I’ve been reading comic strips for as long as I can remember. As a kid, I had every Calvin and Hobbes book and every Far Side. These days I read plenty of web comics. I recently discovered MRA Dilbert, where the words on Dilbert comics are replaced by the bizarre blog rantings of Scott Adams. This made me realize what (for me) makes a comic strip great, the art has to be part of the joke. For many Dilbert strips, the art adds nothing–the joke would work just as well as an all-text tweet.
But look at this classic Calvin, it isn’t funny at all without the art!
It just seems odd to write a comic that doesn’t utilize the whole medium. It’s like reading text off a PowerPoint slide.
Anyway, here’s my favorite example of a text joke that’s kinda funny that becomes hilarious with the right art.
A while back, a study on grade bias based on student attractiveness made the rounds. See here (“For female students, an increase of one standard deviation in attractiveness was associated with a 0.024 increase in grade (on a 4.0 scale)”) and here (“But women in the “less attractive” group showed a much larger gap, earning on average 0.067 grade points less than other students. “)
When I read that, I couldn’t help but think that those are awfully small changes, basically, the difference between a 3.0 and a 2.933 GPA. How could such a small bias play out in reality? let’s assume we have two students who are identical solid “B” students in their academic performance, but one is much more attractive than the other. Let’s see how a bias against one student could look.
##Scenario 1##
Everyone is a little biased, and sometimes that is enough to randomly round down a grade. That would result in report cards looking like:
Hot student
Not Hot
Prof 1
B
B
Prof 2
B
B-
Prof 3
B
B
Prof 4
B
B
Prof 5
B
B
Prof 6
B
B-
Prof 7
B
B
Prof 8
B
B
Prof 9
B
B
Prof 10
B
B
Prof 11
B
B
Prof 12
B
B-
GPA
3.0
2.92
In this case, three different proffs rounded the unattractive student down a little bit.
##Scenario 2##
A few teachers are a little biased and consistently round unattractive students down a little bit. Report card would look like:
Hot student
Not Hot
Prof 1
B
B
Prof 2
B
B-
Prof 3
B
B
Prof 4
B
B
Prof 1
B
B
Prof 2
B
B-
Prof 3
B
B
Prof 4
B
B
Prof 1
B
B
Prof 2
B
B-
Prof 3
B
B
Prof 4
B
B
GPA
3.0
2.93
In this case, Prof 2 consistently gave a slightly lower grade to the not hot student.
##Scenario 3##
A very small minority of teachers are very biased against unattractive students. Report cards would look like:
Hot student
Not Hot
Prof 1
B
B
Prof 2
B
B
Prof 3
B
B
Prof 4
B
B
Prof 5
B
B
Prof 6
B
B
Prof 7
B
C
Prof 8
B
B
Prof 9
B
B
Prof 10
B
B
Prof 11
B
B
Prof 12
B
B
GPA
3.0
2.92
Here, Prof 7 is a real jerk who lowers the not hot student by a full grade.
##Summary##
To summarize the possibilities:
100% of people are a tiny bit biased, and it effects the grades they give 25% of the time
25% of people are consistently biased (a little bit)
8% of people are very biased
or of course
some linear combination of the above (say, 4% of people are very biased and 12% of people are a little biased)
I think the big takeaway here is that, when it comes to giving out grades, it looks like the vast majority of teachers are fair most of the time. Even if you are attractive enough to be a model, you’re unlikely to get a grade rounded up.
Even with that, no reason to assume you have no biases, so why not grade “blind” (i.e., don’t look at the name on the paper before you grade it)? Costs virtually nothing, and could increase fairness of the course.
**Confession: I did not go and read the paper these articles were based on like I should have. I probably just rediscovered things the authors already knew.
Now, there’s an excellent point to be made that way too many people are getting murdered with guns in the US. I totally agree with that. But the above graphic is obviously cherry-picking countries to make a point rather than selecting countries that are reasonably comparable to the US. I mean, they have Luxembourg up there. Luxembourg has a population of a half-million people, so about 640 times smaller than the US.
What would the graphic look like if it wasn’t cherry-picked? Well, here are some countries off the top of my head that I think are comparable to the US in important ways.
Russia. The US and USSR were the only two super powers for a long time, seems like that’s a good comparison.
Canada. Large continent-size country that we border and have a lot in common with.
Mexico. If we have Canada, makes sense to include the other large country we border.
Australia. Big English speaking country. Another former British colony.
Germany. Big industrialized country (Or France, the UK, whatever)
And here’s what that looks like:
So, it’s fine if you want to say the US should strive to be more like Canada and Germany and less like Mexico and Russia, but don’t pretend the US is some bizarre violent outlier.
**I had to fudge to figure out the gun homicide rate in Russia. I just assumed the fraction of total homicides that were gun homicides was the same in the US and Russia. Sources here and here.
This tweet got me thinking about how some people still claim men are intrinsically “funnier” than women. I suspect that comedy is like the vast majority of other professions where success is determined by hours of practice, mentors, and opportunity, while intrinsic skill has little to do with it. But the scientist in me asks, how would you test that?
For classical musicians, the standard has become for people to audition behind a curtain, so one’s gender, age, appearance, etc do not influence how their performance is judged. Obviously, for comedians, we would have to go to more extremes to test comedic ability while masking gender. Thus I propose the:
Comedic Battle of the Sexes!
A proposed scientific test of which gender is funnier
First, we need to convince a nationally televised late-night talk show host to participate, after that, it’s all easy. We find one woman and one man to captain two gendered teams of comedy writers. These captains put together a team of writers (5 or 6 writers each maybe). We’ll need to make sure we don’t end up with an all-star team versus scrubs. We won’t learn much if we have Tina Fey, Amy Schumer, and Sarah Silverman vs three guys who wrote for Mad in the 90s. The captains will have to build their writing teams under a salary cap, such that their members total comedy-related earnings from the last year do not exceed some amount (I dunno, a million bucks?). I’m just stealing this salary cap idea from fantasy football. Once we have the teams put together, we’re ready for a two week long experiment.
Every weekday, each writing team puts together a traditional late-night show opening monologue. We have a bag with 5 red balls and 5 blue balls. Each night, a ball is selected (and not returned to the bag), and that determines which monologue will be performed. This ensures each team will have 5 monologues performed in a randomized order.
Next, a late-night host performs the selected monologue, without knowing which team’s script he is using. And the audience rates the shows, also not knowing which team was being performed. Thus, we have a double-blind study, eliminating any potential biases held by either the performer or the audience. It would be even better to convince two hosts to participate. Then say, Kimmel could perform the selected monologue and Fallon could do the non-selected one each night. Of course, it’d also be nice if there was a female late-night host, but I’m trying to keep this realistic. If people insist on a control sample, we can make a group of people just watch C-SPAN, or maybe just an old Leno re-run.
Now for the data collection. We set up a web page (and maybe a cell-phone app) so people can rate each show. We could even let people put each individual joke in order from funniest to lamest. Along with their ratings of the shows, we’ll ask participants relevant things about themselves like their age, gender, if they think men or women are funnier, etc. We can bring people into the lab and measure their physical response to the shows and compare that with how they rate the shows (maybe they say one show is funnier, but they actually laugh more at another).
Finally, the data analysis. Given all the ratings, we should be able to answer the question of which team was funnier. We can break things down by sub-groups, maybe old men only find women funny, maybe young women only find men funny? There are all kinds of possibilities!
My prediction–I bet professional comedians of both genders are good at their jobs, and there will be no statistical differences between them. I’d bet both teams make lots of good funny. But if there is a big difference, this could totally be a Nature paper!
Postscript: Of course there’s a natural follow-up study to be made. Maybe mixed gender writing teams are funnier than either single-gender writing teams…
I was curious about the best way to commute to and from my office and the airport. My conclusions, I should buy a bike for the summer, and beg car2go to let me park near the airport.
