Author: Andrew Sullivan

Taking The Measure Of Man

Steven Pinker praises Shakespeare as “one of our first and greatest psychologists,” especially dwelling on the wisdom of a few lines from Measure for Measure:

[W]e humans are the last to notice our own limited nature. In seven words, Shakespeare sums US President George W. Bush (C) deliversup a good portion of the findings of modern psychology: “most ignorant of what he’s most assured.” A recurring discovery of social and cognitive psychology is that human beings are absurdly overconfident in their own knowledge, wisdom, and rectitude. Everyone thinks that he or she is in the right, and that the people they disagree with are stupid, stubborn, and ignorant. People reliably overestimate their own knowledge, and misjudge their own accuracy at making predictions. A common theme of both Shakespeare and modern social psychology is the human species’ overconfidence.

Remarkably, Shakespeare identifies this darker side with what we now know to be our evolutionary ancestry. With “like an angry ape,” he compares us to our primate cousins (an impressive 250 years before Darwin). What a striking simile for human impetuousness and foolishness! We tend to dignify displays of human emotion; presented with a burst of feeling, we seek its cause. But an angry ape we look on with amusement—the rage is infantile, comic, the result of ape’s own limited understanding. The detached amusement at the absurdity of human acts continues in the next line—“plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven.” “Playing a trick” refers to something lighthearted, trivial. Our feeble attempts at wisdom and justice, our petty exercise of power, appear ridiculous to wiser, celestial onlookers.

(Photo: US President George W. Bush delivers remarksfrom the South Lawn of the White House on May 1, 2006 regarding a recent trip to Iraq by US Secretary of Defense Donand Rumsfeld and US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Three years after his famous photo-op before a banner hailing “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq, Bush declared that the war-torn country had finally turned a corner in establishing security and democracy. Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty Images)

Trickle-Down Trickery?

Alex Fradera surveys research into how cheating executives harm the whole company:

In a series of online studies, Takuya Sawaoka and Benoît Monin presented participants with information about a hypothetical company employee involved in unethical activity such as deceptive marketing. When the culprit’s position in the company was senior rather than low-ranking, participants were more likely to see his behaviour as representative and go on to make assumptions about other dodgy company practices.

It’s probably not hard for people to believe that ripping off clients is a company-wide policy, especially if they hear that their boss is doing it. But what about less likely policies that directly harm the company? In fact, when bosses were presented as rigging performance data to maximise their bonuses, participants continued to suspect the wider organisation – and not just in a linear, cause-and-effect fashion. A bonus-fiddling boss made people suspicious of mid-ranker’s motives for giving investment advice that turned out to be poor. The assessment seems a more fundamental one: people assume a dishonest leader means a dishonest organisation.

Sledding Runs Into Legal Trouble, Ctd

Last week, Will Wilkinson called the “flinching risk-aversion” of sledding bans “profoundly embarrassing.” But, even if one prioritizes safety, Melinda Wenner Moyer believes such bans are wrongheaded:

The Consumer Product Safety Commission reported that approximately 10,000 sledding-related injuries in children under the age of 14 were treated in hospital emergency departments in 2012. That’s a lot. But by comparison, consider that trampolines caused nearly 79,000 ER-worthy injuries in kids under 14 in 2012, and television sets caused 26,000. (That doesn’t include the permanent hearing loss kids got from watching Dora the Explorer.)

Sledding becomes much less dangerous when it’s done a certain way, too—and that’s precisely why these park sledding bans are a problem:

Open spaces such as parks are among the safest places for kids to sled. One study found that the odds of going to the ER for sledding injuries were five times higher in children who had been sledding on the street compared with in the park. Injuries sustained while street sledding are often much worse, too, and are more likely to involve traumatic brain injuries. But where are kids without big backyards going to sled if they can’t do it in the park? The street, of course.

On that note, a reader writes:

I laughed when I read your post, because I had just read the following passage in the January 3, 2015 edition of the Cook County News Herald (Minnesota, not Illinois). It is from their weekly column, “Down Memory Lane,” and was first published 90 years ago, January 8, 1925:

The children of Grand Marais are requested to slide on Monroe Street where there are not so many cars nor so much danger of accidents. The automobile drivers are also asked to avoid Monroe Street with their cars as much as possible and help make sliding safe there for the children.

Another snapshot from the in-tray:

The reader from Dubuque wrote, “Who takes their kids sledding anymore? What kids venture out of their homes to sled on their own?” Well, here in Normal, Illinois, a few hours’ drive from Dubuque, Iowa, the answer to the first question is, “A lot of people.” When it snows thickly enough, parents, children, and teens on their own go to the top of the main sledding hill in town, Jersey Hill, and sled down. If it doesn’t melt within a few days (always a possibility here), it gets packed down by repeated sledding from hundreds of people, many of whom spend hours on the hill. That just makes it faster and, of course, more more appealing.

As for safety issues, the crest of the hill is in a sort of L-shape, and at the bottom is a creek that parallels the crest in a similar L-shape. The potential for going into the creek is high on the bottom of the L – from top to creek is not even 100 yards, but a lot lower along the main hill, because the creek is farther away – over 100 yards, maybe 200, plus there is a berm before the creek. Parents and children prefer the long hill; teens prefer the shorter one – it’s faster, and one has to bail out before going into the creek – or onto it, because it usually freezes over in January.

I have yet to hear of one lawsuit or one death, but I think I do remember hearing about a major injury. But we still like to sled here!

The Politics Of “Fertility Fog”

Amy Klein investigates why many women remain steeped in misinformation about their reproductive health:

The Committee Opinion [of the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG)] recommends education about age and fertility for ‘the patient who desires pregnancy’ – and that is a quote. In other words, only women who are already trying to get pregnant or thinking about it should be counselled about how age affects fertility.

But what about the other women – the ones who do not realise their fabulous health might not protect them from age-related declining fertility; the ones who might want to start thinking about freezing their eggs while they’re still young enough; the ones who are waiting for one reason or another to have a baby and don’t know that perhaps, like me, they don’t have that much time. Does ACOG believe it’s the doctor’s responsibility to bring up the subject?

‘We feel that women should be able to talk to their ob/gyn about fertility,’ said Sandra Carson, ACOG’s vice president for education. ‘We certainly want to remind women gently that, as they get older, fertility is compromised, but we don’t want to do it in such a way that they feel that it might interfere with their career plans or make them nervous about losing their fertility.’ In other words, there are no guidelines for talking to a woman about her fertility unless she herself brings it up.

All this talk of ‘gentle’ reminders and ‘appropriate’ counselling has a history – a political one. Back in 2001, the [American Society of Reproductive Medicine (ASRM)] devoted a six-figure sum to a fertility awareness campaign, whose goal was to show the effects of age, obesity, smoking and sexually transmitted diseases on fertility. Surprisingly, the US National Organization for Women (NOW) came out against it. ‘Certainly women are well aware of the so-called biological clock. And I don’t think that we need any more pressure to have kids,’ said Kim Gandy, then president of NOW. In a 2002 op-ed in USA Today, she wrote that NOW ‘commended’ doctors for ‘attempting’ to educate women about their health, but thought they were going about it the wrong way by making women feel ‘anxious about their bodies and guilty about their choices’.

Although the ASRM denies the backlash is connected, its spokesman Sean Tipton says the organisation has not done a fertility awareness campaign since.

Walking Like A Man

Or at least the dickish ones:

Jessica Roy covers an experiment carried out by Beth Breslaw:

She spent most of November and all of December colliding with dozens of men, on sidewalks and in train stations and outside of cafés. On one particularly eventful instance in early January, every single man who came across her path on the stretch of narrow East Village sidewalk between the N train and her sister’s apartment smacked right into her, she says. It was like that for the whole experiment, wave after wave of men knocking into her with an elbow or a shoulder or a full-on body-check.

“I can remember every single man who moved out of the way, because there were so few,” Breslaw told me. And though she refused to reposition herself for anyone — including women — Breslaw found that while she did end up running into some females, most cleared a path for her.

Update from a reader:

I’m afraid I have to call bullshit on Breslaw’s experiment of “walking like a man” to see what happens.

She should have said “walking like a jerk” because that’s what she did. My scholarship involves urban spaces and how people share them, and the behavior she describes – refusing to give way at all, just barging ahead – is not exclusive to men, nor is it the correct way to behave in general. Sharing crowded spaces means zillions of quick decisions, including last-second mutual giving-way/pivoting/angling to keep moving among many other people.

My own practice – as a 6’/230 pound pedestrian – is to always share the space, except with one sort of pedestrian: those who aren’t giving way to me in turn. For these jerks, I just stop cold, and get walked into all the time, by men and women, young and old. It’s more prevalent when people are walking two, three, or four abreast on narrow sidewalks, having their conversations and acting like they own all the space, but solo pedestrians of both genders (though, admittedly, more often men) act as though their preferred trajectory was somehow their private property. It isn’t. It’s a shared public space, and we all gotta play nice if we’re going to get along.

Had Breslaw walked towards me in the way Roy’s story describes, I would not have given way (I also would not have walked into her: I’d’ve stopped in my tracks). Had she turned ever-so-slightly, I’d’ve done the same, and we’d’ve passed politely enough.

It’s literally a two-way sidewalk out there. Can’t we all get along?

P.S. My favorite collision ever: a teenaged skateboarder who just ran right into me. Laying on the ground, he said his dad was a lawyer and he was going to sue me.  Even his buddies laughed: if you want to be tough enough to own the sidewalk, you need to be tough enough to take a fall and not go to Daddy for legal assistance.

Who Does Torrenting Hurt? Ctd

Several readers respond to the question:

While I’m not about to defend torrenting per se – of course people should pay for the content they consume – I think it’s important to question the facts underlying Freddie De Boer’s argument. His idea seems to be that the arts and entertainment industry is being destroyed by torrent sites, yet the hard data doesn’t show an industry in the midst of a torrent-soaked crisis. Sales of movie tickets have been stable for 20 years now while revenue has doubled, US book publishers are showing healthy revenue and profits and, while music industry profits have declined (to a mere $15bn I might add), sales of vinyl are soaring, making a mockery of the idea that people won’t pay for a physical product anymore.

It should also be pointed out that torrenting can’t be solely blamed for any declines in revenue or artist’s income.

Amazon has been selling secondhand DVDs and books for years while the rise of Spotify and Netflix have clearly bitten deep into revenue streams. Add that to the fact that the US and Europe are still trying to shrug off an ugly economic slump and it’s not hard to see why creativity isn’t paying as well as it used to.

Finally, of course, it should be acknowledged that the idea of lots of people earning a healthy income through art is a very recent one. Shakespeare and DaVinci were wholly dependent on rich benefactors. Literary giants like Joyce, Tolkien and Orwell all had full-time jobs outside of their writing. Sadly, some of our greatest geniuses – Schubert, Poe, Van Gogh – died in penury. I’d love to see a world where novelists and musicians can earn a living wage through their art, but it’s hard to argue that it’s the norm in the wide span of human history.

Another builds on the reader’s point that “torrenting can’t be solely blamed”:

Mr. deBoer makes the same mistake I often see regarding this issue: the assumption that the decline in music revenues must solely be driven by the rise of file-sharing. In the 20 or so years since file-sharing started en masse, we’ve seen:

  • a major move from priced-to-rent VHS movies to priced-to-own DVDs, eating into the typical person’s entertainment budget;
  • an explosion in the use of gaming consoles, also eating into the typical person’s entertainment budget;
  • because of these two factors, a drop in the amount of time that people spend listening to music;
  • also because of these first two factors, a drop in the amount of shelf space that record stores devoted to music, as they brought more DVDs and games onto the floor;
  • the consolidation of the radio airwaves by companies such as ClearChannel (now iHeartMedia) with central programming that lowers the impact of local artists on the airwaves;
  • probably spurred by these last two factors, a drop in the number of artists that a record label is willing to gamble on, since they see fewer avenues to sell into;
  • the move of music-advertising channels like MTV and VH1 from videos and into original content creation;
  • and of course, a new sales model (iTunes) that emphasizes the single and dampens interest in purchasing an entire album.

Given all of these structural changes in the industry, how could music sales not be expected to drop? Certainly file-sharing has had an impact (and a larger one than the torrent supporters admit), but it often gets blamed for the entire drop in sales, while the industry’s sea-change is ignored.

Another reader doesn’t pull punches:

I torrented a bunch of movies last year. 9/10 were terrible. Like really fucking terrible. (Planet of the Apes, I’m looking at you). I’m glad I didn’t pay for them. And I don’t feel bad. Because I wouldn’t have paid to see them otherwise … and certainly not in a movie theater, arguably the worst experience in the Western world apart from commercial air travel.

That may change when Alamo Drafthouse opens in Brooklyn later this year. They take film seriously (they will eject you from the theater for merely looking at your phone during the film) and offer a variety of freshly prepared, wholesome food. And beer. BEER!

You know what I didn’t torrent? The Interview. Cuz I didn’t have to wait to pay Google to watch it in the private movie theater that is my living room.

Fuck Hollywood.

Another makes that point more delicately:

The author of this article misses the real question. In these days of easier and easier production and distribution, why do we need a “Music Industry”? If everyone in the “Industry” disappeared tomorrow how would the world be diminished?  Music would still be performed, recorded and distributed, listened to and loved. The only thing that would change is that a completely unneeded middle man would be tossed into the rubbish heap of history. An even cursory review of the history of the “Music Industry” would show that there are many more causes more deserving of our sympathy and support.

And if you know of an “Industry” exec who would like to make an argument for his continued existence, please let him make his case. I’m listening.

Nous Sommes Charlie, But Do We Really Want To Be? Ctd

Scott Sayare pushes back on the growing liberal narrative that Charlie’s provocative cartoons lampooning Islamic fundamentalism were “racist”:

Charlie Hebdo is not a racist publication, as has been widely suggested in the Anglophone press, though it does not hesitate to risk appearing so if it might draw a laugh. (A good example is a recent cartoon, noted frequently in the past few days, depicting France’s black minister of justice as a monkey; the drawing was in fact meant to skewer the French racists who have portrayed her as a monkey, but those unfamiliar with French politics might be forgiven this misunderstanding.)

The magazine is, however, intolerant of religion and believers of all sorts, and smug in those anticlerical convictions. Dialogue with its opponents was never of much interest, and it has repeatedly chosen to target some of France’s most vulnerable inhabitants for provocation. … “We have a lot of new friends, like the pope, Queen Elizabeth, and Putin,” one of the magazine’s most prominent artists, the Dutchman Bernard Holtrop, told the Dutch daily Volkskrant amid the outpouring of support after last week’s killings. “We vomit on all these people who suddenly say they are our friends.”

Dish readers here and here also added crucial context to the allegedly racist cartoons published in Charlie, including the one of the French minister of justice. Addressing those who don’t speak native French, Olivier Tonneau digs even deeper to defend Charlie against charges of racism:

[The newspaper] continuously denounced the pledge of minorities and campaigned relentlessly for all illegal immigrants to be given permanent right of stay. …

[T]he main target of Charlie Hebdo was the Front National and the Le Pen family. Next came crooks of all sorts, including bosses and politicians (incidentally, one of the victims of the shooting was an economist who ran a weekly column on the disasters caused by austerity policies in Greece).  Finally, Charlie Hebdo was an opponent of all forms of organized religions, in the old-school anarchist sense: Ni Dieu, ni maître! They ridiculed the pope, orthodox Jews and Muslims in equal measure and with the same biting tone. They took ferocious stances against the bombings of Gaza.

Even if their sense of humour was apparently inacceptable to English minds, please take my word for it: it fell well within the French tradition of satire – and after all was only intended for a French audience. It is only by reading or seeing it out of context that some cartoons appear as racist or islamophobic.

And Robert Zaretsky situates both Charlie Hebdo and the controversial author Michel Houellebecq within France’s lengthy tradition of self-consciously provocative humor:

While historians can trace this vital, often bulging vein of French humor as far back as Rabelais, it is easiest—a rationale, after all, that Charlie Hebdo made its credo—to go no further than the Belle Epoque and the birth of le fumisme. Practiced by performers in the cafés of then-exotic Montmartre, fumisme was part disdain, part mockery and zesty provocation, shuffled and dealt with cutting accuracy to its pathetic target—namely, the bourgeois clients who, escaping their humdrum lives and filling the room, couldn’t get their fill of hearing their way of life ridiculed. It was, as the historian Jerrold Seigel has noted, “a refusal to treat the official world with seriousness and respect.”

A French reader of Dreher’s reflects on what society gains from Charlie’s commitment to offending anyone and everyone:

As far as the ‘nasty kids’ and ‘useless provocations’ anathemas go, I’d like to yell that it’s not true, or at the very least offer some extremely important proviso. First, any Charlie reader, and I mean any, would, time and again, choke on a cartoon (even the cartoonists themselves, sometimes). Which, in and by itself, would school you: you’d learn to turn the other cheek, you’d learn to feel others’ pain at being offended, you’d learn to let go of your pain at being offended, and, last but not least, you’d learn that, sometimes, the only offense was to your vainglorious self. Sure, on the whole, that made for an unholier-than-Thou and a leave-no-holy-cow-unskewered weekly: “bête et méchant”. But, for the reader, it was also a weekly lesson in humility and humanity.

Chait doubles down on his insistence that the press has a responsibility to reprint Charlie’s offensive cartoons – something that can’t be said enough:

Let us stipulate for the sake of argument that Charlie Hebdo is crude and even racist. Freedom of expression is not a strong defense of crude, racist, or otherwise stupid expression. Indeed, one of the most common and least edifying defenses made by people who have proffered offensive opinions is that they have the right to free speech. The right of expression is not the issue when the objection centers on the content.

In this case, the content of Charlie Hebdo’s work is not the issue. The issue is the right of publication. Given the fact that violent extremists threaten to kill any journalist who violates their interpretation of Islam, establishing the freedom (I argue) requires committing the blasphemy. To argue, as some have, that the threat is wrong, but that journalists should avoid blasphemy out of prudence allows the extremists to set the rules.

When Film Is Your Filter

David Shariatmadari reviews Flicker, the new book by neuroscientist Jeff Zacks that looks at “the influence of moving images on our perception of reality”:

Zacks sets out the wealth of experimental evidence which shows that a filmed version of events will likely override our knowledge of the facts. Not only because superstimuli are so compelling, but because we’re not very good at remembering the sources of information that inform our opinions. Was that in the local paper or did my friend tell me about it? Did I learn that from a history book or from watching Cate Blanchett in Elizabeth? Was I watching Osama bin Laden in the film Zero Dark Thirty or in a documentary? The political implications are huge, if not entirely unexpected: Hollywood can win hearts and minds at the expense of the truth.

In a November review of Zacks’ book, Noah Berlatsky expanded on that last point:

Why do people have such trouble distinguishing fact and fiction? The answer, Zacks argues, is that our brains are model-building machines. “The hard-core version of the model-building account,” he explains, “says that when we understand a story just by reading it, we fire off the same neural systems that we use to build models of the real world.” Zacks tried to validate this model by using fMRI scanning while people watched films—and what he discovered was that when, for example, a character on screen reaches for an object, the fMRI showed activity in the area corresponding to motor hand control. Because of these and related experiments, Zacks is convinced that “memories of our lives and memories of stories have the same shape because they are formed by the same mechanisms.” He concludes: “It is not the case that you have one bucket into which you drop all the real-life events, another for movie events, and a third for events in novels.” Your model-building brain “is perfectly happy to operate on stuff from your life, from a movie, or from a book.”

That’s “a big part of the appeal of narrative films and books,” Zacks argues. “[T]hey appeal to our model-building propensities.” But it’s also why we have trouble separating out what’s real and what’s fiction. Human brains use models to understand reality, and it doesn’t matter whether the model is labeled “fiction” or “fact.”

Update from a reader:

I am sort of embarrassed to say I know MUCH more about the presidency of Jed Bartlett and the government of his day than I have known about any in real life. The West Wing sent me to the dictionary and the encyclopedia to see which things were real and which were for dramatic effect. I learned a bunch about the real government because of that show, so I guess it’s ok, but yeah.

Mental Strength

Cari Romm flags a study where small group of test subjects “had their non-dominant arms placed in elbow-to-finger casts for four weeks.” Half “were asked to perform mental-imagery exercises five days a week, imagining themselves alternately flexing and resting their immobilized wrists for five-second intervals”:

When the casts came off at the end of the four weeks, both groups had lost strength in their arms—but the group that had imagined themselves doing the arm exercises lost significantly less, measuring an average of 25 percent weaker than at the start of the study, compared to 45 percent for the group that hadn’t taken part in the mental-imagery activities. “There’s a fair amount of evidence that you’ll activate the same parts of the brain doing imagery as you do if you’re actually doing the task itself,” explained Brian Clark, a physiology professor at Ohio University and the study’s lead author. “The basic thought is that the imagery is allowing the brain to maintain those connections.”