Category Archives: Science & Tech

The Trouble with Fake Nerds

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Being a nerd has become the cool kid thing to be. The media people in Washington now call their big gala the “nerd ball” because it attracted all of the policy wonks. The fact that few of these people can do basic mathematics does not matter. They wear the right costumes and strike the right pose so they can pretend to be bookish nerds. Every  liberal pretends to be a science fan, even though none of them have any background in science, especially the human sciences.

But, fads are what they are and no group is more faddish than the Left. The trouble with this one is that incredibly stupid ideas get passed around like settled science, to use a common refrain. Here’s a good example from Tech Crunch, a site that caters to the fake nerd crowd.

Here’s an idea crazy enough that it just might work: Pave the streets with solar-powered panels that have their own built-in heat and LED lights. That’s what Scott and Julie Brusaw hope to accomplish with their ongoing Solar Roadways project, which they just funded through a hugely popular crowdfunding campaign.

The husband-and-wife team has spent the better part of the last decade developing solar-powered modular panels that could be installed in roadways and parking lots, and would be able to collect power from the sun. Those panels could also keep streets clear of snow and ice, while illuminating them with LEDs.

Rather than paving streets and driveways with asphalt, the Solar Roadways panels would theoretically be able to decrease our nation’s dependence on fossil fuels by generating massive amounts of clean energy. Panels are made from ruggedized glass and connect to one another through a mesh network, so that even if one panel fails the system will notify repair crews that it needs to be replaced.

Actually, the theory is nonsense. Asphalt is black and that means it absorbs sunlight readily. The light is converted into heat, which is why the road is smoking hot in the middle of summer. It is also why the snow melts away even when it is below freezing, once the road is exposed. The road is converting close to 100% of the sunlight into heat. Solar panels, on the other hand, convert about 15% of sunlight into electricity. For that reason alone you have a huge loss of energy using solar panels instead of asphalt.

Then you have the issue of storage. If you want to use solar to light the roads, then you have to store the energy because lighting them in the daytime is stupid. That means batteries. They have a loss of energy, but they also cost a boatload of money and have to be replaced regularly.

We’re not even at the hard parts. Building a road from solar panels would require new materials capable of handling the massive abuse that comes from being driven over by trucks and cars. Those materials could not be smooth as the cars would fly off the roads in the rain.

Anyone with a mastery of basic science would spot this as nonsense, but the fake nerd trend means these people get to con a bunch of fake nerds into “crowdfunding” their alchemy. There’s always good money in pretending to be the smartest guy in the room.

Fake Safety

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The wearing of helmets while cycling is a new thing. People started putting them on their kids in the safety scares of the 1990’s. Then they because a weird fashion statement for middle aged people. The pros started wearing them, so the amateurs started wearing helmets, for the same reason they wear jerseys. The fact that they look stupid and probably don’t work does not matter.

A leading neurosurgeon has controversially claimed that cyclists who wear helmets are wasting their time.

Henry Marsh, who works at St George’s Hospital in Tooting, London, said that many of his patients who have been involved in bike accidents have been wearing helmets that were ‘too flimsy’ to be beneficial.

He made the comments while speaking at the Hay Festival during a discussion with Ian McEwan, whose 2005 novel Saturday featured a neurosurgeon.

He cited evidence from the University of Bath that suggests that wearing a helmet may even put cyclists at greater risk. The research showed that drivers get around 3 inches closer to cyclists who wear helmets because they perceive them as safer.

He said: “I ride a bike and I never wear a helmet. In the countries where bike helmets are compulsory there has been no reduction in bike injuries whatsoever.

Of course not. Think about the ways you can crash on a bike. One is you just fall over to the side while not moving. Unless you strike your head on a curb or rock, you bruise an elbow and that’s it. Since this is less likely than falling down the stairs and we don’t wear helmets walking around the house, it makes no sense to wear a helmet on a bike to mitigate against this possibility.

Another way to crash is you hit something and go over the bars. That’s going to hurt, but you’re much more likely to break an arm or wrist than break your melon. That’s why broken arms and wrists are vastly more common than broken heads. More important, that flimsy piece of plastic is not saving your head if you take a direct hit.

The other possibility is you get hit by a car. A broken melon is the least of your worries in that case. The sudden deceleration is going to cause a lot more damage than just cracking your skull. of course, that bit of plastic and foam is not going to matter, other than to make it a bit easier to identify your body. That’s always been the real benefit of wearing a motorcycle helmet

“I see lots of people in bike accidents and these flimsy little helmets don’t help.”

Mr Marsh said that he had been riding his bike for 40 years, wearing a cowboy hat, and had only fallen off once.

“I have been cycling for 40 years and have only been knocked off once. I wear a cowboy hat and cowboy boots. I look completely mad.”

Cyclists travel around 3.1 billion miles each year in Britain. Lights and reflectors are a legal obligation after dark, and reflective jackets an increasingly common sight.

But helmets are not compulsory in the UK, unlike in Australia and parts of the US, yet the government encourages cyclists to wear one.

Research conducted by Dr Ian Walker, a professor of traffic psychology at the University of Bath, showed that motorists drove around 8cm closer when overtaking cyclists with helmets.

He suggested that drivers think helmeted cyclists are more sensible, predicable and experienced, so therefore the driver doesn’t need to give them much space when overtaking.

Non-helmeted cyclists, especially non helmeted “women” are less predictable and experienced, according to this study and so motorists give them more room.

That’s something experienced cyclist know. The safest way to ride on public roads is in the middle oft he road with traffic. The drivers will see you and not try to pass you at a high rate of speed. They will also see that you can’t see them. They may get pissed and blow the horn, but they are unlikely to drive over you.

Bad Science

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Even the most disconnected people know the gag about science announcing something and then the next day announcing the opposite. This is most common with food and diet, where everyday brings a new scare. If you follow the soft-sciences, then you know that most of what passes for academic research in some fields is complete nonsense that is easily refuted. This story in the New York Times goes into detail about the origin of what we have come to call junk science.

My first Raw Data column, published in January, was about the controversy over irreproducibility — experiments whose outcomes cannot be verified independently by another lab. Featured in the piece was a study by Dr. John P.A. Ioannidis that has been a source of contention since it appeared in 2005. It was called “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.”

All scientific results are, of course, subject to revision and refutation by later experiments. The problem comes when these replications don’t occur and the information keeps spreading unchecked.

Dr. Ioannidis’s analysis took into account several factors — things like noisy data, a small sample size or relatively lenient standards for deciding if a finding is statistically significant. His model could be applied to any area of science that met his criteria. But most attention to the reproducibility problem has been in the life sciences, particularly in medical laboratory research and epidemiology. Based on the number of papers in major journals, Dr. Ioannidis estimates that the field accounts for some 50 percent of published research.

The small sample size is a favorite of the health rackets. I wish I had saved it, but my all time favorite was a study on milk using eight Norwegian dairy farmers. I forget the details, but it had something to do with heart disease and dairy consumption. The executive summary made the claim that dairy causes heart disease. They assumed the nitwit reporters would not bother to read the study.

Another area of concern has been the social sciences, including psychology, which make up about 25 percent of publications. Together that constitutes most of scientific research. The remaining slice is physical science — everything from geology and climatology to cosmology and particle physics. These fields have not received the same kind of scrutiny as the others. Is that because they are less prone to the problems Dr. Ioannides described?

Faye Flam, a science writer with a degree in geophysics, made that argument in a critique of my column in Knight Journalism Tracker, and I responded on my own blog, Fire in the Mind. Since then I’ve been thinking more about the matter, and I asked Dr. Ioannidis for his view.

“Physical sciences have a stronger tradition of some solid practices that improve reproducibility,” he replied in an email. Collaborative research, for example, is customary in physics, including large consortiums of experimenters like the teams that announced the discovery of the Higgs particle. “This certainly increases the transparency, reliability and cross-checking of proposed research findings,” he wrote.

He also mentioned more stringent statistical standards in particle physics — like the five sigma measure I mentioned in my second column — as well as sociological factors: “There seems to be a higher community standard for ‘shaming’ reputations if people step out and make claims that are subsequently refuted.” Cold fusion was a notorious example. He also saw less of an aversion to publishing negative experimental results — that is, failed replications.

Another factor, as Ms. Flam suggests, is how constrained a field is in generating plausible hypotheses to test. Almost anything might be suspected of causing cancer, but physicists are unlikely to propose conjectures that violate quantum mechanics or general relativity. But I’m not sure the difference is always that stark. Here is how I put it my blog post:

“What about the delicate and exquisitely controlled experiments that occur in laboratories? Are hypotheses involving intracellular enzyme pathways and the effects of microRNA on protein regulation so much less constrained than, say, solid-state physics and materials science?

Everyone is being polite here. The difference is social science is not science. Physics and chemistry are science. Science relies on math to validate itself. Long before humans walked the earth, arithmetic was true. Two plus two was true at the dawn of time and will be true into the future. Social sciences rely on statistics, which they use to calculate probabilities. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it is not science.

You can calculate the probability of you getting black jack on the next deal. You cannot prove you will get black jack. When you get into areas with loads of hard to quantify variables, statistics loses much of it value. The response to that is the creation of simplified models and studies that have no connection to reality. The result provides statistically useful results, but the difference between statistically useful and practically useful is often so large as to make them mutually exclusive.

Dr. Ioannidis said he was struck by an “arrogant dismissal” by some physical scientists of the suggestion that their field might be anything less than pristine. We won’t really know, he said, unless there are empirical studies like the recent ones in medical science.

“I have no doubt that false positives occur in all of these fields,” he concluded, “and occasionally they may be a major problem.”

I’ll be looking further into this matter for a future column and would welcome comments from scientists about the situation in their own domain.

Science is not immune from mischief. This story from last week shows how broken the peer review system is these days. Peer review is intended to weed out the junk science from the legitimate science. Experts in the field review your work, critique your methods, challenge your assumptions and look at your data. If computer generated gibberish is passing through the system it means no one is looking at this stuff. Peer review is useless if there are no peers and no review.

Good News From The Black Death

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Every society has its myths. Foundation myths not only explain how the culture came to be, but also why they are God’s special people. Up until a couple of decades ago, Americans were taught in grammar school about the Pilgrims, religious liberty and the founding of the world’s first representative democracy. Other myths justify the existing order and the traditions of the people. In the West, this means believing in the equality of man, natural rights and so forth. Myths are a necessary part of who we are.

In America, politics, popular culture and policy debate all start from the assertion that all people are equal at birth. Everything about a person is determined by environment. Even things like heart disease, cancer, and body type are negotiable, despite science saying otherwise. Of course, sex and race are ruled irrelevant. Any differences between the sexes or races is assumed to be a carryover from past sins in the culture. Public policy in areas like education are aimed at eradicating these cultural shadows.

As is always the case with religion, myths and belief, science tends to be an enemy. The HBD folks have done yeoman’s work popularizing and expanding on ideas percolating up from the sciences, particularly genetics and evolutionary biology. Still, it is a small collection of people that follow this stuff and even a smaller group that think public policy should reflect the new knowledge. Superstition is the rule, but if you are the least bit optimistic, then stories like this one should give you some hope.

Enter Mihai Netea, an immunologist at Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre in the Netherlands. He realized that in his home country, Romania, the existence of two very distinct ethnic groups provided an opportunity to see the hand of natural selection in the human genome. A thousand years ago, the Rroma people—commonly known as gypsies—migrated into Europe from north India. But they intermarried little with European Romanians and thus have very distinct genetic backgrounds. Yet, by living in the same place, both of these groups experienced the same conditions, including the Black Plague, which did not reach northern India. So the researchers sought genes favored by natural selection by seeking similarities in the Rroma and European Romanians that are not found in North Indians.

Netea; evolutionary biologist Jaume Bertranpetit of Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain; and their colleagues looked for differences at more than 196,000 places in the genomes of 100 Romanians of European descent and 100 Rroma. For comparison, the researchers also cataloged these differences in 500 individuals who lived in northwestern India, where the Rroma came from. Then they analyzed which genes had changed the most to see which were most favored by selection.

Genetically, the Rroma are still quite similar to the northwestern Indians, even though they have lived side by side with the Romanians for a millennium, the team found. But there were 20 genes in the Rroma and the Romanians that had changes that were not seen in the Indians’ versions of those genes, Netea and his colleagues report online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. These genes “were positively selected for in the Romanians and in the gypsies but not in the Indians,” Netea explains. “It’s a very strong signal.”

Now, why should Gypsy resistance to the plague matter? Well, as a cultural matter, it does not. What matters is the free and open discussion in a mainstream science journal about genetic differences in human populations. If genes matter in disease resistance, there’s no denying they matter in other areas. More important, if observable differences are genetic, then there is little point in arguing for environmentally based antidotes. That would be like trying to talk someone out of having cancer.

Now, there are plenty of these turning up every week and that supports for the above point. What’s important here is the casual discussion of gypsies, a protected class in Europe. Even though everyone hates them, no one is allowed to mention them. They are not quite on the level of American blacks, but they enjoy a similar status. When geneticist feel free to study and report on protected classes, then maybe the Overton window is moving in the direction of rationality. Even a little movement is a miracle.

ID’ers Are Kooks

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The other day, the Spectator gave a platform to Stephen Meyer, the intelligent Design guru, so he could make his case. They gave John Derbyshire the chance to reply. Most people shrug off the intelligent design people, assuming they are just the creationists with a different line of attack. Therefore only believers bother to read the arguments put forth by people like Meyer. If you read what this guy has to say, it is not hard to come away thinking these people are worse than creationists.

When writing in scientific journals, leading biologists candidly discuss the many scientific difficulties facing contemporary versions of Darwin’s theory. Yet when scientists take up the public defense of Darwinism—in educational policy statements, textbooks, or public television documentaries—that candor often disappears behind a rhetorical curtain. “There’s a feeling in biology that scientists should keep their dirty laundry hidden,” says theoretical biologist Danny Hillis, adding that “there’s a strong school of thought in biology that one should never question Darwin in public.”

The reticence that Darwin’s present day defenders feel about criticizing evolutionary theory would have likely made Charles Darwin uncomfortable. In the Origin of Species, Darwin openly acknowledged important weaknesses in his theory and professed his own doubts about key aspects of it.

In the Origin, Darwin expressed a key doubt about the ability of his theory to explain one particular event in the history of life, an event known as the Cambrian explosion. I’ve recently written a book, Darwin’s Doubt, about this in which I argue that the problem Darwin identified not only remains to this day, but that it has grown up to illustrate a more fundamental conceptual difficulty than he could have understood—a problem for all of evolutionary biology that points to the need for an entirely different understanding of the origin of animal life on Earth.

An interesting thing about the intelligent design people is they have an authoritarian mindset that is revealed in their habit of relying on appeals to authority. On the one hand, they rely on the Bible as their ultimate source of authority. That makes sense, as they are believers. They assume, however, that evolutionary biologists also rely on an authority as their god. The ID’er turn Darwin into a shaman or prophet, who they seek to discredit, assuming that will discredit the theory for which is best known.

The trouble is evolutionary biologists do not worship Darwin and are more than willing to point out his shortcomings. It is how science works. It is what makes Darwin a scientist and not a philosopher. He readily acknowledged his own shortcomings and gaps in knowledge. Attacking Darwin to discredit evolution is like attacking Blaise Pascal to disprove probability theory. A whole lot of work and a whole lot of people have built on and modified what Darwin started. Darwin’s shortcomings, real or imagined, are irrelevant.

The real problem with the ID’er is this. Let’s say they are correct and evolutionary biology is a dead end and self-refuting at that dead end. Let’s say the math of genetic mutation is so improbable that it cannot possibly explain the diversity of life. How does that validate Intelligent Design? One has nothing to do with the other. Intelligent design is built on a collection of logical fallacies. To argue that natural selection is invalid proves intelligent design is correct is a version of the fallacy of the undistributed middle.

Of course, the motivation is the argument from adverse consequences. Their particular brand of Christianity requires a more literal interpretation of creation. God created the heavens and earth just as we see it today. Natural selection says the current natural world is the result of random selection, along with other things like sexual selection. Therefore, if natural selection is true that invalidates their religious beliefs. Since they are not abandoning those beliefs, they can never accept evolution.

That’s really the irritating thing about these people. They are not honest. John is correct to call them liars. On the one hand, they swear they are not starting from a religious angle and are scientists like everyone else. Unlike real scientists, however, they make no attempt to prove their claims or even offer up a shred of data in support of their claim. Instead it is a non-stop assault on “Darwinism” as they imagine it. It really is the opposite of science when you think of it. It’s also fundamentally dishonest.

Bad Science

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Alex Tabarrok has a piece in Slate arguing that more guns in a society results in more suicides, at least in some places under certain conditions. For reasons no one can explain, this effect is not observed in East Asian counties or among Asians anywhere in the world. A similar phenomenon has been observed about gun ownership and crime, where increased access to guns only increases black crime, while increased gun ownership among whites seems to reduce crime. Another mystery.

In fairness to the writer, the math is not defective and the observation is sound. A gun is a much more effective tool for killing yourself than a knife or a brick. Give the ways you can use a gun to kill yourself, the odds of surviving are very small. Other forms of suicide, like pills and the idling car in the garage routine are slower and increase the chance of discovery and therefore survival. They concede that point in the Slate article.

Are the people not killing themselves with guns simply committing suicide by other means? Some are—but not all. While reduced household gun ownership did lead to more suicides by other means, suicides went down overall. That’s because contrary to the “folk wisdom” that people who want to commit suicide will always find a way to get the job done, suicides are not inevitable. Suicides are often impulsive decisions, and guns require less forethought than other means of suicide—and they’re also deadlier.

Suicides are often impulsive decisions. If we assume the well thought out suicides are a constant and just focus on the impulsive ones, it is easy to see how this number would correlate to the availability of effective killing tools. If every household had strong poison that tasted like candy, we would see the same effect. That’s hardly a surprise. The availability of guns certainly results in more accidental shootings and impulsive shootings that stem from disputes. Take away all the knives and we get fewer knife accidents.

Of course, if we were talking about poison or knives, Slate would not bother publishing it and Tabarrok would not bother writing about it. The Left hates gun ownership, as it is a proxy for white males. Therefore, there is no money to be made in studying the use of guns in preventing crime. There’s money to be made peddling a study of the obvious, as long as it confirms some shibboleth of the Left. That’s what you see here.

The folks at Slate expect their readers to come away with the impression that science says guns cause suicide. It is a revealing bit about how the Left operates. The real focus of their propaganda is not the unbelievers, but in fact their own believers. In fact all of their agitating for gun grabbing is aimed at their own people, in an effort to stoke their enthusiasm for the cause in general. Gun grabbing is just the red cape to get the bulls of the Left excited. You see it in this sort of rhetoric.

Our research had to overcome the fact that no one knows with great precision how many guns there are in America, how many households own a gun, how gun ownership varies demographically and geographically, what types of guns there are, or how guns are used. In part that’s because in 1996, Congress banned the CDC from funding any research to “advocate or promote gun control.” That’s not a ban on gun research, technically, but after Congress extended the wording and expanded the ban to other agencies, it had enough of a chilling effect to reduce CDC funding for gun violence research from $2.5 million per year in the early 1990s to just $100,000 in recent years.

In other words, the gun bogeyman is made scarier because he cannot be quantified, so there could be a gun in your town, ready to cause you to commit suicide. That’s another aspect to the gun grabbing cult. They have imbued guns with magical qualities, which is why they are so willing to believe guns cause blacks to murder one another and suburban whites to kill themselves. The gun is a material projection of white privilege and white supremacy. It’s mere presence acts as if a white man is there to oppress you.

Of course, the reason Congress banned the CDC from gun studies is they were churning out the sort of junk science we see in this Slate article. Alex is a bright guy and he clearly knows his work is going to be used by the gun grabbers. Those gun grabbers will not mention any of the caveats. They will simply scream, “See? See? Science says guns cause more suicides!” Tabarrok knows this, yet he has been pimping this paper and the supporting research for a month. Libertarianism is just another grift.

Again, the issue here is not methodology. It is the misappropriation of authority, in this case social science, to promote falsehoods. If you make poison for a living you have a responsibility to take precautions. That means not selling it to children or people you suspect are evil. If you do social science research, you have an obligation to guard against your work being used for nefarious ends. Tabarrok is willingly adding the authority of his name to something he has to know is misleading, at best.

Criminally Stupid

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Most people have no idea what goes on in their local government office, because they don’t work for the government. You can have some idea how the department of motor vehicles operates, but you don’t know what really goes on inside those offices. You just see the part that faces the public. The people inside know about the computer systems, the people who do nothing but take up space and the the ridiculous managers and supervisors who fill their days with busy work and pointless meetings.

The revers is true as well. The people working in government offices have no idea what happens in the dreaded private sector. Most government workers and just about all managers have never worked in the private sector, outside of college jobs. They don’t know about the drive for efficiency, cost cutting, and profit margins. They don’t know what it is like to keep the computer software up to date so the company can maintain its competitive edge and continue to reduce costs, by reducing labor.

The reason this matters is when the government decides they are going to increase the the number of interfaces between the government and the dreaded private sector, it means increased opportunities for a clash of cultures and technologies. The culture within the government office, for example, is never going to blend well with the culture inside a private business. Similarly, the technology and process are never going to interface smoothly with those in the private sector. There’s going to be problems.

This is what is happening with the ObamaCare exchanges. In government, IT projects are as mostly about rewarding favored companies in specific districts. They eventually get done and generally work, but they are never intended to reduce costs or lower the number of people in the government office. In the private sector, technology is a tool to cut people and costs, but often a tool to defend against mischief. Trying to bring government IT systems into the retail space, is like putting government workers in the private sector.

Now, the reason all of our government systems have not been compromised is they are not exposed to the world. Most people are unaware of the alternative “internet” used by security forces, but it exists and it used by national security, diplomats and parts of government. Secure communication channels are essential. More often, government systems are simply so old, they can’t be accessed over the internet.  There are plenty of government systems running COBOL applications to this day.

This initiative to upgrade these government systems so they can interface with the private sector systems sounds good in theory, but that’s where the culture problem comes into the mix. Since none of these legacy systems were written by people contemplating the Internet, they have nothing more than old school password security. By exposing them to the internet, bad actors can now quickly crack the security and get into the back-end systems where the sensitive data is stored. The whole system is now exposed.

Lesson From The Market: Software

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I go to an upscale grocery store that is like Whole Foods, but without the preachy liberal nonsense. They sell all the fashionable stuff and they make sure to create an atmosphere that flatters their clientele. It has a coffee shop and bakery, so shoppers can have a latte and a muffin while they browse the organic food items. Of course, everyone uses the silly canvas sacks that are supposed to be good for the earth. It’s all pretentious and silly, but unlike Whole Foods, the prices are great so i tolerate the other stuff.

Anyway, I was at the checkout and I noticed they still use a character based computer software. Judging from the interface, I’m going to say it is written in COBOL. You can sort of tell by the blue screen with red highlights. It could be some form of business basic or maybe even Clipper/Foxpro. Regardless, it is old stuff, probably written for them two decades ago. They have scanners and scales, but that’s not revolutionary. Integration to these items was done long before the graphical user interface.

Checkout is fast and efficient. The clerks never struggle to price an item or look up some obscure code for a weird item. For the grocery chain owners, the point-of-sale system is perfectly adequate and they obviously see no reason to “modernize it.” From their perspective, this tools does the job that needs doing, so there is no reason to replace with a new tool. In the grocery business, margins are small, so anywhere they can reduce costs, they will, even if it means using a twenty year old software system.

I know of at least a dozen goodly sized companies that use legacy system for their business. In one case, they use a system written by a firm long defunct in a language long abandoned. The other use systems that are a decade or more out of date and no longer supported by the developer. I know of a large importer using character based software written in the 80’s. Most banks in this country rely on software written in the 1970’s, patched up over the last few decades. There’s lots of old code out there.

The point here is that good enough is good enough. As much as we think technology is a constant driver of innovation and change, it does run its course. The lesson from the market is that we may have picked all of the low hanging fruit from the computer revolution. While automation will continue, it will be much slower than the futurist would like us to believe. That growing pile of legacy code that is out there in the world will only make the process slower. We are quickly reaching the point of diminishing returns.

Dropping Facebook

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I am not a young person, but I am not old yet either. That means I am less inclined to adopt new technology than a 20-something, but I will if it is practical. The older you get, the definition of “practical” tends to narrow. A teenager views a smart phone as a necessity, while a senior views it as a novelty. I have a smart phone and rely on it a great deal, but I also know I could get along without it, because I remember a time when these things did not exist. The dark ages get a bad rap. It was not so dark.

Facebook was sort of the reverse. In my youth I was an early adopter of mobile phones so I moved up with the technology. Facebook sis not exist in my youth, so I was a late adopter. Anyway, one of my friends badgered me into signing onto Facebook a few years back. I setup a page and did nothing with it. I added friends for the first month or so then I stopped. I would log in daily to see what was posted and maybe comment on occasion, but mostly it was a daily peak into on the lives of friends and some strangers.

The fact is, I never really used it much. I like my friends, but I have no need or desire to communicate with them daily. E-mail is better anyway. The friends of friends who come into view from time to time are not very interesting. It seems that the more prolific users are crazy. They are like drug fiends who will do anything to get attention on-line. They quickly run out of good ways to get attention, so they lurch into the unlimited supply of bad ways to get attention. You learn a lot about people a a result. None of it good.

My liberal friends have some real wackos in their circle. If you are logging onto a website of a politician to tell them and the world how much you love them, you need a psychiatrist, not a platform. Otherwise, the daily fare on Facebook is boring scraps of information about the collection of average people in my life. God bless them, but they are just not that interesting. Neither am I. I read a lot and know a lot of things that most people don’t know, but I am no more interesting than the next guy.

So, I deactivated my account. It seems that may be the one thing I have in common with young people. Facebook is now losing its cool factor with the young. I’ve always said it was a fad, but I started to wonder if I was mistaken. It turns out I was right. We know that a very large number of the accounts on Facebook are fake. We also know many are dormant. More important, we know that most of us are not that interesting. Facebook is like reality TV, without the parts created by writers to make it interesting.

The whole rationale for the company, however, is they get young people hook ed on the site, so they can sell them stuff or have the ad makers sell them stuff. If it turns out that they do not get young people, then you have to wonder if Facebook is a viable business, at least in the long run. The myth of marketing is that you have to sell young people in order to sell older people. Maybe that’s false, but if they are not selling young people, what are they selling to old people? That’s never been very clear with Facebook

Putting that aside, I wonder if social media has the legs experts claim. For all of human history, we lacked social media. Humans socialized in person. We have evolved to be good at it. We have never been good at communicating through writing or pictures. Almost all human knowledge is passed along in-person. A good way to look at it, consider the telephone. People will call one another to arrange a get together. No one meets with someone to arrange a telephone call. That would be absurd.

Telephone technology is a decent alternative to in-person communication, but not the preferred one. Social media like Facebook is closer to phone tag than anything else. It is people leaving message for one another on the refrigerator. Again, it works to a point, but it is never replacing normal human in-person interaction. Then there is the openness of these platforms. Despite the madness for an open society by the usual suspects, the truth is white people like their privacy. Facebook is anti-privacy.

The Problem With Women

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Steve Sailer has a post up about the trials and tribulations of girls in science. His post is commentary on this very long article by a woman calling herself Eileen Pollack. The general thrust of that piece that girls don’t go into STEM field in great numbers, because there is some invisible force filed that repels them. This invisible force field cannot be seen, because it is invisible, but it can be described by women with the right credentials from the women’s studies department. They call this force field “male privilege.’

Of course, as Sailer points out, Mx. Pollack started out in life as an undergrad in physics, but lost interest and moved onto creative writing. It turns out that women are not as good at math, on average, as boys, but they are also less interested in it. That means the number of girls in the STEM fields is going to much lower than expected, just using test scores for mathematical aptitude. Feminism, ironically, can not tolerate women choosing to be women, so they insist women are being tricked in some way.

Feminism stopped being a serious topic long before anyone reading this was alive and now it is quite silly. A century ago, changing the law to better serve women in the industrial age was a worthy topic. In the agrarian age, divorce, for example, was not an issue for most people. Property rights and legal rights were also far less important. As cities grew and social relationships changed, the law needed to change to address the needs of both men and women, so feminism made some sense.

Today it is just the stereotypical “feminists” grousing about men. In college, feminism is where the low self-esteem gals go when they don’t want to become lesbians. Some thing that has been true for a long time is the easiest women to get are the ones hanging around the women’s studies department. Despite all the man-hating and sisterhood talk, they will jump in the sack with the first guy showing interest. All their talk about independence and not needing a man is just an act.

Now, it is worth mentioning that the scrambling of the sex roles has made sorting these things more difficult. Men are far less manly, especially at elite universities where feminism is rampant. They are also far less worldly. From the female perspective, being out-competed in these cognitive fields by wimps and socially awkward losers could very well look like a conspiracy. The girls are atop the status system on campus and more aggressive than these males, but they can’t compete.

Even so, the main driver of the gender equity delusions is a studied and rampant ignorance of biological reality. The starting point is always the assumption that some mysterious force or perhaps a hidden conspiracy is preventing the egalitarian paradise from emerging. The default is the dream, rather than observable reality. Even the basic relationship  between the sexes is excluded. The fact that boys like pretty girls and girls like high status males is not a mystery.

The new study goes a long way toward providing hard evidence of a continuing bias against women in the sciences. Only one-fifth of physics Ph.D.’s in this country are awarded to women, and only about half of those women are American; of all the physics professors in the United States, only 14 percent are women. The numbers of black and Hispanic scientists are even lower; in a typical year, 13 African-Americans and 20 Latinos of either sex receive Ph.D.’s in physics. The reasons for those shortages are hardly mysterious — many minority students attend secondary schools that leave them too far behind to catch up in science, and the effects of prejudice at every stage of their education are well documented. But what could still be keeping women out of the STEM fields (“STEM” being the current shorthand for “science, technology, engineering and mathematics”), which offer so much in the way of job prospects, prestige, intellectual stimulation and income?

Imagine if someone said, “Our study goes a long way toward providing hard evidence of a continuing bias against whites in the National Basketball Association…” Everyone gets that blacks are, on average, better equipped by nature to excel at some sports. No one thinks this is odd, but in the cognitive fields, it is blasphemy to suggest there are differences between the sexes and races. It suggests the problem of gender equity is really just  a problem with women accepting reality.