Persistent Myths in Feminist Scholarship | Hacker News Reader

Persistent Myths in Feminist Scholarship

chronicle.com

90 pointskylec44 comments

I think the problems Summers identified here are common to fields that are very politically charged. I think that "scholars" are more likely to trumpet questionable or even clearly false "research" - and their opponents are more likely to angrily attack them for these mistakes.

Suppose that an immensely convenient theorem showed up in a math paper 10 years ago, that was later shown to be flawed. Well, I suppose math grad students looking to solve problems would be tempted by this theorem, and might erroneously use it for a while. But unlike the "rule of thumb" inaccuracy, math doesn't tend to induce the same wish to believe. We may "wish" to believe that a map can filled out with four colors, because it seems like a cool concept, but we're not going to get angry when someone shows that our current proof is false.

This is an important issue in and of itself, but I want to point out that such problems are not limited to this field. See the comments at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=623420.

such problems are not limited to this field

I agree - it seems to be particularly common in fields that touch, no matter how obliquely, onto issues of public policy. On more than one occasion I have tried to find a definitive reference for a claim and found nothing.

Now that evidence-based medicine has done so much for us, one can only wish for evidence-based sociology. Admittedly, it is a bit harder...

Interestingly I missed the author's name at the top, and read the whole article assuming it was written by a man. I was surprised at the end to discover the opposite.

I missed the name too, but I took a guess it was a woman. I was with a Jewish friend today who'd mentioned that the jokes Sasha Cohen makes about Jews could only be made by a Jew or there'd be backlash.

I've had some decent discussions with feminists in the past, and their work on identity is really pretty interesting and valuable. But their numbers are totally screwed up - you know that "1/4th of all women have been raped" statistic? It's actually, "1/4th of women surveyed had sex that they wished they hadn't". I'll guess just as many men have had sex they wish they hadn't later.

I wonder why people cook up statistics to make their group's position look worse than it is. Do they think it helps in legislation or funding or education? The health people do it with STDs (greatly exaggerated risks), the drug people do it hardcore (I don't do any intoxicants, but alcohol is way more deadly and dangerous than half the illegal stuff in the USA), racial issues, ethnic issues, gender issues, sexuality, immigration, labor, etc, etc. It seems like tremendously many causes want to exaggerate their positions as worse off than they are, or the effects of choosing the other side as much worse than they are.

I think that'd be tremendously damaging to credibility in the long run, but I guess not many people check up on the science they read in the paper or see on the news.

"I wonder why people cook up statistics to make their group's position look worse than it is."

It's due to the fact that such groups by the nature of their lower status can't get through with their message. Nobody cared much for slavery in the US until Uncle Tom's Cabin came out back then among other gruesome real life accounts. The average plight of downtrodden peoples just gets overlooked. Compare the global hunger crisis to the swine flu scare. Nobody cares for all the food riots and tens of thousands dying of hunger daily etc. but people go crazy about a few flu deaths.

So basically you need something shocking to get attention, whether it's a statistic, story or whatever.

There was a bit of a backlash in Sweden for hype from feminists.

I'm enough on the fence that I voted you and the GP up. I do see where this is coming from.

A bit of the background:

Part of the local backlash was when a woman's house organization's boss stupidly came out as a heavy man hater during an interview. Now, some feminist arguments are exaggerated propaganda, but consider what kind of men she had interaction with daily... I can understand her opinion.

(A relative of mine has volunteered for a woman's house for a few decades and have some shocking stories. After those discussions, I realized how people e.g. can turn racist.)

When thinking about it, the backlash came when an opportunist tried to create a political party around feminism...

Before that, we saw politicians in established parties trying to ride that hype wagon.

A pity such an important field has so much sh-t. To paraphrase a Swedish expression: Where pathos go in, reason go out.

Edit: On consideration, if you don't have honesty you don't have anything. There are so many more ways to be completely wrong than close to correct, so any flirting with idealists will generally create more damage than the idealists can ever solve. I'll take a stand on zero-tolerance of dishonesty. (That said, don't paint all feminists with the same brush. It is not like they are flat Earthers all of them.)

Nobody cared much for slavery in the US until Uncle Tom's Cabin came out back then among other gruesome real life accounts.

UTC was propaganda, not a real life account. Slaves were much too valuable to be treated in the way depicted in the book. Horrible treatment sure, but what's in the book makes no sense on a commercial/economic level.

"UTC" was literature ;-) based on real people. My sentence was a little misleading though: I meant that the other accounts were "real life".

You sound like a slavery supporter though. You should look up some history books. Slaves were treated like cattle or pets basically. House slaves were pets and plantation slaves were cattle.

Acknowledging that slaves had real economic value is in no way a declaration of support for slavery. The fact that you can make such a jump in logic is profoundly disturbing to me. Those sorts of conclusions take away from honest discussion.

I think he means that that argument sounds similar to the ones actually given by slavery's supporters. I've heard an old economic argument that chattel slavery is better than wage slavery (what we have now), because you treat something you own better than what you merely rent.

(So an anarchonistic example is that a car you own will remain in better shape than one you rent. That's actually not such a terrible argument, though of course we'd reject it nowadays.)

That said, I don't personally know either way, and Wikipedia does mention that _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ is popularly seen as propaganda. (I personally haven't read the book, but it wouldn't surprise me if it were 'propaganda' in the sense that it was biased and promoted a political point of view. Apparently, before the Nazis, propaganda didn't have such bad connotations.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncle_Tom%27s_Cabin#Literary_si...

Exactly. This is the way slave holders in the south argued. You should read the actual book. It's very moving, one of the greatest American literary works. I read it in my first semester of American Studies.

You just argued that slavery wasn't that bad. In your opinion slaves were treated quite well because they had some monetary value, which is simply not true. You rewrite history in favor of slavery and then you accuse me of being dishonest? Not even fascists nowadays support slavery. This is more than disturbing. I simply can't believe how you can actually support slavery while the US has an African American president.

It's classic emotional appeal marketing and it works in the short term. In the long term it can undermine credibility, which in this case it has.

>I wonder why people cook up statistics to make their group's position look worse than it is.

Yvain at LW has written a couple great posts on this exact topic, and the comments aren't too bad either:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/7s/why_support_the_underdog/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/9b/help_help_im_being_oppressed/

Choice quote: "It's also why every time BBC or someone shows a clip about the region, they get complaints from people who thought it didn't make their chosen side seem weak enough!"

One has to wonder - given the individual and group mindset that promulgated and then rationalized those feminist book(s), ideas, and arguments laden with falsehoods and fabrications - what the reaction to this article would have been had its author been a man.

It may be safe to say that a lot of scholarship, regardless of gender, is flawed. That women do not wish to be publicly flogged is, perhaps, a tendency of the gender.

Maybe contacting the author, first, was a better way to handle the situation?

Of course, the article author doesn't try to search her own flaws in her approach.

"Maybe contacting the author, first, was a better way to handle the situation?"

I disagree. Statements made in a public, academic context should be debated and corrected in a public, academic context. This is perfectly appropriate; indeed, taking it private may well be inappropriate. This is the nature of academia, and anything less is a disservice to the greater academic community in question, who are shut out of a private conversation.

Obviously some professional courtesy is called for; such debate should not be acrimonious, and sending a note to the originator of the debated items is probably appropriate unless you know they can't miss it. But I'm not seeing anything egregiously wrong with the author's approach or tone in this article.

Many of the corrections in question involve objective facts, too. While I am keeping in mind I am seeing only one side of the story, I have a hard time seeing what justifies responding to a debate about what the objective fact of the matter is with any sort of accusations or stonewalling. The March of Dimes example seems pretty open-and-shut, for instance.

It's standard procedure in academia---in CS, at the very least---to notify the people you're correcting in advance. This ensures that they (a) know about the problem, (b) are aware of your efforts and can comment directly to you, and (c) can participate in the discussion that ensues when you publish.

Perhaps I'm confused, but doesn't she describe her contact with the author? "I mentioned these problems in my message to Lemon"

She did, but only after mentioning it in public, she says.

Insightful.

But not Hacker News.

I swear, "not Hacker News" seems to be the overriding meme here on HN, and it's getting old.

Sure this article's partially about feminism, but it's also about academic integrity, which I think falls well under the purview of "Hacker News". Not to mention the fact that CS and programming are often the focus of gender difference issues by feminists.

What anybody thinks about it in a post is irrelevant.

Upvote it (or not) if you think it belongs, flag it if you think it doesn't.

Maybe we should have a separate category for comments about the categorization of an article.

    1. Δ Persistent Myths in Feminist Scholarship (chronicle.com)
         35 points by kylec 2 hours ago | 11 comments | 28 relevance flames

I think if you gave folks some public way of indicating their complain, instead of an anonymous/invisible flag, it might help. Sometimes people are just driven to do something publicly. After all, flagging might be the way HN works, but it's not necessarily the way people work.

This is an essay from an AEI fellow about gender politics. The fact that it centers on academia does give it a foothold on HN, but it's misleading to suggest that this editorial is more than a borderline Hacker News submission.

I wouldn't flag it, but I wouldn't protest if it had gotten flagged off. There are hundreds and hundreds of similar articles, all epsilon from "Hacker-Newsworthy", that thankfully don't make it onto HN.

CS and programming are actually /not/ often the focus of gender issues by feminists.

The discussion on the gender-balance in said fields is brought up internally, most of the time, if not always. The 'feminist' crowd (gender theorists, women's studies academics, etc.) is honestly not that interested, or aware, of our problems.

> The discussion...is brought up internally, most of the time, if not always.

You may be right, but I suspect the reason for the above has something to do with the influence of feminists.

I doubt it.

That implies that the problems women face in computing (by being women) historically and currently are myths and only exist if you think about 'em.

They aren't, and there's plenty of evidence to show otherwise. email me if you really want a lit. review on the subject.

No, that's not what I was implying. I'm suggesting that the issue would be brought up less often if feminists did not have significant influence in our society. I can put a positive spin on it if you prefer: Thanks to the work of feminists over the past few decades, women and men in computing know well enough to bring up the issue of sexism in their field on their own.

Data point: My mother was a programmer back in the 1950s. She wrote numerical programs that simulated missile trajectories... in octal. She thought it was great when she got an assembler.

I don't recall her ever saying anything about discrimination on the job. The thing she griped about was being told by a math professor that math was no place for a woman.

Maybe there are some gating effects happening that steer women away from trying technical fields? It seems to me that, within most software places, you belong if you know your stuff. Nobody cares about your race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, or other basis for "discrimination". We care if you can code. (If you can't code, and got the job as a token person-of-that-color/gender/sexual orientation, then we usually have a problem with that, but that's not the same as bias against that color or gender or sexual orientation.)

That's the way it's been almost everywhere I've ever worked, and I've been in software for 25 years.

So what I'm trying to say is, there's almost always room for some introspection, but maybe we're too hard on ourselves? Maybe the lack of women in software isn't really the software guys' fault?

That is because computer programming is (still) not a particularly prestigious job, it still suffers from negative stereotypes, nerd, geek, etc. Right now, we're under their radar.

There is a reason feminists want us to say "chairperson" but don't care if you say "binman".

> I swear, "not Hacker News" seems to be the overriding meme here on HN, and it's getting old.

If people would post less of this sort of thing, then you wouldn't see it. Are you really interested in hacker / startup articles or do you just want to see "interesting" things? There are good subreddits for the latter.

See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=700644

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups."

Taken at face value, this means that if you get enough people to vote for something, then it's ok, no matter how "off topic" it is.

Since there is no check for "being a hacker" to join this site, presumably I could find a bunch of people interested in, say, the Tour de France, get them to join, and start voting up bike racing articles. Or for that matter, perhaps there are enough people already here interested in bike racing to vote up those articles.

Hence the flag button and editors.

So, effectively, there is some sort of "what should be here" standard. It is not just "anything goes" as per the guideline.

This kind of article completely fails the "of more interest to hackers than other people" test, which I think is more relevant.

I agree that this article straddles the line, but like you point out, it's a big fuzzy line. I think it's best to just flag and move on.

"This kind of article completely fails the "of more interest to hackers than other people" test"

Au contraire, it's front page news at HN, and I don't see it enjoying such popularity at any other aggregator service. That does suggest it is, in fact, of more interest to hackers - or at least the HN variety - than other people.

Just getting something on the front page does not signify that it's hacker news. This article got there, for instance, and was subsequently killed:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=693525

From the welcome message:

"Stories on HN don't have to be about hacking, because good hackers aren't only interested in hacking, but they do have to be deeply interesting.

What does "deeply interesting" mean? It means stuff that teaches you about the world. A story about a robbery, for example, would probably not be deeply interesting. But if this robbery was a sign of some bigger, underlying trend, then perhaps it could be."

http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

I thought that this submission fell into that category. If you don't agree, well, OK.

(edited to remove personal reference)

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22not+hacker+news%22+site:ne...

yields "about 7,220 results" on Google

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