angryprofessor

So you are proposing that chemicals cause aggresion in rats, and aggression in humans, but for a different reason? Seems unlikely to me.

Double blind experiments do show causation (ignoring metaphysical discussions).

There are 3 possibilities: Chemical -> Behavior, Behavior -> Chemical, or ??? -> (Chemical and behavior).

A randomized trial eliminates the latter two possibilities (since chemical is correlated only to a coin flip). Double blind eliminates experimenter bias.

>Empirical observations show that chemicals have some correlation with emotions, which does not imply that either causes the other.

Timing and randomization shows that chemicals are the cause. Double blind experiments must have been done at some point, which would show the effect is causative.

As for drug effects being cultural, I disagree. Amphetamines also cause aggression in rats, for instance:

http://www.springerlink.com/content/p2745782608v6558/

Ideas could cause aggression, certainly. Lots of things can.

However, we DO know chemicals can in humans. Pot and ecs reduce aggression, while meth increase it. I don't know if particular mechanisms are understood, I'm not a biochemist. But empirical observations do show that chemicals (in some way) affect aggression (and other emotions).

As for ideas, we don't know the mechanism there either. In fact, we understand the mechanisms of thought less than those of emotion. I can predictably make you and other humans I don't know happy or sad with chemicals; I can't do the same with ideas.

>I, and a majority of my friends, are in favor of the war.

I'm not opposed to it either (1). I guess I'm assuming you live on the coast; if you do, it's very surprising if you know multiple people who favored the war.

Regardless, my point is that many women make an emotional decision to support Hillary. They then come up with rational sounding reasons after the fact.

In any case, the point is that we know for certain that chemicals in the brain influence emotion and decision making (e.g., Ritalin). And the silliness/irrationality described on overcoming bias is mostly emotion defeating reason.

Regarding aggression specifically, we know that males are more aggressive both in humans and other mammals. Why do you suspect a non-chemical cause in humans, and a chemical one in other mammals?

>To reasonably be so certain I haven't had a girlfriend, you must think I am quite young. What about my writing style makes you think I am young?

I have no idea what your age is. I've never met a person who has had a seriously relationship and also believes women don't make extremely emotional decisions.

(1) I think freeing Kurdistan was sufficient justification, just as freeing Kuwait was sufficient justification for Iraq 1. At this point, I favor either ending it immediately or doing it right (split the country into small pieces, let them merge together if they want).

No offense, but I'm 99% convinced you've never had a girlfriend.

Here is a blog that has links to lots of quantitative evidence.

http://www.overcomingbias.com/

For more anecdotal evidence, ask your female friends why they support Hillary for president. When they give the rational (but mistaken) response "she is against the war," point out her actual position. Ask if this changes their view. If you believe people are rational, you might be surprised at the results.

edit: I don't mean to single out women as irrational. Men are too, though in different ways (a comparable example: lots of anti-war men like McCain). But since we are discussing gender differences, the Hillary example popped into my head.

The best explanation I've seen for the disparities within science is reasoning/mathematical ability. String theory () requires the most (all difficult math), experimental condensed matter requires much less.

By the way, I should have mentioned that these disparities exist after grad school, not among first year students. They appear after qualifying exams/coursework has weeded out the people who aren't super smart.

() I'm not a snobby string theorist, I do computational E&M. But string theorists are the smartest, for reasons I can explain another time.

As for hormones:

First, animals do have personalities, though they are different from humans.

Second, it doesn't need to bypass intelligence. Humans aren't computers with an "emotion" screensaver on the front. Humans make most decisions (partially) emotionally. Starting a business or choosing a field is not a purely rational decision, no matter what most business owners want to think.

>...So, for example, suppose culture contains a trigger which causes parents to be more discouraging of one type of children's book than another, for girls. ...

I could consider such explanations plausible for explaining gender gaps between law and chemistry.

But theoretical high energy physics vs experimental condensed matter physics? That sounds way too specific for a diffuse cultural cue that no one can identify.

>By what mechanism does testosterone cause aggressive personalities?

Hmm, I thought testosterone increased aggression, but a quick google search suggests the correlation goes the other way.

Nevertheless, it is known that most male mammals are more aggressive than females. Whatever the biochemical cause, this trait (in humans) could explain greater success/participation in business.

>It's easy to make up and describe a cultural factor that would explain the data. For example, the previous shift was about how adult women were treated in public -- open discrimination. The second shift will come when parents (and others) treat young children more equally in subtle ways. That's one possible cultural explanation, of many.

You still need to explain why this affects physics, but not law.

This idea seems very weak when you look at gender gaps within fields. Most people barely know the difference between physics and chemistry (let alone theoretical vs experimental, or condensed matter vs high energy), yet there are gender gaps between them. Compare also web design to programming.

How can culture cause a disparity between things that the culture doesn't even know about?

>But for biology, there does not exist a single reasonable explanation that can account for the data. In particular, in must detail by what mechanism the genes effect the personality of adult women. That is, "there is a gene for business" wouldn't suffice, without saying specifically how that gene works.

For business, aggression would be my best guess. Testosterone is known to cause aggression, and it is also known that men have more of it.

>So I don't know specifically why it is that parents, and others, discourage girls from business and technical areas in particular.

Not only technical areas, but also particular technical areas. What makes experimental physics less technical than theoretical, and chemistry less technical than physics?

Also, if you look at the percentage of women in technical fields, it does look like cultural barriers dropped. I.e., over the same timeframe that cultural barriers dropped in medicine, they dropped similarly in physics/engineering, causing women to increase from about 1970-1990. After 1990, the % women was roughly flat in all fields: in medicine at 50%, in physics at 20%.

Basically, womens liberation had the same qualtitative effect on physics that it had on medicine; only the magnitudes differ.

This strongly suggests that some other factor is keeping women out of technical fields. It could be cultural, but it's a completely different type of cultural barrier than the one that kept women out of medicine and physics up until the 1990's. It could also be biological, I don't see much evidence for or against that.

>One thing I can tell you is that women working in a field does not imply the problem is solved. First, they might be less skillful, on average. But second, they might have had to put in more effort to achieve the same level of skill, and that could be very hard to detect.

Lots of difficult to measure things are possible. I'll wait for evidence of them.

(*) By the way, I'm using physics/EE as a proxy for all technical fields, since I've been forced to sit through lots of meetings on that topic. Speaking openly in those meetings was frowned upon...

> And in particular, it is more repressive of females, and cripples their ability to think more, especially in business and technical areas.

Why business and technical areas in particular?

Historically, I'd agree with you. But that effect has completely vanished in many fields: law and medicine are two prominent examples. It also partially vanished in technical fields; physics went from 0% to 20% women in the same way that medicine went from 0% to 50%.

Why do you think that physics and computer science are more anti-woman than medicine? And for that matter, why is experimental physics less anti-woman than theoretical physics? And similarly, why does environmental engineering have more women than electrical?

It's not clear cut, mainly due to a lack of useful data. I don't know much about the labor market in the UK (your link only discusses employment/unemployment in 2007, not the effects of minimum wage in 1998), but I'll discuss the US.

In the US, only 1-2% of workers make minimum wage. If a minimum wage law drove 50% of them out of work over 2 years, it would increase unemployment by only 0.25-0.5%/year. And 50% is a huge; in reality, far fewer than 50% of minimum wage workers will be driven out of the market.

The effects on minimum wage also don't last much beyond a few years, since the minimum wage is not indexed to market wage for low skill jobs (or even to inflation, which is not the same thing). So in a few years, the minimum wage drops below market wage and becomes irrelevant.

This effect is sped up by companies raising prices (since costs rise across the industry, this doesn't cause a loss of market share). This drives up prices, causing inflation, which again reduces the effect of minimum wage.

Minimum wage is mainly just a a propaganda tool for politicians. That's why it's not indexed to inflation: if it were, they couldn't get on TV and say "I care about America's poorest workers" every few years. That's also why minimum wage is kept low; if they pushed it above market wage for the bottom 1-2%, the harmful effects might be large enough to be visible (even if they are questionable, this is not a risk a politician wants to take).

>But, as far as I know, there are none in the city limits of Chicago and New York.

This isn't because wealthy people don't want to shop there. In both NY and Chicago, unions and their lackeys on the city council didn't allow walmart into the city.

My general impression: in the NY suburbs (where walmart does exist), people will do weekly shopping at whatever store is closest/most convenient. The "shopping for fun" that many wealthier women do is a target only activity, however.

>Before replying, please make extra sure that your argument works for women, but not children.

That's a very good point, one that I've made in the past. If you try it with a slightly less intelligent crowd than YC, you will get the following response:

"How dare you compare adult women to children?"

>The rate of suicide is high among Grad/PhD students because they have to "think outside the box" every single day. They have to find a "breakthrough".

That's really not true, though many grad students (especially in physics) think it is. You need to make a useful research contribution, but it can be evolutionary.

My thesis problem is a very popular one: new Ph.D.'s are awarded monthly for incremental advances in this area. Only about 2 theses on the topic (in the past 10 years) have actually been breakthroughs. The rest are just marginal improvements, i.e. 1'st order -> 2'nd order -> 4'th order, spherical coordinates -> arbitrary spherical-like coordinates -> arbitrary coordinates, etc.

One important fact you miss (and the author missed also). All US bonds are dollar denominated assets.

The dollar was hugely overvalued (and still is, but less), as a direct result of China (and others) buying all this debt. By the time we repay this debt, the dollar will be less overvalued. This means that China gave us a $1=100 yuan loan, and gets back $1=80 yuan (numbers strictly made up, interest neglected).

To push the analogy way too far, it's as if I bought stuff on a credit card, with payments due in AngryProfessorBucks (which I can print as many of as I want).

So in short, it's good for us, but sucks for China. We get cheap products now, and pay for it with low value currency later.

I'm hostile to colleges (and recruiters), though I don't think I count as anti-intellectual (my job is basic research).

My reason for opposing colleges (and recruiters) is simple: colleges/recruiters are middlemen sitting between you and the job you want. They may add some value, although in my view it is minimal (and certainly not worth the cost). But the main reason most people go to college/recruiters is simply because it is difficult to get a job without them. And if you can bypass them, you are probably better off.

Colleges (unlike recruiters) also suck vast amounts of money from the countries scientific infrastructure, but that's a different issue.

It's true that we were the world leader once upon a time. From the 20's to the early 40's, we had a major competitive advantage: our factories didn't explode much, whereas European and Japanese factories did. In the late 30's and early 40's, there were also trade barriers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U-boat, http://www.navy.mil) preventing the US from receiving Japanese and European exports.

However, in 1945, Europe and Japan figured out how to build non-exploding factories. The trade barriers were also removed. We retained our competitive advantage for some time after that, since it took them time to build up an industrial base.

But it is silly to expect us to be world leaders to the extent we were back then. That epidemic of factory explosions was a one time occurrence.

What companies get is a good chunk of the infrastructure is funded by the public.

Most labs get big chunks of money from the government, which funds basic research. As a result of this funding, the lab exists and people are trained in the basic science. Turning an already existing lab towards stuff useful for the company is much easier than building one from scratch.

Since much of that basic research money is funneled into universities, corporations have to go to universities to get the benefits.

There are certainly no problems with supervised recounts. Look how well they go:

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

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._presidential_election,_200...

I'm not saying electronic is definately the way to go. I'm just saying that paper ballots also have big problems, and that one can protect reasonably well against pure software hacks.

I agree with you, to a point. But lets not ignore the drawbacks of paper voting: a bunch of old ladies counting paper ballots can have error rates approaching 1%.

Better electronic systems are possible.

In NJ, we have an electronic machine which is just a bunch of buttons and lights: push a button, a light in row 1 goes on, push the commit button, and "Row a, column b" is recorded. A translucent paper ballot indicating the meaning of "Row a, columnb b" is placed on top of the lights/buttons, so the machine doesn't know which row/column corresponds to which candidate.

Using a machine like this, and physically randomizing the rows/columns machine by machine on election day (which isn't done in NJ), software fraud would be difficult.

Of course, none of this will stop fraudulent voting (which is very easy), zombie voting and other old fashioned trickery (google the washington governor's election, seattle district in particular).

I voted under a phony name in 2006, due to bad handwriting. After I discovered this, I called up my old roommate, who voted under my name (rather than his) in my old town. Vote totals were unnaffected, but only because we were honest.

You might try looking for controversy. I've thought about this more for reddit/slashdot comments than for polls, but here are my ideas:

For comments on a point based site (such as reddit, this site if it gets popular), there are signs that a post is being downmodded by people who disagree. For instance, -10 points, 10 replies. Or 10 upmods, 12 downmods.

In your case, this would probably be 10 "innappropriates", and another 20-30 people actually using the poll. You might also look for people clicking "innappropriate" and then voting in the poll.

For 4, try Calculus on manifolds, then Differential Geometry (both by Michael Spivak).

Some of the many worlds variants make sense. I prefer bohmian mechanics (I can reason about it better), but I have no objection to MW. Ultimately I don't care one way or the other: the predictions for MY universe are the same, whether or not it is unique or one amoung many.

However, the point I was making is that most physicists believe in wave collapse. The writer of the article was simply providing a reasonably good summary of QM with wave collapse. According to Q1 of your article, this is still a mainstream belief except amoung string theorists, apparently. I agree, it's almost certainly wrong. But that's not yet a mainstream position.

As for other non-ridiculous interpretations, just look at bohmian mechanics or GRW. Bohmian mechanics postulates that particles exist and are guided by the wave function. The testable physical predictions are identical to many worlds. GRW makes different physical predictions (possibly testable in the near future), but the theory makes sense as well.

>Universes do not split like that. That would mean many universes were being created from nothing every instant. What actually happens is there are already infinitely many "universes" and they become different. And not one per outcome, but in proportion to the probability of outcomes.

It's not the writers of the article who have no clue. It's quantum physicists themselves.

In the Copenhagen interpretation of QM, a conscious observer induces wave collapse (a random process). In this interpretation, there are no other worlds. In Wave Collapse/Many Worlds, a parallel universe is created in which wave collapse occured but gave a different outcome.

There are different interpretations of QM (e.g. bohmian mechanics or GRW/stochastic collapse) which don't have this problem. If you are interested in QM, I strongly suggest looking these theories up. But Copenhagen QM (the theory in most textbooks) does have this problem.

The reporter did an adequate job of explaining the consensus view. The problem is really that the consensus view can allow for nonsense such as what was described in the article.

>So if you're still feeling guilty, target some investment money in saving time for scientists -- all scientists. If you could save them a few hours each week, imagine how much value you could add?

One very useful webapp would be a personal bibliography database, i.e. BibDesk for the web. Let me create an account, and upload papers. Give me tags, comments and full text search, as well as bibtex output. Maybe even the ability to share papers with other authors (possible copyright issues here).

Organizing papers is painful right now. My home and office are rsynced together, but that's useless when I'm in other locations, and I don't have full text search (just a list of folders by name of author). Most of my coworkers don't even do that.