Month: July 2022

Reduced Violence and the Spread of People & Ideas

Reduced Violence and the Spread of People & Ideas

Posted on by jabittan
In the United States, urban and metropolitan areas of the country seem very polarized against rural areas of the country. This is an important aspect of American political and social polarization that plays out in how we vote and how we think. Denser areas and higher population areas tend to vote for Democrats while rural areas tend to vote for Republicans. Urban and metro areas are more favorable to immigration and gay marriage than rural areas. Living in larger and denser cities seems to shape the way people think about social issues and how they ultimately vote.
 
 
This is not necessarily a surprising issue and reflects self selection effects and general life experience effects on the way we think about people and the world. The more you are exposed to diverse and different people, the more likely you are to be accepting of them, at least if your encounters with them are generally positive.
 
 
Steven Pinker writes about this phenomenon in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, specifically addressing how the spread of ideas and the spread of people has created a less violent world. As we have been better able to mix and interact, we have become a more tolerate species. Pinker writes,
 
 
“Why should the spread of ideas and people result in reforms that lower violence? There are several pathways. The most obvious is a debunking of ignorance and superstition. A connected and educated populace, at least in aggregate and over the long run, is bound to be disabused of poisonous beliefs, such as that members of other races and ethnicities are innately avaricious or perfidious; that economic and military misfortunes are caused by the treachery of ethnic minorities; that women don’t mind being raped; that children must be beaten to be socialized; that people choose to be homosexual as part of a morally degenerate lifestyle; that animals are incapable of feeling pain.”
 
 
While it is tempting to match all the examples from Pinker in the above paragraph to current American Political parties and dynamics, I think (and I believe Pinker would agree) it is more powerful to map this back to different cultures, different eras, and different human outlooks and beliefs throughout the history of mankind. We evolved within small tribal groups and slowly developed cities. However, our cities were never as interconnected as they are today. It was possible to think of people who didn’t speak your language or live up to your customs as savages. This seems to be a typical way of thinking for humans, especially when there isn’t anyone or anything available to prove you wrong. It is easy to imagine that the Greeks effectively dehumanized the Trojans to justify destroying Troy. While this has still happened in modern times (the Nazi’s dehumanization of Jews as an example) it is harder to justify today. Our institutions and reformations recognize that there is very little meaningful difference between human races at aggregate levels, that human sexuality is far more complex than male/female, and ideas around compassion for the planet and animals have grown. Creating an interconnected planet has made us a more peaceful species over time by helping us learn more about different humans in different places with different customs but similar emotional and mental capacities to ourselves. The spread of ideas has made us more tolerant and has reduced violence.
Non-Violence Requires Mental Fortitude

Non-Violence Requires Mental Fortitude

Posted on by jabittan
Being non-violent is not naturally easy for human beings. Non-violence requires a measure of self-discipline, self-control, and mental fortitude. It requires that we see beyond ourselves, shifting our perspective outside our own self-interest and point of view.
 
 
Steven Pinker writes about this in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature. Pinker writes, “insofar as violence is immoral, the Rights Revolutions show that a moral way of life often requires a decisive rejection of instinct, culture, religion, and standard practice. In their place is an ethics that is inspire by empathy and reason and stated in the language of rights.”
 
 
When we are not measured, when we do not exercise self-control, and when we lack mental fortitude, we can become violent. Just as we can become addicted to substances, indulgent in too many desserts, and unwilling to go to the gym, we can lash out physically against others when we do not think through our actions with reason and discipline. We are social creatures, so having mental fortitude and thinking about our actions within the context of the society we are a part of is natural for us, but that doesn’t mean it is always the easy, default way of being.
 
 
Violence has been a long standing element of our social arrangements and behaviors behaviors. Whether through instinct, which said that we must kill a neighbor to protect what is ours, through cultural practices which failed to put taboos on violence between spouses, religions which encouraged eternal rewards for violent deaths defending religious principals, or eye-for-an-eye criminal justice policies, violence has been an accepted part of many of our institutions. But a language of rights and empathy toward other people have reduced the role and acceptance of violence in our institutions. Rational thought, combined with mental fortitude is making our species a less violent species over time. Non-violence is not easy, but it is something we can rationally program into our institutions in continually better ways.
Individualism, Violence Against Women, and Humanist Views

Individualism, Violence Against Women, and Humanist Views

Posted on by jabittan
“Cultures that are classified as more individualistic, where people feel they are individuals with the right to pursue their own goals, have relatively less domestic violence against women than cultures classified as collectivist, where people feel they are part of a community whose interests take precedence over their own,” writes Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature. It is somewhat strange that an individualistic culture would value women more than a collectivist culture. From the immediate outset, it is not clear to me why that would be. I could easily imagine an alternative viewpoint where individualistic men were more likely to be violent toward women because they prioritized their own sexual desires more than the woman’s health, safety, and individual desires. At the outset, it seems like it may be other variables that play a stronger role in determining levels of violence against women.
 
 
But Pinker continues, “these correlations don’t prove causation, but they are consistent with the suggestion that the decline of violence against women in the West has been pushed along by a humanist mindset that elevates the rights of individual people over the traditions of the community, and that increasingly embraces the vantage point of women.” This suggests that it is a larger cultural shift which changes the relationships between men and women within individualistic cultures relative to more traditional cultures where the collective took greater precedent over the individual. If a woman is expected to produce many kids or is the property of a man, then violence is somewhat expected in maintaining a male dominated hierarchy. Sexual violence and rape may be dismissed if a woman exists to produce children in such a system. If a woman is more free to express herself and chose her own path, then violence is less acceptable because it cannot be employed to maintain a predetermined set of options.
 
 
I am sure there are a lot of confounding variables still at play, but I think it is very interesting, and a very positive development, for individualistic cultures to be less violent toward women than more traditional collectivist cultures. Individualistic cultures seem to allow people to express themselves in unique ways with less fear of violence if they don’t follow traditional roles and molds. I would expect this to extend beyond women to other populations as well, and while it may make the world more complex and confusing, it will hopefully continue to make it less violent as we continue to value the unique perspectives of each person.
Moral Vantage Points & Costs vs. Benefits

Moral Vantage Points & Costs vs. Benefits

Posted on by jabittan
I am in favor of making as many rational choices as we can, but the reality is that we cannot take subjectivity out of our decision-making entirely. When we strive to be rational, we make decisions based on objective statistics and measurable data. We try to take subjectivity out of our measures so that our decisions can be fact based. But an unavoidable problem is determining which facts and measures to use in our evaluations. At some point, we have to decide which factors are important and which are not.
 
 
This means that there will always be some sort of subjectivity built into our systems. It also means we cannot avoid making decisions that are at some level political. No matter how much of a rational technocrat we strive to be, we are still making political and subjective judgements.
 
 
Steven Pinker has a sentence in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature which reflects this reality. Pinker writes, “A moral vantage point determines more than who benefits and who pays; it also determines how events are classified as benefits and costs to begin with.”
 
 
Pinker’s reflection is in line with what I described in the opening paragraph. Who gets to decide what is a cost and what is a benefit can shape the rational decision-making process and framework. If you believe that the most important factor in a decision is the total price paid and another person believes that the most important factor is whether access to the end product is equitable, then you may end up at an impasse that cannot be resolved rationally. Your two most important values may directly contradict each other and no amount of statistics is going to change how you understand costs and benefits in the situation.
 
 
I don’t think this means that rationality is doomed. I think it means we must be aware of the fact that rationality is bounded, that there are realms where we cannot be fully rational. We can still strive to be as rational as possible, but we need to acknowledge that how we view costs and benefits, how we view the most important or least important factors in a decision, will not be universal and cannot be entirely objective.
The Rights Revolution & a Code of Etiquette

The Rights Revolution & a Code of Etiquette

Posted on by jabittan
“The prohibition of dodgeball represents the overshooting of yet another successful campaign against violence, the century-long movement to prevent the abuse and neglect of children,” writes Steven Pinker in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature. Pinker argues that the Rights Revolution, endowing people with unalienable human rights that need to be defended by the state, is part of a progressive civilizing campaign stretching back hundreds of years in human history. This civilizing process includes taboos against behaviors such as knifing a dinner guest who says something mean, urinating in public, beating up strangers, and as Pinker notes, dodgeball. Humanity has slowly been civilizing and that has brought about more peaceful behaviors which we can see in how we think about violent (but not necessarily super dangerous) children’s games and sports.
 
 
Pinker continues, “it reminds us [the dodgeball prohibition] of how a civilizing offensive can leave a culture with a legacy of puzzling customs, peccadilloes, and taboos. The code of etiquette bequeathed by this and the other Rights Revolutions is pervasive enough to have acquired a name. We call it political correctness.”
 
 
I find the way that Pinker places political correctness within a frame of a civilizing process to be interesting and helpful. People often complain that political correctness means they can’t say what they think and what they believe to be true. (Personally, my sense is that people dislike political correctness because they can no longer say mean things about minority populations with cultural traditions they find strange, people with disabilities, or people who are not cisgender). As Pinker notes, this is part of a civilizing process revolving around human rights. Civilization continues to recognize more people who have been marginalized and to affirm their rights, which may include prohibitions against minor discriminatory actions, like name calling or refusing to bake someone a cake.
 
 
Political correctness is a code of etiquette that helps us be more civilized toward each other. We can argue about where it overshoots (as Pinker does with dodgeball – an activity I don’t have a problem being prohibited in schools) but we should all be able to recognize that it is a response to a continually evolving cultural civilization process. Political correctness is not some form of mind control or some form of deliberate feminization of society. It is a continued movement and ever developing code of etiquette which guides us to be more respectful of human rights and less tolerance of belligerence and violence in human society.
Incentives for Overestimating Risk

Incentives for Overestimating Risk

Posted on by jabittan
In the United States, and really across the globe, things are becoming more expensive. The price of food, gasoline, cars, and other goods have gone up quite a bit in the last year as the global economy adjusts to the new realities of the post-COVID world, as economies continue to respond to economic stimulus events, and as uncertainty around whether the pandemic truly is in our rear-view mirror continue to hang over our global consciousnesses. During this time of high inflation, many tv pundits, politicians, and experts are forecasting doom and gloom for national and global economies. Forecasting bad news seems to be the norm right now.
 
 
Steven Pinker explored the incentives for overestimating risk and forecasting bad news in his 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature. Pinker specifically looked at violence and war in his book and found that there are incentives for people to predict something negative, but not necessarily incentives for people to predict something positive. Pinker writes:
 
 
“Like television weather forecasters, the pundits, politicians, and terrorism specialists have every incentive to emphasize the worst-case scenario. It is undoubtedly wise to scare governments into taking extra measures to lock down weapons and fissile material and to monitor and infiltrate groups that might be tempted to acquire them. Overestimating the risk, then, is safer than underestimating it – though only up to a point.“ (emphasis mine)
 
 
We might be safer if everyone predicts a worst case scenario. If the people with the largest platforms focus on the dangerous potential for a terrorist attack, the public will demand action to reduce the risk. If there is a great focus on the need for improved safety equipment in hospitals responding to a new strain of COVID, then public officials are more likely to act. If there is overwhelming concern about inflation and economic collapse, the government will hopefully take better actions to balance the economy. Predicting that everything will work out and hum along on its own could be more dangerous than predicting the worst outcomes. Predicting doom and gloom not only gets attention, it can drive early and decisive decision making.
 
 
But as Pinker notes, it is safer to overestimate risk only to a point. Pinker cites the costs of the war in Iraq in search of weapons of mass destruction that did not exist as an example of dangerous worst case forecasting. Overreacting to COVID in China through excessive lockdowns and insufficient vaccination efforts may be contributing to higher global prices for goods at the moment. And predicting an economic collapse could spook markets and scare consumers, leading to worse economic outcomes than might otherwise occur. There are incentives to predicting the worst, but also costs if our predictions go too far.
 
 
I think our jobs as individuals is to be aware of the worst case scenarios, but not to become too trapped by such predictions. We need to remember that making worst case scenario predictions will provide feedback into what is already a noisy system. It is likely that forecasting the worst and spurring action by individuals will avert the worst. This doesn’t mean we can sit back and let others handle everything, but it should encourage us to think deeply about worse cases, our actions, and how panicked we should be.
Terrorist Motivations

Terrorist Motivations

Posted on by jabittan
One of the arguments that Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler make in their book, The Elephant in the Brain, is that we are not very good at accurately gauging the motivational reasons behind the actions of ourselves and others. We tend to look for large ideological and rational explanations for our behavior and the behavior of others. We often overlook simpler explanations of self-interest in favor of more high minded reasons for behavior.
If we recognize that we do a poor job of understanding the motivation of ourselves and others, then it is not surprising to learn that our assumptions of terrorist motivations are also often wrong. Steven Pinker demonstrates this in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature. Pinker specifically looks at suicide bomb terrorists and our general assumption that they are motivated by pure religious beliefs. This assumption, according to Pinker, is incomplete for many suicide bomb terrorists. Pinker writes,
“Using interviews with failed and prospective suicide terrorists, the anthropologist Scott Atran has refuted many common misconceptions about them. Far from being ignorant, impoverished, nihilistic, or mentally ill, suicide terrorists tend to be educated, middle class, morally engaged, and free of obvious psychopathy. Atran concluded that many of the motives may be found in nepotistic altruism.”
Pinker shows that there are a lot of pedestrian motivations for why individuals become suicide terrorists. Their motivation is not always a fervent ideological belief or hope for a spiritual reward of heavenly virgins. Pinker references Atran to show that some suicide terrorists are given the opportunity to have their debt cleared for future generations by going through with a suicide operation. Some suicide terrorists have had families kidnapped and threatened if the suicide bomber doesn’t go through with a bombing. Some terrorist groups offer substantial money to the surviving family members of the suicide terrorists. These monetary and family life motivations are what Atran refers to as nepotistic altruism.
We frequently make assumptions about others and about what motivates them. We make fun of others based on our assumptions, dismiss them, and are surprised to learn that our assumptions can be wrong. We are surprised when we see someone do something awful for motivations that we share with them. When we fail to understand motivation, we fail to understand what types of policies, rewards, and punishments might be useful in changing behaviors. It is important that we accept that we don’t fully understand the motivations of others and work to improve our perspectives so that we can better shape society to prevent things like suicide bomb terrorism.
Why We Help Our Kin

Why We Help Our Kin

Posted on by jabittan
It is not a completely unreasonable question to ask why humans and other species go out of their way to help their kin. Whether it is our direct offspring, our nieces and nephews, our grandchildren, or other distant blood relative decedents, we often find a need to do things to help them. Despite how gross changing a diaper can be, how expensive helping someone get to college can be, or how costly the provision of aid and assistance can be, we find an inner pull to be of assistance. That inner pull is also often joined with outer social norms and expectations around kin assistance, despite the fact that sometimes the costs truly are burdensome.
 
 
Steven Pinker addresses this in The Better Angels of Our Nature. He writes, “natural selection favors any genes that incline and organism toward making a sacrifice that helps a blood relative, as long as the benefit to the relative, discounted by the degree of relatedness, exceeds the cost  to the organism. The reason is that the genes would be helping copies of themselves inside the bodies of those relatives and would have a long-term advantage over their narrowly selfish alternatives.”
 
 
If there is a chance that our genes are shared with another blood relative, then it makes sense that we would have an inclination to provide assistance to help that relative survive and pass along their genes. If the cost is not so great that we won’t be able to survive and pass along our genes, or ensure that a child who shares more of our genes won’t be able to reproduce, then we will provide assistance. From an evolutionary psychology standpoint, this theory aligns with observations and self-interest for individual humans and animals. Without pulling out a pen and paper or calculator, our brains are able to do a rough calculation of the cost we would face relative to the improved chance for survival of our kin. Where we see the needle inch toward the benefit outweighing the cost, we make an effort to help our kin, and put up with sometimes substantial individual costs. 
 
Two Genocide Non-Factors

Two Genocide Non-Factors

Posted on by jabittan
In his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker examines evidence around numerous factors that contribute to violence or that we might expect would contribute to violence. In one section, he specifically looks at factors that do and do not contribute to genocidal violence. Better understanding what does and doesn’t cause violence can help us better understand how we should organize societies. And when we think about how we should organize societies and think about global populations given global poverty and ethnic diversity, the results that Pinker highlights regarding genocide can help us learn a lot.
 
 
“Measures of ethnic diversity didn’t matter, refuting the conventional wisdom that genocides represent he eruption of ancient hatreds that inevitably explode when ethnic groups live side by side,” Pinker writes. Genocide is hard to understand and ideas of natural ethnic group hatred and conflict seems like it must be a contributing factor to genocide. However, evidence indicates that across the globe many ethnic groups live side by side, without one side trying to completely eliminate the other. Either increased or decreased ethnic diversity relative to the global average isn’t what seems to be a sparking factor in whether genocide occurs, despite what we might assume.
 
 
“Poor countries are more likely to have political crises…” Pinker continues, “but among countries that did have crises, the poorer ones were no more likely to sink into actual genocide.” The second non-factor that Pinker highlights with regard to genocide is poverty. Economic development is also not a leading factor that determines whether a genocide will occur in a country or within a violent conflict.
 
 
These two factors are important to recognize as non-factors for genocide because both factors can be used to further harmful political goals. Claiming that ethnic diversity can lead to genocide might be used as a reason to restrict immigration and the movement of people across borders and regions. Some may claim that they are trying to prevent genocide by reducing the freedom with which some minority groups may be able to move. For the second non-factor, we can also see that poor countries are not inevitably inclined toward genocide as they try to increase economic wellbeing. We can dismiss poor countries and aid to poor countries relatively easily, especially in the United States if the poor countries are far away from us. Associating poorness with genocide may be a reason for some people not to support global aid and assistance, fearing that aid may be captured by a powerful ethnic group and used to wage genocidal violence against others. Showing that levels of poorness are not associated with genocide may be helpful in encouraging people to support global aid to poor countries.
Middleman Minorities & Discrimination

Middleman Minorities & Discrimination

Posted on by jabittan
Older interpretations of Christianity held that it was against the Christian God’s commandments for Christians to loan money and charge interest. Consequentially, across Europe Christians generally were not bankers, because it was a religious violation for Christians to be in positions where they were charging interest. Banking then became a niche role for non-Christians – Jews in particular across Europe. For hundreds of years Christians did not work as bankers, but Jews did, and today we still have the stereotypical consequences of the ancient traditions that kept Christians out of banking while opening up a spot for Jews within financial industries.
 
 
Steven Pinker writes about phenomena like the Jewish-Christian banking arrangement in Europe and the subsequent discrimination that Jews faced in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature. Pinker writes, “it’s common for particular ethnic groups to specialize in the middleman niche and to move to whatever communities currently lack them, where they tend to become prosperous minorities – and targets of envy and resentment.” Jewish banking is a salient and easy to understand example. Bankers are still hated today because they are not doing anything that really appears to be work to people who produce goods and don’t work in the banking industry. Bankers move money around and profit on capital, rents, and interest. Providing the capital for a project is important and valuable, but we have trouble understanding it and don’t easily trust those who are in such a position.
 
 
Pinker continues on this specific point, “in intuitive economics, farmers and craftsmen produce palpable items of value. Merchants and other middlemen, who skim off a profit as they pass goods along without causing new stuff to come into being, are seen as parasites, despite the value they create by enabling transactions between producers and consumers.”
 
 
Pinker gives other examples in his book of populations that have emigrated to new countries or existed within larger majority populations and found niche roles as middlemen. For the reasons noted in the quotes above, these minority groups have often found themselves scorned by the larger populations they find themselves within. They often become the victims of violence and have been the targets of genocide. Despite the fact that minorities (especially when they emigrate) find ways to fill important niches and despite the fact that filling such niches provides economic value, xenophobic populations can massacre minorities when rhetoric against them reaches irrational frenzies.