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Comment by KirinDave | Hacker News Reader

I'm not entirely sure what you're referring to, but it is not inconsistent to suggest that previously held "objective" truths being revealed as social constructs is not a de-objectivication (forgive me for that) of these concepts but an acceptance of their reality.

In general, this helps people who want to argue on ideological grounds rather than hurting them. It's bad for people who want to treat somewhat arbitrary concepts as objective to stifle debate.

A good example: gender roles vary so much culturally and possess so many outliers in the data that attempting to argue for an objective ground truth almost invariably ignores or dismisses numerous counter examples.

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The thing is, in a lot of ways those gender roles actually are universal. Not among individuals, of course, but among societies, there are no exceptions to these:

"M&F seen as having different natures" "F->M direct child care" "M->F more competitive" "M->F greater spatial range" etc

Steven Pinker talks about this (and much else) in this speech. Skip to 26:56 for this particular point. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n691pLhQBkw

An objective truth doesn't have to apply to every individual without exception, to be an objective truth. It just has to be a consistent trend. So M/F differences like the above really are objective truths, the same as "men are taller than women" or "cougars are more dangerous than goats".

(edit: this is not to say anything prescriptive about what ought to be done; it's simply a descriptive statement. Of course Pinker covers all this ground; I recommend the whole talk)

> An objective truth doesn't have to apply to every individual without exception, to be an objective truth.

I agree with this. We can objectively say, for example, that in the US many women end up as primary care providers for children. We can even note that because of breastfeeding & postnatal recovery we expect to see women become primary care providers.

But what I'm hinting at is that a lot of people are using "objective facts" as a code for extremely prescriptive speech right now on the grounds that the observation of majority means that that majority is correct, hence my mention of gender roles.

A lot of criticism of the notion of "post-modern" thought is that it questions norms previously thought to be purely objective. The degree to which one does this is of course an individual thing and we need to constantly affirm the boundary beyond which it no longer makes sense to erode the pretense of objective truth (e.g., the Sokal paper).

Pinker isn't an anthropologist, and his statements about "universal" gender roles across every fucking society in history are false. Common, sure. Universal, nope.

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