Why Can't A Woman Be More Like A Man? My Review Of A UK Telegraph Article on Biological Sex Differences

This is the title of a new book about biological sex differences.  The first I heard about the book is today's article in the UK Telegraph.  The bolded bit at the beginning of the article gives us all the clickbait anyone would wish for:

Yes, it's official, men are from Mars and women from Venus, and here's the science to prove it
In his fascinating new book the developmental biologist Lewis Wolpert argues that there is actually hard science behind many of our stereotypical gender roles

After all that the article itself is quite disappointing, because everything in it is pretty old hat.  Wolpert argues that men are more promiscuous than women because of that evolutionary biology "hard science" which took a time machine and went back to prehistory and decided that the most promiscuous men left the largest numbers of children, all with hard-wired promiscuity gene.  Oh, except for the female children, of course.

Then there's the problem of trying to figure out who the men are promiscuous with if they are heterosexual.  Either women, too, are promiscuous (which even the more recent evolutionary psychology stuff admits to) or a small number of women are extremely promiscuous.

Wolpert places a lot of weight on Simon Baron-Cohen's research in this piece.  For instance, the mechanical mobile vs. face study is one in which Baron-Cohen participated:

A few hours after birth, girls are more sensitive than boys to touch, and 40 hours after birth girls look longer at a face than boys, while boys look longer at a suspended mechanical mobile.

Perhaps this study (on very young infants) has been replicated by someone later, but when I looked into it a couple of years ago I didn't find any evidence that it had ever been replicated.   The study was been criticized by Elizabeth Spelke in 2005 and by Alison Nash and Giordana Grossi in 2007.  I strongly recommend reading those criticisms, because one of the magical tricks in the writings of this field is to present a particular piece of research as the very-final-and-confirmed scientific truth when, in fact, the debate in the field continues.

Can you spot the difficulty of responding to something like this piece by Wolpert?  Almost every sentence he writes makes me think of references that show otherwise or at least cast doubt on his statements.  For instance, the stuff about women being better at empathy than men doesn't necessarily mean (if true) that the differences are inborn, and distinguishing between reported empathy and other measures of empathy may matter.

But none of that is visible in Wolpert's arguments:

Emotional differences are also manifest. Almost the opposite of aggression is empathy, an emotion that marks a fundamental difference between the two sexes, being much stronger in women. Empathy is the ability to share others’ feelings, to take a positive interest in them and to decode non-verbal emotional cues. Simon Baron-Cohen’s theory is that the female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy, while the male brain is predominantly hard-wired for systemising, that is, for understanding and building systems.

The problems with Baron-Cohen's systemising vs. emphatizing theory are many and serious.  I have written about them before, but in case you missed it, a VERY long excerpt from my files is attached to the bottom of this post.  It's important to understand what the evidence for Baron-Cohen's theory really looks like, so do take a few minutes to read that excerpt after the asterisk.*

Some Of My Pet Hates. On Twitter Opinions, On US Reactions to the Islamic State And Such.

1.  A new journalistic fashion is to  write a short piece about what people say on Twitter on some issue.  The piece begins by setting out the point of the debate or describes some recent event.  It then goes into a list of Twitter comments and presents them as --- what?  As evidence?  As opinions?

The latter, usually.  But what are we to conclude from those opinions?  That they are generally held?  That they are the most common opinions on some question?  That they are important opinions?  That they are unusual opinions?  Given by famous people?

The process of picking the Twitter opinions for such a piece is opaque.  First, Twitter opinions are not like an opinion survey.  The people who include themselves in a conversation are a self-selected bunch, to use statistical language, not a cross-section of all affected individuals.

Second, the actual opinions in some Twitter conversation don't always give the flavor of the final post.  That's because the journalist picks the interesting opinions or wants to bring out a particular point by showing the support or criticism it received.  That selection process (which is probably subconscious) means that the final sample in the piece may not look like the Twitter conversation in the actual numbers of tweets which are in support of or opposing some opinion or person.

Third, what those two points mean is that the overall meaning of what is covered in the piece is unclear.  We can't conclude that the opinions in it are common among some general population of interest, we can't conclude that the opinions in it are even the most common among Twitter users or the people in that particular discussion.

Using Twitter as a source can also be valuable, in the sense that it brings out opinions which might not otherwise be included, and writing about Twitter opinions is also meaningful when the story consists of those opinions, i.e., is about what someone famous said on Twitter etc.

That's not what I am irked by here, but the kinds of stories which add Twitter opinions as if that was additional data, not opinions, as if that was a way to show the widespread significance of some issue.

2.  The parallel use of "males-and-women" or "females-and-men" in stories about gender.  I see this a lot.  It's annoying because one could write "women-and-men" or, if absolutely necessary, "females-and-males." 

And guess what's really weird?  This particular mistake is by far most common in pieces by meninists and others bent towards that way of thinking.  So common that I wonder if it's a coded message or something!  Here comes the biological essentialist telling us why men rule and women drool.

3.  The last but certainly not the least of my current irritations is the way political fronts arrange themselves neatly by opinion into camps on the Islamic State question.  Bomb that demonic area back into stone age goes the right-wing message, just a little sharpened by me.  And the equally sharpened-by-me left-wing message seems to be that the US is every bit as bad as the Islamic State or if not the US then Saudi Arabia so what's the difference?

There's a prior readiness for those fairly absolute stances, and some of that is because of the way the right-wing belligerence of the past has fed into the discussion by creating "Islamophobic" prejudice which then has created a particular defensive response from the left-wing which has contributed to the right-wing arguments and so the circle continues.

The problem with such absolute stances is that they impede the analysis of more detailed data or arguments and make nuanced debate almost impossible.   They can also create very odd ethical bedfellows.  For instance, suddenly women's rights matter to some in the US extreme Christian fringe or matter less to some in the US social justice left-wing because different fears are weighed in those cups of the scale and some fears take precedence.

I get the great difficulty of trying to have a more nuanced conversation.  Our hind-brains have been triggered to take over  (danger!danger!).  Sadly, that tends to result in dualistic thinking of good and evil, of what matters and what doesn't, and often a forcing of everything to line up with either good or with evil.

Speed Posting, 9/12/14: The First WOC To Lead the American Bar Association, Oscar Pistorius and Ray Rice

Paulette Brown is the first African-American woman elected to lead the American Bar Association.

Oscar Pistorius has been found guilty of culpable homicide in the death of his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp.  "Culpable homicide" in South African law is roughly equal to manslaughter.  His actual sentence could be as long as fifteen years or he could even avoid prison altogether, depending on the judge's decision.  The decision not to find Pistorius guilty of premeditated murder hinges on this:

In South Africa, a perpetrator can be convicted of murder if he or she had foreseen that their actions would lead to someone's death and still proceeded with that course of action.
Ms Masipa said she could find no proof that Pistorius had the requisite intention to "kill the deceased, or anyone else for that matter". 

Legal expert Prof Pierre de Vos tweeted : "Not sure rejection of [murder charge] is correct here.
"Surely if you shoot into a door of a small toilet and know somebody behind door you foresee and accept possibility of killing?"
But the judge clearly said on both Thursday and Friday that the prosecution had not proven beyond reasonable doubt that the athlete had foreseen that he would kill someone when he fired four shots through the door of his toilet in the early hours of Valentine's Day 2013.

In the US it's difficult not to see that case as relating to the question of intimate partner abuse and how famous people are treated when they are found to have committed such abuse or even the death of the abused.  But the South African context is somewhat different:

There is a perception here in South Africa that most crime is committed by poor black people targeting the white middle classes or the wealthy elite.
Cue "white fear" - a phrase used to refer to the rich white haves in society who live behind high walls, afraid of the intruder who may come in the night. It was the threat of this intruder that apparently gripped Pistorius with fear on that tragic morning.

It's still hard to say whether Reeva Steenkamp received justice.  I get that legal decisions must be framed on law and evidence and don't always match our innate feelings of what would have been just.

Talking about intimate partner abuse, the Ray Rice case in the United States has provoked a lot of debate about what Janay Palmer and the survivors or victims of abuse in general should have done or should do (and a lot of debate about the National Football League's values, culture and general behaviors). 

I'm still trying to write something very long on intimate partner violence in general, but certain powerful and emotional pieces are worth reading both about the reception of the news by some who would defend Rice or blame his then-girlfriend-now-wife and the dilemma of trying to understand victims who don't leave the abuser or who refuse to charge the abuser: 

First, on the question why victims don't leave their abusers, read this and this.  Second, on the views of some black men who take Rice's side and what's wrong with those views, read this.

Note that all those pieces try to increase our understanding of these cases.  They are not about what courts should decide in any particular case.  Neither do the "why I stayed" pieces mean that the society shouldn't interfere or that the matters are somehow private business.


  

Meanwhile, in the state of Missouri, contraception and abortions are bad, guns good

This post puts together three stories I read about Missouri yesterday.  The first is about a legal case where Paul and Theresa Wieland don't want contraceptive coverage to be available for their daughters who are covered in the parents' group health insurance policy.  The daughters are twenty, nineteen and thirteen.  The couple's lawyer argues that 

“The employees are to Hobby Lobby what the daughters are to Paul and Teresa Wieland,” Timothy Belz, an attorney from the conservative Thomas More Society, who represents the Wielands, told a panel of three federal judges on the appeals court in St. Louis on Monday. A district court had dismissed the case, saying the Wielands lacked standing to sue.

 Whatever the legal merits of that case might be, the idea that parents and employers should have the right to determine whether their adult children or employees, respectively, are allowed to use contraceptives and that both of these are about religious freedom strikes me as stupid.  It's not religious freedom for the adult children or the employees.  But I guess it would be viewed as nothing but religious freedom in a feudal society.

Missouri legislature has been busy creating laws which keep women safe!  In the first such law:

 Missouri women seeking abortions will face one of the nation's most stringent waiting periods, after state lawmakers overrode the governor's veto to enact a 72-hour delay that includes no exception for cases of rape or incest.

Supporters of the law call it a reflection period.  In case a woman was impulse-buying an abortion and needed time to reflect on that.

Another new law is also about the safety of women and other people in Missouri! It's a new gun law which makes it easier for people to have guns on them:

 Missouri lawmakers expanded the potential for teachers to bring guns to schools and for residents to openly carry firearms, in a vote Thursday that capped a two-year effort by the Republican-led Legislature to expand gun rights over the objection of the Democratic governor.
The new law will allow specially trained school employees to carry concealed guns on campuses. It also allows anyone with a concealed weapons permit to carry guns openly, even in cities or towns with bans against the open carrying of firearms. The age to obtain a concealed weapons permit also will drop from 21 to 19.

These three stories are not about the same issues.  But they all reflect the political power distribution in the state of Missouri:  Who has the right to self-defense, who has the right to decide who has the right to self-defense and which types of self-defense (or even aggression) are supported by the powers that be. 

How To Read Reports: The New Unicef Report On Violence Against Children

I learned about this new report at Think Progress:

One in ten girls has been sexually assaulted. Six in ten children are regularly beaten by their caregivers. Half of all girls between the ages of 15 and 19 believe a man is “justified” in hitting his wife. Nearly one in five homicide victims are children.
Those are just a few of the findings in a new report from UNICEF that details the “shocking prevalence” of violence and abuse against children around the world. The study — which represents the largest-ever compilation of information on the scope of child abuse — draws on data from 190 countries, and concludes this type of violence has been so normalized that many children are growing up with the assumption it’s just the way the world is supposed to work.

The report has important information.  It tells us where homicide of children (and especially of boys) is common, for example.  That would be in the Caribbean and Latin America.  This should be viewed against the background of high homicide rates in that area in general.  The report tells us that this relatively small area is responsible for 32% of all homicides on this planet (though I'm not sure how the planet is defined here), and speculates that the reasons are in criminal gang activity and the wide availability of firearms.  It's of interest to note that ten countries account for more than one half of all child homicide victims, with Nigeria leading by a wide margin, followed by Brazil, India and the Democratic Republic of Congo.  The United States gets to be included among those ten countries, too, even though it's pretty different in economic and power terms.

So one lesson the report teaches us is that children are not immune from the general levels of violence in an area.  And neither are children immune from the cultural and religious beliefs of their demographic groups.  Thus, the quoted figure of almost half of all girls (44%) between the ages of 15 and 19 believing that a man is justified in hitting his wife (if she burns his dinner, if she neglects the children, if she goes out without his permission etc.) is because that's what the cultures of the interviewed girls believe.  And the boys have similar beliefs, on average, though in several countries the percentage of girls who believe in the husband being entitled to beat the wife is higher than the percentage of boys who believe the same thing.

But here's where I got a bit worried about the report:  Several of its tables quote data separately for various areas and then for the whole world.  The thing is, the underlying data does not cover most of Europe (it does cover Eastern Europe) and neither does it cover the United States or Canada (or Russia, I think).  That's because the data predominantly comes from lower-income countries:

Given the general lack of uniformity in the way data on violence against children are collected, this report relies mainly on information gathered through internationally comparable sources, including the UNICEF-supported Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS), the US Agency for International Development (USAID)-supported Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), the Global School-based Student Health Surveys (GSHS) and the Health behaviour in School-aged Children Study (HbSC).

These international survey programmes have been almost exclusively implemented in low- and middle-income countries (with the exception of the HbSC).

So while the focus of this report is largely on these countries, this should in no way be interpreted to suggest that violence against children is not found in high-income nations.

To that end, the report also uses country-specific facts or evidence derived from small-scale studies and national surveys to shed light on certain aspects or circumstances from a variety of countries for which representative or comparable data are unavailable.

The omission of most of the high-income countries doesn't make what is included any less important.  But it does mean that we cannot interpret the averages in the report as pertaining to the world.  The "world" includes all countries, and the views on, say, how justified husbands are to beat their wives are unlikely to be exactly the same in Europe and North America as they are, say, in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The speed with which journalists are now forced to work is probably behind the fact that I've recently spotted a lot of similar problems in published reports or discussions of reports (such as the Rotherham one on child sexual exploitation).  If all you have time to look at is the press release, the press release better be a very good one.  In this case the report itself seems to equate the concept of world with the countries included in the report.  That would not be a problem if the omitted countries were, on average, like the included countries.  But they are not .

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Added later:  Why would this minor thing bother me so much that I wrote about it?  Because the more the speed of news delivery increases the more the audience will be left with false or at least somewhat misleading information.  That's not what information dissemination is supposed to do.

Climbing the Mars Hill. Mark Driscoll's Misogynist Church Eight Years Later.

I wrote about the Mars Hill church and its creator, Mark Driscoll, eight years ago on this very blog!  You can even read that antique post. 

The Mars Hill church is a good case study on extreme religionists and what makes their little hearts thump and their little minds tick. 

I sometimes suspect (fairly often, actually) that one big draw of extremist literal interpretations of Islam, Christianity and Judaism is the very literal permissions the holy books give to hate on women and to control women and to state that gods want women subjugated.  That is, I think some people, especially misogynists, are drawn to those interpretations because they sanctify their unpleasant bundles of feelings about women and sex and give permission to hate on women.  All this could work in the reverse direction, naturally, so that someone who finds the literal God or Allah then just realizes that now he or she must hate on women and build them tiny little corrals in which they can breed for the purposes of one sire.  The reverse direction seems more likely to me.

So how is the church of misogyny and homophobia working out for Mark Driscoll, it's sole progenitor?  It's done pretty well over the years.  Lots of people have joined Driscoll's flock of true believers.  But not that long ago someone found that Driscoll has been foaming-at-the-mouth about the perfidy of the wimminz on the Internet.  Under a pen-name.  Here are a few examples:

Mark Driscoll has long been a controversial figure, whether posting on Facebook about effeminate worship leaders, or saying wives had to take some of the blame for their husband's infidelity if they had 'let themselves go'.
Revelations this week that the Mars Hill pastor had in 2000 posted a series of condemning messages online under a pseudonym were therefore met with almost universal horror.
The series of posts, which have been removed from message boards, reveal a tirade of angry rants.
Beginning with the words "We live in a completely pussified nation," Driscoll – under the name 'William Wallace II' – initiated a thread in which he condemns the majority of Christian men for being "Promise Keeping homoerotic worship loving mama's boy sensitive emasculated neutered exact male replica evangellyfish."
According to Driscoll, "It all began with Adam, the first of the pussified nation, who kept his mouth shut and watched everything fall headlong down the slippery slide of hell/feminism when he shut his mouth and listened to his wife who thought Satan was a good theologian when he should have lead her and exercised his delegated authority as king of the planet.
"As a result, he was cursed for listening to his wife and every man since has been his pussified sit quietly by and watch a nation of men be raised by bitter penis envying burned feministed single mothers."

Driscoll ended his comment by noting that he expected many women to disagree with him, but "they like Eve should not speak on this matter".
"And, many men will also disagree," he added, "which is further proof of the pussified epidemic having now become air born and universal."
 

The linked article states that these revelations were met with horror.  But surely everyone knew what Driscoll preaches?  I seem to have figured it out eight years ago.  Is it the stronger language that makes the new revelations so horrifying?  That we see his Freudian slip hanging tattered under his priestly robes?  Or is it that we cannot criticize someone's religious beliefs until that someone says the same thing with nasty slurs?

Whatever.  Driscoll isn't doing quite so well right now.  He was removed from the Act 29 network in August, and now his evangelical mega-church is shutting down some of its member churches:

The Washington-based evangelical megachurch Mars Hill is shutting (some of) its doors. Following controversy over founder Mark Driscoll’s well-documented homophobic and sexist remarks, church officials announced over the weekend that they would be closing several of Mars Hills 15 Pacific Northwest branches, citing financial difficulties caused by “negative media attention.” Several staff and clergy members have also been laid off. At the end of last month, Driscoll himself announced that he would be taking a six-week-long leave of absence.

Men are More Harassed On The Net Than Women. So Cathy Young Tells Us.

She does so in a recent Daily Beast article with the title "Men Are Harassed More Than Women Online."

It's worth thinking about that title, even knowing that Young herself didn't pick it.  That's because the only evidence she offers for men being harassed MORE than women is a Demos study, which argues that famous men receive more Twitter abuse than famous women.  More about that study later.

The rest of Young's argument consists of anecdotes about individual men who have been harassed (and does not consist of of anecdotes about individual women who have been harassed), the extent of the harassment they have suffered, examples of feminists harassing anti-feminists and so on, as well as the fact that a sizable minority of what Young regards as harassers are female, even though the majority are male.

She then tells us to ignore the 2006 study which found chat room bots given female usernames receiving twenty-five times more threatening or sexually explicit messages than bots with male and neutral usernames.  And why should we ignore the study?  Because Young tells us that the Internet has changed since 2006.  But the study wasn't about something which could be affected by such change, given that it isolated one single question:  That about the impact of being taken for a woman rather than a man on the net, all other aspects being held constant.

Unless we assume that the current cross-section of Internet users is quite different from the 2006 version, with far less sexist behavior, it's difficult to see why that study wouldn't still matter.  It's not a decisive study, of course, but then neither are the studies Young prefers.

She refers to two studies.  The first one is a Pew Institute study about Internet use with a focus on privacy and security of Internet use.  That study has a question (p. 94) which relates to Internet harassment and stalking but does not define these terms to the respondents and does not distinguish stranger harassment from harassment by acquaintances (including people from the respondent's past) or even by advertisers.  Eleven percent of the men interviewed and thirteen percent of the women interviewed stated that they had experienced Internet harassment or stalking.

The study also asks (p. 98) whether the respondent agreed with the statement "Something happened online which led me to physical danger."  Five percent of the female respondents and three percent of the male respondents answered in the affirmative.  But it's hard to know what specific types of examples those answers might have reflected.  Anything that could lead a person to physical danger could qualify, not just harassment by strangers on the net.

Whatever our interpretation of that study, it doesn't demonstrate that men are harassed more on the net than women, right?

That assertion is based on the Demos study.  I tried to find the study at the link given here but was unsuccessful. Thus, what I have to say about the study is based on the summary information the people at Demos have provided and a couple of takes on the study found elsewhere.

The Rotherham Report On Child Sexual Exploitation. My Analysis.

1.  The Events

Welcome to Rotherham, England, a manufacturing town near Sheffield.  Right now the town is famous for a reason it would not have chosen:  The Rotherham Report:  In this town of 250,000 inhabitants at least 1400 young girls were sexually groomed, raped, gang-raped and pimped over a period of sixteen years while many of the authorities responsible for protecting the girls did nothing or actively suppressed information about the wide-spread abuse.

Fourteen hundred is probably a low estimate of the extent of this abuse.  But even that number turns out to mean one new victim every few days over that time period. Professor Alexis Jay, the author of the report, quotes several examples of the abuse these girls faced and the responses of the police and the local politicians to earlier reports on the same problem:

At least 1,400 children were subjected to appalling sexual exploitation in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013, a report has found.
Children as young as 11 were raped by multiple perpetrators, abducted, trafficked to other cities in England, beaten and intimidated, it said.

...

The inquiry team found examples of "children who had been doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally violent rapes and threatened they would be next if they told anyone".

...

Failures by those charged with protecting children happened despite three reports between 2002 and 2006 which both the council and police were aware of, and "which could not have been clearer in the description of the situation in Rotherham".
Prof Jay said the first of these reports was "effectively suppressed" because senior officers did not believe the data. The other two were ignored, she said.
The inquiry team found that in the early-2000s when a group of professionals attempted to monitor a number of children believed to be at risk, "managers gave little help or support to their efforts".
The report revealed some people at a senior level in the police and children's social care thought the extent of the problem was being "exaggerated".

What accounts for the way these children (mostly girls (1)) were failed by the society?

These were broken girls to begin with, most of them, often coming from homes with mental illness, drug abuse and other problems, frequently taken into care by the social services.  These were the kind of girls who traditionally are not allowed to have a childhood.  These were the kind of girls who act out, who believe the grooming for sex to be love, the love they so desperately seek for.  These were the kind of girls the police sometimes regarded as adults, fully able to consent to sex with strangers.  And these were often the kind of girls that social workers despair over:  Difficult cases, refusing help, refusing to name their torturers for fear of further violence to them or their families or because the tainted "love" they received was taken as real love and affection or because they had been beaten and dulled into slave-like submission.

But in the Rotherham case these were also white girls and their descriptions of the perpetrators of the abuse singled out men of Asian origin.  Hence the second proffered explanation for the societal failure here has to do with the fear of being accused of racism(2) and the fear of hurting community relations between different races:

The majority of those behind the abuse were described as Asian, while the victims were young white girls.
Yet the report found that councillors failed to engage with the town's Pakistani-heritage community during the inquiry period.
Some councillors were said to have hoped the issue would "go away", thinking it was a "one-off problem".
The report said several staff members were afraid they would be labelled racist if they identified the race of the perpetrators, while others said they were instructed by their managers not to do so.
Several councillors interviewed believed highlighting the race element would "give oxygen" to racist ideas and threaten community cohesion.

To understand the reference to the failure of "engaging with the town's Pakistani-heritage community" can be difficult for an outsider.  My reading suggests that the two communities were viewed as two separate worlds and that the "ambassadors" from the Pakistani community were old men, imams and wealthy businessmen.  They were the ones who appear to have interpreted that community to the rest of Rotherham and they were the ones who were deemed the proper representatives of that community.  Several articles address the sexual abuse of Pakistani girls in Rotherham and elsewhere and point out that the women in that community were not able to get their voices heard.

What this means is that we don't know the number of Pakistani victims in Rotherham.  But whites are the majority group in that town and thus would be most of the victims of any group of sexual abusers.  In short, the alleged perpetrators didn't have to "target" white girls for their victims to mostly consist of white girls.

Come On, Give Us The Names, Senator Gillibrand!

This is the current storm in the teacup of US gender politics.  Or the teacup in the storm, depending on how you view the case of what Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) wrote in her new book Off The Sidelines and what happened then.

Her book states that several (male?) senators made inappropriate comments about her body, her weight and her looks:

“Good thing you’re working out, because you wouldn’t want to get porky,” Gillibrand revealed a senator said to her in a story in People.
“Don’t lose too much weight now. I like my girls chubby,” Gillibrand said another senator said to her.
“You know, Kirsten, you’re even pretty when you’re fat,” Gillibrand added another senator said to her.

Now at least a couple of Beltway Boyz want her to name names.  If there are no names, it didn't happen.  And if she is not willing to name names why put the stuff in her book in the first place? What if these were Democratic senators, and Gillibrand is protecting them?  What if she is trying to "pull a Hillary on us" (a move named after Hillary Clinton) by implying that she's going to be the brave girl who will climb into the old boys' tree-house, and also into power, while the old boys aren't allowed to defend themselves.

All this is boring (Would you name someone who has a lot of power over you or with whom you need to work closely in the future?  But might you still not want to point out stuff about the culture in which people in the US Senate work?) and impossible to prove or disprove without more evidence.

But the events are still worth examining.  For instance, the demand for naming names is aimed at Gillibrand, not at the unnamed senators she writes about.  This suggests to me that Gillibrand is not believed.

That took me on a detour to an article which uses transgender people to learn more about gender roles and the reactions to someone's gender:

Ben Barres is a biologist at Stanford who lived and worked as Barbara Barres until he was in his forties. For most of his career, he experienced bias, but didn’t give much weight to it—seeing incidents as discrete events. (When he solved a tough math problem, for example, a professor said, “You must have had your boyfriend solve it.”) When he became Ben, however, he immediately noticed a difference in his everyday experience: “People who don't know I am transgendered treat me with much more respect,” he says. He was more carefully listened to and his authority less frequently questioned. He stopped being interrupted in meetings. At one conference, another scientist said, "Ben gave a great seminar today—but then his work is so much better than his sister's." (The scientist didn't know Ben and Barbara were the same person.) “This is why women are not breaking into academic jobs at any appreciable rate,” he wrote in response to Larry Summers’s famous gaffe implying women were less innately capable at the hard sciences. “Not childcare. Not family responsibilities,” he says. “I have had the thought a million times: I am taken more seriously.”

Bolds are mine.  It's a detour because the idea of women having less authority, the idea that women are questioned more and believed less readily is one which rings a very loud bell in my own experiences. *

But it's only a detour, because the Gillibrand example is about something different than the questioning of her expertise as a politician, and one could argue that to suggest that a group of eighty male Senators (out of a total of one hundred) contains at least three guys who make inappropriate comments to women smears all the men in the Senate.  At least it gives each of them a probability of 0.04 of being the kind of guy who talks about a woman's porkiness.  I wouldn't worry about that probability myself.

Onwards and upwards, my friends.  Suppose that these events did happen.  Are they just examples of how men talk to each other, innocent quips not intended to mean anything?  I read that comment somewhere.  Let's try it out.  Imagine a heterosexual male senator telling another heterosexual male senator:  "You know Bob/Jim/Bill, you're even pretty when you're fat."  Or:  "Don't lose too much weight now.  I like my boys chubby."

Or do a gender reversal on those comments by assuming that the recipient is a man and the commenter a woman.

The first of the three comments linked to above might pass those sieves or colanders.  The other two certainly would not.
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*I'd like everybody to be equally questioned.  It makes me very prepared and guarantees that I fairly rarely spout on stuff I know nothing about.  On the other hand, it takes a lot of time and the hurdles of disbelief really get tiresome as the decades roll by, not to mention wondering what opportunities all this has made me miss.

Convert Or Kill Them

That's the advice Phil Robertson, a reality television star, gave Sean Hannity on the Hannity show when it comes to the Islamic State.  Now why anyone would interview a reality television star on the best US foreign policy with regards to the Islamic State beats me.

The other odd thing about that advice is that it exactly mirrors the views of the Islamic State, which has offered various religious minorities those very options:  Either convert or lose your life.

The utterances of Phil Robertson don't have the same weight as the utterances of the spokesmen of the Islamic State.  Neither do American right-wing Christians kill people the way the soldiers of the Islamic State do.  But it's still worth pointing out the mirroring:  You (the other people) work for Satan, we work for the real god.  All the billions of people in the middle do not matter for either side.  Not really.

None of this is intended as some sort of a "we do it, too" defense of the horrors that the Islamic State is carrying out.  But the reasons why it uses the media to advertize its cruelty are much more complicated than Phil Robertson or Sean Hannity understand, and the best long-run US reaction is very unlikely to be proposed on Fox.

Happy Labor Day

Things to think about:


The Five Day Workweek
The Forty-Hour Week
Annual paid vacation time
Paid parental leave
Safety Rules At Work
Guaranteed Minimum Wage

Some of those exist in various places, some of those used to exist but seem to be passing or never existed at all.  All of those allow us ordinary humans to be productive in the society while also having families, fragile bodies and the need to spend a few minutes of the day admiring the beautiful sky.

Add to the list.

The Weird Case of Dan Page

Dan Page is the St. Louis police officer who was relieved of his duty because of this:

The same St. Louis police officer who was seen on CNN earlier this week pushing Don Lemon back during a live broadcast from Ferguson, Missouri, has been relieved of his duty after video emerged of an hour-long speech he delivered railing against African-Americans, the LGBT community and President Barack Obama. CNN reported the news about Officer Dan Page, who made the controversial remarks at an Oath Keepers meeting just months ago. 

He has now retired.

I watched the video of Page's remarks at that Oath Keepers meeting one night last week.  I even took notes!  They were necessary because Page was so very difficult to follow.  To give you an example, he mentioned the four horses of the apocalypse, then stated that one of them was light green, and what is the color of the Islamic flag?  Right!

Many of the transitions reminded me of Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, where

three under-employed editors who work for a minor publishing house decide to amuse themselves by inventing a conspiracy theory. Their conspiracy, which they call "The Plan", is about an immense and intricate plot to take over the world by a secret order descended from the Knights Templar. As the game goes on, the three slowly become obsessed with the details of this plan. The game turns dangerous when outsiders learn of The Plan, and believe that the men have really discovered the secret to regaining the lost treasure of the Templars.

Page refers to the end times, the three final battles, and argues that the Chinese will be involved in the first two.  Therefore he shows the audience slides of South Korean Navy Seals.

So what was the rant all about?  It's about the end of the United States which Page believes to be coming soon.  He talks about the last sixteen hours (or days?) and what's going to happen during that time:  First, an emphasis on foreign news, second, and emphasis on domestic racism and third, the resurgence of old hatreds.  That last bit seems to be about inner cities igniting but he also warns the ladies (so he says) that domestic violence calls are a waste of police time and that people should just kill each other already.

Page believes that children with his values will be moved to re-education camps.  He believes that real men have left the military and all that will soon be left is women and what he calls sodomites.  He rants about gays and the "four sodomites" of the Supreme Court, he rants about president Obama as an undocumented illegal alien, and he tells women that women who are in the military are not content to be women and that we got all those "female firsts" by lowering entry standards.

So does he mention killing?  Several times.  He boasts about having killed and he tells the audience that he will kill some more during those last sixteen time units of the United States.

All that should make the bosses of Dan Page worried, of course, and all of us should be worried if it indeed is true that he held powerful positions in the US military operations in Africa, as he stated.  But his rant wasn't about his work as a police officer; it was a rant about end-times, the weird beliefs of certain segments of the extreme US right, of the coming apocalypse.

What I found most frightening is that the audience at the rant seemed to take Page quite seriously and to agree with his conspiracy theories.  The underlying assumption is that internal enemies are more important than external enemies.

Let Boys Be Boys. Fox News And Elsewhere on Wolf Whistles And More. My Analysis.

First Part


A recent article* about hookup culture and rape at US colleges had this quote from one of the students interviewed:

Some men feel that too much responsibility for preventing sexual assault has been put on their shoulders, said Chris Herries, a senior at Stanford University. While everyone condemns sexual assault, there seems to be an assumption among female students that they shouldn’t have to protect themselves by avoiding drunkenness and other risky behaviors, he said.
“Do I deserve to have my bike stolen if I leave it unlocked on the quad?” Herries, 22, said. “We have to encourage people not to take on undue risk.”

It led rise to the "lock-up-your-vaginas" meme on Twitter, but one also wonders what the mental stance of Herries might have been here:  Did he think of himself as a bystander, a potential offender or someone who was going to be falsely accused because the woman was drunk and regretted the sex later on?

Probably a bystander.  It would make no sense to argue that "some men feel too much responsibility for preventing sexual assault" otherwise, unless we took a really sick view of what is normal and natural about guys and sexual behavior.

However boring I will be, I still have to explain why the bike stealing example doesn't quite work.

First, if you lock up your bike, it is other bikes that will be stolen.  It doesn't reduce bike theft unless every single person locked up their bikes everywhere.

Second, even that wouldn't necessarily reduce bike theft.  I know someone who locked up her bike to a heavy metal stand, provided for that purpose outside a library and full of bikes from other careful bike-lockers.  That same someone then saw from the library window a truck drive to the stand, two burly men stepped out and simply lifted the whole stand with bikes to the back of the truck which then drove away.

The point of that story is that if all women stop drinking alcohol, the way self-defense against rape will next be formulated is by telling women not to go out at night, not to wear certain clothing, not to talk to strange men or go to fraternity parties etc.  The goalposts move, and the cost of that moving for women is to limit their freedoms and to make them stay at home.  Then the locks of the house are what will be blamed if the inhabitants get sexually assaulted.

It's good to be careful and to protect oneself.  It's good not to drink too much.  All those things are true and useful.  But they smell odd when presented in a setting where rape just somehow happens, sexual harassment just somehow happens, and nothing else can be done about it, except by focusing on what the potential victims can do to protect themselves.


Second Part

Here's an even more recent take on the same topic, in the context of discussing the meaning of fraternities and sororities on campuses.  A former GMU President, Stephen Joel Trachtenberg:

Rehm: And you don't see them participating in sexual misconduct?
Dr. Trachtenberg: No no! I think it turns out that there are good and bad in fraternities and out of fraternities. What we're focusing here on is a general situation. I think what we're doing is creating a false correlation. For example, we point out that the women don't drink, don't have sorority parties which have alcohol. They don't have to. They go to the parties at the fraternities. So it's not as if the women aren't drinking. They are, in fact.
Without making the victims responsible for what happens, one of the groups that have to be trained not to drink in excess are women. They need to be in a position to punch the guys in the nose if they misbehave. And so part of the problem is you have men who take advantage of women who drink too much and there are women who drink too much. And we need to educate our daughters and our children in that regard.

Bolds are mine.  The last paragraph is wonderful!  It appears to equate trying to take advantage of someone drunk and being drunk as equal slices of the problem.  If there were no drunk women -- presto!  --- nobody would be trying to take advantage of women!  Problem solved, and all we need to do is train women and educate daughters and, er, children.

So where are we?  Roughly, it's the behavior of women which causes sexual assaults and rape and such on US campuses.  I'm being unfair here, because the article I linked to in the first part gives many other points of views, but this particular attitude is so common in our hindbrains, so much alive even after it has been killed over and over again, that we need to interrogate it more (with harsh lights and no tea or toilet breaks).  But first

Third Part

This is from today.  The Fox Outnumbered program (where four women gang up on one man and then they all state various sexist tropes) tells us that:

Fox News hosts defended the practice of catcalling, insisting women should "let men be men" and downplaying the harmful impact widespread street harassment has on women.
On the August 28 edition of Fox News' Outnumbered, hosts highlighted a New York Post opinion article that suggested women "deal with" "flattering" catcalls. Co-host Kimberly Guilfoyle defended street harassment saying, "let men be men," and, "look, men are going to be that way. What can you do?" Guest host and Fox contributor Arthur Aidala reenacted his personal signature "move" -- aiming a slow round of applause at women on the street, which one host said she'd find flattering.

Bolds are mine. 

As a complete aside, ask yourself this question:  What populations of looks does Fox News draw its people from?  Are the women random samples from the look distribution of American women?  Are the men random samples from the look distribution of American men?

Here's the picture of the people who discussed whether catcalls and such are flattering to women:

Back to the topic, sigh.

Speed Blogging August 26, 2014; Useful Information

I seem to be currently blocked about writing in depth on any particular issue.  So this post is like giving you the raw ingredients and the chopping board and the knife when you were invited for dinner.  Sorry about that.

First, this piece gives information about the racial divide among those who were killed by the police.  It also explains in detail what the data can tell us and what it cannot tell us.  The context for the link comes from recent events in Ferguson and elsewhere.

Second, two recent pieces are about the way health advice, given via media, might be a bit confusing. One is about salt intake, the other one about the importance of a good breakfast in weight control. 

In the past we were told not to eat eggs or not to drink coffee or not to consume too much salt or not to eat fats (and later not to eat certain types of fats) and so on and so on. 

It's tricky to know how to respond to such advice, in general, because sometimes the advice changes, as these examples show and other times the advice is really intended for only a sub-population, not for everyone.  But the tone of such advice can be unrelentingly demanding, even when the data is not that final.  and the people most likely to follow published nutrition and lifestyle advice might not be the people who would benefit from it.

The recommendation for moderation is a good one, of course.  But does that mean that moderation in everything should extend to moderation itself?  In any case, I refuse to moderate about chocolate.

Third, the first studies about reading on screen vs. on paper are beginning to come out.  This one is interesting (though I haven't looked at the study itself).  It compares two groups reading the same story, one group on Kindle and one group on paper:

In most respects, there was no significant difference between the Kindle readers and the paper readers: the emotional measures were roughly the same, and both groups of readers responded almost equally to questions dealing with the setting of the story, the characters and other plot details. But, the Kindle readers scored significantly lower on questions about when events in the story occurred. They also performed almost twice as poorly when asked to arrange 14 plot points in the correct sequence.

If this is correct my guess would be that a book gives you more concrete hints about where in the story something happened than the screen.  I often remember that some fact I'm searching for was, say, in the beginning chapters of the book, on the right side.  If I read on Kindle the feeling of more or less pages on the right vs. the left of my eyes is lost.

Fourth, one study suggests* that women and men are treated differently when it comes to the awarding of flex-time at work, and another suggests* that daughters spend much more time caring for their elderly parents than sons.  If these results are correct the reason is probably in ingrained gendered expectations about who should be doing the non-monetary work related to families.

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*I have not read either of the original studies, only the summaries.

Why Statistics Is Sexy. Or The Need to Distinguish Between Large and Small Numbers.

I've always liked statistics as a science  but never thought it hawt and sexy.  Now I wish we could make statistics more sexy (bare more skin?) in order to save more of us from falling into those hidden wolf traps of the net.  They don't have sharpened sticks, those traps (holes in the ground, covered by branches), but they do hurt our understanding in somewhat similar ways.

An example of the wolf trap:  Someone writes on, say, racism or sexism in recent events and then gets attacked by trolls.  Suppose that in one scenario there are five very active trolls hammering at the poor writer, in an alternative scenario there are five thousand such trolls. 

The two scenarios are not the same, they don't tell us the same story about the likely number of people "out there" believing whatever those trolls believe.  That's why it's very wrong to argue that the presence of five Twitter trolls in one's mentions means that the troll-opinion is extremely common in the real world.  Yet in the last week I've seen several people take that view of events:  The mere existence of any nasty trolls (and nasty they are) means that those trolls have sizable backing in the world of opinions, ideas and values.

So that is about proportions or percentages.  There will always be people with extreme nasty values, there will always be some who troll.  To unearth a troll comment and then to write about it as if it represents a sizable number of people in the real world is lazy and just wrong.  Even utopia would have a few trolls, hankering for life in hell.

It matters whether 0.1 percent or 60% of Americans believe that broccoli should be banned.  Those who don't get that difference are going to create "the-sky-is-falling" stories, and they are not ultimately helpful.

Add to all that the problem of self-selection, which means that those who comment on any particular incendiary topic are much more likely to be the ones who hold the extreme opposite view of the one any particular writer has used in a piece (broccoli haters, whether 0.1% or 60%, will be much more likely to be in the comments section of your Broccoli Is King article than anyone else). 

That's why the comments sections, especially if not moderated, are dominated by angry voices and often opinions better suited to critters who just crawled out of the primeval slime*.  You know, the way any article about gender inequality that focuses on women gets comments from angry meninists.

People who agree with the writer tend not to waste time scribbling that down under the article, and people who aren't that bothered either way tend not to spend time in the comments, either.  The Twitter discussions work on somewhat similar principles, though the fact that people have followers makes them less hostile to the imagined writer here.  But those who hated what you wrote are the ones with real energy to look up your handle and then enter the "discussion."

These two problems I've described above are a) ignoring the actual prevalence of various beliefs  and b) ignoring self-selection on the net.  That double-ignorance can have bad consequences:  We may be misled into believing that a molehill is a mountain, we may initiate much larger angry fights with an imaginary enemy (windmills?) and we may misunderstand the scope of the problem altogether.

A similar problem is born when someone writes an article starting with the planned plot.  Suppose that the plot is how much people hate broccoli.  The intrepid journalist will then go out and interview people.  What if the vast majority of those interviewed aren't bothered about broccoli at all?  That statement will not have a prominent place in the planned story.  Instead, even if it takes a very long time, the journalist will find a few people who reallyreally hate that green tree-pretender among the vegetables, and it is the opinions of those few people that we all will then read.

The next stage (and believe me I've seen this stage recently, though not about broccoli hating) is for people to talk about the vast camp of broccoli haters and mention the opinions of the interviewed few as representative of what that vast camp thinks.

This doesn't mean that anecdotes cannot reflect majority views or the views of an important numerical minority.  But strictly speaking an anecdote, if true, tells us only that one particular person held a particular opinion.  It doesn't tell us how common that opinion is.  For that we need the collection and analysis of statistical data about the whole relevant population (all vegetable eaters in the case of broccoli).

So all this was what has stopped me from writing on various interesting topics yesterday.  Aren't you glad I shared?
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*With all due apologies to critters from the primeval slime who are probably charming and empathic ones.

The Cruelest Month Of All. On Recent News.

The foreign and domestic news I came back to (from my selfish post-vacation angle) are so horrible that my customary post-travel migraine hurts less, even before drugs, than the thought of tackling them, assuming that I somehow should have wise words on anything.

Which isn't the case.  But neither is this August the cruelest month of all.  It just seems so, because of the access to global news which have not been good.  That access gives bystanders the feeling of participating, the diffuse feeling of needing to do something, yet knowing that there isn't much one can do.

Against that background the events in Ferguson, Missouri are not as horrible as the events in Iraq /Syria or Israel /Palestine or Ukraine or the Ebola epidemic in Africa.  Ferguson offers hope, of people responding to the police ineptness and brutality with protests, of black people responding to a poorly representative local government in terms of race by setting up voter registration tables, of all people waking up to the needs for racial justice in policing. Whatever the horrors of Ferguson, there are also these spots of light.

It's harder to see a lot of immediate hope in how the Ebola epidemic is developing.  Jina Moore writes touchingly of the special dangers women in Liberia face, because they are the majority of the caretakers of patients.  There is no known effective treatment for Ebola, with a current death rate of 54%, and that makes quarantine imperative, despite its cruelty.

Then there is the Islamic State in Iraq and Levant, with its extreme radical ideology, its desire for genocides of those whose religious beliefs differ from the radical doctrine by even one iota, its brutality and inflexibility.  The most recent news about the beheading of one US journalist and the threat to behead another journalist are disgusting. 

They might also be intended to elicit a certain response from the US, because recruiting new soldiers is easier if the enemy can be seen as the great white Satan raining drones on innocents in Iraq and Syria rather than local almost-coreligionists.  And the news about the slaughter of journalists are intended to terrorize the rest of us.

Right now the Islamic State is slaughtering to glorify the god they imagine to exist, and that slaughtering applies to anyone who opposes them but especially to adult men.  Women and children are usually not killed because they are seen as resources, not as equal opponents.  Young boys can be brought up to be soldiers, young girls can be married off soonish, and young adult women (and teenage boys) can provide immediate sexual services which do not seem to differ from the idea of rape or sexual slavery for the non-Muslim women and youth in the area.   But the longer-term goals of this particular regime are surely going to be terrible for the Muslim women.

Assuming there is a longer term for the regime.  My impression is that the fighters have a sizable contingency of outside fanatics:  men, who have gathered there to turn their dream of a medieval caliphate into reality.  I doubt that those dreams can be turned into anything but a nightmare, even for them.  Still, any possible response to the current nightmare will not be without further violence or cruelty, because that is what wars mean.

How does one end a post like this on a positive note?  By remembering that most people on this planet are not suffering the types of cruelty I describe above, and by believing that education, a just distribution of resources and the belief in the humanity of all members of homo sapiens can make some difference.  We are never going to have utopia, but we could have a  milder type of dystopian future where people complain about taxes and what their neighbors do to their yards and the way the youth behaves.

Letters from Vacation 3: The Male Nannies of Scandinavia

That title is a joke, reflecting the surprise of some outside observer a while ago  about the much greater participation of Nordic fathers on hands-on care of their children than is common in the Anglo-Saxon world, say, and probably in most other places.

I observed that participation in Finland.  Now, July is the vacation month there, so it could be that all those young dads were out alone with their children because they were doing vacation parenting only. 

But I seriously doubt that, given the great competency of so many young men loading (and unloading) two or three toddlers into and out of the family car while expertly assembling (and disassembling) the stroller and also negotiating with a crying child, all simultaneously.  Indeed, the parental skills most demonstrated were first class and clearly reflected long practice.

It's not that dads in the US aren't competent carers; it's that seeing them out alone with the children is much less common than what I recently observed, and that difference is probably a cultural one.  What drives it is unclear, but one guess is the generally greater gender equality in the Nordic cultures and another is the effect of the parental leave policies which make it desirable for the dads to take some part of the total parental leave, because that gives the fathers both time for bonding and time for learning how to care for the child, on their own.

I've written about this difference after my past travels to Finland, too, but as far as I can tell the trend is getting stronger over time, and the few dads I spoke with both love it and are surprised that the same wouldn't be true elsewhere.

 

Speed-Blogging, 8/15/14: On Ferguson, the Benefits of PMS and the First Woman to Win the Field Medal in Mathematics

This will be a hodgepodge of issues, as usual, but more than usual, because I intentionally avoided all news while recharging my batteries.  That made me blissfully and innocently uninformed, even happy, the way people living sane lives look to me.

Here it goes:

First, on Ferguson, wiser people have written about the horrors of racism, the militarized police shooting an unarmed young teenager and then using tear gas on mostly peaceful protesters, the arrest of journalists and so on, as well as the tone-deafness of the local police forces until last night.

But it's still worth pointing out that if Ferguson's 21,000 inhabitants are two-thirds black, to get a police force of 53 officers with just three black officers suggests that the selection process is not a random one in the sense of the applicant pool consisting of a fair sample from the community.  It takes more information than I have to analyze the reasons for that racial imbalance (is it straight racism, indirect racism, the reluctance of people of color to side with the "enemy" or what?), but surely the community efforts should be aimed at getting a more representative police force.  A more representative city council is also necessary.

Second, a "brave scientist" (to quote the popularization I read) has figured out the evolutionary edge PMS (premenstrual syndrome) gives to some women!  I bet you want to know what that might be:

Professor of Molecular Evolution, Michael Gillings, believes that in our evolutionary past there was a hidden selective advantage to PMS, because it increased the chance that infertile pair bonds would dissolve, thus improving the reproductive outcomes of women in such partnerships.
“In the past, women had many fewer menstrual cycles than women in modern societies, because they did not have control over reproduction and were either pregnant or breastfeeding most of the time,” said Gillings.
“Imagine that a woman was pair bonded with a sterile or infertile male. Then, even in the past, they would have had regular cycles. If women in these relationships exhibited PMS and this increased the likelihood of the pair bond dissolving, this would be a huge reproductive advantage.

Damn.  There goes my evolutionary edge, because PMS is not something I've ever experienced.

More seriously, perhaps professor Gillings is correct.  But perhaps he isn't.  Not everything that exists does so because it was advantageous for evolutionary reasons, though I have read serious ruminations (in evolutionary psychology literature, natch) on the idea that suicide conveys evolutionary benefits! It only remains to prove those benefits.

It's pretty hard to find out if prehistoric women were continually pregnant or breastfeeding, by the way.  Perhaps they were.  But pregnancy can be a pretty hormonal experience for some women, right?  According to Gillings, pregnancies might then have caused similar reasons to dissolve the pair bond.  And then there's the possibility that menstruation might have been infrequent not only because of pregnancies and breastfeeding, but because women cease to menstruate below a certain body weight.  If food was hard to get in those distant times, it could be the case that many women weren't menstruating that frequently.

And were people of the distant past pair-bonded in the first place?  If so, were the women free to walk out of that bond or not?

We cannot answer those types of questions without a time machine.  But what we can do, is to point out that the writer of this popularization began the piece with an extraordinary sentence:

A brave scientist has sought to answer a question that has baffled for centuries: why do women get premenstrual syndrome (PMS)?

When you combine that with the attached picture you get something very different from a neutral discussion of an article.

Finally, Maryam Mirzakhani is the first woman to win the prestigious Fields Medal, the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in mathematics:

Maryam Mirzakhani was awarded the Fields Medal for her sophisticated and highly original contributions to the fields of geometry and dynamical systems.
"This is a great honor. I will be happy if it encourages young female scientists and mathematicians," Mirzakhani said. "I am sure there will be many more women winning this kind of award in coming years."

Mirzakhani is Iranian by birth.  Iran's president supposedly tweeted congratulations to Mirzakhani.  The tweet shows her picture both with and without a head scarf.  More on that dilemma for Iranian newspapers here.  

Letters From Vacation 2: Interesting Differences in Public Toilets

The vacation is over (sniff), but the letters I planned to write will be written now, and this one is all about the differences I spotted, in the order they happened.

Public toilets.  The flushing mechanism can vary widely, and then you feel like a three-year-old figuring out that potty business:  Proud when you get it right.  And what's very nice are places which have the sinks for washing hands inside the cubicles, too.  But mostly I was impressed by the hooks.  When you travel you need strong hooks for the backpack and whatever else you have in the cabin of the plane, and the tiny, flimsy door hooks of the usual cubicles are worth zit in that context.

Imagine a largish letter U, flatten the base and then attach it to the wall from that flattened base so that the arms of the U flail out into the room, invitingly.  If the flattened base is about three inches long, the hook can either take two bags, one on each flailing arm, or support a heavy backpack over both of them.

Such trivial things make life much easier.  God is in details and Goddesses are in the micro-details.

Other travelers have told me stories about public toilets which are just holes in the floor.  That takes good knees, but I didn't come across any to test mine (which are divinely flexible, naturally).  And naturally I know nothing about the toilets for men (though in some places people used the toilets independently of gender-markings (women's icons have a dress with one leg hanging from the middle of it)) because the toilets were for just one person at a time.

All the toilets I saw were impeccably clean, by the way.

Those words make me sound like someone with a bad vacation diarrhea.  The real reason is that when we fly we see lots of toilets in various countries, right?  Toilets must stand for symbols of countries. 

Incidentally, I hate the euphemism of calling toilets bathrooms, because taking a bath in the toilet bowl would be a disgusting experience and not on anybody's bucket list.

Economics Tuesday 5: On Austerity

Or the idea that austerity is a good economic policy to get us rapidly out of recessions.  Or the idea that austerity policies can be used as a disguise to dismantle the welfare states all over the world.  Or the idea that austerity policies are good for us because we are all sinners and we deserve to be punished for those sins.

This post has links to theories which try to explain how austerity policies would work.  I recommend reading those.  The experience for the reader is of "the-emperor's-new-clothes" type.

Research Monday 5: The Baumeister Chronicles

I wrote about Roy Baumeister in 2012, because of the paper he then published together with Kathleen Vohs.  It's worth coming back to his general work as it is a very important basic pillar of the belief systems among some of the angriest MRAs. 

For example, I've recently read several comments explaining that civilization, roads, bridges, art and science all belong to men and so do corporations:  Men, and men alone created them.  For women to just demand entry into something they never contributed to (honest, that's what those guys believe:  that women never worked, never gave birth or cared for children, never created art etc.) is the greatest unfairness ever. 

All this is based on Baumeister's arguments.  By the way, John Tierney of the New York Times eagerly disseminated them here and here.

For these reasons, it's useful to see what Baumeister's arguments are.  The first post I wrote is here, the second here and the third here.  A very important additional post about the idea that men have evolved more than women (which both Tierney and Baumeister implicitly support) can be found here.

A Few Old Rants, Re-Heated

Because I still think these are good rants.  This one is about the definition of political participation, this one is about my eternal frustration with the research popularizers and this one is about the unattainable perfection which we are, nevertheless, expected to try to attain.

A Most Hilarious Cadillac Ad. And Thoughts on Paid Vacations.

This post talks about the ad.  On the question of guaranteed paid vacation days and vacation time taken the US fares terribly.  Or very well if you view this from the employers' point of view.

And then there's this map about the countries which don't guarantee paid maternity leave (or parental leave!):

Remember that the countries the US competes against are mostly not among the ones who have similar policies?  Just pointing out that the usual competitive argument (we can't afford it because "they" don't do it) fails here.

Women, Get Your Mrs. Degrees Before It Is Too Late! A Re-Post

The post, from last February, is here.  On reading it I'd like to stress one aspect of these eternally-repeating warnings:  They are always aimed at women who are going to college or who want to have a career instead of a job.  That it's those women who are most likely to marry and stay married is immaterial, because the objective of the stories is not to address single-motherhood or childlessness or anything similar but to assert that women must choose between their brains and their uteri.

The way the message is told to women who are not planning to go to college and/or to women who come from lower income classes is slightly different:  There the problem is all those men who have given up and play computer games at home on unemployment benefits.  Those men need good jobs so that they can become worthy of marriage, but the road to the good jobs is blocked by --- guess what? --- the society (coughfeminaziworldfavoringgirlscough) pushing girls to fill up colleges etc.

I have no idea if similar stories are told to men about their chances of marriage, to ignite that terror of ending up all alone except for several cats.  But I doubt it because the social scripts differ by gender.

Economics Tuesday 4: The Economics of Health Care

Dry horse-food granola posts, these are.  But worth wading through if you have stamina.

This old post talks about some of the basic reasons why market-based solutions do fairly poorly in health care, this post explains why price competition in health care is unlikely to work very well except for a few commodities (preventive care, dental care).  This post turns the idea of death panels in health care (a common conservative imaginary threat) into a boring topic about how all systems, whether government- or market-based, end up having to ration care in some ways.  Finally, this post explains the meaning of the much-hated individual mandate.*

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*I just realized that I haven't done a general post on international comparisons of health care costs and health care outcomes!  An odd omission.  The gist of that post would be that the US runs the most expensive health care system in the world, that the US does not do terribly well on crude quantitative measures of health (such as increasing life expectancy or reducing infant mortality) but that it might do somewhat better on qualitative measures of care.  Access to health care remains a problem which ACA might be able to solve.

On the other hand, many of the reasons for, say,  the lower life expectancy figures in the US might not be easily influenced by anything that the formal health care system does.  This is because life expectancy is very much affected by deaths at younger ages (because each such death causes a lot of future years of life to be lost), and the US has high figures of early-age deaths from violence and accidents.  But it would be possible to affect infant mortality rates by providing better access to prenatal care. 

Research Monday 4: The Kanazawa Files

Satoshi Kanazawa is an evolutionary psychologist (well, a sociologist, really) whose research can be used as the example for almost everything that makes me grind my teeth about a certain kind of evolutionary psychology (the kind some people denote by capital letters: Evolutionary Psychology).

I've written a lot about his work.  If you need to get irritated for a few hours, the links are in this post from last fall.   You can go backwards to find out why he's a Big Deal.  Or you could begin with this funny-ha-ha and sexist Psychology Today article, or this racist study by him.  Then find out what I say about his work.  To get relief, perhaps.

Have You Seen My Libido? A Re-Post

From here.  Yesterday's re-posting was about Mike Huckabee's opinions so why not do the same today?  This post continues on some of the topics of the previous one.  But I also found it funny.  Mostly I don't find my old posts that funny...

Put Me On A Pedestal. A Re-Post

This post is about how a conservative guy would run a political campaign against a woman.  It's hard to do if she is to stand on a pedestal because then he will have to topple it. 

When I read that post again I started thinking of similar difficulties inside the hierarchy of the Catholic church (they don't affect Islam that much because women are pretty much excluded, and in some other sects or religions women are already in the hierarchy, at least on the lowest rungs of the ladders).  Pope Francis reacted to questions of women's role in his church with a man's-rib joke.

Both responses bring in stuff like chivalry (as do certain sites which hate feminism) or the specific value of the feminine but both are ultimately negative reactions to the idea that we should have a few more women in power.

Needed: A Different Concept of Infrastructure. A Re-Post And More

But a good one, I think.  It uses an expanded concept of the term "infrastructure."  That concept would include the access to potable water.  Given what has been happening in Detroit recently, water is now available for some who have not paid their water bills (golf courses and sports arenas) but not available for others who are late on their water bills (poorer people):

The average monthly water bill in Detroit is $75 for a family of four — nearly twice the United States average — and the department is increasing rates this month by 8.7 percent. Over the past decade, sales have decreased by 20 to 30 percent, while the water department’s fixed costs and debt have remained high. Nonpayment of bills is also common. The increasing strain on the department’s resources is then passed on to customers.
But residents aren’t the only ones with delinquent accounts. Darryl Latimer, the department’s deputy director, told me that the State of Michigan holds its biggest bill: $5 million for water at state fairgrounds. (The state disputes the bill, arguing that it’s not responsible for the costs of infrastructure leaks.)
A local news investigation revealed that Joe Louis Arena, home of the Detroit Red Wings, owed $82,255 as of April. Ford Field, where the Detroit Lions play, owed more than $55,000. City-owned golf courses owed more than $400,000. As of July 2, none had paid. Mr. Latimer said the Department of Water and Sewerage would post notice, giving these commercial customers 10 days to pay before cutting service. But he did not say when.
And in the meantime the city is going after any customers who are more than 60 days late and owe at least $150.

Economics Tuesday 3: Free Market Fairy Tales and Food Safety

You need to be careful when using the term "free markets."  For those who would check the box "free-market fundamentalist" in a questionnaire about one's religion, the term means a deus ex machina: markets as an infinitely wise and objective ruler of our lives, a divine power, something which manages things better than anyone else.  This religious view is extended to apply to all those things which non-market institutions usually manage, including the government (except for wars and legal enforcement of property rights).

That concept has nothing to do with economics, by the way.  Markets do some things very well, others so-so and fail dismally in some areas.  But markets are never the arbiters of fairness or justice, and those concepts, too, the market fundamentalists would leave to the marketplace.

The economic meaning of a term like "free markets" would perhaps be closest to an unregulated market.  Whether not to regulate a market is good or bad depends on the characteristics of a market.  Take health care, for an example:  How comfortable would you feel if anyone at all could set up a business as a heart surgeon, without any formal training or qualifications?  The extremists would support that idea, arguing that customers (patients) would do the necessary work to find out if a person is qualified or not.  But most countries do not let an untrained person do heart surgery, and that's because of the high costs of poor care, the difficulty for customers to actually learn about someone's skills (given that one could lie about them in advertising in a completely unregulated market) and the great asymmetry of information in those types of markets.

I used that example because those who believe in market-solutions for health care argue by analogy:  If the farmers' markets work, why not something similar for heart surgery?

A different economic term that some seem to confuse with "free markets" is the concept of perfectly competitive markets.  The two are not the same, and perfectly competitive markets are pretty rare in reality.

Here is a fairy tale about free markets.  It's relevant for understanding why food safety regulations matter.  More on that topic here.

Research Monday 3: Studying Gender in Brains

Now this post (fried girl and boy brains), from last December,  was very hard to write, because it took me ages to research and  because it taught me a lot of unpleasant stuff about science politics in general.  These two posts (the "daring young man on the flying trapeze" and how to popularize gender science) address the popularization problems of studies of this type.