The Implicit Association Test (IAT) shows that most of us possess unconscious biases about gender, race, or ethnicity. Mahzarin Banaji of Harvard, co-author of the new book Blindspot and an expert on these hidden biases, discusses with Tamar Gendler of Yale the best ways to rid ourselves of these stereotypes:
You can watch the entire conversation here and subscribe to the Mind Report here.
In a rumination on the life and work of David Foster Wallace, David J. Michael spots this passage from The Pale King:
It turns out that bliss—a second-by-second joy + gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious—lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (tax returns, televised golf), and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Constant bliss in every atom.
Previous Dish coverage of Wallace here, here, here and here.
San Antonio, Texas, 5.07 pm
In an interview with The Awl, George Saunders recalls his Roman Catholic upbringing and the guilt that came with it:
Guilt is ego, actually, when you think of it. If I’m at a party with you and I’m trying to be clever, and I say something hurtful and afterward I feel guilty about it, in a way that presupposes that I should be so in control that I would never make a mistake—that’s ego. The thought that I—I, so perfect and above reproach—would never make a human blunder. Which is—you know, that’s very egotistical, to understand yourself as He Who Never Blunders.
The epitaph on Charles Bukowski’s gravestone is “Don’t Try.” Dan Colman turns to the poet’s letters to unpack the phrase’s meaning:
In October 1963, Bukowski recounted in a letter to John William Corrington how someone once asked him, “What do you do? How do you write, create?” To which, he replied: “You don’t try. That’s very important: ‘not’ to try, either for Cadillacs, creation or immortality. You wait, and if nothing happens, you wait some more. It’s like a bug high on the wall. You wait for it to come to you. When it gets close enough you reach out, slap out and kill it. Or if you like its looks you make a pet out of it.”
Pivoting off posts by Rod Dreher and Alan Jacobs, Noah Millman unpacks the problem with contemporary “natural law” arguments:
The people who, today, seem to me to be making “natural law” type arguments of the sort Aristotle himself would recognize are the evolutionary psychology folks – the people who are trying (we can debate with what success) to develop a genuinely scientific genealogy of morals, to know our natures by understanding, scientifically, how they got that way. But this isn’t at all what people who call themselves supporters of a “natural law” approach to law and ethics do.
It seems to me that this is the reason that natural law arguments fail in practice. It’s not that we can’t accept that we have natures, or that those natures might be constraining in one fashion or another – outside of certain politically touchy topics, we entertain the idea that our natures constrain us, and how we can pursue (and achieve) happiness, all the time. It’s that the advocates of a natural law approach cannot explain adequately how they know what they claim to know about our natures, and expose that purported knowledge to scientific criticism of the kind that we would recognize if the question were, say, “do dogs feel pain?” And the suspicion grows, over time, that this question isn’t opened not because it cannot be opened but because it must not be opened, because it is really the conclusions that are “known” absolutely, and not the premises.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry takes the argument in a slightly different direction, defending the Enlightenment notion of natural rights while holding that this “is not a religious concept, and what’s more, it’s much more useful as a secular concept”:
Without appealing to God, the only way to ground the idea of universal human rights is if there is such a thing as human nature, which is shared by human beings, because they are human beings, and which includes the endowment of rights. This is the classic formulation of secular Enlightenment morality. Because human beings are beings “of a rational nature”, they have rights, the Enlightenment tells us—the key word here being nature. The insane still have human rights, the Enlightenment tells us, because even though they may not individually be rational, they share human nature, which itself is rational, and thereby endowed of rights. This seems absolutely crucial to me. No human nature, no natural law, no human rights, no secular Enlightenment morality (as we have thus far been able to understand these things).
Hannah Goldfield reflects on the ways Amour – winner of this year’s Oscar for best foreign language film – reminded her of her own grandparents’ deep love for each other:
In “Amour,” Anne and Georges’s daughter, Eva, is portrayed almost as their enemy, and at the very least an outsider. They seem to have a good, loving relationship with her, but they don’t want her meddling in their lives. This—the idea of a couple’s relationship with their child playing such clear second fiddle to their relationship with each other—struck me as very and appealingly French: romance over all else. It reminded me, too, of Ayelet Waldman’s controversial 2005 “Modern Love” column in the New York Times, in which she unequivocally and unapologetically states that she loves her husband, the novelist Michael Chabon, more than her children. She would choose him over them if it came down to it, she said, and couldn’t imagine experiencing joy without him.
But my sadness arose from how close to home “Amour” hit: this was how much my grandparents had loved each other. The sad fate that Anne and Georges were meeting onscreen was the fate that my grandparents had met. I had known that it was happening at the time, and I had witnessed it to some degree, but Haneke brought me so close to its nucleus I almost felt I was experiencing it myself. “Life is so long,” says Anne contentedly, as she and Georges flip through an old photo album. As I sat crying in the movie theatre, I realized that if I was lucky enough to say the same, and lucky enough to find love that lasted, I would be unlucky enough to see it end.
Ann Friedman continues to wonder if such a thing could really exist:
Despite our commitment to baseline feminist ideals, most of us don’t like to be relationship aggressors. We prefer to meet someone in person, not just browse pics of his pecs. We respond to emotional cues and pheromones and all sorts of subtle factors. But what if that isn’t entirely true? What if women are just as open to spontaneously meeting a man for a drink—and maybe more? After all, in a survey of a hundred thousand OkCupid users, over half the women said they’ve had casual sex. Women may initiate contact less frequently, but they are comfortable reaching out first if they see a profile that appeals to them. Maybe the real failure is that no one has built an app that women want to use.
But after test-driving Check Him Out, an app designed through female focus groups, she was left cold:
Only women can initiate contact, though men can “favorite” profiles. Rolland says that fifty-nine per cent of their users are women, and I decided to join their ranks to “shop” for myself. The site suggested I check out “products” as far away as Vancouver. (I live in Los Angeles.) Not a sign of a very robust user base. I didn’t see a single man I’d be interested in messaging. Plus the whole shopper-product dynamic made me feel gross.
Friedman also tested a beta version of Three Day Rule. Rebecca Greenfield notes the recent praise of yet another app designed by women for women, Tinder, which tries to nail the balance between verifying authenticity and respecting privacy:
The app only lets people who have mutually liked each other (based mostly on their photo) message each other. Meaning: “No more OkCupid troll sending you message after message promising dick pics if you give him your phone number,” as NYU Local’s Caroline Hayes and Chelsea Beeler put it. In fact, the photos it chooses to show come up in a more controlled way because of its relationship to Facebook. In addition to location, shared interests, friends, and other Facebook things are what determine who you see.
Jason G. Goldman highlights just a few, reassuring humans that “for just about any fantasy between consenting adults that might be thought of as beyond conventional sexual practices or decency as dictated by society, you can bet that there’s a non-human species for whom that particular behaviour is commonplace”:
Take giraffes, for instance. Males, called bulls, make casual visits to various groups over time in search of a cow who might mate with him. In order to select the mating partner the bull literally finds the one that best suits his taste – by sampling their urine. Females co-operate in this “urine-testing” ritual, according to researchers David M. Pratt and Virginia H. Anderson. “When the bull nuzzles her rump, she must produce a stream of urine if he is to catch some in his mouth and savour it,” they write. If a cow is particularly attracted to a visiting bull, she may simply decide to urinate as he walks past her, no prodding required. Urolagnia, or “golden showers” as it is more commonly known, is not a human invention, it seems.
On a related note, Christopher Ryan recently delivered a not-yet released TED talk on human sexuality and its animal origins. Ben Lillie recaps:
Where did our misconceptions about sex come from? Well, Darwin, as it turns out, was a world-class Victorian prude. He was fascinated by the colorful genital swelling in bonobos, but what he didn’t know is that female chimps have sex 1-4 times an hour with up to a dozen partners.
Furthermore, Ryan notes that female chimps are sexually available for 40% of their menstrual cycles, but bonobos for 90% — almost as much as humans, who are capable of engaging in sex at any point in their cycle. That is a trait that is vanishingly rare among mammals.
For Ryan, a key question to understanding the origin of human sexuality is, “Are human beings a species that evolved in the context of sperm competition?” Are they competing against each other or with the sperm of other men as well? It doesn’t seem to be the case. For example, the average human has sex about a thousand times per birth. “If that seems high to you,” laughs Ryan, “don’t worry, it seems low to other people in the audience.” A more typical number among apes is to have sex about a dozen times per birth. Additionally, Ryan notes, humans and bonobos are among the only animals that have sex face to face. They also have external testicles. Says Ryan, ”External testicles are like having an extra fridge in the garage for beer. If you’re the kind of guy that has a beer fridge, you expect a party to happen at any moment.”
Brett Aho explores what science can tell us about why we use psychoactive drugs despite the stigmas against doing so. One possibility? Getting high could be seen “as a form of evolutionarily novel behavior”:
The theory builds off of what evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa calls the Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis. It combines his Savanna Principle, which states that the human brain has difficulty dealing with entities and situations that didn’t exist in the ancestral environment, with the theory of evolution of general intelligence, which suggests that general intelligence evolved as a psychological adaptation to solve evolutionarily novel problems. Within the realm of evolutionary psychology, this hypothesis predicts that individuals of higher intelligence are more likely to engage in novel behavior that goes against cultural traditions or social norms.
Interestingly, the findings of a forty-year-long study funded by the British government paralleled this hypothesis, and found that “very bright” individuals with IQs above 125 were about twice as likely to have tried psychoactive drugs than “very dull” individuals with IQs below 75. As Kanazawa explains, “Intelligent people don’t always do the ‘right’ thing, only the evolutionarily novel thing.”
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