Abstract
Recent renaming of the R.A. Fisher Award and Lectureship without official discussion among members of American Statistical Association (ASA), along with other events of similar type, was an important step in creating a new atmosphere in science in general. On the one hand, this is tightly related to such critical issues as freedom of speech, research and opinion, while on the other hand, it is related to conformity, yielding to irrelevant demand, and to denial of evidence as a first basic principle in science. The paper shows that a) all accusations against R. Fisher are factually groundless; b) the decision was motivated not by the facts, but by political and moral pressure, connected with allegedly “institutional racism” of the American society and the US police specifically; c) the decision was a natural consequence of the victimhood culture, which penetrates more and more into academia; d) this culture, in turn, is counter-scientific in a sense that it does not need any evidence; e) particularly, the most popular current thesis about “police bias against black people” – which seems a direct real trigger of the lecture renaming – cannot be confirmed by available data. Showing all that, the paper could be considered a warning against dangerous social tendencies in modern science in general and statistics in particular.
Keywords
Introduction
Among daily news of the last several weeks, like burning cars, smashing windows and toppling the statues of Columbus and other undesirables, the short information about renaming one of the most prestigious statistical awards, R. A. Fisher Award and Lectureship,1 (Crane et al., 2020) seems very insignificant and, definitely, not worthy to be publicized widely, beyond the narrow circle of professionals. It coincided with removal of stained glass in his honor in the University of Cambridge (Cahan, 2020) and with renaming F. Galton and K. Pearson Lecture Theatres and Pearson Building in University College London (June 19, 2020).2 Those facts could be considered in the broader context though. Statistics is the basis for data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, thus it is the foundation of the most advanced modern and future technologies. R. Fisher (1890–1962) “
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What happened with one of the greatest scientists of 20 h century Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher is very well documented, and I can just put here a definitely incomplete list of his major contributions to statistics: the concept of degrees of freedom, the key element of any statistical estimation; the variance analysis (ANOVA), together with ubiquitous F-distribution by his namesake; discriminant analysis (the first “supervised machine learning” technique, when “machines”, aka computers, didn’t exist); design of statistical experiments (which is the basis, in particular, for clinical trials, a game changer in medicine); hypotheses testing theory, a tool that became a norm for any statistical study, which just recently started to be reconsidered because its famous p-value concept was actually dogmatized by Fisher’s successors (Wasserstein et al., 2016); concept of maximum likelihood estimation, utilized now in countless studies. I could add Behrens – Fisher problem, Fisher exact test, Fisher information, Fisher-Kolmogorov equation, Fisher-Tippet-Gnedenko theorem, etc. In fact, one cannot turn around in modern statistics without stumbling on something that R. Fisher has either invented or indirectly foreseen. And I haven’t even touched upon his work in biology, where he was recently called “the greatest of Darwin’s successors” (Edwards, 2011) (as a founder of population genetics and much more.) By all measures, his contributions to the two sciences, statistics and biology, in the century of narrow specialization were just unparalleled, to say the least.
One may expect, that it is not easy to discredit such a monumental figure, or at least do it very fast, considering that his influence is rooted deeply and widely everywhere; however, it did not take long. Here are some key events, resulting in renaming the award (bold everywhere are mine).
Daniela Witten, a professor from University of Washington and member of Fisher Lecture award committee, came up with the idea of the renaming; she twitted about it on June 4th. In the beginning of June 2020, an assistant professor Miles Ott from Smith College, started a Petition on Change.com (D. Witten’s initiative or not, I do not know). Petition collected about 8,000 signatures very fast (it is not clear, how many of signatories were statisticians or biologists), and it is closed now. No discussions within the wide statistical community, no publication about it in Amstat News, the monthly magazine of ASA, have followed. However, some people were aware about the process, as informal online discussions, containing (by my estimation) about 60–70 messages in different threads, took place and ended on June 20th3,4,5 (Crane et al., 2020; Witten, 2020). Unfortunately, I missed all that and didn’t participate in the discussions. The Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies (COPSS), which has established the award in 1963, released a statement6 that it had retired, effective immediately, on June 23d. The comment motivating its decision was: “We take this action to advance a more just, equitable, diverse, and inclusive statistical community…We acknowledge that not all statisticians will agree with this action. The path of equity and inclusion stimulates diverse perspectives on substance, pace and content of an issue, and consensus can sometimes be impracticable.”
So, it took just about 20 days from start to finish (imagine solving
D. Witten. After all those events with D. Floyd “I’ve been trying to think of ways that *I* can improve my tiny corner of the world”. And she got two sudden revelations:
“Fisher was not a great guy. He was really big into eugenics. Check out his Wikipedia page: “eugenicist” is actually the second word used to describe him (after “British”, but before “statistician” or “geneticist”).
“…yikes! It is not good that a major award is named after this guy!! What exactly this bad guy Fisher did, why it cries for the immediate action, remains unclear. “He said some terrible things in the 1950’s. I don’t want to put them on Twitter.” D. Witten is afraid that “terrible things” will spoil the innocent Twitter’s audience in about the same way as Gorge in “The Name of the Rose” was afraid that publishing of the Aristotle’s “Poetics”, propagating virtues of laughter, will spoil the whole humankind. Well, U. Eco placed his heroes in the 14
M. Ott was much more straightforward and pronounced (perhaps, exactly those?) terrible words openly. Here is the petition (in a reduced version): “Fisher was a prominent proponent of Eugenics. Further, as noted in his Wikipedia page: In 1950, Fisher opposed UNESCO’s The Race Question, believing that evidence and everyday experience showed that human groups differ profoundly "in their innate capacity for intellectual and emotional development" and concluded that the “practical international problem is that of learning to share the resources of this planet amicably with persons of materially different nature”, and that “this problem is being obscured by entirely well-intentioned efforts to minimize the real differences that exist”. The revised statement titled “The Race Concept: Results of an Inquiry” (1951) was accompanied by Fisher’s dissenting commentary. By honoring Fisher, we dishonor the entire field of Statistics. We ask that this award be named after David Blackwell, whose many achievements include…” (then follows a list of achievements, which is of no relevance here – I.M). Wikipedia again! Not that much effort the two main initiators of the renaming process put in their claim, about which several sarcastic remarks were already given in the discussion. From discussions which followed, a few new arguments were added:
…it was wrong then for Fisher to visit with the Klan when he came to the states. (H. Peach7
). In the same thread, this statement was opposed by two participants (S. Sharkansky and R. O’Brien) as ungrounded. I can just join them; it’s completely unproven.
He supported and advocated for social systems that oppressed and killed others, including defenses for actual Nazis. (T. Carpenter, (Crane et al., 2020)). Those grave claims are not supported by the author.
Perhaps you’re wondering what Fisher might have said to help von Verschuer? Here’s an excerpt! It probably won’t make you feel better! M. Griffin.8 Here is this quoted excerpt (Weiss, 2010) which is R. Fisher’s letter written in Nov 1948 as a response to request from Germany about scientific merits of a well-known geneticist, one of the pioneers (after F. Galton) of the twins studies O. von Verschuer: “As he has been attacked for sympathy towards the Nazi movement, I may say that his reputation stood exceedingly high among human geneticists before we had heard of Adolph Hitler. It was, I think his misfortune rather than his fault that racial theory was a part of the Nazi ideology, and that it was therefore of some propaganda importance to the Nazi movement to show that the Party supported work of unquestionable value such as that which von Vershcuer was doing. In spite of their prejudices I have no doubt also that the Party wished to benefit the German racial stock, especially by the elimination of manifest defectives, such as those deficient mentally, and I do not doubt that von Verschuer gave, as I should have done, his support to such a movement. In other respects, however, I imagine his influence was consistently on the side of scientific sanity in the drafting and administration of laws intended to this end.”
This sounds very bad, indeed (and, most likely, corroborates the previous accusation by T. Carpenter or, maybe, even unrevealed D. Witten’s “terrible words”).
In summary, after excluding the ungrounded claims, R. Fisher is accused in the following:
he was a devoted eugenicist; he has a dissented opinion about UNESCO statement about race in 1951; he supported a Nazi scientist, who has been involved in racial practices, and showed solidarity to some of his views.
The respective comments in their order are as follows.
The peaceful transition from Eugenics to Social Biology.
Fisher – eugenicist
There is a huge literature about eugenics, its history, origins, its relation with genetics in general and its current status. It’s not my role here even to make references, plenty of which could be found elsewhere. There is no doubt that R. Fisher was both geneticist and eugenicist, either before or after WWII. The term was heavily compromised after infamous Nazi experiments with people based on race, mental and physical ability; they used a killing of people as an element of “racial hygiene” and “eugenic tool”. Such an “approach”, besides Nazis, was never proclaimed by any well-known scientist, with one exception, as far as I know, of K. Mereshkovsky (author of Symbiogenesis theory). But even he did it in a form of the novel (The Earthly Paradise, 1903), where all non-whites are eliminated from the face of the Earth just to free it for a couple of millions of superhumans (Mereshkovsky, 2020).
The Nazi Germany era compromised not only this term together with innocent ancient “swastika”, but most importantly, thousands of reputations, for good or for bad. “Interesting times” stimulate brushing with one wide brush; it seems, we are witnessing the same type of phenomenon right now – so, we can understand people at that time easily.
Otherwise, the logic of eugenics, as it was formulated by F. Galton and supported by practically all biologists and geneticists for many decades, remains the same. “Eugenics is the attempt to improve the human gene pool” (Wilkinson & Garrard, 2013). Either it is “positive” (how to improve traits for newborns) or “negative” (how to eliminate undesirable traits), it is intended to improve genetically the quality of mankind. It lives among us now under different names (like “social biology”, “population genetics”, “evolutionary genetics”, etc. – see the rare open discussion of the term in our time (Wilkinson & Garrard, 2013), but works on the eternal problems of improving the “human stock “, which interested people since Plato’s time. Eugenics in action in our days is, say, global genetic testing (including prenatal counseling), a multibillion industry in USA;10 even “sterilization of unfit”, the word even more anathema than eugenics itself, still has a very diverse legal status in the American states.11
To my mind, those facts tell clearly that to accuse R. Fisher of his standing in eugenics means just nothing – yes, he was a eugenicist, as thousands of scholars and practitioners now, regardless of how they name themselves. This Fig. 1 illustrates better than many words what happened in 7 years after Fisher’s death - the same cover, the same authors, the same problems – but with a different title, under which this American journal is happily living (after another renaming in 2008) now.
This being said is not to ignore an enormous number of very complicated bioethical problems, which bothered people then and bother them today – but the tabooed word “eugenics” cannot be the reason for naming R. Fisher a “bad guy” deserving dishonoring.
What is most disturbing in discussion – people do not make a simplest verification of their statements. When M. Rubin brought to M. Griffin’s attention R. Fisher’s affirmative quote about eugenic sterilization, she thankfully and enthusiastically replied that “His despicable beliefs were not popular and outside the mainstream.”12 Ok, what is despicable about decision of the California 4th District Court of Appeal, that “a developmentally disabled adult with "mild mental retardation" may be reproductively sterilized” (2013)13 or similar decisions in Illinois (2008) and many other states of various years? Sterilizations in USA are very rare now, it is true, but a) they are not completely prohibited and b) they were much more popular in Fisher’s times when at least 60,000 people were sterilized in the USA (Stern, 2016), not to mention Europe. What exactly was “outside the mainstream” here?
“…what would genetics be like today if it was not historically basically 100% eugenics? I’d love to see fictitious genetics without its eugenics history. Has anybody written such a piece?” – remarked O. Guest, exactly to the point. I doubt that someone has, but less sure for the near future. With such a rigor and speed with which changes are made in universities, this type of book may indeed appear soon.
Fisher – dissident; race and intelligence problem
The petition lists two Fisher’s sins: that he was a eugenicist, and that he dissented on UNESCO’s The Race Question inquiry in 1951. Indeed, Fisher was among several prominent scientists, who tried to make the statements broader. Fortunately, at that time UNESKO published not only the final text, but the dissenting opinions, and we can judge now what really has happened there. It’s enough to compare just two statements. The first is in the main body of the UNESKO document:14
“It is
The second is the dissenting opinion:
“Sir Ronald Fisher has one fundamental objection to the Statement, which, as he himself says, destroys the very spirit of the whole document. He
As one may see, the official statement allows for differences between “human groups” (aka races), while Fisher is sure that they do exist, i.e. the two statements are different in quantity, not in kind. Other similar official statements also express doubts, not certainty, like that (p. 9): “There
“No evidence” means it may (or may not) appear. There is also no evidence for the opposite; otherwise it will be undoubtedly stressed here. Even this simple consideration eliminates the ground for accusation: at the bottom line, what is the qualitative difference between “possibility” and “belief”? They are both not proven facts; Fisher is much more certain in something; and UNESCO just assumes. Is that a crime, keeping in mind the lack of factual evidence at that time?
Moreover, what Statement says is, in statistical terms, much less digestible than Fisher’s dissenting opinion. “…it is certain that, within a single group, innate capacities vary as much as, if not more than, they do between different groups.” Ok, let it be “certain” (although how? Was it really measured? What were results?). It just means that determination in a pair “race – intellect” will be equal or less than 50%, according to the rule of sum of variances between and within groups. Fair enough. What does it prove? Just an obvious fact that the differences between races do exist, but they could be less pronounced than the differences between individuals within each race.
But this official Statement could be interpreted in exactly the same direction as Petition tries to accuse Fisher in: UNESKO admits that there are innate differences between races (yet less significant than Fisher does) – so, it is a racist Statement and racist organization. What is the difference? And why Fisher, not UNESKO and not both should be blamed?
Ironically, Fisher’s approach is much closer to the supposed UNESKO political mission to be expressed in the Statement. Since he thinks (as UNESKO does), that difference between races exists, he is very practical with that and proposes “amicable sharing of the planet resources” on behalf of disadvantaged (in modern terms) – otherwise, what is the pragmatic purpose of the document? This is exactly what he meant, I guess, saying that swiping the problem under the rug “destroys the very spirit of the whole document”, which should be practical, rather than “scientific”. Indeed, one cannot find anything in the whole document, saying about help to some nations (while in practice, to be sure, UN spent billions of dollars in the “amicable aid” during the upcoming decades).
The only thing one may say about Fisher in this episode: he was not “politically correct” in our modern sense and spoke very straightforwardly, as he always did in many scientific disputes with K. Pearson, E. Pearson & J. Neyman and others. And I don’t even have to go into the essence of the debate, which was very hot then and remains hot today: is there difference between race intelligence and if yes, is it because of “nature” or “nurture” (see references in (Murray, 2020) and in other sources). I would allow just two quotations.
The outcries against those who speak of racial and gender gaps in IQ have become deafening, at times resembling Lysenkoism in language if not in deed. (Ceci & Williams, 2009). These words were written by two scientists, who think that “racial and gender differences in IQ are not innate but instead reflect environmental challenges. Although we endorse this view, plenty of scholars remain unpersuaded.” “When scientists are silenced by colleagues, administrators, editors and funders who think that simply asking certain questions is inappropriate, the “At Michigan State University, one group used the strike to organize and coordinate a protest campaign against the vice president for research, physicist Stephen Hsu, whose crimes included doing research on computational genomics to study how human genetics might be related to cognitive ability – something that to the protesters smacked of eugenics…Within a week, the university president forced Mr. Hsu to resign.” (WSJ, (Krauss, 2020)). The title of the article is: “The Ideological Corruption of Science. In American laboratories and universities, the spirit of Trofim Lysenko has suddenly been woke.”
Interestingly enough, among many other critical passages of the UNESKO statement made by dissidents 70 years ago was this one: “Statement also purports to be an authoritative body of scientific doctrines…I must register my fundamental opposition to the advancing of scientific theses as such…I recall the National Socialists’ notorious attempts to establish certain doctrines as the only correct conclusions to be drawn from research on race,
The net effect of this accusation: based on the narrowly picked up phrase, without not only scientific, historical, but even textual context, the author of Petition accused R. Fisher of a crime he didn’t commit either by old nor by the new “standards”, if we do not regard as a new standard the current outcry about “racial justice by any cost and immediately”. Just as well he could accuse UNESKO itself, but didn’t hit upon the idea of doing that.
Despite the fact that this accusation was not raised neither in D. Witten’s activities nor in Petition, and for that reason, perhaps, didn’t affect the final decision about the lectureship renaming, it seems the most condemning out of all others, if true. Ultimately, all previous things were concerned with different use of words, but here the essence is in approving the actions, and if he supported the real Nazi racial practice – I would not look any further to acquit him from the “bad name” label. But how true is that all?
R. Fisher was one of about 20 scientists whom the German authorities asked to evaluate the “value” of O. von Verschuer in order to decide his fate in the after-war country. And his was one of the three opinions with more or less positive attitude about this person – a dissenting voice, again. A lot of details, pros and cons, explaining his (and others) position could be found in the excellent study (Weiss, 2010) which reconstructs a very complex historic situation of that time (and, specifically, the fear that the new foe and just recent ally – the Soviet Union – will attack East German biology with the same tool, T. Lysenko.) But not that is critical here; I don’t want to seek extenuating circumstances, because I will never know, what was exactly in Fisher’s mind when he wrote this supportive letter.
What I can do though, is to try to interpret his words in their real meaning. In fact, just one phrase needs examination, which is: “In spite of their prejudices I have no doubt also that the Party wished to benefit the German racial stock, especially by the
There is a very well documented work (Burdett, 2011) about perception of the Nazi “Euthanasia” program in Britain where the author says: “there was very little discussion in either country of the Nuremberg Medical Trial itself – in contrast to the earlier Trial of the Major German War Criminals. Such discussions as did take place portrayed the NMT as having been convened for the exclusive purpose of prosecuting Nazis accused of medical experimentation upon inmates of concentration camps. These journals do debate non-Nazi “euthanasia”
If this “he did not know” theory is true (which I cannot prove), then Fisher’s phrase about “elimination of defectives” could be interpreted in a standard eugenic sense of that time: it addresses the future generations to be manipulated by genetics in order to minimize the number of genetic deceases in society, but not the actual slaughter. The whole letter will be read approximately as following: O. von Verschuer is an outstanding scientist; he was involuntary involved in some work by the very bad regime; at this historic moment, eugenic recommendations and the bad state policy coincided, and now, in a normal situation, I, R. Fisher, would pursue the same kind of scientific policies, as von V. did, because it is what our science is about.
R. Fisher was a British patriot; wanted to be drafted in the WWI (declined due to bad sight), spent all WWII years in Britain (i.e. knew first-hand horrible bombing of London, etc.); his son, an aviator, was killed in a combat – it is hard to imagine that he could sympathize Nazi regime per se, especially in what concerned murdering of sick people (he never defended such a measure, as far as I know). But on the other hand, he was a very ardent explorer, a stubborn personality, who valued his hard-earned opinions very high – to the extent that he might consider it irrelevant what state exactly, Germany or Britain, would implement certain policies he agreed with. He might feel that his duty was to be as objective as he could and keep politics aside from science as far as he could.
All this line of arguments with series of “ifs” does not make me neither happy with R. Fisher at this point nor convinced that I’m actually right. But as far as I know, if there is a “red flag” for doubt, it should be used in favor of the accused, not the other way round. It is not my or anyone else’s duty to disprove accusations – it is the direct obligation of the accuser to prove he/she is right. In the case of Fisher, it was not done in the least bit. The case was not analyzed, even cursorily as I have done here (ultimately, I’m not a specialist in R. Fisher’s biography or history of that time in general). Just simple logic and common sense are suggesting that all the rules were violated and the grave accusation that Fisher supported one of the most horrifying Nazi policy seems much more a slander than a fact, until the opposite is proven.
To summarize, all three types of accusations are not grounded enough to make such a serious decision. I’m sure that if any real discussion had taken place within the scientific community beforehand, it would have revealed much more facts about the “demand” for renaming than I was able to provide within a short time. However, the decision was made without any discussion. COPSS organized an invited session in JSM in August 2020 “with experts exploring Fisher’s role”16
but apparently not for retracting its own decision, but to put face on it. I can indirectly conclude it due to the fact, that the paper (Mandel, 2020) was sent to all panelists and nobody replied to it (however, I can check the content of the presentations when they will be available). Another fact – the name of R. Fisher has not appeared in the title of the invited session (contrary to promise in
All the arguments I have brought and many more others which I do not know about are clear to see and available to anyone interested, especially to the esteemed members of COPSS and any other members of the academic community. The decision makers obviously cared less about the facts, and more about something else. About what?
Causes
The actual causes, perhaps, are even more important and sad than the actions.
New revelations could cause reconsideration of a closed criminal case, as sometimes happens, but that’s not applied here, as I already mentioned. For that reason, D. Witten could have her revelations about horrible nature of R. Fisher, as an informed member of the Committee for the award named after him, much earlier – say, when she entered this Committee. But she hasn’t. What triggered all those and many other urgent decisions in the USA was a stream of events started with killing of G. Floyd on May 25, 2020. They included so many things like vandalism, peaceful and not peaceful demonstrations, rise of crime, requests for “defunding police,” spiking of BLM’s activity, calls for “racial justice,” against “institutional racism,” a ‘free zone” in Seattle, overturning monuments to various famous people and so on. Events like these created an atmosphere in which a surge of natural compassion for the victim slowly dying in plain view of millions covered a huge number of people, but immediately turned out not against police brutality as such, but against only one specific type of it, directed toward the black people. This emotional impulse, as many times before, was overblown by mass media to an unbelievable extent and generated seemingly unrelated actions – from riots in the street to the kneeling in Congress, from defacing the monument of R. Wallenberg (Tugend, 2020) (an archetypical anti-discrimination warrior) to the obligations of some companies to hire more black employees than before. Undoubtedly, the renaming of the lectureship belongs to the same type of urging unexpected actions (where is G. Floyd and where is R. Fisher?), as was demonstrated above in detail. One may expect that the scientific community should be immune to emotional response of any type and in any circumstances. Scientists, unlike politicians and journalists, have their own weapon to address any situation, and statisticians, for this matter, are the most suitable for this of them all. They should know very well that a single case, whatever horrible of beautiful it is, does not represent the whole picture and cannot be used as a ground for any action. The case of G. Floyd raised the problem of police brutality, especially against blacks – Ok, let us look at the figures about that and picture what the problem really is. It seems absolutely obvious and trivial; solving any problem starts with data collection, analysis, etc. It might be expected from the statistical community at large, but it spectacularly failed and provided virtually nothing, as far I know. I showed in (Mandel, 2020) that data do not support the idea that police killing suspects in America has racial bias (the fractions of people killed by police under different circumstances, like “armed”, “fleeing” and so on are virtually equal to each other for whites and for blacks). But these data were available all the time; it is not me who had to do that. Why didn’t the authoritative statistical bodies, before they rushed off into renaming, even check the point? Is there a problem with police brutality in the country? Undoubtedly there is. But it lies in a completely different sphere. Here are some figures: American police kills much more people than any other developed country and more than many underdeveloped.17 If USA, on average, witnesses around 46.6 people killed by police annually per 10 m of population, Angola Of course, those figures cannot be taken at the face value, but should be considered as a function of crimes in those countries (one may expect a higher level of police killings in a country with higher crime rate). Direct calculations of that type, however, are not that easy. Different countries report crimes in different manner; it is hard to compare them without long special investigation. The international bodies, like the United Nations are expected to give the best answer. But closer look shows the inconsistencies there as well (together with internal data problems discussed in (Mandel, 2020)). For 2018, for example, the UN reports 16,214 homicides for the USA (with reference to FBI),18 while FBI itself reports 8,957 “Murder and nonnegligent manslaughter” and DOJ – 11,970 (see (Mandel, 2020)). So, even for the “simplest” category, like homicide, international comparison is not that trivial, to say nothing of more complicated ones. If, however, we use the UN data as a rough benchmark, the picture is that: in 2018, the USA had 5 people murdered per 100,000 of population while the United Kingdom 1.2, the difference is 4.2 times. The difference in the rates of police use of force is 46.6/0.5 Those are the real problems. They need urgent attention, if of a very different kind. The high crime rate is a huge issue, and I cannot discuss it here. Police violence is a completely different topic, which I cannot also discuss at length, but just mention that it is decentralized; it doesn’t track the officers with a former violations record; the data on past incidents are not collected properly and uniformly. The recent review in Nature outlines many of these problems and ways to resolve them. One observation from this review is especially revealing: “Policing, in large part for historical reasons, has proceeded in kind of a science-free zone.” (Peeples, 2020) This is, very unfortunately, exactly right. But even if all that is true, the figures above and the estimates in (Mandel, 2020) are easily available. With a proper approach, the case of G. Floyd could be classified by statisticians as another reminder of the old, over-matured police- and crime- related problem, not race-related problem, as a case of absolutely meaningless death (he didn’t constitute any real danger to the officers), one of too many. Yet it was not done; professional statisticians entered the mainstream choir reducing everything to the “institutional racism” everywhere, and used the non-relevant case of R. Fisher as a luckily found opportunity to “contribute” to the surrounding hysteria by suddenly “recalling” the mortal sins of a person who died almost 60 years ago. Instead of looking at the real problems, the false narrative about the racial police and general society injustice was immediately proposed as a root of all evils and supported by anyone, statisticians at large included. Why has it become possible? One contributing factor is general liberal dominance in academia and in science, what is widely known and well documented (Jaschi, 2017; Langbert, 2018); out of about 8,600 professors studied in 50 colleges ratio “Democrats/Republicans” is 12.7 to 1 (Langbert, 2018). It is translated into general academic support of the mainstream democratic party line, exploiting the Floyd’s death at its best. But I do not want to speculate about political leaning of those who made the critical decisions. What needs to be stressed though is that everything that happened perfectly fits the logic of the victimhood culture, which is alarmingly fast becoming dominant in many segments of the American society. In their book (Campbell & Manning, 2018), authors showed very convincingly what is going on, especially in student campuses, and now, it seems, almost everywhere. The ancient noble culture is typical of the weak state, which cannot always defend its citizens; it is oriented toward personal bravery and self-defense (duel codex; vengeance, family bloody feuds, high sensitivity to any personal offence, etc.), many features of which we still see in many countries. It was replaced by the modern dignity culture, where the opinion of others is not that important and a person may rely on the state which should defend him or her (from which follow self-reliance, less personal sensitivity, court instead of duel, complains addressed to the authority, not to the offenders, etc.) But some time ago, the victimhood culture started to replace the dignity culture in many places. It combines the super-sensitivity of the noble culture with reliance to others, state included, for resolving the issues. It is tightly related with such concepts as microaggression and self-identity; those who feel that way very insistently require that all those “identity rights” should be satisfied on top of general rights of the citizen. It creates a completely new atmosphere where it is not just political correctness that reigns, but super correctness where any random word could be interpreted as an offense by the “victim” and requires some kind of satisfaction and apology from the “offender”. Such a culture can exist only in the society which agrees with it and yields to ever expanding requirements. For normal relationships in a dignity culture where we have lived so far, there is a rule of law, and if any “offence” is not properly rubricated there – it is not offence. But not in victimhood culture. Victims of “microaggression” would require “safe space” in campus – and get it. They would require common bathrooms with any sex – and get it. Now, the majority of requests is related with a race – and anyone gets it without resistance from “others”. This is exactly what happened with that story of lectureship: unconditional yielding to “requests’, without even factual checks and, of course, without correct positioning of the raising problem into proper social context. Ironically, the very discussion of the proposal for renaming provided the input that illustrates this thesis in the most convincing way. The comment by D. Cordy19 contains almost all features of the victimhood culture just as if in a textbook. I would quote him and give my short comments.
The accomplishments-based justifications are very scary, I believe, to most African-Americans: How many research papers can make up for racism? Yes, the meritocracy principle contradicts to main tenets of the victimhood culture, where “justifications” are to be based not on merits only, but also on identity.
However, we are not living in 1930. We are in 2020 and Black people are being murdered on television, choked out and hunted down from pickup trucks. And, those are just the ones caught on camera. This is exactly the point I tried to dissuade in the paper; it is stated without any prove and connection with the renaming. It replaces the real problem of the criminality and police brutality with the non-existing problem of institutional racial bias by the police.
R.A. Fisher is dead. He did provide great contributions to the field. That is not the debate. The real question is do you care about how this makes a 17-year-old African-American woman from rural South Carolina considering her major feel? And, that is the only question that I care about. This is exactly where the complaint for “micro-aggression” starts. A 17-year-old girl should feel ashamed about the relation of some long dead guy R. Fisher and eugenics, while, most likely, she never heard about either one. But if she will be informed – it is not hard to predict in which way. Yes, the misinformed girl may feel ashamed. It is also called brainwashing.
No one would call A.S.A. a very diverse organization. Sure, there is always the one black person but that is not diversity. It is another deviation from the main issue: R. Fisher, it seems, should not be responsible for the lack of black members in ASA. Or is he? Also, it is a direct hint at what should be done: increase the diversity in ASA, regardless of merits. Diversity is the goal, not the natural result of certain processes. Potentially, this is the most dangerous direction of development, on which I’ll dwell later.
I can acknowledge Fisher’s contributions but I will not be attending the Fisher lecture and neither will most minorities. The victimhood is generalized, with elements of threatening and blackmailing. Did Mr. Cordy himself attend these lectures earlier? I saw many black people in attendance for the last several years. Didn’t they know about this horrible guy? Who will open their eyes?
This is not a question of do some white statisticians believe Fisher made a contribution to the field that outweighs his beliefs. Note, that “Black” earlier was with capital letter, and “white” here is not. It is a new modern fashion, to stress the Equality of All Races
This is a question of does your organization care enough about the gifted minority child that WILL pick a different field because they cannot see themselves in ours. Amplification of the threat; the very presence of the bad name should repel the person from the field. This is an invitation to reconsider everything; so called “cancel culture”. C. Darwin once noted that “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage “aces” (Darwin, 1871; p. 201). At the same time, he was an ardent abolitionist, wished nothing bad to anyone – and yet believed that “natural selection” will end up with this result. Sounds extremely abhorrent in our days? Absolutely. So, this poor girl will never contemplate studying not only statistics, but biology, too. After recently published comments by A. Einstein about Chinese (Dreier, 2018) no Chinese should select physics as a major, since his name is still respected by some “white physicists”. Or, after countless comments by almost any significant figures about Jews for the last couple of thousand years, Jews should run away from science, literature, music, and art as fast as they can, being mortally offended by their haters’ names and titles spotted here and there. Forgetting times, circumstances, biases, logic, history and everything, take all things at face value and pretend to be offended by them – this is way to go. It is really sad, if one is actually offended – his/her life would be a nightmare. A person from dignity culture would keep all that in mind and go ahead with sorrow, which is an inevitable result of any historic readings; a person from a victimhood culture will take it personally and would try “to refute”. Note, though, that Fisher never made such shocking statements, and yet he is the one to blame; what to say about the others who did?
Fisher’s perspectives were not simply complicated but dangerous. Even the arguments about inter-mixing are racist. People justifying bad with worse. What exactly was so dangerous? It is a direct invitation to non-discussion, a very typical reaction to challenge within the victimhood culture. No arguments are provided and no counterarguments are expected from others.
This part below is for all minorities reading this: If this is a real debate for the A.S.A. I believe we should simply not renew our memberships. Well, I leave it without comments. What is surprising, again, is not this type of victimhood narrative per se, but the fact that it inspires immediate compassion and affects the behavior of the decision makers. D. Cordy’s comment immediately found supporters, admitting that “his prospective” opened their eyes. Pure emotions (which never need any reasoning behind them) regulate the deeds, even in science, the supposed citadel of reason. As D. Hume once remarked, “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.” He was, alas, correct. To summarize, the chain of events was like this: death of the police victim
The problem of renaming is as old as human history. New emperor smashes the statues of the previous one and eradicates his name from everything; pious priests forbid pronouncing the names of the condemned heretics; the cities change their names several times during one’s lifetime. If G. Orwell described theoretical importance of renaming for the totalitarian regime (when history was corrected on a daily basis), the USSR provided a perfect practical example of how it happens. Knowing that, I can easily imagine the fate of the current waves of renaming and “cancel culture”, Fisher’s lectureship included.
The lectureship is just a first step. Similar events in London signal that names of F. Galton, K. Pearson and R. Fisher, the founders of modern statistics and many branches of biology, could be ostracized altogether. It is hard to imagine, that their scientific contributions will be carefully separated from their eugenic views – as this paper shows, carefulness is not an inherent feature of the ongoing processes but a bug. If, as D. Cordy assumed, the young students should be appalled to hear the name of R. Fisher assigned to the honorable lecture, why should they not feel the same disgust every time they see his name in the textbooks? Other “victims of racial persecution” sooner or later will say that this or that name should not be mentioned in a book at all – and it will be eradicated as the names of so many scientists, writers, philosophers and politicians from the Soviet time books. It is also hard to imagine, that the problem will not go further, to other figures. The recent examples of Columbus, Lincoln, Washington, etc., show the foreseen directions. I’m surprised, that it didn’t touch yet the horrible name of Amerigo Vespucci, who turned out to be a slave owner and participated in slave trade (yet in opposite direction, from America to Europe – does it count on his benevolence?). If D. Cordy proposes to all “offended” to stop membership in ASA – wouldn’t he propose to stop “membership” in this continent, if it will not be renamed? The whole idea to reconsider the history of science (and it will be reconsidered, if the tendency like this prevail) based on different moral issues of the past is actually not just wrong, but plainly absurd. One cannot find any person in the past free of something which is “offensive” for our contemporaries (and very often was offensive at his/her times). I’m deeply appalled myself by antisemitic slurs by K. Pearson (R. Fisher, by the way, never did such things, as far as I know) or by horrible politics towards Jewish immigration from Nazi Germany by F.D. Roosevelt and W. Churchill during WWII, or by C. Darwin’s ideas like quoted above, and always keep it in mind when I think about those people. But it doesn’t prevent me from recognizing their huge achievements. There is no scale, where one can weigh very different thing about personal traits (in a sense that “racism overweighs accomplishments”). At the bottom line, the human history is a blood chain of wars and genocides, and anyone could immediately find thousands of foes around; the “offenses” will become as countless as meaningless. And this exactly where the dignity culture starts – its offender’s, not my business. And where will it end if supplanted by the victimhood logic. It is a very personal moral choice. I have nothing against D. Cordy having personal opinion about R. Fisher, as bad as it could be, but I’m categorically against the logic that personal moral judgments should be enforced to be a common rule. This is where the demarcation line between dignity and victimhood cultures lies, and if science will cross this line – it’s extremely dangerous, indeed. Historically, the returning of the old names happened when some ideology, or ruling dynasty, or revolution of a kind has happened, as it was in perestroika in Russia. But in the current situation in USA and in other countries, it is not in the foreseeable future, unless the whole victimhood culture will suddenly stop its winning ride. It’s not a question of dynasty or revolution, but a question of the profound change of the fabric of society. If the victimhood culture with its ever-growing demands for “non-offensive behavior of everybody, dead or alive”, will finally concur education and academia, the changes will be irreversible. In his unbelievably brave letter to Stalin in 1930 a great writer M. Bulgakov wrote: “The fight against censorship In the mentioned “Faculty Letter”, 450 signatories from one of the most prestigious Universities in the USA and the world ask the University President, particularly, for the following: “Constitute a committee …that would oversee the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors, incidents, research, and publication …Guidelines on what counts as racist behavior, incidents, research, and publication will be authored by a faculty committee for incorporation into the same set of rules and procedures.” Think about that. Isn’t it the same as “…fish, publicly assuring that it does not need water” from M. Bulgakov’s letter? Professors voluntarily ask for limitation of freedom of expression and ready to pass the rules of this limitation to the hands of certain “committee”! In Soviet Union no publication was possible without the so called “Act of expertise”, a piece of paper of five pages long with about 20 different questions, answers to which should provide the evidence that the paper does not contain state secrets, “anti-Marxist ideology” and so on. It should be signed by 4–5 highly ranked faculty members. It took easily up to two or three weeks to get it signed (needless to say, no one really read neither the paper nor the “Act”.) Now, in Princeton University, professors want to set up something very similar, but for checking “racism”! Indeed, a history repeats itself as a farce. I can imagine how some gray-haired professor will send emails to remind the members of such a “committee” of giving his/her conclusion about racial purity of the article about elementary particles. I can also imagine how easily this newly created bureaucracy will transform into an inquisition-like body, breaking one’s reputations and insisting on firing “not sufficiently anti-racist people” (the collective pressure on “racists” has already started, which is so evident, say, from the B. Weiss resignation letter (Dreier, 2018).) No wonder, that indignant J. Katz said about this and many other proposals (like various perks for “people of color” only) that they “if implemented, would lead to civil war on campus and erode even further public confidence in how elite institutions of higher education operate.” This is a very sad new reality. The victimhood culture, again, may exist only if the “demand” for advantages meets “supply” from others. Here, a supply even outpaces a demand; society itself offers things which cry for inequality of various groups. As J. Katz sarcastically remarked, “Let’s leave aside who qualifies as “of color,” though this is not a trivial point.” Not trivial indeed. It immediately reminds the racial practice of Nazis, who went to genealogy up to 3 The main social danger is not even in the renaming stuff, but in retiring from the meritocracy principle. In the Soviet Union, national policy and violation of meritocracy went hand in hand. “Minority” nations (which could easily be actually a majority in its region) got support (if in very patronizing manner) from the Moscow, but it was not for free – the real Russification in different forms always took place. They paid to the Russians with ill-concealed or open nationalism in the Soviet and post-Soviet times, respectively. In both scenarios, meritocracy was gravely distorted. Any privileges given to a minority (like lowering requirements for getting to university, etc.) were transformed into the system of corrupted network for “my own people” in Soviet and the replacement of Russians in post-Soviet times. Witnessing all that first hand for many years, when I see similar tendencies in USA, I feel extremely uneasy. Ideally, the struggle against racism should not necessarily coincide with denial of meritocracy, but practice, it seems, does not follow this course. The future of the victimhood culture in academia and society as a whole would depend on two factors: the level of demands from the “offended” by whatever reasons and the level of resistance to those demands from all “others”. As in any complex system, if the relation between the two processes will have negative feedback (i.e. the increase of demand will be followed by increase of resistance) – the new balance will be set, perhaps, to the common wellbeing. But if the feedback will be positive, i.e. “others” instead of resisting will yield to new and new demands – the system should sooner or later collapse (imagine, for example, the actual prevailing of the “identity” principle over meritocracy principle in hiring and so on). As of now, the relation between the two sides of the process does not seem nice – say, 1 against 450 in Princeton case or 10–15 against 8,000 signatories of the Petition in R. Fisher case; one anonymous Berkley Professor is “certain that if my name were attached to this email, I would lose my job and all future jobs …for the record, I write as a person of color.”22 However, the victimhood culture so often crosses the borders not only dignity, but also legal frames; within it the only workable principle of equality of all people without exceptions in the eyes of the law is so often violated, that cases like described in (Langbert, 2018) will multiply. It also feeds the hope that not all is already lost.
D. Witten complained in a process of renaming, that “The fact that a majority of statisticians who I queried about this disagreed with me is incredibly discouraging about the prospect of seeing any real change in our field” (Witten, 2020). Well, it is encouraging to me. What is discouraging indeed is that those voices, yet existing, are not widely heard. Just time will tell how all that will evolve.
In the “struggle with cosmopolitism” era, Soviet physicists sometimes referred to A. Einstein as “Odnokamushkin” (aka “One Stone’s”) to avoid criminal mentioning both a Jew and a foreigner. However, they did refer to his works, because they could not bypass them. Statisticians, similarly, cannot bypass Fisher’s work. Will his name be replaced with “Angler” (aka Fisher)? Or will any references disappear altogether? How best to cut or at least minimize the dishonor the science of statistics demeaned itself with?
I want to acknowledge moral help I received from many people whom I personally do not know (and with whom I do not always agree), participants of discussion about renaming, who defended the common sense, scientific honesty, and historical truth. I’m very grateful to Dr. S. Lipovetsky for his support and fruitful discussions.
Footnotes
COPSS Statement on Fisher Lectureship and Award (released on June 23, 2020)
UCL denames buildings named after eugenicists (2020).
The recent push to rename the R.A. Fisher Lectureship (blog, 06/07/20)
Troubled by the hasty decision to rename the Fisher Award (2020). (blog, 6/19/20)
Twitter thread (2020).
COPSS Statement on Fisher Lectureship and Award (released on June 23, 2020)
Troubled by the hasty decision to rename the Fisher Award (2020). (blog, 6/19/20)
Twitter thread (2020).
Biodemography and Social Biology
Global Genetic Testing Services Market is Expected to Reach USD 67.1 Billion by 2025 (2020).
Sterilization law in the United States
Twitter thread (2020).
Sterilization law in the United States
The Race concept: results of an inquiry (1952). UNESCO, Document code: SS.53/II.9/A, 1952
Otmar Freiherr von Vershcuer
COPSS Statement on Fisher Lectureship and Award (released on June 23, 2020)
List of killings by law enforcement officers by country
Victims of intentional homicide (2020) 1990–2018. United Nations Office on Drugs and crime
The recent push to rename the R.A. Fisher Lectureship (blog, 06/07/20)
Faculty Letter to President Eisgruber Princeton University (2020)
A Letter on Justice and Open Debate. Harper’s magazine (2020),
Anonymous Berkeley Professor Shreds BLM Injustice Narrative (2020),