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I'd consider it the left trying to have their cake and eat it too. It is trying to enforce the association of a particular behaviour to a particular biological sex. Which may or may not be the case.

I'm not really sure what you're getting at here. From where I sit, the left is not trying to enforce an association between behavior and biological sex. It is quite the opposite, in fact. Trying to enforce, for example, the notion of strong, stoic men has resulted in generations of emotionally immature men with anger issues. From what I've seen, there is more of a push to break down the strict boundaries of gender roles to allow room for more personal expression. To some extant, the feminist movement has moved the goalposts for women, allowing them to express more traditionally masculine traits and to get involved in rough sports, etc. On the flip side, however, image the reaction by many if a little boy when to school wearing a pink, frilly dress. Quite frankly, in many places, this boy would be in physical danger for something as trivial as clothing choice.

What do you mean by "gender"

In the most basic sense, I mean gender as the male/female dichotomy as a social construct. See the American Psychological Associations's description for more details.

To those that push identity politics it seems to almost be like a religion, making claims about some 'innate sense of being' about a particular sex.

When did you decide to identify as a man or woman? I'm honestly not trolling here. Instead, I just want to illustrate how for the majority of people, this is a nonsense, no-brainer question. For some, however, this is a very difficult question. I have known several trans people, and one common thread that is echoed across everything that I've read is that even as a small child, they have had a sense of being the opposite gender of their biological sex.

Certainly identity politics is fraught with bad politics/power plays, etc., but please don't think that this is only something the the left is guilty of. The far-right's obsession with immigration and fear of the loss of white culture is identity politics at its worst.

It's all well and good for people to have weird and wonderful senses of spirituality, but it isn't cool to push them on others. Some clearly male person with stereo-typically feminine traits claims to be female? fine, but others don't have to agree and are entitled to think the person is deluded, that instead it's fine for guys to be how they are and it doesn't change them being guys.

If you want to think transgender people are deluded, that's fine - you can think whatever you want. At the same time, though, you should recognize that trans people have existed for a long time in different cultures.

Literally, all that most trans people want is to just live their lives as the gender of their choice. They don't want to push anything on you, only to be treated with respect, be addressed with a particular set of pronouns, and live according to how they picture themselves. Why is this such a big ask?

We were smarter in the 1950's

IQ-wise, no question.

Turns out not. IQ-wise, we are much smarter now. They have to continuously recalibrate IQ tests to keep the average at 100. (Google the Flynn Effect)

> argues layer after layer after layer that humanity has systematically overvalued the punitive signal for behaviour modification

There is a significant behavior between this and idea that punishment does not work. That punishment can be, and has been, overused in some circumstances is not in question. There are numerous papers, such as this one from the American Psychiatric Association, http://www.apa.org/news/press/.... There is also this publication from the National Institute of Justice on the effectiveness of punishment as deterrence, https://nij.gov/five-things/pa... .

If I might say, the NIJ publication is particularly interesting. It points out that the severity of sentencing does little to deter crime, but the _certainty_ of sentencing does.

In this case not just your data but specifically tracking you purchases as related to the advertising you viewed in order to analyse the most effective advertising methods in order to more effectively manipulate your choice, regardless of how poorly that purchase served you needs. Basically a big ole fuck you transaction, tied to which lies are the most effective when it comes to sucking you in. Corporate level, AI, major douche baggery, how to be more of a cunt con person selling you over priced shit , that is unfit for purpose, beyond it being cheap to produce and sold with massive mark ups, !00 %, 1,000%, 10,000% anything goes, this is for AI crafted, individual targeted, style of ads, nothing to do with product, just how your gullibility can be most effectively targeted to pay way too much for way too little and basically big ole fuck you, to customer satisfaction.

What style of ad most effectively pushed you purchase to a particular product. This is actually pretty criminal and the https://www.apa.org/ should review this activity and consider banning professionals who would corrupt their knowledge to the detriment of every one the psychologically attack.

Keep in mind this is in total disregard to your mental health, how much they damage your psychology, as long as you pay too much for too little.

This also works out because Whites and Asians have an average IQ that's close to, and perhaps slightly above, 100.

Whites, asians, blacks, and latinos all have IQ scores that are close to 100.

YES, that part IS disproportionate. And the causes appear to be, at least in part, sociological in nature.

Prove it.

CAN DO!

Factors Impacting Women's Participation in STEM Fields.

Women in STEM: Challenges and determinants of success and well-being.

Why Female Students Leave STEM.

That was like 2 minutes of google cutting and pasting. You didn't really think this one through did you? "Gender studies" as part of humanities is one of those things that bored people go on and on about. And all I have to show is that there are SOME factors. Unless you can show that NOTHING in any of these papers and articles has any impact, you've got to yield to this one.

But seriously, nature vs nurture is an old debate that obviously isn't one-sided. You ARE a dumbfuck if you think it's all one or the other.

. Personality is also genetic. I don't know enough about the relationship between genetics and personality just yet to comment on if this has some correlation to race so I tend to leave that one alone.

Too late.

Nature isn't outdated. At least I don't think so. Our nature is fine tuned to survival

It's tuned to survive in a hunter-gatherer society that fucks at 15, most babies die before 5, and most people never see more than 200 people in their lifetime. Times have changed.

Supporting girls in STEM to the exclusion of boys is sexist.

I don't. As stated. Try reading shit instead of shoveling it into my mouth.

How about instead of worrying about what race and gender the people in these occupations are we simply allow people to choose freely which jobs they want?

We do. This is a highschool class. Kids are not adults and should be guided towards good paths. FURTHERMORE, taking AP comSci is also a choice for these girls.

Of what?

I wrote before what you convinced me of believing.

Yeah, yeah, grammar and geography. Whelp, you've convinced me you're a dumb fuck and an ass. Listen, Peterson is a smart guy and I believe a lot of what he says. He's careful not to step over the line from fact to opinion. You're not. Regurgitating his statements and adding your own interpretation isn't going so well for you. It makes you look not only like an idiot, but a racist sexist idiot.

Claims with no citations? You're either an idiot or an outright troll/liar.

A small sampling of the citations linked in the post in question:
http://www.city-journal.org/20...
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi...
http://www.umass.edu/legal/Ben...
http://www.jstor.org/discover/...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/Publ...
http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub...
http://www.motherjones.com/pol...
https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/abst...
https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/abst...
http://www.jstor.org/discover/...
http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinf...
http://www.jstor.org/discover/...
https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles...
https://www.ncjrs.gov/app/abst...
http://qje.oxfordjournals.org/...
http://www.sentencingproject.o...
http://online.wsj.com/articles...
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa...
https://www.law.upenn.edu/live...
That's enough citations that I then have to add in this line because the stupid post filter thinks the average line length is too short. That's enough citations that I then have to add in this line because the stupid post filter thinks the average line length is too short. That's enough citations that I then have to add in this line because the stupid post filter thinks the average line length is too short. That's enough citations that I then have to add in this line because the stupid post filter thinks the average line length is too short. That's enough citations that I then have to add in this line because the stupid post filter thinks the average line length is too short.

Did they correct for the issue that very smart people are likely to lead groups with different functions than moderately smart people? Maybe there is a correlation between high intelligence and leading groups that work under very large time pressure or under poorly - defined constraints?

Hard to say, my library doesn't pay for online access to the article, but the abstract says,

Accounting for the effects of leader personality, gender, age, as well as company, country, and time fixed effects, analyses indicated that perceptions of leadership followed a curvilinear inverted-U function of intelligence.

So at least some possible correlations are removed.

Have you heard of childhood amnesia? https://www.apa.org/science/ab...

Most likely for you to remember your cat dying, it had to be traumatic. Since then you probably processed it and put it in perspective and moved on. Now you remember it as just another event but at the time it probably wasn't just another event; it was probably a major event.

You mean, apart from women being neurotic?

It is a fact, confirmed by established research, that women are significantly more likely than men to exhibit neurotic traits such as "depression, panic disorder, phobias," and so on. For example, see

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/know-your-mind/201306/the-stressed-sex-1

and

http://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/0022-3514.94.1.168

For example, he states that women are more neurotic and less able to deal with stress. We know that isn't true, because we have studied it in great detail.

You make a claim without substantiating it. From the quick google I see something different. The number of stressors could be a factor or the way the brain operates but either way there is more to it than what you lead on. Also, the links to his original memo were initially stripped out, did you check his sources or are assuming he was making unsubstantiated claims like you?

  Considering the guy was fired and the responses in TFS it does sound like people were screeching autistically because someone said something they didn't like.

A 1984 meta-analysis found an IQ to job performance correlation coefficient ranging from 0.2 to 0.6, meaning that between 4% and 36% of the variance in job performance can be explained by IQ. Other factors account for the rest of the variance.

For income, the research consensus of correlation coefficients appear to ranging between 0.4 and 0.5, meaning that between 16% and 25% of income variance can be explained by IQ. An individual's location, inherited wealth, race, education, perseverance, and social connections are more important factors than IQ.

"Is being transgender a mental disorder?"

A psychological state is considered a mental disorder only if it causes significant distress or disability. Many transgender people do not experience their gender as distressing or disabling, which implies that identifying as transgender does not constitute a mental disorder. For these individuals, the significant problem is finding affordable resources, such as counseling, hormone therapy, medical procedures and the social support necessary to freely express their gender identity and minimize discrimination. Many other obstacles may lead to distress, including a lack of acceptance within society, direct or indirect experiences with discrimination, or assault. These experiences may lead many transgender people to suffer with anxiety, depression or related disorders at higher rates than nontransgender persons.

According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), people who experience intense, persistent gender incongruence can be given the diagnosis of "gender dysphoria." Some contend that the diagnosis inappropriately pathologizes gender noncongruence and should be eliminated. Others argue that it is essential to retain the diagnosis to ensure access to care. The International Classification of Diseases (ICD) is under revision and there may be changes to its current classification of intense persistent gender incongruence as "gender identity disorder."

(source)

It is not considered a disorder in itself, the adverse effects resulting from it are.

Maybe stronger, but not to live longer. Short term ok, but avoid long term stress.

"Telomeres are a protective casing at the end of a strand of DNA. Each time a cell divides, it loses a bit of its telomeres. An enzyme called telomerase can replenish it, but chronic stress and cortisol exposure decrease your supply. When the telomere is too diminished, the cell often dies or becomes pro-inflammatory. This sets the aging process in motion, along with associated health risks."

http://www.apa.org/monitor/201...

I actually don't care if employees share salary information - those that want to share are, as far as I'm concerned, free to do so. Generally, I think the best compensated employees will be the least likely to share because they realize less productive employees may be jealous of them. Generally the least skilled workers seem to think they are much better than they are.

I certainly would have no interest in participating in "collective bargaining" for my job. Nor do I think hardly any of my coworkers that I've respected would be interested in doing so. However, I have no problem with others participating in collective bargaining. If a group of employees got together and wanted to bargain collectively and I made policy, I would urge them to try to unionize. But if they didn't want to, or couldn't get enough of their coworkers to vote to unionize, I think I would generally be happy to evaluate each employee in the group, determine what raise I thought each deserved, then distribute that raise pool equally (as a percentage) among the group. I would share with any employee that requested what their contribution to the common raise pool was (obviously I could not give that information to other employees though). Of course, no employees have ever requested collective bargaining in my organizations or in any around me so I've never had to actually face this question.

If you conducted a anonymous survey among all the employees in your statistically significantly sized group (perhaps Department, perhaps below) and asked "Do you believe, among employees in this group who perform similar jobs, that you perform ABOVE or BELOW or RIGHT AT the median?", do you think the number of people who respond "BELOW" would be statistically the same as those who respond "ABOVE"? I strongly suspect that more will select ABOVE than BELOW.

Generally in the US work environment, I've found that low performers are much more likely to overestimate their skills and contributions while high performers are more likely to underestimate or accurately estimate theirs.

Interestingly, some studies have suggested that

the least competent performers inflate their abilities the most; that the reason for the overinflation seems to be ignorance, not arrogance; and that chronic self-beliefs, however inaccurate, underlie both people's over and underestimations of how well they're doing.

An example of this I recall outside my direct field was an acquaintance who was a lab tech who seriously believed that she did the same work as the engineers but wasn't paid as much. This was completely ignorance on her part -- she had no idea what the engineers did outside the lab because she didn't delve into what engineers were doing the other 95% of the time when they weren't in the lab.

As far as the risk I will never get a quality employee who feels like they have been pushing themselves too hard etc... I don't see why requesting salary information would affect that significantly. I would want an explanation of why they were interested in taking a pay cut to work in my organization. Reasons like "more interesting work", or "bored with doing the same old work" might be very legitimate if they were clearly overpaid in their past job (which sometimes happens because someone has become the critical expert or has a critical skill that the employer is so terrified of losing that they effectively "bribe" the person to stay but the person isn't happy and, likely, isn't even doing their best work due to poor morale).

However, in most groups I've managed I probably would not accept the "pushing myself too hard" unless the person was also dropping to a job with less critical responsibility. Outside of a couple employees I've had that were techs rather than engineers, everyone in my group has been on salary so working "less for less salary" is too difficult to manage. As well, most organizations I've been in/manag

Newsflash: sex isn't binary, after all, and intersex people are collateral damage in the pseudochristian jihad against LGBT folk:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.isna.org/faq/what_i...
http://www.apa.org/topics/lgbt...
http://www.usatoday.com/story/...

Well said. The only thing I would add is research shows that willpower is a limited resource and is depleted and replenished over time. A successful diet requires managing that resource and not starving yourself of willpower because that's when you fall off the wagon and the diet breaks or fails completely.

Finding ways to make yourself feel good about the diet and the progress you're making, along with normal day to day happiness is crucial for a successful diet. This is 10 times more important for people who use food as a form of comfort, which is a fair number of overweight folks.

If I had to guess, I'd assume that UK kids are probably somewhat better off in terms of "book material" than their forebears, though independent assessments of reasoning skills (i.e., non-curricular tests similar to IQ tests), etc. seem to show mild declines.

I thought that IQ tests showed marked improvements in abstract/conceptual reasoning skills, and moderate increase in vocabulary skills (4 point increase in vocab skills amongst schoolchildren from 1953 to 2006).
http://www.apa.org/monitor/201...
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...

I never trust Malcom Gladwell, but he's quoted in that second article saying the exact opposite of OP: "And, if we go back even farther, the Flynn effect puts the average IQs of the schoolchildren of 1900 at around 70, which is to suggest, bizarrely, that a century ago the United States was populated largely by people who today would be considered mentally retarded."

What, you mean they are western educated industrialized rich and democratic?

It has been - e.g., http://www.apa.org/monitor/201... [apa.org].

No, it wasn't picked up "long ago". The article you point to shows research since the 2000's, doesn't talk about magnetite, and shows weak associations after people specifically looked for this effect. So, the effect may be real, but it can't be all that strong, otherwise it would have shown up much earlier.

For example, the two main sources of UFPM from driving an internal combustion vehicle are due to combustion (out of the tailpipe), and the metals released from frictional breaking. Since EVs and hybrids tend to rely on regenerative breaking and use less/no gasoline, both sources are addressed.

See, I think you reveal the real reason this story is being pushed: people are looking for justifications to push electric cars. And, as usual, people accept preliminary science and weak effects when it suits their political agenda, and reject it when it does not.

It has been - e.g., http://www.apa.org/monitor/201.... Because they're caused by ultrafine particulates (something which is harder to track relative to the larger PM10 and PM2.5), it takes long term exposure and accumulation to be better detectable. Also UFPM moves different than PM10/2.5 relative to wind, and is emitted in inconsistent ratios (e.g., from combustion across natural gas, coal, petroleum, etc.). For example, the two main sources of UFPM from driving an internal combustion vehicle are due to combustion (out of the tailpipe), and the metals released from frictional breaking. Since EVs and hybrids tend to rely on regenerative breaking and use less/no gasoline, both sources are addressed.

This research and its scary implications has been going on for quite some time, and ties to ultrafine particulates that are small enough to pass through the blood-brain barrier (e.g., Calderon-Garcuidenas et al, 2008 - , and APA Monitor on Psychology 2012.

So the question might be reversed, should everyone with the same job description be paid exactly the same, regardless of work output or experience?

This is a good question. All people inflate their own sense of worth. Workers who claim to work 80 hours a week are often making very different choices about how to manage their time as someone who claims to work 40. It's one half of the Dunning-Kruger effect (the other half being that people of high capability often underestimate the difficulty of what they do).

http://www.apa.org/monitor/feb...

Now I'm not saying that you're exaggerating the amount of work you did in comparison to others (especially those tricksy women, amirite?), but it would be consistent with what we know about human nature and the actual data from the workplace of people who claim to work long hours. Studies have shown that the more hours people claim to work over 55, the more they're exaggerating how many hours they actually work. People who claim to work 75-80 hours a week are usually overestimating by at least 20 hours.

https://www.fastcompany.com/30...

Competence is a complicated thing masquerading as a simple thing. No, people who have the same job title as you shouldn't necessarily make the same amount of money. Your pay is based on performance reviews, training, proven competence and a whole slew of other inputs. The problem is, a lot of those so-called metrics have a built-in bias. And in a salaried workforce, those biases can really run rampant. That's why in countries with healthier, more dynamic economies, you will see pay based on seemingly arbitrary measures like job title and seniority. This was an innovation of the labor movement and led to the most productive workforces in the world.

http://www.epi.org/publication...

I have no doubt that you're a competent, hard-working guy. That's my built-in bias because I like you, Ol Olsoc. A lot of times, we find agreement around here. We have things in common. If I were overseeing a performance review of you, I'd probably be predisposed to rate you highly. I'd certainly be predisposed to rate you more highly than the woman who's been a bitch to me every since I made that joke about the one-eared elephant at Miller's retirement party.

Now, get the picture?

Stereotype threat originates both from within the Black communities ( Studious kids are picked on for "acting white" ), and externally ( Teachers do not push Black kids as hard as they do other racists due to their bias ).

Pop-up ads aren't so simple, they serve the useful function of making a product more familiar, and thus more desirable. This is a phenomenon documented by reputable psychology research. It has also been demonstrated that nasty behavior - especially online - is generally used to shut down people's critical faculties, which probably tells us something about the intellectual integrity of your position.

Citations:

Familiarity and desirability as it related to marketing: http://psycnet.apa.org/?&fa=ma...

The nasty effect: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...

Especially considering the strong correlation between material wealth and quality of life & longevity.

See: http://www.apa.org/monitor/oct... and http://www.tennessean.com/stor... for just a pair of many studies showing this.

Lie. To quote the American Psychiatric Association
There is insufficient evidence to support a claim of porn addiction
Other than moralizing, there is no excuse to attack porn access

Anon for obvious reasons.

Don't want people to know you are a biggot? Understandable.

male dominated offices/teams/companies have a higher probability of disfunction

Bullshit.

There is a statistically significant difference between the effect size estimates in the mixed-sex studies compared to the same-sex studies, Q(1) = 41.16, p < .001. During mixed-sex interactions, women were more cooperative than men (d = – 0.22, 95% CI [– 0.29,– 0.15]). However, during same-sex interactions, men were more cooperative than women (d = 0.16, 95% CI [0.06, 0.25]).

Source (unpaywalled link).

As to your first point, it isn't reliable nine times out of ten. It's likely no more accurate than a placebo (i.e. having the suspect give testimony into a microphone hooked up to a computer and claiming the computer can determine whether he is lying or not).

As to the second point, it's just a prop.

As to the third point, yes, it has a psychological effect providing the suspect believes it is effective. But relying on the ignorance of suspects seems a pretty piss poor way to guarantee you're getting useful testimony.

The American Psychology Psychological Association has a pretty good writeup on it:
http://www.apa.org/research/ac...

In particular:

The accuracy (i.e., validity) of polygraph testing has long been controversial. An underlying problem is theoretical: There is no evidence that any pattern of physiological reactions is unique to deception. An honest person may be nervous when answering truthfully and a dishonest person may be non-anxious. Also, there are few good studies that validate the ability of polygraph procedures to detect deception. As Dr. Saxe and Israeli psychologist Gershon Ben-Shahar (1999) note, "it may, in fact, be impossible to conduct a proper validity study." In real-world situations, it's very difficult to know what the truth is.

So we have is a machine built on a faulty set of assumptions about behavior that it is probably could never be verified, which utterly undermines your first point. It simply does not detect lies. Full stop.

"For now, although the idea of a lie detector may be comforting, the most practical advice is to remain skeptical about any conclusion wrung from a polygraph."

Source: The Truth About Lie Detectors (aka Polygraph Tests)

So you can forget as long as it's not a polar bear... :) (ref: http://www.apa.org/monitor/201...)

Being transgender is not considered a mental illness. Nor is does being diagnosed as transgender result in a 'nearly automatic' diagnosis of schizophrenia. There is an _increased rate_ of schizophrenia among transgender people. But it still remains uncommon - less than 1 to 5% of transgender people are _also_ diagnosed as schizophrenic.

Answers to Your Questions About Transgender People, Gender Identity and Gender Expression from the American Psychological Association

http://www.apa.org/topics/lgbt...

Is being transgender a mental disorder?

A psychological state is considered a mental disorder only if it causes significant distress or disability. Many transgender people do not experience their gender as distressing or disabling, which implies that identifying as transgender does not constitute a mental disorder. For these individuals, the significant problem is finding affordable resources, such as counseling, hormone therapy, medical procedures and the social support necessary to freely express their gender identity and minimize discrimination. Many other obstacles may lead to distress, including a lack of acceptance within society, direct or indirect experiences with discrimination, or assault. These experiences may lead many transgender people to suffer with anxiety, depression or related disorders at higher rates than nontransgender persons.
According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), people who experience intense, persistent gender incongruence can be given the diagnosis of "gender dysphoria." Some contend that the diagnosis inappropriately pathologizes gender noncongruence and should be eliminated. Others argue that it is essential to retain the diagnosis to ensure access to care. The International Classification of Diseases (ICD) is under revision and there may be changes to its current classification of intense persistent gender incongruence as "gender identity disorder."

If you are wrong the best case scenario is that you go to jail for assault or worse and that an innocent person gets hurt or killed.

Assualt is the threat of violence. Discharging a firearm at someone is attempted murder whether or not you hit them if it can be reasonably assumed that your intent was to hit them. Hell, even pointing a firearm at someone can be seen as attempted murder if it can be assumed that a third party's intervention is why you never fired. Sorry for the pedantry but I agree with you and I think this rather important fact should be emphasised to people in order to prevent the "idiot cowboys" that you are criticising in your post.

Police officers who are experienced in dealing with hostile and sometimes armed people make that mistake rather often. You lack the training and experience they have so what makes you think you will be any more successful in differentiating a real threat from an imagined one?

Have you ever actually spoken to a police officer when they were out of uniform? I mean like sat down and had a beer with them? My guess would be no, because police don't do that with civilians. They don't like to leave their social echo chambers where they can be constantly reassured that their jaded outlook toward the rest of the human race is valid. Police are overworked and isolated from the rest of their community, they constantly deal with the worst parts of our society and that makes them see the worst in the people that they meet. This leaves them in a mental state that is no better equipped to deal with these situations then an untrained yet rational person. Normally I think of psychology as a psudo-science, but then papers like these make me think that there might be something there: http://www.apa.org/science/abo...

Call it intuition, flow, procrastinated inspiration, the nine muses or whatever, that's actually your unconscious doing your work and slipping you the answers. Except, it *is* his work too, he is part of you. Heck, the unconscious is probably *most* of you, and that's something our conscience really doesn't likes and tries to hide desperately.

Freud focused on the grim side of our hidden brain—can't blame him, that's where the money was at—but now we know that most of what we do—and what we decide!?—is done without thinking—consciously, that is. Already in 79 Betty Edwards, inspired by the early studies of hemisphere specialization, realized that she needed not teach her students to draw, but simply to do it On the Right Side of the Brain. She ingrains in her students the ability to shut down their concious thinking so the specialized motor and visual centres of their brain can do the heavy (pencil) lifting. For this, she uses some visual aids, and a bunch of tricks to distract or tire conciousness so it will step out of the way. After some 40 hours of practice, most of her students can switch to the visual/perceptual mode at will.

Strangely, we haven't learned many new tricks to talk—or just listen—to our hidden selves since then. In her excellent book A Mind for Numbers—which is the basis for the most popular Coursera class, Learning How to Learn—Barbara Oakley includes many tips to access diffuse/unconscious thinking to solve hard problems or get creative inspiration, all involving distracting or shutting down consciousness—going for a jog or taking a nap, for example. [1]

But we all knew this already. When you forget where did you left the keys, or you have that word in the tip of the tongue, the best you can do is stop thinking about it. What we might not realize, is that this applies to about anything else: whether you're driving, playing music, dancing, painting, writing, cooking, doing sports, if you want to be really good at it, you gotta practice it until you internalize it, until you can do it without "thinking".

Which makes perfect sense. Versatile as it is, our conciousness is terribly slow. 40 bps—or even less—bandwith, with a 500-800ms latency. Try playing some twitch games with that over the net! Rather than a processor, our conciousness might be more like a chipset, a modest switchboard, just trying to pass stuff the right way. So, if you need to react fast, or calculate something complex, don't think, don't even think, think and you'll screw up!

But procrastinating binges as a source of creativity, that's just a lame denial of your Facebook addiction. ;)

[1]. Some studies do contradict the distraction trick, however: "creative thinking does not appear to critically depend on any single mental process or brain region, and it is not especially associated with right brains, defocused attention, low arousal, or alpha synchronization, as sometimes hypothesized."

And the unconscious is not all roses either, but also a source of invisible mischief and discrimination, thanks to its obsolete heuristics, as explained by Shankar Vedantam in his terrifying The Hidden Brain.

who ultimately wants more cheap labor..

This. I have been wondering whether they have been trying to setup the future for big corporations to gain cheaper labor. They can later claim it was intended all along to help both the H1B problem and keeping America as the top innovation country.

Except they forget programming isn't for everybody. People who are genuinely interested in programming will learn it.

I suspect part of the problem are the cute and idiot-friendly logic games presented with a glossy UI for the general population. They suspect that's what real programming is like. Then someone tells them about the WYSIWYG/drag-drop in C# and other languages, and they jump all over that. Everything being made into a game to introduce people into a field isn't helping either. Kids these days already easily bored from technology bombardment. But the defense will always be "so you don't want to get kids introduced and excited into a STEM field?"

Yes you are right, it is almost always the popular ones doing the bullying, and guess who the popular people are? The women making the damn accusations. Let's not delude ourselves here, unless the women are atrociously ugly they will be very popular in a group with very few women in it. Also women have an extremely strong ingroup bias which men do not have, in fact men have a bias for women not against them. source: http://psycnet.apa.org/journal...

And yet women are favored 2:1 in hiring for STEM faculty jobs (other than as economists, which are at 1:1), while both men and women unfairly favor women in general, with women favoring women harder than men favor women (meaning that OF COURSE women are less trustworthy than men when it comes to research that relates to the favoritism or anti-favoritism of women in relation to men).

Favoritism in STEM faculty hiring
Inherent sexism in favor of females by both females and males

In the end the patriarchy, whenever there might've been one, being anti-female is simply mere projection on the part of women. Men have always had to do more and harder work than women, and men (but not women, even infertile and/or post-menopausal women that could not get pregnant and/or could or would not work as much or hard as men did) were always considered expendable (and thus had their bodies, sanities, and lives expended in cripplingly and/or fatally hard work, in wars, and in survival situations such as the sinking of the Titanic) in any society that sustained itself long-term in competition with other societies.

It's actually the other way around.

If the world were perfect, it would be. However, in my experience, it doesn't work that way. I saw numerous people who were good at the social game and spotlighting (performing well when someone is looking) get ahead. I've even seen people who simply looked the part (tall and athletic) be promoted faster than those who was better than them in literally every test - practical and paper.

I was even on a board for a meritorious promotion and I was the sole person against one of the selections who got along well with the leadership. I didn't think he was mature enough to handle the responsibilities but everyone said he was a great guy, and would be fine. Short version: They promoted him and two months later he was busted back down for assaulting an officer while out drinking.

While you need a certain level of knowledge and ability, once you have that how well you do is often based on how tall, athletic and attractive you are. I don't have access to the entire paper, but you can look at an interesting abstract here.

Another huge issue is their close ties to law enforcement and the resulting biased conclusions.

Drug dogs

Or polygraphs...

Or traffic/speed cameras...

This.

Except -- not even statistically. In real statistics, effect size matters; even a significant effect is unimportant if the effect size is small (see effect size in Wikipedia).

Psychological meta-analyses show that even though statistically significant gender effects may exist, their effect size is very small -- these differences are not important (see for example this paper by Janet S. Hyde, but also numerous other publications). There are few exceptions: males seem to have better dimensional orientation and women have a better ability to read other people's emotional state, but even in these cases the effect size is modest. The real difference is... the frequency of masturbation (Cohen's d ~ 1, but even that is not the largest effect that one observes on the daily basis in science).

Let's take Johnny. He's a smart kid, probably has the neurochemical make-up to be some sort of a genius. The problem is, he's retained less knowledge that can be used to adequately assess his raw intelligence through a common battery of questions.

The problem for your hypothesis is that intelligence tests do not rely on knowledge. Intelligence tests assess a person's ability to acquire new knowledge and apply that knowledge to new situations. Tests for intelligence do not ask things like, "Who was the first President of the United States?" Intelligence tests ask things like, "If all zerps are zogs, and all zogs are blarps, are all blarps zerps?" The answer is no, and it doesn't require knowing anything. It's purely a matter of thinking it through. Some people are capable and some aren't.

Except coaching does work for intelligence tests

In 14 studies on the Scholastic Aptitude Test, coaching raised scores by an average of 0.15 standard deviations; in 24 studies on other aptitude and intelligence tests, coaching raised scores by an average of 0.43 standard deviations.

And that's not even touching other big variables like the home environment, cultural bias, knowledge of the opportunity existing, etc.

OK, I'm not saying that all this is not true, but every single link in the summary is to the same site, called "antipolygraph.org". So I suspect that every link would be to someone writing who is, well, anti-polygraph. I generally try to explore all sides of an issue, so it would be useful if someone researched this a bit more.

You know, what, never mind I'll do it.

APA thinks they're bunk: http://www.apa.org/research/ac...

ABC news sort of thinks so, too.http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=92847&page=1

Interestingly, the ABC news article says that polygraphs are starting to be ruled inadmissible in the US. Not 100%, but in some courts.

The stupidness here, in my opinion, is that the FBI is ruining someone's career over this. Now, I suspect there's more to the story (there always is). Maybe the higher-ups wanted to get rid of this guy anyways and this was an excuse? Maybe its an inane policy that even the higher-ups hate but they are too timid to stand up to the system?

The question is not about how many people have had sex by age 18 (or 16), but whether this is really consensual sex in the first place.

While I agree that jail time is almost certainly counterproductive, I completely disagree with the premise that early-age sex is either psychologically or physically healthy behavior. Further, it really is rare that young women are engaging in a fully consensual manner. They may "want" to have sex as a way of "proving maturity," or to be part of the cool crowd, but that's a poor definition of 'consensual.'

A certain overly randy POTUS fired a very well-spoken Surgeon General who had the nerve to suggest that teens would be far better off both physically and mentally if they engaged in autoeroticism. High time we accepted that position and did whatever we can to reduce the societal pressures to have early sex.

The question is not about how many people have had sex by age 18 (or 16), but whether this is really consensual sex in the first place.

While I agree that jail time is almost certainly counterproductive, I completely disagree with the premise that early-age sex is either psychologically or physically healthy behavior. Further, it really is rare that young women are engaging in a fully consensual manner. They may "want" to have sex as a way of "proving maturity," or to be part of the cool crowd, but that's a poor definition of 'consensual.'

Claiming that sex under the age of 17 or 16 is by definition "not consensual" is handing prosecutors a free pass to torment, harass, convict and jail half the teenage population at their total unaccountable discretion.

Sex, starting in the early teenage years, is a normal part of human development. Most of the research that claims that teenage sex is harmful is done by right-wing religious organizations like the Heritage Foundation, who have a long track record of being anti-science. This is global warming for sex.

You have unfortunately been taken in by the right-wing fantasies about the innocent flowers of childhood, the pathology of sex, their atavistic view of guilt, and their belief that they have the right to punish other people for their private life, again at their own total unaccountable discretion (which they don't apply to themselves, for example Josh Duggar or Bristol Palin).

Back in the 1950s, homosexuals were arrested for hanging out in gay bars, teenage girls were sent to reform school for having sex, and abortion was illegal so hospitals were filled with women dying of sepsis from illegal abortions. After the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, including Roe v. Wade (which ruled that the government had no right to intrude in the bedroom), I thought those days were over, but now it looks like a pendulum swing. In the 1990s the same people created the day care child sex abuse cases, and put bewildered people in jail for years (for what turned out to be fabricated charges). And the right wing is banning abortion again, state by state. It looks like you haven't learned the lessons of those days.

Unfortunately there is a lunatic fringe of the feminist movement of people like Andrea Dworkin, who was a lesbian and convinced a lot of people into believing that all heterosexual sex is rape and exploitation of women by men. They'd like to see the issue of teenage sex framed as boys raping and exploiting girls, even if the girls actively want to have sex. There's a whole anti-sex industry that has moved into this issue, with its own fake experts and think tanks like the Heritage Foundation.

I'll go to the scientific literature. Teenage sex is normal, it 's been going on since prehistory, and it doesn't do any more harm than any other normal activity (and a lot less harm than driving, swimming or football). Why is it your business to tell a teenage girl that she can't have sex even if she wants to, or that sex is somehow wrong?

http://psycnet.apa.org/jo

Oh bull. Therapy is a throw away thing today. The stigmata evaporated along about the '80s.

http://www.med.navy.mil/sites/nmcsd/nccosc/healthProfessionalsV2/reports/Documents/Stigma%20White%20Paper.pdf from the Navy says seeking mental health treatment is still heavily stigmatized in the military / clearance world and the American Psychological Association agrees with them http://www.apa.org/monitor/2009/06/stigma-war.aspx

How about this reference http://www.apa.org/pubs/info/r..., yet they still train psychologists to work in marketing targeting children. Did the American Psychological Association, play with the torturers and in the most sick fashion imaginable the victims? Was there a buck in it? You betcha, it's the American way, your American dream and fuck their nightmares.

So which is worse damaging the psychology of children to sell products or participating in the psychological torture of suspected terrorists, pretty fucking much, equally evil. Unless of course those suspected terrorist are also minors, yes, the US military managed to achieve that level of evil, with the aid of professional psychologists. Well, at least Darth Cheney managed to truly earn his spot in history and so did Uncle Tom Obama for failing to prosecute.

Both the American Psychiatric Association and American Psychological Association have declared this a solved issue since the 70's.

How the APA classifies it has zero to do with whether it is hereditary-- bringing that up is just a dodge. The fact is there is no smoking gun gay gene, and the general consensus is that it has many causes.

Heck, your own link specifically says the following:
What causes a person to have a particular sexual orientation?
There is no consensus among scientists about the exact reasons that an individual develops a heterosexual, bisexual, gay, or lesbian orientation. Although much research has examined the possible genetic, hormonal, developmental, social, and cultural influences on sexual orientation, no findings have emerged that permit scientists to conclude that sexual orientation is determined by any particular factor or factors.

That doesnt stop the false narrative that its 100% innate and unchosen, however.

But in this case they are only attacking those with an intrinsic attribute

Close, but fundamentally wrong. They are opposing a very specific lifestyle choice; by and large these businesses would have no issue with a homosexual not getting married, or getting married in a heterosexual marriage; likewise they would generally equally oppose a heterosexual person trying to form a homosexual marriage.

The fact that those scenarios are unlikely to arise is irrelevant; it demonstrates the crucial difference that the object of opposition is not the person, but their behavior.

You are essentially making an argument that if women were still not allowed to vote, it wouldn't be discriminatory because you are only against the behavior of women voting,

That is not at the sort of argument I am making. You would rightly note that our system calls for equal rights under the law, and that men and women do not have access to the same rights (voting).

In this case, homosexuals have the ability to marry just as heterosexuals do; they just prefer not to do the sort of widely and historically sanctioned form of marriage. YOUR argument is akin to saying that paedophiles dont have equal rights, because they prefer to have sex with children and society has arbitrary rules about that. Except, they are treated 100% equally under the law-- it is their ACTION that gets a different treatment, not anything innate to them.

It is wild speculation to call homosexual an intrinsic trait; no causation has been proven one way or the other AFAIK.

Both the American Psychiatric Association and American Psychological Association have declared this a solved issue since the 70's. People do not choose to be homosexual any more than they choose to be Asian. Here is a link to some literature on the matter in case you are actually interested instead of just trolling.

In any case, its not an intrinsic attribute that is being "attacked" but a behavior or lifestyle.

If a business was against all marriages then you could make a case for them attacking a lifestyle or behavior. But in this case they are only attacking those with an intrinsic attribute who wish to behave and live like those without this attribute.

You are essentially making an argument that if women were still not allowed to vote, it wouldn't be discriminatory because you are only against the behavior of women voting, not discriminatory towards women in general. It is a very poor argument.

What if someone argued "I was intrinsically born a pedophile", would you agree that you couldnt refuse to serve them because it was intrinsic?

I would agree that ex-cons have rights. Even pedophiles. Ex-cons do have legal limitations to protect society, such as protecting children from pedophiles. But I would defend a pedophile's right to order a burger at McDonalds without being discriminated against.

DUI laws being a classic example: studies show the majority of people are NOT significantly impaired at 0.08%).

Nope.

http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinf...

>10 21–35 yr old male moderate drinkers were tested on divided-attention and information-processing tasks at blood alcohol levels (BALs) of 0, 15, 30, 45 and 60 mg/dl. All response measures showed evidence of impairment beginning at 15 mg/dl and increasing impairment with increasing BALs. Findings provide no evidence that low BALs improve performance on driving-related skills, as has sometimes been suggested

http://ajph.aphapublications.o...

>CONCLUSIONS: It all states adopted 0.08% legal blood alcohol limits, at least 500 to 600 fewer fatal crashes would occur annually.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi...

>There is no evidence of a threshold blood alcohol (BAC) below which impairment does not occur, and there is no defined category of drivers who will not be impaired by alcohol....These more sophisticated studies show that significant impairment occurs at very low BACs ( http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...

>results from the pooled analyses were clear and consistent. Changes in legal BAC limits significantly affected alcohol-related fatal crash involvement for both the SVN and BAC test result measures, and the laws affected drivers at all drinking levels.

There's a large body of evidence correlating economics & culture to educational outcomes.

Genetics correlate also, but this is mostly genetic differences between individual families, not "race".

Gender difference in mathematics is only apparent in individual countries and fairly nonexistent when looking at the world as a whole (implying that gender differences in mathematics is due to culture).

This evidence is a good place to start understanding the problem and search for improvements. Therefore scholarships may be helpful (deals with the economics side). But focusing on "race" is misguided, when focusing on the problem of culture can give tangible improvements (ex: community centers in rough inner city areas), regardless of "race".

Anyone can search Google Scholar to look into these in more detail.

"it was absent from the literature". A simple Google search shows many articles discussing the "vertical occipital fasciculus" - 265,000 for me:

The article referenced here: http://www.pnas.org/content/ea...

Some other references:
2012: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
http://www.nan.upol.cz/neuro/c...
1943 reference: http://psycnet.apa.org/index.c...

There were a lot more. Something seems fishy here.

It's about 70 percent accurate, which is more than any other method.

The American Psychological Association disagrees with you.

The accuracy (i.e., validity) of polygraph testing has long been controversial. An underlying problem is theoretical: There is no evidence that any pattern of physiological reactions is unique to deception. An honest person may be nervous when answering truthfully and a dishonest person may be non-anxious. Also, there are few good studies that validate the ability of polygraph procedures to detect deception. As Dr. Saxe and Israeli psychologist Gershon Ben-Shahar (1999) note, "it may, in fact, be impossible to conduct a proper validity study." In real-world situations, it's very difficult to know what the truth is.

A particular problem is that polygraph research has not separated placebo-like effects (the subject's belief in the efficacy of the procedure) from the actual relationship between deception and their physiological responses. One reason that polygraph tests may appear to be accurate is that subjects who believe that the test works and that they can be detected may confess or will be very anxious when questioned. If this view is correct, the lie detector might be better called a fear detector.

Some confusion about polygraph test accuracy arises because they are used for different purposes, and for each context somewhat different theory and research is applicable. Thus, for example, virtually no research assesses the type of test and procedure used to screen individuals for jobs and security clearances. Most research has focused on specific incident testing. The cumulative research evidence suggests that CQTs detect deception better than chance, but with significant error rates, both of misclassifying innocent subjects (false positives) and failing to detect guilty individuals (false negatives).

Research on the processes involved in CQT polygraph examinations suggests that several examiner, examinee, and situational factors influence test validity, as may the technique used to score polygraph charts. There is little research on the effects of subjects' differences in such factors as education, intelligence, or level of autonomic arousal.

Evidence indicates that strategies used to "beat" polygraph examinations, so-called countermeasures, may be effective. Countermeasures include simple physical movements, psychological interventions (e.g., manipulating subjects' beliefs about the test), and the use of pharmacological agents that alter arousal patterns.

Polygraph testing has generated considerable scientific and public controversy. Most psychologists and other scientists agree that there is little basis for the validity of polygraph tests. Courts, including the United States Supreme Court (cf. U.S. v. Scheffer, 1998 in which Dr.'s Saxe's research on polygraph fallibility was cited), have repeatedly rejected the use of polygraph evidence because of its inherent unreliability. Nevertheless, polygraph testing continues to be used in non-judicial settings, often to screen personnel, but sometimes to try to assess the veracity of suspects and witnesses, and to monitor criminal offenders on probation. Polygraph tests are also sometimes used by individuals seeking to convince others of their innocence and, in a narrow range of circumstances, by private agencies and corporations.

The development of currently used "lie detection" technologies has been based on ideas about physiological functioning but has, for the most part, been independent of systematic psychological research. Early theorists believed that deception required effort and, thus, could be assessed by monitoring physiological changes. But such propositions have not been proven and basic research remains limited on the nature of deceptiveness. Efforts to develop actual tests have always outpaced theory-based basic research. Without a better theoretical unders