"Down the memory hole" is unnecessary hyperbole and sadly sets the tone for the rest of the article. In 1984 the memory hole was a place where information was permanently destroyed. This is...
"Down the memory hole" is unnecessary hyperbole and sadly sets the tone for the rest of the article. In 1984 the memory hole was a place where information was permanently destroyed. This is choosing not to publish a paper after it had been previously accepted. The authors are free to publish the article elsewhere, which they did.
Once we had written up our findings, Sergei and I decided to try for publication in the Mathematical Intelligencer, the ‘Viewpoint’ section of which specifically welcomes articles on contentious topics.
It seems like part of the problem here is the ambiguous and broad meaning of "academic paper". They were going to be published in an academic journal, but in a special section that seems like a closer equivalent to the op-ed pages of a newspaper.
“Several colleagues,” she wrote, had warned her that publication would provoke “extremely strong reactions” and there existed a “very real possibility that the right-wing media may pick this up and hype it internationally.”
Here's where the broad definition of "academic paper" can create issues. This sounds like it was an op-ed set to be published in a scientific journal. However, once it's published, it can be cited by media in a way that gives the impression that it was an uncontroversial paper published and implicitly endorsed by that academic journal.
If you're going to pull a paper from a journal that has been published, you have to retract it. You can't just delete it and pretend you never tried to publish it. So NYJM really ought to issue...
If you're going to pull a paper from a journal that has been published, you have to retract it. You can't just delete it and pretend you never tried to publish it. So NYJM really ought to issue whatever it is they do for retractions, even if they don't want to keep around the original retracted article.
But I've had a look at the article this guy is griping about. I've even looked beyond the embarrassing degree of confusion between the concepts of sex and gender that should have disqualified the author from studying either. The article is waving around mathematics unsafely without doing any of the hard humanities work that you absolutely have to do if you want to take your science within 100 miles of questions about differences between categories of people. It's trying to abstract everything away with all the stuff about "sex A" and "sex B", and I'm sure that if you do all that abstraction the math works out, but presenting a model like this and then not talking about how hard it would be to map it back onto human society, or about how the stuff you've abstracted away is quite likely to have a bigger effect size than any possible result of whatever you were modeling, is just irresponsible.
It invites people to map your results back onto human society in the most simplistic way possible. If you write "Abstract sex B comes out more variable than abstract sex A in our model because of group selection and strong sexual selection for the top end of sex B", then you get in the press something like "Women made men catch colorblindness because of their only liking pro footballers" or some other such nonsense. This is because you didn't want to do the hard work of explaining how much you lost by, say, reducing love to a real number on the unit interval and postulating everyone straight. The author especially didn't do the work you need to do to take an idea like "mating with only the top 50% or less of sex B" and scrub off all of the cultural baggage that it got from being used as a justification for going out and murdering women.
The author doesn't seem to get what the problem is here, either, which doesn't inspire my sympathy. The linked writeup is upset about how we can't do "dispassionate academic study", and how his "mathematician to mathematician" (which to me reads like "man to man") pleas are ignored, and how all these dang women are calling in their fathers to torpedo his article because they find its results inconvenient. He apparently missed the memo where the idea of "dispassionate academic study" was discredited as an excuse for not thinking about the shortcomings of your models or the impact of your work on society.
"Down the memory hole" is unnecessary hyperbole and sadly sets the tone for the rest of the article. In 1984 the memory hole was a place where information was permanently destroyed. This is choosing not to publish a paper after it had been previously accepted. The authors are free to publish the article elsewhere, which they did.
It seems like part of the problem here is the ambiguous and broad meaning of "academic paper". They were going to be published in an academic journal, but in a special section that seems like a closer equivalent to the op-ed pages of a newspaper.
Here's where the broad definition of "academic paper" can create issues. This sounds like it was an op-ed set to be published in a scientific journal. However, once it's published, it can be cited by media in a way that gives the impression that it was an uncontroversial paper published and implicitly endorsed by that academic journal.
If you're going to pull a paper from a journal that has been published, you have to retract it. You can't just delete it and pretend you never tried to publish it. So NYJM really ought to issue whatever it is they do for retractions, even if they don't want to keep around the original retracted article.
But I've had a look at the article this guy is griping about. I've even looked beyond the embarrassing degree of confusion between the concepts of sex and gender that should have disqualified the author from studying either. The article is waving around mathematics unsafely without doing any of the hard humanities work that you absolutely have to do if you want to take your science within 100 miles of questions about differences between categories of people. It's trying to abstract everything away with all the stuff about "sex A" and "sex B", and I'm sure that if you do all that abstraction the math works out, but presenting a model like this and then not talking about how hard it would be to map it back onto human society, or about how the stuff you've abstracted away is quite likely to have a bigger effect size than any possible result of whatever you were modeling, is just irresponsible.
It invites people to map your results back onto human society in the most simplistic way possible. If you write "Abstract sex B comes out more variable than abstract sex A in our model because of group selection and strong sexual selection for the top end of sex B", then you get in the press something like "Women made men catch colorblindness because of their only liking pro footballers" or some other such nonsense. This is because you didn't want to do the hard work of explaining how much you lost by, say, reducing love to a real number on the unit interval and postulating everyone straight. The author especially didn't do the work you need to do to take an idea like "mating with only the top 50% or less of sex B" and scrub off all of the cultural baggage that it got from being used as a justification for going out and murdering women.
The author doesn't seem to get what the problem is here, either, which doesn't inspire my sympathy. The linked writeup is upset about how we can't do "dispassionate academic study", and how his "mathematician to mathematician" (which to me reads like "man to man") pleas are ignored, and how all these dang women are calling in their fathers to torpedo his article because they find its results inconvenient. He apparently missed the memo where the idea of "dispassionate academic study" was discredited as an excuse for not thinking about the shortcomings of your models or the impact of your work on society.