cognitive psychology
Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality
August 23, 2010 - 06:49 — bhugaI changed my mind on some things while reading this book, but not because of this book. This book is terrible.
The book attempts to prove the idea that humans evolved in a more or less willy-nilly sexual environment, and that modern ideas of monogamy are basically ridiculous. The book is awful; I did not finish it. The first third or so that I read contains ad-hominem attacks on Darwin (a straw man attack for this topic if there ever was one), pointless, rambling surveys on other areas of evolutionary psychology with little relevance or effort to tie it to the topic at hand, and vague, unscientific jabs at various members of the self-proclaimed moral establishment. They make some points, but the methodology is so bad that it's entirely by accident.
At any rate, I would not trust the book's main point based on the book's examples of pre-agricultural tribes, because of the aforementioned methodology problems. But it's true that most pre-agricultural societies are organized around fierce egalitarianism, with lots of communal child rearing. The 'standard narrative' of a providing father and paternity-certainty-providing mother doesn't work there.
Now, we've had 10 thousand years or more to evolve cognitive responses to agriculture, so I do not agree with the premise that nobody is wired for monogamy. However, the book made me think about how we treat people who are not (and I would definitely grant that surely, some people are not).
It would be worse than being gay. Society views polyamorous folks as damaged and self destructive; courts routinely take their kids away. One needs a partner to self-actualize, as its put, and failing at marriage is a personal flaw. And I admit that I kind of held this view before, but in retrospect, it's profoundly unfair to people who are not cut out for, biologically or otherwise, taking relationships seriously.
Further, it made me think about how I feel about jealousy. Not that it's ever been an issue; I haven't had a 6 or 7 year relationship to itch over. But is monogamy like a 'hidden cost' economics problem? Namely, much like the government bailing out a car company saves a few jobs, creating an unseen cost of what that money could have done had it created new companies and hired new workers, perhaps that's what relationships are doing. Perhaps monogamy prevents the short-term cost of jealousy, but it's creating a long-term, hidden cost of folks feeling stifled. I'm not going to make sweeping generalizations like this book did, but its something to think about.
Spent: Sex, Evolution and Consumer Behavior
June 4, 2010 - 22:50 — bhugaWoa-hoa-hoa. I'm not sure this is the seminal work on the topic, but it's the first time I've read about some of this stuff, and it totally changes things.
Miller here postulates the big 5 (big 6, really, if one counts general intelligence) are lost territory for marketers. The big 5, which I have heard about before but never so thoroughly read, are Openness to experience, conscientiousness, aggressiveness, stability, and extraversion. Put together, these 5 can more or less describe any personality. Add in intelligence, and the picture gets clearer.
The core thesis of the book is that most purchases are made with an intent to signal one or more of these traits, the better to signal to potential mates that one possesses these properties, and thus would be a good match for a viewer. Thus, a hybrid smart car is just as much of dick-swinging as a Ferrarri, its just claiming that the currently-pendulous genitalia are smarter as opposed to aggressive. This is only *exactly how I have felt my entire life*, so finding this book was an excellent thing for me.
On a personal level, this book has been really key for me. I don't know that it would be for most other people; most people were not meticulously removing vendor labels from their backpacks in high school lest they be associated with, or advertising, a brand. I had never been able to define why, other than saying almost any product is an attempt to grasp status. I had been able to articulate 'kinds of status' before, but never anything as clear as this. Sometimes its not about status per se, its about traits. It's kind of like status--a lot of products are a claim on 'high status' because they are associated with such an extreme of this or that trait. But it's not binary 'status', and this is going to change how I look at things.
The problem is that I'm not sure what, exactly, this new information will allow me to do. Although with this mental framework in place, I see this everywhere, I'm not sure what I'd want to do here. I've long since divested myself of 'status', purposefully, but I see now that that has actually not been just a strong negative-status signal but a positive signal on other traits that I *don't* think represent me.
So what do I do? Attempt to re-create myself with more visible signals of the traits I consider good about myself? Continue ignoring it, one day perhaps finding a group of people as consciously sensitive (in the painful sense) to branding as I am? Lord knows I can, I'm used to the looks of confusion. Maybe I should found a company, the brand of which implies anti-brand?
It would seem that the most direct approach for solving the problem, if indeed there is one, is to adjust what I display. But the core thing I spend money on--seeing new places, because I like doing that--implies any number of things, many of them not necessarily congruent with how I see myself. I really have no idea what I'd want to display.
Man, I don't know. A part of me wishes I could un-read this book. I think things would be simpler.
Moral Minds
June 25, 2009 - 09:35 — bhugaA very intriguing book, and very much along the topic of cognitive biases that I so love. Maybe a bit too dense to really recommend, though.
This book is rough to say is 'good'. It's pop science, the good kind that brings together a lot of different studies, but not quite as readable or approachable as, say, Pinker or even Dawkins, which is saying something. But the topic is phenomenal, and Hauser pulls together an incredible amount of data. If you're in to cognitive psychology--which I think is one of the most best-covered subjects in popular science today--this one's not to be missed. It's too important.
Hauser postulates, and provides significant evidence for, a basic moral grammar, akin to the universal linguistic grammar, a system of moral precepts from which moral systems can be built based on local societal norms, but which limits certain moral systems from existing. Much like no known language has OSV word order (I think, I am paraphrasing stuff I read a long time ago here), no moral system will allow the death penalty for a 6 year old fighting with their sibling.
The most important thing to me is the ample evidence that the reasoning we use to make moral decisions is not available to us. We cannot say why it's okay to divert a speeding train to kill 1 and save 5 but we can't kill 1 to harvest their organs for to save 5. We have a moral engine in our brains, chugging away at the problem, but the plans for the engine are not available to us. We try and capture them, but much of morality is jut rationalization.
This is very, very important for a lot of areas. Take public policy. We can rationalize that we help the needy, because helping an injured person in front of you is logically equivalent, in a way, to donating money to poor children across the world. But we have a lot of evidence that that kind of large-scale, institutional charity is actually harmful in the long run. Our attempts to extrapolate on moral reasoning result in public policy that is wildly ineffective, and we need to recognize that sometimes large-scale decisions cannot be made in a way that reconciles with our moral feelings.
It's also got a lot of important ramifications for animal rights. We grant human rights to mentally disabled folks, but it sure looks like a big part of what makes us moral is that we can put together certain kinds of information in our brains and apply them to base biological systems--i.e. we need to do logical processing on the history of our interactions with a person to perform the proper context analysis to come up with a modern, moral solution to a quandary. But an awful lot of animals--primates, dogs, dolphins, etc--display certain kinds of moral systems that might become all but equivalent to our own instantly with the addition of human-level information storage and processing. Lots of animals understand the concepts of teasing and unfairness. On the other hand, lots of animals do not seem to understand the concept of cruelty--in situations where violence is allowed (which is most of them, for most animals), there is little research to suggest that 'enough' violence is a concept animals understand. Submission poses seem to stimulate an end to violence, but not to actually engage moral reasoning.
The book was very worrisome for me. I have the moral ability to be a vegetarian because I don't think that any animals contain the intellectual processing required to be truly moral creatures. But it seems that a lot of moral processing is more or less hard-coded, including human morality. I had not considered that we might be working with more or less the same reflexive system but with the added ability to apply knowledge over long time spans.
What if I'm wrong and I have to give up vegetarianism? That would suck! Animals taste so goddamn good! Fortunately, I can already say that I would still be able to eat seafood if this is enough to make me re-think things.
