Socialism. A terrible and popular stone age creed.

****

It is a continuing shock to me that every time socialism is shown to be destructive a new generation of socialists emerge like the worst sort of zombie apocalypse. It seems we're programmed to like this ideology - it's our stone age sensibility that makes us support a creed that serves mostly to take us back to that stone age:

According to Professors John Tooby and Leda Cosmides of the University of California, Santa Barbara, human minds evolved in the so-called “Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness” between 1.6 million and 10,000 years ago. “The key to understanding how the modern mind works,” Cosmides writes, “is to realize that its circuits were not designed to solve the day-to-day problems of a modern [humans] – they were designed to solve the day-to-day problems of our hunter-gatherer ancestors.”

With the result that:

...humans are, by nature, envious, resentful and unable to comprehend, let alone appreciate, a sophisticated economic system that has evolved in spite of, not because of, our best efforts.

We're wired to think the economy is a zero-sum game, a thing of 'them' and 'us' and we resent hierarchy as well as being envious of those who have more, are stronger or seem more powerful. This is the core emotional content of socialism and explains why so many reject - despite the evidence of its success - the idea that self-interest drives innovation, invention and growth in a world unlimited in the scope of its creativity.

Socialism is a terrible ideology founded in envy and too often resulting in the very opposite of what its adherents profess to want. Yet so long as our brains respond with envy, resentment and incomprehension there will be socialists. Part of me feels we should be training these negative reactions out of people - but that would be brainwashing so probably not the best of ideas!

....

Some more good stuff for your reading lists

****

Bradford West Labour Party - more fun for the politics watcher

"We would respectfully ask, out of courtesy, for a full explanation of the NECs decision to impose candidates in our constituency along with an explanation of the specific allegations without having to read in the press first.

"We are deeply concerned that the voice of our membership is being silenced and to this end we would ask the decision to impose candidates in Bradford West is overturned.

"We would welcome an urgent meeting with representatives of the NEC to further explain our concerns on behalf of our constituents."

Simple-minded lefties

Writing in the journal Political Psychology, a team of researchers led by the University of Montana psychologist Lucian Gideon Conway III reports the results of four studies that together call "into question the typical interpretation that conservatives are less complex than liberals." It turns out that liberals and conservatives are both simple-minded, depending on the topic under discussion.

Are the Koch brothers really right-wing?

How, then, are the Kochs members of the radical Right? They are pro-gay marriage. They favor liberal immigration policies. They are passionate non-interventionists when it comes to foreign policy. They are against the drug war and are spending a bundle on dismantling so-called “mass-incarceration” policies. They’ve never seized a national park at gunpoint.

Is rhino farming the answer to poaching?

The push to lift the ban on selling rhino horn came from game breeders, John Hume and Johan Kruger, who claim that legalising the trade within the country will reduce rhino deaths - rhino horn is similar to our fingernails, and can actually be harvested without harming the animal. Hume also argued that if the ban on rhino trade continued, he'd no longer be able to afford to keep his 1,200 farmed rhinos.

Don Boudreaux respectfully takes Stephen Hawkings down several pegs

"The above, Prof. Hawking, is, as you know, what people who know nothing of physics often sound like when they rely upon popular myths and personal intuition to make sense of physical reality. And it’s pretty much what you, a brilliant physicist who knows nothing of economics, sound like when you rely upon popular myths and personal intuition to make sense of economic reality."

The dark side of the liberal, progressive left

"Scopes was charged for teaching from a textbook called A Civic Biology: Presented in Problems, published in 1914. The book taught Darwin’s doctrine as fact, but it didn’t leave his conclusions there. The author, George William Hunter, not only asserted the biological difference of races, he insisted on the vital importance of what he called “the science of being well born”—eugenics. Like most progressives of the time, Hunter believed in “the improvement of man” via scientific methods. That meant promoting personal hygiene, proper diet, and reproductive control. A Civic Biology also has suggestions for what to do with “bad-gened” people, in a section called “The Remedy.” “If such people were lower animals,” the books says, “we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity would not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race. Remedies of this sort have been tried successfully in Europe.”

Tyler Cowen guessing at when we'll have driverless cars

Singapore will have driverless or near driverless neighborhoods in less than five years. But it will look more like mass transit than many aficionados are expecting.

...neoliberal orgasms - why capitalists have the best sex (or something)

Positioned as the ‘peak’ of sexual experience, orgasm is packed with sociocultural meaning. Exploring the construction of orgasm in Cosmopolitan magazine in the context of the shift towards a postfeminist sexuality and the neoliberal shift towards the rational management of sex as work, this article argues that magazines offer a ‘pedagogy of the body'...

Read responsibly.

....

Maths and social science...

****

The research methods lecture for my MSc sticks in my mind. Not just because I have a curiosity about different research methods and their rationale but also because the lecturer told us not to worry about maths, indeed that she wasn't any good at maths.

Sadly, the results of such wilful ignorance look like this:

"Not many psychologists are very good at maths," says Brown. "Not many psychologists are even good at the maths and statistics you have to do as a psychologist. Typically you'll have a couple of people in the department who understand it. Most psychologists are not capable of organising a quantitative study. A lot of people can get a PhD in psychology without having those things at their fingertips. And that's the stuff you're meant to know. Losada's maths were of the kind you're not meant to encounter in psychology. The maths you need to understand the Losada system is hard but the maths you need to understand that this cannot possibly be true is relatively straightforward."

In the social sciences (and this is psychology among the most maths rich of these disciplines) the use of maths appears almost discouraged - we're told about qualitative research, how it gives greater insight and understand than mere number crunching. And, when someone comes up with a complicated quantitative explanation of everything ("The Spirit Level" springs to mind as a good example here) the legions of non-mathematicians leap upon the research with glee and excitement. Sadly, what they can't do is explain the maths.

It is a deceptive idea that we can call something 'science' - even with the qualifier 'social' - and then pretend that it can be studied without a reasonable degree of competence in maths and with research methods based on experiment, empirical study and data analysis. This isn't to dismiss qualitative studies - I used to be Planning Director in an ad agency, I love a nice focus group - but to say that, for all their value, such methods simply aren't science.

....

No. Sitting doesn't make you obese. Eating too much does.

****

Some halfwit American psychologist wants to ban television because it makes us obese. Trust me folks this man is a weapons grade nutcase:

On average, he says, a British teenager spends six hours a day looking at screens at home – not including any time at school. In North America, it is nearer eight hours. But, says Sigman, negative effects on health kick in after about two hours of sitting still, with increased long-term risks of obesity and heart problems.

No. Eating too much makes you obese not watching the telly. If Prof. Sigman believes otherwise then he really doesn't deserve the title "scientist".

There are 24 hours in the day and the child will spend around ten of them asleep. That leaves around eight hours of other stuff. But the clue to this lies elsewhere in the article (in the Guardian, now leading the way in nannying fussbucketry). This is about ensuring children lead a purposeful life - lying about doing fun stuff because it's fun can't be healthy can it?

The RCPH's Professor Blair said there were some simple steps parents could take, "such as limiting toddler exposure as much as possible, keeping TVs and computers out of children's bedrooms, restricting prolonged periods of screen time (we would recommend less than two hours a day) and choosing programmes that have an educational element."

If sitting watching a screen is bad, it doesn't matter what you're watching surely? Or is there some magic dust that flows from "educational" content that stops kids dying from watching the goggle box?

This is a classic piece of New Puritan propaganda. We must have a purposeful life and the over-riding purpose of life is for it to be a long as possible. Health is everything and any pleasure that does not serve this purpose must be stopped.

....

And you thought scientific racism was dead?

There I was reading Miss Snuffy's latest piece on English education - in which she speaks of the experience of three black kids at a public school - and, in the comments, I came across this (addressed to another commenter) from a person calling him/herself "cotewood":

I assume that you are not stupid enough to propose that the small, light Pygmy brain is, on average, equal to the large, heavy Ashkenazic brain

Grief - scientific racism in the flesh! And "cotewood" continues in this racist frame:

We will, therefore, certainly continue to waste money and effort trying to change Africans into Englishmen and women rather than adopting a public policy based on recognising the human reality.

I really had thought such views had died out and really didn't expect to encounter them in the comments on a national newspaper site! And let's be clear about this - the concepts that underpin scientific racism are nonsense. It may be the case that G B Shaw and H G Wells believed this rubbish but today when we can be pretty sure that the "black-white" IQ gap isn't down to genetics, it is a little trying.

For me, we have to make the case for reducing our reliance on race-based analyses since they become increasingly meaningless within an intergrated and intergrating society. Which is why the obsession - seen most recently in the UK's national census questions - with categorising the population according to their "racial origins" is counter-productive and leads inexorably to bad policy. And adds fuel to the fire of racist loonies like "cotewood" here!


....