Outliers

“Big data” is all the rage.

As if all the knowledge of the universe is somehow encoded there, just waiting to be mapped like the genome.

Don’t get me wrong, big data is very exciting. Our social science models are more accurate, our marketing more creepy. Big data is helping us understand the world just a little bit better. And that is fantastic.

But perhaps there’s something more valuable to be gleaned from all this big data.
As Brooke Foucault Welles, Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern, argues, “honoring the experiences of extreme statistical minorities represents one of Big Data’s most exciting scientific possibilities.”

At last we have datasets large enough to capture the “outlier” experience, large enough to truly explore and understand the “outlier” experience.

Why is this important?

As Welles describes:

When women and minorities are excluded as subjects of basic social science research, there is a tenancy to identify majoring experiences as “normal,” and discuss minority experiences in terms of how they deviate from those norms. In doing so, women, minorities, and the statistically underrepresented are problematically written into the margins of social science, discussed only in terms of their differences, or else excluded altogether.

There has been much coverage of how medical trials are largely unrepresentative of women – with one study finding less than one-quarter of all patients enrolled in 46 examined clinical trials were women.

This gender bias has been shown to be detrimental, with Anaesthetist Anita Holdcroft arguing in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, that the “evidence basis of medicine may be fundamentally flawed because there is an ongoing failure of research tools to include sex differences in study design and analysis.”

We should insist on parity in medical research and we should settle for nothing else when it comes to the social sciences.

People who deviate from the so-called norm – whether women, people of color, or just those that experience the world differently – these people aren’t outliers. They aren’t anomalies to be polished away from immaculate datasets.

They are the rare pearls you can only find by looking.

And “big data” provides an emerging venue for finding them.

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Lessons from a Snowy Sidewalk

Is there anything more awkward than trying to navigate snow-narrowed sidewalks?

There probably is, but that definitely ranks in the top ten.

For those of you from more mild climes, the problem, you see, is this: a sidewalk of once predictable width, formerly capable of allowing two strangers to pass unperturbed, now forces a level of intimacy which is most unseemly in many parts of the world.

That is, the side walks are too narrow for two people to pass.

Forced with such a conundrum, the pedestrians options are this: wait, claim the right-of-way, or try to pass anyway.

Waiting might seem like the safe bet, but it is not without risks: for one thing, this approach is untenable if you are in any sort of a hurry. It will take you forever if you are always yielding the right-of-way. For another, you occasionally end up in the awkward wait-off: who will strike out upon the narrow sidewalk first?

And, of course, choosing to wait can be awkward in itself: age, race, and gender norms all come crashing into play as busy pedestrians try to gauge the best way to interact.

I imagine that in Victorian Boston gentlemen always yielded passage to the ladies.

Which, of course, always makes me want grant first passage to the men. (Though I have been known to play the occasional game of narrow side-walk chicken with self-absorbed bros who don’t strike me much as gentlemen.)

Being somewhat old-fashioned, I tend to yield to my seniors – though having heard stories of embarrassment from grandparents who’ve been offered seats on the T, I’m not sure that’s actually the best way to go.

In fact, I’m fairly certain I once caught a look of surprise and distress from a woman who I let pass – I might have well just yelled “old lady!” at her, for all that old-fashioned habit was worth.

If both parties try to pass, that some times works out. Other times…well, I hope you’re okay getting to know strangers.

In the end, I suppose, we all just do the best we can.

I try to yield some of the time, claim the right-of-way some of the time, and only try to pass on walkways that seem like they can handle the two lane traffic. But sometimes I misjudge.

And I try to be equal in the types of people I wait for and the types of people who wait for me.

Sometimes, I misjudge, but overall – it’s like the snowy, narrowed sidewalks are this great equalizer. It doesn’t matter who you are, it doesn’t matter where you going. Only one person can go at a time and we all need to treat each other with respect and patience if any of us are ever going to get anywhere.

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Resilience

This morning I ran across an intriguing opinion piece by

In it, Chadburn argues, ” …normalizing the idea that residents in low-income communities can simply bounce back in response to a lack of resources…is handicapping our ability to help those truly in need.”

She recognizes the focus on resilience as an asset-based approach, yet expresses concern that projects which promote resiliency “valorize the idea that we should remain unchanged, unmoved and unaffected by trauma.”

Resilience, she says, is an antonym for broken.

I’m not sure her definition there is accurate, but she’s right to raise concerns about praise for the unbroken – as if all it takes to recover is to pull yourself up by the bootstraps.

Perhaps resilience should be seen more like Kintsugi – the Japanese art of repairing a broken dish with gold lacquer. Perhaps the places where we are broken should not be something to hide, but rather something to cherish.

Or perhaps that, too, puts too much focus on the whole, too much focus on the way things ought to be – and doesn’t pay enough respect to the dreary way things actually are.

I’ve been told that people who make it through difficult and traumatic experiences often do so by developing certain coping mechanisms – mechanism which might serve them well in one context while being entirely socially unacceptable in the next.

Perhaps, then, we should imagine people with resilience not as whole and unscathed, but rather as world-weary warriors, deeply scarred and wounded. Broken, perhaps, but beautiful all the same.

says resilience claims: “I am not broken. I can take more.”

Perhaps we should say: “You can not break me. I’m already broken.”

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Confidence

Someone told me today that the world would be a better place if more people had more self-doubt.

That sounds about right.

I have written before about how unimpressed I am by the common solution to the so-called confidence gap – that is, when it’s raised as a problem that women typically don’t have the confidence level of men, I’m skeptical that the best solution is for “women to be more like men.”

Maybe none of us should be egotistical pricks.

I mean, really, should anyone aspire to be Gilderoy Lockhart?

And I’m a bit uncomfortable putting this all in gender terms – it is true that women, on the whole, have lower levels of confidence than men, on the whole – but I also know plenty of bombastic women and overly humble men.

That’s not to suggest we should just ignore the gender dimension of this issue. It is most certainly a problem that men are generally taught to be aggressively confident while women are generally taught their ideas are worth nothing. That is a problem, indeed.

But just for a moment, let’s pretend we want to instill the same lessons in all young people regardless of their gender, regardless of the race, class, sex or gender identity. Let’s just pretend we want all people to learn the same lessons. And then we can ask:

What’s the right amount of confidence to have?

Probably my least favorite type of person is someone who is overly confident with nothing to show for it. People who are overly confident with everything to show for it aren’t too far behind.

Invariably, it seems, it’s the people who think they know everything who actually know nothing and the people who think they know nothing who actually know everything.

Well, not actually know everything – because the people who think they know nothing know it’s impossible to know everything – but the poetry is better that way.

Irregardless, nothing is worse than a blowhard.

But while stunning over-confidence can be tyrannical, a dramatic lack of confidence can be devastating.

A little self-doubt may be a good thing, but too much self-doubt can be crushing, paralyzing. To wake up every morning convinced of your own incompetence, convinced nothing you ever do will add value – well, that’s no way to live, though many do live that way.

But self-doubt doesn’t have to be debilitating.

A physicist by training, I think often of the men who developed the nuclear bomb. Just what did they think they were doing?

They were inspired by patriotism, by science. They had a fascinating problem at the cutting edge of human knowledge and they brilliantly developed a solution. A solution that ended in death, destruction, and the continual threat of more.

“Now we are all sons of bitches,” Kenneth Bainbridge famously said to  J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Those men probably should have doubted themselves a little more.

A moral life requires constant introspection, constant questioning, constant examining of your true motives and beliefs.

And I think that confidence should probably follow a similar process –

If you aren’t doubting yourself, you are probably doing something wrong.

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The Secret History of Wonder Woman

Today, I heard history professor Jill Lepore talk about her recent book, The Secret History of Wonder Woman.

The story is one of sex and sexual identity, of feminism and struggles against convention.

According to Lepore, Wonder Woman began in 1941 as a tool for silencing critics of comic books. With the genre having only recently arrived on the scene, parents were concerned about the effects of comic books on their impressionable young children.

Superman came from a master race – problematic for 1941. Batman originally carried a gun – which was also unfavorable to the sensibilities of the day. In fact, in an effort to console concerned parents, Bruce Wayne was later given a back story – one in which his parents were shot – and Batman ceased to carry a gun.

Wonder Woman was supposed to quell such critics – although she ultimately drew more criticism of her own – by fighting for truth, love, and equal rights.

Before giving the new character her own comic book line, a short survey was given to comic readers – Should Wonder Woman be allowed, even though a woman, to become a member of the Justice Society?

Surveys came back favorably, and Wonder Woman was given her own line.

Creator William Moulton Marston, a psychologist with a Harvard education, described his creation in the early 40s: “Frankly, Wonder Woman is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who should, I believe, rule the world.”

If that seems somewhat radical for a white man in the 40s, it probably was. Marston grew up seeing the front lines of the suffragette movement – his Freshman year at Harvard he heard radical feminist and political activist Emmeline Pankhurst speak. She didn’t speak at Harvard proper, though a male student group invited her, but rather spoke off campus as the administration would not allow women in Harvard Yard.

Marston was fascinated by radical feminists and passionate about equal rights. “The only hope for civilization is the greater freedom, development and equality of women in all fields of human activity,” read the press release announcing Wonder Woman.

In Lepore’s description, the history of Wonder Woman quickly becomes a history of Marston – and of Marston’s family.

As the New York Times describes, “The Secret History of Wonder Woman” is fundamentally a biography of Wonder Woman’s larger-than-life and vaguely creepy male creator, William Moulton Marston (1893-1947). He was a Harvard graduate, a feminist and a psychologist who invented the lie detector test. He was also a huckster, a polyamorist (one and sometimes two other women lived with him and his wife), a serial liar and a bondage super-enthusiast.

But that doesn’t really tell the story.

Marston married his college sweetheart, Elizabeth Holloway Marston, and then later – while working as a professor at Tufts University – fell in love with a student, Olive Byrne.

Eventually, Olive moved in with Marston and his wife, and Olive and Elizabeth each bear two children.

After Marston’s death in 1947, Olive and Elizabeth continued to live together until Olive’s death in the 1980s.

Lepore, a dedicated historian, lamented that there isn’t more documentation clearly describing the nature of their relationship. There are no letters between the two women, no notes indicating intimacy.

At least none which survived.

The polyamorous relationship was quite scandalous, you see, and a lot of effort was put into obfuscation. Marston was eventually blocked from his academic career due to the unsavory nature of his personal life. Meanwhile Olive – the daughter of Ethel Byrne and niece of Margaret Sanger – was concerned that the truth of her personal life would destroy advocacy for birth control.

And at the center of it all is Wonder Woman.

Wonder Woman was conceived as part Olive, part Elizabeth, part Margaret Sanger. She was a compilation of all these powerful and strong woman Marston had in his life. But she was part Martson – a man who I imagine wished he could have seen more Wonder Woman in himself.

Leport said that the story of Marston is about the cost of living an unconventional life.

If that’s the case, it is this intimate vulnerability which reveals Wonder Woman’s true power. Wonder Woman’s story isn’t about leading an unconventional life – it’s about leading the life you want to live and fighting to have that life accepted.

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Gender (non)Conformity

Not long ago, someone told me that she was still learning to be a woman. This person was over the age of 15, so it struck me as a particularly interesting comment.

Actually, it reminded me that when I was about 15 I’d told someone that I wasn’t very good at being a girl.

“What does that even mean?” they’d appropriately responded.

It also reminded me that in my early 20s I went out and bought a bunch of “sweaters with weird necks” (I now know them as “cowl necks”) because, “that’s what women wear.”

To be fair, there was an element of class identity to that last one, as I struggled to fit into my first office setting. But still, that feeling of gender identity was there.

And it was interesting that we’d both had this experience of having to “learn” to be our gender.

Of course, our experiences have been different – I am a cisgendered woman (unless I lose points for being “bad” at it), and the person I was talking to is a transgendered woman.

I certainly don’t mean to claim understanding or familiarity with another’s experience, but I’m honestly not sure why either of us need to “learn” to be like our gender.

Yet somehow it seems reasonable to imagine a transgendered woman saying she needs to learn to be a woman, even as it sounds absurd to hear a cisgendered woman say so.

I wondered if anyone had ever questioned her comment they way someone had once questioned mine.

No, but seriously – what does that even mean?

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Gender and Grammar

I generally feel rather strongly about using correct grammar. I suppose I ought to as a communications professional. But there are a few rules which I continue to break no many how many times I’ve been corrected.

I almost wish I’d kept a running tally, for example, of the number of times I’ve been marked down for noun/pronoun disagreement. That is, for writing sentences such as:

Did your child get their vaccine?

That’s incorrect, you see, because the child is singular while “their” is plural. You could ask about children getting their vaccine, but if your talking to a person with one child, that is not an optimal solution.

Traditionally, the proper approach was to always use “he” when a singular gender was unknown.

But, as others have noted this approach is generally considered “outdated and sexist.” An unknown person isn’t always male, after all.

So then came the so-called gender-neutral solutions:

Did your child get his or her vaccine?

Or, if you’d like to be a little more edgy, you can replace the default “he” to a default “she”:

From each, according to her abilities.

Those were the grammatical suggestions I received growing up, but neither ever seemed quite satisfactory.

“He or she” is just clunky. If you don’t know the gender of the person you are talking about, nobody cares enough for you to spend that much time on it.

Using a default “she” is delightfully subversive, but I personally find it rather stale. It seems to typically be used by men who are trying too hard to prove they’re feminists. That use may have its place, but is generally unhelpful to me.

And, of course, there’s a bigger problem to these solutions: both reinforce a gender binary. Are “his” and “hers” the only gender options?

English doesn’t offer much in the way of genderless nouns, as you might guess from the fact that they would more properly be called “neuter” nouns.

Did your child get its vaccine?

Well, okay, I might say that, but only because I am cold-hearted and childless.

From each, according to its abilities.

Better get ready for the Marxist robot take over.

Some have advocated for the use of newer pronouns, such as ze and xe. Call me old fashion, but I just prefer the simple they.

And better yet, there’s a now a term for this. I haven’t been suffering from noun/pronoun disagreement after all – I’ve just been using the singular they.

This may seem all neither here nor there, but words matter. Words are important.

So I was delighted to see the New York Times recently profile students at the University of Vermont – where the university allows students “to select their own identity — a new first name, regardless of whether they’ve legally changed it, as well as a chosen pronoun — and records these details in the campuswide information system so that professors have the correct terminology at their fingertips.”

Of course, this doesn’t stop the times from trotting out tired tropes of gender norms – saying one student “was born female, has a gentle disposition, and certainly appears feminine.”

But, I suppose, change happens bit by bit. It changes through big movements and upheaval, but it also changes through words and grammar. And so I stand by my grammatical standard:

Regardless of a person’s gender, they can go by any pronoun they want.

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Trusting Young People

Not long ago, there was a story on the news about parents being investigated after their children, 10 and 6, were found walking to the park on their own.

A few weeks after that, someone told me how folks in their neighborhood complained about teens “hanging out” downtown. A complaint I’ve heard more than a few times in my own communities.

Those teens were probably up to no good, older neighbors seemed to think. With their loud talking and lack of important business.

These stories seem some how connected.

I do not nor have I ever had children, so I certainly don’t intend to tell people how to raise their own. Besides, each child has their own quirks and personalities, and I rather suspect there’s not a single style of parenting that works for them all.

But I often wonder if we – collectively, as society – ought to put more trust in our young people.

I have no children, but I’ve had the pleasure of learning from many young people. And I humbly hope they have learned something from me.

It may not be my responsibility to raise them, but it is our collective responsibility to welcome them, to engage them, to support them.

But apparently, teens hanging out can’t be trusted because they act like teens. Perhaps the kids going to the park can be trusted, but the world around them is so dangerous that we should fear letting them in it.

We’re so accustomed to thinking of kids as lesser beings that such a protective instinct seems natural. And perhaps it is, to some degree – I imagine if I did have children I would feel quite strongly that children need to be protected from some things.

But I’d never stand for a law saying that adult women couldn’t go out alone after dark – even if it was for their own protection. Such paternalism – inappropriate in most situations – is still appropriate in the situation from which it gets its name: pater, after all, is the Latin word for father.

And, again, perhaps paternalism of children is appropriate. I don’t imagine we’d want to simply unleash the world upon our kids – or worse yet, to unleash our kids upon the world. But the dangers of paternalism in other situations is enough to give me pause.

I suppose what I ask is this – that we collectively try to trust young people more, or at the very least, we look deeply at the roots of our concern.

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Waiting

My father always told me that it’s better to be 30 minutes early than 1 minute late, so I’ve spent a significant portion of my life waiting.

Apparently, I am not alone in this – in 2012 the New York Times reported that Americans spend roughly 37 billion hours each year waiting in line.

It’s somewhat unclear, but I assume that estimate doesn’t include time waiting not in line – waiting for your child’s soccer game to finish, waiting for the meeting before yours to finish, waiting for a building to open, or waiting for the bus (which may or may not be in a line).

The Times argues that the “drudgery of unoccupied time” leads to complaints about waiting. Moving baggage carousels further from a gate, for example, reduced complaints since passengers had more occupied time walking to the carousel and less unoccupied time waiting at the carousel.

In some ways this makes sense, but in other ways I find it baffling.

Unoccupied time? What does that even mean?

Don’t get me wrong, I can get impatient with the best of them. About 4 and half hours into the flight to California I am about ready to jump out the window to get off of the plane. I get anxious when I’m running late and unfocused when I’m waiting for news.

But just waiting in general?

I don’t know. Isn’t that…kind of what life is? Finding ways to occupy unoccupied time?

Maybe I’ve just read Waiting for Godot too many times.

My father, after all, also taught me that when you arrive somewhere 30 minutes before you have anything to do there, it’s wise to bring a good book. Add snacks and water to that list and I’m good to go.

And if it’s too dark to read, that’s no big drama. After all, there’s always something interesting to think about.

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Honesty and Social Clues

There’s this quintessential moral dilemma: someone asks for your opinion on something and your honest feedback is…less than positive. Do you give positive feedback out of a sense of compassion, or give negative feedback out of a commitment to honesty?

It’s a question open to great debate.

But it may be primarily a debate of theory – when asked for feedback on someone’s hideous new outfit, for example, it’s possible that the most common reaction is neither lie nor truth – it’s paralysis and, possibly, fear.

Nobody knows what to say.

It’s not just a problem of moral paralysis, it is a problem of social paralysis. What is the “right” thing to say? Asks both about what is moral and what is socially optimal – and the later is definitely context dependent.

If someone is bristling with excitement over the outfit they just dropped a small fortune on you may not want to respond in the same you would to someone who is trying to decide how they feel about their newest hand-me-down.

What’s particularly interesting is that in many of these conversations you – the person beading with sweat trying to figure out how to respond – are really just a spectator to another person’s inner dialogue.

When someone asks what you think, it doesn’t always mean they care what you think.

Perhaps they are looking for validation or confirmation of what they’ve already decided. You can give it or not, but either way it’s not really about you. You’re just a mirror for what they want to see.

The real social challenge is that generally we don’t know what’s in the other person’s head. Do they really want feedback? Do they just want a reinforcement of their view? If that’s the case, what is their view and what kind of reinforcement can be provided?

These are the types of thoughts that run through my head as I stare panic-stricken at my interrogator.

So I think, actually, the best response to stall for information. Ask questions, make non-committal statements, see how they play their hand.

My favorite response is what I call the air-suck, that is, the noise you make when someone asks for feedback and you respond with, “Well….<air-suck>.” It may be the universal sign that you’re not comfortable providing your honest feedback.

And it provides your questioner with an important opportunity – they can create a space for honest dialogue or they can finish the thought for you. In that case, you didn’t lie – though you didn’t tell the truth – but you did serve as a mirror, which is all that was really asked of you anyway.

And, of course, if someone is genuinely interested in your honest, open feedback, the solution is simple – give it.

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