Physicists love spontaneous symmetry breaking. It’s a great way to reconcile the messiness of reality with our belief in simple and beautiful underlying mechanisms. We posit that the true fundamental dynamics of the world has some symmetry — X can be exchanged with Y, and all relevant processes are unchanged — but the actual state of the world does not respect that symmetry, which leaves it hidden (or “nonlinearly realized,” if you want to sound all sciencey). Deep down, a (left-handed) electron is completely interchangeable with an electron neutrino; but in the world as we find it, this symmetry is broken, and we end up with an electron that is charged and massive, a neutrino that is neutral and nearly massless. The Higgs boson that the Large Hadron Collider is looking for would be the telltale sign of the mechanism behind this symmetry breaking.
For reasons which escape me, this concept has not been borrowed (as far as I can tell) by social scientists and pundits more generally.* Which is too bad, as it explains a great deal. For example, appealing to the concept of spontaneous symmetry breaking would have been really helpful to Whoopi Goldberg on The View recently, as she patiently tried to explain to a distraught Elisabeth Hasselbeck why it’s just not the same when black people use the word “nigger” as when white people do. (From Sociological Images, via The Edge of the American West.)
Which is not to say that it’s always okay, or that there is no thoughtful critique of the re-appropriation of derogatory language by targeted groups, etc. Just that “If it’s wrong when white people say it, it should be wrong when black people say it too! It’s just not fair!” is far too simple-minded to carry any weight.
Let’s imagine that, in our view of a happy future utopia, all races find themselves in situations of perfect equality of opportunity and dignity. Everyone enters society with equal status, and people are judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. (The “symmetric vacuum.”) In such a world, arguments like “If you can do it, why shouldn’t I be able to?” would be perfectly legitimate. But even if we want that to be the world — even if we believe that the grand unified theory of social ethics involves a symmetry of rights and obligations under the interchange of various racial categories — it’s not the world in which we live. In the real world, different races don’t go through life with the same masses and charges (if you will). There really are such things as discrimination, legacies of poverty and exclusion, and so on. We can argue about the best way to deal with those features of reality, but pretending that they don’t exist isn’t a very useful strategy.
As Whoopi explains, many blacks have chosen to re-appropriate the n-word as part of a conscious strategy of fighting back against a power dynamic that uses language to keep them at the bottom. Again, one can argue about the effectiveness of that strategy, and the circumstances under which it is appropriate, and whether Jesse Jackson should really have used that term in referring to Barack Obama. But it doesn’t follow that “if it’s fair for you, it should be fair for me.” Here is a guy who sadly doesn’t get it; a white high-school teacher who is genuinely puzzled about why he got in trouble for calling one of his black students “nigga.”
I was contemplating writing this post for a long time, with the relevant symmetry being men/women and the social milieu being the scientific community. Too many physicists reason along the following lines: “Men and women should be treated equally. Therefore, any time we privilege one over the other, as in making a special effort to encourage women in science, we are making a mistake.” That would be a reasonable argument, if the symmetry weren’t dramatically broken by the state in which we find ourselves. Which happily is not a stable vacuum! (Note that the underlying assumption is not that different genders or races are necessarily equivalent when it comes to innate abilities; that is largely beside the point, and obsession about those questions gets to be a little creepy. But they should certainly have equal opportunities — and right now, they don’t.) Treating one group differently than the other isn’t what we ultimately want to be doing — it’s not part of the happy utopia — but it might be the best response to the current state of unequal treatment overall.
But Whoopi’s little teaching moment was too good to pass up. If the discussion of race and gender in the rest of the MSM rose to that level of sophistication, we’d all be better off.
———-
*I’ve been searching for an excuse to mention Kieran Healy’s Standard Model of Sociophysics. I’m not sure if this is it, but I’ll take it.
“Spontaneous symmetry breaking refers implicitly to perturbation series. The true vacuum is still there, its just hidden b/c someone erroneously decided to pick the wrong saddle point to perturb around.”
The “true” vacuum is the symmetry-breaking vacuum. It has nothing to do with perturbation theory. The other vacuum is still “there”? Where? In theory space? The real world has a very specific vacuum, and its the symmetry-breaking one.
“theory spcae” should have been “field space”.
I had a child while I was in physics graduate school. My son was 2 when I got my Ph.D., and I dropped out of science for 8 years to raise him. (I returned to research this year, and my first new paper is on the arXiv).
I was somehow able to do this even though I am male. Many physicists were shocked when I made the decision to become an at-home-dad. Apparently, I revealed the underlying mother-father child raising symmetry which they had completely failed to see in our symmetry-broken society. I don’t think any of them decided to make this new phenomena a basis for experimental investigation in their own relationships, but I’d love to hear stories of others who did. (Sean my remember this and have a different perspective, since I was just down the hall from him at the University of Chicago.)
Interesting point of view, and I largely agree. However, one problem with allowing different things to different groups is that it may be generally for the greater good, but have unpleasant consequences for individuals. For example, affirmative action in higher education is generally a good tool to help underpriviledged groups, but it is very unfair to the (white male) student who would otherwise have made it into Harvard/Yale/etc. The problem is that social groups are not homogeneous, and there are plenty of white males that are pretty far from priviliged.
As for the discussion about taxes: The middle classes in the US pay just as much tax as the middle classes in European countries, so that’s not good argument. It’s about the way the tax money is spent. Unfortunately, the prevailing culture in the US seems to be that a policy is good if it hurts others more, rather than if it hurts me less.
Yea so for instance roughly, you might have something like a group G that breaks down to a subgroup H. The real theory has G as a symmetry, but you only see H b/c you picked the wrong vacuum to do physics in. If you could analyze the full nonperturbative behaviour of the theory, you’d recover G.
Good?
In the interest of sexual equality, we must a) install urinals in all ladies restrooms, or, b) eliminate sexually separated restrooms. /snark
The point? Absolute equality is a crock. Real-world differences matter.
Haelfix,
I think we disagree on the meaning of the word “wrong”. If a piece of iron develops a magnetization, the magnetization has to point somewhere and your piece of iron is no longer invariant under rotations. I would say the symmetric vacuum is the wrong vacuum. If you analyze the full theory, you still only see H.
On the other hand, you always “see” something of the larger symmetry group through the Goldstone modes, but that’s just telling you that the energy (or action or whatever you folks like to use) is invariant the larger group G. Or in other words, the magnetization could have pointed in any particular direction. But that’s not really the same thing since it still had to pick one.
Maybe I misunderstand what you mean by “recover” as well?
Sean,
Right on.
Enforcing different rights for different birth groups will create vested interests (a political coalition between the enforcers and the groups in question). These vested interests in turn will act to distort and undermine rights for other birth groups. In the end this will institutionalize castes, which we have spent a few thousand years more or less successfully getting out of.
I don’t think you can have very good science in a caste society, either. The talent pool shrinks, and there are certain conclusions you can’t draw for political questions, so the fields of study shrink as well.
Evidence: striking historical correlations between times of increase in the degree of individual (not birth group) rights in society, and scientific creativity.
Regards,
Mike
Freeman Dyson introduced me to the idea of social symmetry breaking when he lectured in Toronto about his book “Infinite in all Directions.” That must have been around 1986. If I recall correctly he alluded to symmetry breaking going all the way from the cosmos to nations to species and individuals.
Should we apply this metaphor to humanity then we might presume an initial symmetry for our species, when our ancestors were a tight, small group of tribes in Africa: “all men” then could have been equal — more equal than we are now. Symmetry began to break when our ancestors exploded out of Africa into the “vacuum” of the larger Globe.
If my layman’s understanding is correct then all-human symmetry (or supersymmetry) could be restored if we entered a state of high energy and high density.
So all men would become equal again if we attained a condition of stifling overpopulation, intolerable social pressures, and high energy warfare of everyone against everyone.
That doesn’t sound so nice. I’d prefer the relatively low energy, low density scuffles and tempests we have to endure in our present stratified, partitioned, class-divided condition.
Maybe it’s stretching an analogy too far.
To bittergradstudent,
I would have to say that your assessment of how black people use the n-word is incorrect. I say this as someone grew up in and continues to live in a mostly-black neighborhood and who is a fan of hip hop. Most usage of the n-word by black people that I have ever heard is in a positive or at least neutral tone. And kids from a fairly young age understand the balance of power that is involved in “taking back” this slur, which is why they start using it at about the time that they start identifying with race as part of their identity.
I will not say that black people never use this word in a derogatory manner, because that is certainly true, but it is not the usual way in which it is used.
And to look more at the symmetry breaking process involved in this word, I think there were two stages. The symmetry was first broken whenever the word became a slur and not just a corruption of the word “negro.” The symmetry broke in such a way that it was a word of power for white people because it would be much more damaging when they used it. Later, black people seized the power in the word by making it positive. Now, instead of a word of power for white people, it simply signifies ignorance.
You wrote:
I was contemplating writing this post for a long time, with the relevant symmetry being men/women and the social milieu being the scientific community. Too many physicists reason along the following lines: “Men and women should be treated equally. Therefore, any time we privilege one over the other, as in making a special effort to encourage women in science, we are making a mistake.” That would be a reasonable argument, if the symmetry weren’t dramatically broken by the state in which we find ourselves. Which happily is not a stable vacuum! (Note that the underlying assumption is not that different genders or races are necessarily equivalent when it comes to innate abilities; that is largely beside the point, and obsession about those questions gets to be a little creepy. But they should certainly have equal opportunities — and right now, they don’t.) Treating one group differently than the other isn’t what we ultimately want to be doing — it’s not part of the happy utopia — but it might be the best response to the current state of unequal treatment overall.
Far be it for a psychologist to question a physicist but I think I will try.
Your logic is incorrect because you did not include the outcome measure!
And the only outcome measure that will satisfy someone demanding equality of opportunity IS equality of equality of results. Once you allow unconscious motivation then whatever say a tenure committee decides, unconscious bias may be invoked to show that it was not the weakness of the candidate but the weaknesses of the committee.
This was the hit on the original flavor of psychoanalysis (Which did have its Borg aspects). It is the origin of the Python “Dead Parrot” sketch. (Jay Haley has a wonderful take on the power tactics of analysts)
You cannot prove that a subjective assessment of a candidate is unbiased. Nor with a little more thought on the matter, prove that some “objective” measure is unbiased. Ditto all those “studies” which show that women need women as “role models” to go into science etc.
Finally let us say that Group X is 10% poorer in higher maths. But THEY have decided that there must be equality in hiring members of Group X. So in your Maths department of 10 members one X deserved to be tenured but four others got tenure to satisfy THEM. These four get the perks and benefits of tenured faculty.
But say that they teach for thirty years. How many students are you punishing then by forcing them to be taught by these four professors of lesser ability.
What does it do to the quality of maths in our society for these many years.
You choose-its not my field.
Might the situation be better explained in terms of complexity theory? In the relationship of bottom up process forming and shedding top down order, as process expands the context, it keeps creating definition, expanding until it is no longer viable and then shedding it, yet tending to take features of that previous form in account when developing the next form. Think in terms of a crab growing and shedding a shell every year, as it grows larger. In that sense, the n word being used by whites would be like trying to put the crab back into last years shell, while for black people, it is expanding on old forms in order to remove the constrictions they otherwise enable.
John M., wonderful point
#29 Pieter Kok, re:
.
I strongly recommend checking out the book, “The Shape of the River”, from a local university library, and studying the charts within. Beautiful data, which don’t actually support the two (common) assumptions Pieter makes here.
This is one of your best posts ever. I love it when physics can be applied so beautifully to other parts of life.
Let’s see: widespread religious fundamentalism from the lowest to the highest echelons of society; more than half the population rejects evolution in favour of a ghastly fairytale; no guaranteed health care, especially for the poor; the highest prison population per capita in the world; the lowest infant mortality rate, the highest teen pregnancy rate, the highest obesity rate, and one of the lowest life expectancies in the Western world; a government that has been emasculated in all areas except the military and serves only corporations (hello fascism!); a backwards culture that celebrates militarism, psychopathy and triumphalism; the only country in the world apart from that paragon of human rights, Somalia, that has not ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child; perhaps the only country in the world where the primitive notion of natural rights trumps the civilised notion of human rights; the only nation on Earth where the cult of right-libertarianism has gained a significant foothold; vast suburban wastelands and dying urban areas; a transportation system that is completely unfit to handle the challenges of peak oil; and let’s not mention Iraq, government-supported torture, war crimes and other embarrassing features.
So yeah, Europe should copy the US.
Tyler,
Thanks!
We all try pushing our limits. Frequently they push back. That’s life.
in re to affirmative action #29:
It’s interesting to note society’s response to college admissions
when males became the minority.
There was no discussion of affirmative action, the pros and cons
of “remedying” the situation, the potential negative effects on
the beneficiaries or society at large. When colleges found that
applying equal standards for admission to both male and female
applicants resulted in more women than men on campus, they
simply changed the the requirements for men (in other words
they lowered the standards.) One admissions officer even had
the balls to suggest that they were doing it for the benefit of
the women on campus as well. What woman would be happy
without enough guys around?
This happened relatively quietly, recently, and is still going on.
How can we possibly consider hiring or admitting to graduate
school any men from these universities, knowing that they probably
were admitted only because they were guys? What have we done
to their delicate psyches? And where is the outrage over the
women whose rightful spots on the acceptance list were given
to less deserving men?
Or maybe we should flip the arguement and insist on more women
in science to make the guys happy.
Time 2008
NYTimes OpEd
Good point, Macho. Since women are clearly much smarter than men, we should bring in a law to enforce a 60:40 female-male ratio in postgraduate science. Why should we settle for 50:50? Isn’t affirmative action for males a little unfair when the natural numbers are for more females?
A reply to Comment # 12:
I’m not a Popperian, but I think I can point you in the right direction. Back in 1982, Jon M. McDowell published a paper which showed that female professors were (1) more likely to have children and, (2) on average, had more children if they were in fields characterized by a low obsolescence rate of academic knowledge (history, language) than if they in fields with a high obsolescence rate of knowledge (physics, chemistry). That is to say, female professors in fields where a career interruption would tend to be costly tended to have fewer children than female professors in fields where a career interruption would be relatively low-cost. No such pattern exists for male professors.
This pattern suggests that couples generally make child-bearing decisions within a more-or-less rational framework, and that couples generally behave as if females have a comparative advantage in child care & child-rearing. Moreover, it supports the economic theory of the family as developed by Becker & Minter, and implies a work-family trade-off that is very strong for women & rather weak for men.
As an undergraduate, I did some empirical research for a class in – surprise, surprise – empirical research, and found that the relative durability of knowledge within a given field was a strong predictor of the proportion of doctorates given to females in that field. This finding strongly implies that women gravitate away from fields that raise the lost-income cost of child-bearing & child-rearing.
Is that sufficiently empirical for you?
Reply to Comment #20:
Why? Do we really want to subsidize the practice of separating infants & children from their mothers? Because once the mothers of very young children go back to work, most of the time, their children get warehoused in commercial day-care centers.
What is the goal? Is the goal to find the best students, workers, & professors at the lowest opportunity cost? Or is the goal some arbitrary standard of numerical parity?
Not sure I can agree with that claim. I don’t think I would like to live in Sweden or Norway, even if I mastered North Germanic languages & lived around the block from the best pizzeria in Scandinavia.
Why not? The real rate of unemployment is estimated at well over 15% in those countries, official statistics notwithstanding. Birth rates are unsustainably low. Illegitimacy ratios are destructively high. Marriage & family are in tragic decline. Taxes are higher. Respect for the traditions & institutions that I value is in tragically short supply.
No, I think I’ll stay here. But you’re welcome to catch a boat any time the fancy hits you.
Relpy to comment #29:
In many states, and in elite schools like Yale & Harvard, whites more or less break even because of affirmative action. While more black students are admitted, fewer Asian students are admitted, and the number of whites is about the same.
However, the claim that “affirmative action in higher education is generally a good tool to help underprivileged groups” is not supported by the evidence. Students admitted under affirmative action tend to have much lower graduation rates than other students, even if they would have had very good prospects at less demanding schools. And those affirmative action students that do get degrees tend to wind up in less demanding fields, including some fields that are highly politicized.
The evidence for affirmative action programs generally is not supportive of the claim that such programs benefit target groups. For example, American blacks, as a group, made faster economic progress prior to the advent of affirmative action policies than in the decades that followed the spread of racial preferences.
Uhhh, paid maternity leave would be the exact opposite of separating infants and children.
Only in the short run.
Sorry for the thread hijack; affirmative action was just my (possibly flawed) example to illustrate that the argument for different rules for different groups seems to assume homogeneous groups.