Plato’s Beard

Scratch even a leftist in the West and you will often find a hippie-hating individualist/reductionist. Every since Dawkins and Sokal, Summers and Pinker did a number on their brethren, many leftists have been labouring (no pun intended) hard to distance themselves from any feel good, “new age”, hippie type framework or explanations. This has to be a bit embarrassing:

Shankar Vedantam - When Play Becomes Work - washingtonpost.com

Psychologists have long been interested in what happens when people’s internal drives are replaced by external motivations. A host of experiments have shown that when threats and rewards enter the picture, they tend to destroy the inner drives. Paychecks and pink slips might be powerful reasons to get out of bed each day, but they turn out to be surprisingly ineffective — and even counterproductive — in getting people to perform at their best.

[...]

Deci tracked a bunch of college students who were solving puzzles for fun. He divided them into two groups. One group was allowed to keep solving puzzles as before. People in the other were offered a small financial reward for each puzzle they solved.

The psychologist later evaluated the volunteers: He found that people given a financial incentive were now less interested in solving puzzles on their own time. Although these people had earlier been just as eager as those in the other group, offering an external incentive seemed to kill their internal drive.

Rewards and punishments guide the lives of most Americans. Young children are given stars for putting away their toys, kids earn a few bucks for mowing the lawn, and teens are told they will be grounded if they get in trouble. For adults, stock options, raises, demotions and firings become different kinds of carrots and sticks.

Beliefs about the utility of rewards and punishments in motivating human behavior are deeply ingrained, and most people don’t know that more than 100 research studies have shown that motivating people in this manner can have the unintentional effect of undermining their internal drives.

The striking thing about the research, said Roland Benabou, an economist at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, is that it is so starkly at odds with bedrock economic principles.

“A central tenet of economics is that individuals respond to incentives,” Benabou noted in one research study. “For psychologists and sociologists, in contrast, rewards and punishments are often counterproductive, because they undermine intrinsic motivation.”

But wait, there’s more… the killer part, in fact:

But rewards and punishments are not always counterproductive, Benabou said. He drew a distinction between mundane tasks and those that carry meaning for people. In the first case, Benabou argued, rewards and punishments work exactly the way economists predict: They get people to do things.

External rewards and punishments are counterproductive when it comes to activities that are meaningful — tasks that telegraph something about a person’s intellectual abilities, generosity, courage or values.

Killer part because it spells out what any worker knows to be true — rewards and punishments (more often the latter) are employed to get us to do the dirty work of those handing out the rewards and punishments.

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[With apologies to Missy Elliot]

Winding down a tediously long essay describing in detail the vengeance driven tribal battles in New Guinea, Jared Diamond finds in them a justification and need for bloodthirstiness:

Annals of Anthropology: Vengeance Is Ours: The New Yorker

[...]

We regularly ignore the fact that the thirst for vengeance is among the strongest of human emotions. It ranks with love, anger, grief, and fear, about which we talk incessantly. Modern state societies permit and encourage us to express our love, anger, grief, and fear, but not our thirst for vengeance. We grow up being taught that such feelings are primitive, something to be ashamed of and to transcend.

There is no doubt that state acceptance of every individual’s right to exact personal vengeance would make it impossible for us to coexist peacefully as fellow-citizens of the same state. Otherwise, we, too, would be living under the conditions of constant warfare prevailing in non-state societies like those of the New Guinea Highlands. [...]

My conversations with Daniel made me understand what we have given up by leaving justice to the state. In order to induce us to do so, state societies and their associated religions and moral codes teach us that seeking revenge is bad. But, while acting on vengeful feelings clearly needs to be discouraged, acknowledging them should be not merely permitted but encouraged. To a close relative or friend of someone who has been killed or seriously wronged, and to the victims of harm themselves, those feelings are natural and powerful. Many state governments do attempt to grant the relatives of crime victims some personal satisfaction, by allowing them to be present at the trial of the accused, and, in some cases, to address the judge or jury, or even to watch the execution of their loved one’s murderer.

This smells of biologism (or biological determinism if you prefer). We find it abhorrent when used in various forms in EP and elsewhere to “explain” rape or other acts frowned upon in society. And if we are able to demonstrate that there is no rape instinct to counter that wonderful biologism, but not so with Diamond’s claims above, Diamond still commits what is otherwise rejected as the “naturalistic fallacy”. There are probably better defences (see Kant) of “retributivism” but this one IMHO fails miserably. And it is an insult to those who either do not share the bloodthirstiness of Diamond’s “we”, or consciously seek to rise above it, not “ignore” it.

In the USA, the norm is anything but not “permit[ting] our thirst for vengeance”. As the line in the movie rendition of the life of Hurricane Carter goes, the norm is “any black man will do”, created and promoted by the very vengefulness that Diamond wants to give primacy, under terms such as “victim’s rights” and “survivors rights”. It is not an exaggeration to summarise the mood as one where it is considered that it is better to hang someone, than let a crime go unpunished. So we have the FOP and the victim continuing to deny the innocence of the young black men who spent many years in jail before being exonerated and released, in the “Central Park Jogger” incident which prompted full page ads from billionaire Donald Trump lusting for a hanging. This state sanctioned attitude is the direct result of encouraging (rather than discouraging) the need for vengeful satisfaction. Here is the New York Times:

… Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey observed at the time…: ”You rob a store, rape a jogger, shoot a tourist, and when they catch you, if they catch you . . . you cry racism. And nobody, white or black, says stop.”

And:

[T]he brutalization of the victim demonized the suspects and seemed to make any presumption of innocence impossible. Donald J. Trump bought full-page newspaper advertisements demanding the death penalty and rejecting assertions (from Cardinal John J. O’Connor, among others) that society shared the blame for conditions that breed crime.

”I want to hate these muggers and murderers,” Mr. Trump wrote. ”They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes.” (What if the jogger had died and the five young men had been executed, Mr. Trump was asked the other day. ”If they were convicted and weren’t guilty the government would’ve made a tragic mistake,” he said.)

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As has become the norm these days, most of the media is agog over Obama’s Race In America speech. To his credit, the man tackled some of the controversies that led to this speech more directly than employ his usual forceful repetition of uplifting trivialities. The intent of this blog post is to ponder on the trend (in the way we talk about things) that seems to have reached its nadir in the rhetoric surrounding his campaign. I will offer two examples, at least one of which any member of the broad left will appreciate.

The first example is that incongruous claim of Fox News: that they are Fair and Balanced. It is not arguable (I hope) that even those who disagree on whether Fox can make this claim will agree that Fair and Balanced is a good goal for a news organisation. I believe that is not necessarily so. Why not instead Objective and Factual? We are aware of the valid critique of notions of objectivity and fact as offered by philosophers, post-modernists and relativists. Yet, all that suggests is that a fair and balanced approach is a good means to the end of informing the public in a critical manner of events and issues. Instead, a subtle (or perhaps not so subtle) substitution of terms occurs, where Objective is replaced by Neutral or Centred. As some have said: “Nazis and gypsies/Jews get equal time — we report, you decide!”.

Similarly, you have this class of political citizens now known as “independents” — the name denotes that these individuals are independent of political parties and (by some extension) ideologies. But where do they stand on right and wrong? After all, those who support this or that party or ideology do so (typically) not because of some arbitrary preference, but because they believe their ideology to be right or just. It should perhaps be unsurprising then that independents tend to be those who are least affected by issues of truth and justice.

A second example is the appeal, via Obama, of the term “unity”. We, the public, are “yearning for unity”, some sort of “middle path” (as one New York Times writer, Ron Klain, puts it), implying either that disunity is the primary problem facing us, or that unity can simultaneously serve as both the means and end. The real problem however is that it can be neither, exactly because it cannot be produced from thin air (or hot air, for that matter!), for the resolution of the issues of contention rightly preclude unifying behind a programme, agenda or methodology towards a common goal. We are often offered the analogy of ‘herding cats’ to highlight the problems of extreme fractiousness, and it is not an entirely invalid argument, but it is not the central problem. Feminists, labour activists, minority rights advocates, animal welfare activists and others are not acting out of a sense of feline disobedience, but rather constantly working on reconciling the righteous demands of their cause with the limits of immediate political change.

As in the case of creationism vs evolutionary theory, the divisions among political groups reflect fundamental disagreements in the way we see and project the world, how it is and how it should be. Unity cannot resolve the issues but rather the resolution of these issues can bring about unity: if the parties involved can agree upon a mechanism for resolution. And that, in my humble opinion, is the real issue. The divisions among groups remain intractable because these groups do not even share a methodology for resolving disputes. The routine fallback, in the face of this block, is the invocation of allegedly shared “values”, common roots, mythical glorious pasts, and such bromides. Which incidentally are a large part of many of Obama’s “inspiring” speeches. If you don’t believe me, here are the “greatest hits” from the Race in America speech as they appear in the first few paragraphs:

• Obligatory introductory reference and eulogy to founding fathers
• Unite for “our children and grandchildren” — childless need not apply!
• “Unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people”
• “… no other country on Earth is my story even possible” (why not?)
• “we saw how hungry the American people were for this message of unity” (this is a leap of rhetoric even for Obama, that people hunger not even for “unity” but for a “message” of unity. Jon Stewart pointed out something puzzling about George Bush’s speeches: the man would arrive at various spots facing emergencies and proclaim that he was there to reassure the people, and so on. What Stewart found strange was that Bush would tell us what he was there for, which is more or less obvious, but fail to give us a clue on how he planned to go about this task!).

Obama is possibly a more honest chap than many others in his sphere. Rather than capitalise on the Geraldine Ferraro controversy, by continuing the ongoing “framing” of her comments in a racist context (no doubt ably aided by her continued blathering), he astutely nails the crux of the criticism:

On one end of the spectrum, we’ve heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it’s based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap.

In case it isn’t obvious, I don’t speak for Ferraro or her psychologist, but the above is the legitimate form of what I would like to call the “Obama as a non-threatening black man advantage” thesis. And as noted in a previous post, this is the promise offered explicitly by Obama supporters like Oprah Winfrey: “[you] are free from the constraints of gender and race”.

If there is one valuable insight that philosophers of science and sociologists have demonstrated it is that issues in science (and metascience) are frequently decided (or at least argued) in quite non-”scientific” ways (by which I mean what is generally claimed to be the scientific way — in truth a formalisation of rationality, common sense, and long-standing methods of human reasoning). In the skirmishes within science, certain “paradigms” take hold not because of their technical superiority but often because of certain very human prejudices. The idea that selfishness precedes (and even excludes) co-operation, is an example, and one that is beginning to deservedly face resistance, not just in popular science writing through which it has gained its hold, but also in more serious analysis which it had constrained in the past:

For Human Eyes Only - NYT

[...]

Why should humans be so different? And yet we are. We can’t fool anyone. The whites of our eyes are several times larger than those of other primates, which makes it much easier to see where the eyes, as opposed to the head, are pointed. Trying to explain this trait leads us into one of the deepest and most controversial topics in the modern study of human evolution: the evolution of cooperation.

[...]

In a recent experiment, our research team has shown that even infants — at around their first birthdays, before language acquisition has begun — tend to follow the direction of another person’s eyes, not their heads. Thus, when an adult looked to the ceiling with her eyes only, head remaining straight ahead, infants looked to the ceiling in turn. However, when the adult closed her eyes and pointed her head to the ceiling, infants did not very often follow.

[...]

Why might it have been advantageous for some early humans to advertise their eye direction in a way that enabled others to determine what they were looking at more easily? One possible answer, what we have called the cooperative eye hypothesis, is that especially visible eyes made it easier to coordinate close-range collaborative activities in which discerning where the other was looking and perhaps what she was planning, benefited both participants.

If we are gathering berries to share, with one of us pulling down a branch and the other harvesting the fruit, it would be useful — especially before language evolved — for us to coordinate our activities and communicate our plans, using our eyes and perhaps other visually based gestures.

Infant research, too, suggests that coordinating visual attention may have provided the foundation for the evolution of human language. Babies begin to acquire language through joint activities with others, in which both parties are focused on the same object or task. That’s the best time for an infant to learn the word for the object or activity in question.

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Spiegel Online has a series of Kremlin Minutes posted on their web site, such as this one: The Kremlin Minutes: “We Should Demolish the Wall Ourselves”.

Visit Spiegel Online for more. I am sure we won’t see much of this in US press since as Spiegel points out (last sentence):

In the fall of 1990, as Germany celebrated reunification, an enormous tragedy was taking shape in Moscow. The historical turning point can be reconstructed from previously undisclosed minutes of Politburo meetings published in Russia this month. And Mikhail Gorbachev may finally get the historical recognition he deserves.

We wouldn’t want to give up on the myth that a B-grade actor who couldn’t differentiate between his movie roles and reality was rather The Great Communicator who single-handedly brought the “cold war” to an end.

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New York Times reports on a scientific forum at the Salk Institute titled “Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason and Survival”, consisting of the usual suspects such as Weinberg and Dawkins repeating their angry young scientist polemics, described aptly by one of the conference speakers:

A Free-for-All on Science and Religion - New York Times

[...]

By the third day, the arguments had become so heated that Dr. Konner was reminded of “a den of vipers.”

“With a few notable exceptions,” he said, “the viewpoints have run the gamut from A to B. Should we bash religion with a crowbar or only with a baseball bat?”

His response to Mr. Harris and Dr. Dawkins was scathing. “I think that you and Richard are remarkably apt mirror images of the extremists on the other side,” he said, “and that you generate more fear and hatred of science.”

[...]

I wonder how it is that we (assuming there are at least a few non-scientistic atheists other than me) permit someone like Dawkins to presume to speak for us or the general position of atheism. Perhaps it is a good thing that a majority (if true) of scientists want to now make this an all out war (I assume they are now comfortable enough in their self-sufficiency to take this step). It may be a good thing since it forces the general population to have to choose some position and path, not necessarily religion or scientism.

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[via BoingBoing]

The Dead Sea Scrolls it seems contain specifications for construction of latrines:

The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Toilet evidence links Dead Sea Scrolls to sect

[...]

The Essenes are one of the few ancient groups whose toiletry practices were documented. The first century Jewish historian Josephus noted that members of the group normally went outside the city and dug a hole, where they buried their waste.

Two of the Dead Sea Scrolls note that the latrines should be situated northwest of the settlement, at a distance of 1,000 to 3,000 cubits — about 450 to 1,350 yards — and out of sight of the settlement.

Tabor and Joe Zias of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, an expert on ancient latrines, went to the site and took samples.

Zias sent samples to anthropologist Stephanie Harter-Lailheugue of the CNRS Laboratory for Anthropology in Marseilles, France, who found preserved eggs and other remnants of roundworms, tapeworms and pinworms, all human intestinal parasites.

Samples from the surrounding areas contained no parasites. Had the waste been dumped on the surface, as is the practice of Bedouins in the area, the parasites quickly would have been killed by sunlight. Buried, they could persist for a year or longer, infecting anyone who walked through the soil.

The situation was made worse by the Essenes having to pass through an immersion cistern, or Miqvot, before returning to the settlement. The water would have served as a major breeding ground for the parasites.

“The graveyard at Qumran is the unhealthiest group I have ever studied in over 30 years,” Zias said. Fewer than 6 percent of the men buried there survived to age 40, he said. In contrast, cemeteries from the same period excavated at Jericho show that half the males lived beyond age 40.

What impressed me about this bit of news was that the Bedouins will probably have a hard time explaining the reasons behind their practices, but even back at the relevant time, the Essenes probably had elaborate and sophisticated explanations for the superiority of their system as compared to the illiterate practices of the nomads.

My point? There are parallels to this sort of thing in the patronising dismissal of “primitivism” by the scientistic, but often, the lack of an explanation no more disqualifies a practice than the presence of an elaborate, detailed and systematic explanation (in itself) underwrites another.

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This from The Observer:

Low IQs are Africa’s curse, says lecturer | The Observer

The London School of Economics is embroiled in a row over academic freedom after one of its lecturers published a paper alleging that African states were poor and suffered chronic ill-health because their populations were less intelligent than people in richer countries.

Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist, is now accused of reviving the politics of eugenics by publishing the research which concludes that low IQ levels, rather than poverty and disease, are the reason why life expectancy is low and infant mortality high. His paper, published in the British Journal of Health Psychology, compares IQ scores with indicators of ill health in 126 countries and claims that nations at the top of the ill health league also have the lowest intelligence ratings.

[...]

Having examined the effects of economic development and income inequality on health, he was ’surprised’ to find that IQ had a much more important impact, he said. ‘Poverty, lack of sanitation, clean water, education and healthcare do not increase health and longevity, and nor does economic development.’

[...]

Assuming for a second that his data are correct, and that IQ measures something significant (what we generally understand by the term “intelligence”), the above seems to suffer from that old precaution about correlation and causality. There is no reason provided (at least stated in the article — I guess I have to hold down the gag reflex and go read the full paper) to justify the use of the results of a particular test (IQ) as a cause, rather than as an effect.

Two things, in my opinion, define the post-socialist, post-communal turn (1980 onwards) more than others: 1) Competition and 2) Reductionism. They are the result of an unholy combination of scientism and capitalism (hyper-individualism). The former (hyper-competition) pits us against each other relentlessly, both by pushing to the extremes the effects of success and failure, and emphasising competition over co-operation in theoretical frameworks (social darwinism and so on). Reductionism and scientism disfavour holistic approaches and understanding, limiting knowledge (and the action arising from it) to the immediately quantifiable. The following bit of news is a small demonstration of the pitfalls of such an approach:

Childhood ends earlier as parents pressure children, says survey | Guardian

[...]

[A] report released from the Institute for Public Policy Research supported the notion that pushing children too hard at a young age can backfire.

Academic results themselves do not ensure a higher income, and too much focus on them can inhibit social development and confidence, it said.

With apologies for the editorialising ;-).

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Well, not really, but it’s an interesting new twist in the Science Wars:

Sociologist Harry Collins poses as a physicist
By Jon Lackman - Slate Magazine

In a recent experiment of his design, British sociologist Harry Collins asked a scientist who specializes in gravitational waves to answer seven questions about the physics of these waves. Collins, who has made an amateur study of this field for more than 30 years but has never actually practiced it, also answered the questions himself. Then he submitted both sets of answers to a panel of judges who are themselves gravitational-wave researchers. The judges couldn’t tell the impostor from one of their own.

There are more details on the reaction from Sokal himself, further down in the article.

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