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From Eliezer Yudkowsky at the very challenging and stimulating Overcoming Bias:

This fallacy gets its name from an ancient sci-fi TV show, which I never saw myself, but was reported to me by a reputable source (some guy at an SF convention).  Anyone knows the exact reference, do leave a comment.

So the good guys are battling the evil aliens.  Occasionally, the good guys have to fly through an asteroid belt.  As we all know, asteroid belts are as crowded as a New York parking lot, so their ship has to carefully dodge the asteroids.  The evil aliens, though, can fly right through the asteroid belt because they have amazing technology that dematerializes their ships, and lets them pass through the asteroids.

Eventually, the good guys capture an evil alien ship, and go exploring inside it.  The captain of the good guys finds the alien bridge, and on the bridge is a lever.  “Ah,” says the captain, “this must be the lever that makes the ship dematerialize!”  So he pries up the control lever and carries it back to his ship, after which his ship can also dematerialize.

And from there, Yudkowsky goes on to discuss the quicksand foundations of psychology and Artificial Intelligence. Well worth the time and skull sweat.

One mild demurrer: If you look over at my Categories, you’ll see that I deride psychology as “Witch Doctoring”. This is in response to claims that psychology is in any way a science; it is not, because it lacks underlying mechanisms and testable hypotheses.

However, it’s easy to ridicule the field in hindsight, without viewing it in its historical context.

Imagine, to use the opening metaphor, that you live on a ship, have been raised on a ship, where nobody has ever been in the bridge; indeed, no one even knows the bridge exists. The ship simply flies around the universe, completely out of control. The origins of the ship, and the technology and science underlying its operation, have been forgotten so long ago, no one even remembers the ideas of technology and science. It is not unreasonable that all sorts of bizarre superstitions should arise as to how to direct the flight of the ship.

Then one day an ignorant, superstitious, but curious savage, fellow by the name of Freud, finds this rusted-shut hatch….

Sounds like a great idea for a science fiction story, eh? The idea of a colonial ship carrying crew and passengers who have forgotten their origins is indeed a popular one, although I don’t recall this particular issue being explored.

A couple of the best examples are Alfred Bester’s novel The Stars My Destination, and Gene Wolf’s tetralogy Book of the Long Sun (Actually, a long cycle of novels). There’s another novel (which I read in high school, so pre-1972) about a militaristic religion, with enforcers based on the Spanish Inquisition, deliberately set up to control the population of a colony ship; damned if I can remember its title or author, though. Then there’s The Starlost, a disasterous TV series disowned by its creator, Harlan Ellison.

“Why, in fact, are there so few women in the high echelons of academic math and in the physi­cal sciences?”

Christina Hoff Sommers in The American:

Women now earn 57 percent of bachelors degrees and 59 percent of masters degrees. According to the Survey of Earned Doctorates, 2006 was the fifth year in a row in which the majority of research Ph.D.’s awarded to U.S. citizens went to women. Women earn more Ph.D.’s than men in the humanities, social sciences, education, and life sciences. Women now serve as presidents of Harvard, MIT, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, and other leading research universities. But elsewhere, the figures are different. Women comprise just 19 percent of tenure-track professors in math, 11 percent in physics, 10 percent in computer science, and 10 percent in electrical engineering. And the pipeline does not promise statistical parity any time soon: women are now earning 24 percent of the Ph.D.’s in the physical sciences—way up from the 4 percent of the 1960s, but still far behind the rate they are winning doctorates in other fields. “The change is glacial,” says Debra Rolison, a physical chemist at the Naval Research Laboratory.

Rolison, who describes herself as an “uppity woman,” has a solution. A popular anti–gender bias lecturer, she gives talks with titles like “Isn’t a Millennium of Affirmative Action for White Men Sufficient?” She wants to apply Title IX to science education. Title IX, the celebrated gender equity provision of the Education Amendments Act of 1972, has so far mainly been applied to college sports. But the measure is not limited to sports. It provides, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex…be denied the benefits of…any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.”

Harvard’s legendary Math 55 class does not look like America. The class roster at semester’s end? ‘45 percent Jewish, 18 percent Asian, 100 percent male.’

While Title IX has been effective in promoting women’s participation in sports, it has also caused serious damage, in part because it has led to the adoption of a quota system. Over the years, judges, Department of Education officials, and college administrators have interpreted Title IX to mean that women are entitled to “statistical proportionality.” That is to say, if a college’s student body is 60 percent female, then 60 percent of the athletes should be female—even if far fewer women than men are interested in playing sports at that college. But many athletic directors have been unable to attract the same proportion of women as men. To avoid government harassment, loss of fund­ing, and lawsuits, they have simply eliminated men’s teams. Although there are many factors affecting the evolution of men’s and women’s college sports, there is no question that Title IX has led to men’s participation being calibrated to the level of women’s interest. That kind of cal­ibration could devastate academic science.
…
Departments of physics, math, chemis­try, engineering, and computer science have remained traditional, rigorous, competitive, relatively meritocratic, and under the control of no-nonsense professors dedicated to objec­tive standards. All that may be about to change.

[Emphasis mine.]

According to Sommers, the movement seems based on self-serving research performed by aggrieved parties.

Oh, I just love this:

MIT biologist Nancy Hopkins, an effective leader of the science equity campaign (and a prominent accuser of Harvard president Lawrence Summers when he committed the solecism of suggesting that men and women might have different propensities and aptitudes), points to the hidden sexism of the obsessive and competitive work ethic of institutions like MIT.

“It is a system,” Hopkins says, “where winning is everything, and women find it repulsive.”

Women find it repulsive? Isn’t that, in and of itself, a statement that women are indeed different than men?

Via Glenn Reynolds.

“Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic strip about schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life?”

Via Radley Balko.

One of my standard dinner table debate tactics is “Do you trust George Bush to…? No? Then why do you trust him to be the only one with the guns?” And one of the “trust” questions is, “Do you trust George Bush to tell you whether or not you can smoke that joint? Remember, if he can tell you you can’t, he can tell you you must.” That last gets scoffed at.

No more, I think.

Melanie Wertin at the Lawrence Journal World and News writes:

President Bush’s New Freedom Commission on Mental Health wants to screen all schoolchildren for mental illness. The law has been passed in some states, and the program is called TeenScreen. Normal kids are labeled mentally ill with an array of disorders such as mathematics disorder, reading disorder, conduct disorder, just to name a few. This is ludicrous, and parents need to be aware of what is happening so they don’t let their children fall into a statistic.

Despite the evidence linking psychiatric drugs to suicide and violence, these drugs are prescribed to millions of children and teens based on subjective diagnoses made without any physical tests, such as blood tests, brain scans or X-rays.

[My comment over at Alphecca.]

“New Freedom”. >>Shudder< <

That’s even better than “Homeland Security”.

My result from taking this on-line quiz:

Your Aspie score: 141 of 200
Your neurotypical (non-autistic) score: 79 of 200
You are very likely an Aspie

I’m a little annoyed with the “Aspie” label; the diminutive makes me feel that people with Asperger’s are…cuddly, which is exactly the opposite of what Asperger’s is all about.