Rivers68
To start with, frankly, as a society it's high time we told our journalists to stop mucking around in our research journals. Today I will wake up and see how scientists discovered that coffee is terrible for my health, and then tomorrow I will hear that scientists are concerned I'm not drinking enough coffee. The problem isn't the scientists. The problem is journalists who don't know when to publish a scientific article (i.e. when there's a major breakthrough, and then only tentatively; or after a new theory or discovery is thoroughly understood). Routine papers, no matter how thrilling, should not be commented on in the media. That has nothing to do with what we do as scientists: we should continue to try to publish our incremental achievements. It has to do with our responsibilities as citizens. It's high time we all (not just scientists) made it clear this behavior from journalists is embarrassing as well as meddlesome.
Secondly, when we act as though certain ideas are "dangerous," we embolden our political opponents and we also teach our students/children that those ideas are very likely to be true. Nuance says that women can have on average lower IQs than men and we can still treat them like our metaphysical and political equals. When we act as though that's impossible, we show our opponents how weak our leadership really is. We also suggest to our students that perhaps the truth is other than what we, the scientists and academicians, are saying. Dangerous to whom?, they might rightly ask. Those for whom the status quo is most beneficial? Is that more likely to be the professor or the student?
In short, I don't think it's naive to discuss academically the variability hypothesis or other politically contentious topics without regard for the negative societal impacts. Those impacts are not our bailiwick. The real question is: does our side ("the left," say, or your favorite political party) have the strong institutions and grassroots network to resist when others want to pervert our discussions or research? One thing will not end: the other side will continue to try to push its agenda, and sometimes, as I already alluded to, this will constitute atrocities, big or small. Therefore, we need a strong community and real leadership to counteract this. That is not the purview of our scientific life.
It is part of our civic life, one which I find lately is being neglected more and more (and not just by scientists). In the US, the Republican Party is apparently quite good at rallying its people and getting them out to vote. It also has few scruples where spreading misinformation or hateful rhetoric is concerned. What compounds this and makes it worse is the Democratic Party acts as though various fashionable ideas in or around social science ("white privilege," "unconscious bias," "microaggressions") and certain social questions (acceptability of homosexuality, deference owed to questions of race) were God given and don't require campaigning or explanation. On the contrary, as someone in math, I have never been schooled in what can be done to cure unconscious bias, for instance, or whether or not psychologists have any evidence to suggest talking about unconscious bias will do anything other than p*ss off a lot of otherwise sympathetic people. If Democrats or social scientists or whomever care so much about some of these issues, the politically practical and, indeed, moral thing to do is to really spend the time bringing people over to their side. As far as I'm concerned, this is not being done, but instead the work has been replaced by a combination of social media outrage and "public shaming" and belittling idealogical opponents by making references to obscure studies the vast majority of us have not been educated well enough to understand. (With regard to referencing an obscure paper or five, see my discussion of journalists getting out of our research journals. I am beginning to feel the same should apply to good faith conversations between non-experts.)
Please, understand me. There is doing science and then there is doing politics. No question, if you are doing difficult science on biology or sociology, that only adds to the weight of your political duties. However, that is not an excuse to abandon the science (or relegate some of it to the dangerous pile) altogether.
For what it's worth, it sounds like the Summers/Damore discussion was added at the suggestion of the referees or editors at NYJM. If you look at the arXiv history, Hill and coauthors didn't include included mention of Summers/Damore until version 5 of their paper. (It disappears at version 8. I would generously guess Hill removed it because he didn't particularly agree with NYJM's suggestion.)
Finally, for those who are concerned that the mention of Summers/Damore is damning, here is what Hill says about Summers/Damore in the NYJM version of the paper:
"A resurgence of controversy came after the VH was linked to the forced resignation of Harvard President Larry Summers and the firing of Google engineer James Damore."
"VH" is variability hypothesis. My point is the paper does not endorse either Larry Summers or James Damore. It just mentions that the topic of the paper is a contentious one, as proven by the controversy surrounding Summers and Damore, and that the hope of the paper is to provide a concrete (if simple) mathematical theory in which to investigate VH in the evolution of species. If it weren't the variability hypothesis but instead Anderson localization, I think it's clear it would have received neither fire nor fury.
I feel as though somehow the West (as a civilization) has become overcome with embarrassment at what it did in the past (to Africans, Native Americans, and Asians, in particular) and now, instead of moving on and pursuing reconciliation in good faith, we have decided the only recourse is to obsess about how we are the enemies of civilization. Future? What future? We did so much bad stuff in the past. How could we take any pride in who we are? We're still so racist, sexist, etc. Nevermind the fact that modern life owes a great debt to the West (aircraft, antibiotics, modern representative government, etc.)
There are serious problems facing the world today (climate change potentially a existential threat to our species). If you look at the past few centuries, you would think that it is precisely the West that has the institutions and paradigms to address those problems. I'm not saying China isn't destined for great things, or won't contribute to addressing the problems. But imagine what China could do if it worked hand in hand with a 21st century USA that was as determined to end climate change as the 20th century USA was to end various infectious diseases (polio, tuberculosis, measles, for example) or put a man on the moon. Our team is losing the basketball game because one of our star players is at home moping about a mistake he made last season. It's societal narcissism, and, instead of helping "the Rest" (to use Niall Ferguson's shorthand for non-Westerners), it serves no one.
My point is: we need to see we are sick as a society. We are too preoccupied by things that happened in the past. Isn't this the lesson of at least one of the great classical tragedies? Why did Romeo and Juliet die? Because their families were stuck in the past and couldn't see that the future was more important than their petty feuds. There's no question we should continue to mind how we treat others (women, immigrants, people from other ethnicities), but we also (in the US, say) need to rediscover a sense of shared national heritage and purpose. History did not, as Fukuyama says, end with the destruction of the USSR. Surely, now that the USSR is gone, the interesting (and peaceful!) work should begin. Instead we're bickering amongst ourselves?