Read on Twitter
I& #39;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">https://twitter.com/StatGenDa...
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& #39;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& #39;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& #39;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
