Nooz and other doings in California

I am awake early, but since I also retired early, I’ve had a decent night’s sleep. It’s a good thing, too, as my panel is this afternoon: the penultimate event before Greg Lukianoff, President of FIRE, talks about “How cancel culture destroys trust in expertise.” (You can see the full meeting schedule here: the meeting itself is called “Censorship in the sciences: Interdisciplinary perspective.”)

You can join the meeting for free by using this Zoom link.

Our own panel, livestreamed between 3 and 4 pm California time, is small, but involves two awesome women: moderator Julia Schaletzky, who worked for some years in the biotechnology sector before moving to UC Berkeley, where she is Executive Director of the Center for Emerging and Neglected Diseases, Drug Discovery Center. Her expertise is in life sciences entrepreneurship and innovation, so she knows a lot about science funding as well as the various incursions of “progressive” ideology into science.  I was delighted to discover that Julia is a jazz singer on the side, and you can see a sample of her work here.

Our panel is called “Censorship and pseudoscience in the life sciences,” and will use as a launching pad the paper that Luana Maroja and I wrote in 2023 for Skeptical Inquirer on “The ideological subversion in biology“, examining six areas of evolutionary biology where ideology has led to misleading statements: sex and gender, the evolutionary differences between men and women, the genetic differences between individuals of a group, the conclusions of evolutionary psychology, the claim that indigenous knowledge has coequal status with modern science, and the biggest hot potato: race.

Luana, who appears often in these pages for giving talks or helping me with posts (she is THE expert on woke intrusions into science), is a professor of evolutionary biology at Williams College and works on, among other things, speciation. She is an avid gardener and has a black belt in karate.

It will be the first true discussion I know of at the meeting, as none of us have prepared speeches and will just start talking to each other and see how it goes.

Highlights of yesterday’s meetings included Steven Ceci summarizing his and the entire corpus of research on sex equity in science (most of his work was done in collaboration with his partner Wendy Williams).  Ceci, presenting on Zoom,  showed seven papers investigating whether women were discriminated against in being evaluated, hired, promoted, funded, or given tenure in science. The data (now summarized in a paper cited below) are unequivocal: there is no sex discrimination in any of these areas save some weak (and he says, now nonexistent) evidence that women professors get worse teaching evaluations than do men, as well as a very small salary differential in favor of men.  In all other studies, women and men were equal in achievement—or women getting higher ratings—save for a very early paper with the lowest sample size (I believe it was 238, compared to 500-1000 individuals in the other six studies).

The paper summarizing all this, Ceci et al., involved collaborating not only with Williams, but with one of their adversaries, Shulamit Kahn, can be found HERE. Because they were adversaries trying to reach agreement about the data, the paper took five years to write.  The upshot: the widespread claims that science is rife with structural sexism are simply not true, yet people still cite only the single early paper with a small sample size showing discrimination while ignoring the other six papers (including meta-analyses) showing that this is not the case. This is one example how an ideologically favored narrative gains traction while substantive refutations of that narrative are ignored. But read the paper for yourself.

But I run on too long describing all the talks. More about disagreements now:

I particularly enjoy clashes of opinion, which of course are bound to occur, especially at a heterodox conference like this.

One person, whose name I can’t recall, stood up and rebuked us all for talking about ideology, DEI statements, censorship in science, and other seemingly trivial matters, while not paying attention to what he says are the BIG problems: China’s development of a hypersonic plane that can bomb the world, climate change, plastics in the ocean, and so on. This was a prime example of “whataboutery”, and although the problems he mentioned are indeed important, they were not the subject of this conference, and most of us are academic scientists concerned with keeping our own disciplines free from ideology. And that was the response he got from the attendees.  I get the same kind of comment often about things on this website (e.g. “Why don’t you criticize Trump more?”), and my response to the whataboutery is similar.

There was another kerfuffle in the panel on DEI statements, “Is compelled speech a form of censorship?” moderated by Bob Maranto with discussants (each gave a short speech) Michael Shermer, Abigail Thompson, and John K. Wilson. (Michael and Abbie have appeared in these pages, with Abbie often contributing invertebrate photos.)

Wilson was heterodox at a heterodox meeting, arguing, against the views of other panelists, that DEI statements could be a good thing so long as they came from the faculty itself and were not imposed upon universities by the administration or government.

Well, that got people’s dander up, especially Gregg Lukianoff, who was sitting in the front row and, as President of FIRE, has often vehemently opposed DEI statements (see here, for instance).  He rebuked out Wilson for giving distorted data and pointed out that at least half of university professors oppose these statements. Abbie, too, took issue with this. As you may know, she herself was demonized for writing about DEI statements as unacceptable and compelled loyalty oaths (see her WSJ op-ed here), with mathematicians and scholars, offended, calling for her firing and even her own chancellor denouncing her views as not representative of UC Davis’s views. But Abbie soldiers on.

Lots of people in the audience also objected to Wilson’s views, and I’m afraid that he came off the worse in this discussion. DEI statements are indeed loyalty oaths in practice, and you’d better espouse a preferred viewpoint if you want to get hired or promoted. They are likely illegal as well, leading to racial discrimination in favor of minorities. Better to adhere to the University of Chicago’s Shils Report:

The Shils report dictates that faculty at the University of Chicago must display distinguished performance in each of the following criteria when being considered for promotion:

• Research
• Teaching and Training, including the supervision of graduate students
• Contribution to intellectual community
• Service

None of this involves DEI, in case you think that DEI statements count as “service,” and DEI statements aren’t permitted at the University of Chicago. Nevertheless, some departments get sneaky and try to find ways around them for hiring new faculty. I think this duplicity is widespread in American colleges.

Today’s talks feature Wilfred Reilly talking about academic taboos, Sally Satel running a panel on “Censorship around gender research and medicine”, featuring my friend Carole Hooven, Jesse Singal speaking on “soft censorship” in media and academia, our panel, and the last talk, Greg Lukianoff speaking on cancel culture (see above).

The only journalist I know of at this meeting is Singal, and I hope he writes about it. The NYT’s Pamela Paul was scheduled to come, but had to cancel. That’s sad because she could have written an awesome column about “heterodox” views of science

*********

*Back in the real world, wildfires continue to rage in the L.A. area, with the Palisades fire (the biggest), burning largely out of control as the winds are expected to pick up.

*Trump’s economic advisor is proposing BAD THINGS:

To serve as an economic adviser to Trump, it helps to share his belief that tariffs make the U.S. richer. Not many economists meet that criterion.

Stephen Miran has made just that case. Miran, nominated to chair Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers, has written that the U.S. could be better off with average tariffs of around 20% and as high as 50%, compared with the current 2%.

*And in California, a man gave raw milk to two of his cats, killing them since raw milk can be–and was in this case–infected with the bird flu virus. DO NOT GIVE RAW MILK TO YOUR CATS.

I’m trying to keep up this site despite being at meetings most of the day, so let’s have some tweets and memes.

From Things With Faces: someone’s pigeon with clown face markings on its body:

From Stacy:

And a very good one from Stash Krod:

From Nicole:

Masih is back showing the brave women of Iran defying their odious theocracy:

Although the Islamic Republic has criminalized sending videos to me, threatening 10 years in prison, this brave student risked it to ensure the courage of these schoolgirls reaches Khamenei, the morality police, and the world.

In front of Girls’ School in Tehran, a female hijab… pic.twitter.com/SpTXCMl5tZ

— Masih Alinejad Read More