I’d just about finished this lengthy post when I got the news that our readers and fellow bloggers are calling for lots of juicy attackblogging instead of dryasdust issues analysis. But it’s done now, so I’m going to post it anyway.
Matthew Yglesias had a well-argued piece a couple of days ago on Social Security and the Efficient Markets Hypothesis (EMH), in which he quoted me on the (generally left-wing) implications of rejecting the EMH. This spurred me to start on a post (or maybe a series) on the EMH, the equity premium and the implications for Social Security reform. Most of what I have to say is consistent with what Matt and others have said previously, but perhaps there will be a bit of a new perspective.
I’m going to look at three plans1. First, the status quo, that is, a scheme where the Social Security fund is invested in government bonds and pays a defined benefit. Next, diversification, that is, investing the Social Security fund in a diversified portfolio of debt and equity, but still with a defined benefit structure. Third, privatisation private accounts personal accounts, that is, allowing individuals to make their own investments and reducing the defined benefit correspondingly.
The main reason the alternatives might yield substantial benefits is the equity, premium, that is, the fact that, on average, returns to equity have been much higher than returns to debt in the long run. So, it might appear that investing Social Security money in equity, either individually or through the Fund could yield better returns than the current policy of holding only government debt.
This post will be about the implications if the EMH is exactly, or approximately true.
The easy case is when the EMH is exactly correct. In this case, the equity premium is simply the market’s aggregate evaluation of the required premium for the additional risk involved in holding equity. The EMH requires that each individual hold their own optimal mix of risk and expected return at the prevailing market prices, and that they take full account of expected taxes, Social Security payments and so on.
Under the EMH, neither of the reforms will make a difference. If the Social Security fund shifts into equities, individuals will reduce their own holding of equity until the desired balance is restored. Moreover, individuals will be entirely indifferent about personal accounts. If forced to open them, they will, initially at least, invest entirely in bonds, so restoring their (by hypothesis, optimal) status quo ante.
One important point about the EMH that’s relevant at present is that the risk associated with the equity premium has to be real long run risk. If equity investors were guaranteed of coming out ahead over, say, 20 years, no significant premium could be sustained. So the US experience, where a 20 year holding period has almost always been enough must be somewhat atypical. Shiller makes the point that other countries have experienced longer periods of poor stock returns, while still exhibiting an equity premium.
A more interesting case is when the EMH nearly holds. Suppose that the market is efficient in most respects but that some people are credit-constrained or face high borrowing costs. As a result they can’t hold as much equity as they want, since they can’t borrow to get it. This gives a case for either of the proposed reforms, since directly or indirectly, this gives credit-constrained households exposure to equity.
Note however, that almost any violation of the EMH leads to interventionist policy conclusions unappealing to free-market types. For example, given credit constraints, it’s generally desirable to increase the consumption of the young, for example by subsidising post-secondary education. something that is commonly stigmatised as “middle-class welfare”. So, as Matt says, invoking EMH violations, implicitly or otherwise, is a very dangerous intellectual strategy for supporters of privatisation.
1 In each case, I’ll ignore the underfunding issue, the fact that Social Security taxes at current rates will eventually be insufficient to fully fund promised benefits, under current rules. Whichever scheme is adopted, some combination of lower benefits, higher Social Security taxes or general revenue support will be required.
This piece by Nicholas Kristof encapsulates everything I don’t like about ‘evolutionary psychology’, particularly in its pop mode. Kristof makes the argument that the success of the religious right is due to a predisposition to religious belief grounded in supposed evolutionary advantages, supposedly reflected in a particular gene, referred to by its putative discoverer as ‘The God Gene’. This is pretty much a standard example of EP in action. Take a local, but vigorously contested, social norm, invent a ‘just so’ story and assert that you have discovered a genetically determined universal. Kristof doesn’t quite get to the point of asserting that there exists a gene for voting Republican, but it follows logically from his argument (Dawkins defends the idea of a gene for tying shoelaces, for example).
Where to begin on the problems of all this?
The obvious one is that a large proportion of the US population, and a much larger proportion of the population in other developed countries, appears to lack the necessary gene. If you are going to explain this kind of thing properly in an EP context, you can’t, as Kristof does, assert that believing in God has evolutionary advantages - otherwise atheists would be extinct. You need a stable mixed-strategy equilibrium. I’m sure I could generate half a dozen untestable Pleistocene scenarios for such an equilibrium if I put my mind to it for an hour, but Kristof doesn’t even bother.
Then there’s the problem that proportions of believers have changed radically in the space of a few generations. In the late 18th century, Dr Johnson plausibly asserted that there were not above a dozen outright atheists in the kingdom of England. Unless this tiny band of infidels was incredibly fecund, it’s hard to account for the millions who can be found there today. The contrast between the US and Europe today is even more striking, since the differences in living standards and lifestyles is small and the gene pools are fairly similar. Quite subtle differences in social conditions can generate huge differences in religious beliefs.
Third, there’s the definition of religion. Kristof makes much of Chinese drivers dangling pictures of Chairman Mao from their rear-view mirrors, but this is better described as superstition than religion. If he is saying that people haven’t evolved to be perfectly rational, and that superstition is one manifestation of this, then I won’t disagree, but I’ll bet my lucky T-shirt he wants to claim something stronger than this.
Coming back to the starting point, this kind of problem arises invariably with pop EP because it’s inherent in the applications. No doubt EP can be used, at least in principle, to explain genuine cultural universals (according to Pinker, ‘tickling’ is an example) but no one cares much about genuine cultural universals. If there were pro-tickling and anti-tickling factions, a great deal of effort would be expended on proving that tickling was natural, and a crucial part of training hunters to stay silent while tracking the great mammoth or whatever. Since, AFAIK, no-one much is against tickling, the issue doesn’t arise.
Kevin Drum relays the bad news that high self-esteem is basically good for nothing in terms of tangible outcomes. These findings sound much like the literature on optimism and pessimism, which finds that optimists overvalue their abilities and blame others for their mistakes. People with sunny dispositions are a real menace to society. A solid Irish Catholic upbringing (or functional equivalent) is guaranteed to inoculate you against these problems for good. Where I grew up, people thought “self-esteem” was the Italian for “sauna”.1
1 I wish I could claim authorship of this joke. But I’d feel very guilty if I did.
There’s a nice little piece in today’s Telegraph about the psychology of visual perception and how we fail to notice all kinds of things because our attention is directed in particular ways (of course conjurors have always exploited this). The article refers to the striking gorilla-suit experiment:
Working with Christopher Chabris at Harvard University, Simons came up with another demonstration that has now become a classic, based on a videotape of a handful of people playing basketball. They played the tape to subjects and asked them to count the passes made by one of the teams.
Around half failed to spot a woman dressed in a gorilla suit who walked slowly across the scene for nine seconds, even though this hairy interloper had passed between the players and stopped to face the camera and thump her chest.
However, if people were simply asked to view the tape, they noticed the gorilla easily. The effect is so striking that some of them refused to accept they were looking at the same tape and thought that it was a different version of the video, one edited to include the ape.
There’s also a link to a page where you can watch the gorilla video . (For that video on its own go here .)
Easter in Australia is a four-day public holiday, and coincides with school holidays, so it’s a good time to organise get-togethers. There are events for nearly everyone from poodle-fanciers to petrolheads (even, I believe, some major religious celebrations). For most of the past thirty years, I’ve gone to the National Folk Festival (held in Canberra since the early 90s). This always gets me into the kind of utopian mood where you think that the troubles of the world would be over if only we would all be like brothers and sisters to each other1. And lately, it always seems to coincide with particularly bloody events in the real world, making me very reluctant to get out of this mood and back to reality.
There was lots of great stuff, but I particularly enjoyed seeing Judy Small again. Among her new material, the funniest was Lesbian Chic has passed me by, opening withThey throw panties at kd, No-one ever does that for meMy career as a folksinger was considerably shorter and less successful than Judy’s has been, but in that respect at least, my experience matches hers.
Also of interest was a competition for performances inspired by Bob Dylan, who is, I suspect, taken rather less seriously by folkies than by baby boomers at large. Although there were some serious entries, the winner was a bouzouki-style belly dance presentation of Blowin’ in the Wind.
Talking of demographics, the Festival is one of the few events to which generational cliches can safely be applied. Generation X-ers (age group 25-40) were notable for their rarity, and so, as a result, were children aged under 5. All other age groups were well represented, particularly teenagers who seem to enjoy this event a lot.
1 This despite the many folk songs in which brothers and sisters do all manner of dreadful things to each other
Brothers and sisters I have none, but that man’s father is my father’s sonMost people can solve this familiar puzzle if they think about it for a while, but only slightly more complex versions have them floundering. Yet the problem described isn’t much more difficult than naming the day after the day after yesterday, which (I think) most people can do instantly. The fact that such a simple problem can be posed as a puzzle is just one piece of evidence that people (at least people in modern/Western societies) have trouble learning about and reasoning about kinship relations.
I’m generally sympathetic to the Cosmides-Tooby idea of the mind as a collection of special-purpose gadgets rather than a general-purpose computer. The work of Kahneman and Tversky on probability judgements (also my own main area of theoretical research) supports this idea. And I’ve even put forward evolutionary arguments to support the view that people are likely to overweight low-probability extreme events1.
So, there is a bigger puzzle here for me. Assuming that the set of gadgets with which our minds are now equipped is the product of evolution, shouldn’t we (at least in some phase of our lives) be as good at learning about kinship systems as young children are at learning languages? After all, it’s hard to imagine that we can be acting to promote the survival of our genes if we don’t know who is carrying them.
It’s often asserted that modern/Western society has a particularly minimal kinship system and that the systems prevailing in other societies are considerably more complex. This certainly seems to be true of the Aboriginal Australian systems I’ve seen described, but I don’t know whether it’s true more generally. Has the kinship instinct atrophied over time, and, if so, what are the implications?
1 Contrary to the prevailing assumption that CTers are remorselessly opposed to evolutionary psychology in all its forms.
In Latin, a lucus is a “dark grove”. In the eighteenth century, British etymologists decided that the word lucus came from the root verb lucere, meaning “to shine”. The idea was that a lucus was called a lucus because there was no lucendo going on there. The fact that this explanation achieved currency among schoolmasters gives you some sort of idea of the desperate state of Classical scholarship in Britain in the eighteenth century1, by way of an introductory toccata to a short but ill-tempered discussion on another field in which truly terrible explanations are par for the course; Evolutionary Psychology. People who have read Henry’s comments in the same area are excused this one.
The trouble with lucus a non lucendo type explanations is that having learned one of them doesn’t help you at all with deducing any others. For example, if there were a particular type of mushroom that usually grew in dark groves, then the principle which led you to establish lucere as the root of lucus might start you thinking that it should probably be called a cuniculus, since rabbits don’t eat it. Or a vinum, because it doesn’t taste of wine. Or a catapult, because it isn’t one. Because the “non lucendo” explanation didn’t really add anything to our understanding of why a grove is called lucus, it doesn’t help you move on. There’s a general principle at work here, related to the parsimony of hypotheses; if something’s going to count as an explanation of X, then it ought to at least partly work as an explanation of things which are similar to X.
A number of explanations in evolutionary psychology don’t do very well by this criterion. Most glaringly, the famous “Natural History of Rape” by Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer, which goes on for several hundred pages explaining how rape is either “an adaptation that was directly favored by selection because it increased male reproductive success by way of increasing mate number” or “a product of other psychological adaptations, especially those that function to produce the sexual desires of males for multiple partners without commitment”. This is a pretty controversial theory in and of itself, but let’s pretend that we all took it on board as a really good theory of why men commit rapes. How far does this get us as a theory of things similar to rape?
Well, what’s similar to rape? Two things; consensual sex is similar to rape in that it involves sex. And aggravated sexual battery is similar to rape in that it’s a sexual assault. Thornhill and Palmer’s theory (that rape is either a mating strategy or a byproduct of mating strategies) works reasonably well in giving us a theory of consensual sex – that’s also likely to be a mating strategy. But not very well at all in giving us a theory of aggravated sexual battery. Or indeed of any other sex crime which does not involve the vaginal penetration of a woman of childbearing age. It’s an explanation that doesn’t explain.
And similarly with the Sad Hominid explanation of depression (that under stress, some people become depressed, which helps their reproductive chances because it means that people will feel sorry for them and look after them). Ignoring the physiological implausibility of this explanation (clinical depression is often associated with erectile dysfunction in men, and you’re gonna have to work hard to convince me that impotence is a good way of maximising one’s progeny), it fails by the lucus a non lucendo criterion as well. Some people under stress end up with depression. However other people develop different mental illnesses, most of which render them much less sympathetic than the stereotypical depression patient. It’s hard to see this theory of depression working well as a theory of paranoid behaviour or of schizophrenia. Which is odd, as cases of depression are often found alongside cases of one of these other serious mental disorders.
Part of the issue here is that any form of psychology makes a poor sociology, and it’s only evolutionary psychology that tries to pretend that the distinction between individual and social psychology doesn’t exist.
[The reason for this, by the way, is that “evolutionary psychology” is simply a rebranding exercise for sociobiology. It’s not extending proven psychological results forward into the social sphere. It’s building backward into a “hard” science in order to shore up already constructed sociological theories which have come under attack. As a method of scientific inquiry, this has all the merits of constructing a house roof first and foundations last.]
And the other part of the issue is that, however much Steven Pinker would like it to be, the mind is not a Swiss Army knife and the division of psychological entities into modules is something without anatomical basis when carried out at the level of anything other than the broadest and most general ur-behaviours. The only things which are even a candidate for evolutionary explanation are the big drives; eating, reproduction, childcare, status, suppression of same-species aggression. And these are the things in which nobody has ever disputed the role of evolution. The fact that a) we have a sex drive and b) the existence of this sex drive is explained by our Darwinian imperative toward reproduction was there in Freud for chrissakes. And the fact that the simple existence of a sex drive is next to useless in explaining any specific human sexual behaviour has been known since very shortly after Freud. It’s the same with all our broad drives. Almost everything we do in an average day is just simply too complicated and specific to a particular time and place to be the subject of any evolved module (or to be the subject of any general reasoning at all, as Hayek pointed out).
So when one feels tempted to compromise with the evolutionary psychologists, and to say that “perhaps Darwinian evolutionary theory can shine some light on this social conundrum”, it’s worth remembering that this light is highly likely to be a lucus a non lucendo. Vale.
Footnotes:
1An entirely unfair remark on my part; the original source of the “lucus a non lucendo” etymology was Marcus Honoratus2 in the fourth century AD and the majority of serious British classicists correctly deduced that he was joking. But it was in the C18 that the error became popular.
2Or possibly Marcus Terentius Varro in the second century BC. Or possibly Virgil3.
3By the way, I was never taught this crap, I just pick it up off Google.
Following up on Henry’s post, I wanted to look slightly differently at the appeal of evolutionary psychology. As I said in Henry’s comments thread the ev psych analysis is essentially “realist”. This is the kind of style of social and political analysis that purports to strip away the illusions of idealistic rhetoric and reveal the underlying self-interest. The only question is to nominate the “self” that is interested. In Ev Psych the unit of analysis is the gene, in Chicago-school economics the individual, in Marxism the class, in public choice theory the interest group, and in the realist school of international relations the nation.
All of these realist models are opposed to any form of idealism in which people or groups act out of motives other than self-interest. But, logically speaking, different schools of realists are more opposed to each other than to any form of idealism. If we are machines for replicating our genes, we can’t also be rational maximizers of a utility function or loyal citizens of a nation. Clever and consistent realists recognise this - for example, ideologically consistent neoclassical economists are generally hostile to nationalism. But much of the time followers of these views are attracted by style rather than substance. Since all realist explanations have the same hardnosed character, they all appeal to the same kind of person. It’s not hard to find people who simultaneously believe in Ev Psych, Chicago economics and international realism. One example of this kind of confusion is found in Stephen Pinker whose Blank Slate I reviewed here, back in 2002.
Here’s my conclusionthe most interesting parts of Pinker’s book do not relate to human nature at all, but to his restatement of a pessimistic view of the human condition. In the process of this restatement, Pinker abandons his evolutionary psychology model without realising that he is doing so.Take, for instance, his observation, following an approving citation of Hobbes, that ‘violence is not a primitive, irrational urge, nor is it a “pathology”, except in the metaphorical sense of a condition that everyone would like to eliminate. Instead, it is a near-inevitable outcome of the dynamics of self-interested, rational social organisms’. This is backed up by the work of political scientiist who claim that war has generally benefited the aggressors.
Pinker may well be right, but his argument is inconsistent with the claim that violence is the product of genetic predispositions acquired by our distant ancestors, that is, of primitive, irrational urges specific to males. If the Hobbesian view is right, violence will arise as a rational response to this environment in the absence of any predisposition to violence or even in the presence of an instinctive aversion to violence, such as that which evolutionary psychologists impute to women.
On the other hand, an environmentalist theory of violence such as that of Pinker in his Hobbesian mode has optimistic corollaries which he partly recognises. If the environment is such that violence is costly, a rational organism will choose the path of peace. Whatever political scientists may argue about the broad sweep of history, aggressive war has not been a profitable policy from World War I onwards. The aggressors lost both wars, and the victors reaped nothing but grief in their attempts to extract benefits from their victories. More recently, Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic have ruined their countries and, in all probability, themselves by playing the politics of war. The real threat today is neither the rational use of force in the manner of Clausewitz nor aggressive genes inherited from the Pleistocene past but the culturally-generated craziness of Osama bin Laden and Timothy McVeigh.
Ultimately, whatever contribution our genes may or may not make to our nature, there is not much we can do about them. Unless we are prepared to embark on large-scale genetic re-engineering, our only hope is to focus on those aspects of our condition that are amenable to nurture.
I’m off to see Das Rheingold on Saturday (or, rather, since the production is by English National Opera , The Rhinegold ). The anticipation of this set me off googling for a hilarious passage from a Jerry Fodor review of Steven Pinker. I’d have liked to have found the whole thing, but the money quote is there in this review of a Fodor’s In Critical Condition :
The literature of psychological Darwinism is full of what appear to be fallacies of rationalization: arguments where the evidence offered that an interest in Y is the motive for a creature’s behavior is primarily that an interest in Y would rationalize the behavior if it were the creature’s motive. Pinker’s book provides so many examples that one hardly knows where to start.… [H]ere’s Pinker on why we like fiction: “Fictional narratives supply us with a mental catalogue of the fatal conundrums we might face someday and the outcomes of strategies we could deploy in them. What are the options if I were to suspect that my uncle killed my father, took his position, and married my mother?” Good question. Or what if it turns out that, having just used the ring that I got by kidnapping a dwarf to pay off the giants who built me my new castle, I should discover that it is the very ring that I need in order to continue to be immortal and rule the world? It’s important to think out the options betimes, because a thing like that could happen to anyone and you can never have too much insurance. (p. 212)
UPDATE: Thanks to commenter C.P. Shaw. The whole Fodor article, which I’d failed to find using Google is available on the LRB website .
I recently read Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morality with a group of colleagues. To the extent to which I understood the book (and despite the book’s brevity I’m feeling somewhat sympathetic to those snakes who have to sit around whilst they digest a large mammal), my comprehension was greatly assisted by Brian Leiter’s excellent Nietzsche on Morality . Reading the reviews and commentary on Mel Gibson’s Passion, I was immediately reminded of a passage from the second essay, where Nietzsche is writing about the genesis of guilt from the sense of indebtedness (at first to ancestors) and remarks on the further excruciating twist that Christianity brings: on the pretext of having their debts forgiven, believers are put in a postition of psychological indebtedness from which they can never recover (He sent his only son, and we killed Him):
…. we confront the paradoxical and horrifying expedient with which a martyred humanity found temporary relief, that stroke of genius of Christianity—God’s sacrifice of himself for the guilt of human beings, God paying himself back with himself, God as the only one who can redeem man from what for human beings has become impossible to redeem—the creditor sacrifices himself for the debtor, out of love (can people believe that?), out of love for his debtor! (sec. 21)
I haven’t seen Gibson’s film yet (since it doesn’t open in the UK for another month) but it is clear from the reviews that it is precisely this aspect of the Christian story that Gibson accentuates through his relentless focus on the torture and suffering of Jesus. (And see the email of the day on Andrew Sullivan for evidence that some believers are taking the movie in exactly this way.)
Contrast this with, say, Pasolini’s treatment of the story in his The Gospel According to St. Matthew , where another aspect of the Christian message is emphasised: that we all belong to a common humanity, that each person has moral worth and should be recognised as such, and that compassion is an appropriate attitude to the suffering of our fellow humans (a vision powerfully expressed, also, in Joan Osborne’s song “One of Us”). Nietzsche doesn’t like this aspect of Christianity either, of course, but for me at least, it is the most attractive feature of the religion. Not just attractive, of course, but morally and politically important and influential: the basic equality of humans posited by both Locke and Kant is strongly rooted in this Christian tradition (which poses an unresolved problem, I think, for those of us who want to hang onto that moral idea whilst rejecting religion - c.f Jeremy Waldron’s recent God, Locke and Equality ).
One of the reasons I can’t bring myself to share the antipathy to religion that is expressed by someone like our esteemed regular commenter Ophelia Benson , is that, at its best, religion succeeds in a symbolic articulation of universal moral concern that secular morality finds it hard to match up to (motivationally, I mean). Secular morality is a thin gruel compared to the notion that, as children of God, we are to think of ourselves as brothers and sisters. It sounds as if Gibson’s film is a reminder not of religion at its best, but at its very worst: cruel and sadistic and aiming to provoke a mixture of guilt, worthlessness and rage in believers. I’m keeping an open mind about whether the film is specifically anti-semitic, but it sounds very much as if the film draws on and inflames the very reactive attitudes that have inspired much religious violence and persecution (not to speak of personal unhappiness) in the past.
Since the discussion on Chris' post on mumbo-jumbo went straight from the ludicrous Edward de Bono to the Flynn effect, I thought I'd repost a lightly edited version of a piece on the Flynn effect and The Bell Curve that was on my own blog a couple of months ago, but might be of interest to CT readers.
The Bell Curve got a thorough hammering on statistical grounds when it came out (this review by conservative economist Jim Heckman in Reason is damning, and it was one of the polite ones). But the thing that most annoyed me when I read it was their discussion of the Flynn effect, namely that average scores on IQ tests have risen steadily over time, by amounts sufficient to wipe out the differences between racial groups on which Murray and Herrnstein rely. As Thomas Sowell points out in this review (reproduced by Brad de Long), it's hard to see how any claim that differences in IQ test scores observed in Western societies are mostly due to genetic factors can stand up in the face of this observation. But Murray and Herrnstein slide straight past it, saying that they are concerned with contemporary inequality, not with time trends. This is about as reasonable as a "nurturist" deciding to ignore twin studies on the grounds that most people aren't twins.
I think there are two reasonable interpretations of the Flynn effect. One is to agree with Murray and Herrnstein that IQ test scores measure "intelligence" and to conclude that intelligence is primarily determined by environmental factors, and particularly by education.
The second is that IQ tests scores do not, in fact, correspond to what we normally mean by intelligence but to something narrower, and more environmentally malleable. The simplest version of this would be to suppose that IQ tests measure the capacity to solve IQ test problems and to attribute the Flynn effect to "test sophistication", the fact that people who have done IQ tests in the past do better. The problem is that the administration of IQ tests to kids was probably more common 50 years ago than today.
A more plausible claim is that IQ tests are essentially academic achievement/aptitude tests. They are 'content-free' in that they don't rely on information from specific courses in the manner of school assessments, but they do test skills that are promoted by school education and by an environment where most people have high (by historical standards) levels of education. They are good predictors of university performance (thanks for this link to Jack Strocchi). Since academic aptitude naturally rises with education we would expect to get the obvious virtuous circle - the more schooling there is, the higher is IQ and the more kids are capable of benefitting from a university education.
While it's implausible that the population is massively more intelligent than it was a couple of generations ago, it's not unreasonable to suggest that capacity for academic achievement has been rising steadily. Fifty years ago, someone who suggested that the majority of people were capable of getting a university degree would have been regarded as utopian. And despite the dumbing down of the last decade or so, the content of the average degree is probably tougher now than fifty years ago.
On the other hand, I imagine that, if there were tests that depended, even subtly, on familiarity with agriculture, scores would have plummeted over the same period.
I'm happy with the idea that intelligence is more than IQ. But of course, the evidence on which Murray and Herrnstein rely is all about IQ scores. This evidence shows, about as unambiguously as is possible, that changes in the environment can substantially increase the average IQ score of a population with a broadly constant genetic endowment.
The Guardian has a readable and disturbing piece about what happens if you try to fake your way into a mental instutution:
In 1972, David Rosenhan, a newly minted psychologist with a joint degree in law, called eight friends and said something like, “Are you busy next month? Would you have time to fake your way into a mental hospital and see what happens?”
Lauren Slater reports on the extreme hostility this researcher faced when he published and since, on the fact that his fellow inmates could tell he was sane even when the doctors couldn’t, on how he wrote down his experiences and had this labelled as “writing behavior” (which I suppose it was). But what would happen if you tried to do the same thing today? Slater tried ….
I just got the latest issue of Scientific American, and noted with interest the Table of Contents, in which the Skeptic column promised an evolutionary explanation of the mutiny on the Bounty. I vaguely expected the usual stuff about alpha and beta males or somesuch, but I found that the ev psych boffins have come up with a startling new discovery. Young men like having sex. At this point the mathematics and biochemistry get a bit complicated for me (oxytocin is in there somewhere), but apparently this has something to do with the survival of the species.
Even more startling, though, is the fact that
Although Bligh preceded Charles Darwin by nearly a century,he managed to anticipate this discovery. Who would have thought that a former governor of New South Wales (and not a successful one) would share with EO Wilson and Stephen Pinker the honour of founding evolutionary psychology? In Bligh's words
I can only conjecture that they have Idealy assured themselves of a more happy life among the Otaheitians than they could possibly have in England, which joined to some Female connections has most likely been the leading cause of the whole business.Delivery times are somewhat strange here in the Antipodes, and I thought perhaps I had an advance copy of the April edition, but the cover says February.
Why is it that people with ‘real’ illnesses like heart disease, cancer or ‘flu can receive unqualified sympathy and support, while those suffering from an equally organic illness like depression are so often told to ‘just snap out of it’?
I’ve just started reading Andrew Solomon’s extraordinary book ‘The Noonday Demon; an Atlas of Depression’, which has the most striking opening sentence and paragraph I think I’ve ever read. Last night, I read Solomon’s horrifying account of a visit to an emergency room after he’d dislocated his shoulder. He was terrified that the pain and trauma of a relatively uncomplicated injury would lead to a breakdown, and explained his history of severe, psychotic depression. He first asked calmly, then begged, for adequate pain relief and a psychiatric consultation. The response from the emergency doctors was ignorant and curt - ‘pull yourself together’ - and a severe depressive episode did indeed ensue.
This morning, the Guardian publishes an affecting story about a football player called Nic Colley who was too ashamed to admit to depression, and told team-mates he had cancer instead. When the lie was found out, the Tamworth FC, who had fully supported Colley when he was a cancer patient, turfed him out. To some, Colley’s actions seem unpardonable, especially as he allowed fund-raising efforts on his behalf. But it’s easy to see why he thought a sportsman with a mental illness would be, in his own words, ‘slaughtered’. Frank Bruno, former heaveyweight champion of the world, was admitted to a mental hospital in September, to the memorable Sun headline ‘Bonkers Bruno locked up’.
So why do we find it so damn hard to offer heartfelt sympathy and support to people with mental illness? Because we think that these diseases are in some way not ‘real’, and that the people who suffer from them have somehow invited them in or allowed them to stay. It seems to me that the people who vehemently exhort those with depression or a range of illnesses that are equally stigmatised* to ‘snap out of it’ are speaking not from judgement but in fear. How terrifying is it to think that you might wake up one day and be one of those people who literally cry with despair at the prospect of having to get washed and dressed? Or to realise one spring, perhaps months after a bout of winter ‘flu, that your health has disappeared for no apparent reason and may never be coming back? How horrifying might it be to inexplicably find yourself in a state where your mind or your body has simply forgotten how to be well?
It’s simply too awful to think this kind of thing could ‘just happen’, and much easier to blame the people it happens to.
*And I’m thinking here of chronic fatigue syndrome.
The whole thing is worth reading, but I’m just going to quote two paragraphs from a fascinating New Yorker article about people who commit suicide off of the Golden Gate bridge.
A familiar argument against a barrier is that thwarted jumpers will simply go elsewhere. In 1953, a bridge supervisor named Mervin Lewis rejected an early proposal for a barrier by saying it was preferable that suicides jump into the Bay than dive off a building “and maybe kill somebody else.” (It’s a public-safety issue.) Although this belief makes intuitive sense, it is demonstrably untrue. Dr. Seiden’s study, “Where Are They Now?,” published in 1978, followed up on five hundred and fifteen people who were prevented from attempting suicide at the bridge between 1937 and 1971. After, on average, more than twenty-six years, ninety-four per cent of the would-be suicides were either still alive or had died of natural causes. “The findings confirm previous observations that suicidal behavior is crisis-oriented and acute in nature,” Seiden concluded; if you can get a suicidal person through his crisis—Seiden put the high-risk period at ninety days—chances are extremely good that he won’t kill himself later….
Kevin Briggs, a friendly, sandy-haired motorcycle patrolman, has a knack for spotting jumpers and talking them back from the edge; he has coaxed in more than two hundred potential jumpers without losing one over the side. He won the Highway Patrol’s Marin County Uniformed Employee of the Year Award last year. Briggs told me that he starts talking to a potential jumper by asking, “How are you feeling today?” Then, “What’s your plan for tomorrow?” If the person doesn’t have a plan, Briggs says, “Well, let’s make one. If it doesn’t work out, you can always come back here later.”
À Gauche
Jeremy Alder
Amaravati
Anggarrgoon
Audhumlan Conspiracy
H.E. Baber
Philip Blosser
Paul Broderick
Matt Brown
Diana Buccafurni
Brandon Butler
Keith Burgess-Jackson
Certain Doubts
David Chalmers
Noam Chomsky
The Conservative Philosopher
Desert Landscapes
Denis Dutton
David Efird
Karl Elliott
David Estlund
Experimental Philosophy
Fake Barn County
Kai von Fintel
Russell Arben Fox
Garden of Forking Paths
Roger Gathman
Michael Green
Scott Hagaman
Helen Habermann
David Hildebrand
John Holbo
Christopher Grau
Jonathan Ichikawa
Tom Irish
Michelle Jenkins
Adam Kotsko
Barry Lam
Language Hat
Language Log
Christian Lee
Brian Leiter
Stephen Lenhart
Clayton Littlejohn
Roderick T. Long
Joshua Macy
Mad Grad
Jonathan Martin
Matthew McGrattan
Marc Moffett
Geoffrey Nunberg
Orange Philosophy
Philosophy Carnival
Philosophy, et cetera
Philosophy of Art
Douglas Portmore
Philosophy from the 617 (moribund)
Jeremy Pierce
Punishment Theory
Geoff Pynn
Timothy Quigley (moribund?)
Conor Roddy
Sappho's Breathing
Anders Schoubye
Wolfgang Schwartz
Scribo
Michael Sevel
Tom Stoneham (moribund)
Adam Swenson
Peter Suber
Eddie Thomas
Joe Ulatowski
Bruce Umbaugh
What is the name ...
Matt Weiner
Will Wilkinson
Jessica Wilson
Young Hegelian
Richard Zach
Psychology
Donyell Coleman
Deborah Frisch
Milt Rosenberg
Tom Stafford
Law
Ann Althouse
Stephen Bainbridge
Jack Balkin
Douglass A. Berman
Francesca Bignami
BlunkettWatch
Jack Bogdanski
Paul L. Caron
Conglomerate
Jeff Cooper
Disability Law
Displacement of Concepts
Wayne Eastman
Eric Fink
Victor Fleischer (on hiatus)
Peter Friedman
Michael Froomkin
Bernard Hibbitts
Walter Hutchens
InstaPundit
Andis Kaulins
Lawmeme
Edward Lee
Karl-Friedrich Lenz
Larry Lessig
Mirror of Justice
Eric Muller
Nathan Oman
Opinio Juris
John Palfrey
Ken Parish
Punishment Theory
Larry Ribstein
The Right Coast
D. Gordon Smith
Lawrence Solum
Peter Tillers
Transatlantic Assembly
Lawrence Velvel
David Wagner
Kim Weatherall
Yale Constitution Society
Tun Yin
History
Blogenspiel
Timothy Burke
Rebunk
Naomi Chana
Chapati Mystery
Cliopatria
Juan Cole
Cranky Professor
Greg Daly
James Davila
Sherman Dorn
Michael Drout
Frog in a Well
Frogs and Ravens
Early Modern Notes
Evan Garcia
George Mason History bloggers
Ghost in the Machine
Rebecca Goetz
Invisible Adjunct (inactive)
Jason Kuznicki
Konrad Mitchell Lawson
Danny Loss
Liberty and Power
Danny Loss
Ether MacAllum Stewart
Pam Mack
Heather Mathews
James Meadway
Medieval Studies
H.D. Miller
Caleb McDaniel
Marc Mulholland
Received Ideas
Renaissance Weblog
Nathaniel Robinson
Jacob Remes (moribund?)
Christopher Sheil
Red Ted
Time Travelling Is Easy
Brian Ulrich
Shana Worthen
Computers/media/communication
Lauren Andreacchi (moribund)
Eric Behrens
Joseph Bosco
Danah Boyd
David Brake
Collin Brooke
Maximilian Dornseif (moribund)
Jeff Erickson
Ed Felten
Lance Fortnow
Louise Ferguson
Anne Galloway
Jason Gallo
Josh Greenberg
Alex Halavais
Sariel Har-Peled
Tracy Kennedy
Tim Lambert
Liz Lawley
Michael O'Foghlu
Jose Luis Orihuela (moribund)
Alex Pang
Sebastian Paquet
Fernando Pereira
Pink Bunny of Battle
Ranting Professors
Jay Rosen
Ken Rufo
Douglas Rushkoff
Vika Safrin
Rob Schaap (Blogorrhoea)
Frank Schaap
Robert A. Stewart
Suresh Venkatasubramanian
Ray Trygstad
Jill Walker
Phil Windley
Siva Vaidahyanathan
Anthropology
Kerim Friedman
Alex Golub
Martijn de Koning
Nicholas Packwood
Geography
Stentor Danielson
Benjamin Heumann
Scott Whitlock
Education
Edward Bilodeau
Jenny D.
Richard Kahn
Progressive Teachers
Kelvin Thompson (defunct?)
Mark Byron
Business administration
Michael Watkins (moribund)
Literature, language, culture
Mike Arnzen
Brandon Barr
Michael Berube
The Blogora
Colin Brayton
John Bruce
Miriam Burstein
Chris Cagle
Jean Chu
Hans Coppens
Tyler Curtain
Cultural Revolution
Terry Dean
Joseph Duemer
Flaschenpost
Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Jonathan Goodwin
Rachael Groner
Alison Hale
Household Opera
Dennis Jerz
Jason Jones
Miriam Jones
Matthew Kirschenbaum
Steven Krause
Lilliputian Lilith
Catherine Liu
John Lovas
Gerald Lucas
Making Contact
Barry Mauer
Erin O'Connor
Print Culture
Clancy Ratcliff
Matthias Rip
A.G. Rud
Amardeep Singh
Steve Shaviro
Thanks ... Zombie
Vera Tobin
Chuck Tryon
University Diaries
Classics
Michael Hendry
David Meadows
Religion
AKM Adam
Ryan Overbey
Telford Work (moribund)
Library Science
Norma Bruce
Music
Kyle Gann
ionarts
Tim Rutherford-Johnson
Greg Sandow
Scott Spiegelberg
Biology/Medicine
Pradeep Atluri
Bloviator
Anthony Cox
Susan Ferrari (moribund)
Amy Greenwood
La Di Da
John M. Lynch
Charles Murtaugh (moribund)
Paul Z. Myers
Respectful of Otters
Josh Rosenau
Universal Acid
Amity Wilczek (moribund)
Theodore Wong (moribund)
Physics/Applied Physics
Trish Amuntrud
Sean Carroll
Jacques Distler
Stephen Hsu
Irascible Professor
Andrew Jaffe
Michael Nielsen
Chad Orzel
String Coffee Table
Math/Statistics
Dead Parrots
Andrew Gelman
Christopher Genovese
Moment, Linger on
Jason Rosenhouse
Vlorbik
Peter Woit
Complex Systems
Petter Holme
Luis Rocha
Cosma Shalizi
Bill Tozier
Chemistry
"Keneth Miles"
Engineering
Zack Amjal
Chris Hall
University Administration
Frank Admissions (moribund?)
Architecture/Urban development
City Comforts (urban planning)
Unfolio
Panchromatica
Earth Sciences
Our Take
Who Knows?
Bitch Ph.D.
Just Tenured
Playing School
Professor Goose
This Academic Life
Other sources of information
Arts and Letters Daily
Boston Review
Imprints
Political Theory Daily Review
Science and Technology Daily Review