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Comment by bluetomcat | Hacker News Reader

The direction of scientific research is a product of the wisdom of the era. Science often seeks to reinforce some "common sense" observations about the world from that era, to theorise about them, to build sensible (but not necessarily realistic) analytic models out of them, to classify things. So maybe 19th century racism came out of the observation that people of different skin colours perform differently on a particular task, and there must be scientific explanation behind that. 20th century global warming theories are observing a local rise in global temperatures, and draw all kinds of conclusions.

In much the same way as we dismiss "racism" today as backwards and scientifically unsound, in 50 or 100 years time, "gender studies" will be considered implausible and frowned upon.

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Could you explain to me the logic linking racism as scientifically unsound today and the conclusion that gender studies will be considered scientifically unsound later on?

Cultural, psychological and perceptual changes in the wider population through the centuries and decades. The same scientific theory, put in 2 different cultural setups has a different chance of attracting its proponents and opponents. In one cultural setting the arguments sound right and do not offend anyone, then the corresponding theories become widely accepted. In another, the arguments sound outlandish and attract much more opponents who come up with equally reasonable arguments.

>Cultural, psychological and perceptual changes in the wider population through the centuries and decades. The same scientific theory, put in 2 different cultural setups has a different chance of attracting its proponents and opponents.

Science doesn't (or at least shouldn't) be a popularity contest as to how many proponents and opponents it attracts. The problem you're identifying is that dominant philosophies and ways of viewing the world change with time, but this is no more true for 'gender studies' as it is for any other field (of science, technology, or anything else) in which the philosophical foundation upon which it is built is so heavily involved in the results. I think a good analogy here might be interpretations of quantum mechanics, which similar to the philosophy of essentialism (for instance) can gain or lose popularity.

Nevertheless, the discussion then becomes a matter of which philosophical underpinning makes the most sense or fits the empirical data. The fact this discussion is occurring does not make a whole field of study 'implausible' as a parent comment said; on the contrary, it makes it richer. It's fine for opponents and proponents to have equally reasonable arguments, but it's unclear as to how this makes a particular science untenable or equivalent to the old scientific racism, phlogiston, or phrenology.

Why is gender studies unique in this category? It looks to be so broad as to apply to anything- memes, capitalism, gig economy, smartphones, etc.

Why "gender studies" in particular though? Why not "global warming," as per your own example? Once our cultural setting stops believing that temperatures are rising, won't they stop rising? Or why not "antiracism"? It's trendy to not believe that certain races are inherently superior - doesn't that just mean that all science saying as much is influenced by its cultural context and therefore just as unreliable as the scientific racism of the past?

(Or is it possible that the endeavor of science is actually a slow and flawed but nonetheless unrelenting movement towards objective truth?)

> Why "gender studies" in particular though? Why not "global warming," as per your own example?

If you reread the post, you'll note that it is actually also attacking "20th century" global warming science by analogizing it to "19th century" racism.

This thread was completely derailed by the written version of this: https://youtu.be/b0e-omnsukM?t=82

I wouldn't say this thread derailed, it was never on a reasonable set of tracks to begin with.

bluetomcat's statement is in the realm of Relativistic Epistemology.

In general, epistemology is about the root of human knowledge, and why some statement of knowledge represents a justified belief, but those roots never terminate because as Feynman said the Why question never stops recurring, as we dig deeper. In other words, there is no objective truth or any thing for that matter (no pun intended) apart from what we observe (the idea of "primacy of consciousness over matter" per E. Schrödinger et al, a neurophenomenologist view of reality) which means that our justified beliefs depend on how we observe and what we can and cannot conceive of given our finite mental model.

I don't think epistemic relativism is the way to go about life as it basically puts a barrier to further inquiry and pursuit of a truth that we feel is there, and it's the act of digging that allows us to progress, and not the transient truths we derive along the way, as we dig deeper. It's almost as if the truth is a magnet with infinite power and infinite distance that keeps our consciousness in motion or that it sits behind the barrier between being and not being, life and death, etc.

In the wise words of Manuel, I know nothing.

Also, see Bohm's final paper on Hidden Variables and the Implicate Order, the most sane of all metaphysical thoughts that I've come across.

I've started reading Bohm's paper- it's fascinating, thank you for the recommendation. The focus on the "verb" or "happening" rather than the particular seems to line up with Levinas. In turn, I'd highly recommend checking out this paper "Essential Vulnerabilities: Plato and Levinas on Relations to the Other" if you resonate with Hidden Variables: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv3znz3r

Considering the topic of the article, it's interesting that this comment was downvoted to [dead]. Humans seem to have a strong dislike for the general idea that there are limits to our knowledge of reality, and it seems to me that the magnitude of that dislike increases as a function of the intelligence of the individual (the smarter one is, the more disgust experienced during discussion of the unknown/unknowable).

We all know absolutely there are limits - quick tell me the first words ever uttered by any human being! We can't for it has been lost to entropy, whole converted into the same end state regardless of possible outcomes. It isn't even "find what word was written on this paper before it was immersed in ink and smoother" but "find out what word was written on the paper after it was burnt and the carbon used through a cycle of bacteria, plant, animal, and minerals for a few millenia.

The rhetoric is particularly galling because it is self-reinforcing willful ignorance - refusing to learn and then saying "We cannot possibly know!" instead of trying to stretch our limits.

> We all know absolutely there are limits

Once attention is drawn to it, yes. But in our real time behaviours and thoughts, at the low level detail of how the human mind works, do we sometimes ~forget? Does man sometimes suffer from hubris or other imperfections?

> The rhetoric is particularly galling because it is self-reinforcing willful ignorance

That is but one of many possible interpretations of my words, as is often the case, but not always realized.

> refusing to learn and then saying "We cannot possibly know!" instead of trying to stretch our limits.

I've made no such claim (but to be clear, I'm not sure if you were making that assertion). I've noticed that the human mind is often able to "see" things that aren't there (something else that seems to be often overlooked, particularly when convenient for the person doing the looking) - it is an incredibly powerful entity.

You should reread the article and then imagine having to defend these statements in a few years.

From the article:

> An article about women engineers, published in 1908, has a promising start: If women are attending technical schools and are not legally blocked from working in a forge or firm, why do they face so many obstacles to employment? A reader in 2020 who discovers such a socially progressive question in the archives of Scientific American anticipates a discussion of sex discrimination.

> Alas, no. Author Karl Drews explains it simply: the obstacles “are inherent in the nature of the case and are due to women's comparative weakness, both bodily and mental.” He elaborates: “The work of the engineer is creative in the highest sense of the word. From his brain spring the marvels of modern industry,” in contrast to women, “whose notable performances have hitherto been confined to the reproductive arts.”

From you:

> In much the same way as we dismiss "racism" today as backwards and scientifically unsound, in 50 or 100 years time, "gender studies" will be considered implausible and frowned upon.

...So are you proposing we're going back to gender essentialism?

There is a whole lot of nuance and middle ground between gender essentialism and what is currently put forth as scholarship in the humanities. Criticizm of that scholarship and field is well warrented given the mess it is making. The evidence and defeatablity that is built into STEM has been thrown to the wind for option stated as fact in "gender studies" that you are a bigot or other fun word if you disagree with.

> The evidence and defeatablity that is built into STEM

I don't know if evidence and defeatability is really built into STEM. I'm an academic in computer science, and in the field of computer science we recently had a PhD candidate commit suicide in a major academic institution due to corrupt approval rings in major conferences. Similarly, several fields of STEM have reproducibility crises, including my own field, as well as politically motivated science as is being explored in this article.

In theory, STEM has evidence and has defeatability through the scientific method. In reality, the people working in the field of knowledge are still spending most of their time wading through bullshit and only taking the opinions of their friends to be true.

I totally agree. I have a chem PdD and have seen the imperfections of the system. I would also suggest that corrupt approval rings being a problem is evidence of defeatablity - although a very messy one. You lose your job if shown to be corrupt. In chem as well, something like 30 % of published work is unreproducible, but there is at least a mechanism where that can be fixed.

The example I like is white fragility. Agree with it - affirm it's truth. Disagree with it - affirm it's truth. Such a simple circular logic that an undergrad shouldn't get a passing grade on the work is now near secular gospel.

> You lose your job if shown to be corrupt

This is not true in computer science. There have been no major oustings following the literal suicide of a PhD candidate who had directly witnessed the corruption for themselves.

If you have a Chem PhD where did you gain the expertise on the humanities to be able to summarize and dismiss it so quickly?

I see similar generalizations frequently, but rarely links to primary sources.

Because I was told by my dean of STEM that "it's not advantageous for this position that you're a white scientist" followed by "You came from a well-educated family right?". My lower class farmer dad that that was funny. I was forced to get up to speed pretty quickly and strongly motivated to do so.

people don't understand how far this is gone in the college system right now, and how that is now being incorporated into every curriculum and taught to every student as what seems to me to be a secular morality that you would be an immoral person to not agree with.

Check out table a and B from the following Berkeley initiative. there's a clear biased towards diverse candidates and diversity is simply defined as non-white straight or male. https://ofew.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/life_sciences_...

That fittingly enough sounds like a description of a NP hard problem in nature and theoretical vs practical verifiability. Individually every instance may receive validation relative to the local. In practice doing it and cross comparing across all is impossible due to scale - and that is just for simple propositions. Propositions themselves may be too massive to hard prove.

I suppose that in itself is a small but significant difference about more mathematically practicable fields. If someone comes out with a P=NP proposes algorithm we can test it for various conditions and say "No that is bullshit, just obfuscating it as - setting the state up requires (N!)." If it really isn't.

The smaller units of operability can be verified and there are no "anomalous unreproducible artifacts" to contend with.

> Criticizm of that scholarship and field is well warrented given the mess it is making.

What mess? Can you expand on this claim?

to quote from "how to be an antiracist" - a best selling book during this last year

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/08/10/ibram-x-k...

>The defining question is whether the discrimination is creating equity or inequity. If discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist. If discrimination is creating inequity, then it is racist. . . . The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.

I'm not super fond of the idea of indefinite discrimination on race. How do we run those numbers, who decides what is or isn't a good policy, does that change with the politics of who is president every 4 or 8 years? Especially because I didn't ask to be born my race or sex, but I was told by my dean of STEM that "it's not advantageous for this position you are a white scientist" followed by "you came from a well-educated family right?". My lower class farmer dad thought that was funny.

I've since left the college system due to what I feel is now labled antiracist discrimination.

I have to pay extra in my electricity, phone and postal fees to cover the extra expense of rural service as mandated by law. (and phone service, and a whole bunch more)

I have to pony up some insane percentage of my taxes for farm subsidies.

A bunch of my tax money goes to the schools set up in rural areas too.

I have to pay for a bunch of county roads that are rarely used by a handful of families out in the country.

I don't get to forgo taxes on gasoline I use to get to work.

These are all laws of equitable discrimination - prior to them cities were getting ahead of rural areas by leaps and bounds, so the laws were passed to help rural folks maintain an equitable place in society. By having these in place it's much harder to point to a person and say "look they are from the country, they're not going to be good at tech since they didn't have access as a kid".

Growing up rural is just as much an accident of birth as race, why are you not complaining about all the special benefits you got? I could make a pretty solid argument that I was was the victim of equitable discrimination since I didn't get any rural benefits growing up. Is it because they don't feel special, and that maybe you still had some hardship as a result?

The goal of the equitable discrimination you're against is to get that same level of "its not special" (good or bad) for folks of all races, just like it is for folks who grew up in rural places.

After that, we can maybe strive for even more equitable society.

I was literally discriminated on the basis of color of my skin and my assumed family of origin, and that seen as perfectly acceptable and it seems that is what you are argueing for. If we can't have shared definitions enough to say that isn't ok or to say that is not equitable, what's the point in discussing it.

Do we simply assume every application with more melanin should have a leg up on any and every job application? Or how do we leagally measure the amount of non-equitable treatment an applicant has? There are a million reasons two people could be non equal, to institute hiring based on who is the best - but also most melanin even if they grew up in the top 1% with the best education money can buy is real bad.

If we want workable solutions, teachers unions and schools and policies that have failed for decades need a serious rework. Charter schools in the same building as public schools with a lottery system for intakes have been shown to greatly outperform their public counterparts.

I spent years in college, and simply put, something has to radically change before students get to college, and defense of teachers unions and a government mandated monopoly on educate must shift. Unfortunately, this isn't being considered politicaly and is often demonized.

I am arguing that you have had some extra help in your life. You got the benefit of many programs in place to benefit you because of the demographic of your parents. Someone else may get some extra help because the demographic of their parent.

Both those cases come at potential expense of others.

I'm sorry you are upset that you weren't qualified for this extra help too, but sometimes being qualified for one form of help doesn't qualify you for other forms of help. This is because there are a million reasons two people can be non-equal.

Look at how upset you are that you didn't get special consideration because you aren't a person of color. That you had someone make a decision about you based on that. Now imagine getting through all those years of college while experiencing that on a regular basis... seems like it might be hard, no?

I would strongly consider the "extra melanin" as a giant bonus for candidates, they have shown they can put up with some pretty challenging stuff without quitting school over it. People that can handle challenges are the people I want on my team, not people who abandon goals the first time they encounter something that's personally difficult.

As the random non-sequitor into education policy:

* home schooling and private schools and religious schools have existed as alternatives to government run public schools forever. There is no monopoly.

* Perhaps we could consider paying the teachers a decent wage instead of demonizing those who try to get them a decent wage? Do you think FAANG would stay at the top if they paid engineers shit, if not why would teaching be different?

* What does this have to do with helping people get to an equitable place?

> So are you proposing we're going back to gender essentialism?

The societal and cultural discourse would likely shift to completely different subjects altogether. Probably people will place little importance on race and gender, and we would have thrown away the model of the world which reasons in terms of oppressing and oppressed groups.

Such a model has never existed in the history of life on this planet. All creatures compete and discriminate to aid in their continued existence as a species. I think a world in which oppression doesn't exist on some level is perhaps a lifeless moon.

To date, if anything, racism is studied more today than ever previously in history. The one exception is that it now includes the opinions of the marginalized.

Bigotry disturbingly is a fungible concept whose basis is only coincidental to actual differences. Rwanda's infamous Tutsi genocide is proof that distinctions may be made arbitrary and there is nothing essential about any difference. If in the darkest of timelines the Nazis had created a "pure" Aryan bloodline and didn't collapse or mutate to something less dysfunctional they would almost certainly go fractal in their divisions until they dropped below the minimal long term viable population number and try to kill their way out of harmful mutations from having a gene droplet instead of a gene pool.

Past conceptions have been along different lines and may differ in the future as well. Egyptian Dynasties and Roman Empire had a "are they currently a part of our empire or not Y/N" distinction.

I wouldn't really call it the "wisdom" of the era. It's much more defined by the lack of wisdom than by its presence, meaning we do a whole lot of short-term work on confirming biases and antagonizing and only on larger time-scales do we see the power of refinements to the scientific method. "Current" science for any value of "current" is majorly fraught with bias and vast divergences, and time puts a low-pass filter on the concepts which become over {years, decades, centuries} cemented as "truths". And thankfully, even on long timescales there are people willing to put in the work to challenge assumptions and refine the scientific method so that we, as a civilization, strive for improvement in spite of/against our prejudices.

In today's age we do still acknowledge and notice differences which need to be accounted for, and correlate with skin color or whatever people call "race"[0]. This isn't racism, because racism is scientifically unsound, because racism is not a science or an academic field, it's a prejudice associated with beliefs. Science has been done by human beings and human beings carry prejudice, but science itself doesn't. What we see nowadays is an increase in useful acknowledgement of differences (useful in the sense that if we are blind to these differences we will negatively impact people, for example by disregarding genetic differences between people and treating them sub-optimally[1].

Whatever bullshit was sold as being the difference between whites and blacks wasn't scientific as much as it was the expression of prejudice made to sound scientific. Phrenology did the same with whoever society wanted to see as criminals (unsurprisingly, that would usually be a mix of the non-whites-of-the-time, the poor and the disenfranchised). On top of legitimizing prejudice, it also prevented doing actual work to help everyone equally.

There's no reality where we'll equate racism as the prejudice it is, with gender studies as the current attempt our world is making at understanding genders. There might however be many high-frequency oscillations in papers published today that will be filtered out by the field or fields benefiting from acknowledging differences and features that will stand the test of time and coming out of the current field of gender studies. You might say that many current claims around the emerging field will be looked at with distance and judged implausible, but certainly the idea of incorporating an understanding of genders and their differences is not something that in its entirety will be looked at as "implausible and frowned upon".

Because racism is prejudice and beliefs, and gender studies is an interdisciplinary academic field of study.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/06/why-are-h...

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1692342/

edit: I also realize now that you would have had a slightly better claim if you had put phrenology where you put racism - with the difference that phrenology was never really more than a pseudo-scientific extrapolation departing from science to advance oppression of others whereas gender studies constantly faces scrutiny to reinforce scientific claims and is a proponent of empathy. Pretty diametrically opposed goals and methods, ultimately.

Early modern race scientists said exactly the same thing. They thought they were just trying to incorporate an understanding of races and their differences. But now we reject the field as a whole; we don't just think some of their conclusions were implausible, we think their methodology was fundamentally bad and their whole conceptual framework was tainted by bigotry. Those who study similar things today don't see themselves as part of the same intellectual tradition at all.

I don't see why it's impossible that the same thing could happen to gender studies.

Because we learn from our mistakes in science, for the most part?

That is, the thresholds to claim things are much higher (despite what dailymail-equivalents succeed in advertising on social networks), and the methodologies are able to be scrutinized almost in real time by the entire world (let's give a shout out to sci-hub there..)

What I'm saying, is that yes there will have been mistakes made because science mostly makes mistakes (especially in the short term), but that the threshold to invalidate something that gets anchored nowadays is much higher than "not long ago" (on the order of a few human generations at most).

"Race scientists who would think scientifically" back then are probably now diluted into "[other science] scientist who are aware of differences regarding their research", as evidenced by the two links I gave in the previous post. Whether it is AI researchers having to think a bit harder about how their training sets incorporate no black people, or anesthesiologists having to accommodate for a redhead's genetically higher tolerance to what they're being put under. Also, AFAIK, "race science" is a term that seems to have been coopted in the last few decades - the closest thing I could think of that was practiced might have been a biased anthropology, but otherwise it is scientific racism that was pervasive throughout the research of other fields, and not a field in and of itself. That's already a pretty major difference with gender studies, and therefore why I added the edit in my previous post.

Gender studies as a field will produce research that makes valid claims with repeatability will survive, and research with biased claims or no repeatability. Time will kill the bad ideas without necessarily killing the field - or is physics worthless because we once attached meaning to Heliocentrism or considered that there was an aether for the transmission of light, or even simply because QM and relativity don't blend well ?

Interestingly enough with your parallel, the foundations of scientific racism were intertwined with people perceiving race as a social construct over a biologically immutable one (Henri de Boulainvilliers). I suspect research of the nature to make a discernible definition emerge along those lines[0] will contribute to the evolution of the perception of the field and ultimately help the more useful research survive debates in the long run.

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29460079/

Physics isn't considered worthless, but alchemy is, even though it laid much of the groundwork for modern chemistry. My contention is that the fundamental tenets around which gender studies research is framed - things like the definition and concept of gender identity used in that paper you linked - could end up being so misguided that research based on them is unusable no matter how rigorous. The strength of our modern castle-building tools won't help us if the foundation's made of sand.

But your comparison (and fear) only holds if you believe that in 2020 we could see alchemy exist without being outright debunked. This is what I'm saying is different in the world of 2020 vs even just 110 years ago (phrenology).

Gender studies aren't new either, sure they've been a resurgence but we're talking about decades by now. If it truly doesn't hold a single ounce of useful meaning as a field in a world of constant worldwide scrutiny that, even limited to the "scientists" of yore, has probably not doubled but gone beyond tenfold, where's the evidence to raze it all?

We're fearing what we don't understand because it shatters our perceptions, but we're in the best of times to be facing new things with open arms in order to apply the full brunt of scientific techniques to it and sift through what will stand the test of time.

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