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?