Witch Hunt at CERN

From the BBC website:

"A senior scientist has given what has been described as a "highly offensive" presentation about the role of women in physics, the BBC has learned. At a workshop organised by Cern, Prof Alessandro Strumia of Pisa University said that "physics was invented and built by men, it's not by invitation". He said male scientists were being discriminated against because of ideology rather than merit.

He was speaking at a workshop in Geneva on gender and high energy physics. Prof Strumia has since defended his comments, saying he was only presenting the facts. Cern, the European nuclear research centre, described Prof Strumia's presentation as "highly offensive". The centre, which discovered the Higgs Boson in 2012, has removed slides used in the talk from its website "in line with a code of conduct that does not tolerate personal attacks and insults".

Prof Strumia, who regularly works at Cern, presented the results of a study of published research papers from an online library. He told his audience of young, predominantly female physicists that his results "proved" that "physics is not sexist against women. However the truth does not matter, because it is part of a political battle coming from outside".

This is all wearisomely familiar from the James Damore case at Google a year ago. If the institutions which are dedicated to truth in science can't defend it against political pressure, who can?

Here's the offending slide presentation (PDF) by the way. It's ponderous-humorous and a bit technical; the BBC cherry-picked remarks they could use out of context. Read it if you dare!

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On the strength of it all I decided to let Luboš back.

The Reference Frame is hereby reinstated on the right-hand side of the web version in the blog list. For all his extravagant language, grotesque and offensive personal insults and tone-deaf histrionics, the physics, though partisan, is good and the attacks on SJW nonsense merited.

In Luboš's post yesterday, "Nasty SJWs persuade spineless CERN officials to start an inquisition trial against an Italian scientist", the professor at the centre of the row, Alessandro Strumia, added this piece in the comments:

"Thank you Lubos for writing me alerting about this mess; let me clarify.

CERN organised this "gender workshop". Having recently worked on bibliometrics, I had the data relevant for the workshop, so I did the simple checks that should have been done before claiming that physicists are sexist, etc etc etc

Next I went to hear the workshop, that was ignored by almost all theorists who privately have bad opinions about it.

One of the speakers told (as if this were common knowledge) that words such as “competitive”, “conservative”, “hardworking” are bad. A participant said that physicists are second only to military in sexual harassment. And the rest was along similar lines, as clear from the quotations on my second page. Have a look at the other talks still kept on line by CERN, and switch “men" with “women”, and then decide if they are sexist.

It was clear that anything different from their line would have been discredited and ignored. And the objective results that I got from bibliometrics did not support their line: there is no discrimination against women.

This is a good news, but it's not what they want.

Like with LHC results, which are not the best we hoped, it’s our duty to present honestly what we get.

That’s why I decided that the only option (apart from self-censorship) was openly talking about the alternative ideas “discredited” in past gender workshops and that they don’t want to hear, from Simon Baron Cohen, to Summers...

Having spoken with many physicists and friends (including female physicists who attended the workshop), I am fully sure that the big majority understands, although many of them fear the consequences of speaking. I myself tried to find somebody else who dared to speak in my place, and I decided I had to speech only after having seen courageous people that in the past years begin to openly challenge the ideology (like the guy who said “ideological echo-chamber" and was fired by google), and that people thinks very different than media etc.

So I hope to survive and keep doing the physics that I like. Although I am worried that, acting on self-conservation instinct, CERN might worsen a bad situation.

After the talk, I warned important physicists there “a mess will happen”, and they believed my worries were exaggerated. So I am sure that good honest people hosted and funded the workshop underestimating that it was politically-charged and driven by people who dislike our culture based on hard and smart work and on gender-neutral merit, which I think is worth defending.

The sexist attacks against physicists might violate CERN code of conduct, but I liked that CERN is so open to free speech that we can discuss the unpleasant issues raised by the workshop. The fact that my talk is no longer freely available makes me fear that somebody might want my head to appease a political area which is highly voted by academicians, but recently not so much by the people.

I am happy if somebody wants to discuss and check honestly what I wrote in the talk, but tomorrow I have to work full day.

PS Lubos: when you started blogging, I believed you were a totally wrong idiot. But your blog contains good physics, so I kept reading, and with time, I come to realise that I was wrong, and you were right, although too much ahead of time. A very great US physicist told me that you were even moderate, before what happened to you."

That final paragraph - very interesting. But I believe, based on his words above, that Professor Strumia is too naive and trusting to be long for this world.

Update (Oct 5th 18): BackReaction has been taking a look at the citation data Prof. Strumia was using, and at his slides: "Gender-bias in Academia: The Case Strumia". This seems the kind of debate you would expect within the physics community.

Diary: vexatious Sunday

My day starts with the Sunday Times and I'm reading Dominic Lawson on the James Damore/Google affair. I'm reminded of the illiterate and distorted editorials in The Times and The Economist (previous post) and I fantasise about cancelling my subscriptions as I ponder the old dilemma: (i) do they know the science but choose to lie about it, which makes them mendacious hypocrites; or (ii) have they not even bothered to check the relevant body of knowledge carefully cited by Damore, choosing instead to ventilate their blank-slate wish-fulfillment fantasies - which makes them incompetent.

In either case, why am I spending good money reading them? I console myself that The Economist does a good quarterly Technology Review and The Times occasionally has some useful news in it.

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While Clare is at Mass I resume Frederick Beiser's Hegel.

When you read highly abstract discussions relating to substance, essence, the necessary, the contingent, the noumenon and phenomenon, the synthetic a priori, it's tempting to think that the underlying problem set these guys are wrestling with is impossibly abstruse.

Not so: at the end of the eighteenth century, with enlightenment rationality crumbling under the Reign of Terror and religion on the ropes, Hegel and the Romantics are struggling with straightforward questions.

• Is the universe a Newtonian machine or is there scope for free will?
• If knowledge is just representations in our minds, can reality be truly known?
• If we have free will, and God is not a personal judge, whence morality?

I think we have a good scientific framework for these questions today (not, of course, uncontroversial), but Hegel was definitely on the right track. His stuff is abstract both because the right scientific toolset hadn't yet been developed, but also because in a dynamic world of evolving connections, the individual concrete element of reality is conditioned by its relationships with other things - and some of those relationships are inherently abstract.

Quick example: you concretely see a human walking from one location to another where they start doing certain things in a structured way and conversing with others. What extra information about that scenario's history of embedding relations do you need to properly and fully understand what is happening?

If I tell you the person is a priest and he walked to his church? If I say she is a barista and she walked to her coffee shop in a now-desanctified church? How much more do you need to understand completely and fully? A lot.

You get the idea.

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In our irreligious age, residual belief in God seems a mere foible. But Hegel was not an atheist, and to be consistent God had to be present in the ontology of reality. Looming over everything was Spinoza's immanent God, a divine presence infusing everything. But this leads to quietist, passive conclusions. If we are part of God, what scope for novelty or freedom?

Hegel adds conflict, dynamics and process through the dialectic, but does he really have a solution?

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In the afternoon we strolled to Wookey and had toasted teacakes on our return.

The evening progresses,  I watch BBC coverage of the IAAF World Championships and my distaste with the deep feminisation of media culture surfaces again. Some Brit has just been disqualified in a walking race of epic length after three warnings, at the 10 km mark or thereabouts.

He seems tearful but full of resolve to do better in future. The BBC interviewer is like a trauma therapist: "How do you feel?" "Can you recover from this?" "You put in so much hard work!" ..

Call me systemising rather than empathising but - insofar as I care - I would rather have liked some footage of his DQ faults, and someone explaining technically what he had done wrong and what he should do about it.

Dispassionate analysis? Not what this is about.

OK. I'm done with being vexed for today .. until the BBC News at ten o'clock.

".. then I must be .." *

The Economist this week writes:

"Mr Pichai had good reasons to sack Mr Damore. One is the content of the memo. It says many reasonable-sounding things: that “we all have biases” and that “honest discussion with those who disagree can highlight our blind spots”. But these are just camouflage before a stonking rhetorical “but”: the argument that innate differences, rather than sexism and discrimination, explain why women fare worse in the technology industry than men. “Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance)”, Mr Damore writes, “may contribute…to the lower number of women in high-stress jobs.”

"Research has indeed shown some smallish group-level differences in personality and interests between the sexes. But drawing a line from this to women’s suitability for tech jobs is puerile. An unbiased eye would light on social factors rather than innate differences as the reason why only a fifth of computer engineers are women. "

In today's Sunday Times, Dominic Lawson observes of The Financial Times:

"... the Financial Times, which in an editorial denounced Damore’s memo as “almost pure drivel”. That paper is facing industrial action on behalf of its female employees, who suffer from a 13% gender pay gap (according to the National Union of Journalists).

It, too, has an internal reason for declaring to the world how deplorable it finds young Damore, so it published another article accusing him of a “long email rant against diversity programmes . . . a rambling confused mash-up of outdated science”.

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When these idealogues attend a performance of 'The Life of Galileo' by Bertolt Brecht,

"This was a lively, heartfelt performance which showcased reason and science vs. obscurantist arguments from authority designed solely to buttress the interests of those in power. This never fails to be relevant."

they root for Galileo, bravely sticking it to The Man. It never occurs to them that they are The Man.

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The genius of Brecht was to give good arguments to the Catholic Inquisition. The interrogator points out that regardless of any purely-scientific merits of Galileo's thesis, the practical effects of the new doctrine would be to undermine the primacy and sanctity of scripture and thus subvert the social order, undermining authority and leading to dangerous chaos.

A very high price to pay for some arid, esoteric and contested version of 'truth'.

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* Imposter.

If Google did heavy lifting ...

Following on from the James Damore affair (read first).

Suppose Google's business involved heavy, manual construction work. The relevant Division is full of tough, strong endomorph types. They are mostly male with a smattering of shot-putter women.

Top software development is the mental equivalent of this level of performance ..

The HR people go crazy. This tip of the company spear is shockingly male-dominated, showing entrenched .. well, you know. They demand more diversity training and proactive affirmative action hiring. We want a 50-50 equal gender ratio. And we want it now.

A Damore-equivalent naïf observes that men are on average quite a bit stronger than women. That any women who can hack it are more than welcome in the Division. But biologically there just aren't that many applicants compared to qualified men. Going for 50-50 is going to be a stretch. Perhaps this equality of outcomes thing is, well, .. inappropriate?

As Google's CEO fires him, does he still say this?

"However, portions of the memo violate our Code of Conduct and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace. Our job is to build great products for users that make a difference in their lives.

To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK. It is contrary to our basic values and our Code of Conduct, which expects “each Googler to do their utmost to create a workplace culture that is free of harassment, intimidation, bias and unlawful discrimination.”

Plainly the female employees of the Division - by virtue of the fact they were hired in the first place and are meeting the standards - are not  'less biologically suited'. No one said otherwise.

But comparison of the male-female population distributions for physical body strength indicates that women in the general population are 'less biologically suited'. It's why we have separate male and female sports events.

Female-Male trait distributions overlap, but are sometimes not identical.
If you're hiring for extreme values of such a trait, don't be surprised
 if the applicant pool sizes differ quite substantially.

I'm not sure the CEO's sophistry would work for physical strength employment. But cognitive and personality traits are not so obvious at a glance and playing word-games is easier.

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Further reading.

*  "Women's Brains" - male-female comparison: Human Connectome project (N = 900).

*  "Women and Minorities in Science"  - a typically-erudite analysis from La Griffe.

*  "Sex Differences in Mathematical Aptitude" - La Griffe analysis relevant to software dev.

James Damore gets fired

The rainbow colours of diversity

The ex-Google employee was terminated for observing (in an internal memo) that genders differ in their aptitude for, and interest in, computer science.

• Razib Khan predicted: "whoever wrote that memo will surely be fired".
• Scott Alexander rebutted the Google official line indirectly (wrong about aptitude).
• Greg Cochran simply mused about 'The Index'.

Steve Hsu has this to say, while Scott Aaronson has written an elegant and oblique post.

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Blank-slate ideology asserts that all humans - of whatever gender and/or race - are cognitively biologically-identical, and that therefore all detrimental differences of outcome are solely due to oppression. When elites defend plainly-wrong ideas with the utmost ferocity, I am reminded of Marx's point, "The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas."

Why would the ruling elite want to believe it? Because it would be so dangerously divisive to look at any human subgroup and affirm that group's lower average cognitive performance or competence. Even identifying plainly outperforming groups - such as the Ashkenazim - risks opening the door to the concept of differences. So extreme is this impetus to faux-egalitarianism that many people deny even physical performance differences between genders or races. Social cohesion is the game.

I keep reminding myself (I already wrote about this) that globalisation is the economic driver for blank-slate ideology. Its young, educated beneficiaries are eager converts (arguably against their own longer-term interests) to causes so apparently egalitarian, culturally left-wing .. and economically convenient for globalised capital.

At least we haven't reintroduced the auto-de-fé yet or I wouldn't be writing this.

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The Google CEO's sophistry was particularly disingenuous: see "If Google did heavy lifting ...".