Science Fiction

Beware of any headline that says ‘new research has shown….’

It’s usually a media beat-up based on some results fabricated by cherry-picking academics seeking public attention ahead of a grant proposal or some university job promotion.

Having said that, these style of headlines do offer an opportunity for great entertainment.

An example today was that scientists have shown that people that measure in the ‘psychopathic’ scale are up to one third less likely to be affected by the urge to yawn in sympathy with another human being.

Yeah but what are the error bars? It’s the ‘up to’ that gives away this particular piece of bullshit.

For example one psychopath might never yawn in response to someone else yawning whereas another might be a complete furbie.

If it were true though, you could imagine us all getting surreptitiously measured on the ‘yawn sympathy’ scale through, for example, YouTube on our smartphones.

Then our individual degree of psychopathic tendencies could be used to tailor the online advertising that we are subjected to.

For example, there is no use trying to get a psychopath to donate to a charity based on images of human suffering.

And just to highlight the idiot savant nature of many senior research scientists, the SMH reports that at the weekend ‘some of Australia’s finest minds pondered’ gender equality in the Australian science community.

‘Pondering’ is spot on. Outside of their own field of research, scientists are often pretty shit at doing anything rigorously.

The article contained only two implied root causes of the gender inequality in senior roles in Australian science, namely that (1) women have to care for children at some stage in their careers, and (2) there is an absence of female role models in senior scientific positions.

Although these observations may be sometimes correct I suspect they are second order observations and not indicative of the root cause problem.

I would hypothesise that the absence of gender equality in senior scientific positions in Australia is primarily due to these facts:

(1) Science in Australia is almost entirely constrained to government funded organisations.

(2) These organisations lack modern corporate governance and they are breeding grounds for the promotion of egomaniacs.

(3) Women on average are much better at spotting this trend early in their scientific careers (usually while being jerked around during their PhD’s) and they are more likely to wisely move across into the private sector and away from science.

(4) The private sector offers women the opportunity to work in a saner workplaces less exposed to bullying and bullshit, more flexible in career choices, and more open to life choices.

For women, I’m not sure there is a problem here.