The capability of computers and our ability to program them seems to be increasing exponentially. Even if we hit a brick wall in terms of increased miniaturization and frequency our CS knowledge seems sure to continue building on itself. It stands to reason that within the next century we will have the ability to build computers, or at least augment our own brains, to create entities smarter than ourselves (whether or not you think they will have experiences). But if our creations are smarter than us then, barring any limit imposed by fundamental physics, one would think they could improve on our design and design another generation that was even smarter. These machines (or augmented humans) would soon reach transcendent levels of intelligence and change our society beyond recognition.

At least this is (more or less) the notion of the Singularity as popularized by Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil. For more details I recommend reading Vinge himself or checking out one Kurzweil’s many interviews and talks (audio) as well as his webpage. These are certainly two very smart individuals who have the rare ability to look beyond the specifics and take a fairly clear headed look at how technology will transform society. But smart doesn’t mean infallible and predicting the future is a notoriously difficult business.

While I used to find the arguments for the singularity convincing I’m now much more skeptical. In particular it seems the argument for the singularity rests on a misconception of intelligence. I mean it seems obvious to us that if someone was significantly smarter than us they would be significantly better at designing intelligent computers or human augmentation. But that’s because we both assume that intelligence is some kind of fully general ability to solve problems and conflate intelligence with technical skill and achievement. After all we rarely see people’s raw IQ scores so we tend to simply call people intelligent if they are especially capable in technical fields or other academic endeavors. However, while intelligence is certainly helpful much of what makes for a good scientist or engineer is their store of accumulated experience, both personal and distilled into formal education.

While it does seem that people’s ability at a wide range of reasoning tasks is substantially correlated this doesn’t mean talking about intelligence makes sense for anyone but biologically natural humans. It seems quite plausible that there is no such thing as general reasoning ability. Rather there are only heuristics applicable to certain types of problems, e.g., ability to do mental rotations, solve crosswords, recognize objects etc.. Yet if so there is no reason to believe that there is any good heuristic for designing good heuristics, in fact it seems downright unlikely. Thus just because we were able to find a collection of heuristics that give rise to something better at math and play chess than us doesn’t mean we should expect it to have a substantially easier time discovering better heuristics for the next generation. Sure, we will probably be able to create beings who can remember more numbers, do CAD drawings in their heads and so forth but the singularity requires an exponential (or at least super-linear) increase in capability over time so mere elimination of minor inefficiencies we have at AI design isn’t sufficient.

Even in mathematics people primarily reason inductively. We don’t blindly search for a formal proof, rather, we try the same techniques we’ve seen work in ’similar’ problems in the past and attempt minor modifications. In other words what makes someone a good mathematician is largely their mental collection of heuristics they use to approach problems. While continued miniaturization of computer chips might enable AI to reduce the time it takes to do mathematics pure increases in computational speed a may already be near the physically practical limit (though going 3D and using light should eventually give a few more orders of magnitude) and certainly this effect wouldn’t be sufficient to create the singularity. Thus it seems the singularity requires a sequence of exponentially increase sequence of better and better heuristics to guess the true theory based on limited data. In other words a more effective form of scientific induction.

In other words people currently use some heuristic to guess at a rule underlying a set of observations. We make some finite number of observations about disease occurring near wells near sick families and hypothesize that disease can be spread through the water. We observe some examples of current generated by metal exposed to various frequencies of light and hypothesize that light must come in quantized units. The singularity seems to require that not only is there a heuristic that lets us make equally effective guesses at the true theory based on less information but that there is an exponentially increasing sequence of such heuristics. Moreover, it would be necessary that each heuristic can discover the next in roughly the same amount of time despite the substantially greater performance each subsequent heuristic requires. Frankly, I find this somewhat implausible.

So today on science Friday on NPR they had some kind of expert on smell on the program. According to him scientists have actually done studies that when women pass gas it has a stronger smell per volume of gas than male emissions. Apparently though men pass a greater volume of gas, perhaps explaining the difference.

Frankly, I’m just amazed that this has been studied. To be fair it was probably a result noticed during a more general study of the subject but it’s still amusing to think that some poor grad student’s job was to document people’s farts and collect samples. Makes me glad I’m not doing an experimental science.

On the plus side that grad student had an interesting answer when people asked what they did but I don’t know if it was a plus for getting dates. It would also make for some amusing work experience on a resume.

I wonder if they have this information up on wikipedia. This is the sort of totally useless information that is important to record and catalog. Both to protect future generations of graduate students and to settle drunken bets.

This morning the supreme court released it’s opinion in Heller. Additional commentary from SCOTUSblog can be found here, here, and here and the Volokh conspiracy has some good commentary as well but some technical issues on their end temporarily prevent me from linking directly to their posts on the subject. The upshot of all of this is that the court decided by 5-4 to affirm the judgment of the appeals court and invalidate the DC handgun ban.

I find the Heller opinion and associated dissents disappointing for several reasons. On a pragmatic level I would have preferred a larger majority for either side rather than the narrow 5-4 opinion that virtually guarantees this issue will continue to be fought at ballot boxes and courtrooms for years before we have a firm precedent for second amendment interpretation. On a more theoretical level I find neither the majority or the dissent offer a very compelling case for their interpretation.

Steven’s dissenting opinion pulls out the old canard that the second amendment merely protects the right to own a gun as part of some official organized militia, i.e., the feds can’t stop the states from designating individuals as militia members and allowing them to keep weapons. Scalia’s majority opinion decisively repudiates this view by pointing out that the militia was understood at that time to be the preexisting body of armed citizens. Moreover, it seems clear to me that one of the motivations behind the second amendment was to create an armed citizenry capable of resisting tyranny as they did in the American revolution. In other words the choice to give this right to the people rather than the states was deliberate and reflects the clear belief on the part of the founders that individual citizens had the right to keep the sort of arms necessary to be effective members of a citizen army. Ultimately it simply doesn’t make sense to grant this right to the people at large if it was really a right of the states to designate people who could bear arms.

But the second amendment simply makes no mention of individual self-defense and no amount of Scalia’s fancy footwork can change that. The best argument Scalia can make is citing sources from shortly after the 2nd amendment was passed who choose to take it as guaranteeing an individual right to self-defense. If the justices wanted to find the right to own arms for self-defense was one of the unenumerated rights or part of the penumbra then I would consider the argument but it simply isn’t part of the second amendment. Given the understanding of the federal government at the time of ratification it would actually be somewhat puzzling for the framers to write in protection of an individual’s right to self-defense from the federal government. Unlike today the worry wasn’t over regulation by the federal government but outright tyranny: laws against protest/criticism, eliminating resistance by disarming parts of the population. Moreover, Breyer makes a compelling argument against an absolute right to individual self-defense by pointing out a ratification era law barring the storage of loaded weapons inside buildings for the safety of firefighters.

However, even if you accept that the second amendment preserves an individual right to self-defense Scalia’s opinion offers no convincing response to the argument by Washington DC that long guns (shotguns, rifles, assault rifles?) are sufficient for this purpose. Indeed according to SCOTUSblog the district court had reviewed articles suggesting that long guns were more effective for home defense. All Scalia does is observe that hand guns are the most popular choice of weapon for self-defense but this tells us nothing. Maybe people buy handguns for self-defense because it looks like the guns on TV but surely the 2nd amendment doesn’t guarantee the right to own a ‘badass’ self-defense weapon. More generally this leaves us with no idea what sort of weapons the government can restrict. Can the government regulate tazers? What about mace? Frankly the idea that the second amendment would guarantee a right to a tazer if they were sufficiently popular strikes me a ludicrous. Moreover, Scalia’s view shows nearly no deference to the court’s deciscion in United States v. Miller which held that only weapons that were reasonably related to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia received 2nd amendment protection.

In my view the right interpretation of the second amendment protects an individual right to own the sort of weapons that generic members of the infantry would use. Thus the government should not be able to bar the possession of M16s, AK-47s or rifles but handguns would be fair game. Not only is this more true to the constitutional text and the original intent it is consistent with Miller. Unfortunately it’s also maximally politically unpalatable. It simultaneously pisses off the pro-gun lobby by allowing handgun bans while scaring the anti-gun lobby by eliminating bans on assault weapons. Of course the assault weapons ban is based purely on emotion (assault weapons scare people) not on a rational comparison of the joy peaceful users get with the harms a ban could avert. But when has that mattered? Note that my understanding of the second amendment would also allow laws banning the storage of loaded weapons in the house or other measures designed to avert accidental deaths.

This having been said I’m open to arguments for a national gun ban, or very heavy regulation. I’m skeptical that local regulations could be that effective in deterring gun deaths given the difficulty in preventing interstate transport of weapons but I would be more hopeful about a national regulatory regime. I just think any such law should be preceded by an amendment to the constitution. However, we must guard against the temptation to regulate guns just because they seem scary and are often used in crimes. While I have some guesses about what would and wouldn’t be reasonable laws I would be unwilling to encourage any specific law until I’d seen and understood the statistical arguments by both sides and I hope that other people will do the same.

So Phillip Sands, the author of torture team, is being interviewed on NPR as we speak about the use of harsh interrogation techniques at Guantanamo. Now I’m seriously bothered but many of the revelations about Guantanamo, particularly the possibility that we used harsh interrogation methods when we had strong reason to believe they wouldn’t be effective and that we kept people locked up despite strong reason to believe they posed no threat nor had committed no crime just to avoid looking foolish. Certainly the indefinite secret detention of people and the use of techniques like water boarding violates the spirit of both the US constitution and international human rights treaties whether or not they constitute technical violations. However, the suggestion that senior officials in the Bush administration, including Bush himself, face a real risk of being subject to criminal penalties by foreign nations is just absurd and actually encourages human rights violations. Moreover, the notion that merely suggesting that US law doesn’t bar certain kinds of harsh interrogation techniques is itself a war crime is flat out absurd.

Now is it possible that top members of the Bush administration will face prosecution for things they did in office? Yes, if later revelations stoke up sufficient public outrage they could face charges in the US but even that seems most unlikely. But the idea that Bush might end up being arrested during a trip to Europe after he leaves office is simply laughable. It’s one thing for the Europeans to arrest the former dictator of Chile and prosecute him for crimes that he had legal immunity for in Chile. Not only was there enough support in Chile for him to be (unsuccessfully) prosecuted but a country like Chile has much less international influence than the United States. Given the attitudes of US citizens toward international courts and US independence it’s simply not plausible that we wouldn’t make a fuss if another country tried to arrest Bush after he left office. It’s one thing to arrest a foreign dictator another to arrest a US president whose actions were supported by a substantial fraction of the populace. Even many people who might favor a prosecution in the US would recoil at the idea that the Europeans or anyone else could tell us what we could and couldn’t do. Arresting a former US president is the kind of stupid idea that could lead to a war (but won’t since no non-symbolic arrest will happen).

Moreover, perpetuating these simplistic attitudes about international law actually encourages human rights violations. Despite the fact that Chinese leaders and Kim Jung-Il have certainly committed human rights violations, including some that likely amount to torture, there is no serious suggestion that they will be prosecuted. This is appropriate as productive engagement is much more likely to improve the human condition than a hard line attitude. However, foreign leaders, knowing they won’t have the protections former US presidents enjoy, aren’t stupid will react accordingly. If they see that leaders of repressive regimes will be protected from prosecutions but former leaders of more open societies are not they have a substantial incentive to cling to power. On the other hand if we save war crime prosecution for truly horrific acts (genocide etc..) it might persuade dictators to soften their tactics or even give up power in exchange for pledges of immunity.

Finally I have to say I’m boggled by the idea that merely expressing a legal opinion about what US law allows could make one a war criminal. I mean if Yoo is supposed to be a war criminal for suggesting that water boarding was legal wouldn’t the human rights activist who protests the lack of a law preventing a US president from ordering water boarding be equally guilty? Now of course a legal opinion from the president’s legal advisers has legal significance that the opinion of a human right’s activist lacks but surely that legal significance doesn’t make it a war crime not to lie. If that human rights protestor was appointed as a legal adviser to be president he surely would not suddenly then be obligated to lie and pretend there was a law that barred water boarding when there was not. But if it isn’t criminal (or even immoral) for a legal advisor to say that water boarding isn’t currently illegal but really should be outlawed surely it can’t be criminal for him to mistakenly claim it isn’t currently illegal.

Now certainly, as we saw during the Nuremberg trials, if a lawyer goes beyond observing that something is legal to actively participating in decisions that choose to implement it than things are different. I suspect the intuition that Yoo has committed war crimes comes from people’s assumption that he deliberately twisted the law to achieve his preferred policy outcomes. However, as hard as it may be to believe, it’s far from clear that Yoo consciously did anything of the kind and it would certainly be near impossible to prove any such thing even if you think that water boarding rises to the level of a war crime.

So today on slashdot I ran across a link to law professor Daniel Solove’s article grappling with the “nothing to hide” argument against privacy protections. He certainly has some thought provoking things to say and his new book will likely be interesting but I think he makes some fundamental errors in his approach to the subject. Nevertheless, reading it did inspire me to better formulate some of my thoughts on the subject.

The problem with Solove’s arguments is that he tries to simultaneously argue for the value of privacy while seemingly rejecting the notion that there is any principled commonality to the values that we place under the rubric of privacy. While both of these notions are plausible on their own they are in significant tension with each other. If indeed privacy is a word like ‘game’, famously analyzed by Wittgenstein to be a hodgepodge of different concepts related only by a chain of analogies, then it’s at best pointless and confusing to defend it as a package and at worst a way to smuggle in values you can’t defend using the cover of an unprincipled linguistic grouping. Unless the values we term privacy have some important principled commonality then they should stand or fall on their own merits rather than riding the coat tails of the vague positive connotations we have with the word privacy.

To see that privacy isn’t really a monolithic notion compare the idea that other people shouldn’t be able to easily find out your social security number really doesn’t have much to do with the idea that the government shouldn’t be able to monitor your phone calls and reading habits. These two notions don’t really have very much in common. One of them is concerned with other people’s knowledge of your intimate affairs and private conversations while the other involves only a purely arbitrary identifying number. The reason we don’t want people to find out our social security number isn’t because it’s an intimate detail of our life but because it’s unfortunately used as an authentication method for certain financial transactions and we fear becoming the victims of credit fraud. Certainly it’s important that people not be able to buy a car in my name but arguments that defend my right to be free of government surveillance aren’t going to have much to say about who finds out my social security number and vice versa.

However, I do think there is a certain core concept that is shared by many, though far from all, things we conceptualize as a right to privacy. That is the notion that we should enjoy a certain autonomy or freedom of choice, both from the government and society, in how we conduct certain parts of our lives. Certainly this is no definition of even one kind of privacy but I think it’s the uncritical acceptance that it’s literally privacy that’s important that sidetracks so many people into silly issues like what facebook publishes by default on their friend feed¹. The reason I tend to be largely critical of privacy crusaders is that they tend to take the idea too literally and fight a lost cause trying to limit what other people are able to learn about you (endangering free speech….and privacy² along the way) rather than looking for the underlying value privacy provides for the culture and seeing how best to achieve that end in the information age

Ultimately what privacy provides is the freedom from judgment (be it legal, religious or social) about certain aspects of our lives. It does this both by making it practically difficult to enforce certain kinds of invasive laws (thus discouraging their enactment) as well as keeping your porn collection or wild spring break party a secret from your parents/priest/boss. Both of these mechanisms are endangered by the information age. The traditional protections of 4th amendment law border on uselessness in the face of fancy data mining programs to suggest likely offenders, the amount of information out there on the internet (your friends and neighbors gossip…and may take infrared pictures of your house even if the police can’t), and the huge amount of information we store on computers (police can subpoena your ISP’s buisness records or get access to your entire computer if they have probable cause to see even one document). Similarly search programs and the inevitable advent of facial recognition along with people’s tendency to post pictures to the internet will erase the anonymity you might have once had on spring break.

However, I think we can find replacements for these tools that provide the same benefits in the information age. Just as some other cultures have done we need to develop traditions of ignoring (or at least not scolding) based on certain aspects of people’s lives. This is the reason that unequal loss of privacy/anonymity is so much more dangerous than an equitable loss. Everyone has things that might embarrass them or present a less than professional image and if we all know that these can easily be found we are much more likely to let other people have their personal space as well. The legal aspect will be more difficult but it is also achievable. We will need to shift the focus of our protections away from the guarding of information and towards rules against intrusiveness. Perhaps in addition to rules requiring search warrants we could have rules barring unprompted investigation, i.e., rules that prevent tearing someone’s life up for a crime without a particularized identification of a victim who does/would have wanted an investigation. That’s just a shot in the dark but I suspect something better will be found.

In case you hadn’t heard Judge Kozinski just decided to recuse himself from the obscenity trial of Ira Issaacs because of the controversial pictures found in a (mistakenly) publicly accessible directory on his website. Reading the LA times article I linked above might give you the impression someone stumbled across his porn stash but an email from his wife and the comments in response to the Volokh Conspiracy coverage reveals that it wasn’t so much porn as crude humor. The most offensive content seems to have been either a man trying to relieve himself forced to flee from an aroused donkey or a (likely faked) picture of a young man fellating himself captioned with a spoof on the mastercard ‘priceless’ commercials. Hardly hard core content and even if it had been so what? The judge’s material was hosted on a private computer (possibly uploaded by his son) and (with the exceptions of minor copyright violations) there is no serious argument that he is guilty of any crime.

In fact I find it downright worrisome that judges can be forced to recuse themselves from an obscenity trial because they have tastes that some people find offensive. In effect if we demand that judges who are known to like risque pictures recuse themselves from obscenity cases we bias the pool of judges in a puritanical direction, much like death qualifying a jury biases them towards conviction. Now some might argue that a judge is obligated to recuse himself in a situation like this on the grounds that it demonstrates a conflict of interest but that argument is easily shown to be flawed.

Presumably the reason one might think there is a conflict of interest is that if Kozinski likes looking at risque photos he might feel greater affinity for the defendant or want to keep such images legal. However, if valid this argument would apply equally strongly to the judge who doesn’t like looking at risque pictures or finds them disgusting/offensive. After all if you find porn objectionable you probably have an even stronger motivation to find for the prosecution than someone who found some risque pictures amusing had to find for the defense. But of course no one would dream of demanding a judge recuse themselves because they dislike pornography.

If you still think Kozinski is obligated to recuse himself try replacing a pornography with death metal and check if the arguments still holds. Imagine that the government brought an obscenity prosecution against a band for playing some offensive kind of rock and roll back in the 50s or 60s (suppose Slayer was teleported back in time). Should judges have to recuse themselves in this case because they have been observed by members of the public rocking out in their car? Or most realistically suppose there was an obscenity prosecution over a book depicting child sexuality. Should a judge who read Lolita in college have to recuse themselves? What if they publicly admitted it was their favorite book thereby prompting a public outcry?

Ultimately judges are what stands in the way of tyranny by the majority (or minority who shames the majority into submission) and it’s harder for them to do that if they can be shamed into recusal because they aren’t sufficiently prudish. Unfortunately, because pornography is a sexual taboo there is an unfortunate tendency against defending it. Despite the vast numbers of people who consume internet porn no one wants to tell a news reporter they do, or even vigorously defend the practice lest their mom or aunt or whoever read this in the paper. This let’s people get away with ridiculous errors in logic that would be obviously absurd in any other context. Just in searching for background on this subject I ran into several articles that cast the general tendency of people to get bored with stuff they have already seen/done as if it was akin to drug addiction in the case of pornography. This situation with judge Kozinski is just another example that would never have happened if people didn’t shut off their brains when the issue of pornography came up.

I know I’m beating this issue to death so I will try to keep this post short but reading slashdot today I ran across this awful article from the Wall Street Journal Blogs saying women write better code than men. Now in and of itself the idea that statistically women write better code than men is neither absurd nor offensive but this article might as well have been ripped out of a 1950s era stereotype about women’s inferiority at math¹.

Emma McGrattan, the senior vice-president of engineering for computer-database company Ingres–and one of Silicon Valley’s highest-ranking female programmers–insists that men and women write code differently. Women are more touchy-feely and considerate of those who will use the code later, she says. They’ll intersperse their code–those strings of instructions that result in nifty applications and programs–with helpful comments and directions, explaining why they wrote the lines the way they did and exactly how they did it.

This remark is shortly followed by an equally over broad statement to the effect that men are too interested in showing off how clever they are to write readable code. Now while it’s certainly possible that (of the people who program) women are somewhat more likely to write better code (though I know of no evidence to this effect) this article adopts the sweeping tones of stereotype and bias to suggest that individual hiring decisions should favor women on these grounds. It is exactly this sort of unwarranted assumption that group characteristics make a difference even after individual factors (like say looking at previous code they have written, interviewing them) that distinguishes outright prejudice and discrimination from mere scientific hypothesizing. Well that plus the tendency to offer totally unsupported explanations that play into gender stereotypes (women are more touchy-feely).

If the conclusion had been the other way around and suggested that women were too touchy-feely to program well this vice-presidenty would probably quickly find themselves out of a job. This is why I blame faux feminism for this sort of attitude. It is exactly the confusion of feminism with the idea that we should cheer on women like they were a sports team that creates the impression this kind of harmful remark is reasonable. Despite obviously validating the idea that we should hire people based on unproven stereotyped generalizations about their gender instead of individual accomplishment this remark is seen as ‘ok’ because it favors hiring women. Another good example of this effect is how acceptable it has become to advocate for single sex education when coached in terms of helping women, even when the underlying theory would make Larry Summers cringe.

Now if the only harm these attitudes inflicted was a bit of discrimination against men you might reasonably think it wasn’t a huge deal². However, you simply can’t train people to accept traditional gender stereotypes and discriminate based on those only when it gives a certain kind of result. If you convince people to hire women for coding jobs because they are more touchy-feely you can’t avoid the fact that they are going to turn around and favor men for jobs in math, physics or the military where being touchy-feely is perceived as a negative (perhaps with some justification). Hell, even being good team players and leaving clear directions are going to be negatives for some job.

In fact I think what we are seeing right now is the harm of being touchy-feely about gender equality. The point is that deciding what views/people are good based on who sounds like they are on your side might have been fine when discrimination was primarily overt but when the primary concern is the affect of societal gender roles and semi-conscious stereotypes the greatest danger comes from the people encouraging that type of thinking and behavior, especially if they do so while claiming the `feminist’ moral high ground.

There are important questions about the appropriate role of government in encouraging healthy behavior. As a free society we should have deep reservations about forcibly taking people’s money and using it to tell them how they should live, even when we are sure that would make for a better society. History is replete with examples of tyrannical majorities wasting resources and even fueling crime combating`harmful’ behavior. Thus we already have plenty of reason to tread carefully when legislation to discourage tobacco use, encourage exercise or promote a healthy diet is proposed. However, I have a much more fundamental question. Is it even preferable to have a society where people live longer?

At first glance this seems to be a truly stupid question. After all it’s bad when people die early. Isn’t it? Well, I certainly don’t want to die and neither do most people but that misses the point. We all die eventually and even if we personally want to put off death as long as possible can we truly say that a society where the average life span is 90 years rather than 70 is a better place? Would a society where the average life span was 200 years be even better? What sort of life span would be optimal?

It’s tempting to answer ‘infinite’ and certainly it would be wonderful if we could all retain our youth for forever and never have to grieve over lost friends and family. However, for the immediate future this simply isn’t possible. No healthy diet or prudent lifestyle can reduce the (average) number of friends we must mourn¹ and no amount of yoga or wheatgrass smoothies can prevent old age from taking it’s toll. Moreover, suppose we really could increase our lifespan indefinitely. At least for the next century or so we would have to virtually stop reproducing to avoid outgrowing our resources.

Ultimately we can’t simply say ‘life is good so we want more of it.’ Almost certainly such a policy would actually demand we divert money from healthcare into programs encouraging reproduction. As a society we’ve already reached the conclusion that it’s better to maintain a relatively small population that can live well than to expand into a great multitude that can barely make do. But rationally applying this insight to this question suggests that investing in longer life spans might not make sense.

Certainly we feel greater pain when someone is snatched from life too early and so we certainly shouldn’t stop pursuing more effective treatments to save people who might otherwise be struck down in the prime of life. Nor would we want to create distress or anger by denying people treatment. However, researching ways to further prolong our life span would likely introduce greater variability (some people die of heart attacks at 65 others make it to 130) and thus prolong the time people would have to endure the loss of loved ones as well as the sense of tragedy and anger at their deaths. Other things being equal a society is better if people spend a smaller proportion of their lives old and frail and since extending old age is unlikely to make people substantially happier (on average²) investing in technologies to lengthen our lifespan seems counterproductive. Of course we should look for technologies that let people be healthy and fit for a greater fraction of their lives and if we are able to make 80 feel like 55 that might justify more investment in keeping people alive till 80.

The observation that merely putting off death is not necessarily a desirable end in and of itself also has substantial consequences to what kind of charity and aid is best to give to the third world. However, that will have to wait for another post.

So in a recent post I argued that we really shouldn’t care at all if there are innate gender differences because such differences would be irrelevant to our judgments about any individual’s ability. In that post I simply took it for granted that the presence of innate gender differences really shouldn’t affect our judgment of people’s ability but now I see this is a point I need to explore at greater length. In particular I think there are three major fallacies that people fall into which leads them to assume that the question of whether there are innate statistical differences in men and women’s proclivity for math and science makes a difference in people’s daily lives. These fallacies lead people to think that the existence of innate gender differences would somehow justify gender discrimination and bigoted stereotypes. Of course not liking the consequences of a theory is no reason to reject it but in this case it’s certainly worthwhile to repudiate the fallacious thinking that makes people care so much about this issue.

The three fallacies that I’ve noticed are the following.

1. The confusion of small statistical differences with our intuitive notion of a valid generalization.
2. The belief that innate factors are somehow set in stone while cultural or social effects are temporary and thus justify different inferences.
3. Failure to appreciate the power of conditionalization.

The first fallacy is pretty obvious but very hard to correct. Most people don’t have good quantitative skills, much less experience with statistics so tend to translate claims about small statistical differences into simple stereotypes. Even people who should know better often don’t apply their quantitative training to this domain. This is why you see people respond to claims about innate statistical differences as if someone had claimed that women simply couldn’t do math and science. Once you get beyond this point you tend to run into the second fallacy.

Unfortunately both sides in the nature vs. nurture debate encourage the notion that innate differences are simple matters of ability and social effects are easily overcome issues of confidence. This leads to the fallacious conclusion that somehow innate differences call for a policy of denying women positions in math/science while nurture effects simply call for more encouragement. This couldn’t be further from the truth. One of the largest determiners of math/science achievement is interest and any possible innate differences could just as easily be differences in interest as they are differences in ‘ability.’ Moreover, it’s totally unclear to what extent differences in experience and exposure at young ages make. Thus it’s easily possible that the current gender gap could be the result of some innate difference that makes girls less interested in science as currently presented but small tweaks in science education could grab their attention. Alternatively it’s surely possible that the gender gap is the result of deep cultural forces that are nearly impossible to change and can’t be compensated for by our educational system, e.g., the type of behavior that attracts male romantic interest biases girls away from math and science. Quite simply there is no simple moral or effect on our judgment that one answer to the nature/nurture debate should have as opposed to the other.

The third and last fallacy is perhaps the most problematic, particularly in light of the second fallacy. People tend to assume that if women statistically tend to be worse at task X this is reason to lower their estimate of some particular woman’s (perhaps themselves) ability at task X. Counterintuitively this just isn’t the case. Conditionalizing on the standard information we gather about virtually anyone we meet can eliminate or even reverse the effect that gender should have on our estimation of someone’s ability. If you’ve taken any probability courses you’ve probably seen this point made using the example of the famous berkeley discrimination case. If you haven’t let me give you a simple example.

It’s undoubtedly true that statistically men are worse at nursing than women. This isn’t a claim about innate ability just a simple observation following from the fact that more women than men are nurses hence fewer men have received nursing training. Thus if you know nothing about someone other than their gender you should expect men to have a lower nursing ability. However, this doesn’t entail that you should trust male nurses less than female ones. Nor does it entail that men who aren’t nurses are somehow worse at nursing than women who aren’t nurses. It could even be that men who choose to become nurses despite the stereotypes have particular talent for it and thus conditionalizing on profession reverses the effect gender should have on your expectation of someone’s nursing ability.

The same could very well be true for skill at math/science. Even if there is some innate factor that makes women statistically worse at math/science it’s quite possible that those women who do pursue math/science tend to be more skilled than their male counterparts. In other words once you know that someone is interested in pursuing math/science finding out that individual is a woman might increase the expectation of her ability despite the fact that statistically women were worse than men at math/science. Since we tend to gather all sorts of information about someone we meet or consider for a job it’s totally unjustified to use statistical facts about men vs. women in the general population to reach conclusions about a particular individual.

The issue of nature vs. nurture really, really doesn’t matter that much. It’s almost never justified to use weak group characteristics like this to judge an individual and it’s equally unjustified to take mere statistical differences in a profession as proof of discrimination. So aside from pure scientific curiosity we should forget about nature vs. nurture and concentrate on applied questions like: Does science education unnecessarily make girls feel marginalized or less able? Would greater exposure to female role models in science make more women satisfied with their choice of career? Does rote memorization at the middle school level create barriers that discourage more studious individuals from pursuing math and physics?

In the post before last I pointed out that despite the spin a recent study in science was actually better evidence for biological effects in mathematics ability than it was for the environmental hypothesis. In short showing that girls get better at both math and reading as gender equality increases without shrinking the gap between their math and reading scores is most of the hypothesis that girls simply gain some general academic advantage over boys (for instance they study more) in cultures that don’t oppress them. If this was straightforwardly a matter of discrimination or stereotyping we would expect women’s math and reading scores to equalize as gender equality increased.

Now it was bad enough when some random science summaries spun the study in this fashion but it’s even worse to see ars technica running stories saying things like this about the study:

But a new study suggests that, when it comes to math, we can forget biology, as social equality seems to play a dominant role in test scores.

Ughh, what is it about this topic that causes people to check their reasoning ability at the door? I mean I can understand that the general public might think the suggestion of a statistical difference amounted to a claim that women were incapable of doing math/science but people with a science background should know better. There is no serious doubt that the variation inside the genders is vastly larger than any possible difference in averages. Moreover, once you actually have some evidence about a person’s mathematical/scientific ability (like you’ve talked to them) their gender isn’t relevant. That is we should expect conditioning on actual evidence about someone’s ability should screen off any impact of their gender.

I write about this topic for the same reason I write about other topics. I find fallacious reasoning to be infuriating, especially when it seems to be motivated by a desire to reach certain comforting beliefs. However, it really should be a minor scientific curiosity. It doesn’t matter one jot what the cause of observed differences in gender performance might be. What matters is the effect these differences have on society and what actions we can take to minimize any harms that result from them.

I mean (hypothetically) suppose it turns out that the gender gap in math/science is caused entirely by social conditioning that makes women prefer some disciplines and men others but that those women who do choose to do math/science face no discouragement and those who don’t are made genuinely happy by their choices. In that case there is no compelling reason to force a change to the gender ratio in the sciences, especially if that change could only be brought about by painful social reorganization and reeducation (say by actively punishing women who pursue stereotypical careers to stop them from being role models for next generation).

On the other hand (hypothetically) suppose that the gender gap is the result of some innate difference in cognition but a simple change in the way science is conducted or taught would let many women who want to be scientists contribute productively to the field instead of having their dreams frustrated. Then obviously we should make that change regardless of the fact that the an innate difference was underneath the gender gap.

In short this issue really doesn’t fucking matter but it really really bothers me when I see people, especially scientists, spinning studies so heavily to reach the conclusions they find pleasant to believe. The roots of the gender gap are clearly complicated and almost certainly result from some complex interplay of innate and environmental factors but just think about how differently we would approach this problem if we were studying another species. Instead of prematurely trying to announce the death of either theory we would say the issue was still murky, explain the competing evidence and leave it at that. Why can’t we do that here too?