Armando asked me to "refute this."
Ok, I'll respond. All I ask is for a constructive discussion, unlike those where Armando has been flaming right and left.
To see what it is I'm supposed to "refute," & etc., see the continuation.
Here's what Armando is so proud of:
Back to Summers. Here is what he said about women in science.
There are three broad hypotheses about the sources of the very substantial disparities that this conference's papers document and have been documented before with respect to the presence of women in high-end scientific professions. One is what I would call the--I'll explain each of these in a few moments and comment on how important I think they are--the first is what I call the high-powered job hypothesis. The second is what I would call different availability of aptitude at the high end, and the third is what I would call different socialization and patterns of discrimination in a search. And in my own view, their importance probably ranks in exactly the order that I just described.
So. He is not, as some have claimed, merely listing three possibilities and encouraging us to discuss whether or not they might be contributing factors. He is explicitly saying that women are not in science because they choose not to be (the "Mommies don't want high-powered careers" argument); because they are genetically inferior ("at the high end"; this is the "oh sure, some women are smart, but the best women aren't as smart as the best men" argument); and that, oh yeah, maybe socialization and discrimination happen too, but really that's far less important than the fact that women really don't want these jobs, and if they do, they're just not good enough.
The first paragraph, which Armando quotes from Summers, conveys exactly what Summers has recanted: in the New York Times, he was quoted yesterday as saying that he had "substantially understated the impact of socialization and discrimination," and that "the issue of gender difference is far more complex than comes through in [his] comments."
I think Summers was right to recant, and I've never said otherwise.
I do think, however, that Armando mischaracterizes Summers in the second paragraph, which is all Armando.
As I read Summers, he was "listing possibilities and encouraging us to discuss" (Armando's words), as well as saying what the rank of the factors are "in [his] view" (Summer's words). Note that Summers constantly highlights the difference between his assessment of the problem (his analysis of it into factors) and his speculations about it (his ranking of those factors). There's nothing wrong with taking on both tasks, while disarticulating them. Summers can't expect to have people like Armando willfully steamrollering over all of his careful qualifications ("I would like nothing better than to be proved wrong") about his speculations in order to--what? does Armando even disagree with his categories of analysis?
So, in a nutshell: personally, I think that in the talk Summers did a pretty good job of isolating the factors involved, and that, yes, he did a bad job of ranking them in order of importance.
Why do I value Summers's isolation of those involved factors?
I think all the time about sex-based discrimination in the academic workplace, and like I said I've learned a lot from these threads about it. That's why I've been reading responses on Summers here, by the way--not so I can brush off silly insults from Armando. Summers should have talked about discrimination more. But then again, that's not the talk he set out to give, and there are decent reasons for why he chose to focus on the factors he focused on--such as the fact that discrimination tends to be what the conversation focuses on, so there is already a lot of talk, relatively speaking, about it.
I'm speculating here, but Summers seems to me to clearly have fallen into the trap of wanting his newer thoughts to be the most important thoughts. Whoops, wishful thinking. But even if, as Summers now acknowledges, those newer thoughts aren't more important than thoughts about discrimination, they are it seems to me nevertheless worthwhile.
What is interesting about those other factors, the ones on which he chose to concentrate?
Well, first, I'm fascinated by the whole issue of 80-hour weeks in professional life and whether anyone--man or woman--should be subjected to them. I think it is great that Summers raises this issue, although he could have gone much, much further, posing questions such as: If women shy away from them, aren't they smart to do so? Do men "choose" to do this, or are they tricked or trapped into such lifestyles, fooling themselves when they say it's a "choice"? But he was giving a talk, not writing a book.
Meanwhile, I'm troubled, but willing to face, the notion that more men have eccentric brains. But above all, on that issue, since you asked (ha! as if), I'm interested in something Summers didn't bring up, which is the question of how the influx of women into science is necessarily changing our ideas of achievement, aptitude, and intelligence. Does the eccentricity of men's brains radiate in all directions? Or to the contrary has science been set up to reward the patterns of male eccentricities? If the latter is the case, then men who seemed like Einsteins before will soon come to just seem like bad cases of OCD.
Sort of like Armando has in my eyes dwindled, over the past 48 hours, from a stalwart polical wit into a stupid flame-thrower.