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University Profs' Criticism Led to Retraction of Math Paper on Gender (2018)

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61–70 of 106 posts

Re: University Profs' Criticism Led to Retraction of Math Paper on Gender (2018)

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High-energy physicists make up theories for the mechanisms behind phenomena that may or may not even exist all the time. One can question the utility of this but no one strings up such authors for heresy.

Theoretical physics does not aim to influence social policy.

Does this paper aim to influence policy?

Re: University Profs' Criticism Led to Retraction of Math Paper on Gender (2018)

#62

Ironicaly if the Greater Male Variability Hypothesis is true this also means that many more men are more dumber than women since women are more centered towards the gauss average. Ironicaly this is never mentioned, they just see this is a "many more men can have a higher iq distrubution wise due to the male gauss tail stretching out further than womens, so this is sexist to say that men are smarter". This shows you h…

>Ironicaly this is never mentioned, they just see this is a "many more men can have a higher iq distrubution wise due to the male gauss tail stretching out further than womens, so this is sexist to say that men are smarter".

Because many advocates of GMVH are only interested in justifying the gender imbalance in leadership positions biologically, dismissing any well known social factors (e.g. competence rating on double blind fake CVs)?

"Feminists say GMVH means men are all smarter" is a gross oversimplification of the situation.

If you have 2.5 hours to spend on a video essay, I'd very much recommend "The Bell Curve"[1], a breakdown of the book of the same name. Not so much for the racism part, but for the background on the construction of IQ.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo

Re: University Profs' Criticism Led to Retraction of Math Paper on Gender (2018)

#63
imho the "Academic Activists Send a Published Paper Down the Memory Hole"[1] first hand account gives a better insight, as clearly the Chicago Maroon piece leaves too many questions.

[1] https://quillette.com/2018/09/07/academic-activists-send-a-p...

Re: University Profs' Criticism Led to Retraction of Math Paper on Gender (2018)

#64

Retracting a paper should only be done in select situations, like fraud, plagiarism or violating ethical guidelines. Was any of that present? If you retract papers that were just 'wrong' you would be retracting at least 50% of the work published in a lot of fields. Furthermore you would leave a blind spot in the research, other researchers might try and pursue those retracted ideas not realizing they are dead ends.

> If you retract papers that were just 'wrong' you would be retracting at least 50% of the work published in a lot of fields.

Wouldn't that be a win? Don't people read & reference these published, reviewed, non-retracted 'wrong' papers with the assumption that they are right?

Re: University Profs' Criticism Led to Retraction of Math Paper on Gender (2018)

#65

Ironicaly if the Greater Male Variability Hypothesis is true this also means that many more men are more dumber than women since women are more centered towards the gauss average. Ironicaly this is never mentioned, they just see this is a "many more men can have a higher iq distrubution wise due to the male gauss tail stretching out further than womens, so this is sexist to say that men are smarter". This shows you h…

I think you meant “grovel”. Growling like a dog before them would be quite a fun experiment.

True my bad

Re: University Profs' Criticism Led to Retraction of Math Paper on Gender (2018)

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Theoretical physics does not aim to influence social policy.

That's news to me. How do all those nifty particle accelerators get funded, then?

The budget is only loosely related to social policy. Social policy is related to who gets what rights and priveleges.

Re: University Profs' Criticism Led to Retraction of Math Paper on Gender (2018)

#67
post #2

The paper itself is a chuckle fest (as are many Intelligencer submissions) and concludes: > The goal here has been neither to challenge nor to confirm Darwin’s and other researchers’ observations of greater male variability for any given species or any given trait, but rather to propose an elementary mathematical theory based on biological/evolutionary mechanisms that might serve as a starting point to help explain h…

High-energy physicists make up theories for the mechanisms behind phenomena that may or may not even exist all the time. One can question the utility of this but no one strings up such authors for heresy.

> strings

I see what you did there.

Re: University Profs' Criticism Led to Retraction of Math Paper on Gender (2018)

#68
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Theoretical physics does not aim to influence social policy.

Does this paper aim to influence policy?

Of course. All anthropological work about contemporary society seeks to inform public opinion which dictates policy.

Re: University Profs' Criticism Led to Retraction of Math Paper on Gender (2018)

#69
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've created a simple mathmatical model that suggests they wouldn't get created in the first place, so we no longer need to discuss whether banning them was a good idea or not, it just happened naturally, and there's nothing anyone could have done to change that.

And the obviously hyperbolical nature of that model still doesn't prevent you from creating it or from it leading to potential further research oppurtunities (in fact,please do release the paper that results from such,I'd love to read it.) and following logically from that it still doesn't prevent anyone from creating a model that disagrees or from following any potential research opputunities that such would lead to…

Here is the model:

Individual agents have a mild preference for publishing only models I agree with. They will never publish anything that I 2/3 disagree with (I rank all published papers in order of preference and the bottom 1/3 fail this test) and will immediately retract anything they have published that I disagree with to that extent and replace it with something I do agree with a random amount that places it in the top 66%. We start with them having published things that I randomly agree or disagree with.

No other factor than my agreement will have any impact on their decision to publish or retract.

Surprisingly, with only this mild preference people will automatically self censor and not publish any models I disagree with.

In reality, it's a series of laws that stops them, but we've just proved it's natural so really do those laws even matter?

Re: University Profs' Criticism Led to Retraction of Math Paper on Gender (2018)

#70
post #52

Surely the right wing media will now jump on the fact this paper was "cancelled" as it was communicating an inconvenient truth for the wokerati? You can't win. The best thing to do is to let such things go as this article would have gone unnoticed.

Or, we could not make decisions about what to publish and what not based on how the lunatic fringe might react to it.

If only. There is a very vocal minority that is advocating for tolerance and freedom of expression, but only if it aligns to their world view that "is at the right side of history"
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