The Futility of Reason

Dramatic title, I know, but one of my biggest frustrations for much of my life was how unreceptive to logical arguments many of my fellow men and women seemed to be. As a huge geek and a unashamed bookworm, I felt I had all the science to make anyone understand why God couldn’t exist, or how minimum wage harms the poor, or why the blank slate approach to understanding human psychology was flawed, yet nobody was interested. Indeed, it seemed the more flawless the logic and the more numerous the syllogisms, the less impact I had. Not to mention, the less I got invited to parties.

Our rational neocortexes are the most recent arrivals on the block, and can at best ride shotgun and politely suggest routes while the  hypothalamus got its primitive, emotional and irrational hands on the wheel. Our motivations, drives and desires rules our lives, and if one is to communicate effectively with people this is the first lesson.

Case in point:

In fall quarter 2007, researchers posted messages in the bathrooms of two DU undergraduate residence halls. The messages said things like, “Poo on you, wash your hands” or “You just peed, wash your hands,” and contained vivid graphics and photos. The messages resulted in increased handwashing among females by 26 percent and among males by 8 percent.

All the medical textbooks in the world can not get the message across as powerfully as a picture in vivid colors that makes us distinctly queasy. Marketers know this of course, and that is why they put naked women on everything from sports cars to soup cans.

Gene Expressions sums it up:

Most human cognition is implicit, and we’re really not as amenable to rational appeals we like to think we are.

Take that one, Ayn Rand!

…and he should have a ten inch penis, a castle on the moon, and make me laugh.

Being funny is one of man’s most sought after characteristics. I say “man’s” for a reason. Christopher Hitchens stated the obvious in his essay Why Women Aren’t Funny:

Why are men, taken on average and as a whole, funnier than women? Well, for one thing, they had damn well better be. The chief task in life that a man has to perform is that of impressing the opposite sex, and Mother Nature (as we laughingly call her) is not so kind to men. In fact, she equips many fellows with very little armament for the struggle. An average man has just one, outside chance: he had better be able to make the lady laugh. Making them laugh has been one of the crucial preoccupations of my life. If you can stimulate her to laughter—I am talking about that real, out-loud, head-back, mouth-open-to-expose-the-full-horseshoe-of-lovely-teeth, involuntary, full, and deep-throated mirth; the kind that is accompanied by a shocked surprise and a slight (no, make that a loud) peal of delight—well, then, you have at least caused her to loosen up and to change her expression. I shall not elaborate further.

While we certainly can appreciate funny women – the same way we can appreciate beautiful men – humor seems to be a less potent competitive advantage in women when it comes to the cut-throat mating marketplace.

Why is this so? Firstly we should ask, why are humor so powerful in generating attraction in the first place?

I defer to Geoffrey Miller in virtually all things, and this is not one of the exceptions. Miller suggests that humor works as an honest mental fitness indicator.  An honest fitness indicator is an indicator that is hard to fake: a bright peacock’s tail that is costly to grow   and attracts predators for example. An inferior peacock will not be able to fake this, because to sport such a tail requires expert hunting skills to obtain all the necessary nutrients, and surviving with it demands the strength and speed to escape predators.

Humans do not grow tails of course. As a social specie, we put a high premium on social skills and intelligence, not plumage. Miller thinks that since humor often is cognitively complex to produce and is easy to get wrong – who of us haven’t experienced a joke bombing –  a sense of humor displays high intelligence.

If so, you’d expect smart people to be funnier. According to this fascinating article entitled Humor as a Mental Fitness Indicator by Daniel P. Howrigan at University of Chicago at Boulder, this is indeed the case.

To explain the pervasive role of humor in human social interaction and among mating partner preferences, Miller (2000a) proposed that intentional humor evolved as an indicator of intelligence. To test this, we looked at the relationships among rater-judged humor, general intelligence, and the Big Five personality traits in a sample of 185 college age students (115 women, 70 men). General intelligence positively predicted rater-judged humor, independent of the Big Five personality traits. Extraversion also predicted raterjudged humor, although to a lesser extent than general intelligence. General intelligence did not interact with the sex of the participant in predicting rating scores on the humor production tasks. The current study lends support to the prediction that effective humor production acts as an honest indicator of intelligence in humans.

 

Homer Simpson got it right people: Be more funny.

The funniness gender gap is readily explained in this light. Sense of humor indicates intelligence which is strongly correlated with social status. Women place a high premium on social status in a mate, because historically their own social status – and thus their safety and access to resources – is to a large extent determined by that of their partner. Men’s status are on the other hand wholly dependent on their own efforts and relationships to other MEN of high status, so these attributes are less important in their mate choices.

Changing Lifestyle Changes Gene Expression

I have harped on and on ad nauseum about how unhealthy and disempowering the trend within personal development to discard hard science and embrace new age hogwash is. I realize, of course, that some people find the idea of being genetically “predisposed” towards one thing or the other distasteful; it seems to threaten cherished notions that we are masters of our fate, captains of our soul.  If our actions to some extent are the results of chemical processes in our minds, and some have different chemical makeups than others, it instinctually seems that science offers constraints, rather than bold new opportunities.

This is a fallacy. No matter what the world is, it is what it is, and to command it you have to  know how it works. Only by getting a deep understanding of the fascinating machinery in our own minds can we hope to discover ways to maximise our potential. I deal with this in the blogpost Self Improvement in the Era of the Chromosome on this blog.

Which brings me to the second article of the day from edge.org, the title of which summarized my position on these matters so well that I saw fit to steal it for this blogpost.

It is written by Dean Ornish, a clinical professor of medicine at UCSF, and deals with primarily with preventing or healing disease, but the lessons are widely applicable.

Some exerpts:

J. Craig Venter has shown that one way you can change your genes is by making new ones. We are finding that another way you can change your gene expression is simply by changing your lifestyle.

In May of this year, we published an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Craig was the communicating editor). We found that changing lifestyle actually changes gene expression. In only three months, we found that over 500 genes were either up-regulated or down-regulated—in simple terms, turning on genes that prevent many chronic diseases, and turning off genes that cause coronary heart disease, oncogenes that are linked to breast and prostate cancer, genes that promote inflammation and oxidative stress and so on.

These findings may capture people’s imagination—so often, people think there is not much they can do, what I call genetic nihilism: “Oh, it’s all in my genes, what can I do?” Well, it turns out you can do a lot, more quickly than we had once realized and to a much greater degree than had been thought possible.

Ornish goes on to detail a study of women suffered from stress due to taking care of chronically ill children. Under the microscope it torned out that these women as a result of that stress had lower levels of telomerase. Telomerase is en enzyme that repairs and lengthens telomeres, the part of our chromosomes that control how long we live.

In my experience, most things in biology go both ways. If stress reduces telomerase and makes telomeres shorter, perhaps stress management techniques, exercise, improved nutrition, and social support might increase these?

Well, that’s what we found. After just three months, telomerase increased by almost 30 percent and thus telomere lengthening is likely to have occurred as well. In this context, comprehensive lifestyle changes not only work as well as pharmaceutical drugs, but even better, as no drug has yet been shown to increase telomerase or to lengthen telomeres.

Sorry little Johnny, “my genes ate my homework” won’t do.

By the way, it gets even better. This Ornish is a very smart guy.

There are lots of ways we have of numbing ourselves and distracting ourselves from our pain, literally and figuratively bypassing our pain.

But the pain is not the problem. The pain is a messenger. It is saying, “Hey, listen up! Pay attention, you are not doing something that is in your best interest.” Our goal is to help people connect the dots between when we suffer and why. Then, the suffering becomes information, a teacher, a catalyst for change rather than something to be numbed out.

I wish I could quote it all, but it is probably better you go and read the whole article. Warmly, whole-heartedly recommended.

Odin

Emotional Contagion, or the Importance of Good Friends and Role Models

There’s a great article over at the fantastic science website Edge.org that once again gives credence to the importance of surrounding yourself with positive, like-minded people.

Some excerpts:

Our happiness is determined by a complex set of voluntary and involuntary factors, ranging from our genes to our health to our wealth. Alas, one determinant of our own happiness that has not received the attention it deserves is the happiness of others. Yet we know that emotions can spread over short periods of time from person to person, in a process known as “emotional contagion.” If someone smiles at you, it is instinctive to smile back. If your partner or roommate is depressed, it is common for you to become depressed.

We found that social networks have clusters of happy and unhappy people within them that reach out to three degrees of separation. A person’s happiness is related to the happiness of their friends, their friends’ friends, and their friends’ friends’ friends—that is, to people well beyond their social horizon. We found that happy people tend to be located in the center of their social networks and to be located in large clusters of other happy people. And we found that each additional happy friend increases a person’s probability of being happy by about 9%. For comparison, having an extra $5,000 in income (in 1984 dollars) increased the probability of being happy by about 2%.

This article deals with happiness, but the same probably applies equally well for other desirable character traits. And, quite likely, less desireable traits.

Decide what kind of human being you would like to become, then surround yourself with people who are like that.

Memetics and Pickup

My good friend Oracle of Sweden has a fantastic new series of blogposts on the topic of memetics up at his blog.

The world of pickup and social dynamics has been taking a turn away from scripts and routines towards natural game the last few years. This was a very healthy development, and about time. I’ve seen better things come out of the community the last two years than in all the preceding years together.

The very name of this blog is a play on the puzzling fact that the ultimate destination of this journey is when you find yourself having gone full circle. You don’t feel you’re “doing” anything anymore, you break all the rules, yet it still somehow works.

If I was gonna sum it up as briefly as I can, being natural is being centered. Where scripted game is endlessly polishing the facade, going natural is developing an actual solid core. Once what is on the inside is indeed attractive, what one says and does doesn’t require much thought at all. What’s inside always shines through.

The problem with all the thought and discussion about being a natural is that it is – as the above – kinda vague and airy fairy. This development is still in its infancy, so everyone is still kind of running around like headless chickens, trying to find the way to “center oneself” and “finding core confidence”. How the hell do you do that? Some seem to turn to spirituality, some to religion.

While I certainly can appreciate spirituality, I have a scientific mind, am an atheist at heart and find faithbased and new agy answers unsatisfying. Oracle is the same, so I was not even surprised when we had a discussion recently and it turned out that despite living on different sides of the planet, we’d had many of the same thoughts the last few weeks. Of course, he is as always without equal in clearity of thought and application of the relevant science.

On the top of my wish list for this Christmas is a purely secular unified field theory that bridges the gap between structured game and natural game without invoking ghosts in the machine or chakras. I predict that Oracle of Sweden will be the one providing it.

First post

Nobody is gonna read this, so I guess I might was well write down my grocery list. Still, this is my first post on my new blog, so I guess I should say something about what I want to use it for – out of respect for tradition, if nothing else.

Over the years I have posted a lot on various online forums, but never taken the time to create a web page where this endless stream of thought (non-sensical or not) can be collected in one place. So I will post some of my old stuff here, as well as put up whatever pops into my head on the topics of women and sexuality.

Stay tuned my friends.

Much love

- Odin