Phoebe

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BREAKING NEWS The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2024 #NobelPrize in Physics to John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.”

Born 65 years ago this minute. Happy to say the last five years have been my all-time most productive (so far)... writings.stephenwolfram.com/2024/08/five-m…

Compared to men, women are more likely to value "meaning" when it comes to job choice ht @_alice_evans. Culture shapes what is seen as meaningful & this impacts women disproportionately. Pro-abundance, pro-market movements need to pay attention to this. writingruxandrabio.com/p/pro-progress… Excerpts: "Among the researchers and public commentators that are trying to shed light and improve the public conversation around these facts is Alice Evans, a gender sociologist at King’s College London. On her personal blog, she had an interesting post this week, discussing an underrated source of the gender wage gap: the difference in how much men and women value "meaning” at work. On average, women value meaning, or doing what is considered socially valuable, more than men. Consequently, they are willing to accept what are usually lower salaries in order to pursue such professions. Both genders express a preference for interesting work that provides autonomy. The gender difference is larger when it comes to flexible working hours. Bigger still is the gender difference in whether the job is helpful to others or useful to society. The share of women who say they value jobs which help others say is 8.2 percentage points higher than that of men. Alice suggests that a way to diminish the gender wage gap is to change the “vibes” of certain highly-paid jobs, especially those in STEM, whose contribution to society is severely underrated and whose advantages are framed purely in terms of financial benefits. In other words, she proposes a change in culture. Alice is right on an important point: while women’s preference for so-called meaningful jobs might be hard to change, women do not make judgements on what careers are valuable in a void. On the contrary, especially at young ages, when big decisions like this are made, they are highly sensitive to what the culture at large portrays as “good.” For men this is less of an issue. Given that they value financial benefits more, they will still end up in careers that pay more (say in tech), regardless of how pro-social they are perceived to be. This means that at least to some extent, what careers women choose to pursue can serve as a barometer of what society considers pro-social, meaningful and of positive impact to the world. And looking at it through this lens does not paint a positive image about what society values for those of us who are broadly aligned with a pro-market, pro-progress movement. (...) My observation aligns with Alice’s suggestion that women might be underestimating the social benefits of more lucrative careers like those in STEM because of a culture that vilifies the products of market forces. 17-year-old college applicants might underestimate the power of STEM. While Amnesty International obviously appeals to progressives, it’s possibly worth celebrating massive advances in biochemistry, pharmacology and public health (…) That said, many sectors’ social impact may be under-appreciated. If your elderly loved ones survived COVID, it’s possibly due to vaccines. Biochemists saved millions of lives. Yet in the U.S., Big Pharma is widely vilified. This demonisation may have turned progressive young women away from pharmaceuticals, too disgusted and ashamed to tell friends that they’re working ‘for the enemy’. I like that Alice chose the vaccine example, because it perfectly illustrates how we consistently underestimate the social benefits of market-driven scientific innovation. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it was governments that mostly fumbled the response, while we were largely saved by companies who produced efficacious vaccines in record times, most notably those exploiting mRNA technology (again invented to a large extent by a woman.) These start-ups, largely unknown to the public before the pandemic, were largely the product of investment from another sector that usually carries a negative connotation: venture capital. In the UK, it was a (woman) biotechnology venture capitalist, Kate Bingham, who chaired the government's successful Vaccine Taskforce, steering procurement of vaccines. Yet the common wisdom that most young people passively internalize is that for-profit work is generally icky, that corporations are greedy and that non-profit work and governmental intervention is what will change society for the better. When I graduated university, career choices were explicitly framed as a choice between selling out and having a positive impact. And anecdotally, I also noticed something that supports the data from the studies brought by Alice: faced with this choice, women were disproportionately more likely to choose positions they perceived to be societally beneficial. Sometimes there can be a trade-off between societal impact and pay. One could argue that too many bright students pursue jobs in domains like finance or corporate law, which could be done by less smart people to little loss to society2. But the pro-social alternative to these jobs is not necessarily to be found among the lowest paid non-profit positions, either. In particular, decently lucrative STEM positions are consistently underrated in terms of social impact. And the companies producing drugs or semiconductors need people working in areas like business development and law, too. So the option to impact technological progress is not limited to only those that have STEM degrees. I still think we need competent people to work in government or non-profits, but it is much better if they have internalized the importance and efficiency of markets, so that they can work from these positions at aiding, as opposed to hindering, a well-functioning economy. What I have noticed happens is the opposite: those attracted to these jobs are usually the most anti-market people. Incidentally, Kate Bingham herself had something to say about the general attitude towards life science companies prevalent in the British government, that supports my observations: The government must do better. It needs to take a positive, proactive approach to the life sciences industry. The government lacks the knowledge, and interest to detect the differences between money-grabbing opportunism and valuable corporate behaviour. To the extent that this wisdom about the noxious nature of corporations persists, women will be disproportionately more likely to ditch high-paying and ultimately socially beneficial careers for well-intentioned positions that in the end might not achieve that much. It is ironic that so-called progressives like Bernie Sanders, who would pay lip service to the idea of gender wage equality, are among the people who contribute the most to this culture that ultimately holds women back. Even if getting more women in lucrative careers is not among your top priorities, if you are broadly aligned with the “Progress Studies” movement or take a pro-market view, you should still care about whether women view these topics positively. Since people often unconsciously adopt societal values, it's crucial to consider how culture broadly depicts different pursuits, as these portrayals significantly shape public perceptions of what's valuable or worthwhile. One suggestion I would have for those that want to promote a more pro-abundance outlook is to move away from the Gooncave-y aesthetic that has come to define a lot of male-dominated spaces, including a lot of those that define themselves as pro-tech. The truth that I have observed time and time again is that women will be willing to engage in causes they believe in a rather selfless way. Most events that promote a pro-abundance, pro-progress outlook that I have attended have been organized by women who believe in the righteousness of the cause and are willing to engage in work that advances it with, all else equal, much less need for external applause and validation than corresponding men. The earnest and enthusiastic involvement of women is a huge boon for any type of ideological movement and one can ignore it at their own peril. In other words, idealism is a double-edged sword. It can be harnessed to great societal benefit if the overarching cultural narratives about what actions are beneficial are correct. Or it can be wasted on well-intentioned but ultimately unimpactful or even negative pursuits."