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Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

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Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#71

Post by doombolt »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #67
doombolt wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

E.g. do you want a real eye opener? In a monogamous society, given that Darwin's observation about increased male variability holds, when partitioning by desirability, women in the top half will have access to males with desirability greater than their own, while women in the bottom half will only have access to males with desirability worse than their own. Go figure. (There's a lot of assumptions here but none of th…

Well it's a good thing that men and women can judge each other on more than one axis then isn't it? (one's trash is another's treasure etc. by whose ranking is one in the top or bottom half? hope you catch my drift.)

Yes it is a good thing, as far as my opinion is concerned.

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#72

Post by bilbo0s »

pgeorgi wrote: post #42
tptacek wrote: post #8

There is more going on than this. It's important to know a bit about the venues in question. Mathematical Intelligencer isn't really a journal at all; it's literally a magazine, carried on the shelves it bookstores. It runs some original research but also poetry and jokes and general cultural coverage. NYJM is, on the other hand, a serious (if online-only, lower-tier) theoretical mathematics journal. Ted Hill's paper…

Who trolled whom? According to Hill (and supported by the timeline) the revisions were at the request of the editors. In that case, it was these editors who wanted a political axis added to it instead of just publishing an "undergrad applied math problem" to get a discussion started. There's a proud history of publishers helping each others against outside threats (eg in 1960's Germany during the Spiegel-Affair the r…

>The following paper may not match our usual standards...

My opinion of the declining quality of scientific and especially mathematical papers is different. I used to work in medical and molecular imaging. Whatever we did obviously required FDA approval. One engineer, a good one, but engineers aren't usually very detail oriented when it comes to "getting the math right" so to speak, referenced a paper in some of the documentation to some code. Long story short, the paper had been peer reviewed, but was riddled with material errors. I caught the issue in our internal review process, and removed the incorrect code and reimplemented the feature correctly. (Was highly annoyed at having to essentially write my own paper for documentation and FDA submission).

Here's the point though, we're already putting out too many poor quality papers. (And calling them "poor quality" is being charitable.) Why is the mathematics community being pressured to go even lower quality?

I took the liberty of reading this "paper", and there's no meat in it. Put it in the Intelligencer, or in Wired, or on HN, or Reddit or whatever. But let's try to get actual journals cleaned up. The way this should to work is that people like the engineer at my company, should be able to cite a peer reviewed scientific paper from a peer reviewed journal. (Or a mathematics paper, in that particular case). But right now that's an unsafe practice where the safety of a human life is potentially a concern. The quality problem is out of hand right now. (And it's not just the "paper" that is the subject of this article, low quality papers abound out there, believe me). My question is, why are we intentionally asking to make the issue worse?

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#73

Post by pk3469 »

TangoTrotFox wrote: post #59
Yoric wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Three answers to this. 1. Look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17949340 for a more detailed account of what happened. This specific story is not a case of taboo, it's a case of attempting to publish something that's not science in a science journal, being of course rejected, and reframing the rejection as a taboo. 2. It can be discussed, but this kind of discussion invariably attracts people who are not there…

In my opinion not discussing things because you think the topic is going to be potentially harmful, or discussion 'impolite', is regressive. Those are the very things that most need active and open discussion. Otherwise it's akin to aiming to have kids never do drugs by never talking about them, or when you do talk about them to present them as caricatures that anybody with an ounce of grey matter can realize is out…

This censorship 2.0 mindset has permeated even HN, the supposed bastion of rationality.

No discussion, no counter argument, just downvotes for posts like this.

Anyone who's expressed this kind of opinion has probably seen their score fluctuate between double digit positives and negatives until finally settling into downvoted flagged state. This is clearly a divisive topic, but the censorship side is dominant.

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#74

Post by googlryas »

pjc50 wrote: post #69
googlryas wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"eye color is a social construct" and "the importance of eye color is a social construct" are two completely separate ideas. OP clearly states '"race" is a social construct'.

Eye color is a social construct because color is a social construct. The presence of the genes for coloration is the only unambiguous thing, and even then it's vulnerable to all sorts of anomalies in gene expression (heterochromia, chimericism etc)

Color is not a social construct.

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#75

Post by spacehome »

doombolt wrote: post #34
doombolt wrote: post #30

He's not criticizing the mathematical model, rather the application of this model to modern human society, which is something that nobody ever claimed. Straw man and a bad one at that. He does have some arguments but math is nowhere found, making this a joke of a refutation.

E.g. do you want a real eye opener? In a monogamous society, given that Darwin's observation about increased male variability holds, when partitioning by desirability, women in the top half will have access to males with desirability greater than their own, while women in the bottom half will only have access to males with desirability worse than their own. Go figure. (There's a lot of assumptions here but none of th…

Monogamy was your first unrealistic assumption.

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#76

Post by pgsandstrom »

elchief wrote: post #11

> the idea that some huge percentage of males are simply not desirable enough (as we shall see, the paper requires this percentage to be over 50) to have a chance of reproducing bears no relation to the world as we know it In early humans only the top 16% of males mated Most people mate now, due to religious/society-enforced monogamy https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2833377/

You are quoting the paper in a dishonest way. Did you get 16% from this?

> Using human-chimpanzee dX/dA and human diversity data from genome-wide surveys we obtained estimates of α between 2.7 and 5.9, again assuming β between 1 and 1.4 and a range of ancestral population sizes

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#77

Post by pdkl95 »

googlryas wrote: post #74
pjc50 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eye color is a social construct because color is a social construct. The presence of the genes for coloration is the only unambiguous thing, and even then it's vulnerable to all sorts of anomalies in gene expression (heterochromia, chimericism etc)

Color is not a social construct.

Yes, it is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMqZR3pqMjg

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#78

Post by doombolt »

spacehome wrote: post #75
doombolt wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

E.g. do you want a real eye opener? In a monogamous society, given that Darwin's observation about increased male variability holds, when partitioning by desirability, women in the top half will have access to males with desirability greater than their own, while women in the bottom half will only have access to males with desirability worse than their own. Go figure. (There's a lot of assumptions here but none of th…

Monogamy was your first unrealistic assumption.

Monogamy is something that is mathematically well defined.

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#79

Post by kasey_junk »

iguy wrote: post #47
Arnt wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rather dubious. He says three things: a) Only 16% etc b) most people mate now c) due to religious etc The first is well backed up. The second, not so much, it depends on community (look up the number of childless people in, say, Milan). The third, WTF? Mixing up facts with WTF like that attracts downvotes.

> The third, WTF? Not really. A society where only 16% of men mate has 84% angry young men with nothing to lose. Expect a lot of violence, and not much careful consistent tending of the fields... My understanding is that this is why state-sanctioned monogamy exists: it is a tool for avoiding this situation.

You are making a fairly obvious mistake here in conflating timelines. Widespread “state sanctioned monogamy” is a very recent phenomenon but the genetics results you are basing from have to do with very long time frames.

There are loads of plausible ways monogamy arose as a virtue that needn’t have to do with changing that ratio & there are loads of ways that ratio could have come about without societies filled with “angry young men”

This is a fairly obvious set of bad reasoning. Either you’ve not paid much attention or you are arguing in bad faith (likely to further some worldview).

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#80

Post by mg96226 »

Arnt wrote: post #28
frebord wrote: post #6

Honest question, the general physical differences between the sexes or even races are undeniable, so why is it so taboo to talk about the differences that almost certainly exist in our minds?

Because the differences are small. Insignificant. If you take some group of 1000 people which has been selected in some way that skews towards intelligence, you might find that the men have IQ 105.14 on average and the women 105.13. Like, wow. You can find groups with bigger differences if you're willing to pick an obscure group, but then you have a bigger but more obscure difference. If you talk about that you risk…

If the differences are insignificant then why are most sports segregated by gender? Why does the entire female FIDE rating distribution sit 200 points lower than the male distribution?

The FIDE gap is not one that can be hand waved away as under-representation or discrimination or anything else. There are clearly differences between genders and races, and sometimes they are clearly significant. Whatever your views may be regarding how society should treat those differences, don't insult your own intelligence by claiming they don't exist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIDE_world_rankings

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