The Lack of Progress in Science: Sex Differences, by Razib Kahn. About the sheer idiocy of the reality-denying PC academics, and their effect on the rest of us.
[T]here are now people with academic appointments arguing for the ending of sex segregation in sports. Often they are sociologists, who believe all things are socially constructed, and take some element of non-binary aspect to gender to meaning that the distribution of possibilities are entirely flat and arbitrary.
Consider this data, which shows that almost all men are stronger than almost all women, in grip strength, starting at puberty:
Adrienne Milner, author of Sex Segregation in Sports: Why Separate Is Not Equal, argued that sex segregation in sport denoted women’s inferiority, and that was a problem. The fact is that when it comes to strength, especially upper body strength, all the data do suggest that women, on average, are markedly inferior to men. This is a fact. This fact causes problems. But the fact that this fact causes problems does not entail that we literally deny the fact. …
Second, she analogizes sex and gender as social constructs to race as a social construct. I knew she was going to go there, because this is a rhetorical nuclear option which is going to quickly defenestrate interlocutors. She observes that: “We look at race as a social construction. It is not genetic, it is not biological, and we believe the same is [true] for sex … The male-female dichotomy doesn’t cover everyone, right? We have trans people, intersex people.” …
The facts may not be on Milner’s side, but she has the theory and the “moral arc of history” backing her. It would take great courage to still dig in and defend reality as it is, as opposed to her preferences.
Notably the people putting forward this nonsense are not paid by their results. Where there is no feedback, people can deviate a long way from reality without penalty. But politically, these people have the upper hand and make a living out of perpetrating their fantasies.
When you get right down to it, everything is a “social construct” and everything is a “model,” simply because we perceive it. Perception occurs in our minds, which use models and constructs. So what?
All models are wrong, but there are still superior and inferior models. Their measure is in how they correspond to, and predict, reality. Not how they correspond to our ethical judgements of how the universe should be.
Many sociologists dissent from this position. They’ve marched into the academy and taken it over. Because of their ideology that all things are social, they believe they can reshape the fabric of the universe through their own normative preferences. To me this is a problem. I struggle against it. Our deep human intuitions often reject, and recoil, against fragments of reality.
But to successfully grapple with reality we need to attempt to understand reality on its own terms, not our own. …
There are genuine difficult empirical questions about the nature of human variation and our dispositions, and how it relates to the values that we hold to be true. The fact that we’re still discussing sex segregation in sports and how it is unjust illustrates how far we’ve come in the solipsistic and socially constructionist direction.
To think that there are wordsmithing parasites out there who build careers based on trite misunderstandings of words like “construct.” What a rich society we are to be able to support people wasting their time like this.
