[DanAndersen]

Direct arxiv link to the preprint in question: https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.04184

Kudos to the author for being brave enough to detail these events. Academia and the process of science has enough blind spots without needing activists in the mix to add their own.

>“Several colleagues,” she wrote, had warned her that publication would provoke “extremely strong reactions” and there existed a “very real possibility that the right-wing media may pick this up and hype it internationally.”

It's as if these people had never heard of the Streisand Effect. What would have been a stuffy publication of no interest beyond a small circle of curious researchers is now a public salacious affair.

[barry-cotter]

> It's as if these people had never heard of the Streisand Effect. What would have been a stuffy publication of no interest beyond a small circle of curious researchers is now a public salacious affair.

You're not reading about all the other times articles offensive to a certain point of view got memory holed successfully. Most of the time powerful assholes get away with their behaviour. Note that the only reason this article is even on the internet is that one of the original two co-authors is retired and beyond the reach of professional threats.

[waterhouse]

In a similar vein, there's a paper with the fascinating name "Thirty Years of Denying the Evidence on Gender Symmetry in Partner Violence: Implications for Prevention and Treatment".

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233717660_Thirty_Ye...

"Method 7: Harass, Threaten, or Penalize Researchers Who Publish Evidence on Gender Symmetry ... The most extreme example was the experience of Susan Steinmetz. When she was at the University of Delaware and was being reviewed for promotion and tenure, there was an organized attempt to block her appointment through unsolicited letters to her department and the university president. They asserted that Steinmetz was not a suitable person to promote because her research showing high rates of women's perpetration of PV was not believable. In short, they accused her of scientific fraud (Susan Steinmetz, personal communications during the years 1973 to 1988, when we collaborated in research and coauthored two books). An academic version that implies fraud is Pleck and colleagues (1978). Even more extreme, there was a bomb threat at a daughter's wedding.

At the University of Manitoba, a lecturer's contract was not renewed because of protests about her research, which found approximately equal rates of PV by women and men.

I have been repeatedly harassed and penalized. ... Two of my graduate students were warned that they will never get jobs if they do their PhD dissertation with me."

And more examples are given.

[orangecat]

Wow. That's especially amazing considering that the claim of similar domestic violence rates actually supports the progressive axiom that there are no innate psychological differences between men and women.

[weberc2]

It may support that axiom but contradict others; specifically that women are helpless victims and men misogynistic brutes.

[jostmey]

It looks like a well written paper with some really cool ideas. Too bad about what happened to it

[AlexCoventry]

There is nothing original or subtle about it, and it was blatantly intended by the Mathematical Intelligencer editor to stir shit up.

[barry-cotter]

All of that can be true and Amie Wilkinson's campaign of harassment would still be vile and disgusting behaviour, unworthy of an adult of any kind. She got the paper withdrawn from two different journals, and got Dr Tabachnikov to withdraw his name from the paper.

What do you think of Dr Wilkinson's behaviour? Because that’s what the article is about, a campaign of harassment from a woman in a position of power.

[mirimir]

What's relevant here is her unprofessional and harassing behavior. If she were a man, the behavior would be no less vile, nor more so.

[AlexCoventry]

> What do you think of Dr Wilkinson's behaviour?

I'd need a more authoritative account of it to form a view.

[aunasdfuyb]

And what authoritative accounts have you used to dismiss the paper and the journal editor?

If you believe the editor when they say "I am happy to stir up controversy" why not also believe them when they say "we could make a real contribution here"?

[AlexCoventry]

> what authoritative accounts have you used to dismiss the paper and the journal editor?

I read the paper and drew my own conclusion.

> why not also believe them when they say "we could make a real contribution here"?

That snippet in context: "After the Middlebury fracas, in which none of the protestors had read the book they were protesting, we could make a real contribution here by insisting that all views be heard." That's just fancy language for "stir shit up." There's nothing there about the intellectual merit of Hill's paper, just an unobtainable value that "all views be heard."

People should read the paper to make up their own minds, though. I'm with her, there.

[UncleMeat]

Why do you feel qualified to evaluate the paper? This is the risk. It is difficult for laypeople to properly evaluate a paper, so any nonsense when presented well can convince people.

[mirimir]

Yes, and it's still there.

If it goes away, I'll be happy to provide copies. Or put it up somewhere secure.

And FYI:

> At this point, faced with career-threatening reprisals from their own departmental colleagues and the diversity committee at Penn State, as well as displeasure from the NSF, Sergei and his colleague who had done computer simulations for us withdrew their names from the research. Fortunately for me, I am now retired and rather less easily intimidated—one of the benefits of being a Vietnam combat veteran and former U.S. Army Ranger, I guess. So, I continued to revise the paper, and finally posted it on the online mathematics archives.

[leibwiht]

>It's as if these people had never heard of the Streisand Effect.

It's not that they don't know about it, it's that the quote in question is an overt threat and the entire point of it is that the person it is said to will give up and stop trying out of fear, which would certainly prevent any sort of Streisand effect from happening.