Tag: psychology

Conservation of Threat

as the environment becomes safer we manufacture new threats. To study how concepts change when they become less common, we brought volunteers into our laboratory and gave them a simple task — to look at a series of computer-generated faces and decide which ones seem “threatening.” The faces had been carefully designed by researchers to range from very intimidating to very harmless. As we showed people fewer and fewer threatening faces over time, we found that they expanded their definition of “threatening” to include a wider range of faces. When they ran out of threatening faces to find, they started calling faces threatening that they used to call harmless. Rather than being a consistent category, what people considered “threats” depended on how many threats they had seen lately.

Drone Warrior PTSD

When the drone program was created, it seemed to promise to spare soldiers from the intensity (and the danger) of close-range combat. But fighting at a remove can be unsettling in other ways. In conventional wars, soldiers fire at an enemy who has the capacity to fire back at them. They kill by putting their own lives at risk. What happens when the risks are entirely one-sided? Remote warfare erodes “the warrior ethic,” which holds that combatants must assume some measure of reciprocal risk. “If you give the warrior, on one side or the other, complete immunity, and let him go on killing, he’s a murderer. Because you’re killing people not only that you’re not necessarily sure are trying to kill you — you’re killing them with absolute impunity.”

Child Psychopaths

At 11, Samantha has wavy black hair and a steady gaze. She flashes a smile when I ask about her favorite subject (history), and grimaces when I ask about her least favorite (math). She seems poised and cheerful, a normal preteen. But when we steer into uncomfortable territory—the events that led her to this juvenile-treatment facility 3000km from her family—Samantha hesitates and looks down at her hands. “I wanted the whole world to myself. So I made a whole entire book about how to hurt people.”

Starting at age 6, Samantha began drawing pictures of murder weapons: a knife, a bow and arrow, chemicals for poisoning, a plastic bag for suffocating. She tells me that she pretended to kill her stuffed animals. “You were practicing on your stuffed animals?,” I ask her. She nods. “How did you feel when you were doing that to your stuffed animals?” “Happy.” “Why did it make you feel happy?” “Because I thought that someday I was going to end up doing it on somebody.” “Did you ever try?” Silence. “I choked my little brother.”

Principles As Exhaustible Resources

I think of respect for free speech as a commons. Every time some group invokes free speech to say something controversial, they’re drawing from the commons – which is fine, that’s what the commons is there for. Presumably the commons self-replenishes at some slow rate as people learn philosophy or get into situations where free speech protects them and their allies. But if you draw from the commons too quickly, then the commons disappears. When trolls say the most outrageous things possible, then retreat to “oh, but free speech”, they’re burning the commons for no reason, to the detriment of everybody else who needs it.

Elephant in the Brain

One of the most frustrating things about writing physical books is the long time delays. It has been 17 months since I mentioned my upcoming book here, and now, 8.5 months after we submitted the full book for review, & over 4 months after 7 out of 7 referees said “great book, as it is”, I can finally announce that The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life, coauthored with Kevin Simler, will officially be published January 1, 2018. Sigh. A related sad fact is that the usual book publicity equilibrium adds to intellectual inequality. Since most readers want to read books about which they’ve heard much publicity lately from multiple sources, publishers try to concentrate publicity into a narrow time period around the official publication date. Which makes sense. But to create that burst of publicity, one must circulate the book well in advance privately among “thought leaders”, who might blurb or review it, invite the authors to talk on it, or recommend it to others who might do these things. So people who plausibly fit these descriptions get to read such books long before others. This lets early readers seem to be wise judges of future popular talk directions. Not because they actually have better judgement, but because they get inside info.

2018-03-01: Policy would benefit

policy analysts and social scientists who claim that they understand the social world well enough to make recommendations for changes—they should understand the elephant in the brain. They should have a better idea of hidden motives because they could think about which institutions that we might choose differently to have better outcomes.

Derek Parfit

What makes me the same person throughout my life, and a different person from you? And what is the importance of these facts? You are in a terrible accident. Your body is fatally injured, as are the brains of your 2 identical-triplet brothers. Your brain is divided into 2 halves, and into each brother’s body one half is successfully transplanted. After the surgery, each of the 2 resulting people believes himself to be you, seems to remember living your life, and has your character. (This is not as unlikely as it sounds: already, living brains have been surgically divided, resulting in 2 separate streams of consciousness.) What has happened? Have you died, or have you survived? And if you have survived who are you? Are you 1 of these people? Both? Or neither? What if 1 of the transplants fails, and only 1 person with half your brain survives? That seems quite different—but the death of 1 person could hardly make a difference to the identity of another. The philosopher Derek Parfit believes that neither of the people is you, but that this doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter that you have ceased to exist, because what has happened to you is quite unlike ordinary death: in your relationship to the 2 new people there is everything that matters in ordinary survival—a continuity of memories and dispositions that will decay and change as they usually do. Most of us care about our future because it is ours—but this most fundamental human instinct is based on a mistake, Parfit believes. Personal identity is not what matters.