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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   35361 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.

The whole "growth mindset" bundle of ideas trades a lot on this motte-and-bailey.

Motte: All else being equal, someone who believes that hard work matters and innate talent does not will perform better than someone who believes the opposite.

Bailey: It is actually the case that hard work matters and innate talent does not.

My understanding is that the studies focus on supporting the motte - to the extent that there is good science here, it supports the motte. (It's social science so of course that extent is very little.) But most of the discussion around growth mindset acts as if the bailey was proven, which the studies don't even attempt to prove.

It's interesting because it's hard to know how self-consciously this substitution is made. Is it done intentionally by people who believe the motte and therefore wish to convince people of the bailey for their own good? Is it simple confusion? Is it bad faith twisting of social science to support a politically desired conclusion (the blank slate hypothesis)?

I suspect that a large component is that believers in the motte want to resolve cognitive dissonance when it comes to acting on the motte. They are convinced that it will be good for others if they are persuaded of the bailey. But this holds whether the bailey is true or not! And trying to convince people of something that's not true for their own good is the kind of thing bad guys do, and they are not bad guys, so the bailey must be true.

Definitely a conundrum. I personally find a 'growth mindset' to make me more effective, but agree that the science does not bear it out. Cognitive dissonance is necessary to function well in the modern world.

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A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

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