Category: science

18 Morality? Oh THAT’S rich…

March 15, 2012
by Crommunist
· blog · crime · ethics · poverty · psychology · science

Now I have no idea how many people actually believe this, and maybe I’m late to the party, but it seems that the criminal justice system is set up in such a way that people on the lowest socioeconomic rungs bear the brunt of the punishment. Sure, part of it is the fact that the very wealthy can afford lawyers and have more familial strings to pull to reduce the charge. But that stuff is extra-judicial. That’s not the way the justice system is set up – that’s the way the entire political/economic/social system is set up. It’s rigged for the rich – everyone knows that.

But the criminal justice system itself – the way the laws are enforced, what we think of when we conjure an image of ‘crime’, the kinds of cases we prosecute and the way we go about executing ‘justice’ – these all seem to be in the business of punishing the poor. Steal $50 from someone on the street and you’re a monster – steal several trillion and you’re appointed to the president’s economic council. We actually have the gall to distinguish between ‘crime’ and ‘white collar crime’, as though one is the nicer version of the other.

Now there are a number of potential explanations for this, but certainly one of them is that poor people are just less trustworthy. I was offered that hypothesis straight-faced by someone at Skeptics in the Pub a couple of months ago – poor people are poor because they’re immoral and lack the decency to work their way out of poverty. The wealthy are less criminal because they’re more moral, right? Yeah, looks like the opposite is true: … Continue Reading

51 I quit

March 9, 2012
by Crommunist
· blog · funny · personal · science

For as long as I can remember, I have been deeply fascinated by science. One of my earliest memories involves a cross-country trip (nothing can prepare you for how immense Canada is – you have to drive across it) with a big stack of science books – of course the highlight of the whole trip was the Royal Tyrell Museum of Paleontology in Drumheller, Alberta. As a matter of fact, the second-most difficult decision I’ve ever had to make was in high school, when I had to choose whether to pursue a career in science or music. The most difficult, incidentally, was deciding whether my best friend would live or die*.

Science has always been a huge part of my life, which is why I am devastated to say that I am going to have to quit:

In a recent experiment, Paul Vasey of Canada’s University of Lethbridge and Barnaby Dixson of New Zealand’s Victoria University of Wellington found that while beards may be stylish, and are probably a mark of alpha males, they aren’t necessarily a key tool for attracting the ladies. “Women … do not rate bearded faces as more attractive than clean-shaven faces,” the researchers wrote in the journal Behavioral Ecology.

(snip)

Both men and women said that with beards, the men looked older and more aggressive than they did with their beards shaved. The viewers also ascribed higher social status to the men when they were bearded than when they were baby-faced. Women said that the clean-shaven faces were more attractive than the whiskery ones.

There comes a time in everyone’s life where they are forced to choose between their deeply-held personal beliefs, and the scientific consensus. Many people find it difficult to accept scientific evidence for the age of the earth. Others find the vastness of the cosmos too daunting and shut out the evidence for the Big Bang. Still others cannot bring themselves to accept the fact that all life is descended from a common ancestor, in defiance of the Genesis account. It seems that I am forced to make the same decision.

Look at this face: … Continue Reading

20 Show her the money!

March 8, 2012
by Crommunist
· anti-racism · blog · economics · feminism · news · skepticism

Happy International Women’s Day!

In every field, at every level of education, men earn more than women. That’s the grim takeaway of this new report [PDF] from the U.S. Census Bureau, which assesses the value of a higher education in the United States—and illustrates the persistent pay gap between male and female employees who hold comparable degrees. In short, education is valuable, but it’s most lucrative if you’re male.

I have more patience than some others when it comes to stupid attitudes about sexism and feminism. Part of that is simple privilege: I can afford to not take those kinds of attitudes personally; however, some of my zen is honestly come by. I’ve always called myself a feminist, but my understanding of that term didn’t really mature until I became involved in organized skepticism. I then came to understand feminism as a branch of skepticism – learning to unpack and, in a way, debunk claims about gender roles, sex characteristics, history, and a whole host of others. In fact, the level of overlap between feminism and anti-racism has helped enhance my understanding of both topics.

I can kind of understand the problem though, and it relates directly to that overlap. I care deeply about anti-racism for, at least in part, fundamentally selfish reasons. While I must always start this statement with the huge caveat that I have managed to escape the worst aspects of racism in my own life, racism still very much affects my day-to-day life. I have, therefore, a vested interest in seeing the world pay more critical attention to race and race issues. Because of this selfish motive, it is easy for me to empathize with women and recognize the multitude of similarities in the problems we face. However, it took me several years to come to this conclusion. … Continue Reading

8 CASS: Skepticism FTW

March 6, 2012
by Crommunist
· blog · Canada · CFI Vancouver · forces of stupid · science · skepticism

I don’t claim to understand the climate science. I am not a climatologist, I haven’t cracked the literature, and even if I did I lack the training to fully parse truth from falsehood. I am confident in accepting the scientific consensus, however, because of the advocacy by people whose opinions I have come to trust and whose credibility has been demonstrated to me. When I read the work of someone who clearly has a grasp on critiquing evidence and weighing claims based on the facts rather than elaborate conspiracy theories about a New World Order plot to ban incandescent lightbulbs, I have no difficulty accepting the fact of the human contribution to global warming. Folks like Orac, or Darksyde, or Mano – they keep my head straight when I get confused, and they’re who I refer inquisitive friends to.

There’s another group that I rely on heavily when I need some expertise outside my own background:

A group of scientists is raising alarm about “incorrect science” in a course at Ottawa’s Carleton University that was taught for three years by a climate change skeptic. “We describe a case in which noted climate change deniers have gained access to the Canadian higher education system through a course taught at Carleton University,” the Ottawa-based Committee for the Advancement of Scientific Skepticism said in a report this week.

But the course instructor, Tom Harris, denies there are any problems with the science he taught. CASS, which says its goal is to “critically [examine] scientific, technological and medical claims in public discourse,” said its audit of video lectures and course materials for the second-year course called “Climate Change: An Earth Sciences Perspective” found the course to be biased and inaccurate. … Continue Reading

6 Black Canadians: outcomes, attitudes, and evidence

February 27, 2012
by Crommunist
· black history · blog · Canada · critical thinking · economics · history · race · racism · sociology

This morning I walked you through a crude statistical analysis of labour participation in black Canadians, showing that while the experiences of black Canadians runs parallel to that of African-Americans, it is not directly comparable. However, a more detailed look at the evidence suggests a slightly different picture – black men face a 22% wage gap for identical work when compared to their non-black counterparts, even when controlling for age, education, experience, and other potential explanatory factors.

There is an old truism within the black community (and a similar one among women) that one is expected to work twice as hard as whites to achieve identical success. While 22% is not 50%, it is still a fact that black men do not see the same results for their (our) hard work. Mensah spends a few pages going through two alternate explanations that are offered for this and other kinds of race-based disparities: the class argument and the culture argument, before arriving at his (and my) explanatory model: the race argument.

The class argument – “race is just a function of class”

Some theorists argue that when we measure race-based differences between groups, what we are actually measuring is a function of socioeconomic class. The solutions to these discrepancies, therefore, must be through programs targeted at class mobility rather than anti-racism. This argument is unsurprisingly popular, as it allows us to maintain our illusion of a ‘post-racial’ society in which racism is the domain of a handful of bad people. However, the evidence (the above statistic included) does not support class as the primary explanatory factor driving inequalities between blacks and whites. … Continue Reading

0 Black Canadians: Making it work

February 27, 2012
by Crommunist
· black history · blog · Canada · economics · history · race · sociology

This is the fourth and final instalment in a series of posts I am writing in my annual commemoration of Black History Month. My inspiration, and source of historical material, is a book by Joseph Mensah called Black Canadians: history, experiences, social conditions. As I work my way through the book, I will be blogging my reactions and things that stand out. You can read the first post here, and its follow-up here. The second post is here. The third post is here, and its follow-up is here.

Last week I made reference to the problems inherent in understanding Canadian black culture.The cultural juggernaut that is the United States dominates media expressions of ‘the black experience’, and because of porous cultural borders (and the comparatively small number of black Canadians) much of black Canadian culture is defined in similar terms as those of African Americans. The problem with this approach, obviously, is that black Canadians and African Americans have very different histories (as I hope the past few weeks worth of posts have demonstrated).

Similarly, much of the racial scholarship around the realities of being black are, in fact, the realities of being African-American. The kinds of systemic racism that we see all to often in the United States may not, in fact, be reflected in the Canadian experience. After all, Canada and the United States have vastly different approaches to immigration, citizenship, and multiculturalism (encapsulated in Canada’s ‘mosaic’ model, vs. America’s ‘melting pot’ model). We know from the vast available stores of data and analysis that anti-black racism is a real economic problem in the United States. The obvious question we must ask is do the experiences of black Canadians reflect those of African Americans?

The answer seems to be “no and yes” … Continue Reading

155 OMG LOOK, CATS!

February 23, 2012
by Crommunist
· blog · funny · personal · science

For as long as I can remember, I’ve disliked cats. I probably got the attitude from my father, who was allergic and disliked animal hair on his black slacks (he wore black slacks a lot – my dad’s got style). It’s not usually a big deal – I don’t hate cats or anything, I’m just not a fan. If you can split the world into ‘cat people’ and ‘dog people’ I am totally a ‘dog person’. I love dogs. They’re awesome. Cats are some special combination of insane, needy and dickish; dogs just want to play. Plus you can train dogs to do stuff – cats train you.

I don’t like cats, is what I’m saying.

But you know who does like cats? The fucking internet. I can’t go three links on Reddit without someone posting a picture of their goddamn cat doing something completely uninteresting. “Look, he’s sitting in a shoebox!” Hi-fucking-larious, bro! A million upvotes for you! “Look, she’s chasing a laser pointer because of an instinctual attraction to movement and a lack of comprehension of human technology!” Wowee! I’ve never seen that a million times before! That certainly didn’t stop being amusing to me by the time I turned 8!

I don’t like people who go nuts about cats, is what I’m saying.

But now I think I have a bit more sympathy for them: … Continue Reading

12 The power of Dr. House

February 23, 2012
by Crommunist
· blog · health · poverty · science

I was recently reflecting on a fact that I usually ignore: I am in excellent health. That’s not to say I’m in excellent shape (I’m not), but I am able to live a more or less ‘normal’ life completely free of any infirmity. I don’t have any recurrent pain, difficulty sleeping, food allergies, mental distress, social anxiety… basically I’m kicking ass at life. When I consider what the reality is for many people, even if I restrict my thinking only to those in North America, I am still coming out ahead of a good chunk of the population who has to interact with the health care system in one way or another.

It is somewhat ironic that I make a living researching ways to improve the health care system, but that the only time I actually interface with it is when I go to the office. The irony expands a bit when I think of the myriad of ways in which people’s ill health makes working either an impossibility or a real difficulty. Even with a publicly-funded health care system, there is a severe economic consequence associated with illness. This association diminishes somewhat in white-collar jobs (unless you have some kind of injury that interferes with cognition, or a mental illness that makes knowledge work difficult), but your health is the foundation of your entire life if you work in a trade – a busted knee or a broken finger means the difference between working and starving.

Interestingly, the relationship between health and wealth works in the other direction as well. While the correlation between education/income and health are well-understood in the realm of health research, the evidence supporting causation is somewhat less robust. However, the picture is getting a little clearer: … Continue Reading

26 The bankruptcy of racism

February 9, 2012
by Crommunist
· blog · economics · race · racism · science

Many of the topics we discuss here are personal, at least insofar as race is concerned. We talk about the effect race has on colouring people’s experiences, on how they may perceive identical treatment quite differently. I’ve occasionally shared some anecdotes from my own life to underscore some point or another. This is no accident – race and experiences of racism are incredibly personal, and the facts can often not be divorced from the subjective experience.

That being said, I hope that you haven’t been left with the impression that racism only has interpersonal consequences. From the get-go, I have been trying to convey the fact that attitudes about race work their way into every aspect of our lives, often without our knowledge or consent (and certainly without the consent against whom the weight of racism is pressed).

It is a fact, therefore, that if you scratch the surface of just about any human activity, you will find racism simmering just below the surface: … Continue Reading

18 Stupidity, conservatism, and racism: more than meets the eye

February 2, 2012
by Crommunist
· blog · critical thinking · crommunism · hate · psychology · science

So this morning I scrutinized a study by Hodson and Busseri that purports to show that the link between low cognitive ability and prejudice is moderated largely by political ideology; namely, that stupidity makes you conservative, and conservativism makes you racist. They conducted two experiments to test their model, and the results of their study supported the hypothesis. Hooray! More science with which to thrash conservatives, right?

Well, as you may have guessed from the title of this piece, the results of this study may be a bit ~~Decepticon~~ deceptive.

Okay, enough of that. Welllll… maybe just one more:

Starscream 2012!

As much fun as it would be to simply say “case closed, conservatives are racist cuz ur dum”, it would be decidedly un-skeptical. There were a number of things that jumped out at me about this paper, and I’m going to try and detail where I think the authors over-step their conclusions. … Continue Reading

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