This is one of the most excellent must read articles ever sent to me (by a girlfriend who does this sort of thing for a living. You know who you are, Girl. Thank you!) I’m talking about David Roberts, “There’s a Gender Divide on Nuclear Power, but It Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Means,” at Vox.
First I’ll tell you why I think it’s awesome. Then I’ll quote some of the best bits for you, if you just want to skip to that…
The Awesomeness
The reason I find it awesome is multifold.
- It’s a good example of going beyond correlation data to test causal hypotheses. You know, that thing EvoPsych almost never does and yet still claims to be science.
- It’s a really good example of dispelling myths of innate gender differences the Sam Harris crowd is fond of, and proving instead that it’s all about culture and social systems, and thus the structure of society, that then needs to be structured differently (the system needs to be changed in some way), and the programming of brains, that then need to be reprogrammed (and we have no automated virus to do that; we each individually have to admit our operating system is jacked and fix it.)
- It closes with an excellent survey of standard scientific caveats that apply to how all statistical studies should be read, covering some of the common mistakes people make (usually various generalization and causal fallacies) after hearing a study that they need to stop making, which is alone worth reading the whole thing for.
- And on top of all that, it’s also a good example of demonstrating the pervasive effect on cognition and belief that white male privilege causes.
Whereas it becomes obvious that a white man can break into his car he left his keys in and expect a cop to help him, while a black man would get rousted, probably arrested, and possibly shot (the white man thus has a privilege the black man does not). Or that a white man’s resume is more likely to result in a hire than the identical resume from a black woman (ditto). Those manifestations of privilege are clear when pointed out, but seemingly scattered among countless disparate scenarios. But this article shows that white male privilege even affects beliefs and perceptions on a fundamental level that explains a lot of what’s fucked up about our country’s politics. It also explains a big chunk of science denialism and why white men, even atheists and so called skeptics, succumb to such nonsense weirdly often, too.
The funny thing is that the question began as “Why are women so disproportionately against nuclear power than men?” Because that’s how the question was framed. Until someone framed it differently, and noticed it was actually “Why are white men so disproportionately in favor of nuclear power?” Because guess what. Women and minority men? Opinion levels measure about the same. Instead of white guys being the standard (an assumption white male privilege often makes, even unconsciously), they are actually the weirdo outliers. Their deviance is what needs to be explained. Not everyone else’s.
And this connects with a point often overlooked: many people believe the right things for the wrong reasons. And that can disguise the fact that this is happening. White men may be right about nuclear power. So the natural assumption is that they disproportionately support it because they believe correctly by a correct methodology. I mean, how else could they have come to a correct belief? Right?
Except, no. Too many people come to correct beliefs for bad reasons. And it is commitment (or blind surrender) to those bad reasons that causes other false beliefs. The being right about the one thing can trick a mind into thinking it has a good method, therefore every other belief that method generates must be just as reliable. Nope.
Another point to take away is that it’s not always about factual differences. People can assess the facts identically and still differ in how much risk they are comfortable accepting. That’s a personal choice, not a wholly objective one.
One can make objectively legitimate appeals for consistency in one’s anxieties, and one can fairly argue that it is counter-productive to be so averse to risk you are paralyzed, or so inured to risk you wreck the world like a bull in a china shop (but recognize that the lines demarking these excesses must necessarily still vary from individual to individual for valid personal reasons), or that some risks and risk aversions can’t be imposed on the community just because you personally are okay with them, at least when instead there are ways you can choose your own exposure to the risk without meddling with other people’s liberty or safety (like, choosing not to live near a nuclear power plant…notice how a big part of the problem is that most people don’t have that privilege. These things often get dumped in neighborhoods whose population is too poor or disempowered to move out of them.)
Which brings us to the last interesting thing this study should remind us of: that the risk being the assessed is not always simply, for example, “Is nuclear power safe?” Often the risk being assessed on top of that and thus adding to it is, “Is it safe to trust the people who insist it’s safe?” When those are people, as a class, who often have been very untrustworthy, the powers that be often being caught in lies, and very dismissive of the concerns of minorities and the disadvantaged, running roughshod right over them and not even caring, even wasting human lives and resources on disastrously mistaken ventures or from outright negligence.
No one will ever trust politicians. So it’s up to scientists to restore credibility in good science-based decisions. Restoring trust in the scientific community is thus even more important than educating the public about the actual risk factors and risk levels involved in various kinds of nuclear power sources. And there are historical reasons women and minorities don’t trust the science community.
The Best Bits
The overall conclusion (quoting from one of the studies surveyed) is dead interesting:
Perhaps white males see less risk in the world because they create, manage, control, and benefit from so much of it. Perhaps women and nonwhite men see the world as more dangerous because in many ways they are more vulnerable, because they benefit less from many of its technologies and institutions, and because they have less power and control.
Yep. That. And do you know how to fix that? Yeah. A lot of white guys need to stop hogging all the privileges, power, and wealth. Or trying to. Or not letting women and minorities a fair shot at it. Because it’s fucking with your mind. It’s making you so inured to risk you support useless wars and dangerously unregulated oil drilling, and don’t give a shit about fixing the storm walls that would prevent one of the greatest disasters in U.S. history, and think guns are totes safe, and…basically, every distinctively conservative belief or boondoggle there is. And then you wonder why so many women and minorities don’t trust you when you talk up nuclear power.
And true, it is mostly (mostly) conservative white men (depending on how you define conservatism: many liberal atheists and skeptics count as conservative by the definition these studies use). As Roberts puts it:
What looked like a gender divide on nuclear power is in fact mostly a function of the “extreme risk skepticism” of “white hierarchical and individualistic” males. (In the US, “white hierarchical and individualistic” males generally go by the more economical “conservatives.”)
So. Yeah.
And then. Last but not least. The coda Roberts attaches at the end that applies to everything involving comparative statistical studies of any kind:
- “…the data tell us only about statistical patterns. They do not tell us anything about ‘men’ and ‘women’ as such,” and thus we cannot casually make inferences to biology as cause, and “they certainly don’t tell us anything about particular individuals.” Because, for example, “Plenty of non-males and non-whites support nuclear power; plenty of white males oppose it,” etc. So you can’t say things like “women are against nuclear power” or “white men support nuclear power.” All we are seeing is statistical disproportions in these categories, not universal essential traits of men and women or white people and nonwhite people.
- But this also means social and economic forces, not essentially gender or race, are causing these measured disparities, and “Social and economic forces can be interrogated and changed.” Which is what many white men fear the most. That they will have to change themselves and their world (look how much they whine with absurd hyperbole about witch hunts over organizations firing spokespeople who don’t express the values they were hired to support, e.g., that sadder puppy Tim Hunt, who actually did nothing less than suck at one of his jobs, so his getting fired from that one job was entirely appropriate). Or even have to admit it’s fucked and needs changing in the first place (thanks to their love affair with just world and system justification fallacies).
- Put more broadly, that things often correlate does not mean they always do, e.g. though climate denialists disproportionately support nuclear power (showing that they can trust science…when accepting it doesn’t threaten their way of life), “this does not mean that all climate change deniers support nuclear power or that supporting nuclear power makes you any kind of denier.” Like the two lessons above, and the one below, you should adapt this sentence to every statistical study you have ever or will ever rely on.
- The author remarks on how often it seems to him “that supporters of nuclear power” and any other science they have a hard time selling to the public “have trouble letting go of the knowledge-deficit model.” By which he means, “They react to gaps like these by wondering how the unduly frightened masses can be made more rational” and thus “can be made to see things how they see things.” But, um, maybe “white males ought to contemplate why almost all other groups are more sensitive to local risks than they are. Perhaps it’s not as simple as everyone else being wrong.” Privilege often comes with privilege blindness. The Dunning-Kruger effect is not far behind.
Is anything safer than nuclear per unit of energy produced?
https://www.google.com/search?q=deaths+per+terawatt+hour
Note that that depends on the regulatory regime. Crap regulation / unpoliced corruption = Chernobyl and Three Mile Island and Fukushima. Good regs = super safe nuclear. But a lot of people don’t trust the government-corporation in-bed relationship when it comes to writing and enforcing good regulatory codes for the construction, security, and maintenance of anything, much less nuclear power. The Katrina disaster happened because these same people couldn’t even fix a fricken wall, almost literally the simplest technology in the history of humankind. You can maybe understand why they might not believe governments and corporations will be any more diligent with the most complex technology in the history of humankind. That is what people’s fears are based on. Not on their assessment of how safe nuclear could be. It’s not about people not getting the science. It’s about people not trusting the rich and powerful. And this is what pro-nuclear advocates often don’t understand.
“Evo psych is not science”
Whenever I read something like this, it’s almost always from people who only read about evolutionary psychology from science journalists (whose primary purpose is ‘man bites dog’ sensationalism), apoplectic MRAs, or gender studies. All three sources are focused on gender differences, so the only reason they would have for being interested in evo-psych in the first place is what it says about gender differences; giving the false impression that evo-psych is only about gender differences. It’s not.
Even when it is, actual evolutionary psychologists are more measured in their conclusions. Science journalists have no motivation to be tentative in reporting (as a matter of fact, they have an opposing motivation), MRAs… lol, and gender studies has been shown to misrepresent evolutionary psychology.
If, by whatever standards are being used, that evo-psych is considered not-science (ignoring some successful predictions), neither was evolutionary theory itself in the 19th century. Because “19th-century evolutionism made no quantitative predictions. It was not readily subject to falsification. It was largely an explanation of what had already been seen. It lacked an underlying mechanism, as no one then knew about DNA. It even contradicted the 19th-century laws of physics.”
Either way, I’m in a STEM grad program so all of the Humanities looks like weaksauce anyhow (<- tongue in cheek). I normally don't even bother commenting on social justice stuff since it's hopelessly mired in tribalism… but you just had a post about going to the original source instead of relying on the parties who are reporting it. Every single time I’ve bothered to read an original article by evo-psychologists, they are always more tentative than the absolutist rhetoric used by the three groups I mentioned above.
Other than that, this study coheres with other studies I’ve read about the relationship between belief and levels of existential threat felt blablabla… (this one sentence would have also been a pretty boring comment).
If these were astrologers, this would like you saying astrologers were real scientists because they also publish legit astronomy in the same journals sometimes. Amidst papers on astrology.
I’ve read tons of studies. The studies themselves. Not “gender studies” reviewers of them. The studies. They almost always suck methodologically. And I’m not just getting this confirmed from well informed science journalists, but also actual scientists who critique the field for the very reason of their shit peer review standards. See the sentence starting “factually dubious claims about gender differences have been made” here. I have several links there confirming this.
While we work on making society more nearly equal, another thing that can be done to make the proponents of technology X more credible is to have the spokespeople for X be people who live next door to an example of X.
Maybe we could *require* the people who make the decisions about design & maintenance of anything dangerous ( or perceived to be dangerous) to live nearby. Would the Bhopal disaster have occurred if major shareholders of Union Carbide India were living a few km downwind of the plant?
I note that many of the articles only consider nuclear vs. fossil fuels, and the ones that do include rooftop solar use a number for falls off roofs borrowed from the roofing business. The last time I had a roof done, one of the roofers put his foot through my ceiling. If contractors hire people who make rookie mistakes like that, it doesn’t seem fair to blame photo-voltaic arrays.
The linked article is good, but I’m not sure one can easily arrive at the conclusion that white males are less risk averse. Many of the same guys who insist free market capitalism is like a mighty locomotive, able to pull all 7 billion of us out of poverty also scream bloody murder that the tiniest pebble of regulation put in its path will utterly wreck it. That doesn’t seem very risk tolerant to me.
As the article showed, the people in question are reframing risk in terms of protecting privileges they have or want, or lumping risks on others that they themselves never have to face. And then rationalizing all that. So it’s not that they are tolerant of all risks. It’s that they are inured to risks that don’t affect them or that they think won’t affect them.
Odd question for you: any compelling reason why the woman (“girlfriend,” “Girl”) who passed along the Vox piece can’t be identified by name?
No. There just isn’t any reason to include it.
I am averse to naming girlfriends on my blog without their permission. And there has to be a reason to need to name them for there to be any reason to bother asking. There just wasn’t any need to name her here. I know her well enough. She’s quite content with this reference.
This represents a dramatic exaggeration of a kind that I’ve never seen the author make before.
The New Orleans flood protection works are in fact an enormous, sophisticated, interdependent system of floodwalls, pumps, canals, locks, and levees (what you probably meant by “wall” because they are a simple technology, unlike floodwalls which rely on advanced materials). It’s also constrained by a huge number of non-technological factors, for example many floodwalls are sited where levees would be far superior because the much wider right-of-way required for a levee was not available and there wasn’t the will to widen it by eminent domain.
The broader point of the paragraph is correct and doesn’t depend on this throwaway claim.
(disclaimer: I am not a civil engineer, and I only know enough about hydrology to have a glimpse of how much I don’t know)
Granted. I was of course using hyperbole. We can build more advanced walls and things. But still note that the ancient Chinese solved the same problem with simple walls. That we choose to do it with fancier ones doesn’t change the point: we couldn’t even be bothered to build tech the ancient Chinese would have. Much less use the modern tech we have.
IMHO the core of white male privilege is economics, specifically capitalism. Capitalism is all about the right of the investor to move money as they please, invest in enterprises as they wish, and extract profits with those profits having primacy over all other considerations.
As with so many other capitalist enterprises, but with nuclear power being a prime example, the conflict is not what to do, but how to do it. Is it possible to create a fail-safe nuclear reactor? Is it possible to responsibly and safely handle and transport nuclear wastes? Is it possible to store wastes long enough for their radioactivity to decay to near background levels and do it safely over the centuries this may take? The answer to all these questions is affirmative. It can be done. It can be done with existing technologies.
The answer is much less positive if you add the provision that you have to produce power cheaply enough to compete with other sources and you tack on a demand that the enterprise show a profit. The rub is not nuclear versus humanity. The rub is between nuclear, as manifested within a capitalist system that demands everything to be cheap and profits maximized, and the consequences of running a potentially messy and dangerous technology under that capitalist regime.
In every case so far it has been a conflict between safety, training, and fail-safe design and a desire to do things cheaply that has caused the problems. Compromises were made to keep nuclear power cheap and/or to maximize profit and that is what is at the root of all the accidents. Nuclear power can and does work but you can’t easily or safely do it on the cheap. Or with one eye focused on maximizing the bottom line.
As with so many issues, this is a conflict between what it is that humans need to survive (healthy food, clean water, medical care) , the sort of society that we wish to create (with dignity, fairness, security and relative safety), and the demands of capitalism to maximize privatized profits and socialize liabilities.
All well analyzed. But with one drawback. Communist Russia built Chernobyl. The most unsafe nuclear plant in history.
So it’s not just capitalism that gets in the way. The massive indifference to human rights and life of totalitarian Marxist regimes can have the same or worse effect. Of course, that may be because of corruption, given that Marxist regimes tend in fact to be crypto-capitalist (e.g. cutting corners in order to skim off the top). But I think the actual dynamic in that case is more complex than that.
Seems like this is most likely a combination of male privilege and white privilege, not just white privilege. Otherwise you’d see more white women involved.
That’s precisely the research article’s point.
It’s also interesting to note that a key link in the failure chain leading to the Fukushima disaster was also the failure of a wall. In fact, it was a very similar failure to provide an adequately high wall to meet foreseeable but infrequent conditions, leading to flooding of emergency generators required to power the plant’s active cooling systems.
(I’m not sure why this only occurred to me a few hours later.)
I wonder how much of it is being white privilege and how much is just privilege (being rich etc). This could be tested by checking within group data. They could interview white non-Muslims living in Islamic countries. I can tell from the experience you don’t feel privileged there.
In 2012 in Finland 61% of men but only 24% of women supported nuclear power. It’s hard to imagine that white race would that big of a factor in Scandinavia where everyone is white. Finland never had colonies and it was regularly attacked by other white countries.
Have you written about white/heterosexual/Christian/majority pride? It seems to be ok being black/brown/gay and proud of it and not being called racist/phobic etc. but it doesn’t work other way around
Makes sense. Then why do we need to know she’s a “girlfriend,” at all? Why not just the name?
I’m pressing the point because the transparent use of hat-tips and vias is increasingly important in on-line social justice spheres. Not that I’m suggesting this is the case in this instance, but there are examples of quite prominent people failing to note when content has been brought to their attention, which later proves, for them, to be quite fruitful. (I’m specifically thinking of Marcotte and Schwyzer, here, but there are certainly other examples.)
Because it would be rude to just say my girlfriend is just some rando.
Whereas if she wanted to be named, she would be.