As the Republican world view percolates throughout the society, it is gratifying to know that actual science and knowledge are, in fact, impediments to being successful, or even considered to be an expert at something.
I'm so glad that I can forget all that stuff about structural integrity and building safety I learned. That Stuff Is Hard!
Anyway, The inimitable August has penned a cartoon celebrating diversity in intellectual capacities!
I especially like the panel showing a cute lil Michael Chrichton playing with toy dinosaurs. Rowr! Grr!
I used to do a cartoon. I'm so jealous.
Sunset Over A Sizzler®
10 hours ago
The only problem with the cartoon being, of course, that Larry Summers said no such thing. If there are any impediments to success involving actual knowledge and science, it seems to me to fall much more with the faculty. They couldn't even tolerate that Summers would suggest that biology might have an effect.
ReplyDeleteWell, anyway, there's a bunch of stuff about it at my blog, though I haven't written on it much lately. Makes me depressed. Summers got a raw deal, and twits like your cartoonist neatly packaging it into "Summers doesn't think girls are smart" are just as stupid as the Mallard Filmore cartoons implying it's okay to be a homophobe.
well, Gore never claimed to have invented the internet, either, but that didn't prevent most of the media nad the entire right side of the political spectrum to bleat that tripe endlessly. Yeah, August used a shorthand to represent Summers basic argument, I'm sure he didn't intend it as a direct quote but as a satiric nickname.
ReplyDeleteBecause boilerplate and plausible deniability aside, that is the main thrust of what Summers was saying in that speech. Like the language of racism and other types of bigotry, it has morphed into softer, coded language that enable the progenitors to proclaim "Who, me?" with wide eyed innocence.
I've known a fair number of female engineers, not the least of which is my wife, and would love the entertainment value of watching you and Larry Summers defend this position directly to them. Having seen their career curves, I can say without hesitation that any lack of achievement cannot be dismissed as a deficiency of ability.
Raw Deal? I really don't know, and neither do you. what we know is what's been written on the various news sources we refer to, and the complete story is probably somewhere between. A recent Time article indicates that Summers was an abrasive personality and allowed conflicts to overshadow his ability to govern.
The idea of sexual differences contributing to differing performances has, of course, been studied throughout the sciences. And been largely discredited. Pinker pointed out that there are studies indicating that there may be a biological basis for this lack of representation, and there may be; my bet is that these studies are what is known as outliers, and may be inapplicable for anynumber of reasons; but the reality of scientific research is that repeatability is a critical element to providing support for any conclusions, and that is how consensus is achieved.
But here's the thing (and not incidentally, the point of Pollak's cartoon). Summers is an economist and made his public remarks concerning a discipline where his knowledge does not, per se, provide authority. It is possible that Summers is perfectly qualified as an economist, but his decision to make such a supposition in public and in the face of the experience of his own Arts and Sciences faculty was an ill-considered slap in their faces, and at best, ill-informed.
Which is where it comes into the cartoon in question. All too often, people who really don't have any pertinent expertise are being treated as experts or even being put in critical positions. It's a directly related result of the anti-educational and incurious ideal so well exemplified by your Mr. Bush and tirelessly propagated by people like Bill O'Reilly and Russert.
But that picture of Chrichton playing with toy dinosaurs still cracks me up.
And Mallard Fillmore? Yep, stupid and packaged.
Tripe is endlessly bleated by both sides I will grant you. My approach has always been to try to avoid knee-jerk easy response tripe and actually look a little deeper. Doesn't always work, I'll grant you, but I try-- so when I see someone doing the easy knee-jerk tripe about a situation I KNOW is far from easy and dismissable, I take some umbrage. Justifiable, I believe, though no doubt others might not concur.
ReplyDeleteI wrote quite a bit about the Summers case last year about this time, and it continues to dismay me when I see the easy "Summers says women are stupid" take on the controversy. He said no such thing. Go here http://www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/2005/nber.html read what he actually said, and show me where he said women are stupid. Note also that he prefaced his speech by saying that he was trying to be provocative-- had in fact been asked to be provocatove-- and that biology was only one hypothesis he advanced for why women are underrepresented in the hard sciences.
If you want to boil down what Summers actually said to "shorthand to represent Summers basic argument" I think it is pretty much this: On the extremes, both high and low, there are more men represented then women. Thus at instutions that take only the cream of the cream of the cream-- like Harvard-- there are likely to be more men than women. There are also likely to be more complete dullards that are men than women.
No where in there does it say that women can't or won't be capable of being in that extreme 1/100th of 1 percent, but that it is more likely for men.
Further-- after an initial bruhaha over the comments, and consultation with others more knowledgeable than he in the particular field in question, Summers apologized and admitted that his comments had been too needless provocative. Personally, I don't think his comments were meant as a slap in the face, and I find it odd that you later make reference to Bush's "anti-educational and incurious ideal." That "ideal" is exactly the sort of thing Summers is on about-- if you can't even talk about contentious issues, can't even offer up a controversial hypothesis without getting shouted down as narrow-minded and painted as a misogynist.... well, really, who are the incurious ones? The folks that try to be provocative knowing it likely won't be popular, or the ones who's egos are so tender they can't handle even the suggestion that their tightly held beliefs aren't sacrosanct?
And I'll happily discuss the issue with your wife-- because the issue is not what you frame it to be. I just find the response of "Inconceivable!" to the proposition that biology may play a factor in learning abilities and distributions to be rather pathetic. And very unscholarly and incurious.
One final point. Perhaps you're right-- perhaps Pinkers results were merely outliers. How will we ever know if every time someone has the terminity to actually suggest we look at biological factors, he is blasted from any number of angles?
And yes, I'll grant you the cartoon of Michael Crichton is pretty funny.
Have a good weekend.
Okay. I went through Summers speech, skimming I grant you. What I saw was a speech ostensibly to generate a discussion about WGY women are underrepresented inteh sciences, especially at Harvard. LHS postulated three factors: The high stress of th positions beig unattractive to women (the women are predisposed to avoid arguments and stress argumet), what he termed the 'availability of aptitude', and socilaization/ social pressures. He also ranked them in that order of importance.
ReplyDeleteHe did not, as you point out, say that women are stupid, and I haven;t seen anyone actually saying that he did. But the essence of his second point is that there is some kind of ability that women lack preventing them from fulfilling the role - which either boils down to 'Barbie saying 'Math is Hard' or Newt Gingrich talking about the biological messiness of a hoo-ha preventing a woman from doing 'man stuff'.
The thing is, and one of the questioners pointed this out, that it's not an issue of examining this factor. that issue has been analyzed and most of the behavioralists agree that the inherent abilites argument don't hold water, and that many of the faculty strongly disagree with that idea.
It's not an issue of needing to study the idea, although I'm certain new points of view can be further developed and refined, but that in general it's been discarded by the work already done in the field. Anytime someone wants to raise an issue yet again, are we obliged to re-visit annd re-perform the previous work? At some point, you have to move on and accept some of these things as decided, and use them as foundations for further work. It's not that the idea is inconceivable, it's that it has been shown to be unrealistic. It's exasperation with having to re-explain the issues every time it's raised by
And further, I have an issue with his ordering (Based on nothing more than the fact that I do, of course, have an opinion on Everything). Personally, I have actively pursued diversity in my hiring choices, looking for qualified people of all stripes; in a technical field, I am limited by the people who have training to perform the tasks I need. Can't hire 'em if they're not there. Not due to any lack of abilities I have ever observed, but that the choice to pursue this career is not made. My supposition is that it is primarily due to socilogical factors pre-defining choices for African-Americans, but the end result is the same: dramatic under-representation in the field.
Based on that, I would argue that his selection of inherent abilities as second in that ordering of factors is NOT actually supported by observations, but that it should in fact, be a distant third,if not dropped off the chart entirely. I would go further, and say that the 'high stress' character of the field is not a particular deterrent either; The social and political factors far outweigh the other two issues he raises.
And if I had to forward my own supposition as to why the number of women in the science has dropped at Harvard, I would suggest investigating the impact of the limitations imposed by the expectations that the woman will eventually discard career for motherhood and homemaking; after a couple of decades of this imposed limitation, I would imagine women got the message that a high level career at Harvard in the sciences isn't going to happen. It's a self-reinforcing assumption of the sort all too common at traditional institutions.
I will have a good weekend; the widescreen HD TV shows up tomorrow. It's Couch Time!
Neither here nor there, but I believe the word you're looking for towards the end there is 'temerity'
Temerity. Yes, that was it.
ReplyDeleteFirst point-- tough talk to skim. Succinct, Summers is not.
Second point-- why does it come down to "Math is hard" or Newt Gingrich and Hoo Ha (which would be a great Dr. Seuss story, don't you think)? Seems glib and a rather large leap of logic to me.
Third point-- but even if nearly all of the evidence points the other way on the biological aspect of thing (and I do not have the time or inclination to check if that is so), wouldn't you consider the reaction of the faculty and, later, much academia, to be completely out of scale to the offense? The comments were informal, prefaced as provocative, and Summers later apologized for not having all the facts at hand. Isn't that how it's supposed to work?
Nobody said, "Larry, interesting speech, but you really probably should look at study X, Y and Z before you ask these provocative questions of yours. 'Cause a lot of this has already been answered." Instead they cried for his head on a pike. Instead they painted him as a misogynist and a dullard.
Point the fourth: I would agree that Summers' ordering is probably not right-- but prior to actually reading the speech did you even know that there were three hypotheses offered up by Summers as possible factors in the under-representation of women faculty in the "hard" sciences?
The point that comes after four: Don't we want people at our premier universities to be asking questions that question the status quo? Of course we do. Now, Summers framed the question awkwardly, and perhaps drew far too much inference from far too little data, but at least he's asking the question. Which provides those who have a better idea what the answer is to... what's the word... oh yeah... teach. Teach, as in educate Larry, and the U.S. public that A) Women are underrepresented in the sciences, B) It is most likely due to socio-economic influences, not biology, and C) We're happy Larry brought this up, because while all three of his factors are likely to have some influence, his ranking of their importance is not supported by current data. Having a healthy debate is always good, as long as both sides keep an open mind. Teach as in educate, not teach, as in let's teach Larry a lesson for having the temerity to question us and ours.
Point the whatevertheheckitis: Do we need to rehash what's already been established? Yes, absolutely. Not all the time, and not in all circumstances, but re-examining your beliefs and well-run trajectories is INVALUABLE. Particularly in science. Humans are creatures of habit. We are. So, having somebody from outside a particular small and insular group-- say academics at a high-level educational institution-- come in and ask questions that most if not all in that small and insular little group would consider "settled law" is not necessarily a bad thing. There can only be healthy debate when their are two sides.
Point the six millionth: Gotta run. Enjoy your TV.
Nick-
ReplyDeleteI agree we've all beat this into the ground, and MC Larry Bigmouth has been offered a compensatory job, so it's basically last week's outrage, but:
1. Yup. Skimming is an art. I admitted I didn't have the focus to fully read the thing. Hopefully it was better vocally. Otherwise, it's MC Larry Z-Bore.
2. Glib, perhaps, but on a quick basis, I couldn't think of what other inherent abilities of any significance could affect women being able to serve in high level Scientific Academia. And I don't want to think about Newt Gingrich and hoo-has any more.
3. Yup he apologized, all was right, and one of the questioners DID make reference to other studies similar to the way you pointed out. Life is good and the planets are turning in their orbits. I don't know about crying for his head on a pike; but there was the no confidence vote, based on apprently a number of issues that didn't receive the airing that this speech did, and based on that (and maybe a request from the Corporation) Summers decided to step down. It looks to me like this was just one of the issues that the faculty had with the guy, and happened to be the final one. If not on this one, something else would have triggered the resignation, because from the accounts I've seen, he wasn't working out the way it had been hoped.
Point the fourth: Nope, I didn't and all mad props to Big Nick the Stack Mack-Daddy for forcing me to look deeper.
Numero-post-Four-O andf Five-O: Yes, we need to check our assumptions on a regular basis. And again, some of the folks in the audience did respond in this way, challenging parts of Summers talks.
The academic sciences are not as insular as you state. The constant challenging does come from other areas in the sciences, as well as the battles to publish articles in science rags and journals. The journals are particularly harsh on submittals, and the reasoning has to be very sound to get through; but once it is, it disperses very rapidly.
So ultimately, I think we're in agreement; although you have more sympathy for Big L than I do; at worst, he's got a pretty soft landing arranged. Everybody has the shit hi their particular fan at some point in their working life, and Larry's turn was played out in public.
And August used it to set up a series of easy jokes, which he admitted to at the end of his cartoon. Larry Summers: Footnote to an Internet based cartoon. Man, your fifteen minutes are UP.
Just can't seem to stop beating that dead horse. Don't know if you subscribe to the New Republic or not, but they just had an interesting article on Summers' resignation. Written by one of the law professors at Harvard.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, he thinks Summers being forced to resign is a very ominous sign for Harvard and higher education in general. Not surprisingly, I agree with him. The full article can be found here: http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=w060227&s=stuntz022706&c=1 and you don't even need to subscribe to read it-- just sign up with them.
Core points are these:
>>>>Overspecialization breeds self-indulgent scholasticism. Too many scholars write for an audience of dozens (if that--a good friend of mine says he writes for six people), and far too few write for thousands, fewer still for millions. In a bygone era, the best intellectuals wrote for educated people generally, not for a handful of specialists. American universities are chock full of brilliant minds that keep their brilliance locked up in a closet, talking only to people in their small corner of the intellectual world. Graduate education and academic promotion standards push scholars to fine-tune their disciplines' methodologies. (The very word--it means "methods"--captures something of the disease: In universities, as elsewhere, there is an inverse relationship between the pretentiousness with which a task is described and the quality with which the task is performed.) Broadening one's field of vision tends to be a bad career move.
Summers cared about problems like these, as only a lover of ideas can. In a conversation with the law school's lateral appointments committee, he said that not so long ago, the people who made tax policy were all lawyers--but that now, nearly all are economists. He wondered whether that fact said something troubling about legal education. Seems like a pretty good question to me. Evidently, most of my Arts and Sciences colleagues prefer a president who knows and cares too little about what they do to criticize it, whose comments on their job performance consist only of the occasional pat on the back. Most universities work that way: like an awards dinner for a child's soccer league--no distinctions are drawn; everyone gets a prize. Harvard seemed, briefly, to set a different standard. No longer.
The newspapers have been filled with stories of Summers's supposed obnoxiousness. Few of the stories note the coin's other side: The academic world has never seen a university president so eager to hear and engage opposing arguments. Summers might indeed tell you you're flat wrong, an experience people in my job too rarely have. But you could tell him that he's full of shit--and he'd smile and argue back.
Problem is, university faculty don't want to talk back to their bosses; they don't want to have bosses. And their preferences matter. The past 40 years have seen faculty take near-total control of leading universities. These institutions are democracies of a peculiar sort: Only a part of one constituency gets to vote. Two kinds of people teach in universities: those who invest in some combination of teaching students and writing scholarship (the best people invest in both), and those who go through the motions. Which group do you suppose is more likely to attend the meetings and write the memos and vote on the motions of no confidence? The correlation isn't perfect: There are great teachers and scholars who do invest in institutional governance, and thank God for them. Over time, though, general tendencies swamp individual variations, and the general tendency here is disastrous. It is as if you took the bottom half of GM's factory workers a half-century ago and told them to run the corporation, promising that whatever they did, their jobs were guaranteed and their pay could only rise. It's a great gig while it lasts.
Summers was brought down not because he was politically incorrect or bad at soothing academic egos, though those things contributed far more than they should have. The core problem is that he wanted to shake up the comfortable world of higher education. Most Americans think of universities as a bastion of the political left, and in one sense they are. But in a deeper sense, institutions like Harvard embody a particularly blind sort of conservatism: All change causes discomfort, and so must be resisted. In this deeper sense, Summers was and is very much a man of the left--the best kind of left. Good for him. Harvard's governing board has now chosen, publicly and emphatically, the status quo. Bad for them, and before long, bad for all of us. A friend of mine who runs a small business likes to say that the last move of a failing enterprise is to fire all those who want change. It's hard to imagine another such reform-minded president in a top university anytime soon. From now on, the forces pushing change will all come from the outside. Inside, we will see only denial and resistance, in equal measure. The downward spiral will accelerate. >>>>>
I guess mainly my point with this last salvo is merely to illustrate that the fact that Summers was an economist, not a biologist, should not disallow him from commenting on a particular topic or situation. Oh, and I don't really care at all if Larry got a soft landing-- I care that I see higher education rolling merrily down the road to mediocrity and, I hope I'm wrong, irrelevancy.
Because close hard looks at things within a discipline by those within the discipline-- as in your peer reviewing process for publication-- tend to generate mostly echo chamber responses. Everyone has the same general background, are interested in the same general principles and reads the same similar journals, books and whatnot. A new voice, a controversial voice, a voice willing to challenge existing "well-established principles" should not be shouted down out of hand.
And I strongly believe Larry Summers was shouted down out of hand, quite possibly because he ruffled feathers and wasn't particularly "respectful" of his faculty. But whatever the reason, the message has been sent-- don't ask about "sensitive" subjects or challenge the faculty's preconceptions. Not if you want to keep your job, anyway.