Meanwhile back on the Savannah

“Midnight in the Garden of Good an Evil” is not a great movie but an OK one; certainly if you want to see a lot of purty pictures of Savannah it’s a good one. Kevin Spacey portrays, according to my grandmother Henrietta, the main character extremely convincingly–even going so far as to both have his mannerisms and resemble him somewhat, which she thought incredible for a picture of a dead man. There must have been video of him, obviously. There are a number of very unconvincing things about the book, mainly the idea that this white journalist from New York (IIRC) could insinuate himself into both white high society (second tier–but still) and black society in so short a time as to be both privy to all kind of secrets and taken by an…I don’t know voodoo I guess…practitioner on a midnight rowboat ride up in a marsh somewhere. (First-tier Savannah society is so insular you could only gain that kind of access by marrying someone, even though it’s true everyone loves to gossip. But getting invited to parties?) I say “voodoo I guess” because despite the fact that people totally do this thing, or practice this religion, or whatever, we don’t even really call it anything, so much do we not talk about it. No, that’s an exaggeration, we call it voodoo; there’s an island near my dad’s place in Bluffton called either Voodoo Island or Devil’s Elbow Island (or more cheerfully Potato Island, but I think the Crams pushed that and it never happened.) You can read a short story about it here, if you like. I had been thinking for a while people might like to read it, it’s from 2004, so quite a while ago. Yeah, voodoo, but not like in Florida where people have actual Santeria churches and storefronts and stuff; more like everyone is a devout Christian–but everyone–but still there are women who will do voodoo for you. As I say in the story, white people hire black people to put curses on other white people. And I’m not entirely sure how they find them, except that everyone knows who to ask? Everyone knows everything about everyone, is the answer to that. Well, no, there are information asymmetries: the black community as a whole knows more because maids know everything about their employers but not vice versa, and so on for a lot of other things.

I have resisted writing about the Brendan Eich Mozilla affair. Literally. The ‘resisted’ bit is literal, I mean. Every day, for more than a week, I have expended non-trivial willpower to post nothing. It’s the moral equivalent of a giant bag of snacks in the kitchen of my mind. Unopened. That I am so distracted by the knowledge that someone, right now, is writing something wrong on the internet about Brendan Eich, is a sign I am a glutton for empty calories of falsehood.

Thus, my new policy. I am allowed to eat as many stale snacks of falsehood as I want. I’m opening the Brendan Eich bag. Now. By commencing to write this post I have opened the bag. The temptation is increasing! But I’m … just going to let it sit, getting good and stale. It’s already sort of stale. I did manage to wait more than a week. If, after staleness really sets in, I still want to partake, I may do so. At which point I just may manage to do so moderately, in proportion to such true nutritional content as I may add.

Going forward, let it be so! Fresh truths and stale falsehoods served! [click to continue…]

Some time in 2009, I was sitting on a bar stool in Dulles Airport, killing an hour or two before a delayed flight back to the west coast. It was one of those horse shoe bars, and I was the only woman. The half a dozen or so suited men were being conspicuously polite about not imposing themselves, but I was feeling quite open to some company for the wait. I raised my glass to the two nearest guys and we got chatting. I was on white wine, and they were on whiskey. After a drink, one of them left to get his flight. The remaining guy stuck around. He was an ex-marine and very good company. He was itching to tell a story, but also kind of averse, so I sat back and let him come to it in his own time.

His old job at the Pentagon had been to sit in a single office and man two phones. One phone was for receiving calls through the public phone system. The other one, he simply picked up and it automatically went through to a blocked internal number. Every so often, the receiving call would ring. It would be a member of the public who wanted to report extra-terrestrial activity; strange lights, crop circles, abductions, whatever. Usually, though, just the strange lights. The guy would write down all the details verbatim, thank the caller for their information, and hang up. Then, he’d pick up the other phone, pass the details along to an unnamed individual, and hang up. And that was it. For two years, he recorded alien-sightings from the public and passed them to someone or other in the military chain of command.

The story tickled me. Not least, because it’s so inconclusive. You can see why the US military would want to keep tabs on sightings of odd-looking aircraft. (I still remember seeing the Stealth bomber parked in Dublin airport a while back and finding it hard to believe it was human tech.) But also, it’s kind of delicious to think the Pentagon is paying a little attention to stuff randomers see and report, just in case it turns out to be aliens.

Of course, the US is not the only country in the world trying, discreetly, to keep an open mind on intelligent, extra-terrestrial life. Recently, the UK’s National Archive opened some files about UFO sightings in Britain. The BBC news story says that between “1950 and 2009, a special Ministry of Defence unit investigated more than 10,000 UFO “sightings” – a rate of one every two days.” The unit followed the same model as my bar-buddy’s; a public hotline and a single staffer whose job was to record and refer. The more you look at the types of things recorded, the more it seems that it’s simply a way to keep track of all-too-terrestrial unexplained happenings in the sky.

All the same, I’m with Stephen Hawking on this; if more intelligent and inter-galactically mobile life exists out there, I very much hope they neither discover nor take any notice of us.

I hoisted this from comments…because I can. (Although you should read comment 101 by Jenna Moran in the previous thread as well.) Also, because people often covertly stipulate that men could “amass resources from which to provide for children” on the veldt, and I’d really like to see that…ah…fleshed out a little more because piles of rotting food≠sexy times, unless YOU’RE MOLE! Well, I suppose moles are more plausibly relevant than spiders; at least they’re mammals about whom Kafka has written depressing stories. Oh wait, by that logic cockroaches are back in. Sort of. Whatever. Also, I apologize in advance for the profanity which is going to get CT banned from the Panera Bread wifi and which we were wont to employ in the past only when complaining in the most vehement terms about torture. Now that CT has gone downhill and isn’t a serious academic blog anymore what with the lady-posting about all the lady-topics that only affect ladies, such as human reproduction, I’m just busting out with profanity all over the place. If this is causing anyone any actual problems please contact me.

One thing one might wish to consider is what the actual economic/social conditions were like back in the Environment of Early Adaptation? Well, the real answer is that we have no idea, but a not totally implausible answer is that the most similar existing societies are those who live in relatively small bands of hunter-gatherers, such as the !Kung, and (apparently) less ¡exciting! tribes in the Amazon. In such tribes everyone has notably more leisure time than in agricultural societies, though of course their reproduction rate is much, much lower.

Generally, the gathering (mostly done by women) provides 80% of the average adults’ calories and the hunting (mostly done by men) 20%. That’s on average, and the protein is obviously important, so… Now, being the all-that best hunter in the tribe can convince lots of laydeez to have sex with you. Is this because they want your resources? No, because every motherfucking-body shares the food, Holmes. Shares the motherfucking food. They don’t want your resources—-though they probably wouldn’t say no to you getting the oysters off that roast wild turkey for them. They want your hot body. Why are you so good at hunting? You’re in the pink. A fine physical specimen, keen of eye, etc.

Now, if you, hypothetical armchair evolutionary psychologist, are very, very good, I might allow you to construct a loooong chain of argument by analogy, in which being the best hunter=social capital, and monetary capital today=social capital. Note, however, that you will be forced to leave out all the bits about “providing” for the offspring and so forth, and be left with something more along the lines of birds that do stupid dances to garner sexual attention, and the great engines of modern capital will turn out to be the baroque construction of a thousand bower-birds working at cross-purposes. Which, granted, not totally implausible.

“No but food’s important,” I hear armchair evolutionary psychologist cry. Yes. Food. Totes important. We’re all together on this one. So maybe fucking the best hunter does get you (as female hunter-gatherer) a bit of extra food. (Note that everyone’s far from starving or they could just put in a little more time looking for food, which they do not, because they’d rather hang around poking the fire with a sharp stick or creating oral epics.) Then maybe you’d want the best hunter to think your kid was his so your kid would get extra food too. But life is short, and being the best hunter doesn’t last forever, maybe you better fuck that likely young up-and-comer with the blue feather in his hair. And then again, truth be told, strength isn’t everything, and that guy who used to be the best hunter a few years back knows a trick or two, if things were to get rough, might be useful. You know what you should really do here? Fuck every last member of the tribe who isn’t your dad or your brother, and convince each and every one of them that he is your special little schnookie-boo, and separately at various times of the day give each of them a blushing, downcast look which indicates he is the still point of your turning world.

And that explains why women are all total sluts to this very day, and why people who think that the veldt predisposes women to sleep with old men who have lots of money appear to have forgotten about the perishability of food items, and the non-utility/replaceability of almost all other items, and the fact that there was no money then. The End.

P.S. My husband came up with the “ad hominid” formulation and deserves full credit.

Oi, this is so dumb and irritating that I pretty seriously considered not writing about it at all, in part because I worry the comments thread will develop a fetor of glib ev-psych nonsense. Uplift the human race, people, and surprise me with your intelligent thoughtfulness and concern for the feelings of other commenters. Who, I would like you to note, are actual human beings. Ya Rly!

Moving on, Slate has proffered for your attention an article by one Mark Regnerus, if that is his name. It is entitled thusly: “Sex is Cheap: Why Young Men Have the Upper Hand in Bed, Even When They’re Failing in Life.” I’m actually concerned that the stupid is going to burn my screen, and that readers of the article should perhaps be provided with an old-timey screensaver to avoid this. Flying toasters, say.
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This conversation actually happened at our house just now. In truth, I was first lying in bed with the laptop and then addressing John from a somewhat lascivious position difficult to illustrate with stick figures. No, now you’re imagining something worse. Anyway, I think the xkcd couple should be able to afford a better desk and computer by now. Little thing that pulls out for your keyboard? What is it, 1996?
“I thought of the title! And I helped with Photoshop!”–John.

Aside from containing a brilliant exposition of how blogospherical “rebuttal” actually works — basically endless posts by halfwits repeating that X (an eminent scholar) is an ignoramus because X has contradicted the received wisdom of a tribe — this post by Dave Graeber at Naked Capitalism has to be one of the most informative and entertaining pieces I’ve read in a long while. What happens when the findings of anthropologists about earlier societies clash with the a priori assumptions of economists about how things _must_ have happened? Well, you can guess. The really interesting stuff is in the anthropological detail, so read the whole thing, as they say, but I’ll just quote Graeber on economics and scientific method:

bq. Murphy argues that the fact that there are no documented cases of barter economies doesn’t matter, because all that is really required is for there to have been some period of history, however brief, where barter was widespread for money to have emerged. This is about the weakest argument one can possibly make. Remember, economists originally predicted all (100%) non-monetary economies would operate through barter. The actual figure of observable cases is 0%. Economists claim to be scientists. Normally, when a scientist’s premises produce such spectacularly non-predictive results, the scientist begins working on a new set of premises. Saying “but can you prove it didn’t happen sometime long long ago where there are no records?” is a classic example of special pleading. In fact, I can’t prove it didn’t. I also can’t prove that money wasn’t introduced by little green men from Mars in a similar unknown period of history.

Via the “ICCI blog”:http://www.cognitionandculture.net/ICCI-blog/the-dark-side-of-evolutionary-psychology.html, some sixty-odd evolutionary psychologists have published a collective letter, disassociating themselves from Satoshi Kanazawa.

bq. We have previously pursued the usual scientific channels open to us to counteract what in our view is Kanazawa’s poor quality science by reviewing and rejecting his papers from scientific journals, and by publishing critiques of his papers in the scientific literature. This has not stopped him from continuing to produce poor quality science and promoting it directly to the public. We have therefore taken the unusual step of making this statement to counteract the damage we believe he is doing to the perception of our discipline in the media and among the public. … Many of these critiques completely undermine the work: the statistician Andrew Gelman, for example, has re-analysed the data Kanazawa used in 2007 to suggest that “Beautiful people have more daughters” and has demonstrated that Kanazawa’s conclusions are simply not supported by the data. Despite this, Kanazawa has not withdrawn the critiqued paper nor published a correction. … The peer review process is not perfect and appears to have failed when dealing with Kanazawa’s poor quality work.Those of us who have reviewed his papers have had experiences where we have rejected papers of his for certain journals on scientific grounds, only to see the papers appear virtually unaltered in print in other journals, despite the detailed critiques of the papers given to Kanazawa by the reviewers and editors of the journals that rejected his papers.

I’ve no doubt that Kanazawa’s work is bad by the commonly accepted standards of evolutionary psychology. But as the ICCI blog politely suggests, there is a broader problem with the field that the collective letter doesn’t address as directly as it should. Evolutionary psychology has benefited from media attention, but also been distorted by it – there are significant incentives to produce ‘shocking’ and ‘contrarian’ findings. I saw this first hand a few years ago when I got involved in an email discussion with the co-editor of an evolutionary psychology journal which had published one of Kanazawa’s more egregious stinkers. When I pushed the person in question on how obviously bad the piece was, the response was that:

bq. I happen to think it is a great thought provoking document, and one of the few in the last ten years that have actually gotten people to talk about issues. … I would rather have an article that causes people to think and talk and yes, argue and criticize than to publish an article that is one more facet of the same old thing.

There’s something to be said for stirring it up every once in a while. But there’s also something to be said for trying to get things right. Typically, academic journals are supposed to emphasize the latter rather than the former. It’s beyond dispute that Kanazawa can produce “thought provoking”1 articles that get people to “argue and criticize.”2 But the peer review process is supposed to do a bit more than to verify that your ideas are daring and controversial. That at least one journal editor (and surely more than one, given Kanazawa’s publication record) in the field don’t seem to understand this suggests that there is a problem.

1 If “thoughts” can be taken to encompass internal queries-to-self along the lines of ‘how the fuck did this ever get published?’

2 The joint letter mentions some 24 critiques of his papers by 59 social and natural scientists. If Satoshi Kanazawa did not exist, theorists and methodologists would have to invent him as a cautionary example.

Update: I should probably link manually to Cosma’s webpost responding to this since, you know, that whole Trackback thing doesn’t work so well anymore. I should also say that while I am no very great fan of Stephen Pinker’s work, the title of this post should not be read in any way as implying that it’s on a level with Kanazawa’s ( I just don’t think of halfway decent puns often enough that I can easily junk them).

Kevin Drum gives The Black Swan a fairly thumbs-downish review. I had a slightly more favorable reaction myself when I read it recently. I’ll add a comment and a question. Drum is right about the crankishness of the book’s tone. It’s impressive, isn’t it? How well ivory towers work as insanity field-generators? Everyone knows they make their inhabitants go crazy. But it’s also true that they drive everyone outside insane, who comes anywhere near.Those the gods would destroy, they first make really, really annoyed. To live just outside an ivory tower without going all cranky. That’s the trick.

Now, a question. Taleb claims in passing at various points that the modern world is Extremistan, and getting more so all the time. By constrast, our primitive ancestors lived in Mediocristan. As Drum summarizes: “[Taleb] writes about how humans are hardwired to be bad at estimating risks in the modern world.” Extremistan breeds more ‘black swans’: events that are, if I remember rightly, highly unpredictable; highly consequential; retroactively explicable. But it strikes me that animals – our ancestors in particular – probably never lived in Mediocristan. The Pleistocene wasn’t Mediocristan. Our ancestors were just as bad at estimating risks in their environments as we are in ours. Their black swans, the stuff that gave them fairly short lives, were just different. Mediocristan isn’t a time or a place, or a primitive development stage, it’s a projection of a confused form of cognition. It’s a place everyone acts as if they live in, but no one has lived there. Mediocristan is only a state of mind. This is the important thing, for Taleb, so I expect he would respond by saying – yeah, whatever. I didn’t write a history of the Pleistocene. But he does repeatedly imply that it’s a state of mind because, once upon a time, we really lived there. He talks as though it’s an adaptive trait that has become mal-adaptive. But that’s wrong, right?

You’ve met The Girls From Planet 5. Now meet … [click to continue…]

Sigh.

You know what that means. I’ve been reading Jonah Goldberg again. Here we go, pondering the notion that a few of these teabag types might be right-wing extremists of a certain sort.

I wrote a book on fascism which tried to show that what everybody knows isn’t necessarily true. The idea that soldiers will return from war and become right-wing militants? Well, that has its roots in Fascist Italy, where veterans returned as black-shirted shock troops of “Il Duce,” Benito Mussolini. The only problem with this theory is that what they clamored for was socialism — the socialism of the trenches! — and their leader had earned the title “Il Duce” as the leader of the Socialist Party.

Now obviously ‘socialism of the trenches’ means something like: recover that feeling of unity and common cause we had, in the immediate aftermath of that initial irruption of chaos and disaster, when everyone set aside petty class differences and stood, shoulder to shoulder, against a perceived external enemy.

And it’s obvious that nothing like that could be spiritually akin to – oh, say, Glenn Beck’s 9/12 project. Because Glenn Beck isn’t in favor of socialism.

Sigh.

Let’s talk Texas secession. Like I said, Belle bought me this stack of old paperbacks – because she loves me – and the whole mouldering lot are turning out to be weirdly prescient. First the beaver management, now this. [click to continue…]

On X-Mas I gave good ol’ PZ a visit. He had up a quote from Rick Warren:

I believed that evolution and the account of the Bible about creation could exist along side of each other very well. I just didn’t see what the big argument was all about. I had some friends who had been studying the Bible much longer than I had who saw it differently…Eventually, I came to the conclusion, through my study of the Bible and science, that the two positions of evolution and creation just could not fit together. There are some real problems with the idea that God created through evolution… My prayer is that you will have this same experience!

The Bible’s picture is that dinosaurs and man lived together on the earth, an earth that was filled with vegetation and beauty…man and dinosaurs lived at the same time…From the very beginning of creation, God gave man dominion over all that was made, even over the dinosaurs.

After that, I decided to give my X-Mas presents the attention they richly deserved. The adverb that describes the way my mother-in-law shopped for me is ‘awesomely’. [click to continue…]

When I was 5, we moved from liberal Dun Laoghaire, Co. Dublin to rural Cashel, Co. Tipperary, and from a free and easy Montessori School to the local convent/Christian Brothers. I’d been reading on my own for a couple of years already (mostly because I was jealous that Henry already could) and I’m not sure I’d really ever heard of the alphabet. The first week in Senior Infants at my new school, we started memorising and chanting our ABCs. I was horrified. I vividly remember counting up the remaining years till I would be finished with school, and it was 14, almost three times longer than my life to date. I’m not sure if I cried then, but now when I think of my little 5 year old self and the bleak and largely tortuous future set out before me, I almost could. [click to continue…]

Like several other contributors at Crooked Timber, I have little patience for evolutionary psychological explanations of the Sunday colour supplement variety. A couple of commenters suggested a couple of weeks ago that this was inconsistent with my “suggestion”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/11/10/engineers-of-jihad/ that Diego Gambetta’s paper on suicide terrorism and engineering was ‘fascinating.’ The intimation, as I understood it, was that I was prepared to give a free pass to dubious explanations that fit my ideological priors while giving a hard time to equally (or perhaps less) dubious explanations that didn’t. As it happens, when checking out Gambetta’s website again (I’m trying to engage his arguments about the Sicilian mafia extensively in the book that I’m finishing), I came across an interesting link that draws out the actual contrasts between Gambetta’s work and the preponderance of the popular ev-psych literature.

Some of you may remember an article entitled “Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature” by Miller and Kanazawa that got some attention in the right-blogosphere a few months ago. Among other dodginesses, this article completely misrepresents the work of the aforementioned Diego Gambetta.
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