## Highlights I worked hard to be successful, but that “success” was one that was defined by society. It was about grades, prestigious universities, tenure. I tried to be successful according to existing structures and a blueprint handed down to me by previous generations of academics. I was, in a sense, successful: I looked successful. I was, in another sense, not successful: I didn’t feel successful. I realized that the values marking my apparent “success” as defined by others were not really my values. — location: 120 ^ref-45368 --- With some people’s definition of feminism being highly restrictive and some other people’s encompassing almost everything, it is a divisive concept even before it has even really gotten past the definitions. — location: 168 ^ref-32826 --- Some people stereotype feminists as angry, man-hating, anti-family women, and this is an off-putting image for potential feminists of any gender. This highlights another source of the divisiveness of feminism: it inherently seems to separate women from men even as it is trying to overcome that separation. — location: 171 ^ref-55775 --- It is important to remember that averages—whether mean, mode, or median—do not apply to individuals. “The average person” is not a real person. Saying that “the average person” does something-or-other certainly doesn’t mean that most people exhibit that behavior, and it does not tell us anything concrete about an individual in front of us. This includes the amount of sleep people need (some people really don’t need much), the amount of calories needed to maintain a healthy weight (some people need to eat a lot less than the official daily recommended amounts), whether doing exercise makes you feel better (according to research averages it does, but it doesn’t work on everyone), whether or not you can win the lottery (it is so unlikely as to be impossible, and yet people do win almost every week). — location: 199 ^ref-20954 --- For example, the equation 1 + 2 = 2 + 1 is analogous to the equation 2 + 5 = 5 + 2. But in math we don’t just leave it at that—we say a + b = b + a for any numbers a and b. This abstraction makes our point simultaneously less ambiguous and also more open to generalization, in the sense of broadening to include more examples. Similarly, if we think about a pattern of women not speaking up in meetings, and female students not asking questions in class, the similarity at an abstract level could be summed up as “women not speaking up in mixed-gender environments.” At this point we have not measured how prevalent this pattern is, we haven’t found what causes it, and we haven’t found out how to change it. But in identifying the pattern we have made a start, by shaving off extraneous details and homing in on what is really important. This is a crucial step in building a good theory. — location: 242 ^ref-4449 --- Before category theory there was set theory, which has a different ideology and thus very different technicalities. Set theory is based on the idea that the fundamental starting point of math is membership—that is, whether or not a given thing is a member of a particular set. — location: 261 ^ref-40528 --- Category theory takes a different starting point: relationships. It is built on the idea that we can understand a lot about something or someone by looking at their relationships with those around them. — location: 266 ^ref-55152 --- The key in math is that we choose which details to ignore for now, because of what we have decided to focus on, but that this is a temporary situation. We leave the baggage behind, but we don’t burn it; we recognize that it could be useful for something else. It’s a temporary abstraction in order to explore a particular aspect of a situation, not a be-all and end-all abstraction claiming to represent the entire situation. With regard to gender, this is important because we are going to focus on aspects of the discussion that are only about how people relate to one another, not about intrinsic or biological characteristics; however, we are not claiming that the intrinsic characteristics are never relevant and can be forgotten forever. — location: 311 ^ref-36282 --- We are going to introduce a new dimension to the discussions about gender, and that dimension is to do with the ways people relate to one another. I am going to think about ways of relating that I believe are particularly relevant to the inclusion of women in society, but we will approach this in a way that doesn’t need to be directly tied to gender. Not only is it a different dimension from gender, I believe it is a different dimension from the existing ways in which we think and talk about character traits. It is hard to define a new dimension because you can’t express it in terms of the existing ones. However, this form of abstract invention is prevalent in math. It might seem a bit like making things up, but that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. One example illustrating this is when mathematicians invented a new type of number called imaginary, by taking square roots of negative numbers. We sometimes say you can’t take the square root of a negative number, but really we just mean that no ordinary number can be the square root of a negative number. So what about some other kind of non-ordinary number? — location: 349 ^ref-56958 --- The categorically inspired approach will show us ways in which we can treat men and women the same if they relate to others in the same way. This doesn’t mean that all men and women are the same, which is absurdly oversimplistic. It means that we can find the types of behavior that are important or beneficial, find people who exhibit those behaviors, and treat those people as “the same.” For example, instead of saying something like “Men ask for pay raises more than women and that’s why they’re paid more,” we could say “People who ask for pay raises are paid more” (regardless of whether they’re men or women).1 We can then go one step further and ask whether this is actually how we want the system to work: Should people be paid more because they ask for more? I believe they should be paid more according to evaluation of their actual work, not just because of their ability to ask for a higher salary. This provides a more nuanced solution, although it is also more difficult than simply paying women the same because “men and women are the same.” But it is crucially less divisive. — location: 400 ^ref-12406 --- Math isn’t just about getting the right answers; it’s about dreaming up different worlds in which different things can be true. For example, children (and adults) often ask if infinity is a number or not. The answer is that it depends on what world of numbers you dream up. Infinity is not in our ordinary world of everyday numbers, and if we just try to throw it in by “inventing” it naively, we end up with all sorts of contradictions and paradoxes. But there are many ways to dream up different worlds of numbers that can include infinity without causing those problems. In category theory we can dream up worlds in different ways. We can decide what type of relationship we want to focus on, and see what world this produces. But we can also decide what kind of world we want to see, and then look for the kinds of relationships that will make that happen. — location: 453 ^ref-26052 --- we can contrast it with what the weak, unsound argument looks like, which is something like this: 1. Men are observed to have quality Y on average, under some select circumstances. 2. Quality Y is believed to be good for activity Z without any very strong basis. 3. “Therefore,” men are naturally better (or worse) at Z. 4. “Therefore,” we don’t need to do anything about the imbalances in favor of men in activity Z. — location: 559 ^ref-35838 --- There’s another slide that turns “Men are observed to be better at systemizing” into “Men are by nature better at systemizing,” assuming the effect to be a result of nature, not nurture. This is the sort of deceptive argument that enables some people to assert that gender differences are biological and therefore gender imbalances in the world are not the fault of discrimination. The abstract version is like this: men are observed to have quality Y ↓ men naturally have quality Y — location: 571 ^ref-37139 --- There is a rather large leap from babies looking at pictures for a few seconds longer to the gender imbalance in math professors at research universities. And yet this is the sort of inference that happens: 1. Girl babies looked at the face for slightly longer than the boy babies on average. 2. Therefore, girls’ brains are hardwired for empathy, whereas boys’ brains are hardwired for systemizing. 3. Math is about systemizing; therefore, this shows that men are hardwired to be better at mathematics. — location: 640 ^ref-42703 --- Historically, brains were weighed as a supposed way of studying the relative intelligence of men and women. This measure is certainly unambiguous and objective, but using it to indicate intelligence presupposes a link between brain weight and intelligence. In fact, historically, scientists assumed that men were more intelligent than women, found that men’s brains weighed more on average, concluded that brain weight must determine intelligence, and then used the fact that men’s brains weigh more to conclude that men are more intelligent than women. It’s a breathtakingly circular argument. — location: 656 ^ref-22549 --- Even more tenuously, the questionnaire asks about my understanding of people in social situations and seems to conclude that if I am able to understand people, then this is an indication that I am bad at math, which is an egregious myth to be perpetuating. — location: 667 ^ref-5394 --- In Inferior, Angela Saini writes of a table “more than three pages long” of all the statistical gaps that have been found between men and women on all sorts of measures, including mathematics, aggression, and self-esteem. She sums it up like this: “In every case, except for throwing distance and vertical jumping, females are less than one standard deviation apart from males.” She goes on to say: “On many measures, they are less than a tenth of a standard deviation apart, which is indistinguishable in everyday life.” — location: 786 ^ref-18680 --- In Testosterone Rex, Cordelia Fine also goes into this, pointing out that there is not a “sharp line” between men and women but rather a “shifting mosaic of features.” One meta-analysis of many studies found that “about 40 percent of the time, at least, if you chose a woman and a man at random, the woman’s score would be more ‘masculine’ than the man’s, or vice versa. (If there were no average sex differences, this would happen 50 percent of the time, so 40 percent is not far off that parity.)” Again, this included research on a wide range of measures such as mathematical ability, reading ability, competitiveness, and leadership style. — location: 793 ^ref-36631 --- Science is supposed to be impartial, but the choice of null hypothesis in the first place puts an immediate bias into any of these studies. Unfortunately, this is one way in which science has historically been used to hold women back. — location: 821 ^ref-27391 --- We have seen that even if men and women are different, there is a large range of behavior and large overlaps in the range of men’s and women’s behaviors. I think that instead of adopting a black-and-white position that men and women are different and thus gender imbalance is fair, it would be more reasonable to ask a more nuanced question about the range of gray in this area: To what extent are men and women different, and how much gender imbalance is thus fair? — location: 826 ^ref-57003 --- One example is students who lack self-confidence. The received wisdom is that self-confidence helps you do better. However, students’ lack of belief in themselves can lead to them being much better at recognizing their weaknesses and improving themselves, as well as being cautious enough to check their work thoroughly and back everything up with evidence and strong arguments; they just need more encouragement and support to get there. Whereas students who are very confident might be better at persevering in an unsupportive environment, but they are always in danger of putting forth shoddy work and baseless claims owing to their confidence. On average, all things being equally unsupportive, I would expect the self-confident students to do better. But in a supportive environment I would expect the self-doubting students to do better. — location: 836 ^ref-6135 --- According to Boyce’s theory, dandelions would do better than orchids “on average” if situations “on average” are not suitably nurturing (which they probably aren’t at the moment). One response would be thus to favor dandelions; a different one would be to provide nurturing environments so that orchids too can reach their full potential to participate in society. Of course, dandelions benefit from not doing the latter, so self-interested dandelions are likely to oppose it. — location: 847 ^ref-48599 --- in higher-level math it becomes more about dreaming up different worlds in which different things can be true, so instead of asking “Is this true or false?” we might ask “In what worlds could this be true and in what worlds is this false?” — location: 860 ^ref-37520 --- Our current human world has been handed to us by past generations. In this world men and women might well appear to be different in various ways. Men are more successful than women, overall, in math and science and business and politics. But the mathematician in me says that there could be a different type of world in which that doesn’t have to be true, and not just through us imposing quotas and insisting on fifty-fifty gender ratios. Not only are both of those divisive policies, but moreover they miss an important point: if something about the environment is preventing women from being as successful as men, then imposing a quota without thinking about the environment is going to increase women’s representation without necessarily increasing their success. This is perhaps encapsulated as the difference between diversity (which is about numbers) and inclusion (which is about environment). — location: 864 ^ref-38561 --- The issue of how to make things equal is relevant to gender differences. We have become so fixated on thinking about gender differences that we associate character traits with genders and then try to make genders equal by compensating for the perceived shortfalls on one side, like giving Sam more cookies. This is typically flawed twice over: first, in that we’re associating character with gender in the first place, and second, in that we’re assuming that the character traits associated with men are more valuable, and that to make men and women equal we thus need to get women to have more of the character traits associated with men. — location: 905 ^ref-55777 --- If you hear somebody (somebody more traditional, perhaps) describe a woman as “very feminine” or a man as “very masculine” or “manly,” an image probably comes to mind, even if you wouldn’t use those words yourself.1 But why? The words do not just describe the behavior of women and men—they prescribe a supposed “ideal” or “natural” behavior of women and men. — location: 919 ^ref-32475 --- Currently, instead of considering gender and character separately, we are doing various confused things. On one hand, in the name of equality women are encouraged to be more like men in order to be “successful,” and men are encouraged to get in touch with their “feminine” side, to learn empathy, express emotions, and be collaborative, although these are not gender-specific traits: people of any gender can have empathy and emotions, it’s just that certain traits have traditionally been associated with certain genders, and we’re beginning to see that that isn’t necessary — location: 976 ^ref-40987 --- Take the debunked image of hunter-gatherers: we now know that around two-thirds of their food came from gathering and only one-third from hunting.6 The hunt was dangerous and often unsuccessful, but—surprise—is still popularly celebrated and used to prop up justifications of male domination. — location: 1011 ^ref-8556 --- A related example is Florence Nightingale, known as “The Lady of the Lamp” and arguably most widely remembered as a nurse. In fact, she was also a groundbreaking mathematician whose nursing was made effective by her analytical approach to data. Crucially, her innovative visualizations of that data meant that her analysis was actually taken on board by those in power, enabling her to make the sanitary changes that would dramatically improve on the dire mortality rates in hospitals during the Crimean War. But “The Lady of the Pie Charts” doesn’t sound as romantically evocative as “The Lady of the Lamp,” and besides, she doesn’t fit the popular image of a scientist as an old (white) man with mad hair— — location: 1045 ^ref-23527 --- Men may claim that differences are innate in order to exclude women from male-dominated activities, and to relieve themselves of the responsibility of having to do anything about gender imbalances. But women may say it too: successful women may say it in order to retain their status as a rarity, — location: 1101 ^ref-18277 --- In No Contest: The Case Against Competition, Alfie Kohn describes “pseudofeminism” as seeking “the liberation of women through the imitation of men.” It is a compounding of two assumptions: first, that gender differences are tied to character differences, and second, that the character types associated with men are more valuable, or even critical, for success. Of course, it’s not just women who are imitating men; it’s men too. — location: 1118 ^ref-22483 --- Perhaps being able to be uncowed by aggressively dominant people is a genuinely useful skill to have learned, but it’s only useful because aggressively dominant people exist. If they didn’t exist, it wouldn’t be a useful skill at all. — location: 1143 ^ref-50274 --- think really hard about what I do consider to be “success.” I started out assuming that I wanted to be successful via an already accepted route: getting a PhD, having my original research published in international journals, winning tenure, getting promoted. Eventually I realized that those definitions of success are a bit meaningless to me. I was expected to apply for grants in order to get promoted. But I realized I didn’t really desire those promotions, and I didn’t really need grants either. For me, success is about the people whose lives I have helped. As I am an educator, my biggest opportunity for helping people is in helping them to understand something they find difficult—for example, mathematics. This is a different type of success. — location: 1167 ^ref-32957 --- There is ongoing debate about the lack of girls at high levels in this competition. Are they not chosen for the team because of bias, or are they just not as good at math? Some people point out that they can’t be chosen for the national teams because there are hardly any girls competing on regional or local teams. Why is that? How can we persuade more girls to take part? But I would rather pose a different question: Is it important for us to persuade more girls to take part? The Olympiad is not the be-all and end-all of mathematical achievement. It is a constructed competition in a field that really doesn’t have competition as its focal point. — location: 1185 ^ref-9544 --- If we object to the idea that “men are better,” it’s not that helpful to declare instead that “women are better.” It pits men and women against each other and sets up a prescriptive framework rather than a descriptive one. In math we only use descriptive theories. There is no way for an abstract theory to impose behavior on concrete life, and so if our theory doesn’t accurately describe something, then it might be a logically sound theory but it won’t be relevant or helpful. — location: 1202 ^ref-12231 --- when I turn up for a speaking event wearing a dress, the tech guy quite often says that it will be hard to mic me because I’m wearing a dress; I typically interject “And because the equipment is designed for men” to draw attention to the baseline assumption that this is the only possible way microphones could be designed. — location: 1216 ^ref-1866 --- I am not saying we should be “gender blind.” While inequities continue to exist in the system, and while historical inequality still has an impact on the present, I advocate taking much more active steps to counteract this. But the steps we need to take can, I think, be understood more clearly if we consider gender and character separately. — location: 1226 ^ref-49558 --- In modern-day parlance, hiring more underrepresented people is about diversity, whereas creating an environment in which they can thrive is about inclusivity. — location: 1273 ^ref-19362 --- There was an investigation in the 1990s into why male undergraduates did so much better than female ones at Oxford and Cambridge, even though the exams were anonymous and so the discrepancy couldn’t really be put down to direct bias.14 Perhaps surprisingly, the gender difference in history exams was even bigger than the one in math. The finding that stuck with me was that men tended to write essays that took a strong position and argued it fiercely, and that this was highly valued. A balanced position argued from all points of view was valued less. (The report had many more facets than this.) One solution is to train women to make more one-sided arguments. But is that really beneficial to society? We could instead actually think about the value of balanced arguments, regardless of the gender of the person making them. — location: 1295 ^ref-15046 --- In Crossing Deirdre McCloskey writes of her new experiences when she transitions to being a woman, and among other things finds that women will help her. — location: 1408 ^ref-32203 --- Mathematically speaking, if we have two things that are not equal, we could make them equal by making the lesser one greater or by making the greater one less, or by a combination of both. However, there is a completely different way we could do it, which is by evaluating the two things on a new dimension entirely. We wouldn’t necessarily make them equal in the end, but we would at least have made sure neither of them was affected by the original inequality. — location: 1441 ^ref-43939 --- I took a mathematical approach, not shying away from reorganizing existing thoughts into new packages and giving them names. In math when we name new concepts we sometimes use old words in new ways, if we are particularly seeking to make connections with previously known concepts. But sometimes we are trying to clear our minds and get rid of prior associations, and that’s when we invent new words. That’s also why we need new words here, to break our prior associations with gender and clear our minds. I brainstormed for a year or two on and off with my dear, empathetic, emotionally sensitive, supportive friend Gregory, and came up with the following words: “ingressive” and “congressive.” The etymological idea is that “ingressive” is about going into things, and “congressive” is about bringing things together. These are descriptive words rather than prescriptive ones. They just describe behavior, attitudes, or situations. Using descriptive words can liberate people of all genders, and in particular, men can be liberated from gender pressures as well. There might be a tendency to immediately constrain ourselves according to these new criteria, and find ways to assess who is born ingressive and who is born congressive, but that is absolutely not the idea, as we’ll see. — location: 1567 ^ref-62818 --- ingressive: focusing on oneself over society and community, imposing on people more than taking others into account, emphasizing independence and individualism, more competitive and adversarial than collaborative, tending toward selective or single-track thought processes congressive: focusing on society and community over self, taking others into account more than imposing on them, emphasizing interdependence and interconnectedness, more collaborative and cooperative than competitive, tending toward circumspect thought processes — location: 1601 ^ref-2587 --- I would call the right-hand side an aspect of implicit bias, in which society favors men not just because they’re men per se but because of the way society favors certain characteristics that happen to be associated with men, perhaps all unconsciously. I believe we are currently addressing the character bias in terms of gender, and this is causing other problems, while also not fixing the old ones. — location: 1687 ^ref-57329 --- In No Contest, Alfie Kohn characterizes competition as coming from situations where resources are scarce. But education involves a resource that can never be scarce: one person having knowledge and wisdom does not prevent someone else from having it. It might be scarce in the sense that not many people have it, especially when it comes to very specialized knowledge, but the whole point of education should be to share knowledge and wisdom with the next generation and thus ensure that it keeps growing. So the fact that we make education competitive is at worst contradictory and at best a choice that we should acknowledge and question. — location: 1771 ^ref-4322 --- Mathematician and educator Professor David Kung has a thought-provoking TEDx talk in which he points out that if we teach students to associate knowledge with authority rather than processes, then they will become adults who continue to do that and who will thus believe whomever they see as an authority figure, rather than the important processes of logic, evidence, and reason. — location: 1801 ^ref-28304 --- many traditional classrooms (especially in college) are ingressive, with all students—and the teacher—trying to show how brilliant they are, often by making others feel stupid. It is often boys doing it to girls and men doing it to women, but not always; it is ingressive people doing it to congressive people. A congressive classroom is instead one in which nobody is trying to win but everyone is trying to make sure the group is making progress and learning things. — location: 1810 ^ref-15975 --- I give students projects to explore and investigate, where there is no right and wrong answer but a “low floor and high ceiling”—that is, a low barrier to entry and no real limit to what you can learn from it. I get them to collaborate rather than compete, with the idea that the whole class, between them, will contribute to the collective discovery process, nudged along by the teacher. — location: 1814 ^ref-40580 --- “The Finnish way of thinking is that the best way to address insufficient educational performance is not to raise standards or increase instruction time (or homework) but make school a more interesting and enjoyable place for all.” — location: 1889 ^ref-36658 --- Ingressivity is so ingrained in our upbringing, in our education, and in society that we might just think we’re rewarding something that’s “good,” such as with the “strong” arguments being favored in Oxbridge exams (as described in Chapter 3), without stopping to think about whether there’s a congressive version of “good” that we’re overlooking and that might even be better. Other times we might just never have thought about it, such as in first-come-first-served situations. For example, when people raise their hand to ask questions, why does the person who raises their hand first deserve to ask the first question? — location: 2053 ^ref-57713 --- There is also a question of whether competition really spurs individuals to do better. Highly competitive situations can lead people to cheat, deliberately sabotage others, or give up. They might give up because they can never win (like me and sports), but they might also give up after the competition has ended because they did not develop any intrinsic motivation for the activity, only the extrinsic motivation for winning. — location: 2155 ^ref-63607 --- “Enough leaning in. Let’s tell men to lean out.” — location: 2260 ^ref-64809 --- Instead of ingressively facing such “risk” head-on, we can do something congressive about it. In the end I think it would be much better if everyone learned not to mock other people, but in the meantime we can think of ways to get through such situations congressively rather than just plowing through. I am aware that there are many ways in which I might look ingressive, but my motivations are actually congressive. I’m really not inherently self-confident, but I stand up and speak in front of large audiences. I avoid taking risks, but I took the apparently very risky step of quitting a secure, permanent job to become largely freelance. I am easily hurt, and yet I put myself on social media at the mercy of all the random obnoxious men on there (and yes, the people who are obnoxious to me on social media are almost always men). This is because I have found congressive ways to do things that look ingressive. — location: 2408 ^ref-38930 --- Traditional strength might be thought of as power, toughness, the ability to be unyielding either physically or emotionally, and thus to overcome others. That is ingressive strength. Congressive strength could be more like flexibility. Some physical materials are strong precisely because they are flexible, whereas something rigid is more likely to break. — location: 2418 ^ref-14248 --- In yet further nuance, there are ingressive and congressive forms of validation too. Ingressive validation takes the form of awards, prizes, grades, income, status symbols, and other external signs of your “superiority” to others. Congressive validation is more about the knowledge that you have made some sort of contribution, helped some people, created something, improved something. — location: 2457 ^ref-33945 --- If congressive people feel that they must take risks to be successful, they might be put off from even trying. Instead, I urge congressive people to build big safety nets to reduce the risk. This can be in the form of contingency plans, careful preparation, and a support network. — location: 2495 ^ref-52632 --- society tells us we should learn, such as “leaving your comfort zone” or “resilience.” Instead of leaving my comfort zone (which sounds terrifying), I work out how to extend my comfort zone. Resilience is also an off-putting idea to me because I don’t like the idea of bouncing back or of being somehow impervious to bad things happening. I would rather be a sensitive human who is hurt by bad things but then tries to find ways to transform the bad experiences into something good, such as a way I can help other people. — location: 2504 ^ref-46693 --- Psychologist Philippa Perry talks about bringing up children in a non-judgmental environment rather than in one that’s all about winning and losing, which enables them better to deal with combative energy by thinking “Hmmm, interesting person” rather than fighting back. — location: 2531 ^ref-16145 --- Typically we all ingressively go away afterward and try to think up the best acerbic put-downs that we can, and then wish we could have thought of them at the time. But I have come to realize that I would rather think of ways to neutralize the ingressivity than come up with a scathing retort. When we neutralize ingressive energy we achieve several things. We open up a space for more congressive interaction, but we also move away from rewarding ingressive behavior and move toward encouraging congressive behavior. And, crucially, we change the balance of power away from the status quo. — location: 2564 ^ref-63404 --- I like dreaming up structures that automatically induce congressive behavior even from people who might resist it, as with my dream train design. I believe that this is a powerfully congressive way in which we can start to change the power structures of the status quo. And since those power structures currently still favor men, I think this is a form of feminism. — location: 2638 ^ref-59278 --- So math could be more congressive by being about exploration and processes. It could be more about ways of thinking than about knowledge. — location: 2656 ^ref-62929 --- I would like to see a non-cumulative curriculum so that each stage doesn’t depend on the previous stage. The traditional model is more like a series of hurdles that get higher and higher and are specially designed to weed people out at each level. Not only is this ingressive, it’s also counterproductive, as we are not weeding out the right people. — location: 2657 ^ref-4671 --- congressive math is not just about the subjects we teach; it’s also about the way we teach. It should be more about depth than speed, about invention and growth rather than finding the “math people” and separating them from the “non-math people.” — location: 2661 ^ref-47724 --- A more congressive approach is to focus on students’ experiences of math and make sure that whatever happens they maintain their interest, curiosity, and appreciation for it. If we train them to be able to spew out facts in an exam but hate math, then as soon as the exam is over they will purge all that they have learned from their brain and feel negative toward math forever, in which case I don’t think we have achieved much. — location: 2669 ^ref-60027 --- An example of a congressive version is the “registered reports” format for publishing research.1 Unlike the ingressive system, where dramatic positive results are favored, in this congressive system peer review is conducted on the research question and the methodology before the data are collected. Thus it is the process that is reviewed, not the answer. The idea is that if the question is interesting and the methodology is sound, then the result of the experiment is interesting whether it turns out to be positive or negative. Psychology researcher Alexander Danvers writes that when this method is used “there are no research failures.”2 He argues that the (ingressive) approach of trying to get “eye-catching, wild” results does not do as much for cumulative scientific understanding, and that celebrating such high-risk work when it does go well skews scientific culture so that scientists spend more time on questions that are of interest only when the results are positive. — location: 2693 ^ref-21304 --- The fixation on exclusivity is at the root of many of these problems. It is the ingressive idea that keeping people out is a sign of quality and that letting people in is a sign of weakness. — location: 2711 ^ref-2656 --- There are some more congressive systems of assessment by “standards” or “descriptors” rather than by grades, where instead of a single ranking there is a description of various important aspects of skill in certain areas, and the aim is to achieve some proficiency in each one. This encourages us to think about what skills education is really about and aim to teach proficiency in those instead of just aiming to achieve certain grades. — location: 2725 ^ref-571 --- One specific area I have developed in a congressive way is question time after a talk. Typically questions are solicited by asking people to raise their hands, and then the questions are taken on a first-come-first-served basis. Not only is the selection process ingressive, but the whole situation of getting people to ask questions out loud in front of an audience is extremely ingressive. It does not encourage congressive questions, which would come from genuine curiosity. Instead it encourages ingressive “performance”-style questions from ingressive people who have no fear and whose main aim is often to try to demonstrate what they perceive as their superiority to the speaker and everyone else in the room. Typically the much more interesting exploratory questions come from congressive people who ask quietly afterward rather than asking in front of everyone. — location: 2741 ^ref-49457 --- Now instead of asking for raised hands I invite everyone to have discussions with those around them. I walk around the room hearing what people would like to explore, then return to the front and share those thoughts with everyone along with my reflections. Not only does this open possibilities for congressive people to participate without pressure or fear, but when the potential for performance and a public assertion of superiority is transformed into a human interaction, then somehow the ingressive behavior dissipates. — location: 2762 ^ref-55981 --- In Becoming, Michelle Obama writes of working to remedy the imbalance in her law firm, which predominantly hired people who were male and white. She had to persuade the recruiting team to look beyond the usual metrics of prestigious universities and exam results and consider the applicants’ backgrounds to understand whether they’d coasted on privilege or raised themselves up from difficult beginnings. I would now call that thinking congressively rather than ingressively about hiring. — location: 2784 ^ref-47688 --- I have founded a consciously congressive music organization in Chicago called the Liederstube, focused on classical song. There is no barrier to entry—anyone can come and sing, and anyone can come and listen. There is also no barrier between the performers and the audience—everyone sits together in a cozy room with an atmosphere that is more like a party than a concert. It is less like performing (which is ingressive) and more like sharing music we love (which is congressive). There is no emphasis on perfection or correctness (which is ingressive). The pressure of performance on a stage is completely removed, and this can result in more emotionally touching music. — location: 2801 ^ref-13212 --- During ingressive arguments I have rarely seen anyone persuaded of anything. We can retrain ourselves to make arguments more congressive by seeking to understand things rather than defeat other people. In those situations you might suddenly find that you don’t mind discovering that you’re wrong after all, and that you learn a lot more about something. — location: 2843 ^ref-8589 --- Considering systems of democracy, direct election of a president (as in the United States) is much more ingressive, whereas in other systems such as the United Kingdom’s the head of the government is just the leader of whichever party has the most seats. It is possible that this is why it is taking much longer to get a woman president of the United States than a woman prime minister of the United Kingdom or a woman chancellor of Germany.5 But I would prefer to say that really it makes it harder to get a congressive leader. — location: 2903 ^ref-34014 --- This is another potential benefit of ranked voting systems: they encourage a less combative and partisan campaign because candidates need to appeal to their opponents’ supporters in order to pick up second-choice votes. — location: 2953 ^ref-10184 --- alternative system involves “constitutional conventions, cross-party forums and citizens’ assemblies” to supplement parliament.9 I would call this a more congressive approach to running a country. — location: 2956 ^ref-49160 --- The status quo is evidently supported by those who win in the current structures (of whom there are not that many), but unfortunately also by those who are convinced that they could win—indeed, that they might soon win. Perhaps this is an essential aspect of the “American dream,” the idea (or rather, the dream) that in this structure anyone can rise up, even all the way to the top. Convincing people that they are about to rise up while simultaneously keeping them down is a particularly pernicious way to maintain power. — location: 2966 ^ref-39872 --- As Alfie Kohn says, “I would prefer to see skepticism directed at the status quo rather than employed in its service.” Jessa Crispin reminds us that “breaking away from the value system and goals of the dominant culture is always going to be a dramatic, and inconvenient, act.” — location: 3011 ^ref-41000 --- LOOK FOR SIMILARITIES BETWEEN PEOPLE AND SITUATIONS RATHER THAN DIFFERENCES This is like the idea of seeking to empathize with other people rather than show how different you are. This might be in response to someone talking about their experiences, their tastes, their dreams, or things that are bothering them. Remember that it’s not a competition. — location: 3109 ^ref-2987 --- SEEK TO SUPPORT OTHERS RATHER THAN ADVISE THEM, UNLESS THEY SPECIFICALLY ASK FOR ADVICE Unsolicited advice is ingressive, as it assumes a position of superiority—you are taking it upon yourself to assert that you know better than the other person does about what is going on, and you are assuming that there is something you can offer that they won’t already have thought of. — location: 3118 ^ref-58608 --- BUILD MUTUALLY BENEFICIAL SITUATIONS There are too many zero-sum situations in the world, often unnecessarily, as with the contrived scarcity we discussed that causes unnecessary competitions. Even if you can’t control large structural situations, we can all make changes in interpersonal situations. — location: 3132 ^ref-33386 --- ADOPT THE PRINCIPLE OF CHARITY This means seeking the most generous interpretation of someone’s point rather than an antagonistic simplification. — location: 3148 ^ref-44295 ---