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So much for the marketplace of ideas. The PC vigilantes have taken over.
Forbidden facts and scientific papers that are erased: Thou shalt not discuss intelligence
Announcing the advent of the disappeared scientific paper:
Three days later, however, the paper had vanished. And a few days after that, a completely different paper by different authors appeared at exactly the same page of the same volume (NYJM Volume 23, p 1641+) where mine had once been.
What topic is too hot to discuss? In this case, hotter than climate — variability of intelligence. Obviously, it is an irrelevant construct, so irrelevant it must be outlawed. This debate got so ugly, half the board members of the second journal threatened not just to resign but to harass their own journal til “it died”. It’s that bad.
These institutions are sitting ducks — staffed with nice busy people who avoid conflict and who are not equipped to handle the missiles coming. Empiricism and rational debate is being replaced with bullying and censorship. See his plea at the end. To fight back against the bullies, spread the word, buy Ted Hill’s book, or subscribe to Quillette.
Quillette: Academic Activists Send a Published Paper Down the Memory Hole
Ted Hill is Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Georgia Tech. He has just published a memoir PUSHING LIMITS: From West Point to Berkeley and Beyond.
In the highly controversial area of human intelligence, the ‘Greater Male Variability Hypothesis’ (GMVH) asserts that there are more idiots and more geniuses among men than among women. Darwin’s research on evolution in the nineteenth century found that, although there are many exceptions for specific traits and species, there is generally more variability in males than in females of the same species throughout the animal kingdom.
Evidence for this hypothesis is fairly robust and has been reported in species ranging from adders and sockeye salmon to wasps and orangutans, as well as humans. Multiple studies have found that boys and men are over-represented at both the high and low ends of the distributions in categories ranging from birth weight and brain structures and 60-meter dash times to reading and mathematics test scores. There are significantly more men than women, for example, among Nobel laureates, music composers, and chess champions—and also among homeless people, suicide victims, and federal prison inmates.
Darwin wondered why males might have evolved to be more variable than females, but could not settle on an answer, so Ted P. Hill took up the search…
My aim was not to prove or disprove that the hypothesis applies to human intelligence or to any other specific traits or species, but simply to discover a logical reason…
I came up with a simple intuitive mathematical argument based on biological and evolutionary principles and enlisted Sergei Tabachnikov, a Professor of Mathematics at Pennsylvania State University, to help me flesh out the model.
He got great feedback, the preprint was published, the paper reviewed, typeset, accepted and scheduled. But at about the same time James Damore was triggering international strife at Google for suggesting that differences in gender variability might explain gender disparities in careers in Silicon Valley.
The accepted article was published as a preprint and then the trouble began: A representative of the Women In Mathematics (WIM) chapter in his department at Penn State warned that “the paper might be damaging to the aspirations of impressionable young women.” She worried that some will see maths being used to “support a very controversial, and potentially sexist, set of ideas…”. . . .
Forbidden facts and scientific papers that are erased: Thou shalt not discuss intelligence
Announcing the advent of the disappeared scientific paper:
Three days later, however, the paper had vanished. And a few days after that, a completely different paper by different authors appeared at exactly the same page of the same volume (NYJM Volume 23, p 1641+) where mine had once been.
What topic is too hot to discuss? In this case, hotter than climate — variability of intelligence. Obviously, it is an irrelevant construct, so irrelevant it must be outlawed. This debate got so ugly, half the board members of the second journal threatened not just to resign but to harass their own journal til “it died”. It’s that bad.
These institutions are sitting ducks — staffed with nice busy people who avoid conflict and who are not equipped to handle the missiles coming. Empiricism and rational debate is being replaced with bullying and censorship. See his plea at the end. To fight back against the bullies, spread the word, buy Ted Hill’s book, or subscribe to Quillette.
Quillette: Academic Activists Send a Published Paper Down the Memory Hole
Ted Hill is Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Georgia Tech. He has just published a memoir PUSHING LIMITS: From West Point to Berkeley and Beyond.
In the highly controversial area of human intelligence, the ‘Greater Male Variability Hypothesis’ (GMVH) asserts that there are more idiots and more geniuses among men than among women. Darwin’s research on evolution in the nineteenth century found that, although there are many exceptions for specific traits and species, there is generally more variability in males than in females of the same species throughout the animal kingdom.
Evidence for this hypothesis is fairly robust and has been reported in species ranging from adders and sockeye salmon to wasps and orangutans, as well as humans. Multiple studies have found that boys and men are over-represented at both the high and low ends of the distributions in categories ranging from birth weight and brain structures and 60-meter dash times to reading and mathematics test scores. There are significantly more men than women, for example, among Nobel laureates, music composers, and chess champions—and also among homeless people, suicide victims, and federal prison inmates.
Darwin wondered why males might have evolved to be more variable than females, but could not settle on an answer, so Ted P. Hill took up the search…
My aim was not to prove or disprove that the hypothesis applies to human intelligence or to any other specific traits or species, but simply to discover a logical reason…
I came up with a simple intuitive mathematical argument based on biological and evolutionary principles and enlisted Sergei Tabachnikov, a Professor of Mathematics at Pennsylvania State University, to help me flesh out the model.
He got great feedback, the preprint was published, the paper reviewed, typeset, accepted and scheduled. But at about the same time James Damore was triggering international strife at Google for suggesting that differences in gender variability might explain gender disparities in careers in Silicon Valley.
The accepted article was published as a preprint and then the trouble began: A representative of the Women In Mathematics (WIM) chapter in his department at Penn State warned that “the paper might be damaging to the aspirations of impressionable young women.” She worried that some will see maths being used to “support a very controversial, and potentially sexist, set of ideas…”. . . .