Six years ago I received an email from a colleague in the mathematics department at UC Berkeley asking me whether he should participate in a study that involved “collecting DNA from the brightest minds in the fields of theoretical physics and mathematics.” I later learned that the codename for the study was “Project Einstein“, an initiative of entrepreneur Jonathan Rothberg with the goal of finding the genetic basis for “math genius”. After replying to my colleague I received an inquiry from another professor in the department, and then another and another… All were clearly flattered that they were selected for their “brightest mind”, and curious to understand the genetic secret of their brilliance.
I counseled my colleagues not to participate in this ill-advised genome-wide association study. The phenotype was ill-defined and in any case the study would be underpowered (only 400 “geniuses” were solicited), but I believe many of them sent in their samples. As far as I know their DNA now languishes in one of Jonathan Rothberg’s freezers. No result has ever emerged from “Project Einstein”, and I’d pretty much forgotten about the ego-driven inquiries I had received years ago. Then, last week, I remembered them when reading a series of blog posts and associated commentary on evolutionary biology by some of the most distinguished mathematicians in the world.
1. Sir Timothy Gowers is blogging about evolutionary biology?
It turns out that mathematicians such as Timothy Gowers and Terence Tao are hosting discussions about evolutionary biology (see On the recently removed paper from the New York Journal of Mathematics, Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed, Additional thoughts on the Ted Hill paper) because some mathematician wrote a paper titled “An Evolutionary Theory for the Variability Hypothesis“, and an ensuing publication kerfuffle has the mathematics community up in arms. I’ll get to that in a moment, but first I want to focus on the scientific discourse in these elite math blogs. If you scroll to the bottom of the blog posts you’ll see hundreds of comments, many written by eminent mathematicians who are engaged in pseudoscientific speculation littered with sexist tropes. The number of inane comments is astonishing. For example, in a comment on Timothy Gowers’ blog, Gabriel Nivasch, a lecturer at Ariel University writes
“It’s also ironic that what causes so much controversy is not humans having descended from apes, which since Darwin people sort-of managed to swallow, but rather the relatively minor issue of differences between the sexes.”
This person’s understanding of the theory of evolution is where the Victorian public was at in England ca. 1871:
In mathematics, just a year later in 1872, Karl Weierstrass published what at the time was considered another monstrosity, one that threw the entire mathematics community into disarray. The result was just as counterintuitive for mathematics as Darwin’s theory of evolution was for biology. Weierstrass had constructed a function that is uniformly continuous on the real line, but not differentiable on any interval:
.
Not only does this construction remain valid today as it was back then, but lots of mathematics has been developed in its wake. What is certain is that if one doesn’t understand the first thing about Weierstrass’ construction, e.g. one doesn’t know what a derivative is, one won’t be able to contribute meaningfully to modern research in analysis. With that in mind consider the level of ignorance of someone who does not even understand the notion of common ancestor in evolutionary biology, and who presumes that biologists have been idle and have learned nothing during the last 150 years. Imagine the hubris of mathematicians spewing incoherent theories about sexual selection when they literally don’t know anything about human genetics or evolutionary biology, and haven’t read any of the relevant scientific literature about the subject they are rambling about. You don’t have to imagine. Just go and read the Tao and Gowers blogs and the hundreds of comments they have accrued over the past few days.
2. Hijacking a journal
To understand what is going on requires an introduction to Igor Rivin, a professor of mathematics at Temple University and, of relevance in this mathematics matter, an editor of the New York Journal of Mathematics (NYJM) [Update November 21, 2018: Igor Rivin is no longer an editor of NYJM]. Last year Rivin invited the author of a paper on the variability hypothesis to submit his work to NYJM. He solicited two reviews and published it in the journal. For a mathematics paper such a process is standard practice at NYJM, but in this case the facts point to Igor Rivin hijacking the editorial process to advance a sexist agenda. To wit:
- The paper in question, “An Evolutionary Theory for the Variability Hypothesis” is not a mathematics or biology paper but rather a sexist opinion piece. As such it was not suitable for publication in any mathematics or biology journal, let alone in the NYJM which is a venue for publication of pure mathematics.
- Editor Igor Rivin did not understand the topic and therefore had no business soliciting or handling review of the paper.
- The “reviewers” of the paper were not experts in the relevant mathematics or biology.
To elaborate on these points I begin with a brief history of the variability hypothesis. Its origin is Darwin’s 1875 book on “The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex” which was ostensibly the beginning of the study of sexual selection. However as explained in Stephanie Shields’ excellent review, while the variability hypothesis started out as a hypothesis about variance in physical and intellectual traits, at the turn of 20th century it morphed to a specific statement about sex differences in intelligence. I will not, in this blog post, attempt to review the entire field of sexual selection nor will I discuss in detail the breadth of work on the variability hypothesis. But there are three important points to glean from the Shields review: 1. The variability hypothesis is about intellectual differences between men and women and in fact this is what “An evolutionary theory for the variability hypothesis” tries really hard to get across. Specifically, that the best mathematicians are males because of biology. 2. There has been dispute for over a century about the extent of differences, should they even exist, and 3. Naïve attempts at modeling sexual selection are seriously flawed and completely unrealistic. For example naïve models that assume the same genetic mechanism produces both high IQ and mental deficits are ignoring ample evidence to the contrary.
Insofar as modeling of sexual selection is concerned, there was already statistical work in the area by Karl Pearson in 1895 (see “Note on regression and inheritance in the case of two parents“). In the paper Pearson explicitly considers the sex-specific variance of traits and the relationship of said variance to heritability. However as with much of population genetics, it was Ronald Fisher, first in the 1930s (Fisher’s principle) and then later in important work from 1958 what is now referred to as Darwin-Fisher theory (see, e.g. Kirkpatrick, Price and Arnold 1990) who significantly advanced the theory of sexual selection. Amazingly, despite including 51 citations in the final arXiv version of “An Evolutionary Theory for the Variability Hypothesis”, there isn’t a single reference to prior work in the area. I believe the author was completely unaware of the 150 years of work by biologists, statisticians, and mathematical biologists in the field.
What is cited in “An Evolutionary Theory for the Variability Hypothesis”? There is an inordinate amount of cherry picking of quotes from papers to bolster the message the author is intent on getting across: that there are sex-differences in variance of intelligence (whatever that means), specifically males are more variable. The arXiv posting has undergone eight revisions, and somewhere among these revisions there is even a brief cameo by Lawrence Summers and a regurgitation of his infamous sexist remarks. One of the thorough papers reviewing evidence for such claims is “The science of sex differences in science and mathematics” by Halpern et al. 2007. The author cherry picks a quote from the abstract of that paper, namely that “the reasons why males are often more variable remain elusive.” and follows it with a question posed by statistician Howard Wainer that implicitly makes a claim: “Why was our genetic structure built to yield greater variation among males than females?” An actual reading of the Halpern et al. paper reveals that the excess of males in the top tail of the distribution of quantitative reasoning has dramatically decreased during the last few decades, an observation that cannot be explained by genetics. Furthermore, females have a greater variability in reading and writing than males. They point out that these findings “run counter to the usual conclusion that males are more variable in all cognitive ability domains”. The author of “An Evolutionary Theory for the Variability Hypothesis” conveniently omits this from a very short section titled “Primary Analyses Inconsistent with the Greater Male Variability Hypothesis.” This is serious amateur time.
One of the commenters on Terence Tao’s blog explained that the mathematical theory in “An Evolutionary Theory for the Variability Hypothesis” is “obviously true”, and explained its premise for the layman:
It’s assumed that women only pick the “best” – according to some quantity X percent of men as partners where X is (much) smaller than 50, let’s assume. On the contrary, men are OK to date women from the best Y percent where Y is above 50 or at least greater than X.
Let’s go with this for a second, but think about how this premise would have to change to be consistent with results for reading and writing (where variance is higher in females). Then we must go with the following premise for everything to work out:
It’s assumed that men only pick the “best” – according to some quantity X percent of women as partners where X is (much) smaller than 50, let’s assume. On the contrary, women are OK to date men from the best Y percent where Y is above 50 or at least greater than X.
Perhaps I should write up this up (citing only studies on reading and writing) and send it to Igor Rivin, editor at the New York Journal of Mathematics as my explanation for my greater variability hypothesis?
Actually, I hope that will not be possible. Igor Rivin should be immediately removed from the editorial board of the New York Journal of Mathematics. I looked up Rivin’s credentials in terms of handling a paper in mathematical biology. Rivin has an impressive publication list, mostly in geometry but also a handful of publications in other areas. He, and separately Mary Rees, are known for showing that the number of simple closed geodesics of length at most L grows polynomially in L (this result was the beginning of some of the impressive results of Maryam Mirzakhani who went much further and subsequently won the Fields Medal for her work). Nowhere among Rivin’s publications, or in many of his talks which are online, or in his extensive online writings (on Twitter, Facebook etc.) is there any evidence that he has a shred of knowledge about evolutionary biology. The fact that he accepted a paper that is completely untethered from the field in which it purports to make an advance is further evidence of his ignorance.
Ignorance is one thing but hijacking a journal for a sexist agenda is another. Last year I encountered a Facebook thread on which Rivin had commented in response to a BuzzFeed article titled A Former Student Says UC Berkeley’s Star Philosophy Professor Groped Her and Watched Porn at Work. It discussed a lawsuit alleging that John Searle had sexually harassed, assaulted and retaliated against a former student and employee. While working for Searle the student was paid $1,000 a month with an additional $3,000 for being his assistant. On the Facebook thread Igor Rivin wrote
Here is an editor of the NYJM suggesting that a student should have effectively known that if she was paid $36K/year for work as an assistant of a professor (not a high salary for such work), she ought to expect sexual harassment and sexual assault as part of her job. Her LinkedIn profile (which he linked to) showed her to have worked a summer in litigation. So he was essentially saying that this victim prostituted herself with the intent of benefiting financially via suing John Searle. Below is, thankfully, a quick and stern rebuke from a professor of mathematics at Indiana University:
I mention this because it shows that Igor Rivin has a documented history of misogyny. Thus his acceptance of a paper providing a “theory” for “higher general intelligence” in males, a paper in an area he knows nothing about to a journal in pure mathematics is nothing other than hijacking the editorial process of the journal to further a sexist agenda.
How did he actually do it? He solicited a paper that had been rejected elsewhere, and sent it out for review to two reviewers who turned it around in 3 weeks. I mentioned above that the “reviewers” of the paper were not experts in the relevant mathematics or biology. This is clear from an examination of the version of the paper that the NYJM accepted. The 51 references were reduced to 11 (one of them is to the author’s preprint). None of the remaining 10 references cite any relevant prior work in evolutionary biology on sexual selection. The fundamental flaws of the paper remain unaddressed. The entire content of the reviews was presumably something along the lines of “please tone down some of the blatant sexism in the paper by removing 40 gratuitous references”. In defending the three week turnaround Rivin wrote (on Gowers’ blog) “Three weeks: I assume you have read the paper, if so, you will have found that it is quite short and does not require a huge amount of background.” Since when does a mathematician judge the complexity of reviewing a paper by its length? I took a look at Rivin’s publications; many of them are very short. Consider for example “On geometry of convex ideal polyhedra in hyperbolic 3-space”. The paper is 5 pages with 3 references. It was received 15 October 1990 and in revised form 27 January 1992. Also excuse me, but if one thinks that a mathematical biology paper “does not require a huge amount of background” then one simply doesn’t know any mathematical biology.
3. Time for mathematicians to wet their paws
The irony of mathematicians who believe they are in the high end tail of some ill-specified distribution of intelligence demonstrating en masse that they are idiots is not lost on those of us who actually work in mathematics and biology. Gian-Carlo Rota’s ghost can be heard screaming from Vigevano “The lack of real contact between mathematics and biology is either a tragedy, a scandal, or a challenge, it is hard to decide which!!” I’ve spent the past 15 years of my career focusing on Rota’s call to address the challenge of making more contacts between mathematics and biology. The two cultures are sometimes far apart but the potential for both fields, if there is real contact, is tremendous. Not only can mathematics lead to breakthroughs in biology, biology can also lead to new theorems in mathematics. In response to incoherent rambling about genetics on Gowers’ blog, Noah Snyder, a math professor at Indiana University gave sage advice:
I really wish you wouldn’t do this. A bunch of mathematicians speculating about stuff they know nothing about is not a good way to get to the truth. If you really want to do some modeling of evolutionary biology, then find some experts to collaborate or at least spend a year learning some background.
What he is saying is די קאַץ האָט ליב פֿיש אָבער זי װיל ניט די פֿיס אײַננעצן (the cat likes fish but she doesn’t want to wet her paws). If you’re a mathematician who is interested in questions of evolutionary biology, great! But first you must get your paws wet. If you refuse to do so then you can do real harm. It might be tempting to imagine that mathematics is divorced from reality and has no impact or influence on the world, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Mathematics matters. In the case discussed in this blog post, the underlying subtext is pervasive sexism and misogyny in the mathematics profession, and if this sham paper on the variance hypothesis had gotten the stamp of approval of a journal as respected as NYJM, real harm to women in mathematics and women who in the future may have chosen to study mathematics could have been done. It’s no different than the case of Andrew Wakefield‘s paper in The Lancet implying a link between vaccinations and autism. By the time of the retraction (twelve years after publication of the article, in 2010), the paper had significantly damaged public health, and even today its effects, namely death as a result of reduced vaccination, continue to be felt. It’s not good enough to say:
“Once the rockets are up,
who cares where they come down?
That’s not my department,”
says Wernher von Braun.
135 comments
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September 17, 2018 at 12:58 pm
Igor Rivin (@igriv)
Dear Professor Pachter,
I am glad you have finally expressed your views in public – this works much better than junior high methods like maligning people in Twitter conversations and hacking their Wikipedia entries. I have great professional respect for you, and hope we can, if not resolve, at least make clear our differences. With this end in mind:
1. The Hill paper. Your comments on previous work in evolutionary biology are interesting, but I am not sure they are relevant. This is a paper in applied mathematics, which proposes (as many commenters on the Gowers and Tao blogs have noted) a toy model which would lead to GMVH. Is the paper interesting to mathematicians? Yes, as demonstrated by Sir Timothy Gowers’s writing not one but two essays on the subject on his blog, and various fairly well known mathematicians (some with expertise in evolutionary biology) discussing the issues on the blog(s). You are saying that Sir Tim does not know what he is talking about. That is certainly your prerogative, as is his expressing his views and Prof. Hill coming up with models.
2. The only requirement for publication in the New York Journal of Mathematics was (and I think still is) that AN editor be interested in the subject matter, and the paper is refereed (I state this very clearly in my comments on the various blogs, including quillette.com). In this case, because of the previous problems the paper had engendered, I went far beyond this requirement, first coordinating the solicitation of the paper with the late Mark Steinberger (the editor in chief), then asking for two referee’s reports. Both referees have published extensively in applied mathematics.
2a. Given that the procedures were followed, and the paper deemed suitable by four people, I am not quite sure what would cause you to suggest my being fired as editor (for your information, I disagreed strongly with the decision to “unpublish” the paper, and tendered my resignation. This was declined by two consecutive editors in chief.)
3. Sexual harassment/the Searle matter. Firstly, $4K month times 12 months is $48K (the Searle accuser’s salary), not $36K. At Temple, our graduate assistants (who have to teach) get paid half that. As far as I know, the Searle accuser had no formal responsibilities, and this was in Philosophy, a field notorious for the difficulty of finding work in. It is thus reasonable to ask what she knew and when she knew it. How is this “misogyny”?
I should note that I have known of some egregious cases of senior people (some in evolutionary biology) taking advantage of their junior colleagues/employees. It is important that this be addressed, but it is equally clear that some people take advantage of the climate to profit (or just to injure the alleged guilty parties). Not only is this disgusting, but it also cheapens the experience of the people who did have painful and traumatic experiences.
Footnote: Dylan Thurston’s (private) accusation of “doxing” is ridiculous: the name of the Searle accuser was public, which is how I found her LinkedIn page.
3a. In other venues, you or people close to you have made much of my ridicule of Professor McLaughlin’s horrifying success in requiring people accused of sexual harassment stripped of their academic honors. Part of the reason for this is elaborated above. The other part is that, even if the individual is guilty of heinous crimes, that does not diminish his or her scientific contribution. This is true of Plato (owned slaves, pedophile), Thomas Jefferson (owned slaves), Lev Pontriagin (virulent anti-Semite), Oswald Teichmuller (Nazi), Bloch (axe murderer), and many, many others.
September 17, 2018 at 11:53 pm
Lior Pachter
For the record I have never edited your Wikipedia page, nor have I asked anyone else to do so. I have also not solicited an edit to your page.
September 18, 2018 at 11:58 am
Igor Rivin (@igriv)
Thank you – I appreciate it!
September 19, 2018 at 3:08 pm
Adam Epstein
This sorry affair, especially your role in it, is consistent with an adage that up till now I found unduly divisive, not to mention snarky: to wit, any doubt regarding the continuing need for feminism can be immediately resolved by a glance at the comments below the line of any article on the topic.
September 17, 2018 at 2:14 pm
anonymous
The Male Variability Hypothesis does not specifically concern intellectual ability in humans.
That it has become synonymous with it is an unfortunate artifact of our cultural obsession with our own inflated self worth, and of our inability to overcome our tribalistic political nature.
The idea is that males are more variable in general for genetic reasons. To the extent that intelligence is heritable, that means they will be more variable in intelligence too, but that is one small part of it.
So it happens that empirically human males are indeed more variable in intelligence as demonstrated quite conclusively by a huge number of studies (and that is also true for most psychological traits that one can measure somewhat objectively). You can wave that off with “culture” and “sexism”, etc., but human males are also more variable than females when it comes to physical traits that have nothing to do with “culture” and “sexism” (birth weight, for example).
And you observe greater male variability in animals too, which definitely has nothing to do with “sexism” (although it would be really really great if we stopped with the navel gazing and did more studies in animals rather than chewing over the same human intelligence differences again and again).
In the best case scenario for those denying that male variability is greater, both sides in the debate are betraying the core scientific principles and are instead behaving as ideological and partisan hacks.
P.S. It should perhaps also be noted that this whole business about sexual selection, parental investment, etc. has in general some extremely unpalatable to modern sensibilities implications, so while we’re at it, why not just reject the whole thing altogether (we will pretend that peacock tails, big antlers, and drab grey females are not at all how things are in the animals kingdom)? I mean, if there ever was a rape apologist anti-feminist theory, that’s it. Because why do human males rape human females? The reason has nothing to do with “culture” and “sexism”, but with the brute fact of life that they can do it, because they are bigger and stronger. But then naturally we have to ask why it is that they are bigger and stronger? Well, the answer is that they had to compete with each other for access to females, and that competition was (and often still is) of physical nature. Then once you have become big and strong enough to outfight your male opponents and get access to the females’ eggs, you are also big and strong enough not to bother with the whole fighting business and just corner some female and inseminate her directly. But who is ultimately to “blame” for why it came to that? That is quite obvious — it is the females for being choosy and starting the whole escalating process in the first place. QED.
Given these abhorrent implications, it is reasonable to assume that the whole sexual selection literature is the product of sexist male scientists looking to rationalize their oppression of women, and should therefore be rejected and buried.
But we are not finished for that line of reasoning leads us to other fields that have troubling implications. It would be really bad if we found, for example, that most females successfully reproduce while a large fraction of males do not. It would lend support to all of that sexist rape apologist pseudoscientific theorizing. Wait, that’s what we find empirically, including when we sequence genomes and trace ancestry. Can’t have that, let’s ban human genomics too…
See how how far and how quickly we got?
It never ends.
And the only way out of it is to focus on empirical data and logic, not on stupid insignificant human politics.
Unfortunately, unlike most of your posts, which stick to the cold hard facts and logic, that is almost completely absent from this one, which is all about your own political biases and personal attacks and insinuations.
September 17, 2018 at 2:40 pm
drycat
Can you recommend anything to read to start getting one’s paws wet?
September 17, 2018 at 3:31 pm
Ed
Of all of the stupid comments you could have chosen Nivasch’s comment is pretty weak. Public outrage about sex differences is quite real for a reminder see the google memo episode.
September 17, 2018 at 3:52 pm
longtail
There are (at least) two things that contributed to inflaming the situation at NYJM to the point where it couldn’t be resolved within a smaller circle.
1. Members of the editorial board other than Rivin and (presumably) the editor-in-chief had to wait nearly three months to receive copies of the referee’s reports after they had asked for them. This gap is still unexplained, and probably contributed to growing suspicion by members of the board that the reports didn’t actually exist at the time of publication. At the same time, it delayed any final resolution of the situation by three months, which couldn’t have left Hill feeling any better about the situation.
2. Somehow, an email from an editor to the editor-in-chief which spoke of the paper in withering terms was (at least partially) passed on to the Hill. I can’t think of any reason to pass that kind of information along, except to piss Hill off.
Rivin has repeatedly avoided explaining the three month gap, and hasn’t said whether he knows anything on the second point either.
September 17, 2018 at 4:42 pm
dalitt
This hits the nail on the head. At this point, the natural remedy would be to ask Hill and the referees if they mind if the reports in question are released. And then (assuming they don’t mind), releasing the reports, along with the dates they were solicited and received. If all the parties involved don’t mind, it might be worth de-anonymizing the referees as well.
September 19, 2018 at 12:21 pm
erasmuse
Prof. Hill provides one of the referee reports, and 40 pages of other documents here:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/lnm3csfna4seavr/hill_redacted.pdf?dl=0
It really does look like he wants everything to be made public, and his enemies don’t.
September 17, 2018 at 4:58 pm
Igor Rivin (@igriv)
@longcat (the feline references are thick here) are you expecting me to comment on your post? I am sorry, I have no interest in conversing, much less debating, with anonymous cowards. If you are just making a statement, that is certainly your right, though I am not sure why anyone would take you seriously.
September 17, 2018 at 5:50 pm
longtail
Is this your standard MO when there’s an issue you don’t want to address?
September 17, 2018 at 6:01 pm
nicolasbray
What’s wrong with posting anonymously on the internet?
September 17, 2018 at 6:04 pm
longtail
I’m not sure, but I have this strange impulse to slink away in shame.
September 17, 2018 at 6:47 pm
Igor Rivin (@igriv)
Absolutely nothing wrong with posting anonymously, just don’t expect to be responded to with the respect a non-coward would get.
September 17, 2018 at 7:48 pm
A Salty Scientist
Add power differentials as something else outside of Dr. Rivin’s area of expertise. Punching down and bullying are not the acts of the courageous.
September 17, 2018 at 9:16 pm
Igor Rivin (@igriv)
Punching down? Bullying? Perhaps you could clarify.
September 17, 2018 at 10:00 pm
longtail
Hill indicates that he got Farb’s email to Steinberger from “IR.” I guess we don’t need to wonder any more how it got to Hill.
September 18, 2018 at 12:02 pm
Igor Rivin (@igriv)
No, you don’t. However, I will insult your intelligence by noting that since IR was explicitly excluded from the original distribution, the significance of this is not clear.
September 18, 2018 at 3:44 pm
longtail
My working theory is that it involved two breaches of confidence. Given my substandard intelligence, that’s the only possibility I can imagine, in the absence of someone spelling out another one for me.
September 17, 2018 at 6:47 pm
Igor Rivin (@igriv)
Claire Lehmann of Quillette just posted that Hill’s supporting docs are now online: https://www.dropbox.com/s/estihpbvdbiy4qg/Hill_RetractionWatchAppendix_Sep14.pdf?dl=0#
September 18, 2018 at 1:47 pm
asdf
404 already
September 17, 2018 at 7:20 pm
igorpak
September 17, 2018 at 8:25 pm
longtail
Only one referee report in Hill’s dossier, and it says: “It might be worth having a mathematical biologist look at the proposed model and provide comments. I can say, though this is not my field, that the consequences of the model are correctly derived.”
September 17, 2018 at 9:25 pm
Andy P.
The link to the supporting docs is dead. Given how hilariously damning the excerpt from the one referee report is towards the claim that this was properly refereed, I am curious to see the rest of it.
September 17, 2018 at 9:30 pm
longtail
It’s linked from this page: https://retractionwatch.com/2018/09/17/what-really-happened-when-two-mathematicians-tried-to-publish-a-paper-on-gender-differences-the-tale-of-the-emails/
September 17, 2018 at 9:31 pm
Daniel L
The (single) referee report in the supporting docs was pretty rough — in addition to admitting that the referee is a non-expert, they spend the first paragraph of the (short) report lamenting PC culture, and do not address the mathematics in the paper in any serious way. The report ends with some amateur biology. Rivin writes that Hill can address the minor comments in the report with a couple sentences, or not at all, if I recall correctly.
September 17, 2018 at 9:53 pm
Andy P.
Yeah, the report was somehow even more ridiculous than I expected. I’d be embarrassed to give such a shoddy piece of work to an editor.
September 17, 2018 at 10:28 pm
nicolasbray
“Are offspring distributed the same way as the population they came from, or from the subset? In other words, say you are an individual at an extreme, and thus were classified with a ‘highly variable’ label. Would your offspring be fluctuating about your value, or would your offspring be as likely as any other offspring to have a given value?”
These seem like…pretty important questions, no? The relationship between parent and offspring phenotype is kind of important for evolution. Also, the second sentence there seems to suggest that the reviewer didn’t totally understand what was going on.
And Rivin’s response to the author says “it is not necessary to address [these questions] for publication but if you could add a couple lines, that would be great!”
Either we’re dealing with serious incompetence here or the point of this whole exercise was simply to manufacture a fig leaf justification for publishing this thing.
September 18, 2018 at 12:18 am
haticeozcan2014
Reblogged this on tabletkitabesi.
September 18, 2018 at 1:08 am
eventhisoneistaken
Lior Pachter is a hypocrite, and worse:
September 18, 2018 at 2:06 am
Josh Benningham
Thanks for the wonderful post Lior! One minor comment. May you please not refer to what Igor is trying to advance as a “political aim”? Misogyny is not right. Period. I am a conservative and want to separate myself/other conservatives from his sort of behavior as much as possible. I doubt you had any intent to tarnish conservatives, but I just think using the term “political” is potentially harmful. But thanks again for the great post.
September 18, 2018 at 2:26 am
Lior Pachter
Thanks for your feedback and point well taken. I have edited the post to properly articulate what I intended to say, namely that the goal was to promote a “sexist agenda”.
May 8, 2020 at 1:48 pm
Jessica Levin
Lior, I am happy you edited to change “political” to “sexist”, but doesn’t such a change go against your rule to treat your blog posts like the arXiv (a reason you gave to not take down your Yuval Peres post)? I understand changing typos, but this change was a change of meaning.
May 8, 2020 at 1:50 pm
Lior Pachter
The arXiv makes possible revisions, and as you can see from this very thread there is a complete record here that the change was made. That is exactly why I replied that I am making the change. So I think it’s fine.
September 18, 2018 at 12:13 pm
Igor Rivin (@igriv)
What evidence do you see of “misogyny”. Did you read my response to Lior’s post?
September 18, 2018 at 12:38 pm
Josh Benningham
He was claiming that you are pushing misogyny. I was just saying that that should be called “misogyny” or “sexist agenda” rather than anything political. That is all.
September 19, 2018 at 12:20 pm
Igor Rivin (@igriv)
Ah, thank you, that does clarify it, but I hope that my comment makes it clear that misogyny is not part of my world-view.
September 18, 2018 at 2:15 am
Alex Green
Lior, your post confuses me. The only potential harm, it seems, that could come from Gowers’s or Terry’s blogs is misogyny. But they advance no misogyny at all. Their posts lean quite the opposite way in fact.
September 18, 2018 at 2:49 am
Lior Pachter
Both Tao and Gowers’ blog posts are problematic because they helped to promote a narrative crafted by Hill and Rivin. The narrative is that legitimate science was being stifled because liberal academics and editors disliked the implications of a mathematical model. The narrative is rubbish because the paper is literally garbage (see https://pandasthumb.org/archives/2018/09/hot-garbage.html), and the whole premise is sexist.
I don’t believe that Tao or Gowers intended for their blogs to turn into propaganda vehicles for misogynists, but unfortunately that is what happened. This was partly due to the fact that even though they are exceptional mathematicians, the biology context of the Hill paper was unfamiliar to them, and were unable to evaluate the manuscript.
September 18, 2018 at 3:15 am
GM
Based on the e-mail exchanges posted on RetractionWatch:
Click to access Hill_RetractionWatchAppendix_Sep14.pdf
It is quite clear that this is indeed what happened. The editors of both journals state it as clearly as possible.
The paper may or may not be hot garbage but that is not why it was retracted.
Also, it is not why you are writing about it, let’s be honest.
If your objections to sloppy research were the reason, you would be retweeting RealPeerReview several times a day, but we have in fact never seen you criticize those fields at all, even though if one is to look for a place where shoddy ideologically driven outright pseudoscientific “research” is to be found within otherwise respectable academic institutions, it is the various “Studies” departments that one has to go to first.
Also, I wrote a rather lengthy comment earlier today, and it did not appear, I wonder why that is.
Finally, there is a much bigger question here, that is largely left out of the discussion. Journals these days are electronic, there is no paper copy of record to go back to. If a journal can make a paper disappear just like that (which was not possible in the days of printed copies), and nobody is outraged by the implications of doing so, what kind of future are we going to be living in? It’s not as if the direction that society overall is taking is towards less politicization and more rational level headed objective thinking, quite the opposite, people on both sides of the political spectrum are living in their own alternative realities and are more than willing to bend and twist facts, outright lie, and directly censor what they do not like.
Are we going to allow those practices to enter the scientific literature? That would very much indeed be a neo-Lysenkoist era. Letting one sloppy (according to some) paper pass seems like a very insignificant matter in comparison.
September 18, 2018 at 7:35 am
Lior Pachter
You imply in your message that I censored a comment you posted. I have not censored a single comment. Two messages were directed straight to SPAM (one a link to Igor Pak’s blog and another a lengthy comment by “anonymous”) which I just approved, perhaps that is the one? There is no conspiracy going on here.
Regarding whether the paper is hot garbage, it is not a “may or may not” situation. It is hot garbage. The honest reason I blogged it is because it is dangerous hot garbage. If you look at the rest of my blog you’ll see that, in fact, I’ve blogged about papers in a number of areas that aren’t directly what I research myself, precisely looking out for papers that are pseudoscientific “research” from respectable academic institutions. However I do restrict my blogging to areas and issues where I know something about what is going on. Here is a sampling:
and so on and so forth…
You’ll see most of it is in some way or another related to mathematical or computational biology. That is what I know something about. That’s what I’ll stick to- it takes plenty of time to write these blog posts as it is.
Finally, what happened here is not that someone accidentally let “one sloppy (according to some) paper pass”. An editor of a respected mathematics journal deliberately hijacked it to further a cause he believes in. That is a practice that we should not allow to become normalized in science
P.S. The various comparisons to Soviet individuals and practices that have been thrown about on this and other blog comments has not escaped me. Lysensko, specifically, was probably responsible for more deaths than any other scientist in history (https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/12/trofim-lysenko-soviet-union-russia/548786/) To suggest that editors at the NYJM, mathematicians who have behaved honorably and correctly in this case in dealing with an unprecedented situation, a hijacking of their journal by a colleague, were like Lysensko, is disgusting. People keep talking about “this paper disappearing”, as if Hill himself was sent to the Gulag. I am happy to tell you that the paper has been found, safe and sound. You can go and read it on the arXiv. Also happy to tell you that it was rejected from two journals, as it should have been.
September 18, 2018 at 8:02 am
GM
When it is all said and done a century or two from now, mainstream economists and social scientists, and unfortunately, a lot of people in STEM too, will have billions of deaths on their hands to answer for due to the pseudoscience that they have been pushing over the last two centuries.
Yeah, it won’t be a single person responsible for it, but many billions of deaths it still will be, all due to valuing one’s ideology more than doing proper science.
But in any case the number of deaths has nothing to do with the reason why Lysenko is brought up in this discussion, it is the patterns of thought that are important, and there the parallels are unmistakable. To this day Russian genetics has not recovered from that episode, in case it needs reminding.
I am also astonished that to you the fact that an editor published something following his own personal opinion (which happens all the time, and is in fact how journals were run for centuries before peer review became the norm) is more objectionable than the fact that a paper was literally disappeared without even a retraction notice, an unprecedented act with enormous ramifications for academic freedom going into the future.
I am sure you are aware that you have a certain reputation regarding not keeping your mouth shut when you see something wrong. May that continue long into the future, it is a great net benefit to science.
But given that it is always the people such as you that fall first when that sort of censorship becomes an established practice, I am baffled that you are more than happy to go with it now.
P.S. More generally, I am also baffled by the fact that you are so loudly pro-feminist, which is why I brought it up in the previous message. If one is going to be the bullshit-detector-in-chief, he should be applying the same sort of epistemic standards to all fields, not just to bioinformatics. With respect to feminism, that makes quite strident anti-feminism the only possible position one could adopt, so abysmal are the intellectual standards in that (and related) fields. Yet we see exactly the opposite… It’s not just you, I notice people like Dan Graur doing the same too.
It is frankly very depressing to watch, it seems that people just can’t escape their political animal nature, regardless of the scientific heights that they have climbed.
September 18, 2018 at 11:32 am
nicolasbray
“It is frankly very depressing to watch, it seems that people just can’t escape their political animal nature, regardless of the scientific heights that they have climbed.”
Yeah, either that or you could just be completely wrong about feminism.
September 18, 2018 at 4:00 pm
kaisa
GM, please start blogging with your real name as Igor Rivin requests! He has called you a coward, and I am sure you’d want to rectify the situation. Also, I want to write your name down in my sparkly feminist book of intellectually impoverished shame, or whatever you think we lady mathematicians use.
September 18, 2018 at 4:44 pm
GM
Not everybody has tenure. Not that it matters that much — we are starting to see even tenured professors getting fired for not submitting to the rule of the feminist mob, and even without that, one can always be accused and found guilty of “harassment” on the basis of no evidence in a kangaroo Title IX court.Even Nobel prize winners have been excommunicated for quite innocuous remarks…
But still, if I could afford to blog under my real name, I gladly would. But I can’t.
Which is thanks to people like you.
Also, I don’t recognize “kaisa” as any real person’s name, so it is kind of strange to hear such demands from you.
Anyway, that one cannot be a feminist and a scientist is in no way controversial. There is a fundamental epistemological incompatibility between the two, even worse in fact than the incompatibility between religious belief and science. One cannot be a sincere believer and a good scientist in the same time, for that requires that one selectively applies the set of proper epistemological practices that define science. And you are not a real scientist if you do that — science is totalizing (that is one of the few things that the critique of science you hear from the various “studies” departments gets right). But still, at least one can selectively apply those some of the time. Feminism. in contrast, rejects the whole epistemological framework of science altogether. Which makes it substantially worse than creationism. The absurdity of the realization that whole departments in modern universities are more anti-science that fundamentalist Christians hits hard, but that makes it no less true — at least the fundamentalist Christians are philosophical realists who do not deny the existence of objective reality and objective truth, their beef is with particular scientific claims regarding those.
Again, none of this is in any way controversial.
Only people who are some combination of philosophically ignorant and improperly scientifically trained (for the record, if your political/tribal affiliations are more important to you than following logic and evidence, no matter where they lead, you have not been properly trained).
But this has never been about science and philosophy, it is about entitled spoiled upper and upper middle class bourgeois brats affirming to each other their belonging to those classes for their worst nightmare in life is that one day they might fall out of those strata. That is the sole purpose of the complex behavioral code being imposed on people — to maintain the separation between outsiders and insiders, the latter having been sufficiently well behaviorally conditioned to stick to the behavioral code and maintain their social status within that particular in-group.
It is also a very useful method of control — males are the ones primarily driving things in pretty much every field, and once due process and freedom of speech have been done away with, it becomes very easy to get rid of the inconvenient ones once that is deemed expedient…
September 18, 2018 at 6:41 pm
igorpak
About the “dangerous hot garbage” part. As I wrote in my blog, have not read the paper and have zero opinion on the merits or demerits (I also skipped all technical discussions on this blog and other blogs as I am completely uninterested). But I am very curious about your general view irrespective of this specific paper.
It is presumably technically possible to retract a paper from the arXiv and in the early days was occasionally done, usually by the authors. After all, arXiv is somewhat selective of what it accepts and in fact Greg Kuperberg posted on his FB page that he reclassified the paper as [q-bio.PE] after it was submitted in math. Moreover, the arXiv started with government support and has a fair amount of bureaucracy which is an analogue of the “editorial board” and can in principle collectively change its policy if it wants to:
http://front.math.ucdavis.edu/about
So for the sake of the argument, let’s suppose it just takes one email to Greg Kuperberg and perhaps after some internal review by the board the paper could be gone from the arXiv. Would you advocate for the retraction and be willing to write such an email?
If NOT, it is dangerous only to publish it in a reputable journal, right? How about non-reputable journals such as the infamous Antarctica Journal of Mathematics?
http://www.domainsmoon.com/ajm.html
If YES, how about viXra? Or, more relevantly, how about a personal webpage on a public university server? Is writing and posting such a paper still dangerous to the scientific community or you are ok with that kind of noise?
I am not trying to be sarcastic or challenge you premise. Rather, I am genially interested in your view at what point can a math or math biology paper become dangerous to the scientific community.
September 18, 2018 at 7:31 pm
Lior Pachter
Hi Igor,
I appreciate your question and I’ve thought about this quite a bit so I’m happy to reply. I first started thinking seriously about your question a few years ago when the bioRxiv became popular in biology. The bioRxiv and arXiv are similar but there are a few key differences. For example, the bioRxiv does not accept review papers. arXiv does. The arXiv does not allow comments on preprints, bioRxiv does. There has been extensive discussion and debate in the computational biology community about whether bioRxiv should require papers to have methods section. Also, I’ve followed debates about whether/when retractions should be allowed in the arXiv or bioRxiv. I know of one such recent retraction when somebody submitted a paper coauthored with numerous senior Caltech faculty, a paper that these faculty had never heard of and knew nothing about.
My opinion on this is that it’s healthy for science for there to be multiple different venues for publication, each with distinct purposes, rules and restrictions. For example, I think blog posts are great vehicles for communication and, in line with the first amendment, individuals should be free to post what they want (subject to standard limitations, e.g. one should not be able to publish obscene material). The arXiv and bioRxiv serve a different purpose. They are repositories intended to disseminate scholarly communication and they are not free blogging sites. I think they ought to be very open in what they accept but there should be grounds for retractions (e.g. as in the case I mentioned above), and basic rules in place much as there are now. I don’t have a problem with someone posting a paper on how they can square the circle, or a counterexample to Fermat’s Last Theorem, even though they are obviously “wrong”. I think the arXiv and bioRxiv should cast a wide net for what they publish. Case in point, I don’t have a problem with the Hill paper being hosted in the arXiv.
Journals currently serve many purposes and one of them is to provide readers a valuable filter for the arXiv or bioRxiv. Another is to give a stamp of approval for readers; in some cases this is relevant beyond the research community, and can apply to the general public. A paper that has undergone peer review has (ideally) been checked, carefully examined, questioned etc. There are many possible mechanisms for “journals”. I am a fan of the overlay concept of journals such as Discrete Analysis. But right now those are the minority and we disseminate science mostly via traditional for-profit, or sometimes non-profit journals. At the journal level the bar can vary, but at a minimum papers need to be what I’ll called PLoS One Evaluated (POE). By this I mean, that a minimum standard should be something like that of PLoS One, that explicitly eliminates impact from consideration, yet requires a few minimum standards to be met. See:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/criteria-for-publication
The criteria are:
1. The study presents the results of primary scientific research.
2. Results reported have not been published elsewhere.
3. Experiments, statistics, and other analyses are performed to a high technical standard and are described in sufficient detail.
4. Conclusions are presented in an appropriate fashion and are supported by the data.
5. The article is presented in an intelligible fashion and is written in standard English.
6. The research meets all applicable standards for the ethics of experimentation and research integrity.
7. The article adheres to appropriate reporting guidelines and community standards for data availability.
These criteria work for mathematics just as well as for biology. For example #3 an #4 in math means that theorems are clearly stated and their proofs are correct. To establish these criteria are met requires domain experts to be involved. Hill’s paper does not pass this minimal bar of correctness. It certainly fails on criteria #3 and #4, and possibly also #2.
When a paper is in what can be a controversial area, e.g. parts of climate science, population genetics, evolutionary, biology, or human biomedicine, the POE is particularly important. This is because if a paper receives the stamp of approval of publication, people implicitly assume it satisfied criteria such as those of POE, and if it doesn’t satisfy those criteria it can lead to serious harm. That is what happened with the Wakefield study I mentioned in my blog post. The Hill study, were it to be published in its current form is dangerous because it doesn’t satisfy POE yet addresses issues that are socially important and have a long and sordid history. In its current form a naïve reader, by which I mean not a stupid reader, but rather one who doesn’t know much biology or math, might believe something that is not true: that evolution can explain gender disparities in mathematics.
Some final points:
1. I don’t believe journal publication is the only way for the scientific community to operate. Far from it. I am hopeful for a future that involves direct community review of preprints coupled to a mechanism that allows for establishing POE.
2. Journals are not perfect and mistakes can be made. Journals might think a paper has been POE when it hasn’t. Sometimes authors commit fraud and reviewers don’t catch it. Sometimes reviewers commit fraud. Sometimes editors commit fraud. For this reasons journals should have mechanisms for retracting papers.
3. There are of course journals that don’t require POE and basically publish anything for a fee (some call these predatory journals). But people can check for when such journals require POE or not. Some journals are fraudulent, pretending that they review papers for POE when they don’t. Such “journals” are highly problematic.
September 18, 2018 at 10:08 pm
igorpak
Thank you, Lior!
I largely agree with your publishing views (still no opinion on Hill’s paper). Let me mention one important point of disagreement.
I think there no such thing as harm to the society when “hot garbage paper” is published. There is a clear harm to the reputation of the journal, which all editors recognize (although perhaps disagree on particulars what constitutes a “garbage paper”). When such publications happen, everyone can take a mental note and simply move on.
In my opinion, the hope that one can protect the “naive reader” is largely misplaced. Just like some newspapers and news stations are more honest and reliable than others, some math journals publish mostly garbage and some usually don’t. But the reputation can change over time; a solid good journal can become predatory while an upstart electronic journal can rise to be the leading journal in the area. If you are ok with garbage papers on the arXiv, I don’t see why a garbage paper in the Antarctica Journal of Mathematics (AJM) should be any different. After all, AJM is willing to publish anything for a mere $4/page.
Now take the following collection of math journals: AJM, NYJM, Moscow Mathematical Journal, American Journal of Mathematics, Illinois Journal of Mathematics, Michigan Mathematical Journal, Asian Journal of Mathematics, African Journal of Mathematics, Siberian Mathematical Journal, Pacific Journal of Mathematics, and Rocky Mountain Journal of Mathematics. The reputations of these journals vary greatly, and I bet even you won’t know them all without some investigation. Even worse, these reputations can (and do) vary across different areas of mathematics making it all even more confusing.
Now, to a “naive reader” the difference between these journals is purely geographical since the reputation is largely subjective. So it is hard to see how the publication of “garbage” would be harmful in some of them but not in others. Thus, my point.
September 19, 2018 at 3:23 am
Anonymous
Sorry prof. Pak, but I don’t follow your logic and equivalences made seem false to me. Do you mean to say a journal can’t have say over their quality because some journal somewhere publishes anything for $4/page, and what’s the difference for the public? This elaborate logical construction is sophistry plain and simple. As for the damage done, there is no shortage of examples in economics, medicine and sciences people actually care about. I can see you don’t see the relevance to mathematics, but then you can read some history, for example Roger Godement’s “postface” to his volumes of Analysis.
September 19, 2018 at 10:54 am
nicolasbray
GM: “One cannot be a sincere believer and a good scientist in the same time, for that requires that one selectively applies the set of proper epistemological practices that define science.”
Obviously wrong. Not only are a large fraction of scientists in the realm of biology sincere believers in a certain cause but indeed their belief in that cause is one of the major motivators of their work.
The belief I’m referring to, of course, is that it’s bad when people suffer and/or die from the various diseases that tens of thousands of scientists spend their lives trying to understand and treat.
GM: “Again, none of this is in any way controversial.”
This is not only obviously wrong but rises to the level of obviously stupid for the simple reason that there is a large contingent of scientists who are avowed feminists. It is plainly nonsensical to assert that the negation of a widely-held belief is uncontroversial regardless of its truth.
Given the large number of very intelligent people who disagree with you completely and your observed tendency to make obviously incorrect statements on this subject, I will suggest again that you consider the possibility that you simply have zero understanding of the issues at play here.
September 19, 2018 at 12:55 pm
GM
@ nicolasbray
Thank you for providing another great illustration of my point about how otherwise quite accomplished professionally people will readily commit elementary logical errors when not doing so would conflict with their preconceived ideological commitments.
The fact that there are religious people working in science and that there are people working in science who are feminists has very little relevance to the philosophical compatibility of the two things.
There is a major difference between being employed in science and thinking scientifically. It is deeply regrettable, but still a fact of life.
There is also a major difference between professing belief, whether in a theistic religion, such as Christianity, or a secular one, such as feminism, and actually having a proper understanding of the underlying philosophy.
September 18, 2018 at 7:58 am
valuevar
On “humans descending from apes”: I am pretty sure that all of us (including, I’d hope, the original poster) know that humans are not descended from apes that exist now. Perhaps referring to the last chimpanzee-human common ancestor as an “ape” is an abuse of language? I am glad to learn that. (Is “hominin” the correct term?) At any rate, trying to sink or ridicule opponents due to their imprecise use of language is something that many of us mathematicians do, but I’d be glad if we did it less.
September 19, 2018 at 2:38 pm
Gabriel Nivasch
Thanks!
September 18, 2018 at 12:20 pm
Igor Rivin (@igriv)
By the way, I am shocked you actually cite that notorious harasser Weierstrass.
September 18, 2018 at 12:27 pm
nicolasbray
I’m not shocked that you apparently have zero understanding of what’s going on.
September 18, 2018 at 1:51 pm
Igor Rivin (@igriv)
I am all eyes/ears. I don’t think insults are informative, however.
September 18, 2018 at 2:14 pm
Jim Donaldson
Igor, saying “unfortunately for Searle, he did not read her LinkedIn profile” gives off a weird impression (to me at least). It seems as if you are saying his actions are fine but he got unlucky because of her legal background. His actions are plain wrong.
September 19, 2018 at 12:26 pm
Igor Rivin (@igriv)
Jim Donaldson: If I say that “unfortunately for Hitler, the US joined the war”, am I expressing a positive view of Hitler? (by the way, this is irrelevant, but from what little I know, Searle is a rather horrible human being, and this case deepens that impression. My argument was simply that the woman was not clearly a victim).
September 18, 2018 at 3:37 pm
3rdMoment (@3rdMoment)
I’ve rarely read such a self-defeating post.
Concerned person: “Here is an example of how research can be singled out for special scrutiny or even supressed, because its conclusions are politically unpopular.”
Pachter: “No, the paper was supressed because it was bad science. Also the paper promotes a despicable sexist agenda.”
Can you see how the second sentence undercuts the first?
September 18, 2018 at 7:13 pm
Willard
I can’t find the words you put in Lior’s mouth, Moment.
You have a quote?
September 18, 2018 at 11:24 pm
Anon
I believe that he might be referring to this.
> The narrative is that legitimate science was being stifled because liberal academics and editors disliked the implications of a mathematical model. The narrative is rubbish because the paper is literally garbage (see https://pandasthumb.org/archives/2018/09/hot-garbage.html), and the whole premise is sexist.
Not quite an exact translation, but it’s not exactly putting words in Pachter’s mouth either
September 19, 2018 at 7:45 am
Willard
Quoting the comment thread may not be the best way to substantiate Moment’s “self-defeating post,” Anon. Here’s a quote from the post:
Here’s another one:
Moment’s paraphrase misconstrues the second quote, and the self-defeat looks like the effect of Moment’s caricature.
September 19, 2018 at 3:19 am
Omer Moussaffi
I’ll take the risk of summarizing the relevant point:
If you try your hands in a highly contested piece of science with a clear political agenda, you better have your science rock solid.
We have had 300 years of scientists attempting to prove white males are superior to the rest of creation, from Descartes to Spencer. It was dismal to begin with, and it got discredited on scientific grounds. Given the history of the field one should be wary of a paper making such claims. What would happen within a serious math journal if it published a paper proving the pi=4?
September 19, 2018 at 7:02 pm
johngalt2001
“one should be wary of a paper making such claims”
Of course, the paper makes no such claim.
The very proposal that it is sexist is absurd in the extreme. Lior goes so far as to say that it advocated that men have higher general intelligence than women. This is plainly false (libelous?). Honestly if Lior does not understand that about the paper, how can he be trusted about anything? This post weighs strongly against Lior’s position because of its obvious errors and political motivations and attacks. Lior seems to be just about the only person who thinks the article is hot garbage, but that apparently does not faze him in the least. It should.
September 19, 2018 at 8:17 pm
Lior Pachter
I took the phrase “hot garbage” as a descriptor for this paper from a blog post by Reed Cartwright:
https://pandasthumb.org/archives/2018/09/hot-garbage.html
Reed Cartwright is an assistant professor of genomics, evolution and bioinformatics at Arizona State University.
As you can see your claim that I am the only person who thinks this paper is hot garbage is false. I remain unfazed.
September 19, 2018 at 11:06 am
nicolasbray
Do you think that it would be wrong to subject research on, say, the negative effects of vaccines to special scrutiny?
September 19, 2018 at 6:32 am
valuevar
Einnetzen? Not einsetzen?
September 19, 2018 at 6:41 am
valuevar
No, einnetzen is right (and apparently also exists in Hessian dialect, with the same meaning). I wonder about the origin?
September 19, 2018 at 2:37 pm
Gabriel Nivasch
Hi Lior,
Hill’s paper seems to have been suppressed, in part, because of touching the taboo topic of differences between men and women. In my comment, I expressed surprise at this topic being “forbidden”.
After all, men and women do exhibit physical and psychological differences. Eg men have on average much more muscle mass than women. Therefore, the question of whether there might also be differences in intelligence or not is not to be dismissed a priori, whatever the answer turns out to be.
I have nothing smart to say about the quality of Hill’s paper.
My biology background is only high school + some reading on my own.
Yes, humans do not descend from modern apes but from some ape-like common ancestor.
For the record, I treat all my students nicely, irrespective of gender, and I believe we should make sure women feel comfortable in math study programs.
September 19, 2018 at 3:01 pm
Lior Pachter
Hi Gabriel,
I appreciate your reply. Hill’s paper was not suppressed. It was rejected from the Math Intelligencer and from NYJM after editors at NYJM realized the journal was hijacked and the review a sham. The topic of biological differences between men and women is not at all “forbidden”. To the contrary, it is an active area of research and of great interest in areas as varied as molecular biology to neurobiology. Just take a look at Google Scholar here
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&q=differences+between+men+and+women
Specifically with regards to intelligence there is a technical problem: intelligence is not a well-defined phenotype. As a result it is easy to write bad (or sometimes plain rubbish) papers about intelligence, and indeed many of them (such as Hill’s) ought to be, and are, rejected from respectable journals.
I applaud you for committing to provide a fair and equitable environment for all your students regardless of gender.
If you are interested in (mathematical) biology I encourage you to reach out to colleagues in Israel. There is a vibrant community around you that is world-class. One place to start is the annual Israeli Bioinformatics Symposium organized by the Israeli Bioinformatics Society. I was a speaker in 2016 at Bar-Ilan and was impressed with the connections biology has with computer science and mathematics in Israel. The next conference will be held in a few weeks at the Technion
https://ibs2018.net.technion.ac.il/
September 19, 2018 at 3:14 pm
GM
This is demonstrably false though
Here is what the MI editor had to say on the matter:
Here is what the NYJM editor said:
There is nothing about the paper’s content or the editorial message in the explanations for why the paper was rejected that the editors provided.
So where are you getting the idea that those are the reasons?
September 19, 2018 at 3:39 pm
Lior Pachter
I agree that the editorial handling at NYJM was not good. I imagine that the editor and editorial board were not prepared for an attempted hijacking of their journal. Hopefully all math journals will learn from this episode and put in place better procedures for the future.
September 19, 2018 at 3:55 pm
Eli Rabett
One major issue with this paper is its assumption that courtship marriage is the norm for humans since forever. This has not been the case as far back as we can trace and even now is not the case many places where marriages are arranged, usually by parents.
September 19, 2018 at 7:06 pm
johngalt2001
It’s a toy model, so this objection is irrelevant
September 19, 2018 at 8:19 pm
Pinko Punko
The toy is useless if it’s assumptions are useless, Then we are left with what is the purpose of the toy model if not to provide a simplified version of what we know to be true. What explanatory power is there?
September 20, 2018 at 8:37 pm
Elizabeth Batory
I am sorry, Professor Rabett, but where in the paper is there any reference to “courtship marriage”. Are you suggesting that “parents” are LESS selective than the woman? All evidence points to the contrary – humans in the throes of hormones are less selective than those trying (somewhat rationally) to arrange the best match.
September 20, 2018 at 3:43 am
Adam Epstein
“But this has never been about science and philosophy, it is about entitled spoiled upper and upper middle class bourgeois brats affirming to each other their belonging to those classes for their worst nightmare in life is that one day they might fall out of those strata. That is the sole purpose of the complex behavioral code being imposed on people — to maintain the separation between outsiders and insiders, the latter having been sufficiently well behaviorally conditioned to stick to the behavioral code and maintain their social status within that particular in-group.”
‘Twas ever thus, GM. But now the shoe is on the other foot, and you don’t like it much.
As for your rationalization of anonymity, strictly speaking I don’t have tenure either, though to be fair, my post is “permanent” according to some definition, for which I do check my privilege.
September 21, 2018 at 3:01 pm
UHB
“That is the sole purpose of the complex behavioral code being imposed on people — to maintain the separation between outsiders and insiders.” Answering the question, How can these people become even more tedious? Come for the misogyny, stay for the class resentment. “Stalin” is (rightly) invoked as a criticism, but I seem to detect a taste for “Mao.”
September 22, 2018 at 4:33 pm
GM
The sole moral justification of the SJW movement is that is defending the oppressed and downtrodden.
And this is why they never talk about class — it is very very difficult to defend the view that the daughter of some Google executive of South Asian descent making millions of dollars and living in Palo Alto is more oppressed than, for example, my grandfather, who lived his whole life in a God forsaken place where he had to wake up around 3 am to go to work, from which he then came back around 9 pm in the evening, nearly every day for 50 years, for very little pay.
Very very difficult.
Yet this is precisely what we are being asked to accept…
September 23, 2018 at 4:26 pm
UHB
I don’t know who can have told you that academic science and math is, or should be, a haven for boors or that people concerned with social justice are working to make it so. It could have been someone you’d characterize as an “insider” being ironic. That I wholeheartedly admit is a regrettable but traditional flavor of bourgeois cruelty.
September 20, 2018 at 7:37 am
Rob
Lior is clearly very virtuous, but he had a tough week. He got himself all worked up about that job opening in the Netherlands (https://twitter.com/lpachter/status/1042067957386436608), where poor women were “literally” told NOT to have babies for a few shackles. Ah, the patriarchy… I can honestly not distinguish them from actual nazis and Einzatstruppen. But then some brave souls explained to the First Among Equals that no bad intentions had been involved. Torches were extinguished and the Dutch got off with a warning. But He had to find another way to vent his frustrations.
What better way than to be publicly virtuous about some other sexism, imaginary or not? So, we get to this paper about maths. After having checked that all involved were cis white males, he felt more confident about this case. He rented a space on the forum of the internet and began carving out the proscriptions. Anyone who is found to be guilty of wrong thinks is clearly lacking in enthusiasm for the Great Revolution we are experiencing right now. Can you imagine, these guys (both cis AND white!!) had the audacity to think that perhaps there is a theory that might be able to explain some part of a subset of the differences in the mean properties between males and females!! His judgement: anti-soviet propaganda! 10 years in the gulags is too lenient. They must be fired.
Lior asked his comrades for their opinion and they were all wise enough to agree with Him.
Let’s put up a show trial, with Lior as judge and executioner. We let the accused boil in their own sweat a bit, and – along the traditional way of show trials – finish with voluntary, rehearsed, and spectacular confessions! Standing ovation until Stalin gives permission to stop. After that peace will return to the soviet. Until the next round of proscriptions, that is.
September 20, 2018 at 8:07 am
Adam Epstein
Speaking as someone who neither claims to be feminist, nor would be acknowledged as such by feminists, I have weighed and measured your attempted irony and found it wanting.
September 20, 2018 at 8:29 am
nicolasbray
I find three things interesting about your comment:
1) That you felt the need to mention shekels.
2) That you do not know how to spell “shekels”
3) That you do know how to spell “Einzatstruppen”
To be clear, these are the only three things that were interesting. The rest was pure drivel.
September 20, 2018 at 8:44 pm
Elizabeth Batory
An often repeated claim is that Professor Pachter has nothing better to do with his copious spare time (see, e.g., https://medium.com/@NoOneOfConsequence/note-i-found-this-note-in-a-berkeley-coffeeshop-written-on-a-sheet-of-foolscap-crumpled-up-and-7621cf3368ca ). Which makes the comparison of him with Comrade Stalin not quite a propos.
September 22, 2018 at 1:44 am
Yemon Choi
Dear Rob, your imagined reading of Lior Pachter’s internal states and private actions is all very entertaining, but in your version you link to a tweet that Pachter wrote on 18th Sept and go on to say … “He had to find another way to vent his frustrations. What better way than to be publicly virtuous about some other sexism, imaginary or not? So, we get to this paper about maths.”
Given that I can find tweets by Pachter on this furore which predate the current blogpost, and since the current blogpost is dated 17th September, perhaps your account is missing the step where Pachter, after needing “another way to vent his frustrations”, stepped into a time machine.
Also, in your imagined telling of Pachter’s thoughts, you have him declaring to himself “10 years in the gulags is too lenient. They must be fired.” I think it would be rather odd to put someone in a gulag _without_ firing them, although I suppose in my country of employment this would allow athe relevant department to enter Valentin Pryanchikov’s work in the REF.
September 20, 2018 at 6:48 pm
Riley Liu
Why is this Igor Rivin person so nasty??
September 21, 2018 at 7:59 am
longtail
Good question.
September 22, 2018 at 3:26 am
Adam Epstein
All of his supporters’ snarkily earnest comparisons between this affair and the way certain academics – especially Jewish – were treated in the bad old days might make a person wonder how bad those old days could have been, after all.
September 22, 2018 at 10:28 am
Adam Epstein
Comparions with Soviet times.
September 22, 2018 at 1:58 pm
Paul
Dear Lior,
As an economist specializing in dynamic models, I believe the difference between static and dynamic optimality is highly relevant here. (Just as with “no negotiation with terrorists” idea).
From a static perspective, deviating from a rule may look fine – a potentially poor paper will not get a stamp of approval and so the society will benefit. But how does this change dynamic incentives of various parties involved in science? Why will journals think carefully about rules if they know they don’t have to stick to them?
Why would a genius young PhD candidate, who can potentially make a groundbreaking contribution to understanding gender, would want to go into this research area if certain results, or even tentative hypothesis, can be very damaging for your career whereas nothing of this sort will happen if you obtain the PC results?
There was an article on the main page of CNN website with the title: “If you want a job done right, get a woman”? You may have missed this article, but now that I pointed to it and given your interest in this topic, can we expect a very harsh post of yours debunking the claims in that article and calling for some drastic measures towards people who published it? You may reply that this is not a scientific publication, but in your replies above you said you care about issues that are socially important, and clearly that CNN article has been read by a much larger number of people than Hill’s paper. So, it’s much more important to comment on the cnn article than on Hill’s paper, don’t you agree?
Can we have your take on Tim Hunt story? Can we see your angry post about him never been given the chance to explain himself, whereas his accuser was later found to fabricate her CV? I saw just one bit on your twitter: “Copied verbatim from Tim Hunt. “I’m very sorry if people took offence.” How do we interpret this? Are you trying to comment something but be as vague as possible? Why not take stand? After it became known that the accuser’s CV is highly problematic, did you write anything on twitter or here in the blog in support of Tim Hunt? I can’t find anything, but maybe you can provide the links.
To sum up, your outrage may have had a positive short-lived effect in this particular case – the public is not exposed to bad research. But I believe, of course without well-documented findings to support my claim, that the long-term outcome is that your post is going to make more pronounced disincentives for young researchers to go into this area. Though firm evidence is missing, I personally know cases when people don’t even want to go in that area. Thanks for your contribution towards this trend!
September 22, 2018 at 4:49 pm
GM
Well said.
May I add a few other things.
Regarding this post, Lior said that “The honest reason I blogged it is because it is dangerous hot garbage..
But weren’t the “studies” on which Obama’s Title IX policies were based (you know, the ones about 1 in 5 women being raped on campus, only 2% of rape allegations being false, etc.) also “dangerous hot garbage”?
Thousands of innocent male students got their lives ruined because of that. And it created a totally toxic atmosphere on campus with no prospects for normalization any time soon. That looks like quite a dangerous consequence to me. For the record, I have personally witnessed multiple such cases, every single one of them was a malicious accusation to get revenge and/or gain academic advantage. I am quite certain that Lior himself has also observed his fair share of such cases at Berkeley and now at Caltech.
Yet he never criticized the sloppy use of statistics and outright data fabrication on which all of this is based.
Then there is a the deeper philosophical issue, which I raised above, and which everyone keeps ignoring because either they do not understand it (which alone is a damning indictment of the failures of the educational system today) or because they have no answer to it so they prefer to pretend I never said it.
Feminist philosophy is fundamentally incompatible with scientific epistemology. Even more so than, for example, that of the Catholic church. It goes directly against the core foundational principles of the scientific enterprise.
But has Lior gone after, for example, auto-ethnography as a research tool? No. Has he ever mentioned the likes of Sandra Harding? No.
If one is to defend science against sloppy politicized research, he would be writing against feminism all day. There is no greater danger for science at the moment than feminism. The creationists never had political power (even when the Republican party is in power, it has usually always been sufficient to bring up separation of church and state, and if that fails, some arguments about science education and “economic competitiveness”, and that has been enough to largely keep the crazies away from the system), while the feminists hold all the power throughout most of the educational system.
I have been long waiting for the day when they directly come after evolutionary biology, for they simply have to, if follows logically from their writings that they will one day. They just haven’t felt strong enough to try it. Who knows, this fiasco might be one of the first episodes in that war…
September 22, 2018 at 5:05 pm
Elizabeth Batory
A little evidence of our gracious host’s judgment:
https://www.single-cell-analysis.com/stephen-quake-responds-to-lior-pachter/
Click to access response_to_nonsense_blog_post.pdf
This does not a priori mean that his post is wrong, of course, but should make us think twice (at least) about accepting Professor Pachter’s judgment at face value.
September 22, 2018 at 11:05 pm
Igor Rivin (@igriv)
An interesting article on the technical side: https://deeperthoughts.blog/2018/09/23/a-remark-on-hills-work-on-the-greater-male-variability-hypothesis/
September 23, 2018 at 10:44 am
anthony
I have read with interest the blog entry but I am left wondering: which mathematical mistakes were made in the mathematical derivations, given the assumptions?
In the post that I read there were a lot of motivations for why the post’s author did not like the final results or the assumptions, but I could not find a clear explanation of what was wrong in the paper itself in terms of mathematics. Thanks for providing an explanation of the mathematical mistakes in the paper, rather than motivations to dislike the results, if you have the time.
September 23, 2018 at 11:37 am
longtail
No one is arguing that there were mathematical mistakes. The mathematics was straightforward and correct. However, the real interest of the paper, if it has any, is whether the model is useful in applications. If the paper had discussed just the mathematical piece without any potential applications, most mathematicians would have thought “OK, this is correct, but I can’t see anything interesting about it.”
September 23, 2018 at 11:49 am
Igor Rivin (@igriv)
As longtail correctly states, there are no mistakes, and if you read the blog post I link to just above your comment, you will see that the mathematics is not just correct but very relevant. The blog post (the one I link to) also comments on the merit of Pachter’s objections. I hope that answers your questions…
September 24, 2018 at 1:18 am
Adam Epstein
Very relevant to the grinding of a rather particular axe.
September 24, 2018 at 10:51 am
Anonymous since I don't trust you to act ethically towards me
Claiming vindication by citing YOUR OWN blogpost (without making it clear that you are the author) is super-sketchy behavior.
September 24, 2018 at 11:30 am
nicolasbray
Don’t be silly. How could it be his blog post? Rivin has been very clear that only cowards comment anonymously.
September 24, 2018 at 12:07 pm
Anonymous since I don't trust you to act ethically towards me
nicolasbray: LOL!
September 24, 2018 at 12:47 pm
Igor Rivin (@igriv)
It is not anonymous, the authorship is right there in the “About” page. Are you blaming me for your reading comprehension failings?
September 24, 2018 at 1:30 pm
Anonymous since I don't trust you to act ethically towards me
Igor: I obviously was aware all along whose blog it was. But the way you hyped your link (“An interesting article on the technical side”) together with the way the blog entry is written (e.g. “while also spewing pages of absurd accusations against Igor Rivin (the handling editor of the paper)” — are you in the habit of referring to yourself in the third person?) makes it sound like you are trying to suggest to casual readers that this someone other than you. I’m delighted to hear that this was not your intention.
September 24, 2018 at 6:12 pm
Lior Pachter
I have been following this conversation and want to note that when I first saw this “deeperthoughts” blog I was interested to know who wrote it.
I saw the posts were authored by “The demon king”, a descriptor which was not very informative, so I went to the About page. There I saw nothing. Oh well, I thought.
I just checked again and the blog does now list the author’s name in the About page. Fortunately I can confirm that I’m not going mad by looking at the Wayback Machine, which shows that at least until September 6th the blog was being written anonymously.
https://web.archive.org/web/20180906003634/https://deeperthoughts.blog/about/
September 24, 2018 at 6:17 pm
Igor Rivin (@igriv)
Dear Anonymous,
Actually, my taunts were primarily directed at the aptly named Mr Bray (although you are guilty of egging him on), and as for speaking of myself in third person, this is a literary device going back to (at least) Xenophon, and supposed to indicate that I am trying to be factual. Referring to my blog post as interesting is both truthful (I do find it interesting, and I think so do several others) and self-deprecating.
September 24, 2018 at 6:23 pm
Igor Rivin (@igriv)
Dear Professor Pachter,
It was never written anonymously – posts appear without fail on all my social media platforms (including LinkedIn, where my timeline is public, as you know well), and the Demon King gravatar (an ideal hyperbolic dodecahedron) is very well known due to my MathOverflow presence. At some point this was sort of a joke that those who cared, knew for the above reasons, but once this discussion spilled over into the big world, it became necessary to be (even) more public. I
September 25, 2018 at 5:46 am
Nicolas Bray
Igor, you do realize that we can just scroll up and see your previous comment, right? Changing your story at this point doesn’t really do you much good. So not just cowardly but dishonest and stupid. Anything else you’d like to add?
But, yes, my name. A favorite topic of people like you who have nothing else to work with. You’re always convinced that you’re such wits. You’re half right about that, at least.
September 25, 2018 at 9:39 am
Igor Rivin (@igriv)
@nicolasbray I have no idea what you are talking about, nor am I interested in continuing the conversation.
September 25, 2018 at 10:56 am
nicolasbray
Yes, I can very much believe both that you are unable to follow a simple conversation and also are eager to slink off now that your dishonesty has been exposed.
September 27, 2018 at 8:03 am
Arthur Woody
@nicolasbray don’t despair, as someone mocked for their name I assure you that with time you become increasingly hardened to any insults.
September 27, 2018 at 1:54 pm
Igor Rivin (@igriv)
@nicolasbray Yes, dear, whatever you say. @Arthur Woody There is a family friend with the same last name as yours, and it honestly never occurred to me that there was a taunt there. I think there has to be a resemblance between the name and behavior to merit taunts, and so I fear that your comments to Nicolas are a bit too optimistic.
September 27, 2018 at 2:28 pm
Anonymous since I don't trust you to act ethically towards me
Igor: Despite claiming that you were done with this conversation, you insisted on not only having the last word, but in making your final comments openly misogynistic (“Yes, dear, whatever you say.” being what asshole men traditionally say to dismiss women’s concerns). Super classy.
September 27, 2018 at 4:30 pm
Igor Rivin (@igriv)
Dear Anonymous: Dr Bray, whatever my opinion of him, does not appear to be a woman, so interpreting whatever I say as misogynistic is a little over the top. As for being done with the conversation, Dr Bray insulted me going away, and I (wisely or not) decided to show my (already obvious, so it was not necessary) contempt for his behavior. However, whatever my issues with him are, he is honest and courageous enough to speak under his own name. You are not.
September 27, 2018 at 4:52 pm
Anonymous since I don't trust you to act ethically towards me
Igor: Oh, I know you and your history (which long predated this fiasco) far to well to use my real name. You are not known for your professional ethics. Unlike Nicolas, our research interests are close enough for you to attempt to hurt me professionally (though I am senior enough that I doubt you’d have much effect).
As for your explanation that your comment couldn’t be misogynistic since Nicolas is male, addressing men in feminine ways is a standard way that misogynists insult people. As I said before, super-classy.
September 27, 2018 at 6:55 pm
nicolasbray
Yes, the implicit idea that it is an insult to categorize someone with women is obviously misogynistic.
To Arthur: thank you but honestly hardening to insults isn’t necessary. If they were substantive, it might have an effect but when grown men regress to schoolyard bully tactics they’re only insulting themselves.
September 27, 2018 at 7:09 pm
GM
Once again we come back to my point about people working in science being mere scientific workers rather than actual scientists.
When people compare a man to a woman in order to insult him, they do so with the implicit assumption that a woman is less than a man in the totality of the characteristics that define a man.
Which is a totally objective factual statement.
Physical strength, height, testosteron levels, etc. etc. have very different distributions in men and women. And women are objectively inferior to men when it comes to performing a long list of tasks because of that disparity (as most glaringly evidenced every 4 years at the Olympics, but also every day of the year in between). The list of tasks at which women are demonstrably better is much shorter
Therefore there is nothing objectively misogynist about the practice of insulting men that way. It cannot be “misogyny” is its factually true — then one is just stating facts.
September 27, 2018 at 7:11 pm
nicolasbray
GM: I must admit that I hadn’t considered it that way before.
Given my well-known Olympic aspirations, this new perspective makes Igor’s insult quite cutting.
September 27, 2018 at 7:27 pm
Anonymous since I don't trust you to act ethically towards me
GM: Thank you for your “input”. Usually people like Igor hem and haw around the issue, attempting to maintain a small semblance of plausible deniability that their motivations are misogynistic. Given that I rather doubt he’ll have the guts to explicitly disagree with your claims, this makes it far easier to convince casual readers of the ugly truth.
As for me, I think I’ll go back to working on science.
September 27, 2018 at 7:38 pm
The demon king
@GM actually, when I was commenting, the only sentiment I was trying to express towards Bray is condescension, and the statement that I made, while, it is true, frequently made by men to their shrewish wives, was used only for its condescending connotations, and not in any gender-specific way. As a matter of fact, while I completely agree that women and men have (as groups) rather different skill sets, I do not agree that women’s skill set is in any way inferior. People who try to force women to do things they do not have natural aptitude for (like things that require upper body strength, I am sure you can think of many more) are doing a great disservice to women. It is, as a matter of fact, said by some wise individuals that women’s far higher “EQ” (Emotional Quotient) makes them suitable for a greater variety of tasks than men, and this explains in part the higher concentration (which we can call “ghettoization”) of men in the hard sciences.
This higher EQ is apparent even in this subthread, and in general one thing that makes the discussion of the last two weeks rather painful is that 90% of those involved are rather high on the spectrum (I don’t necessarily exclude myself from this), which makes the communication a bit tortured.
September 27, 2018 at 8:01 pm
nicolasbray
We might not agree on much, Igor, but I will stand with you on this: forced female labor in the field of lumberjacking must end.
October 1, 2018 at 11:01 am
Anonymous since I also don't trust you to act ethically towards me
Igor: it would be easier to believe that your blog was never meant to be anonymous if you also didn’t go around linking to it from various accounts called “Moshe ben Maimon”.
Or is everyone supposed to know that “Moshe ben Maimon” is you, just like they were with “The Demon King”?
October 1, 2018 at 1:53 pm
Igor Rivin (@igriv)
I have no control over who links to my blog, so I am not sure what you are talking about.
October 2, 2018 at 9:38 pm
Anonymous since I also don't trust you to act ethically towards me
Yes, I assume that if you could control who links to your blog, more people would actually do it. Instead it’s just you and the supposed “Moshe ben Maimon” linking to it over and over again.
It’s incredibly obvious, Igor. It’s not like your denials are actually fooling anyone so why not just admit it?
September 24, 2018 at 5:19 pm
eventhisoneistaken
Speaking of hot garbage: https://posttenuretourettes.wordpress.com/2018/09/25/hot-garbage/
September 25, 2018 at 12:45 am
Adam Epstein
Igor, I served with Xenophon. I knew Xenophon. Xenophon was a friend of mine. Igor, you’re no Xenophon.
I also failed to notice that the link was to your own blog. Mea culpa!
September 27, 2018 at 1:51 pm
Igor Rivin (@igriv)
https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/a-twice-retracted-paper-on-sex-differences-ignites-debate-64873
October 1, 2018 at 10:31 am
erasmuse
I’ve written a long essay on the Hill affair, with lots of links and footnotes. Corrections welcomed. See
http://rasmusen.dreamhosters.com/b/2018/10/the-ted-hill-male-variability-paper-that-the-math-journals-suppressed
–Eric Rasmusen, economist, Indiana University
October 3, 2018 at 12:23 am
Archie Ames
Professor Rivin, as a scientist, if but a lowly one compared to some here, I apologize for some of the behavior you’ve been subjected to. I know some will say you come off as grumpy here but that could be the results of incessant childish attacks you’ve faced. I have tremendous respect for Dr. Pachter, being an avid follower of him, but I found this recent post quite a departure not only in subject matter but in tone and rigor from the usual pure scientific topics he blogs as an expert (I hate the word authority) on.
Unfortunately the concept of equality has somehow mutated from an ideal of equal metaphysical worth into a moral imperative that everything is literally the same in all aspects regardless of data. Its perhaps the strangest cultural phenomenon I’ve ever witnessed. It is effectively a new religion, creeping toward the status of state religion in some areas, and defended with the same furor and emotion. One would think biologists of all people would be able to fathom the possibility that evolution didn’t magically decide to one day to skip sex differences when changing everything else or that these sex differences; one of the most self-evident realities in our lives, isn’t just a sociological illusion. But I guess the power of fanaticism is not just limited to a handful of middle eastern and indian iron age philosophies.
Personally I do believe as a general rule men and women are significantly different in many ways both individually and in general. That doesn’t mean one is worth less than the other. I also don’t believe that this is something that necessarily needs to be or should be ‘fixed’. If this makes me a misogynist bigot or whatever so be it I guess.
I hope this odyssey you’ve been on does not discourage you from continuing your work/crime of supporting researchers who examine data and draw conclusions impartially, ie behave like scientists. I would also like to thank Dr. Pachter for at least as far as I can tell, maintaining a free and transparent discussion on his weblog without censorship regardless of his feelings.
October 3, 2018 at 11:05 am
Igor Rivin (@igriv)
Dear Archie,
First, many thanks for your kind words – I very much appreciate them.
Secondly, the difference you are alluding to – between “equality of opportunity” and “equality of outcomes” is, indeed, key. The former is what the Founding Fathers had in mind (and something that has been of incalculable benefit to all of us), and the latter is what many of us ran from, only to find a large fraction of academia to be thoroughly indoctrinated in it. And you are right again that the fervor is religious. People who are heterodox (like myself, apparently) are viewed as being evil, and any means necessary are used to attack them (because, after all, it’s good vs evil, right). Unfortunately, in this little world we live in and in the larger world as well, once that viewpoint is adopted, reason is cast aside, and violence becomes the only answer. I hope we can al stir away from the brink, but it is becoming progressively less likely.
In the meantime, these people act in a fashion that can only be described as deranged. The president of my university has been bombarded my demands to un-tenure me (not because of this Ted Hill todo, but because I had commented negatively on the National Academy decision to strip honors from those accused of sexual harassment. Some people have declared a fatwa against me (see https://deeperthoughts.blog/2018/10/02/fatwas-r-us/) and who knows what else.
Anyway, thanks again.
October 29, 2018 at 10:41 pm
shravansingh123 (@shravansingh121)
classic pseudo liberal vs no nonsense guy, and just throw all mathematics and biology in it. Igor on one hand explained so eloquently what his views are whereas Pachter is acting like a classic SJW who are offended by everything what they do not believe in and try to crucify you for it.
November 29, 2018 at 1:57 am
dendisuhubdy
Reblogged this on Deep Learning Research Blog.
December 5, 2018 at 8:54 am
Carina
Here is my recent email to Politico:
Click to access politico-email-29nov2018.pdf
following my repeated (and failed) attempts to reach out to Ted Hill and Quillette requesting corrections to the article, particularly with regard to the account of events at Penn State.
— Carina
December 5, 2018 at 9:00 am
erasmuse
Carina, the letter doesn’t say what the article got wrong. What corrections would you make if you were Quillette? It would be useful for them (and eveyrone else) to draft for them what you think would be an appropriate erratum.
December 5, 2018 at 9:02 am
erasmuse
ps— I’m on Hill’s side in this, just to let you know, but I’ll post anything you write on my blog, unaltered. I’d then give Hill or others a chance to put up a separate post on my blog if they want to, to dispute what you write.
December 5, 2018 at 9:16 am
Carina
Thank you. I need to think carefully about how (and whether) to go public with this… I was hoping that by reaching out to Hill and Quillette directly, they would make the corrections on themselves. (I did provide both Hill and Quillette with detailed lists of inaccuracies.) Now that this has failed, I’m not sure what to do. The whole thing is very frustrating, but I do not have the appetite for a public fight… 😦