Online Gender Workshop, as ever, is brought to you by your friendly, neighborhood Crip Dyke.
A new and interesting series of posts directly related to gender should commence later today. And, yes, I’m aware that life came along inconveniently and too-long delayed my promised gender-sudoku post. That, too, will come, but not immediately.
Here I just want to point out of bit of innumeracy that bugs me. Why innumeracy in the online gender workshop? Ultimately for the same reason as the sudoku-gender connection: the biggest problems caused by our gender systems are with
- The compulsory nature of the system, and
- The poor thinking we humans do both implementing and reflecting on the system.
Any general improvement in critical thinking among the various peoples of the world should be of use in correcting #2, at least over time. And so I can be a bit of a martinet on the issue of carefully and critically thinking for oneself.
So this example of poor critical thinking comes from Gizmag, a website devoted to Gee Whiz! and Whizbang! in equal measure. A bit like the popular mechanics/popular science magazines and website, Gizmag has a compelling dedication to covering smaller manufacturers of electric vehicles and novel, efficient ICE-powered vehicles. Thee-wheelers (including enthusiastic coverage of tilting three-wheelers), “tiny house” living, and off-grid solutions make me an occasional reader. (Their shared weakness with popsci for writing puff pieces about the latest mass produced models from major auto manufacturers and latest mass-produced video game tech rolls my eyes too quickly for them to stay on the site for long.) Like most large websites, the writing is inconsistent, but often on Gizmag it’s quite good. The inconsistency comes from the many disparate contributing authors: sometimes the best writer you can get to review the latest Ford pick-up isn’t exactly Jeanette Winterson.
Materials science is another source of endless amazement to me. Deformable surfaces, even sticky ones, cause ice to pop off because ice is rigid, right? I mean, it’s not that hard to de-ice a gore-tex parka, is it? Well, since I don’t study that stuff, I was surprised to find out that all the de-icing work that’s been done has skewed very, very heavily towards either slipperiness on a macro scale or hydrophobicity on a molecular scale. But hey! What if you got a thin, sticky solution that dries rubbery and applied that to things that needed de-icing? Say goodbye to the ice.
That’s the article that I had just finished reading before I looked at this one covering a new spray-on variant of very recent albedo-reduction tech. You wouldn’t necessarily think it, but coating something with as pure a black as possible is incredibly important for any number of applications. The article mentions coating the tube that shades the mirror for a telescope, and how eliminating any possible reflection is even more important for space telescopes. They don’t actually say why, but the reason is simple: some light reaching earth’s surface is inevitably redirected, refracting off moisture in the atmosphere, etc. This refracted light will cause noise in your telescope’s light-catcher (whether your eye or whether an electronic data gatherer or whether you’ve hooked the scope up to a film camera). We have previously been able to get things black enough so that the amount of light reflected off the inside of the telescope is swamped by this atmosphere-redirected light. But when we go outside the atmosphere, the entire point is to avoid the light noise caused by redirected photons. So you don’t want a detector that introduces its own noise, and you design your circuits to minimize noise, and I mean minimize it. At that point, common black coatings do reflect enough light to greatly lower the quality of data, since the effects of these photons aren’t swamped by either refracted light or by the noise of conventionally built circuitry.
So, sure, you want a black coating that will reduce the noise reaching the detector, but do you want to pay for a coating that reflects 17 times less light than coatings already used with good results? Gizmag thinks you do:
Surrey NanoSystems released its Vantablack coating two years ago. Now … the material is available in a convenient spray-on form.
The new version, known as Vantablack S-VIS, is almost as good – it traps 99.8 percent of ultraviolet, visible and infrared light. According to Surrey Nanosystems, that’s 17 times less reflective than the super-black paint used in the Hubble telescope.
I went to the Surrey Nanosystems website, and they do indeed give Gizmag a plausible reason to say the coating is 17 times less reflective than the coating used on the Hubble:
Vantablack S-VIS is so effective that its performance far outstrips that of any other conventionally-applied coating, typically achieving a reflectance of less than 0.2%. Unlike other black absorbers, it offers this exceptional performance across a wide-range of viewing angles and wavelengths, which is critical for optical instruments, as well as in many aesthetic applications. It is, for example, some 17 times less reflective than the super-black paint used for minimizing stray light in the Hubble space telescope.
But, of course, Surrey Nanosystems got this one wrong, and Gizmag failed their readership today. Did I go and research the coating used on the Hubble to find this crucial error? No, this isn’t a research failure. This isn’t a fact-checking failure. This is a critical thinking failure. It might be true, as some of you suspect, that the low-reflectance coating used in the Hubble has a reflectance somewhere around 3.4%. But we don’t need to know that.
Say you’re buying some Vantablack. The quantity you want is 100 dollars or pounds or any currency really. They advertise a special price: for one week it will be sold at one-third less. They helpfully round down to the nearest full currency unit. You’d expect to pay 66 (whatevers), right? Then another special offers to charge you 0.5 times less. What would be your price? 0.5 times less is the same as 50% less. It costs 50. Next week, it gets a steeper discount, it’s 0.9 times less than the standard price. How much does it cost? 10. If during the next week it is sold for 1.0 times less than the standard price, well, [(Standard Price) – (1 times the standard price)] = Free.
If Surrey Nanosystems is stupid enough to give you a contract charging you a mere 1.7 times less than their standard price, you should buy as much as they can produce. If they wanted to offer a price 17 times less than standard, so much the better. But don’t ever buy it because it reflects 17 times less than the Hubble’s anti-reflective coating reflects. Then you are the sucker.
I must be missing something… colloquially 17 times less light = amount of light / 17. Surely the colloquial usage isn’t the mathematical one, but rather just an another way of saying 1/17 as the opposite of 17 times more? *scratches head*
So that’s relevant to gender because we often use language to talk about gender that is sloppy and technically inaccurate.
Not just that— in my experience, the colloquial language referring to gender is more than imprecise; it conflates vastly different concepts to such a degree that communicating the distinction becomes sufficiently difficult that we “learn” they are the same for lack of evidence to the contrary communicated in a form we can understand.
But the precise language contradicts the colloquial meaning; the word “man (colloquial)” is almost completely unrelated to the word “man (precise)” so gaining the necessary precision requires crossing a language barrier. And since there’s only limited standardization, many people have coined equally precise but mutually incomprehensible languages; one person may refer to three distinct concepts as “sex, gender, male” while another refers to the same concepts in the same order as “gender, gender role, masculine.” Not to mention, to people who have had the colloquial meanings heavily ingrained, it can be tricky to learn a language where the words are the same and the meanings conceptually related but completely different; the new words sort of feel “wrong” because they’re not how we’re accustomed to speaking.
So I can see lots of parallels between “17 times less” and “male.”
Doesn’t that mean they’re giving you seventy percent of the price, if you’re saying 1X less = $0? That is, you’re not exactly the one “buying” something in a situation like that, although you do get something (the extra cash and the product). But that’s just a minor quibble about word choice.
Why wouldn’t we need to know facts like that, that if it’s true and the statement is about that?
I don’t understand. You’re saying it’s false (or logically impossible) for something to be 17 times less reflective than Hubble’s coating? Why? It’s not a proportion of “absolute reflectivity” compared to a theoretical physical minimum or maximum, but proportional to the specific value of the Hubble coating’s reflectivity, just like the claim says. So it’s just Hubble/17 or Hubble * 1/17 — that’s what “seventeen times less” expresses here. It’s multiplied by (“times”) 1/17, which is obviously “less” than 1/1. Why would believing something like that make us suckers?
Or are we suckers for actually buying it, when you’re not disputing that it’s actually the case (and we’re not holding a false belief), because it’s somehow confusing to talk like that anyway (even though it hasn’t been confusing in the sense of misleading us about the facts, if there’s some other relevant sense of being confusing)?
At worst it’s a failure to use a language that is completely without ambiguity. Given that there is no such thing, I don’t think we can hold that against Surrey Nanosystems or Gizmag.
Why should we assume that “1/2 less” means the same thing as “1/2 times less”.
Sure, in those word problems we all suffered through in school, “less” meant “minus”, but “n times less” meaning “1/nth as much” (especially when n is greater than 1) seems like a perfectly understandable and straightforward English language idiom.
No, it’s idiomatic English. “N times less than y” means “y/N”, where N is greater than 1. And I don’t recall seeing the construction “one third times less”. That seems rather tortured. “one third off”, or “two thirds price”, maybe.
Let me explain. It doesn’t make sense, for example, to talk about an objective probability less than zero or greater than one. There aren’t 100.3% or -39.5% chances of anything. It’s part of understanding a probability, not understanding the particular facts about any particular event, that you know there is a minimum and a maximum at zero and one.
When talking about money, particularly cutting or raising a price/cost in relation to a previous value, it often works in a similar fashion (but percentages are always used instead of a real number). There aren’t any stores which put on sales in which items are 170% off, because that wouldn’t be profitable for the store. (On the other hand, things can be marked up by 500% of the cost, which is bigger than 1 yet that doesn’t stop consumers from buying them.) It’s not impossible, but it won’t generally happen if people are trying to get the best deal they can. You’re very safe in assuming sellers will advertise their sales between 0% and 100% of their own “ordinary” price (although it could be, for example, 17 times less than their competitor’s price) — any other behavior would not make much sense, but it could happen.
None of that implies that any old value whatever can’t be >100% less than some other value. That’s just not how it works, and there’s nothing confusing about it if you’re doing the math correctly. Besides, the analogy with money (or probability) doesn’t give me any clues about how reflectivity might be measured or described — why wouldn’t we need to know something about that before we decide who is or isn’t a sucker?
You want to see a really silly example of this sort of thing?
Recently, I saw the following stamped on the urinal plumbing in a men’s washroom of an office building: “Saves 80% more water than a 1-gallon urinal”. Tell me, how much water does a 1-gallon urinal save? And who uses a urinal with a 1-gallon flush, anyway?
The cafeteria in this same office complex had a banner advertising its “low-carbon foods”.
maybe the issue is the phrase “less than”, which could be used 2 different ways. Either as a Divisor or a Difference.
I’d like to suggest that “17 times smaller than” may have been a less confusing phrase than “17 times less than”.
[but i’m the guy who objects to the express line that says “less than 10 items”, as incorrect; correct would be “fewer than 10 items”]
not sure how this could be filed under “innumeracy”. excuse me for expressing my biased take on this discussion…
In his final paragraph Dr. Myers wrote:
>But don’t ever buy it because it reflects 17 times less than the Hubble’s anti-reflective coating reflects. Then you are the sucker.
My first thoughts on reading that was don’t buy it if its anti-reflective coating is more expensive than what you need. Perhaps you only need to make or cover graffiti. As others have pointed out PZ is calling out cases of imprecise language concerning arithmetic. When it comes to pricing the question I consider is, “how much do I pay for this?” rather than, “how much less than last week’s price is it?”
But his point is that we are used to imprecise language when it comes to pricing gamesmanship. And we use imprecise words when it comes to human sexuality / gender etal.
Do we need a sliding scale as between introvert and extrovert when it comes to gender expression? And if we do, is such a scale only –1 to +1 on the x-axis? Or is there a y-axis?
It was much simpler when I was a boy in the 1950’s. Men were men, women were women and some people traveled to Sweden if they wanted to switch. At the time I had no clue why someone would want to switch. My best thought at the time was some kind of dementia.
More recently one of the secretaries where I once worked was transitioning / had transitioned. My thoughts were
* that’s weird
* thankfully I have little occasion to interact with this person
* what about bathrooms?
* glad it’s not my job to decide about bathrooms
Like many people I have had no direct experience with non-heteronormative gender issues. Same sex marriage I have had indirect exposure. There is no way that two ladies marrying could change my marriage of 48 years.
I am looking forward to the Online Gender Workshop.
@Peter B
The OP’s author is Crip Dyke, not PZ, btw.
The Pedant’s Revolt
Language use is situational. I think most of us would recognise what Surrey Nanosystems meant, especially as it’s marketing blurb intended to put a concept across in as short and snappy a way as possible. I expect some of their materials scientists have already had a word with the marketing droid in the pub after work on a Friday.
Context has to be taken into account. If a detective tells me that they have a theory about who murdered Lord Carstairs in the library with a candlestick, I don’t reply, “No, you have a hypothesis.”* If a creationist tells me that evolution is “just a theory”, they can expect a robust and disparaging response.
* I reply “I’m not the butler.”
Well, Crip Dyke never actually says “17 times less means multiplied by 17”, it’s just sort of implied over the span of a few annoyingly long paragraphs which seem designed to obscure the meaning (maybe I also had difficulty because I have a bit of a cold). Is this another trolling workshop?
Surely “17 times more” means multiplied by 17.
And I’m pretty sure “17 times less” means divided my 17.
Apparently this is a thing people argue about sometimes:
https://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2008/12/21/having-defended-five-times-bigger-on-to-six-times-lower/
http://volokh.com/posts/1253897118.shtml
Though google searching for “0.9 times lower” gave some results that seem to simply mean “0.9 times” (which is how Crip Dyke used it). Difficult to tell. Did the same with 0.3 instead of 0.9, and got more results (about 5 thousand instead of a mere 3 thousand). Also noticed a trend that this usage occurred more in things like science papers.
Searching for “3 times less” produced 250 000 results, searching for “0.3 times less” only produces only about 5000.
*eh that’s not actually quite how Crip Dyke used it.
Anyways it’s pretty clear that this isn’t a case of “critical thinking failure”, it’s a case of differing language use, and Crip Dyke probably knows this.