The Larry Summers incident (which if you don’t know about it already you probably don’t want to–though if you insist they have a good discussion with plenty of links over at CrookedTimber) reminds me of an issue I’ve always had with sociology. The super-short version of the incident is that Summers (Harvard president) made some comments about women and mathematics professorships. He suggested that there were innate issues contributing to the difference in number of women in mathematics and his critics suggest that there are sociological issues. My response is: yes. But the whole thing reminds of a problem. Let us assume a case where two groups have no innate differences. If the only difference in outcomes were due purely to personal choice, I don’t think sociology has a good method to detect that. And even worse if there were a situation where the result is mostly personal choice, and mildly social pressure, I suspect that sociology would correctly identify the social pressure and incorrectly identify it as the major reason for the difference.
Is there a good method to avoid this problem?
“If the only difference in outcomes were due purely to personal choice”
I guess I am enough of a determinist to think “personal choice” to be an insignificant variable. There are reasons that Texans marginally prefer football to basketball, as compared to people who live in Indiana. There are reasons people prefer Whoppers to BigMacs. Most of the time I don’t care about those reasons, but McDonalds cares a lot.
Can you give me some examples of choices you can say are totally free and non-determined or influenced?
He said, specifically, that he ranked the three possible explanations for women’s underrepresentation in this order of importance:
1. “the high-powered job hypothesis” which is that high powered-jobs require levels of time and commitement that “it is a fact about our society that that is a level of commitment that a much higher fraction of married men have been historically prepared to make than of married women.”
2. “different availability of aptitude at the high end” 3. “different socialization and patterns of discrimination in a search.”
I disagree utterly with the relative positions of #2 and #3 and I think it is unbelievably self serving and lazy, as well as factually wrong, for a University president to say that. I can see a defensible argument for concluding that we don’t know whether #3 is more or less of a factor than #2, and a defensible argument for concluding that #3 is more important than #2.
I agree that #1 is the most important, but I also if you think that’s a matter of personal choice and unconnected to socialization or to discrimination of any kind you are CLUELESS. They are personal choices made in a context where women usually have to choose between having children and getting tenure, and men usually do not. Much of this is because of overt discrimination, now or in the past. Some of it is because of biology–only women give birth and only women can breastfeed–but even when it comes to the physical differences, I am totally convinced that if the group that had more or equal political power also had the uterus and the boobies, we would not have a system where that group had to choose between a high powered job and having children.
I don’t think Summers should be fired for these remarks, and I object to calls to fire him much more than I object to what he said. The only context where I can see them forming part of a justification for firing him is if there’s a sustained pattern of the hiring and tenuring of female professors getting worse and worse on his watch–these remarks are a small bit of empirical evidence that it’s not a coincidence.
As for your direct question: I don’t think sociologists deny that personal choice plays a roll. I think they’d see themselves as asking why there’s a large and pervasive difference in the personal choices made by men and women, or Jews and Catholics, or whatever else. And it boils down to things like biological differences, social pressure, and discrimination. Sociology might discount biological differences but since there’s such a pervasive history of explaining too much through biological differences, I think it’s useful to have a field where they’re discounted in the starting assumptions. I mean, in economics there’s a starting assumption that people are totally rational actors, and God knows that’s not true–but it’s also quite a useful assumption sometimes.
I agree with katherine . I am sorry that there are calls for him to be fired. I don’t want the left to engage in the kind of bullying that has become characteristic of the right. People should be able to discuss things without being afraid of vilification on the blogishere. We are becoming a society where everyone is at risk of being infamous for fifteen minutes.
i don’t know of a solution to the problem Sebastian poses. maybe we just need to focus on changing the factors over which we have some control.
I’m with Bob. You respond to the world around you and the incentives they seem to reflect. These, for must of us, are sociological artifacts. I don’t pretend to have even a coherent basic conception of the limits of claims about free will, but the more I talk to smart people interested in tangential fields, the less sure I am about my belief in it.
(actually, Catholics and Jews are a flawed example because to some degree you choose whether to be Catholic or Jewish, so it’s possible that some of the cultural determinants are themselves freely chosen to some degree. Though, conversions back and forth are pretty darn rare.
Political ideology is even more a matter of choice, which is why I’m more suspicious of claims that conservatives are being discriminated against in academia than claims that women are: it’s possible that academics become more liberal; less likely that academics become more male. It’s also possible that the same factors that lead you to choose to vote Republican lead you to prefer a private sector job over academia, or the factors that lead you to choose to vote Democratic lead you to prefer academia. Whereas your sex isn’t a matter of choice, so it would have to be a biological predisposition that ultimately causes the different representation in academia. Also, there’s more of a history of overtly discriminating against women than overtly discriminating against conservatives.
The only context where I can see them forming part of a justification for firing him is if there’s a sustained pattern of the hiring and tenuring of female professors getting worse and worse on his watch…
There is, but I don’t have time to rustle up a link, sorry. Try Crooked Timber, B&S and Bitch, PhD; I know at least one of them has the stats.
When Hilzoy posted about the Summers speech I linked to this article and I still think it is one of the better ones about male/female differences.
About the personal choice question: I think you can never really answer that with sociology since there is always interference from the environment. Even in psychology it is sometimes hard to distinguish wether someone wants something out of personal choice or due to peer pressure, or self image adepted to reference group or similar procedures. And that is only *one* person…
The question of free will and responsibility gets complicated because of morality and the criminal justice system, and I not one to say McVeigh or Lindley England or whoever are not responsible. Leave that aside.
But one place to quantify free will is in politics.
1)Votes Republican because past five generations have voted Republican
2)Vote for Bush because likes foreign policy but dislikes economic and social policy
Are both of these personal choices? Equally free? Whatever.
Karl Rove, because Texans have free will, does not have to take into account the fact that 100% of Texans might vote for Kerry, and thereby spend a lot of money in NY or California to cover the possibility. Given the info Rove has before the election, once someone steps into a booth and pulls a lever, I would guess Rove knows in aggregate, how 95+ percent will vote.
And most of us don’t lose sleep at night because our partners, being free agents, could chop our heads off in our sleep. We assume a very great degree of predictability, and believe what remains can be influenced.
I dunno, Bob. Maybe we differ here. Increasingly, I think that “free will” is what we label the lacunae of decision-making processes that we don’t understand. At the moment (and probably for my lifetime) that includes pretty much everything. Ideas surrounding “free will” are pretty long-standing, and are very robust, so the systems that depend on notions of free will (inc. punishment regimes) are a pretty good back-up for all of the areas where we really don’t know what we’re talking about. But I think we use words like “responsible” b/c it’s useful, not b/c its accurate.
The invariable problem is that people take ill-defined theories and try to game a utoptia out of them. And, in general, our social models suck. So the model fails, and the entire project of trying to understand ourselves in mechanistic fashion falls out of fashion. (Admission: I know nothing about sociology, for example, so maybe the models are much better than I expect).
“if there’s a sustained pattern of the hiring and tenuring of female professors getting worse and worse on his watch…”
There have been fewer women tenured on his watch but
a) small sample size – not statistically significant changes.
b) he has instituted changes in the tenuring scheme intended to get younger professors – which may as a side-effect reduce the entrant pool of women having kids earlier rather than later.
c) I don’t know if there were changes in the overall entrant pool about which Harvard could do nothing.
d) Maybe other schools increased their efforts to attract female professors.
I don’t want the left to engage in the kind of bullying that has become characteristic of the right.
Sadly, and I say this out of love for many of the liberal persuasion with whom I am in great sympathy on a great many issues, when it comes to a century of discovery concerning innate traits and innate biological differences, a mere mention of the idea is often enough to get one tarred, feathered and declared a Nazi by many of the leading thinkers on the left. Pinker’s The Blank Slate documents many such instances. The very idea of innate differences in capabilities is anathema to certain schools of thought, and will result in just that kind of bullying.
Okay, but Summers did not only suggest that innate differences may exist. He also said he thought they did exist, and moreover that they were more important factors than discrimination or socialization. That, coming from the person who has ultimate authority over the most prestigious and powerful university in the country and who has hired and tenured fewer women than his predecessors*, is what got people upset.
*not taking a position on whether it’s his fault. Haven’t looked at the numbers or studied the issue in any detail.
Understood, Katherine, and I’m aware of and appreciate the difference between Summers’ comments and raising the general idea. But I’m also aware that it is in itself a hot-button issue for many, and that, much like the right-wing will jump on even the perception of the tiniest criticism of America, there would have been no way for Summers to have raised the idea publicly that would have kept certain quarters from going apeshit.
“Okay, but Summers did not only suggest that innate differences may exist. He also said he thought they did exist, and moreover that they were more important factors than discrimination or socialization.”
Disagree to the extent that he would I think include socialization as a part of the major thrust of his argument. I.e., women are socialized more than men to want families, raising a family is not consistent with 80-hour-weeks, etc.
Without any research available to me, I would guess, based on what has happened to men and women over time in different environments, cultures and nations, that, even if there is an inherent difference, as Summers suggests, it is completely swamped by social, cultural and educational pressures on children as they develop.
What is more bothersome to me is the lack of knowledge of science that Summers displays with his discussion. You always have to define the appropriate null hypothesis, and in sociology the null hypothesis almost invariably is that there is no difference. Given the variability of people as a whole, it is almost always impossible to identify a population in sociology that is inherently different from the population as a whole on a particular characteristic. Once you add in nurture, you are almost certain to have allowed your biases to play you for a fool if you ‘discover’ an inherent difference.
Summers has no evidence to point to that there are such inherent differences, so, given the nature of science, he would not only have been wise not to speculate that way but also should have known that his speculations were, for scientific purposes, wrong for the moment. The track record of the “Women are naturally inferior, er, different” crowd has been very poor. The president of a university should be wary of such obvious pitfalls.
Ah, a thread that manages to touch on a whole raft of normally distinct issues that I care about. OK:
About Summers I have very little to say. I don’t know how this will shake out. But there’s one thing I would say especially to the conservatives who read this blog, and that is: be very wary of interpreting anything the Harvard faculty does as liberal political correctness.
I am normally wary of inferring much of anything from the fact that academics are e.g. more likely to be registered Democrats than the population at large, since in my experience political views do not enter into (and are never brought up in) e.g. hiring decisions. But I always think to myself: could it be that I and everyone I talk to are somehow an unrepresentative sample, and have just by chance ended up in places where this is true? (Or, more likely: is it that philosophy is not a representative discipline?)
When I’m talking about Harvard in particular, however, I have no such compunctions: I grew up in Harvard, and I know it. And here’s one thing I know: while there are (e.g.) questions about whether the Harvard administration really stood up for some of its faculty during the McCarthy era, the Harvard faculty itself is completely devoted to academic freedom. They are all odd intellectual types who are vividly aware of the importance of freedom of thought to their own lives. Moreover, they have a clear investment in preserving academic freedom, since they do not want anyone telling them what they can and cannot say.
And it’s not just that faculty members have a vested interest in freedom of thought. In general, I find, the higher up the academic food chain you move, the less likely you are to find political correctness operating, simply because good scholars know good scholarship and respect it. This is especially true at a place like Harvard, which is, and knows it is, the best university in the world. There are obvious downsides to this, like arrogance; but there are upsides as well. One is a sense that you have nothing to prove to anyone, and can therefore do what you think is right. (Thus, in hiring: political considerations, which normally don’t figure, would be looked down on with contempt at really excellent universities: the very idea of hiring anyone other than the best person in the field would strike the Harvard departments I know as beneath them.) Moreover, the psychological incentives all run against the idea of political correctness: having been appointed to a place like Harvard, people have a natural tendency to believe that Harvard only hires the most extraordinary minds (e.g., themselves), and to maintain and insist on this exclusivity.
The point of all this is to say: It is conceivable to me that one or two faculty members might go all PC on Larry Summers and forget about the importance of academic freedom. (My Law of Large Groups again.) But it is not conceivable to me that any expression of faculty displeasure that acquires any appreciable amount of support is so motivated. I’m not saying this because I like Harvard and don’t want to think ill of it. It has its good points and its bad points, like most places. It’s rather that, knowing the place reasonably well, this particular possibility seems to me to run flatly counter to everything I know about the faculty. (Explaining anything the Harvard faculty does in terms of a lack of appreciation of academic procedure is like explaining the conduct of the American Bar Association by citing its failure to appreciate the importance of following clearly defined procedures, or the actions of the Chamber of Commerce in terms of an inadequate appreciation of the wonders of free markets.) And so however this shakes out, I would urge people to be skeptical of explaining anything in terms of liberal political correctness.
More on other parts of the post later.
Sorry: in my second to last sentence (the one in parentheses), “Explaining anything the Harvard faculty does in terms of a lack of appreciation of academic procedure” should be: ” … in terms of a lack of appreciation of academic freedom.
Note to self: preview is your friend.
am i the only one puzzled by SH’s assertions?
he states, without support, that the entire discipline of sociology is incapable of detecting false positives and is incapable of assigning correct weightings to various influences.
now, he and von and I and others are all lawyers. this gives us a somewhat jaundiced view of the scientific profession. BUT (a) I’m very curious to find out what kind of work SH was doing that led him to his views about sociology; and (b) I’m fascinated what evidence SH has beyond personal experience regarding the inability of sociologists to correct for false results.
or is he just making s**t up?
After all, I could say that I suspected that conservative homosexual males live with such strong cognotive dissonance in today’s political climate that they as a group are incapable of adequately analyzing the science surrounding other people’s views of the innate ability / discrimination / socialization debate.
but my suspicion, were i to say such a thing, would be utterly unsupported.
Francis
Francis, I am not a sociologist, but if I were I think I’d tell you that sociology is really really hard. As things stand I don’t find SH‘s question inflammatory – not the case for your counterexample.
Moving on to sociology: I think part of the problem is taking ‘free choice’ and ‘social pressure’ to be opposed, and/or taking ‘free choice’ to be inexplicable. Both are wrong, I think. Consider traffic patterns: each and every person (leaving carjackings aside) driving on a freeway made a personal choice to drive at a given time by a given route, but traffic patterns are nonetheless predictable. This is lucky, since it means that the people who design highways can, for all practical purposes, not consider the possibility that literally everyone in the area who owns a car will decide to use the same highway at the same time.
The part of sociology we’re discussing, as I understand it, is concerned with the predictable and explainable parts of human behavior. These often result from choices, but that doesn’t make them less explainable. What I’d be interested in, if I were a sociologist trying to verify/falsify Summers’ claims, is which personal choices were attributable to discrimination, social pressure based on stereotypes etc., and other bad things, and which were based on more benign things. (I.e., it’s which causes these choices have that matters, not whether they have any at all.) And there’s no reason that I can see to think that sociology couldn’t sort that out.
fdl, SH in no way deserved your comment.
a thesis:”There is some percentage of the population who would preference child rearing to career advancement, and that percentage, all other things being equal, would be higher among women than men.”
Sebastian, for the sake of an argument discards innate or biological differences. Neat. He presumes that there are some social pressures or conditioning. Again neat. He then assumes a third factor, free will or personal preference, unconditioned. Many people think such a thing exists. Lots. SH asks how such free decision making might be measurable.
I found nothing offensive in the post at all. A lot of people believe in that “free will” stuff.
Imagine an androgenous or fully liberated society where there were no significant socialized gender differences, or social incentives or disincentives to having children.
In such a place it might become harder to determine why one person would make the choice. I believe there would still be reasons, but they are the kinda of reasons we usualy choose to ignore, like the reason I prefer vanilla to chocolate ice cream, or progrock to classical.
Read “Beatnik Bayou” by John Varley. Good story.
I”m of the opinion that the problems of sociology are the problems that humans have in handling statistical concepts of correlation. For instance, here’s an interesting discussion of the relationship between the garbage one discards and their putative beliefs. Yet as evidence, how solid is it in arguing for values? Hilzoy’s example of freeway is spot on, and it is one of the key examples in Mitchel Resnick‘s book _Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams: Explorations in Massively Parallel Microworlds (Complex Adaptive Systems)_. He was also behind the software Starlogo which visually represented decentralized systems.
One I suspect often runs into difficulties finding controls and performing clean expts – I for example would be interested in seeing a society of a few generations of the children of a cohort of infants raised by robots.
Just wait’ll my kids grow up, rilkefan.
Slart, you’re not just leaving things to fate?
In some things, we have no choice; fortunately I’m a guy who can move mountains. Still, the damned mice keep ordering me around.
It may be that, all other things being equal in a perfect world with no prejudice, average differences between male and female brains would be seen. Testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, and other sex hormones cross the blood brain barrier.
However, in the real world where there is a lot of prejudice, acknowledged and unacknowledged, overt and subtle, I don’t see any way to determine what those differences are. Studies have shown that people treat infants differntly based on whether they believe those infants are male or female. And the differences in treatment only continue and increase as time goes on.
For example, Largo, et al observed young children at play. They found no difference in play behavior according to gender until the children got to about age 2, after which children started to mimick gender specific behavior. No hormonal change occurs at age 2. However, 2 year olds begin observing the world more closely and begin to understand what is expected of them more clearly. In other words, they begin to play gender specific games at about this age because they learn that that is what they are supposed to do. (More details on the study are in the book Babyjahre. Sorry, it’s not on the web. Neither, as far as I know, has it been translated into english.)
Other studies have demonstrated prejudice at the grade school, high school, college, and graduate/professional school levels. Not even to mention prejudice on the job…Given the amount of prejudice confounding the results, how is anyone to know whether there are real innate differences between men’s and women’s ability to succeed in academia or in math and science?
The links below are to a couple of articles suggesting that negative stereotyping and related problems may be major contributors to the relative lack of success of women in traditionally male fields such as math and science. (Incidently, can someone explain to me how to copy links so that they come out as links rather than plain text and how to rename them? I’m pretty sure that my inability to do these things is based on lack of having ever been taught, not innate inability;-)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=
Abstract&list_uids=14498781
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=
Abstract&list_uids=15189633
Minor anecdotal observation from the trenches: at the level of freshman/intro calculus, my female students routinely beat the pants off my male students. [Metaphorically speaking, though I’ve had my suspicions.] The general distinction is that the female students are unafraid to ask for help, while the male students apparently are (at least, they rarely do). This has been confirmed pretty much uniformly across all the TAs I’ve talked with; the girls just do better work and are more willing to ask questions.
What’s really interesting — and I can’t speak to this, having no direct experience teaching at this level — is that the gender disparity is completely reversed in the upper level math classes. There, it’s the male students who are unafraid to ask questions and the female ones who tend to be the wallflowers. Coupled with the disproportionate male-to-female ratio, this tends to vault the male students far, far ahead of their female peers.
I have no friggin’ clue why any of this holds, btw, I’m just throwing it out there as a data point.
PS: I am, of course, generalizing here; I’ve had phenomenal male students and craptacular female students. My point is that, en masse, the observations hold true.
I wish I could find the graph I saw recently, as it was on this very subject – women in science, math, etc. It showed a slow, steady build over the past fifty years of women joining in, which I found reassuring as I had unreasonably assumed that things maybe stalled at some point.
Anarch’s anecdote is fascinating, but like him, I don’t even know where to begin speculating on what it means.
But speaking of speculation, it’s Dianne’s talk of socially constructed gender that really riles me. The manner in which male and female characteristics are expressed are socially determined; the characteristics themselves are not.
I used to think this idea was rather silly and harmless – but that was before I heard about botched circumcisions leading to gender reassignment…
Pinker cites a perhaps outdated study: “And a meta-analysis of 172 studies by psychologists Hugh Lytton and David Romney in 1991 found virtually no consistent difference in the way contemporary Americans socialize their sons and daughters.”
Dianne, if you want to make hyperlinks I suggest you either do ctrl-u and look for some examples of the form bracket a href=”blah.html” close-bracket, or google on basic html. This is a slightly awkward process so it’s a good idea to preview and make sure the link works.
All this talk of “free will” and no references to scripture!
(Calvinist and the Papist would have something to say!)
The Liberals have taken over!
Anarch, my experience of math is being quite good in high school and starting junior-level courses (physics math, anyway) when I entered college. I had a friend who was a year or so behind me intending to major in math. Sophomore year we took some geometry course together and I think I was better than him. Then I went away for a year and took topology and algebra in Germany, and when I got back senior year he was talking about stuff – C* algebras, something-or-other spaces, who knows what, stuff I never learned subsequently, and I found real analysis very difficult and had to lean on his previous year’s solution sets. He’s gone on to have a snazzy career at a snazzy institution. Anyway, I have the impression that I was just getting by on being smart, whereas he was using less smartness than some innate math talent that turned on at some point and just grabbed everything.
Probably this experience makes me more inclined to believe the 4-sigma tails position.
“What I’d be interested in, if I were a sociologist trying to verify/falsify Summers’ claims, is which personal choices were attributable to discrimination, social pressure based on stereotypes etc., and other bad things, and which were based on more benign things. (I.e., it’s which causes these choices have that matters, not whether they have any at all.)”
Hmmm, after reading the thread thusfar, I wonder if my question could have been been better formulated as “Can sociology detect questions of taste or will it always explain them as different socialization?” It may be that I’m not being fair to the science. I don’t ask biology to explain galaxy formation, perhaps I shouldn’t ask sociology to factor in free will.
Sebastian: I think free will is a red herring here. (I mean: the truth or falsity of causal determinism, etc., don’t seem to be what you’re worried about; if I read you right, it’s taking account of personal taste, whether free or not.) Also, I’m not sure that taste per se is usefully opposed to things like socialization.
Think of it this way: a sociologist in the relevant (data-driven, not descriptive) branch is essentially going to try to gather data and run regression analyses in an effort to find correlations which (ideally) might be explanatory. Tastes that are partially formed by socialization will show up as correlated with socialization (provided you can measure that.) Other tastes will not. If taste sorts with gender and nothing else, it might just get explained as a gender-driven difference in preference. The hard part would be determining that it really wasn’t correlated with anything besides gender — how would you know whether or not you had gone through all the possible hypotheses?
Having a plausible story to explain some difference is also important. I mean, we all (presumably) accept the idea that male/female differences in e.g. genitalia are produced by biology, not socialization, since there is (afaik) no remotely plausible story about how socialization could produce any such differences (leaving aside people who go through gender reassignment, etc.) In the case of math aptitude you can tell plausible stories either way, though, which is what makes it hard.
It may be that I’m not being fair to the science. I don’t ask biology to explain galaxy formation, perhaps I shouldn’t ask sociology to factor in free will.
I think the proper analogy might be that you don’t ask astrophysicists if galaxy formation they can’t explain might be the result of galaxies making choices (alternatively, “God wanted it that way”).
Ah, maybe we are getting somewhere here. I’m not asking that sociology explain free choices–it almost certainly could not. What I’m asking is whether or not it allows for free choices. Does sociology completely deny a place for free will? Is it entirely mechanistic?
What is “free will” expressed in a scientific language? Could I tell if someone was acting in a “free choice” way under a pet scan?
Anyway, probably the behaviour in question would end up being described as “subject performed random act, perhaps due to noise in neuron #…” But that’s not sociology afaik – doubt sociologists think about individual humans. The only relevant question I can think of in what I guess is the intended context is the degree to which humans are socializable.
“What is “free will” expressed in a scientific language? Could I tell if someone was acting in a “free choice” way under a pet scan?”
It all depends on your account of free will. The majority view among non-philosophers seems to be that in order for a choice to be free, it must not be caused by anything else. The majority view among philosophers is that freedom is consistent with a choice’s being caused. (Why? Imagine that some completely indeterministic event happens in your brain — say, a uranium atom sheds one electron rather than another — and the effects of this are somehow amplified, so that if it emits one electron, you (apparently voluntarily) resist some temptation, and if it sheds another, you don’t. Suppose, to go further, that all your choices are indeterministic (uncaused) in this way. Would this be freedom? No, say most of us. It’s not as though you choose, for one thing. And for another, we normally think that we are morally responsible for our free choices, but it seems odd to say that you’d be responsible for resisting the temptation if the fact that you did so really did depend on this totally uncaused event.
Aha, some people say, but maybe you’re responsible for all the previous actions that formed your character in such a way that you were vulnerable to this temptation, vulnerable enough that this silly little uranium atom’s decaying in one way rather than another made all the difference. — This doesn’t help. If all those previous actions were themselves caused by indeterministic events in this way, then it’s just as hard to see why you’re responsible for them. And if they aren’t, then responsibility turns out to require not uncaused choices, but previous ones with normal sorts of causes.
If you think about how odd it would be to say that we are responsible for truly uncaused choices — choices that are not just uncaused by “external influences”, but by e.g. our existing character — then you might start wondering whether freedom of the will, whatever it is, really has so much to do with whether your actions are causally determined — whether we’re not just looking in the wrong place, or setting up the alternatives wrong. I start from (roughly) this point, and say: yes, this is looking in the wrong place, so what we need is a better account of freedom that doesn’t get us into this mess.
Anyways, back to the original question: I think the analogy with God’s role in physics is probably good. As I understand it (and I’m sure I’ll be corrected if I’m wrong), the methodological naturalism of science is not a denial that God exists; it’s just a recognition that the sorts of things science is looking for are not divine actions. God, if He exists, need not obey any natural laws or work in a regular fashion; and therefore spotting His actions in the universe would neither allow us to explain anything (since we explain by citing general laws, and His operation would not necessarily conform to any), nor be detectable by normal scientific means. (I mean, He might obligingly write “I, God, did this!” across the heavens, but if he didn’t, how would we tell that it was Him at work?) Likewise with what you might call “mere” taste (taste unexplained by anything else) in sociology, I think.
Does sociology completely deny a place for free will? Is it entirely mechanistic?
Well out of my ken here; probably a question for Healy. But I’m not sure that anything that has scientific intentions describes “free will” as we lay people might. (That’s probably a question for Hilzoy.) The few neurobiologists I know are fairly suspicious of “free will.” And economics, to extent that it aims to sort out a rational actor responding to incentives (which looks like a mechanistic rule to me), doesn’t look “free will” friendly either.
it’s Dianne’s talk of socially constructed gender that really riles me. The manner in which male and female characteristics are expressed are socially determined; the characteristics themselves are not.
Jonas
I’m not trying to pick a fight (lord knows there’s been enough of them around these parts), but why does it rile you so?
Speaking for myself, I view most of human history as chipping away at the manner in which characteristics are determined as we have more control over our environment. I would certainly grant that a small set of characteristics, given a certain environment, are going to result in a larger number of constraints. However, since ‘man’ is increasingly able to control that environment and deal with ‘his’ needs, it is not altogether clear to me why we have to accept those constraints.
We have seen far too often how constraints that have seemed carved in stone were not really so fixed. 100 years ago, women were prevented from participating in the Olympics. Of course, if life were simply competitive Olympic events, then we men could rest comfortable in the fact that elite men will always be slightly better than elite women (though the elite women would kick 99.9% of the male butt). But it would be possible to construct events where women’s particular anthropometric differences would result in them having an advantage. (Women hold almost all of the world records in ultra-endurance swimming, for example)
But when we look at real-world problems outside of killing mastadons with flint tipped spears, more is always better when we think about the universe of possible solutions. When you only have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
As another example, we can look at someone like Temple Grandin whose unique perspective gives us answers to problems we weren’t aware of, and this makes me think that we should err on the side of tackling more rather than fewer constraints.
Furthermore, there are a large number of animal species where the power balance is inverted. The Greeks, with the notion of Amazons, imagined that it would be possible for men and women to change places on the hierarchy. They viewed it as a bit of Bizarro World, granted, but if they could envision the possiblities, certainly we can.
Of course, my perspective on this is shaped by being in a country whose differences in gender socialization, to my eyes, lead to a situation where a huge pool of talent and energy lies untouched, forced into specific career paths and increasing the out-marriage rate. Of course, I am the beneficiary of this, but I’m not under any impression that I earned any of it ;^)
Well, of course I think that everything is caused or random and hence free will makes no sense, especially since I reject the physicality of truly random events. But I can see someone of faith accepting my noise model above – saying the soul is an unphysical not subject to our reasoning or the law of the excluded middle.
As to God not skywriting, I could probably come up with scenarios, but they’d come out seeming petty.
Effin’ Hilzoy. Please wait until paged (as in above post) before explaining idea so articulately; this allows others to feel that they are not completely useless.
The majority view among philosophers is that freedom is consistent with a choice’s being caused.
I’m not convinced philosophers (or anyone, really) have a sufficiently deep theory of causation to turn that into a meaningful statement, though. Which, I hasten to add, isn’t a comment on the paucity of philosopher’s intellects; it’s that there are too many unresolved scientific questions — how does thought emerge from the neural network, is the collapse of a wavefunction truly random &c — to adequately pose, let alone resolve, the question.
If I’m wrong, though, please let me know 🙂
“If I’m wrong, though, please let me know :)”
I assert one could build a transparently deterministic system that would pass a Turing test. And that no reasonable person acquainted with such a system would claim to have more free will than it.
Anarch: the view that a choice’s being free is consistent with its being caused doesn’t necessarily require a very specific view of the nature of causality (let alone: of how the brain works.) It just requires that it be consistent with the variants that seem most plausible.
Those philosophers (including me) who think freedom is consistent with causal determinism (for what it’s worth, I don’t believe in determinism, but that doesn’t affect the claim that we could be free if it were true) tend to think that what matters, as far as freedom is concerned, is how choices are caused, but this (in practice) tends to mean: by your character, reasoning, etc., or by e.g. a seizure?
The Turing test isn’t a good way of solving the free will/determinism debate at all. Conversation does not encompass the whole of human existence – if it did our lives would be much easier. Programming a decent conversation partner seems a far easier proposition than programming a full, conscious mind – especially given dumb hacks like this [PDF].
By dumb hack, to be clear, I mean very clever and smart from a pragmatic point of view, but not the genius involved in, let’s say, programming another genius.
I assert one could build a transparently deterministic system that would pass a Turing test.
That’s true at a trivial level; one could simply program in all possible conversation paths (bounded by, say, the length of the desired conversation). I’m not sure what that says about the question at hand, though.
SCMT: Sorry; I was relying on my complete model of the deterministic universe to predict your question, thereby saving me the trouble of reading the thread, but I screwed up the times, posted before you asked it, and in so doing revealed all. Drat.
You only believe that deterministic stuff because your genetics and experiential inputs made you think like that. 😉
Sociology is the study of societies — hence the name — not of individuals. The results of sociology are consistent with either free will or determinism. If determinism, sociology studies the details of that determinism. If we have free will, then sociology studies the causes that inspire it.
For myself I believe that we have free will as individuals, but we exercise that free will in a context, and from the context we can estimate with some accuracy how many of us will make a particular choice. Thus sociology has a point. (At least, this is what the voice in my head tells me to believe.)
rilkefan: I assert one could build a transparently deterministic system that would pass a Turing test.
A lot of us would love to see it. Link?
I assert that true artifical intelligence is about ten years away. I reason like this: For fity or sixty years now, artificial intelligence has been about ten years away. Why should now be any different?
But perhaps you have specialized knowledge. Who among us is a bot? Is there any better Turing test than ObWi?
Amos, I have coded a very simple AI system that passed a boneheaded kind of intelligence test: at the Open Day for which it was written, a bunch of teenage geeks played with it for some time and were convinced that I had developed true AI. (Actually, what I’d done was enter a whole bunch of words that I guessed teenage geeks were likely to use when talking to a computer, and programmed in five-place arrays, one per word, random choice of response, so that if someone asked “Did you see the Star Trek episode last night” the program would pick one of five responses at random to “Star Trek”: but if someone else asked another question with “Star Trek” in it, they were likely to get a different answer. This impressed them.)
As far as I know, most convincing AIs operate in much the same way as my boneheaded program from years ago – they pick up words/phrases that people say to them, and respond with those words/phrases or with coded-in responses. Which are fun to play with, but they mimic human behaviour, rather than human intelligence.
rilke: Do you have a link to the original article by Lytton et al that your post cited? I haven’t been able to find it yet and without seeing the original data I can’t really say much about it. Maybe I can find it in the library here if it isn’t readily available on line.
Ha. Typically, I found the article–or at least the abstract– as soon as I claimed I couldn’t. Here is the link to a copy of the abstract (sorry, I haven’t gotten around to looking up basic html yet):
http://www.psycinfo.com/plweb-cgi/padirect_icnstf.pl
I don’t agree with Pinker’s interpretation of the article. While Lytton and Romney do conclude that the differences in the way parents treat their children according to gender are small, they do not conclude that they are non-existent. Of note, they state “In North American studies, the only socialization area of 19 to display a significant effect for both parents is encouragement of sex-typed activities.” So they did find that parents in North America tend to encourage sex stereotyped play, exactly the behavior that might lead to a difference in the choices men and women make in their courses of study later on in life. Also note that this study was a meta-analysis: a study of other studies. They note that effects were seen more often in higher quality than lower quality studies, raising the possibility that their meta-analysis underestimates the effects.
Just to make trouble…can anyone rigorously define “male” and “female”? Is the chromosomal sex that is important or the phenotypic? Is it the genetalia or the brain which determines gender? Is a person with testicular feminization male or female? What about a transgendered person?
What do you have against bots? Biocentrist.
I think you ought to know I’m feeling very depressed.
Both, amongst other things I’m sure.
Male. Does a person who gets their leg amputated cease to be human, because humans are bipeds?
As I don’t think transgender surgery results in a complete physiological transformation into another gender, I think such persons are reasonable faciscimiles of their opposite sex, but still whatever they were to start with.
I think you ought to know I’m feeling very depressed.
Why are you feeling very depressed?
I think it’s something to do with the unceasing pain he’s feeling in all the diodes on his right-hand side.
Why are you feeling very depressed?
Life… don’t talk to me about life…
Hmm… can’t tell for sure from the responses, but you may be missing the Eliza reference.
Life… don’t talk to me about life…
Can you elaborate on that?
me: “I assert one could build a transparently deterministic system that would pass a Turing test.”
Anarch: “That’s true at a trivial level; one could simply program in all possible conversation paths (bounded by, say, the length of the desired conversation). I’m not sure what that says about the question at hand, though.”
Uhh, no. By that logic you can win the Nobel Prize next year – just program in all possible Nabokov-brilliant novels bounded by say 300 pages and publish thirty of them. I’d lend you my million monkeys but…
Amos, I don’t expect to see the Singularity for thirty or forty years, but I think my argument stands.
Jonas
People with testicular feminization are completely insensitive to androgen–they lack the receptor. Phenotypically, they are more or less female: they have vulvae, vaginas, and I think uteri, although they have testes instead of ovaries. However, their testes are located in their abdomens rather than in a scrotal sac (a very dangerous situation, by the way: testicular fems are highly prone to testicular cancer). They also have female secondary sex characteristics, sometimes extremely well developed secondary sex characteristics. Interestingly, they lack most body hair, ie underarm hair–that turns out to be androgen dependent. I believe that a person with testicular feminization was once Miss America. Was she really Mr America?
This may be untrue, but my sister was told in med school that Jamie Lee Curtis is an example of the syndrome described above. Genetically XY, but insensitive to androgens.
This may be untrue,
Snopes has it as Undetermined – but only because, as they point out, there is no way to prove this rumor true or false without a chromosome test: there is no more reason to believe it true of Jamie Lee Curtis than there is reason to believe it true that Arnold Schwarzenegger is gay.
There are gay bodybuilders; there are gay Hollywood actors: there are gay politicians: all three professions tend to encourage an extreme closetiness: if you use the “If possible then true” operator, it works for both the Jamie Lee Curtis rumor and the Arnold Schwarzenegger rumor.
But it’s just as likely not to be true.
Oops. Testicular fems don’t have uteri. Sorry for the error.
Of course, by its very nature, you’re almost doomed to not notice it until after it’s happened.
Who among us is a bot?
I’ve always been a bit suspicious of TtWD,who at times seems to me to indicate traits of Jesurgislac’s methodology, and who at times seems to go beyond that. Perhaps better algorithms, or human intervention, or just maybe true intelligence. Of course if Timmy is a bot then maybe I am also….
There are gay bodybuilders
Cite?
there are gay Hollywood actors
Cite?
there are gay politicians:
Cite?
all three professions tend to encourage an extreme closetiness
Cite?
Ok, I’m not a bot, I’m Sebastian. 😉
think free will is a red herring here.
That’s Free Willy you’re thinking of, and he’s a whale, not a herring.
Actually, I read that Free Willy suffered from vermillion clupea syndrome, in which a creature with the outward characteristics of an entrapped whale actually has the sexual and rhetorical organs of a red herring.
Could be. Certainly white whales are often similar to red herrings.
Dianne,
Apologies, I completely misunderstood and confused testicular feminization. That being said, I find such conditions to be fascinating questions of gender, but not in any way undermining the fact that most people fall into the main two categories.
rilkefan, sorry, back to the argument.
everything is caused or random and hence free will makes no sense
But our state of knowledge is so limited that such a sweeping inference goes way beyond what we can confidently assert. How are our brains wired? What effect does quantum-mechanical “randomness” hove on out brains? How do neuronal action potentials become thoughts? We are just beginning to find out about the first, but only when we know much more will we even to be able to state an operational definition for “free will”.
In the meantime I just assume that this feeling of free will that I have, actually reflects some underlying reality.
Uhh, no. By that logic you can win the Nobel Prize next year…
Ahhh, you never said anything about efficiently writing such a program 😉 My apologies; I misunderstood the level of abstraction in the phrase “one could build”. Could you clarify?
You were proposing to generate all conversations, no? I can do that now, though unfortunately there’s probably not enough storage space in the universe. But we’re talking about winning a Turing Test, and the problem of sorting out the human-like conversations is highly non-trivial – if you can do that, then allow me to sell my goods and follow you.