Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

Papers like that are far more often published in applied math (look, we can apply this math to that problem) or computer science (look, we can apply this ML algorithm fruitfully to this type of data, for instance). I have sympathy in trying to find journal homes for these types of papers, because I'm looking for journal homes right now for some very interdisciplinary papers (applications of topology or algebraic geometry to finance). Often it seems you have to have really amazing results so you can publish in a general-interest science journal, because the math journals are so specialized they won't consider something like my papers or this paper.

You don't have to accept anyone else's judgement on the quality of the paper, although Tim Gowers is a guy who knows his math. A cheap shot here is to search for the word "theorem" in the provided arXiv text. Doesn't appear. Ok, the authors are so modest that they only prove propositions, not theorems -- but that is a sign it's not a real math paper! Then look at the propositions themselves. Prop 7.1, the first of a grand total of three propositions in the paper (no lemmas): a particular normal distribution is more variable than another if the... variance of the first is bigger. Wow. Sure, the authors say "the following simple proposition may be well known" but dang, this is not groundbreaking. This is barely mathematics.

Try following through the proofs of the three propositions. It really is at an undergrad level -- I'd be happy assigning some of these 'propositions' as homework exercises in the class I'm teaching now except we have more useful material to cover. There are also some problems the authors should have addressed regarding the subpopulation assumptions, etc. A good article of this type would have done additional modeling to address that. If I were reviewing it, I'd like to see a breakdown say of the different results given initial values of parameters (I'm a total sucker for wall-crossing or regime-change-type results -- like, cross this wall in the space of parameters and the behavior of the model will change in this way. Think phase planes in differential equations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_plane or regime-change results in economics). A dynamical systems analysis would be cool, but I'm biased like that. Analysis of robustness or sensitivity would be nice. I'd want to see comparison with other models, or applications of these models to other topics. The author could have replaced the non-math appendix full of useless crap with this material.

It's really important to be able to argue that your model isn't just a one-trick pony if you want to call it math -- you need to show it's a useful model with interesting mathematical properties that you can elucidate in the paper. This paper doesn't do that.

Look, I understand the political argument you are making, but politics has no place in peer reviewed scientific and mathematics journals. Quality is always the argument, or should be.

If people want to have a political argument, take it elsewhere. There are a lot of people out there doing serious work who are relying on the reliability of the information presented in peer reviewed journals. The political people have, quite literally, the entire world outside of peer reviewed journals to engage in their flame wars. The mathematics community should be pushing back on stuff like this. As I said, it's not a problem if you'd like to publish that stuff elsewhere, it's appropriate in other venues. But you can't just be publishing whatever you like in a peer reviewed journal.

It's particularly galling that the political people had so infested NYJM that they decided to simply dispense with the formality of peer review in the case of this particular paper.

Why?

Presumably because it agreed with their politics.

I mean, that's literally some "Sun revolves around the Earth .. you can't question this .. great doctrinal import" type stuff.

Come on people.

Please, TRY to be reasonable here. I'm not saying you can't have the flame wars you want to have, I'm just asking that we not put low quality science or math papers in peer reviewed journals. Especially papers so low quality that you feel the need to exempt them from peer review lest they not get published.

I guess the point is we've had ~350 years of scientific discovery and philosophical musings since Locke, and we still don't have simple answers to any of this stuff.

I don't think any serious commentator today (on Quillette or elsewhere) would argue that the existence of some degree of innateness of human nature should pre-determine anyone to a lesser level of freedom or equality or ability to thrive in the world.

I think they'd argue that a better understanding of the former is necessary in order to improve the latter.

At least I would, as someone who has significant skin in the game in terms of my own ability to function.

I'm with you on the axe-grindiness of Quillette, and since you mention it, that's probably why I don't read it much anymore.

"Libertarian" can mean all kinds of things these days, but in the comment to which I was replying, the description connotes associations with things like: extreme positions against state welfare and gun control, extreme laissez-faire economic policy, social Darwinism, Ayn Rand, the Tea Party, etc.

In my (admittedly limited) experience, these themes seem to appear quite frequently in Reason Magazine, and they certainly do on Fox News.

They aren't a focus for Quillette, however, which in my experience, generally embraces more moderate/centrist (i.e., classical liberal) positions on economic and social issues.

The axe-grindiness to which you refer would stem from the fact that a big part of its raison d'être is to confront what it sees as the ideological corruption of academia.

I agree it can be quite histrionic in its coverage of this issue, and it doesn't hold much interest for me.

But it still matters to demarcate between "highly partisan libertarian-right" and more moderate, sober ideological positions.

Would you argue that Social Text would, in that situation, still have some sort of duty to publish the paper? Would you argue they'd have a responsibility to give it a prominent, permanent, place in their archives to avoid accusations of having "disappeared" it? Would you argue that they'd need to air that dirty laundry in public? If they did air it all publicly and honestly, would you treat that as a form of bullying of Sokal and his accomplice(s)? Remember: that would be the powerful journal leveling accusations of deliberate fraud against an academic who submitted the paper, and accusations of, at the very least, dishonesty and violation of review processes against one of their own.

If we're trying to draw conclusions about innate differences operationalized as distribution test scores, any kind of biased schooling undermines the ability to draw conclusions from that population.

Couple of points here. A culture biased along gender lines may bias the outcome thus obscure the effect of genetics on gender differences. Also, no one in their right mind claims that environment has no effect, and so measuring some environmental influence doesn't undermine the greater male variability hypothesis.

>And what is unusual about Czech Republic

I wouldn't hazard a guess, but the "paradoxical effect" of gender equality negatively correlating with female interest in STEM might have some hard-to-tease-out influence here.

Is it so crazy to think that a man with no partner could live a socially responsible life? The choice isn't a binary "Happy with wife and kids" vs "Flame, looting, violence and plague".

I'm basing my experience on Australian law here, but our 'modern state-sanctioned monogamy' is a comprehensive system to stop fathers from having children then walking away when the going gets tough.

There are loads of plausible ways monogamy arose as a virtue that needn’t have to do with changing that ratio & there are loads of ways that ratio could have come about without societies filled with “angry young men”

This is a fairly obvious set of bad reasoning. Either you’ve not paid much attention or you are arguing in bad faith (likely to further some worldview).

It shows, at least in this contrived example, that the information is present in the individuals and not in the brain of the classifier.

I don't understand your last point. Is it wrong to say that I could extremely accurately classify blue and brown eyed people?

Is your stance in life that, if some information has been used in the past for bad purposes, we must pretend like it doesn't exist so those bad things don't happen again?

It claims that while averages for men and women are the same, you get more men at the high IQ end of the spectrum and also more men at the lower end of the IQ spectrum (which balance out the average).

The whole argument is predicated on what happens at the edges of the normal distribution, not what happens at the center.

We don't imprison random people from the population, we imprison the most aggressive (in case of violent crime at least).

We hire people with top IQ for engineering and science related endevours.

We promote people who work the hardest ("industriousness")

The most ambitious people get the top jobs.

It doesn't matter if on average two groups are the same for those qualifiers, if only the top 1% are selected, then you would expect which ever group has the flattest bell-curve distribution (and thus more "on the edge") to be over-represented (whether it is gender, "race", age). If it isn't, then racism/sexism/whateverism is at work.

Caveat: with top IQ in engineering, an important factor that only people who "like things more than people" apply, other way around for loads of other fields.

Therefore, if on some metric, you have two groups who are average but one with greater deviation, and then you select among the top 5% of the combined group, you will select more of the group with greater deviation even though the groups are average. You can test this with simulations if you want.

This isn't much of a problem until you apply it to everyday demographics, at which point it can result in uncomfortable conclusions.

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).

To start with, frankly, as a society it's high time we told our journalists to stop mucking around in our research journals. Today I will wake up and see how scientists discovered that coffee is terrible for my health, and then tomorrow I will hear that scientists are concerned I'm not drinking enough coffee. The problem isn't the scientists. The problem is journalists who don't know when to publish a scientific article (i.e. when there's a major breakthrough, and then only tentatively; or after a new theory or discovery is thoroughly understood). Routine papers, no matter how thrilling, should not be commented on in the media. That has nothing to do with what we do as scientists: we should continue to try to publish our incremental achievements. It has to do with our responsibilities as citizens. It's high time we all (not just scientists) made it clear this behavior from journalists is embarrassing as well as meddlesome.

Secondly, when we act as though certain ideas are "dangerous," we embolden our political opponents and we also teach our students/children that those ideas are very likely to be true. Nuance says that women can have on average lower IQs than men and we can still treat them like our metaphysical and political equals. When we act as though that's impossible, we show our opponents how weak our leadership really is. We also suggest to our students that perhaps the truth is other than what we, the scientists and academicians, are saying. Dangerous to whom?, they might rightly ask. Those for whom the status quo is most beneficial? Is that more likely to be the professor or the student?

In short, I don't think it's naive to discuss academically the variability hypothesis or other politically contentious topics without regard for the negative societal impacts. Those impacts are not our bailiwick. The real question is: does our side ("the left," say, or your favorite political party) have the strong institutions and grassroots network to resist when others want to pervert our discussions or research? One thing will not end: the other side will continue to try to push its agenda, and sometimes, as I already alluded to, this will constitute atrocities, big or small. Therefore, we need a strong community and real leadership to counteract this. That is not the purview of our scientific life.

It is part of our civic life, one which I find lately is being neglected more and more (and not just by scientists). In the US, the Republican Party is apparently quite good at rallying its people and getting them out to vote. It also has few scruples where spreading misinformation or hateful rhetoric is concerned. What compounds this and makes it worse is the Democratic Party acts as though various fashionable ideas in or around social science ("white privilege," "unconscious bias," "microaggressions") and certain social questions (acceptability of homosexuality, deference owed to questions of race) were God given and don't require campaigning or explanation. On the contrary, as someone in math, I have never been schooled in what can be done to cure unconscious bias, for instance, or whether or not psychologists have any evidence to suggest talking about unconscious bias will do anything other than p*ss off a lot of otherwise sympathetic people. If Democrats or social scientists or whomever care so much about some of these issues, the politically practical and, indeed, moral thing to do is to really spend the time bringing people over to their side. As far as I'm concerned, this is not being done, but instead the work has been replaced by a combination of social media outrage and "public shaming" and belittling idealogical opponents by making references to obscure studies the vast majority of us have not been educated well enough to understand. (With regard to referencing an obscure paper or five, see my discussion of journalists getting out of our research journals. I am beginning to feel the same should apply to good faith conversations between non-experts.)

Please, understand me. There is doing science and then there is doing politics. No question, if you are doing difficult science on biology or sociology, that only adds to the weight of your political duties. However, that is not an excuse to abandon the science (or relegate some of it to the dangerous pile) altogether.

It's The Holy Inquisition, crowdsource edition.

'There is not a gender skill gap when it comes to using technology' is a very different argument to 'certainly is that the physical differences betwen individuals regardless of sex are bigger than those between sexes'

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