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Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

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Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#131

Post by seanhunter »

tacomonstrous wrote: post #97
cyborgx7 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is about science, not mathematics. But scientific results are open to being question in their methodology and in the interpretation of their results. Mathematics is either correct or it isn't. This is a pretty blatant attempt of shifting something from one category to the other.

>Mathematics is either correct or it isn't. That's not really a relevant standard for publishability. There is an infinite variety of correct mathematics that is far from being novel enough to be in a quality journal.

Well correctness is surely an important factor in whether or not mathematics is publishable, wouldn't you say? Necessary but not sufficient, perhaps.

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#132

Post by tptacek »

enriquto wrote: post #110
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"!

The paper is on Arxiv for everyone to read. But apparently, it was introduced into NYJM through subterfuge, and the peer review board demanded (understandably) that it be removed. Again: its presence in NYJM, given that journal's remit, was embarrassing to everyone involved. Not just politically but as mathematicians.

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#133

Post by tptacek »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #61
probably_wrong wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly! My troll-sense was tingling when reading the original article, so I was skeptic about the content claims of the original article. But the author had a good point: the NYJM screwed up by not publishing a retraction. A retraction would have made clear what the problem with the paper was. Sure, publicly saying "we made a mistake" sucks, but not doing so empowers the author of the paper to claim they are being p…

"...A retraction would have made clear what the problem with the paper was. Sure, publicly saying "we made a mistake" sucks, but not doing so empowers the author of the paper to claim they are being persecuted for their beliefs..." Or simply imagine so, given a lack of information. I'm still trying to sort this out. So this entire thing boils down to "Not-so-good pop-math piece is hated by some. It is first accepted…

It is clear on its face that the paper is not of the quality, or even really the subject matter, to merit inclusion in NYJM. It's not even a close call. It's a little embarrassing to see people on HN not able to recognize that. This isn't a political question; it's a "being able to read and evaluate journal articles" question.

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#134

Post by tptacek »

DanBC wrote: post #101
ziggurism wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, I don't believe so.

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#135

Post by tptacek »

pgeorgi wrote: post #129
bilbo0s wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"we publish it here not for its quality but because some people want to keep it hidden for non-scientific reasons" You can't be serious. Here's how it should work, ideas that survive rigorous examination should be published, because that is how merit is measured in the context of peer reviewed journals. What else are scientific and mathematical ideas to be judged on if not merit? So now we'll allow people to be publ…

Either my communication style is horrible or you go to great lengths to misunderstand me. Either way it's sad. Papers should, in general, be judged by their merit. The editor of the Intelligencer did so and wanted to publish it in "Viewpoints", essentially an op-ed section. That was shot down. Not for quality, or unsuitability for the medium, but because of a political campaign. Therefore the paper was _not_ judged f…

You can simplify the discussion here by clarifying what you think of the paper's inclusion in NYJM. The paper's status in Intelligencer is of much less impact to the "scientific precedent" of this story, since the Intelligencer is barely science at all.

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#136

Post by iguy »

kasey_junk wrote: post #103
iguy wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (t…

> Before approximately the Victorian age

No this isn't true. We have excellent data about ordinary people in England, back more than 500 years, and the pattern is very much ordinary nuclear families. More vividly, you know well how much stick a certain Henry got from the pope... for wanting to marry multiple women in series. But Kings are a poor guide. What we are discussing is what the situation was for the average peasant. Do you really think medieval European villages were full of guys with 5 wives? This did not happen.

Edit: a good book on this is Laslett's "The World We Have Lost", see e.g. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1362413/Peter-La...

I'm pretty sure that the pattern in the Roman world was also very much 1 man + 1 woman. I'm pretty sure this is the default in Hinduism too, pretty strongly. (Again, with odd exceptions for the very powerful, who don't matter for the data.) And, as I said, the genetic data on effective male + female population sizes has a dramatic dip in it, around 10K years ago -- this dip ends, I forget maybe 2K years later, not in Queen Victoria's reign.

Whether religion caused this monogamy seems like a confusing question. But somehow societies decided that this was something they wished to enforce, and moral enforcement tended to be the job of the priest. So no, this is not WTF material.

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#137

Post by DanielBMarkham »

tptacek wrote: post #133
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"...A retraction would have made clear what the problem with the paper was. Sure, publicly saying "we made a mistake" sucks, but not doing so empowers the author of the paper to claim they are being persecuted for their beliefs..." Or simply imagine so, given a lack of information. I'm still trying to sort this out. So this entire thing boils down to "Not-so-good pop-math piece is hated by some. It is first accepted…

It is clear on its face that the paper is not of the quality, or even really the subject matter, to merit inclusion in NYJM. It's not even a close call. It's a little embarrassing to see people on HN not able to recognize that. This isn't a political question; it's a "being able to read and evaluate journal articles" question.

So no, there's no way of telling whether or not an editorial change in direction was made or a mistake. Instead we can just talk about journals in general, with nobody knowing what the hell was going on in this particular case.

And all the other comments regarding other journals and their consistency of quality is where, exactly? I'm also missing any discussion of standards to judge quality articles and their application (or lack thereof)

I must be missing it because to me it looks like a bunch of usual political crap.

Assuming charitable intent, I understand that you might want to talk about honing one's ability to "read and evaluate journal articles" instead of what this turned out to be. That'd be cool. I'd like to read more of that. Sounds great.

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#138

Post by tacomonstrous »

seanhunter wrote: post #131
tacomonstrous wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Mathematics is either correct or it isn't. That's not really a relevant standard for publishability. There is an infinite variety of correct mathematics that is far from being novel enough to be in a quality journal.

Well correctness is surely an important factor in whether or not mathematics is publishable, wouldn't you say? Necessary but not sufficient, perhaps.

Certainly necessary, but very far from sufficient. But even that isn't quite accurate. Every one of my published papers has some kind of error in it. When something is sufficiently interesting and complex, this is essentially inevitable given how the human mind works. Hence the late Voevodksy's attempt to come up with a framework for making such ideas machine checkable.

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#139

Post by sheepmullet »

hef19898 wrote: post #130
mg96226 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because FIDE ratings encompasses the entire distribution, from left tail to right, across every participating nation, age group, and interest bracket. If the delta was due to males getting additional coaching, then the left tail of the distribution would be different in shape for males and females. It is not. Nor do more progressive countries show any signs of closing the gap. The best evidence we have right now sugg…

That kind of ignorance goes both ways. I for my part become suspicious of any Argument that is using data with a limited amount of context and Details on how the data was collected and analysed. Especially if the aim is to have some kind of "proof" for the superiority of one group of people over another. Using your specific example of the 100m-record. Women's 100m 1988: 10.49s, men's 100m 1987: 9.93s. Less than a sec…

> Less than a second difference.

A second is a massive amount of time in the 100m.

Compare male 100m world records with female:

http://www.alltime-athletics.com/m_100ok.htm

http://www.alltime-athletics.com/w_100ok.htm

Most of the fastest women in the world can be beaten by high school male runners.

For example Michigan high school mens third place in 2018 was 10.66. That’s top 10 women’s world record.

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#140

Post by tarsinge »

buboard wrote: post #98
tarsinge wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad timing. The hot issue today is overcoming discriminations and social pressure, which to my knowledge dwarf any physical effects. That doesn't mean that these research should not be discussed, but I can understand why introducing a side discussion is frowned upon, because that's not the kind of subtle analysis that you'll get in click-baity links and twitter posts. In this very particular context, if I had to choo…

> The hot issue today is overcoming discriminations and social pressure, which to my knowledge dwarf any physical effects That is an extremely unscientific statement, let alone logically false. It's impossible to attach a moral value to any scientific finding anywhere, especially a priori. There are always both good and bad consequences, impossible to predict. And if you are coming to science with a predefined set of…

Sorry maybe my sentence wasn't clear, my point is that we can't be naive and discuss these kinds of scientific results in a vacuum ignoring their misinterpretation in a related public debate.

Quite the contrary, I don't see how it's scientific to draw conclusions from these specific results to the general state of society, something that unfortunately will happen.

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