago

The female body is our only means of citizen production. Genetic and resource input is all that's required of the male. As such, the female mind is wired to instinctually minimize risk, so as to set the stage for a healthy womb in the time leading up to conception and for the 9 months following. That's my two cents. Otherwise, I'm concerned why people are apparently getting funded to research these sorts of things.

traject_ 8y ago

Wow, I didn't know that academia was getting this bad; what happened to letting the truth be debated a la the Socratic dialogue in the academia of all places!

lucio 8y ago
>what happened to letting the truth be debated a la the Socratic dialogue in the academia of all places! https://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1038&context=rrgc https://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi...
- thyrsus 8y ago
  The Bailey paper proposes three steps: 1. Women have been historically discriminated against. 2. Women are currently discriminated against by people using the Socratic dialog. 3. The Socratic dialog discriminates against women. The leap from 2. to 3. is reminiscent of "Hitler was a vegetarian. Therefore vegetarians are Nazis."
quotemstr 8y ago
What happened? I call it valence hijacking. Sometimes, a thing --- a word, an institution, a bit of history --- has cultural power. It's surrounded with an aura (or valence, if you will) of gravitas and mystique, usually accumulated over decades, or millennia. Acrivists notice that these things have cultural power and hijack them, turning them into something useful for the cause while denying that anything has changed. Consider, for example, how many people claim, in all earnestness, that disagreement is "literal violence". Disagreement is obviously not violence, but by using this word, activists can "steal" some of the emotion attached to the word "violence" and weild it for their cause. This hijacking works for a while, until people catch on. At that point, activists, like locusts, move on to areas not yet stripped bare of meaning. The same mechanism that at micro scale operates on words operates at macro scale on institutions. Academia in particular has been ravaged by this process: huge parts of the academy no longer practice anything resembling science. Their studies do not reproduce. Their papers go unread. Their lectures become diatribes. Their students become zealots. The forms are present, but the substance is gone. This article describes the early stages of such a hijacking.

scythe 8y ago

Interesting. I strongly disagree with the author's attempt to connect his experience with the Damore fracas. Damore's "manuscript" comprised a number of weakly-justified claims on a variety of subjects in psychology and sociology, reaching far beyond the GMVH, and was furthermore directly critical both of the hiring policies of his employer (!!) and of inclusiveness initiatives in the technology industry more generally. By contrast, the paper by Hill et al provides a single argument about a specific topic and downplays the political implications (to the extent it mentions them at all). The paper is not without at least one obvious mistake: > If gender differences in selectivity have been decreasing and are now less significant in some species than they were in prehistoric times, then this theory could also predict that the gender difference in variability in those species has also been decreasing. One recent meta-analysis found empirical evidence of exactly that trend in humans, reporting “The gender difference in variability has reduced substantially over time within the United States Gender variability over the 240 years of the existence of the United States is probably not a good proxy for gender variability over the 5000 years from the beginning of literate societies to the present.

octonion 8y ago

Isn't Quillette a right-wing propaganda outlet? I have them blocked on Twitter.

ignoramceisblis 8y ago
Extraordinary. "I don't know a particular thing, but I'm censoring it anyway and (because?) I heard it was "right-wing"." Read their (succinct) about page to find out more (http://quillette.com/about/ http://quillette.com/about/), and consider reading their articles for yourself, especially before echoing any disinformation you've acquired from your trusty sources. Your comment adds nothing to the discussion. Mine only serves to help guide you in thinking for yourself.

quotemstr 8y ago

This disgraceful behavior from academia is shredding the credibility of the entire enterprise. How is anyone supposed to trust any unintuitive conclusions with expensive implications --- for example, on climate change --- when the academic community has demonstrated a propensity to shriek at and censor unorthodox ideas instead of contest them on the merits?

zeth___ 8y ago
Science has been hijacked from the inside for a long time now. While it's better than trusting straight up corporate releases, there are thumbs on the scales that push studies to get the results those giving the funding want. Social science is particularly bad at this, to the point I doubt any research done since the 1950s isn't ideologically tainted, at that time due to the cold war and the need to discredit anything "communist".
- daodedickinson 8y ago
  There's way too much unmet need to discredit socialism right now. There was a failed meager attempt circa 1950 that ended with McCarthy's character successfully assassinated and socialists in charge of the schools so they could slowly take power even as their ideas obviously destroy wherever they gain it quickly.
briandear 8y ago
This is specificly why I am a climate skeptic. Not a denier, mind you, but a skeptic when it comes to anything purporting to be “settled science.” It’s specifically because there is a strong resistance to anything damaging to the status quo, as supported by grant funding and, to a lesser extent, political agenda. Frankly, it’s hard to trust academia on controversial topics.
- fnordsensei 8y ago
  With climate change though, it seems that the academic consensus is that humanity has an effect on the climate, while (some significant portion of) media seems to regularly depict it as more of a 50/50 up-in-the-air situation. In this article, it's not about media depiction vs academic consensus, but friction within academic sciences itself.

oflannabhra 8y ago

I had not heard of Quillette until Tyler Cowen interviewed [0] Claire Lehmann, the founding editor. This article, and the precipitating events, fit perfectly into Quillette’s raison d’etre[1]. [0] - https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/claire-lehmann-tyler-cowen-political-correctness-social-norms-australian-culture-e52e2c08c629 https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/claire-lehmann-t... [1] - https://quillette.com/about/ https://quillette.com/about/

quotemstr 8y ago
I'm almost wondering whether Quillette should start a scientific publication arm for unsafe research. The open access model has low overhead, and it might be possible to allow researchers to publish under pseudonyms while upholding publication standards.
- ratsmack 8y ago
  And why would publishing controversial subjects be "unsafe"? Isn't one of the merits of ones learning is to have an open mind to new ideas? Why is it that when something is published that a specific group disagrees with or has "feelings" that are troubling do we feel the need to appease them to no ends... I find this troubling myself.
  - waterhouse 8y ago
    I'm guessing quotemstr used "unsafe" to mean "unsafe to your career as a researcher if you try to publish it in conventional universities".
  - mirimir 8y ago
    From the article: > At this point, faced with career-threatening reprisals from their own departmental colleagues and the diversity committee at Penn State, as well as displeasure from the NSF, Sergei and his colleague who had done computer simulations for us withdrew their names from the research. That strikes me as pretty damn "unsafe".
  - 8y ago

userbinator 8y ago

The suppression of uncomfortable truths is not new; it seems almost like a religion and reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_affair

opwieurposiu 8y ago

Amie Wilkinson has managed to do many times more harm to the image of women in science then this paper ever could.

mirimir 8y ago
Well, that's going too far, I think. She comes off as extremely unprofessional, but there are lots of unprofessional men, as well.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
mathprof 8y ago
She is an ideologue who persecutes scientists because their Research doesn't fit her life's narrative. Oppressive Mob mentality at its best and least reflected.

ve55 8y ago

When opponents think about how 'damaging' papers like this are, they should also consider how damaging things like this are to the field in general, and how they may cause a lot of second-order harm. Many that I know have begun to distrust areas of academia much more recently, and when they see scenarios like this over and over it doesn't help. We all know that no one will support you for saying the truth if it won't go down well politically. The end result of this is that Academia will only publish the 'right' results, but it will not matter as few will trust them to begin with. After reading the full article I find it funny they decide to critique the paper by calling it 'pseudoscientific'. I'd like to play the same game back at them and simply call their beliefs 'pseudoscientific' and proceed to pretend like they are discredited and don't warrant further inspection. If you keep crying wolf, eventually no one will believe you when you really need them to. You can't go against truth forever.

whatshisface 8y ago
At least the controversy about string theory has been in the public eye for a while now. It seems like physics hit the worst of it in the 90s and the public trust we have now is relatively sturdy.
- nopinsight 8y ago
  The public trusts most areas of physics because we use them to build many artifacts, some quite amazing, we interact with everyday and also because there are solid experiments that repeatedly confirm them. Some may extend this trust to the most modern areas yet without experimental confirmations, but not everyone does. The situation is quite different for many softer sciences for which neither of the above conditions is true. If the public found out they have been misled by a whole field for decades, the trust in that field could be shaken to a great extent. Even adjacent fields could be affected as collateral damage.
api 8y ago
It's a tough issue because both sides are right. Recent political and social events show that the general public is not yet able to discuss issues like this rationally and maturely. Yet at the same time science must be free to inquire without political restriction. I do not have an answer.

brenschluss 8y ago

The paper seems to have some egregious and basic errors. Take a look at the paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.04184.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.04184.pdf On page 2, it says (in discussing Special Case 1): "If sex A is relatively selective and will mate only with the top most desirable quarter of sex B, then all of the next generation will be offspring of the more variable subpopulation B1" However, if you look at the histogram in Figure 1, it's clear that if sex A mates with the top most desirable quarter of sex B, then sex A is choosing most desirable mates who happened to be part of the subpopulation B1. That is, as diagrammed in the histogram, variability is not a function of the population any more, since the red rectangle noting 'B1' with desirability 3 to 4 is no longer variable. It would be absolutely incorrect to say that "all of the next generation will be offspring of the more variable subpopulation B1". In other words, it's like saying: "In Sack 1, I have a mix of of blueberries and watermelons. Sack 1 is varied in fruit size, and has a high variability. I've sorted them by size, and taken the most largest fruit and put them in Sack 2. Now Sack 2 is full of variable sizes of fruit, since it came from Sack 1, which had high variability." (EDIT: to be clear, I think the above sack example is incorrect; I'm illustrating the logic in which the paper seems to be incorrect, according to my understanding.)

zeth___ 8y ago
You misunderstand the argument. It's like having a bag 1 filled with equal quantities of capsicums, cherries, and apples, then selecting the top reddest 25% of bag 1 and moving them to bag 2. You will have much less variability of fruit type in bag 2 because you used color selection to fill it (apples and capsicums come in three colors at will be selected 1/3rd the rate of cherries). That's the whole point of sexual vs natural selection.
- quotemstr 8y ago
  I'm glad the OP posted his comment, since it presents a window into the kind of thinking that will go on to form the narrative scar tissue surrounding this affair. By now, the response pattern from the activist camp to inconvenient manuscripts should be clear to anyone who has been paying attention. If attempts to silence authors pre-publication don't work, and if post-publication censorship ends up being ineffective, the activist rhetorical tactic of last resort is blatant misrepresentation of a manuscript's contents. They're loathe to use this tactic, since it costs them massive credibility every time they plainly lie about something everyone can read, but it's still better (from their POV) than cognitive dissonance.

jancsika 8y ago

> Half his board, he explained unhappily, had told him that unless he pulled the article, they would all resign and “harass the journal” he had founded 25 years earlier “until it died.” Half a board of academics skulking to avoid controversy, ok. But becoming a hive of killer bees threatening to attacking their own hive? That doesn't pass the smell test.

daodedickinson 8y ago
Sounds exactly like standard academic politics to me.
mirimir 8y ago
Do you argue that the author is lying?
shard972 8y ago
Seems about right to me. Have you turned on a television in the last few years? People are out for blood these days.

DINKDINK 8y ago

And yet it still ~~moves~~ distributes.

jonnybgood 8y ago

This is a one-sided story pushing a "Us vs Them" narrative. I can see nothing productive coming out of this.

pelario 8y ago
I'm not sure if this is pushing a "us vs them"; and yes, it obviously is a one-sided story. So, yes, I would really like to read a reply to this article but any of the other parties mentioned there.
nervlord 8y ago
ofcourse not, it's not talking about anything you want to hear. If it was an article about something you cared about though, or that would offer some advancement of your pet cause, i'm quite sure you'd be out there with your placards and the silly chants
- dang 8y ago
  We've banned this account for violating the site guidelines. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
lolc 8y ago
The weird thing is that the paper was accepted at two journals. Which says something about it's quality. It doesn't mean the author is right! But at that point (if you assume scientifc honesty) you'd expect critics to distill their disagreements in a paper and publish that. That hasn't happened however. All that's happened has happened behind the scenes. Unless the article we read is dishonest in this regard.

another-cuppa 8y ago

I don't even understand why this is controversial. I've explained this to a number of women before and none of them have felt hurt. On the contrary, in fact, it makes them feel better. Humans always fixate on extremes. Men and women. It's a problem in our society. We always want to see the very best and we're not interested in others who are still way above average. There are thousands of women doing great science, engineering, programming etc., but the very best are almost always men, and it's our fault that we only care about the very best.

kupiakos 8y ago
It may have made the women you've talked to feel better, but personally, I'm not a fan of the idea that I'm simply less biologically capable than men in any way.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- js8 8y ago
  "the idea that I'm simply less biologically capable than men in any way" Nobody (serious) is saying that. First, when this is talked about, it's always about averages, which are meaningless from individual perspective. Second, there are obvious biological traits where women are less capable than men on average, like weightlifting. There are also traits where women are more capable, like having kids. These are facts though. You might also not be a fan of idea that "Earth revolves around Sun", but that's how it is. On the other hand, I can understand your feeling. I am for example not a fan of idea that many humans are xenophobes.
  - Zanni 8y ago
    Weightlifting is an excellent example. It's not controversial in the least to say that men (on the whole) are stronger than women. And the strongest man will almost certainly be stronger than the strongest woman. But that doesn't mean a particular woman can't out lift a particular man. I see this all the time at my CrossFit box, where there are women who regularly put more weight on a barbell than I can manage. I'm not even talking about pound for pound of bodyweight either. I'm talking about women who are 50 pounds lighter than I am who can still deadlift 50 pounds more than I can. Some of these CrossFit women are strong.

abecedarius 8y ago

This seems new, and passed over in all the comments so far: > None of them had ever heard of a paper in any field being disappeared after formal publication. Rejected prior to publication? Of course. Retracted? Yes, but only after an investigation, the results of which would then be made public by way of explanation. But simply disappeared? Never. If a formally refereed and published paper can later be erased from the scientific record and replaced by a completely different article, without any discussion with the author or any announcement in the journal, what will this mean for the future of electronic journals? I'd had the impression online journals normally had some plan for archiving. So insiders were left out of the threat model?

mirimir 8y ago
Looks like there's no hard copy. It's totally online.[0] I checked https://web.archive.org/ https://web.archive.org/ but the 2017/10/23 snapshot ends at p. 1539,[1] and the 2017/12/01 snapshot has the substitute paper.[2] Ajay Kumar, Niteesh Sahni, and Dinesh Singh Invariance under finite Blaschke factors on BMOA 1641 So unless someone grabbed it, it's toast. Except for the preprint, anyway. 0) http://nyjm.albany.edu/nyjm.html http://nyjm.albany.edu/nyjm.html 1) https://web.archive.org/web/20171027011421/http://nyjm.albany.edu/j/2017/Vol23.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20171027011421/http://nyjm.alban... 2) https://web.archive.org/web/20171201163957/http://nyjm.albany.edu/j/2017/Vol23.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20171201163957/http://nyjm.alban...
- jaccarmac 8y ago
  It's still available on the site, AND I've grabbed it. http://nyjm.albany.edu/j/2017/23-72v-orig.pdf http://nyjm.albany.edu/j/2017/23-72v-orig.pdf
jessriedel 8y ago
> Retracted? Yes, but only after an investigation, the results of which would then be made public by way of explanation. Just to clarify: when papers are retracted, they are not normally erased from the database and replaced with an explanation. See this Nature paper for an example; the entire paper is kept available online, just as before, except that the words "RETRACTED" is stamped on each PDF page https://www.nature.com/articles/nature10167 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature10167 Likewise, nothing published to the arXiv is ever removed. A retraction notice can be added as an update, but the complete version history is always available. Articles are much more likely to be "un-published" (wiped from the archives) in journalism than scientific publications.

tasubotadas 8y ago

I just love this new concept of inclusivity by exclusivity. And what are those people thinking? They are seriously undermining their credibility in the long term. Imagine this in 50 years - whenever you would mention something about gender-inequality you would be taken as a tin-foiled freak.

jey 8y ago
> whenever you would mention something about gender-inequality you would be taken as a tin-foiled freak. Are you sure? We won't be allowed to acknowledge differences in average adult height or differences in the ability to carry children?

rebuilder 8y ago

Does anyone have an outside source on this? The writeup linked seems pretty one-sided, and the whole naive-surprise-meets-hardnosed-doggedness tone doesn't seem very genuine. So I'm left wondering how accurate a portrayal of events this is.

zebraflask 8y ago
Exactly. It's quite a story, but something in it doesn't ring true.

n4r9 8y ago

> Google engineer James Damore suggested that several innate biological factors, including gender differences in variability, might help explain gender disparities in Silicon Valley hi-tech jobs. Did he? I read it when it came to light and briefly again just now and cannot see any mention of higher variability amongst men. Psychological differences, yes, but mostly in the slightly vague "women like people, men like things" or "women are more neurotic" sense. I'd also question the premise that Damore was fired merely for bringing up psychological differences. He also bridged the is/ought gap by making several demands of Google's hiring practices.

darawk 8y ago
> I'd also question the premise that Damore was fired merely for bringing up psychological differences. He also bridged the is/ought gap by making several demands of Google's hiring practices. I don't think he made demands. He called for open discussion, and a reconsideration of aggressive recruitment of women.
- n4r9 8y ago
  Fair point, demand is too strong a term. He specifically attacked funding for programs for minorities or women, and any hiring practises with emphasis on diversity, as being "based on false assumptions generated by our biases" (supposedly the creeping "leftist" ideology that's taking over Google) and that they "can actually increase race and gender tensions" without backing this up. I'm not going to argue against that in this post, but I think imo he went beyond simply highlighting biological differences.
  - darawk 8y ago
    What he was saying was that if these biological differences are real, then we ought to expect unequal representation in engineering of women. And therefore, diversity programs that aim for equal representation are misguided and doomed to failure.
    - n4r9 8y ago

leiroigh 8y ago

Skim the preprint https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.04184 https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.04184 , especially section 7. The article is not fit for publication in a mathematical journal, it is cosplaying as math. To cite: > The following simple proposition may be well known, but since no reference is known to the author, a proof is included for completeness. >Proposition 7.1. N(µ, σ1) is more variable than N(µ, σ2) if and only if σ1 > σ2. >Proof: [lots of lines] In a real mathematical paper, this claim would not be glorified into a numbered proposition, and it would not merit a proof; this amount of mathematical work is the distance between one line and the next. I would not even expect students to provide a proof for such utter trivialities in a homework assignment. Author should have submitted to PNAS instead, or written a blogpost.

quilletteThrow 8y ago
There are different notions of variability used in the paper, and he is showing one is equivalent to the other. It doesn't seem ridiculous to me to include the proof, even though it is simple. Lots of simple proofs are included in papers and books.
alexandercrohde 8y ago
Can we separate the discussion of whether this paper has a superfluous proof in it from whether its conclusion is true? Additionally, the main point of the article is that that Mr. Hill feels his paper was pushed out of publication because of a political agenda. Let's also acknowledge the claim of political motivations corrupting academics is independent of the "superfluous proof" claim.
- quilletteThrow 8y ago
  The paper doesn't have a conclusion, really. It describes a model and is supposedly intended to spur greater discussion. This is probably part of the reason the paper is written as it is: meant to be simple and easily accessible to people in other fields. The parent will need to work harder to dismiss the author...
  - 8y ago

geofft 8y ago

> “Our concern,” [the NSF] explained, “is that [this] paper appears to promote pseudoscientific ideas that are detrimental to the advancement of women in science, and at odds with the values of the NSF.” I think this is a rational position to take. In particular I would argue that whether or not this paper is one of them, I can conceive of some papers that the NSF should distance itself from quite rationally. Suppose someone had written a paper showing that, say, scientific reaearch itself was harmful, that the more research was done, the more we angered the gods, or something, and so we should limit our research. The authors have actual evidence to this effect (increasing natural disasters in countries with nationwide science programs, etc.) and apart from the intuitively-bizarre hypothesis, nothing is obviously nonsensical with their methods. Still, almost all scientists think the hypothesis is far-fetched enough that this evidence isn't nearly strong enough to even put the hypothesis into play. Also the hypothesis happens to align with a political plank of the Yellow Party, one of the major political parties that believes in not angering the gods and reducing NSF funding. I think the NSF would be justified in quashing this paper early instead of letting it play out in the marketplace of ideas, because of the risks to the marketplace of ideas itself if the paper is put to the debate it otherwise deserves and becomes popular on Yellow-leaning non-scientific media. At that point we are just trying to figure out where the line is. Science, in the sense of the project of humanity to do research about the world, does have values of its own; it is not inherently unscientific for the NSF to ever object to a paper that is at odds with its values.

tbrownaw 8y ago
That sounds like the same basic idea as the usual misapplication of Popper's Paradox of Tolerance. It's not supposed to be that you ban ideas that might be harmful, it that you ban pushing ideas by means other than rational argument.
haberman 8y ago
> I think the NSF would be justified in quashing this paper early instead of letting it play out in the marketplace of ideas, because of the risks to the marketplace of ideas itself if the paper is put to the debate it otherwise deserves What about the risk to the marketplace of ideas if certain ideas can be quashed by authorities for being distasteful? Galileo being the canonical example of this. > it is not inherently unscientific for the NSF to ever object to a paper that is at odds with its values. Science investigates empirical facts about the world. How can a fact be at odds with a value? Facts describe the world as it is. Values describe what we think is important, and how we ought to act. Discovering a fact about the natural world does not inherently say anything about what is right, moral, or good.

Quanttek 8y ago

I have to issues with it: The write-up seems very one-sided as can already be noticed in the language (1) and the paper, as others have pointed out, is not much of a good scientific paper (2). It seems like the whole controversy was engineered or, at least, he deliberately tried to provoke/"troll" the academic community with his paper. 1) Certain parts of the post ring my alarm bells when it comes to the language used: For example: "Fortunately for me, I am now retired and rather less easily intimidated—one of the benefits of being a Vietnam combat veteran and former U.S. Army Ranger, I guess." Also, certain parts don't really seem to pass a smell test: > Half his board, he explained unhappily, had told him that unless he pulled the article, they would all resign and “harass the journal” he had founded 25 years earlier “_until it died._” Faced with the loss of his own scientific legacy, he had capitulated. “A publication in a dead journal,” he offered, “wouldn’t help you.” I also find it highly suspicious that so many statisticians, fellow mathematicians etc seem to think of the paper as pseudoscientific. When even the NSF and editorial boards, institutions traditionally very conservative, are unhappy, there is probably a reason why 2) I'm not mathematician but a cursory glance at the text reveals a few very surprising assumptions. The paper's hypothesis is this: > SELECTIVITY-VARIABILITY PRINCIPLE. In a species with two sexes A and B, both of which are needed for reproduction, suppose that sex A is relatively selective, i.e., will mate only with a top tier (less than half ) of B candidates [1]. Then from one generation to the next, among subpopulations of B with comparable average attributes, those with greater variability will tend to prevail over those with lesser variability. Conversely, if A is relatively non-selective, accepting all but a bottom fraction (less than half ) of the opposite sex, then subpopulations of B with lesser variability will tend to prevail over those with comparable means and greater variability. [1] As the author points out himself, this presupposes that there is an absolute scale of attractiveness. However, he hides that fact (and its facial controversy) in a bit more convoluted writing: "it will be assumed that to each individual (or phenotype) in each sex is assigned a numerical desirability value which reflects its desirability to the opposite sex". There is only a larger group of people in the top bracket, e.g. 9s, if that is an absolute value on an universal, absolute scale (i.e. if you pick a set, numerical point on this graph https://i.stack.imgur.com/JWWuw.png https://i.stack.imgur.com/JWWuw.png). If attractiveness is relative and based on the average for example, your contextual situation and "top bracket" corresponds to e.g. top 10%, than the group size doesn't change and the subpopulation with greater variability doesn't have an advantage. And there is evidence for that when we recall that most people date people from a similar social background and that ideas of attractiveness are (partially) based on your background. Additionally, looking at statistical evidence, we can see that, while there is a difference in childless partners, - which would imply that one groups dates more selectively - that difference is not as large as the authors allude to: https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2010/27/more-childless-men https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2010/27/more-childless-men. And that is only one crude statistic, best would be number of children per partner. From the way he writes the paper (and especially this write-up), despite disclaimers to the contrary, he clearly tries to apply his theory to humans with women being the selective sex.

aldoushuxley001 8y ago

Well that's a fine indication of how corrupt our scientific institutions are these days. Damn shame.

verylongname 8y ago

Assuming the basic facts claimed by the author are correct, this is really bad. I'm not referring to the behavior attributed to the U Chicago professor and her husband, either. That might be exaggerated by the author (the account is only one side of the story) and, even if it isn't, strong feelings are not uncommon when it comes to controversial topics. Systems should work even when individuals or small groups of people behave badly. The scandal here is the journal editors deviating from their standard procedures. There are procedures in place for re-evaluating articles which have been published or accepted for publication, and for retracting them if they don't meet proper standards. If the members of editorial boards don't think those procedures are proper, they should work to change them, or, barring that, resign. What they did instead undermines the credibility of the journals. How do we know that usual procedures are followed in other cases when they clearly weren't in this one (assuming the facts are as stated in the post)? Are there articles that are accepted for publication because of external pressure, over the objection of reviewers and editors? Are there other papers which have been disappeared without the expected retraction notices? What a disgrace.

thraway180306 8y ago
The process, as told by the author, was that one of the editors invited to submit, and three weeks later it was published upon which the rest of the editorial board took notice and threatened resignation. By that telling it was published practically on the spot, especially for mathematics where things are famously glacially slow. Browsing through the journal one mostly sees submission and publication dates separated by many months. Last published paper in the current volume was received over a year before. But this paper made it in three weeks. So it was fast tracked by an editor. Editorial board could take issue with that, arguing it haven't gone by the review properly or whatever the usual procedures before publication are. It might have been put up on the web by the managing editor (since on leave and replaced in the interim) or whomever had the admin password, but editorial board to whom the journal's reputation really belongs hasn't deemed it to be their publication. Of the timeline, author says he's uploaded to ArXiv in September, while by that time he was on revision 3 of https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.04184 https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.04184 uploaded in March. What was added in September however was a piece of journalism in an appendix, that then disappeared in most recent revisions. Last revision was posted just 2 weeks ago, apparently there still were arguments to strengthen (or journalism to remove) before Quillette ran the story. There he paints his work as "science" and some people including the editorial board as "activists". By Google however appears the same Ted Hill founded a site "to promote campus activism in general" and "to serve as a focal point for organizing activists" where he chronicles his long history of activism http://www.motherfunctor.org/CompleteHistory2013.php http://www.motherfunctor.org/CompleteHistory2013.php

epx 8y ago

I have observed empirically GMVH in cats. Female cats were more "standard" in behavior, and held their own much more consistently. (This is NOT to say that they were run-of-the-mill; every one of them had pretty different personalities. I still miss Maria, my Siamese cat. Hope reincarnation exists.) The male cats varied from totally dumb to extremely intelligent. One cat "Negro" was almost like a monkey, he managed to walk on my shoulders around my head, while most cats are afraid of being held this high. But he ran the wrong gay when my dad was parking the car and was run over ;( Pretty dumb error for a cat that was so intelligent. An idiot-savant cat, perhaps?

YuriNiyazov 8y ago
You are getting downvoted because you included the name of your cat which to an American-native audience means something quite different than a Portuguese- or Spanish- native audience.
- epx 8y ago
  Oh... damn. But I won't edit.

jmmcd 8y ago

My main problem with the paper is that it's about groups, not individuals. Groyp selection has been debunked. There are better ways to think about the wider variance that don't involve groups. Think instead about each individual "gambling" in its embryology and development.

yorwba 8y ago
Selection in the paper operates at the individual level. The groups are only a convenient abstraction to determine outcomes at the population level. You can think of group membership being determined by carrying a specific allele. Then the number of individuals in a group is just the frequency of that allele.

no_identd 8y ago

Here's a blog post discussing this: https://gowers.wordpress.com/2018/09/09/has-an-uncomfortable-truth-been-suppressed/ https://gowers.wordpress.com/2018/09/09/has-an-uncomfortable... Here's a "Statement addressing unfounded allegations." by the Mathematical Intelligencer: https://math.uchicago.edu/~wilkinso/Statement.html https://math.uchicago.edu/~wilkinso/Statement.html And here's a "Statement in response to Ted Hill's unfounded allegations." by the New York Journal of Mathematics: https://www.math.uchicago.edu/~farb/statement https://www.math.uchicago.edu/~farb/statement