Sixteen Volts

I recently read two interesting books about common sense that I have seen mentioned around the blogosphere.

The first one was "Why Gender Matters" by Leonard Sax. This book discusses certain inherent differences between boys and girls from babies to teenagers, and the practical consequences that these differences entail for raising and educating them. Now, of course all intelligent and enlightened people know that gender is only an arbitrary social construct with no biological basis, and can name many cultures that raise their boys to be meek and their girls to be heroes... surely there must be several... or at least there were in the neolithic era before the evil patriarchy enslaved everybody. But for the rest of us troglodytes, the book is great. Steve Sailer has reviewed it in "Boys will be boys".

My darling wife doesn't seem to have internalized the enlightened feminist theories, which is perhaps one reason why our marriage is still so happy and equal and works so well after all these years. I read for her some commonsense observations about differences between boys and girls that would make any feminist stand up on her hind legs, but she just looked at me puzzled and said "well, duh". There was also one story that was genuinely funny, not in a mocking or a sarcastic or an ironic way or anything like that, but which made both me and my wife literally roll on the floor laughing when I read it out for her. Those who have read the book can perhaps guess what story I mean: it was about a little girl who was given a toy truck, a toy backhoe and a toy front loader to play with, and she demonstrated absolutely delightful lateral thinking and inventiveness in making these toys more suitable for her girlish ways of thinking and playing.

The second book was "Profiles, Probabilities and Stereotypes" by Frederick Schauer, which I picked up on a whim. I half-expected this book to be a rant againt the things listed in its title, but it actually turned out to be their defense. The book argues that statistical generalizations and stereotypes are not evil, but absolutely necessary for every real-world person. Only omniscient people would be able to be particularists and see everything and everyone as an individual, but under real-world constraints of time, money and energy, relying on generalizations and stereotypes is efficient. But the book actually goes much further than this, arguing that generalizations and stereotypes are not only efficient, but there isn't really that much morally wrong with them.

The second chapter of this book discusses pitbulls, and it wasn't until yesterday that I learned that Malcolm Gladwell's silly defense of pitbulls was originally written as a response to this chapter. Gladwell is, of course, best known for his idea that thinking is bad and important decisions are best made without deliberation, but for some reason, this gut-level policy seems to take a 180 degree turn for him whenever certain sensitive topics are involved. For example, when you try to decide how you'd react when you see a pit bull running loose, compared to seeing a cockerspaniel running loose. But seriously, how could you even possibly begin to parody someone who argues, in all apparent seriousness and against even the most elementary probabilistic reasoning, that

If you look, in fact, at emergency room statistics, you'll see that more people are admitted every year for non-dog bites than dog-bites--which is to say that when you see a Pit Bull, you should worry as much about being bitten by the person holding the leash than the dog on the other end.

Schauer's book, on the other hand, makes e.g. the following observations:

Thus, a policy of controlling "deeds and not breeds" would be a policy much like letting all people practice surgery or law until something goes amiss, and like letting people drive as fast as they want to unless they cause an accident. The fact that we do not do this for surgery, law or driving suggests that the argument that we should do so for dogs turns out to work better as a slogan than a policy. Punishing "deeds and not breeds" might be possible in theory (although it still tends to assume that committing one attack is predictive of committing other attacks, itself a probabilistic assumption based on a generalization about canine behaviour), but would be a form of regulation quite different from much of the rest of what we commonly take to tbe the appropriate regulatory approaches. [...] If there is something troubling about restricting pit bulls because they are pit bulls, and perhaps there is, it cannot simply be the fact that this approach is based on a generalization that might not hold in some, or even in many, particular instances.

Cars and household appliances share with dogs the property of not being human beings. But this banality points the way to the second lesson to be drawn from the case of pit bulls. Because dogs, unlike cars, unlike appliances, unlike almost all other animals, and indeed unlike almost all household pets, are often thought in humanoid ways, the moral and rhetorical devides we typically deploy when we are talking about people come quickly, and perhaps too quickly, to mind. A few people might with a straight face be able to refer to "breedism", but no one has yet been accused of "brandism" for believing that Volvos are more reliable than Jaguars. Yet the social salience of the rhetoric and morality of antidiscrimination and antistereotyping makes it tempting to expand the moral rhetoric of antidiscrimination to other areas. Because the tendencies to see dogs in particularly humanoid ways are especially strong, the expansion of the moral rhetoric of antidiscrimination into the world of dogs is one that comes with a particular ease.

The later chapters of the book then discuss and defend the seemingly arbitrary and unfair practices of e.g. having the same speed limit for all drivers, forcing airline pilots to retire at the age of 60, and presuming that anybody possessing some drug more than a given threshould amount has an intent to sell it instead of keeping it for his own personal use.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Monday, February 27, 2006 at 9:15 AM