(See update below)
Prof Abi, over at Nanopolitan, has been tirelessly campaigning for politeness in debate. Dilip D’Souza in the comments section makes a perceptive observation. (See comment #17)
Abi, I notice you’re running up against the old motto: if I broadly agree with you, you’re arguing reasonably (even if I sometimes have my disagreements with you); if I don’t agree with you, you’re spewing vitriol.
Now let me change the subject completely.
Today, I find that Prof. Abi has posted two items related to the gender gap. The second one is a piece of research which investigates whether women are less competitive than men. That by itself is not new. Research after research has come out indicating the subtle and interesting differences between men and women.
That reminded me of something. A few months back, Prof. Larry Summers, president of Harvard had speculated on why there is a gap between men and women in Mathematics and the Sciences. He had been as nuanced as can be reasonably be expected in a speech. He had presented three hypotheses,, the first (and the most plausible, according to him) of which said that women were not as willing to put in long hours as men. The second was biology, which ensured that at the high end of the curve, women had less aptitude for the sciences. The third is that women are discriminated against.
There were howls of outrage at this. Many of them were abusive. Most of them misunderstood the remarks and betrayed a complete lack of understanding of statistical nuances like “average”, “standard deviation” and “high end of the curve”.
Prof. Abinandanan, at that time, had an approving post giving a roundup of the reactions to the remarks. One of the reactions calls Prof. Summers a “congenital idiot”. Prof. Abinandanan calls this outrage “justified”. He is not even happy when Summers puts up a “weak apology”, saying that more research is required before validating a claim. Professor Abinandanan, who is on the faculty of the Indian Institute of Science, apparently thought, at that time at least, that there exist empirical claims which are outside the pale of scientific validation.
So what was I saying? Ah, yes, that I find Dilip’s remarks quite perceptive. It is easier to spew vitriol towards your opponents than towards those on your side. It is easier to tolerate “hard-hitting” remarks when it is directed towards those on the other side than it is to tolerate “vitriol” when it is directed towards you. It is just as easy to dismiss criticism directed at you as “vitriol” and therefore, undeserving of an answer.
Therefore The Examined Life hereafter promises to be equally rude towards everyone and equally sceptical towards everything, including claims that it agrees with. If I am proved wrong, I will quickly apologise, regardless of how much of my ego I have invested in it. If I have vitriol directed at me, I will nonetheless answer any substantive points that the vitriolic criticism makes and ignore the vitriol. If the criticism is content-free and consists entirely of vitriol I will ignore it completely and not link to it. As my aim is to focus on issues, I will never let questions of tone, tenor and rudeness to hijack the debate, regardless of how mean they’ve been to me.
Update: Prof. Abinandanan responds to my post. As far as I could make out, the argument seems to be that calling some people the names he disapproves of, such as “anti-national”, “subversive”, etc. chills the debate, but the name I pointed out, viz. “congenital idiot” does not. Why? Only he knows.
Prof. Summers wasn’t just called a “congenital idiot”. One of the links that expressed the “outrage” that Prof. Abinandanan found “justified” had a headline which went “News Flash: Larry Summers is a Dick”. Not one of the links in Abi’s post argued with Summers with data. Not one. I’ve read them all. All of them just make a bunch of assertions. The only remotely cogent argument that I could find said that it was inappropriate to even suggest that it might be innate differences, because it is self-evidently true that it is discrimination that is causing the problems. Ergo, Larry Summers is a “dick” for bringing scientific arguments to dispute what is self-evidently true. But Prof. Abi says that this does not amount to chilling the debate, and Prof Abi is an honourable man.
Seriously, if Prof “Congenital Idiot” Abinandanan thinks that smearing people with names like these does not detract from the debate, then, well… there is a simple way of verifying that claim.
Update Ends.
Truly priceless sir. Watch out for my next”vitriolic” entry.
And incidentally, notice that Prof Abi left out the third hypothesis that Summers offered, i.e. women face discrimination. How’s that for fairly characterizing your opponent’s views?
Worse still, he misunderstands Larry Summers’ phrase “high end” as referring to “high school” revealing that he either knows nothing about statistics or about the subject he is writing on. Apparently that is not a barrier to
spewing vitriolmaking hard-hitting comments.Ha ha. Ravi, good stuff, but I hope you realise that more vitriol (I mean, hard-hitting analysis) is going to be headed your way now. Substantive discussion? What’s that? You will soon be assailed by sarcasm, sanctimony and self-righteous condemnation. Enjoy the barrage.
I agree with your policy that when an argument makes a substantive point, it deserves to be answered, even if it contains vitriol.
When you’re the target of only vitriol, of course, you may choose to ignore it, the first time. On occasions I’ve ignored it the second time too. But I’ll make sure the third time is the last time.
I just hope you won’t be daunted by the rubbish hurled at you, and then decide to get rid of the comments section.
This is an excellent blog, and needs to have the comments section open. As does Abi.
Excellent Analysis, Ravi. Great Stuff
But what are arguments without “vitriol” – comment-fights where both parties are carrying vitriol hoses are a lot more amusing to read, than the well researched polite and serious stuff ;P
Hi Ravi,
Claim verified!
Now that you have uttered that ‘congenital idiot’ thingy yourself, it is not all that bad, is it? You got it off your chest, and I didn’t get hurt. And the debate can still go on, without malice. See, I told you so!
The posts that I linked to, and that you refer to in your update, were all written within a couple of days after Larry Summers speech, and so were full of emotion and passion and yes, some nasty language that expressed the bloggers’ outrage and scorn. But, pretty soon, enough evidence (with data) came out in the open to show that Summers was wrong — way, way, wrong — fueling further rounds of outrage and scorn directed at him. Finally, it is this expression of outrage (not just from the ones that I linked to, but from many others as well) that led to Larry Summers’ issuing an apology about four days after his speech. So, your characterization, — that Summers’ detractors (at least the ones that I linked to) were full of just hot air — is not quite correct. There was a lot of hot air initially, but hard-headed analysis did follow.
As you said in your comment on my post, calling someone a ‘congenital idiot’ could boomerang on the caller. Quite! In the Summers case, the bloggers took that risk willingly (and so did I, in approvingly quoting from Myers’ post). As things stand, these bloggers (and others who expressed their outrage) were proven right.
Well, you have decided to take that risk yourself. We will just wait and see how it all pans out. In the meantime, I just have this fine feeling of being vindicated 🙂
Let’s assume for argument’s sake that Summers was wrong. Are you saying that being wrong justifies the kind of outrage that was heaped on him? Are you seriously suggesting that the first thing to do is to express outrage and then present evidence? Is this the way to do science?
What exactly is “Offensive and odious” about comparing the heritability of autism and intelligence (as you have asserted on your blog)? Is the purpose of science to find the truth or to avoid giving offense?
You do know that autism, a mental disease, disproportionately affects men – so much so that autism has been called the disease of “extreme maleness” – or do you know?
And as for Summers being proved wrong, I’d like to take your word for that, but I’d like to know what you understand by “availability of aptitude at the high end” (His words) That is a subtle concept and really the key to the whole thing. Your post indicates that you do not understand what he meant by that. How can you be convinced that he is wrong if you didn’t even understand what he said? So what do you understand by those words?
Ah, as for the “apology”, he did not accept that he was wrong. He simply “regretted the impact of his words”. Learn to read properly Abi.