Top Retractions of 2020
the-scientist.com
the-scientist.com
I hate this so much.
> In the last two decades many groups and/or individuals have been designated with "preferential status". This in spite of the fact that the percentage of women and minorities in academia and pharmaceutical industry has greatly increased. It follows that, in a social equilibrium, preferrential treatment of one group leads to disadvantages for another. New ideologies have appeared and influenced hiring practices, promotion, funding, and recognition of certain groups. Each candidate should have an equal opportunity to secure a position, regardless of personal identification/categorization. The rise and emphasis on hiring practices that suggest or even mandate equality in terms of absolute numbers of people in specific subgroups is counter-productive if it results in discrimination against the most meritorious candidates. Such practice affects the format of interviews and has led to the emergence of mandatory “training workshops” on gender equity, inclusion, diversity, and discrimination.
I apologize for my naivety on this topic, but: Isn't this basically saying that if A and B have the same qualifications, but B is a member of a discriminated group, B should be preferred. If A has better qualifications, A should be preferred. I can see that this might be controversial, but what exactly is offensive here (or "appalling" [0])? Am I misunderstanding the section above?
[0] https://twitter.com/CIC_ChemInst/status/1269003560357773312?...
At a more abstract level, it is dehumanizing, by way of eliminating individual characteristics and treating all people of a group by some imaginary group identity.
This criticism seems entirely reasonable to me. I find it appalling that this is not only controversial but controversial enough to warrant censorship.
I also think it's telling that none of the critiques of this essay actually address this specific point; rather, they hand wave about historic injustice as if that has anything to do with what he's saying.
I think it's likely that the people pushing these mandated group quotas in the name of diversity were the racists of yesteryear, whose opinions seemingly change with the winds of what's popular, rather than having ideologically sound footing.
1. There are groups of people 2. Some groups are in better positions than others 3. There are historical reasons for claim 2 4. The people in the worse off group today, did not cause this historical reason, yet still suffer from it (be it done by or to their predecessors, doesn't matter). 5. a just world is one in which all groups, when given the opportunity, are represented in positions of power at the expected rates.
So let's say I run a school that generates successful powerful people regularly. I always get a greater than capacity nunmber of applicants scoring perfectly. Some might argue that random choice is the most fair - but I'm not interested in being fair to the better off group at the expense of furthering what I believe to be the creation of a just world. It is of no concern that some white upper class student didn't get in. If I go by random choice that group has an outsized chance of winning at the expense of the worse offs, because we would expect them to have a non-representational ratio of applicants to the worse. off group. Say, 15:1 or something.
Oh but that's not fair to the individual, you might say.
Well, groups are made of individuals and so my belief about group representation in a world of equal opportunity isn't over ridden. It's for _those_ individuals in the worse off group.
So I see little to no problem in caseas of equal merit being decided with an explicit favouring.
Furthermore, where the merit is not equal but the imbalance in merit is solidly explained by the inherent deficits of the worse off group, I see no problem in leaning that too (think extra curricular - captain of sailing team in high school and attended expensive code boostcamps in summers, or something). Two activities that would be unjustly unavailable to the worse off group.
It is saying that worse candidates get jobs over better candidates because there is an artificial minority quota that must be achieved.
I helped fill a PhD position in Germany, it took 6 months to fill, because the first 19 properly qualified candidates were men. The 20th was a women, their qualifications were significantly worse than most men, but she got the job because of the quotas set by the German research foundation.
I never helped with filling a position again and this was one of the contributing factors for my decision against staying in academia.
It is another story whether handling the formalities of hiring for German universities is easy. It is not.
That said, removing an article for not encompassing the whole conversation isn't a good thing.
30 years after Communism fell, people start grumbling that very similar ideas seem to flourish and grow in the West, threatening freedom once more.
Right now as it stands, I am in the Silicon Valley and it feels like I can be hung for using the wrong pronoun even.
I think there would be a lot more tolerance of language if it didn't have real negative policy and workplace outcomes.
> We used to tolerate being offended
I remember when a pop country band got death threats for saying the Iraq war was a bad idea. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixie_Chicks_controversy
The pendulum is swinging because for a long time, people have felt downtrodden by those who told them they had no choice but to tolerate such treatment, and now those same downtrodden realize they no longer have to be. In the age of the internet, people have found commonality in their oppression, solidarity in their commonality, and strength in their solidarity.
That being said, the pendulum has swung a bit too far in many places. Persecuting small offenses is surely a form of oppression in and of itself. Careful consideration must be taken as to what is actually intolerable and what is simply offensive. The latter is excusable, the former is, well, intolerable.
Neoliberalism has very close to nothing at all to do with this, being a center-right economic ideology that's basically unconcerned with any axis of offense. Occasionally, neoliberals tactically engage in superficially identity politics (progressive or regressive) to draw in allies that don't have an fundamental preference for corporate capitalismo, and might engage in perfomative offense gestures as part of that, but they aren't the driving force there they are using to to appeal to other groups.
> We used to tolerate being offended
No, “we” didn't, unless by “we” you mean oppressed minorities. Dominant social groups in used to openly (and to a lesser extent and less openly still do) murder people for offending them, with virtually no accountability, and before that it wasn't even extralegal, the grounds of offense were written into law with harsh punishments.
> If I have a giant microphone for the entire world, I would tell everyone to toughen up a bit and ignore people who offend you.
The people with the resources to have metaphorical giant microphones have always has that message to the people that don't; that's no innovation.
Of course, they usually are no less prone to offense.
> Right now as it stands, I am in the Silicon Valley and it feels like I can be hung for using the wrong pronoun even.
Yes, a lot of propaganda effort by relatively privileged groups has been directed at making you feel that way. But when (much rarer than it used to be within living, but it still happens) people actually do get hung for offending people in the US, it's almost without exception by the people that are behind that propaganda effort not the people at whom it points blame.
The comparison to suppression of Galileo’s scientific work is nonsensical.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2515-2#ref-CR3
The original paper used games played by humans to produce new optimization algorithms. But actually their implementation of standard algorithms had bugs, so they wrongly thought the new ones were better.
Wikipedia article: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Moves
The counter analysis reported in November just wasn't as sexy so didn't make such headlines.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2020/10/22/venu...
(Discussions of HCQ regardless, talking about effectiveness is one thing, falsifying data is another)
There were only 3 on HCQ.
> and how President Trump is dumb
President Trump was mentioned once, in the second HCQ piece, and not in a context which particularly suggested he was dumb. (Arguably, it could be viewed as recontextualizing something for which he was viewed as dumb by many people independently.)
Although speaking truth to power is unavoidably political ..
Science is the process of flushing all the bad opinions out much like they are doing in this article. Now in December the scientists will be comfortably ahead of the laypeople in their understanding of the Coronavirus.
Whereas you are talking about Science, as practiced by scientists, person_of_color is talking about "Science", as it is perceived by the general public. Science vs "Science". And not to be overlooked are the layers between these two as well: the communication/information ecosystem.
This may seem like a subtle, unimportant difference (or not noticed at all in normal(!), realtime cognition), but that's just an impression...perception - the actual importance is the systemic consequences in the world.
We can wag our fingers all day at the idiots who "don't understand/listen to The Science", but if actual science (Science vs "Science") isn't actually communicated to the public, and also done in a manner such that it both(!) lands and sticks in these people's minds, we will then enjoy the suboptimal consequences that result. We can then (choose to) proceed to assign blame (enjoying the psychological/emotional pleasure that often comes with that) as to whose "fault" this is all we want - the current systemic consequences are what they are (however: the future consequences may be influenced by this blame assignment process). So says Science (or more precisely, would say, if we could be bothered to study such things, with the same depth and rigour that we study the hard sciences [1]).
> Science is the process of flushing all the bad opinions out much like they are doing in this article.
Is this article Science, or "Science", or a hybrid (in general, and also from this perspective of Systemic Consequences)? I would personally classify it as being far more towards the "Science" side of the spectrum.
> Now in December the scientists will be comfortably ahead of the laypeople in their understanding of the Coronavirus.
In most respects surely, but all? And again: might even seemingly completely innocuous statements like this possibly have Systemic Consequences?
[1] How Much Does It Cost To Find A Higgs Boson?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/07/05/how-much-d...
> The Large Hadron Collider took about a decade to construct, for a total cost of about $4.75 billion. There are several different experiments going on at the LHC, including the CMS and ATLAS Detectors which discovered the Higgs boson. CERN contributes about 20% of the cost of those experiments, which is a total of about $5.5 billion a year. The remainder of the funding for those experiments is provided by international collaborations. Computing power is also a significant part of the cost of running CERN - about $286 million annually. Electricity costs alone for the LHC run about $23.5 million per year. The total operating budget of the LHC runs to about $1 billion per year.
> The Large Hadron Collider was first turned on in August of 2008, then stopped for repairs in September until November 2009. Taking all of those costs into consideration, the total cost of finding the Higgs boson ran about $13.25 billion. That's a large amount, but there are over 50 billionaires on the Forbes list actually worth more than that. The money itself is provided by the CERN member countries, and a little over 70% of the annual budget is provided by Germany, the U.K., Italy, France and Spain. The money for the experiments also comes from large institutions such as universities and observer governments such as the United States, India, and Russia.
I think the same can be said of just about any field, but with medicine it's more clear to people who aren't experts in the field, compared to a field like physics. As I understand it, for all of modern medicine's many marvels, it can't do much about the common cold, or tinnitus. I suppose that's analogous to how we have software that can beat any human chess player, but text-to-speech is still a work in progress. Our systems have a harder time moving the pieces than picking world-class chess moves.
There are big open problems in physics, absolutely. But in the domains where our theories currently apply and that we can experiment on, we can actually use them to predict with extreme accuracy how things will behave, and we have been able to exploit this to create marvels of technology like nuclear reactors, microchips, the LHC, MRIs and many others - all with essentially 100% accuracy in everything they do.
In medicine on the other hand, we barely have one drug that works or doesn't work predictably in every person; we're not sure what to measure in someone to understand what potentially impacts any particular disease; we are still discovering entire organs in the human body every year; we have only recently realized that the trillions of bacteria that naturally live in our bodies have more than minor impact on our organism, but we still have little idea of what their effects actually are; and if we start looking at psychiatry or neuro-science or nutrition, we're not even sure we're asking the right questions, nevermind giving any of the right answers.
Hell, there are some signs that we may have a microbiome in our brain[0], long thought to be essentially aseptic in healthy humans.
[0] https://www.colorado.edu/lab/neurodegeneration/there-brain-m...