Specficially what I’m talking about is the hubub caused by some criticism of Sarah Palin suggesting that as a mother to 5 (one of whom has special needs and another is pregnant) she might find it difficult to manage the responsibilities of the president’s office if it came to that. Many people have shot back that this is unfair since no one is asking Obama about how much time his family will occupy. Maybe it is unfair maybe it isn’t. I don’t find fairness a very useful (or meaningful) concept in situations like this. However, absent further evidence it is a worry that is more reasonable to have about Palin than about Obama.

For starters Palin has a larger family with younger children and most importantly has a special needs child (downs syndrome). Right away this makes comparisons to Obama invalid. Still, one might point out that even if Obama was in this position the same questions wouldn’t be asked of him because he is a man. That’s completely correct. However, this isn’t some groundless double standard. As many feminists have been complaining about for years it really is still true that women do more of the child rearing than men. It really doesn’t matter whether you think that is the result of a chauvinistic society, an intrinsically greater maternal instinct or space rays affecting our brains. Given that women are much more likely to be the ones on call for their offspring’s minor emergencies and problems it’s a valid question to ask whether such an eventful family life will interfere with Palin’s ability to function as president if McCain passes away (if she can govern Alaska she can handle being VP). Like it or not our culture (either innately or historically) is one in which women tend to put a greater priority on childcare relative to their work than do men. Given all the social pressure evaluating women based on their maternal success rather than their professional success it would be quite surprising if this wasn’t the case even disregarding the impact of breast feeding, giving birth and the evolutionary psychology reasons to expect this outcome.

Of course Palin’s husband might be the primary caregiver for their children (many men are) and Palin might neglect her family for the sake of her career to the same extent the average male VP candidate does. In fact I am quite confident that Palin’s family wouldn’t substantially interfere with her being president. Which is really too bad because given what i know about her views I’d be much more comfortable taking my chance on whatever adviser might run things in her place. Partially my convinction stems from the fact that I’m not convinced that the long nights and extra hours pay off that well for a president but more so from the fact that Palin has managed to make it to this point with her family. However, none of this changes the fact that it perfectly reasonable to believe that a woman with a large family with special needs would be more likely to have difficulty giving the crazy dedication to the job than a man in a similar circumstance. I don’t believe this is enough of a difference to justify trumping policy/judgment considerations with this relatively minor worry but this whole `experience’ debate is no less trivial.

In short I find it annoying when people go to great trouble to assert something (women work harder than men because they must do more childcare when they get home) and then turn around and try and deny the obvious consequences when they support (even if weakly) a conclusion they dislike². Ultimately what puzzles me about this whole thing is why people feel inclined to go down this path at all. If people would just say a more understandable version of something like this I would be happy, “Yes, women might be slightly more likely to invest time at home but anyone at this level must have heroic dedication to their work and any minor difference in probabilities is outweighed by the potential for overestimation of this effect due to reliance on stereotypes .”

Another debate swirling around Palin is the acceptability of pulling her teenage daughter’s out of wedlock pregnancy into the campaign. Before I say anything more about this point I want to express how sorry I feel for her daughter. It’s bad enough that she isn’t going to get an abortion³ and worse that she is going to be pressed into marriage at 18 but she has to deal with normal teenage embarrassment plus the shame of being knocked up all on national TV. However, no matter how emotionally salient this particular girl’s suffering may be to us she is just one person while the choice of our next president will dictate policies affecting teen pregnancies in the thousands at the very least not to mention deciding matters of life and death for millions and setting the fates of nations. Thus my conclusion is that if this girl’s plight can bring home the consequences of abstinence only education and abortion restrictions enough to really affect policy then we would be remiss to let hundreds or thousands of other girls end up in much worse positions just to shield this one girl from the spotlight. That having been said we should minimize the intrusion that the political campaign has into this girl’s life, e.g., the policy of avoiding her first name seems appropriate, and avoid anything but the most indirect of references lest one trigger a backlash.

For starters I think it’s fairly irresponsible for a publication of the AAAS to offer a statement like this as unqualified commentary

The results “essentially confirm” earlier studies–and they should finally put to rest the idea that girls aren’t going into technical fields because they can’t do the math, says Ann Gallagher, a psychologist who studies testing at the Law School Admission Council in Newtown, Pennsylvania.

The casual reader will certainly understand this claim as saying that women are not innately disadvantaged relative to men in technical fields. Yet this research doesn’t even come close to proving this claim and in light of broader trends in male/female school performance that came up previously this result is perfectly compatible with girls being innately statistically worse at doing mathematics. Given that girls tend to outperform boys generally in academics before college we must either conclude that girls have greater innate intellectual talent or that some other factor, such as a greater willingness to study or pay attention to the teacher, accounts for this general academic superiority and must be accounted for to accurately compare innate ability. While the former hypothesis shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand the later one seems more likely¹ meaning that this study is essentially useless in comparing the innate abilities of boys and girls in math/science. While the authors of the research article might have reasonably expected their audience to be aware of the generally higher performance of girls in pre-college schooling leaving these considerations out of interpretive articles for the lay reader is at best unacceptable sloppiness.

True, the sentence I quoted is technically true. Girls have the literal capability to do technical fields but the obvious implication is that they have statistically equal innate ability which simply isn’t demonstrated by this piece of research. Unfortunately the article on ars is no better.

Thus, the gender gap in math performance seems to be insignificant in grade school, which is good news. Unfortunately, that does not help explain why the gender gap widens later in life. It is possible that pressure from society eventually catches up to women and makes it difficult to stay in certain fields, as the problem certainly doesn’t seem to be innate intellectual capability.

Once again this is a technically correct claim that is nevertheless extremely misleading. For starters, just like the piece in Science NOW this remark plays to the false idea that there is a sharp well-defined distinction between nature and nurture while also implying that whatever social effects cause the gender bias in the sciences must be negative. It’s equally possible that women are relatively more likely to be drawn away from math/science by other interests (child rearing, law, other non-technical pursuits). Even discouraging social pressures aren’t necessarily bad. If women leave technical subjects because they find math/science nerds less hot or simply don’t like hanging out with them that’s not a harm against women². Moreover, there are a vast number of explanations that don’t fall clearly on either the socialization nor innate differences side, e.g., suppose women are innately less rebellious and more eager to please authority figures and thus our educational system is more likely to snuff out their interest and ability to think critically. Fallaciously suggesting that social effects must be harmful barriers to women is almost as bad as what the sexist individuals on the nature side of the debate do when they conflate evidence of innate differences with female incapacity.

As if this wasn’t enough the arstechnica article casually dismisses the results from the article about greater male variation in performance and the Science NOW article ignores them entirely. Interestingly the study found that different races favored different genders at the high end of the tests, e.g., more Asian girls than Asian boys scored at the very high end while more white boys than white girls scored at the top. Still, while both ars and the original journal article dismiss the effects found as small in a discipline requiring mathematical ability at the 99th percentile these data suggest we should find 67% women and only 33% men. Pointing out that some engineering fields have only 15% women as the journal article does only tells us there are other factors at work but it doesn’t downplay the significance of this one. In fact given that math and physics Ph.D.s are probably almost exclusively chosen from the top half percent in mathematical ability this effect on it’s own might account for much of the observed gender gap. Moreover, in combination with the normal tendency of people to clump with others of the same gender and the role of friends/acquaintances in determining classes and majors it’s certainly plausible that even relatively minor differences in gender ratio could be magnified into something larger even if everyone acted in a fair and reasonable fashion.

Ultimately, however, any conclusions you might have been tempted to draw from the results in this article are undone by the fact that none of the questions asked in the standardized tests required serious thought. I stand with the researchers in bemoaning the sorry state of standardized testing in pre-college education but unfortunately for them this undermines any conclusions they might wish to draw about gender and innate ability. Quite simply how well you can memorize the quadratic formula and plug in numbers is totally irrelevant to your ability to do higher mathematics. I’m about to get my Ph.D. in mathematics despite being almost held back a grade because I wasn’t fast enough at my multiplication tables and regularly losing a fair number of points on math tests in high school because I didn’t memorize their stupid rules.

Of course there is nothing here to suggest that the gender differences we see in technical fields are the result of any innate differences but this research certainly doesn’t show otherwise so it shouldn’t be presented as doing so. Frankly I’m quite disturbed at the persistent bias in lay scientific articles about this subject. While I wholeheartedly agree about the importance of disabusing the public about their simpleminded stereotypes about gender differences and strongly support efforts to root out remaining discriminatory treatment covering up the complexities of the issue as these articles do feels too close to being propaganda for the desired answer for my taste.

During the debate the mental health professional opposing the barrier offered rational responses and citations pointing out the faulty reasoning used in arguments for the efficacy of the barrier those who wanted the barrier would call in to say something like, “you admit a barrier might save some people so how many lives is enough?” or, “If you just say we will always have suicides your saying we will always have poverty and…” and those callers at least were making cogent arguments. Many others simply related their personal knowledge of people who had tried to commit suicide and otherwise used emotional ploys (likely unconsciously) to frame the question as whether you were for or against suicide. One caller even went so far as to explicitly express her outraged amazement that someone in the mental health profession would be so cold and unfeeling as to not want to stop suicides.

What is notable about these remarks is that the guest opposing the barrier was arguing that it simply wouldn’t be effective and that we should put our resources into mental health services rather than barriers. The only role these arguments, or the anecdotes offered in the SF gate series promoting the barrier could have in the argument is to make people feel bad for not supporting the barrier. Indeed, despite the fact that at some point we must trade off cost against lives saved (a billion dollars would not be a cost effective price to pay to save one person) some of these arguments derive their force only by pushing the opponent to bite the bullet and admit that these lives aren’t worth X dollars.

To be fair, the callers opposing the barrier were no better. Their arguments seemed to be little more than thinly glossed resentment at being forced to accomodate suicidal individuals. Also the lady supporting the barrier did make reasonable points by citing several studies that on their face would seem to suggest a barrier would be effective. These studies were pretty much the same ones mentioned in this article and fairly easily rebutted. For instance, showing that survivors of one attempt have good prospects for survival is almost totally useless and may even work argue against the barrier. Not only do the survivors constitute a biased sample containing few of those most intent on killing themselves but this statistic, if valid, argues for ensuring that people first attempt suicide in a fashion that is likely to be prevented. Yet, unless you believe a large portion of people who jump off the golden gate bridge do so on impulse while crossing the bridge for unrelated reasons, you would expect that putting up a suicide barrier on the golden gate that is known to be nearly foolproof would drive people contemplating suicide to focus on another location that may not be so easily monitored. Moreover, making it impossible to jump off a particular bridge seems much more akin to taking a single gun off the street or blocking access to one type of barbiturate while leaving others on the market than the wholesale elimination of one convenient method of killing yourself, e.g., putting your head in a coal-gas stove. Not to mention the fact that a single historical data point about gas stoves is highly suspect, likely involves plenty of confounding factors and the rise in suicides 15 years hence is inconsistent with the supposed claim.

Still, even if you generously believe that the barrier will prevent a number of deaths approximately equal to the 34 confirmed suicides that occur some years this simply doesn’t get you to the conclusion that a suicide barrier is justified. For instance economic studies suggest that we implicitly trade off a single life for about 1.5 million dollars. Importantly even if our individual choices in terms of risks and rewards would place a higher dollar value on a statistical life it’s the choices implicit in government decisions that are really relevant since if we could use the 50 million that it will likely cost to build the barrier to save more lives some other way surely that would be preferable. Thus not even counting the loss of utility that might occur from a degradation of the bridge aesthetics nor the fact that the life of a suicidal person is likely to be less enjoyable and thus contribute less utility than an average member of society (suicidal people really do feel more unhappy than most of us) the barrier is a close call. With these factors considered it seems to me that the costs outweigh the benefits.

If you disagree that’s fine but it’s disturbing that people support these projects merely to avoid thinking of themselves as cold because they weigh the cost against the value of the lives lost. That doesn’t make you warm and caring, it makes you a moral monster. Deciding that someone’s life isn’t worth the amount of money it costs to save may seem cold but it’s not as horrific as letting people die because you wanted to feel warm and fuzzy so you couldn’t be bothered to balance the lives this money could save if used to improve road safety with those that might be saved via a suicide barrier.

There is certainly a kernel of truth in these stories as in most of the misleading articles New Scientist publishes. However, these articles make it sound as if we are going to run out of various rare earth metals the way you might run out of toilet paper at home, i.e., we used it all up and have to make do without it. Indeed the article in the Asimov magazine explicitly analogizes this ‘crisis’ to a science fiction scenario of a world without usable iron. True, the prices of many rare earth metals and even Zinc are rising rapidly and for many of them we are currently using them faster than they are being mined. But does that mean we will ‘run out’ or even have to give up our flat screen TVs with Indium based transparent transistors or fancy new Intel CPUs with Hafnium based high-k dielectric? Certainly not. Moreover, we most certainly won’t ‘run out’ of these metals the way these stories suggest.

The idea that the Indium on Earth is just going to be used up in 2017, Terbium in 2012 and Zinc in 2037 is just absurd from both a geological and economic point of view. As an economic matter the market won’t simply let us keep increasing our consumption until we suddenly run out. Rather, when demand increases relative to supply the price rises and decreases consumption. If companies really believed zinc was going to simply run out in 2037 do you think they would be selling it cheaply enough to make it cost effective to make pennies with it or use it in many other trivial ways? There isn’t any great crisis ahead, merely a rise in price for these metals that will cause other metals to be substituted where possible and wasteful uses to be eliminated (eliminate the damn penny!) while essential uses (LCD displays, CPUs) continue. If you don’t believe me put your money where your mouth is. If you think we will simply run out of Terbium in 4 years buy up some Terbium or Terbium futures and you’ll make a fortune.

It’s an even more absurd proposal from a geological perspective. Neither Indium or Gallium occurs naturally in high concentrations in any mineral. Rather small quantities of both these minerals are isolated from Zinc deposits (Sphalerite) and in the case of Gallium Bauxite and coal as well. Already then something seems fishy about the suggestion we would run out of Indium in 9 years but wouldn’t run out of Zinc for another 20 years after that. Surely companies aren’t going pull all of the worlds Zinc deposits out of the ground so they can isolate the 50ppm of of Gallium and then pay to store the Zinc for another 20 years. Moreover, some simple math shows how absurd the suggestion is that we will simply run out of Zinc.

Zinc makes up .0004% of the Earth’s crust and the continental crust in turn accounts for .374% of the earth total mass. Wikipedia tells us the Earth has a mass of 5.97 * 10²⁴ kilograms and doing the math gives us 8.910¹³ metric tons of Zinc in the continental crust. Given a current consumption rate of about 7.110⁶ metric tons a year we could continue at this rate for 10 million years before we depleted the Zinc in the crust.

Of course we can’t efficiently extract anywhere near all the Zinc in the crust and it’s the notion of efficient extraction that’s central to this issue. Unlike the toilet paper you keep in your bathroom mineral deposits aren’t all equally easy to extract until you suddenly run. If we were willing to pay more for minerals like Zinc companies would start mining locations that were formerly unprofitable. Conversely if the amount of Zinc we have sitting around in storage shrinks the price of Zinc will rise and consumption will decrease. Likely the numbers quoted in the New Scientist article describe the point at which current rates of usage will deplete the proven reserves of these various minerals in the ground. In other words they tell us how long these metals would last if mining companies didn’t bother to go look for more, didn’t start extracting ore from regions currently unprofitable when prices increased and people kept using them at the same rate despite increased scarcity. We might as well assume the Martians are stealing our metal with ray guns to predict future catastrophic shortages. Now I’m just guessing at what these numbers are supposed to actually mean (the articles couldn’t be bothered to tell us that) but there is no doubt that none of these articles gives cause to be anxious.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

It’s well known to parents that to raise a child correctly sometimes you must suppress your sympathy for your children and punish them or make them deal with the consequences of their actions. Often if we want children to learn to deal with a situation we have to suppress our instincts for sympathy and let them bear responsibility. While I don’t think the affect of female sympathy is quite like that of the over-indulgent parent it has many similar features. A good example is the issue of crying.

It’s a frequent (and likely valid) complaint that women’s tendency to cry more than men holds them back in the workplace. As primates you can’t avoid the fact that we will parse tears as a sign of weakness while swears or more aggressive seeming behavior send a more threatening message². However, speaking as a guy who cries more than most of my female friends I’m pretty sure that our upbringing has a massive effect on our inclination towards tears³. Indeed if we gave girls the same degree of shit we give boys for crying the crying gap would shrink radically if not disappear all together. Of course I do support being less hard on boys for crying but so long as we are inclined to help crying girls (crying guys on the street are ignored) the intrinsic harms of appearing vulnerable will encourage men to cry less⁴.

Crying is really a minor point in the larger picture. A much more worrying instance of this kind of sympathetic sexism is the way we we tend to treat men and women in arguments. Intellectual arguments are the lifeblood of many disciplines and they are especially important to understanding science and math where challenging your friend who got a different answer is often the best way to learn the material but unfortunately the women who come into my office hours for math are way less likely to be engaged in any sort of argument (by other female or male peers) than the guys. If we wanted a more equitable society we would be teaching girls to give as good as they got in an argument and suck it up if they lose like we do boys. However, instead of sending girls the message that they should hold their own like boys the people who feel strongly about women’s issues today are the most likely to attack any man who upsets a woman by arguing with her.

In short ‘feminism’ has decayed into the same kind of ‘respect for women’ mentality that the Victorians used to put women on a pedestal while keeping them from achieving equality. Intuitively we all understand that if people see someone as needing of protection or requiring special gentle treatment they will also see that person as weaker and less capable. Thus if we truly want girls to succeed in the rough and tumble intellectual world of mathematics and physics we have to stop treating them like they were fragile dolls requiring special protections. If we want true gender equality we need to go a lot further. We need to congratulate girls on being competitive and argumentative like we do with guys but we also need to discourage them from asking for help, breaking down or appearing helpless like we do with guys.

I would like to live in such a world (and to some extent do) but I think it’s quite clear that most of society, including most of those who would identify as feminists have no such desire. What most people desire is an updated version of the Victorian pedestal where we tell women they can do whatever they want and write off any statistical differences to unnamed discrimination while at the same time continuing to treat women as fragile objects to be protected. Most people would rather live in a society where ditching your boyfriend beside the road is less bad than ditching your girlfriend no matter who has the black belt. Most women would rather date men who can help them with their homework when they break down rather than men who sob when they can’t get a math problem. ‘Feminists’ especially seem to prefer a society where men get shit for making a girl cry in an argument and the girl receives sympathy even if the guy did nothing but frustrate her by being stridently correct. Ultimately the problem is that most people, ‘feminists’ included like gender roles a great deal but also want perfect (statistical) professional parity. However, you can’t just take gender roles on and off the way you do with hats. The stereotypes and attitudes people form as young children will follow them into the laboratory as well as the living room and bedroom. People need to make a choice about whether they want gender equality of not and if not stop pretending.