University Profs' Criticism Led to Retraction of Math Paper on Gender (2018) | Hacker News Reader

University Profs' Criticism Led to Retraction of Math Paper on Gender (2018)

chicagomaroon.com

82 pointsRafelMri97 comments

Ironicaly if the Greater Male Variability Hypothesis is true this also means that many more men are more dumber than women since women are more centered towards the gauss average.

Ironicaly this is never mentioned, they just see this is a "many more men can have a higher iq distrubution wise due to the male gauss tail stretching out further than womens, so this is sexist to say that men are smarter".

This shows you how biased all of these critics are, zero scientific discussion, pure emotional and egoistic outbursts.

They see this paper as "men are better", while in reality it says only "men are more in the extremes, both higher AND lower extremes than women."

Also if you read this: https://quillette.com/2018/09/07/academic-activists-send-a-p...

This is a good example of how NOT to handle a situation like this. The authors tried to convience the people that they were just doing science in good faith, but those feminist zaelots just saw it as "men are better".

You cannot argue with such people. Those people in charge are the opposite of intellectual academic scientists.

Sad so to see what academia has devolved to.

Sad that people in such high places have such beliefs.

The correct response in this situation is to tell them to go f** themselves and expose them for the immature brats that they are.

Growling like a dog before them IS ALWAYS THE WRONG COURSE OF ACTION.

If you growel before them you give them authority, this is the worst thing that you can do and will perpetuate this anti-scientific cycle.

I think you meant “grovel”. Growling like a dog before them would be quite a fun experiment.

True my bad

>Ironicaly this is never mentioned, they just see this is a "many more men can have a higher iq distrubution wise due to the male gauss tail stretching out further than womens, so this is sexist to say that men are smarter".

Because many advocates of GMVH are only interested in justifying the gender imbalance in leadership positions biologically, dismissing any well known social factors (e.g. competence rating on double blind fake CVs)?

"Feminists say GMVH means men are all smarter" is a gross oversimplification of the situation.

If you have 2.5 hours to spend on a video essay, I'd very much recommend "The Bell Curve"[1], a breakdown of the book of the same name. Not so much for the racism part, but for the background on the construction of IQ.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo

>Because many advocates of GMVH are only interested in justifying the gender imbalance in leadership positions biologically

This is also a gross oversimplification. Yes, there are a bunch of men at the top willing to take advantage of anything, but there are also hoards of men at the bottom tired of being blamed for things they have no control over and potentially be "indebted" socially, who would never see any benefit from the guys at the top.

Problem being the same, address the elephant in the room and stop having people at the top only interested in themselves and willing to exploit everything.

> while in reality it says only "men are more in the extremes, both higher AND lower extremes than women."

The paper explicitly does not say that, have a look at the conclusion of the paper in question.

Regardless weather this hypothesis is true or false, I think the story is that even investigating the idea is somehow VERBOTEN!

Most often it isn't the authors of that make the outrageous claims themselves, it is the selective interpretation of some of the readers. You could argue that they are begging the question but I don't think this is true either in modern academic settings.

Agreed that academia should have had some integrity and deny the first demands of studies getting removed. Even the bad ones that at least can serve as negative example if nothing else.

> Ironicaly this is never mentioned

What are you talking about? That is mentioned everywhere. Have a look at the Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesis): "Note that the curve with the greater variability (green) yields higher values in both the lowest and highest ends of the range."

The evidence points strongly towards confirmation for the hypothesis regarding intelligence. Only the reason is unclear.

> This shows you how biased all of these critics are, zero scientific discussion, pure emotional and egoistic outbursts.

Pure projection on your part. You are not even familiar with the current discussion.

>A University investigation cleared two University of Chicago mathematics professors of wrongdoing after they independently criticized a controversial mathematics paper [...]

I'd like to know the sense of "independently" that the author had in mind here, considering the two are married to one another. Also worth wondering whether the paper was intrinsically "controversial", or merely made to be so by virtue of the complaint(s).

> I'd like to know the sense of "independently" that the author had in mind here, considering the two are married to one another.

Yes, dear.

My assumption is that in this context 'independently' means not in their official duties or roles as people affiliated with the university. So the university investigated them for something they did on their own time

The paper itself is a chuckle fest (as are many Intelligencer submissions) and concludes:

> The goal here has been neither to challenge nor to confirm Darwin’s and other researchers’ observations of greater male variability for any given species or any given trait, but rather to propose an elementary mathematical theory based on biological/evolutionary mechanisms that might serve as a starting point to help explain how one sex of a species might tend to evolve with greater variability than the other sex.

ie. Such a thing may or may not be true, but if it were true there is a pachinko machine that can create that effect.

Of course, more generally, if you posit a distribution, there exists a pachinko machine that can recreate it.

What's telling is that this paper appends two runs of empirical data sets:

A.1 Primary Research Studies Supporting the Greater Male Variability Hypothesis

and

A.2 Primary Research Studies Not Supporting the Greater Male Variability Hypothesis

so they're not even backing a horse in any race, just stirring the pot for a giggle .. via 30+ pages with references.

Everything is a chuckle if you replace phrases like "plausible evolutionary mechanism" with "pachinko machine".

It's a valid equivalence.

The paper could equally describe an plausible evolutionary mechanism by which the male sex evolves to be tiny in comparison to females who consume them after snu-snu.

While this has zero bearing on the reality of human evolution it has an example in nature in the spider kingdom.

> While this has zero bearing on the reality of human evolution

It does have bearing. It is proof by example that biology and evolution does not rule out such a possibility. For the actual paper in question, it is proof that such an outcome is not (yet) ruled out even in the specific case of humans.

The possibilities are endless (albeit enumerable), sure - that's the chuckle - it's a given from the outset and flows from the axioms of the game.

This paper doesn't take a broad view and show that many things are possible, it takes a narrow view and demonstrates that one specific thing (among many) is possible.

ie. a dull trite result.

The fact that many possiblies can follow from evolution does bring any specific light to bear on the actual extent reality of human evolution as it is today.

The same arguments here that show it is possible for a mechanism of weights to favour more variation in males can equally be used to show that weights exist to favour more variation in females, or, as in the case of spider, that weights could exist to favor a size variation in which females dwarf males.

Fascinating .. but an abstract result that sheds nothing on the current extant actuality.

It's a math paper, not one in evolutionary biology. Only the mathematical aspect is of relevance here, and either it holds water or it doesn't. You can assume a seven-dimensional space, and for analyzing the geometry of such space it is irrelevant whether it actually exists somewhere in the universe or beyond.

High-energy physicists make up theories for the mechanisms behind phenomena that may or may not even exist all the time.

One can question the utility of this but no one strings up such authors for heresy.

Theoretical physics does not aim to influence social policy.

That's news to me. How do all those nifty particle accelerators get funded, then?

The budget is only loosely related to social policy. Social policy is related to who gets what rights and priveleges.

And a group of physicist getting very expensive toys while the chemist/biologist/psychologist do not is exactly that. The physicist have rights and privileges the others don't have.

Does this paper aim to influence policy?

Of course. All anthropological work about contemporary society seeks to inform public opinion which dictates policy.

That's a pretty broad statement about a broad field. Can you provide any citations that back up your position?

Could you give any explanation for why anthropological studies on contemporary society would be published if not to share their findings?

>All anthropological work about contemporary society seeks to inform public opinion which dictates policy.

I'm specifically asking about the goal of informing public opinion and dictating policy which is a wildly different goal than just 'sharing their findings'.

Here is your claim:

>Theoretical physics does not aim to influence social policy.

'aim to influence social policy' is an extremely specific goal that you're prescribing to all anthropology of modern society, I'm asking you to back up that claim

I said "which", not "and". Public opinion is inherently tied to publishing findings. Their goal is to publish their findings, which informs public opinion, which dictates policy.

You're claiming that I claimed that the authors prescribed policy, which I clearly did not.

No, I'm refuting your claim about anthropology in general having an 'aim to influence public policy'.

Public policy is not the focus of anthropology, where did you get that idea?

Anthropology is not political science

You used very specific words that mean very specific things. 'Aim to influence' means that the goal is literally to influence public policy. That's not what the study of anthropology is about.

>Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including past human species.[1][2][3] Social anthropology studies patterns of behaviour, while cultural anthropology[1][2][3] studies cultural meaning, including norms and values.

Anthropologists generally try not to interfere with the society they're studying, they don't want to impact the system because they are just there to record. Not to change. Of course there will be some activists in many fields but that is not the goal in anthropology.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropology

They're not prescribing any policy in the paper. But you seem to be saying it's impossible to write about your observations of humans without having some ulterior political motive. This seems pretty tenuous, can you back it up? What policy do you think the authors are trying to secretly advocate for?

That is not at all what I said or even implied. You're extrapolating.

My point is that studies seek to inform on their areas of focus. Particle physics spending policy does not affect social issues. Anthropology of contemporary society does.

In what way would this paper affect social issues?

Edit: Someone asked "does this paper aim to influence policy" and you replied "of course." I'm asking how.

Are we talking about the same paper here? I thought this paper discussed a possible mechanism for a hypothesis that they openly acknowledge may or may not be true. This may be fun mathematics but it doesn't seem like any basis to influence public opinion or social policy.

This paper would have definitely gone completely unnoticed, just a cute little theoretical exercise, if it hadn't been blown up into a public controversy by its critics.

What social policy would you suggest a study like this could influence?

> strings

I see what you did there.

uh...no. They are not stirring the pot. Proposing rigorous processes that approximate observed phenomena is a very common line of research. Many of the phenomena in financial markets that I cared about when I was trading had researchers coming up with models/modifying existing models to attempt to generate the same observed risk premia.

Retracting a paper should only be done in select situations, like fraud, plagiarism or violating ethical guidelines. Was any of that present? If you retract papers that were just 'wrong' you would be retracting at least 50% of the work published in a lot of fields. Furthermore you would leave a blind spot in the research, other researchers might try and pursue those retracted ideas not realizing they are dead ends.

I agree, but it's not clear from the article if the paper is even wrong.

As I understand it there's robust evidence in support of the hypothesis itself (GMVH), and this paper was an attempt to model how the effect could come about.

It looks to me more like it was retracted for being distasteful to the journal editor's wife.

According to the author and a publisher no scientific criticism has been offered.

Suppose some had. Almost every paper has some shortcomings on which it can be validly criticized. But how much criticism those shortcomings generate, and if that criticism results in a retraction or academic censure, depends on if the paper dared to endanger any modern-day holy cows.

Then you could as well argue peer review should not look at methodology, but only for fraud, plagiarism and ethics violations. A retraction can in some cases be seem as a delayed failed (broader) peer review.

Methodology is part of fraud and maybe ethics. It's also required in the future for meta analysis. It might be that published papers disagree on the topic. If there are problems with methodology you can't really use the data as it's noise (at best).

A retracted paper doesn't disappear from the surface of the world. It is still indexed in commercial and institutional repositories, some of which will also have copies. Retracting is the right thing to do if the authors or editors want to show that they cannot vouch for what they have published.

"Retracting is the right thing to do if the authors or editors want to show that they cannot vouch for what they have published."

Alternatively, they might have retracted to have the bullying and intimidation stop.

It's like saying a kid hands over his lunch money everyday to the school bully because he realizes his mom actually wants the bully to have more spending power. Or the business owner truly wants to hire the mobster as clearly you never know when some random pyromaniac decides he feels a bit cold.

This is clearly a case where it was redacted due to pressure. This is the classical and most relevant threat to science.

> If you retract papers that were just 'wrong' you would be retracting at least 50% of the work published in a lot of fields.

Wouldn't that be a win? Don't people read & reference these published, reviewed, non-retracted 'wrong' papers with the assumption that they are right?

A competent researcher wouldn't make that assumption. Random idiots might do so, though.

A great example of Streisand effect.

I would have never heard about this paper if the wife of the editor didn't censor it.

Interesting hypothesis and nothing too far fetched, unless you're hellbent on proving men and women are the exact same.

The paper itself:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.04184.pdf

There's a whole genre of simple mathematical models that excuse centuries of well documented oppression.

Like the 'only a small amount of desire to live near similar people leads to self-segregation' thing.

You know what else leads to segregation? Actual laws that enforce it at the point of a gun with legal and extra-legal terrorism.

If only there was some way to tell which of these occurred in real history.

I don't know what point you're making. Should those models not be allowed to exist? Usually the way this goes is that a scientist proposes a model to describe something, and it's fine. When it goes wrong is usually when the public picks up that science and uses it to do something horrible.

The thing about self-segregation behaviour you mention is a basic fact of life, you can see it everywhere, all the time, chances are you've done it to yourself if you've ever been embedded in a different culture for any amount of time. It's interesting and potentially useful to build a scientific model out of it for analysis or other purposes. There's no problem at all with it until some politician thinks it allows them to be bigoted and oppressive.

If the actual 'science' implied in any way that people should be oppressed based on the models, it was obviously bad science and would not have stood the test of time in any case.

I've created a simple mathmatical model that suggests they wouldn't get created in the first place, so we no longer need to discuss whether banning them was a good idea or not, it just happened naturally, and there's nothing anyone could have done to change that.

And the obviously hyperbolical nature of that model still doesn't prevent you from creating it or from it leading to potential further research oppurtunities (in fact,please do release the paper that results from such,I'd love to read it.) and following logically from that it still doesn't prevent anyone from creating a model that disagrees or from following any potential research opputunities that such would lead to.

The validity of a mathematical model is dependent solely upon it's internal (and,depending on the extent of the research,external) consistency.Whether it possess any form of 'accuracy to the real world' only comes into play when people who don't understand this attempt to use it to justify their preconceptions.

Here is the model:

Individual agents have a mild preference for publishing only models I agree with. They will never publish anything that I 2/3 disagree with (I rank all published papers in order of preference and the bottom 1/3 fail this test) and will immediately retract anything they have published that I disagree with to that extent and replace it with something I do agree with a random amount that places it in the top 66%. We start with them having published things that I randomly agree or disagree with.

No other factor than my agreement will have any impact on their decision to publish or retract.

Surprisingly, with only this mild preference people will automatically self censor and not publish any models I disagree with.

In reality, it's a series of laws that stops them, but we've just proved it's natural so really do those laws even matter?

It would help if you read the parent comment and made a response to its contents. In so far, you've just validated his point - as a member of "the public" not understanding science and using partial truths to reinforce previously held beliefs.

The point I think the parent is trying to make is that the problem is not scientists creating models, the problem is people not understanding the models and using it as an excuse to be vicious; or politicians using an untrue view of models to further their own agendas.

> Like the 'only a small amount of desire to live near similar people leads to self-segregation' thing.

> You know what else leads to segregation? Actual laws that enforce it at the point of a gun with legal and extra-legal terrorism.

"Tell me you don't understand social science, without telling me you don't understand social science." The point of these models is not usually to argue for the status quo. Often they're made as a simple sanity check. For instance, if even small incentives towards aggregation can lead to self-segregation, this changes the policies we would choose to try and create a different outcome.

It's not a small incentive though. It's a toy model where the only thing that the agent cares about is how many of his neighbours are the same color as him. Every single person in this model society will immediately move house if 1/3 of their immediate neighbours are the wrong color and not move to any such neighbourhood for any reason, since there are no other motivations in the model.

Which apparently was considered a 'mild' preference by the person who made the model, in the middle of the civil rights era.

It basically renders any immigration inpossible for example, is that really a mild preference?

Is it really that surprising that people might have wanted to model "preferences for segregation" in the middle of the civil rights era? That's when controversial policies such as school busing were started, and the implied argument for those was not very different from the one that's surfaced by this model - segregation was understood as self-reinforcing, and only very strong policy choices could drive a "mixing" outcome.

You are referring to Schelling's model, and the threshold he found for segregation wasn't 1/3 but 2/3 'wrong', i.e. that everyone prefer not to be in a minority of less than 1/3. This was just was striking about it – that even if every individual is happy with being in a minority, the population can still segregate. I'm not aware that he ever referred to the degree of preference in his model as 'mild', or small. It's relatively small, compared to what you might otherwise expect – I think most people would have guessed that it took a preference of 1/2 to produce self-segregation.

I think my point still stands.

People will move for one reason only, when they are in a 1/3 minority or smaller, and when they move they will only move to a place where they are not in such a minority, which alters the balance for the other people living there causing the chain reaction.

It's a neat mathmatical toy, but when you spell out what it's doing it's tautological and obvious, which is cool for maths, less so for social policy.

It's not novel to claim that the possibility of men going full Genghis Khan might result in greater trait-variability for men and explain the Lek paradox and so forth.

The paper seems to distance itself from Bateman's principle but I can't figure how it meaningfully differs besides being framed very weirdly.

Here’s one of the authors of the mentioned article explaining how the situation developed for more context: https://quillette.com/2018/09/07/academic-activists-send-a-p...

Context:

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2018/09/11/on-the-recently-re...

https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2018/09/17/mathematics-mat...

https://quillette.com/2018/09/07/academic-activists-send-a-p... (by one of the paper's authors)

http://www.personal.psu.edu/cpc16/politico-email-29nov2018.p... (mail criticizing Quillette article)

According to a document drop publicly released on Retraction Watch, Senechal wrote to Hill and Tabachnikov, concerned about the “very real possibility that the right-wing media may pick [the article] up and hype it internationally.” She proposed a round-table discussion be held in lieu of publishing the paper, one that never occurred.

I don't understand why the people involved would care if some political group picked up the paper. The best political move for the profs in this case is to state their criticisms of the paper and move on. Stamping down on it just makes it louder. Ignoring the valid academic criticisms of the piece makes it look deliberately pushed out to the world. Just comment and move on.

This feels like another academic advertisement for internet politics. The 'sexism makes politics' angle is so worn out lately.

Because you don’t want yourself or the journal your are editor for to be used as a weapon by right wing extremists (i.e. so called conservatives). Even if the research would be true and we could use the knowledge to improve society, the right wing will pick it up and use it to promote sexism and racism.

Except that right wing trolls will pick up literally anything for their own purposes. Trying to avoid that by playing politics about scientific matters is a fool's game, it only compounds the problem further.

Are you sure about that? I’m sure that you probably could find small but significant (in the statistical sense) differences of intelligence between races and genders if you tried hard enough. It would be strange otherwise. Would that knowledge make the world a better or worse place in the current political climate? What would your thoughts be about the motivation behind that research? Do you really think it would be honest, unbiased search for truth?

The "current political climate" around race and gender is so thoroughly screwed up that it's hard to think of any real research activity that might make it actually worse. And if you care about e.g. educational outcomes across races and/or genders (which plenty of people do, seeing as these are highly relevant to broader social goals!), the question you refer to is in fact relevant-- if only to conclusively rule out larger differences as a possible factor, and place the research spotlight on other things-- such as e.g. pervasive, systemic dysfunction within educational institutions themselves.

Why doesn't good people fund good science where they get all these numbers for difference in intelligence etc? Currently the only sources for those numbers comes from biased people, so getting the real numbers out there should be a win and reduce racism, no? Because without those numbers people will view the difference as much bigger than they are, that is how bias works.

You fight bias with real numbers and statistics, for example whenever biased people talk about criminal immigrants we point to statistics showing that immigrants aren't very criminal, I don't see why this situation is different.

> You fight bias with real numbers and statistics,

I really wish that was the case. Say that the research say that group A is slightly more intelligent than group B, but that the variation between each group is much larger than the small difference between the averages. The only thing that will be repeated ad nausea, and used to justify all sorts of inequality, is group A is more intelligent than group B.

> for example whenever biased people talk about criminal immigrants we point to statistics showing that immigrants aren't very criminal

In my country immigrants are about twice as likely as the native population to have a criminal record. A lot of that can be explained by bias among the police and courts, and by social class. What people remember is TWICE as criminal, which rapidly becomes “most of them are criminals”, not that 97% don’t have any criminal record (compared to 98.5).

People can and will make up all sorts of claims, they don't need formal research as an excuse. So having reliable information about these things is still preferable to not having it. Then a ludicrous claim like "most people in X group are criminals" can at least be debunked easily.

Part of the problem is that the question itself is not very sensible in the first place. But if you want to ask more complex questions, you first need to conclusively set aside simpler ones, even ones that are so ludicrous as to only be useful as a convenient straw man. So this is very much a worthwhile activity.

And thus to degrade the sense that you’re working for truth instead of just your political agenda.

There’s always some kind of bias that direct your research, be conscious of it or not. Thinking that there’s any kind of pure truth seeking in any research that has social implications is utterly naive.

And it is ridiculous to compare unavoidable unconscious bias and pulling research papers that don’t align with your politics.

There was a very real possibility that political opponents would like the result of the paper.

Thus giving weight to the political opponents claims that academia has an unfair bias towards one political position and is willing to distort the truth to accommodate this bias.

I really don’t want academia to be driven by politics and shit like this retraction just encourages it.

Surely the right wing media will now jump on the fact this paper was "cancelled" as it was communicating an inconvenient truth for the wokerati?

You can't win. The best thing to do is to let such things go as this article would have gone unnoticed.

Or, we could not make decisions about what to publish and what not based on how the lunatic fringe might react to it.

If only. There is a very vocal minority that is advocating for tolerance and freedom of expression, but only if it aligns to their world view that "is at the right side of history"

Maybe this explains why political conservatives are skeptical of scientists?

imho the "Academic Activists Send a Published Paper Down the Memory Hole"[1] first hand account gives a better insight, as clearly the Chicago Maroon piece leaves too many questions.

[1] https://quillette.com/2018/09/07/academic-activists-send-a-p...

I honestly don't understand supressions of such things. I feel like to shows that the people who want to supress it know it's true but don't want to deal with the truth.

Scientists who studied in medieval times how many angels can fit a needle tip must have reincarnated and continued their research in an adjacent field.

> However, the idea that such questions had a prominent place in medieval scholarship has been debated, and it has not been proven that this particular question was ever disputed.[6] One theory is that it is an early modern fabrication,[a] used to discredit scholastic philosophy at a time when it still played a significant role in university education. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_many_angels_can_dance_on_t...

They had to be "cleared of wrongdoing" after they criticized a mathematics paper?

The morality police in the US aren't so different than in other places.

No,

> After Hill’s paper was published in a second journal, the New York Journal of Mathematics (NYJM), University of Chicago mathematics professor Benson Farb, who is married to Wilkinson, partook in the editorial decision to retract the paper. Hill wrote to the University claiming that their actions constituted a violation of his freedom of speech, but the University found no evidence of wrongdoing after an investigation earlier this year.

The wrongdoing of which they had to be cleared was a conflict of interest, due to her husband being the editor of one of the journals.

Imagine the 'indirect effect' that these kinds of things have on discussions throughout the industry.

Reddit just had a discussion about the video 'Fat' (i.e. 'Bad') by Weird Al Mocking Michael Jackson.

It 'couldn't be made today' first because it wouldn't even be pitched in the first place - too much risk. They'll try another idea.

Maybe it's 'not nice' in 2022 to use the term 'fat' - or, maybe it's not so bad, and we're just too concerned about everything - the point is - the concept won't ever really be 'thought of' because everyone is aware of the 'new rules'. It's a form of systematic oppression. It's all over the place.

I suggest we should probably err on the side of expression as long as people aren't directly doing something obviously hateful.

Especially in non-populist channels like academia.

Fox News will always find 'something' to harp on, let's not worry about what they have to say, unless we're in some kind of emergency i.e. war, insurrection, pandemic.

Let's publish, create, then talk about it.

Weird Al's "Fat" did not mock Michael Jackson. The "Fat" song was a parody which continued on the theme established with "Eat It". Mockery is quite different to parody.

Fun fact: Michael Jackson let them use the original "Beat It" set for "Eat It".

> It's a form of systematic oppression.

Against who? Parody artists? Weird Al has a parody along the same lines on his 2014 album and I'm not aware of any outrage.

If your biggest concern in life is being "cancelled" (a dramatic term for being criticized on the internet), I think that says more about you and your intolerance for free speech, than anyone else.

Being 'cancelled' in academia and entertainment is a very real thing that happens to artists, but more notably, as I mentioned, suppresses tons of content across the board that won't even get pitched otherwise.

While some people do overstate it, it's definitely real.

Those who diminish it are the fascists of our generation.

Sean Penn (far left activist) and Conan O'Brien (staunch centre left advocate, public supporter of Hillary Clinton etc.) publicly decried the problem as 'Stalinist' - strong words. In their experience, in private conversation in Hollywood people are freaked out about the oppression, while a few virtue signal here and there publicly while towing the party line, everyone is thinks it's nuts.

Stephen Pinker (staunch centre-left, respected academic) has spoken out about this, and faced a 'cancellation' of his own for merely suggesting publicly that the issue with policing in America is more a general problem as opposed to specifically a racial problem. The 'mob' came for him and tried to have his participation on various boards 'cancelled'.

A long list of thinkers, including the likes of Chomsky himself, had to come out and publicly admonish the 'cancellers' (mostly on the far left) for the systematic problem.

It's without modern precedent.

There's a 'civil war' between generations at the NYT (Editorial) about what constitutes 'fair'.

The 'outrage mob' has a measurable effect on academia and especially creative culture.

Producers just don't want to risk a project being annulled, and so they go out of their way to 'sanitize' efforts left and right.

The Wachowski sisters (then brothers) were 'condemned' for 'Cloud Atlas' where they dared to have people of different classes, genders and races, play various characters - frankly in attempt to display the common humanity within all of us (not some arbitrary bit of ugly humour) - though the outrage wasn't enough to hurt them, it's become a 'no go zone' for content in 2022.

Actors playing characters of different source origin i.e. someone 'non Japanese' playing a character from Anime, actors playing historical figures, actors playing arbitrary fictional characters of questionable origin etc. etc. - it's all a minefield, scaring producers away from anything.

30 Rock, made by your typically socially progressive groups, had several episodes pulled.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Go ahead and re-watch 'Superbad' - it could not be made today, it wouldn't even get pitched. Every scene is 'off message' - arbitrary bits about crude porn, jokes involving trans people, 'period' gags. It was always a bit 'outrageous' but that kind of humour will risk too much ire and so it's out. Even the actors just wouldn't want to risk being on the wrong side - look at Seth Rogen's most recent work, it's like a 180 degree shift.

Institutional entities that have been around for some time, notably 'make money' and notably have their own production ability - South Park and Family Guy, basically get a free pass.

But most people in entertainment and academia do not have power like 'Dave Chapelle' or institutional protection like 'South Park' or respect of 'Stephen Pinker' - so they 'stay on message' and 'away from controversy' or else the script does not get approved. And FYI even the people turning it away aren't ideological about it 'it's just business' and an accommodation of the outrage mob, fickle advertisers etc..

The 'outraged' a fairly small group, with a sizeable group of allies particularly among Gen Z, which can be noted in the continuous public furor over ostensibly 'terrible person', JK Rowling. The way they go on about here is medieval.

While I don't think our campuses are overtly hostile, the issue does linger.

> A long list of thinkers, including the likes of Chomsky himself, had to come out and publicly admonish the 'cancellers' (mostly on the far left) for the systematic problem.

Please re-examine what right-wing cancellation means.

School administrators leaving because of right-wing pressure that "diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives" = "CRT" = "toxic propaganda" = ideological poison" is cancelling by the right, yes? https://www.propublica.org/article/georgia-dei-crt-schools-p...

] Parents Defending Education has created “indoctrination maps” tracking everything from a district celebrating “Black Lives Matter week” to one that allows students to watch CNN Student News, while the Atlanta-based Education Veritas and Kahaian’s Protect Student Health Georgia provide portals for anonymously reporting educators supposedly sympathetic to CRT, DEI and other so-called controversial learning concepts. ...

] And with that effort came a renewed vilification of CRT, a four-decade-old theory that, contrary to its opponents’ accusations, is rarely if ever taught in K-12 public school systems (it typically is taught in graduate-level college and law school courses). ...

] Using local media coverage and lawsuits, ProPublica has identified at least 14 public school employees across the country, six of them Black, who were chased out in part by anti-CRT efforts in 2021.

Sure sounds like right-wing cancel culture to me.

Odds are, you haven't heard of them.

All the examples you gave were of famous people. But Steven Pinker is not cancelled. Sean Penn is not cancelled. JK Rowling is not cancelled. Not in any meaningful sense.

Operatively speaking, "cancel culture" seem to mean "rich and powerful who don't like to be criticized".

And it's pretty easy to show - define "cancel culture", then see how well it applies to many right-wing actions, like the Southern Baptist Convention's 8 year boycott of Disney, or the broad right-wing opposition to Kaepernick's kneel, which was much less than the recent Supreme Court judgement concerning a "quiet" prayer at the 50-yard line.

You're mixing streams.

Yes, I'm very aware of the debates surrounding CRT and public furor.

Nobody is is getting 'cancelled' due to 'CRT' - rather, it's a subject that is very rightly controversial.

'CRT' is an interesting concept, which is ultimately a bit post modern, and can be used to propagate misinformation as much as it can be a tool of enlightenment.

For example 'CRT' has is the ideology used to get rid of AP classes in high school. Does that seem reasonable? I think many would disagree with the policy. It's inherently controversial.

But that aside - nobody is 'cancelled' over it. Careers are not ruined. Authors, creative people, academics - they are all free to publish books and papers on the subject. Nobody is pulling books from the shelf because it's about 'CRT'.

"Operatively speaking, "cancel culture" seem to mean "rich and powerful who don't like to be criticized"."

No - this is completely false. The vast focus of 'cancel culture' has been focused on those who transgress values of ostensible social justice. The best examples would be Dave Chapelle on Netflix, or, Kevin Hart's cancellation of Oscar Hosting, or Comedians pulling jokes on campus.

The 'outrage' is from the young, the left.

Colin Kaepernick can publish whatever book he wants, attend whatever parade he wants, make any kind of speech he wants, and none of it would be controversial.

Disney is not pulling content because of what Floridians think about this or that, however, they absolutely are pulling and shaping content based on what social justice ideologues believe.

The JK Rowling thing I personally have the most knowledge of. There is a "continuous public furor" (read: trans people and allies criticizing her) because she is one of the many, many people obsessed with posting their opposition to trans people online.

And? JK makes statements that are supportive of trans people in her view, but that they are also different than women. It's her right.

The issue is she's being bullied and lambasted for not having the 'correct view' in the eyes of the social justice mob.

This ultimately rolls up to economics and producers get afraid.

Every work related to her new gets a bitchy frothy scathing indictment in 'The Daily Beast' and other rags because irrespective of the quality of the content, they 'hate' the author for her ideological positions, and so, they make a fuss.

She's rich and certainly her books are still popular, so she has some degree of defence, but the outrage against her is populist fascism.

'Social Justice Mobs' - particularly among the young (I'm making my assumptions from Reddit readership) are a problem. The kids are self righteous fascist.

This is an entirely separate problem from 'right wing mobs' trying to overthrow election results, denying that such a thing as 'trans' exists etc.. The means of expression of power are quite different.

I tend to be sympathetic to your arguments, and I realize what I'm raising is not directly related to your point. But as others pointed out, Yankovic was far from mocking Michael Jackson... and in fact it's well known that Jackson was in on the joke:

“Michael Jackson wasn’t just cool about my parody of ‘Beat It,’” Yankovic told People in 2016. “But he also loved my version of ‘Bad,’ which was ‘Fat.’ He even let me use the actual ‘Bad’ subway set for the ‘Fat’ video. He was very supportive, which was huge with opening the doors with other artists. Because if Michael Jackson signed on, you couldn’t really say no.”

(https://www.cheatsheet.com/entertainment/michael-jackson-acc...)

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