Everything is Television Social media is becoming constant short form video. "In the glow of a local news program, or an outraged news feed, the viewer bathes in a vat of their own cortisol."
Cognitive Dissonance It has happened again. A new paper, based on a tranche of unsealed historical documents, casts serious doubt on a piece of social psychology research from the mid-20th Century. Shocker!
Herodotus Validated The Scythians used human leather on their quivers. I never trusted those guys.
How the Letter E Almost Ruined English Poetry It includes good descriptions of the loss of grammatical endings in Germanic languages and even more in English and how that influenced the accenting of syllables.
Jesse Singal on the "Feminization" Discourse - Part 1 This provides some context on how even mild versions of Helen Andrews claim are utterly rejected in many fields of the academy, with shockingly little evidence. I know, I know, in our section of the blogosphere we've known this for years. But it is still new to some people. Part II discusses how Singal thinks Andrews's overall argument still has holes. (Leah Libresco Sargeant at The Free Press points out that if the theory were entirely true, highly feminized professions like Pharmacist and Veterinary Medicine would have collapsed. )
1 comment:
That Leah Libresco Sargeant observation sounds like a false dichotomy to me.
Helen Andrews was talking about generalization of human traits. I don't believe she or anyone assenting to her observations claims that men never engage in passive-aggressive conflict, nor that no woman is capable of logical data-driven problem resolution. I would also dispute her characterization of those professions. There are less than 50,000 veterinarians of both sexes and though the majority are female, it's a roughly 60/40 split (Vet techs, however, are over 80% female). The number of Pharmacists is similarly small, roughly 300,000, and the female/male split is about 56/44. So neither profession is overwhelmingly female when compared to professions such as pre-school teachers (97%), child care workers (94%), LPNs and RNs (85+%), or bank tellers (85%). It is not hard to imagine that a specific subset of women who may have an atypical set of traits is drawn to those professions. I'll note that both of them have relatively long hard-science oriented training regimes.
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