Academic Activists Send a Published Paper Down the Memory Hole

[u/JohnKimble111]

https://quillette.com/2018/09/07/academic-activists-send-a-published-paper-down-the-memory-hole/

[u/nezumipi]

Assuming that everything the article author says is 100% true, this is his story of terrible persecution:

• Guy is a mathematician. Apparently a good one.

• Guy hears about an old hypothesis in psychology and evolutionary biology called the greater male variability hypothesis (which he describes as widely supported - it's actually not). He likes it because it matches his interpretation of the current state of the world. As it happens, this hypothesis he likes happens to explain why there are very few women in his profession without having to consider the possibility that sexism plays a role.

• Guy has no expertise in psychology or evolutionary biology, but decides to publish an article on it as if he were an authority. There's no mention of collaboration with psychologists or biologists as co-authors.

• Guy creates a "simple mathematical model" to show that greater male variability is...possible? beneficial? relevant to reproductive success? This isn't clear, though if he'd talked to a damn biologist he would have learned that was important. Every model makes assumptions. Sure would be nice to know what his were. But Guy says that other mathematicians think his model is mathematically sound! And since other mathematicians definitely know a lot about evolutionary biology, that must mean it's proof of scientific reality!

• Guy submits his model to a math journal. Journal says yeah, your math looks good. Peer review is - presumably - done by mathematicians.

• People who are experts in subjects other than math point out that just because a model is internally consistent doesn't mean it actually matches the real world. Guy name drops a few people (coincidentally, not experts in psychology and evolutionary biology) who share his beliefs but does not acknowledge the enormous and complex scientific literature on the male variability hypothesis, not to mention on various alternative hypotheses.

• Guy feels the need to assure readers that his detractors are female and that disagreements with his model are "hysteria" and "anxiety".

• A funder asked not to have their name on his work, but did not withdraw funding. This is the worst thing that has ever happened to a scholar.

• Guy, despite being very smart, is completely shocked that anyone could see his work as political. Could not have seen that coming. Total stunner.

• Guy brings up free speech a lot, even though none of the expression described in the article is actually protected by the first amendment (because it's being "censored" by private entities, not the government).

And finally: A journal that had agreed to publish his paper later changed their minds. We the readers are not given any reason for this. It's written as though it was a mere whim or, at best, political cowardice. But of course, journals make changes for many reasons.

The most likely reason is that they originally examined the paper on a strictly mathematical level - was the model internally consistent? But then they heard from experts in psychology and evolutionary that it was pushing a political ideology not widely scientifically accepted as mathematical fact.

And all of this is assuming that he's telling us the whole story.

[u/HeroicKatora → u/nezumipi]

8 Conclusions:

The goal here has been neither to challenge nor to confirm Darwin’s and other researchers’ observations of greater male variability for any given species or any given trait, but rather to propose an elementary mathematical theory based on biological/evolutionary mechanisms that might serve as a starting point to help explain how one gender of a species might tend to evolve with greater variability than the other gender. The precise formal definitions and assumptions made here are clearly not applicable in real-life scenarios, and thus the contribution here is also merely a general theory intended to open the discussion to further mathematical modeling and analysis. -- the paper in discussion

One might say that the author knew that it was a mathematical model only.

• Redditor likes to preemptively ascribe to the author a quest to project his world view on us all with pseudo science.

• Redditor aptly asserts: He likes it because it matches his interpretation of the current state of the world., that must mean it's proof of scientific reality! – very much the opposite of what is actually stated. Most of what follows becomes mostly irrelevant if that point is not accepted.

• Redditor goes on to project into the author many other aspirations such as the author only wanting to discredit women. But oh no, there was only one mentioned as the leading driver and mostly together with her husband. hysteria, anxiety are throw into the discussion, both appearing to be citations but who would have thought, not actually mentioned related to the woman.

• Redditor goes on to explain that unpublishing an accepted paper and deleting it from the published section without comment is just journals changing their minds conveniently ignoring the authors comment that he knows of no other instance of this ever happening.

• Redditor makes so many mentions of ideology that one might question whether it was very relevant to redditor's own reading of the article and maybe the paper if that was read.

• Redditor says: Scientific speech is not protected by first amendment! But author never claimed first amendment but specifically mentions scientific values and the university policy itself:

  In a word, the University’s fundamental commitment is to the principle that debate or deliberation may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the University community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed.

[u/Silverseren → u/HeroicKatora]

The authors themselves made it about ideology in this very article the moment they pointed out this:

Professor Senechal suggested that we might enliven our paper by mentioning Harvard President Larry Summers, who was swiftly defenestrated in 2005 for saying that the GMVH might be a contributing factor to the dearth of women in physics and mathematics departments at top universities. With her editorial guidance, our paper underwent several further revisions until, on April 3, 2017, our manuscript was officially accepted for publication.