« Surprise - Governments Out For Money Too | Main | Maurice Hinchey Proves Himself to be Spectacularly Uninformed »

February 18, 2005

Speaking Truth to Power Idiots

I saw on Wizbang that a transcript of the meeting with Lawrence Summers has been released. He gives a great speech. However, I also think the responses to his speech in the transcript are quite interesting.

First of all, this part is funny,

Q: Well, I don't want to take up much time because I know other people have questions, so, first of all I'd like to say thank you for your input. It's very interesting-I noticed it's being recorded so I hope that we'll be able to have a copy of it. That would be nice.

Yes, that was nice.
[From the speech] If it was really the case that everybody was discriminating, there would be very substantial opportunities for a limited number of people who were not prepared to discriminate to assemble remarkable departments of high quality people at relatively limited cost simply by the act of their not discriminating, because of what it would mean for the pool that was available. And there are certainly examples of institutions that have focused on increasing their diversity to their substantial benefit, but if there was really a pervasive pattern of discrimination that was leaving an extraordinary number of high-quality potential candidates behind, one suspects that in the highly competitive academic marketplace, there would be more examples of institutions that succeeded substantially by working to fill the gap. And I think one sees relatively little evidence of that.

Q: Secondly, you make a point, which I very much agree with, that this is a wonderful opportunity for other universities to hire women and minorities, and you said you didn't have an example of an instance in which that is being done. The chemistry department at Rutgers is doing that, and they are bragging about it and they are saying, "Any woman who is having problems in her home department, send me your resume." They are now at twenty-five percent women, which is double the national average-among the top fifty universities-so I agree with you on that. I think it is a wonderful opportunity and I hope others follow that example.


Good job at totally missing the point! The question is not whether it is possible to have a department with more women professors if you recruit heavily, the question is whether the quality of that department increases because of it.

[From the speech] Most of what we've learned from empirical psychology in the last fifteen years has been that people naturally attribute things to socialization that are in fact not attributable to socialization. We've been astounded by the results of separated twins studies. The confident assertions that autism was a reflection of parental characteristics that were absolutely supported and that people knew from years of observational evidence have now been proven to be wrong. And so, the human mind has a tendency to grab to the socialization hypothesis when you can see it, and it often turns out not to be true

Q: One thing that I do sort of disagree with is the use of identical twins that have been separated and their environment followed. I think that the environments that a lot of women and minorities experience would not be something that would be-that a twin would be subjected to if the person knows that their environment is being watched. Because a lot of the things that are done to women and minorities are simply illegal, and so they'll never experience that.


Let me get this straight. So the questioner is saying twin studies would be worthless because people wouldn’t discriminate if they knew they were being watched because discrimination is illegal? First of all, the kind of discrimination we’re talking about is generally not overt or illegal. When we speak of socialization, the great bulk of it is done by the parents. We’re talking about parents buying their little girls dolls instead of trucks, or not emphasizing school work. None of that is illegal. And it’s not like the researchers are hanging over the subjects 24-7, cowing anyone who might discriminate against the children. Even if the fact that the child was in a research study changed the ways in which people interacted with the child, so what? Twin studies are concerned with the circumstances the subjects ACTUALLY grow up in, not the circumstances they would have grown up in had they not been in a study. So if observation really did prevent discriminate/socialization, then the study might not tell us much, but it wouldn’t be invalid.

Q: Raising that particular issue, as a biologist, I neither believe in all genetic or all environment, that in fact behavior in any other country actually develops [unintelligible] interaction of those aspects. And I agree with you, in fact, that it is wrong-headed to just dismiss the biology. But to put too much weight to it is also incredibly wrong-headed, given the fact that had people actually had different kinds of opportunities, and different opportunities for socialization, there is good evidence to indicate in fact that it would have had different outcomes. I cite by way of research the [unintelligible] project in North Carolina, which essentially shows that, where every indicator with regard to mother's education, socioeconomic status, et cetera, would have left a kid in a particular place educationally, that, essentially, they are seeing totally different outcomes with regard to performance, being referred to special education, et cetera, so I think that there is some evidence on that particular side.
Yeah, and if you control for mother's education, socioeconomic status, et cetera, there will still be great variability. Summers never said that socialization had nothing to do with it; he simply said that there was more to it than that. Besides which I’m sure those factors make a big difference in, for instance, whether someone graduates from high school or not, but I doubt they make a very big difference in whether or not someone becomes a professor after getting a graduate degree. Somehow I don’t think there are a lot of people who manage to overcome their terrible life in order to get a PhD, but they just can’t get past their humble upbringing enough to become a professor.
Q: You know, in the spirit of speaking truth to power, I'm not an expert in this area but a lot of people in the room are, and they've written a lot of papers in here that address ....

LHS: I've read a lot of them.

Q: And, you know, a lot of us would disagree with your hypotheses and your premises...

LHS: Fair enough.

Q: So it's not so clear.

LHS: It's not clear at all. I think I said it wasn't clear. I was giving you my best guess but I hope we could argue on the basis of as much evidence as we can marshal.

Q: It's here.

LHS: No, no, no. Let me say. I have actually read that and I'm not saying there aren't rooms to debate this in, but if somebody, but with the greatest respect-I think there's an enormous amount one can learn from the papers in this conference and from those two books-but if somebody thinks that there is proof in these two books, that these phenomenon are caused by something else, I guess I would very respectfully have to disagree very very strongly with that. I don't presume to have proved any view that I expressed here, but if you think there is proof for an alternative theory, I'd want you to be hesitant about that.


In the spirit of speaking truth to power, this questioner, and the entire NOW organization for that matter, is an idiot if they think that it’s a good idea that we totally ignore any research that disagrees with our premises and refuse to even discuss it rationally and without using the phrase “speaking truth to power.”

Unfortunatly, Summers had to leave pretty quickly, or we could have seen more.

Michelle Malkin and Powerline have more.

Posted by illuminaria at February 18, 2005 04:18 AM

Comments