[dillow logic] economic reasons women are crap

Flipchart Fair Tales takes the esteemed Chris Dillow to task for his Times affected article on his blog:

Since he got a regular column with the Times, Chris Dillow’s blog articles have become increasingly outlandish. His recent piece on why women are crap is a case in point.

However, although his arguments, if that’s what you can call them, are silly, they are no worse than some of the rubbish that apparently respectable columnists write about men.

Those all-men-are-hopeless articles have been around for at least the past twenty years. Some of the bullshit has been repeated so often that it has become ’stuff everyone knows’.

Chris answers, using that particular logic he's famous for:

My motivation for writing it was in my question: “am I a victim of selection effects?” and in the fact that a couple of earlier posts had discussed selection effects.

Let’s grant that my arguments are silly. Doesn’t this show that even huge samples - women I’ve met in the last 20 years - can be systematically biased, if they are drawn from non-random sources.

This being so, shouldn’t we be much less confident than we are about drawing inferences from personal experience - even a lot of it? The post was not about women, but about the nature of knowledge - a point everyone seems to have missed.

And yes, some of my posts might seem silly. But this is because I occasionally (often?) err on the side of silliness, to undermine notions of judgment, credibility and expertise.

My brain hurts.