That hasn't happened however. All that's happened has happened behind the scenes. Unless the article we read is dishonest in this regard.
So, yes, I would really like to read a reply to this article but any of the other parties mentioned there.
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.)
This paper is arguing that in addition to sexual selection's first order directional effect, there's an overlaid second order effect on variability, and the argument makes sense. Male reproductive success is already highly variable, because male gametes are cheap. Some males end up being disproportionately successful, e.g., Genghis Khan. From a gene's point of view, being hosted in Khan was winning the jackpot.
If you have a number of male offspring, some of them will be evolutionary "duds" no matter what. If you increase the variability in reproductive success of your male children, then some of them will be less reproductively successful and others will be more successful. But there's an asymmetry: "duds" are already duds and can't be made less successful, but on the other side of the curve, by increasing variability, you increase the likelihood of a jackpot.
The effect doesn't apply to female children, since a female mammal cannot have 200 offspring in her lifetime, but a male mammal certainly can.
(Your fruit analogy is inapt, since fruit in a bag don't reproduce among themselves and regress toward the population mean.)
Ah, but now she could. With enough money to pay for enough surrogates (or eventually, machines) and childcare.
So maybe, going forward, there'll be more variability in human female reproductive success. Interesting.
From the paper:
"Note that this theory makes no assumptions about differences in means between the sexes, nor does it presume that one sex is selective and the other non-selective"
So the reproduction capacity of sex A and sex B is equal. I'm attempting to debate the paper strictly based on its own arguments.
No, that's exactly correct. The example is set up so that no individual from B2 gets to mate with A. Therefore, the next generation only consists of offspring of B1. (I think you understand that, since you say "sex A is choosing most desirable mates who happened to be part of the subpopulation B1".) B1 is the more variable subpopulation. Therefore, the sentence "all of the next generation will be offspring of the more variable subpopulation B1" is correct.
I suspect you are interpreting it as making a statement about the subpopulation B11 (of the subpopulation B1) that actually gets to mate. But if you split B1 into the more desirable B11 and the less desirable B12, then you can't even talk about their variability relative to B2, because the paper only defines comparisons of variability for distributions with the same median.
So the sentence "all of the next generation will be offspring of the more variable subpopulation B11" is not only incorrect but meaningless. Although they seem to be talking about the same individuals (and "all of the next generation will be offspring of the subpopulation B11" is true) they are talking about different populations, and "more variable" can only be applied meaningfully to B1.
In terms of your fruit example, the correct translation would be "All fruit in Sack 2 came from Sack 1, which had high variability." without any implications about variability of Sack 2.
Heritability of variability is only introduced on page 6: " it will be assumed that the pace of evolution is negligible compared to the pace of reproduction, so the two subpopulations remain distinct, with offspring distributed the same way as the parent subpopulation". In other words, although three subpopulations B11, B12 and B2 can be clearly distinguished, only membership in B1 or B2 is actually heritable, with B11's offspring either in B11 or B12. If B2 ever got to reproduce, it would have B2 offspring, while B12 would produce B11 or B12. So although B12 never reproduces, it never dies out due to offspring of B11.
Of course the conditions in those examples are contrived and that makes the conclusions almost trivial (a caveat that is noted in the paper: "The precise formal definitions and assumptions made here are clearly not applicable in real-life scenarios, and thus the contribution here is also merely a general theory intended to open the discussion to further mathematical modeling and analysis") but it is certainly free from egregious and basic errors.
> If B2 ever got to reproduce, it would have B2 offspring, while B12 would produce B11 or B12.
Okay, this is clear regarding the paper’s assumption of heritability of variability. Assuming that variability is a completely static characteristic innate to a population and perfectly heritable seems to me such a simplistic assumption as render most of the conclusions ineffective or correct only within a narrow set of assumptions.
After all, every GA would never work if this was the case.
I did think for a second that your definition was the case, and variability was a function of phenotypical expression, but it (as defined in the paper) is strictly about the statistical distribution of desirability within a population. See p4.
It's like having a bag 1 filled with equal quantities of capsicums, cherries, and apples, then selecting the top reddest 25% of bag 1 and moving them to bag 2.
You will have much less variability of fruit type in bag 2 because you used color selection to fill it (apples and capsicums come in three colors at will be selected 1/3rd the rate of cherries).
That's the whole point of sexual vs natural selection.
Yes, I completely agree with you! You will have much less variability.
However, that's not what the paper argues. The paper argues that you would have more variability.
I'd appreciate you taking a look at the original paper (specifically, the bottom of page 2 [edit: and Figure 1]) and understanding my original argument.
You have increased variability between generations by reducing the variability in the second generation.
I agree with you that the variability has been reduced in the second generation.
It seems that we both disagree with the original paper, then, as it states
"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"
In other words, if subpopulation B11 is chosen by A, then B11 would produce B11, this reducing the variability, not increasing it.
Maybe it's less ambiguous if we talk about machines which spit out a randomly sized ball when you press a lever. After collecting a certain number of balls from the machines, you determine what proportion of the largest p% is from each machine and replace all balls by selecting from the machines according to their proportion.
If you have a machine M1 producing very large balls and very small ones in equal quantities, as well as M2 producing medium-sized balls, then the prediction is that the proportion of balls coming from M1 will increase if p < 50% and decrease otherwise.
In that model, although you can clearly group the very large balls as B11, there is no machine M11 only producing those balls. Both very large and very small balls will, if they are in the top p%, require you to press the lever on M1. The size of the balls only influences which machine will be chosen, not what kind of balls will be coming out of that machine.
In genetic terms, B1 and B2 carry different alleles of the same gene and have different genotypes, while B11 and B12 are different phenotypes possible for B1. If B11 were to produce only B11, that would be inheritance of phenotype, i.e. Lamarckian evolution, which is also interesting, but less relevant for real-world genetics.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make, especially since you've opted not to quote or address the majority of my comment.
The paper makes no distinction between sexes -- so a discussion of male or female differences, whether in reproductive success, does not discuss on the paper's model.
> If you have a number of male offspring, some of them will be evolutionary "duds" no matter what. If you increase the variability in reproductive success of your male children, then some of them will be less reproductively successful and others will be more successful. But there's an asymmetry: "duds" are already duds and can't be made less successful, but on the other side of the curve, by increasing variability, you increase the likelihood of a jackpot.
Your argument holds the selectivity of the female sex as constant, and discusses variability of the male sex.
The paper's argument is about variability in one sex ('sex B') being a function of the selectivity of sex A. These are fundamentally two different arguments, and so whether your argument is true or not, your argument does not discuss the paper's model.
> The effect doesn't apply to female children, since a female mammal cannot have 200 offspring in her lifetime, but a male mammal certainly can.
Addressed in a previous comment.
> (Your fruit analogy is inapt, since fruit in a bag don't reproduce among themselves and regress toward the population mean.)
Thank you - I did not know this until now. I assumed that fruit reproduced asexually in bags.
My fruit analogy is presented because the error that the paper seems to make happens at a simple statistical level -- because the paper assumes that you can 'sort' a two variably desirable populations (B1 and B2) on a histogram by desire, find the top 25% of the population (B11), and assume that the top 25% desirable population (B11) is as variable as the original population it came from (B1).
Given that the paper is about evolutionary mechanisms and whether one group "prevails" over another, I think my assumption is reasonable; and I think that, given my assumption, the paper makes good sense in the examples under discussion.
"The actual magnitudes of these desirability values are assumed to have no significance, and are used only to make comparisons between individuals. Here and throughout, it will also be assumed that the same desirability value is assigned to each individual by every member of the opposite sex. "
I might interpret the sentences you quote as "We can give each individual a beauty score from 0 to 100, and all members of the opposite sex agree on what beauty score an individual gets." And we might imagine the coin-flippers have beauty in the ranges 90-100 or 0-10 (depending on the flip result), while the others are all between 40-60 beauty.
I don't disagree with you, but that is not what the paper states, and that is not how the paper defines desirability.
I am not saying that the paper's definition is correct for a broader understanding of biology. Rather, the paper's stance is to generate a simple model and to prove an argument within that model. I am saying that, within the definition that the model is using, the model is internally incorrect.
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.
The situation is quite different for many softer sciences for which neither of the above conditions is true. If the public found out they have been misled by a whole field for decades, the trust in that field could be shaken to a great extent. Even adjacent fields could be affected as collateral damage.
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 that telling it was published practically on the spot, especially for mathematics where things are famously glacially slow. Browsing through the journal one mostly sees submission and publication dates separated by many months. Last published paper in the current volume was received over a year before. But this paper made it in three weeks.
So it was fast tracked by an editor. Editorial board could take issue with that, arguing it haven't gone by the review properly or whatever the usual procedures before publication are. It might have been put up on the web by the managing editor (since on leave and replaced in the interim) or whomever had the admin password, but editorial board to whom the journal's reputation really belongs hasn't deemed it to be their publication.
Of the timeline, author says he's uploaded to ArXiv in September, while by that time he was on revision 3 of https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.04184 uploaded in March. What was added in September however was a piece of journalism in an appendix, that then disappeared in most recent revisions. Last revision was posted just 2 weeks ago, apparently there still were arguments to strengthen (or journalism to remove) before Quillette ran the story.
There he paints his work as "science" and some people including the editorial board as "activists". By Google however appears the same Ted Hill founded a site "to promote campus activism in general" and "to serve as a focal point for organizing activists" where he chronicles his long history of activism http://www.motherfunctor.org/CompleteHistory2013.php
The members of the editorial board did not just threaten resignation, but (according to the article) threatened to "harass the journal until it died."
Academia is in sore need of reform. Especially elite academia has learned branding matters more than scientific truth.
> 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?
[0] - https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/claire-lehmann-t...
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?
Frankly, it’s hard to trust academia on controversial topics.
Is "human CO2 emissions are causing an increased greenhouse effect and ocean acidification" settled science? Yes.
Is "how much will that affect us and the planet at different time scales" settled science? Not completely, no. The climate system is incredibly hard to model.
What scientists are doing in the latter regard is making their best estimates, seeing that these predict very bad things happening, and then saying we should work as hard as possible to reduce emissions.
Which, incidentally, nobody is actually doing.
In this article, it's not about media depiction vs academic consensus, but friction within academic sciences itself.
Social science is particularly bad at this, to the point I doubt any research done since the 1950s isn't ideologically tainted, at that time due to the cold war and the need to discredit anything "communist".
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.
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.
Are you sure? We won't be allowed to acknowledge differences in average adult height or differences in the ability to carry children?
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?
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:
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.
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.
What about the risk to the marketplace of ideas if certain ideas can be quashed by authorities for being distasteful? Galileo being the canonical example of this.
> it is not inherently unscientific for the NSF to ever object to a paper that is at odds with its values.
Science investigates empirical facts about the world. How can a fact be at odds with a value?
Facts describe the world as it is. Values describe what we think is important, and how we ought to act. Discovering a fact about the natural world does not inherently say anything about what is right, moral, or good.
It's not supposed to be that you ban ideas that might be harmful, it that you ban pushing ideas by means other than rational argument.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't think he made demands. He called for open discussion, and a reconsideration of aggressive recruitment of women.
I'm not going to argue against that in this post, but I think imo he went beyond simply highlighting biological differences.
"I don't know a particular thing, but I'm censoring it anyway and (because?) I heard it was "right-wing"."
Read their (succinct) about page to find out more (http://quillette.com/about/), and consider reading their articles for yourself, especially before echoing any disinformation you've acquired from your trusty sources.
Your comment adds nothing to the discussion. Mine only serves to help guide you in thinking for yourself.
Just to clarify: when papers are retracted, they are not normally erased from the database and replaced with an explanation. See this Nature paper for an example; the entire paper is kept available online, just as before, except that the words "RETRACTED" is stamped on each PDF page
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature10167
Likewise, nothing published to the arXiv is ever removed. A retraction notice can be added as an update, but the complete version history is always available.
Articles are much more likely to be "un-published" (wiped from the archives) in journalism than scientific publications.
What no journal does is to replace erroneously published article with another entirely unrelated one in-place. This is a very poor behaviour on the part of the managing editor here, who is currently on leave and replaced.
Nature is unusual, for example they publish letters complaining about ArXiv's moderation, beside publishing a lot of editorial and opinion stuff.
I checked https://web.archive.org/ but the 2017/10/23 snapshot ends at p. 1539,[1] and the 2017/12/01 snapshot has the substitute paper.[2]
Ajay Kumar, Niteesh Sahni, and Dinesh Singh
Invariance under finite Blaschke factors on BMOA 1641
0) http://nyjm.albany.edu/nyjm.html
1) https://web.archive.org/web/20171027011421/http://nyjm.alban...
2) https://web.archive.org/web/20171201163957/http://nyjm.alban...
In all seriousness, sometimes for certain people (outliers) there can be, but like musicians and sports stars for every one person who turns a censored idea into a speaking tour there are millions who are just quietly fired.
You can be suspicious all you want, but frankly that is totally irrelevant info and frankly useless. Some people are suspicious that the earth is round, either it is or it isn't and if you think he's wrong, prove him wrong and publish your findings, that's the system. The system is not "I don't like this idea so it must be wrong"
This is honestly going to end in disaster soon enough
In a sense, the minority community brings it to itself. If you highlight how you're not different, then you cannot complain that stories will be written about how you're not different - that's the whole point of highlighting it! But once the society completely accepts that you're not different, then the difference will truly not matter and there will be no story (for better or worse).
The leap from 2. to 3. is reminiscent of "Hitler was a vegetarian. Therefore vegetarians are Nazis."
Sometimes, a thing --- a word, an institution, a bit of history --- has cultural power. It's surrounded with an aura (or valence, if you will) of gravitas and mystique, usually accumulated over decades, or millennia.
Acrivists notice that these things have cultural power and hijack them, turning them into something useful for the cause while denying that anything has changed. Consider, for example, how many people claim, in all earnestness, that disagreement is "literal violence". Disagreement is obviously not violence, but by using this word, activists can "steal" some of the emotion attached to the word "violence" and weild it for their cause.
This hijacking works for a while, until people catch on. At that point, activists, like locusts, move on to areas not yet stripped bare of meaning.
The same mechanism that at micro scale operates on words operates at macro scale on institutions.
Academia in particular has been ravaged by this process: huge parts of the academy no longer practice anything resembling science. Their studies do not reproduce. Their papers go unread. Their lectures become diatribes. Their students become zealots. The forms are present, but the substance is gone.
This article describes the early stages of such a hijacking.
Censorship is as old as organized society. Historically, the power to censor belonged to those in power (the Church, royalty, etc.) But it was never exercised openly, it always rested on some higher justification (to prevent offending God or upset the social order). And so, censorship, which is always, in effect, an instrument of domination, somehow became "the moral choice".
At some point (I'd say, fairly recently, sometime in the 70s) minorities fighting "the Good Fight" (tm) discovered the power of moral censorship and they are now basking in it. But it's a double-edged sword and it's very difficult not to cut yourself when using it.
And yet actual real some mathematical journal editors apparently thought otherwise before they got pushed into a purely political retraction.
[v1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.04184v1.pdf
It's not up to you to decide, but up to the reviewers and editors of the journal where it was sent for publication. And according to what we know, it was accepted.
I downvoted you, for this reason.
Also from the description, which is not impartial being by the author, it is admitted it was snuck into an online journal by one of its editors. We don't know anything about the nature of peer review in this case other than when the wider board of editors got a know of that, majority of them allegedly threatened to resign.
It is however a very bad form by the managing editor to publish another article in the place of the other, even if that one was decided to be published erroneously. NYJM journal page says he's on leave and ceded his duties to an interim replacement.
Additionally, the main point of the article is that that Mr. Hill feels his paper was pushed out of publication because of a political agenda. Let's also acknowledge the claim of political motivations corrupting academics is independent of the "superfluous proof" claim.
In addition, the NYJM version of the paper is also still available: http://nyjm.albany.edu/j/2017/23-72v-orig.pdf
You're not reading about all the other times articles offensive to a certain point of view got memory holed successfully. Most of the time powerful assholes get away with their behaviour. Note that the only reason this article is even on the internet is that one of the original two co-authors is retired and beyond the reach of professional threats.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233717660_Thirty_Ye...
"Method 7: Harass, Threaten, or Penalize Researchers Who Publish Evidence on Gender Symmetry ... The most extreme example was the experience of Susan Steinmetz. When she was at the University of Delaware and was being reviewed for promotion and tenure, there was an organized attempt to block her appointment through unsolicited letters to her department and the university president. They asserted that Steinmetz was not a suitable person to promote because her research showing high rates of women's perpetration of PV was not believable. In short, they accused her of scientific fraud (Susan Steinmetz, personal communications during the years 1973 to 1988, when we collaborated in research and coauthored two books). An academic version that implies fraud is Pleck and colleagues (1978). Even more extreme, there was a bomb threat at a daughter's wedding.
At the University of Manitoba, a lecturer's contract was not renewed because of protests about her research, which found approximately equal rates of PV by women and men.
I have been repeatedly harassed and penalized. ... Two of my graduate students were warned that they will never get jobs if they do their PhD dissertation with me."
And more examples are given.
If it goes away, I'll be happy to provide copies. Or put it up somewhere secure.
And FYI:
> At this point, faced with career-threatening reprisals from their own departmental colleagues and the diversity committee at Penn State, as well as displeasure from the NSF, Sergei and his colleague who had done computer simulations for us withdrew their names from the research. Fortunately for me, I am now retired and rather less easily intimidated—one of the benefits of being a Vietnam combat veteran and former U.S. Army Ranger, I guess. So, I continued to revise the paper, and finally posted it on the online mathematics archives.
It's not that they don't know about it, it's that the quote in question is an overt threat and the entire point of it is that the person it is said to will give up and stop trying out of fear, which would certainly prevent any sort of Streisand effect from happening.
For 2), this looks quite normal in terms of mathematical modelling. You make a model based on some simplifying hypotheses. You show what result you can get from these hypotheses. The conclusion is "these results follow from the hypotheses". You don't pretend to prove that this is how it works in the real thing, you just give one example of a mechanism that gives the observed results. This is basically how you propose a new theory. Then your "opponents" are supposed to show with more scientific work that a) you made a mistake, or b) your simple theory is a bad model, for example because after changing hypothesis X to better reflect reality, the model no longer produces the expected result.
(Your opponents are not supposed to suppress your theory by exploiting their social connections to prevent publication behind your back. Well I guess there is a viable argument for suppressing valid research if the "truth" is harmful to society, but I don't think this was properly argued here).
It's not made clear (and others mention) that the paper has changed a lot, so it's current form is different than it was originally, and it appears that the author tried to sneak it in to at least one journal, without normal peer review.
That's not good science.
"The actual magnitudes of these desirability values are assumed to have no significance, and are used only to make comparisons between individuals." (page 4)
"To quantify the notion of “selective”, it will be assumed that for each sex in a given sexually dimorphic species there is an upper proportion p ∈ (0 , 1) of the opposite sex that is acceptable for mating." (also page 4)
The paper applies exactly to the scenario where the top bracket corresponds e.g. to the top 10%.
It is simply sad that our totally defensible theories are almost completely silenced these days for fear of hurting our academic or professional prospects, and they seem more triumphant by the day simply because we're silenced. I don't even feel safe posting from my usual account. Guess I should be thankful that people aren't burned at stakes anymore.
There's no great comcrete evidence backing this up (as far as I know). But Laba is one who should know, having once been a very mathematically gifted girl.
Maybe men really are outliers on a greater scale, but IMO we do enough tamping-down of female outliers that I'm not willing to draw that conclusion from the preponderance of male geniuses we see today.
[1] https://ilaba.wordpress.com/2017/06/24/gifted-while-female/
I've had intimate relationships with more than twenty women in my life. I've had friendships and professional relationships with many times more. I'd hazard to guess that my experience with women is way above average for this forum. I've not met a single one who told me they really wanted to be a scientist/engineer/programmer etc but found that society didn't let them. In fact, I find the contrary to be true: the ones that have chosen those fields were offered more encouragement than I ever was.
Just let people do what they want to do.
"it's our fault that we only care about the very best"
Actually, that might also explain the cultural difference of USA vs the other parts of the world. Perhaps in the U.S. people are more obsessed with the very best, and that's why these things become controversial.
It reminds of a recent discussion here about being open about your salary. My conclusion from (based on comments of other people) it was that it is a strong taboo in the U.S., although in Norway, it is acceptable for everybody to know. And that it possibly also ties to higher emphasis on competition in the U.S.
It's interesting - it takes an outsider (or a jester) to see society's taboo.
It's not just U.S., btw, and you're not even extreme. I remember couple of articles from the mid-90's about Russians who had moved to US after the Cold War and got married. They carried their cultural norms with them, among which there was a ruthless drive for extreme excellence.
They ran into recurring problems with their US family members when the offspring won 2nd or 3rd place in science fair. The rest of the family were proud, but those from Russia simply considered them having failed. The mentality they carried was simple: "If you don't win, it's not worth noting. Improve."
What makes this truly interesting is that the USSR/Russian education system and culture has produced a much less gender-imbalanced outcome.[0] And going off on a tangent - I have no idea whether these things are related or not, but at least in maths those educated in Russian school system are routinely considered pretty hard-core.
Nobody (serious) is saying that. First, when this is talked about, it's always about averages, which are meaningless from individual perspective.
Second, there are obvious biological traits where women are less capable than men on average, like weightlifting. There are also traits where women are more capable, like having kids.
These are facts though. You might also not be a fan of idea that "Earth revolves around Sun", but that's how it is.
On the other hand, I can understand your feeling. I am for example not a fan of idea that many humans are xenophobes.
Bottom line, notwithstanding ham-fisted commentary by the author, and some here, this paper is not about men exhibiting greater variability in reproductive fitness, or whatever, than women do. It's about gender differences generally among sexually dimorphic species. And given how remarkably humans are unconstrained by biological hardware, it's totally unclear how this work is relevant for us.
Also, this paper reports no observations. It's not even a review. It does list many studies and reviews, but without any substantial critique or discussion. It just presents results of some simple mathematical modeling.
And yes, perhaps the remaining author does display an agenda. But even so, the models presented are either interesting or not, regardless of the agenda. And from my reading of the history, it's arguable that the initial paper would have displayed far less agenda than the somewhat bitter version that ended up on https://arxiv.org/ .
That statement speaks volumes, and probably in ways that you did not intend.
I am very short, so the same things apply to me, it doesn't mean I like it, but reality is that which doesn't go away when you deny it.
I don't like the idea men live shorter than woman, but that's reality.
Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
And nobody here said that women are less capable than men. The hypothesis was, that the distribution for some traits for men has more kurtosis, so while the mean is similar, there are more outliers, and to be clear, in both directions!
As for the description of alleged emotional states involved, I'm oblivious and not seeing the relevance. Recounting the events and actions taken sufficed for a horrific story. The author deemed it important however to make it into something even more colourful with threats of some unspecified future actions (how does one harass a journal?).
The managing editor you speak of went on leave and has an interim replacement. I can see that entirely appropriate if only because of how retraction was handled by deletion and overwriting, instead of a proper notice in place. This was extremely unprofessional administration, which is usually a duty of the managing editor solely. The other possibility I described is that it wasn't really published the usual way, which is even more damning.
Can you provide a copy, or even examples? I can pull up dozens of Science, Nature, and Physical Review retracted articles to support my point. If those huge families of journals behave as I say, on what basis are you claiming "most" journal don't?
> What no journal does is to replace erroneously published article with another entirely unrelated one in-place.
Did anyone ever suggest this was the case?
> the ArXiv does have a moderation team and stuff is being removed
I know several members of the moderation team. They of course reject some articles at the time of submission, but I'm not aware of any being retracted and un-published after being posted publically. Can you please link to such a retraction, or to evidence of this in the Internet Archive?
The rest is a stream of words.
As such it is a work of social science. It might even have been respectable in social science journal. Economists input a lot of assumptions into calculus 101 level equations and call that a "mathematical proof" of an economic theory.
If the author wanted this to be a interdisciplinary discussion, why drag it into a mathematical journal where actual mathematical truths are published?
Author says himself he was unable to formulate actual mathematical idea and recruited help. Why ask Tabachnikov, who is a geometer specializing in classical mechanics, instead of someone with like a clue about statistical modeling? He then compares his experience to one he had fighting in Vietnam... which only makes me wonder if that wasn't the point: to either succeed with a flag-planting diversion or be able to make that comparison and hero of himself anyways.
I am just saying that (1) this paper does not belong into a mathematical journal, and (2) the point looks almost too trivial to state.
I am a mathematician; I cannot say whether the paper belongs into a bio journal and whether its points are common knowledge in the bio community. I can only say that, had the arxiv-paper landed on my desk for peer review, I'd have recommended to reject it.
[1] By the conservation law that each offspring has one male and one female parent, differing "effective selectivity" and differing variability of reproductive success are kinda equivalent in the model; casting it in terms of "desirability" looks like a weird choice to me.
So we should corner science off from loaded subjects? That sounds alot like what the church's position on Galileo was.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasitism_(social_offense)#So...
In the UK, about 4% of inventors are women, whereas the figure is 15% in Russia.
> At this point, faced with career-threatening reprisals from their own departmental colleagues and the diversity committee at Penn State, as well as displeasure from the NSF, Sergei and his colleague who had done computer simulations for us withdrew their names from the research.
That strikes me as pretty damn "unsafe".
> Steinberger replied later that day. 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.
It's sad that these lunatics have the power to do these things, but that's why people appease them.
Indeed, the only reason this sort of crap happens is because organisations and companies don't have the guts to tell the moral police to sod off. If they did, and their tactics stopped working, many of these issues would go away.
Because humans are coalition forming apes, with a brain built to survive in that environment not to perceive truth.
Again, I am neither advocating for or against the truth of this. I'm pointing out that Damore did more than simply highlight biological differences. I think that's important because the shallow way it is discussed - e.g. in the linked article - only leads to divisiveness.
A good example of this may be the US version of "Queer as Folk", a dramatic series on Showtime from 2000-2005 [1].
Most of the main characters were gay, but only a little under half of the actors that played them were gay. Another actor was bi, and the rest were straight.
But you could not tell from the performances which were which. The straight actors were as convincing as the gay actors, even in scenes involving serious erotic action.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queer_as_Folk_(U.S._TV_series)
I rarely see minorities arguing that they're literally no different than anybody else. Co-opting the Riddle scale [0], that sort of view is "you're not X, you're a person!". I believe the differences between people should be celebrated, and absolutely not used to discriminate. If a story is written about how a Japanese immigrant went through struggles coming to America, it would be disgraceful to have a white woman play that role.
The reality is that the majority of Americans see trans people as different. It would be wonderful if that weren't the case, but until then, any cis (non-trans) person playing a trans person is going to be a caricature of the trans experience (although a cis man playing a trans man would be slightly better). Trans people continually try to argue that they're in the same overall category of cis people of the same gender, i.e. {trans women} ∪ {cis women} ⊆ {women}. It is a uniquely minority experience to see someone who cannot understand your struggles pretend to have them for a day.
A common thing I see amongst "anti-PC" folks is the confidence in arguing a point in fields that they simply don't understand, and the hypocrisy that comes with that. She states that the norms that prevent using racial epithets or using gender as an insult are perfectly fine. Immediately after, she invalidates the experiences of all trans people in a typical fashion - "trans people are a performance and not their gender". If her mind had existed in 1970, she would've been perfectly fine with racial epithets, and argue that the people trying to tell her that's wrong are needlessly PC.
I find your position laughably ridiculous.
I disagree. For example, recently I was at a play about Jewish holocaust survivor. I don't know if the actor is Jewish, I think he is not, but I don't care. It doesn't retract from the experience in any way.
Now, white woman playing an Asian woman could cause issue with suspension of disbelief. An Asian actor would be ideal, but other than that, it's not going to be a big deal. If it was a really good play (as in writing and acting), I would forgive them the characters didn't look in a realistic way.
"The reality is that the majority of Americans see trans people as different. It would be wonderful if that weren't the case, but until then, any cis (non-trans) person playing a trans person is going to be a caricature of the trans experience"
I disagree again, and I don't follow the logic here. Certainly, the producers of the said movie about TG people didn't considered them to be different enough to worry about whether the role is to be played by cis or trans woman.
And I personally think it would be better for trans people to get the story out rather than point out that it is a caricature. If you argue that we should not think about these people as being different, then it is not a caricature. It's a human playing a human.
I personally don't care if person is LGBT and what letter. It's something that is relevant in the bedroom and I couldn't care less. It makes almost no difference in all other interactions. But you Americans are just weirdly obsessed with sexuality for some reason.
What do you think of Dr Wilkinson's behaviour? Because that’s what the article is about, a campaign of harassment from a woman in a position of power.
I'd need a more authoritative account of it to form a view.
If you believe the editor when they say "I am happy to stir up controversy" why not also believe them when they say "we could make a real contribution here"?
Here's one I've seen a few articles on within the past year or so. According to test data (SAT, PISA, and I believe others) on teens, girls who are at the top in science tend to also be at the top in other areas too [1]. Boys who are at the top in science tend to be more ordinary in other areas.
People in general tend to to enjoy more and go into careers in areas they are good at.
Result for boys: boys who are at the top in science are highly likely to want to go into science. It's what they are good at and enjoy.
Result for girls. For the girls at the top in science, though, it is just one of the things they are good at and enjoy, and often they are even better at those other things than they are at science. So top girls in science are more likely than top boys to pick some other area to go into.
Roughly, the top girls tend to be more rounded than the top boys. I've not seen anything on why that might be so.
[1] Anecdotally, that fits me. When I first took the SAT in high school, I got 790 on math, and a terrible 540 on verbal. I took it again to see if I could do better on verbal, and got that up to 640, which is still nothing to write home about but is at least good enough to suggest I might actually be able to write. Math dropped to 750 the second time, which was embarrassing.
That’s an extremely bad and uncharitable way of summarising patriarchal oppression. It’s not about men being nice or not, it’s about (in part) a society that assigns roles to men and women and expects girls from a young age to be less logical, less mathematical, less interested in technology, etc., thus discouraging them from pursuing scientific careers. This effect, by this point, is extremely well-founded.
That’s not to say GMVH might not also be an effect, but to restate socialised gender roles as “men are just horrible people”, and to call that more controversial, is ridiculous.
1. that humans are not obligated to care about each other's feelings, either. If you are pursuing a course of research that is purely hurtful and has no perceived positive impact, nobody is making you pursue it. (I don't think this paper is in this category, to be clear.)
2. that an idea is more likely to be true simply because it hurts people's feelings. The hypothesis of this paper is simply a hypothesis. It's got some evidence, but it's subject as all ideas are to future argument. "What if it's true, let's not flinch away" is a fine sentiment; "It's true, deal with it" is not.
I suspect, given two hypotheses- one that is politically correct and one that isn't- the politically incorrect one will be held to a much higher standard of evidence required due to confirmation bias and people acting as described in the article.
If you look at psychology, the politically incorrect results (IQ) have much better evidence despite being constantly attacked. Compare that to say, priming and sterotype threat - which everyone wanted to believe in.
This is not about my feeling vs your feelings, it is about your tribe vs my tribe. Simple! The whole article is about the opposing faction was obsessed about Alt-Right or Conservatives using this paper as a basis of their arguments.
I think that's a great analogy. But two questions come to mind:
1. Are there any movies that are not terrible for people who know enough to compare them to reality? Gell-Mann amnesia comes to mind. Most productions focus on telling a story and will happily ignore constraints of the setting if that allows for more dramatic scenes.
2. What about trans people playing cis people? Maybe they would be better suited for the role because of spending more time as their preferred gender, but otherwise the argument feels pretty transphobic if you simply switch cis and trans.
It's almost as if when you're an atheist and people who believe in god say that you're a believer or that you had a bad experience with religion etc. No, it is simply an indifference.
There's something about the "girls can do anything" mantra (which I totally agree with!) that seems to translate to "no girl has ever been less capable than anyone at anything as long as they try hard enough." Any theory or evidence contradicting that notion is nonsense.
My daughter, who is very strong and is stronger than her brothers, wouldn’t even compete if she had to go up against men in her sport, powerlifting. It’s very obvious in that sport that sex related hormones make a difference.
People are saying that seriously a lot on HN.
I read the paper and drew my own conclusion.
> why not also believe them when they say "we could make a real contribution here"?
That snippet in context: "After the Middlebury fracas, in which none of the protestors had read the book they were protesting, we could make a real contribution here by insisting that all views be heard." That's just fancy language for "stir shit up." There's nothing there about the intellectual merit of Hill's paper, just an unobtainable value that "all views be heard."
People should read the paper to make up their own minds, though. I'm with her, there.
How so?
> I'm with her, there.
With who?
To put it in HN terms: you're deploying untested code for a global scale life support system written by a first-project-junior in an experimental new technology stack directly to production without having a test or staging environment, and there are no backups.
Obviously! But the theory of Anthropogenic Catastrophic Global Climate Change is different. This one is beyond reproach and matches practice perfectly.
Should Canada take it as a declaration of war if Australia starts a program to reduce CO2 to 150 ppm?
You may wish to reassess your remark for accuracy after actually taking the time to digest the Clean Air Act codified in 42 U.S.C. Ch 85[1].
[1] https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/USCODE-2016-title42/html/USCOD...
But will the effects of it being there for some time be also temporary? No one can say.
edit: better phrased as
On what timeframe the negative effects of a temporary screen will revert?
By then, it seems likely that Canada will be part of the US. Or at least, that the northern US and Canada will have merged. And impacts do seem horrible for Australia.
But damn, war over atmospheric CO2 management. What a trip.