genetics

Men and violence

PNRJ book reviews, core principles, current events, ethics, personal, politics, public policy, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Apr4 JDN 2459302

Content warning: In this post, I’m going to be talking about violence, including sexual violence. April is Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention Month. I won’t go into any explicit detail, but I understand that discussion of such topics can still be very upsetting for many people.

After short posts for the past two weeks, get ready for a fairly long post. This is a difficult and complicated topic, and I want to make sure that I state things very clearly and with all necessary nuance.

While the overall level of violence between human societies varies tremendously, one thing is astonishingly consistent: Violence is usually committed by men.

In fact, violence is usually suffered by men as well—with the quite glaring exception of sexual violence. This is why I am particularly offended by claims like “All men benefit from male violence”; no, men who were murdered by other men did not benefit from male violence, and it is frankly appalling to say otherwise. Most men would be better off if male violence were somehow eliminated from the world. (Most women would also be much better off as well, of course.)

I therefore consider it both a matter of both moral obligation and self-interest to endeavor to reduce the amount of male violence in the world, which is almost coextensive with reducing the amount of violence in general.

On the other hand, ought implies can, and despite significant efforts I have made to seek out recommendations for concrete actions I could be taking… I haven’t been able to find very many.

The good news is that we appear to be doing something right—overall rates of violent crime have declined by nearly half since 1990. The decline in rape has been slower, only about 25% since 1990, though this is a bit misleading since the legal definition of rape has been expanded during that interval. The causes of this decline in violence are unclear: Some of the most important factors seem to be changes in policing, economic growth, and reductions in lead pollution. For whatever reason, Millennials just don’t seem to commit crimes at the same rates that Gen-X-ers or Boomers did. We are also substantially more feminist, so maybe that’s an important factor too; the truth is, we really don’t know.

But all of this still leaves me asking: What should I be doing?

When I searched for an answer to this question, a significant fraction of the answers I got from various feminist sources were some variation on “ruminate on your own complicity in male violence”. I tried it; it was painful, difficult—and basically useless. I think this is particularly bad advice for someone like me who has a history of depression.

When you ruminate on your own life, it’s easy to find mistakes; but how important were those mistakes? How harmful were they? I can’t say that I’ve never done anything in my whole life that hurt anyone emotionally (can anyone?), but I can only think of a few times I’ve harmed someone physically (mostly by accident, once in self-defense). I’ve definitely never raped or murdered anyone, and as far as I can tell I’ve never done anything that would have meaningfully contributed to anyone getting raped or murdered. If you were to somehow replace every other man in the world with a copy of me, maybe that wouldn’t immediately bring about a utopian paradise—but I’m pretty sure that rates of violence would be a lot lower. (And in this world ruled by my clones, we’d have more progressive taxes! Less military spending! A basic income! A global democratic federation! Greater investment in space travel! Hey, this sounds pretty good, actually… though inbreeding would be a definite concern.) So, okay, I’m no angel; but I don’t think it’s really fair to say that I’m complicit in something that would radically decrease if everyone behaved as I do.

The really interesting thing is, I think this is true of most men. A typical man commits less than the average amount of violence—because there is great skew in the distribution, with most men committing little or no violence and a small number of men committing lots of violence. Truly staggering amounts of violence are committed by those at the very top of the distribution—that would be mass murderers like Hitler and Stalin. It sounds strange, but if all men in the world were replaced by a typical man, the world would surely be better off. The loss of the very best men would be more than compensated by the removal of the very worst. In fact, since most men are not rapists or murderers, replacing every man in the world with the median man would automatically bring the rates of rape and murder to zero. I know that feminists don’t like to hear #NotAllMen; but it’s not even most men. Maybe the reason that the “not all men” argument keeps coming up is… it’s actually kind of true? Maybe it’s not so unreasonable for men to resent the implication that we are complicit in acts we abhor that we have never done and would never do? Maybe this whole concept that an entire sex of people, literally almost half the human race, can share responsibility for violent crimes—is wrong?

I know that most women face a nearly constant bombardment of sexual harassment, and feel pressured to remain constantly vigilant in order to protect themselves against being raped. I know that victims of sexual violence are often blamed for their victimization (though this happens in a lot of crimes, not just sex crimes). I know that #YesAllWomen is true—basically all women have been in some way harmed or threatened by sexual violence. But the fact remains that most men are already not committing sexual violence. Many people seem to confuse the fact that most women are harmed by men with the claim that most men harm women; these are not at all equivalent. As long as one man can harm many women, there don’t need to be very many harmful men for all women to be affected.

Plausible guesses would be that about 20-25% of women suffer sexual assault, committed by about 4% or 5% of men, each of whom commits an average of 4 to 6 assaults—and some of whom commit far more. If these figures are right, then 95% of men are not guilty of sexual assault. The highest plausible estimate I’ve seen is from a study which found that 11% of men had committed rape. Since it’s only one study and its sample size was pretty small, I’m actually inclined to think that this is an overestimate which got excessive attention because it was so shocking. Larger studies rarely find a number above 5%.

But even if we suppose that it’s really 11%, that leaves 89%; in what sense is 89% not “most men”? I saw some feminist sites responding to this result by saying things like “We can’t imprison 11% of men!” but, uh, we almost do already. About 9% of American men will go to prison in their lifetimes. This is probably higher than it should be—it’s definitely higher than any other country—but if those convictions were all for rape, I’d honestly have trouble seeing the problem. (In fact only about 10% of US prisoners are incarcerated for rape.) If the US were the incarceration capital of the world simply because we investigated and prosecuted rape more reliably, that would be a point of national pride, not shame. In fact, the American conservatives who don’t see the problem with our high incarceration rate probably do think that we’re mostly incarcerating people for things like rape and murder—when in fact large portions of our inmates are incarcerated for drug possession, “public order” crimes, or pretrial detention.

Even if that 11% figure is right, “If you know 10 men, one is probably a rapist” is wrong. The people you know are not a random sample. If you don’t know any men who have been to prison, then you likely don’t know any men who are rapists. 37% of prosecuted rapists have prior criminal convictions, and 60% will be convicted of another crime within 5 years. (Of course, most rapes are never even reported; but where would we get statistics on those rapists?) Rapists are not typical men. They may seem like typical men—it may be hard to tell the difference at a glance, or even after knowing someone for a long time. But the fact that narcissists and psychopaths may hide among us does not mean that all of us are complicit in the crimes of narcissists and psychopaths. If you can’t tell who is a psychopath, you may have no choice but to be wary; but telling every man to search his heart is worthless, because the only ones who will listen are the ones who aren’t psychopaths.

That, I think, is the key disagreement here: Where the standard feminist line is “any man could be a rapist, and every man should search his heart”, I believe the truth is much more like, “monsters hide among us, and we should do everything in our power to stop them”. The monsters may look like us, they may often act like us—but they are not us. Maybe there are some men who would commit rapes but can be persuaded out of it—but this is not at all the typical case. Most rapes are committed by hardened, violent criminals and all we can really do is lock them up. (And for the love of all that is good in the world, test all the rape kits!)

It may be that sexual harassment of various degrees is more spread throughout the male population; perhaps the median man indeed commits some harassment at some point in his life. But even then, I think it’s pretty clear that the really awful kinds of harassment are largely committed by a small fraction of serial offenders. Indeed, there is a strong correlation between propensity toward sexual harassment and various measures of narcissism and psychopathy. So, if most men look closely enough, maybe they can think of a few things that they do occasionally that might make women uncomfortable; okay, stop doing those things. (Hint: Do not send unsolicited dick pics. Ever. Just don’t. Anyone who wants to see your genitals will ask first.) But it isn’t going to make a huge difference in anyone’s life. As long as the serial offenders continue, women will still feel utterly bombarded.

There are other kinds of sexual violations that more men commit—being too aggressive, or persisting too much after the first rejection, or sending unsolicited sexual messages or images. I’ve had people—mostly, but not only, men—do things like that to me; but it would be obviously unfair to both these people and actual rape victims to say I’d ever been raped. I’ve been groped a few times, but it seems like quite a stretch to call it “sexual assault”. I’ve had experiences that were uncomfortable, awkward, frustrating, annoying, occasionally creepy—but never traumatic. Never violence. Teaching men (and women! There is evidence that women are not much less likely than men to commit this sort of non-violent sexual violation) not to do these things is worthwhile and valuable in itself—but it’s not going to do much to prevent rape or murder.

Thus, whatever responsibility men have in reducing sexual violence, it isn’t simply to stop; you can’t stop doing what you already aren’t doing.

After pushing through all that noise, at last I found a feminist site making a more concrete suggestion: They recommended that I read a book by Jackson Katz on the subject entitled The Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women and How All Men Can Help.

First of all, I must say I can’t remember any other time I’ve read a book that was so poorly titled. The only mention of the phrase “macho paradox” is a brief preface that was added to the most recent edition explaining what the term was meant to mean; it occurs nowhere else in the book. And in all its nearly 300 pages, the book has almost nothing that seriously addresses either the motivations underlying sexual violence or concrete actions that most men could take in order to reduce it.

As far as concrete actions (“How all men can help”), the clearest, most consistent advice the book seems to offer that would apply to most men is “stop consuming pornography” (something like 90% of men and 60% of women regularly consume porn), when in fact there is a strong negative correlation between consumption of pornography and real-world sexual violence. (Perhaps Millennials are less likely to commit rape and murder because we are so into porn and video games!) This advice is literally worse than nothing.

The sex industry exists on a continuum from the adult-only but otherwise innocuous (smutty drawings and erotic novels), through the legal but often problematic (mainstream porn, stripping), to the usually illegal but defensible (consensual sex work), all the way to the utterly horrific and appalling (the sexual exploitation of children). I am well aware that there are many deep problems with the mainstream porn industry, but I confess I’ve never quite seen how these problems are specific to porn rather than endemic to media or even capitalism more generally. Particularly with regard to the above-board sex industry in places like Nevada or the Netherlands, it’s not obvious to me that a prostitute is more exploited than a coal miner, a sweatshop worker, or a sharecropper—indeed, given the choice between those four careers, I’d without hesitation choose to be a prostitute in Amsterdam. Many sex workers resent the paternalistic insistence by anti-porn feminists that their work is inherently degrading and exploitative. Overall, sex workers report job satisfaction not statistically different than the average for all jobs. There are a multitude of misleading statistics often reported about the sex industry that often make matters seem far worse than they are.

Katz (all-too) vividly describes the depiction of various violent or degrading sex acts in mainstream porn, but he seems unwilling to admit that any other forms of porn do or even could exist—and worse, like far too many anti-porn feminists, he seems to willfully elide vital distinctions, effectively equating fantasy depiction with genuine violence and consensual kinks with sexual abuse. I like to watch action movies and play FPS video games; does that mean I believe it’s okay to shoot people with machine guns? I know the sophisticated claim is that it somehow “desensitizes” us (whatever that means), but there’s not much evidence of that either. Given that porn and video games are negatively correlated with actual violence, it may in fact be that depicting the fantasy provides an outlet for such urges and helps prevent them from becoming reality. Or, it may simply be that keeping a bunch of young men at home in front of their computers keeps them from going out and getting into trouble. (Then again, homicides actually increased during the COVID pandemic—though most other forms of crime decreased.) But whatever the cause, the evidence is clear that porn and video games don’t increase actual violence—they decrease them.

At the very end of the book, Katz hints at a few other things men might be able to do, or at least certain groups of men: Challenge sexism in sports, the military, and similar male-dominated spaces (you know, if you have clout in such spaces, which I really don’t—I’m an effete liberal intellectual, a paradigmatic “soy boy”; do you think football players or soldiers are likely to listen to me?); educate boys with more positive concepts of masculinity (if you are in a position to do so, e.g. as a teacher or parent); or, the very best advice in the entire book, worth more than the rest of the book combined: Donate to charities that support survivors of sexual violence. Katz doesn’t give any specific recommendations, but here are a few for you: RAINN, NAESV and NSVRC.

Honestly, I’m more impressed by Upworthy’s bulleted list of things men can do, though they’re mostly things that conscientious men do anyway, and even if 90% of men did them, it probably wouldn’t greatly reduce actual violence.

As far as motivations (“Why some men hurt women”), the book does at least manage to avoid the mindless slogan “rape is about power, not sex” (there is considerable evidence that this slogan is false or at least greatly overstated). Still, Katz insists upon collective responsibility, attributing what are in fact typically individual crimes, committed mainly by psychopaths, motivated primarily by anger or sexual desire, to some kind of institutionalized system of patriarchal control that somehow permeates all of society. The fact that violence is ubiquitous does not imply that it is coordinated. It’s very much the same cognitive error as “murderism”.

I agree that sexism exists, is harmful, and may contribute to the prevalence of rape. I agree that there are many widespread misconceptions about rape. I also agree that reducing sexism and toxic masculinity are worthwhile endeavors in themselves, with numerous benefits for both women and men. But I’m just not convinced that reducing sexism or toxic masculinity would do very much to reduce the rates of rape or other forms of violence. In fact, despite widely reported success of campaigns like the “Don’t Be That Guy” campaign, the best empirical research on the subject suggests that such campaigns actually tend to do more harm than good. The few programs that seem to work are those that focus on bystander interventions—getting men who are not rapists to recognize rapists and stop them. Basically nothing has ever been shown to convince actual rapists; all we can do is deny them opportunities—and while bystander intervention can do that, the most reliable method is probably incarceration. Trying to change their sexist attitudes may be worse than useless.

Indeed, I am increasingly convinced that much—not all, but much—of what is called “sexism” is actually toxic expressions of heterosexuality. Why do most creepy male bosses only ever hit on their female secretaries? Well, maybe because they’re straight? This is not hard to explain. It’s a fair question why there are so many creepy male bosses, but one need not posit any particular misogyny to explain why their targets would usually be women. I guess it’s a bit hard to disentangle; if an incel hates women because he perceives them as univocally refusing to sleep with him, is that sexism? What if he’s a gay incel (yes they exist) and this drives him to hate men instead?

In fact, I happen to know of a particular gay boss who has quite a few rumors surrounding him regarding his sexual harassment of male employees. Or you could look at Kevin Spacey, who (allegedly) sexually abused teenage boys. You could tell a complicated story about how this is some kind of projection of misogynistic attitudes onto other men (perhaps for being too “femme” or something)—or you could tell a really simple story about how this man is only sexually abusive toward other men because that’s the gender of people he’s sexually attracted to. Occam’s Razor strongly favors the latter.

Indeed, what are we to make of the occasional sexual harasser who targets men and women equally? On the theory that abuse is caused by patriarchy, that seems pretty hard to explain. On the theory that abusive people sometimes happen to be bisexual, it’s not much of a mystery. (Though I would like to take a moment to debunk the stereotype of the “depraved bisexual”: Bisexuals are no more likely to commit sexual violence, but are far more likely to suffer it—more likely than either straight or gay people, independently of gender. Trans people face even higher risk; the acronym LGBT is in increasing order of danger of violence.)

Does this excuse such behavior? Absolutely not. Sexual harassment and sexual assault are definitely wrong, definitely harmful, and rightfully illegal. But when trying to explain why the victims are overwhelmingly female, the fact that roughly 90% of people are heterosexual is surely relevant. The key explanandum here is not why the victims are usually female, but rather why the perpetrators are usually male.

That, indeed, requires explanation; but such an explanation is really not so hard to come by. Why is it that, in nearly every human society, for nearly every form of violence, the vast majority of that violence is committed by men? It sure looks genetic to me.

Indeed, in anyother context aside from gender or race, we would almost certainly reject any explanation other than genetics for such a consistent pattern. Why is it that, in nearly every human society, about 10% of people are LGBT? Probably genetics. Why is it that, in near every human society, about 10% of people are left-handed? Genetics. Why, in nearly every human society, do smiles indicate happiness, children fear loud noises, and adults fear snakes? Genetics. Why, in nearly every human society, are men on average much taller and stronger than women? Genetics. Why, in nearly every human society, is about 90% of violence, including sexual violence, committed by men? Clearly, it’s patriarchy.

A massive body of scientific evidence from multiple sources shows a clear casual relationship between increased testosterone and increased aggression. The correlation is moderate, only about 0.38—but it’s definitely real. And men have a lot more testosterone than women: While testosterone varies a frankly astonishing amount between men and over time—including up to a 2-fold difference even over the same day—a typical adult man has about 250 to 950 ng/dL of blood testosterone, while a typical adult woman has only 8 to 60 ng/dL. (An adolescent boy can have as much as 1200 ng/dL!) This is a difference ranging from a minimum of 4-fold to a maximum of over 100-fold, with a typical value of about 20-fold. It would be astonishing if that didn’t have some effect on behavior.

This is of course far from a complete explanation: With a correlation of 0.38, we’ve only explained about 14% of the variance, so what’s the other 86%? Well, first of all, testosterone isn’t the only biological difference between men and women. It’s difficult to identify any particular genes with strong effects on aggression—but the same is true of height, and nobody disputes that the height difference between men and women is genetic.

Clearly societal factors do matter a great deal, or we couldn’t possibly explain why homicide rates vary between countries from less than 3 per million per year in Japan to nearly 400 per million per year in Honduras—a full 2 orders of magnitude! But gender inequality does not appear to strongly predict homicide rates. Japan is not a very feminist place (in fact, surveys suggest that, after Spain, Japan is second-worst highly-developed country for women). Sweden is quite feminist, and their homicide rate is relatively low; but it’s still 4 times as high as Japan’s. The US doesn’t strike me as much more sexist than Canada (admittedly subjective—surveys do suggest at least some difference, and in the expected direction), and yet our homicide rate is nearly 3 times as high. Also, I think it’s worth noting that while overall homicide rates vary enormously across societies, the fact that roughly 90% of homicides are committed by men does not. Through some combination of culture and policy, societies can greatly reduce the overall level of violence—but no society has yet managed to change the fact that men are more violent than women.

I would like to do a similar analysis of sexual assault rates across countries, but unfortunately I really can’t, because different countries have such different laws and different rates of reporting that the figures really aren’t comparable. Sweden infamously has a very high rate of reported sex crimes, but this is largely because they have very broad definitions of sex crimes and very high rates of reporting. The best I can really say for now is there is no obvious pattern of more feminist countries having lower rates of sex crimes. Maybe there really is such a pattern; but the data isn’t clear.

Yet if biology contributes anything to the causation of violence—and at this point I think the evidence for that is utterly overwhelming—then mainstream feminism has done the world a grave disservice by insisting upon only social and cultural causes. Maybe it’s the case that our best options for intervention are social or cultural, but that doesn’t mean we can simply ignore biology. And then again, maybe it’s not the case at all:A neurological treatment to cure psychopathy could cut almost all forms of violence in half.

I want to be completely clear that a biological cause is not a justification or an excuse: literally billions of men manage to have high testosterone levels, and experience plenty of anger and sexual desire, without ever raping or murdering anyone. The fact that men appear to be innately predisposed toward violence does not excuse actual violence, and the fact that rape is typically motivated at least in part by sexual desire is no excuse for committing rape.

In fact, I’m quite worried about the opposite: that the notion that sexual violence is always motivated by a desire to oppress and subjugate women will be used to excuse rape, because men who know that their motivation was not oppression will therefore be convinced that what they did wasn’t rape. If rape is always motivated by a desire to oppress women, and his desire was only to get laid, then clearly, what he did can’t be rape, right? The logic here actually makes sense. If we are to reject this argument—as we must—then we must reject the first premise, that all rape is motivated by a desire to oppress and subjugate women. I’m not saying that’s never a motivation—I’m simply saying we can’t assume it is always.

The truth is, I don’t know how to end violence, and sexual violence may be the most difficult form of violence to eliminate. I’m not even sure what most of us can do to make any difference at all. For now, the best thing to do is probably to donate money to organizations like RAINN, NAESV and NSVRC. Even $10 to one of these organizations will do more to help survivors of sexual violence than hours of ruminating on your own complicity—and cost you a lot less.

Creativity and mental illness

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Dec 1 JDN 2458819

There is some truth to the stereotype that artistic people are crazy. Mental illnesses, particularly bipolar disorder, are overrepresented among artists, writers, and musicians. Creative people score highly on literally all five of the Big Five personality traits: They are higher in Openness, higher in Conscientiousness, higher in Extraversion (that one actually surprised me), higher in Agreeableness, and higher in Neuroticism. Creative people just have more personality, it seems.

But in fact mental illness is not as overrepresented among creative people as most people think, and the highest probability of being a successful artist occurs when you have close relatives with mental illness, but are not yourself mentally ill. Those with mental illness actually tend to be most creative when their symptoms are in remission. This suggests that the apparent link between creativity and mental illness may actually increase over time, as treatments improve and remission becomes easier.

One possible source of the link is that artistic expression may be a form of self-medication: Art therapy does seem to have some promise in treating a variety of mental disorders (though it is not nearly as effective as therapy and medication). And that wouldn’t explain why family history of mental illness is actually a better predictor of creativity than mental illness itself.

My guess is that in order to be creative, you need to think differently than other people. You need to see the world in a way that others do not see it. Mental illness is surely not the only way to do that, but it’s definitely one way.

But creativity also requires basic functioning: If you are totally crippled by a mental illness, you’re not going to be very creative. So the people who are most creative have just enough craziness to think differently, but not so much that it takes over their lives.

This might even help explain how mental illness persisted in our population, despite its obvious survival disadvantages. It could be some form of heterozygote advantage.

The classic example of heterozygote advantage is sickle-cell anemia: If you have no copies of the sickle-cell gene, you’re normal. If you have two copies, you have sickle-cell anemia, which is very bad. But if you have only one copy, you’re healthy—and you’re resistant to malaria. Thus, high risk of malaria—as we certainly had, living in central Africa—creates a selection pressure that keeps sickle-cell genes in the population, even though having two copies is much worse than having none at all.

Mental illness might function something like this. I suspect it’s far more complicated than sickle-cell anemia, which is literally just two alleles of a single gene; but the overall process may be similar. If having just a little bit of bipolar disorder or schizophrenia makes you see the world differently than other people and makes you more creative, there are lots of reasons why that might improve the survival of your genes: There are the obvious problem-solving benefits, but also the simple fact that artists are sexy.

The downside of such “weird-thinking” genes is that they can go too far and make you mentally ill, perhaps if you have too many copies of them, or if you face an environmental trigger that sets them off. Sometimes the reason you see the world differently than everyone else is that you’re just seeing it wrong. But if the benefits of creativity are high enough—and they surely are—this could offset the risks, in an evolutionary sense.

But one thing is quite clear: If you are mentally ill, don’t avoid treatment for fear it will damage your creativity. Quite the opposite: A mental illness that is well treated and in remission is the optimal state for creativity. Go seek treatment, so that your creativity may blossom.

Pinker Propositions

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May 19 2458623

What do the following statements have in common?

1. “Capitalist countries have less poverty than Communist countries.”

2. “Black men in the US commit homicide at a higher rate than White men.”

3. “On average, in the US, Asian people score highest on IQ tests, White and Hispanic people score near the middle, and Black people score the lowest.”

4. “Men on average perform better at visual tasks, and women on average perform better on verbal tasks.”

5. “In the United States, White men are no more likely to be mass shooters than other men.”

6. “The genetic heritability of intelligence is about 60%.”

7. “The plurality of recent terrorist attacks in the US have been committed by Muslims.”

8. “The period of US military hegemony since 1945 has been the most peaceful period in human history.”

These statements have two things in common:

1. All of these statements are objectively true facts that can be verified by rich and reliable empirical data which is publicly available and uncontroversially accepted by social scientists.

2. If spoken publicly among left-wing social justice activists, all of these statements will draw resistance, defensiveness, and often outright hostility. Anyone making these statements is likely to be accused of racism, sexism, imperialism, and so on.

I call such propositions Pinker Propositions, after an excellent talk by Steven Pinker illustrating several of the above statements (which was then taken wildly out of context by social justice activists on social media).

The usual reaction to these statements suggests that people think they imply harmful far-right policy conclusions. This inference is utterly wrong: A nuanced understanding of each of these propositions does not in any way lead to far-right policy conclusions—in fact, some rather strongly support left-wing policy conclusions.

1. Capitalist countries have less poverty than Communist countries, because Communist countries are nearly always corrupt and authoritarian. Social democratic countries have the lowest poverty and the highest overall happiness (#ScandinaviaIsBetter).

2. Black men commit more homicide than White men because of poverty, discrimination, mass incarceration, and gang violence. Black men are also greatly overrepresented among victims of homicide, as most homicide is intra-racial. Homicide rates often vary across ethnic and socioeconomic groups, and these rates vary over time as a result of cultural and political changes.

3. IQ tests are a highly imperfect measure of intelligence, and the genetics of intelligence cut across our socially-constructed concept of race. There is far more within-group variation in IQ than between-group variation. Intelligence is not fixed at birth but is affected by nutrition, upbringing, exposure to toxins, and education—all of which statistically put Black people at a disadvantage. Nor does intelligence remain constant within populations: The Flynn Effect is the well-documented increase in intelligence which has occurred in almost every country over the past century. Far from justifying discrimination, these provide very strong reasons to improve opportunities for Black children. The lead and mercury in Flint’s water suppressed the brain development of thousands of Black children—that’s going to lower average IQ scores. But that says nothing about supposed “inherent racial differences” and everything about the catastrophic damage of environmental racism.

4. To be quite honest, I never even understood why this one shocks—or even surprises—people. It’s not even saying that men are “smarter” than women—overall IQ is almost identical. It’s just saying that men are more visual and women are more verbal. And this, I think, is actually quite obvious. I think the clearest evidence of this—the “interocular trauma” that will convince you the effect is real and worth talking about—is pornography. Visual porn is overwhelmingly consumed by men, even when it was designed for women (e.g. Playgirl—a majority of its readers are gay men, even though there are ten times as many straight women in the world as there are gay men). Conversely, erotic novels are overwhelmingly consumed by women. I think a lot of anti-porn feminism can actually be explained by this effect: Feminists (who are usually women, for obvious reasons) can say they are against “porn” when what they are really against is visual porn, because visual porn is consumed by men; then the kind of porn that they like (erotic literature) doesn’t count as “real porn”. And honestly they’re mostly against the current structure of the live-action visual porn industry, which is totally reasonable—but it’s a far cry from being against porn in general. I have some serious issues with how our farming system is currently set up, but I’m not against farming.

5. This one is interesting, because it’s a lack of a race difference, which normally is what the left wing always wants to hear. The difference of course is that this alleged difference would make White men look bad, and that’s apparently seen as a desirable goal for social justice. But the data just doesn’t bear it out: While indeed most mass shooters are White men, that’s because most Americans are White, which is a totally uninteresting reason. There’s no clear evidence of any racial disparity in mass shootings—though the gender disparity is absolutely overwhelming: It’s almost always men.

6. Heritability is a subtle concept; it doesn’t mean what most people seem to think it means. It doesn’t mean that 60% of your intelligence is due to your your genes. Indeed, I’m not even sure what that sentence would actually mean; it’s like saying that 60% of the flavor of a cake is due to the eggs. What this heritability figure actually means that when you compare across individuals in a population, and carefully control for environmental influences, you find that about 60% of the variance in IQ scores is explained by genetic factors. But this is within a particular population—here, US adults—and is absolutely dependent on all sorts of other variables. The more flexible one’s environment becomes, the more people self-select into their preferred environment, and the more heritable traits become. As a result, IQ actually becomes more heritable as children become adults, called the Wilson Effect.

7. This one might actually have some contradiction with left-wing policy. The disproportionate participation of Muslims in terrorism—controlling for just about anything you like, income, education, age etc.—really does suggest that, at least at this point in history, there is some real ideological link between Islam and terrorism. But the fact remains that the vast majority of Muslims are not terrorists and do not support terrorism, and antagonizing all the people of an entire religion is fundamentally unjust as well as likely to backfire in various ways. We should instead be trying to encourage the spread of more tolerant forms of Islam, and maintaining the strict boundaries of secularism to prevent the encroach of any religion on our system of government.

8. The fact that US military hegemony does seem to be a cause of global peace doesn’t imply that every single military intervention by the US is justified. In fact, it doesn’t even necessarily imply that any such interventions are justified—though I think one would be hard-pressed to say that the NATO intervention in the Kosovo War or the defense of Kuwait in the Gulf War was unjustified. It merely points out that having a hegemon is clearly preferable to having a multipolar world where many countries jockey for military supremacy. The Pax Romana was a time of peace but also authoritarianism; the Pax Americana is better, but that doesn’t prevent us from criticizing the real harms—including major war crimes—committed by the United States.

So it is entirely possible to know and understand these facts without adopting far-right political views.

Yet Pinker’s point—and mine—is that by suppressing these true facts, by responding with hostility or even ostracism to anyone who states them, we are actually adding fuel to the far-right fire. Instead of presenting the nuanced truth and explaining why it doesn’t imply such radical policies, we attack the messenger; and this leads people to conclude three things:

1. The left wing is willing to lie and suppress the truth in order to achieve political goals (they’re doing it right now).

2. These statements actually do imply right-wing conclusions (else why suppress them?).

3. Since these statements are true, that must mean the right-wing conclusions are actually correct.

Now (especially if you are someone who identifies unironically as “woke”), you might be thinking something like this: “Anyone who can be turned away from social justice so easily was never a real ally in the first place!”

This is a fundamentally and dangerously wrongheaded view. No one—not me, not you, not anyone—was born believing in social justice. You did not emerge from your mother’s womb ranting against colonalist imperialism. You had to learn what you now know. You came to believe what you now believe, after once believing something else that you now think is wrong. This is true of absolutely everyone everywhere. Indeed, the better you are, the more true it is; good people learn from their mistakes and grow in their knowledge.

This means that anyone who is now an ally of social justice once was not. And that, in turn, suggests that many people who are currently not allies could become so, under the right circumstances. They would probably not shift all at once—as I didn’t, and I doubt you did either—but if we are welcoming and open and honest with them, we can gradually tilt them toward greater and greater levels of support.

But if we reject them immediately for being impure, they never get the chance to learn, and we never get the chance to sway them. People who are currently uncertain of their political beliefs will become our enemies because we made them our enemies. We declared that if they would not immediately commit to everything we believe, then they may as well oppose us. They, quite reasonably unwilling to commit to a detailed political agenda they didn’t understand, decided that it would be easiest to simply oppose us.

And we don’t have to win over every person on every single issue. We merely need to win over a large enough critical mass on each issue to shift policies and cultural norms. Building a wider tent is not compromising on your principles; on the contrary, it’s how you actually win and make those principles a reality.

There will always be those we cannot convince, of course. And I admit, there is something deeply irrational about going from “those leftists attacked Charles Murray” to “I think I’ll start waving a swastika”. But humans aren’t always rational; we know this. You can lament this, complain about it, yell at people for being so irrational all you like—it won’t actually make people any more rational. Humans are tribal; we think in terms of teams. We need to make our team as large and welcoming as possible, and suppressing Pinker Propositions is not the way to do that.

Moral responsibility does not inherit across generations

PNRJ cognitive science, core principles, ethics, public policy, Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

JDN 2457548

In last week’s post I made a sharp distinction between believing in human progress and believing that colonialism was justified. To make this argument, I relied upon a moral assumption that seems to me perfectly obvious, and probably would to most ethicists as well: Moral responsibility does not inherit across generations, and people are only responsible for their individual actions.

But is in fact this principle is not uncontroversial in many circles. When I read utterly nonsensical arguments like this one from the aptly-named Race Baitr saying that White people have no role to play in the liberation of Black people apparently because our blood is somehow tainted by the crimes our ancestors, it becomes apparent to me that this principle is not obvious to everyone, and therefore is worth defending. Indeed, many applications of the concept of “White Privilege” seem to ignore this principle, speaking as though racism is not something one does or participates in, but something that one is simply by being born with less melanin. Here’s a Salon interview specifically rejecting the proposition that racism is something one does:

For white people, their identities rest on the idea of racism as about good or bad people, about moral or immoral singular acts, and if we’re good, moral people we can’t be racist – we don’t engage in those acts. This is one of the most effective adaptations of racism over time—that we can think of racism as only something that individuals either are or are not “doing.”

If racism isn’t something one does, then what in the world is it? It’s all well and good to talk about systems and social institutions, but ultimately systems and social institutions are made of human behaviors. If you think most White people aren’t doing enough to combat racism (which sounds about right to me!), say that—don’t make some bizarre accusation that simply by existing we are inherently racist. (Also: We? I’m only 75% White, so am I only 75% inherently racist?) And please, stop redefining the word “racism” to mean something other than what everyone uses it to mean; “White people are snakes” is in fact a racist sentiment (and yes, one I’ve actually heard–indeed, here is the late Muhammad Ali comparing all White people to rattlesnakes, and Huffington Post fawning over him for it).

Racism is clearly more common and typically worse when performed by White people against Black people—but contrary to the claims of some social justice activists the White perpetrator and Black victim are not part of the definition of racism. Similarly, sexism is more common and more severe committed by men against women, but that doesn’t mean that “men are pigs” is not a sexist statement (and don’t tell me you haven’t heard that one). I don’t have a good word for bigotry by gay people against straight people (“heterophobia”?) but it clearly does happen on occasion, and similarly cannot be defined out of existence.

I wouldn’t care so much that you make this distinction between “racism” and “racial prejudice”, except that it’s not the normal usage of the word “racism” and therefore confuses people, and also this redefinition clearly is meant to serve a political purpose that is quite insidious, namely making excuses for the most extreme and hateful prejudice as long as it’s committed by people of the appropriate color. If “White people are snakes” is not racism, then the word has no meaning.

Not all discussions of “White Privilege” are like this, of course; this article from Occupy Wall Street actually does a fairly good job of making “White Privilege” into a sensible concept, albeit still not a terribly useful one in my opinion. I think the useful concept is oppression—the problem here is not how we are treating White people, but how we are treating everyone else. “What privilege gives you is the freedom to be who you are.”? Shouldn’t everyone have that?

Almost all the so-called “benefits” or “perks” associated with “privilege” are actually forgone harms—they are not good things done to you, but bad things not done to you. “But benefitting from racist systems doesn’t mean that everything is magically easy for us. It just means that as hard as things are, they could always be worse.” No, that is not what the word “benefit” means. The word “benefit” means you would be worse off without it—and in most cases that simply isn’t true. Many White people obviously think that it is true—which is probably a big reason why so many White people fight so hard to defend racism, you know; you’ve convinced them it is in their self-interest. But, with rare exceptions, it is not; most racial discrimination has literally zero long-run benefit. It’s just bad. Maybe if we helped people appreciate that more, they would be less resistant to fighting racism!

The only features of “privilege” that really make sense as benefits are those that occur in a state of competition—like being more likely to be hired for a job or get a loan—but one of the most important insights of economics is that competition is nonzero-sum, and fairer competition ultimately means a more efficient economy and thus more prosperity for everyone.

But okay, let’s set that aside and talk about this core question of what sort of responsibility we bear for the acts of our ancestors. Many White people clearly do feel deep shame about what their ancestors (or people the same color as their ancestors!) did hundreds of years ago. The psychological reactance to that shame may actually be what makes so many White people deny that racism even exists (or exists anymore)—though a majority of Americans of all races do believe that racism is still widespread.

We also apply some sense of moral responsibility applied to whole races quite frequently. We speak of a policy “benefiting White people” or “harming Black people” and quickly elide the distinction between harming specific people who are Black, and somehow harming “Black people” as a group. The former happens all the time—the latter is utterly nonsensical. Similarly, we speak of a “debt owed by White people to Black people” (which might actually make sense in the very narrow sense of economic reparations, because people do inherit money! They probably shouldn’t, that is literally feudalist, but in the existing system they in fact do), which makes about as much sense as a debt owed by tall people to short people. As Walter Michaels pointed out in The Trouble with Diversity (which I highly recommend), because of this bizarre sense of responsibility we are often in the habit of “apologizing for something you didn’t do to people to whom you didn’t do it (indeed to whom it wasn’t done)”. It is my responsibility to condemn colonialism (which I indeed do), to fight to ensure that it never happens again; it is not my responsibility to apologize for colonialism.

This makes some sense in evolutionary terms; it’s part of the all-encompassing tribal paradigm, wherein human beings come to identify themselves with groups and treat those groups as the meaningful moral agents. It’s much easier to maintain the cohesion of a tribe against the slings and arrows (sometimes quite literal) of outrageous fortune if everyone believes that the tribe is one moral agent worthy of ultimate concern.

This concept of racial responsibility is clearly deeply ingrained in human minds, for it appears in some of our oldest texts, including the Bible: “You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me,” (Exodus 20:5)

Why is inheritance of moral responsibility across generations nonsensical? Any number of reasons, take your pick. The economist in me leaps to “Ancestry cannot be incentivized.” There’s no point in holding people responsible for things they can’t control, because in doing so you will not in any way alter behavior. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on moral responsibility takes it as so obvious that people are only responsible for actions they themselves did that they don’t even bother to mention it as an assumption. (Their big question is how to reconcile moral responsibility with determinism, which turns out to be not all that difficult.)

An interesting counter-argument might be that descent can be incentivized: You could use rewards and punishments applied to future generations to motivate current actions. But this is actually one of the ways that incentives clearly depart from moral responsibilities; you could incentivize me to do something by threatening to murder 1,000 children in China if I don’t, but even if it was in fact something I ought to do, it wouldn’t be those children’s fault if I didn’t do it. They wouldn’t deserve punishment for my inaction—I might, and you certainly would for using such a cruel incentive.

Moreover, there’s a problem with dynamic consistency here: Once the action is already done, what’s the sense in carrying out the punishment? This is why a moral theory of punishment can’t merely be based on deterrence—the fact that you could deter a bad action by some other less-bad action doesn’t make the less-bad action necessarily a deserved punishment, particularly if it is applied to someone who wasn’t responsible for the action you sought to deter. In any case, people aren’t thinking that we should threaten to punish future generations if people are racist today; they are feeling guilty that their ancestors were racist generations ago. That doesn’t make any sense even on this deterrence theory.

There’s another problem with trying to inherit moral responsibility: People have lots of ancestors. Some of my ancestors were most likely rapists and murderers; most were ordinary folk; a few may have been great heroes—and this is true of just about anyone anywhere. We all have bad ancestors, great ancestors, and, mostly, pretty good ancestors. 75% of my ancestors are European, but 25% are Native American; so if I am to apologize for colonialism, should I be apologizing to myself? (Only 75%, perhaps?) If you go back enough generations, literally everyone is related—and you may only have to go back about 4,000 years. That’s historical time.

Of course, we wouldn’t be different colors in the first place if there weren’t some differences in ancestry, but there is a huge amount of gene flow between different human populations. The US is a particularly mixed place; because most Black Americans are quite genetically mixed, it is about as likely that any randomly-selected Black person in the US is descended from a slaveowner as it is that any randomly-selected White person is. (Especially since there were a large number of Black slaveowners in Africa and even some in the United States.) What moral significance does this have? Basically none! That’s the whole point; your ancestors don’t define who you are.

If these facts do have any moral significance, it is to undermine the sense most people seem to have that there are well-defined groups called “races” that exist in reality, to which culture responds. No; races were created by culture. I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: The “races” we hold most dear in the US, White and Black, are in fact the most nonsensical. “Asian” and “Native American” at least almost make sense as categories, though Chippewa are more closely related to Ainu than Ainu are to Papuans. “Latino” isn’t utterly incoherent, though it includes as much Aztec as it does Iberian. But “White” is a club one can join or be kicked out of, while “Black” is the majority of genetic diversity.

Sex is a real thing—while there are intermediate cases of course, broadly speaking humans, like most metazoa, are sexually dimorphic and come in “male” and “female” varieties. So sexism took a real phenomenon and applied cultural dynamics to it; but that’s not what happened with racism. Insofar as there was a real phenomenon, it was extremely superficial—quite literally skin deep. In that respect, race is more like class—a categorization that is itself the result of social institutions.

To be clear: Does the fact that we don’t inherit moral responsibility from our ancestors absolve us from doing anything to rectify the inequities of racism? Absolutely not. Not only is there plenty of present discrimination going on we should be fighting, there are also inherited inequities due to the way that assets and skills are passed on from one generation to the next. If my grandfather stole a painting from your grandfather and both our grandfathers are dead but I am now hanging that painting in my den, I don’t owe you an apology—but I damn well owe you a painting.

The further we become from the past discrimination the harder it gets to make reparations, but all hope is not lost; we still have the option of trying to reset everyone’s status to the same at birth and maintaining equality of opportunity from there. Of course we’ll never achieve total equality of opportunity—but we can get much closer than we presently are.

We could start by establishing an extremely high estate tax—on the order of 99%—because no one has a right to be born rich. Free public education is another good way of equalizing the distribution of “human capital” that would otherwise be concentrated in particular families, and expanding it to higher education would make it that much better. It even makes sense, at least in the short run, to establish some affirmative action policies that are race-conscious and sex-conscious, because there are so many biases in the opposite direction that sometimes you must fight bias with bias.

Actually what I think we should do in hiring, for example, is assemble a pool of applicants based on demographic quotas to ensure a representative sample, and then anonymize the applications and assess them on merit. This way we do ensure representation and reduce bias, but don’t ever end up hiring anyone other than the most qualified candidate. But nowhere should we think that this is something that White men “owe” to women or Black people; it’s something that people should do in order to correct the biases that otherwise exist in our society. Similarly with regard to sexism: Women exhibit just as much unconscious bias against other women as men do. This is not “men” hurting “women”—this is a set of unconscious biases found in almost everywhere and social structures almost everywhere that systematically discriminate against people because they are women.

Perhaps by understanding that this is not about which “team” you’re on (which tribe you’re in), but what policy we should have, we can finally make these biases disappear, or at least fade so small that they are negligible.

Nature via Nurture

PNRJ cognitive science, core principles , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

JDN 2457222 EDT 16:33.

One of the most common “deep questions” human beings have asked ourselves over the centuries is also one of the most misguided, the question of “nature versus nurture”: Is it genetics or environment that makes us what we are?

Humans are probably the single entity in the universe for which this question makes least sense. Artificial constructs have no prior existence, so they are “all nurture”, made what we choose to make them. Most other organisms on Earth behave accordingly to fixed instinctual programming, acting out a specific series of responses that have been honed over millions of years, doing only one thing, but doing it exceedingly well. They are in this sense “all nature”. As the saying goes, the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one very big thing. Most organisms on Earth are in this sense hedgehogs, but we Homo sapiens are the ultimate foxes. (Ironically, hedgehogs are not actually “hedgehogs” in this sense: Being mammals, they have an advanced brain capable of flexibly responding to environmental circumstances. Foxes are a good deal more intelligent still, however.)

But human beings are by far the most flexible, adaptable organism on Earth. We live on literally every continent; despite being savannah apes we even live deep underwater and in outer space. Unlike most other species, we do not fit into a well-defined ecological niche; instead, we carve our own. This certainly has downsides; human beings are ourselves a mass extinction event.

Does this mean, therefore, that we are tabula rasa, blank slates upon which anything can be written?

Hardly. We’re more like word processors. Staring (as I of course presently am) at the blinking cursor of a word processor on a computer screen, seeing that wide, open space where a virtual infinity of possible texts could be written, depending entirely upon a sequence of miniscule key vibrations, you could be forgiven for thinking that you are looking at a blank slate. But in fact you are looking at the pinnacle of thousands of years of technological advancement, a machine so advanced, so precisely engineered, that its individual components are one ten-thousandth the width of a human hair (Intel just announced that we can now do even better than that). At peak performance, it is capable of over 100 billion calculations per second. Its random-access memory stores as much information as all the books on a stacks floor of the Hatcher Graduate Library, and its hard drive stores as much as all the books in the US Library of Congress. (Of course, both libraries contain digital media as well, exceeding anything my humble hard drive could hold by a factor of a thousand.)

All of this, simply to process text? Of course not; word processing is an afterthought for a processor that is specifically designed for dealing with high-resolution 3D images. (Of course, nowadays even a low-end netbook that is designed only for word processing and web browsing can typically handle a billion calculations per second.) But there the analogy with humans is quite accurate as well: Written language is about 10,000 years old, while the human visual mind is at least 100,000. We were 3D image analyzers long before we were word processors. This may be why we say “a picture is worth a thousand words”; we process each with about as much effort, even though the image necessarily contains thousands of times as many bits.

Why is the computer capable of so many different things? Why is the human mind capable of so many more? Not because they are simple and impinged upon by their environments, but because they are complex and precision-engineered to nonlinearly amplify tiny inputs into vast outputs—but only certain tiny inputs.

That is, it is because of our nature that we are capable of being nurtured. It is precisely the millions of years of genetic programming that have optimized the human brain that allow us to learn and adapt so flexibly to new environments and form a vast multitude of languages and cultures. It is precisely the genetically-programmed humanity we all share that makes our environmentally-acquired diversity possible.

In fact, causality also runs the other direction. Indeed, when I said other organisms were “all nature” that wasn’t right either; for even tightly-programmed instincts are evolved through millions of years of environmental pressure. Human beings have even been involved in cultural interactions long enough that it has begun to affect our genetic evolution; the reason I can digest lactose is that my ancestors about 10,000 years ago raised goats. We have our nature because of our ancestors’ nurture.

And then of course there’s the fact that we need a certain minimum level of environmental enrichment even to develop normally; a genetically-normal human raised into a deficient environment will suffer a kind of mental atrophy, as when children raised feral lose their ability to speak.

Thus, the question “nature or nurture?” seems a bit beside the point: We are extremely flexible and responsive to our environment, because of innate genetic hardware and software, which requires a certain environment to express itself, and which arose because of thousands of years of culture and millions of years of the struggle for survival—we are nurture because nature because nurture.

But perhaps we didn’t actually mean to ask about human traits in general; perhaps we meant to ask about some specific trait, like spatial intelligence, or eye color, or gender identity. This at least can be structured as a coherent question: How heritable is the trait? What proportion of the variance in this population is caused by genetic variation? Heritability analysis is a well-established methodology in behavioral genetics.
Yet, that isn’t the same question at all. For while height is extremely heritable within a given population (usually about 80%), human height worldwide has been increasing dramatically over time due to environmental influences and can actually be used as a measure of a nation’s economic development. (Look at what happened to the height of men in Japan.) How heritable is height? You have to be very careful what you mean.

Meanwhile, the heritability of neurofibromatosis is actually quite low—as many people acquire the disease by new mutations as inherit it from their parents—but we know for a fact it is a genetic disorder, because we can point to the specific genes that mutate to cause the disease.

Heritability also depends on the population under consideration; speaking English is more heritable within the United States than it is across the world as a whole, because there are a larger proportion of non-native English speakers in other countries. In general, a more diverse environment will lead to lower heritability, because there are simply more environmental influences that could affect the trait.

As children get older, their behavior gets more heritable—a result which probably seems completely baffling, until you understand what heritability really means. Your genes become a more important factor in your behavior as you grow up, because you become separated from the environment of your birth and immersed into the general environment of your whole society. Lower environmental diversity means higher heritability, by definition. There’s also an effect of choosing your own environment; people who are intelligent and conscientious are likely to choose to go to college, where they will be further trained in knowledge and self-control. This latter effect is called niche-picking.

This is why saying something like “intelligence is 80% genetic” is basically meaningless, and “intelligence is 80% heritable” isn’t much better until you specify the reference population. The heritability of intelligence depends very much on what you mean by “intelligence” and what population you’re looking at for heritability. But even if you do find a high heritability (as we do for, say, Spearman’s g within the United States), this doesn’t mean that intelligence is fixed at birth; it simply means that parents with high intelligence are likely to have children with high intelligence. In evolutionary terms that’s all that matters—natural selection doesn’t care where you got your traits, only that you have them and pass them to your offspring—but many people do care, and IQ being heritable because rich, educated parents raise rich, educated children is very different from IQ being heritable because innately intelligent parents give birth to innately intelligent children. If genetic variation is systematically related to environmental variation, you can measure a high heritability even though the genes are not directly causing the outcome.

We do use twin studies to try to sort this out, but because identical twins raised apart are exceedingly rare, two very serious problems emerge: One, there usually isn’t a large enough sample size to say anything useful; and more importantly, this is actually an inaccurate measure in terms of natural selection. The evolutionary pressure is based on the correlation with the genes—it actually doesn’t matter whether the genes are directly causal. All that matters is that organisms with allele X survive and organisms with allele Y do not. Usually that’s because allele X does something useful, but even if it’s simply because people with allele X happen to mostly come from a culture that makes better guns, that will work just as well.

We can see this quite directly: White skin spread across the world not because it was useful (it’s actually terrible in any latitude other than subarctic), but because the cultures that conquered the world happened to be comprised mostly of people with White skin. In the 15th century you’d find a very high heritability of “using gunpowder weapons”, and there was definitely a selection pressure in favor of that trait—but it obviously doesn’t take special genes to use a gun.

The kind of heritability you get from twin studies is answering a totally different, nonsensical question, something like: “If we reassigned all offspring to parents randomly, how much of the variation in this trait in the new population would be correlated with genetic variation?” And honestly, I think the only reason people think that this is the question to ask is precisely because even biologists don’t fully grasp the way that nature and nurture are fundamentally entwined. They are trying to answer the intuitive question, “How much of this trait is genetic?” rather than the biologically meaningful “How strongly could a selection pressure for this trait evolve this gene?”

And if right now you’re thinking, “I don’t care how strongly a selection pressure for the trait could evolve some particular gene”, that’s fine; there are plenty of meaningful scientific questions that I don’t find particularly interesting and are probably not particularly important. (I hesitate to provide a rigid ranking, but I think it’s safe to say that “How does consciousness arise?” is a more important question than “Why are male platypuses venomous?” and “How can poverty be eradicated?” is a more important question than “How did the aircraft manufacturing duopoly emerge?”) But that’s really the most meaningful question we can construct from the ill-formed question “How much of this trait is genetic?” The next step is to think about why you thought that you were asking something important.

What did you really mean to ask?

For a bald question like, “Is being gay genetic?” there is no meaningful answer. We could try to reformulate it as a meaningful biological question, like “What is the heritability of homosexual behavior among males in the United States?” or “Can we find genetic markers strongly linked to self-identification as ‘gay’?” but I don’t think those are the questions we really meant to ask. I think actually the question we meant to ask was more fundamental than that: Is it legitimate to discriminate against gay people? And here the answer is unequivocal: No, it isn’t. It is a grave mistake to think that this moral question has anything to do with genetics; discrimination is wrong even against traits that are totally environmental (like religion, for example), and there are morally legitimate actions to take based entirely on a person’s genes (the obvious examples all coming from medicine—you don’t treat someone for cystic fibrosis if they don’t actually have it).

Similarly, when we ask the question “Is intelligence genetic?” I don’t think most people are actually interested in the heritability of spatial working memory among young American males. I think the real question they want to ask is about equality of opportunity, and what it would look like if we had it. If success were entirely determined by intelligence and intelligence were entirely determined by genetics, then even a society with equality of opportunity would show significant inequality inherited across generations. Thus, inherited inequality is not necessarily evidence against equality of opportunity. But this is in fact a deeply disingenuous argument, used by people like Charles Murray to excuse systemic racism, sexism, and concentration of wealth.

We didn’t have to say that inherited inequality is necessarily or undeniably evidence against equality of opportunity—merely that it is, in fact, evidence of inequality of opportunity. Moreover, it is far from the only evidence against equality of opportunity; we also can observe the fact that college-educated Black people are no more likely to be employed than White people who didn’t even finish high school, for example, or the fact that otherwise identical resumes with predominantly Black names (like “Jamal”) are less likely to receive callbacks compared to predominantly White names (like “Greg”). We can observe that the same is true for resumes with obviously female names (like “Sarah”) versus obviously male names (like “David”), even when the hiring is done by social scientists. We can directly observe that one-third of the 400 richest Americans inherited their wealth (and if you look closer into the other two-thirds, all of them had some very unusual opportunities, usually due to their family connections—“self-made” is invariably a great exaggeration). The evidence for inequality of opportunity in our society is legion, regardless of how genetics and intelligence are related. In fact, I think that the high observed heritability of intelligence is largely due to the fact that educational opportunities are distributed in a genetically-biased fashion, but I could be wrong about that; maybe there really is a large genetic influence on human intelligence. Even so, that does not justify widespread and directly-measured discrimination. It does not justify a handful of billionaires luxuriating in almost unimaginable wealth as millions of people languish in poverty. Intelligence can be as heritable as you like and it is still wrong for Donald Trump to have billions of dollars while millions of children starve.

This is what I think we need to do when people try to bring up a “nature versus nurture” question. We can certainly talk about the real complexity of the relationship between genetics and environment, which I think are best summarized as “nature via nurture”; but in fact usually we should think about why we are asking that question, and try to find the real question we actually meant to ask.

The irrationality of racism

PNRJ core principles, heuristics and biases , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

JDN 2457039 EST 12:07.

I thought about making today’s post about the crazy currency crisis in Switzerland, but currency exchange rates aren’t really my area of expertise; this is much more in Krugman’s bailiwick, so you should probably read what Krugman says about the situation. There is one thing I’d like to say, however: I think there is a really easy way to create credible inflation and boost aggregate demand, but for some reason nobody is ever willing to do it: Give people money. Emphasis here on the people—not banks. Don’t adjust interest rates or currency pegs, don’t engage in quantitative easing. Give people money. Actually write a bunch of checks, presumably in the form of refundable tax rebates.

The only reason I can think of that economists don’t do this is they are afraid of helping poor people. They wouldn’t put it that way; maybe they’d say they want to avoid “moral hazard” or “perverse incentives”. But those fears didn’t stop them from loaning $2 trillion to banks or adding $4 trillion to the monetary base; they didn’t stop them from fighting for continued financial deregulation when what the world economy most desperately needs is stronger financial regulation. Our whole derivatives market practically oozes moral hazard and perverse incentives, but they aren’t willing to shut down that quadrillion-dollar con game. So that can’t be the actual fear. No, it has to be a fear of helping poor people instead of rich people, as though “capitalism” meant a system in which we squeeze the poor as tight as we can and heap all possible advantages upon those who are already wealthy. No, that’s called feudalism. Capitalism is supposed to be a system where markets are structured to provide free and fair competition, with everyone on a level playing field.

A basic income is a fundamentally capitalist policy, which maintains equal opportunity with a minimum of government intervention and allows the market to flourish. I suppose if you want to say that all taxation and government spending is “socialist”, fine; then every nation that has ever maintained stability for more than a decade has been in this sense “socialist”. Every soldier, firefighter and police officer paid by a government payroll is now part of a “socialist” system. Okay, as long as we’re consistent about that; but now you really can’t say that socialism is harmful; on the contrary, on this definition socialism is necessary for capitalism. In order to maintain security of property, enforcement of contracts, and equality of opportunity, you need government. Maybe we should just give up on the words entirely, and speak more clearly about what specific policies we want. If I don’t get to say that a basic income is “capitalist”, you don’t get to say financial deregulation is “capitalist”. Better yet, how about you can’t even call it “deregulation”? You have to actually argue in front of a crowd of people that it should be legal for banks to lie to them, and there should be no serious repercussions for any bank that cheats, steals, colludes, or even launders money for terrorists. That is, after all, what financial deregulation actually does in the real world.

Okay, that’s enough about that.

My birthday is coming up this Monday; thus completes my 27th revolution around the Sun. With birthdays come thoughts of ancestry: Though I appear White, I am legally one-quarter Native American, and my total ethnic mix includes English, German, Irish, Mohawk, and Chippewa.

Biologically, what exactly does that mean? Next to nothing.

Human genetic diversity is a real thing, and there are genetic links to not only dozens of genetic diseases and propensity toward certain types of cancer, but also personality and intelligence. There are also of course genes for skin pigmentation.

The human population does exhibit some genetic clustering, but the categories are not what you’re probably used to: Good examples of relatively well-defined genetic clusters include Ashkenazi, Papuan, and Mbuti. There are also many different haplogroups, such as mitochondrial haplogroups L3 and CZ.

Maybe you could even make a case for the “races” East Asian, South Asian, Pacific Islander, and Native American, since the indigenous populations of these geographic areas largely do come from the same genetic clusters. Or you could make a bigger category and call them all “Asian”—but if you include Papuan and Aborigine in “Asian” you’d pretty much have to include Chippewa and Najavo as well.

But I think it tells you a lot about what “race” really means when you realize that the two “race” categories which are most salient to Americans are in fact the categories that are genetically most meaningless. “White” and “Black” are totally nonsensical genetic categorizations.

Let’s start with “Black”; defining a “Black” race is like defining a category of animals by the fact that they are all tinted red—foxes yes, dogs no; robins yes, swallows no; ladybirds yes, cockroaches no. There is more genetic diversity within Africa than there is outside of it. There are African populations that are more closely related to European populations than they are to other African populations. The only thing “Black” people have in common is that their skin is dark, which is due to convergent evolution: It’s not due to common ancestry, but a common environment. Dark skin has a direct survival benefit in climates with intense sunlight.  The similarity is literally skin deep.

What about “White”? Well, there are some fairly well-defined European genetic populations, so if we clustered those together we might be able to get something worth calling “White”. The problem is, that’s not how it happened. “White” is a club. The definition of who gets to be “White” has expanded over time, and even occasionally contracted. Originally Hebrew, Celtic, Hispanic, and Italian were not included (and Hebrew, for once, is actually a fairly sensible genetic category, as long as you restrict it to Ashkenazi), but then later they were. But now that we’ve got a lot of poor people coming in from Mexico, we don’t quite think of Hispanics as “White” anymore. We actually watched Arabs lose their “White” card in real-time in 2001; before 9/11, they were “White”; now, “Arab” is a separate thing. And “Muslim” is even treated like a race now, which is like making a racial category of “Keynesians”—never forget that Islam is above all a belief system.

Actually, “White privilege” is almost a tautology—the privilege isn’t given to people who were already defined as “White”, the privilege is to be called “White”. The privilege is to have your ancestors counted in the “White” category so that they can be given rights, while people who are not in the category are denied those rights. There does seem to be a certain degree of restriction by appearance—to my knowledge, no population with skin as dark as Kenyans has ever been considered “White”, and Anglo-Saxons and Nordics have always been included—but the category is flexible to political and social changes.

But really I hate that word “privilege”, because it gets the whole situation backwards. When you talk about “White privilege”, you make it sound as though the problem with racism is that it gives unfair advantages to White people (or to people arbitrarily defined as “White”). No, the problem is that people who are not White are denied rights. It isn’t what White people have that’s wrong; it’s what Black people don’t have. Equating those two things creates a vision of the world as zero-sum, in which each gain for me is a loss for you.

Here’s the thing about zero-sum games: All outcomes are Pareto-efficient. Remember when I talked about Pareto-efficiency? As a quick refresher, an outcome is Pareto-efficient if there is no way for one person to be made better off without making someone else worse off. In general, it’s pretty hard to disagree that, other things equal, Pareto-efficiency is a good thing, and Pareto-inefficiency is a bad thing. But if racism were about “White privilege” and the game were zero-sum, racism would have to be Pareto-efficient.

In fact, racism is Pareto-inefficient, and that is part of why it is so obviously bad. It harms literally billions of people, and benefits basically no one. Maybe there are a few individuals who are actually, all things considered, better off than they would have been if racism had not existed. But there are certainly not very many such people, and in fact I’m not sure there are any at all. If there are any, it would mean that technically racism is not Pareto-inefficient—but it is definitely very close. At the very least, the damage caused by racism is several orders of magnitude larger than any benefits incurred.

That’s why the “privilege” language, while well-intentioned, is so insidious; it tells White people that racism means taking things away from them. Many of these people are already in dire straits—broke, unemployed, or even homeless—so taking away what they have sounds particularly awful. Of course they’d be hostile to or at least dubious of attempts to reduce racism. You just told them that racism is the only thing keeping them afloat! In fact, quite the opposite is the case: Poor White people are, second only to poor Black people, those who stand the most to gain from a more just society. David Koch and Donald Trump should be worried; we will probably have to take most of their money away in order to achieve social justice. (Bill Gates knows we’ll have to take most of his money away, but he’s okay with that; in fact he may end up giving it away before we get around to taking it.) But the average White person will almost certainly be better off than they were.

Why does it seem like there are benefits to racism? Again, because people are accustomed to thinking of the world as zero-sum. One person is denied a benefit, so that benefit must go somewhere else right? Nope—it can just disappear entirely, and in this case typically does.

When a Black person is denied a job in favor of a White person who is less qualified, doesn’t that White person benefit? Uh, no, actually, not really. They have been hired for a job that isn’t an optimal fit for them; they aren’t working to their comparative advantage, and that Black person isn’t either and may not be working at all. The total output of the economy will be thereby reduced slightly. When this happens millions of times, the total reduction in output can be quite substantial, and as a result that White person was hired at $30,000 for an unsuitable job when in a racism-free world they’d have been hired at $40,000 for a suitable one. A similar argument holds for sexism; men don’t benefit from getting jobs women are denied if one of those women would have invented a cure for prostate cancer.

Indeed, the empowerment of women and minorities is kind of the secret cheat code for creating a First World economy. The great successes of economic development—Korea, Japan, China, the US in WW2—had their successes precisely at a time when they suddenly started including women in manufacturing, effectively doubling their total labor capacity. Moreover, it’s pretty clear that the causation ran in this direction. Periods of economic growth are associated with increases in solidarity with other groups—and downturns with decreased solidarity—but the increase in women in the workforce was sudden and early while the increase in growth and total output was prolonged.

Racism is irrational. Indeed it is so obviously irrational that for decades now neoclassical economists have been insisting that there is no need for civil rights policy, affirmative action, etc. because the market will automatically eliminate racism by the rational profit motive. A more recent literature has attempted to show that, contrary to all appearances, racism actually is rational in some cases. Inevitably it relies upon either the background of a racist society (maybe Black people are, on average, genuinely less qualified, but it would only be because they’ve been given poorer opportunities), or an assumption of “discriminatory tastes”, which is basically giving up and redefining the utility function so that people simply get direct pleasure from being racists. Of course, on that sort of definition, you can basically justify any behavior as “rational”: Maybe he just enjoys banging his head against the wall! (A similar slipperiness is used by egoists to argue that caring for your children is actually “selfish”; well, it makes you happy, doesn’t it? Yes, but that’s not why we do it.)

There’s a much simpler way to understand this situation: Racism is irrational, and so is human behavior.

That isn’t a complete explanation, of course; and I think one major misunderstanding neoclassical economists have of cognitive economists is that they think this is what we do—we point out that something is irrational, and then high-five and go home. No, that’s not what we do. Finding the irrationality is just the start; next comes explaining the irrationality, understanding the irrationality, and finally—we haven’t reached this point in most cases—fixing the irrationality.

So what explains racism? In short, the tribal paradigm. Human beings evolved in an environment in which the most important factor in our survival and that of our offspring was not food supply or temperature or predators, it was tribal cohesion. With a cohesive tribe, we could find food, make clothes, fight off lions. Without one, we were helpless. Millions of years in this condition shaped our brains, programming them to treat threats to tribal cohesion as the greatest possible concern. We even reached the point where solidarity for the tribe actually began to dominate basic survival instincts: For a suicide bomber the unity of the tribe—be it Marxism for the Tamil Tigers or Islam for Al-Qaeda—is more important than his own life. We will do literally anything if we believe it is necessary to defend the identities we believe in.

And no, we rationalists are no exception here. We are indeed different from other groups; the beliefs that define us, unlike the beliefs of literally every other group that has ever existed, are actually rationally founded. The scientific method really isn’t just another religion, for unlike religion it actually works. But still, if push came to shove and we were forced to kill and die in order to defend rationality, we would; and maybe we’d even be right to do so. Maybe the French Revolution was, all things considered, a good thing—but it sure as hell wasn’t nonviolent.

This is the background we need to understand racism. It actually isn’t enough to show people that racism is harmful and irrational, because they are programmed not to care. As long as racial identification is the salient identity, the tribe by which we define ourselves, we will do anything to defend the cohesion of that tribe. It is not enough to show that racism is bad; we must in fact show that race doesn’t matter. Fortunately, this is easy, for as I explained above, race does not actually exist.

That makes racism in some sense easier to deal with than sexism, because the very categories of races upon which it is based are fundamentally faulty. Sexes, on the other hand, are definitely a real thing. Males and females actually are genetically different in important ways. Exactly how different in what ways is an open question, and what we do know is that for most of the really important traits like intelligence and personality the overlap outstrips the difference. (The really big, categorical differences all appear to be physical: Anatomy, size, testosterone.) But conquering sexism may always be a difficult balance, for there are certain differences we won’t be able to eliminate without altering DNA. That no more justifies sexism than the fact that height is partly genetic would justify denying rights to short people (which, actually, is something we do); but it does make matters complicated, because it’s difficult to know whether an observed difference (for instance, most pediatricians are female, while most neurosurgeons are male) is due to discrimination or innate differences.

Racism, on the other hand, is actually quite simple: Almost any statistically significant difference in behavior or outcome between races must be due to some form of discrimination somewhere down the line. Maybe it’s not discrimination right here, right now; maybe it’s discrimination years ago that denied opportunities, or discrimination against their ancestors that led them to inherit less generations later; but it almost has to be discrimination against someone somewhere, because it is only by social construction that races exist in the first place. I do say “almost” because I can think of a few exceptions: Black people are genuinely less likely to use tanning salons and genuinely more likely to need vitamin D supplements, but both of those things are directly due to skin pigmentation. They are also more likely to suffer from sickle-cell anemia, which is another convergent trait that evolved in tropical climates as a response to malaria. But unless you can think of a reason why employment outcomes would depend upon vitamin D, the huge difference in employment between Whites and Blacks really can’t be due to anything but discrimination.

I imagine most of my readers are more sophisticated than this, but just in case you’re wondering about the difference in IQ scores between Whites and Blacks, that is indeed a real observation, but IQ isn’t entirely genetic. The reason IQ scores are rising worldwide (the Flynn Effect) is due to improvements in environmental conditions: Fewer environmental pollutants—particularly lead and mercury, the removal of which is responsible for most of the reduction in crime in America over the last 20 years—better nutrition, better education, less stress. Being stupid does not make you poor (or how would we explain Donald Trump?), but being poor absolutely does make you stupid. Combine that with the challenges and inconsistencies in cross-national IQ comparisons, and it’s pretty clear that the higher IQ scores in rich nations are an effect, not a cause, of their affluence. Likewise, the lower IQ scores of Black people in the US are entirely explained by their poorer living conditions, with no need for any genetic hypothesis—which would also be very difficult in the first place precisely because “Black” is such a weird genetic category.

Unfortunately, I don’t yet know exactly what it takes to change people’s concept of group identification. Obviously it can be done, for group identities change all the time, sometimes quite rapidly; but we simply don’t have good research on what causes those changes or how they might be affected by policy. That’s actually a major part of the experiment I’ve been trying to get funding to run since 2009, which I hope can now become my PhD thesis. All I can say is this: I’m working on it.