Silicon Valley Diversity II

In previous posts I have mentioned what I call “trigger words.”  These are words that fire off an automatic judgment in our brains as either good or bad.  We have been conditioned to react to these words.  Words like natural, green, organic and sustainable automatically draw a favorable review.  Words and expressions like chemicals, carbon, big business and radiation automatically make us scared or less trusting.  Although everyone learned in school that the entire universe is made of atoms and compounds, also called chemicals, and it’s common sense that nicotine and snake venom are all natural; many people still have the predictable gut reaction to these words.  Advertisers and advocates use these automatic responses to draw us on board, hoping that a trigger word will get us to act before we spend too much time thinking.

Another trigger word is diversity.  When it is thrown into conversations and arguments, it carries an automatically favorable connotation.  Another assumption about it is that you can tell by looking at a group of people whether or not it is a diverse group.  Diversity, we are told, leads to more creativity and better solutions in all cases, sometimes even when the pursuit of diversity supersedes the pursuit of competence.  If these are facts rather than beliefs, I would like to see the data on those studies.

Mohamed El-Erian in his book The Only Game In Town devotes several chapters to the advantages of diversity for companies and governments to meet financial challenges in the near future citing several experts on the subject.  Even after his high praise for the power of diversity he warns:  “This is not to say diversity should be pursued at the expense of competence…it is about getting the right mix.”  But there may be another issue.

A couple of summers ago the big crisis of the month was the lack of diversity in Silicon Valley.  There were too many white men and not enough men and women of color, or women in general.  My conclusion was that to reject anyone because of some prejudice against his or her physical appearance, whether conscious or unconscious, is wrong.  Likewise to favor anyone for the same reason is to risk producing a substandard product.  I would rather that the applications on my computer not crash than to feel an inner glow knowing the programmer was hired based on his or her ability to represent some victim class and thereby help even up the score.

With all the fuss at the time, there was no mention that all Americans might soon become underrepresented.  Look at the tables below.  The first shows the proportion of graduate students in several graduate STEM majors in US universities. The second shows the number of US colleges with a majority of international students and their overall proportions in graduate electrical engineering and computer science programs.  These numbers do not reflect well on America’s continued leadership in this area, nor do they proudly represent how well our school system is doing.

Perhaps if the country spent more time educating students and preparing them for difficult courses, and less time worrying about things like diversity, problems would sort themselves out.  We’d have qualified and interested men and women, blacks and whites, and everyone else.

Is Anyone Paying Attention?

What do we learn from the behavioral dimensions?  Perspective helps us sort out the important from the trivial.  Critical thinking leads to logical conclusions.  Responsibility causes people to shun scapegoating and face problems head-on.  Economic understanding yields the fact that money is not static and costs are eventually covered somewhere.  Discipline helps us stick to a course of action, rather than avoiding problems or looking for an easy way out.

Recently a Bloomberg headline blared: The World is Getting Fatter and No One Knows How to Stop It.  According to the article: “Economic forces are conspiring to cause the great global weight gain.”  Forces that contribute to the problem include rising incomes, increasing global trade, changing food supplies and declining physical activity.  The site shows some impressive graphs emphasizing a steady increase in the number of people overweight or obese in a world that was once as concerned about malnutrition.  This is a serious problem, directly related to behavior and only indirectly to the factors listed above.  This report shows little grasp of or interest in the discipline and responsibility factors.

Soon after that the World Health Organization released a new study reporting “diabetes cases have quadrupled over the last 40 years, mostly in poorer nations. Today, 8.5 percent of all adults worldwide suffer from the chronic disease, and 3.7 million deaths are linked every year.”  They do see the behavioral side of the problem linking it to “more and more unhealthy eating and a reduction in physical activity, which contributes both to overweight, which in turn is a big cause of type 2 diabetes.”  This too is important news.

Finally, CBS (and certainly other sources) weighed in (pun intended) with the news that comedian Amy Schumer is miffed at being included in a Glamour Magazine issue celebrating “plus size” women, telling how they can be inspirations.  This is not important at all, except as an example of a whole bunch of people missing the point.

With the worldwide increase in obesity and deaths related to diabetes, why in the world would anyone celebrate plus-size people?  They are trivializing a serious problem.  They are not only excusing irresponsible behavior; they are celebrating it.  In this sense, the magazine and Ms. Schumer have much in common, as she jokes about her size and the pressure from similar magazines to try all the diet tricks to amuse her fans, while they make light of, even celebrate, a serious health issue only to sell more magazines

The comments on CBS This Morning after they aired the segment were just inane.  Gayle King says the average size of an American women is 14, like that’s some kind of excuse and our health is being graded on a curve – everyone is getting fatter, so it’s OK!  Then she compares categorizing women as plus size to accusing someone of being 50 years old when they are really 40.  This misses the whole point.  You can’t do anything about your age, but in most cases, it’s behavior that leads directly to being overweight.

Of course, some will argue that their weight is their own business.  But when it begins to cause problems, they expect someone else to pay the doctor bill.  That someone else turns out to be the rest of us through taxes and the prices we pay for our own health insurance as well as what we pay for goods from companies whose costs include an employee health insurance benefit.

So we have run the gamut with people not able to separate the substantive from the trivial, blaming outside factors, ignoring the societal costs of their decisions, and trying to glamorize and excuse rather than face a growing problem.  I’m only sorry the focus in society is so exclusively on women when men need at least just as much incentive to change.

Finally, some will urge us to be more tolerant, more compassionate.  How about being honest with ourselves and others about the real problems instead of excusing, celebrating and blaming it on external factors, like not enough sidewalks?

Yoga and You

Knowing that I am a registered and practicing yoga teacher (RYT-200), someone brought this article to my attention.  It was from the Health tab on the Fox News website and the headline read:  Can Yoga Change Your DNA?  The article went on to say that yes it can, and favorably.  You would expect that I should have been all excited about this news, a new and positive way to entice people to sign up for and attend my yoga classes.  But I like to practice critical thinking, which led me to do some research.

The original study was done in 2010, published in a cancer magazine in November 2014, cited by the Huffington Post in August 2015 and finally featured by Fox this week. 

According to Huffington, researchers at the University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada administered a yoga and meditation program or supportive-expressive group therapy or a 1-day stress management seminar to breast cancer survivors.  The sample size of those finishing the full study was 88, not large but adequate.  They all suffered from significant emotional stress.

Blood samples taken at the end of the study showed those in the yoga program maintained telomere length.  Telomeres are stretches of DNA that cap our chromosomes and help prevent chromosomal deterioration.  “Telomeres, located at the tips of DNA chromosomes, shorten with aging and age-related diseases including cancer, cardiovascular disease and diabetes. As telomeres shorten, cells age and die more quickly. Conversely, telomere lengthening can increase a cell’s longevity.”  So something that positively affects telomere length is good!

So what’s the problem?  First, the author of the Huffington article writes:  “The yoga group participated in weekly 90-minute yoga sessions for 8 weeks. The yoga group also practiced the yoga and meditation program at home.”  Then she goes on to plug books she wrote on yoga and stress relief.  The trouble is, these women did not go to regular yoga classes.  They attended a program called mindfulness-based cancer recovery (MBRC), developed in-house based on some of the researchers’ experiences with different types of yoga and meditation.

The second issue is that the yoga group was not the only group to do well.  The original study tells us: “Researchers found the yoga and group therapy participants had maintained their telomere length.”  Only those in the one-day seminar had shortened telomeres.  Another smaller study from Harvard compared meditators to non-meditators and found the meditators had longer telomeres, but did not find a cause and effect relationship concluding only that meditation “might alter relative telomere length.” [Emphasis added.]  In addition, the University of Calgary study itself says clearly, “longer telomere length is associated with better post-cancer survival.” [Emphasis added.] (Associated with, especially from only one small study, does not guarantee any real-world relationship.)

Finally, the primary author of the study has her own book on Amazon on MBRC and has good reason to have been promoting this for the last 5 years.  That makes me suspicious of any claims that go beyond the bounds of the original study.

So what should I honestly tell students and perspective students?  For most people yoga can make you feel good physically and mentally.  It can reduce stress.  For a limited number of stressed cancer survivors, about 8 weeks of something resembling yoga was as effective as 8 weeks of stress therapy.  So if you want to reduce stress, which may lead to a longer life (but they are a long way from showing any significant relationships), give it a try.  I will not, like some complementary health guru, present the findings of a couple of very limited studies, even ones that may agree with my personal preferences, as the indisputable truth.  (Look how often researchers have waffled back and forth between the benefits and dangers of coffee drinking.)

If yoga is not for you, there was also an article on the Health tab of Fox News saying, “a recent survey conducted by the Harvard School of Public Health [found] 87 percent of men and women said that spending time with their pet helped them feel less [stressed and more relaxed]."  If you have a dog or cat and also do yoga, you should be super mellow!

Researchers, even at prestigious universities, apply for grants, do studies and publish the results of the studies with sexy headlines and lots of hype to secure more grants to do more studies.  (It’s called job security.)  One way critical thinkers reduce stress is to do a little of their own research instead of reacting to headlines and hype about "some flavor of the week" discovery leading them off in yet another direction in search of easy answers to life’s problems.

Anti-Aging?

When I happened across this item from CBS news last week I had several thoughts about the points made.  The story, in brief, is about Americans spending $60 billion per year on cosmetics, creams and anti-aging products.

In the course of the article it covered a number of different, almost unrelated, subjects.  One was about ingredients.  “A Senate Committee is expected to consider new regulations on what goes into cosmetics.”  A second point was about the wide variation of prices.  Their expert dermatologist commented on two moisturizers – “one that costs about $10 and other that costs $170” saying “there was no difference that accounted for the price gap, so much so in fact, that she would go for the cheaper moisturizer.”  A final point was about the sales tactics.  “Anti-aging is a marketing term. Science has never yet found an ingredient that slows or reverses the aging process."  They wrapped up by reinforcing the importance of sunscreen, the closest thing to an anti-aging product you can buy.

The first point about ingredients took me back to June of last year when I wrote about the food police warning not to buy “products with more than five ingredients or any ingredients you can’t easily pronounce.”  How few people realize that substances can also be absorbed through the skin?  If they are foolish enough to take that simplistic advice about food, they should not even get near a jar of night cream!  Even the most generic creams have many ingredients, some difficult to pronounce.

I thought the second point about vast price discrepancies for little or no benefit was old news.  Consumer testing organizations have for years been telling us that the common brand is usually a much wiser buy than the luxury brand, whether it’s cosmetics or shampoo.  With so much of the population in debt, don’t we have better things to do with a large portion of that $60 billion than throw it away on supposed miracle remedies from exclusive brands?

On the marketing side, I happened to pick up a recently published book called My Adventures With Your Money.  It is about an accomplished conman who lived early in the last century and made most of his money selling worthless mining stock.  At one point it said:  “Anyone who lost money would have a hard time finding…any place where he actually misrepresented…He freely indulged in opinions, promises and exaggerations.  These are the tools with which he ensnares his victims.”  This sounds familiar not only in the get-rich-quick schemes of today, but also in a fair share of legitimate advertising, especially in the health and beauty market.  Much of it is about hype, opinions, celebrity endorsements, or reliance on a reputation or brand associated with exclusivity and luxury goods.

Finally, comes the importance of sunscreen.  It’s true.  But how many people continue to go to the beach (and tanning salons) unprotected?

It’s not like we don’t know most of this stuff already, yet they keep presenting it as “news,” and many continue to ignore it.  Americans want to make themselves beautiful.  But instead of staying in shape and sticking to a diet, getting enough sleep and avoiding the sun, we turn to the miracle in a jar and money is no object.