fear and loathing in watchmaking school
This is Joe Juaire, my watchmaking instructor. Joe Juaire is a gregarious, jolly guy. I feel I understand his personality well enough to relate to him in the ways it is important to do so. The rest of my class is, comparatively, a mystery.A funny thing happened first thing in the morning in class today. I was reading an article that I'd printed up in the library just minutes before and I came to this:
In many traits, men show greater variance than women, and are disproportionately found at both the low and high ends of the distribution. Boys are more likely to be learning disabled or retarded but also more likely to reach the top percentiles in assessments of mathematical ability, even though boys and girls are similar in the bulk of the bell curve. The pattern is readily explained by evolutionary biology. Since a male can have more offspring than a female--but also has a greater chance of being childless (the victims of other males who impregnate the available females)--natural selection favors a slightly more conservative and reliable baby-building process for females and a slightly more ambitious and error-prone process for males. That is because the advantage of an exceptional daughter (who still can have only as many children as a female can bear and nurse in a lifetime) would be canceled out by her unexceptional sisters, whereas an exceptional son who might sire several dozen grandchildren can more than make up for his dull childless brothers. One doesn't have to accept the evolutionary explanation to appreciate how greater male variability could explain, in part, why more men end up with extreme levels of achievement.
It was so novel (to me) a way of looking at the differences between men and women that I made a "Huh!" noise and then started to explain to a couple of people who gathered in to see what this was about. Here I was explaining what everybody (I hope) is already familiar with, that what this was saying was that the deviation for many traits other than sex might be a result of sexual selection, when I made the mistake of saying the words "increased chances of exceptionalism", and one woman just said "That sounds sexist", and turned around, not to speak to me for the rest of the day. For all I know, this will be the last time we ever speak. Anyway, I made the point I started out to make, much to the astonishment of my classmates who thought I was oging to drown in it after being given the slamming door by that lady, which I felt was slightly unfair. After all, I was just exposing people to something that I found interesting and all, not saying that their god is dead or anything. After this, we all turned to our work and it died out. But. Then I saw the very next sentence of the article, out of the corner of my eye.
What are we to make of the breakdown of standards of intellectual discourse in this affair--the statistical innumeracy, the confusion of fairness with sameness, the refusal to glance at the scientific literature? It is not a disease of tenured radicals; comparable lapses can be found among the political right (just look at its treatment of evolution). Instead, we may be seeing the operation of a fascinating bit of human psychology.
The whole thing had actually been about this which had just happened to me as I was reading it. Borges would have been pleased with this synchronicity. The only thing I could not do, and the most just, would have been to point this event out to the class and to that woman --who had performed as if on cue-- her act of "breakdown of standards of intellectual discourse."
I don't know these people, but where this kind of conversation is concerned, I think I'm alone in my class.
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