puppies and teddybears with big scary claws

Got this from Daily Kos, which I seem to be reading while I'm lounging around being sick. It's awesome footage of a grizzly mama and two cubs getting a little harassed by a wolf, which seems to want to play with the cubs. Two things I noticed: first, that wolf is big! Grizzlies are enormous, and the wolf looks not too much smaller than the mama: I guess they must have really different builds, because a large wolf is 150 pounds and a small grizzly sow starts at something like 250 or 300 pounds. Second, you can really tell that at one point the wolf wants to play - it looks just like a dog doing what's called a play bow with its shoulders and head low, hindquarters high, and tail wagging (right after minute four). The grizzly cubs are almost impossible for me to read - mama seems mostly interested in chasing the wolf away, but I can't tell what the cubs want at all. I think this speaks to the long human acquaintance (including, for many of us, personal acquaintance) with wolf relatives. We're pretty good at reading canine behavior; ursine stays kind of mysterious. Third thing, even though I said there'd be two: this is such a cool thing to do! The USGS is putting solar-powered motion-activated cameras in the Northern Rockies to videotape wildlife doing their wildlife thing. It's mostly to understand how effective their DNA collection efforts are, and whether there's sampling bias with respect to age and sex, but you can see a wide range of other applications for that kind of camera information.

Here's the video, and here's the link to the USGS site.

problems with industrial farming, in brief

The New York Times has an op-ed out about industrial animal farming. It's actually very good - it hits, briefly, all the major problems with the meat system, from rural impoverishment to labor exploitation to antitrust issues to environmental damage to antibiotic resistance. You might not actually know what all of the problems were from reading it, but any given sentence could act as a starting point to learn more about why, exactly, our food system is so totally fucked.

more inherent problems with poverty

While I was home last weekend - digression: it was so great - a friend saw the post about stress causing asthma and pointed me to this Financial Times article which discusses the effects of stress via low social status on developing brains. Quick summary: it's bad. This suggests to me that if Teach for American and other education policy people are interested in eliminating the gap between rich and poor in educational attainment, they're going to have to eliminate (or at least dramatically reduce) the low social status and stress associated with poverty.

This also suggests one possible source of the Scandinavian 'bumblebee economy' (discussed, very briefly, in the Iceland article - basically, high taxes and high growth!): the Scandinavian states - with their excellent social services, low inequality, and strong safety net - more efficiently use and develop the increasingly valuable mental capacity of their citizens. This could also explain some of the findings on Sweden that Lane Kenworthy recently discussed.

As an aside, he writes about school choice in Sweden being a surprise for the left - I'd argue that Sweden in this situation doesn't hold lessons for the US, because inequality is so much lower that the risks of school choice are correspondingly lower. My concern about school choice is that it will leave low-income/low-status students stranded in schools that get worse and worse; if there is less social inequality, I would similarly expect less inequality in educational options.

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why I dislike David Brooks

He ends up on the wrong side of reality a lot of the time. He also writes about social science without bothering to know anything about it. I like this description of the kind of standard journalists and columnists should be held to, though I'd add that anyone who writes regularly on one subject (as Brooks does about sociology and political science) should have some kind of basic understanding of the academic ideas in that field.

blur: gender

It was interesting to read Elizabeth Weil's article about single-sex education immediately after reading Women Don't Ask (a book about gender and negotiation that I very much recommend, for reasons I'm about to go in to). Weil splits the world of one-gender education advocates into "two camps: those who favor separating boys from girls because they are essentially different and those who favor separating boys from girls because they have different social experiences and social needs." The first camp relies primarily on some very sketchy brain and development research - that boys and girls hear differently, smell differently, draw different kinds of pictures, prefer different temperatures - and comes to the conclusion that boys will learn better actively, and girls will learn better through interpersonal connections.

Some of this research purports to control for socialization because it is done with young children - interesting in light of the fact that parents describe boy and girl babies differently (girls as more frail, boys as more robust) when there is no discernible medical difference. Women Don't Ask also cited one study with very interesting implications for research design: young children who are offered the choice of playing with 'boy' toys or 'girl' toys (trucks/dolls, etc) make the gender-appropriate choice when an observer is in the room, but disregard gender when they think they're not being observed. There are a couple of other, similar studies that suggest that such choices persist (women make higher demands in negotiation letters when they think no one will know if the author of the letter is male or female). When the research that suggests that boys and girls draw different pictures or have intrinsically different preferences was done, was there an observer in the room? Was that observer's gender considered? The research the 'intrinsic difference' folks are using to justify single-sex education is not only a very crude sorting tool (great example of this in the article from Giedd), but also has serious observer bias problems.

Which leads me to the same damn conclusion I always make about gender: we don't know a damn thing about what's innate and what's learned. Maybe a damn thing. But not more than that.

another use of numbers

Obama just passed the million donor mark. Another way of thinking about this is that 1 of every 300 Americans (not American adults) has donated to the Obama campaign. Another way to make sense of this is to say that about 1 of every 234 Americans over 16 has donated to Obama's campaign. Maybe the best way, since you have to be 16 to donate.

That is a stunning statistic, though I don't have much to compare it with (other than the number of people in jail as listed in the post below). Obama's on track to potentially have 1% of the US population actually giving him money by November 4. That's, that's, I don't know what that is except great. A great use of basic math.

social science research

1. A lovely article by someone I'm reading in my grad school ed policy class about the limits of social science research: to wit, the data are unreliable and crude, the rules and structures governing the system don't stay the same across place and time, and randomized field trials are usually impossible. And yet I still want to get a Ph.D. in social science.

2. A consequently unreliable social science article about the correlation between socioeconomic segregation and achievement. I'll read it in more depth and perhaps have more to say about it later. On an anecdotal basis, I think that at my school the high concentration of people who expect little mainstream economic success and thus little need for academic success works to reinforce a prevailing norm of underachievement. The same students, in an atmosphere where most of their peers were focused on achievement, might behave very differently.

Being sick apparently makes me write.

crazy shit

I haven't written anything for, what, a month? And I never did write the post about the Outward Bound trip and how amazing it was and how ridiculously cute all those kids are, but if you email me I'll send you the link to their photos.

And I have a whole month's worth of crazy shit at school to write about (getting asked about by a senior, apparently seriously; the boys who just got arrested; two murders of students in two weeks; class average on a quiz being 81%, meaning they learned their times tables [!!!!]; the boy who told me, 'this is the best math'; long conversations with a student about friendship, values, strip clubs, and Aristotle; explaining why I don't have a TV; Vietnamese food with kids) but there will always be crazy shit at school.

What there might not always be, though, is ice in the Arctic. Which, that is crazy. The Northwest Passage? It's going to exist. The North Pole? Not frozen. As of 2013, says the new prediction, and that doesn't even consider the historic lows in ice coverage from 2005 and 2007. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is talking about catastrophe: catastrophic extinctions (40-70% of species on earth!), catastrophic drought (Tucson, I'm looking at you), continued and catastrophic rises in sea level (wiping my current and possible future homes off the map).

Where's my post-apocalyptic survival group when I need it?

the scientific method v. cultural myths

The CDC just reported that being overweight makes you less likely to die, over-all. When you consider all sources of mortality, people who are 'overweight' are much less likely to die from a number of diseases, which cancels out a higher death rate from a few well-known ones. They also found that being underweight is associated with higher mortality, and I think it's worth pointing out that the article didn't mention any possible alternative explanations for obesity being associated with higher mortality, but listed several possible alternatives to the heresy that being skinny is itself unhealthy (e.g. people get thin because they're sick or smoke).

Like many other ideas about body size, the idea that being over a particular size will kill you was one with scant or no evidence; now we have actual evidence against it.

In response, a preventive medicine specialist told the New York Times that "excess weight makes it more difficult to move and impairs the quality of life." Let's stipulate that there are people for whom this is true. But there is no evidence that people can lose weight and keep it off except becoming obsessive about it in the way that anorexics are obsessive about it; and I would bet money I don't have that for most people, "excess weight" mostly "impairs the quality of life" because people are assholes about it, because there's practically no positive media about anyone over a size 4, and because of the constant pressure to get thin. Those issues, incidentally, affect almost all women of all sizes, and use up a good chunk of the brain power of a couple generations. Have I mentioned that fat is a feminist issue?

One of the researchers very sensibly said, "If we use the criteria of mortality, then the term 'overweight' is a misnomer."

Another, after stressing that it was his personal opinion, said, "If you are in the pink and feeling well and getting a good amount of exercise and if your doctor is very happy with your lab values and other test results, then I am not sure there is any urgency to change your weight."

Which is such sensible advice, and so well supported by his research. And yet fat is such a crazy issue in American medicine that he had to qualify the hell out of it. Being sensible is a dangerous position in the diet wars.

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1. Quotation marks because saying people for whom arbitrary combination of their height and weight is over 25 weigh 'too much' is ridiculous, as the article linked to points out. 'Too much' for whom? For what reason? Over what weight?

the importance of math education

There's an article in the New York Times pointing out that it is logically impossible for men and women to have different average numbers of sex partners. Which is a problem, since men and women report significantly different lifetime averages (e.g. 4 sex partners for women, 7 for men in the US, or in Britain 12.7 for men and 6.5 for women). Anyone who is decent at math and remembers the definition of the mean will be able to tell you that in a world with about the same number of men and women, it is impossible for men to have more hetero sex partners than women. Indeed, a mathematician has actually proved it. So, explanations?

1. The researchers say it might be that men have significant numbers of sexual experiences with women who aren't counted in the survey, like prostitutes or women in other countries. That would mean that there's got to be some country somewhere where women have many more sex partners than men, and thus far no one's found it. Also, I question their ability to screen prostitutes out of the survey data.

2. Men and/or women are lying their heads off in what they think are the socially approved directions. I think this is quite likely.

3. Men and women have very different distribution patterns for their data. The mean number of partners must be the same for men and women, but that doesn't mean the median number of partners must be the same. As an example, imagine that there are only 5 men and 5 women in the world, and a total of 13 sexual partnerships. The men have had 0, 1, 3, 4, and 5 sexual partners; the women have had 1, 1, 1, 5, and 5 sexual partners. The mean for both groups is going to be 13/5 = 2.6 partners, but the median number of partners for men is 3, while the median for women is 1. That's a huge percentage difference just because women had a few people with high numbers of partnerships, while most women still had fewer sex partners than most men. Is this likely on a large scale? I don't really think so - it's a lot harder to skew data like that when you're not making it up and there are thousands of people in your data set. But I don't really know, and apparently the social scientists who could find out for us aren't. My best guess still goes to #2.

This is an example of bad math education perpetuating a particular social ill, namely the idea that men get around more than women. To his everlasting credit, the mathematician who inspired the article points out exactly this: that taking this data as accurate works to “reinforce the stereotypes of promiscuous males and chaste females" and may skew self-reporting and behavior. If math education were better, and people understood mean and median and interpreting statistical graphs, and if the news media could therefore publish graphs of the statistics in question, there'd be a lot more ways for people to check stereotypes against reality.

When will those darn math teachers do something about it?

evolutionary psychology and its discontents

There's an article in Psychology Today titled Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature. Echidne of the Snakes spent some time doing a point by point refutation, which I suggest you read if you're interested in that sort of thing. Basically, the article itself is a particularly genius example of how Evolutionary Psychology as most people use the term is basically a collection of speculation about the lives of early humans, most of which gets used to justify sexism and crappy appearance politics. Refuting it requires slightly less work than shooting fish in a barrel. You don't even need a gun!

My sister studied bioanthropology (basically, the study of humans using biology, which includes quite a bit of evo-psych) in college, and I remember vividly two conversations about it that I had with her. When she was a sophomore and deciding to study bioanth, she argued that I was just wrong not to accept that differences between men and women were biologically based, and that my feminism was blinding me to the strong evidence for it. Two years later, as a senior, she called me up while I was driving through Utah and asked what she should do. She needed to write a senior paper - like a small thesis - to get honors, which she very much wanted, but she felt like she couldn't in conscience write a paper on any of the bioanth subjects she'd studied because the standards of evidence were so unutterably lame and unconvincing. Two years of study brought her to the conclusion that even at a fancy-pants research university, most evolutionary psychology is a collection of speculation about the lives of early humans.

I have a similar problem with a great deal of political theory, including all social contract theory. These theories rely on some kind of imagined history of early humans: life was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short," then we all got together, signed the social contract, and turned our power over to the state. Hobbes is one of the most honest about this kind of thing (he doesn't make up rights without explaining where they come from) but still. Wasn't it great when we all signed the social contract? What a great party! No wait, no one was there. IT NEVER HAPPENED. (One of the things I like about Aristotelian political theory is that, while there's a theory of human nature, there's no just-so story about how we came to be this way.)

We know a little more about the lives of early humans in a factual sense than we used to, but we still have essentially zip about social structure. Among other things, it's pretty unreasonable to argue that social evolution just stopped at some point (which is what you have to say for evo-psych to still be relevant, or to use modern hunter-gatherers to learn about ancient hunter-gatherers), when we have very clear evidence that lactose tolerance evolved in some places as recently as 3,000 years ago. Humans continue, however, to be very good at coming up with reasons to justify whatever it is we want to justify right now, including rights, greed, censorship, free speech, monogamy, polygamy, etc.

Evolutionary psychology and political theory share one gigantic missed opportunity. Yes, it would be very very interesting to know more about how human brains really work and have evolved, and yes, it would be very very interesting to know how the social structure of early human societies developed, and think about what implications those have for our ideas about politics and community. Aristotle assumes that humans are by nature social - he doesn't even really imagine an isolated state of being human - and that seems likely to have some foundation (unlike, for example, his transparently bad justification for slavery). There's some serious work to be done matching up science and archeology about early humans with theories about human nature and society. But political theorists (who have some excuse, since they're not scientists or historians) and evolutionary psychologists (who have none, since they claim to be both) have done a pretty dreadful job of it. Too bad!

natural selection

A partial list of selective pressures that modern medicine has made irrelevant to humans in the developed world (and the technology that fixes them):

Good eyesight (glasses, contacts, LASIK)
Easy childbirth (C-section)
To some extent, high sperm count (fertility treatments)
Lactose tolerance (lactaid, abundant and varied food)
Resistance to smallpox, measles mumps rubella, tetanus, diptheria, pertussis, chickenpox, polio, and meningitis (childhood vaccinations)
Resistance to black plague, streptococcus, cholera, infant diarrhea (antibiotics and water treatment)

Is this relevant information? If so, how and why? If not, why not?