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I wouldn't really call it the "wisdom" of the era. It's much more defined by the lack of wisdom than by its presence, meaning we do a whole lot of short-term wo

by cmehdy 6y ago

I wouldn't really call it the "wisdom" of the era. It's much more defined by the lack of wisdom than by its presence, meaning we do a whole lot of short-term work on confirming biases and antagonizing and only on larger time-scales do we see the power of refinements to the scientific method. "Current" science for any value of "current" is majorly fraught with bias and vast divergences, and time puts a low-pass filter on the concepts which become over {years, decades, centuries} cemented as "truths". And thankfully, even on long timescales there are people willing to put in the work to challenge assumptions and refine the scientific method so that we, as a civilization, strive for improvement in spite of/against our prejudices. In today's age we do still acknowledge and notice differences which need to be accounted for, and correlate with skin color or whatever people call "race"[0]. This isn't racism, because racism is scientifically unsound, because racism is not a science or an academic field, it's a prejudice associated with beliefs. Science has been done by human beings and human beings carry prejudice, but science itself doesn't. What we see nowadays is an increase in useful acknowledgement of differences (useful in the sense that if we are blind to these differences we will negatively impact people, for example by disregarding genetic differences between people and treating them sub-optimally[1]. Whatever bullshit was sold as being the difference between whites and blacks wasn't scientific as much as it was the expression of prejudice made to sound scientific. Phrenology did the same with whoever society wanted to see as criminals (unsurprisingly, that would usually be a mix of the non-whites-of-the-time, the poor and the disenfranchised). On top of legitimizing prejudice, it also prevented doing actual work to help everyone equally. There's no reality where we'll equate racism as the prejudice it is, with gender studies as the current attempt our world is making at understanding genders. There might however be many high-frequency oscillations in papers published today that will be filtered out by the field or fields benefiting from acknowledging differences and features that will stand the test of time and coming out of the current field of gender studies. You might say that many current claims around the emerging field will be looked at with distance and judged implausible, but certainly the idea of incorporating an understanding of genders and their differences is not something that in its entirety will be looked at as "implausible and frowned upon". Because racism is prejudice and beliefs, and gender studies is an interdisciplinary academic field of study. [0] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/06/why-are-health-studies-so-white/487046/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/06/why-are-h... [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1692342/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1692342/ edit: I also realize now that you would have had a slightly better claim if you had put phrenology where you put racism - with the difference that phrenology was never really more than a pseudo-scientific extrapolation departing from science to advance oppression of others whereas gender studies constantly faces scrutiny to reinforce scientific claims and is a proponent of empathy. Pretty diametrically opposed goals and methods, ultimately.

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
Early modern race scientists said exactly the same thing. They thought they were just trying to incorporate an understanding of races and their differences. But now we reject the field as a whole; we don't just think some of their conclusions were implausible, we think their methodology was fundamentally bad and their whole conceptual framework was tainted by bigotry. Those who study similar things today don't see themselves as part of the same intellectual tradition at all. I don't see why it's impossible that the same thing could happen to gender studies.
- cmehdy 6y ago
  Because we learn from our mistakes in science, for the most part? That is, the thresholds to claim things are much higher (despite what dailymail-equivalents succeed in advertising on social networks), and the methodologies are able to be scrutinized almost in real time by the entire world (let's give a shout out to sci-hub there..) What I'm saying, is that yes there will have been mistakes made because science mostly makes mistakes (especially in the short term), but that the threshold to invalidate something that gets anchored nowadays is much higher than "not long ago" (on the order of a few human generations at most). "Race scientists who would think scientifically" back then are probably now diluted into "[other science] scientist who are aware of differences regarding their research", as evidenced by the two links I gave in the previous post. Whether it is AI researchers having to think a bit harder about how their training sets incorporate no black people, or anesthesiologists having to accommodate for a redhead's genetically higher tolerance to what they're being put under. Also, AFAIK, "race science" is a term that seems to have been coopted in the last few decades - the closest thing I could think of that was practiced might have been a biased anthropology, but otherwise it is scientific racism that was pervasive throughout the research of other fields, and not a field in and of itself. That's already a pretty major difference with gender studies, and therefore why I added the edit in my previous post. Gender studies as a field will produce research that makes valid claims with repeatability will survive, and research with biased claims or no repeatability. Time will kill the bad ideas without necessarily killing the field - or is physics worthless because we once attached meaning to Heliocentrism or considered that there was an aether for the transmission of light, or even simply because QM and relativity don't blend well ? Interestingly enough with your parallel, the foundations of scientific racism were intertwined with people perceiving race as a social construct over a biologically immutable one (Henri de Boulainvilliers). I suspect research of the nature to make a discernible definition emerge along those lines[0] will contribute to the evolution of the perception of the field and ultimately help the more useful research survive debates in the long run. [0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29460079/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29460079/

by cmehdy 6y ago

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago

Early modern race scientists said exactly the same thing. They thought they were just trying to incorporate an understanding of races and their differences. But now we reject the field as a whole; we don't just think some of their conclusions were implausible, we think their methodology was fundamentally bad and their whole conceptual framework was tainted by bigotry. Those who study similar things today don't see themselves as part of the same intellectual tradition at all. I don't see why it's impossible that the same thing could happen to gender studies.

cmehdy 6y ago
Because we learn from our mistakes in science, for the most part? That is, the thresholds to claim things are much higher (despite what dailymail-equivalents succeed in advertising on social networks), and the methodologies are able to be scrutinized almost in real time by the entire world (let's give a shout out to sci-hub there..) What I'm saying, is that yes there will have been mistakes made because science mostly makes mistakes (especially in the short term), but that the threshold to invalidate something that gets anchored nowadays is much higher than "not long ago" (on the order of a few human generations at most). "Race scientists who would think scientifically" back then are probably now diluted into "[other science] scientist who are aware of differences regarding their research", as evidenced by the two links I gave in the previous post. Whether it is AI researchers having to think a bit harder about how their training sets incorporate no black people, or anesthesiologists having to accommodate for a redhead's genetically higher tolerance to what they're being put under. Also, AFAIK, "race science" is a term that seems to have been coopted in the last few decades - the closest thing I could think of that was practiced might have been a biased anthropology, but otherwise it is scientific racism that was pervasive throughout the research of other fields, and not a field in and of itself. That's already a pretty major difference with gender studies, and therefore why I added the edit in my previous post. Gender studies as a field will produce research that makes valid claims with repeatability will survive, and research with biased claims or no repeatability. Time will kill the bad ideas without necessarily killing the field - or is physics worthless because we once attached meaning to Heliocentrism or considered that there was an aether for the transmission of light, or even simply because QM and relativity don't blend well ? Interestingly enough with your parallel, the foundations of scientific racism were intertwined with people perceiving race as a social construct over a biologically immutable one (Henri de Boulainvilliers). I suspect research of the nature to make a discernible definition emerge along those lines[0] will contribute to the evolution of the perception of the field and ultimately help the more useful research survive debates in the long run. [0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29460079/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29460079/