If a significant portion of the population has a market value lower than the cost for them to have a reasonable quality of life isn't that some kind of fundamental failure condition for society/humanity?
Is there a more rigorous explanation of why they count the probability space how they do? Watching that video I feel like the ordering of the kids and the striking of one of the "b2b2" entries seems wrong to me. If we care which kid was first... which doesn't seem to matter... then the first b2b2 and the second b2b2 seem like they're different and shouldn't "cancel."
Then again... it took me multiple explanations to understand the Monty Hall problem.
Yeah, it definitely seems wrong to me. B2B2 has twice the probability of any other event listed in that table.
edit: I guess it's more nuanced than that. The explanation and interpretation sections on this blog post [1] and on wikipedia talk about the controversy.
This B2/B2 elimination also immediately jumped out to me as being wrong.
But a Youtube comment wrote:
> "But the thing is, I ran a few tests through a big randomized sample set, and... he's right. It's super weir … the second boy-girl problem had ~51.9% change of containing a girl. Keep in mind this was about 100 million randomized samples too."
So I think intuitively, something that might make sense to you is that the reason that BB is more common with the restriction that a boy must be on Tuesday is that having 2 boys increases the probability that you will have a boy that was born on Tuesday.
Here's another way to think about it. It's twice as likely to have one girl and one boy (either BG or GB) compared to having 2 boys. Thus, the version of the paradox where you're given that the parent has a boy results in a 2/3 chance of the other child being a girl.
However, the more unlikely it is that any given boy satisfies the condition (in this case the condition would be being born on a Tuesday), the more likely the BB case becomes compared to BG or GB.
More concretely, if only 1/n of the boys satisfies some condition, you would be left with only 1/n of BG or GB, while you would be left with 2/n - 1/(n^2) of BB. In this case, let the population be all parents with at least one boy (this consists 1/3 of BB, 1/3 of BG, and 1/3 of GB). Letting n = 7, (BG union GB) represents (1/7)(2/3)=2/21 of the population, while BB represents (2/7 - 1/49)(1/3) = 13/147 of the population.
I hope that's a more intuitive way of thinking about it. The important part is realizing the differences between knowing that the parent has a boy vs knowing that the parent has a boy born on Tuesday.
>having 2 boys increases the probability that you will have a boy that was born on Tuesday.
I guess. But the fact that it happened to be Tuesday isn't really important. The person could just as easily have had a kid on Wednesday. And all the logic would be the same. And the kid has to be born on some day of the week. How does finding out what day it was give us any additional information about the other child? It's completely independent!
I think the main thing here depends on your interpretation of how the parent is chosen.
Let's say the question is the same, but we relax the requirement that the boy is born on Tuesday. Do you think the probability that the other child is a girl is 2/3 or 1/2?
For those like me who didn't immediately understand where this came from:
P(atleast one of two boys satisfies the condition)
= 1 - P(neither of two boys satisfies the condition)
= 1 - [P(a boy doesn't satisfy the condition)]^2
= 1 - [1 - P(a boy satisfies the condition)]^2
= 1 - [1 - 1/n]^2
= 2/n - 1/n^2
The article seems to address that in the second chart. When a woman publishes with only women they get the 9% bump they're supposed to. When they publish with a mixed-gender group they get only 4%, and when they publish with only men they get almost no benefit. Is this what you were asking?
I wonder if they controlled for age in this study. Women in the sciences are younger than men (on average), so a dual-female paper is more likely to be from two contemporaries, while a dual-male paper could more easily be from an old prof and a young one. From what I've seen, the more established author tends to get more of the credit/prestige, even though the less-established one tends to do more of the work.
The story seems to be that when Janet writes with George, her colleagues infer that George deserves the credit. That might be a reasonable inference if women were more likely to join research collaborations as the junior partner, but in fact Ms. Sarsons finds that they are less likely to do this.
That does seem very flawed. If there's a strong correlation between gender and age in the field then why would that be not accounted for? I can definitely see people assuming the older person was the brains/leader of a project.
I'm going to copy some of the comments I made over there. Hopefully this is acceptable.
The study does not say there is price discrimination, but it heavily implies it. The WSJ article does say there is discrimination.
First of all, I think the article falls into some kind of Political Correctness trap by claiming that certain products are for boys and others are for girls. Why couldn't a boy want the pink scooter? Why couldn't a girl want red?
Building on that, if we see the pink one as "girls" and the red one as "boys" then it does look like discrimination. However, if we view the red one as "neutral/base color" and the pink one as a less popular "color option" it seems less like discrimination and more like paying for a unique customization. Do we know there isn't a blue scooter priced the same as pink?
The conclusion (of the study) states:
> DCA found, on average, that women pay approximately 7 percent more than men for similar products. Products’ price differences based on gender are largely inescapable for female consumers simply due to the product offerings available in the market.
This seems fundamentally contradictory to me. If the products are sufficiently similar but priced differently, why would women buy the "women's version?" What makes it "inescapable?" If product A is so much better than product B, such that buying Product A is "inescapable," I'd expect a difference of more than 7% in price.
The Wall Street Journal seems to draw the reasonable conclusion in its headline: Women should buy the "men's product."
The title needs a colon or something. Right now it reads like only women involved in Gender Studies pay more for stuff.
The article is pretty interesting. There are a few stark contrasts where you see the exact same item costing twice as much in pink than red.
I think there is an interesting philosophical debate to be had here (which the article implies, but doesn't address): Is this gender-based price discrimination? I'm going to contend: no.
First of all, I think the article falls into some kind of Political Correctness trap by claiming that certain products are for boys and others are for girls. Why couldn't a boy want the pink scooter? Why couldn't a girl want red?
Building on that, if we see the pink one as "girls" and the red one as "boys" then it does look like discrimination. However, if we view the red one as "neutral/base color" and the pink one as a less popular "color option" it seems less like discrimination and more like paying for a unique customization. Do we know there isn't a blue scooter priced the same as pink?
Let's look at the jeans. Are the Men's and women's jeans actually the same? Probably not. I'm guessing the women's jeans are cut much differently. When I was in Boy Scouts I (male, with typical male proportions) bought the "Adult Womens'" uniform because it was cut different and fit me better. I didn't actually notice the price because that was back in the glory days of my parents buying me stuff, but I would have chosen the "womens'" uniform even if it were twice the price.
The conclusion states:
> DCA found, on average, that women pay approximately 7 percent more than men for similar products. Products’ price differences based on gender are largely inescapable for female consumers simply due to the product offerings available in the market.
This seems fundamentally contradictory to me. If the products are sufficiently similar but priced differently, why would women buy the "women's version?" What makes it "inescapable?" If product A is so much better than product B, such that buying Product A is "inescapable," I'd expect a difference of more than 7% in price.
Forget smoothsort, it loses out to insertion sort even. Divide-and-conquer n*lg n algorithms tend to switch to insertion sort when the size of the partition goes below a certain value because of how fast insertion sort is.
Even if you're right (which I disagree) you need to be way more tactful with this type of thing or you stoke the "programming is misogynist" fire.
Responding more directly:
> "I tried to politely decline"
> she strung him along
It could be interesting to see the exact conversations, but I don't think she "strung him along" as much as just never told him to stop "forcefully enough". Regardless, even if she had been banging the guy, stop means stop. Besides that, she shouldn't have had to decline anything in the first place... This is why you don't ask out women in professional settings: there is no good way for them to say "no".
It seems like in this case there is relatively objective evidence. I agree this is super tricky, but I don't think it has much to do with "he said she said".
I believe the core issue here is that the bad actor has so much clout he cannot be held accountable by anyone involved. I would expect the problem to generalize to way more than just conferences.
I'm not sure there is much the conference can really do, especially without risking the same backlash against our author that she is trying to avoid by not exposing him.
It’s possible the conference organizers are simply unjust or don’t understand, but we should consider why, in this particular example, the conference may have had to be unjust. What if cancelling this speaker would be so detrimental it would stop the conference? As an organizer, what would you do? In a situation like this, especially if some money has been collected and things like that, the organizers may not be allowed to make such a significant change due to competing obligations from the people who paid.
Even if they could evict him, how would the conference describe his removal? Couldn't this description cause the same backlash that's keeping our author from exposing him herself?
One question that’s on my mind is: is there anything criminal in his conduct? Could our author get a restraining order against the guy? Maybe our author can get the restraining order against the man, and then just go to the conference and call the police to remove him. That's my best attempt at a fair solution, but do keep in mind it would involve blind-siding the conference with the loss of a speaker. This might be necessary, as it seems the conference doesn't have the power to stop this guy without their hand being forced in this way. Also, I don't really know enough about law to say this plan is remotely feasible, but it’s the best I can come up with.
