Eclecticism

I haven’t had as much time to really dive into this as I’d like, but that happens sometimes. Last month, Royce pointed out Harvard President Lawrence Summers’ remarks about women and their aptitude for sciences and asked me what I thought.

I wasn’t sure, but I ended up offering a limited defense of Summers — though not of what he said, for the simple fact that at the time there was no transcript, and all the reports were simply operating on second- or third-hand reports.

Well, a transcript of the session has been released, and from skimming it over, I’m more convinced than I was before that Summers was being a goob. Looks like I erred a bit too far on the side of caution on this one (though I’ll stand by that error — I’d far rather look at what someone did say than what someone else says that they said).

From the New York Times, via Daily Kos:

At that point, the Harvard leader suggested he believed that the innate aptitude of women was a factor behind their low numbers in the sciences and engineering.

“My best guess, to provoke you, of what’s behind all of this is that the largest phenomenon – by far – is the general clash between people’s legitimate family desires and employers’ current desire for high power and high intensity; that in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude; and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination,” Dr. Summers said, according to the transcript.

Slate’s William Saletan, who had what I felt was a good look at the original furor, has also come back to take another look at Summers’ remarks.

For more than a month, critics have accused Harvard President Larry Summers of using genetics to explain away sexism in society and academia. They’ve demanded that he release transcripts of the remarks in question, delivered at an academic conference on Jan. 14. On Thursday, facing calls for his resignation, Summers released the transcript. It shows his critics misconstrued or misrepresented him on numerous points. It also shows what he got wrong and why.

[…]

In short, Summers got a bum rap. So was his analysis of biological and cultural factors sound? The transcript answers that question, too. The answer is no. Summers grossly overreached the evidence, and he made a couple of glaring logical blunders.

Summers proposed “that in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude, and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination.” In other words, biology outweighs environment. No evidence he presented justifies this hypothesis.

[…]

Why did Summers make these mistakes? The transcript suggests two conflicting reasons. One is that he’s stubborn and argumentative. […] The other is that once he offers a hypothesis, he’d rather defend and extend it than listen objectively to the alternatives. He’s got an open mind but not an open heart.

I suspect this, rather than sexism, is the root of Summers’ errors, because a sexist wouldn’t have said what he said while displaying a second intellectual flaw evident in the transcript. Again and again, Summers warned his listeners to be skeptical of what they’d prefer to believe. We all want to believe socialization explains differences in male and female outcomes, he observed. Therefore, he reasoned, we should distrust that hypothesis and look for evidence to the contrary. He was so busy being skeptical of the popular explanation that he forgot to be skeptical of the unpopular one. He overstated the case for innate sex differences not because he wanted to believe it, but because he didn’t.

Whatever his reasons or justifications, now that we know what was said, it’s clear that Summers hasn’t been facing an undeserved controversy. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out in the long run.