CERN suspends physicist after his science-and-gender talk
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There is a stark difference in the number of citations Ceresole (~3000) and Strumia (~30000) have, and Strumia has roughly double the number of first author papers. So on the face of it this seems like a very bad case of unfair / biased hiring practice.
Since when does motivation make someones point invalid?
> number of citations
Note that they're in slightly different fields, so that in addition to reservations about simple counting, you might expect different numbers anyway.
> the number of first author papers
This means nothing -- both lists are alphabetical.
Ceresole does not have a SINGLE refereed publication since 2014, and the one from 2014 is not exactly in the best journal. And that wasn't because of a career break. According to her CV she has been the Coordinator of the INFN Theory Group in Torino since 2015.
It is hard to believe that she could have been hired for any position in 2018 without a henchman (or henchwoman) on the committee. So the question arises whether someone close to her pushed her application. Then we know about the close association with Penati through a European COST action. Now what should have happened in such a case is that INFN's anti-corruption code should have been followed. I won't discuss the implications any further, and only say that all hell may break loose if there was something fishy about this hiring. Read the INFN code for yourselves, and consider that Italian academics are civil servants, so that a case of corruption would constitute a felony under the penal code. I wouldn't get into a fight for affirmative action over this case. It could backfire terribly.
Some good points. The proper scientific answer is a peer-review, not a suspension.
When science and politics collide, politics always win. Science needs an environment free of politics.
It's a way to justify the use of power to silence criticism. Always, always, always that is the purpose of the phrase, and this is a perfect example.
> Physics is not sexist against women. However truth does not matter, because it’s part of a political battle coming from outside. Not clear who will win.
So why poke that bear? You know it'll maul you if it notices you.
> PS: many told me “don’t speak, it’s dangerous”. As a student, I wrote that weak-scale SUSY is not right, and I survived. Hope to see you again.
Oh yeah, but being perceived as a crank in your specialized field is nowhere near as dangerous as alerting the pitchfork crowd. I don't think he'll survive that, he just painted a target on his whole field. It'll be Damore 2.0.
EDIT:
> When science and politics collide, politics always win. Science needs an environment free of politics.
Yes; to quote dlss[0], "The political process converts ideas from logical propositions into group signaling devices. Once a idea becomes a signal, any question of its truth or falsehood is commonly ignored for several human generations.". Science should avoid it as much as possible.
--
Which do you think are good points specifically? I am struggling to find them myself.
It's very hard to engage with your comment without knowing exactly what your argument(s) are.
* I don't follow why the distribution of women in different fields "Does not look discrimination". Seems to me it could be adequately explained by either M, C, or a combination of both, theories
* I find the correlation between % of women in STEM/Theory and Gender Equality Index unconvincing for a few reasons. One is that there are regional + cultural correlations between countries that, unaccounted for, undermines the regression somewhat. The RHS plot also looks like it's influenced a lot by a few high leverage points on the right hand side.
* I have no idea how you get to "it’s merit, not sexism." from "M more cited than F, equally by M and F". To think that sexism operates only through the action of misogynist men is a naive and unhelpful view of the world. There are plenty of alternative, structural reasons that could cause a trend like this. To take one example, if women leave the field in greater numbers or earlier in their career than men, they could not present their findings at conferences or promote their papers in ways that would boost citations.
I know it's hard to fully engage with a talk when you just have the slides, but I think even with full generosity of interpretation, the points raised here are still lazy, weak points.
Furthermore, data is a tool. A very useful tool, but one among many. When we reach for data alone, while giving no weight at all to the lived experiences of our female friends and colleagues, we are throwing away real, useful information. This talk fails to really acknowledge any points beyond the bibliometric data. If you're really interested in getting to the truth, with no agenda, using only one limited source of information is a really poor way to do it.
i've been seeing this 'lived experience' nonsense for years. Anecdotal evidence is not evidence, has everybody forgotten this?
"I said Thoughtcrime according to Minister of Truth and PC Thought Police."
"It’s blind human biology practiced as in the plains of Africa thousands of years ago."
What the hell?
I don't mean to belittle his work. But his point would come across much clearly without the last few slides. Let's not make this an idealogical issue!
Judging by the reaction, he's not wrong (and given a similar reaction to Damore's memo, which was written in a much "nicer" style, this statement wasn't the cause of the reaction - i.e. it's not a self-fulfilling prophecy).
It should be easy enough for someone opposing this man's view to take the dataset presented about and disprove the conclusions made.
Claiming statistics like "amount of citations at time of hiring" are offensive is by no means helping anyone's case.
I hope the author will be reinstated quickly because I see no reason to act revenge upon him just because one disagrees with their conclusions from a statistical analysis. This is exactly what the peer reviewed system should prevent.
Maybe, maybe not. I have several female friends who went on to study soft sciences and regret it. Some say this out loud, some give non-verbal clues. They clearly prefer their daughters to choose STEM careers. The paradox here is that these kids are just not interested in STEM that much, just as my friends themselves are not. They treat STEM as a way of making money, not something interesting to discover. If you don't have this internal curiosity in you, it's hard to pass it on to your kids.
I think on the other pages are are also phrases and formulations that don't have a phrase in scientific presentations. CERN is full of smart people and they will find a way to deal with this issue.
That's unrealistically idealistic. Science depends on things like funding, ability to voice unpopular opinions and to research them etc. These are all influenced (if not entirely determined) by the zeitgeist and science doesn't exist independently of that.
Two fronts. Firstly, people will be prevented from exploring avenues that don't really fit into the zeitgeist. Secondly, people won't be interested, inclined or knowledgeable about ideas outside the zeitgeist to sufficiently explore them.
Or, let's consider only western democracies.
Does that include Volksverhetzung in modern Germany?
Does it include the US during the various anti-socialist and anti-communist movements? Or those prosecuted under the Sedition Act of 1918, like when Debs was jailed for speaking out against US involvement in WWI?
Nor is the US alone of the western democracies in prosecuting people for their seditious acts of speaking out against the government.
And then there are the western democracies which have (or had) laws against blasphemous libel. Was Canada not part of the western world in 1935 when Rahard was found guilty of saying things "calculated and intended to insult the feelings and the deepest religious convictions of the great majority of the persons amongst whom we live"?
The historical evidence says that your views - that the ability to 'voice unpopular opinions' - is not a fundamental part of the western world, nor even a fundamental part of western democracy.
Important? Certainly. Influential? Yes. But fundamental and a default state? No, I don't think so.
I believe if he'd given the presentation, minus his "cultural marxism", it would have been ok. IMHO he brought this on himself by bringing in politics.
I find this sentiment weird. Science is, to me, inherently political. As I have noted before, it's interesting how people will claim anything they don't like is "political"-> bad. You probably don't go around telling off scientists acknowledging climate change for being political, after all.
Not necessarily. This can be viewed as a case of vaccines-cause-autism. The proper scientific answer there is to prevent endless repetition of the same boring, already sufficiently disproven, 'good points'.
His observations/facts/data can be explained in a number of different ways, if you take into account that there are sociological factors to consider. Even in physics just taking the data 'as is' is not acceptable: you need to check whether the data is reasonable. In these case there are huge questions to be answered: why do women publish fewer papers? Why do they get cited less? If the answer is 'because of sexism', then the argument presented by this physicist is a circular argument.
First slides trying to sound sciency about a political topic. You can't use statistics as objective tool for political decisions - the questions you ask are already biased, see for example slide "% of women in theory". There is (super weak) negative correlation between gender index and women in fundamental theory. So what? If you chose a different subfield it might come out differently! Cherry picking at its best. "I'm evidence-based" lol, the fake paper about chocolate helping weight-loss is as well!
To my ex-physicist, ex-CERN, the presentation looks good after a quick read. There are numbers (nubs are good), graphs (graphs are good) and expectation of statistics which make sense (as opposed to a lot of "studies").
I now expect the adversaries to burn it on the stake by refuting one by one the slides.
Oh well, at least this is what is done in science. CERN completely fucked up here, the atmosphere must have changed in the 20 years I was there last.
This is really a shame and simply shows the incapacity of some grouos to discuss FACTS.
Call me privileged or whatever, but this whole thing is a sideshow. It moves votes and sells papers and nothing more. I wonder if this is what it felt like in France during the Dreyfus affair.
I went to a game development convention with one such person and we started the event off by watching a presentation given by a woman about how to get started with VR development in Unity. The presentation was informative and well-done. As we walked out of the conference hall afterwards, I asked my friend what she thought of the talk. Her first, immediate, and only comment: "it was practically all white dudes in there." As a white dude myself I had absolutely no idea how to answer this. I still don't.
What do you even say to that?
All I ever read about with respect to universities these days is incredible weakness. No matter how absurd or extreme the complaint, the administrators always fold. A terrible sign of the intellectual decay at heart of our civilisation.
arguments should be fought with better arguments.
You think that better arguments are going to convince people with this kind of reasoning?
Loads of people all over the place are just wrong. It happens all the time. And there isn't a moral obligation to respond to some wrong opinion over and over again.
People who think we need to have rational debates with flat earthers are not people who will be convinced by much. They are the 20% of people who think Bigfoot are real.
I suspect the suspension is a desperate attempt at trying to contain PR damage to the organization.
I find it surprising that you can follow up a comment that has no substance beyond invoking a vague emotional response with this.
If you think arguments are the way for constructive discourse, perhaps you ought to present some arguments yourself.
> “I don’t think he represents the majority view,” Covi said. “There were a few men who were there but they didn’t support his view.”
After all, none of her friends stepped forward to object that she wasn't a witch. Before or after we burned her!
Also, I find it ironic that he mentions people fired because of similar opinions on the slide 24, and then gets suspended for the same reason. Could we at least have an honest, open discussion about the content rather than silencing the (currently) non-mainstream views?
The people who complain about this and instead of refuting his points instantly cry out make themselves look bad.
I'm kind of worried that this inflammating mess is starting to take hold in Europe after stirring up so many waves in the US and especially Canada.
To quote Stephen Fry, ''I would like this quotation from Bertrand Russell to hover over the evening. "One of the painful things of our time is that those feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and in decision. Let doubt prevail.''