One of the principle arguments both for our confidence in the application of our physical theories to unobservable situations¹ and the reality of the postulated objects is that our physical theories are particularly simple. The background idea is that when we approximate a function by fitting points or some other general method we expect to get a complex unwieldy object back thus the simplicity of our physical theories shows they aren’t just good approximations based on lots of data points but somehow really get at what is happening. However, I’m skeptical that our intuitions about simplicity are correct. In particular I worry that our idea of what’s simple is deeply influenced by what we find useful. To explain further let me offer an example.

Suppose you are given a box that lets you dial in any² number between 0 and 1 and returns some output value between 0 and 1 within some experimental error³. If after trying many values you derive a polynomial with 25 coefficients that lets you very closely approximate the average result⁴ for a given input you probably wouldn’t think you’d hit on anything deep about the operation of the box. In fact you’d probably guess that greater precision (averaging over more tests) would reveal subtle distinctions between your approximate function and the true value. On the other hand if after the same number of tests it appears that sin(x) is an equally good approximation you might think this was the true function and expect this to be born out by further experiments. You might even make hypothesises about the box’s mechanism on this basis.

My worry is that those theories we take to be simple and elegant really aren’t simple at all. For instance is it really the case that sin(x) is a simpler function than some 25 term polynomial with integer coefficients between 1 and 10? The obvious way to answer this is to ask how many symbols it takes to define each function but this answer depends on what we take to be our primitive terms. To put the point more formally the Kolmogorov complexity of a string depends on our choice of a universal prefix-free machine. However, it’s reasonable to think that so long as we pick one system to represent out theories in and stick with it then it will function as a useful measure of a theories complexity⁵.

However, in practice we never really fix one system and insist on writing all our theories in terms of it. When people discovered that the sin function was frequently useful in describing physical systems they stuck it into their toolkit. They didn’t stick with whatever previous system they had been using and include the definition of sin(x) in all of their theories. Yet if our idea of what a simple theory is changes in response to what seems to make good predictions we no longer have a good argument for the truth of our theories. If it had turned out that a parametrized solution to the equation y^3+x*y=x^2 had been widely useful in physical theories instead of solutions to x^2+y^2=1 then it would probably have been those functions rather than cos(x) and sin(x) that we regarded as elementary functions.

I don’t doubt that evolution has endowed us with a notion of simplicity that works well in everyday macroscopic scenarios. What I’m skeptical of is the claim that the abstract mathematical theories that underlie particle physics and cosmology are really especially simple. Certainly it’s true that they can be expressed in a form that strikes us as elegant and appears simple but they only do so by making use of many layers of abstraction. I’m not so sure that if we examined the mathematical framework for quantum mechanics written out as a formal statement in PA it would still strike us as particularly simple.

In short I’m worried that we underestimate the power of additional layers of abstraction. Sure, the mathematical concepts used in modern physics are the result of a series of definitions and abstractions each one of which strikes us as simple and elegant but the essential question is whether alternative theories giving similar agreement with the data would admit a similar chain of definitions. Given that no real work (to my knowledge) has been done about the additional complexity each layer of abstraction brings to a theory what reason do we really have to be confident about the simplicity of physics?

In the chronicle of higher education yesterday there was a short snippet about academics taking performance enhancing drugs and if you have a nice proxy server you can read the longer article or the commentary in nature (you can also find the Volokh Conspiracy article that brought it to my attention). Now I was quite pleased with the reasonable approach taken in the Nature article. In particular I thought the following paragraph hit things right on the head.

Rather than individuals purchasing substances over the Internet, we believe it would be better to ensure supervised access to safe and effective cognitive-enhancing drugs, particularly given potentially dangerous drug–drug interactions. Such regulation must be evidence-based and a product of active dialogue between scientists, doctors, ethicists, policy-makers and, importantly, the general public. This may necessitate a new form of regulation because the remits of the existing health and drug agencies are for the regulation of medicines for treatment, not for enhancement.

If a new class of compounds (so far most ‘cognitive enhancers’ are effectively less euphoric versions of amphetamines) really is developed that appeals primarily to educated wealthy people rather than being associated with lower socioeconomic classes such a change in our regulatory outlook might actually occur. True, I’m skeptical that more than a modest cognitive enhancement effect is possible from drugs (they can’t fundamentally rewire the brain) but accepting the careful use of drugs as enhancements has the potential for massive increases in utility. While I doubt drugs are ever going to make us all geniuses there is no reason to believe that future pharmaceutical research can’t produce mood enhancing drugs with only mild side effects. The benefits to depressed people alone of not stupidly insisting that depression is always a disease (rather than an unfortunate extreme end of a distribution) and researching medications that might make everyone a bit happier would be huge¹. More broadly I’m sure that everyone has noticed that some people tend to be more happy and energetic than others (and studies have suggested these people are more productive as well). The benefits to society of a compound that could shift everyone’s baseline amount of happiness up to where it naturally lies for these bright happy people would be greater than any other change since the industrial revolution.

However, in the chronicle article we find a much less enlightened view from one interviewee.

The notion raises hackles in some parts of academe. “It smells to me a lot like taking steroids for physical prowess,” said Barbara Prudhomme White, an associate professor of occupational therapy at the University of New Hampshire, who has studied the abuse of Ritalin by college students. Revelations about the use of performance-enhancing drugs in professional baseball have stirred public interest recently, and she sees parallels between athletes and assistant professors. “You’re expected to publish and teach, and the stakes are high. So young professors have to work their tails off to get that golden nugget of tenure.”

Now I’ve always thought it was kinda silly to keep performance enhancing drugs out of sports² but there at least it’s merely a game and fairness is a principle concern. In academics, however, we are supposedly actually producing something of worth. We don’t try and tell academics they can’t spend more time on their work because other people have children to take care of or family obligations. It’s not about being a fair competition but about maximizing academic output. True, perhaps one might reasonably worry that these performance enhancing drugs don’t genuinely lead to more performance in the long run, i.e., they are a way of gaming the system, but short of that I see no reason why they shouldn’t be allowed.

Also I found it amusing the way everyone seemed to assume that it was unacceptable for students to take these sorts of drugs during exams yet no one tries to stop people with ADD from taking ritalin or amphetamine during exams and often even give them extra time. Of course ADD is a real issue but it falls on a continuum and the same drugs that help concentration with ADD have been shown to boost everyone’s scores on the SAT.

I was originally inspired to think about the whole privacy issue when I heard that David Brin argued that it was the uneven lose of privacy that was the threat not the loss of privacy itself. I didn’t bother to actually read what he had said until today but unsurprisingly he has some pretty interesting views on the subject.

What was surprising, however, was to see someone else who had a reasonable take on the whole ‘privacy’ issue, especially linked from slashdot.

While the author seems reluctant to make the leep the article flirts with the two critical points in the ‘privacy’ debate. First of all that true obscurity/freedom from recording is a lost cause and secondly that the real danger is from unequal erosion of our obscurity. So long as we only see footage of ‘crooks’ or the surveilance cameras are only placed in minority/poor neighborhoods it’s easy to use the substantial difference between what society officially designates as acceptable and how people actually behave against the most powerless parts of our society.

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While I think there are unnecessery harms caused by inflexible expectations for academics and by insufficient societal acceptance of male caregivers I’m uncertain that this amounts to gender inequity and totally unconvinced that gender fairness requires universities to redress the problem. After all while we have a societal obligation to eliminate the biases causing women to be paid less for the same work¹ (and thus get less stuff per unit work) it doesn’t follow that gender fairness requires apple to charge women less for a computer. But let’s save the deep theoretical questions about the nature of inequity and fairness for another post and assume for the moment that: the statistically greater career cost children impose on academic women demonstrates a gender inequity that universities have a particular² responsibility to address. Does this provide an argument for the university to subsidize or provide free child care?

There is a temptation to view things like subsidized child care, health insurance for dependents or free health club memberships purely as positive contributions to the beneficiaries. When the benefits of a policy are concrete and easy to see while the harms are diffuse and widely shared it’s hard to give the policies costs fair consideration. Much to our detriment in the legislative process. So for the moment let’s assume there are no externalities, i.e., in the absence of university subsidized child care the day care would still be housed in the same location, the same people would make use of it and the only difference is whether they pay for the child care out of their own pockets or the university covers (part of) the cost. In this case subsidies for child care are a pure transfer from the people without children (or who don’t use child care) to the people with children.

Now some of the people who don’t use child care are the male academics whose wives stay at home. But in my experience few academics still marry women willing to stay at home the whole seven years until their kids start school and even then sometimes their wives may be busy. Thus this is primarily a transfer payment from the university employees who don’t have children to those who do have children. But the very problem we were trying to redress was that succesful female academics are much less likely than their male counterparts to have children. The article I discussed yesterday cited the figure that 70% of men with tenure are married with children while only 44% of women. Thus on net subsidizing child care is likely to take money out of the pockets of female academics and place it in the pockets of male academics.

Now maybe free child care would increase the number of female academics with children enough that it would be a net transfer from male academics to female ones. Heck, maybe social factors even mean that male academics would take advantage of child care services at such a low rate that it would be a net transfer to female academics without any shift in the numbers. However, these are tough empirical questions that require hard data and don’t dispute the central point that this isn’t a well thought out way to address the supposed inequity.

Ultimately, if the goal was for the university to redress the inequity created by the uneven division of child raising duties between the sexes no program that doesn’t compensate female academics who choose to give up having kids should be considered. Moreover, the benefits that a daycare can provide are limited parents still need to take care of the children at home. If the goal was either to redress an unfairness or to stem the loss of women in academia wouldn’t a strictly better solution be to pay women more than men? This would capture both the women who gave up kids and those who didn’t and let them use the money to pay for child care or hire a maid to clean up after the kid or whatever.

It’s considerations like this that make me unable to escape the conclusion that the fairness based demands for child care have more to do with emotional wants than any compelling policy analysis. The fact that people will support subsidizing child care but are unlikely to support direct cash payments suggests a fundamental incoherence that is better explained in terms of emotional salience than by theoretical considerations. I speculate that the demand for subsidized child care arises because female academics find the tension between academic success and raising their children frustrating and feel it’s unfair they have to make a choice when they see men getting to have both. Since the cost of child care is a salient obstacle to the ‘fair’ outcome it is understandable that people would assume the lack of free child care is unfair. However, the fact that the beneficiaries don’t line up with the supposed victims of unfairness and the lack of a sound theoretical principle that picks out this agent (the university) and this fix (free child care) suggest that emotional salience and valid moral principles diverge in this case.

Note that I fully believe the university should act to help parents when it is doing more than making transfers from non-parents to parents. For instance I think the university should help avoid the inefficiency and difficulties of finding nearby daycare by creating on campus childcare. It should just charge the users of the facility what it costs them to run it. I also think universities should offer special loans to graduate student families to pay for that child care they don’t need to pay back until they are earning more money (in general it should offer more of these loans to grad students for other reasons too but I suspect families are good credit risks). There are lots of good reasons for many of these policies. However, the correct arguments for many of these policies will be data heavy analysisses comparing relative costs and benefits not outrage inspiring calls for gender fairness.

In my last post I discussed the views of UC Berkeley’s graduate Dean on academic support for families at length. Here I want to offer the quick 10,000 foot conceptual overview and some thoughts about why people have the strange views they do.

The arguments given about the problems for women with babies in academia all focused on the extra time and energy women put into childcare. Now if women put more effort into children simply because they find raising children more rewarding (relative to men) the fact more women than men drop out to raise children is actually the desired outcome. It’s what would result from perfectly fair mutually beneficial trades. On the other hand if you think that the extra effort women put into childrearing isn’t the result of fair deals then the target should be on encouraging women to put less effort into childrearing, not making the unfair division of labor slightly less bad for women.

The only plausible argument (and that wasn’t mentioned) for gender inequity is the biological constraint that women face. Yet once again looked at from an appropriate economic point of view most women seem to on net value the experience of giving birth to children more than they dislike the constraint of having to reproduce early. Moreover, once these sorts of biological differences are taken into account the greater difficulty men have finding random sex or their shorter lifespans are unfairnesses that employers ought to take into account.

What then to explain this widespread convinction that it is a type of gender inequity not to offer support for having families? Well whenever we are frustrated we would like to find something unfair to blame it on and this case makes that particularly easy. The nature of parenting is to obscure relative differences in desire to childcare. No one comes out and places dollar value on offspring and our culture strongly discourages doing so thus it is difficult to emotionally appreciate the statistical differences in attitude towards children that account for the difference in childrearing effort. Moreover, our culture makes it easy to think of having kids as some kind of unquantifiable inherent good rather than something with different values to different people.

So the recent issue of the Berkeley graduate had this interview on the cover with a Mary Ann Mason, Dean of the graduate division at Berkeley, about the difficulty of raising children while pursuing an academic career. While this is an issue that deserves discussion Ms. Mason’s attempt to link child friendly policies to gender equity and the deep incoherence of the views she is pushing is an affront to the sort of broad spectrum critical thinking universities supposedly promote.

Before I begin I want to stress the fact that I fully support the elimination of unnecessary requirements for academics and increased job flexibility. I think academia is being irrational in it’s level of resistance to part-time¹ and reentering researchers. I even agree that we should pay academics with children more (subsidized child care) if it offers a good marginal value for research. None of these things is the point at issue. My thesis is that the widely accepted views voiced by Ms. Mason are incoherent and what other arguments and unknown facts might support the same policies is totally incoherent.

My first point of contention with this article is the unanalyzed assumption that more women in academia is fundamentally a good thing. The number of women in academia is an indicator of our success in eliminating discrimination and the pressure on girls to conform to stereotypes and I think we can all agree that increases resulting from this are a good thing. However, I think we’d all also agree that tricking (or forcing) women who don’t want to be (and won’t like being) academics into the profession would be a bad idea. Thus it simply isn’t enough to observe that having children is one of the biggest leaks of women in the academic pipeline to conclude that it’s an area of concern².

If Ms. Mason had said no more than this I might, in a fit of holiday charity, accept that it was merely a confused way of saying that we should eliminate unnecessary barriers to academia. However, where she clearly steps out beyond where reasonable argument could take her is with the following accusation.

Having no babies at all was the dominant success mode for women. Among tenured professors, we found a much larger percentage of single women without children. There was a higher divorce rate, too, among women faculty at the top tier. So we saw a dramatic shift in family demographics those who continue on are far less likely to have — not only do women with children drop out of the academy, but those who continue on are far less likely to have children or to be married. This presents a double standard in terms of gender and equality.

Does it present a double standard? Does the fact that we see a much larger percentage of men who have never (or rarely) had sex in mathematics graduate school also constitute a double standard? Obviously not (unless we can get a subsidized brothel). Even leaving aside the possibility of pure common cause (which I doubt) this effect proves nothing other than the fact that raising kids takes time. Though to be fair Ms. Mason’s point is really not complete without her other observation.

Overall, only 55 percent of women with early babies — babies born any time up to 5 years post-Ph.D. — became tenured professors. By comparison, 78 percent of men with early babies got tenure. Women dropped out of the track not because they were denied tenure — but because of family issues and wanting to have babies, to start their families.

Alright now it’s starting to look like Ms. Mason might actually have a point. Maybe this drop out rate is the result of some special form of discrimination against women with babies. Indeed Ms. Mason makes a point of observing that men who have children are still regarded as serious while women who have children are more likely to be thought of as less dedicated to their jobs. Finally we have what looks to be like a real issue of gender inequity…except Ms. Mason admits that this is because they really are devoting more time to their children.

Yes. Across the board, men can have children at any time and still be considered serious in their research. Women in academia who do the same are considered less serious, because women have a very significant second shift as caregivers.

So it’s not that women are unfairly treated worse than men in the same situation it’s just that women really are choosing to devote more time to child care. How is the university’s treatment of this women inequitable? Because it holds them to the same gender neutral standard as the men? Unless Ms. Mason is arguing that men simply aren’t able to be caregivers this is just a roundabout way of saying that statistically speaking women place a higher priority on childcare relative to academia than men.

The various data printed along the side of the article do nothing to challenge this interpretation. Sure women with kids might spend more time i childcare than men with kids but at best this shows that the men female academics marry are perpetuating a gender inequity. So why is it the school’s policies that are being blamed? In fact it doesn’t even show that. Their are two very plausible interpretations of such data. First, that male academics are more willing to ‘marry down’ than women or that statistically speaking women are more attracted to childcare than men. Neither of which suggest any inequality. I mean no one would conclude that a study demonstrating that men in bars spend more money on women than vice versa as a prima facia case for unfairness so how is this different?

Ultimately I don’t see any plausible argument here at all. I’ll examine some of the reasons for this fallacious line of thinking and give a conceptual overview in the next post.

I haven’t posted much (at all) on this blog about my personal life. I don’t want to read posts about your cat or how you cooked dinner last night and I presume you (meaning people I don’t know) don’t want to read complaints about applying for postdocs or heard about my sex life. Besides, while there isn’t much about my life I consider private¹ there is certainly such a thing as oversharing. However, I’m going to make an exception and say that Sharon and I are now engaged. Luckily we agree about not really being into a very traditional wedding (certainly no white dress)

Anyway in addition (instead?) of rings we’ve been thinking about the idea of doing marriage tattoos instead, i.e., each of us getting tattooed in some manner to symbolize our commitment. We would have to do them several weeks ahead of course but the permanence is quite appealing. The only problem is figuring out what tattoos to get. We have one idea for a decorative tattoo that Sharon might get on her lower back (a kind of flower with a certain meaning but the relationship symbolism is only weak) but no idea for me.

So anyway does anyone have any suggestions for nice decorative tattoos (or a decorative embellishment of a tattoo) with the relevant symbolism? Optimally some part of the tattoo Sharon is getting would signify the fact that she is committing/giving herself to me permanently and presumably the same thing in reverse. However, the tattoos should be decorative and not crass. That means no hearts of any kind, no “property of P.G./S.G.” tattoo (at least in english), no tattooing names (maybe as a small part of a larger design). In general anything that is too cutesy or would make a 13 year old girl squeal about how sweet it was probably won’t fly but if you have a suggestion of any kind toss it out there. Using pictographic characters to nicely represent more complex concepts (or avoid literal advertisement of the meaning) is an option but Chinese characters that would scandalize maternal relatives probably should be avoided besides this is just so stereotypical.

As an aside if anyone has any ideas about an officiant (having some random stranger do this seems kinda weird but so does just having a friend…preferably it would be someone with an authority that we both recognize which is difficult being non-religious)

Is it just me or does anyone else think that advertising your brand by paying people to get tattoos of your slogans/logos a horrible idea. I mean sooner or later someone with a brand tattoo gets arrested for some high profile crime? I can just see the press talking about the “Energizer Rapist” or the “Geico Serial Killer.” Even if you avoid this risk using background checks how long will it be before someone gets checky and gets a second tattoo mounting/eating/shooting your logo. Using a slogan, rather than your logo, might minimize these risks but remember how dumb slogans from the 50s sound now? Do you really want to keep people reminded of what your slogan was back in the naughts.

Of course I think most large companies are smart enough to realize this which is why tattoo advertising is nothing but an attempt to gain free press. Once the media gets tired of reporting on the people who were paid to tattoo some corporate logo on their body companies will stop paying them to do it.