by alexmat on 9/7/18, 11:09 PM with 222 comments
by ve55 on 9/8/18, 4:00 AM
Many that I know have begun to distrust areas of academia much more recently, and when they see scenarios like this over and over it doesn't help. We all know that no one will support you for saying the truth if it won't go down well politically. The end result of this is that Academia will only publish the 'right' results, but it will not matter as few will trust them to begin with.
After reading the full article I find it funny they decide to critique the paper by calling it 'pseudoscientific'. I'd like to play the same game back at them and simply call their beliefs 'pseudoscientific' and proceed to pretend like they are discredited and don't warrant further inspection.
If you keep crying wolf, eventually no one will believe you when you really need them to. You can't go against truth forever.
by verylongname on 9/8/18, 5:15 PM
The scandal here is the journal editors deviating from their standard procedures. There are procedures in place for re-evaluating articles which have been published or accepted for publication, and for retracting them if they don't meet proper standards. If the members of editorial boards don't think those procedures are proper, they should work to change them, or, barring that, resign. What they did instead undermines the credibility of the journals. How do we know that usual procedures are followed in other cases when they clearly weren't in this one (assuming the facts are as stated in the post)? Are there articles that are accepted for publication because of external pressure, over the objection of reviewers and editors? Are there other papers which have been disappeared without the expected retraction notices? What a disgrace.
by abecedarius on 9/8/18, 7:23 AM
> None of them had ever heard of a paper in any field being disappeared after formal publication. Rejected prior to publication? Of course. Retracted? Yes, but only after an investigation, the results of which would then be made public by way of explanation. But simply disappeared? Never. If a formally refereed and published paper can later be erased from the scientific record and replaced by a completely different article, without any discussion with the author or any announcement in the journal, what will this mean for the future of electronic journals?
I'd had the impression online journals normally had some plan for archiving. So insiders were left out of the threat model?
by oflannabhra on 9/8/18, 3:06 AM
[0] - https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/claire-lehmann-t...
by rebuilder on 9/8/18, 8:19 AM
by jfoutz on 9/8/18, 12:02 AM
by quotemstr on 9/8/18, 2:53 AM
How is anyone supposed to trust any unintuitive conclusions with expensive implications --- for example, on climate change --- when the academic community has demonstrated a propensity to shriek at and censor unorthodox ideas instead of contest them on the merits?
by traject_ on 9/8/18, 12:19 AM
by leiroigh on 9/8/18, 3:00 PM
The article is not fit for publication in a mathematical journal, it is cosplaying as math.
To cite:
> The following simple proposition may be well known, but since no reference is known to the author, a proof is included for completeness.
>Proposition 7.1. N(µ, σ1) is more variable than N(µ, σ2) if and only if σ1 > σ2.
>Proof: [lots of lines]
In a real mathematical paper, this claim would not be glorified into a numbered proposition, and it would not merit a proof; this amount of mathematical work is the distance between one line and the next. I would not even expect students to provide a proof for such utter trivialities in a homework assignment.
Author should have submitted to PNAS instead, or written a blogpost.
by tasubotadas on 9/8/18, 8:16 AM
And what are those people thinking? They are seriously undermining their credibility in the long term. Imagine this in 50 years - whenever you would mention something about gender-inequality you would be taken as a tin-foiled freak.
by userbinator on 9/8/18, 3:13 AM
by epx on 9/8/18, 5:39 PM
The male cats varied from totally dumb to extremely intelligent. One cat "Negro" was almost like a monkey, he managed to walk on my shoulders around my head, while most cats are afraid of being held this high. But he ran the wrong gay when my dad was parking the car and was run over ;( Pretty dumb error for a cat that was so intelligent. An idiot-savant cat, perhaps?
by opwieurposiu on 9/8/18, 3:55 AM
by no_identd on 9/12/18, 11:43 AM
https://gowers.wordpress.com/2018/09/09/has-an-uncomfortable...
Here's a "Statement addressing unfounded allegations." by the Mathematical Intelligencer:
https://math.uchicago.edu/~wilkinso/Statement.html
And here's a "Statement in response to Ted Hill's unfounded allegations." by the New York Journal of Mathematics:
by DanAndersen on 9/8/18, 12:00 AM
Kudos to the author for being brave enough to detail these events. Academia and the process of science has enough blind spots without needing activists in the mix to add their own.
>“Several colleagues,” she wrote, had warned her that publication would provoke “extremely strong reactions” and there existed a “very real possibility that the right-wing media may pick this up and hype it internationally.”
It's as if these people had never heard of the Streisand Effect. What would have been a stuffy publication of no interest beyond a small circle of curious researchers is now a public salacious affair.
by geofft on 9/8/18, 3:37 PM
I think this is a rational position to take. In particular I would argue that whether or not this paper is one of them, I can conceive of some papers that the NSF should distance itself from quite rationally.
Suppose someone had written a paper showing that, say, scientific reaearch itself was harmful, that the more research was done, the more we angered the gods, or something, and so we should limit our research. The authors have actual evidence to this effect (increasing natural disasters in countries with nationwide science programs, etc.) and apart from the intuitively-bizarre hypothesis, nothing is obviously nonsensical with their methods. Still, almost all scientists think the hypothesis is far-fetched enough that this evidence isn't nearly strong enough to even put the hypothesis into play. Also the hypothesis happens to align with a political plank of the Yellow Party, one of the major political parties that believes in not angering the gods and reducing NSF funding.
I think the NSF would be justified in quashing this paper early instead of letting it play out in the marketplace of ideas, because of the risks to the marketplace of ideas itself if the paper is put to the debate it otherwise deserves and becomes popular on Yellow-leaning non-scientific media.
At that point we are just trying to figure out where the line is. Science, in the sense of the project of humanity to do research about the world, does have values of its own; it is not inherently unscientific for the NSF to ever object to a paper that is at odds with its values.
by scythe on 9/8/18, 1:08 AM
The paper is not without at least one obvious mistake:
> If gender differences in selectivity have been decreasing and are now less significant in some species than they were in prehistoric times, then this theory could also predict that the gender difference in variability in those species has also been decreasing. One recent meta-analysis found empirical evidence of exactly that trend in humans, reporting “The gender difference in variability has reduced substantially over time within the United States
Gender variability over the 240 years of the existence of the United States is probably not a good proxy for gender variability over the 5000 years from the beginning of literate societies to the present.
by Quanttek on 9/8/18, 3:46 PM
1)
Certain parts of the post ring my alarm bells when it comes to the language used:
For example: "Fortunately for me, I am now retired and rather less easily intimidated—one of the benefits of being a Vietnam combat veteran and former U.S. Army Ranger, I guess."
Also, certain parts don't really seem to pass a smell test:
> Half his board, he explained unhappily, had told him that unless he pulled the article, they would all resign and “harass the journal” he had founded 25 years earlier “_until it died._” Faced with the loss of his own scientific legacy, he had capitulated. “A publication in a dead journal,” he offered, “wouldn’t help you.”
I also find it highly suspicious that so many statisticians, fellow mathematicians etc seem to think of the paper as pseudoscientific. When even the NSF and editorial boards, institutions traditionally very conservative, are unhappy, there is probably a reason why
2)
I'm not mathematician but a cursory glance at the text reveals a few very surprising assumptions. The paper's hypothesis is this:
> SELECTIVITY-VARIABILITY PRINCIPLE. In a species with two sexes A and B, both of which are needed for reproduction, suppose that sex A is relatively selective, i.e., will mate only with a top tier (less than half ) of B candidates [1]. Then from one generation to the next, among subpopulations of B with comparable average attributes, those with greater variability will tend to prevail over those with lesser variability. Conversely, if A is relatively non-selective, accepting all but a bottom fraction (less than half ) of the opposite sex, then subpopulations of B with lesser variability will tend to prevail over those with comparable means and greater variability.
[1] As the author points out himself, this presupposes that there is an absolute scale of attractiveness. However, he hides that fact (and its facial controversy) in a bit more convoluted writing: "it will be assumed that to each individual (or phenotype) in each sex is assigned a numerical desirability value which reflects its desirability to the opposite sex". There is only a larger group of people in the top bracket, e.g. 9s, if that is an absolute value on an universal, absolute scale (i.e. if you pick a set, numerical point on this graph https://i.stack.imgur.com/JWWuw.png). If attractiveness is relative and based on the average for example, your contextual situation and "top bracket" corresponds to e.g. top 10%, than the group size doesn't change and the subpopulation with greater variability doesn't have an advantage. And there is evidence for that when we recall that most people date people from a similar social background and that ideas of attractiveness are (partially) based on your background.
Additionally, looking at statistical evidence, we can see that, while there is a difference in childless partners, - which would imply that one groups dates more selectively - that difference is not as large as the authors allude to: https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2010/27/more-childless-men. And that is only one crude statistic, best would be number of children per partner.
From the way he writes the paper (and especially this write-up), despite disclaimers to the contrary, he clearly tries to apply his theory to humans with women being the selective sex.
by jancsika on 9/8/18, 4:26 AM
Half a board of academics skulking to avoid controversy, ok. But becoming a hive of killer bees threatening to attacking their own hive? That doesn't pass the smell test.
by n4r9 on 9/8/18, 8:55 AM
Did he? I read it when it came to light and briefly again just now and cannot see any mention of higher variability amongst men. Psychological differences, yes, but mostly in the slightly vague "women like people, men like things" or "women are more neurotic" sense.
I'd also question the premise that Damore was fired merely for bringing up psychological differences. He also bridged the is/ought gap by making several demands of Google's hiring practices.
by aldoushuxley001 on 9/8/18, 4:22 PM
by octonion on 9/8/18, 2:27 AM
by another-cuppa on 9/8/18, 6:29 AM
by DINKDINK on 9/8/18, 4:44 AM
by jonnybgood on 9/8/18, 6:15 AM
by jmmcd on 9/8/18, 7:54 PM
by brenschluss on 9/8/18, 4:04 AM
Take a look at the paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.04184.pdf
On page 2, it says (in discussing Special Case 1): "If sex A is relatively selective and will mate only with the top most desirable quarter of sex B, then all of the next generation will be offspring of the more variable subpopulation B1"
However, if you look at the histogram in Figure 1, it's clear that if sex A mates with the top most desirable quarter of sex B, then sex A is choosing most desirable mates who happened to be part of the subpopulation B1.
That is, as diagrammed in the histogram, variability is not a function of the population any more, since the red rectangle noting 'B1' with desirability 3 to 4 is no longer variable. It would be absolutely incorrect to say that "all of the next generation will be offspring of the more variable subpopulation B1".
In other words, it's like saying:
"In Sack 1, I have a mix of of blueberries and watermelons. Sack 1 is varied in fruit size, and has a high variability. I've sorted them by size, and taken the most largest fruit and put them in Sack 2. Now Sack 2 is full of variable sizes of fruit, since it came from Sack 1, which had high variability."
(EDIT: to be clear, I think the above sack example is incorrect; I'm illustrating the logic in which the paper seems to be incorrect, according to my understanding.)
