7 ms·

CERN suspends physicist after his science-and-gender talk

74 points by kushti 8y ago

mishurov 8y ago
Suspending of based and redpilled Alessandro is an example of the leftist witch hunt against normal people and is a possible consequence of the modern codes of conducts in tech societies. A Giordano Bruno of the twenty first century.
matteuan 8y ago
The rector of his University has started ethical proceedings against him: https://www.unipi.it/index.php/english-news/item/13316-note-of-the-rector-of-the-university-of-pisa-ethical-proceedings-against-alessandro-strumia https://www.unipi.it/index.php/english-news/item/13316-note-...
- repolfx 8y ago
  Why does anyone try to defend universities anymore? Why does anyone working at them think they can voice un-PC opinions? Other than maybe the university of Chicago, are there any that don't routinely punish academics for offending extremist women whilst still loudly proclaiming that they're bastions of free thinking and intellectual bravery? I can't think of any. All I ever read about with respect to universities these days is incredible weakness. No matter how absurd or extreme the complaint, the administrators always fold. A terrible sign of the intellectual decay at heart of our civilisation.
xupybd 8y ago
Very hard to tell what was said and what happened from that article.
vilda 8y ago
The presentation: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1c_NyUhOZ8erdqU2AGZJZtNfFeA91Kefj/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/1c_NyUhOZ8erdqU2AGZJZtNfFeA9... Some good points. The proper scientific answer is a peer-review, not a suspension. When science and politics collide, politics always win. Science needs an environment free of politics.
- prablenha 8y ago
  Guess this is what they mean when they say we are in a "post truth world".
  - jlawson 8y ago
    No, this is what they mean when they say "everything is political". It's a way to justify the use of power to silence criticism. Always, always, always that is the purpose of the phrase, and this is a perfect example.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  From the last slide, "Conclusions": > Physics is not sexist against women. However truth does not matter, because it’s part of a political battle coming from outside. Not clear who will win. So why poke that bear? You know it'll maul you if it notices you. > PS: many told me “don’t speak, it’s dangerous”. As a student, I wrote that weak-scale SUSY is not right, and I survived. Hope to see you again. Oh yeah, but being perceived as a crank in your specialized field is nowhere near as dangerous as alerting the pitchfork crowd. I don't think he'll survive that, he just painted a target on his whole field. It'll be Damore 2.0. EDIT: > When science and politics collide, politics always win. Science needs an environment free of politics. Yes; to quote dlss[0], "The political process converts ideas from logical propositions into group signaling devices. Once a idea becomes a signal, any question of its truth or falsehood is commonly ignored for several human generations.". Science should avoid it as much as possible. -- [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12699503 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12699503
- truculent 8y ago
  > Some good points. Which do you think are good points specifically? I am struggling to find them myself. It's very hard to engage with your comment without knowing exactly what your argument(s) are.
  - 1000units 8y ago
    Essentially every descriptive claim he presented is sensible and well-evidenced.
sitepodmatt 8y ago
I read through the slides briefly, is it just an analysis of the current state of affairs? I can't quite tell to be honest, a lot of jargon there that's over my head, but I worry if those complaining fall into the same boat as me, in that there might not be nothing sexist there but now we can't discuss it in scientific terms now because the mere discussion point is sexist in itself.
- simion314 8y ago
  The issue is that you can make any opinion because you have just some slides you do not know what was actually said. This institutions should apply the existing rules for this kind of complaints and this kind of issues are not for HN IMO.
  - sitepodmatt 8y ago
    We agree on last part of the sentence that's for sure.
randyrand 8y ago
seems like there are good arguments that he makes that deserve well reasoned responses.
randyrand 8y ago
If this continues to be the response to a reasoned talk about gender differences, I fear trump-like characters will continue to gain ground. arguments should be fought with better arguments.
- rtpg 8y ago
  "Oh man people are really mad at this person, therefore _the person must be right_" You think that better arguments are going to convince people with this kind of reasoning? Loads of people all over the place are just wrong. It happens all the time. And there isn't a moral obligation to respond to some wrong opinion over and over again. People who think we need to have rational debates with flat earthers are not people who will be convinced by much. They are the 20% of people who think Bigfoot are real.
  - prablenha 8y ago
    If they can't come up with counter arguments, then certainly that person is right.
    - scrollaway 8y ago
      I can't come up with counter arguments to your post that you would not dismiss. That doesn't mean you're right, it means I'm bad at coming up with high quality counter arguments.
      - prablenha 8y ago
        Okay, don't worry then. I'm sure some people will come around with high quality counter arguments.
        scrollaway 8y ago
        It won't help if you ignore their existence, just like you're ignoring the existence of counter-arguments to this guy's talk, many in this very thread.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Insanity 8y ago
This was discussed here previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18112125 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18112125
- slazaro 8y ago
  And it was flagged, because why should we have a reasonable discussion about something that's controversial, right?
thisagainx9999 8y ago
Time for everyone to open up the tin can where we keep our opinions. At this point there's a passive background level of gender politics which seeps into every conversation at a constant rate like clicks in a geiger counter. Depending on the facts and narrative, the same people and publications hold up their news articles as vindication. "look look! sexism is still a big deal" say team sjw on this article. A few months back it was "look look! sjws really are being unreasonable" as the demore controversy unfolded. metoo became a bit of a wash, with points going to both sides. Kavanaugh sits on our tounges right now as we try to decide if his controversy falls into gender politics or just normal politics. No minds are changed, just different subsets of people get slightly quieter for the 2 week news cycle. Its the exact same mechanic as the gun debate. One group waits for school shootings to say "ban assault guns", and the other group waits for trucks to plow through crowds to mock the first group with "ban assault trucks". Call me privileged or whatever, but this whole thing is a sideshow. It moves votes and sells papers and nothing more. I wonder if this is what it felt like in France during the Dreyfus affair.
- adamrezich 8y ago
  I think you'd have to be willfully blind to see that the sexes have been increasingly turned against one another for political gain by various factions in recent times to the point of absurdity. I have known these "men vs. women" (both men and women!) people personally in my life and as I got to know them better, came to learn that they truly believed in their dangerous, ridiculous, absurdly reductive worldview at a very core level. I went to a game development convention with one such person and we started the event off by watching a presentation given by a woman about how to get started with VR development in Unity. The presentation was informative and well-done. As we walked out of the conference hall afterwards, I asked my friend what she thought of the talk. Her first, immediate, and only comment: "it was practically all white dudes in there." As a white dude myself I had absolutely no idea how to answer this. I still don't. What do you even say to that?
gerland 8y ago
It's just overwhelming how this sexist narrative is globally accepted. Being a man was never easy to begin with, but things like that are really discouraging.
- mar77i 8y ago
  Then again, us men seem to have put up with it since at least Galileo. Who famously spoke out something unrelated to the current controversy, but with the common feature that the clergy at the time also found it comparably unacceptable. I'm kind of worried that this inflammating mess is starting to take hold in Europe after stirring up so many waves in the US and especially Canada.
  - mar77i 8y ago
    To make it clear, I'm not advocating against feminism and the debate of this topic in and on itself, but us technical people, men and women of enlightenment-era reason "Vernunft" need to consistently contest the growing conflation between debate and disagreement. It is wrong to automatically assume that when we consider something "debatable" we secretly believe it to be "irrefutably false". That is an uncultured and rather arrogant stance, because an actual debate we enter with the humility of the possiblity that we, all parties entering debates, any and all of us may be wrong. To quote Stephen Fry, ''I would like this quotation from Bertrand Russell to hover over the evening. "One of the painful things of our time is that those feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and in decision. Let doubt prevail.''
iguy 8y ago
I especially like the last paragraph: > “I don’t think he represents the majority view,” Covi said. “There were a few men who were there but they didn’t support his view.” After all, none of her friends stepped forward to object that she wasn't a witch. Before or after we burned her!
orbifold 8y ago
I think he had personal reasons for giving this talk. He links to a presentation given by Anna Ceresole (http://www.weizmann.ac.il/stringuniverse/sites/stringuniverse/files/the_string_theory_universe.pdf http://www.weizmann.ac.il/stringuniverse/sites/stringunivers...) at the latest STRINGS conference in 2018 on gender equality. In that presentation they explain how they created a European Network of female string theory researchers (virtually unknown to me, never seen a paper by them, whereas in the US there are a lot of very good female string theorists Cvetic, Silverman etc.) with the explicit goal of increasing the number of females in permanent positions. The chair of that EU funded network Silvia Penati apparently hired Anna Ceresole for a professorship that Allessandro Strumia also applied for. There is a stark difference in the number of citations Ceresole (~3000) and Strumia (~30000) have, and Strumia has roughly double the number of first author papers. So on the face of it this seems like a very bad case of unfair / biased hiring practice.
- Confusion 8y ago
  Only if you think hiring decisions should depend only on certain measurable professional qualifications. Which they of course never are. If someone has a specialization that you already have in your portfolio, while a competitor has a different specialization that would be an addition, then the competitor can be preferred. If someone is a loner while the competitor is a teamplayer, then the competitor can be preferred. Etc. Maybe he just behaved like an a* during the hiring procedure, taking for granted he would be hired. You don't know and any conclusion based purely on the numbers is unwarranted and premature.
  - orbifold 8y ago
    I think it is unethical to hire someone, if you are both part of a special interest network of any kind. If you compare their citation record on (http://inspirehep.net/author/profile/A.Ceresole.1 http://inspirehep.net/author/profile/A.Ceresole.1 and http://inspirehep.net/author/profile/A.Strumia.1 http://inspirehep.net/author/profile/A.Strumia.1), there is really little contest who should be hired though (both work in high energy physics, Ceresole more on theory, Strumia on phenomenology). But yes I agree there are many factors that play into the hiring decision we can't know about. In any case it seems most likely that this was his primary motivation.
kork__ 8y ago
Physicists have been the canary in the coal mine for societies. From being expelled from Nazi Germany for Jewish physics. To being dissidents in the USSR for their anti-nuclear stance. To being killed in the cultural revolution for being bourgeoisie collaborators. To being painted as communists in the US for their anti-nuclear views during the second red scare and their their pro-climate change views more recently. Somehow I don't see this ending well for gender studies.
yAnonymous 8y ago
He does bring up valid arguments and deserves a scientific response. The people who complain about this and instead of refuting his points instantly cry out make themselves look bad.
dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
having read the whole presentation, I'm very surprised to read the article. What's on the slides doesn't match the content of the article. Also, I find it ironic that he mentions people fired because of similar opinions on the slide 24, and then gets suspended for the same reason. Could we at least have an honest, open discussion about the content rather than silencing the (currently) non-mainstream views?

74 points by kushti 8y ago

Suspending of based and redpilled Alessandro is an example of the leftist witch hunt against normal people and is a possible consequence of the modern codes of conducts in tech societies. A Giordano Bruno of the twenty first century.

matteuan 8y ago

The rector of his University has started ethical proceedings against him: https://www.unipi.it/index.php/english-news/item/13316-note-of-the-rector-of-the-university-of-pisa-ethical-proceedings-against-alessandro-strumia https://www.unipi.it/index.php/english-news/item/13316-note-...

repolfx 8y ago
Why does anyone try to defend universities anymore? Why does anyone working at them think they can voice un-PC opinions? Other than maybe the university of Chicago, are there any that don't routinely punish academics for offending extremist women whilst still loudly proclaiming that they're bastions of free thinking and intellectual bravery? I can't think of any. All I ever read about with respect to universities these days is incredible weakness. No matter how absurd or extreme the complaint, the administrators always fold. A terrible sign of the intellectual decay at heart of our civilisation.

xupybd 8y ago

Very hard to tell what was said and what happened from that article.

vilda 8y ago

The presentation: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1c_NyUhOZ8erdqU2AGZJZtNfFeA91Kefj/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/1c_NyUhOZ8erdqU2AGZJZtNfFeA9... Some good points. The proper scientific answer is a peer-review, not a suspension. When science and politics collide, politics always win. Science needs an environment free of politics.

prablenha 8y ago
Guess this is what they mean when they say we are in a "post truth world".
- jlawson 8y ago
  No, this is what they mean when they say "everything is political". It's a way to justify the use of power to silence criticism. Always, always, always that is the purpose of the phrase, and this is a perfect example.
TeMPOraL 8y ago
From the last slide, "Conclusions": > Physics is not sexist against women. However truth does not matter, because it’s part of a political battle coming from outside. Not clear who will win. So why poke that bear? You know it'll maul you if it notices you. > PS: many told me “don’t speak, it’s dangerous”. As a student, I wrote that weak-scale SUSY is not right, and I survived. Hope to see you again. Oh yeah, but being perceived as a crank in your specialized field is nowhere near as dangerous as alerting the pitchfork crowd. I don't think he'll survive that, he just painted a target on his whole field. It'll be Damore 2.0. EDIT: > When science and politics collide, politics always win. Science needs an environment free of politics. Yes; to quote dlss[0], "The political process converts ideas from logical propositions into group signaling devices. Once a idea becomes a signal, any question of its truth or falsehood is commonly ignored for several human generations.". Science should avoid it as much as possible. -- [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12699503 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12699503
truculent 8y ago
> Some good points. Which do you think are good points specifically? I am struggling to find them myself. It's very hard to engage with your comment without knowing exactly what your argument(s) are.
- 1000units 8y ago
  Essentially every descriptive claim he presented is sensible and well-evidenced.

sitepodmatt 8y ago

I read through the slides briefly, is it just an analysis of the current state of affairs? I can't quite tell to be honest, a lot of jargon there that's over my head, but I worry if those complaining fall into the same boat as me, in that there might not be nothing sexist there but now we can't discuss it in scientific terms now because the mere discussion point is sexist in itself.

simion314 8y ago
The issue is that you can make any opinion because you have just some slides you do not know what was actually said. This institutions should apply the existing rules for this kind of complaints and this kind of issues are not for HN IMO.
- sitepodmatt 8y ago
  We agree on last part of the sentence that's for sure.

randyrand 8y ago

seems like there are good arguments that he makes that deserve well reasoned responses.

randyrand 8y ago

If this continues to be the response to a reasoned talk about gender differences, I fear trump-like characters will continue to gain ground. arguments should be fought with better arguments.

rtpg 8y ago
"Oh man people are really mad at this person, therefore _the person must be right_" You think that better arguments are going to convince people with this kind of reasoning? Loads of people all over the place are just wrong. It happens all the time. And there isn't a moral obligation to respond to some wrong opinion over and over again. People who think we need to have rational debates with flat earthers are not people who will be convinced by much. They are the 20% of people who think Bigfoot are real.
- prablenha 8y ago
  If they can't come up with counter arguments, then certainly that person is right.
  - scrollaway 8y ago
    I can't come up with counter arguments to your post that you would not dismiss. That doesn't mean you're right, it means I'm bad at coming up with high quality counter arguments.
    - prablenha 8y ago
      Okay, don't worry then. I'm sure some people will come around with high quality counter arguments.
      - scrollaway 8y ago
        It won't help if you ignore their existence, just like you're ignoring the existence of counter-arguments to this guy's talk, many in this very thread.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

Insanity 8y ago

This was discussed here previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18112125 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18112125

slazaro 8y ago
And it was flagged, because why should we have a reasonable discussion about something that's controversial, right?

thisagainx9999 8y ago

Time for everyone to open up the tin can where we keep our opinions. At this point there's a passive background level of gender politics which seeps into every conversation at a constant rate like clicks in a geiger counter. Depending on the facts and narrative, the same people and publications hold up their news articles as vindication. "look look! sexism is still a big deal" say team sjw on this article. A few months back it was "look look! sjws really are being unreasonable" as the demore controversy unfolded. metoo became a bit of a wash, with points going to both sides. Kavanaugh sits on our tounges right now as we try to decide if his controversy falls into gender politics or just normal politics. No minds are changed, just different subsets of people get slightly quieter for the 2 week news cycle. Its the exact same mechanic as the gun debate. One group waits for school shootings to say "ban assault guns", and the other group waits for trucks to plow through crowds to mock the first group with "ban assault trucks". Call me privileged or whatever, but this whole thing is a sideshow. It moves votes and sells papers and nothing more. I wonder if this is what it felt like in France during the Dreyfus affair.

adamrezich 8y ago
I think you'd have to be willfully blind to see that the sexes have been increasingly turned against one another for political gain by various factions in recent times to the point of absurdity. I have known these "men vs. women" (both men and women!) people personally in my life and as I got to know them better, came to learn that they truly believed in their dangerous, ridiculous, absurdly reductive worldview at a very core level. I went to a game development convention with one such person and we started the event off by watching a presentation given by a woman about how to get started with VR development in Unity. The presentation was informative and well-done. As we walked out of the conference hall afterwards, I asked my friend what she thought of the talk. Her first, immediate, and only comment: "it was practically all white dudes in there." As a white dude myself I had absolutely no idea how to answer this. I still don't. What do you even say to that?

gerland 8y ago

It's just overwhelming how this sexist narrative is globally accepted. Being a man was never easy to begin with, but things like that are really discouraging.

mar77i 8y ago
Then again, us men seem to have put up with it since at least Galileo. Who famously spoke out something unrelated to the current controversy, but with the common feature that the clergy at the time also found it comparably unacceptable. I'm kind of worried that this inflammating mess is starting to take hold in Europe after stirring up so many waves in the US and especially Canada.
- mar77i 8y ago
  To make it clear, I'm not advocating against feminism and the debate of this topic in and on itself, but us technical people, men and women of enlightenment-era reason "Vernunft" need to consistently contest the growing conflation between debate and disagreement. It is wrong to automatically assume that when we consider something "debatable" we secretly believe it to be "irrefutably false". That is an uncultured and rather arrogant stance, because an actual debate we enter with the humility of the possiblity that we, all parties entering debates, any and all of us may be wrong. To quote Stephen Fry, ''I would like this quotation from Bertrand Russell to hover over the evening. "One of the painful things of our time is that those feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and in decision. Let doubt prevail.''

iguy 8y ago

I especially like the last paragraph: > “I don’t think he represents the majority view,” Covi said. “There were a few men who were there but they didn’t support his view.” After all, none of her friends stepped forward to object that she wasn't a witch. Before or after we burned her!

orbifold 8y ago

I think he had personal reasons for giving this talk. He links to a presentation given by Anna Ceresole (http://www.weizmann.ac.il/stringuniverse/sites/stringuniverse/files/the_string_theory_universe.pdf http://www.weizmann.ac.il/stringuniverse/sites/stringunivers...) at the latest STRINGS conference in 2018 on gender equality. In that presentation they explain how they created a European Network of female string theory researchers (virtually unknown to me, never seen a paper by them, whereas in the US there are a lot of very good female string theorists Cvetic, Silverman etc.) with the explicit goal of increasing the number of females in permanent positions. The chair of that EU funded network Silvia Penati apparently hired Anna Ceresole for a professorship that Allessandro Strumia also applied for. There is a stark difference in the number of citations Ceresole (~3000) and Strumia (~30000) have, and Strumia has roughly double the number of first author papers. So on the face of it this seems like a very bad case of unfair / biased hiring practice.

Confusion 8y ago
Only if you think hiring decisions should depend only on certain measurable professional qualifications. Which they of course never are. If someone has a specialization that you already have in your portfolio, while a competitor has a different specialization that would be an addition, then the competitor can be preferred. If someone is a loner while the competitor is a teamplayer, then the competitor can be preferred. Etc. Maybe he just behaved like an a* during the hiring procedure, taking for granted he would be hired. You don't know and any conclusion based purely on the numbers is unwarranted and premature.
- orbifold 8y ago
  I think it is unethical to hire someone, if you are both part of a special interest network of any kind. If you compare their citation record on (http://inspirehep.net/author/profile/A.Ceresole.1 http://inspirehep.net/author/profile/A.Ceresole.1 and http://inspirehep.net/author/profile/A.Strumia.1 http://inspirehep.net/author/profile/A.Strumia.1), there is really little contest who should be hired though (both work in high energy physics, Ceresole more on theory, Strumia on phenomenology). But yes I agree there are many factors that play into the hiring decision we can't know about. In any case it seems most likely that this was his primary motivation.

kork__ 8y ago

Physicists have been the canary in the coal mine for societies. From being expelled from Nazi Germany for Jewish physics. To being dissidents in the USSR for their anti-nuclear stance. To being killed in the cultural revolution for being bourgeoisie collaborators. To being painted as communists in the US for their anti-nuclear views during the second red scare and their their pro-climate change views more recently. Somehow I don't see this ending well for gender studies.

yAnonymous 8y ago

He does bring up valid arguments and deserves a scientific response. The people who complain about this and instead of refuting his points instantly cry out make themselves look bad.

dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago

having read the whole presentation, I'm very surprised to read the article. What's on the slides doesn't match the content of the article. Also, I find it ironic that he mentions people fired because of similar opinions on the slide 24, and then gets suspended for the same reason. Could we at least have an honest, open discussion about the content rather than silencing the (currently) non-mainstream views?