"Doing objective, physical work, whether it’s mending, cooking, or building always prompts me to consider myself in relation to the world."
Physical work still has frustratingly subjective components, like what's close *enough*, have you tried *enough* stain-removal techniques before giving up?
When to abandon a physical project as failed isn't entirely free of subjective judgment.
One of the blissfully freeing aspects of math is that there isn't "proved enough", just proved or not. Pure math's freedom from empiricism offers a freedom from subjectivity that isn't practically available anywhere else (clever as empirical science is at reducing subjectivity).
"The actual science of logic is conversant at present only with things either certain, impossible, or entirely doubtful, none of which (fortunately) we have to reason on" outside of pure math. "Therefore the true logic for this world is the calculus of probabilities, which takes account of the magnitude of the probability which is, or ought to be, in a reasonable man’s mind.” – James Clerk Maxwell
Well, how reasonable can you expect your reasonable man to be?
I wonder, are the subjective parts of physical/concrete work due to fallenness or imperfection in the physical world? To use your example, if a stain won't come out, that's not necessarily due to imperfect *effort* but rather maybe due to imperfect *conditions*. In some cases it would take a miracle (felix culpa style) to restore stained cloth to a pre-stain or no-stain-detectable condition.
Whereas, on the other hand, when we're studying pure math, we are studying the ideal or (in some senses) perfect. (I wonder if I remember enough math to talk intelligently about this?)
"If she is worried that “the rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female,” why have industries already dominated by women (pharmacy, veterinary medicine) not collapsed? I choose those industries specifically because their failures should be noisy, producing a visible body count. If women persistently, and perniciously, prioritize “empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition,” I’d expect to see visible harms in less politically contentious arenas."
I'm not inclined to blame the field of medicine's dysfunctions on its growing number of women, but I think it's easy to argue that it has come to prioritize safety over risk and so produced exactly the body count you're looking for! Scott Alexander wrote:
"Some Australian oncologists did an analysis and found that 60 people per year died from IRB-related delays in Australian cancer trials. 6,000 people died from delays in ISIS-2, and that was just one study. Tens of thousands were probably killed by IRBs blocking human challenge trials for COVID vaccines. Low confidence estimate, but somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 Americans probably die each year from IRB-related research delays.
So the cost-benefit calculation looks like - save a tiny handful of people per year, while killing 10,000 to 100,000 more, for a price tag of $1.6 billion. If this were a medication, I would not prescribe it."
I agree that the FDA and IRBs have swung too strongly toward "the safest choice is delay/disapproval" but I don't think this swing tracks with the rise of women in the field. It's much more a response to particular horrors (e.g. Mengele, and Thalidomide) leading to understandable overcorrection.
Yep, I agree! But since you can find a body count if you go looking, I think the argument against Andrews becomes tougher. It's not always the case that the harms she's predicting have failed to materialize; in some cases, they have, so I think we've got to argue that even so, femininity makes a poor culprit.
Does this actually correlate with the phenomenon she's describing though? If the problems with IRBs predate women's rise, then I don't see how it supports her argument.
My upcoming book has a whole chapter on Stein!
Can't wait!
"Doing objective, physical work, whether it’s mending, cooking, or building always prompts me to consider myself in relation to the world."
Physical work still has frustratingly subjective components, like what's close *enough*, have you tried *enough* stain-removal techniques before giving up?
When to abandon a physical project as failed isn't entirely free of subjective judgment.
One of the blissfully freeing aspects of math is that there isn't "proved enough", just proved or not. Pure math's freedom from empiricism offers a freedom from subjectivity that isn't practically available anywhere else (clever as empirical science is at reducing subjectivity).
"The actual science of logic is conversant at present only with things either certain, impossible, or entirely doubtful, none of which (fortunately) we have to reason on" outside of pure math. "Therefore the true logic for this world is the calculus of probabilities, which takes account of the magnitude of the probability which is, or ought to be, in a reasonable man’s mind.” – James Clerk Maxwell
Well, how reasonable can you expect your reasonable man to be?
Programming has this too (to a point)
I wonder, are the subjective parts of physical/concrete work due to fallenness or imperfection in the physical world? To use your example, if a stain won't come out, that's not necessarily due to imperfect *effort* but rather maybe due to imperfect *conditions*. In some cases it would take a miracle (felix culpa style) to restore stained cloth to a pre-stain or no-stain-detectable condition.
Whereas, on the other hand, when we're studying pure math, we are studying the ideal or (in some senses) perfect. (I wonder if I remember enough math to talk intelligently about this?)
"If she is worried that “the rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female,” why have industries already dominated by women (pharmacy, veterinary medicine) not collapsed? I choose those industries specifically because their failures should be noisy, producing a visible body count. If women persistently, and perniciously, prioritize “empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition,” I’d expect to see visible harms in less politically contentious arenas."
I'm not inclined to blame the field of medicine's dysfunctions on its growing number of women, but I think it's easy to argue that it has come to prioritize safety over risk and so produced exactly the body count you're looking for! Scott Alexander wrote:
"Some Australian oncologists did an analysis and found that 60 people per year died from IRB-related delays in Australian cancer trials. 6,000 people died from delays in ISIS-2, and that was just one study. Tens of thousands were probably killed by IRBs blocking human challenge trials for COVID vaccines. Low confidence estimate, but somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 Americans probably die each year from IRB-related research delays.
So the cost-benefit calculation looks like - save a tiny handful of people per year, while killing 10,000 to 100,000 more, for a price tag of $1.6 billion. If this were a medication, I would not prescribe it."
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-from-oversight-to-overkill
I agree that the FDA and IRBs have swung too strongly toward "the safest choice is delay/disapproval" but I don't think this swing tracks with the rise of women in the field. It's much more a response to particular horrors (e.g. Mengele, and Thalidomide) leading to understandable overcorrection.
Yep, I agree! But since you can find a body count if you go looking, I think the argument against Andrews becomes tougher. It's not always the case that the harms she's predicting have failed to materialize; in some cases, they have, so I think we've got to argue that even so, femininity makes a poor culprit.
Does this actually correlate with the phenomenon she's describing though? If the problems with IRBs predate women's rise, then I don't see how it supports her argument.
Hm, fair. I was just thinking in a pretty hand-wavey sense that medicine has certainly gotten more woman-heavy since the days of thalidomide.