I don’t see how this can be anything but a good thing. If you are certain that there is discrimination against women in physics, then this is a great opportunity to convince the world of it.
I never understood the attitude of “trust us, it exists, but no one is allowed to question it”. I think Feynman said something like “I’d rather have questions I can’t answer than answers I can’t question”.
EDIT: I don’t understand the downvotes. Why would someone not want an opportunity to present evidence of their claims and rebut arguments to the contrary? Why are we so adamantly opposed?
i think there's something about the voting algorithm. i notice a lot of comments being flagged to death with what can only be very few votes (like 3-4), but then later get unflagged and even upvoted with signifcant numbers. The downvotes always appear to come the first few minutes, (it's as if downvotes count more, or are counted first i dont know?)
The last sentence, quoted from one of the critics:
> Strumia “certainly hasn’t attempted any analysis of the relevant systemic problems” that might influence gender differences in physics, such as implicit bias or outright harassment.
Might or mighty, just telling it's systemic actually doesn't show anything.
Questionnaires about hurt feeling in academia don't prove anything either because the same gender bias would apply, everything from what words do you use to implied answers that many time creep in into those "systemic" studies.
I upvoted you because I think it's a good question.
One problem is that nowadays, people often don't get presented with the entirety of the available evidence on politically charged questions (like gender equality). Whatever pundit or facebook friend will cherry pick the evidence that suits their agenda, even if that evidence has been thoroughly debunked. So while I agree with you that in the context of academic curiosity, everything that can pass peer review should be published, sometimes publishing something that you know will be debunked later could lead to a net societal loss and should therefore be avoided.
Then again, I'm very against silencing opinions, even for the "greater good" (within some framework I'm sure you could describe China's censorship as for the "greater good")
No one is obligated to amplify opinions either though. HN has a bizzare streak that private publishers and organisations must grant their medium to every controversial opinion that asks, which is bizarre on a forum that is based on letting downvotes directly silence an opinion (and where down votes are only enabled once you clear the bar of a certain amount of up votes in the first place)
I’m not familiar with that. I’m familiar with the notion that social media giants should behave more like utilities, but that view is based on the sheer volume of speech that they can manipulate even to manipulate our democracies. However, even that view is not ubiquitous here. The other meme that is more widely held that seems similar to what you are describing is support for net neutrality, which again asks private ISPs to behave as utilities, but for different reasons than those given for social media giants.
>a forum that is based on letting downvotes directly silence an opinion
I cannot express just how strongly opposed to that approach I am. I reserve my use of the downvote to low effort comments, factually inaccuracies, and the like. If we silence people we disagree with we end up with propaganda, not discussion. I’m often hesitant to downvote any comments that espouse a political opinion I disagree with, even if they are eg low effort, because I’m worried about silencing the opposition.
Surprisingly (to me), I don’t see anything about what you should or shouldn’t downvote in the site guidelines, so it’s possible my views don’t align with the hn community as a whole. But I really like being able to have constructive discussion, and would hate to have hn’s quality degrade to that of a political subreddit.
I mean, if the paper does not meet the typical standards for a scientific publication, then obviously publishing it is a bad idea.
Note: I am not in any way whatsoever suggesting that this paper is substandard. I have not read a word of it. Just pointing out that there are definite scenarios where publishing papers, controversial or not, can be a bad thing.
I downvoted you because this felt like an egregious strawman:
> I never understood the attitude of “trust us, it exists, but no one is allowed to question it”. I think Feynman said something like “I’d rather have questions I can’t answer than answers I can’t question”.
The researcher who reviewed his paper, and is quoted as being extremely critical of it, did not evince the irrational mindset that you imply:
> The study contains “several unsubstantiated claims,” she says, and doesn’t properly cite or discuss papers that come to conflicting conclusions. “Overall,” Sugimoto says, “the manuscript does not provide a convincing understanding of the literature or the methods, lessening the credibility of the results.”
Furthermore, this reviewer is on the board of the publication in question. And despite her critique, she affirms the authority and independence of the editor-in-chief to publish the paper:
> In an email, Sugimoto wrote that “To maintain the editorial integrity of our journal, the Board of ISSI does not interfere with individual decisions on manuscripts: the Editor-in-Chief assumes full responsibility for editorial decisions.”
Who do you attribute this "no one is allowed to question it" mindset to?
I despise this recent (yes, it is recent) assumption that an author is obligated to include everything related in any way in their bibliography. A bibliography should be a list of papers that informed the paper in question; not every paper has to be a comprehensive survey (how exhausting that would be). If I win the lottery and find a counterexample to the Riemann Hypothesis by testing random numbers, I should be able to publish a paper with zero references, if I so desire; I should by no means be obligated to cite every paper ever written on the Riemann Hypothesis. This is just a lazy cop-out used by reviewers who want to reject papers but can't find any solid objections to the contents of those papers.
I agree that if we give the critic no benefit of the doubt, we might interpret her complaint as petty filibustering done in bad faith. But we only have that short quote from that critic. We don't know if she elaborated – or even if she were asked by the reporter to elaborate – on what she believes the significance of those not-included papers to be.
If she is referring to major omissions, as in, the omitted papers are generally well-known and respected in the field, then her complaint is not a "lazy cop-out" nor a filibuster in bad faith, but a legitimate rebuttal.
It's not a particularly attractive subject of study (to my personal interests), but publishing controversial ideas is precisely the task of scientific journals. Then, rebuttals of these ideas can be published, and the readers can form an opinion in the face of evidence.
This old white man may be a good old sexist, but is there truth to the statement "female physicists face more career obstacles than their male colleagues" ?
I was lucky enough to do my Phd with an all-female group of advisors and i m pretty sure it was beneficial for my work. There are all sorts of female-only or female-first awards, funding, prizes, scientist networks and, considering how there are less women in STEM field, conference quotas and funding quotas visibly benefited my advisors and indirectly, me. This provided opportunities for visibility for my (mediocre) work that were just not available otherwise. I 'm not in academia so not sure how this translates to hiring prospects, but AFAIK everyone is struggling, regardless of gender. I'd recommend having a female supervisor however.
It’s actually the opposite problem at the moment. Far more women are pursuing college degrees than men. Men have been in this declining trend, they dropout more, get less grants, scholarships, ...etc.
From what I understand the issue is more complicated. Women are pursuing more college degrees than men, but also men still occupy the a disproportionate number of of administative, leadership, and professor positions. The overall story comes that women pursue higher education because they need to acquire more education/accolades to achieve the positions of male peers.
Answering to a "male problem" (e.g. men pursuing less education) by stating it's actually another example of bias agains women ("that's because women need more education to get the same job") is not really a constructive position, is it?
I don't actually know if it is another example of bias against women. I only know that the picture might be more complicated- men may pursue less education but also men can advance faster with less education comparatively. The overall picture is probably not so simple as that men pursue less education therefore men are systematically disadvantaged.
Arguably, it shows that men are disadvantaged in one axis and not necessarily the whole axis, which is why I'm bringing up that there are other spaces along this axis where men are not systematically disadvantaged. I do firmly believe that men are disadvantaged in several fields and spaces which require addressing, but not that that means men are disadvantaged overall.
Couldn't that also be explained by the fact that more women attending college than men is a relatively new development, and most administrative/leadership/professor positions are held by older people, hence the gender ratio will take time (>20-30 years) to reflect the new gender balance?
After all, the people that are professors now were studying in the 1980s-1990s, hence the current ratio of male/female professors should logically represent the gender ratio of the field in the 1980s-1990s if there is no inherent gender bias, not the gender ratio of the field in 2019.
From what I understand new professorships, NSF CAREER awards, and similar are still majority male. There is an observed phenomenon that when men enter a female-dominanted field they still gain leadership positions faster than women do. This happens in nursing and schooling, for example.
> but also men still occupy the a disproportionate number of of administative, leadership, and professor positions.
Men are (scientifically speaking) generally more dominant and more competitive. They will take on more risk to reach higher and more powerful positions, and are willing to sacrifice family life to do so. Women (again in general) will sacrifice professional development in order to stay and care for their family. No amount of political/SJW pushing is going to change biology.
The claim here is that men don't pursue higher education at the rates women do. Does this mean PhD and graduate school programs are not competitive? Or that a PhD is staying home and taking care of family?
Could be due to several reasons. Maybe men are more eager to start working quicker to make money, or maybe they have dependents whom they have to support, and thus they need to start making money quicker. Maybe women who are pursuing PhDs already have husbands who are working bringing in money, so they are able to pursue higher studies, not to mention the grants that are specific to women to encourage them to pursue academia.
Plus, my point was referring to the disproportionate percentage of men in higher and more dominant positions (C-level, etc.). These positions require a significant amount of work and time sacrifice, which more men are willing to put themselves through.
"Could be due to several reasons. Maybe men are more eager to start working quicker to make money, or maybe they have dependents whom they have to support, and thus they need to start making money quicker."
Therefore, the claim that there is a gap between women and men in education level reflecting a male disadvantage is untrue, by your claim. And I am also claiming that the discrepancy might be conflated by other factors, like that it is possible men don't pursue higher education because they may not need to in order to reach high status. Which is something you also confirm by stating that men achieve higher and more dominant positions despite the lack of education because they're more competitive and more risk friendly.
Aren't we speaking on the same page? I'm very confused.
That's not really the same thing though, is it? The list of career obstacles that women face as a consequence of being women includes far more than numbers of grants and degree candidates.
The mere existence of an observed phenomena doesn't imply that some other set of phenomena doesn't occur. It's about determining what can be observed. It's making sure that we don't see patterns where there are none. It's also about making the case of whether the observation is a problem at all, or whether it is just a point of interest and that are goals might be to determine what sort of set of problems we are trying to solve.
In my estimation, the most powerful argument for career obstacles is about competency, pay, opportunity. You need to be educated in order to do anything. You need to get paid so that you can survive, and you need the opportunity of a position in order to get paid. The obstacles from this follow the ordering:
I need to survive, I need something to do, I need to live a life that is not full of suffering (so much that I can even control that), and to do that I need to take on responsibility and work so that there is both something to do, something to reduce suffering, something to get paid for, so that I can survive. I need to be competent because the market pays people based on this notion that you should be educated so that you can actually get any job. Otherwise why be educated at all.
Given this, I would think that the goal of a university would be to reduce the price/performance ratio of a tuition at all possible efforts so that the level of competency can be obtained through quality education at a reduced cost while balancing the incentives such that the resources funnel to the right places where problems can be best solved. In my estimation, this is not even close to what is happening and it's where I would hope things start moving forward - since in large part it appears to the largest possible obstacle for people.
> The mere existence of an observed phenomena doesn't imply that some other set of phenomena doesn't occur. It's about determining what can be observed. It's making sure that we don't see patterns where there are none.
I should note that the latter part of this statement is probably even more important that the first. Which is to say, it is not self-evident that a particular observation is how things actually are. The way in which you articulate things is a formulation of reality based on what you have observed and who you are (in all the millions of years of human development that implies). It's important to note that the observation has to be rooted in evidence: measurements and methods, and causal proofs. Even if, perhaps especially, a particular argument is compelling from the perspective of its ethical implications, it does not necessarily imply it stands on solid ground.
I believe, and perhaps this might be where the ethical implication comes from, that there is reason we formulate compelling arguments along the political spectrum or across anything that doesn't have its roots firmly grounded in the evidence (because maybe not all things can actually be observed, maybe you don't have the data, maybe there's a lot more to it). I believe that we do this because there is some kind of narrative structure that underlies the propositions we lay out. That narrative structure is vital to us because it might be that we base our entire emotional stability on the stability of that structure.
If the structure isn't reliable, or someone challenges our notions of how we see a problem, or how a problem could be solved, when its challenged we get the sense that it is challenging us. We don't like that - we don't believe it. Our entire psychological well being depends on whether the narrative structure of the viewpoint holds weight - perhaps most especially when we don't even want to look at the evidence.
A woman wouldn't be in any better position to compare the male experience with the female experience than a man would, because in both cases they would have to have knowledge that wasn't from direct experience.
Sure, they can’t definitely answer “being a woman is harder”. But they can probably give some insight into the obstacles they’ve encountered. In my experience, those obstacles are very different than the ones a guy like me has.
Well, there are certainly some traditional obstacles - like taking time off to give birth, or changing your name after marriage messing up your publication/citation counts.
Deciding whether the female-only awards you mention are sufficient to compensate for such obstacles is an inherently apples-to-oranges comparison.
From what I have seen, there are also obstacles that stem from universities and funding bodies doing "affirmative action" that has not been thought through completely.
Think about it - whenever someone needs participants for a committee of some sort, a leader for a research centre, or similar, they always want to achieve a better gender balance than the actual average gender balance in their field. This means that female scientists are requested to do significantly more non-science work than male scientists. Of course this has drawbacks.
>In a move likely to attract criticism, a peer-reviewed journal
Literally the first sentence of the article.
His original presentation was heavily debated on Twitter and other places. Now that a revised version is published, everyone will be able to publish rebuttals in various (peer-reviewed) journals. That's how it's supposed to work.
This is approaching weird semantic questions: what is non-peer-reviewed content in a peer-reviewed journal? I mean, normally the answer would be “Sponsored advertising” but I don’t think Strumia is paying them.
And this isn’t how it’s supposed to work. Substandard papers don’t get published. Papers from people with no grounding in the subject matter don’t get the big journals. The debate is between legitimate scholars and studies, there’s no evidence this paper passes either bar.
This isn’t politics, this is science. You don’t just publish your opinion and shout “Debate me!”
What makes you think the paper was not peer reviewed?
This is from the paper:
>Acknowledgements I thank the referees for their comments; the InSpire team for clarifications; Guy Madison for discussions and suggestions; Riccardo Torre for (among many things) having implemented the WGND name-gender association; Sabine Hossenfelder for having independently replicated the results in fig. 8b and section 3.1 using arXiv data [Hossenfelder et al.(2018)]; more colleagues who prefer not to mentioned.
I like the last sentence in particular and I'm not surprised :)
>Papers from people with no grounding in the subject matter don't get the big journals
No! Papers should be judged by their merits, not by their authors. This is why in many fields, it's customary to send a blinded version of the paper to the peer reviewers, without the author's name or affiliation (this is called double-blind peer review).
I realise I left a “not” out of this sentence. Meaning we ended up in a situation in which everyone thought they were supporting the merits of peer review. Win some, cause an almighty wreck some.
How dare they let science interfere with politics? If the science doesn't agree with the current politics, it's obviously bad science.
And if this particular study indeed turns out to be bad (not replicating, bad methodology, etc) that would validate the above truth even more. It would obviously be because no good science could ever come from studying such issues -- not because papers regularly turn to be bad, regardless of subject.
The only appropriate response is for non-scientific concerned groups plus a few politically-minded scientists to put pressure to their institutions to make sure such researchers don't work in the field again.
I have an idea about quantitatively measuring git commits and associated names of a population in order to make to make qualitative statements about each individual's life experiences in subsets of that population, like "most of the men have no life", "the men need to go outside and smile more".
I did technical things and some math. But it's an edgy conclusion. Can I be published in your journal?
I would like to think my response makes relentless fun of your position (and a mockery of your delivery) as well as chide the position of those that will inevitably strawman it.
Neither such positions addresses the real crumbling core which is that the conclusions of the paper do not reasonably follow from the bibliographic methodology, and as such the paper's entire approach is quite illogical from the get-go.
It seems the brunt of the controversy around the author arose from non-scientific assertions he made during a guest lecture:
> During the presentation, he asserted that physics was built and invented by men, and stated on a slide that “Physics is not sexist against women.”
While the premise of the article is that the paper's publication is "a move likely to attract criticism", the person most critical of the paper, who is interviewed in the article, cites substantive non-political reasons why they dislike the paper:
> One member of the editorial board of QSS, which is published by MIT Press and the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI), gives Strumia’s paper poor reviews. The study is “methodologically flawed” and “fails to meet the standards of the bibliometric community,” says Cassidy Sugimoto, an information scientist at Indiana University in Bloomington...
So how does the content of the article justify your snark and imaginary irrational response?
>> During the presentation, he asserted that physics was built and invented by men, and stated on a slide that “Physics is not sexist against women.”
Well, the first claim is statistically true (and people who are against e.g. sexism in physics also accept it as true and want to change it).
The second is their opinion, which one might or might not agree with. Don't know about physics, but the biology department in our university was mostly women, for example (contrast with CS, which was 90% men).
>So how does the content of the article justify your snark and imaginary irrational response?
I already covered it in the second part of my response, didn't I?
"if this particular study indeed turns out to be bad (not replicating, bad methodology, etc) that would validate the above truth even more. It would obviously be because no good science could ever come from studying such issues -- not because papers regularly turn to be bad, regardless of subject"
No, you didn't, or at least I interpreted whatever you were trying to say as a red herring. Who in the article makes that insinuation? Who said anything about the paper's purported flawed methodology as automatically validating the "above truth"?
I don't see how personal grievances and perceptions of "many people in real life" are useful and relevant to the discussion. Just like my many real life experiences with guys being assholes is not useful to discussing this paper and its publication.
The whole thread is about the political perceptions and opinions of whether such an article should be printed, based on perspectives on various societal issues, plus some meta-discussion on how journals should work.
Check out the (at the moment at least) top voted comment: "In case anyone remembers the incident at CERN (...)" etc.
And of course that meta discussion is much more useful than wether this individual article is correct or not.
I dismissed the criticism because it was not substantive.
> methodologically flawed
How is it flawed?
> fails to meet the standards of the bibliometric community
What standards?
These are both unsubstantiated points, there is no counter argument because there is no argument to counter, all that can be done is to dismiss the argument which comes across as snarky.
If it's not clear, the quoted critic did not write the OP's submitted article. Perhaps "substantive" is the wrong word here, as I did not mean to imply the critic had the space to elaborate on what she meant. What I intended to convey was that her critique was based on valid grounds – e.g. a dispute on the methodology and research. Not "waaaaah i'm a SJW and this paper hurts my political beliefs so please ban it", which is how I interpreted the insinuation made by the parent commenter.
And again, it's worth reiterating what the critic does not assert: that she doesn't want the paper to be published by her journal. She explicitly tells the reporter that her editor-in-chief has complete authority and independence.
We don't have enough evidence to conclude that the 'methodology' concern is legitimate and not merely pretense for a political concern. We need to know about the specific concern. I'm glad she's not asking for the paper to be suppressed because if her concerns are valid, they can be vindicated through the ensuing debate; if the debate renders her concerns invalid, that's good too. In either case, we're a little closer to the truth of the matter and we can make better decisions going forward.
I don't know much about the study quoted but I wanted to make an general counter-argument to one of your statements. I often see this counter-argument made implicitly but for the sake of clarity I'd like to explicitly state it here.
>And if this particular study indeed turns out to be bad (not replicating, bad methodology, etc) that would validate the above truth even more.
Publishing bad-science and then saying other scientists will show it is wrong is both true and does not address the central complaint: it will cause harm to those outside the scientific community.
This is because as far as the public is concerned publication functions as endorsement. For instance the Antivaxxer movement got an enormous boost when incorrect science was published that purported to show that vaccines cause autism. It is likely that publishing that study has resulted in many human deaths.
If a paper makes a claim which could cause public harm, that study should be held to a significantly higher standard of evidence than a study which is unlikely to cause harm. Consider two papers:
1. A paper which argues that photons travel faster than the speed of light.
2. A paper which argues that diet coke cures cancer.
They both might be sloppy research, they both make extraordinary claims but the second ones harm to society is higher and thus must have very strong evidence to be published.
>Publishing bad-science and then saying other scientists will show it is wrong is both true and does not address the central complaint: it will cause harm to those outside the scientific community.
If "publishing bad science" was the issue people were concerned with, then 80% of published (peer-reviewed and all) papers should be met with the same or worse reactions for they are time and again shown to be bad science.
But I fear that it's the "we don't like the conclusions" more than the "bad science" part. And I fear that the latter (which might very well be the case) is even a priori assumed given the conclusions.
In you response you take for granted what oughta be proved: that the paper would cause "public harm".
GP did not argue that "publishing bad science" was a concern, but the effects of the publication of bad science. Those are to be considered greater and worse here than with 80% of published research.
>In you response you take for granted what oughta be proved: that the paper would cause "public harm".
Yes, this is exactly my point: If for any paper we conclude that it would cause "public harm" then the burden of evidence should be increased. The above post does not argue that paper does or does not cause harm but that all criticism of publication is void because later papers would show the original to be incorrect. This is a very strong claim.
Things are getting too meta. We’ve lost focus. I think the time has come for another good old global-scale war. Something to unite the democratic nations in meaning, gender pronouns and vision. Who knows, we might get some useful scientific advancements/papers out of it as well.
To the degree that it can be established as a symptom of a bigger problem, demographic measurements based on particular identities and gender are good to have but shouldn’t be taken as some kind of political proof or validation - it’s just measurements and data is good to know.
I know 'gender differences' is in the headline of the submitted article, but it made me think the paper was about physiological differences (e.g. female and male brains are different when doing physics work), when it's more about gender disparity in the field. I'm looking forward to seeing the data he publishes (the paper states "Data are made available in Appendix A", but I'm assuming the appendix hasn't been published yet).
In case anyone remembers the incident at CERN (mentioned in the article) regarding the author of this paper, I have some n=1 information.
I used to work at CERN when this happened, and I remember the day because there was much chatter and unrest about it. The author claimed that a woman was hired for a position instead of him, while they were the only two candidates and he had much more papers published and citations.
While of course that does not mean that there is systemic sexism in CERN's hiring process because it could very well simply be that the guy is unbearable, I have heard a high-up HR employee at CERN say that women are favored when hiring.
I strongly disagree with equality of outcome, since this is basically fighting inequality with sexism.
I did not dare to speak my thoughts to anyone apart from very few colleague friends.
There's more to hiring than numerics, there's always the prerogative and perhaps even need to take a chance. People have not always had similar chances or abilities to produce the results you'd like to see in all candidates, but it just may be you can give a person a place to shine. The candidate that already shone may be safer, but in practice it may as well mean more of the same (that you've hired). Since you're using the same metrics (paper output etc. in your case). Sometimes more of the same is not what you need.
There's a whole universe of reasons for (not) hiring someone. Pretending anyone is hiring (or even able to) based on merit is not seeing clearly. You rarely know, apart from superstar hires for identical roles they've performed elsewhere already, is all about taking a chance. You may as well freshen up the org with atypical hires, in my experience worth their shots far more than 'default' hires, which, in my view, a nearly always just hires most similar to you.
I don't like to push metrics like paper output or number of recitations, because I believe many understand the obvious shortcommings of that. But the alternative you are suggesting is pure favoritism, which is even worse.
It's not favoritism. It's making an educated guess, educated by numerics, personal fit, but also stuff like how many chances did this person have and am I (as the hirer) able/inclined to provide one, how did the person handle adversity (may be one of the most valuable things you get into your org), and so on.
Using your estimate of what a person might do/become given a chance is not at all the same as favoritism. Favoritism is hiring people just like yourself and calling it meritocracy.
This strikes me as switching out one type of bias for another, with no proof of improvement as to the end result. As long as you're not breaking labor law, not a problem, but without stats showing outcome, you can't say it's objectively better.
Proof is hard because hiring is not replicable. However, doing nothing provides proof for the status quo, and if you are happy with that, by all means do not change.
Honestly I'm having a hard time following your position. It sounds like you're making some kind of circular argument; that we should hire more women because they face discrimination. But the whole debate is about whether or not they face discrimination in the first place. Or maybe you're advocating for discrimination in general on the basis that a person's immutable characteristics informs about his/her character (their work ethic, resilience, etc) or their ideas (e.g., the black candidate will bring in new ideas on account of his race compared to the white candidate) with some degree of reliability?
The quickest way to get a cultural shift in a technical office is to go from 98% male to 70% male. Things get real different real quick. There's no reason to leave gender out of culture shifts, except that you don't like it.
> There's no reason to leave gender out of culture shifts, except that you don't like it.
Or that it's illegal in many jurisdictions to select a candidate because of their gender. Can't speak for others, but if I see evidence of this happening in writing, I have no qualms about forwarding the docs/emails/whatever off to the Dept of Labor and a labor attorney to pursue this discriminatory behavior (discrimination is discrimination, whether "anti" a specific gender or "pro") by an employer.
Culture shifts should be a byproduct of effective, non-discriminatory hiring practices (which includes blinding to protected classes).
> Culture shifts should be a byproduct of effective, non-discriminatory hiring practices (which includes blinding to protected classes).
Good idea, but nearly nobody does it (removing socioeconomic indicators such as name/gender/address from CVs). It is also difficult to insulate yourself from your network when hiring, as well as controlling for other items on a CV (you want Ivy League? Hello bias!).
Which is why I think some active thought on the subject of diversity is essential when hiring. You will never remove bias completely, so we might as well acknowledge the 800 pound gorilla and deal with it directly.
I would really like any sort of supporting evidence for this claim. I imagine churning 28% of your employee base regardless of gender would produce a culture shift--probably a very negative one. Even more negative if you're targeting people based on their immutable characteristics--and that's before the (rightful) discrimination lawsuits start pouring in.
Maybe start with free catered lunches on Fridays or something.
It is you who obsesses over gender I'm afraid, not me. What I am saying is that as the hirer, you are able to give someone a chance. Therefore, you can look at the potential of your candidates, rather than accomplishments. You can also look at how much you can afford a wrong hire, because it is a risk, sure.
Knowing that people from group X (be they women, men, minorities, people from poor background without access to networks) on average are going to need bit more help than people from the right background, the right education, the right everything, that is something you can use in order to a) be the change you want to see b) run the risk of fresh ideas in your org. Even if you do not feel inclined towards a), b) is needed in all dynamic companies, and certainly institutes such as CERN.
> It is you who obsesses over gender I'm afraid, not me. What I am saying is that as the hirer, you are able to give someone a chance. Therefore, you can look at the potential of your candidates, rather than accomplishments. You can also look at how much you can afford a wrong hire, because it is a risk, sure.
It was ambiguous whether or not you were advocating for using gender as a proxy for "better culture fit". The GP was just being explicit that that's a bad idea.
> Knowing that people from group X (be they women, men, minorities, people from poor background without access to networks) on average are going to need bit more help than people from the right background, the right education, the right everything, that is something you can use in order to a) be the change you want to see b) run the risk of fresh ideas in your org.
It seems like you're actually arguing for using gender, race, etc as a proxy for "better culture fit" or "fresh ideas". This is illegal in most civilized places as it's immoral and based on dubious assumptions (notably that there is more inter-group intellectual diversity than intra-group diversity, i.e., all men (or women, or whites, or asians, or etc) are the roughly same).
Most countries here in Europe have not made positive discrimination illegal.
I'm arguing for understanding that most hirers simply hire people with similar backgrounds as their own. That creates the barrier I think we are discussing here. Using indicators such as gender (if your type of org has an extreme disbalance) may help you see that, and correct for it, if you so chose.
'Culture fit' is actually one of those criteria I hate: it usually means hiring similar people.
> 'Culture fit' is actually one of those criteria I hate: it usually means hiring similar people.
Yeah, I agree that it seems to imply something like that; I meant it in the sense of "hiring people who will move the culture in the direction you'd like it to move", which I think is what we're discussing, but I'm happy to use any such term.
> Most countries here in Europe have not made positive discrimination illegal.
"positive discrimination" is one of the terms I hate. It seems to imply that it is correcting for something when part of the debate is whether or not there is anything to correct for.
> I'm arguing for understanding that most hirers simply hire people with similar backgrounds as their own
I'm happy to accept this understanding, but not blindly. I'd like to know that it's based on robust evidence and at least the obvious counterpoints have been addressed. If the understanding is correct, it should survive rigorous debate and analysis; however, many proponents of this conclusion/theory seem to fervently oppose any such debate, analysis, etc. Hopefully we can at least agree that it would be reasonable to be skeptical of this theory/conclusion if indeed its proponents are trying to stifle debate/analysis even if we don't agree that the stifling is real.
And if you don't agree that the stifling is real, do you feel like there is rigorous debate and analysis on the topic? Do you see skeptics of the theory raising interesting or legitimate questions/issues? If so, do you believe those issues are being adequately addressed (and how so / give examples?)? If not, what issues do you perceive them as raising and why are those issues not legitimate? Can you provide a steelman argument?
Like someone above alluded to, if you have an overbearing personality, a history of poor people skills, and such, your skills probably won't matter unless you are top 1%, and even then it will depend on just how bad you are.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 148 ms ] threadI never understood the attitude of “trust us, it exists, but no one is allowed to question it”. I think Feynman said something like “I’d rather have questions I can’t answer than answers I can’t question”.
EDIT: I don’t understand the downvotes. Why would someone not want an opportunity to present evidence of their claims and rebut arguments to the contrary? Why are we so adamantly opposed?
This might help: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taboo
> Strumia “certainly hasn’t attempted any analysis of the relevant systemic problems” that might influence gender differences in physics, such as implicit bias or outright harassment.
Might or mighty, just telling it's systemic actually doesn't show anything.
Questionnaires about hurt feeling in academia don't prove anything either because the same gender bias would apply, everything from what words do you use to implied answers that many time creep in into those "systemic" studies.
One problem is that nowadays, people often don't get presented with the entirety of the available evidence on politically charged questions (like gender equality). Whatever pundit or facebook friend will cherry pick the evidence that suits their agenda, even if that evidence has been thoroughly debunked. So while I agree with you that in the context of academic curiosity, everything that can pass peer review should be published, sometimes publishing something that you know will be debunked later could lead to a net societal loss and should therefore be avoided.
Then again, I'm very against silencing opinions, even for the "greater good" (within some framework I'm sure you could describe China's censorship as for the "greater good")
I cannot express just how strongly opposed to that approach I am. I reserve my use of the downvote to low effort comments, factually inaccuracies, and the like. If we silence people we disagree with we end up with propaganda, not discussion. I’m often hesitant to downvote any comments that espouse a political opinion I disagree with, even if they are eg low effort, because I’m worried about silencing the opposition.
Surprisingly (to me), I don’t see anything about what you should or shouldn’t downvote in the site guidelines, so it’s possible my views don’t align with the hn community as a whole. But I really like being able to have constructive discussion, and would hate to have hn’s quality degrade to that of a political subreddit.
Note: I am not in any way whatsoever suggesting that this paper is substandard. I have not read a word of it. Just pointing out that there are definite scenarios where publishing papers, controversial or not, can be a bad thing.
> I never understood the attitude of “trust us, it exists, but no one is allowed to question it”. I think Feynman said something like “I’d rather have questions I can’t answer than answers I can’t question”.
The researcher who reviewed his paper, and is quoted as being extremely critical of it, did not evince the irrational mindset that you imply:
> The study contains “several unsubstantiated claims,” she says, and doesn’t properly cite or discuss papers that come to conflicting conclusions. “Overall,” Sugimoto says, “the manuscript does not provide a convincing understanding of the literature or the methods, lessening the credibility of the results.”
Furthermore, this reviewer is on the board of the publication in question. And despite her critique, she affirms the authority and independence of the editor-in-chief to publish the paper:
> In an email, Sugimoto wrote that “To maintain the editorial integrity of our journal, the Board of ISSI does not interfere with individual decisions on manuscripts: the Editor-in-Chief assumes full responsibility for editorial decisions.”
Who do you attribute this "no one is allowed to question it" mindset to?
If she is referring to major omissions, as in, the omitted papers are generally well-known and respected in the field, then her complaint is not a "lazy cop-out" nor a filibuster in bad faith, but a legitimate rebuttal.
I was lucky enough to do my Phd with an all-female group of advisors and i m pretty sure it was beneficial for my work. There are all sorts of female-only or female-first awards, funding, prizes, scientist networks and, considering how there are less women in STEM field, conference quotas and funding quotas visibly benefited my advisors and indirectly, me. This provided opportunities for visibility for my (mediocre) work that were just not available otherwise. I 'm not in academia so not sure how this translates to hiring prospects, but AFAIK everyone is struggling, regardless of gender. I'd recommend having a female supervisor however.
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/08/why-me...
Arguably, it shows that men are disadvantaged in one axis and not necessarily the whole axis, which is why I'm bringing up that there are other spaces along this axis where men are not systematically disadvantaged. I do firmly believe that men are disadvantaged in several fields and spaces which require addressing, but not that that means men are disadvantaged overall.
After all, the people that are professors now were studying in the 1980s-1990s, hence the current ratio of male/female professors should logically represent the gender ratio of the field in the 1980s-1990s if there is no inherent gender bias, not the gender ratio of the field in 2019.
Men are (scientifically speaking) generally more dominant and more competitive. They will take on more risk to reach higher and more powerful positions, and are willing to sacrifice family life to do so. Women (again in general) will sacrifice professional development in order to stay and care for their family. No amount of political/SJW pushing is going to change biology.
I'm very confused where this is coming from.
Plus, my point was referring to the disproportionate percentage of men in higher and more dominant positions (C-level, etc.). These positions require a significant amount of work and time sacrifice, which more men are willing to put themselves through.
Therefore, the claim that there is a gap between women and men in education level reflecting a male disadvantage is untrue, by your claim. And I am also claiming that the discrepancy might be conflated by other factors, like that it is possible men don't pursue higher education because they may not need to in order to reach high status. Which is something you also confirm by stating that men achieve higher and more dominant positions despite the lack of education because they're more competitive and more risk friendly.
Aren't we speaking on the same page? I'm very confused.
In my estimation, the most powerful argument for career obstacles is about competency, pay, opportunity. You need to be educated in order to do anything. You need to get paid so that you can survive, and you need the opportunity of a position in order to get paid. The obstacles from this follow the ordering:
I need to survive, I need something to do, I need to live a life that is not full of suffering (so much that I can even control that), and to do that I need to take on responsibility and work so that there is both something to do, something to reduce suffering, something to get paid for, so that I can survive. I need to be competent because the market pays people based on this notion that you should be educated so that you can actually get any job. Otherwise why be educated at all.
Given this, I would think that the goal of a university would be to reduce the price/performance ratio of a tuition at all possible efforts so that the level of competency can be obtained through quality education at a reduced cost while balancing the incentives such that the resources funnel to the right places where problems can be best solved. In my estimation, this is not even close to what is happening and it's where I would hope things start moving forward - since in large part it appears to the largest possible obstacle for people.
I should note that the latter part of this statement is probably even more important that the first. Which is to say, it is not self-evident that a particular observation is how things actually are. The way in which you articulate things is a formulation of reality based on what you have observed and who you are (in all the millions of years of human development that implies). It's important to note that the observation has to be rooted in evidence: measurements and methods, and causal proofs. Even if, perhaps especially, a particular argument is compelling from the perspective of its ethical implications, it does not necessarily imply it stands on solid ground.
I believe, and perhaps this might be where the ethical implication comes from, that there is reason we formulate compelling arguments along the political spectrum or across anything that doesn't have its roots firmly grounded in the evidence (because maybe not all things can actually be observed, maybe you don't have the data, maybe there's a lot more to it). I believe that we do this because there is some kind of narrative structure that underlies the propositions we lay out. That narrative structure is vital to us because it might be that we base our entire emotional stability on the stability of that structure.
If the structure isn't reliable, or someone challenges our notions of how we see a problem, or how a problem could be solved, when its challenged we get the sense that it is challenging us. We don't like that - we don't believe it. Our entire psychological well being depends on whether the narrative structure of the viewpoint holds weight - perhaps most especially when we don't even want to look at the evidence.
Since you did your PhD with many women, why not ask them?
Deciding whether the female-only awards you mention are sufficient to compensate for such obstacles is an inherently apples-to-oranges comparison.
Think about it - whenever someone needs participants for a committee of some sort, a leader for a research centre, or similar, they always want to achieve a better gender balance than the actual average gender balance in their field. This means that female scientists are requested to do significantly more non-science work than male scientists. Of course this has drawbacks.
> There are all sorts of female-only or female-first awards, funding, prizes, scientist networks
hm...so you benefited from visibility for mediocrity, implicitly admitting undeserved visibility, yet claim obstacles. How does this compute?
edit: I either misread or OP got edited, silly me.
Literally the first sentence of the article. His original presentation was heavily debated on Twitter and other places. Now that a revised version is published, everyone will be able to publish rebuttals in various (peer-reviewed) journals. That's how it's supposed to work.
And this isn’t how it’s supposed to work. Substandard papers don’t get published. Papers from people with no grounding in the subject matter don’t get the big journals. The debate is between legitimate scholars and studies, there’s no evidence this paper passes either bar.
This isn’t politics, this is science. You don’t just publish your opinion and shout “Debate me!”
This is up for the editors and reviewers to decide. They obviously decided it's ok
> You don’t just publish your opinion
Most big journals have an opinion section, sometimes about policies. Scientific debates are great imho
This is from the paper:
>Acknowledgements I thank the referees for their comments; the InSpire team for clarifications; Guy Madison for discussions and suggestions; Riccardo Torre for (among many things) having implemented the WGND name-gender association; Sabine Hossenfelder for having independently replicated the results in fig. 8b and section 3.1 using arXiv data [Hossenfelder et al.(2018)]; more colleagues who prefer not to mentioned.
I like the last sentence in particular and I'm not surprised :)
No! Papers should be judged by their merits, not by their authors. This is why in many fields, it's customary to send a blinded version of the paper to the peer reviewers, without the author's name or affiliation (this is called double-blind peer review).
And if this particular study indeed turns out to be bad (not replicating, bad methodology, etc) that would validate the above truth even more. It would obviously be because no good science could ever come from studying such issues -- not because papers regularly turn to be bad, regardless of subject.
The only appropriate response is for non-scientific concerned groups plus a few politically-minded scientists to put pressure to their institutions to make sure such researchers don't work in the field again.
/s
I did technical things and some math. But it's an edgy conclusion. Can I be published in your journal?
/s
Else, it could very well serve as that.
Neither such positions addresses the real crumbling core which is that the conclusions of the paper do not reasonably follow from the bibliographic methodology, and as such the paper's entire approach is quite illogical from the get-go.
The positions I make fun of accept this insanity.
Toodle-oo~
> During the presentation, he asserted that physics was built and invented by men, and stated on a slide that “Physics is not sexist against women.”
While the premise of the article is that the paper's publication is "a move likely to attract criticism", the person most critical of the paper, who is interviewed in the article, cites substantive non-political reasons why they dislike the paper:
> One member of the editorial board of QSS, which is published by MIT Press and the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI), gives Strumia’s paper poor reviews. The study is “methodologically flawed” and “fails to meet the standards of the bibliometric community,” says Cassidy Sugimoto, an information scientist at Indiana University in Bloomington...
So how does the content of the article justify your snark and imaginary irrational response?
Well, the first claim is statistically true (and people who are against e.g. sexism in physics also accept it as true and want to change it).
The second is their opinion, which one might or might not agree with. Don't know about physics, but the biology department in our university was mostly women, for example (contrast with CS, which was 90% men).
>So how does the content of the article justify your snark and imaginary irrational response?
I already covered it in the second part of my response, didn't I?
"if this particular study indeed turns out to be bad (not replicating, bad methodology, etc) that would validate the above truth even more. It would obviously be because no good science could ever come from studying such issues -- not because papers regularly turn to be bad, regardless of subject"
Many people in real life, forums, etc. Who said it had to be in the article? I'm pointing at a larger trend.
The whole thread is about the political perceptions and opinions of whether such an article should be printed, based on perspectives on various societal issues, plus some meta-discussion on how journals should work.
Check out the (at the moment at least) top voted comment: "In case anyone remembers the incident at CERN (...)" etc.
And of course that meta discussion is much more useful than wether this individual article is correct or not.
> methodologically flawed
How is it flawed?
> fails to meet the standards of the bibliometric community
What standards?
These are both unsubstantiated points, there is no counter argument because there is no argument to counter, all that can be done is to dismiss the argument which comes across as snarky.
And again, it's worth reiterating what the critic does not assert: that she doesn't want the paper to be published by her journal. She explicitly tells the reporter that her editor-in-chief has complete authority and independence.
>And if this particular study indeed turns out to be bad (not replicating, bad methodology, etc) that would validate the above truth even more.
Publishing bad-science and then saying other scientists will show it is wrong is both true and does not address the central complaint: it will cause harm to those outside the scientific community.
This is because as far as the public is concerned publication functions as endorsement. For instance the Antivaxxer movement got an enormous boost when incorrect science was published that purported to show that vaccines cause autism. It is likely that publishing that study has resulted in many human deaths.
If a paper makes a claim which could cause public harm, that study should be held to a significantly higher standard of evidence than a study which is unlikely to cause harm. Consider two papers:
1. A paper which argues that photons travel faster than the speed of light.
2. A paper which argues that diet coke cures cancer.
They both might be sloppy research, they both make extraordinary claims but the second ones harm to society is higher and thus must have very strong evidence to be published.
If "publishing bad science" was the issue people were concerned with, then 80% of published (peer-reviewed and all) papers should be met with the same or worse reactions for they are time and again shown to be bad science.
But I fear that it's the "we don't like the conclusions" more than the "bad science" part. And I fear that the latter (which might very well be the case) is even a priori assumed given the conclusions.
In you response you take for granted what oughta be proved: that the paper would cause "public harm".
Yes, this is exactly my point: If for any paper we conclude that it would cause "public harm" then the burden of evidence should be increased. The above post does not argue that paper does or does not cause harm but that all criticism of publication is void because later papers would show the original to be incorrect. This is a very strong claim.
Edit: All downvoters are pinkos.
Good that you mentioned "old". Indeed when WW3 begins in the west it will be the 75 year olds beating the 95 year olds. Probably with canes or sth
I strongly disagree with equality of outcome, since this is basically fighting inequality with sexism.
I did not dare to speak my thoughts to anyone apart from very few colleague friends.
I completely agree with your positions, and I am also “undercover”.
I wonder how many of us are there...
There's more to hiring than numerics, there's always the prerogative and perhaps even need to take a chance. People have not always had similar chances or abilities to produce the results you'd like to see in all candidates, but it just may be you can give a person a place to shine. The candidate that already shone may be safer, but in practice it may as well mean more of the same (that you've hired). Since you're using the same metrics (paper output etc. in your case). Sometimes more of the same is not what you need.
There's a whole universe of reasons for (not) hiring someone. Pretending anyone is hiring (or even able to) based on merit is not seeing clearly. You rarely know, apart from superstar hires for identical roles they've performed elsewhere already, is all about taking a chance. You may as well freshen up the org with atypical hires, in my experience worth their shots far more than 'default' hires, which, in my view, a nearly always just hires most similar to you.
Using your estimate of what a person might do/become given a chance is not at all the same as favoritism. Favoritism is hiring people just like yourself and calling it meritocracy.
I am not, and will advocate for the contrary.
I think clarity would improve your posts.
Maybe you want a better cultural fit, and that's 100% acceptable by my book. But leave gender out of it.
Or that it's illegal in many jurisdictions to select a candidate because of their gender. Can't speak for others, but if I see evidence of this happening in writing, I have no qualms about forwarding the docs/emails/whatever off to the Dept of Labor and a labor attorney to pursue this discriminatory behavior (discrimination is discrimination, whether "anti" a specific gender or "pro") by an employer.
Culture shifts should be a byproduct of effective, non-discriminatory hiring practices (which includes blinding to protected classes).
Good idea, but nearly nobody does it (removing socioeconomic indicators such as name/gender/address from CVs). It is also difficult to insulate yourself from your network when hiring, as well as controlling for other items on a CV (you want Ivy League? Hello bias!).
Which is why I think some active thought on the subject of diversity is essential when hiring. You will never remove bias completely, so we might as well acknowledge the 800 pound gorilla and deal with it directly.
Maybe start with free catered lunches on Fridays or something.
Knowing that people from group X (be they women, men, minorities, people from poor background without access to networks) on average are going to need bit more help than people from the right background, the right education, the right everything, that is something you can use in order to a) be the change you want to see b) run the risk of fresh ideas in your org. Even if you do not feel inclined towards a), b) is needed in all dynamic companies, and certainly institutes such as CERN.
It was ambiguous whether or not you were advocating for using gender as a proxy for "better culture fit". The GP was just being explicit that that's a bad idea.
> Knowing that people from group X (be they women, men, minorities, people from poor background without access to networks) on average are going to need bit more help than people from the right background, the right education, the right everything, that is something you can use in order to a) be the change you want to see b) run the risk of fresh ideas in your org.
It seems like you're actually arguing for using gender, race, etc as a proxy for "better culture fit" or "fresh ideas". This is illegal in most civilized places as it's immoral and based on dubious assumptions (notably that there is more inter-group intellectual diversity than intra-group diversity, i.e., all men (or women, or whites, or asians, or etc) are the roughly same).
I'm arguing for understanding that most hirers simply hire people with similar backgrounds as their own. That creates the barrier I think we are discussing here. Using indicators such as gender (if your type of org has an extreme disbalance) may help you see that, and correct for it, if you so chose.
'Culture fit' is actually one of those criteria I hate: it usually means hiring similar people.
Yeah, I agree that it seems to imply something like that; I meant it in the sense of "hiring people who will move the culture in the direction you'd like it to move", which I think is what we're discussing, but I'm happy to use any such term.
> Most countries here in Europe have not made positive discrimination illegal.
"positive discrimination" is one of the terms I hate. It seems to imply that it is correcting for something when part of the debate is whether or not there is anything to correct for.
> I'm arguing for understanding that most hirers simply hire people with similar backgrounds as their own
I'm happy to accept this understanding, but not blindly. I'd like to know that it's based on robust evidence and at least the obvious counterpoints have been addressed. If the understanding is correct, it should survive rigorous debate and analysis; however, many proponents of this conclusion/theory seem to fervently oppose any such debate, analysis, etc. Hopefully we can at least agree that it would be reasonable to be skeptical of this theory/conclusion if indeed its proponents are trying to stifle debate/analysis even if we don't agree that the stifling is real.
And if you don't agree that the stifling is real, do you feel like there is rigorous debate and analysis on the topic? Do you see skeptics of the theory raising interesting or legitimate questions/issues? If so, do you believe those issues are being adequately addressed (and how so / give examples?)? If not, what issues do you perceive them as raising and why are those issues not legitimate? Can you provide a steelman argument?