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CERN cuts ties with 'sexist' scientist Alessandro Strumia

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Re: CERN cuts ties with 'sexist' scientist Alessandro Strumia

#201

Post by iguy »

cm2187 wrote: post #190
thaumasiotes wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If male variance is higher, there are likely both benefits and downsides to it Yes, but the general concept is that the benefits and the downsides occur in different people. A single person doesn't illustrate "the benefits and the downsides" of greater variability any more than a single person can illustrate variability. WRT issues of pure sample size, you can see one of the standard supports for GMVH in the SAT To…

And what I find frustrating in this discussion is that people don't like to think in term of distributions. The 78k female aren't less capable in any way than the 120k males, there is just fewer of them. But then a journalist will summarize that as "women scoring less than males in math at SAT". And then we go into a sterile flame war of blanket statements about gender, etc. The debate on the Damore memo in that resp…

As a mathematical comment, if these are two distributions are gaussians, and one has 120k above some cutoff, the other 78k, then the distributions above this cutoff are not the same.

They will typically have slightly different means (not far above the cutoff) and quite strongly different tails.

Re: CERN cuts ties with 'sexist' scientist Alessandro Strumia

#202

Post by rosser »

lawnchair_larry wrote: post #193
rosser wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile people (though broadly, it appears, a different set of them) also appear to be unwilling, to the point of delusion, to accept the fact that it is meaningless to attempt to extrapolate from statistical phenomena to individual, or vice-versa. So, sure: stipulated. Male h. sapiens sapiens have statistically greater variability, across the population. That in no way whatsoever prevents a woman from being the bi…

You are correct that a set of people are unwilling to accept that, but it’s actually the same set. Those who bring up male variability pretty frequently take great pains to state, gratuitously, that it applies to populations in a general sense and not individuals. Damore called this out as well, but the mob rewrote his words for him to omit anything like that. Most men advancing this argument have no problem whatsoev…

That's quite curious to me, since the overwhelming majority of the argument I've seen that cites the Damore memo glosses right over that distinction, or, at best, does an, "I'm not saying the thing, but, you know, the thing..." with this very question.

Maybe that's an inference I'm putting there, in at least some of the cases, but in another nontrivial subset of them, it's a serious exercise in creative interpretation to find any other read of the person's own words.

Re: CERN cuts ties with 'sexist' scientist Alessandro Strumia

#203

Post by thaumasiotes »

motohagiography wrote: post #189
thaumasiotes wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If male variance is higher, there are likely both benefits and downsides to it Yes, but the general concept is that the benefits and the downsides occur in different people. A single person doesn't illustrate "the benefits and the downsides" of greater variability any more than a single person can illustrate variability. WRT issues of pure sample size, you can see one of the standard supports for GMVH in the SAT To…

Would the drop out rate of men (assuming higher) provide an additional control? If low achieving men selected out of the data set before it was collected at the SAT level, there could be a long tail of underachieving men. This would certainly effect averaging, and if number of dropouts were greater than the 90th percentile, there could be some selection/survivor bias in play on how males appear as a group.

Dropout rate is not relevant, because we're only looking at high achievers and we believe their dropout rate is negligible. There are roughly equal numbers of boys and girls graduating high school (technically, there are more girls!), but there are many more high-achieving boys than girls. Boys are much more likely to excel.

This is not a statement about the group average, but about the group variance. The SAT is not a good tool to use to assess group averages; I already mentioned this.

Re: CERN cuts ties with 'sexist' scientist Alessandro Strumia

#204

Post by lawnchair_larry »

anigbrowl wrote: post #181

I'm nearly 50 and decided some years ago that life was just too short to bother accommodating people who are assholes. Perhaps he's brilliant, but there's quite a lot of brilliant people around and if there's a discovery just waiting to be made it's more likely that someone else will do than that the opportunity to make it will be lost forever. I'm not arguing that everyone has to hold the same views, but if your nee…

That’s one way to look at things. But keep in mind, in that hypothetical world, we just erased Feynman, Einstein, Oppenheimer, and, well, probably the entire United States. Folks may disagree about whether that’s a net win or a net loss.

Re: CERN cuts ties with 'sexist' scientist Alessandro Strumia

#205

Post by tptacek »

lawnchair_larry wrote: post #180
tptacek wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last September, Professor Strumia stated that “physics was invented and built by men, it's not by invitation" at a presentation at the Cern the workshop. He also showed cartoons deriding women campaigning for equality in science and presented the results of an analysis that he claimed showed that work conducted by female physicists was not as good as their male counterparts. Did Larry Summers do anything as overt as…

If we are seeking truth, as we do in science, we must accept that there can never be anything wrong with attempting to analyze whether A outperforms B, no matter what A and B are . It doesn’t matter if it’s offensive or politically incorrect. So, what he did seems to be no more “overt” than attempting to analyze which thruster design is most efficient. If he’s wrong, the most appropriate and most effective rebuttal i…

No, for several reasons.

First and most obviously, the purpose of this workshop was to further women's participation in high-energy physics (physics and computer science are the two most lopsided science fields; the need for need for more participation is obvious prima facie). It was not the purpose of the workshop to hash out Strumia's political beliefs, and had the workshop known what Strumia was going to present, they would have rejected it --- not for lack of truth, but for lack of relevance.

Second, Strumia's presentation was unserious. It was unserious because of the cartoons. It was unserious because of the invocation of "cultural marxism". It was unserious because it had a title chosen to obscure the purpose of the talk. It was obscure because it has a whole slide allocated to Strumia's grievance about losing an academic role to a particular woman. There can be value in presenting a contrarian point of view at a summit with almost any premise. There is no value in trolling a venue, which is what he did.

Third, as the sibling post observes, he was subsequently depantsed by his peers and sponsors, because he had neither the credibility in social sciences nor the credibility in his own field to be persuasive, and his underlying data did not rise to meet the dumb occasion he created for himself.

We're essentially recapitulating the argument HN had over Ted Hill's NYJM paper, which was, I think, a little embarrassing for the Ted Hill defenders on HN.

I stand by my summary: play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

Re: CERN cuts ties with 'sexist' scientist Alessandro Strumia

#206

Post by tptacek »

ThomPete wrote: post #126
tptacek wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not at all sure what your argument is here. Strumia clearly did mislead CERN and the workshop organizers, pretty clearly gave a presentation to troll the workshop, and clearly launched an attack on another scientist (present at the workshop) during his presentation. Is your argument that someone should have been able to give a contrarian presentation about gender disparities in physics at this workshop? I agree w…

Which illustrates the fundamental issue here. This was not something that came from within, this was forced from the outside namely the media, in this case, BBC which made it politically problematic for CERN. If a woman or man had launched an attack on the problems of being a woman in a male-dominated field nothing would have happened, in fact, he or she would have been applauded for speaking truth to power and celeb…

You know, the BBC, and the 8,000 academics, including more than 450 major-university-affiliated high energy physicists, who signed an open letter condemning the presentation. But, sure, the BBC couldn't have helped.

Re: CERN cuts ties with 'sexist' scientist Alessandro Strumia

#207

Post by thaumasiotes »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #85
bhouston wrote: post #6

I am reminded of Larry Summers, then the head of Harvard, who said something similar: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2005/jan/18/educationsge... I think that previously there was a distinct issue with not enough women going through the degree programs. If the degree programs are 80% men and 20% women, statistically the men will outperform the women in outlier achievements just because there will likely be more p…

> If male variance is higher, there are likely both benefits and downsides to it Yes, but the general concept is that the benefits and the downsides occur in different people. A single person doesn't illustrate "the benefits and the downsides" of greater variability any more than a single person can illustrate variability. WRT issues of pure sample size, you can see one of the standard supports for GMVH in the SAT To…

Edit, too late: of course 120:78 is not a 2:1 ratio; males are outnumbering females better than 3 to 2.

Re: CERN cuts ties with 'sexist' scientist Alessandro Strumia

#208

Post by [deleted] »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #203
motohagiography wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would the drop out rate of men (assuming higher) provide an additional control? If low achieving men selected out of the data set before it was collected at the SAT level, there could be a long tail of underachieving men. This would certainly effect averaging, and if number of dropouts were greater than the 90th percentile, there could be some selection/survivor bias in play on how males appear as a group.

Dropout rate is not relevant, because we're only looking at high achievers and we believe their dropout rate is negligible. There are roughly equal numbers of boys and girls graduating high school (technically, there are more girls!), but there are many more high-achieving boys than girls. Boys are much more likely to excel. This is not a statement about the group average, but about the group variance. The SAT is not…

[deleted]

Re: CERN cuts ties with 'sexist' scientist Alessandro Strumia

#209

Post by lawnchair_larry »

scott_s wrote: post #197
lawnchair_larry wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we are seeking truth, as we do in science, we must accept that there can never be anything wrong with attempting to analyze whether A outperforms B, no matter what A and B are . It doesn’t matter if it’s offensive or politically incorrect. So, what he did seems to be no more “overt” than attempting to analyze which thruster design is most efficient. If he’s wrong, the most appropriate and most effective rebuttal i…

> His analysis was quickly dismissed as being unscientific and incorrect by experts in the impact of research. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-47478537 Racists and misogynist have been using bad science to justify their views for centuries. (See, for example, phrenology.) Once identified as such, we are under no obligation to continue suffering such fools.

What do racists and misogynists have to do with anything being discussed?

See, you’re doing it too. Maybe one day you can consider accepting the possibility that a non-racist, non-misogynist might wonder if race or sex can influence general outcomes in a given domain!

Personally, I find the idea that it can only influence athletic performance (which I understand is a difference that polite society allows us to acknowledge) to be extremely unlikely. I actually would rank “women, in general, are inherently better than men at “ to be more likely than “in general, men and women are exactly the same”.

Re: CERN cuts ties with 'sexist' scientist Alessandro Strumia

#210

Post by tptacek »

davrosthedalek wrote: post #170
tptacek wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He misled CERN to get his talk into the workshop, didn't provide materials a priori, deliberately gave his talk an obscurantist title, and attacked the workshop (and specific individual scientists and organizers) during the presentation. It was a stunt; he played the workshop. Nobody is going to congratulate him for that.

While I agree with your other points, I have yet to attend a physics conference where I'm asked to provide my slides a priori.

I'm not suggesting he had to, just that he in several ways went out of his way to make sure nobody knew what he was going to say. It's not like the workshop accepted his talk knowing he'd be presenting a contrarian view; had they know, they would not have accepted him.
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