## Tyler Cowen interview https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/amia-srinivasan/ TC: Are you comfortable with the probable reality that in a feminist utopia, men and women will become more different, overall, than they are today? AS: I would deny the premise. [...] I think it's ridiculous to try to read off what things would be like from current conditions. I'm trying to imagine a world in which gender doesn't exist. --- AS: That's like calling [Nordic countries] socialist! [...] Feminist sights have always been set on something far more radical. --- But I don’t think these differences are profound enough to be able to give us any deep sense of what it would look like to do something that many feminists like me would like to do, which is abolish gender as such. I think it would be just as Mill thought. It was ridiculous to try and ascertain what women were innately oriented towards doing or what their capacities were under the conditions of 19th-century patriarchal England. I think it’s pretty ridiculous to try and read it off of the differentials between Iran and the Nordic countries. Suppose that in the world you’re imagining . . . so, I’m imagining a world in which gender doesn’t exist. You have people with varying different kinds of bodies, so as to restate your hypothetical is the question, how would I feel about a world in which people who are female-bodied gravitated towards certain things, and people who are male-bodied gravitated towards other things? I think we should look at the evidence. But I think we should also be intensely cautious about drawing precisely those conclusions that have been drawn over and over again in the history of thinking about women and men, and thinking about gender conclusions that would want to suggest that women are innately drawn towards certain forms of activity and labor and self-expression. The idea that there’s any example of a known society where we’re so distant from that, such that we can start to get a good grip on what women and men are innately like, I think, is epistemically naive. I’m not saying that this stuff isn’t interesting, and you might end up being right in the end. I might end up being wrong. COWEN: That would be a parameter value that might get you closer to social conservatism, maybe. SRINIVASAN: No, it really wouldn’t. Part of why I find this whole discourse problematic is because I think we should be suspicious when we find ourselves attracted to data — very, very thin and weak data — that seem to justify beliefs that have held great currency in lots of societies throughout history, in a way that is conducive to the oppression of large segments of the population, in this particular case women. I also think one error that is consistently made in this discourse, in this kind of conversation about what’s innate or what’s natural, is to think about what’s natural in terms of what’s necessary. This is a point that Shulamith Firestone made a very long time ago, but that very few people register, which is that — and it was actually made again to me recently by a philosopher of biology, which is, “Look what’s natural isn’t what’s necessary.” It’s extraordinary. It’s not even like what’s natural offers a good equilibrium point. Think about how much time you and I spend sitting around. Completely unnatural for humans to sit around, yet we’re in this equilibrium point where vast majority of humans just sit around all day. So, I think there’s a separate question about what humans — as essentially social, cultured, acculturating creatures — what our world should look like. And that’s distinct from the question of what natural predispositions we might have. It’s not unrelated, but I don’t think any of us think we should just be forming societies that simply allow us to express our most “natural orientations.” we should be very skeptical about innate differences. Beware thinking about what is natural as what is necessary. AS: no view on whether chess should be segregated by gender. --- AS: "One thing history might show us is that it is the prophets, and not the pragmatists, who are the most powerful world makers." "One might take a similar attitude towards philosophy in general. It's job not to get the world right, but to get ourselves right." Conceptual innovation that tries to restructure reality. "Sex work" => work. Preoccupied with unkowability of ourselves to ourselves. With this picture, implies that agents can do the best they can by their own lights and still get things very wrong, whatever the normative system is. Normative performance is hostage to these external forces. Tragic view. How we do in the world depends radically on where we find ourselves. Same spirit of tragedy is built into my feminist outlook. [[=Bernard Williams#Amia Srinivasan on Williams]] --- I’m a little worried that you’re resorting to a kind of genealogical fallacy in dismissing the 30 Nobel laureates as from a particular class background. I would agree they are. But they’re also really very, very smart people who’ve looked at the evidence, and they think it’s about tradeoffs, and it’s comparative. They think that true socialist economies perform worse on all, or at least most, of the metrics you cite. What is it, empirically, that _you_ know that they don’t or I don’t? That’s where I see a big gap between us. **SRINIVASAN:** What I know, and, in fact, I think they know and you know, is that we are in an extraordinary state of crisis. The other thing I haven’t even mentioned is the profound deficit of democracy that capitalism entails. ### All highlights TC: How does húmor fit into utopia? TC: as men and women become more equal, societies become richer, there is some empirical evidence that men and women become more different. E.g. there are more women in STEM per capita in Iran than in Sweden. When things are very bad, men and women are in some ways forced to become similar, as things get better, they seem to become more different. Are you comfortable with the probable reality that in a feminist utopia, men and women will become more different, overall, than they are today? AS: I would deny the premise. [...] I think it's ridiculous to try to read off what things would be like from current conditions. I'm trying to imagine a world in which gender doesn't exist. AS: We are not going to have a productive conversation if you keep describing the Nordics as gender-egalitarian societies. TC: in relative terms they are, right? AS: That's like calling them socialist! [...] Feminist sights have always been set on something far more radical. we should be very skeptical about innate differences. Beware thinking about what is natural as what is necessary. AS: no view on whether chess should be segregated by gender. Skeptical about consent models. Consent in current broadly patriarchal society: necessary but not sufficient condition on ethical sexual activity. Cases of ethically problematic sex that are consensual, e.g. professor-student relationships. TC: Disabled individuals in the Netherlands often receive a kind of sex voucher, to transact with sex workers. Good idea or bad idea? AS: Extraordinary political importance not to use word Incels to describe involuntary incelibates. That group is way way larger than the subgroup who would identify with the political movement of Incels. AS: "One thing history might show us is that it is the prophets, and not the pragmatists, who are the most powerful world makers." "One might take a similar attitude towards philosophy in general. It's job not to get the world right, but to get ourselves right." Conceptual innovation that tries to restructure reality. "Sex work" => work. Preoccupied with unkowability of ourselves to ourselves. With this picture, implies that agents can do the best they can by their own lights and still get things very wrong, whatever the normative system is. Normative performance is hostage to these external forces. Tragic view. How we do in the world depends radically on where we find ourselves. Same spirit of tragedy is built into my feminist outlook. TC : fave Brian eno: another green world by a long shot. Music for airports bang on a can version. I think he really does practice philosophy — or he did — as a humanistic discipline. If you look at his essays in, for example, the _London Review of Books_, they are very different from what goes under the name public philosophy today. They are _real_ works of philosophy. What they aren’t is a philosopher coming down from his Olympian heights and wheeling out a couple of philosophical distinctions which are supposed to help the masses get clear on things. It’s rather Williams just doing philosophy in a way that’s respectful of an audience, that expects them to do some work but that also does some work on his own part. I think that’s very important as a model of how to write about philosophy and how to write for a wider philosophical audience. [...] Williams is very interested in the question of perspective and of points of view. He’s very interested in the aspiration to a perfectly neutral scientific description of the world, and very interested in the question of what that leaves out. At the same time, he _very_ much wants to [resist a view put forward by Richard Rorty](https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v11/n22/bernard-williams/getting-it-right), which begins from a **recognition of the contingency of worldviews to a kind of nihilistic or skeptical conclusion about the ability to achieve common understanding**. I’m very interested in that specific dialectic because **Williams isn’t some knee-jerk realist who just wants to dismiss Rorty and say, “Look, common-sense reasoning just gets us on to the true picture of the world.”** He thinks that a purely scientific picture of the world leaves out essential parts of the nature of the world. There, **you have to take up a certain kind of normatively loaded perspective to be able to describe the world correctly**. He’s, again, in this kind of ambivalent position with respect to these questions about objectivity and value and perspective. I’m very much interested in that locus of problems. [...] I think the thing you’re observing is that I have a _huge_ amount of anxiety about state power, and about different forms of domination, _including_ state domination, which distinguishes me from a certain kind of socialist perspective. I also have — and I think you’re also noticing this more — not just an anxiety about state power or forms of authority, but also an active embrace of forms of dissensus, innovation, novelty, boundary-breaking, boundary-crossing. And I think that’s absolutely right. I think trans people specifically, but queer people more broadly, often participate in a kind of dissident politics, a politics that wants to slough off certain forms of boundaries and constraints. Not always — I don’t think that the rights of queer people have to rest on them being any kind of political vanguard, just to be clear. [...] I’m also interested — and I think this is a certain kind of philosophical foundationalism in me that is attracted to the idea of certain human universals and universal forms of human flourishing. I think, when we try and articulate what the conditions of human flourishing are, beyond the most basic necessities like food and water and safety and shelter, we start getting ourselves into certain forms of political trouble. This has historically been a problem for Marxists, where the theory can seem to rest on a particular vision of [species-being](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08935696.2012.657459?journalCode=rrmx20), a particular humanistic picture of what it is to be human and to live a human life well, but I’m attracted to that thought as well. There is that strong part of me, as well, that thinks that there is some content to the question of what it means to live well with each other. It’s not simply about free exploration and the challenging and disruption of boundaries, so I’m ambivalent between those two things. [...] I’m not particularly impressed, I’ve got to say, by the fact that the last 30 Nobel prize–winning economists haven’t been in favor of socialism. You’d be hard-pressed to find many socialists in the academy broadly. We’re always hearing about the way in which the university has been overtaken by Marxists, but look at philosophy. You almost get none. Why is this? Because universities — for all I love them and admire them and think they play, or can play, an important social function — are pretty class selecting. It’s no surprise to me that they skew very liberal and very centrist on the whole. [...] I’m a little worried that you’re resorting to a kind of genealogical fallacy in dismissing the 30 Nobel laureates as from a particular class background. I would agree they are. But they’re also really very, very smart people who’ve looked at the evidence, and they think it’s about tradeoffs, and it’s comparative. They think that true socialist economies perform worse on all, or at least most, of the metrics you cite. What is it, empirically, that _you_ know that they don’t or I don’t? That’s where I see a big gap between us. **SRINIVASAN:** What I know, and, in fact, I think they know and you know, is that we are in an extraordinary state of crisis. The other thing I haven’t even mentioned is the profound deficit of democracy that capitalism entails. The idea that the US is a democratic system is just a complete joke. The idea that what you’re going to have is just some campaign finance reform to fix that is ridiculous. The most important institutions of American political and social life aren’t democratically run. That’s true not just of the Supreme Court, but it’s also true of corporations. Are there tradeoffs? Could it be that there would be less growth? Yes. Is that okay? Yes. I think we need to be thinking about a de-growth economy. Is it the case that you’re going to maybe have less innovation? Possibly. Are we going to keep on going full steam ahead with a system that causes mass immiseration, that’s exploitative, deeply alienating, is not solving the problems that it says that the profit motive is somehow supposed to magically solve? I think that’s the question.