George F. Will: Harvard president pays high price for his hypothesis - pretty interesting assessment
posted by unca | 4:03 PM
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4 Comments:
He suggested that perhaps part of the explanation might be innate — genetically based —gender differences in cognition.
He should have added for example.
Blacking out or throwing up when someone says something you might not agree with.
I say she should have taken it like a man.
i too am astounded that so few people (ok, women) see the irony in hopkins' reaction.
but anyway, here's my attempt to be even-handed about the whole thing:
our success depends in large part on our ability to correctly identify/categorize/classify things, to recognize patterns. knowledge is power. pattern recognition is one of the first definitions of intelligence.
sometimes we identify patterns, but mis-identify the causes. sometimes the patterns go away, but we don't let go of the pre-judgements (the convenient categorizations) we got used to making, that were familiar and comfortable to us, that made life feel more ordered and safe.
when we identify patterns, we tend to overuse them because pattern recognition simplifies life -- it saves time and effort. one of the ways we do this is to apply judgments to an individual that are only true or potentially useful in the aggregate.
sometimes patterns appear, but they are of no practical use, either because the evaluation/sampling process is incomplete/questionable (sometimes there are just too many variables to control for), the results are inconclusive, individual variation is so high, or because the differences between groups -- even in aggregate -- is so small.
sometimes our tendency to abuse pattern-recognition causes us to develop a counter-strategy: denying the existence of the patterns in the first place, and squelching inquiry into the subject. we can argue that raising the question of gender-aptitude for science will automatically degenerate into the idea that "girls are bad at math", and the harm caused by promoting that idea is much greater than the loss of scientific rigour inherent in the practice of pretending gender differences never extend to cognition.
sometimes we're so caught up in our counter-strategy that we assign to it a truth-value beyond its usefulness and we hold to it with religious fervor. we employ an overuse of pattern-recognition in reverse. ie, "Anyone who would raise this question must be a stupid and bad person who wants to harm me. I need to throw up now."
I think your point about patterns being useful in the macro world and not in the micro one is so important and is the core distinction that most people forget.
People do judge individuals according to stereotypes developed when looking at groups. And because group characteristics are only abstractions they won't apply to all the individuals and so can be used unfairly. However, the practice of throwing out the analysis of groups and claiming there are no differences is intellectually dishonest and therefore not the solution.
From a common sense perspective, can it possibly be the case given evolution that males and females or Africans, Asians, and Europeans would all have identical cognitive abilities in all areas? I would think that it would be common sense that it would be highly improbable. More so because of the obvious physical differences.
Yes, the problem is that when acknowledging differences in the aggregate, there will always be those who would use this to promote bogus and dangerous generalizations to individual cases. I once had a discussion with a friend who argued that intelligence and talents of any kind were not inheritable at all. Finally, he admitted that even if they were, he would not admit it for political reasons which (as Bryan notes) he deemed to be of higher importance.
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