I just read the full article in the link you posted, and I don’t see how the conclusion is flawed. Skinner himself says:

“what is threatened of course is the autonomy of the poet…but is there anything wrong with a supportive myth?… To accept a wrong explanation because it flatters us is to risk missing the right one.”

That is to me, pretty much equivalent to my view, but more polite.

The tone of the article is much nicer/politer than I am being, but I don’t think I am oversimplifying or caricaturing what Skinner said. His view fundamentally does threaten egoistic delusions of “creativity” on the part of those who are too attached to a particular ideal of being “human.” He seems to think he can convince his opponents with reason that they shouldn’t be offended by this perspective, and the only difference in my summary position is that I don’t think you can avoid offending those opponents because the offense felt is real, even if it is based on a deluded sense of human nature and personal identity.

What seems to offend YOU though is that I’ve accepted Skinner’s core position (I like anything that punctures individual vanities about “creativity”) but not his idea that it is objectively non-offensive. Originality is too attractive a trait for people to not feel attached to, and I absolutely understand why his critics responded the way they did.

But you should know VC, after more than a dozen years of intermittent sparring between us, that I am, and will always remain, a guy who draws quick ‘n dirty sound-bite conclusions out of quick overviews of stuff. And that based on my quick surveying, I WILL form my own opinion, often at variance with the conclusions drawn by the author. Mothers’ opinions of their babies are not always shared by others.

Mile wide, inch deep you once called me, and back then I took it as a badge of honor and ran with it And I still find my thinking style far more useful than deep, scholastic fussing over nuances in unquestioning acolyte mode, with far too much respect for “original sources.” Rather ironic that you are taking me to task here for not respecting the “original” of an article that reconstructs the very notion of originality in ways that suggest that we should NOT respect it too much.

I am happy that you are still trying to “reform” me, but you’ll have to give up at some point. I am, and will always remain, unrepentantly shallow from perspectives such as yours.

Venkat

http://o4rl.com/WorkSamples/VB_Seminar_Web_Page_materials/VB%20Seminar%20Readings/Skinner%20On%20having%20a%20poem.pdf

So, you concluded that “B. F. Skinner reduced this apparently solemn human urge to a farce”, without bothering to read what he said in his article?

Some recent news on the subject of early babyhood minds: NY Times piece and Slate piece both based on a recent book by Alison Gopnik, which is on my list.

Whether my conjectured greater power is used with greater responsibility is of course, a different question. When that higher-bandwidth connection is replaced by a lower-bandwidth father connection (plus, say assorted female helper relatives and babysitters), the gap in interaction is presumably filled by more random engagement. The baby’s mind would see the world as a more chaotic/less deterministic place. Whether that is a good thing or not is debatable. Kinda like deep end/shallow end approaches to learning swimming.

But enough on this tangent The main point was on the metaphors, which I believe to be pretty rich and powerful, and you believe to be “trivial.” There’s no good way to resolve that difference, since I have found that people either “get” the idea that metaphor is central to cognition, not peripheral, or they are completely skeptical about it.

I’m not denying that women probably have a larger role in child rearing than men in aggregate but, on an individual level, I think there are many cases in which the father has more “impact” than the mother.

Regarding the bold claim (yes it IS bold), my sense of early childhood development, as a non-expert, is that the mother is the single biggest development force, for good or bad, when the brain is at its most plastic and fastest-developing. Freud may have been wrong (well, he probably WAS wildly wrong) about the specifics, but I think he was overall correct about the big influence mothers have, especially at pre-linguistic and pre-crawl phases, when the infant cannot seek out sensory stimuli on its own. Even the greatest male dad or teacher simply does not have this level of access. Not that I personally mind, since I am not particularly fond of babies after about 1 minute of peek-a-boo .

Thanks for the ref. I took a glance, and it seems to parallel, though not quite mirror, my thinking. I definitely don’t subscribe to the unreconstructed, post-feminist “women are wonderful” theory. To some extent, that vein of thought, especially as pushed by people like Maureen Dowd, is self-serving silliness and over-compensation.

If I had to go with a catchphrase, I’d say: “women suffer a slightly different variety of existential angst than men.” Happy men and women are all alike (and equally dull). Mars and Venus are miserable each in their own way. Apologies to Tolstoi.

I may have more follow-up thoughts after I read the essay in full.

Venkat

Pregnancy is a source of many metaphors: Sure, but mostly in a trivial way. Pregnancy is such a general event it’s easy to find similarities to other events.

“On the other hand, on the scale of all human history, even the most influential 1000-page book can be more than a generative drop, and the insemination metaphor seems apt.” – is there a negation missing in this sentence?

The name Y Combinator comes from Lambda Calculus: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_point_combinator#Y_combinator . Any resemblance to the Y chromosome is purely co-incidental.

“in the development of others, there is no way men can matter as much as women can.” That’s a bold claim, can you expand on it?

I recommend you read “Is there anything good about men”: http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm . It seems to go down the path you seem to want to take.

Cheers
Hang

Other than abstaining from drinking/smoking/raw fish, the mother doesn’t do much – her body takes over the creation. She’s not making decisions on how to add the lungs and kidneys and toenails. It’s all driven by another force. The creation process is on auto-pilot, and the woman is the vehicle. When you think about the entire process, it is overwhelming. That’s why you have to whittle it down to metaphors and analogies.