Category: Science

Paul Rubin argues that our evolutionary heritage biases us against seeing larger moral communities.

Our primitive ancestors lived in a world that was essentially static; there
was little societal or technological change from one generation to the next.
This meant that our ancestors lived in a world that was zero sum — if a
particular gain happened to one group of humans, it came at the expense of
another.

This is the world our minds evolved to understand. To this day, we often see
the gain of some people and assume it has come at the expense of others.
Economists have argued for more than two centuries that voluntary trade, whether
domestic or international, is positive sum: it benefits both parties, or else
the exchange wouldn’t occur. Economists have also long argued that the economics
of immigration — immigrants coming here to exchange their labor for money that
they then exchange for the products of other people’s labor — is positive sum.
Yet our evolutionary intuition is that, because foreign workers gain from trade
and immigrant workers gain from joining the U.S. economy, native-born workers
must lose.

…we tend to interpret other people’s actions as saying something about them, whereas we interpret our own actions as saying more about the situation we’re in.  So, when we picture ourselves acting in the third-person, we see ourselves as an observer would, as the ‘kind of person’ who performs that behaviour.  "Seeing oneself as the type of person who would engage in a desired behaviour increases the likelihood of engaging in that behaviour", the researchers said.

Here is the article, which claims you should envision your desired successes through the perspective of a third person, to better bring them about.

I think what this post is really telling you is that an individual’s sense of clinical judgement is overrated to the point of being dangerous.  A similar circumstance applies to psychologists, who are most accurate in making diagnoses when they are young, and tend to rely on checklists.  Later, as experienced practicioners, they rely on clinical judgement and misdiagnose.  This means that psychologists become demonstrably less skilled as they become more experienced.  A sort of inversion of expertise. See Robin Dawes, House of Cards.

Here is Robin’s post that evoked the comment, here are the comments.  Here is the recommended book.  We cannot be sure this is the Michael Crichton, you know, the Jasper Johns collector…in any case my favorite Michael Crichton novel is Sphere.

European astronomers have spotted what they say is the most Earth-like planet yet outside our solar system, with balmy temperatures that could support water and, potentially, life.

Here is the story.  That planet is only about twenty light years away.  Are earth-like planets so common?  That probably means lots more civilization-supporting planets than I had expected.  But where are the alien visitors?  As suggested by the Fermi paradox, we must revise our priors along several margins, one of which is the expected duration of an intelligent civilization.

We already have a civilization, so the added optimism on that front doesn’t help us much.  On the other hand, we don’t know how long our civilization will last, but now we must be more pessimistic. 

I might be happier if I were more altruistic toward possible alien races; right now my appreciation for them is mostly aesthetic (modally speaking, that is), not empathetic.  All you alien altruists should be jumping for joy.  Holders of selfish, planet-based moralities should despair.

No matter what the proper galactic welfare function, I suppose I should be wracked with emotion.  I’m not.

The female students were asked to rate the men for their attractiveness as long-term partners.  Overall, the better looking men were rated as more attractive, as were those men with higher status.  Crucially, however, there was an interaction between facial attractiveness and status, such that good-looking men with high status were actually rated as less attractive than good-looking men of medium status.

Here is the full report.  Remember when Yogi Berra said (more or less): "No one goes there anymore, it is too crowded."

I am not sure that being rated less high is, for these wealthy, handsome men, a sexual or mating disadvantage.  I do not feel sorry for them.

From a private point of view, only one:

In comparing identical twins, Kohler found that mothers with one child are about 20 percent happier than their childless counterparts; and while fathers’ happiness gains are smaller, men enjoy an almost 75 percent larger happiness boost from a firstborn son than from a firstborn daughter [TC: remember the result that fathers with sons are less likely to leave?].  The first child’s sex doesn’t matter to mothers, perhaps because women are better than men at enjoying the company of both girls and boys, Kohler speculates.

Interestingly, second and third children don’t add to parents’ happiness at all.  In fact, these additional children seem to make mothers less happy than mothers with only one child–though still happier than women with no children.

"If you want to maximize your subjective well-being, you should stop at one child," concludes Kohler, adding that people probably have additional children either for the benefit of the firstborn or because they reason that if the first child made them happy, the second one will, too.       

Here is the longer story.  See this paper.  Here is the researcher’s home page. 

I am hardly an expert in this area, but I find the logic appealing.  One kid is quite able to fill your time and thoughts.  I call this the "parent as empty vessel" model.  The argument for more than one kid, in this view, would rest on risk-aversion and the chance that one kid might die or not work out so well.

Note the contrast between Kohler with Bryan Caplan’s theory that you should have more kids now than you want, so you may enjoy them when you are old.  At that point in time, no single kid "fills the empty vessel" and so more of them are needed.

I believe that men enjoy children more than women do, as they are less stressed by worry.  Whether men want children more is a different question [this last sentence has been altered from a previous version.]

The pointer is from the still totally awesome www.politicaltheory.info.

A loyal MR reader asks:

Explore the economics of the Tom Leykis model of human behavior: under a surprisingly broad set of conditions, women are more attracted to men who treat them poorly, don’t spend money on them, etc., while nice guys finish last.

Here is a very early MR post on that topic, and another.  Amber offers salacious commentary.  I’ll add that a lot of the so-called nice guys aren’t actually nicer than average, once you get past the surface.

41 in a series of 50.

Randall Parker wrote an interesting sentence:

To state my argument at a philosophical level:  Technological advances increase what one can do with one’s positive liberty and by doing that they increase the ease which people can violate  negative liberty.  This rift came as a result of reading a post by Tyler Cowen on positive and negative liberty.

He has further rapid speculations:

Will rejuvenation therapies lead to such a huge
boost in the world’s population that even the industrialized countries
will fall back into a Malthusian trap?   On Darwinian grounds this seems
inevitable.  I’ve previously argued that natural selection will reverse the trend of declining fertility in industrialized countries.
Combine that selective pressure with bodies that stay young for
centuries and a population explosion seems inevitable unless either
humans get wiped out by robots or a world government decides we do not
have an unlimited right to reproduce and enforces restrictions on
reproduction.

What is nature’s only hope?  That rich people decide that owning
their own unspoiled rain forests is a hugely status enhancing form of
consumption.  Show your benevolence and wisdom by buying half the Amazon
and let your friends visit its untamed wildness.

The subtitle is Why We’re Living Longer, Healthier, More Comfortable Lives on a Cleaner Planet, and it is written by Indur M. Goklany.  Imagine an up-to-date version of Aaron Wildavsky and Julian Simon, in easily digestible form.  On global warming, it won’t make Tim Lambert happy, but it not "denialist" either.  A useful resource, recommended.  Here is the book’s home page.  Here are papers by Goklany.

…conventional wisdom suggests keeping a daily gratitude journal.  But one study revealed that those who had been assigned to do that ended up less happy than those who had to count their blessings only once a week.  Lyubomirsky therefore confirmed her hunch that timing is important.  So is variety, it turned out: a kindness intervention found that participants told to vary their good deeds ended up happier than those forced into a kindness rut.

Here is more.

Here are two excerpted quotations, cited by John Tierney in his sadly gated blog:

“While we typically think of a smile as displaying our emotional state (happiness), it also appears that smiles convey information about the signaler’s status.  Specifically, lower status individuals appear to smile more than higher status individuals.  I suspect that this is due, in part, to the fact that there are several different types of smiles, including a true happiness smile and a true embarrassment smile.  The latter smile, the embarrassment display, is often seen as an appeasement display in primates.  Jimmy Carter smiled a lot, George Bush smiles much less.  Jimmy Carter is generally perceived to be warm and friendly, but not very dominant and strong.  George Bush is perceived be be somewhat less warm and friendly, but is seen as quite dominant and strong.”

And:

“I believe that the smiling faces of the models for the lower priced brands are simply conveying information regarding the social status of the brand image, rather than attempting to make customers feel better.  Sometimes the advertiser must make a trade-off between advertising high status and presenting an emotionally positive image.  Thus, the non-smiling faces of the higher status brands are not trying to make the consumer feel bad; they are simply attempting to display the signals that are associated with higher status.  We liked Elvis even when he sneered at us from the stage because the contemptuous sneer is typically produced by individuals with higher status.  Although we don’t generally like contemptuous individuals, most folks admire higher status individuals and want to be around them.  Thus, the irony is that higher status brands are creating a positive image -– high status–by using a negative signal (lack of a smile).”

Cialdini asked his subjects to read a short biography of Grigori Rasputin, the notorious monk who served as an adviser in the court of Czar Nicolas II, and to give their opinion of him.  The biography depicted Rasputin as a mendacioius and manipulative villain.  In half the cases Cialdini had adjusted Rasputin’s birthday so that it matched that of the reader.  Those subjects who shared a birthday with Rasputin were ovrewhelmingly more likely to rate him positively — as a strong and effective leader with many redeeming qualities.

That is from Jake Halpern’s Fame Junkies: The Hidden Truths Behind America’s Favorite Addiction.  By the way, Bob Cialdini’s Influence is one of my all-time favorite books, if you don’t already know it you should.

…a growing body of research–and a new study from the trenches of the New York public-school system–strongly suggests it might be the other way around.  Giving kids the label of “smart” does not prevent them from underperforming.  It might actually be causing it.

It turns out you should praise them for their effort, not their intelligence.  If you praise kids for their intelligence, they tend to avoid tasks they fear they will fail at.  And get this:

Scholars from Reed College and Stanford reviewed over 150 praise studies. Their meta-analysis determined that praised students become risk-averse and lack perceived autonomy.  The scholars found consistent correlations between a liberal use of praise and students’ “shorter task persistence, more eye-checking with the teacher, and inflected speech such that answers have the intonation of questions.”  …image maintenance becomes their primary concern–they are more competitive and more interested in tearing others down.  A raft of very alarming studies illustrate this.

That is, by the way, from New York magazine.

…boredom has little to do with lack of external stimulation and everything to do with being out of touch with our emotions.

More here, though I wonder whether a third cause is controlling the correlation.

In a paper posted online in the current issue of the journal
Psychological Medicine, a team of psychiatrists and literary scholars
reports that it could not find a single account of repressed memory,
fictional or not, before the year 1800.

The researchers offered
a $1,000 reward last March to anyone who could document such a case in
a healthy, lucid person.  They posted the challenge in newspapers and on
30 Web sites where the topic might be discussed.  None of the responses
were convincing, the authors wrote, suggesting that repressed memory is
a “culture-bound syndrome” and not a natural process of human memory.

Madame Tourvel, in Dangerous Liaisons, was the closest they found to an example, but the character did not come close enough.  Here is the story. 

You can submit your suggestions here, I should note I am not convinced by the lack of a winner.  People can be oddly unable to recognize a pattern until they understand the pattern; just think how late in human history the first good explanation of supply and demand comes (North? Steuart? Smith? Bailey? Longfield?), and that is a fairly basic economic concept which can be taught to most high schoolers.