Wow, this topic seems to have the same heat to light ratio as discussions about nature/nurture and the gender gap in the sciences. It's pretty amazing the percentage of confident arguments for one side or the other that seem to be based on little more than personal ancedotes or what the author wanted to believe.

Anyway serious discussion of this issue should start with the original paper (if you have access). A quick skim will reveal that it really doesn't offer much if any support for the evolutionary claim.

The study basically took a bunch of yearbook photos (from 1956) of people for whom they already had data about reproduction. They then asked participants in the "Madison Senior Scholars program" to rate the attractiveness of these yearbook photos (so presumably US HS or college students). They then observed that attractive women tended to have more children than unattractive women (though attractive women outproduced very attractive women).

This setup should make one very leary of drawing any deep evolutionary explanations for the observed phenomenon. Indeed the authors themselves point out that they can't draw any conclusions about mechanism and seem to suggest there are likely complex causes underlying the observations. Moreover, the authors come right out and say the observed correlations between offspring gender and attractiveness aren't significant enough to warrant any conclusions. ("best interpreted cautiously before more data are available").

As far as reproductive success goes just off the top of my head I can come up with a whole bunch of hypothesizes that would account for the greater offspring effect.

1. Yearbook attractiveness in 50s women reflects effort and hence priority they place on finding a husband/reproducing.
2. Attractiveness is correlated to health/nutrition which correlates with more/easier births.
3. Attractiveness is correlated to grooming habits learned in households with better socioeconomic status. This leads to more marriages.
4. People tend to find people who look like their parents attractive so those sub-ethnic groups who have more kids tend to get rated higher
5. Random correlations from a bunch of other factors (race etc..)

One could go on but what's the point. The study just doesn't say what this ridiculous piece of science 'journalism' claims it does.


However, that isn't grounds to reject the claim that humans have been evolving to be more attractive or even that physical attractiveness in women undergoes stronger selection pressure than it does in men. Presumably, one should think that at least the first claim was true (at least before birth control). Hell, it's pretty much a tautology (by definition more attractive means ceterus parabus people find you more sexually attractive). The second claim is less clear. After all in most animals it is the male which undergoes the greater pressure to look attractive. However, in humans there are plausible reasons to think that other forms of status for men take the place of purely physical status while the need for healthy births retains that pressure for females. Of course there are probably real papers on this with real evidence and who knows what that means in the modern enviornment.

Just to be pedantic it's not that we lack diffeqs to describe the system just that we can't solve them preciscely enough.

I mean we are pretty damn sure of the fundamental physics here. There is no quantum field theory weirdness that is needed to do this right (some quantum maybe) and there is enough material that the discrete size of atoms shouldn't make a difference so there MUST be a diffeq that will model it correctly.

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Seeing as I do computability theory I will tell you with ENOUGH computing power we can do whatever the fuck we want. Sit the thing down with our best low energy theory of fundamental particles and just search through all possible configurations occupying a 50x50x50m space with less than such and such total energy. Eventually it will hit on the best design by exhaustion.

As a working mathematician I had a great deal of sympathy for many things Lockhardt had to say. In particular he couldn't be more right about the total uselessness of most of the math curriculum to most students. Go ask a working professional (doctor, lawyer, etc..) to solve a system of linear equations in 2 unknowns and it's immediately apparent they got no direct practical benefit from their math classes.

I quibble with his ragging on epsilon-delta and other precise definitions. I finally realized math was elegant and exciting precisely because I was so disgusted with (ugly) intuitive arguments about smoothness I went and found a book that taught me the elegant formal definitions that made calculus all fit together. Not that I would recommend this for everyone but I personally find it one of the most aesthetically aspects of analysis.

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However, where he really totally blows it is when he assumes that math can be a fun exploratory intellectual adventure for everyone. Yes, virtually everyone has the innate intelligence to do this but no matter what you do math is going to make some people feel dumb and frustrated. There are right and wrong answers in math and not everyone can be above average.

Sure, everyone might be lackadaisical in HS art class but that's because few (no?) people's future depends on their ability to do well in the class. On the other hand the best and the brightest signal their ability by performing well in math. Sure, these students succeed because they are curious and interested but all the other students will struggle to look like the mathematically advanced kids and those who fail will feel bad about themselves for it. No matter how you teach you can't eliminate the economic pressure on the students to appear as if they are good at math.

People don't like doing things that make them feel stupid or frustrated and learning real math requires genuine curiosity and thought. You just can't force people who resent the subject to think.

Perhaps we should simply accept that math is going to be like literature or art. A small percent will have the desire and interest to pursue it in highschool and we should just try to avoid turning off the rest enough they might return in their own time.

>We have two working examples of fusion generation, the Hydrogen Bomb that uses a fission device to jump start it and the Sun which is hugely radioactive.

Uhh, what? It's actually pretty damn easy to create fusion reactions in the labratory merely using ions and electric fields. Of course they are hugely energy negative but it's not like these are our only two examples of fusion. Also the response about the sun indicates a complete lack of understanding about the different types of radioactivity and the relation between this and fission.

It's not like we don't have a detailed understanding of how fusion works. We know there is no fundamental law barring fusion power, the issue is all about practical generation.

I mean just consider the state of technology one hundred years ago. Advances in computational power alone should allow useful solutions of the diffeqs governing plasma containment. One might be able to make a case for 40 years but trying to push predictions about the future past that point doesn't seem particularly useful.

Also I have to wonder how useful it is to learn that some scientists think that iter is going in the wrong direction. Of course some scientists do, otherwise why would we build an *experimental* reactor. The question shouldn't be whether some people are skeptical but whether ITER is the most efficient way to advance our understanding of these issues.

The problem for amazon with a subsidized kindle is that it would have created an immediate demand for some other publisher to provide discounted books for use on the kindle. Amazon would therefore have to respond by clamping down on what the kindle can view/read to recoup their investment.

Besides, it's going to be expensive either way and people would feel angry if they paid alot for an e-book reader and the books were priced higher than they are now.

Unfortunately that would convey a falsely inflated sense of risk to most listeners.

I mean if your friend asks, "Hey, does anything bad happen to you if you eat a mentos after drinking coke?" The correct answer is NO not, "Well there is a small chance you will choke." Also consider what happens when news agencies report on super small risks from common products or behaviors. People often take a risk to mean something common enough to be worth worrying about.

Moreover, what the package insert says is often totally bogus. I believe they have to include the side effects found in the clinical trials even when those side effects occurred less frequently than they did in placebo. Even when it's right it can be misleading as it won't mention the risks you avoid by taking the medication (birth control helps prevent some conditions).

In short the doctor has a choice of providing the listener with what they really want to know, "Do I need to worry about anything because I'm taking this product?" or give a literally correct response that will be harmfully misunderstood by many patients.

These people. If you had a code plenty of people who figured they needed the "real meds" would use it wrongly. Of course in your case it's worse since the effective medications to suppress coughing are mainly opiates so if you don't have a long history with the doc they may worry you are trying to score some drugs.

So I haven't read this book so won't comment on it directly but the review at least brought up a pet peeve of mine: the idea that somehow it would be dystopian to 'hide' how bad life was by making us artificially happy.

This notion doesn't even really make sense. Evolution has dictated that certain things make us happy and others make us sad but that doesn't mean there is something objectively reasonable about being happy when you have high social status and many mates and sad when you have few material resources. Moreover, I think we should be particularly suspicious about the judgments we make when we see these scenarios in fiction (e.g. brave new world). The problem is that we are extremely accustomed to infering things about people's mental states from their external circumstances so when that link is broken we are highly vulnerable to reaching the wrong conclusions. For instance, to steal an example from Brave New World, despite being axiomatically told Soma makes people happy when we read about the people who take it we somehow assume they aren't 'really' happy.

I think a much more productive way to think about these situations is to instead imagine reacting to an alien society which behaved in such a manner and thereby stripping away many of our prejudices.

In my experience virtually every college has some AntiVirus/Security policy that they SAY is necessary to connect to the network so the people who have no clue install it but it's rarely actually required. Usually you can just download the package (or even not) and just click past all the crap about it and connect anyway.

And as another mathematician I will call total BS on that.

Yes, I definatly agree there are excellent students who need a fair bit of time to digest material and there are quick but not deep students as well but are you really going to claim that there is NO relation between the time it takes to pick up a piece of math and mathematical ability.

Hell, in modern mathematical practice a great deal of what we do is spend time trying to digest the work of other mathematicians so we can profit from their techniques. Ultimately if you can pick them up faster you have an advantage. It's an advantage that can be outweighed by other factors but it's still an advantage.

The parent's point is logically valid. Other factors being equal picking up a subject faster is an advantage. Or course other factors may not be equal. While this is based primarily on ancedotal experience IMO part of the difference has to do with the way that men and women relate to the course and to other students (for reasons that are certainly at least partly social). Women are much more willing to ask for help from the instructor and possibly less willing to contest other students solutions. Given the way we teach math pre-college and in introductory classes following the instructor's advice too closely is a disadvantage for becoming a real mathematician.

Is that in those countries girls generally outperform boys in school. Yes, boys and girls seem to do just as well in math but girls substantially outperform boys on the reading/linguistic tests. Moreover, the difference between girls math and language scores seems to be fairly similar across all these countries.

I wouldn't read too much into this but if anything this is evidence for a biological difference in terms of math ability. Either you think that girls are simply innately better at academics in general or you think some other factor explains the generally superior performance of women in school in these tests. If so one would want to subtract out that effect (say maybe girls care more about achieving in school than boys) before trying to estimate any innate differences.

Frankly what nearly everyone says in this debate is stupid for several reasons:

• It's totally irrelevant what the statistical distribution of talent is between the genders. What matters is whether someone is getting unfairly screwed over.
• Even if one thinks that girls are statistically less good at math one can't infer that being female should cause one to think they are any worse at math. How conditioning on gender should affect one's beliefs about ability depends on very subtle questions about the shapes of the distributions and one's prior knowledge.
• The idea that somehow there is this sharp distinction between innate talent and socialization is flat out idiotic. There are all sorts of complicated effects based on one gender's different preferences (even say in just dating) affecting what kind of things they feel are worth pursuing. Likely these kinds of effects outweigh any issues with innate ability to rotate objects or the like.

However, it really pisses me off when I see people try to misrepresent the (still fairly hazy) data as obviously implying a position that they wish were true.

Yes, that's true but it also doesn't show that more guns would have prevented deaths.

Only the limiting factor really matters and in this case it wasn't guns but willingness to fight. Indeed, I submit the limiting factor is virtually always willingness to fight save a few numerically small last stands (Masada, Thermopylae, etc..). If you have the will you can kill your enemies with your bare hands and steal their guns.

The jews and other holocaust victims didn't fight back for the same reason Japanese American's didn't fight when we put them in internment camps. They didn't believe they would be killed. Without that knowledge they could have all had piles of firearms in their basement and it wouldn't have made a difference (except perhaps provoking a confiscation).

No, if everyone the SS tried to round up had been armed and aware losing meant a near sureity of death for them and theirs they would have taken over the country. Hell, even if only 10% had been ready and willing to die for the cause they would have won, guns or no guns.

History is filled with examples of asymetric warfare where armed fanatics bested or held their own against huge numerical and military advantages. The vast majority of soldiers in every regular army aren't killers nor eager to die. They mostly just go with the flow and try not to get shot. Except for a small number of elites they are useless without their command structure and the psychological comfort of group membership.

Fanatics or people with their back to the wall don't suffer the same disadvantages. When failure is as good as death for you and yours you'll fight back even in isolation. Military hardware is great for defeating armies but most of it is useless against a scattered population of individual killers. That's why a small number of insurgents in Iraq can keep hundreds of thousands of our troops occupied and even then most insurgents aren't true fanatics or up against a wall. Even a thousand men ready to kill and die to stop you is a grave threat even if they are armed with sticks.

But of course the upshot of this is that I agree with your conclusion. Guns wouldn't have made a difference, only knowledge would have. Even without guns the holocaust would have been a fraction of the size had the victims really believed they were to be sent to their death. On the other hand without that belief guns would be confiscated before anyone was willing to use them.

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Let me put it this way. No matter how racist and unfair you think the police where you live are how likely are you to shot back if they come and demand your guns under a new law? Would you have fired back to stop them from taking you to a japanese internment camp in WWII?

If your answer is no why would you think it would have gone down and differently during the holocaust? Maybe during less organized genocides but not the holocaust.

It's not like Amazon somehow magically doesn't have any overhead, shipping or design costs for the Kindle. They also have inventory costs, returned item costs and all the other gunk associated with manufacturing and selling an item.

Having merely a 50% of the cost (not including IP) for a still pioneering device like this seems totally reasonable.