[ExI] Clark abstract

[hkhenson]

At 09:04 AM 1/10/2008, Lee wrote:
>Keith writes

snip

> > The behavior related to "political correctness" with respect to
> > different cultures is a widespread behavior in western culture.  (In
> > this case I think we have to leave out Japan which I normally count
> > in the western culture block.)  Therefore there must be an evolved
> > underlying psychological mechanism involved.
>
>Naturally. Didn't you like my explanation of what it was?
>Here it is once more:
>
>      May I suggest that reluctance to discuss race and
>      gender differences in the West is powered by
>      altruism, the sort that makes one reluctant to
>      discuss the possible shortcomings of friends and
>      associates?
>
>In other words, it is people's feelings of altruism (towards the poor,
>the sick, the backward, the disenfranchised, etc.) which is the
>evolutionary mechanism responsible. I won't go over the evolutionary
>explanations of altruism here---one may see any number of books
>and articles, from "Origin of Virtues" on down to "The Mating Mind".

It's possible.  Ghod knows what interacting with much larger numbers 
of people including animated cartoons on TV and movies while growing 
up has done to the calibration of our detectors of who is a tribal 
relative and the normal recipient of altruistic behavior.

snip

> > As a guess it's tapping the same psychological mechanisms as other
> > political matters.
>
>I'd put it the other way:  many political matters rely on instinctual
>feelings of altruism. Whenever any socialist wants more government
>control of anything, for example, all he or she need do is exhibit
>sufficiently gut-wrenching visual material (which, of course, shortcuts
>rationality). Children suffering is one of the most common recourses.

Politics itself shortcuts rationality.  If anyone has not read Dr. 
Westen's really fine fMRI research on partisan politics, they 
should.  Anyone need a pointer or a .pdf?

(from the press release)

The investigators used functional neuroimaging (fMRI) to study a 
sample of committed Democrats and Republicans during the three months 
prior to the U.S. Presidential election of 2004. The Democrats and 
Republicans were given a reasoning task in which they had to evaluate 
threatening information about their own candidate. During the task, 
the subjects underwent fMRI to see what parts of their brain were 
active. What the researchers found was striking.

"We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain 
normally engaged during reasoning," says Drew Westen, director of 
clinical psychology at Emory who led the study. "What we saw instead 
was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits 
hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known 
to be involved in resolving conflicts." Westen and his colleagues 
will present their findings at the Annual Conference of the Society 
for Personality and Social Psychology Jan. 28.

Once partisans had come to completely biased conclusions -- 
essentially finding ways to ignore information that could not be 
rationally discounted -- not only did circuits that mediate negative 
emotions like sadness and disgust turn off, but subjects got a blast 
of activation in circuits involved in reward -- similar to what 
addicts receive when they get their fix, Westen explains.

"None of the circuits involved in conscious reasoning were 
particularly engaged," says Westen. "Essentially, it appears as if 
partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the 
conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, 
with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of 
positive ones."

>Of course, this is *not* to say that we should ignore suffering---far
>from it. But our conclusions should be based on a careful weighing
>of costs and benefits, even statistics. It's better, for example, for a
>very few children to starve to death than for millions to be destitute
>and have no propects.  But to grok that last sentence, one needs to
>really understand what "million" means, and most people, sadly,
>don't have that ability in such a context.

Heck Lee, the way things are headed we are talking about multiple 
*billions* dying within the next 20-30 years.  And you are right, we 
were not evolved to deal with human numbers larger than a tribe.

Keith