I don’t know the ins and the outs of the Summers case, but that article has a smell of straw man. Especially this (emphasis mine) :
You see, there’s a shifty little game that proponents of gender discrimination are playing. They argue that high SAT scores are indicative of success in science, and then they say that males tend to have higher math SAT scores, and therefore it is OK to encourage more men in the higher ranks of science careers…but they never get around to saying what their SAT scores were. Larry Summers could smugly lecture to a bunch of accomplished women about how men and women were different and having testicles helps you do science, but his message really was “I have an intellectual edge over you because some men are incredibly smart, and I am a man”, which is a logical fallacy.
From what I understand (and a quick check on Wikipedia confirms this), what got Larry Summers in trouble wasn’t that he said we should use gender as a proxy for intelligence, but merely that gender differences in ability could explain the observed under-representation of women in science.
The whole article is attacking a position that, as far as I know, nobody holds in the West any more : that women should be discriminated against because they are less good at science.
Well, he also seems to be attacking a second group that does exist (those that say that there are less women in science because they are less likely to have high math ability), mostly by mixing them up with the first, imaginary, group.
The whole article is attacking a position that, as far as I know, nobody holds in the West any more : that women should be discriminated against because they are less good at science.
Well, I think PZ Myers is a liar who has never heard of such people, but they do exist. Robin Hanson, for one. More representative is conchis’s claim early in the comments that
some [Oxford] admissions fellows were discounting female students’ grades on the basis that they were more likely to reflect conscientiousness than talent.
Rewritten: I’ve heard hints along these lines in America, where girls get better grades, in both high school and college, than boys with the same SATs. This is suggested to be about conscientiously doing homework. If American colleges don’t want to reward conscientiousness, they could change their grading to avoid homework.
That would make them be like my understanding of Oxford, where I believe grades are based on high-stakes testing, not on homework. But I also thought admissions was only based on high-stakes testing, too. That is, I don’t even know what the quoted claim means by “grades,” nor have I been able to track down people openly admitting anything like it.
Do British students get grades other than A-levels? Are there sex divergences between the grades and A-levels? A-levels and predictions? I hear that Oxbridge grades are lower variance for girls than boys. I also hear that boys do better on the math SATs than on the math A-levels, which seems like it should be a condemnation of one of the tests.
Well, he also seems to be attacking a second group that does exist (those that say that there are less women in science because they are less likely to have high math ability), mostly by mixing them up with the first, imaginary, group.
Which makes a kind of instrumental sense, in that advocacy of this position aids the first group by innocently explaining away gender inequalities. (I think it’s obvious that most people don’t distinguish well, in political situations, between incidental aid and explicit support.) Also, if evaluating individual intelligence is costly and/or inevitably noisy, it is (selfishly) rational for evaluators to give significant weight to gender, i.e. discriminate. And given how little people understand statistics, and the extent to which judgments of status/worth are tied to intelligence and to group membership, it seems inevitable that belief in group differences will lead people to discriminate far more than would be rational.
Which makes a kind of instrumental sense, in that advocacy of this position aids the first group by innocently explaining away gender inequalities. (I think it’s obvious that most people don’t distinguish well, in political situations, between incidental aid and explicit support.)
Can’t this be said of just about all straw men ? Yes, setting up a straw man may be instrumentally rational, but is it the kind of thing we should be applauding ?
Say we have two somewhat similar positions:
Position A, which is false and maybe evil (in this case “we should discriminate against women when hiring scientists, because they aren’t as likely to be very smart”)
Position B, which is maybe true (in this case (“the lack women female scientists could be due to the fact that they aren’t as likely to be very smart”)
A straw man is pretending that people arguing B are arguing A, or pretending that there’s no difference between the two—which seems to be what P.Z. Myers is doing.
You’re saying that position B gives support for position A, and, yes, it does. That can be a good reason to attack people who support position B (especially if you really don’t like position A), but that holds even if position B is true.
Can’t this be said of just about all straw men ? Yes, setting up a straw man may be instrumentally rational, but is it the kind of thing we should be applauding ?
Agreed. I don’t necessarily approve of this sort of rhetoric, but I think it’s worth trying to figure out what causes it, and recognize any good reasons that might be involved. (I also don’t mean to say that people who use this rhetoric are calculating instrumental rationalists — mostly, I think they, as I alluded to, don’t recognize the possibility of saying things representative of and useful to an outgroup without being allied with it.)
I don’t know the ins and the outs of the Summers case, but that article has a smell of straw man. Especially this (emphasis mine) :
From what I understand (and a quick check on Wikipedia confirms this), what got Larry Summers in trouble wasn’t that he said we should use gender as a proxy for intelligence, but merely that gender differences in ability could explain the observed under-representation of women in science.
The whole article is attacking a position that, as far as I know, nobody holds in the West any more : that women should be discriminated against because they are less good at science.
Well, he also seems to be attacking a second group that does exist (those that say that there are less women in science because they are less likely to have high math ability), mostly by mixing them up with the first, imaginary, group.
Well, I think PZ Myers is a liar who has never heard of such people, but they do exist. Robin Hanson, for one. More representative is conchis’s claim early in the comments that
Rewritten: I’ve heard hints along these lines in America, where girls get better grades, in both high school and college, than boys with the same SATs. This is suggested to be about conscientiously doing homework. If American colleges don’t want to reward conscientiousness, they could change their grading to avoid homework.
That would make them be like my understanding of Oxford, where I believe grades are based on high-stakes testing, not on homework. But I also thought admissions was only based on high-stakes testing, too. That is, I don’t even know what the quoted claim means by “grades,” nor have I been able to track down people openly admitting anything like it.
Do British students get grades other than A-levels? Are there sex divergences between the grades and A-levels? A-levels and predictions? I hear that Oxbridge grades are lower variance for girls than boys. I also hear that boys do better on the math SATs than on the math A-levels, which seems like it should be a condemnation of one of the tests.
Which makes a kind of instrumental sense, in that advocacy of this position aids the first group by innocently explaining away gender inequalities. (I think it’s obvious that most people don’t distinguish well, in political situations, between incidental aid and explicit support.) Also, if evaluating individual intelligence is costly and/or inevitably noisy, it is (selfishly) rational for evaluators to give significant weight to gender, i.e. discriminate. And given how little people understand statistics, and the extent to which judgments of status/worth are tied to intelligence and to group membership, it seems inevitable that belief in group differences will lead people to discriminate far more than would be rational.
Can’t this be said of just about all straw men ? Yes, setting up a straw man may be instrumentally rational, but is it the kind of thing we should be applauding ?
Say we have two somewhat similar positions:
Position A, which is false and maybe evil (in this case “we should discriminate against women when hiring scientists, because they aren’t as likely to be very smart”)
Position B, which is maybe true (in this case (“the lack women female scientists could be due to the fact that they aren’t as likely to be very smart”)
A straw man is pretending that people arguing B are arguing A, or pretending that there’s no difference between the two—which seems to be what P.Z. Myers is doing.
You’re saying that position B gives support for position A, and, yes, it does. That can be a good reason to attack people who support position B (especially if you really don’t like position A), but that holds even if position B is true.
Agreed. I don’t necessarily approve of this sort of rhetoric, but I think it’s worth trying to figure out what causes it, and recognize any good reasons that might be involved. (I also don’t mean to say that people who use this rhetoric are calculating instrumental rationalists — mostly, I think they, as I alluded to, don’t recognize the possibility of saying things representative of and useful to an outgroup without being allied with it.)