37 ms·

CERN cuts ties with 'sexist' scientist Alessandro Strumia

• ktjfi 8y ago
  On one hand, in this political climate it's really stupid to say something like that. On the other, someone has to be the first person to say it. (Not that I necessarily agree with what he said)
  • peteretep 8y ago
    > On the other, someone has to be the first person to say it. I don’t understand this point. Please could you expand on what you mean?
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    • ktjfi 8y ago
      I mean, if you want to say something as controversial as that, and you decide to wait until more people say it first, you may have to wait a lifetime. (Once again, I haven't looked at the data, so I don't necessarily agree with what he said.)
      • digdigdag 8y ago
        His evidence is based on predetermined assumptions. He does not even have the scientific background to even tackle this area of study. It's not even that he said something controversial. He made crude errors in his research that would have made a respectable sociologist laugh him out the door.
        • merpnderp 8y ago
          What makes you claim his research has been reviewed? The article makes it sound like it was never peer reviewed and the people debunking it are doing so merely from his claims, not his methods and data.
        • scottlocklin 8y ago
          Citations needed: the subject requires basic statistics to make assertions on. Pretty sure he was qualified to do so. Also pretty sure psychometric researchers say exactly what Strumia said as any fool with google or wikipedia could determine. His only crime is having the temerity to stand up to imbeciles who insist on conspiracy theories to explain the comparative lack of female achievement in physics.
    • rjf72 8y ago
      The tale of The Emperor's New Clothes [1] would be appropriate. In society in general we've decided to take as an assumption that everybody is identically capable in everything and thus that any and all differences must then be attributable to some form of discrimination, bias, or prejudice. And this is something that is pleasant to believe in large part because not believing it has led to dystopic outcomes in the past, including but not limited to government driven eugenics. So it's something that we want to believe. And also stating you do not believe it is a great way to have people judge you for some secret ist of some sort or another. At the same time this view is contradicted by reality. In times past this reality would have been mostly just empirical, but in modern times we also have genetic and other factors strongly contradicting any notion of inherent equality. So what to do? In my opinion the most important thing here is to ensure as much equality of opportunity as reasonably possible. And this is an effort that should never relent. However, at the same time, it also has to be acknowledged that the lack of equality of result does not inherently mean there's a problem. Ultimately it's the typical problem. Trying to create utopia is often a great path to dystopia. Enforced equality of result for all is rather a key point in Brave New World. Of course this does not mean that discrimination does not exist. But the standard for assumption of such needs to start growing beyond wild induction from dubious toy experiments, or from works that start with absolute equality as an assumption. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Clothes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Clothes
      • geofft 8y ago
        > In my opinion the most important thing here is to ensure as much equality of opportunity as reasonably possible. And this is an effort that should never relent. Cool, so you agree that a scientist who attacks his colleagues imperils equality of opportunity, then?
        • rjf72 8y ago
          Well intentioned ideologies do not inherently produce a non-negative outcome. Negative outcomes are very much a possibility, particularly when views are flawed. And so at some point any ideology that is not extremely well supported by data should be challenged, even if that ideology is the nicest most well intentioned one in the world. Google's recent pay study is one little microcosm that demonstrates this. Under fire for the widely perceived belief that females are underpaid for doing the same work as males, Google engaged in substantial data crunching and analysis to correct any inequities. It turns out they were underpaying their male employees. Why might this be? We already answered this. There is a widely held belief that females are underpaid for doing the same work as males. This may be true in some instances, but it's certainly nothing like a universal truth. But you can see even on these forums that many Google employees do treat it as something approaching a universal truth, many even refusing to belief it was false following Google's analyses. And so when a manager has discretionary funds to distribute, whom is he going to prefer? People, generally, want to do the right thing. And so in the pursuit of equality, you end up creating inequality. These sort of paradoxical outcomes are not uncommon. Declaring that a view is not well supported by evidence, even when that view is nice, is not 'attacking'.
  • tyingq 8y ago
    This wasn't an errant comment, it was a quite a lot of effort. I imagine he knew full well what the potential consequences were. Feels like a deliberate move.
  • avip 8y ago
    You can't be "the first" and repeat something already stated by Darwin. It's called variability hypothesis and is a much discussed, with strong evidence I think, issue.
• bhouston 8y ago
  I am reminded of Larry Summers, then the head of Harvard, who said something similar: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2005/jan/18/educationsgendergap.genderissues https://www.theguardian.com/science/2005/jan/18/educationsge... I think that previously there was a distinct issue with not enough women going through the degree programs. If the degree programs are 80% men and 20% women, statistically the men will outperform the women in outlier achievements just because there will likely be more positive outliers in the larger group by definition even if the means are similar. I think that just because the sample size for women is smaller, it will appear that the variance is smaller as there are less samples to spread it out. Thus it is possible that this will address itself if women equalize with men or exceed them in terms of graduation numbers in the relevant fields. Given that women have actually come to dominant a lot of previously male dominated fields, fields where prominent men said women would never succeed at, I think that mathematics and physics could fall as well. It may take longer, but it is very possible. If male variance is higher, there are likely both benefits and downsides to it, and I wouldn't be surprised if while statistically women are different there are unforseen benefits to that. I feel like he has found one statistical difference between men and women and believe that this defines forever men and women performance in the very complex field of physics. This is over simplifying everything and I'd never bet on such an oversimplified prediction based on cherry picking by an amateur. I think that when some people discover there are third rail/hot button issues that "can not be talked about in polite company", they take stronger positions on those issues in a reactionary way than are actually warranted by the evidence. EDIT: What about this comment is causing this to be downvoted?
  • dang 8y ago
    > EDIT: What about this comment is causing this to be downvoted? That breaks the site guidelines, which ask: "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading." It also leads directly to off-topic dreck like this subthread, which I detached: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19346310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19346310. (The rest of your comment is fine.) https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  • tptacek 8y ago
• chki 8y ago
  He claims that he could proof his assumptions if he were to be published in a journal but I think it would be very strange if somebody published his "research". He is not a sociologist and this is clearly not his area of expertise.
  • harias 8y ago
    Peer-review will help with that. I strongly support amateurs publishing if they have something real to contribute. Gate-keeping based on degrees is bad.
    • SiempreViernes 8y ago
      The argument you object to is exactly that peer review will not accept it because it is trash research.
    • geofft 8y ago
      There is too much crank science in the world to evaluate it all in good faith: if peer reviewers were tasked with reviewing every clever idea from someone who notices a correlation in one data set—and, in particular, at conductor their own experiments to replicate the result—there would statistically be no time for correct science. Scott Aaronson's "Ten Signs a Claimed Mathematical Breakthrough is Wrong" on https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=304 https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=304 is a similar argument. Though there's no hard logic why a non-TeX math paper from an outsider would be wrong, the probability that it's right is extremely low.
      • fromthestart 8y ago
        This isn't exactly crank science. This is a valid challenge to an equality assumption which permeates modern academia and industry, with potential negative consequences, which has never actually been proven. And the same correlative "evidence" for sexism (which really is just a conflation of equality of outcome and equality of opportunity) could just as readily be taken as a manifestation of functional inequality. But social stigma and an imepenetrable bias in academia keeps any meaningful research in this area from occurring, probably because people are afraid of the potential implications. That's bad science and ultimately is probably bad for society if it turns out these unproven assumptions for equal competence are untrue.
• fallingfrog 8y ago
  Haha I totally misread that as “sexiest” scientist
  • samcday 8y ago
    That would certainly have made for a much more interesting article!
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
• SiempreViernes 8y ago
  Lying about the contents of your talk so you can insult members of a selection comitte that didn’t pick you is not a good way to get a contract renewed, who would have known? Strumia must have really let his victory of the 750 GeV iron throne* dictate his sense of entitlement. *: http://resonaances.blogspot.com/2016/06/game-of-thrones-750-gev-edition.html http://resonaances.blogspot.com/2016/06/game-of-thrones-750-...
  • 0815test 8y ago
    Yeah, it's important to be aware of this when thinking about Strumia's case. The guy said a whole lot more than "women are less able at cutting-edge physics than men", and much of what was being said was, if not outright BS, certainly willfully courting controversy in a highly unprofessional way, and not something that even people who are aware of possible gender differences in ability would support. To make a comparison that many people here will understand, Strubia's talk is a lot like what the media misrepresented James Damore as saying, and nothing like what James Damore actually said.
  • harias 8y ago
    Your comment points to an underlying story. It mentions a selection committee that was not referenced in the article. Can you please link me to a source where I can learn more about it.
    • SiempreViernes 8y ago
      One of his slides shows a ”case study” that compares the citation number of a named female member of the selection comitte (there are of course several more members), the citation number of the named female that got the position, and the citation number of Strumia himself. Underneath this table he wrote ”the opressive ambient started to open”...
• Udik 8y ago
  To me, the point in Strumia's case is that it doesn't matter whether his conclusions, or data, are sound or bonkers: the fact is that bad scientific research eventually condemns you to irrelevance, not to political outrage and disciplinary measures. The latter should be reserved to those who knowingly falsify data, plagiarise other people's work, etc.
  • SiempreViernes 8y ago
    Uh, you do know his actual actions was to misrepresent the contents of his talk, and spend time of it insulting members of a selection comitte that didn’t hire him? The fact is that he thinks open harrasment of people that didn’t judged him less suitable for a position is ok, which in itself is reason to keep him away from any position of imprtance.
    • Udik 8y ago
      The personal attack (or piece of personal anecdata) in the presentation was certainly condemnable and should have been left out- but let's not pretend the problem wasn't the content of the whole presentation, personal attack or not.
      • SiempreViernes 8y ago
        While his whole presentation had serious issues, starting with his misrepresentation of its contents to the organisers, the personal attack is clearly the most important infraction. It is, on its own, enought cause to sanction him as he was.
        • tptacek 8y ago
          The JusticeForStrumia page (run by supporters of Strumia) showcases an email from CERN that says exactly this: the personal attack was the major professional problem from the talk.
      • netsharc 8y ago
        Similar to the Googler who got fired after his anti-diversity paper, the content is almost irrelevant, the fact that they're so cocksure of their superiority to dare say what they said meant they were unprofessional beings who didn't belong in a collaborative work environment. It didn't help that they think their research backed up their cocksureness, but in reality the research were painfully biased and incorrect.
• zarkov99 8y ago
  And the fact is his statements were all backed up by real data, one would think Physicists could easily debunk them if they were bogus. Instead his detractors provided nothing but wishful thinking platitudes. Ideology over science, feelings over truth, shrieking, hysterical pronouncements over rational argument, welcome to the age of bullshit. Good luck with your next Physics breakthrough.
  • scottlocklin 8y ago
    Hey now, you're not an expert in this field, so you should just keep your mouth shut and step to the back of the room and let "experts" tell you what to think.
  • geofft 8y ago
    I don't follow - the article says that other scientists did debunk his claims. Did they not? There is a lengthy scientific rebuttal at https://www.particlesforjustice.org https://www.particlesforjustice.org linked in the article. The fact that it also contains a moral rebuttal does not detract from the scientific one.
    • mpweiher 8y ago
      They did not. The particlesforjustice is mostly hand-waving and claims about things like implicit bias etc. with little or no empirical support. See https://justiceforstrumia.org https://justiceforstrumia.org for a lengthy and somewhat more substantial rebuttal of the rebuttal.
      • geofft 8y ago
        Thanks, I'm strongly in favor of this debate existing so I'm glad that site exists. As I read it, that site does not rebut any of the claims of particlesforjustice. It attacks a few sources used by particlesforjustice in defense of the claim that discrimination exists in STEM and potentially explains the reason why some groups perform more poorly. Granting, for argument, that those attacks are valid and the sources don't claim what they're being used to claim, that still does not rebut Strumia's argument. Indeed, justiceforstrumia says, "They object to Strumia's talk for 'mining' and 'misrepresenting' data, but their own case suffers from comparable flaws." In other words, perhaps Strumia's argument was flawed and so is the rebuttal; that still leaves us nowhere. The remainder of justiceforstrumia is a digression about James Damore, tribalistic thinking, why socialism is bad, horseshoe theory, the "war on gamers" (I'm not making that up, that's the exact title of a source offered by justiceforstrumia), and the importance of falsifiability. This would be interesting if at some point we got to the question of whether Strumia's claims were falsifiable or not, and whether particlesforjustice had in fact managed to prove them false, but the site never gets there. Assuming the sources offered by particlesforjustice in claims 1, 3, and 4 are invalid, claims 2, 5, 6, 7, and 8 still stand. A coherent rebuttal would either say why those claims are invalid, or why those claims are inaccurate depictions of what Strumia said. Saying "You can't say person X's claims wrong, actually the whole ideology of science is broken and falsifiability is important" is not scientific debate; it is itself ideology. Saying "Here, let us determine whether these claims are false, through analysis and argument of the claims themselves and not their speakers" would be scientific debate. (Who wrote this site, btw? Is it from a scientist, or just someone random on the internet? It doesn't seem like it's written with the same understanding of scientific debate as particlesforjustice, so I'm trying to make sense of it.)
• samcday 8y ago
  > "Some people hated hearing about higher male variance: this idea comes from Darwin, like other offensive ideas that got observational support," he told BBC News. See I was almost ready to get on board with hearing what he has to say... > He also showed cartoons deriding women campaigning for equality in science and presented the results of an analysis that he claimed showed that work conducted by female physicists was not as good as their male counterparts. ... Until I realized he's probably just a jackass. https://youtu.be/mNHf2wW0LEw?t=119 https://youtu.be/mNHf2wW0LEw?t=119 If you're going to critique something that is considered a "hot button topic" in the current politic climate, you have to also be intelligent enough to approach it with some tact. It seems like this guy just wanted to pwn the SJW libtard cultural marxists. As an aside, I'm a white guy who works in tech. I used to have white guilt but I've grown past that. But still - what I can't understand is why my white homies feel that it's up to them to speak up about racial/gender issues. Here's the thing pal, if we get to a point where there's overwhelming data showing that our society has shifted to a point where we're legitimately a minority that is being persecuted and marginalized (haha, like that'll ever really happen tho), then you can polish your slick slide deck showing why the libtards are ruining everything. Until then, please sit down, be quiet, and enjoy your abundance of privilege.
  • erentz 8y ago
    > what I can't understand is why my white homies feel that it's up to them to speak up about racial/gender issues. I don’t know what your “white homies” are saying (maybe they’re just immature dicks and that’s why you feel that way). But so long as they feel it’s important, are honestly and genuinely basing it on a good intention and with good reasoning, why shouldn’t they be allowed to be part of the conversation? This idea that only non-white people can talk about diversity, or only women or trans (etc.) should be able talk about gender is preposterous on the face of it.
    • samcday 8y ago
      Given the downvotes, I can only surmise that HN isn't really the place to discuss this sort of stuff, which is fair enough! Anyway, thanks for responding thoughtfully and calmly. :)
• nabla9 8y ago
  You can't start neutral discussion with weak evidence, strong conclusion and open hostility. Strumia could have just presented his findings neutrally, without already made up his mind and having a clearly visible agenda and hostility. There is a pattern that is repeating: 1. Scientist has a political opinion on difficult politically volatile issue that is outside his field. 2. Scientist finds some supporting evidence. 3. Scientist comes out with agenda, evidence and overly confident conclusion. 4. Backlash 5. Scientist claims that he is discriminated. He thinks that just because he had some hard data, his presentation was just cold neutral science. 6. Others find easily some evidence that explains his theories away (Women leaving the field in disproportionately higher rates in this case).
  • tptacek 8y ago
    There are really strong parallels between this and the Ted Hill NYJM fiasco. And, like the physicists in this story, professional mathematicians pointed out that Hill's paper was wildly inappropriate for the venue. Both Hill and Strumia tried to launder their institutional credibility into authority to make political arguments. Arguably, Hill was more successful, even if his stunt was more egregious.
    • MAXPOOL 8y ago
      In the 19th century William Whewell developed concept of "Consilience of Inductions". Evidence from independent, unrelated sources can "converge" on strong conclusions. We should feel more confident about our conclusions when we have lots of lines of evidence that stand alone independently, preferably collected by different people, in different parts of the globe or at least different universities. Maybe they don’t even like each other. Many contrarian views grow long time in small small minded groups or even withing one individual. They have high internal consistency and logic. When exposed to outsiders, they usually spot some obvious errors immediately.
  • cm2187 8y ago
    Yes and no. As others pointed, Larry Summers wasn't provocative and suffered a similar backlash. And when you have a strong political pressure on a topic, it is logical that the only people who will speak up will tend to be the more provocative, anti-establishment outliers.
• mruts 8y ago
  It seems like there’s a lot far-leftists here that just downvote everything they don’t (what happened to developers having a libertarian streak?)
  • geofft 8y ago
    > (what happened to developers having a libertarian streak?) Developers and scientists are characterized by a search for the truth, and the truth is on the side of the SJWs and not the libertarians. There was a period of time when it seemed libertarianism might have been right, but it's passed. And though libertarianism is an appealing philosophy, it turns out facts don't care about your feelings.
    • vixen99 8y ago
      'developers and scientists are characterized by a search for the truth' (whereas...). Selfless desire for truth from a superior caste, eh? Might be true of course (not in my experience which tells me that status and personal advantage always win out) but what evidence do you have for that?
  • dang 8y ago
    Please do not take HN threads into ideological flamewar. This community is divided that way, just as society at large, and "Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19346228 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19346228 and marked it off-topic.
• YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
  >> He also showed cartoons deriding women campaigning for equality in science and presented the results of an analysis that he claimed showed that work conducted by female physicists was not as good as their male counterparts. My underlined sentence, is most likely the reason Cern considered that Alessandro Strumia's actions would bring disrepute to the Centre. Holding and publicly discussing controversial views is one thing. Publicly ridiculing your colleagues is quite another.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • zarkov99 8y ago
    Did you see the slides in question? If not take a look: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1c_NyUhOZ8erdqU2AGZJZtNfFeA91Kefj/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/1c_NyUhOZ8erdqU2AGZJZtNfFeA9... I see no great insults here, one cartoon suggests that the gender studies activists that are so concerned about the lack of women in STEM could have better addressed the problem if they themselves pursued careers in STEM rather than gender studies. The other cartoon is even milder. As to ridiculing his colleagues, from what I can see there is one slide in which Strumia states a female colleague that was hired over him has 10x fewer citations. Assuming that is true, how is that ridiculing a colleague?
    • YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
      Yes, I've seen the slides. They are offensive and the cartoons in them are offensive in the context of the slides. There is no question that they would harm CERN's repuation and that people at CERN would be livid at Strumio's talk as a result.
      • mrjesus 8y ago
        "Offence is taken and not given". They are obviously jokes to illustrate a point. The fact that you call them offensive instead of attacking the criticism itself is fuelling the push back against you and it is continuously mounting. I have seen people's careers and spoken to countless others because people took offence over basically nothing or flat out lined to ruin someone. Men now are actively just avoiding women at work whenever possible if they are smart. Precisely because of this offence culture. In the UK we have people going to prison for being "offensive" this can be anything from jokes in poor taste to legitimate political speech. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-43816921 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-43816921 https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/02/27/chelsea-russell-and-the-depravity-of-pc/ https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/02/27/chelsea-russell-and...
• mcguire 8y ago
  From the particlesforjustice link: "As an example of the inappropriateness of citations as a metric, almost 1/3 of Strumia's citations come from being one of thousands of authors on the CMS Higgs discovery paper, to which we can safely conclude that his contribution (as a theoretical associate in an experimental collaboration) was modest. Hundreds more citations come from papers about the statistically insignificant 750 GeV fluctuation at CERN, which disappeared with more data." Ouchie.
  • leereeves 8y ago
    And yet even if you throw out half his citations, he would still have over 3x as many as the woman who was hired over him. He has 21,000 citations. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Alessandro_Strumia https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Alessandro_Strumia The woman who was hired has 3000. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Anna_Ceresole https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Anna_Ceresole
    • SiempreViernes 8y ago
      Yes, the slide you refer to, where he publicly names and insults a member of the selection comitte that didn’t hire him is the slide that relly got him in trouble. You are, quite obviously, going to get in trouble by demonstrating such lack of professionalism. Any selection comitte that considers questions such as: ”will the candidate respect collegues if they happen to be female” will from his presentation know that the answer is absolutey not.
      • leereeves 8y ago
        > the slide you refer to I didn't refer to any slides. Are you replying to the wrong person? > ”will the candidate respect collegues if they happen to be female” will from his presentation know that the answer is absolutey not. But now I will refer to slides, to counter that statement: Physics does not depend on nation, race, sex ⇒ open to good people from any background. Curie etc. welcomed after showing what they can do, got Nobels... He doesn't object to women in physics. He objects to lower standards and "positive discrimination" for women in physics.
• bloopernova 8y ago
  Q: Did Prof. Strumia work with subject matter experts on his controversial research before giving his presentation? My opinion: Being an expert in one area may not translate well into other areas. I'm a pretty good sysadmin, maybe even above average. But I don't present myself as a good/great devops or software engineer because I know I don't know as much as the developers I work with. If I'm trying to figure out some issue that involves a build or code in some way, I do my initial research then present that tentative conclusion to trusted experts for them to review. I don't make a presentation saying definitively "this is now happening" because I'd probably be wrong.
  • mcguire 8y ago
    The neat thing about physicists (and many engineers) is that, because they understand the fundamentals of everything, they are completely qualified to speak on any topic.
    • htns 8y ago
      We shouldn't settle for anything less than a panel of women's studies professors.
      • dang 8y ago
        No flamebait, please. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• rjf72 8y ago
  For those that would like to see the slides of his talk to judge for themselves they are available here [1]. The slides described as "cartoons deriding women campaigning for equality in science" by the BBC, are 5th and and 2nd from the bottom. [1] - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1c_NyUhOZ8erdqU2AGZJZtNfFeA91Kefj/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/1c_NyUhOZ8erdqU2AGZJZtNfFeA9...
  • sonnyblarney 8y ago
    The BBC's characterization I think is unfair, I suggest HN'ers actually read the presentation. While controversial, I don't think it's poignantly offensive. I'm wary of researchers getting into flame wars and I guess CERN does have the right to avoid such things, at the same time, he seems to be making some points with a lot of data - the best thing someone concerned with opinions could do is actually debunk them instead of having him silenced ... because the BBC's article trying to shut him down may in fact have the opposite effect.
    • tptacek 8y ago
      It's a formal presentation at a CERN workshop that invokes "Cultural Marxism". CERN had to apologize for the presentation after the workshop. Of course they're pissed.
      • sonnyblarney 8y ago
        They had to apologize because some people were going to be offended, surely, it doesn't mean the presentation is intellectually offensive. 'PR' is different than 'Science'. 'Cultural Marxism' is just a popular term for Intersectionalism, and it's a real issue, particularly on campus. People should be able to talk about issues that are a little bit uncomfortable.
        • tptacek 8y ago
          He misled CERN to get his talk into the workshop, didn't provide materials a priori, deliberately gave his talk an obscurantist title, and attacked the workshop (and specific individual scientists and organizers) during the presentation. It was a stunt; he played the workshop. Nobody is going to congratulate him for that.
• russellbeattie 8y ago
  This is like saying Americans are empirically bad at soccer. First, so what? Second, he should be smart enough to realize this is a rash generalization, regardless of past data. Third, he should know that saying something like this just insults those already in the field, encourages ignorance from others, and discourages those coming into the field, and thus serves absolutely no purpose. For someone who is supposed to be an intelligent and capable leader of a heavily funded public project, this is pure stupidity and justifies any action they took against him, regardless of gender politics. That said, the guy is totally sexist. No idea why BBC bothered to put it in scare quotes, when it's unquestionably true.
• patrickg_zill 8y ago
  The skeptic in me asks: if he goes to a friend of his at CERN and asks him to present a talk that reaches the exact opposite conclusion, no matter how shaky the reasoning, will that person be similarly in danger of losing their position?
  • fl0wenol 8y ago
    If he takes pot shots at colleagues by way of example during the presentation, then yes.
• Proven 8y ago
  I cut ties with the discriminating CERN.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• duxup 8y ago
  >Prof Strumia analysed papers available in a database of particle physics research. He produced a series of graphs which, he claimed, showed that women were hired over men whose research was cited more by other scientists in their publications, which is an indication of higher quality. >He also presented data that he claimed showed that male and female researchers were equally cited at the start of their careers but men scored progressively better as their careers progressed. I know being published and cited is a big deal in those fields, but is that really a great measuring stick? Couldn't those choices be filled with any sort of bias, or just picking things that support a common theory or line of thinking... and not indicate quality? It seems like a potentially poor benchmark.
  • Barrin92 8y ago
    Yes, it is completely circular. Because if discrimination against women exists, then the higher citation rate and slower career progress are equally explained by this. This isn't evidence in favour of some causal explanation about innate differences between men and women, he's just trying to justify his prior assumptions. This is very much comparable to the circular nature of IQ measurement. People with racist attitudes often conflate innate ability and IQ, because IQ is very much designed to measure the sort of things that people who like IQ tests are good at. These people will often present evidence in the same way the physicist does, by pointing out that say, people with higher IQs have higher personal income, but this obviously neglects the facts that if IQ tests / degrees etc.. are licenses for success in the first place, so you're just running in circles.
    • toasterlovin 8y ago
      IQ tests are not used as barriers to any institutions in the US (or in most of the developed world). They are almost exclusively used for research purposes.
      • 0815test 8y ago
        IQ tests have been used as barriers in some circumstances - for example, people who are "too smart" may be at a disadvantage should they want to enter some police forces in the U.S.
• pygy_ 8y ago
  There's no doubt Strumia did a dumb, and while he may kind of have a point regarding the variability hypothesis, there's actually more to it. It comes down to chromosomes. XY individuals have a single X chromosome while XX individuals have two (duh). The X and Y chromosomes have a small section that pairs one another (the pseudo-homologous region), but most of their chromatin is different. The Y is mostly made of genes required for the architecture of the testicle, whereas the non-homologous part of the X contains genes that are implicated in many cellular processes. Humans need at least one chromosome to be viable. In XX individuals, to avoid the over-expression of the dedicated X genes (those that are not part of the pseudo-homologous region), one X chromosome is deactivated. This happens at random, during the early embryonic life. As a consequence XX individuals have roughly one half of their cells that expresses the alleles of their father's X and the other half expresses those of their mother's. XY individuals only express the alleles of their mother's X. Depending on what an allele does and how an allele pair interacts, this can have different consequences. The canonical example is color vision where XY individuals are more often affected by color perception issues than at a much higher frequency than XX individuals. Also, some XX individuals exhibit tetrachromacy, i.e. for them color is a 4d space rather than the RGB 3d space most of us are used to. For other parameters like body size, having distinct alleles results in a phenotype that is in between. After normalization, XY individuals have a larger variance in body size than XX folks, since the latter can fall into more intermediate buckets. Sex chromosomes in birds are the other way around. Males have a WW pair while females have a WZ pair. In birds, the variance for body size is larger in females. This leads us, at long last to IQ, whose variance is larger in the XY group than in the XX one (with an identical mean in both groups). This may lead one to think that it makes it normal to have more XY folks in academia for mathy/brainy topics like physics (since there will be more of them in the upper tail of the distribution), but it ignores several things: - IQ is an imperfect measure, and we may be ignoring people whose faculties are, like tetrachromacy, out of reach for XY folks, who designed the tests. - XY folks in the upper tail of the distribution for a given parameter (say, IQ) have nevertheless a higher probability to be catastrophic in other dimensions (when compared to XX folks). This is relevant because science is becoming more and more of a collective endavour where social abilities matter as much as raw intelligence. It looks like Strumia sucks at that game.
  • 8y ago
• lgleason 8y ago
  I wonder what would have happened if he had done a presentation in favor of the current favored political/pseudo religious orthodoxy with bad/inaccurate poorly done data. We will never know but, I'll bet you not much would have been said about it. I'm not in the field, but from everything I've read the rest of his work is some of the top in the field. So we un-person this individual and start to dis-credit his work, not based on its merit, but because of the creators "moral character". If someone dug back into Einstein and many other prominent scientists I'm sure that they could find plenty of issues with their moral character as well. For science to thrive it needs to be based on realism and facts. If someone presents inaccurate facts, they need to be refuted with with accurate ones and a lively debate needs to be possible to get to truth. The mobs condemning someone does not achieve that goal. This is also probably one of the reasons why scientific innovation is continuing to slow down.
  • OldFatCactus 8y ago
    Lol Firstly, the guy isn't qualified to make such a sweeping statement about the opposite sex. So before we even step into the problems with why it's a dumb idea to say such things, lets just make it clear that he's a physicist and not an anthropologist, biologist, or sociologist. We definitely care about his moral character, but it's also just flat out incredibly naive to discredit women in his field when they've been playing catch-up for years due to cultural boundaries in the sciences. Any scientist who steps out of their lane to attack another gender or race deserves every bit of what they get. It's cowardly to use your position as a scientist in a completely unrelated field to justify your hatred for some other group of humans. Moreover, the guys history is terrible. He's got a chip on his shoulder about women and unethically chose to use his platform as a CERN scientist to exercise his anger.
    • titanix2 8y ago
      It is comments like yours that is currently fuelling the ‘diversity’ meme pushback. You are denying someone the right to express facts just because of its gender and divergent political opinion. The guy is a physicist, he is way more qualified than any sociologist to deal with statistics. Your position is not only ridiculous virtue signaling but you are also creating a scary world where the messenger is more important than the message.
• dominotw 8y ago
  oh I remember listening to Janice talk about it in her podcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOCIke7zLMo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOCIke7zLMo
• PostOnce 8y ago
  I went into this leaning towards "they probably are mistreating the guy", but nope, dude's... wrong, manipulative, a liar to further his own goals? The guy quotes the Istanbul Convention, article 4, as being "Discriminations against men 'shall not be considered discrimination'" https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/01A6/production/_105922400_47478537.jpg https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/01A6/production/... But what it actually says is "Special measures that are necessary to prevent and protect women from gender-based violence shall not be considered discrimination under the terms of this Convention." https://www.coe.int/en/web/conventions/full-list/-/conventions/rms/090000168008482e https://www.coe.int/en/web/conventions/full-list/-/conventio... So I don't know how much deeper I need to dig in light of this to figure out this guy was probably justly dismissed and will lie to and attempt to manipulate the media in his favor, given his obviously intentional misquoting the above. This doesn't further any cause of men's rights or anything, if anything it harms it.
  • Udik 8y ago
    Why would measures meant to protect somebody from violence ever be considered discriminatory in the first place?
    • thucydidesofusa 8y ago
      Go read the indictment of the American justice system. Locking up violent people is racist because comparatively more blacks and hispanics are violent.
    • microcolonel 8y ago
      The convention says this because the intent is to introduce measures which are clearly discriminatory (in the way they describe), but nominally intended to prevent violence against women in particular. Of course, a major error on their part is to limit it based on sex, which (regardless of your take on the expediency or righteousness of the distinction) is inherently discriminatory.
    • DanBC 8y ago
      People complain about government-funded women's refuges not accepting male victims of domestic violence. I think those people are wrong, especially if there are male refuges available.
• eruci 8y ago
  Perhaps he meant to say that "some women were less able at physics than some men. And vice versa."
• Mugwort 8y ago
  I'll just say this. Anyone who discourages anybody from even TRYING to learn or pursue a career in science is a bully and a jerk. That's the way the world is going and being tech savvy only makes the world a better place. That said our schools and workplaces should still be based on MERIT. I don't care where the science comes from so long as it's good science. If it just so happens to be more men are doing science than women, then we should make sure it's not because somebody is being shut out. Everyone get's to try and I even mean slow learners who are men and maybe even white. I say this because we NEED science and technological know-how going forward. If someone is so inclined educate them, give them a job. Yes we need more women in science, because we need more people in science, badly. It would be a pity if someday we achieve some quota that we're satisfied with and leave it at that. The world demands more people competent in science than can every fill the need, especially going forward. I personally DO NOT CARE wha the sex of the scientist who did XYZ happens to be. If fewer women get into the sciences or lean towards studying biology or something else, I accept that on one condition, that the DOOR is OPEN for EVERYONE. The country with the most technologically capable citizens is probably the one that's going to lead the world. Science education should be given out liberally and not rationed for an elite few. I personally do not care how the final stats and quotas look. Did every woman sincerely interested in a science career have the support and means necessary to pursue her goals? The answer to the question should be a resounding YES. The next thing is that I don't like sexist people but why make an example out of this guy and fire him? It doesn't solve anything. He didn't harass or grope someone. Go ahead and trash his ideas, discredit him, etc. whatever but leave his job alone. It's savage to fire people just because they have opinions you do like.
  • sprash 8y ago
    Why can't we just invent a virus that turns everyone into hermaphroditic futanarias. If there's only 1 gender, that'll end gender discrimination. On a serious note: The identity politics culture, in particular third wave feminism, was a psyop instigated by the CIA (for further information look up e.g. Gloria Steinem) in order to exactly prevent organizations to give people power/reward based on MERIT. This leads to a failing and dysfunctional power structures and subsequently to the failure of the attacked organizations. Why High-Energy-Physics is under attack and who would be the attacker is totally unclear to me. The result however will be a inefficient non functioning institution doomed to fail. If CERN were to be publicly traded I would sell now!
• anigbrowl 8y ago
  I'm nearly 50 and decided some years ago that life was just too short to bother accommodating people who are assholes. Perhaps he's brilliant, but there's quite a lot of brilliant people around and if there's a discovery just waiting to be made it's more likely that someone else will do than that the opportunity to make it will be lost forever. I'm not arguing that everyone has to hold the same views, but if your need to have your views heard is so pressing that you're willing to damage the social cohesion of your peer group or team to the point that they can't get anything done then it better be something super-important like the lab being on fire or the discovery of fraud or catastrophic professional negligence.
  • lawnchair_larry 8y ago
    That’s one way to look at things. But keep in mind, in that hypothetical world, we just erased Feynman, Einstein, Oppenheimer, and, well, probably the entire United States. Folks may disagree about whether that’s a net win or a net loss.
    • anigbrowl 8y ago
      No, 'we' didn't. Einstein does not have a reputation for alienating his scientific colleagues or throwing tantrums at the IAS that I'm aware of.
  • fao_ 8y ago
    > I'm nearly 50 and decided some years ago that life was just too short to bother accommodating people who are assholes. Perhaps he's brilliant, but there's quite a lot of brilliant people around and if there's a discovery just waiting to be made it's more likely that someone else will do than that the opportunity to make it will be lost forever. Not just that but, how many (potentially smarter) people would refuse to work in that company/field/lab because of people like him? By listening to him, he's potentially doing more damage to the field than he could ever contribute, because that then makes it clear to everyone thinking about entering the field (or even in the field) that bigots like him are listened to. By shutting him down and removing his platform, it's clear that speech like that is not accepted there, thus making bigotry of that sort less prevalent in the field as a whole. The question boils down to "is this acceptable talk for the workplace, does this talk create a hostile workplace for anyone", and the answers to that are pretty clear cut.
• octopoc 8y ago
  At my company, any sort of presentation at trade shows or conferences has to be reviewed by the marketing department first. In fact often the content originated from the marketing department. It seems to me like large scientific organizations like CERN should do something similar. Science has always been political and probably always will be.