Social science – A millennial's musings

Don’t ask why?…

A reader kindly sent me this article.

I don’t agree with its analysis, but it has some interesting points about using what vs why can have a significantly different effect.

During my stint in psychiatry, I learnt perhaps the most helpful question: what makes you say that? Notably, not a why question even though it asks about the same thing.

I also remember a brilliant psychiatrist giving a patient advice. The patient had a personality disorder and started reading about them to understand why she has it. He told her that at that point reading that could make it worse – and that interventions such as mindfulness and therapy were superior.

As for my disagreement. The article suggests introspective people are unhappy. It assumes and, with a very simple experiment, shows that asking why causes people to be sad. I think that introspective people aren’t sad because they are introspective, but sad and poorly self-aware people turn to introspection. And Negative Capability is still a thing.

The unofficially religious

I’ve recently attended a Catholic funeral. At one stage the priest said that the deceased wasn’t really dead. That was the point at which my suspension of disbelief painfully broke down.

I have respect for both religious people and atheists. The likes of Ricky Gervais with their cutting comments aimed at the religious folk are really cutting at people’s refusal to think critically, not their faith.

Your God is the best God.
In fact, he’s the only God.
All other Gods are ridiculous, made up rubbish.
Not yours though. Yours is real.

— Ricky Gervais (@rickygervais) September 11, 2012

If it were any other way, there would be no such thing as fanatical atheists. Or reasonable religious people. Most of all I think that people who claim that they are atheist do have a religion, they just don’t call it a religion.

Some have turned to science. Science has the answers, they say. Not really. Science is all about questions. “But science has proven…” Science has never proven anything. It has only ever said that within this narrow range of values and under these ten unrealistic assumptions, a relationship between two variables doesn’t break down. That’s science.

And don’t get me started on social science. Anyone who has handled data and statistical packages will know how to ask the right questions to get the right answers. That too is called science these days.

Then there is yoga, fitness, self-help, vitamins and mindfulness and all that other stuff that is basically a pagan pantheon in the context of weakened organised religion. Its importance ebbs and flows and whenever it’s not doing well, people find new unofficial deities. These things answer the same need that religion does: what to do when you don’t know what to do.

I’ve yet to meet a person who has the tolerance of uncertainty strong enough to not have a religion, whether it is officially called one or not.

David Foster Wallace comes to mind yet again:

“Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.”

P.S. I am aware that many of my readers aren’t Irish, so for anyone who has even a remote interest in Ireland/ rural life/ religion/ comedy, you need to watch a few Father Ted episodes. Daily Motion seems to have all of them.

Pareto principle as a consequence of positive feedback loops

“Alexander to Aristotle greeting. You have not done well to publish your books of oral doctrine; for what is there now that we excel others in, if those things which we have been particularly instructed in be laid open to all? For my part, I assure you, I had rather excel others in the knowledge of what is excellent, than in the extent of my power and dominion. Farewell.”

And Aristotle, soothing this passion for preeminence, speaks, in his excuse for himself, of these doctrines, as in fact both published and not published: as indeed, to say the truth, his books on metaphysics are written in a style which makes them useless for ordinary teaching, and instructive only, in the way of memoranda, for those who have been already conversant in that sort of learning.

– The Life of Alexander the Great By Plutarch

Besides the fact that Alexander was a paranoid megalomaniac, this occurred to me:

Learning begets more learning.

As well as:

Fitness begets more fitness.
Money begets more money.
Friendship begets more friendship.
Even children – traditionally people tended to either have none at all or a good few.

There is positive feedback (all up to a point of course and then returns diminish).

Why are societal things positive feedback loops whereas biological things are generally negative feedback loops? There are exceptions of course, notably the use it or lose it principle in anything neurological/behavioural as well as in exceptional situations like labour.

Can we think of any examples where there is a negative feedback loop in a sociological context?

It doesn’t have to be limited to humans by the way.

I can think of the following examples of negative feedback in society:

Election fatigue or the general situation of chasing after someone who isn’t interested be it in marketing or in interpersonal situations (for clarity, we can phrase it as the more attention they receive, the less attention they return).
Obviously, there are lots of theories about how markets self-regulate, but they are filled with problems.
Prices vs demand and prices vs supply is another tempting one. However, here the relationship is more genuinely between supply and demand rather than between either of those and price – and that’s not a negative loop.

And if there aren’t very many examples of negative feedback, this explains that so many things in society follow the 80/20 rule rather than the normal distribution.

In fact, you can extrapolate the 80/20 rule. Then you get:

64% of outcomes come from 4% of causes,

51.2% of outcomes come from 0.8% of causes.

I have about 20 GB worth of songs on my phone and I listen to the same 10 tracks. In other words, because there is no negative feedback (up to a pretty high threshold), these 10 songs monopolise my listening “choices”. I have a whole wardrobe of stuff but I wear the same things all the time. Same with pots and pans. Apps on my phone.

Income inequality doesn’t quite as devilish when you think about it this way.

My thinking is that if we find more examples of macro scale negative feedback loops, we may be able to understand whether there is another way.

Or are we just always going to be in a use it or lose it situation? Are we just one giant self-similar network of walking talking neurons?

By Bewareircd – Own work, Public Domain, Link

Love of labour: a bad romance with the illusion of security

The more things change, the more they stay the same. But this time it is really different:

What an uncomfortable graph. Sometimes when things scale, they are just a bigger version of the small thing. However, at times, they also develop new properties. A population of cells becomes an organ – and has new properties. A large teddy bear can be used as a pillow, while a small one cannot.

What can a large human population do that a small one couldn’t? What does it mean for the individual?

The above graph of world population vs time scares me because we’re going into the unknown. In a sense, each one of us is less important. It takes much more to compete. If you are “one in a thousand”, in 1800 that would have got you places. Today, not so much.

What does that mean for individuals? Can such a demand for food, water and energy be met, never mind sustainably? How do we find a place in such a competitive imminently expanding world? Albeit we’re no longer accelerating the growth, the sheer numbers are a little bit unnerving.

Not to fall into conspiracy theories or 1984/Brave New World despair, but for the sake of an analogy, consider cows, or minks, or any other farmed animal. I’ve always felt that breeding animals to kill them is a kind of (?necessary) evil, but it is somehow made better by the fact that they are bred. They don’t have to worry about food and get to have lots of babies. In a roundabout way, they have won in the Darwinian casino.

But then I wondered: if cows and minks are bred for their meat and their fur, are we kind of… bred for economic growth?

Each one of us has to comply with the assertion that success comes from having lots and lots of things in order for this to be perpetuated. Few people look for fame and fortune to exercise some kind of power (if you prefer “change the world”) – and to be fair I have respect for such people.

employment in the context of a growing population — “Idle as trout in light”

I get the sense though that to most people, fame and fortune is an end in itself. Furthermore, I suspect it is a product of our culture rather than just hedonism. For a proper first principles hedonist, it would never make sense to work so hard to have things they will never get time to enjoy.

I’ve always found it fascinating that the very people I know from school that were so rebellious that they just wouldn’t comply with the simplest of instruction become exemplars of compliance and obedience when there is a paycheck involved.

It’s someone’s birthday?

“I’ve work tomorrow.”

Can’t stand the sight of the boss?

“I have to go to work.”

Wife giving birth?

“I better get to work, so.”

It seems that no amount of personal problems can stand in the way of being at work. And when it does happen, the rest of the working tribe treats it as some kind of weakness and/or deceit to get out of doing work.

Buckminster Fuller comes to mind:

“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”

“Inspectors of inspectors”… The irony. A friend of mine, a former employee of a multinational once pointed out: we have trackers for trackers. Entire days are spent changing amber to green and red to amber.

Some also theorise that very few jobs require 9-5 x 5 days a week. A lot of time is spent being idle. Why then do the employers insist of you being there? I would argue it isn’t the employer: it’s the culture. Some people won’t take their job seriously if they are given the autonomy to manage their own time (though I always bet on the opposite when looking for people in my own ventures).

If you think about it, it’s kind of disrespectful to insist that someone is there just so that their boss has the option of coopting them into some work engagement. Another interesting (?side) effect is that predictably a person has no strength to create anything outside of work. An eight hour day of being surveyed and judged, a draining commute, an uncomfortable suit and a toilet seat you cannot sit on… As Taleb puts it:

“In short, every organization wants a certain number of people associated with it to be deprived of a certain share of their freedom. How do you own these people? First, by conditioning and psychological manipulation; second by tweaking them to have some skin in the game, forcing them to have something significant to lose if they were to disobey authority –something hard to do with gyrovague beggars who flouted they scorn of material possessions.”

I wonder if it is becoming harder, though, to be a gyrating roaming monk (these days they have a Mac and are called digital nomads) given that the population is growing. Is there room to be an individual? Nietzsche has his concerns:

“Those who commend work. – In the glorification of ‘work’, in the unwearied talk of the ‘blessing of work’, I see the same covert idea as in the praise of useful impersonal actions: that of fear of everything individual. Fundamentally, one now feels at the sight of work – one always means by work that hard industriousness from early till late – that such work is the best policeman, that it keeps everyone in bounds and can mightily hinder the development of reason, covetousness, desire for independence. For it uses up an extraordinary amount of nervous energy, which is thus denied to reflection, brooding, dreaming, worrying, loving, hating; it sets a small goal always in sight and guarantees easy and regular satisfactions. Thus a society in which there is continual hard work will have more security: and security is now worshipped as the supreme divinity. – And now! Horror! Precisely the ‘worker’ has become dangerous! The place is swarming with ‘dangerous individuals’! And behind them the danger of dangers – the individual!”

It’s pretty clear that Nietzsche’s talking about institutional employment.

This essay of mine isn’t about robbing the rich or some other way of getting out of work. It’s not promoting Zuckerberg’s universal basic income. It’s about the fact that work is indeed glorified. Much of what is called work is being trapped in purposelessness.

And it’s not even work that is glorified: nobody cares about the labour of a painter who hasn’t (yet) made their hobby into a job or a blogger, or whoever. It is the stamp of approval from some institution that people really respect. Perhaps, it is just easier to relate to.

I suppose, being Russian, I can’t help but be reminded of how easily institutions fail. Countless Russian firms have risen to unbelievable heights and quickly died in the last 20 years. Even the USSR itself: seeing such a behemoth collapse shatters one’s faith in institutions.

And it wasn’t even that weak, with real industry and gargantuan natural resources. In a completely different context, where I am now – Ireland – also has become a State and gone through a couple of different names in the XX century. That empire disappeared too.

Nietzsche above and Taleb (in multiple works) have spoken about this security that people look for. The security that people trade a portion of their freedom for. Clearly though, it is an illusion. Remember 2008?

nietzsche fuller taleb on work and employment — The chap in the pink shirt knows how to party like it’s 1728

Meanwhile, the seaside restaurant beside me boasts having been established in 1728. Chin chin, Mr Taleb, and chin chin to everyone being creative and working hard to not lose your individuality among the impending billions.

How our shrinking brains are turning us into Homo Domesticus

This is the first contribution, I hope of many, by T.J. His background is as varied as entrepreneurship, medicine, game development and politics.

I must admit, at the outset, that when I first vocalised the thoughts herein, I did it as a form of humour and out of frustration regarding my fellow man. However, the more I thought about it, the more I reckon there might be some validity in it. This is not necessarily in the sense that a new human subspecies has actually developed, but that process may have indeed started.

You probably learned in school that a species is a group in which two individuals can reproduce. If they can’t, they aren’t the same species. Things are a bit more complex than that, and there are many arguments regarding that definition. For example, what if A and C can’t mate, but B can mate with both?

A subspecies is even harder to define. As a rule of thumb, if it looks a lot different but can theoretically breed, its a subspecies*. This generally involves some sort of “block” on breeding: how else would the populations look different? In fact, a definition regarding the propensity to breed can also be used. A great example is the tiger. In that case, the different subspecies are separated geographically so mating is difficult (tigers don’t do long distance relationships). Physical differences can reinforce the problem in a feedback loop. A female Chihuahua can conceive offspring with an Irish Wolfhound, but I’m not too sure how well things will workout in the long run (Wolfhounds always leave the seat up, you see). Eventually, things get so bad, they just become two different species, and they don’t even require lawyers to do so. For our purposes we will be super pragmatic: if Wikipedia says it’s a subspecies, it is.

“But T.J., Wikipedia doesn’t say there is a new human subspecies!” I hear you say. Well yes, I’m getting to that. First, let’s discuss a subspecies that is on Wikipedia, Canis Familiaris, but you might know him as Spot, or Fido, or something – the domestic dog. Of course, our oldest friend is also basically a wolf and can successfully breed with one. (In fact, different wolf species can even breed occasionally, as I said, it’s complicated). The point is, we consider the domestic dog a separate subspecies. The fact that we don’t consider each breed of dog a subspecies is basically down to taxonomical snobbery and a fear of having to come up with a bunch of Latin names.

Why is the dog important here? Well one way to make a new subspecies is domestication. This is the manner in which I think we have formed a new subspecies of human. Let’s call him Homo Domesticus.

In 1959, a Soviet scientist called Dmitri Belyaev conducted an experiment.

He hypothesised that domestication was the result of selecting for “tameability”, not other traits like fertility or strength.

Had the Soviets not starved all the farmers in the country to death beforehand, they could have just asked them about it instead of conducting a 50 year experiment. But then again, that was the result of policy created by Soviet academics, so maybe there was some conflict of interest. Anyway, the experiment involved selectively breeding foxes to domesticate them. Belyaev was right. By the tenth generation of foxes, 18% were so tame that he had to come up with a new category of tameness for them. It is theorised that this is linked to lower adrenaline production by the “domestic” foxes.

What is very interesting is that domestic rats also have smaller adrenal glands than their wild counterparts. I am conflating an atrophied adrenal gland with lesser adrenal production, but it is not an unsound assumption. They also have smaller brains, hearts and other organs. So could it be that domestication is simply the result of lesser adrenal production? Let’s park this idea for a minute and move on to a more popular species (for reasons I will never know).

Humans have had a decreasing brain size for the last 28,000 years, Wikipedia reliably informs me. Upon discovering this, I immediately thought, could we be domesticating ourselves?! It turns out I’m not the first to think this. A study by Bailey and Geary used population density as a proxy for advanced societies and found that there was a correlation between this and brain size reduction in history. The conclusion was that “life got easier”, basically.

Since individuals had more security from those around them, they could scrape by with less intelligence.

Now I am tempted to leave things here with a note that a reliance on our fellow man will therefore lead to humans becoming stupid – brain size does map to intelligence on a large scale such as human evolution, but that would be intellectually dishonest. There is a large body of academics that think that the reliance on others may have nothing to do with intelligence. It could be down to heat loss, or that our brains became more efficient at doing what they do and needed less volume. I am tempted to discuss why I think those ideas have merit but are untrue, but do not have the space here. Furthermore, I want to keep this light and cutting rather than scientific and thorough (too late, say you).

Personally, I have a much darker theory. Brain size did correlate to intelligence and to societal complexity. But not because we are all happy bunnies living in wonderland. Let me take the case of one our “best” moments as a species: agriculture!

Agriculture is great, apparently. Yet human health suffered immensely as a result. The fossil record shows (is it a fossil record if the bones have not petrified?) that human height dropped four inches and there is a myriad of pathologies that developed upon the adoption of agriculture. This later changed but only after about 8,000 years. So why did we do it? Or a better question would be, why did we keep doing it? Perhaps it was because societal elites were able to domesticate others. Whether they are slaves or peasants, the result is the same.

One group forces the other to farm, and if they don’t, they are killed. Almost as if they are selecting for tameness…

Of course, that wasn’t 28,000 years ago. It isn’t hard to imagine the same process earlier in history? In fact, for the farming peasants to be tame enough to stay, they would likely have already been tamed in prior generations. Remember the foxes? 18% in only ten generations. I should also have mentioned that domestic rats do not run away after losing a fight like wild rats, they stay and lie submissively. By the twentieth generation, 35% of foxes were of the super tame variety. How many human generations in 28,000 years? About 1,000, actually.

But hold on! How is that a subspecies? Well, for most of human history there has been a tendency to mate with those of a similar social standing. This functions as a block to mating and could result in certain traits becoming concentrated, forming two subspecies. Maybe it’s not so far fetched.

So who are they then? In areas where there are wolves and dogs, wolf-dog hybrid occur. They might be a different subspecies, but that doesn’t mean that the big bad wolves aren’t utterly dashing to the refined domesticated ladies. Sort of like a canid James Dean, I guess. Furthermore, in humans, we know that while there was a tendency to mate in a certain social circles historically, it was by no means as rigid as portrayed today. William the Conqueror is a good case in point. (His mother was the daughter of a tanner.) Therefore, the process of domestication and subspeciation is likely incomplete in us. We all probably have both traits, to varying degrees. There are the wild men and the servile.

The significance of all this is that in the last few decades publicly traded corporations and the state encroached more into our everyday lives, filling the role of our trainers and being run by the most domesticated, institutionalised humans of all.

Due to the above, we risk completing the process of domestication. Don’t be under the illusion that we have more personal freedoms than in yesteryear, but that’s an argument for another day.

* To qualify as breeding in this context, the offspring must be “viable”, that is, fertile.