Don't trust them further than their facts will support

From The Future Is Female. And She's Furious. by Cathy Young. The article is both a book review of three recent feminist tracts as well as general critique of the turn towards toxic feminism.

This passage resonated. Emphasis added.

You can debate the extent to which gender inequalities in 21st century liberal democracies stem from present-day sexism, from cultural baggage from the past, or from personal choices and innate sex differences at an individual level. But does the gallery of horrors in the literature of feminist rage really reflect women's lives in today's America?

In 1994, dissident feminist Christina Hoff Sommers published a controversial book, Who Stole Feminism?, that charged feminist activists and authors with using bogus facts and other "myth-information" to portray modern Western women as brutally oppressed. Much of this critique has held up—and, as the new crop of feminist books shows, has remained relevant.

Indeed, one pseudo-fact debunked by Sommers and mostly retracted by its authors, school equity crusaders David Sadker and the late Myra Sadker, makes a comeback in Chemaly's book: the claim that boys in class call out answers eight times as often as girls do, while girls who speak out of turn are usually rebuked. Manne not only recycles that "fictoid" (as Sommers called it) but garbles it.

These are no isolated lapses. A cursory fact check of Chemaly's lengthy endnotes reveals that many of her sources don't say what she claims they do. The claim that "when women speak 30 percent of the time in mixed-gender conversations, listeners think they dominate," for instance, is sourced to a 1990 study that shows only a slight tendency to overestimate the female portion of a male-female dialogue. (Chemaly's claim is apparently derived from a passing mention in the study of a 1979 article by Australian radical feminist scholar Dale Spender.) The purported source for another alleged fact—"domestic violence injures more American women annually than rapes, car accidents and muggings combined"—is a book appendix by journalist Philip Cook that debunks this very myth.

Georgetown University circa 1981. Course in some higher level economics. Professor is a self-avowed Marxist. Much of the course is taught by a PhD candidate TA.

One of the great learnings from that course had nothing to do with the academic content. It had to to do with trust and veracity.

The TA assigned some academic economic article for our reading and required a review of the argument. The article's argument was extreme but plausible. It was well constructed and deeply researched and footnoted.

I prepared my counter-argument, focusing on chinks in the logic and the occasions of too great extrapolation.

In the class where we reviewed our critiques, the TA sprang a surprise on us. Line by line, as the academic in the original article argued his case, the TA went to the supporting footnote and produced the original source. In almost every instance, the academic was implausibly twisting the original piece or outright misrepresenting what had been claimed.

The TA's point was that you can't take anything at face value. It is fine to focus on the logic and reason and find faults there but if the factual input is already wrong, you are kind of wasting your time. It is easier sometimes to demonstrate factual error and misrepresentation than it is to split logical hairs in an argument.

Go to the source and make sure you are not dealing with garbage-in:garbage-out. It is eactly the same thing Young is pointing out.

A cursory fact check of Chemaly's lengthy endnotes reveals that many of her sources don't say what she claims they do.

Many people are fine making the form of an argument rather than making an argument. That is especially true when the facts don't support their position. Focus on the substance, focus on the truth. And don't, simply because they have an advanced degree or an academic title, trust them further than their facts will support.