C.S.I. Jenkins on love and sex education

In a column in The Globe and Mail, “What’s Love Got to Do with Sex Ed? Maybe Everything” Jenkins writes,

Ontario schools are introducing a new sex ed curriculum this September, one that covers topics such as sexting and consent as opposed to merely the mechanics of sex. Predictably, some parents are vocally outraged.

But among the voices in what’s been called a “coalition of the pure,” some are more interesting than others. Recently The Globe and Mail reported that Michal Szczech, a father of two, is not dismayed by what appears on the new curriculum but by what is missing from it. Szczech is said to be calling for classes that will cover not just sex, but love.

Now that’s not a bad idea. There’s just one huge snag: What do you teach?

Read Jenkins’ column here.

C.S.I. Jenkins is the Canada Research Chair in Philosophy at the University of British Columbia, and is writing a book on the nature of romantic love.

A business argument for diversity (& a cartoon)

Not a new argument, but a useful source:

“fooled by Experience”
Soyer, Emre
Hogarth, Robin M.
Source:
Harvard Business Review. May2015, Vol. 93 Issue 5, p72-77. 6p.
…..
As Peter Drucker wrote, “The first rule in decision making is that one does not make a decision unless there is disagreement.” To devise healthy strategies, executives need to hear many perspectives, including feedback that is critical of their own actions. Executives should surround themselves with people from diverse backgrounds and promote independent thinking in their team. Many executives task certain coworkers, friends, or family members with speaking frankly on important matters.
Ed Catmull, the president of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios, stresses the importance of building a brain trust, a group of advisers who will deflate egos and voice unpopular opinions. He argues in his September 2008 HBR article that disagreements in meetings end up benefiting everyone in the long run, because “it’s far better to learn about problems from colleagues when there’s still time to fix them than from the audience after it’s too late.”

Also from the same issue of the Harvard Business Review:

A company’s reputation is reliant on the conduct of its employees. Posting “funny” videos of yourself online? What were you thinking?

Austin TX staff training session: Men Are From Earth, Women Aren’t

The city of Austin, Texas recently elected a municipal council with a majority of women councilors. The city manager’s office deemed this such a profound change to the operations of government that a special training session was arranged to teach city staff, who are apparently recruited directly from the monastery of Mount Athos, how to work with women-folk.

Surprisingly, an office that thinks this session is a good idea seems not to be an office rich in contacts with workplace gender experts. So one of the expert presenters turned up and cited that locus classicus of empirical evidence and conceptual subtlety, Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. And the other based his warnings — notably, that women ask a lot of questions and don’t like numbers — on his personal experience:

The city commission [Allen] had worked with is all-female, which apparently qualified him for the job. Plus, he has an 11-year-old daughter who plays volleyball. (Allen was later fired from his city manager position for unrelated reasons.)

I’m glad to hear that the firing was for unrelated reasons. Letting their 11 year-old play volleyball would be a terrible reason to fire someone.

After the Internet and social media got their WTF on, the city manager appears to have realized that an apology was called for. That was good. But his apology wasn’t for the right thing. That was bad.

“I have to acknowledge that this particular training should have received proper vetting. I must take responsibility for that not having occurred,” [Austin city manager Marc] Ott states to reporters.

Well, no. The problem wasn’t a failure to vet the content of the presentations; arguably the presenters did more or less what they were supposed to do. The content was ridiculous because the idea for this training session was terrible. (Because there are philosophers on the Internet: of course in a different possible world, an idea for a training session might not be terrible. E.g., if it were already known that the staff environment were one hostile to women. In that very different case, though, a very different kind of intervention than this would have been required — earlier, and not simply because more women had been elected.) A better apology in this case would have focused on the decision to arrange staff training of this sort in the first place: i.e., predicated on lazy generalizations about women, and on the idea that accountability to women representatives is a deviant case, requiring special preparation for staff beyond basic professionalism, courtesy, and respect.