Hasta pronto, Elliott.
It was a while ago now, but I just heard “Son of Sam” and felt compelled to write. Elliott Smith was really great, a bringer of beauty to the world. It breaks my heart, really. There’s a part of me that knows that sometimes, people just hurt a lot and feel the need to bow out. Another part of me wonders whether or not tragedy could be averted if we could find a way to prevent people from feeling like square pegs.
I feel like there are strong social norms toward integrity and consistency, strong intrinsic (or potentially learned) desires to feel like the world is an essentially good place, and strong social messages to people to be skeptical and critical.
There isn’t a widely accepted framework, though, that allows all three. As a result, I think most people that seem well-adjusted are either inconsistent, cynical, or naive.
That, in itself, might sound cynical, but it’s not. I think people are essentially good. I think people generally possess integrity, good will, and insight in vast reserves. I feel like the ones who are really serious about it, though–those who are diligent in their search for two of them–almost invariably end up violating the third.
It reminds me of Arrow’s impossibility theorem in some ways. Arrow’s impossibility theorem says, basically, that if you want to take a look at all possible policies, you want to ignore irrelevant policies, and you want to be able to rank policies consistently (a>b, b>c => a>c), and you want to allow no individual in the society to be a dictator, then you can’t do it. Somebody has to be the dictator in order to be complete, consistent and rational. I’m fudging the terms to translate it from math into English, but I think you get the point.
One of the things I love about music is its ability to satisfy consistency, beauty, and insight. The reason art can accomplish what reason so often fails to is, I think, the fact that art strives to be generally universal in its themes but particular in its subject matter. It doesn’t look at all possible policies.
(This is all false analogy, by the way, so it’s not a proof, but hopefully it’s pretty.)
Religion and grand philosophy have often failed to take advantage of this property. I think that’s one of the penetrating powers of science. In theory, at least, science is incredibly humble. As a result, it is incredibly powerful.
The insight is greater than science, though. It’s negative capability. Drop the completeness aspect and you can paint your way back out of the corner. There’s no shame in saying, “I don’t know.” It’s an empirical question, I guess, but I like to think that if we could say, it’s okay to bow out of life if it’s really not your thing–if we could say that, maybe less people would feel the need to bow out. Maybe if loss, poverty, sorrow weren’t so anathema, they wouldn’t compound. In complete sets of philosophy, though, in religion, in particular, there’s no room for random sadness and loss, no room for the inexplicable. All of it has to be God’s will, or none of it can be. I think we can work our way up to a consistent, beautiful, critical world-view that doesn’t need to be universal in order to have its force.
It’s striking to me, the prospect of bringing Pickle up without religion, without belief in God. It’s a different life from mine. I know it’s hard for P’s grandparents. I hope it makes sense to everyone, eventually, although I know it might not. I have faith, though, that the results will speak for themselves. I hope we can help make sense of sorrow as well as joy, though, in a way that integrates it into the beauty of the world, a beauty derived from transience, from the very randomness that makes godlessness seem scary to pretty much everyone, and in a way that looks at sorrow and joy in the complexity with which we actually experience them.
I think we can make sense of joy and sorrow (and love and death and beauty and sex and the origin of everything) by saying that, to be honest, we don’t really know. We’re just living through it like everybody else, and the joy thing is pretty great, and the sorrow thing, not so much, sometimes, but it’s all life, and I think life is good. Let’s talk about it some more and see what we come up with. It’s all about reducing it to a human scale. What we lose in breadth of stroke we gain in explanatory power and internal consistency. To get Integrity, Wonder, and Honesty requires Humility. Descriptive life.
A breather
Heavens. I’ve been meaning to post again since Tuesday. Some weeks are busy weeks. I have a presentation I’m delivering next Wednesday–the first presentation of my own work I’ve ever done, and so I’ve been busy as hell. Which I guess is how it’s supposed to work, the week before the first presentation of one’s work one has ever given, now that I type it out, but still, it feels busier than it has a right to be.
The reason I’ve been meaning to post is because we got to see Pickle again. I could watch that ultrasound monitor all day, I tell you. Which is odd and striking, because it’s not like a sense of elation, the way the words sound. It’s more just a sense of fascination and curiosity. Check the pictures of Pickle:
Doesn’t s/he look like Baby Skeletor? Hopefully, s/he has ambitions of world domination and superpowers to boot. We got to watch the action for about a half hour, I guess, and seriously, I don’t think I would ever believe that something that monotonous (which it is, let’s face it, fetuses don’t get up to much) could be that compelling.
In the meantime, Pickle’s parents are getting nerdier. Cheryl started playing Neverwinter Nights with Rick and Jeff and I last night and already she has a level 6 elf ranger named Febriethe-something. She acquitted herself quite well, I think. Today, during Experimental Econ, Dr. Cox said something like “time is, after all, the ultimate constraint,” which is nerd-core enough in itself, only then I thought “Ti is less than or equal to T-bar for all i” which just cranks it to the proverbial eleven. So Pickle should pretty much with certainty have blue eyes and the awesomest collection of science fiction and fantasy trading cards in history.
They moved the due date up again. Now it’s August 29. We get to see Pickle again in 7 weeks. I’ll have two midterms, a presentation, and most of my four papers under my belt by then, if all goes according to plan. I’d better. There’ll be 3 weeks left of classes then.
In the meantime, I’m rereading A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, which is really good. I’ve got the beginning of an idea for modeling people’s preferences for other people as preferences over others’ preferences, or over others’ ordering of preference orderings. I wonder if it has implications for voting, like choosing based on “types” or something.
I’m also trying to keep up with four courses, which it occurred to me to say to Paul, “I don’t know what I was thinking, taking four courses,” until I remembered that I asked him for advice and he said to take four courses. I’ll be glad I did it when I’ve done it. When I finish, I want to go camping. I’m not sure that’s likely. A trip to a cabin would probably suffice. I want quietude, though, and I want to get out of this vault and breathe some fresh air.
I’m looking forward to the summer. One class, a baby on the way, some research to actually focus on, short sleeves and sneakers on the pavement, a relatively empty campus, basketball on Fridays, maybe some revisions for publication, maybe some headway on a dissertation, Luke and Rach visiting, trips to the dog park, an excuse to listen to loud music with a nice breeze flowing through the house.
As ever, a man of eternal spring,
Jason
Women, Men and Competition
Dr. Lise Vesterlund (University of Pittsburgh) delivered a seminar to us on Friday afternoon. Interesting and provocative stuff–everyone should read the paper (Niederle, Segal, and Vesterlund, forthcoming) with the appropriate hesitation and humility to prevent wide and sweeping inferences. Links are at the bottom of this post.
The paper covers a set of experiments where men and women were asked to add up 5 2-digit numbers in their heads, repeatedly for 5 minutes. In the first task, they were paid $0.50 for every correct answer. In the second task, they competed against their group (2 men and 2 women in the Pittsburgh experiment, 3 men and 3 women in the Boston version) in a winner(s)-take-all version. In Pittsburgh, the one with the highest score received $2.00 for every correct response, everyone else recieving nothing. In Boston, the top two performers each received $1.50 per response, everyone else recieving nothing. In the third task, they were given the opportunity to choose to either compete in the tournament again or get paid a piece-rate again, and then, in the fourth task, they were given the opportunity to submit a previous piece rate performance for competition or piece-rate payment. In the Boston experiment, they added two more tasks involving a form of Affirmative Action, in which the winners were the highest woman performer and the highest performer from the remaining five in a tournament, then with the opt-in tournament. Finally, having seen none of the results the whole time (making all decisions based on priors and their own performance), subjects were asked to self-assess relative to their group, and in Boston, relative to the group members of the same gender.
In both studies, the women systematically opted in less often than the men, controlling for performance. So, in Pittsburgh, men and women performed equally. In Boston, the men performed slightly better (due to a few outliers at the top of the distribution), but in both cases, controlling for performance, when given the opportunity to enter the winner-take-all tournament, men were far more likely to enter the competition (73% of all men entered in Pittsburgh, 35% of all women).
The upshot I took from the presentation was that there could be three major driving reasons why the women in the experiment were less likely to enter: beliefs about performance, desire to compete, and risk preference. In reverse order,
Risk preference
It’s unclear how much of an impact, if any, this has on the gender gap. When comparing the decision to submit a previous performance to a tournament–basically, to take a gamble, rather than a sure bet–those who thought they performed best were equally likely to submit their performance, male or female. It doesn’t appear that risk alone, the desire to take a high-stakes gamble on a past performance over a sure thing, can account for much of the difference.
Desire to compete
When looking at the desire to enter into a high-stakes gamble on a future performance, however, men were much more likely to enter than women, even controlling for their own beliefs about their chances. About 50% of the women who thought they ranked highest entered the tournament, while about 80% of the men who thought they ranked highest entered. That’s a 30 percentage-point difference. Which is big. So there’s something about the prospect of the pressure of competition that men seem to like and women don’t. Cultural? Genetic? Who knows. I think it’s probably cultural, but a lot of people seem to think there’s a genetic basis–competition for mating or food, etc. The distinction, though, between future performance or past performance is important, I think, because it has a lot to do with the state of mind while performing.
This has some implications for how we can encourage high-performing women (and discourage low-performing men, I suppose). If it’s cultural, then praising competition among women could get them more interested in entering high-stakes professions where their abilities can do a lot of good. If it’s genetic, then changing the structure and mechanism of workplace advancement could be another way to encourage capable women to work their way into positions of power.
Beliefs
Finally, and I think this is probably the most striking thing that I heard, both men and women are wrong about their own performances. Dr. Vesterlund said that they were both overconfident, but that’s not really correct. Instead, they both suffer from the Lake Wobegon effect, which I think has been misdefined as, again, systematic overconfidence. Instead, I think it’s that everyone tends to shift their self-assesment toward “above-average,” and so everyone below the 70th %ile (or so) is overconfident, while everyone above that line is underconfident, and people on that dot tend to have pretty good estimates (by sheer chance, really) of their abilities. There’s a paper on competence and the ability to self-assess, but for the life of me, I can’t remember the citation, so I’ll try to come up with it and repost.
So everyone’s beliefs are off. Low-performing men overestimate their ability by more than low-performing women do. High-performing women underestimate their ability by more than high-performing men do. Basically, the above-average line that men and women move their estimates toward (at least in the computation of the sum of five two-digit numbers) is different. An unbiased estimate of performance for an average performer would be (on a rank of 1-4, 1 being best) 2.5, right? Half above, half below. In Pittsburgh, the men and women performed equally well, and so both averaged about 2.5. The mean male estimate of own rank was 1.4 while the mean female rank of estimate was 1.825. Fully 3/4 of the men (30 of the 40) thought they had done the best in their group. Only 17 of the 40 women thought they had done so.
To me, that seems huge. Even setting future competition aside, women were as likely to submit a past performance for competition as men, controlling for self-estimated performance. But if self-estimated performance is so highly skewed, we still have women being far less likely to compete than men. Additionally, Vesterlund and Niederle find them far less likely to compete than they should be willing to do to maximize total social gain.
So to recap, even when they outperform their male counterparts, women don’t mind risk that much, they don’t enjoy timed competition, and they don’t think they’re as good as they should. Men enjoy competition, even when they know they’ll probably lose, and they think that they’ll lose more rarely than they actually will.
The conversation after the presentation was as interesting as the presentation itself. The business world is real-time winner-take-all–no wonder so few CEO’s are women. So are politics and many other professions. More than that, how have we managed to inculcate such lowered self-assessments into the young women who were the subjects of this study? Are these results applicable across the population?
If we let people know how they do, will men be disappointed and stop striving? Maybe women will be so pleasantly surprised to find out that they’re better at almost everything then they think they are (or better than people they thought they were worse than, at least), and will turn that sense of new ability into heightened ambitions and desire to compete.
Girl or boy, Pickle will not suffer from a lowered self-assessment. That’s not like a pledge, it’s just an admission. The Delaney family has never been one that liked to encourage humility for humility’s sake, certainly not in measures of performance. Perhaps in measures of value as a human being or comparative worth or self-righteousness, but if you’re good at math, you’re good at math. If you’re smart and good-looking and can spell and like to read heavy stuff and derive functional forms for everyday occurrences and you’re funny and quick of wit, a formidable disputant and everyone likes you, then hey, you’re one of us, no surprise there, right?
Still, Dr. Vesterlund had a very good point. What can we do as a society, really? We have blocks in our path. Even her most liberal friends, who want to raise their children gender-neutral, don’t give their sons dolls and skirts. They just give their daughters baseballs and math books and pants. In America, growing up gender-neutral means being brought up as boys have historically been brought up. What does that say about our value of a traditionally female upbringing? It’s got to be possible to get the parts of that that would benefit boys and girls without the parts that would damage them both, in my opinion. It wouldn’t have killed me to learn how to cook a decade earlier than I did. I did my laundry from age 9 onward. I still can’t sew a button very well, but I hope any son I have can. To be fair, I had a doll (I stole it from my cousin Kaity and named it “Alice Cooper,” and from age two to three continually had to explain to people that Alice Cooper was a boy’s name, not a girl’s name, which makes me both precocious and incredibly weird), so maybe I’m not the best example, but then again, maybe I am.
Information’s probably good. I always like standardized tests, because they give you a chance to calibrate your self-assessment, and I guess because I usually did well. But hopefully my kids will do well. And if they don’t, then hopefully they’ll be able to acknowledge that standardized tests are just measures along one axis, and not even one that should count for much, in the long run. Still, I think, better to know thyself, painful or no. Hopefully more people feel the same way.
Dr. Vesterlund’s previous paper, which formed the first half of the presentation (and covered the Pittsburgh study), can be found at the link below, with the presentation in the second link.
Do Women Shy Away from Competition?
You can find Dr. Vesterlund’s home page at Pitt here: Dr. Vesterlund’s home page
Pickle, the Process, and jokes about poo
So Cheryl’s 11 weeks going on 12. In the meantime, life has gone on pretty much as it wasbefore we got pregnant, except now the part of our time and energy that was filled with excitement and anxiety about trying to get pregnant has been filled with excitement and anxiety about staying pregnant. For me, at least, it hasn’t really slid over into the excitement and anxiety of actually having a kid, yet. It’s a matter of time, though, and I can start to see it phasing in, little by little. Coming up with a proper noun to replace the surprisingly awkward him/her/it has been helpful, as has, obviously, seeing the ultrasound.
There’s a little bit of concern about whether or not we’ll actually be any good at parenting, but I think we’re pretty sure we’ll be good at it. We both love kids, have had a lot of time and experience holding them without crushing them and watching them while, admittedly, not paying enough attention that they don’t run into things and fall over, but enough that they never run into things too hard or fall too far. We’re good at things we enjoy, as I think most people are, and we enjoy kids and playing and, really, finally, the day-to-day work of life. A good marriage between good people who genuinely want children is, as far as I can tell, the best thing you can really do for a child.
I just finished reading Freakonomics, and the parts about the really important bits of parenting being done before you have the child resonated a lot. I think, in truth, a lot of it is actually what you do when you’re around your kid, but not what you do when you’re thinking actively and consciously about what to do, but what you do when you’re just being yourself, on autopilot. Whether you read to your kid, or take them to museums, or let them watch TV all day long seems to me to be way less important for long-term outcomes than whether you’re the sort of person who generally values reading, and does it on your own as a leisure activity, whether you react to conflict in a constructive or violent way, whether you are a private, introspective, considerate, conflict-averse person or an outgoing, opinionated, public and assertive person or some mix of the two.
I’m sure we won’t be immune to parenting advice, but I kind of hope we are. We’ve been true to ourselves in a lot of ways, keeping the parts of our upbringing and education that have made good and reasonable sense to us, and jettisoning or replacing the parts that don’t, fashioning our own mix of the best available and feasible way to live, or at least the one that seems to suit us best. I know that having kids changes a lot, and I have to imagine one of the ways it changes things is simply to make everything a lot more tiring.
The process by which Cheryl and I form belief is pretty long and drawn out. It involves discussion and looking things up and sometimes (or maybe often) a heated argument and then we both backtrack and retreat to our corners and look at things from the other person’s perspective and then we come back together, conciliatory, and reach a preliminary consensus–more of a hypothesis or set of hypotheses, really–and then kind of agree to let it rest, or kind of just get tired and happy together and let our running mutual internal monologue drift to another topic, and then usually it comes up again a little while later and we do a shortened version of the whole thing and reinforce our settled mutual belief. It’s really great. It makes us both smarter and more humble and more considerate and better informed. It helps with consensus on everything from religion and cosmology to how much to fill the tea kettle (still working on that one) or where shoes are and are not meant to be placed (not on countertops, apparently). It is a lot of work, though. And in between feedings, I think we may have some trouble getting through all the parts of the process. (the Process?) Maybe once Pickle is 6 months old, we’ll be able to rub our tired eyes, reassess and figure out what parts we’re doing right and what parts we’re doing wrong.
For me, though, the Process is one of the most fun and rewarding parts of our friendship and marriage, so the fact that it’s challenging is a good thing, and a greater challenge just implies a greater reward. It’s the work we put into it, and the knowledge that Cheryl’s willing to work with me so that we can understand each other better, that gives it such force. Sometimes, when it’s a lot of work, it’s really tiring, but when it’s more work, it’s more worth it. So there’s a hopeful tone to strike.
—-
Cheryl noted the other day that there’ll probably be a surprisingly large amount of time where it’s just her and me and Pickle. It seems like such an event, I guess. Hell, it is such an event, especially the first great-grandkid on my dad’s side, and the first grandkid in my immediate family (sorry, Pickle II). The eventitude makes it seem like everyone will be there for an extended period of time, but that’s not how it works, right? I mean, you may juggle in front of crowds, but let’s face it, if you do that, you’ve spent a lot of time juggling alone.
The nice part of which is that we won’t be juggling alone, but juggling together. And Cheryl will temper my impish desire to dress the kid up in funny ways or make him try to wriggle out of a pillowcase or gloat over the fact that I can beat her in arm-wrestling without even trying hard (HA-ha). And hopefully I will provide perspective when Pickle is keeping the neighborhood awake with ear-piercing shrieks, by jumping into my own rendition, and trying to outscream the screamer. I don’t know exactly what it’ll look like, really, but it’ll be fun and funny, and I’ll be making up catchy jingles and mathematical derivations of the kid’s birthday and social security number, and Cheryl will be making up new words and teaching the kid her version of espanfranglish and cracking jokes about poo (the best kind, really–hell, even just saying “poo”–hehehe). Eventually Pickle will be the one cracking the poo jokes. And that’ll be awesome enough to make up for sleep deprivation. It’ll be our club, no bullies allowed, just a good life to be had by all.
