"Understandably, this caused hurt and outrage among many female academics. But things can be true even if they make us feel bad, and Summers’s speculation is at least compatible with what we know about sex differences in other animals. A truth-seeking institution would have set feelings aside and asked whether the hypothesis was right or wrong (as Summers himself said it might well be). Instead, Summers resigned. This was a watershed event that has influenced how university administrators are selected, and how they behave — as we saw in last week’s congressional hearing on campus antisemitism, where three nice university presidents struggled to mount a coherent, and plausible, defense of free expression on campus...."
December 12, 2023
"Unfortunately, the universe isn’t here to please us, which means niceness and truth will sometimes be at odds."
"I think, for example, of my fellow Post columnist Lawrence H. Summers, who was forced out as president of Harvard several years ago after he speculated, at a small private seminar, that one possible reason for the underrepresentation of women in elite science and engineering programs might be that their ability was less variable than men’s. So while both sexes perform about as well on average, the women might tend to cluster near the middle, while the men are overrepresented at the bottom and the top — the latter being where elite programs draw from."
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68 comments:
He was absolutely correct.
Men are more likely to be either morons or geniuses.
Large and prestigious research institutions are looking for the geniuses, and more men are in that pool.
I thought Summers got in trouble talking about the possibility of inherent differences in interest and temperament between men and women? I recall a story about his daughter receiving a couple of toy trucks as a present and she proceeded to dress them up like dolls.
Favoring being nice over identifying and defending the truth seems a more likely feminine characteristic than masculine. To support this I would cite the fact that women tend to feel more anxiety over being perceived as bossy than men.
She's not wrong. The internet got a little worse when she went behind the WaPo paywall.
What Summers did to the Russian economy, really qualifies as jerk status,
"Understandably, this caused hurt and outrage among many female academics."
It's "understandable," alright, since the hurt and outrage were entirely political: progs think disparities that disfavor their favored groups are due to discrimination and oppression, hence the hysteria when Larry questioned whether that was the whole story. Following the biological science endangers the prog narrative.
"A truth-seeking institution would have set feelings aside and asked whether the hypothesis was right or wrong"
LOL.
"where three nice university presidents struggled to mount a coherent, and plausible, defense of free expression on campus"
Depends on what the meaning of "nice" is here. Nice progs, sure. But any one of the three would assist in Summers-style backstabbing, and Gay has in fact been involved in railroading heterodox black faculty.
I thought it was even more benign than that, that women just didn't seem to be interested in certain fields.
"Understandably, this caused hurt and outrage among many female academics."
And therein lies the real problem.
There is no crying in science.
Girls like art and making babies.
Boys like numbers and building stuff.
Are you a girl or are you a boy?
Do you like team sports or cheering from the sidelines and planning which winner you want to be on the team with?
If you are a girl, you'll be happy and fine if you find a mate.
If you are a boy, you'll be happy and fine if you find a girl mate who knows her role.
Why is this hard for anyone? /s
Summers was 100% correct. Females have X + X chromosomes and these average out. Males have X + Y and have no duplicate backup copy of either X or Y. Females are split into invisible stripes across their bodies...but not male bodies...
https://educationinsiders.com/why-women-are-stripey/
Evolution moves in random directions, continues only when a generation is functional, and has no mechanism at all for (anthropomorphic) "fairness." Any given species can spend millions of years perfecting its form via adaptation, only to be wiped out by a volcano or a comet. The universe doesn't care and moves on without missing a beat.
I miss Jane Galt. And Protein Wisdom. Those two comments were the only ones I ever found that were like this one. neo's is very close.
Larry Summers was my first thought upon reading the Gay post, but he did at least get five years as president of Harvard before being drummed out; on the other hand, he was more or less forced to leave upon proposing a question that could have been the subject of fruitful inquiry, rather than permitted to stay upon embracing an unbelievable double standard for free speech. I won't comment on the plagiarism intimations.
Megan has felt the wind shifting. She is good at that.
Serious question (about pay rates)
How much of an Asshole do you have to be, to get a big raise?
If you are nice, and understanding;
when your boss explains that you're doing a great job.. But they JUST CAN'T pay you any more..
What do you do?
If you are an asshole, and a jerk;
when your boss explains that you're doing a great job.. But they JUST CAN'T pay you any more..
What do you do?
Flip side..
When your jerk boss tells you you've got to work overtime (at time and a half).. What Do YOU do?
It's Hard to Believe, that men make more than women.
Wait a minute.. It's Not Hard to Believe at all.. Not for one moment
When you're
Compare the treatment of white male Summers to the current black woman President who said it's OK to call for the genocide of Jews.
Yes and no. The problem is there are many types of jerks.
Yes, we do need "jerks" that challenge the status quo and received wisdom, especially in higher education. Otherwise, the institution ossifies and becomes of dubious usefulness as time passes. Summers was that sort of jerk.
The problem is the people who pushed him out are also jerks. When you work in higher education and your reaction to someone questioning your beliefs is essentially "burn the witch," then you shouldn't be in the position you are in. Your temperament is ill-suited for this role. The thing is these are typical sort of people who get into these positions. Once you have entrenched yourself as a teacher, anyone who accuses you of being wrong is a threat to your position and must be eliminated. Who wants a professor who is a proven failure?
Then we get into the jerks that are both disruptive and illogical, who are generally useless cranks; the jerks that physically assault people they don't like, who are just dangerous; the jerks that do not do anything but have tenure and just absorb cash; the jerks that are embezzling money, etc. If we are going to discuss jerks, you need to be more specific.
I will repeat my comment from the earlier Gay story:
You can watch Claudine Gay's Harvard Innaugural address here:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cld8LZ_Od74
Or you can do as I did and watch the expression of unbounded irritation and resentment on the face of Larry Summers, sitting behind her with other past presidents, and think about what is going through his head as he drums his fingers, crosses his legs and bounces his foot, and under-claps in appreciation of the new AA hire for the job he got kicked out of for speaking too freely.
There's a reason that men and women have the same average IQ. They choose the questions, balancing men-skill questions and women-skill questions, so that they come out the same average, the theory being that they should come out the same so make them the same.
to the woke left, playing along with their delusions is just being "nice"
Here is McMegan illustrating she is part of the problem (emphases added):
"Understandably, this caused hurt and outrage among many female academics..."
No, it is anything but understandable; but it might indeed have shown why those ostensible female academics weren't really qualified to be academics.
"... three nice university presidents struggled..."
Good grief, if she thinks these are nice people I would hate to encounter the ones she thinks aren't nice.
The chief sex difference is not plumbing but method of thinking.
It does seem this is true, and is generally not proved to be wrong. When there are more (or at least equal) women in jail than men, then maybe it could be demonstrated to be false...
Favoring being nice over identifying and defending the truth seems a more likely feminine characteristic than masculine.
If you look at the world as shifting from a masculine focus to a feminine one, it explains most of what's happening.
It also explains most of what's needed to correct the problems, and why we're likely to be living with them for some time.
Religion.
Show me the fitness function!
and yet she dismisses the blunt speaker time and again, for the purveyor of dross,
As I recall, one of the women who witnessed the appalling spectacle (Summers proposing an explanation for a well-known phenomenon) said that it made her physically ill. Presumably, she meant this to be taken as evidence of her superior ability to reason about phenomena.
Summers made one comment at one event that, at worst, was viewed as acknowledging differences by sex without any real time opportunity to better define his comments.
Claudine Gay has overseen a 2 month campus wide anti-semitic tolerance culminating in publicized, prepared for, and repeated statements in front of Congress showing a tolerance for calls for genocide of part of her student body - Jews - even with tacit or explicit support by her faculty.
The idea of even drawing a comparison shows how ridiculous accountability has become and how protected classes exist in our society. And those classes of protected individuals are not who are often taught about today.
Large and prestigious research institutions are looking for the geniuses, and more men are in that pool
A large prisons are looking for the morons. There are way more men there, but no one is particularly concerned about that. M
"... three nice university presidents struggled to mount a coherent, and plausible, defense of free expression on campus....".
Bilge. What they were struggling to explain was why sauce for the White Male is also sauce for the Jew. No one ever complained about the stuff they were putting on the white males, so they were understandably puzzled about why you wouldn't use it on Jews. They look quite similar, after all. This is actually probably as close to rational thinking as any of those three evil witches has come in her lifetime.
Things were already headed in the truly best direction back in the late '60s. I have my first degree in Geology, considered the toughest major at Middlebury, a tough school to get into, and even tougher to graduate. We had to produce, and defend, original research theses contributing new geological knowledge. For our Bachelor degree! Several semesters of three lab sciences, plus Calculus.
Yet for many years, in the late '60s and the '70s, the Midd Geology undergrads were, for most of years, 50-50 men and women, most of those latter going on to productive careers, and thus quietly opening the field to women, just by being incredibly competent geologists. For example, Susan Cashman, world-renowned volcanologist, and a classmate of mine at Middlebury, where we studied tectonics and other geology under (also renowned) Peter Coney. Sue's twin sister Pat became a well-regarded structural geologist, and their little sister Cathy is also a volcanologist. Another, Mryka Beyer, moved beyond geology to develop the first doctoral program in applied remote sensing.
Affirmative Action was not needed, and these women's innate intelligence and professional competence never questioned. Sadly, political activists pimping mediocre women pushed and pushed, not for equal opportunity, but for publicly-visible equal outcome. Now, at least half the women we see in positions of alleged competence are what we farmers call "post turtles", and they're accompanied by depressingly many BIPOC, LGBTQRSXYZ+, and who knows what other post-turtles.
Women, incredibly competent women were absolutely essential for getting people on the Moon. These days, proudly touted "all-women" engineer teams build pedestrian bridges which collapse onto busy highways and kill a bunch of folks. Or collide their destroyer into another Navy ship.
Affirmative Action is a big part of why almost nothing seems to work properly any more.
Ivy League vs Leftists is blue on blue and my only input is to sit back, watch, and if things go really sour, pop a bottle of bubbly.
If Washington Post is getting involved, then it's blue on blue on blue and that's truly a Christmas miracle.
Pointing out a past example of hey maybe this somewhat right wing take from a somewhat left wing fellow was maybe sorta something we should have tolerated is just catnip designed to get rightwingers to step into this meat grinder as well. Hey maybe if we defend these leftists now that they've backhandedly halfway conceded something from a decade ago, they'll defend us on the same principle going forward!
They won't. They will Lucy and the Football you the very next chance they get no matter how much you stand up for them now. Let them devour themselves.
Feminism requires creationism: evolution stopped at the neckline.
It is inappropriate for the President of a University to speculate about the relative intelligence of one group or another. It should be the job of the president of any university to make sure that both faculty and students understand that grades are given on merit only and personal prejudices are expected to be set aside as much as humanly possible. It’s precisely the conviction on the part of many people that universities no longer (maybe they never did but were better at hiding it) attempt to make merit based decisions that is undermining the value of a college education. Larry Summers did the right thing by resigning.
#HateLovesAbortion #PoliticalCongruence #Diversity #Religion #Atheism
McArdle:
"Unfortunately, the universe isn’t here to please us, which means niceness and truth will sometimes be at odds."
'The universe' is cold, nasty and brutish. It's not a god-substitute. In any case, it's very much possible to speak the truth without being a jerk.
Affirmative Action was not needed, and these women's innate intelligence and professional competence never questioned. Sadly, political activists pimping mediocre women pushed and pushed, not for equal opportunity, but for publicly-visible equal outcome.
Exactly ! My high school girlfriend got a BS in Chem Eng in 1960. I helped her a bit with math for the SAT but I was in California while she was at Purdue. She married a classmate and moved to California to work in aerospace. We used to socialize.
...and he is a jerk but not for the reasons everybody thinks he is. The real problem people have with him is he's actually quite rational. Kooks hate that...
Enigma:
https://educationinsiders.com/why-women-are-stripey/
Check your sources. That domain is up for sale (on the landing page) and 844 is an area code (same page) that is known to have scammers.
Here's a good video on that topic - https://youtu.be/BD6h-wDj7bw
Affirmative action... discrimination denies human dignity and agency is a leverage game in the democratic/dictatorial mode.
“If you look at the world as shifting from a masculine focus to a feminine one, it explains most of what's happening.”
I would suggest that the problem there is that women are less able to think about higher level effects of their actions. In particular, they seem less able to think nationally. Looking back, I think that it was a mistake giving them the vote (despite coming from a long line of suffragettes (back at least to the 1850s). I think that we can blame the DEI fiasco, open borders, massive deficit spending, etc, all on the short sightedness of women, being imposed on this country and culture.
For example, with the Israeli/Hamas issue this last 5 weeks, both sides aren’t equally at fault. One side invaded the other, captured, raped, and murdered (sometimes at the same time - yes, women were executed while their rapists were in them) the civilian men, women, children, and even babies (some even beheaded), they captured. Unspeakable brutality. Nothing Israel has ever done, or even did here, was even remotely comparable in brutality. Yet, so many women insist on giving both sides equal weight, and, indeed, since Muslims, despite their religious mandates to reconquer lands they once held, are rated higher on the intersectionality pyramid, than Jews, are the ones listened to by female dominated organizations, such as modern academia.
Before the late 1970’s less than half of high school graduates went to college and more of them were men than women. In about 1978 half of high school graduates went on to college and it was a 50-50 split between men and women. In recent years, up to 70% of high school graduates go on to college and about 60% are women. (Women started earning more bachelor’s degrees than men after 1982.)
And yes, a bell curve distribution with men and women having the same average but men having a higher standard deviation perfectly explains this.
Also note that this says nothing about an individual but does explain group differences.
If this isn’t nice enough for some, then how nice is it to point out that there are a lot more men than women at the low end of the spectrum and many of them wind up in prison.
The universal fitness function is be fruitful and multiply. Everything else (e.g. morality, ethics, eugenics, diversity, political congruence) is a religious tenet.
Affirmative Action is a big part of why almost nothing seems to work properly any more.
This is why I hahahaed on the thread about women's being (unexpectedly!) caught in the net.
Just because the universe is indifferent doesn't mean that human beings should be.
Inclusion of massive amounts of women in the workforce especially in the professions dominated by science and technology is relatively new.
Transitions are never easy and progress is not advanced in a straight line. Human society does not operate like a Swiss watch.
Everything is going to work out in the end so maybe dial down the indignation over some fleeting temporary slip-ups.
Panic and Hysteria are never good looks.
"Now, at least half the women we see in positions of alleged competence are what we farmers call "post turtles",…"
Those poor turtles!
"Also note that this says nothing about an individual but does explain group differences."
Individuals have intelligence, not groups. Where progressives go off the rail with their nonsensical policies (well, one place, anyway) is that the relevant unit of measurement is the individual, not the group.
"If this isn’t nice enough for some, then how nice is it to point out that there are a lot more men than women at the low end of the spectrum and many of them wind up in prison."
As well, most "high risk of death" jobs are done by a man- women are not at all interested in equality there either.
I AM a woman, and I don't think it's "understandable" at all that the Harvard women were upset over Summers' remarks. What he said was reasonable, and is a proper subject for discussion and debate.
Moreover, it doesn't fry my grits in the slightest if a group that I belong to is lesser, on average, than some other group. As an example, do I care if Ashkenazi Jews and certain Asian ethnic groups have higher average IQs than my ethnic group (norther European)? Nope. My IQ is what it is, regardless of anyone else's.
it was a mistake giving [women] the vote
The Constitution does not discriminate by sex. How pervasive was a denial to vote?
"Understandably, this caused hurt and outrage among many female academics."
Well, I "understand" that female academics used the opportunity of Summers repeating data on male and female intelligence from various studies, to grab some more power and money from the university, and to eliminate an excellent university president in favor of one more amenable to their own goals, but that is all I see to understand. The way to dispute an academic finding in the sciences is to present better data, not act hurt and express outrage without any supporting data. And that is all they did, act hurt and outraged, because they were NOT hurt except in their feelz, and they used any supposed outrage only to advance their own prestige.
The data Summers noted has since been extended and explained by self-selection biases among genders with equal math abilities. The data he cited had more than one explanation. And the women who were hurt and outraged did NOTHING to explain the very real data of gender disparity in math any better than he did.
More boys than girls with equal, higher levels of math ability want to study math, simply put. The issue lies in women having better things to do than get math PhDs.
Nature: https://rdcu.be/dtrHz
"Nothing Israel has ever done, or even did here, was even remotely comparable in brutality."
I guess that depends upon what you mean by "Israel".
James Damore would like a word.
"Now, at least half the women we see in positions of alleged competence are what we farmers call "post turtles",…"
Those poor turtles! "
Now I am curious, In my youth my father decided that I would benefit from the plantation of strawberries in the back of our 3 acre lot. We had an invasion of turtles who came to eat of our bounty.
I sold some turtles to a local French Restaurant, and made my slave driving parent a profit on the berries. "If each slave confronts his master, the master will be too busy fighting than to further enslave.
'Transitions are never easy and progress is not advanced in a straight line. Human society does not operate like a Swiss watch.'
We should transition to an all-Asian NBA.
It won't be easy, but there's too much scoring now...
Eva Marie said...
"It is inappropriate for the President of a University to speculate about the relative intelligence of one group or another. It should be the job of the president of any university to make sure that both faculty and students understand that grades are given on merit only and personal prejudices are expected to be set aside as much as humanly possible. It’s precisely the conviction on the part of many people that universities no longer (maybe they never did but were better at hiding it) attempt to make merit based decisions that is undermining the value of a college education. Larry Summers did the right thing by resigning."
As that classic joke about the engineer and the guillotine concludes: "I think I see the problem."
No speculating about the actual reason for the phenomenon at issue. Especially if it makes women feel bad. All decisions are to be made on "merit," as long as the outcomes make us happy.
The fact is that in the past women who were scientists were not in advanced classes because of affirmative action but because of their exceptional intellectual merit. Yet we know from their bios that because they were women they were often ridiculed and discouraged for wanting to do that work. Their lives were made more difficult, their contributions ignored.
I don’t know what actually happened at the party that Larry Summers attended but if I were a Science professor there I would have deeply irritated by his suggestion that I was average or inferior in my field simply because of being a woman. It would not matter to me what other women in general like or pursue as careers, or what most men expect from women, I would expect to be treated as a scientist on my merits just as any guy would expect to be treated. If Summers didn’t respect women in science he shouldn’t have been the president of an educational institution where women study.
But now thanks to DEI who knows?
Feminism assumes and asserts the superiority of women. Mary Daly fantasized about eliminating most of the men and boys in the world, and she kept her job. But sure, Larry Summers. Okay.
"Eva Marie said...
It is inappropriate for the President of a University to speculate about the relative intelligence of one group or another. It should be the job of the president of any university to make sure that both faculty and students understand that grades are given on merit only and personal prejudices are expected to be set aside as much as humanly possible."
So you don't challenge the narrative that the imbalance is due to sexism because it would be "inappropriate".
This is why the left win. The right is just too damn polite.
"Blogger n.n said...
it was a mistake giving [women] the vote
The Constitution does not discriminate by sex. How pervasive was a denial to vote?"
Funnily enough the Constitution didn't mention the right to vote at all, let alone talk about right to vote by gender.
"Many people are surprised to learn that the right to vote—for any American—is not part of the original 18th-century text of the U.S. Constitution. Later Amendments established this right in reverse, by clarifying ways in which it is forbidden to limit the vote. “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex,” the 19th Amendment clarified."
https://time.com/5879346/19th-amendment-facts-myths/
Rosalyn C. said: "If I were a Science professor there I would have deeply irritated by his suggestion that I was average or inferior in my field simply because of being a woman."
Rosalyn, Summers never said that; you are putting hurtful words in his mouth that he never spoke. Shame on you!
What he commented on was the fact that there are currently far fewer women than men at the highest levels of STEM academics. His hypothesis was relatively simple: Maybe this situation is due to the fact that male and female humans have equal median intelligence, but men have much greater variability in distribution of intelligence (which seems to be scientifically true at this point in time). So one finds a disproportionately higher number of men at the highest intelligence levels, as well as a higher number of men at the lowest levels. It's basic normal distribution statistics. The fact that men have only one X chromosome and women have 2 might account for this variability.
Some people are taller than others. Some people can run faster than others. And some people are smarter than others. As long as all qualified people are given equal opportunity to excel, humanity will thrive.
boatbuilder said:
“All decisions are to be made on "merit," as long as the outcomes make us happy.”
Sorry but I don’t know what your point is.
“after he speculated, at a small private seminar, that one possible reason for the underrepresentation of women in elite science and engineering programs might be that their ability was less variable than men’s“
“After” is the key word here. Larry Summers made his controversial statements in January, the Harvard Faculty gave him a vote of no-confidence in March, and Larry wasn’t forced to resign until the following February, during which time a couple more controversies occurred.
It depends on the context.
Based on the SJW world view, every person who contributes in any way to the betterment of society is a jerk. Which is one of the many reasons that SJW, i.e., wokeness is such a damaging ideology. Imagine, celebrating victimization.
Socialism is the stepchild of women voting. Fairness, defined by the hoi poloi, over merit. Unless overcome, the death of civilization and the triumph of Big Brother.
"the universe isn't here to please us"
Alternate theory: The entire history of time, and the entire universe, and everything in it, exists solely to allow Althouse to blog, with the happy side effect of also allowing her readers to comment. This is the Althouse-Centric Universe Theory, adapted from Terry Pratchett's Unseen University professoriat, who thought the world existed so they could have big dinners.
Patrick Henry. -- the socialist movmenent in America predated the woman's vote by several decades. Read before speaking.
I like Megan, and she's right about much of this.
But saying the three presidents "struggled to mount a coherent, and plausible, defense of free expression on campus" seems like too much of a gift to them. They didn't struggle to defend free speech; they struggled to defend the indefensible double standard that protects favored groups and leaves the Jews to their fate.
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