Richard Sharpe wrote: I wonder how you quantify an imponderable, or is that just more mental masturbation? 
 
Is it mental masturbation to say that there are processes that will affect environmental and human welfare that we don't yet know how to measure? Frex, to pick an example doubtless dear to many hearts here, bureaucracy can be grossly inefficient. Even if it's not corrupt.  
 
Talking about efficiency only in terms of money (money as measured and recorded) is acting like the drunk who was asked why he was crawling on his hands and knees around the lamppost. Answer: he had dropped his keys somewhere in the last block. Question: Why, then, are you only looking near the lamppost? Answer: because that's where the light is.  
 
I agree that it would be good to have some sort of measure for the imponderables I mentioned. Perhaps it should be in kilowatts or calories rather than currency?

SG: Rather than profit, or ROI, in financial terms, perhaps what we really ought to be charting is ecological efficiency. That is, how much energy/water/arable land/mineral wealth and so on that we're using, how much we're polluting our environment and thus affecting our future welfare, and most important, how EFFICIENTLY we're using the resources that we do use.  
 
An industrial process that uses fewer raw materials and less energy to produce a more useful, recyclable product should be rewarded. The market may or may not recognize this efficiency; if not, regulation should supplement the market. 
 
Note that human social groups/organizations may be more or less efficient, that the nurture of human capital (health and education) is part of efficiency, and that imponderables such as generalized social trust can make a big difference in social functioning.

It's 99% girls. Can't guys be sexy?  
 
Years ago there was a calendar called "Studmuffins of Science". For the girls who like to look at a cute SMART guy.

Try reading Iain Banks' Culture novels: billions of organic beings all watched over by machines of loving grace. The organic beings are something between pets and friends.

I was a victim of date rape, many years ago. I never reported it; in fact, it took some time for me to realize that I could BLAME the acquaintance who took advantage of me. I took LSD for the first and last time in the late 1960s. The female friend who was there to watch over me started feeling ill. She dropped me off at the house of a male we both knew, who proceeded to take advantage of me even though I was lying motionless, incapable of resistance, crying the whole time.  
 
I refused to see him ever again, but I also blamed myself for not resisting.  
 
A large part of that was, I think, my 1950s and 1960s American middle-class upbringing. Women were expected to protect themselves. To dress demurely, to stay out of situations in which they might be defenseless, to put themselves in purdah, in effect. Any deviation from the rules of purdah made a subsequent rape the woman's fault. "She was wearing revealing clothing; she was drinking with the guys; she asked for it."  
 
The fuss over date rape was more than hysteria, I think: it represented an attempt to change the rules of purdah, to say that women *should* be able to wear revealing clothing, go to parties, drink, flirt, kiss, and then say NO -- and have that NO respected.  
 
I haven't looked closely at any empirical studies of date rape. Rapes reported to police don't count, as most date-rapes wouldn't have been reported. You can do retrospective self-report surveys, but how the questions are phrased and how the respondents define rape would be hard to control. Rape isn't a "fact", but a culturally-defined category, and I think we're seeing a process of category change here.

No, Razib, I wasn't an English major. Two anthropology degrees and one computer degree. I refused to take further English classes after a clash, my sophomore year, with an English professor who was shocked, SHOCKED, that I would not admire Wordsworth.  
 
I don't enjoy much contemporary "literary" fiction. To me, lit fic reeks of the attempt to impress. I prefer authors who try to amuse. 
 
I do, however, have one lit fic favorite: Vikram Seth.

Huh? All this does not compute. I'm female and read a lot of SF (fen [fans] call it sf rather than sci-fi, which sounds horribly wrong). I also love Jane Austen and the Genji Monogatari. I must have read the Genji Monogatari five times.  
 
A lot of genre prose is plot-driven rather than character-driven. That's just as true of bodice-rippers as it is of sf. It's HARD to write believable characters. Most authors just manage to put cardboard cutouts in motion.  
 
I find a great deal of so-called modern "literary" fiction boring, but that may just be Sturgeon's Law in action (90% of everything is crap).  
 
Go hang out at Making Light for a while, Razib, and many of your gender stereotypes about sf readers will crumble. Making Light is a blog hosted by Patrick and Theresa Neilsen-Hayden, of Tor Books.

What gave the Arabs of Muhammad's time a military advantage? Reza Aslan's book pointed me to Richard Bulliet's The Camel and the Wheel. Bulliet argues that improvements in the camel saddle had vastly increased the usefulness of the camel both as a military mount and a trader's beast of burden. Camels didn't require roads; they were cheaper than the wheeled transport. Arabs were the camel breeders; Arabs had an advantage.  
 
I can tell that Razib has been reading Patricia Crone :)

It's simply not so that American anthropology was racist from the start. Franz Boas, the immigrant German scholar who popularized anthropology in the US, was a Jew and utterly opposed to any sort of racialism. He published little, but what he did publish argued strongly against common racial stereotypes. He believed that basic human biological equality could be established scientifically. I agree that this seems simplistic now, but for the time, it was a scientific advance upon "dumb but happy" ethnic caricatures.  
 
There's also an argument to be made for the difficulty of achieving a "Martian" viewpoint that sees humans as just another animal. You don't achieve this simply by getting an academic credential. You're a product of your own society/culture and tend look at other folks through an ethnocentric lens.  
 
That said, I don't think that you must therefore abandon any effort at objectivity, and engage in cultural "interpretation" as a form of belles lettres. Science can help us come closer to a Martian viewpoint, even if we'll never reach that elusive asymptote.  
 
So can education and communication. If your "subjects" can critique your conclusions, you can't be as high-handed as anthros used to be.

In my experience as a Zen Buddhist, the point isn't wham-bang mystical experiences, it's balance and clarity. When you experience a moment of clarity, you can feel a thrill of "that's it!", just as you do when you improve your golf swing, or your swim stroke, and FEEL your body telling you that you've finally got it right. The feeling is pointless if you can't keep swinging or swimming correctly, or if you don't keep living with balance and clarity.  
 
From that standpoint, I can read writers of many religions and say, "They got it". Others can profess mystical rhapsodies and I'm unimpressed. Throwing all such experiences and claimed experiences together and looking for commonality is GIGO (Garbage In Garbage Out).

Atheist != nonreligious. Buddhists are atheists. I'm a Buddhist. Your religious readership is thus underreported.