Tag: women
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The Great Stagnation and the Possibilities of Redistribution
Tyler Cowen’s new e-pamphlet (The Great Stagnation) takes on the slowing gains to be had from social and technological progress and offers an interesting explanation of some of the trends that many people see as troubling: the flat arc of median incomes since 1973 and the apparently universal surprise that the last decade offered no…
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Dworkin on Sen
Thomas Gregersen quotes Ronald Dworkin on Amartya Sen: It is not helpful, in the world of real politics, only to call for due consideration of a large variety of factors that everyone concedes relevant without also offering some overall scheme to suggest how these different factors should be weighted in a practical decision about a…
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Blame, Offense, and (again) Contempt
1. Two studies suggest that women apologize more than men. The reason? They are more easily offended, and find more actions more offensive: In Study 1, participants reported in daily diaries all offenses they committed or experienced and whether an apology had been offered. Women reported offering more apologies than men, but they also reported committing…
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Best blog post I’ve read today
From Tyler Cowen: I would not say that “we are now at war with the terrorists” but our situation has some war-like elements. Any persistent war has required major social changes, if only temporary ones, in how the body is viewed and handled. If we are so unwilling to even consider these changes in body…
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Deference Reduces Group Intelligence
NPR has a story about group intelligence: Anita Woolley, an assistant professor of organizational behavior and theory, has been studying what it means to say a group is “intelligent.” So she created teams of two to five people, drawn from 700 volunteers, and asked the teams to solve various kinds of problems. “We had some…
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Against Deference: Epistemic Privilege Considered
Following up on my claim in the last post that “honor produces error,” in my view, the problem is epistemic privilege, i.e. deference. By deference, I mean the epistemic privileges that some people receive or earn through demonstrating their erudition or looking like they know what they’re talking about. When you think of deference, you…