July 27, 2018

Source: Bigstock

As for the entries on women having “more mentions of romantic partners and family,” this is consistent with the robust research on sex differences, which time and time again finds that women (on average or on the whole) simply talk about “romantic partners and family” more than men do. The implication is that women tend to be more interested in those subjects than men are. Of course, for ordinary people such a difference goes without saying. There’s nothing controversial about it. It takes a highly educated ideologue to perceive a moral evil here.

It is revealing that ideas like “equitable performance across different subpopulations” are only ever applied to areas that stand high in the class hierarchy. Nobody ever demands that there be more women in plumbing, or more blacks in bricklaying. After all, resentment is basically self-interested and reflective of personal group identities. Therefore, the “parity” or “equality” resentment calls for is never meant to apply up and down the class strata.

What sort of people are they who worship at the altar of resentment, this terrible idol of the post-Christian West? Zou and Schiebinger afford representative examples. The former is a young assistant professor at Stanford. Regardless of what he actually believes, playing the equality game is indispensable for Zou. He joined the faculty at Stanford less than two years ago, and if he wants to get tenure, he must at least pay lip service to the standard cant about equality. And certainly, there is much to be gained by publishing papers like “AI can be sexist and racist—it’s time to make it fair.” There’s no better way to ingratiate yourself with the petty bluestockings and last men who control academia.

Schiebinger is a more straightforward case, for like so many women academics, she is a palpable gender ideologue. Her faculty profile at Stanford’s website makes this plain. Although her degrees are in English and history, Schiebinger is Director of the EU/US Gendered Innovations in Science, Health & Medicine, Engineering, and Environment Project, and has been Director of Stanford’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research. Her scholarship focuses on “the history of women’s participation in science; gender in the structure of scientific institutions; and the gendering of human knowledge.” She “presented the keynote address and wrote the conceptual background paper for the United Nations’ Expert Group Meeting on Gender, Science, and Technology.” And “in 2015, she addressed 600 participants from 40 countries on Gendered Innovations at the Gender Summit 6—Asia Pacific, a meeting devoted to gendered innovations in research, development, and business” (all italics mine).

And on and on in this dreary gendered vein. “Boredom it is that breeds your vicious soul, vile woman,” said the poet Charles Baudelaire. I don’t know that Schiebinger is vicious or vile, but my God, she should get a life. Her private obsession with gender (tellingly, the concept is never sex) has distorted her perception of the public issue that is artificial intelligence, and there is little justice in her efforts in this domain. On the contrary, she and other academic dullards and bureaucrats are committed to the destruction of excellence, even to the very concept of it. After all, what could be more adverse to these base levelers than the genius of Kepler, or Galileo, or Newton—all white men, alas?! Do their achievements represent “equitable performance[s] across different subpopulations”? No, a thousand times no!


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