Avoiding scientific inquiry into gender issues

Having watched Idiocracy last night, I feel a bit sensitized to stupidity and anti-intellectualism in public fora.

In the Sunday June 22 Arizona Republic, among the Opinions, Kathleen Parker writes in "Why women still do more housework":

... But little truck is given to the obvious: Men and women are hard-wired differently. Of course, that sort of statement will get you thrown off college campuses these days -- ask Lawrence Summers -- but common sense and experience often explain what science cannot.

Often? And how would one know when common sense and experience have successfully explained what science cannot? Science has an understanding of reproducibility of results, peer review, empiricism. "Common sense and experience" rely on assertions seeming true and narrow perspective.

I don't think common sense and experience often explain what science cannot explain. That's the sort of anti-intellectual platitude that sounds nice and like it might be true but is unfounded. It's "truthy", if you will.

"Hard-wired" evokes the hardest science in psychology and cognitive science. If men and woman are hard-wired differently, it will be (and in part, so far, has been) hard science that will discover this wiring, in what ways it works, and in what ways there are differences -- with care to understanding of significance in both its scientific meanings (statistically significant) and common meanings (differences that actually matter).

These differences in wiring will be anything but "obvious" -- this is the lesson, e.g. in popular science book Freakonomics, that things that seem like they ought to be true aren't necessarily true.

To deride serious researchers and scientists ("gender theorists") that any answer to differences in men and women lies in "simply that men and women have different preferences" is to idiotically beg the question: yes, but why do people have different preferences? Is this a matter of biological wiring? A response to cultural messages? Investigating this in a scientific way, subject to hypotheses that are testable and theories that can be proven wrong, potentially improves human understanding of the world. I wish the writer were acknowledging that, perhaps even encouraging women to become interested in careers in the sciences.

What the writer actually closes with is "Sometimes things just are what they are. A wishful theory is no match for nature's stubborn ambition.", a disconcertingly defeatist approach that admits unknowability where it ought not be given ground.

I was very disappointed in the opinion piece "Why women still do more housework".

On the meaning of "self insured"

From the story "Chandler law enforcement uses new tactic against copper thefts" by Megan Boehnke in today's Arizona Republic:

Theives have left more than 3 miles of trails dark and cost the city hundreds of thousands of dollars.
"The city is self-insured, but we have to pay a deductible just like anyone else, so it hits taxpayers," Parks Maintenance Manager Kris Kircher said.

I don't get it. When a city self-insures, that means that the city doesn't take out an external insurance policy against the risk. This avoids paying insurance premiums, but it leaves the city (and therefore, the taxpayer) directly vulnerable to the full cost of the loss should it occur. So the city doesn't have to pay deductibles like anyone else. It absorbs the full cost of the loss.

For example, I could choose to self-insure against potential damage at my apartment. There's no law requiring renter's insurance and no requirement of it where I live. If I self-insured, I would pay no insurance premiums. But if damage were to occur, I wouldn't pay deductibles like anyone else -- I'd have to experience the full cost of the damage without insurance to cushion me from it. Instead, in actuality, I do have renter's insurance.

In the long run, on average, having insurance and paying premiums is more costly than not. This is how insurance companies make money -- they make more money from investing the premiums than they pay out in claims. Insurance is a mechanism for distributing risk -- by all policy holders incurring some "loss" in the form of predictable premiums and deductibles, individual policy holders avoid concentrated local risk, sharing it across all policy holders.

It can make sense for municipalities and governments to self-insure -- they may be large enough that the odds are achieved and they're better off avoiding the overhead of insurance. But self-insurance has little to do with deductibles. Something is confused in this reporting.

I posted a comment about this on the Arizona Republic article. Maybe if I check back in a while there will be an answer.