The tide of cognitive pollution rolls on

An interesting example of cognitive pollution, confirmation bias, and ideological interpretation over fact-checking and empiricism. From A miracle of wrong: Hanna Rosin error reborn in Mark Regnerus book by Philip N. Cohen.

I’ve been working on my review of Mark Regnerus’s new book, Cheap Sex, in 10-minute power bursts. Here’s one funny thing I noticed: Hanna Rosin’s most prominent error from The End of Men apparently repeated telephone-style by Regnerus.

In the Atlantic article, which led to her TED Talk and then book (full review), The End of Men, Hanna Rosin’s editor chose two dramatic statements that were wrong to lead with:

The two factual claims were:

Earlier this year, women became the majority of the workforce for the first time in U.S. history.

Most managers are now women too.

But these claims were untrue.

That year, 2010, women were not the majority of the workforce, and most managers were not women. And they still aren’t. What was true was that for 10 months women outnumbered men in what the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports as the “nonfarm payroll,” from June 2009 to March 2010. In every month before and since, men have been the majority. Here’s that trend, by month:

[snip]

It’s not “the workforce,” but it is a good indicator of shocks to the economy — private companies may lay people off immediately, while self-employed people still consider themselves employed even if they’re suddenly losing money. Anyway, in the BLS’s household survey that asks people if they are working, the Current Population Survey, there were about 10 million more people counted as employed, and men’s majority have never been threatened. This is a reasonably called “the workforce.” Note the time trend here is longer, and it’s annual:

The source of the wrong statement about managers is just Rosin combining managerial and professional specialty jobs into “managers,” which she also did in the TED Talk, which is just wrong. Professionals include a lot of women, like nurses and teachers. The managerial occupations have never been majority-female either. Both are important, but only one fit her narrative.

So Rosen built a whole narrative that received a lot of attention on the back of two factually incorrect assumptions.

A classic example of cognitive pollution, an inexhaustible topic.

The half-life of cognitive pollution can be exceptionally long. Cohen is reviewing a book by Mark Regnerus.

Anyway, the point of this is that Mark Regnerus picked up this meme — which Rosin popularized but lots of other media repeated — and stated it as current fact in his 2017 book. So powerful (among those not powerfully applying themselves) is the idea of automatic gender progress in one direction, that this is not the kind of thing they think they will ever have to check again. Once women pass a milestone, it’s passed, period.

Imagine writing a whole book based on incorrect assumptions. And not just incorrect assumptions but objectively demonstrable incorrect assumptions. Cognitive pollution breed cognitive pollution.