
Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed? - Fomite
https://gowers.wordpress.com/2018/09/09/has-an-uncomfortable-truth-been-suppressed/
======
tptacek
There is more going on than this.

It's important to know a bit about the venues in question. Mathematical
Intelligencer isn't really a journal at all; it's literally a magazine,
carried on the shelves it bookstores. It runs some original research but also
poetry and jokes and general cultural coverage.

NYJM is, on the other hand, a serious (if online-only, lower-tier) theoretical
mathematics journal.

Ted Hill's paper is light on mathematics. As Joel Fish, an assoc. math prof at
UMass Boston described it, it's of the caliber of an undergraduate applied
math homework problem. It's also packed with citations to psychology, ev-bio,
and current events.

Arguably, Hill's paper was reasonable for Intelligencer. But it had no place
whatsoever in NYJM, which basically never runs anything but hardcore proof-
heavy theoretical mathematics. In the very most charitable interpretation,
Hill's paper is an applied math exercise.

Here's where the plot thickens: apparently, Hill's paper didn't undergo normal
peer review at either journal, and, in particular, was fast-tracked in (papers
apparently appear in NYJM as they're submitted, not in annual editions) by an
editor that vocally shares Hill's politics. In response, I understand that a
significant number of NYJM's peer review board threatened to quit --- an
understandable response, since Hill's paper is embarrassing in the context of
the rest of what NYJM publishes.

I encourage people with strong opinions who haven't done so already to:

1\. Read the current version of Hill's paper.

2\. Skim the first version of Hill's paper, which had a coauthor and virtually
none of the political content subsequent editions had.

3\. Skim subsequent versions and notice how and where they introduced
political content, and match that up to the dates Hill suggests the paper was
submitted, first to M.I. and then to NYJM.

4\. Select a few papers at random from NYJM and skim them quickly to get a
sense of the venue Hill is angry he was rejected from.

I'm left with the impression that this was an elaborate troll, one NYJM didn't
handle well --- but then, that would be difficult, since its editor in chief
is out on leave owing to a grave medical problem.

 _Later_

This has been flagged to the nether regions of the HN story rankings, and
justifiably so! It's a political controversy! But it's frustrating that the
story introducing Hill's side of this in Quillette was at the top of the front
page and accumulated hundreds of comments, while an actually-informed story
that critically analyzed the paper itself will get no attention at all.
Consider that the next time you think about complaining about people flagging
politics off the front page. The Quillette story deserved to be flagged.

~~~
doombolt
Can you please add links for your pp. 1-4?

Otherwise it looks like you assume the result of this path without helping us
actually walk it.

~~~
pgeorgi
Theodore Hill (the paper's author) wrote about his side on
[https://quillette.com/2018/09/07/academic-activists-send-
a-p...](https://quillette.com/2018/09/07/academic-activists-send-a-published-
paper-down-the-memory-hole/)

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

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

~~~
doombolt
Thank you!

So I went through more than half of abstract versions and the article itself,
struggle to find anything scandalous there. I persuade everyone to do the
same.

~~~
kaitai
The news is that it's not the paper per se that's scandalous. It's the
bypassing of the editorial board -- someone trying to get his buddy's stuff
published without going through the usual channels.

~~~
kgwgk
Those were the usual channels.

------
elchief
> the idea that some huge percentage of males are simply not desirable enough
> (as we shall see, the paper requires this percentage to be over 50) to have
> a chance of reproducing bears no relation to the world as we know it

In early humans only the top 16% of males mated

Most people mate now, due to religious/society-enforced monogamy

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2833377/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2833377/)

~~~
TomK32
Looking at my grandfather's generation, two of his brothers fell in the war,
another two never had children of their own at died of old age in the same
(big farm) house they were born and living all their life. math checks out.

~~~
hef19898
Anectodes are bad samples, just saying...

------
joe_the_user
This is headline and article appear to be just a way to sneak a non-
mathematical position into questions of supposed mathematical censorship.

True or not, suppressed or not, the claim being described can't be described
as a "Mathematical truth". It's a paper in what could be described as
theoretical biology and theoretical biology making a point. IE, there's no
theoretical math that anywhere near this model - no one's suppressing calculus
'cause they don't like some derivative results.

~~~
cyborgx7
Yes, this is about science, not mathematics. But scientific results are open
to being question in their methodology and in the interpretation of their
results. Mathematics is either correct or it isn't. This is a pretty blatant
attempt of shifting something from one category to the other.

~~~
tacomonstrous
>Mathematics is either correct or it isn't.

That's not really a relevant standard for publishability. There is an infinite
variety of correct mathematics that is far from being novel enough to be in a
quality journal.

~~~
seanhunter
Well correctness is surely an important factor in whether or not mathematics
is publishable, wouldn't you say? Necessary but not sufficient, perhaps.

~~~
tacomonstrous
Certainly necessary, but very far from sufficient. But even that isn't quite
accurate. Every one of my published papers has some kind of error in it. When
something is sufficiently interesting and complex, this is essentially
inevitable given how the human mind works. Hence the late Voevodksy's attempt
to come up with a framework for making such ideas machine checkable.

------
jerkstate
here's a genetics paper that covers this topic:
[https://investigativegenetics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....](https://investigativegenetics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/2041-2223-5-13)

Issues with the paper and its relevance to the platform it was published in
notwithstanding, I think that we have two highly politicized sides, one
wishing to promote a finding of "this is how things have been through history"
as "this is the way things ought to be" (The MI staff expressed this concern),
and another side that seeks to minimize or hide these findings because it will
hinder efforts to engineer a "better" future.

I think both sides are causing problems and this kind of stuff is getting
tiresome.

~~~
olleromam91
Sometimes it feels like we are in competition to claim that we are the least
fortunate of all sub-groups. Not future focused at all.

~~~
Rivers68
Yes! Someone said it! It is time to put the past behind us and think about the
future.

I feel as though somehow the West (as a civilization) has become overcome with
embarrassment at what it did in the past (to Africans, Native Americans, and
Asians, in particular) and now, instead of moving on and pursuing
reconciliation in good faith, we have decided the only recourse is to obsess
about how we are the enemies of civilization. Future? What future? We did so
much bad stuff in the past. How could we take any pride in who we are? We're
still so racist, sexist, etc. Nevermind the fact that modern life owes a great
debt to the West (aircraft, antibiotics, modern representative government,
etc.)

There are serious problems facing the world today (climate change potentially
a existential threat to our species). If you look at the past few centuries,
you would think that it is precisely the West that has the institutions and
paradigms to address those problems. I'm not saying China isn't destined for
great things, or won't contribute to addressing the problems. But imagine what
China could do if it worked hand in hand with a 21st century USA that was as
determined to end climate change as the 20th century USA was to end various
infectious diseases (polio, tuberculosis, measles, for example) or put a man
on the moon. Our team is losing the basketball game because one of our star
players is at home moping about a mistake he made last season. It's societal
narcissism, and, instead of helping "the Rest" (to use Niall Ferguson's
shorthand for non-Westerners), it serves no one.

My point is: we need to see we are sick as a society. We are too preoccupied
by things that happened in the past. Isn't this the lesson of at least one of
the great classical tragedies? Why did Romeo and Juliet die? Because their
families were stuck in the past and couldn't see that the future was more
important than their petty feuds. There's no question we should continue to
mind how we treat others (women, immigrants, people from other ethnicities),
but we also (in the US, say) need to rediscover a sense of shared national
heritage and purpose. History did not, as Fukuyama says, end with the
destruction of the USSR. Surely, now that the USSR is gone, the interesting
(and peaceful!) work should begin. Instead we're bickering amongst ourselves?

------
zeroname
_" When applied to humans, this model is ludicrously implausible. While it is
true that some males have trouble finding a mate, the idea that some huge
percentage of males are simply not desirable enough (as we shall see, the
paper requires this percentage to be over 50) to have a chance of reproducing
bears no relation to the world as we know it."_

It's not ludicrous at all. The world "as we know it" is not the world Homo
Sapiens evolved in. There is some evidence of _much harsher_ selection bias a
few millennia ago:

[https://psmag.com/environment/17-to-1-reproductive-
success](https://psmag.com/environment/17-to-1-reproductive-success)

~~~
jeromebaek
This is very interesting. Have you other articles that follow up on this
study?

------
Animats
This would be a good simulation exercise. Play with the parameters and watch
generations evolve.

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

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

Memories...

~~~
rdl
[https://www.economist.com/the-economist-
explains/2013/04/15/...](https://www.economist.com/the-economist-
explains/2013/04/15/what-is-the-streisand-effect)

~~~
Dowwie
prepare yourself for disappointment when this change doesn't manifest

------
jaccarmac
I'd just like to point out that the paper was never removed from the NYJM
site[0]. Note the references to the Damore controversy in the third paragraph
of the introduction, which Hill conveniently left out of the version he linked
to on arXiv. Also interestingly, its accepted date was later than the paper
that replaced it and most of the other accepted papers that I've checked from
that edition.

0:
[http://nyjm.albany.edu/j/2017/23-72v-orig.pdf](http://nyjm.albany.edu/j/2017/23-72v-orig.pdf)

~~~
Rivers68
Ironically, when Larry Summers and James Damore are mentioned in the paper,
Hill references a blog post on the Heterodox Academy website (i.e. references
SH17a and SH17b in the paper). Ironic because Heterodox Academy was founded
partly to chronicle illiberal behavior on university campuses. To clarify why
I find your bringing up Damore ironic, I'll say that I don't think it's
particularly relevant to this discussion, and certainly not damning. (However,
it does contribute to my feeling that this paper doesn't belong in a pure math
journal.)

For what it's worth, it sounds like the Summers/Damore discussion was added at
the suggestion of the referees or editors at NYJM. If you look at the arXiv
history, Hill and coauthors didn't include included mention of Summers/Damore
until version 5 of their paper. (It disappears at version 8. I would
generously guess Hill removed it because he didn't particularly agree with
NYJM's suggestion.)

Finally, for those who are concerned that the mention of Summers/Damore is
damning, here is what Hill says about Summers/Damore in the NYJM version of
the paper:

"A resurgence of controversy came after the VH was linked to the forced
resignation of Harvard President Larry Summers and the firing of Google
engineer James Damore."

"VH" is variability hypothesis. My point is the paper does not endorse either
Larry Summers or James Damore. It just mentions that the topic of the paper is
a contentious one, as proven by the controversy surrounding Summers and
Damore, and that the hope of the paper is to provide a concrete (if simple)
mathematical theory in which to investigate VH in the evolution of species. If
it weren't the variability hypothesis but instead Anderson localization, I
think it's clear it would have received neither fire nor fury.

------
ArchTypical
> wouldn’t that suggest that males would have a much higher selection pressure
> to become more desirable than females?

I would think they would want to be more variable as conditions are variable
(and therefore fitness criteria are variable). This is such a chaotic theory,
that no amount of mathematics could categorize it in a definitive way.

~~~
TheJoYo
there has to be losers when it comes to selection pressures. we can modify our
memes faster than we can modify our genes so this doesn't really apply to
decent with modification through biological reproduction. biological
evolutionary theories unrelated to biological reproduction are meh.

------
eridius
tl;dr: No.

Elaborating slightly: A paper that is related to (but does not directly argue
for) an "uncomfortable truth" was published, then unpublished 3 days later and
replaced with a different paper. The author of this blog piece tracked down
the paper and read it, and it turns out to simply be a bad paper that
shouldn't have been published to begin with.

~~~
ziggurism
Being a bad paper, even a "never should have been published", is not
sufficient reason for retroactively un-publishing a refereed and published
paper. A rebuttal or at worst retraction is the appropriate action in that
case.

~~~
DanBC
Was it refereed?

~~~
tptacek
No, I don't believe so.

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

~~~
Arnt
Because the differences are small. Insignificant.

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

If you talk about that you risk attracting the companionship of people who
need to get a life, or sounding like one of those people.

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

~~~
Arnt
If significant, then it should have effects noticeable in daily life, right?
Otherwise you'd have a significant difference that signifies little or
nothing.

After almost 20 years of living with a woman 30cm smaller than myself, I can't
make a long list of such effects. I easily reach some high shelves that my
wife can't, I can see over most parked cars before crossing the street so I
have a better view of the traffic, and she can snuggle under the bed cover but
I cannot. That's about it. We're an easily noticeable couple and that thing
about crossing the street was a big surprise, but if you ask about
_significant_ differences I have to say, no, not really.

I'm sure the answer is different in some special contexts, perhaps garment
production. But you asked me.

~~~
reversecs
If you are or know a very tall man, 6 6 or something, you might see this
occur.

When the man walks into a room and finds there is someone of his height, or
someone even taller present, the man begins to feel a sense of insecurity
about this challenger. Suddenly he isn't the tallest guy in the room. It feels
like a threat, it feels like competition.

I know this is a general feeling for certain. These men don't walk around
thinking they are better than everyone else because they are taller but when
they finally encounter someone of their height they are really sensitive to
their presence.

I can't imagine women feel the same way. I've actually heard that women have
insecurity about being too tall. If ones security about they masculinity and
femininity can be shaken by their height, but in totally different ways, there
might be something real about it. I do know that a lot of guys are excluded
from the saying pool because of their height, and I know a lot of women value
height in attraction.

The correlation of testosterone, power, and height in men are all in
alignment. It's part of a male concept.

The infamous David Reimer case is a great example of how boys and girls are
just different. David adopted all of the male stereotypes even though he was
being raised as a girl with hormone therapy, psychological reinforcements (to
try to teach and convince him he was a girl) from toddler through primary
School. He still wouldn't conform and his brother knew something was wrong.
When they found out it was an experiment the brother killed himself and David
began to identify as a man again, he even went on to marry a woman. He killed
himself in his 40s I believe.

The idea of a convenient truth and inconvenient truth need to be considered. I
see it so much today that people are willing to twist facts and blow up
supporting minutia to convince themselves that men and women have equal
capabilities and have equal values as human beings (atleast evolutionarily).

------
rsynnott
Betteridge's Law strikes again.

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

~~~
acdha
Why not is the wrong question when all around the world researchers have been
actively doing that for many decades, and making huge efforts to identify and
control for confounding environmental factors. When essays like this one,
Damore’s screed, etc. get debunked it’s based on the actual scientific
research not supporting the position rather than a lack of interest in
understanding how it works.

------
rectang
Those who believe they are superior will never be persuaded otherwise.

------
doombolt
He's not criticizing the mathematical model, rather the application of this
model to modern human society, which is something that nobody ever claimed.
Straw man and a bad one at that.

He does have some arguments but math is nowhere found, making this a joke of a
refutation.

~~~
doombolt
E.g. do you want a real eye opener?

In a monogamous society, given that Darwin's observation about increased male
variability holds, when partitioning by desirability, women in the top half
will have access to males with desirability greater than their own, while
women in the bottom half will only have access to males with desirability
worse than their own.

Go figure.

(There's a lot of assumptions here but none of them particularly unrealistic).

~~~
hef19898
Well, it always strikes me how well educated people with a lot of Knowledge in
their domain (assuming that point is valid for the majority on Hacker News)
have the tendency to totaly over-simplify other scientific fields. In this
case evolution, biology and statistics. So what actually happened to humility,
scientific literacy and honest curiosity?

Not sure if it was intended, but your second post comes across as Sexist and
trying to reason this with bad science.

~~~
doombolt
It's not a question of science. It's a question of math. Math is a model which
allows you to over-simplify other scientific fields in the first place, and
then devise solutions which turn out to be useful even in their over-
simplified form.

This is the reason for the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in
natural sciences. However, here I'm not pushing any direct resemblance between
model and any society anywhere. You're doing that, not me.

~~~
hef19898
Basing your "top half of females" behaviour on un-specified asumptions,
failing to even hinting on what is "desirable" and then subjugating this model
of society to some sort of statistical model was not my idea. nAgain not sure
whether this was intentional or not or if I got your point wrong, after all we
do not know each other.

But again, that is to much oversimplyfication for my taste. Especially when
mathematics are applied without any relevant domain knowledge.

~~~
doombolt
Don't see why the math should be serving your taste.

Nowhere in my message I am applying mathematics to a domain. I'm just stating
that such math exists. Applying, or not applying, them to any real society is
left as an exercise for a reader.

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

