Links and Quotes for August 8, 2016: How Men and Women Pick Their Jobs, Love in the Time of AI, and More

Does Rosie Like Riveting? Male and Female Occupational Choices – NBER

The idea is that women may not like the nature of male dominated jobs. This hypothesis underlies work by Pinker (2008), who argues that females and males have different tastes, which lead them to gravitate towards different occupations. She argues that women tend to prefer jobs that require empathy and interacting with people. Conversely, men like work that requires them to ‘make things.’ Pinker (2008) sees this as the reason why women are less likely to become aerospace engineers and are more likely to enter teaching.

To empirically examine this hypothesis, we parsimoniously summarize occupational content in three latent factors, distilled from descriptions in the ONET database, which we label ‘people,’ ‘brains,’ and ‘brawn.’ The occupational content measures matter for both male and female job satisfaction. We find that female job satisfaction is higher in occupations that have high ‘people’ and ‘brain’ content but is lower for ‘brawn.’ Conversely, males are indifferent to jobs that have high ‘brawn’ content. Importantly, including these measures reduce the coefficient on the share of men in the occupation by a third or more for women, while it does little to the coefficient in the male job satisfaction regressions. …

While our results are basically descriptive, they suggest that differential tastes by gender may be an important ingredient in explaining the occupational choices of men and women. We remain agnostic regarding the origin of these differences in preferences, which could be biological, evolutionary, or caused through socialization.

Another AI startup wants to replace hedge funds – Re/code “Shaunak Khire, Emma’s creator, claims his system differs from current finance computing — high-frequency trading and “quant” data science — because its system of neural nets takes into account a more complex set of factors affecting stocks, like management changes or monetary policy in Europe, that other programs miss.”

Swedish church to use drones to drop thousands of Bibles in ISIS-controlled Iraq – CT

‘Pokemon Go’ maker dreams of video games played on contact lenses – LA Times

Science Curiosity and Political Information Processing – SSRN

The data presented in this paper suggest that science curiosity, unlike other dispositions integral to science comprehension, seems to counteract rather than aggravate the signature characteristics of politically motivated reasoning. …

Together these two forms of evidence paint a picture—a flattering one indeed—of individuals of high science curiosity. On this view, individuals who have an appetite to be surprised by scientific information—who find it pleasurable to discover that the world does not work as they expected—do not turn this feature of their personality off when they engage political information but rather indulge it in that setting as well, exposing themselves more readily to information that defies their expectations about facts on contested issues. The result is that these citizens, unlike their less curious counterparts, react more open mindedly, and respond more uniformly across the political spectrum to the best available evidence.

How AI Will Redefine Love – Singularity Hub “In many societies, love is not limited by gender, class or race. In a few decades, we might be arguing that love is also not limited by biology. … In such a world, where our own existence will be largely non-biological, it is only inevitable that we eventually accept being in love with entirely non-biological beings.”

The Politics of English Forgetfulness – Quanta

Brexit demonstrates one of England’s most trusted strategies of power: deliberate forgetfulness. The nineteenth century historian John Seeley famously wrote, ‘we seem, as it were, to have conquered half the world in a fit of absence of mind’. Even the hesitant syntax here reflects that English upper-class style of entitlement – effort and ruthlessness must be concealed or disavowed. The acquisition of empire, the unseemly speed of its end and its long legacy, have all been shrouded in forgetfulness. No other nation has made ‘absence of mind’ part of its statecraft. It goes even further, this national forgetfulness is also part of how the English define their identity. When writers attempt to describe England, the tone is often elegiac. Something has been lost…. Churchill commenting on this national trope maintained that even the word ‘England’ had been forgotten. ‘There is a forgotten, nay forbidden, word which means more to me than any other . . . That word is England.’