"I Trust My Gut"

I recall reading descriptions on what percentage of people form their opinions by trusting authority versus subjective impression versus social aspiration and a few others. I don't remember whether I have ever been convinced by the measurements of any such reports, as they were likely questionnaires. But I get the general idea, and there is something to it. We observe others who readily accept what important people tell them, while others rely heavily on their impressions of people and situations, and third/fourth/fifth groups gravitate to what ideas the Best People have, or trying to see behind motives. We all think we are being logical, sure, and some of us are. Yet we all have tendencies.

The greater density of connections between the two sides of the brain in women has been offered as an explanation of women's intuition. Men are tracking a more limited number of paths, but they can identify them and explain them.  Women are drawing on more data but have trouble identifying exactly where the reasoning comes from. It's a tidy explanation, and may even have some truth to it.  I know men who are certain that their wives can see through others better than they do and rely on their opinions of whether to trust people or not.

I have trust in the long-term experience of others, and early in my career was fascinated by clinicians who would say out loud "I've learned to trust my gut on these things. I think he's lying." It was a conflict for me because it didn't sound like reasoning to a clinical decision, but I did respect that these clinicians had much more training and experience, and others in the room would nod supportively when they said this. I supposed it could be true, an alternate way of evaluating that I just didn't understand all that well. I paid attention. I noticed there were others who didn't use those words but seemed to be arriving at opinions in similar ways. I still think there might be something to it.

But I came to reject and even fear it over time when it dropped from the lips of a person who had power over a patient, because I saw it go wrong.  An early case I still regret not seeing more clearly. A young man had been brought in through an unusual backchannel, mostly on the testimony of his wife, who was divorcing him. She reported he had abused her and the children and had made strange sexual statements about them. He now had a no-contact order and could not see her or them. He was pleasant but quiet, denying everything, only occasionally seeming to get irritated when describing the situation. He was too calm. He pointed out he had a responsible job, volunteered with the Boy Scouts, and had a church he went to that his wife had decided she didn't like.  

The team leaders, middle-aged social worker and best friend charge nurse both spoke with him quite a bit over the next week.  I did not, and the case was only mine part-time anyway. We were coming up to a decision point whether we should release him. He had not said or done anything dangerous at the hospital. His wife had called various people at the hospital to tell us how dangerous he was and to please not release him. He had not authorised us to give her information, but the team leaders decided they could listen and ask questions. That second part is now expressly forbidden, but was only frowned upon then. It is easy to see how one could give lots of information away with the questions one chose to ask. 

"We" decided to try and hold him and filled out the petition, but the hospital attorney sent it back, saying there was nothing to bring to court. Our clinicians shook their heads. "I really think he's dangerous.  I trust my gut on things like this.  There's something about him that's just not right." 

I had known him slightly in childhood, and mentioned that he had always been quiet. He was seen as odd, overly focused on small details of things. Well, that sealed it.  They were now sure that he was dangerous and had always been dangerous. They talked about Tarasoff Duty to Warn and who should call the wife. I was surprised.  I thought my statement might make him seem less dangerous.

I have run into him a few times over the years. His wife remarried very soon after and always bad-mouthed him to the children after he was allowed contact again. He remarried five years later and eventually all the children came to live with him, as his ex-wife's new husband was rejecting of her children, favoring his own greatly. She became involved in a criminal matter years later. My patient still volunteered for scouts, his second wife ran an antiques store. He still seemed quiet and a bit odd, forty years later, but Google revealed nothing untoward. 

That's the best of the gut-trusting stories, but I have many others over the years. There were not many clinicians fully like that, but there were always a few, and others that showed soft signs of it. They came to resent me, as I was the one preparing the petitions to send over to legal, and would have to repeatedly tell them that we needed hard evidence. Very occasionally they would become quite upset, even losing their temper, blaming me that I just didn't know how to present these cases correctly and our legal team was incompetent. They would cite their years of training and many similar cases. They railed that the courts would not accept their professional opinion as sufficient for commitment. I noticed that the patients they worried about, mostly male or a female schizoid/schizotypal, just seemed odd and quiet to me. Over time, they left our system, as their clinical gut because less and less respected.

These clinicians were all women, though there were men among the nod-alongs. These women would deal with more overtly dangerous men all the time, even establishing some rapport with them.  But the spooky ones upset them at some deeper level. 

I have wondered if it is related to the phenomenon of abused and addicted women not being attracted to men that are a little weird, even though they know intellectually that they will be safer, provided for, and treated well by them. The weirdness is just too much for them, while the abuse is not. I suspect an evolutionary substrate to this, but don't trust the just-so stories I am making up about it. These days I wonder if this is bound up with the gut instincts of True Crime fans as well. 

Clearly, at least some people's gut instincts are not reliable, no matter how much they insist they are.

Links From 2015

 What Question is God Asking You?

I Got It Wrong  about Bernie Sanders supporters

Men and Women Offended/Not Offended in a work context.  Lots of Comments 

The Uses of Fiction  the friend who offended me died not long after.  I was glad I had said nothing about this.

Ferret-Legging 

Believed or Performed?

Fifteen years ago I wrote a series May We Believe Our Thoughts which covered some of the popular edges of the science, philosophy, and reflection on how reliable even our best thinking is.  We already know that our automatic thinking is often very shortcut and unreliable, but how about when we really try? 

I have written half a dozen times on politics being performative in general, and whether the cynical paranoia that everything is a scam and we are too wise to be taken in ("The Dwarves are for the Dwarves") is really believed or adoped as a world-weary pose.

I am now turning that flashlight onto True Crime, wondering if people really believe that the Canton police could really be planting evidence, or that Patrick Clancy masterminded not only a non-impulsive triple murder of his children but cleverly and undetectably framed his wife for the deed, including an attempted suicide? Or is it all much vaguer than that: I stand with women and corrupt men get away with too much.

This is not new, at least not brand new. They are similar to the Andrea Yates case. Jonbenet Ramsey's parents were accused of murdering her, mostly on the basis that people thought it was creepy to have little girls in beauty pageants, so...you know...people like that...they might do anything, right? The Pamela Smart case was right near here.  We would drive by the prison she was in every day before she was transferred.  There were protests in the parking lot, "JUSTICE FOR PAME" because women felt she was being railroaded. I worked with a few women who went to a protest or two back in the 1990's. Interestingly both seemed to respond to my suggestion that there were a thousand better causes in the world, and if they wanted to help women in general there were better ways. This is part of why I wonder how deeply into the belief these Lindsey Clancy supporters are.

I don't want to get into defining what "belief" means, or making deep distinctions between Belief A and Belief B. No doubt these are important and a wonderful intellectual exercise. I don't care. I want the simple version these days. Intellectual laziness has taken over. CS Lewis found that when he gave talks to servicemen during the war that many of them believed it was all propaganda anyway.  He wondered why they would continue to fight at all, then, and decided that the drive to "stick to your mates," and be loyal to a town, a flag, or a regiment was more powerful than country or abstract notions of justice in the end. Women being loyal to Lindsey may be more like that.  Do they really believe it? Well, they certainly really disbelieve the opposite. They certainly don't believe that the police are trustworthy or supposedly good husbands aren't just clever sociopaths. Patrick divorced her and got remarried (the bastard). They don't leave their own husbands because they believe they are wiser now.  They were fooled by men before, but now they know how to see through things. This husband is fine.

I admit I can't sort it out. I can't tell you what the pivot point is that sends some women to the disbelief category and others to the belief side of the ledger. Is it a narrow thing that a single good friend on the other side could switch them, or is it almost inevitable if we only could add up their clues? Does it change over time?

Dolly

I have been so impressed that the woman who wrote 3000 songs, recorded 300 of them, and saucily embraced the cartoonish character snobby elites tried to impale her on has had the collective obituary of people writing about her character. Don't we all just wish.

This song was first recorded 100 years ago, and as it is Roud 410, the guess is that it is at least 50 years older than that. Probably not deeply old, or it would have surfaced somewhere in Appalachia. Dolly was from Pigeon Forge, Sevier County, TN, and if you were to pick an archetypal Appalachian place to set a novel you could hardly do better. It's 2-3 hours* from KY, WV, VA, NC,  SC, GA, and AL, an obscure settlement in an obscure county, on an obscure river that is not along one valley, but four. It's not so obscure anymore, because of all the Dolly Parton things that are there now.

This was fifty years ago. I always thought she was over-the-top and annoying - until she sang, at which point I would just stop whatever I was doing and listen for a bit. "But whoever clings to her life will lose it, and she who gives her life away will save it." (Luke 17:33) She gave herself away.

*When she was born it was more like 4-5 hours, except worse in snow or mud season, but still... 

Singing Dog

 "I had a dog once who could sing 'Come, Josephine, in My Flying Machine,' but I had to get rid of him. (This is the first time I have ever told anyone about it.) He flatted badly on the 'up she goes!' and that sort of thing gets on one's nerves after a while."  Robert Benchley "Dogs" 1936

Motte-Moat

I have made many references to Motte-and-Bailey arguments over the last couple of years. It is a new phrase in the last decade or two, but related concepts have long been known in logic.  There is the idea from advertising of bait-and-switch, which is also used shadily in discussion, and Earl Wajenberg just introduced me to the word paltering, which also sounds rather Shakespearean. 

Discussing this last night at Pub Night and trying to explain the origin to an older academic who had not encountered it (but picked it up quickly, especially when I related it to the elastic term "gnosticism"), I realised I was still uncertain about the derivation. Motte was clearly related to "moat," which I took as the exterior ditch with water, sometimes even a diverted river, surrounding a castle. This looked more like the Bailey part of the story, but the motte refers to the central well-fortified area, not the expansion.  I had eventually adjusted due to context, but it still nagged at me that the motte seemed to be quite distinct from the moat, rather than identical to it. 

The power of just looking things up, which we can do so easily now...

Rabbit-hole alert: Motte is from Old French meaning "mound," clearly related to Germanic and Celtic words for the same, with extended meanings of mud/dirt/peat and perhaps even originally Proto-Uralic, as it shows up in Finnish and Saami "mud" as well. The mounds to be defended were often artificial, with a circle dug around them and the soil thrown into the center. The low-lying areas would collect water, which would be an especial barrier for horses. 

This is similar to the etymologies of ditch and dike. Dich once referred to the type of barrier in which a long trench of dirt* was dug and piled along the side. It was a single item originally, but turned into a doublet, with dike referring to the upper part and ditch the lower in different regions. See also Proto-Germanic skurtij meaning apron, tunic, which became both shirt and skirt. 

*Unrelated etymology, even though it looks similar. 

Pinball Wizard

There are some creative endeavors where I think "I wish I had thought of that," because I admire it and it is the sort of thing I might have created at my best.

I would never have thought of this idea in a thousand years. 

 

LOL

 LOL no longer means "laughing out loud," it just means funny, which is milder. You have to say "Literally laughed out loud at that" now. ROTFL never quite meant rolling on the floor, just "really funny." It's the diminution of language we have seen throughout our lives with words. Awesome need not include an awe at this point. We use language to exaggerate, reaching for a word that is too strong for dramatic or humorous effect. I suspect that will go even more quickly with initials, whose literal meaning is already obscured.

Before blogging, when I commented at Ship of Fools I tried to jump start some initials about spraying coffee on your keyboard, but nothing caught on. The world is poorer for this.

Update:  Thomas Doubting suggests LLOL.  I like it. 

Using the Truth to Lie

Bethany has a new piece this morning about conspiracy theories using some true facts but leaving out others. Down The Rabbit Hole, One True Fact at a Time. A favorite psychiatrist of mine used to refer to "the truths people use to lie with," and it is a useful concept. We have better evolved to detect lies - which are there, right in front of us - than to detect truths that have been omitted.  Makes sense. 

 In this case, the user was aware the bot might just be agreeing with them, but the bot was constrained to factual information only. It appears that constraining the bot to factual information basically negated the effect of warning people that the bot might just be agreeing with you. The paper’s authors suggest that this is because the “traces of sycophancy are harder to detect among selectively-presented factual data than fully hallucinated data.” You don’t say.  In other words: you can absolutely cause catastrophic delusional spiraling by always telling the truth, as long as the truth you’re telling is carefully selected. 

Contrary to my science friends telling me this is all due to poor science training in the schools, I don't find that even advanced degrees are a sure defense against such theories. It is worth noting that even non-paranoid reasoners respond in the same way. Look at this terrible thing that Trump did. And that one. Well, not necessarily untrue...but compared to Biden, Harris, Obama...? No, all that started under Bush and Cheney...Whoa, Clinton was there first.  As Wally in Dilbert once said "We ate that banana years ago." Which of us would bring up the facts that are against us in an argument? We stay stuck in our wrong beliefs not because of lies, but because of clinging to some truths and hiding others in the closet where we don't have to look at them.

For reference, my children largely went to those same schools and are also up on the conspiracy theories that circulated in the evangelical community in the 90s and beyond. The two Romanians arrived still wondering if we were going to sell their body parts. Kyle, a Child of the Sixties even though he was born in 1996, went down the rabbit hole of Paul McCartney being replaced by an imposter years ago. Fortunately, none of them married into families that have conspiracy theorists.

Oh wait...

It is interesting in online comment sections if you challenge someone that their idea is paranoid they will often respond by saying "Show me one thing on this list that isn't true." That seems like informal support for Bethany's theory here. 

Update: In reading an article today cautioning (but not opposing) the use of Welbutrin, Thomas Cook writes "In fact if you really want to mislead people, there's no better way than with obscure science." 

Deep Ancestry

I started a deep ancestry post over a month ago, trying to summarise the radically new stuff we have learned over the last 10-15 years.  It was based on a David Reich interview, and couple of people Razib interviewed, plus a long argument an Indian nationalist was having on Substack that I tried to research, because it seemed so counter to what else I was reading.

I gave up.  It was 1000 words written, plus a dozen two-sentence clusters that I wanted to expand on, and I had no confidence I was getting it right. 

John Hawks, who is an actual expert, addresses the issue in a recent post of his own. Modern humans evolved from an 80-20 mixture of two deep streams. This is not so much Neanderthals and Denisovans, but their precursors, and the admixtures that went into them. Here's what I think you need going in: the 80 is obviously most of who we are, the 20 contains more of what makes us different from Homo erectus and the others. Secondly, over this length of time in the hundreds of thousands of years, 80% of our current genetics does not mean that was 80% of our ancestors in those years.  Variations of us that had significant advantages of cognitive fitness might be only 2% of the quantity (of gggggrandparents) of a widespread population, but eventually have an outsize influence. But they would still be highly vulnerable, and the superior disease immunity of a more primitive population would still be hugely important. 80-20 is only a starting point for discussion.

Next, being able to copy tool and technology use is easier than inventing it. The super-bright may have sprung up and died off many times because of disease, while the more primitive hung on because they could at least copy better their technology before they passed into the night. Wiping out a tribe doesn't mean you can't notice they have fishing weirs.

Our ancestors eliminated the people who built Stonehenge, which set civilisation back a thousand years, but that's how ancestry works.  Neanderthals had a greater variety of the same tools, suggesting that they were more creative/intelligent than us, but also that they had to reinvent things from scratch more often. Homo sapiens copied the Neanderthals, shared information more efficiently, interbred with them enough to get their best immunity genes, and left them literally in the dust.

Anyway, John Hawks.  Great summary, much better than what I could have given you. 

 

 

Famine in Gaza

 Turns out there is none after all. And this is from UNICEF, who were the ones who declared the famine last year. 

“The whole system is built on nobody checking anything,” he said, adding that it sometimes felt like he was the only one reading the IPC’s reports. 

Daycare Barely Matters

There are wild claims left and right about daycare helping the whole country and economy versus damaging children to the point of trauma. What have we learned to expect around here about the effects of childhood interventions? Yes, you there in the back? Correct. They seldom matter in the long run. 

Does Daycare Damage Children's Brains? 

Pitch Clock

It is unlikely I will ever be a worship leader again. It is one of those things I do just well enough to hold the fort until an actual talented person shows up.  Such versatility is necessary in a small congregation but in a larger one there is always a better choice than the jack-of-all-trades.

See?  I have already gotten distracted and gone down a side street and I am barely started. So if I were ever a worship leader again, yes, I would need a pitch clock.