So what’s your solution?
November 21, 2015 8:43 PM   Subscribe

Professor of Mathematics Izabella Laba's "A Response to … " Scott Aaronson's "Words Will Do". An exchange between a mathematician and a computer scientist, on the use of terms including: privilege, hegemony, false consciousness, mansplaining, etc., and the general problem of clear communication, when the social sciences are applied towards political causes.

The reply by Isabella Laba (3073 words), Professor of Mathematics at the University of British Columbia:

Ban me from using words that are too complicated, or words that you do not like, and you’ll get metaphors. Take away those, and my sentences will get long and clunky to compensate for it. Put down any restriction you like, and I will try to find a way around it. But if you leave me no way out, you will be asking me to lie.

Take that example of the woman being lashed in Saudi Arabia for driving a car, from the original year-old comment I had quoted. No, we do not need theory to explain that the woman is treated unjustly and horribly. We need it to explain her oppressor.

Feminism is not a rigid doctrine or a unified front… We must learn from the mistakes of the young, naive Bolshevik recruits who went to fight for progress and did not believe that well-meaning people like themselves could do wrong.


The original opinion by Scott Aaronson (2380 words plus 243-comment discussion), Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT:

… as far as I can tell, the people who build complex intellectual edifices around words like “privilege” and “delegitimation” and “entitlement” and “marginalized” are very much the same sort of people who, a few generations ago, built similar edifices around “bourgeoisie” and “dialectical” and “false consciousness.” … And in both cases, the only thing that the impressive theoretical edifice ever seems to get used for, is to prove over and over that certain favored groups should get more power while disfavored ones should get less.

List of selected posts on Laba's blog, ranging over mathematics, academia, gender, and more.
posted by polymodus (111 comments total) 33 users marked this as a favorite
 
Let me rephrase that, he speaks in fallacies.
posted by Oyéah at 9:35 PM on November 21, 2015 [6 favorites]


I can see why he would dislike the word mansplaining.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 9:36 PM on November 21, 2015 [37 favorites]


A very eloquent response on the part of Laba. I particularly liked:
But if they were to tell me, as people often do, “come on, you must understand what he means, you’re just pretending that you don’t,” I must reply that the more I think about it, the more I’m aware of the limits of any such common understanding.
Been thinking about that for years, albeit not in the context of feminism. It is very difficult to talk about topics with people who do not have the underlying context, and she talks about that in a very accessible way, I think.

Aaronsen is just as horrid here as the last time he came up on Mefi. It's hard to read the bit about how 'disfavored groups should get less power' without remembering that he literally lamented on his blog about how women can now choose their own husbands.

Upon preview:
Let me rephrase that, he speaks in fallacies.

Reading his crap, I get the impression a straw man may have killed his parents or something, yeah.
posted by mordax at 9:38 PM on November 21, 2015 [32 favorites]


I mean I know why, but God, why does anyone give a shit what this blowhard has to say anymore? Why does he keep getting airtime?
posted by emptythought at 9:53 PM on November 21, 2015 [11 favorites]


Because unfortunately, too many people think that because he has insight into numbers means he has insight into sociology.
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:00 PM on November 21, 2015 [4 favorites]


I mean I know why, but God, why does anyone give a shit what this blowhard has to say anymore? Why does he keep getting airtime?

Because he's an accomplished computer scientist who, among other things, has started the Complexity Zoo for complexity classes (P and NP are well-known ones, but there are many others), writing Quantum Computing Since Democritus, and consistently writing interesting and informative blog posts about quantum computing.

Of course, when I search for him on Metafilter, I can only turn up his occasional posts about social justice, and the dismissive comments therein. This says more about MeFi's demographic than about Aaronson.

If y'all respect Izabella Laba enough to post and discuss her reply to Aaronson, respect him enough to not be this insulting. She was.
posted by Rangi at 10:01 PM on November 21, 2015 [20 favorites]


Of course, when I search for him on Metafilter, I can only turn up his occasional posts about social justice, and the dismissive comments therein. This says more about MeFi's demographic than about Aaronson.

I thought it said about him that he's prone to claiming expertise superior to that of actual experts in fields he knows nothing about.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 10:04 PM on November 21, 2015 [48 favorites]


If y'all respect Izabella Laba enough to post and discuss her reply to Aaronson, respect him enough to not be this insulting. She was.

At the same time, he's basically a marine biologist vehemently claiming he has a deep understand of how to build a space ship with warp drive, if people would just do this ONE OBVIOUS THING.

He's great at writing long, involved and technical rants about how he thinks he can engineer and mechanize social interaction and social justice but... I guess i just don't think that double whammy of "you can reduce it all to mechanics! it's simple see!" and playing ball way out of his court is worthy of that much respect?

Can you think of a single instance where someone reducing a social problem or interaction to some kind of if-then-it's-easy (which also conveniently includes rules for why you can't call them an asshole) wasn't deeply disrespectful to the people involved?

He's not only talking sideways, he can't approach this the way he is without saying the people involved who are already trying to solve this stuff are too dumb to science it up like he is.

It's like the ultimate final form of engineers disease.
posted by emptythought at 10:08 PM on November 21, 2015 [59 favorites]


Engineer's disease is a hell of a drug.

(Crap, should have previewed.)
posted by tonycpsu at 10:09 PM on November 21, 2015 [19 favorites]


If y'all respect Izabella Laba enough to post and discuss her reply to Aaronson, respect him enough to not be this insulting. She was.

I love CS theory so I have a lot of respect for the guy but he's blundering around pretty embarrassingly about this stuff.
posted by atoxyl at 10:47 PM on November 21, 2015 [6 favorites]


> Of course, when I search for him on Metafilter, I can only turn up his occasional posts about social justice, and the dismissive comments therein. This says more about MeFi's demographic than about Aaronson.

He's fucking tiresome. I am tired of Men Who Are Experts in This Area Over Here acting like it makes them experts in All The Things. I am tired of otherwise smart people being too fucking dumb to see where they are not actually very smart. I wish there were someone in his life he trusts enough to let take the shovel away from him.
posted by rtha at 10:49 PM on November 21, 2015 [55 favorites]


Of course, when I search for him on Metafilter, I can only turn up his occasional posts about social justice, and the dismissive comments therein. This says more about MeFi's demographic than about Aaronson.

I don't think it really says anything useful about MeFi's demographic. Social justice is a much broader topic than quantum computing or complexity theory--that is, broader in the sense of being personally relevant to more people. So of course it's going to be much more widely discussed. This says that MeFi is not primarily composed of computer scientists, software developers, etc. I don't think that's a surprise and I don't see any reason to consider that a bad (or a good) thing.

FWIW, I was a regular reader of Aaronson's blog until he started ranting about feminism. On that topic he is a blowhard, a crank even. It makes me feel intensely embarrassed for him.
posted by equalpants at 10:50 PM on November 21, 2015 [25 favorites]


Because he's an accomplished computer scientist who, among other things, has started the Complexity Zoo for complexity classes (P and NP are well-known ones, but there are many others), writing Quantum Computing Since Democritus, and consistently writing interesting and informative blog posts about quantum computing.

With all due respect, your attitude is part of the problem. It's great that Aaronsen has turned in important work, and whatever compensation and accolades he's gotten are, I'm sure, well-earned. No one here has accused him of not deserving those things.

However, that shouldn't give him a pass to be an asshole and not get called on it. His attitudes, and those of men like him are *directly harmful* to his field of study in that they discourage women and minorities from wanting to participate and contribute too. See, when Aaronsen talks out of his ass without pushback, that's a signal that maybe a woman should rethink getting into a program he's involved with. Maybe a POC guy should too. I know *I* would worry about the workplace environment around him.
posted by mordax at 10:50 PM on November 21, 2015 [77 favorites]


Or to go even further, I happen to think myself that the contemporary social whatever left tends to place more weight on certain concepts than they can actually bear. But to claim that "privilege" and "entitlement" are "recondite language" might as well be trolling. "Entitlement" isn't even jargon it's used to mean just that.
posted by atoxyl at 10:57 PM on November 21, 2015 [3 favorites]


When people talk about pointy-headed, weightless intellectuals jabbering on about nothing, this is the kind of thing they're talking about.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 11:01 PM on November 21, 2015 [5 favorites]


Aaronson is smart enough to know he's being dumb. However, like so many people when they find themselves with a surfeit of privilege, he doesn't really care.

This says more about MeFi's demographic than about Aaronson.

Does it say... that there are more women on MeFi than CS researchers? Because that doesn't seem too remarkable. And I say that as a female CS student.
posted by easter queen at 11:02 PM on November 21, 2015 [24 favorites]


Also I can really only read this horrible essay about one paragraph at a time, because it is so elementary and tedious and also sort of disgusting in that anyone is actually taking time and energy to respond to this kind of "but what if women just admitted that their problems aren't interesting to anyone else" kind of ignorance.
posted by easter queen at 11:07 PM on November 21, 2015 [10 favorites]


These sorts of episodes seem like the world's best argument against g. The sheer quantity of ideas he gets wrong about how words, people, power, institutions, social systems, etc, all work, is pretty impressive. Like, sub-freshman. But unfortunately most people who might disbelieve in a single grand IQ measure are probably also those who are already sympathetic to liberalism, while those who believe in g -- in the idea that a brilliant engineer is presumably a brilliant social thinker -- are more likely to subscribe to a unified hierarchy with smart white men at the top explaining how things work to the rest of us, and thus presumably agree with him. Hierarchical conservative authoritarianism -- the idea that there is one ladder of greatness, IQ, racial purity, biblical correctness, etc -- is a remarkably tough nut to crack. An aversion to intellectual complexity or change means that a lot of linguistic and social phenomena are going to look hopelessly messy and best avoided or eradicated. Convincing him that there's a good deal more to it than favored-group-wants-more-stuff is pretty hard when that would mean him starting a massive intellectual project from scratch, with none of the respect and clout he's come to rely on. I'd say our time was better spent ignoring him, if it wasn't for all the younger CS and other types reading him who are in fact still willing to take on massive new intellectual projects from scratch. But we better start brainwashing them now, before the gunk becomes waterproof.
posted by chortly at 11:18 PM on November 21, 2015 [15 favorites]


Yes, in fact, he claims to think the social sciences are much harder than the hard sciences. And yet he so completely fails to engage with them meaningfully on any level. Like, any level. Even a quantitative level.
posted by easter queen at 11:20 PM on November 21, 2015 [6 favorites]


He manages to dismiss Freud and Marx as "pretentious charlatans" along the way.
posted by demiurge at 11:23 PM on November 21, 2015 [9 favorites]


literally lamented on his blog about how women can now choose their own husbands.

He did not literally say that.

Anyway I was also struck by the thing about Marx because once again - off all the things you could legitimately criticize Marx for and you're going to lazily try to blame him for Stalin? Am I being uncharitable?
posted by atoxyl at 11:33 PM on November 21, 2015 [4 favorites]


Also for some reason people who feel offended that not everyone wants to hear a CS genius's opinions on gender studies DO NOT actually also want to hear a gender studies expert ramble on and on for pages about computer science! Imagine that!

That should be the punishment, I say.
posted by easter queen at 11:33 PM on November 21, 2015 [17 favorites]


They're both mathematicians, and they both write very clearly and eloquently, and they agreed on many points. I think it's pretty embarrassing to criticize, at the very least, honest and clear writing with a drive-by paragraph littered with swear words and vitriol.
posted by esprit de l'escalier at 11:41 PM on November 21, 2015 [8 favorites]


I wasn't implying that Laba was a gender theorist. I'm saying, when they're looking for insight on a complicated computer science problem, why don't they consult a gender theorist? Perhaps even a dismissive gender theorist with little or no experience in computer science?

If there's a good reason they would not be interested in a gender theorist's opinions until he or she was actually immersed in some kind of computer science training... well, then vice versa. It's possible to be clear and honest and also quite ignorant and insulting.

I also don't think it's embarrassing at all to be upset or offended by the continual re-airing of this guy's sexist dirty laundry.
posted by easter queen at 11:50 PM on November 21, 2015 [6 favorites]


He manages to dismiss Freud and Marx as "pretentious charlatans" along the way.

Well, you know. Even a stopped clock.
posted by AdamCSnider at 11:54 PM on November 21, 2015 [6 favorites]


They're both mathematicians, and they both write very clearly and eloquently, and they agreed on many points.

To me it seems clear that they agree on some points (and I wouldn't even say "many") only because Laba is being very generous and making a point of visibly agreeing with Aaronson's least questionable, most tautological arguments (e.g. "jargon is impenetrable to outsiders"). Standard practice for opening a conversation with a hostile person who's otherwise likely to stick their fingers in their ears and walk away. She seems to genuinely want to educate him, which is very kind and hopefully not wasted effort.

P.S. Ain't nothing wrong with swear words either.
posted by equalpants at 12:13 AM on November 22, 2015 [23 favorites]


I thought Ben Carson's campaign had finally debunked the idea "I know one thing, therefore I know everything!" But no, apparently Scott Aaronson and his cheerleaders either think Carson really does know everything, or they were unable to generalize the lesson.
posted by the agents of KAOS at 12:56 AM on November 22, 2015 [6 favorites]


Laba says something I don't follow here when rebutting the "bell curve" argument for male over-representation in senior mathematical roles:
The bell curve is symmetric about its mean value. This means that the two extremes should be about equidistant from the mean. In other words, the average person’s mathematical ability should be exactly halfway between the two extremes, or equivalently, the average person should have one half of the mathematical ability of the very best mathematicians at the level of, say, the Fields Medal or Abel Prize. [...]
There are lots of problems with the bell curve argument, some of which she mentions, but I think she's fundamentally misdescribing what a bell curve is and what mathematical ability would have to mean. For instance, if you group a homogeneous group of people (same sex, race, etc.) by height you might find that the number of people who fit into each group (say, the ones between 4' 11½" and 5'½"; the ones between 5'½"and 5' 1½", etc.) formed an approximate bell curve. None the less, you wouldn't expect the people in the middle to be twice as tall as the shortest, or the tallest to be twice as tall as the middle.

To the extent that the bell curve argument makes sense when applied to abilities, you would conjure up some sort of implicit "height ability" and say that the tallest people have as much more "height ability" over the middle group of people, as the middle group have over the shortest group. Not twice as much - it might be measured at 110 vs 100 – but the extra height bestowed by that level of "ability" could mean the difference between being a great basketballer and a merely competent one. Similarly, Summers and Pinker would say that a small amount of extra "maths ability" means the difference between being able to do algebra, or being able to do the very abstruse stuff that mathematicians are paid to do (but refuse to explain properly (not that I am bitter.))

This bell curve argument doesn't seem incoherent to me, or at least not incoherent in the way Laba means, but maybe I misunderstood her. Because of the other reasons she gives, I think it's a stupid argument, but this particular bit of her rebuttal confused me.
posted by Joe in Australia at 1:01 AM on November 22, 2015 [4 favorites]


Aaronson's arguments about language are truly strange. He holds up Shakespeare and John Stewart Mill as examples of people who wrote about ordinary human problems using ordinary language--and Shakespeare created a huge number of words to suit his purposes and Mill made up words like "utilitarianism" which don't exactly roll off the tongue.

Aaronson also makes the strange mistake of equating thinking obsessively about something with thinking deeply about something. Just because he is stuck swimming in the shallow end doesn't mean that the rest of us can't go off the diving board.
posted by colfax at 1:26 AM on November 22, 2015 [33 favorites]


As a computer scientist Aaronson should know that often you need a specialized language to effective discuss complex ideas with other people across time and space. For example, this is the second paragraph from a recent blog post that Aaronson wrote:
While some people like to make it more complicated, the Bell inequality is the following statement. Alice and Bob are cooperating with each other to win a certain game (the “CHSH game“) with the highest possible probability. They can agree on a strategy and share information and particles in advance, but then they can’t communicate once the game starts. Alice gets a uniform random bit x, and Bob gets a uniform random bit y (independent of x). Their goal is to output bits, a and b respectively, such that a XOR b = x AND y: in other words, such that a and b are different if and only if x and y are both 1. The Bell inequality says that, in any universe that satisfies the property of local realism, no matter which strategy they use, Alice and Bob can win the game at most 75% of the time (for example, by always outputting a=b=0).
Imagine if Aaronson criticism was applied to his own text above.

Also, I agree that Laba is being very very generous and patient with Aaronson in a way that he probably will never be. It must be exhausting to have the same trite discussions over and over again, especially when the other person lacks a basic understanding of the topic.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 1:28 AM on November 22, 2015 [6 favorites]


I agree with you, Foci, but I think it's not about lacking a basic understanding but in fact refusing to have a basic understanding. I think this is because, setting aside his absolutist stances (e.g. on Marxism) and general terribleness, his disagreement hinges on one basic (and to me, obvious) fallacy:
Was I racist or sexist or homophobic to someone? Then that can be explained easily...
Can it? Can it really? Or do humans have all sorts of cognitive biases that blind them to their own missteps? I mean, even a computer scientist should know enough (and agree enough with) basic psychology (or cognitive science, or history...) to understand that humans are really really good at rationalizing and really really bad at being rational calculators of fact.

This is the crux of wrongness in Aaronson's argument. His entire train of logic rests on the claim that pointing out social problems is straightforward. That's not true, it's never been true, and—ha, ha—it's fairly straightforward to see that. But convincing someone of that falsity is hard. Not all racism is KKK terrorism. Subtle sexist mental bias has been found in experiment. Homo- and trans-phobia manifest in nuanced networks varying from outright violence to social slights that one may find tough to understand in isolation but that make a clear and real difference in aggregate. Some of these issues are complex and therefore require time and learning to understand.

(Also, calling privilege an "empirically-empty notion" is monumentally stupid. I mean, wow. Of all the terms he could whine about, he picks the one that can be expressed (at least partially) in dollars and statements of historical fact? As mordax pointed out upthread, he seems to prefer fighting straw-man counterexamples to engaging with even the most basic of nuance. This example specifically was that a suicidal college man can't have privilege over a group of happy college girls, to which I say: come on, dude.)
posted by daveliepmann at 2:01 AM on November 22, 2015 [17 favorites]


The dismissal's of Freud and Marx are just so nuts. Clearly he has never read either in detail and has no understanding of the huge influence they exert over actual accepted theory today in both realms. Would Keynes General Theory have come about without Marx and Quesnay?

Even Aaronson's cited criticism of Freud is absurd - he cites Freud and hypnosis, and yet this is a criticism Freud himself would admit! - Freud only ever dabbled in hypnosis in his early years and dismissed it later on. In comparison Freud's writings on sexuality however seem so amazingly close to our thoughts about it today.

Its telling that he holds up Steven Pinker (a very controversial figure) as bringing "true knowledge" of "human nature" to the human sciences.
posted by mary8nne at 4:05 AM on November 22, 2015 [16 favorites]


I find the language of this thread quite sad. Most people seem to be focusing on insulting Scott. He is a "blowhard", an "asshole", a "pointy-headed, weightless intellectual", and "smart enough to know he is being dumb". Well, fine, I am sure you will get a few internet favourites for saying so - but I don't think we need another place on the internet where we compete to act antagonistically to convince each other that the world is full of enemies who are stupider and less agreeable than ourselves.

I think the point of posting something like this to metafilter should, (I hope) not be about giving us an excuse to insult someone who we think is wrong about something and thereby get that intoxicating feeling of "I was right and they were wrong and everyone saw me" (and for anyone who has tried to read Quantum Computing since Democritus - I admit the idea of feeling in anyway intellectually superior to Scott has to be an intoxicating one - that is a serious brainfuck of a book).

Hopefully, if you read both articles together I think there is a seed of empathy and hope there. The story of this post should be the story of the dialogue between Scott and Izabella and the truth-seeking impulse there (even if truth is not always found) in both. I think a dialogue like this should make us more humble and more optimistic about the future of equality and help us emphasize with and understand the anxieties and positions of both posters.

p.s Its a bit of a strange derailment of the thread to launch into an anti-science rant about why you don't believe in IQ as a valid concept. You seem to be fighting against a strawman just like Scott! If you want to understand IQ as it is actually used as a valuable concept I would recommend this book by Stuart Ritchie as a good remedy.
posted by Another Fine Product From The Nonsense Factory at 4:16 AM on November 22, 2015 [7 favorites]


What would you say
If I took
Those words away
Then you couldn't
Make things new,
Just by saying
"I love you"
More than words,
More than words
posted by ennui.bz at 4:48 AM on November 22, 2015 [5 favorites]


Hopefully, if you read both articles together I think there is a seed of empathy and hope there. The story of this post should be the story of the dialogue between Scott and Izabella and the truth-seeking impulse there (even if truth is not always found) in both.

That's really, really unfairly charitable to Scott, and-

p.s Its a bit of a strange derailment of the thread to launch into an anti-science rant about why you don't believe in IQ as a valid concept.

-oh, okay, yeah, nevermind.
posted by Pope Guilty at 4:51 AM on November 22, 2015 [4 favorites]


Or maybe he's saying stupid shit and people are pointing that out correctly. I don't know him from Adam and I don't understand computer science in the slightest, but the gibberish he's spouting here is moronic. I gain no special benefit from "feeling intellectually superior to Scott" because I've never heard of him before. But I can tell you that he's talking out of his ass here.
posted by Scattercat at 4:53 AM on November 22, 2015 [16 favorites]


Well, fine, I am sure you will get a few internet favourites for saying so - but I don't think we need another place on the internet where we compete to act antagonistically to convince each other that the world is full of enemies who are stupider and less agreeable than ourselves.

Yeah! Why is everyone being so mean to -
You’ll need a sophisticated framework, for example, to prove that even if two adults both insist they’re consenting to a relationship, really they might not be, because of power structures in the wider society that your superior insight lets you see.
Wait, what the Hell? What even is this? I do not even recognize this straw man.
posted by running order squabble fest at 5:01 AM on November 22, 2015 [9 favorites]


The story of this post should be the story of the dialogue between Scott and Izabella and the truth-seeking impulse there (even if truth is not always found) in both.

Well, it already is. We have a woman who, instead of applying herself to her own work, is taking the time to try and explain to a man holding forth loudly on topics that he clearly does not understand to any great depth why he is wrong (and doing it in a way that is gentle enough that it won't provoke a more dangerous outburst). This is an old old script which I am sure that the man in question, so blinded by his own privilege that he thinks he can deny the concept of privilege with no pushback, will learn nothing from it.

Aaronson's great at CS, but his only role outside that field is apparently to be a near comic opera exemplar of a stereotype of the clueless male STEM practitioner.
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:15 AM on November 22, 2015 [39 favorites]


Wow, those were both great essays, much better and more thought provoking than I expected from the comments here. I am a physicist and have been a fan of Aaronson for making quantum computing a little more understandable, but haven't read his blog regularly enough to have noticed any issues in terms of his social positions. But he really is pretty good about using regular words, even in technical contexts, whenever possible. I appreciate that, because I also am nearly always on the side of familiar language over jargon, in any context, including physics and mathematics.

However, The result is that papers and reports (and e-mails!) I write have a tendency to be about 4x longer than those of most of my colleagues, with the result that a lot of my colleagues sigh heavily and roll their eyes discreetly when they get them. But I find that I think more clearly when I force myself to unpack the dense concepts I am arguing about, and things tend to get bigger when they stay just as weighty while getting less dense.

Being a nerd, I tend to think about the issue in terms of Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra. If I could assume that fellow Star Trek nerds were the only people reading this, I could just say that (wouldn't even need the hyperlink) and move on to the next point. But not everyone has seen that episode of Star Trek... It's about an alien race that communicates entirely in references and metaphors, such that the "universal translator" can't make sense of what they're saying. You have to know the stories.

Jargon is like that, in every field. If we've both read the same papers about quantum optics, I can refer to entangled photons being in a "high NOON state" and you'll know what I mean. (You'll also know what "entangled" and "photons" mean.) On the other hand, if we haven't, I have the choice of giving you a capsule summary of the concepts or giving you a hyperlink or a footnote so that you can read this whole other thing in order to be able to understand my thing, or accepting that I'm limiting my audience to people who have already read this other thing (people who already know the story of Darmak and Jalad at Tanagra.)

I'm usually in favor of the capsule summary... But look how long this comment is getting already! I bet a bunch of people have tl;dr'd out of it three paragraphs ago. (And how many people not on MeFi know what tl;dr means?)

Anyway, I disagree with Scott that social justice issues need jargon less than other fields, because I think the literature on social justice issues is rich enough to be worth referencing and building on. Precisely because, as he says, so many people spend so much time thinking about it, and so many great writers have written so much about it. I can refer to "invisible backpacks" and "easy mode" and "privilege" to establish very quickly what I'm talking about, here on MeFi. "You read that invisible backpack essay right? Well, I think this scenario is like the examples in that essay, and here is why I think they're similar..."

But I also agree with him that I shouldn't do that unless I am very confident that most or preferably all of my audience really has read that essay and knows what I mean. Otherwise it's just obscurantism. And obscurantism really is dangerous. It makes it possible to replace communication with shibboleths and secret handshakes. It makes it possible to use language itself as a tool to keep others down, keep them out of the club.

So I go on writing super long comments and e-mails and reports, in the interests of inclusion and not making people feel stupid and making sure I understand my own underlying assumptions... and irritating everybody who already got my references because why can't I just get the the frickin' point already? Jargon can be a force for evil, but more often it's just a force for brevity. And that tension between wanting to be clear and wanting to be brief is exactly the same in the social sciences as in any other field.
posted by OnceUponATime at 5:19 AM on November 22, 2015 [23 favorites]


Oh, hold on... is that about men no longer being able to proposition their female students/junior employees with quite such impunity? If so, that's a _really odd_ place to throw it in.

I mean, the rest is the usual Rebecca Watson/Tim Hunt/Adria Richards/Matt Taylor stuff - and the day white dudes stop using "lynching" to describe women or people of color being mean to white dudes, while skipping blithely away from the subsequent years-long harassment and threatening of those women and people of color is basically the day the universe experiences heat death. But that's a new one on me.
posted by running order squabble fest at 5:29 AM on November 22, 2015 [6 favorites]


I appreciate that, because I also am nearly always on the side of familiar language over jargon, in any context, including physics and mathematics.

UH OH! YOU HAVE USED NON-PERMITTED WORDS (APPRECIATE, FAMILIAR, LANGUAGE, JARGON, CONTEXT, INCLUDING, PHYSICS, MATHEMATICS).
posted by effbot at 5:31 AM on November 22, 2015 [4 favorites]


Basically Aaronson seems to be expressing an opinion about writing style. It's like Orwell's essay about politics and the English language. Lana seems sympathetic to this point. She links to Nahisi-Coates saying he'd rather stop writing than use the phrase "white privilege," not because he thinks there is no white privilege but because he finds it rhetorically ineffective. This is a generally interesting topic and everyone knows academics are often bad at writing and that it would be better if they weren't.

But Aaronson's clumsy, pompous and uneducated way of talking about this gives credence to a paranoid notion that "the feminists" and "the gender theorists" and wide swathes of progressive thinkers are purposely obscurantist and impossible to understand and only writing to please their small circle of academic comrades. It's all over the comments: "thanks for saying what so many of us don't dare say" and so on. He also just doesn't seem interested in understanding the stuff he's criticizing. Instead he just dismisses all of it, vaguely and widely, and in an accusatory way.

If he's serious about helping the causes whose rhetoric he criticizes, he needs to step up and study and contribute. Now he's just whining unconstructively and encouraging others to dismiss entire fields of important study. At least he could hold up some of what he considers good writing.
posted by mbrock at 5:38 AM on November 22, 2015 [19 favorites]


Aaronsen is just as horrid here as the last time he came up on Mefi. It's hard to read the bit about how 'disfavored groups should get less power' without remembering that he literally lamented on his blog about how women can now choose their own husbands.

I’m continuously amazed and/or depressed at the way some people on here are absolutely determined to put the most tendentious possible interpretation on people’s words. This isn’t what he wrote & you know it, but you don’t like the guy & so apparently it’s perfectly fine to claim that he wrote something that’s sort of related to what he wrote but much, much worse. Naturally when challenged, you’ll claim that they’re the same thing really, because you know that’s what he really meant in his heart because you know he’s a bad person, just like the last time around.

We should do better than this.
posted by pharm at 5:51 AM on November 22, 2015 [8 favorites]


What Joe in Australia said. Its clear that Laba doesn't even understand the normal distribution...
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 6:18 AM on November 22, 2015


And

p.s Its a bit of a strange derailment of the thread to launch into an anti-science rant about why you don't believe in IQ as a valid concept.

Its not anti-science to critique scientific concepts. In fact, its scientific to do so! and saying it anti-scientific to do so is actually literally anti-science!
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 6:21 AM on November 22, 2015 [9 favorites]


Hopefully, if you read both articles together I think there is a seed of empathy and hope there. The story of this post should be the story of the dialogue between Scott and Izabella and the truth-seeking impulse there (even if truth is not always found) in both. I think a dialogue like this should make us more humble and more optimistic about the future of equality and help us emphasize with and understand the anxieties and positions of both posters.

I also really enjoyed reading these two articles, for the same reasons you've expressed here so eloquently.
posted by Meatbomb at 6:27 AM on November 22, 2015 [3 favorites]


Laba doesn't even understand the normal distribution.

IQ is often measured in "standard deviations" (which makes sense given that the mean itself is constantly changing, such that it has to be re-normed to 100 every few years.) The Larry Summers quote in that posts talks about IQ in terms of standard deviations. I think her statement makes sense if your units of measure are standard deviations above some lowest bin. The average person is indeed half way between the dumbest and brightest segments of the population on a bell curve.
posted by OnceUponATime at 6:32 AM on November 22, 2015


But that's a completely different claim than,

"the average person should have one half of the mathematical ability of the very best mathematicians at the level of the Fields Medal..."
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 6:42 AM on November 22, 2015


So anyway I actually do political science and this bit

In politics and social sciences, over an enormous swath of academia (including in the West), it would’ve been: Marx, Engels, Trotsky, Lenin.

Is completely, ludicrously, over-the-top wrong. Laughably, could have been corrected in thirty seconds by actually asking someone, pants on your face wrong. The actual answer is that there can't be a consensus answer because of how PSC is put together as a more or less random assemblage of "other fields when they're discussing politics," but in American politics the answers might have been the Michigan crew or VO Key or, for fun and not consensus at all, Bill Riker.

Similarly, the idea that academic economists in the US would have given Marx et al as a consensus is so wrong as to be point-and-laugh crazy. I am not an economist and can't say who might be consensus candidates, but obvious candidates include (after they'd done their work) Nash, Selten, Samuelson, Coase, Friedman, Arrow, and Sen.

So...

At the same time, he's basically a marine biologist vehemently claiming he has a deep understand of how to build a space ship with warp drive, if people would just do this ONE OBVIOUS THING.

Yeah, that.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 6:45 AM on November 22, 2015 [27 favorites]


I know and like and talk math with both people in this discussion. I'm glad the discussion exists and I think it's valuable. I don't really want to wade into this thread except I can promise you with 100% certainty Izabella knows what the normal distribution is.
posted by escabeche at 7:09 AM on November 22, 2015 [31 favorites]


OK, a little more: Izabella's blog is great and has a small fraction of the readership of Scott's (what can I say, quantum computing is a hotter topic than harmonic analysis, there's no justice) so here's a few of my favorite posts of hers:

The Complexities of Communism What it was like to grow up in the Eastern Bloc, and how that compares to the popular idea of "Communism" as deployed in contemporary US/Canada politics.

Why I'm Not On Math OverFlow Why is Math OverFlow, a popular math Q&A site for researchers, much more male-dominated than the math profession as a whole?

On commenting, conversations, and epijournals How open-source, transparent, and democratic do we actually want assessment of math research to be?
posted by escabeche at 7:22 AM on November 22, 2015 [24 favorites]


You’ll need a sophisticated framework, for example, to prove that even if two adults both insist they’re consenting to a relationship, really they might not be, because of power structures in the wider society that your superior insight lets you see. [Aaronson]

Let me try to shed light on this using really short words.

Is there anyone here who thinks a nubile coed can speak frankly to a randy prof and say "Ick -- you're older than my dad and the thought of fucking you makes me queasy" without fear that he'll take revenge on her, even if all he does to put her down is frown every time someone mentions her name?

How can negotiations about sex and dating be free and consensual when a professor has significant discretionary power over the student's grade and recommendations? (And why isn't this topic discussed as frankly and crassly as I described it. Whose feelings are we working very very hard to accomodate?)
posted by puddledork at 7:38 AM on November 22, 2015 [31 favorites]


There are feminists who agree on the goals, but disagree on the methods. There are those who disagree on the goals as well. There are always those who are in it for career opportunities. I’m with those who want to learn. If I need to read a literary essay in order to do that, fine. If I need to read an academic paper in sociology and learn some vocabulary in the process, I’ll do that, too. We must learn from the mistakes of the young, naive Bolshevik recruits who went to fight for progress and did not believe that well-meaning people like themselves could do wrong. We must learn if we are not to repeat their mistakes.

I really like this a lot. Good essay.

I largely agree with her reasoned defense of conceptual terminology. I think the problem of conceptual language is that, as it seeps out of an academic setting and into popular use/discourse, it is often misunderstood and misapplied to the point where it is no longer conceptually useful, or at least no longer conceptually clear. Also, there's a tendency to treat conceptual words as hermetic truths rather than as imperfect and necessarily incomplete representations of complex ideas. Laba gets that but seems to believe, and I would agree, that dispensing the baby with the bathwater isn't the answer to the problems of conceptual language.
posted by echocollate at 7:52 AM on November 22, 2015 [6 favorites]


Hopefully, if you read both articles together I think there is a seed of empathy and hope there. The story of this post should be the story of the dialogue between Scott and Izabella and the truth-seeking impulse there (even if truth is not always found) in both. I think a dialogue like this should make us more humble and more optimistic about the future of equality and help us emphasize with and understand the anxieties and positions of both posters.

Well.

One thing to note here is another statement in Laba's piece:
We can try to escape the vocabulary, but we can’t escape the syntax. Women, especially, are rarely allowed to speak in simple declarative sentences. It took two years of legal campaigning to get Canada to admit, in 1929, the simple declarative fact that women are persons. We must hedge, tack, curtsy at every figure, wary that if we don’t then our next turn might end on the outside of a closed door. Our truths have to crawl out from under the stones first, uncoil a little bit, veer this way and that to avoid the stick.
And, indeed, a passing mention earlier in her post:
Still, I have no desire to hide (as some have suggested) behind Twitter’s 140-character limit and avoid making my case at more length.
As soon as she dares to disagree with her betters, she will be attacked - and those attacks will range across her competence (normal distribution!), her character, her motivation, her courage and so on. She has to adopt this respectful tone, regardless of her feelings, if she wants to avoid being written off as an angry feminist by the gatekeepers of her profession, and endlessly criticised by angry dudes on social media. Even then it probably won't work, but it will hopefully keep down the numbers somewhat.

So, the tone argument is, if not valid, certainly something that a woman in Laba's situation is going to need to take into account.

Regarding the truth-seeking impulse - well, it pains me to disappoint, but here's Aaronson at the beginning of this year:
The first concession is that, as Laurie Penny maintained, my problems weren’t caused by feminism, but rather by the Patriarchy. One thing I’ve learned these last few days is that, as many people use it, the notion of “Patriarchy” is sufficiently elastic as to encompass almost anything about the relations between the sexes that is, or has ever been, bad or messed up—regardless of who benefits, who’s hurt, or who instigated it. So if you tell such a person that your problem was not caused by the Patriarchy, it’s as if you’ve told a pious person that a certain evil wasn’t the Devil’s handiwork: the person has trouble even parsing what you said, since within her framework, “evil” and “Devil-caused” are close to synonymous. If you want to be understood, far better just to agree that it was Beelzebub and be done with it. This might sound facetious, but it’s really not: I believe in the principle of always adopting the other side’s terms of reference, whenever doing so will facilitate understanding and not sacrifice what actually matters to you.

Smash the Patriarchy!

The second concession is that, all my life, I’ve benefited from male privilege, white privilege, and straight privilege. I would only add that, for some time, I was about as miserable as it’s possible for a person to be, so that in an instant, I would’ve traded all three privileges for the privilege of not being miserable. And if, as some suggested, there are many women, blacks, and gays who would’ve gladly accepted the other side of that trade—well then, so much the better for all of us, I guess. “Privilege” simply struck me as a pompous, cumbersome way to describe such situations: why not just say that person A’s life stinks in this way, and person B’s stinks in that way? If they’re not actively bothering each other, then why do we also need to spread person A’s stink over to person B and vice versa, by claiming they’re each “privileged” by not having the other one’s?

However, I now understand why so many people became so attached to that word: if I won’t use it, they think it means I think that sexism, racism, and homophobia don’t exist, rather than just that I think people fixated on a really bad way to talk about these problems.
These are presented as "concessions", but they are of course simply insults. This tone continues in his characterisation of Laba as speaking "derisively" - anyone wishing to form their own opinion on how derisive she was can read the tweets here.

As near as I can tell, this is not indicative of an interest in seeking truth - in the intervening near-year no further consideration, internal or external, appears to have taken place. Instead, it seems, women are being forced to explain these things over and over again, without speaking "derisively" (i.e. contradicting or using upsetting concepts or terminology). Eventually, they will get exhausted and either give up - at which point we can all carry on as before - or get snippy, at which point one can pantomime outrage at how angry and mean they are being, and get reassurance from one's supporters that they are clearly irrational. Those supporters may also decide to take the fight to them in professional or other arenas.

It's a technique by now achingly familiar, and I don't think at this point that there is much need to deliver a reciprocal pantomime of the assumption of good faith when it is spun up.

Aaronson does not need to be deploying this tactic maliciously, or even intentionally. That's the beauty of it - he can benefit from the readiness of angry dudes on the Internet to harass women who contradict him into silence without even knowing it happens. Which, conveniently, is a really good argument for the utility of terms such as "entitlement" and "privilege".
posted by running order squabble fest at 8:24 AM on November 22, 2015 [52 favorites]


except I can promise you with 100% certainty Izabella knows what the normal distribution is.

Yeah, there's something uncomfortably odd about multiple people in this thread suggesting that this person doesn't understand the normal distribution and therefore we can dismiss her ideas.
posted by advil at 8:25 AM on November 22, 2015 [21 favorites]


So anyway I actually do political science and this bit

In politics and social sciences, over an enormous swath of academia (including in the West), it would’ve been: Marx, Engels, Trotsky, Lenin.

Is completely, ludicrously, over-the-top wrong.


Yeah, the most obvious stupidity of engineers pronouncing that entire fields of social science are bunk is usually this jaw-dropping assumption that they basically know what, say, sociologists have been up to for the past 50 years and then immediately demonstrating that they have absolutely no idea. Aaronson's is pretty solidly making that mistake all over the place.
posted by straight at 8:49 AM on November 22, 2015 [9 favorites]


Yeah, there's something uncomfortably odd about multiple people in this thread suggesting that this person doesn't understand the normal distribution and therefore we can dismiss her ideas.

Oh come on. No one said that we should dismiss her ideas. You frankly, made that up. Joe in Australia rightfull criticized this rebuttal when he said, "None the less, you wouldn't expect the people in the middle to be twice as tall as the shortest, or the tallest to be twice as tall as the middle." Which is what her argument implies. Are we not allowed to critique this? Smart people who know stuff make mistakes all the time, should we not criticize her for making those mistakes? Keep in mind this is engaging with her actual argument. Which should be prized.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 8:51 AM on November 22, 2015


And to add I should have qualified my original statement by saying she doesn't understand how the normal distrubtion works when applied to actual social phenomena which is not uncommon among engineers, mathetmaticians, etc. When one tool used in abtract terrain and is also used in actual social analysis, experts of the abstract often misapply them. I know this because I read a lot of economics.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 8:53 AM on November 22, 2015


What Joe in Australia said. Its clear that Laba doesn't even understand the normal distribution...
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 9:18 AM on November 22 [+] [!]


Not sure what else you're implying here.
posted by advil at 8:54 AM on November 22, 2015 [7 favorites]


Privilege is a relatively simple and quite useful construct that a lay person can understand the basic contours of in minutes. What I think Aaronson is trying to deny is not the concept of privilege, but the higher-level analysis that's facilitated by viewing group privilege as something to be explicitly dealt with independent of the observable conditions of the individuals involved. That seems to be what he's saying in his original comment that started this exchange:
If men are doing horrific things to women—for example, lashing them for driving cars, like in Saudi Arabia—then surely we can just say so in plain language. Stipulating that the torturers are “exercising their male privilege” with every lash adds nothing to anyone’s understanding of the evil.
This isn't the example I'd choose to illustrate privilege, but even from this provocative example, Aaronson's contention that the concept adds nothing to our understanding is simply false. Why should we focus only on the fact that someone's doing a horrific thing without thinking about the historical context for how they were put in a position to do that horrific thing without any repercussions? The whole point of the invisible knapsack metaphor is that certain groups carry advantages with them they may not even be aware of, but help them immensely throughout their lives. How is the ability to drive without facing the business end of a whip not an advantage, or, dare I say, a privilege?

If you dismiss the concept of privilege, then it's easy to look at the holder of the whip and the society that established the state that put the whip-holder in that position as cartoonishly evil individuals, instead of as, at least in part, products of the societies that they were raised in, whose path in life was constrained in ways they as individuals had nothing to do with. Trying to phrase everything in terms of discrete actions taken by individual actors without controlling for group dynamics and historical context may lead to a simpler model, but this is one of those cases where a simplified model leads to a loss of fidelity. If my choices are a bit more complex model that looks at privilege as a real thing (even if we can't see it under a microscope) or a simpler model that views humans as finite state automata, I'll choose the former.

Imagine how Aaronson would respond if someone came into his comments section and insisted that "multiplication" was too jargon-y when "repeated addition" will do. He'd rightly insist that multiplication is a different thing than repeated addition, even though in some situations the two can be thought of as equivalent. But somehow, he can't possibly accept that "privilege" is more than merely a rhetorical shorthand for people treating other people badly? Please.
posted by tonycpsu at 9:39 AM on November 22, 2015 [26 favorites]


On one level, this post bugs me, because Aaronson is so obviously on the wrong side of MeFi consensus (I think he's wrong too!), and it's both predictable and unseemly to watch folks line up to take a whack at the piñata.

But I'm grateful for the introduction to Laba's blog. One often hears that a specialist's opinion on a matter outside their specialty is of no value. Laba puts the lie to this fallacy by engaging with social issues and other fields as a mathematician and arriving at lucid insights that only a mathematician would have. For example, this post explaining the abuse of bell curves has at its core the observation that a distribution may be approximately Gaussian in "the middle to moderate extreme range", where most of the mass is, but may be something else entirely out on the tails. This is the kind of thing mathematicians know in their bones -- the most basic example of a sequence that approaches a bell curve, namely the binomial coefficients, does not in fact have Gaussian tails -- but how many of the people who use bell curves to talk about IQ, math ability, etc. have given this much thought?

Those who are saying that Laba is being "generous" or "patient" with Aaronson, it sounds like you are claiming her for your own point of view. Do you think that as she typed her rebuttal, she was secretly thinking "This guy has a bad case of engineer's disease but I'm going to be too nice to say so?" I doubt it, because (1) she's probably been accused of engineer's disease herself and recognizes the fallacy, and (2) she doesn't mince words elsewhere on her blog. Why not just take her at her word that she finds Aaronson worth responding to, and possibly finds more to respect about his argument than you do?
posted by aws17576 at 9:52 AM on November 22, 2015 [7 favorites]


@puddledork - I don't think the situation you describe is one where both parties consider it consensual.

What you describe is awful, but I don't think it addresses the essay. Which is discussing a different scenario altogether
posted by askmehow at 9:59 AM on November 22, 2015


Aaronson's problem with "privilege" is obvious to me. He talks about it from the standpoint of literal meaning but his real issue is that it makes him feel guilty. He wants to make it clear that his life sucks too, only different. He's a victim of privilege and wants victim's rights.
posted by Obscure Reference at 10:08 AM on November 22, 2015 [14 favorites]


One often hears that a specialist's opinion on a matter outside their specialty is of no value.

Really? I don't hear this, and I certainly don't say this. A specialist's opinion outside their specialty cannot rely on their standing within their specialty for authority, that's all. Aaronson is welcome to make all the ill-considered, non-researched, and ridiculously wrong statements about areas outside of computing all he wants, but those arguments will be taken on their own thin merits; he doesn't get to hide behind his specialty when people who actually know something about those areas say "you are not even Freshmen 101 wrong" and dismiss him out of hand. It's kind of the flip side of the way that we are supposed to take a cause seriously because a celebrity does -- their ability to act or sing or whatever does not say anything about the seriousness of their analysis of a social or medical problem; what is important is their engagement in that social or medical area, how well they've done research, and so on.

Engineer's disease is invoked often because it's a real thing you see when you deal with engineers. It doesn't come up with every engineer and it's not limited to engineers, but, then, you can get tennis elbow even if you've never played tennis.
posted by GenjiandProust at 10:11 AM on November 22, 2015 [11 favorites]


I don't find it predictable or unseemly at all to watch people complain about Aaronson's argument (which is pernicious and gross, and perhaps he should carry himself with more dignity instead of expecting everyone else to accommodate him). However, I think Aaronson's argument itself is certainly predictable and unseemly. Very embarrassing to make such an ass of yourself, but predictable indeed.

I'm not sure why exactly people are so disgusted by disgust with this discursive temper tantrum that is frankly taking up too much of any woman's time, if she spends any time engaging with it at all. Is there something less disgusting about posting an article about someone's deep misunderstanding of computers or technology, and all the geeks of MeFi lining up to take a whack? I get the feeling that that's ok because someone who is wrong about technical matters is most definitely wrong-- and you can see this would have such great impact on our society, the wrongness about computers, or bridges, or television sets, or what have you-- but whining incessantly about how women aren't wiping your ass enough is just vaguely, subjectively wrong, and couldn't possibly have far-ranging effects in aggregate on women and society. Oh no. Not even if you're a professor and an authority in a field which has a pretty serious diversity problem.

I'm starting to get this really annoying "teach both sides of the controversy" vibe from MeFi which I can't account for (except as backlash) and it's a little frustrating at this time of year, with the American election season getting into gear. Mainly it's someone posting that they are offended or hurt by the content of something and everyone lining up to take a whack at how that person is wrong for being offended, or how their offense is offensive. And this is somehow more fair and balanced.
posted by easter queen at 10:19 AM on November 22, 2015 [17 favorites]


Also, I'm pretty amused by those lining up to defend Aaronson's totally misinformed view of social science, and then the next shift casting aspersions on Laba's understanding of mathematics. Men: experts on everything, by birth! Women: don't so much know anything, even their field of expertise.
posted by easter queen at 10:22 AM on November 22, 2015 [22 favorites]


Also, the tired free speech business at the end of Aaronson's post is the point, I think -- he falls in with the (male) internet voices who want the freedom to say what they want without restriction, including the freedom of others to say what they like about those opinions. It's the same kind of thinking that values the "right" to make rape and death threats over the right to not be threatened with rape and death.

A significant effect of the "plain language" Aaronson espouses would be removing any overarching theory of privilege and oppression (oh no, that jargon!) and reduce every oppressive interaction to anecdotes that can be explained away or disregarded. Breaking down collective action on the part of the oppressed is one of the go-to tools of privilege, after all.
posted by GenjiandProust at 10:26 AM on November 22, 2015 [20 favorites]


Also, I'm pretty amused by those lining up to defend Aaronson's...

If, by "amused" you mean "ready to bang my head on the keyboard in weary annoyance," I am with you.
posted by GenjiandProust at 10:29 AM on November 22, 2015 [7 favorites]


I've just realized why I keep conflating the Scotts Aaronson and Alexander, despite being wrong in very different ways: They're both most (and frequently) informative to me when described by a writer as something like "thoughtful" or "deeply insightful." This gives me the information that I can stop treating that writer as a serious person.
posted by PMdixon at 10:38 AM on November 22, 2015


What you describe is awful, but I don't think it addresses the essay. Which is discussing a different scenario altogether

So I guess my question is what is this different scenario? When he says:
You’ll need a sophisticated framework, for example, to prove that even if two adults both insist they’re consenting to a relationship, really they might not be, because of power structures in the wider society that your superior insight lets you see.
What is he talking about, if it isn't relationships between students and professors? Like puddledork, that was the first option I came to - there are, on reflection, others, but they seem even ickier. Clearly Aaronson thought this was important enough to put front and center in his set of examples of the iniquities of politically correct terminology, but what is it?
posted by running order squabble fest at 10:59 AM on November 22, 2015 [4 favorites]


You’ll need a sophisticated framework, for example, to prove that even if two adults both insist they’re consenting to a relationship, really they might not be, because of power structures in the wider society that your superior insight lets you see.

Wait, what the Hell? What even is this? I do not even recognize this straw man.


I read this as a reference to the radfem concept "all heterosexual sex is rape, because in a patriarchy there can be no such thing as uncoerced female consent", a bogeyman which has an outsized traction in male anti-feminism relative to its marginal presence in feminist theory of any wave.
posted by Errant at 11:03 AM on November 22, 2015 [6 favorites]


A significant effect of the "plain language" Aaronson espouses would be removing any overarching theory of privilege and oppression (oh no, that jargon!) and reduce every oppressive interaction to anecdotes that can be explained away or disregarded. Breaking down collective action on the part of the oppressed is one of the go-to tools of privilege, after all.

This is exactly what I was trying to formulate-- those "confusing" and "alienating" terms are supposedly exclusionary jargon because they are pressure points of accumulated knowledge. When I learned them, as a woman, I wasn't angered and confused and left out-- I was relieved, amazed, grateful that others had thought about these issues that impacted my life in so many ways and had already understood and analyzed them to the point that there was a terminology, so I didn't have to explain myself from square one every time. It was implicitly saying, "there are words for this, you're not crazy, it exists. You don't have to write a mathematical proof that women are people every time you want to talk about harassment, or exclusion, or pain. You can have a 201 conversation. You need to have that conversation!" In fact, as someone pointed out above, having those terms allows people to actually critique them-- to engage and try to improve our understanding. It is complicated. It is. How could it not be?

I mean, is it better to teach our children about the five senses, or make them reconstitute everything accomplished by empiricists before them?

Take away those words, and I'm back to explaining "women are people, and we get the short end of the stick," over and over and over again. And men like Aaronson can just say, "nah," even though they've demonstrated they have no qualifications for understanding. He's right in that without any repository of shared knowledge, we are implicitly on the same level when it comes to understanding my own experience. So if you don't believe there is a power imbalance between men and women, of course you'd say what Aaronson does. But there absolutely is a real, demonstrable power difference. It can be shown-- not with a proof, but with statistics, with dollar amounts, etc. You can't hand wave that away... but Aaronson basically does, by treating it as irrelevant to the conversation.

There was recently an FPP about child abuse in Australia and how the people who give opinions in court have absolutely no training or understanding in child psychology or abuse, and thus they end up giving abused children to their abusers and claiming that the non-abusive parent (the mother in these instances) is abusive by claiming abuse. That's how dangerous it can be to claim that "jargon" and "special language" around socially important concepts is unnecessary. There is real knowledge that can be gained from studying even loosey-goosey concepts like child psychology. Real harm can be prevented or undone. You could try to understand the field without any use of special language or jargon whatsoever, but... why? You need to study the field to understand it. It's not transparent. The jargon assists in that understanding. Claiming that jargon is unnecessary to me reads as "studying this is unnecessary, and I should be able to sound like I have without having done any work."

That's not the reason jargon exists. Jargon is a side effect of doing that work and trying to aggregate knowledge. Of course it needs to exist-- it's so obvious.

I understand the argument that social justice needs to be inherently more accessible by virtue of the fact that more people should understand it, but just because there is special language doesn't mean you can't communicate in different terms (people do-- see many theorists, activists, posters during protests, etc.). And it doesn't mean that the jargony language isn't helpful, just because you can't jump into an advanced conversation without having done your homework.

... which Aaronson clearly sees as the only bar for all social science. That's why this conversation exists and why it is frustrating.

Now I have my own CS research to do, actually, so I'm going to go do that and quit diluting my value on this obvious answer to Aaronson's problems.
posted by easter queen at 11:04 AM on November 22, 2015 [24 favorites]


I also believe that the social sciences are harder—way harder—than math or physics or CS. They’re harder because of the tenuousness of the correlations...
Also, he seems to be implying that all knowledge is "correlations" which is frightfully naive, especially for a computer scientist interested in quantum computers. I bet he believes that brains *are* objectively "quantum computers" of some sort, rather than "quantum computer" being a concept employed by human brains. Which is a real-life philosophical problem.

but,
Evolutionary psychology, heuristics and biases, reciprocal altruism, and countless other developments likewise strike me as intellectual progress within the sciences of human nature.
Forget naive positivism, the barely concealed misogyny or the delusion that communism dominates the academic social "sciences" this is the real "record scratch" moment in the essay: evolutionary psychology? Really? It's exactly the sort of academic scientism which would appeal to someone who is looking for attractive clothes to dress his preconceptions.

The bottom-line is: scratch a "neoliberal" or a libertarian and you'll find someone who believes their position in society (or future position that they aspire to) will have been the result of some objective natural ordering. They'll buy just about any claptrap which puts them in their rightful place at the top of that ordering.
posted by ennui.bz at 11:07 AM on November 22, 2015 [18 favorites]


See also: the lesbian continuum; Adrienne Rich's "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" (full text).
posted by Errant at 11:08 AM on November 22, 2015 [1 favorite]


Re: the "all heterosexual sex is rape" thing, yeah, and that's another area where actually reading Dworkin would lead you to a more nuanced and engagement worthy understanding of her claim, even if you didn't agree with it (though it's hard not to agree with the subtext, which is that women have lacked sexual agency to varying degrees throughout time for many compelling reasons). It's a little painful to see someone claim such a revolutionary understanding but not understanding that two people can consent to sex, but one of them does so from a position of power and one from a position of disempowerment, and it's complicated. And "experts" disagree. But it's worth talking about.

It should be trivial for him to imagine being coerced into having sex he doesn't want to have for extra-sexual reasons, but I guess a lot of men don't understand that without being drawn a picture a few times.

You’ll need a sophisticated framework, for example, to prove that even if two adults both insist they’re consenting to a relationship, really they might not be, because of power structures in the wider society that your superior insight lets you see.

puddledork's insight was amazing here: sometimes the jargon even serves to save men's feelings!
posted by easter queen at 11:08 AM on November 22, 2015 [7 favorites]


Plus, from Wikipedia (not exactly inaccessible): "Intercourse (1987) is a radical feminist analysis of sexual intercourse in literature and society, written by Andrea Dworkin. Intercourse is often said to argue that "all heterosexual sex is rape", based on the line from the book that says "violation is a synonym for intercourse." However, Dworkin has denied this interpretation, stating, "What I think is that sex must not put women in a subordinate position. It must be reciprocal and not an act of aggression from a man looking only to satisfy himself. That's my point."

Duhhhhhh.

And oh god, to claim all political/social science is Marx and Freud, who are charlatans, and to totally ignore any of the quant analysis around any of these problems, and then to say EVO PSYCH is the gold standard...

I run out of benefit of the doubt to extend.
posted by easter queen at 11:10 AM on November 22, 2015 [8 favorites]


Also, I'm pretty amused by those lining up to defend Aaronson's totally misinformed view of social science, and then the next shift casting aspersions on Laba's understanding of mathematics.

Who did this?
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 11:26 AM on November 22, 2015


Check out advil's comments above (she points it out).
posted by easter queen at 11:27 AM on November 22, 2015 [1 favorite]


And advil refers to my comment, which I admitted was wrong because it was unqualified. I also never mentioned Aaronson or defended him or his position, so your characterization could not have applied to me.

Joe in Australia critiqued her argument about the bell curve and mathematical ability, but he too did not defend Aaronson. So again it could not have applied to him.

I simply do not see anyone defending Aaronson and then casting aspersion's on Laba's understanding of mathematics.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 11:33 AM on November 22, 2015


Other people have said many insightful things above about this specific case, but I just wanted to add this: in my experience as a woman in math, the phenomenon of well-meaning mathematicians avoiding the language (and ideas) of academic feminism is nearly universal--even among the men whom I would call the best allies! Even among the men who are constantly asking women how the department can be a better place! It is so sad to me when the men asking me these questions invariably appear uncomfortable when they hear suggestions any more theoretical or radical than “give undergraduate women more support.” (And as others have pointed out above, it's not that mathematicians are just generally uncomfortable with accepting theory as useful. I mean, come on guys, just as there's more to algebraic geometry than describing zero sets of polynomials over C, there's more to supporting women than trying to make sure they feel comfortable asking questions in class....)

And it's deeply frustrating, because you don't want to make these men uncomfortable, because they are the "good guys," and you don't want to seem too radical and not collegial enough or whatever, but on the other hand, after experiencing this long enough, you start to get a feeling that their goals for the field of mathematics and your goals for the field of mathematics aren't so well-aligned after all.
posted by bergamot and vetiver at 11:47 AM on November 22, 2015 [14 favorites]


I’m continuously amazed and/or depressed at the way some people on here are absolutely determined to put the most tendentious possible interpretation on people’s words. This isn’t what he wrote & you know it, but you don’t like the guy & so apparently it’s perfectly fine to claim that he wrote something that’s sort of related to what he wrote but much, much worse. Naturally when challenged, you’ll claim that they’re the same thing really, because you know that’s what he really meant in his heart because you know he’s a bad person, just like the last time around.

Every thread, same old crap. You aren't 'challenging' me. You are tiring me.

He wrote that he wished he lived in an earlier time, when he would've been handed a wife without actually having to navigate relationships. That was not an isolated thing taken out of context, or a joke: his attitudes about women are very unfortunate, and it is a recurring theme plain to anyone who has actually looked. He does not respect the choices they make or seek to understand them, he merely complains about them and the effect those choices have on *him*.

Reading it charitably, he's a lonely but unintentional creep, and if he spoke to me like that in a private conversation, I could very well be inclined to take pity on him and try to help. We're all only human, and I assume he has redeeming features. I might try to gently get him on a better path if he had the good grace to keep this off a public forum.

The problem that you fail to understand, and the reason he deserves my scorn, (and yeah, he deserves way worse than what I said), is that he did not. He did this in public. He is a figure in a position of authority where the shit that comes out of his mouth does, indeed, have broader implications and is given undue weight. People listen. People point to it. People emulate it. He normalizes these attitudes, and it is not unintentional - he knows he has a platform and is attempting to use it to sway people to his point of view.

Yes, that makes him a bad person. I don't care what's in his heart, I care about his public stance. And yes, the implications of the shit that comes out of his mouth are as unpleasant as I make them out to be, and your failure to perceive that in no way makes it untrue.

This comes back to the same point that I made before, wherein him speaking this way with a lack of pushback is, in fact, harmful not only to random people, but harmful to his field of study, because it speaks to a culture where not every potential contributor would feel welcome and safe. We all know what guys like him are like. We've all had to deal with them. We've all heard the same tone policing crap about how we need to tackle it nicely.

I am saying - in my infinitesimally small way - that this is bullshit, and we can go ahead and say that. I am attempting to normalize that we shouldn't coddle those attitudes. The more of us say it, the better it is. And again, I'm only talking about his unfortunate attitudes about women. I'm perfectly willing to take for granted that he is good at his actual field of study, and am in no way challenging his credentials or accomplishments there. I'm neither in a position to do so, nor do I believe it is relevant here.

More than that, I am not saying it for Aaronsen. I would never bother. I know that no one can reach him with anything he doesn't want to hear: not Laba, with her eloquence and grace. Not me, with my very real, and very appropriate disdain. That's what's wrong with him in the first place, and how this keeps happening. He doesn't *have* to listen, and he does not *choose* to listen, and he is using the tools at his disposal to try and make sure things stay that way. (You may peruse the rest of the thread for more detailed discussions of what is wrong with what he said this time.)

What I'm saying is for the benefit of everyone who has to listen to his shit, whether they're weighing it for what they should do, or simply tired from it.

Your characterization that I am being unfair is beneath consideration. His words can do real harm, I object to that strenuously, and your failure to address that portion of my argument while claiming I'm being awful and disingenuous is a lazy swipe, not an argument.

Now, I'm stepping away because listening to the pathetic tone arguments offered in his defense makes me upset, and if I haven't made my point by now, I plainly wasn't going to.
posted by mordax at 11:51 AM on November 22, 2015 [37 favorites]


Also, I'm pretty amused by those lining up to defend Aaronson's totally misinformed view of social science, and then the next shift casting aspersions on Laba's understanding of mathematics.

I said one wave came in to defend Aaronson, and the next shift came in to denigrate Laba's mathematics. I did not say the two groups were the same. But the cumulative effect is very familiar.
posted by easter queen at 11:53 AM on November 22, 2015 [6 favorites]


so "those" are not one person but two different people. got it.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 11:55 AM on November 22, 2015


I simply do not see anyone defending Aaronson and then casting aspersion's on Laba's understanding of mathematics.

OK - teachable moment!

Let's assume good faith. So, MisantropicPainforest, when you said:

Its clear that Laba doesn't even understand the normal distribution...

You didn't mean that it was clear that Laba doesn't even understand the normal distribution. Because that would be an absurd thing to say, right? What kind of person would try to undermine a professor of mathematics that way? So, let's take it as read that what you actually meant was:

[...] she doesn't understand how the normal distrubtion works when applied to actual social phenomena which is not uncommon among engineers, mathetmaticians, etc.

So, the problem here is that, in reality, people do indeed try to undermine women all the time with claims that they do not have the first idea about their areas of specialism. Laba actually mentions Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian in her blogpost. Angry dudes on the Internet have been maniacally trying to prove that Quinn knows nothing about video games or narrative design (and by extension has slept her way into her roles as a narrative designer), and by the same token that Sarkeesian knows nothing about video games and is as such unqualified to offer a critique, feminist or otherwise. This is part of a sustained campaign to try to destroy their credibility and their careers.

And let's also assume - in good faith - that you genuinely do not see how seeking to undermine a woman critiquing Aaronson (for example by arguing that she is not competent in her own discipline) would often be done with the intent to defend Aaronson. You and Joe In Australia just happened by and noticed a failing in her mathematics that needed to be pointed out, absolutely independent of the larger issue. Also fine.

So, who should you be unhappy with at this point? Is it the people who read "Its clear that Laba doesn't even understand the normal distribution" and thought that you mean that it was clear to you that Laba didn't understand the normal distribution, or is it the tendency to tear down women who dare to speak out by any means necessary, including accusations of incompetence in their field of expertise?
posted by running order squabble fest at 11:55 AM on November 22, 2015 [12 favorites]


You and Joe In Australia just happened by and noticed a failing in her mathematics that needed to be pointed out, absolutely independent of the larger issue. Also fine.

Keep in mind that this only applies to my original misstated and dumb comment that I later qualified. I don't think it applies to what Joe in Australia wrote, and if you go back and re-read it its pretty clear what he's getting at and doesn't have anything to do with mathematics.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 12:13 PM on November 22, 2015 [1 favorite]


Yeah, I'm not actually angry at the people who pointed out what they thought were flaws in Laba's mathematics. It's tangential, maybe, but it's a thing. But to come into this thread and hear people say that we should give Aaronson the benefit of the doubt no matter what qualifications he most surely lacks, and then hear that Laba's math is probably totally wrong, I don't know, I mean not totally wrong but you should have, again, realized what I meant, women have to say exactly what they mean but men can just generalize and speak wildly without expertise...

(This is a summarization of the thread, not of one person's comment.)

I mean, it happened just now. Someone took issue with what you actually said: "Laba doesn't even understand the normal distribution." But we were supposed to know what you really meant, especially since calling someone a sexist is the worst thing you can do (worse than sexism). Then I actually did say what I meant-- that there was a weird two-pronged thing in this thread that was really disheartening. But because I wasn't given the benefit of the doubt, I had to defend myself. From you. The person who assumes he will have the benefit of the doubt when he says "Laba doesn't even understand the normal distribution."

It's just tiring. And this is all a subthread in a larger thread about how women and feminists are the worst. I've barely started my day and I feel like I need a nap.

I'm categorically not saying we should just allow people to be blatantly wrong because it's unimportant, but I am saying that how we phrase our objections says a lot about the assumptions we have going in. And we place a much higher burden of clarity and proof on women/feminists, because we assume they're... wrong. Unconsciously and consciously.

It also says something about priorities.

I have a feeling this comment will be perceived as an attack because I didn't sidestep and mince words enough, but it's not intended to be. It's just how I experienced this conversation, and most conversations about these topics on Metafilter. I'm not accusing anyone of anything worse than unconscious expectations they've developed based on how they're usually treated.

If I could ask a genie for a wish it would just be to have people extend women and feminists the same benefit of the doubt that they do men. When a woman says something is offensive-- instead of getting angry, trying to understand. And when a woman says something polysemic, giving her the benefit of the doubt and trying to engage, in good faith, since she's clearly put thought and time into her comments. And being receptive to looking at trends in communication at large and acknowledge that while you don't hate women, you might be unintentionally contributing to an environment that is hostile to what women say but invites male bloviating wherever it may happen.

Accusing a female mathematician of not understanding mathematics, even accidentally, in a thread about how women are making persecution up and actually have all the privilege and should have less space to complain about their issues, etc... it is just terribly predictable, even if it isn't intentionally anti-woman.

Actually, the whole point is that this stuff is complicated precisely because it is often unintentional. We often don't know our own minds or realize what is making us act. This should be obvious-- when we read, we don't inspect each word in a granular way, we automatically interpret meanings and synthesize and making highly complex calculations of meaning without consciously doing so. It doesn't seem unlikely that with brains like this, we sometimes unintentionally contribute to making things shittier for other people. Even if we're essentially good people. That's precisely why feminists work inside language.
posted by easter queen at 12:15 PM on November 22, 2015 [23 favorites]


The person who assumes he will have the benefit of the doubt when he says "Laba doesn't even understand the normal distribution."

News to me.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 12:21 PM on November 22, 2015


Keep in mind that this only applies to my original misstated and dumb comment that I later qualified.

By your own admission, you made a statement that, with a plain and neutral reading, said the precise thing you said nobody was saying. You then, only after calling others out for burning straw men, added some commentary that could charitably be read as a clarification, or uncharitably read as retconning. Given that it was your error and subsequent call out that started this derail, could you perhaps drop the straw man accusation? Someone did in fact say the thing you said nobody said, and that person was you. Your clarification doesn't un-say what you said, it only clarifies it, and the discussion has for the most part moved on past the point where we need to identify precisely how many people were attacking Laba's understanding of her own discipline.
posted by tonycpsu at 12:23 PM on November 22, 2015 [10 favorites]


If the sample space is a linear scale of 0% mathematical skill to 100% mathematical skill, then those in the middle at 50% mathematical skill are not only the same distance from each end, but also half as skilled as those with 100% mathematical skill.

While this does not hold when the bottom end of the scale is anything other than 0; and while one may debate whether a 0-100%, linear, univariate scale with bell curve distribution accurately models mathematical abilities in the relevant population; context clues seem to me to fairly directly indicate that Laba was invoking this model in the quote in question. Though I haven't rtfa yet.
posted by eviemath at 1:21 PM on November 22, 2015 [6 favorites]


Aaronson also makes the strange mistake of equating thinking obsessively about something with thinking deeply about something. Just because he is stuck swimming in the shallow end doesn't mean that the rest of us can't go off the diving board.

This is an extremely common nerdy dude belief(fallacy?), which is probably part of the reason he has so many ardent supporters. Questioning it would mean questioning their own beliefs and actions, which is of course hard and way too big of an ask. Nah, it's the other person who must be wrong duhhh

As soon as she dares to disagree with her betters, she will be attacked - and those attacks will range across her competence (normal distribution!), her character, her motivation, her courage and so on. She has to adopt this respectful tone, regardless of her feelings, if she wants to avoid being written off as an angry feminist by the gatekeepers of her profession, and endlessly criticised by angry dudes on social media. Even then it probably won't work, but it will hopefully keep down the numbers somewhat.

I got interrupted while writing my previous post and decided it stood well enough on its own, but I had started to get in to this.

Basically if she gets angry then she can be dismissed and is obviously being irrational as far as the peanut gallery is concerned. But when it's approached this way, it supports the crappy ~both sides of the controversy~ narrative, rather than Aaronson constructing a situation in which even the least bad option forced her to legitimize his crappy approach here. This is not a value neutral or "balanced" action. It's the equivalent to pinning several important pieces in a chess game(ugh, there I am doing the nerdy dude chess thing sorry).

He is playing a very mean and unfair game here and that needs to be recognized. This response is not polite because this monocle and tea pontificating, this is the only "acceptable" way to engage and it's quite fraught.

Shit, I often catch myself rolling my eyes and going "really?" at some angry responses to bullshit like this before I interrogate it more. But she gave it way more than it deserved as far as niceness went and even here Is getting picked on. See how the game is played?

He basically threadshitted the internet.
posted by emptythought at 1:29 PM on November 22, 2015 [15 favorites]


mordax: I am not making a tone argument: I just think you’re wrong.
posted by pharm at 1:37 PM on November 22, 2015 [1 favorite]



If the sample space is a linear scale of 0% mathematical skill to 100% mathematical skill, then those in the middle at 50% mathematical skill are not only the same distance from each end, but also half as skilled as those with 100% mathematical skill.

The sample space of a normal distribution is unbounded, so it was a ridiculous thing for her to say. Even the idea of "double the mathematical skill" suggests wrongly that linear relationships are meaningful for latent variables that can be transformed arbitrarily.
posted by esprit de l'escalier at 1:37 PM on November 22, 2015 [1 favorite]


You do know Aaronson said some pretty blatantly idiotic shit too, right? More power to you if you want to critique the math, here, but uh then I think you pretty much have to admit Aaronson is like that mathematical mistake on speed.

MisantropicPainforest, if that's your whole response to my comment then you don't seem to really give a shit, so noted.
posted by easter queen at 1:54 PM on November 22, 2015 [5 favorites]


Mordax and pharm talked about a previous post where Aaronson talked about marriage in earlier times. They characterized it very differently. I think this is the comment they're both referring to.
posted by ntk at 1:54 PM on November 22, 2015 [2 favorites]


Fuck the normal distribution, seriously. If that is the only point on which you feel competent to enter this discussion, then you're not competent to do so and we'd all be better off without your contribution.
posted by the agents of KAOS at 1:56 PM on November 22, 2015 [11 favorites]


I feel like someone should defend her math on mathematical grounds here, not just "stop picking on her!" (Though I do wish people would stop picking on her.)

So I will. Her statement makes sense if you assume 1) She's imagining a histogram with a finite dataset rather than a mathematically perfect normal distribution (actually this is of the point of the post, which is not the subject of this FPP, that real datasets aren't symmetrical and don't extend infinitely on each side.) 2) the units of measure are "standard deviations above the lowest value (or bin)" 3) the lowest bin defines a skill level of zero (this jibes with the graph she shows with the label "we cut off the curve here because it corresponds to zero math ability.) This kind of an arbitrary choice of zero because obviously every human has more math ability than, say, a rock. But the Fahrenheit scale has an arbitrary zero too, and it's still useful.

Also I think IQ tests are bullshit, but that's not really what this thread is about.
posted by OnceUponATime at 2:00 PM on November 22, 2015 [8 favorites]


I keep trying to read Aaronson's incredibly long rambles about this shit but they all boil down to "I believe in feminism but women are doing it wrong, and it's crazy to say that a straight male nerd could be sexist to a woman because having confusing sexual desires is the worst thing that can happen to a person."

OnceUponATime, I thought the math was already addressed above, but thanks. But even if you disagree with Lada's math, the point still remains that Aaronson's post is essentially like a monkey at a typewriter. He doesn't even try to engage with Lada.
posted by easter queen at 2:04 PM on November 22, 2015 [4 favorites]


Mod note: At this point let's just really drop that whole "but the normal distribution" thing entirely. Should have been dropped a while ago, if anything.
posted by cortex (staff) at 2:06 PM on November 22, 2015 [8 favorites]


He doesn't even try to engage with Lada.

Yeah, that is very noticeable. She wrote a very lengthy and honest response, and his one-paragraph update is mainly about his problems rendering her web page in his browser.
posted by running order squabble fest at 2:26 PM on November 22, 2015 [17 favorites]


I didn't comment on this when I saw it last night, as it was likely to get me all angried-up before bedtime, but I kind of wish I had. As a feminist in CS (in fact, just defended my thesis last week—just call me Doctor Traveler! Except don't, that's confusing and pretentious) it's right up my alley. In fact this was the post that made me realize “that quantum complexity guy” and “that self-righteous Shtetl guy” are the same guy. This was a conversation I would have liked to have been in earlier. Among other things, I could have tried to nip in the bud a derail about a 100%-math-correct statement Laba made.

I like the analogy about Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra, especially because it illustrates a problem here: Darmok's strategy (not technically his name, I forget the alien captain's real name, everyone calls him "Darmok") only worked because both he and Picard are diplomats, willing to work, to risk even life, to understand their counterpart. Can you imagine Darmok and Gul Dukat at Tanagra? Dukat is intelligent, true, but he's also arrogant and single-minded. In fact now that I think on it, I believe there was an episode of Dukat and Sisko forced to work together to survive some wilderness and it revealed a few things about Dukat's approach to cooperation, too.

Point is, I don't belive Aaronson has, yet, extended nearly as much good faith as Laba has, nor has it been nearly as much as is necessary to have a true seeking-understanding conversation here.

In his original essay, all his examples of areas where he “graciously” allows psychology to use jargons aren't psychology at all, they're statistics (heteroskedasticity) or neuroanatomy (anterior cingulate cortex). And they aren't any more necessary than other jargon, either—instead of “heteroskedastic” one could say “when throwing a ball, my precision is worse when I throw farther”. Why not grant that psychology qua psychology needs its jargon? We'd have a fine mess trying to sort out the difference between “positive vs. negative reinforcement” and “reinforcement vs. punishment” without those terms, and that's just basic Skinnerian stuff, who I mention because he did.

I could go on, at (considerable) length. But Aaronson's writing on this stuff is not just flawed, it's not just that I disagree with it, it's that his views are to the humanities what a creationist's are to evolution. It is not only seemly but an intellectual responsibility to knock his views down hard, one way or another, because his wrongness is as severe as, say, Ben Carson's; and given his esteem and reputation the potential for that wrongness to do real harm to real people is manifest.
posted by traveler_ at 10:45 PM on November 22, 2015 [27 favorites]


You’ll need a sophisticated framework, for example, to prove that even if two adults both insist they’re consenting to a relationship, really they might not be, because of power structures in the wider society that your superior insight lets you see.
What is he talking about, if it isn't relationships between students and professors? Like puddledork, that was the first option I came to - there are, on reflection, others, but they seem even ickier. Clearly Aaronson thought this was important enough to put front and center in his set of examples of the iniquities of politically correct terminology, but what is it?


The only logic I can make of this is basically equivalent to "The halting problem cannot be solved generally. Therefore we cannot determine whether 'int main[]{print "Hello World"; return 0;}' will halt.
posted by PMdixon at 2:31 AM on November 23, 2015 [7 favorites]


I can agree with Aaronson up to a certain point; language can be used as a cudgel to intimidate or beat down your opponents in any setting. Some subjects, such as the physical sciences require a highly technical vocabulary and style to speak precisely enough to be understood. Some subjects may not require the same level of complexity, but assume it nonetheless as it confers a legitimacy onto them (e.g. a good sign you're being introduced to a conspiracy theory or a cult, is if all of their material is needlessly stylistically derivative of a more legitimate source, such as the bible or an academic journal. A superficial appeal to authority if you will.)

On the other hand, it seems very convenient that the offender which needs to be taken down in a blog post is the set of concepts which push back at the author's privileges. Scott should have had a moment of introspection when he wrote the words "because politics and ideology and the scientist’s own biases place such powerful thumbs on the scale" rather than ploughing on regardless.
posted by Ned G at 9:11 AM on November 23, 2015 [1 favorite]


It is beyond depressing to see, in 2015, a thread in which a bunch of men angrily berate people who're criticizing the guy who said a jerk thing. I just read this whole thread and I'm not even sure why, seeing as 3-4 comments in I knew enough to replicate the rest of it in its entirety.

It's depressing to me because we have posters here who, repeatedly and at great effort, attempt to clarify why this is important, why Aaronson's words are frustrating, why people aren't willing to see this as a conversation between two equals. Why these issues are important. Why people who think they're participating in a discussion are acting to drive away other participants. And then those posters get responses that are identically conversation-stifling, identically ignorant, identically exhausting.

It's depressing because we have people who would like us to respect the extent to which Aaronson is emotionally involved in his arguments, the intelligence which he brings to the table, the time he puts into saying what he has to say—and then those same people refuse to acknowledge the intelligence and the effort and the emotional involvement of anybody else who jumps into the conversation.

It's depressing to me because, by demanding that we respect Aaronson's contribution, people are attempting to set the terms of this conversation despite not really being participants. They are demanding that people within it adhere to certain "standards" that exist for arbitrary reasons and along fundamentally uneven axes.

It's depressing because we've had this discussion before, a hundred time, yet people still feel the need to come in and mansplain about why the word "privilege" sucks—even as dozens of people talk about what a tremendously good and useful term it is for this kind of conversation. It's depressing because it means watching people dismiss as "jargon" all the terms that make easy communication about this subject possible.

For that matter, it's depressing to hear people angrily demand that we read thousands of words written by a guy who doesn't know the first thing about what he's talking about, then turn around and refuse to learn a few basic terms that would make this conversation not only easier but unnecessary to hold.

Above all, it's depressing because this is yet another reflection of a situation in which one group of people makes life harder and more frustrating and more tiresome for another group of people, then refuses to take responsibility for having done so. It's a wholly unnecessary series of cruddy, awful behaviors, imposed upon people who are refused the chance to even talk back without accepting a series of rules that are themselves unnecessary but for the fact that the group inflicting all the harm has chosen to inflict these rules as well. Not that following the rules guarantees you any measure of success; Laba wrote 3,000 very carefully-chosen words, and to what end? Who benefitted? To listen to some people in this thread, the beautiful thing here is that "a conversation started", never mind that this is a "conversation" in the sense that a game of Mother, May I? is a democracy.

If you're wondering why so many people respond to Aaronson's words with anger, disrespect, and dismissal, look at your own behaviors and ask why people might get tired of pretending like they respect your input here. Civility doesn't work when it's used on somebody so convinced he and his intellect are so high-and-mighty that the only conversation left to be had involves his setting somebody else straight. Anger and mockery and disrespect are sometimes the clearest way of communicating to somebody that maybe it's them, and not you, who ought to feel like he's less than an equal participant in a given discussion.
posted by rorgy at 9:11 AM on November 23, 2015 [14 favorites]


The later part of the discussion on Aaronson's blog, incidentally, becomes an argument about modern art with Aaronson taking a position I believe could be reasonably fairly stated as, "My kid could draw it, so it ain't art."

He really does not approach any discussion with anything close to respect for opposing views, does he?
posted by kyrademon at 9:16 AM on November 23, 2015 [11 favorites]


He really does not approach any discussion with anything close to respect for opposing views, does he?

No, which is why the repeated calls for comity towards him are so offensive.
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:27 AM on November 23, 2015 [9 favorites]


Some subjects, such as the physical sciences require a highly technical vocabulary and style to speak precisely enough to be understood.

Yes, it would be impossible to explain things like general relativity using a non-technical vocabulary.

Obviously you can't do high level research using a basic vocabulary -- in physical or social sciences.
posted by jeather at 9:35 AM on November 23, 2015 [1 favorite]


Obviously you can't do high level research using a basic vocabulary -- in physical or social sciences.

I agree with that. I don't think the xkcd thing is a particularly useful example in a discussion about academic vocabularies though, I mean yes, you can say some things using simple language (so maybe it's my fault for being too imprecise with language in my original comment!)
posted by Ned G at 10:14 AM on November 23, 2015


Above all, it's depressing because this is yet another reflection of a situation in which one group of people makes life harder and more frustrating and more tiresome for another group of people, then refuses to take responsibility for having done so.

I agree with your point, I was just going to sidle up to it very delicately. (I can be delicate, even if I wasn't earlier.)

I tend to think that people who were advocating upthread that we be nicer to Aaronson were most likely people who are fond of Aaronson, who read his blog and who relate to him, who readily empathize with him. And the people who agree with him the most may be the people who are most like him in age, race, gender, educational status, religion, etc. (This is my theory and I didn't click through to commenter's profiles.)

We comprehend better the things that align with our own experiences. We 'feel for' people who feel like us in some way.

It's fairly easy to admire and agree with people who say the things we feel, the things that are consistent with our experience. In a country where white men have most of the positions of power and leadership, those leaders tend to understand and prefer and 'give a sympathetic hearing' to the messages that come from people similar to them. There is a huge difficulty is getting a message communicated across and experience gap. When one group has proportionately too much power and influence, other groups disproportionately have too little. "Being taken more seriously" is a major privilege that white men have in US culture. Being hard to understand by the powerful is a dis-privilege for non-white, non-male people in the US.

(I wish I had said this in a less abstract way. But the polysyllables blunt the harshness.)
posted by puddledork at 11:15 AM on November 23, 2015 [4 favorites]


I tend to think that people who were advocating upthread that we be nicer to Aaronson were most likely people who are fond of Aaronson, who read his blog and who relate to him, who readily empathize with him. And the people who agree with him the most may be the people who are most like him in age, race, gender, educational status, religion, etc.

I agree, but at the same time, it doesn't mean that we should give credence to the requests. The problem is that "civility" is too often used to quash speech that the person doesn't like:

The origin on this conversation, of course, is the video of angry Yale students confronting Christakis. My own first reaction to that video is to very ardently wish the students were being more civil. The reason for this reaction obviously isn’t an ideological, abstract commitment to civility, but instead because I can more easily place myself in Christakis’s position, which is an unpleasant thing to contemplate. But that’s not a good reason to double down on that gut reaction, reaching for a set of arguments about the proper bounds of civil discourse to adorn and bolster it as something more than an identity-driven gut reaction. There are some very good reasons to resist the temptation to double down on that reaction, one of which is that I simply have no idea what it’s like to be part of an institution and a community that is simultaneously and constantly openly sending both the message that you’re a valued member of the community and belong here, and (usually less openly and directly) that you’re not, and you don’t. The less capacity for empathy I have, the less it makes sense for me to sit in judgement of the proper ratio of civility to anger in the response.
posted by NoxAeternum at 12:21 PM on November 23, 2015


"I could go on, at (considerable) length. But Aaronson's writing on this stuff is not just flawed, it's not just that I disagree with it, it's that his views are to the humanities what a creationist's are to evolution."

My first thought when reading Aaronson's post was, "Finally, a man has proved that feminism weighs the same as a duck!"

I do note that at least in other posts, he claims to have read a great deal of the people he's criticizing, notably Freud, Marx and Dworkin. To some extent this, to me, illuminates the deficiencies in the autodidactic approach — I had many classmates with similar takes on Marx, and they were able to ask their stupid questions of an expert professor, and most of them revised their views. Left alone, I have no doubt that many of them would have persisted in offering stupid opinions on the works. I do note that autodidacts and lone geniuses have made significant contributions to e.g. math — I wonder if one requirement for success in understanding social sciences is to actually be social enough to engage with other people. In any event, to the extent that CS is a field based on rigorous logic, Aaronson has demonstrated an appallingly poor grasp of rhetorical logic.

It seems like Aaronson is caught in the double bind of not knowing what he doesn't know and being contemptuous of those that do know it.

(As for his earlier Shtetl idealism — it's worth noting that when he finally discovers that women do not generally treat all men as sex criminals by default, he blames a "culture" generally, rather than realizing that his problems seem to have largely been caused by not actually interacting with any women, "objectifying" essentially. I can relate to some of his rather generic angst about being a nerdy teen dude coping with sexual desire, but I seem to have been lucky enough to realize earlier than Aaronson that women are also people and many of those people would like to have romantic relationships — even fuck! — with men. Treating it as a shared interest instead of something men do that women resist seems pretty normal, and while there's definitely a shit-ton of fucked up media about women's sexual virtue, it's a shame that Aaronson doesn't seem able to see his part in that.)
posted by klangklangston at 12:54 PM on November 23, 2015 [6 favorites]


I can relate to some of his rather generic angst about being a nerdy teen dude coping with sexual desire, but I seem to have been lucky enough to realize earlier than Aaronson that women are also people

Amen--this is why I feel intensely embarrassed reading his rants. I was a nerd, I was nervous about girls, I was certainly exposed to bullshit media "Nice Guy" narratives and all that stuff, it would've been easy to get seduced by that kind of paranoid worldview. Thankfully I was not a complete idiot. So I look at Aaronson and I see myself if I had taken a wrong turn 20 fucking years ago and then continued to pile on layer after layer of denial all the way up to the present day. It's like, how on earth can he even function in society?

So I don't think people need to go easy on him. The statute of limitations has run out, he should've figured things out by now.
posted by equalpants at 8:10 PM on November 23, 2015 [10 favorites]


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