Additional thoughts on the Ted Hill paper

First, I’d like to thank the large number of commenters on my previous post for keeping the discussion surprisingly calm and respectful given the topic discussed. In that spirit, and to try to practise the scientific integrity that I claimed to care about, I want to acknowledge that my views about the paper have changed somewhat as a result of the discussion. My understanding of the story of what happened to the paper has changed even more now that some of those attacked in Ted Hill’s Quillette article have responded, but about that I only want to repeat what I said in one or two comments on the previous post: that my personal view is that one should not “unaccept” or “unpublish” a paper unless something was improper about the way it was accepted or published, and that that is also the view of the people who were alleged to have tried to suppress Ted Hill’s paper on political grounds. I would also remark that whatever happened at NYJM would not have happened if all decisions had to be taken collectively by the whole editorial board, which is the policy on several journals I have been on the board of. According to Igor Rivin, the policy at NYJM is very different: “No approval for the full board is required, or ever obtained. The approval of the Editor in Chief is not required.” I find this quite extraordinary: it would seem to be a basic safeguard that decisions should be taken by more than one person — ideally many more.

To return to the paper, I now see that the selectivity hypothesis, which I said I found implausible, was actually quite reasonable. If you look carefully at my previous post, you will see that I actually started to realize that even when writing it, and it would have been more sensible to omit that criticism entirely, but by the time it occurred to me that ancient human females could well have been selective in a way that could (in a toy model) be reasonably approximated by Hill’s hypothesis, I had become too wedded to what I had already written — a basic writer’s mistake, made in this case partly because I had only a short window of time in which to write the post. I’m actually quite glad I left the criticism in, since I learnt quite a lot from the numerous comments that defended the hypothesis.

Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

Update to post, added 11th September. As expected, there is another side to the story discussed below. See this statement about the decision by the Mathematical Intelligencer and this one about the decision taken by the New York Journal of Mathematics.

Further update, added 15th September. The author has also made a statement.

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I was disturbed recently by reading about an incident in which a paper was accepted by the Mathematical Intelligencer and then rejected, after which it was accepted and published online by the New York Journal of Mathematics, where it lasted for three days before disappearing and being replaced by another paper of the same length. The reason for this bizarre sequence of events? The paper concerned the “variability hypothesis”, the idea, apparently backed up by a lot of evidence, that there is a strong tendency for traits that can be measured on a numerical scale to show more variability amongst males than amongst females. I do not know anything about the quality of this evidence, other than that there are many papers that claim to observe greater variation amongst males of one trait or another, so that if you want to make a claim along the lines of “you typically see more males both at the top and the bottom of the scale” then you can back it up with a long list of citations.

You can see, or probably already know, where this is going: some people like to claim that the reason that women are underrepresented at the top of many fields is simply that the top (and bottom) people, for biological reasons, tend to be male. There is a whole narrative, much loved by many on the political right, that says that this is an uncomfortable truth that liberals find so difficult to accept that they will do anything to suppress it. There is also a counter-narrative that says that people on the far right keep on trying to push discredited claims about the genetic basis for intelligence, differences amongst various groups, and so on, in order to claim that disadvantaged groups are innately disadvantaged rather than disadvantaged by external circumstances.