I did the survey! I don’t have sufficiently convenient access to a photocopier or scanner to be induced to do the digit ratio thing though.
Emily
Could I suggest posting a link to the survey in Discussion as well? I hardly ever check Main any more, and I don’t think I’m the only one.
I took the survey :) thanks for running it again!
Yes, I’ve definitely experienced that quite often—despite having been exposed to Ian Stewart’s good advice in Letters To A Young Mathematician that your first tactic when you don’t understand something should be to just keep reading.
I clicked on this title with hackles slightly raised, prepared to point out that feminism is a normative set of beliefs, evolutionary psychology is a descriptive set of theories, and therefore there is no such conflict. Fortunately the content of your actual post makes it clear that it’s unnecessary to point this out, but you might like to know that your title may come across as inflammatory!
I think the problem you describe, to the extent that it does exist, is part of a more general problem in (some communities in) feminism that has to do with a vague general suspicion of “the establishment”, including science. Some of it’s there for good reason, e.g. the history of medicine contains some pretty bad atrocities against women, but it’s definitely taken too far in some circles.
My opinion is that there’s no quick fix for this. Getting more women into science is the long-term fix. Scientifically-inclined online communities incorporating friendly behaviour towards women and embracing feminism is a small step that can help!
Laundry (plus ironing, if you have clothes that require that—I try not to), washing up (I think this is called doing the dishes in America), mopping, hoovering (vacuuming), dusting, cleaning bathroom and kitchen surfaces, cleaning toilets, cleaning windows and mirrors. That might cover the obvious ones? Seems like most of them don’t involve much learning but do take a bit of getting round to, if you’re anything like me.
Women will still be alluring, food will still be delicious, and Michaelangelo’s David will still be beautiful, no matter how well you describe these phenomenon.
I hate to pick on petty details, but I’ve been pondering the absence of women here lately and this sort of thing really does add up to a sense of being an outsider. This is awfully male/hetero-centric. (I somehow don’t get the feeling that “you” here is a lesbian or bi woman. I guess I could be mistaken.)
Being handed that sense of outsider-ness is really distracting from the rest of your post. Which I will now read more carefully in an attempt to focus on your actual point instead of petty details.
- Sayeth the Girl by 19 Jul 2009 22:24 UTC; 75 points) (
- 19 Jul 2009 2:35 UTC; 5 points) 's comment on Absolute denial for atheists by (
There’s causality anywhere there’s a noun, a verb, and a subject: ‘Dumbledore’s wand lifted the rock.’
This is a rather confused use of some linguistic terminology. I think “a subject, a verb, and an object” is probably what was intended. (It’s worth noting that in academic syntax these terms are somewhat deprecated and don’t necessarily have useful meanings. I think the casual meanings are still clear enough in informal contexts like this though.)
Beyond the terminology issue, I’m unconvinced by the actual claim here. Arguments from linguistic usage often turn out to be very bad on scrutiny, and I’m not sure this one holds up too well. What about ‘Quirrell secretly followed Harry.’? Seems like a much weaker assertion that Quirrell is causally affecting Harry in some way here. I expect there are more obvious examples—that one took me 10 seconds to come up with.
I wonder to what extent the problems you describe (divorces, conflict, etc) are caused mainly by poor matching of the people having the problems, and to what extent they are caused by the people having poor relationship (or other) skills, relatively regardless of how well matched they are with their partner? For example, it could be that someone is only a little bit less likely to have dramatic arguments with their “ideal match” than with a random partner—they just happen to be an argumentative person or haven’t figured out better ways of resolving disagreements.
Can you find nicer friends? No one has ever been weird about the fact that I don’t really drink. (If anyone tried to be weird about it, I think I would claim there was alcoholism in my family—there’s not, as far as I know. And not be friends with them.)
Is http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/new/ doing something strange for anyone else? As of today, every time I go there, the page changes automatically to http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/top/ after a few seconds.
- 18 Mar 2014 19:48 UTC; 3 points) 's comment on Open thread, 18-24 March 2014 by (
I think this is probably really hard to answer sensibly without some more information about you and your goals.
Since most women managed to reproduce, we can assume a winner strategy is having a large number of daughters
But if everyone adopts this strategy, in a few generations women will by far outnumber men, and suddenly having sons is a brilliant strategy instead. You have to think about what strategies are stable in the population of strategies—as you begin to point towards with the comments about game theory. Yes, game theory has of course been used to look at this type of stuff. (I’m certainly not an expert so I won’t get into details on how.)
If you haven’t read The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, it’s a fun read and great for getting into this subject matter. How The Mind Works by Steven Pinker is also a nice readable/popular intro to evolutionary psychology and covers some of the topics you’re thinking about here.
Basic chemistry. I hated chemistry the first 2-3 of years of high school (UK; I don’t know if it’s taught differently elsewhere). It was all about laundry lists of chemicals, their apparently random properties, and mixing them according to haphazard instructions with results that very occasionally corresponded approximately with what we were informed they should be. We were sort of shown the periodic table, of course, but not really enlightened as to what it all meant. I found it boring and pointless. I hated memorising the properties and relationships of the chemicals we were supposed to know about.
Then, all of a sudden (I think right at the start of year 10), they told us about electron shells. There was rhyme! There was reason! There were underlying, and actually rather enthralling and beautiful, explanations! The periodic table made SO MUCH SENSE. It was too late for me… I had already pretty much solidified in my dislike of chemistry, and had decided not to take an excessive amount of science at GCSE because similar (though less obvious) things had happened in biology and physics, too. But at least I did get that small set of revelations. Why on earth they didn’t explain it to us like that right from the start, I have no idea. I would have loved it.
Really really simple procrastination trick that works wonders for me: don’t just minimise the browser when trying to work, close it. If I need to use it for something work-related, one tab only and close it again immediately afterwards. The trick here, I think, is that flipping to the browser window is an automatic reaction when I get stuck on my work. If my mouse goes to the taskbar and it isn’t there, the extra moment required to think: “Oh, I’ll have to relaunch it” is just about enough to override the automatic reaction with: “No, I’m working”.
I’m surprised to see how close I was to the mean in so many cases. I expected on several questions that I would be, if not an outlier, then outside the middle quartiles. I was wrong in most cases. Clearly the OB/LW brainwashing process has been more successful than I realised… :P
Seriously, very interesting results. I’m a bit dismayed by the 3% female figure—I knew I was in a minority, but I didn’t realise it was that tiny. I wish I could articulate some suggestions for getting hold of more female readers/commenters. I can sort of see intuitively how this place could seem like not the most attractive one to some women, but I don’t have any ideas for sorting that out. Largely I guess it may just be a self-perpetuating thing. Perhaps the first step ought to be just getting some of the current female readers/commenters to make (more/some) top-level posts too. I wish I felt brave and knowledgeable and intelligent enough to attempt one touching on some aspect or other of feminism.
I don’t know if this applies so much in America, where you don’t choose your degree (“major”?) until after starting university (“college”?), but I’m sure there are other UK/elsewhere people reading too, and perhaps this has some broader relevance as well. So… one thing that I wish I’d borne in mind when I was making decisions and torn between going into several different fields. Switching between fields (mid-degree, after your degree, for your graduate degree(s), whatever) is totally possible and loads of people do it, but a general pattern I think I’ve observed is that it’s a lot easier to switch from a more technical field to a less technical field. So, all else being equal, if you find yourself wavering between two or three choices of study area, I would be inclined to advise you to pick the most technical one. (I’m aware that there’s some potential handwaving here about what “technical” actually means. I think the useful interpretation of it probably correlates very strongly with more maths.)
I was completely unaware of this pattern myself and have now managed to orchestrate two successive switches from a less to a more technical field, so it’s absolutely not impossible, and I don’t regret the path I’ve ended up taking for various reasons. But I reckon academically/career-wise I’d have made things a bit smoother for myself, and given myself more choices, if I’d started out with the most technical of the things that I love.
I guess that’s why there were separate questions asking whether you prefer monogamy or whatever else, and how many partners you happen to have.
I took the survey :)
I took the survey. Also just realised that my choice of pass phrase was really silly… I was trying to make it easy for myself to remember what the second word would be, but failed to observe that the first word could become public and therefore it would be sensible to choose something that wouldn’t be obvious to just about anybody from knowing the first word! Ah well, in the unlikely event that I win the draw, whoever gets in first can have the prize, I guess...