Via Mahalanobis an interesting little look at those few women who have won a Nobel Prize. The full list is here. Should we take this as evidence of how careful you should be in your career choice? Y’know, if you want to get to the very top (which the Nobel is in science) then you’d perhaps be better off making a different career choice if you’re female?

The actual numbers (not including the Peace Prize) are 2.5 % of them go to women. 10 for literature, 7 for physiology and medicine, 3 chemistry and 2 physics. This actually works out pretty much as we would think from our EQSQ tests up at the top there.

Two reasons for the very low overall numbers. Of course, in the last century or so there has indeed been a great deal of discrimination about what sort of education or jobs women can get, so that would definitely skew the early results. Fortunately that’s a lot less prevalent now. The second is that point that got Larry Summers into all that trouble at Harvard. That at the very extremes of any genetically influenced attribute we would expect to see more men.  More dunces and more geniuses, in short.

Given those two, what would we expect to see as the distribution amongst the various subjects? Well, from our tests we know that men are more likely to be systemizers, women empathizers (and note that it is a liklihood, a probability, not a certainty). So we would expect to see fewer women in a subject like physics which is rigorously systemizing than we would in literature which is much more about emotions.

So, cute little proof that we may actually be on the right lines here. A further datum: no woman has ever won the Fields Medal. This is the equivalent of the Nobel for mathematicians.

BTW, the reason there is no Nobel for maths is because Alfred Nobel, who left the money for the prizes, well, his wife ran away with a mathematician. He didn’t like them very much after that.

[tags]personality tests, emotional quotient, systemizing quotient, EQSQ, science, physics, chemistry, Nobel, fields, literature, harvard, larry summers [/tags]

Well, I’d rather hope that readers here don’t actually take astrology seriously. There’s a number of reasons why you shouldn’t (like, umm, it’s rubbish is a good starting point) but just to give you a few:

1) Writing the newspaper astrology columns is traditionally the job given to the newest intern. The people who write them are not trained in anything in any way.

2) It might only be old fuddy duddies like me who remember but in the musical Hair there was a song called “The Age of Aquarius”. We’d actually, the whole planet, moved from one sector of the sky to another: this means that all star charts should have changed at that point. They didn’t.

3) As reported at Pfitz’s Miscellany today there is a new scientific report out. As the Discovery Channel puts it:

One of the largest studies of the possible link between human traits and astrology found little, if any, connection between the traditional sun signs of the zodiac and characteristics of individuals. The study adds to the growing body of evidence that there is no scientific basis for star signs, such as Aries, Taurus and so on.

This rather speaks to one of the things raised in the comments. The net is full of personality tests and some of them are simply there for a giggle. Others for more nefarious purposes and finally, there are those based on sound science. The ones we have up at the top there, the EQ and SQ tests are indeed based on sound science. The definition here of science is that you need to have correlation, then causality and then replication. Correlation is that we’ve got two (or more) things going on at the same time. Can be something simple, like men are generally taller than women. In our case, more complex, that women are generally more empathic than men.

Then we have to look for causation. What is actually making this happen? Often there is no link at all. The two things are happening independently. In our case we find that there is something called the male type brain and also the female. It tends to be (but not exclusively so) that women are more likely to have the female (empathic) type brain than men.

The final crucial test, the one that distinguishes something as science, is that another researcher can look at the data, or even different data, and see the same conclusion. That is, that we can replicate the experiment.

As the EQ and SQ tests pass all of those three test themselves, they are therefore science.

Astrology is another matter of course. As the above report shows, we don’t even have correlation. So it’s rubbish.

[tags]personality tests, emotional quotient, systemizing quotient, EQSQ, science, astrology [/tags]

Interesting little post at Geoff’s New New Blog about going to see a lecture by Simon Baron-Cohen as part of the Cambridge Science Festival.

As we know here Baron-Cohen belongs to, perhaps is the founder of, a school of psychology which posits that autism and Asperger’s Syndrome are examples of, or perhaps symptoms of, an extreme type of the male brain. Those EQ and SQ tests up at the top there show whether you’ve got a male, female or balanced type brain but truly extreme scores (EQ 1, SQ 100) might show such an extreme. Oh, by the way, these are not diagnostic tests, they’re too simplistic for that. They’re more indicative of the thoughts of that school of psychology than anything else.

One interesting thing is the way in which Baron-Cohen rather quashed the speculations about whether historical figures were autistic or not. Geoff doesn’t explain the reasoning fully but I would guess that it’s because, as autism itself has only been diagnosed recently, it’s a tad silly to run around identifying everything someone did in the distant past as being symptomatic. Although as Geoff also correctly points out, Newton’s 17 years of lecturing to an empty room were evidence of something odd. The post is well worth reading for the precis of the whole lecture.

My favorite line? The Maths Building at Cambridge University was expressly designed for autistic people. They obviously think they know something about maths undergraduates.
[tags]personality tests, emotional quotient, systemizing quotient, EQSQ, school of psychology, autism, asperger’s, aspies, maths, cambridge university [/tags]

Well, why not, why not go a little off subject on a Tuesday? Career tests are important, of course, but the EQSQ tests will still be up above tomorrow. Tuesday’s one of those days when we all need a little lighter material to get us over the fact that it’s an entire four days until the weekend again (and yes, we did have to work yesterday, darn it). Or so they tell me anyway.

So, rather than Simon Baron Cohen and his career tests, let’s look at the cousin, Sacha Baron-Cohen. You’ll know him as Ali G but you may also know of his character, Borat. As Film Ick points out this character is now about to feature in a full length movie, a project that appears to be having more than the usual run of troubles. Still, they’ve got a good director now.

Borat is supposed to be Kazakh and I have to admit from my own knowledge of the country he’s actually noting like any Kazakh I’ve ever met. So while he’s extraordinarily funny, the satire is a little odd: it’s not actually of Kazakhs, rather of some straw man existing only in the imagination. As part of the creation of the character though the website was actually set up in Kazakhstan, with the .kz suffix. This caused something of a problem for Baron-Cohen when one of his skits seriously annoyed several politicians. As parenthetical remarks points out, that website was closed down and there were threats to sue him for “insulting the national honour” and the like. Fortunately the politicians started thinking (not always a given in that part of the world) and these threats have now been withdrawn. It was actually the President’s daughter who made the decsion to back off.

As Registan says though, anyone with knowledge of that part of the world wouldn’t take such a retreat at face value. The Eurasian Media Forum is taking place in Almaty: people tend to take free speech seriously at such things.

[tags]personality tests, emotional quotient, systemizing quotient, EQSQ, Borat, Kazakhstan, Ali G, Baron Cohen, Movies, film [/tags]

Now Matt Yglesias is a pretty smart guy (certainly brighter than I) but it looks like he failed to read the intructions on the packet. He took a version of the personality quiz, the EQSQ tests that we have up above. However, he took the version over at The Guardian’s website. That’s the English newspaper who, with their version of the personality quiz, fail slightly to explain how to interpret the results.

As lots of people read him the same error has propagated across some other blogs, like BattlePanda, and it’s not until we get to the comments section of In Lehmann’s Terms that we get the correct interpretation.

Now, the tests, as we know, are attempting to measure whether the testee (that’s you!) has a male type, female type or balanced brain. Male type is more systemizing, female more empathic.

What was being done wrong was to look at the actual scores on each part of the test. That is, to look at the average for men, say, on one of the tests, then look at the specific results and so say, hey, I’m more/less empathic/systemizing than men/women.

Un unh. As you take the test yourself the responses will be entirely subjective. We all put different meanings on “very important”, “mildly” and so on. So the actual score, and the relationship between your score and the averages actually mean nothing because of that very subjectivity.

However, precisely because you do take both tests, whatever bias you have towards high or low scores will be the same on both parts. Thus, although your scale of answers will be highly subjective, comparing the two results will be objective.

So the true way to read the results is, if your EQ is much higher than your SQ, you have a “female” type brain, if SQ much higher than EQ, a male, If roughly equal, then you have a balanced brain.

[tags]personality tests, emotional quotient, systemizing quotient, EQSQ, The Guardian, Baron Cohen [/tags]

There’s a lovely little piece over at the Scudder Interregnum on whether it is actually nature or nurture that is important in in defining brain type and thus aptitudes for certain jobs and career choices.

Starting from the beginning (always a useful place) the argument isn’t that babies are a tabula rasa, a blank slate upon which society writes whatever it wishes. No, clearly, there are indeed physiological and mental differences right from the start. We might imagine that these are solely what are described by our EQ and SQ tests which you can take up at the top there. But Scudder’s argument is more subtle than that.

OK, so there are natural differences. But this does not mean that the differences at age 25 are solely those caused by the “nature” differences observed in the babies. Yes, society does indeed impose certain strictures upon people but these are a great deal less important than the other point identified. That in the process of growing up we are likely to practise those skills and attributes we enjoy (usually those we are good at, to no one’s surprise) and neglect those we don’t enjoy. So the differences are magnified over time. While there may indeed have been slightly different starting points, after 25 odd years the differences are much greater due to this reinforcement.

There’s also an extremely good point made about science and scientists being systemizers by our tests. Yes, it may well be true that that trait makes a good scientist…of a certain type. But so much of science these days is about working in large teams, requiring the management skills and tolerance of others shown by the empathic attributes of the female brain type.

That latter is an interesting thought when making decisions about career choices. It might have been true that one or other brain type was better for a certain career at one point, but that can change, as the attribute required for careers can indeed change.

[tags]personality tests, emotional quotient, systemizing quotient, EQSQ, career choice, science,  [/tags]

As I said yesterday I was going to go off and have a look for more on mirror neurons. Firstly, the Wikipedia entry. While it’s not 100% accurate and there can be glaring errors and ommissions most especially on subjects of any controversy, it’s always a useful first stop in trying to find out about anything.

Slightly off point there’s also Bill Ardolino at INCDJournal pointing out that not only can you, as per yesterday’s post, become unhappy by being around unhappy people and angry by being around same, you can actually catch cooties by even reading their words. Something to do with the way electrons propagate I guess, or maybe it’s simply quantum. So much is these days.

In more detail (and with perhaps more science than Bill’s cooties fears) there’s also this journal article by V.S. Ramachandran. While this blog’s hero (and creator of those free personality tests up at the top) Simon Baron-Cohen gets mentioned (and thus we know that it is both great science and absolutely true) the important point is this. Mirror neurons are the thing thought to create empathy in humans. When we swing our arm certain neurons fire off in a particular manner in our brains. But when we watch someone else swing their arm, the same neurons in our own brain fire off in the same way as if we were doing it. We can thus feel the emotional response of someone else to their performing an action because we feel the same as when we do it ourselves. This is the very basis of empathy of course.This has taken us quite a long way from our free personality tests and the empathizing and systemizing quotients they provide but I find it all quite fascinating. Knowing how empathy actually works is great, a useful underpinning to the science behind the tests. I guess what I need to find out next is why empathy developed? What evolutionary advantage does it give to the apes and monkeys (and thus us) and the certain types of birds that also seem to show it?[tags]personality tests, emotional quotient, systemizing quotient, EQSQ, mirror neuron, human mind, brain, science, wikipedia [/tags]