Letters to the Editor
Stevo23
Published Letters: 63 Editor's Choice: 2
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No pleasing Broadsheet
[Read the article: Many women have a low sex drive. Or not]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]When pharmaceutical companies make Viagra, they're being anti-feminist by ignoring women's sex drives and focusing only on men.
When pharmaceutical companies do a study and find that there are many women with low sex drive, they're being anti-feminist by exaggerating the number of women with low sex drives just to help their bottom line.
When/if the pharmaceutical companies eventually produce their product to help women with low sex drives, they will of course be excoriated here for being anti-feminist by "pathologizing" women's low sex drive (all the ones who supposedly didn't exist), and for just making a product so that husbands can pump up their partners' libidos.
Honestly, I don't know how anyone could win with this crowd.
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Let's recap
[Read the article: 2 + 2 = duh]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Scientific studies that show results we agree with: great study, but so patently obvious it wasn't worth conducting.
Scientific studies that show results we don't agree with: horribly flawed and irredeemably biased.
Maybe the major journals should just hire the Broadsheet crew to do their peer-reviewing for them.
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Re: Counting vs. spelling
[Read the article: 2 + 2 = duh]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Spelling can be done by a spell-checker. Arithmetic can be done by a calculator.
Just as spelling is not writing, arithmetic is not math.
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@Vince Foster
[Read the article: 2 + 2 = duh]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Obviously. I would sure hope so.
However, the Broadsheet post doesn't link to Science, just an AP article which notes that
"For the class of 2007, the latest figures available, boys scored an average of 533 on the math section of the SAT, compared with 499 for girls.
On the ACT, another test on which girls lag slightly, the gender gap disappeared in Colorado and Illinois once state officials required all students to take the test."
Which suggests they're looking at averages which have absolutely nothing to do with the claims Larry Sumners was making (yet both Broadsheet and the AP don't seem to understand this fact).
The (very much debatable) claim made by Sumners was that perhaps men and women had different levels of variance in their math/science ability. It is entirely possible for two sets of data to have the same average, but not be distributed in the same way.
For example, say 4 boys scored: 10, 20, 80, 90. They would have an average score of 50.
Say 4 girls scored: 40, 50, 50, 60. They also have an average score of 50.
This is the claim that Sumners was making: perhaps male aptitudes vary more widely (there are more genius men, and more retarded men).
The discussion is pretty academic anyway, because averages and variances of large samples are basically useless for drawing conclusions about any individual member of that sample.
The thing that irritates me is that Broadsheet (and most other press outlets) are so ignorant of basic math, science and statistics that they aren't even really qualified to comment on this stuff.
As I begged in a previous comment, hire a science consultant, please.
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Transcript correction
[Read the article: "WTF" of the day]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm not sure why transcripts are so often inaccurate, as quoted in the Broadsheet article, Rush is saying,
"...and he found somebody that did something with her mouth other than talk."
But if you watch the video yourself, he clearly says,
"...might be attracted to a woman...whose mouth did something other than talk."
The true version is actually even more awful in that it removes the woman herself as actor in the sentence, reducing her to her mouth.
Anyway, Salon (and everyone else in the world), try to actually write what people said, not what they would've said if their grammar were better, or their brains were less enfeebled.
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"summer child care was $1,800 a month for my three kids"
[Read the article: Our cupboard was bare]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]See, real poor people get family members or old ladies from their church to watch their kids. Or the oldest kid gets stuck playing parent to their younger siblings.
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Re: Familiarity
[Read the article: A new use for stem cells: Breast augmentation]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Not just familiarity for the public, but also for doctors. Physicians and researchers will gain invaluable knowledge about stem cell therapies. By learning to grow new breast tissue, we'll be much better prepared to grow, say, liver tissue, or lung tissue.
Cosmetic procedures are an ideal, high-profit incentive venue to get pharmaceutical companies to invest in innovative new treatments.
And if fake breasts become, well, a little less fake, that's probably a win too.
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Re: Mythic 'dead white guys' classes?
[Read the article: What does it mean to be an "anti-feminist"?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]A lot of posters on here have talked about why we need women's studies classes because in their other classes, all they learn about are dead white guys. I want to know where/when these classes were? Maybe this was true in an earlier generation, but I can tell you it is no longer the case at all. The pendulum has swung the other direction.
I'm probably younger than most of the posters here (just finished uni) and I can tell you that almost every history class I ever took was focused on cultural history of minorities and oppressed people.
Do you know what I learned about the Second World War in my AP US History course junior year of HS?
1) Women entered the workforce while men were away at war, but mostly returned to domestic life afterwards.
2) Blacks migrated to the North.
3) Truman desegregated the Armed Forces.
That's it. I'm not exaggerating. We learned nothing else about WWII. Now certainly all those are important things, but it's certainly not a full account of what is easily the most pivotal event of the last 100 years.