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Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

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Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#61

Post by DanielBMarkham »

probably_wrong wrote: post #22
Fomite wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My take on this is that something is badly wrong in NYJM's editorial office.

Exactly! My troll-sense was tingling when reading the original article, so I was skeptic about the content claims of the original article. But the author had a good point: the NYJM screwed up by not publishing a retraction. A retraction would have made clear what the problem with the paper was. Sure, publicly saying "we made a mistake" sucks, but not doing so empowers the author of the paper to claim they are being p…

"...A retraction would have made clear what the problem with the paper was. Sure, publicly saying "we made a mistake" sucks, but not doing so empowers the author of the paper to claim they are being persecuted for their beliefs..."

Or simply imagine so, given a lack of information.

I'm still trying to sort this out.

So this entire thing boils down to "Not-so-good pop-math piece is hated by some. It is first accepted by a journal, then rejected without comment, leading the authors to believe it was a deliberate campaign that led to their rejection, not the quality of their work"?

And the proof that it was a quality issue that caused it to be pulled?

I'm thinking we still don't know. All I know from reading this thread is that the article doesn't match up in quality against others that were published. I'm not saying this thread is wrong. I'm saying that speculating on the quality of the work is as much bullshit as the authors claiming it was a campaign. To your point, without a clear retraction, it's just people making stuff up -- based on stuff they already believed long before this paper ever came along.

So far? Not so much. But admittedly, only the flame-throwers get the media attention. I neither know nor care about this. The only reason it interests me is the quality of the debate, which I would hope among mathematicians would be a little better than average. (Since I admire them so)

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#62

Post by googlryas »

charlesism wrote: post #55
oh_sigh wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could we use the word 'breed' then, instead of race? I guarantee you that if you showed me a mixed room of hundreds of native Danes and Sentinelese - I could classify them as easily as one could classify chihuahuas vs great danes.

> if you showed me a mixed room of hundreds of > native Danes and Sentinelese - I could classify them What relevance does that have? Could you reliably tell a Dane from a Greek? How about a Sentinelese from a Pakistani? When people say "race" is a social construct, they don't - well, unless they're morons - mean that people aren't more different, the more distantly-related they are. It's the categories that are the s…

> What relevance does that have?

It shows, at least in this contrived example, that the information is present in the individuals and not in the brain of the classifier.

I don't understand your last point. Is it wrong to say that I could extremely accurately classify blue and brown eyed people?

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#63

Post by gui67gk »

sebastianconcpt wrote: post #52
amelius wrote: post #50

Instead of focusing on a flawed paper, why not look for evidence that there is more variability in one of the sexes in the real world?

Because for the left, as long as they “work”, reality isn’t as valuable as narratives. They will pretend they honor reality until the arguments get cornered. Then they’ll fallback to their Postmodern anti-realist and anti-rational philosophy and find the next way to use victimhood to try to control the behavior of everybody else. All that with other’s people money, of course.

Reality includes hundreds of generations of oppression and subjugation of women by social structures

Anyone analyzed whether alpha male attitudes have impacted female evolution?

Yeah, actually; other primates have killed alpha males and punished any that show authoritarian attitudes. Afterward they developed much more egalitarian social structures.

But human men can’t quite grasp their lack of value to propagating the species, generally speaking. And resort to pointing at one contrived accomplishment after another (ooh good for you at writing a lot of code in a gamed society that has propped you up, James!)

It’s social welfare after generations of violent oppression of others that’s given human males a leg up. But sure they do it all on their own, those precious little snowflakes.

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#64

Post by iguy »

roenxi wrote: post #49
iguy wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The third, WTF? Not really. A society where only 16% of men mate has 84% angry young men with nothing to lose. Expect a lot of violence, and not much careful consistent tending of the fields... My understanding is that this is why state-sanctioned monogamy exists: it is a tool for avoiding this situation.

> A society where only 16% of men mate has 84% angry young men with nothing to lose. Is it so crazy to think that a man with no partner could live a socially responsible life? The choice isn't a binary "Happy with wife and kids" vs "Flame, looting, violence and plague". I'm basing my experience on Australian law here, but our 'modern state-sanctioned monogamy' is a comprehensive system to stop fathers from having chi…

OK, I exaggerate a little!

And the modern states have indeed retreated from this role... but still outlaw keeping a harem of five -- as must have been common if 16% of the men had almost 100% of the women.

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#65

Post by ahartmetz »

jerkstate wrote: post #23

here's a genetics paper that covers this topic: https://investigativegenetics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.... Issues with the paper and its relevance to the platform it was published in notwithstanding, I think that we have two highly politicized sides, one wishing to promote a finding of "this is how things have been through history" as "this is the way things ought to be" (The MI staff expressed this concern), an…

Yes, where are the people saying "this is the truth but I don't have to like it"?

There are these wholesale worldviews that people buy into. As a less offensive example, apparently you can't be leftist and not believe in anthropogenic climate change, or conservative and believe in it.

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#66

Post by pjc50 »

elchief wrote: post #11

> 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 In early humans only the top 16% of males mated Most people mate now, due to religious/society-enforced monogamy https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2833377/

"16%" does not appear in that paper, and it's arguing based on inherited chromosomes: inherently that's going to be confounded by deaths in childhood or childbirth, etc.

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#67

Post by jazzyjackson »

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…

Well it's a good thing that men and women can judge each other on more than one axis then isn't it?

(one's trash is another's treasure etc. by whose ranking is one in the top or bottom half? hope you catch my drift.)

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#68

Post by pjc50 »

oh_sigh wrote: post #19
dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the general physical differences between the sexes or even races are undeniable This was a case some decades ago. Read the introduction to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization) - even the use of the word "race" is problematic today.

Could we use the word 'breed' then, instead of race? I guarantee you that if you showed me a mixed room of hundreds of native Danes and Sentinelese - I could classify them as easily as one could classify chihuahuas vs great danes.

How about instead you try to distinguish between a Tutsi and a Hutu, or a Serb vs a Croat? Because in both cases wars of mass murder have recently been fought over those differences.

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#69

Post by pjc50 »

googlryas wrote: post #60
dagw wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could also easily differentiate between brown eyed and blue eyed people. The social construct part comes in when you try to explain why one differentiation is more 'important' than the other.

"eye color is a social construct" and "the importance of eye color is a social construct" are two completely separate ideas. OP clearly states '"race" is a social construct'.

Eye color is a social construct because color is a social construct.

The presence of the genes for coloration is the only unambiguous thing, and even then it's vulnerable to all sorts of anomalies in gene expression (heterochromia, chimericism etc)

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#70

Post by pjc50 »

tptacek wrote: post #8

There is more going on than this. It's important to know a bit about the venues in question. Mathematical Intelligencer isn't really a journal at all; it's literally a magazine, carried on the shelves it bookstores. It runs some original research but also poetry and jokes and general cultural coverage. NYJM is, on the other hand, a serious (if online-only, lower-tier) theoretical mathematics journal. Ted Hill's paper…

Quilette is a highly partisan libertarian-right publication and you'd be well advised to treat it as trolling.
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