rich people get screwed over by even richer people

When I read a story about a recent basketball trade, it made me realize that, whatever you think about highly paid professional entertainers generally, one has to acknowledge that a very difficult aspect of most of their lives is that they constantly have to move around. People want to be entertained by new things; the same two teams playing every night isn't considered fresh enough (despite the fact that we love a long playoff series...) Having to move around all the time could be fun for a few years when you're young, but when you reach a certain age it is nice to settle down. At least I think so.

Anyway, this trade is getting a lot of attention because it involves a "superstar" player being traded to New York City. I use the scare quotes because this player is a superstar not because he helps his team win, but because he makes a lot of flashy plays, or so say the data. So he's either stupidly more style than substance and happens to get rewarded for it, or he is cynically selfish and willingly makes his team worse in a way he can profit from. Perhaps the other facts suggest which. This player has (openly) been wanting to be traded to the NYC team for almost a year, while also refusing to turn down an (open) lucrative contract offer from his current team, and his pressure tactics finally seem to have worked. To accomodate his demands, the teams involved had to trade other players, who were (openly) considered mere pawns used to make the math work for the superstar player.

Well one of those "pawns" is the best player in the deal at helping teams win games (which is the ostensible professional responsibility of a basketball player), and one of the most respected veterans in the league. And he had openly been very happy to be living in Denver, where he grew up. And now, because of this trade forced by the young hotshot, he has to uproot his life and move from Denver to NYC. I know he's receiving rich financial reward for his services, but when I read:

"I can't deny that when the trade went down last night, I was kind of more sad than happy," Nuggets coach George Karl said after his team's short-handed shootaround Tuesday. "I think most of that sadness was because of Chauncey."

it just hits home that these guys, despite being modern day gladiators, are also just people trying to make a living, and sometimes they get screwed over by some young hotshot and a systemic bias of the medium by which richer people make money off of them.

And then I realize that I can just pick a random story on the front page of the NYT and it will involve people getting screwed over way harder by people who are way richer, and without their own $15 million contract to ease their pain.

BINGO!

usually i just delete emails from my alma mater, but i paid attention to a recent one long enough to decide it deserves ridicule. check this out! let's have a big gambling contest and pretend we're learning something!

non-issues

Until your discipline can dispense with unproven modularity, gender and race essentialism, arguments from a presumed "mental fossil record" which of course can never be demonstrated, sociobiology, Dawkins' selfish gene and its general use as a justifier of the worst social norms and localized prejudices, I'm not really interested in discussing its value to leftist revolution.

- Jack Crow*

My discipline has never relied on unproven modularity. We have no interest in race essentialism, and to the extent that our theories involve what you might call "gender essentialism," they are supported by overwhelming cross-cultural evidence**. We don't argue from an undemonstrable mental fossil record, and we don't use The Selfish Gene to justify norms or prejudices, because we understand very well that one cannot infer a moral "ought" from an empirical "is."

So, now we can talk about the value of ev psych to leftist revolution!

(And please tell me where you got these mistaken notions.)

* I don't mean to pick on Jack specifically. I like his writing, and I appreciate his willingness to discuss the topic. I think his views are likely shared by many others, so I'm using his public remarks as a representative sample of leftist objection to evolutionary psychology.

** Yes, we do think that just as there are, on average, physical differences between men and women, there are psychological differences, and that evolution explains these differences. This is a value-neutral observation, and we acknowledge huge variance in behaviours and preferences within and between sexes. These differences are in no way used by the discipline to encourage discrimination or to restrict individual freedom.

advocacy is hard!

ok, i suppose i'm not really surprised to encounter such seething hostility to ev psych (see the comments sections). hell, if ev psych really were what they think it is, i'd be contemptuous too.

but i am surprised that these people, good folks with whom i so often agree in other domains, seem so confident in their criticism and rejection despite very strongly appearing to misunderstand fundamental principles. i understand that people have to choose what they want to spend their time learning about and that they have good reason not to have devoted as much time to the subject as me, but it appears to me that they're knocking down straw men and seem unwilling to even entertain the possibility that they're doing so. that's frustrating! i have thoughts about the mechanisms that poison people so strongly against ev psych, but i'll save that. i'm mostly just saying this for my own sanity (a good summary for the entire history of the blog), and don't intend to dwell on the point. and i don't mean any disrespect to anyone; i hope that's clear.

anyway, i think i'm going to try a different approach. every once in a while i'll highlight some good research. it is a lot easier to talk about one specific study than to just dive into a defense of an entire discipline against people who don't want to hear it. hopefully some of them will stick around for those more focused discussions.

questions for critics of evolutionary psychology

i've encountered lots of generalizations about the entire field, presumably based on exposure to a small sampling. and people seem to have some extremely confused ideas about ev psych. so i'm wondering exactly where you're getting your info. mainstream media? primary literature? books?

Chomsky on Egypt

We should remember there's an analog here. I mean, it's not the same, of course, but the population in the United States is angry, frustrated, full of fear and irrational hatreds. And the folks not far from you on Wall Street are just doing fine. They're the ones who created the current crisis. They're the ones who were called upon to deal with it. They're coming out stronger and richer than ever. But everything's fine, as long as the population is passive. If one-tenth of one percent of the population is gaining a preponderant amount of the wealth that's produced, while for the rest there 30 years of stagnation, just fine, as long as everyone's quiet. That's the scenario that has been unfolding in the Middle East, as well, just as it did in Central America and other domains.

...

Furthermore, Egypt cooperates in the crushing of Gaza. That terrible free election in January 2006 not only frightened the U.S. and Israel -- they didn't like the outcome, so turned instantly to punishing the Palestinians -- but the same in Egypt. The victor in the election was Hamas, which is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. That was very much feared by the Egyptian dictatorship, because if they ever allowed anything like a free election, the Muslim Brotherhood would no doubt make out quite well, maybe not a majority, but it would be a substantial political force. And they don't want that, so therefore they cooperate. Egypt, under Mubarak, cooperates with Israel in crushing [Gaza], built a huge fence on the Egyptian border, with U.S. engineering help, and it sort of monitors the flow of goods in and out of Gaza on the Egyptian side. It essentially completes the siege that the U.S. and Israel have imposed. Well, all of that could erode if there was a democratic movement that gained influence in Egypt, just as it did in Palestine.

source.

evolutionary psychology for leftist anarchist types

I'm always surprised by the hostility to evolutionary psychology (ev psych) from the left (meaning further left than loyal Democrats), because I consider the science extremely supportive of the leftist-anarchist worldview. Since many bloggers cover political issues much better than me, maybe as a lefty-anarchist evolutionary psychologist, my blogging efforts would be well spent debunking some common objections to ev psych and highlighting some findings that should be of great interest to. My first pass will skip the references (I'm feverishly ill, but fired up), but if people comment and want the primary literature I'll be happy to provide it!

First of all, the theory of evolution by natural selection is the unifying principle of biology. Since humans are biological organisms, we are no more exempt from the forces of evolution than any other life form. I actually am kind of uncomfortable calling myself an "evolutionary psychologist" because psychology, being the science of brain and behaviour, must be evolutionary; if a central principle or finding in psychology conflicts with evolutionary theory, something is wrong! Furthermore, evolutionary theory has been wildly successful at predicting and explaining animal behaviour, including human behaviour.

Misconceptions (feel free to suggest other objections for me to try to debunk!):

In a comment thread over at Jack's place, I encountered a few common misconceptions about ev psych, all of which I'd like to eventually address, respectfully. Among them (these aren't necessarily exact quotes, just my understanding of the objections raised):

1. "Sexual attraction is not scientific."

I think the intended meaning (correct me if I'm wrong) is that sexual attraction isn't a topic that science can attempt to understand. If that's the intended meaning, it is very wrong. We know a great deal about the science of sexual attraction; see my comments in that thread for an intro, and feel free to post questions in the comments.

2. "Ev psych is Lamarkism applied to mind."

Originally I wrote: Nobody (or close to it) takes Larmkian inheritance of acquired characteristic seriously in any field of biology, ev psych included. If you think otherwise, please provide specific references and I'll gladly take a look.

Update: I was a bit hasty with the outright dismissal of inheritance of acquired characteristics, because a lot of work in epigenetics is showing exactly that. Still, I don't know of much, if any, use of Lamarck's theories in ev psych; our models are Darwinian (and modern synthesis).

3. "Ev psych claims that human nature is fixed, which can't possibly be right given the extraordinary variety in human behaviour, culture, and social structure."

Indeed, it cannot possibly be right that human nature is fixed. Learning, conditioning, and plasticity are very important parts of understanding behaviour. I think this misunderstanding comes from a root confusion thinking that "genetically based" means fixed. A better way to think of it is that our genetic structure allows flexibility within a certain range.

One commenter highlighted the common occurrence of cross-species adoption, presumably as a way to argue "evolution could not possibly favor an animal investing so heavily in the offspring of another species?" The confusion here is between proximate and ultimate levels of explanation. Evolution by natural selection creates proximate mechanisms that are adaptive on average. That "on average" is key! In the case of cross-species adoption, the evolved proximate mechanism might be something like "take care of younglings in my nest." Since the vast majority of such younglings would be your own offspring, this behavioural tendency is adaptive on average. But there are many species, cuckoos for example, that exploit parental sollicitude mechanisms as a way to avoid the cost of raising their own offspring.

4. "Ev psych is innately conservative."

The next section mentions some key findings that I think are deeply subversive, but I'd be curious to hear what people think are the conservative aspects of ev psych.

Findings that lefties ought to like:

1. Inequality seems to be at the root of a variety of social ills.

Since natural selection can be conceived of as intrasexual competition for a share of the parentage of the next generation, it follows that inequality of outcome should be associated with heightened competition. Where there is a "winner take all" situation, for example in elephant seals, where one dominant male beachmaster gains the vast majority of sexual access to females and thus a large share of the parentage, we expect fierce competition, which we certainly see. Humans are no different! There is no better predictors of male-male homicide (from a cross-national scale, all the way down to neighborhood level) than income inequality (except possibly life expectancy, which I can address later if someone is curious). A variety of other social ills (e.g. a myriad of health outcomes, problem gambling, traffic fatalities) are also strongly correlated with income inequality. Correlation doesn't equal causation, but the findings are overwhelmingly supportive of the basic concepts of biology, and are equally supportive of the anarchist worldview of skepticism towards power structures! A common confusion is that these issues are related to absolute poverty, as opposed to relative poverty, but these correlations remain extremely strong once you control for various poverty measures (plus poverty is a relative concept anyway).

2. The classical economics model of humans as purely self-interested rational maximizers is totally inadequate.

Cooperation and conflict is my specialty within the field, and there are dozens, if not hundreds, of studies debunking the conservative models common in economics. In fact one group of evolution-minded researchers has proposed that humans are innately cooperative, even in situations where we do not stand to gain ("strong reciprocity" theory); I find the details slightly misguided, but its popularity if nothing else is indicative of how seriously the discipline takes cooperation and altruism as a fundamental characteristic of human psychology.

Ok, that's all for now. I'll update or make new posts if I attract some attention.

i think i'm dying of a cold, so i'll mostly continue to not blog for the next 2 to 5 days.

go egyptians!

keep 'em coming!

wikileaks, palestine papers, tunisia, yemen, egypt, jordan. exciting, inspiring times.

Let me get this straight. Management can lock the doors, prevent workers from working, not pay the workers signed to contracts, and also prevent them from working for anyone else, even in another country? What the fuck?