Steven Pinker: THE BLANK SLATE, post 10

Posted on Friday 2 August 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

Finally: the last topic chapter, about The Arts, and then the final chapter.

Earlier posts about this book: post 1, post 2, post 3, post 4, post 5, post 6, post 7, post 8, post 9.

– – –

–Ch20, The Arts

The arts community thinks the arts are in trouble; examples about bookstores closing, etc (and this was 22 years ago!) But TS Eliot said something similar in 1948. Now we have competition from science and engineering; too many PhDs; careerism.

Actually, the arts and humanities have never been in better shape; consider attendance at concerts, number of books in print; recordings of music, videos of movies, dozens of TV stations, the web. So why all the lamentations? Some say new works are mediocre. This has always been true. The best is as good as anything. There are many new varieties of music. Computer graphics. The decline is a cognitive illusion, 403m. [[ I’d say this is a variation of the “good-old-days” syndrome, which is related to the motivations of MAGA: we’re comfortable with things we’ve lived with all our lives, and skeptical of anything new and different. Thus the pace of innovation in the arts is related to the human life span. ]]

Still, there are three areas of concern. Continue reading →

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How Name Calling, Unfortunately, Seems to Work

Posted on Thursday 1 August 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

Preoccupied today with Larry matters. The estate sale finished last weekend, and went well, according to the sellers. But now the sellers of Larry’s house are charging *me* for things I kept, as if I stole things they think I’d promised that they could sell. Which I did not.

One item for today.

Slate, Scaschi Koul, 1 Aug 2024: Democrats Are Finally Going Low, and It Feels … Amazing, subtitled “Perhaps, finally, they are ready to deal with the swirl of awful that is Donald Trump.”

How to respond to Trump’s yearslong parade of luridness? Eight years ago, Michelle Obama gave a speech at the Democratic National Convention, one that would inadvertently shape the way the Democratic Party would handle Republican attacks for years to come. “When someone is cruel or acts like a bully, you don’t stoop to their level,” Michelle said. “Our motto is ‘When they go low, we go high.’ ”

It’s a nice idea. It felt good at the time for Democrats to at least be able to pat themselves on the back for their own morality. But it’s one that has not ever really won elections. Hillary Clinton famously lost in 2016, proof positive that staying above the fray wasn’t an effective strategy for this new type of Trumpian Republican who does not care about having a fair, clean fight. Maintaining the high ground in politics has been a failed strategy for almost a decade now. In 2008 you could reliably hope that a candidate’s decency would stop a voter from running her mouth at a town hall about how the Democratic candidate was a maybe-terrorist. Now you’re almost guaranteed he’ll join in. (“He is the founder of ISIS,” Trump said of Obama in 2016.)

Once again, this is understandable in light of the evolution of morality. Going “low” means appealing to tribal morality and intuitions; going “high” means appealing to higher morality and cosmopolitan sympathies. Everyone has base tribal morality built in; only a few can conceive of cosmopolitan morality. I’ve blogged about this over and over again. You can appeal to everyone by calling the other side names, as, alas, the Democrats are now doing. Only a few are responsive to higher callings.

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Steven Pinker: THE BLANK SLATE, post 9

Posted on Thursday 1 August 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

This time: Children. The old nature vs. nurture debate is too simplistic and binary. Given implications of our innate human nature, the (by now unsurprising) takeaway here is that parents have far less influence on their children than people have thought. As many parents eventually learn to their dismay.

Earlier posts about this book: post 1, post 2, post 3, post 4, post 5, post 6, post 7, post 8.

– – –

–Ch19, Children

The nature-nurture debate is over—at least when it comes to what makes people different from one another. There are three laws of behavioral genetics. They’re simple enough, even though they dispute the long assumed Blank Slate.

1. All human behavioral traits are heritable.
2. The effect of being raised in the same family is smaller than the effect of the genes.
3. A substantial portion of the variation in complex human behavioral traits is not accounts for by the effects of genes or families.

Continue reading →

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Doing Your Own Research; Body Doubles; Intellectual Laziness

Posted on Wednesday 31 July 2024 by Mark R. Kelly
  • How “doing your own research” results in absurd conspiracies about Biden body doubles;
  • Hemant Mehta tries to parse Candace Owens’ vast conspiracy theories;
  • And how objections to the Olympics opening ceremony are all about intellectual laziness.

The problem is, on the internet, you can’t tell what’s true or not, unless you pay attention and are savvy about which sources you’re looking at. The majority of people have never read newspapers or even watched the nightly network news on TV, but most of them now have internet and social media access. So people don’t understand the difference between credible sources and sources telling them what they want to believe. It’s been a problem for two decades, and it’s getting worse.

AlterNet, Roxanne Cooper, 27 Jul 2024: Opinion | The problem with ‘doing your own research’: Arizona conspiracy theory edition

Continue reading →

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Steven Pinker: THE BLANK SLATE, post 8

Posted on Wednesday 31 July 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

This time: Gender. Are there innate differences between the sexes, or not? What does denial of the Blank Slate say about gender policies? And about rape.

Earlier posts about this book: post 1, post 2, post 3, post 4, post 5, post 6, post 7.

– – –

 
–Ch18, Gender

Pinker begins by considering the [1968] movie 2001 (as one example among many potential ones) against current reality. Among its misses was the role of women—who in the film are still secretaries and assistants. How quickly social arrangements can change. Several things caused the change in the status of women. The expanded moral circle; technological and economic progress, including lowered infant mortality; and of course feminism. Beginning with the right to vote etc with the 19th amendment, and especially changes in the 1970s with business life. Still, things have not improved in much of the world.

Continue reading →

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Nostalgia, Weird Ideas, Joy vs Grimness, Prayers

Posted on Tuesday 30 July 2024 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Tom Nichols on how nostalgia for the past tells us lies;
  • More on JD Vance’s tribal morality and short-term thinking;
  • Robert Reich on Kamala’s joy and Donald’s grimness;
  • And the meaning of why Trump rallies open with Christian prayers.
——

Tom Nichols.

The Atlantic, Tom Nichols, 26 Jul 2024: The Lies Nostalgia Tells Us, subtitled “I was a child in the 1960s, and those days weren’t better—but in one way, they were sweeter.”

Before reading this: Continue reading →

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Steven Pinker: THE BLANK SLATE, post 7

Posted on Tuesday 30 July 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

Today: Violence. Are humans inherently violent? Is war inevitable? Or is violence learned behavior? This chapter, of course, anticipates Pinker’s later book, THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE, which documents how violence has *declined* throughout human history, though that’s a different topic.

Earlier posts about this book: post 1, post 2, post 3, post 4, post 5, post 6.

– – –

 

–Ch17, Violence

So is war eternal and inevitable? Churchill quote. The archaeological record supports the idea. Even cannibalism. And so on. Cruelty. Christians and their crosses. Efforts to reduce violence have led to legislation, as if violence has nothing to do with human nature but is taught by culture, or endemic to certain environments. The Seville Statement again. Claims that we ‘know’ what causes violence. Violence is a learned behavior, many claim. Learned from TV shows and video games. Or from childhood abuse. Another theory is about the American conception of maleness. And the frontier culture.

Continue reading →

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Today’s Post About How Politics Illustrates Human Nature, For Better or Worse, Mostly Worse

Posted on Monday 29 July 2024 by Mark R. Kelly
  • How Republicans cheer mass deportation;
  • How JD Vance’s comments reflect conservative values that prioritize children over adults;
  • Two pieces about how Republican values have been abandoned their traditional core values, in the service of a tyrant;
  • Items about the deliberate misunderstanding of the Olympics Opening Ceremony, white supremacists, Elon Musk’s video lies;
  • An essay by Peter Wehner, another disillusioned Republican, about what’s happened to his party.
– – –

Tribal moralists know: Outsiders are *bad*.

The Guardian, Jeff Yang, 29 Jul 2024: Republicans cheer for ‘mass deportation’ – a dark new chapter in America’s history of othering ‘them’, subtitled “The convention celebrated Trump’s vision of immigration as a disease. The GOP idea of a cure would mean I, and millions of others, would not exist”

Continue reading →

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Steven Pinker: THE BLANK SLATE, post 6

Posted on Monday 29 July 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

The final section of the book is about various “Hot Button” topics: politics, violence, gender, children, and the arts. These chapters show how the doctrines of the blank slate, the noble savage, and the ghost in the machine have been imagined to ‘explain’ or justify such behaviors, why they are wrong, and how the understanding of evolutionarily derived human nature can better account for the reality of our behaviors.

I’ll summarize less than in previous post, and perhaps sprinkle some bolds in to highlight key points. And spread these last few chapters over several posts.

Earlier posts about this book: post 1, post 2, post 3, post 4, post 5.

– – –

 

Part V: Hot Buttons

Here we have topics where people debate but rarely change their minds when their arguments are refuted. Typically these are the issues that divide liberals and conservatives. Many of these topics hinge on empirical questions in biology or psychology; but instead of changing minds, people are apt to suppress the facts and cling to what they hold sacred. Often there is common ground, and disagreements are matters of emphasis.

–Ch16, Politics

Continue reading →

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The Need for a Fantasy Past

Posted on Sunday 28 July 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

There are two problems with MAGA. First, it’s regressive in that it’s trying to reimpose primitive tribal values onto a complex, global world. Second, more practically, it’s simply not possible to return to conditions of the past. Today’s items:

  • Why MAGA can’t return to the past;
  • Myths (lies) Republicans tell about abortions;
  • More about Christian hysteria over the Olympics Opening Ceremony, which they completely misunderstood;
  • And another piece about how the attraction to conspiracy theories can’t be fought with truth; it’s about psychological needs to matter;
  • And OnlySky is back.

Washington Post, Megan McArdle, 25 Jul 2024: Opinion | J.D. Vance can’t go back in time — and neither can the rest of us, subtitled “The days of America’s manufacturing boom are gone for good.”

For one of the youngest vice-presidential candidates ever nominated, J.D. Vance sounds a little crotchety. His convention speech last week pined for an America that the 39-year-old himself never knew — a land before drugs and deindustrialization ravaged the Rust Belt, when housing was cheap and families were intact, and proud American craftsmen made the world’s best products with their own hands.

Continue reading →

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