Is philosophy worse for women than math is?

My philosopher friends today are all talking about the resignation/firing of Colin McGinn, a pretty well-known philosopher as I understand it, who as it turns out has been sending e-mails to his graduate students describing…. well, there’s no real reason for me to describe it, I leave that kind of filth for the Chronicle of Higher Education.  

Philosophy and math have roughly the same male-female ratio, but philosophy has blogs like What Is It Like To Be A Woman In Philosophy? and math, as far as I know, does not.  Is that because math has actually created a culture friendlier to women than philosophy has?  Or is it because philosophy is closer to the social criticism tradition and philosophers are more likely to want to talk about these things openly?

I have one small data point.  I once heard a philosopher give a talk in which there was a weird joke about you have to be careful not to sleep with your graduate students because [some philosophy joke I didn't get and don't remember.]

Or rather, it read as weird to me, because I think it’s highly unlikely that someone would say something like that in front of a roomful of mathematicians under any circumstances.  Or if they did, there would be a burst of murmurs and everyone would be looking back and forth with the “Did he say that?” look.  On this occasion, only I was looking back and forth.  Nobody seemed to think it was weird, not the women, not the men.  It was an informal, jokey kind of talk.  But still.

 

 

Men have it all

Someone shared this HuffPo piece on my Facebook feed:

The newly-combined global HR leadership team were coming together for the first time at the Zurich headquarters and the CEO was going to be opening the meeting and addressing the HR team. I was really looking forward to the meeting and the opportunity to focus on the growth and performance strategy and to hear what the CEO had to say about the role HR would play.

I then realized that my 5-year-old daughter’s birthday assembly at school would be taking place on the first day of the HR conference, at exactly the same time that the CEO would be addressing us. I had always had a full-time job and had remembered one piece of advice from another Mom: “Don’t ever miss the birthday assembly.” I went back and forth in my mind. I was concerned about getting off on the wrong foot with my new boss by not attending the start of the meeting, and wondered if would I be making a career-killing decision if I explained that I would be attending the birthday assembly and would fly to Zurich in the afternoon but would miss the CEO’s address.

Did you notice that somebody’s missing from this story?  Somebody else who could have gone to the birthday assembly?  Somebody with a penis?

You read articles like this all the time, usually under some heading that says, in many words or few, “Women can’t have it all.”  But what these articles call “having it all” and treat as an impossible fantasy  – being a good, loving parent without sacrificing work ambition — is what men call “daily life.”

And that’s part of the problem.  If you start from the position that raising children is a colossal amount of work, and that fathers are not going to participate in that work, then, yeah, women have some very tough choices to make.  But only one of those assumptions is a fact of nature.

 

On the other hand, up yours, AT&T

I know I recently praised the pricing of AT&T’s family plan, and I stand by that.

However, when I actually signed up for the plan, I received a long and somewhat complicated .pdf document detailing my new phone contract; after staring at this for a while I understood that it was indicating a a much higher price.  Twenty minutes of online customer support chat alter, I was able to figure out that, rather than renewing my plan as I’d asked for, AT&T had upped me to a plan with more minutes that cost $30 more a month.

I also use AT&T for my home phone and internet service.  (I used to use them for cable TV, too, before I dropped cable for Netflix like all right-thinking people!)  Same story when I signed up for that:  the promised bundle discount wasn’t on my first bill, but after a long conversation with customer support they fixed it.  Until the second bill, when the discount had disappeared again, requiring another long conversation with customer support.  That time it finally stuck.

It’s depressing that from a pure profit standpoint this is probably pretty good business practice: overcharge everyone, and count on the fact that lots of people don’t have the time or cultural capital to both recognize the overcharge and successfully reverse it.

The NSF should fund conference daycare

I was pleased to see that this year’s Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Diego offers subsidized on-site childcare for participants in the meeting.  But even after the subsidy, it isn’t exactly cheap; at $14/hour, a mathematician who wanted to attend the conference full-time would easily spend over $300 on childcare.

Can you use your NSF grant to cover this $300?  Nope:

Can NSF award funds be used for travel and associated dependent-care expenses for dependents of individuals funded on an NSF award?

NSF award funds may not be used for domestic travel costs or associated dependent-care expenses for individuals traveling on NSF award funds. Travel costs associated with dependents may be allowable for International travel in accordance with Award and Administration Guide Chapter V.B.4, which contains several stipulations, including that travel must be continuous for a period of six months or more.

What about organizers of NSF-funded conferences?  Can we offer to use NSF money to cover childcare costs for attending mathematicians?  That’s another nope:

Can conference/workshop awards or travel funds from research awards be used to support child care at conferences and workshops?

NSF award funds may not be used to pay for travel costs or expenses related to onsite care (e.g., daycare) for dependents of participants at NSF-sponsored conferences and workshops. NSF-sponsored conferences and workshops are encouraged to consider child-care services to ease the burden on attendees, but the costs of such services are the responsibility of those that choose to utilize the accommodations.

For me to go to a conference requires me to buy a plane ticket and book a hotel room.  NSF wants me to go to conferences, so they allow me to charge these unavoidable expenses to my grant.  If I’m a single parent of a 1-year-old child, going to a conference requires me to have childcare available at the conference location.  No childcare means I don’t go to the conference.  If NSF is willing to pay two hundred bucks a night for my hotel room, why not a hundred bucks a day for childcare?

Gluten-free for lent

I have a friend who has given up gluten for lent.  We had an interesting discussion today about whether this would be annoying to someone suffering from celiac disease.  We considered this test case:  would it be OK, or not OK, to rent a wheelchair and give up walking for Lent?  Clearly not OK, it seems to me, but I’m having trouble formulating the correct decision principle.  Lots of people give up sweets for Lent, and this doesn’t seem insensitive in any way to the world’s diabetics.

Should science journalists check copy with their sources?

I have often heard mathematicians complain — most recently, last night — about their work being mangled when it gets covered in the press.  Why don’t science journalists check with their sources to make sure that the science is presented accurately?

There’s a great discussion of this issue at PLOSBlogs, featuring many well-known science writers and highly-placed editors in the comments.  It’s a tough issue.  On one side, journalists are quite likely to make mistakes about technical subjects (not only science) even if they’re very diligent when conducting the interview.  On the other hand, journalists are not public relations officers, and I tend to agree that it’s important to preserve that distinction, even when there are some costs.

As for me, I would never show copy to a source prior to publication.  Then again, because I mostly write about math, I think people cut me a lot of slack — if I oversimplify somebody’s work, they know that I know that I’m oversimplifying, and respect that I’m bowing to journalistic necessity.

Holden Karnovsky on the perils of expected utility

I asked a while back how seriously we should take expected utility computations that rely on multiplying very large utilities by very small probabilities.  This kind of computation makes me anxious.  Holden Karnovsky of GiveWell agrees, arguing that we are constrained by some kind of informal Bayesianness not to place too much weight on such computations, especially when the probability computation is one that can’t really be quantitatively well-grounded.  Should you give fifty bucks to an NGO that does malaria prevention in Africa?  Or should you donate it to a group that’s working on ways to deflect asteroids on a collision course with the Earth?  The former donation has a substantial probability of helping a single person or family in a reasonably serious way (medium probability of medium utility.)  The latter donation is attached to the very, very large utility of saving the human race from being wiped out; on the other hand, the probability of achieving this utility is some combination of the chance that a humanity-killing asteroid will be on course to strike the earth in the near term, and the chance that the people asking for your money actually have some prospect of success.  You can make your best guess as to the extent to which your fifty dollars decreases the chance of global extinction; and you might find, on this ground, that the expected value of the asteroid contribution is greater than that of the malaria contribution.  Karnovsky says you should still go with malaria.  I’m inclined to think he’s right.  One reason:  a strong commitment to expected utility makes you vulnerable to Pascal’s Mugging.

 

 

Gendered conference campaign

A group of philosophers runs a gendered conference campaign, whose goal is to get conference organizers not to plan all-male rosters of speakers.

Does math need a campaign like this?

Discuss.

Reader survey: how seriously do you take expected utility?

Slate reposted an old piece of mine about the lottery, on the occasion of tonight’s big Mega Millions drawing.  This prompted an interesting question on Math Overflow:

I have often seen discussions of what actions to take in the context of rare events in terms of expected value. For example, if a lottery has a 1 in 100 million chance of winning, and delivers a positive expected profit, then one “should” buy that lottery ticket. Or, in a an asteroid has a 1 in 1 billion chance of hitting the Earth and thereby extinguishing all human life, then one “should” take the trouble to destroy that asteroid.

This type of reasoning troubles me.

Typically, the justification for considering expected value is based on the Law of Large Numbers, namely, if one repeatedly experiences events of this type, then with high probability the average profit will be close to the expected profit. Hence expected profit would be a good criterion for decisions about common events. However, for rare events, this type of reasoning is not valid. For example, the number of lottery tickets I will buy in my lifetime is far below the asymptotic regime of the law of large numbers.

Is there any justification for using expected value alone as a criterion in these types of rare events?

This, to me, is a hard question.  Should one always, as the rationality gang at Less Wrong likes to say, “shut up and multiply?” Or does multiplying very small probabilities by very large values inevitably yield confused and arbitrary results?

Update:  Cosma Shalizi’s take on lotteries and utilities, winningly skeptical as usual.

Weird NYT walkback on the Hauser case

The New York Times recently revisited the case of Marc Hauser, the Harvard psychologist accused of research fraud.  Nicholas Wade’s new article suggests that Hauser might be more sloppy than dishonest, the victim of a bureaucratic legal process that makes no allowances for innocent mistakes, and that the situation is starting to turn in Hauser’s favor:

Also last month his principal accuser outside of Harvard, Gerry Altmann, allowed that he may have spoken too hastily. Dr. Altmann is the editor of Cognition, a psychology journal in which Dr. Hauser published an article said by Harvard to show scientific misconduct.

When first shown evidence by Harvard for this conclusion, Dr. Altmann publicly accused Dr. Hauser of fabricating data. But he now says an innocent explanation, based on laboratory error, not fraud, is possible. People should step back, he writes, and “allow due process to conclude.”

Here’s Altmann’s response:

[Wade] selectively quotes from me to support the contention that the discrepancy between Hauser’s raw data and the published data were due to “devastating error, but not fraud”. In fact, there has been no stepping back. As I make very clear in this blog (and repeated in emails to Mr. Wade – see below), the information I have received, when taken at face value, leads me to maintain my belief that the data that had been published in the journal Cognition was effectively a fiction – that is, there was no basis in the recorded data for those data. I concluded, and I continue to conclude, that the data were most likely fabricated.

From there, the article gets feisty and strange.

Dr. Hauser’s difficulties began in 2007 when university officials went into his lab one afternoon when he was out of the country and publicly confiscated his records, an action based on accusations by some of his students.

For the next 18 months he had no idea what he was accused of.

Well, unless he actually had fabricated data, in which case he might have had a tiny shred of an idea.

A troika of Harvard department heads then delivered a secret report.

Hold on now, that sounds Russian!

Then there’s this:

Harvard’s investigation has been “lawyer-driven,” says a faculty member who spoke on condition of anonymity, and has stuck so closely to the letter of government-approved rules for investigating misconduct that the process has become unduly protracted — it lasted three years — and procedurally unfair to the accused.

“I think it legitimate to ask why the Harvard brass did not push back against their lawyers,” this member said. “At Harvard we now have the Un-Larry administration — no risk-taking, no thinking outside the box, no commitment to principles that challenge standard university practice,” he said, referring to Harvard’s previous president, the economist Larry Summers.

It’s not clear to me why Harvard’s lawyers would be so keen on besmirching a distinguished and popular professor, or how bending the rules to avoid bringing charges against Hauser would demonstrate a “commitment to principles.”