magfrump comments on A Rational Education - Less Wrong

12 Post author: wedrifid 23 June 2010 05:48AM

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Comment author: Vladimir_M 24 June 2010 10:05:24PM *  11 points [-]

magfrump:

[C]lasses in feminist science studies [...] have a perspective on rationality [...] that is unique and valuable. [...] It wasn't until the last year that I realized how much of feminism deals with things like resolving hidden inferences...

That's interesting. In my experience, when one attempts to study human mating behavior -- and the human behavioral sexual dimorphism in general -- in a completely detached manner, as if one were a space alien without any agenda or preconceptions, the resulting insights tend to sound shockingly evil from a feminist perspective, and regularly elicit instinctive condemnation with little actual understanding from feminist authors.

Of course, it could be that my view of what constitutes neutral and detached observations is skewed by various biases, or that I am oblivious of more intellectually competent and honest feminist authors. Therefore, I think it would be interesting to see a top-level post, or at least an open thread comment, elaborating on your insights in this area. This with all the usual caveats that apply to politically and ideologically charged topics, of course.

Comment author: magfrump 24 June 2010 10:21:53PM 2 points [-]

Basically the great insight of feminism is that when you charge into a politically and ideologically charged topic and try to study it like a space alien in a totally detached manner, you loose all sorts of relevant information.

For example, when you try to ask in quantum physics, is this a particle or a wave, it stops making any sense because your question is bad. The experience I have, which may not be everywhere because I took a feminism class where the professor was a quantum physicist, is that asking questions like "are women less intelligent than men" or "are women more vengeful than men" carry implicit value judgments which lead to generally bad decisions among politicians.

So while being "detached" from your context may help when doing math problems, it gives you a certain perspective on, say, affirmative action. If you're supposed to forget about context...

Anyway I'm rambling. I have been meaning to write a top-level post about it all, but it's a bit intimidating given the high quality of posts in general and I've been really busy. Probably in a couple of weeks I will have more time and hopefully get around to it.