@Jason_Silva argues that to understand is to perceive patterns. He has produced a list of people he calls pattern seekers - those who he thinks have made a profound impact on the world by extracting meaning from chaos, and discovering what he calls metapatterns.
@milouness asks why do these lists always have so few women. One possible answer to Carmen's question can be determined by looking at the people Jason includes in his list. For example, he credits Watson and Crick for a pattern that was actually discovered by Rosalind Franklin. This is a common error whose explanation is complex - one reason Franklin doesn't receive the popular credit is that she was already dead (of ovarian cancer, as it happens) when Watson, Crick and Wilkins received the Nobel Prize for their work together. Another reason was that she was more cautious than her male colleagues about publishing speculative models without further empirical evidence. This omission suggests that Jason is unaware of the detail from which his claimed pattern emerges.
Jason's list seems to have been hastily assembled from the obvious intellectual celebrities of the twentieth century, and therefore merely reinforces established celebrity rather than identifying underrated genius. I'm sorry, but I don't see such lists as contributing very much to our understanding of anything. Is a list just a journalistic meme for having nothing much to say?
See also Zeitgeist magazine reveals the top lists of 2011 (Newsbiscuit).
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
The Ecosystem Myth
#AWOBMOLG #systemsthinking Adam Curtis outlined the thesis of his second programme in an Observer article yesterday How the 'ecosystem' myth has been used for sinister means (Observer 29 May 2011).
Curtis makes an association between ecology and empire, which was first mooted by the Norwegian historian of science Peder Anker in a book called Imperial Ecology (Harvard University Press 2001).
The story starts with the origin of the words "ecosystem" and "holistic", which were coined by Arthur Tansley and Jan Christiaan Smuts respectively. Tansley was a Fabian socialist, while Smuts was a Field Marshall during the First World War, and later became the Prime Minister of South Africa. These two men, from opposite ends of the political spectrum, are identified as co-founders of the idea of self-regulating systems.
But in 1935, Tansley wrote an academic paper called "The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts and Terms", attacking the presumption of an ecology as a self-regulating closed system possessing homeostasis. He alludes in the paper to the notion that the ideal society can be based on ecological theory, and suggests that Smuts and his followers are motivated not by science but by an attachment to a view of society involving "less exalted wholes". This may have been a coded reference to the racial doctrines that dominated the British Empire, and were later to be institutionalized as Apartheid (although Smuts's own position on apartheid was complicated, as his Wikipedia entry indicates).
Anker sees the rapid expansion of the science of ecology within the British Empire as evidence that ecology was "objectively" in the service of the imperial powers, thus lumping Smuts and Tansley together notwithstanding the strong disagreements between them. Curtis performs a similar rhetorical trick when he talks about the adoption by left-wing communes of an idea of self-regulating systems.
As an extreme example of faith in self-organizing systems, Curtis cites an interview with Lucy Annson of UK Uncut, conducted by the BBC Newsnight journalist Emily Maitlis. Maitlis invited Annson to condemn the more extreme incidents that had occurred during the UK Uncut protest, and Annson was determined to evade any notion of collective responsibility.
Both Smuts and Tansley would have regarded Annson's statement as absurd, and certainly not supported by any reasonable notion of ecosystem or holism. Given that the purpose of the protest is largely defined in terms of its journalistic coverage, we can surely regard the protest and the coverage as a connected system, involving Maitlis as well as Annson. That's the same holistic sense of the word "involved" as when Donne says "any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind".
Annson's denial of collective responsibility is also not a reflection of the actual behaviour of many communes, which as Curtis points out can sometimes be just as dysfunctional and oppressive as hierarchical organizations, if not worse. So although Curtis can mock the moral confusion displayed by Ms Annson, does this really illustrate a more general phenomenon?
I'll probably blog some more when I've watched the programme. For my review of the first programme, see All Chewed Over By Machines.
Curtis makes an association between ecology and empire, which was first mooted by the Norwegian historian of science Peder Anker in a book called Imperial Ecology (Harvard University Press 2001).
The story starts with the origin of the words "ecosystem" and "holistic", which were coined by Arthur Tansley and Jan Christiaan Smuts respectively. Tansley was a Fabian socialist, while Smuts was a Field Marshall during the First World War, and later became the Prime Minister of South Africa. These two men, from opposite ends of the political spectrum, are identified as co-founders of the idea of self-regulating systems.
But in 1935, Tansley wrote an academic paper called "The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts and Terms", attacking the presumption of an ecology as a self-regulating closed system possessing homeostasis. He alludes in the paper to the notion that the ideal society can be based on ecological theory, and suggests that Smuts and his followers are motivated not by science but by an attachment to a view of society involving "less exalted wholes". This may have been a coded reference to the racial doctrines that dominated the British Empire, and were later to be institutionalized as Apartheid (although Smuts's own position on apartheid was complicated, as his Wikipedia entry indicates).
Anker sees the rapid expansion of the science of ecology within the British Empire as evidence that ecology was "objectively" in the service of the imperial powers, thus lumping Smuts and Tansley together notwithstanding the strong disagreements between them. Curtis performs a similar rhetorical trick when he talks about the adoption by left-wing communes of an idea of self-regulating systems.
"Thousands of young Americans who were disenchanted with politics went off instead to set up their own experimental communities – the commune movement. And they turned to Arthur Tansley's idea of the ecosystem as a model for how to create a human system of order within the communes."Tansley may have coined the word "ecosystem", but he explicitly repudiated the idea of using ecological thinking to design human society. So in what sense is it fair to describe this as Arthur Tansley's idea?
"Although Tansley and Smuts and their argument about power would be forgotten, hybrid combinations of their ideas were going to re-emerge later in the century."
As an extreme example of faith in self-organizing systems, Curtis cites an interview with Lucy Annson of UK Uncut, conducted by the BBC Newsnight journalist Emily Maitlis. Maitlis invited Annson to condemn the more extreme incidents that had occurred during the UK Uncut protest, and Annson was determined to evade any notion of collective responsibility.
Lucy Annson insisted again and again to Emily Maitlis that she was only a spokesperson for herself, and under the rules of the network no one could stand back and judge the system. Emily said: "You're not a completely peaceful organisation." Lucy came back with the killer line: "I don't think anyone can make an assessment of that, other than the people involved in the actions themselves."
Both Smuts and Tansley would have regarded Annson's statement as absurd, and certainly not supported by any reasonable notion of ecosystem or holism. Given that the purpose of the protest is largely defined in terms of its journalistic coverage, we can surely regard the protest and the coverage as a connected system, involving Maitlis as well as Annson. That's the same holistic sense of the word "involved" as when Donne says "any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind".
Annson's denial of collective responsibility is also not a reflection of the actual behaviour of many communes, which as Curtis points out can sometimes be just as dysfunctional and oppressive as hierarchical organizations, if not worse. So although Curtis can mock the moral confusion displayed by Ms Annson, does this really illustrate a more general phenomenon?
I'll probably blog some more when I've watched the programme. For my review of the first programme, see All Chewed Over By Machines.
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Why Do Sportsman Believe?
Reading an article possibly by Matthew Syed (Religion and sport: Do prayers help players? BBC News Magazine 28 May 2011). There is some evidence that religious belief boosts sporting performance, and there are many examples of strong religious faith at the top level of sport,
Atheists observe that the content of the religion doesn't seem to make much difference, and that the visible superstitions and obsessions of some players (former Kent and England wicket-keeper Alan Knott comes to my mind) appears to perform the same purpose.
The article notes that Jonathan Edwards, the triple jumper, abandoned his strong religious faith when he stopped competing. Obviously we can't generalize from one case, but it is a hint that his faith may have had no other purpose in his life.
Atheists observe that the content of the religion doesn't seem to make much difference, and that the visible superstitions and obsessions of some players (former Kent and England wicket-keeper Alan Knott comes to my mind) appears to perform the same purpose.
The article notes that Jonathan Edwards, the triple jumper, abandoned his strong religious faith when he stopped competing. Obviously we can't generalize from one case, but it is a hint that his faith may have had no other purpose in his life.
Thursday, May 26, 2011
All Chewed Over By Machines
#AWOBMOLG Have been watching the first part of the latest Adam Curtis documentary "All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace". @socialtechno reckons "It's like a man writing a love letter to someone he doesn't love."
The documentary is named after a rather soppy 1950 poem by Richard Brautigan, and opens with Ayn Rand. Curtis would like us to believe that everyone in Silicon Valley was inspired and influenced by Ayn Rand (based on the fact that a few people named their children and companies after herself or her works) and he uses the life and works of Ayn Rand to frame a powerful but logically flawed dialectic about technological capitalism.
This conflates a diverse range of beliefs and theories that were circulating all around the world, certainly not just in California. Those developing these ideas were far more likely to have been inspired and influenced by Karl Marx than by Ayn Rand. (Marx wrote of a world in which "the free self-development of each would be the condition of the free self-development of all"). Or perhaps Paul Goodman or Marcuse or Sartre or Norman O Brown or Ivan Illich or any number of other postwar European and American intellectuals. Meanwhile, cybernetics was emerging from the work of mathematicians and systems thinkers - including Norbert Wiener, Ross Ashby, Jay Forrester and Stafford Beer - who posed a radical critique to the managerial philosophy of Taylorism and Fordism.
Curtis refers to this collection of ideas as "The Californian Ideology". According to Wikipedia, this term was coined by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, who wrote an essay with this title in 1995 as a critique of West Coast cyber-libertarianism. The essay doesn't mention Ayn Rand, but it does mention some of the writers who appear in Curtis's film, including Stuart Brand, Kevin Kelly, Peter Schwartz and Alvin Toffler. By stringing together short clips from his interviews with these and other worthies, Curtis creates the impression that their opinions can all be lumped together into a common belief system, which he can then attack in the next part of the film.
Greenspan himself observed that there was a puzzling mismatch between corporate profits and genuine productivity growth. If the global economy had been a viable system in the cybernetic sense, designed or emerging according to the principles of Stafford Beer and others, this kind of information would be properly shared and interpreted, and would have had significant regulatory force.
Greenspan's original interpretation of this mismatch was that there was a worm in the apple of new market liberalism: he was soon persuaded to abandon this interpretation in favour of a much more optimistic one. As Curtis shows, using the IMF's intervention into Indonesia as an example, the financial elites leveraged the market system to protect their own interests, even when this ran counter to any notion of stability or general prosperity or natural justice. Ayn Rand would probably have called such behaviour "rational". Curtis gives us a lot of background about Rand's unbalanced sex life, in order to illustrate the mutually destructive nature of Rand's selfish notion of "rationality". He perhaps intended this section of the film as an allegory for the systemic side-effects of the Myth of the Machine.
Greenspan is portrayed in the film as an anti-hero, whose indecision and folly led an unsuspecting world (along with a compliant or distracted President Clinton) into disaster. Curtis also uses the Monica Lewinsky story, a tiny amount of familiar stock footage stretched by slow motion effects, to reinforce the train-crash element of the Clinton presidency. (Although it's difficult to see how Curtis can blame Californian hippies for all that. Might just as easily blame the Cavendish Laboratory.) But this is a fairly conventional version of recent history, which doesn't seem to tell us very much about our changing relationship with technology.
There is a heroic way of narrating history that concentrates on leaders and their personal strengths and weaknesses. Curtis's previous film, The Power of Nightmares, told a fascinating tale of the leaders of the American Right and the leaders of al Qaeda, and revealed intriguing links and parallels between Bush and Bin Laden.
There is also an "objective" way of narrating history, that downplays leadership and concentrates on the deeper system forces that shape events. George Orwell noted the tendency of Marxists to overuse words like "objectively", but surely nobody can doubt that political activity can sometimes have unanticipated or even counterproductive effects. Systems thinkers including Stafford Beer and Maturana remind us that complex sociotechnical systems may sometimes have a life of their own, preserving their essential characteristics regardless of the espoused intentions and best efforts of the people who are supposed to be in charge. (POSIWID was Beer's name for this effect.) Economists appeal to the "invisible hand", which supposedly creates beneficial outcomes without conscious planning or top-down governance. (By the way, the extreme form of economic liberalism espoused by Greenspan was popular in the 19th century, so it's a bit misleading to credit Ayn Rand with inventing this idea.) And narratives about the power of The Machine tend to belong here.
I've got better things to do with my time than work out how Ayn Rand's version of "objectivism" attempts to reconcile the notion of personal heroism (while steering away from Nietzsche's version) with the notion of system forces (while steering away from Marx's version). But if Adam Curtis believes he can produce a historical account that personalizes how we are watched over by machines, without dealing with the problems introduced by an array of German intellectuals from Marx to Nietzsche, he may be as much a captive of the Ayn Rand camp as the people featured in his film. (See what I did there?)
Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, The Californian Ideology (1995)
Terry Eagleton, In Praise of Marx (Chronicle Review, April 2011)
Kevin Kelly, Out of Control (1994)
Montserrat Tovar, Pandora’s Vox: On Community in Cyberspace (1994)
Previews and reviews of "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace"
The documentary is named after a rather soppy 1950 poem by Richard Brautigan, and opens with Ayn Rand. Curtis would like us to believe that everyone in Silicon Valley was inspired and influenced by Ayn Rand (based on the fact that a few people named their children and companies after herself or her works) and he uses the life and works of Ayn Rand to frame a powerful but logically flawed dialectic about technological capitalism.
Thesis
"Ever since the 1970s, computer utopians in California believed that if human beings were linked by webs of computers, then together they could create their own kind of order. It was a cybernetic dream, which said that the feedback of information between all the individuals connected as nodes in the network would work to create a self-stabilizing system. The world would be stable, yet everyone would be heroic Randian beings completely free to follow their desires."This conflates a diverse range of beliefs and theories that were circulating all around the world, certainly not just in California. Those developing these ideas were far more likely to have been inspired and influenced by Karl Marx than by Ayn Rand. (Marx wrote of a world in which "the free self-development of each would be the condition of the free self-development of all"). Or perhaps Paul Goodman or Marcuse or Sartre or Norman O Brown or Ivan Illich or any number of other postwar European and American intellectuals. Meanwhile, cybernetics was emerging from the work of mathematicians and systems thinkers - including Norbert Wiener, Ross Ashby, Jay Forrester and Stafford Beer - who posed a radical critique to the managerial philosophy of Taylorism and Fordism.
Curtis refers to this collection of ideas as "The Californian Ideology". According to Wikipedia, this term was coined by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, who wrote an essay with this title in 1995 as a critique of West Coast cyber-libertarianism. The essay doesn't mention Ayn Rand, but it does mention some of the writers who appear in Curtis's film, including Stuart Brand, Kevin Kelly, Peter Schwartz and Alvin Toffler. By stringing together short clips from his interviews with these and other worthies, Curtis creates the impression that their opinions can all be lumped together into a common belief system, which he can then attack in the next part of the film.
Antithesis
Meanwhile, one of the most influential followers of Ayn Rand was Alan Greenspan, for many years the Chairman of the US Federal Reserve. Along with other members of the financial elite, Greenspan persuaded President Clinton to abdicate control of the financial sector, and leave financial stability and prosperity to the markets. In some ways this new market libertarianism was a continuation of the economic monetarism that prevailed in the 1980s under Reagan and Thatcher. During the 1990s, however, people started to tell themselves a story in which the new technology somehow replaced the old economy (boom and bust) with a new economy based on unshakeable stability, perpetual productivity growth and a transfer of power from governments to the people. This story (which we now know to have been wishful thinking) echoed some elements of the Californian ideology, but it was overlaid with all sorts of other political agendas.Greenspan himself observed that there was a puzzling mismatch between corporate profits and genuine productivity growth. If the global economy had been a viable system in the cybernetic sense, designed or emerging according to the principles of Stafford Beer and others, this kind of information would be properly shared and interpreted, and would have had significant regulatory force.
Greenspan's original interpretation of this mismatch was that there was a worm in the apple of new market liberalism: he was soon persuaded to abandon this interpretation in favour of a much more optimistic one. As Curtis shows, using the IMF's intervention into Indonesia as an example, the financial elites leveraged the market system to protect their own interests, even when this ran counter to any notion of stability or general prosperity or natural justice. Ayn Rand would probably have called such behaviour "rational". Curtis gives us a lot of background about Rand's unbalanced sex life, in order to illustrate the mutually destructive nature of Rand's selfish notion of "rationality". He perhaps intended this section of the film as an allegory for the systemic side-effects of the Myth of the Machine.
Greenspan is portrayed in the film as an anti-hero, whose indecision and folly led an unsuspecting world (along with a compliant or distracted President Clinton) into disaster. Curtis also uses the Monica Lewinsky story, a tiny amount of familiar stock footage stretched by slow motion effects, to reinforce the train-crash element of the Clinton presidency. (Although it's difficult to see how Curtis can blame Californian hippies for all that. Might just as easily blame the Cavendish Laboratory.) But this is a fairly conventional version of recent history, which doesn't seem to tell us very much about our changing relationship with technology.
Synthesis
Curtis portrays Clinton as an important pivotal figure in this story, brought down by a series of tragic conflicts. Being as arrogant and selfish as Ayn Rand in his sexual behaviour - but being forced into concealment and deception by his political position. Adoring the old-style democratic politics (says Curtis), but being lured by the evil Greenspan-Iago into the new anti-politics. (Clinton as the glamorous Othello, obviously, who remains handsome even when picking his teeth.)There is a heroic way of narrating history that concentrates on leaders and their personal strengths and weaknesses. Curtis's previous film, The Power of Nightmares, told a fascinating tale of the leaders of the American Right and the leaders of al Qaeda, and revealed intriguing links and parallels between Bush and Bin Laden.
There is also an "objective" way of narrating history, that downplays leadership and concentrates on the deeper system forces that shape events. George Orwell noted the tendency of Marxists to overuse words like "objectively", but surely nobody can doubt that political activity can sometimes have unanticipated or even counterproductive effects. Systems thinkers including Stafford Beer and Maturana remind us that complex sociotechnical systems may sometimes have a life of their own, preserving their essential characteristics regardless of the espoused intentions and best efforts of the people who are supposed to be in charge. (POSIWID was Beer's name for this effect.) Economists appeal to the "invisible hand", which supposedly creates beneficial outcomes without conscious planning or top-down governance. (By the way, the extreme form of economic liberalism espoused by Greenspan was popular in the 19th century, so it's a bit misleading to credit Ayn Rand with inventing this idea.) And narratives about the power of The Machine tend to belong here.
I've got better things to do with my time than work out how Ayn Rand's version of "objectivism" attempts to reconcile the notion of personal heroism (while steering away from Nietzsche's version) with the notion of system forces (while steering away from Marx's version). But if Adam Curtis believes he can produce a historical account that personalizes how we are watched over by machines, without dealing with the problems introduced by an array of German intellectuals from Marx to Nietzsche, he may be as much a captive of the Ayn Rand camp as the people featured in his film. (See what I did there?)
Notes
Richard Brautigan, "All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace" (via American Poems). Brautigan was briefly a poet-in-residence at CalTech, so he must have influenced loads of people in Silicon Valley mustn't he?Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, The Californian Ideology (1995)
Terry Eagleton, In Praise of Marx (Chronicle Review, April 2011)
Kevin Kelly, Out of Control (1994)
Montserrat Tovar, Pandora’s Vox: On Community in Cyberspace (1994)
Previews and reviews of "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace"
- Adam Curtis (especially comments by Leeravitz and leftnotliberal)
- Chris Applegate (24 May 2011)
- Brainfisch (26 May 2011)
- Andrew Orlowski (The Register 23 May 2011)
- Ashwin Parameswaran (24 May 2011)
- Paul Rennie (24 May 2011)
- Alasdair Thompson (Bright Green 26 May 2011) (via OrgZone 25 May 2011)
- Sam Wollaston (Guardian 23 May 2011)
- Saturday Review (BBC Radio 4, 21 May 2011)
- Howard Gold, Did Greenspan channel or betray Ayn Rand (MarketWatch June 2010)
- Noah Kristula-Green, Tea Party Embraces Ayn Rand (FrumForum, July 2010) via Jonathan Chait (New Republic)
- Amity Shlaes, Rand’s Atlas Is Shrugging With a Growing Load (Bloomberg July 2009)
- Vladimir Shlapentokh, The Marxist and Bolshevik Roots of Ayn Rand’s Philosophy (Aug 2010)
- Jenny Turner, As Astonishing as Elvis (LRB Vol 27 No 23, 1 Dec 2005) with reply by Chris Sciabarra (6 Dec 2005)
- Slavoj Zizek, The actuality of Ayn Rand pdf, (Journal of Ayn Rand Studies Vol 3 No 2, Spring 2002)
- Brian Holmes, NEOLIB GOES NEOCON: Adam Curtis, or Cultural Critique in the 21st Century (June 2007)
- Adam Curtis: Cognitive Deterrorization (Politics of Knowledge, Feb 2008)
- Adam Curtis Alarm Clock Films (Diagonal Thoughts, March 2008)
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Satoshi Kanazawa
@PsychToday descended to new lows of #badscience and #titillation this week when it published Satoshi Kanazawa's latest blogpost on the physical attractiveness of black women, complete with some pseudoscientific tosh about evolutionary psychology and testosterone. Following a storm of protest, Psychology Today has removed the offending blogpost (although it is still available elsewhere, for example on Quora); its other bloggers (Daniel Hawes, Nathan Heflick, Scott Barry Kaufman, Robert Kurzban, Mikhail Lyubansky, Melody T McCloud, Michael Mills, Stanton Peele, Steven Reiss, Gad Saad, Sam Sommers, and others) have felt the need to gang up on Dr Kanazawa, as if that somehow redeemed the reputation of the website. Commentary and criticism elsewhere includes BBC News, Nanjala Nyabola (Guardian). PZ Myers names Kanazawa "among the many reasons that I detest evolutionary psychology".
This is not the first time that Dr Kanazawa's pseudoscientific musings have provoked criticism from his fellow bloggers at Psychology Today. In November 2008, Christopher Ryan argued that Sloppy methodology is the Achilles Heel of evolutionary psychology. I myself took issue with Dr Kanazawa in my piece on Footballers Wives and Evolutionary Psychology.
But is it just Dr Kanazawa who is at fault here, as some of his more cautious critics suggest, or is there a fundamental methodological flaw at the core of evolutionary psychology? Dr Ryan has also recently criticized Stephen Pinker, suggesting that he may have used misleading data in his TED talk on the origins of war (Stephen Pinker's Stinker). For his part, Stanton Peele believes that "Satoshi Kanazawa's racism perfectly embodies evolutionary psychology".
Dr Ryan's generously illustrated blog features posts on human sexual behaviour and the female form, which he compares with other species - notably the bonobo. What he seems to be claiming is that the similarities between human and bonobo are explained not by their common genetic heritage, but by the existence of some evolutionary advantage of these characteristics.
Sounds plausible enough, but then pseudoscience can make all kinds of speculative explanation sound plausible. For example, someone might try to construct an argument to the effect that large breasts change shape more with age and maternity, therefore breast size makes the visual effects of ageing more obvious and helps men to choose younger and more fertile partners with fewer previous offspring. (That might sound ridiculous, but the logical structure is not very different from other arguments I've seen. See my post on the Purpose of Baldness.) But how on earth do we ever choose between conflicting theories, how do research bodies decide whether to fund this kind of research, and what kind of evidence is deemed relevant?
There is a simplistic POSIWID argument behind a lot of evolutionary biology and psychology, which goes like this. Here is an interesting and perhaps puzzling characteristic; therefore it must have some evolutionary purpose (expressed in terms of selective advantage); so the researchers just need to work out what it is. They then corroborate our hypothesis by carrying out a quick study, often using American psychology students as the subjects.
There are several methodological problems with this approach: firstly, in the way the characteristic is framed in the first place, secondly in the presumption that each characteristic must have a clearly identifiable purpose in its own right, thirdly in demonstrating purpose by identifying outcomes that can be correlated with the characteristic in question, and fourthly in inferring evolutionary processes from present-day observations alone. Kanazawa might just as well argue that Michael Phelps does everything he does in order to get laid. Beyond parody.
This is not the first time that Dr Kanazawa's pseudoscientific musings have provoked criticism from his fellow bloggers at Psychology Today. In November 2008, Christopher Ryan argued that Sloppy methodology is the Achilles Heel of evolutionary psychology. I myself took issue with Dr Kanazawa in my piece on Footballers Wives and Evolutionary Psychology.
But is it just Dr Kanazawa who is at fault here, as some of his more cautious critics suggest, or is there a fundamental methodological flaw at the core of evolutionary psychology? Dr Ryan has also recently criticized Stephen Pinker, suggesting that he may have used misleading data in his TED talk on the origins of war (Stephen Pinker's Stinker). For his part, Stanton Peele believes that "Satoshi Kanazawa's racism perfectly embodies evolutionary psychology".
Dr Ryan's generously illustrated blog features posts on human sexual behaviour and the female form, which he compares with other species - notably the bonobo. What he seems to be claiming is that the similarities between human and bonobo are explained not by their common genetic heritage, but by the existence of some evolutionary advantage of these characteristics.
Sounds plausible enough, but then pseudoscience can make all kinds of speculative explanation sound plausible. For example, someone might try to construct an argument to the effect that large breasts change shape more with age and maternity, therefore breast size makes the visual effects of ageing more obvious and helps men to choose younger and more fertile partners with fewer previous offspring. (That might sound ridiculous, but the logical structure is not very different from other arguments I've seen. See my post on the Purpose of Baldness.) But how on earth do we ever choose between conflicting theories, how do research bodies decide whether to fund this kind of research, and what kind of evidence is deemed relevant?
There is a simplistic POSIWID argument behind a lot of evolutionary biology and psychology, which goes like this. Here is an interesting and perhaps puzzling characteristic; therefore it must have some evolutionary purpose (expressed in terms of selective advantage); so the researchers just need to work out what it is. They then corroborate our hypothesis by carrying out a quick study, often using American psychology students as the subjects.
There are several methodological problems with this approach: firstly, in the way the characteristic is framed in the first place, secondly in the presumption that each characteristic must have a clearly identifiable purpose in its own right, thirdly in demonstrating purpose by identifying outcomes that can be correlated with the characteristic in question, and fourthly in inferring evolutionary processes from present-day observations alone. Kanazawa might just as well argue that Michael Phelps does everything he does in order to get laid. Beyond parody.
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
On Reputation
From @CJFDillow on the externalities of superinjunctions.
Ms Khan attracted a lot of publicity to herself when she chose to protest about various allegations about her and Mr Clarkson that had been circulated on Twitter. Most people looked at the allegations and dismissed them as highly unlikely. The story, repeated with glamorous pictures in all newspapers, has merely served to remind us about her wealth and beauty, and has probably only enhanced her reputation. Perhaps the real purpose of her protest was to deflect attention and credibility from some other allegations. (See my post on Google-spinning.)
Chris assumes that Ms Khan's reputation would be sullied if she were discovered to have had a relationship with anyone outside the usual round of actors and sportsmen and other good looking airheads. Although I'm not a fan of Mr Clarkson, I imagine that a wealthy and bored woman might find a discreet relationship with him to be quite interesting, and I can't see that her reputation would be particularly damaged. It's not as if she were caught attending one of Mr Berlusconi's or Mr Mosley's parties, or spilling out of nightclubs in a dishevelled state.
Meanwhile, Chris assumes that Mr Clarkson's reputation is enhanced by these allegations. Again, I can't see that a popular and happily married journalist wants to be associated with bored heiresses, let alone by their indignant denials.
"People can allege that Jemima Khan is shagging Jeremy Clarkson and say that the press isn’t reporting this because of a superinjunction. ... In this way, Ms Khan’s reputation is damaged by the existence of super injunctions (though the social cost of this is mitigated by the fact that Mr Clarkson‘s reputation is enhanced)."
Ms Khan attracted a lot of publicity to herself when she chose to protest about various allegations about her and Mr Clarkson that had been circulated on Twitter. Most people looked at the allegations and dismissed them as highly unlikely. The story, repeated with glamorous pictures in all newspapers, has merely served to remind us about her wealth and beauty, and has probably only enhanced her reputation. Perhaps the real purpose of her protest was to deflect attention and credibility from some other allegations. (See my post on Google-spinning.)
Chris assumes that Ms Khan's reputation would be sullied if she were discovered to have had a relationship with anyone outside the usual round of actors and sportsmen and other good looking airheads. Although I'm not a fan of Mr Clarkson, I imagine that a wealthy and bored woman might find a discreet relationship with him to be quite interesting, and I can't see that her reputation would be particularly damaged. It's not as if she were caught attending one of Mr Berlusconi's or Mr Mosley's parties, or spilling out of nightclubs in a dishevelled state.
Meanwhile, Chris assumes that Mr Clarkson's reputation is enhanced by these allegations. Again, I can't see that a popular and happily married journalist wants to be associated with bored heiresses, let alone by their indignant denials.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)