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Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

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Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#101

Post by DanBC »

ziggurism wrote: post #7
lilyball wrote: post #5

tl;dr: No. Elaborating slightly: A paper that is related to (but does not directly argue for) an "uncomfortable truth" was published, then unpublished 3 days later and replaced with a different paper. The author of this blog piece tracked down the paper and read it, and it turns out to simply be a bad paper that shouldn't have been published to begin with.

Being a bad paper, even a "never should have been published", is not sufficient reason for retroactively un-publishing a refereed and published paper. A rebuttal or at worst retraction is the appropriate action in that case.

Was it refereed?

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#102

Post by hef19898 »

collyw wrote: post #87
Arnt wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Do you think height differences between men and women are insignificant? They seem pretty obvious despite many exceptions.

Yes, and guess what the genetic differences are also significant. XX vs XY, meaning women are less likely to suffer from genetic defects and deseases.

Just how are These differences affecting the way a given Person can function in today's highly technical world? Except purely physical sports, at the very high end Level of athletes, that is? And even there athletes are not just devided by sex but also weight in case of martial arts.

Even in traditionally "male" Domains like warfare a smaller size can be an Advantage. Take pilots of certain combat helicopters, if you are to big you can't fly them because you simply don't fit in the cockpit.

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#103

Post by kasey_junk »

iguy wrote: post #95
kasey_junk wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No and no. I don't even know what times you think I'm conflating. From memory, numbers like 16% come from population genetics around the time we invented farming -- we swung from relatively egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies to massively unequal concentrated power. Kings who could command the labour of thousands. There's a giant bottleneck there in how many men reproduced. And we started on building organised soci…

Wide spread state sanctioned monogamy as a norm is a couple of hundred years old. All 3 of the Hebrew based religions for instance don’t have the requirement and quite the opposite have polygamy as part of their basic texts.

Before approximately the Victorian age the idea of monogamy from a reproductive position would be seen as odd.

States have other ways to handle their angry young men. A common one from history (the Bible is rife with it) was using them to slaughter some other states young men & enslave the women.

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#104

Post by charlesism »

googlryas wrote: post #62
charlesism wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you showed me a mixed room of hundreds of > native Danes and Sentinelese - I could classify them What relevance does that have? Could you reliably tell a Dane from a Greek? How about a Sentinelese from a Pakistani? When people say "race" is a social construct, they don't - well, unless they're morons - mean that people aren't more different, the more distantly-related they are. It's the categories that are the s…

> What relevance does that have? It shows, at least in this contrived example, that the information is present in the individuals and not in the brain of the classifier. I don't understand your last point. Is it wrong to say that I could extremely accurately classify blue and brown eyed people?

    > not in the brain of the classifier.
Sure, but you can see physical differences between your paternal and maternal grandfather, too, even if your culture considers them the same "race."

    > to say that I could extremely accurately 
    > classify blue and brown eyed people?
And why not classify them as deep blue, light blue, hazel, and deep brown? Or blue, gray, and brown? Etc.

The point isn't that everyone's eye color is the same. It's that the classification is arbitrary.

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#105

Post by mattmanser »

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?

Undeniable? No. Amongst the other issues stated, this isn't necessarily a physical difference, it could be purely a societal one.

All these studies suffer from a bias that we can't get rid of unless we assume it's not true for a few generations, namely is the effect due to nature vs nurture.

Whether it's race or sex, if society favour one race or sex over the others, how can we ever know if it's due to something in the genes, or due to the general favours, special treatment or encouragement that particular sections of society receive that caused the imbalance?

If you are told while young that you should be a house proud parent rather than a DIY parent, a Princess instead of a Knight, a Hostess rather than a Pilot[1], of course these "undeniable" differences are going to emerge.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/22/sexist-tui-air...

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#106

Post by bilbo0s »

pgeorgi wrote: post #85
bilbo0s wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> Why is the mathematics community being pressured to go even lower quality? If quality had been the only argument, I'd buy it - but[0]: - “As a matter of principle,” she wrote, “I support people discussing controversial matters openly … At the same time, I think it’s good to be aware of the effects.” - “but you should know in advance that many (most?) of us have strong disagreements with what you did.” (not "with th…

>If quality had been the only argument, I'd buy it

Look, I understand the political argument you are making, but politics has no place in peer reviewed scientific and mathematics journals. Quality is always the argument, or should be.

If people want to have a political argument, take it elsewhere. There are a lot of people out there doing serious work who are relying on the reliability of the information presented in peer reviewed journals. The political people have, quite literally, the entire world outside of peer reviewed journals to engage in their flame wars. The mathematics community should be pushing back on stuff like this. As I said, it's not a problem if you'd like to publish that stuff elsewhere, it's appropriate in other venues. But you can't just be publishing whatever you like in a peer reviewed journal.

It's particularly galling that the political people had so infested NYJM that they decided to simply dispense with the formality of peer review in the case of this particular paper.

Why?

Presumably because it agreed with their politics.

I mean, that's literally some "Sun revolves around the Earth .. you can't question this .. great doctrinal import" type stuff.

Come on people.

Please, TRY to be reasonable here. I'm not saying you can't have the flame wars you want to have, I'm just asking that we not put low quality science or math papers in peer reviewed journals. Especially papers so low quality that you feel the need to exempt them from peer review lest they not get published.

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#107

Post by acdha »

amelius wrote: post #50

Instead of focusing on a flawed paper, why not look for evidence that there is more variability in one of the sexes in the real world?

Why not is the wrong question when all around the world researchers have been actively doing that for many decades, and making huge efforts to identify and control for confounding environmental factors. When essays like this one, Damore’s screed, etc. get debunked it’s based on the actual scientific research not supporting the position rather than a lack of interest in understanding how it works.

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#108

Post by undreren »

hef19898 wrote: post #38
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 always strikes me how well educated people with a lot of Knowledge in their domain (assuming that point is valid for the majority on Hacker News) have the tendency to totaly over-simplify other scientific fields. In this case evolution, biology and statistics. So what actually happened to humility, scientific literacy and honest curiosity? Not sure if it was intended, but your second post comes across as Sex…

The second post's primary fault is that it assumes that desirability does not vary with the individual. What one person considers "prime mate material" another could consider garbage. Until this is established, the entire point is moot.

We know that it is false though. Some people favor partners from a specific ethnic group, for example.

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#109

Post by pjc50 »

tomhoward wrote: post #82
pjc50 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quilette is a highly partisan libertarian-right publication and you'd be well advised to treat it as trolling.

I'm no great devotee of Quillette (I haven't come across an interesting article there for a while), but that's not really a fair characterisation. It's not "libertarian" in the way Reason magazine is, or "right-wing" in the way that Fox News is. I think its editors broadly identify as "classical liberals", and they have a stated mission of challenging the "blank-slate" view of human nature. You can disagree with thes…

> I think its editors broadly identify as "classical liberals", and they have a stated mission of challenging the "blank slate" view of human nature.

This is incoherent: either you're a believer in something like Locke's "free and equal in the state of nature", or you're not a "classical liberal".

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#110

Post by enriquto »

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…

It is alright that a journal rejects a paper. There are thousands of papers rejected everyday, this is the basis of peer review.

What is strange is that a paper is "disappeared"!

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