We’re at a point where gender studies shouldn’t even be considered part of the humanities anymore, I’d say. As you remind us, they’re severely in denial about what biology, medicine and psychology have established and their experimental data. They’re the intellectual equivalent of anti-vax “activists” (except that the latter have yet to reach the same degree of entryism and grift).
There are other adjacent fields that are similarly problematic, being committed to discredited ideas like Marxist economics, or to what’s sometimes naïvely called “post-modernism” (actually a huge misreading of what the original postmodernists were in fact trying to achieve!). All of that stuff is way too toxic and radioactive to even think about seeking it out explicitly.
I understand and to largely share your concerns. Theoretically, there’s a distinction between academic and activist gender studies and while the latter probably has almost nothing to offer and would likely just cause toxicity even if acting in good faith the former might have more value. I am not confident about the degree to which this distinction between academic study and activist action exists in actual fact, though.
>This is a discipline that can only exist by the deliberate denial of the medical and psychological fields and all the reproducible experimental data of said fields.
I’m not sure that this is true. The fundamental idea that ‘gender’ is an interesting concept that interacts with culture and biology in sometimes surprising ways seems valid, so saying that there is _no way_ gender studies can exist as a field without ignoring medical facts strikes me as a much stronger statement than I’m comfortable with.
As much as there is a reading of gender studies that is opposed to science and rigour, I think there is a reading that paints modern gender studies and ‘LGBTism’ as a surprisingly rational movement, as it injects nuance (consider the distinction they make between biological sex and psychological gender) and has neat transhumanist themes (the LGBT biohacker movement is really interesting and is actually what made me consider any of this as being worth a second glance, check out Ada Powers on twitter for the sort of thing I’m talking about here).
Gender studies has been a source of a lot of toxicity and its interactions with the rationalist community have not been a source for a lot of hope (I’m familiar with Scotts Alexander and Aaronson’s difficulties with feminist activists in the past) but I suspect/hope that there are _individual scholars_ in the field who try to avoid toxicity and apply whatever rigour they can to their work and that by finding and reaching out to these people we might begin development of a more rationalist-friendly gender studies with higher norms for outgroup tolerance and evidence.
Again, I’m not super confident in this and I think there is a decent chance that this will wind up being pointless but it still seems worth spending a little time investigating.
Any reasonable scholar who’s in gender studies faces a high reputational risk if they would debate on LessWrong in a reasonable way about their field. Any field that has dogma’s that aren’t allowed to be publicly debated has a problem with the kind of open discussion we are having here.
Again, I’m not super confident in this and I think there is a decent chance that this will wind up being pointless but it still seems worth spending a little time investigating.
The question is not just whether it’s pointless but about whether it’s potentially harmful.
This is a stronger case than the one Anderson made, I think, and it is one I take seriously (which is why I plan to approach this problem by reading material first to see what the landscape is actually like).
Any field that has dogma’s that aren’t allowed to be publicly debated has a problem with the kind of open discussion we are having here.
I agree with this statement, but the question is whether modern gender studies is actually such a field. Trying to make bold claims about the quality of academic discussion in a field neither I nor my conversation partner has actually investigated seriously strikes me as a futile exercise. I think it’s probably a bad idea to judge the quality of academic feminism by the merits of tumblr or ‘pop’ feminism in the same way it would be unfair to judge skeptic movements by the intellectual standards of r/atheism.
I’m also deeply skeptical of the idea that inviting feminists to participate in discussion would lead to an opening of the hellgates. LessWrong is a community that has examined infohazards and sees participants from a wide variety of political backgrounds including many that are considered extreme by most people, so my prior is that we’re better than most communities at managing political discord in a sane way.
We lost a room in which we held LW meetups in Berlin because LW discusses topics that shouldn’t be discussed. The discussion in itself is ‘unsafe’ regardless of how you discuss or what conclusions are reached.
That’s norms for using a meeting room. When it comes to norms that the gender studies community expects there own members to follow, a person who has a reputational stake in the community has a lot more to lose from violating norms in that way.
This isn’t even a question of the academic quality of their discourse. a/atheism doesn’t attack people in a way that destroys careers and isn’t dangerous to anyone. This is different here. I wouldn’t want a lone reasonable person in the gender studies field to lose their social capital and/or career for associating with this place.
The standard way LW historically handled politics is by discouraging it’s discussion. SSC did things differently and payed a price for it.
Amusingly, the article you linked redirected to a different article which seems to reinforce your first point and I think helped clarify for me the exact dynamics of the situation. The author defends Dr. Littman’s paper on what she terms ‘rapid-onset gender dysphoria’ against the heavy backlash it received (mostly on twitter, it seems) and especially Harvard’s response to that backlash.
I find it difficult to imagine that healthy academic discourse could take place in an environment that conflict-heavy. Critically, this does not require the field itself to be nonsense but rather so deeply joined to the social justice culture war that the normal apparatuses of academia are hijacked.
This has raised my estimation of the risk of inviting gender studies researchers to participate in discussions on LW significantly, especially since as you point out, that risk runs in both directions.
There may still be ideas worth salvaging from the gender studies community and I’m really curious at what a ‘rationalist gender studies’ field looks like but the risk does look salient enough it may not be worth the effort.
You lost your meeting room because you were discussing (what I assume to be) politically sensitive topics. I think we’d agree that intellectual progress halts when important topics become too charged to touch and I don’t want feminism to become like that in the rationalist sphere.
But rationalist sphere != LessWrong and perhaps this isn’t the right place for progress in that area to happen. You bring up the differing approaches of SSC and LW and I actually quite like SSC’s approach of high-discussion-norms while not shying from sensitive topics, but you’re not wrong about paying a price for that.
So now I’m left wondering, if not here, then where? Where could rational-adjacent people sanely interact with feminists and sociologists and others in ‘challenging’ fields and what would the discussion there have to look like to keep people safe?
The answer might be ‘nowhere’. This could be a fundamentally irreconcilable difference and if that’s the case then I will be sad about it and move on. I don’t think I have enough evidence to conclude this yet, but I will concede that is this place does exist, LessWrong probably isn’t it.
You lost your meeting room because you were discussing (what I assume to be) politically sensitive topics.
No, I lost it because it was a LessWrong meetup and there are such discussions on LessWrong (and our meetup.com page says SSC/LW, so SSC association was also a problem). The problem was not that the topics might be discussed on the meetup with was more applied rationality focused.
The problem was one of association, not one of meetup content. We could have held the meetup if we wouldn’t link from any LW or SSC branded page and called it ‘rationality meetup’.
So now I’m left wondering, if not here, then where?
The ‘Darwinian Gender Studies’ facebook group seems one place worth mentioning. TheMotte was founded to have a place where discussion could be happen with less collateral damage.
There might still be a risk for any insider to participate in them with their public identity attached. Private discussions behind closed doors would be less risky.
So now I’m left wondering, if not here, then where? Where could rational-adjacent people sanely interact with feminists and sociologists and others in ‘challenging’ fields
I contest that those are not actually claims made by sociologists. Or if they are, they are minority opinions (in which case there would be other sociologists debunking them).
As a test, if you provide links to sociologists (or academic feminists/gender studies researchers) making each of those claims I will try to find others within the same field arguing against them.
the second you step into the sociology department you’re not only expected to ignore that, you’re expected to deny it and attribute it to *oppression* without a single shred of supporting evidence.
To be perfectly honest, I’ve never stepped into a sociology department except to take classes that happened to be scheduled in the sociology building. The closest I’ve studied to sociology or gender studies in a formal setting was an introductory folklore course.
That being said, your statement sounds concerningly weakmanish, like the sort of criticism one would level at a field is one’s only experience with it were extremists and people complaining about the extremists. After some googling I found an article in the Huffington Post by Dr. Carol Morgan, who has a PhD in Gender Communication, that references the nature vs nurture debate (and provides anecdotal evidence on the nature side for the author’s sons’ gender identities).
the big “Nature vs. Nurture” debate in gender. In other words, why are males and females so different? No one can deny that both are at work. We are simply born with different bodies, different hormones, and quite literally, different brains. So there is a strong argument for the “nature” side of the debate.
This does not sound like a paragraph that would come out of a field that has decisively settled on ‘nurture’. I think the extent to which gender behaviors are biologically determined is still quite hotly debated within gender studies and the closest to a consensus view I can find is “they both play a role but people tend to naively overestimate the position of nature”.
Perhaps you should reevaluate what gender studies researchers actually believe?
Are you claiming that none of the differences between men and women are cultural? To me, that seems as obviously incorrect as saying all of them are. Not to go all ‘fallacy of the grey’ here but this really does seem to be an issue where both sides are a major influence. IQ is around 50% heritable, the other 50% also matters, though.
My view is that if we accept both biological and cultural influences on behavior then behavioral geneticists, neurologists, evolutionary psychologists, etc. focus their effort on the biological side and sociologists and academic feminists focus on the cultural side. Can you not see how, at least in theory, this is an interesting dynamic? Even if it were the case that all academic feminists think all observed social differences between men and women come from social causes (which, again, I think is a weakman argument) can’t you see that there’s something worth investigating there?
There is a fascinating feedback loop between biology and culture and the ways in which (mostly) static biological realities are interpreted culturally in many different ways and how this can shape the lives of people living within that culture are varied and difficult to describe simply. One of the things that I love so much about the rationalist community is their daring attempts to tackle really challenging issues in a clear manner. Things like the Human’s Guide to Words sequence or SSC’s Categories post take a look at the nuance and complexity of language and culture and make an honest, and in my view surprisingly successful, attempt to pull coherent, useful models out of the mud. I think we should do this for more stuff and I think gender is one of the issues that could really use a nice, demystifying treatment.
And when I ask myself where I might find people who could help with this ‘demystify gender’ project, I recall that there is an entire field of study that deals with this topic specifically. Even if there’s a bunch of crap coming out of that field, hell, even if 95% of it is people trying to find ways to confuse the issue harder or just trying to score political points, surely there’s clear-thinking people in there somewhere, right? There are people who went to school to study this stuff because they found it interesting in the same way some people find probability theory or linguistics interesting.
I’m not saying we should open the floodgates to every tumblr feminist with a grudge, but do you really think that trying to find open-minded gender studies researchers who would be willing to engage in adversarial collaboration would be such a terrible idea? Do you really take such an uncharitable view of the field you can’t imagine any usable work coming out of it?
IQ is around 50% heritable, the other 50% also matters, though.
This sounds like it’s written by a person who’s not quite clear what X percent heritable means. Apart from that making up numbers like this for rhetorical purposes and treating them as if they are factual is bad form.
The right answer to the nature vs. nature debate isn’t it’s 50-50 but: That’s a bad question and a bad frame for understanding reality.
Instead of debating nature vs. nature one should look at the empirical findings we have and build up a view on the world based on them.
I agree, that was a confused point for me to make that didn’t advance my main argument. The initial claim Anderson made was that the field of gender studies advocated total social determination of all observed differences between genders, I argued that this was not the case and provided an instance of a gender communications researcher discussing the biological influences on gendered behavior.
The point about IQ was a half remembered factoid from a metastudy I read a while back and I’ve been unable to find subsequently so it’s likely misremembered. It’s irrelevant to the discussion though, I think.
It was, as I admitted, a mistake. I was being inexact as it was not critical for my central point, if it was I would have looked it up, failed to find it, and adjusted my approach (or more likely, left out IQ altogether). I’m unsure what continuing to belabor this accomplishes aside from chastising me for insufficiently respecting numbers.
You admitted a mistake but it wasn’t the mistake for which I was criticizing you. I don’t have a problem with people misremembering numbers. This prompted me to explain my criticism.
Alright, a different angle then. If we did find some academic feminists or gender studies researchers who were willing to engage in good faith, serious discussion without trying to be activist or throwing around accusations of -isms or -phobics, would you object to their presence in the community? The hostility you’ve shown towards an entire field is something I find deeply concerning.
Perhaps you and I just have fundamentally different approaches towards outgroups since I honestly cannot think of a single group I would treat the way you’ve been treating feminists in this discussion.
New age pagans, reactionaries, anarchists, neoliberals, small-c-conservatives, and even the alt-right; I consider these to be among my outgroups and I could make major criticisms of their core philosophies as well as how they generally conduct themselves in discourse. But if a member of any one of them actually wanted to engage me in a real discussion in good faith I would take them up on it (time permitting, of course) and if they brought up evidence I had overlooked or perspectives I hadn’t considered then I would gladly update my views in response.
It’s very simple: if you are a real academic you spend your time savaging your own ideas until you cannot assail them further, and then you put them out there for your peers to do exactly the same in ways you hadn’t considered.
This is pretty close to my entire ethos; it’s the reason I became a rationalist in the first place and the reason I think the rationalist community has a chance to help the world where so many ‘grand vision’ movements have failed. But we have to be willing, no, eager, to engage our ideological opponents and take from them what value we can.
When I see you repeating antifeminist talking points and taking a dramatically uncharitable view of a huge academic field and political movement (and yes, I am bothered by the extent to which those two overlap) which seems to be informed by their most vitriolic and toxic members (and yes, the more moderate members seem to do frustratingly little to reign in their extremist counterparts) what I keep thinking is: we’re supposed to be better than this.
good luck getting them to sit down to talk with people that don’t believe exactly the same thing they do.
I’ve decided to interpret this as genuine. Throughout this whole conversation I’ve been annoyed at you for not engaging with what gender studies scholars actually believe, but my exposure to their ideas has basically been Wikipedia, some mild googling, and popular media. We’ve been going back and forth about whether feminists can argue coherently and in good faith and whether the field of gender studies is suitably rigorous but I’m only just now realizing the best way to resolve the question is to read some of their stuff critically and form my own opinions.
I’ve got a hypothesis that feminist social theory could be a helpful addition to the ever-growing rationalist canon and a way to test that just by doing a little reading. I’ll let you know if it turns out you were right all along.
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We’re at a point where gender studies shouldn’t even be considered part of the humanities anymore, I’d say. As you remind us, they’re severely in denial about what biology, medicine and psychology have established and their experimental data. They’re the intellectual equivalent of anti-vax “activists” (except that the latter have yet to reach the same degree of entryism and grift).
There are other adjacent fields that are similarly problematic, being committed to discredited ideas like Marxist economics, or to what’s sometimes naïvely called “post-modernism” (actually a huge misreading of what the original postmodernists were in fact trying to achieve!). All of that stuff is way too toxic and radioactive to even think about seeking it out explicitly.
I understand and to largely share your concerns. Theoretically, there’s a distinction between academic and activist gender studies and while the latter probably has almost nothing to offer and would likely just cause toxicity even if acting in good faith the former might have more value. I am not confident about the degree to which this distinction between academic study and activist action exists in actual fact, though.
>This is a discipline that can only exist by the deliberate denial of the medical and psychological fields and all the reproducible experimental data of said fields.
I’m not sure that this is true. The fundamental idea that ‘gender’ is an interesting concept that interacts with culture and biology in sometimes surprising ways seems valid, so saying that there is _no way_ gender studies can exist as a field without ignoring medical facts strikes me as a much stronger statement than I’m comfortable with.
As much as there is a reading of gender studies that is opposed to science and rigour, I think there is a reading that paints modern gender studies and ‘LGBTism’ as a surprisingly rational movement, as it injects nuance (consider the distinction they make between biological sex and psychological gender) and has neat transhumanist themes (the LGBT biohacker movement is really interesting and is actually what made me consider any of this as being worth a second glance, check out Ada Powers on twitter for the sort of thing I’m talking about here).
Gender studies has been a source of a lot of toxicity and its interactions with the rationalist community have not been a source for a lot of hope (I’m familiar with Scotts Alexander and Aaronson’s difficulties with feminist activists in the past) but I suspect/hope that there are _individual scholars_ in the field who try to avoid toxicity and apply whatever rigour they can to their work and that by finding and reaching out to these people we might begin development of a more rationalist-friendly gender studies with higher norms for outgroup tolerance and evidence.
Again, I’m not super confident in this and I think there is a decent chance that this will wind up being pointless but it still seems worth spending a little time investigating.
Any reasonable scholar who’s in gender studies faces a high reputational risk if they would debate on LessWrong in a reasonable way about their field. Any field that has dogma’s that aren’t allowed to be publicly debated has a problem with the kind of open discussion we are having here.
The question is not just whether it’s pointless but about whether it’s potentially harmful.
This is a stronger case than the one Anderson made, I think, and it is one I take seriously (which is why I plan to approach this problem by reading material first to see what the landscape is actually like).
I agree with this statement, but the question is whether modern gender studies is actually such a field. Trying to make bold claims about the quality of academic discussion in a field neither I nor my conversation partner has actually investigated seriously strikes me as a futile exercise. I think it’s probably a bad idea to judge the quality of academic feminism by the merits of tumblr or ‘pop’ feminism in the same way it would be unfair to judge skeptic movements by the intellectual standards of r/atheism.
I’m also deeply skeptical of the idea that inviting feminists to participate in discussion would lead to an opening of the hellgates. LessWrong is a community that has examined infohazards and sees participants from a wide variety of political backgrounds including many that are considered extreme by most people, so my prior is that we’re better than most communities at managing political discord in a sane way.
We lost a room in which we held LW meetups in Berlin because LW discusses topics that shouldn’t be discussed. The discussion in itself is ‘unsafe’ regardless of how you discuss or what conclusions are reached.
That’s norms for using a meeting room. When it comes to norms that the gender studies community expects there own members to follow, a person who has a reputational stake in the community has a lot more to lose from violating norms in that way.
This isn’t even a question of the academic quality of their discourse. a/atheism doesn’t attack people in a way that destroys careers and isn’t dangerous to anyone. This is different here. I wouldn’t want a lone reasonable person in the gender studies field to lose their social capital and/or career for associating with this place.
The standard way LW historically handled politics is by discouraging it’s discussion. SSC did things differently and payed a price for it.
That’s all separate from the actual quality of the academic discourse but it matters. As far as the discourse goes https://quillette.com/2019/09/17/i-basically-just-made-it-up-confessions-of-a-social-constructionist/ is an article by an insider where he reflects on the low standards he used over the decades.
Amusingly, the article you linked redirected to a different article which seems to reinforce your first point and I think helped clarify for me the exact dynamics of the situation. The author defends Dr. Littman’s paper on what she terms ‘rapid-onset gender dysphoria’ against the heavy backlash it received (mostly on twitter, it seems) and especially Harvard’s response to that backlash.
I find it difficult to imagine that healthy academic discourse could take place in an environment that conflict-heavy. Critically, this does not require the field itself to be nonsense but rather so deeply joined to the social justice culture war that the normal apparatuses of academia are hijacked.
This has raised my estimation of the risk of inviting gender studies researchers to participate in discussions on LW significantly, especially since as you point out, that risk runs in both directions.
There may still be ideas worth salvaging from the gender studies community and I’m really curious at what a ‘rationalist gender studies’ field looks like but the risk does look salient enough it may not be worth the effort.
You lost your meeting room because you were discussing (what I assume to be) politically sensitive topics. I think we’d agree that intellectual progress halts when important topics become too charged to touch and I don’t want feminism to become like that in the rationalist sphere.
But rationalist sphere != LessWrong and perhaps this isn’t the right place for progress in that area to happen. You bring up the differing approaches of SSC and LW and I actually quite like SSC’s approach of high-discussion-norms while not shying from sensitive topics, but you’re not wrong about paying a price for that.
So now I’m left wondering, if not here, then where? Where could rational-adjacent people sanely interact with feminists and sociologists and others in ‘challenging’ fields and what would the discussion there have to look like to keep people safe?
The answer might be ‘nowhere’. This could be a fundamentally irreconcilable difference and if that’s the case then I will be sad about it and move on. I don’t think I have enough evidence to conclude this yet, but I will concede that is this place does exist, LessWrong probably isn’t it.
No, I lost it because it was a LessWrong meetup and there are such discussions on LessWrong (and our meetup.com page says SSC/LW, so SSC association was also a problem). The problem was not that the topics might be discussed on the meetup with was more applied rationality focused.
The problem was one of association, not one of meetup content. We could have held the meetup if we wouldn’t link from any LW or SSC branded page and called it ‘rationality meetup’.
The ‘Darwinian Gender Studies’ facebook group seems one place worth mentioning. TheMotte was founded to have a place where discussion could be happen with less collateral damage.
There might still be a risk for any insider to participate in them with their public identity attached. Private discussions behind closed doors would be less risky.
Perhaps /r/TheMotte?! (Backstory.)
Hmm, that might be worth exploring. Thanks
Name three?
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I contest that those are not actually claims made by sociologists. Or if they are, they are minority opinions (in which case there would be other sociologists debunking them).
As a test, if you provide links to sociologists (or academic feminists/gender studies researchers) making each of those claims I will try to find others within the same field arguing against them.
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To be perfectly honest, I’ve never stepped into a sociology department except to take classes that happened to be scheduled in the sociology building. The closest I’ve studied to sociology or gender studies in a formal setting was an introductory folklore course.
That being said, your statement sounds concerningly weakmanish, like the sort of criticism one would level at a field is one’s only experience with it were extremists and people complaining about the extremists. After some googling I found an article in the Huffington Post by Dr. Carol Morgan, who has a PhD in Gender Communication, that references the nature vs nurture debate (and provides anecdotal evidence on the nature side for the author’s sons’ gender identities).
This does not sound like a paragraph that would come out of a field that has decisively settled on ‘nurture’. I think the extent to which gender behaviors are biologically determined is still quite hotly debated within gender studies and the closest to a consensus view I can find is “they both play a role but people tend to naively overestimate the position of nature”.
Perhaps you should reevaluate what gender studies researchers actually believe?
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Are you claiming that none of the differences between men and women are cultural? To me, that seems as obviously incorrect as saying all of them are. Not to go all ‘fallacy of the grey’ here but this really does seem to be an issue where both sides are a major influence. IQ is around 50% heritable, the other 50% also matters, though.
My view is that if we accept both biological and cultural influences on behavior then behavioral geneticists, neurologists, evolutionary psychologists, etc. focus their effort on the biological side and sociologists and academic feminists focus on the cultural side. Can you not see how, at least in theory, this is an interesting dynamic? Even if it were the case that all academic feminists think all observed social differences between men and women come from social causes (which, again, I think is a weakman argument) can’t you see that there’s something worth investigating there?
There is a fascinating feedback loop between biology and culture and the ways in which (mostly) static biological realities are interpreted culturally in many different ways and how this can shape the lives of people living within that culture are varied and difficult to describe simply. One of the things that I love so much about the rationalist community is their daring attempts to tackle really challenging issues in a clear manner. Things like the Human’s Guide to Words sequence or SSC’s Categories post take a look at the nuance and complexity of language and culture and make an honest, and in my view surprisingly successful, attempt to pull coherent, useful models out of the mud. I think we should do this for more stuff and I think gender is one of the issues that could really use a nice, demystifying treatment.
And when I ask myself where I might find people who could help with this ‘demystify gender’ project, I recall that there is an entire field of study that deals with this topic specifically. Even if there’s a bunch of crap coming out of that field, hell, even if 95% of it is people trying to find ways to confuse the issue harder or just trying to score political points, surely there’s clear-thinking people in there somewhere, right? There are people who went to school to study this stuff because they found it interesting in the same way some people find probability theory or linguistics interesting.
I’m not saying we should open the floodgates to every tumblr feminist with a grudge, but do you really think that trying to find open-minded gender studies researchers who would be willing to engage in adversarial collaboration would be such a terrible idea? Do you really take such an uncharitable view of the field you can’t imagine any usable work coming out of it?
This sounds like it’s written by a person who’s not quite clear what X percent heritable means. Apart from that making up numbers like this for rhetorical purposes and treating them as if they are factual is bad form.
The right answer to the nature vs. nature debate isn’t it’s 50-50 but: That’s a bad question and a bad frame for understanding reality.
Instead of debating nature vs. nature one should look at the empirical findings we have and build up a view on the world based on them.
I agree, that was a confused point for me to make that didn’t advance my main argument. The initial claim Anderson made was that the field of gender studies advocated total social determination of all observed differences between genders, I argued that this was not the case and provided an instance of a gender communications researcher discussing the biological influences on gendered behavior.
The point about IQ was a half remembered factoid from a metastudy I read a while back and I’ve been unable to find subsequently so it’s likely misremembered. It’s irrelevant to the discussion though, I think.
Exactly 50-50 would be very surprising result for a meta-study. “50% heritable” has an exactness that “around half heritable” doesn’t have.
Treating both of those the same way is what I would expect from people who don’t respect actual numbers.
It was, as I admitted, a mistake. I was being inexact as it was not critical for my central point, if it was I would have looked it up, failed to find it, and adjusted my approach (or more likely, left out IQ altogether). I’m unsure what continuing to belabor this accomplishes aside from chastising me for insufficiently respecting numbers.
You admitted a mistake but it wasn’t the mistake for which I was criticizing you. I don’t have a problem with people misremembering numbers. This prompted me to explain my criticism.
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Alright, a different angle then. If we did find some academic feminists or gender studies researchers who were willing to engage in good faith, serious discussion without trying to be activist or throwing around accusations of -isms or -phobics, would you object to their presence in the community? The hostility you’ve shown towards an entire field is something I find deeply concerning.
Perhaps you and I just have fundamentally different approaches towards outgroups since I honestly cannot think of a single group I would treat the way you’ve been treating feminists in this discussion.
New age pagans, reactionaries, anarchists, neoliberals, small-c-conservatives, and even the alt-right; I consider these to be among my outgroups and I could make major criticisms of their core philosophies as well as how they generally conduct themselves in discourse. But if a member of any one of them actually wanted to engage me in a real discussion in good faith I would take them up on it (time permitting, of course) and if they brought up evidence I had overlooked or perspectives I hadn’t considered then I would gladly update my views in response.
This is pretty close to my entire ethos; it’s the reason I became a rationalist in the first place and the reason I think the rationalist community has a chance to help the world where so many ‘grand vision’ movements have failed. But we have to be willing, no, eager, to engage our ideological opponents and take from them what value we can.
When I see you repeating antifeminist talking points and taking a dramatically uncharitable view of a huge academic field and political movement (and yes, I am bothered by the extent to which those two overlap) which seems to be informed by their most vitriolic and toxic members (and yes, the more moderate members seem to do frustratingly little to reign in their extremist counterparts) what I keep thinking is: we’re supposed to be better than this.
I’ve decided to interpret this as genuine. Throughout this whole conversation I’ve been annoyed at you for not engaging with what gender studies scholars actually believe, but my exposure to their ideas has basically been Wikipedia, some mild googling, and popular media. We’ve been going back and forth about whether feminists can argue coherently and in good faith and whether the field of gender studies is suitably rigorous but I’m only just now realizing the best way to resolve the question is to read some of their stuff critically and form my own opinions.
I’ve got a hypothesis that feminist social theory could be a helpful addition to the ever-growing rationalist canon and a way to test that just by doing a little reading. I’ll let you know if it turns out you were right all along.
Give specific examples. What do gender theorists claim to be trying to do, and how are they failing to do it?
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