2020 Report Card on some of the achievements and struggles of men compared to those of women.
Before a woman decides that men have it easier, she might want to consider this list. This is not a comprehensive list. Admittedly, women fare worse than men in many situations.
I'm reading The Constitution of Knowledge by Jonathan Rauch (2021). It has been a very slow read for me because it is such a impressive and detailed analysis of what is ailing us today. Here is a major distinction that is largely unappreciated. Information is merely "stuff," whereas knowledge must be carefully earned through the use of intricate institutions that coordinate, test and refine human observations and conclusions. This excerpt is from page 125:
What the institutionalization of modern, fact-based journalism did was to create a system of nodes—professional newsrooms which can choose whether to accept information and pass it on. The reality-based community is a network of such nodes: publishers, peer reviewers, universities, agencies, courts, regulators, and many, many more. I like to imagine the system’s institutional nodes as filtering and pumping stations through which propositions flow. Each station acquires and evaluates propositions, compares them with stored knowledge, hunts for error, then filters out some propositions and distributes the survivors to other stations, which do the same.Importantly, they form a network, not a hierarchy. No single gatekeeper can decide which hypotheses enter the system, and there are infinitely many pathways through it. . .
Suppose some mischievous demon were to hack into the control center one night and reverse the pumps and filters. Instead of straining out error, they pass it along. In fact, instead of slowing the dissemination of false and misleading claims, they accelerate it. Instead of marginalizing ad hominem attacks, they encourage them. Instead of privileging expertise, they favor amateurism. Instead of validating claims, they share claims. Instead of trafficking in communication, they traffic in display. Instead of identifying sources, they disguise them. Instead of rewarding people who persuade others, they reward those who publicize themselves. If that were how the filtering and pumping stations worked, the system would acquire a negative epistemic valence. It would actively disadvantage truth. It would be not an information technology but misinformation technology.
No one saw anything like that coming. We—I certainly include myself—expected digital technology to broaden and deepen the marketplace of ideas. There would be more hypotheses, more checkers, more access to expertise. How could that not be a leap forward for truth? At worst, we assumed, the digital ecosystem would be neutral. It might not necessarily tilt toward reality, but neither would it systematically tilt against reality.
Unfortunately, we forgot that staying in touch with reality depends on rules and institutions. We forgot that overcoming our cognitive and tribal biases depends on privileging those rules and institutions, not flattening them into featureless, formless “platforms.” In other words, we forgot that information technology is very different from knowledge technology. Information can be simply emitted, but knowledge, the product of a rich social interaction, must be achieved. Converting information into knowledge requires getting some important incentives and design choices right. Unfortunately, digital media got them wrong.
Excerpt from an article at FAIR's Substack by Alice Irby, who helped establish the Job Corps, and in the 1970s joined Rutgers University as the first female Vice-President of a major university. Title of her article: "Then and Now":
Many of us who labored in the civil rights movement were inspired by Martin Luther King Jr. I heard him call on us to respect others, not suppress them; to embrace diversity, not discriminate against each other; to improve our country, not tear it apart. Hope. Dreams. Fairness. Equality. The coming together of diverse people from all walks of life to work toward fulfilling the promise of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as promised by the Declaration of Independence. The Civil Rights movement opposed bigotry by relying on hope, opportunity, and cooperation. We did not succumb to anger, dissension, despair, or intolerance.
Now, as I look around, I am frightened. I see hate, not hope; dissension, not dreams; tribalism, not unity. The Civil Rights movement fought for the principle of equal opportunity, regardless of race. Today, those who call for “equity” actually support discriminating against individuals based on race to bring about equal outcomes between racial groups.
I am a follower of Martin Luther King Jr., not Ibram X. Kendi. I do not believe that present discrimination is the remedy for past discrimination. Our nation was not founded on slavery, but on ideas that paved the way for the abolition of slavery. It is because of these beliefs that I support FAIR, a multiracial, non-partisan organization dedicated to principles of fairness, tolerance, and equality—a community whose advisors and members stand tall in reaffirming our common humanity and who show courage in combating forces of intolerance, racism, and injustice. I stand not only for our founding ideals and aspirations, but also for more eternal verities—compassion, respect for all, kindness toward others, and love of mankind. I choose the optimism of King over the pessimism of the neo-racist “anti-racism” of today.
We are all one race—the human race. We laugh, cry, and bleed the same. America is a beautiful multiracial mosaic, and it grows more diverse with each passing year. In our present moment, it is especially necessary to hold true to the values of fairness, understanding, and humanity that shaped the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. These are the values that can help to heal our societal wounds, restore excellence to our educational institutions, ensure justice and equal rights for all, and garner our many diverse strengths as we seek, as ever, a more perfect union.
From Heterodox Academy, a discussion of Jonathan Rauch's excellent new book, The Constitution of Knowledge. Here's the HxA landing page for this video.
The production of knowledge thrives when universities value open inquiry, but recent trends in conformist thinking pose new threats to research, writing, and teaching. How do we combat conformist culture in our classrooms and research, while encouraging inquiry into unorthodox ideas? How can our epistemic institutions continue to seek and know truth? We were joined by HxA co-founder and Board Chair Jonathan Haidt for an in-depth discussion with Jonathan Rauch, author of The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth.
As Rauch states in the teaser, the system doesn't work by magic. It requires all of us to participate in good faith:
I've been posting ad nauseam about Wokeness over the past 18 months because it starkly contradicts many of my core beliefs. And it starkly contradicts basic principles deeply cherished by what I believe to be the great majority of Americans. I have categorized dozens of my articles with the label Wokeness. You can read them all by clicking on this link. I have carefully documented not only theories about why this movement has gained traction. I have also carefully collected many instances in which people have hurt, belittled, fired, tormented and rattled each other by embracing Woke Ideology while throwing long-established beliefs (including basic Enlightenment Principles and Martin Luther King's "content of character" aspirations into the trash.
Bari Weiss has be speaking loud lately, rallying the great majority of people--they tend to be afraid to speak up--to say what they believe and to not feel compelled to say things that they don't believe. It all sounds so simple, but the Twitter mobs are loud and vocal and they have thoroughly intimidated those who are in charge of our meaning-making institutions (e.g., schools, media, government, social media). Weiss argues that if we all just start speaking up, this insanity will diminish greatly because it will encourage others to speak up too. Here is an excerpt from Bari Weiss' article at Commentary. It is titled "We Got Here Because of Cowardice. We Get Out With Courage: Say no to the Woke Revolution." Here is Wokeness in a nutshell from her article:
It begins by stipulating that the forces of justice and progress are in a war against backwardness and tyranny. And in a war, the normal rules of the game must be suspended. Indeed, this ideology would argue that those rules are not just obstacles to justice, but tools of oppression. They are the master’s tools. And the master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house.
So the tools themselves are not just replaced but repudiated. And in so doing, persuasion—the purpose of argument—is replaced with public shaming. Moral complexity is replaced with moral certainty. Facts are replaced with feelings.
Ideas are replaced with identity. Forgiveness is replaced with punishment. Debate is replaced with de-platforming. Diversity is replaced with homogeneity of thought. Inclusion, with exclusion.
In this ideology, speech is violence. But violence, when carried out by the right people in pursuit of a just cause, is not violence at all. In this ideology, bullying is wrong, unless you are bullying the right people, in which case it’s very, very good. In this ideology, education is not about teaching people how to think, it’s about reeducating them in what to think. In this ideology, the need to feel safe trumps the need to speak truthfully.
In this ideology, if you do not tweet the right tweet or share the right slogan, your whole life can be ruined. . . . In this ideology, the past cannot be understood on its own terms, but must be judged through the morals and mores of the present. In this ideology, intentions don’t matter... In this ideology, the equality of opportunity is replaced with equality of outcome as a measure of fairness. If everyone doesn’t finish the race at the same time, the course must have been defective.... In this ideology, you are guilty for the sins of your fathers. In other words: You are not you. You are only a mere avatar of your race or your religion or your class....In this system, we are all placed neatly on a spectrum of “privileged” to “oppressed.” We are ranked somewhere on this spectrum in different categories: race, gender, sexual orientation, and class. Then we are given an overall score, based on the sum of these rankings. Having privilege means that your character and your ideas are tainted.... Racism has been redefined. It is no longer about discrimination based on the color of someone’s skin. Racism is any system that allows for disparate outcomes between racial groups....skeptics of any part of this radical ideology are recast as heretics. Those who do not abide by every single aspect of its creed are tarnished as bigots, subjected to boycotts and their work to political litmus tests.
How in hell's name could anyone be drawn to such stupidity? Weiss points to several causes that have made fertile ground for this dysfunction:
All of this has taken place against the backdrop of major changes in American life—the tearing apart of our social fabric; the loss of religion and the decline of civic organizations; the opioid crisis; the collapse of American industries; the rise of big tech; successive financial crises; a toxic public discourse; crushing student debt. An epidemic of loneliness. A crisis of meaning. A pandemic of distrust. It has taken place against the backdrop of the American dream’s decline into what feels like a punchline, the inequalities of our supposedly fair, liberal meritocracy clearly rigged in favor of some people and against others.