More thoughts on Susan Pinker

I've read nearly 200 pages of Pinker now. I'm procrastinating from other things.

She makes a very obvious case that men and women frequently want different things in the professional realm, particularly in regard to work-family balance. That is something that virtually everyone agrees is true, and most also agree that professions should accommodate that fact so that women can pursue a wider range of professions.

What is less obvious is the extent to which this is a preference wired in the brain versus a response to facts of life. Pinker clearly sees it as wired in the brain, but a perfectly plausible alternative is that women are simply responding to certain realities that are rooted in experience and the practicalities of having children. 

To wit, two people might start off wanting the same things, but then go on to face different circumstances and have their goals and desires diverge. If, tomorrow, my life changed completely (and we needn't make this some magical scenario where a genie changes my biology, I could simply lose my job or get a different job or get sick or my wife dies or my wife gets an amazing new job or a close family member moves nearby or whatever else, good or bad or in-between) I might well start wanting different things in life. None of this would have anything to do with changes to my brain or past experience or socialization or whatever else, just a change to my present circumstances. Likewise, women might well (and indeed seem to, based on all available evidence, I hasten to add) have brains wired like male brains, but have different goals because of experiences and facts of life.

Pinker makes a case for difference, but she doesn't make a case for difference rooted in the original brain programming. (Nor did her brother succeed in making that case in his book, I hasten to add.)

Not all differences are nature or nurture, at least in the sense of things shaped by genes and early environment. Some differences are present. Take two twins. Raise them the same way. They won't be exactly the same, but they'll generally be quite similar. Then put them in different situations and of course they'll take different paths, even with the same nature and nurture.

Now, in some sense differences due to new circumstances are still environmental, and hence nurture, but they're not baked-in nurture. And anything involving reproduction is ultimately nature, but societies shape the circumstances under which that very natural function is carried out. A society with flexible jobs and subsidized childcare will be one where people are "nurtured" to perform a "nature" function differently than one with less flexibility and less support for childcare.

On a different note, Chapter 7 is probably the chapter most consistent with more acceptable, consensus notions in the present. In Chapter 7 she makes much of Impostor Syndrome. She sees it as biological, which obviously gives short shrift to culture and society. But even worse, there's now reason to believe that Impostor Syndrome is as common among men as among women; men just talk about it less because (in keeping with the nature of Impostor Syndrome) they're even more insecure about it! I don't fault Pinker over her assumption that Impostor Syndrome is more common among women; she wrote in 2008 and a lot has changed in the social science landscape since then. (I do fault her assumption that it's biological, but that's the fundamental nature of the book, not a matter specific to her discussion of Impostor Syndrome.)

I'm also not convinced that Impostor Syndrome actually limits people. This is not a quibble with Pinker specifically, but with all discourse around it. Given the number of highly successful people who have it, we can't really rely on it as an explanation of any failures or shortcomings. Yes, some people might well say that Impostor Syndrome is why, at some point, they turned down an opportunity to go farther. On the other hand, people weigh opportunities every day, and sometimes they look at one and say "Nope, not this one, I'll try something else." Sometimes they say they're choosing something else because they think they're not good enough, sometimes because they think it's a dubious opportunity, sometimes because they see something better. 

If we're humble about our self-knowledge, we should be a little careful before assuming it was actually Impostor Syndrome, or at least that Impostor Syndrome led them to make a decision that they shouldn't have made. What if a person decided not to take an opportunity because they feel they need to spend a little more time in their current situation, consolidating and preparing for the next step? Or that spending more time in their current situation might offer some benefits to better prepare them to make good on the next step down the line? That might actually be a good call, even if "Oh, I'm not ready, I'll fail" is a rather pessimistic way of framing the decision.

The Sexual Paradox by Susan Pinker

Susan Pinker is a psychologist and the sister of Steven Pinker, who wrote The Blank Slate. She also wrote her own controversial book alleging biological differences between groups: The Sexual Paradox. She cites abundant research purporting to show sex differences in a wide variety of contexts, but she frames her book around the captivating hook of two distinct subsets of men and women: Men who went on to successful careers after exhibiting various learning disabilities and other neurological challenges as children. This makes for fascinating individual tales, but it also limits the lessons that we can draw from the focus of her book. Even if we set aside the anecdotes and just focus on, say, statistical comparisons between men and women with dyslexia (or whatever other condition), we're comparing outliers from two groups, rather than averages or medians. This limits the relevance to the wider populations of men and women.

Also, her anecdotes are subject to interpretation, and her interpretations depend on which details one emphasizes. To wit, consider some of the women profiled in Chapter 3, which focuses on women who left STEM careers:

1) She considers a computer science professor pseudonymed "Donna." Donna spent sixteen years in the field but then said she was bored. OK, so it was lack of interest that drove her away? Well, Pinker later mentions that Donna got burdened with a disproportionate amount of mentoring and committee responsibilities, a common experience for women faculty, especially in STEM. Can I say with certainty that Donna left more because of a disproportionate burden rather than disinterest in the field? Of course not. But without more extensive quotations from Donna I can't be confident that Pinker accurately summarized Donna's motives.

2) A geography PhD pseudonymed Sonia. Sonia started a professorship but apparently didn't enjoy the demands of teaching and research. OK, fair enough, though I will note that it's not clear that she lacked enthusiasm for the subject; it seems that the workload was hard to balance, a common concern. Preferences regarding the pace of work are very different from preferences regarding the type of work.

So she took an administrative role in an office preparing grants and reports. But her boss was a jerk. Pinker says he was a jerk to everyone, so it wasn't sexism; we lack the evidence to adjudicate that interpretation. She thus changed careers to elementary education.

It's hard to read this narrative as indicating some innate preference for people-oriented work, given that it was a third choice and other factors beyond the type of work played into each transition. Maybe this individual woman really did prefer people-oriented work over data on land use or whatever. Maybe she liked both. Maybe she actually would have been happier doing geography in a different context. We don't know.

3) She also cites an anonymous law professor who got a BS in molecular biophysics and biochemistry, then went to an MD/PhD program, and finally left (with the MD but apparently not the PhD) to go to law school. She is now a law professor, and claims to be happier. She says she was not discouraged in any way while she was in science, and in fact felt pressure to stay rather than pressure to leave.

Maybe so. I'll just note that people who get a BS from Yale, an MD from Harvard, and a law degree from presumably a top-tier law school (she's an Ivy law professor, and they rarely hire from outside the top tier) are unusual in many ways, and move in unusual environments. Not only would I not extrapolate from her to a wider swath of women, I also would not extrapolate from her universities to all of academic science.

Besides women, she also discusses Terence Tao, a top mathematician who was a prodigy from an early age, but was nowhere near extraordinary in language skills. Again, I wouldn't extrapolate from such a singular person to men at large. She likewise made references to Einstein earlier, and the contrast between his mathematical and language skills. She doesn't explicitly endorse the theory that he was dyslexic, but she is clearly willing to entertain it. Besides the fact that Einstein was, um, unusual, the man read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in his teens; that is not an easy read (to put it mildly).

When she cites larger studies she has a point, but her case studies are not as illustrative as one might hope.

Hobbes, Chapter 30

 A few quick thoughts on chapter 30 of Hobbes.

Paragraph 3: Hobbes believes that people should be educated on doctrines that are conducive to peace, and that it is a sovereign's duty to make sure people receive this sort of education. The uneducated or miseducated are easy to seduce. On this I agree, though I don't agree that the ill-educated are drawn to resistance. The ill-educated can easily be co-opted by an authoritarian leader.

Paragraph 6: He concedes that the biggest obstacle to teaching people doctrines conducive to peace (or at least to Hobbes' notion of peace) is that people are determined to not learn things that run counter to their ambitions. True enough.

On the other hand, he also believes that the common people are like "clean paper", essentially blank slates. I guess any authoritarian, even a seemingly cynical one, is ultimately an idealist. He believes that people are controllable.

Thoughts on Pinker's _Blank Slate_

I very much enjoyed The Blank Slate, but I haven't been in the blogging mood lately.  So I won't be doing chapter-by-chapter blogging.  I'll just comment on a few over-arching themes:

First, people obviously fear theories of genetic factors underlying intelligence and other abilities because of the attraction that such theories hold for racists, sexists, and other foul bigots.  Pinker concedes the need for caution, but also notes that the idea of humans as malleable blank slates was beloved of Marxists.  And the Marxists have managed to hold their own when it came to killing and oppressing.  Ultimately, the problem with racists is the same as the problem with communist:  They want to control people on the basis of their theories, and kill anyone who gets in the way. If we conclude that individual abilities are strongly (but not solely) influenced by genes we can either oppress people whom we deem to be genetically unsuited for certain paths, or develop a plethora of different educational paths for everyone to find and hone their strengths.  One of these things is very different from the other.

This is somewhat reminiscent of my observation that a theory of success is not enough; you also need a theory of failure.  If you have a theory of success, your theory of failure could be that disadvantaged people lack the characteristics that lead to success, or that they are denied the opportunity to utilize/develop those characteristics.  There's no such thing as a standalone theory of success that blames or exonerates the disadvantaged; to have such a theory we have to supplement it with a theory of why the disadvantaged didn't or couldn't do whatever it is that our theory says is critical for success.

Second, Pinker argues that the effects of parenting are smaller than people want to believe. I think he's over-stating his case (more on that in a moment), but to whatever extent parents don't matter, teachers must matter even less.  Also, he argues that neural plasticity isn't as powerful as people like to think, i.e. brains aren't as malleable as people believe.  As a person responsible for teaching 18 year-olds, I wish he'd also said that to whatever extent the brain is plastic, that plasticity decreases (which is different from saying that it completely disappears) with age.  You can't expect me to change people as much as a kindergarten teacher can, and you can't expect a kindergarten teacher to change people as much as a parent can.

Third, when he argues that parents matter less than we want to believe, he refers to the fact that well-designed studies of parenting practices and household characteristics don't find that those variables explain much of the variance of various outcomes.  However, the proper control groups are people from similar social classes, neighborhoods, etc.  I think it follows that if we just vary one characteristic of a household but keep everything else in that household similar to the rest of the neighborhood (i.e. the rest of the control group) then not much will change.  Well, that just means that what matters is that parents provide the same general baseline as everyone else, not that they get everything right or jump on every fad.  A parent who doesn't provide the same overall baseline as the rest of the neighborhood could very well produce a different outcome (better or worse) than a parent who does the same as the rest of the neighborhood.  A particular fad or whatever doesn't matter, but overall adherence to the big picture does.

Of course, he also says that even if parents don't matter for various long-term sociological outcomes as many people would like to hope, so what?  Parents matter as long as they are in a child's life.  Failure to do the basics would matter, provision of the basics matters a lot, and loving family relationships enrich life.  They might not move the needle much on sociological outcomes but who cares?  Not every moment of our lives has to be calibrated to some social reform agenda.  We can simply live as social primates with loving bonds and make the most of that.

Finally, I like his point about how literature, poetry, and other artistic endeavors might be better windows into human nature than much of the ideologically-constrained and often non-replicable social science out there.  That doesn't mean that every poet, novelist, or sculptor out there is equally possessed of timeless insight, but if something is widely-recognized as brilliant it might be resonant with something in human nature and human experience.  We can learn a lot about humans by pondering those works that have resonated with us throughout the ages.

So I guess I'd better keep reading.

Next book: The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker

My next book will be The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker.  He talks about human nature, its biological contributors, and why people deny it.  Since human ability is a constant concern of educators, this should be well worth reading.