Quintessential goes 3-d

SL in 3 dimensions? Is that possible, does it really work?
Yes it does! The new Kirsten’s viewer offers 3-d option!!!
I have been neglecting my second life pretty badly recently. There has been so many things going on in parallel worlds, but this I had to try out.

The latest Kirsten’s viewer supports 3-d viewing with red-blue “anaglyph” glasses like these.

So far my favourite SL viewer has been Imprudence (and still is for normal use), which you can get from http://blog.kokuaviewer.org/ . But the newest S21 version of Kirsten’s viewer is a very interesting initiative. S21 is also stable unlike than previous versions, even though it is using the infamous 2.x based viewer and UI, which earlier really didn’t work on my laptop at all. But now I recommend to try out Kirsten’s 3-D experience, it does really work. Kirsten’s website is here http://www.kirstensviewer.com/

Slow Life

The volcanic ash cloud over Europe in April slowed down people’s lives for one whole week. Or at least it slowed down their traveling. Of course it was a disaster for the airlines and many travel agencies and some holiday destinations suffered losses, too, but other than that the businesses everywhere seemed to work pretty much as usual. Actually I heard many people to express a sort of relief for the slowdown of travel. There were many, who said that the ash cloud reminded them to appreciate the “forgotten” means of transportation such as trains and buses and motivated them to spend effort learning the collaborative internet tools for communication instead of initiating business travel. To be honest, some people even confessed that it was only good that the ash cloud provided an excuse to cancel useless business trips that their organization was expecting them to do…

I, too, was stuck in Germany, when the ash cloud arrived to Sweden on a thursday afternoon. My 1.5 hour flight was changed to a 12 hour train travel. But I didn’t feel too bad about it. I took a night train and didn’t loose effectively any work time. Actually, even though the flight time was only 1.5 hours, the travel to the airports had been another 30-45 mins in each direction plus the waiting time at the airport would have been at least an hour – assuming the flight had been on time. So even in the best case the air travel had taken me about 4 hours during the best work hours, and since it would have been mostly moving from one line to another, I would have only small pieces of time to do anything useful or interesting with my laptop. My mind is so slow that getting properly concentrated on any more serious issue (booting my brain to focus) takes at least 15-20 mins, so out of that 4 hours, I might have been able to use effectively only like maybe half an hour. Calculating it that way, I could claim that taking the train was actually more efficient from a productivity point of view than the original plan to use the plane.

In general I like long distance train travel. It offers an escape from unnecessary office discussions and the train takes you conveniently from one city center to another. In Europe the city structure supports train travel excellently and a train-bicyle combination can be a great way for commuting or medium distance travelling. Yet many people even in Europe seem to prefer driving to the airports in traffic jams and taking planes even when the time saving was just an hour or two. But I think the ash cloud made more and more people conscious about the alternatives.

Train and bus travel as a way for a Slow Travel is just one aspect of the Slow Life movement that has become a hot topic recently. At least in where I live you can hear about Slow life ideology more and more everywhere. Besides Slow Travel there are Slow Food, Slow Money, Slow Design, Slow Art, Slow Media, Slow Parenting, Slow Architecture, Alow Reading, Slow Shopping, Slow Sex and Cittaslow…
all of which have sort of independent origins, but share the general idea that life is today getting more and more hectic, and that people will not be happy unless there is going to be more time to really think what really matters personally, in grass root level and locally and how can we promote the well being of our environment in general.

For a general motivation for the Slow Life, wikipedia entry about Slow Movement[1] cites Guttorm Fløistad, A Professor of philosophy in the Oslo Universitet: Fløistad summarizes the philosophy [of Slow Movement], stating: The only thing for certain is that everything changes. The rate of change increases. If you want to hang on you better speed up. That is the message of today. It could however be useful to remind everyone that our basic needs never change. The need to be seen and appreciated! It is the need to belong. The need for nearness and care, and for a little love! This is given only through slowness in human relations. In order to master changes, we have to recover slowness, reflection and togetherness. There we will find real renewal.
But what is that drives the world to become faster? In other words why does the pace of change seem to accelerate a decade after decade? Carl Honore, the writer of In Praise of Slow [2] thinks that we (in the western world) are hung up with the notion that being busy and trying to do things fast is a value in itself. He says [3]

It [Slow Movement] is a cultural revolution against the notion that faster is always better. The Slow philosophy is not about doing everything at a snail’s pace. It’s about seeking to do everything at the right speed. Savoring the hours and minutes rather than just counting them. Doing everything as well as possible, instead of as fast as possible. It’s about quality over quantity in everything from work to food to parenting.

Also Honore says that Slow Movement is not about being “anti-speed”: I love speed. I like my Internet connection to be fast and I play two of the fastest sports around, ice-hockey and squash, in my spare time. I live in London, which is a city of volcanic energy, and I enjoy working to deadlines. Speed has its place in the modern world. Often you have to move quickly, particularly at work. The problem is that speed has become a way of life. We do everything in a rush. We are stuck in fast forward and that is unhealthy.

I have been noticing the existence of slow movements maybe a couple of years now. And for me it would be very easy to agree with the citations in the above. I feel often that the values of the professional people that I see around me are so often more about saving time, not savoring it, (like the example about air vs. train travel). I studied a little more what the different slow subcultures mean and I liked particularly Slow Design, which means [4]:
- Longer design processes with more time for research, contemplation, real life impact tests and fine tuning.
- Design for manufacturing with local/regional materials and technologies or Design that supports local industries, workshops and craftspeople.
- Design that takes into account local/regional culture both as a source of inspiration and as an important consideration for the design outcome.
- Design that studies the concept of natural timecycles and incorporates them into design and manufacturing processes.
- Design that looks at longer cycles of human behavior and sustainability.

and Slow money [5]:
Slow Money is a movement to organize investors and donors to steer new sources of capital to small food enterprises, organic farms, and local food systems. Slow Money takes its name from the Slow Food movement. Slow Money aims to develop the relationship between capital markets and place, including social capital and soil fertility. Slow Money is supporting the grass-roots mobilization through network building, convening, publishing, and incubating intermediary strategies and structures of funding.

(….I know, I know… quoting directly from wikipedia might not make much of a blog article, but I think the summaries there were good and the wiki pages had also good references for anyone interested to study further.)

So The Slow movements looked very good and healthy ideas to at first sight. But are they really applicable everywhere? Would it be just something too far fetched to be applied in real life? Something for the middle-aged western urban well-to-do professionals to play with to think that they are doing something to improve the quality of life and environment?

There might be a little of that, who knows. For example I would wonder
- What about young people, who are just entering professional life and starting their careers. Usually they are hungry to become busy and important first, before they have any need for a slower lifestyle
- Same with retired people. Many people who retire seem to be a bit at loss, once the business goes away
- By far the most of people in development countries are not busy out of choice, but out of a clear necessity. Can the Slow Movement offer anything to them for improving the quality of life?
- In many cultures, the time and the importance of tight schedules is not perceived the same way everywhere. For example some African writers have coined a term “Africa time” to describe the disregard of punctuality. But does it lead to a greater happiness?

But even if the Slow movement would be something mainly for the upper middle classes, Honore is making the point that practically all cultural revolutions (or evolutions) have become reality only when the middle class has taken the values, represented by the change, to it’s own. I could add that in my opinion something similar would be actually true for any change in any organization. There are management theories (which my own experience strongly supports) that suggest, that any true change in a behaviour of people can happen only through the change of the cultural values of the people who are in gatekeeper positions how the work is really done. In other words the change occurs only through the change of cultural values of the middle level (class) people who define the work (lifestyle) of how things are run in an organization (society)….So if any societal change is to be pursued, it needs to offer something for the middle class, who actually concretely runs the businesses.

It is also easy to be cynical and dismiss Slow movement as something unimportant or economically marginal. On the other hand, the same was said originally about organic food movement which is related to Slow Food ideologies. Yet today over 4 % of all food production in EU is produced with highly regulated and supervised organic food principles and it’s relative share of the production is growing. In Austria over 10% of all food is already organically produced. Not economically insignificant I would say! The same is true for Fair Trade, which is already over 4 billion US$ business - quite big business for the poorest countries. Not to mention about Green technologies, such as Recycling, Sewage and waste management, renewable energies, Air and water purification….The countries all around the world are already investing over 2 trillion $ in green technologies so it would appear already to be a bigger business than the worldwide arms industry (~1.5 trillion $). Compared to the 1960s the arms industry spending was probably several tens of times bigger business than green industries, but not any more. The world has changed really radically thanks to the change of our attitudes towards environmental sustainability. Why couldn’t it change also in respect of preserving our own lives and ridding ourselves from the culture of speed?

Does that make sense? Looks good, but....
I need to ask second opinions so I hope be able post an interview or two sometime soon :-)

Cheers
Quin

[1] Wikipedia, May 5th 2010, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_Movement ,
[2] Honore, C. “In praise of Slow: How a Woldwide movement is challenging the cult of speed”, Orion Books, London UK, 2004
[3] Internet page on May 5th, 2010, http://www.carlhonore.com/?page_id=6
[4] Wikipedia, May 5th 2010, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_design
[5] Wikipedia, May 5th 2010, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_Money
[6] Wikipedia, May 5th 2010 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Africa_time

More about Philo activities in SL

I decided to make a quick update to the last blog. Two months is a long time in SL and a lot has happened since. The most important event has been the creation of a new Philosophy Island (PI), a whole sim dedicated to discussions and debating. PI sim was originally created by Lokifluff, but now it is administered by a council of it's residents, who have rented maybe 70 % of the area and and an elected "senate" which oversees the common areas and the activities there. I don't remember the slurl address, but you can find PI easily by typing Philosophy island in the SL map search.

Philosophy Island's common area has camp fire (much like in PH) for ongoing discussions, and there are also lots of scheduled and moderated presentations and speeches. The scheduled events have covered a very wide range of topics, such as Wittgenstein's views on dualism, moral realism, the usefulness of meme hypothesis, Rawl's theory of justice or even the benefits and threats of natiolism and patriotism. Go check the weekly program of events. It can be acquired close to the PI campfire, located roughly at the center of the island.

It will be interesting to see how the activities in PI will develop. Namely one of the big challenges in anonymous discussion forums has been the moderation policy. I have been planning to write an essay about my experiences about hanging in various philosophy discussion forums in the internet and SL since summer 2000 (10 years this summer!). I have noticed that all anonymous philosophy/politics/religion forums tend to undergo a similar kind of evolution from the initial enthusiasm and idealism after the founding of the forum to flame wars and when the interesting discussions bring traffic, to the unavoidable attacks of malicious trolls, spammers and abusive griefers. Then follow the neverending metadisucssion and whining about moderation policy (or the lack of it) and finally the decay of the forum to a boring socializing chat forum, where any attempt to discuss philosophy will be considered as snobbery... It's funny how all the unmoderated or "lightly" moderated forums tend to follow the same phases of evolution. It would seem that the life span of an unmoderated or lightly moderated philo discussion forum is about 2-3 years from the initial enthusiasm, where people spend a lot of time in preparing their contributions to make a serious and interesting discussion to a silly chat room, where the average length of replies is 3-4 words.

Of course the forums with a very tight moderation keep griefers away and the discussions stay focused on the topics that the forum was founded for, but it tends to happen at the cost of livelyhood or the playfulness of the atmostphere. And a tight moderation will definetely consume a lot of resources for the administrator of the site. So in some ways the "heaviness" of moderation will be a choice between quantity of traffic and quality of discussions. Some moderation is usually always needed, because if the atmosphere is let to be too abusive and rotten for too long time, it will lead to all the serious contributors (who I think are the interesting ones) to abandon the forum for good.

Some people are concerned that any moderation whatsoever would restrict the freedom of expression and somehow hinder innovation. That is a of course a valid concern....yet according to my experience from over 10 years in several (officially politically neutral) forums, I cannot say that I had ever encountered a moderation decision where the decision had been based on the political or philosophical content of the opinions that someone has expressed. The moderation decisions have practically always been caused by spamming, verbal abuse or personal attacks that do not relate to the discussions. In practise, the true restricitions to people's freedom to have a conversation with each other have been caused by self centered spammers or hostile trolls.

I do think though that sometimes the moderators have not been fully up to their task. People are very sensitive about the equal treatment and the consistency of the moderation policy. I have seen cases, where a moderator might have favored some type of humor over something else, or given some people special privileges for example in a way that someone's abusive behavior has been overlooked because the person has been a regular for so long, or she/he is moderator's friend. Sometimes there has been even cases where it has looked as if the moderator had wanted to create drama on purpose...A manipulative moderator, yikes!

Usually all the moderators have been appointed by the administrator of the forum, (in SL, by the owner of the sim). However in Philosophy Island the common discussion areas are governed by a senate, which is elected by the members of the PI group, so that the governance would be a representative democracy, with elections every 3 month. It will be interesting to see, how this system will affect the evolution of the discussions and atmosphere! Will the PI common area general discussions follow the same path of evolution than the forums I have seen before, or does the democracy bring different dynamics.

In summary, my experience is that although a clear moderation policy is crucial for a discussion forum to be a hospitable place for people to hang, it almost doesn't matter what type of a moderation there will be, as long as it's logical and consisten. I would even say that when it comes to the freedom of expression, moderation policy has been factually almost a non-issue. Out of all the metadiscussion about moderation, that I have encountered, perhaps 98 % has been nothing but clueless whining and creating drama out of nothing just to annoy the other forum regulars. Not that the remaining 2% hadn't been real issues, but endless whining about moderation has spoiled the atmosphere in so many forums and caused mass escape of everyone who actually wants to discuss about something of substance.

Discussion forums are not about moderation policies, but rather about the people who want spend their time there and the expectations of the administrator: what are the topics she hopes the people would be talking about; is the forum meant for discussion about philosophy, science, knitting, food recipes or mercedes-benz spare parts, or is the purpose of the forum to create a lively theater for drama, abuse noobs and innocent bypassers or facilitate social chit chat...the moderation policy can then be chosen accordingly. Freedom of expression is hardly limited in any case, since the internet is still full of forums where to express any serious opinion whatsoever under a pseudonym. Or with an established SL identity that can be used also out of SL (like in my case). And if the moderation policy of any of the myriad existing forums is still not to one's liking, it's always possible to setup a new one in 5 minutes!

However, now there are true and serious threats to the freedom of expression in SL! Please do take a look at this blog http://whenitchanged.blogspot.com/2010/01/privacy-is-my-right-message-to-linden.html Lauren Jones has been able to point out the hazards of Linden Labs and facebook co-operation better than I could ever have been able.

If we are to be ripped away our anonymity and the possibility to create avatar identities, separate from our "meatspace avatars", it means that our meatspace dependencies will start to affect our ability to express experimental thoughts, innovative ideas not to mention making provocations in search of the hidden truths. If you have seen the trouble to read this writing all the way down here, please do check out Lauren's blog, it's really important for anyone who takes an SL identity even slightly seriously!!!

QS

PS: Lauren is talking about an SL persona that is promoting the full integration of RL and SL personas, with an obvious goal to make money...
Any PI regular reading this: Doesn't this sound a bit familiar ? =)

Q

Philo and Economics activites in SL during spring 2010

Hi!
I have been spending a great deal of my SL time in Philosophy House (PH) camp fire. Usually the discussion there is just general chit chat, sometimes not too interesting at all, but every now and then a good philosophy topic comes up and then the conversation can be engaging. But the main attraction of PH has been that there is always people, pretty much 24/7. A problem from a discussion point of view is that the chat format tends to limit how much "room" there is in the local chat window to justify your arguments. If you are not a really fast typist, the topic often tends to fade away, before you have time to get all your ideas visible - or like in my case, I come up with the all the best replies only too late, after the topic has changed already =). Of course at the same time, that is the appeal of chatting as well: The fast pace of interaction, makes it feel like a real life conversation except the strength with the text format can temporarily support several parallel threads going on at the same time.

So now there are a couple of web forums associated to PH or the crowd that comes there regularly. The idea is to offer a forum for a more slow paced discussion. Brinn Bedlam started a "traditional" internet discussion forum for PH in http://www.thephilosophyhouse.com where the idea is to allow people to write longer posts. Many of the PH regulars, that I recognize, seem to have made posts there already.

I have been planning to go even further and start an internet journal for longer article-like essays, like the some of the posts I have had in this blog. The PH journal is not officially public yet, but you can take a sneak preview at http://phjournal.ning.com. In order for PH Journal to be a real philosophical journal, there is an editorial policy. Even though there are no strict guidelines for format, the expectation is that the citations would be referenced and arguments justified. If you take a look, I'd be grateful for all feedback how you think it looks like through the phjournal mail.

I have also been active in pursuing the investigation of "Quantum theory of Economics" (QTE) in SL workshop and I have had some amazing contributors this year. During the workshop it turned out rather soon, that the idea wasn't quite so radical than I had thought in my blog in March =) It appears that there are quite many research groups working with more or less similar kind of ideas already. However applying quantum formalism to macroscopic interactions is still a very fresh approach and the field is very open for all new mathematical and formally sound theories. A new workshop around QTE, business interactions and microeconomics will now start within Tothica SL group (see for example http://www.tothicasl.net). The idea is to discuss qualitatively microeconomics and specifically how business comes into being as a result of human interactions and external circumstances (QTE apporach) and how that creates economy in general. The workshop will also have a Ning forum at http://qteconomics.ning.com, where I will gradually copy all the material from the previous QTE workshop in SL. The moderated discussions will be held in the Library of Clemson University Dev sim. For notices of exact location and time of the workshop's SL session, join the Tothica group. They have great Philo discussions and other meetings, too...and costs nothing to join!

Hope to see you not just inworld but also at all the new and fancy associated web 2.0 Ning forums!

Merry approaching christmas season
Quin

From Political Correctness to Quantum Gender

In her book "Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning" [1] Karen Barad discusses how it is physically impossible to separate matter from meaning in practise. She is working towards a theory which she calls agential realism. It is based on the idea that the meanings the conscious agents making the observation have in their mind are conceptually inseparable from the object they are investigating. She says that this would be a generalization of the classical Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. She quotes Niels Bohr and says: Bohr’s argument for the indeterminable nature of measurement interactions is based on his insight that “concepts are defined by the circumstances required for their measurement” [Bohr]. That is theoretical concepts are not ideational in character; they are specific physical arrangements. [1].

To me it seems that Barad’s ideas would somehow touch on something about the connection between matter and discourse that the existentialists and postmodernists have tried to intuitively grasp have for the last 50 decades. But unlike postmodernists in the average, Barad actually knows what she is talking about when she refers to mathematics and QM. Using the agential realism approach she discusses how we could analyze ethics, metaphysics, “topologies of power” and other branches of applied philosophy. Most concrete she gets when she applies agental realistic analysis to “technoscientific practises” and gender roles. In my (not very) humble opinion that analysis raises her in to the front row of contemporary feminist theorists. She also naturally continues from the observations of Judith Butler since I think Barad’s treatment kind of paves a QM theoretical background to Butler’s realization that even sexes, not just gender roles, are fundamentally pejorative: Sexes are in practise created by actions and interactions rather than being a preassigned property of humans.

At this point I need to remind that of course Butler, too, is not denying the existence of biological sexes, but she is making an argument that fundamentally sexes come into being through our actions and interactions. Butler does not want to separate gender roles and sexes in a same way that the traditional 2nd and 3rd generation of feministic theory [2] has usually done, since she is making a convincing argument that there is no reason to do it. And as a bonus it becomes much easier to construct a credible “queer theory”, because after all the lesbians and gays seem to fall into the middle in all classical feminist theories. I am not really an expert on queer theories….but Butler is! If Butler interests you, you must read “Gender trouble” [3]

Now in my previous blog I was making an argument that the progress of equality development has stopped in many fields in western countries, despite the legislation everywhere in west should in principle support it by now. Yet there are many unresolved issues. In many - if not even the most - of disciplines in science and business women (or sometimes men) are underrepresented, in OECD countries women get paid only 70-80 % of what men do in average and very often the fitting of everyday family live and work career is seeing as the problem for women only!!! My claim was that this can be seen as a failure for feministic movement and that it could be because the contemporary feministic theory does yet not give all the building blocks to make further progress from where we are now. Of course there are movements that try to free themselves from the obvious limiting dogmas of 2nd and 3rd generation feminism and call themselves post feministic, but I do not see any whatsoever reason to give up feminism and go post feministic quite yet – we are definetely not there yet! I would rather promote investigating new approaches based on Barad’s and Butler’s ideas. And I have already a cool term to describe this study: Quantum Gender.


So what would it mean in practise? With the title “from political correctness to quantum gender” I meant we need to move on from just being politically correct to something more. Because the legislative means used to achieve the goals of 2nd and 3rd generation feminism are not enough to break the glass ceilings that still hinder people to obtain the same opportunities in work life and society regardless what type of sex organs they have been born with.

If we take Barad’s quantum physical approach, Quantum Gender would mean that our gender (and sex too like Butler suggests) becomes into existence only as a consequence of and with the meaning that an active agent observing the sex gives to it. In work life and professional world it should entail a principle that if we are looking people to perform specific functions, we should not define people in advance based on what irrelevant properties (sex organs, skin color, ethnic background etc) they might have, but only what a person is expected to do. If we assign people irrelevant properties in advance, it affects also the outcome of our judgement. Now that is of course common sense and that’s’ what the equal opportunity legislation in western world tries to achieve anyway, but in practise it’s not enough as we have seen. In the previous blog I gave examples how people still treat exactly similar job applications differently depending whether the applicant’s name is male or female. So I fear the glass ceilings will not get broken by the legislative actions alone.

I suspect that there are very few jobs anymore in the post-industrialized world where biological sex really has any relevance. In fact hardly any work (if any other than being a prostitute) requires specific sex organs to do the job. It may even be sex organs might have relevance only in activities what they are good for, namely reproduction and sexual recreational pleasure. So with the Quantum Gender approach our sex should not come into being at all when we define ourselves as professionals. Of course that has been the goal for feminism at all times, but since the feministic theory has been so far based on the dichotomies, sex has still been a predefined property of individuals. It means that feminism so far has been saying: Let’s be Politically Correct (statement PC)
PC: We are men and women – but hey, it is forbidden treat us such when it doesn’t count
Whereas the Quantum Gender proposal (statement QG) would be more like
QG: We are people - and when we want to think about having sex, let’s observe our sexes then

I think QG approach would make a more easy path to break the glass ceilings in the long run. Firstly I hear a lot of the people complain about political correctness. I think it is because some feel the PC statement is fundamentally saying “We have sexes, but let’s not think about it” and it becomes a bit like saying “Don’t think about a pink elephant” - and of course you end up doing just that. My observation is that for the more simple minded people the PC statement seems to be stressful ;-) Secondly QG should be good also in sense that it should free ourselves from gender role expectations as careerists, household keepers, parental roles…(and anywhere outside bed room activities =) If we assume that there are no sexes, where they don’t count, there should not be any pressure on expectations either. But in order to get there the QG idea should be part of our culture.

Changing culture towards QG makes sense in my opinion. Us humans are self aware intelligent creatures and we have adapted our culture many times to support the life conditions we have lived in. Today we don’t live in caves any longer and in modern information society advancing equality should benefit both the common good and individual happiness by allowing us to use our abilities and properties in ways that are relevant to what we want to do. Not by labelling us in advance according to our sex organs.

Of course I am not saying that legislation everywhere in the western world or OECD countries is fully compliant to move to QG yet. Particularly in terms of maternity leave compensation there is still a lot to do in many countries, although I think EU is in average more progressive than US at the moment. However, I think QG could be the next step…but how to get there?

I don’t have any program how we could move from PC to QG yet. I do not suggest that governements should start tuning their legislations right this instance just because I wrote this blog =)…. But I would rather challenge people to start thinking of the next generation of feministic movement by investigating Barad and Butler seriously, thinking about what differenc QG could make, research what the implementation of Barak’s and Butler’s ideas would mean in practise and how this implementation could be done with concrete actions.

I know also that when I am saying that 3rd gen feminism is promoting PC, I am not giving enough credit to all contemporary feministic studies. There are of course a lot of woman studies scholars that are basically saying essentially the same thing as I outline here as a QG principle. However, oftentimes they reject being called feminists, and that I don’t agree with. I think as long as we are not people first and men and women only where it counts…there is no reason to give up feministic movements. And we are not there yet.

I see the equality train slowing down in the west and I fear it is in a jeopardy of stopping altogether before reaching the station unless it is fuelled with new ideas.


[1] Barad, Karen “Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning”, Duke Unoversity Press

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-wave_feminism

[3] Butler, Judith “Gender Trouble”, Routledge, 1989

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Phew…it has been a really busy fall. I haven’t had much time do blogging even though the world is no less full of topics to rant about than before =). Cheers to anyone dropping by here!

Status update on patriarchy / Feminism in a standstill

Ann Gallagher and James C. Kaufmann conclude in their book “Gender differences in mathematics” [1] that It has simply never been established that there is any meaningful and substantial sex differences in mathematics ability that is not massively confounded with factors related to individual experience. Therefore researchers whose goals are to are to understand the biological basis of behaviour still need even to produce data that suggest that there is that there is any sex difference that can be even partly explained by biological factors.

There is a huge amount of research on the subtleties of differences between female and male cognition, but all research indicates that whatever differences there are (for example in problem solving strategies) based on the current data, it is practically impossible to unambiguously separate biological factors from what is caused by gender roles and individuals' personal histories of learning. There seems to be more variance in intellectual performance within a group consisting solely of men than a group of women. In other words the Gaussian distribution seems to be more spread out of a fully male group in terms all types of intellectual performance (not just mathematical) than with a fully female group. But this too, could be just a reaction to how the school systems and teachers have reflected to gender role based behaviours and expectations [2].

The history of science and philosophy has truly been “His Story” since other than a very few exceptions, women have been banned to participate higher education up until about 100 years ago. The most courageous and eager of women did however make themselves heard in science, but they had to usually do it either anonymously or using their husbands name to be able to get their thoughts published.

For exemple Marie-Sophie Germain, who was the first woman to get a seat in the French academy of science, had to first pretend to be man, “monsier LeBlanc”, in order to be taken seriously and to establish the correspondence with her first mentor Friedrich Gauss, the most prominent mathematician of the time. Here is how she eventually revealed herself to Gauss in 1807 [4]:

But how to describe to you my admiration and astonishment at seeing my esteemed correspondent Monsieur Le Blanc metamorphose himself into this illustrious personage who gives such a brilliant example of what I would find it difficult to believe. A taste for the abstract sciences in general and above all the mysteries of numbers is excessively rare: one is not astonished at it: the enchanting charms of this sublime science reveal only to those who have the courage to go deeply into it. But when a person of the sex which, according to our customs and prejudices, must encounter infinitely more difficulties than men to familiarize herself with these thorny researches, succeeds nevertheless in surmounting these obstacles and penetrating the most obscure parts of them, then without doubt she must have the noblest courage, quite extraordinary talents and superior genius. Indeed nothing could prove to me in so flattering and less equivocal manner that the attractions of this science, which has enriched my life with so many joys, are not chimerical, [than] the predilection with which you have honored it.

There are many sad stories during the 19th centuries how brilliant women were simply prohibited attending universities, especially in mathematics and philosophy, but that was then. Today the situation is of course different at least in western societies…or is it?

Namely there are still amazingly few women in science and technology and even philosophy, much less than you would expect now that there should not be any more legal restrictions for women doing science (in western world). I claim that it is largely because the old gender role based patriarchy is still there between our ears. I think such strong cultural traditions don’t completely disappear in 100 years, in just a few generations.

From my own personal experience I can say that I have several times run into attitudes and heard many men claim that women are somehow less capable to succeed in mathematics, philosophy, technology or Information technology, because their problem solving strategies are somehow more “conservative” or “less creative” or whatever. But you don’t just have to take my word for it. There are a lot of studies showing that in IT business and engineering, exactly similar job applications get a less favourable review, if the applicant has a female name than a male name [5]. Interestingly I remember reading a study that showed that if a male job application reviewer had a women engineer in his family, he would rate female engineering job applicants more favourably than men who have no experience about woman engineers…The prejudices seem to go away with experience.

In fact I have met some young male “hero” SW developers that have been quite convinced that women are up to no good particularly as programmers. Well I myself am not up to any good...that's true... but I wonder if these guys are aware that many of the modern programming languages such as Java, C and C++ are based on the theoretical findings of this year’s Turing price winner (most esteemed recognition in computing) Barbara Liskov’s work on data abstraction and programming language development [6] (thanks Strider). So dear boys before you judge all the woman programmers beforehand, remember that the tools you use might have a solid female touch in them ;-)

During the 10 years I have hung out in the internet participating philosophy discussions I have met even admitted misogynists, who think that women just make too much noise about themselves. I don’t agree they do since I dare to suspect that practically every women over the age of 35 has some experiences how the patriarchy's attitudes have surfaced in some instance in a way that it has had a disruptive effect in some serious work at hand, whether it be in business or academia. Glass ceilings are still there in many places! When you are younger, you don’t care so much about individual incidents, at least if they don’t occur everyday, or if you are of the more naive sort, you might not even understand some of the underlying innuendos to connect the dots. But when you start approaching middle age, at some point you will start to notice that patriarchy and sexism are still alive and an undercurrent in many places that matter.

And in fact the patriarchy is not in the business of going away at the moment. The statistics show that women’s share of the traditionally male dominated businesses has not increased significantly during the last 20-30 years in the western countries and women still earn smaller salaries with same ratio that they did a few decades back. I think this is a major failure for the feministic movement.

I will not accuse men…or let me take that back... yes I do accuse some men. The kind of men who have made a hasty conclusion that all feminism in general is useless or unnecessary, without acknowledging that our western societies are still far from being equal, or men who think the equality has just come automatically, without knowing all the work that was done by feminist movements before women got to vote, go to school or even go to work in any society today. Or the kind of men who use constantly sexist argumentation just out of mean sexist attitudes (disguised sometimes as humor), fear of women or plain stupidity, or the men who outright hate women and see it acceptable to spread hatred. Of course there can be man hating women too and they would be equally harmful, but according to my experience these men (or women) are just the-not-so-smart people among us, who are afraid of loosing their identity if they do not maintain an illusion being superior just because of their sex. I personally believe that with proper understanding of gender roles and how they work in a society, the reasons to be afraid would in general diminish in the long run. There would be less reasons to be afraid of loosing "manhood" (or womanhood for that matter).

But I think discussing how feminism and feministic theory should evolve is important. I suspect that feministic or gender theories are in a standstill, because they seem not being able to analyse the gender questions further in a way that would explain satisfactorily why equality among sexes does not seem to be making progress at the moment.

- - - - - -

My original plan was to write more about the gender theories, especially refer to Judith Butler and Karen Barad, since I think they have very original ideas that could open new ways by challenging the traditional dichotomies... but I ran out of time now :-( I hope to be able to continue soon, since I already had a cool title for that writing: Quantum gender !!!
- of course :D

Q

[1] Gallagher, A. and Kaufmann, J. “Gender differences in mathematics”, Cambridge University Press, 2005
[2] McGillicuddy-De Lisi, A. and De Lisi R. Biology, “Society and Behavior, The Development of Sex differences in cognition”, Ablex publishing, 2002
[3] http://www.agnesscott.edu/lriddle/women/germain.htm
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Germain
[5] Wilson, F.M. “Organizational behaviour and gender”, Ashgate publishing, 2003
[6] http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/turing-liskov-0310.html/

Loki the Liger

One day my roommate at our Heffalump (!) apartement, Lokifluff Clarity, was wearing a Liger avatar. I guess a Liger is taxonomically somewhere between a Tiger and a Lion. Doesn't it look amazing? By clicking the picture you can see it in full screen size :

Here is another shot. The kitty on the floor was the package for the liger Avi.

The liger could roar and jump and do all the things a real life liger would do...if only it existed

Aww...isn't it cute!!!

smiles
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