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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

#271

Post by cqqwdq »

tptacek wrote: post #212
lawnchair_larry wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 acknow…

He didn't call you a racist or a misogynist, or even Strumia (though I'll say it: Strumia is a misogynist). He simply pointed out that the basic mechanisms of scientific discussion have been abused to push dumb ideas in the past, which is obviously true. That is in fact a flaw in your argument. You're the one getting triggered here.

Of course he did: "Once identified as such, we are under no obligation to continue suffering such fools."

How can this not be related to the issue at hand?

Also, could you please read the guidelines and refrain from statements like "You're the one getting triggered here."?

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

#272

Post by belorn »

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.

If we want to look at the long tail of intellectual ability, the opposite side would be intellectual disability. Either measured by IQ, diagnosed as neurodevelopmental disorders or now days more commonly both.

Both side of the bell curve has poor definitions and IQ tests are far from perfect as it is said to optimize the accuracy between IQ 70 and 100. That said, we do see more men in practically every kind of type of data set for both side of the bell curve.

To cite a professor of both biology and neurology, no society on earth like to talk or even think about the mentally disabled. The "downsides" of greater variability is a group that most people treat as they don't exist, so I would not be surprised if many people really believed that the only explanation for a different top 1% is discrimination.

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

#273

Post by davrosthedalek »

BurningCycles wrote: post #260
davrosthedalek wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are they paid the same? Are they the same level of famous? I don't really watch basketball, but I don't think they are, and a "they are not as good as men" bias could very well be at play here.

The economics of sports are dominated by one factor, the size of the audience. If women started to watch female sports in anywhere near the numbers men watch male sports then the economics would change. As it stands, women are just not as interested in watching sports as men are, with some exceptions like figure skating and gymnastics.

This leads to a couple of questions: Why do men prefer to watch men sports, why do women prefer to not watch sports, and is the "watch same gender preference" the same for men and women? For the latter, my impression is that women mostly prefer to watch men teams too.

Also, the audience=the customer, so isn't this true for almost all fields? If we are OK with wildly different pay scales in sports because of audience preference, couldn't Hollywood claim the same?

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

#274

Post by SiempreViernes »

leereeves wrote: post #266
mcguire wrote: post #41

From the particlesforjustice link: " As an example of the inappropriateness of citations as a metric, almost 1/3 of Strumia's citations come from being one of thousands of authors on the CMS Higgs discovery paper, to which we can safely conclude that his contribution (as a theoretical associate in an experimental collaboration) was modest. Hundreds more citations come from papers about the statistically insignificant…

And yet even if you throw out half his citations, he would still have over 3x as many as the woman who was hired over him. He has 21,000 citations. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Alessandro_Strumia The woman who was hired has 3000. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Anna_Ceresole

Yes, the slide you refer to, where he publicly names and insults a member of the selection comitte that didn’t hire him is the slide that relly got him in trouble.

You are, quite obviously, going to get in trouble by demonstrating such lack of professionalism. Any selection comitte that considers questions such as: ”will the candidate respect collegues if they happen to be female” will from his presentation know that the answer is absolutey not.

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

#275

Post by davrosthedalek »

rosser wrote: post #237
toasterlovin wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 biggest or smartest, or a man the smallest or weakest, or either the best at one job, or the worst at another. It does not prevent a women from being the most (or the least) anything. But it says a lot about the probability of that being the case.

So, if a woman comes along who is, in point of fact, the smartest person in the room, do we accept that, or do we insist that because the probability is that much smaller, we must assert it over the reality? Because one of those things sure seems to happen a whole lot more than the other.

One should, obviously, accept that. But if the hypothesis is true, one should also accept that, in a room of smart (or dumb) people, the ratio is not 50:50.

There is obviously a need to fight against any discrimination against an individual based on an unrelated factor (race, gender, hair color etc.). But I fear that a lot of measures do not actually fight against that, but add discrimination to offset other discrimination to reach the 50:50. While this obviously has moral problems, I think it can be a good tool if it reduces the discrimination against individuals in the long run. But /that/ must be the metric.

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

#276

Post by davrosthedalek »

tptacek wrote: post #210
davrosthedalek wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, but adding fictive ways to your "several ways" makes it disingenuous. The things he did different from the normal process (title, abstract etc.) are enough to show that he deceived CERN.

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

#277

Post by SiempreViernes »

zarkov99 wrote: post #133
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #36

>> 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. My underlined sentence, is most likely the reason Cern considered that Alessandro Strumia's actions would bring disrepute to the Centre. Holding and publicly discussing controversial views is o…

Did you see the slides in question? If not take a look: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1c_NyUhOZ8erdqU2AGZJZtNfFeA9... I see no great insults here, one cartoon suggests that the gender studies activists that are so concerned about the lack of women in STEM could have better addressed the problem if they themselves pursued careers in STEM rather than gender studies. The other cartoon is even milder. As to ridiculing…

He is saying ”you got hired despite being dumb, and the girl that hired you was dumb too!”, which is clearly what he is implying given the context of the talk itself and that nice conspirational quote he put underneath.

I find it remarkable that you can read that slide, where he insults the selection comitte by proxy and one of its female members directly, and not come to the conclusion that he is correctly being kicked out.

What would it take to count as bad? A specific death threat with his signature underneath, or would his citation count balance that out too, as long as the wording is mild?

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

#278

Post by SiempreViernes »

leereeves wrote: post #269
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #36

>> 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. My underlined sentence, is most likely the reason Cern considered that Alessandro Strumia's actions would bring disrepute to the Centre. Holding and publicly discussing controversial views is o…

That's an excellent point that reminds me of the article that was recently on Hacker News: Our Culture of Contempt. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/02/opinion/sunday/political-... He could have handled this more professionally. But at the risk of committing a "motive attribution error" myself, it seems clear that that standard is being selectively applied; even the CERN staff who filmed a fake human sacrifice and rel…

No, it is the insulting of named members of the selection comitte that didn’t hire him that is almost the entirety of the problem.

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

#279

Post by SiempreViernes »

lawnchair_larry wrote: post #218
tptacek wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> the need for need for more participation is obvious prima facie) You lost me there, because in no way is that obvious prima facie. [Trigger warning, because adults can’t have dispassionate conversations about facts and ideas, and will cherry-pick then knee jerk, probably even in spite of this warning: I’m not saying that women don’t want to enter these fields in the next sentence. I’m not saying that the lack of wo…

> I do agree that it was an embarrassing moment for HN, likely for precisely the opposite reasons.

So you think it was embarrasingfor HN, but haven’t yet decided why? :) Hah, yeah, that sounds about right from you.

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

#280

Post by leereeves »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #278
leereeves wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an excellent point that reminds me of the article that was recently on Hacker News: Our Culture of Contempt. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/02/opinion/sunday/political-... He could have handled this more professionally. But at the risk of committing a "motive attribution error" myself, it seems clear that that standard is being selectively applied; even the CERN staff who filmed a fake human sacrifice and rel…

No, it is the insulting of named members of the selection comitte that didn’t hire him that is almost the entirety of the problem.

Your theory is that the whole reason for firing him was that he insulted CERN management? That's an interesting theory, but it certainly makes the CERN management look petty.
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