mathbabe

Whose fault is it when a woman gets sexually assaulted? For most people I interact with, the answer seems obvious: the assailant is at fault. Otherwise we’re blaming the victim.

In spite of that commonsense logic, though, there seems to be a sustained argument on the other side of the debate, and not only from right-wing talk radio. For example, over on the Guardian there’s quite a discussion about how The Pretenders star Chrissie Hynde blames herself for previous sexual assault, with the following excerpt pretty much summing up her position:

She said: “Technically speaking, however you want to look at it, this was all my doing and I take full responsibility. You can’t f*** about with people, especially people who wear ‘I Heart Rape’ and ‘On Your Knees’ badges … those motorcycle gangs, that’s what they do.

“You can’t paint yourself into a corner and then say whose brush is this? You have to take responsibility. I mean, I was naive.”

In Bangladesh, we similarly see arguments for why people marry their daughters off young which rely on the inevitability of sexual violence:

“I photographed the wedding of Akhi’s 13-year-old sister last year, and when I asked her mother why she was marrying her daughter off, she described not feeling comfortable to let her walk to the corner store because she would be harassed by men and boys,” Joyce said. “She also said no boy wants to marry a girl older than 18. If a girl is still single past that age people will ask too many questions. She knew it was wrong to marry very early, but they weren’t from a wealthy family, and she told her daughter’s husband to wear condoms for a few years, so it will be OK. Marriage is seen as a cover of respect and protection for women. By not going to school, it reduces the risk of being sexually active outside the house or be harassed while commuting.”

Don’t get me wrong, I think sexual violence is outrageous and wrong. The last thing I’d want to do is to suggest acquiescence in the face of it. I don’t want to blame victims or make things worse for them in any way. But we hear arguments like the above from reasonable, thoughtful people, who have plenty to lose by being wrong. They’re coming from personal experience which we should listen to. We should, in addition, examine why the “logical” argument doesn’t seem to work with them.

I have a theory. It’s about what our cultural expectations about men are. I’ll divide it into cases.

1. Men can more or less control violent urges and are not inherently sexual predators. In this worldview, women of all ages should be free to wear whatever we want and go wherever we want and expect only consensual sexual interactions. This is an ideal world, which one might call civilized. Mind you I’m not even talking about being bombarded with idealized visions of sexualized femininity on billboards (but that would be nice too). I think I more or less live in this world and that means I’m lucky.
2. Men are divided into two groups: sexual predators and “others.” Just as it would be silly to ask a lion not to kill an antelope when it’s hungry, and similarly it would be ridiculous to think that (some) men wouldn’t rape a woman if they had the chance. That’s along the lines of the worldview of Chrissie Hynde. If you really think that there just simply are men out there who are uncontrolled and uncontrollable sexual predators, then of course it’s up to the individual to steer clear of them. And it doesn’t make her wrong and us right, it just means we have different expectations of what men are like.
3. No man can be trusted, they’re all trying to take advantage of women at all times, and harassment is to be expected. This does seem to be more or less the expectation in certain situations, like in the above quote from a mother in Bangladesh as well as all the communities torn apart by war and insecurity and desperate poverty. If someone faces this kind of reality, they have to work within it, even if it means marrying off their 13-year-old daughter before she’s ready or willing. It’s a bad choice versus a worse choice.

Today I’m celebrating some good news for working-class people in this country. Namely, the definition of “employee” is changing, making it easier for employees at McDonalds and other places to complain about poor treatment. The good news comes via a National Labor Relations Board ruling yesterday.

I wrote previously about the economics of McDonalds franchises, but it comes down to this: 90% of the low-level employees at McDonalds don’t technically work for McDonalds at all; instead, they work for a local franchise owner, who in turn rents stuff, including the McDonalds brand, from the parent corporation.

In spite of the technical and legal framework, the parent corporation controlled the burger flippers at a minute level, through surveillance, customer service policy, branding requirements, and most importantly through controlling the margins of the franchise owner.

The legal separation, which was solidly working until yesterday, meant that employees couldn’t complain about bad treatment of their employer, McDonalds, but rather had to complain only about the way the local franchise owner treated them. This prevented large-scale unionization attempts among other things. The new ruling means that the workers will have the right to negotiate with McDonalds corporation as a “joint employer.” Another way of saying this is that McDonalds will have much more liability when it concerns mistreatment of franchise workers.

An example of how this is good news is the following: it used to be true that if one McDonalds unionized, and demanded and received better wages, it would have little knock-on effects and indeed it would be quite difficult to pull off, given how tight the margins are for franchisees. Now, with the new ruling, a second McDonalds location could possibly use that one example as leverage in a bargaining agreement. Moreover, as a joint employer, McDonalds corp cannot shut down a franchise just for unionizing.

The ruling extends well beyond McDonalds. In fact the original case was a company that hired contractors to do its recycling. It will likely mean that it will in general be much harder for corporations to create legal distance between itself and the people hired to do work for that company, so contractors of all varieties, as long as the parent company has a substantial amount of control over the workers.

Power is the opposite of dependency. I learned this definition from Adam Reich when he came to talk to my Occupy Summer School students this summer about sociology and the OurWalmart struggle.

It’s useful and convincing: you have power over someone if they are dependent on you.

So it makes sense that systems of tipping gives us power as consumers. Waiters, or other service people, are dependent on us for tips, which are often a large part of their overall salaries, so we have power over them.

In fact, it gives us a kick, a real but short-lived kind of status in service situations. We get to temporarily play the part of the “little lord.” Some people exploit this role, demanding too much, asking for special favors, and enjoying having someone do our bidding. Others are over-sensitive to slights; if they feel like their status is being questioned at any level, they switch from little lords to little tyrants, demanding attention and extra work from their waiters. We’ve all seen this.

When you ask an American, we like our tipping systems, and we don’t want to give them up, even though it leads to all kinds of financial problems for restaurant workers. Partly this is because, as part of the power relationship, if the waitstaff or serviceperson wants to get a good tip from us, they have to be nice to us. They have to make us feel like they like us, and, a secondary requirement, that they like their job. Surly waiters are waiters who don’t depend on tips and who make us realize that being a waiter isn’t always such a great job. Not that this entire dynamic is obvious to us every time we enter into a tipper-tippee relationship, but it’s there, lurking.

So far nothing I’ve said is at all new. Tipping has been around for a while. But there is a new kind of service economy evolving, which I call “the gig economy,” but which tellingly has been described as “the sharing economy” by some.

So, if you hire an Uber or Lyft driver to drive you somewhere, the payment has become somewhat invisible, since it happens on your credit card via the app, and instead of tipping you rate your driver (although you can tip as well). in fact the “cashless and seamless” experience of being driven by an Uber driver is one of the selling points. “Hassle-free” is a commonly heard phrase around the gig economy.

But in terms of power dynamics, replacing tipping by rating doesn’t do much, since Uber drivers are entirely dependent on their overall rating to stay employed. And you might object because riders get rated as well, but let’s face it, the worst thing that could happen to a poorly rated rider is that he gets kicked off the app and has to use another rider app, but the worst thing that can happen to a driver with a bad rating is he could lose his job.

My fear is this: the invisibility of the transaction makes us as consumers even less aware of the power dynamics than we already are. We have gone from a transactional relationship, in a restaurant, to a inequitable faux-friendship. The marketing of the “sharing economy” doesn’t help:

Why is this a problem? Some of the most important lessons I teach my children is how to be grateful, polite, and non-tyrannical to people who are serving us, at a restaurant or wherever. It’s part of learning how to be an empathetic person, and a balancing out of one-on-one human interactions which I think is super important. I want them to know that service is not servitude, and that everyone is a person just trying to do their best. Of course, this goes for any kind of transactional service, not just the tipping kind.

However, the first step in extending gratitude to people who are extending us a service is to know when that transaction is occurring. If every bill is magically and invisibly settled, then my kids won’t even recognize that it existed, and instead of gratitude for help, they might just think the person they just interacted with really liked them. Another way for my kids to learn empathy is, of course, for them to have jobs in which they experience the other side of the transaction, and I hope they do have jobs like that, although it’s getting much harder to get such a job than it used to be.

Maybe I’m being an old fuddy-duddy here. After all, when I think about the future of work, I often come to the conclusion that sooner or later, once the robots are doing lots of the grunt work and hard labor, the rest of us will be more or less in service to each other. There will be teachers, and personal trainers, and personal assistants, and life coaches, and people who hang out with old people, and nannies, and so on. Every now and then society will support people who just think – although they too will provide service in the form of essays or research – or people who just have loads of cash and just entertain themselves all the time.

So, maybe it’s old-fashioned to want balance in each relationship; instead, we can enjoy the “friendly interactions” of servicing one person and then turning around and being serviced by someone else in another realm. Maybe someday I’ll be an Uber driver, smiling at my rider, then I’ll meet up with my personal trainer who is extremely nice to me. Maybe the seamlessness and cashlessness of each future transaction will free everyone up to talk about politics, and philosophy, and what have you, instead of haggling over the bill.

Or, and here’s my pessimistic side emerging, or maybe we’re watering down the appearance of power relationships because we have redefined the word “innovation” as “ways to make rich peoples lives easier” and we call something a “disruption” if a bunch of people’s job security is weakened and they need to rely on rating systems – and need to claim to like their job and their customers – in order to scrape by.

What do you think? What are the consequences of the gig economy on power dynamics between people?

There have been a lot of great articles recently on my beat, the dark side of big data. I wanted to share some of them with you today:

1. An interview with Cynthia Dwork by Clair Cain Miller (h/t Marc Sobel). Describes how fairness is not automatic in algorithms, and the somewhat surprising fact that, in order to make sure an algorithm isn’t racist, for example, you must actually take race into consideration when testing it.
2. How Google Could Rig the 2016 Election by Robert Epstein (h/t Ernie Davis). This describes the unreasonable power of search rank in terms political trust. Namely, when a given candidate was artificially lifted in terms of rank, people started to trust them more. Google’s meaningless response: “Providing relevant answers has been the cornerstone of Google’s approach to search from the very beginning. It would undermine the people’s trust in our results and company if we were to change course.”
3. Big Data, Machine Learning, and the Social Sciences: Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency by Hannah Wallach (h/t Arnaud Sahuguet). She addresses the need for social scientists to work alongside computer scientists when working with human behavior data, as well as a prioritization on the question rather than data availability. She also promotes the idea of including a concept of uncertainty when possible.
4. How Big Data Is Unfair by Moritz Hardt. This isn’t new but it is a fantastic overview of fairness issues in big data, specifically how data mining techniques deal with minority groups.
5. How Social Bias Creeps Into Web Technology by Elizabeth Dwoskin (h/t Ernie Davis). Unfortunately behind the pay wall, this article talks about negative unintended consequences of data mining.
6. A somewhat different topic but great article, The MOOC revolution that wasn’t, by Audrey Watters (h/t Ernie Davis). This article traces the fall of the mighty MOOC ideals. Best quote in the article: “High failure rates and dropouts are features, not bugs,” Caulfield suggests, “because they represent a way to thin pools of applicants for potential employers.”

What is Comparative Advantage?

You may have heard about comparative advantage. As a concept, it’s a neat and mathematically valid argument. It goes like this, as described in wikipedia:

Say you have two countries, England and Portugal, which both make and use cloth and wine, say at time 1. Their productivity is described in this chart:

Which is to say that in England, it takes more work than in Portugal to produce one unit of either cloth or wine, maybe because of climate differences. In this sense, Portugal has an “absolute advantage” over England in both categories.

However, as I said, both England and Portugal make and use both products. So, if England needs one unit of each, it takes them 220 hours, and if Portugal wishes to consumer one unit of each, it takes them 170 hours to produce it.

Here’s where trade comes in. Starting at time 2, they decide to cooperate. Let’s say England focused on cloth, and make 2 units of cloth. That would take them 200 hours instead of 220 earlier. And let’s also assume Portugal focused on what it’s good at, namely making 2 units of wine. That would take them 160 hours, instead of 170. Then the countries could trade their extra units to each other, and both of them would have saved time and would have gotten the same amount of stuff.

Actually, there’s another way of thinking about it. Instead of working less, workers in England and Portugal could work the same number of hours and produce more stuff. They could use their extra stuff to trade for new things, and that excess would essentially be proof that this comparative advantage theory is a success.

Criticisms of Comparative Advantage

Comparative advantage is used as a reason that countries should engage whenever possible in free trade; it’s almost a religious belief for some economists. But, as you might have anticipated, there are some serious issues with comparative advantage. For example:

• When comparative advantage kicks in for a given industry, the people in that industry lose jobs. Like wine-makers in England in the above example.  Even cloth makers in England might lose jobs if the actual demand for cloth is limited. Of course, the idea is that the economy of England as a whole benefits, so a few jobs lost should somehow be absorbed.
• Also, you can’t simply expect the country that’s the best at a certain thing to be able to arbitrarily expand that industry and forget everything else. Think overfishing, or overgrazing: eventually there are diminishing returns.
• Next, technology comes into play. When one country figures out how to be incredibly productive due to technological advantages, like for example huge farming machines and equipment, then it’s essentially impossible for other countries, without access to such technology, to compete, even if they have good climates. That means most farmers in other countries cannot compete with the United States from a productivity standpoint, for example, even putting aside the ludicrous farm bill, which subsidizes American farmers and further distorts their advantage.
• Speaking of distortions, one argument against comparative advantage is that historically countries didn’t actually become powerful through exploiting comparative advantage and free trade. Instead, they imposed tariffs and such to nourish and grow internal industries.
• If a country buys into comparative advantage, by need or by choice, they often find themselves overreliant on one product, the market of which could be volatile or fail. There’s plenty of historical evidence that this monoculture approach to economics is a bad idea. For example, Ireland went through a famine when there was a blight on their potatoes, even while it was exporting huge amounts of “money crop” grains to England, and more recently Ireland focused heavily on finance and technology, only to be severely hurt by the credit crisis.
• Mostly, though, what is most troublesome about the modern worshipping of comparative advantage is that we end up using it as an excuse to exploit people. As my friend Jordan Ellenberg explained:
  

  If you apply comparative advantage to, say, the US and Bangladesh, what you get is “given existing conditions, the US should make computers, not work very hard, and be rich, Bangladesh should stitch T-shirts for Old Navy at 30 cents an hour, work really hard, and be poor.”

• Not that they don’t want jobs in Bangladesh. They do, and generally speaking trade agreements with poor countries help people in those countries. It’s just that we have to also acknowledge our moral responsibility to people and to reasonable working conditions.

How does this relate to marriage?

Well, first let’s think about how to apply the theory of comparative advantage to a marriage, which people tend to do. The idea is that, instead of splitting up the chores with your spouse half and half, which causes unending arguments about whose turn it is, as well as wasted productivity, we instead decide “who’s good at what” and divvy up the chores in a more scientific manner.

Growing up, I did almost all the household chores while my brother did very few (and the ones we kids didn’t do, my mother did). it wasn’t because my parents told me that, as a girl, I was the natural choice, but because I just “seemed better” at everything. The result was that I did everything, and slowly my “advantage” over my brother – defined here as efficiency, not actual advantage – which was at first small, became large.

Of course nowadays parents rarely ask their kids to do chores, so chores have mostly become a marital dispute. And given that women are expected to be – and have been trained to be – both better at and more willing to do housework, they tend to have more practice at multi-tasking and the dishes.

We arrive at a problem similar to the Bangladesh/ US situation above. Again, Jordan nailed it:

In the sexist soup straight couples all swim in, “don’t keep score, everybody do what you’re best at” seems to invariably end up at the equilibrium “woman does 75% of the shitwork” and what the comparative advantage crowd says is you are not even allowed to be mad about this, women, it is ratified by science, accept that like the Bangladeshis you are in your proper place in the equilibrium state.

One of the problems with applying an economic theory to a marriage is that we don’t actually keep track of how much time it takes us to do various things, and even if we did do that we’d probably do it wrong. Just imagining watching the clock during dishes or laundry sounds silly, and never mind with being in charge of the grocery list, since depending on how you measure that, it could either take no time at all or take all your time. Plus, when you find yourself being petty about small things, you end up measuring your marriage along those petty lines, and even thinking about it that way.

My advice to married couples is to ignore scientific arguments, and instead think about a system that will minimize longterm resentment, which is poison in any marriage or relationship. And that might mean using comparative advantage in part, both as a way of figuring out what people are good at and what people like to do, but it will also probably include doing stuff that you hate and you’re bad at sometimes just to understand what the other person goes through.

After all, the essential ingredients in any marriage is a sense of teamwork, the dedication to alleviating the other person’s suffering, and a promise to encouraging one another’s fulfillment. And economics doesn’t have much to say about those things.

You might have heard about “the five love languages.” They come from a ridiculously popular book by Gary Chapman by the same name, and they are purportedly the following:

1. gifts,
2. quality time,
3. words of affirmation,
4. acts of service (devotion), and
5. physical touch.

Chapman’s idea is that, in order to be happier with your loved one, you figure out how they like to receive your love, instead of just doing to them what you’d have done to yourself. So you might like hugs and physical touch the most, but they might need you to say kind things to them. So you say nice things, and then they give you hugs, and everybody’s happy.

I like this list because it really does seem like some people respond more to certain things than others. Personally I’m a touch person, and someone who likes gifts seems almost fake to me, but putting them both on a list makes me realize that maybe we’re just wired differently. It helps me understand other people a bit more and reserve judgment.

I want to do the same thing but for work instead of love. The question changes from “how to you want to receive love” to “what motivates you to work?”. I’ve come up with the following list:

1. money
2. security
3. status
4. social connection
5. making a positive contribution to the world
6. relief from boredom/ organizing framework
7. passion

Ideally an employer would offer to people what they care about. Personally I care about making a positive contribution to the world, but most employers only offer money.

I’m the freak here, I guess. Most people would say they work because they get paid. But really it’s not that simple when you think about it. Some people value money past the point of security, which is why I separated out those two. For that matter, some people care about money as status, but on the other hand academics (generally) care about status beyond money, which is why I made status a separate category too.

The next three are self-explanatory, and I think independent, and for the last category I’m including musicians and artists, people who do stuff in spite of having no reason to think it will ever pay.

Well, my list might be imperfect, but I think it’s good enough to make one point. Namely, that most of those reasons are actually pretty much independent of money after all, so maybe I’m not such a freak.

The work versus money issue matters because of the countless discussions about what might happen if we ever get to the “Star Trek economy” stage of existence, where our basic needs are met and we’re capable of doing other stuff. When we have free time and the resources and security not to worry about food or shelter, what would happen next?

Would we all just play video games 12 hours a day and eat too much? Would we feel useless and dried up and depressed?

I think the answer is, it depends on your personality. If you are the type of person who works out of passion, this new world order wouldn’t slow you down a bit; you’d have even more time to pursue your thing. If you want to contribute to the world, or create meaningful social connections, you’d find a way to do that with likeminded people. If you’re an academic who wants to be the smartest person in the world, you’ll have even more time to do that (but probably way more competition for the title).

My guess is that the only people that would be deeply disappointed are the people who now really really like money for its own sake. I don’t really think there are too many of these people, but they are the very people who might create obstructions to the Star Trek economy’s existence, because they are both powerful and rich in this setup, and potentially have the most to lose.

Dearest Readers,

Oh My God! Holy crap!! I’ve got incredible news for you all. Namely, my best friend, who will be henceforth known as Sister Of My Sister, is here with me today to help dole out incredibly unhelpful, entirely silly, and possibly hurtful advice. Congratulations to all of you for receiving it!!

Before we begin, I need to mention my new hero, the woman who has slept with 3000 men:

Captivating! Is that a pole? What is that pole for?

You can read all about her here, my friends. Tell me in comments how much you love her too. What vim! What vigor! Also high on the my-list-of-favorite-people: this lady.

On with the main event! Readers, remember when I complained last week about running out of questions? Well, you’ve responded, for which I am very grateful. My trust Google Spreadsheet (soon to be the “Alphabet Spreadsheet”) is happily filled in with a dozen or so new questions. But that’s not to say it should stop! Please continue to add to my list, because why? Because it is a real pleasure of my life, which I look forward to all week and I am ever so grateful for it.

So please do a sweet Auntie a good turn and:

ask Aunt Pythia any question at all at the bottom of the page!

By the way, if you don’t know what the hell Aunt Pythia is talking about, go here for past advice columns and here for an explanation of the name Pythia.

——

Dear Aunt Pythia,

I’m on the verge of graduating with a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics, and suddenly I’m wondering whether going to grad school is the right thing to do – there are a few subjects (mostly in Complex Analysis) which I really like, and I definitely will keep reading about them in the future. Thing is, I really don’t know if I have what it takes to do research in math. I don’t know whether I should try going to grad school and drop out if it doesn’t work out, or whether I should just be content with my bachelor’s degree and keep reading Ahlfors in my free time.

Thanks for any reply,
E

Dear E,

Here’s the thing. We never know whether we have what it takes for anything. At least we who are not crazy narcissistic don’t. So I’d say, if you love something, and if the signals are good that you are capable (i.e. your profs are encouraging), then follow your instincts. It’s a very good sign that you want to read math in your spare time! Go with that.

Or, in the words of my good friend Jordan Ellenberg, do what you’d do if you weren’t insecure.

Sister of My Sister says: go to culinary school.

Aunt Pythia and SoMS

——

Dear Aunt Pythia,

I find this article disturbing. Here’s an excerpt:

[O]ne of academia’s little-known secrets is that private college admissions are exempt from Title IX’s ban on sex discrimination—a shameful loophole that allows some of the most supposedly progressive campuses in the nation to discriminate against female applicants.

Consider my own alma mater, Brown University. In 2014, 11 percent of men were accepted at Brown versus 7 percent of women, according to U.S. Department of Education data.

Brown is hardly the only, or the worst, offender. At Vassar College, the 34 percent acceptance rate for men was almost twice as high as the 19 percent rate for women. At Columbia University, the acceptance rate was 8 percent for men versus 6 percent for women. At Vanderbilt University, it was 15 percent versus 11 percent. Pomona College: 15 percent versus 10 percent. Williams College: 21 percent versus 18 percent. This bias in private-college admissions is blatant enough that it can’t be long before “gender-blind admissions” becomes the new campus rallying cry.

Colleges won’t say it, but this is happening because elite schools field applications from many more qualified women than men and thus are trying to hold the line against a 60:40 ratio of women to men. Were Brown to accept women and men at the same rate, its undergraduate population would be almost 60 percent women instead of 52 percent—three women for every two men. . . .

Today’s [admissions] officials . . . fear though that if enrollments reach 60 percent women, it will scare off the most sought-after applicants, who generally want gender balance for social reasons. “Once you become decidedly female in enrollment, fewer males and, as it turns out, fewer females find your campus attractive,” Kenyon College’s dean of admissions, Jennifer Delahunty Britz, wrote in The New York Times in 2006.

Any comments?

Smart Guy

Dear SG,

Interesting. So you’re saying there’s a de facto affirmative action policy for men taking place in elite colleges.

The statistician in me needs to make the following caveats: some of these statistics could be explained away if we found out that high-achieving girls tend to apply to more places than high-achieving boys on average. Then you’d see many of the same girls applying to a bunch of places, for example, and the boys might apply to fewer.

As a thought experiment, say girls apply to twice as many colleges as boys. From the perspective of the college, among their best applicants they see twice as many from girls. Their acceptance rates, even if they had consistent standards across genders, would be lower for girls. Does that make sense?

Also, keep in mind that a college’s acceptance rate isn’t the same thing as kids actually showing up at college. It could be – and we know it is likely true, in fact – that the same kids are being accepted at a bunch of places and then saying no to all but one. Again, we have to be smart about this, which is all a crazy and inflated system. And without being on the admission committee myself, I really don’t know what’s going on.

Having said all that, I don’t know of any statistics that would make us think girls do apply to more places. I conclude that the stats from the article definitely warrants more investigation.

Here’s another thing to keep in mind. Girls, statistically speaking, are better students than boys, but boys tend to do better on SAT’s at the high end. Personally I don’t think this is all that meaningful one way or another, because both “grades” and “SAT scores” are somewhat arbitrary systems of judgement, neither of which are particularly convincing to me of inner intrinsic worth. Even so, it might be partly responsible for college admissions; colleges might care more about SAT scores than about grades.

I guess that’s what it comes down to: how do colleges decide who to accept? What are their acceptance guidelines like, and are they gender specific? I mean, we might find them discussing the “too many girls” situation, or, more likely, we might just find them trying out different processes until they come upon one that results in “a satisfactory student body.”

A cynical person would point out that what colleges really care about is future endowment contributions, and in our sexist society men are more likely to be the contributors to that. I’m not saying it’s not a factor, but I’m not sure it could possibly be that explicit; it’s more likely to be embedded in an algorithm or at least a process, as many such assumptions are. In any case I’d love someone with more experience in the admissions process at an elite school to weigh in.

Sister of My Sister says she believes that our worst suspicions about the college admissions process are true.

Aunt Pythia and SoMS

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Dear Aunt Pythia,

Which question that you’ve answered most affected you, and what was the effect?

Curiously Hunting And Obviously Sympathetic

Dear CHAOS,

Thanks for the question, it’s brought me great pleasure in thinking back at all the wonderful questions I’ve had the pleasure to answer. I hope it won’t bother you terribly if I admit that my favorite piece of advice wasn’t actually in an Aunt Pythia column at all, but rather was a mathbabe post called How do I know if I’m good enough to go into math?, which, come to think of it, I should have referred my friend E above to as well. Hey E, go look at that post!

Here’s why that post affected me. I met the wonderful young person who wrote the question to me, afterwards, and she told me quite earnestly how much it helped her. She’s now a thriving and ambitious math major at an elite school. What a pleasant experience, to be able to encourage someone like that!

Moreover, when I went to visit my math camp earlier this summer, I was told that this note had been shared with quite a few of the participants as a way to ward off annoying and competitive behavior; hopefully it helped, but in any case I was super astonished at how much it is needed.

I guess I’m saying that, this is the piece of advice that is closest to that fantasy you have, that you could get in a time machine and go back to your previous self and say something like, hey self! Don’t worry so much, everything’s going to be okay, and you can go ahead and start feeling good now! Because there’s really no time to lose when it comes to just getting on with your life. And that’s really the best feeling that an inveterate advice giver like myself could possibly feel.

Sister of My Sister says that that post and every other is why mathbabe is her hero.

Aunt Pythia and SoMS

——

Dear Aunt Pythia,

My wife of 5 years is a lesbian and I’m not a woman. We’ve known this for about 3 years.

As you might imagine this eliminates the kinds of sex that we find convenient to share with other people in most social settings.

We’ve taken to pretending we’re sexually conventional, even to close friends, because we fear that they’d be really awkward about it if we ever let on. Everyone we have told so far has made a point of avoiding the subject, as if they simply don’t know what to say, understandably I suppose. They’ve been supportive and kind, but awkward.

How can we avoid widespread social awkwardness without feeling like we’re deceiving our friends and families?

Accidentally Asexual Humans

Dear AAH,

Why are you two still married? Are there kids? If I’m a friend of yours, and you tell me this, and you don’t have kids, i’d be anything but quiet. I’d say, get the fuck out!

And that holds for anyone who tells me they aren’t getting regular sex from their partner – unless they have a very good reason, like an illness – and they don’t have kids. If they have kids, then fine, make an arrangement with your spouse to get some outside action while you keep a stable household and until the kids are in college. But for an unromantic atheist such as myself, marriages are not simply friendships, they are sexual arrangements. Moreover, to live a full life you want to at least have the option to get action.

You say you’ve been married for 5 years, and for more than half you’re not having sex. Moreover, it doesn’t seem to be ending soon. I just don’t get it. Your friends are too polite and confused to say what I’m saying now: get out, remain friends, and go find someone who can’t resist your manly self. There are plenty of women looking for a good man that would love to enjoy your company.

Sister of My Sister agrees with me wholeheartedly, but suspects there is some other compelling reason you’ve stayed with your wife and would like you to write back and tell us what that is.

Aunt Pythia and SoMS

——

Readers? Aunt Pythia loves you so much. She wants to hear from you – she needs to hear from you – and then tell you what for in a most indulgent way. Will you help her do that?

Please, pleeeeease ask her a question. She will take it seriously and answer it if she can.

Click here for a form for later or just do it now:

Yesterday I went to a fascinating discussion at the Population Council on child marriage in sub-saharan Africa. Specifically, we heard about the effectiveness of four strategies to delay the age at marriage among girls aged 12–17 in parts of Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Burkina Faso in regions with a high prevalence of child marriage (around 12-18%). The strategies were:

1. holding community conversations about the benefits of delayed marriage,
2. helping pay for school supplies to keep girls in school,
3. giving families with girls aged 12-17 a goat or two chickens in exchange for an agreement that they keep her unmarried for two years, and
4. doing all of the above.

They also had control areas where they did nothing except poll the girls at the beginning and end to see what percentage of them overall were married, had sexual experience, and had been pregnant. There were typically about 2500 girls in each of the three areas.

They also split the girls further, into two age ranges: 12-14, and 15-17. There are, sadly, many girls in that younger group getting married, sometimes without even knowing in advance that they were to marry, and not knowing or even meeting their husband in advance of their marriage day.

The researchers kept track of effectiveness as well as cost for each of the strategies, both per vulnerable girl and per “avoided child marriage”. A few comments:

• A local economic condition in one region – I think it was Tanzania – namely a situation where all the local coffee farmers were swindled out of their pay, resulted in worsening poverty and dramatically increased child marriage in that region.
• While giving a family a goat or two chickens might sound like a bizarre incentive to avoid marrying their daughter, it is common in Burkina Faso (but not in Ethiopia) to offer dowries in the form of livestock.
• In fact, the reasoning is often desperate and economic: I need these cows, I will give up my daughter for them.
• In Ethiopia, if I remember correctly, it’s a social bonding issue, where you are bound to marry your daughter to a neighbor’s son out of a sense of neighborliness. It’s also hard to refuse these requests.
• There’s also fear that parents have that their daughter might become pregnant before they are married, so they marry her off before that can happen.
• They also worry about their girls becoming “old maids” if they’re not married by 18.
• Different strategies to delay marriage seemed to work for the younger girls than for the older girls.
• Often the young girls who are going to be married young are also not going to school, so it makes little sense to focus efforts only on girls in school.
• As the closing speaker pointed out, these girls’ sexuality has been utterly commoditized for the marriage market, and their autonomy is basically nonexistent. In that sense, even delaying marriage from 12 until they are 16 makes a real difference in their negotiating power.
• Not to mention that, the younger they are married and start having babies, the more likely they are to live in poverty for another generation.

It’s refreshing to see scientific experimental design and data collection being used for such a good cause! I was really impressed by their approach and intelligence over at the Population Council, and I just subscribed to be notified of their future events and research announcements here.

Some of you may have seen the recent New York Times article entitled Teacher Shortages Spur a Nationwide Hiring Scramble (Credentials Optional). As the title indicates, it turns out that not too many people are throwing their hat into the school teacher ring recently. And given the enormous turnover, this is bad news for the profession.

I’ve got a general rule about such headlines that I like to follow. Namely, whenever we hear about a “labor shortage” in a given profession, we should think about four things:

1. Wages
2. Conditions on the job
3. Benefits, including retirement
4. Cost/ length of training

So for school teachers, we might break it down like this:

1. Wages – median at around $58K, has been rising a bit ahead of inflation if I’m eyeballing this graph correctly
2. Conditions on the job – much worse in the past decade due to the Value-Added Model, and other Education Reform measures which remove autonomy and force teachers to teach to the test
3. Benefits, including tenure and retirement – under relentless fire from gleeful Republican politicians
4. Cost/ length of training – sizable, which means that it might take the profession quite some time to recover

When you take the above points together, you realize that it’s not a salary thing so much as an environment that has become toxic. A capable person, however earnest, would think twice before entering such an industry. This is particularly true right now, when tenure is on the chopping block but the salary hasn’t risen to compensate for the added risk.

Teachers, as a profession, are not so different from truckers, who I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. We’ve got some skilled workers whose environments have been severely degraded, and whose salaries have not risen in response. Considering the fact that the economy is somewhat better, this means people are unwilling to go get trained and qualify for such jobs. Moreover, there’s a real reason in both industries to avoid lowering the barrier to entry; we don’t want illiterate teachers nor do we want dangerous truckers. The solutions are obvious: either make their lives better or give them more money, or both.

There’s one more profession that’s going through a “labor shortage,” namely fruit pickers (hat tip Tom Adams). This is because we have many fewer Mexicans coming in for work, and Americans are generally unwilling to break their backs for a measly $11.33 per hour median wage. This is somewhat different from the other industries, because there’s really no lower bar for training, and anyone willing to do the work is given a job. There are also no benefits or job security, and obviously conditions are horrendous.

Even so, the solutions are still obvious: make the job better or pay more.

I’m happy to announce that I’m on the Program Committee for Bloomberg’s Data For Good Exchange. This is a one day event, taking place on September 28th at the Bloomberg offices. It’s been scheduled to lead into the annual Strata NY conference which is run by O’Reilly.

In addition to the event, which will have speakers and keynotes by people like my buddy Jake Porway, there’s a competition for papers that contribute to the public good. The fact that I’m on the Program Committee means that I get to choose a bunch of papers which were submitted according to this call for papers, take a look at the contents, and rate them.

I’ve taken a quick look at the papers and they look pretty amazing. Stay tuned for more.

It’s time to get busy, people. I need to find futurist conferences to go to (and to speak at), I need to hobnob at cocktail parties. Now that I care deeply about predicting and shaping the future, I need to get on top of this shit.

As part of my research, I have stumbled upon Dylan Matthews’s brilliant Vox piece entitled I spent a weekend at Google talking with nerds about charity. I came away … worried. In a word, Matthews agrees with my post from yesterday.

He spent a weekend at an “Effective Altruism” (EA) conference at Google Mountain View, with many other “white male nerd(s) on the autism spectrum” and he came away with this observation:

In the beginning, EA was mostly about fighting global poverty. Now it’s becoming more and more about funding computer science research to forestall an artificial intelligence–provoked apocalypse. At the risk of overgeneralizing, the computer science majors have convinced each other that the best way to save the world is to do computer science research. Compared to that, multiple attendees said, global poverty is a “rounding error.”

This particular brand of futurism takes refuge in “existential threats” which they measure very carefully with lots of big powers of 10. They worship a certain extra-special white male nerd from Oxford named Nick Bostrom. From Matthews’ piece, where a majority of those at the conference were worrying about the risk robots taking over:

Even if we give this 10^54 estimate “a mere 1% chance of being correct,” Bostrom writes, “we find that the expected value of reducing existential risk by a mere one billionth of one billionth of one percentage point is worth a hundred billion times as much as a billion human lives.”

No, it doesn’t matter what that means. The point is that it’s a way of nerdifying the current messy world and thereby have an excuse for not improving things now.

Matthews sees through this all, in terms of their logic as well as their assumptions. Here’s his logical argument:

The problem is that you could use this logic to defend just about anything. Imagine that a wizard showed up and said, “Humans are about to go extinct unless you give me $10 to cast a magical spell.” Even if you only think there’s a, say, 0.00000000000000001 percent chance that he’s right, you should still, under this reasoning, give him the $10, because the expected value is that you’re saving 10^32 lives.

And here’s his critique on their assumptions:

…the AI crowd seems to be assuming that people who might exist in the future should be counted equally to people who definitely exist today.

Just in case you’re thinking that this stuff is too silly to be taken seriously, some of the people putting money into think tanks that worry about this crap include Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and other Silicon Valley success stories. The money, and the Google location, adds to the self-congratulatory tone. An event organizer made this embarrassingly clear: “I really do believe that effective altruism could be the last social movement we ever need.”

From left: Daniel Dewey, Nick Bostrom, Elon Musk, Nick Soares, and Stuart Russell. Taken from Vox by Anna Riedl.

I find this kind of reasoning very familiar, and here’s why. Anyone who’s worked at a hedge fund has heard far too many people with a similar “Bill Gates Life Plan”: first, amass asstons of money by hook or by crook, and then, and only then, deploy their personal plans for charity and world improvement.

In other words, this whole movement might simply be a way of applying a sheen of scientific objectivity and altruism to a vain and greedy impulse.

I’ve got my work cut out for me. Please tell me if you know of conferences or such which I can apply to.

I’ve been thinking about the future a lot recently, so I’ve decided to throw my hat into the futurism ring. Don’t get me wrong, this wasn’t an easy decision. Nevertheless I think it’s the right one.

It all started with fretting over the present. Things seem to be unraveling, and I spend at quite some time each day worrying about stuff like our country’s oligarchy problem, our racist policing and justice systems, and the overall lack of good middle class jobs.

So far that’s just a list of our present woes, but any plan to address them needs to incorporate a hopeful plan for the future, right? So naturally I decided to look into “futurism,” which attempts to anticipate and guide our future plans.

Here’s the thing, though. As described beautifully in Rose Eveleth’s Atlantic piece, Futurism Needs More Women, the field is currently clogged with white North American men between the ages of 55 and 65 who talk optimistically about super cool future technology, and living longer, and uploading their brains, and so on.

It’s is not a particularly appealing pool to jump in on, but here I come anyway. And, being a world class cannonballer, I’m not afraid of making a splash.

So, there’s a big problem with futurism right now, which is that, on the whole, they pretty much entirely ignore social issues, which as you’ll notice are highly entwined with my top three concerns, politics, racism, and the end of work (otherwise put: the only way to compete with robots is to become one). I plan to change futurism; I’ll be the loudmouth at the futurism conference talking about other things and how we need to plan. I’ll make this shit real. I mean, after all, why should the white guys have all the fun of deciding what the future might look like?

Before I go on, let me explain why women (so far!) have been reluctant to join the futurism movement. We remain unimpressed with their major visions so far: live forever, become one with a machine, let technology solve all social problems. Here’s why.

Living forever/ the singularity. Women get their period when they’re young, then they go through menopause when they’re old, and then they die when they’re really old. I mean, oversimplification, but whatever; the point is they are firmly tied to their aging bodies and are well aware of the ticking biological clock, and not just the one for having babies. Personally I’m 43 and even though getting my period is a messy pain, at this point I am deeply nostalgic for my youth every time it happens.

By contrast, men grow pubes at the age of 14 and nothing ever seems to change again. They might have even forgotten they ever didn’t have them. In any case men are more likely to consider the idea of putting their brains in jars – hooked up to the internet, of course – as a reasonable approximation of their current state of existence. I feel sorry for them. Being reminded of death once a month makes it impossible to be so silly. Or at least much harder.

Technophilia. Men – especially futurists – seem to love technology, and fail to cast a critical eye on anything that seems remotely “innovative.” I call this the “I win” blindspot, whereby people who are generally rewarded in a system seem to think the system must be great. After all, if you’re the one creating the surveillance software or analyzing the surveillance footage or sensor data on say, long-haul trucks, you’re getting paid really well to promote “progress.” Not so much the story for the truckers being surveilled, but whatever, I guess they should have learned to code.

I mean, that’s just one small example, but I could go on for hours. And I think women, and for that matter anyone who isn’t a successful white dude, sees both sides. That’s why we’re not jumping at the chance to join the technophiliac bandwagon.

Anyhoo, futurism is unbearably narrow at the moment, but I don’t think that should stop me. In spite of my focus on social issues, I have the credentials required to worm my way into the conversation. In fact, I have a convincing explanation for why their approach so far – into the probability of various future trends – is fatally flawed. Namely, they’ve got too few variables. They focus on technological change without taking into account human beings. So their Monte Carlo engine, if you will, of possibly futures ends up with only tweaks that they allow in their tiny little list of possibilities. I plan to add to that list. And given that they seek to influence policy as well as the individual’s forward-looking self, this list might matter.

Please congratulate me! I cannot wait to meet Ray Kurzweil in person and congratulate him on all his rings.

This is a guest post by mathematrucker.

There are a lot of pros and cons to being an over-the-road (OTR) truck driver, namely, one who spends weeks or even months at a time on the road. The pros can outweigh the cons for those like me who enjoy long highway trips. But this may be about to change.

A huge issue right now is surveillance. Inward-facing cameras that keep a constant watch on the driver may soon become the norm. Swift Transportation (the largest carrier in the U.S.) began installing them in all its company-owned trucks a few months ago.

Most OTR drivers are allowed to drive up to eleven hours per work shift and seventy hours every eight days. Their actual driving hours frequently reach these limits. That’s a lot of time to be in front of a running camera, never knowing for sure who might be watching you. If these cameras become widespread they are sure to cause many drivers (including me) to look for different work.

ELDs and Hours of Service Rules

One surveillance tool that is already well established is the electronic logging device (ELD). The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA, the regulatory body that covers interstate trucking) recently sent a rule to the White House for final review mandating that all trucks use them.

Federal hours-of-service regulations require drivers to maintain an up-to-date log book. Unlike paper logs, ELDs effectively prevent drivers from driving way past the legal limits. But they can also severely hinder drivers from driving short distances when they need to.

Most OTR drivers are paid by the mile—the more miles they drive, the more money they make. This provides a strong incentive to use all eleven driving hours per work shift. With paper logs, if a driver needs to exceed the limit by a few minutes to get to a safe place to sleep (versus stopping after say ten hours, possibly sacrificing some pay), they can. With ELDs this same scenario might force the driver into choosing between (1) sacrificing pay, (2) sacrificing overnight safety by stopping wherever, or (3) recording a logging violation to get to the safe place.

But many ELDs offer a fourth option as well: gaming the device (without tampering with it). Carriers can and usually do program some flexibility into ELDs. For example, trucks might be allowed to travel up to one mile below 10 MPH without the current duty status going to line 3 (driving), with resets occurring every time it does go to line 3. (Anyone catching a whiff of loophole here may want to hold their nose before reading the next sentence…) Many ELDs update and display the current duty status every second, but only record it at the top of every minute.

If the truck is not on a freeway, the driver can easily game such a device by alternately accelerating to around 45 MPH and decelerating to below 10 MPH once every minute, perhaps signaling a phantom turn to help avoid notice. To keep from decelerating too late, a smartphone can be used to watch the time to the second. Though no logging violation gets recorded, this technique does leave a trail of evidence on the device that might be noticed in an audit, but audits are infrequent. The alternative—recording a logging violation—will be detected immediately.

The FMCSA’s proposed mandate should require that ELDs record duty status by the second. It probably doesn’t.

The hours-of-service rules themselves are far from perfect. For one thing they do too little to prevent employers from depriving drivers of sleep. Ones who sleep nights are routinely directed to drive all night. Such orders went into my personal “go ahead, fire me if you need to” (for refusing) category many years ago, but this shouldn’t have been necessary.

The hours-of-service rules never said anything about time of day until a new rule was introduced in 2013 requiring two 1 AM to 5 AM periods in every thirty-four-hour rest break (such breaks reset hours driven to zero). Strong industry resistance caused this rule to be suspended in December 2014.

Of course, the problem of fatigue at the wheel will finally be solved when automation replaces truck drivers. Some studies predict it will happen soon. Anyone under the age of thirty (forty?) should take this into consideration if they are thinking about becoming a trucker.

Per Diem Pay

Due to a corporate tax strategy that has gained wide acceptance in recent years, income figures reported nowadays for OTR truckers are probably considerably lower than actual—perhaps by as much as twenty percent.

For many years the tax code has supplied OTR truck drivers with a surprisingly generous deduction called the standard meal allowance. For the past several years it has been $47.20 (80% of $59) per day on the road. Multiplied by 300 days (a typical number), this equals $14,160. The driver’s log book suffices to document how many days were spent on the road.

This sweet tax deduction sours into something called per diem pay when employers decide to get in the middle and “reimburse” drivers instead. They get the money to pay for this by reducing wages. Some companies report this nontaxable pay in Box 14 “Other” on the W‑2 but many do not report it at all; they are not required to.

Per diem pay is bad for drivers and good for companies. Companies mainly benefit from the reduction in payroll taxes. Per diem can also subtly reduce driver vacation pay per week: many companies pay 1/52 of the previous year’s earned income. Drivers also get socked with an “administrative fee” when per diem pay is used. I’ve seen this fee as high as 3% of gross income. The other downsides to per diem are too numerous to go into here. More info can be found in this article.

The reason I left my longtime, relatively well-paying OTR job five years ago wasn’t so much because my employer switched over to using per diem pay, it was more because of a deceptive “more pay in your pocket” ad campaign it foisted on drivers while per diem was still optional. Most drivers were not fooled by it. After spouting the same nonsense over and over for nearly two years, the company finally made per diem mandatory in late 2009.

Rather than resign immediately, I decided to stay on until the following June when my annual vacation pay would accrue. Without knowing it at the time, this decision would also bring me the million-mile safe driving award (during calendar years in which I had no preventable accidents, my paid miles at this company added up to more than a million by 2010). The purpose of these awards is mainly to promote the company image, but they do also look good on the resume, so I gladly accepted.

Closing Remarks

Returning to the theme of pros and cons, I close with a few pros:

• It doesn’t take an inordinate amount of training to get behind the wheel of a truck. Many say more training should be required—and they are probably right—but as of now it doesn’t take that much. Viewed strictly within the context of job-seeking my years of formal math education have served little to no useful purpose to date. By contrast, in 1994 after just a three-week training course plus three more weeks of paid, on-the-road training, I was earning a modest living doing something that didn’t even seem like work (it still doesn’t).
• One of the standard pros people cite is you don’t have a boss breathing down your neck. You do have one telling you where to go and when, but yes, the physical distance helps. Unfortunately inward-facing cameras threaten to obliterate the no-boss-breathing advantage.
• It’s real easy to get out of jury duty if you’re an OTR driver and you don’t want to go.

I’ve been enjoying thinking about ways for Uber drivers to game the surge pricing algorithm at Uber. I don’t know how it works, exactly, but I’m going to imagine that it’s along these lines:

• there are well-defined neighborhoods in a city. This seems to be corroborated by the way the Uber app works for both drivers and riders.
• in a given neighborhood, there are two groups: people asking for a ride who haven’t yet been picked up, and drivers looking to give a ride.
• If the number of riders is 5 more than the number of drivers, then it becomes a “surge zone” for some amount of time, say 30 minutes.

Of course, I made up the numbers 5 and 30, but I’m guessing it’s more or less of this form, and those particular values don’t matter for the rest of the discussion anyway.

So here the thing, Uber wants to keep their riders happy, but to do that they actually tend to want to avoid creating surge situations, since surge situations usually imply riders wait longer and pay more. On the other hand, Uber drivers prefer surges, since they get paid more, and sometimes much more.

That means Uber drivers have a great incentive to game the system and create artificial surges. One way they can do this is by waiting outside an area that might become surge, wait for it to become surge, and then go into that area and swoop up a rider.

But it would make a lot more sense for drivers to work together to do this. Imagine what would happen if all the drivers agreed to sit together in some central location, wait for surge pricing somewhere, and then assign people in order to go get those riders. Pretty much all the rides would become surge. Again, that wouldn’t make the riders happy, but it would benefit the drivers.

All they’d need to coordinate this is something like a walkie talkie system. Or an app. And oh, wait, such a thing already exists, and it’s called Blinkr (hat tip Alex Rosenblat). Instead of congregating in the same place, though, they had an even simpler idea, namely to turn off their Uber app, thus decreasing the local supply of drivers, then wait for surge pricing.

It’s something like an Uber strike, and it requires coordination, but I don’t think it’s illegal, right? I mean, Uber can’t fire them for doing this, since they aren’t employees, right?

I’m super proud to say that Alex Carp, a journalist who was present for more than half of Occupy Summer School last month, did a fantastic job of writing up the OSS experiment for the New Yorker’s Talk Of The Town column.

Here is Alex’s New Yorker Piece, called “Protest U,” please enjoy!

We also got coverage from the German Public Radio, which includes a picture:

I’m the blue-haired person on the left.

Anyone who speaks German can go ahead and tell me if it’s a nice piece.

What, what? My friend Becky Jaffe sent me this video of Tig Notaro giving advice:

I thought it was moving and intimate, just like an advice column should be. What do you think, should Aunt Pythia go video?

Pros for Aunt Pythia going video:

1. the connection with the audience,
2. doesn’t have to wear anything below the waist,
3. can show nutella crepes in real life, no more boring pics.

Cons for Aunt Pythia going video:

1. maybe too much intimacy (TMI),
2. has to wear a shirt,
3. sometimes fakes it and bakes Pillsbury cinnamon rolls.

Please make a suggestion below if you are an Aunt Pythia fan. If you hate Aunt Pythia then I don’t really care what you think.