How to interpret the bias of genders as gender bias · 1:13pm Apr 22nd, 2016
A recent article in the New Republic by Andrew Piper and Richard Jean So, Women Write About Family, Men Write About War, says, "Data analysis shows that women authors are still stereotyped in book reviews. Despite a century’s worth of women’s rights movements... male (and sometimes female) writers still talk about female authors through the lens of “The Lady Writer.”"
They examined a collection of 10,287 reviews from the Sunday Book Review of The New York Times published since 2000. They did a stylometric analysis of the word frequency when reviewing male vs. female authors. The results:
As you can see, the results are jarring. Book reviewers are three or four times more likely to use words like “husband,” “marriage,” and “mother” to describe books written by women between 2000 and 2009, and nearly twice as likely to use words like “love,” “beauty,” and “sex.” Conversely, reviewers are twice as likely to use words like “president” and “leader,” as well as “argument” and “theory,” to describe books written by men...
Perhaps, cynically, we might say these results are hardly surprising. Yes, the presence of stereotypes of women writers in book reviews is sad but largely predictable. But what is particularly startling about our results is their chronological stability: If you look at the results for the period between 2010 and 2016, the distinctive words are nearly identical. Men still write about politics and have “ideas.” Women still write about “family” and obsess over love or themselves (“me”). These results directly contradict current claims around gender inequality in book publishing; things are bad but they are getting better.
Shocked, I am. Shocked.
I kept looking for the part where they said that they read the contents of some of these book reviews, to determine whether the reviewers used these words in their reviews because they were just throwing them in due to the sex of the author ("Ms. Harshwhinny, a beauty if ever there was one, wrote in her sexy if biased history of the biathlon..."), or, if, you know... dare I say it...
MEN WRITE MORE BOOKS ABOUT WAR, POLITICS, AND ECONOMICS, AND WOMEN WRITE MORE BOOKS ABOUT LOVE AND MARRIAGE? 
Is this so 
hard to believe?
But that part never came. They didn't bother reading any of the reviews, because, of course, they already knew that men and women couldn't write differently! The idea is absurd, not to say heretical. There's no time to waste thinking about that. We have to demonize those evil men again, and call for another witch hunt and more affirmative action!
Now I want a sexy but biased history of the biathlon.
Wait, they torpedoed their thesis in the bloody title of the article, then spent the rest of the article pretending they hadn't done so? At best, the editor picked the title and then ran the article anyway, because clickbait.
Journalists are rarely good at social inference. (I've done research in this area, actually.)
I suppose one could argue that society has artificially moulded men and women to think differently, have different priorities, or write about different things.
Whatever the root cause, to assume that men and women don't have any general differences at all, though, and that it's only perceptions/treatment of them that differ, goes against nearly all of the statistical evidence I've ever seen. Not to mention much of the anecdotal. ~ Sable
Well, it seems that the authors could at least have contacted women who have a long and successful history of writing about war--such as Christie Golden and Lois McMaster Bujold--to get their perspective on the subject.
But they didn't.
Maybe somebody could.
3888331
Remember: articles are written by journalists. Headlines are written by orcs that survived the fall of Mordor.
Or in any case by editors who probably didn't read the entire article because they're working to a tight deadline (which the author probably barely met), and in any case work to different objectives than the author of the article did. The author wants to write a compelling story. The editor who writes the headline wants to compel people to read that story. The editor has only a very short time to come up with a compelling headline and in a pinch (and they're always in a pinch) will choose one that's compelling over one that accurately reflects the story.
It's not uncommon to see headlines that do not reflect, or else completely contradict the story below them. Through the magic of the "refresh" icon you can sometimes see these headlines get corrected over the course of the story's first day online--sometimes in the first hour.
But in any case don't blame the author for a stupid headline. It's one of the few things of which a journalist is usually innocent.
(BIG CAVEAT: this is just me thinking through things from the outside. I am not a journalist nor do I know anything about journalism except what a family member told me they learned from their stint as a science journalist)
3888328 All in favor, say Aye.
I'm a little surprised that none of "son," "father," or "wife" (e.g., "xxx, his wife," "he met his wife") showed up in the male column. Perhaps any biographical slant is only enough to push them off of the female column.
Kek.
Well, that is because gender is nothing but a social construct. Of course, you wouldn't know that because you're a white male. Check your privilege, educate yourself, and you'll see that reality must be disregarded where it contradicts feminist doctrine. Embrace the doublethink.
I think it's an insulting conclusion on the author's part to assume that these preferences are in any way negative.
Well, I go to the bookstore and find that pretty much all techothrillers are written by males, for males, while pretty much all romance (and specially erotic novels) is written by females, for females. Please call me when you can find me a female John Clancy.
3888331 Looks like they suffered from a Blinding Flash of the Obvious and spent the rest of their article trying to find the 'Save' button.
What we need is a narrative in which women engage in subversive violence against the patriarchy while men plead for meaningful relationships.
Encouragingly, there's been some work already done along those lines:
(EDIT: Matrixzpan is hottestszpan)
mobygames.com/images/shots/l/341931-strong-bad-s-cool-game-for-attractive-people-episode-4-dangeresque.jpg
3888562 Check Steven Universe episode Open Book.
To be fair, the real question here (which the writers of the article may not have addressed well) is "Do women write about family and men write about war, or are women successful (more published and reviewed) when they write about family, and men when they write about war?"
I'm inclined to go with "women are more likely to write about family and men about military subjects" but it's a much more controversial question and more interesting to read arguments about, at least.
Also worth noting that they took a sample size of 'The New York Times' and no other publications. The Times is a pretty eclectic collection to pull from, both of the books reviewed and the number and variety of reviewers, but it is still a skewed list determined by what that specific publication deems appropriate to review. If we take the conceit that the statistical information is definitive in its findings, either in revealing what women tend to write about or what reviewers tend to emphasize in their reviews—which I'm not exactly convinced that it is in either direction—all that could be said is that conclusion is revealing about the books or reviews in The New York Times, not about books or reviews in general.
I'd be interested to know if this stylometric analysis remains comparable across a larger variety of review publications, especially genre-specific ones. If you were looking at, say, Sword and Laser, would this still be the case? And how would the words 'husband' or 'argument' compare to the frequency of 'dragon' or 'warp-drive'?
3888626
It would be interesting to see it done with a genre publication, but I suspect some thing would remain the same thanks to the influx of Paranormal Romance into Fantasy. Though in general you'd probably also see a divide based on Science Fiction and Fantasy, since I believe (notable exceptions aside) women are still more published in Fantasy than they are in Science Fiction even discounting Paranormal Romance.
3888646
I am also inclined to think that some topics are more appealing to women to write about than they are to men and vice versa, and that it would be likely that some things would end up holding true to support that idea regardless of the genre of work being reviewed, I'm just not sure that doing this sort of analysis is actually all that strong of evidence to support or refute that idea. Too many factors at play, I think. It would be interesting to see whether the trends hold up outside of the NYT box, though, regardless of what those trends could actually tell us.
The article is puzzling, because the first half of it is rock solid, and the second half falls apart.
I'm going to go point-by-point on this. It's not precisely a fisking, I guess? Close enough.
Decent introductory paragraph. It could be meatier, but I'm going to assume the article assumes most of its readers are already familiar with gender essentialism and why it is bullshit.
Interestingly, they don't raise what could be a very strong point here, which is that George Eliot wrote under a male pen name because she was (rightly) very sure that writing under her real name would ensure she wasn't taken seriously. Given the thrust of this article that seems like it would be worth dropping in.
Punchy and also true. So far so good. The original article had an embedded link to a second article about V.S Naipaul, whose name I know but whose works I have not read, and there is some grade-A misogyny in there.
Again, they're making their points well and supporting them. Those are some numbers that should give one pause.
Now, the writers here, Messrs. Piper and So, aren't exactly covering new ground. A lot of people have done a lot of research, with various degrees of rigor, in this vein. It's why these days it is much less common to see an article about a female politician that spends three paragraphs talking about what label of dress she's wearing and how her hair was coiffed before mentioning she was the pivotal vote on an enormous piece of legislation or has just been indicted for fraud, for example. Or how women are rarely referred to in print anymore as "Mrs. Husband's Name."
This isn't to say that doesn't still happen. Examples off the top of my head: people often felt obligated to comment on Carly Fiorina's sartorial choices during both her ill-fated campaigns for political office, whereas nobody with a major media perch ever seems to note that Ted Cruz very much needs to get some new suit jackets tailored, because they're not fitting well either around the shoulders or at the cuffs. The desk jockeys at CNN can't seem to let a weeklong news cycle go by without mentioning Hillary Clinton's hair, while they refrain from noting that Bernie Sanders looks like he's about to announce he just invented the flux capacitor. But it's way, way better than it was, precisely because a lot of people were able to compile mountainous examples and say "this is bullshit" and get people to agree.
I've digressed. The point is, they're not breaking new ground here, which means they ought to be aware of how to do this sort of thing competently. There's methodology in place, is what I'm saying. Good methodology.
Okay, with you so far...
And this is where the wheels come off.
Bad Horse and I have some fairly strong ideological cleavages, but credit where credit is due; he identified the problem here right off, which is that these guys didn't actually control for the subject matter being discussed. It makes the glaring assumption that the books under discussion here are topic neutral, or at the very least that their sample sizes are so large that any noise in the system is going to be drowned out.
Did Piper and So actually control for this? We don't know. Maybe! Perhaps this article is a laymans formulation of a more detailed academic abstract; that happens a lot. It could be they actually culled out books with similar subject matter, enough to form a usable sample size, and then ran their linguistic analyses. It's possible, because this.
The Sunday Book Review of the New York Times is published every week. There have been about 830 (give or take) weeks between now and 2000. Let's round down to 800, assuming this thing took a few months to get to print. Let's also round down to 10,200.
10,200 divided by 800 is 12.75. Call it 13. 13 books a week over 15 years or so. Obviously this is rough, but it should be ballpark accurate.
That's low. Even in the pre-internet days when it all had to go on a dead tree the Times usually managed more book reviews than that a week, somewhere between 15 and 20. The total number of book reviews in that timeframe should be at least in the area of 14,000, probably higher.
This means that, unless I'm wildly mistaken, Piper and So did cull. They employed some methodology to only evaluate some reviews and not others. We don't necessarily need to know the precise details; they were writing a New Republic article, putting in a thousand words that only people with a grounding in statistics will understand is something a good editor would not allow. But they need to notate something in the article along those lines, such as "we controlled for subject matter, placing like alongside like as best we were able to; these reviews contain a roughly equal number of books on the same subject matter by both male and female writers."
And that's assuming this is what they actually did. We don't know that! My supposing that they might have is a pure intellectual exercise. Maybe they culled using different methodology. Maybe it was as simple as "a lot of reviews from the early aughts aren't available in a digital format, so we just won't use them." Maybe they didn't cull at all and my supposition that they did is way off. But we need to know that, because...
That's a serious statement about a serious issue. It is, in fact, a statement I agree with to a certain extent... but it isn't a statement this article actually backed up.
Bare minimum, what they needed to do was place like alongside like. That would have been a decent starting point, a place to see if you're on the right track. In fact, that by itself would probably have been sufficient to prove their point; if you place a whole lot of books with similar subject matter by male and female authors next to each and discover that they're being reviewed using very different language, you've made a pretty strong case that something ugly is happening somewhere.
Did they do that? We don't know. Without knowing that the entire rest of their article is questionable. Questionable at best.
But that would just be a starting point. Maybe while you're doing that, you discover that the Times is disproportionately reviewing books with certain subject matter by female authors and books with certain subject matter by male authors. (Are they? I don't know! Someone should maybe go see! Perhaps some linguistics experts with time on their hands!) That might lead you to do some digging into what sort of books are being published by male authors and what sorts by female authors, and in turn lead you to investigate what the selection processes are like at the major publishing houses. It might lead you all the way down the rabbit hole into exploring what sort of subjects women and men are encouraged or discouraged from pursuing when they set out to be writers!
That's all work that's actually been done, by the by. Piper and So would not have had to do the heavy lifting themselves; there are people out there doing it for them. I don't know much about "literary" publishing, as when it comes to fiction I mostly read genre fiction unless specifically prompted by someone whose opinion I trust, but a lot of people with inside knowledge at the publishing houses that specialize in genre fiction (Teresa Nielsen Hayden has had much to say over the years) have had some pretty damning things to say about the sort of things their various filters used to and to an extent still do catch if you have a traditionally female name but will get you past the slush pile for a second look if you have a male one.
I suspect, but cannot prove, that Piper and So are slamming into the same wall that a lot of people who are really attached to statistical analyses do, which is that they think all they need is a really good model and really good math. And, well... no. You're working in the social sciences, guys. Models form the basis of your analyses; they're not the be all and end all.
The TLDR here: I am inherently sympathetic to the point these guys are trying to make and I don't think they've proven it. That says a lot about their ability to actually convince anyone else. There are too many unknowns there, unknowns that could have been easily addressed. I've head to type "we don't know" far too many times in the making of this post.
3888646
Well, using Tor UK's 2013 submissions as a data source, women submit more Fantasy than Science Fiction, so that sounds about right:
What always amuses me is that third wave feminists argue that gender is purely a social construct, but at the same time categorically state that a person can be born with a male or female brain.
Hilarious cognitive dissonance.
3888625 Yes, that would be a better question to ask. They didn't ask it.
It would be difficult to answer, because either the hypothesis that women are being discriminated against, or the hypothesis that women and men are more interested in, or better at, different things, would lead to the same results: a higher fraction of women who submitted manuscripts on topic A would get published, while a higher fraction of men who submitted manuscripts on topic B would get published. Because if women on the whole are more interested in topic A, woman will in general be more immersed in and knowledgeable about topic A, regardless of their own interest in the topic. And if women are inherently better at some things, well--you can see how that will end up.
It would be especially difficult because ability distributions are not flat or normal. This is a much larger problem with comparisons of pay: Pay distributions approach a power-law distribution as you look at very high-paid professions such as CEO, which means that whichever group has more members will have a higher average, even if they have the same pay distribution. Talent distributions have for years been assumed to have a normal distribution--we describe the IQ distribution as if it were normal--but this assumption isn't well-justified by IQ tests, which are garbage past the 2nd or 3rd standard deviation. "Ability", though, depends on praise and practice, which makes it resemble career success distributions, which definitely have power-law distributions.
There is a different consideration in topics which are mentally very challenging such as mathematics or physics: Men have a higher variance in IQ than women do (perhaps simply because they have more genes to vary). So there are more male geniuses, idiots, and lunatics than female geniuses, idiots, and lunatics. So if you pick a field that requires high intelligence, and a level of success that requires very high intelligence, you should find more men than women if there is no bias anywhere. Nobel prizes, for instance, would be expected to go mainly to men if there is no bias.
UPDATE: Finally got the article I wanted, which is often cited as saying the variance is higher, but never quoted to say what it is!
Ian J. Deary , Paul Irwing, Geoff Der, Timothy C. Bates.
Brother–sister differences in the g factor in intelligence: Analysis of full, opposite-sex siblings from the NLSY1979.
Intelligence Volume 35, Issue 5, September–October 2007, Pages 451–456.
This result is significant. "Top 2%" is roughly "ivy-league". Judging from this study, if there were no bias in university admission, we should expect Harvard to have twice as many men as women.
This, then, raises social justice questions. If a non-biased policy results in having twice as many males as females in the elite who run the country, then we can either discriminate against males in admission into the elite, or discriminate against females in representation in the elite.
This is where you should become a utilitarian, because a utilitarian would say we should then find the proper trade-off between these two values, and everything will be fair in terms of total utility.
3888395
When people set up a study like this, and scrupulously control for bias and outside influences, they often find that their results don't show any correlation to a significant degree. Which means they have nothing to publish.[1]
But with a little bit of creative and targeted blindness... voila! A paper, or at least an article to feed the Insatiable Maw of Pseudoscience!
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[1] Yes, it is barely possible to get a journal to publish your paper, No Correlation Between Yoga Pants and Earlobe Cancer, but nobody's going to read or cite it.
3888859
So true.
Then watch it gain traction and eventually get turned into policies/politics in the name of good will.
3888692
It's interesting that they bunch up urban fantasy and paranormal romance in one group.
3888816
IQ can't tell you whether or not intelligence follows a power-law distribution anyway, given that IQ is a deliberately statistical measure. The difference between IQ 85 and 100 and IQ 100 and 115 is each one standard deviation on a 15 SD test, but that doesn't tell us that someone with an IQ of 85 is as much less intelligent than someone with an IQ of 100 as someone with an IQ of 100 is compared to someone with an IQ of 115.
I'm not aware of any absolute measures of intelligence that operate in this fashion.
3888803
There's a good reason for that. If "maleness" and "femaleness" isn't entirely socially constructed, then it is proper to treat males and females at least somewhat differently (because they are at least somewhat innately different), and the gender-centric goals of third-wave feminism fall apart.
If "maleness" and "femaleness" is entirely socially constructed, however, then you can't be "an X in a Y's body" or be forced into a category against your will, and the identity-centric and trans* rights movements within third-wave feminism fall apart.
Since modern feminism isn't a monolith, but is made up of various camps with different priorities and beliefs, any attempt to pick one or the other would splinter the coalition. There are groups who stick to one or the other, but they're usually marginalized by the have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too mainstream.
3888859 We have seen a long line of 'science' reports like that since... Well, let's just say four out of five serpents prefer apples.
If a dishonest person has a point they want to prove, the first thing done after gathering data is to throw out any points which might clash with the conclusion. Then, using only the finest science, the remaining points are 'adjusted' to smooth out any undesired peaks or valleys, and last but not least, they create a model which uses those data points to provide a nice graph. Of course, the model is proprietary, and can't be released if nosy people start asking questions, and only the 'adjusted' numbers are available for anybody to examine for errors, and of course anybody who comes up with different answers is a fraud who deserves nothing but scorn and ridicule.
Is it hot in here or is it just me?
It's the "disparate impact" trap. It's easy to prove circumstances are different for different groups with statistics, proving someone is doing something wrong (like discriminating against someone else) means establishing a causal relationship, which is very difficult. So the easy thing is to just assume the existence of a difference proves discrimination, and leave it to the accused to prove otherwise, which puts the burden of establishing a causal relationship on them.
If they're smart, they'll quietly concede you're right because it's probably easier for them to agree with you and make some gesture of fixing the problem, but if they are dumb they will try and disprove that by stepping on the sociological minefield that you've constructed.
3889494
Yeah... a million ways to fudge the data. That's why peer review is so important. If I was King o' the World, I'd offer bounties on catching science fraudsters.
3889504 That's so 90's. You don't even have to prove the existence of a difference now, simply assert it with great volume.
3889565 Even peer review can get it dead wrong. I vaguely remember some recent major medical or physics journal who attempted to test each of the papers they had published in one year and were unable to validate the conclusions in at least half of them. One of the problems with peer review is the knowledge of what the other experiment showed may warp your interpretation of the answers you get when running the experiment in your own lab. If it matches, you relax and get sloppy, knowing everything is right with the world, but if it doesn't, you have to go back and double-check everything you did. Cold Fusion ring a bell?
3889597
Yeah the media went nuts with it, but Cold Fusion hadn't undergone peer review when it was announced. They didn't publish, they press-released. Classic sign of Shit Science. And sure enough, once it did undergo review it failed spectacularly.
Even with people deliberately gaming the peer-review system (and there have been several), it's still the best system we have for science to self-correct. And, there are even some thoughtful proposals out there now for some ways to improve the system itself.[1]
-----------
[1] There are also many ideologically-driven proposals for improving (i.e. subverting) it. But, seriously, fuck those guys.
3888401 aye
3889565
You just bias the mean, Gene
Use a sub-set, Brett
Throw back your Poisson, Ron
You just listen to me:
Oh, ignore your Laplace, Gus
You don't need to regress much
Just pick a new P, Lee
And pocket your fee...
3889809
That's hilarious!
OMFsunrise-manedG!!!
But, then I'm one of those guys who hears, "The Great P Debate" and doesn't think about North Carolina bathrooms.
3889417
Wait, why can't you be forced into an entirely socially constructed category against your will? I'm pretty sure lots of things work on exactly that principle.
I don't know, do you have any good research to back that up?
Otherwise I'm going to be as dismissive of the claim as I am of the article and for the same reasons. I'm not being pithy here, I can come up with at least a half dozen different explanations for their results as vaguely defined as that study was and unless you've got some empirical evidence for your explanation, it's no more certain than any of the others.
Let's look at some of them:
A) the reviewers really are biased
1)and the writers are right that this is an industry problem
2) and this is a institutional issue with the NY Times only
B) the genders split in what they want to write
C) publishers have gender bias in what books they publish
D) readers have gender bias in what books they buy
E) the genders are not split in what they want to write, but they are split on what they are willing to submit for publication, due to some sort of societal pressure
F) The real bias is in the people who designed the study and they fudged the results somehow
G) some combination of the above.
3890058
If identity is entirely constructed, you can simply insist that you are black, or a 6’5″ Chinese female child in first grade. People can attempt to pigeon-hole you (as they do), but no collection of objective facts can be used to prove it, and you can reject their reality and substitute your own, and call it a hate-crime if they continue to object.
3890511
First, we've moved from 'gender identity' to 'all identity' which is a bit of a goal-post shift.
Second, of course objective facts can be used to indicate what artificial social construct you are forced into.
Or did you think 'first grader' was a naturally occurring inherent quality of humanity, to use one of your own examples? Despite schools with grade systems not existing for most of history? Or how about "Chinese"? Is that anything but an artificially constructed label? Countries certainly aren't naturally occurring and most of them haven't been around in their present state all that long. If you're going to maintain that you can prove someone fits in these categories (which I agree with, by the way) then you must maintain that people can be forced into constructed social constructs.
3890516
OK, I think we're risking the rathole of "using different definitions and arguing past one another" here.
One issue that often comes up when discussing identity with modern feminists is the motte and bailey doctrine.
In my post above, I'm not referring to "the proper academic meaning of 'socially constructed'" but the common usage as "'socially constructed' means 'whatever I want it to be'".
Your objections are all perfectly valid when applied to the technical meaning of "socially constructed", but miss the mark when we're dealing with non-academics. We're dealing with the groups which include people who argue that "mayonnaise" is a perfectly valid gender identity.
3890535
Ah. You'd think it'd be obvious that 'socially constructed' means 'society' is involved even to non-academics. "Whatever I say it is" would be something like "personally constructed". Or some kind of solipsism.
I'm not sure how acknowledging that would hurt trans rights, though. If people could decide to be 6'5' and save up to be surgically altered to be 6'5", I'd be in favor of allowing them to do that, too (still going back to your examples).
3890545
Well, that's where we get into the "coalition of disparate camps" issue. But first....
[Disclaimer: I am not advocating for or against any of the following positions]
Anyway, we have a whole bunch of different takes on the trans* issue in feminist circles. Some of the one's I've observed include:
-genitals and genetics have no bearing whatsoever on whether you're a man or a woman
-only womyn-born womyn are true womyn
-MtF trans* people are appropriating the oppression of women
-FtM trans* people are gender-traitors
-men can have vaginas and women can have penises
-vaginas are masculine and penises are feminine [not a typo]
-the penis/testicles and clitoris/ovaries are completely interchangeable
-anyone who doesn't experience dysphoria isn't really trans* (see "tucute")
-anyone who thinks dysphoria is part of being trans* is a bigot (see "truscum")
If we lean hard on the solipsistic-gender side, where all that matters is how you identify yourself, then the dysphoria, surgery and reproductive issues fall outside the purview of the movement. Since your physical form is utterly irrelevant to whether you're a man or a woman, it isn't feminism's place to advocate for or against surgery or other physical issues, or to deal with dysphoria. The non-solipsistic trans* camp(s) within feminism are understandably unhappy with this view.
The feminist infighting over the current US political obsession over bathrooms is just one example of the issue. Some want to keep "non-womyn" out of the women's room, some want to let everyone use whatever bathroom they want, some want one set of rules for penis-havers and another set of rules for vagina-bearers. We have the "make everyone use the same bathroom" camp and the "make everyone use individual rooms" camp. If they had to pick between "men and women are inherently different" and "men and women are the same", some of these would be eliminated as obviously incorrect, and the "big tent" comes crashing down.
3890500
I didn't make that claim. I didn't publish an article in the New Republic. It's their responsibility to consider such an obvious possible answer.
However, when you live in a species which has developed a worldwide consensus on certain differences between men and women--say, that women are more interested in babies and men are more interested in fighting--which all known cultures have agreed to across thousands of years, every ethnicity, and every continent--you should lend that universal consensus of the human race across all time and space more credence than other hypotheses.
3890535 The thing that gets me about the postmodern claim that language is a social convention is that, instead of taking this to mean that we should respect language because it's a social convention, they take it to mean we can mangle language any way we like, make up words, use old words in new ways, use words in new ways and not tell anybody what we mean by it, and just generally trample all over the dictionary.
People who delight in violating social conventions don't belong in society.
I believe the reason they do this--maybe I'll write a long post about this someday--is that post-modernists are disappointed medieval Catholics at heart. They really really want there to be a God and a transcendent signified, and if there isn't, they just want to trample everything.
3890759
Don't forget
original sinprivilege! What began as a useful tool for analyzing class interactions has turned into a weapon for beating down anyone who disagrees with you.3889565 Yet, peer review isn't as important as we pretend it is. Books circumvent peer review. Richard Dawkins killed group selection theory by doing an end-run around peer review and publishing a one-sided popular book. Sociobiology, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Skinner's Verbal Behavior & The Behavior of Organisms, The Interpretation of Dreams / On Dreams, On Growth & Form, The Origin of Species, Newton's Principia, and Smith's The Wealth of Nations were non-peer-reviewed books. Non-peer-reviewed books have started many paradigm shifts in science, and constitute most of linguistics and almost everything in philosophy & literary theory. Many of them were science too poor to have passed peer review (e.g., writings by Marx, Freud, Teilhard de Chardin), but some may have been too good to have passed peer review (Darwin, Wilson). (Evolutionary biology in particular has a very long history of being a science bound by social agendas even at the level of peer review.)
The big problem with books, besides partisan ones like Dawkins' or Gould's, is when a book becomes important because of one or 2 ideas in it, and then we're stuck with everything in it. Marx writes one clever thing about alienation, so we keep Marx in the curriculum, and it's impossible to teach Marx and carefully say "this part here is interesting, but this and this and this is completely wrong". Teachers have neither the time nor the intelligence to sift out the good from the bad, so we propagate the bad. Same thing with Plato, Hegel, Jerry Fodor, and the post-modernists.
3890855
See my comments regarding ideological end-runs. And the operative word FUCK.
PopSci books have nowhere near the impact that other cultural blindspots do.
3890749
Nah, near universal consensuses have been wrong before. Quite a few times, actually. Reality is not a popularity contest. Unless we're back to discussing social constructs, in which case it's a popularity contest whose results can change over time.
Also, look at the amount of caps and emoticons you put in suggesting your claim. You were making it, by the way you phrased it. No one says "Is that so hard to believe" about something they aren't saying is true. Though it is true you didn't submit it to a peer reviewed journal.
3891034 I'm not really talking about popsci books, tho I think they have a huge impact today, for good and bad, e.g., "The structure of scientific revolutions", "The selfish gene", "The blank slate," "The black swan." But there are entire fields, like philosophy and literary criticism, where only books matter, and those books aren't pop sci, but they aren't peer reviewed, either.
How people decided that Derrida is important and we were all going to read his books, I don't know. Particularly since they're so unreadable.