Human Nature, Class, Segregation, Utopia and Occupy Wall Street.

Every time someone attempts to build a horizontal, leaderless, classless society they face-plant into the fact that the desire of people to associate with those who seem to be like themselves is hard-wired into human nature.  Dealing with that fact is one reason why pragmatic Marxists in the 20th Century had to rack up such a high body count as they tried to make their utopian omelette by mass murdering a few tens of millions of eggs.  As evidence of this truth, watch, this unintentionally hilarious video from the Daily Show.

[The video code seems to be "eating" my text.]

Why you might want to appear early on the Court's calendar.

Decision fatigue and the story of three prisoners seeking parole:

The odds favored the prisoner who appeared at 8:50 a.m. — and he did in fact receive parole. But even though the other Arab Israeli prisoner was serving the same sentence for the same crime — fraud — the odds were against him when he appeared (on a different day) at 4:25 in the afternoon. He was denied parole, as was the Jewish Israeli prisoner at 3:10 p.m, whose sentence was shorter than that of the man who was released. They were just asking for parole at the wrong time of day.


There was nothing malicious or even unusual about the judges’ behavior, which was reported earlier this year by Jonathan Levav of Stanford and Shai Danziger of Ben-Gurion University. The judges’ erratic judgment was due to the occupational hazard of being, as George W. Bush once put it, “the decider.” The mental work of ruling on case after case, whatever the individual merits, wore them down. This sort of decision fatigue can make quarterbacks prone to dubious choices late in the game and C.F.O.’s prone to disastrous dalliances late in the evening. It routinely warps the judgment of everyone, executive and nonexecutive, rich and poor — in fact, it can take a special toll on the poor. Yet few people are even aware of it, and researchers are only beginning to understand why it happens and how to counteract it.

Decision fatigue helps explain why ordinarily sensible people get angry at colleagues and families, splurge on clothes, buy junk food at the supermarket and can’t resist the dealer’s offer to rustproof their new car. No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be, you can’t make decision after decision without paying a biological price. It’s different from ordinary physical fatigue — you’re not consciously aware of being tired — but you’re low on mental energy. The more choices you make throughout the day, the harder each one becomes for your brain, and eventually it looks for shortcuts, usually in either of two very different ways. One shortcut is to become reckless: to act impulsively instead of expending the energy to first think through the consequences. (Sure, tweet that photo! What could go wrong?) The other shortcut is the ultimate energy saver: do nothing. Instead of agonizing over decisions, avoid any choice. Ducking a decision often creates bigger problems in the long run, but for the moment, it eases the mental strain. You start to resist any change, any potentially risky move — like releasing a prisoner who might commit a crime. So the fatigued judge on a parole board takes the easy way out, and the prisoner keeps doing time.

Another scientific study proves that water is wet. First it was atheists tend toward autism and now...

...people who tend to be utilitarian in solving moral dilemmas tend toward anti-social personalities.

These results (which recently appeared in the journal Cognition) raise questions for psychological theories of moral judgment that equate utilitarian responses with optimal morality, and treat non-utilitarian responses as moral "mistakes". The issue, for these theories, is that these results would lead to the counterintuitive conclusion that those who are "optimal" moral decision makers (i.e., who are likely to favor utilitarian solutions) are also those who possess a set of traits that many would consider prototypically immoral (e.g., the emotional callousness and manipulative nature of psychopathy and Machiavellianism).

Jeepers, who would have thought that people who decide the answer to moral questions based on a cold-hearted analysis of the best outcome could possibly be cold-hearted people who analyze everything in terms of outcomes?

Score another one for Aristotle and his idea that actions shape habits and habits shape personality and personality shapes destiny.

Autism, Atheism and the Psychological Need for Definite Rules.

Vox Day points to the recent study showing a link between atheism and autism and offers several insights:

First, he takes a much deserved victory lap for spotting the relationship before Science (TM) made the same connection:

The amusing thing about the vehement reaction by many atheists to my description of their observable tendency towards socially autistic behavior is that it was not only based on my personal observations over the years, but also by the Asperger's Quotient results proudly reported by dozens of the Internet's most militant atheists. But the link should have always been obvious because it is logically inevitable. Even if one believes that a god is nothing but a social construct, it should not be hard to grasp that a degree of social dysfunction would tend to inhibit one's understanding of those constructs.


Now, obviously god-blindness will take a variety of forms, just as color-blindness does. My belated discovery of my own very mild color-blindness has, in some ways, helped me understand what Brent Rasmussen once described as a missing sense more than my longtime agnosticism ever did. You can explain it to me all you like, you can walk me slowly and patiently through all the lines on the image, but I am still not going to see it. Even if I trust that it is there, I simply cannot see it and no amount of desire allows me to detect it. It is perhaps worth recalling that just as my color-blindness is totally undetectable by others whereas the total or red-green versions are readily observable to anyone paying attention to the individual's behavior, god-blindness is not going to automatically translate into full blown New Atheist social autism.

Next, he points out that atheists - let's say, to be more precise, the New Atheists - worship reason rather than use it as a tool:

What is slightly misleading about the article's description of these socially autistic individuals is that what is described as a "preference for logical beliefs" should actually be phrased as a "preference for beliefs that appear to be logical". For, as we have repeatedly seen, socially dysfunctional atheists tend to be extraordinarily illogical, to such an extent that they will deny the existence of straightforward dictionary definitions in use for hundreds of years in order to cling to their pseudo-logic.

It's not so much logic as static rules that appeal to them. Where the cognitive deficiency is revealed is in their inability to understand that the decision tree they have adopted with quasi-religious fervor is insufficiently dynamic. I suspect it is somehow related to their concomitant emotional immaturity, as I see a similar problem with static decision trees all the time in children's soccer.

For example, you might tell a young defender to closely mark #12 because he is the most dangerous striker on the other team. Then you will watch in disbelief as that defender obediently stays wide and out of the play at #12's side instead of moving into the center and attacking the other striker who has the ball and is heading for a shot on goal. What the young defender doesn't understand that the order to mark the one player is a conditional one and that the order should no longer be considered in effect once a greater danger to the goal presents itself. So, it's necessary to keep building more and more complex decision trees as the player develops until the light bulb goes off, the logical bases underlying all the various trees are finally understood, and the defender can begin thinking and analyzing the situations for himself rather than simply attempting to identify which branch of the decision tree applies to the present situation.

Vox is absolutely right, as any parent will tell you.  Children are uncomfortable with uncertainty and want definite rules, particularly if the rules work in their favor.  A sign of growing maturity is the ability to live with the uncertain, the vague and the ambiguous.

This mindset is probably what lies beneath the gibe, "scratch an atheist, find a fundamentalist."  Atheist interpretations of the bible are often more woodenly literal than the most woodenly literal fundamentalist.  While we might chalk this up as a polemical posture, the reality might well be that they just don't understand things like "metaphor" and "hyperbole."
Of course, this suggests that our response to these kinds of bad arguments should not be to accuse atheists of "bad faith," but to have sympathy for them as limited human beings.
 
Vox concludes:

An inability or dislike for processing dynamic if-then situations has nothing to do with logic per se, it is simply a need for clear-cut rules that remove any necessity for active thinking. To the socially autistic, both "Science" and "Reason" are perceived as The Legitimate Rulegivers and they represent far more than the simple tools they are to the neurotypical. Of course, it is more than a little ironic that those who claim to be freethinkers and paragons of logic are actually exhibiting illogical behavior that is fundamentally based on an aversion to thinking.

Hence the idea of "worshipping reason," not using it.

It is like Chesterton's insight into insanity:

Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.


The madman's explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory. Or, to speak more strictly, the insane explanation, if not conclusive, is at least unanswerable; this may be observed specially in the two or three commonest kinds of madness. If a man says (for instance) that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny that they are conspirators; which is exactly what conspirators would do. His explanation covers the facts as much as yours. Or if a man says that he is the rightful King of England, it is no complete answer to say that the existing authorities call him mad; for if he were King of England that might be the wisest thing for the existing authorities to do. Or if a man says that he is Jesus Christ, it is no answer to tell him that the world denies his divinity; for the world denied Christ's.

Nevertheless he is wrong. But if we attempt to trace his error in exact terms, we shall not find it quite so easy as we had supposed. Perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing it is to say this: that his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle.

Chesterton, Orthodoxy, Chapter 2.

This was already known to anyone who has watched an episode of "House" or "Bones."

Study points to link between atheism and autism.

People with 'mild' forms of autism are more likely to be atheists, according to a controversial new study - and more likely to shun organised religion in general.


The study, which looked at posts on autism forums, focused on people with high-functioning autism such as Asperger's.

The study, from University of Boston, speculates that common autistic spectrum behaviours such as 'a preference for logical beliefs' and a distrust of metaphor and figures of speech, could be responsible.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect...

...or why the principle that "you can choose be stupid or you can be a jerk, but you can't be both at the same time" is so often honored in the breach.

Observation #4 of this Cracked article on "5 Things TV Writers Apparently Believe About Smart People" is "It's Okay To Be A Dick, As Long As You're Smart" - which, lord knows is why I spent all that becoming an expert in the Ostrogothic Kingdom of Italy...well, that and the fact that it is a "babe magnet -

Yes, the writers always set it up so that the good the character does outweighs the bad. In real life, on the other hand, the people who think they're geniuses overwhelmingly are absolutely not. Seriously -- it's science. The more you learn about a subject, the less likely you are to consider yourself an expert (because you have actual knowledge of how much you don't know). It's the guy who has read two books on the subject and worked in the field for a year who's more likely to decide he's graduated to the league of smug, condescending assholes. We have a feeling that soon the offices of the world will be full of sarcastic douchebags because they came through on one project and now believe they're the indispensible Dr. House of their operation.

Here's the linked Wiki article on the "Dunning - Kruger Effect":

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled people make poor decisions and reach erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to appreciate their mistakes.[1] The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their ability as above average, much higher than it actually is, while the highly skilled underrate their own abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority. This leads to the situation in which less competent people rate their own ability higher than more competent people. It also explains why actual competence may weaken self-confidence. Competent individuals falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. As Kruger and Dunning (1999) conclude, "Thus, the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others" (p. 1127). [2]


The effect is not specifically limited to the observation that ignorance of a topic is conducive to overconfident assertions about it, and Dunning and Kruger cite a study saying that 94% of college professors rank their work as "above average" (relative to their peers), to underscore that the highly intelligent and informed are hardly exempt.[3] Rather, the effect is about paradoxical defects in perception of skill, in oneself and others, regardless of the particular skill and its intellectual demands, whether it is chess, playing golf[4] or driving a car.[3]

So, apparently, if you don't think you are an expert in something you may be an expert, unless, of course, you really aren't an expert in it.  On the other hand, if you think that you are an expert in something, you most likely probably aren't.

Got that?

Actually, this is surprisingly applicable to me this week.  I had to explain to a person who had spent over a decade in a particular job that, yes, she really was an expert in that job despite her belief that she wasn't.

I've noticed that we all take our own knowledge as the baseline for what everyone knows, which is why "[c]ompetent individuals falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding." ["What? Everyone doesn't know about the Ostrogothic Kingdom of Italy???? How is that possible?"]

Another argument to permit open homosexual into the military....

...because allowing mixed heterosexual crews has never been a problem.

Navy CO and XO of mine countermeasure ship fired for "fraternization."

The skipper and executive officer of a mine countermeasures ship crew were fired Dec. 8 after Navy officials determined the two were involved in an “unduly familiar relationship.”


Lt. Cmdr. James Rushton, commander of the MCM Crew Constant, along with Constant’s XO, Lt. Cmdr. Anne Laird, both received non-judicial punishment for misconduct, Navy spokesman Cmdr. Jason Salata said today. Rushton has been reassigned to administrative duties at Commander, Naval Surface Forces, U.S. Pacific Fleet. Salata said Laird also has been reassigned.

“She’s been taken off the ship, but her next assignment is still pending,” he said.

Because obviously no one would expect men and women on long cruises in foreign lands away from family and friends to have inappropriate relations.  Human nature doesn't work that way. 

Thank God, homosexuals are known for their iron-clad sexual discipline.

One of the comments points to a not very surprising subterranean reality:

majrod Dec 11, 2010 12:05:41 AM VAL - BTW, you have a point. Having served and commanded in primarily combat arms units I can tell you my four year stint as a tactical officer at West Point introduced me to situations I* didn't have to deal with in combat arms units.


I dealt with allegations of sexual harrassment between cadets that turned a love triangle with the girl telling a story to her fiancee vs being honest about her visiting a fell's room.

I dealt with an orgy between two couples (which were also fraternizing because of command influence) that escalated into allegations that the whistle blower was lying and violating the honor code. One of the cadets wrote a letter to his congressman complaining he was being punished without a shred of proof while admitting in the letter he did everything alleged. They all got separated and the guys went to Korea as E4's.

A friend of mine stumbled onto a same sex relationship (again because of a jilted lover) that ended up involving a lesbian Major, a Captain (aware of the relationship who commented through e-mail that all they needed was a good f---), the majority of one of the female varsity teams and the #1 ranking cadet (female). Officers were offered a courtmartial or article 15 with resignation.

I could go on.

In a candid conversation with an MP friend of mine he relayed its pretty much par for the course with mixed sex units.

Its a wonder they can get their mission done and a reason why we don't need that drama in unit's whose primary mission is to win our wars by killing the other guy.

This, on the other hand, is just funny:

USMC-FO Dec 13, 2010 1:24:24 PM Passing by the CO's cabin, seaman apprentice Wexler was surprised to see a tie hung on the door knob and to hear the low heavy breathing moans coming from inside the cabin; jeez, he thought, the captain must be passing a hard dump......

6 Most Creative Abuses of Loopholes that Actually Worked...

...from Cracked.

This has got to be one of the best ever:

In the late 1960s, Leonard Casley grew way too much wheat, which could only ever be a serious problem if you live in Australia. You see, Australia had wheat quotas at the time and Hutt River (the province where Casley and other families grew) had inadvertently surpassed it, meaning they weren't allowed to sell any of it. When they petitioned for the quota to be raised, the governor responded by saying, "No," and filing a law to take their land away. THAT'S how serious Australians are about wheat.

In a desperate attempt to delay the legal process, the five families of Hutt River seceded from Australia under the Treason Act of 1495. This would have been as pointless as that time you were five and told your mom you were leaving home... if the government hadn't accidentally referred to Casley as "Administrator of Hutt River Province" in official correspondence, which actually gave him legal recognition as a ruler under Australian law. Yes, in Australia, calling someone something magically turns them into that.

Taking full of advantage of the mistake, Casley declared himself His Majesty Prince Leonard I of Hutt, meaning it was now treason, under Australian law, to charge him with any crime or interfere with how he ran his new country.

Could Australia have stopped him? Sure. But by the time they got around to it, the statute of limitations had run out. So as of 1972, The Principality of Hutt River had officially seceded from Australia and stopped paying income taxes.

As of the modern day, Hutt River is still separate, while Australia treats it as a private business that doesn't pay them taxes and just tries, really hard, to pretend it's not there.

For the Law-geek in all of us.

License to Idiocy.

Megan McCardle writes:

No one who has studied much economics will be surprised by this: the Peltzman effect in action.

The NHTSA had volunteers drive a test track in cars with automatic lane departure correction, and then interviewed the drivers for their impressions. Although the report does not describe the undoubted look of horror on the examiner's face while interviewing one female, 20-something subject, it does relay the gist of her comments.

After she praised the ability of the car to self-correct when she drifted from her lane, she noted that she would love to have this feature in her own car. Then, after a night of drinking in the city, she would not have to sleep at a friend's house before returning to her rural home.

I assume that we eventually will have cars that can drive themselves; the pieces of the puzzle, from GPS to distance sensors, are falling into place. Until then, however, humans will continue to treat safety improvements as a License to Idiocy, considerably reducing the safety improvements from optimal.

This is not to say that all safety regulations are useless--the number of tired or drunk drivers (and their victims) saved by lane drift alerts seems likely to exceed the victims of the extra idiots lured onto the road by the technology. But as Tom Vanderbilt chronicled in his book, Traffic, (and at shorter length on his blog) you can sometimes actually reduce traffic accidents by making driving harder; people who feel uneasy are less likely to make inattentive mistakes.

I like the fact that the 20 year old test subject immediately grasped the practical application of this new technology.

Laws with unintended consequences.

The Endangered Species Act leads to more killings of endangered species, boxing gloves lead to more brain injuries, and other great moments in forgetting that human beings are more perverse than lawmakers imagine.

Chimp Warfare.

Scientists have observed bands of Chimpanzees using raid and ambush techniques similar to those used by foraging cultures.

There have been several books that have demolished the "peaceful savage" model, which argues that it was civilization - or religion if you are a nutcase New Atheist - that led to war.  A book on the subject that I recommend is "Warfare before Civilization" by Lawrence Keeley.  Keeley's book is interesting for pointing out how much self-delusion anthropologists must engage in to to identify obvious defensive structures - such as thick walls - as mysterious cultic artifacts of no particular pragmatic consideration.  Keeley also explains how one community can devastate another community over the long term by periodically raiding and murdering isolated indviduals of the other community, which it seems is a strategy that Chimpanzees engage in.

Via Mark Shea.

Fallen Human Nature.

Students get tired of their lockers being broken into and set up a video camera. 

The thief they catch is their 49 year old gym teacher.

Students sick of getting their lockers broken into and having their money disappear set up a cell phone camera to hopefully catch the crook in the act.


Deputies said the video showed the crook was Steven Simmons, 49, their PE teacher.

It's news that spread quickly at North Marion High School.

“There's videos going around and forwarded messages of his mug shot, and it's crazy,” said Shelby Revels, a North Marion High student.

Deputies said at first Simmons denied going into the lockers.

However, when confronted with the video, they said he confessed to stealing money from students for years.

This year, it totaled around $400.

I will be the last person to say something nice about a PE teacher, but, damn, WTF?  How sociopathic do you have to be to do something like that?  How stupid do you have to be to risk your job for petty change.

Man is wolf to man.

Albinos in Tanzania are hunted down and killed to harvest their limbs for magic potions.

Officials say ignorance, prejudice, traditional beliefs and poverty are behind the epidemic of albino killings. In a country where per capita income is $442 a year, the limb of a person with albinism can fetch almost anywhere from $500 to $2,000.

It doesn't help matters that many in Tanzania still live according to superstition. For decades, people with albinism have been thought of as ghosts and bad omens. It is also believed that albinos don't die; they just disappear.