I've been watching this unfold over Twitter - looks like the paper published had serious errors and has been largely dismantled. As a more general point, I think instances such as these are a reminder of why diversity in academia is important. 1/ https://twitter.com/StatGenDan/status/1330238657937207303

Having not looked into the paper in question in detail, as far as I can tell, what happened was that it was really inconsistent with the prior of a large number of academics, particularly those who had women mentors, so they interrogated the claims and found many issues. 2/

That's great. Exactly how science is supposed to work. When somebody makes a claim inconsistent with our priors, we examine the claims using established methods and decide whether we should accept the claim and update our priors. 3/

The reason diversity comes into this is that if we all have the same priors, then a claim might be uniformly consistent with our priors and we will all just accept it and move on. 4/

In an ideal world, we would interrogate all claims, even those consistent with our priors. But that's not the way humans operate. 5/

So, we need to have a diversity of priors, based on different backgrounds and experiences, so that somebody is available to interrogate scientific claims from all perspectives. 6/

As a corollary of this claim - yes, this should include ideological diversity too since we are more skeptical of claims inconsistent with our political views....7/

As an example, many of us - myself included - uncritically accepted a study claiming racial disparity in the impact of voter ID laws. Can't know for sure, but this was probably because it fit with our political priors. Turns out that the study did not hold up to scrutiny. 8/

There are other historical examples across a number of fields and touching on a number of subjects. For example, scientific racism was treated uncritically when the academy was racially homogenous. 9/

One can imagine that the claim that women mentors are inferior claim would have come under less scrutiny in an era when the academy was (more) dominated by men. 10/

Anyway, this is nothing earth-shattering. Diversity makes us smarter - this is true in academia too. 11/11