Physics in a diverse world, or a spherical cow model of physics talent | Hacker News Reader

Physics in a diverse world, or a spherical cow model of physics talent

arxiv.org

38 pointsmathgenius19 comments

From what I can tell from this text, their solution to increase diversity is to add more dimensions on which to judge a candidate, since an infinite dimensional orange is all skin. In this way any given candidate could be judged as best so when hiring based on objective factors you can also give preference to diverse candidates.

Which seems to be a version of just arbitrarily choosing a candidate that you wanted to hire(for diversity purposes), but who wouldn't normally meet the criteria.

It's a pure political text designed to aggrandize the author without actually committing to a solution or another. He rejects affirmative action but then talks about multidimensionality as a tool to justify it in practice, as you point out.

He observes (correctly) that poverty is one of the strongest drivers of exclusion, which is a nice political trope, but then ignores that idea going further with his model of talent distributed randomly to spherical cows.

Well, guess what, talent is not distributed randomly, the way people get exceptional in one of their dimensions is by practicing and developing it. When a series of great filters are applied beginning in kindergarten for some people based on some factor of race, class, gender etc., they will not have ever had the chance to develop relevant aptitudes and will always look flat no matter what projection you apply to their sphere.

My reading of the text is that "dimensions" he is talking about are the various ways of being good at physics, not the many ways an individual person can be talented. From the text:

"...What this suggests to me is that there are a huge number of ways of being a great physicist and that in turn suggests there are many ways of being a great physicist that we haven’t seen yet. Diversity is critical to the future of physics, I believe, because it is imperative to explore this vast space of physics talent and that means encouraging people who are different and who think and act differently..."

This is a great way of thinking about diversity. As a physics phd student myself I have observed this a lot -- that the students who put together a fantastic dissertation project are often not the ones who come in with a great transcript or who sound the smartest when asking questions in class. I see that other commenters are intent on misunderstanding this, which is a shame.

Edited to add: separate from the discussion about what this means for admitting students or hiring professors, another important part of this is on the education and mentorship side. A uniform academic (or workplace) culture that rewards people who fulfill a narrow conception of merit will exclude people who have a lot to contribute, but are made to feel uncomfortable in that culture and devalued in that conception of merit.

Sadly I have never seen a diversity initiative that tried to help creative students who weren't getting good grades, or any other way to help increase diversity of thought in physics. Taking the people of different colors with the best grades doesn't lead to the diversity you talk about, instead it seem to make the criteria we use for merit ever narrower in order to ensure fairness, so we are really going backwards.

I agree that DEI programs rarely take this form, but there are places where this is really the model, including in my program. Even then I would not claim that it is practiced perfectly, but it seems to do a pretty good job of emphasizing the right things.

Could you point out your or some of the other places that have a good model for DEI? My department has been struggling with this and will be redoing their mentorship program in the near future.

Maybe this a good place to start: https://www.science.org/content/article/michigan-s-surprisin...

I see that other commenters are intent on misunderstanding this, which is a shame.

Or perhaps they just disagree?

To be clear, I mean to say that they are intent on misunderstanding one proposal from the talk, which is a small piece of what the talk is about. They take that one piece and make unflattering assumptions about its context -- assumptions which are explicitly addressed in the talk. If they brought evidence or experience to refute the experience of the speaker, that would be a different thing. They did not.

Critical context - the author ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Georgi ) was a career physics prof. at Harvard University. He is very aware of how badly even attempting to speak more truthfully about some aspects of diversity, at a supposedly candid and off-the-record conference, turned out for Harvard's President Larry Summers ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Summers#Differences_b... ).

Reasonable assumption: He carefully self-censored in writing the article. Then ran it past several trusted friends, asking for their additional censorship.

In Russia we say "spherical horse" instead of "spherical cow". I suppose that's because the russian translation of "horse" ("конь") sounds somewhat similar to "cow", and the translated phrase has the same rhythm as the original one. With "cow" ("корова") the translated phrase turns out to be a little tongue-twistey.

> The number of racial minorities in the applicant pool was still almost zero.

What does this mean? Is racial minority a synonym for “non-East-asian, non-Indian, non-white”? Or where there no Indians? I assume there where white and East Asian people? But no latin americans? Or is it an American euphemism for non-black?

Here is a useless, but interesting remark about spherical models: the surface area of a spherical hyper-cow reaches maximum in 7 dimensions, then rapidly shrinks to zero. This should give an idea what hyper-cow is ideal.

And the volume reaches its maximum at 5 dimensions.

And the surface area to volume ratio grows without bound

Prioritizing "diversity" over doing good Physics is the best way to sabotage science in western institutions. Our Chinese competitors will love it.

And what makes you think diverse people can't be good at Physics?

According to Law 45 of the 48 Laws of Power, an effective approach is to employ a comforting deception: preach change, and even make changes behind the scenes, but maintain the comforting appearance of familiar institutions and traditions.

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