CapitalistImperialistPig

Some aspects of human behavior appear to be hardwired. That frequent claim is probably more controversial than it should be, but it looks like neuroscientists have the goods for fear of snakes. They have actually identified the neurons responsible. This week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of scientists examines one particularly long-lasting source of fear: snakes. The researchers found that certain neurons in the brain only respond to these legless reptiles. These snake-dedicated neurons, they argue, are a legacy of our distant primate past, when the animals posed one of the greatest threats to our survival. The new study builds on years of experiments by psychologists. They found that the widespread fear of snakes stems from a perceptual bias: people recognize snakes faster than other objects.

The latest week of Prof Harari's lectures are devoted to what he calls the Marriage of Science and Empire. The theme is the mutually beneficial influences that had on each other. Science, he claims, provided not just the material tools to construct the empire, but also some of the rationale for their justification, especially through the sort of racist theories popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. He makes a big deal about the fact that the European imperialists, unlike the earlier empires of the world, always included scientists. Geographers first, to catalog and classify the world, but then geologists, biologists, archeologists, anthropologists, historians and linguists. Nobody, he says, had been able to read Egyptian hieroglyphics since perhaps the first century AD until Napoleon's troops found the Rosetta stone. His expedition contained scientists who recognized its importance at once. It was an important enough piece of war booty that the British...

Harari certainly argues so. Of course the different varieties of humanism (liberal, socialist, and evolutionary) in his version don't exactly agree with each other. They also come into frequent conflict with some of the older religions, those most versions don't reject any of them. Christianity and Islam claim their legitamcy from Holy Books. So do a few others. The classic conflict between liberal humanism and some of the biggest older religions comes over the question of human rights. Many religions and traditions have fairly detailed codes of behavior and roles for various people in society. Liberal humanism rejects many of these in the name of freedom - freedom to marry whom you want, for example. Traditional notions of filial obedience and respect are undermined in the same name. These kinds of changes are upsetting everywhere and most of all in traditional societies with roles that form the bedrock of economic relations.

Paul Krugman squares off against Bond King Bill Gross. Bill Gross is at it again, coming up with yet another reason for the Fed to tighten despite a still-depressed economy and inflation falling well below target. He is, of course, not alone — it has actually been amazing how wide a variety of reasons people in or close to the financial industry have come up for tight money in an economy that seems to need to opposite. Many of the people making these arguments started with dire warnings about runaway inflation; but when inflation failed to materialize, they didn’t change their policy views, they came up with new rationales for doing exactly the same thing. The thing is, the rentiers just want to collect their rent. So add the rentiers’ sense of entitlement to the reasons we have made such a botch of macroeconomic policy.

The IQ test is more than a century old, about 113 years. Nobody knows what it measures in any fundamental sense. It has been and continues to be used for all sorts of practical purposes, some utterly frivolous reasons (membership in Mensa and similar deliberately exclusive clubs, and others dubious for yet other reasons. It's advantages are that it's cheap to administer and score as well as fairly strongly predictive. The original purpose was classifying the mentally retarded, for purposes of planning their education. In one sense, that might be still the main use, to the extent that we are all retarded compared to somebody. The big breakthrough of IQ testing came when the Army adopted it for attempting to classify the hordes of WWI draftees. Because of the time and money the testing and evaluation required (in the pre-computer age), the Army wanted to know what it was getting for its money. Extensive evaluation yielded two important kinds of results: that higher scores ...

Brad DeLong calls (one of) this year's Nobel memorial economists, Eugene Fama , a dumbass. Why can't we all just get along?

There are none so blind as those who will not see. Knowledge is a dangerous commodity. It erodes institutions, power structures, and world views. That's why the fiercest battles of anti-science are fought on behalf of churches, industries and other power structures. Smaller scale interests have their own territories to defend though, and scientists are not immune to the temptation to cast some studies into disrepute because they don't approve of the consequences that they fear might flow from them. We usually find, though, that the head in the sand approach is mostly just disadvantageous for those who choose blindness. Many kinds of cultural analyses have been targeted by the advocates of the "blank slate" view of human nature, but none more so than IQ studies. IQ tests were originally designed to classify degrees of mental retardation, but they have continued to proliferate in use because they are one of the most powerful predictors of achievement in an enormo...