PUA's

From 14 years ago, a longer post on a topic that was new to me then, which resonated with my audience well enough to generate 30 comments. Lots of people I miss there. I don't hear much about the topic anymore.  Maybe I don't hang out at the right joints.  The topic is still interesting, but what I noticed was the quality of the disagreement.  Everyone seemed to partly agree and partly disagree with everyone else, which made for a good discussion.  It is not only that people were polite, but that everyone seemed interested in getting to a good general understanding.  Each believed they had good points to make but were curious about what others had to say. 

I kept trying to expand it to discuss tyrants and political manipulation, but no one nibbled.

Remember that if you comment, none of the comments before mine about the technical minutiae will be read by their original authors. We are starting fresh after that.

*********

Dr. Helen has a link commenting on PUA's - that is "pick up artists." Get used to the acronyms if you choose to read up on this. Either some few with a strong founder effect on the phenomenon of game likes thinking in abbreviations, or this male type in general likes it. The longer article is here is you want to skip directly to that.

The concept is that women's sexual responses can be hacked, using their evolutionary hardwiring against them to seduce them. An idea rather frightening even if only partly true. There is apparently a lot of interest by proponents of what they call game in more academic discussions of what it all means in understanding male-female relationships in general, the future of the human race if knowledge of game becomes more widespread, whether the techniques discussed have wider application for leadership and politics, and, I imagine, a dozen other related items. One reads all this with a sort of horrified fascination.

I don't know the history of this - I recall reading in college that Balzac had claimed that any man could seduce any woman if he would only listen long enough - though I have little doubt that there is much discussion of natural game versus game as an intentional manipulation if one wanted to search for it. And certainly some of the more basic points have been long observed. For example, that women say they want sensitive caring men but go to bed with bad boys has been noted by most high school males. The traditional counters to this, that this only applies to a subset of women and is most prominent in younger women, are acknowledged by some proponents and emphatically denied by others. Questions of what the PUA's ultimately decide they really want in a relationship also take up much discussion space.

I should note that while this sounds like mere braggadocio and hopeful wishing on the part of some men, the proponents have actually amassed evidence that what they claim is in fact true and observable, whether anyone wants it to be true or not. They would claim that it is the disbelief that is mere braggadocio and hopeful wishing on the part of women.

It's hardly surprising that this concept of manipulating others via the use of artificial techniques would emerge from discussions of seduction. But similar things have been claimed about the behavior of tyrannical political groups, cult religions, and sales techniques. Something of these more general applications did show up in Lewis's That Hideous Strength, sounding quite plausible in that context. It may be that we all can be hacked in many ways, and this is simply one aspect, attracting much energy and attention for obvious reasons.

I like to think I would not have used this in high school and college even if I had known. Yet I can't say that with any assurance.

I don't think it is wise to dismiss this as impossible simply because we can invent arguments why it shouldn't be true. That the wilder claims are unlikely doesn't mean that there's not something to it.

Sex and Strategy

Texan99's intriguingly titled post doesn't have that much sex in it, actually.  Tricky advertising, maybe. Still, it's fun.

Even less sexy, but fun if you are into observations of how those on the left get economic information not merely wrong, but exactly backward, is Carl's post on why Wall Street was the one place #Occupy should not have occupied. Chuckle.

Pinker's Better Angels

Steve Sailer (sidebar) has a partial review, linking to a more extended version, of Pinker's The Better Angels Of Our Nature. An excerpt, which is exactly the sort of thing I find encouraging.

A few points: the topic of violence is gigantic and Pinker's book is remarkably thorough. So, don't assume that Pinker hasn't considered, at length, the various counter-arguments. My galley copy is festooned with my notes to myself in the margin like: "A-ha! P. is ignoring X. That undermines his whole argument." But then, 400 pages later, Pinker writes something like, "You have probably noticed that so far I haven't mentioned X, which might seem to undermine my whole argument. But, I have seven responses to X."

Pinker and Anti-Pinker

I am a fan of Steven Pinker's thinking and writing.  Well, the first third of every chapter of his writing, I should say.  I don't know what happens to him, but he starts off beautifully and then becomes boring.

Pinker is in agreement with Chomsky that a good deal of the structure of language is embedded in us at birth (The Language Instinct, 1994).  There is not universal agreement with this among linguists, cognitive scientists, and others who study this, but I think the evidence is pretty strong.  Extending this idea, Pinker wrote The Blank Slate about ten years ago - it is actually a refutation of the blank slate theories of Rousseau - and did a wonderful job, really, of showing how much of human behavior is not learned but comes pre-loaded.

Now comes his The Better Angels Of Our Nature.  I haven't read it, only read his NYT article and excerpts from the considerable discussion about it at the moment.  But the argument seems to be that the dramatic decline in war, murder, and violence over the last few centuries, especially the last 60 years has been the result of ideas that have become more common.  Worse, the ideas he thinks are doing much of this good work are Enlightenment ideas - rather the heartland of blank slate thinking.

So which is it?  There can be balancing, mediating effects, and subtlety in all large ideas, of course.  We need not insist that a thinker taking a side in a discussion be always required to be at the extreme of that side, granting no sensibleness to his opponents.  But if he is going to largely switch sides, we want him to at least notice this, so he can explain his change.  Pinker doesn't seem to.  He thinks he's not very far from where he was two, or ten, or twenty years ago.  I don't get it.

Here is some of what I think is behind it.  Pinker is devoutly secularist, and believes that the Enlightenment comes from the application of nonreligious, humanist, scientific ideas to understanding humans.  Well, he's rooting for his side, whether he sees it or not.  Confirmation bias is powerful in history.  Let me root for my side, just for a bit.  I think a better case can be made that these Good Ideas can be seen growing, century by century, in every place that Christianity sits down and influences the culture.  The murder rate started dropping long before not only the Enlightenment, but even the Renaissance. 

We can't replay history and measure what would have happened if Christianity had not come to Europe.  But we can say that the growth of science, the rights of man, tolerance, and all the good stuff we take for granted in the modern world seems to have slowly grown up like this precisely once in human history, other regions falling back after progress.

Secondly, the violence of the French, Russian, and Chinese Revolutions are left off the ledger.  They are not left out of his book, but they are absent from the calculation of the ideas affecting the world.

It's curious.

Demographics

National Geographic's September issue has an article on the fertility rate dropping precipitously in Brazil.  While the increase in income leading to fewer children per woman is noted, they spend a long time talking about the powerful women on steamy Brazilian soap operas and how few children they have as a major cultural influence on the fertility rate dropping below 2.1-2.3 replacement.

Okay.  And all those other countries without steamy soap operas who show a similar decline...?  Because...?

I thought it was half a joke, or a journalistic hook as an illustration of the larger cultural trend.  Nope.  The woman writing the article clearly thinks it's the soap operas that are a big factor in creating the change. I have learned from missionaries to Brazil that the soap operas are ubiquitous and a big cultural focus, so I can see how someone visiting could get that initial impression that they are driving, rather than reflecting culture.  But when you are writing for a reportedly scientific magazine, aren't you supposed to check other countries in similar situations and just sort of, y'know, look them over for what is happening?

The question whether it is fewer children driving prosperity or prosperity driving fewer children is an interesting place to start.  One quickly learns, if you follow world demographic trends anywhere, that the two feed off each other somewhat and the question is too simple.  Limiting children occurs on the basis of people's estimate of how many children they can bring to a certain level of prosperity. If you know that nothing you do is going to make any difference in how wealthy your children will be, why not have a bunch?  They're fun to have around, if you aren't going to invest time in their future anyway, and they might provide some material benefit to you in your old age, if you have one.

But if there is a chance at the brass ring, why not focus your energy?  You can't be a tiger mother, or even a typical-upwardly-mobile-suburban-mother with lots of children so easily.

That's what the phenomenon used to be called, and it is in turn, a derivative of the mothers from some ethnic groups, especially Jews.  Jonathan and Ben were never Tigermommed, but they were full in the older version: Montessori, private school, music lessons, hours of read-aloud, etc. 

Cultural optimism tends to influence how many children one has as well.  Long ago I offered a theory on the countries that were victors, perpetrators, and victims during WWII, and their subsequent fertility rates. That was five years ago, and I still haven't seen anyone else speculate on that. 

Evolution - Creationism Series

Reposted from July 2010. Nothing new to see here, but folks might like the review.

Creationism and Politics
There are some interesting practical considerations, however, and that might be fun. (For me, that’s who.) Volokh Conspiracy recently had a thread about a 7D creationist running for political office, and whether that should be an automatic disqualifier. As an evangelical and an evolutionist, the question interests me.

Thought Experiment: Genesis and Science
If the first eleven chapters had somehow gone missing for centuries and were only recently rediscovered, it would be academics telling Christians they should accept them gladly, and the fundamentalists who would resist this most strongly.

Evolution and Young-Earth Creationism
Impressions Versus Science

If you bing, google, or yahoo up “first humans” you get a collection of estimates of upright figures who lived somewhere further than 2 million years ago. Artistic images from the Olduvai and Laetoli discoveries likewise show bipedal creatures, a bit hairier than us, heads a little different, but clearly meant to emphasise their similarity to us. They hold hands. They look off to the horizon. I will call this the National Geographic impression, as that is the popular-culture representative of the textbooks and educational videos which teach that view.

Evolution and Young-Earth Creationism 1A
Journal entries for grad student assigned to watch earth develop.
2,100,000 years. No change to report. This batch got smarter than the other apes and then stopped dead. I think we should drop humans as a study.

2,200,000 years. There might be some hints of progress here, but I'm probably imagining things because I want to see it. Hope springs eternal in the Martian gazorninplat and all that.

Evolution and Young Earth Creationism 2
It was pretty clear what I was driving at with the contrast between the National Geographic 2M+ years impression of the origin of humanity versus the Genesis impression. For 97% of that 2,300,000 years, those creatures didn’t have sophisticated language as we know it.

Rapid Language Development
There are lots of genetic and cultural foundations to language that likely developed in spurts over time. Yet some final genetic piece seems to have been a tipping point that sent communication from primitive to complex very rapidly

Founding Population
We pulled the beginning of behaviorally modern humans from over 2 million years ago down to something like 50,000 - perhaps even 10,000 years ago. But there are other objections to the Genesis account. It narrows the founding population to two people, Adam and Eve, for example

Location, Location, Location
When we compared anatomically modern humans (minimum 2M years ago) to behaviorally modern humans (max 60K years ago), I gave a hint that even stricter definitions of behaviorally modern humans might bring our definition even closer than the important dividing line of the emergence of language. Because Ice Ages forced the widely-spread peoples into now-tropical areas, we seemed to learn to interact more peacefully about 18,000 years ago.

Impossible Things
We change our thinking not because we find one impossible thing in our old beliefs, but because we find too many


To Correct Impressions
As historian Paul Johnson notes, both the Wellhausen (Critical Method, Documentary Hypothesis) followers and the fundamentalists had a comforting simplicity to their ideas: The fundamentalists that the Bible was always literally true word for word, the scholars that it never was.

Recent Conversations -Wayfinding

The whole wayfinding series, mostly from 2011.  I did quite a bit of research for this and made a number of observations I think are still interesting.

How We Give Directions

Wayfinding - general
Wayfinding - Hunter-gatherer

Old Route 28

More Wayfinding

Wayfinding and Gender Differences - Evolution

Wayfinding and Stonehenge

Inner Navigation

Inner Navigation II

Update: A recent paper on spatial navigation.
More Wayfinding 2013 
Note on Wayfinding 2012
Mapmaking 
Spatial Memory 

Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters

Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters, by Miller and Kanazawa

I really wanted to love this book. I was hoping for the latest in evolutionary biology research – it’s got that; I wanted it in summary form, without all the arguments about methodology and who’s the current fair-haired child in the field – it is that; I was hoping for clear and even clever prose – it’s got that, too.

It’s got all the main things I wanted. Why then, would I give it only three-and-a-half stars?

Evolutionary biology has an overriding weakness, as a field. All its evidence is necessarily indirect, and involves a fair bit of guesswork. I write this as one who believes their way of looking at human behavior has a great deal to offer – certainly more than the “everything is cultural” liturgies we were made to recite when I was in college. (The authors suggest that this is still the dominant philosophy in the social sciences.) Much of what we do now derives from adaptive patterns that worked well in a hunter-gatherer context, but are more ambiguously useful now. Mate-selection and sexual behavior have attracted most of the attention in the field, but family structure, trading and trust behavior, and even political and religious attitudes have been examined in terms of evolutionary biology.

But this book is a bit too far over-the-top in its insistence on biology. It declares that evolution essentially stopped 10,000 years ago – I think there is ample evidence that’s not true; It makes a big deal out of slight differences, as in the book’s title research, which reveals one of those 51-49 important-over-time divergences that don’t illuminate much of our daily life;* it accepts highly-suspicious numbers at face value to bolster its claims. For example, it accepts for 90% of the book the dubious claim that 10-30% of American children have different fathers than are claimed on their birth certificate, before acknowledging just at the end that the 4% number suggested by better research is the more probable.

Flowing from the indirect evidence is an even greater weakness, a willingness to accept just-so stories as the most likely explanation for a behavior unless someone can disprove it. Thus, Beautiful People has a lovely, entirely plausible evolutionary explanation of how religion came to be. But Nicholas Wade’s Before The Dawn reports an entirely different, equally plausible explanation. They are not quite mutually exclusive, but they have nothing to do with each other. Evolutionary biology abounds with these stories, that just make sense explaining everything. Sometimes they do. Sometimes further research on related topics confirms the original explanation repeatedly.

Sometimes not, and the just-so story fades into oblivion, with all the claim-makers whistling innocently that they were nowhere near the place. Weakness of the field. (See Dubbahdee’s comment under Wayfinding for another example of a possible, plausible, but perhaps completely bogus explanation.

My other complaint is that the book takes too long to get airborne. If you need an introduction to the basic concepts of evolutionary biology, plus some strong arguments why the cultural explanations don’t hold, then the first 70 pages won’t annoy you. I was expecting more, and they annoyed me. Though it was fun to see the myths of Margaret Mead, the Gentle Tasaday, and Chief Seattle exploded back-to-back-to-back.


*The Wymans had four generations of sons only – we’re not pretty, but we’ve worked hard at upgrading the stock for beauty the last three generations – and now we’ve got daughters dominant (exclusive, in my line). So I was particularly interested in what the title was all about. Pretty minor correlation.

Incest and DNA

My son in Nome, referencing another grim situation that has come across his screen, said that the joke about the villages is that a virgin is defined as a girl who can run faster than her father. “The Villages” means almost entirely Native populations, Yupik and Inuit. I had heard the sad joke about other places many times – first, I think, about the peninsula counties of Maryland in the 18th C, though the reference was to being able to run faster than one’s uncle. The accusation has been made about Appalachian areas as long as I can remember (though those often took the form of cousin-marriage jokes), and I am starting to hear that incest is distressingly common in some African groups recently coming to America. There were towns and village sections of NH that were rumored to be incest-ridden – being familiar with the dark side of social histories in this state over the last 35 years, I can confirm that some of the rumors, at least, are true. (I have no sense there is any ethnic difference, BTW.) I had only heard of brother-sister incest in professional settings, never in news stories or general discussion, but that is being acknowledged recently. We have long known that step-relatives are far more risk to children than blood relatives, and the data are bearing this out.

We have lived in a swirl of rumor with little data all these years, and the excesses of recovered or implanted memory have added to the confusion. We have speculated whether certain cultures are more prone to incest, but our knowledge has been so limited that this has been irresponsible. I have suspicions on that score, but disbelieve them myself. We have identified some common themes that seem to be holding up – that older siblings are more likely to perpetrate on brothers and sisters when no father is present; that father-daughter incest is more common when the mother is unavailable, depressed, or loses to her daughter in some competition for power in the family; we have wondered whether particular dislocations of culture, such as expulsion or refugee status, create an increase because of the thoroughness of family breakdown, though that is only theory.

That drug and especially alcohol abuse co-occur is one of the strands of information we actually do know with confidence at present.

We are about to start knowing the answers to these questions. And some among us are going to be harmed by it and fight to insist it isn’t true. If whites of certain groups or subcultures show up badly, expect an increasing in them pointing out terrible things that black or Hispanic people do – unless of course there are subgroups of blacks or hispanics exposed under the same light. This will be knowledge we don’t want to have, but we will have it. I don’t know whether we’ll be able to disguise the truths on this one.

One note on how cultures that are either prone to such breakdowns or have such breakdown thrust upon them have been able to survive darwinian selection, given that more children with disabilities would seem to decrease group survival: think of it as natural selection in high gear, if tribes leave the weak behind. There will be little or no greater chance of exceptionally good genes for survival, but the bad genes will be expressed rather than being carried in secret, and weak lines culled. Rather chilling, even if one is considering our ancestors of 100,000 years ago. We may all have benefited from it.

Another Conversation

This time I would like to connect you to a conversation. Steve Sailer had two posts related to his review of Francis Fukuyama's new The Origins of Political Order, plus comment on the research on poverty and "depletable willpower" in an article at The New Republic. (Bird Dog at Maggie's linked to that earlier this week as well.) These posts included links to two fascinating sites I was previously unfamiliar with - hbd chick and Steve Hsu's Information Processing blog.

From sailer's original:

Unfortunately, Fukuyama never gets around to wrestling with the obvious question that has been central to the study of ethnic nepotism since Hamilton made explicit the genetic basis of tribal altruism in a 1975 paper: Who, exactly, are your kin? Where do your relatives end? The answer is: It depends. You grapple with this same question in your daily life, where the answers turn out to depend upon circumstance

hbd chick suggests that the forbidding of cousin marriage by the Roman Catholic church, centuries ago, contributed mightily to the greater cooperation among peoples and the expanded boundaries of what people considered "their tribe." This led to ultimately to ideas of nationhood founded on something other than relatively local blood ties. She references this a lot on her site, but perhaps it is best to start here, on the disappearance of European tribes.

Browsing her site, she also links to people kicking Steven Jay Gould, and discusses the weaknesses of moral arguments about what is "fair" in who lives on what land. My kind of blogger. And Sailer is also kicking Gould for the same reason this week, as is anthropologist John Hawks, who I have linked to before.


Hsu's site speaks to intelligence testing, racial differences - with an
emphasis on asian vs white - wealth distribution, the personality needed
for startups and the crossover dribble in basketball, Yeah, I'm in the right
territory with this guy, too.

And a really good site leads you pretty quickly to excellent commenters, to other sites, asf. I'll be browsing these for awhile,

MWBOT10 - Optimism

Via Ann Althouse, our tendency to optimism.

When we learn what the future may hold, our neurons efficiently encode unexpectedly good information, but fail to incorporate information that is unexpectedly bad.

To Banish Evil

Simon Baron-Cohen, who I have mentioned before in conjunction with autism research, has banishing evil and increasing empathy as his new project. Hard to argue with the spirit of that, but it would seem at minimum quixotic.

He has some thought of redefining evil as lack of empathy, and seeking ways this might be treated. He's an intelligent man, and the immediate objections that come to mind have likely occurred to him, at least in part, so I don't want to shoot from the hip and reveal my dilettante shallowness. Yet it does occur to me that this is exactly the sort of grandiose scheme that gets humankind in trouble. The balance of empathy along a continuum in a tribe might allow only a narrow range for group survival.

For the record, yes, he is related to Sasha Baron-Cohen of "Borat" fame. There are other filmmakers and artists in the family tree as well. And yes, the irony of a premiere social-understanding researcher being Borat's cousin is worth contemplating.

Kenyan Distance Runners

Evidence accumulates that there are slight genetic advantages of Kenyans from the Rift Valley which help them run better at distance. These include less bulky calves and ankles, more slow-twitch fibers in their muscles, and (somewhat relatedly) more efficient use of oxygen by the muscles. West Africans, in contrast, are seen as having some genetic advantages that make them better in explosive strength sports, such as sprinting or jumping.

It bothers some people no end that there might be genetic advantages in one group versus another, because who knows where that might lead? So they go to great lengths to prove that all differences are environmental. This can lead to ridiculous claims. The study's data points screamingly points to genetic factors, which for some unexplainable reason, the article insists are environmental factors.

That said, it pays to be clear exactly what "genetic factors" mean.

1. At an elite level, even slight advantages may be great.
2. Traits we regard as under our control, such as tenacity, coachability, or pain threshold, might be just as heritable as calf size.

But most importantly, 3. Each of these traits is a single advantage, not a general advantage for "modern distance running." There has been no selection over the past 10,000 years for traits that will make you "travel across the ocean and run specific distances on the flat in special shoes." There are any number of traits that could be advantageous in distance running, or any other sport. The Kenyans have a specific suite of tiny genetic advantages. Other combinations of genetic difference might work as well, or better. Frank Shorter had a VO2 maximum that exceeded that of the Kenyans. Put that together with one other genetic trait and it might be a world beater.

This has larger implications for all genetic differences between groups. A demonstrated advantage in reflexes, IQ, cold tolerance, stress tolerance, or nasal cuteness might be quite real, but not the whole story. Genes matter, and those who play the "follow your dreams" game of pretending otherwise are being viciously cruel to young people. But there is more than one way to skin some, if not all cats. A little wisdom, a little perspective, and something similar to the dream might be found.

Judging A Book By Its Cover

People can identify criminals by their photos. The magazine carrying this has not been my favorite over the years - it has been the "where's the beef?" source for psychology* - but I read up on this columnist and he seems to be the real deal.

In this blog, I have repeatedly emphasized the fact that virtually all "stereotypes" are empirically true. If they weren't true, they would not be stereotypes in the first place. To my knowledge, all of the very, very few stereotypes that are not empirically true, for some reason, have to do with people's appearance. Hence, it is not true that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and it is not true that beauty is only skin-deep.Another "stereotype" about physical appearance that is not empirically true is "you can't judge a book by its cover." In previous posts, I have explained that women can tell which men would make good fathers and which men would make bad fathers simply by looking at them. And people can tell who are altruistic and who are egoistic simply by looking at a 30-second video clip without sound.

The article lets you try your hand at it as well. I did very well (10 of 13) on my definites, but once I had put someone into the indefinite category did no better than chance.

* Rather like Discover has been for science in general, and Omni before that. High on speculation about new developments and discoveries, before they are solidly established.

Context

Part of what has impressed and worried me about Watson winning at Jeopardy is how difficult context must be to program. A coworker said "Meredith is Genesis" to the intern yesterday. Only about half the people present, all of whom work in the NH mental health system, understood what was being said.

If you play with it, you could find a dozen possible meanings for the reference, but would likely be wrong. (Michael and Retriever might pull it out.) The full meaning of the phrase is "The town of Meredith, NH is in the service region of the community mental health center Genesis Behavioral Health in Laconia."

That degree of subtlety would be difficult to teach a computer. One can see how it could be programmed to know it is in a NH mental health context and thus assign certain meanings to words that have multiple referents. Or one could also program it to recognise "Meredith" as a girl's name or a surname, and "Genesis" as a rock band or a book of the Bible, but even that gets tricky. Meredith is also a lakeport here, and of course many things in the town are named after it.

Plus subtle mishearings. These things are so tricky, in fact, that human beings often get them wrong in conversation. Minimalist references are common in our speech and we get by them 90% of the time. But not all the time. (Does this happen more frequently to married couples, or is it just because there is more conversation about diverse topics, and thus more opportunity? Or because one is male and one female?)

I don't know how you teach a computer to sort through those many meanings, some of which have never been associated before in all of human speech.

Teenage Impulsivity

Anyone who has seen a teenager in the grip of an obsession knows that they can work harder than most people. Like a garage tinkerer who will spend hours refining an invention that will save him a few seconds a few dozen times in his life, a teenager can devote enormous persistence to a task that strikes his fancy. If the reward is visible. If the reward is not visible, they are easily distracted into one that is, even if it is a lesser reward.

I have no idea how you're going to use this information, BTW. I certainly haven't figured it out.

Why then, are they so lazy, so unconcerned, about tasks which need to be accomplished - even they know need to be accomplished eventually - but hold no charm?

Because our "achieve reward" and our "avoid discomfort" circuits are separate, and theirs haven't lined up yet. For adults, the connection between the two concepts has developed over time, so we can at least roughly estimate some balance between them. But for teenagers, these two items are still quite separate. Their "achieve reward" circuits are actually more active than an adult's. So active, in fact, that it kicks in for whatever crosses its path. Their energy goes to "the next visible reward." All others, take a number. Rather like the dog-man in the movie who turns his head and says "Squirrel!" Shiny, shiny.

Complicating this is the underdeveloped circuitry for avoiding discomfort. Because teenagers dawdle over anything unpleasant, you would think it would be the opposite - that they do little but avoiding discomfort. Yet it is the underdevelopment, the lack of ability to see that 10x discomfort will occur if you don't endure x comfort now that keeps them unmoved by consequences. 10x, x, it's all the same. My parents are mildly upset, my parents are very upset, it's all the same. I might be embarrassed for a few moments, I might lose my job - those are about equivalent to a teenager.

This is of course entirely understandable to adults, even as it is infuriating. We feel those same impulses on their separate circuits and get the point that one might not want to do something unpleasant. Why not put it off a few more minutes, hours, days? But adults have the better-developed pain avoidance, and can better foresee how painful this is going to be if it is postponed too long.

Social And Mating Behavior

A friend at church - quite obviously a parent who has watched her own children go through adolescence, as you shall see - refers to the large collection of teenagers congregating between the doors and the parking lot as The Mating Circle. I had had a similar idea before I had even heard she had said that, comparing them to flocks of birds in season: preening, flying off in small groups only to return, strutting, decked out in bright plumage. It is both appalling and charming, really. They can't seem to help it. They just do this. Like cranes or marmots or Red Handed Howler Monkeys, as soon as they become sexual able, regardless of whether they are conscious of any sexual interest, human children start displaying their genetic fitness and access to resources by leaping around, exposing fleshing, banging into each other, and trying to exclude others.

To those who immediately protest that there are other, less primitive qualities being displayed, I roll my eyes. Yes, of course this is an oversimplification, a cynical prism with which to view Princess and Junior. But as we spend our entire conversation about youth discussing them through the prism of encouraging responsibility, and planning for the future, and instilling values - as if they were reasonable creatures instead of those who we would make reasonable - can we just take a moment to drop the polite pretense that we use to try and instruct them and face what we are really up against? They just fall into this frightening behavior and they are completely unaware of it.

There was a South Park episode (Season 6: Episode 10) in which Bebe is the first girl to develop breasts, and suddenly all the boys in the neighborhood are playing outside her house, bashing each other, competing, acting like orangutans - and they have no idea why. They just do. The South Park creators are still politically correct enough to portray Bebe as having considerable insight into what is going on, but this is ludicrous. Anonymous, commenting on my Where Have All The Good Women Gone? post, described a young girl with half a skirt as if she knew what was up. Doubtful.

Think of her as a type of wren. She does this, and she doesn't know why. This is why girls argue with their mothers - well, some mothers, anyway (I hold the mom in that comment more responsible). The mother looks and says "You are communicating to every male of our species "I want to mate." The daughter responds in outrage that this is not so, she is just trying to be fashionable, so as not to be unpopular. To her, the general social minimum, set by the other young wrens in the flock, means that she absolutely cannot dress like her mother. She does not see her own mating display, she sees that it is far less than those Other Girls, who she disapproves of as much as you, Mother.

Also boys, crashing into trees for no apparent reason, BTW. Same thing. And it strikes long before actual puberty, when they still find girls icky. Nature prompts them to display pre-heroic behavior as a warmup for horrible societies in which 14 year old boys actually do have to be heroic.

I'm about to bring the water level up to the throat, boys and girls, so those of you young 'uns who feel you have seen through this and are above it, beware.

The Mating Circle is also a Social Circle, of course, which is what makes it complicated. The social circle aspect pushes you to fit in with your age cohort, which in historical terms is as important as fitting in with your family and the larger society - maybe more. When your life expectancy is 40 and no one has enough to leave an inheritance, the people who you will go into battle with, or work with, or bear your children in the company of, or will still be alive when you take sick at age 25 and your kids are still under 10, are a more precious resource than the parents who are telling you that your skirt is too short or the swimming hole is dangerous. Fit in, but stand out. It's hard to be young, and parents who see that your biological imperatives have to be modified for a society that requires you to pass algebra don't simplify it. We battle against mighty forces.

The circle is complicated in much more subtle ways. The girl who stands aloof because she is an academic, who won't lower herself to be like the (shameless) other girls - just another type of plumage, to attract males of the subspecies she prefers. The girl helping her mother with the lemon squares instead? Same thing. Just a different plumage. The boys hanging around the electronic equipment discussing new technology? It's a subset of the social circle, with an unconscious eye to the mating circle.

So all you Arts & Humanities girls, so taken with the boys who really "get it" about what the New Woman is all about - they are just doing whatever it takes to get laid find a suitable mate, just like all those tiresome rednecks shooting at bottles. (The latter are just looking for a different type of wren.) It's just the plumage for your subspecies. As good A&H males, they have learned, with no consciousness of the act whatsoever, what attitudes help them fit in with the A&H tribe, and what A&H girls like.

I don't fault them for that, not only because I was that guy, but because they aren't calculating sociopaths. All the young of our species look out over the territory and sense at some deep level where their best chances are. The problem is that they calculate this through a primitive prism of Life Expectancy = 40. Adults have to inject, from earliest years, that they will actually live to be 100 and live in a culture that requires them to find a job and keep it, so passing in your Civics homework is valuable. The kids that appear from our perspective to understand that are actually only the subspecies which has discovered that A's are a plumage I can acquire better than most, and attracts a subspecies that has no interest in guys who can ride a mechanical bull. Those guys discover other types of masculinity displays, such as cross-country skiing or being a back-to-the-lander who knows how to make and market organic maple syrup. It's the same thing. And the femininity displays of the girls in that tribe are emphatically not eyelashes or fawning and giggling - those disgusting displays are for another, inferior subspecies - but are present nonetheless.

And lest you think I am criticising you for this, remember that I raised my sons to be attracted to this alternative femininity precisely because it is not prom queen style. (Be wary, though. In distancing yourself from that, you can cut yourself off from the obvious in favor of the rarefied. The village idiot knows that what generically attracts women to men and men to women never really goes away, and must be relied upon. Assistant Village Idiots still need to be reminded that the exalted qualities "above" the primitive are not separate from, but founded on, the primitive. Moderns think otherwise because they hope something other than reality is true.)

All this grim cynicism will be tied into the Book of Proverbs in the near future, BTW. God is very realistic as well as very righteous. We give lip service to thinking Him far more righteous than we, but secretly hold the view that we are more realistic. Not so. This was all foreseen long ago.

For those who think I am wildly overstating this case, consider: the girls I dated in high school and college, including my bride of 34 years, would be at the far extreme of distancing themselves from the stereotypical goddesses of popular culture of the day, and I at the far extreme of demonstrating that I was not of the hypermale stereotype of same. Yet they all, even though they had no interest in sex (at least with me, which I will compliment myself by thinking was faintly generalisable), wore thigh-high dresses or smallish to very-small two-piece bathing suits, addicted themselves to historical romances, or otherwise let feminine display leak out - and I, sensitive, androgynous, and artistic male, nonetheless took insane physical risks, pretended to a high pain threshold, and wore my jeans spray-paint tight. As did all their friends and my friends in the AP and eastern college culture we inhabited.



Just for fun, look at your local middle-school through college acquaintances through those eyes this week. Even the denial of masculine and feminine roles is but the embracing of them in another form, unconsciously displaying the number of blinks that their subspecies of firefly mates with.*

*The reference is to Madeline L'Engle's Arm of the Starfish, in which Kali Cutter, a wicked temptress by Christian YA fiction standards, attempts to deceive Adam by convincing him she is not really in league with her evil father, but is good and wants to be on his side. A female character, who sees through Kali, warns Adam that firefly subtypes blink their proper number of times to attract a suitable mate - there are two-blink and four-blink fireflies - but that when none are available, they blink a different number of times to attract the wrong type, which they eat. Our two older sons grew up on the analogy of firefly blinks - that subspecies identify themselves by blinking a certain number of times, and one should stick to girls who gave off the right number of blinks. We didn't stress that part about being eaten by false-blinkers.

Jeopardy

I didn't watch the computer on Jeopardy, but I have reflected on the level of difficulty of programming a computer to play the game. Human beings are supposed to own the area of judgment, perspective, common sense, but this is clearly an example of a machine moving into that territory. I had said at first that this was a halfway point between Deep Blue and the singularity, accomplished in only 14 years. After considering the advantage the computer had on hitting the buzzer, however, I have backed off slightly from that. Still, it's impressive, and more than a little unnerving.

"Halfway" should be conceived on something more like a logarithmic scale. If a machine gets to 50% of common sense, judgment, and perspective it won't need any further programming. It will easily go the last half itself, and quickly. Common sense is not an off-on phenomenon, where the machine doesn't have it at one level of programming but crosses the threshold at the next upgrade. By its very nature, it relies on a machine's ability to teach itself. There is a tipping point at which it will develop something equivalent to common sense on its own, with no further intervention from humans.

And that is a problem, as its end product will have to be similar to human sense, but will almost certainly not be identical to it. It will tread a different path to get there. We can't count on it to see things as we do.

And then keep going, without noticing that any line has been crossed.

This is why I consider global warming to be an unimportant issue. We will shortly have computers that can make the judgment of what we should do far better than we can. And if we decide we don't want to, it will simply take our resistance into account and outwit us into doing it anyway.

Marmots

There is a study summarised over at Live Science suggesting that being bullied has evolutionary benefits, and shows some heritability. Given the considerable caveats of relating human social behavior to marmot social behavior, it is nonetheless intriguing to wonder whether there might be any such mechanisms involved in us at all.

The idea seems preposterous at first, with our mindset that evolution encourages survival of the fittest and produces only the strong and persevering. But a moment's reflection brings the reminder that there is some survival advantage to those who say Enough. This dude's crazy. Just get out. Given the long record of tyranny and domination in human history, it is probably some advantage for most of us to have that mechanism kick in eventually. Further, tyrants themselves were often those who rose up through the ranks during the reign of other tyrants. So bullies may in fact be those most likely to possess any be-bullied genetic leanings.

It's easy to see the abuses and rationalisations such knowledge could elicit. We already blame victims more than we should, and this looks fair to increase that. But shouldn't we want to know? If there are people who more readily elicit aggression and bullying - who may even invite it from others who would not normally be aggressive - won't attempts to solve problems of violence be forever futile if we ignore that?

I am greatly simplifying complicated things, and it is best not to speculate too far. Yet our tendency is to study criminals, bullies, and control freaks, trying to find if there is something amiss in their genes (and upbringing, and current condition) so that we might make modifications in how we organise ourselves. What if that is only half the story, or less?

Princesses

The always-creative Virginia Postrel discusses the continuing fascination with princesses in an American culture where the real item has been defunct for a few centuries. With five sons, I haven't come up on this issue much, other than to hear mothers express concern about the values taught when one allows a daughter to go in this playtime direction. And all those who disdain popular culture are honor-bound to dislike Disney Princesses, just as they do Wal-Mart and McDonalds.

Don't take that as a Disney endorsement however, has I find them a bit tiring myself. They're all Spunky Gals, trading on the one cultural universal for American women. Even as far back as Snow White, which seems a bit, er, traditionally feminine stereotypical to modern eyes, the Disney version is quite an elevation in status for SW over the earlier versions. In those, she appears at the dwarves' home and becomes rather a servant. In Disney, she becomes more The Mother, clearly in charge of these knuckleheads and setting a disorderly household to rights.

They're all likeable certainly - and why not, as they are carefully designed to hit buttons both ancient and modern in our psyches. And they are Spunky Gals, after all, which I suppose is a good thing. Postrel concludes with the adaptability of the princess role - a base of specialness, independence, and aspiration which can be decorated with whatever local ornaments mothers and daughters can negotiate.