One of the fundamental lessons of political science is that politics is unavoidable. There is no political vacuum.
Come to think of it, this is a fundamental lesson of just about any field of study. Economics? Yup. A fundamental lesson of economics is that the principles of economics cannot be avoided; they arise everywhere, even in settings that would not seem “economic.” Sociology? Yes again. Chemistry? Biology? Yes and yes. Art? Yup: serious study of art is based on the idea that art is everywhere.
As the saying goes: Poetry is everywhere, even in boxes labeled “Poetry.”
I was thinking about this after reading this passage in a book review by Arianne Shahvisi:
As the neuroscientist Gina Rippon writes in The Gendered Brain, dealing with the myths of ‘neurosexism’ is like playing ‘whack-a-mole’: each time you smack one down, more spring up elsewhere. Why are these myths so tenacious? For a start, findings are often based on small sample sizes, or observed effects are overblown. There are also reporting biases, the most obvious of which is the ‘file drawer effect’. Studies that discover differences between the sexes are readily submitted for publication, while those that don’t tend to be filed away. Observations of similarity therefore go underreported, and accounts of brain sex dimorphism are less likely to be undermined by research that fails to replicate their findings. As the psychologist Gerald Haeffel put it in a Royal Society paper published in June, ‘Psychological science is on an extraordinary winning streak. A review of the published literature shows that nearly all study hypotheses are supported. This means that either all the theories are correct, or the literature is biased towards positive findings.’
Longtime readers of this blog will realize that I pretty much agree with this passage, which applies to psychology and social science research more generally and to sexism in these fields more specifically. I’ve used the term “schoolyard evolutionary biology” to refer to this attitude, which I recall seeing in an extreme form a few years ago with the statement from a psychology professor that “Psychologically, men and women are almost a different species,” which is about as scientistic and ideology-blinded as you can get.
There’s just one place where I disagree with Shahvisi here. Or, not disagree exactly, but I think she’s missing something. Yes, there’s lots of bias in what gets studied, what gets published, and what’s get publicized, and outlets such as Freakonomics are there to push work that is consistent with traditional sex stereotyping. At the same time, Shahvisi doesn’t mention that there are other outlets such as Lancet or the London Review of Books that will promote work that goes in the other direction.
The connection to the first paragraph of this post is that, yes, it’s too bad that there are institutions that are so uncritically receptive to traditional sexist perspectives. Also this sort of bias is always going to be there, along with other biases from other directions. There’s no politics-free zone here.
Just to clarify: when I say “politics,” this is not just left/right politics. For example, naive gender essentialism could be considered a conservative ideology, but it was promoted by Freakonomics, which is not really a politically conservative site—they take a mix of liberal, moderate, and conservative positions on various issues.
The problem that I see in many social/psychological/medical studies is what I call one dimensionalism. Human behavior is complex, and drawing out a single parameter yields poorly reproducible results. The impact of coffee on longevity is an example. Longevity is the result of many variables, and coffee drinking is also the result of multiple variables; for example LDS adherents don’t drink coffee and also don’t drink alcohol. Thus we can find studies showing adverse, neutral, and even positive effects of coffee on life span. On the Marginal Revolution blog there was an entry a few days ago on the blurry relationship of IQ and income; isn’t it clear that a single parameter like IQ is not the only determinant of something as complex as income. My classmates who became pediatricians had lower incomes than my orthopedic surgeon classmates.
When a proton is driven into another proton at near light speed, the collision produces a bunch of stuff, not just one particle. We should expect studies of humans to produce a cloud of results and not a single outcome. We should use the tools of statistics to rank likelihood of outcomes.
> On the Marginal Revolution blog there was an entry a few days ago on the blurry relationship of IQ and income; isn’t it clear that a single parameter like IQ is not the only determinant of something as complex as income. My classmates who became pediatricians had lower incomes than my orthopedic surgeon classmates.
Another complicating factor, looking at Finnish data (http://aalto-econ.fi/tervio/Notes_on_the_shape_of_the_ability_earnings_relation.pdf) we don’t see such a threshold effect.
Park said, “My classmates who became pediatricians had lower incomes than my orthopedic surgeon classmates.”
My pediatrician brother-in-law addressed this problem by expanding his practice to young adults — namely, the parents of his pediatric patients. (He took this path because quite a few of his patients’ parents asked him if he could be their primary care physician — they liked the fact that he treated them as adults.)
” isn’t it clear that a single parameter like IQ is not the only determinant of something as complex as income.”
Who has ever said anything differently?
That was one laughable book review.
It begins with a personal humblebrag sob story and keeps going downhill from there. Shavisi uses “stereotype threat” to explain why there has never been a woman world chess champion. Stereotype threat is not a thing in the real world, it’s something invented to “explain” any differences between “majority” and “minority” so the narrative of the latter’s oppression can be preserved. very much like “microaggressions”
Shavisi claims there are no evidence for sex dimorphism in the human brain once differences in size are accounted for. Then admits that male brains have higher proportion of white matter which is crucial for signal transmission, which, obviously is a morphological difference with important implications.
Perhaps London Review of Books should have asked a neuroscientist and not a philosopher to review the book.
Of course, Rippon and Shavisi are very busy fighting straw men. Rippon and Shavisi exemplify the ideologically dogmatic feminist anti-intellectuals who a priori rule out the possibility of meaningful sex differences. No matter how much evidence is produced, they will never admit to it.
GB:
One way to say this is that an annoying feature of Shavisi’s review is not just that it has mistakes, but that she seems so sure of herself about it. In that way, ironically she is mimicking some of the bad features of work that she is criticizing.
What is the origin of the saying “Poetry is everywhere, even in boxes labeled poetry.” I like it.
Recursion.