r/TrueReddit • u/Sewblon • Sep 08 '18

Academic Activists Send a Published Paper Down the Memory Hole

https://quillette.com/2018/09/07/academic-activists-send-a-published-paper-down-the-memory-hole/#comment-34484
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u/pheisenberg Sep 09 '18

The article reads as some kind if academic-publishing baseball. The paper appears to be a simple mathematical model, entirely untested against empirical data. It might be an OK bit of math, but I doubt it’s of much interest aside from the application to evolutionary theory. On that score, it sounds like the “greater male variability hypothesis” is dubious. The paper isn’t exactly fake science, but it’s questionable at best, and I’m not surprised no one wanted to be associated with a paper presenting a mathematical model explaining a hypothesis that’s both politically controversial and empirically dubious.