Spartan power as an ideal; essentially, after Sparta had begun to decline as a military power, it clung to a reputation of military prowess because that’s all it had left. Sparta’s institutions postdate its peak, and lived up to an imagined past glory rather than accurately reflecting its traditional society. Good lesson for ultraconservatives and obsessive traditionalists in here, I think.
At Thermopylai, Sparta made its name as a society of warriors. Afterwards, everyone fears them; we’re frequently told of the shaking knees and chattering teeth of those who know they’re going up against Spartans. However, from the sources of the Classical period, it becomes clear that Sparta is feared and respected in warfare only because of Thermopylai. No one can name any other example of Spartans fighting to the death against insurmountable odds. When the Spartans surrendered at the battle of Sphakteria (425 BC), comparisons were immediately drawn with the men of Leonidas, whose reputation the warriors at Sphakteria had failed to live up to. There was apparently no other go-to example of Spartan prowess.
It seems that at this point the Spartans decided to commit to the name they’d made for themselves. For the entire Classical period, there are no native Spartan writers that we know of; the products of Spartan leisure-class culture dry up. Instead, what we find in other sources, people talking about Sparta, is increasing awe at their well-ordered society, their political stability, and their military skill. This keeps building right the way through the Classical and Hellenistic periods, and the most incredible tales of Spartan ruthlessness and single-minded obsession with warfare were actually written in the days of the Roman Empire – centuries after Sparta was beaten in war by the city-state of Thebes and reduced to the status of second-rate power. It would seem that the Spartans doubled down on their reputation as a specifically military power, and gradually started building up the system of customs and institutions that would convince later observers that they must always have been a force to be reckoned with. This only seems to have happened in response to their reputation – but in hindsight, it must have been hard for Greek and Roman authors to separate cause and effect.
In other words, the Spartan reputation for military skill and their actual military record appear to be largely unrelated. During their rise to prominence, nobody thought they stood out. In the period of their slow but irrevocable decline, admiration for their methods steadily rose to a fever pitch. This is important; apparently the degree of respect they commanded in ancient times seems to have had little to do with the power they actually had. So it goes, too, in modern times.
Good post (and not all about deflating Sparta)
Reading some of these back-and-forths reminds me of reading Thucydides in college – Thucydides is full of back-and-forth speeches where one person argues for a position and someone else counter-argues and so on, and I would always read the first speech and think “OK, this person is clearly right” and then read the second and think “no, the first person was clearly wrong,” and basically I’d always agree with the person I’d read most recently
I imagine the reason I don’t experience this more in real life is that in most real-life debates the two debaters don’t seem evenly matched to me? The reason they’re so evenly matched in Thucydides is that, as he openly admits, he writes the speeches that he thinks the people ought to have given (steelmanning?) rather than the ones they gave in real life at the time
has there been any good critiques of the Google diversity thing?
besides pointing at it in mock outrage, I mean
[under readmore for long, somewhat controversial, overwhelmingly inside-baseball thing, and worse, inside-baseball for a league I don’t even play in]
(via gattsuru)
Contra Grant On Exaggerated Differences →
Thank you for writing this @slatestarscratchpad.
curious again to hear any responses that aren’t just “yuck reflex”
Briefly:
1) Scott’s dismissal of the Hyde meta-analysis is unfounded. He claims it lumps a bunch of common interesting claims with a bunch of nothing claims that find nothing. But here are some of the things Hyde found small or no difference in:
Math (several studies), science, aggression (one study out of several), non-physical aggression (several studies), and leadership (several studies). All of these are things for which any person on the street could identify the stereotype and which way it’s supposed to point, and probably at least some would still believe it.
As an additional nitpick, when Scott lists things Hyde “found gender differences in” he lists things even if they were only found in one of several studies in the meta-analysis. If all of the things he listed were found in every study that studied them, there would be no way of getting near the headline 78% figure.
2) Scott is making a very strong assertion here based on casual reading of charts. Closer reading of the same charts shows that Scott’s reading is specious.
For example, Sweden is generally agreed to be less sexist than Japan and indeed has more female CS students (29% to 20%). Portugal, which would be fairly typical in sexism for Europe, does exceptionally well in gender balance (49%). Italy, similarly not the most sexist country in Europe, is doing pretty okay (42%). And if you look closer you find some VERY strange things, like how Yemen’s rate is 59% but Oman’s, right next door with a similar culture, is 26%.
Furthermore: if you look at the study Scott cites about Big Five personality traits, there are some obvious problems with it (it’s got a table which is the epitome of fishing for p-values; seriously, sex ratio in smoking?). It also doesn’t seem to have been replicated at all as far as I can tell from Google, although of course I could just be unable to find a replication.
There’s also the more obvious problem that it’s actually totally meaningless in this context. What would that have to do with this? You can’t just wiggle your eyebrows suggestively in the direction of a link and claim you’re done, you would need to actually prove it, or at least provide evidence for it.
3) The section is fine as far as the narrow claim about Harvey Mudd, but I can make a fairly strong argument that the broader claim is false.
Grant himself puts in a very suggestive graph which Scott doesn’t bother to argue with. If you look at the social context you find that drop happens about when the social connotations of computer science change from “secretarial work” to “math”. You can see in this famous Cosmo article that women were being held up not just as equally capable computer programmers as men but as more capable in the 1960s. (There’s a different explanation here, which could also be the case but which I find more likely to be an offshoot of the underlying problem.)
4) There’s a lot of bluster and repetitions of long-debunked arguments like “but you feminists never care about getting women into coal mining!” in this section that I’m not going to get into specifically.
A lot of the strength of the argument is debunked by that same graph in the same article which Scott must have already seen. It peaks along with every other job and then decreases. If it was an innate aptitude thing you’d expect it to hit a ceiling and then stay roughly level over time, not decrease.
That’s a strong sign of shifting social norms, which Scott never considers. He just assumes that all social norms get more permissive over time. Of course, if you look at the evidence it’s pretty clear that in fact, Cosmo was writing articles about how many women there were in CS and how it was like cooking dinner in the 60s, and that seems pretty absurd now.
A lot of this is also Scott, in somewhat typical Scott fashion, misapplying studies. For example, using Shashanni 1997 to prove that women aren’t responding to negative stereotypes is like using the many repeated studies which prove that most Americans are unwilling to endorse racist beliefs to a survey taker to prove that racism is dead. In fact, if you read it closely, you find it actually shows almost exactly the opposite: the female students in that study were less likely to have used a computer, to have a computer at home, to say they were confident about using a computer, and to say they liked using a computer. The study also found that liking and confidence decreased for the female students (increased for male students) if they perceived at least one of their parents thought computers were more appropriate for boys, and increased for both male and female students if they got encouragement from their parents. The only thing that study found was equal was a belief in the broad equality of men and women with computers, which Scott cherry-picks to say that stereotypes don’t matter when in fact the whole point of the study is that they do!
Sidenote on the hormone stuff: Scott, and other LWers, and the trans community, have all observed that trans women are disproportionately likely to be programmers, particularly relative to cis women. This seems to me to be pretty strong evidence that it’s not hormones (which trans women share with cis women) and is socialization (which they don’t).
5) Trying to have a debate about the science, despite me debating the science, is not something I think is useful here. Science should be debated by scientists. I don’t want to debate some random Google employee about psychology; that just produces a lot of bad psychology. Making very strong claims like the ones in question about shaky science is never a good look and generally ends up in a giant quagmire of an argument such as this one.Thanks!
thirqual replied to your link “Exclusive: Here’s The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating…”
You know that the version linked above has been edited to remove charts, sources (apparently ~30, mostly hypertext) and personal info? (100% with you about the similarity to candid adherence to tBS)
… welp
(PDF of a more complete version is here if anyone is curious)
Matt Weinstock, a Los Angeles newspaper columnist, once remarked that Fowler’s chili “was reputed to open eighteen sinus cavities unknown to the medical profession.”
fun fact: i typed the words “fun fact”, then got distracted by an IM, then got up to pee, and now i have literally no idea what this post was supposed to be.
(4:20:34) Victorious flute trilling at K’varn’s apparent defeat.
(4:23:00) Nervous flute trilling (continued sporadically through next song).
Exclusive: Here's The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally At Google [Updated] →
I feel like the word “screed” used to mean more than “text I disagree with.”
Engineer: *writes a very level-headed, well reasoned essay, even if I might not agree with all of it*
Management: *responds with zero substance*
Media: “Engineer writes zero substance creed!!!”I get the sense that this person has not heard any feminist/social justice thinking about gender. This is weird because they speak about being saturated in it and stressed out by the impossibility of disagreeing with it - and I believe them! And nonetheless it feels like they have never heard it clearly enough articulated to disagree with. It’s like some things have filtered through, such as ‘saying men and women are different are bad’, but without any of the underlying intellectual work like ‘we acculturate men and women differently, and aggressively so, and they are more different in places that demand more difference of them’ and ‘men and women get rewarded and punished socially for different behavior’ and ‘there might, even if you stripped all that away, be actual differences on average, but the gender balance of fields swings a lot off cultural factors and the mapping from innate differences to career choices is probably very messy’.
I think there are lots of people who get some sort of conclusions section of feminist thought and none of the argumentation for it and end up filling in their own, confusing and terrible, arguments for how to reach that conclusion, and thinking feminists think something like ‘there are no differences between how men and women socialized in America act and behave’.
Also, Googler, it might make sense to have girls’ tech education programs even if there would be a gender imbalance in tech even in a perfectly egalitarian society, because if you are right that there are differences between men and women, there might be differences in the best way to teach them to code, and the insistence against gender-specific classes goes badly with the rest of your argument.
But I do think the right way to answer this is with those counterarguments, not with ‘you’re making women uncomfortable’, because when someone is both wrong and making women uncomfortable and you only point out the second thing they’re going to decide they’re right and being silenced.
The fact is that counterarguments to his article ARE taking the form of “shut up” and “you’re making women uncomfortable” and “I’m not even going to comment, just look at this horrifying thing”. (Except yours.)
That answers your question about how he could’ve been saturated in social-justice rhetoric and not have absorbed the real lines of reasoning that gave rise to that rhetoric: Mainstream feminists are getting really, really bad at routinely explaining why we believe what we believe in a way that proceeds clearly from established premises.
It’s not a surprise that this guy never heard a coherent explanation of the left-leaning perspective on gender and racial disparities in tech. Now that that perspective has morphed into a widespread ideology, the vast majority of people he meets who parrot these tenets are not going to give him a convincing explanation of why they’re a good idea. So, of course, he’s going to end up at “this thinking is full of holes, let me write an explanation of all the obvious ones I see”.
He’s absolutely right that the ideology has gone too far. His article is perfect evidence of that.
I agree with much of the above, but I wouldn’t describe the guy’s essay like this:
So, of course, he’s going to end up at “this thinking is full of holes, let me write an explanation of all the obvious ones I see”.
One of the frustrating things about the essay was that it was very light on arguments and evidence; it was basically a really long position/thesis statement. In a lot of places it seemed like the guy was just assuming that people disagreed with him out of simple ignorance – that the (often vague) claims he was making were well-established science that anyone would learn if they, uh, educated themselves.
And I think that’s because the guy isn’t coming up with his own ideas; it looks like he’s mostly parroting his own set of (unmentioned) sources. A lot of things about the essay, down to some of the individual phrases (“the science of human nature”), sound a whole lot like the way Steven Pinker writes about these issues, and I’d bet good money that he’s read Pinker’s “The Blank Slate” and that it was one of the main influences on the document. (If not Pinker, then someone influenced by him, or vice versa. Definitely someone in the same cultural “sphere.”)
I can remember writing similar things myself right after I read The Blank Slate – which I read as a teenager, before I really knew anything about anything. I’m not mentioning that to say “lol, look at this guy, he’s as naive as I was at age 15″ (I’m sure he isn’t). What I mean is, I know what it’s like to have Pinker as your first serious (i.e. “more than just talking points”) introduction to a lot of these specific issues. He’s very persuasive and at least looks like he knows a hell of a lot. (There’s an endnote number after like >50% of the sentences in that book, and a lot of them lead not to one cited text but a whole catalogue of them.) And he does give you the sense that there is perfectly well-established science contradicting a lot of current left/liberal opinion, and that what remains to be done is not arguing for the counterclaims but simply “raising awareness” about them.
So, yeah, I definitely think there’s a failure of communication on the feminist side here. But I think an important part of the puzzle is that the other side is (sometimes) communicating in a persuasive, relatively classy way. It’s disappointing that anyone is scandalized by the content of an article like this, as though it’s a bunch of totally novel batshit stuff, rather than just saying “oh, hi Pinker.” (I’m not accusing anyone upthread of doing this, but I saw it in some of the responses elsewhere.)
The two primary motions are rotation and sexual movement, whose combination is expressed by the locomotive’s wheels and pistons.