Some people are worried that unthinking, uncaring robots will be part of our future. They are concerned about a Cylon uprising or maybe a Terminator, but that is unlikely to happen any time soon; there hasn't been a true advancement in artificial intelligence since the early 1990s, all we know is that the brain is a lot more complicated than making faster CPUs, regardless of what Ray Kurzweil sells to the public in books (and now from a nice gig at Google also).
My vague libertarian leanings want me to stay out of the marijuana issue, just like I don't interfere in vaginas and just like I think the government should stop micromanaging gold fish and Big Gulps and telling restaurants whether or not to allow a cigar after a great steak.
But marijuana has become a political issue and it has fallen along predictable political lines; if you think cigarettes should be banned and marijuana legalized, I know how you vote. And therefore the people suddenly presenting nonsense statistics, dubious medical claims and sociological woo are seemingly doing it because they want to stick it to right wing people who are against pot. That's not science, people.
If there are fewer than 50% females in physics, that is a call to action, argues virtually ... everyone in academia. We need greater outreach for girls, we need to change classes to appeal to them, we need to fund campaigns to convince women who are inclined to be doctors and help people to instead work in a lab, we are told.
Why, argue others? We need doctors too. Science is hard, so is medicine. If a young woman wants to be a doctor instead of a physicist, so be it. If the social sciences are overwhelmingly female and the hard sciences are less overwhelmingly male, it is a tough argument to claim all those women in psychology were forced into it because sexism blocked them out of chemistry.
Is sex as addictive as cocaine or alcohol?
It depends on who you ask. Obviously there is an entire industry built up around the idea that it is, just like there is an industry build around homeopathy and curing gay people, but that doesn't mean the NIH should be funding those things.
A few weeks ago, I made note of evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller (
Evolutionary Psychologist Geoffrey Miller Has His Own Grad Student Criteria - Weight) and his odd claims about what makes a successful grad student.
He claimed that obese women - errr, sorry,
people, but since over 70% of psychology grad students are women we know what he meant - wouldn't have the discipline to complete grad school. You know, because they eat too much.
A saying in the Old West was that God made men, but Sam Colt made them equal.
Well, not completely equal, but his invention of the revolver certainly made life better for flintlock pistol owners. Speed and accuracy were still a subjective issue.
Now, maybe even accuracy is going to be egalitarian.
When I was a young man at Duquesne, we had a rifle team. In the NCAA then, if you were going to have a popular Division I sport that offered scholarships (such as basketball) you had to offer multiple smaller (less popular) Division I sports also - with scholarships, though obviously not full ones.
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