Comments on: Links for September http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/09/02/links-for-september/ In a mad world, all blogging is psychiatry blogging Fri, 24 Jul 2015 06:21:52 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=4.2.3 By: Women Friends are Better Friends - My blog http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/09/02/links-for-september/#comment-131612 Thu, 07 Aug 2014 17:03:00 +0000 http://slatestarcodex.com/?p=961#comment-131612 […] Hat tip to Scott Alexander. […]

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]]> By: 財布 フェンディ http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/09/02/links-for-september/#comment-21642 Sat, 23 Nov 2013 13:38:50 +0000 http://slatestarcodex.com/?p=961#comment-21642 カメラ

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]]> By: estelendur http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/09/02/links-for-september/#comment-16733 Wed, 18 Sep 2013 17:21:25 +0000 http://slatestarcodex.com/?p=961#comment-16733 If you have a traffic-activated light in Ann Arbor where one of the axes never activates unless there is a car *or the pedestrian crossing button is pressed*, then they are necessary during, say, rush hours. This includes most of the traffic lights in the State/Stadium/Packard triangle. This also constitutes a reason to go up on the sidewalk while on a bike if you don’t think a car will be along before the cycle starts over…

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]]> By: Fnord http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/09/02/links-for-september/#comment-16635 Fri, 13 Sep 2013 23:49:12 +0000 http://slatestarcodex.com/?p=961#comment-16635 Regarding base phi, it’s hardly the only irrational number for which that’s possible. It’s really easy to convert binary to base squareroot of 2.

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]]> By: Jack http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/09/02/links-for-september/#comment-16558 Mon, 09 Sep 2013 15:36:12 +0000 http://slatestarcodex.com/?p=961#comment-16558 Apologies. You’re probably right, I need to think this through more completely.

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]]> By: Sniffnoy http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/09/02/links-for-september/#comment-16541 Sun, 08 Sep 2013 20:03:04 +0000 http://slatestarcodex.com/?p=961#comment-16541 …wait, seriously? I’d noticed the “hold up traffic” effect; I had no idea they didn’t shorten the actual wait though. Oh my…

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]]> By: Paul Torek http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/09/02/links-for-september/#comment-16539 Sun, 08 Sep 2013 19:32:54 +0000 http://slatestarcodex.com/?p=961#comment-16539 Ann Arbor pedestrian crossing buttons are not placebos. They’re much worse. They don’t change the length of time you’ll wait, but they hold up traffic for a very long time when your turn comes around. By which time, you’ll probably already have crossed due to a gap in traffic (perfectly legal here). Useful if you’re elderly or disabled; otherwise pointlessly cruel to drivers.

I always suspected elevator “close doors” buttons though. It’s been a very long time since I’ve seen one do anything.

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]]> By: nyan sandwich http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/09/02/links-for-september/#comment-16465 Wed, 04 Sep 2013 22:14:15 +0000 http://slatestarcodex.com/?p=961#comment-16465 Only if the plants are currently limited by energy, and not nutrition (because the farmers already buy fertilizer). If this is the case, the farmer is already spending some of the yield on fertilizer. If this is cheaper for some subset of farmers than fertilizer (eg. those where price/productivity is very low), then it’s a boost in (effective) yield.

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]]> By: Swimmy http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/09/02/links-for-september/#comment-16459 Wed, 04 Sep 2013 16:57:29 +0000 http://slatestarcodex.com/?p=961#comment-16459 You simply have the theory wrong. You can spend a long time studying economics and I doubt you’ll see it anywhere suggested in any major textbook that you have a monopsony or oligopsony when sellers greatly outnumber buyers. You have a monopsony when you have precisely one buyer (and no potential competition), and an oligopsony when you have very few. Dozens of fast food chains, many of them franchises and so still competing with each other, combined with thousands of small restaurants, even within a single city, does not an oligopsony make. There are some more complicated theories to explain how a whole boatload of employers can act like an oligopsony or monopsony without collusion, but they don’t appeal to there simply being a whole lot more workers than employers. I know of no economist who has ever suggested you need to have an equal number of buyers and sellers for competition to work well, or anything close.

The satire works because it maps to (and links) specific arguments for minimum wages that 1) frequently do not appeal to any strong market failure arguments, and 2) ignore important Bayesian evidence to the contrary.

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]]> By: Sarah http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/09/02/links-for-september/#comment-16453 Wed, 04 Sep 2013 13:55:12 +0000 http://slatestarcodex.com/?p=961#comment-16453 I worry about the message “it’s important to overcome gender-stereotype-based fears!” actually reinforcing said fears.

From what I’ve seen, there is no math gender gap. Period. Median math test scores in the US are equal between boys and girls. The gender breakdown on international math exams varies widely from country to country.

There’s a gender gap in performance at the very high end (no female Fields medalists), but when we’re talking about long tails of lifetime achievement, it becomes less clear that we’re still talking about mathematical ability rather than “competitiveness”, “careerism”, or just institutional support.

There is no damn gender gap in math. Most of the “gaps” (in test performance, math BA’s/PhD’s/employment, etc) have either vanished already or are rapidly narrowing.

Gender is an endlessly fascinating subject and makes good press. Gender differences are interesting. Genuine inequities do exist in many professions and areas of life. But women-and-math is *basically not a thing* and becoming less of a thing every day. While it flatters my vanity to belong to a category that’s constantly in the news, from what I’ve seen of the facts, it’s incredibly overhyped.

The persistence of “stereotype threat” as an experimental finding implies that salient memes matter a lot. Here’s a beneficial meme that happens to be true: girls are not actually worse at math than boys, and at every level of education, the percent of people getting degrees in math who are female has been rising by about 1% a year for decades.

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