Bad news story of the day: MMA Underground's "Is the outrage over Cyborg really about aesthetics?"

In just bad news reporting, MMA Underground has an article that is titled "Is the outrage over Cyborg really about aesthetics?"  It mentions how Cris Cyborg seems to be excortiated for steroid use in a way that many other male fighters aren't.  He mentions how the most popular women's fighters - Gina Carano and now Ronda Rousey - are attractive as if it's relevant.  It is not.

But . . . what makes the article horrible isn't that it wonders if Cris Cyborg is being discriminated due to comparisons with prettier fighters.  What the article does is talk about how, y'know, when men are caught for steroid use it doesn't effect their popularity.

The question asked isn't if Cyborg is being discriminated against because she's not pretty but if she's being discriminated against because she's a woman.  Not because she's a not a pretty woman, but more because she fails to satisfy the criteria that most men have for "womanhood".

The answer to that is, "Well, duh, yeah."

A deeper analysis would talk about how men like to define acceptable womanhood and Cyborg has always been a contentious fighter because she destroys male stereotypes about what a woman should look like and how a woman should be.  The idea that a woman should be as physically powerful as a man, more than most men, with the kind of aggression in a fight that one associates with someone like Wanderlei Silva . . . well, that's disturbing to a lot of men.  That she then totally fails to court any particular image of conventional womanhood is doubly troubling - which is why male fight fans embrace fighters like Rousey and Carano, because while they fight, they still "look like women".  They don't challenge as many stereotypes about what a woman should "be", or, more precisely, what a man thinks a woman should be.

So when this unrepentant physical woman fighter, incredibly strong, not just for a woman but period, who has the kind of aggression we associate with the most terrifying fighters, who then goes on to reject most of the forms of womanhood - she doesn't try to go around pretty, she walks around pretty much exactly like any elite male athlete might go, lots of t-shirts and comfortable shoes, sexist men look for a reason to hate her.  Her steriods bounce merely gave them that rationale.  They can say she's bad for the sport, she's a cheat, so forth and so on, even when they're far less interested in condemning male fighters for the same misdeeds (much less the discussion about testosterone replacement therapy, where men can legally acquire anabolic steroids!).

The question isn't if Cris Cyborg is discriminated vis-a-vis other women.  It's simply how much she's being discriminated due to sexist bullshit.  (Right answer: a lot.)

So, bad article!  Bad!

Bad Science Journalism over at io9

This article on io9 basically sums up, to me, both everything that is wrong with science journalism as well as experimental psychology.  The reason?  The subject matter of the article is just . . . well, I have no idea how it could have possibly met a peer review's standards, albeit my experience with the process is both secondhand and having to do with real science.

But the thrust of the article is that religion helps self-control and virtue.  The problem comes with the specific tests they use that they believe tests self-control and virtue.

One of them is a person's ability to drink shots of orange juice and vinegar for a nickle a shot.  The second is testing their delayed gratification by giving them five dollars today but six dollars if they wait a week.  The third had to do with how long a person was willing to spend solving an insolvable puzzle.

I can't imagine how any of these have anything to do with virtue.  Virtue is a moral stance - there is no morality in any of these actions.  No one is either helped or harmed by their performance or lack of performance.

I am also having any trouble seeing how they have much to do with self-control because . . . they are all so trivial.  Is self-control the ability to down undrinkable drinks for a pittance?  Or sticking with a problem that can't be solved but also has no bearing to a person's life?  Not drinking a horrible drink, even though you might pick up as much as twenty cents, does not define self-control, but . . . intelligence.  There is no gain in drinking it and it's uncomfortable, even nauseating.  Performing a pointless task for no gain is no self-control - stopping a pointless task for no gain is, again, just the smart thing to do.

The only thing that speaks to self-control, and very weakly at that, is the delayed gratification test.  But it's hamstrung by the small rewards offered for delaying that gratification.  "Give me five bucks now or . . . I wait a week, have to schlep myself over to the psych building so I can get another buck?"  That's weak because none of the people involved need that extra dollar today (because it is such a superficial sum of money that it's possession would not particularly help even a starving person - that starving person would be better off taking the fiver and getting something to eat *now*.)  So, if there is no gratification, there can be no delayed gratification.

(The subject with this whole business is these cats are evolutionary psychology guys, which is, itself, an embarrassment to science because of how normative it is.)

That's the bad science.  Now the bad journalism.  The journalist mentions none of this, that should be obvious, I feel, to a science journalist.

Worse, neither mention some very uncomfortable facts about the correlation between godlessness and self-control that would, I think, bear discussion.  Such as the fact that atheist or agnostics tend to be richer, better educated, have fewer unwanted pregnancies, divorces and bankruptcies than religious people.  And as speaks to virtue, they are far less likely to be in prison, which suggests that they don't commit as many crimes.  This is a nonsuperficial point that is not discussed, not at all.

Like I said, the problem with both research psychology (broadly, that they continue to allow crap like evo psych to be part of their field) and science journalism (total lack of criticism).