Category: Human Behavior and Cognitive Science

  • Señor Doolittle: I recommend the following book as it deals (on a rather basic l

    Señor Doolittle: I recommend the following book as it deals (on a rather basic level) with social psychology, yet it contains lots of links to more literature concerning cultural differences in attitudes and prejudices or ingroup/outgroup behaviour.


    Source date (UTC): 2013-05-05 06:04:00 UTC

  • WITH A WIFE WHO IS A HOARDER IS A CRUSHING BATTLE THAT YOU WILL EVENTUALLY LOSE

    http://www.psmag.com/health/hoarding-science-55196/LIVING WITH A WIFE WHO IS A HOARDER IS A CRUSHING BATTLE THAT YOU WILL EVENTUALLY LOSE

    I lasted 17 years. But the eventual understanding that no matter how much money I made, it wouldn’t matter, and when she had a child, her nesting behavior, and the natural tiredness that comes from caring for young children amplified her hoarding behavior, and life became unbearable. I could not survive in that environment.

    Her apartment, when I met her, was piled floor to ceiling with papers and magazines, and junk. What’s fascinating to me is that she actually knows the contents of every box, pile, and drawer. I mean, to some degree, I’m envious of that kind of recall. Until of course, you realize that without those real-world indexes, that the hoarder cannot recall anything. And that this is one of the things that causes their behavior.

    We didn’t understand ‘hoarding’ as a compulsive behavior when we met. We just assumed it was harmless and silly. And I thought I could live with it, and control it. And I managed to contain it to ‘her’ one room – a studio. But when we had the baby, that studio became the baby’s room, and there were no boundaries.

    Not that I’m a piece of cake either. I mean, can you imagine living with me? Women seem to love it. But I think it’s just because I’m an uncontrollable catnip toy that doesn’t ever become boring. It’s not because i’m easy. I’m not. When combined with my health problems it was more than I could bear.

    I still love her to death and always will. And I miss her all the time. But living with that kind of thing is just unbearable. And its ruinous. And it’s incurable. And its tragic.


    Source date (UTC): 2013-05-01 03:48:00 UTC

  • OBJECTIFY AND SUBJECTIFY – MEN VS WOMEN IN DEBATE One more fascinating differenc

    OBJECTIFY AND SUBJECTIFY – MEN VS WOMEN IN DEBATE

    One more fascinating difference between women and men in debate.

    As men, our ideas are separate from ourselves. We discuss, and argue, whenever possible with facts, not experiences. Women think we objectify them. Well, the fact is we do. But women aren’t special. We objectify everything. Objectifying things is what makes us MEN.

    With women, their ideas are indistinguishable from themselves. They discuss, argue, with experiences not facts independent of experiences. Women SUBJECTIFY everything. That is what makes them WOMEN.

    This is why men dominate debates (and hard sciences). If our arguments fail, we just try a different one, and learn from it. It isn’t personal. With women, not only is there argument a failure, but because it is intertwined with their emotional experiences, and because the identify with their emotional experiences they feel, far too often, that they have failed.

    Yet another reason why it is so much easier to be a male. I get exhausted whenever I try to think like a woman. I can do it for about half a second before I’m completely incapable of reason, and collapse from exhaustion. 😉

    But who would take care of screaming irrational children if women operated like men do? We’d be extinct.

    PS: now, before some idiot says “not all women”, please understand that categories that are universal describe distributions. It’s implicit that we are UNEQUAL even within gender, and therefore as UNEQUAL within gender, we can be described along multiple distributions. I realize that simple people think in simple terms (equality) but grownups think in terms of distributions and equilibria. ie: a point described by an ideal type, vs multiple-axis.

    The world is fascinating really if you don’t subscribe to dogma. 🙂

    🙂


    Source date (UTC): 2013-04-30 08:21:00 UTC

  • UKRAINE: ALL WOMEN ARE BEAUTIFUL I mean, that’s what beauty means, right? Fertil

    UKRAINE: ALL WOMEN ARE BEAUTIFUL

    I mean, that’s what beauty means, right? Fertility? Whether it’s an undiscovered country, a bountiful table, a garden, an architectural model. Beauty is the presence of resources – of potential, and fertility is potential.

    I just… can’t get over it. Almost every woman in this country is desirable. They aren’t weak. They aren’t victims. They aren’t masculine. They pretty much run everything except the military and heavy industry – which is saying more about who can manage certain demographic populations of males than anything else.

    Femininity is beautiful. It’s an attitude. And body image isn’t a problem when the standard is femininity and grace, not genetic perfection.

    I love this country. Even the crazy bullshit macho nonsense is beautiful.


    Source date (UTC): 2013-04-28 09:49:00 UTC

  • DATA ON TRUST VS PACK INSTINCT? We have a lot of data describing the different l

    DATA ON TRUST VS PACK INSTINCT?

    We have a lot of data describing the different levels of trust between cultures. But does anyone know of any data that deals with the different levels of pack (group) instinct between cultures. Aboriginal Americans, and East Asians seem at the extreme. Turkic, semitic peoples, in the middle and Indo Europeans in the middle and africans at the low end.

    For example, we know that as babies, asians are more pliable, whites in the middle and africans at the lowest. That’s a pretty good data set, even if it’s certainly open to criticism.

    It’s all good to intuit this. But how can I test it? Any data anywhere?


    Source date (UTC): 2013-04-26 02:02:00 UTC

  • What Advantages Or Disadvantages Do Social Media Contribute To The Educational Development Or Problems Among Our Youth Today?

    I don’t think the concept of ‘problem’ makes a great deal of sense in this context – or at least I’m not sure what you are referring to.  Our world changes.  Agrarianism, organized religion, government, literacy, industrialization, and even electric light, have had a dramatic impact on people’s lives.  We are always in a state of change.  I don’t see this as a ‘problem’ unless it creates some outcome or other that is demonstrably a material ‘bad’ that we can measure. And I have a problem seeing social media as anything other than a free market for information that is not impeded by organized mysticism or organized statism.

    I think that the way we educate children in schools could easily be described as prisons, where we subject them to artificially exaggerated social stresses because they interact with too few adults and do so in abnormal circumstances. We artificially induce extended childhoods, and delay the onset of mature adulthood.  This not only causes absurd stresses but creates alienation from the nuclear family that would normally provide the adaptive environment that creates the calm, confident and healthy mind. So, we create  alienation as a systemic condition in society.  (Childhood as we understand it is a recent invention. And probably a bad one.)

    I think that social media provides a form of competition against this destructive environment, that reduces alienation.  And that the internet in general, provides so much information, that it is possible for children to find membership in groups regardless of locale. 

    So I think the argument is that school is the problem of alienation and we see social media providing a solution to alienation, and that some of us would prefer that such alienation did not need to be mollified by social media, and instead a healthy individual was developed inside of the nuclear family.  But the problem here is not social media. It is education and the incentive for two parent incomes that make possible our intergenerational redistribution.

    So, the net is, that social media, and the interenet in general, are net goods.  The problem is everything else.

    https://www.quora.com/What-advantages-or-disadvantages-do-social-media-contribute-to-the-educational-development-or-problems-among-our-youth-today

  • OF RACE AND REPRODUCTION QUESTION: “Why is single motherhood so common in the so

    http://www.carseyinstitute.unh.e/ECONOMICS OF RACE AND REPRODUCTION

    QUESTION: “Why is single motherhood so common in the south?”

    Well, of course I don’t like to say the impolitic truth and then have to fend off the ignorant. Quora is peopled by the demographic that does not rely on data. We know this because almost all questions there can be answered easily with available data. But since all data of meaning requires knowledge of economics and statistics, and ignorance of economics and statistics is pervasive, this prohibits access to comprehension of that data, and prohibits resolution of questions of popular opinion and political doctrine.

    As such, it’s tedious to answer impolitic questions here. That is why few people do it.

    That said, I will do my best:

    FAMILY STRUCTURE

    1) Family structure and family economic structures determine poverty. The nuclear family is highly efficient economic structure. The two income nuclear family is the most efficient economic structure. For a male it is the smallest tribe he can be alpha in, and maintain access to a female as he declines in desirability For a woman she is the alpha female in her tribe of one, and has a monopoly claim on his production for the duration of her childrearing, despite her declining ‘desirability’ during this time. The nuclear family also places asset demands on the male, and therefore delays marriage and mating, both of which increase the skill level, work experience of the members.

    2) Redistribution undermines the family and increases poverty, partly because men in the lower classes are less desirable (and able) than women in the lower classes, because men are more widely distributed in feature and ability than are women, with more men at the very top (nobel prize winners) and more men at the bottom (persistently impulsive criminality). Our Y chromosome is where nature experiements, and our wider male distribution affects mating under monogamy, and less so under polygyny, because under polygyny, a smaller number of more desirable males can be shared amongst a larger number of marginally more desirable females.

    3) Racial groups are more or less ‘desirable’ as mates worldwide, not just in the states. This has largely to do, as best as any of us can tell, with a mating preference for females with thinner skin in contrast to mates with thicker skin as a signal that is different from the thicker skin of males. Since the only uniform scale of beauty across all cultures, other than symmetry, is quality of female skin clarity, this is the only selection preference necessary to explain racial preferences, other than the rate at which we appear to have exited Africa and begun the process of near-speciation (racial diversification), and the problem of access to vitamin D in the northern climes. This research is impolitic and the people who pursue it are ostracized from academia so it has moved to being conducted under a different guise, or now to china where such things are considered only logical. But the research is available. And it shows that fairer, thinner skin on females with finer features, is more desirable regardless of racial group.

    4) People mate almost entirely within race (<15%) and prefer to associate, work, and live within racial groups. With the consumer marketplace for goods the only shared environment. Extremes can run counter to this fact with crossing occurring at the lower and higher ends of desirability where each individual has better options in mates and often better access to social class by crossing racial boundaries.

    5) Even where racial admixture occurs, it places downward pressure on extra-group status and opportunity (desirability). In other words, racially mixed children maintain the lower of their racial preferences. Altough in black and hispanic communities and families children are still ranked in preference by skin color because it grants access to status both mating and social.

    ECONOMICS

    6) Impulsivity (the ability to resist impulses) varies between the races, with the east asians the least impulsive distribution, and the subsaharan african population the most impulsive. Impulsivity is a positive reproductive strategy unless external (climate) pressures punish survival. Impulsivity places a high penalty on learning ability which favors long periods of ‘frustration’ and concentration.

    7) Impulsivity affects both trustworthiness and creditworthiness. Nuclear families have higher more stable incomes, and are more creditworthy, as well as more economically efficient. As such high densities of nuclear families will produce higher wealth. Higher wealth will generate greater opportunity. Greater opportunity within a geography will increase demand for housing in that geography. Housing in that geography will increase in price. People who live in more impulsive, less efficient groups will of course, be unable to gain access to that geography and its opportunities.

    8) For these reasons (Which I assume I should use graphs to illustrate) the reason that poverty and single motherhood are so prevalent in the south is that 74% of black mothers, and a high percentage of hispanic mothers are unmarried. And they live in close communities reliant on support from extended family members, with populations too high to integrate into more successful communities. White single motherhood is on the increase in the lower classes, and teh USA, Ireland and New Zealand, where the postmodernist and feminist movements have been most successful, have the highest rates of single motherhood among whites, and the countries of southern europe who remain familially integral the lowest: Italy, Greece, Spain and Luxembourg.

    TRUST AND OPPORTUNITY

    All humans are faced with opportunities for both cooperation and conflict at all times. We must choose how to apply our limited time effort and resources to a limited number of opportunities.

    All opportunities other than exchanges of commodities purely on price, consist of a network of cost and benefit tradeoffs. All cost and benefit tradeoff’s are simple.

    We trade (cooperate) on all sorts of terms, but economic status, social status, values, language, culture(mythology, habits) are significant terms. Every variation in every property that is not identical in interest is a negative.

    Status signals (status and reputation) have higher value in-group than across groups. Therefore status pressure to encourage each of us to adhere to agreements is of higher value in-group.

    Therefore we trust and cooperate in-group at lower cost and risk than across group.

    This is why people break into racial, cultural, socioeconomic, educational, generational, occupational groups. Because it’s the lowest risk pool of people with the lowest cost of cooperation, even if it’s less productive it may also be the only pool available to you where you can find someone willing to pay the higher cost of cooperating with you across groups.

    Political discourse assumes we want to help each other and we do. The problem is the logic of that statement -it’s meaningless when we CAN help everyone, we must still choose the best return on our help. And we do. And that is how it is. Anything else is irrational.

    SOUTHERN RELIGIOSITY

    Race is the reason for ‘everything’ in the south, including religiosity. Although southern religiosity we must understand is a rebellion against the state, after the north conquered the south. Race is the reason for everything in america. People are born, live, reproduce, associate, work with, and speak to, people within their racial groups except where they participate in the marketplace together.

    RATES OF POVERTY BY RACE

    http://www.carseyinstitute.unh.e…

    RATES OF SINGLE MOTHERHOOD BY RACE

    LINK: http://datacenter.kidscount.org/…

    There is no end of data on this subject.


    Source date (UTC): 2013-04-12 03:28:00 UTC

  • OMG OF THE DAY “I’m not demanding. I just want you to buy me a car.” Only a woma

    OMG OF THE DAY

    “I’m not demanding. I just want you to buy me a car.”

    Only a woman can say that kind of thing with a straight face.

    And only a woman can actually believe it.

    WTH?


    Source date (UTC): 2013-04-11 03:29:00 UTC

  • How Do Christian Conservatives In The Usa Explain The Very High Teen Birth Rates In The Bible Belt?

    INCREDIBLY FUNNY BUT TERRIBLY BAD ANSWERS : HERE IS THE CORRECT ONE.

    Here is the correct, and entirely impolitic one. It also accounts for poverty and IQ statistics.

    Diversity increases extremes.

    —PART 1 – CAUSATION—
    ECONOMICS OF RACE AND REPRODUCTION

    QUESTION: “Why is single motherhood so common in the south?”

    Well, of course I don’t like to say the impolitic truth and then have to fend off the ignorant. Quora is peopled by the demographic that does not rely on data. We know this because almost all questions there can be answered easily with available data. But since all data of meaning requires knowledge of economics and statistics, and ignorance of economics and statistics is pervasive, this prohibits access to comprehension of that data, and prohibits resolution of questions of popular opinion and political doctrine.

    As such, it’s tedious to answer impolitic questions here. That is why few people do it.

    That said, I will do my best:

    FAMILY STRUCTURE

    1) Family structure and family economic structures determine poverty. The nuclear family is highly efficient economic structure. The two income nuclear family is the most efficient economic structure. For a male it is the smallest tribe he can be alpha in, and maintain access to a female as he declines in desirability For a woman she is the alpha female in her tribe of one, and has a monopoly claim on his production for the duration of her childrearing, despite her declining ‘desirability’ during this time. The nuclear family also places asset demands on the male, and therefore delays marriage and mating, both of which increase the skill level, work experience of the members.

    2) Redistribution undermines the family and increases poverty, partly because men in the lower classes are less desirable (and able) than women in the lower classes, because men are more widely distributed in feature and ability than are women, with more men at the very top (nobel prize winners) and more men at the bottom (persistently impulsive criminality). Our Y chromosome is where nature experiements, and our wider male distribution affects mating under monogamy, and less so under polygyny, because under polygyny, a smaller number of more desirable males can be shared amongst a larger number of marginally more desirable females.

    3) Racial groups are more or less ‘desirable’ as mates worldwide, not just in the states. This has largely to do, as best as any of us can tell, with a mating preference for females with thinner skin in contrast to mates with thicker skin as a signal that is different from the thicker skin of males. Since the only uniform scale of beauty across all cultures, other than symmetry, is quality of female skin clarity, this is the only selection preference necessary to explain racial preferences, other than the rate at which we appear to have exited Africa and begun the process of near-speciation (racial diversification), and the problem of access to vitamin D in the northern climes. This research is impolitic and the people who pursue it are ostracized from academia so it has moved to being conducted under a different guise, or now to china where such things are considered only logical. But the research is available. And it shows that fairer, thinner skin on females with finer features, is more desirable regardless of racial group.

    4) People mate almost entirely within race (<15%) and prefer to associate, work, and live within racial groups. With the consumer marketplace for goods the only shared environment. Extremes can run counter to this fact with crossing occurring at the lower and higher ends of desirability where each individual has better options in mates and often better access to social class by crossing racial boundaries.

    5) Even where racial admixture occurs, it places downward pressure on extra-group status and opportunity (desirability). In other words, racially mixed children maintain the lower of their racial preferences. Altough in black and hispanic communities and families children are still ranked in preference by skin color because it grants access to status both mating and social.

    ECONOMICS
    6) Impulsivity (the ability to resist impulses) varies between the races, with the east asians the least impulsive distribution, and the subsaharan african population the most impulsive. Impulsivity is a positive reproductive strategy unless external (climate) pressures punish survival. Impulsivity places a high penalty on learning ability which favors long periods of ‘frustration’ and concentration.

    7) Impulsivity affects both trustworthiness and creditworthiness. Nuclear families have higher more stable incomes, and are more creditworthy, as well as more economically efficient. As such high densities of nuclear families will produce higher wealth. Higher wealth will generate greater opportunity. Greater opportunity within a geography will increase demand for housing in that geography. Housing in that geography will increase in price. People who live in more impulsive, less efficient groups will of course, be unable to gain access to that geography and its opportunities.

    8) For these reasons (Which I assume I should use graphs to illustrate) the reason that poverty and single motherhood are so prevalent in the south is that 74% of black mothers, and a high percentage of hispanic mothers are unmarried. And they live in close communities reliant on support from extended family members, with populations too high to integrate into more successful communities. White single motherhood is on the increase in the lower classes, and teh USA, Ireland and New Zealand, where the postmodernist and feminist movements have been most successful, have the highest rates of single motherhood among whites, and the countries of southern europe who remain familially integral the lowest: Italy, Greece, Spain and Luxembourg.

    TRUST AND OPPORTUNITY
    All humans are faced with opportunities for both cooperation and conflict at all times. We must choose how to apply our limited time effort and resources to a limited number of opportunities.

    All opportunities other than exchanges of commodities purely on price, consist of a network of cost and benefit tradeoffs. All cost and benefit tradeoff’s are simple.

    We trade (cooperate) on all sorts of terms, but economic status, social status, values, language, culture(mythology, habits) are significant terms. Every variation in every property that is not identical in interest is a negative.

    Status signals (status and reputation) have higher value in-group than across groups. Therefore status pressure to encourage each of us to adhere to agreements is of higher value in-group.

    Therefore we trust and cooperate in-group at lower cost and risk than across group.

    This is why people break into racial, cultural, socioeconomic, educational, generational, occupational groups. Because it’s the lowest risk pool of people with the lowest cost of cooperation, even if it’s less productive it may also be the only pool available to you where you can find someone willing to pay the higher cost of cooperating with you across groups.

    Political discourse assumes we want to help each other and we do. The problem is the logic of that statement -it’s meaningless when we CAN help everyone, we must still choose the best return on our help. And we do. And that is how it is. Anything else is irrational.

    SOUTHERN RELIGIOSITY
    Race is the reason for ‘everything’ in the south, including religiosity. Although southern religiosity we must understand is a rebellion against the state, after the north conquered the south. Race is the reason for everything in america. People are born, live, reproduce, associate, work with, and speak to, people within their racial groups except where they participate in the marketplace together.

    RATES OF POVERTY BY RACE
    Page on Carseyinstitute

    RATES OF SINGLE MOTHERHOOD BY RACE
    LINK: KIDS COUNT Data Center

    There is no end of data on this subject.


    —PART II—
    CORRELATION NOT CAUSATION

    States are, in general, rational economic alliances, usually run by an oligarchy, and usually the oligarchy grants monopolistic privileges to key industries in order to fund them sufficiently that they can compete outside of the local market where returns are highest.  We call this corporatism.  It is a rational system. Unfortunately, the natural incentive of all monopolies, and of course, a political bureaucracy is by definition a monopoly, are self interested and will prey upon their populations to the limits at which they can maintain power.

    Religions are ARATIONAL (not irrational) and they are a means of setting the moral limits to the actions of the state. Religions are resistance movements. Mystical religions consist of rational ends, but stated irrationally.  The only religion that is compatible with the state rather than an opposition to it is polytheistic, or what we today would call ‘history worship.”  The state will attempt to control religious doctrine to the best of its ability. In some cases it succeeds – theocracy results.  This is usually bad, because while oligarchic monopolies are self interested and predatory, they are also economically productive.  Theocratic bureaucracies are self interested and predatory but economically unproductive, and they manufacture ignorance in volume.

    The south is religious as a means of opposing the state. First, in response to the conquest by the north. Second as a resistance to the north.  Third as a resistance to racial integration.  Fourth as a resistance the feminist and postmodern attack on the family using redistribution and law. 

    I will leave it to you whether the use of arational methods to resist the state is effective (it is) or and whether or not it is right (it appears that the feminist, socialist, and postmondern movements have systemically increased poverty by destruction of the nuclear family.)

    —PART III – CONCLUSION—

    There is a correlation between southern religiosity and single motherhood, but there is no causal relationship.

    I hope that this was helpful and informative.

    Curt Doolittle

    https://www.quora.com/How-do-Christian-conservatives-in-the-USA-explain-the-very-high-teen-birth-rates-in-the-Bible-Belt

  • FACEBOOK AS SOCIAL SCIENCE I love Facebook. You can sort of ask man-on-the-stree

    FACEBOOK AS SOCIAL SCIENCE

    I love Facebook. You can sort of ask man-on-the-street questions of people who are (at least reasonably) self selected for topical literacy.

    It’s like having your own really large pool of first year grad students to ask willing questions of without having to offer ten dollars a head, and getting your prof’s to promote it to their students.

    I mean really. It’s awesome. You can sort of wander from club to club commenting and chatting with people in all these rooms, and there isn’t any cover charge, and the bouncers just use harsh language.

    I love Facebook. lol.


    Source date (UTC): 2013-04-09 07:56:00 UTC