Spent

I've been working my way through Spent, Geoffrey Miller's application of evolutionary psychology to consumerism.

Miller has written an outstanding pop-science book on an important subject, and when I have more time I would like to quote from it more extensively. But for now, I want to address myself to its most irritating feature: the author's snide leftism.

Stuff like this:

In traditional symmetric warfare both sides play be certain tacit rules of engagement. You line up your phalanxes, musketmen, or tanks, and we line up ours, and both sides fight it out until one concedes or flees, and the other declares victory. In asymmetric warfare, the side that is weaker by traditional criteria seeks victory by using new tactics or technology. The British longbowmen defeated the French knights at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415 by firing volleys of arrows from absurd distances, rather than waiting honorably to be squashed by the cavalry charge . . . . Al-Qaeda terrorists on 9/11 infuriated the Pentagon by hijacking our airplanes, rather than buying their own from our arms dealers.

That's pretty typical.

Miller perhaps has his own reasons for wishing to buttress his left-wing credentials:

One of the most frustrating experiences in human life is to adopt an unfashionable new worldview after much evidence-based research, rational consideration of alternatives, and ethical soul-searching, only to have one's peers misconstrue that worldview as a personality signal that conveys the opposite of one's true traits and intentions. This is a common experience among evolutionary psychologists, and it nicely illustrates the way that ideology signals can fail under certain conditions.

Critics such as Stephen Jay Gould, Steven Rose, and Richard Lewontin have convinced a substantial portion of the educated public that evolutionary psychology is a pernicious right-wing conspiracy, with the hidden ideological agenda of reviving biological determinism, sexism, racism, and elitism. They conflate the worst excesses of 1860s social Darwinism, 1890s union-busting capitalism, 1930s Nazi eugenics, and 1970s sociobiology with the twenty-first-century science of human nature.

What the critics fail to explain, however, is why evolutionary psychology has attracted the support of so many socially conscious progressive thinkers, ranging from the animal rights philosopher Peter Singer to the economist Robert Frank, the archcritic of runaway consumerism. They likewise fail to explain why so many prominent evolutionists (E. O. Wilson, Robert Trivers, John Maynard Smith) have had strong ties to left-wing politics in their private lives. And they fail to explain why right=wing American fundamentalists see evolutionary psychology as an ultraliberal attack on family values and religion.

For the most part, the leftism is just background noise that doesn't really have much affect on his thesis. But the one exception to this is his confounding of the personality trait "openness" with political liberalism.

Now at one level, openness -- "curiosity, novelty seeking, broad-mindedness, interest in culture, ideas, and aesthetics" -- doesn't sound like a salient feature of the conservative temperament, given our stated preference for stability, practicality, and the tried-and-true. So his assertion that it correlates positively with "social tolerance" and political liberalism is certainly plausible. The problems start when he gets down to specifics.

For instance, he gives some examples of bumper stickers that he claims advertise levels of openness:

High Openness

• Question reality
• Legalize freedom
• My karma ran over your dogma
• Sorry I missed church. I was busy practicing witchcraft and becoming a lesbian.
• Reality is where the pizza delivery guy comes from

Low Openness

• Live it up, sinner
• Shut up, hippie
• Welcome to America. We speak English. Learn it or leave
• Stereotypes make life easier
• If God didn't want us to eat animals, he wouldn't have made them out of meat
• Gun control means using both hands

Let's take look at these in detail.

"Legalize Freedom", has been the conservative rallying cry for nigh 30 years, especially among "low-openness" religious people who want the federal government to leave them alone.

"Karma . . . dogma": so, are you Hindu? No? Then the bumper sticker doesn't really signal openness to Eastern religions, does it. It just indicates hostility towards Catholicism, a religion to which you are dogmatic in your lack of openness.

Are you a witch? A lesbian? No? See above.

Do you eat pizza? Yes? Then other than showing contempt for the people who work for low pay making your life easier, what's your point, exactly?

Among the "low openness" stickers, granted that the first four show "low openness" and appear to indicate conservatism. But what does eating meat and gun ownership have to do with openness? He could have made a more plausible assertion (that I would nonetheless dispute) that they indicate low agreeableness. But why should people who want to restrict the firearms and food of other people get credit for openness?

Miller repeated claims to be an individual of exceptional openness; however, in Miller's telling, being "open" only means buying in to ideas he already likes. It never means buying in to ideas he doesn't like. For instance:

Conspicuously displayed aesthetic taste is a convenient, visible way for people to display their deeper personality traits. For example, if I were rich, I would collect paintings by the contemporary artist Fred Tomaselli, rather than the usual Post-Impressionists or Abstract Expressionists collected by Upper East Side hedge-fund mangers. Why? Because I find Tomaselli's work visually and intellectually richer, and I appreciate the biological materials, compositional skills, and psychedelic themes. In other words, I would want my art collection to reflect my personal taste, meaning in this case I would (unconsciously) want it to proclaim my openness (to wierd hallucinogen-inspired art) . . . .

Personal taste should not just attract like-minded individuals; it should also repulse differently minded ones. To be effective, in must be a high--risk, high-gain form of taste signaling, rather than a meek nod to the least common denominator. The Tomaselli paintings would be effective for my social-screening purposes because few people of low openness could bear to sit through a dinner party with such disorienting works on the walls. They would feel existential nausea and never come back. On the other hand, visitors who admired the work articulately, without gagging, would reliably signal their higher openness. Conversely, Christians can repulse atheist intellectuals like me by hanging black-velvet Jesus paintings on their walls, just as Van Helsing repelled vampires with garlic.

Leaving aside the relative artistic merits of Tomaselli and Jesus paintings, on what grounds can Miller claim high openness (as opposed to, say, low agreeableness) by displaying artwork he hopes will gag people he doesn't like, but his repulsion at images of Jesus does not indicate a similar hole in his own much-heralded openness?

To his credit, Miller identifies "openness" as conspicuous among the "Central Six" (intelligence, openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness, stability, and extraversion) as being dangerously maladaptive when taken to extremes, and he is at his funniest when he describes where the combination of high openness and low intelligence will take you. But the over-identification of openness with hostility to religious conservatism is the book's biggest failing.

Still, though, it's a good read.

Employment Testing, USAF Edition

This is interesting:

MEMORANDUM FOR TECHNICAL OFFICER SURVEY PARTICIPANT, 4 June 2009

FROM: AF/A1, 1040 Air Force Pentagon, Washington DC 20330-1040

SUBJECT: AFOQT Revision – Technical Officer Survey Participation

We are initiating a major revision of the Air Force Officer Qualifying Test (AFOQT). The AFOQT, in its many forms, has had an effective track record of predicting officer training and pilot training success since it was implemented in 1953. Its screening has saved tens of millions of training dollars by reducing attrition and contributed to an effective officer accession process. Since initial development, the AFOQT has been revised 17 times. The current version, Form S, was implemented in 2005. With our rapidly changing mission and Air Force culture, we want to ensure the next revision assesses all of the current critical officer skills.

To better identify theses technical skills, we are conducting a survey . . . .

The survey goes on to ask participants drawn from technical and aviation military career fields to rate the importance to success in their careers of 54 different mental, physical, and social facilities:

• Cognitive Abilities: Oral Expression, Listening Comprehension, Reading Comprehension, Written Expression, Mathematical Computation, Mathematical Reasoning, Inductive Reasoning, Deductive Reasoning, Memorization, Perspective Prioritization, Task Management (Multi-tasking), Pattern Recognition, Planning Resourcefulness, Foresight, Technology Literacy, Spatial Orientation, Visualization, Adaptability, Situational Awareness, Information Processing/Sensor Management, Electro-Mechanical Science, Earth/Weather Science, Critical Thinking, Perceptual Vigilance, Aviation Knowledge

• Psychomotor Abilities: Static Strength, Physical Fitness/Stamina, Finger Dexterity, Arm-Hand Steadiness, Multi-limb Coordination, Choice Reaction Time, Rate Control, Hand/Eye Coordination, Color Vision, Depth Perception, Auditory Acuity, Visual Acuity

• Interpersonal Abilities: Persuading/Influencing, Mediation, Cooperating, Assuming Responsibility, Responsiveness, Decisiveness, Resilience, Teaching/Mentoring, Work Effectively in Isolation Settings, Work Effectively in Stressful Situations, Empathy, Self-Assessing, Self-Discipline, Integrity, Selflessness

I once had an opportunity to ask a military engineer how much opportunity she had to actually apply her engineering education. The dirty little secret, she said, was that most military engineers did what she did: technical management. Specifically, most of them spent most of their time engaged in some facet of the military procurement process, a byzantine administrative function in which the Armed Services spend a great deal of effort educating officers to perform effectively.

But on the other hand, she went on, their experience in bringing in non-ABET-accredited degree holders was not good, even though the work they did was not, strictly speaking, engineering. People with B.A.s, even in management, tended to get lost in the technology. It was just easier to train engineers to be managers than to train managers in technology.

I was thinking about this in the context of the Ricci decision. As articulated by Justice Kennedy, the test of "business necessity" for purposes of avoiding disparate impact liability is whether the employment standard is "manifestly job related". But what if the evidence for job relatedness is only statistical? Ricci's exam avoided that problem because its questions were obviously specific to firefighting. But what if someone objected to the disparate impact of the AFOQT (and you know there is one) on the grounds that pilots and engineers did not actually have to solve the kinds of problems on test in their day-to-day jobs? The military could presumably point to the correlation between AFOQT scores and performance, but would that satisfy the courts?

I think the survey mentioned above wisely chose to rate broad categories of ability rather than narrow ones. I suppose that, say, mathematical computation and reasoning are measured by the ability to solve a second-order differential equation, but while professional engineers only seldom face the second problem, the first is indispensable to success in the profession.

A Dissident Perspective on the Huntingdon Valley Club

Blogger "Kate-A" (who appears from her photo to be a mulatto, if it matters) writes:

I don't believe that [John] Duesler, club president and Obama fundraiser, is a bigot or racist - he's your typical white liberal who sincerely believes blacks are equal to whites, but his exposure has been predominantly to educated blacks, those in the same income bracket as himself. Like most white people in leafy hillside villages, he doesn't hang around with folks from the 'hood.

While Duesler has put foot in his mouth trying to explain the club's reason for cancelling the kids, with the din and roar of 65 kids freed from an inner city basement still ringing in his ears - it was nothing more than culture shock. Duesler and his fellow ghetto-shocked villagers are pathetically struggling to be politically correct. I've seen it happen to liberal white folks before ... when thrown into certain integrated settings, many of the racial stereotypes they refused to believe, are suddenly right there slapping them in the face. It's one thing for white leafy villagers to see inner city kids actin' a fool on TV or in a movie - quite another when up close and personal.

. . . .

The problem is not whether the kids are black or poor - but you have to admit they always seem to be black and poor, the problem is not racism - the problem is the kids have no social etiquette, no sense of personal space, no respect. And as adults, most will be like the adults around them now - crying racism when their behavior doesn't serve them well.

UPDATE: I couldn't confirm whether or not John Duesler is an Obama fundraiser, but according to OpenSecrets.org, Huntingdon Valley residents in zip code 19006 collectively donated $46,687.00 to the Obama campaign and only $34,875.00 to the McCain campaign. (Hillary Clinton also pulled in $24,050; none of the other candidates broke into five figures.)

As Steve Sailer might ask, how's this working out for them?

Ne le dis à personne

I watched the excellent French movie Tell No One on DVD this weekend. It's an outstanding film about which I will say nothing that will give away the mystery. But I have two quick points.

1. Actor François Cluzet is fully 15 years older than the actress that plays his wife. I'm curious about how often age differences of this magnitude occur in real-life relationships, but it's a fairly common in movieland, for obvious reasons. The problem is that the story asks us to believe that the couple fell in love as children. Indeed, the movie shows them as children at roughly age 12-13. (IMDB doesn't list the actors ages, but they are obviously children.) The fact that one of them aged 15 years faster than the other was pretty hard to miss. (Parenthetically, why did the director go out of the way to coach child actors in how to deliver adult-style kisses? I know, they're supposed to be in love, but they would still kiss like children.)

2. When the movie shows Dr. Alex Beck (Cluzet) helping an rough-hewn "Ali G"-style gangsta early in the film, the audience just knows that this will be the one who helps Alex out of a tight spot later in the film. This particular kind of relationship -- hero does a good deed for a lowlife, lowlife turns out to be useful later -- is almost a movie cliche'. But it occurred to me that French popular culture has glorified its criminal underclass in the same way that American popular culture has. Somehow I had thought that, what with the street violence in Paris becoming so bad a few years ago that it made American television, these kind of people had lost their romance. But the movie street gang, at great risk to themselves, hide Alex from the police and help him prove his innocence. Just what criminals always do, right?

Why No Posting?

I've been busy. Very busy. In fact, I shouldn't even be taking time to blog about why I haven't done much blogging. I've got a "major sequence exam" already overdue, and a prospectus defense to prepare by the end of the summer. So posting will be light for the next couple of months.

In the mean time, please read Megan's flurry of posts on healthcare:

The final point is that while people commonly think of administrative costs as "wasted", in fact, they are an important part of the market system. As Alex Tabarrok points out, and I have myself from time to time, many of the arguments in favor of national health care are literally socialist. And no, I am not using that term to apply to "anyone who is in favor of redistribution" or "government programs". But consider the following common arguments:

• National health care will be cheaper because we will reduce administrative overhead
• National health care will reduce wasteful competition in the form of me-too drugs
• National health care will reduce wasteful competition in the form of advertising and other marketing expenses
• National health care will allow us to rationally distribute care to where it does the most good rather than the current messy, wasteful hodge-podge
• National health care will use resources for production instead of profits
• National health care will achieve economies of scale in purchasing and record-keeping
• People will not overuse free goods because there are hard limits to desired consumption.

These were all arguments advanced in favor of socialism. Contrary to popular conservative belief, socialists were not unfamilier with either the incentive problems of communism (people will not work hard if there's no benefit to doing so) or the Hayekian argument about the value of prices, aka the Socialist Calculation Problem. Rather, smart socialists thought that they could overcome these problems with a combination of status competitions (Hero of the Soviet Union, Second Class) and massive efficiencies gained by wringing all that fragmented, wasteful competition out of the system. Economists who would be ashamed to make these sorts of arguments about Proctor and Gamble or the used car market suddenly start parroting these things as if they hadn't been thoroughly discredited by the last seventy years.

. . . .

[A]s Ezra points out, people in Germany and France are not dying in the streets. So centralization does work better on health care than it does in steel.

But I'd argue that the difference is that Germany and France, unlike the Soviet Union, have companies which produce in American markets to provide them products. One key thing to remember is that there's a big difference between a situation where the government is a sizeable buyer/producer, and one where the government is essentially the only buyer/producer. In the latter case, the market still works, even if the government presence distorts it--prices are set by supply and demand, research is done, and so forth. Indeed, it is not well appreciated on the left how dependent Medicare is on private insurers to tell them what the competitive price is for the treatments and products it pays for--if the private sector went away, Medicare would have to develop some sort of pricing system, and so would all the health care systems abroad. Once the government becomes the dominant player, however, everything changes.

. . . .

Right now, the US has a market--no matter how screwed up--for medical goods. It is not a good market. But no one in the market, except Medicare, has enough pricing power to totally undermine the market mechanism, so it grinds out an equilibrium that bears some resemblance to consumer demand. In turn, Europe can buy those market-produced products. But if you kill the last market, everything suddenly looks very different. What's the right price for innovation? What should we research? Those questions stop being decided on the basis of the number of consumers served, and start being decided on the basis of who has the best lobby.

There's one more difference, which is that health care is not transportable. When British coal was overpriced and delivered erratically, this was obvious, because other countries had a steady supply of the commodity at a lower price. Healthcare is hard to measure and impossible to transship, and almost no one consumes health care internationally (though I'll note that as the internet has facilitated comparisons, Europeans have become disenchanted with their rationing boards).

Parsing Ricci

Steve Sailer has the lowdown on the Ricci decision. Here is the money quote from Kennedy's majority opinion:

The problem for respondents is that a prima facie case of disparate-impact liability—essentially, a threshold showing of a significant statistical disparity, ... and nothing more—is far from a strong basis in evidence that the City would have been liable under Title VII had it certified the results. That is because the City could be liable for disparate-impact discrimination only if the examinations were not job related and consistent with business necessity, or if there existed an equally valid, less-discriminatory alternative that served the City’s needs but that the City refused to adopt. ... We conclude there is no strong basis in evidence to establish that the test was deficient in either of these respects.

Let's do some boolean algebra:

A = job related.

~A = not job related.

B = consistent with business necessity.

~B = not consistent with business necessity.

(A & B) = job related and consistent with business necessity.

~(A & B) = "not job related and consistent with business necessity"

~A | ~B = not job related or not consistent with business necessity.

C = equally valid, less-discriminatory alternative

Those of you with training in logic know that, per De Morgan's Law, ~(A & B) = ~A | ~B. Thus, the formula for a disparate impact judgement appears to be ~A | ~B | C: one or more of not being job related, not being consistent with business necessity, and the existance of an alternative.

Question: why "job related"? This was always considered an easier standard to meet than "business necessity", which is why the 1991 Civil Rights Act enshrined "business necessity" as the standard that defendants must meet to justify disparate impact.

Father's Day at the White House

I made the White House mailing list. I don't remember signing up for this mailing list, although I'm not objecting. Evidently, my email address must have been extracted from one of the many emails I have sent to lawmakers complaining about the direction of our current policy. I sent these emails to the Bush White House, too, but I was never made the mailing list. Indeed, I can't even remember having received a response to my specific comments. (Congresscritters are much better about this.)

This email represented itself as being a Happy Father's Day message from Michelle Obama and said, inter alia:

We all know the remarkable impact fathers can have in our children's lives. So today, on this 100th anniversary of Father's Day, take a moment to celebrate responsible fatherhood and the men who've had the courage to step up, be there for our families, and provide our children with the guidance, love and support they need to fulfill their dreams.

"our children . . . our families." Ours as in, we women possess the families? As opposed to their children and families which would have implied that the fathers possess the children and families?

This overuse of "our" may be out of the political stylebook, but it strikes me as unnatural and inappropriate. Husbands and father don't pick a random family to support. They very specifically support their own families and children: i.e., the families to whom they hold lawful title and to whom they exercise lawful responsibilities.

But maybe this is the point being contested?