12 ms·

> “I have friends who are anthropologists and primatologists and evolutionary psychologists … [who are under] an enormous amount of pressure to generate data th

> “I have friends who are anthropologists and primatologists and evolutionary psychologists … [who are under] an enormous amount of pressure to generate data that shows that all gender differences are cultural.” You would think that, no matter what your goals for the roles of gender (or sex) in society are, you would achieve these goals best by deliberately seeking out and investigating the properties of the underlying biology (and culture) with the utmost of academic and intellectual integrity, and only afterwards pushing for the policies you prefer to realize that world. Then you would have the advantage of using a position of Enlightenment, instead of Ignorance. Maybe in a few more generations when people look back at us the way we look back on the Victorian era.

Crito 12y ago
> "You would think that, no matter what your goals for the roles of gender (or sex) in society are, you would achieve these goals best by deliberately seeking out and investigating the properties of the underlying biology (and culture) with the utmost of academic and intellectual integrity, and only afterwards pushing for the policies you prefer to realize that world." That is how it is supposed to work, but reality is never so clean. One of the best modern examples of doing it backwards (starting with a conclusion, and then working backwards from there), is so called "intelligent design"/"creation science". Many different groups and movements are guilty of it, but the ID scene is relatively unique in the lengths that they went to present themselves as legitimate scientists. See: Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitzmiller_v._Dover_Area_School_District http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitzmiller_v._Dover_Area_School...) Those nutjobs insisted that they were real scientists, despite the glaring contradictions with their nonsense and the scientific method. His comparison was rather apt.
- kijin 12y ago
  ID was nuts because it tried to present itself as a description of the past. But if you're trying to issue prescriptions for the future (i.e. what kind of world do you want to create?), there's nothing fundamentally wrong about first identifying where you want to go and then cherrypicking biological and psychological traits to manipulate in order to get there. It would be just like writing a program to get the results you want.
  - Crito 12y ago
    Descriptions of the past are not nuts. History, the legitimate peer-reviewed study of history, does the same. Evolutionary biology tells us much about the past, as does much of physics. None of that is problematic. ID was nuts because of their flawed methodology. > "But if you're trying to issue prescriptions for the future (i.e. what kind of world do you want to create?), there's nothing fundamentally wrong about first identifying where you want to go and then cherrypicking biological and psychological traits to manipulate in order to get there." Do not confuse policy forming / social engineering with science.
    - kijin 12y ago
      Actually, I agree with you. What I meant is that ID used an inappropriate methodology for what it purported to do, but the same methodology might be appropriate in other contexts such as social engineering.
Lorento 12y ago
Are blacks less intelligent than whites? How many jews were really killed in the holocaust? These are absolutely not settled questions but what university will allow that kind of research? Who will publish it if the results support something that's illegal to publicly state? Even academics put their careers ahead of integrity when it would result in losing their career as well as being widely condemned.
- pluma 12y ago
  Personally I find the entire "the holocaust was only about Jews" meme appalling. Yes, it disproportionally affected Jews, but it also affected a lot of non-Jews (as well as people who did not self-identify as Jews). Presenting it as a purely Jewish tragedy is disrespectful to all the non-Jewish victims. The more important thing is that it was about humans. Humans did these things to other humans. You should not feel any better about what happened if you're not personally related to any of those who caused the suffering than you should feel any less offended if you're not personally related to those who suffered. The Holocaust was a failure of humanity. As was every single genocide before and after that particular one. Turning it into a "Nazis killing Jews" story allows us to artificially distance ourselves from what happened: "I'm not a Nazi, so why should I care?" or "I have nothing against Jews, so what does it have to do with me?" ("I only hate gay people"). In Germany we have a huge problem with this. We pretend to have dealt with our history, but we vehemently oppose the idea that the "monsters" who committed that "great evil" were normal human beings. As if that would somehow make them innocent. It does quite the opposite, actually: acknowledging that it was "just" humans doing those things to humans can help us understand what made ordinary humans "like us" end up doing something that horrible to other ordinary humans. We're actually seeing something similar with East Germany: because everybody knows East Germany was an "Unrechtsstaat" (literally the opposite of a "Rechtsstaat", or "state of law", but also implying "organized injustice") their mass surveillance and censorship was fundamentally different from our mass surveillance and censorship. There's absolutely nothing we could learn from them because by definition we're nothing like them and any attempt to portray East German life as anything other than constant suffering and oppression "trivializes" the injustice of its government. Creating taboos around these problems doesn't solve them, it just hides them. The US hasn't solved its racism just because the current president has darker skin. Acknowledging physiological differences between sexes or even ethnic groups isn't sexist or racist. Treating people unfairly because of these differences (or assumptions about the extent of those differences via stereotype pigeonholing) is.

Crito 12y ago

> "You would think that, no matter what your goals for the roles of gender (or sex) in society are, you would achieve these goals best by deliberately seeking out and investigating the properties of the underlying biology (and culture) with the utmost of academic and intellectual integrity, and only afterwards pushing for the policies you prefer to realize that world." That is how it is supposed to work, but reality is never so clean. One of the best modern examples of doing it backwards (starting with a conclusion, and then working backwards from there), is so called "intelligent design"/"creation science". Many different groups and movements are guilty of it, but the ID scene is relatively unique in the lengths that they went to present themselves as legitimate scientists. See: Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitzmiller_v._Dover_Area_School_District http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitzmiller_v._Dover_Area_School...) Those nutjobs insisted that they were real scientists, despite the glaring contradictions with their nonsense and the scientific method. His comparison was rather apt.

kijin 12y ago
ID was nuts because it tried to present itself as a description of the past. But if you're trying to issue prescriptions for the future (i.e. what kind of world do you want to create?), there's nothing fundamentally wrong about first identifying where you want to go and then cherrypicking biological and psychological traits to manipulate in order to get there. It would be just like writing a program to get the results you want.
- Crito 12y ago
  Descriptions of the past are not nuts. History, the legitimate peer-reviewed study of history, does the same. Evolutionary biology tells us much about the past, as does much of physics. None of that is problematic. ID was nuts because of their flawed methodology. > "But if you're trying to issue prescriptions for the future (i.e. what kind of world do you want to create?), there's nothing fundamentally wrong about first identifying where you want to go and then cherrypicking biological and psychological traits to manipulate in order to get there." Do not confuse policy forming / social engineering with science.
  - kijin 12y ago
    Actually, I agree with you. What I meant is that ID used an inappropriate methodology for what it purported to do, but the same methodology might be appropriate in other contexts such as social engineering.

Lorento 12y ago

Are blacks less intelligent than whites? How many jews were really killed in the holocaust? These are absolutely not settled questions but what university will allow that kind of research? Who will publish it if the results support something that's illegal to publicly state? Even academics put their careers ahead of integrity when it would result in losing their career as well as being widely condemned.

pluma 12y ago
Personally I find the entire "the holocaust was only about Jews" meme appalling. Yes, it disproportionally affected Jews, but it also affected a lot of non-Jews (as well as people who did not self-identify as Jews). Presenting it as a purely Jewish tragedy is disrespectful to all the non-Jewish victims. The more important thing is that it was about humans. Humans did these things to other humans. You should not feel any better about what happened if you're not personally related to any of those who caused the suffering than you should feel any less offended if you're not personally related to those who suffered. The Holocaust was a failure of humanity. As was every single genocide before and after that particular one. Turning it into a "Nazis killing Jews" story allows us to artificially distance ourselves from what happened: "I'm not a Nazi, so why should I care?" or "I have nothing against Jews, so what does it have to do with me?" ("I only hate gay people"). In Germany we have a huge problem with this. We pretend to have dealt with our history, but we vehemently oppose the idea that the "monsters" who committed that "great evil" were normal human beings. As if that would somehow make them innocent. It does quite the opposite, actually: acknowledging that it was "just" humans doing those things to humans can help us understand what made ordinary humans "like us" end up doing something that horrible to other ordinary humans. We're actually seeing something similar with East Germany: because everybody knows East Germany was an "Unrechtsstaat" (literally the opposite of a "Rechtsstaat", or "state of law", but also implying "organized injustice") their mass surveillance and censorship was fundamentally different from our mass surveillance and censorship. There's absolutely nothing we could learn from them because by definition we're nothing like them and any attempt to portray East German life as anything other than constant suffering and oppression "trivializes" the injustice of its government. Creating taboos around these problems doesn't solve them, it just hides them. The US hasn't solved its racism just because the current president has darker skin. Acknowledging physiological differences between sexes or even ethnic groups isn't sexist or racist. Treating people unfairly because of these differences (or assumptions about the extent of those differences via stereotype pigeonholing) is.