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.
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.
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.
We want curious conversation here. Not only do ideological battle and curiosity not overlap, the former destroys the latter, like a tank battle in a city park. If people can't post in the intended curious spirit, they shouldn't post at all; and if they do anyway, flags are the appropriate outcome—no? I'm not sure why this would be unclear.
It would be understandable if HN were opposed to posts and comments that "do ideological battle," but that doesn't appear to be the case. If HN's editorial policy is that "ideological battle" may be waged with impunity by one side but may not be called out by the other, that's deeply troubling.
How can there be curious conversation if an honest and frank discussion is disallowed? There's a huge social upheaval occurring, with a large number of people trying to change the status quo to focus on equity in outcome over equality in opportunity. I respectfully disagree with the idea that selectively stifling speech on just one side of that discussion will somehow make discussion more curious and open, instead of less.
I think this is literally the most predictable phenomenon that shows up on HN—it's so reliable that one can confidently predict people's politics simply by their assessment of moderator (and/or community) bias.
> How can there be curious conversation if an honest and frank discussion is disallowed?
An honest and frank discussion is not disallowed. What's disallowed is ideological rhetoric that seeks to defeat the other side instead of relate to it. That's deeply destructive of curiosity. If we were to allow it, it would actually drive everyone who isn't consumed by such passions away from HN, and that would be the death of HN. If you want to smite enemies, there are lots of other places to do it.
* https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...