I like Galef’s work, but I think she focuses too much on individual level solutions. It would be nice if each individual were optimally truth-seeking on their own. But if most people have one or another mindset that isn’t optimal for truth-seeking, it seems to me to be better to design social systems to enable these individual mindsets to work well collectively. I think this is what Adam Smith says about capitalism, and Philip Kitcher and Michael Strevens say about science, and Elinor Ostrom about traditional management of collective pool resources.
Yes, that's a good point. A friend of mine makes an even stronger argument: that while a soldier mindset is bad for individual truth-seeking, a community composed of opposing soldier mindsets can, under the right conditions, be even better than a world of scouts. (In the same way that under capitalism, individual selfishness might lead to a better world overall, even better than if everyone were more selfless.) I'm not sure I buy it, but it's worth taking seriously.
Thanks, Paul. This is the best take I’ve seen on this topic. One idea I would add: both the stereotypically male and female styles have characteristic strengths and weaknesses, not only in truth-seeking, but in other areas like parenting or cooperation. Under this view, there are healthy or virtuous ways to be characteristically male (e.g. brave, independent, principled), as well as unhealthy or "toxic" ways to be male (vengeful, domineering, aggressive). The same holds for femininity. In fact, one of the simplest ways to understand wokeness is that it provides benefit where it promotes stereotypically feminine virtues like empathy and caring, but causes problems when it enables unhealthy manifestations of these qualities, such as gossip, social exclusion, selective empathy, or mama bear aggression. This is also the simplest lens to understand the MAGA movement – it's a very unhealthy version of masculine behavior, lacking the male virtues.
This is great. I do feel like developmental psych talks can be full of softball 'compliment sandwich' questions but I've never been convinced that the more adversarial mode in econ or philosophy is really generating more enlightenment or just creating opportunities for folks to show off. Plenty of "I have more of a comment than a question" vibes.
Interesting read! I think part of what the author considers femininity is simply politeness. Women are conditioned since birth to make ourselves more palatable to everyone, so it could simply be our own internalized sexism to attempt to soften uncomfortable truths. And I do this myself, but it doesn’t stop me from speaking my mind, just in a more polite way. I’m an analytical person in higher Ed that values free speech, but some conditioning is hard to overcome. I agree, that men being outwardly argumentative doesn’t help either. Hopefully we can simply educate others in civil discourse.
I would add that it’s not merely internalized sexism leading women to be polite. We are judged far more harshly than men are for any lack of politeness. Sometimes we can see perfectly well that our behavior is driven by conditioning in certain circumstances, but we decide it’s not worth it to be impolite because the consequences for us personally will suck worse than the alternative. Still though, very bad for “getting to the truth” either way.
The thing is, everything slightly over the line of the system of patriarchy can be seen as wokeness. There can be a man who is the embodiment of patriarchy and if he decided to wear a really light pink shirt one day in a year or use the words "please" and "thank you" a bit too often, he would likely be perceived as more feminine and then the next step will be getting questioned about his judgment. Or a woman who fits a little more into the stereotypical "femininity", let's say, wearing too much makeup or not speaking about something —sometimes even an idea of her own— as if it's the only truth, refraining from interrupting someone while they're speaking might (always do seem like that, I'm just being politically correct over here) seem as a submissive trait, which in fact in a civilized world should be the most basic thing not to do. I think it all lies in the line of an internalized system. The question is: Are you on the line or have you crossed it?
I’m glad I finished the piece before commenting. Halfway through I thought,”Half the population has a suboptimal mindset, and the other half has a suboptimal mindset. Does talk of an optimal mindset mean anything at all?!?!”
Then Paul knocks it out the park with a third option. The Scout Mindset. Thanks for the great read🧐
This is easily the best and most correct article on the controversy. (Is it masculine or feminine to start with a compliment if you truly mean it?)
I think an easy response would be that modern truth seeking institutions were built to withstand male modes of non-truth seeking. To take an old example from Richard Hanania, if a man wants to settle an argument with fists, that is clearly beyond the pale at modern institutions, but if a woman cries (is this a fair comparison?), the fight is effectively over and the woman has, if not won, then at least not lost.
To put it another way, modern truth-seeking institutions have no antibodies against female forms of truth-seeking failure, while they have some, imperfect guardrails against male forms of failure. Thus, the entry of women en mass will cause a lower amount of truth seeking as women enter, even if they are no better than men on that front.
The key thing in that analysis that contradicts Andrews is that it is just a matter of time until universities, non-profits, law firms, government beauracracies, etc. adjust.
You wrote: "I’ve been to talks in male-dominated fields (such as, until relatively recently, philosophy) where it was all status competition, with top prize going to the questioner who eviscerates the speaker with the most savage question. This is disastrous for the pursuit of truth—it discourages the brilliant but timid from participating; it favors verbal dexterity over thoughtful reflection; it rewards dishonesty (God help the speaker who admits a weakness in his argument), and it shuts down the possibility for collaboration."
I've been to talks like that too, but in my experience they are out of the ordinary. Most of the time, the status competition stuff is quite minor, grudgingly tolerated, and usually comes from some young fool. I have heard, from the professors who taught me, that in the 1970s things were much more combative and insulting at conferences. In that respect, the culture just keeps getting less and less of the silly pseudo-masculine strutting behavior. Yes, it's still there, but there's a lot less of it now, according to what I've heard.
I thought so too. I'd add that perhaps Bloom has fallen victim, ironically, to a feminised sense of argument - in that many people (mostly men?) enjoy the cut and thrust, are not taking it personally, aggressively defending their ground etc, but having fun in the pursuits of truth/exchange of ideas. I've several friends and colleagues for whom this is true (men and women), and noticed that others can get alarmed by the argument/debate and try to shut it down (even though we were enjoying it).
This is somewhat tangential to the "truth pursuit" agenda, but it seems to me that the collective knowledge is in an utterly bizarre denial of female-coded ("feminine"?) ways of performing and effecting aggression, violence, hostility and dominance. Almost as if they've never met a sample group of typical 14 year old girls.
On the topic itself, though.
I think OP is spot on with the claim that "standard masculine" and "standard feminine" modes of behaviour in social institutions are equally antithetical to the "pursuit of truth" and "rule of law", which are a product of Enlightenment / rationality /reflexivity -- ie modernity, itself a fairly unique not to say perverse mode of thinking and being. By framing the problem in gendered terms Andrews seems to -- hilariously -- have bought into the rad fem idea that those (roughly Enlightenment coded) ways are somehow inherently masculine.
I'd buy into a slightly different idea, though, that the pursuit of truth and the rule of law ARE indeed threatened by, for the lack of better label, more "common sensical" stances, whether aggressively militant or softly manipulative/conformist. But it's not a gender or sex war, if I was looking for a metaphor I'd say it's more a PFC vs limbic system conflict.
Thanks for this! If typical attributes of both men and women render them unsuited to truth-seeking, humans in general must be pretty bad at it (as confirmed by everyday experience). You reject androgyny as a solution...but where do "scouting" styles come from? Scouts are also men and women. Human curiosity is the starting point, but it is generally too easily satisfied. What do you think are the motivations that keep a truth-seeker on track?
Regarding footnote 1, I guess this would be an example of collider bias? Although I think Andrews might respond in one of two ways:
(1) even if female CEO seem very "masculine" relative to the average male or average female, the average female CEO might still noticeably diverge from the average male CEO; and
(2) this point only holds if one expects those positions to continue to have the similar selection criteria to what we currently have, a point which Andrews denies given her view that feminization is driven by a departure from meritocracy via tools like civil rights legislation.
I don't agree with either of these points, but I wonder if I'm right that they are least partially address this (admittedly non-central) point.
Both approaches are imperfect and progress is chaotic but are they really both equally bad? Of the two which has achieved, and which is more likely to achieve, the better results? Which is more likely to implement the scout mindset? Isn’t the soldier mindset a good description of the woke’s evangelical defence of some dangerously irrational and destructive ideas?
Women are trained to look away from the truth from a young age with fairy tale after fairy tale ending with "happily ever after." This is not an attack on men, but in the spirit of truth seeking we should recognize that male infidelity in marriage has lomg been winked at and kept secret by women to keep families and their breadwinner together. Nothing is more destabilizing to a family than a shrew who insists on telling the truth. In men's defense, I think life-long monogamy is a lovely fairy tale but unnatural to our species. It's particularly ill suited to young men, but that's the social deal we've invented if you want legitimate heirs. So women learn to see what we want to see and deny the rest, even to ourselves. Women know they tell the truth at their peril.
Thanks a lot for this article. I think this topic deserves more discussion. An excellent article on the broader topic by Francis Fukuyama is: Women and the Evolution of World Politics
I like your article overall, but I disagree that pursuing status is primarily a male mode of interaction. I see women as being equally at fault for that mode of interaction as men, if not moreso. Think about who tends to care the most about popularity contests, especially in places lile high school where the mental tools to overcome our base impulses aren't yet as well honed.
Thanks for sharing your insights. I've been thinking about this discussion a lot. The problem seems to be the assumption that the pursuit of "truth" is what matters. Why would that be? Why not reducing suffering? Why not increasing human flourishing? (Or flourishing for all sentient individuals.)
Personally, I think "the pursuit of truth" is a cop-out to let people off the hook for actually making the world a better place.
This is not true for me. I don't value "truth." In the same way people say you can't be moral unless you believe in some god(s) - not for me. Yuval's quote is great, IMO:
Morality doesn’t mean “following divine commandments.”
It means “reducing suffering.”
Therefore in order to act morally,
you don’t need to believe in any myth or story.
You just need to develop a deep appreciation of suffering.
–Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century
ok, well how are you going to know what actually reduces suffering if you don't care about the truth? at the very least you need it as a second order value. Though I get the feeling you don't value truth nearly as little as you think you do: after all, you wouldn't care about suffering in the abstract rather than your own if you didn't at least think it was overwhelmingly likely to be true that people other than yourself are suffering.
Maybe this is more about affinity - ie, to put it a bit crudely, people who talk about truth more than they talk about suffering give you the ick? Just a thought.
My take is that people talk about "Truth" when what we generally mean is our personal feelings. People think Veganism is Truth. Vaccines cause autism; flat earth; communism; AI will kill us all; plants feel pain; heaven; post-modernism. Etc. etc. etc.
The subtitle of my latest book is "A half-failed life...". (https://www.losingmyreligions.net/) I was sure I knew "The Truth" and I was actually making the world a worse place.
I'll give you an example, lessening suffering on the streets of San Francisco you want to give out free needles, allow? Shoplifting, ignoring petty crimes. Whereas ultimately the truth is these actions do much more harm to society.
I like Galef’s work, but I think she focuses too much on individual level solutions. It would be nice if each individual were optimally truth-seeking on their own. But if most people have one or another mindset that isn’t optimal for truth-seeking, it seems to me to be better to design social systems to enable these individual mindsets to work well collectively. I think this is what Adam Smith says about capitalism, and Philip Kitcher and Michael Strevens say about science, and Elinor Ostrom about traditional management of collective pool resources.
Yes, that's a good point. A friend of mine makes an even stronger argument: that while a soldier mindset is bad for individual truth-seeking, a community composed of opposing soldier mindsets can, under the right conditions, be even better than a world of scouts. (In the same way that under capitalism, individual selfishness might lead to a better world overall, even better than if everyone were more selfless.) I'm not sure I buy it, but it's worth taking seriously.
It’s how our legal system is structured! And I think William James makes a version of this argument in “The Will to Believe” as well.
Thanks, Paul. This is the best take I’ve seen on this topic. One idea I would add: both the stereotypically male and female styles have characteristic strengths and weaknesses, not only in truth-seeking, but in other areas like parenting or cooperation. Under this view, there are healthy or virtuous ways to be characteristically male (e.g. brave, independent, principled), as well as unhealthy or "toxic" ways to be male (vengeful, domineering, aggressive). The same holds for femininity. In fact, one of the simplest ways to understand wokeness is that it provides benefit where it promotes stereotypically feminine virtues like empathy and caring, but causes problems when it enables unhealthy manifestations of these qualities, such as gossip, social exclusion, selective empathy, or mama bear aggression. This is also the simplest lens to understand the MAGA movement – it's a very unhealthy version of masculine behavior, lacking the male virtues.
Yes, but why did young men flock to MAGA? https://open.substack.com/pub/dennisonwrites/p/why-your-son-is-right-wing?r=fcyvs&utm_medium=ios
This is great. I do feel like developmental psych talks can be full of softball 'compliment sandwich' questions but I've never been convinced that the more adversarial mode in econ or philosophy is really generating more enlightenment or just creating opportunities for folks to show off. Plenty of "I have more of a comment than a question" vibes.
Interesting read! I think part of what the author considers femininity is simply politeness. Women are conditioned since birth to make ourselves more palatable to everyone, so it could simply be our own internalized sexism to attempt to soften uncomfortable truths. And I do this myself, but it doesn’t stop me from speaking my mind, just in a more polite way. I’m an analytical person in higher Ed that values free speech, but some conditioning is hard to overcome. I agree, that men being outwardly argumentative doesn’t help either. Hopefully we can simply educate others in civil discourse.
I would add that it’s not merely internalized sexism leading women to be polite. We are judged far more harshly than men are for any lack of politeness. Sometimes we can see perfectly well that our behavior is driven by conditioning in certain circumstances, but we decide it’s not worth it to be impolite because the consequences for us personally will suck worse than the alternative. Still though, very bad for “getting to the truth” either way.
The thing is, everything slightly over the line of the system of patriarchy can be seen as wokeness. There can be a man who is the embodiment of patriarchy and if he decided to wear a really light pink shirt one day in a year or use the words "please" and "thank you" a bit too often, he would likely be perceived as more feminine and then the next step will be getting questioned about his judgment. Or a woman who fits a little more into the stereotypical "femininity", let's say, wearing too much makeup or not speaking about something —sometimes even an idea of her own— as if it's the only truth, refraining from interrupting someone while they're speaking might (always do seem like that, I'm just being politically correct over here) seem as a submissive trait, which in fact in a civilized world should be the most basic thing not to do. I think it all lies in the line of an internalized system. The question is: Are you on the line or have you crossed it?
Define “slightly.” Not from your point of view, but from those whose views on this topic you disagree with.
Also, I have to add that, I love Lucy.
I’m glad I finished the piece before commenting. Halfway through I thought,”Half the population has a suboptimal mindset, and the other half has a suboptimal mindset. Does talk of an optimal mindset mean anything at all?!?!”
Then Paul knocks it out the park with a third option. The Scout Mindset. Thanks for the great read🧐
This is easily the best and most correct article on the controversy. (Is it masculine or feminine to start with a compliment if you truly mean it?)
I think an easy response would be that modern truth seeking institutions were built to withstand male modes of non-truth seeking. To take an old example from Richard Hanania, if a man wants to settle an argument with fists, that is clearly beyond the pale at modern institutions, but if a woman cries (is this a fair comparison?), the fight is effectively over and the woman has, if not won, then at least not lost.
To put it another way, modern truth-seeking institutions have no antibodies against female forms of truth-seeking failure, while they have some, imperfect guardrails against male forms of failure. Thus, the entry of women en mass will cause a lower amount of truth seeking as women enter, even if they are no better than men on that front.
The key thing in that analysis that contradicts Andrews is that it is just a matter of time until universities, non-profits, law firms, government beauracracies, etc. adjust.
You wrote: "I’ve been to talks in male-dominated fields (such as, until relatively recently, philosophy) where it was all status competition, with top prize going to the questioner who eviscerates the speaker with the most savage question. This is disastrous for the pursuit of truth—it discourages the brilliant but timid from participating; it favors verbal dexterity over thoughtful reflection; it rewards dishonesty (God help the speaker who admits a weakness in his argument), and it shuts down the possibility for collaboration."
I've been to talks like that too, but in my experience they are out of the ordinary. Most of the time, the status competition stuff is quite minor, grudgingly tolerated, and usually comes from some young fool. I have heard, from the professors who taught me, that in the 1970s things were much more combative and insulting at conferences. In that respect, the culture just keeps getting less and less of the silly pseudo-masculine strutting behavior. Yes, it's still there, but there's a lot less of it now, according to what I've heard.
I thought so too. I'd add that perhaps Bloom has fallen victim, ironically, to a feminised sense of argument - in that many people (mostly men?) enjoy the cut and thrust, are not taking it personally, aggressively defending their ground etc, but having fun in the pursuits of truth/exchange of ideas. I've several friends and colleagues for whom this is true (men and women), and noticed that others can get alarmed by the argument/debate and try to shut it down (even though we were enjoying it).
This is somewhat tangential to the "truth pursuit" agenda, but it seems to me that the collective knowledge is in an utterly bizarre denial of female-coded ("feminine"?) ways of performing and effecting aggression, violence, hostility and dominance. Almost as if they've never met a sample group of typical 14 year old girls.
On the topic itself, though.
I think OP is spot on with the claim that "standard masculine" and "standard feminine" modes of behaviour in social institutions are equally antithetical to the "pursuit of truth" and "rule of law", which are a product of Enlightenment / rationality /reflexivity -- ie modernity, itself a fairly unique not to say perverse mode of thinking and being. By framing the problem in gendered terms Andrews seems to -- hilariously -- have bought into the rad fem idea that those (roughly Enlightenment coded) ways are somehow inherently masculine.
I'd buy into a slightly different idea, though, that the pursuit of truth and the rule of law ARE indeed threatened by, for the lack of better label, more "common sensical" stances, whether aggressively militant or softly manipulative/conformist. But it's not a gender or sex war, if I was looking for a metaphor I'd say it's more a PFC vs limbic system conflict.
Thanks for this! If typical attributes of both men and women render them unsuited to truth-seeking, humans in general must be pretty bad at it (as confirmed by everyday experience). You reject androgyny as a solution...but where do "scouting" styles come from? Scouts are also men and women. Human curiosity is the starting point, but it is generally too easily satisfied. What do you think are the motivations that keep a truth-seeker on track?
Interesting!
Regarding footnote 1, I guess this would be an example of collider bias? Although I think Andrews might respond in one of two ways:
(1) even if female CEO seem very "masculine" relative to the average male or average female, the average female CEO might still noticeably diverge from the average male CEO; and
(2) this point only holds if one expects those positions to continue to have the similar selection criteria to what we currently have, a point which Andrews denies given her view that feminization is driven by a departure from meritocracy via tools like civil rights legislation.
I don't agree with either of these points, but I wonder if I'm right that they are least partially address this (admittedly non-central) point.
Both approaches are imperfect and progress is chaotic but are they really both equally bad? Of the two which has achieved, and which is more likely to achieve, the better results? Which is more likely to implement the scout mindset? Isn’t the soldier mindset a good description of the woke’s evangelical defence of some dangerously irrational and destructive ideas?
Women are trained to look away from the truth from a young age with fairy tale after fairy tale ending with "happily ever after." This is not an attack on men, but in the spirit of truth seeking we should recognize that male infidelity in marriage has lomg been winked at and kept secret by women to keep families and their breadwinner together. Nothing is more destabilizing to a family than a shrew who insists on telling the truth. In men's defense, I think life-long monogamy is a lovely fairy tale but unnatural to our species. It's particularly ill suited to young men, but that's the social deal we've invented if you want legitimate heirs. So women learn to see what we want to see and deny the rest, even to ourselves. Women know they tell the truth at their peril.
Thanks a lot for this article. I think this topic deserves more discussion. An excellent article on the broader topic by Francis Fukuyama is: Women and the Evolution of World Politics
Author(s): Francis Fukuyama
Source: Foreign Affairs, Vol. 77, No. 5 (Sep. - Oct., 1998), pp. 24-40
Published by: Council on Foreign Relations
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20049048
Accessed: 29/08/2009 21:51
I like your article overall, but I disagree that pursuing status is primarily a male mode of interaction. I see women as being equally at fault for that mode of interaction as men, if not moreso. Think about who tends to care the most about popularity contests, especially in places lile high school where the mental tools to overcome our base impulses aren't yet as well honed.
Hi Dr. Bloom,
Thanks for sharing your insights. I've been thinking about this discussion a lot. The problem seems to be the assumption that the pursuit of "truth" is what matters. Why would that be? Why not reducing suffering? Why not increasing human flourishing? (Or flourishing for all sentient individuals.)
Personally, I think "the pursuit of truth" is a cop-out to let people off the hook for actually making the world a better place.
Then why not just take whatever psychedelics or other substances you need to until the world looks perfect to you?
You need to value truth in order to pursue anything else worth valuing.
Hi gnashy,
This is not true for me. I don't value "truth." In the same way people say you can't be moral unless you believe in some god(s) - not for me. Yuval's quote is great, IMO:
Morality doesn’t mean “following divine commandments.”
It means “reducing suffering.”
Therefore in order to act morally,
you don’t need to believe in any myth or story.
You just need to develop a deep appreciation of suffering.
–Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century
Take care!
ok, well how are you going to know what actually reduces suffering if you don't care about the truth? at the very least you need it as a second order value. Though I get the feeling you don't value truth nearly as little as you think you do: after all, you wouldn't care about suffering in the abstract rather than your own if you didn't at least think it was overwhelmingly likely to be true that people other than yourself are suffering.
Maybe this is more about affinity - ie, to put it a bit crudely, people who talk about truth more than they talk about suffering give you the ick? Just a thought.
Thanks for the thoughtful questions.
My take is that people talk about "Truth" when what we generally mean is our personal feelings. People think Veganism is Truth. Vaccines cause autism; flat earth; communism; AI will kill us all; plants feel pain; heaven; post-modernism. Etc. etc. etc.
The subtitle of my latest book is "A half-failed life...". (https://www.losingmyreligions.net/) I was sure I knew "The Truth" and I was actually making the world a worse place.
Here is more of my thinking. https://www.mattball.org/2025/10/this-is-neither-rational-nor-objective.html
Sorry to ramble on so much. Thanks again, and take care.
I'll give you an example, lessening suffering on the streets of San Francisco you want to give out free needles, allow? Shoplifting, ignoring petty crimes. Whereas ultimately the truth is these actions do much more harm to society.