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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Some more interesting points about Donna Strickland:
She got the award for research she did during her PhD. I don’t have exact numbers, but this is really uncommon. People usually have to work for years after their PhD to make Nobel-worthy contributions to their field.
She’s still just an associate professor. Not a full professor. I wonder if it has something to do with people like this dude.
She didn’t have a Wikipedia page until an hour after the announcement that she won the Nobel prize. If Twitter is to be believed Wikipedia editors rejected a page for her as recently as May this year, stating that her research was not significant enough to merit a page.
OT bit: I have an appointment with a divorce lawyer next week. Hurray! Finally gonna get it done.
My ex got totally sucked into the Cultural Marxism debacle. In one sense it’s not a totally unreal thing in that many different groups compete for cultural currency – hence the networked charismatics and their fight to put leadership in the 7 mountains of culture (or whatever BS they call it). Cultural Marxism is the label that those on the right give a collection of views. What isn’t real is the vast ‘left-wing’ conspiracy to destroy culture so it can be rebuilt in a new Marxist utopia. For them they see any attempt to redress the balance as an attempt to destroy the whole culture – including those unearned privileges that don’t seem that unearned to individuals.
I can guarantee you that Strumia got breaks for being male, but that wasn’t enough, he also had to be smart and clever and work bloody hard. #Notallmen have a position at CERN. (And now one fewer does…)
When unspoken privilege is handed out it can be difficult to spot if you’ve received it, there are all kinds of reasons why you wouldn’t want to spot it.
Cultural Marxism allows men of a certain bent to explain away disappointment but it’s not exactly a new theory. My grandfather who was a darn good physicist used to joke about how it would be better to be a black disabled lesbian ‘these days’ and this was well before CM started gaining currency among the embittered. He was incapable of seeing that the way society was structured gave him a leg up for being male. He was able to have a family and fun and dedicate himself to physics. He could only see his disadvantages and how he’d overcome them (and they were many, mainly income and class and personally a dysfunctional family of origin – he had to work bloody hard to get where he was) not that other people had even bigger barriers in front of them that didn’t even allow them to get on the first rung of a science career.
My partner, also a scientist not a physicist, has had a number of really lucky breaks in his career – not least that he switched sciences because the one he was in didn’t allow him to meet many girls. But no doubt also because he’s male. I did the same undergraduate degree as he did, but was a classic case of women falling out of the pipeline – as well as my own personal problems. I was suffering from depression and I went for a job interview where it became clear that the only reason I was brought in was because they wanted me to fill out the equal ops form. I kinda gave up after that. If I’d been mentally fully healthy or if I’d not had that experience maybe I’d have stayed in science. I wish I’d been mentally healthier at that stage in my life, but I wasn’t and I didn’t have the fight in me. If I had it to do over, I would do many things differently.
None of this excuses what he said and what he did and he deserves the implosion of his public career that will almost surely follow. He’ll still have his home position and he’ll carry on publishing. But I suggest he’ll also fall further into that CM crap and start publishing a blog or contributing to some vile platform.
@Johanna: Wikipedia is a complete trainwreck as far as social justice is concerned.
This man’s nonsense led me to tweet a whole thread.
This nonsense led me to tweet a whole thread.
https://twitter.com/ChthonicQueex/status/1046771118059790336
Why, if you are going to give a presentation that you have to know is going to upset a lot of people, wouldn’t you run it by some of the people of the gender you are attacking first?
Or ask anyone if they felt your speech was appropriate?
Could he have actually believed that his presentation would be appreciated by the majority of his colleagues?
@Hexum
You’re thinking like a normal human being, not a Nazi troll. Being upsetting and inappropriate – “Triggering the libs” – was his entire point.
@otherwise
The Chemistry Prize was just awarded to Frances Arnold, another woman.
My money is on Chanty Binx. Mangry men will never ever stop being mad at a red head yelling at a group of dudes.
@Hexum7
I think it was more that he prides himself about being able to confidently make statements that run against the commonly-held dogma. See the last line in his presentation slides:
@SFHC
“Nazi troll” is a bit strong, I feel. “STEMlord student in Sociology 101 lecture” seems closer to the mark.
It’s not always just when they pontificate outside of their own fields. Some experts have major blind spots inside theirs, particularly in medicine:
https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/everything-you-know-about-obesity-is-wrong/
Whoops – my comment was in response to Bakunin ?
Tells you a lot about what he’s reading in his spare time.
@Nequam
I once knew a guy who was brilliant – perfect SAT scores, taught himself to code at age 9, got a scholarship to Harvard – but also extremely stupid about very basic stuff. As an example, he used to regularly borrow money from all of his friends and acquaintances because he was usually broke, but when we helped him move his apartment, we literally found almost $10,000 in uncashed paychecks that had fallen behind various pieces of furniture (most were so old he couldn’t cash them).
I coined the term savant idiot because of him.
@Queex
That thread is a good thread. I haz followed you.
Re OP – if I tried to teach a class with slides that looked like MS Paint had mated with 4Chan, I’d be laughed out of the room, and with damn good reason.
@Ariblester
Considering that the phrase “Cultural Marxism” was made up by Nazis to mean “THE JOOZ” and is used by Nazis and nobody else… Yeah, no, I’ll stick with what I said, thanks.
@Kimstu
The example that springs to my mind is Richard Dawkins and his ludicrously pseudo-scientific “meme theory” that basically amounts to:
“Obviously, the social sciences works exactly like genetics. To conclude otherwise might mean that there is a subject that I am not the leading expert in. And that’s as unthinkable as someone else’s personal experience differing from mine.”
I’m sad, the archived version of the slides doesn’t include the pictures.
That said, I did find this thigh-slapper, in the midst of an argument about men having higher max IQs: “Smarter people less affected by implicit bias”
lol self-own
The worst part of this dingus’ stupid parade is that because of him that doofus with the Google manifesto started showing up in my Twitter feed, despite his 15 minutes having been up months ago.
I understand both of these guys cited the oft-debunked Baron-Cohen for their basic misunderstanding of human biology. Anyone who looks at Baron-Cohen’s heavily-flawed research methodologies and concludes that his results and absurdly overreaching conclusions are legitimate has no business working in any kind of research capacity.
A couple of additions to this…
On CBC’s “The Current” this morning ( https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-october-3-2018-1.4848364 ) one of the people they talked to was one of the women in the audience at the talk in question. She noted that part of the problem was that Strumia was one of the senior scientists there and most of the audience were juniors; this meant his opinions could have a direct effect on who got good reviews, promotions, acceptance for further time at CERN, that sort of thing. Which made his talk also a barely deniable threat of ‘don’t rock the boat by complaining about me or I’ll torpedo your career’.
As for the ‘I have more citations, why didn’t they pick me’ complaint… it’s also been noted elsewhere that the main reason why Strumia had more citations was that he was part of a very large research group. The vast majority of his citations weren’t papers where he was the primary author, they were papers written by the group he was a part of that also listed him because he happened to be vaguely involved at the time. He’s not the great researcher, he’s the workhorse who happened to tag along with a dozen other good researchers to get a citation list that long.
@Bina:
Strumia’s talk was reported on October 1st; Donna Strickland’s Nobel was reported on October 2nd. Unless he was on the Nobel selection committee, I don’t think there’s any way the latter caused the former.
As he is Italian, I’m afraid I am less than surprised. I have spent time in Italy, and I have found it to be a country which traditionally reinforces gender roles especially within family units. I hate to say it, but Italy for me seemed to be very old fashioned and anti progressive. Maybe this is a religious thing?
@Gaebolga
That can come from growing up with certain types of emotional abuse IME. It took me a long time to realize I actually could just do certain things as an adult, instead of waiting for an authority figure to give me permission.
I’d also be far, far less functional without software calendars and suchlike. Have some kind of autism spectrum thing going on, tend to get distracted by shiny ideas, and my short-term memory is limited. So without an exocortex, stuff just doesn’t get done.
Planning, organizational skills, and understanding of one’s own agency are IMO completely unrelated to things like math and verbal skill, or ability to learn things.
(And honestly, flying through most of high school without even trying does NOT help the first two of those.)
In other news, Lise Meitner would have wiped the floor with this Z-list hog’s pizzle twenty different ways without even taking her (very elegant) hat off
Oh wow, well I guess I will stop sciencing then! Silly me. Time to watch this again to remind myself of my limits: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LS37SNYjg8w
I am quite amused it has clearly never crossed his mind that women might be put off joining a field so misogynistic that researchers think presentations like this are ok.
About the identification thing: I wonder if that is because of this – if someone is undergoing legal/disciplinary proceedings, it is quite usual not to identify them by name in the press (even if everyone knows who they are). Tis an overcautious thing, usually because the organisation is paranoid about getting sued for libel if the proceedings don’t go their way. (source: I am an ex-PR professional)
I used to work at a big research university, and one time I was the staff representative/note taker for a faculty hiring committee. The things that make a difference are: who your advisor is/was (if it’s someone they know and are friends with recommending you, you have a much better chance), where you got your degrees, and not just how many citations you have (it is important), but how many papers you are first author on. And of course, the majority of the hiring pool the faculty picked was somehow always made up of white men.
TLDR;there’s a lot more that goes into hiring than what he’s saying.
Also, he really doesn’t understand statistics. The fact that he’s been allowed to get this far with this little understanding is a testament to sexism all on its own.