Gendered brains, gendered science, playful plaque ...

[erudito]

Yes, the brains of men and women really are different. Via wildilocks. An intellectually serious debate about why women are disproportionately absent from higher reaches of science and mathematics.

Local historical plaques are not normally this playful in spirit. Via the_christian.

Did I know Andre Norton died? Definitely do now. Via meninaiscrazy

Organising in favour of

Comments

Re: Consensus

[erudito]

On the issue of institutional consensus, I am reminded of the economic value calculation debate of the 1930s concerning the Mises-Hayek claim that a socialist economy could not be made to work because it could not calculate economic value. The professional consensus at the time and for quite some thereafter was that Lange and Lerner won the argument. With the collapse of the USSR and access to archives and uncensored memoirs, it is now very clear that, in fact, von Mises and Hayek were correct. (Soviet planners were doing things such as calculating price ratios from American mail order catalogues or using price information from the New York Times precisely because their system was incapable of generating genuine price information.)

Resistance to the tectonic plate theory is another case of false consensus. There is value in science being cautious (most new ideas are wrong) but consensus is no sort of guarantee of truth.

So, I prefer evidence directly rather than evidence of evidence. And, as I say below, the way various complications have been ignored and levels of certainty seriously overstated have not been reassuring. I particularly get sceptical when beliefs are waved as signs of virtue and dissent as a sign of perdition since the capacity to pollute decision-making is obvious.