https://feedly.com/i/entry/Od/Z0OrlTBzSrJtcae1t5qtueOtvOco3UFNx6gD9Pd4=_16e7d2bd2b5:59e2:d0c89438
in genere sì.
diciamo che rallenta pro capite, meno in aggregato. ralenta la produttività meno la produzione
Visualizzazione post con etichetta charles murray human accomplishment. Mostra tutti i post
Visualizzazione post con etichetta charles murray human accomplishment. Mostra tutti i post
lunedì 18 novembre 2019
martedì 10 settembre 2019
HL We Need a New Science of Progress Patrick Collison
We Need a New Science of Progress
https://feedly.com/i/entry//cnXVr/5HNe2pDqTI3udBeVx4AbJSW9TNhacAl8h6Dc=_16d1216d010:2efe54d:f3f5f202
Citation (APA): Collison, P. (2019). We Need a New Science of Progress [Kindle Android version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com
Parte introduttiva
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 2
We Need a New Science of Progress By Patrick Collison
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 5
Progress itself is understudied.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 5
the combination of economic, technological, scientific, cultural, and organizational advancement that has transformed our lives
Nota - Posizione 6
IL PROGRESSO DEF
Nota - Posizione 6
IL PROGRESSO DEF
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 8
We believe that it deserves a dedicated field of study.
Nota - Posizione 8
TESI
Nota - Posizione 8
TESI
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 9
We haven’t yet cured all diseases; we don’t yet know how to solve climate change; we’re still a very long way from enabling most of the world’s population to live as comfortably as the wealthiest people do today; we don’t yet understand how best to predict or mitigate all kinds of natural disasters; we aren’t yet able to travel as cheaply and quickly as we’d like; we could be far better than we are at educating young people.
Nota - Posizione 12
COSA CI MANCA
Nota - Posizione 12
COSA CI MANCA
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 19
In antiquity, the ancient Greeks were discoverers of everything from the arch bridge to the spherical earth. By 1100, the successful pursuit of new knowledge was probably most concentrated in parts of China and the Middle East.
Nota - Posizione 20
IL PROGRESSO TENDE A CONCENTRARSI
Nota - Posizione 20
IL PROGRESSO TENDE A CONCENTRARSI
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 21
the artists of Renaissance Florence enriched the heritage of all humankind, and in the process created the masterworks that are still the lifeblood of the local economy.
Nota - Posizione 22
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Nota - Posizione 22
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Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 22
The late 18th and early 19th century saw a burst of progress in Northern England, with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
Nota - Posizione 23
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Nota - Posizione 23
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Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 24
Present-day instances include places like Silicon Valley in software and Switzerland’s Basel region in life sciences.
Nota - Posizione 24
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Nota - Posizione 24
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Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 25
ecosystems that are better at generating progress than others,
Nota - Posizione 25
COSA NE DEDUCIAMO
Nota - Posizione 25
COSA NE DEDUCIAMO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 26
Why did Silicon Valley happen in California rather than Japan or Boston?
Nota - Posizione 27
DOMANDA TIPO
Nota - Posizione 27
DOMANDA TIPO
venerdì 28 aprile 2017
Cosa fa fiorire l'uomo
Le grandi conquiste che l’uomo deve al suo genio sono lì da vedere.
Il giudizio su alcune puo’ dividere, lasciamole da parte. Tanto ce ne sono molte che ci vedono più o meno tutti d’accordo nel definirle tali.
Charles Murray ha cercato di inventariarle mediando quanto riportano le enciclopedie più autorevoli.
La quantificazione di Murray è contenuta nel monumentale “Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950” che copre quasi tre millenni della storia umana.
E’ inevitabile che ci siano delle approssimazioni, cosicché, per prudenza, è buona norma limitarsi a segnalare e commentare solo le tendenze inequivocabili.
Detto questo – una volta compilato l’inventario - è inevitabile porsi le domande chiave. Per esempio: cosa facilità le “conquiste dell’umanità”, cosa accelera il suo avanzamento?
***
Ci si aspetta che la pace debba coniugarsi con la prosperità e l'avanzamento dell' uomo...
... Besides being worthy goals in themselves, peace and prosperity might reasonably be expected to promote accomplishment. War and civil unrest disrupt all sorts of human activities...
Eppure la guerra non sembra così distruttiva come sembrerebbe di primo acchito...
... consider how few years it took Germany and Japan to recover from the devastation of World War II...
Si pensi solo al caso anomalo della Grecia di Pericle...
... Nowhere was the disruption of daily life greater than in Athens itself, ravaged by both war and a plague in –430 that killed a third of the population. And yet this century and a half of war and devastation embraces the Periclean Age. Skipping over the merely significant figures and listing just the major ones, those were the years that saw Aeschylus, Pindar, Parmenides, Anaxagoras, Sophocles, Herodotus, Protagoras, Euripides, Myron, Polykleitos, Lysippos, Phidias, Thucydides, Socrates, Democritus, Hippocrates, Polygnotus, Aristophanes, Zeuxis, Eudoxus, Praxiteles, Theophrastus, and, of course, Plato and Aristotle. Everyone in that list from Aristophanes to the end did his most important work in the darkest years of Athens’...
O a quello per molti versi simile della Firenze rinascimentale...
...Life in Renaissance Florence was not quite as harrowing as in Athens, but it was not tranquil. In the autumn of 1495, the Florentine Renaissance was about to enter its most sublime decades. Leonardo da Vinci, age 43, was beginning work on The Last Supper. Michelangelo, just turned 20, had already completed Madonna of the Stairs and was entering the period that would account for much of his finished sculpture. Raphael had turned 11 and was learning his craft from his father. Also that autumn, Florence had just ousted its ruler, was invaded by a French army under the command of Charles VIII, and was spared destruction only because it paid a large ransom. Florence would spend the next five years as a theocratic republic under the religious radical Savonarola, followed by his ouster and execution. The year 1495 is illustrative, not anomalous. Florence was in a chronic state of civil strife, invasion...
O il periodo d'oro olandese...
... The Dutch golden age in the last two-thirds of 17C gathered strength in the middle of the Thirty Years’War and ended in 1648 with its treaty with Spain...
Alla fine diventa eccezione il caso opposto: quello francese, per esempio...
... Of the most famous golden ages, only France’s La Belle Époque, dated in various ways between 1870 to 1914, was a time of peace...
Il senso comune non ne esce confermato ma il test, bisogna dirlo, è povero: la pace è troppo scarsa nella storia dell'uomo per poter testare in modo affidabile il suo influsso...
... Peace cannot explain the trajectory of human accomplishment because there hasn’t been enough peace for a good test. This doesn’t mean that some degree of war and civil unrest are good for human accomplishment, just that they haven’t consistently impeded it...
***
La prosperità economica, invece, fa bene sia alle arti che alle scienze...
... ECONOMIC WEALTH AND GROWTH Accomplishment in the arts and sciences is facilitated by growing national wealth, both through the additional money that can support the arts and sciences and through indirect spillover effects of economic vitality on cultural vitality...
Qui il senso comune è confermato: le società più ricche sono anche quelle che producono più conoscenza, e anche il nesso non è contestabile.
***
Poi ci sono fattori meno ovvi rispetto a pace e prosperità. Per esempio la presenza di modelli esemplari da imitare...
... Streams of accomplishment become self-reinforcing as new artists and scientists build on the models before them... Raphael and Faraday provides inspiration for aspiring young artists and scientists... Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides appeared within a few decades of each other...
L'emulazione conta. Se sia spinta da invidia o ammirazione conta meno...
... Dean Simonton attacked the question anew with an arsenal of quantitative techniques... he demonstrated that the strongest predictors of creativity in a current generation are the number of creative persons and products in the two preceding generations...
Il modello esemplare si forma se il grande genio viene onorato e rispettato nella cultura in cui opera. E’ una questione di dignità e status sociale che scatena la gara benefica verso la “grande conquista”.
***
Serve poi una rete che metta in connessione le élite...
... CRITICAL MASS: ELITE CITIES Streams of accomplishment are fostered by the existence of cities that serve as centers of human capital and supply audiences and patrons for the arts and sciences...
Qui la città è stata decisiva...
... Cities are not only where the significant figures worked, but where they were born and raised. Cities as Nurturers of Talent...
Ma non tutte le città sono uguali. Quelle che propongono una diversità culturale spiccano...
... Dean Simonton discusses this raw material in terms of cultural diversity.10 The literature on creative personalities consistently demonstrates the importance of relativism, complexity, diversity, and richness. Simonton notes that, historically, talented children who grew up in a rich, diverse cultural environment were more likely to develop than those who grew up in a culturally monolithic environment...
***
Altro fattore importante: la libertà...
... FREEDOM OF ACTION Streams of accomplishment are fostered by political regimes that give de facto freedom of action to their potential artists and scholars...
Ma non quella politica...
... Political freedom technically defined fails to explain anything about accomplishment in the arts and sciences... most human accomplishment occurred under regimes that had almost no guaranteed political freedoms... Perhaps, given time, political freedom will prove to be a better environment for accomplishment than any other system...
Gli stati totalitari non hanno fatto male nella storia delle grandi conquiste, purché siano stati in grado di creare delle enclave di libertà per pochi fortunati...
... Totalitarian states effectively quash human accomplishment in the arts and philosophy. They are only slightly less stifling in the sciences, and then because they create isolated enclaves within the totalitarian state that mimic to some degree the intellectual incentives and institutions of non-totalitarian states...
URSS...
... Totalitarian states effectively quash human accomplishment in the arts and philosophy. They are only slightly less stifling in the sciences, and then because they create isolated enclaves within the totalitarian state that mimic to some degree the intellectual incentives and institutions of non-totalitarian states... Soviet Union had produced no significant figures in the visual arts who had not made their reputations before the revolution. Only two composers (Kabalevsky and Shostakovich)...
Ma come può formarsi un'oasi di libertà in un regime?...
... Freedom of action in an autocracy or strong monarchy could be the result of liberties established by custom, or it could be the result of a tolerant ruler...
Il totalitarismo senza sbocchi è invece la tomba della creatività umana…
... That the Balkans did not produce great art and science under the Ottomans is no mystery... The results are that countries with a history of despotism show sharply reduced levels of accomplishment. Parliamentary monarchies and liberal democracies were generally more productive than tolerant autocracies...
***
Ma l'uomo è fatto per eccellere oppure vive bene nella mediocrità? Qual è la sua natura?...
... Is it to be drawn to excellence and, given the chance, to pursue it, or is excellence something that must be elicited from human beings who are naturally indifferent to it?...
Secondo Aristotele l'uomo tende a realizzare in pieno tutte le sue potenzialità. Ama farlo, lo desidera. Potremmo chiamare tutto ciò "Principio di Aristotele"...
... Other things equal, human beings enjoy the exercise of their realized capacities (their innate or trained abilities), and this enjoyment increases the more the capacity is realized, or the greater its complexity... The things we enjoy the most deeply are the things at which we are most expert...
In psicologia una simile concezione dell'uomo era vista come ridicola, almeno negli anni sessanta, quando il paradigma dominante era il comportamentismo. Per i comportamentisti non esiste un’ambizione interiore: l’uomo desidera fare cio’ che gli incentivi esterni lo inducono a fare. Punto e basta...
... Until the 1960s, any psychologist who claimed that the Aristotelian principle says something true about the behavior of human beings faced ridicule...The human mind and personality are driven by positive and negative reinforcements, the behaviorists said. A concept such as “enjoyment” is illusory—human beings will enjoy whatever they are trained to enjoy....
Abraham Maslow fu il primo a seminare dubbi...
... Abraham Maslow published an article entitled “A Theory of Human Motivation”(1943)...Humans persistently exhibited tendencies to enjoy the stimulation of new things, complexity, surprises, even in the absence of any perceptible external reinforcement... humans enjoy not just competence but excellence...
La sua visione venne presto sistematizzata dai suoi discepoli...
Csikszentmihalyi published a series of books elaborating the data and the theory that now goes under the label of flow...
Per costoro a noi piace fare quel che sappiamo fare e ci piace farlo al meglio. Fare al meglio cio’ che sappiamo fare ci realizza. Si parla di solito di “teoria del flusso”.
***
Purtroppo è doveroso concludere con una mesta notizia: siamo in declino. Un declino iniziato nel XIX secolo…
… Though the results vary among the inventories, the overall story is one of recent decline, usually starting sometime in 19C…
Ma questi sono solo crudi dati: bisogna interpretarli!
Per comprendere le cause dobbiamo comprendere meglio la dinamica. Sarebbe bene sapere se ci sono meno geni in rapporto alla popolazione oppure meno persone si occupano delle materie che fanno emergere il genio e producono la conquista epocale?…
… When the ratio of significant figures to the total population goes down in literature, to continue with that example, one of two changes (or possibly both in tandem) must have occurred: the proportion of the total population involved with good literature as producers, critics, and audience, has gone down, or the proportion of people who write lasting work has gone down…
Forse la spiegazione del declino è benigna, chi puo’ dirlo? Forse il genio si impegna in campi non tradizionali o comunque non coperti dall’inventario…
… The explanations for a falling accomplishment rate can be benign. The first half of 20C offers an obvious possibility for the case of literature: among all the new talents who might have been engaged in novels and plays, a large portion became engaged in film and, later, television…
***
Vediamo più da vicino il caso delle scienze e cerchiamo di interpretarlo in modo benigno.
Oggi, anche se c’è un rallentamento, le conquiste impattano di più sulla vita di tutti i giorni (qualcosa che l’inventario trascura)…
… If the scientific inventories were designed to measure the impact of events on daily life, the rate of accomplishment unquestionably would have gone through the roof. But that’s not what the inventories purport to measure. Rather, they are designed to capture significant advances in knowledge…
L’eliocentrismo ha cambiato la vita a pochi. Ma il caso del motore a scoppio è ben diverso…
… The impact of an invention such as the internal combustion engine was so far-reaching that it is hard to imagine a metric that could express it. But as an increment in human understanding of how the world works, it was similar to many other contemporaneous developments…
Inoltre, nei secoli del declino, la popolazione generale è esplosa mentre la popolazione di scienziati potrebbe non aver tenuto il passo, anche se è aumentata…
… The market for science and technology becomes saturated after a certain point, and the West passed that point in mid 19C…
Queste considerazioni ci portano a ritenere che l’inventario sottostimi il reale avanzamento scientifico.
Forse abbiamo già raccolto tutti i frutti bassi dell’albero: dal 1800 il lavoro si fa molto più difficile…
… Scientific and technological discoveries after the mid 1800s were more complex than in earlier days, and therefore the increments in knowledge they represent could be undercounted…
L’esempio della radio…
… Consider, for example, the radio—an invention of incalculable importance, but one that depended on many scientific and technological advances. If the inventory of events had invention of the radio as just one entry, it would be vulnerable to charges that it undercounts complex technological accomplishments…
Sarebbe ingiusto incolpare un’epoca se il lavoro che si trova davanti è più duro di quello delle epoche precedenti.
***
Adottiamo ora un’ottica pessimista.
C’è chi ha parlato esplicitamente di fine del progresso…
… In 1969, Gunther Stent, a molecular biologist at the University of California’s Berkeley campus, published The Coming of the Golden Age: A View of the End of Progress…
Forse le cose da scoprire sono in numero limitato, almeno in molte materie tradizionali…
… Stent acknowledged that his readers would resist the idea, but he asked them to consider the proposition in its component parts. No one would argue that anatomy or geography were subjects without limits, for example… Everything there is to know about chemical reactions, for example, can be known. Once known, that field will be as closed…
Ultimamente queste posizioni sono state riprese…
… Stent’s argument, widely derided at the time, has been taken more seriously by his colleagues in recent years, as described in John Horgan’s The End of Science (1997)….
Inutile negare che nella storia della scienza ci siano periodi più o meno fortunati: periodi in cui c’è più da scoprire e periodi in cui c’è meno…
… Physicist Richard Feynman had a strong sense of how lucky he was to have come along when he did. “It is like the discovery of America—you only discover it once,”…
***
Per le arti il giudizio è ancora più complesso: il concetto di capolavoro è obsoleto, non si accorda con le nuove tecnologie impiegate nella produzione e nella diffusione artistica. Questo solo fatto invaliderebbe l’utilità di un inventario dei capolavori per giudicare la nostra epoca.
mercoledì 8 marzo 2017
Il contributo delle donne all'umanità
Non tutto è uguale nella storia dell’uomo, le eccellenze esistono.
Tutti noi possiamo rendere migliore la vita a chi ci sta vicino, tuttavia, ci sono alcuni “grandi geni” che hanno reso la vita migliore all’intera umanità.
Il relativista nega: tutto è relativo, per lui. Il “meglio” e il “peggio” non esistono.
Contro chi nega l’unica via è dettagliare. Cosa intendere per “grande conquista dell’umanità”? Ecco, di fronte al caso concreto negare o relativizzare diventa sofistico.
E’ quello che fa Charles Murray nel suo “Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950”.
La prima tesi del libro è quindi chiara: le eccellenze esistono:
… In their effect on the individual’s freedom to pursue happiness, the creation of prosperous and free societies is the greatest of all achievements by humans on behalf of other humans….
Seconda tesi: le eccellenze non sono vaghe, sono cose concrete dettagliabili in un inventario:
… book’s first thesis: the dimensions and content of human accomplishment can be apprehended as facts…
Si assume che nel valutare le eccellenze artistiche e scientifiche i fatti siano separabili dalle opinioni.
Si deve poi procedere ad un inventario specifico. Murray considera il periodo dall’ 800 avanti Cristo al 1950 dopo Cristo. Il suo inventario è assemblato ricorrendo alle enciclopedie più prestigiose in ogni campo delle scienze e delle arti…
… I have assembled inventories that contain the people and events most important to the story of human accomplishment in the arts and sciences from –800 to 1950…
L’inventario non deve soffrire eccezioni e comprendere l’ opera dell’intera umanità…
… In this chapter, as for the European role in the preceding chapter, I document the reasons for concluding that the inventories fairly represent the role played by people who were not males and not white…
***
Alcune domande sorgono. Per esempio: come mai la donna ha contribuito tanto poco all’eccellenza umana?
Esempio…
… Just as only two percent of the mathematics significant figures were women, two percent of all the significant figures were women—88 out of the 4,002 persons in the inventories…
La prima donna dell’inventario…
… The earliest woman to appear in the inventories is the Greek poet, Sappho of Lesbos, in –6C. A thousand years later comes the next woman, the natural philosopher Hypatia of Alexandria…
Prima donna nelle arti visive…
… The first woman to qualify as a significant figure in the visual arts is Wen Shu (1595–1634) of Ming China…
Prima donna nelle scienze…
… The first woman to qualify in any of the scientific inventories after Hypatia is astronomer Caroline Herschel (1750–1848), sister and colleague of William Herschel…
Prima donna nella musica…
… The first and only woman in the music inventory is French composer Germaine Tailleferre (1892–1983)…
Nella filosofia, poi, non ci sono donne.
In parte il contributo irrisorio è dovuto all’esclusione ma nel XIX secolo le cose sono più complesse, le donne godono di una graduale parificazione formale. In questo senso il parallelo con gli ebrei risulta utile…
… The dearth of women in the inventories until 19C and 20C reflects near-total exclusion, by law and social pressure, from the possibility of participating. But the legal emancipation of women, which began in 19C at about the same time as Jewish emancipation, took even longer to complete….
Eppure il contributo da irrisorio “sale” a minimo. Un progresso davvero esiguo…
… During the most recent half century we are examining, 1900–1950, women still constituted only 5 percent of significant figures in the hard sciences, 3 percent in mathematics, 7 percent in medicine, and none in technology. In the combined arts inventories, women constituted 5 percent…
Le donne, pur presenti nelle varie discipline, di solito non hanno posizioni apicali. Giusto qualche eccezione qua e là…
… Murasaki Shikibu, the author of Tale of Genji, with the third-highest index score in Japanese literature, is the lone woman… Marie Curie, who won Nobel Prizes in both chemistry and physics, is the only other woman who has an index score higher than 18…
Conclusioni: le fonti più attendibili indicano uno scarsissimo contributo delle donne…
… In short, inventories in the arts and sciences, based on multiple sources, almost all of them written in the last few decades, producing highly reliable indexes, tell us that women constitute only a little more than 2 percent of all the significant figures, fewer than 5 percent of the significant figures in the first half of 20C, and that even the top-ranked women are, with the rarest exceptions, well back in the pack of the distributions in their fields…
***
Le fonti possono essere combinate come si vuole senza che la conclusione cambi.
Facciamo l’esempio di una fonte considerata…
… The Dictionary of Scientific Biography as a Benchmark in the Sciences…
Definizione di figura significativa…
… The definition of significant figures is based on consensus…
Stando solo a questa fonte le conclusioni sarebbero state ancor più radicali…
… Relying exclusively on the DoSB would have led to the conclusion that 0.7 percent of all the significant figures in mathematics and the hard sciences were women, instead of the 1.9 percent actually designated…
Per non sbagliare si è stati generosi anche sulle definizioni in gioco…
… If the selection rules used to augment the number of women are applied to men as well, the proportion of women will remain effectively unchanged, even drop…
Eppure, se andate in libreria, troverete volumi che parlano a lungo del contributo delle donne alla nostra civiltà. Ma che donne troverete in quei volumi? Ecco un esempio…
…. 1. Some women with significant scientific accomplishments but whose work postdates 1950… 2. Educators who taught science… 3. Pioneers, the first women to get a degree… 4. Translators and popularizers of scientific works… 5. Women, usually amateurs, who collected data that were used by scientists… 6. Activists in women’s rights and social reform whose profession was in medicine… 7. Wives, sisters, and children of famous male scientists… 8. Women with accomplishments ancillary to science though not involving scientific discoveries… 9. Women who were directly engaged in scientific professions and conducted substantial original research…
I dati sono talmente chiari che anche errori cospicui nei conteggi non inficerebbero la conclusione.
Anche i Nobel, l’indicatore spannometrico più diffuso, conferma.
***
Gli ebrei hanno una storia parallela a quella delle donne. Vediamola più nel dettaglio…
… In a practical sense, legal equality for Jews first occurred in the newly formed United States, where Jews were given full rights under federal law, though full protection at the state level had to wait upon the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868.7 France and the Netherlands emancipated their Jewish populations in the 1790s. Throughout the first half of 19C, the rest of Western and Central Europe evolved toward more tolerant policies without actually granting full legal equality. In England, Jews faced comparatively few legal restrictions after mid-18C, though it was not until the Promissory Oaths Act of 1871 that the last remnants of discriminatory law were revoked. The revolutions of 1848 saw civil rights granted (though not necessarily enforced) in most of Austro-Hungary and Germany. Bismarck completed the emancipation of Prussian Jews in 1869. Emancipation of Italian Jews began in the Piedmont in 1848 and ended in 1870 in Rome. Switzerland granted emancipation in 1866. In Russia, which in 19C also meant Poland, events moved the other way. The assassination of Alexander II in 1881 intensified long-standing Russian anti-Semitism…
Ma la reazione alla mutata condizione è stata ben diversa…
… What happens? “The suddenness with which Jews began to appear…is nothing short of astounding,” writes historian Raphael Patai. “It seemed as if a huge reservoir of Jewish talent, hitherto dammed up…
Dal 1800 al 1950 l’emersione di figure ebraiche eminenti è stata prorompente, al punto che la razza è sovra-rappresentata nell’inventario delle eccellenze…
… In every case except astronomy, Jews are disproportionately represented. The period 1870–1950…
***
Le cose non cambiano di molto se la medesima indagine viene condotta dopo gli anni cinquanta.
Cosa pensare?
La spiegazione puo’ essere ambientale o biologica.
Probabilmente tra qualche decennio sapremo molto di più sulla genetica. Per ora, che dire?
E’ doveroso segnalare che gli ostacoli ambientali non sono esattamente i medesimi per donne ed ebrei…
… Part of the answer is that the nature of the obstacles facing Jews and women differed. Winning the legal battle could not have nearly the liberating effect for women that it had for Jewish males…
I diritti formali sono bastati ai secondi ma non alle prime. La donna ha almeno tre ostacoli ulteriori…
… A woman trying to take advantage of her newly won legal rights by entering a profession had to be prepared to make three new sacrifices…
Una donna in certi ambienti è una bizzarria che potrebbe sentirsi a disagio…
… First, she had to accept being an oddball, which, depending on her situation, could mean being the object of curiosity, ridicule, scorn,…
Meno tempo per il matrimonio…
… Second, she had to confront the reality that to pursue a career would automatically reduce the likelihood of marriage…
Meno tempo per i figli…
… Third, even if she found herself in a good marriage, she had to confront another reality: Pursuing a career at full throttle, as first-rank accomplishment demands, is at odds with being a full-time mother…
Si tratta di ostacoli che permangono indipendentemente dai diritti…
… Employers continued to prefer men over women, pay them more, and promote them higher… Husbands continued to discourage wives from pursuing careers that would compete with their own…
Il conflitto tra carriera e maternità è forte oggi come ieri…
… anecdotal evidence indicates they were not much less prevalent in 1950 than they had been earlier. The conflict between career and motherhood had not even lessened… The central importance of motherhood means that many women do not want to jeopardize the opportunity to become a mother…
Si diventa “grandi” e si producono “eccellenze” proprio negli anni in cui si diventa madri…
… The years crucial to realizing great achievements have been precisely those years during which women are sexually most attractive, best able to find mates, and best able to bear children…
Essere mamma ed essere papà è ben diverso…
… Rather, it is argued, the emotional distractions of parenthood are far greater for most mothers than for most fathers…
La divisione materiale dei compiti incide poco ai nostri fini…
… However equally the physical burdens of child care are divided, the woman is likely to spend much more of the rest of her time thinking about the child’s needs than the man does…
Qui, infatti, non si parla semplicemente di “lavoro”, si parla di eccellenze, ovvero non di semplici lavoratori ma di gente maniaca, perfezionista, impegnata anima e corpo in quel che fa come in una missione…
… we are not talking merely about motherhood versus career or about juggling jobs and children. When we discuss accomplishments at the level of the people in the inventories, we are commonly talking about perfectionist, monomaniacal…
E che dire della biologia?…
… The most ambitious and controversial explanation for the disparity between accomplishment among men and women is based on biological differences…
L’evidenza empirica ci dice che, di fatto, l’ eccellenza è dominio del maschio in ogni società studiata…
… empirical observation at the core of this view is that in human societies around the world, men have without exception routinely held the top positions…
Qualcuno ritiene che questa sia una caratteristica universale…
… In 1970, sociologist Steven Goldberg published The Inevitability of Patriarchy, in which he asserted that these characteristics were universal… In 1993, Goldberg published a new statement of his theory entitled Why Men Rule…
In casi del genere il culturalismo propone spiegazioni complicate, la biologia spiegazioni semplici…
… Using social construction to explain why human societies have been universally constructed according to these sex differences in role and attainment requires complicated arguments. Using biology to explain them requires simple ones…
L’aggressività e la competitività per giungere al vertice giocano un loro ruolo…
… Many of these differences are argued to cluster around male-female differences in aggressiveness, broadly defined…
Anche a parità di media statistica nelle varie performace che a noi interessano, gli uomini tendono ad occupare gli estremi…
… It is men who go to the extremes, compete ruthlessly, and, in whatever field they take up, are going to achieve the best and the worst… Although the mean IQ of men and women is apparently the same, the variability of male IQ is higher…
Un piccolo quadro delle differenze tra i generi…
… Women tend to do better, for example, in a variety of verbal skills; men in a variety of mathematical and visual-spatial skills. The latter may explain a conundrum: Brain size is reliably correlated with IQ; men and women have different mean brain sizes; but men and women have similar overall IQ.24 Some large portion of those extra brain cells in men may be devoted to three-dimensional processing, the largest and most consistently identified male cognitive advantage… the male advantage corresponds to degree of abstraction involved in an art…
Ma perché queste differenze? Le spiegazioni evoluzioniste sembrano le più semplici.
Ecco uno stereotipo molto significativo…
… to put it in terms of stereotypes that seem to have merit: Wives remember where the car keys are; guys read maps better than girls do…
Pensiamo solo alla divisione dei compiti tra uomo e donna nelle popolazioni primitive…
… Men did the hunting (fostered by other physical advantages of males) while women did the gathering. Their mental repertoires diverged corresponding to the skills that evolutionary pressure rewarded…
L’uomo in giro per la foresta doveva sapersi orientare, per farlo al meglio sviluppa abilità legate all’astrazione. Si tratta naturalmente di abilità centrali nelle scienze come in altre discipline…
… Within the sciences, the ordering from more to less abstract is not so clear cut—some tasks in astronomy, for example, are pure observation, cataloging, and description, while others call on the highest reaches of mathematical abstraction. But in scanning the roster of female significant figures in the sciences, the overwhelming majority made their reputations on achievements that were concrete rather than abstract…
Poiché nelle varie scienze occorrono abilità leggermente diverse tra loro, possiamo verificare come ambiti diversi della scienza siano – guarda caso – in correlazione con la presenza femminile: laddove il ragionamento astratto pesa meno, la pur scarsa presenza femminile si intensifica. In casi del genere difficile pensare all’ambiente.
La spiegazione biologica sembra avere meriti da cui non si puo’ prescindere…
… existing circumstantial evidence is already strong enough to have persuaded me that disparities in accomplishment between the sexes are significantly grounded in biological differences…
Ma forse conviene portare pazienza…
… I close the discussion of sex differences with the point that I made at the outset: All we need is a few decades’ patience and we won’t have to argue anymore…
***
Ebrei. Cosa spiega la performance spettacolare degli Ashkenaziti…
… What explains the extraordinary level of accomplishment among the Ashkenazi Jews who came out of Central and Eastern Europe?…
Hanno sempre avuto la fissa dell’istruzione (forse perché si tratta di un capitale facilmente trasportabile). La tipica famiglia ebraica polacca nel 1918…
… Almost every one of their families hires a tutor to teach its children… their entire population studies. Girls too can read, even the girls of the poorest families…
L’ IQ…
… Reports of the mean IQ of Ashkenazi Jews vary, but it is likely to be at least 107 on tests that are normed to have a mean of 100… The data for Oriental Jews do not show consistently elevated IQ means… Jews also have much larger proportions of people with extremely high IQs… it is at least plausible that selection pressures have led to a higher Jewish IQ with some genetic basis…
Puo’ darsi che la vita particolarmente dura di questa gente abbia creato una selezione naturale dei migliori…
… One cause of genetic difference could be the Diaspora and subsequent centuries of anti-Semitism, requiring the Jews to survive in alien and often hostile cultures. Those who survived and left behind offspring were statistically likely to be more resourceful…
Ci sono poi altri fattori: la lunga tradizione nell’interpretazione delle scritture. La cosa puo’ aver sviluppato facoltà speculative sopra la media.
Si aggiunga che il rabbino è un buon partito…
… The young rabbi was one of the most desirable marriage partners for young women, and also, given the intellectual demands of Talmudic study, probably had a high IQ…
Anche la struttura famigliare era particolarmente adatta e offriva alla prole un ambiente al contempo sicuro e stimolante…
… Jewish family units were strong through 1950, with few children growing up in broken homes and with close networks of grandparents, aunts, and uncles… The high expectations placed on Jewish children are the stuff of cultural cliché…
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