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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   35352 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022

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The triumph of the blank slate

an article in the Atlantic recently made the case that separating sport by sex doesn’t make sense, because it ‘reinforces the idea that boys are inherently bigger, faster, and stronger than girls in a competitive setting — a notion that’s been challenged by scientists for years.’

On a similar theme, a few weeks back the New York Times ran a piece arguing that ‘maternal instinct is a myth that men created’. In the essay, published in the world’s most influential newspaper, it was stated that ‘The notion that the selflessness and tenderness babies require is uniquely ingrained in the biology of women, ready to go at the flip of a switch, is a relatively modern — and pernicious — one. It was constructed over decades by men selling an image of what a mother should be, diverting our attention from what she actually is and calling it science.’

Just recently, Scientific American stated that ‘Before the late 18th century, Western science recognized only one sex — the male — and considered the female body an inferior version of it. The shift historians call the “two-sex model” served mainly to reinforce gender and racial divisions by tying social status to the body.’

Yet what is strange is that such ideas are triumphant, even as the scientific evidence against them mounts up, with the expanding understanding of genetics and the role of inheritance. The tabula rasa should by all rights be dead, indeed it should have been killed twenty years ago with the publication of one of the most important books of the century so far, Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate.

Rather than blank slate-led ideas falling to mockery and obscurity, the opposite has happened — they’ve proliferated and spread. Pinker was obviously right, yet seems to have lost.

i recently was in a seminar discussing fixed versus growth mindsets, and it was argued that believing in any innate/genetic component of intelligence was connected to a 'fixed' mindset. we were discouraged from using the idea of 'talent' as it implied that some people were just naturally better at some things than others. it seems like a core part of the 'diversity, equity, and inclusion' mantra that is finding its way everywhere - the idea of innate difference is anathema to the principle behind caring about equity versus equality.

I am naturally a conspiratorial minded person, and yet no possible conspiracy theory could account for the mass mindlessness of modern academic "science."

I have grown weary of reading science fiction because nothing exhibits such extraordinary madness and fantasy as the modern society in which I currently reside.

Many academics posit that the concept of mammalian sexual dimorphism is a conspiracy of straight white men to oppress everyone else. The true believers are 100% convinced they are making the world a better place with their feminism/leftism. The only reason one would disagree with their theories is deep rooted misogyny/white supremacy.

Truly unbelievable!

Many academics posit that the concept of mammalian sexual dimorphism is a conspiracy of straight white men to oppress everyone else.

I don't think "conspiracy" is the right term for what they're positing. They don't believe in some smokey room where all the old straight cis men gather around to coordinate how to socially engineer everyone else to their liking. It's rather an emergent phenomenon in society that is downstream from all the old straight cis men oppressing everyone else. The upshot is that they get to claim vast nefariousness akin to a conspiracy but also get to stay strong in their views when all the evidence indicates that there's no actual men in smokey rooms coordinating anything of the sort. It really is an innovative worldview that has just enough layers of obfuscation to be acceptable to people who consider themselves intellectual while also retaining the passion and fervor that grand conspiracy theories can inculcate in true believers.

And notably, this phenomenon itself seems to be an emergent one, rather than the result of a bunch of power-hungry "academics" coordinating with each other to produce the ideology with the perfect combination of contagiousness and fervor for their audience. Rather, I think it's the result of simple evolution, as similar ideologies that were too conspiracy-minded or not totalizing enough got weeded out, leaving behind the highly optimized ideology that has been so successful in taking over so many institutions today.

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