Articles 9.
9.1
On resigning from the Board of the University of Austin - Heather Heying
“I am not compelled that the vision you are pursuing is sufficiently revolutionary. To fix higher ed, UATX would need to address the root causes of academic fragility, not just treat the symptoms that threaten its vitality in the present. That, in turn, would require an embrace of the counterintuitive, and tolerance for a great deal more risk than I think there is appetite for in this group.
If I might offer you one piece of advice as I bid you a heartfelt farewell: Should you ever wish to retrace your steps to determine where the founders misstepped—should you want to know how the University of Austin ended up trapped in the next academic quagmire, the answer is in the arms-length treatment of science. Science is not an ingredient that can be added to taste in such an endeavor. It is a reliable North Star, structurally indifferent to the ebb and flow of belief that drives great institutions off the road. The casual approach to science in the formulation of UATX is both cause and effect in this story. The only process powerful enough to protect an institution from madness, not just woke madness, but every version of lunacy, is science, properly practiced. But to build that into this new institution, you would have to rescue this ancient tool from the corruptions of the modern R1 universe.
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Our universities will not be effective truth-seeking institutions if we simply scrape the woke off the top. The rot is far deeper, the product of a kind of analytical immuno-deficiency: terrible ideas took over a system in which new ideas, and the discussion thereof, were increasingly rare. Higher ed needs a fundamental framework of truth-seeking, with the built-in error correction that scientific inquiry provides, if it is to evade this fate in the future.
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Every educated person needs to be able to take an idea that they think is true, identify what would constitute evidence that it’s not, and figure out how they would go about attempting to falsify it. Epistemology—the study of how it is that we make claims of truth, and what constitutes evidence for and against them—should be a core pursuit in a university that claims to be about the pursuit of truth. Every scientific endeavor, and therefore a great number of human endeavors, should begin with: How do I know what is true, and how will I assess claims of truth going forward?
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But in institutions of higher ed, the sciences are effectively Balkanized—the students who aren’t “studying science” don’t learn the fundamental power of scientific thinking, and the science faculty are ever more remote from the rest of the professoriate, in part because they are given release time from teaching and governance as they bring in more and more federal grant dollars. In an era when interdisciplinarity is a buzzword that resonates for nearly everyone, and generalists, not specialists, will be the key to solving most of the problems that now seem intractable, we instead have the rise of the specialist. Scientists are doing ever-less science-y things—following protocols and algorithms, leading with data rather than hypothesis—yet still have the imprimatur of science. Sometimes they are trotted out with the trappings of science—a lab coat! A relevant PhD! Fancy instrumentation and jargon and math-heavy visuals!—to make pronouncements. And most of the non-science-types believe that they have no choice but to receive the wisdom of the scientific authorities. They’re doing science, after all. What could go wrong?”
9.2
Two minds
The Cognitive Differences Between Men and Women - Bruce Goldman
“At the time, this was not a universally popular idea. The neuroscience community had largely considered any observed sex-associated differences in cognition and behavior in humans to be due to the effects of cultural influences. Animal researchers, for their part, seldom even bothered to use female rodents in their experiments, figuring that the cyclical variations in their reproductive hormones would introduce confounding variability into the search for fundamental neurological insights.
But over the past 15 years or so, there’s been a sea change as new technologies have generated a growing pile of evidence that there are inherent differences in how men’s and women’s brains are wired and how they work.
Not how well they work, mind you. Our differences don’t mean one sex or the other is better or smarter or more deserving.
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In her preface to the first edition, Halpern wrote: “At the time, it seemed clear to me that any between-sex differences in thinking abilities were due to socialization practices, artifacts and mistakes in the research, and bias and prejudice. … After reviewing a pile of journal articles that stood several feet high and numerous books and book chapters that dwarfed the stack of journal articles … I changed my mind.”
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Halpern and others have cataloged plenty of human behavioral differences. “These findings have all been replicated,” she says. Women excel in several measures of verbal ability — pretty much all of them, except for verbal analogies. Women’s reading comprehension and writing ability consistently exceed that of men, on average. They outperform men in tests of fine-motor coordination and perceptual speed. They’re more adept at retrieving information from long-term memory.
Men, on average, can more easily juggle items in working memory. They have superior visuospatial skills: They’re better at visualizing what happens when a complicated two- or three-dimensional shape is rotated in space, at correctly determining angles from the horizontal, at tracking moving objects and at aiming projectiles.
Navigation studies in both humans and rats show that females of both species tend to rely on landmarks, while males more typically rely on “dead reckoning”: calculating one’s position by estimating the direction and distance traveled rather than using landmarks.
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But the long list of behavioral tendencies in which male-female ratios are unbalanced extends to cognitive and neuropsychiatric disorders. Women are twice as likely as men to experience clinical depression in their lifetimes; likewise for post-traumatic stress disorder. Men are twice as likely to become alcoholic or drug-dependent, and 40 percent more likely to develop schizophrenia. Boys’ dyslexia rate is perhaps 10 times that of girls, and they’re four or five times as likely to get a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder.
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Discoveries like this one should ring researchers’ alarm buzzers. Women, it’s known, retain stronger, more vivid memories of emotional events than men do. They recall emotional memories more quickly, and the ones they recall are richer and more intense. If, as is likely, the amygdala figures into depression or anxiety, any failure to separately analyze men’s and women’s brains to understand their different susceptibilities to either syndrome would be as self-defeating as not knowing left from right.
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A 2017 study in JAMA Psychiatry imaged the brains of 98 individuals ages 8 to 22 with autism spectrum disorder and 98 control subjects. Both groups contained roughly equal numbers of male and female subjects. The study confirmed earlier research showing that the pattern of variation in the thickness of the brain’s cortex differed between males and females. But the great majority of female subjects with ASD, the researchers found, had cortical-thickness variation profiles similar to those of typical non-ASD males.
In other words, having a typical male brain structure, whether you’re a boy or a girl, is a substantial risk factor for ASD. By definition, more boys’ than girls’ brains have this profile, possibly helping explain ASD’s four- to fivefold preponderance among boys compared with girls.
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Trying to assign exact percentages to the relative contributions of “culture” versus “biology” to the behavior of free-living human individuals in a complex social environment is tough at best. Halpern offers a succinct assessment: “The role of culture is not zero. The role of biology is not zero.”
9.3
Real Life Does Not Fit The Narrative - Amanda Fortini
“I think of that moment all the time these days, when every person, every story, seems to be pushing a concept of some kind.
When I teach college journalism classes, I tell my students to go out and report on events as they unfold, letting their stories arise from whatever they find, while ignoring the expectations or preconceived notions they had at the start. The real world, I tell these impressionable young writers, is always more fascinating than the ideas we hold about it. Reality, truth, the bizarre behavior of people in the wild—they will always surprise you.
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There are so many of these false narratives, in every realm: The economy is healthy even though prices are soaring. Having a Zoom party is fun. Taking a virtual tour of an art museum is almost like being there. Viruses aren’t transmitted among people protesting injustice. #HillaryOnHulu was an organic “trending topic” on Twitter.
My root objection to these fictions isn’t about politics or even ethics, purely; it’s one of aesthetics. Not only are these narratives untrue, they’re also uninspired and formulaic. They feel engineered with a takeaway in mind, assembled from a kit—with a moral, a villain, and a hero. They lack the pleasing strangeness of reality and the uncanny rightness of mimesis. As you consume them, there’s no sense of discovery or revelation. I find them pat, predictable, deadening. They bore me.
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The more I paid attention to what was tangible, the phonier the narratives began to feel. In September, my husband and I attended a tech conference in Miami where no one even talked about politics. Instead, we swam, ate, and discussed books, drug trips, herbal remedies, UFO sightings, beauty, privacy, surveillance, and the best places to visit in Utah. I once again realized what I already knew—that no one I encountered in person ever fit into a prefabricated narrative. ”
9.4
The New Newspeak - Heather Heying
“My hopes for the future include that ever more people become capable and confident of assessing for themselves what they are being told, and decide their own course of action even when it runs counter to the dominant narrative. This, of course, is one of the roles of education. In contrast, getting everyone to go along with the mainstream because everyone else is doing it has, historically, been one of the roles of organized religion. And yet it’s mostly the religion-debasing, #FollowTheScience crowd who are in lockstep now, following orders, and calling for the debasement and exclusion of those who don’t comply. Mostly, these are people who understand neither science nor religion, although they have chosen as their new god the one that feels the least like the old ones.
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I am reminded of the three slogans of the Party in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
Oddly, I can’t say that having Newspeak initiatives launched by elite and powerful institutions, and then made private, is making me feel any stronger, but maybe that’s just me.
Winston, the hero of Nineteen Eighty-Four, finds himself at one point lectured on the wonders of Newspeak by another employee of the Ministry of Truth: “Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?” Syme asks him. “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?”
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Seriously, though: When I was a professor, creating and leading study abroad courses to remote places, I was told an amazing thing by a Title IX compliance officer. Thankfully, she did not work at my school, so I easily evaded her injunctions. She informed me that if, after I had spent years creating a program to go to the Amazon (as I had), someone in a wheelchair wanted to take my program, I would either need to figure out how to make that happen, or cancel the trip for everyone.
“The Amazon is not ADA compliant,” I told the confused young authoritarian. “If it were, it wouldn’t be the Amazon.”
“Then,” she announced with some relish, “you would have to cancel the class.”
That is the endpoint of this ideology. Life has to be made equally awful for everyone. Anything else would be unfair. ”
9.5
Actually, Color-Blindness Isn’t Racist - Coleman Hughes
““Color-blind” is an expression like “warm-hearted”: it uses a physical metaphor to encapsulate an abstract idea. To describe a person as warm-hearted is not to say something about the temperature of that person’s heart, but about the kindness of his or her spirit. Similarly, to advocate for color-blindness is not to pretend you don’t notice color. It is to endorse a principle: we should strive to treat people without regard to race, in our public policy and our private lives.
Embracing color-blindness would mean an end to policies like race-based affirmative action in college admissions.
But wouldn’t gutting these policies have terrible consequences for people of color?
The question need not be posed hypothetically. California actually did ban affirmative action in its state-funded colleges in 1996. And this ban did not hurt students of color. It didn’t reduce college enrollment for black and Hispanic students; it simply re-shuffled them throughout both the University of California and Cal State systems. Many of them did end up at less prestigious schools, but those schools better matched their incoming academic credentials. That is a tradeoff I’m comfortable with. There’s no reason to expect that a nationwide pivot away from race-based affirmative action would be any different.
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What’s more, eliminating race-based policies does not mean eliminating all policies aimed at reducing the gap between the haves and the have-nots. It simply means that such policies should be executed on the basis of class, not race. Not only is class a better proxy for true disadvantage, but class-based policies also avoid the core problem with race-based ones: to discriminate in favor of some races, you must discriminate against others. This discrimination creates an endless cycle of racial grievance and resentment in every direction. Income-based policies—such as progressive taxation, earned-income tax credit, and need-based financial aid—tend to be more popular and less controversial than race-based policies, in part, because they do not penalize anyone for immutable, biological traits.
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How is it that progressives abandoned color-blindness?
In the early 1960s, there was an elite consensus that color-blindness was the goal of race politics. Then the race riots of the late 1960s led politicians and corporations to perform an about-face. They began implementing race-based policies as a hasty and pragmatic response to the riots—much like governments and corporations did in response to the riots of 2020. Today, you can scarcely find a professor in an elite institution who would defend color-blindness.
This is a grave mistake. Color-blindness is the best principle with which to govern a multiracial democracy. It is the best way to lower the temperature of racial conflict in the long run. It is the best way to fight the kind of racism that really matters. And it is the best way to orient your own attitude toward this nefarious concept we call race. We abandon color-blindness at our own peril.
9.6 *
How to Do What You Love - Paul Graham
“To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. We've got it down to four words: "Do what you love." But it's not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is complicated.
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Teachers in particular all seemed to believe implicitly that work was not fun. Which is not surprising: work wasn't fun for most of them. Why did we have to memorize state capitals instead of playing dodgeball? For the same reason they had to watch over a bunch of kids instead of lying on a beach. You couldn't just do what you wanted.
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What a recipe for alienation. By the time they reach an age to think about what they'd like to do, most kids have been thoroughly misled about the idea of loving one's work. School has trained them to regard work as an unpleasant duty. Having a job is said to be even more onerous than schoolwork. And yet all the adults claim to like what they do. You can't blame kids for thinking "I am not like these people; I am not suited to this world."
Actually they've been told three lies: the stuff they've been taught to regard as work in school is not real work; grownup work is not (necessarily) worse than schoolwork; and many of the adults around them are lying when they say they like what they do.
The most dangerous liars can be the kids' own parents. If you take a boring job to give your family a high standard of living, as so many people do, you risk infecting your kids with the idea that work is boring. Maybe it would be better for kids in this one case if parents were not so unselfish. A parent who set an example of loving their work might help their kids more than an expensive house.
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If you think something's supposed to hurt, you're less likely to notice if you're doing it wrong. That about sums up my experience of graduate school.
How much are you supposed to like what you do? Unless you know that, you don't know when to stop searching. And if, like most people, you underestimate it, you'll tend to stop searching too early. You'll end up doing something chosen for you by your parents, or the desire to make money, or prestige—or sheer inertia.
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What you should not do, I think, is worry about the opinion of anyone beyond your friends. You shouldn't worry about prestige. Prestige is the opinion of the rest of the world. When you can ask the opinions of people whose judgement you respect, what does it add to consider the opinions of people you don't even know?
This is easy advice to give. It's hard to follow, especially when you're young. Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you'd like to like.
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Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious. If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige. That's the recipe for getting people to give talks, write forewords, serve on committees, be department heads, and so on. It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn't suck, they wouldn't have had to make it prestigious.
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The test of whether people love what they do is whether they'd do it even if they weren't paid for it—even if they had to work at another job to make a living. How many corporate lawyers would do their current work if they had to do it for free, in their spare time, and take day jobs as waiters to support themselves?
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Sometimes jumping from one sort of work to another is a sign of energy, and sometimes it's a sign of laziness. Are you dropping out, or boldly carving a new path? You often can't tell yourself. Plenty of people who will later do great things seem to be disappointments early on, when they're trying to find their niche.
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When you're young, you're given the impression that you'll get enough information to make each choice before you need to make it. But this is certainly not so with work. When you're deciding what to do, you have to operate on ridiculously incomplete information. Even in college you get little idea what various types of work are like. At best you may have a couple internships, but not all jobs offer internships, and those that do don't teach you much more about the work than being a batboy teaches you about playing baseball.
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Most people would say, I'd take that problem. Give me a million dollars and I'll figure out what to do. But it's harder than it looks. Constraints give your life shape. Remove them and most people have no idea what to do: look at what happens to those who win lotteries or inherit money. Much as everyone thinks they want financial security, the happiest people are not those who have it, but those who like what they do. So a plan that promises freedom at the expense of knowing what to do with it may not be as good as it seems.”