By David Futrelle
Last weekend, Italian physicist Alessandro Strumia gave a talk at a CERN conference in which, he claimed, he would use “bibliometrics data” to answer questions about “a new global symmetry.”
In fact, the talk had nothing to do with high-energy physics, per se; instead, Strumia trotted out a series of flawed arguments and problematic studies in order to “prove” that the preponderance of men in the field is not the result of discrimination against women but rather reflects the fact that men’s brains are better suited to physics than women’s.
Physics, he declared, was “invented and built by men” who are now being undermined in their field, and discriminated against, by “cultural Marxists” determined to tear down their manly accomplishments.
At one point in the presentation, he noted that he himself had been passed over for a job that was given to a woman he implied was less qualified because she had fewer citations than him. He identified her, and a woman on the selection committee, by name.
While the talk itself is not available online, Strumia’s slides are, and they give a pretty clear picture of his presentation.
Here’s one of the slides, which will give you some idea of the quality of his presentation. (Click on the image for a larger version.)
Yesterday, CERN announced that it was suspending Strumia “from any activity at CERN with immediate effect, pending investigation into last week’s event.”
Well, we can only assume the scientist they are suspending is Strumia, since they didn’t mention him by name. Indeed, while CERN was quick to denounce the substance of Strumia’s talk, they haven’t exactly been forthcoming about their organization’s long ties to the researcher.
The group’s first statement on the incident referred to him only as “an invited scientist.” The updated statement announcing the suspension identified him as “a scientist from one of the collaborating universities.” Never mind that Strumia, who teaches at Pisa University, has been working with CERN for many years and uses a CERN email for professional correspondence.
Strumia has also been suspended by the National Nuclear Physics Institute (INFN), an Italian research agency which he also worked with.
In other news, Donna Strickland of the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics today for her work on lasers; she shares the award with two male researchers.
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Proof, it seems, that being a scientist does not mean you are smart.
Shame on CERN for apparently attempting to just not mention their ties to Strumia.
Here is what she worked on:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chirped_pulse_amplification
Is this where I point out that the only person to ever win a Nobel Prize in two different science is Marie Curie?
Quoth the raven: LOLWUT?!
Sounds like Dr. Strumia’s one footnote short of a thesis, if you get my drift.
One quark short of a hadron.
But see the comments policy … with the note that his state is self-inflicted via drinking the alt-right Kool-Ade.
What the fuck is Strumia trying to say with that slide? That perpetuating a victim mentality in women causes more women to enter STEM? Does he think that everyone is as driven by spite as he is?
And congratulations to Donna Strickland, the third woman, ever, to win a Nobel Prize in Physics (even she seemed surprised that the number was so low).
Possibly… possibly that women in STEM only report experiencing discrimination because they’ve been primed to expect it by Evil Feminists? But it’s not terribly coherent.
Also proof that being a physicist does not make you an expert in psychology, evolutionary biology or neuroscience. Maybe better equipped to understand them than a person with absolutely no scientific background, but not an expert.
There seems to be a lot of men in certain field, mostly physics and engineering that believe themselves to automatically be experts in every hard science field and every social science field.
If you got passed over for a research leadership job by someone whose academic metrics are lower than yours, that by itself is interesting.
If you are the sort of person who will whine about it in public, maybe even give a whole seminar whose title could be “wah wah I didn’t get that job”… then it could be that academic metrics aren’t the only factors that were taking into account. Maybe the selectors picked up on these personality traits and decided that they didn’t want a petulant asshole running their String Theory research group.
Ever considered that as a possibility?
@MHC — I think this might be the place.
Apparently this is where we are now.
“On Hostile Sexism”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/10/02/who-supports-kavanaugh-after-last-weeks-angry-hearings-our-research-helps-explain/?utm_term=.90bd54bc32db
Ironically, a young lady I know just got accepted to a really cool program at CERN. I’m really hoping she wasn’t stuck in the room for this travesty (probably not, I doubt she would have let Alessandro leave under his own power if she had to be subjected to this).
Possibly relevant.
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/327748/is-there-really-no-english-equivalent-to-germans-fachidiot
Pretty sure that Dr. Strickland’s Nobel is what left him with that taste of sour grapes in his mouth, so he just HAD to exorcise it somehow. And how he exorcised it: By exercising his machista stupidity. Congratulations to her, and neener-neener-sucks-to-be-YOUs to him.
Ooooo! And speaking of neeners:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V83JR2IoI8k
“All my tubes and wires, and careful notes, and antiquated notions…”
Yet again some self-appointed regressive pundit quote mines, cherry picks data and generally just makes shit up to support male supremacy (let’s be honest: no amount of scientific papers can erase the fact that in the imaginary make-belief world where each sex has it’s “role” that still means women are valued less unless you subscribe to the extreme-far-right view of benevolent male chauvinism) and women have to spend the next month going through every single point with a fine tooth comb to justify our right to be treated as human beings.
It’s like that perverse western trope where the local bandit shoots at some random stranger’s feet screaming “dance!”.
I was very pleased to hear about Dr. Donna Strickland winning the Nobel Prize. However, I wouldn’t be surprised to see some manosphere blowback to the effect that her two male colleagues did all the heavy lifting and she was just kind of thrown in to be politically correct.
*gasp* My alma mater! Sweet! I’m super pleased to have shared the same school with a physics Nobel Laureate! (Even if the extent of the physics that I dealt with in my degree was boring old classical/Newtonian stuff.) Congrats to Dr. Strickland!
Reminder that the director of CERN, head of the LHC’s most famous and successful experiment and discoverer of the Higgs boson particle is… A woman.
Publication lists weigh heavy, but they’re not the only thing that matters. I got the job I currently have although a man on the shortlist had a slightly better (not vastly better) publication list, but I had better teaching experience (had taught a much wider array of subjects, for instance) and was also deemed a better fit. These things happen, and they’re not strange.
Also, some countries (I’ve heard this to be true in particular for the US and the UK, although the UK is reportedly getting better in this area) will put a lot of weight on which university you graduated from, and prefer people from the fanciest universities over people from less fancy universities even when the latter is more accomplished. This isn’t great, but it’s certainly not the fault of feminists, or anything that will generally play in women’s favour.
I think the slide might be going for, “women are underrepresented in STEM fields because of feminists exaggerating harassment, so they are less likely to go into them because of fears of being harassed.”
Also, is it just me, or does anyone else go straight to Rebecca Watson for the red haired person? I feel like I’ve seen a similar misogynistic caricature of her before
weirwoodtreehugger:
Not to mention sociology, anthropology or a whole host of other related fields. For some reason a lot of very intelligent scientists (and I think it’s fair to say physicists are the most prone to this) are susceptible to some kind of “localized Dunning-Kruger syndrome”, in which they simply can’t fathom the notion that there could exist a complicated phenomenon outside the “hard sciences” that they can’t easily comprehend, or that doesn’t align smoothly with their personal prejudices when “correctly” interpreted by a “real” scientist.
He actually used the words “cultural marxism” in his presentation as if it were a real thing. That kind of unthinking credulity does not belong in any research group or scientific or educational institution. If he weren’t such a fucking awful speaker and incompetent presentation-writer, he’d have a grand future peddling lady-hatred on youtube… “hey, I’m just like peterson but i do real hard manly science!”
(obligatory SMBC)
@Kimtsu
In a sense, yes.
But it’s not that they can’t fathom complexity outside of applied physics; it’s mostly a general disregard for anything you can’t immediatly monetize after graduation for it’s surely the sign of an “easy” and “shallow” subject, something no serious smart people would take more than a couple of books to master and they are most assuredly very smart people; that means every engineer or physician or applied economist believes s/he has a perfect grasp of philosophy or sociology and whatnot because s/he has got a really difficult degree which enables complete understanding of the human condition.
Or something like that.
In a sense, in Italy we’re pretty close to the american “STEMlord” worldview, also because of dissemination of those concepts via the Internet.
It’s pretty depressing. 🙁
I came here to say pretty much what WWTH has already said, far more eloquently.
The press coverage has glossed over the fact that the conference itself was to talk about the role of gender in the field. This is why the audience was predominantly young women. This makes his presentation so much more egregious. Although I’m sure his inner teenager really enjoyed being the contrarian in a feminist space.
http://press.cern/press-releases/2018/09/updated-statement-cern-stands-diversity