Category: Science
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The Weirdest People in the World
I finally got around to reading this very significant and influential paper about a highly exotic group of humans: people from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Below is the abstract:
Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology, cognition, and behavior in the world’s top journals based on samples drawn entirely from highly educated segments of Western societies. Researchers—often implicitly—assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that standard subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species—frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self‐concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The comparative findings suggest that members of Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, or behavior— hence, there are no obvious a priori grounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re‐organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges.
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What is Naturalism?
British philosopher Timothy Williamson on why “naturalism as dogma is one more enemy of the scientific spirit.”
Many contemporary philosophers describe themselves as naturalists. They mean that they believe something like this: there is only the natural world, and the best way to find out about it is by the scientific method. I am sometimes described as a naturalist. Why do I resist the description? Not for any religious scruple: I am an atheist of the most straightforward kind. But accepting the naturalist slogan without looking beneath the slick packaging is an unscientific way to form one’s beliefs about the world, not something naturalists should recommend.What, for a start, is the natural world? If we say it is the world of matter, or the world of atoms, we are left behind by modern physics, which characterizes the world in far more abstract terms. Anyway, the best current scientific theories will probably be superseded by future scientific developments. We might therefore define the natural world as whatever the scientific method eventually discovers. Thus naturalism becomes the belief that there is only whatever the scientific method eventually discovers, and (not surprisingly) the best way to find out about it is by the scientific method. That is no tautology. Why can’t there be things only discoverable by non-scientific means, or not discoverable at all?
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Is Organic Food Better?
In Scientific American, Christie Wilcox exposes a few myths about organic food:
Ten years ago, Certified Organic didn’t exist in the United States. Yet in 2010, a mere eight years after USDA’s regulations officially went into effect, organic foods and beverages made $26.7 billion. In the past year or two, certified organic sales have jumped to about $52 billion worldwide despite the fact that organic foods cost up to three times as much as those produced by conventional methods. More and more, people are shelling out their hard-earned cash for what they believe are the best foods available. Imagine, people say: you can improve your nutrition while helping save the planet from the evils of conventional agriculture – a complete win-win. And who wouldn’t buy organic, when it just sounds so good?Here’s the thing: there are a lot of myths out there about organic foods, and a lot of propaganda supporting methods that are rarely understood. It’s like your mother used to say: just because everyone is jumping off a bridge doesn’t mean you should do it, too. Now, before I get yelled at too much, let me state unequivocally that I’m not saying organic farming is bad – far from it. There are some definite upsides and benefits that come from many organic farming methods. For example, the efforts of organic farmers to move away from monocultures, where crops are farmed in single-species plots, are fantastic; crop rotations and mixed planting are much better for the soil and environment. My goal in this post isn’t to bash organic farms, instead, it’s to bust the worst of the myths that surround them so that everyone can judge organic farming based on facts. In particular, there are four myths thrown around like they’re real that just drive me crazy.
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Why Moral Leaders Are Annoying
Josh Rothman in the Boston Globe (via 3QD):
Moral leadership is challenging for an obvious reason — you have to know what’s right and wrong. But it’s also difficult because, on the whole, people are ambivalent about moral crusaders. Now there’s a name for that strange mixture of admiration, guilt, and defensive dismissiveness you feel when you encounter someone better than you: it’s called “anticipated reproach,” and Benoît Monin, a psychologist at Stanford, has studied it in a number of fascinating experiments. His essential finding: The more we feel as though good people might be judging us, the lower they tend to fall in our regard. As he explains in a recent paper, coauthored with Julia Minson of Wharton, “overtly moral behavior can elicit annoyance and ridicule rather than admiration and respect” when we feel threatened by someone else’s high ethical standards. …Once you know how to spot it, “anticipated reproach” is everywhere, and it bedevils people who want to lead morally. Argue on behalf of an environmental cause, and non-environmentalists, anticipating your moral reproach, will think you’re stuck-up and self-righteous. Often, the anticipated reproach — driven, as it is, by fear — is exaggerated and caricatured: vegetarians, Monin finds, aren’t nearly as judgmental of meat-eaters as meat-eaters think they are. Unfortunately, one or two genuinely judgmental do-gooders can put everyone else on a hair-trigger, twisting discussion about moral issues into a vicious circle, in which both parties anticipate reproaches from one another, and put each other down in advance.
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Rethinking Secularism
Here is an excerpt from an essay by Charles Taylor in a new compilation of essays, Rethinking Secularism. Taylor’s essay is its first chapter.
We live in a world in which ideas, institutions, artistic styles, and formulas for production and living circulate among societies and civilizations that are very different in their historical roots and traditional forms. Parliamentary democracy spread outward from England, among other countries, to India; likewise, the practice of nonviolent civil disobedience spread from its origins in the struggle for Indian independence to many other places, including the United States with Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement, Manila in 1983, and the Velvet and Orange Revolutions of our time.But these ideas and forms of practice don’t just change place as solid blocks; they are modified, reinterpreted, given new meanings, in each transfer. This can lead to tremendous confusion when we try to follow these shifts and understand them. One such confusion comes from taking a word itself too seriously; the name may be the same, but the reality will often be different.
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Fooled by Science
H. Allen Orr is among the most insightful writers today on the often uneasy intersection between science and culture (including religion). In this review of The Social Animal by David Brooks, he shines the light on a few follies all too common among science enthusiasts.
Science has a lot of uses. It can uncover laws of nature, cure disease, inspire awe, make bombs, and help bridges to stand up. Indeed science is so good at what it does that there’s a perpetual temptation to drag it into problems where it may add little or even distract from the real issues. David Brooks appears to be the latest in a long line of writers who, enamored of science, are bound and determined to import the stuff into their thinking.The Social Animal is an attempt to write an accessible treatment of a set of weighty topics, many of which require Brooks to stretch in a distinctly scientific direction. The book, which was excerpted earlier this year in The New Yorker, focuses on big and somewhat diffuse questions: What has science revealed about human nature? What are the sources of character? And why are some people happy and successful while others aren’t? To answer these questions, Brooks surveys a wide range of disciplines, including evolutionary psychology, neurobiology, cognitive science, behavioral economics, education theory, and even the findings of marriage experts.
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From Technologist to Philosopher
Damon Horowitz, former technologist, Artificial Intelligence (AI) researcher, and a graduate of Columbia and MIT, talks about the state of AI, why he left that field, and “Why you should quit your technology job and get a Ph.D. in the humanities.”
Over time, it became increasingly hard to ignore the fact that the artificial intelligence systems I was building were not actually that intelligent. They could perform well on specific tasks; but they were unable to function when anything changed in their environment. I realized that, while I had set out in AI to build a better thinker, all I had really done was to create a bunch of clever toys—toys that were certainly not up to the task of being our intellectual surrogates.And it became clear that the limitations of our AI systems would not be eliminated through incremental improvements. We were not, and are not, on the brink of a breakthrough that could produce systems approaching the level of human intelligence. I wanted to better understand what it was about how we were defining intelligence that was leading us astray: What were we failing to understand about the nature of thought in our attempts to build thinking machines?
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The Perils of Personalization
For over a decade, personalization has been a growing trend on the Internet. It feels nice, this idea of news, information, and services customized for our individual interests. But does it have any downsides? The answer, says Eli Pariser, is a resounding yes. In an interview on Democracy Now, Pariser summarizes his key arguments, also laid out in his book, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You.
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Alva Noë on Consciousness
In Out of Our Heads, Berkeley philosopher Alva Noë, “restates and reexamines the problem of consciousness, and … suggests that rather than being something that happens inside us, consciousness is something we do. Debunking an outmoded philosophy that holds the scientific study of consciousness captive, Out of Our Heads is a fresh attempt at understanding our minds and how we interact with the world around us.” Here is an excerpt from a review:The key assumption behind the science of consciousness is that consciousness is an internal process that occurs in the brain. Noë’s chief goal in the book is to show that this highly questionable, yet unquestioned assumption, has led the consciousness research astray; in brief, the search for consciousness has focused on where it isn’t. Noë opens by challenging this assumption, and offers an alternative picture. Instead of characterizing consciousness as an internal process (like digestion) Noë proposes a picture which takes consciousness to be an activity (like dancing). To try to understand consciousness by just focusing on the brain’s neural activity is tantamount to trying to understand dancing strictly in terms of the muscles. In the latter case, the muscles certainly play a part in the explanation, but they can hardly be the entire story. Analogously for the explanation of consciousness: brain processes are a part of the story, but they are not the whole story, even if they have been given an undue amount of attention.
Today I came across this brilliant talk by Noe in which he explains his key ideas about consciousness to a general audience, and which seem to me exactly right, though I submit that they are not so new as some reviews suggest—perhaps Noe’s particular exposition and focus on the topic create that impression. His line of thinking in fact goes back directly (via philosophers like Hubert Dreyfus) to Heidegger, as well as to Wittgenstein. Enjoy the talk—if you like it, check out this conversation and a talk on Edge.org.
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Rao on Indus Valley Inscriptions
Rajesh Rao on the challenge of deciphering the 4000-year-old inscriptions of the Indus Valley Civilization, including whether they represent a linguistic script or a non-linguistic symbol system. Using computational approaches, he suggests that the inscriptions represent a language, possibly a forerunner to the Dravidian languages (for a refutation, see this; more food for thought in the comments section of this post).
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Man is Not Cat Food
Barbara Ehrenreich reviews a few books on the inner lives of non-human animals and our longstanding relationship with them:
In the last decade, human vanity has taken a major hit. Traits once thought to be uniquely, even definingly human have turned up in the repertoire of animal behaviors: tool use, for example, is widespread among non-human primates, at least if a stick counts as a tool. We share moral qualities, such as a capacity for altruism with dolphins, elephants and others; our ability to undertake cooperative ventures, such as hunting, can also be found among lions, chimpanzees and sharks. Chimps are also capable of “culture,” in the sense of socially transmitted skills and behaviors peculiar to a particular group or band. Creatures as unrelated as sea gulls and bonobos indulge in homosexuality and other nonreproductive sexual activities. There are even animal artists: male bowerbirds, who construct complex, obsessively decorated structures to attract females; dolphins who draw dolphin audiences to their elaborately blown sequences of bubbles. Whales have been known to enact what look, to human divers, very much like rituals of gratitude.The discovery of all these animal talents has contributed to an explosion of human interest in animals — or what, as the human-animal gap continues to narrow, we should properly call “other animals.” We have an animal rights movement that militantly objects to the eating of nonhuman animals as well as their enslavement and captivity. A new field of “animal studies” has sprung up just in the last decade or so, complete with college majors and academic journals. Ever since the philosopher Peter Singer’s groundbreaking 1976 Animal Liberation, one book after another has attempted to explore the inner lives and emotions of nonhuman animals. Bit by bit, we humans have had to cede our time-honored position at the summit of the “great chain of being” and acknowledge that we share the planet — not very equitably or graciously of course — with intelligent, estimable creatures worthy of moral consideration.
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The Epidemic of Mental Illness
Marcia Angell has a great essay on the “epidemic” of mental illness in America. It persuasively argues that there is no real science behind the drugs that attempt to treat psychological conditions by fixing “chemical imbalances” in the brain. Meanwhile, the number of children now diagnosed and treated with psychotropic drugs has increased 35-fold in two decades. What can explain this astonishing development?
It seems that Americans are in the midst of a raging epidemic of mental illness, at least as judged by the increase in the numbers treated for it…. Nowadays treatment by medical doctors nearly always means psychoactive drugs, that is, drugs that affect the mental state. In fact, most psychiatrists treat only with drugs, and refer patients to psychologists or social workers if they believe psychotherapy is also warranted. The shift from “talk therapy” to drugs as the dominant mode of treatment coincides with the emergence over the past four decades of the theory that mental illness is caused primarily by chemical imbalances in the brain that can be corrected by specific drugs. That theory became broadly accepted, by the media and the public as well as by the medical profession, after Prozac came to market in 1987 and was intensively promoted as a corrective for a deficiency of serotonin in the brain. The number of people treated for depression tripled in the following ten years, and about 10 percent of Americans over age six now take antidepressants. The increased use of drugs to treat psychosis is even more dramatic. The new generation of antipsychotics, such as Risperdal, Zyprexa, and Seroquel, has replaced cholesterol-lowering agents as the top-selling class of drugs in the US.What is going on here? Is the prevalence of mental illness really that high and still climbing? Particularly if these disorders are biologically determined and not a result of environmental influences, is it plausible to suppose that such an increase is real? Or are we learning to recognize and diagnose mental disorders that were always there? On the other hand, are we simply expanding the criteria for mental illness so that nearly everyone has one? And what about the drugs that are now the mainstay of treatment? Do they work? If they do, shouldn’t we expect the prevalence of mental illness to be declining, not rising?
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The Leatherbacks of Trinidad
(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily.)
Grande Riviere, a tiny village on the northeastern coast of Trinidad, is one of the few beaches in the world where the leatherback turtle comes to nest. It lies near the end of a serpentine road that hugs the palm-fringed Atlantic coast for miles, then cuts through the lush rainforest of the Northern Range. A river, for which the village is named, and the rainforest—abuzz with the sound of crickets and birds—tumble onto its Caribbean sands, giving the place a remote and sensual air.
Cacao plantations once flourished here but the few hundred people of Grande Riviere now rely on fishing and ecotourism. All three or four of its pricey tourist lodges are near the beach; a village bar, a couple of provision stores and eateries, and a post office are on the main road further behind. The star attraction, and the primary reason for our visit last month, is clearly the leatherback.
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Göbekli Tepe
According to the dominant scholarly view of pre-history today, our human ancestors were once nomadic hunter-gatherers, with many recognizable religio-cultural practices like burying of their dead, wearing bone and stone jewelry, and even creating cave art and figurines. What followed, in more or less this order, was agriculture and domestication of animals, permanent settlements, pottery and metallurgy, the rise of cities, specialized crafts and trade guilds, social hierarchies, organized religion and monumental architecture, and eventually money, writing, and the alphabet.However, at a site in Turkey called Göbekli Tepe, a monumental temple built ~11,600 years ago by hunter-gatherers suggests that at least here, organized religion preceded the rise of agriculture and many other aspects of civilization. In recent years, Göbekli Tepe has cast serious doubt on many established theories about our pre-history.
… the site is vaguely reminiscent of Stonehenge, except that Göbekli Tepe was built much earlier and is made not from roughly hewn blocks but from cleanly carved limestone pillars splashed with bas-reliefs of animals—a cavalcade of gazelles, snakes, foxes, scorpions, and ferocious wild boars. The assemblage was built some 11,600 years ago, seven millennia before the Great Pyramid of Giza. It contains the oldest known temple. Indeed, Göbekli Tepe is the oldest known example of monumental architecture—the first structure human beings put together that was bigger and more complicated than a hut. When these pillars were erected, so far as we know, nothing of comparable scale existed in the world.
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How Language Shapes Thought
“Do the structure of particular languages affect the way we attend to, encode, represent, remember, and reason about the world?” I have featured this phenomenally interesting topic many times on this blog (see Enfield, Boroditsky, Knobe and Boroditsky, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o). The implications of this research are huge. I strongly recommend this brilliant, action-packed lecture by Lera Boroditsky (1:40 hrs), whose major experimental research findings, in her own words, can be summarized as follows:
- People who speak different languages think differently.
- Many aspects of language shape thinking: grammar, lexicon, orthography…
- Language meddles in even low-level perceptual decisions.
- Learning new languages can change the way you think.
- Sometimes, people think differently when speaking different languages.
- In bilinguals, both languages are at least somewhat active.
- Learning a new language can change the way you speak your native language.
- Each language provides its own cognitive toolkit, [and] encapsulates the knowledge and world view developed over thousands of years within a culture.
In short, “languages really shape how we construct reality”. Wow, didn’t Nagarjuna get it right (and so did Wittgenstein, from a different philosophical lineage nearly 1800 years later)!
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Wolpe on Bioengineering
Paul Root Wolpe is professor of bioethics at Emory. “His work focuses on the social, religious, and ideological impact of technology on the human condition. Considered one of the founders of the field of neuroethics, which examines the ethical implications of neuroscience, he also writes about other emerging technologies, such as genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and new reproductive technologies.” In this engaging TED talk, he speaks about the cutting edge in bioengineering experiments and the ethical questions they provoke.
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The Rock Art of Djulirri
“In a remote corner of Arnhem Land in central northern Australia, the Aborigines left paintings chronicling 15,000 years of their history. One site in particular, Djulirri … contains thousands of individual paintings in 20 discernable layers. In this video series [total ~15 mins], Paul S. C. Taçon, an archaeologist, cultural anthropologist, and rock art expert from Griffith University in Queensland, takes ARCHAEOLOGY on a tour of some of the most interesting and unusual paintings—depicting everything from cruise ships to dugong hunts to arrogant Europeans—from Djulirri’s encyclopedic central panel.” [—Samir S. Patel, senior editor, ARCHAEOLOGY.]
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The Secret Lives of Ants
Ant colonies have long fascinated humans, not the least due to their parallels with human societies: millions of individuals with no central control, spanning many lifetimes and a large territory, yet able to solve complex problems through cooperation and division of labor. How do they do it? I attended a lecture by Deborah Gordon, a biologist at Stanford, on her decades-long research on ants. Later I found out that this TED talk she did on the same topic is remarkably close to the lecture she delivered. Enjoy!
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Is There Such a Thing Called “Religion”?
It frequently amazes me that so many people are able to debate the pros and cons of “religion” without ever defining what they mean by the term. What exactly is this thing called “religion”? Is there a meaningful cluster of concepts that can delineate it, allow us to talk about it as a stable-enough category of human behavior, and study it as a scholarly discipline using the best methods of science and reason? This is not a mere academic question. I, for instance, come from a land with a bewildering array of beliefs and practices that can pass off as “religion”, where there is no need to even believe in God or spirits to be religious. Indeed, what do we talk about when we talk about “religion”?
In this thoughtful essay, anthropologist Pascal Boyer, author of Religion Explained, argues that as an observable phenomenon, “religion, like aether and phlogiston, belongs in the ash-heap of scientific history”. Empirical studies of “religion” eventually boil down to studying “genuine natural kinds, like costly signaling, counter-intuitive concepts, monopolistic specialists guilds, coalitional psychology, imagined agents, etc.” which are “found in many other contexts of human communication, and [are] often not found in “religion””.
I do not know if many scholars of religion still believe in gods or spirits, but I know that a great many of them believe in the existence of religion itself – that is, believe that the term “religion” is a useful category, that there is such a thing as religion out there in the world, that the project of “explaining religion” is a valid scientific project. Naturally, many of the scholars in question will also say that religion is a many splendored thing, that there are vast differences among the varieties of religious belief and behavior. Yet they assume that, underlying the diversity, there is enough of a common set of phenomena that a “theory of religion” is needed if not already available. -
Enfield on How Language Shapes Thought
On the Culture and Cognition blog, Nick Enfield‘s absorbing review of a book by Guy Deutscher: Through the Language Glass – Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages. It also provides a good overview of the work of numerous scholars who have tackled the question of how language shapes thought. Enfield is a professor of Ethnolinguistics and is affiliated with the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.
[The preceding text] suggests a prima facie argument for a form of cultural relativity grounded in differences between languages. Given that concepts provide a basis for categorization and decision-making, and given that different languages supply their speakers with different concepts, then different languages provide their speakers with different bases for decision-making, and, subsequently, different patterns of behaviour. It’s a captivating possibility. We are members of a single species, but could it be that the different linguistic systems we inherit from different cultural histories cause us to think and act in fundamentally different ways? Or that as bilinguals, when we switch languages, we switch cognitive personalities? This is what linguistic relativity suggests….A version of relativity more likely to succeed begins with the observation that we cannot determine facts independently from the measuring instruments that are used. In life, our measuring instruments are our bodies. Why can dogs hear sounds we can’t? Because dogs have different bodies from us. For humans with human ears, those ultrasonic noises may as well not be real (though we are able to infer their existence using other means, from hi tech instruments like spectrograms to low tech measures like naked-eye observations of dogs’ behaviour). The body defines an individual’s horizons, both limiting and licensing our possible perceptions and actions. If you have the body of a bat, a pitch-dark cave will seem like a good place to be. But with the body of an earthworm, you will feel at home in a stretch of turf. If these are not different worlds they are certainly different worldviews.
