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Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

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Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#81

Post by Firadeoclus »

sheepmullet wrote: post #56
Arnt wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the differences are small. Insignificant. If you take some group of 1000 people which has been selected in some way that skews towards intelligence, you might find that the men have IQ 105.14 on average and the women 105.13. Like, wow. You can find groups with bigger differences if you're willing to pick an obscure group, but then you have a bigger but more obscure difference. If you talk about that you risk…

> you might find that the men have IQ 105.14 on average and the women 105.13 Why would you look at the average? Lots of jobs have an IQ floor.

I would say IQ is insufficient data to express a conceptual floor. After all, few jobs resemble an IQ test.

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#82

Post by tomhoward »

pjc50 wrote: post #70
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.

I'm no great devotee of Quillette (I haven't come across an interesting article there for a while), but that's not really a fair characterisation.

It's not "libertarian" in the way Reason magazine is, or "right-wing" in the way that Fox News is.

I think its editors broadly identify as "classical liberals", and they have a stated mission of challenging the "blank-slate" view of human nature.

You can disagree with these positions, but they're legitimate subject areas that reasonable people can discuss, and it deserves better than to be dismissed as you have - even if some of its articles get it wrong, as this one seems to have done.

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#83

Post by Dowwie »

rdl wrote: post #4

This is the Streisand Effect in action. (I am sure there are going to be people in a few years who learn of the Streisand Effect first and then learn about some random washed-up musician responsible for it second.)

What does Barbara Streisand have to do with this? She had a beautiful voice and was loved by many.

Memories...

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#84

Post by googlryas »

pdkl95 wrote: post #77
googlryas wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Color is not a social construct.

Yes, it is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMqZR3pqMjg

I thought you might be going there with that. That is how our learning teaches us to classify colors into finite groups(/names). That does not mean that color itself is a social construct.

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#85

Post by pgeorgi »

bilbo0s wrote: post #72
pgeorgi wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who trolled whom? According to Hill (and supported by the timeline) the revisions were at the request of the editors. In that case, it was these editors who wanted a political axis added to it instead of just publishing an "undergrad applied math problem" to get a discussion started. There's a proud history of publishers helping each others against outside threats (eg in 1960's Germany during the Spiegel-Affair the r…

>The following paper may not match our usual standards... My opinion of the declining quality of scientific and especially mathematical papers is different. I used to work in medical and molecular imaging. Whatever we did obviously required FDA approval. One engineer, a good one, but engineers aren't usually very detail oriented when it comes to "getting the math right" so to speak, referenced a paper in some of the…

> Why is the mathematics community being pressured to go even lower quality?

If quality had been the only argument, I'd buy it - but[0]:

- “As a matter of principle,” she wrote, “I support people discussing controversial matters openly … At the same time, I think it’s good to be aware of the effects.”

- “but you should know in advance that many (most?) of us have strong disagreements with what you did.” (not "with the quality of the work", but "with what you did")

- "people who explained that the paper was “bad and harmful”" (there _could_ be a quality argument in there depending on what was meant by "bad", but harmful is not a quality category)

> Put it in the Intelligencer

That's what Hill tried first: "Once we had written up our findings, Sergei and I decided to try for publication in the Mathematical Intelligencer, the ‘Viewpoint’ section of which specifically welcomes articles on contentious topics"[0]

As told by Hill, it wasn't his decision that it didn't end up there.

> But let's try to get actual journals cleaned up.

NYJM only appeared on the scene after the Intelligencer was pressured into not publishing. In NYJM case, probably due to political interest of one of its editors (seeing the edits made), sadly not merely due to "I stand for journals' press freedom".

> My question is, why are we intentionally asking to make it worse?

Because the more reasonable alternative was prevented by others. Even just publishing it in the Intelligencer now would be an option to make the entire situation whole again (apart from the year or so wasted on a messy situation). After that, ridicule the paper's result all you want in the Intelligencer or any other journal.

In contrast the outcome that seems to be preferred by the paper's opponents, which is "don't dare talk about it", doesn't sound very sciencey to me.

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

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#86

Post by danieltillett »

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…

This may all be so, but can you provide some citations and evidence to support these claims? Where is the other side of this story?

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#87

Post by collyw »

Arnt wrote: post #28
frebord wrote: post #6

Honest question, the general physical differences between the sexes or even races are undeniable, so why is it so taboo to talk about the differences that almost certainly exist in our minds?

Because the differences are small. Insignificant. If you take some group of 1000 people which has been selected in some way that skews towards intelligence, you might find that the men have IQ 105.14 on average and the women 105.13. Like, wow. You can find groups with bigger differences if you're willing to pick an obscure group, but then you have a bigger but more obscure difference. If you talk about that you risk…

Do you think height differences between men and women are insignificant? They seem pretty obvious despite many exceptions.

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#88

Post by collyw »

Firadeoclus wrote: post #81
sheepmullet wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you might find that the men have IQ 105.14 on average and the women 105.13 Why would you look at the average? Lots of jobs have an IQ floor.

I would say IQ is insufficient data to express a conceptual floor. After all, few jobs resemble an IQ test.

Job interviews on the other hand....

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#89

Post by pgeorgi »

doombolt wrote: post #54
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…

Can you please add links for your pp. 1-4? Otherwise it looks like you assume the result of this path without helping us actually walk it.

Theodore Hill (the paper's author) wrote about his side on https://quillette.com/2018/09/07/academic-activists-send-a-p...

Somewhere in the middle he linked to the paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.04184.pdf

From there you can get to its abstract page that also carries the versions: https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.04184

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#90

Post by Firadeoclus »

doombolt wrote: post #51
hef19898 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basing your "top half of females" behaviour on un-specified asumptions, failing to even hinting on what is "desirable" and then subjugating this model of society to some sort of statistical model was not my idea. nAgain not sure whether this was intentional or not or if I got your point wrong, after all we do not know each other. But again, that is to much oversimplyfication for my taste. Especially when mathematics…

Don't see why the math should be serving your taste. Nowhere in my message I am applying mathematics to a domain. I'm just stating that such math exists. Applying, or not applying, them to any real society is left as an exercise for a reader.

Without application to any domain (which, it seems to me, you actually do by using concrete labels rather than abstract categories), it remains unclear what makes this example "a real eye opener". In what way is it relevant?
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