I enthusiastically applied to various PhD programs, but was unceremoniously rejected, and upon reaching out was met with “…engaging in outdated notions of environmental determinism.” “…you’re playing with fire by suggesting evolved cognitive differences… ” “The political climate on our campus is highly unfavorable for these areas of research.” “…this is probably the worst time in history to be studying such topics.” “…you will likely encounter extreme difficulties in securing grants.”
Sorry, I don't follow. The man has no track record of previous research and applied to several Ph.D programs; of course he was rejected.
Good on him for sticking with his hypothesis far enough to research it thoroughly, write it up, and publish it in a peer-reviewed journal, and now that he has done that work, he might start to turn heads in a Ph.D program. But otherwise, rejection from Ph.D programs after applying with an idea and no credentials is a bit like saying "Based on my new theory of radiation-proof ultra-thin materials, I applied to NASA, ESA, and JAXA for a head researcher position but was unceremoniously rejected." Of course you were, mate. You have no demonstrable history in the field. They want to see at least a working spacesuit prototype first.
The man has no track record of previous research and applied to several Ph.D programs; of course he was rejected.
He was specifically told he was rejected for doing forbidden research. Sure he might have been rejected anyway even if he had been researching something else, but let's not overlook the reasons he was given.
Or it could be they found his hypothesis completely without merit.
Although I found his paper interesting, he handwaved Confucianism away as the explanation for East Asian personality traits.
No matter the origins of Confucianism, it was the Chinese state religion for almost two thousand years and heavily influenced Korea, Japan, Vietnam etc.
Sure, but that doesn't really modify the point. Those fields are "forbidden" (the publication of his paper demonstrates they are not; they are unpopular having generated significantly negative outcomes and no shortage of dead-ends) for a reason.
"The secret to my radiation-proof space suit was interspersing microscopic mercury-selenium pellets in the fabric of the suit with quantum properties that match the wavelength of ionizing radiation at a ~"
"Oh, you're using mercury. In fabric. That goes on human skin. Okay, now we really need to see a prototype. And your health trials."
It's not so much ridiculous as "There are ways to do it safely. History strongly suggests that the default should be to assume it's unsafe, so treat it with heightened scrutiny."
There may be some specific ways in which Lamarckian genetics is correct, but given that trusting too much in it has already resulted in one crippling famine, it's fair to hit claims founded on it with a larger skepticism bat than theories based on Mendelian inheritance.
He was specifically told he was rejected for doing forbidden research.
Or, that's what he told us. Also, I've done my PhD and I don't think I've ever seen a graduate program telling a candidate why they were rejected. It is always the standard "There are more qualified candidates than we can accommodate and we could not accept everyone, I hope you understand."
...which makes me a little bit suspicious about the whole tale.
For me personally I require more evidence than a few quotes that do not appear to actually be direct quotations to accept his conclusion that the reason he was rejected was PhD programs were too "woke". It is possible, but it's also possible that he misunderstood what they were trying to tell him.
Here is the additional (circumstantial) evidence you requested:
The leading journal Nature Human Behaviour recently made this practice official in an editorial effectively announcing that it will not publish studies that show the wrong kind of differences between human groups. [..] the National Institutes of Health now withholds access to an important database if it thinks a scientist’s research may wander into forbidden territory - https://www.city-journal.org/article/dont-even-go-there
I can't find a publicly available copy of the Nature Human Behavior editorial. If you can share it I'd be happy to read it and form an opinion on it. I personally won't take City Journal's opinions at face value.
I can't find it either. What I did find was that that article may have been published by City Journal, but was written by James Lee, of the University of Minnesota, with a Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard [1].
If you still suspect he's lying, his statements are corroborated [2] by Stuart J. Ritchie (has served as a lecturer at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King's College London) [3], who directly cites a rule:
Please note that these summary data should not be used for research into the genetics of intelligence, education, social outcomes such as income, or potentially sensitive behavioral traits such as alcohol or drug addictions.
And an e-mail from NIAGADS:
…the association of genetic data with any of these parameters can be stigmatizing to the individuals or groups of individuals in a particular study. Any type of stigmatization that could be associated with genetic data is contrary to NIH policy.
He links to the page containing the rule [4], but unfortunately the page has since changed ("This dataset is temporarily unavailable"), and archive.org doesn't have an old version. So it could be that two Ph.D.'s working in the field are both lying - as you observe, sources that report things you don't like are untrustworthy.
I found their policy after a very quick search on the 'net so I'll share it with those who for whatever reason can not or do not want to perform this search:
This is quite a long piece of text so I won't quote it - just read it. It does support the premise of that City Journal article in that NHB will not publish research which they deem to trespass on 'forbidden territory' regardless of the scientific validity of such research.
I found that page, but it is labelled as editorial guidelines and not an editorial article, which is what I was expecting to find from the previous description. From my reading then, what is being labelled here as "forbidden territory" is this:
"Non-maleficence and beneficence are two fundamental principles in research ethics requiring the maximization of benefits and minimization of potential harms. These principles form a core part of general frameworks for the ethical conduct of research across the sciences and humanities (for example, The World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki; The Belmont Report; the International Ethical Guidelines for Health-related Research Involving Humans; Ethics in Social Science and Humanities)."
Which I see as more along the lines of the Hippocratic Oath rather than totalitarian thought crime. If this self-described neophyte didn't understand the risks for harm created by his research, that's his fault and not that of the PhD programs.
it is labelled as editorial guidelines and not an editorial article
Editorial Policies
As part of the Nature Portfolio, the Nature Research journals follow common policies as detailed in the Nature Portfolio journals’ authors and referees policy pages, and we request that our authors and referees abide by all of them. Nature Portfolio journals take publication conduct seriously. We reserve the right to decline publication of a paper even after it has been accepted if it becomes apparent that there are serious problems with the scientific content or violations of our publishing policies. Particularly, we want to draw your attention to the following policies and guidelines.
I'd say they're very clear on what these are and what the consequences of violating these guidelines are. They assume their readers and potential authors understand what they mean as well. I think they are correct in their assumption that those who are interested in this publication understand both the meaning as well as the reach of these guidelines.
It is also clear from these guidelines that the City Journal article as well as the self-described neophyte (your words) were right when they said research into these areas is shunned no matter the validity of such research, that as far as this publication is concerned this is 'forbidden territory'.
...didn't understand the risks for harm created by his research, that's his fault and not that of the PhD programs.
No, that is an incorrect characterisation of the circumstances. There is no harm created by this research per se, what harm there might be is in the eyes of the editors of NHB in that this research enters a territory that they deem to be off-limits because it might produce outcomes that undermine the basic tenets of their world view. In reality this research and any outcomes it produces can be used both for good as well as for bad purposes just like nearly all research. The editors at NHB would rather not have to contend with research which undermines their basic tenets of all humans being identical - the 'tabula rasa' or '0% nature, 100% nurture' - so they want to keep it out of their publication (which in itself is their right although it undermines their credibility) as well as out of academic discourse (which is where they are wrong).
I'm sorry, I don't see anywhere in either the editorial or the guidelines where they push nature completely out the window in favor of 100% nurture.
They do appear to be putting nature-based explanations under heightened scrutiny. Probably because attempts at those explanations in the past have proven not only wrong, but served as the foundation for extremely anti-human policy.
And if they don't want to be complicit in that, good on them. This isn't the only scientific field where that's the case. Go try to find the precise calculations necessary to get all of the chemistry and physics right to build a hydrogen bomb with a city-busting yield. Not a dirty bomb or enough tactical nuke to blow up a block or three, something more powerful than what was dropped in World War II. Let us know how that goes. Hint: What you will discover is that some constants used in the scientific community and published in widely circulated documents don't quite add up precisely right... And have different values if you can find documents from the United States and from the old Soviet Union.
And also, if you dig deeply enough in the States, eventually some very nice folks from the Department of Energy will show up and express some curiosity and excitement about your project, wondering how they can help. Because, the thing is, almost nobody is doing the kind of physics that requires those numbers to have extremely specific values, and the kind of equipment you have to buy or build to really investigate those numbers in detail is rare and unusual. Rare and unusual enough to show up on some very inexpensive tracking of who is purchasing it. So they just want to make sure that they help you get exactly. The. Right. Numbers.
Many people who get into PhD programs have some level of undergraduate research (typically performed in a lab, alongside grad students and a professor). When a graduate acceptance committee is evaluating applications, signals like "I have worked with a professor", "wrote an undergrad thesis", and "was coauthor and published in a peer-reviewed journal" cause applicants to be ranked more highly than peers who lack those signals.
Is it? Maybe this is just a terrible paper that reads like 19th century theories about Aryans. Those responses sound like they are pointing to a climate of intellectual repression, but...there's a reason we don't have endowed chairs in phrenology or palmistry or astral projection. And if someone proposed such a thing, the responses might not look too open-minded.
As they say, it's good to be open-minded, but not so open-minded that your brain falls out.
What you're doing by comparing it to phrenology and astral projection is just reductio ad absurdum.
It's not controversial that some personality traits might have genetic roots. It's also not controversial that humans who evolved in different regions have slightly different genetics.
But at first glance at the thesis of the research project, there's every reason to doubt the two combined would make any sense here. Among the immediate initial questions it raises is "Most East Asians don't live in subzero temperatures any more, so why do they still act that way?"
One has to remember how many absolute crackpots institutions of higher learning have write in every year. Now that he's done the heavy lifting on his own, there's a paper that can be discussed, but no shame on any institution that saw a nobody in the field coming in with an idea likely to fail to hold any water that went "Yeah, we're going to invest zero resources into that."
Comparison to phrenology, for an unknown quantity, isn't absurd; it's kind of the status quo for universities getting solicitations from strangers. That channel of communication is where the perpetual motion machines, time cubes, and proposals to go find the resting place of Atlantis come from.
Yeah but ‘racism bad’ and even suggesting that race might have any meaningful impact on anything at all is unacceptable politically, even if obviously true or impossible to disprove.
He's setting up a choice between the content of his paper vs. intellection repression. And I'm choosing not to take the bait. It's possible that he is experiencing intellectual repression AND his paper is not great.
It's not really a 'climate', but official policy that that area of research is off-limits, to the point that tax-funded genetic datasets are withheld if it is suspected one is doing said research: https://www.city-journal.org/article/dont-even-go-there
Comments
This is incredibly sad.
Science has more than just a replication issue. One of many reasons that public trust in institutions has been almost entirely eroded.
Sorry, I don't follow. The man has no track record of previous research and applied to several Ph.D programs; of course he was rejected.
Good on him for sticking with his hypothesis far enough to research it thoroughly, write it up, and publish it in a peer-reviewed journal, and now that he has done that work, he might start to turn heads in a Ph.D program. But otherwise, rejection from Ph.D programs after applying with an idea and no credentials is a bit like saying "Based on my new theory of radiation-proof ultra-thin materials, I applied to NASA, ESA, and JAXA for a head researcher position but was unceremoniously rejected." Of course you were, mate. You have no demonstrable history in the field. They want to see at least a working spacesuit prototype first.
He was specifically told he was rejected for doing forbidden research. Sure he might have been rejected anyway even if he had been researching something else, but let's not overlook the reasons he was given.
Or it could be they found his hypothesis completely without merit.
Although I found his paper interesting, he handwaved Confucianism away as the explanation for East Asian personality traits.
No matter the origins of Confucianism, it was the Chinese state religion for almost two thousand years and heavily influenced Korea, Japan, Vietnam etc.
Sure, but that doesn't really modify the point. Those fields are "forbidden" (the publication of his paper demonstrates they are not; they are unpopular having generated significantly negative outcomes and no shortage of dead-ends) for a reason.
"The secret to my radiation-proof space suit was interspersing microscopic mercury-selenium pellets in the fabric of the suit with quantum properties that match the wavelength of ionizing radiation at a ~"
"Oh, you're using mercury. In fabric. That goes on human skin. Okay, now we really need to see a prototype. And your health trials."
Yes, thinking evolution affects humans is as ridiculous as putting mercury into clothes, and evolution in general has been nothing but dead ends.
It's not so much ridiculous as "There are ways to do it safely. History strongly suggests that the default should be to assume it's unsafe, so treat it with heightened scrutiny."
There may be some specific ways in which Lamarckian genetics is correct, but given that trusting too much in it has already resulted in one crippling famine, it's fair to hit claims founded on it with a larger skepticism bat than theories based on Mendelian inheritance.
Or, that's what he told us. Also, I've done my PhD and I don't think I've ever seen a graduate program telling a candidate why they were rejected. It is always the standard "There are more qualified candidates than we can accommodate and we could not accept everyone, I hope you understand."
...which makes me a little bit suspicious about the whole tale.
For me personally I require more evidence than a few quotes that do not appear to actually be direct quotations to accept his conclusion that the reason he was rejected was PhD programs were too "woke". It is possible, but it's also possible that he misunderstood what they were trying to tell him.
Here is the additional (circumstantial) evidence you requested:
The leading journal Nature Human Behaviour recently made this practice official in an editorial effectively announcing that it will not publish studies that show the wrong kind of differences between human groups. [..] the National Institutes of Health now withholds access to an important database if it thinks a scientist’s research may wander into forbidden territory - https://www.city-journal.org/article/dont-even-go-there
I can't find a publicly available copy of the Nature Human Behavior editorial. If you can share it I'd be happy to read it and form an opinion on it. I personally won't take City Journal's opinions at face value.
I can't find it either. What I did find was that that article may have been published by City Journal, but was written by James Lee, of the University of Minnesota, with a Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard [1].
If you still suspect he's lying, his statements are corroborated [2] by Stuart J. Ritchie (has served as a lecturer at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King's College London) [3], who directly cites a rule:
Please note that these summary data should not be used for research into the genetics of intelligence, education, social outcomes such as income, or potentially sensitive behavioral traits such as alcohol or drug addictions.
And an e-mail from NIAGADS:
…the association of genetic data with any of these parameters can be stigmatizing to the individuals or groups of individuals in a particular study. Any type of stigmatization that could be associated with genetic data is contrary to NIH policy.
He links to the page containing the rule [4], but unfortunately the page has since changed ("This dataset is temporarily unavailable"), and archive.org doesn't have an old version. So it could be that two Ph.D.'s working in the field are both lying - as you observe, sources that report things you don't like are untrustworthy.
[1] https://cla.umn.edu/about/directory/profile/leex2293
[2] https://www.sciencefictions.org/p/nih-genetics
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_J._Ritchie
[4] https://dss.niagads.org/datasets/ng00075/
I found their policy after a very quick search on the 'net so I'll share it with those who for whatever reason can not or do not want to perform this search:
https://www.nature.com/nathumbehav/editorial-policies/ethics...
This is quite a long piece of text so I won't quote it - just read it. It does support the premise of that City Journal article in that NHB will not publish research which they deem to trespass on 'forbidden territory' regardless of the scientific validity of such research.
I found that page, but it is labelled as editorial guidelines and not an editorial article, which is what I was expecting to find from the previous description. From my reading then, what is being labelled here as "forbidden territory" is this:
"Non-maleficence and beneficence are two fundamental principles in research ethics requiring the maximization of benefits and minimization of potential harms. These principles form a core part of general frameworks for the ethical conduct of research across the sciences and humanities (for example, The World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki; The Belmont Report; the International Ethical Guidelines for Health-related Research Involving Humans; Ethics in Social Science and Humanities)."
Which I see as more along the lines of the Hippocratic Oath rather than totalitarian thought crime. If this self-described neophyte didn't understand the risks for harm created by his research, that's his fault and not that of the PhD programs.
Editorial Policies
As part of the Nature Portfolio, the Nature Research journals follow common policies as detailed in the Nature Portfolio journals’ authors and referees policy pages, and we request that our authors and referees abide by all of them. Nature Portfolio journals take publication conduct seriously. We reserve the right to decline publication of a paper even after it has been accepted if it becomes apparent that there are serious problems with the scientific content or violations of our publishing policies. Particularly, we want to draw your attention to the following policies and guidelines.
I'd say they're very clear on what these are and what the consequences of violating these guidelines are. They assume their readers and potential authors understand what they mean as well. I think they are correct in their assumption that those who are interested in this publication understand both the meaning as well as the reach of these guidelines.
It is also clear from these guidelines that the City Journal article as well as the self-described neophyte (your words) were right when they said research into these areas is shunned no matter the validity of such research, that as far as this publication is concerned this is 'forbidden territory'.
No, that is an incorrect characterisation of the circumstances. There is no harm created by this research per se, what harm there might be is in the eyes of the editors of NHB in that this research enters a territory that they deem to be off-limits because it might produce outcomes that undermine the basic tenets of their world view. In reality this research and any outcomes it produces can be used both for good as well as for bad purposes just like nearly all research. The editors at NHB would rather not have to contend with research which undermines their basic tenets of all humans being identical - the 'tabula rasa' or '0% nature, 100% nurture' - so they want to keep it out of their publication (which in itself is their right although it undermines their credibility) as well as out of academic discourse (which is where they are wrong).
I'm sorry, I don't see anywhere in either the editorial or the guidelines where they push nature completely out the window in favor of 100% nurture.
They do appear to be putting nature-based explanations under heightened scrutiny. Probably because attempts at those explanations in the past have proven not only wrong, but served as the foundation for extremely anti-human policy.
And if they don't want to be complicit in that, good on them. This isn't the only scientific field where that's the case. Go try to find the precise calculations necessary to get all of the chemistry and physics right to build a hydrogen bomb with a city-busting yield. Not a dirty bomb or enough tactical nuke to blow up a block or three, something more powerful than what was dropped in World War II. Let us know how that goes. Hint: What you will discover is that some constants used in the scientific community and published in widely circulated documents don't quite add up precisely right... And have different values if you can find documents from the United States and from the old Soviet Union.
And also, if you dig deeply enough in the States, eventually some very nice folks from the Department of Energy will show up and express some curiosity and excitement about your project, wondering how they can help. Because, the thing is, almost nobody is doing the kind of physics that requires those numbers to have extremely specific values, and the kind of equipment you have to buy or build to really investigate those numbers in detail is rare and unusual. Rare and unusual enough to show up on some very inexpensive tracking of who is purchasing it. So they just want to make sure that they help you get exactly. The. Right. Numbers.
Isn't the PhD program where you're supposed to generate the track record of research?
Many people who get into PhD programs have some level of undergraduate research (typically performed in a lab, alongside grad students and a professor). When a graduate acceptance committee is evaluating applications, signals like "I have worked with a professor", "wrote an undergrad thesis", and "was coauthor and published in a peer-reviewed journal" cause applicants to be ranked more highly than peers who lack those signals.
It’s a PhD program, not a job and also you are completely ignoring the reasons he was given for his rejection
If the issue is his credentials why was there so much mention of the topic of research being a problem? Your post seems disingenuous.
The only source we have for the contents of those rejection letters is excerpts from the individual rejected.
I don't think we can extrapolate from that data set alone.
Is it? Maybe this is just a terrible paper that reads like 19th century theories about Aryans. Those responses sound like they are pointing to a climate of intellectual repression, but...there's a reason we don't have endowed chairs in phrenology or palmistry or astral projection. And if someone proposed such a thing, the responses might not look too open-minded.
As they say, it's good to be open-minded, but not so open-minded that your brain falls out.
What you're doing by comparing it to phrenology and astral projection is just reductio ad absurdum.
It's not controversial that some personality traits might have genetic roots. It's also not controversial that humans who evolved in different regions have slightly different genetics.
His research combines the two.
But at first glance at the thesis of the research project, there's every reason to doubt the two combined would make any sense here. Among the immediate initial questions it raises is "Most East Asians don't live in subzero temperatures any more, so why do they still act that way?"
One has to remember how many absolute crackpots institutions of higher learning have write in every year. Now that he's done the heavy lifting on his own, there's a paper that can be discussed, but no shame on any institution that saw a nobody in the field coming in with an idea likely to fail to hold any water that went "Yeah, we're going to invest zero resources into that."
Comparison to phrenology, for an unknown quantity, isn't absurd; it's kind of the status quo for universities getting solicitations from strangers. That channel of communication is where the perpetual motion machines, time cubes, and proposals to go find the resting place of Atlantis come from.
Yeah but ‘racism bad’ and even suggesting that race might have any meaningful impact on anything at all is unacceptable politically, even if obviously true or impossible to disprove.
He's setting up a choice between the content of his paper vs. intellection repression. And I'm choosing not to take the bait. It's possible that he is experiencing intellectual repression AND his paper is not great.
It's not really a 'climate', but official policy that that area of research is off-limits, to the point that tax-funded genetic datasets are withheld if it is suspected one is doing said research: https://www.city-journal.org/article/dont-even-go-there