Nice - blaming the victims. And the ‘deepness’ of the journal is completely irrelevant. It if isn’t particularly reputable, then the paper would be less influential, and there should be no need to threaten people’s careers and reputations to supress it.
Bullshit. None of this ‘context’ justifies what happened. Science requires open criticism and debate, not clandestine suppression of work because someone with pull fears its conclusion.
Nope, in fact that would be why the journals folded so spectacularly, the very little creed they had would end up in flames. As it happened to previous attempts at pushing faulty science in the journals.
Uh, I’m using logic here, the sad reality (for the paper publishers and the weak journals), is that then they would had encountered how sad that paper was anyhow later, after damage was done, the thing that the ones accepting iffy ideas missed (and I come from what did happen when environmental journals did not pull papers that were silly) was that they announced with exaggerations that papers were published on “important journals” and “peer reviewed”. It is a very nasty tactic from the right wing in many places.
On a different note, but as pointed many times before, it is the federal government the one that cancels science now.
Wow, that’s an interesting case.
And also, i have not seen balls caught by spectators at major league ball games before. Now that i have, i think i should duck and run off one ever comes towards me. Holy shit, what a madhouse.
Now that is very symbolic from the Trump era, a better happy memory is this symbol from the Biden era:
It seems to me what happened is that someone with a vendetta against the guy pointed out the paper wasn’t fit to be published, and they looked at it again and decided it wasn’t very good. Maybe they didn’t realize it was bad science at first because they aren’t a very good journal. As he says himself, male variability is a long-established observation with robust support - so why would it be so controversial to publish a theory about it? Especially one that basically looks like Evo Psych 101.
Well the obvious reason is that it’s not contributing anything new or interesting.
I don’t really buy this guy’s story as he presented it. He’s using a lot of his enemy’s quotes without saying how he knows what was said, and his story is presented as a bunch of evil caricatures of women pressuring otherwise totally great guys to capitulate. I think the men involved probably put up that front so he wouldn’t be mad at them, too, as he’s clearly using this platform to go after these women’s reputations. I don’t appreciate the subtle attempt to garner credibility based on his veteran status, either.
Really everyone in this story including the guy who wrote the article sound like emotionally immature drama queens. I hope this is not representative of general academia, but if it is, I dodged a bullet.
I also have a tendency to evaluate the credibility of such people based on their following, and the comments in this article are the typical anti-liberal drivel.
The theory is controversial because it’s politically incorrect. This is the recent article that resulted in it being brought up again:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/09/02/trump-bls-nominee-gender-iq/
They even have links in the article to studies that confirmed the theory, yet they still think talking about it is controversial enough to warrant the piece.
Based on the article, the real story seems to be that Trump fired the head of the agency within the Labor Department that collects and distributes data on employment, consumer prices and other trends, because said agency published the bad news about the effect of Trump’s tariffs on the labour market. So far, so third world dictator.
He’s trying to replace her with the chief economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation, who they suggest may be under-qualified. Unknown how amenable he’ll be to burying the bad economic news, but I daresay it would be libellous to ask that question.
But instead of focusing on this, we get an article about a fake scandal: “guy discusses reasonably well-supported scientific theory with interns”. It’s dumb.
Getting back to the point, absent other evidence, it sounds like the ‘vendetta’ was due to political beliefs rather than personal dislike. Based on my personal experience of debating liberals, this is extremely plausible.
I also had a look on r/math to see what they had to say about it. Conclusion seemed to be that the first journal, (The Mathematical Intelligencer) was an appropriate place to publish it, but that it was lightweight compared to what usually appears in NYJM. However, pretty much everyone agreed silently deleting it was appalling and it should have been handled differently.
That’s very unfair. When reputable outlets are discriminating based on politics (or indeed for any other reason), your choice is to publish your story in disreputable ones or not at all.
If they start pandering to the anti-liberal audience, then you are welcome to judge them.
I think it actually might be, based on how academics behaved on old Twitter.
This appears to be spot on. Crap journals will publish just about anything, so they probably didn’t look at it too closely on its academic merits until someone raised a stink about it. Then they looked at it based on its merits and realized it didn’t have any. I think the most likely scenario, other than the author’s claim that half the board of one journal vowed to destroy him, is that they looked at it and said, “Look, I know you’re vouching for this guy but if any heat comes down on us, it’s going to destroy what little reputation we have.”
Cowardice, yes, but hardly the liberal conspiracy claimed by our unreliable narrator. Just people trying to cover their own asses. And yes, they absolutely should have informed him of their retraction. A more distinguished journal probably would have.
What theory? That men display more genetic variability than women? That’s pretty well accepted, and there are a number of standard theories that explain (at least some of) the effect. This seems to have been a bizarre and counterfactual mathy explanation of the same phenomenon that probably shouldn’t have been published.
I haven’t read enough details of how it was removed to have much opinion.
I don’t see how it’s controversial. I didn’t read the paper, I’m not a math person, but if the argument is essentially, “male variability is because women are evolutionarily more choosy" that’s not only not controversial, it’s already been expressed in like 100 evo psych papers. I have big methodological issues with evo psych yet they keep publishing papers, so there’s a huge platform for their research.
Why would anyone feel the need to suppress this?
Good lord. The NYJM is far from being a ‘crap’ journal. The Mathematical Intelligencer is apparently a less ‘serious’ journal that publishes accessible articles on a range of topics, but does contain real mathematics.
By my reading, it rather sounds like the editors of both journals choose to publish the paper because it would be controversial and attract commentary and rebuttals, and perhaps publicity. But in both cases they got cold feet when they saw the scale of the pushback (which was influenced by unanticipated external events, ie the Damore memo at Google).
The math people I quoted said that it was not a good paper.
Again, what we had there was a case of realizing that to prevent becoming a certifiable crap journal they had to pull it out, however, they ended up showing that indeed they had some crap in them by the little review they did before publishing a bad paper, and then how they pulled out the paper.
And once again, lets not forget why weak papers from people with an ax to grind do this maneuver of selecting less robust journals, considering what the pseudo-scientists (allied now with extreme conservatives) did before, one does have a case of Deja Vu all over again.
This is how it begins: Proponents of a fringe or non-mainstream scientific viewpoint seek added credibility. They’re sick of being taunted for having few (if any) peer reviewed publications in their favor. Fed up, they decide to do something about it.
These “skeptics” find what they consider to be a weak point in the mainstream theory and critique it. Not by conducting original research; they simply review previous work. Then they find a little-known, not particularly influential journal where an editor sympathetic to their viewpoint hangs his hat.
They get their paper through the peer review process and into print. They publicize the hell out of it. Activists get excited by the study, which has considerable political implications.
Before long, mainstream scientists catch on to what’s happening. They shake their heads. Some slam the article and the journal that published it, questioning the review process and the editor’s ideological leanings. In published critiques, they tear the paper to scientific shreds.
Embarrassed, the journal’s publisher backs away from the work. But it’s too late for that. The press has gotten involved, and though the work in question has been discredited in the world of science, partisans who favor its conclusions for ideological reasons will champion it for years to come.
The scientific waters are muddied. The damage is done.
Knowing that a right winger used in recent days the 2018 incident as an example of “cancelling” just completes the picture, there is really a lot of ignorance coming from the right in the US when they willfully ignore what creationists and climate change deniers did before with an already very formulaic sabotage of the scientific method.
It’s controversial because it could explain sex differences at the top of various professions and competitive pursuits, thus implying efforts to increase representation of women there are futile, or unfair to men.
That is presumably why WaPo felt the need to call it controversial and make it the focus of their article, and contributed to Harvard firing Larry Summers back in 2005 (which is mentioned in the same article).
Plenty of not-really-controversial science is considered controversial by the media, and on this board and other social media. This is a common situation.
Sorry, I didn’t realize this was from 2018.
Perhaps they did want to publish it to ruffle feathers, who knows? I don’t trust the author’s depiction of events. I have a little alarm bell that goes off in my head whenever anyone behaves kind of like my mother. Maybe my crazy-dar gets false positives but this guy has tripped the alarm. I’m going to need more than his own account of things to be persuaded.
Oy!
It is controversial because of the spin the right wing gives it. as noted before by the Skeptic:
These “skeptics” find what they consider to be a weak point in the mainstream theory and critique it. Not by conducting original research; they simply review previous work.
As noted already, work that in reality is not so controversial, but the political spin is. The Right Wing really, really hates when a paper that confirms their point of view was already shot down in more ways that just being pulled out.
Except that male variability is widely recognized, whether or not it’s politically incorrect. And as i mentioned above, there are a number of recognized theories that account for it. The one that i usually see is that with only one X chromosome, men are less likely to “regress towards the mean”.
And this particular paper is bullshit. And the author is hoping that his “political incorrectness” will garner him sympathy despite having written trash.
My level of confidence in the guy dropped about 30% when I got to the part where he stealth bragged about being an Army Ranger.
Right?!
Digging into the comments further, I found this statement by one of the women the author of the paper named as one of his conspirators:
According to her, he’s lying.
This is basically scientific sexism.