Insomnia, Mental Illness and Logical Fallacies

As an individual that has studied in the STEM fields and actually work in the field, I've always found psychology as a field of study to be underdeveloped as a scientific discipline.  What I mean by this is that, for as long as the field of psychology has been around, it should have more of a solid intellectual and factual foundation that we often see in STEM fields such as physics, chemistry and biology.  Factual foundations that are well proven and supported by evidence often result in the development of technologies and knowledge that actually improve the quality of our lives.  But we don't see this in psychology. Much of psychology is mired in wishful thinking, logical fallacies and unsubstantiated claims.  In itself, this isn't too bad.  New fields of study often have very little information to work with and researchers have to invent ways to investigate poorly understood phenomena, so there's bound to be missteps and lines of investigation that bare no fruit.  It's when such underdeveloped fields are used to influence and dictate policy, which in turn directs the course of research in that field, resulting in the self-perpetuating cycle of the ignorance that I see in psychology that is such a serious problem.  Since psychology has this impact on our lives, we mistakenly treat it as a mature science on the level of STEM fields when it clearly isn't.

This has been a recurring thought for me for many years and a recent article in The Conversation has compelled me to write about where I see the field of psychology going wrong.  The Conversation intends to describe the link between insomnia and mental disorders, even though the cause still isn't clear, and I currently see no way that they can get much closer to the truth because of several logical fallacies being committed.

Questionable Cause (aka: cum hoc ergo propter hoc)

The logical fallacy of questionable cause occurs when somebody concludes that one event causes another event simply because they typically happen or exist together.  As an example, one might look outside and see dark clouds in the sky and rain.  When considering these two events occurring simultaneously, one might conclude that the rain is causing dark clouds to appear. Such a conclusion is obviously absurd.  The phenomenon is understood well enough that even uneducated people know that it's actually the dark clouds causing the rain and not vice versa. Or one fails to consider that both the rain and the dark clouds can share the same root cause (oversaturation of moisture in the air).

It's when the phenomenon isn't well understood, such as depression and insomnia, that we can inadvertently commit the questionable cause fallacy.  In this case, it's has been assumed for decades that insomnia is a symptom of depression and other mental disorders.  Nobody, as far as I can determine, had seriously considered that insomnia might be causing mental illness.

Literature often describes insomnia being comorbid with other mental conditions such as depression, anxiety, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD),  post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and even bipolar disorder. Also, according to the article:

The relationship between insomnia and mental illness is bidirectional: about 50% of adults with insomnia have a mental health problem, while up to 90% of adults with depression experience sleep problems.

If insomnia is comorbid with mental illness in at least half of the cases, then concluding that mental illness is causing the insomnia, is a textbook case of Questionable Cause.  I can understand the leap in logic.  We often see patients with chronic conditions such as arthritis or acid reflux having difficulty sleeping.  Normal sleep patterns return when the condition is effectively treated or managed.  So I can see that some people might assume that this pattern holds in the case of mental illness.  Except, nobody has ever proved this!  Psychologists assumed that this was true for mental illness as well and ran with it.

It was only until recently that psychologists have begun to question the assumption that insomnia is merely a symptom of mental illness.  According to "The Good Night Study" (Gosling, et al):

The relationship between insomnia and depression has received considerable attention in the past decade. Focus has shifted from the view that insomnia is a symptom, or sequala, of depression to one in which it is conceptualised as a related but not totally dependent phenomenon. Supporting this, insomnia is commonly unresponsive to otherwise successful treatment for depression, being the most common residual symptom following completion of either pharmacological or psychological depression treatment, and the timing of insomnia onset more often than not precedes the onset of a depressive episode.

 As someone who is standing outside looking in, this idea seems obvious to me.  If insomnia is comorbid with other mental disorders, then it's possible that mental illness might be caused by insomnia or that they share a root cause.  This possibility should have been investigated a lot sooner!  Also, consider that we've been raised from the time we were wearing diapers that getting a good night sleep is crucial to good health and well-being--including mental well-being.  Yet, psychology hasn't considered that insomnia could be causing mental disorders until only a decade ago??  Better late than never, I guess, but it shows how the Fallacy of Questionable Cause could allow a paradigm to be established that ends up derailing research in a field that is still seeking good models for mental function.

Appeal to Popularity (aka: Argumentum ad Populum)

The logical fallacy, Appeal to Popularity, is known under several different names--Appeal to Belief, Appeal to Consensus, Appeal to the Masses and the Bandwagon Fallacy.  All of these labels refer to the idea that something must be true because a lot of people say or believe that it's true.

The textbook example of this fallacy was that everybody "knew" that the Earth was the center of the universe and that the sun, the other planets and the stars all orbited the Earth, which was fixed and motionless.  This was known as the Ptolemaic Model of the universe and this model of the universe endured for over a thousand years.  You would think that this was an awfully long time for an idea to endure that was so obviously wrong!  How backwards they must have been!

Except that the wrongness of the Ptolemaic model wasn't obvious at all!  The people that lived in the past didn't arbitrarily pick a theory and threaten all dissenters with death if they disagreed. The model was very successful at making accurate predictions of movements of the sun, moon and planets in the sky for over a millenia.  Rest assured, these predictions were often a matter of life and death.  Older societies often took cues when to sow and harvest their crops based on the locations of the stars, moons and planets.  This model also informed religions about when they should observe certain holidays and holy days.  The Ptolemaic model worked very well as a celestial model and was quite comprehensive for it's time.  There was only one problem: It was wrong! 

The Ptolemaic model of the universe represents a textbook example of a theory that many people believed in because it apparently explained so much about our world, but it still ended up being wrong.  So we can't necessarily assume that a theory is correct based upon its explanatory power. Later, more accurate and precise heliocentric models of the universe faced much resistance exactly because so many people believed in the Ptolemaic model.  For me, the Ptolemaic model is a textbook example of how strong of a headwind the appeal to popularity can have on the advancement of science.

Don't mistakenly assume that the science of today has shrugged off such a prejudice past.  It's hard to believe that with technology making our lives easier and our easy access to information that we still may not understand much about the world.  This is very apparent in the field of psychology. Even today, the mind is very poorly understood beyond the gross anatomy.  It's very much a black box--we don't know how it works beyond receiving and reacting to stimuli and information.  Black boxes should worry any researcher because it becomes too easy to assert a hypothesis as truth and build a whole field of study based on something that hasn't been proven--much like the Ptolemaic model.  It's too easy to commit the Fallacy of Questionable Cause, and yet, this is what the field of psychology has done and it's going to take decades to undo the damage.

The idea that mental illness is causing insomnia and not vice versa isn't just a minority opinion, it's actually dictating the standards of care in the practice of psychology. Recent research attempted to determine if cognitive behavior therapy conducted over the internet (CBT-I) was effective in reducing insomnia and had observed that patients' moods improved according to a recent research article on PubMed:

"If providing an online CBT-I intervention for patients with both insomnia and a comorbid psychological condition can yield improvements in sleep, as well as improvements in mood, this suggests that patients can initiate treatment for insomnia, even in the presence of psychological symptoms of depression or anxiety. That is, patients may not have to wait to seek help for insomnia until their psychological distress is fully resolved. This is of importance given that some clinicians believe patients with insomnia and comorbid psychological symptoms cannot benefit from insomnia treatment until the psychological issue is resolved, particularly if that intervention is conducted online. "

The passage makes it quite clear that the field of psychology regards insomnia as a symptom of mental illness and that it seems to be standard practice--or the practice of a large portion of practicing psychologists--to delay treatment of insomnia in favor of treating the psychological distress.  What justified this approach besides the prejudices of psychologists?

Now that the idea that insomnia can cause mental illness has been raised, the field will start to reevaluate how mental illness is studied and treated, right?

You wish!

Let's consider another logical fallacy.

Appealing to Authority (aka: Argumentum ad Veracundia)

The logical fallacy, Appeal to Authority, refers to an argument that must be true because somebody in authority has said it is true.  This argument is persuasive because people in authority are assumed to have access to knowledge that the rest of us don't have.  Also, many authority figures can be charming and persuasive as well as skilled in their practice.  It's one reason they became authorities to begin with.

When it comes to science, it's important to note that legitimate authorities (not crackpots pretending to be authorities) often are more knowledgeable then the general population in the subjects that they study, practice and do research in, so opinions of authorities in psychology should carry some weight in discussions about the practice of psychology and it's social and political implications. But how can one tell who the authorities are?  One would think that a psychologist is an authority in psychology, right?

Here's an experiment you can try: The next time you visit your doctor, ask him what's the last research article he or she has read and when?  He doesn't have to be a psychologist, he could be another specialist or even your general physician.  Don't even ask him what the article is about.  Just ask him to tell you the title!!!  I'd say 9 out of ten times he wouldn't be able to give you an answer.  It is likely to have been years since he's read any research, assuming he ever did in the first place!!!

This isn't to say that he isn't a legitimate authority on health and medicine.  He still knows more than you.  But he's practicing with knowledge that he acquired during medical school and his residency which may be years to decades out of date!  Of course he's required to take continuing education where he can glean some information on modern developments, but it isn't nearly as rigorous as medical school.  Left to his own devices he may be practicing medicine using science that has been obsolete for decades.

So who is reading all that research and using it to dictate evaluations, diagnosis and treatments?  Well, the authorities are!  Who are they?  They're the different medical associations and government agencies.  They're the ones  that actually evaluate research and create standards of care within their respective fields based on it.

So your doctor isn't getting his knowledge from research journals, he's getting his knowledge from authorities above him (or the reps that are selling drugs or medical devices).  Your doctor is just following a flowchart and using checklists.  He may be very competent at doing this and may even have knowledge of the underlying causes of your problem, but when he's diagnosing and treating you, he's following a flowchart.  Anybody questioning the checklist and standards of care will be greeted with Appeals to Authority.  It's assumed that the authorities are reading all the research and incorporating it into policy and standards of care.  "We treat the mental illness instead of the insomnia, Dr. Smith, because the ABC Association and XYZ Agency recommends it."

So current discoveries in the doctor's specialty won't impact how he practices until the research is evaluated by the authorities above him and enshrined as policy.  That seems to be a pretty straight-forward method of correction except this is where new ideas meet resistance in much the same way as the heliocentric model of the universe encountered resistance from people who had an investment into the Ptolemaic model. And it happens for several different reasons ranging from no-need-to-fix-what-isn't-broken to people thinking that the new paradigm somehow undermines their authority on the subject and end up resisting it solely on principle. 

This resistance is encountered in any field and often explains the observation that science advances one funeral at a time.

Even if a psychologist does read research journals and keep up on current findings, while still finding time to perform his other duties and responsibilities, it's not going to matter much. He must still follow the standard of care set up by the authorities.  So in the case of insomnia and mental illness, he must regard insomnia as the symptom  (it will be specified as such in his checklist for diagnosis) and not a cause, and then select a treatment from a list of approved or recommended treatments by the same authorities to manage a mental disorder that isn't insomnia.  Deviating from these standards too much could be the quickest way to lose his license or get sued for malpractice.  If the worst comes to pass, he can at least say that he followed the standards of care and let the bureaucrats argue about whether it's the right thing to do.

The best scenario in such cases would be for a psychologist to read the research and realize that both cost and the risk of adverse side effects are quite low and try to treat the insomnia in his patient with cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) in the hope that the symptoms of his mental illness subside.  Then he will concurrently treat the mental illness with the appropriate recommended therapy to keep the authorities happy.  But if the treatment for insomnia does resolve the comorbid disorder, he will have a difficult time convincing anybody of the efficacy of treating insomnia.  "Of course his condition improved, Dr. Smith.  You treated his depression with the recommended therapy and his sleep problems abated."

This is just one example how Appeal to Authority can be detrimental to advances in psychology.  This isn't as much of a problem in other medical and STEM fields (although it can still happen) because outcomes are more easily measurable and the results tend to speak for themselves.  But it's easy to see how logical fallacies can be institutionalized in the field of psychology and retard further advances precisely because so little is known about the brain and the mind.

So what's the point?

We all know that failing or neglecting to treat a condition often makes the condition worse when given enough time.  Perhaps many cases of mental disorders is simply insomnia that has persisted untreated for too long.  Too many of us are living stressful lives.  We check Facebook or play Candy Crush in bed instead of going to sleep.  And it's always rush, rush, RUSH during our waking hours! How long can the mind function normally in the absence of adequate sleep before degradation occurs?  I know that if I miss only a day or two of good sleep, I start getting easily irritated, I lose my temper more easily, I feel disconnected from relationships with other people and my work, I lose hand and eye coordination, etc.  Imagine the state of mind when going months to years without a good night sleep!

Also, let's not forget how this can influence policy when politics get involved.  Consider this:  A child of about grade school age has difficulty sleeping at night for a variety of different reasons.  He wakes up and always comes to school tired.  It becomes difficult for him to pay attention in class.  He's sluggish in recess.  Other children don't want to play with him.  He gets easily agitated and loses his temper over minor things.  He won't sit still. He has emotional outbursts. He fidgets and daydreams.  His grades suffer and the teachers are at the end of their wits.

The child gets referred to a counselor by a school principle or administrator that has incentives from the government to identify children with disabilities so they can petition for government aid.  The child is brought to his first appointment with the counselor by his parents who also have a vested interest in a diagnosis for a mental disability so they can convince themselves that their divorce isn't what's screwing up little Timmy.  The counselor, who is on the government dole, has an incentive to find some type of disorder or disability for the sake of job security.

After an hour meeting with little Timmy, the counselor comes up with a diagnosis of ADHD.  How?  Did the counselor do a brain scan?  A blood test?  No, no.  He used a checklist!!!  It's very probable that all little Timmy needed was a good night sleep!!  But no.  We have a huge bureaucracy with incentives to find things wrong with people, being advised by another group of people that refused to consider insomnia as a cause of mental or behavioral disorders because of the logical fallacies that I've described above.

Has anybody noticed that parents don't seem to be putting their children to bed at reasonable hours like they used to?  I'm seeing parents with toddlers and infants in malls, theaters and restaurants at 9, 10 even 11 o'clock at night, even on weekdays!  Meanwhile, diagnosis of behavioral disorders are skyrocketing, especially among children.  Is this just correlation or something more?


In the meantime little Timmy simply gets diagnosed with ADHD.  Nobody seems to consider that Timmy just needs sleep.  At best, the counselor may decide that Timmy needs therapy.  I'm also a big fan of therapy, especially CBT.  It has the potential to help a lot of people.  The catch is that you need patience and time.  The patient needs to develop new habits and new engrams that become reinforced cognitively.  It could take from months to years to see results.  This time frame won't be good enough for Timmy's teachers or parents.  They want a solution, NOW!

So the counselor refers Timmy to a psychiatrist to prescribe ritalin--A STIMULANT!!

I would call this government sanctioned malpractice and encourage everyone else to think twice before insisting that the government should manage our healthcare!


I can already here you mommy bloggers huffing and puffing about how your child is different and he really does have this phantom disorder.

I only have one question, "Where's his father?"  

"But it's in the genes, you know!"

Yes, I know, I know.  A scatter-brained, easily distracted mother ends up raising a scatter-brained, easily distracted child.  Color me shocked!

According to Sleepdex:

• Schizophrenia (2.2 million in US) — often co-morbid with sleep disorders.
• Anxiety disorders including posttraumatic stress disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, and social phobia. (40 million in US each year) — often co-morbid with sleep disorders
• Schizoaffective Disorder (under a million in US) — often co-morbid with sleep disorders
• Dissociative Disorders (under a million in US) — often co-morbid with sleep disorders
• Panic disorders (6 million in US each year) — often co-morbid with sleep disorders

Insomnia may not cause only ADHD, but can possibly be the cause of a variety of mental disorders ranging from panic disorders to schizophrenia!  Yes, this is a hypothesis, but if psychology and psychiatry are still grappling with root causes to mental disorders, then I might as well toss this idea out there and see who runs with it.  All these disorders that are being treated as individual and distinct disorders might simply be symptoms of the same underlying disorder--that disorder being insomnia!  This isn't a far fetched idea considering that medical disorders can exhibit different symptoms and complications in different people.  Consider diabetes as an example. The list of symptoms for diabetes is quite broad and varies on an individual basis. We may treat the different symptoms and complications in diabetics but we also give much attention to persuading all diabetics to adopt a much more healthier lifestyle as well as encouraging other people to live healthy lifestyles to avoid diabetes and its health complications in the future.  We must start to think the same way about mental disorders.

Happy Father Bashing Day!

June 19th was fathers day. Happy Father's day! You guys have earned it!  You're putting up with a lot and you deserve some refuge!

It's Male Bashing Season

Our cultural obsession with bashing fathers doesn't get much press, but it's widespread.  This goes way beyond deadbeat dads, whom many people think the bashing is justified.  There's women criticizing them for not helping more around the house.  Feminists claim abuse from fathers and husbands in divorce proceedings and are granted restraining orders on dubious grounds.  There's complaints that they're not being sensitive enough or not strong enough.  Father's are told that they aren't ambitious enough while women compete with them for jobs.  Father's are spending too much time at the office or not providing enough for a middle class lifestyle. Men are depicted in movies and sitcoms as buffoons and dunces for the comic relief, or as rapists and violent abusers in more drama-filled stories.  At best, they're portrayed as shallow tropes that represent an establishment that must be resisted or rebelled against.  The list goes on and on.  It seems that only men in uniform garner any sort of respect in today's society, but even then, it seems to have more diminished value today than it did in the past.

Father bashing has even made it's way into the church.  As a disclaimer, I was raised Catholic but haven't been to church or observed and practiced my faith since I graduated high school.  But in recent years, I've been finding my way back to it.  Part of my journey has been reading Christian blogs and lurking on discussion boards that revolve around Christian themes.  If a man thinks that he can find refuge in the church from the hostile social and political environment that has subsisted on male bashing, he would be mistaken.

Sunshine Thiry writes in her blog:

My husband and I went to church shortly after I read IB’s post, where I was shocked to hear my first ever Father’s Day sermon...where my pastor says [emphasis added]:

"I have to tell you, it’s our goal on this Father’s Day weekend to lift you up and encourage you.  And I have to tell you from history I’ve learned that often Father’s Day is one of the worst days that dads can ever choose to go to church.  Because often it’s the only time churches feel like they’re going to have the ears of dads and so what they do is they plan to beat them up royally for all they’re not doing right.  Ever been to one of those Father’s Day services?  Oh man, I have.  In fact, here in the early days of my ministry here, you know what we’d do?  Oh man, we planned.  We planned for you guys.  And then what we did is we’d sing “Cats in the Cradle and the Silver Spoon”.  And we’d talk about how you have so royally blown it, the world has gone to hell in a hand basket, and then we’d try and help you recover.  And we wondered why dads didn’t like Fathers Day at our church."

Sunshine's testimony is interesting, because her pastor's sermon (video included in her post) strongly implies that the father bashing on Father's day isn't confined to a few radical churches on the fringes.  He acknowledges that this bash fest is widespread, has been occurring for a long time and the pastors knowingly encourage it.  Father bashing is the norm in church.

And they wonder why people aren't coming to church anymore.

In a way, this is strange.  I know that corporations and military organizations don't dress down a boss, manager or Sergeant in front of his subordinates.  It greatly diminishes his ability to lead and effectively instill discipline and cohesion among his subordinates.  So why does a pastor think he can bust down a man in front of his wife and children and expect any results?  Churches view men as the spiritual head and leader of the family while undermining them at the same time.  Strange indeed.

Criticism and correction should be done in private and away from the eyes and ears of subordinates, and always with the intention of making the person better at his job.  In the church environment, this can be done in confession if a denomination practices it or male retreats where the women are excluded.  I personally know that many Catholic churches host these retreats for men a couple of times each year.

Yes, I'm plugging for my faith.  Sue me!

Most certainly, men in the church are generally aware of self-improvement.  I rarely see a spiritual man that doesn't want to be a better husband and father.  The reason we don't hear more than a dull roar about the male bashing in church is because most men are taking their lessons to heart.  You'll often get a grimaced look, a slight nod and a muttered apology if his errors are brought to his attention.

Queens of the Pulpit

This attitude  toward self-improvement among men seems to be a polar opposite of the attitude exhibited by women.  Dalrock's blog documents a cultural trend of women in the church actively rebelling against the church and the family while their enablers in the church bash men for not being worthy husbands. Dalrock has a conspiratorial view of the situation that one may have trouble accepting, but a major theme is how churches are orienting themselves to placating and even raising women on pedestals while giving them a free pass to sin, break up their families and behave disrespectfully to the men in their lives.  However, if you're skeptical about his views on the subject, research has also documented a growing feminizing in the church. This cultural trend in the church isn't on the fringe either, but mainstream. The churches are turning a blind eye to frivolous divorces.  Women are being elevated and lionized as perfect beings, even promiscuous women and women who have broken their marriage vows.  Redemption from the sins of the past is one thing, placing a woman on a pedestal as some sort of Divine being is approaching idolatry.

The grumbling that we're hearing from men like Dalrock seems to be rooted in the fact that women aren't being called out and held accountable for sinful behavior in the fashion that men are.  Men are being called out for being less than the ideal husband while women are encouraged and enabled to rebel.  Apparently, many churches think that the woman is rebelling instead of submitting because the man isn't being a good enough husband.  How can a family union exist in such a cultural setting? Aren't we all imperfect?  Aren't we all sinners?  Don't we all need God's guidance?

Dalrock posted recently about the difficulty of confronting women about their sin. He quotes from an article by Pastor Doug Wilson, who has counseled many married couples:

When a man mistreats a woman, the current climate still allows a pastor to confront him, and to deal with it thoroughly. Even though the world gets conviction of sin all wrong, this climate does mean that the simple message of repent and believe is one that can still be delivered to men. The men usually expect it, which is good, because they deserve it.
But that is not the case anymore with women. Any counselor who actually tries to address feminine shortcomings in a dysfunctional relationship is a brave counselor. One of the things that happens is that any such an attempted address is immediately construed as “taking the side” of the abuser. And to anticipate an objection here, this is not a function of the counselor being male — my wife has seen the same reaction that I have, and sometimes more quickly.

Both Wilson and his wife have observed that it's a lot more difficult to reproach women about their sins in the church than the men.

Sheila Gregoire and her husband speak at marriage conferences all around the world and gives marriage advice in her blog, To Love Honor and Vacuum.  In one article, Sheila talks about the reception she typically gets from women at these types of conferences:

One of the interesting things about giving the wife talk is that, as I start to talk about what a woman can do to make marriage great, I see many in the audience looking distinctly uncomfortable and shifting in their seats. So, just like clockwork, about seven minutes in, I stop my talk, and say:

I know you women are uncomfortable with me saying all these things that you should do. But let me reassure you that right now my husband has all of your husbands in another room, and he is blasting them and telling them what they need to do, too, in no uncertain terms. So don’t worry. Your husbands are hearing an important message. So get your minds off of them and let’s just spend this time thinking about what we as women can do to make the marriage great.

After that, the women laugh, visibly relax, and I can go on.

The trends documented from various different Christian observers seem pretty clear:  Women don't take well to criticism within the church.  If they accept it at all, it seems only begrudgingly after they are assured that the men are also getting an earful.

I remember being invited to a Promise Keepers conference.  The theme was Making of a Godly Man.  It was a men's only conference that was so large it filled up a football stadium and lasted the whole day.  There were keynote speakers to motivate and encourage all of us to be better husbands, fathers and sons.  They payed tribute to our veterans and civil servants, they gave suggestions about how a divorced man can still be a father to his children, how men can mentor our youth, etc etc.

Where are the football stadiums full of women encouraging each other to be better wives, mothers and daughters?  Seriously, I can't think of one. If women do assemble, it's usually to discuss how victimized and pissed off they are.  The twitter hashtags and memes born from such female assemblies always seem full of neurosis and self-loathing.  It's no wonder to me why so many women are unhappy.  It's as if they're angry that all those equal rights laws and tax dollars they get didn't automatically make their lives better.  But somebody has to pay, and it's usually the guy snoring next to her in bed.  What has he done for her lately?

Catholics Stand the Gap

With all this weighing heavily on my mind, I attended mass at my local Catholic church for over a year, including on Mothers Day and Fathers day.  I was pleased to see that there was no male bashing at the masses.  Other practicing Catholics that I've talked to also haven't seen male bashing at their churches.  I've tried to search on Google for examples of male bashing in the Catholic church--including Catholic Answers-- and couldn't really find any examples.  There was some references to male bashing in pop culture and the media, but nothing in the church.  If anybody has an example of male bashing in the Catholic church, leave a comment.  For now, I'll tentatively conclude that male bashing doesn't occur in the Catholic church.  The Church observes the Fathers Day and Mothers Day holidays by giving fathers and mothers a blessing and a few kind words, but that's it.

So why is this the case?  The male bashing phenomenon hasn't infiltrated the Catholic church (yet).  Is there something about the church that makes it more resilient to modern influences that include male bashing?  I think there might be and here are some of my ideas why.  Call them hypotheses if you will.

1.  No strong tradition of rebellion or revolution

The Great Schism that divided Rome and the East Orthodox churches was about a thousand years ago and wasn't really a rebellion as much as disputes over procedural matters.  A lot of the core beliefs remain intact and you can still see many similarities in doctrine between the two churches--more similarities than other Christian religions.

But other Christian faiths such as Calvinism, Protestantism, Episcopalians and Lutheranism were created in the spirit of rebellion against the church.  Whether the rebellion was justified or not is not the point.  The point is that such rebellion became bodily incorporated into the doctrines of the religions that spun off from Catholicism.  So is it a surprise when certain parishioners of those faiths rebel?  Even rebel against their own families?

2. Papal Authority

All Catholic churches are subordinate to Rome.  Churches that don't tow the line from Rome rapidly find themselves closed down or losing members.  This top-down organizational approach tends to foster consistency with how doctrine is incorporated and preached.  A Catholic can go to any Catholic church in the world and attend the same mass, structured the same way and even listening to the same Gospel readings as his home church--even if the mass was spoken in a completely different language, he can follow along.  There's something to be said about consistency.

There's only one point where a priest has some liberty in conducting his service and that is the Homily.  Sometimes they can be quite long but the priest only discusses the Gospel reading and how we should apply it to our daily lives in these modern times.  It's very much a "What would Jesus do?" type of speech.  So there isn't really room on the agenda for male bashing.  What's keeping a pastor in line at the other churches?

3. The Virgin Mary

Catholics raise Jesus' mother, Mary to a special status level in the church.  We venerate her.  She is the only woman that wasn't born with original sin, she gave birth to our savior by the power of the Holy Spirit and was bodily incorporated into heaven when her time on Earth was finished.  So arguably, Mary never died.  She's perfect!

So the idea that we can place women on a pedestal or regard them as being more pure and spiritual than men like other churches have done is bordering on sacrilege and idolatry.  That level is for Mary, and Mary alone!  Until a woman gives birth to the Messiah for the second coming, she's a wretched sinner just like the rest of us.  So we don't even try to raise them up to that level.  We forgive them and move on.

4. The Catholic church is a patriarchy

Yes, I can here the feminists grumble as I write this.  I think I'm on solid ground when I say that there will never be female priests, bishops and popes in the Catholic church.  Certainly, there are readers and servers that are female, but that's about it.  Don't forget that biblically speaking, women weren't even allowed to speak in church.  And this was actually the practice for many years until relatively recently.

This shouldn't even bother feminists because the church is big on marriage and opposed to icky stuff like abortion and gay marriage, so it's not like they want anything to do with the organization.  So the veneration and elevation of females that happens in other churches doesn't really happen that much in the Catholic church.  And there's the whole separation of church and state thing.  The government can't force the issue on us with any of that equality nonsense.  So women priests aren't going to happen anytime soon.

But if you're curious how a women-led church would function you can visit the Episcopalian churches.  It makes me wonder about the survivability of any liberal institution in general.

It's not that the Catholic church is against "equality".  It's  been preaching that for a long time.  But the priesthood is the only exception.

5.  Priests don't marry

There's been a lot of discussion about whether or not we should allow priests to marry.  A common complaint is how a priest can counsel a married couple when he hasn't been married himself.  But he is already married.  He's "married" to the church and submits to it.  And he's suppose to counsel husbands to love their wives like he and Jesus loved the church, and for wives to submit to their husbands like he submits to the church.

Jesus and his apostles were also unmarried--and I think this is important to note, and not only for tradition's sake.  How effective do you think Jesus and his crew would be in spreading the good word if they were anchored home with their families?  Not very.  A wife and children would get in the way of that objective.

Also, have you noticed that the churches that have the worst problem with male bashing (and divorce rates) are the ones that allow their pastors to marry?  I can imagine a pastor giving a very rousing sermon on the importance of being a good wife and avoiding the temptations of our modern age and then coming home to a wife tapping her foot and giving him the stink eye about what he said.  And that's if he's lucky!

It's not difficult to imagine that a priest being married will end up watering down the message he's suppose to be preaching, at best.  At worst, there comes the undue praise of people for being born with a uterus and using it outside the institution of marriage.  Then the male bashing starts.

So rest assured, a Catholic priest has submitted and is one with Jesus.  That is all the moral authority he needs to consul a married couple.


Personally, I'm relieved that there are some enclaves that can treat men and fathers with respect and keep women on equal footing with them.  Such places still exist and you might hear a good message or two.

Hollywood Screws With My Childhood

I can understand Hollywood's desire for sequels.  The groundwork has already been laid by creating a universe, establishing characters and defining the underlying themes.  If the original made a lot of money and the studio profited, then why not?  The audience would often like to see some of their favorite characters in another conflict to overcome and further develop the character and the universe in the process.  It's win-win as long as it's done well.

It's the reboots that I can't stand.  They are attempts to recast, redefine and change the storyline to appeal to a newer generation of movie goers, often with a political purpose.  Hollywood discovered that slapping the label of a successful franchise on a package full of bull dung will still earn them millions of dollars.  They're right, but it resembles more of a scorched earth tactic than the "evolution" or "send up" that producers claim it is.  Hence, I kiss some of my cherished childhood memories good bye.

Note:  At this point, I'm suppose to issue a "spoiler warning" because there are some idiots in the world that don't realize that you might be giving away plot points in an article that talks about movies.  Consider yourself warned.  Also, consider staying home on election day...and avoid breathing.

The Terminator

Genisys is the fifth installment of a very successful franchise.  Most people will say that Judgement Day was the best, but I really think the first Terminator was the masterpiece.  All the movies feature the rise of a super computer that becomes self-aware called Skynet who decides that mankind needs to be Terminated.  A desperate struggle between the machines and the remnants of humanity in the future prompts both man and machine to travel back in time in attempts to alter the past for their benefit.

Unfortunately, with Salvation we learned the hard way that unless you have Arnold Schwarzenegger cast in the titular role, the franchise flops.  Arnold is still in good shape but he's starting to show his age, which makes his casting as the terminator model T-800 a little bit odd.  The script attempts to get around this fact by sending the T-800 further back into the past to save Sarah Connor from termination when she was a child and raising her.  The T-800 is robotic, but his organic components will age normally and give him the older look that we see in the present day.

"I still got this!"

Time travel is always a little tricky to deal with in science fiction.  It can create too many paradoxes and contradictions but I think the Terminator handled them very well for the most part.  "No fate but what we make" and "the future is not set" were major themes that ran through the first Terminator and Judgement Day and I found them to be encouraging and motivational.  This theme was abandoned in Rise of the Machines, but it was replaced with a more interesting one; the emergence of a temporal war fought across time between man and machine where they either try to keep Skynet from being created or facilitate it's emergence through it's vulnerable, embryonic stages. This theme was further explored in the television series, The Sarah Connor Chronicles.  It was clever, I remember thinking.  Conceivably, the war between humanity and Skynet may never end leading to many more sequels and spinoffs.  This is how they should have continued with it.

Unfortunately, the producers and writers for Genisys ditched such a promising development.  It wasn't entirely their fault.  The Sarah Connor Chronicles had suffered from a writer's strike, bad casting, and a bad time slot (just ask Firefly).  Summer Glau as the terminator/protector, Cameron, was pretty good, but John and Sarah Connor were miscast.  So the writers for Genisys might not have seen the theme as being a workable formula. 

They went with a reboot that changed the timeline entirely!  And they still have casting problems!  Sorry but Jai Courtney is no Kyle Reese; not even close.  Emilia Clarke seems to have done well in Game of Thrones but she can't hold a candle to Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor.

The producers also decided to make Genisys a PG-13 installment while the ones before it were rated R.  I assume they wanted to appeal to a broader audience but this is unfortunate.  Without the blood and gore and language that gives Terminator an R rating, it looses a lot of it's suspense and intensity.

Also, Arnold Schwarzenegger is suppose to die/get destroyed. That's the rule! He was the villain in the first Terminator but in Judgement Day and Rise of the Machines he gives us hope that an AI can learn compassion, evolve beyond it's programming and be self-sacrificing and give humanity another chance.  In all fairness, he attempts to do this but through a deus ex machina, he's saved.  Now he's an upgraded T-800/T-1000 hybrid ready for another adventure.  Reese is still alive too, by the way.

(Sigh) This is no longer the Terminator that I grew up with and I have a feeling it's going to get a lot worse.

Star Trek

Now that the Gene Roddenberry and his wife have been dead for a while, the studios had another franchise with it's own well-established universe and loyal fan base to malign for cash and prizes. Some idiot thought that adding more CGI, casting younger and hotter actors out of an Abercrombie and Fitch catalog, and rewriting the canon would somehow make Star Trek appealing enough to a younger fan base who wouldn't appreciate the more cerebral subjects that the original vision of the Star Trek universe entailed.

Who needs talent when you look like this?

The reboot is maybe a little better than that week old newspaper lining the bottom of your bird cage.  The Star Trek universe is also on a completely new and reinvented timeline so forget all that cannon that you learned covering everything from the original series that aired in the 1960's to Star Trek Enterprise that wrapped up its series finale in 2005.  That's a good forty years of rich history down the drain.

If you don't think that's a big deal, then you really haven't met a Trekkie before.  The Star Trek canon has effectively been written in stone according to these people and studio greed smashed it and tried to glue it back together with a few pieces missing and tell everybody it's just as good.  Now I'm picturing Star Trek conventions in chaos as everybody has to qualify what friggin' timeline they're talking about.  You've potentially created a schism so wide that Trekkies will long for the simple times where the worst thing they had to worry about were people trying to convince others about whether James Kirk or Jean Luc Picard is the best captain.

Listen, I get it.  You hacks in the studios wanted to make a sci fi action film.  You even had some sequels in mind so you can milk the fan base for a good decade. But instead of using your own creativity to build your own universe and timeline, and create and develop your own characters and fan base, you raided an established and beloved franchise.  The resulting pile of garbage has no resemblance to the original Star Trek universe.  Sure, you kept some of the characters names, but now they're completely different people. 

And what the hell did you do to Spock?!?!?  You took a role model that might have inspired a generation of millennials to think rationally about problems they face and turned him into a brat that throws temper tantrums every 15 minutes.

Star Wars

Episode VII, The Force Awakens was billed as a sequel to the original Star Wars trilogy, but in reality, it is a reboot of episode IV, A New Hope.

Evil planet-crushing super weapon--check
Said planet crusher destroyed by hitting an achilles-style weak spot--check
Enigmatic and masked antagonist that is strong with the dark side of the force--check
A quirky, cute and lovable droid as a main character--check
Important information concealed in said droid to be delivered to the resistance--check
Young orphaned protagonist that isn't aware of his or her strength with the force--check
Said orphan eeking out an existence on desert planet--check
Beloved older mentor of said orphan being slain with a light saber--check

...and so on.  You get the idea.

What mars this picture is Rey's (Daisy Ridley) inexplicable knowledge and skill with machines and the force.  When the film opens, we see that Rey eeks out a living by salvaging parts from busted or abandoned ships and selling them for cash.  I can believe that Rey learns through experience which types of parts would give her the most value when she sells them.  But can a person know how to build and repair machines using this information?  I'm doubting it.  In one critical scene, Rey fixes a potentially dangerous breakdown of the Millennium Falcon better than Han Solo or Chewbacca despite never being on board the ship before. Rey also possess enough knowledge and skill with the force that it can facilitate her escape from the clutches of the First Order, and confront and defeat Kylo Ren in a lightsaber dual.

Don't worry ladies, she has Grrrl Power©!

Luke Skywalker, on the other hand, barely touches a lightsaber in A New Hope and needs help from Obiwan Kenobi, Han Solo and Chewbacca to rescue Princess Leia.  He spends most of his time in Empire Strikes Back being trained by Yoda and he is still no match for Darth Vader.  Despite Luke being strong with the force, he doesn't become proficient with the force until Return of the Jedi.  Yet, Rey seems to have all this knowledge and skill because of--what? Grrrl Power©!

Then there's the casting of a black actor, John Boyega, to play Finn.  I agree with some of the critics that say this is simply pandering--casting a black actor so you can say how progressive you are for casting a black actor.  But, may I suggest that you cast one that can act before you break your arm patting yourself on the back?  Before you accuse me of reading too much into this, consider what the director, J.J. Abrams, said when directing The Force Awakens:

“I think we all have a hell of a lot to do, and I think it is insane to me that we still have to have a conversation about inclusivity. It’s shameful.  We all need to do better to represent this world. It’s something that is important to me, and is something that we’re focusing on. It’s inevitable and crazy that it’s taken so long. To imagine being someone who would see mainstream media and see themselves be underrepresented would be an incredibly hurtful thing.”

My question is, "Has this guy been asleep for the past 30 years?" There are many minorities and women in main leads, even in Star Wars. In fact, the science fiction genre is often first in exploring progressive ideas such as diversity--and did so well before Abrams came along--but it must enhance the story.  You can't be ham-fisted with it. Now, don't misunderstand me.  I'm not opposed to women or minorities playing strong leads.  But John Boyega as Finn sticks out in The Force Awakens in a way that Billy Dee Williams didn't in The Empire Strikes Back; probably because Williams was a much better actor. Samuel L. Jackson also does well as Mace Windu in the prequels. In other franchises, Avery Brooks presented well as Commander Benjamin Sisko in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.  I also think Jennifer Lawrence was fantastic as Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games.  And I think Linda Hamilton's portrayal as Sarah Connor in the Terminator franchise is brilliant!  So audiences are well acclimated to seeing women and minorities as main leads.  JJ Abrams' casting decisions were more of a setback for women and minorities because they stick out so much in The Force Awakens.

But in the end, be careful about your grandstanding and virtue signaling when supporting cast diversity in movies.  It might be counter productive by making you look like a hypocrit.  Critics complained about the jive-talking Jar Jar Binks in The Phantom Menace and the asian inflections of the Trade Federation as being racially insensitive.  Yet, the Empire is represented by white actors that speak with British accents and nobody bats an eyelash.



As a write this, I saw a trailer for a Ghostbusters reboot featuring all female leads.  Also, there's a press release indicating that Tom Cruise is on board with a Top Gun reboot.  I don't know any details about the script but I'm willing to bet good money that female pilots are going to feature more prominent rolls in this movie.  One of them may even die to show that women can be skilled warriors and die for their country just as well, or even better, than men.  Something tells me that this pretentious reboot fad will go on for a while.  God help us!

Stefan Molyneux Stands for Truth and You Should Too

If you are ever confused about what may be happening in the world and where the recent cultural shifts have originated, I highly recommend Stefan Molyneux's YouTube channel.

He evaluates of lot of cultural and political discussions using reason and logic and presents it in a way that you can understand.  His videos are on the long side but Stefan goes beyond the sound bites.

His most recent video is one of my favorites and is only about 8 minutes long.  He inspires us to stand up for truth and reason.  Lies and deception should be confronted--not maliciously but with the gentle guiding hand of a wise grandparent.  Those who can reason and think logically and rationally should lead others to new positions based on solid facts and reasoning. 

I whole-heartedly agree.  We should put an end to postmodernist, moral relativism and align our morals, our spirituality and our conscience to reality or we are lost.

Are Men Better Inventors?

February is Black History month and this poster is making the rounds on social media.

Before you keep scrolling, take a look at the list carefully.  Do you notice anything about this list? They are all black inventors, but did you notice anything else in common? Take a few minutes if you're not sure. I can wait.









They are mostly men. Women make up roughly half of the population so why the gender disparity when it comes to inventions? It's not even a slight majority of men or any other number near half of that list. Only 3 of the 53 black inventors are women. 

It's been often remarked that everything that we enjoy in the world--everything that benefits us and makes our lives better--is due to the work of men.  This goes far beyond inventions and discoveries.  Explorers were predominantly men.  Soldiers were predominantly men. Rulers were predominantly men.  So were poets, artists and philosophers.  Things today that we take for granted are done mostly by men: plumbing, construction, waste management, distribution of goods, etc.  Even things we don't really notice because it's difficult to imagine the world organized any other way are developments brought forth by men such as economies, bureaucracies, government, military organizations, and the scientific method.  All of this has been brought forth by men.

Wishful Thinking

At this point, a rabid feminist will interrupt the dialog by claiming that women could have just as easily accomplished these things if they weren't oppressed and chained to their stoves the whole time throughout history.  Well, what about the poster?  Black people were an oppressed class for much of America's history, and yet, they still managed to invent things.

First, even if true, I would expect that these oppressed women, while chained to their stove, could still invent a better stove or develop a logically coherent philosophy (which would only require pen and paper), but we have no historical record of this.  And it's not due to "The Patriarchy©" or men stealing the women's ideas and inventions.  Rosalind Franklin eventually got credit for playing a crucial role in discovering the structure of DNA. Also, despite attempts to literally obliterate Hatsheput from Egyptian history, historians were still able to piece together who she was and what she did as Pharaoh.

Yes, there are many gaps in the historical record.  So we can't rely on this as evidence that women haven't invented many things?  I disagree.  How about we consider a couple of modern-day examples.

Aviation

It's interesting that when a woman accomplishes something in a male dominated field, it tends to be hyped more than if a man accomplished it.

Let's consider Amelia Earhart.  You know who she is, right?

She was the first woman to conduct a transatlantic flight from Newfoundland to  Northern Ireland in 1932 using a Lockheed Vega 5B.

The Lockheed Vega 5B

The flight earned her a nickname of Lady Lindy.  Why?  Because a man named Charles Lindbergh completed a longer transatlantic flight from New York to Paris 5 years earlier in 1927 using a custom built, single engine airplane called the Spirit of St. Louis.

The Spirit of St Louis

Lindbergh gets recognition because his flight was between the mainland US and Europe.  But there was an earlier transatlantic flight that was truly death-defying!

Thirteen years prior to Earhart's flight, in 1919, John Alcock and Arthur Brown also flew from Newfoundland to Ireland using a WWI era bomber.  Here's a photo of the plane that they flew.

Alcock and Brown nearly died.  They were in an open cockpit and had to cope with ice, northerly winds and fog.  One of them had to repeatedly crawl out onto the wings in mid flight to chip ice off of the engines.  Here's a photo after they landed in Ireland.

Apparently you don't have to stick the landing.  As long as you can walk away, it counts!

These flights I'm describing are transatlantic flights.  The first plane to fly around the world  was piloted by Wiley Post and Harold Gatty in 1931.  Here is the aircraft they used called the Winnie Mae.

If you think it looks a lot like Earhart's plane it's because it is.  You're looking at another Lockheed Vega!

So let me recap this historical digression for the slow people.  Earhart's achievement came 5 years after Lindbergh's record-setting flight using the same plane that two men used to fly around the world one year prior!  Earhart's achievement was all feminist hype and she gets my nomination for being the most overrated figure in history.

I picked aviation because early in it's history it was an extremely dangerous endeavor.  I pointed out the successful high points but many people lost their lives trying to push aviation limits.  People were still trying to figure out the technology and discover what technology was needed and which designs worked best.

Finally, one puzzling thing about aviation history is that there were female pilots during this time; pilots that were a lot better and more competent than Earhart.  Yet, if I asked 1000 people nobody would be able to name one other female pilot from this era besides Earhart. So it's obvious that there was no evil patriarchy keeping women from flying planes.  My first question is why none of these female pilots attempted a transatlantic flight?  Or even a flight around the world?  Second, why did the feminists tap Earhart for the trip instead of a more competent pilot who can live up to the hype?

Facebook

Facebook is an interesting example because most of us can still remember a time when the internet didn't exist.  It wasn't that long ago which means that certainly by this time women were already fully indoctrinated into believing that they can do anything men can do (even better than men can do) while going into STEM fields to cheers of you go grrrll--which would include computer programming.

Then the internet was born (developed my men), including the establishment of the necessary infrastructure (developed by men), the hardware (developed by men), the HTML and browser software (developed by men) and the services that allow us to access it (developed by men).

Where were you ladies during all this?

Then Mark Zuckerberg creates Facebook with a couple of friends in his college dorm room while attending Harvard as an undergrad.  A lot of technical pursuits in the modern day live or die based on funding, but that is the beauty of Facebook.  It required no start up costs beyond the nominal investment of a computer plus some programming knowledge and skill--skills that Zuckerberg cultivated at a very early age.

Feminists like to complain that institutionalized sexism or male privilege is discouraging or thwarting women's careers and ambitions, but none of this would have gotten in a girl's way of creating Facebook.  You simply sit at a computer and do it.

Oh, you need skills also, and knowledge about how the internet works beyond using your mouse and remembering your passwords.  I find it hard to believe that schools were keeping women out of computer classes.  Even if they did, the internet was already established with some areas of the world wide web offering free tutorials and literature on writing HTML.  The requisite knowledge was easily accessible and available.

So I ask again, "Where were you ladies during all this?"

 

It's Not About Ability

Don't misunderstand me.  There are many women who do quite well in STEM fields, especially when a particular field has already been developed and mature.  So my examples aren't meant to be an assertion that women can't do anything or that they are incompetent.  Certainly, men fall on a broad spectrum of ability as well.  Not every man can be a pilot to fly around the world or a computer wiz to invent Facebook.

The point of my historical digression is that there is no patriarchy or oppression that is keeping women from becoming inventors.  Our poster of black inventors even includes three women.  When I talk about invention, I'm not discussing the ability to learn or perform highly technical tasks.  History and our modern age has demonstrated that women are capable of doing this (individual results will vary, just like with men). When I talk about invention, I'm talking about origins--it could be a machine, a physical object, a political system or philosophy. There seems to be something in the nature of men that allow them to visualize things that don't yet exist and find the means to bring that vision into reality. The ability to invent, for better or for worse, seems to be a masculine trait.

Even if Earhart was a good pilot, it still took two men to invent the airplane and bring it into existence to begin with (the Wright Brothers).  Also, as much as we laude Sheryl Sandberg for becoming the COO of Facebook, both the website and the company were invented and developed by Mark Zuckerberg.

This is only a blog post but any careful contemplation of the past 10,000 years of documented human history shows that female subjugation by males is a myth.  If there is any burden or enslavement placed on women, it is from nature itself and not the work of men. In fact as civilization progressed, man's ingenuity has succeeded in subduing his environment, eliminating threats and raising the quality of life to the point that female intellectualism should have flourished if it had existed in equal capacity to a man, but it's noticeably absent or of diminished character instead.

The question is why?  Why is it like this?

Intelligence Quotient (IQ)

The ability to invent would seem to be rooted in somebody's intelligence in some fashion.  The ability to think creatively and logically seems critical to this.  So it would seem IQ would be a good way to measure tendencies of people and populations to invent.  Discussions involving IQ are more complicated than they appear.  There is a lot of discussion about different types of intelligence and whether or not the tests that are designed actually measures intelligence accurately. However, IQ is a good proxy for this discussion and its what most people are familiar with when discussing intelligence.

Nevertheless, IQ doesn't measure raw intelligence absolutely.  It's a normalized aggregate. The Flynn Effect describes the phenomenon that average IQ among various populations around the world has steadily increased over the past century.  Given enough time, we'll all be geniuses which would be absurd.  So IQ scores get updated periodically and test results get normalized based on how well a test subject did in comparison to a group of other people who took the same test. The average IQ score is automatically adjusted to 100, if your score lands more than two standard deviations away from this average (about 130), then you're considered gifted and can join Mensa if you wanted.  A score lower than two standard deviations (about 70) makes you mentally retarded and you may have trouble performing some tasks that require a high level of cognition.

Likewise, average IQ of men and women are both normalized to be 100.  It is assumed that men and women, on average, are of equal intelligence, but this is debatable.  For example, it's often observed that women do better at verbal portions of the test where men do better at spacial recognition, but in the aggregate these complementary differences wash out so the average, normalized intelligence (the hump or the bell curve) might not tell us much about why men may be better inventors.

To get a true indication of why men may make better inventors, we may need to look at extremes--the tail end of the curve.  We have a lot of data on IQ testing.  When you plot out IQ scores by gender you get curves that look like this.

from Quora.com

The differences of the curves are exaggerated for effect in this diagram, but scholars have noted that men tend to outnumber women at the extreme far ends of the curves--both at high intelligence and low intelligence.  In fact the further down you go on the curves, the greater the gender disparity in favor of men.  This would seem to make sense.  It explains why most of our inventors and nobel prize winners are men while most of our prisons and special education classes are also full of men.  Women, on the other hand, are over-represented in the center of the curve--they cluster around the average IQ of 100.

The IQ scores also shed some additional insight.  As I already noted.  IQ is an aggregate of several types of intelligence.  Initially, it would seem that spacial recognition and logical deduction would be required to make better inventors, and men do excel in this generally speaking, but inventors are rare.  We should be seeing a lot more inventors if this was true.  In order to score higher on the IQ test a person needs to master other forms of intelligence that scientists try to measure, including verbal intelligence which women tend to do well on.

If creativity is required to make an inventor (it makes sense to me), then creativity would entail drawing from as broad a base of knowledge and experience as possible and try to recombine them or restructure them differently to create something new.  So it would seem that one would need to master a plethora of cognitive skills and not specialize too much in order to make a good inventor.  Generally speaking, men seem to be born in a better position to accomplish this.

This is also why I find the feminist argument for the historical oppression of women to explain the disparity of inventors so vacuous.  True genius and resourcefulness can't be suppressed--not for long.  It will always overcome obstacles in its way.  This is invention by definition.  But for thousands of years of recorded history we don't see this with many women.  We see women eventually participate in rolls and in fields with men, like Amelia Earhart or Sheryl Sandberg, but we always see that men were at all the groundbreaking events in history.

Invention Correlates With Test Scores

If you're still not convinced that high IQ tends to make inventors, then consider a recent meta-analysis done by Jonathan Wei from Duke University.  After analyzing millions of test scores over several decades he found that there was a strong link between how well college students did on standardized testing and what college majors they ended up completing.  Students that scored the highest tended to be enrolled in STEM majors at college.  The meta-analysis included many different standardized tests such as the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT).

And the Graduate Record Examination (GRE)

The differences in test scores between majors or fields of study don't seem very large, but when you consider a sample of size of millions, the differences are significant.  Read the study yourself but it seems like students that consistently scored the highest on standardized tests end up majoring in STEM fields such as engineering, mathematics and physical sciences.  These are fields where invention and discovery seems most likely to occur.  As already noted, men tend to achieve the highest scores in these types of tests.  They also seem to enter STEM fields in greater numbers than women.

This gender disparity in STEM hasn't gone unnoticed.  Feminists, politicians and the university system have expended great effort in trying to recruit more women in STEM fields.  The image in the title bar of the article I linked to is very telling.

Look at all these women in STEM!

Having a photo of female graduates in an article discussing high test scores and STEM majors is a subtle attempt at trying to raise a woman's self-esteem enough to start studying STEM.  I also, saw recent advertisements for colleges that look something like this.

Grrrllll  Power!

And there are woman's outreach efforts much more explicit than this.  There are workshops, clubs, guidance counselors, etc all trying to push women into STEM.  Everybody in the educational system is in on it.  But what usually ends up happening is this:

To many people, especially the feminists, gender equality means equality in outcome.  So unless there's a 50/50 gender balance in all fields, they will see it as a problem and lobby for more money to be spent and programs created to try and get more women into STEM and other male dominated spaces.  But if it's an issue of intelligence, than these lobbying efforts are going to flop.  There are simply more men than women scoring higher on the intelligence tests that would determine how well you would do in a STEM field, and hence, become an inventor.


Speaking as somebody who is in a STEM field, coming up with new and innovative ideas is extremely difficult, even for somebody with the intellectual chops to do well in these fields.  Most of the time we are just tinkering--it's high level tinkering, but still just tinkering.  Maybe one idea may lead to something that is life changing or truly innovative, but most of the time, attempts at innovation and invention will fail.

Looking at modern research and the historical record, there doesn't seem to be systematic oppression of women.  Logically, there's no reason why women can't be inventors and some of them do, but in much smaller numbers than men.  The capacity to invent seems to be rooted in biology that is ultimately reflected in intelligence scores in several different areas of intelligence (verbal, science and math).  Why this seems to be a trait more common in men isn't very well understood.  It would require more advancements in neuroscience and studies in cognition.

A Practical Guide to Buying an Engagement Ring

I've been in the position of buying jewelry for a special somebody at least several times, and in the case of diamond engagement rings, I've done this three times.  So I want to impart some experience to some up and coming, love-struck men who will be following after me.  A lot about diamond shopping is confusing because we don't think about it much.  To the diamond experts out there, I won't be getting into too many technical details so there's no sense trying to pick a bone with me.  The truth is that emotion governs a lot of diamond shopping and nobody does this very frequently.  So this is more of a practical guide to keep somebody from getting ripped off without needing a lot of expert knowledge.  A normal man buys houses more frequently that he buys diamonds so he's going to need some advice he can implement in the store.

Diamonds Are Worthless

Gentlemen, the diamond may be a girl's best friend but they are worthless to us.  I'm not just talking about the cabal of diamond miners and producers that have conspired to restrict diamond supply to the market to keep diamond prices high.  Everybody knows this.  Diamond producers and jewelry makers know this.  I've even read articles from diamond experts that openly talk about this. So this is no secret.

What I mean by worthless is that once you buy a diamond ring, that money is gone for good.  You're never going to see it again.  A diamond isn't an investment.  It won't appreciate.  That appraisal you got for it is worth less than the paper it was printed on.  If you don't believe me then try selling it.  You will never get an offer anywhere close to what you paid for it.  Pawn shops and other jewelers will low ball you so much it will be insulting. Yes, there are cases in the news where somebody like Elizabeth Taylor can sell a diamond for a tidy profit of millions of dollars.  Those are the exception and not the rule.  Unless you are going to a celebrity auction there is nothing exceptional about the diamond that you'll be buying.

Jewelers don't like to buy back their own diamonds.  They were never their own diamonds to begin with.  They were loaned to them by a diamond dealer or distributor on consignment.  This means they don't have to buy the diamond for it to sit in their jewelry case.  They don't need to pay for it until they sell it.  Buying the diamond back from you would put their own money at risk.  Not gonna happen!  Of course, some places will offer you some store credit or a trade in value on other merchandise in their store, but you'll still get hosed on the deal.

So that $5,000 you spent on an engagement ring?  It's gone.  I don't like it either, but that's the point.  Women are wired through eons of evolution to seek men that are good providers and will stay with them.  Because of this, men have to find a way to demonstrate that they are such men to win a woman's affection.  Buying a car, a house, or power tools isn't good enough.  Items like these contain intrinsic value to a man though their utility.  You have to give her something that has no intrinsic value to you and diamonds fit the bill nicely.  We may shake our fists at De Beers for monopolizing the diamond supply, but realistically, if it weren't diamonds being considered proof of commitment and providership, then it would be something else and that luxury commodity would be hoarded by a corporate cabal.

Guys, let's face it.  We want to do this for a woman we really like.  We'll also want to spend just enough for it to satisfy our own primal desire to take care of her.  This is why buying costume jewelry isn't going to satisfy that urge.  It will require a parting with a significant portion of your wealth knowing that it's gone for good.  So it's our responsibility to make sure that the girl is worth it. If you chose your girl wisely then you'll only need to be held over a barrel like this once in your life.

Cut is All That Matters

Cut is all that matters.  I'll repeat: Cut is all that matters!  Let me say it again for the cheap seats: Cut is all that matters!

You may have heard about the four C's--Color, Clarity, Cut and Carat. They are four criteria that diamond experts use to grade and price diamonds.  Jewelers will be more than happy to explain the scales they use because an educated customer is usually more satisfied with their purchase and less likely to bring it back for a refund or exchange. So jewelers will tell you all that you want to know about the four C's.

A lot of diamond shoppers want to find the perfect diamond and consider every C as important.  This isn't the way you should shop for diamonds. You have to think of each C as a piece of pie.  It isn't possible to increase one slice without shrinking one or more of the others.  There will be trade-offs.  The C you should consider most important, or the biggest slice of the pie, is the cut.

 The key thing to remember is that every diamond that you are likely to see in the store is flawed in some way.  Examining the diamond at only 10x magnification will reveal defects called inclusions. A jeweler is more than willing to let you look at the diamond for yourself.  Keep in mind that the grading scale is subjective.  You will see inclusions but you won't be able to tell how included the diamond is without a standard scale in front of you.  Even if you had such a scale, your diamond isn't going to match to any standard precisely.  There will be a judgement call being made.

Color is even more subjective.  Since diamond is transparent, it will be difficult to determine a true color value unless you had perfect lighting and the diamond was placed against the right background. Despite all the diamonds I've seen at varying color grades, I could never see a difference in color with my untrained eye.

There's also an incentive among dealers to exaggerate color and clarity grades for their own benefit which only makes the diamonds more expensive.  Legally, it isn't considered fraud as long as the grade on the certificate in the jewelry store is within 2 grades of it's true grade.  Why?  Because the scales are subjective.  Yes, there are standards for the clarity and color scales, but very few diamonds match the standards precisely.  Assigning the grade is often a judgement call, even among experts who are unbiased or have no vested interest in your transaction.

So there's no such thing as a perfect diamond? Yes, there are, but they aren't sitting in a jewelry store waiting for you to buy them.  More likely, they are sitting in a museum or somebody's safe. The perfect diamonds are referred to as investment grade and have already been purchased, auctioned and traded by dealers and distributors.  We are too far down the supply chain to even have a chance of seeing them.

You won't likely notice the color or the flaws if the cut is good and the diamond is set properly. A well cut diamond will have enough brilliance to wash out any defects or color making them imperceptible to the naked eye.  For this reason, I recommend the round cut or the princess cut.  Both shapes are cut to maximize brilliance and sparkle.  This is why I suspect they are the most popular cuts.  Something like an emerald cut would be a poor choice because the emerald cut emphasizes clarity and gives the diamond a very transparent, glassy look which makes inclusions much easier to see. An inclusion can often be concealed if it is near the edge of the diamond or under one of the prongs in a setting.  If you notice any color, it's probably the color of the setting being transmitted through the stone.  Even a white gold or platinum setting can effect a diamond's perceived color.


The important thing to keep in mind is that you only need to worry about the cut of the diamond.  How beautiful your fiance is going to think the engagement ring is will be determined by it's cut because the diamond's cut determines how well it sparkles and it's apparent beauty. Jewelers have different grades of cut, but do you think you can tell the difference between an excellent cut and a very good cut?  Maybe not.  You might as well look at a few stones and pick out the one that sparkles the best.

Size Doesn't Matter Much

There's one more C to cover and that is carat weight. The size of the diamond, or carat weight, tends to be regarded as crucial.  Out of the four C's of diamond grading, this is the only one you can verify independently and objectively.  In reality, it doesn't matter much.  It's effect on you or your fiance is entirely psychological. 

This isn't to say that the diamond's weight doesn't effect its price.  It does.   Larger diamonds are more rare than smaller diamonds, and therefore, more expensive. One would expect that if we were to plot a graph of price versus carat size, we would see something like this:

Price should dramatically increase with carat size when considering diamonds of equal quality.  However, this is the idealized case.  This graph isn't what we see in reality.  In reality a price versus carat weight graph would look like this:

The price per carat still trends upwards, but in a stepwise fashion.  The important thing you should notice is that the dramatic increases (the steps) occur at popular sizes.  There's a step (a dramatic price increase) at 0.25 carat, 0.50 carat and so on.  This is because these are the sizes that most people ask for and are in high demand.

You can use this information to your advantage. Most people can't determine a diamond's carat weight by eye.  You would have to weigh the unmounted diamond on a scale.  Considering the different shapes and cuts that are available for diamonds as well as the different settings that a diamond can be mounted in, I would say determination of carat weight by eye is virtually impossible.

A 1-carat diamond, considered by many people to be a good size, weighs only 200 milligrams.  Each carat is divided into 100 points, meaning that each point is about 2 milligrams, or the weight of 2-3 grains of sugar.  Few people can tell the difference between a diamond that is 0.5 carat and 0.49 carat, or even 0.45 carat for that matter.  With 0.5 carat being a popular size, you can save a significant amount of money by buying a diamond that is 0.45-0.49 carat, which places your diamond right before one of the steps on the graph and a lot less expensive.  In industry parlance this is known as buying shy.  You can buy a 0.45 carat diamond for your girlfriend and say its "about half a carat" and you should be fine, unless she was looking for something dramatically bigger!

If your feeling guilty about adding a few points to a diamond to impress your girlfriend and save a few bucks, don't be.  A person's inability to determine carat weight is why jewelers tend to round up or exaggerate the size of premounted diamonds.  A jeweler can take a diamond that weighs 0.30 carats, mount it in a setting, call it a 1/3 carat diamond ring and make an extra $500.  But can anybody really detect a 0.03 carat difference (a measly 3 points)?  Not a chance!  So don't rely on your eye.  Make sure you shop at a store that has loose diamonds that can be weighed on a scale at the shop.

Diamond cutters further up the supply chain can also play fast and loose with carats and points.  They also know that certain carat sizes bring in significantly more money and they may cut the diamond for size instead of brilliance.  Did I mention that cut is the only thing that matters? All the angles and facets for the different cuts of a diamond have been worked out and optimized for brilliance a long time ago.  All the stones are scanned and modeled on computer.  There should be little margin for error.  The only reason why diamond cutters would change the cut is to produce a larger diamond that they can sell for more money. Stick with beauty instead, even if the diamond is a couple points smaller.

So don't feel guilty over a few points difference.  Jewelers and diamond dealers certainly aren't being to ethical about it. You're also insuring quality while being a little more flexible on the carat weight.

 

What About Synthetic Diamonds?

Diamonds are composed of carbon that has been crystallized within the earth under heat and pressure for long periods of time.  The pressure and heat requirements have been duplicated in the laboratory in recent years so now it's possible to manufacture diamonds.  Although there is no chemical distinction, the industry designates these man-made diamonds as synthetic diamonds.

So does this make diamonds cheaper?  Can I can save money by buying synthetic diamonds?

No, not really.  It takes significant energy and time to make diamonds of an appreciable size and that is a cost that needs to be recovered when sold.  Having said that, the synthetic diamond will be cheaper than a natural diamond of comparable quality.  But there's a catch. The manufacturer isn't going to go through all the trouble of making diamonds that don't end up being completely flawless.  Certainly, such synthetic diamonds will be cheaper than the natural variety, but remember, we're not ever able to buy such diamonds to begin with. The diamonds we get to choose from at the store are all flawed in some way.  So while the flawless synthetic diamond is significantly cheaper than a flawless natural diamond, the flawless synthetic diamond is still going to be more expensive than the flawed diamonds you find in the store.

There are some websites that claim to offer synthetic diamonds at cheap prices but they are really cubic zirconia (ziroconium oxide) or moissanite (a silicon-carbon mineral) so read carefully and buyer beware.

The Human Cost

An unfortunate reality is that many diamonds come from areas of the world that are at war (civil war or war with another country), flagrantly commit human rights abuses, and under control of brutal and corrupt governments.  Countries in Africa have had a well documented history of mining diamonds with slave labor and selling them on the international market to fund wars and rebellions.  It should be unnerving that buying diamond jewelry could be supporting these abuses, but nobody seems to care, and a man will probably be accused of being a cheapskate if he was to seek an alternative means to show commitment than a diamond engagement ring. 

The Kimberly Certification Process was ostensibly created to ensure that the proceeds from diamonds being sold internationally aren't being used to fund wars, but I'm skeptical about how effective this certification process is.  Who is policing these countries and enforcing this and how can we tell if the certification is valid while we are talking about an area of the world where bribes for political favors is commonplace?  What about us, the end users of diamonds?  How do we tell where the diamonds came from?  The fact is we don't know anything about the source of the diamonds we buy and we won't anytime soon since there's no transparency in the diamond trade.

On the other hand, diamond mining seems to be the only viable option for income and trade for a lot of poor countries.  If done properly, it could mean the difference between prosperity or a bleak future.  But this doesn't mean that you need to pay more than you should for diamonds.

Get an Appraisal

Lastly, I would recommend getting the ring appraised by an independent appraiser, not the jewelry store itself.  Just because you dropped $5,000, it doesn't mean that it's worth that much, although many will guarantee that it will appraise for that amount you paid or more.

Like I said earlier, you're never going to get the appraised price when you try and sell it, but insurance companies like to know the values of things that they insure.  A lost or stolen ring might be insurable in some cases and you can be reimbursed for the loss.

Also, there's going to be a roughly 50% chance that your marriage isn't going to make it 'till death.  I hate to be a cynic, but divorce is a realistic possibility for you.  There's nothing keeping you together and you can dissolve the marriage at any time--often against your will because most divorces are filed by women.  The appraisal will be useful for assigning value when dividing the marital assets.  You don't want the judge or lawyers to assign a low value for the ring and have you pay more in the settlement so the appraisal will come in handy.  It might not seem like a big deal, and you'll think there's more important things to fight over, but letting her keep the $5,000 dollar engagement ring might mean you can keep the living room set or the car.

I can't tell you how much you should spend.  The rule of thumb says two months salary but that's a bunch of bologna.  This rule was peddled by the same people selling the diamonds to begin with.  But I believe that you should get what you pay for, and then some.  So I hope this article helps.