In the O.J. Simpson case, the defense tried to disallow testimony that Simpson battered his wife on the grounds that fewer than one in a thousand men who batter their wives or girlfriends go on to murder them. This is true, but completely inapplicable since there was a murder victim: other widely available crime statistics indicate that when a man batters his wife or girlfriend, and she later turns up murdered, the batterer is the murderer more than 80% of the time.
-- you have to ask the right questions
There's a strong tendency to filter out silent probabilities. Planes that aren't hijacked by terrorists don't make the news, and neither do people who buy losing lottery tickets. Casinos take advantage of this phenomenon by installing slot machines which flash and make noise in an attempt to draw attention to winners.
In a large collection of measurements, the average value will be approximately the same as the average value of a small collection. The extreme value, on the other hand, will be considerably higher for the large collection.
Basic probability: the more you try, the more likely you are to score a success
The batting averages problem
-- An average is composed of two variables: production and opportunities. You can easily outperform someone whose quality is above yours if you have more opportunites to produce.
The discrimination problem: women applied in disproportionate numbers to popular classes, whereas men applied in disproportionate numbers to less popular classes. Since there was only so much room in each class, fewer women were admitted to the school. This prompted a discrimination lawsuit by a group of women who saw the admissions disparity as evidence of sexism.
The gambler's fallacy: believing that the probability of an isolated event is linked to the previous distribution of events
Regression to the mean: the fact that extreme probability results balance themselves out with additional testing
Life's winners and losers:
If you flip a coin with a friend, one of you is likely to win more often than the other. The lopsidedness of these results is evened out by successive iterations.
The Pete Rose story: Everyone at his skill level had a similarly minute probability of achieving a 44-game hitting streak. When we think of the record, though, we don't think of everyone else who could have potentially accomplished it - we treat the one man the dice favored as a legend.
Reward, punishment, and regression to the mean:
For every action, there are a range of outcomes. When people hit outliers, they're bound to regress to the mean.
Since people are rewarded for good performance (positive outliers) and punished for bad performance (negative outliers), what happens is that behavior seems to improve after punishment and deteriorate after rewards.
-- we're Skinner boxing it
People avoid risk when seeking gains, but are willing to accept increased risks to avoid losses.
Objections to being identified as a number seem silly. If anything, numbers enhance individuality, not detract from it: people are more likely to have the same name or similar appearances than they are to have the same credit card number.
Incidence vs. likelihood:
An activity might be very dangerous but quite rare - for this reason, its dangerous nature would receive comparatively little attention
Hypothesis errors:
Type I errors: when a true hypothesis is rejected
Type II errors: when a false hypothesis is accepted
Statistics need to include confidence intervals and be accurate reflections of the population surveyed
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Sunday, April 20, 2008
The Visual Display of Qualitative Information - Edward R. Tufte - ***
Graphical displays should reveal the data, and its message, to the eye.
Only a graphic can display a large volume of data in a small space.
The man who invented the bar chart, William Playfair, was skeptical about his invention, noting that his bar chart did not chart the progression of time. Multiple bar charts can be used, but generally, a graphic is a better way to display data that evolves over a timeline.
A good graphic includes every relevant variable in it - instead of looking at multiple graphics and trying to compare the two, all the relevant information should be laid out before the viewer in a neat and accurate fashion.
Graphics that accompany data should either be to scale or not used at all.
Lie factor:
size of effect shown in graphic
over
size of effect shown in data
Compare apples to apples.
Don't have a misleading zero point.
Draw everything to scale.
Tables are usually better than graphics for reporting 20 numbers or less.
Use as little ink as possible.
If the ink isn't displaying data, erase it.
The idea that statistics are boring has created a dearth of graphical abominations to accompany them.
Japan's statistics story:
No nation ranks more highly in its collective passion for statistics than Japan. Statistics are the subject of holidays, conventions, awards, and nationwide contests. Entries in the children's statistical graph contest were screened three times by judges, who awarded first prize this year to the work of five seven-year-olds. Their creation, titled "Mom, play with us more often," was the result of a survey of 32 classmates regarding the frequency with which mothers play with their offspring and the reasons given for not doing so.
When color is used to portray varying degrees of strength within the same data set, gradients in color, not multiple colors, should reflect the strength of the variation.
A small graphic, if it's to scale, is absorbed with little loss of information.
Tables > pie charts. Graphics > pie charts. The only thing worse than a pie chart are multiple pie charts.
When numbers are highly labeled, a way can be found to work the labels into the graphic.
The text relevant to a graphic should lead into the graphic. Don't just slap the graphic anywhere on the page the way magazine editors do.
The seperation of blocks of text from their accompanying graphics is a deevolution caused by advances in printing technology.
Outsourcing the art for your data is ill-advised, because commercial artists are usually better cosmeticians than they are analysts.
Display data with greater weight in thicker lines.
Only a graphic can display a large volume of data in a small space.
The man who invented the bar chart, William Playfair, was skeptical about his invention, noting that his bar chart did not chart the progression of time. Multiple bar charts can be used, but generally, a graphic is a better way to display data that evolves over a timeline.
A good graphic includes every relevant variable in it - instead of looking at multiple graphics and trying to compare the two, all the relevant information should be laid out before the viewer in a neat and accurate fashion.
Graphics that accompany data should either be to scale or not used at all.
Lie factor:
size of effect shown in graphic
over
size of effect shown in data
Compare apples to apples.
Don't have a misleading zero point.
Draw everything to scale.
Tables are usually better than graphics for reporting 20 numbers or less.
Use as little ink as possible.
If the ink isn't displaying data, erase it.
The idea that statistics are boring has created a dearth of graphical abominations to accompany them.
Japan's statistics story:
No nation ranks more highly in its collective passion for statistics than Japan. Statistics are the subject of holidays, conventions, awards, and nationwide contests. Entries in the children's statistical graph contest were screened three times by judges, who awarded first prize this year to the work of five seven-year-olds. Their creation, titled "Mom, play with us more often," was the result of a survey of 32 classmates regarding the frequency with which mothers play with their offspring and the reasons given for not doing so.
When color is used to portray varying degrees of strength within the same data set, gradients in color, not multiple colors, should reflect the strength of the variation.
A small graphic, if it's to scale, is absorbed with little loss of information.
Tables > pie charts. Graphics > pie charts. The only thing worse than a pie chart are multiple pie charts.
When numbers are highly labeled, a way can be found to work the labels into the graphic.
The text relevant to a graphic should lead into the graphic. Don't just slap the graphic anywhere on the page the way magazine editors do.
The seperation of blocks of text from their accompanying graphics is a deevolution caused by advances in printing technology.
Outsourcing the art for your data is ill-advised, because commercial artists are usually better cosmeticians than they are analysts.
Display data with greater weight in thicker lines.
The Rebel Sell - Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter - **
The "rebel sell" is the idea that the masses are bad, and by doing things that distinguish yourself from them (such as buying "alternatives"), you become rebellious and cool.
The book opens with a recount of Kurt Cobain's suicide, framing him as a casualty of the myth of counterculture.
The great philosophers of the Enlightment (1688-1804) railed against 'obedience' and saw the masses as an ally in their struggle. Later radicals viewed the masses with suspicion, seeing them as part of the problem, not part of the solution. Between conformity and obedience, conformity became the greater sin; it is here from which the myth of counterculture draws its roots.
Counterculture has a tendency to reject perfectly rational solutions to problems in favor of ones that will never work, claiming that the rational solution is "not radical enough".
The crabs in a bucket story:
The crabs don't want to stay in the bucket, but once one makes any progress towards the rim, the others try to crawl over it, using its progress as a way of furthering their own escape. As a result, they all wind up back where they started.
The initial reluctance to give workers the vote was based on the assumption that the first thing they'd do is eat the rich. This is not what happened. The workers voted for reform, not revolution.
The first-generation hippies demonstrated their nonconformity by violating the dress code of the 1950s. It wasn't long before the clothing they wore started showing up in advertisements and on mannequins. Department stores took to selling peace medallions and love beads. "The system" regards nonconformists as a marketing opportunity, not a threat to the established order.
The concept of co-option, that the failure of a revolutionary idea stems from the successes "the system" achieves in consciously negating the idea's effects, is a cornerstone of countercultural theory that renders it unfalsifiable.
The goal of revolutionary thought should be to effect an improvement on society, not provide entertainment for intellectuals.
People learned you can't even organize a commune, much less an entire society, based on the assumption that people will behave like saints.
Having fun is not a subversive act.
Perfectly free and equal individuals often have an incentive to adopt coercively enforced rules of conduct to govern their interactions.
-- the idea is to stack the deck towards cooperation and away from exploitation
Dissent vs. deviance: dissent is legitimate protest from people theoretically willing to play by the rules, deviance is the behavior of people interested in breaking the rules for selfish reasons
The dissent vs. deviance litmus test: would the world be a better place to live if this behavior became mainstream?
A normal, well-adjusted adult follows the rules that promote the general interest and conscientiously objects to those that are unjust. This option is one the countercultural critique has studiously ignored.
-- Jon Stewart outlined the tendency of rationality to be trumped by rhetoric in his speech about how people don't take to the streets and shout, "Be reasonable!"
All the dumb little rules we are supposed to follow serve as cues that allow others to infer what is likely to follow.
The idea that people who play by the rules in small things will play by the rules in big things has an intuitive, but false, appeal; con artists and psychopaths are able to exploit this phenomenon to their advantage.
Nonconformists drive consumer spending in a big way by purchasing items that "set them apart" from the crowd.
-- when the crowd gets wind of the trend, the hipster must move on. He is trapped by his nature in an endless search for frontiers untouched by plebeian hands, the masses always nipping at his heels.
The question of whether or not you are engaged in competitive consumption has nothing to do with your thoughts on the subject. As an example, you may not think that driving an SUV or truck is a good idea, but there's an 80% chance you'll be the one who dies if you wind up in a fatality involving someone who does.
One way or another, the income of a society is going to be spent. People who don't buy things put their money in the bank, where it's spent by someone else. Reduced demand in one sector is met with increases in demand experienced among other sectors.
The hippies didn't need to sell out in order to become yuppies, because they were never really dissenting. Rejecting materialist values or mass society doesn't force you to reject consumer capitalism. "Dropping out", from a consumer standpoint, is manifested as an expressed willingness to pay a premium for goods that distinguish oneself from the masses. If you really want out of the system, you have to go off and live in the woods somewhere -- without commuting back and forth in a Range Rover.
The lower one's status one is, the more they're willing to pay to improve it.
Material goods: goods that are scarce because they require effort to produce
Positional goods: goods that are scarce because their production cannot be increased
Most goods have both material and positional qualities.
We can think of the positional aspect of a good as its "competitive premium": a premium paid by the good's purchaser that keeps other people out
Good taste is a positional good. One person can have it only if many others do not.
-- I referenced this earlier in my hipster comment
When people complain about threats to their individuality or their identity, they're really complaining about threats to their status. Distinction is a zero-sum game: you can only have it if others do not.
The Naomi Klein story:
In the beginning of No Logo, Naomi Klein complained about how companies are converting old factories into a series of faux factory-loft apartments. She lived in a real factory-loft apartment and was bothered by this. Any reader with a feel for how social class in Canada worked at the time would have known that real factory-loft apartments in Klein's area were possibly the most desirable pieces of property in the country, obtainable only by people with superior social connections. The arrival of the yuppies, presumably people who would not have been able to "properly appreciate" the district's revolutionary heritage, aggravated her and threatened an erosion of her social status. People were buying these lofts because they wanted to be cool like her. When faced with the prospect of losing the distinction of having a REAL factory-loft apartment, the idea that her landlord might decide to convert her building to condominiums, she did the only thing she could to keep her social status intact: threatened to move out.
In this story, we see the forces driving competitive consumption in their starkest form. The extraordinary thing is that they passed unnoticed, even though they occur in the introduction of a book that has been adopted as the bible of the anticonsumerism movement.
No Logo provides a stinging indictment of every aspect of the modern advertising-driven economy, and yet anyone who reads it through to the end will be startled to discover that it contains not one positive proposal for fixing any of these problems.
-- yeah what the fuck
-- this may be cognitive dissonance kicking in, but I'm glad she didn't waste my time by having me read a proposal I couldn't implement or influence. No Logo was a good book for promoting personal awareness of the topics she covered, which was about all I expected to get out of it when I picked it up
Supporters of school uniforms see them as a form of arms control that minimizes class differences between students.
The Branded story:
In her book Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers, journalist Alissa Quart takes a hard look at contemporary youth culture and is shocked by what she finds. Preteens wearing makeup, teens working as "trendspotters" for corporations, high schoolers doing steroids or getting costmetic surgery - all of them treading in a sea of brands, brands everywhere. Quart places the blame on marketers and advertisers, and because she is convinced that the enemy is conformity, not competition, she rejects school uniforms as a solution to the problem she has diagnosed. According to Quart, what students need to do is rebel. She celebrates the 60's scene, with its cultural creativity; she actually suggests that kids should become more like she was, back in the days when all she needed in the way of style was a pair of Converse trainers and a Ramones T-shirt.
The fact that she actually names the brand of shoes she wore during her adolescent rebellion is staggering. For some reason, she thinks there is a difference between the Converse trainers she wore (basketball shoes made famous by Julius Erving) and the Nikes that kids wear today (basketball shoes made famous by Michael Jordan), to the point where she was a 'rebel' and today's teenagers are 'victims'.
Advertising is less like brainwashing than it is like seduction. Just like you can't seduce someone who doesn't have an interest in sex, you can't sell teeth whitener to someone who is not concerned about his appearance.
Coolhunters and viral marketers provide a valuable service to low-status (uncool) groups by giving them more rapid access to what is cool, making it more difficult for high-status people to treat them with contempt.
-- that's an awesome perspective
-- one problem, though, is that these people can be wrong (to put it kindly) at which point you have uncool people being manipulated into picking up uncool things and thinking they're cool when they're not
If mass production allows individuals access to goods that they would otherwise not have been able to afford, it would be obnoxious to deny them the opportunity on the grounds that we don't like the aesthetic consequences.
Whenever you feel that society is forcing you to conform or treating you like a number, not a person, ask yourself, "Would my individuality create more work for other people?" If the answer is yes, your individualism is a luxury, and you should be adequately prepared to compensate those you impose upon for your exercise of it.
In an ideal world, no one would need to conserve anything, because economic conditions would be such that they could not afford to purchase much more than the optimal level of the goods and services they would have formerly been asked to conserve.
-- this makes sense from the perspective of scarcity economics, but my version of an ideal world is one in which production conditions are such that the need for conservation never arises - no one needs to conserve salt
The tragedy of the commons: when an individual who draws from a public pool is given incentives to exploit that pool at the expense of the other pool members and the knowledge that if he doesn't, others will. The result, naturally, is a race to the bottom.
Counterculture concocts explanations -- often empirically false -- as to how features of modern mass society that none of us could ever reasonably hope to change are creating social problems.
-- I'm looking at you, Michael Moore
-- the fact that counterculture is a cry for change directed at people unable to effect change is what turned me off of it. You can read books like No Logo, watch documentaries like Bowling for Columbine, but in the end all you wind up with are opinions, not solutions. What makes counterculture media counterculture is its message that the system is corrupt, something to be worked outside, and as you can imagine, this doesn't go a long way towards effecting meaningful change in objectionable industries. Could No Logo have been able to change Nike or any of the corporations it indicted if its message was directed at industry insiders, not the plebes? Maybe not, but maybe there's no need for them to change. These books aren't exactly Silent Spring [Rachel Carson's expose on pesticides that prompted the banning of DDT and saved the bald eagles] - the message they send is polemecist, not reformist, composed of an uncritical moral indictment against organizations whose practices the authors detest. We read these and wind up overeducated and opinionated, with half the facts and none of the answers.
-- I'm done here.
The book opens with a recount of Kurt Cobain's suicide, framing him as a casualty of the myth of counterculture.
The great philosophers of the Enlightment (1688-1804) railed against 'obedience' and saw the masses as an ally in their struggle. Later radicals viewed the masses with suspicion, seeing them as part of the problem, not part of the solution. Between conformity and obedience, conformity became the greater sin; it is here from which the myth of counterculture draws its roots.
Counterculture has a tendency to reject perfectly rational solutions to problems in favor of ones that will never work, claiming that the rational solution is "not radical enough".
The crabs in a bucket story:
The crabs don't want to stay in the bucket, but once one makes any progress towards the rim, the others try to crawl over it, using its progress as a way of furthering their own escape. As a result, they all wind up back where they started.
The initial reluctance to give workers the vote was based on the assumption that the first thing they'd do is eat the rich. This is not what happened. The workers voted for reform, not revolution.
The first-generation hippies demonstrated their nonconformity by violating the dress code of the 1950s. It wasn't long before the clothing they wore started showing up in advertisements and on mannequins. Department stores took to selling peace medallions and love beads. "The system" regards nonconformists as a marketing opportunity, not a threat to the established order.
The concept of co-option, that the failure of a revolutionary idea stems from the successes "the system" achieves in consciously negating the idea's effects, is a cornerstone of countercultural theory that renders it unfalsifiable.
The goal of revolutionary thought should be to effect an improvement on society, not provide entertainment for intellectuals.
People learned you can't even organize a commune, much less an entire society, based on the assumption that people will behave like saints.
Having fun is not a subversive act.
Perfectly free and equal individuals often have an incentive to adopt coercively enforced rules of conduct to govern their interactions.
-- the idea is to stack the deck towards cooperation and away from exploitation
Dissent vs. deviance: dissent is legitimate protest from people theoretically willing to play by the rules, deviance is the behavior of people interested in breaking the rules for selfish reasons
The dissent vs. deviance litmus test: would the world be a better place to live if this behavior became mainstream?
A normal, well-adjusted adult follows the rules that promote the general interest and conscientiously objects to those that are unjust. This option is one the countercultural critique has studiously ignored.
-- Jon Stewart outlined the tendency of rationality to be trumped by rhetoric in his speech about how people don't take to the streets and shout, "Be reasonable!"
All the dumb little rules we are supposed to follow serve as cues that allow others to infer what is likely to follow.
The idea that people who play by the rules in small things will play by the rules in big things has an intuitive, but false, appeal; con artists and psychopaths are able to exploit this phenomenon to their advantage.
Nonconformists drive consumer spending in a big way by purchasing items that "set them apart" from the crowd.
-- when the crowd gets wind of the trend, the hipster must move on. He is trapped by his nature in an endless search for frontiers untouched by plebeian hands, the masses always nipping at his heels.
The question of whether or not you are engaged in competitive consumption has nothing to do with your thoughts on the subject. As an example, you may not think that driving an SUV or truck is a good idea, but there's an 80% chance you'll be the one who dies if you wind up in a fatality involving someone who does.
One way or another, the income of a society is going to be spent. People who don't buy things put their money in the bank, where it's spent by someone else. Reduced demand in one sector is met with increases in demand experienced among other sectors.
The hippies didn't need to sell out in order to become yuppies, because they were never really dissenting. Rejecting materialist values or mass society doesn't force you to reject consumer capitalism. "Dropping out", from a consumer standpoint, is manifested as an expressed willingness to pay a premium for goods that distinguish oneself from the masses. If you really want out of the system, you have to go off and live in the woods somewhere -- without commuting back and forth in a Range Rover.
The lower one's status one is, the more they're willing to pay to improve it.
Material goods: goods that are scarce because they require effort to produce
Positional goods: goods that are scarce because their production cannot be increased
Most goods have both material and positional qualities.
We can think of the positional aspect of a good as its "competitive premium": a premium paid by the good's purchaser that keeps other people out
Good taste is a positional good. One person can have it only if many others do not.
-- I referenced this earlier in my hipster comment
When people complain about threats to their individuality or their identity, they're really complaining about threats to their status. Distinction is a zero-sum game: you can only have it if others do not.
The Naomi Klein story:
In the beginning of No Logo, Naomi Klein complained about how companies are converting old factories into a series of faux factory-loft apartments. She lived in a real factory-loft apartment and was bothered by this. Any reader with a feel for how social class in Canada worked at the time would have known that real factory-loft apartments in Klein's area were possibly the most desirable pieces of property in the country, obtainable only by people with superior social connections. The arrival of the yuppies, presumably people who would not have been able to "properly appreciate" the district's revolutionary heritage, aggravated her and threatened an erosion of her social status. People were buying these lofts because they wanted to be cool like her. When faced with the prospect of losing the distinction of having a REAL factory-loft apartment, the idea that her landlord might decide to convert her building to condominiums, she did the only thing she could to keep her social status intact: threatened to move out.
In this story, we see the forces driving competitive consumption in their starkest form. The extraordinary thing is that they passed unnoticed, even though they occur in the introduction of a book that has been adopted as the bible of the anticonsumerism movement.
No Logo provides a stinging indictment of every aspect of the modern advertising-driven economy, and yet anyone who reads it through to the end will be startled to discover that it contains not one positive proposal for fixing any of these problems.
-- yeah what the fuck
-- this may be cognitive dissonance kicking in, but I'm glad she didn't waste my time by having me read a proposal I couldn't implement or influence. No Logo was a good book for promoting personal awareness of the topics she covered, which was about all I expected to get out of it when I picked it up
Supporters of school uniforms see them as a form of arms control that minimizes class differences between students.
The Branded story:
In her book Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers, journalist Alissa Quart takes a hard look at contemporary youth culture and is shocked by what she finds. Preteens wearing makeup, teens working as "trendspotters" for corporations, high schoolers doing steroids or getting costmetic surgery - all of them treading in a sea of brands, brands everywhere. Quart places the blame on marketers and advertisers, and because she is convinced that the enemy is conformity, not competition, she rejects school uniforms as a solution to the problem she has diagnosed. According to Quart, what students need to do is rebel. She celebrates the 60's scene, with its cultural creativity; she actually suggests that kids should become more like she was, back in the days when all she needed in the way of style was a pair of Converse trainers and a Ramones T-shirt.
The fact that she actually names the brand of shoes she wore during her adolescent rebellion is staggering. For some reason, she thinks there is a difference between the Converse trainers she wore (basketball shoes made famous by Julius Erving) and the Nikes that kids wear today (basketball shoes made famous by Michael Jordan), to the point where she was a 'rebel' and today's teenagers are 'victims'.
Advertising is less like brainwashing than it is like seduction. Just like you can't seduce someone who doesn't have an interest in sex, you can't sell teeth whitener to someone who is not concerned about his appearance.
Coolhunters and viral marketers provide a valuable service to low-status (uncool) groups by giving them more rapid access to what is cool, making it more difficult for high-status people to treat them with contempt.
-- that's an awesome perspective
-- one problem, though, is that these people can be wrong (to put it kindly) at which point you have uncool people being manipulated into picking up uncool things and thinking they're cool when they're not
If mass production allows individuals access to goods that they would otherwise not have been able to afford, it would be obnoxious to deny them the opportunity on the grounds that we don't like the aesthetic consequences.
Whenever you feel that society is forcing you to conform or treating you like a number, not a person, ask yourself, "Would my individuality create more work for other people?" If the answer is yes, your individualism is a luxury, and you should be adequately prepared to compensate those you impose upon for your exercise of it.
In an ideal world, no one would need to conserve anything, because economic conditions would be such that they could not afford to purchase much more than the optimal level of the goods and services they would have formerly been asked to conserve.
-- this makes sense from the perspective of scarcity economics, but my version of an ideal world is one in which production conditions are such that the need for conservation never arises - no one needs to conserve salt
The tragedy of the commons: when an individual who draws from a public pool is given incentives to exploit that pool at the expense of the other pool members and the knowledge that if he doesn't, others will. The result, naturally, is a race to the bottom.
Counterculture concocts explanations -- often empirically false -- as to how features of modern mass society that none of us could ever reasonably hope to change are creating social problems.
-- I'm looking at you, Michael Moore
-- the fact that counterculture is a cry for change directed at people unable to effect change is what turned me off of it. You can read books like No Logo, watch documentaries like Bowling for Columbine, but in the end all you wind up with are opinions, not solutions. What makes counterculture media counterculture is its message that the system is corrupt, something to be worked outside, and as you can imagine, this doesn't go a long way towards effecting meaningful change in objectionable industries. Could No Logo have been able to change Nike or any of the corporations it indicted if its message was directed at industry insiders, not the plebes? Maybe not, but maybe there's no need for them to change. These books aren't exactly Silent Spring [Rachel Carson's expose on pesticides that prompted the banning of DDT and saved the bald eagles] - the message they send is polemecist, not reformist, composed of an uncritical moral indictment against organizations whose practices the authors detest. We read these and wind up overeducated and opinionated, with half the facts and none of the answers.
-- I'm done here.
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
You Just Don't Understand - Deborah Tannen - ***
When a woman asks, "What do you think?", chances are good that she wants a discussion, not a decision.
Women nag because they don't know if the man is taking them seriously; men delay because they want to feel like they're acting of their own volition.
-- if you genuinely want to help someone, ask them to let you know what you can do. If they're calling the shots, they won't feel like allowing you to assist them is an indication that they can't handle things.
Men look for evidence of dominance and status, women look for evidence of connection
Divorced men and women both cited increased freedom as a benefit, but the freedom meant different things. To men, the freedom meant reduced obligations. To women, the freedom meant they didn't have to worry about the men!
Again, when a woman says something to a man, she's probably not looking for a solution.
When a man offers unsolicited advice to a woman, he's telling her they're not the same - she has the problems, he has the answers.
When a man says something to a woman, she shouldn't pounce on it as an opportunity to improve their connection.
Women have a tendency to deflect attention from themselves.
Troubles for men: tell them they've got it
Troubles for women: ask them about it and let them share their feelings
"In order to help the highest-status member of the party to dominate the conversation, others are expected to ask him questions that they know he can answer with authority."
-- I'll have to try this sometime, people will love it
[talking about a guy trying to fix the author's camera]
"He declared the lid hopelessly stuck. He explained the reason, then explained in detail how I could take pictures without a light meter. . . Even though I knew there wasn't a chance in the world I would adopt his system, I listened politely, feigning interest, and assiduously wrote down his examples. . ."
-- How do you counter this?
-- Maybe he could have explained enough of it to give her the gist of its complexity, then asked her, "How is this sounding so far?" - that would give her a nice opportunity to tell him she doesn't want to do it or ask questions
"It's just that I'm so used to listening to men go on about things I don't care about, I didn't even realize how bored I was until you made me think about it."
- they will do it and they will hate you for it without knowing why
"There is a kind of social contract operating here. Many women not only feel comfortable seeking help, but feel honor-bound to seek it, accept it, and display gratitude. For their part, many men feel honor-bound to fulfill requests for help whether or not it's convenient for them to do so."
Women are more comfortable learning from other women, who don't seperate themselves from their students as strongly
-- when teaching a woman, have them do things - women like a shared growth experience vs. men's enjoyment of proving competence by obeying orders
Men get annoyed when people don't accept their judgement, because they think their competency is being questioned
-- what to remember here is that the point at which further assessment is "unnecessary" is reached sooner by men than women, who like to improve things
Men are public speakers, women private speakers.
For women, talk is interaction. For men, talk is information.
-- never spend more than a couple sentences on an unsolicited explanation
Men's silence at home is a disappointment to women.
Men tend to disregard women's arguments, which draw more strongly from anecdote than men's.
-- for a woman, the anecdote is a prelude to the point, not the evidence for it
Women are as likely as men to have opinions during meetings; however, they aren't as suited to competing for floor time.
- During a presentation, a woman's key drive is that people understand her. A man's drive is that his competency can stand up to any attack.
"Keeping friends up to date about the events in one's life is not only a privilege; for many women it is an obligation. One woman explained that she didn't enjoy telling the story of her breakup with her boyfriend over and over, but she had to, because if she failed to inform her friends about such an important development, they would have been deeply hurt when they found out. . . The woman, furthermore, was incredulous when she learned that her boyfriend had not told anyone at all about their breakup."
"Carol had several women friends she talked to every few days, exchanging stories about dates with men. They would share their excitement before a new date, then report in detail what had been said and done. When Carol fell in love and formed a lasting relationship with a man, she ran out of material for talks with her friends. . .This put a strain on her friendships."
-- Sex and the City?
A few girls told a researcher (Eckert) that they prefer to have boys as friends because boys don't try to get juicy details and are less likely to spread them around. The girls may think that this demonstrates the moral superiority of boys. But the researcher points out that the reason a boy is less likely to scavenge for gossip and distribute his findings is because he has much less to gain by it. Boys' access to status is less a matter of who they are close to. . .
"scapegoat": a way to address an imbalance of power within a conversation
A psychologist (Leet-Pellegrini) set out to discover whether gender or expertise determined who would behave dominantly in a conversation. She set up pairs of people and asked them to discuss the effects of television violence on children. In some cases, she made one of the partners an expert by providing relevant information ahead of time. On average, experts did talk more, but men experts talked more than women experts.
Expertise also had a different effect on women and men with regard to supportive behavior. Leet-Pellegrini hypothesized that the person being supportive would be the non-expert: this was true everywhere except when the expert was a woman and her non-expert partner was a man. In this situation, the women experts showed support - saying things like "Yeah" or "That's right" far MORE than the non-expert men they were talking to. The women in this experience didn't wield their expertise as power, instead playing it down and making up for it through extra assenting behavior. They acted as if their expertise were something to hide. . . and perhaps it was. . . evidence of the woman's superior knowledge sparked resentment, not respect.
-- WHOA
When a woman has knowledge but won't speak up, it's not because she's afraid of being wrong. It's because she's afraid of being offensive.
When an expert man talked to an uninformed woman, he controlled the conversation from start to finish. When an expert man talked to an uninformed man, he controlled the conversation at the start, but didn't always have it at the end. Apparently, when the women surmised that the men they were talking to were more informed, they accepted that. But the men, despite their lack of information, would try to give their expert fellows a run for their money, possibly gaining the upper hand by the end.
-- the author goes on to say that she automatically assumes that her expertise gives her authority, which women agree with, but men often challenge her. She also states that most women lack experience in defending themselves against argumentative challenges, which they misinterpret as personal attacks on their credibility.
Women play "group wins" while men play "I win"
Women ask, "Do you like me?", vs. men asking, "Do you respect me?"
Sociologist Mirra Komarovsky found that the more middle class a couple was, the more the husband and wife considered each other friends.
Men and women listen in different ways. Women want feedback and support; men want quiet attention.
Some men don't like to listen at length because they feel it frames them as subordinate. Many women do want to listen, but expect it to be reciprocal - and are frustrated when their turn never comes.
Women want a balance in conversation; men assume that conversations are automatically balanced by each person's need to speak.
Two sociologists found that lesbians have sex less often than heterosexuals or gay men. They believe this happens because the women don't feel comfortable taking the role of initiator, a position in which they could be potentially perceived as making demands.
-- I bet couples with a "butch" would have more sex than couples without
Men's focus on dominance trains them to recognize and rebel against orders coming from equals.
Women use "Let's do this" as a way of offering their opinions to the group without telling them what to do. Men translate "Let's do this" into "I want you to do this" and resist it as if it were a stealthy manipulation.
-- the only time "Let's do this" is appropriate in guy language is when a man is improving on a previous proposal
-- Women, if you have good ideas, the man-group needs you to submit them in the form of a question [as men do] and be willing to defend them from inferior ideas
-- if a woman is using "Let's" on you, you should be happy: you're in her group
"It is not that women do not want to get their way, but that they do not wish to purchase it at the cost of conflict."
Women engage in creative solutions to preserve a balance in status.
Women are used to hearing explanations for preferences, but guys aren't used to giving them.
Boys boast, but girls who boast get criticized by the group for showing off.
Boys typically air complaints about other boys in the offenders' presences. Girls' complaints typically air in the absence of the accused, as to avoid conflict [and the ostracism that comes from going too far].
Girls fighting shatters their potential for friendship and makes them enemies; guys fighting gives them an opportunity to hash out their differences and become friends.
A woman's stories tend to be about community: a man's stories tend to be about contests.
-- she can hear all your stories of contests when you're not talking to her
Women will talk as much as men when everyone has a chance to speak, but don't like to be solo speakers as much as men.
Because women don't struggle to be seen as one-up, they're often seen as one-down.
Women having lower status than men subjects everything they do to that bias, which is difficult to overcome because it's subconscious.
When a woman asks for something indirectly, it's because she wants to get it without subordinating the other party with a direct request -- not because she's trying to trick them.
A woman saying "I'm sorry" means she feels bad, not that she needs to apologize.
Women don't want their apologies "accepted" and ignored - they want you to apologize, too, which strengthens the connection.
When women and men get together, they act according to men's norms.
Women don't like to let people know what they're doing wrong unless this can be done in an egalitarian way.
To a woman, intimacy means telling her what's on your mind - including what hurts.
Understanding gender differences in conversational style may not prevent disagreements from arising, but it gives you a better chance of preventing them from spiraling out of control.
Women nag because they don't know if the man is taking them seriously; men delay because they want to feel like they're acting of their own volition.
-- if you genuinely want to help someone, ask them to let you know what you can do. If they're calling the shots, they won't feel like allowing you to assist them is an indication that they can't handle things.
Men look for evidence of dominance and status, women look for evidence of connection
Divorced men and women both cited increased freedom as a benefit, but the freedom meant different things. To men, the freedom meant reduced obligations. To women, the freedom meant they didn't have to worry about the men!
Again, when a woman says something to a man, she's probably not looking for a solution.
When a man offers unsolicited advice to a woman, he's telling her they're not the same - she has the problems, he has the answers.
When a man says something to a woman, she shouldn't pounce on it as an opportunity to improve their connection.
Women have a tendency to deflect attention from themselves.
Troubles for men: tell them they've got it
Troubles for women: ask them about it and let them share their feelings
"In order to help the highest-status member of the party to dominate the conversation, others are expected to ask him questions that they know he can answer with authority."
-- I'll have to try this sometime, people will love it
[talking about a guy trying to fix the author's camera]
"He declared the lid hopelessly stuck. He explained the reason, then explained in detail how I could take pictures without a light meter. . . Even though I knew there wasn't a chance in the world I would adopt his system, I listened politely, feigning interest, and assiduously wrote down his examples. . ."
-- How do you counter this?
-- Maybe he could have explained enough of it to give her the gist of its complexity, then asked her, "How is this sounding so far?" - that would give her a nice opportunity to tell him she doesn't want to do it or ask questions
"It's just that I'm so used to listening to men go on about things I don't care about, I didn't even realize how bored I was until you made me think about it."
- they will do it and they will hate you for it without knowing why
"There is a kind of social contract operating here. Many women not only feel comfortable seeking help, but feel honor-bound to seek it, accept it, and display gratitude. For their part, many men feel honor-bound to fulfill requests for help whether or not it's convenient for them to do so."
Women are more comfortable learning from other women, who don't seperate themselves from their students as strongly
-- when teaching a woman, have them do things - women like a shared growth experience vs. men's enjoyment of proving competence by obeying orders
Men get annoyed when people don't accept their judgement, because they think their competency is being questioned
-- what to remember here is that the point at which further assessment is "unnecessary" is reached sooner by men than women, who like to improve things
Men are public speakers, women private speakers.
For women, talk is interaction. For men, talk is information.
-- never spend more than a couple sentences on an unsolicited explanation
Men's silence at home is a disappointment to women.
Men tend to disregard women's arguments, which draw more strongly from anecdote than men's.
-- for a woman, the anecdote is a prelude to the point, not the evidence for it
Women are as likely as men to have opinions during meetings; however, they aren't as suited to competing for floor time.
- During a presentation, a woman's key drive is that people understand her. A man's drive is that his competency can stand up to any attack.
"Keeping friends up to date about the events in one's life is not only a privilege; for many women it is an obligation. One woman explained that she didn't enjoy telling the story of her breakup with her boyfriend over and over, but she had to, because if she failed to inform her friends about such an important development, they would have been deeply hurt when they found out. . . The woman, furthermore, was incredulous when she learned that her boyfriend had not told anyone at all about their breakup."
"Carol had several women friends she talked to every few days, exchanging stories about dates with men. They would share their excitement before a new date, then report in detail what had been said and done. When Carol fell in love and formed a lasting relationship with a man, she ran out of material for talks with her friends. . .This put a strain on her friendships."
-- Sex and the City?
A few girls told a researcher (Eckert) that they prefer to have boys as friends because boys don't try to get juicy details and are less likely to spread them around. The girls may think that this demonstrates the moral superiority of boys. But the researcher points out that the reason a boy is less likely to scavenge for gossip and distribute his findings is because he has much less to gain by it. Boys' access to status is less a matter of who they are close to. . .
"scapegoat": a way to address an imbalance of power within a conversation
A psychologist (Leet-Pellegrini) set out to discover whether gender or expertise determined who would behave dominantly in a conversation. She set up pairs of people and asked them to discuss the effects of television violence on children. In some cases, she made one of the partners an expert by providing relevant information ahead of time. On average, experts did talk more, but men experts talked more than women experts.
Expertise also had a different effect on women and men with regard to supportive behavior. Leet-Pellegrini hypothesized that the person being supportive would be the non-expert: this was true everywhere except when the expert was a woman and her non-expert partner was a man. In this situation, the women experts showed support - saying things like "Yeah" or "That's right" far MORE than the non-expert men they were talking to. The women in this experience didn't wield their expertise as power, instead playing it down and making up for it through extra assenting behavior. They acted as if their expertise were something to hide. . . and perhaps it was. . . evidence of the woman's superior knowledge sparked resentment, not respect.
-- WHOA
When a woman has knowledge but won't speak up, it's not because she's afraid of being wrong. It's because she's afraid of being offensive.
When an expert man talked to an uninformed woman, he controlled the conversation from start to finish. When an expert man talked to an uninformed man, he controlled the conversation at the start, but didn't always have it at the end. Apparently, when the women surmised that the men they were talking to were more informed, they accepted that. But the men, despite their lack of information, would try to give their expert fellows a run for their money, possibly gaining the upper hand by the end.
-- the author goes on to say that she automatically assumes that her expertise gives her authority, which women agree with, but men often challenge her. She also states that most women lack experience in defending themselves against argumentative challenges, which they misinterpret as personal attacks on their credibility.
Women play "group wins" while men play "I win"
Women ask, "Do you like me?", vs. men asking, "Do you respect me?"
Sociologist Mirra Komarovsky found that the more middle class a couple was, the more the husband and wife considered each other friends.
Men and women listen in different ways. Women want feedback and support; men want quiet attention.
Some men don't like to listen at length because they feel it frames them as subordinate. Many women do want to listen, but expect it to be reciprocal - and are frustrated when their turn never comes.
Women want a balance in conversation; men assume that conversations are automatically balanced by each person's need to speak.
Two sociologists found that lesbians have sex less often than heterosexuals or gay men. They believe this happens because the women don't feel comfortable taking the role of initiator, a position in which they could be potentially perceived as making demands.
-- I bet couples with a "butch" would have more sex than couples without
Men's focus on dominance trains them to recognize and rebel against orders coming from equals.
Women use "Let's do this" as a way of offering their opinions to the group without telling them what to do. Men translate "Let's do this" into "I want you to do this" and resist it as if it were a stealthy manipulation.
-- the only time "Let's do this" is appropriate in guy language is when a man is improving on a previous proposal
-- Women, if you have good ideas, the man-group needs you to submit them in the form of a question [as men do] and be willing to defend them from inferior ideas
-- if a woman is using "Let's" on you, you should be happy: you're in her group
"It is not that women do not want to get their way, but that they do not wish to purchase it at the cost of conflict."
Women engage in creative solutions to preserve a balance in status.
Women are used to hearing explanations for preferences, but guys aren't used to giving them.
Boys boast, but girls who boast get criticized by the group for showing off.
Boys typically air complaints about other boys in the offenders' presences. Girls' complaints typically air in the absence of the accused, as to avoid conflict [and the ostracism that comes from going too far].
Girls fighting shatters their potential for friendship and makes them enemies; guys fighting gives them an opportunity to hash out their differences and become friends.
A woman's stories tend to be about community: a man's stories tend to be about contests.
-- she can hear all your stories of contests when you're not talking to her
Women will talk as much as men when everyone has a chance to speak, but don't like to be solo speakers as much as men.
Because women don't struggle to be seen as one-up, they're often seen as one-down.
Women having lower status than men subjects everything they do to that bias, which is difficult to overcome because it's subconscious.
When a woman asks for something indirectly, it's because she wants to get it without subordinating the other party with a direct request -- not because she's trying to trick them.
A woman saying "I'm sorry" means she feels bad, not that she needs to apologize.
Women don't want their apologies "accepted" and ignored - they want you to apologize, too, which strengthens the connection.
When women and men get together, they act according to men's norms.
Women don't like to let people know what they're doing wrong unless this can be done in an egalitarian way.
To a woman, intimacy means telling her what's on your mind - including what hurts.
Understanding gender differences in conversational style may not prevent disagreements from arising, but it gives you a better chance of preventing them from spiraling out of control.
The Undercover Economist - Tim Harford - ***
Things are most expensive when they are scarce: through examination, you can find out whether the scarcity is natural or artificial
Three economic reasons to pay expensive prices:
- The ROI justifies the price
- The convenience justifies the price
- The alternative is unavailable
A trade union is partly designed to bargain collectively, but also partly designed to block too much entry into the profession.
The self-incrimination strategy: where a company will charge a premium for some of its products despite similar production costs
One way to get people to pay as much as they can afford is to make the cheaper alternatives as unappealing as possible
Safeway vs. Wholefoods:
Safeway charges high prices on branded orange juice and sparkling water, because those are luxury items to its customers. Wholefoods sells these items for less, because these are low-end items in Wholefoods: the high-end customers are likely to buy the fresh-squeezed juice at the in-store juice bar or other such products.
Price discounts are best saved for price-conscious or repeat customers.
People object to individual-based prices, but are less resistant to group-based prices.
Premiums charged by retailers go straight into their pockets - the raw materials are a tiny portion of the price of the good, and changing them is a miniscule increase in expense.
When retailers rotate beween sale prices and high prices, they're able to make sales to price-sensitive consumers who won't buy the item for the higher price.
Companies find it more profitable to increase prices (above the sale price) by a larger amount on an unpredictable basis than by a small amount on a predictable basis.
One trick retailers use is to separate items with premiums from lower-priced items so that the consumer doesn't notice the price difference
-- not stocking the lower-priced alternatives also works, as does giving all items a premium, when dealing with price-insensitive customers
Restaurants can't charge people for dawdling, but they can charge people extra for items that tend to be consumed during longer meals, such as appetizers, desserts, and wine.
Externality: any impact of an economic transaction on an uninvolved party
Externalities need to be proportionately charged to the parties causing them
Externality pricing is attractive because it attacks the problem without making any assumptions regarding the solution.
- some of the solutions are good, but others are dodges (building a home with few windows to escape per-window luxury taxes)
The Undercover Economist vs. the carbon-neutral movement:
When the UE got to the discussion, a staff member asked him how he traveled to the meeting, explaining that trees would be planted to offset the emissions. The UE didn't understand how this worked. If planting trees was the best way to deal with carbon issues, why have the meeting? If the awareness-raising debate was the important thing, why spend their limited resources planting trees?
Subsidies mar the true cost of things, allowing inefficient and otherwise impractical transactions to take place
The energy efficiency example: if a renovation is worth $500 to a homeowner and $300 to a utility company, it won't get done if it costs $1000. If a government grant of $500 is given to perform the renovation, the government will have spent $500 to make the parties $300 better off.
-- if a subsidy is insufficient, it encourages little change and raises the margin slightly
-- if a subsidy is an overcompensation, it encourages too much change and raises the margin in a big way
-- insufficient subsidies would be a good way to expand important but marginal trades
-- overcompsative subsidies would be good for investment purposes: if the important thing is that the investment gets made, it might be better to overpay and recoup the investment after a longer period than to never make the investment
Inside information changes the nature of a market.
the lemons problem: when inside information guts a market because ignorant buyers are unwilling to pay for quality they cannot observe
Tourist traps exploit the tourist's lack of inside information, charging him a premium for his ignorance.
Health insurance is expensive because people are able to self-select their participation: "fair" rates are noxious to the healthy, but leapt upon by the feeble
The only information a potential customer can glean from an ad with no informational content is that it was expensive to make, and therefore the entity responsible for it must be doing something right.
-- that's awesome
When you have inside information and someone else knows it, you can earn trust by communicating your value in ways that would be prohibitive to the valueless
When someone else has inside information and you know it, you can ask them to demonstrate their value - and you can enact safeguards against duplicity
moral hazard: the prospect that a party insulated from risk may behave differently from the way it would behave if it were fully exposed to the risk
Reported earning per share:
When buying a stock, check the company's earnings per share against the share price
The Grolsch method of stock trading: see what's popular, buy it early, cash out quickly
Long-term price-earnings ratios have always been around 16.
All stock prices incorporate tremendous expert knowledge.
Long-term profitability for a company comes from having a capability others cannot match.
When the telecommunications spectrum was auctioned off, the auction theorists made the mistake of allowing the telecommunications companies to make bids containing area codes. Since every company wanted a piece of the pie, but none of them wanted to pay more than they had to for it, the companies chose to bid in blank territories.
Collectivist auction: anyone who stays in the room is willing to buy the item for the named price, whereas anyone who leaves is not
Never ascribe to conspiracy that which is adequately explained by incompetence.
A project is most likely to be successful if the people who benefit from its success are the same people who make it possible.
Nepal's dam:
Nepal's irrigation system involved a dam and canals. The farmers near the dam would help clear the canals, and the farmers near the canals would help maintain the dam. When a new dam was built, a dam that required less maintenance, the farmers near the dam no longer needed help and the agreement broke down.
Cameroon, like other poor countries, is a topsy-turvy world in which it's in most people's interest to take action that directly or indirectly damages everyone else.
Comparative advantage is the foundation of the way economists think about trade.
-- nationalism makes comparative advantage an arms race
One of the most important theorems of trade theory, the Lerner theorem, proved in 1936 that with a zero trade balance, a tax on imports is exactly equivalent to a tax on exports.
Three economic reasons to pay expensive prices:
- The ROI justifies the price
- The convenience justifies the price
- The alternative is unavailable
A trade union is partly designed to bargain collectively, but also partly designed to block too much entry into the profession.
The self-incrimination strategy: where a company will charge a premium for some of its products despite similar production costs
One way to get people to pay as much as they can afford is to make the cheaper alternatives as unappealing as possible
Safeway vs. Wholefoods:
Safeway charges high prices on branded orange juice and sparkling water, because those are luxury items to its customers. Wholefoods sells these items for less, because these are low-end items in Wholefoods: the high-end customers are likely to buy the fresh-squeezed juice at the in-store juice bar or other such products.
Price discounts are best saved for price-conscious or repeat customers.
People object to individual-based prices, but are less resistant to group-based prices.
Premiums charged by retailers go straight into their pockets - the raw materials are a tiny portion of the price of the good, and changing them is a miniscule increase in expense.
When retailers rotate beween sale prices and high prices, they're able to make sales to price-sensitive consumers who won't buy the item for the higher price.
Companies find it more profitable to increase prices (above the sale price) by a larger amount on an unpredictable basis than by a small amount on a predictable basis.
One trick retailers use is to separate items with premiums from lower-priced items so that the consumer doesn't notice the price difference
-- not stocking the lower-priced alternatives also works, as does giving all items a premium, when dealing with price-insensitive customers
Restaurants can't charge people for dawdling, but they can charge people extra for items that tend to be consumed during longer meals, such as appetizers, desserts, and wine.
Externality: any impact of an economic transaction on an uninvolved party
Externalities need to be proportionately charged to the parties causing them
Externality pricing is attractive because it attacks the problem without making any assumptions regarding the solution.
- some of the solutions are good, but others are dodges (building a home with few windows to escape per-window luxury taxes)
The Undercover Economist vs. the carbon-neutral movement:
When the UE got to the discussion, a staff member asked him how he traveled to the meeting, explaining that trees would be planted to offset the emissions. The UE didn't understand how this worked. If planting trees was the best way to deal with carbon issues, why have the meeting? If the awareness-raising debate was the important thing, why spend their limited resources planting trees?
Subsidies mar the true cost of things, allowing inefficient and otherwise impractical transactions to take place
The energy efficiency example: if a renovation is worth $500 to a homeowner and $300 to a utility company, it won't get done if it costs $1000. If a government grant of $500 is given to perform the renovation, the government will have spent $500 to make the parties $300 better off.
-- if a subsidy is insufficient, it encourages little change and raises the margin slightly
-- if a subsidy is an overcompensation, it encourages too much change and raises the margin in a big way
-- insufficient subsidies would be a good way to expand important but marginal trades
-- overcompsative subsidies would be good for investment purposes: if the important thing is that the investment gets made, it might be better to overpay and recoup the investment after a longer period than to never make the investment
Inside information changes the nature of a market.
the lemons problem: when inside information guts a market because ignorant buyers are unwilling to pay for quality they cannot observe
Tourist traps exploit the tourist's lack of inside information, charging him a premium for his ignorance.
Health insurance is expensive because people are able to self-select their participation: "fair" rates are noxious to the healthy, but leapt upon by the feeble
The only information a potential customer can glean from an ad with no informational content is that it was expensive to make, and therefore the entity responsible for it must be doing something right.
-- that's awesome
When you have inside information and someone else knows it, you can earn trust by communicating your value in ways that would be prohibitive to the valueless
When someone else has inside information and you know it, you can ask them to demonstrate their value - and you can enact safeguards against duplicity
moral hazard: the prospect that a party insulated from risk may behave differently from the way it would behave if it were fully exposed to the risk
Reported earning per share:
When buying a stock, check the company's earnings per share against the share price
The Grolsch method of stock trading: see what's popular, buy it early, cash out quickly
Long-term price-earnings ratios have always been around 16.
All stock prices incorporate tremendous expert knowledge.
Long-term profitability for a company comes from having a capability others cannot match.
When the telecommunications spectrum was auctioned off, the auction theorists made the mistake of allowing the telecommunications companies to make bids containing area codes. Since every company wanted a piece of the pie, but none of them wanted to pay more than they had to for it, the companies chose to bid in blank territories.
Collectivist auction: anyone who stays in the room is willing to buy the item for the named price, whereas anyone who leaves is not
Never ascribe to conspiracy that which is adequately explained by incompetence.
A project is most likely to be successful if the people who benefit from its success are the same people who make it possible.
Nepal's dam:
Nepal's irrigation system involved a dam and canals. The farmers near the dam would help clear the canals, and the farmers near the canals would help maintain the dam. When a new dam was built, a dam that required less maintenance, the farmers near the dam no longer needed help and the agreement broke down.
Cameroon, like other poor countries, is a topsy-turvy world in which it's in most people's interest to take action that directly or indirectly damages everyone else.
Comparative advantage is the foundation of the way economists think about trade.
-- nationalism makes comparative advantage an arms race
One of the most important theorems of trade theory, the Lerner theorem, proved in 1936 that with a zero trade balance, a tax on imports is exactly equivalent to a tax on exports.
The Strategy of Conflict - Thomas Schelling - ****
There are two schools of thought regarding conflict. One school believes that conflict is bad and tries to eliminate it. The other school believes that conflict is inevitable and tries to win.
Most conflict situations are essentially bargaining situations.
Using an ultimatum as deterrence uses different skills than the carrying out of that ultimatum.
As far as deterrence goes, the only way a threat can be "too large" is if it violates suspension of disbelief with its severity - effective deterrent threats are never carried out.
-- That's kind of cool, but I disagree with it. In a situation where the effectiveness of a solution is fixed, you ideally want to solve the problem with the least amount of coercion possible. This makes for better relations and doesn't give your opponents the ability to develop defenses against your stronger weapons.
Being unable to appeal to a higher authority hurts negotiations.
Conflict theory is based on rationality, but irrationality can be a strategic advantage.
The threat of mutual destruction cannot be used to deter an adversary too unintelligent to comprehend it or too weak to enforce his will on those he represents.
We tend to identify peace, stability, and conflict resolution with notions like trust, good faith, and mutual respect. To the extent that this view encourages trust and respect, it's good. When trust and good faith don't exist, and when these qualities can't be cultivated by our pretending they exist, we need to look elsewhere for peaceful solutions.
-- in Chapter 2, the book specifically states that it isn't going to concern itself with mutually advantageous bargaining: instead, it'll focus solely on situations where good for one means bad for the other.
-- that seems like a limited view. A rose is probably not going to be the first thing an expert thistle-spotter sees.
Binding oneself fixes your position, but doing so surrenders control to the other party.
The first person to lock himself into a position establishes the precedent.
If you can demonstrate that the other party isn't commited, or that they've miscalculated their commitment, you may undo or revise their commitment.
Restricting the agenda: saying "these are the only things we discuss" to prevent extracurricular extortion (and non-essential issues)
Imagine there are two projects, each with a cost of 3. Each project is worth 2 to Player A and 4 to Player B. Player A has no incentive to do either of these projects by himself. If Player B wants to get Player A's help, he needs to offer to split the costs - giving Player A a net gain of 1 vs. Player B's net gain of 5.
-- note: if Player A and Player B were directly competing with each other, it would probably be unwise for Player A to double Player B's potential growth (if Player B did both projects by himself, he'd be at +2 instead of +4)
An important limitation of economic problems is that they tend to involve divisible objects and compensable activities. If a drainage ditch that would protect two houses costs $1000, and it's worth $800 to both homeowners, we assume that if they both knew the score, they'd get together and pay the $1000 jointly. But if it costs 10 hours a week to be scoutmaster, and each considers the job worth 8 hours of his time but one man must do the whole job, we can't assume that one of the neighbors will propose a deal to compensate the other for those extra hours.
When you bind yourself to a principle, it looks like you must either choose stalemate or discredit that principle.
-- my way to counter principled negotiations is to convince the party that either:
-- (a.) they shouldn't be applying the principle to this particular case, or
-- (b.) my offers aren't inconsistent with their principles
Last clear chance: a legal doctrine that recognizes that before an event occurs, there are points at which some of the parties can no longer affect it.
The best defense against a threat is to carry out your actions before the threat is ever made. If you can't hasten your actions, you can commit yourself to them to the point where the threat would be unable to alter your course. Finally, the threat has to be communicated - if you make yourself unavailable for messages, you can deter the threat itself.
-- that is unbelievable
If a threat can be broken down into a series of smaller threats, there's an opportunity to demonstrate on the first few transgressions that the threat will be carried out on the rest.
This tactic of decomposition applies to promises as well as threats. If neither party trusts the other on large issues, they might be willing to trust each other on small ones.
What makes many agreements enforceable is only the recognition of future opportunities that will be eliminated if mutual trust is not created and maintained, and that the value of these opportunities outweighs the gains that would come from cheating in the present instance.
-- you can manipulate this dynamic by structuring situations so people have nothing to gain by cheating you
When people can't communicate but need to cooperate, they do so through a common language of equitability, selecting what they believe to be logical points of agreement.
Since agreements typically default to "logical" values, it's important to set the stage in such a way as to give favorable outcomes prominence.
"The initial departure of retaliation from the locality that provokes it may be a kind of declaration of independence that is not conducive to the creation of stable mutual expectations."
-- if your relative weakness in an assessment based on stable expectations is what keeps your opponents from fearing your retaliation, this kind of declaration is the only immediate way to achieve meaningful deterrence.
-- Any bargaining situation can quickly evolve into a hierarchy of extracurricular threats and promises if there are no limits regarding what can be put on the table. Any zero-sum situation you see in reality can be transformed away from its basic dynamic with just a few words.
Mobs evolved away from leadership because leadership could be identified and eliminated: now, "incidents" are the coordinating entities.
Tipping points are the result of communication systems that make it easy to take one course of action and virtually impossible to agree on other solutions.
Coordination isn't about guessing what the other person will do: it's about guessing what he thinks you'll do based on what you'll think he'll do, ad infinitum.
-- giving people a prize for successfully choosing the options they think others will find most attractive is an unbelievably effective way to determine mass appeal
If your neighbor's fruit tree overhangs your yard and you pick all the fruit on your side of the line, he has a pretty good idea of what he's acquiesced to in future if he doesn't retaliate. If, instead, you pick the same amount of fruit randomly from both sides, he won't really know how to react. Was it you who took the fruit? Is he going to have to stop you, or are you not going to take any more?
Game theory needs to take into account communication and enforcement systems to be applicable in real-world situations.
If twenty men are held up for robbery by one man who has six bullets, they can overwhelm him provided they're willing to lose six of themselves. The gunman must keep this kind of agreement from being formed: he must sever their communications and threaten any man from being first.
Prohibition delivers enormous power into the hands of the people who can enforce otherwise-unenforcable contracts.
"The ordinary high-school graduate has to work hard for his money, but he could destroy a hundred times that much if he set his mind to it. Given an institutional arrangement in which he could abstain from destruction for a mere fraction of the value that he might have destroyed, the boy clearly has a calling as an extortionist rather than as a mechanic or clerk. It is fortunate that extortion usually defends on self-identification and overt communication by the extortionist himself."
-- bahaha
The timely destruction of communication may be a winning tactic. When a husband and wife are arguing on the phone about where to have dinner, the argument is won by the wife if she announces where she's going and hangs up.
-- that's not a winning tactic unless the need to collaborate outweighs the desire to prevent the "winner" from reaping the rewards of dysfunctionality. Even if it succeeds, it damages the "winner's" reputation: people recognize that there's not a lot of potential for a collaborative relationship with someone whose idea of negotiation is to get the last word in, destroy all communication, then wait for the other guy to acquiesce.
-- the best use of this tactic is temporary interruption of communication, which takes people out of the moment and gives them time to think about the preceding negotiations. The only time you ever want to be the "hang-up-the-phone" guy is when someone's trying to steamroll over your final offer: there's no discussion taking place at that point.
Children are skilled at avoiding the warning glance from their parents, knowing that if they perceive it the parent is obliged to punish noncompliance. Adults are equally skilled at not requesting the permission they suspect would be denied, knowing that explicit denial is a sterner sanction that obliges the denying authorities to take cognizance of the transgression.
-- the "better to seek forgiveness than beg permission" douchebags
In zero-sum games, the objective is not to be found out. In mixed-motive games, the objective is to make the other party take your behavior for granted.
Those who played uncooperatively against a cooperative partner had an opportunity, on the second play, to respond to the implicit offer of cooperation. Instead of thinking of the act as a cooperative one, however, they tended to assume that the cooperative player either didn't care or didn't quite understand the game.
-- there's something to be learned from this.
A promise's cost is paid when it succeeds, and a threat's cost is paid when it fails. If you promise more than you need to, you pay more than you need to. If you threaten more than you need to, the excess is superfluous - a successful threat is one that's not carried out.
-- again, I would stay away from threatening more than is necessary... they go into some math that agrees
You can't threaten that you MIGHT do something, because that's equivalent to saying that you MIGHT NOT do it - it shows that you're not commited. Furthermore, if you don't carry out a threat that you MIGHT have commited, you're only reinforcing your opponent's belief that when it's put up or shut up you'll shut up.
The only way to threaten that you MIGHT do something is if the final decision to carry out that threat is not entirely under your control.
Brinksmanship is the ability to push your opponent to the point where if you go, he goes with you.
If surprise has an advantage, it makes sense to be the first person to gain that advantage.
The perceived likelihood of being attacked first is a large factor in one's willingness to attack.
-- ideally, you want to structure situations so that surprise attacks confer no advantage: barring that, you want their advantage to be outweighed by disadvantages.
If you have the ability to strike with impunity, your opponent will factor that into the likelihood that you'll attack first and be accordingly more likely to attack you because of it.
An example is submarines. As things stand, submarines can't be stopped from launching their nukes. If technology came out that made it possible to detect and eliminate every sub before its nukes were launched, the situation would be substantially less stable [thanks to the increased effectiveness of surprise attacks]. The U.S. knows this, but we have to research submarine detection methods anyway - we can't afford to be without detection when someone else has it.
It's important that your opponent is not forced to guess whether or not you'll attack him if you have no intention of making a surprise attack. During the Cold War, a general remarked, "Our reluctance to strike first is in fact a military disadvantage to us; but it is also, paradoxially, a factor in preventing a world conflict today."
-- earlier in the book, the author recounts someone's proposal not to execute the Russian spies who represented Russia's only way of independently verifying that we were telling the truth about this
-- when you launch a surprise attack, the goal should be to obliterate the opponent's capacity for reprisal.
An assessment of defensive measures comes out differently if we put primary reliance on deterrence. Chicago cannot be hidden. Similarly, a defense of Chicago that requires the enemy to triple the size of his attack may be a poor prospect; it may mean only that the enemy must invest in a larger initial attack.
-- this is something I know from RTS. If you're building static defenses, odds are you're probably losing.
The ideal limitation for a situation in which people can't be stopped from cheating is high enough to negate the advantage of cheating.
If the enemy can hit anything he can locate, and kill anything he can hit, he has to be made unable to locate it.
Examine the sustainability of measures for increasing alertness. If they're not sustainable, they're not effective solutions against situations where the enemy can attack at any time.
You cannot prove that you won't do something. You can only prove that you can't.
Compliance must be observable, verifiable, and provable.
Tenants are less easily removed by threat of forcible eviction than by shutting off the utilities.
J.M. Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money
The Art of Coercion
Most conflict situations are essentially bargaining situations.
Using an ultimatum as deterrence uses different skills than the carrying out of that ultimatum.
As far as deterrence goes, the only way a threat can be "too large" is if it violates suspension of disbelief with its severity - effective deterrent threats are never carried out.
-- That's kind of cool, but I disagree with it. In a situation where the effectiveness of a solution is fixed, you ideally want to solve the problem with the least amount of coercion possible. This makes for better relations and doesn't give your opponents the ability to develop defenses against your stronger weapons.
Being unable to appeal to a higher authority hurts negotiations.
Conflict theory is based on rationality, but irrationality can be a strategic advantage.
The threat of mutual destruction cannot be used to deter an adversary too unintelligent to comprehend it or too weak to enforce his will on those he represents.
We tend to identify peace, stability, and conflict resolution with notions like trust, good faith, and mutual respect. To the extent that this view encourages trust and respect, it's good. When trust and good faith don't exist, and when these qualities can't be cultivated by our pretending they exist, we need to look elsewhere for peaceful solutions.
-- in Chapter 2, the book specifically states that it isn't going to concern itself with mutually advantageous bargaining: instead, it'll focus solely on situations where good for one means bad for the other.
-- that seems like a limited view. A rose is probably not going to be the first thing an expert thistle-spotter sees.
Binding oneself fixes your position, but doing so surrenders control to the other party.
The first person to lock himself into a position establishes the precedent.
If you can demonstrate that the other party isn't commited, or that they've miscalculated their commitment, you may undo or revise their commitment.
Restricting the agenda: saying "these are the only things we discuss" to prevent extracurricular extortion (and non-essential issues)
Imagine there are two projects, each with a cost of 3. Each project is worth 2 to Player A and 4 to Player B. Player A has no incentive to do either of these projects by himself. If Player B wants to get Player A's help, he needs to offer to split the costs - giving Player A a net gain of 1 vs. Player B's net gain of 5.
-- note: if Player A and Player B were directly competing with each other, it would probably be unwise for Player A to double Player B's potential growth (if Player B did both projects by himself, he'd be at +2 instead of +4)
An important limitation of economic problems is that they tend to involve divisible objects and compensable activities. If a drainage ditch that would protect two houses costs $1000, and it's worth $800 to both homeowners, we assume that if they both knew the score, they'd get together and pay the $1000 jointly. But if it costs 10 hours a week to be scoutmaster, and each considers the job worth 8 hours of his time but one man must do the whole job, we can't assume that one of the neighbors will propose a deal to compensate the other for those extra hours.
When you bind yourself to a principle, it looks like you must either choose stalemate or discredit that principle.
-- my way to counter principled negotiations is to convince the party that either:
-- (a.) they shouldn't be applying the principle to this particular case, or
-- (b.) my offers aren't inconsistent with their principles
Last clear chance: a legal doctrine that recognizes that before an event occurs, there are points at which some of the parties can no longer affect it.
The best defense against a threat is to carry out your actions before the threat is ever made. If you can't hasten your actions, you can commit yourself to them to the point where the threat would be unable to alter your course. Finally, the threat has to be communicated - if you make yourself unavailable for messages, you can deter the threat itself.
-- that is unbelievable
If a threat can be broken down into a series of smaller threats, there's an opportunity to demonstrate on the first few transgressions that the threat will be carried out on the rest.
This tactic of decomposition applies to promises as well as threats. If neither party trusts the other on large issues, they might be willing to trust each other on small ones.
What makes many agreements enforceable is only the recognition of future opportunities that will be eliminated if mutual trust is not created and maintained, and that the value of these opportunities outweighs the gains that would come from cheating in the present instance.
-- you can manipulate this dynamic by structuring situations so people have nothing to gain by cheating you
When people can't communicate but need to cooperate, they do so through a common language of equitability, selecting what they believe to be logical points of agreement.
Since agreements typically default to "logical" values, it's important to set the stage in such a way as to give favorable outcomes prominence.
"The initial departure of retaliation from the locality that provokes it may be a kind of declaration of independence that is not conducive to the creation of stable mutual expectations."
-- if your relative weakness in an assessment based on stable expectations is what keeps your opponents from fearing your retaliation, this kind of declaration is the only immediate way to achieve meaningful deterrence.
-- Any bargaining situation can quickly evolve into a hierarchy of extracurricular threats and promises if there are no limits regarding what can be put on the table. Any zero-sum situation you see in reality can be transformed away from its basic dynamic with just a few words.
Mobs evolved away from leadership because leadership could be identified and eliminated: now, "incidents" are the coordinating entities.
Tipping points are the result of communication systems that make it easy to take one course of action and virtually impossible to agree on other solutions.
Coordination isn't about guessing what the other person will do: it's about guessing what he thinks you'll do based on what you'll think he'll do, ad infinitum.
-- giving people a prize for successfully choosing the options they think others will find most attractive is an unbelievably effective way to determine mass appeal
If your neighbor's fruit tree overhangs your yard and you pick all the fruit on your side of the line, he has a pretty good idea of what he's acquiesced to in future if he doesn't retaliate. If, instead, you pick the same amount of fruit randomly from both sides, he won't really know how to react. Was it you who took the fruit? Is he going to have to stop you, or are you not going to take any more?
Game theory needs to take into account communication and enforcement systems to be applicable in real-world situations.
If twenty men are held up for robbery by one man who has six bullets, they can overwhelm him provided they're willing to lose six of themselves. The gunman must keep this kind of agreement from being formed: he must sever their communications and threaten any man from being first.
Prohibition delivers enormous power into the hands of the people who can enforce otherwise-unenforcable contracts.
"The ordinary high-school graduate has to work hard for his money, but he could destroy a hundred times that much if he set his mind to it. Given an institutional arrangement in which he could abstain from destruction for a mere fraction of the value that he might have destroyed, the boy clearly has a calling as an extortionist rather than as a mechanic or clerk. It is fortunate that extortion usually defends on self-identification and overt communication by the extortionist himself."
-- bahaha
The timely destruction of communication may be a winning tactic. When a husband and wife are arguing on the phone about where to have dinner, the argument is won by the wife if she announces where she's going and hangs up.
-- that's not a winning tactic unless the need to collaborate outweighs the desire to prevent the "winner" from reaping the rewards of dysfunctionality. Even if it succeeds, it damages the "winner's" reputation: people recognize that there's not a lot of potential for a collaborative relationship with someone whose idea of negotiation is to get the last word in, destroy all communication, then wait for the other guy to acquiesce.
-- the best use of this tactic is temporary interruption of communication, which takes people out of the moment and gives them time to think about the preceding negotiations. The only time you ever want to be the "hang-up-the-phone" guy is when someone's trying to steamroll over your final offer: there's no discussion taking place at that point.
Children are skilled at avoiding the warning glance from their parents, knowing that if they perceive it the parent is obliged to punish noncompliance. Adults are equally skilled at not requesting the permission they suspect would be denied, knowing that explicit denial is a sterner sanction that obliges the denying authorities to take cognizance of the transgression.
-- the "better to seek forgiveness than beg permission" douchebags
In zero-sum games, the objective is not to be found out. In mixed-motive games, the objective is to make the other party take your behavior for granted.
Those who played uncooperatively against a cooperative partner had an opportunity, on the second play, to respond to the implicit offer of cooperation. Instead of thinking of the act as a cooperative one, however, they tended to assume that the cooperative player either didn't care or didn't quite understand the game.
-- there's something to be learned from this.
A promise's cost is paid when it succeeds, and a threat's cost is paid when it fails. If you promise more than you need to, you pay more than you need to. If you threaten more than you need to, the excess is superfluous - a successful threat is one that's not carried out.
-- again, I would stay away from threatening more than is necessary... they go into some math that agrees
You can't threaten that you MIGHT do something, because that's equivalent to saying that you MIGHT NOT do it - it shows that you're not commited. Furthermore, if you don't carry out a threat that you MIGHT have commited, you're only reinforcing your opponent's belief that when it's put up or shut up you'll shut up.
The only way to threaten that you MIGHT do something is if the final decision to carry out that threat is not entirely under your control.
Brinksmanship is the ability to push your opponent to the point where if you go, he goes with you.
If surprise has an advantage, it makes sense to be the first person to gain that advantage.
The perceived likelihood of being attacked first is a large factor in one's willingness to attack.
-- ideally, you want to structure situations so that surprise attacks confer no advantage: barring that, you want their advantage to be outweighed by disadvantages.
If you have the ability to strike with impunity, your opponent will factor that into the likelihood that you'll attack first and be accordingly more likely to attack you because of it.
An example is submarines. As things stand, submarines can't be stopped from launching their nukes. If technology came out that made it possible to detect and eliminate every sub before its nukes were launched, the situation would be substantially less stable [thanks to the increased effectiveness of surprise attacks]. The U.S. knows this, but we have to research submarine detection methods anyway - we can't afford to be without detection when someone else has it.
It's important that your opponent is not forced to guess whether or not you'll attack him if you have no intention of making a surprise attack. During the Cold War, a general remarked, "Our reluctance to strike first is in fact a military disadvantage to us; but it is also, paradoxially, a factor in preventing a world conflict today."
-- earlier in the book, the author recounts someone's proposal not to execute the Russian spies who represented Russia's only way of independently verifying that we were telling the truth about this
-- when you launch a surprise attack, the goal should be to obliterate the opponent's capacity for reprisal.
An assessment of defensive measures comes out differently if we put primary reliance on deterrence. Chicago cannot be hidden. Similarly, a defense of Chicago that requires the enemy to triple the size of his attack may be a poor prospect; it may mean only that the enemy must invest in a larger initial attack.
-- this is something I know from RTS. If you're building static defenses, odds are you're probably losing.
The ideal limitation for a situation in which people can't be stopped from cheating is high enough to negate the advantage of cheating.
If the enemy can hit anything he can locate, and kill anything he can hit, he has to be made unable to locate it.
Examine the sustainability of measures for increasing alertness. If they're not sustainable, they're not effective solutions against situations where the enemy can attack at any time.
You cannot prove that you won't do something. You can only prove that you can't.
Compliance must be observable, verifiable, and provable.
Tenants are less easily removed by threat of forcible eviction than by shutting off the utilities.
J.M. Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money
The Art of Coercion
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People - Stephen R. Covey
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People
Be proactive
Begin with the end in mind
Put first things first
Think win/win
Seek first to understand, then to be understood
Synergize
Sharpen the saw (increase your capacity for productive action)
If you try to use human influence strategies and tactics of how to get other people to do what you want, while your character is fundamentally flawed, in the long run you cannot be successful. Your duplicity will breed distrust, and everything you do will be perceived as manipulative.
"The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." -- Albert Einstein
Production vs. Production Capability - invest in your future, don't kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, and don't neglect the now for the later.
The determinisms: genetic, psychic, or environmental "excuses"
The stimulus-response cycle is different in humans - it's more like stimulus - perception - response
Reactive people are driven by feelings.
The three types of problems: direct control, indirect control, and no control.
Anytime we think the problem is "out there", that thought is the problem.
-- assume nothing is static about the future
-- avoid conversation in which someone won't be helped
Try the thirty-day test of proactivity
-- reminds me of the "If you can do it for a month, you can do it for the rest of your life" idea
It's easy to climb the ladder of success only to discover it's leaning against the wrong wall.
It's possible to be very busy without being very effective.
-- the Ronald McFondle philosophy: "Take more action. Take more effective action."
Plan things before you do them.
Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.
Develop a personal mission statement:
-- my mission statement:
recognize, influence, and exploit patterns and dynamics for profit
-- to fulfil this mission:
pay attention
stay transcendent
be creative
do my best
reexamine situations periodically
plan
-- these roles take priority in achieving my mission:
renaissance man: have a wide body of knowledge to draw from
observer: be aware of things as they unfold
warrior: take action, be disciplined, vanquish fears
friend: get guidance, opportunities, and assistance from other friends
commander: make plans, exercise leadership, provide oversight
-- this book contains much crowing
ingredients of a good affirmation: personal, positive, present, visual, emotional
step back and use visualization from time to time
What one thing could you do that if you did on a regular basis would make a tremendous positive difference in your personal life?
-- constantly seek to improve everything around me
What one thing in your business or professional life would bring similar results?
-- quickly earn and maintain a reputation as an expert
Successful people have the habit of doing things failures don't like to do.
The time management matrix: classify activities as Important/Not Important and Urgent/Not Urgent
Watch out for misclassifications, and spend time doing important things that aren't urgent.
People get frustrated with their schedules when the schedule won't bend around spontaneous occurences. Weekly planning towards goal accomplishment works better than daily planning.
Effectiveness is substantially more important than efficiency when dealing with people. You can't control how long it takes to bring a person to the point where you want them to be.
Delegation is an important part of both leadership and management.
-- whenever the group acquires an objective, delegate its components
You can't talk your way out of problems you behave yourself into.
The emotional bank account - make deposits exceed withdrawals
-- competition builds strength, cooperation gets results
Types of mindsets:
Win/Lose, Lose/Win, Win/Win, Lose/Lose, compromise (lesser win/win), and Win/Win or No Deal
-- the No Deal option is critically important
High on courage, high on consideration: Win/Win
High on courage, low on consideration: Win/Lose
High on consideration, low on courage: Lose/Win
-- High on unresolved issues: Lose/Lose
Dealing with Win/Lose is the real test of Win/Win.
-- you'd have to draw them out of that mentality: transcend the dynamic
"I can't understand my kid. He just won't listen to me at all."
"You don't understand your son because HE won't listen to YOU?"
-- "He looked into his own head and thought he saw the world." - a good phrase
Satisfied needs do not motivate.
Seek first to understand, then be understood.
When rephrasing what someone said, try not to unconsciously put your own spin onto it.
Recognize and value people's differences.
Force Field Analysis:
The current level of performance is determined by the driving forces that encourage upward movement and the restraining forces that discourage it.
-- this is true and I'm going to exploit the shit out of it
He advises people to read a book a week. I can easily read two or more.
Be a magic mirror - show people what's good about themselves.
"The voice of conscience is so delicate that it is easy to stifle it, but it is so clear that it is impossible to mistake it."
The upward spiral: commit, learn, do.
-- see me there.
Be proactive
Begin with the end in mind
Put first things first
Think win/win
Seek first to understand, then to be understood
Synergize
Sharpen the saw (increase your capacity for productive action)
If you try to use human influence strategies and tactics of how to get other people to do what you want, while your character is fundamentally flawed, in the long run you cannot be successful. Your duplicity will breed distrust, and everything you do will be perceived as manipulative.
"The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." -- Albert Einstein
Production vs. Production Capability - invest in your future, don't kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, and don't neglect the now for the later.
The determinisms: genetic, psychic, or environmental "excuses"
The stimulus-response cycle is different in humans - it's more like stimulus - perception - response
Reactive people are driven by feelings.
The three types of problems: direct control, indirect control, and no control.
Anytime we think the problem is "out there", that thought is the problem.
-- assume nothing is static about the future
-- avoid conversation in which someone won't be helped
Try the thirty-day test of proactivity
-- reminds me of the "If you can do it for a month, you can do it for the rest of your life" idea
It's easy to climb the ladder of success only to discover it's leaning against the wrong wall.
It's possible to be very busy without being very effective.
-- the Ronald McFondle philosophy: "Take more action. Take more effective action."
Plan things before you do them.
Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.
Develop a personal mission statement:
-- my mission statement:
recognize, influence, and exploit patterns and dynamics for profit
-- to fulfil this mission:
pay attention
stay transcendent
be creative
do my best
reexamine situations periodically
plan
-- these roles take priority in achieving my mission:
renaissance man: have a wide body of knowledge to draw from
observer: be aware of things as they unfold
warrior: take action, be disciplined, vanquish fears
friend: get guidance, opportunities, and assistance from other friends
commander: make plans, exercise leadership, provide oversight
-- this book contains much crowing
ingredients of a good affirmation: personal, positive, present, visual, emotional
step back and use visualization from time to time
What one thing could you do that if you did on a regular basis would make a tremendous positive difference in your personal life?
-- constantly seek to improve everything around me
What one thing in your business or professional life would bring similar results?
-- quickly earn and maintain a reputation as an expert
Successful people have the habit of doing things failures don't like to do.
The time management matrix: classify activities as Important/Not Important and Urgent/Not Urgent
Watch out for misclassifications, and spend time doing important things that aren't urgent.
People get frustrated with their schedules when the schedule won't bend around spontaneous occurences. Weekly planning towards goal accomplishment works better than daily planning.
Effectiveness is substantially more important than efficiency when dealing with people. You can't control how long it takes to bring a person to the point where you want them to be.
Delegation is an important part of both leadership and management.
-- whenever the group acquires an objective, delegate its components
You can't talk your way out of problems you behave yourself into.
The emotional bank account - make deposits exceed withdrawals
-- competition builds strength, cooperation gets results
Types of mindsets:
Win/Lose, Lose/Win, Win/Win, Lose/Lose, compromise (lesser win/win), and Win/Win or No Deal
-- the No Deal option is critically important
High on courage, high on consideration: Win/Win
High on courage, low on consideration: Win/Lose
High on consideration, low on courage: Lose/Win
-- High on unresolved issues: Lose/Lose
Dealing with Win/Lose is the real test of Win/Win.
-- you'd have to draw them out of that mentality: transcend the dynamic
"I can't understand my kid. He just won't listen to me at all."
"You don't understand your son because HE won't listen to YOU?"
-- "He looked into his own head and thought he saw the world." - a good phrase
Satisfied needs do not motivate.
Seek first to understand, then be understood.
When rephrasing what someone said, try not to unconsciously put your own spin onto it.
Recognize and value people's differences.
Force Field Analysis:
The current level of performance is determined by the driving forces that encourage upward movement and the restraining forces that discourage it.
-- this is true and I'm going to exploit the shit out of it
He advises people to read a book a week. I can easily read two or more.
Be a magic mirror - show people what's good about themselves.
"The voice of conscience is so delicate that it is easy to stifle it, but it is so clear that it is impossible to mistake it."
The upward spiral: commit, learn, do.
-- see me there.
The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins - ****
What is man? After posing this question, the eminent zoologist G. G. Simpson put it thus: "The point I want to make now is that all attempts to answer that question before 1859 [the discovery of evolution] are worthless and that we will be better off if we ignore them completely."
Emperor penguins are afraid to jump into the water for fear of being eaten by seals. If one would dive in, the rest would know whether there was a seal or not. None of them want to be the guinea pig, so they wait and sometimes even try to push each other in.
-- I imagine them being pretty good-natured about this
Often altruism within a group goes with selfishness between groups.
Living creatures don't evolve to do things for the good of the group: that's a common mistake made by people not familiar with evolutionary theory.
Dawkins' argument is that the fundamental unit of natural selection is the gene.
Darwin's 'survival of the fittest' is really a special case of the more general law of 'survival of the stable'.
Things in nature tend to form themselves into stable configurations.
Simulations of the primordial stew have shown that its various components form themselves into amino acids, the building blocks for protein.
Dawkins' hypothesis is that the major significant step in the primordial stew came when a molecule figured out how to duplicate itself. "The Replicator" continued to duplicate itself over and over, but there were copying errors which produced new variants of replicators. Soon, these replicators reached the point where they needed to compete for resources and started evolving efficiencies, offenses, and defenses: cell walls are given as an example of a defense.
The replicators that survived were the ones that built themselves survival machines. Now, the replicators are genes, and we are their survival machines.
Identical twins have identical DNA - the single cell containing the DNA blueprint duplicates itself during the division process.
Sex shuffles genes around. The exact combination of genes in an individual is short-lived, but the genes themselves are long-lived.
Allele: genes that are rivals for the same slot on a chromosome (brown eyes vs. blue eyes)
The shorter a genetic unit is, the less chance it has to be split or be affected by mutation, increasing its "lifespan".
The bee experiment:
Honey bees are susceptible to an infectious disease called foul brood. Some strains of bees are "hygenic", stamping out epidemics by uncapping the cells of infected grubs and throwing them out of the hive. When a non-hygenic strain was crossed with a hygenic strain, the hybrid wasn't hygenic. The researcher then crossed the hybrids with the hygenic strain again and received interesting results. Some groups were hygenic, some were non-hygenic, and others would uncap the cells of the grubs but not throw them out. Thinking that there were seperate genes responsible for uncapping the cells and throwing the grubs out, the researcher took the caps off of the infected grubs - sure enough, half of the apparently non-hygenic bees threw out their grubs.
One theory (the Medawar theory) behind why people die of old age is that a gene that has negative consequences for its bearer is more likely to be replicated if its effects occur later in the bearer's life. Under this theory, what we know as old age is a byproduct of the accumulation of late-acting lethal and semi-lethal genes in the gene pool.
We have a lot more DNA than is used to build a body. Biologists are racking their brains trying to think what useful task this apparently surplus DNA is doing.
-- that'd be a fun job. What IS it doing?
The gene pool is the new primordial soup.
Evolution went plant -> animal with muscle -> animal with muscle and memory -> animal with muscle, memory, and simulation ability
Genes can only do their best in advance by building a fast executive computer for themselves, and programming it in advance with rules and 'advice' to cope with as many eventualities as they can 'anticipate'.
Genes make general predictions, and do so very slowly. Polar bear genes have come to predict that the polar bear's environment will be a cold one. If the climate of the Arctic became a desert, the predictions of the genes would be wrong, and the bear would likely die.
Evolutionary stable strategy: one which, if most members of a population adopt it, cannot be bettered by an alternative strategy.
Retaliation is an evolutionarily stable strategy. Prober-retaliator, where you retaliate if attacked and occasionally test opponents to see if they'll fight back, is close.* Peace works against retaliators but not against aggressors (who attack everybody), bullies (who attack until someone fights back), and prober-retaliators.
-- Prober-retaliator is a high-risk high-reward strategy that only pays off in the long run if the benefits gained by winning instigated fights and reproducing can offset the population decrease caused by losing fights. A society of prober-retaliators would need to evolve a dominance hierarchy that allowed probing challenges, but kept actual fighting to a minimum.
* The endnotes to the book tell a different story. Dawkins admits that there's no such thing as a "close to" ESS, and says that retaliation is not an ESS because it can be invaded by people who play peace. The real ESS, as researched by someone else, is a mixture of aggressors and bullies: bullies get free wins over each other, which keeps the numbers high, and as many aggressors as the bully population can support.
Territorialism is another evolutionarily stable strategy. Evolving a pattern of "intruder wins, resident loses" would be weak, because no one would want to be a resident anywhere - they'd all be nomads, which results in a lot of otherwise-wasted energy spent moving around
The fish experiment:
Two fish built nests in opposite ends of a tank. The researcher took the fish and put them in glass tubes. Next to each other, the fish tried to fight each other through the glass. When the tubes were moved into fish A's territory, fish A tried to fight and fish B tried to retreat. When the situation was reversed, so were the results.
The butterfly experiment:
Pretty much the same as the fish experiment, except the researchers managed to trick the butterflies into thinking that they each got there first. Serious, prolonged fights broke out.
Size and fighting:
If larger fighters always win fights, there's only one evolutionarily stable strategy: pick fights with people smaller than you and run away from people larger than you.
If large fighters have a slight advantage in fights, that strategy still works, but there's an alternate evolutionarily stable strategy: pick fights with people larger than you and run away from people smaller than you!
That strategy, however, is only evolutionarily stable as long as its deviants never reach the kind of numbers that would shift the strategy back to the more intuitive one of using your size advantage to triumph over the smaller people.
The cricket experiment:
The researcher (R.D. Alexander) used a model cricket to beat up real crickets. After this treatment, the beaten crickets were more likely to lose fights against other crickets.
-- this is one reason you get a great fight when you pit champion vs. champion
-- it also goes a long way towards explaining intentional avoidance of competition: though an individual defeat may not sting, being "weighed in the balance and found wanting" is a slippery slope
-- crickets who won fights were more likely to court females - winners also keep the rise in testosterone that comes from competition
Dominance hierarchies are not a function of a group dynamic - they're the result of recognition, by an individual, that it would be better to give in to a dominant individual than to fight him.
-- UO is a perfect example of this
Honesty and lying are not stable evolutionary strategies in a war of attrition. Once lying is evolved, selection favors bluff-callers, which decreases the liars' numbers and has a negative impact on the honest people.
The poker face is an evolutionarily stable strategy.
The selfish gene is not one copy of the gene, but all copies.
The minimum requirement for a suicidal altruistic gene to be successful is that it should save more than two siblings or more than four half-siblings (uncles, grandparents, etc.)
-- a child would be worth the same as a sibling, since the child shares half the genetic material - a grandchild would count as a half-sibling
The mathematical formula for "altruism", from a genetic standpoint is (cost - (benefit * perceived relationship %)) - if this results in a net gain, do it
-- I wonder how reciprocity figures into this? Reciprocity is a crazy collusion attack which makes total sense from a genetic standpoint - reciprocally responsible individuals would be spreading the risk and enjoying a higher chance of surviving to pass those genes on.
Humans are familiar with rules, and rules are so powerful that if we're small-minded, we obey them even when it does no one any good.
memeoid: someone so taken over by an idea that their own survival becomes inconsequential
In most cases we should probably regard adoption as a misfiring of a built-in rule.
An example of a deliberately engineered misfiring of the maternal instinct is provided by birds that lay their eggs in somebody else's nest.
Individual guillemots can recognize their own eggs in case the eggs get mixed up, and incubate their offspring exclusively. Why would they need this ability when everything's taken care of if each mother sits on an egg? The answer is to guard against the evolution of cheating behavior, where mothers spend their time laying eggs instead of taking care of them. Even if the other mothers refused to be blackmailed, without the ability to know which egg came from which parent, the honest mother is more likely to incubate one of the two or three eggs laid by the cheater than the one laid by herself.
As has been mentioned, neither cheating nor the honesty that allows for it is an evolutionarily stable strategy. The cheating strategy in this case is unstable because the altruistic strategy it exploits is unstable and will disappear. The only ESS for a guillemot is to recognize its own egg and sit exclusively on its own egg. This is exactly what happens.
Songbirds have learned to discriminate in favor of eggs bearing the markings of their species, but cuckoos have learned to lay eggs bearing those markings. Songbirds with eyes sharp enough to detect the forgery stand a better chance of passing their genes on to successive generations, as do the more proficient forgers. This "arms race" is a good example of how natural selection can sharpen active discrimination.
-- is an "arms race" an ESS? I would say no, because at one point, one side is likely to gain a significant advantage over the other and then multiply that advantage. Also, the resources they're using to fund this race may be finite.
Men are more likely to put in less effort in caring for their offspring than women are, because women know for a fact that the offspring is theirs. A maternal grandmother can be more attached to her daughter's baby than a paternal grandmother, who can think her son was cuckolded.
A thing sometimes not realized even by people who worry about population problems is that population growth depends on when people have children as well as how many they have. Since populations tend to increase by a certain proportion per generation, it follows that if you space the generations out more, the population will grow at a slower rate per year.
Increases in food production may temporarily alleviate the population problem, but it's mathematically certain that they cannot be a long-term solution; indeed, like the medical advances that precipitated the crisis, they may well make the problem worse by speeding up the rate of the population expansion. . . it is hard to believe that this simple truth is not understood by those leaders who forbid their followers to use effective contraception methods. They express a preference for natural methods of population limitation, and a natural method is exactly what they are going to get. It is called starvation.
-- I would say that increasing food production isn't an ESS, but I would stop short of saying that it wasn't a long-term solution. Malthus was right about food supply increasing linearly while population increases exponentially, but ~71% of the earth's surface is covered by oceans. Serious expense would be required to inhabit even a small part of an ocean, and I'm sure we haven't even scratched the surface of their true agricultural potential.
If you can't win a fight, you can wait for an opportunity.
One possible explanation for menopause is that genes for becoming infertile in middle-age became numerous because they were present in grandchildren whose survival was assisted by grandmotherly altruism.
The mathematical altruism model says that sibling altruism takes place at 1:2 - where the benefit to the altruist is doubled by the benefit to the recipient. Until then, there will be greed.
-- a way around this is to space children out so that they're not forced to compete over the same resources
A child will lose no opportunity at cheating. It will pretend to be hungrier than it is, younger than it is, more in danger than it is. It is too small and weak to bully its parents physically, but it uses every psychological weapon at its disposal: lying, cheating, deceiving, exploiting. . .
-- the funny thing is, this is natural. Animals cheat their asses off too.
-- Play to Win is the right concept for life. Scrubsmanship does not prepare you to recognize the fact that everyone you'll ever deal with can and will potentially take any advantage available to them.
Genes in juvenile bodies will be selected for their ability to outsmart parental bodies; genes in parental bodies will be selected for their ability to outsmart the young.
Parents should invest equally in sons and daughters. Usually, that means one son per daughter, but in special cases (such as elephant seals with their harems), it makes more evolutionary sense to, say, have three daughters and one triple-strength son.
In a study of elephant seals, 4% of the males did 88% of the copulating.
There are two mating strategies - the domestic bliss and the he-man
The domestic bliss strategy:
The simplest version of the domestic bliss strategy is this. The female looks the males over and tries to spot signs of fidelity and domesticity in advance. There's bound to be variation in the predisposition of males to become faithful husbands. If the females can recognize these qualities in advance, they can benefit themselves by choosing males who possess them. One way to do this is to play hard to get. Any male not patient enough to wait is not likely to be a good bet as a faithful husband.
Courtship rituals require considerable pre-copulation investment by the male. This is very good from the female's point of view, but it also suggests another version of the strategy: can females require males to put in so much pre-copulation investment that they won't abandon the relationship after copulation? The answer to this is that males can cut their losses at any point, especially in the presence of females who have more lax requirements for suitors.
Since the female's strategy for determining a good husband is dependent on her ability to detect qualities of fidelity and domesticity in advance, males can exploit this by appearing to have those qualities until copulation occurs. . . Natural selection tends to favor those females who are good at seeing through this deception. One way a female can do this is to play especially hard to get when courted by a new male, but be increasingly ready to accept the advances of a faithful ex. This will automatically penalize young males embarking upon their first breeding season, whether they're deceivers or not. The brood of naive first-year females would tend to be dominated by unfaithful fathers, but in the females' second and third years, faithful fathers have the advantage.
For simplicity, males have been talked about as either purely honest or thoroughly deceitful. In reality it is more probable that all males, indeed all individuals, are a little bit deceitful, in that they are programmed to take advantage of opportunities to exploit their mates. . . Males have more to gain from dishonesty than females, and we must expect that they will usually tend to do a bit less work than the females, and to be a bit more ready to abscond.
The he-man strategy:
The female resigns herself to not getting any help from the father and goes all-out for good genes. If the female can detect good genes in the male, she can benefit her own genes by allying them with good paternal genes. Chances are good that most of the females will agree with each other on which are the best males, since they all have the same information to go on. Therefore, these few lucky males will do most of the copulating. This is presumably what happened in elephant seals.
From the point of view of a female trying to pick good genes with which to ally her own, what is she looking for? One thing is evidence to survive. Obviously any potential mate who's courting her has proved his ability to survive at least into adulthood, but he has not necessarily proved that he can survive for much longer. A good policy for a female might be to go for older men. Whatever their shortcomings, they have at least proved that they can survive.
What other evidence? There are many possibilities. Perhaps strong muscles as evidence of ability to catch food, perhaps long legs as evidence of ability to run away from predators. One of the best things a mother can do for her genes is to make a son who will turn out in his turn to be an attractive he-man. . . one of the most desirable qualities a male can have in the eyes of a female is, quite simply, sexual attractiveness itself. Originally, then, females may be thought of as selecting males on the basis of obviously useful qualities like big muscles, but once such qualities became widely accepted as attractive among the females of the species, natural selection would continue to favor them simply because they were attractive.
A. Zahavi theorizes that this system, too, can be tricked. Genes that produce cost-effective false muscle are passed on until, by counter-selection, females become capable of differentiating false advantages from real ones. Therefore, it's not enough to look strong - one must also, demonstratably, be strong.
The birds of paradise story:
A slightly longer tail than usual was selected by females as a desirable qualitity in males. Tails just became longer and longer and longer until finally they became so grotesquely long that their manifest disadvantages started to outweigh the advantage of sexual attractiveness.
In nature, bright colors attract females. The female of a species is often drably colored, as she need not compete for males.
A fish story:
Fish reproduce by spewing reproductive cells into the water. The male is disadvantaged because his sperm are more easily diffused than the female's eggs. Since the male can't spawn first, he waits for the female to spawn. She does, and then takes off - a decision not available to the male fish, who can't leave the potential children to die.
-- if you wanted to change this, you would have to pull together a massive collusion attack to get male fish to release their sperm first, but the evolutionary incentive to cheat here is through the roof
Chapter 10 - reciprocity (all right)
Bird calls to warn of predators seem like an example of altruistic behavior, but there are two good selfish reasons for them. One is that the calling bird is trying to prevent his companions from making him a target; the other is that as long as all of the birds move at the same time, he stands a low chance of being picked out of the flock.
To reduce the risk of making the alarm call, birds have evolved alarm calls with acoustic properties that make the caller hard to locate.
Pronking gazelles jump around to let predators know that they're not old and unhealthy. "Chase someone else!" is what they're effectively saying.
Altruistic behavior in bees can be explained by the fact that the worker bees are sterile - their genes will never reproduce, so they're expendable - and that the unit of bee functionality is the hive.
In many species of social insects, workers essentially farm their queen, using her to make sisters. The optimal ratio for farming is 3 workers per drone, and that's extremely close to what researchers discovered when they looked at 20 different ant species. The queen's optimal ratio is 1 worker per drone, which is what the researchers found when they looked at species in which the queen was not dependent on same-species workers to care for her eggs.
Reciprocity is an ESS against cheating and can only be developed in species that can recognize individuals they've previously dealt with.
Cleaner fish, the fish that remove parasites from other fish, have nasty little mimics. These mimics dance around and trick the big fish into relaxing. When the big fish lets down its guard, the mimic takes a bite of its fin and runs away. Fortunately for the cleaner fish, however, the big fish have decided that the advantages the cleaner fish provides justify not immediately eating him.
For a meme, longetivity is not as important as fecundity.
Meme theory says that memes have their own pool - a meme pool - in which they compete for the limited resource of transmission time.
Replicators can't be expected to forego short-term selfish advantage for any reason.
-- this is why every ESS requires exploit protection
Foresight can be used to engineer artificial systems that triumph over short-term selfishness.
The book talks about the prisoner's dilemna over multiple iterations. In the experiment that was run, an initially cooperative strategy of retaliation had the most potential for a high score but could never win.
-- I wish I could have entered that competition with this strategy: initial cooperation / retaliation until the last round, where I pocket the betrayal points
-- people would have devised strategies to beat my strategy by betraying each other one move earlier until it finally reached "always betray", the only ESS for a prisoner's dilemna
-- oh: he talks about that exploit later and says that game theorists have a fix, which is that the length of the game is never revealed
Divorce is a zero-sum game for the participants and a nonzero-sum game for the lawyers, who make money based on the time they spend on the case.
The fig story:
Fig wasps can either pollinate fig flowers, which perpetuates the fig tree, or lay eggs in them, which perpetuates the wasp. If the wasp lays eggs in too many flowers and pollinates too few, the tree retaliates by cutting off the development of the fig, leaving the wasp's offspring to die.
Some genes mess with meiosis, "cheating" to beat their alelles.
Life/Dinner principle: drawing its name from the rabbit, who runs for his life, and the fox, who's just running for his dinner, this principle refers to the evolutionary advantage possessed by creatures who've needed to become experts in their game to offset significant costs of failure
The pig experiment:
Researchers taught pigs how to pull a lever on one side of their cage to dump food into the other side of the cage. They then put two pigs who knew the trick into the cage, and watched what happened. The pigs evolved a strategy where the weaker, subordinate pig would sit at the food trough while the dominant pig pulled the lever. It sounds counterintuitive until you realize that the weaker pig knows he won't get anything to eat if he pulls the lever while the dominant pig is in the trough.
Handicap theory of sexual selection:
1. Qualifying handicap (if you succeed with a handicap, you're better than someone who succeeds without it)
2. Revealing handicap (the handicap reveals some ability the other sex wouldn't ordinarily see)
3. Conditional handicap (you have to be a good choice to even develop this handicap)
4. Strategic choice handicap (you know your quality and can choose to grow handicaps for sexual selection)
It's based on four things:
1. Males vary in quality.
2. Females can't perceive males' qualities directly and must rely on male advertisement.
3. Males know their own quality and evolve strategies based on this.
4. Females evolve strategies they feel are most likely to beat males' strategies.
Out of this, what we want is an evolutionarily stable pair of strategies for male and female. What winds up happening is this:
1. Despite being able to advertise anything they want, males choose a level that correctly reflects their quality even if their quality is low - because the worse you are, the more your ads cost.
2. Despite being able to counter ads however they want, females usually end up believing the males.
-- this makes sense. What handicaps would I evolve?
Excessive strength
Overeducation
Expensive clothing [fake: I'd buy it for 50% off]
Expensive experiential hobbies (concerts, trips, culture, etc.)
Expensive social hobbies (anything I'd do repeatedly with friends that I wouldn't do alone)
Enough irresponsibility to make things interesting
Robert Ardrey - The Social Contract
Martin Daly and Margo Wilson - Sex, Evolution, and Behavior
Donald Symons - The Evolution of Human Sexuality
Emperor penguins are afraid to jump into the water for fear of being eaten by seals. If one would dive in, the rest would know whether there was a seal or not. None of them want to be the guinea pig, so they wait and sometimes even try to push each other in.
-- I imagine them being pretty good-natured about this
Often altruism within a group goes with selfishness between groups.
Living creatures don't evolve to do things for the good of the group: that's a common mistake made by people not familiar with evolutionary theory.
Dawkins' argument is that the fundamental unit of natural selection is the gene.
Darwin's 'survival of the fittest' is really a special case of the more general law of 'survival of the stable'.
Things in nature tend to form themselves into stable configurations.
Simulations of the primordial stew have shown that its various components form themselves into amino acids, the building blocks for protein.
Dawkins' hypothesis is that the major significant step in the primordial stew came when a molecule figured out how to duplicate itself. "The Replicator" continued to duplicate itself over and over, but there were copying errors which produced new variants of replicators. Soon, these replicators reached the point where they needed to compete for resources and started evolving efficiencies, offenses, and defenses: cell walls are given as an example of a defense.
The replicators that survived were the ones that built themselves survival machines. Now, the replicators are genes, and we are their survival machines.
Identical twins have identical DNA - the single cell containing the DNA blueprint duplicates itself during the division process.
Sex shuffles genes around. The exact combination of genes in an individual is short-lived, but the genes themselves are long-lived.
Allele: genes that are rivals for the same slot on a chromosome (brown eyes vs. blue eyes)
The shorter a genetic unit is, the less chance it has to be split or be affected by mutation, increasing its "lifespan".
The bee experiment:
Honey bees are susceptible to an infectious disease called foul brood. Some strains of bees are "hygenic", stamping out epidemics by uncapping the cells of infected grubs and throwing them out of the hive. When a non-hygenic strain was crossed with a hygenic strain, the hybrid wasn't hygenic. The researcher then crossed the hybrids with the hygenic strain again and received interesting results. Some groups were hygenic, some were non-hygenic, and others would uncap the cells of the grubs but not throw them out. Thinking that there were seperate genes responsible for uncapping the cells and throwing the grubs out, the researcher took the caps off of the infected grubs - sure enough, half of the apparently non-hygenic bees threw out their grubs.
One theory (the Medawar theory) behind why people die of old age is that a gene that has negative consequences for its bearer is more likely to be replicated if its effects occur later in the bearer's life. Under this theory, what we know as old age is a byproduct of the accumulation of late-acting lethal and semi-lethal genes in the gene pool.
We have a lot more DNA than is used to build a body. Biologists are racking their brains trying to think what useful task this apparently surplus DNA is doing.
-- that'd be a fun job. What IS it doing?
The gene pool is the new primordial soup.
Evolution went plant -> animal with muscle -> animal with muscle and memory -> animal with muscle, memory, and simulation ability
Genes can only do their best in advance by building a fast executive computer for themselves, and programming it in advance with rules and 'advice' to cope with as many eventualities as they can 'anticipate'.
Genes make general predictions, and do so very slowly. Polar bear genes have come to predict that the polar bear's environment will be a cold one. If the climate of the Arctic became a desert, the predictions of the genes would be wrong, and the bear would likely die.
Evolutionary stable strategy: one which, if most members of a population adopt it, cannot be bettered by an alternative strategy.
Retaliation is an evolutionarily stable strategy. Prober-retaliator, where you retaliate if attacked and occasionally test opponents to see if they'll fight back, is close.* Peace works against retaliators but not against aggressors (who attack everybody), bullies (who attack until someone fights back), and prober-retaliators.
-- Prober-retaliator is a high-risk high-reward strategy that only pays off in the long run if the benefits gained by winning instigated fights and reproducing can offset the population decrease caused by losing fights. A society of prober-retaliators would need to evolve a dominance hierarchy that allowed probing challenges, but kept actual fighting to a minimum.
* The endnotes to the book tell a different story. Dawkins admits that there's no such thing as a "close to" ESS, and says that retaliation is not an ESS because it can be invaded by people who play peace. The real ESS, as researched by someone else, is a mixture of aggressors and bullies: bullies get free wins over each other, which keeps the numbers high, and as many aggressors as the bully population can support.
Territorialism is another evolutionarily stable strategy. Evolving a pattern of "intruder wins, resident loses" would be weak, because no one would want to be a resident anywhere - they'd all be nomads, which results in a lot of otherwise-wasted energy spent moving around
The fish experiment:
Two fish built nests in opposite ends of a tank. The researcher took the fish and put them in glass tubes. Next to each other, the fish tried to fight each other through the glass. When the tubes were moved into fish A's territory, fish A tried to fight and fish B tried to retreat. When the situation was reversed, so were the results.
The butterfly experiment:
Pretty much the same as the fish experiment, except the researchers managed to trick the butterflies into thinking that they each got there first. Serious, prolonged fights broke out.
Size and fighting:
If larger fighters always win fights, there's only one evolutionarily stable strategy: pick fights with people smaller than you and run away from people larger than you.
If large fighters have a slight advantage in fights, that strategy still works, but there's an alternate evolutionarily stable strategy: pick fights with people larger than you and run away from people smaller than you!
That strategy, however, is only evolutionarily stable as long as its deviants never reach the kind of numbers that would shift the strategy back to the more intuitive one of using your size advantage to triumph over the smaller people.
The cricket experiment:
The researcher (R.D. Alexander) used a model cricket to beat up real crickets. After this treatment, the beaten crickets were more likely to lose fights against other crickets.
-- this is one reason you get a great fight when you pit champion vs. champion
-- it also goes a long way towards explaining intentional avoidance of competition: though an individual defeat may not sting, being "weighed in the balance and found wanting" is a slippery slope
-- crickets who won fights were more likely to court females - winners also keep the rise in testosterone that comes from competition
Dominance hierarchies are not a function of a group dynamic - they're the result of recognition, by an individual, that it would be better to give in to a dominant individual than to fight him.
-- UO is a perfect example of this
Honesty and lying are not stable evolutionary strategies in a war of attrition. Once lying is evolved, selection favors bluff-callers, which decreases the liars' numbers and has a negative impact on the honest people.
The poker face is an evolutionarily stable strategy.
The selfish gene is not one copy of the gene, but all copies.
The minimum requirement for a suicidal altruistic gene to be successful is that it should save more than two siblings or more than four half-siblings (uncles, grandparents, etc.)
-- a child would be worth the same as a sibling, since the child shares half the genetic material - a grandchild would count as a half-sibling
The mathematical formula for "altruism", from a genetic standpoint is (cost - (benefit * perceived relationship %)) - if this results in a net gain, do it
-- I wonder how reciprocity figures into this? Reciprocity is a crazy collusion attack which makes total sense from a genetic standpoint - reciprocally responsible individuals would be spreading the risk and enjoying a higher chance of surviving to pass those genes on.
Humans are familiar with rules, and rules are so powerful that if we're small-minded, we obey them even when it does no one any good.
memeoid: someone so taken over by an idea that their own survival becomes inconsequential
In most cases we should probably regard adoption as a misfiring of a built-in rule.
An example of a deliberately engineered misfiring of the maternal instinct is provided by birds that lay their eggs in somebody else's nest.
Individual guillemots can recognize their own eggs in case the eggs get mixed up, and incubate their offspring exclusively. Why would they need this ability when everything's taken care of if each mother sits on an egg? The answer is to guard against the evolution of cheating behavior, where mothers spend their time laying eggs instead of taking care of them. Even if the other mothers refused to be blackmailed, without the ability to know which egg came from which parent, the honest mother is more likely to incubate one of the two or three eggs laid by the cheater than the one laid by herself.
As has been mentioned, neither cheating nor the honesty that allows for it is an evolutionarily stable strategy. The cheating strategy in this case is unstable because the altruistic strategy it exploits is unstable and will disappear. The only ESS for a guillemot is to recognize its own egg and sit exclusively on its own egg. This is exactly what happens.
Songbirds have learned to discriminate in favor of eggs bearing the markings of their species, but cuckoos have learned to lay eggs bearing those markings. Songbirds with eyes sharp enough to detect the forgery stand a better chance of passing their genes on to successive generations, as do the more proficient forgers. This "arms race" is a good example of how natural selection can sharpen active discrimination.
-- is an "arms race" an ESS? I would say no, because at one point, one side is likely to gain a significant advantage over the other and then multiply that advantage. Also, the resources they're using to fund this race may be finite.
Men are more likely to put in less effort in caring for their offspring than women are, because women know for a fact that the offspring is theirs. A maternal grandmother can be more attached to her daughter's baby than a paternal grandmother, who can think her son was cuckolded.
A thing sometimes not realized even by people who worry about population problems is that population growth depends on when people have children as well as how many they have. Since populations tend to increase by a certain proportion per generation, it follows that if you space the generations out more, the population will grow at a slower rate per year.
Increases in food production may temporarily alleviate the population problem, but it's mathematically certain that they cannot be a long-term solution; indeed, like the medical advances that precipitated the crisis, they may well make the problem worse by speeding up the rate of the population expansion. . . it is hard to believe that this simple truth is not understood by those leaders who forbid their followers to use effective contraception methods. They express a preference for natural methods of population limitation, and a natural method is exactly what they are going to get. It is called starvation.
-- I would say that increasing food production isn't an ESS, but I would stop short of saying that it wasn't a long-term solution. Malthus was right about food supply increasing linearly while population increases exponentially, but ~71% of the earth's surface is covered by oceans. Serious expense would be required to inhabit even a small part of an ocean, and I'm sure we haven't even scratched the surface of their true agricultural potential.
If you can't win a fight, you can wait for an opportunity.
One possible explanation for menopause is that genes for becoming infertile in middle-age became numerous because they were present in grandchildren whose survival was assisted by grandmotherly altruism.
The mathematical altruism model says that sibling altruism takes place at 1:2 - where the benefit to the altruist is doubled by the benefit to the recipient. Until then, there will be greed.
-- a way around this is to space children out so that they're not forced to compete over the same resources
A child will lose no opportunity at cheating. It will pretend to be hungrier than it is, younger than it is, more in danger than it is. It is too small and weak to bully its parents physically, but it uses every psychological weapon at its disposal: lying, cheating, deceiving, exploiting. . .
-- the funny thing is, this is natural. Animals cheat their asses off too.
-- Play to Win is the right concept for life. Scrubsmanship does not prepare you to recognize the fact that everyone you'll ever deal with can and will potentially take any advantage available to them.
Genes in juvenile bodies will be selected for their ability to outsmart parental bodies; genes in parental bodies will be selected for their ability to outsmart the young.
Parents should invest equally in sons and daughters. Usually, that means one son per daughter, but in special cases (such as elephant seals with their harems), it makes more evolutionary sense to, say, have three daughters and one triple-strength son.
In a study of elephant seals, 4% of the males did 88% of the copulating.
There are two mating strategies - the domestic bliss and the he-man
The domestic bliss strategy:
The simplest version of the domestic bliss strategy is this. The female looks the males over and tries to spot signs of fidelity and domesticity in advance. There's bound to be variation in the predisposition of males to become faithful husbands. If the females can recognize these qualities in advance, they can benefit themselves by choosing males who possess them. One way to do this is to play hard to get. Any male not patient enough to wait is not likely to be a good bet as a faithful husband.
Courtship rituals require considerable pre-copulation investment by the male. This is very good from the female's point of view, but it also suggests another version of the strategy: can females require males to put in so much pre-copulation investment that they won't abandon the relationship after copulation? The answer to this is that males can cut their losses at any point, especially in the presence of females who have more lax requirements for suitors.
Since the female's strategy for determining a good husband is dependent on her ability to detect qualities of fidelity and domesticity in advance, males can exploit this by appearing to have those qualities until copulation occurs. . . Natural selection tends to favor those females who are good at seeing through this deception. One way a female can do this is to play especially hard to get when courted by a new male, but be increasingly ready to accept the advances of a faithful ex. This will automatically penalize young males embarking upon their first breeding season, whether they're deceivers or not. The brood of naive first-year females would tend to be dominated by unfaithful fathers, but in the females' second and third years, faithful fathers have the advantage.
For simplicity, males have been talked about as either purely honest or thoroughly deceitful. In reality it is more probable that all males, indeed all individuals, are a little bit deceitful, in that they are programmed to take advantage of opportunities to exploit their mates. . . Males have more to gain from dishonesty than females, and we must expect that they will usually tend to do a bit less work than the females, and to be a bit more ready to abscond.
The he-man strategy:
The female resigns herself to not getting any help from the father and goes all-out for good genes. If the female can detect good genes in the male, she can benefit her own genes by allying them with good paternal genes. Chances are good that most of the females will agree with each other on which are the best males, since they all have the same information to go on. Therefore, these few lucky males will do most of the copulating. This is presumably what happened in elephant seals.
From the point of view of a female trying to pick good genes with which to ally her own, what is she looking for? One thing is evidence to survive. Obviously any potential mate who's courting her has proved his ability to survive at least into adulthood, but he has not necessarily proved that he can survive for much longer. A good policy for a female might be to go for older men. Whatever their shortcomings, they have at least proved that they can survive.
What other evidence? There are many possibilities. Perhaps strong muscles as evidence of ability to catch food, perhaps long legs as evidence of ability to run away from predators. One of the best things a mother can do for her genes is to make a son who will turn out in his turn to be an attractive he-man. . . one of the most desirable qualities a male can have in the eyes of a female is, quite simply, sexual attractiveness itself. Originally, then, females may be thought of as selecting males on the basis of obviously useful qualities like big muscles, but once such qualities became widely accepted as attractive among the females of the species, natural selection would continue to favor them simply because they were attractive.
A. Zahavi theorizes that this system, too, can be tricked. Genes that produce cost-effective false muscle are passed on until, by counter-selection, females become capable of differentiating false advantages from real ones. Therefore, it's not enough to look strong - one must also, demonstratably, be strong.
The birds of paradise story:
A slightly longer tail than usual was selected by females as a desirable qualitity in males. Tails just became longer and longer and longer until finally they became so grotesquely long that their manifest disadvantages started to outweigh the advantage of sexual attractiveness.
In nature, bright colors attract females. The female of a species is often drably colored, as she need not compete for males.
A fish story:
Fish reproduce by spewing reproductive cells into the water. The male is disadvantaged because his sperm are more easily diffused than the female's eggs. Since the male can't spawn first, he waits for the female to spawn. She does, and then takes off - a decision not available to the male fish, who can't leave the potential children to die.
-- if you wanted to change this, you would have to pull together a massive collusion attack to get male fish to release their sperm first, but the evolutionary incentive to cheat here is through the roof
Chapter 10 - reciprocity (all right)
Bird calls to warn of predators seem like an example of altruistic behavior, but there are two good selfish reasons for them. One is that the calling bird is trying to prevent his companions from making him a target; the other is that as long as all of the birds move at the same time, he stands a low chance of being picked out of the flock.
To reduce the risk of making the alarm call, birds have evolved alarm calls with acoustic properties that make the caller hard to locate.
Pronking gazelles jump around to let predators know that they're not old and unhealthy. "Chase someone else!" is what they're effectively saying.
Altruistic behavior in bees can be explained by the fact that the worker bees are sterile - their genes will never reproduce, so they're expendable - and that the unit of bee functionality is the hive.
In many species of social insects, workers essentially farm their queen, using her to make sisters. The optimal ratio for farming is 3 workers per drone, and that's extremely close to what researchers discovered when they looked at 20 different ant species. The queen's optimal ratio is 1 worker per drone, which is what the researchers found when they looked at species in which the queen was not dependent on same-species workers to care for her eggs.
Reciprocity is an ESS against cheating and can only be developed in species that can recognize individuals they've previously dealt with.
Cleaner fish, the fish that remove parasites from other fish, have nasty little mimics. These mimics dance around and trick the big fish into relaxing. When the big fish lets down its guard, the mimic takes a bite of its fin and runs away. Fortunately for the cleaner fish, however, the big fish have decided that the advantages the cleaner fish provides justify not immediately eating him.
For a meme, longetivity is not as important as fecundity.
Meme theory says that memes have their own pool - a meme pool - in which they compete for the limited resource of transmission time.
Replicators can't be expected to forego short-term selfish advantage for any reason.
-- this is why every ESS requires exploit protection
Foresight can be used to engineer artificial systems that triumph over short-term selfishness.
The book talks about the prisoner's dilemna over multiple iterations. In the experiment that was run, an initially cooperative strategy of retaliation had the most potential for a high score but could never win.
-- I wish I could have entered that competition with this strategy: initial cooperation / retaliation until the last round, where I pocket the betrayal points
-- people would have devised strategies to beat my strategy by betraying each other one move earlier until it finally reached "always betray", the only ESS for a prisoner's dilemna
-- oh: he talks about that exploit later and says that game theorists have a fix, which is that the length of the game is never revealed
Divorce is a zero-sum game for the participants and a nonzero-sum game for the lawyers, who make money based on the time they spend on the case.
The fig story:
Fig wasps can either pollinate fig flowers, which perpetuates the fig tree, or lay eggs in them, which perpetuates the wasp. If the wasp lays eggs in too many flowers and pollinates too few, the tree retaliates by cutting off the development of the fig, leaving the wasp's offspring to die.
Some genes mess with meiosis, "cheating" to beat their alelles.
Life/Dinner principle: drawing its name from the rabbit, who runs for his life, and the fox, who's just running for his dinner, this principle refers to the evolutionary advantage possessed by creatures who've needed to become experts in their game to offset significant costs of failure
The pig experiment:
Researchers taught pigs how to pull a lever on one side of their cage to dump food into the other side of the cage. They then put two pigs who knew the trick into the cage, and watched what happened. The pigs evolved a strategy where the weaker, subordinate pig would sit at the food trough while the dominant pig pulled the lever. It sounds counterintuitive until you realize that the weaker pig knows he won't get anything to eat if he pulls the lever while the dominant pig is in the trough.
Handicap theory of sexual selection:
1. Qualifying handicap (if you succeed with a handicap, you're better than someone who succeeds without it)
2. Revealing handicap (the handicap reveals some ability the other sex wouldn't ordinarily see)
3. Conditional handicap (you have to be a good choice to even develop this handicap)
4. Strategic choice handicap (you know your quality and can choose to grow handicaps for sexual selection)
It's based on four things:
1. Males vary in quality.
2. Females can't perceive males' qualities directly and must rely on male advertisement.
3. Males know their own quality and evolve strategies based on this.
4. Females evolve strategies they feel are most likely to beat males' strategies.
Out of this, what we want is an evolutionarily stable pair of strategies for male and female. What winds up happening is this:
1. Despite being able to advertise anything they want, males choose a level that correctly reflects their quality even if their quality is low - because the worse you are, the more your ads cost.
2. Despite being able to counter ads however they want, females usually end up believing the males.
-- this makes sense. What handicaps would I evolve?
Excessive strength
Overeducation
Expensive clothing [fake: I'd buy it for 50% off]
Expensive experiential hobbies (concerts, trips, culture, etc.)
Expensive social hobbies (anything I'd do repeatedly with friends that I wouldn't do alone)
Enough irresponsibility to make things interesting
Robert Ardrey - The Social Contract
Martin Daly and Margo Wilson - Sex, Evolution, and Behavior
Donald Symons - The Evolution of Human Sexuality
The Moral Animal - Robert Wright - ****
People's minds were designed to maximize fitness in the environment in which those minds evolved.
The disjunction between our design and our lives is probably responsible for much psychopathology and suffering.
Since sex is a bigger investment for a woman than a man, men favor quantity and women favor quality.
In one experiment, three-fourths of the men approached by an unknown woman on a college campus agreed to have sex with her. The women on campus, approached by an unknown man, all refused.
Monogamy is most common in species with vulnerable offspring and in meat-eating species, where the additional protein makes family-raising practical.
For a species low in male parental investment [humans are high-MPI], the basic dynamic of courtship is pretty simple: the male really wants sex, the female isn't so sure.
Females in low-MPI species won't compete over a man because their dream is to copulate with him, not monopolize him.
One effective way to deceive someone is to believe what you're saying. In this context, that means being "blinded by love". . . this, indeed, is the great moral escape hatch for men who persist in a pattern of seduction and abandonment.
A woman's fear is that the man will withdraw his investment; a man's fear is that his investment is being misplaced.
resource extraction: when give sex means get gifts
Throughout the world, men tend to group desirable women into two categories: wife material and mistress material
-- this relates to the strategies played by men and women in The Selfish Gene, but adds an extra layer: the complications that arise when the strategy a woman plays isn't the same as the one a man sees, and vice versa
The more attractive a girl is in adolescence, the more likely she is to "marry up", to marry a man of higher socioeconomic status.
The more sexually active a girl is in adolescence, the less likely she is to marry up.
Trivers asked if it was possible "that females adjust their reproductive strategies in adolescence to their own assets"?
How have societies coped with sexual asymmetry? Asymmetrically. 980 of the 1154 societies for which anthropologists have data have permitted a man to have more than one wife, though 43% of those classify polygyny as "occasional".
The danger of polygyny is that women who move up the ladder by wedding married men aren't available to the rest of the men. Assuming equal sex ratios, every time a woman moves up the ladder, all the women move up (there's a vacancy) and every man except the one she married moves down (the pool of women has worsened and one man will not have a mate).
Serial monogamy, in some ways, amounts to polygyny. Attractive men are given the opportunity to monopolize women: a top male can get a top prospect, use her for years, then discard her for another top prospect. Since the cast-off women can no longer attract top men, they bounce to next-tier men, their best option at the time, who can repeat the process. In this way, a scarcity of quality women trickles down the social scale.
Hints of mortality can draw a man into marriage, though it is often these same hints, much later, that drive him to seek fresh proof of his virility.
An unmarketable commodity is a contented one.
Feelings, in their fine contours, are proxies for calculation.
Mothers in poor condition are likely to favor daughters over sons: boys are most competitive in prosperity, whereas girls can attract sex partners in almost any condition.
No life experiences (except, say, exposure to radiation) affect the genes handed down to offspring.
Reciprocal altruism differs from kin selection in that kin selection actually requires others to be helped; with reciprocal altruism, only the appearance of helping is required before the reward is obtained.
One striking feature of the rewards and punishments dished out by the conscience is their lack of sensuality. The conscience can't make us feel bad the way hunger makes us feel bad, or good the way sex makes us feel good.
"I would give a thousand pounds for your good name."
"Why?"
"Because I could make ten thousand by it!"
Exploitation is most commonly found where interactions are not likely to be repeated.
One theory regarding hierarchy is that it makes the group so cohesive that most or all of the members benefit, even if they benefit unequally.
pecking order: a hierarchy established by combat
The most prolific human parent in the world is credited with 888 children -- about 860 more than a woman could dream of having, unless she had a knack for multiple births. His name and title: Moulay Ismail the Bloodthirsty, the Sharifian emperor of Mococco. It's a little chilling to think that the genes of a man nicknamed "Bloodthirsty" found their way into nearly 1,000 offspring. But that's the way natural selection works: the most chilling genes often win.
Man is the rival of other men; he delights in competition, and this leads to ambition which passes too easily into selfishness. These latter qualities seem to be his natural and unfortunate birthright.
The story of Mike the chimp:
Mike, though not a hulking specimen, discovered by running towards more manly chimps while propelling empty kerosene cans loudly in their direction, he could earn their respect. Sometimes Mike repeated this performance as many as four times in succession, waiting until his rivals had started to groom once more before again charging them. When he eventually stopped, often in the precise spot where the other males had been sitting, they sometimes returned and with submissive gestures began to groom Mike. . . Mike made determined efforts to secure other human artifacts to enhance his displays.
Power through expertise.
Humans tend to compare themselves to those very near them in the status hierarchy - to those just above them, in particular.
"There is evidence that the worst parts of human nature are always near the surface, ready to rise when cultural restraint weakens. We are not blank slates, as some behaviorists once imagined."
-- the title of the next book in my lineup: The Blank Slate
The best liar is the one who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way.
You could say that low self-esteem evolved as a way to reconcile people to subordinate status when this reconciliation is in their genetic interest.
Don't expect people with low self-esteem to hide it. It may be in their genetic interest to convey their acceptance by behaving submissively so that they aren't treated like a threat.
Feeling bad about yourself is a way of discouraging the repeat of status-reducing behaviors.
The split-brain story
-- Rationalization is a defense - this is proof that why means justify
beneffectance: the tendency of people to present themselves as both beneficial and effective
When we ask friends for help, we are often asking not only that they use their status, but that they raise ours in the process.
Backing a friend means verbally defending him when his interests are in dispute -- and, more generally, saying good, status-raising things about him.
We feel genuinely in awe of those to whom we might profitably grovel.
Language evolved as a way of manipulating people to your advantage; cognition, the wellspring of language, is warped accordingly.
What was best in Freud is his sensing the paradox of being a highly social animal: being at our core libidinous, rapacious, and generally selfish, yet having to live civilly with other human beings -- having to reach our animal goals via a torturous path of cooperation, compromise, and restraint. From this insight flows Freud's most basic idea about the mind: it is a place of conflict between animal impulses and social reality.
The courts would do better to spend less time deliberating the circumstances under which a crime occured and more time deliberating what the practical effect of possible punishments will be.
metanorm: a norm for punishing people who do not punish deviants
The disjunction between our design and our lives is probably responsible for much psychopathology and suffering.
Since sex is a bigger investment for a woman than a man, men favor quantity and women favor quality.
In one experiment, three-fourths of the men approached by an unknown woman on a college campus agreed to have sex with her. The women on campus, approached by an unknown man, all refused.
Monogamy is most common in species with vulnerable offspring and in meat-eating species, where the additional protein makes family-raising practical.
For a species low in male parental investment [humans are high-MPI], the basic dynamic of courtship is pretty simple: the male really wants sex, the female isn't so sure.
Females in low-MPI species won't compete over a man because their dream is to copulate with him, not monopolize him.
One effective way to deceive someone is to believe what you're saying. In this context, that means being "blinded by love". . . this, indeed, is the great moral escape hatch for men who persist in a pattern of seduction and abandonment.
A woman's fear is that the man will withdraw his investment; a man's fear is that his investment is being misplaced.
resource extraction: when give sex means get gifts
Throughout the world, men tend to group desirable women into two categories: wife material and mistress material
-- this relates to the strategies played by men and women in The Selfish Gene, but adds an extra layer: the complications that arise when the strategy a woman plays isn't the same as the one a man sees, and vice versa
The more attractive a girl is in adolescence, the more likely she is to "marry up", to marry a man of higher socioeconomic status.
The more sexually active a girl is in adolescence, the less likely she is to marry up.
Trivers asked if it was possible "that females adjust their reproductive strategies in adolescence to their own assets"?
How have societies coped with sexual asymmetry? Asymmetrically. 980 of the 1154 societies for which anthropologists have data have permitted a man to have more than one wife, though 43% of those classify polygyny as "occasional".
The danger of polygyny is that women who move up the ladder by wedding married men aren't available to the rest of the men. Assuming equal sex ratios, every time a woman moves up the ladder, all the women move up (there's a vacancy) and every man except the one she married moves down (the pool of women has worsened and one man will not have a mate).
Serial monogamy, in some ways, amounts to polygyny. Attractive men are given the opportunity to monopolize women: a top male can get a top prospect, use her for years, then discard her for another top prospect. Since the cast-off women can no longer attract top men, they bounce to next-tier men, their best option at the time, who can repeat the process. In this way, a scarcity of quality women trickles down the social scale.
Hints of mortality can draw a man into marriage, though it is often these same hints, much later, that drive him to seek fresh proof of his virility.
An unmarketable commodity is a contented one.
Feelings, in their fine contours, are proxies for calculation.
Mothers in poor condition are likely to favor daughters over sons: boys are most competitive in prosperity, whereas girls can attract sex partners in almost any condition.
No life experiences (except, say, exposure to radiation) affect the genes handed down to offspring.
Reciprocal altruism differs from kin selection in that kin selection actually requires others to be helped; with reciprocal altruism, only the appearance of helping is required before the reward is obtained.
One striking feature of the rewards and punishments dished out by the conscience is their lack of sensuality. The conscience can't make us feel bad the way hunger makes us feel bad, or good the way sex makes us feel good.
"I would give a thousand pounds for your good name."
"Why?"
"Because I could make ten thousand by it!"
Exploitation is most commonly found where interactions are not likely to be repeated.
One theory regarding hierarchy is that it makes the group so cohesive that most or all of the members benefit, even if they benefit unequally.
pecking order: a hierarchy established by combat
The most prolific human parent in the world is credited with 888 children -- about 860 more than a woman could dream of having, unless she had a knack for multiple births. His name and title: Moulay Ismail the Bloodthirsty, the Sharifian emperor of Mococco. It's a little chilling to think that the genes of a man nicknamed "Bloodthirsty" found their way into nearly 1,000 offspring. But that's the way natural selection works: the most chilling genes often win.
Man is the rival of other men; he delights in competition, and this leads to ambition which passes too easily into selfishness. These latter qualities seem to be his natural and unfortunate birthright.
The story of Mike the chimp:
Mike, though not a hulking specimen, discovered by running towards more manly chimps while propelling empty kerosene cans loudly in their direction, he could earn their respect. Sometimes Mike repeated this performance as many as four times in succession, waiting until his rivals had started to groom once more before again charging them. When he eventually stopped, often in the precise spot where the other males had been sitting, they sometimes returned and with submissive gestures began to groom Mike. . . Mike made determined efforts to secure other human artifacts to enhance his displays.
Power through expertise.
Humans tend to compare themselves to those very near them in the status hierarchy - to those just above them, in particular.
"There is evidence that the worst parts of human nature are always near the surface, ready to rise when cultural restraint weakens. We are not blank slates, as some behaviorists once imagined."
-- the title of the next book in my lineup: The Blank Slate
The best liar is the one who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way.
You could say that low self-esteem evolved as a way to reconcile people to subordinate status when this reconciliation is in their genetic interest.
Don't expect people with low self-esteem to hide it. It may be in their genetic interest to convey their acceptance by behaving submissively so that they aren't treated like a threat.
Feeling bad about yourself is a way of discouraging the repeat of status-reducing behaviors.
The split-brain story
-- Rationalization is a defense - this is proof that why means justify
beneffectance: the tendency of people to present themselves as both beneficial and effective
When we ask friends for help, we are often asking not only that they use their status, but that they raise ours in the process.
Backing a friend means verbally defending him when his interests are in dispute -- and, more generally, saying good, status-raising things about him.
We feel genuinely in awe of those to whom we might profitably grovel.
Language evolved as a way of manipulating people to your advantage; cognition, the wellspring of language, is warped accordingly.
What was best in Freud is his sensing the paradox of being a highly social animal: being at our core libidinous, rapacious, and generally selfish, yet having to live civilly with other human beings -- having to reach our animal goals via a torturous path of cooperation, compromise, and restraint. From this insight flows Freud's most basic idea about the mind: it is a place of conflict between animal impulses and social reality.
The courts would do better to spend less time deliberating the circumstances under which a crime occured and more time deliberating what the practical effect of possible punishments will be.
metanorm: a norm for punishing people who do not punish deviants
The Elements of Style - Strunk and White - ***
The Elements of Style
Note: I have no idea why Strunk and White would make the first chapter of this book so inaccessable to the average reader. Here's an example:
"Participial phrases preceded by a conjunction or by a preposition, nouns in apposition, adjectives, and adjective phrases come under the same rule if they begin the sentence."
The book drops the jargon somewhere around the second chapter, but it's painful until then.
TOP 5 IDEAS:
Keep related words together.
Work from a suitable design.
Write in a way that comes naturally, and don't assume that because you've acted naturally, your product is without flaw.
Make the paragraph your unit of writing.
Place the emphatic words of a sentence at the end.
Charles's is correct, Charles' isn't
Semicolons combine two complete sentences.
Colons link sentences while continuing the flow.
Singular subjects use is, plurals use are, regardless of what they're linked to
He's one of those people WHO'S never ready on time: INCORRECT
He's one of those people WHO'RE never ready on time: CORRECT
His speech as well as his manners are objectionable: INCORRECT
His speech as well as his manners is objectionable: CORRECT
If NONE means NOT ONE, use singular forms:
None of us is perfect - RIGHT
None of us are perfect - WRONG
-- what the hell
-- this makes sense. "one of us", not "us", is the subject
Compound cliches (the long and short of it) are considered singular
Every is considered singular, no matter how many subjects follow it
"Every window, picture, and mirror was smashed."
Make the paragraph your unit of writing.
Show, not tell.
Make definite assertions in writing. "Not" shouldn't be used as an evasion, i.e., "He was not pleased with the ending."
Don't use "would", "should", etc. unless there's uncertainty.
Prefer specific, definite language over abstraction.
Extra words are bad.
"The fact that" is an unacceptable phrase.
-- I agree, it tips your hand as a cliche-spewing chump
Avoid a succession of loose sentences (two-part sentences joined with "and", "but", etc.)
If you've written a monotonous paragraph, reform it. Simple sentences can be good.
Keep related words together.
-- that's very helpful advice
-- when I'm editing or rereading my work, I'll check to see whether I've put the words in the strongest order
Make sure your sentences don't have multiple interpretations.
Example: "All of the members were not present."
Does that mean "Not all of the members were present." or "All of the members were absent."?
Keep summaries to one tense.
Place the emphatic words of a sentence at the end.
-- I've been trying to do this.
The other prominent position in a sentence is at the beginning.
-- if you emphasize something in the beginning of a sentence it has a natural tendency to get overruled by the emphasis at the end of the sentence
-- use one emphasis per sentence for stronger messages
Exclamation marks are reserved for actual exclamations.
-- tell that to the easily excitable, they'll fight you for it
MISUSED WORDS AND EXPRESSIONS:
And/or: a device, or shortcut, that damages a sentence and often leads to confusion or ambiguity
-- shouldn't that read "confusion and/or ambiguity"? hehehe
Cases: Don't use "cases" unless referring to actual incidents (or casings)
Claim (verb): Not to be used as a substitute for DECLARE, MAINTAIN, or CHARGE.
-- I'd use it as a substitute for DECLARE or MAINTAIN when intentionally leaving room for doubt: "He claimed he put it back, but it's not there."
-- The dictionary agrees: "To state to be true, especially when open to question; ASSERT or MAINTAIN."
-- owned
Compare to / Compare with:
Compare to = dissimilar things
Compare with = similar things
Comprise: Don't confuse COMPRISE with CONSTITUTE
-- comprise = consist of
-- constitute = amount to
-- I'm probably guilty of this
Different than: should be DIFFERENT FROM
Factor: Another cliche-spewing chump word, avoid it
Farther and Further:
farther = distance
further = time, quantity
Feature: Another cliche-spewing chump word, avoid it
The common word meaning "combustible" is "inflammable". But some people are thrown off by the in- and think "inflammable" now means "not combustible." For this reason, trucks carrying gasoline or explosives are now marked FLAMMABLE.
-- HAHAHAHA, that's the saddest thing I've ever heard, especially since the book was published before I was born and flammable's a legitimate word now
Fortuitous: Don't confuse FORTUITOUS with FORTUNATE
Fortuitous = happening by chance
Fortunate = lucky
-- guilty of this
More importantly: should be MORE IMPORTANT
-ize: people were making verbs by adding -ize to nouns: listed are CUSTOMIZE, PRIORITIZE, and FINALIZE
-- I bet grammarians rarely win these battles: though the law's on their side, the speakers of the house are not, and thus they find themselves outvoted and the law changed
Less: use FEWER when fewer applies
Regretful: not to be used in place of REGRETTABLE
They: not for use in addressing a group of people
Transpire: does not mean HAPPENED - means LEAKED OUT
STYLE ADVICE
Place yourself in the background.
Write in a way that comes naturally, and don't assume that because you've acted naturally, your product is without flaw.
"Don't assume that because you've acted naturally, your product is without flaw."
-- I wish I had invented that sentence. It perfectly captures my attitude toward people who use the authenticity of their actions as a shield against reproach.
Work from a suitable design.
-- I've never done that, it could help a lot
Revise and rewrite.
Don't overwrite.
Don't overstate.
Don't use qualifiers (rather, very, little, pretty).
Don't be Spontaneous Me.
-- save the stream-of-consciousness bullshit for your blog
Don't explain too much. Let conversation disclose the speaker's manner or condition.
Avoid fancy words. Let your ear be your guide.
Be clear.
"There are occasions when obscurity serves a literary yearning, if not a literary purpose. . ."
-- Hah!
Don't inject opinion into your writing.
Use figures of speech sparingly.
Prefer the standard to the offbeat.
What's appropriate in advertising or business writing may not be for formal or literary writing.
Note: I have no idea why Strunk and White would make the first chapter of this book so inaccessable to the average reader. Here's an example:
"Participial phrases preceded by a conjunction or by a preposition, nouns in apposition, adjectives, and adjective phrases come under the same rule if they begin the sentence."
The book drops the jargon somewhere around the second chapter, but it's painful until then.
TOP 5 IDEAS:
Keep related words together.
Work from a suitable design.
Write in a way that comes naturally, and don't assume that because you've acted naturally, your product is without flaw.
Make the paragraph your unit of writing.
Place the emphatic words of a sentence at the end.
Charles's is correct, Charles' isn't
Semicolons combine two complete sentences.
Colons link sentences while continuing the flow.
Singular subjects use is, plurals use are, regardless of what they're linked to
He's one of those people WHO'S never ready on time: INCORRECT
He's one of those people WHO'RE never ready on time: CORRECT
His speech as well as his manners are objectionable: INCORRECT
His speech as well as his manners is objectionable: CORRECT
If NONE means NOT ONE, use singular forms:
None of us is perfect - RIGHT
None of us are perfect - WRONG
-- what the hell
-- this makes sense. "one of us", not "us", is the subject
Compound cliches (the long and short of it) are considered singular
Every is considered singular, no matter how many subjects follow it
"Every window, picture, and mirror was smashed."
Make the paragraph your unit of writing.
Show, not tell.
Make definite assertions in writing. "Not" shouldn't be used as an evasion, i.e., "He was not pleased with the ending."
Don't use "would", "should", etc. unless there's uncertainty.
Prefer specific, definite language over abstraction.
Extra words are bad.
"The fact that" is an unacceptable phrase.
-- I agree, it tips your hand as a cliche-spewing chump
Avoid a succession of loose sentences (two-part sentences joined with "and", "but", etc.)
If you've written a monotonous paragraph, reform it. Simple sentences can be good.
Keep related words together.
-- that's very helpful advice
-- when I'm editing or rereading my work, I'll check to see whether I've put the words in the strongest order
Make sure your sentences don't have multiple interpretations.
Example: "All of the members were not present."
Does that mean "Not all of the members were present." or "All of the members were absent."?
Keep summaries to one tense.
Place the emphatic words of a sentence at the end.
-- I've been trying to do this.
The other prominent position in a sentence is at the beginning.
-- if you emphasize something in the beginning of a sentence it has a natural tendency to get overruled by the emphasis at the end of the sentence
-- use one emphasis per sentence for stronger messages
Exclamation marks are reserved for actual exclamations.
-- tell that to the easily excitable, they'll fight you for it
MISUSED WORDS AND EXPRESSIONS:
And/or: a device, or shortcut, that damages a sentence and often leads to confusion or ambiguity
-- shouldn't that read "confusion and/or ambiguity"? hehehe
Cases: Don't use "cases" unless referring to actual incidents (or casings)
Claim (verb): Not to be used as a substitute for DECLARE, MAINTAIN, or CHARGE.
-- I'd use it as a substitute for DECLARE or MAINTAIN when intentionally leaving room for doubt: "He claimed he put it back, but it's not there."
-- The dictionary agrees: "To state to be true, especially when open to question; ASSERT or MAINTAIN."
-- owned
Compare to / Compare with:
Compare to = dissimilar things
Compare with = similar things
Comprise: Don't confuse COMPRISE with CONSTITUTE
-- comprise = consist of
-- constitute = amount to
-- I'm probably guilty of this
Different than: should be DIFFERENT FROM
Factor: Another cliche-spewing chump word, avoid it
Farther and Further:
farther = distance
further = time, quantity
Feature: Another cliche-spewing chump word, avoid it
The common word meaning "combustible" is "inflammable". But some people are thrown off by the in- and think "inflammable" now means "not combustible." For this reason, trucks carrying gasoline or explosives are now marked FLAMMABLE.
-- HAHAHAHA, that's the saddest thing I've ever heard, especially since the book was published before I was born and flammable's a legitimate word now
Fortuitous: Don't confuse FORTUITOUS with FORTUNATE
Fortuitous = happening by chance
Fortunate = lucky
-- guilty of this
More importantly: should be MORE IMPORTANT
-ize: people were making verbs by adding -ize to nouns: listed are CUSTOMIZE, PRIORITIZE, and FINALIZE
-- I bet grammarians rarely win these battles: though the law's on their side, the speakers of the house are not, and thus they find themselves outvoted and the law changed
Less: use FEWER when fewer applies
Regretful: not to be used in place of REGRETTABLE
They: not for use in addressing a group of people
Transpire: does not mean HAPPENED - means LEAKED OUT
STYLE ADVICE
Place yourself in the background.
Write in a way that comes naturally, and don't assume that because you've acted naturally, your product is without flaw.
"Don't assume that because you've acted naturally, your product is without flaw."
-- I wish I had invented that sentence. It perfectly captures my attitude toward people who use the authenticity of their actions as a shield against reproach.
Work from a suitable design.
-- I've never done that, it could help a lot
Revise and rewrite.
Don't overwrite.
Don't overstate.
Don't use qualifiers (rather, very, little, pretty).
Don't be Spontaneous Me.
-- save the stream-of-consciousness bullshit for your blog
Don't explain too much. Let conversation disclose the speaker's manner or condition.
Avoid fancy words. Let your ear be your guide.
Be clear.
"There are occasions when obscurity serves a literary yearning, if not a literary purpose. . ."
-- Hah!
Don't inject opinion into your writing.
Use figures of speech sparingly.
Prefer the standard to the offbeat.
What's appropriate in advertising or business writing may not be for formal or literary writing.
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