Quotulatiousness

February 27, 2023

The instinct to protect

Filed under: Health, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Rob Henderson on the way that women react to men who demonstrate protective instincts toward them:

Human psychology evolved in environments far more violent than even the most dangerous modern U.S. cities. Overall, in the U.S., the average death rates from interpersonal violence are less than 1 in 10,000.

In contrast, in hunter-gatherer societies, 15 percent of deaths were the result of physical violence.

Our violent evolutionary past has shaped our minds. Even peaceable people in developed countries who have never even been in a fight can still readily estimate men’s physical strength from their face, body, and voice. These estimations tightly correlate with men’s actual physical strength.

A 2022 paper (preprint link here) investigated whether people prefer romantic partners who are willing and able to protect them from violence.

Considering the frequency and intensity of violence in the human ancestral environment, affiliating with people who were able to protect you would have been advantageous. The authors of the paper suggest such preferences have shaped human mating psychology.

The authors (Barlev, Arai, Tooby, and Cosmides) explore the question of whether a potential partner’s ability to protect you from violence is valued. It seems obvious that the answer (especially for women) is almost certainly yes.

However, they also explore whether a potential partner’s willingness (independent of ability) is also considered attractive.

When a woman judges a man, does learning that he is willing to protect her from violence make him more attractive, even if he isn’t particularly effective at doing so?

What about when a woman learns that a man is able but unwilling to protect her? Imagine a muscular guy who, upon seeing his date get mugged, just stands there and does nothing, or runs away.

Is he still more attractive than a guy who is unable but willing to protect her? Picture a scrawny guy who, upon seeing his date get mugged, physically tries but is unsuccessful in his attempt to stop the mugger.

The paper explores these questions.

[…]

Here you see that women rate male dates (described in this particular version of the study as average in physical strength and average in physical attractiveness) who make no attempt to protect them as a 2 out of 10 in attractiveness. Women rate a man who attempts to protect them but fails as a 7.5 out of 10. And a man who attempts to protect them and succeeds is an 8 out of 10.

So the major bump in attractiveness comes from willingness, rather than ability.

Luftwaffe Defeated in One Week?! – War Against Humanity 099

Filed under: Britain, China, Germany, History, Japan, Military, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 26 Feb 2023

Allied and German Air Forces fight fierce battles over Europe with civilians caught in the crossfire, while Joseph Stalin and Lavrenti Beria deport two entire ethnicities of half a million in just one week.
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“From nine or so I could memorise all the dates of the kings and queens of England … all of which proved hugely useful when it came to impressing the opposite sex in my teens”

Filed under: Britain, Education, History — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The preview portion of an Ed West article on how history should be taught as black comedy rather than a morality tale:

I love history; it is my greatest passion. If I didn’t have to worry about money I’d go and live in a former Templar castle in the Languedoc and spend my afternoons reading 19th-century French historians (pretending to read in the original for my Instagram account, obviously, but actually using a translation).

From a very young age I was obsessed with the subject. The first history tale I remember being engrossed by was the story of Ethelred the Unready and Edward the Martyr. I suppose I felt some sort of nominative solidarity with Edward, the rightful king murdered by a wicked stepmother who then put her own son Ethelred on the throne — and who turned out to be the worst combination of both useless and backstabbing.

Of course, I later learned that the story was more complicated; Edward may not have been murdered, and Ethelred was dealt a very difficult hand. But as a child it sent my mind away to a far off place in a similar way that King Arthur first captured the imagination of many others. Like them, I was first attracted to history via the medieval world, with its kings, castles and sword fights, and its colourful jousts where fair maidens watched heroic knights beat the crap out of each other (although the early medieval had almost none of those things, but again, don’t let that ruin the fun).

There was obviously a very nerdy aspect to this. From nine or so I could memorise all the dates of the kings and queens of England (although I got a bit vague when it got as far as the Edwys and Edwigs), all of which proved hugely useful when it came to impressing the opposite sex in my teens.

Dates are not the most important thing, but for a certain type of mind they make it easier to connect everything. If I learned of an insane pope who liked to torture his cardinals or “Wenzel the Drunkard“, the German king fond of throwing enemies off bridges, I could put it in context that this was the time of Richard II, and it is easier to place. If I’m now reading about Chinese emperors or what was happening in the Umayyad caliphate, where the connection with England would be slim or non-existent, my understanding of English dates still makes it easier to understand.

I loved the fantasy and the expanded sense of imagination, but as I got older, I came to better appreciate the most beautiful thing about history, that it’s all one great black comedy, filled with petty emotions and motivations, and the psychodrama and human absurdity is not some side issue, but the whole point.

Yet the subject is never really taught like that, and perhaps can’t be; and the national history curriculum when I was at school seemed structured in such a way as to suck all the life out of it. It’s not just the incoherence or emphasis; everyone complains about what is taught at school, and no one will ever be satisfied. But worse was the way the subject was almost designed to make it as boring as possible. An area of study was introduced, and then almost immediately we were asked to evaluate the primary and secondary sources; the aim was to invite scepticism, but most teens and pre-teens simply drift off at this point.

Just tell us the story — we can deconstruct it later. Personally, I feel that history shouldn’t be primarily an analysis of how hegemonic power structures orchestrate public relations; it shouldn’t be a morality tale about good and evil; it shouldn’t be a means to make society more inclusive; it should be fun, and when done correctly, it’s the most fun subject in the world.

I’ve heard a lot of other folks’ complaints about how history was taught when they were in school, and it generally aligns with my own experience. The overall plan seemed to be to actively avoid anything that might interest the students (battles, treachery, romance, excitement in general) and instead concentrate on treaty negotiations, lists of dates, and any other dry-as-dust ways to fill the lecture time. As anyone can tell by the subjects I tend to include here on the blog, I’m a big history nerd, but I actively hated the topic in school even as I was reading history for myself outside of school hours.

Ed also recommends the brilliant podcast series The Rest is History with Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland (now also available on YouTube, which is where I started listening to it a few weeks back). I’d read several books by each of them, so it was quite a treat to discover they were co-operating on a history podcast that more than met my expectations.

“One” (Metallica) – Medieval Cover

Filed under: Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Algal the Bard
Published 6 Feb 2022

Song composed by James Hetfield & Lars Ulrich.

Instruments: Lute-guitar, Irish Bouzouki and Flabiol
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QotD: Sigmund Freud’s insights

Filed under: Health, History, Quotations, WW1 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Sigmund Freud was a perverted old cokehead, but he had some useful insights. One of them is that anxiety works like a spring (my paraphrase). You need a spring to have a certain tension in order to work, but if you compress it too tightly, it breaks. Anxiety that can’t be discharged (his term) in healthy, socially beneficial ways instead gets discharged in unhealthy, neurotic ways.

That’s what happened with Anna O., history’s most famous psychiatric patient. She had a very turbulent love/hate relationship with her father, as tightly wound girls do. When he became deathly ill on a family vacation, the unresolvable tension caused a whole host of physical symptoms, including hysterical paralysis. Pioneering psychologist Josef Breuer “talked her through” it, finally resolving the emotional conflict and “curing” the patient.

All this would’ve been interesting, but largely irrelevant, were it not for World War I. The world at large didn’t care about the problems of overprivileged Jewish girls, but they did care about their soldiers suddenly going crazy in the trenches. Once military doctors finally ruled out a physical cause, they were left with Freudian explanations: A soldier can’t stop fighting, because he’s an honorable, dutiful soldier. Yet that soldier must stop fighting. The only honorable way out is a wound. If the enemy doesn’t wound him, then, his subconscious will. Hence the bizarre “conversion disorders” — hysterical blindness, paralysis, mutism, etc. — characteristic of “shell shock.”

But a funny thing happened. While everyone now acknowledged the real power of the subconscious mind, we sort of … forgot … about it. Psychology, particularly psychotherapy, went back to being a ghetto Jewish preoccupation. Bored, over-privileged housewives might go to a shrink to talk through their “issues”, but as for the rest of us, well, if we weren’t going into combat anytime soon, why bother? Outside of a few crusty old reactionaries (like yours truly) making fun of SJWs, when was the last time you heard the word “neurotic”?

But that’s the thing: either the subconscious is real, or it isn’t. When we say “neurotic” (the few of us who still do), we usually mean people like Anna O. — rich, cosseted, politically active human toothaches who try to force the entire world into the all-encompassing drama of their Daddy Issues (see also: Virginia Woolf). But that’s not how Freud meant it. According to him, we’re all neurotic to some degree or another, because that’s just how anxiety works.

We all have strong emotional impulses that run counter our self-image. Hence the entire panoply of pop-Freudianism: The preacher who constantly rails against homosexuality from the pulpit is secretly gay (“projection”). The strict, controlling, everything-in-its-place type is a sadist (“anal-retentive”). The player who can’t settle down with any woman is actually trying to find a Mommy figure (“Oedipus complex”). And, of course, the — ahem — daddy of them all, the crippling Daddy Issues that make feminists such fun.

But that’s just the thing: Either anxiety works that way or it doesn’t. Just because we don’t see a specific syndrome in ourselves doesn’t mean we don’t have a whole bunch of anxiety we need to discharge. Just because it’s subclinical, in other words, doesn’t mean it’s not real, or unimportant. See for example the legions of keyboard commandos who show up in the comments of any blog with more than fourteen readers. Yeah, sure, it’s possible that those guys all got kicked out of SEAL Team 6 for being too badass … but it’s probably classic identification. They’re deeply uneasy about the world and their place in it, so they construct themselves an identity as the Rambo of Evergreen Terrace.

Severian, “High Anxiety”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-03-16.

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