The Excluded Middle

Commenting on my post about single-sex education, RKU snarks:

Didn't Matt just do a posting yesterday strongly implying that any claim of an innate statistical difference in female/male mental/psychological behavior was "sexist"?

This seems to be a favorite tactic of the right. Apparently, if I'm going to favorably cite someone as saying that "boys and girls are, on average, at different levels of lanugage and motor development when they enter school" then I also can't object to writing op-eds that argue, without evidence, that women are stupider than men. Because, clearly, either you're a die-hard egalitarian blank slater or else it's no fair objecting to sexism. The flaw here should be clear. Yes "boys and girls are (on average) different," but, no, cutting-edge neuroscience does not back up all your long-held prejudices.

Comments

In addition to Matt's point, the right wing fundamentally doesn't understand-- or doesn't care to understand-- liberal and feminist critiques of studies that proclaim race and sex differences.

It isn't that we believe there are no such differences. It is that so many "differences" have proven to be culturally constructed or the result of assumptions and biases, open and latent, that we know that one needs to be very careful jumping to conclusions in this area. Especially because the result of jumping to conclusions can be all sorts of unfair race and sex discrimination.

Indeed, despite nowadays paying lip service to the cause of antidiscrimination, the conservative movement seems to have plenty of members who would like nothing more than to establish scientific confirmation for traditional prejudices. It's an indicator that many folks still have such prejudices, still pine for the days when they could publically express them, and are willing to latch onto anything that looks vaguely scientific in order to legitimize bigotry.

Posted by Dilan Esper | March 4, 2008 12:31 PM

There's also the question of where exactly it gets us, policy-wise, if we unequivocally establish that there is a difference.

First off, differences can reflect societal arrangements rather than innate difference.

Second, knowing what the results are on average doesn't really tell us what to do with any given person.

Harping on differences among groups, and insisting that they're all innate and genetic, strikes me as a rather crankish, counterproductive way to spend your time.

Um, on preview, what Dilan said.

Posted by Elvis Elvisberg | March 4, 2008 12:33 PM

Policy-wiseness is not the only goal, of course. Knowledge for knowledge sake and all that.

If knowledge, once acquired, leads to better policy choices, that would be OK, too. If we establish that girls learn math best after gym class while boys learn math best after lunch (on average), we might want to take advantage of that knowledge, without quibbling over whether it is true in every case. If we learn that boys have a harder time sitting still in 3rd grade than girls, that too would be worth knowing, but we shouldn't use it as a reason to exclude boys from 3rd grade. Subtle difference.

Posted by kharris | March 4, 2008 12:49 PM

However, many on the left are frequently unwilling to admit that some differences exist at the innate level. See what happened to Larry Summers for merely suggesting that innate differences might play a role in math and science performance and that the topic may merit further research. He was excoriated by the left.

It seems to me that the left and right both deny, prop up, manipulate, unreasonably extrapolate and twist scientific findings in this area to support their own agendas. Upon further reflection, I don't think it's limited to this area of study.

Posted by mike | March 4, 2008 12:55 PM

So most conservatives are complete fucking idiots. This is not news to those of us who have hunted them in the wild.

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | March 4, 2008 1:01 PM

However, some on the left refuse to even entertain the possibility of innate difference. Remember Larry Summers? All he did was suggest innate difference as a potential explanation for the gender gap in math and science performance. He didn't say it was the explanation. He just said it might be, and that it might be worth researching. He was excoriated by the left.

It seems to me that people on both the right and the left will deny, prop up, manipulate, unreasonably extrapolate, etc. as necessary in this area to fit their pre-existing narratives.

Posted by mike | March 4, 2008 1:01 PM

excoriated by the left

Read: "criticized by the already-irritated Harvard faculty." The ensuing controversy was five steps closer to reasonability than the Ward Churchill brou-ha-ha, but still a ways away from meriting all that much upset.

IIRC, people were frustrated that he showed was talking about stuff he didn't know much about. I could be wrong, and it could have been 90% about political correctness. But he who controls the faculty lounge doesn't necessarily get to control much else.

Posted by Elvis Elvisberg | March 4, 2008 1:02 PM

The thing is, even if you assume that the studies suggesting the largest differences between average IQ or variance in IQ in men and women are true, a "die-hard egalitarian blank slater" would still be closer to holding an accurate view than the typical right-winger interpreting the data to show that "men and women are just different."

Whether or not the bell curves for various cognitive abilities are shaped slightly differently for the male and female populations, the fact remains -- and there is no scientific basis to deny -- that the large majority of each population falls within the overlapping range and that knowing someone's sex is a terrible basis on which to predict anything about their measured cognitive abilities.

Posted by Christopher M | March 4, 2008 1:06 PM

However, some on the left refuse to even entertain the possibility of innate difference. Remember Larry Summers?

Nobody I know of "refuses to entertain the possibility of innate difference". That's the right-wing characture of the feminist critique of these sorts of conclusions.

The issue is not WHETHER there may be innate differences-- obviously, women have 2 X chromasomes, while men have an X and a Y, and women and men have various biological differences. The issue is that every time differences of ANY SORT are detected, a lot of conservatives-- seeking to ratify preexisting prejudices-- want to declare that the differences are innate rather than cultural, when in fact history has proven that a vast swath of things that people assumed were innate turned out to be cultural, and when in fact declarations of "innate differences" have been used to oppress and discriminate against women and minorities.

It's really easy for conservatives to argue against the straw man of "there's no such thing as innate differences". It's a nice way to avoid the real debate and the real reasons for caution in this area.

Posted by Dilan Esper | March 4, 2008 1:13 PM

In all fairness, it doesn't seem right to take a widely refuted op-ed in the Washington Post and one snarky comment by some unnamed, presumed representative of the right, and draw the conclusion that everybody on the right 1) agrees with the op-ed, 2) has some fundamental misunderstanding of the issue, 3) is a fucking idiot.

But I suppose you all feel better when you get to tear down a straw man and use the F word to boot.

Posted by mike | March 4, 2008 1:14 PM

Looks like my "snark" really hit a nerve! Or maybe Matt's g-f belted him one!

Here's the problem with Matt's desperate defense. The Allen piece was clearly written in a provocative, satirical tone---I hardly think she was seriously claiming that "all women are stupid" especially since such a claim would be directly refuted by the specific data she herself cited.

What she did say was that in a whole range of behavioral characteristics, males and females---on average---differ, some of those differences may be innate, and those differences can be "spun" in a wide range of different ways.

For example, women get into more traffic accidents but men get into much bigger ones, women may be more emotional but men are enormously more violent (maybe by a factor of ten or something), etc.

Now if we leave out Allen's deliberately provocative "spin" on the facts, the differences she cited are (in my opinion) on a complete continuum with the behavioral differences which Sara Mead simultaneously cited among boys and girls, some of which are probably innate and some of which are cultural.

So while it's perfectly reasonable to criticize Allen as a "rightwing provocateur" deliberately trying to stir up controversy and gain attention with her choice of egregious phrasing and emphasis, simply dismissing the *facts* she cited or strongly implying that taking them seriously represents "sexism" is just plain silly.

Reality is reality, whether described by conservative Charlotte Allen or liberal Sara Mead.

I'll admit I've never taken a philosophy class---Harvard or otherwise---in my entire life, but I think the fallacy here is less one of the "Excluded Middle" than of the "Included Muddle"...

Posted by RKU | March 4, 2008 1:18 PM

Great post, MY.

Posted by John McCain: More of the Same | March 4, 2008 1:20 PM

In all fairness, it doesn't seem right to take a widely refuted op-ed in the Washington Post and one snarky comment by some unnamed, presumed representative of the right, and draw the conclusion that everybody on the right 1) agrees with the op-ed, 2) has some fundamental misunderstanding of the issue

Mike:

1. You certainly were drawing hasty generalizations about "the left" in your earlier posts.

2. There's plenty of evidence of movement conservatives-- not just Charlotte Allen, but she is one example of a movement conservative-- promoting a scientific basis for racial and gender psychological and aptitude differences, based on thin evidence or while ignoring cultural factors.

3. You certainly were arguing the straw man and misunderstanding the argument as to why caution is necessary in this area.

Posted by Dilan Esper | March 4, 2008 1:26 PM

"Caution is necessary in this area" was the whole point of my initial post, Dilan. I was merely pointing out that people on both the right and the left play these same games (that you describe in your 2nd point) to fit their pre-existing notions.

I certainly agree that some or many on the right ignore cultural and socio-economic factors, just as some on the left dogmatically believe in ONLY those factors.

Of course, and as usual, the truth is probably somewhere in between, and this WashPost op-ed is certainly not helping anybody.

Posted by mike | March 4, 2008 1:34 PM

I certainly agree that some or many on the right ignore cultural and socio-economic factors, just as some on the left dogmatically believe in ONLY those factors.

You are seeing dogma where there isn't any. For instance, no liberal or feminist denies that pregnancy causes physical and biochemical and psychological changes in women that men do not experience. But the thing is, not only is there obvious evidence of this, but science backs it up-- we have been able to isolate many of the chemical changes in the body as a result of pregnancy.

But what we have on most of these race and gender differences issues is a lot of anecdotal evidence, along with some aggregate data, which are used by right wingers to write cultural issues out of the equation. Until we can isolate the cultural factors and figure out what is really biological, it is healthy to assume that it is all cultural, because at least erring in that direction makes race and gender discrimination less likely.

But I assure you, what you are seeing is skepticism, not dogma.

Posted by Dilan Esper | March 4, 2008 1:45 PM

See what happened to Larry Summers for merely suggesting that innate differences might play a role in math and science performance and that the topic may merit further research. He was excoriated by the left.

No, Larry Summers was criticized because he didn't know the basic literature in the field he was discussing. A college president speaking before a conference of experts is expected to have read up on the fundamentals of the field.

He showed that he didn't understand the concept of socialization and unconscious bias, as he limited possible external causes of gender imbalance to active discrimination. That sort of ignorance in unacceptable in the academy, particularly from someone who is in charge of hiring decisions for a major university.

Posted by DivGuy | March 4, 2008 1:49 PM

RKU,
I am not sure why he was motivated enough to respond to your silly post in that other thread either. There is obviously nothing inconsitent about criticizing one article on a given topic for being stupidly written while approving of another argument on the same topic which is not stupidly written.

Perhaps yours was just a good excuse to make a point he has wanted to make for a long time. But the Allen piece is hardly chock full of facts that need to be answered. She does cite a study about driving habits, but then points to the fact that men drive more than women as adding to the phenomenon when it more likely explains it away. If men are more likely to drive on the highway, then they are likely to pile up more accident free miles, but when they have accidents they are likely to be more deadly.

Even the claim that kicks things off, the supposed spate of Obama swooning, seems to be anecdotal nonsense. I first heard about this meme in a post reporter chat, and his reaction was that he had seen that happen many times at various candidate events. The people up front generally have been standing for hours with crowds pushing on them. In that result some people will swoon. But like astrology once one has people who want to believe confirming examples count, and disconfirming ones don't.

So what you have in the Allen piece doesn't even reach the level of a second rate comedy routine. Even the bad comics know that if you want to do the men are different than women routine you need to devote about equal time to each side or it doesn't work. And why is the Post providing editorial space to bad attempts at comedy routines anyway.

Posted by Lon | March 4, 2008 2:26 PM

People who want to criticize Larry Summers should actually read what he wrote. In fact, he did not claim that women were on average worse at math than men. He said there may be greater variance in innate spatial/mathematical ability. He did not claim that this was the biggest reason for differences in the frequency of men and women in physics and math faculties -- he explicitly said that the double burden of extra housework and childcare was the single biggest reason.

Summers also drafted a World Bank study which showed that primary education for girls has the biggest ROI of any investment in developing countries.

The fact was that the Harvard left-lib establishment had an entire aviary because Summers was talking about the subject at all.

It is also a fact that MY has, on a number of occasions, been precisely the blank slate strawman he now says he isn't. Most recently, he actually threatened researchers into differences in male and female mate preference ("people need to be much more careful about this stuff" or what?), even though that is the least controversial area of gender psychology.

Posted by Pithlord | March 4, 2008 2:48 PM

Until we can isolate the cultural factors and figure out what is really biological, it is healthy to assume that it is all cultural

"Until we know the truth, better to assume the position that fits my worldview."

That, Dilan, is the definition of dogma.

Posted by mike | March 4, 2008 3:08 PM

Lon:

Look, the Allen article was a pretty stupid article, and said lots of stupid things. In fact, Allen seems fairly ignorant AND she deliberately headlined and phrased her piece to be as totally provocative as possible (and get lots of agitated liberals to link to it and boost WaPo's page-hit count!).

But the core issue discussed---the behavioral differences between males and females---was totally legitimate, as was much of the data cited.

However, Matt's original attack didn't distinguish between these two aspects, and (especially) his commenters denounced them both as a package.

So: You can give Allen an F- on "style" if you want, but her grade on substance has to be somewhere pretty close to that of Sara Mead's article dealing with roughly similar subject matter.

It's like the old joke: "I'm firm, you're inflexible, he's a stubborn mule!"

Posted by RKU | March 4, 2008 3:08 PM

mike:

If you enjoy misstating arguments and arguing against straw men, congratulations, you did a great job.

If you like being honest about the views of those who disagree with you, I am afraid you utterly failed.

There are exceedingly persuasive reasons for not jumping to the conclusion that fits CONSERVATIVES' worldviews on this issue. You may not accept them. But you can't just assume them out of existence and claim I am being unprincipled and dogmatic, when I actually articulated those reasons and you didn't respond to them.

Continue to be an ostrich if you wish. But stop misrepresenting arguments simply because you don't have a coherent response to them.

Posted by Dilan Esper | March 4, 2008 3:11 PM

And before somebody puts words in my mouth, I'm not saying we should assume it's biological or innate. I'm saying we don't know, and we shouldn't assume. We should establish testable hypotheses and test them. As Pithlord points out, that's the line of thought Larry Summers was pursuing.

Earlier I was claiming that the right assumes one thing (see Charlotte Allen), and the left assumes another (see Dilan Esper). I thought we could all agree that we shouldn't jump to either conclusion, but I see self-deception is not limited to conservatives.

Posted by mike | March 4, 2008 3:12 PM

Well, mike, the problem is that the genetic/phrenologist etc. explanations for difference keep on turning out to be wrong.

Posted by Elvis Elvisberg | March 4, 2008 4:04 PM

Why is that a problem? Are you saying that disproving some unnamed genetic theory somehow proves some unnamed socio-economic theory?

Posted by mike | March 4, 2008 4:38 PM

Why is that a problem? Are you saying that disproving some unnamed genetic theory somehow proves some unnamed socio-economic theory?

I am going to try this one more time (though I should know better).

The issue is in the absence of conclusive evidence, should we presume there are relevant inherent gender and race differences or should we presume there are not?

There are good reasons to presume there are not such differences (even if that ultimately turns out to be an incorrect presumption), because: (a) that turns out to be correct much of the time, as things we assumed to be inherent turn out to be cultural; and (b) that presumption avoids providing a false justification for racial or gender discrimination.

In contrast, there are no good reasons for presuming such differences.

When an inherent difference actually gets established, the presumption is no longer operative. But it really has to get established-- which means more than that some right wingers who want to validate their preferences trumpet it.

Posted by Dilan Esper | March 4, 2008 5:14 PM

A careful perusal of the literature suggests that gender may be correlated with social attitudes or chromosomes. Admittedly this is a controversial finding. It may be that both these findings need to be evaluated in light of the strong correlation of gender and social science. It is possible that both are artifacts, byproducts of the underlying causation of gender in social science theory.

Posted by Dick Mulliken | March 4, 2008 5:38 PM

The first scientist to document that males and females have the same average intelligence was IQ researcher Cyril Burt in 1912.

Posted by Steve Sailer | March 4, 2008 7:48 PM

Matt,

It's not your fault that you are ignorant about the human sciences -- you're young and it takes years to get up to speed. But, you _don't_ have to continuously prove you're ignorant.

What would be interesting is to hear your opinion on a nonscientific subject that you have studiously avoided giving us for over four months -- your opinion of the firing of James Watson, who is probably America's foremost living man of science. Is it a good thing for top figures in the human sciences such as Watson and Larry Summers to be fired for frankness about what the data show? Or it is a bad thing?

Posted by Steve Sailer | March 4, 2008 7:55 PM

In the unlikely event that anybody here is interested in what the transcript of Larry Summers' endlessly denounced 2005 talk says:

Let me try to outline Summers' unusual approach to "underrepresentation." He tends to view people relativistically, employing that most useful of all conceptual tools for thinking about both the similarity and the diversity of human beings: the probability distribution (more roughly known as the bell-shaped curve).

In contrast, most intellectuals today think in absolute, black and white categories, and thus they get irrationally upset by mention of any facts they can denigrate as a "stereotype." Many seem unable to distinguish between perceptive observations about the average traits of a group and blanket assertions about each and every group member. Thus, even carefully worded summations of the obvious like, "More men than women find mechanical engineering interesting," are indignantly countered with, "So, you're saying no woman likes engineering? Huh? Huh?"

As a bell curve aficionado, Summers noted a widely observed tendency: "It does appear that on many, many different human attributes -- height, weight, propensity for criminality, overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability -- there is relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means … there is a difference in the standard deviation and variability of a male and a female population."

In other words, as any woman could testify, there are more stupid men than women; likewise, at least in math and spatial reasoning, there are more brilliant men than women.

Summers stated, "… if one is talking about physicists at a top twenty-five research university, one is not talking about people who are two standard deviations above the mean. [In a normal bell curve, only one out of 44 individuals is that much above average.] And perhaps it's not even talking about somebody who is three standard deviations above the mean [or one out of 741]. But it's talking about people who are three and a half [one out of 4,299], four standard deviations above the mean [one in 31,574] …"

Observing that among the top five percent of twelfth-graders in math and science, it's common to see two boys for every girl, Summers estimated that the variance in ability is about 20 percent greater among males. He went on, "If you do that calculation -- and I have no reason to think that it couldn't be refined in a hundred ways -- you get five to one [males per female], at the high end."

Actually, Summers was being a bit politically correct with his math. At three standard deviations above average (the equivalent of a 145 IQ), there would be over seven males for every female. At four standard deviations (a stratospheric 160 IQ), there would be more than 30 men for each woman. This also implies, correctly, that there are a lot more retarded men than women, but they don't come up much for tenure at Harvard.

These proportions are not contradicted by the Nobel Prize statistics. Since 1901, women have made up four percent of the Nobel laureates in Medicine, two percent in Chemistry, and only one percent in Physics. Strikingly, no woman has won a Nobel in Chemistry or Physics since 1964.

http://www.isteve.com/2005_National_Post_Summers_Harvard.htm

Posted by Steve Sailer | March 4, 2008 8:15 PM

Esper: "The issue is in the absence of conclusive evidence, should we presume there are relevant inherent gender and race differences or should we presume there are not?

There are good reasons to presume there are not such differences (even if that ultimately turns out to be an incorrect presumption), because: (a) that turns out to be correct much of the time, as things we assumed to be inherent turn out to be cultural; and (b) that presumption avoids providing a false justification for racial or gender discrimination.

In contrast, there are no good reasons for presuming such differences."

I disagree with this whole approach. I see no reason for "presumptions" in either direction. If you don't know something, don't promote a social theory or a social policy based on what you don't know.

There simply is no rational basis for presumptions of any kind. You either know or you don't.

Either a difference between male and female is innate or it is not. If it is or is not, what is the origin of the difference. That's all that matters.

What one should be arguing for here is not presumptions in one direction or the other, but the elimination of presumptions. Policy-wise, this is clearly the better approach from the standpoint of female civil "rights" (leaving aside the issue that I consider the concept "rights" to be null and void - substitute the term "policy" instead of "rights" if you like.)

In other words, in setting social policy, you can use a statistical analysis to determine if there IS an actual difference, and then treat it as real without being concerned over whether it is "innate" or "cultural". Properly, such policy should be able to deal rationally with that percentage of people who do not possess that difference as well as those who do.

The REAL problem is treating a difference as being either innate or cultural without KNOWING the source of the difference.

Until human bodies and brains have been adequately mapped out and the physics and chemistry of the physicality clearly determined, and the math of genetics and the evolutionary impact, and then all that translated into the social and cultural evolutionary history of human societies, it is presumptuous to proclaim most human capabilities purely genetic or purely cultural.

Until then, all such discussions are probably intended to establish one chimp's superiority over another - and likely on fraudulent grounds.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | March 4, 2008 11:55 PM