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Gil brought up bias against women in another thread. We had a lengthy discussion about this some time ago (which eventually degenerated). At a recent meeting where I was asked to talk briefly about the main issues that MathOverflow has had, I mentioned "demographic bias" as one of them. Although we recognize the importance of this issue, we have not found much that we (the moderators) could do about this. Of course, we welcome feedback on this important issue.
Warning: This is a sensitive topic! Please stay on topic and be respectful...
Bias is very specific and was chosen deliberately. There is little hope that we can change the community and individuals. We can, however, change the site (well, pretty soon we will) to remove some structural bias. That said, I have yet to hear anything we could do.
Edit: I added "structural" to the title to make the topic clearer.
I guess it wasn't clear from the original question that we want feedback regarding the site itself. Here is an example from Izabella Laba's blog post http://ilaba.wordpress.com/2011/03/28/why-im-not-on-mathoverflow/
To me, the “reputation” system looks like a formalized version of the same informal evaluation systems that social groups have been using forever. If a woman has noticed in the past that she is being taken less seriously than her male colleagues, she’ll expect the same on MO, for example that she’ll get fewer points than a male colleague for the same knowledgeable answer. The point system encourages a competitive mindset, and I think that mathematicians tend to be competitive by nature. If you’re female and expect to start with a huge disadvantage just for this reason, you may well be discouraged from participation.
This of course is based on general life experience, not on anything that has actually happened on MO. I’d love to see MO develop a reputation (heh) for treating women fairly.
As a partial remedy for this, we added two preference options:
Is there anything else we could do to make the reputation system more palatable?
Rita, we were typing at the same time, that wasn't a response to your post. I was just trying to clarify the topic since "bias" can apparently be used in ways I wasn't aware of. In any case, I'm glad your MO experience has been (mostly) positive. I think we all get spurious downvotes, which could be due to inane reasons like some users poorly aiming at the up arrow... (I just checked and it doesn't look like you're the victim of a personal vendetta or anything like that.)
Thanks for reminding us of that, Steve. In case we look back here in the far future, here is a snapshot of the current counts for each arxiv category:
(Yes, there are a few other problematic categories too. I hacked a clustering program last year that I might dig up to further analyze this if I have time.)
Any kind of bias... We shouldn't be biased against certain biases!
Since it is about any kind of bias:
I think there is a bias against anon/pseodonymous users. This is not a personal complaint, and in some sense by-design as there is a suggestion in the FAQs. Still, I wanted to bring it up, since to me it falls well into this microcosmos or toy-model of the real world idea, and I though about this before, but I really do not want the following to be overinterpreted. (If somebody sees a problem of whatever kind with this I remove it, it is not my intention to be provocative here.)
It is in some sense an interesting experience for me (as somebody who falls in real-life along most, perhaps all, typical criteria in, how to say this neutrally 'the local standard group' perhaps, to the extent this makes sense) to be a member of some group seen with certain reservations by 'the local standard group'.
And, I believe to notice certain analogs of patterns of behaviour towards this group that are AFAIK somewhat typical in such a situation. For example, that memebership in this group is brought up in situation of conflict somewhat arbitrarily (that is, as some kind of ad hominem as opposed to there being any direct connection of membership and conflict-at-hand).
Actually, what is the percentage of anonymous/pseudonymous users amongst all users?
Andres, I don't know. If I absolutely had to get some idea and do it myself, I'd go through the long list of users where in many cases (such as 'quid') it would be obvious that it's a pseudonym or anonym, in many cases (e.g., Andreas Blass) obvious that it's a real name. Names like 'Agol' or 'gowers' not exactly pseudonyms and would not be counted as such. Also cases like HW and VA are not too hard to decipher. I think that most cases would be either easy to associate with a real person or pseudonyms which are hard or impossible, although proceeding in this manner would obviously be a tedious and time-consuming task.
In case you're saying that it's a stupid question or unanswerable without putting in a lot of work, you might be right, but mainly I was after a rough estimate and wondered if anyone had any idea.
@Todd Trimble: Technically, it certainly depends what counts as 'user' and in addition what counts as anon/pseudonymous [people just whose display name is not the full real name are never counted in here, if they 'identify' further on the userpage via a link to a webpage for example]. What I meant, and thought to write but did not quite arrive at making precise, but thought to be understood were in some sense 'regular' users.
In any case, at the top-end (100) the anon/pseudonymous users are about 5 percent, then they increase (slowly) but if you flip through the pages they stay a few quite long. At around Top 300 (this is about the voting threshold it seems like 15percent, roughly). If you want to get a rough idead further down I'd suggest pick in the userlist orderer by rep around page 30, that is top1000 or 700rep. They seem still fewer there.
Thanks very much, quid. I had guessed the anon/pseudonymous numbered higher than the rough estimates you report; that's interesting.
Steve said: MO has a pronounced bias in favor of [certain branches of mathematics] and against [other branches]
When I read the title of this thread, I thought that is what it would be about. I have the same impression as Steve. But what can be cone about it? I don't know. (Asking our eager closers to make small changes in their habits has not worked.)
Angelo, those were MO question counts. The number of papers in each category can be found here.
For the discussion of fields, in particular if we come to certain parts at the applied/computational end it is perhaps worth keeping in mind the existence of http://scicomp.stackexchange.com/ , several of the top-rep users being mathematicians; and for (applied) statistics there is http://stats.stackexchange.com/ though this might already be away a bit. To me it is genuinely unclear if there is any merit in trying to attract contributions that seem a very good fit for the former to MO, even if they would also fit here. Even more so as likely the sites will soon be part of the same network.
I'm a bit puzzled by one aspect of this lack of representation of certain fields. One saying I hear a lot these days (out of context) is: You can't ask for what you don't know. Presumably, if some people take the time to say that a certain field X is underrepresented that means that we already do have qualified and interested people in field X. If that is correct, then it's some kind of bootstrapping issue that is going on. Does anyone have thoughts about this?
I'm curious what those other places are?
While Nilima Nigam seems (based on a quick search) not active there she said Jan 14th, 2012, in response to David Ketcheson advertesing here on meta the site scicomp.SE, mentioned above:
I agree with David. This SE seems actually a very good site for numerical analysis/scientific computing. Within a few months of its inception it has more substantive questions, and more answers, in these areas than in the equivalent time span on MO.
@Steve Huntsman: first, to avoid a possible misconception, I certainly had nothing against MO having more activity in these areas. Second, still, this site exists and might contribute to the fact that there is little activity on MO in these areas; so it might be part of an explanantion for the bias.
Third, it is in a true sense unclear to me if a specific "recrutement activity" in this area has any merit (globally) in view of the existence of that site, which is (at 1k questions over a year or so) not large.
Finally, what could IMO be interesting is to start some dialog with people, specifically the mathematicians working in academia, there; I don't know on whether they know/how they see MO, whether they would prefer to be on MO but feel unwelcome, or by contrast are glad not to be bother by all these pure things flaoting around on MO.
Added: regarding your final paragraph, which I either missed or you added later: what is 'belong on MO' supposed to mean? Okay, they might be on-topic here as well. Somebody asked them elsewhere. So, what? A quite agressive discussion on meta.math.SE developped following the presentation of the idea that after migration of MO a certain type of questions should be moved from math.SE to MO.
Added 2: But let me add that I agree, and even said on accassion I think, that MO is also in my opinion somewhat dismissive towards certain subjects, and it should not. It will however be hard to change this. Which does not mean on should not try.
I really appreciate Steve Huntsman's bringing this bias to our attention, but (Steve) I'm a little confused about question 33230. It seems users like David Speyer and Victor Protsak (who presumably represent some of the more dominant MO fields) were in support of keeping this question open, while you said you entered a vote to close because it had a trivial answer. This runs counter to the notion that the MO mainline is dismissive toward (say) stochastic mathematics. Did I misunderstand your point?
I would be interested to see cases where you feel the MO mainline wrongly shut down questions.
And yet many applied questions that require great sophistication to address but don't appear to have the same level of polish are considered to be unworthy of MO.
I'm genuinely interested in seeing in any examples you have of this, so that I might better recognize what you've been observing.
Frank Thorne may be on to something when he mentioned "prose". One type of answer that is often greatly celebrated, often very disproportionately so in my opinion, is the short, pithy, conceptual answer. Answers that require a hard-core calculation or technique are rarely upvoted much, AFAICT. So perhaps "hard analysis", which requires great command of technique and subtle estimates, might not capture the public fancy so much. Might that tie in to what you're observing, Steve?
@Todd Trimble: Mass spring model for hair is another example; see in particular also the meta of that question mentioned in a comment there for general thoughts on the matter.
Personally, I would be even more interested to see example from geraldedgar, since here what was thought of is quite a bit less clear for me than for Steve Huntsman.
@Donu: two divided by a finite number is not infinitesimally small. Or if you really mean infinitesimally small: where do you work? I'm sure after hiring infinitely many mathematicians they can fit another one in!