There are obviously no incompatibilities between reality and the moral claims of feminism.
That’s false. The moral claim of feminism is that man and woman should be treated equally. Reality is that they aren’t treated equally. The goal of feminism is to change reality.
In the last decades feminist were quite successful in doing so. Given the success of the feminist movement they don’t have a real incentive to chance the way they try to create social change.
Most humans have biases on a subconscious level. Scientists are humans. A person that’s well trained in deconstructivsm can find gender bias in a lot of gender related writing by scientists.
A person that’s well trained in deconstructivsm can find gender bias in a lot of gender related writing by scientists.
Maybe that’s because a person well trained in deconstructivism can find anything in anything. :D
More seriously, maybe a person can more easily find the biases they don’t share then the biases they share. And maybe being interested in feminism and being interested in deconstructivism correlates positively.
There are obviously no incompatibilities between reality and the moral claims of feminism.
That’s false. The moral claim of feminism is that man and woman should be treated equally. Reality is that they aren’t treated equally.
I think you are misinterpreting what was meant here. What seems to have been meant is that there’s no conflict between what normatively feminism claims and the description of how reality actually behaves, not whether the feminist ideals have been accomplished. This is in contrast with for example how classical marxism makes claims about the nature of reality that are just demonstrably false about the nature of economics, and that’s independent from any descriptive claim about how economies currently work.
What seems to have been meant is that there’s no conflict between what normatively feminism claims and the description of how reality actually behaves, not whether the feminist ideals have been accomplished. This is in contrast with for example how classical marxism makes claims about the nature of reality
Yes, they do. See for example all the comments talking about ‘patriarchy’.
It may help to reread my comment. I’m not arguing that there aren’t such conflicts- I was discussing what OP meant. In fact, I’d agree that to some extent the claim being made is wrong. I can easily for example find self-identified feminists who claim that all aspects of gender are not biological. Since one has things like male babies having on average larger birth-weight than females, this is trivially false. At the same time though, one of the serious problems with this sort of discussion is that one can construct many definitions of the terms in question, since in any movement, many different people will use different notions of what they mean by a given ism. Interpreting OP as saying that for many self-identified feminists, feminism doesn’t conflict with descriptive aspects of reality is a distinct claim, which should be taken seriously.
See for example all the comments talking about ‘patriarchy’.
So that’s a pretty broad category, and doesn’t seem to support your claim. Such comments have included observations that a) not all societies are patriarchal and some classical small societies have had strong matriarchal elements b) many aspects of gender roles in classical Western civilization were far more restrictive of the formal power given to women than men. Given inheritance laws favoring sons over daughters (male primogeniture wasn’t just for nobility, and even classical inheritance laws pre-feudalism often gave an extra large portion to the eldest male heir (look at the Talmudic laws for example), the many forms of higher education that were denied to women (most of the Ivy League schools for example didn’t let women in as undergraduates until the late 1960s), restrictions on married women’s economic rights (in the United States until the 1970s, it was difficult for a married women to even write checks to pay utility bills), and many other aspects this is difficult to see.
That’s not to say that all comments about patriarchy are true. Claims that science is inherently patriarchy run the gamut from incoherent to demonstrably false. Similarly, claims that fluid dynamics have been less extensively studied than general mechanics because of a mental association between fluids and female menstruation as opposed to male genitalia which involves erections, are generally not even worth addressing. But such claims are rare, and aren’t necessarily representative of feminism as a whole. Indeed, even on a college campus in a left-wing city, it will often take effort to find feminists who actively argue for these sorts of positions. So overall, any claim that this somehow applies to “all the comments talking about ‘patriarchy’” is inaccurate.
I think you are misinterpreting what was meant here.
No, I do understand well what diegocaleiro intended to communicate. It’s just that what he intended to communicate isn’t the only thing that he communicates.
When it comes to discussing gender the goal of most feminists is to change social realities. It’s not to make claims that explain reality.
Whenever people who have different goals interact there will be some conflict.
In science you can often interpret a fact in multiple ways. If your goal is the search of truth within the scientific community it makes sense to have different people argue for the merits of all possible explanations for the data that you have. If your goal is social change than you profit from blanking out possible explanation that go against your social goals whenever there’s a possible explanation that’s more benefitial for your goal of social change.
No, I do understand well what diegocaleiro intended to communicate. It’s just that what he intended to communicate isn’t the only thing that he communicates.
Are you saying that you are deliberately interpreting his statement in a way that you know wasn’t intended?
diegocaleiro stated goal is about understanding that conflict.
I’m interpreting his statement in a way that shifts the attention towards the reason there’s conflict between evolutionary psychology and feminism.
I don’t think it’s useful to address the statement in a way that doesn’t help with understanding the conflict between evolutionary psychology and feminism.
There’s also the meta level. You won’t understand the whole conflict between evolutionary psychology and feminism as long as you think that the only part of communication that matters is the part that the sender intends to send.
It feels only sporting to tell you that a lot of people on this site have been trained to have alarm bells go off when reading this sentence.
That doesn’t change the fact that this is the reality. This is why it’s hard to have no conflict between evolutionary psychology folks and academic feminists.
I describe reality and because of their training for alarm bells LessWrong folk doesn’t like my post. Evolutionary psychologists describe reality and because of their training for alarm bells feminists don’t like it.
There no substantial difference. Few people care about understanding reality for it’s own sake.
I don’t see LessWrong as a sport that’s about maximizing karma.
That’s not what I mean. I am talking specifically about the statement:
A person that’s well trained in deconstructivsm can find gender bias in a lot of gender related writing by scientists.
If I were feeling less sporting, I would make a jibe about how well-trained in deconstructivism (deconstructionism?) a person would have to be to find gender bias in the list of ingredients on a box of cereal. Literary textual analysis is not seen as a particularly credible method for deducing facts around here.
The wording of the statement is also worrying, in that it’s reminiscent of confirmation bias and Type I errors.
I am not making any kind of comment on any gender-politics issue in my response to you. I am simply informing you that the argument you have chosen to use in this case is an extremely poor match for the audience.
Literary textual analysis is not seen as a particularly credible method for deducing facts around here.
My argument doesn’t rest on the claim that literary textual analysis is a credible method for deducing facts.
It rests of the claim that feminists use literary textual analysis as a method for deducing facts.
It rests on the claim that the fact that feminists find their facts that way is one of the main reasons for the conflict between feminists and evolutionary psychology.
Your problem is that you can’t distinguish a descriptive statement about the truth that some people use literary textual analysis to find facts from a value judgement about whether it’s good that they do.
That’s false. The moral claim of feminism is that man and woman should be treated equally. Reality is that they aren’t treated equally. The goal of feminism is to change reality.
In the last decades feminist were quite successful in doing so. Given the success of the feminist movement they don’t have a real incentive to chance the way they try to create social change.
Most humans have biases on a subconscious level. Scientists are humans. A person that’s well trained in deconstructivsm can find gender bias in a lot of gender related writing by scientists.
Maybe that’s because a person well trained in deconstructivism can find anything in anything. :D
More seriously, maybe a person can more easily find the biases they don’t share then the biases they share. And maybe being interested in feminism and being interested in deconstructivism correlates positively.
I think you are misinterpreting what was meant here. What seems to have been meant is that there’s no conflict between what normatively feminism claims and the description of how reality actually behaves, not whether the feminist ideals have been accomplished. This is in contrast with for example how classical marxism makes claims about the nature of reality that are just demonstrably false about the nature of economics, and that’s independent from any descriptive claim about how economies currently work.
Yes, they do. See for example all the comments talking about ‘patriarchy’.
It may help to reread my comment. I’m not arguing that there aren’t such conflicts- I was discussing what OP meant. In fact, I’d agree that to some extent the claim being made is wrong. I can easily for example find self-identified feminists who claim that all aspects of gender are not biological. Since one has things like male babies having on average larger birth-weight than females, this is trivially false. At the same time though, one of the serious problems with this sort of discussion is that one can construct many definitions of the terms in question, since in any movement, many different people will use different notions of what they mean by a given ism. Interpreting OP as saying that for many self-identified feminists, feminism doesn’t conflict with descriptive aspects of reality is a distinct claim, which should be taken seriously.
So that’s a pretty broad category, and doesn’t seem to support your claim. Such comments have included observations that a) not all societies are patriarchal and some classical small societies have had strong matriarchal elements b) many aspects of gender roles in classical Western civilization were far more restrictive of the formal power given to women than men. Given inheritance laws favoring sons over daughters (male primogeniture wasn’t just for nobility, and even classical inheritance laws pre-feudalism often gave an extra large portion to the eldest male heir (look at the Talmudic laws for example), the many forms of higher education that were denied to women (most of the Ivy League schools for example didn’t let women in as undergraduates until the late 1960s), restrictions on married women’s economic rights (in the United States until the 1970s, it was difficult for a married women to even write checks to pay utility bills), and many other aspects this is difficult to see.
That’s not to say that all comments about patriarchy are true. Claims that science is inherently patriarchy run the gamut from incoherent to demonstrably false. Similarly, claims that fluid dynamics have been less extensively studied than general mechanics because of a mental association between fluids and female menstruation as opposed to male genitalia which involves erections, are generally not even worth addressing. But such claims are rare, and aren’t necessarily representative of feminism as a whole. Indeed, even on a college campus in a left-wing city, it will often take effort to find feminists who actively argue for these sorts of positions. So overall, any claim that this somehow applies to “all the comments talking about ‘patriarchy’” is inaccurate.
No, I do understand well what diegocaleiro intended to communicate. It’s just that what he intended to communicate isn’t the only thing that he communicates.
When it comes to discussing gender the goal of most feminists is to change social realities. It’s not to make claims that explain reality. Whenever people who have different goals interact there will be some conflict.
In science you can often interpret a fact in multiple ways. If your goal is the search of truth within the scientific community it makes sense to have different people argue for the merits of all possible explanations for the data that you have. If your goal is social change than you profit from blanking out possible explanation that go against your social goals whenever there’s a possible explanation that’s more benefitial for your goal of social change.
Are you saying that you are deliberately interpreting his statement in a way that you know wasn’t intended?
diegocaleiro stated goal is about understanding that conflict.
I’m interpreting his statement in a way that shifts the attention towards the reason there’s conflict between evolutionary psychology and feminism. I don’t think it’s useful to address the statement in a way that doesn’t help with understanding the conflict between evolutionary psychology and feminism.
There’s also the meta level. You won’t understand the whole conflict between evolutionary psychology and feminism as long as you think that the only part of communication that matters is the part that the sender intends to send.
It feels only sporting to tell you that a lot of people on this site have been trained to have alarm bells go off when reading this sentence.
That doesn’t change the fact that this is the reality. This is why it’s hard to have no conflict between evolutionary psychology folks and academic feminists.
I describe reality and because of their training for alarm bells LessWrong folk doesn’t like my post. Evolutionary psychologists describe reality and because of their training for alarm bells feminists don’t like it.
There no substantial difference. Few people care about understanding reality for it’s own sake. I don’t see LessWrong as a sport that’s about maximizing karma.
That’s not what I mean. I am talking specifically about the statement:
If I were feeling less sporting, I would make a jibe about how well-trained in deconstructivism (deconstructionism?) a person would have to be to find gender bias in the list of ingredients on a box of cereal. Literary textual analysis is not seen as a particularly credible method for deducing facts around here.
The wording of the statement is also worrying, in that it’s reminiscent of confirmation bias and Type I errors.
I am not making any kind of comment on any gender-politics issue in my response to you. I am simply informing you that the argument you have chosen to use in this case is an extremely poor match for the audience.
My argument doesn’t rest on the claim that literary textual analysis is a credible method for deducing facts. It rests of the claim that feminists use literary textual analysis as a method for deducing facts.
It rests on the claim that the fact that feminists find their facts that way is one of the main reasons for the conflict between feminists and evolutionary psychology.
Your problem is that you can’t distinguish a descriptive statement about the truth that some people use literary textual analysis to find facts from a value judgement about whether it’s good that they do.