Delusions of Gender—I watched a video of the author speaking about her book, and it was interesting, but the same information could be told much quicker than in one hour. So here are some points I remembered:
Selection bias: if you make a study and you don’t find a difference between male and female brain, you don’t write a bestseller. Also, comparing the male and female results is the first obvious idea of any researcher, so given p = 0.05, one research in twenty would publish something about the differences between men and women, even if there was none. So if you want some meaningful results, you need to do the meta-analysis of the published studies—and they often look just like they would if the difference wouldn’t really exist: larger samples have smaller differences, and almost half of them shows the difference in the opposite direction.
Some differences are exaggerated and misinterpreted. For example, there is a picture of a brain showing that in these little areas women had more signal than men (or vice versa) when solving a maze. First, many popular authors will interpret it as “women only used these parts, and men only used those parts”, while in reality it means that both men and women used their whole brains, but in the most of the brain their activity was the same, and only in these little parts a difference was found (which is likely a random noise that will appear differently if the study will be replicated). Second, there will be a huge generalization in popular books, from solving the maze to… pretty much any mental activity.
The rest of the video is mostly talking about how stereotypes are bad and self-fulfulling; with some examples of how e.g. the way a question was asked has influenced the results.
...will ya look at that. Some jerk silently downvoted a book recommendation without comment, just because the book being praised seems vaguely feminist and/or anti-pop-evopsych.
Shadowplayers: The Rise And Fall of Factory Records by James Nice (who is also military history writer James Hayward). A history of the Factory Records label, by the man who’s reissuedlarge chunks of its catalogue over the past twenty years. A marvellous story if Manchester post-punk sounds like the sort of thing you’d be interested in. I have to go through it and redigest large chunks of it into Wikipedia. This is unduly difficult as for once in my life I’ve bought the physical paper item and it’s a five hundred page brick, but at least I can use page numbers in the references.
I have to go through it and redigest large chunks of it into Wikipedia. This is unduly difficult as for once in my life I’ve bought the physical paper item and it’s a five hundred page brick, but at least I can use page numbers in the references.
I suspect this is an esoteric enough bit of good scholarly practice that no one’s ever thanked you for this, so I’d better do it: thank you for not being one of those people who thinks their citations of 500-page bricks don’t need page numbers.
Much liked this book, which is a sort-of modern version of Machiavelli’s The Prince. Don’t get fooled by its silly title, this book is the general-audience version of Bueno De Mesquita et al’s selectorate theory, which describes any kind of power structure in terms of which groups leaders need to please (or can ignore!) in order to stay in power. It’s a rather cynical theory, with leaders having staying-in-power as more or less their only goal, and they give a great many example; leaders in democracies and authocracies are more-or-less equivalent, it’s only that the former needed to please many more people and thus are induced to play a bit nicer.
Of course, political science is a bit shaky, but the writers do have statistics and analysis (but one needs the more scholarly version of the theory for that) to back it up. Also, esp. Bueno De Mesquita is known for making quite accurate predictions of future events, more so than others. This gives some confidence, esp. against the common theme of theories that can predict anything.
With selectorate theory in hand, the book explains how we could look at e.g. foreign aid, international politics, to make it beneficial to leaders (democratic or not) to be better to their subjects, improve governance, freedoms etc. So, in the end, the cold, hard-nosed cynicism does point to some ways to make the world a better place...
Recommended. I’ll be going to watch world events through these lenses, and see how wel it works.
Nonfiction Books Thread
I second Ben’s recommendation for How to Think Straight about Psychology from last month.
Delusions of Gender—I watched a video of the author speaking about her book, and it was interesting, but the same information could be told much quicker than in one hour. So here are some points I remembered:
Selection bias: if you make a study and you don’t find a difference between male and female brain, you don’t write a bestseller. Also, comparing the male and female results is the first obvious idea of any researcher, so given p = 0.05, one research in twenty would publish something about the differences between men and women, even if there was none. So if you want some meaningful results, you need to do the meta-analysis of the published studies—and they often look just like they would if the difference wouldn’t really exist: larger samples have smaller differences, and almost half of them shows the difference in the opposite direction.
Some differences are exaggerated and misinterpreted. For example, there is a picture of a brain showing that in these little areas women had more signal than men (or vice versa) when solving a maze. First, many popular authors will interpret it as “women only used these parts, and men only used those parts”, while in reality it means that both men and women used their whole brains, but in the most of the brain their activity was the same, and only in these little parts a difference was found (which is likely a random noise that will appear differently if the study will be replicated). Second, there will be a huge generalization in popular books, from solving the maze to… pretty much any mental activity.
The rest of the video is mostly talking about how stereotypes are bad and self-fulfulling; with some examples of how e.g. the way a question was asked has influenced the results.
...will ya look at that. Some jerk silently downvoted a book recommendation without comment, just because the book being praised seems vaguely feminist and/or anti-pop-evopsych.
Typical LessWrong.
Shadowplayers: The Rise And Fall of Factory Records by James Nice (who is also military history writer James Hayward). A history of the Factory Records label, by the man who’s reissued large chunks of its catalogue over the past twenty years. A marvellous story if Manchester post-punk sounds like the sort of thing you’d be interested in. I have to go through it and redigest large chunks of it into Wikipedia. This is unduly difficult as for once in my life I’ve bought the physical paper item and it’s a five hundred page brick, but at least I can use page numbers in the references.
I suspect this is an esoteric enough bit of good scholarly practice that no one’s ever thanked you for this, so I’d better do it: thank you for not being one of those people who thinks their citations of 500-page bricks don’t need page numbers.
I’ve put up a mirror of my book reviews if anyone is interested in seeing them all in one place.
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith: The Dictator’s Handbook
Much liked this book, which is a sort-of modern version of Machiavelli’s The Prince. Don’t get fooled by its silly title, this book is the general-audience version of Bueno De Mesquita et al’s selectorate theory, which describes any kind of power structure in terms of which groups leaders need to please (or can ignore!) in order to stay in power. It’s a rather cynical theory, with leaders having staying-in-power as more or less their only goal, and they give a great many example; leaders in democracies and authocracies are more-or-less equivalent, it’s only that the former needed to please many more people and thus are induced to play a bit nicer.
Of course, political science is a bit shaky, but the writers do have statistics and analysis (but one needs the more scholarly version of the theory for that) to back it up. Also, esp. Bueno De Mesquita is known for making quite accurate predictions of future events, more so than others. This gives some confidence, esp. against the common theme of theories that can predict anything.
With selectorate theory in hand, the book explains how we could look at e.g. foreign aid, international politics, to make it beneficial to leaders (democratic or not) to be better to their subjects, improve governance, freedoms etc. So, in the end, the cold, hard-nosed cynicism does point to some ways to make the world a better place...
Recommended. I’ll be going to watch world events through these lenses, and see how wel it works.