Unsupervised Thinking

On this "very special" episode of Unsupervised Thinking, we partner with our fellow podcasters over at Always Already, a critical theory podcast, to burst out of our respective academic bubbles and tackle issues of science and society. The fodder for our conversation is Brain Storm, a book by Rebecca Jordan-Young, that lays out the evidence that prenatal hormone exposures influence gender differences in behavior later in life. In the book, she claims that the sum total of the studies she covers only offers weak support for the hypothesis, and that scientists need to appropriately incorporate other factors into their models such as socialization and environment. While we use this book as a common starting point, our conversation quickly moves beyond the particulars of these gender science studies. We start by questioning who is the intended audience of this book and what it's trying to say to different groups. This moves us into a discussion on critiques of science made by non-scientists and the role that th