Matt Seymour @realmattseymour@qoto.org

@arteteco @rnitsch @peterdrake well put. I think we're in agreement there. I do have to reassess my initial comments and acknowledge my own bias.

@PakkonenCT @ChrisWilson she just turned around too fast?

@rnitsch @arteteco @peterdrake Thanks, I'll give that a read.

@rnitsch @arteteco @peterdrake ok, apologies. The male greater variability hypothesis is the issue at the heart of this. The argument has been made this is based on socialised sexism with some work done to seek out examples in other species to prove it’s a thing. My limited understanding is that it’s far from proved or agreed upon.

@RunningInCircles@mstdn.io delicious

@rnitsch @arteteco @peterdrake I fear you're trolling me now.

I've always wanted a Citroen DS... If ever I have more money than I'm quite sure what to do with, I'll get one like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzo3dsa_X6A

@rnitsch @arteteco @peterdrake Because the politics don’t go away just because we’d like them to, means this sort of thing can happen. I suspect it was entirely avoidable.

@rnitsch @arteteco @peterdrake The author clearly expected the paper to be cause controversy. The topic is controversial, and it doesn’t take much reading around to know that. What little reading I’ve done tells me the idea is far from universally accepted and quite possibly falls into the area of bias in the first place. So to cite work, which has been questioned for bias, as a basis for this paper is always going to be problematic. All, of course, just in my opinion.

@rnitsch @arteteco @peterdrake I think we probably agree on most of that. I don’t know this guy or the interactions he’s had with people and we only have one side of the story so can’t really make a judgement either way, yet we all have. It’s easy for someone to frame their position as open to critique without them really being so, something I’ve encountered a few times.

@rnitsch @arteteco @peterdrake Finally, I'd suggest that taking the attitude of true science being devoid of politics and bias, is a route to being completely blind to your own biases (which it's hard not to be anyway) and therefore lead to deeply questionable results in some cases.

@rnitsch @arteteco @peterdrake From the account of the author it sounds like the guys involved are basically asshats who knew full well what they were doing and rather than trying to find a way through the difficulties, you know... the politics, they just ploughed on regardless. I can think of a few ways this could likely have been avoided. Involve a woman, for example, in the work. Two men putting out a paper that adds fuel to an argument that brings up strong emotions is a recipe for political suicide. And lo... that's what happened. People are people and if you take the attitude that people in academia are somehow different then you're going to run into these sorts of problems. Screaming "censorship" doesn't help. It makes it easier for the whole thing to be brushed off as a bitter old white dude upset that women are working in his field now. Whether there's any truth in that is irrelevant because politics.

@arteteco @rnitsch @peterdrake I agree, it's problematic.

@rnitsch @arteteco @peterdrake I understand the idea but it simply isn't possible. It is not possible for humans to be truly objective and it is not possible to remove politics from anything. So, with that in mind, how does one go about releasing some work that has the potential to be cause problems? Any position that adopts a "This is science and science is facts and if you don't like it you don't like facts and I don't care what you think" is not the way to do it.

Since installing Pi-Hole for my home network more than a third of DNS lookups are being blocked. General web browsing is so much faster as a result.

@arteteco @peterdrake @rnitsch it isn’t trash. It’s maths. Maths is maths so from that perspective the paper is fine. That it can be seen as legitimising a contended and potentially deeply problematic hypothesis is why there’s a problem. Politics comes into this of course. Some will argue that idea should be discussed and not suppressed. Other will say that it’s unhelpful to add fuel to a particular fire whilst claiming not to. I can see both sides of this.

@arteteco @peterdrake @rnitsch To be fair, this paper itself is maths. I'm a mathematical idiot, however the concept behind the paper of Greater Male Variability Hypothesis is, as far as I am aware a contended idea that is far from proven. A maths exercise is all well and good, but if it serves to strengthen a disputed idea, I can see why it would end up being shelved.

@arteteco
Yes, as made available today.
@peterdrake @rnitsch