Trigger warnings, safe spaces, and fascism on college campuses

[old_gregg]

Overstated is more likely. Given his educational training he is probably naturally sympathetic to those variables being important than say an economist like me. His discipline may be more likely not to see those variables as having problematic measurement problems. And it all may be explained by a very human reaction to an antagonistic interviewer, and he ended up verging into the polemic without intending to.

lib arts btfo!

[pelagius]

Overstated is more likely. Given his educational training he is probably naturally sympathetic to those variables being important than say an economist like me. His discipline may be more likely not to see those variables as having problematic measurement problems. And it all may be explained by a very human reaction to an antagonistic interviewer, and he ended up verging into the polemic without intending to.

And if I had to guess he's probably not worse than other people that popularize underlying academic work. Say, A Bart Ehrman?

[BigFatMeanie]

Sorry, I forgot to mention variables that measure experience; those still matter too (not as important as occupational choice). Women still move out of the workforce more often and appear to demand more flexibility in terms of workplace experience. A man in the same career, that entered the workforce at the same time, will tend to have more experience on average ten or 20 year later. This tends to be associated with higher wage. So if this gets us to many factors then I guess I don't object to what your take away.

Anecdote: My employer started offering a part-time option a while back. You can work a minimum of 24 hours a week at pro-rated salary and keep your benefits. Of course, when salary increases and stock options are doled out at the end of the year, the part-timers generally don't get as big of raises or as many stock options as the full-timers, even on a pro-rated basis. They simply have less contributions on record throughout the year to justify the same level of raise and options as someone that worked 2X and often up to 3X as much every week (damn those FLSA exemptions for "computer related occupations"!). If those part-timers go back to full-time work a few years from now they're definitely going to have a wage gap with those that stayed full time, even within the same job and overall experience level.

I'll leave it to the reader to determine which gender overwhelmingly leads in both raw numbers and percentage of their numbers choosing the part time option since it was offered.

[Moliere]

I thought that, to a degree, he was trying to simplify things for a large audience in a short interview. As well as for an interviewer with an agenda who wasn't really going to let him try to explain things or what he meant before cutting him off and telling him what he is saying and believes.

So I just took his position as you can't simplify it to one easy factor - male versus female. There are other factors that play a role - which includes factors inherent to stereotypical characteristics of being male or female but which may be seen in individuals of either gender - and that you can't just say it is because of gender alone.

It could've been interesting if she'd asked him to expound and then let him do it. Maybe ask for some of those additional characteristics without cutting him off and accusing him of some other misogynistic statement that he felt the need to defend himself from instead of trying to honestly understand what he was saying.

This is what I thought as well. He was well into the interview by then and knew he wasn't going to get more than one sentence before the interviewer interjected.

What I love about JP is that he's not afraid to include the evolutionary differences between men and women into the picture. He outright states that men adn women handle situations differently, which causes more men to be in executive positions at companies and more women to be in other jobs. Sure it's unequal, but let's not forget that thousands upon tens of thousands upon hundreds of thousands of evolutionary forces have created us into what we are in terms of sex. There are definately innate differences between sexes (in general) and we can't just wish those away...or correct them through legislation without unintended consequences. Men are better at some things and women are better at some things. It just so happens that certain parts of a capitalistic society that pay better tend to favor the innate traits of men over women. That gap may close some day (hopefully it does) and it's okay to push a bit to get it closed, but slamming the door shut is likely not the best solution.

[Donuthole]

FTR, JP sounds like an educated, Canadian version of Art Vandelay. Similar voice and affect.

[pelagius]

This is what I thought as well. He was well into the interview by then and knew he wasn't going to get more than one sentence before the interviewer interjected.

What I love about JP is that he's not afraid to include the evolutionary differences between men and women into the picture. He outright states that men adn women handle situations differently, which causes more men to be in executive positions at companies and more women to be in other jobs.

That's fine to believe this ... maybe it will even turn on to be true, but, once again, I don't think you can reach this conclusion based on the data except for the evolutionary fact that women get pregnant and have babies. This leads to a variable that does matter, the fact that women's workforce participation is more fluid and so they lag men in experience on average.

In the end there is a gap, some of the gap can be explained by observables, but not all of it. The important variables are occupation selection (women choose less remunerative occupations) and experience (women leave the workforce more and work less hours on average). Psychological measures created from ex post survey data should probably be ignored because they are measured after the wage difference exists and hence likely biased (ok, surely biased in my view).

What you can do:

Tell evolutionary psychology stories about why women, for example, pick less remunerative occupations. I'm actually quite sympathetic to some of these stories (particularly the ones related to motherhood). In this case, I think you're mostly telling a story rather than making a solid inference from the data. I think that's fine, but at best I think you can say these evolutionary psychology stories are consistent with the data. I don't think it's a conclusion that can be inferred from the data. Whether you believe these stories tends to be a function of how compelling you find these evolutionary psychology frameworks (it's worth remembering the evolutionary psychology is crap social science just like economics).

Of course, you can also tell stories (consistent with the data) about systemic cultural conditioning created by the "patriarchy" leading to some of the difference in occupational selection.

[wuapinmon]

That's fine to believe this ...

What of the "agreeable" argument he makes? There have been a few times when my wife has asked for a raise and then worried that she was going to get fired for asking only to get the raise, but she's probably waited too long to ask for a raise several times, even with me pushing her, because she's afraid of upsetting the work relationships. Is this too anecdotal?

Hell, this one place in Orem, she was making $30k after two years (having started at $25k--this was in 2000) with a masters in sociology from USU. They hired two guys with bachelors in English from BYU at $35k. A smartass in IT redirected every single email in the company to her email account when she complained to him that she wasn't getting some emails from some floor managers that she needed for a phone survey they were running. She got an email that had her name in it, which she found by searching for her name since the floor managers always addressed her by name in their emails. It was from the company owner to a vp about hiring the two BYU guys. He said, "How much are we paying wuap's wife? These guys have families with kids. She doesn't. Go ahead and hire them at $35k."

She was as pissed as I've ever seen her, and that includes a fight in the old St. George Holiday Inn we had about how big of a colossal *&^%$#@! (*&^%$# her father was when we first got married. After stewing for a couple of weeks, applying for a managerial job at the MTC in their phone center (I knew they weren't giving that job to a woman--at least back then) she one day just marched into a meeting between the owner and the vp and told them about the email she'd gotten, how upset it had made her, and what were they going to do about it. Shocked they offered her $42k a year on the spot. She accepted it immediately, without a counter offer. I told her she could have countered because they were probably shitting themselves since she had it in writing, but, either way, that was awesome for us.

As a final bribe, when she quit, they gave her two months severance. But, her timidity has cost her money. I know she doesn't speak/act for her gender, but I have to wonder if agreeability, regardless of gender, equals lower pay. I imagine that it does. Then, is there a gendered difference in agreeability. If so, is it innate gender, innate individual personality (independent of gender) or a result of gendered enculturation. I'd be willing to bet that it's largely a factor of enculturation. There are subcultures in American culture wherein the women are known for their veritable lack of agreeability. As such, I'd like to know how JP would respond to that idea. If, you think I'm not far off here.

[pelagius]

What of the "agreeable" argument he makes? There have been a few times when my wife has asked for a raise and then worried that she was going to get fired for asking only to get the raise, but she's probably waited too long to ask for a raise several times, even with me pushing her, because she's afraid of upsetting the work relationships.

Right, that's among the class of potential explanations that may be true but aren't tested well in the data because those variables are hard to measure well in the context of the male/female wage gap. What can be said is the following (I think): women are more agreeable on average than men (this is measured imprecisely too but I believe this basic stylized fact) but we can't say that its an important factor (or a factor at all) in the observed wage gap.

Is this too anecdotal?

Yeah, it is. The variance in agreeableness within gender is huge relative to the mean difference across genders.

I'd be willing to bet that it's largely a factor of enculturation. There are subcultures in American culture wherein the women are known for their veritable lack of agreeability.

I'm not willing to bet one way or the other, but I don't think the role of enculturation should be dismissed and it wouldn't surprise me if it's important.

There are subcultures in American culture wherein the women are known for their veritable lack of agreeability.

This is one way an empiricist could potentially try to get out whether enculturation matters for the wage/gap

[Donuthole]

She was as pissed as I've ever seen her, and that includes a fight in the old St. George Holiday Inn we had about how big of a colossal *&^%$#@! (*&^%$# her father was when we first got married

Indoor/outdoor pool! That hot tub was a make out hot spot in HS.

[wuapinmon]

Indoor/outdoor pool! That hot tub was a make out hot spot in HS.

My sentence construction in your quote leaves open that my father-in-law has changed. That is not the case. My brother-in-law was the night clerk at that hotel for a while after his mission, and he regularly had to run Dicksee Flyers (pun intended) out of that pool.

[Walter Sobchak]

Anyone read Pinker's new book?

Excerpt from a recent interview @ WeeklyStandard:

Adam Rubenstein: If “reason” is to be “the currency of our discourse,” what’s the future of identity politics? Is identity politics based in reason? Your new book touches on the issue, but cursorily. Could you provide more of an explanation of identity politics, where it comes from, where it’s going, and how we should think about it?

Steven Pinker: Identity politics is the syndrome in which people’s beliefs and interests are assumed to be determined by their membership in groups, particularly their sex, race, sexual orientation, and disability status. Its signature is the tic of preceding a statement with “As a,” as if that bore on the cogency of what was to follow. Identity politics originated with the fact that members of certain groups really were disadvantaged by their group membership, which forged them into a coalition with common interests: Jews really did have a reason to form the Anti-Defamation League.

But when it spreads beyond the target of combatting discrimination and oppression, it is an enemy of reason and Enlightenment values, including, ironically, the pursuit of justice for oppressed groups. For one thing, reason depends on there being an objective reality and universal standards of logic. As Chekhov said, there is no national multiplication table, and there is no racial or LGBT one either.

This isn’t just a matter of keeping our science and politics in touch with reality; it gives force to the very movements for moral improvement that originally inspired identity politics. The slave trade and the Holocaust are not group-bonding myths; they objectively happened, and their evil is something that all people, regardless of their race, gender, or sexual orientation, must acknowledge and work to prevent in the future.

Even the aspect of identity politics with a grain of justification—that a man cannot truly experience what it is like to be a woman, or a white person an African American—can subvert the cause of equality and harmony if it is taken too far, because it undermines one of the greatest epiphanies of the Enlightenment: that people are equipped with a capacity for sympathetic imagination, which allows them to appreciate the suffering of sentient beings unlike them. In this regard nothing could be more asinine than outrage against “cultural appropriation”—as if it’s a bad thing, rather than a good thing, for a white writer to try to convey the experiences of a black person, or vice versa.

To be sure, empathy is not enough. But another Enlightenment principle is that people can appreciate principles of universal rights that can bridge even the gaps that empathy cannot span. Any hopes for human improvement are better served by encouraging a recognition of universal human interests than by pitting group against group in zero-sum competition.

AR: There is, as you recognize a “liberal tilt” in academia. And you write about it: “Non-leftist speakers are frequently disinvited after protests or drowned out by jeering mobs,” and “anyone who disagrees with the assumption that racism is the cause of all problems is called a racist.” How high are the stakes in universities? Should we worry?

SP: Yes, for three reasons. One is that scholars can’t hope to understand the world (particularly the social world) if some hypotheses are given a free pass and others are unmentionable. As John Stuart Mill noted, “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.” In The Blank Slate I argued that leftist politics had distorted the study of human nature, including sex, violence, gender, childrearing, personality, and intelligence. The second is that people who suddenly discover forbidden facts outside the crucible of reasoned debate (which is what universities should be) can take them to dangerous conclusions, such as that differences between the sexes imply that we should discriminate against women (this kind of fallacy has fueled the alt-right movement). The third problem is that illiberal antics of the hard left are discrediting the rest of academia, including the large swaths of moderates and open-minded scholars who keep their politics out of their research. (Despite the highly publicized follies of academia, it’s still a more disinterested forum than alternatives like the Twittersphere, Congress, or ideologically branded think tanks.) In particular, many right-wingers tell each other that the near-consensus among scientists on human-caused climate change is a conspiracy among politically correct academics who are committed to a government takeover of the economy. This is sheer nonsense, but it can gain traction when the noisiest voices in the academy are the repressive fanatics.

[Jeff Lebowski]

Anyone read Pinker's new book?

Excerpt from a recent interview @ WeeklyStandard:

God bless Pinker.

Now if he could only get a decent hairstylist.

[wuapinmon]

God bless Pinker.

Now if he could only get a decent hairstylist.

I think Pinker is one of the foremost minds in America today, probably the world. Frankly, I'm shocked that he's not more famous than he is. I guess our anti-intellectual culture has prevented any increase any popularity among the masses.

[Art Vandelay]

FTR, JP sounds like an educated, Canadian version of Art Vandelay. Similar voice and affect.

Ha. That is as close to a compliment (backhanded or otherwise) as DH has ever given me.

[Katy Lied]

Today the students in my son's high school walked out of classes over gun violence. Parents were emailed a warning that this would happen, where it would happen, and that it would be 17 minutes long. Students could opt to participate or not. If they did, they were escorted by school security to an indoor auditorium where they milled around for 17 minutes. If they opted out, they remained in class where they milled around for 17 minutes waiting for the other students to return. For kids that were at lunch, another 17-minute protest session was scheduled for 2nd lunch period.

Even the student protests are snowflakish. No risk, no passion, just a mild interest in the change in routine.