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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

#231

Post by pygy_ »

rosser wrote: post #202
lawnchair_larry wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 interpretati…

Damore did not mention the variability hypothesis, but he clearly made his points in terms difference of distributions, implying that aiming for exact parity while using metrics that are biased in favor of males was foolish. At least that's what I remember of his essay.

The whole thing was a bit ham-fisted though...

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

#232

Post by lawnchair_larry »

rosser wrote: post #202
lawnchair_larry wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 interpretati…

Haha, it glosses over that because it seems obvious! Why is a disclaimer necessary? It feels inappropriate. Why would someone assume I’m saying this other awful thing, instead of saying only what I’m saying, nothing more and nothing less?

Your last comment is truly perplexing to me, and it’s something I’ve observed from other “detractors”. Why are the words not read and interpreted literally? Why does it take a serious exercise in creative interpretation to not assume ulterior motives?

I’ve spent a very long time puzzling over that. I considered it might be a “once bitten, twice shy” type situation, in which there is hyper vigilance involved, but that would only seem to explain “victims”, not allies, who do the same thing. This would seem to be supported by the observation that it’s only racist/sexist in one direction. But I really don’t know.

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

#233

Post by dang »

OldFatCactus wrote: post #228
dang wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you please stop posting to Hacker News in the flamewar style, regardless of how wrong others are or you feel they are? You did it here too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19348928 . (Edit: and also here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19348978 . And here again: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19349065. ) We ban accounts that keep doing this. It's what we're trying to prevent from destroying thi…

I'm sorry. Won't happen again

Appreciated!

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

#234

Post by mikekchar »

iguy wrote: post #201
cm2187 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is a great point and I wish these kinds of discussions always had someone to point out that kind of important detail. I think the parent's idea would be better expressed by saying that we can't say anything about individuals in either population without more information. You don't know where in the tail that individual lies. Assuming a continuous distribution it could be anywhere. So while it might be more likely for a random individual from population A to outperform a random individual from population B, there is no way to know a priori if it will happen for specific individuals. Obvious, I know, but it's the kind of thing that people often miss when they get into a heated discussion.

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

#235

Post by rosser »

lawnchair_larry wrote: post #232
rosser wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 interpretati…

Haha, it glosses over that because it seems obvious! Why is a disclaimer necessary? It feels inappropriate. Why would someone assume I’m saying this other awful thing, instead of saying only what I’m saying, nothing more and nothing less? Your last comment is truly perplexing to me, and it’s something I’ve observed from other “detractors”. Why are the words not read and interpreted literally? Why does it take a serio…

> Why does it take a serious exercise in creative interpretation to not assume ulterior motives?

Because I try to follow the HN guideline of assuming good faith on the part of the people with whom I engage. I'm definitely not always successful, but I doubt anyone is.

When I find I'm having to get creative with my interpretation of the comment I'm reading, to the extent that I'm reading in things that appear counterfactual to the comment's intent, or things its author has said elsewhere in the thread, in order to find a position that isn't premised in this broken extrapolation between populations and individuals we're discussing, is when I feel left with little choice but to assume it is thusly brokenly premised.

That is to say: I try not to find it, but when I find myself twisting someone's words in order to make it not appear in them, my fallback case is to (tacitly) assume it's there, pending better evidence.

Does that clarify the perplexity my (admittedly somewhat awkwardly phrased) comment seems to have created?

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

#236

Post by tptacek »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #229
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…

The argument is obvious: the presentation itself is intellectually (mostly) valid and not offensive. The perception of it might be, by some, ergo, he was dismissed. His dismissal is not an objective nature of the inherent 'offensiveness' of the presentation.

No, the presentation is not mostly valid. It purports to discuss disparities in intellect and preferences between men and women in high-energy physics, but digresses into the fact that men die in battle more often than women, that sexual harassment concerns are overblown, that it was unfair that he was passed over for a job when a (named) "less qualified" woman was accepted, that discrimination generally works out in favor of women since men are more likely to die on the job, that Matt Taylor was unfairly dragged for appearing on camera in a shirt covered in pin-up girls, that charges of homophobia at CERN are false, and that all this is due to "thoughtcrime" by the Cultural Marxist Minister of Truth (his words). He even cites that laughable Ted Hill paper.

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

#237

Post by rosser »

toasterlovin wrote: post #227
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…

> 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.

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

#238

Post by mikekchar »

nabla9 wrote: post #28

You can't start neutral discussion with weak evidence, strong conclusion and open hostility. Strumia could have just presented his findings neutrally, without already made up his mind and having a clearly visible agenda and hostility. There is a pattern that is repeating: 1. Scientist has a political opinion on difficult politically volatile issue that is outside his field. 2. Scientist finds some supporting evidence…

A long time ago I saw a presentation that started with the premise that 60% of everybody is crap at their job. Doctors, lawyers, airline pilots, and even scientists. Of course that's just a number pulled out of the air, but the idea was that even if a person studies something for a long time and even if they pass some standardised tests, they can still be bad at their job.

I've met completely incompetent programmers who had advanced degrees and tons of experience (not 60% of the field, mind you, but enough to realise it does happen). The field of science is not immune to this. I remember my brother telling me a frightening story of going to a first year science lecture and the professor saying that correlation implies causation. He put up his hand and said, "You mean does not imply causation, don't you?" The professor said that, no, if it's correlated it means that one caused the other. How can you get a PhD in science and also manage to land a job at a university (reasonably well respected at that) and be so confused at such a basic level? It happens, though.

Sometimes even very smart and capable people have huge blind spots in the way that they think. Again, I've worked with a number of programmers who were extremely talented and intelligent but were unable to program anything that didn't turn into a massive ball of spaghetti. They could barely keep it working (due to their intelligence and talent), and nobody else even had a chance. This is sucking at your job, even though you have the mental hardware and skills to do a good job. It happens -- everywhere. In all walks of life. I remember the case of the airline pilot who got sick of waiting for air traffic control to give him the OK to take off. He decided to go anyway and killed hundreds of people including himself. Apparently he was a very experienced and skilled pilot.

What you are seeing is not a pattern that involves scientists. What you are seeing is a pattern that involves people who are self-deluded and over confident. I mean we could put "Actor" in for "Scientist" in your points and it would read just as well. Yes, the field of science is not immune to this kind of problem.

I think the main thing is that if an actor says something stupid we think, "Oh they are just an actor". If a scientist says something stupid, we tend to think that maybe they should be doing better. A scientist's job is to think critically, build models and test them objectively against the data. When a scientist seems incapable of doing this basic task, maybe we need to wonder if they are actually able to do their job well -- because lot's of people are crap at their jobs. Even scientists.

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

#239

Post by belorn »

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.

When it comes to gender equality discussion, both side seems to always accuse the other of bad science. To mention a few:

The effect of estrogen on emotional stability.

The effect of testosterone on violence and crime.

The pay gap in respect to unadjusted versus adjusted data.

Blind audition and p values.

Domestic violence statistics and reported rate of abuse.

If there is a neurobiological change in victims of sexual assault.

Sexsomnia and how common it is.

Campus rape statistics and if its one-quarter of all college girls.

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

#240

Post by natrik »

paganel wrote: post #121
jmole wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been reading recently about a structural/sociocultural/technological phenomenon that's actually holding women back in a field where women tend to dominate in representation at the academic level, but are regularly outcompeted by men at the professional level. Piano playing. It all comes down to the shape of the instrument, and hand-span, which is unquestionably (and uncontroversially) larger in men than in women…

This could go the other way, like you might be seen as saying that women don't have hand-spans as big as men, meaning that they're not as good as men when it comes to their physical capabilities and as such "providing" them with smaller pianos might be looked at as "demeaning" towards said women (you're thinking about them as not being as good as men are). Gender politics can be fun like that.

This isn't an issue in the WNBA and Women's basketball in general where the ball is smaller than the men's ball.
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