Med school admissions in milieu of reform (by Skylanda)

Every year, medical school hopefuls sit down to endure a grinding six-hour hazing ritual known as the MCAT: the Medical College Admission Test. For the fourth time in its history, the committee that oversees the exam is considering a major overhaul of the exam.

So if you’re not in the line-up to apply for medical school, what interest could this possibly hold for you? The training of medical professionals plays an enormous – and understated role – in the functioning of the medical system that is helmed by people who have survived this training regimen. It starts before the MCAT, but this test is emblematic of some of the sustaining flaws that drive classical medical training, and some of the places where real reform might create sustainable change in the overall health care system.

The traditional MCAT covers the core sciences required of premed students: physics, chemistry, biology, a little biochemistry. It tests stamina as dearly as knowledge, and does well to predict “success” in medical school, as measured by the ability to pass subsequent tests and achieve reasonable scores of the various board exams required along the way. It is notoriously poor at predicting ethics, clinical performance, or personalities compatible with patient care, and this is part of the current drive for reform. Critics of reform argue that these traits are picked up in personal statements and interviews – the MCAT is a test of knowledge, dedication, and stamina that is necessary to weed out unprepared students without sufficient mental moxy for the program; pro-reform proponents advocate for inserting material coverage psychology or sociology, or adding personality inventories alongside the exam.

All of these, I argue, fundamentally miss the point. No one, I believe, thinks that medical education should be less rigorous. It is the content of medical education – from the MCAT on up – that needs a fundamental shift, and that idea is hardly even on the table.

As it stands today, medical students take four years of undergraduate courses (in any field, though including the core science courses), then complete two years of pre-clinical studies, two years of clinical rotations, and a minimum three-year residency. Of these minimum eleven years of study, you may be surprised to know that fully half (the undergraduate and pre-clinical years) are only tangentially related to what a medical student ends up doing with their life; the rest are an amalgam of requirements and hoops that largely defy any utility to the task of medicine. This starts with the MCAT and the requirements that drive it; it continues with the first step of US Medical Licensing Examination, which covers such gross detail of non-clinical topics that medical schools are forced to focus away from clinical medicine for the first two years if only to get students to pass this exam. School to school and administrator to administrator, medical colleges are themselves are not immune from promulgating the idea that every student should take a rapt interest in the minutiae of topics that certainly hold distant relevance to medicine, but simply cannot be memorized at that detail with massive expansion of knowledge the world is currently experiencing.

The worst offender of my pre-clinical years was a neuroscience course in which we memorized in agonizing minutiaea the microanatomy of every nerve course through the spinal cord at a level of detail that was beyond most practicing neurosurgeons; we glossed over salient issues like anti-depressants, biological bases of behavior, and neurological disease in 15 minute spurts. When negative feedback about the non-clinical focus of the course reached the director, he nonchalantly dismissed these concerns by telling us, “Don’t worry – you’ll learn that in your clinical years!” Indeed, it was accepted wisdom that two pre-clinical years of cramming information that would never be accessed again was a reasonable norm – that this was a good use of limited training time.

The sum effect of the diversion of time from learning about medicine to mastering an arcane level of detail more appropriate to research-guided PhDs is that the timeframe for learning clinical medicine is shoved into an accelerated five years for general medicine (or longer, for surgery or medical specialties). This feeds the pressure and rush of the residency years, as well as the back-pressure against resident work-hours reform – after all, there is a limited time in which to master this immense volume of clinical skill: six years have already been burned on other topics, so few are left for the meat of the career. This does not begin to address the investment expense required to throw six years of non-clinical training at every doctor – expense that is taken up by state funds and private debt alike, which in turn drives medical students away from critical but lower-paying careers like primary care. And in my experience, it is often the burn of the residency years that fundamentally shapes many physicians’ attitudes toward work, burnout, reimbursement, and debt. You cannot repay what young physicians endure during residency; most take it back the only way they can – monetarily.

True reform of the MCAT would mean a massive retrospective review of what pre-medical training and characteristics drive an acquisition of skill, an aptitude for the profession, and a likelihood of filling specialties we need most at this moment in time. True reform would also mean canning the entire content of the first step board exam in favor of material that is salient to the profession instead of cowing to the traditionalist ideal that every physician should have a classical education (which is promptly forgotten in favor of the vast chunk of knowledge that MDs are required to carry around in their heads day-to-day). No one is arguing for dropping the rigors of testing; but perhaps cutting the pre-med organic chemistry in favor of anatomy, or dropping the second semester of physics in favor of genetics, may actually produce more apt physicians who do not find themselves not behind the eight-ball of burnout so early in their career.

On its own the MCAT is certainly not a solo-flying herald or cause of inefficiency in the medical system. But it is the entry point into a system that emphasizes hell-bent tradition over efficiency or pragmatism at all points along the way – and it is no wonder that those who experience it come out the other end with a set of priorities that reflect the values of the training they endured.

Cross-posted from my recently re-located and re-launched blog, now found at America, Love It or Heal It.

In The Dark About The Only Light We Have [Anthony McCarthy]

Towards effective liberalism, 1.

In the past month or so I've developed a new pet peeve, one which can make me grit my teeth. I've noticed how often some variation on the phrase "we're hard wired to," gets said among the mid-high brow folks in the media. I've yet to start counting but my sense is that I'm hearing or reading it at least once a day in some form of media communication. That communication can turn a metaphor into a deeply entrenched habit of thought that becomes an effective and possibly damaging basis for actions.

The idea that we are "wired" is to reduce an incompressible phenomenon, our consciousness, our perception, our thought and our analyses into something that we believe we do understand, the computer. With that comes the comfort of believing we have a handle on something in service to the professional interests of the people who start off that chain of reductionist credulity. It's sustained by the desire of time-pressed and rather superficial academic and media scribblers to give their utterances a false caché of what they take to be cutting edge and exciting science. From there it goes on to be an unconsidered fashion accessory of superficial thought.

The idea that we are machines has become so widely believed and entrenched in what passes as the intelligentsia, that pointing out that the metaphorical and ideological substance of the phrase isn't backed up by anything but an ideological interpretation of extremely fuzzy science will get a pretty strong reaction.

The fact is that no one has anymore an idea of what consciousness is than they do what time is. Anyone who has tried to wade through the philosophical attempt to deal with time will inevitably confront the fact of the incomprehensibility of our consciousness, of the reality that the most basic of our our realities is undefinable and incomprehensible.

There is no reality that isn't intrinsically bound up with consciousness, "reality" is the word we use for what our consciousness perceives and understands. Time, in the only way it can have meaning to us, would seem to be intrinsically tied up with those problems but what we're doing is trying to conceive of the undefinable with something we don't know enough to even come up with the rules for doing that. We don't know how we know or what it means to know, we don't even know what it means to construct the product of our perception to create the limited image of the universe available to people. And we do construct the aspects of our sensory perceptions that we think about. Our thoughts are made by us.

I can't remember the scientist who speculated that for whatever consciousness which bacteria could have, gravity is essentially nonexistent, Brownian motion being entirely relevant to them, in its place. Of course that's all speculation. Though the idea that our perception of the universe and our place in it rules our most basic thinking about it seems to me to be the most sensible of statements. How a bacterium perceives the universe and its place in it is unavailable to us in any real way, but we can imagine how such an alien consciousness, so limited to its peculiar situation, would concieve of its existence in its habitat.* Perhaps that habit of thinking, the belief that our thinking about something like bacterial consciousness is understandable, is what's at work when we think about our own consciousness.

Computer science gives us some intellectual hold on the functioning of machine processing - which is no huge surprise since it was invented by computer science - which we use to organize and sift enormous amounts of information and the speed. The results of it, presented to our senses, seems like a form of consciousness and we are duped by that despite our knowing that human beings have done whatever was done. It tricks even some very bright people into pretending they don't know that it's a machine set into motion by very fast and very efficient but basically inert mechanics, prevented from doing some things and made to do some things by our mechanical and logical ingenuity. It doesn't reflect anything about whatever process consciousness is, about which we know nothing other than that it's there, without which no other aspect of existence is known, without which we don't exist. And we have no knowledge of what it is and where it comes from. Unlike the computer, our consciousness was not made by us to our specifications. Neither it's schematics nor its operational manual is available to us, we don't even know if it is linear or random or incomprehensibly unlimited in its ability. We don't even know if the analogies of schematics and operations are relevant to whatever consciousness is. We do know that our rational processing of information and even our most basic perception we use to think about such things is limited and that our metaphors really aren't identical to what they are used to describe.

The number of people who have an emotional reaction to pointing out that, whereas the machine is known to be he result of physical processes and phenomena brought out through our intentional design, is suggestive of a habit of our thinking, in itself. The fact is we don't have any real knowledge of any actual analog of consciousness in the physical world. The vehemence of that emotional reaction leads me to conclude that it's got motives apart from the mere defense of a scientific position, which the "hard wired" one really isn't. At its foundations and throughout its use, it's an assertion of dogmatic materialism.

Feminism, daily and inevitably, confronts entrenched ways of thought based in the selective and self-interested view of reality on behalf of men, obviously there but almost entirely unacknowledged. Most of it happens on the same, barely thought, level that "everyone knows we are hard wired" holds in our lives.

That ur-level view defines women as being less than and other than men and that, by nature, men are the default form of humanity, if not all of life which has gender. The denial of that orthodoxy causes an extremely emotional reaction which will grasp at any straw to deny women their person hood, their intellectual integrity, their most sacred rights as a human being. And what is thought and said about and done to women can be done to any other group of people whose intrinsic rights are ignored or denied. It is what allows the obnoxious banter of the "Market Place Report" about matters that dole out death to the many and even the biosphere to be so horrifically peppy.

Taking in a panoramic view of the reductionist ideology in scientific (and in a related way, non-scientific) thought and their resultant declarations, what that ideology frequently says about women is, I believe, intrinsically related to the idea that we are machines made of meat, meat which happens to come in two varieties, based in gender. The assertion is that women are "hard wired" differently than the way men are. Instead of being a light that illuminates an infinitely more complex reality of human beings it reduces us to a lower status than is ours by right. That reduction is an opaque cover for an ideology that reduces everything to the status of inert matter. And it reduces some more than others.

I believe the way out of that is to admit the unknowability of our consciousness, about what we really are. I believe the way out of that is to fearlessly assert that we are more than objects, that we are all more than objects with a higher status than the merely physical world our limited reason defines. We are undefinable and ineffable and our experience and human history shows us more than physics or mathematics or any other science is competent to tell us what the results of our collective, experienced life mean. History proves that the results of reducing any or all people to the same category of objects leads to them being considered in terms of commerce and use and exploitation. We must demand that people be treated better than that and there is no scientific method that can find the basis of that assertion. Our human experience can't make the connection between the subatomic structure of matter and our total experience of human beings living in a community and on the Earth. We have to find the basis of a decent life elsewhere.

The level of our conscious experience is not negligible or ignorable. The convenient and professionally and ideologically opportunistic reduction of it doesn't change that it is the real, effective higher level of existence that we actually live is that by which everything we know of the lower levels of matter is known. All of that is known only by an analogy and extension of our earliest, inarticulate, conscious experience, it literally can't escape that dependence on the humblest and simplest facts of that experience. All things we talk about are only inferential, in all their impressiveness.

* Habitat is, in a fundamental way, created by the organism, the organism creates the habitat. But I won't go into that today.

Note, also, that as far as we conceive of them being removed from us and our experience, a bacterium shares a lot with us, living on the same planet, having a physical existence in the same way we do. Any attempt to conceive of a conscious life even farther removed from that would completely exhaust our attempts at imagination.

Post script. Reading this over again, I realized it was the first part of something longer I've been thinking about for a long time. I can't tell you when the next installment will be forthcoming but I will link to this when it's posted.

Friday Night Music

For those of you who have read Tove Jansson's Moomin books or heard of them. This is a song called "Oh, tiny party-goer," and I believe that the lyrics are by the author herself. A rough translation:
Oh tiny party-goer,
Morning will dawn soon,
It's midnight already
You wander the road alone,
Your paws are tired
And you can't find the way home.

The idea is that this is what happens after an overlong party.

This is the version I like the best of those available on the net:

On Medicare, Parents and the Good-old-Times

While reading this and other articles on the Medicare fights I suddenly realized that the conservatives' hankering over some mythical past when All Was Well in the world is most selective. Medicare was created almost fifty years ago, but they don't like it.

Though it's not just the conservatives who yearn for an imaginary past. Here's New York City mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg, on the new wave of bad parents:

“Unfortunately there are some parents who just come from — they never had a formal education, and they don’t understand the value of education,” Mr. Bloomberg said on the program, which is broadcast on WOR-AM (710).

He went on to observe: “The old Norman Rockwell family is gone.”

That is not only rude but also inaccurate. First, the Norman Rockwell family never existed. Rockwell was a painter who idolized certain aspects of the American experience, the way greeting cards do.

Second, the world in which Rockwell painted was full of people who had less formal education than the parents of today and many of them did not value education, at least based on the stories I have heard from older people.

Everyone say "Takei" Today

posted by Anthony McCarthy

The Caligula Effect? Really?

Fun and games, again, about powerful men and their sexual urges. An article in the Time magazine begins with the usual argument that men can sire any number of children most easily (because, you see, all one needs to have a child grow up into a mature individual ready to pass the genes on is a fertilized egg!), and this is why the male libido consists of trying to mate with as many women as possible. Unless self-restraint enters the picture. But what if it doesn't?

In some cases, though, the stability never happens; in some cases, unlimited opportunity simply leads to unlimited appetites. Emperors and despots may be best known for this kind of behavior. The 18th-century Moroccan ruler Moulay Ismail is said to have fathered 888 children with his 500 concubines. Genghis Khan makes Ismail look practically barren. A 2003 analysis of the Y chromosome of 2,123 men now living across the former Mongol empire showed that there are 16 million males living today whose line stretches back to the great conqueror — or one out of every 200 males now on the planet. But modern-day men of power — Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Eliot Spitzer, John Edwards, John Ensign, JFK, FDR, and most recently, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Dominique Strauss-Kahn — with their serial wives or serial philandering, can behave just as badly, if less prolifically.

This the article calls the Caligula effect! Don't know about you, but I was taught that Caligula was utterly mad and cruel. Are we to take the Caligula effect as signifying that in the mentioned modern cases, too?

More interestingly, Moroccan ruler Moulay Ismail and the famous Genghis Khan didn't get to sire so many children (assuming they did) because of serial philandering or because they were ladies' men. That paragraph misses the point. A woman refusing John Edwards, say, doesn't get her head chopped off or her family murdered. I bet you anything that refusing Genghis Khan would have led to that very outcome.

In short, the quoted paragraph confuses possibly violent force, societal power and sexual attraction of men with power. It's all baked into one pie, called the Caligula effect. Possible rapes, women sold by their parents or taken by military force, willing mistresses or girlfriends, it's all the same!

Now why would someone write that way? Could it be because the writer views the world through testosterone glasses, meaning that the intended audience consists of men? How else could we explain this quote:

That same phenomenon, Josephs believes, may explain the public outrage when sexual misbehavior of elites — particularly the kind that involves violence or assault — become public. "We don't want our leaders to be philanderers," he says. "In an egalitarian society, nobody should monopolize all of the females or sleep with our wives, or we're going to get even."

Misbehavior of the kind which involves violence or assault?

And nosir, I don't want the elite to get hold of all my females, sigh, and I shall certainly get even.

How to explain an article like this? My guess is evolutionary psychology of the stupid kind as the background noise, baked into a pie with some confusion about what sexual assault might mean. And that male gaze, naturally.

On End Times

This is a funny take on the end of the world, scheduled for May 21st, 2011. Though strictly speaking the hell fires (why is hell seen as a hot place and not an ice float?) aren't supposed to be lit in the first round. That consists of the Raptured suddenly disappearing. Hell enters the picture a bit later, after some earthly torture for the sinners.

Marching in Lockstep

Atrios refers to this post about the mass discipline of the Republicans:

Most clear-eyed political observers thought that Newt Gingrich's candidacy would be unsuccessful, but no one could have foreseen just how rapidly it would implode. Forget about the Tiffany's revelation -- after criticizing Paul Ryan's plan to turn Medicare into a voucher program, Gingrich was actually forced to call Ryan to apologize. Just imagine how humiliating that must have been for someone who sees himself as a world-historical figure. But this episode is about more than Gingrich.

Atrios' comment:

That THE LEFT demands complete ideological purity has been an article of faith for as long as I can remember.

But it is increasingly true of the Right, that there is a growing list of views and beliefs which one must adhere to.

I don't know enough about the purity demands of the old left to comment on that part, though trying to make liberals or progressives to work together on a concrete goal often amounts to trying to herd cats.

So yes, I agree that rigid demands of identical ideologies are somewhat nasty and bring to mind goose stepping and similar unpleasant concepts. I also agree that this rigidity is currently more common on the right than on the left, at least in the sense of successful unification of everyone behind a detailed set of principles.

At the same time, the "big tent" concept has its own problems. Not much gets achieved with that cat-herding, and the need to bargain with those who hold a different set of basic principles can result in the sort of ugliness where someone else's basic principles are pawns in the eleventh-dimensional chess game the Obama administration is rumored to play.

Today's Hilarious Story: Dude-itors

It is about the "new" breed of dude editors!

A snippet:

Just a night of dudes being dudes, bros being bros, but there’s a lot of this going around Manhattan media these days. In fact, you don’t have to look farther than the youngish, vaguely athletic, literate and street-jargoned top editors at The New York Times Magazine, Bon Appétit and Bloomberg BusinessWeek. They’re dudes; they’re editors. Ladies and dudes, meet the Dude-itors. These are not the editors who call you “Mr.” and “Miss,” as famed New Yorker editor William Shawn once did — although he did drive an M.G. convertible on the weekend. These guys say “Hey, man” as a salutation. Dude-itors don’t practice lines for lunch at the Century Association — they practice their golf swing in the office, toss around Nerf footballs when an issue is closing, and occasionally play pickup basketball together.

Delicious! As Matt Yglesias points out in a tweet, dude editors are as rare as female nurses! A story worth telling.

If John Koblin, the writer of this piece, was in the business of manufacturing after-shave, all he would need to do is to condense this and put it in a bottle.

I'd buy it. Then I'd squirt it all over my boringly female persona and come out high-fiving everyone, in-between spitballs and back-slaps and groin scratches and golf practice. Yeah, man. Huge, man. Nice rack, man!

On the Slutwalk

I waited too long to post on this topic. By the time I felt ready to do so, the articles and blog posts which had appeared somehow drained me of any desire to add to the debate.

The first Slutwalk was held in Canada. Boston soon followed, then several other Slutwalks and several more are being planned in various countries.

That the initial trigger seems to be out of proportion (a police officer speaking to ten students in Toronto) to the response (large protests far away from the initial incident) tells us that this is a grass roots movement (among some groups of women (and men), at least), fired by the still common victim blaming when it comes to sexual violence.

Pam Gems (1925-2011) (by res ipsa)

Reading the obituaries, once again, I see that the playwright Pam Gems died last Friday. (Isn't "Pam Gems" an excellent name?) In college, a friend put on a showcase of scenes from several Gems plays, and then got one of the professors in the English department to add Gems' "Queen Christina" to the syllabus during her final semester.

In 1970, after the family moved to London, she found her way to the fringe theater movement then taking shape. Already in her 40s, she made an awkward fit initially. "I was often called reactionary,” she told The Daily Telegraph of London in 2006. “The first time I went to a women’s group I took jam, because that’s what you do in the country — I was that naïve."

She soon found her footing and her subject, the complexities of women’s lives, which she explored in plays like “Betty’s Wonderful Christmas,” the monologues “My Warren” and “After Birthday,” and “The Amiable Courtship of Miz Venus and Wild Bill,” her first full-length play. “I realized that there was no authentic work about women: they were occasionally celebrated but never convincingly explored," she told the magazine Spare Rib in 1978.

Emotions ran hot at the time. On the opening night of “Go West, Young Woman,” about female American pioneers, at the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm, two feminist groups halted the production because it included male characters.

A complete list of Pam Gems' works is here.

Update: The Guardian's obituary is actually more comprehensive.

Some Signs Are Too Much, Even For Forced-Birthers

Some signs are too much, even for the forced-birthers:

Right to Life New Mexico was attempting Monday to have an endorsement removed from a pro-life billboard on White Sands Boulevard between First Street and Second Street. The billboard went up sometime during the weekend.
The billboard depicts an Alamogordo businessman, GEFNET owner Greg A. Fultz, holding what appears to be an outlined baby in his arms as he is looking down at it. Next to the picture, in large print, is the statement, "This Would Have Been A Picture Of My 2-month Old Baby If The Mother Had Decided To Not KILL Our Child! [sic]."
Fultz, 35, said he created the organization, National Association of Needed Information (N.A.N.I.), to dispense his pro-life message.

Fultz appears to be a Men's Rights Activist of a rather extreme type:

It's my belief that fathers should have a say regarding pregnancy. Women have all the power when it comes to pregnancy. The men get no say when a woman wants to go and have an abortion without the say of the father. I believe that is wrong because men are 50 percent of the result of the pregnancy. They should have an equal right to their unborn child and decisions regarding it."

Mmm. Except that men can't get pregnant or face the very real health risks of pregnancy.

Remember the Yale Fraternity Case?

I have an older post to remind you.

Now Yale University has acted:

A prestigious Yale fraternity that counts both Bush presidents among its alumni is being banned from recruiting and activities on campus for five years after pledges were ordered to chant obscenities against women.
Yale says it has also disciplined several Delta Kappa Epsilon members and asked the fraternity's national office to suspend the chapter for five years.

"Obscenities" is such a fuzzy word, compared to "No Means Yes. Yes Means Anal." That's what the pledges chanted.

If you read the whole piece you get a slightly bowdlerized version of the chant. Still, I think the term "obscenities" is not the correct one to use in this context. It lacks the threat aspect of the actual chant and suggests that all this is just a lot of fuss about some harmless college capers.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn: A Ladies' Man?

Strauss-Kahn is the chief of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and was expected to be a candidate in France's next presidential elections. Until last Saturday, that is, when he was taken off a plane bound for Paris because a hotel housekeeper accused him of sexually assaulting her at the Sofitel hotel in New York City.

When I read the story my first reaction was that there is something good about a country in which the police is willing to detain and question the head of the IMF on the say-so of a hotel maid. Justice should always be impartially administered but it is not.

I'm not going to try Mr. Strauss-Kahn on this here blog. But I AM going to question this recent article on the case:

Amid charges of sexual abuse and rape, Dominique Strauss-Kahn's ladies' man reputation may be working against him.
Nicknamed "the Great Seducer," the International Monetary Fund chief has spoken publicly about his affinity for women and his infidelity. And while flirting and cheating are a far cry from the current allegations, some experts say they fall onto the same spectrum of sexual inappropriateness.

Some experts say! The same spectrum of inappropriateness? Would one end of it consist of flirtatious comments and the other end of violent rape? It's like saying that scowling at your neighbors and hiring a hit-man to kill them are behaviors along the same spectrum of inappropriateness.

Let's not forget, amid all this talk about flirting and being a ladies' man, that Strauss-Kahn is accused of this:

...forcing a housekeeper at Manhattan's Sofitel Hotel to perform oral sex and submit to anal sex after emerging naked from his suite's bathroom.

Given that, how does this sound to you:

As IMF head and a possible contender for the French presidency, Strauss-Kahn joins a long list of high-profile politicians, actors and athletes accused of sexual indiscretions that shattered their careers and marriages. And while one might ask, "What were they thinking?" experts say they might not have been thinking at all.

"Sexual indiscretions?"

Poor Kanazawa. Warning: Racism

There he goes again, this time with a Psychology Today blog post which argues that black women, on average, are uglier than other women. This, finally, was too much even for the happy-go-lucky-if-it-means-extra-clicks Psychology Today, the bargain bin of Freud and Jung and Kanazawa! And so poor Kanazawa's post got deleted.

But worry not! It's still available for your perusal. Not that I recommend such perusal. You should just stay here with me and remind yourself that Kanazawa's research has been found a bit flawed in the past, and a quick glance through the deleted post makes me suspect that this particular piece is more flawed than just a bit. For instance, Kanazawa writes:

At the end of each interview, the interviewer rates the physical attractiveness of the respondent objectively on the following five-point scale: 1 = very unattractive, 2= unattractive, 3 = about average, 4 = attractive, 5 = very
attractive. The physical attractiveness of each Add Health respondent is measured three times by three different interviewers over seven years.

That's objective??? What makes it objective? Using a scale? I'd call that silly. I could make up a scale and use it on Kanazawa's research, for instance, but I bet he wouldn't regard that as objective.

Let's not forget that we are not being shown all the data in whatever Kanazawa has been doing. We don't know the average age, sex and race distributions of the respondents, we don't know the age, race or sex of the interviewers, and we can't follow his steps in the factor analysis. Knowing all that is relevant if one wishes to critique Kanazawa's work.

But it doesn't really deserve that. Because there is no "objective" measure of physical attractiveness, if by "objective" we mean something that would not vary by time and place.

Kanazawa has touched upon this topic before, by the way. This time he went too far, even for the bargain bin of psychology.
----
This is a good critique of Kanazawa's post.

We Won

Well, the Finnish men's ice-hockey team are now the world champions.

That the victory was against Sweden is especially sweet because of that love-hate relationship one always has with one's siblings. Also because they came from behind to win.

Women Behind the Wheel

In Saudi Arabia:

A Saudi mother said Sunday she defied a ban on women drivers in the ultra-conservative kingdom by getting behind the wheel for four days without being stopped.

Najla al-Hariri, a housewife in her mid-30s, said she drove non-stop for four days in the streets of the Red Sea city of Jeddah "to defend her belief that Saudi women should be allowed to drive."

"I don't fear being arrested because I am setting an example that my daughter and her friends are proud of," Hariri told AFP, adding she was offering driving lessons for women.

The reason for the ban is naturally control of women, just as that's the reason for the need of a woman to have a male relative with her when she travels further away.

Al-Hariri also points out another myth about the Saudi ban on women driving, the idea that women are treated like queens, having their male relatives as their chauffeurs:

"We are always under their mercy to give us a lift," she said.

And of course she is right, because what recourse do the women have if the men refuse?
---
Link by Moonbootica.

Just a Thought (by res ipsa)

It'd be a lot easier listening to Maureen Dowd's keening and wailing over sexism and regression in the fall TV lineup if she hadn't contributed so much sexist horseshit to the discourse in her own columns.

Kate Swift (1923-2011) (by res ipsa)

Remember when you were a kid and all the pronouns in the textbook were "He" and "Him"? Well, that is not the case anymore in great part because of Kate Swift, who died yesterday and whose obituary you can read here.

The flooding of southern Louisiana (by Skylanda)

If you’ve been keeping an eye on the slow-motion tragedy unfolding in southern Louisiana – the one that is poised to flood out some 25,000 people in the low-lying bayou country – now might be the time to delve into the archives and re-read John McPhee’s near-definitive account of the history of the levee-ing of the Mississippi River through its southern passages. It is an astounding story, from one of America’s great teller-of-tales, first told in 1987 on the pages of the New Yorker, later in his compilation, The Control of Nature:

“The Mississippi River, with its sand and silt, has created most of Louisiana, and it could not have done so by remaining in one channel. If it had, southern Louisiana would be a long narrow peninsula reaching into the Gulf of Mexico. Southern Louisiana exists in its present form because the Mississippi River has jumped here and there within an arc about two hundred miles wide, like a pianist playing with one hand—frequently and radically changing course, surging over the left or the right bank to go off in utterly new directions. Always it is the river’s purpose to get to the Gulf by the shortest and steepest gradient. As the mouth advances southward and the river lengthens, the gradient declines, the current slows, and sediment builds up the bed. Eventually, it builds up so much that the river spills to one side. Major shifts of that nature have tended to occur roughly once a millennium.”

The essay is not named for the river that we know; it’s named for the river that might-have-been, the Atchafalaya. This is the stream whose course would have stolen the Mississippi’s waters back around 1950 when it was locked off from the main waters in an attempt to prevent a wholesale diversion around the southern cities, and to keep a waterway running through New Orleans - and thus to keep alive an economy and a way of life that depends on maritime traffic. If you have an hour, read the essay; it is illuminating in a way that no news report captures.

The law of unintended consequences might just as easily be called the law of obvious consequences no one wants to acknowledge; hydrology does not, and has never, favored the channeling of moving water into narrowly constricted flow regimes. The levee-ing of the Mississippi’s course in the north and the strait-jacketing of the river into its narrow course through the bayou region was always a recipe for a flood of Biblical stature. These efforts allowed people to live in areas (and root in a culture so unique that one might almost call it indigenous) where no human would rightly put down more than the prow of a boat throughout most of history; it spawned a self-perpetuating bureaucracy for whom ever-greater investment leads in close circuit to ever-greater need for infrastructural support – and ever-greater blame when the inevitable fails.

John McPhee and many in his cast of characters foresaw this day twenty four years ago, much as alarms were raised in advance of Hurricane Katrina that fifty years of re-engineering the bayou region (including the infamous Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, which allowed a salt-water intrusion to diminish the protective cypress swamps and channeled flow into the city) would bring disaster into New Orleans if ever a hurricane made a direct hit. What these two moments have in common is not only geography, but a common root: these are not natural disasters, these are man-made disasters. These are not alone attributable to the weather and rains of fate; these are predictable, engineered, preventable disasters.

It is hard to argue with the Corps of Engineers today, when the waterways will be opened that may run the flood so far out as to drown the entirety of Morgan City; the choice is between a million people and structures in the greater area around New Orleans – which has certainly taken its share of hits in the last few years – and relative handful in the lowlands, and that’s a grim but not difficult choice to make. The more difficult choices will come in the next months to years: will we as a nation go on insisting that elements like fire, water, and earth should obey the edicts of poorly-planned engineering, or will we decide on safer and saner means of planning around these forces that are as inevitable as death and taxes, and as integral as the air we breathe to the fabric of life.

In the meanwhile, twenty five thousand evacuees could use your thoughts and contributions, today.

On Indian Election Results

According to the Guardian, women did well in the latest Indian elections:

Indian politicians Mamata Banerjee and Jayalalithaa have won control of West Bengal and Tamil Nadu respectively.

...

Ramachandra Guha, a political historian and analyst, said the results were unprecedented. "You don't want to go too far as huge problems of gender inequality, foeticide, oppression and discrimination against women remain in India but it is still exceptional to have so many very powerful women at one time," Guha said.

That is good news, within the proper framework. At the same time, I noticed an anti-corruption theme in the elections. Women tend to do better under those conditions, perhaps because they are viewed as untainted outsiders.

And this comment is pretty interesting because of that last sentence:

Banerjee, whose austere lifestyle is in stark contrast with that of some of India's senior politicians, said on Friday that gender was not an issue. "It is not me, it is the people of Bengal. That I am a woman is not the issue. Without my sisters I cannot do my job but not without my brothers too," she told the NDTV television channel.

Some people suspect female politicians of favoring women. But few suspect the average male politician of favoring men. Hence the need to insert that bit about "brothers" in the comments.

Today's Hilarious Story

Has to do with Mike Huckabee:

Do your children know enough about Ronald Reagan? If they attend a liberal public school, probably not! Thankfully, a charming theocrat talk show host and 2012 Republican presidential nomination front-runner is here to educate them, with cartoons. Mike Huckabee presents "Learn Our History," an edutaining look at the American story from World War II to Ronald Reagan. In fact, it consists solely of World War II and Ronald Reagan. (There is more coming, though! Up next is 9/11.)

Don't miss the videos at that link!

Social Security And Medicare Are Just Like Winning a Lottery!

An opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal (where else?) about the impossible burden and unfairness of Social Security and Medicare starts like this:

Readers may recall the 1950s TV show, "The Millionaire," which portrayed stories of individuals who were given a "no strings attached" gift of money by an anonymous benefactor. Each week in one of the show's opening scenes, a man representing the wealthy benefactor, John Beresford Tipton Jr., knocked on an unsuspecting recipient's door and announced: "My name is Michael Anthony and I have a cashier's check for you for one million dollars."
That TV program is scheduled to return next year as a reality show, and the new recipients will be the typical husband and wife who reach age 66 and qualify for Social Security. Starting next year, this typical couple, receiving the average benefit, will begin collecting a combination of cash and health-care entitlement benefits that will total $1 million over their remaining expected lifetime.

Such clever tricks the author, John Cogan, used there! The idea that this gift comes unexpectedly, as if won in a lottery! No, it is not something the recipients have contributed to, in the sense of having paid into the funding system of both Social Security and Medicare.

And notice the show Cogan uses here. It is over fifty years old! A million dollars meant something quite different in the 1950s than it does today! But Cogan manages to emotionally tie this all into a pretty package wrapped in "undeserved" and "giant wealth."

Then there is the possibility that he may compare a check of one million dollars to benefits which might (assuming that his calculations are at all correct which is a huge assumption, and one I make only to discuss the rest of Cogan's tricks) add up to that amount over a period of years. Did Cogan discount the future benefits to that age of sixty-six to make them commensurate with that lump-sum gift check of the 1950s?

I'm not sure if he is giving us the present value of the benefit flow or not. But I suspect the latter, and that would be bad.

Think about it. Suppose that one lottery offers you a million dollars, given over a period of ten years at 100,000 dollars per year, and that another lottery offers you a million dollars, paid out today. The two winnings are NOT the same size, because you could always invest the latter check and earn more than a million over the next ten years.

Enough econo-babble. Cogan then ties all this to the poor children who must pay for the winnings of the elderly, and the attached cartoon reinforces that point. The piece ends with this:

So today's seniors need to consider how they want the script for "The Millionaire" sequel to be written: There's a knock at the door. We now know that on the other side there's a check for a million dollars. When the door opens, do we really want to see our children, under the commanding gaze of Uncle Sam, presenting us with that check?

That is hilariously funny, because in the absence of Social Security and Medicare who would it be who would have to support those elderly parents in many, many cases?

Their children.
------
Added later:
For much more on Cogan's piece, go here.

Blogger Done Robbed My Posts

You may already know that Blogger was bloggered yesterday, and so all the posts published after a certain date and time have disappeared. In the case of this blog it means all yesterday's posts. My apologies.

Hilarious! Rand Paul on Health Care and Slavery

I have to keep reminding me that actual human beings voted this man in:

A hearing of the Senate HELP Subcommittee on Primary Health and Aging looked at emergency room use and took an odd turn Wednesday when Sen. Rand Paul compared the “right to health care” to slavery.
“With regard to the idea whether or not you have a right to health care you have to realize what that implies. I am a physician. You have a right to come to my house and conscript me. It means you believe in slavery. You are going to enslave not only me but the janitor at my hospital, the person who cleans my office, the assistants, the nurses. … You are basically saying you believe in slavery,” said Paul (R-Ky.), who is an ophthalmologist.

Let me think this through. So if we have a right to vote, all those people working the election booths are slaves, right? We keep them in pens in-between elections.
And naturally all health care workers in the UK are slaves, too?

Oddest Lunch of the Year

Popcorn and a mug of hot chocolate! But chocolate is one of the main food groups and popcorn is a vegetable, so I am covered.

Life is interfering with my blogging today. We shall resume our regularly scheduled programming tomorrow or late tonight. In the meantime you could debate your comfort foods or the weirdest meal you ever had.

Mine may just have been the salad a friend once served me. It consisted of one half of a raw onion (not chopped or anything else weak!) and the greens (chopped!) from a bunch of carrots. The carrot roots were not present at the meal.

Here is the baby parrot after a shower. She/he enjoys showers very much, flying in and sitting on the shoulder of a human taking one.

Ladies, Be Prepared To Cry. For Today's Fun Research Popularization Is Out.

Today's fun research popularization. It's breezy, it's flippant, and it's on gender differences in compassion:

Nearly everyone agrees that women, on the whole, are more compassionate than men. In a 2008 Pew research poll, 80 percent of Americans expressed that view.
Is this a sexist stereotype? Apparently not. Newly published brain-imaging research suggests that, in this case, conventional wisdom is correct.
It finds women’s brains process compassion differently than men’s, apparently due to the distinctive way our respective neural systems evolved.

Mmm. Strong stuff! We start with a stereotype. Then we argue that science has proved it correct. Then we argue that the reason is in the evolution of our neural systems! And note that a study which actually does not find a difference in reported compassion but in brain activity by gender is used to defend a stereotype that such a difference exists.

I love this stuff. What comes next? We are told that the study had TWELVE men and TWELVE women look at 100 pictures, fifty of which depicted scenes that were expected to provoke compassion. The brains of those 24 participants were scanned with fMRI technology.

The findings? Sure, men and women were equally likely to REPORT the same number of compassionate experiences, but see what happens when we peek inside their brainz:

However, what was happening in the participants’ brain told a different story. As the compassion-evoking photos were viewed, activity was observed in two areas of the brain — the thalamus and the putamen, part of the basal ganglia — in women but not in men.

“Also, women showed a greater activation in the cerebellum, a structure governing fine movement control that is also involved in judgment, selective attention and affective experiences,” they report. “The cerebellum may play a role in the decision to execute helping actions.”

From all this the researchers concluded, as clearly is completely appropriate, that:

“Our results suggest that compassion mechanisms evolved differentially in women, probably in connection with social skills including maternal preverbal communication and emotional responses to helpless offspring,” a research team led by Roberto Mercadillo of the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s Institute of Neurobiology writes in the journal Brain and Cognition.

I should look up the actual results, sigh, because statements like "activity was observed in two areas of the brain — the thalamus and the putamen, part of the basal ganglia — in women but not in men" may mean lots of different things in terms of numbers in those two study samples. Did all women have the same reaction, for instance? Any outliers among the twelve men or the twelve women? Outliers have a very big effect in small studies.

Then there is the fact that brain activity may change based on the way brains are used. And the difficulty in interpreting some of these types of scans. And the obvious fact that observing such differences, even if the study was done perfectly, tells us nothing about the evolution of compassion mechanisms.

But none of this matter anywhere near as much as something I wrote about a few months ago:

In 1995 a wife-husband research team published the first study appearing to show that men and women process language differently in their brains. Sally and Bennett Shaywitz used functional MRI to study the brains of nineteen women and nineteen men during three different language tasks.

One of the tasks, identifying rhymes, showed gender differences in the relative activation levels of the brain. Lise Eliot in Pink Brain. Blue Brain. writes (pp. 185-6):

...men exhibited strong activation of the lower portion of the left frontal lobe, while women tended to activate the same frontal area but on both sides of the brain. Of the nineteen women, eleven exhibited this bilateral pattern and eight activated just the left hemisphere (like men). So the results of this study seemed to indicate that in processing language, or at least during this particular rhyming task, women were more likely to use both hemispheres while men used exclusively the left hemisphere. As one of the first reports to find a sex difference by using functional MRI, this study got a lot of press. An article in the New York Times Science section promptly declared: "Men and Women Use Brain Differently, Study Discovers," and the findings continue to be highlighted even in recent popular works.

...

later studies failed to replicate Shaywitzes' original finding. Eliot again (pp. 186-7):

Like any good research, the Shaywitzes' study inspired many attempts at replication. By 2008, twenty-six comparable brain-imaging studies were available for Iris Sommer and her colleagues at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands to synthesize using meta-analysis.

Their overall conclusion: there's no sex difference in language processing. While some studies reported results similar to the Shaywitzes', others did not. Some even found that women processed language more strongly on the left side. When you put all the findings together, it's a wash; there is no significant difference in the way men's and women's right and left hemispheres are activated by language.

All this has to do with the idea that brain lateralization might differ between men and women in language use. This doesn't seem to be the case. But no worries! We still get a lot of popularizations based on exactly that idea, even though it has now been removed from the relevant university-level textbooks.

The short message: Wait to see if a small study indeed is replicated by others before popularizing a message that women are more compassionate than men based on evolutionary reasons.

But here is the weirdest thing about this particular popularization: Its use:

So ladies: When the men in your life seem insensitive to suffering, try not to respond with scorn. The problem, it seems, is one of brain circuitry. It shouldn’t be hard to take pity on them; after all, you have an enormous capacity for compassion.

See how we have completely forgotten that the men and women in the study reported the same number of compassionate episodes?! It's the brain scans which determine the extent of our compassion now.

Now that was fun.

Corporatism 101

Don't you love articles which clearly explain the diseases in our new feudal system of corporations on top, everyone else the serfs? This is one such lovely example:

If you like Rioja's hazelnut tortamisu, thank pastry chef Eric Dale. And if you happen to pop your head into the bakery room and admire the tile job on the floor, you can thank him for that, too. Ever since his boss, chef Jen Jasinski, discovered that Mr. Dale is handy, she's had him doing double duty as the maintenance man. He has spent hours repainting the oven, fixing the plumbing and installing a garbage disposal. And that's just the start. He used to manage the dessert operation at one of Ms. Jasinski's restaurants; now he's up to three. All told, Mr. Dale says, his hours have expanded to more than 60 a week.

Wow, you might go. Then you might wonder if Mr. Dale gets paid more for all these extra multi-tasking duties. The article does not tell us that but it does point out that most of these new "superjob holders" (yeah!) don't get paid extra:

In a recent survey by Spherion Staffing, 53% of workers surveyed said they've taken on new roles, most of them without extra pay (just 7% got a raise or a bonus). Now that sales are picking up, there's even more work to do, but companies are reluctant to hire, say human-resources experts. Some are anxious about what the economic future holds, while others are seeing their profits increase now that their work forces are leaner.

Bwahahah! Corporations want to be more flexible which means that their workers have less flexibility, longer days of work and more multi-tasking! Corporations grow fatter in profits which means that their workforce gets leaner.

What's fascinating about all this is how Marxist the flavor is if you let your tongue feel it. But we are not supposed to do that, and this is where the invisible elephant stomps into the room:

All these problems with having to work so much harder for the same pay as before? They are up to the workers to solve:

Of course, the ultimate responsibility for workload management falls to the employee. Experts say that in many cases, employers have no idea how many tasks they've loaded on one person, so workers have to "manage up."

Which is hilarious in a job market where the firms can pick and choose. You start "managing up" and you will be out on your ass.

This example reminds me of the zillions of articles I have read about how women, all on their own, can balance work and family, while everybody else stands by without lifting a finger. Those individual-centered pieces are extremely common, and they may have a point or two in that we surely can affect our own lives a little. But when workers face vast corporations and a buyers' labor market they can forget all about having a job if they start "managing up."

Be Invisible, Please!

A Hasidic newspaper erased Hillary Clinton from that famous picture of president Obama and his advisers in the situation room during the bin Laden raid.

The reason? This:

...an editorial policy stipulating that they "will not intentionally include any images of women in the paper because it could be considered sexually suggestive."

But the images of men are not considered sexually suggestive.

All this is familiar fare in the fundamentalist circles of many religions. Sexual allure is something only women have and the way to control that allure is by controlling women's visibility. Hence the strict dress codes for women, the sex segregation and the seclusion of women. Hence, also, the shaming of women who refuse to go along with those rules.

What would look odd about these arrangements to someone from another planet is this: It is the men who are the protected group in this kind of fundamentalism. They are seen as total slaves of their sexual desires, too frail and unreliable to be allowed to look at pictures of female politicians. But the conclusion from all this is not to seclude the men but to seclude the women.

Chaz Bono on biology (by Suzie)

Yesterday's NYT quotes Chaz Bono, formerly Chastity, on biology and gender.

“There’s a gender in your brain and a gender in your body. For 99 percent of people, those things are in alignment. For transgender people, they’re mismatched. That’s all it is. It’s not complicated, it’s not a neurosis. It’s a mix-up. It’s a birth defect, like a cleft palate.

"I never really understood women before, to be honest, but I had a tolerance for women that I don’t have now. No, really. There is something in testosterone that makes talking and gossiping really grating. I’ve stopped talking as much. I’ve noticed that Jen [his longtime partner] can talk endlessly. I just kind of zone out. ... I just don’t care!

"I’ve learned that the differences between men and women are so biological. I think if people realized that, it would be easier. I would be a great relationship counselor. I know the difference that hormones really make.”

The weirdest guy thing he does now?

“I got way more gadget-oriented, I have to say. I don’t know why. Definitely since transitioning I’ve wanted to be up on the latest, coolest toy.”

I've yet to see scientific proof that testosterone makes people more interested in electronics. The idea that women talk more than men is a myth. For more on gossip, please read my post here. I've also written (4/18/2008) on the danger of thinking that men and women behave differently from each other (and in stereotypical ways) because of brain differences. This thinking has been used to justify discrimination against women for eons.

If a conservative said, even with humor, that he could barely tolerate women and all their chattiness; if he said men and women have different brains, and suggested that testosterone makes a person like gadgets, wouldn't a "lifelong liberal" like writer Cintra Wilson challenge him? So, why doesn't she question Bono on his retro view of gender? Perhaps she doesn't because she's too busy confronting "a whole swag-bag full of transphobias that I didn’t know I’d had."

Wilson repeatedly asks if Cher influenced Bono's gender identity. He says no. (She doesn't ask if Sonny Bono, who became a Republican politician, influenced Chaz's ideas on gender.) Our culture, our parents, other aspects of socialization have no bearing on our identity as male or female. For Chaz Bono, it's all biology.

In interviews, Wilson brings up "how uncomfortable we are as a society with people who don’t fit into the usual gender roles. ... To finally usher a complete color wheel of sexuality into the mainstream, perhaps it takes a child of Cher."

It's as if Wilson never heard what Bono said. He isn't confronting gender roles or sexuality. He describes himself as "very traditionally male." He's a man who loves a woman. He finds that people, especially men, treat him much better now. “I’m constantly shocked by how friendly and cool straight men are to each other." (Hey, Chaz, welcome to the patriarchy.)

It's telling that this article was published in the Fashion & Style section.

------------

Keep your comments civil or I will delete them. Do not hog the discussion.

------------

Whoops, I forgot to mention that Bono is publicizing his book, "Transition: The Story of How I Became a Man,"

which will be released tomorrow. Also tomorrow, the documentary “Becoming Chaz” will premiere on the Oprah Winfrey Network.