There’s also an epistemological point in Michael’s post, which is interesting too.
The issue of the day is sexism/feminism and the debate is splitting down two rough sides: those who find religion immoral or irritating and want to campaign against it with no time devoted to anything else, and those whose objection to religion is part of a generally progressive agenda (frequently called ‘social justice’), and who feel that organised atheism is in danger of replicating the same old problems which religions have perpetuated.
Part of the problem here is that skepticism and feminism are coming from different traditions: feminism has historically been less concerned about evidence and more about consciousness-raising, while skepticism treats evidence as a gold standard and denigrates anecdotes (valued in feminism as ‘lived experience’) as meaningless. Many feminists treat a speaker’s identity as central to their credibility (this is where concepts like ‘mansplaining’ come in) while skepticism is about ignoring the identity of the speaker and focusing solely on the quality of evidence or logic they present. It’s easy to see how these different ways of looking at the world could magnify any argument and turn mild disagreements into longlasting bitter hostility, even before the current level of childishness, name-calling and abuse started.
I hope skepticism doesn’t treat anecdotes (and/or lived experience) as meaningless for all purposes and in all contexts. If it does, that sounds like what people mean by “scientism,” those who use the word without quotation marks, which I never do. Anecdotes are out of place in science, but they’re not meaningless in all senses and for all purposes. Anecdotes and their larger cousin, fiction, are often very meaningful. Imagine life without them!
Also, feminism is political while skepticism is epistemological. One is about what we value and how we think things should be; the other is about how we can figure out what there is and what we can know. They’re not radically different – feminism can be seen as skepticism about traditions and rules, for instance – but they’re not side by side in the library.
“…skepticism treats evidence as a gold standard and denigrates anecdotes (valued in feminism as ‘lived experience’)…”
This is utterly wrong. The only real knowledge anybody can have is from their own ‘lived experience’. All else is mere booklearnin’
I don’t fully agree with that dichotomy that he makes. As you pointed out, feminism is political – it’s about values – but value propositions do contain fact propositions as premises. The principles of old-school skepticism certainly apply there.
Second, moral/ethical reasoning – i.e. reasoning about values – should actually be part of every skeptic’s toolkit. Currently it’s not – I think it should be.
Skepticism and Ethics related.
Probably very wise.
I wouldn’t even go so far as to say that “anecdotes are out of place in science”… they’re don’t typically amount to sufficient evidence to prove a point, but they can (1) disprove a claim and (2) spark new research – the first step of the scientific method is, after all, “observation”. Plenty of new and useful information has been gleaned from case studies in medicine, for example (yes, typically followed up by controlled experiments… which wouldn’t have been conducted if not for the case studies).
Automatically writing off all anecdotes as ‘meaningless’ IMO qualifies as hyper-skepticism, and is really not a goal to strive towards. A lot of self-proclaimed skeptics (probably not most, but I’ve seen “more than a few”) seem to have written off “casual observation” entirely, assuming that anyone recounting an experience they had is assumed to be lying or an outlier of one. And preferring to insist – regardless of context – that “the plural of ‘anecdote’ is not ‘data'”.
Catchphrases like that can be useful shortcuts, but only if you remember that they are shortcuts, and miss a lot of the nuance that exists in, you know, what even scientists like to call The Real World.
“Many feminists treat a speaker’s identity as central to their credibility (this is where concepts like ‘mansplaining’ come in) while skepticism is about ignoring the identity of the speaker and focusing solely on the quality of evidence or logic they present”
Michael has this exactly backwards. ‘Mansplaining’ refers to a man ‘explaining’ something that he knows less about than the person he is explaining to, on the assumption that he, being a man, is clearly the authority on the matter. It is the mansplainer himself who is treating his identity as central to his credibility. When feminists identify his behaviour as ‘mansplaining’, they are (skeptically) drawing attention to his flawed assumption.
In other words, feminists point out when ‘skeptics’ are doing it wrong.
Skepticism is too political. By way of anecdote I recall many essays in mainstream skeptical mags berating the U.S. govt for lending credence to, and paying for, “alternate” medicine. Sure it was evidence first, but once the matter was decided activism was required.
Much of this is just excuses. Even if you think that the movement should focus on religion and treat social justice as a separate issue it remains a problem that harrassment occurs at events. The movement is not particularly concerned with crime prevention but if there were reports of thefts at events the response would not be that this had nothing to do with atheism. People would be asked to be vigilant, report incidents and catch the offenders.
I think he’s fallen victim to the straw-femminists out there (and some actual branches of feminism that play absolutely no role in this discussion).
Let’s start with the skepticism:
The feminists involved in this debate are ardent skeptics. They don’t go around humming “ommmmmm” and they don’t talk about their magic yoni and the deep goddess. They are, in short, not Naomi Woolf.
They are people who will throw more studies at you than you can read in a year. Just look at the Pharyngula wiki, or say “Pteryxx” three times in a row (mouthyb is another commenter who has a deep and profound knowledge on those things).
We know our stuff. We’re not making it up or are extrapolating from one single person.
Anectdotes vs. data
As others have said, it’s a catchphrase. It’s a good one but it’s limited.
If I tell ou a story about how I was groped, it’s one anecdote. If about 95% of women can tell you stories about how they were groped it’s a solid body of data about sexual assault and harassment. That’s exactly what you do in sociology: You make sure your group is large enough, diverse enough, has few confounders and then you collect the data. Each woman who answers “yes” to the question about whether she’s been groped in her life has at least one anecdote about this. And then you look at your data and you can tell whether the woman who has an anecdote is a statistical outlier, somebody who was merely unlucky, or whether that anecdote can be taken as an example of a wide-spread phenomenon.
FFS, you wouldn’t say police statistics about picked pockets are worthless because each victim just has an anecdote.
And then there’s the mansplaining.
As Ruth has said, that’s backwards. Mansplaining means that the guy automatically assumes to have something interesting, valuable and competent to add (Hello Ron Lindsay). The worst form of it is when men tell women how they are actually feeling (the women, not the men) or whether their emotions are justified.
I short, I think he makes a distinction that does not exist, but that is perpetuated by many people who call themselves skeptics but actually aren’t because they ignore the vast body of data we have on those issues.
Hm. The distinction *I’ve* observed between the people who have lost their shit about sexual harassment policies and suchlike and the people who haven’t is that the people who can’t handle the idea of “Hey, guys, don’t do that,” seem to be the ones who dislike religion because it enforces social norms, whereas the people who think that having sexual harassment policies is perfectly reasonable seem to be the ones who dislike religion because it enforces harmful, baseless, and inflexible social norms.
My impression has been that there’s a class of so-called skeptics who have just had such negative experiences with the enforced conformity of religion that they’re allergic to any attempts whatsoever to enforce social standards, no matter how basic those standards might be. I see this in the people who complain that feminists are being “dogmatic” and in those who cry “free speech” every time they’re asked to not call people cunts. It also seems like it might be connected to the strong strains of libertarianism in some quarters of our community.
Now, this is purely anecdotal and impressionistic, of course, so maybe I need to hand in my skeptic badge now. And certainly it’s not the only issue in play. But it seems to me that it might be a more useful distinction than the one Michael is trying to make.
Isn’t it interesting that some people’s anecdotes are taken far more seriously than others?
@11, this is the problem with anecdotes and I think Storey gets it close to bang on with his
“Many feminists treat a speaker’s identity as central to their credibility […] while skepticism is about ignoring the identity of the speaker and focusing solely on the quality of evidence or logic they present. ”
I will always be a “It’s what you say I care about, not hwo you are” type of skeptic. Some (but not all) of our prominent skeptical feminists aren’t of this stripe and so I can see why it grates on people.
@9, i’d be interested in your take on why more of the forums and blog activity with respect to A+, skeptical social justice etc. is not of the form of studies and findings, rather than these single individual anecdotes. I think it would make a big difference to how the movement was perceived by skeptics who’re currently fence sitting or turning away from ti because it doesn’t feel liek skepticism any more.
@8, if there were thefts people would discuss the best way to deal with them and would certainly act the same way they are here, by a small group, for whom a particular policy is perfect, stridently defending it and another group finding it too authoritarian. A little ssubsection int he middle would discuss it reasonably and because skeptics are people too, a large group on the outsides of the discussion would have a slanging match.
spacklick says: – I will always be a “It’s what you say I care about, not hwo you are” type of skeptic. Some (but not all) of our prominent skeptical feminists aren’t of this stripe and so I can see why it grates on people. –
Some (but not all) of our prominent skeptics aren’t of this stripe, either. They just think/claim they are. Then they apply different rules to evidence depending on whether or not they like its inplications. Cognitive dissonance is not confined to theists.
Ahhh that’s very good, Anne C – especially
That sums up exactly the infuriated thought I’m always having – “yes there are taboos on certain kinds of epithets, and yes, there should be. Not all taboos are irrational and bad. We need some.”
Dave @ 3 – do you recommend any particular posts on that blog? I took a look and the ones I saw were pretty thin (and a bit tilted in the direction of frowning on this very blog network).
If I look at identity and who is saying what, I think it’s healthy skepticism to take into account whether or not a person’s level of privilege interferes with their ability to understand social issues. If a white man is talking about issues relating to race and gender, I’m not going to completely dismiss anything he says, but I have to take into account what effect his identity might have on how he views issues. If he says ‘public sexual harassment isn’t a big problem’ I know that it may just be that since it doesn’t happen to him, he sees it as something which occasionally happens in extreme situations or which, when it happens, isn’t a big issue. I guess my skepticism would be as to whether or not he’s qualified to speak on the issue.
1. One strand of feminism contributed heavily to making science more objective by pointing out gender biases (not only in social sciences and humanities, but e.g. in medical sciences, too).
2. Can a skeptic who is not skeptical of traditional gender roles and gender stereotypes be truly called a skeptic? – I think not.
foaming at the mouth/
I fucking hate it when people characterize feminism as nothing but anecdotes. There’s an entire arm of statistics devoted to rigor with qualitative (read responsive) data sets. Getting a degree to do research on societies (a PhD) requires you to be a statistician. You learn experimental protocol, statistical rigor, how to mix models to most accurately interpret the data, how to use single models, how to quantify (as in, literally how to calculate) leverage and tell how outliers effect the trends in a data set, how to avoid biasing data collection, how to correctly (conservatively and/or responsibly) interpret statistical data and how to read and interpret the law and US policy to understand the nature of the federal or state policies which are designed to deal with social trends or subgroups. If you are a researcher, you may actually be called on to use research to provide advice to the lawmakers writing those policies.
At NO FUCKING POINT is that process just ‘opinion.’ If you are a researcher, you will be asking people what their feelings are about a subject, but that’s essentially a small corner in a very large room. We’re actually encouraged to be both quantitative and qualitative, because of the explanatory power of both the change in terms of numbers in the thing being measured and the individual reaction in particular populations which are effected by the thing being measured.
Moreover, we’re also subject to peer review, and if the kind of asshole who thinks this is all opinion knew a damn thing about peer review, they’d know that this is like wrapping yourself in steak and jumping into a shark tank. It does function to make scientists more rigorous, but reviews are not nice, and rarely tactful in their responses to a paper.
And yet, some ignorant jackass has looked at feminism from the outside and determined that his uneducated, un-researched opinion is of equal merit to 30 years of rigorous research.
I mean, why in the world would his opinion not be worthwhile, all on its own? Why should he bother to use google scholar to look a fucking thing up, or visit any of the databases dedicated to studies on this? His ignorance is just as fucking good as the research.
/foaming at the mouth
“Part of the problem here is that skepticism and feminism are coming from different traditions: feminism has historically been less concerned about evidence and more about consciousness-raising, while skepticism treats evidence as a gold standard and denigrates anecdotes (valued in feminism as ‘lived experience’) as meaningless. Many feminists treat a speaker’s identity as central to their credibility (this is where concepts like ‘mansplaining’ come in) while skepticism is about ignoring the identity of the speaker and focusing solely on the quality of evidence or logic they present.”
Like @5 and @9 i always thought this was a bizarre overextension of the anecdotes-aren’t-data cautionary aphorism, because, like ibbica and Gilliel say, personal accounts, interviews, and narratives of lived experience are part of the medical hierarchy of evidence, constitute evidence in sociology, and of course are fundamental evidential sources in history and anthropology!
As well as in law, industrial design, behavioral economics, marketing, and however many more methodical, evidence-based scholarly or applied knowledge-making endeavors we could name.
I don’t know where the anxiety about qualitative research comes from: is it a presumption that claims from ‘lived experience’ exist in an unreachable untestable subjective zone where all is shifting sands and decay — as if historians, sociologists, anthropologists, critical legal scholars hadn’t reflected on the drawbacks of eyewitness testimony, memory formation, cognitive biases, epistemological influences and devloped critical methods, theory, and appropriate standards of evidence in response
I’ve also seen the concept of “shame” being treated as problematic in this context, particularly in the AAA discussion. There was this notion that it’s just straight up bad to cause people to feel shame, because that’s what religion does, and a complete neglect of the fact that some behaviors really are worthy of shame.
Another place I’ve seen “free speech” being used oddly is in these repeated blowups about anti-Muslim hate. I had a huge argument about this with someone who was cheering on AA’s PA state director Ernest Perce’s weird Koran-flogging protest against a pro-religious-diversity resolution before our state legislature. In response to my acquaintance’s initial rah-rah post, I basically said, “This protest is weird and poorly targeted and makes us look like a bunch of bigoted dumbasses, so I wish he wouldn’t do it or would do it differently.” So then my interlocutor accused me of trying to squelch Perce’s freedom of speech. Worse, ze was apparently completely immune to any explanation I made of what freedom of speech actually means.
So I think this is a problem on a larger scale than just discussions of feminism. There’s a certain strain of just straight-up rebelliousness in a lot of us who painfully clawed our way out of repressive religious upbringings (myself included), and it seems like it’s hard to get people to learn to consistently temper that instinctual rebellion with education and empathy. I doubt this explains all of the jerks and careless thinkers, and it certainly doesn’t excuse them, but it might at least provide some insight into how to approach some of them. :/
Spegelei,
This is a good point. I suspect there’s a significant overlap between these hyperskeptics and the jackasses who insist that science consists entirely of physics, chemistry, astronomy, and geology (and maybe biology if they’re feeling generous). As someone who has long been involved in the physical sciences, I see a lot of this crap, and I am sick to death of it.
@mouthyb
*applauds* *hands you a towel*
Oh right, I saw some of that “shame” stuff – in particular from former Catholics. I sort of knew what they meant but yes, as you say – shame isn’t always bad.
A. There is no necessary connection between feminism and woo. It just happens that, for historical reasons, a lot of ‘fashionable nonsense,’ had accrued around feminism.
B. There is no necessary connection between skepticism and creepy libertarian/randroidism or nasty, basement-apartment, trolls. I don’t know how much intellectual pretension backs these pigs–I don’t like to look.
Our epistemology suffers when we are poorly equipped to identify and examine the biases bestowed upon us by our culture. There was a dude on B&W a while back who talked about having a “bullshit detector” which he uses to evaluate any and all claims, including those about rape and harassment. Problem is, skeptical tools like “bullshit detectors” or “common sense” are calibrated by immersion in culture. A “bullshit detector” calibrated within a culture that teaches us to be unduly dismissive of claims about rape and to devalue what women say will give false readings.
We can, of course, work to overcome the unreliability of our tools, but not without a way to question what we take for granted. Feminism gives us that. Even when it puts forth wrong ideas, it helps to shift our perspective away from our defaults. And, accordingly, it improves our epistemology.
Ophelia,
Yeah, Catholicism definitely has the rep, although I’ve also heard some of the more sex-negative Protestant fundie-isms reported as pretty bad on that front. I’m ex-liberal-Catholic, with a family that now tends toward modern theological correctness rather than the old-school hellfire and shame, so I never really got hit with that specific bit of nastiness, but clearly a lot of people did. I definitely experienced a lot of conformity pressure, though, so I have a certain sympathy for kneejerk “Don’t tell me what to do!”, and I definitely had my own Ayn Rand/Ender’s Game phase in high school.
The thing that’s harder for me to understand is why so many people who are so proud of being skeptics don’t *question* those responses and learn to restrain them when they’re not appropriate. Haven’t they ever heard of Richard Feynman? “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”
:/
Mouthyb’s post, #18, is excellent. I think this idea that feminism is all about cuddly little stories does a huge disservice to the social sciences.
Above all else, I personally used “lived experience” primarily to answer one question – what has the person talking perceived? That is, I listen to what they’re saying. It may or may not correspond to external reality; it may be that even if it does it’s not a warranted reaction. But it is generally a good starting point for further investigation.
Not sure I’m being clear here but my point is that reducing feminism to a series of anecdotes is to undo decades of hard work in this field, and (probably not deliberately) seems to delegitimize it.