Psychologist Paul Bloom has a fantastic article in The Atlantic exploring the fields of neuroscience and social psychology and how the general public tends to draw the wrong conclusions from them. Bloom explains,
Everybody loves nonintuitive findings, so researchers are motivated to explore the strange and nonrational ways in which the mind works. It’s striking to discover that when assigning punishment to criminals, people are influenced by factors they consciously believe to be irrelevant, such as how the attractive criminals are, and the color of their skin. This finding will get published in the top journals, and might make its way into the Science section of The New York Times. But nobody will care if you discover that people’s feelings about punishments are influenced by the severity of the crimes or the criminals’ past record. This is just common sense.
Whether this bias in what people find interesting is reasonable is a topic for another day. What’s important to remember is that some scholars and journalists fall into the trap of thinking that what they see in journals provides a representative picture of how we think and act.
Or, put another way,
Statistically significant…doesn’t mean actually significant. Just because something has an effect in a controlled situation doesn’t mean that it’s important in real life. Your impression of a résumé might be subtly affected by its being presented to you on a heavy clipboard, and this tells us something about how we draw inferences from physical experience when making social evaluations. Very interesting stuff. But this doesn’t imply that your real-world judgments of job candidates have much to do with what you’re holding when you make those judgments. What will probably matter much more are such boringly relevant considerations as the candidate’s experience and qualifications.
Bloom concludes, “Yes, we are physical beings, and yes, we are continually swayed by factors beyond our control. But as Aristotle recognized long ago, what’s so interesting about us is our capacity for reason, which reigns over all. If you miss this, you miss almost everything that matters.”
President Viktor Yanukovych apparently “signed a deal with opposition leaders to dilute his powers, form a caretaker government and hold early elections” according to The Washington Post. I know it is easy to get behind on international news and politics, so the Post had a wonderful piece that answers some of the most basic questions regarding the Ukrainian situation and the protests involved. The protests revolve around Yanukovych’s rejection of greater economic integration with the European Union. But why? As a recent article in The New York Review of Books explains, this integration was
an aspiration that for many Ukrainians means something like the rule of law, the absence of fear, the end of corruption, the social welfare state, and free markets without intimidation from syndicates controlled by the president.
The course of the protest has very much been influenced by the presence of a rival project, based in Moscow, called the Eurasian Union. This is an international commercial and political union that does not yet exist but that is to come into being in January 2015. The Eurasian Union, unlike the European Union, is not based on the principles of the equality and democracy of member states, the rule of law, or human rights.
On the contrary, it is a hierarchical organization, which by its nature seems unlikely to admit any members that are democracies with the rule of law and human rights.
The most interesting bit, however, was the following about the claim that these protestors are Nazis:
Why exactly do people with such views think they can call other people fascists? And why does anyone on the Western left take them seriously? One line of reasoning seems to run like this: the Russians won World War II, and therefore can be trusted to spot Nazis. Much is wrong with this. World War II on the eastern front was fought chiefly in what was then Soviet Ukraine and Soviet Belarus, not in Soviet Russia. Five percent of Russia was occupied by the Germans; all of Ukraine was occupied by the Germans. Apart from the Jews, whose suffering was by far the worst, the main victims of Nazi policies were not Russians but Ukrainians and Belarusians. There was no Russian army fighting in World War II, but rather a Soviet Red Army. Its soldiers were disproportionately Ukrainian, since it took so many losses in Ukraine and recruited from the local population. The army group that liberated Auschwitz was called the First Ukrainian Front.
There is much, much more. With Russia’s recent barring of journalist and former Moscow correspondent David Satter just prior to the Sochi Olympics, it might be worth taking a look at this troubled country and the people who suffer because of it.
Ars Technica has an article with responses from two sides, Cogent Communications vs. Verizon, of an increasingly-relevant corporate backroom debate involving multiple players that has already begun to affect the everyday life of a huge swath of internet subscribers in the US and has ties to the growing debate over net neutrality. The argument breaks down as follows. Let’s use the roads analogy I used in my earlier post about net neutrality and stretch it into absurdity:
Imagine that Verizon owns all the roads from you to halfway to the nearest Netflix distribution center, and another company, Cogent, owns all the roads from that point and the rest of the way to the Netflix distribution center. Verizon and Cogent have an implicit arrangement to allow traffic to pass unmolested at the switch point from one road network to the other. You have an explicit contract with Verizon that every month you can receive unlimited shipments from anywhere in the world but at a maximum of twenty per day, and each time you or anyone else wants a shipment they have to dispatch a messenger on a bicycle, creating a small but steady stream of outflowing traffic.
Netflix is sending at least a million shipments a month to everyone in your neighborhood and surroundings and the number is growing. Eventually, the incoming Verizon road starts to become clogged with shipments, many of them Netflix’s big trucks, and people start to miss their shipments from both Netflix and elsewhere and instead of being able to get twenty shipments per day per their contract with Verizon, they can only get ten or fifteen. Meanwhile, Verizon, instead of using money from their existing business to upgrade their roads to handle a higher volume of traffic, simply allows the road to remain gridlocked unless Cogent or Netflix pays them money to finance the upgrades, and the price they are demanding is many times higher than a typical equivalent construction project requires.
This is essentially what is happening right now. In a sense, Verizon is leveraging their stranglehold on huge parts of the US ISP market to hold both customers and content providers hostage from each other, separating customers from the content they have requested and content providers from their subscribers unless someone ponies up to their satisfaction. Their complaints about traffic disparity aren’t necessarily unjustified, but punishing their customers and reneging on their agreements is wrong. What they’re doing is tantamount to extortion, and it only works because there is no recourse for anyone, and they know it. The problem will only get worse so long as Verizon, Comcast, et al face little or no competition in their markets. Traffic will degrade, it will be discriminated against, and we’ll pay more for it.
This is what happens when we let the government bestow superpowers on rich corporations and not take seriously their mandate to regulate anti-consumer behavior.
I’ve written before about the supposed conflict between religion and science. Spoiler alert: there isn’t one. Reasonable people, whether or not they are scientists and whether or not they are religious, see no particular need for religion and science to be opposed. The impression persists, however, because the vocal minorities on either end of the spectrum find it in their best interest to keep the issue alive and because of occasional surveys that appear, at first glance, to validate the divide.
Elaine Howard Ecklund, a sociologist at Rice University, caused a stir with a survey of 1,700 scientists at Harvard, MIT and other elite colleges. About a third were atheists (as opposed to fewer than one-in-20 ordinary Americans), just under a third were agnostics, and the rest reported varying degrees of belief.
Well, Ecklund is back with a newer and much bigger survey (more than 5x the size of the last one). The results? Quoting from The Economist again:
At the annual meeting of the AAAS in Chicago on February 16th Dr Ecklund unveiled the first results of a still-larger study into science and religion… This new survey sought out “rank-and-file” scientists: researchers in company labs, engineers, dentists and so on. To her surprise, Main Street scientists are only a bit less religious than the average American. Perhaps Ivy League scientists are ultra-secular because they are Ivy League, not because they are scientists?
I didn’t find any comprehensive guide to the results, and early press reports are just starting to come out a few days after the fact, but this article from Science and Religion Today had some initial findings. Among them:
27 percent of Americans feel that science and religion are in conflict—and of this group, 52 percent side with religion.
Nearly 20 percent of Americans perceive religion as hostile to science, while about 22 percent think scientists are hostile toward religion.
It makes me wonder, how much of these three groups (the 27 percent who see science and religion in conflict, the 20 percent who perceive religion as hostile to science, and the 22 percent who think scientists are hostile to religion) is overlap? At a guess, it looks like we really do just have too polar extremes (about 15% to a side) who are busy shouting at each other about some never-ending conflict between science and religion while the rest of us wish they would both just shut up.
The important thing, I think, is to remember that the crazies may have us surrounded, but we’ve got them outnumbered.
The American Enterprise Institute hosted His Holiness the Dalai Lama for an event titled “Happiness, Free Enterprise, and Human Flourishing.” The two panels were “Moral Free Enterprise: Economic Perspectives in Business and Politics” and “Unlocking the Mind and Human Happiness.” The speakers (besides the Dalai Lama) included Arthur C. Brooks (AEI), Jonathan Haidt (New York University), Glenn Hubbard (Columbia University), Daniel S. Loeb (Third Point LLC), Diana Chapman Walsh (MIT), Richard Davidson (University of Wisconsin), Otto Scharmer (MIT), and Arthur Zajonc (Mind & Life Institute). “This is such a wonderful day when a religious leader particularly loved on the left comes to a free market think tank,” said Jonathan Haidt (as quoted in a Yahoo News piece). “It makes me think we can break out of the rut we’ve been in for so many years in our arguments about business and government.”
Controversial sociologist Mark Regnerus had a Slate article a couple years back entitled “Sex Is Cheap,” which argues that the “market price” of sex is currently very low. The Austin Institute for the Study of Family and Culture (where Regnerus is a senior fellow) recently put out a short video called “The Economics of Sex,” which seems to cover a lot of the same material. Check it out below.
The March 2014 issue of First Things features the (free) article “Against Heterosexuality.” In it, author Michael Hannon explains, “Sexual orientation is a conceptual scheme with a history, and a dark one at that. It is a history that began far more recently than most people know, and it is one that will likely end much sooner than most people think. Over the course of several centuries, the West had progressively abandoned Christianity’s marital architecture for human sexuality. Then, about one hundred and fifty years ago, it began to replace that longstanding teleological tradition with a brand new creation: the absolutist but absurd taxonomy of sexual orientations.” Heterosexuality thus became “this fanciful framework’s regulating ideal…On this novel account, same-sex sex acts were wrong not because they spurn the rational-animal purpose of sex—namely the family—but rather because the desire for these actions allegedly arises from a distasteful psychological disorder.”
Hannon provides the history of sexual orientation as a category, beginning in the 19th-century. As classical religious beliefs about sexuality became less dominant, “pseudoscience stepped in and replaced religion as the moral foundation for venereal norms…This perverted psychiatric identity, elevated to the status of a mutant “life form” in order to safeguard polite society against its disgusting depravities, swallowed up the entire character of the afflicted.” In other words, the invention of sexual orientation led to “homosexuals” being seen as a depraved species. “Heterosexual” was constructed to serve as the norm in the increasingly secular society.
While Hannon’s language may sometimes be inflammatory, the history and implications are both interesting and important:
First of all, within orientation essentialism, the distinction between heterosexuality and homosexuality is a construct that is dishonest about its identity as a construct. These classifications masquerade as natural categories, applicable to all people in all times and places according to the typical objects of their sexual desires (albeit with perhaps a few more options on offer for the more politically correct categorizers). Claiming to be not simply an accidental nineteenth-century invention but a timeless truth about human sexual nature, this framework puts on airs, deceiving those who adopt its labels into believing that such distinctions are worth far more than they really are.
How much damage has this binary social construct caused?:
Young people, for instance, now regularly find themselves agonizing over their sexual identity, navel-gazing in an attempt to discern their place in this allegedly natural Venn diagram of orientations. Such obsessions generate far more heat than light, and focus already sexually excited adolescents on discerning extraneous dimensions of their own sexual makeup. This self-searching becomes even more needlessly distressing for those who discern in themselves a “homosexual orientation,” as they adopt an identity distinguished essentially by a set of sexual desires that cannot morally be fulfilled.
And what does this mean for those who identify as “heterosexuals”?:
And yet, when it comes to the gravest evil effected by the sexual-orientation binary, homosexuality is not the culprit. Heterosexuality is—not, of course, as though we can have one without the other. The most pernicious aspect of the orientation-identity system is that it tends to exempt heterosexuals from moral evaluation. If homosexuality binds us to sin, heterosexuality blinds us to sin.
Check it out and give it some thought. We could all possibly benefit from a fresh perspective.
The crazy-sounding name actually comes from a Bible story found in Numbers 27.
For someone who writes about Mormonism an awful lot (and blogs at Mormon blog Times And Seasons), I’m actually surprisingly new to the “bloggernaccle“.[ref]Side not: it tickles me to no end that this entry actually exists in Wikipedia, even if it is technically for “Mormon blogosphere.”[/ref] Which means I’m not really very familiar with a lot of the big-name blogs, even if I’ve heard of them. Like Zelophehad’s Daughters. (Easier to remember than to spell!) I take it that my bloviating on issues related to gender roles and overall skepticism of feminism and all things socially left might get me into some pretty hot water over there, but that’s just a guess. I don’t actually know.
In any case, I happened upon this piece by Eve over there called Don’t Be My Ally, and I really liked it.
Her main point, which is that the relationship of “ally” is incredibly dehumanizing for ally and allied alike, is profound. To my mind, it’s basically a politer version of the “identity politics” criticism from the right-wing of American politics: reducing people to their categories is an awful thing to do to someone. She’s also unafraid to point out what I consider to be far and away the worst trait of Mormon feminism:
In recent years I’ve been unsettled to see how often Mormon feminism roots itself more deeply in in various secular feminisms than it does in Mormonism or in Christianity.
My own relationship with the term “feminism” is… complex. I go back and forth. But if Mormon feminism were really and truly distinct from secular feminism (i.e. the political dogma of the American left), I would be very excited and much more interested in engage and self-identifying as feminist. (I am concerned about women’s issues; I’m just leery of the baggage that comes with the word “feminism.”)
Lastly, she manages to get in some good digs at male allies that (1) I firmly believe need to be said and (2) made me chuckle:
Inevitably some allies tote their ally(ship? hood?) to enhance their own status and credibility, and some usurp the voices of those they ostensibly champion.
Yup. I like to refer to this as “White Knight Chauvinism,” although another variety (which I have yet to name) is basically a slightly better-disguised of nice-guy whining. You know, when “nice-guys” (which usually, at best, means “socially impotent”) complain that girls always date jerks as though they could sort of browbeat attractive ladies into dating them. It’s weird and creepy. And, as a guy, I can’t help but notice that more or less the same motive seems to operate for some allies who view their support as a way to ingratiate themselves with the ladies.
On top of being an article I really liked, it just made me happy to see such common sense coming from an outlet that I would be predisposed to view with skepticism. It’s always good to be reminded of the possible common ground between reasonable people no matter what their political home turf may be.
There was an initial wave of angry condemnation when The Triple Package was first released, and my problem with that reactionary wave was just that: It was reactionary. It’s been over a month since those first-pass criticisms were unleashed, and over at Slate Daria Roithmayr has had time to formulate a more nuanced and sophisticated response. Or, as turns out to be the case, not. Instead, her response shows the twin perils of (A) putting politics ahead of reality and (B) espousing historical theories without consulting Wikipedia first[ref]I’m not saying Wikipedia is the final word on research, but if you don’t at least start there…[/ref].
According to Roithmayr, the real reason that different cultural groups perform differently is that they start out with unequal resources. Otherwise: we are all exactly the same. The problem is that Roithmayr pretends it’s a conclusion of her research when quite obviously it is pure political dogma. She explains the success of each of the seven cultural groups identified by Chua in their turn. I’m not a historian, so I’m not qualified to analyze all of them, but in the case of her hypothesis about what makes Mormons successful, her explanation is so bad that you don’t have to be. Even the most superficial familiarity with our history[ref]Again: Wikipedia[/ref] shows that she has no idea what she’s writing about. Consider:
It’s not just that Mormons have developed a “pioneer spirit” or that they believe that they can receive divine revelations, as Triple Package would have us believe. It’s more that the first Mormons started with enough money to buy a great deal of land in Missouri and Illinois. They then migrated to Utah, where Brigham Young and his followers essentially stole land from the Shoshone and Ute tribes, refusing to pay what the tribes demanded, and petitioning for the government to remove them. Beyond thousands of acres of free land, early political control over Utah was helpful.
So here’s the true story of Mormonism: a bunch of really wealthy families just decided to buy a bunch of land in New York, Ohio, Missouri, Illinois, and so forth. Why did they keep moving around and buying new land? Oh, you know, just because. They were fickle like that. Then they thought it would be fun to move to Utah because, you know, the land by the Great Salt Lake is legendary for being so fertile. That’s what everyone says when they drive through Utah, right?
Look how green everything is!
In case you can’t detect all the sarcasm, the reality is that the Mormons were poor and marginalized from the start and that they moved from one state to the other at the point of a gun, suffering murders, rapes, and theft along the way. When they managed to build the city of Nauvoo up to one of the largest American cities at the time, well, that was about the time Joseph Smith was murdered and they were surrounded by thousands of armed men with, you know, cannons and then forced out of their homes without compensation in the middle of winter.[ref]They were able to walk across the Mississippi on their way out.[/ref] The land they stole in Utah was only marginally fit for agriculture and the reason they were there in the first place was simply to get away from constant oppression, but that ended up not working so well when the United States sent the largest federal expeditionary force of its history (to that point) to subjugate those wacky religious nuts, resulting in the low-grade Utah War of 1857[ref]Not to be confused with the Mormon War of 1838 in Missouri or the Mormon War of 1844-1848 in Illinois. In case it isn’t clear: Mormons lost those wars. Or, as Roithmayr puts, it, we “migrated”.[/ref]
Since Roithmayr says “For many groups, like Cubans and Mormons, the early wave was a select group endowed with some significant material or nonmaterial resources—wealth, education, or maybe a government resettlement package,” and since Mormons were by and large quite poor[ref]Definitely after all the pillaging and running for their lives if not before.[/ref] the only reasonable conclusion is that she can’t tell the difference between a resettlement package and an armed invasion.
The Haun’s Mill Massacre where a mob of over 200 killed about 20 Mormon men and boys and were never prosecuted. Or, as Roithmayr describes it, the “Haun’s Mill Polite Conversation.”
She mentions Mormons one more time, writing:
The most recent (newly converted) Mormons hail from Africa and Latin America, and many of them have migrated to the U.S. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has also begun outreach to U.S.-born blacks (African-Americans have only been allowed in the Mormon church priesthood since 1978). Black Mormon trajectories look nothing like the white Mormons at the center of The Triple Package’s argument.
Keen observers might point out the obvious fact that “recent” converts are probably not the best indication of the long-run effects of a culture.
Again: I’m still skeptical of Chua’s points. I haven’t read the book and I don’t subscribe to the thesis. I’m also not nearly as familiar with the history of the other cultures described. I do know that in general there’s a serious selection problem when you’re comparing immigrants (often those with the wealth and education to be mobile) with their home population (sometimes slanted towards those unable to get away). I think Roithmayr could probably have made a serious, convincing counter-argument if she’d been willing to put history ahead of ideological wish-fulfillment. As it stands, she’s making the case against Triple Package look worse, and she’s not doing much for the either the credibility of either Slate or the discipline of critical race theory.
The cover story of the 2014 Jan/Feb issue of Christianity Today traces the work of political scientist Robert Woodberry and his earth-shattering article “The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy.” While a graduate student, Woodberry took interest in a surprising link between democracy and Protestantism. While various case studies seemed to support the link, it wasn’t until Woodberry “created a statistical model that could test the connection between missionary work and the health of nations. He and a few research assistants spent two years coding data and refining their methods. They hoped to compute the lasting effect of missionaries, on average, worldwide.” The results were shocking. “It was like an atomic bomb,” said Woodberry. “The impact of missions on global democracy was huge. I kept adding variables to the model—factors that people had been studying and writing about for the past 40 years—and they all got wiped out. It was amazing. I knew, then, I was on to something really important.” Woodberry’s discovery revealed a surprising truth: “Missionaries weren’t just part of the picture. They were central to it.” But not every kind of missionary: “The positive effect of missionaries on democracy applies only to “conversionary Protestants.” Protestant clergy financed by the state, as well as Catholic missionaries prior to the 1960s, had no comparable effect in the areas where they worked. Independence from state control made a big difference.” It turns out that “Protestant missionaries not funded by the state were regularly very critical of colonialism.” And “so far, over a dozen studies have confirmed Woodberry’s findings. The growing body of research is beginning to change the way scholars, aid workers, and economists think about democracy and development.”
