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Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

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Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#191

Post by jeromebaek »

zeroname wrote: post #170

"When applied to humans, this model is ludicrously implausible. While it is true that some males have trouble finding a mate, 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." It's not ludicrous at all. The world "as we know it" is not the world H…

This is very interesting. Have you other articles that follow up on this study?

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#192

Post by dropit_sphere »

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…

It's important to keep in mind that this only applies to relative desirability, though, and the mapping between "rank" and subjective desirability ("I think I did well") is...weird, with oft-cited wrenches in the mix like changing prospects by age (generally better for men and worse for women), women's attraction to status (a commodity both "real" in that it affects things, and "fake" in that it's "just" a social construct, like fiat currency)...I don't intend to take away from your point.

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#193

Post by tptacek »

enriquto wrote: post #190
tptacek wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It very much is embarrassing to everyone involved; there's no denying that. It's less clear to me that the outcome is bad. Hill's paper really doesn't make sense in NYJM. It's so out of place I think it's actually pretty embarrassing to Hill as well.

I understand that a paper may be published by error. But just removing it without explaining the move to the readers is a shameful lack of respect towards them. If I was on the editorial board of this journal I would resign immediately. It doesn't matter how silly the paper is, the problem is that they are treating their readers as idiots.

I don't think you're following the controversy here. Publishing it in the first place was the shameful lack of respect, and the editorial board did threaten to resign over it. The right way, apparently, to think about what happened at NYJM is that Hill got one of his friends to sneak an inappropriate article into a journal.

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#194

Post by kgwgk »

tptacek wrote: post #193
enriquto wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand that a paper may be published by error. But just removing it without explaining the move to the readers is a shameful lack of respect towards them. If I was on the editorial board of this journal I would resign immediately. It doesn't matter how silly the paper is, the problem is that they are treating their readers as idiots.

I don't think you're following the controversy here. Publishing it in the first place was the shameful lack of respect, and the editorial board did threaten to resign over it . The right way, apparently, to think about what happened at NYJM is that Hill got one of his friends to sneak an inappropriate article into a journal .

> The right way, apparently, to think about what happened at NYJM is that Hill got one of his friends to sneak an inappropriate article into a journal.

Who was that friend of his? Rivin, the editor who contacted him after learning about the article from his co-author, Steinberger, the editor-in-chief and founder of the journal who decided to publish the paper, or the unnamed referee who had a very positive opinion?

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#195

Post by tptacek »

kgwgk wrote: post #194
tptacek wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you're following the controversy here. Publishing it in the first place was the shameful lack of respect, and the editorial board did threaten to resign over it . The right way, apparently, to think about what happened at NYJM is that Hill got one of his friends to sneak an inappropriate article into a journal .

> The right way, apparently, to think about what happened at NYJM is that Hill got one of his friends to sneak an inappropriate article into a journal. Who was that friend of his? Rivin, the editor who contacted him after learning about the article from his co-author, Steinberger, the editor-in-chief and founder of the journal who decided to publish the paper, or the unnamed referee who had a very positive opinion?

The "unnamed referee" is apparently Rivin.

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#196

Post by kgwgk »

tptacek wrote: post #195
kgwgk wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The right way, apparently, to think about what happened at NYJM is that Hill got one of his friends to sneak an inappropriate article into a journal. Who was that friend of his? Rivin, the editor who contacted him after learning about the article from his co-author, Steinberger, the editor-in-chief and founder of the journal who decided to publish the paper, or the unnamed referee who had a very positive opinion?

The "unnamed referee" is apparently Rivin.

What makes you think so? If it has been mentioned here or in the linked blog I’ve missed that.

Still, if it should be so obvious to any casual observer that the paper doesn’t belong in that journal: how did that escape the journal’s founder and editor-in-chief? (Maybe Rivin was also impersonating Steinberger!)

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#197

Post by tptacek »

kgwgk wrote: post #196
tptacek wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "unnamed referee" is apparently Rivin.

What makes you think so? If it has been mentioned here or in the linked blog I’ve missed that. Still, if it should be so obvious to any casual observer that the paper doesn’t belong in that journal: how did that escape the journal’s founder and editor-in-chief? (Maybe Rivin was also impersonating Steinberger!)

I don't know, but Steinberger stepped down due to a medical crisis sometime during this drama (it's hard to fix timelines because Hill waited a long time to write this Quillette post).

I don't know exactly where I got the impression that Rivin was the person who got this paper fast-tracked, but I think probably somewhere on Joel Fish's Twitter timeline.

As I understand it: NYJM is an online-only journal that continually adds papers to each "volume", so it's not like a typical refereed journal where there's a cohort of submissions and a calendar during which the whole peer review committee downselects submissions. You couldn't, for instance, easily fast-track a Usenix paper into a conference proceedings without blowing up the program committee.

And, again: you can just look at NYJM and then at this paper and see immediately that it didn't go through peer review. It is unlikely any paper I've found in NYJM for several years back. There are practicing mathematicians on this thread saying the same thing; Tim Gowers also says as much in the blog post we're commenting on.

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#198

Post by kgwgk »

tptacek wrote: post #197
kgwgk wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think so? If it has been mentioned here or in the linked blog I’ve missed that. Still, if it should be so obvious to any casual observer that the paper doesn’t belong in that journal: how did that escape the journal’s founder and editor-in-chief? (Maybe Rivin was also impersonating Steinberger!)

I don't know, but Steinberger stepped down due to a medical crisis sometime during this drama (it's hard to fix timelines because Hill waited a long time to write this Quillette post). I don't know exactly where I got the impression that Rivin was the person who got this paper fast-tracked, but I think probably somewhere on Joel Fish's Twitter timeline. As I understand it: NYJM is an online-only journal that continua…

> the whole peer review committee

What do you mean? Do you expect the whole editorial board to review every paper? I think it’s usual for acceptance to be decided by one editor, based on the report from referees (in the case of the NYJM, one referee). Peer review is provided by the external referee(s), not by the journal editors (but they can also act as reviewers for submissions handled by another editor, I guess it depends on the journal’s policy).

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#199

Post by rubatuga »

kgwgk wrote: post #53
foolrush wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that "race" is a social construct... https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/04/race-gen...

Animal taxonomy is also a social construct: phylum, class, order, family, genus, species are all labels that we have created and not an intrinsic property of animals.

That last bit isn’t true, species are not a social construct.

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#200

Post by tptacek »

kgwgk wrote: post #198
tptacek wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, but Steinberger stepped down due to a medical crisis sometime during this drama (it's hard to fix timelines because Hill waited a long time to write this Quillette post). I don't know exactly where I got the impression that Rivin was the person who got this paper fast-tracked, but I think probably somewhere on Joel Fish's Twitter timeline. As I understand it: NYJM is an online-only journal that continua…

> the whole peer review committee What do you mean? Do you expect the whole editorial board to review every paper? I think it’s usual for acceptance to be decided by one editor, based on the report from referees (in the case of the NYJM, one referee). Peer review is provided by the external referee(s), not by the journal editors (but they can also act as reviewers for submissions handled by another editor, I guess it…

I've been a part of the program committees for a couple scholarly journal editions over the past two decades and in none of them were individual reviewers given the ability to accept or decline papers. At Usenix a few years ago, the practice was that everybody reviewed everything, and the program chairs (I was one) essentially counted votes and managed discussions. That was also the impression I got doing this for an ACM/IEEE journal in the early 2000s.

(It is, for whatever it's worth to you, also essentially the practice at Black Hat USA, which gets thousands of submissions every year --- albeit the review board is separated out into tracks with their own covering reviewers. But BH Cryptography, for instance, has 10 cryptographer reviewers, and they reviewed everything on the track).

Can I ask, from where did you get the impression that it was typical for an individual member of a review board to get assigned a paper and pass/fail it, or for any one review board member to have the authority to accept a paper?

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