"A myth is a religion in which no one any longer believes." - James Feibleman

***

Edge: THE SCIENCE OF GENDER AND SCIENCE; PINKER VS. SPELKE, A DEBATE

"[Addendum: It is crucial to distinguish the moral proposition that people should not be discriminated against on account of their sex — which I take to be the core of feminism — and the empirical claim that males and females are biologically indistinguishable. They are not the same thing. Indeed, distinguishing them is essential to protecting the core of feminism. Anyone who takes an honest interest in science has to be prepared for the facts on a given issue to come out either way. And that makes it essential that we not hold the ideals of feminism hostage to the latest findings from the lab or field. Otherwise, if the findings come out as showing a sex difference, one would either have to say, "I guess sex discrimination wasn't so bad after all," or else furiously suppress or distort the findings so as to preserve the ideal. The truth cannot be sexist. Whatever the facts turn out to be, they should not be taken to compromise the core of feminism...]

Three-dimensional mental transformations: the ability to determine whether the drawings in each of these pairs the same 3-dimensional shape. Again I'll appeal to a meta-analysis, this one containing 286 data sets and 100,000 subjects. The authors conclude, "we have specified a number of tests that show highly significant sex differences that are stable across age, at least after puberty, and have not decreased in recent years." Now, as I mentioned, for some kinds of spatial ability, the advantage goes to women, but in "mental rotation,"spatial perception," and "spatial visualization" the advantage goes to men. [Ed: Doubtless this must be because boys are told (only after puberty) that they are good at mental rotation, spatial perception and spatial visualization, but girls are told (also only after puberty) that they are bad at them.]...

The idea that there are cultures out there somewhere in which everything is the reverse of here turns out to be an academic legend. In his survey of the anthropological literature called Human Universals, the anthropologist Donald Brown points out that in all cultures men and women are seen as having different natures; that there is a greater involvement of women in direct child care; more competitiveness in various measures for men than for women; and a greater spatial range traveled by men compared to by women...

It is said that there is a technical term for people who believe that little boys and little girls are born indistinguishable and are molded into their natures by parental socialization. The term is "childless."...

There's an irony in these discussion of bias. When we test people in the cognitive psychology lab, and we don't call these base rates "gender," we applaud people when they apply them. If people apply the statistics of a group to an individual case, we call it rational Bayesian reasoning, and congratulate ourselves for getting them to overcome the cognitive illusion of base rate neglect. But when people do the same thing in the case of gender, we treat Bayesian reasoning as a cognitive flaw and base-rate neglect as rational!"


The thing with the most ardent advocates of political correctness is that they insist on extremes. For example, this group insists that gender misrepresentation in science is entirely due to discrimination rather than innate factors. OTOH, those who maintain that there're innate factors explaining this readily admit that there're sociological factors involved.

Similar phenomena can be observed in other fields, for example Rape and Power. The consensus in the literature seems to be that it is 100% power, but those who take the opposite view do not say it is 0% power.

I have only the vaguest familiarity with the literature on colonialism and its effects, but I suspect there are many with the view that all the failings of the current African states (for instance) are due to the legacies of colonialism (though maybe some will grant that geography is also a factor).

Addendum: Related PC rant