Hubbard and Reality

To the Editors of The Crimson:

Professor Hubbard talks a lot about reality. If you want to go hide in the closet, or pop a peyote button, that's fine, but that route's a dead end.

There is another route. You sit around a table with people and toss out ideas. Everyone tries to "shoot down" the ideas by either pointing out logical contradictions in them or by giving examples from experience where those ideas proved wrong. The ideas not shot down remain as possibilities, but no one can be sure that these ideas will remain unrefuted forever, and so we have ideas that might be real.

In short, if you want to come out in the open and lay your cards on the table, no one knows what's real, we only know what isn't, and what might be.

Essential to this process is that as many people with as many different experiences be brought in to shoot down ideas. This means not only blacks and whites, men and women, but also physicists, biologists, and poets Everyone. If a bunch of physicists went off by themselves and excluded chemists, they might waste a lot of time on a whole bunch of ideas that the chemists could shoot down at the toss of a hat. That's why fresh insights are often gained in "interdisciplinary research."

Hubbard wants a bunch of women to go off to a closet to construct a reality. If we assume Hubbard's sexist bias that they would construct a different reality than a mixed group, then they would necessarily also come up with a lot of ideas that a mixed group could have shot down in a jiffy! What a way to blow time and energy! And what's preventing a woman from proposing ideas in a mixed group anyway?

It is easy to see Hubbard's mistake about this matter, what with her overriding fear of male dominance, but her statement that advanced courses in biology should likewise be limited to biologists is nonsense! Thank about the contributions of physicists and chemists to biology The sad part is that too often non-scientists are shunned from such courses. With their fresh perspectives and different experiences, they could add a whole lot.

Hubbard wants to exclude men from courses now, to correct the past situation where women were excluded. This is nonsense. You don't heal someone by exchanging one disease for another.

John Jacobs '77