lambdaphage's comments

I debated how to present the CS data, because there are a few things going on there. Here are the raw counts:

http://images.techhive.com/images/idge/imported/article/ctw/...

The two spikes circa 1985 and 2003 are also present in the men's data.

What we see is not women checking out of CS, but much more men getting into it, hence the percentage of degrees awarded to women goes down.

Your point about accounting is an interesting one. I suspect it's explained by this: http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/25/average-iq-of-students...

I was referring to M.D.'s.

All jobs require some dealing with people and some dealing with things. Does that imply no difference between the fractions of the day that software engineers and social workers spend systematizing vs. empathizing?

But let's examine the point more closely: what is the name for the department that is explicitly in charge of managing human needs and social relationships at a large software development company? Who tends to prefer those jobs?

This is a good point worth keeping in mind. We're talking about a statistical property of groups of people, and one that is relatively uncommon in both groups.

The interesting thing about medicine and law is that they are professions that deal with human needs and social relationships. As formal barriers were removed, the percentage of law and medical degrees awarded to women steadily increased to parity:

http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/hua_hsu/cohen_do...

The graph doesn't show the last few years, but I believe medicine is over 50% women now.

Compare this to computer science. I can't find easily find data for Ph.D.s or master's degrees, so here is bachelor's degrees over roughly the same period:

http://core0.staticworld.net/images/idge/imported/article/ct...

Lastly, for contrast, look what happened to vet school:

https://www.avma.org/News/JAVMANews/PublishingImages/100215g...

(NB: technically enrollment rather than completion.) That looks to me pretty clearly like a thumb lifting off the scale.

I do not think the quantity of sexism in CS is zero. Yet from my experience of CS and law, I have a hard time believing that there is more bad behavior, (on the order of a 200-300% difference) among computer scientists than among lawyers. Maybe I'm wrong about that?

In any case I think comparisons to medicine and law actually raise more questions than they answer.

Are you suggesting that Dennett is a continental philosopher?

I am cringing. Gould was a classic case of projection, having been guilty of everything he accused his opponents of: misreading one's opponents, proneness to ideological bias, and experimental technique so sloppy that deliberate fraud starts to look like the simpler explanation. (http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjo...)

There are other bones to pick with Gould, but these are the ones that make him impossible to read as an interested layperson without personally verifying every sentence.

RNA is highly unstable.

The essay you link ultimately endorses the economics Nobel.

What is your preferred explanation? That a doctor suspected ebola but, because Duncan was an African without insurance, thought it better that he walk around for four more days?

Girlfriend's family is from Flanders, the Dutch-speaking region of Belgium. Her sister speaks fluent English despite very modest formal language training. (On the order of the n<=3 years of Spanish or French that most American students take without much to show for it.) She did, however, watch a lot of subtitled TV.

There are about 20 million Dutch speakers, vs. perhaps 400 million English speakers in the US and UK, which have large markets for TV shows and movies with correspondingly large budgets. For the average Dutch speaker, the subtitled offerings in English are apparently much richer than the home-grown stuff.

This, at least, was how it was explained to me by multiple independent Dutch-speaking Belgians who all had an embarrassingly firm command of idiomatic English.

Why do you think we observe the positive manifold, then?

This pair of rhetorical questions actually has a non-rhetorical answer, and it is far more interesting (though less precious) than the one implied here.

This being the internet, the serious answer is a mouseclick away: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_%28psychometrics%29

Yes, maxing out one dimension of performance may degrade it in another. This is just Berkson, again. My point is that along the entire range of variation, all reasonable measures of athletic performance are likely to be positively correlated. If you doubt this, consider the following thought experiment:

1. Pick an arbitrary athletic contest: 100m dash, bench press, obstacle course, marathon, whatever.

2. You pick a member of the population at random.

3. I pick a member of the German national football team at random.

4. If Joe Schmoe wins, I pay you a dollar. If Dieter Schmieter wins, you pay me a dollar.

5. Repeat until convinced.

Who do you think will win more money in the long run? Will the Germans tend to win because of their high general fitness, or will it be a toss-up because the Germans merely have "high soccer fitness" which does not help (or perhaps even disadvantages) them at non-soccer tasks?

That is what I mean when I speak of a "general factor of fitness". Over the whole range of population, people who do better at one athletic task will tend to do better at any other. If you take a sample from the population, measure their performances on whatever athletic tasks you choose, and drop the results into PCA, you will find one factor which is positively correlated with every test and explains, I'm guessing, at least 3/4 of the variance. What happens at the extreme tails is already acknowledged, and does not bear on this general point.

I tried to find data for non-elite-athletes taking something like the NFL combine and couldn't find anything, but there, at least, is a testable prediction for you.

My only point about a "general factor of fitness" was that I am unfazed by the comparison to IQ, because physical fitness is a perfectly reasonable concept that captures something real in the world. So too IQ. If you think the analogy is inapt, remember who brought it up :)

Two points about this. First, a consensus developed over more than a hundred years of study requires a little more than an off-handed dismissal-- do you understand _why_ a general factor of intelligence is acknowledged by practically everyone who has studied the issue, or why it is impossible to devise a test that purports to measure cognitive ability but varies independently of that general factor?

Secondly, I gladly accept your reductio of a "general factor of fitness". If you restrict yourself to the range of world-class athletes, I grant that performance in archery will correlate negatively with performance in sprinting. This is just Berkson's paradox, or the "restriction of range" phenomenon. If you consider the entire population, however, I would be very surprised if a "general factor of fitness" didn't fall right out of a battery of athletic tests. In general, people who are faster than average will also be stronger than average and probably more dextrous too, and it makes sense to call that factor "physical fitness".

I can't speak for the GCTA method, but the five main findings discussed in the review have all been known within the field for years: this is a review, rather than a research article.

If these findings are surprising to you, it is because there is probably no greater gap between lay and expert opinion than on the subject of intelligence. The psychological study of intelligence has a poor reputation among the lay public primarily due to the perception that it might support unsavory political conclusions. Hence, psychometric research must be intrinsically flawed crackpottery. In truth, the correlations between IQ and various life outcomes exceed practically any other effect observed in social science. Further, we have as much reason as we ever could have in social science--from a variety of sources all pointing in the same direction--to suspect that the causal arrow points from intelligence to good outcomes.

I encourage you to look into the issue for yourself, but my synopsis is that the picture one gets from the literature is unrecognizably different from the picture one gets from non-specialist media.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainstream_Science_on_Intellige...

Let a thousand flowers wilt!

Consider this statement from the lead author:

"As economies develop, one language often comes to dominate a nation’s political and educational spheres. People are forced to adopt the dominant language or risked being left out in the cold – economically and politically."

Another way of putting that would be:

"People learn foreign languages so they can communicate with a greater number of people", which does not have quite the same potential for moral panic as the original.

The paper still appears to be embargoed, but the authors have not made much of a case for why linguistic diversity per se is important. Not nearly enough to support their moral claim that states should take efforts to encourage people to speak languages that they themselves have decided not to speak.

I don't understand how this constitutes an explanation:

"Why don't restauranteurs maximize their profits? They're leaving money on the table," said Alice.

"They don't maximize their profits because, if they did, they wouldn't be running a restaurant in the first place. The fact that so many of them end up destitute is proof of that," replied Bob.

That seems to me more like a reaffirmation than an explanation. Doesn't it still seem mysterious when you put it that way?

If the market for restaurants were far from competitive (due to say, a law sharply limiting the number of restaurants in a town) I could understand that sort of attitude. It seems to me, though, that even though there's a lot of product differentiation, there are still many restaurants per cuisine type in every major city and ultimately, a meal is a meal. We should be able to learn something by granting that the market is competitive. So that in the long run marginal revenue equals marginal cost, and firms that can't do that, exit.

Given that, why are so many restaurants run as labors of love according to principles that would make a freshman econ major wince? And does that explain why so many restaurants that are run that way are run into the ground? Doesn't this state of affairs (which is pretty much public knowledge to anyone who's ever had a friend who worked in a restaurant) imply the existence of a large stack of $20 bills on the sidewalk for a profit-maximizing restaurant to swoop in and pick up?

That question isn't rhetorical; I find restaurant economics genuinely confusing, to the point where I am willing to believe that the most parsimonious explanation involves legions of chef/owners irrationally blowing their credit ratings on a mid-life crisis. A mid-life crisis with waitstaff and sanitation permits.

Monogamy should decrease sibling-sibling genetic conflict, relative to polygamy, since you can expect to be more closely related to your siblings on average. Even in ideally monogamous species, though, there is still genetic conflict between siblings, and between parents and children. Even though kin selection can drive these relationships toward cooperation, there still exists an opportunity for conflict whenever a behavior would benefit you more than twice what it would cost your sibling. The tension is heightened for parent-offspring relationships, since the expected reproductive potential of the parent is even lower from the offspring's genes' point of view. In the cases where this doesn't hold, such as in _Hymenoptera_ where females share 3/4 of their variation with their sisters through a quirk of genetics, eusociality tends to evolve and you get as conflict-free a family as you could imagine. A hive. That's what the absence of parent-offspring conflict looks like.

Even during fetal development, in which both parties have a strong interest in the survival of the other, there is a range of conditions that would be acceptable (i.e. better than nothing) to both parties. You should still expect replicating gene machines in such a scenario to claw over the surplus: the mother seeking to distribute her resources among all her offspring in a way that maximizes her fitness, and the fetus to maximize its own.