Thanks for the replies, and sorry again for personalizing my criticism. (Which would be wrong even if weren’t so off-base factually.)

I don’t think the reason this kind of dynamic develops has anything to do with defects in your English, which is fine. I think it’s more a tendency shared by most of us (where “us” is participants in blog threads, or educated English speakers circa 2009, or human beings in general, or maybe especially the male subsets of the above) to treat discussion as a kind of combat and look for opportunities to win points rather than for mutual understanding. In face to face conversation this tendency is usually restrained by all the nonverbal cues that allow you to identify or sympathize with your interlocutor, and misapprehensions can be corrected quickly before they snowball. But online it’s much easier to reduce someone to whatever abstract position you want to argue against—especially if, as here (for totally understandable reasons!) there’s no response from the other side.

So I wouldn’t take it at all personally. With perhaps one caveat—some of these dynamics get restrained by the various cues—jokes, familair references, etc.—that establish in online settings that the speaker is “one of us”. If you seem to get attacked more than other CT bloggers, I would guess it’s because you don’t really do the cool-TV-show/old-SF-writer/fun-music-video/odd-personal-experience posts thatmany of the otehr regualrs do, which help establish the sense of CT as a community. Which isn’t to say you should do such posts, just a guess about why this difference might exist.

I think what you said about imaginatively occupying the other position is very interesting. I hope you will write a post on that! This can be enormously helpful in understanding arguments. It might be indispensable for issues like this. It’s something people have difficulty with (to the great detriment of the quality of public and private discourse on many questions) but they may be even less able to do it on the internet. It might have something to do with the strange fact that we are replying directly to someone we think of as ‘someone’ but we are unable to pick up on any non-verbal cues and so we project imaginary traits on them?

Another feature of these discussions is that I think we group views into camps. If anyone tries to cut through the gordian knot or enter in with new assumptions, they are often relegated to certain argumentative spaces the reader already assumes exist. Another way of putting this is that people don’t read carefully—especially not on the internet.

This happens even with academic papers, says the woman with more than one paper rejected because the reader didn’t like some entirely different view they thought my view resembled. To avoid this you sometimes have to say: My view is NOT VIEW A, B AND C even though a careful reader would already get your view..

The former is just speculation because in feminist threads (not academic ones) I’ve raised questions/issues and those replying to me angrily used masculine pronouns, sort of assuming only a man would raise such issues. (I wasn’t making anti-feminist arguments and I don’t know why that happened.)

But note that these are rarely the only options on offer, and we’d all do well to remember that.

This applies to Ingrid’s comments, where she took it to mean attacking somebody.

Nice try at talking down but just because the ‘obnoxious’ in my ‘obnoxious concepts’ & your ‘obnoxious persons’ is the same word, it is not fair game to transfer it thus & make out as if I cared whether you were obnoxious are not. Or do you think that ‘myth’ was a reference to things that might possible be factually ‘right’?

No, I don’t think there is a linear relationship, but if you insist on taking your examples close to ZERO time to enforce I point you apparently want to make about LOADS of it -I gladly admit that the time/effect curve passes through the (0,0) point and slopes up & does so to reach saturation and an amount of time that is much less than the amount of time socially put as a standard to reach any specific effect.

It is well known in sports that marathon-runners should be wary about over-training & so should we about over-working ;-)

I’m in the “parenting is work, and you can’t be as good at two jobs as at one” category. is one of those obnoxious concepts related to the myth of hard-work meritocracy.

Lucky for me then that I have no problems with being obnoxious per se. I’d far rather be right and obnoxious or wrong and obnoxious than never venture an opinion for fear of saying something that someone somewhere might possibly regard as obnoxious. I find the mere concept of worms growing up in human flesh absolutely creepy, and yet it does happen and I understand the worms can cause serious health problems, so I don’t see obnoxiousness per se as a reason to stop discussing things, although sometimes it’s a reason to delay discussion until after dinner.

I’m not sure about what you mean when you say that there is no relationship between the amount of time you put on spending time with kids and its effect on anyone. Surely, if my parents had not spent time with me as a kid, I would know rather less about them? I do recall quite a few enjoyable times in their company as a child. I think I don’t understand what you are trying to say. Or to take the role of academic research – are you trying to say that there is no relationship between time spent saying reading journal articles in your area and how much you learn?

Not to worry – it was typical blog-reaction hyperbole. But as to your facts: if you want to win the marathon you have at least to run for more than 2 hours, that much is clear. Nevertheless, there will be those that need to practice a lot and those that practice not so much. The difference between them is talent. What I’m getting at roundaboutly is – your fact (certainly as far as intellectual achievements are concerned) is not a truism, and a major problem nowadays is that it is treated as one. The result is lots of talent is bein wasted because we expect people to work with their minds as our parents used to work with their shovels. Human progress is to be able to work less, not more (and this applies to parenting as well – but please note the ‘to be able’ in the sentence).

Ingrid,

For the record: as far as I, as a fellow lowlander, have a part in this misunderstanding you feel in the reactions: I think I got the gist of what you were driving at – although I have to admit I did not understand the details, but this can be the consequence of my limitations in English as well – but I do think that singling out the ‘less kids’ idiocy out of the above is doing less justice to your thread than any injustice done to you in it ;-)

No indeed. They stood and fell on their own logical consistency, or lack thereof.

Thus, for this argument, an old philosophical tool: the reductio ad absurdum.

So here it goes. Yes, of course you should hire the more productive employee. Businesses (even academies) are seeking to maximize productivity per employee. All other businesses should do the same. This is a foundation of capitalism.

In fact, when it comes to snow days, kids’ sick days, class breakfasts, soccer practices, annoying quasi-holidays when schools are closed but “real” businesses aren’t, or summer holidays, the non-parent will always have the parent beat.

Thus, on a macro scale, it would evolve into a system where Workers work and Breeders breed and raise children—but don’t work themselves, because they’re not productive enough.

However, the only way to sustain such a reasonable system would be for the Workers to financially support the Breeders, since it’s not in the Workers’ best self-interest to stifle the supply of future Workers (for economic and corporate growth is the foundation of modern capitalism). Also, the only way for future Workers (i.e., children) to acquire the proper socialization to join the existing Workers is if Workers are not actively hostile to children and Breeders by refusing to provide for their material, social, and intellectual needs.

And if Workers are reasonable and proactive, they’ll have a vested interest in such a system, because when they retire, younger Workers who were once children will cook for and take care of older Workers in retirement homes, and they wouldn’t want these younger people to be incompetent, or worse, to hate them.

But the only way to support such a system is if the Workers will have to work even harder to sustain themselves, children, and Breeders.

But it will come to pass that some workers resent this—“Why should I work to support these people who are on a kind of welfare?”—just the same way many people resent paying property taxes to fund schools, even though they benefited from these same schools when they were children.

And it may also come to pass that just because a Worker is childless, it doesn’t mean they’re not an incompetent, or a bad Worker. In fact, doing-nothing-but-work May make Workers bitter and hostile, since the breeders are off going to the park and the beach and on bike rides, while they’re working 18-hour days. And what if, while working these 18-hour days, these Workers become less productive?

In that case, Workers who are incompetent, bitter, burnt out or merely less productive end up dropping out of the working pool, because, let’s face it, every time they look out the office window and see those happy kids, they’re getting evidence that there’s more to life than just work. Or, just looking outside the office window is a sign of non-productivity.

(And just to simplify, let’s just ignore the possible squeamishness that children might have about entering the Working system, or the hypothetical situation where Breeders or children stumble across the writings of someone like Karl Marx.)

And the more Workers that drop out, the harder the other Workers have to struggle, because now they have to support a whole other class of dependents: Former Workers. And pretty soon they can’t, and the whole system collapses.

QED

A similar area where I did push back though, is helping your sick child. At a previous job I needed to take off a day and a half a medium-crucial time to help a friend going through a major surgery. My boss let a coworker take off time for children’s doctor visits all the time. I initially got a lot of crap for it, but eventually I said something along the lines of “this person is as important to me as the children X takes time for.”

The needs of parents vis-a-vis children are very important, and as a society we should support them in the very difficult child-raising endeavor. But don’t take for granted that “my kid needs it” is always a good reason to have a childless person do something for you.

(And Ingrid it doesn’t strike me that you are a person who would take that for granted—it is a general comment)

Anyway, it doesn’t matter a lot because you’ve made me extremely unhappy by construeing my comments as disapproving of your lifestyle.

I’m sorry if that’s the impression I’ve given, because it’s not true. I do not think you in any way disparaged my lifestyle; I think you want to support it. What I disagree with you on is a question of fact, not moral judgment: I think that more time and effort leads to genuinely more production in most cases, and so there is a trade-off between optimal parenting and optimal workplace productivity.

I think that all things considered academia is a good profession for parents – but, as a 50 year old professor, and mother of three children, once told me: the advantage is the flexibility; the disadvantage is the number of hours you have to work to just stay up to date with your field and do some reserach (she was NOT talking about workign at a top university or publishing top research). This resonates with my experience in the social siences and humanities in the Netherlands.

Some of you are implicitely taking a US context as given; there are countries where there are no top universities, and no third tier universities. There are even countries where all universities are more or less similarly situated, in terms of what it means to work there and what is expected in terms of teaching load and research time. The Netherlands is one case. If I understand the situation in the US correctly, the inequaliteis between the universities, and between the kind of employment contracts that people get differ dramatically; here there are of course differences, but my informed guess is that they are minimal if one where to compare it with the US situation.

Intersting that two claims where mentioned in the comments but not further discussed:
(1) collectively we need fewer rather than more children;
(2) part of the problems with the academic labour market is that there are too many PhDs, who all want to have academic jobs.

The first is, in my view, one of the biggest taboos of our age (I don’t think we are able to reasonably and calmly discuss this claim); the second must be a context-dependent claim, but I subscribe to it for the Dutch labour market. It’s a different story, but the funding is being diverted from lecturer and reader-positions to PhD positions, and I think this is a bad development.

Finally, let me apologise for taking so long to get back to the comments section – I was working long days on hiring committees this week…. and I had two children I also wanted/needed to spend some time with…

What I find more worrisome is that people read views in my post that I don’t have. The truth is, I have no ‘all things considered’ views on how much we should do an affiarmative-action like action towards people who have large caring responsibilities, such as parents. I can see the value of people at both sides. I have been working (on and off, I should confess) on this question of conflicts of interests between parenst and non-parents for a few years now, and what strikes me is (1) how sensitive these issues are, and (2) how difficult we find it to put ourselves in the shoes of ‘the other side’.

(Why I find this worrisome is that this is not the first time that I get quite attacked on CT for posting something in which people read things that I had not the intention of writing, hence views that I do not endorse; so either my English really isn’t good enough, or else I am not able to write clearly enough (both should be enough reason to fire me, I fear), or else I should let a post rest for a day before I hit the ‘publish’ button, or else we have too many readers who dislike me/my posts and hence are predisposed to read the most uncharitable interpretation of what I write. Whatever. This is not the first time I think I am having a problem here with coming across like I’d like to be interpreted. Material for another post, I fear…)