I mean, shouldn’t that be the null hypothesis? That until we have specific evidence that suggests otherwise, we should assume that differences between sexes are not due to innate biological differences?
Even aside from that, we can do a quick game theory analysis to determine what assumptions create the best outcome.
Let’s say that there is a field with a gender gap in performance. There are four possible worlds:
The differences are innate and biological. We do nothing.
The differences are innate and biological. We put in place programs that make it more likely that women end up in the field.
The differences are social and cultural. We do nothing.
The differences are social and cultural. We put in place programs that make it more likely that women end up in the field.
Scenario 2 is the scenario you’re warning us about, but is it the end of the world? We waste a little effort, but it’s not like inclusivity programs are particularly expensive or difficult to implement. And it might mean that some of the lowest performing men are replaced by women; but we’ve established that any actual gaps are likely to be minimal, and the women these programs select for (and the women who are interested in them) are those who would have been most suited to these roles anyways. So any decrease in productivity should be minimal.
On the other hand, if the differences are cultural, and we do not address them, then we are lost by out on potentially stellar female candidates because they never even attempt these fields in order to realize they have a passion and talent for them.
I agree, and if someone says “We know this profession is biased against women because women are underrepresented in it”, we should challenge that by asking, “aren’t there other reasons why this might be the case, and did we test for those?”.
But we are not yet at the place where this is the only reason to suspect that gender bias exists. If a Twitter warrior is lazy enough to make that argument, by all means, rip them a new one; but it doesn’t mean that all Girls in STEM programs are stupid and misguided. Most of them operate on logic that’s a lot more nuanced then “there aren’t many women in science rofl”.
The context here does not help at all, white knighting a very sexist and reprehensible tool nominated by the sexist in chief does not make it a good argument. The real harm is being done by the current executive by actively cancelling and banning the progressive views that are more supported by the evidence.
When I was a child, almost all doctors and lawyers were men, and during my lifetime I have seen that change completely. The gender imbalance amongst mathematicians has changed more slowly, but there is no reason in principle that the pace couldn’t pick up substantially.
That article also pointed out that you can be a great mathematician even if you don’t necessarily have outstanding raw computing power - there are a lot of factors that go into it besides talent. And if this is true, then it wouldn’t even particularly matter if more men than women have outstanding mathematical intelligence. It could be that other genes, or one’s environment or some combination thereof are more responsible for success than raw talent.
Now you have seen someone claim it. This belief is not rare, I assure you.
Sure. I haven’t personally encountered much discrimination (and I studied STEM subjects at university and work in a male-dominated area), but not much isn’t none. I do want barriers removed; I don’t want anyone held back from studying or working in areas where they have an interest and can contribute.
I know things were much, much worse in the past, based on accounts of women from previous generations (and I’m grateful to them for fighting to change that). And improvement can be spotty: one company might be trying to increase representation of women, while at the same time another may be turning a blind eye to sexual harassment or discrimination by sexist managers. So you don’t reach a point where you say “it’s all good now”.
But why step up diversity efforts now, when things really have changed? There used to be major systemic barriers, and now in many cases the biggest barrier is likely not wanting to be the odd one out (and that’s as true for men thinking of becoming veterinarians or primary school teachers as women considering software engineering).
The way I see it, people are by and large making choices according to what they are interested in and good at, and also their ambitions and goals in life (should you work for a non-profit where you get to make the world better, or for a mega-corp that pays well?) And it is mostly these choices that result in sex imbalances in various professions.
So, why is it my business, or yours, or the government’s, to tell people they are making the wrong choice? How do we know that meddling with these choices - encouraging people to try a profession they weren’t going to, pushing others to give up on their ambition - will make anyone concerned happier or better off? People don’t always know what they want, but they generally have a better idea than some CEO setting an arbitrary target for representation.
This is exactly what I believed prior to 2020. Maybe the programs will do some good, and if not, a little time and money is wasted, but that’s not a big deal.
But it isn’t just programs to encourage women to consider a STEM career or support groups to overcome obstacles once there. College places and job openings are zero sum. If you give one group of people a boost, you are necessarily discriminating against other groups. That’s unfair when you have no evidence the disparities were due to some earlier discrimination.
An example: the RAF decided they needed to recruit more women and minorities to train as fighter pilots. But there weren’t enough applying to fill their quotas. So they started turning away all white man applying. That’s a lot of young men having their boyhood dreams dashed, in order to recruit more women to a job that by all appearances, few wanted to do. And for what? So they could say the gender ratio was 80-20 rather than 95-5?
I never wanted an extra boost when applying to university or for jobs. Just to be considered on the same terms as everyone else. I know neither way is perfect, but I do think that in this case the downsides of the first option are bigger than the downsides of the second.
I’m tired of being accused of bigotry for saying things like that.
I wasn’t planning to spend my evening writing an essay about this, yet here I am. If only human problems were simple and straightforward, and the right thing to do clear and obvious. But alas, they are not, and it isn’t.
Back to the paper:
By my reading, they were afraid it would be misrepresented as evidence for or proof of the greater male variability theory. I don’t think it was a bad paper per se, but it was not proof or evidence of the theory. Nor was it a significant contribution to the literature; it was a model meant to demonstrate a possibility in principle, whose simplified assumptions are unlikely to correspond to the real world.
If I’m correct about the above, do you think it should have been published? How much should fear of media misrepresentation influence the practice and publication of scientific research? If instead it could have been inaccurately described by the media as disproving the theory, do you think anything similar would have happened? I am sure it would not have. Exaggerations in favour of one’s preferred beliefs are not policed.
In general, the media is pretty dire at reporting research: claims are always exaggerated and limitations ignored. I don’t know what we can really do about this. It probably balances out overall, but nobody is getting the ‘overall’ view in today’s polarised news environment.
No. I do not have the math, statistics or genetics expertise necessary to determine the quality of the paper for myself. But If I’m taking the consensus view, the paper doesn’t add to the variability theory in any meaningful way, and it doesn’t detract from it either. If it detracted from it, and its principles and reasoning were sound, then maybe it should be published, in the same way I think studies that fail to replicate should be published. That doesn’t mean it has no value whatsoever. This might be something more appropriate for a conference paper or poster presentation.
Zero.
How much should media coverage for one’s pet issue influence the same? Because I think it’s blatantly obvious that was Riven’s primary motivation.
I’m not a scientist or researcher, but I married a man who is very serious about research, and I find it hard to believe that a reputable journal would publish obviously shoddy work simply for the political clout. At least in part because of how embarrassing it would be when it was exposed, but also because the majority of scientists value what’s true.
My husband and I have discussed this because, while we have different areas of interest, we are both passionate about clinical psychology, and it may sometimes appear as if we are in lockstep on our theoretical orientation, and we kinda are. Not because I blindly take on his opinions as my own but because we both value what’s true, and in many cases we’ve arrived independently at the same conclusion. Even though I’m not a scientist I would rather have my concept of the world blown apart than have an inaccurate view of it. It’s not a preference, it’s a fundamental part of who we are.
I think I have more faith in scientists than you do. They aren’t perfect, some value their egos more than good data, there is fraud and corruption and all the things that come with being human, but I think they are pretty good at policing their own.
I don’t really know how to answer the rest of your argument because I have to think about it. But for this I would say I know two women who left engineering because of the sexism, and one who remains in her job but deals with it on a regular basis. I don’t think it’s true that systemic discrimination doesn’t exist anymore.
We can gather evidence about the likelihood of cultural differences by noting that some scientific fields do have a substantial number of women in them - and noting the particular fields that have women in them vary with time (so in the first half of the twentieth century, intensive calculations was a female field (as shown in the history of astronomy and computer science), but now, for some reason, calculating power is deemed a male characteristic). This is consistent with a very rapid change in human genetics, changing what fields women and men are good for, in a matter of decades.
Another way to look at history is to look at the lives of particular people. Obviously, someone who is succeeds in a scientific field is going to be unusually passionate about science, overcoming barriers to success. But what are those barriers - are they things like “having to take a job that uses their scientific skills (like being a patent examiner, for example) and allows them to support a family, but cuts into their time for producing scientific papers”, or things like having to work without pay after evading rules that initially forbade education at all? Perhaps these hints would provide an inkling of the fundamental biological differences that lead to differing results
Or maybe for a journal like The Mathematical Intelligencer that “aims at a conversational and scholarly tone, rather than the technical and specialist tone more common among academic journals”; includes letters, opinion, and columns on the history of mathematics; and according to one editor, aims “to inform, to entertain, and to provoke”?
Here’s the email from the editor of the first journal, where she tells them she has decided not to publish the paper after all, and explains why. According to her, concerns about media misrepresentation were the main reason.
That does seem likely, and I agree it is not a good reason. Based on the facts as I understand them, Riven shouldn’t have published the paper. Still, the other editors of the NYJM should not have removed it without notice, either.
It’s not scientists I lack faith in, it’s the system within which they are working, which incentivises them to publish early and often, have novel and interesting results (vs the basic work of confirming that fairly obvious and unsurprising things are in fact correct), and discourages them from trying to replicate earlier work, and from publishing null results. Actual fraud is rare, but p-hacking in order to get a significant result of some kind is not, hence the replication crisis affecting social science. These problems are much wider than political pressure of the cancel culture sort.
The link below is not where I learned about these issues, but it’s a nice account from someone with personal experience in the matter, and includes some of the wider events, as well as what has and can be done to improve the practice of social sciences, and of psychology in particular:
Another example from years ago, and with exaggerations from conservative sources, it is really a pattern.
Suffice to say, when @Babale mentions that ““We know this profession is biased against women because women are underrepresented in it?” Damore is the one that made that accusation… against women in favor of men. More sexism.
One can say it was exaggerated because Damore brought the case to the labor board and he and his lawyers got a hold of them losing the case there, and so they did go the arbitration way, and one does not hear much of that now because he and Google did settle, IOW, not much from him yapping about it in the talking circuit. It was also noted that other guy got canned at Google for being a nuisance for defending the women so much.
Damore withdrew his complaint with the National Labor Relations Board before the board released any official findings. However, shortly before the withdrawal, an internal NLRB memo found that his firing was legal. The memo, which was not released publicly until February 2018, said that, whereas the law shielded him from being fired solely for criticizing Google, it did not protect discriminatory statements, that his memo’s “statements regarding biological differences between the sexes were so harmful, discriminatory, and disruptive as to be unprotected”, and that these “discriminatory statements”, not his criticisms of Google, were the reason for his firing.[3][4][5][50]
After withdrawing his complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, Damore and another ex-Google employee instead shifted focus to a class action lawsuit accusing Google of various forms of discrimination against conservatives, white people, and men.[3][4][9][51] In October 2018, Damore and the other former Google employee dismissed their claims in the lawsuit, in order to pursue private arbitration against Google.[11] Another engineer, Tim Chevalier, later filed a lawsuit against Google claiming that he was terminated in part for criticizing Damore’s memo on Google’s internal message boards.[52][53][54]
Damore and Google came to an undisclosed settlement and agreed to dismiss the lawsuit in 2020.[55]
Speaking of examples of cancel culture, a friend who spends too much time on Xitter keeps finding stories of people being fired for expressing joy at Kirk’s death on social media.
Yup. Chris Rufo and other prominent (and not so prominent) conservatives have been explaining how this is totally different to the sort of firing people that liberals were doing.
Here’s a comment from Rufo, since no one here wants to defend right-wing cancel culture:
Of course, it hasn’t been limited to people in positions of public authority (and he included people like teachers in that description), or only those who were celebrating the assassination, and it’s debatable how mainstream Charlie Kirk’s opinions were among conservatives.
But IMHO this is no worse a justification for cancelling people than the left-wing ones we’ve seen. Do any of the pro-cancel culture people in the thread actually support these firings?
I would point out that these firings aren’t anything new for conservatives. In the current climate of liberal so called “cancel culture” we forget that the conservatives have been doing it for ages. We just never called it “cancel culture”
So it’s not so much of a case of “oh no, we created a Frankenstein monster. Now we are getting cancelled” as it is an acknowledgment that the conservatives have always had the power. (I would include the Democrats until recent 2 decades).
We are just living in a time when the powerless in society have enough allies to exercise a similar ability to “cancel”.
That wasn’t my question. I was wondering if we have any equal opportunity cancellers here, who think it’s right to fire people both for celebrating a political assassination, and for expressing bigotry.
Eh, I’m fine with many of the firings. Some of these people were assholes, and if you’re not professional enough to keep your least charitable thoughts to yourself, then you should suffer the consequences.
