Differences between male and female names

The one compensation when Windows takes over your computer in order to do an update is that you get to turn to the many stacks of books around you to pass the ten or fifteen minutes. Held hostage today, I picked up The Cambridge Encyclopedia of The English Language by David Crystal. I find his work dense and technical but also fascinating. This is actually one of the better books of his that I have as it makes a weakness into a strength. Lots of thinly sliced topics with great depth.

On page 153 he has a discussion of names. Here are a bunch of things I did not know/had not thought about.

Female first names tend to be longer than males, in terms of the number of syllables they contain.

95% of male names have a first syllable which is strongly stressed, whereas only 75% of female names show this pattern.

24% of male names have a single syllable compared to only 10% of female names.

Only 13% of male names have three syllables but 29% of female names do.

Female names are much more likely to end in a (spoken) vowel.

Popular male names have longevity. There are several male names which show up repeatedly on every list of top twenty names going back decades but no single female name appears on all lists.

There are fewer predictable patterns associated with female names than with male names.

Those with the strongest opinions on complex societal issues are highly selective in their consideration of relevant evidence

From Non-Scientific Beliefs Among Undergraduate Students by Chris Impey, Sanlyn Buxner, and Jessie Antonellis. There are some definitional bones to pick but this research has the advantage of a large population base (N=11,000) and is longitudinal (22 years).

In discussions among scientists and educators, it is often assumed that pseudoscience belief stems from a lack of critical thinking skills and that pseudoscience belief is negatively correlated with science knowledge and an understanding of how science works. For the analysis described in this paper, those conjectures were hypotheses to be tested. In addition, we were interested in how pseudoscience beliefs change during progress through the undergraduate experience, and whether or not susceptibility to pseudoscience is related to religious belief.

Although we see small differences in the performance of students who held strong faith-based beliefs or strong beliefs in unscientific phenomena, these corresponded to about a one point difference, out of 15, in science literacy. This difference is less than the difference we see between science and education majors in the sample, which corresponds to an average of two points out of 15 on the science literacy scale. We also see relatively small reductions in pseudoscience belief over the course of an undergraduate career that includes at least three science courses. Confused signs of the nature of any relationship between formal education and pseudoscientific thinking have also been noted elsewhere (Goode 2002).

These generally null results present a challenge to educators. If nonscientific ways of thinking are widespread and resistant to standard modes of instruction, do educators need to be concerned and what do belief systems have to do with efforts to create a citizenry that is informed enough to vote on issues that involve science and technology? Some commentators have contended that pseudoscience and the paranormal are often skirted in the classroom, or treated as taboo subjects, meaning that nonscientific belief systems are not confronted (Martin 1994). Another point of view holds that pseudoscience beliefs cannot be addressed without classroom content that is relevant to societal issues (Hobson 2000, 2008). But psychologists Lindeman and Aarnio (2007) find support for a conceptual framework where a variety of superstitious, magical, and pseudoscientific beliefs accrue from the same kind of ontological confusion, and analytic thinking coexists with nonscientific forms of intuitive thinking. Moreover, research shows that people tend to motive their reasoning process based on prior beliefs and biases (Kunda 1990), and those with the strongest opinions on complex societal issues are highly selective in their consideration of relevant evidence (Lord, Ross, and Lepper 1979). Both of these effects mitigate against a completely rational world view. Religious beliefs exist in a distinct realm since they are based on faith. They may be similarly decoupled from aspects of worldview that are associated with evidence and causal connection, explaining the weak relationship seen here between religious belief and science knowledge. Improving science literacy will require a more nuanced approach that takes account of this psychological landscape. Since we also have found that science knowledge and attitudes are not substantially altered by the college experience, we have embarked on a separate study to understand where young adults get their information about science and technology.

Sometimes you have to work to unclutter cryptic verbiage to get to the really interesting conclusions. Based on this evidence:

Religious believers hold only half as many unscientific beliefs as education majors.

A college education which includes at least three science courses has no significant impact on extent of pseudoscientific beliefs.

People reach the conclusions they wish based on their prior beliefs rather than on the evidence.

Those with the strongest opinions on complex societal issues are highly selective in their consideration of relevant evidence.

I love the concluding sentence - "Since we also have found that science knowledge and attitudes are not substantially altered by the college experience, we have embarked on a separate study to understand where young adults get their information about science and technology." Well, yes, that might be useful.

This is consistent with the more general finding a couple of years ago by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa in their book Academically Adrift, where they found 45% of undergraduates “demonstrated no significant gains in critical thinking, analytical reasoning, and written communications during the first two years of college.” The most recent data indicates that there is some improvement over the course of their four year education. But by the time they are seniors, 36% still show no improvement in critical thinking, analytical reasoning and written communications.

One might posit that this is a distinctly American issue but the National Science Board's Science and Engineering Indicators, 2014 reports that "Levels of factual knowledge in the United States are comparable to those in Europe and are generally higher than levels in countries in other parts of the world."

Some observations.

"Students have a complex web of prior belief systems and understandings about nature based on experience, upbringing, popular culture, and social interactions." What I have referred to elsewhere as KESVB - Knowledge, Experience, Skills, Values and Behaviors.

Knowledge and educational skill gaps are material (up to three years) by the time children begin Kindergarten.

Those gaps widen over the duration of K-12.

University has little impact on knowledge and critical thinking in terms of measured results.

Given that Knowledge and Skills are the things one would expect to be most positively affected by education and yet are not, this seems to suggest that Values and Behaviors (often referred to as culture) has a disproportionate impact on outcomes.

Given that culture is established via the home environment, all this layering of evidence seems to support that the biggest single source of impact on life outcomes is parental values and behaviors. A belief not uncommon among the hoi polloi but not widely shared in academia. We spend a lot of time and money trying to make teachers and professors more effective and what the evidence suggests is that we ought to be spending that time and money figuring out how to make parents more effective; and indeed, figuring out what are the critical values and behaviors fostered by parents which make the biggest difference in life outcomes.

I'd suggest we actually know the answers to those questions but academia is reluctant to acknowledge those answers.

What happens when the solution has to be freely chosen and occurs in domains beyond government influence?

From Government Can't Fix Real Gender Pay Gap by Megan McArdle. Both a good round up and, as usual, sharp phrasing.

The solutions that often do get proposed -- mandatory paid maternity leave for at least a year, generously subsidized childcare, more flexible schedules and so forth -- would certainly make it more convenient for working women to be mothers, but to the extent that they make it easier to take off chunks of time, they might even increase pay disparity, not decrease it, particularly among educated women. Subsidized day care is not going to help anyone work 14 hours a day. You can mandate paternity leave, but you cannot mandate that men use it to take care of their kids, rather than getting some work in.

When married men were paid more than single women as a matter of explicit policy, this was relatively easy to fix. When married men are paid more than single women because their wives are relieving them of the burden of home duties, it’s a lot harder to describe a remedy. To the extent that it’s needed, the remaining work to be done on the pay gap has to be done in places where the government, or indeed any explicit policy, has difficulty going: inside families, or the subconscious recesses of our minds.

That's the central issue. What happens when the solution has to be freely chosen and occurs in domains beyond government influence?

That whirlwind of meatloaf is unleashed

From Ballistics by Billy Collins

The Effort
By Billy Collins

Would anyone care to join me
in flicking a few pebbles in the direction
of teachers who are fond of asking the question:
"What is the poet trying to say?"

as if Thomas Hardy and Emily Dickinson
had struggled but ultimately failed in their efforts—
inarticulate wretches that they were,
biting their pens and staring out the window for a clue.

Yes, it seems that Whitman, Amy Lowell
and the rest could only try and fail
but we in Mrs. Parker's third-period English class
here at Springfield High will succeed

with the help of these study questions
in saying what the poor poet could not,
and we will get all this done before
that orgy of egg salad and tuna fish known as lunch.

Tonight, however, I am the one trying
to say what it is this absence means,
the two of us sleeping and waking under different roofs.
The image of this vase of cut flowers,

not from our garden, is no help.
And the same goes for the single plate,
the solitary lamp, and the weather that presses its face
against these new windows--the drizzle and the
morning frost.

So I will leave it up to Mrs. Parker,
who is tapping a piece of chalk against the blackboard,
and her students—a few with their hands up,
others slouching with their caps on backwards—

to figure out what it is I am trying to say
about this place where I find myself
and to do it before the noon bell rings
and that whirlwind of meatloaf is unleashed.

Swamping one's soul in the sea of vapidity which overwhelms him who reads only "the last new books."

From A Book Lover's Holidays in the Open by Theodore Roosevelt, 1916. Chapter IX. The entire brief chapter is worth reading in its entirety.

Another matter which within certain rather wide limits each reader must settle for himself is the dividing line between (1) not knowing anything about current books, and (2) swamping one's soul in the sea of vapidity which overwhelms him who reads only "the last new books." To me the heading employed by some reviewers when they speak of "books of the week" comprehensively damns both the books themselves and the reviewer who is willing to notice them. I would much rather see the heading "books of the year before last." A book of the year before last which is still worth noticing would probably be worth reading; but one only entitled to be called a book of the week had better be tossed into the wastebasket at once. Still, there are plenty of new books which are not of permanent value but which nevertheless are worth more or less careful reading; partly because it is well to know something of what especially interests the mass of our fellows, and partly because these books, although of ephemeral worth, may really set forth something genuine in a fashion which for the moment stirs the hearts of all of us.

Books of more permanent value may, because of the very fact that they possess literary interest, also yield consolation of a non-literary kind. If any executive grows exasperated over the shortcomings of the legislative body with which he deals, let him study Macaulay's account of the way William was treated by his parliaments as soon as the latter found that, thanks to his efforts, they were no longer in immediate danger from foreign foes; it is illuminating. If any man feels too gloomy about the degeneracy of our people from the standards of their forefathers, let him read "Martin Chuzzlewit"; it will be consoling.

If the attitude of this nation toward foreign affairs and military preparedness at the present day seems disheartening, a study of the first fifteen years of the nineteenth century will at any rate give us whatever comfort we can extract from the fact that our great-grandfathers were no less foolish than we are.

Nor need any one confine himself solely to the affairs of the United States. If he becomes tempted to idealize the past, if sentimentalists seek to persuade him that the "ages of faith," the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, for instance, were better than our own, let him read any trustworthy book on the subject—Lea's[273] "History of the Inquisition," for instance, or Coulton's abridgment of Salimbene's memoirs. He will be undeceived and will be devoutly thankful that his lot has been cast in the present age, in spite of all its faults.

Showing up for a protest becomes a cognitive fashion statement, not a political act to effect change.

An interesting observation in Why Street Protests Don't Work by Moises Naim. Naim provides an example of what might be behind the issue.

Why? How can so many extremely motivated people achieve so little? One answer might be found in the results of an experiment conducted by Anders Colding-Jørgensen of the University of Copenhagen. In 2009, he created a Facebook group to protest the demolition of the historic Stork Fountain in a major square of the Danish capital. Ten thousand people joined in the first week; after two weeks, the group was 27,000 members-strong. That was the extent of the experiment. There was never a plan to demolish the fountain—Colding-Jørgensen simply wanted to show how easy it was to create a relatively large group using social media.

He concludes -

Behind massive street demonstrations there is rarely a well-oiled and more-permanent organization capable of following up on protesters’ demands and undertaking the complex, face-to-face, and dull political work that produces real change in government. This is the important point made by Zeynep Tufekci, a fellow at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University, who writes that “Before the Internet, the tedious work of organizing that was required to circumvent censorship or to organize a protest also helped build infrastructure for decision making and strategies for sustaining momentum. Now movements can rush past that step, often to their own detriment.”

There is a powerful political engine running in the streets of many cities. It turns at high speed and produces a lot of political energy. But the engine is not connected to wheels, and so the “movement” doesn’t move. Achieving that motion requires organizations capable of old-fashioned and permanent political work that can leverage street demonstrations into political change and policy reforms.

Back to the trade-off issue. As long as you do not suffer any of the consequences, it is easy to be pro or con on any topic, even enthusiastically pro or con. Showing up for a protest becomes a cognitive fashion statement, not a political act to effect change. Or so it seems. To effect change you have to give up one thing in order to accomplish another - you have to pay the price. There are a lot more people willing to go through the motions than there are people willing to actually pay the price.

The keenest enjoyment of the wilderness is reserved for him who enjoys also the garnered wisdom of the present and the past

Reading wisdom from Teddy Roosevelt, On the Mount Rushmore of Literary Life by Rebecca Joines Schinsky.

Roosevelt describes the opening of the world to the prosperous man of 1916, that narrow window when all was open and immemorial cultures were accessible to the contemporary in a way never seen before.

The grandest scenery of the world is his to look at if he chooses; and he can witness the[ix] strange ways of tribes who have survived into an alien age from an immemorial past, tribes whose priests dance in honor of the serpent and worship the spirits of the wolf and the bear. Far and wide, all the continents are open to him as they never were to any of his forefathers; the Nile and the Paraguay are easy of access, and the borderland between savagery and civilization; and the veil of the past has been lifted so that he can dimly see how, in time immeasurably remote, his ancestors—no less remote—led furtive lives among uncouth and terrible beasts, whose kind has perished utterly from the face of the earth.

And what should the culture man bring with him?

He will take books with him as he journeys; for the keenest enjoyment of the wilderness is reserved for him who enjoys also the garnered wisdom of the present and the past.

And which books?

I am sometimes asked what books I advise men or women to take on holidays in the open. With the reservation of long trips, where bulk is of prime consequence, I can only answer: The same books one would read at home.

Book suggestions will probably be helpful about in proportion to the outsider's knowledge of the mind and soul of the person to be helped

From A Book Lover's Holidays in the Open by Theodore Roosevelt, 1916. Chapter IX. The entire brief chapter is worth reading in its entirety.

I am sometimes asked what books I advise men or women to take on holidays in the open. With the reservation of long trips, where bulk is of prime consequence, I can only answer: The same books one would read at home. Such an answer generally invites the further question as to what books I read when at home. To this question I am afraid my answer cannot be so instructive as it ought to be, for I have never followed any plan in reading which would apply to all persons under all circumstances; and indeed it seems to me that no plan can be laid down that will be generally applicable. If a man is not fond of books, to him reading of any kind will be drudgery. I most sincerely commiserate such a person, but I do not know how to help him. If a man or a woman is fond of books he or she will naturally seek the books that the mind and soul demand. Suggestions of a possibly helpful character can be made by outsiders, but only suggestions; and they will probably be helpful about in proportion to the outsider's knowledge of the mind and soul of the person to be helped.

Of course, if any one finds that he never reads serious literature, if all his reading is frothy and trashy, he would do well to try to train himself to like books that the general agreement of cultivated and sound-thinking persons has placed among the classics. It is as discreditable to the mind to be unfit for sustained mental effort as it is to the body of a young man to be unfit for sustained physical effort. Let man or woman, young man or girl, read some good author, say Gibbon or Macaulay, until sustained mental effort brings power to enjoy the books worth enjoying. When this has been achieved the man can soon trust himself to pick out for himself the particular good books which appeal to him.

I know that I am not right about everything, and yet I am simultaneously convinced that I am.

From From creationism to ESP: Why believers ignore science by Laura Miller.

Fortunately for Storr, he wanted to write and he’s really good at it. Each chapter in “The Unpersuadables” plunges the author into a peculiar subculture, and each has its own narrative flavor. The account of a family who discovers that their late, estranged daughter and sister had fallen into the clutches of therapists convinced of the existence of networks of Satanic ritual child abusers, murderers and cannibals works like a detective story. Another on Lord Monckton, a famous British climate-change denier, is a profile in reactionary nostalgia as a way of life. The Morgellons chapter is, of course, a medical thriller, although the results are not vindicating when Storr finds a doctor willing to analyze some fibers for a sufferer. (Most medical professionals view even the request to have such lab work done as a symptom of a psychological disorder, but this particular physician had been afflicted with a rare parasite himself and sympathized.) And Storr tries — very, very hard, in a chapter resembling a courtroom drama — to get to the bottom of some troubling disputes surrounding the presiding saint of the skeptics movement, James Randi.

Running through all these stories is Storr’s growing uncertainty about certainty. In the first chapter, he presents his readers with a conundrum: “I consider — as everyone surely does — that my opinions are the correct ones,” yet to assume that he really is right about everything “would mean that I possess a superpower: a clarity of thought that is unique among human beings. Okay, fine. So accept that I am wrong about things — I must be wrong about them.” Yet when Storr surveys his own views, again, they all strike him as spot-on. “I know that I am not right about everything, and yet I am simultaneously convinced that I am. I believe these two things completely, and yet they are in catastrophic logical opposition to each other.”

Such rumination undermines Storr’s faith in his convictions, rooted as they once were in the rather quaint confidence that human beings make up their minds rationally. Instead, exploring recent developments in neuroscience, he learns that we believe first — engaging mental models formed early in life and rarely amenable to change — and come up with the reasons for it afterward. By the now-familiar process of confirmation bias, we ignore what doesn’t support our most favored notions, and shine a brilliant spotlight on the ones that do. Our minds operate unconsciously to a flabbergasting degree, while our consciousness is forced to tag along after, cooking up convincing rationales. “We do not get to choose our most passionately held views, as if we are selecting melons in a supermarket,” is Storr’s provocative conclusion.

I like Storr's articulation of the paradox of people's confidence. “I know that I am not right about everything, and yet I am simultaneously convinced that I am." If we logically accept that we are not right about everything, then the task is to identify what it is that we believe that is not true and eradicate that belief. But we don't do it.

None of us is consciously irrational or illogical or stupid. Consequently everything we believe, must be true, otherwise we would have corrected it. Therefore when we make decisions we must be making good decisions. And when things don't turn out they way they ought to have, then it is the fault of someone else and not ourselves.

The reality is that we do tolerate illogic, irrationality and dubious facts, we just work very hard to ignore that. I guess the resolution is that we do know that we are not right about everything but that we characterize the things about which we are incorrect as being trivial enough not to warrant the effort of investigation. We discount the risk adjusted cost of cognitive mismatch (the mismatch between our chosen belief and the measured reality). If we understood the real cost of holding ill-supported beliefs, we would likely invest more effort in assessing our beliefs. But because we don't understand that cost, and because we have built-in psychological mechanisms for attributing those costs to the failures of others, then we end up never improving our decision processes.

I wonder if this isn't behind the long run success of Protestant Christianity in general (accountable to God) and Calvinist based Christianity in particular, Judaism, Confucian-based cultures in northeast Asia. That with their focus on individual agency, responsibility and accountability, it discourages individuals from blaming others for their failure and thereby forces them to explore their own suppositions thereby creating an epistemeological feedback mechanism for improving knowledge and logic. I guess the counterfactual would be: Are there any cultures marked by long-term success which also disavow personal responsibility for cognitive hygiene?

Niels Bohr famously described a non-falsifiable scientific hypothesis as “not even wrong.”

From Mistakes To Avoid For Theologians Talking About Economics by Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry.

Gobry touches on an issue that Thomas Sowell discusses at length - the tendency of well intended parties to try and engage with subjects beyond their experience and comprehension to disastrous effect. As if good intentions were an adequate substitute for good outcomes. For both Sowell and Gobry, part of the issue is the reluctance to engage with the empirical world as is rather than the utopian world as we would want it to be.

Today, I want to focus on another problem I too often see in theological and religious commentary on economics, and I would call it aestheticism.

Like it or not, economics is an empirical discipline.

Yes, yes, economics is not as empirical as many economists think. Yes, yes, the mathematical models of economics have many problems and they are certainly not the only valid mode of inquiry into economics. And yes, certainly, just like every other sapientia, the fact that economics is empirical certainly does not immunize it from moral or theological judgement.

But any fruitful engagement with economics must start with what economics actually is and must be aware of its terms—either explicitly superseding them, or engaging it in those terms.

Niels Bohr famously described a non-falsifiable scientific hypothesis as “not even wrong.” By this he meant that, because the hypothesis could not be either proven or disproven through experiment or other empirical means, it was beyond the remit of science, and thus not even wrong.

Now, it’s fine to make non-scientific claims when you are not making science. But when we mistake science for theology — and vice versa — we make mistakes. When some clerics disputed the heliocentric model of the Solar System on the basis of scriptural evidence, they were not even wrong. They were doing bad science and (even worse) bad theology.

In economic theology, this most often takes the form of what I’ll call aestheticism—in other words, giving economic warrant to certain arrangements not on the basis of either empirical determination or (I would argue) good theology, but rather a romantic, aesthetic feeling.

Gobry provides some examples where papal declarations have sought to address economic issues in a theological fashion and then concludes:

The Church should either engage economics on its own terms or criticize it in a properly theological sense—what I call the prophetic voice. When St Basil the Great told his rich parishioners that their bread belongs to the poor, he was not doing economics, either good or bad, but he was preaching the Gospel, and that is of much higher value.

But what I call theological aestheticism tries to do both at the same time and, in the end, fails at both.

What I like about Gobry's comment is that he puts his finger on the root issue when arguing with non-empirical people. The first division is whether we are having an argument about facts or feelings. No point in adducing evidence if all we are doing is expressing feelings. No point in being upset if what we are addressing are the facts.

But often, non-empirical people elide the bifurcation. They attempt to cast empiricism as the same thing as subjectivism for exactly the reasons Gobry highlights. They think that because empiricists may not be as consistently empirical as they aspire to be; because the models and hypotheses with which they work often turn out to be erroneous; and because empiricists often also fail to maintain consistency in distinguishing between facts and assumptions (beliefs, opinions), that therefore empiricism is really just subjectivism with numbers. It isn't. Empiricism can be practiced well or poorly but it is none-the-less distinct from subjectivism.

There are some questions we can answer under defined conditions even though it might take a long while to get to a useful answer. There are other questions that can never be answered because they are purely a function of value systems. It is important to recognize the difference.