Quotulatiousness

November 20, 2014

Are you as smart as a Neanderthal parent?

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

In The Federalist, Rachel Lu says that Neanderthals were better at parenting than modern humans:

Is it just me, or has the world gone completely crazy when it comes to childrearing?

You know what I’m talking about. Once upon a time, people expected to get married in early adulthood and have kids at reasonable intervals. Parents stayed married and paid the bills, while kids played in front yards and freely opened sidewalk lemonade stands. Children fit naturally into the rhythm of American life.

Nowadays, we treat children like a deathly plague, unless of course you’ve decided you want one. Then they become a luxury good worth tens or even hundreds of thousands. Once acquired, they must be treated like prize poodles, feted and protected at every turn.

The traditional family model has largely been put through the shredder, much to the detriment of children. We try to make up for this by hovering over our kids every second, and sending the police after parents who still think it’s fine to take their grandparents’ more laid-back, “let the kids play” approach.

In other words, our ideas about family are a huge, hairy mess. It’s strange we would have so much trouble figuring out a thing that’s been done since Neanderthal times. Then again, maybe that’s the real problem. Unlike Neanderthals, we’re obsessed with figuring out how to do this. We’ve fought tooth and nail to free ourselves from the natural implications of our biology and, as a reward, we now have to plan every detail of family formation. There’s no taking comfort in “the done thing” anymore. Parenthood today is all about doing it right.

November 16, 2014

Where does your dog rank?

Filed under: Randomness — Tags: — Nicholas @ 10:15

An infographic in Slate slices and dices doggy data to provide you with a quick way to alienate half of dog owners (whose beloved mutts fall into the “Inexplicably overrated” or “Rightly ignored” quadrants:

Top dog infographic

As a dog owner myself, I am pleased to note that Brittany (Xander) and Corgi (Kaylee, although she’s a Corgi mix) both fall into the “Hot dog!” quadrant (and our late-and-still-lamented Shi-Tzu would also be in that quadrant). This clearly must indicate that the chart is 100% accurate.

Update: Forgot to H/T Megan McArdle for the link.

November 8, 2014

I am apparently a “Right-Leaning Anarchist Isolationist Cosmopolitan Liberal”

Filed under: Personal, Politics, Randomness — Tags: — Nicholas @ 09:28

Yet another of those “answer this set of questions and we’ll tell you what you believe” tests. According to 5 Dimensional Policial [sic] Compass, I am:

You are a: Right-Leaning Anarchist Isolationist Cosmopolitan Liberal

Collectivism score: -33%
Authoritarianism score: -100%
Internationalism score: -67%
Tribalism score: -33%
Liberalism score: 33%

H/T to John Donovan, who is a “Left-Leaning Anti-Government Non-Interventionist Nationalist Liberal”. Splitter!

November 7, 2014

Good topic for a psychology paper – does the field of psychology suffer from political bias?

Filed under: Politics, Randomness — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:02

In The Atlantic, Maria Konnikova discusses the idea of pre-existing political bias in the field of psychology:

On January 27, 2011, from a stage in the middle of the San Antonio Convention Center, Jonathan Haidt addressed the participants of the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. The topic was an ambitious one: a vision for social psychology in the year 2020. Haidt began by reviewing the field that he is best known for, moral psychology. Then he threw a curveball. He would, he told the gathering of about a thousand social-psychology professors, students, and post-docs, like some audience participation. By a show of hands, how would those present describe their political orientation? First came the liberals: a “sea of hands,” comprising about eighty per cent of the room, Haidt later recalled. Next, the centrists or moderates. Twenty hands. Next, the libertarians. Twelve hands. And last, the conservatives. Three hands.

Social psychology, Haidt went on, had an obvious problem: a lack of political diversity that was every bit as dangerous as a lack of, say, racial or religious or gender diversity. It discouraged conservative students from joining the field, and it discouraged conservative members from pursuing certain lines of argument. It also introduced bias into research questions, methodology, and, ultimately, publications. The topics that social psychologists chose to study and how they chose to study them, he argued, suffered from homogeneity. The effect was limited, Haidt was quick to point out, to areas that concerned political ideology and politicized notions, like race, gender, stereotyping, and power and inequality. “It’s not like the whole field is undercut, but when it comes to research on controversial topics, the effect is most pronounced,” he later told me. (Haidt has now put his remarks in more formal terms, complete with data, in a paper forthcoming this winter in Behavioral and Brain Sciences.)

Haidt was far from the first to voice concern over the liberal slant in academia, broadly speaking, and in social psychology in particular. He was, however, the first to do it quite so visibly — and the reactions were vocal. At first, Haidt was pleased. “People responded very constructively,” he said. “They listened carefully, took it seriously. That speaks very well for the field. I’ve never felt as if raising this issue has made me into a pariah or damaged me in any way.” For the most part, his colleagues have continued to support his claims — or, at least, the need to investigate them further. Some, however, reacted with indignation.

The psychological imbalance of Twitter follower relationships

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

Several years ago, a friend of mine pointed out that because he read my blog regularly, he felt we had been in contact much more than we actually had (at that point, we hadn’t talked in nearly a year). The same phenomenon occurs in the wider world with Twitter followers who sometimes think they have a relationship with this or that person they follow. @elixabethclaire explains the situation:

October 27, 2014

QotD: The value of co-operation as a social strategy

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

In any species that lives lives other than the solitary, brutish, and short variety, members cooperate. Cooperation is often a utility maximizing approach for basic economic reasons: if I’m well fed because I had a good hunting day, and you’re hungry because you had a bad day, a marginal calorie is worth much less to me than it is to you, so I should share some of my catch with you. This is true for two reasons: first, because if we’re kin, your future reproductive success redounds to the benefit of (some of) my genes, and second, because you might return the favor a day or a year later.

Nature, however, is better at generating frenemies than friends. A better way for me to reproduce my genes is to use a mixed strategy: helping you when it’s easy, defecting when I think I can get away with it, etc. I should ideally take food from you when offered, yet give back as little as I can get away with. I should be seen to be a good ally, and fair, and yet stab you in the back when I can get away with it.

In social species, there’s advanced technology to accomplish these goals: I can marshal alliances, vote people off the island, harass males away from fertile females, seize more than my share of the food for myself and my offspring.

It doesn’t matter if it’s nice; it matters if it’s effective. Gnon has no pity and laughs at your human ideals…especially because he created your human ideals to help you be a convincing liar in social games.

And thus deception slithered its way in to the garden of Eden and/or earthly delights.

What is the take away here? It is this: evolution has crafted every one of us for one mission: to pass our genes on to the next generation. The fact that you, or you, or you, have chosen not to have kids does not refute this; in fact, in supports this. Your genes will not be present in the next generation, and Gnon will laugh.

And what effects does this mission have on us? High libidos? Well, yes, some of that — but so much more. We’re the ape with the run away brains. Any ape that just had a high libido is long removed from the gene pool. Only the apes that also are excellent at joining alliances, marshaling allies, sniffing when the winds are changing, and defecting strategically reproduced with enough success to have contributed meaningfully to our genome.

A million years ago this alliance-making skill meant being on the right side of the alpha ape…and perhaps sneakily supporting the up-and-coming number two male.

Ten thousand years ago it meant being a member of a hunter gatherer tribe, and making status-degrading jokes about the one guy who was acting a bit big for his (deer hide) britches.

A thousand years ago, it meant … well, by a thousand years ago, social alliances for status games were starting to look pretty damned modern. It meant cobbling together wacky alliances from diverse groups like Diggers, Levelers, and Fifth Monarchists in order to overthrow one set of rulers and establish yourself in their place. Once in power there are all sorts of food-and-sex optimizing strategies for those good at the alliance game… like enslaving the foot soldiers of the old regime and selling them into slavery overseas, seizing their land, and more.

Clark, “Gamer Gate: Three Stages to Obit”, Popehat, 2014-10-21.

October 23, 2014

QotD: When “impostor syndrome” meets the “Dunning-Kruger effect”

Filed under: Quotations, Randomness — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

The more I think about things like the Dunning-Kruger Effect and Impostor Syndrome, the more I suspect they’re sociological as opposed to psychological.

If you’re unfamiliar, the Dunning-Kruger Effect is the name of a cognitive bias where people consistently rate themselves as being higher skilled than others, even (especially?) then they are decidedly not. In other words, people are nowhere near as good as they think they are.

Diametrically opposed to that is Impostor Syndrome, where people refuse to acknowledge their accomplishments and competencies.

If you’re aware of both of them, you might constantly vacillate between them, occasionally thinking you’re awesome, then realizing that it probably means you aren’t, going back and forth like a church bell. I know nothing of this, I assure you. But the point is that I think they’re almost certainly related to the people that we surround ourselves with.

Matt Simmons, “The Impostor Effect vs Dunning-Kruger”, Standalone Sysadmin, 2013-02-27.

October 6, 2014

“Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise a kid”

Filed under: Cancon, Randomness — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 18:18

Kathy Shaidle on the decline of Toronto’s “Village”, once the second largest gay neighbourhood in North America:

I wasn’t exactly “the only straight in the Village” but sometimes it felt that way. Back then, the stretch of Church Street from Bloor as far as Gerrard was replete with rainbow flags, gay-owned/friendly establishments, and their sometimes disturbingly clone-y patrons. Alongside bars like Sailor and the Barn Stables, gift shops dealt in pink triangle lapel pins and Joan Crawford-themed birthday cards. Zelda’s, with its drag-queen-trailer-park-themed décor, was a beloved brunch destination.

On residential offshoots like Charles and Maitland, homes and gardens were lovingly, even competitively, tended. For Pride (which grew in length from a single summer day to a whole month during my tenancy) and “gay Christmas” (Halloween), festive decorations were hung early and often. “Any excuse for a party” was a phrase you heard almost as frequently as “It’s five o’clock somewhere.” Even the rare misanthropic gesture screamed “gay,” like the fellow who strung colored lights on his balcony to spell out “FUCK XMAS.”

Then, slowly, over the course of a decade, “pop and pop” neighborhood anchors like the Priape sex shop gave way to tacky “breeder” franchises, like fake British pubs and pizza joints. Perversely, the Second Cup demolished its famous “steps,” which had long served as the Ghetto’s 24/7 public square.

The Village took on the grim, grimy atmosphere of an off-season amusement park.

If you’re thinking “AIDS,” think again. I would have predicted the same cause once upon a time, as the 1990s saw more and more skeletal figures shuffling along the sidewalks, until they became names inscribed on the memorial in the same notorious park where the living still stubbornly cruised for sex and drugs.

But gay and straight observers alike agree: it wasn’t low T-cells but low interest rates that emptied out the Ghetto. Lifelong renters — like me — could suddenly afford homes of their own, but not in Boystown, where even a dilapidated house listed in the high six figures. Gays started colonizing (and, predictably, beautifying) new neighborhoods where buyers could get more house for their money: Cabbagetown, Leslieville, and even the once unthinkable Parkdale (now nicknamed Queer Street West).

October 4, 2014

Kids, don’t try this at home

Filed under: Britain, Randomness — Tags: — Nicholas @ 09:55

Published on 2 Oct 2014

#TheRidge is the brand new film from Danny Macaskill… For the first time in one of his films Danny climbs aboard a mountain bike and returns to his native home of the Isle of Skye in Scotland to take on a death-defying ride along the notorious Cuillin Ridgeline.

H/T to Roger Henry who said “Here’s some more of that insane bike-rider from Scotland […] I kept expecting to hear someone say ‘He’s fallen in the water’.”

September 10, 2014

Ohio Amish Barn Raising – May 13th, 2014 in 3 Minutes and 30 seconds

Filed under: Randomness — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 17:11

Published on 14 May 2014

My husband, Scott Miller, shot this video with a Canon 60d Camera using a Pixel TW-282/E3 Wireless remote timer set at 20 second intervals. He shot 1600 pictures from 7:00am until 5:00pm and compressed the 10 hours into 3 minutes and 30 seconds. He even took the day off work to help :). The music in this video was found on the free YouTube music library. It is a song called Cruisin’, by Scott Vestal, off of the compilation album, Bluegrass ’95. To use this video in a commercial player or in broadcasts, please email licensing@storyful.com

July 10, 2014

Sometimes, “a phase” really is just a phase

Filed under: Randomness — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:21

Lindsay Leigh Bentley contrasts her own “tomboy” childhood with that of Ryland, who was born female but whose parents have transitioned her (at age 5):

I have no degree in early childhood development, nor have I studied psychology. I didn’t even graduate from College.

I am also not here to pass judgement on Ryland’s parents. I believe that they are doing what they believe to be the most loving thing for their child. I’m simply sharing my story because I see so much of my 5-year-old self in this child.

I was born the second daughter to two loving, amazing, supportive parents. They would go on to have 2 more daughters. The four of us couldn’t be more different, even down to our hair and eye color. Our parents embraced our differences and allowed us to grow as individuals, not concerned with the social “norms” for girls. I often joke that I was the boy my dad never had. My dad is a free spirit, 100% unconcerned with what people think of him, and he thought nothing of “out of the box” behavior. I function more as a firstborn than a second born (however, this does not make me the firstborn, amiright?)

[…]

I wanted to be a boy. Desperately wanted to be a boy. I thought boys had more fun. I felt like a boy in the way that our society views genders. I liked blue and green more than pink and purple. I remember sitting up as high as I could climb in our huge mulberry tree, bow & arrow in hand, trying to kiss my elbow (a neighbor lady had told me that if I could accomplish this, that I would turn into a boy, which was what I wanted in that moment, as a child, more than anything.)

Thankfully, my parents didn’t adhere to the archaic stereotypes that “boys like blue” and “girls like pink;” that “boys play with dinosaurs, and girls play with dolls.” Had they told me that liking these things made me a boy, I would have concluded that I was a boy.

They just let me be me. They let me be a girl who wore jeans more often than skirts. They let me play with slingshots rather than princess wands. They didn’t conclude that I was gay, or transgender. They didn’t put me in a box that would shape my future, at the expense of my own free will.

June 24, 2014

Stereotypes, “gaydar”, and sexual orientation

Filed under: Randomness, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:38

In (of all places) the Toronto Star, Brian Platt says that “gaydar” is a real thing and that it works better for conservatives than for liberals:

In less than the blink of an eye, your subconscious “gaydar” makes a judgment about someone’s sexual orientation based entirely on facial traits — and it’s usually right.

So says the research of Nicholas Rule, a University of Toronto psychologist giving a talk on the subject this week as part of WorldPride. “The gist of it is that people can accurately judge someone’s sexual orientation from very minimal information about them,” Rule said in an interview.

“You only need to see a face for less than 40 milliseconds to judge sexual orientation with the same level of accuracy that you get if you take all the time in the world.

“To put that in perspective, it takes 400 milliseconds to blink your eye.”

Facial “gaydar” is 65-per-cent accurate on average, according to Rule and his co-researchers at U of T’s Social Perception & Cognition Laboratory. These judgments can be reliably made based on the eyes alone, though facial shape and texture are also big factors.

“Conservatives are more accurate than liberals in making these judgments when they study a face, because conservatives are more likely to use stereotypes,” Rule said. “Of course, stereotypes are often wrong, but they do have what we call kernels of truth. Liberals tend to not want to use stereotypes in making judgments, and it impairs their accuracy.”

June 15, 2014

Men and women really are different

Filed under: Randomness — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:10

CH posts a pair of charts derived from user information (which may or may not be accurate) on the dating site OkCupid, showing the preferences of men and women for dating partners over time:

Men and women are different 1

Women’s preferences for men over time

As women get older, in general they prefer older men. Seems reasonable, right? CH acidly comments “Cougar glorification agit-prop to the contrary notwithstanding, women are not keen on dating men younger than themselves”. But men are not at all the same (at least for the OkCupid crowd):

Men and women are different 2

Men, at least in this sample, are all feelthy horndogs who like younger women. And that doesn’t change much the older they get…

May 18, 2014

QotD: Liqueurs

Filed under: Quotations, Randomness — Tags: — Nicholas @ 00:01

The story of liqueurs continues with a few more of the herbal type. In this context the word herb needs to be interpreted pretty broadly. Wherever drink is made, enterprising chaps will take some of the local spirit — distilled from grain, grapes, other fruit, rice or whatever it may be — and flavour it with almost anything they find growing near by. Many of these concoctions never travel from their home village, and no wonder. In the Dordogne area they produce a beverage called Salers, flavoured with the root of the yellow or mountain gentian, of which they have plenty. Well, there may be nastier drinks but I don’t care to imagine them.

Other agents used in liqueurs of this general type include tea, aloes, hazelnuts, thistles, cocoa, snake root, bison grass, lavender, soya beans and nutmeg, not to speak of tangy stuff like pyrethrum and rhizomal galangae — actually the last two help to produce the pleasantly burning or “warm” taste most liqueurs have.

The distinctively clean and fresh flavour of peppermint is at the heart of one of the most popular of all liqueurs, crème de menthe, of which there are numerous brands. It comes in two versions, the white or transparent and the more familiar artificially coloured bright green. Either is best served with crushed ice and drunk through a straw. If you find it too sweet, try cutting it with an equal part of cognac. When made with the white kind this is knows as the Stinger, once called for by no loss a drinks pundit than James Bond.

Peppermint is supposed to help digestion; so is aniseed, used to flavour all manner of anise liqueurs and anisettes. Marie Brizard is the most famous of them. The firm recommded it as part of a long drink with ice and fresh lemon juice, topped up with plenty of soda water. There’s no accounting for taste is what I always say.

Fans of Italian food, and others, will know about Sambuca, which is flavoured with a herb giving an effect very similar to aniseed. There’s rather a shy-making ritual that involves floating a few coffee beans on the top of your glass and putting a match In the surface to the drink, thus singeing them slightly.

Another Italian liqueur, Galliano, has gained a good deal of ground over the last few years, not as a drink on its own but as a constituent of the famous or infamous cocktail the Harvey Wallbanger, named after some reeling idiot in California. It’s basically a Screwdriver with trimmings, in other words you stir three or four parts fresh orange juice with one part vodka and some ice, then drop a teaspoonful or so of the liqueur on top.

My own favourite in this group is kümmel, flavoured with caraway seed, smooth, and best drunk slightly chilled and straight — as a liqueur, in fact.

Kingsley Amis, Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis, 2008.

May 16, 2014

Improving “privilege awareness” at Harvard

Filed under: Education, Randomness, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:02

Conor Friedersdorf talks about a new privilege awareness exercise for new grad students at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government:

Such exercises are not without insight or merit (though I find it hard to believe that first-year graduate students at Harvard haven’t encountered this sort of thing before). It surprises me not at all that Harvard insiders would craft the exercise to highlight where they ostensibly stand relative to their fellow Harvard classmates.

As a Harvard outsider who will one day live under a governing elite populated by today’s KSG first-years, I’d only ask for one addition to the “step forward, step back” exercise. Prior to the day it is conducted, KSG should take out some ads in local media: $50 dollars available for the first 500 non-Harvard students to show up at the campus football field at an appointed time. Let them gather, black, white and brown; men and women; straight and gay. The hoi poloi and the KSG freshmen should all mass together behind one end zone. Then the stadium announcer should say, “If you’re not a Harvard student, stay where you are. And if you are a Harvard student, take 95 steps forward, until you’re at the 5 yard line by the far end zone.”

Once all the KSG freshmen are lined up straight at that 5 yard line, everyone can do the “step-forward, step-back” exercise as before. I submit that my augmented approach will afford a more accurate understanding of privilege as it operates at Harvard.

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