it is actually only partly because of our culture. genetics found out many years ago that male and female brains are sort of preprogrammed trough evolution. man are stronger therefore they were more likely to survive risky endevors like hunting and in general experimenting. females in return had to cover the more manual, monotone and mostly repeating tasks without taking risks (collecting berries).
through this evolutional behavior men just have no fear “breaking” things and women are rather scared of breaking things and try to handle situations on the emotional level instead of putting in risk. a good example is that women are prefered in factories doind repeating work. our brains are just wired like that.

Just as inevitably, someone will reply to that guy like so:

Wow. And the fact that this sort of gender-essentialist, ev-psych nonsense is the VERY FIRST RESPONSE to an extremely thoughtful post? Oh, yeah, the constant messages that women should go back to their “natural” work (read: taking care of men and children) definitely have nothing to do with women’s challenges in technology. Nuh-uh, it’s all about our genetic adaptations to pick up berries. Go check the research, because you’re quoting a bunch of debunked bullshit.

This fight just won’t go away, and the reason it persistently avoids resolution is because the two sides of the argument represented above — I couldn’t have found a better archetype of it if I’d made it from whole cloth — are just talking past each other. Or maybe, to the members of their respective choirs. I’ll paraphrase these two sides, reducing them to absurdity.

Guy: There exists evidence that men and women are different when it comes to logical reasoning and mathematics. I have misplaced my references on this evidence. Women are inferior and nothing will ever change that.
Girl: Your evidence must be “bad science” because its conclusions contradict my very pleasant, egalitarian beliefs. You are obviously a sexist. [To be fair, the dude often is a sexist]

What really bothers me about this repeating argument isn’t so much the often blatant sexism expressed, but that it’s always immediately derailed by emotional rhetoric into a conversation that’s no longer about evidence. After all: it’s a scientific question. Without evidence, it’s just a particularly nasty sort of philosophy. I said as much when I wrote about the Larry Summers debacle back in 2005:

What is really at stake here is academic freedom. The job of a scientist is to discover and present facts, not to dictate which facts should and should not be presented. When the president of a prestigious university suggests a venue of research and is silenced and forced into retreat by ideologues, there is cause for concern.

I was taking poetic liberties in that opinion piece — Summers didn’t so much “suggest a venue of research” so much as talk off the cuff about his own personal beliefs, which include the probability that innate differences between the sexes plays some role in gender imbalances in various occupations. As evidence, he cited the much wider distribution of SAT math scores among men relative to women, despite a similar mean. In other words, many more men than women score very high or very low on the math SAT, although the average scores for each gender are relatively close. For scores above 700, it’s a ratio of 2:1.

What happened to Summers was a case study for everything people hate about the Political Correctness movement — the privileging and presupposition of certain thoughts over others. A torrent of media voices, his peers, and fellow academics called for his censure or resignation. A blog kind enough to link to my opinion piece paraphrases their outbursts:

The speech of Lawrence Summers was outrageous – everyone who has heard it should either black out or throw up. He has no right to speak in this way. Women are discriminated. You can see that they have a smaller representation in various professions – and most people (both men and women) believe that men are more likely to be successful in these professions. This proves that discrimination is everywhere around us because everyone with the right opinions about the world knows that the women are identical to the men, perhaps except for one organ. Note that this is not a circular argument because it is not a circular argument.

Several commentators at the time pointed out the irony of feminists shutting down a debate about the rational abilities of women with an emotional outburst, such as this lady.

I can think of few things more discouraging to any woman who lives by her intellect than the sight of some of the nation’s most highly credentialed female scholars attempting to use their emotions to cut off argument, rather than focusing on winning the debate. Political correctness is the opposite of thought. It proceeds by moral condemnation and emotional outrage: Anyone who can imagine such a thought must be a bad person, or a crazy one.

Because here’s the thing: when you disagree with someone about a potentially falsifiable thing they said, you’re supposed to disprove them with contradictory evidence, not angry rhetoric. That people agree to do so is the only reason the scientific community can function.

It saddens me to see people scorning evolutionary psychology because some of its findings reinforce gender stereotypes from the fifties. Evolution is the guiding light of biology, which is the root of psychology and behavior. Just as I didn’t really understand the unifying principles of life on earth until I understood evolution, I didn’t really get the unifying principles of the people around me until I understood evolutionary psychology and cognitive science. It probably says a lot about my own propensity for engineer-thought that I needed a formal, math-based framework to understand other people’s motivations, but there it is.

Of course, that’s not to say that out culture isn’t responsible for some part of the gender imbalance in science and engineering (but not all of it). The driving force behind these social pressures is illustrated nicely by the aforementioned bland essay, and is something I’ll call Male Privilege.

Most of my classmates were not that extreme, and from my experience, most mean well but are just socially awkward. They can say something so simple as “Oh don’t you know that command?” but in an inadvertently condescending voice that makes you feel like you’re the only person who doesn’t know it. As someone just testing out the CS waters, that type of experience in every class can be very daunting. I think women are more susceptible to these feelings of inadequacy, and it can deter some potential CS concentrators from the department. From my limited experience, the ones that stayed with it were pretty strong-willed and generally kept to themselves.

White Privilege means never having to worry that your apparent race is the cause of your inadequacy in the eyes of others. Male privilege is never having to worry your gender is the cause. Anxiety caused by such worries is a measurable demotivator and performance killer in academic contexts, so we know objectively (at least in the case of race) that it’s a real problem that we should try to correct. Note that I have absolutely no idea how to do so short of quotas in CS schools and corporate jobs, and good luck getting that one past the Fourteenth Amendment. Still, plenty of people want to fix the problem by doing exactly that, applying Title IX to the sciences. Yes, they are serious.

I think a large part of putting this fistfight to bed, or at least making it marginally more civil, is for the proponents of innate gender differences to stop referring to “ability” and start referring to “preference,” turning the argument from one about superiority into one about empowerment and choice. It’s not a misrepresentation — the data are entirely sensible in this light — and it reframes the debate to not sound so confrontational. Susan Pinker does so very eloquently in the same Times article about Title IX:

Ms. Pinker, a clinical psychologist and columnist for The Globe and Mail in Canada (and sister of Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist), argues that the campaign for gender parity infantilizes women by assuming they don’t know what they want. She interviewed women who abandoned successful careers in science and engineering to work in fields like architecture, law and education — and not because they had faced discrimination in science.

“Creating equal opportunities for women does not mean that they’ll choose what men choose in equal numbers,” Ms. Pinker says. “The freedom to act on one’s preferences can create a more exaggerated gender split in some fields.”

I don’t think the argument will get anywhere close to settled anytime soon, and sadly I see it getting worse in the face of more empirical evidence, but I do wish people would quit saying it was all my fault.

“Scientific racism” is a slur in the academy, roughly analogous to calling something “psuedoscientific” in the mainstream scientific community. Largely because there are observed differences in the results of IQ tests of different races, it is politically correct in many academic circles to refer to general intelligence under the euphemism “whatever it is that IQ tests measure.”

And, in fact, it’s solid science that performance on such tests is strongly influenced by individuals’ own perceptions of their ability. Blacks taking a test that is presented as a “laboratory exercise” outperform those taking the same test presented as an exam. In Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely relates an even more intriguing experimental result. Researchers seeking to understand the effect that stereotypes have on math test performance decided to see if they could study the interaction between two conflicting stereotypes: that Asians are good at math; and that women are bad at it. They tested a large sample of Asian women, subconsciously priming a third of them to think about their womanhood (by asking questions about child birth, motherhood, etc.), another third to think about their Asian-ness (by asking questions about the language spoken at home, immigration, etc.), and leaving a final third as a control group. Perhaps not surprisingly, they found that each test group lived up to the stereotype they were primed to think about — the Asian group did better, and the woman group worse, than the control group.

As a society, we find the very idea of cognitive differences between races so vile and reprehensible that anyone making such claims does so at the risk of their academic and scientific career. The Bell Curve, a book on intelligence distribution that includes a chapter on the black-white achievement gap and suggests it cannot be explained by social factors alone, has received more refutation (and its authors, more ostracism) than any other modern, mainstream scientific text.

I’m currently reading How the Mind Works, an aptly named treatise about how evolution designed the human brain to fill the “cognitive niche” that no other species does. The author, Steven Pinker, understands that any discussion about innate human behavior, no matter how polite, raises the hackles on many of his more critical readers, and so he spends the first couple chapters of his book hammering home the point that we, as a society, need to separate the concept of what is right from what is true. He warns about the dangers of the twin logical fallacies applied to this area of research: the naturalistic fallacy (because something is natural, it must be good); and its opposite, the moralistic fallacy (because something is good, it must be natural). He notes that in the 1980s UNESCO proactively refuted any scientific study that claimed humans have an innate, evolved tendency towards violence and war, asserting that it is “scientifically inaccurate” to make such claims.

But with the genetic revolution, any ethnic differences that do exist are inevitably going to come to the forefront. Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia is concerned about our ability to keep this discussion civil:

The most offensive idea in all of science for the last 40 years is the possibility that behavioral differences between racial and ethnic groups have some genetic basis. Knowing nothing but the long-term offensiveness of this idea, a betting person would have to predict that as we decode the genomes of people around the world, we’re going to find deeper differences than most scientists now expect. Expectations, after all, are not based purely on current evidence; they are biased, even if only slightly, by the gut feelings of the researchers, and those gut feelings include disgust toward racism…

The protective “wall” is about to come crashing down, and all sorts of uncomfortable claims are going to pour in. Skin color has no moral significance, but traits that led to Darwinian success in one of the many new niches and occupations of Holocene life — traits such as collectivism, clannishness, aggressiveness, docility, or the ability to delay gratification — are often seen as virtues or vices. Virtues are acquired slowly, by practice within a cultural context, but the discovery that there might be ethnically-linked genetic variations in the ease with which people can acquire specific virtues is — and this is my prediction — going to be a “game changing” scientific event…

I believe that the “Bell Curve” wars of the 1990s, over race differences in intelligence, will seem genteel and short-lived compared to the coming arguments over ethnic differences in moralized traits. I predict that this “war” will break out between 2012 and 2017.

It’s getting harder every year to profess the standard social science model of the “blank slate” embraced by Piaget and Freud (and many others). The more we learn about genetics and the brain, the more we learn that major aspects of our personalities and minds are determined at birth or earlier. For example, recent research suggests that executive function — one’s ability to control one’s thoughts and behavior — is almost entirely heritable. As time passes, the number of cognitive and behavioral traits in the “almost entirely heritable” list is guaranteed to grow, seriously challenging long-cherished beliefs about justice, merit, and agency.

Since this result is inevitable, it’s imperative that we begin, as Pinker suggests, to separate our moral disgust from our notion of scientific truth. It’s certainly proper to be passionately skeptical about results indicating inborn differences between groups of humans; but it’s not proper to rule out, a priori, the possibility that such differences could exist, as is the current fashion in the academy.

Claims of perpetual motion have been around a long time, and if you read the history, you’ll notice some commonalities among the inventors:

• Absolute, unshakable confidence in themselves and their devices
• Extreme paranoia about their idea being stolen
• Conspiracy thinking, such as “if they knew I was talking to you they would kill me”

The patent office has rejected perpetual motion patents out of hand for a long time, except if the inventor submits a working device demonstrating his idea. There are lots of angry perpetual motion inventors, like the ones in the video, convinced there’s a conspiracy in the patent office, orchestrated by the “status quo” (often the oil industry), to keep their ideas unknown. Many of these same inventors are unwilling to share their ideas with anyone — after all, they haven’t gotten them patented yet! You might steal them!

It’s incredible to me that people who are so manifestly brilliant and talented could be so bonkers crazy at the same time. Take the Seattle inventor, interviewed with his “over unity” motor, a device that outputs more energy than it takes to run. He’s running an electric motor to spin a magnet, then using the motion of that magnet as a generator to produce electricity, which he uses to charge a battery. He talks about running the device for 50 hours non stop, swapping the batteries back and forth. It doesn’t seem to bother him that each time he cycles the batteries he loses a fraction of the original charge, or that he’s never experimented
with attaching a load to the engine.

Then there’s Reidar Finsrud, who is either a fraud or the creator of a near perfectly efficient machine. His plan seems to be to combine as many different elements from other perpetual motion machines as possible — magnets, springs, inclines, pendulums, precise timing — in order to completely frustrate any attempt on the part of an examiner to sort out how it works. So far, he’s been successful.

In the long run, though, we’ll find that he’s just taken a very circuitous route to reproducing existing very efficient machines, such as flywheels that have a zero-load rundown time measured in years. The laws of motion and thermodynamics just don’t have any exceptions for adding enough pendulums and magnets. There’s simply no evidence that these laws can be violated, and anyone trying to do so, to get something for nothing, is either going to end up disappointed or overturn a century of scientific theory. Which do you suppose is more likely to happen?

The ones Obama just approved to be built are the standard water-cooled, fast-breeder Uranium-238 reactors that we all know and love, not the above hotness. But with Nobel Laureate Steven Chu as the head of the Department of Energy, I can’t write off an idea this good out of hand.