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.
Showing posts with label worldview. Show all posts
Showing posts with label worldview. Show all posts
Sunday, April 20, 2008
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
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 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 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.
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.
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin - ***
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
"I scarce ever heard or saw the introductory words, "Without vanity I may say," &c., but some vain thing immediately followed."
"There was a salt-marsh that bounded part of the mill-pond, on the edge of which, at high water, we used to stand to fish for minnows. By much trampling, we had made it a mere quagmire. My proposal was to build a wharff there fit for us to stand upon, and I showed my comrades a large heap of stones, which were intended for a new house near the marsh, and which would very well suit our purpose. Accordingly, in the evening, when the workmen were gone, I assembled a number of my play-fellows, and working with them diligently like so many emmets, sometimes two or three to a stone, we brought them all away and built our little wharff. The next morning the workmen were surprised at missing the stones, which were found in our wharff. Inquiry was made after the removers; we were discovered and complained of; several of us were corrected by our fathers; and though I pleaded the usefulness of the work, mine convinced me that nothing was useful which was not honest."
-- this is awesome humor
Ben Franklin was a vegetarian
"the chief ends of conversation are to inform or to be informed, to please or to persuade"
Acting like you know everything makes people want to contradict you
Ben Franklin smuggled himself to New York by pretending he'd gotten a girl pregnant and was running away to avoid a shotgun wedding
A man is sometimes more generous when he has but a little money than when he has plenty, perhaps thro' fear of being thought to have but little.
"His drinking continu'd, about which we sometimes quarrell'd;, for, when a little intoxicated, he was very fractious. Once, in a boat on the Delaware with some other young men, he refused to row in his turn. "I will be row'd home," says he. "We will not row you," says I. "You must, or stay all night on the water," says he, "just as you please." The others said, "Let us row; what signifies it?" But, my mind being soured with his other conduct, I continu'd to refuse. So he swore he would make me row, or throw me overboard; and coming along, stepping on the thwarts, toward me, when he came up and struck at me, I clapped my hand under his crutch, and, rising, pitched him head-foremost into the river. I knew he was a good swimmer, and so was under little concern about him; but before he could get round to lay hold of the boat, we had with a few strokes pull'd her out of his reach; and ever when he drew near the boat, we ask'd if he would row, striking a few strokes to slide her away from him. He was ready to die with vexation, and obstinately would not promise to row. However, seeing him at last beginning to tire, we lifted him in and brought him home dripping wet in the evening."
-- hahaha
He let me into Keith's character; told me there was not the least probability that he had written any letters for me; that no one, who knew him, had the smallest dependence on him; and he laught at the notion of the governor's giving me a letter of credit, having, as he said, no credit to give. . . He wish'd to please everybody; and, having little to give, he gave expectations.
When Ben Franklin loaned people money, he usually got shortchanged. When he fronted money to people, the same happened.
"On occasion, I carried up and down stairs a large form of types in each hand, when others carried but one in both hands. They wondered to see, from this and several instances, that the Water-American, as they called me, was stronger than themselves, who drank strong beer! . . . I thought it a detestable custom; but it was necessary, he suppos'd, to drink strong beer, that he might be strong to labor. I endeavored to convince him that the bodily strength afforded by beer could only be in proportion to the grain or flour of the barley dissolved in the water of which it was made; that there was more flour in a pennyworth of bread; and therefore, if he would eat that with a pint of water, it would give him more strength than a quart of beer."
-- Ben Franklin knew nutrition
-- he talks about the "folly of being on ill terms with those one is to live with continually"
"I should have mentioned before, that, in the autumn of the preceding year, I had form'd most of my ingenious acquaintance into a club of mutual improvement, which we called the JUNTO; we met on Friday evenings."
-- nice
Franklin may have started the first library in North America
From a letter to a friend who urged Franklin to continue work on his autobiography:
"School and other education constantly proceed upon false principles, and show a clumsy apparatus pointed at a false mark; but your apparatus is simple, and the mark a true one; and while parents and young persons are left destitute of other just means of estimating and becoming prepared for a reasonable course in life, your discovery that the thing is in many a man's private power, will be invaluable!"
-- he talks about "the impropriety of presenting one's self as the proposer of any useful project, that might be suppos'd to raise one's reputation in the smallest degree above that of one's neighbors, when one has need of their assistance to accomplish that project", and suggests that status-raising projects should be suggested by others
"Reading was the only amusement I allow'd myself. I spent no time in taverns, games, or frolicks of any kind"
-- later, he was tempted into playing chess by a buddy, but when he saw it was taking up too much of his time he promised to do something productive for every game he lost - he wound up learning Italian because of this
"We have an English proverb that says, "He that would thrive, must ask his wife." It was lucky for me that I had one as much dispos'd to industry and frugality as myself."
I conceiv'd the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection. I wish'd to live without committing any fault at any time; I would conquer all that either natural inclination, custom, or company might lead me into. As I knew, or thought I knew, what was right and wrong, I did not see why I might not always do the one and avoid the other. But I soon found I had undertaken a task of more difficulty than I bad imagined. While my care was employ'd in guarding against one fault, I was often surprised by another; habit took the advantage of inattention; inclination was sometimes too strong for reason. I concluded, at length, that the mere speculative conviction that it was our interest to be completely virtuous, was not sufficient to prevent our slipping; and that the contrary habits must be broken, and good ones acquired and established, before we can have any dependence on a steady, uniform rectitude of conduct.
-- I'm beginning to see that myself.
The 13 Virtues of Benjamin Franklin
1. TEMPERANCE. Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.
2. SILENCE. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.
3. ORDER. Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.
4. RESOLUTION. Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.
5. FRUGALITY. Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing.
6. INDUSTRY. Lose no time; be always employ'd in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.
7. SINCERITY. Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly.
8. JUSTICE. Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty.
9. MODERATION. Avoid extreams; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.
10. CLEANLINESS. Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, cloaths, or habitation.
11. TRANQUILLITY. Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.
12. CHASTITY. Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dulness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another's peace or reputation.
13. HUMILITY. Imitate Jesus and Socrates.
He concentrated specifically on one virtue a week and repeated this cycle continuously, keeping a notebook in which he'd record each day's faults. The notebook also contained the day's schedule.
"I enter'd upon the execution of this plan for self-examination, and continu'd it with occasional intermissions for some time. I was surpris'd to find myself so much fuller of faults than I had imagined; but I had the satisfaction of seeing them diminish."
The story of the speckled axe:
A man brings an axe to a smith, wanting to have its entire surface as bright as its edge. The smith humors him, telling him he'll grind the axe bright if the man will turn the grindwheel; the man huffs and puffs, checking on his work from time to time to time, then finally says he'll take his axe the way it is. "No," said the smith, "keep going, we'll have it bright soon; as yet, it is only speckled."
"Yes," said the man, "but I think I like a speckled axe best."
-- self-improvement is hard, cognitive dissonance easy
"On the whole, tho' I never arrived at the perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short of it, I was, by the endeavour, a better and a happier man than I otherwise should have been if I had not attempted it"
"I purposed writing a little comment on each virtue, in which I would have shown the advantages of possessing it, and the mischiefs attending its opposite vice; and I should have called my book THE ART OF VIRTUE, because it would have shown the means and manner of obtaining virtue, which would have distinguished it from the mere exhortation to be good, that does not instruct and indicate the means, but is like the apostle's man of verbal charity, who only without showing to the naked and hungry how or where they might get clothes or victuals, exhorted them to be fed and clothed.
But it so happened that my intention of writing and publishing this comment was never fulfilled."
-- a shame, but thankfully, the reason it was never fulfilled was because he was too busy living his values to put them down on paper
-- he talks about how once a party attains the purpose it was formed for, each member starts to pursue his own interests
-- "the united party of virtue", a body of virtuous and good men of all nations meant to be governed by virtuous and wise rules. Admission was to start with young single men, who'd keep the existence of the society secret and practice the 13-week virtue cycle. These people would recommend friends for inclusion in the society, which centers around helping its members through advice, assistance, and support in promoting one another's interests, business, and advancement in life.
-- unbelievable
"I was not discourag'd by the seeming magnitude of the undertaking, as I have always thought that one man of tolerable abilities may work great changes, and accomplish great affairs among mankind, if he first forms a good plan, and, cutting off all amusements or other employments that would divert his attention, makes the execution of that same plan his sole study and business."
-- he recommends women take up accounting instead of music or dancing, for sound reasons: not only would a widower not be taken advantage of, but she could also manage her late husband's business
"He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged."
-- holy shit, I've seen that - the underlying theory is probably a dominance thing
-- he advises to keep your invoices straight
-- a mention of Ben Franklin's inventing the fire department, which was awesome: additionally, they were a social club, meeting once a month to discuss new ways of firefighting
A preacher wanted to build a house for orphans in Georgia. Franklin comments as follows:
"I did not disapprove of the design, but, as Georgia was then destitute of materials and workmen, and it was proposed to send them from Philadelphia at a great expense, I thought it would have been better to have built the house here, and brought the children to it. This I advis'd; but he was resolute in his first project, rejected my counsel, and I therefore refus'd to contribute."
The preacher, however, was a master orator - Franklin was later shamed into contributing far more than the original nothing. A friend had emptied his pockets prior to attending the speech, suspecting a collection was coming: when he heard this oratory he felt such a desire to give that he asked the man next to him if he could borrow some money. Unfortunately, the man was perhaps the only man in the company with the firmness not to be affected; he replied, "At any other time, Friend Hopkinson, I would lend to thee freely; but not now, for thee seems to be out of thy right senses."
"Partnerships often finish in quarrels; but I was happy in this, that mine were all carried on and ended amicably, owing, I think, a good deal to the precaution of having very explicitly settled, in our articles, every thing to be done by or expected from each partner, so that there was nothing to dispute."
-- he recommends that anyone intending to enter a partnership take this precaution
Ben Franklin's strategy for borrowing: go to dinner with the guy and get him drunk
Ben Franklin's strategy for voting: show up on time
-- he talks some shit about how the Quakers couldn't stand firm on their commitment not to support war, and how they gave up their power to effect change in exchange for keeping their principles intact
He invented the four-panel lantern
"after supper, he told us, jokingly, that he much admir'd the idea of Sancho Panza, who, when it was proposed to give him a government, requested it might be a government of blacks, as then, if he could not agree with his people, he might sell them."
-- oh man
General Braddock's last words: "We shall better know how to deal with them another time."
When no one would attend a priest's sermons, Franklin suggested that the sermons be directly before rum giveaways and performed on location.
Franklin matter-of-factly states that his ship was chased by privateers, and comments on how shipbuilding suffers because hullbuilding, rigging, and sailing are all functions performed by different people who don't communicate with each other.
"I scarce ever heard or saw the introductory words, "Without vanity I may say," &c., but some vain thing immediately followed."
"There was a salt-marsh that bounded part of the mill-pond, on the edge of which, at high water, we used to stand to fish for minnows. By much trampling, we had made it a mere quagmire. My proposal was to build a wharff there fit for us to stand upon, and I showed my comrades a large heap of stones, which were intended for a new house near the marsh, and which would very well suit our purpose. Accordingly, in the evening, when the workmen were gone, I assembled a number of my play-fellows, and working with them diligently like so many emmets, sometimes two or three to a stone, we brought them all away and built our little wharff. The next morning the workmen were surprised at missing the stones, which were found in our wharff. Inquiry was made after the removers; we were discovered and complained of; several of us were corrected by our fathers; and though I pleaded the usefulness of the work, mine convinced me that nothing was useful which was not honest."
-- this is awesome humor
Ben Franklin was a vegetarian
"the chief ends of conversation are to inform or to be informed, to please or to persuade"
Acting like you know everything makes people want to contradict you
Ben Franklin smuggled himself to New York by pretending he'd gotten a girl pregnant and was running away to avoid a shotgun wedding
A man is sometimes more generous when he has but a little money than when he has plenty, perhaps thro' fear of being thought to have but little.
"His drinking continu'd, about which we sometimes quarrell'd;, for, when a little intoxicated, he was very fractious. Once, in a boat on the Delaware with some other young men, he refused to row in his turn. "I will be row'd home," says he. "We will not row you," says I. "You must, or stay all night on the water," says he, "just as you please." The others said, "Let us row; what signifies it?" But, my mind being soured with his other conduct, I continu'd to refuse. So he swore he would make me row, or throw me overboard; and coming along, stepping on the thwarts, toward me, when he came up and struck at me, I clapped my hand under his crutch, and, rising, pitched him head-foremost into the river. I knew he was a good swimmer, and so was under little concern about him; but before he could get round to lay hold of the boat, we had with a few strokes pull'd her out of his reach; and ever when he drew near the boat, we ask'd if he would row, striking a few strokes to slide her away from him. He was ready to die with vexation, and obstinately would not promise to row. However, seeing him at last beginning to tire, we lifted him in and brought him home dripping wet in the evening."
-- hahaha
He let me into Keith's character; told me there was not the least probability that he had written any letters for me; that no one, who knew him, had the smallest dependence on him; and he laught at the notion of the governor's giving me a letter of credit, having, as he said, no credit to give. . . He wish'd to please everybody; and, having little to give, he gave expectations.
When Ben Franklin loaned people money, he usually got shortchanged. When he fronted money to people, the same happened.
"On occasion, I carried up and down stairs a large form of types in each hand, when others carried but one in both hands. They wondered to see, from this and several instances, that the Water-American, as they called me, was stronger than themselves, who drank strong beer! . . . I thought it a detestable custom; but it was necessary, he suppos'd, to drink strong beer, that he might be strong to labor. I endeavored to convince him that the bodily strength afforded by beer could only be in proportion to the grain or flour of the barley dissolved in the water of which it was made; that there was more flour in a pennyworth of bread; and therefore, if he would eat that with a pint of water, it would give him more strength than a quart of beer."
-- Ben Franklin knew nutrition
-- he talks about the "folly of being on ill terms with those one is to live with continually"
"I should have mentioned before, that, in the autumn of the preceding year, I had form'd most of my ingenious acquaintance into a club of mutual improvement, which we called the JUNTO; we met on Friday evenings."
-- nice
Franklin may have started the first library in North America
From a letter to a friend who urged Franklin to continue work on his autobiography:
"School and other education constantly proceed upon false principles, and show a clumsy apparatus pointed at a false mark; but your apparatus is simple, and the mark a true one; and while parents and young persons are left destitute of other just means of estimating and becoming prepared for a reasonable course in life, your discovery that the thing is in many a man's private power, will be invaluable!"
-- he talks about "the impropriety of presenting one's self as the proposer of any useful project, that might be suppos'd to raise one's reputation in the smallest degree above that of one's neighbors, when one has need of their assistance to accomplish that project", and suggests that status-raising projects should be suggested by others
"Reading was the only amusement I allow'd myself. I spent no time in taverns, games, or frolicks of any kind"
-- later, he was tempted into playing chess by a buddy, but when he saw it was taking up too much of his time he promised to do something productive for every game he lost - he wound up learning Italian because of this
"We have an English proverb that says, "He that would thrive, must ask his wife." It was lucky for me that I had one as much dispos'd to industry and frugality as myself."
I conceiv'd the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection. I wish'd to live without committing any fault at any time; I would conquer all that either natural inclination, custom, or company might lead me into. As I knew, or thought I knew, what was right and wrong, I did not see why I might not always do the one and avoid the other. But I soon found I had undertaken a task of more difficulty than I bad imagined. While my care was employ'd in guarding against one fault, I was often surprised by another; habit took the advantage of inattention; inclination was sometimes too strong for reason. I concluded, at length, that the mere speculative conviction that it was our interest to be completely virtuous, was not sufficient to prevent our slipping; and that the contrary habits must be broken, and good ones acquired and established, before we can have any dependence on a steady, uniform rectitude of conduct.
-- I'm beginning to see that myself.
The 13 Virtues of Benjamin Franklin
1. TEMPERANCE. Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.
2. SILENCE. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.
3. ORDER. Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.
4. RESOLUTION. Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.
5. FRUGALITY. Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing.
6. INDUSTRY. Lose no time; be always employ'd in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.
7. SINCERITY. Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly.
8. JUSTICE. Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty.
9. MODERATION. Avoid extreams; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.
10. CLEANLINESS. Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, cloaths, or habitation.
11. TRANQUILLITY. Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.
12. CHASTITY. Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dulness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another's peace or reputation.
13. HUMILITY. Imitate Jesus and Socrates.
He concentrated specifically on one virtue a week and repeated this cycle continuously, keeping a notebook in which he'd record each day's faults. The notebook also contained the day's schedule.
"I enter'd upon the execution of this plan for self-examination, and continu'd it with occasional intermissions for some time. I was surpris'd to find myself so much fuller of faults than I had imagined; but I had the satisfaction of seeing them diminish."
The story of the speckled axe:
A man brings an axe to a smith, wanting to have its entire surface as bright as its edge. The smith humors him, telling him he'll grind the axe bright if the man will turn the grindwheel; the man huffs and puffs, checking on his work from time to time to time, then finally says he'll take his axe the way it is. "No," said the smith, "keep going, we'll have it bright soon; as yet, it is only speckled."
"Yes," said the man, "but I think I like a speckled axe best."
-- self-improvement is hard, cognitive dissonance easy
"On the whole, tho' I never arrived at the perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short of it, I was, by the endeavour, a better and a happier man than I otherwise should have been if I had not attempted it"
"I purposed writing a little comment on each virtue, in which I would have shown the advantages of possessing it, and the mischiefs attending its opposite vice; and I should have called my book THE ART OF VIRTUE, because it would have shown the means and manner of obtaining virtue, which would have distinguished it from the mere exhortation to be good, that does not instruct and indicate the means, but is like the apostle's man of verbal charity, who only without showing to the naked and hungry how or where they might get clothes or victuals, exhorted them to be fed and clothed.
But it so happened that my intention of writing and publishing this comment was never fulfilled."
-- a shame, but thankfully, the reason it was never fulfilled was because he was too busy living his values to put them down on paper
-- he talks about how once a party attains the purpose it was formed for, each member starts to pursue his own interests
-- "the united party of virtue", a body of virtuous and good men of all nations meant to be governed by virtuous and wise rules. Admission was to start with young single men, who'd keep the existence of the society secret and practice the 13-week virtue cycle. These people would recommend friends for inclusion in the society, which centers around helping its members through advice, assistance, and support in promoting one another's interests, business, and advancement in life.
-- unbelievable
"I was not discourag'd by the seeming magnitude of the undertaking, as I have always thought that one man of tolerable abilities may work great changes, and accomplish great affairs among mankind, if he first forms a good plan, and, cutting off all amusements or other employments that would divert his attention, makes the execution of that same plan his sole study and business."
-- he recommends women take up accounting instead of music or dancing, for sound reasons: not only would a widower not be taken advantage of, but she could also manage her late husband's business
"He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged."
-- holy shit, I've seen that - the underlying theory is probably a dominance thing
-- he advises to keep your invoices straight
-- a mention of Ben Franklin's inventing the fire department, which was awesome: additionally, they were a social club, meeting once a month to discuss new ways of firefighting
A preacher wanted to build a house for orphans in Georgia. Franklin comments as follows:
"I did not disapprove of the design, but, as Georgia was then destitute of materials and workmen, and it was proposed to send them from Philadelphia at a great expense, I thought it would have been better to have built the house here, and brought the children to it. This I advis'd; but he was resolute in his first project, rejected my counsel, and I therefore refus'd to contribute."
The preacher, however, was a master orator - Franklin was later shamed into contributing far more than the original nothing. A friend had emptied his pockets prior to attending the speech, suspecting a collection was coming: when he heard this oratory he felt such a desire to give that he asked the man next to him if he could borrow some money. Unfortunately, the man was perhaps the only man in the company with the firmness not to be affected; he replied, "At any other time, Friend Hopkinson, I would lend to thee freely; but not now, for thee seems to be out of thy right senses."
"Partnerships often finish in quarrels; but I was happy in this, that mine were all carried on and ended amicably, owing, I think, a good deal to the precaution of having very explicitly settled, in our articles, every thing to be done by or expected from each partner, so that there was nothing to dispute."
-- he recommends that anyone intending to enter a partnership take this precaution
Ben Franklin's strategy for borrowing: go to dinner with the guy and get him drunk
Ben Franklin's strategy for voting: show up on time
-- he talks some shit about how the Quakers couldn't stand firm on their commitment not to support war, and how they gave up their power to effect change in exchange for keeping their principles intact
He invented the four-panel lantern
"after supper, he told us, jokingly, that he much admir'd the idea of Sancho Panza, who, when it was proposed to give him a government, requested it might be a government of blacks, as then, if he could not agree with his people, he might sell them."
-- oh man
General Braddock's last words: "We shall better know how to deal with them another time."
When no one would attend a priest's sermons, Franklin suggested that the sermons be directly before rum giveaways and performed on location.
Franklin matter-of-factly states that his ship was chased by privateers, and comments on how shipbuilding suffers because hullbuilding, rigging, and sailing are all functions performed by different people who don't communicate with each other.
Freakonomics - Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
Freakonomics - Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
--This book is so accessable, its examples so memorable, that I'm not going to need to write down a lot of notes.
-- I should have taken the notes
Top 5 ideas:
The risks that scare people and the risks that kill people are often very different.
Legal markets are bound to fail when healthy black markets exist for the same products.
An expert whose argument reeks of restraint or nuance often doesn't get much attention.
Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life. Understanding them or ferreting them out is the key to solving just about any riddle.
The broken window theory: the idea that minor nuisances turn into major nuisances if left unchecked.
Top stories:
pools vs. guns
the brady bill
online dating
Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life. Understanding them or ferreting them out is the key to solving just about any riddle.
The conventional wisdom is often wrong.
Dramatic effects often have distant, even subtle causes.
- When people are initially motivated by something other than money, and money then enters the equation, low sums of money will actually make things worse over time.
Roughly half the white women and 80% of white men declared race didn't matter to them on an online dating site. These white men sent 90% of their emails to white women; the white women sent 97% of their emails to white men.
A little creative lying can draw indignation.
As a leader, you have to have yours first: otherwise, people will start to question your position as a leader.
"A distinction without a difference" -- a nice phrase
Given the rarity with which executions are carried out in this country and the long delays in doing so, no reasonable criminal should be deterred by the threat of execution.
-- contrast this with people walking around with a hand cut off, etc.
The broken window theory: the idea that minor nuisances turn into major nuisances if left unchecked.
To an economist, the background check and waiting period before handguns are purchased makes no sense: regulation of a legal market is bound to fail when a healthy black market exists for the same product. . . A study of imprisoned felons showed that even before the Brady Act, only 1/5 of the criminals bought their guns through a licensed dealer.
"If you own a gun and have a swimming pool in your backyard, the swimming pool is about 100 times more likely to kill a child than the gun is."
The typical parenting expert, like experts in other fields, is prone to sound exceedingly sure of himself. . . an expert whose argument reeks of restraint or nuance often doesn't get much attention.
The risks that scare people and the risks that kill people are often very different.
"Imagine that you are a government official charged with procuring the funds to fight one of two proven killers: terrorist attacks and heart disease. Which cause do you think the members of Congress will open up the coffers for? The likelihood of any given person being killed in a terrorist attack are infinitely smaller than the likelihood that the same person will clog up their arteries with fatty food and die of heart disease..."
Motivation is an indicator of success.
--This book is so accessable, its examples so memorable, that I'm not going to need to write down a lot of notes.
-- I should have taken the notes
Top 5 ideas:
The risks that scare people and the risks that kill people are often very different.
Legal markets are bound to fail when healthy black markets exist for the same products.
An expert whose argument reeks of restraint or nuance often doesn't get much attention.
Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life. Understanding them or ferreting them out is the key to solving just about any riddle.
The broken window theory: the idea that minor nuisances turn into major nuisances if left unchecked.
Top stories:
pools vs. guns
the brady bill
online dating
Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life. Understanding them or ferreting them out is the key to solving just about any riddle.
The conventional wisdom is often wrong.
Dramatic effects often have distant, even subtle causes.
- When people are initially motivated by something other than money, and money then enters the equation, low sums of money will actually make things worse over time.
Roughly half the white women and 80% of white men declared race didn't matter to them on an online dating site. These white men sent 90% of their emails to white women; the white women sent 97% of their emails to white men.
A little creative lying can draw indignation.
As a leader, you have to have yours first: otherwise, people will start to question your position as a leader.
"A distinction without a difference" -- a nice phrase
Given the rarity with which executions are carried out in this country and the long delays in doing so, no reasonable criminal should be deterred by the threat of execution.
-- contrast this with people walking around with a hand cut off, etc.
The broken window theory: the idea that minor nuisances turn into major nuisances if left unchecked.
To an economist, the background check and waiting period before handguns are purchased makes no sense: regulation of a legal market is bound to fail when a healthy black market exists for the same product. . . A study of imprisoned felons showed that even before the Brady Act, only 1/5 of the criminals bought their guns through a licensed dealer.
"If you own a gun and have a swimming pool in your backyard, the swimming pool is about 100 times more likely to kill a child than the gun is."
The typical parenting expert, like experts in other fields, is prone to sound exceedingly sure of himself. . . an expert whose argument reeks of restraint or nuance often doesn't get much attention.
The risks that scare people and the risks that kill people are often very different.
"Imagine that you are a government official charged with procuring the funds to fight one of two proven killers: terrorist attacks and heart disease. Which cause do you think the members of Congress will open up the coffers for? The likelihood of any given person being killed in a terrorist attack are infinitely smaller than the likelihood that the same person will clog up their arteries with fatty food and die of heart disease..."
Motivation is an indicator of success.
The Meme Machine - Susan Blackmore - **
-- when I first heard about memes I had the same view as Gould: what use is this concept
Dawkins (1993) imagines useful self-replicating programs that might carry out market research by infecting many computers ..
-- nice prediction
Hunter-gatherers were estimated to spend only about fifteen hours a week hunting. . . Tudge assumes that agriculture arose because it was favoured by natural selection. He suggests that because farming produces more food from a given area of land, farmers will produce more children who will encroach on neighboring hunter-gatherers' lands and destroy their way of life.
Karl Popper's three "cosmic evolutionary stages":
World 1: bodies
World 2: brains
World 3: ideas
Much of human learning is Skinnerian [based on operant conditioning] and not memetic.
Patients who lost their emotional responses through brain damage did not become super-rational decision makers. Instead, when asked to make simple choices, they became paralyzed with indecision.
Imitation is learning something about the form of behavior through observing others. Social learning is learning about the environment by observing others. . . in social learning, one animal may invent a new behavior during individual learning and then somehow lead another animal into such a situation that it is likely to learn a similar behavior. The result looks like copying but it is not, because the behavior must be created anew by the second learner. . . the details of the first behavior are not transmitted and cannot be built upon.
-- the distinctions worth making are that humans consciously transmit ideas to each other and that humans can invent behaviors that have absolutely nothing to do with their environment. The point the author makes about how social learning isn't really copying is total crap: any behavior someone imitates without receiving an explanation from the guy who started it is automatically going to be created anew by the guy copying it.
The main principle behind the Lamarckian theory of evolution was that if you made a change during your lifetime, you could pass that change onto your offspring. The Lamarckian theory is obviously wrong for biological evolution - children of amputees aren't amputees - but it's an important concept.
-- memes might use Lamarckian evolution
A wagon with spoked wheels carries more than freight from place to place: it carries the brilliant idea of a wagon with spoked wheels from mind to mind.
The high percentage of energy the brain consumes is a misleading figure, because that figure refers to a body at rest.
Big brains are so expensive that if you could catch your prey with a slightly smaller one you would have an advantage.
The author suggests that big brains are required to store memes, among other things.
The difference between being an imitator and being an innovator is that imitation is a general skill. As an imitator, you can copy innovations in many fields, whereas innovation requires more specialization.
-- the tech tree goes imitate, modify, invent
Whom does it pay to imitate? The good imitators of course. Imagine a woman who is especially skilled at copying the latest ways of picking inaccessible fruits, or a man especially good at copying the best toolmaker.
-- if you try to copy someone who's making a copy you'll get a third-generation idea. Unless the imitator has made herself a better version of the skill, your third-generation copy would be a dilution of a dilution. Ideally, in this case, you'd want to go straight to the source and copy the innovator who first figured out how to pick the fruit - that way, less of the purity of the knowledge is lost.
There's no theoretical limit to how much modding someone can do, which makes contests between imitators wars of escalation.
WHY IMITATION IS COOL:
1. It pays to copy the best people in the field
2. It pays to mate with the best people in the field
3. A dwarf on a giant's shoulders sees the farther of the two [modders are likely to have better versions of skills than innovators, at a much lower cost]
4. Innovators are usually left behind when the field changes, but imitation is a general skill.
The process of sexual selection is the same as it is in examples of biological evolution, but with the added twist that the things being selected for can spread at the speed of memetic evolution. Meme-driven selection favors mating with males who are not only good at imitating in general, but who are good at imitating whatever happens to be the favored memes at the time.
-- the renaissance man knows the venerated ideas and skills of his time
Why do we talk so much? Meme theory offers some thoughts:
- talking is an efficient way of propagating memes
- it's hard to be silent when there are so many memes working so hard to be spread around
- talkers have an easier time converting closemouthed people to talkers than vice versa
- talking keeps social groups together
People seem to learn language by just picking it up, using minimal input to build richly structured grammatical speech.
Noam Chomsky pointed out that the logical structure of languages was far more complex than anyone had ever thought, and proposed the idea of an innate Universal Grammar. He thinks that our language capacity was not a function of natural selection: that it came from elsewhere.
-- this reminds me of how Pankration had similarities to Jiujitsu despite their having evolved hundreds of years apart in vastly distant regions. The comment was made that "there are only so many ways to break an arm". Could it be that this Universal Grammar reflects our being wired to express thoughts in a finite amount of predetermined patterns?
A theory on the evolution of language is that language was of benefit to memes, not genes. The memes then changed the environment in which the genes were selected, forcing them to build progressively better meme-spreading apparatuses.
-- in the early days, memes were survival-based, and if you could spread them around better it would provide a definite genetic advantage to the group you belonged to
r-selection: selection in unstable environments, where it pays to reproduce quickly and opportunistically
K-selection: selection in stable environments with heavy competition for limited resources, where it pays to produce a few large, long-lived, well-cared-for offspring
Successful evolution is all about the discovery of good tricks.
-- the Alex Valle vs. John Choi SFA2 match where Valle busted out the unblockable custom combo is an awesome illustration of this. From then on, the game was played using unblockable custom combos.
-- That match is also a testament to the power of imitation and adaptability: though Choi did end up losing, he quickly figured out what was happening and even used the trick against Valle.
Grammar improves replication. How many things can you say with a given set of words? Not many, unless you have some way of modifying them to express different meanings.
Evolutionary psychologist David Buss found that in every one of thirty-seven cultures, males preferred younger mattes and females preferred older ones.
Buss also wired people to electrodes and asked them to imagine their partners having sex with someone else or forming deep emotional attachments to someone else. For men, the sex caused distress; for women, distress was caused by the emotional infidelity.
In fair-skinned people, hair color darkens with age.
-- didn't know that
Women certainly want to get as much male investment as possible, but they may not be able to find good genes and a good provider in the same man. This is apparently true in zebra finches and swallows where the more attractive males have been shown to work less hard in bringing up the young, leaving the females to work harder. On the "best of both worlds" theory a woman's best bet may be to capture a nice yet unattractive man who will rear her children, then go get better genes from elsewhere. . . In a survey of nearly four thousand British women, the women who were having extramarital affairs tended to --have sex with their lovers more when they were ovulating - and this was not true for sex with their husbands.
-- thank you, DNA testing, for clamping down on this kind of behavior
Vertical transmission of memes: transmission from parent to child
Horizontal transmission of memes: transmission from unrelated source to child
Coercing homosexuals into acting like heterosexuals has actually helped spread homosexuality (through reproduction).
The women who devote more time to memes and less to genes are the most visible women, which makes them the most likely to be imitated.
With the advent of the internet more and more people are getting connected and spending inordinate amounts of time playing with new memes. The computer nerd is more in the thrall of the memes he plays with than of the genes he is carrying.
-- it is true, I am this nerd
From a meme's point of view, the time and effort expended on an adopted child are exactly as valuable as that expended on one's own offspring.
The memetic idea behind altruism is that anything that makes others want to spend time with you is potentially a good thing for your memes.
The altruism trick: where you do something nice for people, then try to leverage that gratitude into getting your idea accepted
potlatch: a Native American event where rival groups try to impress each other by giving away or destroying as much of their own stuff as they can
-- this is a bad meme
People are more easily influenced by people they like. The major factors that increase liking include physical attractiveness, similarity, cooperativeness, and the belief that the other person likes you.
One record-breaking salesman even used to send out thirteen thousand cards a month to his clients saying 'I like you' - and presumably he was not wasting his money.
-- the salesman was Joe Girard, author of How To Sell Anything To Anybody, and I'm pretty sure that was not a monthly occurence
The "light at the end of the tunnel" effect could be caused by the way the visual system works. Cells throughout the visual system are organized so that many are devoted to the center of vision and few are devoted to the periphery. When all the cells are firing randomly, the effect is like a bright light in the middle fading out toward the edges.
-- I looked this up, and what's happening is severe oxygen starvation and high doses of sympathetic nervous system activity are dilating the pupils, causing the light. Since blood flow is greatest to the center of the retina, everywhere else fades out first as its oxygen depletes. If blood flow is restored, the person is "drawn towards the light" as the bright area gets larger and larger.
-- the experience of movement can be accounted for by oxygen starvation messing with muscle spindles, which are proprioceptors. Even if the person is not moved, oxygen starvation causes convulsions, which get reported to the brain by the spindles.
The truth trick: saying "this explanation is the truth" and stopping there
The morality trick: where a meme people don't want attaches itself to a meme people want (or want to avoid!). You'll be cool if you buy our product, you'll be bad if you have sex before marriage, etc.
People typically go to psychics when they are at their lowest and want guidance. This means they are all the more likely to fall for claims of higher powers or special insight.
Literally thousands of experiments have demonstrated without a shadow of a doubt that the claims of astrology are false, and yet one-quarter of American adults believed in the basic tenets of astrology according to a 1991 Gallup poll. These disturbing facts are better explained in terms of the power of the memes to replicate themselves than by writing all these people off as stupid, ignorant, or gullible.
-- memes of this nature have evolved thoughtcrime walls to prevent the critical facilities that make people successes in the real world from destroying their irrational beliefs
Alternative medicine preys on fear; fear of pain, disease, death. It uses a natural human experience that (for most people) has no satisfactory explanation: the experience of going to a practicioner and feeling better. Cognitive dissonance caused by dropping money on something that doesn't work is highly effective, especially in countries like England where conventional medicine is free.
-- I think another big reason it spreads is because of another human experience without a satisfactory explanation: NOT feeling better after a visit to a conventional doctor. If conventional medicine didn't meet your hypochondriac emotional needs, or if you didn't like the price you paid for the answer you got, you're vulnerable to anyone who can offer you a more fulfilling experience. Thus, the meme spreads.
Religions provide answers, though they may be false, and useful rules for living.
The marker trick: be good to people who act like you.
Markers that are costly or difficult to learn can deter exploitation by outsiders.
-- a lot of the religious stuff is not getting noted, because I plan on not having discussions about religion
-- the Noble Eightfold Path of Buddhism is pretty cool, I'll reprint it at the end of the book
The author suggests that the gear that marks the information age is related to mimetic evolution.
In 1820, a Cherokee Indian called Sequoyah observed that Europeans made marks on paper and went on to devise a system for writing down the Cherokee language. Although he was illiterate [duh] and knew no English, his observations were enough for him to devise a writing system so successful that Cherokees were soon writing, reading, and printing their own books and newspapers.
-- the author talks about Japanese kanji as an example of a language system that sucks, saying "We have yet to see whether the economic and cultural power of Japan is enough to ensure the survival of its complicated writing system in a world in which the transmission of memes is everything." This is an interesting point: kanji and its Chinese analog(s) are probably going to suffer in the face of systems like katakana and pinyin.
The telephone was bound to be a success, because people have evolved to want to talk to each other.
People keep predicting that the age of books will come to an end, but books are high-fecundity, high-fidelity, and long-lived.
If copies of copies are made then the errors are compounded, and any good tricks invested in the original product are lost.
-- the point I made earlier, where you don't want to copy the best imitators if all they're doing is making copies
The most common topic for searches on the world wide web is sex. The vast majority of computer games are based on killing and warfare. Any memes which can get into or tag along with such memeplexes are more likely to succeed.
-- I did some research and apparently there are MMOEGs - the E standing for Erotic. These would be pretty awesome for women, who could use them to feel sexy and safe.
Robots would need to be able to spread memes before they could become like humans.
THE NOBLE EIGHTFOLD PATH
Morality
1. Right Speech—One speaks in a non hurtful, not exaggerated, truthful way
2. Right Actions—Wholesome action, avoiding action that would do harm
3. Right Livelihood—One's way of livelihood does not harm in any way oneself or others; directly or indirectly
Mastery
1. Right Effort/Exercise—One makes an effort to improve
2. Right Mindfulness/Awareness—Mental ability to see things for what they are with clear consciousness
3. Right Concentration/Meditation—Being aware of the present reality within oneself, without any craving or aversion.
Wisdom
1. Right Understanding—Understanding reality as it is, not just as it appears to be.
2. Right Thoughts—Change in the pattern of thinking.
Dawkins (1993) imagines useful self-replicating programs that might carry out market research by infecting many computers ..
-- nice prediction
Hunter-gatherers were estimated to spend only about fifteen hours a week hunting. . . Tudge assumes that agriculture arose because it was favoured by natural selection. He suggests that because farming produces more food from a given area of land, farmers will produce more children who will encroach on neighboring hunter-gatherers' lands and destroy their way of life.
Karl Popper's three "cosmic evolutionary stages":
World 1: bodies
World 2: brains
World 3: ideas
Much of human learning is Skinnerian [based on operant conditioning] and not memetic.
Patients who lost their emotional responses through brain damage did not become super-rational decision makers. Instead, when asked to make simple choices, they became paralyzed with indecision.
Imitation is learning something about the form of behavior through observing others. Social learning is learning about the environment by observing others. . . in social learning, one animal may invent a new behavior during individual learning and then somehow lead another animal into such a situation that it is likely to learn a similar behavior. The result looks like copying but it is not, because the behavior must be created anew by the second learner. . . the details of the first behavior are not transmitted and cannot be built upon.
-- the distinctions worth making are that humans consciously transmit ideas to each other and that humans can invent behaviors that have absolutely nothing to do with their environment. The point the author makes about how social learning isn't really copying is total crap: any behavior someone imitates without receiving an explanation from the guy who started it is automatically going to be created anew by the guy copying it.
The main principle behind the Lamarckian theory of evolution was that if you made a change during your lifetime, you could pass that change onto your offspring. The Lamarckian theory is obviously wrong for biological evolution - children of amputees aren't amputees - but it's an important concept.
-- memes might use Lamarckian evolution
A wagon with spoked wheels carries more than freight from place to place: it carries the brilliant idea of a wagon with spoked wheels from mind to mind.
The high percentage of energy the brain consumes is a misleading figure, because that figure refers to a body at rest.
Big brains are so expensive that if you could catch your prey with a slightly smaller one you would have an advantage.
The author suggests that big brains are required to store memes, among other things.
The difference between being an imitator and being an innovator is that imitation is a general skill. As an imitator, you can copy innovations in many fields, whereas innovation requires more specialization.
-- the tech tree goes imitate, modify, invent
Whom does it pay to imitate? The good imitators of course. Imagine a woman who is especially skilled at copying the latest ways of picking inaccessible fruits, or a man especially good at copying the best toolmaker.
-- if you try to copy someone who's making a copy you'll get a third-generation idea. Unless the imitator has made herself a better version of the skill, your third-generation copy would be a dilution of a dilution. Ideally, in this case, you'd want to go straight to the source and copy the innovator who first figured out how to pick the fruit - that way, less of the purity of the knowledge is lost.
There's no theoretical limit to how much modding someone can do, which makes contests between imitators wars of escalation.
WHY IMITATION IS COOL:
1. It pays to copy the best people in the field
2. It pays to mate with the best people in the field
3. A dwarf on a giant's shoulders sees the farther of the two [modders are likely to have better versions of skills than innovators, at a much lower cost]
4. Innovators are usually left behind when the field changes, but imitation is a general skill.
The process of sexual selection is the same as it is in examples of biological evolution, but with the added twist that the things being selected for can spread at the speed of memetic evolution. Meme-driven selection favors mating with males who are not only good at imitating in general, but who are good at imitating whatever happens to be the favored memes at the time.
-- the renaissance man knows the venerated ideas and skills of his time
Why do we talk so much? Meme theory offers some thoughts:
- talking is an efficient way of propagating memes
- it's hard to be silent when there are so many memes working so hard to be spread around
- talkers have an easier time converting closemouthed people to talkers than vice versa
- talking keeps social groups together
People seem to learn language by just picking it up, using minimal input to build richly structured grammatical speech.
Noam Chomsky pointed out that the logical structure of languages was far more complex than anyone had ever thought, and proposed the idea of an innate Universal Grammar. He thinks that our language capacity was not a function of natural selection: that it came from elsewhere.
-- this reminds me of how Pankration had similarities to Jiujitsu despite their having evolved hundreds of years apart in vastly distant regions. The comment was made that "there are only so many ways to break an arm". Could it be that this Universal Grammar reflects our being wired to express thoughts in a finite amount of predetermined patterns?
A theory on the evolution of language is that language was of benefit to memes, not genes. The memes then changed the environment in which the genes were selected, forcing them to build progressively better meme-spreading apparatuses.
-- in the early days, memes were survival-based, and if you could spread them around better it would provide a definite genetic advantage to the group you belonged to
r-selection: selection in unstable environments, where it pays to reproduce quickly and opportunistically
K-selection: selection in stable environments with heavy competition for limited resources, where it pays to produce a few large, long-lived, well-cared-for offspring
Successful evolution is all about the discovery of good tricks.
-- the Alex Valle vs. John Choi SFA2 match where Valle busted out the unblockable custom combo is an awesome illustration of this. From then on, the game was played using unblockable custom combos.
-- That match is also a testament to the power of imitation and adaptability: though Choi did end up losing, he quickly figured out what was happening and even used the trick against Valle.
Grammar improves replication. How many things can you say with a given set of words? Not many, unless you have some way of modifying them to express different meanings.
Evolutionary psychologist David Buss found that in every one of thirty-seven cultures, males preferred younger mattes and females preferred older ones.
Buss also wired people to electrodes and asked them to imagine their partners having sex with someone else or forming deep emotional attachments to someone else. For men, the sex caused distress; for women, distress was caused by the emotional infidelity.
In fair-skinned people, hair color darkens with age.
-- didn't know that
Women certainly want to get as much male investment as possible, but they may not be able to find good genes and a good provider in the same man. This is apparently true in zebra finches and swallows where the more attractive males have been shown to work less hard in bringing up the young, leaving the females to work harder. On the "best of both worlds" theory a woman's best bet may be to capture a nice yet unattractive man who will rear her children, then go get better genes from elsewhere. . . In a survey of nearly four thousand British women, the women who were having extramarital affairs tended to --have sex with their lovers more when they were ovulating - and this was not true for sex with their husbands.
-- thank you, DNA testing, for clamping down on this kind of behavior
Vertical transmission of memes: transmission from parent to child
Horizontal transmission of memes: transmission from unrelated source to child
Coercing homosexuals into acting like heterosexuals has actually helped spread homosexuality (through reproduction).
The women who devote more time to memes and less to genes are the most visible women, which makes them the most likely to be imitated.
With the advent of the internet more and more people are getting connected and spending inordinate amounts of time playing with new memes. The computer nerd is more in the thrall of the memes he plays with than of the genes he is carrying.
-- it is true, I am this nerd
From a meme's point of view, the time and effort expended on an adopted child are exactly as valuable as that expended on one's own offspring.
The memetic idea behind altruism is that anything that makes others want to spend time with you is potentially a good thing for your memes.
The altruism trick: where you do something nice for people, then try to leverage that gratitude into getting your idea accepted
potlatch: a Native American event where rival groups try to impress each other by giving away or destroying as much of their own stuff as they can
-- this is a bad meme
People are more easily influenced by people they like. The major factors that increase liking include physical attractiveness, similarity, cooperativeness, and the belief that the other person likes you.
One record-breaking salesman even used to send out thirteen thousand cards a month to his clients saying 'I like you' - and presumably he was not wasting his money.
-- the salesman was Joe Girard, author of How To Sell Anything To Anybody, and I'm pretty sure that was not a monthly occurence
The "light at the end of the tunnel" effect could be caused by the way the visual system works. Cells throughout the visual system are organized so that many are devoted to the center of vision and few are devoted to the periphery. When all the cells are firing randomly, the effect is like a bright light in the middle fading out toward the edges.
-- I looked this up, and what's happening is severe oxygen starvation and high doses of sympathetic nervous system activity are dilating the pupils, causing the light. Since blood flow is greatest to the center of the retina, everywhere else fades out first as its oxygen depletes. If blood flow is restored, the person is "drawn towards the light" as the bright area gets larger and larger.
-- the experience of movement can be accounted for by oxygen starvation messing with muscle spindles, which are proprioceptors. Even if the person is not moved, oxygen starvation causes convulsions, which get reported to the brain by the spindles.
The truth trick: saying "this explanation is the truth" and stopping there
The morality trick: where a meme people don't want attaches itself to a meme people want (or want to avoid!). You'll be cool if you buy our product, you'll be bad if you have sex before marriage, etc.
People typically go to psychics when they are at their lowest and want guidance. This means they are all the more likely to fall for claims of higher powers or special insight.
Literally thousands of experiments have demonstrated without a shadow of a doubt that the claims of astrology are false, and yet one-quarter of American adults believed in the basic tenets of astrology according to a 1991 Gallup poll. These disturbing facts are better explained in terms of the power of the memes to replicate themselves than by writing all these people off as stupid, ignorant, or gullible.
-- memes of this nature have evolved thoughtcrime walls to prevent the critical facilities that make people successes in the real world from destroying their irrational beliefs
Alternative medicine preys on fear; fear of pain, disease, death. It uses a natural human experience that (for most people) has no satisfactory explanation: the experience of going to a practicioner and feeling better. Cognitive dissonance caused by dropping money on something that doesn't work is highly effective, especially in countries like England where conventional medicine is free.
-- I think another big reason it spreads is because of another human experience without a satisfactory explanation: NOT feeling better after a visit to a conventional doctor. If conventional medicine didn't meet your hypochondriac emotional needs, or if you didn't like the price you paid for the answer you got, you're vulnerable to anyone who can offer you a more fulfilling experience. Thus, the meme spreads.
Religions provide answers, though they may be false, and useful rules for living.
The marker trick: be good to people who act like you.
Markers that are costly or difficult to learn can deter exploitation by outsiders.
-- a lot of the religious stuff is not getting noted, because I plan on not having discussions about religion
-- the Noble Eightfold Path of Buddhism is pretty cool, I'll reprint it at the end of the book
The author suggests that the gear that marks the information age is related to mimetic evolution.
In 1820, a Cherokee Indian called Sequoyah observed that Europeans made marks on paper and went on to devise a system for writing down the Cherokee language. Although he was illiterate [duh] and knew no English, his observations were enough for him to devise a writing system so successful that Cherokees were soon writing, reading, and printing their own books and newspapers.
-- the author talks about Japanese kanji as an example of a language system that sucks, saying "We have yet to see whether the economic and cultural power of Japan is enough to ensure the survival of its complicated writing system in a world in which the transmission of memes is everything." This is an interesting point: kanji and its Chinese analog(s) are probably going to suffer in the face of systems like katakana and pinyin.
The telephone was bound to be a success, because people have evolved to want to talk to each other.
People keep predicting that the age of books will come to an end, but books are high-fecundity, high-fidelity, and long-lived.
If copies of copies are made then the errors are compounded, and any good tricks invested in the original product are lost.
-- the point I made earlier, where you don't want to copy the best imitators if all they're doing is making copies
The most common topic for searches on the world wide web is sex. The vast majority of computer games are based on killing and warfare. Any memes which can get into or tag along with such memeplexes are more likely to succeed.
-- I did some research and apparently there are MMOEGs - the E standing for Erotic. These would be pretty awesome for women, who could use them to feel sexy and safe.
Robots would need to be able to spread memes before they could become like humans.
THE NOBLE EIGHTFOLD PATH
Morality
1. Right Speech—One speaks in a non hurtful, not exaggerated, truthful way
2. Right Actions—Wholesome action, avoiding action that would do harm
3. Right Livelihood—One's way of livelihood does not harm in any way oneself or others; directly or indirectly
Mastery
1. Right Effort/Exercise—One makes an effort to improve
2. Right Mindfulness/Awareness—Mental ability to see things for what they are with clear consciousness
3. Right Concentration/Meditation—Being aware of the present reality within oneself, without any craving or aversion.
Wisdom
1. Right Understanding—Understanding reality as it is, not just as it appears to be.
2. Right Thoughts—Change in the pattern of thinking.
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