Latest Article: "Studies Have Shown" Is Not Enough

 My latest opinion piece has been published in Discourse Magazine. It's titled "'Studies Have Shown' Is Not Enough." It's on the problem of people wanting to jump on edufad bandwagons as soon as a few studies supposedly show something.

More on Rene Girard's "I See Satan Fall Like Lightning"

 After spending the majority of the book exploring how the Bible "flips the script" on the cycle of violence and scapegoating, transferring sympathy from the overpowering crowd to the overpowered victim, in the last few chapters Girard notes how our era fully embraces the love of victims. He's not just talking about the political correctness of the 80's and 90's (he wrote in 1999), but about a couple centuries of expanded rights and liberation. He fully acknowledges that much expressed concern for rights is more rhetoric than action, but that doesn't change the fact that the rhetoric has power in modern culture.

One particularly noteworthy point in our era of cancellation and Twitter mobs is that even when we fall into the habit of scapegoating that Christianity tried (and failed) to expunge, it's common to scapegoat people for being bigots who scapegoated someone else. Hell, just the fact that I felt it important to add the parenthetical about Christianity failing at its task shows how much this era is obsessed with sin and failing. I cannot quote every awesome point in chapters 12-14, but a choice few:

On scapegoating in the name of concern for victims:

We ferociously denounce the scapegoating of which our neighbors are guilty, but we are unable to do without our own substitute victims. We all try to tell ourselves that we have only legitimate grudges and justified hatreds, but our feeling of innocence is more fragile than our ancestors'....Indeed, we practice a hunt for scapegoats to the second degree, a hunt for hunters of scapegoats. Our society's obligatory compassion authorizes new forms of cruelty. (pg. 158)

On modern society:

The idea of a society alien to violence goes back clearly to the preaching of Jesus, to his announcement of the kingdom of God. This ideal does not diminish to the extent that Christianity recedes; to the contrary, its intensity increases. The concern for victims has become a paradoxical competition of mimetic rivalries, of opponents continually trying to outbid one another.

The victims most interesting to us are always those who allow us to condemn our neighbors. And our neighbors do the same. They always think first about victims for whom they hold us responsible. (pg. 164)

Indeed. The beam in our own eye and the mote in our neighbor's eye.

But that quote on page 164 also exposes the weakness of the book: He doesn't offer much explanation for WHY our increasingly secular society is even more victim-obsessed. He offers a few points about global culture, and the fact that as we strip away the supernatural the most important part of Christian heritage we don't have to let go of is concern for victims. He talks about how Nietzsche recognized this central concern of Christianity, how the Nazis ran with it, and how the rest of the world recoiled in (mostly sincere) horror. On one level we needn't be surprised that people recoiled from the Nazis in horror. On the other hand, look at how many empire-builders of the past are regarded in the modern era with, if not full adoration, at least grudging respect.

Some of it is surely that their victims are dead but their lines on the map remain, and the Nazis are still in living memory. But horror of the Nazis cannot explain every facet of our victim focus. Girard is a grand systematizer, an intellectual with a Big Idea. He needs everything to fit into that paradigm. I offer for consideration an economic and technological fact: Machinery changes so many social arrangements.

Women are less constrained by their (on average) smaller size and muscles, and slavery is even less profitable when control of machines is more important than control of human muscles. (But let's not forget that workers able to exercise freedom have always had certain productivity advantages, advantages that ruling classes had to squelch in the interests of their individual power rather than collective prosperity.)

In this era of liberation, concern for victims is inevitable and important. Scales are being rebalanced. And so in this era the loving, victim-cherishing aspect of Christianity (in culture and heritage if not always in explicitly professed belief) will prevail over the submission to a Lord and Father in heaven.

In short, Girard takes his theory a bit too far. He tries to make it everything instead of a significant piece of the puzzle.

Revisiting Rene Girard: _I See Satan Fall Like Lightning_

 A while back I tried reading Rene Girard's Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World and gave up. Now I'm attempting his later, shorter book titled I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. It promises to be an exploration of the victim concept in Western culture, and at some point will tackle political correctness. The basic premise is that Christianity flipped the script on the age-old ritual of scapegoating and communal violence, putting the emphasis not on the community purified by the removal of the enemy, nor even on the heroism of the divine sacrifice, but on the wrongness of crucifying Him. I'm about a third of the way in, and he's still mostly talking about "mimetic rivalry."

I was not sold on the mimetic basis of rivalry when I first read Girard. But this book makes a key point: Humans envy each other no matter how wealthy their society is. If our envy were based on desires that didn't derive from social cues, anyone with more food than a baseline caveman would be happy. But we desire new things and more things because we see what those around us have and how much they enjoy it.

One other key point: In chapter 4 he talks about a pagan society killing a beggar to end a plague. Contemporary historians considered the claim credible. Now, obviously killing a guy already in the town will not stop an epidemic. If he were the initial carrier and killed by arrows from a distance before entering the city, OK, that might save the town. But he was in town. No way killing him could stop a microbe.

What Girard says is that plagues led to social disorder, and so social disorder was sometimes interpreted as a plague. One might note an analogy with the social contagion of mass hysteria even in the modern world. So if historians note lots of people suffering mass hysteria, and perhaps even getting physical maladies from the disruption of life, the breakdown of services and supplies, etc., well, anything that restores order could indeed end the epidemic.

Girard writes on page 52:

Until the Renaissance, whenever "real" epidemics occurred they disrupted social relations.

Alas, he wrote this book in 1999, and died in 2015. He never experienced 2020.

Some have joked that Russia's invasion of Ukraine ended COVID. Now, on one level that's absurd: COVID was and is still spreading, albeit not with the same severity after a few years of both vaccine-acquired and naturally-acquired immunity. And early 2022 corresponded with the tail of the first Omicron wave that gave COVID to damn near everyone who had not already gotten it. On another level, Ukraine certainly diverted a lot of attention from COVID. A certain kind of Westerner had a new foe to oppose and a new victim* to support. I think I know what Girard would say to that.

*I characterize Ukraine this way not to critique them as weak but to simply recognize that they were the targets of unprovoked aggression. Their response has been heroic.

Poverty by America: The most interesting education point

There's a lot of idealism in the later chapters of Matthew Desmond's Poverty, By America. "Why don't we just get people to do all these things that will make it better?" I'm not going to tear into it because I'm reading for the stuff I can take away, not the stuff I'll leave behind. I'm going to focus on page 164, where he mentions an absolutely fascinating educational experiment that I need to read more about: Early in this century, Montgomery County, MD randomly assigned poor families to different public housing units, some in poor areas and some in more affluent areas. The county also massively pumped resources into its poorest schools. (One should always be skeptical of claims that resources were showered on the poor. However, Matthew Desmond seems to be at least as skeptical of these claims as anyone else would be, so I am inclined to believe him.)

Desmond notes that poor kids in affluent areas did better than poor kids in poorer areas, even if the schools got more money.

Now, I haven't examined the literature on this yet (but two key articles cited by Desmond are here and here), so I can't say anything about this with certainty, but I'll wager that two things happened, both of which I see evidence of on a daily basis on a campus that is very proudly, vocally dedicated to serving the most disadvantaged, to a degree that would give another Matthew a stroke:

1) All poverty relief and social services are delivered via "leaky buckets." There are lots of people who get their cuts. Yes, some amount of overhead is inevitable, necessary, and even (in small doses) beneficial. That grain of truth is the excuse used by every rent-seeker along the way. They insist that we need various administrators to plan and organize. We need specialized case workers to monitor each kid. The school lunch program needs several layers of planning to determine whether they bought the most nutritious brand of sugary pudding. We need assessment of all these various activities. And of course we need oversight to make sure that none of this money is wasted on pointless bloat!

So much for offering the salaries that will lure the best teachers, or making sure classrooms have roofs that don't leak and enough supplies that teachers don't have to spend their own money. (Though if they want to get reimbursed I'm sure there's a process available, one with 26 different steps to make sure no money is wasted. The Deputy Associate Superintendent for Administrative Efficiency has hired specialized staff to carry out all 26 steps!)

So who knows whether any of that high spending materialized in ways that could even begin to improve the classroom. Pretending to improve education for the poor is basically a massive jobs program for well-meaning college grads.

2) Meanwhile, you know what happens in affluent districts? Well, it probably isn't a showcase of pure efficiency. Affluent suburbs are perfectly capable of hiring paper-pushing grifters, even if they'll never hire as many as the districts trying to Save The World.

Still, in those more affluent classrooms there are kids who have more stable homes, and parents with the bandwidth and know-how to push them. The median kid in the class is ready and able to go farther, and the teacher teaches accordingly. Doesn't mean that all of those kids are geniuses who will actually reach great heights--many of those tokens of achievement that the schools spit out are their own form of grift that affluent college-educated parents push their kids to seek along their road to a cushy job Saving The World. Some of those kids are being prepared to preach the latest bullshit about Equity and Inclusion so they can prove that they are the most deserving applicant for some do-gooder job.

Still, the teacher teaches to the middle. And the middle in that affluent suburb is higher than the middle in a poorer district. And most of the kids below that middle are at least trying to reach that middle. They might not quite get there, but they're mostly aiming for it, and the standard that they might just fall short of is higher than the standard that they might exceed in a different setting. Offering challenges matters. There's no magic or mystery about putting a poor kid next to a more affluent peer. Some will emulate the affluent peer, and others will feel alienated from the peer. All that teachers and school leaders can do is play the odds, and the odds are that calibrating challenges to a higher but still reasonable and attainable median will result in more kids at least getting close to that higher goal. Some will always be left behind (and one can only hope that spoiled Harvard prick Teddy Kennedy is roasting in hell for pretending otherwise), but most will at least come close to a higher but reasonable median if that's what they're presented with.

None of this is nuclear rocket surgery. You don't need a PhD to see it. Two functioning eyes will do. Hell, one of my eyes is pretty mediocre. One and a half working eyes. That's it. That's what you need.

Current Reading: Poverty by America

 I'm reading Poverty by America, a book by Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond on the systematic factors that undergird the persistence of poverty in America. I'm not going to summarize everything--some of his economic assertions are a bit optimistic, but he has important observations. In particular:

1) Payday lenders and check-cashing places really do exploit the poor. I'm not convinced that getting more reputable bank to serve low-income/high-risk customers is as easy as he thinks, but by god it is a task worth working on. There must be some regulatory changes that could help here.

2) The money that inmates have to spend on phone calls is insane. It's just one of the many ways that literally captive customers are milked when they can least afford it. Obviously it's not the worst thing done to inmates, but it's a proxy for a bunch of things, and I suspect that an attack on the vested interests around exploitation of prisoners would raise similar issues whether the topic was phone calls or something else.

3) The decline of unions has had utterly predictable consequences for inequality in America.

4) Zoning that favors single-family dwellings is a huge cause of soaring costs of living.

5) America's tax code is full of social engineering, and the vast majority of it is for the benefit of the upper-middle class and above. I'm not optimistic that America would tolerate wholesale abandonment of tax breaks without corresponding across-the-board cuts, but even a more-or-less revenue-neutral change that removed these thumbs on scales would release a lot of economic pressures, and unskew a whole bunch of things. And if the change were even mildly revenue-positive, it would definitely improve the fiscal situation.

Hirschman on party systems

Hirschman makes the point that the Median Voter Theorem (all parties compete for the median voter and hence wind up nearly indistinguishable) breaks down because parties are dominated by people who will stay and exercise their voice option rather than the exit option. And exit doesn't necessarily mean voting differently--it could just mean that you stop volunteering for party work. So the party can stay away from the median if the other party does likewise, because both serve internal constituencies that chose voice over exit.

Hirschman also makes the case that, in some sense, this serves the public good. Two indistinguishable parties mean that there's no choice and the policy outcomes are far from both the left and right flanks. That sounds bad on the surface, but moderates aren't the only people whose interests count. The wings deserve some consideration too. If, say, we line everyone up on a spectrum from 0 to 100, placing the parties at points 25 and 75 means that nobody is more than 25 away from a party. Of course, they might be 50 away from a winner, but if the two parties alternate, you could be no more than 25 away from a common outcome and no more than 25 away from the average effect. That's not so bad.

I'm not prepared to endorse extremism, but it's an interesting point.

Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Midpoint

A few interesting observations:

1) Hirschman notes that lazy quasi-monopolies with public subsidies might like it when dissatisfied users exit instead of protesting. Public schools are happy if the most demanding parents transfer to private schools instead of going to School Board meetings. The Postal Service might be OK if (some but not all) demanding customers use FedEx instead of calling their congressman.

On one level this is obvious. But it's also economically interesting to note how organizations cushioned against market forces might get worse rather than better in the presence of competitive outlets.

2) He notes that similar things apply in politics. Some poorly-run countries prefer if former politicians move abroad rather than critiquing successors. Some countries are happy if dissidents go into exile, and might even leave them alone to send the message that exile is a great choice.

Next read: Exit, Voice, and Loyalty by Albert O. Hirschman

 The next read will be Exit, Voice, and Loyalty by economist Albert O. Hirschman, a book on how people can respond to problems in institutions. They can leave, they can use their voices to critique, or they can remain loyal in ways that largely avoid obvious critique. I read it a while ago and don't remember much, so time to reread.

Latest Read: The Education Myth by Jon Shelton

My latest read is The Education Myth by Jon Shelton. It's a very detailed walk through education and economic policy in the US, starting in early US history but mostly focusing on the 20th and 21st centuries. I'm not going to walk through every point, just note two things;

1) His basic critique is one that I echo: US policymakers have focused pretty much exclusively on education as improving workers, rather than focusing on creating more opportunities for work. Yes, teaching a man to fish helps him feed himself, but are there healthy fisheries for him to ply? Good harbor infrastructure? Functioning markets in which to sell his catch? Are there alternative careers if fishing isn't his comparative advantage?

The government cannot do all of this (or arguably most of it) but to the extent that they do play a role, it has to be something broader than just trying to train people without regard for the world they're being trained to move in.

2) Near the end, on page 179 he notes that while research has shown that states with good educational investments tend to have less income inequality, the causality isn't clear. Maybe states that invest in social spending across the board have less income inequality AND more educational spending because those two priorities tend to go together in a lot of Americans' values systems. Or maybe greater economic security leads to more desire to invest in education. An individual can climb relative to others via education, but it's not clear that a society can equalize itself via education. If anything, the conditions that lead to learning require economic development before you can get more kids to spend more time studying.

Latest read: The Captive Mind by Milosz

 I'm reading The Captive Mind by Czeslaw Milosz, a book about why intellectuals conformed in communist societies. I have only read one chapter so far, but there's an observation that I have to blog:

The loss of religion means a loss of common axioms and reference points. (Not an original point, but well worth making.) In a society with a common framework, the intellectual can reason from shared axioms to useful conclusions, and hope to be relevant and important. The intellectual is providing a service that people need, a way of assuring them that their actions are consistent with shared values. Communism provides alienated intellectuals a way to be part of the society as a quasi-theologian.

Milosz also tells of a conference where Polish artists and writers were instructed on the newly ascendant ideology of Marxism (Milosz defected in 1951). The audience was obviously unimpressed but mostly quiet. But people got ground down over time anyway. Because everyone wants to fit in.

I am starting to understand why university administrators summon faculty to long meetings.

Latest Read: The Stolen Year by Anya Kamenetz

I haven't had much of a blogging urge for a while, but I want to get a couple of thoughts out there about my latest read, so I can remember them. I'm reading The Stolen Year by Anya Kamenetz, a book on the damage done to kids by moving school online during COVID. It's a 300 page popular book with a certain font and layout, so I thought I would find it unremarkable. But in chapter 1 I'm hooked. She goes into the history of education in America, even as far back as Colonial times, which is not something I'd expect in this genre.

I like three points in particular:

1) Americans like the idea of education as "fixing" people once and for all, so they never need fixing again. We'll educate them and then poverty is fixed. We'll educate them and then they're virtuous people. We'll educate them and then they're whatever it is that we need them to be so we can believe that some perennial problem is solved. 

It's largely folly, but it's what we believe in this culture. Liberals believe it because it means that a social service (allegedly) fixed some problem. Conservatives believe it because they've taught a man to fish and now he (allegedly) never needs feeding again.

I've heard this critique of the culture before, but I've only heard it from a few people. But Kamenetz is one of those wise few. That makes her stand out among writers on education. I need to pay attention to her.

2) It is hence unsurprising that in a country with far less of a safety net than peer countries of similar wealth and cultural heritage, education would be one of the few universal guarantees. We guarantee public education to rich and poor. We guarantee it to the disabled. We guarantee it to teenagers in jail, apparently. (This was news to me, but she's an NPR reporter focused on education, so I presume she's looked into this.) We might not guarantee everyone a great education, but it's the one service we guarantee in some form.

This is part of why schools are the main anti-hunger program in the country. We feed poor kids...via school. We might not feed them anything terribly healthy, but this is how we feed them.

She makes the interesting point that the commitment runs so deep that even profoundly disabled kids who will never gain the ability to communicate much are still guaranteed special education. I confess that I had often privately thought that this was a bit much, a well-meaning but inefficient way of meeting needs that aren't really amenable to school intervention. I've known a few kids in that situation, I understand why it's done, I even feel good for them. But part of me always wondered if it's really necessary to address their needs this way instead of some other route.

But Kamenetz makes the interesting point that this is a marker of our dedication to this universal guarantee. If we didn't go there, if we eroded the guarantee for them, we could erode it for more people. And soon we'd erode it for people who have needs that really are best met via school. I can respect that point.

It's strange that an anti-intellectual country like ours would be so committed to schools. Indeed, maybe having an anti-intellectual culture value schools in all the wrong ways just exacerbates our educational problems. But value them we do.

3) Until March of 2020. And then we shut them down. And now we see so many problems. Because we shut down something we've never fully backed away from previously. That has a lot of deep implications beyond the immediate, narrow questions of whether Learning Objectives 2b and 2c on Official Checklist B612 were met. There's always a way to check a box and pretend that you did so honestly.

But walking away from one of your few (supposedly) ironclad commitments? That does something to a culture. That sort of thing can shut down a whole bunch of non-obvious circuits. The conservative in me thinks we flipped a switch on things we never understood and don't really know how to reboot. A progressive optimist would say "Oh, just fund these programs that are Recommended By Experts. It's Best Practice." But I don't think societies are that simple.

Recent articles

I have gotten two opinion pieces out this week:

1) A piece in Areo on the doubletalk around diversity and affirmative action.

2) A piece in Real Clear Education on the obstacles to improving graduation rates when students are underprepared and need to work to support themselves.

The more things change, the more they stay the same

 I have been reading a lot but haven't had the blogging bug. Until today, because I read two very different things that clicked together.

I'll start with the Serious Reading: I'm reading Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a very philosophical novel that I won't attempt to summarize in full. I'm about a third of the way in, in chapter three of Part 3 ("Words Misunderstood") He's describing the experiences of Sabina, a Czech woman who has moved to Switzerland after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Sabina is talking to some other Czech emigres, and one of them starts inquiring into her anti-communist bonafides. Did she engage in sufficiently dissenting activities back in Czechoslovakia? Did she do enough to oppose the Soviet-backed regime?

Sabina's realization is that this guy is the mirror image of the communist functionaries who would scrutinize people's dossiers before they could get jobs or travel visas or official approval for other activities of life. It also reminds me of a point that Vaclav Havel made in his essay "The Power of the Powerless": These modern authoritarian regimes care deeply about appearances. It's not enough to just threaten to kill anyone who tries to thwart the dictator's material interests, they also need to keep up the veneer of ideological uniformity.

Related to the veneer of ideological uniformity, today I learned that in the official Dungeons and Dragons rules they will no longer refer to Elves, Dwarves, Orcs, etc. as "races." They are now "species." It seems that the essentializing of group differences in Dungeons and Dragons comes too close to racism in our real world.

There are two levels on which we could look at this. If we approach it purely on the level of the specific term, well, I don't know what the "right" term is to describe a world of fantasy and magic, with trolls and wizards and lizard-men and gnomes and all sorts of other weird stuff. Surely trolls and humans and lizard-men differ from each other more than, say, humans from different continents differ from each other. On that level, "race" seems an inapt term, and trying to equate the difference between an orc and an elf to the difference between two groups of real humans seems illogical. On the other hand, the existence of half-elves, half-orcs, half-giants (in some stories), etc. suggests that these creatures can mate with humans, and maybe do differ less than most species.

Not to mention that they mix and mingle in many of these fantasy societies, which may be the far more salient reason to say that they are more akin to different human races than to, say, dogs and cats. From a story perspective, Elves and Dwarves and Lizard Men (or Lizard Thems, to be gender-neutral?) are groups that often have their own separate kingdoms but frequently trade and sometimes even mix in bustling trading ports. Their interactions are fantastical, exaggerated stand-ins for conflict and cooperation between human groups, as magical creatures in fairy tales have long been. "Race" captures their story function quite accurately, if sometimes uncomfortably. (And who said fiction is or ought to be uniformly comforting?)

But that's not the real point here. It's not about dogs and cats versus human groups in modern society. It's about moral hygiene. It's about trying to ensure that this fantasy game doesn't corrupt the youth with ideas that run counter to the morality that adults are trying to install. And we've seen this game before, with the 1980's freak-outs about D&D being satanic. Now a new group of prim, proper grown-ups with strict moral codes is trying to parse games of fantasy and imagination for anything that might corrupt the youth, and lo and behold they've found it. How long before Tipper Gore starts bitching about music again?

All of this has happened before and will happen again.

In Defense of Dissenting Syllabi

(Also published at Medium)

Could any professor fairly summarize–in just one sentence–the complicated history of land rights in their locale over centuries of conquest and settlement? Ethicists, historians, political scientists, lawyers, and other experts could fill thick volumes while analyzing that topic–or at least fill more pages than any syllabus. Nonetheless, University of Washington (UW) computer scientist Stuart Reges provocatively stated on his syllabus “I acknowledge that by the labor theory of property the Coast Salish people can claim historical ownership of almost none of the land currently occupied by the University of Washington.” Reges now alleges in a lawsuit that his institution initiated disciplinary action in response. While this may seem on the surface to be a question of workplace speech on matters ancillary to the course, it goes to the heart of open discussion in higher education. If faculty are encouraged to air popular stances on complex questions, we must also allow dissent from those stances.

Taken in isolation, Reges’ syllabus statement is obviously inappropriate. It’s hard enough to get students to pay attention to reading assignments and homework deadlines; why alienate anyone with provocations irrelevant to course material? My physics syllabus this fall will list assignments on electromagnetic waves and relativity, not my opinions on drug legalization, face masks, or election procedures (to reference just three of my many contrarian views). The only reason to drop political bombshells in my syllabus would be to encourage careful reading. (“Hidden amidst the due dates is an opinion on gun control. Can you find it?”) If UW merely required that syllabi be simple, practical documents focused on course content and policies, few would object.

In context, though, Reges’ statement is less an exposition of John Locke’s theory of property ownership than a response to UW encouraging instructors to include syllabus statements acknowledging the Native Americans from whom the land was taken. (Writer and law professor Eugene Volokh confirmed the official encouragement in correspondence with UW Allen School Director Prof. Magdalena Balazinska.) Reges’ protest was not good pedagogy, but UW’s recommendations make it harder to reasonably push back on his statement. A university that values open inquiry and expression cannot reasonably scrub syllabi of dissent on complex topics that have been declared syllabus-appropriate.

Open inquiry does not mean that every venue must be open to every idea. My physics class this fall will not be an appropriate venue for discussing territorial claims in Kashmir (as long as we’re on the topic of land rights…), nor would a class on international politics be a good setting to discuss Einstein’s theory of relativity. Likewise, evidence-free assertions, irrespective of topical relevance, would be inappropriate in either class. However, despite the strong evidence supporting the theory of relativity, my physics class is an entirely appropriate setting for discussing clever experiments that search for evidence contradicting it.

In Reges’ case, the university had already decided that computer science syllabi are appropriate venues for discussing this topic, and his statement referenced a widely-studied philosophical argument. Locke’s argument is, of course, fair game for both praise and criticism in relevant academic venues. The fact that computer science classes are not good venues for discussing Locke’s ideas is a reason to keep computer science classes focused, not to selectively promote certain views on land ownership.

One might want to treat land acknowledgments differently from other social and political controversies since they address the propriety of the institution’s very existence in that location. However, colleges and universities avoid prescribing stances on many other activities with weighty implications for their missions. For instance, a student health center’s decision to offer (or not offer) certain reproductive health services could affect whether some students are able to remain in college, and likewise have profound moral consequences (depending on your outlook). ROTC provides crucial financial support for many students, and some research programs rely on Department of Defense research grants. Nonetheless, most people recognize that war, peace, and reproductive rights are fit for open debate, not prescribed stances.

A tempting pedagogical rationale for treating land acknowledgments differently from Reges’ critique thereof is that most land acknowledgments are harmless nods to widespread sympathies for marginalized groups, while Reges’ critique was inflammatory and distracting.  However, this argument sidesteps the fact that academics frequently critique widespread sentiments. Patriotic sentiment tugs at many people’s heartstrings, but everyone agrees that criticism of the US government is fair game. Jesus preached a charitable message that even many atheists admire, but no reasonable academic would consider Christianity beyond critique. At the same time, we mostly try to strike a balance whereby religion and partisan politics are kept out of syllabi, except when germane to the course material.

If university policy just required succinct syllabi that avoid irrelevant controversies, I–and likely many other academics–would deem it a mundane workplace rule akin to word limits in travel funding requests. However, if one opens discussion of a controversial topic, basic fairness requires room for reasoned dissent in academic environments. To quote a controversial book, to everything there is a season. Syllabi should be useful, academic discussions should be informed, and dissent should receive fair consideration.

Next Book: The Color Bind

I'm currently reading The Color Bind: California's Battle to End Affirmative Action by journalism professor Lydia Chavez. I stumbled across it pretty randomly and thought the topic looked interesting. It was written in the 1990's, and looked at the battle over Prop 209, which ended most forms of affirmative action in California's public institutions. I was in California but not very aware of this stuff at the time, so it's an interesting look at that era for me, written by someone who was on the scene at the time.

I doubt I'll blog all of it in detail, but in the first few pages it's interesting to see that some of the key proponents were a couple of obscure academics, one of them an adjunct philosophy instructor with various affiliations, and the other a tenured professor of anthropology at Cal State Hayward (now known as Cal State East Bay). On pages 7-8 she describes the anthropologist's experiences at a 1989 conference on multiculturalism, and the strong emotions he came away with. (He was not pleased.)

I suppose some readers might say this is too simplistic, to ascribe so much to an obscure academic conference. And if the question is why millions of people voted as they did, it's obviously about far more than one frustrated anthropology prof. On the other hand, if the question is why one guy became an activist willing to do the work, well, everyone has an origin story, and often those stories start with seemingly small things. Whatever you think of the bigger subject and controversies, it's a very human and convincing detail.

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.

Derrick Bell's _Silent Covenants_

 I've been reading Derrick Bell's Silent Covenants. Bell was an influential figure in critical race theory (CRT), a school of thought that nowadays is associated with some of the more batshit things to show up in school lessons and workplace trainings on race and diversity. Defenders of CRT have argued that it is mischaracterized by its critics, and after reading Bell I think they are basically right. Or, at least, I think they are right to say that the idea has roots that are far more reasonable than what the critics currently point to. That's separate from whether the critics are accurate in their characterization of the various trainings currently trotted out. Since this book was published in 2004, I'm not going to use this post to examine workplace diversity trainings in 2022.

Bell's central points in this book are (1) Brown vs the Board of Education didn't accomplish anywhere near as much as was hoped (a pessimistic point, but one that he defends reasonably) and (2) white people only support progress for Black people when and to the extent that it also benefits white people. The second notion is called "Interest Convergence." I think it's basically true: Most people aren't saints, so they will pursue self-interest more than the interests of others. There's a lot to be pessimistic about in that observation, and it can lead to a pretty accurate characterization of the world as being about conflict and struggle. It's a Hobbesian notion about the state of nature.

At the same time, there's a way to view interest convergence more positively: Improvement for disadvantaged groups happens when people see a common good. This is not so different from Hobbes' notion that we can escape a state of nature via a commonwealth.

I don't know enough about CRT, or at least pre-2020 CRT outside of various trainings, to say if other theorists mostly think in terms of common good or conflict, but Bell is clearly a pessimist, and for understandable reasons.

Bell's value judgments are largely unassailable in the way that value judgments tend to be, because they are rooted in premises that you either accept or don't, or accept in some situations. Where I take issue with him is in the later chapters, where he dances around the idea that Black students tend to need different educational models than white students. To the extent that he's explicit about different needs, it's largely focused on pride and role models, and I think those points are pretty unassailable. But he keeps hinting that there's more, and that's a common feature of progressive educational commentary. Needless to say, I fundamentally disagree with him there, and wish he didn't go down that road, because it detracts from his more valid analyses.

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.

Hobbes, Chp. 18 & 19

 A few things stand out from the last few chapters of Hobbes:

Chapter 18, Paragraph 9: It is the right of the sovereign to decide what speech is permissible. Of course I recoil from this...but he's not wrong. I say that not to really excuse infringements of speech rights, but to note that even respecting speech rights is a choice. We say it isn't a choice, we say it isn't something the government gets to decide, but they do. And not just in the "fire in a crowded theater" sense and related matters, not just in those edge cases. The choice to respect laws and constitutional rights and court rulings is ultimately a choice. In a free society it's a choice that the government makes frequently and without much argument, but it's a choice. When you dig deep into the nature of power, that fact is inescapable.

And we saw on January 6 that respecting the foundations of a liberal society really is a choice, and it's a choice that the powerful don't always make, and neither do their supporters. We saw that some leaders choose illiberally, and ultimately their resistance failed only because other people in key places resisted them. How great or small you think the threat ultimately was, it was a threat, and it was a threat that was averted by choices.

Chapter 19, paragraph 4: Hobbes argues that monarchy is the best form of government because it ties the monarch's personal interests to the state and people. This is of course entirely incorrect, as plenty of leaders put their own interests ahead of their people's. However, leaders who put themselves too obviously ahead of their people tend to run pariah states. Perhaps we can say that a liberal and affluent society is more likely to be one where the leader sees the affluence and prestige of their state on the world stage as being in their own personal interests, and they thereby foster a dynamics and free society.

Of course that's idealistic, but the point of ideals is to ask what direction to push in.

I think there's a lesson for leadership: If your organization is one that everyone wants to be a part of, you and your organization will thrive. If you just want to get your own piece of the pie at the expense of others, you will hurt the place.

Chapter 19, paragraph 23: The Romans built a stable empire by bringing people in the provinces under the umbrella of Roman citizenship and rights. This gives some context with the modern interest in inclusion.