Brown privilege in the American executive suite
Why East Asians but not South Asians are underrepresented in leadership positions in the United States: Whereas extensive research has examined the “glass ceiling” faced by women, little research has examined the “bamboo ceiling,” whereby Asians appear disproportionately underrepresented in leadership positions in the United States. To investigate the mechanisms and scope of this problem, …
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Right science
About a month back a researcher at Yale published survey results which showed that Tea Party members exhibited more science knowledge than the general public, somewhat to his chagrin. I wasn’t particularly surprised, because the knowledge of science as it relates to political ideology is somewhat complex. Often the right-leaning get lower marks because of […]
The post Right science appeared first on Gene Expression.
Right science
About a month back a researcher at Yale published survey results which showed that Tea Party members exhibited more science knowledge than the general public, somewhat to his chagrin. I wasn’t particularly surprised, because the knowledge of science as it relates to political ideology is somewhat complex. Often the right-leaning get lower marks because of […]
The post Right science appeared first on Gene Expression.
Equilibration of attitudes toward divorce
One thing that people occasionally mention in the comments on this weblog is that it seems futile to be “conservative” because the arrow of history goes in one direction. Even many conservatives, including myself, have fallen into this assu…
Classicists are smart!
The post below on teachers elicited some strange responses. Its ultimate aim was to show that teachers are not as dull as the average education major may imply to you. Instead many people were highly offended at the idea that physical education teachers may not be the sharpest tools in the shed due to their […]
The less intelligent more likely to accept astrology as scientific
Over at Culture of Science Sheril Kirshenbaum posts a figure from the NSF displaying what proportion of those without high school educations and those with college educations accept the scientific status of astrology. It’s pretty clear to me that…
Loose vs. tight societies
A new paper in Science, Differences Between Tight and Loose Cultures: A 33-Nation Study, is making the media rounds. Here’s NPR:
…The idea for this study really dates to the 1960s. Back then, an anthropologist decided to evaluate a few doze…
Fixing science, in part
The GiveWell Blog has some suggestions for “Suggestions for the Social Sciences”. Here is the big one:
Our single biggest concern when examining research is publication bias, broadly construed. We wonder both (a) how many studies are done,…
Men trust people more than women do
One of the weird things I randomly noticed when querying the “TRUST” variable in the GSS was that men were more trusting than women. I didn’t think much of that, but take a look at this logistic regression:
Trust in people, …
We, Robot & Hamilton’s Rule
The original robots
We are haunted by Hamilton. William D. Hamilton specifically, an evolutionary biologist who died before his time in 2000. We are haunted because debates about his ideas are still roiling the intellectual world over a decade after h…
Who “hearts” science among liberals
First, if it is clear that you haven’t read the post itself and leave a comment I won’t just not publish it, but I’ll ban you. Second, if you complain about this in the comments, I’ll ban you too. Now that you feel appropriately…
Tiger mom for some, not for others
In a rumination on the “Tiger mom” phenomenon, Andrew Gelman suggests:
…Back when I taught at Berkeley and it was considered the #1 statistics department, a lot of my tenured colleagues seemed to have the attitude that their highest a…
The academy is liberal, deal!
A new article in The New York Times, Social Scientist Sees Bias Within, profiles Jonathan Haidt’s quest to get some political diversity within social psychology. This means my post Is the Academy liberal?, is getting some links again. The data wi…
Which nations think over the long term
One of the major parameters which shape individual success, and macroeconomic growth in the aggregate, is time preference. Time preference basically measures an individual’s future-time orientation. Would you for example take $1,000 in the present, or wait 30 days and accept $1,500 dollars? It doesn’t need to be money, children can exhibit time preference as […]
The wheel of history turns to the gods
About six months ago I read a history of modern Italy and was struck by a passage which observed that during the early years of the Italian state none of the prominent political leaders were practicing Roman Catholics. Part of this was specific to the history of the rise of modern Italy, Umberto I fought the […]
Support for bans on interracial marriage by sex
A quick follow-up to my previous post which points to the data that women tend to be more race-conscious in dating than men. There’s a variable in the GSS which asks if you support a ban on interracial marriage, RACMAR. Here’s the question itself:
Do you think there should be laws against marriages between (Negroes/Blacks/African-Americans) […]
Female race consciousness as prudence
Big Think has a post, Do Women Value Ethnicity Over Income in a Mate?:
The results are striking. An African-American man would have to earn $154,000 more than a white man in order for a white woman to prefer him. A Hispanic man would need to earn $77,000 more than a white man, and Asian man […]
More exercise = more I.Q.?
Interesting post by Gretchen Reynolds reviewing the evidence on exercise and intelligence. The title is “Phys Ed: Can Exercise Make Kids Smarter?”, so this is definitely seen as something which is “actionable” in a public policy sense, especially in light of the increases in obesity among young people. Intuitively I think most people are going […]
Social science isn’t “science”?
Update: The title is way too strong as a reflection of my opinion. I’ve added a question mark.
A friend once observed that you can’t have engineering without science, making the whole concept of “social engineering” somewhat farcical. Jim Manzi has an article in City Journal which reviews the checkered history of scientific methods as […]