Depressing Father’s Day Secrets
One day late, but still timeless.
PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail
in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard.
PostSecret, 13345 Copper Ridge Road, Germantown, MD 20874, USA
White Girls Can Rap Too
Song for Friday from the dopest white girl MC I know.
K.FLay studied psychology and sociology at Stanford.
Favorite tracks of mine from her include:
Nerdcore arist MC Lars, whom she did an EP with, tried to court her, failed, and then wrote Rapgirl about her. “Every Biggie needs a Kim.”
Being Aware of Cognitive Bias
The New Yorker, “Why Smart People Are Stupid”:
Self-awareness was not particularly useful: as the scientists note, “people who were aware of their own biases were not better able to overcome them.” This finding wouldn’t surprise Kahneman, who admits in “Thinking, Fast and Slow” that his decades of groundbreaking research have failed to significantly improve his own mental performance. “My intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions, and the planning fallacy”—a tendency to underestimate how long it will take to complete a task—“as it was before I made a study of these issues,” he writes.
Ahh, that’s unnerving. I would like to think that being aware of my own cognitive bias makes me able to recognize it in different but similar situations.
The classic example: A bat and ball cost a dollar and ten cents. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? Apparently, most people say 10 cents automatically.
I would like to think that because I have practiced conceptualizing it as 2x+ 1.00 = 1.10, x=0.05, it will make me more self-aware when encountering different but similar math word problems. Does this study suggest that would not be the case?
I dunno. I’m not sure what they mean by more “cognitively sophisticated” or how exactly they determine bias. I want to continue my “reading and criticizing primary sources” kick today, but I am very poor and the study .pdf costs $12.
The fine denizens of the Internet who have read the study, however, are criticizing The New Yorker article for overstating things. They’re saying that the smarter people only overestimated their own ability to overcome bias. This is a different kind of bias than performing poorly on the tests, and the association was weak anyway. With such a grandiose title like “Why Smart People are Stupid,” this accusation of blowing things out of proportion isn’t surprising.
Cosmo Claims Men “Lack” 12 Abilities
Cosmopolitan is at it again. Trying to mitigate their “Please him better!” terrible advice for insecure women with “But, it’s okay, you’re better than him!”
The “girl power whoo” attitude of their online article 12 Things Women Do Better Than Men annoys me because it tacitly marginalizes men without recognizing the full story. For each “fact” Cosmopolitan cites a study, because yanno, that’s the final authority on the men v. women debate. As a gender egalitarian, I say this is not helping feminism.
This junk list confirms what I’ve already known: The average Joe and Jane columnists suck suck suck at reading and interpreting scientific studies. (In this case, it’s Christie Griffin, who lists some of her favorite things on Twitter as “dresses” and “karma.”)
I’ll give them a few of the stereotypes. Women are cleaner*, eat more diet consciously, and live longer. They statistically make better lifestyle choices that are good for general health and longevity. Sure. It still doesn’t say much about happiness or other factors about that go into quality of life. This is where Cosmo’s list falls off the boat.
We Interview Better
A study at the University of Western Ontario says that women have higher anxiety about interviews, but prep and perform better.
But there’s no objective scale for “best” interview qualities. Here’s the school’s press release about it. The study was done by a doctoral student under a couple professors, but I can’t find it published in any journals, which makes me think it was a poorly-conducted or insignificant study. I have no idea what the methodology was or if more than one person was doing the judging.
In the professors’ previous work, interviewers were asked to rate the interviewees using a Relative Percentile Method that the professors themselves wrote. Nothing says ass-kissing your professor like citing their work as a reference in your own.
We Evolve Hotter
Men like to fuck hot women? No! News to me.
We Have Stronger Immune Systems
As a BioChem major who studied under a virologist, this immediately didn’t sound right.
The study is titled “Gender differences in expression of the human caspase-12 long variant determines susceptibility to Listeria monocytogenes infection.” It looked at the expression of a single human gene transferred into mice, and then assumes that this inflammation effect would translate to humans. Does that not ignore the fact that the Caspase-12 gene is just one component of a complex immune system? Have men evovled different adaptations for other kinds of infections or even other food-borne pathogens?
Cosmo makes a broad claim for a weak conclusion.
I have a personal anecdote for this one. My fake stock account at updown.com has a 15% return because I invested in safe companies like CVS/Caremark and Blizzard Entertainment. It’s still only a 15% return.
Yes, women are more risk averse in a lot of areas, but it can also prevent them from flirting with the great rewards that those risks can grant access to.
We Graduate College More Often
Here’s the big statistic that’s tossed around all time. It’s True.
But in the “real world” it doesn’t matter all that much because there’s still a disproportionate amount of women studying the humanities over the sciences and having trouble landing prestigious positions. We still get paid shitty, especially after age 35. The wage gap is smaller but still there for science and tech jobs.
If you want to talk about women in the workforce, those are the statsitics you want to talk about. Not gloss over the problems with Degree Pride, while ignoring the ridiculous amounts of debt caused by tuition inflation.
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I’m pretty sure the reader demographics of this magazine almost entirely consist of 14-year-old girls who don’t know where their clits are. And maybe a smaller number of 14-year-old boys who don’t know where the clit is.
Some months I want to relentlessly mock the entirety of Cosmopolitan, but there’s already a blog that does it remarkably well.
*Follow-up post about cleanliness: https://clantilyscad.com/2012/06/17/are-women-cleaner-than-men/
WTF Wednesday – Kitten Taken to a Strip Club
Not THE kitten. But who doesn’t like the Catbook Pro?
Man Barred from Taking Kitten to Florida Strip Club
The Charlotte County Sheriff’s Office reported Everett Lages refused to leave the premises when the owner of Emerald City strip club said he wouldn’t be allowed in with the cat.
Rather than leave, Lages called 911. When deputies arrived, they called a taxi for the intoxicated kitten owner to get him and the pet back home, police wrote in a news release posted on Facebook.
The guy was subsequently arrested when he refused to pay the cabbie, and the kitten was taken by animal control. Mugshot in the link.
One of my main criticisms of Occupy was its inability to support specific legislation out of fear of appearing partisan or something. This blog post runs a similar vein about the Wisconsin recall and criticizes a journalist that criticizes the “Wisconsin uprising” for using “traditional politics.”
I’ve read many post-mortems on the unsuccessful effort to recall Scott Walker, many thoughtful, many not. What I haven’t seen discussed, though, are a few fundamental questions crucial to understanding whether the decision to recall Walker was wise, or the effort conducted well: how was the decision made, by whom, and with what awareness and acknowledgement of the risks and difficulties?
Andy Kroll has a thoughtful analysis of the “Wisconsin Uprising” that was first posted at TomDispatch and is now also up at Mother Jones. It’s a good piece, worth reading, but more starkly than most that I’ve read, it exposes what’s missing from almost all the Wisconsin analyses: Who, and on whose behalf, made the decision to recall Scott Walker?
Kroll’s use of verbs, tenses, group nouns and the passive voice reveal some of the problems with the belief that “the movement” was somehow co-opted or led astray by…
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Are Women Cleaner than Men?
[This post is a spin-off from my Cosmo Claims Men “Lack” 12 Ablities post.]
Everyone seems to has a personal anecdote about the topic. Are women more, less, or equally as dirty when compared with men?
There’s tons of messy girls out there for demonstration. I’m one of them. Clothes all over my floor. Smell test if I’ve only worn an outfit once. Desk drawers open with the contents sprawled about on the table. My friend’s mom has a “messy room equilibrium” theory where each person has their own messy quotient before they’ll start cleaning, and I think mine is pretty high.
I’m messy. But I’m not gross. I think this is an important distinction in the debate.
The layer of fecal coliforms that I scrapped off the inside of my boyfriend’s toilet does not exist in mine. (Baby, in all your last-minute toilet scrubbings before I show up, you’ve forgotten to really get under the inside rim.) In college, I had to harass the boys on our coed floor to cover their meat with aluminum foil so it didn’t funk up our fridge.
In organic chem class, my regular partner was sick. I was paired with two other boys for the lab. When prepping, they dumped the test tubes in semi-soapy water and then pulled them out to dry. “Don’t you want to scrub those on the inside first?” I asked. “No, it’s good enough.” We finished first before all the other girls, but also got contamination-caused false positives in the lab results.
False positives, hah, I’m not even trying with the dirty puns. Anyway, those are my stories that form my prejudices about cleanliness.
Let’s looks at the science:
Bacteria
The study that Cosmo quotes found that researchers discovered that men had 10 to 20 percent more bacteria in their workspaces than women. Reasons the researchers hypothesized were that men were known from previous studies to wash their hands less, and they simply have a larger surface area on their bodies to shed germs off.Oh wait, here’s an infographic that says womens’ desks “have 3.5 times more bacteria.” Which one is right?
Well, an older study from 2007 that found that more women stored food in their desks than men, and that’s why there was more bacteria in the desks and on the keyboards. You know what? It doesn’t matter. I don’t even want to analyze the methodologies of the studies. We need bacteria anyway to build up immunity against more serious pathogens
You swab different people at different companies, and you’re going to find different results. It’s not a study that reproducible in a meaningful way. Just wash your hands when you scratch your ass or somebody else’s ass and you’ll be fine.
Hoarding
Despite the people that tend to pop on the TLC shows, men reportedly have slightly higher tendencies to become hoarders than women.
“Hoarding” is going to pop up under its own category in the DSM-V revision, but in my opinion, it’s just a different behavioral manifestation of OCD. OCD, of course, can go the other way with obsessive cleanliness. It’s hard to find gender stats on that particular behavior, but I’m sure there’s plenty of men on that side of spectrum as well. The Aviator, anyone?
Children
Children are just the incubi and succubi of viral plague. With parental tendencies to overuse Amoxicillin and Tamiflu on little Jimmy and Jane for every sniffle and then not finish the 10-14 day course (I’ve see this happen all the time in my line of work), it’s a recipe for breeding newly mutated forms of upper respiratory infection. Which the kids will pass around with the ball at recess and then bring home to mom and dad.
I’m still pretty sure women are still statistically the primary caregivers, so they are the next in line for exposure to the grossness. Even so, this is a cultural thing, not an innate tendency for sickness.
Personal Hygiene
This one is a clear win for the women in terms of bathing, washing clothes/sheets more often, and general fastidiousness to personal grooming.
Conclusion
Cleanliness and perceptions of cleanliness can vary so much by occupation, upbringing, and culture. Even from an evolutionary perspective of division of labor, it’s not like men never had to clean (weapons and temporary camp sites).
“Women are cleaner than men” is a reasonable argument. But like every argument that marginalizes the outliers and sets the stage for norms that divide the sexes, there’s no need to claim it makes them the better sex.