The engineer terrorist

Slate reviews the scholarly literature. Explaining the mechanics of the over-representation of engineers at the higher echelons of transnational terrorism is a guessing game, but the empirical reality seems relatively robust. Though I suspect that sociological and economic factors are necessary (see the linked paper in the article), I think the ultimate precondition has to be the psychology and training of engineers, who are geared toward analysis of a problem and devising a solution. The most ingenious/ridiculous models of Young Earth Creationism seem to spring from the minds of fundamentalist engineers, who must resolve their Biblical literalist premises with the world as it is. One can foresee how the same sort of mentality would be much more explosive in the Islamic world, where the fundamentalist premises lead to a set of inferences (e.g., Islam’s manifest superiority over the West) which seems at variance with the state of the world. The engineer resolves this contradction by devising “solutions.”

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Science in Berkeley, it’s a white thing

Several readers have pointed me to this development at Berkeley High School:

Berkeley High School is considering a controversial proposal to eliminate science labs and the five science teachers who teach them to free up more resources to help struggling students.
The proposal to put the science-lab cuts on the table was approved recently by Berkeley High’s School Governance Council, a body of teachers, parents, and students who oversee a plan to change the structure of the high school to address Berkeley’s dismal racial achievement gap, where white students are doing far better than the state average while black and Latino students are doing worse.
Paul Gibson, an alternate parent representative on the School Governance Council, said that information presented at council meetings suggests that the science labs were largely classes for white students. He said the decision to consider cutting the labs in order to redirect resources to underperforming students was virtually unanimous.

There’s a small issue here, and that’s the allocation of resources efficient to solve proximate problems. In other words, California is currently under fiscal strain, as are localities. Secondary education is always under strain in this country. Berkeley High School has always had issues with disparities between whites & Asians and blacks & Latinos (though this is no exceptional dynamic). Here’s the demographic data for Berkeley High School:
berkdata.png
The 2006-2008 American Community Survey says that Berkeley’s overall population is:
Non-Hispanic white – 57.4%
Black – 9.3%
Hispanic – 10.7%
Asian – 18.1%
One issue is UC Berkeley students who are being counted in the ACS are probably inflating the proportion of Asians. The modal age bracket in Berkeley is 20-24. The modal bracket is in the 35-50 range in both Oakland to the south, and Albany to the north. But it is striking that Non-Hispanic whites are so underrepresented and blacks so overrepresented. There is only one public high school in Berkeley. It is likely correct that blacks in Berkeley are more fertile than the whites, but I don’t think the disparity is striking enough to account for the demographics of Berkeley High School. Rather, many whites must be sending their children to private schools.
This action will reinforce this tendency; the type of engaged parents which a public school benefits from won’t consider sending their child to one which has to slash science laboratories to focus on remedial education. So Berkeley High School is simply accelerating its long death spiral.
More generally, the bizarre racialist logic used to justify the slashing of the science curriculum, that science implicitly benefits whites, is objectionable (at least to me, and likely to readers of this weblog). Our civilization is grounded fundamentally in science. Additionally, Berkeley High School is just a few blocks from UC Berkeley, where there are plenty of non-whites who do science. 42% of the undergraduates at UC Berkeley are Asian, as opposed to 31% who are white. The word “Asian” of course is not found in the story above, because it doesn’t fit the whites-against-the-rest narrative. From what I can tell a substantial proportion of the citizenry of Berkeley and similar communities remain stuck in a 1960s time-warp when it comes to ethnic relations. Back then this was an America in black & white.
Here’s the most recent ACS on California:
42.3% White (not including White Hispanic)
36.6% Hispanic or Latino (of any race)
12.5% Asian
6.7% Black or African American
2.6% Multiracial
1.2% American Indian
Berkeley is much whiter and blacker than California as a whole. As I noted above, the transient presence of Cal students probably inflates the Asian American proportion, but these students are not going to be long term members of the community. The city’s peculiar and anachronistic demographics may explain the unselfconsciousness of Berkeley’s racialist politics.

Why do we delay gratification even when there is no downside?

Earlier this year, John Tierney reviewed several studies on how delaying gratification makes us feel better in the short term by preventing guilt but makes us feel more miserable in the long term by causing regret over missed opportunities. I added my two cents here, just to note that this sounds like part of the Greg Clark story about recent genetic change in the commercial races that adapted them to the emerging mercantile societies they found themselves in. What I had in mind was the delaying of vice — investing a dollar today rather than splurging, moderating the amount of drink or sweets you enjoy, and so on.

But now Tierney has another review of related studies which show that we delay gratification even for what should be guilt-free pleasures like redeeming a gift card, using frequent flier miles, and visiting the landmarks in your local area. And don’t we all have enjoyable books and DVDs we’ve been putting off? After indulging in these cases, there is no potential bankruptcy, no hangover, and no tooth decay — so why do we indiscriminately lump them in with genuine vices and put off indulging in them? Obviously this tendency too is a feature of agrarian or industrial groups — hunter-gatherers would never leave gift cards lying around in their drawers.

It must be because of how recent the change toward delaying gratification has been. Given enough time, we might evolve a specialized module for delaying gratification in vices and another module for doing so in guilt-free pleasures, which would be better than where we are now. But when our genetic response to a change is abrupt, typically we have broad-brush solutions that take care of the intended target but also leave plenty of collateral damage. Over time our solutions get smarter, but it takes awhile. Just look at how crude the responses to malaria are.

We see this domain-general taste for (or aversion of) risk in other areas. People who lead more risky lifestyles buy much less insurance than people who lead cautious lifestyles. Those who ride motorcycles without helmets would be richer and more likely to pass on their genes if they bought a lot of insurance, while those who play it safe would be richer by not buying all that superfluous insurance. Instead, daredevils are daredevils all the way — including a contempt for insurance.

This casts doubt on how easy it is to change our behavior so that we no longer postpone our indulgence in guilt-free pleasures. Because we have a domain-general delay of gratification, it will still just feel wrong. You can also argue the logic of buying lots of insurance to the motorcyclist who rides without a helmet, but that won’t change his mind because his tastes for risk is across-the-board.

Cheers for the coming tech-war!

Google, Past and Future:

Ah, but what about 2010? That, claim the editors at Smartgrid, will be the year that Google and Microsoft really roll up their sleeves and go to war. In everything from search to office apps and Internet browsers, the two behemoths will roll out fancy new services designed to erode their rivals’ revenue streams. “Both companies are largely betting their collective futures on this battle, so the stakes are huge,” said industry analyst Rob Enderle. “Microsoft is going to partner and try to starve Google out of content and partners. Google is going to work against Microsoft’s pricing model and starve them out of money. Both are, for once, largely going after each other’s relative weaknesses and leveraging their respective strengths, so this will likely be a battle for the history books.”

This sort of competition is good for consumers. I think only a company with Google’s prestige can convince many purchasers of Office that its price point is a relict of the 1990s and the era of shrink-wrapped software. Free is probably not viable (or at least not exclusively), but there’s no natural reason that Microsoft has to reap the margins it currently does.

The less intelligent you are, the more bored you are

The Audacious Epigone has an interesting post up, Burden of boredom borne by blockheads:

This isn’t just me speaking from personal experience–the data confirm it. The GSS asked respondents in 1982 and again in 2004 how often they have time on their hands that they don’t know what to do with. Using the familiar categorization method employed here before*, the following table shows the percentage of each group’s members who reported to “almost never” be without something worthwhile to do in their free time:

He presented his data in tabular format. I decided to use the variables he kindly provided and produce some charts. Below are the frequency bored from lowest WORDSUM score, 0, to highest, 10. 0 meaning 0 out of 10 words correct on a vocabulary test, and 10 meaning 10 out of 10 correct. I also checked degree attainment. For those who have a hard time making out the legend, the darker the shading, the more bored the class.

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One year after the financial collapse, Gotham in a downward spiral

Actually, not really. New York on Track for Fewest Homicides on Record. I assume that those who project long term fiscal problems due to a contraction in the financial sector in New York City are probably correct (assuming that the financial sector actually doesn’t expand back to its pre-2009 size). But the assumption that the economic fallout would lead to 1970s levels of anomie doesn’t seem to be panning out. As I indicated earlier I found suggestions of such a reversion plausible at the time because I had a rather economistic mental model of the “root causes” of crime. But that seems less plausible when you look over the arc of the past century. Another model of course is that in fact it was financial sector workers who were driving much of the crime directly by subsidizing illicit activity through their enormous incomes generated by the efficiencies of capital allocation which they drove (I’m not being serious here).

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New comment format

A lot of people (including paying readers! kidding!) are complaining about the new commenting format. I’ll be euphemistic and observe that it’s suboptimal. But I don’t have time to work on tweaking and beautifying it now, so please be patient. Over time it’ll move up the stack of my priorities, and hopefully your awesome contributions to the discussion will be facilitated by a more elegant and user-friendly commenting interface by the end of January.

Additionally, I am thinking that posting “admin” messages in this space is also suboptimal. It uses space which should be allocated to real posts about science and such. If you’re in the minority of readers who actually cares enough about your blog-reading experience to gripe in the comments, I invite you to subscribe to/follow my twitter feed, I’m gonna put “admin” related stuff there from now on. You can also send messages via twitter. Email is fine as always, but if you’re someone who I don’t recognize, there’s a non-trivial chance that you’ll stay at the bottom of the task stack and I’ll never get back to you. I have my twitter feed on my Google homepage, so I am more likely to see random direct messages (as I noted earlier, I get a non-trivial number of messages from PR people, so it isn’t unlikely that I’m forgetting emails in the “none of the above” folder).

Mutation and selection in stickleback evolution

Understanding the precise molecular mechanisms underlying changes in animal morphology is a tricky problem–usually two species which have diverged morphologically (say, mice and humans) are now so unrelated as to make genetic study exceedingly difficult, if not impossible. For years, a group led by David Kingsley has been addressing this problem in a cleverly-chosen model–three-spined sticklebacks. Importantly for the question of morphological evolution, freshwater populations of this fish have lost many of the spines and pelvic girdle carried by the saltwater populations (there are a number of hypotheses, probably not all mutually exclusive, for why this has been under selection).

In a new paper, this group demonstrates the precise genetic alteration underlying this change in a number of freshwater populations. Perhaps surprisingly, it appears to be due to the recurrent deletion (in different freshwater populations) of an enhancer of an important developmental gene. Strikingly, creating a transgenic freshwater fish with a copy of this enhancer (which normally is missing) leads to freshwater fish with a pelvis like the saltwater fish.

In fact, this enchancer seem to fall in a “fragile” (read: repeat-laden) region of the genome, which presumably increases the rate of deletion at this site. If one imagines there are a number of genetic paths to get to the reduced pelvis size favored in freshwater environments, the probability of each path depends on the mutation rate of each genetic change. In this case, many (though not all) freshwater populations have independently taken the same path, likely due to the increased mutation rate at this fragile site.

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Citation: Chan et al. (2009) Adaptive Evolution of Pelvic Reduction in Sticklebacks by Recurrent Deletion of a Pitx1 Enhancer. Science. Published Online December 10, 2009 [DOI: 10.1126/science.1182213]

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