The Black Box Society by Frank Pasquale
There’s a new book out, called The Black Box Society and written by Frank Pasquale, a lawyer focused on technology and a friend of mine. It’s published by Harvard University Press and it looks like this:
To be honest, when I first received it I was a bit worried that it would make my book, which I am utterly engaged in writing, entirely moot. After all, Frank and I had discussed his book and I’d seen earlier versions. I knew it contained information about racist secret algorithms in finance and tech, and there were also other issues in common with our two books.
Now that I’ve had a chance to read it, though, I’m not as worried. First of all, Frank’s book is aimed at a different audience, which is to say a somewhat more academic and technical audience. In particular his policy recommendations near the end of the book seem to be written for lawyers who know the current laws and need arguments to improve them.
Also, his focus is on secrecy itself as a means of power, whereas I focus on models as the object of interest.
I like a lot of what Frank says, and I think his metaphors work really well. For example, he talks about the early promise of the internet to expose information of all sorts, on powerful corporations as well as individuals. Then he talks about how reality has been a disappointment, and we’ve ended up with an internet that acts as a “one way mirror,” whereby powerful corporations can see into individual’s lives but those individuals can’t look back.
He also makes the important point that, when it comes to the NSA and other government agencies snooping around, while they might be legally prevented from gathering certain kinds of data about people, nothing prevents them from buying information and profiles from data warehouses like Acxiom, which can do the kind of collecting that they can’t. In other words, the data warehousing industry acts as a giant loophole in the set of rules protecting our civil liberties.
For another really interesting review of Frank’s book, written by a software engineer, take a look at David Auerbach’s Slate review (hat tip Jordan Ellenberg). In particular he has interesting things to say about the extent to which algorithms are intentionally evil (they’re probably not) and the extent to which engineers can fix problems (they probably can).
In any case, I recommend The Black Box Society, it’s a fascinating and important book.
Link to my JMM prezi talk
I seem to have caught a break at the San Antonio airport, with free wifi. So I will take this opportunity to offer a link to my prezi talk.
See the prezi here: http://prezi.com/makkue0d84nc/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy&rc=ex0share
One embarrassing omission from my talk is the existence of many public facing math podcasts. Embarrassing not because I knew about them – I didn’t – but because I should have, since after all I participate in a weekly podcast myself, so of course I know it’s a new and exciting medium. Luckily, the audience member who pointed out my mistake has agreed to write a guest post surveying the math podcast landscape, so stay tuned for that.
Palantir’s leaked documents and the concept of uncertainty
Did you hear about TechCrunch’s leaked documents detailing the client list of Palantir, the super secretive data mining contractor (hat tip Chris Wiggins)? Palantir, founded by uberlibertarian Peter Thiel, had clients as of 2013 including the LAPD, the CIA, DHS, NSA, the FBI, and CDC. Besides data mining for government agencies, they also work in the finance sector and the legal sector.
Here’s the scariest thing about the TechCrunch article:
Samuel Reading, a former Marine who works in Afghanistan for NEK Advanced Securities Group, a U.S. military contractor, was quoted in the document as saying It’s the combination of every analytical tool you could ever dream of. You will know every single bad guy in your area.”
That quote, if true, belies a lack of understanding of what data mining can actually do in terms of accuracy. No data mining tool can be both comprehensive and accurate – find all the bad guys with no accidental good guys getting caught in the net. It’s just not possible, unless you have DNA samples with markers for “bad guyness,” and even then DNA tests sometimes get mixed up.
It behooves an expensive and fancy consulting company to act like their tools are prophetic, however, even if that means false positives or false negatives happen all the time, which of course they do, with any algorithm.
It’s bad enough when stupid start-up companies claim big data solves everything, when what they’re doing is trying to solve a problem nobody cares about. It’s another thing altogether when it’s our military and military contractors and police and secret services, and when we don’t have any view into what it actually does. Scary stuff.
Citation as received wisdom
So I’m here at JMM, hanging out with my buddy Aaron Abrams and finagling free wifi at the Hyatt (pro tip from Jonathan Bloom: sign up to be on their gold membership plan, which is free, and as a member you get free wifi).
Aaron and I started talking about the case of MIT professor Walter Lewin, and whether his OpenCourseWorks physics lectures should or should not have been removed after he was discovered to have been a sexual harasser.
UPDATE: Here’s an article giving some idea of what Lewin did, which was basically to harass women who were taking his online class.
I’ve already asserted that it makes sense to me that they are removed, but I wasn’t happy with my explanation. I think I’ve understood it better now, and I wanted to throw it out there.
To explain it, let’s move to a more cut and dry example, or at least an older one, namely Harvard mathematician George Birkhoff. That guy was a hugely famous and powerful mathematician in his day, which was in the 1930’s. He was also a huge anti-semite, and prevented Harvard from hiring jewish mathematicians fleeing the Nazis.
When it comes to doing math, I might write a paper that uses a result he proved. Will I cite him? Personally, I would feel weird about it. Citing someone, speaking their name, is not just a mathematical shortcut, a way of avoiding proving everything from basic principles, although it is that, of course. If you have no prior knowledge about someone, you might not see that, but I’ve set it up explicitly so you see more than that.
Here’s what I see. By citing him, I am doing more than giving him credit for proving something, I’m including him in the community of mathematics, which is actually an honor. And honestly I’d rather not honor the wisdom of someone I detest.
Update: to be clear I would cite him if I needed to. I just would actively feel weird about it. I might even add a note.
Going back to Walter Lewin. Supposedly he can explain certain kinds of physics really really well. People say this, and I believe them. But of course the physics is already known, he’s not inventing something, and other people can also explain it, just not quite as well, at least right now.
Why would a given person choose to watch Lewin’s lectures instead of someone else’s lectures on the same material? Well, what is the delta between those two experiences? On the one hand, it’s a better explanation, which adds, but on the other hand, it’s the knowledge that we are honoring a man with no integrity, which subtracts. If written citation is received wisdom, then actually sitting and listening to a person is even more intimate.
For me, personally, these two opposite considerations don’t add up to a net positive. I’d rather watch someone else explain the physics.
As for MIT’s OpenCourseWorks (OCW) platform, they also had a “delta” computation to make, and they had to take into account the community they are trying to build through OCW. They want women in particular to feel welcomed to that community, and they decided that the videos’ presence made that more difficult (and it’s already difficult enough in physics). I think they made the right call.
Guest post by Tom Adams: Obama homeownership push or mortgage market share battle?
This is a guest post by Tom Adams, who spent over 20 years in the securitization business and now works as an attorney and consultant and expert witness on MBS, CDO and securitization related issues.
Good news for would-be home buyers – the Obama Administration heard your concerns and has a new tool to help make homes more affordable!
Are they going to increase wages? Or reduce the price of homes? No, they’re going to attack mortgage rates for Federal Housing Administration (FHA) borrowers. Of course, mortgage rates are already at close to all time lows, having declined significantly over the past year to about 3.7% on conventional 30 year fixed rate loans. The Administration’s main tool for doing this is to cut the insurance fee charged by the Federal Housing Authority on new mortgages by 0.50%, from 1.35% to 0.85% (on top of the interest rate charged to borrowers).
This fee is paid by borrowers into a fund that the FHA uses to protect itself against losses in case borrowers that it has insured later default. In theory, this move was somewhat controversial because the FHA’s fund had incurred higher than expected losses during the crisis and the FHA had to ask Congress for money to shore up the fund not that long ago. Around the same time, the FHA raised this insurance premium to additionally replenish the fund.
If it’s already really cheap to borrow money, is another 0.5% reduction going to make that big a difference? Probably not, because historically low interest rates haven’t been the obstacle to buying a house. I expect the number of net, new home buyers produced as a result of this change will be considerably lower than the Administration is projection (“millions of homeowners,” according to Obama’s statement today).
Rather, would-be homeowners don’t have the income to support buying the houses listed for sale in their markets – which is another way of saying that, for average Americans homes are too expensive for them to afford (or wages are too uncertain for them to want to buy).
Also note that the new lower fee is primarily aimed at new home purchasers. In order for existing FHA borrowers to get the new lower premium they would have to refinance into a new loan, which means they’d have to incur new closing costs. The new closing costs would probably eat up most of the savings for a year or more. Presumably, this would discourage many existing borrowers from refinancing for the lower premium, which helps the FHA by allowing it to retain the old, higher premium on the borrowers who don’t refinance.
This highlights one of those fundamental conundrums in the housing market. Existing homeowners and home sellers want home prices to go up. Representatives of this group are great at lobbying and have convinced many people (including, by all appearances, this Administration) that rising home prices are a good thing for America. On the other hand, potential home buyers would rather not have home prices going up – because that makes buying much harder. For whatever reason, this group has about zero lobbying juice.
Making credit cheaper is a small tool the Administration has via this reduced premium, so they used it, I guess. But it’s an action that has consequences, including potentially running the risk of not having enough in the fund down the road if losses increase (not a risk I’m especially worried about – the Urban Institute did a fine analysis of why the lower fee is probably sufficient – but it’s a reasonable concern). In addition, it is somewhat disheartening that the Administration still seems to believe that the solution to consumer issues is to have the consumers take on more debt.
The most significant impact of this change is that it will make FHA loans more competitive with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac loans. You may recall that Mel Watt, the man in charge of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), which manages Fannie and Freddie, made a big announcement recently that the GSE’s would offer 97% loan-to-value (LTV) ratio loans to qualified borrowers. Previously, that type of LTV had been mostly the territory of the FHA.
So, effectively, this is just a form of catch-up for the FHA. The various government housing agencies are competing for market share among the same limited universe of qualifying borrowers by trying to get them to take on bigger mortgages than they would qualify for previously. For the average would-be buyer of the average house, the new, lower FHA fee would be worth about $900 a year, equivalent to about a $75 reduction in monthly payment.
It’s hard to believe that anyone in the Administration believes that this will do much for making homes more affordable for Americans. Perhaps it is a measure, however, of how seriously the Administration is taking the issue of housing affordability. There are big issues in housing and the economy that need to be taken seriously – like resolution of Fannie and Freddie, home prices that still remain beyond the reach of many Americans, stagnant wages, on-going foreclosure and mortgage servicing problems – but the Administration seems content to tinker around the edges and try to sell it as important reform.
Going to San Antonio for JMM
Hey, so this is cool. The Alternative Banking group just came out with a second Huffington Post essay, this time on how the bailout isn’t over, how it didn’t work, and how we’re already preparing for the next one. I think it came out really well. You can read it here.
Also, I’ll be giving a talk at the Joint Math Meetings again this year, this time as an invited MAA speaker. My title is Making the Case for Data Journalism, and you can see the abstract here. I guess I’m speaking on Monday afternoon at 4pm in a place called the Lila Cockrell Theatre.
So, a few things. If you’re a math nerd planning to be in San Antonio this weekend, please don’t leave Sunday, because there are still talks on Monday! Also, if you want to hang out, leave a comment or send me email and I’ll try to figure out a way to meet up with you. I honestly feel like I don’t know too many mathematicians anymore, so it would be nice to see or meet a friendly face. I’m getting to San Antonio Friday.
Creepy big data health models
There’s an excellent Wall Street Journal article by Joseph Walker, entitled Can a Smartphone Tell if You’re Depressed?, that describes a lot of creepy new big data projects going on now in healthcare, in partnership with hospitals and insurance companies.
Some of the models come in the form of apps, created and managed by private, third-party companies that try to predict depression in, for example, postpartum women. They don’t disclose what they are doing to many of the women, or the extent of what they’re doing, according to the article. They own the data they’ve collected at the end of the day and, presumably, can sell it to anyone interested in whether a woman is depressed. For example, future employers. To be clear, this data is generally not covered by HIPAA.
Perhaps the creepiest example is a voice analysis model:
Nurses employed by Aetna have used voice-analysis software since 2012 to detect signs of depression during calls with customers who receive short-term disability benefits because of injury or illness. The software looks for patterns in the pace and tone of voices that can predict “whether the person is engaged with activities like physical therapy or taking the right kinds of medications,” Michael Palmer, Aetna’s chief innovation and digital officer, says.
…
Patients aren’t informed that their voices are being analyzed, Tammy Arnold, an Aetna spokeswoman, says. The company tells patients the calls are being “recorded for quality,” she says.
“There is concern that with more detailed notification, a member may alter his or her responses or tone (intentionally or unintentionally) in an effort to influence the tool or just in anticipation of the tool,” Ms. Arnold said in an email.
In other words, in the name of “fear of gaming the model,” we are not disclosing the creepy methods we are using. Also, considering that the targets of this model are receiving disability benefits, I’m wondering if the real goal is to catch someone off their meds and disqualify them for further benefits or something along those lines. Since they don’t know they are being modeled, they will never know.
Conclusion: we need more regulation around big data in healthcare.
Big data and class
About a month ago there was an interesting article in the New York Times entitled Blowing Off Class? We Know. It discusses the “big data” movement in colleges around the country. For example, at Ball State, they track which students go to parties at the student center. Presumably to help them study for tests, or maybe to figure out which ones to hit up for alumni gifts later on.
There’s a lot to discuss in this article, but I want to focus today on one piece:
Big data has a lot of influential and moneyed advocates behind it, and I’ve asked some of them whether their enthusiasm might also be tinged with a little paternalism. After all, you don’t see elite institutions regularly tracking their students’ comings and goings this way. Big data advocates don’t dispute that, but they also note that elite institutions can ensure that their students succeed simply by being very selective in the first place.
The rest “get the students they get,” said William F. L. Moses, the managing director of education programs at the Kresge Foundation, which has given grants to the innovation alliance and to bolster data-analytics efforts at other colleges. “They have a moral obligation to help them succeed.”
This is a sentiment I’ve noticed a lot, although it’s not usually this obvious. Namely, the elite don’t need to be monitored, but the rabble does. The rich and powerful get to be quirky philosophers but the rest of the population need to be ranked and filed. And, by the way, we are spying on them for their own good.
In other words, never mind how big data creates and expands classism; classism already helps decide who is put into the realm of big data in the first place.
It feeds into the larger question of who is entitled to privacy. If you want to be strict about your definition of pricacy, you might say “nobody.” But if you recognize that privacy is a spectrum, where we have a variable amount of information being collected on people, and also a variable amount of control over people whose information we have collected, then upon study, you will conclude that privacy, or at least relative privacy, is for the rich and powerful. And it starts early.
Aunt Pythia’s advice
Didja miss Aunt Pythia? Because Auntie P sure as heck missed you all, over there in Utrecht, Holland, where all the food was fried and all the time was family time.
But! But! Aunt Pythia did not fritter away opportunities to do ground-breaking sex columnist research for your benefit. Oh no, absolutely not. In fact, Aunt Pythia has three – count them, three! – important things to share with you.
First, a book. It’s called How To Build A Girl, and everyone reading this should stop what they’re doing and go buy it and read it right now. Honestly, it’s one of the funniest coming of age stories I’ve ever read, and it’s about a girl! So exciting! Aunt Pythia lovers in particular will love it, because there’s lots of masturbation in it. Not enough, in my personal opinion, but a fabulous start. Hopefully the new trend in feminist autobiographies.
Second, this list of things that turn women on. Summary: almost everything except flaccid penises and Axe Body Spray. It’s not really a good list, but I get turned on by lists of things that turn people on, so I just threw it in anyway.
Third and finally, the most amazing technological invention ever, especially considering my addiction to Candy Crush! Namely, a combination kegel exercise machine, vibrator, and video game controller:
Ladies, it’s time to do your kegels. OK you can stop now. No, really.
Not really sure how this wasn’t invented as soon as people understood batteries, but whatevs, we’ve got it now.
OK, so are you ready for some amazing advice? Aunt Pythia is prepared to give legendary advice today, so buckle up tight. And 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,
So I’ve been reading a math blog online, and like every other math blog I read, it provides fun descriptions of cool math, targeted at math people, without needless symbols or jargon. This is awesome.
Anyway, the author of this blog posted a picture of herself in one of the posts; it turns out, the author was an African-American female. When I saw the picture, I was pretty surprised. After I realized I was surprised, I was immediately ashamed. Why should it be a surprise that an African-American female runs a math blog post? By being surprised, I felt that I was contributing to the implicit white-male bias in math. (By the way, I’m society’s image of “normal”: a cisgender hetero white male.)
But that’s the thing; I’m *not* prejudiced, and I’ve thought about this. Having attended Mathpath, HCSSiM (2011), and Canada/USA Mathcamp, I’m totally used to there being extremely competent and smart women and members of racial minorities in mathematics. (I’m writing a letter to one such person!) In my undergraduate experience, the women in my classes have been just as competent as men. I have thought about how I behave, and I don’t talk down to female professors or nonwhite students. Partly nature, but also partly because of my high school experience.
I understand that there’s a problem with a lack of mathematicians who are not white males, and I understand that I probably assumed that the author of this blog (from above) was a white male simply because statistically, there’s an extremely high probability that being a math person, they were a white male. In my head, this makes that feeling of surprise seem like a symptom of the problem, rather than a part of its cause.
But I still keep thinking to myself that maybe I’m secretly prejudiced and I’m contributing to the problem. I can’t really shake that feeling, despite knowing in my head what’s really the case, as described above. And I’m kinda scared about that. What should I do?
Anxious Math Junior
Dear AMJ,
Yes, you are prejudiced! We all are! I am too! It’s an important part of growing up, admitting such things. We are flawed, and we are contributing to the problems of our culture. Fact.
Now, as to what you should do, I’m thinking the first step is admitting that you’re prejudiced. You’ve come almost all the way on this one, but it’s clearly difficult for you to step firmly up to the plate. Go for it! And keep in mind that you’re joining a whole bunch of well-meaning people once you do.
Next, make sure that other people join you on that plate. Talk about this experience you’ve had, and how it made you acknowledge a part of you you’d rather not exist, but out of sheer decency and self-reflection you have to admit does. Get other young men and women in STEM to talk about all the fine and competent people in math and how great math – or indeed, any intellectual endeavor – could be if people were just taken as they are, people learning and arguing and exchanging ideas and making discoveries.
Finally, be on the lookout for behavior or practices that expose, continue, or expand stupid prejudices. Call people on such behavior. Be outspoken and cool. Send your young friends to HCSSiM and other places that you think are good places to learn how to be thoughtful about this stuff.
Good luck!
Aunt Pythia
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Dear Aunt Pythia.
A while back, you wrote about how you say and/or feel that you have crush on someone very often, and how this is something fun and playful for you. So maybe you can help me.
My problem is that I fall in love with practically every man that I like and that seems to like me back. For this reason, I have zero male friends. When I start to like a guy, notice that I get a long well with him, I always also have a reaction of weak knees/getting nervous around them etc., which at some point I also realize they notice, at least on a subliminal level, which leads to some kind of “flirting” behaviour (I put it in quotation marks because I am really not flirting on purpose, I just behave a bit awkwardly and sometimes guys behave back in the same kind of awkward way and so the situation feels charged. It is hard to describe but maybe you know what I mean).
I am in a long-term relationship that I enjoy and that I do not want to give up, so it is not that I am actually looking for a new love. I would however really like to have male friends because I would sometimes like to hear a male viewpoint regarding things I think about which is not my boyfriend’s or father’s.
But the only options I seem to have is either (i) avoid the guy and thus (again) contribute to the sad fact that I have zero male friends or (ii) get to know him better and risk some form of emotional chaos that scares me, like developing a more serious crush.
Of course, I would never choose option (i) if the guy is single and seems interested as I do not want to lead somebody on. But if the guy is also in a relationship, and has not expressed romantic interest in me, but just general interest (maybe in a friendship with me — but maybe also for something else, hard to say often), what do I do then? Is there a chance to develop a crush into a friendship? How do you do that?
It feels morally ambiguous to me to try to seek this guy’s company in those cases, like sitting next to him when I have the option, and so I don’t do it and the potential friendship cannot develop.
I feel like you might know how to deal with this problem, so that is why I am asking you, and unfortunately I cannot discuss this problem with my female friends (I have tried once or twice but nobody seems to have any idea what the hell I am talking about, since they claim to fall in love so rarely that it happens once or twice in their life.)
Of course, another idea would also be that maybe my boyfriend and I have a serious problem, otherwise those crushes wouldn’t happen to me, but I don’t think so.
Thoughts? How can I break this pattern?
Many thanks! (Sorry for the bad acronym and the long text! :))
Cannot Remain Unemotional — So Hide?
Dear CRUSH,
First thing’s first, great sign-off. I do NOT mind a bit of tortured punctuation in the name of appropriate acronyms! Nobody would ever accuse me of that!!
OK, now on to your fantastic question. I love it, and I honestly have an immediate crush on you for being so honest about it. I do have a bunch of advice for you as well.
First, listen to emo music. Seriously, there is sanctuary in emotional music. My favorite band for such purposes is Bright Eyes, Fevers and Mirrors (obv), as many of my closest friends will attest to. I listened to it non-stop for an entire year when I first discovered Bright Eyes, and this was in 2002, when I was pregnant with my second kid. So don’t think this stuff ever goes away, either, you will need coping mechanisms your entire life, so get started!
And if Bright Eyes doesn’t suit you – which would be weird – then go ahead and find something else. But definitely have a place to retreat to when things get super emotional.
OK, next piece of advice, which I think you’re anticipating: go ahead and have the crush. It won’t kill you. In fact it will (eventually) make you stronger, even if it takes a few months of pining and incredibly amounts of emo music to deal with.
Because here’s the thing, you’ve got to be brave. You’ve got to live your life fully, and engage in the things that attract you, and trust yourself not to lose it entirely. You’ve really got no other options. Otherwise you’re retreating away from the only thing you really have, which is this one life. Fuck that! Go ahead and take some risks, and sit next to that man or woman who might temporarily throw you for an emotional loop with their perfect wit and amazing smile.
And no, there’s nothing wrong with you. You’re just wired differently from other people (but not me, I’m just like you). You fall in love with everyone, all the time, and that means you experience more. It’s cool! We’re lucky! And eventually you will of course become friends with people who you originally crushed out on, and sometimes you won’t, but it’s worth a try.
Here’s a little secret that a very good friend told me: almost nobody gets sexier when you get to know them better. People are at their very sexiest when you know about 10 minutes about them, scattered over a few weeks or months. They put on the charm, they seem to listen and laugh at your jokes. It’s after 10 years of real conversations that you get to know people really well, well enough to see into their inner zits.
Which is to say, by getting to know these people more, by sitting next to that yummy guy when you have the chance, the problems you are dealing with will generally fade, not increase. And for those very rare few who actually become sexier when you get to know them better, well they deserve your crush so it’s all good.
Ha! I made it sounds pretty good, right? Remember, when you’re an emo, it’s all about enjoying the pain. I’m not called the Queen of Yearning for nothing.
As for your relationship, I don’t think you’re more likely to fuck it up by letting these crushes happen than by trying to suppress them. Suppression does weird things. I also don’t think you’re more likely to fuck up your relationship than people who only fall in love rarely. Personally I re-fall in love with my husband pretty much weekly, which might bore him but it’s absolutely awesome for me.
Good luck!!
Auntie P
p.s. May I suggest that you just go ahead and actively, deliberately flirt? First of all because it’s fun to flirt, and secondly because it might give you a sense of control of the situation, which you don’t currently have?
p.p.s. Also, here’s a suggestion for how you can do everything I’ve suggested all at once: you sit down next to that yummy guy and you say, “How’s about we flirt for a while, to acknowledge the sexual tension between us, and then after a memorably conversation, we lay down the foundations of a lasting friendship? I’ll start. You look amazing in that sweater.” I have found that being incredibly honest about my intentions sometimes helps. Also sometimes backfires, but whatevs! It’s a crazy mixed-up world!!
——
Dear Aunt Pythia,
Has anyone accused you of being a sex tourist for visiting Haiti? I’m just curious because as a single male there is practically nowhere that I could go by myself or with a buddy without accusations of sex tourism, especially Hispaniola. Nobody seems to care when women go to Haiti or Jamaica despite those places being well known for catering to ALL of a woman’s needs. This double standard reeks of cartel tactics. I personally believe that prostitution should be legal but regulated.
Globetrotter
Dear Globetrotter,
Nobody has. Most white women in Haiti are there for charity or on religious missions. I’m sure there is sex tourism there but it’s not on a huge scale.
Question for you: who accuses you of being a sex tourist? How does that come up?
Also, in terms of legalized prostitution, I don’t agree. I like that Dutch prostitutes have a union, but in places like Haiti I think legalized prostitution is one step away from paying people for their body parts. It’s not really a “chosen profession” if you are forced by dire need to do it. My two cents.
Aunt Pythia
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Dear AP,
Should women compete in men’s sports? I’m thinking of games that are highly skill and determination driven (so there doesn’t seem an inherent bias for taller or stronger players) but where top female players are at a lower standard to the top male players.
Is it better or worse for women to have segregated leagues and competitions in these sports?
Always Separate but Equal?
Dear ASbE,
What sports are we talking about exactly? Most sports I know about have huge biases for strength. Even darts, which I watched copious amounts of in Utrecht (2014 World Darts Championship! Fuck yeah Michael van Gerwen!!), seems to favor huge men, maybe not for their strength per se but for their balance and inertia. Or maybe it’s all that time spent in pubs drinking beer.
I also watched an amazing round of the Dutch version of WipeOut, which was brilliantly combined with a blind date TV show, and I was amazed by how much easier it seems to be to jump from one floating disc to another if you’re a tall Dutch man than if you’re a tall Dutch woman. The winning couple was a charming pair named “Hippy” and “Hoppy”. They won because Hippy was willing to use his body as a prop to help out his partner. All the other couples had the men springing ahead and leaving their female partners behind. Let that be a lesson to all you non-hippies out there. Be more of a Hippy.
Not sure I’m answering your question, ASbE, but let me throw in one more unrelated opinion because I’m on a roll. Namely, American football is quickly becoming a sport to which poor minority men sacrifice their bodies. Richer and more educated parents don’t let their kids play the sport, and as we now know it’s incredibly traumatic for the players. We might as well just admit it’s a modern day Gladiator Contest, used to maintain a culture of violence for a people convinced they must be warriors, or at least that others should be. Instead of letting women play football, let’s just stop anyone at all from playing it, at least as it is currently being played.
Sincerely,
Aunt Pythia
——
Well, you’ve wasted yet another Saturday morning with Aunt Pythia! I hope you’re satisfied! If you could, 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:
Male nerd privilege
I recently read this essay by Laurie Penny (hat tip Jordan Ellenberg) about male nerd privilege. Her essay stemmed from comment 171 of Scott Aaronson’s blogpost about whether MIT professor Walter Lewin, who was found to be harassing women, should also have had his OpenCourseWare physics course taken down. Aaronson says no.
Personally, I think it should, because if I’m a woman who was harassed by that dude, I don’t want to see physics represented by my harasser up on MIT’s website; it would not make me feel welcome to the MIT community. Physics is a social community activity, after all, just like mathematics, and it is important to feel safe doing physics in that community. Plus the courses will be available on YouTube and other places, it’s not like the physics represented in the course has been lost to humanity.
Anyhoo, I did really want to talk about white male nerd privilege. Penny makes a bunch of good points in her essay, but I think she misses a big opportunity as well.
Quick summary. Aaronson talks about how he spent his youth and formative years terrified, since he was a shy nerd boy. Penny talks about how she did too, but then on top of it had to deal with structural sexism. Good point, and entirely true in my experience. Her best line:
At the same time, I want you to understand that that very real suffering does not cancel out male privilege, or make it somehow alright. Privilege doesn’t mean you don’t suffer, which, I know, totally blows.
So, I had two responses to her piece.
First was, she was complaining about her childhood, but she wasn’t even fat! I mean, GAWD. She was complaining about being too skinny, of all things. Plus it’s not clear whether or not she came from an abusive home. So I’ve got like, at least two complaints up on her. She thinks she’s had it bad?!
My point being, we can’t actually win when we count up all the ways we were miserable. Because the truth is, most people were actually miserable in their childhood, or soon after it, or at some time. And by comparing that stuff we just get stuck in a cycle of feeling competitively sorry for ourselves and pointing fingers. We need to sympathize, not only with our former selves, but with other people.
And although she does end the essay with the idea that we have to transcend all of our personal bruises and wrongs, and call each other human, and forget our resentments, it doesn’t seem like she’s giving us a path towards that.
Because, and here’s my second point, she doesn’t do the big thing of naming all of her privileges. Like, that nerds get good jobs. And that white people get loads of resources and attention and benefit of the doubt just for being white. At the end of the day, we are privileged to be sitting around talking about privilege. We are not worried about dying of hunger or exposure.
When Aaronson complained that naming male privilege is shaming, I’m prone to agree, at least if it’s done like this. What I’d propose is to figure out a way to talk about these structural problems in an aspirational way. How can we help make things fairer? How can we move this problem to the next level? Scott, you’re wicked smart, want to be on a taskforce with me?
Would it help if we gave it another name? Basic human rights, perhaps? Because that’s what we’re talking about, at the end of the day. The right to be free, to not get shot by the police, the right to hold a good job and care for your family, stuff like that.
Of course, there are plenty of people who are unwilling to move to the next level because they don’t acknowledge the structural racism, sexism, and other stuff at all. They don’t see the current situation as problematic. But on the other hand, there are loads of people who do, and Aaronson is clearly one of them.
As for problems for women in STEM, we’ve already studied this and we all know that both men and women are sexist, so it’s obviously not a blame game here. Instead, it’s a real cultural conundrum which we would like to approach thoughtfully and we’d like to make progress on as a team.
Vacation in Utrecht
Please ignore this post if you are at all squeamish or otherwise appropriate. I fully intend to offend people like you.
OK, so here’s the thing about family vacations, at least for me. They make you lose your genitals.
Seriously, I’ve misplaced my vagina, and for the life of me I can’t find it, or even remember when I last had it. I can barely remember anything at all about it.
This has happened to me before, on numerous occasions. It’s nothing new. It happened a couple of days after I landed in Orlando with the family for spring break a few years ago, and it happened within seconds of entering Great Wolf Lodge about a year ago.
Have you been there? It’s an indoor waterpark, and something about the chlorinated air and hundreds of dripping wet and screaming children made me instantaneously lose contact with my genitals. I know I’m not the only one, I polled the other grownups there and I got serious resonance with this sentiment.
In fact, I walked around for a day and a half (in order to get the most out of my one expensive overnight room) asking people if they’d seen my vagina anywhere. The reactions were mixed and were not always good. In fact once or twice the stares I got were so weird and intense that I was forced to blurt out, “Oh, here it is! In my purse! Just where I left it.” True story.
Conclusion: family vacations are the ultimate birth control.
Honestly, there should be a law that anyone who is thinking of getting pregnant should spend a couple of days at Great Wolf Lodge. If they are still horny after that experience then they deserve whatever they get.
Why, oh why, did we decide to have so many kids? And how can it be so incredibly expensive to pay for them to complain about every moment of the day that doesn’t contain wifi?
Here’s another reason there’s no physical joy in family vacations. The food. The disgusting food you end up eating when with your entire family prevents you from feeling sexy. Never mind sexy, it makes you borderline suicidal.
Yesterday we had pannekoeken for lunch, poffertjes as a snack, and sausage wall frikandels, loompjes, and french fries for dinner. Just in case you are wondering if anything I just listed isn’t fried, the answer is no.
Seriously, it was hugely disgusting, although temporarily delicious. I now know exactly why people declare diets for New Years, it’s because of the food situation in the week beforehand. It’s not that you want to lose weight, it’s that you never want to eat again.
And yes, I know that you can technically eat better food here in Utrecht, but not, as it turns out, if you’re traveling with a 6-year-old. In that case, you have a tiny little hunger striker on your hands, and the longer the strike goes on, the more crying and whining you’ve got, which, since you’re sharing a small hotel room, is a huge hassle. It’s a cost benefit analysis, and the costs always outweigh the benefits. In other words, you decide to forgo actual food for one more day and give in to warmed up waffles with smeared nutella. Breakfast this morning, thankyouverymuch. Kill me now.
Dear readers, please do not judge me. Or at least, if you judge me, then be compassionate. Or at least, if you’re not feeling compassionate, keep an eye out for my vagina, I know it’s around here somewhere.
Mortgage tax deductions and gentrification
Yesterday we had a tax expert come talk to us at the Alternative Banking group. We mostly focused on the mortgage tax deduction, whereby people don’t have to pay taxes on their mortgage. It’s the single biggest tax deduction in America for individuals.
At first blush, this doesn’t seem all that interesting, even if it’s strange. Whether people are benefitting directly from this, or through their rent being lower because their landlord benefits, it’s a fact of life for Americans. Whoopdedoo.
Generally speaking other countries don’t have a mortgage tax deduction, so we can judge whether it leads to overall more homeownership, which was presumably what it was intended for, and the data seems to suggest the answer there is no.
We can also imagine removing the mortgage tax deduction, and we quickly realize that such a move would seriously impair lots of people’s financial planning, so we’d have to do it very slowly if at all.
But before we imagine removing it, is it even a problem?
Well, yes, actually. Let’s think about it a little bit more, and for the sake of this discussion we will model the tax system very simply as progressive: the more income you collect yearly, the more taxes you pay. Also, there is a $1.1 million (or so) cap on the mortgage tax deduction, so it doesn’t apply to uber wealthy borrowers with huge houses. But for the rest of us it does apply.
OK now let’s think a little harder about what happens in the housing market when the government offers a tax deduction. Namely, the prices go up to compensate. It’s kind of like a rebate: this house is $100K with no deduction, but with a $20K deduction I can charge $120K for it.
But it’s a little more complicated than that, since people’s different income levels correspond to different deductions. So a lower middle class neighborhood’s houses will be inflated by less than an upper middle class neighborhood’s houses.
At first blush, this seems ok too: so richer people’s houses are inflated slightly more. It means it’s slightly harder for them to get in on the home ownership game, but it also means that, come time to sell, their house is worth more. For them, a $400K house is inflated not by 20% but by 35%, or whatever their tax bracket is.
So far so good? Now let’s add one more layer of complexity, namely that, actually, neighborhoods are not statically “upper middle class” or “lower middle class.” As a group neighborhoods, and their associated classes, represent a dynamical system, where certain kinds of neighborhoods expand or contract. Colloquially we refer to this as gentrification or going to hell, depending on which direction it is. Let’s explore the effect of the mortgage tax deduction on how that dynamical system operates.
Imagine a house which is exactly on the border between a middle class neighborhood and an upper-middle class neighborhood. If we imagine that it’s a middle class home, the price of it has only been inflated by a middle-class income tax bracket, so 20% for the sake of argument. But if we instead imagine it is in the upper-middle class neighborhood, it should really be inflated by 35%.
In other words, it’s under-priced from the perspective of the richer neighborhood. They will have an easier time affording it. The overall effect is that it is easier for someone from the richer neighborhood to snatch up that house, thereby extending their neighborhood a bit. Gentrification modeled.
Put it another way, the same house at the same price is more expensive for a poorer person because the mortgage tax deduction doesn’t affect everyone equally.
Another related point: if I’m a home builder, I will want to build homes with a maximal mark-up, a maximal inflation level. That will be for the richest people who haven’t actually exceeded the $1.1 million cap.
Conclusion: the mortgage tax deduction has an overall negative effect, encouraging gentrification, unfair competition, and too many homes for the wealthy. We should phase it out slowly, and also slowly lower the cap. At the very very least we should not let the cap rise, which will mean it effectively goes down over time as inflation does its thing.
If this has been tested or observed with data, please send me references.
Aunt Pythia’s advice
Here’s the thing, peoples. I love you – I really do, each and every one of you, except the douchey trolls – but, holy crap, peoples!
Where are the sex questions?!
Have I been unclear? Have I been beating around the sex question bush?
I think not. I think I have been more than forthright in my request demand. And, since none – I repeat, zero – of the questions this week are in the least sex-related, I’m going to have to insert something kind of awesome myself, namely this picture of a bouncey house snowman’s vagina. Remember, you made me do it:
They originally planned a cylindrical tent attachment entrance for the bouncy house, but they thought twice.
Question: is that what you needed to see so early on Saturday morning, before you’d even put on clothes (I’m picturing you all naked or very slightly pajama’d) and before you’ve even finished your morning coffee (and I’m also picturing you all kind of sleepy)?
I think not! So let’s all do better next time, and we can avoid this awkwardness in the future. What that means in concrete terms is a request to:
ask Aunt Pythia your sex 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 Aunt Pythia,
I love your blog and Slate Money Podcast and can think of few people better to share my early life crisis with.
I recently quit my consulting job in San Francisco to move back in with my parents for a year at 29 years young (how sexy is that) and take a few pre-requisite math classes while I study for the GRE in preparation for what I had planned to be admission into a dual MBA/MPP program. Except, something unexpected has happened, I’m finding myself enjoying mathematics for the first time in my life and it has me interested in pursuing something more quantitative than most MBA/MPP programs offer.
I’ve never been a math superstar, but I earned A’s and B’s at a UC in the math courses I was forced to take as a liberal arts major. I have a strong interest in learning how to solve problems and make sense of the world around me. And I’m beginning to see that math, as opposed to economics or finance, may be the best tool for doing so.
I spoke with a professor at the junior college I’m taking these math courses at and she suggested looking into an Applied Math program that would let me get exposure to everything from math, statistics, physics, computer science, and economics to different forms of engineering and finance. Her other suggestion was to remain enrolled at the junior college, complete their calculus sequence, real analysis/linear algebra, and other math electives that would allow me to apply to both undergraduate and graduate level math programs a year or so from now with a few more math classes on my transcript.
I took a look at a few applied math program curriculums and the courses look a lot more interesting than the marketing, strategy, accounting and finance I’d be stuck in at an MBA program.
But there’s a problem… being fascinated and interested by a math curriculum is great, working to gain the the skills necessary to handle those fascinating courses is the hard part.
Which leads me to my question (sorry for the wait): Do you know of any liberal arts undergraduates that have transformed themselves into successful Math or STEM related graduate students? Are their programs for students in my situation? Is this even a possibility? I’m not expecting to be the model candidate for MIT’s program but is their a path to an applied math program at a decent public/private school for someone in my position? Are there other programs outside of Applied Math that might better suit my math curiosity? Any books I could pick up at the library to help me figure out what may best interest me mathematically?
Keep up the good work and thank you for your math help!
Boomerang
Hi Boomerang,
I liked your letter, and I decided to print it, but to be honest I’m not convinced I know how to answer your question. I’ll just say a bunch of things that I hope will be helpful, and then I’ll sign off with some positive last words. Maybe my dear Aunt Pythia readers will have more concrete suggestions! Here goes:
First of all, I’m not familiar with people who have done what you’re trying to do after finishing college. I have met people who’ve gone back to finish a 4-year college program, got interested in math in the last year, and then furiously took a bunch of math classes. I even know someone who went to grad school in math after that. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be done, just that it’s on the late side.
I also think the advice you’ve already received is good. Basically, take the fuck out of the available math classes and learn some good shit. Find out what your taste is and be an insatiable consumer of math. It’s all out there, waiting to be gobbled up by you. And to be honest, it’s never been a better time to learn math, the resources, online and otherwise, are phenomenal.
So I want to encourage your math habit, obviously, but at the same time, I do want to stress that any program in which you’re expected to learn and understand how to solve problems will or at least should involve math. Math is a field in its own right, of course, which I hope you find your way into if that’s your thing, but it’s also the major heavy lifting tool for all other fields. That’s just to say that, being a math nerd in an MBA program is still a good and useful thing, especially if you’re not an MBA asshole.
Good luck!
Aunt Pythia
——
Dear Aunt Pythia,
Is it possible to get over a crush and maintain a platonic relationship?
At the end of the last school year, I developed a crush on a substitute teacher at the school where I’ve taught for 7 years. I’ve been married and monogamous for 23 years, and this is the strongest crush I’ve had in that time – lascivious thoughts and everything (thoughts only). Over the summer, I did some soul searching, and decided that even if I did connect with my crush (it was by no means clear that I would or could), it would be an incredible act of selfishness on my part and wouldn’t get me much in the long run. In fact, it was clear that I’d lose a lot that I value greatly: my marriage, the respect of my coworkers, my kids, my wider family, etc.
Since then, my crush has been hired to the regular staff at my school, and we have become close friends. I have decided that I am not available romantically, and have rededicated myself to my marriage. I am closer to my wife than we have been in a long time (I had been “phoning it in” for a long time – I am now more present in our marriage).
My new friend has confided in me that she and her children were abused in her previous marriage. I intend to be a “safe male” in her life – someone available to listen and support her while she gets her life back together, but I will not seek a romantic relationship.
Is this even possible? Likely?
A Male In Denial Or Obviously Making Everything Difficult?
Dear AMIDOOMED,
Gosh, I love your sign-off, and I love you. You just seem like a wonderful man.
Here’s the thing, some people are amazing and awesome and just plain old crush-worthy. And this is a good thing. An amazing thing, in fact, and handy. Think of adult crushes as a way for your body to force you to make friends with people when you’re busy.
You see, when you’re young, you just have this boatload of time to spend with people, and do ridiculous things like try to hide large objects in your stomach skin (I’m looking at you, Matt Cook), which overall serves as the bonding activity for life-long friendships. It’s amazing and wonderful, and when you finish college you feel like a like-long friendship pro.
You will never have as many friends again, however. Because soon after college ends, the harsh reality of adulthood sets in, and you often gain a spouse if you’re luck and into that, a couple of kids if you’re interested in that kind of thing, and a pile of responsibilities and time-consuming duties that keep you from spending ridiculous amounts of idle time bonding with random people. In other words, you’re at risk of never making another friend again.
Enter the adult crush. It’s a quick-bonding mechanism. Think of it as the super glue of post-college friendship. It can happen for men or women, to men or women, it doesn’t have to be romantic, and it supplies you with enough interest in the other person to care about maintaining a lasting and meaningful relationship. A rare event in these busy times!
So, to answer your question, no, you will never get over your crush, at least not if you’re lucky, and I think you’re amazing and awesome, and so does your family, and so does your new friend, and honestly she needs a good friend so good on you, and it’s all good.
And if I seem like I am enjoying your conflicted agony, then let me suggest it’s actually a huge improvement over not having it. So do your best to enjoy it. And don’t forget to have amazing fantasies.
Auntie P
——
Hi Auntie P
Two quick questions for you
1. Should I use dropbox?
2. How should I de-clutter my computer?
A bit of context, maybe. My private computers are full of stuff. We have 2-3 laptops and 4-5 back up disk which are all full of stuff.
Of course, it’s my own fault. Most of it is just old back up of my computer (so there is a lot of overlap), but I don’t (feel like I) keep a lot of stuff. Mostly music and pictures of my kids. Only I tend to listen to a lot of music and we have a lot of kids (so 2 private laptops and one iPad is actually not all that much). And as much as I like to de-clutter and get rid of stuff – on my computer or otherwise – I do wanna keep those. And I can do it too: my work computer is always completely empty. Since my private computers are so old, they don’t function well with that much stuff. I’d like to put my stuff on dropbox but then I’m not sure, you know with all the data stuff and all. More specifically:
1. I don’t know if I should really share my data – is there really a risk with my kids pictures and my music?
2. Is there a chance that dropbox actually gets hacked or collapses and my data disappears?
And of course, being a well structured efficiency nerd, (have you seen xkcd #1445? that’s me), and you being you, this brings up another topic: how should I go about organizing my stuff on my computer? I really like structured approaches to de-cluttering my life (thank you Gretchen Rubin) as long as they are practical and work. And you’re quite practical and you work. So I thought I might ask you.
Looking Forward to Saturday
Dear LFtS,
This is a non-problem. Data gets cheaper all the time and you never need to organize anything.
I’m sure there’s an app that collects all your music and picture files and makes scrapbooks for you. So don’t think about that for a moment longer. In terms of storage, if you’re worried about being hacked, which I wouldn’t be but don’t listen to me, then buy a couple of modern large hard disks and copy everything onto them. I say “a couple” because you should have more than one copy in case one breaks. Then after you have done that, throw away the 5 backup disks and 3 laptops you’re keeping around as inefficient storage devices.
Also, you can probably stop storing music altogether, unless you like Unbunny like I do, which is hard to stream. No, I take it back, it’s easy to find Unbunny everywhere. Phew.
Aunt Pythia
p.s. What’s happening Saturday? I hope you don’t mean my crappy answer to your question.
——
Aunt Pythia,
I’m a Junior studying Math, but I don’t know what I’m doing. I’ve told myself I like Math since Junior year of high school when I learned Calculus. It was like a lightbulb went off in my head. I thought, “finally, this is what its uses are!” And I found it beautiful. So beautiful I was ahead of the class for the last half of it. I couldn’t wait to go back home and teach myself more of it. That passion has gone away.
I tell myself I like Math. It’s why I majored in it. But I don’t like working most of the time. There are times when I do enjoy dedicating hours to a class, like when I prove the propositions left as exercises in lecture. It’s thrilling. But most of the time, it’s hard for me to get out of bed and go to class, or sit down and do the work.
I feel like I’ve squandered two and half years on a Math degree my school paid for, and my parents, potential employers, and myself won’t value because I’m barely able to put my GPA on my resume. As a Hispanic, I’m acutely aware of how little of us are STEM majors. If I walk into a class, I will be the only URM there. And because I’m lucky enough to have grown up in an upper middle class neighborhood, I feel like I’m doing a disservice to my people. For myself, it’s more frustrating because I have an interest in Data Science, but from what I’ve gathered, graduate school probably isn’t for me.
I don’t know why I feel like this. Is it because I’m lazy? Is it because I’m privileged and have never been challenged? Is Math not for me? Am I depressed? I guess the big question is, how should I figure these questions out?
Anxious Math Junior
Dear Anxious,
I’m feeling your pain. You feel stuck. It’s not uncommon and you shouldn’t beat yourself up about it. Plus, it sounds like you are carrying extra weight on your shoulders.
So, the first step, in my opinion, is to get rid of that extra weight. You are not living The Life Of The Upper Middle Class Latino. You are living your own, personal, never-to-be-repeated life, and you gotta figure out how you want to live it. And you’re still a junior and you can switch majors and still graduate, so don’t worry that things are too late.
Let me suggest you go to a counselor at your school and tell them you want to discuss changing majors. There are, for example, personality tests that people sometimes find very helpful in helping them figure out what to do with their lives. Two of my close family members have been aided by such tests. Sometimes they clarify something you already kind of know, other times they really point you to something you didn’t even know was an option. In any case, not a waste of time, and I encourage you to look into them.
And by the way, it’s a great sign that you once were passionate about calculus. You have the talent and ability to master a difficult subject when the moment is right. The goal is to figure out how to create those moments and see where they will take you.
Good luck!
Aunt Pythia
——
Well, you’ve wasted yet another Saturday morning with Aunt Pythia! I hope you’re satisfied! If you could, 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:
Wage Gaps Don’t Magically Get Smaller Because Big Data
Today, just a rant. Sorry. I mean, I’m not a perfect person either, and of course that’s glaringly obvious, but this fluff piece from Wired, written by Pam Wikham of Raytheon, is just aggravating.
The title is Big Data, Smaller Wage Gap? and, you know, it almost gives us the impression that she has a plan to close the wage gap using big data, or alternatively an argument that the wage gap will automatically close with the advent of big data techniques. It turns out to be the former, but not really.
After complaining about the wage gap for women in general, and after we get to know how much she loves her young niece, here’s the heart of the plan (emphasis mine, on the actual plan parts of the plan):
Analytics and microtargeting aren’t just for retailers and politicians — they can help us grow the ranks of executive women and close the gender wage gap. Employers analyze who clicked on internal job postings, and we can pursue qualified women who looked but never applied. We can go beyond analyzing the salary and rank histories of women who have left our companies. We can use big data analytics to tell us what exit interviews don’t.
Facebook posts, Twitter feeds and LinkedIn groups provide a trove of valuable intel from ex-employees. What they write is blunt, candid and useful. All the data is there for the taking — we just have to collect it and figure out what it means. We can delve deep into whether we’re promoting the best people, whether we’re doing enough to keep our ranks diverse, whether potential female leaders are being left behind and, importantly, why.
That’s about it, after that she goes back to her niece.
Here’s the thing, I’m not saying it’s not an important topic, but that plan doesn’t seem worthy of the title of the piece. It’s super vague and fluffy and meaningless. I guess, if I had to give it meaning, it would be that she’s proposing to understand internal corporate sexism using data, rather than assuming “data is objective” and that all models will make things better. And that’s one tiny step, but it’s not much. It’s really not enough.
Here’s an idea, and it kind of uses big data, or at least small data, so we might be able to sell it. Ask people in your corporate structure what the actual characteristics are of people they promote, and how they are measured, or if they are measured, and look at the data to see if what they say is consistent with what they do, and whether those characteristics are inherently sexist. It’s a very specific plan and no fancy mathematical techniques are necessary, but we don’t have to tell anyone that.
What combats sexism is a clarification and transparent description of job requirements and a willingness to follow through. Look at blind orchestra auditions for a success story there. By contrast, my experience with the corporate world is that, when hiring or promoting, they often list a long series of unmeasurable but critical properties like “good cultural fit” and “leadership qualities” that, for whatever reason, more men are rated high on than women.
A Call For Justice #OccupyCitibank
In the beautiful words of Cleveland Browns wide receiver Andrew Hawkins:
I was taught that justice is a right that every American should have. Also justice should be the goal of every American. I think that’s what makes this country. To me, justice means the innocent should be found innocent. It means that those who do wrong should get their due punishment. Ultimately, it means fair treatment. So a call for justice shouldn’t offend or disrespect anybody. A call for justice shouldn’t warrant an apology.
…
Those who support me, I appreciate your support. But at the same time, support the causes and the people and the injustices that you feel strongly about. Stand up for them. Speak up for them. No matter what it is because that’s what America’s about and that’s what this country was founded on.
I think I will take him up on that suggestion, this morning at Citigroup Headquarters, 399 Park Avenue (near 54th Street) at 10:30am, in part inspired by Liz Warren’s speech from last week. See you there!
What would a data-driven Congress look like?
Recently I’ve seen two very different versions of what a more data-driven Congress would look like, both emerging from the recent cruddy Cromnibus bill mess.
First, there’s this Bloomberg article, written by the editors, about using data to produce evidence on whether a given policy is working or not. Given what I know about how data is produced, and how definitions of success are politically manipulated, I don’t have much hope for this idea.
Second, there was a reader’s comments on this New York Times article, also about the Cromnibus bill. Namely, the reader was calling on the New York Times to not only explore a few facts about what was contained in the bill, but lay it out with more numbers and more consistency. I think this is a great idea. What if, when Congress gave us a shitty bill, we could see stuff like:
- how much money is allocated to each thing, both raw dollars and as a percentage of the whole bill,
- who put it in the omnibus bill,
- the history of that proposed spending, and the history of voting,
- which lobbyists were pushing it, and who gets paid by them, and ideally
- all of this would be in an easy-to-use interactive.
That’s the kind of data that I’d love to see. Data journalism is an emerging field, and we might not be there yet, but it’s something to strive for.
Fairness, accountability, and transparency in big data models
As I wrote about already, last Friday I attended a one day workshop in Montreal called FATML: Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency in Machine Learning. It was part of the NIPS conference for computer science, and there were tons of nerds there, and I mean tons. I wanted to give a report on the day, as well as some observations.
First of all, I am super excited that this workshop happened at all. When I left my job at Intent Media in 2011 with the intention of studying these questions and eventually writing a book about them, they were, as far as I know, on nobody’s else’s radar. Now, thanks to the organizers Solon and Moritz, there are communities of people, coming from law, computer science, and policy circles, coming together to exchange ideas and strategies to tackle the problems. This is what progress feels like!
OK, so on to what the day contained and my copious comments.
Hannah Wallach
Sadly, I missed the first two talks, and an introduction to the day, because of two airplane cancellations (boo American Airlines!). I arrived in the middle of Hannah Wallach’s talk, the abstract of which is located here. Her talk was interesting, and I liked her idea of having social scientists partnered with data scientists and machine learning specialists, but I do want to mention that, although there’s a remarkable history of social scientists working within tech companies – say at Bell Labs and Microsoft and such – we don’t see that in finance at all, nor does it seem poised to happen. So in other words, we certainly can’t count on social scientists to be on hand when important mathematical models are getting ready for production.
Also, I liked Hannah’s three categories of models: predictive, explanatory, and exploratory. Even though I don’t necessarily think that a given model will fall neatly into one category or the other, they still give you a way to think about what we do when we make models. As an example, we think of recommendation models as ultimately predictive, but they are (often) predicated on the ability to understand people’s desires as made up of distinct and consistent dimensions of personality (like when we use PCA or something equivalent). In this sense we are also exploring how to model human desire and consistency. For that matter I guess you could say any model is at its heart an exploration into whether the underlying toy model makes any sense, but that question is dramatically less interesting when you’re using linear regression.
Anupam Datta and Michael Tschantz
Next up Michael Tschantz reported on work with Anupam Datta that they’ve done on Google profiles and Google ads. The started with google’s privacy policy, which I can’t find but which claims you won’t receive ads based on things like your health problems. Starting with a bunch of browsers with no cookies, and thinking of each of them as fake users, they did experiments to see what actually happened both to the ads for those fake users and to the google ad profiles for each of those fake users. They found that, at least sometimes, they did get the “wrong” kind of ad, although whether Google can be blamed or whether the advertiser had broken Google’s rules isn’t clear. Also, they found that fake “women” and “men” (who did not differ by any other variable, including their searches) were offered drastically different ads related to job searches, with men being offered way more ads to get $200K+ jobs, although these were basically coaching sessions for getting good jobs, so again the advertisers could have decided that men are more willing to pay for such coaching.
An issue I enjoyed talking about was brought up in this talk, namely the question of whether such a finding is entirely evanescent or whether we can call it “real.” Since google constantly updates its algorithm, and since ad budgets are coming and going, even the same experiment performed an hour later might have different results. In what sense can we then call any such experiment statistically significant or even persuasive? Also, IRL we don’t have clean browsers, so what happens when we have dirty browsers and we’re logged into gmail and Facebook? By then there are so many variables it’s hard to say what leads to what, but should that make us stop trying?
From my perspective, I’d like to see more research into questions like, of the top 100 advertisers on Google, who saw the majority of the ads? What was the economic, racial, and educational makeup of those users? A similar but different (because of the auction) question would be to reverse-engineer the advertisers’ Google ad targeting methodologies.
Finally, the speakers mentioned a failure on Google’s part of transparency. In your advertising profile, for example, you cannot see (and therefore cannot change) your marriage status, but advertisers can target you based on that variable.
Sorelle Friedler, Carlos Scheidegger, and Suresh Venkatasubramanian
Next up we had Sorelle talk to us about her work with two guys with enormous names. They think about how to make stuff fair, the heart of the question of this workshop.
First, if we included race in, a resume sorting model, we’d probably see negative impact because of historical racism. Even if we removed race but included other attributes correlated with race (say zip code) this effect would remain. And it’s hard to know exactly when we’ve removed the relevant attributes, but one thing these guys did was define that precisely.
Second, say now you have some idea of the categories that are given unfair treatment, what can you do? One thing suggested by Sorelle et al is to first rank people in each category – to assign each person a percentile in their given category – and then to use the “forgetful function” and only consider that percentile. So, if we decided at a math department that we want 40% women graduate students, to achieve this goal with this method we’d independently rank the men and women, and we’d offer enough spots to top women to get our quota and separately we’d offer enough spots to top men to get our quota. Note that, although it comes from a pretty fancy setting, this is essentially affirmative action. That’s not, in my opinion, an argument against it. It’s in fact yet another argument for it: if we know women are systemically undervalued, we have to fight against it somehow, and this seems like the best and simplest approach.
Ed Felten and Josh Kroll
After lunch Ed Felton and Josh Kroll jointly described their work on making algorithms accountable. Basically they suggested a trustworthy and encrypted system of paper trails that would support a given algorithm (doesn’t really matter which) and create verifiable proofs that the algorithm was used faithfully and fairly in a given situation. Of course, we’d really only consider an algorithm to be used “fairly” if the algorithm itself is fair, but putting that aside, this addressed the question of whether the same algorithm was used for everyone, and things like that. In lawyer speak, this is called “procedural fairness.”
So for example, if we thought we could, we might want to turn the algorithm for punishment for drug use through this system, and we might find that the rules are applied differently to different people. This algorithm would catch that kind of problem, at least ideally.
David Robinson and Harlan Yu
Next up we talked to David Robinson and Harlan Yu about their work in Washington D.C. with policy makers and civil rights groups around machine learning and fairness. These two have been active with civil rights group and were an important part of both the Podesta Report, which I blogged about here, and also in drafting the Civil Rights Principles of Big Data.
The question of what policy makers understand and how to communicate with them came up several times in this discussion. We decided that, to combat cherry-picked examples we see in Congressional Subcommittee meetings, we need to have cherry-picked examples of our own to illustrate what can go wrong. That sounds bad, but put it another way: people respond to stories, especially to stories with innocent victims that have been wronged. So we are on the look-out.
Closing panel with Rayid Ghani and Foster Provost
I was on the closing panel with Rayid Ghani and Foster Provost, and we each had a few minutes to speak and then there were lots of questions and fun arguments. To be honest, since I was so in the moment during this panel, and also because I was jonesing for a beer, I can’t remember everything that happened.
As I remember, Foster talked about an algorithm he had created that does its best to “explain” the decisions of a complicated black box algorithm. So in real life our algorithms are really huge and messy and uninterpretable, but this algorithm does its part to add interpretability to the outcomes of that huge black box. The example he gave was to understand why a given person’s Facebook “likes” made a black box algorithm predict they were gay: by displaying, in order of importance, which likes added the most predictive power to the algorithm.
[Aside, can anyone explain to me what happens when such an algorithm comes across a person with very few likes? I’ve never understood this very well. I don’t know about you, but I have never “liked” anything on Facebook except my friends’ posts.]
Rayid talked about his work trying to develop a system for teachers to understand which students were at risk of dropping out, and for that system to be fair, and he discussed the extent to which that system could or should be transparent.
Oh yeah, and that reminds me that, after describing my book, we had a pretty great argument about whether credit scoring models should be open source, and what that would mean, and what feedback loops that would engender, and who would benefit.
Altogether a great day, and a fantastic discussion. Thanks again to Solon and Moritz for their work in organizing it.
Liz Warren nails it
I don’t have enough time for a full post today, but if you haven’t already, please watch Liz Warren’s speech from last Friday. She lays out the facts about Citigroup in an uncomplicated way. Surprising and refreshing coming from a politician.
Aunt Pythia’s advice
Aunt Pythia has something in the works for you dear people, but it’s not quite ready yet, and you’ll have to wait another week. Rest assured, it will be worth it. And apologies to mathbabe.org subscribers who received an errant test post this week.
In the meantime, Aunt Pythia is going to write a quick column today from a Montreal hotel room after an amazing workshop yesterday which she will comment on later in the week.
So quick, get some tea and some flannel-lined flannel, because damn it’s wintery outside, all snowy and shit. Aunt Pythia’s about to spew her usual unreasonable nonsense!
From earlier this week in Montreal.
LET’S DO THIS PEOPLES!!! And please, even if you’ve got nothing interesting to say for yourself, feel free to make something up or get inspired by Google auto complete and then go ahead and:
ask Aunt Pythia your 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,
This may not really be an “Aunt Pythia” question. But could either you or Mathbabe comment on this article on sexism in academic science?
I can imagine many ways they could be misrepresenting the statistics, but I don’t know which.
No Bias, Really?
Dear No Bias,
I was also struck by the inflammatory tone and questionable conclusions of this article. But you know, controversy sells.
So, here are a couple of lines I’ll pull out. First:
Our country desperately needs more talented people in these fields; recruiting more women could address this issue. But the unwelcoming image of the sexist academy isn’t helping. Fortunately, as we have found in a thorough analysis of recent data on women in the academic workplace, it isn’t accurate, either.
And second:
Many of the common, negative depictions of the plight of academic women are based on experiences of older women and data from before the 2000s, and often before the 1990s. That’s not to say that mistreatment doesn’t still occur — but when it does, it is largely anecdotal, or else overgeneralized from small studies.
I guess right off the bat I’d ask, how are you collecting data? The data I have personally about sexist treatment at the hands of my colleagues hasn’t, to my knowledge, been put in any database. The sexist treatment I’ve witnessed for pretty much all of my female mathematics colleagues has, equally, never been installed in a database to my knowledge. So yeah, not convinced these people know what they are talking about. It’s famously hard to prove something doesn’t exist, especially when you don’t have a search algorithm.
One possibility for the data they seem to have: they interviewed people after the fact, perhaps decades after the fact. If that’s the case, then you’d expect more and better data on older women, and that’s what we are currently seeing. There is a lag on this data collection, in other words. That’s not the same as “it doesn’t exist.” A common mistake researchers make. They take the data as “objective truth” and forget that it’s a human process to collect it (or not collect it!). Think police shootings.
The article then goes on to talk about how the data for women in math and other science fields isn’t so bad in terms of retention, promotion, and other issues. For there I’d say, the women have already gone through a mighty selection process, so in general you’d expect them to be smarter than their colleagues, so in general their promotion rates should be higher, but they aren’t. So that’s also a sign of sexism.
I mean, whatever. That’s not actually what I claim is true, so much as another interpretation of this data. My overall point is that, they have some data, and they are making strong and somewhat outrageous claims which I can dismiss without much work.
I hope that helps!
Aunt Pythia
——
Dear Aunt Pythia,
In his November “Launchings” column, David Bressoud has presents some interesting data on differences between male and female college calculus students. As much as I’ve appreciated all of Bressoud’s careful explorations of mathematics education, I find I’m a bit irritated by his title, “MAA Calculus Study: Women Are Different,” because it appears to take the male experience as the norm.
Perhaps I was already annoyed because of a NYTimes op-ed, “Academic Science Isn’t Sexist”, in which Wendy Williams and Steven Ceci claim that “[w]e are not your father’s academy anymore,” and that the underrepresentation of women in math-intensive fields is “rooted in women’s earlier educational choices, and in women’s occupational and lifestyle preferences.” Here, too, the message seems to be “don’t worry about changing the academy — women are different from the norm, which is (naturally) that which works for men.”
My question for you, Aunt Pythia, is this: am I overreacting here?
I received my PhD in mathematics in 1984, and I’ve seen significant change for the better in the academy since then. Child care at AMS meetings? A crowd in the women’s rest room at same? Unthinkable when I started. But if women are still disproportionately “choosing” to go into other fields, might we look a little more closely at the environments in which girls and women are making their educational and “lifestyle” choices?
I welcome your thoughts. If you’re eager for more data analysis, I’d also love to hear your take on the paper by Williams, Ceci, and their colleagues.
Still One of the Underrepresented After All These Years
Dear SOotUAATY,
Without even reading that article, I can say without hesitation that yes, it’s a ridiculous title, and it’s infuriating and YOU ARE NOT OVERREACTING. To be clear, that is bold-faced, italicized, and all caps. I mean it.
The word “different” forces us to compare something to a baseline, and given that there is no baseline even mentioned, we are forced to guess at it, and that imposes the “man as default” mindset. Fuck that. I mean, if the title had been, “There are differences between male and female calculus students,” I would not have been annoyed, because even though “male” comes first, I’m not a stickler. I just want to acknowledge that if we mention one category, we mention the other as well.
To illustrate this a bit more, we don’t entitle a blog post “Whites are different” and leave it at that, because we’d be like, different from whom? From blacks? From Asians? From Asian-Americans? See how that works? You need to say different from some assumed baseline, and the assumed baseline has to be a cultural norm. And right now it’s white male. Which is arguable one reason that calculus students act differently when they are men (har!).
As for the other article, I already shit on that in the previous answer but I’m happy to do it once again. It’s bullshit, and I’m disappointed that the Times published it.
As for the article, I don’t have time now but I’ll take a look, thanks!
Aunt Pythia
——
Dear Aunt Pythia,
I am twenty years old, near the halfway point in my senior year of a mathematics BS at a large, well-regarded public university in the Northeast. I’ve been aiming my energies at graduate school, and I am now looking at PhD program applications. Most apps ask for two or three letters of recommendation from a faculty member who is familiar with your work. This poses a very big problem, because all of my professors hate me.
Okay, maybe it’s not quite like that. But I’ve had a really lousy time in the math department at LWRPUN. My fellow students are dispassionate, unresponsive, and unfriendly. My professors are dry, uncommitted to their students, and the ones who aren’t mathematically incompetent are lousy teachers. On top of all this, a crippling bureaucracy has prevented me countless times from taking classes I’m interested in (few as they are in this catalog), substituting instead ANOTHER REQUIRED SEMESTER OF ANALYSIS.
So I haven’t made any personal connections of the sort that might benefit me in the form of a letter of rec. My work hasn’t even been that good; my depression and anxiety (in general as well as re all this) have increasingly prevented me from completing even easy homework assignments. Nobody here has seen my best mathematical work, and for that matter, nobody anywhere else has either*.
And for four years, everyone I’ve come to with this gathering creeping progressively life-eating concern has given me the same old BS about You should really put yourself out there! and It’s just so important to go to your professor’s office hours! without considering maybe — I’ve tried, I really have.
What can I do, Aunt Pythia? I’m really passionate about mathematics, but I’m worried I won’t be able to pursue my studies without these magic papers.
Anxiously,
Reports Embargoed by Crummy Lecturers, Earnestly Seeking Solace
*I thankfully have a professor from an outside experience willing to write about my teaching credentials, but that one letter is surely not sufficient to show my potential as a graduate student and researcher.
Dear RECLESS,
I am afraid I will have to call bullshit on you, RECLESS. Plus your sign-off doesn’t actually spell anything.
Here’s the thing, there are no mathematically incompetent lecturers at large, well-regarded public universities. There are, in fact, mathematically very competent people who can’t get jobs at such places. Such is the pyramid-shaped job market of mathematics. So whereas I believe you when you say your lecturers have been uninspired, and uncommitted to their students, the fact that you added “mathematically incompetent” just makes me not believe you at all, in anything.
Here’s what I think is happening. You think you’re really into math, but you’ve never really understood your classes, nor have you understood that you’ve never understood your classes, because your self-image is that you’re already a mathematician, and that people have just not acknowledged your brilliance.
But that’s not how math actually works. Math is a social endeavor, where you have to communicate your ideas well enough for others to understand them, or else you aren’t doing math.
I’m not saying you haven’t had bad luck with teachers. It’s a real possibility. But there’s something else going on as well, and I don’t think you can honestly expect to go to the next level without sorting stuff out. In other words, even if you don’t love the teacher, if you loved the subject, got into it, and did the proofs, you’d still be getting adequate grades to ask for letters. The thing about writing letters, as a math prof, is that you don’t have to like the student personally to write a good letter, you just need to admire their skills. But since you can’t do that either, you won’t get good letters, and moreover I don’t think you’d deserve good letters. And therefore I don’t think you should go to grad school.
Suggestion: look carefully at your own behavior, figure out what it is you are doing that isn’t working. Maybe think of what you love about math, or about your own image of being a mathematician, and see if there’s something you really know you’re good at, and other people know it to, and develop that.
Good luck,
Aunt Pythia
——
Dearest Aunt Pythia,
I have a sex question for you! Kind of. You have to get through the boring back story first…I’m a 19 year old female physics major. I’m quiet, rather mousy, and awkward. A lot of the time I feel like I have more to prove than the boys do, because I’m a girl, and because of the aforementioned shyness.
People seem to automatically assume I’m unintelligent. I think I’m just as intelligent as the boys in my program, but I don’t come off that way! Point is, I want to be this cool, strong, independent, successful, respectable girl who doesn’t take shit from misogynistic people who assume I’m inferior.
However, I feel extremely guilty about my sexual preferences. I’m pretty submissive. I’d like power exchange in my relationships…hair pulling, bondage, spanking, being bossed around, the whole bit. I like to be dominated by men. Older men. Smart older men. Hopefully I’ve successfully conveyed my dilemma. I want to be respected by the men (and women, and others) I’m surrounded by in my academic life, but taken control of as a girlfriend.
Why does what I despise happening to me in an academic setting please me so much in a romantic/sexual one? Agh, I feel like such a bad girl! (and not in the arousing way…)
Help!
Much Love,
Conflicted
Dear Conflicted,
This is such a relief – finally, a sex question! – and it’s honestly one of the best questions I’ve ever gotten, ever, in Aunt Pythia or elsewhere. I’m so glad I can answer this for you.
It is absolutely not in conflict to want something in a sexual context that is abhorrent to you in normal life. It is in fact a well-known pattern! You shouldn’t feel at all weird about it! Lots – LOTS – of the submissives I’ve met are, in their day jobs, the boss, literally. They have companies and are extremely fancy and in control. And then they love to be bossed around and spanked. Seriously. If anything, my feeling is that your sexual proclivities point to being alpha in real life, but maybe I’m going overboard.
So yeah, no problem here. You are killing it. And in 3 or 4 years I want you to write back and explain to me how you’ve found an amazing lover who gives you what you want in the bedroom and worships your physics prowess outside it. There will, in fact, be people lining up for this role.
And those people in your program? Do your best to ignore them. Men are just impossibly arrogant at that age, but time will humble them somewhat even as your confidence will rise as you learn more. I’m not saying it ever evens out entirely but it does improve.
Also: find other women (and super cool men) to study with. Surround yourself with supportive people. Take note of obnoxious people and avoid them. Trade up with friends whenever possible.
Love always,
Aunt Pythia
——
Well, you’ve wasted yet another Saturday morning with Aunt Pythia! I hope you’re satisfied! Please if you could, 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:
Join Occupy the SEC in Pushing Congress to Reject Dodd-Frank Deregulation
There’s some tricky business going on right now in politics, with a bunch of ridiculous last-minute negotiations to roll back elements of Dodd-Frank and aid Wall Street banks in the current budget deal. Hell, it’s the end of the year, and people are distracted, so the public won’t mind if the banks get formal government backing for their risky trades, right?
Occupy the SEC has a petition you can sign, located here, which is opposed to these changes. You might remember Occupy the SEC for their incredible work in public comments on the Dodd-Frank bill in the first place. I urge you to go take a look at their petition and, if you agree with them, sign it.
After you sign the petition, feel free to treat yourself to some holiday satire and cheer, namely The 2014 Haters Guide To The Williams-Sonoma Catalog.
mathbabe 