Guest post: There is no algorithm for truth
Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on So many? Like five?
Back in my Movement Skeptic days, before the “deep rifts”, for a while my thinking was heavily influenced by Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate. While I still think Pinker made some valid points*, in the light of everything that’s happened since, I have grown much more sympathetic towards (or at least understanding of) the reluctance among certain feminists to talk about innate cognitive or psychological differences between men and women. As I remember there was a certain “gotcha” that was very popular among “anti-blank-slatists” at the time:
So what you’re saying is that if there were differences in the distribution of interests and talents between men and women that were not entirely attributable to culture, discrimination wouldn’t be wrong after all?
Indeed, I was almost certainly guilty of occasionally using this “gotcha” myself. I now think this is a strawman. It’s not that the supposed innate differences justify discrimination, it’s that they’re too often used to explain away discrimination (Michael Shermer’s infamous “more of a guy thing” comment being a prime example).
There is a tendency among movement skeptics to talk as if claims are either “supported by evidence and sound logic” or not, when, in fact, things are almost never that clear cut. As they say, there is no algorithm for truth. The data is usually at least somewhat ambiguous and open to interpretation, no method is ever infallible, and no study is ever without flaws, so if we’re motivated to reach certain conclusions and avoid others, we can always find reasons why studies that lead to an inconvenient conclusion are “fatally flawed”. For studies that lead to a desirable conclusion we don’t look so hard for flaws and don’t ascribe such fatal consequences to the ones we do notice. We can be biased and guilty of intellectual double standards even without contradicting any established facts and without making any obvious logical fallacies or methodological errors.
So while I don’t deny that there are real differences in the distribution of interests and talents between men and women, my general impression is that right-leaning people tend to be very quick to embrace biological explanations for things like the under-representation of women in positions of power and status without exposing them to the same level of hypercritical scrutiny as the alternatives. They also seem very quick to conclude that if different innate preferences enters into the explanation at all, there is no need to look any further: That’s all there is to it, and sexism has nothing to do with it. And to be fair, at the risk of engaging in false equivalence and bothsiderism, leftleaning people are almost certainly guilty of the opposite double standard.
While I have some issues with Jonathan Haidt, I think he is right to say that the merit of science is not that it makes individual scientists immune to bias, motivated reasoning, intellectual double standards etc. It’s that, at its best, it allows the competing biases of different scientists to “cancel out”, at least to some degree, which is why viewpoint diversity is so vitally important in science. I also think this is a major part of the reason it’s so important to determine in advance (i.e. before the data are in) what is going to count as a positive result. You should always be prepared to bet your pet hypothesis on predictions that haven’t yet been confirmed or disconfirmed. Because once the facts are in, it is always possible to retrofit the data to a desired conclusion.
* Indeed several critics of gender ideology, including Helen Joyce, have made the point that the tendency among many feminists to downplay and minimize the importance of biology has put them in an awkward position when it comes to defending the need for female only spaces.
This is excellent. Thank you.
I had a similar reaction to The Blank Slate; I found much of it compelling at the time, and I still think it made many good points, but I’ve grown less enamored over the years.
I think your point about “supported by the evidence… or not” is insightful. Too much “such-and-such position DESTROYED or DEBUNKED” out there.
Thank you Bjarte. Very Popperian!
Whilst agreeing with this post, I’d like to point out that the physical differences between the sexes largely didn’t matter when it came to education and modern employment options, when separate toilet and changing facilities were the only necessary condition for the safety of the female half of the population and that condition had already been met decades earlier. Nobody arguing that biology has no effect on ability to learn, or efficiency at work, could have foreseen this last decade’s wholesale attempt to deprive us of that fundamental condition; the whole idea is preposterous, which is why it took so many of us by surprise.
Many still have a hard time believing that it is even being attempted – which is why the issues of rapists being sent to women’s prisons, and cheats being allowed to take women’s sporting opportunities and prizes, are so important. They are visible, in a way which isn’t true of predators perving on women in women’s toilets, and cannot easily be lied about in the press. A Facebook friend was absolutely certain that men who claim to be women aren’t committing any crimes, until I pointed out that news outlets have been quite deliberately concealing the fact that they are doing so in droves by the simple sleight-of-hand of referring to them as ‘women’.
I am little rusty at thinking, having isolate myself for so long, but here goes!
The problem with using blank slate models or biological (innate features) models to account for human differences is that speaking in these terms doesn’t really amount to much. One of the things that happens when you ignore sex differences — I find it hard to reduce sex to something purely grammatical — everything about being human becomes so complex that there seems to be no possible resolution, since everyone can make stuff up about gender without reference to any supporting features in the world where we have to deal with our differences. Fine to talk about trans people for example, because they have the experiences that they have, but to mix this up with talk about men being women in some constitutive sense and women being men is nothing but a form of social confusion, which becomes clear when everyone begins to choose their own pronouns, and is offended if you don’t reflect their own self-conception back to them.
Pinker argued that blank state models could be filled with social constructs whereas innate features models allowed for the discovery of actual biological differences that allow us to escape the trap of inherent bias.
I know that’s a pretty simplistic reduction of Pinker’s theory, but it has the virtue of helping the actual similarities in both approaches to stand out more boldly. It doesn’t matter which model we use, we can still fill up the model with our own preferred way of accounting for differences between people, whether between men and women or the poor and the rich, or Germans and Brits, or whatever you want to compare because their is always a penumbra of uncertainty about everything we say. And then you can say that there is some ground for making these distinctions or there isn’t, and be wrong on both counts!
One thing that is neither Pinkerian or Popperian about Bjarte’s insightful post is that for Popper, at least — and I suspect a similar point applies to Pinker — for something to have some objective reference is for the claim to it to be falsifiable in some determinate way, and what has happened heutezutage is that the open-textured way in which truth is discussed leaves the open society vulnerable to its enemies, because now, it seems, you can say almost anything and you can find a group that will support it, no matter how inane. Trump didn’t appear out of nowhere, you know.
Eric MacDonald:
“heute zu tage”
I don’t know enough German to make sense of that, and using Google translate gives me “today to days”, which doesn’t help make the rest of the sentence more comprehensible.
I’m pretty sure it should be “heutzutage” which means “nowadays”.
Yes of course it is heutzutage, which shows how much I have let my mind rot! And it does mean nowadays.
Of course, I don’t think that was the most important thing I said!
Fixed.
Welcome back, Eric!