Aunt Pythia’s advice
Aunt Pythia has barely recovered from her pastry indulgences of last weekend, and yet it is time to once again act the advice tailor and dispense terrible and ill-fitted advice pants (probably because of said pastry indulgences) to anyone who will listen.
Don’t ask her why, but Aunt Pythia is into the concept of a tailor who will do house calls this morning, especially if that tailor will deliberately make ugly clothes. It’s a weird metaphor which Aunt Pythia is just going with, so please join her on this bizarre wavelength. Here’s how she’s feeling:
Well, not ill-fitting like this, but who could resist.
Are you here? Are you prepared? And moreover, do you merely have a grotesque and morbid curiosity about other people’s problems, or are you also prepared to order and be fitted for your very own terrible advice pants as well? If so, don’t forget to:
ask Aunt Pythia a question 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.
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Dear Aunt Pythia,
I’d hoping you’ll weigh in in a debate I’m having with my husband about sex, relationships, and human nature. He and I have had an open marriage for the last 2 years (out of 12 total). It’s generally been overwhelmingly positive for us, and has helped us survive the sometimes soul-numbing simultaneously responsibilities of small kids + demanding jobs reasonably happily (shout out to Dan Savage, for making me realize that this wasn’t a totally insane thing to try).
My husband thinks open marriages will become a lot more common in the coming decade, as sexual openness increases. I agree that they might increase somewhat as they become more normalized, but argue that the fundamentals of human nature inherently limit this. I think jealously is so common that only the people that are naturally low on the jealousy distribution are likely to make open marriages work. Thoughts?
One Philosophically Engaged Nonconformist
Dear OPEN,
I’m glad that is working for you guys! I am all for people figuring out how to be happy. The longer I’m married the more I realize how much of a miracle it is that anyone can stand being in a long-term relationship with anyone else, including themselves.
As for what will happen in the future, I have really no idea. The culture we live in changes so quickly, and assumptions are so ephemeral.
Just think about how quickly things have changed – in super positive ways – for gay people. Just 30 years ago shit was ridiculous, now we’re seeing gay couples get married and divorced. Just last night, I was at a comedy club where one of the comics mused about the possibility of gay men saving themselves for marriage. Who knows? Maybe.
I mean, it’s just one example, but it proves my point: this stuff just keeps moving along. Once upon a time we women got married because of stuff like economic need. Now that is thankfully more or less off the table. It once was assumed that everyone would have kids, now that’s no longer true. Shit changes!
Here’s what won’t change: people will continue to have lots of sex with each other.
The thing I always come back to, when I talk to open marriage people, or people in the “poly” community, is that people have always found ways to fuck each other, married or not, and this new-fangled way of talking and thinking about it is just that: a new-fangled way of talking and thinking about what’s already happening. I’m not saying talking about it so much is bad, although it may, as you suggest, provoke more jealousy at times then the old-fashioned way of staying on the down low. At other times it’s fine, and maybe even great!
I’d venture to say that, whether we talk about it or not, there’s a lot of nooky going on everywhere. I’d bet money on that continuing, and yet once again, I have no bets on the way we’ll talk about it in the future.
Good luck!
Aunt Pythia
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Dear Aunt Pythia,
A few of my intellectually curious friends that are not actively socially conscious or involved in local communities (aka your average nice citizen) often wonder about the usefulness of protests like Occupy or the ones surrounding Ferguson/policy brutality. My response is that it connects likeminded people and I give you and the group you work with on alternative banking systems as an example.
They’re also the ones who question using social media, although I find that social media often brings people’s attention to issues they’re tangentially aware of (or not aware of at all), and normally could happily pretend doesn’t exist. I think this is useful for society. I also have seen social media campaigns to mobilize activists to pressure local officials, similar to the way a petition shows authorities the level of support an issue is receiving from the general public.
Do you have more examples and arguments I can use?
Single Jogger Wins! (aka SJW, aka Social Justice Warrior)
Dear SJW,
I started out in Occupy offended by the way the financial system doesn’t work. Nowadays I think about all sorts of things, like mass incarceration, minimum wage, basic guaranteed income, and the privatization of education. I think about these things primarily through the lens of the finance system, and primarily because I am involved with the Alt Banking group.
So I guess what I’d say to your friends is that we live in a network of people and in a system of power, and the way we learn about how that system functions or doesn’t function is by questioning and critiquing the corners of the system we understand, until those corners give way to corridors and rooms that we thought were disconnected but aren’t, and we start to see patterns of inequity and structural failure, and that process connects us with other people in the system but even more importantly connects things in our own brain that were previously disconnected.
And along the way the failures of the system come down the hardest on the same group or groups of people, and it is maddening and depressing, but because you now have this network of like-minded people you also gain faith and strength that it can’t go on.
Then every now and then something like the Ferguson report comes out, delivered by the actual power structure, and you know you’re making at least some progress.
I hope that helps.
Aunt Pythia
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Dear Aunt Pythia,
I’m 25, male, and finishing up my undergraduate Computer Sciences degree.
I am also completely inexperienced in romantic relationships; I can count the number of romantic relationships I’ve had on [lim–>0] hands. (This applies to the amount of sex/kissing/touch I’ve had as well, BTW.)
I’m pretty sure I’m not asexual. And I know I’m attracted to girls romantically because it’s happened a (very) few times in the past. [The first two were taken and the third sorta faded out before we got to a ‘relationship’ stage.] My mind tends to be really picky, so this is an extremely infrequent event.
There is a further complication; I have someone I know in Australia. Despite being on opposite sides of the world, we are very close. In a platonic sense. I’m not sure whether this is filling up my mental ‘relationship slot’ or not. Anyway, we use the symbol <> (instead of <3)… it’s complicated.
So. I’m not in a conventional romantic relationship, but I wouldn’t even know where to begin in getting into one. And I’m curious.
[1] How do you go about finding people you’d like a relationship with?
[2] …and if they’re willing, how does a relationship happen?
[3] …and how do you keep it going?
[4] Since it’ll probs come up at some point, how do I explain to a relationship partner that I also have this *other* platonic relationship with someone on another continent? [I’m NOT giving up said friend under any circumstances whatsoever.]
Simply Concerned Over Optimal Platonic Sincerity
Dear SCOOPS,
Two things. First of all, I’m gonna go ahead and say yes, you are into that Australian, for the following reasons:
- The last line of your letter indicates that you feel strongly for them,
- The line before that indicates you think the Australian might be a threat to any other relationship, and
- I’m interpreting your explanation of “<>” as a coded message to said Australian, who might read Aunt Pythia columns sometimes and might be touched.
Second point: do you remember Dan Savage’s advice not to masturbate really hard, with your hand clenched, because then your penis will get used to it and actual sex won’t satisfy? I think it was Dan Savage anyway.
Well I kind of feel like saying that to you, but it’s not your penis you’re clenching, it’s your brain. I think you are too picky. I want you to stop being so picky, and start looking for reasons to like the people around you. Find an excuse to have a crush on the next woman who smiles at you. Even more importantly, give that next woman an excuse to have a crush on you, by being charming, funny, and kind.
You know, people think that attraction comes from other people, but it’s a damn lie. Attraction stems from ourselves. We make the person we are with attractive, by projecting the person they want to be onto them, and by simultaneously allowing them to let us be as gorgeous, fun, and as sexy as we secretly know we are.
When I have a crush on someone, I swoon half at their captivating mojo and the other half at my own ability to detect it and to amplify it.
Here’s the best part, namely that it is something we all know how to do if we train ourselves to do it. And you, my friend, are out of practice. So go do some sexy pushups, focus on having a sweet pineful moment, on this continent, on a daily basis, and generally speaking stop clenching so hard, because reality will be a disappointment otherwise.
Good luck!
Aunt Pythia
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Dear Aunt Pythia,
Not a question, but thought you might like this (if you haven’t seen it already).
Loyal Reader
Dear Loyal,
Yes! Love it. Hot.
Auntie P
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Dear Aunt Pythia,
Why are all the cute girls lesbian (or taken)?
Looking Eagerly, Surely, But Inevitably Aborted Near Success
Dear LESBIANS,
When I was single, I kept seeing these cute guys with amazing homemade sweaters, and I would be disappointed when I found out they already have girlfriends or wives. Then one day it occurred to me that they were wearing the sweaters that their girlfriends had made them – duh – and that I should look for a guy who would look good in a homemade sweater. Done and done.
You, my friend, are into the lesbian look. And who isn’t, really. There’s a reason I have blue hair.
I suggest you find a straight girl who isn’t taken – there are plenty of them – and convince her to dress like a lesbian once you guys are hot and heavy. Easy peasy, especially since lesbians have badass style that nobody can resist.
Good luck!
Aunt Pythia
——
Congratulations, you’ve wasted yet another Saturday morning with Aunt Pythia! I hope you’re satisfied, you could have made progress on that project instead.
But as long as you’re already here, please ask me a question. And don’t forget to make an amazing sign-off, they make me very very happy.
Click here for a form or just do it now:
Driving While Black in the Bronx
This is the story of Q, a black man living in the Bronx, who kindly allowed me to interview him about his recent experience. The audio recording of my interview with him is available below as well.
Q was stopped in the Bronx driving a new car, the fourth time that week, by two rookie officers on foot. The officers told Q to “give me your fucking license,” and Q refused to produce his license, objecting to the tone of the officer’s request. When Q asked him why he was stopped, the officer told him that it was because of his tinted back windows, in spite of there being many other cars on the same block, and even next to him, with similarly tinted windows. Q decided to start recording the interaction on his phone after one of the cops used the n-word.
After a while seven cop cars came to the scene, and eventually a more polite policeman asked Q to produce his license, which he did. They brought him in, claiming they had a warrant for him. Q knew he didn’t actually have a warrant, but when he asked, they said it was a warrant for littering. It sounded like an excuse to arrest him because Q was arguing. He recorded them saying, “We should just lock this black guy up.”
They brought him to the precinct and Q asked him for a phone call. He needed to unlock his phone to get the phone number, and when he did, the policeman took his phone and ran out of the room. Q later found out his recordings had been deleted.
After a while he was assigned a legal aid lawyer, to go before a judge. Q asked the legal aid why he was locked up. She said there was no warrant on his record and that he’d been locked up for disorderly conduct. This was the third charge he’d heard about.
He had given up his car keys, his cell phone, his money, his watch and his house keys, all in different packages. When he went back to pick up his property while his white friend waited in the car, the people inside the office claimed they couldn’t find anything except his cell phone. They told him to come back at 9pm when the arresting officer would come in. Then Q’s white friend came in, and after Q explained the situation to him in front of the people working there, they suddenly found all of his possessions. Q thinks they assumed his friend was a lawyer because he was white and well dressed.
They took the starter plug out of his car as well, and he got his cell phone back with no videos. The ordeal lasted 12 hours altogether.
“The sad thing about it,” Q said, “is that it happens every single day. If you’re wearing a suit and tie it’s different, but when you’re wearing something fitted and some jeans, you’re treated as a criminal. It’s sad that people have to go through this on a daily basis, for what?”
Here’s the raw audio file of my interview with Q:
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Four political camps in the big data world
Last Friday I was honored to be part of a super interesting and provocative conference at UC Berkeley’s Law School called Open Data: Addressing Privacy, Security, and Civil Rights Challenges.
What I loved about this conference is that it explicitly set out to talk across boundaries of the data world. That’s unusual.
Broadly speaking, there are four camps in the “big data” world:
- The corporate big data camp. This involves the perspective that we use data to know our customers, make our products tailored to their wants and needs, generally speaking keep our data secret so as to maximize profits. The other side of this camp is the public, seen as consumers.
- The security crowd. These are people like Bruce Schneier, whose book I recently read. They worry about individual freedom and liberty, and how mass surveillance and dragnets are degrading our existence. I have a lot of sympathy for their view, although their focus is not mine. The other side of this camp is the NSA, on the one hand, and hackers, on the other, who exploit weak data and privacy protections.
- The open data crowd. The people involved with this movement are split into two groups. The first consists of activists like Aaron Swartz and Carl Malamud, whose basic goal is to make publicly available things that theoretically, and often by law, should be publicly available, like court proceedings and scientific research, and the Sunlight Foundation, which focuses on data about politics. The second group of “open data” folks come from government itself, and are constantly espousing the win-win-win aspects of opening up data: win for companies, who make more profit, win for citizens, who have access to more and better information, and win for government, which benefits from more informed citizenry and civic apps. The other side of this camp is often security folks, who point out how much personal information often leaks through the cracks of open data.
- Finally, the camp I’m in, which is either the “big data and civil rights” crowd, or more broadly the people who worry about how this avalanche of big data is affecting the daily lives of citizens, not only when we are targeted by the NSA or by someone stealing our credit cards, but when we are born poor versus rich, and so on. The other side of this camp is represented by the big data brokers who sell information and profiles about everyone in the country, and sometimes the open data folks who give out data about citizens that can be used against them.
The thing is, all of these camps have their various interests, and can make good arguments for them. Even more importantly, they each have their own definition of the risks, as well as the probability of those risks.
For example, I care about hackers and people unreasonably tracked and targeted by the NSA, but I don’t think about that nearly as much as I think about how easy it is for poor people to be targeted by scam operations when they google for “how do I get food stamps”. As another example, when I saw Carl Malamud talk the other day, he obviously puts some attention into having social security numbers of individuals protected when he opens up court records, but it’s not obvious that he cares as much about that issue as someone who is a real privacy advocate would.
Anyway, we didn’t come to many conclusions in one day, but it was great for us all to be in one room and start the difficult conversation. To be fair, the “corporate big data camp” was not represented in that room as far as I know, but that’s because they’re too busy lobbying for a continuation of little to no regulation in Washington.
And given that we all have different worries, we also have different suggestions for how to address those worries; there is no one ideal regulation that will fix everything, and for that matter some people involved don’t believe that government regulations can ever work, and that we need citizen involvement above all, especially when it comes to big data in politics. A mishmash, in other words, but still an important conversation to begin.
I’d like it to continue! I’d like to see some public debates between different representatives of these groups.
Standardized Testing Opt-out Rally in Brooklyn Today
I just got back from Berkeley, California, which was amazing.
Listening to the radio out there, I was pleased to hear all about the growing standardized testing protest movement going on here in New York City. And although I see lots of reasons to discuss Common Core issues separately from the over-reliance on testing, I can understand why parents are wrapping all of that stuff up together.
There’s just too much time spent in our schools on testing, so pulling our kids out of that complete waste is an obvious step in the right direction. And New York parents are not the only ones complaining. In Florida, of all places, they recently limited the number of hours kids can be made to take standardized tests.
There will be a rally today at 4pm at the Prospect Park bandshell in Brooklyn for parents who are joining the New York state opt-out movement. I wish I could go.
Another huge story out there in the Bay Area, which I’ll come back to on some other day, is the racist texting and email scandal among the San Francisco police.
Aunt Pythia’s and Uncle Aristippus’ advice
Readers, Aunt Pythia has an amazing guest philosopher here with her today in sunny Berkeley, a paradise on earth and home to the Kouign Amann:
The Bay Area’s answer to the cronut. Plus they’re sexy if you look at them right.
His name is Aristippus, and he claims to be the inventor of hedonism. We’ll be the judges of that, though, shall we? His philosophy dictates a lifestyle in which he consumes delicious pastries and quality coffee on a daily basis, takes long walks by the Bay, and meets new and interesting people while basking in hot tubs. He loves you all, assuming you do not give him reason to stop.
I hope you enjoy Uncle Aristippus, and afterwards don’t forget to:
ask Aunt Pythia a question 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.
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Hi Aunt Pythia,
I have recently started to masturbate in front of my partner of 10 years. It’s something I have done before with other partners but not a lot.
On Saturday night we went out and got drunk we came home and ended up in bed, I went down on her as usual and she came a couple of times then I wanted to wank in front of her. We kissed and she touched me as I masturbated, I love it and find it so erotic. I pushed her hand between her legs and she started to masturbate in front of me, something she has never done before. I watched and finished myself off, with her watching me it was so good.
I now feel a little awkward in front of her, like this was a place we should never have gone, like it’s dirty or she may feel it’s dirty but just does it for me? I know I should ask her about it but I am too shy.
Your advice and advice from other would be welcome.
Thanks,
Horny UK
Dear Horny,
I’m really beginning to wonder if Aunt Pythia has just become a place where people test out their erotic writing chops. I mean, here you are, with an awesome girlfriend who is game for your deepest, dirtiest desire – not so deep, and not so dirty, I might add – and there’s really nothing wrong, and no question in sight, so you made one up. My only real advice is: “it was so good” might need some elaboration.
Aunt Pythia
Friend Horny,
I’m somewhat at a loss for words. Taking your question completely at face value, I can only suggest that you do the obvious: talk to your mate. You’ve been together ten years, you say? It’s wonderful you two are still having regular, mutually satisfying sex, even if you think sharing masturbation is dirty or kinky. Many people do that long before they have sex (my initial reaction to your letter was, “Wait, it took you ten years?”).
If this is an activity you enjoy, but that makes you uncomfortable, you have three choices. First, become desensitized and unlearn the discomfort, so you guys can just enjoy each other’s bodies without feeling that shame. Second, learn to actually enjoy the discomfort – there are definitely people who get off on doing things that feel transgressive or shameful, and if that’s you, there’s nothing wrong with that. Your kink is not my kink, but your kink is OK too! Third, well, give up masturbating in front of each other and find some other kink to enjoy. There are plenty to choose from!
Love,
Aristippus
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Dear Aunt Pythia,
Perhaps you would indulge a break from the “Page Six” titillations to direct your prophetic vision to a math study question. Kind of like a word from our sponsor, MathBabe.
In reading this outstanding post which primarily deals with the eventual delights of not knowing, mention was also made of “Silverman and Tate,” and how it extricated you from the slough of despond. I too had tumbled into that dreaded mire (although I had substantially less to fall).
I immediately took the advice and was similarly uplifted.
So here is my question. Any mention of “Silverman and Tate” is quick to point out, pejoratively, that it is but an easy, undergraduate text. I did find it quite accessible. Now I would like to go further in studying elliptic curves. In that pursuit, I got a copy of Cassels “Lectures on EC.” I thought this would be a well-conceived next step, as one comment I saw characterized it as a “high-brow Silverman and Tate.”
But I find it difficult. Perhaps because it is quite pithy – forgive the eponymous remark. Actually my difficulties with it go far beyond that. This is one of many similar experiences I have had where standard undergrad texts (e.g., Dummit & Foote, Axler “Linear Algebra Done Right” -yuck, even the early parts of “Ireland & Rosen”) go quite well, yet Lang, “Atayah & Macdonald”, etc. are impenetrable. Plus I find it much more enjoyable to study math in action as in “S&T” rather than a catalog of definitions, theorems, and proofs. (Although some proofs are quite symphonic.)
I am a self-studier with no real math education. And I am willing to put in the work. I am in need of advice as to how to progress.
Pilgrim’s (Lack Of) Progress
PLOP
Dear PLOP,
It’s a language! You can’t just read it, you need to learn how to speak it. Seriously, very few people can just pick up a graduate text in math and understand it. It’s not a bad sign, nor is it a failure.
I’d recommend meeting up with others who are also trying to learn this stuff, and finding online resources where you can see people using this stuff. Math Overflow is also a great resource. A quick YouTube search exposes hundreds of relevant lectures. I’m sure there are also podcasts you might consider (look at this list of math podcasts for example).
Keep at it, that stuff is gorgeous!
Love,
Auntie P
Wise PLOP,
Aristippus is afraid he cannot help you with this problem, as he failed at being a real mathematician, and went off to do applied statistics instead.
Love and apologies,
A.
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Dear Aunt Pythia,
You are all-knowing and all-seeing.
What should I think about Amazon Sales Rank figures for my Kindle books? I have only known about them since Thursday. I read a Kindle book by Steve Scott about Kindle books and so I created an Author Page in Amazon. From there, I saw the Sales Rank figures (obviously, a Big Data product). From the Amazon Author Page, I saw the link to Nielson BookScan and saw the sales figures for my hardback book (someone I know from Weight Watchers said “Oh, a coffee table book”).
Lost in Space
Dear Lost,
I have no idea. I have never looked at my Amazon sales rank. Wait, I just did. 12,215. I have no idea what that means.
If I had to guess what that means, I’d say they take a time window – maybe 48 hours – and count how many copies of books have been sold, and simply rank them in order. If they made it too much longer than 48 hours, it would not be sensitive to new hits, and if they made it too much shorter, it would be too volatile. Twitter has a kind of metric like this to define “what’s trending,” and it’s a wee bit more complicated but that’s the gist.
Aunt Pythia
Comrade LIS,
I have known and loved a few authors. Although Aunt Pythia seems to be immune to the fever, all of other writers I’ve known well fell victim, at one time or another, to a mania for checking their sales rank, feeling delighted if it improved, and despondent if it declined. But ultimately they got perspective, and realized it was more important to them to get back to writing their next book, and cash any royalty checks that came in from volumes that had earned out their advance.
So, to be frank, my advice would be to emulate Pythia’s example: don’t think about it at all.
Love,
Aristippus
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Dear Aunt Pythia,
What is your opinion of the pickup artist community? A few of my friends (with severe social anxiety) are obsessed with pickup, crediting it for their newfound confidence and ability to talk to women. They see it as a tool for self-improvement and their dedication is almost stoic, but I see it as misogynistic and myopic.
I am happy to see my friends overcoming their fears, but am torn about the method. What are your thoughts?
Sincerely,
Silently Torn
Silently,
I have some opinions! You may not be surprised to hear this! In fact I already wrote them down more than two years ago, here. And if I do say so myself, that’s some sound advice I gave back then.
As for your friends, I’m not sure if the “you’ve overfit” argument will hold water for them. They are just so excited to finally feel in control and to get laid that nothing will penetrate (har har) their consciousness except if it stops working. I’d suggest laying off hanging out with them until they become humans.
Loverdover,
Auntie P
Quiet Thomas,
My own advice parallels Pythia’s fairly closely. Having once been a nerdy, introverted young man who had difficulty talking to the objects of my desire, I understand the appeal of the PUA community. But I think its casting of dating and mating as adversarial, and its embrace of concepts like “friendzoning,” are counter-productive, at least if your goal is a long-term, collaborative, companionate relationship.
And while PUA tactics may serve the goal of getting laid on a regular basis, there are better ways – you can get laid on a regular basis while retaining your dignity and self-respect. As to how, making yourself as intellectually and physically attractive as you reasonably can is certainly important step. Finding and contributing to a community that emphasizes sexual freedom helps a lot. In particular, if you’re a straight man, you should aim to build a culture that neither shames women for their desires nor pressures them to serve anyone else’s. Straight women’s sexual liberation is greatly to your benefit. I also have thoughts on where you can find this type of community, but that’s perhaps beyond the scope of this letter.
One point I might add to Aunt Pythia’s thoughts above: If your friends do still seem to have issues with social anxiety in situations outside of pickup bars, and you’re close enough friends that it would not be intrusive, you might suggest that talking with an actual licensed therapist about that. Social anxiety can interfere with their friendships and careers, not just their efforts to get their wicks dipped. It’s worth addressing this problem at the root, rather than trying to band-aid it with fancy hats and rote conversational routines.
Love,
Aristippus
——
Congratulations, you’ve wasted yet another Saturday morning with Aunt Pythia and Uncle Aristippus! I hope you’re satisfied, you could have made progress on that project instead.
But as long as you’re already here, please ask me a question. And don’t forget to make an amazing sign-off, they make us very very happy.
Click here for a form or just do it now:
Putting the dick pic on the Snowden story
I’m on record complaining about how journalists dumb down stories in blind pursuit of “naming the victim” or otherwise putting a picture on the story.
But then again, sometimes that’s exactly what you need to do, especially when the story is super complicated. Case in point: the Snowden revelations story.
In the past 2 weeks I’ve seen the Academy Award winning feature length film CitizenFour, I’ve read Bruce Schneier’s recent book, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles To Collect Your Data And Control Your World, and finally I watched John Oliver’s recent Snowden episode.
They were all great in their own way. I liked Schneier’s book, it was a quick read, and I’d recommend it to people who want to know more than Oliver’s interview shows us. He’s very very smart, incredibly well informed, and almost completely reasonable (unlike this review).
To be honest, though, when I recommend something to other people, I pick John Oliver’s approach; he cleverly puts the dick pic on the story (you have to reset it to the beginning):
Here’s the thing that I absolutely love about Oliver’s interview. He’s not absolutely smitten by Snowden, but he recognizes Snowden’s goal, and makes it absolutely clear what it means to people using the handy use case of how nude pictures get captured in the NSA dragnets. It is really brilliant.
Compared to Schneier’s book, Oliver is obviously not as informational. Schneier is a world-wide expert on security, and gives us real details on which governmental programs know what and how. But honestly, unless you’re interested in becoming a security expert, that isn’t so important. I’m a tech nerd and even for me the details were sometimes overwhelming.
Here’s what I want to concentrate on. In the last part of the book, Schneier suggests all sorts of ways that people can protect their own privacy, using all sorts of encryption tools and so on. He frames it as a form of protest, but it seems like a LOT of work to me.
Compare that to my favorite part of the Oliver interview, when Oliver asks Snowden (starting at minute 30:28 in the above interview) if we should “just stop taking dick pics.” Snowden’s answer is no: changing what we normally do because of surveillance is a loss of liberty, even if it’s dumb.
I agree, which is why I’m not going to stop blabbing my mouth off everywhere (I don’t actually send naked pictures of myself to people, I think that’s a generational thing).
One last thing I can’t resist saying, and which Schneier discusses at length: almost every piece of data collected about us by our government is more or less for sale anyway. Just think about that. It is more meaningful for people worried about large scale discrimination, like me, than it is for people worried about case-by-case pinpointed governmental acts of power and suppression.
Or, put it this way: when we are up in arms about the government having our dick pics, we forget that so do our phones, and so does Facebook, or Snapchat, not to mention all the backups on the cloud somewhere.
Workplace Personality Tests: a Cynical View
There’s a frightening article in the Wall Street Journal by Lauren Weber about personality tests people are now forced to take to get shitty jobs in customer calling centers and the like. Some statistics from the article include: 8 out of 10 of the top private employers use such tests, and 57% of employers overall in 2013, a steep rise from previous years.
The questions are meant to be ambiguous so you can’t game them if you are an applicant. For example, yes or no: “I have never understood why some people find abstract art appealing.”
At the end of the test, you get a red light, a yellow light, or a green light. Red lighted people never get an interview, and yellow lighted may or may not. Companies cited in the article use the tests to disqualify more than half their applicants without ever talking to them in person.
The argument for these tests is that, after deploying them, turnover has gone down by 25% since 2000. The people who make and sell personality tests say this is because they’re controlling for personality type and “company fit.”
I have another theory about why people no longer leave shitty jobs, though. First of all, the recession has made people’s economic lives extremely precarious. Nobody wants to lose a job. Second of all, now that everyone is using arbitrary personality tests, the power of the worker to walk off the job and get another job the next week has gone down. By the way, the usage of personality tests seems to correlate with a longer waiting period between applying and starting work, so there’s that disincentive as well.
Workplace personality tests are nothing more than voodoo management tools that empower employers. In fact I’ve compared them in the past to modern day phrenology, and I haven’t seen any reason to change my mind since then. The real “metric of success” for these models is the fact that employers who use them can fire a good portion of their HR teams.
Fingers crossed – book coming out next May
As it turns out, it takes a while to write a book, and then another few months to publish it.
I’m very excited today to tentatively announce that my book, which is tentatively entitled Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, will be published in May 2016, in time to appear on summer reading lists and well before the election.
Fuck yeah! I’m so excited.
p.s. Fight for 15 is happening now.
Open Data conference at Berkeley Center for Law & Technology this Friday
I’m excited to be involved with an interesting and important conference this coming Friday at UC Berkeley, held by the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology as well as the student-run journal, the Berkeley Technology Law Journal.
It’s a one day event, entitled Open Data: Addressing Privacy, Security, and Civil Rights Challenges, and it’s got the following blurb:
How can open data promote trust in government without creating a transparent citizenry? Governments at all levels are releasing large datasets for analysis by anyone for any purpose—“Open Data.” Using Open Data, entrepreneurs may create new products and services, and citizens may use it to gain insight into the government. A plethora of time saving and other useful applications have emerged from Open Data feeds, including more accurate traffic information, real-time arrival of public transportation, and information about crimes in neighborhoods.
The program is here, and as you’ll see I’m participating in two ways. First, I’m giving a tutorial first thing in the morning on “doing data science,” which is to say I’m doing my best to explain to a room full of lawyers, in 40 minutes, what it is that modelers actually do with data, and how there might be ethical concerns. Feel free to give me advice on this talk!
Then at the end of the day, I’m in charge of “responding” to Panel 3. Since this is something we don’t have in academic math conferences or talks, I had to ask my lawyer friend what it means to respond, and his answer was that I just take notes during the panel discussion and then I get to comment on stuff I’ve heard. This will be my chance to talk about whether the laws they are talking about, or the proposed changes in the laws, make sense to the world of modeling.
I’m a bit concerned that I simply won’t understand what they’re talking about, since they are experts in this field of security and privacy law which I know very little about, but in any case I’m looking forward to learning a lot on Friday.
Predatory credit score-based insurance fees
I’ve been looking into who uses credit scores – FICO scores or other alternative scores – and I’ve found that the insurance industry is a major user.
Homeowners insurance rates, for example, varies wildly by state depending on what kind of credit score you have, often more than doubling for people with poor credit versus people with excellent credit. This is in spite of the fact that homeowners insurance applies not to the payments of mortgages but rather to the contents of an apartment or home.
Similarly, auto insurance rates vary by credit score, even though someone with a poor credit score isn’t obviously a bad driver. For example, in Maryland, people with bad credit scores can be charged 40% more just for having bad credit scores.
Statistics like this make me wonder, how much of this price discrimination comes from the insurance companies trying to understand and account for actual risk, and how much comes from their understanding that poorer people have fewer options and will simply pay predatory rates?
And just in case you’re a believer in free markets and fair competition, and think such predatory behavior would be whisked away in a competitive market, insurance companies actually target people who don’t shop around and charge them more. In other words, it’s not a free market if not everyone actually has good information.
Tell me if you have more examples like this, I’m a collector!
Aunt Pythia’s advice
Hello, friends. Aunt Pythia is grateful, as usual, to be able to perform her favorite function this morning, namely doling out questionable and downright misleading advice to earnest and vulnerable nerds. She wishes she could do better than that, but there it is.
For example, here’s some terrible advice that Aunt Pythia is offering up, although nobody even asked her: if an ultra-orthodox jewish man comes onto the plane and is assigned to sit next to you but refuses to because you’re a women, and he doesn’t want to worry about the possibility sexual contact, then just go ahead and whip out your tits and rub them against him to let him stop worrying.
Oh, and there’s also this, which I hope you all watch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDb-U35oBFo
Awesome, right? And no, I don’t care if it’s fake. Please signal your agreement by:
asking Aunt Pythia a question 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.
——
Hi AP,
In the spirit of your abominable snow woman pic, here is my favorite joke pertinent to the species. Two snow people are eating. One says to the other, “this tastes like boogers.” The other replies, “it’s carrot cake.”
Real Men Don’t Eat Carrot Cake
Dear RMDECC,
No, wait, that’s not better than my favorite snowman joke, which is also shorter: One snowman says to another snowman, “do you smell carrots?”
AP
——
Aunt Pythia,
OK, update. Communication was a good thing in this case. A very big misunderstanding occurred, actually more than one.
I guess you can answer the question anyhow if you like, since you love sex questions almost as much as sex.
Just put this update in here and tell dudes that if a guy somehow gets the impression that a girl is being shy about getting theirs in return that they should FUCKING ASK.
Also tell them that pulling your hips back a little is not the universal sign of “stop, I’m about to come.”
METOO
Dear METOO,
Wow. What?
It took me a while to parse this letter, but I think I get it now. You are the person whose letter I published last week, which caused a bit of a stir. Quick summary: new guy, he came and then ignored you, what should you do, and I suggested next time you make sure you come first. Some readers were like, yo, talk about it.
Now that I’m against talking about it! I am not against talking about it! I am simply of the opinion that doing is even better than saying in some cases, especially cases where feelings can get easily bruised.
Actually, let me be more nuanced. I think pillow talk is great, and I highly encourage it, but I think you need to time it well, preferably after both people have orgasmed and there’s no immediate reason for defensiveness.
Anyway, back to the update: I really have no idea what the update says, but clearly you seem to have made some progress in some way. Good for you! I have no idea what you are talking about regarding hips. If you mean that he had some weird theory about body language and interpreted yours to mean he was allowed to ignore your orgasm needs, than obviously that is fucked up reasoning. On the other hand, he might have just made that up on the spot to explain the unexplainable. In any case, I hope things are going better.
Good luck, METOO!
Aunt Pythia
p.s. yes, I do love talking about sex as much as sex. I mean, maybe not as much, but it lasts much longer, so yes, as much.
——
Aunt Pythia,
What do you think of Fit Kids February? I can’t believe we have a major media company fat-shaming children…
NYC1NOT
Dear NYC1NOT,
I have three things to say.
- I can’t believe I am still in February with letters. The way I do Aunt Pythia is from oldest to newest, and I never peek ahead, and it’s exciting that I still have more than a month of backlog. That’s never happened before!
- There’s a difference between fat-shaming kids (bad) and convincing kids to exercise (good). Personally I have no problem with pro-fitness messaging as long as there’s no shaming. Do you have examples of that program being shaming?
- In any case, thanks for reminding me that I’m looking forward to reading this book: Fat Talk Nation, The Human Toll of America’s War on Fat, written by Susan Greenhalgh, a Harvard anthropology professor. Thank goodness someone is finally working on this issue.
Love,
Aunt Pythia
——
Dear Aunt Pythia,
Here’s a little suggestion: there once was man who taught a class on his own time back in California called “Love 1A” after the suicide of one of his students. His name was Leo Buscaglia. During the 1980s his PBS series were very well received – sadly, it appears that a lot of what he spoke about in regards to relationships sort of have fallen by the way side.
May I humbly suggest that those who have such issues at least watch his ‘Speaking of Love’ before they may/may not do something they will regret?
Mid-age Monastic Mainframe Mechanical Miserably Masturbating in Minnesota
Dear MMMMMMM,
This guy is awesome. Here’s part 1 of 6:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opGlp1pE59s
My favorite line: “When you think I’m crazy, that gives me lots of leeway for behavior.” This guy was an inspirational speaker before they became full of shit.
Thanks!
Aunt Pythia
——
Dear Aunt Pythia,
I am contacting you because lately I have met a personal crisis. I am hoping you can give me some advice because I think you seem to have such a career that you love.
In May I graduate from my bachelor in Computer Science. I have been involved in several research projects as an undergrad and have been certain I wanted to join the academic game. However, not long ago I “discovered” I have never had a proper job, and thought “How can I be so certain about joining academia?”
My reasoning before is that I firstly love computer science and the problems I have been solving in a research setting, as well as the curious environment. However, I also realize I enjoy most challenging mathematical/computational problems… What if life as a data scientist in a company I like/or my own would prove even cooler? Sometimes I just want to leave this safe environment I feel like I am in now, and explore the tech world on my own (but perhaps I am scared?).
I am now working on a project that is essentially a modeling problem, given some cool data. I have been learning a lot more machine learning algorithms and statistics. I really like this and it makes me want to become a data scientist. I am a very impulsive decision maker- I always listen to my (stochastic?) stomach. And these days my stomach is telling me to go out after I graduate and check out a different environment.
I know that my family and people now expect me to do a master etc (and I have applied), and in a way I also expect that of myself because I have wanted it for so long and set these goals. I think there is only one of the masters I applied to that I truly want to do. It is hard to remove these influences and think straight. My worry is that I don’t do something that truly excites me.
I think I am a tough person and should be handling this uncertainty well- but I just end up in circles and it drives me nuts, especially when people say “in the end everything will be ok”. The end????!
Hence I am contacting you Aunt Pythia. I just want some advice from your wise past on how to deal with these ticking issues that occupy too much thinking time these days. Did you always know you wanted to do academia as an undergraduate? Any advice to a random confused 21 year old who is trying to make sense of randomness is much appreciated.
Miss Stochastic Process
Dear Miss Stochastic,
Great name. Also, I’m possibly the worst person in the world to give advice on this, but that won’t stop me.
Go get the masters, maybe a Ph.D.; it won’t be the last thing you do, and you have lots of time. You can try it out and see how it goes.
Instead of thinking about what you want to do for the rest of your life, do something that you are likely to enjoy for at least a while, with a strict promise to yourself to quit and change directions once you stop liking it.
That’s not to say you should give up at the first sign of trouble or difficulty. By no means am I saying that. If anything it’s the opposite: a challenge is a reason to stick with it. At the first sign of boredom, however, you should start looking around.
Good luck!
Auntie P
——
Congratulations, you’ve wasted yet another Saturday morning with Aunt Pythia! I hope you’re satisfied, you could have made progress on that project instead.
But as long as you’re already here, please ask me a question. And don’t forget to make an amazing sign-off, they make me very very happy.
Click here for a form or just do it now:
The achievement gap: whose problem is it?
On Monday night I went to see Boston College professor Henry Braun speak about the Value-Added Model for teachers (VAM) at Teachers College, right here in my hood (hat tip Sendhil Revuluri).
I wrote about VAM recently, and I’m not a fan, so I was excited for the event. Here’s the poster from Monday:
The room was not entirely filled with anti-VAM activists such as myself, even though it was an informed audience. In fact one of the people I found myself talking to before the talk started mentioned that he’d worked on Wall Street, where they “culled” 10% of the workforce regularly – during downsizing phases – and how fantastic it was, how it kept standards high.
I mentioned that the question is, who gets decide which 10% and why, and he responded that it was all about profit, naturally. Being an easily provoked person, I found myself saying, well right, that’s the definition of success for Wall Street, and we can see how that’s turned out for everyone. He stared blankly at me.
I told that story because it irks me, still, how utterly unscathed individuals feel, who were or are part of the Wall Street culture. They don’t see any lesson to learn from that whole mess.
But even more than that, the same mindset which served the country so poorly is now somehow being held up as a success story, and applied to other fields like public education.
That brings me to the talk itself. Professor Braun did a very good job of explaining the VAM, and the inconsistencies, and the smallish correlations and unaccountable black box nature of the test.
But he then did more: he drew up a (necessarily vague) picture of the entire process by which a teacher is “assessed,” of which VAM plays a varying role, and he asked some important questions: how does this process affect the teaching profession? Does the scrutiny of each teacher in this way make students learn more? Does it make bad teachers get better? Does it make good teachers stay in the profession?
Great questions, but he didn’t even stop there. He went on to point something out that I’d never directly considered. Namely, why do we think individual responsibility – i.e. finger pointing at individual teachers – is going to improve the overall system? Here he suggested that there’s been a huge split in the profession between those who want to improve educational systems and those who want to assess teachers (and think that will “close the achievement gap”). The people who want to improve education talk about increasing communication between teachers in a school or between schools in a district, and they talk about improving and strengthening communities and cultures of learning.
By contrast the “assess the teachers” crowd is convinced that holding teachers individually accountable for the achievement of their students is the only possible approach. Fuck the school culture, fuck communicating with other teachers in the school. Fuck differences in curriculum or having old books or not having enough books due to unequal funding.
It got me thinking, especially since I read that book last week, The New Prophets of Capitalism (review here). That book explained how hollow Oprah’s urging to live a perfect life is to people whose situations are beyond their control. The problem with Oprah’s reasoning is that it ignores real systemic problems and issues that radically affect certain parts of the population and make it much harder to take her advice. It’s context free in a world where context is more and more meaningful.
So, whose problem is the achievement gap? Is it owned in tiny pieces by every teacher who dares to enter the profession? Is it owned by schools or school systems? Or is it owned by all of us, by the country as a whole? And if it is, how are we going to start working together to solve it?
Everyone hates college administrators
If you were wondering why I didn’t blog yesterday, which you probably weren’t (confession: I don’t read other peoples’ blogs and I don’t listen to any podcasts. So I would never, ever ask anyone to read my blog or listen to my podcast), it was because I was completely confused and irritated by this NYTimes opinion piece on the rising cost of college, written by University of Colorado Law Professor Paul Campos.
I really think the Times needs to either have footnotes or hyperlinks in their opinion pieces, because this guy was playing so fast and loose with his numbers that I had really no idea what he was talking about most of the time. That’s saying something considering that this, the cost of college and its causes, is something I have spent many hours thinking about and researching.
So what happened was, I didn’t have time to completely formulate my opposition to why his reasoning was muddled and confusing. I spent way too much time trying to figure out where he was getting his data. Waste of time.
Good news, though, my Slate Money co-host Jordan Weissman has done all that work for us, in his piece aptly entitled The New York Times Offers One of the Worst Explanations You’ll Read of Why College Is So Expensive. Who says procrastination doesn’t work?
As usual, if you’ve ever listened to my podcast (and this isn’t a request for you to do so!), I don’t agree completely with Jordan. However, my delta of agreement with Jordan is very manageable compared to the delta of disagreement I had with Campos. Basically I would quibble with laying any of the blame at the feet of instructors, but since he barely does that, let’s just go with his awesome take-down.
Take-down of what? Well, Campos basically hates college administrators, and pretends there’s no other problems in the world except them. It’s a mistake that he doesn’t have to make.
I mean really, who doesn’t hate college administrators? As a former college administrator myself, I know it’s universal; I certainly hated myself the entire time.
But that doesn’t mean there’s no other factors at all. Reduced public money for colleges is in fact a huge problem, especially when you pair it with the increased federal aid money going to students at corrupt for-profit colleges. Corinthian obtained $1.4 billion in federal grant and loan dollars in 2010 alone, more than the 10 University of California campuses combined for that same year. This system is in terrible need of repair.
Instead of simply hating on college admin, or rather, in addition to hating on admin, can we start thinking about an alternative no-frills state college system that is truly affordable and gives honest and basic instructions without trying to compete on the US News & World Reports stage?
Aunt Pythia’s advice
Holy shit people we’ve got an awesome column today. Aunt Pythia shall not disappoint, and when she says that, she really means that you wonderful readers have not disappointed Aunt Pythia – your questions are surprising and rich and thoughtful as always. It brings a sweet lightness to Aunt Pythia’s otherwise heavy, snuffly head.
For you see, Aunt Pythia is suffering from a springtime cold, so nothing too terrible, but it probably didn’t help that Aunt Pythia refused to acknowledge the rain yesterday – because it was 61 degrees! – and insisted on biking everywhere.
Not my actual bike, nor the actual spot I was biking yesterday. But close enough for Aunt Pythia.
After you all enjoy this marvelous column chock full of ridiculous advice, please don’t forget to:
ask Aunt Pythia a question 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.
——
Hello dearest Auntie P,
I just wanted to bring your attention to this calendar – sorry that it’s a buzzfeed article – and wish you the best with sexy pin-up men with various knitted objects.
I suppose I don’t really have a question, other than maybe other ideas you have for good calendar pages relating to men posing with sexy yarn?
But I hope you have a good day looking at this anyway!
Much love,
Casting-on Relishly Adorable Fellows To Sex
Dear CRAFTS,
Oh. My. God. Did you know my dear hubby is Dutch? Did you know I sometimes go to Amsterdam? This is seriously the best thing I’ve ever learned about that place, I’m not much of a smoker.
The name “Club Geluk” can be translated as “Club Happiness,” which seems pretty appropriate given this calendar. Here’s my favorite:
Is he holding a kiwi?
Also, it reminds me of my (previously) favorite calendar, which I buy each year and hand out to some baffled friends and visitors, namely the NYC Taxi Calendar:
You can never have too many calendars.
Readers, please do send me awesome calendars, I’m officially – as of now – a collector.
Love always,
Aunt Pythia
——
Dear Aunt Pythia,
Heads-up: I’m going to try to steer this away from the classic millenial-trying-to-find-purpose-in-life story, but it could go there.
I’m a 22-year old trying to decide whether to do a Ph.D. in pure math (topology/geometry). I’m currently taking grad classes in a non-degree program and my thoughts bounce around from “What’s the point of this?” to “Omigoodness my brain is in love” to “I’mstupid-Ihatethis-I’mstupid-Ihatethis”. It’s the sort of thing where I’ll decide ‘definitively’ not to go to grad school, and then immediately solve a hard problem and get into my reach school.
Amidst all that, I’ve been looking at alternatives to Ph.D. programs – things that are still intellectually rigorous/analytical but seem more relevant to the world. I’ve even considered switching to (shhhh) applied math. So my first question is this: what options/careers would you suggest to mathematicians who want to be able to “be useful”?
My second question comes from the fact that one of the main alternatives to math that I’ve considered is journalism. I enjoy writing and loved the journalism classes I took in undergrad. I was lucky enough to go to a talk you gave recently in which you mentioned data journalism. I’m thoroughly intrigued, but I have no idea how to look into it. How does someone ‘get into’ data journalism?
Moral of the story, I’m pretty confused. I love math (and have advisers pushing me towards grad school), but I’m not sure if I like it enough for a Ph.D. (or that I like who I am when I’m doing math). Any/all thoughts you have to offer on this silly mid-life-crisis business would be wonderful.
Thank you so much!
Does \exists \phi: Me \rightarrow Career, \phi isomorphic?
Dear Does,
I hear you, it’s tough. Personally I did a better job, when I was your age, at ignoring any possibility besides going to math grad school. I was laser focused. It’s good and bad to be that way, though, because it means you don’t hesitate to make bad choices.
Also, I don’t think I’d ever suggest not getting a degree in math. It comes in handy in all sorts of ways even if you end up doing something else. Even if it just trains you to be humble about your abilities, and know how to admit when you’re wrong, two basic and critical take-aways.
As for journalism, that’s such a tough field, and you’d find yourself hanging out with people who write articles like this (which is to say they won’t understand math enough to realize that describing Cuomo’s changes in education as a “victory” is not supported by fact). Not saying everyone in journalism is like that – in general I like the skepticism I encounter there – but there’s also real ignorance in some corners, and very few great jobs. But again, also a super rewarding job sometimes and for some people. I wouldn’t tell you not to pursue this if you’re truly interested.
The way to get into it – my best guess, not from experience – is to start doing it and posting your pieces on a blog – yours or your friends – or Huffington Post, so you can develop a portfolio that you can show people when you apply. That and work with journalists on their stuff.
I guess my overall advice is to get the education you think you want, and realize it’s flexible and can be used in lots of ways. It’s not something math professors tell you, mostly because they don’t know this, but math Ph.D.’s or masters degrees impress people in the outside world.
In the meantime take programming classes, keep in touch with applied math people and data journalism projects, and dip your toe into some of those waters when you can; do some projects. Don’t worry too much that the nerds around you are laser-focused, they might have changed completely in a few years, and it’s really not a competition. And good luck!
Aunt Pythia
——
Dear Aunt Pythia,
I’m a female undergraduate at a very good math department about to enter grad school for mathematics. I have a few stereotypically female qualities which I have found to have negatively impacted my time in undergrad. I don’t want to change who I am, but I’m also sick of the sexism in mathematics.
Just a quick background of what I’m talking about: Most of my side interests are stereotypically feminine: kids, baking, volunteering. I want to be a serious mathematician, but I also enjoy volunteering in local schools and do so quite frequently.
I also am pretty feminine in dress/in personality. I’m not that assertive, and I prefer to not answer in class, despite knowing the answer. Most of the males in my classes are much more assertive, aggressive in answering, and authoritative (even if they have no idea if they are right).
I feel that I’m taken less seriously by my peers and taken advantage of because I’m female, but I’m quite shy and quiet and speaking up is very unnatural for me. I perform at the top of my classes and have been successful in my research experiences, but my classmates don’t respect me (probably because I don’t talk about my success or assert my knowledge). I’m fine with my quiet personality, but I don’t know how to deal with my peers.
Examples:
- Peers assume that I’m going to be a high school math teacher, and are surprised I’m going to grad school.
- Many people applied to REUs from my school, but most didn’t get in anywhere and I got into most of the ones I applied to. Two male students complained in the hallway that I only got in because I’m female (which is not true at all – I’ve taken much more math than them and have published before). They only knew I had gotten in because my professors had told them. They don’t know that I heard them.
- I TA for Analysis II and Algebra II and students often “bully” me for the answers. When I say “no,” they don’t respect that and just ask again. I’ve tried being more assertive and authoritative. The students don’t pressure my fellow male TAs for answers and don’t ignore their refusals to give more help after many hints have been given.
- I’ve been told by my peers that I have a better chance at the grad schools I applied to because I’m female. These are just a few examples – I’m treated differently and feel alone in my undergrad department.
I’m just generally lost! I want to be stronger in grad school and I want people to respect my mathematical abilities, but I don’t know how to be assertive without being arrogant or over-confident. I want peers to stop assuming that I know less. Do you have any advice about how I can change in grad school?
Sorry for the super long question!
Wants To Change For Grad School
Dear Wants To Change,
First of all, congratulations. Sounds like you’re killing it. Seriously, and I’m so glad that your talent is being acknowledged and welcomed by the people who admit you and recruit you to REU’s and grad schools. It tells me that you are in a better place than you let yourself think. Spend a few minutes just gloating.
Second of all, fuck those assholes. Seriously. Fuck them. I know what you’re going through because I went through that stuff too, even though I wasn’t at all shy. The worst kind of person is the arrogant young man, they are unbelievably insufferable. I knew more than my share of such men, and let me tell you, they drove me nuts, and they also drove nice men nuts, as well as all the professors. They are universally despised and tolerated only because sometimes they turn out to be human by the time they get older and humbled (see above letter).
Third, some advice:
- Stick with it, everyone gets better when they are a bit older and less insecure. The truly insecure people often self-select out of the math scene altogether because they’re afraid they can’t cut it. For the horrible ones that stay, they become less and less relevant as they are isolated and everyone hates them.
- Never bake anything for math people. Seriously, there’s something about the act of baking in a department that brings out sexism. Stick with your baking for high school kids who will simply love you for it.
- Just ignore students who ask for answers. Yes, they are bullying you because they are completely unthreatened by you. But when they learn you don’t do that, they will stop.
- I would suggest you challenge yourself to answer questions in class, especially if you are taking a class from someone you hope to work with. It is a great habit to have.
- I would never suggest you change anything else about yourself, except for experimentation’s sake and if you are comfortable doing so. You might find people take you more seriously in certain outfits, and I’d never tell you not to wear them, but in this day and age the idea that you have to conform to other people’s standards of what a “serious” mathematician looks like is fucked.
- Most important, remember that you’re there to be educated, and it’s all about you, not them. Their egos are crying out in pain because they are threatened, and sometimes the noise is deafening, but learn to put on a set of ego headphones.
- Also, feed yourself. You might sometimes have problems with your own ego, and you should also be able to seek support, even though it won’t come at the expense of others. Think about how you can get it. I’m imagining that volunteering is a source of that for you, in which case please think of it as an alternative to therapy, and don’t ever ever give it up.
Good luck!
Aunt Pythia
——
Dear Aunt Pythia,
You’re (still) my favorite blogger, but I feel like you may have erred in your response to “Gossiped About And Hurt Humongously”.
You accuse him of claiming women are “discriminated in favor of”, which he did not. He said, “I was arguing that gender plays a role in fellowship/scholarship selection and college admissions”, which does not indicate in who’s favor that bias might be directed.
I think in this case you’ve unfairly put word in his mouth that were not there. Am I missing something here?
Sad And Disappointed
Dear SAD,
Yeah, maybe. I mean, I agree that I read into it a bit, but I’m not sure what I did was unfair. Let’s go back to what he said about the actual conversation:
I’m a guy and a grad student and I was talking to a fellow grad student, Z, about gender issues in academia. Specifically, I was arguing that gender plays a role in fellowship/scholarship selection and college admissions, and she claimed that no, an applicant’s sex does not have any detectable influence on such decisions. We started talking about affirmative action and before we had time to even discuss the implications of affirmative action, she had to go to class and I thought that was the end of it.
I took from this description that he was arguing that there existed affirmative action in admissions, and that this would promote women. I don’t think that was a crazy jump, since I’ve never heard of affirmative action that promotes men.
Readers, what do you think? The full question and answer are here.
Aunt Pythia
——
Dear Aunt Pythia,
OK, I fucked up. He does say later in the article, that he did make the pro female bias contention. As my girlfriend just pointed out to me. I still don’t think that is by default sexist, but I have to admit I read right over that without even seeing it, which may be.
Sad And Dissapointed
SAD,
Oh, what? Let me take another look. Oh right, he goes on to say, “being female sometimes helps in getting scholarships and in college admissions”.
Thanks for writing back!
Aunt Pythia
——
Dear Aunt Pythia,
After some years of “screw it, I’m not even bothering to date,” I met someone I like a lot. He is very smart, interesting, etc, etc. I made him wait ages to spend the night at my house, and last night he finally stayed over.
So anyway, the making out was awesome. We hit the bedroom, and all the clothes come off. Then, four minutes into giving him a blowjob, he just comes. No warning, but I’m ok with that, and I apparently give pretty good ones. What I’m not ok with was that we were now done. Excuse me, what the fuck?
This guy isn’t a selfish jerk at all, and I get that maybe the mood dies for him a bit after he’s gotten his. I also seem to have an effect on some men that makes them a bit “quick.” Given all that, what the hell do I do now? I will give him another shot, but if the same thing happens, he might be getting dumped. On the other hand, he’s practically the only man I have really been interested in for a long time (like, years).
I am not interested in having a discussion about it, and I especially don’t want to make this guy feel bad if he has some medical/PE type issue. However, I also can’t let him think this is acceptable.
Anyway, what would you do? (Actually, I know you, and you’d probably just grab his head and put it between your legs. Any other thoughts for the less assertive among us?)
My Enjoyment The Optional Orgasm
Dear METOO,
Alternative, less aggressive, no-talk option: start masturbating. What’s he going to do, watch? I mean, maybe. Or maybe he will help you out. He sounds like it’s worth a try.
Although, to be very honest, that’s what I’d start doing first, before the blowjob, when you get him into bed the next time. He’s already shown you that he goes second.
Good luck!
Auntie P
——
Congratulations, you’ve wasted yet another Saturday morning with Aunt Pythia! I hope you’re satisfied, you could have made progress on that project instead.
But as long as you’re already here, please ask me a question. And don’t forget to make an amazing sign-off, they make me very very happy.
Click here for a form or just do it now:
How many NYC are arbitrarily punished by the VAM? About 578 per year.
There’s been an important update in the thought experiment I started yesterday. Namely, a reader (revuluri) has provided me with a link to show how many teachers are considered “ineffective,” which was my shorthand for scoring either third or fourth in the four categories.
According to page 5 of this document, that percentage was 16% in 2011-2012, 17% in 2012-2013, and 16% in 2013-2014. We’ll take this to mean that the true cutoff is about 16.3%. Using my formula from yesterday, that means that after 4 years, about
or 12.7% of teachers going up for tenure in the new system will be arbitrarily denied tenure based only on their VAM score.
How many people is that in a given year? Well, this document explains that in 2000, 9,000 teachers were hired and in 2008, 6,000 teachers were hired. I’ll assume my best guess for “teachers hired” in a given year is something between those two numbers, but I’ll also assume it’s closer to the latter since it is more recent information. Say 7,000 new teachers per year.
Of course, not all of them go up for tenure. There’s attrition. Say 35% of those teachers leave before the tenure decision is made (also guessing from this document). That leave us with about 4,550 teachers going up for tenure each year, and 12.7% of them is 578 people.
So, according to my crude estimates, about 578 people will be denied tenure simply based on this random number generator we call VAM. And as my reader said, this says nothing about the hard-to-measure damage done to all the good teachers trying to teach their kids but having to deal with this standardized testing nonsense. It’s a wonder anyone is willing to work here.
Please comment if you have updated numbers for anything here.
The arbitrary punishment of New York teacher evaluations
The Value-Added Model for teachers (VAM), currently in use all over the country, is a terrible scoring system, as I’ve described before. It is approximately a random number generator.
Even so, it’s still in use, mostly because it wields power over the teacher unions. Let me explain why I say this.
Cuomo’s new budget negotiations with the teacher’s union came up with the following rules around teacher tenure, as I understand them (readers, correct me if I’m wrong):
- It will take at least 4 years to get tenure,
- A teacher must get at least 3 “effective” or “highly effective” ratings in those three years,
- A teacher’s yearly rating depends directly on their VAM score: they are not allowed to get an “effective” or “highly effective” rating if their VAM score comes out as “ineffective.”
Now, I’m ignoring everything else about the system, because I want to distill the effect of VAM.
Let’s think through the math of how likely it is that you’d be denied tenure based only on this random number generator. We will assume only that you otherwise get good ratings from your principal and outside observations. Indeed, Cuomo’s big complaint is that 98% of teachers get good ratings, so this is a safe assumption.
My analysis depends on what qualifies as an “ineffective” VAM score, i.e. what the cutoff is. For now, let’s assume that 30% of teachers receive “ineffective” in a given year, because it has to be some number. Later on we’ll see how things change if that assumption is changed.
That means that 30% of the time, a teacher will not be able to receive an “effective” score, no matter how else they behave, and no matter what their principals or outside observations report for a given year.
Think of it as a biased coin flip, and 30% of the time – for any teacher and for any year – it lands on “ineffective”, and 70% of the time it lands on “effective.” We will ignore the other categories because they don’t matter.
How about if you look over a four year period? To avoid getting any “ineffective” coin flips, you’d need to get “effective” every year, which would happen 0.70^4 = 24% of the time. In other words, 76% of the time, you’d get at least one “ineffective” rating just by chance.
But remember, you don’t need to get an “effective” rating for all four years, you are allowed one “ineffective rating.” The chances of exactly one “ineffective” coin flip and three “effective” flips is 4 (1-0.70) 0.70^3 = 41%.
Adding those two scenarios together, it means that 65% of the time, over a four year period, you’d get sufficient VAM scores to receive tenure. But it also means that 35% of the time you wouldn’t, through no fault of your own.
This is the political power of a terrible scoring system. More than a third of teachers are being arbitrarily chosen to be punished by this opaque and unaccountable test.
Let’s go back to my assumption, that 30% of teachers are deemed “ineffective.” Maybe I got this wrong. It directly impacts my numbers above. If the overall probability of being deemed “effective” is p, then the overall chance of getting sufficient VAM scores will be
So if I got it totally wrong, and 98% of teachers are described as effective by the VAM model, this would mean almost all teachers get sufficient VAM scores.
On the other hand, remember that the reason VAM is being pushed so hard by people is that they don’t like it when evaluations systems think too many people are effective. In fact, they’d rather see arbitrary and random evaluation than see most people get through unscathed.
In other words, it is definitely more than 2% of teachers that are called “ineffective,” but I don’t know the true cutoff.
If anyone knows the true cutoff, please tell me so I can compute anew the percentage of teachers that are arbitrarily being kept from tenure.
Review: The New Prophets of Capital
Last night I finished reading Nicole Aschoff’s new book, The New Prophets of Capital, which was published as part of the Jacobin series of books. Here’s a description from their website of their book series:
The Jacobin series features short interrogations of politics, economics, and culture from a socialist perspective, as an avenue to radical political practice. The books offer critical analysis and engagement with the history and ideas of the Left in an accessible format.
And by the way, if you don’t know what Jacobin magazine is, you should take a look. I recently signed up to receive the paper versions of all of their magazines and books, which was my version of a donation to a good and very thoughtful cause.
Aschoff’s book explores the storytelling nature of modern capitalism and neoliberalism, and focuses on the underlying assumptions, as seen through four larger-than-life figures: Sheryl Sandberg, Whole Foods founder John Mackey, Oprah, and Bill (and Melinda) Gates.
She does a good job of explaining, in plain, non-academic English, what’s wrong with these people’s messages. If you’re wondering what exactly bothers you about the Lean In movement, for example, take a look at the chapter on Sandberg, the book is worth it just for that.
The book is short, only 6 chapters. The first chapter gives reasoning for the book, describing how storytelling matters when we think about how culture works, and then the heart of the book follows with a chapter on each person listed above – the “prophets” – with their particular flavor. There’s also a concluding chapter, which is the least convincing, as it was extremely condensed and left too much reasoning unexplained.
The unifying theme throughout the four chapters devoted to the prophets is how these four people manage to be both public critics and private protectors of the current economic system, with an emphasis on protection.
So when Sandberg tells us to lean in, she’s telling us to conform to the way things are, not to threaten it in any way. When Oprah tells us that we have it in ourselves to live fantabulous lives, she’s giving us personal responsibility to be happy and fulfilled, and structural inequality is not acknowledged or recognized. When John Mackey or Bill Gates sees a problem, they set up a “free market solution” to that problem, even though, by definition, poor people don’t have money to pay for what they need.
While none of the book’s material was entirely new to me, it was interesting to see the connections deliberately made between the prevalent high-level business mindset and the individual choices we make for ourselves based on how we imagine the world works. If I really believed the Sandberg line, I’d still be working at a hedge fund, doing my best to please my colleagues and ignore my kids. If I had bought into Oprah’s context-free attitude, I’d blame people for their poverty and think it amounts to bad decision making.
The book isn’t entirely consistent. It maintains both that Bill Gates believes entirely in a free market and that he undemocratically influences education reform in this country with his money. Maybe those are consistent claims but it’s not obvious to me (although I agree with the undemocratic nature of his mega-philanthropy).
It’s a good book. I’d like a bunch of people to read it so we can have a discussion group. I also get the impression that Aschoff could write one of these a year, and I plan to follow her work.
I accept mathematical bribes
Last Friday I traveled to American University and gave an evening talk, where I met Jeffrey Hakim, a mathematician and designer who openly bribed me.
Don’t worry, it’s not that insidious. He just showed me his nerdy math wallet and said I could have one too if I blogged about it. I obviously said yes. Here’s my new wallet:
It’s made of the same kind of flexible plastic they use on the outside of buildings. Or something. I expect it will last for many years.
You might notice there is writing and pictures on my new wallet! They are mathematical, which is why I don’t feel bad about accepting this bribe: it’s all in the name of education and fun with mathematics. Let me explain the front and back of the wallet.
The front is a theorem:
Here’s the thing, I’ve proven this. I have even assigned it to my students in the past to prove. We always use induction. This kind of identity is kind of made for induction, no? Don’t you think?
Well Jeffrey Hakim had an even better idea. His proof of Nicomachus’s Theorem is represented as a picture on the back of the wallet:
It took me a couple of minutes to see why this is a proof.
Here’s what I’d like you all to do: go think about why this is a proof of the above identity. Come back if you can’t figure it out, but if you can, just go ahead and pat yourself on your back and don’t bother reading the rest of this blogpost because it’s just going to explain the proof.
I’ll give you all a moment…
OK almost ready?
OK cool here’s why this is a proof.
First, convince yourself that this “pattern,” of building a frame of square boxes around the above square, can be continued. In other words, it’s a square of 4 1×1 boxes, framed by 2×2 boxes, framed by 3×3 boxes, and so on. It could go on forever this way, because if you focus on one side of the outside of the third layer, there are 4 3×3 boxes, so length 
OK, now here’s the actual trick. What is the area of this box?
I claim there are two ways to measure the area, and one of the ways will give you the left hand side of Nicomachus’s Theorem but the other way will give you the right hand side of Nicomachus’s Theorem.
To be honest, it’s just one bit more complicated than that. Namely, the first way gives you something that’s 4 times bigger than the left hand side of Nicomachus’s Theorem and the second way gives you something 4 times bigger than the right hand side of Nicomachus’s Theorem.
Why don’t you go think about this for a few minutes, because the clue might be all you need to figure it out.
Or, perhaps you just want me to go ahead and explain it. I’ll do that! That’s why I got the wallet!
OK, now imagine isolating the top right quarter of the above figure. Like this:
That’s a square, obviously, so its area is the square of the length of any side. But if you go along the bottom, the length is obviously 
And since we know we can generalize the original figure to go up to 
That’s 4 times the right-hand side of the theorem, so we’re halfway done!
Next, we will compute the area of the original figure a different way, namely by simply adding up and counting all the differently colored squares that make it up. Assume that we continue changing colors every time we get a new layer.
So, there are 4 1×1 squares, and there are 8 2×2 squares, and there are 12 3×3 squares, and there are 16 4×4 squares. In the generalized figure, there would be 
So if you look at the area of the generalized figure which is all one color, say the
That means the overall generalized figure will have total area:
Since that’s just 4 times the left-hand side of the theorem, we’re done.
Notes:
- this would be a fun thing to do with a kid.
- there’s more math inside the wallet which I haven’t gotten to yet.
- After staring at the picture for another minutes, I just realized the total area of the whole (generalized) thing is obviously
which is to say that either the left-hand side or right-hand side of the original identity is one fourth of that. Cool!
Aunt Pythia’s advice
Dear readers!
Do you know where Aunt Pythia is right now? She’s on a train from Washington D.C., coming home from a very short and very pleasant visit, involving a delicious dinner, an evening talk, and even more delicious desserts.
Not the actual desserts from last night.
Readers, it needs to be said that not one, not two, but three different times – in the span of 4 hours – someone mentioned to Aunt Pythia that she shouldn’t forget her duties the following morning.
And has she forgotten? No, she hasn’t, and it’s not only because she was reminded so gently and so often last night. No, it’s because Aunt Pythia loves and adores you – worships you, really – and could never forget you. If she doesn’t write it’s because she can’t write. And as Amtrak’s wifi is holding up (so far!), we are all in for a treat. Auntie P knows she is, anyway.
Give it up for trains people, and after that, don’t forget to:
ask Aunt Pythia a question 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,
You have written that sexual compatibility is important in finding an appropriate partner. But how do you ask or find that out when meeting people to consider dating? And when/how/where does when ask the question, “so how many sexual partners have you had?” I guess you have to date a person to find that out, and I know I shouldn’t ask that on the first date, and maybe even 2nd. And if the answer is above say two, how does one end the courtship without making the other person feel bad?
Here’s where I’m coming (hehe) from: I have been using okcupid to select for people that seem sexually compatible based on the questions they answer (e.g How many dates till sex?), but as is par for the course when it comes to online dating (at least for guys like me who are not tall, handsome, and/or rich) it is very hard to get responses (let alone dates) to the tons of (non-sexual) messages of interest I send. (I’ve had about 5 dates over 8 years of online dating). So I’m trying other ways (speed dating, meet ups, friends, and perhaps, math conferences) to meet people.
I am very sexually inexperienced – I am in my mid 30’s and haven’t made it past a 2nd date; I’ve never had a girlfriend; never been kissed (except maybe by my mom), and so on. My answer to the “how many dates till sex” is the “6 or more” option, and I only contact women with that answer. (I can’t fathom going on only 3-5 dates with someone and then having sex with them!) I am not comfortable dating someone with a lot of sexual partners, because I’m scared of STDs. I mean, you can test for some of the major STDs, but for others (e.g HPV, warts) it’s not always clinically practical, and then what about latency period during which microbes not detectable, and so on. In fact, I’d prefer to date a virgin like myself for that reason, but unfortunately that is unlikely to find at my age (apart from religious people; but I don’t like religion and would not get along with them). Also, my mom is a religious sex-negative nutcase (who has made sex shameful for me)- for example she isn’t happy or comfortable that my sister married a guy who had two previous partners; but he has been an awesome husband for the past 5 years.
very inexperienced regarding getting into nooky
Dear virgin,
First thing’s first. The way you figure out whether you are sexually compatible with someone is by having sex with them. And it may be great, or it may be terrible, or it may (and this is the most likely one) be not terrible but not great, in which case you might have to get better at it with that person (or just get better at it, period). Which may not work, even if you try a bunch, in which case you need to find another person and try again.
Conclusion: you might find yourself having sex a few times, maybe even a lot of times, with a few people, or many people, before you find the right person for you.
Secondary conclusion: if you run across someone who has had sex a bunch of times with a bunch of other people, then you should assume that they are doing it right. You should not assume they are an STD waiting to happen.
Unless they are, of course, that is also possible. Make sure they practice safe sex.
Next question: when do you ask someone how many sexual partners they have had? Answer: never. That is never a relevant question, in my book. Why does it matter? Unless you’re dealing with a freaked out virgin who has been convinced to worry about STD’s, there’s really no point in having that conversation.
Next question: how do you end a relationship with someone because they’ve had more sex than you without making them feel bad? I’d have to say, first think about how to have a relationship at all, with a real person, then worry about that. Oh but wait, since you’re never going to ask them how many sexual partners they’ve had, this won’t come up.
Here’s the thing. Once you’ve gone this long without getting laid, it takes on mythical proportions. It doesn’t need to. Sex doesn’t have to be all that mind-blowing or earth-shattering. Or dangerous, either. Sex is just like prolonged hugging, except stickier.
Friend, you have fallen prey – big time – to the most common mistake of online dating, namely using the information that has been disclosed via online dating and assuming it is sufficient to understand whether you could love someone. It is not. In fact, that data is mostly misleading, especially the picture (and here are Aunt Pythia’s alternative questions).
Also, I think you might need to reread your question and think about the role your mother has had in your life. Specifically, with religion and sex. I’m no expert on this stuff (but fuck it, pretending to be is really the whole point of this column), but it looks like, in an effort to keep you on the religious path, your mother has deliberately perverted your expectations about sex. That might work in some contexts, where there’s a village matchmaker pairing off young virgins, but it aint here. We are in a free market in terms of sex, for better or for worse. If you want to know more about that, please read Why Love Hurts, a really excellent book.
My advice: stop thinking about STD’s, start thinking about things that matter long term like whether you want kids, or where you want to live, or how you want to be awesome. Cultivate a reason for a woman to fall in love with you that is better and sexier than fear.
Good luck,
Aunt Pythia
——
Dear Tia Pythia (summoning my inner Spaniard),
I’m 20 years removed from official education, when I received a B.A. in Math. I worked in an actuarial department for a few years, and then for about 15 years in the IT dept of an accounting firm, where I did some programming, some design, and a lot of higher tier technical support.
I was let go about 18 months ago, and am now applying to a few Masters degree programs in Management Information Systems. I’m also contemplating applying to Data Science Boot Camps (there are a few out there), but they’re all in the $15,000 range. I’m skeptical about spending that on a program which doesn’t result in an actual degree, but I am curious to get your opinion on such technical boot camps.
Trying to turn the circular corner of my career
Dear Trying,
Yeah, I have no idea. I thought of starting one of those boot camps myself out here in New York, but then I realized the cost would be pretty steep to make it work, and in particular the very people who I’d want to attract wouldn’t have the cash, because the point of it would be to train them into shape to get the job.
That said, if they are really devoted to data, they should have data on how well their graduates do in the job market.
Also, getting a masters degree sounds good, but only if the skills it will teach you are up-to-date and will get you a job afterwards. If I were you I’d compare the curriculum to the stuff listed on LinkedIn as required knowledge for the jobs you want.
Good luck!
Aunt Pythia
——
Dear Aunt Pythia,
I want to support female mathematicians, and make sure they feel comfortable and welcome at conferences. And I make sure I my encourage female students and call on them and that I don’t make comments to put them down and so on.
Ok, now that we got that out of the way. I’m a single guy in my mid 30s (never had a girlfriend despite wanting one). Is it inappropriate to go to math conferences with hopes of finding love? (My mom suggests I do this, but I think my mom is clueless; she is not in math).
My question again is, is it appropriate to indicate romantic interest to a female mathematician I meet at a conference, and if so how? Typically I won’t know whether or not she is single (e.g she may not be wearing any obvious wedding ring) so then how should I go about figuring out (or asking) if she has a boyfriend? Is it appropriate to ask “Do you have a boyfriend?” And to be clear I’m not interested in a one-night stand, but a loving relationship between one man and one woman, as the holy bible requires (I actually can’t stand religion, just added that facetiously because I support gay rights).
Do you have a strategy for how I should go about this goal? Should I study her mathematical work (which I likely would be interested in, regardless of my interest in her) before the conference, and then use that to begin a mathematical conversation with her, and perhaps even a mathematical collaboration with her (which I would enjoy, even if there was no reciprocal romantic interest on her part)? Given my lack of past success with women, I am not confident that she will have any romantic interest in me, which may lead to great awkwardness.
Should I feel ashamed for posing such a question (to Aunt Pythia)? I get the sense (based on some past Aunt Pythia column comments) that going to conferences in part to meet women interested in math might offend some feminists (but if I was gay, my question would be about meeting men). And I wonder how is it some mathematicians are in relationships with other mathematicians whom they met “at work” (e.g in grad school, post-doc, professor, etc) – how’d they navigate past the possibility of sexual harassment? I am confused. I long for love, like everyone else does. And I’m sad I can’t seem to find it anywhere.
too sad for acronym
Dear too sad,
Great question. It’s all in the details. You’ve got some good thoughts here, but you’ve also got some stuff that comes across as super creepy. So let’s clean it up a bit.
OK:
- Making friends with people at conferences, men and women.
- Reading their math beforehand and asking them to discuss it in person, knowing it is almost certainly remaining a professional connection which you actually value.
- Being open to love if things click.
NOT OK:
- Following around women, glomming on to them, or otherwise making them uncomfortable at a conference. Whatever you do, ask yourself, “would I do this to a man?” and “why don’t I got ahead and do this to a man for a while so I can convince myself and others that I’m not a creep?”
- Studying up on someone’s math for the sole purpose of enticing them into a “work conversation” so then you can turn it into a date. Ew, totally gross.
- Acting like a conference is a sexy sexy party. It’s not, although sometimes there are parties at conferences, and sometimes they get sexy. To be on the safe side, assume that the women there are there because they want to talk math and meet mathematicians in a professional way. Just because they’re at a party and drinking doesn’t mean they are open to advances.
If you are unsure of whether your actions are creepy, my suggestion is to ask a man or woman who knows you and likes you and whom you trust is not themselves a creep.
In general, my suggestion is to be nice, and friendly, and invite multiple people to lunch, or join a group of people for lunch, and take the opportunity to engage in a fun conversation with the person sitting next to you. If you’re enjoying the conversation, mention that you’re planning to go to restaurant X tomorrow for lunch, and would they like to join? Stuff like that. Make it easy for them to say no, and to bring friends, and be sure they never feel pressured in any way.
Good luck!
Aunt Pythia
——
Aunt Pythia,
There is a function that I can run online. There is apparently some Visual Basic code that implements the algorithm. I pay to have access to be able to run the function. I would like to be able to do automated testing of the function, but to do that, I have thought that I need to have my own implementation. The guy behind this has some functions that he gives me a script that explains how they work.
In the case of this one, there isn’t a script, just code that is not publicly available. The function takes as input two three-digit numbers. the output is 12 three-digit numbers. Is there a machine learning approach that I could use to derive the function so that I can test its performance?
Missing Link
Dear Missing Link,
The answer is no, at least with the information you’ve given me. I have no idea how that function is derived, what form it’s in. If I knew it was a polynomial function (or 12), with some kind of well-defined form, then absolutely, I could infer the coefficients using linear algebra. But given that it always transforms a three digit numbers into three digit numbers, it doesn’t sound polynomial.
It might not even be intrinsically integral: maybe it uses cosines and logarithms and at the very end it lops off the digits to the left and right of some three digits. The point is, without more information I simply have no idea how to infer the function. I need more, and so do you.
Aunt Pythia
——
Aunt Pythia,
I’m interested in your take on the recent New York Times op-ed piece, Searching for Sex.
It seems to me that there are a lot of assumptions contained in the analysis. But I’m writing to ask for your view, not to share mine. How correct do you think his claims are? Should we care about them?
Person seeking every unique dictum on this one recently seen opinion report
Dear Pseudotorsor,
Fantastic sign-off.
You know, I kind of love it when statistics point out how much people lie about sex. It’s one of my favorite things. What I especially like about the condom story in that article is how it’s obvious that both men and women exaggerate how often they’re having sex, at least with condoms. I say, awesome! I love how people always think they’re porn stars. And although men lie more, it’s cool that women also lie.
Here’s the thing, though. Do we really want to be corrected? I mean, given that I haven’t had nearly as much sex as I wish I had, can’t you data people just leave me alone to my imagined life? Does it do any good, really, to think about just how many weeks go by that are utterly dry?
My theory as to why people lie: when you have sex with a person, it creates a temporary (but fantastic!) amnesiatic effect, where you can’t remember what you were mad about, what was wrong in the world, or how long it had been before that moment that you last had sex. It’s also an amazing hangover cure.
So your brain does this thing, in response, whereby it guesstimates that you must have been having sex pretty regularly, i.e. about once a week. And that brain fart lasts for like 4 weeks. Thus the bias.
My point is, it’s a good bias to have, in general, for most people. In fact (and somewhat ironically!) only actual porn stars are suffering from too little perceived sex. Go us! Go imaginary sex!
In other words, I think the author is wrong to ask, why do we have so little sex? I think we instead should be asking, how can we be unreasonably happy about other things just like we are unreasonably happy about our sex lives?
Also, I agree that the one thing the article didn’t discuss sufficiently is the question of selection bias. I mean, I have never asked google about my vagina, ever. I suspect there are quite a few people who don’t ask google about their vaginas. So instead of saying people are insecure about their smelly particulars, I think we might be tempted to conclude that insecure people ask google about their insecurities.
Auntie P
——
Congratulations, you’ve wasted yet another Saturday morning with Aunt Pythia! I hope you’re satisfied, you could have made progress on that project instead.
But as long as you’re already here, please ask me a question. And don’t forget to make an amazing sign-off, they make me very very happy.
Click here for a form or just do it now:
Songs about mothers
I have a soft spot for sensitive singer songwriting men talking about their mothers, even when it’s a fraught relationship. After all, I’ve got three sons, and it’s nice to imagine they won’t forget about me once they leave. And hey, I’d rather have hate than nothing!
This morning I’m all about that. I started out with Sufjan Stevens (who has a new album coming out, by all accounts his best) singing For the Widows in Paradise, For the Fatherless in Ypsilanti:
Next I moved on to another incredibly emo heartfelt band called Iron and Wine, one of my favorites when I’m in this pineful mood. Here they are singing Upward Over the Mountain, a song I credit with the internal efforts I’ve made (so far) to let my sons someday leave me:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Kh09MuIfIU
Next, now that I’m thoroughly in the mood, I’ll just go ahead and – brace myself and – listen to John Lennon’s Mother:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDVkkwl6aJo
And to top that off, I’ll finish with something hopeful, Conor Obersts You Are Your Mother’s Child:
mathbabe 