Piano playing.

It all comes down to the shape of the instrument, and hand-span, which is unquestionably (and uncontroversially) larger in men than in women: http://www.smallpianokeyboards.org/uploads/3/4/1/6/34165129/... (from http://www.smallpianokeyboards.org/hand-span-data.html)

The interesting thing is that there is a solution to the problem, the 7/8 piano, which has an octave spacing of 5.5" as opposed to the 6.5" on a typical piano.

The thing is, no one really takes it seriously outside of a few universities and a dedicated group that's trying to advance this cause.

Even women who learned to play long ago grouse that "I can play a regular piano, you just have to use different technique!", but won't admit to themselves or to others that the technique they're required to use is a detriment to playing the instrument with ease.

The other issue is that these pianos are hard to come by, since almost every manufacturer makes pianos of the same keyboard size, and pianists are one of the few musicians expected to play on whatever instrument they're given.

The other interesting thing is that the majority of men would actually play better on these pianos, because they would suddenly have "rachmaninoff hands", but the legacy of having hundreds of thousands of existing pianos just sitting around prevents progress from being made toward this goal.

P.S. if anyone wants to make a startup company for building 7/8 digital pianos (of which there are none currently on the market), hit me up.

If you're going to make such a drastic change to the piano, at least cut the keyboard into two halves at middle c, then invert both halves.

Now when the right hand starts at what used to be middle c and plays a chromatic scale upward, it's going from high pitches to low pitches. E.g., middle c is now the highest sounding c on the instrument.

(For purposes of this thought experiment, suppose there are two middle c's. I'm describing the middle c to the left below...)

Mirroring that, when the left hand starts at what used to be its middle c and plays a chromatic scale downward in the lower half, it's going from low pitches to higher pitches. That is, what used to be middle c is the lowest sounding pitch.

Benefits:

* when the right hand plays a melody the strongest fingers-- thumb, index, and middle-- are most likely to be playing. The ring finger and pinky-- the weakest fingers-- would be relegated to inner voices most of the time.

* the bass notes-- the most important notes of the accompaniment-- are played with the strongest fingers of the left hand. Again, that's thumb, index, and middle. Ancillary notes, and inner voices of chords, are played with the weaker fingers-- ring and pinky (and possibly middle if thumb is playing the bass note).

That way you vastly improve the ergonomics of the instrument. Otherwise you're just normalizing a big, expensive instrument so that it is guaranteed to be equally uncomfortable for all sizes of hand.

This reeks of the silicon valley stereotype of "I don't know why you're doing it this way, let me come in with zero experience and tell you how to do it better, with technology™. In this case, it's really clear that you are not a piano player, and have not attempted to learn in any serious way.

In the case of the 7/8 piano, there have been case studies, physiological research, actual testing of different sizes of keyboards, etc.

Remember, if you're successful in pushing the 7/8 piano you're going to have both sizes in production for at least a century.

taking something built using relatively coarse tolerances by today's standards and scaling it down by 1/8" is a 'enormous waste'?

if this is the case, human manufacturing technology is in serious trouble.

i don't think anyone is arguing to simply toss out the existing pianos, but to standardize on the smaller one and gradually replace them as time goes on..

How do you make it so that a generation of pianist mustn't learn to master two different sizes of piano?

I've played guitar, I've played drums. Not at the world class level of course, but enough to have a sense of adapting to different layouts/sizes/shapes, etc.

While yes, one has a preference, it's not like this is changing from being a race car driver to a commercial airline pilot - also, plenty of these know how to drive/fly several types. I believe this is a fairly apt analogy.

That isn't true with regard to the virtuoso repertoire.

We're talking about players who make close to 0% mistakes in their daily practice regimen. And when those players perform the most physically demanding pieces-- Chopin etudes, Liszt Transcendental Etudes, Ravel's Gaspard, etc.-- that is still no guarantee they will be able to play with perfect accuracy in a given performance. It's that technically demanding.

There are even some pieces like those Godowsky mashups of Chopin etudes which most players simply cannot perform with any accuracy at all. I think even Jorge Bolet would make a disclaimer before he played them that they could break down at any moment.

Players at that level are indeed as methodical and detail-oriented about their performance regimen as commercial airline pilots are about theirs. The only way to adapt that kind of virtuoso repertoire is to actually practice for hours a day on the 7/8 piano. And given that the current musical world values virtuoso repertoire most highly, there's simply no way around it.

If you don't believe me, try telling a concert pianist the day before the concert that you heard the venue sold the Steinway for a fascinating new piece of technology: a 7/8 piano! I guarantee you they won't mince words about their risk assessment.

I'm not saying that virtuoso pianists aren't able to adapt to different key sizes. But there's an obvious cost to doing so, and current touring pianist would be extremely unlikely to take that on.

Edit: clarification

I have been learning to play piano later in life after growing up playing violin and viola. Although virtually all professional adult violinists play a "full size" violin, smaller sizes exist for children, and I remember wondering as a child whether smaller pianos existed as well. Now, as an adult, I wish there were larger keyboards---the best-practices techniques that my teacher with average hands shows me are physically not possible for my larger hands. So I can easily imagine the inverse would be true.

Violas are an interesting case where, in contrast to the violin, many "full" sizes exist, anywhere from 15 inches to 17 inches to accommodate arm length. I would be curious to see a comparison of whether female violists are better able than female violinists to compete with their male counterparts given the size range of professional violas in contrast to the standardized violin (although I suspect the sample size of violists could be too small).

No, only strawman made-up gender politics is like that.

As it stands, women are just not as interested in watching sports as men are, with some exceptions like figure skating and gymnastics.

Also, the audience=the customer, so isn't this true for almost all fields? If we are OK with wildly different pay scales in sports because of audience preference, couldn't Hollywood claim the same?

Isn't that the way it is though, movie stars are paid tons more than the rest ?

This is a good point, but it seems to be determined by the fundamentals of pianos. Moving a piano is difficult enough that I wouldn't expect this to change. We could all switch to keyboards...

what you may not know about pianos is that the "action", the keys-and-hammers bit, is a totally separate piece that can be removed in about 3 minutes. Most of the 7/8 keyboards manufactured today are actually just smaller actions that can be swapped into normal sized grands.

Also, is there an explanation for "dominate in representation at the academic level"? Does it need one?

Yes, but the general concept is that the benefits and the downsides occur in different people. A single person doesn't illustrate "the benefits and the downsides" of greater variability any more than a single person can illustrate variability.

WRT issues of pure sample size, you can see one of the standard supports for GMVH in the SAT Total Group Report for 2018 here: https://reports.collegeboard.org/pdf/2018-total-group-sat-su...

Of the 2,135,788 students who took the SAT during high school, graduated (high school) in 2018, and had a gender, 1,117,329 were female and 1,018,459 were male. (751 had no gender.) 7% of the females, or ~78,000, scored 700 or above on the math section. 12% of the males, or ~120,000, did the same. So at the 91st percentile males are already outnumbering females by more than two to one after being pulled from similarly sized samples.

The greater-male-variability hypothesis says that males should equally outnumber females among low achievers. These tables don't support that -- 1% of females score below 300 in math, compared to 1% of males; 12% of females score below 400 compared to 11% of males.

The usual response to this is that we assume the SAT comprehensively samples high-ability students -- if you'll get a good score, you are strongly encouraged to take the test -- while mostly overlooking low-ability students, who may see no reason to bother.

They will typically have slightly different means (not far above the cutoff) and quite strongly different tails.

It's absolutely true that, if all you know about an individual is membership of one of these populations, then you know very little. Any new information about the actual person will quickly swamp this signal. If you've actually met A & B (or seen their work) then group membership is irrelevant. This is the situation in hiring people.

But it's also true that these distributions lead you to make predictions about the tails. While any one individual is vanishingly unlikely to win a Nobel prize, you can predict that (if they are fairly awarded) there should be a huge slant in how many go to each group. And I really mean huge, this ratio (if things are Gaussian, etc) grows exponentially in how far along the tail you go. Seeing such a skew is thus no evidence that hiring/prize-awarding is biased.

My point is really that individuals aren't defined by the distribution, just the number of individuals is defined by the distribution. But many people take these distributions personally.

"3.8 million students took the PSAT -- the practice version of the SATs ... 1.7 million students from the class of 2015 took the SAT"

Both side of the bell curve has poor definitions and IQ tests are far from perfect as it is said to optimize the accuracy between IQ 70 and 100. That said, we do see more men in practically every kind of type of data set for both side of the bell curve.

To cite a professor of both biology and neurology, no society on earth like to talk or even think about the mentally disabled. The "downsides" of greater variability is a group that most people treat as they don't exist, so I would not be surprised if many people really believed that the only explanation for a different top 1% is discrimination.

This is not a statement about the group average, but about the group variance. The SAT is not a good tool to use to assess group averages; I already mentioned this.

He also showed cartoons deriding women campaigning for equality in science and presented the results of an analysis that he claimed showed that work conducted by female physicists was not as good as their male counterparts.

Did Larry Summers do anything as overt as this? CERN had to apologize after his presentation, which now includes a note:

Alessandro Strumia applied to give a presentation on “Bibiliometrics data about gender issues in fundamental theory”. The committee was skeptical of his motivations but decided to allow him to give a scientific presentation on data analysis. The committee is deeply disappointed that the presentation, which had not been shared prior to its delivery, included attacks on individuals and was contrary to CERN’s values, as set out in the CERN Code of Conduct. CERN’s official statement on the matter can be found here: https://press.cern/press-releases/2018/09/updated-statement-...

All that said, discussing controversial, emotional topics requires the utmost care. Showing a cartoon of any type relating to this topic shows extremely poor judgement.

Also he made a number of errors as president, e.g. the Shleifer thing and the unfortunate changes made by his people at HMC.

For an example of a comment on a divisive topic that stays within the guidelines, I'd say the one you replied to is pretty good.

Besides the guidelines, you might also find these links helpful for getting the spirit of this site:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/trolls.html

(my money is on B).

If he’s wrong, the most appropriate and most effective rebuttal is a dispassionate fact-based one, not a moral one.

There are going to be some things we learn that we don’t like to hear. I have no idea if this is one of them, and I’m not the person to ask.

Either he is correct, and we have to deal with it, or he isn’t, and we don’t really advance (or worse, we regress) until someone examines the subject more closely and provides something closer to truth.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-47478537

Racists and misogynist have been using bad science to justify their views for centuries. (See, for example, phrenology.) Once identified as such, we are under no obligation to continue suffering such fools.

See, you’re doing it too. Maybe one day you can consider accepting the possibility that a non-racist, non-misogynist might wonder if race or sex can influence general outcomes in a given domain!

Personally, I find the idea that it can only influence athletic performance (which I understand is a difference that polite society allows us to acknowledge) to be extremely unlikely. I actually would rank “women, in general, are inherently better than men at <currently male dominated field>“ to be more likely than “in general, men and women are exactly the same”.

The effect of estrogen on emotional stability.

The effect of testosterone on violence and crime.

The pay gap in respect to unadjusted versus adjusted data.

Blind audition and p values.

Domestic violence statistics and reported rate of abuse.

If there is a neurobiological change in victims of sexual assault.

Sexsomnia and how common it is.

Campus rape statistics and if its one-quarter of all college girls.

First and most obviously, the purpose of this workshop was to further women's participation in high-energy physics (physics and computer science are the two most lopsided science fields; the need for need for more participation is obvious prima facie). It was not the purpose of the workshop to hash out Strumia's political beliefs, and had the workshop known what Strumia was going to present, they would have rejected it --- not for lack of truth, but for lack of relevance.

Second, Strumia's presentation was unserious. It was unserious because of the cartoons. It was unserious because of the invocation of "cultural marxism". It was unserious because it had a title chosen to obscure the purpose of the talk. It was obscure because it has a whole slide allocated to Strumia's grievance about losing an academic role to a particular woman. There can be value in presenting a contrarian point of view at a summit with almost any premise. There is no value in trolling a venue, which is what he did.

Third, as the sibling post observes, he was subsequently depantsed by his peers and sponsors, because he had neither the credibility in social sciences nor the credibility in his own field to be persuasive, and his underlying data did not rise to meet the dumb occasion he created for himself.

We're essentially recapitulating the argument HN had over Ted Hill's NYJM paper, which was, I think, a little embarrassing for the Ted Hill defenders on HN.

I stand by my summary: play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

You lost me there, because in no way is that obvious prima facie.

[Trigger warning, because adults can’t have dispassionate conversations about facts and ideas, and will cherry-pick then knee jerk, probably even in spite of this warning: I’m not saying that women don’t want to enter these fields in the next sentence. I’m not saying that the lack of women is purely because they aren’t interest in the subject. I’m not saying the opposite, either.]

If women don’t want to enter these fields, there is absolutely no need to force them to. Taking this prima facie, and denying anyone the opportunity to even question the premise, is exactly the problem people have with this topic and the activism around it.

You could not be more wrong about your claim that he was unserious. He was very serious and he thinks this is an important issue worthy of his time. There is nothing unserious about using cartoons to make a point, nor with using the term “cultural marxism.” That’s far better than “mansplaining”, and I dare you to tell anyone throwing that term around that they are unserious.

And I don’t agree that he was depantsed by his peers and sponsors due to a lack of credibility. Personally, I think the motivations were emotion-driven. But it’s rarely productive to argue motivations.

I don’t know what the Ted Hill thing is, but when I read comments like that, I wonder if they were actually embarrassed, or if you just want them to be.

I think all of this posturing distracts from what really happened here. The guy is sick of identity politics (are we allowed to say that, or is it like cultural marxism?) and the distraction it’s causing in his field. That’s definitely a position I can relate to.

Edit: Oh, that Ted Hill thing. No, his supporters certainly were not embarrassed. I do agree that it was an embarrassing moment for HN, likely for precisely the opposite reasons.

So you think it was embarrasingfor HN, but haven’t yet decided why? :) Hah, yeah, that sounds about right from you.

Though I can realize how some might be offended, it's not an offensive cartoon.

Or rather - the 'offensiveness of the cartoon' is only a function of one's sensitivity to intersectional issues.

So any cartoon/animation that is 'against' the intersectional view will be regarded as 'offensive'.

The very fact that this cartoon could be regarded as 'offensive' is ironically at the heart of this debate.

We all have a right to be offended, but we also have a right to express ourselves within reason. The cartoon I guess was a needless poke in the eye but it's really not that bad.

I don't know how "offensive" I find it, and I'm not a physicist, but I try to put myself in the shoes of a physicist attending a workshop at CERN when someone gets up on stage with a presentation titled "Experimental test of a new global discrete symmetry" and it turns out to be a lecture about "Cultural Marxism", and I assume I'd have been pissed too.

That's a measure of how afraid CERN is of the reaction to it. It's a matter of PR and has nothing to do with Science.

Anyone who's offended by some data in slides might consider not being a scientist. Or rather just easily debunking it if that's the case.

The data in the presentation is uncomfortable, and maybe it's all utterly misrepresented, but these things have a place in polite society.

Finally, here's this juicy tidbit: he's making a case that men are discriminated against in Science. He's given many examples. Then - he's fired right away for highlighting the fact that he's ostensibly being discriminated against? I wonder if that makes a sneaky, upside down lawsuit.

I don't think CERN is the place for any of this, but there should be a place for it somewhere reasonable where people can talk about reality without losing their jobs.

I don't think we need raging bigots, but we need contrarians.

Strumia clearly did mislead CERN and the workshop organizers, pretty clearly gave a presentation to troll the workshop, and clearly launched an attack on another scientist (present at the workshop) during his presentation.

Is your argument that someone should have been able to give a contrarian presentation about gender disparities in physics at this workshop? I agree with you. But that's not what Strumia did. He tried to pwn the libs, and ended up depantsing himself.

His dismissal is not an objective nature of the inherent 'offensiveness' of the presentation.

This was not something that came from within, this was forced from the outside namely the media, in this case, BBC which made it politically problematic for CERN.

If a woman or man had launched an attack on the problems of being a woman in a male-dominated field nothing would have happened, in fact, he or she would have been applauded for speaking truth to power and celebrated for their courage they certainly wouldn't have ended up being called sexist or wouldn't have their ties cut.

You might as well chose to read him in the same manner, he certainly did think of himself as someone who spoke truth to power.

And it certainly wasn't something that was a bigger problem than someone could say. "What an idiot" and then move on.

But no, this had to be a question of sexism even though he was talking about discrimination against men.

This has James Damore deja vu all over it.

The code of Conduct hail mary is an excuse which is why their apology is not an argument it highlights the very problem.

There doesn't seem to be any evidence of that. How do you imagine the BBC found out about it?

That breaks the site guidelines, which ask: "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading." It also leads directly to off-topic dreck like this subthread, which I detached: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19346310.

(The rest of your comment is fine.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

However currently whenever someone talks about this, the response is not "let's argue your conclusion" but rather "burn the witch".

Well

> If the degree programs are 80% men and 20% women, statistically the men will outperform the women in outlier achievements just because there will likely be more positive outliers in the larger group by definition even if the means are similar.

This would predict 20% of outliers would be women. However this is not the case. A reasonable hypothesis to account for the gap in yoyr reasoning is that higher male variance in intelligence drives more male outliers in physics. I find your explanation for the lack of representiation of women to be comparatively unsatisying.

Now there is a better counterargument from the world of Chess. Chess has similar controversies about Men saying things about women having lower potential. Well a father didn't buy the nature based arguments decided to prove child rearing played a huge role in success and taught his daughters how to play chess. One of his daughters became arguably the greatest women player of all time although she wasn't ever considered world champion material.

Essentially though thia case may indicates its differences in early childhood rearing that causes the differentials. It's not participation in a specific educational stream that's the issue its girls being brought up in a fundamentally different way from how boys are in general. Yet I see much of the comtemporary political discussion focus on higher educational and workforce equity. Really groundbreaking physics tends to be discovered by younger physicists so if education is truly the problem this is waiting too long to address any potential childrearing problem.

Perhaps because its not at all like summers's case. Strumia didn't suggest women are not suited for physics or anything like that.