Quoting DenvilleSteve: I cant trust anything Spelke says until she explains fully her role in the Lawrence Summers takedown. Why do so few woman excel in the computer software profession? It cant just be preference. Common sense dictates that a person prefers what they are good at.

Consider that as funding for universities has increased and become more assured, the academic world has become more PC, more intolerant of opposing views.

We sure are getting a lot of cold weather in recent years. Just when does the warming, that academics are in lockstep agreement is happening, kick in?

-Steve

Jeeze, Steve. Get over yourself. I doubt many people care who you trust, or why - but it's not even about that really, is it? You just find an opportunity to beat on an irrelevant hobbyhorse and can't resist the temptation make incoherent noise in that general direction.

that breathing is driving me insane.
i refuse to watch joshua knobe's diavlogs for that reason alone.

Quoting DenvilleSteve: Why do so few woman excel in the computer software profession? It cant just be preference. Common sense dictates that a person prefers what they are good at.

-Steve

As a female computer science student, the answer to this question is really obvious to me. So few women do computer science (and hence, alter software engineering) because they are often not exposed to it as much as guys in their early lives. They either have to be in the small group of girls who had tried programming or other computer science activities before college, or they have to discover computer science later, maybe by taking a class as a requirement for another major and then switching to CS. The nerd/geek image of a computer science contributes to making it unattractive by default when people don't know what it is, and most people don't know what it is really like until they try it. What might interest you, Steve, is that female computer science students do just as well or even better in their classes as male students. The issue is not few women excelling, but few women knowing about it.

Quoting acornthea: As a female computer science student, the answer to this question is really obvious to me. So few women do computer science (and hence, alter software engineering) because they are often not exposed to it as much as guys in their early lives. They either have to be in the small group of girls who had tried programming or other computer science activities before college, or they have to discover computer science later, maybe by taking a class as a requirement for another major and then switching to CS. The nerd/geek image of a computer science contributes to making it unattractive by default when people don't know what it is, and most people don't know what it is really like until they try it. What might interest you, Steve, is that female computer science students do just as well or even better in their classes as male students. The issue is not few women excelling, but few women knowing about it.

Over an almost thirty year career, I've worked with a large number of programmers and software engineers at sundry levels of skill. I've noticed no identifiable

Fascinating diavlog. I've always wondered how one surmises what infants perceive. I wonder what the results would be if the experiment based on accents would show if the children studied were exclusively those who have nannies or au pairs who come from somewhere else, so that the children spend a lot of time listening to trusted caregivers with two different accents. Would such children "trust"/"prefer" only people with one of those two accents, or would their exposure make them less prone to discriminate based on a third accent, compared to children raised exclusively by their parents?

Quoting DenvilleSteve: [...]

LOL! When I saw DS's name in the comment threads before watching the diavlog, I wondered how he could possibly find something to troll out about on Science Saturday. At least no "brave red state Americans" were mentioned, though. Thank the FSM for small mercies.

Quoting sugarkang: that breathing is driving me insane.
i refuse to watch joshua knobe's diavlogs for that reason alone.

Too bad. You should try to fight through it. Elizabeth had a lot of interesting things to report. (And did most of the talking, if that helps.)

Quoting bjkeefe: Fascinating diavlog. I've always wondered how one surmises what infants perceive.

I wonder what the results would be if the experiment based on accents would show if the children studied were exclusively those who have nannies or au pairs who come from somewhere else, so that the children spend a lot of time listening to trusted caregivers with two different accents. Would such children "trust"/"prefer" only people with one of those two accents, or would their exposure make them less prone to discriminate based on a third accent, compared to children raised exclusively by their parents?

Or would their "trust group" include the distinct, but unenumerated set containing both accents?

Quoting acornthea: What might interest you, Steve, is that female computer science students do just as well or even better in their classes as male students. The issue is not few women excelling, but few women knowing about it.

ok, but the question remains. If men and women are of equal ability, and women are doing just as well as their male peers in computer class, which women have advanced the state of the art in computer science? View the videos of MSFT software researchers. All male.http://channel9.msdn.com/ Apparantly, Spelke was the intellectual leader of the PC crowd that expelled Summers from Harvard. The fact that she gives priority to the role of encouragement in achievment, her actions against Summers make her an anti intellectual, no? Her crowd punish those who advance and voice contrary views. I think it is all about the money. Democrats control academia but dont want to be held accountable. If the academics allow their views to be questioned, some of their funding will be allocated to competing schools of thought, resulting in less money for them.

Quoting AemJeff: Or would their "trust group" include the distinct, but unenumerated set (of ordinality 2) containing both accents?

Yes. Thanks for stating that explicitly. I was presuming both accents would be "trustworthy" to kids raised partly by nannies, but that should be part of the test, too.

I'm not trying to state the obvious, that result just seems (to me) as if it would be consistent with what Spelke was describing.

Quoting AemJeff: I'm not trying to state the obvious, that result just seems (to me) as if it would be consistent with what Spelke was describing.

Me, too. The good news is, though, is that it's a(nother) testable prediction. And, since so many insights have been gained by testing something which seemed "obvious" going in, we might be surprised. What would it say for Elizabeth's overall thinking if babies raised partly by nannies who spoke with accents showed no difference from babies who weren't? But I do predict that they'd be more likely to trust the two accents, and the intriguing question at this point is whether they'd therefore be less likely than the control group to distrust a third.

Neat diavlog. Now can we have one on animal consciousness, please?? Rene Descartes vs. Charles Darwin? Or, I would settle for Clive Wynne, author of this superb book: http://powells.com/biblio/62-9780691126364-0

Quoting DenvilleSteve: which women have advanced the state of the art in computer science?

Clearly no one will disabuse you of the notion that women are genetically inferior to men. But I'll at least answer your question. Women who have advanced the state of the art in computer science: — Grace Hopper
— Jeri Ellsworth
— Anita Borg
— Jeannette Wing
— Mary Lou Jepsen
— Shafi Goldwasser
— Sally Floyd
— Rosalind Picard
— Karen Sparck Jones
— Irma Wyman
— Barbara Liskov
— Fran Allen
— Eva Tardos
— Radia Perlman
— Jean Sammet
— Betty Jennings
— Hedy Lamarr
— Betty Snyder
— Fran Bilas
— Kay McNulty
— Marlyn Wescoff
— Ruth Lichterman There are, of course, many, many more. If disproportionate representation proves a genetic argument, Steve might want to consider the over-representation of Asians in computer science programs. Both among professors and students there are far more Asians than their proportion of the population would predict. If we apply Steve's reasoning, we must conclude that "white" American males are genetically inferior to Asians. The company I work for has extensive IT staff in both India and China*. While my experiences over the last decade amount only to personal anecdotes and may not be representative of larger trends, I have yet to encounter a single female working in IT in India, while our Chinese IT staff is > 50% female. Do you suppose this

Well said, Twin. I recommend to anybody to look up Hedy Lamarr's story, in particular. Tt reads like something that could only have happened in a fevered Hollywood imagination. Yet it's true, and the concept is exquisitely sophisticated. (That's not to denigrate any of the other offerings.) Good post.

elizabeth was a great guest but i just can't watch any more interviews by joshua anymore. the way he speaks is so bizarre it's too distracting and i've grown tired of "decoding" all of his interviews over the years.

Quoting Titstorm: the way he speaks is so bizarre it's too distracting ...

Too bad. I agree that he has slightly unusual speech patterns, but I find him easy to understand, clear in his expression, and well worth listening to. Not to argue with you -- if it puts you off, it puts you off -- but to let him know that he shouldn't feel too self-conscious.

Quoting AemJeff: Well said, Twin.

Second that. I am impressed that you could come up with that many names off the top of your head, male or female.

Quoting TwinSwords:

If disproportionate representation proves a genetic argument, Steve might want to consider the over-representation of Asians in computer science programs. Both among professors and students there are far more Asians than their proportion of the population would predict. If we apply Steve's reasoning, we must conclude that "white" American males are genetically inferior to Asians...

Bigots were fond of the genetics argument for intelligence when they found that whites consistently did better in school than blacks. But they quickly changed their minds when it was observed that northern blacks, while scoring lower than norther whites, did better than southern whites -- "proving," with Steve's reasoning, that northern blacks are genetically superior to southern whites.

This point seems to imply that psychologists like Arthur Jensen, Phil Rushton, and Richard Lynn aren't bigots because they think that on average European gentiles are not the smartest population. http://psychology.uwo.ca/faculty/rushtonpdfs/PPPL1.pdf The psychologists and other researchers on racial differences in cognitive ability who have been accused of bigotry for their views do all believe that Northeast Asians (particularly Chinese, Japanese, and Korean populations) have higher general intelligence, and especially mathematical and visuospatial aptitude, than Europeans. Likewise, they all agree that

Quoting Utilitarian: This point seems to imply that psychologists like Arthur Jensen, Phil Rushton, and Richard Lynn aren't bigots because they think that on average European gentiles are not the smartest population.

http://psychology.uwo.ca/faculty/rushtonpdfs/PPPL1.pdf

The psychologists and other researchers on racial differences in cognitive ability who have been accused of bigotry for their views do all believe that Northeast Asians (particularly Chinese, Japanese, and Korean populations) have higher general intelligence, and especially mathematical and visuospatial aptitude, than Europeans. Likewise, they all agree that Ashkenazi Jews are more intelligent (with an emphasis on verbal rather than visuospatial ability) than other Europeans.

Many also take seriously the idea that northern blacks have genetic predispositions to higher IQ than southern blacks: success in leaving the South was associated with ability, and those migrants would pass on genetic advantages to their children. Similarly, there is an urban-rural IQ gap that seems to be heavily driven by selective migration, e.g. people leave the farm and go to the city for college or cognitively demanding jobs and settle there.

Further, northern blacks have a higher percentage of European ancestry than southern ones, and studies of black-white biracial children consistently show intermediate cognitive ability, which

Quoting Utilitarian: This point seems to imply that psychologists like Arthur Jensen, Phil Rushton, and Richard Lynn aren't bigots because they think that on average European gentiles are not the smartest population.

http://psychology.uwo.ca/faculty/rushtonpdfs/PPPL1.pdf

The psychologists and other researchers on racial differences in cognitive ability who have been accused of bigotry for their views do all believe that Northeast Asians (particularly Chinese, Japanese, and Korean populations) have higher general intelligence, and especially mathematical and visuospatial aptitude, than Europeans. Likewise, they all agree that Ashkenazi Jews are more intelligent (with an emphasis on verbal rather than visuospatial ability) than other Europeans.

Many also take seriously the idea that northern blacks have genetic predispositions to higher IQ than southern blacks: success in leaving the South was associated with ability, and those migrants would pass on genetic advantages to their children. Similarly, there is an urban-rural IQ gap that seems to be heavily driven by selective migration, e.g. people leave the farm and go to the city for college or cognitively demanding jobs and settle there.

Further, northern blacks have a higher percentage of European ancestry than southern ones, and studies of black-white biracial children consistently show intermediate cognitive ability, which

Quoting TwinSwords: Yes, I'm well aware that people like Charles Murray, Richard Herrnstein, and others believe in a racial component to IQ.

Herrnstein is no longer a person. He has been dead for a number of years now.

Quoting DenvilleSteve: Herrnstein is no longer a person. He has been dead for a number of years now.

Twin, you used a verb tense that didn't apply to your entire list nouns! We shall now be forced to disregard your summarily invalidated argument.

Quoting AemJeff: I'd go farther and argue that any and all work published under the AEI umbrella ought to be regarded as corrupt until proven otherwise.

Quite so. On a related note, I saw a funny lede last night in one of Daniel Davies's columns on The Guardian's site:

If you're like me, and you read a lot of reports from political thinktanks, then you probably quite often find yourself thinking "This all seems very interesting, and even perhaps convincing, but I wonder if they're bullshitting a bit on some of these superficially plausible statistics". In these circumstances, I tend to find that you can usually get the right answer by following this simple checklist:

1) Yes they are.

1) Yes they are.

That is very funny. (Not to say "LOL.")

Quoting AemJeff: except to the extent that given the far smaller sample size, it's harder to find women at the farther reaches of the scale - good or bad.

It's not necessarily the sample group. Studies have shown a far greater variance in I.Q. test scores among men than women which would help explain why there isn't a female version of Bill Gates. However, there are fewer mentally retarded women as well so it's really a mixed bag.

Steve - Perhaps you might want to do some reading on correlation vs. causation.

Quoting Fsharp: It's not necessarily the sample group. Studies have shown a far greater variance in I.Q. test scores among men than women which would help explain why there isn't a female version of Bill Gates. owever, there are fewer mentally retarded women as well so itu's really a mixed bag.

I know little about the studies you mentioned, but assuming that's true it's a valid point. As a general rule, I think Occam probably would favor the sample size hypothesis as a dominant factor.

Quoting AemJeff: Twin, you used a verb tense that didn't apply to your entire list nouns! We shall now be forced to disregard your summarily invalidated argument.

I read what he wrote. It does not make sense. Otherwise, the MSFT Corp has to be prosecuted by the Democrats for gender discrimination since all of their top software designers are males.

Quoting DenvilleSteve: I read what he wrote. It does not make sense. Otherwise, the MSFT Corp has to be prosecuted by the Democrats for gender discrimination since all of their top software designers are males.

Steve, unequal distribution isn't prima facie evidence of current discrimination. The pool of women available for those jobs is limited by historical factors (which certainly include prior discrimination, generally). You're trying too hard to make a point that just isn't supported by evidence.

Perhaps there are no female Bill Gates because banks would not give start up loans for such ventures to women. Perhaps they agreed with Steve that women are not as smart as men and it would make for too much risk. It is all a circle.

It would be interesting to compare to what extent xenophobic boundaries (we hate the guys who llve on the other side of that hill) correlate to dialectical differences. My hunch is that as soon as you have linguistic differentiation (the difference between a Bronx accent and a Boston accent), you'll have Otherness and potential hostility, independent of physical or cultural differences. Accent may actually be a marker of territory. I got a little confused in the talk because Elizabeth often used "accent" and "language" interchangeably. I hope the researchers explore more the differences between infants' reactions to mutually comprehensible "accents" in addition to different languages (French/English, Spanish/English).

Quoting AemJeff: Twin, you used a verb tense that didn't apply to your entire list nouns! We shall now be forced to disregard your summarily invalidated argument.

Quoting AemJeff: That is very funny. (Not to say "LOL.")

It was. Thanks for that link, Brendan, and the Slate link you posted, Jeff. I suppose I should have more desire than I do to jump in the trenches and dispute the "blacks are a lower form of life" argument," but people much smarter than me have been doing it quite well for many decades, and I'm inclined to think that if you're the sort of person who believes Murray's arguments, it's probably only because it fits so neatly with other preexisting, um, biases.

I dare to wade into this murky depth (thanks DS - hopefully Spelke will return even after your insult), but since we're talking about evolutionary psychology, I offer this Darwinian light.

When outcomes are unequal in socially acceptable areas of behaviour, such as employment, it is often interpreted as a sign of discrimination. But people who draw this conclusion rarely consider that the discrimination in question might actually be being exercised by the supposedly disadvantaged women themselves.

A classic example is income. Women earn less than men. Or do they? In fact, younger women do not, or not much. A recent report by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), a British think-tank, found that British women aged between 22 and 29 who were in full-time employment earned only 1% less than their male counterparts. This age group corresponds for many women to the period when they are single. Once they have found the best available mate, the calculation changes: a woman no longer needs to show off.

In that context, it is less of a surprise that older women are out-earned by their male contemporaries. One reason is that they now care less about the size of their earnings. Of the top

I would also be interested in what this research says about adoption and bilingualism and learning second languages. I say this, firstly, because even as an ESL instructor in a private South Korean university, I try to deflate expectations students have about becoming fluent. Secondly, Koreans, northern and southern, are obsessed with rescuing the Korean language from Japanese colonialists' systematic attempts to kill the language. The result has been 60+ years of academic work to piece a native tongue back together in both Koreas in two different ways. Just what the role of language is in development would be useful to curb some of the xenophobic tendencies. It's also nice to confirm my subscription to The Economist hasn't been a waste:

Racial difference is an area where modern Darwinists have feared, until recently, to tread. This is hardly surprising, given the topic’s history. Many early evolutionary biologists (though not Darwin himself) thought that just as man was a risen ape, so white, European man was the zenith of humanity, and that people from other parts of the world were necessarily inferior.

The consequences of that have been terrible. It gave a veneer of intellectual respectability to the eugenic horrors

Does this mean you admit you're too dumb to reach judgments independently without some sort of social- misogynist - cue? Obviously, Spelke is a better man than you are.

I think Darwin studied physiognomy in his last book. So, I wonder what fixating on heavy breathing and scowling means in an evolutionary sense. Many commenters have expressed these all-too-human opinions, like Brendan's lack of patience for Carroll's eyes. The audio problem is correctable with a different headset. It's no worse than Reihan Salam's motor-mouth, or Althouse at her best. But, even if it continues, Knobe's little giggles are an infectious and idiosyncratic display of enthusiasm, much like George Johnson's cursing or Eli Lake's music, of which bhTV needs more. Spelke is obviously adept at talking to children. Many "men" here should warm to her performance.

I have no idea if it's true, but I'd bet a dollar to a dime that North Korean Korean is different from South Korean Korean, just like Rebs and Yanks during the Civil War. Differences AMONG native speakers of the same language are way more than enough to start a war. India had an interesting solution to its tribal linguistic problems: states are linguistic entities, but -- oddly at first glance -- the colonial language, English, was chosen as the language of advanced education. Then Hindi also got thrown into the mix as a national language -- the disadvantage being that Hindi is ALSO a state/regional language.

The major difference between the two states' language is, that politics has separated them even further than geography. Korean to start with is a language by royal fiat and committee. King Sejong commissioned noble scholars to create a written language based on native sounds for the good of the people. Pyongyang, as the Nazis tried to do with German, has eliminated all foreign loan words. As with German, this has created some very long circumlocutions. Southern Korean is littered with English, and like the Japanese, Koreans use two alphabets, one native, the other Chinese. Unlike Japanese, though, Koreans don't have a separate alphabet for foreign words. Historically, throughout Choson, nobles used Chinese, and commoners spoke dialect. During the colonial period and after the Korean War, scholars created Korean from the wreckage of Japan's language policy, Chinese, and Gyeonggi - where Seoul is - dialect. Newspapers also fostered the national language. Pyongyang has also retained some pre-colonization usages, such as calling the language, choson-mal. "Choson" is the name of the state Meiji Japan colonized. Southerners use hanguk-mal, where "hanguk" means the nation of the Han people. There are also many more provincial dialects than states just in ROK alone, and DPRK only increases the amount of linguistic confusion. Even my Gyeongsang-educated wife

Fascinating stuff. Thanks for the detailed explanation. Did Jonathan Haidt have something to say about linguistic "purity" in his Bheads discussion of liberal and conservative ethics? I remember the examples he used were about sexual purity on the right and environmental and dietary purity on the left, but I can't recall if discussed preserving and cleansing the National Language.

Quoting Wonderment: Fascinating stuff. Thanks for the detailed explanation.

Second that. Thanks, Balt.

Fascinating research. The fact that children show a preference for someone who speaks with the same accent (or in the same language) while being of a different race illustrates what I have sometimes observed here in Paris: black and white francophone children will play together without difficulty, whereas white anglophone children and francophone children tend to play apart, even if they can understand one another in their childish franglais (or Fringlish). Unless this is a reflection of cultural attitudes learned at home!

I'm not a scientist or sociologist but...
I think "their native language" is a misleading term. I would like to see the test done with a white American infant born in New York City who is loved and cared for from birth by a black Jamaican nanny.
It seems to me that the element left out of these experiments is: Who has loved, cared for and nurtured the infant, regardless of the infant's actual race or supposed language or accent at a point where the infant most likely has no conception of what its own innate race, language or accent are.
It seems to me that these infants are responding more to the likeness and language of their primary caregiver more than anything to do with their own inherent race, language or accent.

Well said! I heartily recommend "the blank slate" to anyone that found this dv interesting (although you can easily skip part 3 - where pinker lets his politics get too involved with his science) -z