The Case for Breaking Up With Your Parents - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education (via Instapaper)

"While democratic institutions need reform to build in dialogue between citizens and experts, they should not be bypassed. By cutting dialogue and diversity for concealed and unaccountable decision-making, "nudge" politics attacks democracy's core. We should not give in to temptation—and save our benevolent meddling for family reunions."

"Recurrent depression was just about the only thing that didn't correlate with childhood self-control. A health index that covered everything from periodontal disease to STDs showed that low self-control correlated with adult health problems; it also correlated with substance abuse issues. Kids with low self-control were more likely to end up raising kids as single parents, had lower savings, and less put away into retirement or home ownership. Finally, a scan of all the police records in Australia and New Zealand showed that criminal convictions also correlated with low childhood self-control. In some cases, IQ and socio-economic status had more profound effects, but the impact of self-control persisted after these were (ahem) controlled for."

RT @yukihiro_matz: What Makes a Programming Language Good | Ideas For Dozens: #en

1. When threatened by sexual assault, ovulating women display a measurable increase in physical strength.
2. Ovulating women overestimate strange males' probability of being rapists.
3. Ovulating women play it safe by avoiding situations that place them at increased risk of being raped.
4. Women become more racist when they're ovulating.

"I'm riveted, and convinced, by much of the logic in this anti-rape area. And researchers are just getting started. Above is a set of astonishing truths that, had an evolutionary approach to studying complex social behavior not been adopted so rigorously over the past quarter-century and applied to human sexuality, would have gone entirely unnoticed."

A study in this month's Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media found more aggressive behavior on reality TV than even in the fictional world of dramas, comedies and soap operas. Coyne says verbal aggression, such as insults, teasing and relational aggression, are common on reality TV; this includes gossiping and social exclusion. The study found some shows are "highly, highly, highly aggressive."
The Apprentice, for instance, topped the list at 85 acts of verbal aggression an hour; American Idol had 57 aggressive acts an hour. The most common forms of physical aggression were punching, pushing and kicking, while the most common acts of verbal aggression were yelling/arguing, insulting and name-calling.
"It's producing this culture of being mean to each other," Coyne says. "We're setting up our culture to being overreactive."

The most important thing to recognize here is that, whether we like it or not, seventy-three million people are playing Farmville: a boring, repetitive, and potentially dangerous activity that barely qualifies as a game. Seventy-three million people are obligated to a company that holds no reciprocal ethical obligation toward those people.

It is precisely at a moment like this—[it being now] legal for corporations to spend unlimited monies on political advertisements—that we must talk about our relationship to corporations, and to one another. Citizens must educate themselves in the use of sociable applications, such as Wikipedia, Skype, and Facebook, and learn how they can better use them to forward their best interests. And we must learn to differentiate sociable applications from sociopathic applications: applications that use people’s sociability to control those people, and to satisfy their owners’ needs.

"If we want to implement a sweetened beverage tax and maximize its effectiveness, the best approach would be to dissociate it from the larger issue of individual choice and focus on its immediate practical benefits, such as the revenue it produces. Over time, we'll get used to it. We might even wonder why we didn't do it sooner."

While the contributions remained high, indicating that participants understood the way the game worked, they would still hold out some resources. This doesn't disprove our prosocial tendencies at all, but indicates that our generosity and desire to work together is limited— something holds us back from fully cooperating.

The authors of the study suggest that the reluctance might be the result of a psychological development that makes us averse to any kind of extreme behavior, either selfish or selfless, even if the rules are set up to reward the extreme.

This may be advantageous in the sense that extreme strategies could be costly if we misunderstood the rules, or if the rules change without warning. The authors even suggest that our brains may intentionally fire some kind of calculation error in extreme situations to prevent hazardous "all-in" commitments. In any case, our preferences in collaborative situations are clear—just not absolute.

"Politics isn't about maximizing rationality, it's about finding compromises that enough people can live with to allow society to take steps in the right direction. Contrary to all our modern instincts, then, political progress on climate change requires not more scientific input into politics, but less. Value disputes that are hidden behind the scientific claims and counterclaims need to be flushed out and brought into the sunlight of democratic deliberation. Until that happens, the political system will remain in gridlock, and everyone will be convinced that they are on the side of truth."

"[...] the reduction of male mortality and liberalized divorce laws account for the growing excess of single males over single females at all reproductive ages. Nonetheless, this male surplus might still translate into a smaller one on the marriage market. Men are likelier than women to end up in jail, in psychiatric institutions, and on skid row. As far as the marriage market is concerned, such men don’t exist. The rate of homosexuality is also higher among men than among women."
"I used to be something of a libertarian. No longer. The sexual marketplace does not function like the marketplace of goods and services. Increasing the demand for young single women will not increase the supply. Nor will this market failure go away if “losers” attend special seminars or get special coaching. Nor will it go away on its own. This is a real problem and one that will likely get worse. Yes, if nothing is done we will have a society where marriage is unattainable for over one third of all men."

The chief goal of all other species is to turn food into offspring. More food means more offspring. It is this biological logic that underlies the perennial fears of human overpopulation. Most creatures live in environments that correspond to open access commons. Recent fertility trends strongly suggest that the simple biological model of human breeding is wrong, or at least, is wrong when the institutions that support economic freedom and the rule of law, e.g., markets, price stability, honest bureaucracies, security of private property, and the fair enforcement of contracts, are well-developed. Economic freedom and the rule of law are the equivalent of enclosing the open access breeding commons, causing parents to bear more and more of the costs of rearing children. In other words, economic freedom actually generates an invisible hand of population control.

In these experiments, people’s mood or emotional state, as measured by psychological assessments, did not change based on whether they counted money or paper. But their perceptions of social or physical discomfort did.

The authors conclude that “even the mere idea of money can have benefits.”

Money, they write, “operates as a social resource that confers a broad, strong feeling of being able to cope with problems and satisfy one’s needs. Resources are valued more in times of threat and adversity than at other times, presumably because resources improve one’s overall ability to cope. Getting or having resources reduces pain and suffering; conversely, losing resources makes one more vulnerable, which intensifies suffering.”

"Now you begin to understand why you watch The Office. The cubicle life is amorphous. What are you actually making? How do you know if you are advancing at your job? Does sending e-mail all day help the brand? Does my boss think I am a good guy? It's an absurd situation, and "self-referential irony supplied by pop culture" helps one cope with that absurdity. Crawford looks around at the sociologists who have studied office life and concludes that the office is best approached as a "place of moral education" with managers acting as therapists, concentrating on helping us become team players. The "team" is what launches the product, lands the account, drives the business. "The individual feels that, alone, he is without any effect," writes Crawford. And worse: "He has difficulty imagining how he might earn a living otherwise." The team makes us passive and helpless."

"If the observers who say that part of our economic troubles result from a mass case of narcissism, from consumers who thought they should have the house of their dreams financed on bad debt to bankers who thought they deserved eight-figure bonuses for packaging that bad debt, then perhaps we are about to be cured. Twenge and Campbell point out that the 1920s was a narcissistic era whose economic collapse led to the Great Depression and the greatest generation. Perhaps its time to dig out those Depression-era recipes for humble pie."

"Envireugenics is less dangerous. It spreads through culture, not coercion. It doesn't employ murder or sterilization. Instead, it relies on segregation. If your kid is RR, he goes here; if he's XX, he goes there. We don't tell you whether you can have a baby. We just tell you whether your baby belongs on the track team, the chess team, or the assembly line.
What's really disturbing about this idea, in the case of ACNT3, is that it isn't crazy. The data make a strong case that being XX really does lock you out of success at the highest levels of sprinting and power sports. From an individual standpoint, that doesn't much matter: You can run track, play pickup basketball, and live happily ever after. But from your country's standpoint, putting you on the track team is a waste. We need that slot for an RR kid, and we need a genetic test to find him.
That's what worries me about Atlas Sports Genetics. It's not just selling a test. It's selling a mentality."

The sorry state of American atheists, then, may have nothing to do with their lack of religious belief. It may instead be the result of their outsider status within a highly religious country where many of their fellow citizens, including very vocal ones like Schlessinger, find them immoral and unpatriotic. Religion may not poison everything, but it deserves part of the blame for this one.

Those subjects that had traditional attitudes towards workplace gender and were a standard deviation off the mean showed substantial salary disparities, with men earning over $11,000 more than their female peers. In contrast, those that were a standard deviation more egalitarian in their attitudes had a pay gap just over $1,000. Only about $1,500 of that came from higher earnings by egalitarian females; the rest is accounted for by a precipitous drop in the earnings of egalitarian males.

The authors conclude that "traditional individuals create reality out of their expectations, leading to a greater acceptance of lower earnings by traditional women." They posit that in addition to career choice, this may play out in the aggressiveness traditionalist males display when negotiating salaries or looking for new opportunities.

Unity is not the great need of the hour, it is the eternal struggle of our immigrant nation. The three Durkheimian foundations of ingroup, authority, and purity are powerful tools in that struggle. Until Democrats understand this point, they will be vulnerable to the seductive but false belief that Americans vote for Republicans primarily because they have been duped into doing so.

The lesson of the Ariaal study is simply that society can adapt to genes instead of the other way around. Maybe we don't have to screen and chuck embryos for every "disease" gene, or drug the kids once they're born. Maybe we can put ADHD kids in education

You can think of this traditional concept of the search for marriage partners as a kind of an auction. In this auction, some women will be more confident of their prospects, others less so. In game-theory terms, you would call the first group "strong bidd

Karelis argues that being poor is defined by having to deal with a multitude of problems: One doesn't have enough money to pay rent or car insurance or credit card bills or day care or sometimes even food. Even if one works hard enough to pay off half of

The right research and policy question today is not “what kind of family do we wish people lived in?” Instead, we must ask “what do we know about how to help every family build on its strengths, minimize its weaknesses, and raise children more succe

His novels are often political in the "rulers fighting" sense as well as in the personal sense -- his characters are at odds with themselves, trying to figure things out like love and sexual identity while also shooting big guns and playing with nanotech.

Defeatists insist Obama cannot win because the average American will never be able to let go of racial prejudice. Yet he somehow speaks to overflowing houses, packed with enthusiastic voters from the American heartland. It will be a sad irony if the bigge

An argument against structurelessness as a rule, since all social groups naturally develop informal structures which must be handled to in order to scale or change or otherwise manage the group.

The paper details the structure of these informal norms that protect the creation, dissemination, and performance of magic tricks. The paper also discusses broader implications for IP theory, suggesting that a norm-based approach may offer a promising exp

Britain is not about to collapse into anarchy, even if the experience of Northern Rock's depositors is profoundly unnerving. But the episode is a reminder of how many conventions in our society—from lining up to showing up for work—only succeed becaus

This Handbook provides a survey of the field of collective intelligence, summarizing what is known, providing references to sources for further information, and suggesting possibilities for future research. The handbook is structured as a wiki, a collecti

This is the reality of sex with minors: The ages of the parties vary widely from case to case. For more than a century, states and countries have been raising and standardizing the legal age of consent. Horny teenagers are being thrown in with pedophiles.

Culture is not about men against women. By and large, cultural progress emerged from groups of men working with and against other men. While women concentrated on the close relationships that enabled the species to survive, men created the bigger networks

In more diverse communities, there were neither great bonds formed across group lines nor heightened ethnic tensions, but a general civic malaise. And in perhaps the most surprising result of all, levels of trust were not only lower between groups in more

...most social scientists explain human behavior as if evolution stops at the neck and as if our behavior is a product almost entirely of environment and socialization. In contrast, evolutionary psychologists see human nature as a collection of psychologi

An allegory of the history of Squeak development in the last 7 years.

In analyzing the texts, the researchers found strong correlations between the content of people’s current lives and the stories they tell. Those with mood problems have many good memories, but these scenes are usually tainted by some dark detail. Those

If you spend/have spent as much time as I do/have online, you begin to sense some of the latent functions of this medium. The Internet is the true melting pot, the true mixing bowl of subcultures and deviance. Out of it have emerged new cultures.

The point is that a year of game-playing likely contributes to making them more aggressive than they were when they started. When video games aren't about violence, their capacity to teach can be a good thing. The games also work for conveying information

This week Slate is publishing three excerpts from Christopher Hitchens' new book, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

Experts who study computer use say the stated yearning to stay abreast of things may mask more visceral and powerful needs, as many self-aware users themselves will attest. Some theorize that constant use becomes ritualistic physical behavior, even addict

The introduction of television made kids more aggressive, harmed the acquistion of reading skills, decreased creativity scores, and cut participation in non-TV leisure activities. The presence of TV itself was the important factor, and not its content.

Some animals are surprisingly sensitive to the plight of others. Biologists argue that these and other social behaviors are the precursors of human morality. They further believe that if morality grew out of behavioral rules shaped by evolution, it is for

But don't worry—when you get old, the sun comes out again.

English economist Andrew Oswald has shown that across European countries, and across U.S. states, high levels of home ownership are correlated with high levels of unemployment. More conventional factors such as generous welfare benefits or high levels of

“Primal laughter evolved as a signaling device to highlight readiness for friendly interaction,” Professor Panksepp says. “Sophisticated social animals such as mammals need an emotionally positive mechanism to help create social brains and to weave

A priority focus of research at the Institute continues to be the emergence, persistence and demise of social institutions and their co-evolution with distinctive human behaviors — such as altruistic cooperation, out-group hostility and adaptive learnin

Economists generally salute holiday gift-giving for its healthy effect on the macroeconomy. But on the microeconomic level, spending on gifts is a resource allocation disaster.