Horizon

I'm at a loss to understand why men who complain that the two sexes have different physical capacities are hollered down as absurd relics of a misbegotten age, whereas women who suggest it get a high five and a you go, girl.

Because you're intentionally missing the distinction between excluding competitors from an entire category of achievement on phony anatomical grounds, and noting that differences between body types may make it sensible to create different divisions within the competition.

Are you similarly at a loss over the distinctions made in boxing between heavyweights and middleweights?

And, no, apparently the fake oh-their-poor-wombs stuff isn't the only excuse being found to keep women out of ski-jumping in the Olympics, but the other excuses sound just as phony from here.

Don't you think that omitting any mention of the other fake and phoney excuses was a bit mischievous?

To declare my reason for posting this: I'm not particularly interested in the problems of high-flying wombs or ski-jumping, but I am interested in blogging, which is what caught my attention here. There was a New Yorker piece by Louis Menand a couple of months ago about expert prediction and how bad it is on the whole, and the causes of its failure strike me as being very similar to what's wrong with a lot of blogging.

"Experts are no different from the rest of us when it comes to learning from their mistakes. Most people tend to dismiss new information that doesn’t fit with what they already believe. Tetlock [the author of the piece under review] found that his experts used a double standard: they were much tougher in assessing the validity of information that undercut their theory than they were in crediting information that supported it. The same deficiency leads liberals to read only The Nation and conservatives to read only National Review. We are not natural falsificationists: we would rather find more reasons for believing what we already believe than look for reasons that we might be wrong. In the terms of Karl Popper’s famous example, to verify our intuition that all swans are white we look for lots more white swans, when what we should really be looking for is one black swan ...

"Tetlock notes, sadly, a point that Richard Posner has made about these kinds of public intellectuals, which is that most of them are dealing in “solidarity” goods, not “credence” goods. Their analyses and predictions are tailored to make their ideological brethren feel good—more white swans for the white-swan camp. A prediction, in this context, is just an exclamation point added to an analysis. Liberals want to hear that whatever conservatives are up to is bound to go badly; when the argument gets more nuanced, they change the channel. On radio and television and the editorial page, the line between expertise and advocacy is very blurry, and pundits behave exactly the way Tetlock says they will. Bush Administration loyalists say that their predictions about postwar Iraq were correct, just a little off on timing; pro-invasion liberals who are now trying to dissociate themselves from an adventure gone bad insist that though they may have sounded a false alarm, they erred “in the right direction”—not really a mistake at all."

The genuinely outrageous pretext shows up the pretextual nature of the other "reasons". Neither of us precisely said the womb business was the only reason offered, though I came close to it in the sentence of mine that you chose to post out of context.

It's hardly unusual for a writer to place greatest emphasis on the most outrageous aspect of a situation. I'm more interested in why you seem so especially zealous in attacking advocates for women's rights as illogical, yet so uninterested in attacking the illogic of men who imprison capable women in enforced feebleness.

Neither of us precisely said the womb business was the only reason offered, though I came close to it in the sentence of mine that you chose to post out of context.

Well, I'll grant you that you did acknowledge that there were a 'combination of reasons', you just decided not to explain what any of those other reasons are, and whether or not they might be sound on their own merits. I'm genuinely sorry if you feel that you were misquoted, but I would point out to you that the monocausal claim that

it's solicitude for their womanly parts that bars brave fit nineteen-year-olds from competing

... seems to exclude the possibility of there being any other explanation. I can only interpret what the author tells me, not what I think the author might have said if they had chosen rigor over style. I grant you that care with the structure of an argument sometimes makes for duller, if more consistent, prose.

Echidne's post is particularly interesting as an example of closed-loop thinking because several of the commentators clearly did not understand it, me-tooing their condemnation of the IOC when the original article explains that it's *not* that organization which is to blame (if indeed anyone is). However temporarily gratifying it might be to receive such efforltess praise, I don't think preaching to the choir is healthy for a writer in the long run. Echidne appears to be a smart person, and I know you are smart. So why such lazy arguments?