No doubt exists that all women are crazy; it’s only a question of degree. – W. C. Fields
R.K. asks,
Are all women crazy? I’ve heard this to be true from both sexes, and though I feel it’s a cop-out I was wondering if you thought there might be some truth in it?
The glib answer is that “women are crazy and men are stupid”. Now obviously, that’s an exaggeration, but there is some very real truth in it. The male brain tends to be better at deductive reasoning, while the female tends to be better at inductive reasoning. In other words, men tend to be much better than women at following a logical process and coming to a conclusion via building one fact upon another; this is why men are generally better at math, engineering and other technical subjects. Women, on the other hand, tend to be much better than men at inference, the process of comparing a thing as a whole to other wholes in her experience and determining which prior situation it most closely resembles. The advantage of the male approach is that it allows wholly new solutions to be formed from bits and pieces; the advantage of the female approach is that it allows the solution of problems for which there is insufficient data by comparing them with previous problems which have already been solved. You might say the male brain is more digital, and the female more analog.
But when a man or woman who has not studied the cognitive differences, or a person who believes in “social construction of gender” and therefore denies that those differences exist, considers the thinking of the opposite sex, he or she is apt to be very confused. Inductive reasoning, because it relies on comparison of wholes, tends toward all-or-nothingness; either a woman “gets” the problem right away or she doesn’t get it at all. So imagine Mr. and Mrs. Exemplar trying to solve the same problem; if it matches something in Mrs. Exemplar’s (personal or learned) experience she might come to the solution immediately, while Mr. Exemplar is still putting all the facts together. Her conclusion? “Boy, he sure is stupid”. Meanwhile Mr. Exemplar sees his lady apparently drawing an answer from thin air, with no thought involved; he therefore assumes she must be crazy. This mismatched perception is bad enough if they arrive at the same solution, but it’s multiplied if they arrive at different ones, all the more so because each will insist that his or her solution and means of arriving at it are the only “right” ones.
The reason the “women are crazy” perception is more universal across both sexes is that inductive thinking is far more prone to “garbage in, garbage out” errors than deductive. To a degree, deductive thought is self-correcting; a person who masters it can recognize when there is something wrong or missing with the facts he has been given, and proceed accordingly. In other words, deductive logic, though slower, is less prone to error in the long run; the process is more powerful than the data, and an erroneous conclusion can later be corrected with additional facts. Inductive logic, on the other hand, is critically reliant on its data, and if those data are corrupt the process is liable to produce the sort of garbage we see from neofeminists all the time. Faulty deductive logic tends to lead to incomplete (“stupid”) conclusions, while faulty inductive logic tends to lead to complete but erroneous (“crazy”) ones; if the initial premises from which induction began are irrational, warped or false, the end result can be totally bat-shit insane. And upon exposure to the results of this kind of GIGO cognition nearly all men, and any woman whose initial premises more closely reflect the real world, come to the same conclusion: the woman who has arrived at these bizarre conclusions is “crazy”, though in truth she is simply a victim of her own flawed axioms.
(Have a question of your own? Please consult this page to see if I’ve answered it in a previous column, and if not just click here to ask me via email.)
