CapitalistImperialistPig

Reasoning is largely done by automatic pattern recognition somewhere in our brains submerged beneath conscious thought. Justification of our conclusions is another matter, and requires our conscious and verbal apparatus. This is one of the themes of Jonathan Haidt's fascinating new book: The Righteous Mind . It sounds likely to me. I going to speculate that when Wolfgang reads Krugman (if he reads Krugman) he doesn't need to do line by line textual analysis to decide Krugman is wrong. Contrariwise, when I read Krugman, my subconscious pattern recognizers can tell right away that he's probably right, as usual. It's when we try to convince each other that our rhetorical brains get involved. If persuasion were impossible, most speech would be superfluous. It it were easy, most would be unnecessary. People do change their minds, even about very important things, but not very easily. I've seen a few such changes propagate across the nation during my life, and th...

Nietzsche* didn't care for empathy. He argues in a few places that it was a Judeo-Christian plot to restrain the aristocratic and creative impulses of human nature. Of course he didn't understand evolution, much less neuroanatomy, so he probably shouldn't be blamed too much for getting the main point upside down - or perhaps he should - he certainly caused enough downstream grief. Simon Baron-Cohen, in his new book: The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty takes a very different tack. Baron-Cohen recalls being told as a child that the Nazis made lampshades out of human skin. The imagery has stuck with him through the years and he has devoted much of his life to trying to understand the problem of cruelty. He presents some samples, including some more egregious ones from Nietzsche's blond beasts, but enough from others to show that monsters come in plenty of human types and races, and anyone with a bit of history can provide endless examples ...

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown ........... Shakespeare Henry IV, Part II. So it is with us and our slightly distant primate cousins , so it seems. A 9-year study of wild baboons in Kenya by Princeton University and the Institute of Primate Research may turn conventional assumptions of alphas males upside down. The study found that alpha males have high testosterone levels, which allows them to dominate other baboons, get access to more food, and attract better mates. This is expected. Surprisingly, though, the alpha males also have high levels of stress hormone glucocorticoid, which scientists measured from their feces samples. In fact, the stress of alpha baboons was on par with low-ranking baboons. The convention wisdom is that access to food and females provides life security and thus less stress for dominant males. Conversely, weak males who are constantly threatened by starvation and physical violence from stronger males are thought to be more stressed. The st...

Evolutionary psychology faces a fundamental challenge if it is to explain a few peculiarly human activities, such as music, mathematics, and art.  How could these abstract activities have had a survival value in their origins?  To try to make the point more acute, how could the guy sitting by his campfire decorating his spear have gotten a competive advantage over his counterpart investing the same time and effort into doing him in? It seems very plausible to me that the artistic impulse had its origins in ordinary pride in workmanship.  Fashioning a really effective stone arrowhead is far from being a trivial task.  I have noted previously on this blog that the human hand is equipped with muscles and control that our fellow great apes lack, and that these muscles give us a precison of control that they lack - chimps, at least, seem to be able to grasp the notion of making a projectile point but lack the fine motor control to be good at it. Just as the muscles an...

Kevin Drum is looking for fundamental aspects of human nature that people don't pay enough attention to. I'm sure that there are a long list but he offers these two for a start: 1.Loss aversion: people really, really hate to lose something they already have and will forego even favorable risks to avoid it. 2.Regression to the mean: an especially strong performance is likely to be followed by a weaker performance and vice versa. I'm going to ignore the second, because it seems to me to be both obvious and misleading. Obvious in the sense that your best day ever is likely to be better than most of the next days. Misleading in the sense that extraordinary performance is often an excellent predictor of very good future performance. I'm especially interested in those that run counter to the fundamental assumptions of classical economics, and the first fits that bill. Kevin's commenters offer a number of elaborations on that idea. One is that we tend to strongly pr...

If I recall correctly, Envy is reputed to be one of the seven deadly sins. Its vile reputation is well celebrated in art and literature, including this recent piece but I always like to try to comprehend the social function of common but unpopular behaviors. Envy is a pretty fundamental element of social glue, I think. People band together in cooperative groups if they think it profits them, but when the benefits go disproportionately to one or a few, it becomes hard to trust the social bargain. That's precisely the situation in most large societies, of course, so it becomes important to suppress envy as a disreputable emotion. Just sayin'.

The first book I read on my new Kindle was Pride and Prejudice. I hadn't read it before but I'm happy to report that Miss Austen did a pretty good job of capturing at least the spirit of the Keira Knightley movie - except for the latter's cheesy American ending. The book got me thinking, though, about the problem of "honor" killings. From a Darwinian point of view the honor killing seems profoundly unnatural - killing one of your own offspring just at the point of reaching her reproductive capacity seems very anti-fitness. I recall recently reading somewhere that a spate of honor killings in India was a new phenomena, related mainly to the disintegrating power of the traditional family organization. Family control of daughters is apparently a key instrument of social power. There weren't any honor killings in P&P, to be sure, but flighty Lydia's running off with the rascally Wickham was a similar type of social earthquake. For her to be living with him...