The Blank Slate - Stephen Pinker - ***

Humans are not blank slates.

Hobbes' leviathan: Hobbes believed people to be evil and that the only way to escape their nature was by surrendering to a higher authority
The myth of the noble savage: the idea that humans in their natural state are untroubled and pure
The myth of the noble noble: the idea that status affects virtue

A truly blank slate couldn't do anything.

Heritability: the percentage of a trait determined by genetics

proximate cause: the immediate reason
ultimate cause: the mechanic responsible for the proximate cause

Universal mental mechanisms can underlie special variation across cultures.
In addition to language instincts [Chomsky's Universal Grammar], there are hundreds of other traits that can be found in every society ever documented.
Donald Brown includes conflict, rape, revenge, jealousy, dominance, and male coalitional violence as human universals.

European culture dominated other cultures because conditions in Europe allowed for competition and the sharing of discoveries

In the early 1970s the New York Times reported the discovery of the "gentle Tasaday" of the Philippine rainforest, a people with no words for conflict, violence, or weapons. The Tasaday turned out to be local farmers dressed in leaves for a photo opportunity so that cronies of the Philippine president could set aside their "homeland" as a preserve to enjoy mineral and logging rights.
- HAH

theory of mind: the ability to guess at other people's goals
Autistic people are impaired in this arena

When an adult first exposes a baby to a word, as in "That's a TOMA", the baby will remember it as the name of the object the adult was looking at, not the object the baby was looking at.
If an adult indicates he did something accidentally, the baby won't imitate him. If the adult indicates he did it purposely, the baby will imitate him.
When an adult tries and fails to do something, the baby replicates the intent, not the failure.

The brain is able to reallocate tissue to new tasks, and can improve existing abilities by expanding their neural sphere of influence
Amputees use the part of the cortex formerly serving the missing limb to represent other parts of their bodies. Congenitally blind [blind from birth] people use their visual cortex to read Braille. Subcortical structures, however, are much less plastic.

The ferret story:
A neuroscientist rewired the brains of ferrets so that signals from their eyes fed into their primary auditory cortex. When he then probed the auditory cortex with electrodes, he found it acted in many ways like the visual cortex. Though the results were not perfect, the ferrets could use their rewired brains to move toward objects that were only detectable via sight.

There's very little genetic difference among humans. Geneticists suspect our ancestors passed through a population bottleneck fairly recently in our evolutionary history.

"Discriminating against people on the basis of traits over which they have no control would be unfair."
-- this isn't a very good point, because the fact that these traits aren't volitional doesn't impact their practical effects
-- I'd think an author familiar with evolutionary biology would have an evolutionary perspective on fairness, but instead, he's got the blinders on. Reality subscribes to merit-based fairness. Being less fit than others for a purpose - for WHATEVER reason - will bring less of a reward. I don't know why he's doing the scrub thing and telling us that the ethics of the situation demand that we ignore perceived information, however relevant, when it is odious.
-- he goes on to make the point about fitness later

The best technique for someone facing discrimination is to set themselves aside as an individual. The more information one has about an individual, the less group stereotypes matter when dealing with that individual.

Hume's Guillotine: the fact that you can't derive what should be [ought to be] from what is

Traits like scientific genius, athletic virtuosity, and musical giftedness are what behavioral geneticists call emergenic: they materialize only with certain combinations of genes and therefore don't "breed true".
When a Nobel Prize winner was asked to contribute to a sperm bank, his response was basically, "You should be asking my dad; look at my kids."

-- the author takes a moment to devote a few sentences to the people behind Godwin's Law
American public health officials were slow to acknowledge that smoking causes cancer because it was the Nazis who originally established the link.

Wright argues that three features of human nature lead to a steady expansion of cooperation.
1. The ability to figure out how the world works
2. Language, which allows knowledge to be shared and bargains to be struck
3. Emotions, which strengthen cooperative bonds and serve as a hedge against exploitation

Peaceful coexistence doesn't have to come from pounding selfish desires out of people. It can come from pitting long-term selfishness (continuing returns from cooperation) against short-term selfishness (immediate returns for exploitation).

Debating determinism is a waste of time: if determinism was real, you wouldn't be able to do anything about it anyway.

explanation vs. exculpation: an explanation for behavior doesn't exonerate the behaver

The Public Good game: everyone makes a voluntary contribution, the experimenter doubles it, and the pot is divided evenly among all the participants regardless of their contributions
-- public expenses don't have the pot doubled

Psychopaths, as far as we know, cannot be "cured". A psychologist showed that certain harebrained therapies, such as teaching them social skills and boosting their self-esteem, can make them even more dangerous.

The ability to spot deception in others is always good, but a certain amount of self-delusion lets people get away with things they couldn't otherwise.

-- ideas being marked as sacred or taboo gives them an inordinate amount of weight and colors people's decisions

Much of what is today called "social criticism" consists of members of the upper classes denouncing the tastes of the lower classes (bawdy entertainment, fast food, plentiful consumer goods) while considering themselves egalitarians.
We don't show contempt to the man who eats tiramisu or drives a gas-guzzling Volvo, but woe to the man who eats a Big Mac or drives an SUV.

Moralizing an issue centers the debate around virtue and sin instead of cost and benefit.
"There is an optimal amount of pollution in the environment, just as there is an optimal amount of dirt in your house." Robert Frank, economist

When facts tip over a sacred cow, people are tempted to suppress the facts.

"They argue out of respect for the social convention that one should always provide reasons for one's opinions, but when an argument is refuted, they work harder on their replacement argument instead of changing their minds."
-- hah

Believing that violence is an aberration is dangerous, because it lulls us into forgetting how easily violence may erupt in quiescent places.
According to one estimate, 7% of young men commit 79% of repeated violent offenses.

The most violent age is not adolescence but toddlerhood: in a recent large study, almost half of the boys just past the age of two, and a slightly smaller percentage of the girls, engaged in hitting, biting, and kicking. As the author pointed out, "Babies do not kill each other, because we do not give them access to knives and guns. The question. . . we've been trying to answer for the past 30 years is how do children learn to aggress. That's the wrong question. The right question is, how do they learn not to aggress?"

Violent cultures arise in societies that are beyond the reach of the law and in which precious assets are easily stolen.
Adjudication by an armed authority appears to be the most effective general violence-reduction technique ever invented.
Canada may be more peaceful than the U.S. in part because the police preceded the settlers as the frontier expanded, keeping Canada from having to develop an honor-based vigilante culture.

The author's story:
As a young anarchist teenager living in Canada in the 1960s, he laughed off his parents' argument that if the government ever laid down its arms all hell would break loose. His prediction was put to the test when the Montreal police went on strike. . . by the end of the day, six banks had been robbed, a hundred shops had been looted, twelve fires had been set, forty carloads of storefront glass had been broken, and three million dollars in property damage had been inflicted before the city authorities were able to call in the army and the Mounties to restore order. . . this decisive empirical test left his politics in tatters.

The problem with sentiments such as "War: what is it good for? Absolutely nothing!" is that the other side has to feel the same way at the same time.

Removing the material incentives in a conflict will not necessarily end it.
The best-laid plans of peacemakers are often derailed by the adversaries' ethnocentrism, sense of honor, moralization, and self-deception.

Women and men tend towards differences in basic skills.
Women are better at remembering landmarks, more in tune with their senses, and are better at mathematical calculation.
Men are better at mentally rotating objects and maps, better at throwing things, and better at solving word problems.

Gender is not a construct - one study of 25 boys who were born without a penis and raised as girls showed that ALL of them showed male patterns of rough-and-tumble play and had typically male interests and attitudes. More than half of them spontaneously declared they were boys.
-- there was another study done on girls whose mothers took hormones while pregnant, causing the girls to wind up with hyena penises (which got fixed): all of those girls were considered tomboys as well

The question of why more women don't choose careers in engineering has a rather obvious answer: because they don't want to. On average, women are more interested in dealing with people, whereas men are more interested in dealing with things.
Any imbalance between men and women in their occupations or earnings is viewed as direct proof of gender bias. The possibility that men and women might differ from each other in ways that affect what jobs they hold or how much they get paid may never be mentioned in public, because it will set back the cause of equity in the workplace and harm the interests of women.

Helen Fischer, an anthropologist, speculates that the culture of business in our knowledge-driven, globalized economy will soon favor women. Women are more articulate and cooperative, are not as obsessed with rank, and are better able to negotiate win-win outcomes. The workplace of the new century, she predicts, will increasingly demand these talents, and women may surpass men in status and earnings.
-- those talents are demanded, yes, but I suspect women's natural advantages in these fields will be trumped by men's competitiveness: men being more obsessed with status encourages them to expend more effort in pursuing higher status and earnings
-- the author goes on to state the second part of my hypothesis

Three laws of behavior genetics:
All human behavior traits are heritable (a bit of an exaggeration).
The effects of being raised in the same family are smaller than the effects of the genes [adopted children will turn out differently].
A substantial portion of the variation in complex human behavioral traits is not accounted for by either genes or families.

Intelligence is heritable, as are the five major ways personalities can vary
OCEAN: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion/introversion, antagonism/agreeableness, and neuroticism

The widely publicized idea that children who get along with their parents are less likely to use drugs comes from a $25 million dollar study. A researcher talks some smack about this: "Perhaps what misled those federal agencies into thinking they were getting their money's worth was the positive way the researchers phrased their findings. Expressed in a different (but equally accurate) way, the results sound less interesting: adolescents who don't get along with their parents are more likely to use drugs or engage in risky sex. The results sound even less interesting expressed this way: adolescents who use drugs or engage in risky sex don't get along with their parents."

Let the way your children are naturally determine the type of parenting you give them.

Parenting counts for very little compared to peer groups and genetics.
The leader of a recent heroic study who had hoped to prove that differences in parenting did affect how children turned out confessed that he was "shocked" by his own results.

Kids try to earn status in the world of kids, not the world of adults.
Once a child acquires a role, it is hard to shake it off, both because other children force the child to stay in the niche and because the child specializes in the skills necessary to prosper in it.