Related: Loss of local knowledge affecting intellectual trends, The Hyborian Age

This post is from Gregory Cochran's and Henry Harpending's excellent blog West Hunter.

Barry Marshall once said that if he had gone to Harvard, he would have known that stomach ulcers were caused by stress, and wouldn’t even have considered the possibility that they might be caused by a bacterium.  There are a number of other important innovators that sure look as if they benefited from living as far as possible from  the sources of establishment opinion.  Back when continental drift was officially nonsense,  quite a few geologists in South Africa and Australia thought it must be correct – partly because there are local geological facts that are hard to explain any other way (like ancient glacial moraines in Australia whose rocks originated in South Africa) but also because physical distance translates into mental distance.

Of course this does not always work – distance is useful, but not sufficient..  Indonesia is pretty far from Harvard, but is a vast wasteland, intellectually.  Ideally, you want a country full of people drawn from the  populations that actually produce creative thinkers (Europeans, mostly) instead of the populations that ought to but don’t.  And it should be really, really far away.

With the Internet and cell phones and all that,  psychological isolation is harder to find. Once even California had some thoughts of its own, but that day is long past. If we want to keep progress from stalling out, we need people that don’t get sucked into to the usual crap – because they can’t.

The only real solution is interstellar colonization: the speed of light is your friend.  A generation ship might do the job -  even if it never arrived. It would be out there for hundreds of years, years in which the inhabitants could go their own way.  Some of the ships would be boring, some of them would go crazy – but at least they’d be different.

Related: Thick and Thin, Loss of local knowledge affecting intellectual trends

An entry I found in the archives on Gregory Cochran's and Henry Harpending's blog West Hunter.

In yet another example of  long-delayed discovery, forms of high-altitude lightning were observed for at least a century before becoming officially real (as opposed to really real).

Some thunderstorms manage to generate blue jets shooting out of their thunderheads, or  glowing red rings and associated tentacles around 70 kilometers up.   C T R Wilson predicted this long ago, back in the 1920s.  He had a simple model that gets you started.

You see, you can think of the thunderstorm, after a ground discharge,  as a vertical dipole. Its electrical field drops as the cube of altitude.  The threshold voltage for atmospheric breakdown is proportional to pressure, while pressure drops exponentially with altitude: and as everyone knows, a negative exponential drops faster than any power.

The curves must cross.   Electrical breakdown occurs.  Weird lightning, way above the clouds.

As I said, people reported sprites at least a hundred years ago, and they have probably been observed occasionally since the dawn of time. However, they’re far easier to see if you’re above the clouds – pilots often do.

Pilots also learned not to talk about it, because nobody listened.   Military and commercial pilots have to pass periodic medical exams known as ‘flight physicals’,  and there was a suspicion that reporting glowing red cephalopods in the sky might interfere with that.  Generally, you had to see the things that were officially real (whether they were really real or not), and only those things.

Sprites became real when someone recorded one by accident on a fast camera in 1989.  Since then it’s turned into a real subject, full of strangeness: turns out that thunderstorms  sometimes generate gamma-rays and even antimatter.

Presumably we’ve gotten over all that ignoring your lying eyes stuff by now.

May you tell others what you see. (~_^)

I had an interesting recent conversation with a fellow academic that I think worth a blog post. It started with my commenting that I thought support for "diversity" in the sense in which the term is usually used in the academic context—having students or faculty from particular groups, in particular blacks but also, in some contexts, gays, perhaps hispanics, perhaps women—in practice anticorrelated with support for the sort of diversity, diversity of ideas, that ought to matter to a university.

I offered my standard example. Imagine that a university department has an opening and is down to two or three well qualified candidates. They learn that one of them is an articulate supporter of South African Apartheid. Does the chance of hiring him go up or down? If the university is actually committed to intellectual diversity, the chance should go up—it is, after all, a position that neither faculty nor students are likely to have been exposed to. In fact, in any university I am familiar with, it would go sharply down.

The response was that that he considered himself very open minded, getting along with people across the political spectrum, but that that position was so obviously beyond the bounds of reasonable discourse that refusing to hire the candidate was the correct response. 

The question I should have asked and didn't was whether he had ever been exposed to an intelligent and articulate defense of apartheid. Having spent my life in the same general environment—American academia—as he spent his, I think the odds are pretty high that he had not been. If so, he was in the position of a judge who, having heard the case for the prosecution, convicted the defendant without bothering to hear the defense. Worse still, he was not only concluding that the position was wrong—we all have limited time and energy, and so must often reach such conclusions on an inadequate basis—he was concluding it with a level of certainty so high that he was willing to rule out the possibility that the argument on the other side might be worth listening to.

An alternative question I might have put to him was whether he could make the argument for apartheid about as well as a competent defender of that system could. That, I think, is a pretty good test of whether one has an adequate basis to reject a position—if you don't know the arguments for it, you probably don't know whether those arguments are wrong, although there might be exceptions. I doubt that he could have. At least, in the case of political controversies where I have been a supporter of the less popular side, my experience is that those on the other side considerably overestimate their knowledge of the arguments they reject.

Which reminds me of something that happened to me almost fifty years ago—in 1964, when Barry Goldwater was running for President. I got into a friendly conversation with a stranger, probably set off by my wearing a Goldwater pin and his curiosity as to how someone could possibly support that position. 

We ran through a series of issues. In each case, it was clear that he had never heard the arguments I was offering in defense of Goldwater's position and had no immediate rebuttal. At the end he asked me, in a don't-want-to-offend-you tone of voice, whether I was taking all of these positions as a joke. 

I interpreted it, and still do, as the intellectual equivalent of "what is a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?" How could I be intelligent enough to make what seemed like convincing arguments for positions he knew were wrong, and yet stupid enough to believe them?

Related: The Blank Slate, The Psychological Diversity of Mankind, Admitting to Bias

"Hjernevask" a well known (in Norway at least) documentary series that I am sure will be interesting to rationalists here is now available with English subtitles online. Produced by Ole Martin Ihle and Harald Eia a Norwegian documentarian and comedian, it casts a light on both ways in which we know people to be different as well as the culture that is academia in the Nordic country and probably elsewhere as well.

The Series

1. The Gender Equality Paradox - Why do girls tend to go into empathizing professions and boys into systemizing professions? Why does the labor market become more gender segregated the more economic prosperity a country has?
2. The Parental Effect - How much influence do parents really have on their children? To what degree is intelligence inherited?
3. Gay/Straight - To what extent is sexual preference innate? Are there differences between heterosexual and homosexual brains? Is homosexuality a result of a choice or is it innate?
4. Violence - Are people from some cultures more aggressive than others?
5. Sex - Are there biological reasons men have a greater tendency than women to want sex without obligation?
6. Race - Are there significant genetic differences between different peoples?
7. Nature or Nurture - Is personality acquired or inherited?

The link go to the YouTube videos with English subtitles. Because linkrot sucks I'm providing another source for the videos.

Some Commentary

There was very little in the series that I found new and disagreed with some presentations. But this is not surprising given my eccentric interest in humans. (^_^) I found the interviews with the scientists and academics interesting and think that overall the series presents a good overview something well worth watching especially considering some of the debates I've seen taken place here recently. (;_;)

I'm somewhat frustrated by the frequent posts warning us about the dangers of Ev. Psych reasoning. (It seems like we average at least one of these per month).

It seems like a lot of this widespread hostility (the reaction to Harald Eia's Hjernevask is a good example of this hostility) stems from the fact that ev. psych is new. New ideas are held to much higher standard than old ones. The early reaction to ev. psych within psychology was characteristic of this effect. Behaviorists, Freudians, and Social Psychologists all had created their own theories of "ultimate causation" for human behaviour. None of those theories would have stood up to the strenuous demands for experimental validation that Ev. psych endured.

-Knb

But science started to suffer. With so much easy money, few wanted to study the hard sciences. And the social sciences suffered in another way: The ties with the government became too tight, and created a culture where controversial issues, and tough discussions were avoided. Too critical, and you could risk getting no more money.

It was in this culture Harald Eia started his studies, in sociology, early in the nineties. He made it as far as becoming a junior researcher, but then dropped off, and started a career as a comedian instead. He has said that he suddenly, after reading some books which not were on the syllabus, discovered that he had been cheated. What he was taught in his sociology classes was not up-to-date with international research, and more based on ideology than science.

-Bjørn Vassnes

The latter wrote that in a 2010 article on the documentary series that I would also recommend reading. HT to iSteve where it is quoted in full.

Related to: Power of Suggestion

Social Psychology & Priming: Art Wears Off

by Steve Sailer

One of the most popular social psychology studies of the Malcolm Gladwell Era has been Yale professor John Bargh's paper on how you can "prime" students to walk more slowly by first having them do word puzzles that contain a hidden theme of old age by the inclusion of words like "wrinkle" and "bingo." The primed subjects then took one second longer on average to walk down the hall than the unprimed control group. Isn't that amazing! (Here's Gladwell's description of Bargh's famous experiment in his 2005 bestseller Blink.)

This finding has electrified the Airport Book industry for years: Science proves you can manipulate people into doing what you want them to! Why you'd want college students to walk slower is unexplained, but that's not the point. The point is that Science proves that people are manipulable.

Now, a large fraction of the buyers of Airport Books like Blink are marketing and advertising professionals, who are paid handsomely to manipulate people, and to manipulate them into not just walking slower, but into shelling out real money to buy the clients' products.

Moreover, everybody notices that entertainment can prime you in various ways. For instance, well-made movies prime how I walk down the street afterwards. For two nights after seeing the Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men, I walked the quiet streets swiveling my head, half-certain that an unstoppable killing machine was tailing me. When I came out of Christopher Nolan's amnesia thriller Memento, I was convinced I'd never remember where I parked my car. (As it turned out, I quickly found my car. Why? Because I needed to. But it was fun for thirty seconds to act like, and maybe even believe, that the movie had primed me into amnesia.)

Now, you could say, "That's art, not marketing," but the distinction isn't that obvious to talented directors. Not surprisingly, directors between feature projects often tide themselves over directing commercials. For example, Ridley Scott made Blade Runner in 1982 and then the landmark 1984 ad introducing the Apple Mac at the 1984 Super Bowl.

So, in an industry in which it's possible, if you have a big enough budget, to hire Sir Ridley to direct your next TV commercial, why the fascination with Bargh's dopey little experiment?

One reason is that there's a lot of uncertainty in the marketing and advertising game. Nineteenth Century department store mogul John Wanamaker famously said that half his advertising budget was wasted, he just didn't know which half.

Worse, things change. A TV commercial that excited viewers a few years ago often strikes them as dull and unfashionable today. Today, Scott's 1984 ad might remind people subliminally, from picking up on certain stylistic commonalities, of how dopey Scott's Prometheus was last summer, or how lame the Wachowski Siblings 1984-imitation V for Vendetta was, and Apple doesn't need their computers associated with that stuff.

Naturally, social psychologists want to get in on a little of the big money action of marketing. Gladwell makes a bundle speaking to sales conventions, and maybe they can get some gigs themselves. And even if their motivations are wholly academic, it's nice to have your brother-in-law, the one who makes so much more money than you do doing something boring in the corporate world, excitedly forward you an article he read that mentions your work.

("Priming" theory is also the basis for the beloved concept of "stereotype threat," which seems to offer a simple way to close those pesky Gaps that beset society: just get everybody to stop noticing stereotypes, and the Gaps will go away!)

But why do the marketers love hearing about these weak tea little academic experiments, even though they do much more powerful priming on the job? I suspect one reason is because these studies are classified as Science, and Science is permanent. As some egghead in Europe pointed out, Science is Replicable. Once the principles of Scientific Manipulation are uncovered, then they can just do their marketing jobs on autopilot. No more need to worry about trends and fads.

But, how replicable are these priming experiments?

He then comments on and extensively quotes the Higher Education piece Power of Suggestion by Tom Bartlett, which I linked to at the start of my post. I'm skipping that to jump to the novel part part of Steve's post.

Okay, but I've never seen this explanation offered: successful priming studies stop replicating after awhile because they basically aren't science. At least not in the sense of having discovered something that will work forever.

Instead, to the extent that they ever did really work, they are exercises in marketing. Or, to be generous, art.

And, art wears off.

The power of a work of art to prime emotions and actions changes over time. Perhaps, initially, the audience isn't ready for it, then it begins to impact a few sensitive fellow artists, and they begin to create other works in its manner and talk it up, and then it become widely popular. Over time, though, boredom sets in and people look for new priming stimuli.

For a lucky few old art works (e.g., the great Impressionist paintings), vast networks exist to market them by helping audiences get back into the proper mindset to appreciate the old art (E.g., "Monet was a rebel, up against The Establishment! So, putting this pretty picture of flowers up on your wall shows everybody that you are an edgy outsider, too!").

So, let's assume for a moment that Bargh's success in the early 1990s at getting college students to walk slow wasn't just fraud or data mining for a random effect among many effects. He really was priming early 1990s college students into walking slow for a few seconds.

Is that so amazing?

Other artists and marketers in the early 1990s were priming sizable numbers of college students into wearing flannel lumberjack shirts or dancing the Macarena or voting for Ross Perot, all of which seem, from the perspective of 2013, a lot more amazing.

Overall, it's really not that hard to prime young people to do things. They are always looking around for clues about what's cool to do.

But it's hard to keep them doing the same thing over and over. The Macarena isn't cool anymore, so it would be harder to replicate today an event in which young people are successfully primed to do the Macarena.

So, in the best case scenario, priming isn't science, it's art or marketing.

Interesting hypothesis.