Astronomer withdraws paper amid concerns

Can someone explain why sibling comment is flagged into oblivion?

Is there any sound evidence that meritocracy and "equity" are compatible? If not, I don't see why sibling comment's position is false, and I don't see how it breaks site guidelines either.

As presented here, his theory is that the careers of younger scientists depend on the qualitative judgments of older scientists.

The field is convinced the judgments of older scientists are systemically, oppressively wrong on matters of sex and race.

So the only acceptable judgment is criticism of the qualitative judgments of older scientists. He can only be un-shunned by criticizing scientists like himself.

I can't speak for the critics because I am not in that particular field and would not have called for its retraction. But having read it, I do think the paper exemplifies a deeply flawed schema for how science works today and how scientists should be judged. In my opinion it shouldn't have been published, at least because it's superficial and doesn't contribute much in practice beyond citations or h index, to the extent those might be used. Should it have been retracted? I don't know and don't really care, to the extent I think there's lots of stuff published in the academic literature that's questionable.

The paper makes these assumptions, at least implicitly: (1) that scientific value should be evaluated in terms of contemporaneous reputation of some sort, and (2) that scientific products reflect something in the individual, as opposed to groups, political factors, and so forth. Both of these assumptions are deeply flawed, or in the least, might be seen as controversial.

I can't speak to astronomy in particular, but in biomedicine academics has become a sort of FOMO rather than focus on correctness, rigor, or insight. In my areas, large citation counts almost always reflect an idea or evidence being on the mind of lots of people, with a small number just having been first to get it on paper for whatever reason. It's kind of like trivial patents or something, where something has a lot of value but is pretty obvious to anyone knowledgable working in the field. Then on top of that you have the group-work phenomenon where things really reflect the group, and not the individual, but because of promotion, the nature of crowds, etc. certain individuals are always trying to soak up attention like a black hole.

Take large observatory projects, or probe missions. Does sending a probe to a planet reflect 1 PI? 2 co-PIs? The team? There's lots of things like this but even more incremental.

It also ignores the role of political factors, which are huge. Imagine a computer science department where all of the non-hardware faculty are bullied out of the department by those doing hardware, physics-type research because of a belief on the part of the latter that anything non-hardware based isn't "real science." Junior faculty are threatened, not given tenure, senior faculty have their salaries frozen and are slandered, people leave in droves until they get what they want. Do we judge someone in that type of environment the same as someone who is surrounded by supportive colleagues?

Academics is broken, and this paper sort of proceeds as it's not. It's not really about diversity, except to the extent that diversity issues can often be a canary with regard to deeper problems with abuse, dysfunction, and corruption.

The short version is this: the paper is circular. Foxes guarding the henhouse, etc.