Knowledge Does Not Dislodge Myths

(Note:  Edited below) "Conversations with Tyler," which is on my sidebar, interviewed Ada Palmer (podcast and transcript available), a professor of Renaissance Studies at University of Chicago who is also a sci-fi writer and is currently writing a novel about Viking metaphysics. She is clearly very knowledgeable about some subjects dear to my heart, and I learned a few things from her in the brief conversation. Is she smart?  Well, she is definitely clever and original, and that is usually considered so.  Is she wise?  I am less sure. She imposes a women's-studies/issues overview to everything, which is always interesting in theory, pulling out perspectives previously undervalued, but can be tedious and cliched. Using terms like "genderedness" or "gender-coded" as if they were deeply meaningful, rather than jargony shorthands from many fields, tend to be a tell.  Yet she does seem to have other arrows in her quiver, and I can put up a lot of jargon when that is the case. I didn't dislike her, I just wanted to smack her a few times.

She does not close well in the discussion. She is talking about violence, competition, and especially decision-making and how it might be done better. (Italics mine in the following).

This is not a biological thing, but this is that a number of behavior patterns, including types of teambuilding and non-zero-sum thinking, are culturally coded female, and women are encouraged to do it, whereas men are encouraged more to do aggressive problem-solving, haggling, and zero-sum thinking.

In my own classroom, I often run this papal election simulation, and there’s a survey that the students have to fill out to say, “What kind of participation in this political simulation would you enjoy?” It’s always very interesting to me that while there’s a huge range of genderedness about most of the questions, the question, “Would you enjoy having a face-to-face opponent where one or the other of you has to fall for the other to rise, and there is no possibility of compromise, you just have to go head on?” That question is almost exclusively said yes to by men, or men are enthusiastic about it. Women are more wary of it.

Whereas the question, “Would you enjoy being on or leading a team and being in charge of helping a group of people work together to achieve a collaborative goal?” is disproportionately answered yes by [women]. This is a culturation thing. This is something that we learn when we’re toddlers, that we learn when we’re in elementary school, as different behaviors are encouraged or discouraged among both men and women. I think that it’s not that we need to eliminate the differences between men and women; it’s that we need to get more of those female-coded problem-solving behaviors to be welcome in positions of power in one way or another.

And how, pray, does she know that this is not biological? Answer: She doesn't, not a bit of it. Try and trace back where in our development this is taught to little boys and little girls.  Huh.  It seems that it is already present in kindergarden!  My goodness, it is presnt in four-year-olds-in three-year-olds, and signs of it are present even in babes in arms!  All the best people in the world (few of whom have children of their own, it seems) have got to figure out how government, uh, society can get in sooner to make good things happen! How does she know this is culturation? Answer: She knows no such thing. She wants it to be true, because then A) she can believe that the world can be made into a place she prefers and B) People like her will be more in demand and have higher status. When something is nearly universal across societies, I would think that might be the default. For example, slavery is near-universal for the last 10K years, with variations in practice, but a consistent presentation.  I get it that it was not practiced in Poughkeepsie or Copenhagen when you grew up, but you need to get over that. The modern era seems to be the outlier. 

She folds immediately into how to change these types of preferred decision-making in an imaginary exercise in inviting people to a worldwide conference.

Especially, if I could bring in educational administrators, people who make decisions about what kind of education gets advanced from some of the powers that shape the world,

She has no evidence that educational administrators have any effect on anything.  But she hopes that they do, because of A) and B) above.

I am not making the argument that preferences in decision-making are biological, whether by gene expression or some other mechanism.  They might be.  That would be the way to bet, with 80% having a heritable/gestational influence and the rest culturally malleable. I am making the argument that again (again...AGAIN), the environmental explanation is simply assumed for the discussion. Lip service is given to possible heritable causes, but as soon as your back is turned, they revert to their priors.  They say that they are of course taking genetics or (gestational and other) hormones into consideration, but they lie.

Their jobs and status would be in jeopardy if it were true, so they have to ignore it.

They lie.

*******

Hmm. Ignoring the larger view in favor of the simplified and narrow view is rather an autistic trait. I wonder what the comparative percentage of autistics in academia versus the general population is? There is an irony: the autistics who know they tend that way are among the most adventurous and accurate thinkers I know (even if they don't know terms like Asperger's or HFA/PDA, etc). The ones who clearly are but don't acknowledge it are the most hidebound and self-righteous.  This looks like a subsequent post coming up.  (If you want to read ahead, look up monotropism and pathological demand avoidance, which is admittedly a terrible term that I hope gets superseded. Pathologise THIS, you bastard.)