17 ms·

Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

191 points by Fomite 8y ago

rectang 8y ago
Those who believe they are superior will never be persuaded otherwise.
joe_the_user 8y ago
This is headline and article appear to be just a way to sneak a non-mathematical position into questions of supposed mathematical censorship. True or not, suppressed or not, the claim being described can't be described as a "Mathematical truth". It's a paper in what could be described as theoretical biology and theoretical biology making a point. IE, there's no theoretical math that anywhere near this model - no one's suppressing calculus 'cause they don't like some derivative results.
- cyborgx7 8y ago
  Yes, this is about science, not mathematics. But scientific results are open to being question in their methodology and in the interpretation of their results. Mathematics is either correct or it isn't. This is a pretty blatant attempt of shifting something from one category to the other.
  - tacomonstrous 8y ago
    >Mathematics is either correct or it isn't. That's not really a relevant standard for publishability. There is an infinite variety of correct mathematics that is far from being novel enough to be in a quality journal.
    - seanhunter 8y ago
      Well correctness is surely an important factor in whether or not mathematics is publishable, wouldn't you say? Necessary but not sufficient, perhaps.
      - tacomonstrous 8y ago
        Certainly necessary, but very far from sufficient. But even that isn't quite accurate. Every one of my published papers has some kind of error in it. When something is sufficiently interesting and complex, this is essentially inevitable given how the human mind works. Hence the late Voevodksy's attempt to come up with a framework for making such ideas machine checkable.
rdl 8y ago
This is the Streisand Effect in action. (I am sure there are going to be people in a few years who learn of the Streisand Effect first and then learn about some random washed-up musician responsible for it second.)
- Dowwie 8y ago
  What does Barbara Streisand have to do with this? She had a beautiful voice and was loved by many. Memories...
  - rdl 8y ago
    https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2013/04/15/what-is-the-streisand-effect https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2013/04/15/...
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - Dowwie 8y ago
      prepare yourself for disappointment when this change doesn't manifest
- kthejoker2 8y ago
  This is like calling Frank Sinatra or Elvis or John Lennon some random washed up musician. Need to check your predilection to undersell what you personally don't value.
eridius 8y ago
tl;dr: No. Elaborating slightly: A paper that is related to (but does not directly argue for) an "uncomfortable truth" was published, then unpublished 3 days later and replaced with a different paper. The author of this blog piece tracked down the paper and read it, and it turns out to simply be a bad paper that shouldn't have been published to begin with.
- ziggurism 8y ago
  Being a bad paper, even a "never should have been published", is not sufficient reason for retroactively un-publishing a refereed and published paper. A rebuttal or at worst retraction is the appropriate action in that case.
  - tptacek 8y ago
    There's apparently a conflict between the editor who essentially snuck the paper into NYJM and the rest of the editorial board, and it occurred some time ago, during a time where the leadership of the journal was changed for other reasons. It's worth paying close attention to the dates in Ted Hill's retelling of the story, and matching them up with his submissions and other events. Long story short: you're probably right, it probably wasn't handled correctly, but there are mitigating circumstances.
  - DanBC 8y ago
    Was it refereed?
    - tptacek 8y ago
      No, I don't believe so.
frebord 8y ago
Honest question, the general physical differences between the sexes or even races are undeniable, so why is it so taboo to talk about the differences that almost certainly exist in our minds?
- foolrush 8y ago
  Given that "race" is a social construct... https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/04/race-genetics-science-africa/?beta=true https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/04/race-gen...
  - oh_sigh 8y ago
    Could an alien with no human social constructions differentiate between Bantu people and historically native Irish people?
    - dagw 8y ago
      They could also easily differentiate between brown eyed and blue eyed people. The social construct part comes in when you try to explain why one differentiation is more 'important' than the other.
      - googlryas 8y ago
        "eye color is a social construct" and "the importance of eye color is a social construct" are two completely separate ideas. OP clearly states '"race" is a social construct'.
        pjc50 8y ago
        Eye color is a social construct because color is a social construct. The presence of the genes for coloration is the only unambiguous thing, and even then it's vulnerable to all sorts of anomalies in gene expression (heterochromia, chimericism etc)
tptacek 8y ago
There is more going on than this. It's important to know a bit about the venues in question. Mathematical Intelligencer isn't really a journal at all; it's literally a magazine, carried on the shelves it bookstores. It runs some original research but also poetry and jokes and general cultural coverage. NYJM is, on the other hand, a serious (if online-only, lower-tier) theoretical mathematics journal. Ted Hill's paper is light on mathematics. As Joel Fish, an assoc. math prof at UMass Boston described it, it's of the caliber of an undergraduate applied math homework problem. It's also packed with citations to psychology, ev-bio, and current events. Arguably, Hill's paper was reasonable for Intelligencer. But it had no place whatsoever in NYJM, which basically never runs anything but hardcore proof-heavy theoretical mathematics. In the very most charitable interpretation, Hill's paper is an applied math exercise. Here's where the plot thickens: apparently, Hill's paper didn't undergo normal peer review at either journal, and, in particular, was fast-tracked in (papers apparently appear in NYJM as they're submitted, not in annual editions) by an editor that vocally shares Hill's politics. In response, I understand that a significant number of NYJM's peer review board threatened to quit --- an understandable response, since Hill's paper is embarrassing in the context of the rest of what NYJM publishes. I encourage people with strong opinions who haven't done so already to: 1. Read the current version of Hill's paper. 2. Skim the first version of Hill's paper, which had a coauthor and virtually none of the political content subsequent editions had. 3. Skim subsequent versions and notice how and where they introduced political content, and match that up to the dates Hill suggests the paper was submitted, first to M.I. and then to NYJM. 4. Select a few papers at random from NYJM and skim them quickly to get a sense of the venue Hill is angry he was rejected from. I'm left with the impression that this was an elaborate troll, one NYJM didn't handle well --- but then, that would be difficult, since its editor in chief is out on leave owing to a grave medical problem. Later This has been flagged to the nether regions of the HN story rankings, and justifiably so! It's a political controversy! But it's frustrating that the story introducing Hill's side of this in Quillette was at the top of the front page and accumulated hundreds of comments, while an actually-informed story that critically analyzed the paper itself will get no attention at all. Consider that the next time you think about complaining about people flagging politics off the front page. The Quillette story deserved to be flagged.
- Fomite 8y ago
elchief 8y ago
> the idea that some huge percentage of males are simply not desirable enough (as we shall see, the paper requires this percentage to be over 50) to have a chance of reproducing bears no relation to the world as we know it In early humans only the top 16% of males mated Most people mate now, due to religious/society-enforced monogamy https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2833377/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2833377/
- 6nf 8y ago
  Not sure who is downvoting you, this seems to be correct?
  - Arnt 8y ago
    Rather dubious. He says three things: a) Only 16% etc b) most people mate now c) due to religious etc The first is well backed up. The second, not so much, it depends on community (look up the number of childless people in, say, Milan). The third, WTF? Mixing up facts with WTF like that attracts downvotes.
    - 6nf 8y ago
      I think the first one is the only relevant one in this case anyway
    - iguy 8y ago
      > The third, WTF? Not really. A society where only 16% of men mate has 84% angry young men with nothing to lose. Expect a lot of violence, and not much careful consistent tending of the fields... My understanding is that this is why state-sanctioned monogamy exists: it is a tool for avoiding this situation.
      - roenxi 8y ago
        > A society where only 16% of men mate has 84% angry young men with nothing to lose. Is it so crazy to think that a man with no partner could live a socially responsible life? The choice isn't a binary "Happy with wife and kids" vs "Flame, looting, violence and plague". I'm basing my experience on Australian law here, but our 'modern state-sanctioned monogamy' is a comprehensive system to stop fathers from having children then walking away when the going gets tough.
Animats 8y ago
This would be a good simulation exercise. Play with the parameters and watch generations evolve.
jerkstate 8y ago
here's a genetics paper that covers this topic: https://investigativegenetics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/2041-2223-5-13 https://investigativegenetics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.... Issues with the paper and its relevance to the platform it was published in notwithstanding, I think that we have two highly politicized sides, one wishing to promote a finding of "this is how things have been through history" as "this is the way things ought to be" (The MI staff expressed this concern), and another side that seeks to minimize or hide these findings because it will hinder efforts to engineer a "better" future. I think both sides are causing problems and this kind of stuff is getting tiresome.
- ahartmetz 8y ago
  Yes, where are the people saying "this is the truth but I don't have to like it"? There are these wholesale worldviews that people buy into. As a less offensive example, apparently you can't be leftist and not believe in anthropogenic climate change, or conservative and believe in it.
- olleromam91 8y ago
  Sometimes it feels like we are in competition to claim that we are the least fortunate of all sub-groups. Not future focused at all.
  - jerkstate 8y ago
    I agree but I also think that the competition makes sense when you look at the incentives for being recognized by society as unfortunate.
  - Rivers68 8y ago
    Yes! Someone said it! It is time to put the past behind us and think about the future. I feel as though somehow the West (as a civilization) has become overcome with embarrassment at what it did in the past (to Africans, Native Americans, and Asians, in particular) and now, instead of moving on and pursuing reconciliation in good faith, we have decided the only recourse is to obsess about how we are the enemies of civilization. Future? What future? We did so much bad stuff in the past. How could we take any pride in who we are? We're still so racist, sexist, etc. Nevermind the fact that modern life owes a great debt to the West (aircraft, antibiotics, modern representative government, etc.) There are serious problems facing the world today (climate change potentially a existential threat to our species). If you look at the past few centuries, you would think that it is precisely the West that has the institutions and paradigms to address those problems. I'm not saying China isn't destined for great things, or won't contribute to addressing the problems. But imagine what China could do if it worked hand in hand with a 21st century USA that was as determined to end climate change as the 20th century USA was to end various infectious diseases (polio, tuberculosis, measles, for example) or put a man on the moon. Our team is losing the basketball game because one of our star players is at home moping about a mistake he made last season. It's societal narcissism, and, instead of helping "the Rest" (to use Niall Ferguson's shorthand for non-Westerners), it serves no one. My point is: we need to see we are sick as a society. We are too preoccupied by things that happened in the past. Isn't this the lesson of at least one of the great classical tragedies? Why did Romeo and Juliet die? Because their families were stuck in the past and couldn't see that the future was more important than their petty feuds. There's no question we should continue to mind how we treat others (women, immigrants, people from other ethnicities), but we also (in the US, say) need to rediscover a sense of shared national heritage and purpose. History did not, as Fukuyama says, end with the destruction of the USSR. Surely, now that the USSR is gone, the interesting (and peaceful!) work should begin. Instead we're bickering amongst ourselves?
doombolt 8y ago
He's not criticizing the mathematical model, rather the application of this model to modern human society, which is something that nobody ever claimed. Straw man and a bad one at that. He does have some arguments but math is nowhere found, making this a joke of a refutation.
- doombolt 8y ago
  E.g. do you want a real eye opener? In a monogamous society, given that Darwin's observation about increased male variability holds, when partitioning by desirability, women in the top half will have access to males with desirability greater than their own, while women in the bottom half will only have access to males with desirability worse than their own. Go figure. (There's a lot of assumptions here but none of them particularly unrealistic).
  - hef19898 8y ago
    Well, it always strikes me how well educated people with a lot of Knowledge in their domain (assuming that point is valid for the majority on Hacker News) have the tendency to totaly over-simplify other scientific fields. In this case evolution, biology and statistics. So what actually happened to humility, scientific literacy and honest curiosity? Not sure if it was intended, but your second post comes across as Sexist and trying to reason this with bad science.
    - doombolt 8y ago
      It's not a question of science. It's a question of math. Math is a model which allows you to over-simplify other scientific fields in the first place, and then devise solutions which turn out to be useful even in their over-simplified form. This is the reason for the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in natural sciences. However, here I'm not pushing any direct resemblance between model and any society anywhere. You're doing that, not me.
      - hef19898 8y ago
amelius 8y ago
Instead of focusing on a flawed paper, why not look for evidence that there is more variability in one of the sexes in the real world?
- sebastianconcpt 8y ago
  Because for the left, as long as they “work”, reality isn’t as valuable as narratives. They will pretend they honor reality until the arguments get cornered. Then they’ll fallback to their Postmodern anti-realist and anti-rational philosophy and find the next way to use victimhood to try to control the behavior of everybody else. All that with other’s people money, of course.
  - gui67gk 8y ago
    Reality includes hundreds of generations of oppression and subjugation of women by social structures Anyone analyzed whether alpha male attitudes have impacted female evolution? Yeah, actually; other primates have killed alpha males and punished any that show authoritarian attitudes. Afterward they developed much more egalitarian social structures. But human men can’t quite grasp their lack of value to propagating the species, generally speaking. And resort to pointing at one contrived accomplishment after another (ooh good for you at writing a lot of code in a gamed society that has propped you up, James!) It’s social welfare after generations of violent oppression of others that’s given human males a leg up. But sure they do it all on their own, those precious little snowflakes.
- acdha 8y ago
  Why not is the wrong question when all around the world researchers have been actively doing that for many decades, and making huge efforts to identify and control for confounding environmental factors. When essays like this one, Damore’s screed, etc. get debunked it’s based on the actual scientific research not supporting the position rather than a lack of interest in understanding how it works.
rsynnott 8y ago
Betteridge's Law strikes again.
zeroname 8y ago
"When applied to humans, this model is ludicrously implausible. While it is true that some males have trouble finding a mate, the idea that some huge percentage of males are simply not desirable enough (as we shall see, the paper requires this percentage to be over 50) to have a chance of reproducing bears no relation to the world as we know it." It's not ludicrous at all. The world "as we know it" is not the world Homo Sapiens evolved in. There is some evidence of much harsher selection bias a few millennia ago: https://psmag.com/environment/17-to-1-reproductive-success https://psmag.com/environment/17-to-1-reproductive-success
- jeromebaek 8y ago
  This is very interesting. Have you other articles that follow up on this study?
ArchTypical 8y ago
> wouldn’t that suggest that males would have a much higher selection pressure to become more desirable than females? I would think they would want to be more variable as conditions are variable (and therefore fitness criteria are variable). This is such a chaotic theory, that no amount of mathematics could categorize it in a definitive way.
- TheJoYo 8y ago
  there has to be losers when it comes to selection pressures. we can modify our memes faster than we can modify our genes so this doesn't really apply to decent with modification through biological reproduction. biological evolutionary theories unrelated to biological reproduction are meh.
jaccarmac 8y ago
I'd just like to point out that the paper was never removed from the NYJM site[0]. Note the references to the Damore controversy in the third paragraph of the introduction, which Hill conveniently left out of the version he linked to on arXiv. Also interestingly, its accepted date was later than the paper that replaced it and most of the other accepted papers that I've checked from that edition. 0: http://nyjm.albany.edu/j/2017/23-72v-orig.pdf http://nyjm.albany.edu/j/2017/23-72v-orig.pdf
- Rivers68 8y ago
  Ironically, when Larry Summers and James Damore are mentioned in the paper, Hill references a blog post on the Heterodox Academy website (i.e. references SH17a and SH17b in the paper). Ironic because Heterodox Academy was founded partly to chronicle illiberal behavior on university campuses. To clarify why I find your bringing up Damore ironic, I'll say that I don't think it's particularly relevant to this discussion, and certainly not damning. (However, it does contribute to my feeling that this paper doesn't belong in a pure math journal.) For what it's worth, it sounds like the Summers/Damore discussion was added at the suggestion of the referees or editors at NYJM. If you look at the arXiv history, Hill and coauthors didn't include included mention of Summers/Damore until version 5 of their paper. (It disappears at version 8. I would generously guess Hill removed it because he didn't particularly agree with NYJM's suggestion.) Finally, for those who are concerned that the mention of Summers/Damore is damning, here is what Hill says about Summers/Damore in the NYJM version of the paper: "A resurgence of controversy came after the VH was linked to the forced resignation of Harvard President Larry Summers and the firing of Google engineer James Damore." "VH" is variability hypothesis. My point is the paper does not endorse either Larry Summers or James Damore. It just mentions that the topic of the paper is a contentious one, as proven by the controversy surrounding Summers and Damore, and that the hope of the paper is to provide a concrete (if simple) mathematical theory in which to investigate VH in the evolution of species. If it weren't the variability hypothesis but instead Anderson localization, I think it's clear it would have received neither fire nor fury.

191 points by Fomite 8y ago

Those who believe they are superior will never be persuaded otherwise.

This is headline and article appear to be just a way to sneak a non-mathematical position into questions of supposed mathematical censorship. True or not, suppressed or not, the claim being described can't be described as a "Mathematical truth". It's a paper in what could be described as theoretical biology and theoretical biology making a point. IE, there's no theoretical math that anywhere near this model - no one's suppressing calculus 'cause they don't like some derivative results.

cyborgx7 8y ago
Yes, this is about science, not mathematics. But scientific results are open to being question in their methodology and in the interpretation of their results. Mathematics is either correct or it isn't. This is a pretty blatant attempt of shifting something from one category to the other.
- tacomonstrous 8y ago
  >Mathematics is either correct or it isn't. That's not really a relevant standard for publishability. There is an infinite variety of correct mathematics that is far from being novel enough to be in a quality journal.
  - seanhunter 8y ago
    Well correctness is surely an important factor in whether or not mathematics is publishable, wouldn't you say? Necessary but not sufficient, perhaps.
    - tacomonstrous 8y ago
      Certainly necessary, but very far from sufficient. But even that isn't quite accurate. Every one of my published papers has some kind of error in it. When something is sufficiently interesting and complex, this is essentially inevitable given how the human mind works. Hence the late Voevodksy's attempt to come up with a framework for making such ideas machine checkable.

rdl 8y ago

This is the Streisand Effect in action. (I am sure there are going to be people in a few years who learn of the Streisand Effect first and then learn about some random washed-up musician responsible for it second.)

Dowwie 8y ago
What does Barbara Streisand have to do with this? She had a beautiful voice and was loved by many. Memories...
- rdl 8y ago
  https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2013/04/15/what-is-the-streisand-effect https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2013/04/15/...
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - Dowwie 8y ago
    prepare yourself for disappointment when this change doesn't manifest
kthejoker2 8y ago
This is like calling Frank Sinatra or Elvis or John Lennon some random washed up musician. Need to check your predilection to undersell what you personally don't value.

eridius 8y ago

tl;dr: No. Elaborating slightly: A paper that is related to (but does not directly argue for) an "uncomfortable truth" was published, then unpublished 3 days later and replaced with a different paper. The author of this blog piece tracked down the paper and read it, and it turns out to simply be a bad paper that shouldn't have been published to begin with.

ziggurism 8y ago
Being a bad paper, even a "never should have been published", is not sufficient reason for retroactively un-publishing a refereed and published paper. A rebuttal or at worst retraction is the appropriate action in that case.
- tptacek 8y ago
  There's apparently a conflict between the editor who essentially snuck the paper into NYJM and the rest of the editorial board, and it occurred some time ago, during a time where the leadership of the journal was changed for other reasons. It's worth paying close attention to the dates in Ted Hill's retelling of the story, and matching them up with his submissions and other events. Long story short: you're probably right, it probably wasn't handled correctly, but there are mitigating circumstances.
- DanBC 8y ago
  Was it refereed?
  - tptacek 8y ago
    No, I don't believe so.

frebord 8y ago

Honest question, the general physical differences between the sexes or even races are undeniable, so why is it so taboo to talk about the differences that almost certainly exist in our minds?

foolrush 8y ago
Given that "race" is a social construct... https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/04/race-genetics-science-africa/?beta=true https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/04/race-gen...
- oh_sigh 8y ago
  Could an alien with no human social constructions differentiate between Bantu people and historically native Irish people?
  - dagw 8y ago
    They could also easily differentiate between brown eyed and blue eyed people. The social construct part comes in when you try to explain why one differentiation is more 'important' than the other.
    - googlryas 8y ago
      "eye color is a social construct" and "the importance of eye color is a social construct" are two completely separate ideas. OP clearly states '"race" is a social construct'.
      - pjc50 8y ago
        Eye color is a social construct because color is a social construct. The presence of the genes for coloration is the only unambiguous thing, and even then it's vulnerable to all sorts of anomalies in gene expression (heterochromia, chimericism etc)

tptacek 8y ago

There is more going on than this. It's important to know a bit about the venues in question. Mathematical Intelligencer isn't really a journal at all; it's literally a magazine, carried on the shelves it bookstores. It runs some original research but also poetry and jokes and general cultural coverage. NYJM is, on the other hand, a serious (if online-only, lower-tier) theoretical mathematics journal. Ted Hill's paper is light on mathematics. As Joel Fish, an assoc. math prof at UMass Boston described it, it's of the caliber of an undergraduate applied math homework problem. It's also packed with citations to psychology, ev-bio, and current events. Arguably, Hill's paper was reasonable for Intelligencer. But it had no place whatsoever in NYJM, which basically never runs anything but hardcore proof-heavy theoretical mathematics. In the very most charitable interpretation, Hill's paper is an applied math exercise. Here's where the plot thickens: apparently, Hill's paper didn't undergo normal peer review at either journal, and, in particular, was fast-tracked in (papers apparently appear in NYJM as they're submitted, not in annual editions) by an editor that vocally shares Hill's politics. In response, I understand that a significant number of NYJM's peer review board threatened to quit --- an understandable response, since Hill's paper is embarrassing in the context of the rest of what NYJM publishes. I encourage people with strong opinions who haven't done so already to: 1. Read the current version of Hill's paper. 2. Skim the first version of Hill's paper, which had a coauthor and virtually none of the political content subsequent editions had. 3. Skim subsequent versions and notice how and where they introduced political content, and match that up to the dates Hill suggests the paper was submitted, first to M.I. and then to NYJM. 4. Select a few papers at random from NYJM and skim them quickly to get a sense of the venue Hill is angry he was rejected from. I'm left with the impression that this was an elaborate troll, one NYJM didn't handle well --- but then, that would be difficult, since its editor in chief is out on leave owing to a grave medical problem. Later This has been flagged to the nether regions of the HN story rankings, and justifiably so! It's a political controversy! But it's frustrating that the story introducing Hill's side of this in Quillette was at the top of the front page and accumulated hundreds of comments, while an actually-informed story that critically analyzed the paper itself will get no attention at all. Consider that the next time you think about complaining about people flagging politics off the front page. The Quillette story deserved to be flagged.

Fomite 8y ago

elchief 8y ago

> the idea that some huge percentage of males are simply not desirable enough (as we shall see, the paper requires this percentage to be over 50) to have a chance of reproducing bears no relation to the world as we know it In early humans only the top 16% of males mated Most people mate now, due to religious/society-enforced monogamy https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2833377/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2833377/

6nf 8y ago
Not sure who is downvoting you, this seems to be correct?
- Arnt 8y ago
  Rather dubious. He says three things: a) Only 16% etc b) most people mate now c) due to religious etc The first is well backed up. The second, not so much, it depends on community (look up the number of childless people in, say, Milan). The third, WTF? Mixing up facts with WTF like that attracts downvotes.
  - 6nf 8y ago
    I think the first one is the only relevant one in this case anyway
  - iguy 8y ago
    > The third, WTF? Not really. A society where only 16% of men mate has 84% angry young men with nothing to lose. Expect a lot of violence, and not much careful consistent tending of the fields... My understanding is that this is why state-sanctioned monogamy exists: it is a tool for avoiding this situation.
    - roenxi 8y ago
      > A society where only 16% of men mate has 84% angry young men with nothing to lose. Is it so crazy to think that a man with no partner could live a socially responsible life? The choice isn't a binary "Happy with wife and kids" vs "Flame, looting, violence and plague". I'm basing my experience on Australian law here, but our 'modern state-sanctioned monogamy' is a comprehensive system to stop fathers from having children then walking away when the going gets tough.

Animats 8y ago

This would be a good simulation exercise. Play with the parameters and watch generations evolve.

jerkstate 8y ago

here's a genetics paper that covers this topic: https://investigativegenetics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/2041-2223-5-13 https://investigativegenetics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.... Issues with the paper and its relevance to the platform it was published in notwithstanding, I think that we have two highly politicized sides, one wishing to promote a finding of "this is how things have been through history" as "this is the way things ought to be" (The MI staff expressed this concern), and another side that seeks to minimize or hide these findings because it will hinder efforts to engineer a "better" future. I think both sides are causing problems and this kind of stuff is getting tiresome.

ahartmetz 8y ago
Yes, where are the people saying "this is the truth but I don't have to like it"? There are these wholesale worldviews that people buy into. As a less offensive example, apparently you can't be leftist and not believe in anthropogenic climate change, or conservative and believe in it.
olleromam91 8y ago
Sometimes it feels like we are in competition to claim that we are the least fortunate of all sub-groups. Not future focused at all.
- jerkstate 8y ago
  I agree but I also think that the competition makes sense when you look at the incentives for being recognized by society as unfortunate.
- Rivers68 8y ago
  Yes! Someone said it! It is time to put the past behind us and think about the future. I feel as though somehow the West (as a civilization) has become overcome with embarrassment at what it did in the past (to Africans, Native Americans, and Asians, in particular) and now, instead of moving on and pursuing reconciliation in good faith, we have decided the only recourse is to obsess about how we are the enemies of civilization. Future? What future? We did so much bad stuff in the past. How could we take any pride in who we are? We're still so racist, sexist, etc. Nevermind the fact that modern life owes a great debt to the West (aircraft, antibiotics, modern representative government, etc.) There are serious problems facing the world today (climate change potentially a existential threat to our species). If you look at the past few centuries, you would think that it is precisely the West that has the institutions and paradigms to address those problems. I'm not saying China isn't destined for great things, or won't contribute to addressing the problems. But imagine what China could do if it worked hand in hand with a 21st century USA that was as determined to end climate change as the 20th century USA was to end various infectious diseases (polio, tuberculosis, measles, for example) or put a man on the moon. Our team is losing the basketball game because one of our star players is at home moping about a mistake he made last season. It's societal narcissism, and, instead of helping "the Rest" (to use Niall Ferguson's shorthand for non-Westerners), it serves no one. My point is: we need to see we are sick as a society. We are too preoccupied by things that happened in the past. Isn't this the lesson of at least one of the great classical tragedies? Why did Romeo and Juliet die? Because their families were stuck in the past and couldn't see that the future was more important than their petty feuds. There's no question we should continue to mind how we treat others (women, immigrants, people from other ethnicities), but we also (in the US, say) need to rediscover a sense of shared national heritage and purpose. History did not, as Fukuyama says, end with the destruction of the USSR. Surely, now that the USSR is gone, the interesting (and peaceful!) work should begin. Instead we're bickering amongst ourselves?

doombolt 8y ago

He's not criticizing the mathematical model, rather the application of this model to modern human society, which is something that nobody ever claimed. Straw man and a bad one at that. He does have some arguments but math is nowhere found, making this a joke of a refutation.

doombolt 8y ago
E.g. do you want a real eye opener? In a monogamous society, given that Darwin's observation about increased male variability holds, when partitioning by desirability, women in the top half will have access to males with desirability greater than their own, while women in the bottom half will only have access to males with desirability worse than their own. Go figure. (There's a lot of assumptions here but none of them particularly unrealistic).
- hef19898 8y ago
  Well, it always strikes me how well educated people with a lot of Knowledge in their domain (assuming that point is valid for the majority on Hacker News) have the tendency to totaly over-simplify other scientific fields. In this case evolution, biology and statistics. So what actually happened to humility, scientific literacy and honest curiosity? Not sure if it was intended, but your second post comes across as Sexist and trying to reason this with bad science.
  - doombolt 8y ago
    It's not a question of science. It's a question of math. Math is a model which allows you to over-simplify other scientific fields in the first place, and then devise solutions which turn out to be useful even in their over-simplified form. This is the reason for the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in natural sciences. However, here I'm not pushing any direct resemblance between model and any society anywhere. You're doing that, not me.
    - hef19898 8y ago

amelius 8y ago

Instead of focusing on a flawed paper, why not look for evidence that there is more variability in one of the sexes in the real world?

sebastianconcpt 8y ago
Because for the left, as long as they “work”, reality isn’t as valuable as narratives. They will pretend they honor reality until the arguments get cornered. Then they’ll fallback to their Postmodern anti-realist and anti-rational philosophy and find the next way to use victimhood to try to control the behavior of everybody else. All that with other’s people money, of course.
- gui67gk 8y ago
  Reality includes hundreds of generations of oppression and subjugation of women by social structures Anyone analyzed whether alpha male attitudes have impacted female evolution? Yeah, actually; other primates have killed alpha males and punished any that show authoritarian attitudes. Afterward they developed much more egalitarian social structures. But human men can’t quite grasp their lack of value to propagating the species, generally speaking. And resort to pointing at one contrived accomplishment after another (ooh good for you at writing a lot of code in a gamed society that has propped you up, James!) It’s social welfare after generations of violent oppression of others that’s given human males a leg up. But sure they do it all on their own, those precious little snowflakes.
acdha 8y ago
Why not is the wrong question when all around the world researchers have been actively doing that for many decades, and making huge efforts to identify and control for confounding environmental factors. When essays like this one, Damore’s screed, etc. get debunked it’s based on the actual scientific research not supporting the position rather than a lack of interest in understanding how it works.

rsynnott 8y ago

Betteridge's Law strikes again.

zeroname 8y ago

"When applied to humans, this model is ludicrously implausible. While it is true that some males have trouble finding a mate, the idea that some huge percentage of males are simply not desirable enough (as we shall see, the paper requires this percentage to be over 50) to have a chance of reproducing bears no relation to the world as we know it." It's not ludicrous at all. The world "as we know it" is not the world Homo Sapiens evolved in. There is some evidence of much harsher selection bias a few millennia ago: https://psmag.com/environment/17-to-1-reproductive-success https://psmag.com/environment/17-to-1-reproductive-success

jeromebaek 8y ago
This is very interesting. Have you other articles that follow up on this study?

ArchTypical 8y ago

> wouldn’t that suggest that males would have a much higher selection pressure to become more desirable than females? I would think they would want to be more variable as conditions are variable (and therefore fitness criteria are variable). This is such a chaotic theory, that no amount of mathematics could categorize it in a definitive way.

TheJoYo 8y ago
there has to be losers when it comes to selection pressures. we can modify our memes faster than we can modify our genes so this doesn't really apply to decent with modification through biological reproduction. biological evolutionary theories unrelated to biological reproduction are meh.

jaccarmac 8y ago

I'd just like to point out that the paper was never removed from the NYJM site[0]. Note the references to the Damore controversy in the third paragraph of the introduction, which Hill conveniently left out of the version he linked to on arXiv. Also interestingly, its accepted date was later than the paper that replaced it and most of the other accepted papers that I've checked from that edition. 0: http://nyjm.albany.edu/j/2017/23-72v-orig.pdf http://nyjm.albany.edu/j/2017/23-72v-orig.pdf

Rivers68 8y ago
Ironically, when Larry Summers and James Damore are mentioned in the paper, Hill references a blog post on the Heterodox Academy website (i.e. references SH17a and SH17b in the paper). Ironic because Heterodox Academy was founded partly to chronicle illiberal behavior on university campuses. To clarify why I find your bringing up Damore ironic, I'll say that I don't think it's particularly relevant to this discussion, and certainly not damning. (However, it does contribute to my feeling that this paper doesn't belong in a pure math journal.) For what it's worth, it sounds like the Summers/Damore discussion was added at the suggestion of the referees or editors at NYJM. If you look at the arXiv history, Hill and coauthors didn't include included mention of Summers/Damore until version 5 of their paper. (It disappears at version 8. I would generously guess Hill removed it because he didn't particularly agree with NYJM's suggestion.) Finally, for those who are concerned that the mention of Summers/Damore is damning, here is what Hill says about Summers/Damore in the NYJM version of the paper: "A resurgence of controversy came after the VH was linked to the forced resignation of Harvard President Larry Summers and the firing of Google engineer James Damore." "VH" is variability hypothesis. My point is the paper does not endorse either Larry Summers or James Damore. It just mentions that the topic of the paper is a contentious one, as proven by the controversy surrounding Summers and Damore, and that the hope of the paper is to provide a concrete (if simple) mathematical theory in which to investigate VH in the evolution of species. If it weren't the variability hypothesis but instead Anderson localization, I think it's clear it would have received neither fire nor fury.