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  1. That's correct. If, in a double-blind study, I rate as an INTJ but am unknowingly given the results for an ESTJ and find them just as accurate, then human resources-types are probably mistaken in believing that this test tells them much about anyone's personality.
  2. Nobody likes my idea from Post #54 of this thread proposing a double-blind experiment to test the veracity of the Myers-Briggs Type Indictator?
  3. Thanks for the input, Hal, Liliriodendren, and Thales! My New Year's resolution is now to read Biological Basis. I mentioned this before in the evolutionary psychology thread on the bottom of this post, but I'm quite uncomfortable with the Dawkinsites' misuse of the term altruism, which they seem to use for any action by an organism that benefits other organisms. Matt Ridley observes that commercial transactions are "positive-sum games" in which all consensually participating parties profit, and then he calls this by a name coined by Robert L. Trivers -- "reciprocal altruism." Well, that sure isn't reciprocal self-sacrifice. I imagine reciprocal self-sacrifice would be something like a suicide pact. I propose replacing the misleading "reciprocal altruism" with something like "reciprocal profit" or "mutually self-interested beneficience."
  4. This thread is for the discussion of Bible verses. I don't only mean ones that espouse altruism and mysticism, but verses that are so creepy that they should even give pause to the Religious Right. I started this thread because I came across this website quoting certain Bible verses and charging that they "advocat[e] killing and rape." I thought, No way! He must be taking these passages out of context. Well, I checked out Numbers 31.15-18. It looks to me like that website evaluated those passages pretty accurately. Moses tells the Hebrews to kill the Midianites and to take their virgin women as love slaves. My favorite resource on this subject is the online Skeptic's Annotated Bible, though its comments are marred by the site's "secular humanist" (i.e., secular altruist) bias. You can also see the Numbers verses I quoted in more pro-religious online Bibles here, here, here, and here. In Isaiah 13. 13-19, it sounds like God is saying that Babylonian women should be raped (He says "ravished") and their children should be killed. Ummmm . . . if I were a character in a Japanese cartoon, this would be the moment where a huge ball of sweat drops out the back of my head. And I find it strange that the Religious Right purports to champion "family values" when Jesus said that you should prioritize Him above any and every member of your family. In Matthew 10. 34-37, Jesus says, And I don't understand why the Religious Right keeps saying that capitalism is compatible with Christianity, when, in Revelation 18. 3-20, God makes it a point to smite all the merchants of Babylon and send them to hell. See here. Note that, since the makers of the online Skeptic's Annotated Bible aren't pro-free-market, they don't have any comments about the anti-business message in Revelation. Of course, I am sure that, for centuries already, many theologians must have found ways to rationalize and "spin-doctor" these passages. What do you think? Other questionable Bible verses and/or comments in this thread would be appreciated.
  5. Thanks for the help, everybody!! I still have a few questions. JMeganSnow writes, Is a proposition not a type of concept? DavidOdden writes, I thought that the concept of time was the result of an induction; that one derives the concept of time after first observing a sequence of events or actions. Isn't "time" derived from the concept of "actions"? One Thing (an Event) happens after Another Thing (another Event), and that's how we arrive at "time"? dondigitalia writes, Pardon the strangeness of this sentence, but your definition of "definition" is very helpful! I understood that a definition was not the exact same thing as a concept, but I couldn't put the difference into words. Since a definition exists to integrate a concept with the rest of what we know, a word's definition helps a person identify the relationship a concept has with other existents? Is this why simpler words like "is" are more difficult to define than more complex words like "serendipity"? With respect to mammals, when I was a little kid in elementary school, I had this World Book Childcraft edition about the animal kingdom, and it had a chapter explaining what distinguished mammalia from all other classes of animalia. At this point, I already knew that whales were mamamls instead of fish. However, it was only when I read this book that I came to understand that what makes mammals unlike all other animal classes is that they produce milk. Up until then, that thought never occurred to me. It didn't really register with me that any organisms other than humans and cows produced milk. Until that point, I thought that what made something a mammal was that it was warm-blooded and didn't have feathers. I never before made the connection between mammals and milk. Since I now see milk production as the mammal's essential, distinguishing attribute, can we not say that it was not only my definition of mammal that changed, but my concept of mammal as well?
  6. Thanks for the replies, Hal and Thales! Hal said, That's true. Richard Dawkins's explanation was a descriptive one. It's just that a lot of other people try to invoke his theory to argue for altruism. Thales wrote, That's a great observation; I wish it occurred to me before you pointed that out! When altruism-espousers say that Dawkins's theory proves that evolution favors altruism, they are begging the question. They presume that individual survival needs some kind of justification, but they never ask themselves whether reproduction needs a justification. People who invoke Dawkins's argument in the manner I described assume that individuals must exist for reproduction, but why can't we say that perhaps it is reproduction that exists for individuals? Thanks a lot, Thales! Dr. Binswanger hits another one out of the ballpark! Thales writes, I was under the impression that the "Dawkinsian" case for altruism was sort of like the utilitarian collectivist argument that conservatives and libertarians use to justify capitalist self-interest. Conservatives and libertarians, following in the footsteps of Adam Smith, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and Dinesh D'Souza, say that a businessperson should look out for his own self-interest, because that will then better enable him or her to improve industrial productivity, create new jobs, and provide more charitable services. The utilitarian free-marketer says that serving one's own self-interest is merely an ethical means to the "higher" end of serving other people. Likewise, those who invoke Dawkins usually say that you should take care of yourself so that you will be better able to take care of your children. If you destroy yourself and your fortune, then your children will suffer. Ergo, they say, taking care of your own well-being is just an ethical means to the "higher" end of serving your kin. I didn't buy into that argument on economics front, but I didn't have an answer to the "Dawkinsites" claim that an organism must exist for the sake of reproduction. It didn't occur to me that maybe it is reproduction that exists for the sake of the individual.
  7. Hey, I have ideas for two experiments that scientists could perform to the test the claims of evolutionary pscyhologists. Experiment #1 has to do with pre-rational behavior, and #2 can look for correlations between genetics and personality type. Experiment #1: Okay, first, here's the evolutionary explanation for why mammals get hungry. Actually, I should have used this example in my first post on this thread, since it's simpler than the one about physical beauty. Suppose there are two mammals of the same species. The first one, Pro-Hunger Mammal, has genes that give it sensations that prod it to eat when it needs to. The second one, Anti-Hunger Mammal, has genes that make sure that it never feels hunger ever. Throughout the course of their lifetimes, Anti-Hunger Mammal will refrain from eating. It will die of starvation, probably before rerproducing. Its genes are not passed on. Meanwhile, because Pro-Hunger Mammal receives physical sensations telling it when it needs to eat, it eats. It lives long enough to reproduce, spreading the "pro-hunger genes" to the next generation. Thus, the "anti-hunger" genes are gradually phased out, growing scarcer with each generation. Simultaneously, the "pro-hunger genes" are a self-perpetuating meme. And that's why humans get hungry. Now, there is a laboratory experiment one can do to test this (perhaps scientists have already done it). You can use laboratory mice. In the experimental group, get a random sample of baby mice and do something that extinguishes their appetite. You could inject them with a drug that makes them incapable of getting hungry. Or, if we already have the technology to do so, you can use mice that are genetically engineered to never get hungry (genetic engineer Mario Capecchi has created mice that cannot close their eyes). Make sure that food is always available to the mice in the experimental group (expect that this food will go uneaten). In the control group, you have a random sample of baby mice. You don't do anything to change them. Just go on feeding them like normal. Let both groups breed. Observe them for three generations. We can expect the majority of mice in the experimental group to die before reproducing. But we can expect the mice in the control group to have a lot of reproductive success. The control group having greater reproductive success than the experimental group would show hunger's contribution to the propagation of the genes of a mammal species. And this has implications for us humans. It helps explain why people get hungry. But, again, note that this explains pre-rational sensations. If an adult human being becomes an alcoholic, this lab experiment with mice does not explain whether this person became an alcoholic primarily because of his genes, primarily because of his conditioning, or primarily because this was his own fault. However, there might be a way to measure the extent to which genes influence our personalities. Experiment #2: There is a very silly best-selling evolutionary psychology book out now called The God Gene. It purports to explain that most humans are "genetically programmed" (my term, not the evolutionary pscyhologists' or the eugenicists') to believe in God, while atheism is an evolutionary aberration. (This book doesn't take into account that, in The Story of Civilization, Will Durant said that some anthropologists believe that many groups of early cavemen might have been atheistic and might not have believed in an afterlife.) There is one aspect of The God Gene I found interesting, though. It described an experiment conducted in the early 1900s by Sir Francis Galton. Galton was a cousin of Charles Darwin, but he was a famous scientist in his own right. He was one of the first people to observe that no two fingerprints are alike, and he also made contributions to statistics. Unfortunately, he was also a pioneer in eugenics. Anyhow, Galton devised a very long personality test which quantified a person's various preferences. (Unfortunately, The God Gene doesn't go into detail about what this test was like.) Galton then gave this test to both fraternal twins and identical twins. His idea of using fraternal- and identical twins was a good one, because this was supposed to take "environment" out of the equation. How can you explain any divergence in the scores of twins (identical or otherwise) for the personality test when each member of a pair of twins (fraternal or otherwise) was raised in the same environment as the other? And each member in a pair of twins is the same age. Galton found that, statistically, there was a greater disparity in the personality test's scores between each fraternal twin than each identical twin. In other words, on average, each set of identical twins scored as having personalities that were more alike in preferences and temperament than each set of fraternal twins. Galton then proclaimed that these results "proved" that genetics are the sole determinant of personality. However, it recently occurred to me that environmental factors still could have biased these results. One can ask the question, "But do parents usually expect identical twins to be more alike in personality than fraternal twins?" Suppose that I, as a parent, would expect fraternal twins to be very different in personality while, at the same time, I would expect identical twins to be much more alike in personality. If that is the case with many actual parents of fraternal- or identical twins, then that can create a social environment that "conditions" and encourages identical twins to see themselves as more alike personality-wise than fraternal twins. If this happens, then Galton's results aren't as perfect as he thought. However, this can be remedied. The newsmedia sometimes report stories about identical twins who have been separated at birth and are then re-united many years later as adults. The news people then like to remark about how the identical twins, who were raised apart, are so much alike in behavior and preference. They have spouses with similar jobs, etc. So here's a new experiment. In the Control Group, you have a random sample of identical twins. Both members of each pair of twins were raised in the same household. In Experimental Group #1, you have a random sample of identical twins who were raised in separate households. And, in Experimental Group #2, you have a random sample of fraternal twins. Both members of each pair of fraternal twins were raised in the same household. Then you give each group a quantifiable personality quiz -- possibly one similar to Galton's (I don't know how to make such a quiz, though). If, on average, a pair of fraternal twins raised in the same household rate as being more alike in personality than a pair of identical twins raised in separate households, then this would suggest that personality is affected more by environment than by genetics. What do you think?
  8. Okay, I believe I understand why objectivity requires that non-axiomatic concepts be "open-ended." Since we (well, rational people, anyway) are continually gathering more and more information about the concretes of material reality, we may find some concepts we previously formed inductively are insufficient and must be revised. For instance, a child may believe that all ocean-dwelling creatures with stream-lined bodies and finny appendages must be fish, while a mammal is a hairy creature that lives on land. When the child learns that whales are mammals, he or she then revises his or her prior conceptions of "fish" and "mammals." My question is: Are all concepts open-ended? It appears to me that an axiom must be "close-ended" by its nature. For example, I don't see how the Law of Identity can be logically revised. Are axiomatic concepts then "close-ended"?
  9. After they hear about Richard Dawkins's "selfish gene" theory, many of my acquaintances tell me that, if it is true that ethics ("ought") can be derived from man's biological nature (what "is"), then the ultimate moral goal of a person should be to propagate his or her genes. That's actually the point of the book The Science of Good and Evil by Michael Shermer. (Not surprisingly, this book whacks at many strawman representations of Objectivist epistemology. While Shermer claims to be a "former Objectivist," he makes it clear that he never understood the philosophy, given that his critique equivocates the objectivity of concepts with Intrinsicism, and falsely characterizes Objectivism as regarding all concepts as close-ended and unrevisable.) In The Biological Basis, does Dr. Binswanger address the collectivists' claim that the propagation of one's genes is the ultimate moral goal for a human being?
  10. Thanks for the link! Those are good questions!! I only became interested in this subject a year or two ago after reading Survival of the Prettiest and Matt Ridley's The Origins of Virtue, so I have to admit I'm still a dilettante with this subject, and an evolutionary psychologist might say that I have a simplistic view of this school of thought. So far, I think that "evolutionary psychology" is more of a descriptive than prescriptive field. That's because evolutionary psychologists believe that everything that "is," in human society, is that way for some sound evolutionary reason. So, whether they intend to or not, they often end up performing a lot of apologetics for whatever the status quo happens to be. Some evolutionary psychologists have made some prescriptive arguments, but not for psychotherapy. Instead, they try to invoke evolutionary psychology when it comes to public policy. So far, their prescriptions for political economy have been illogical and unimpressive (as I will discuss later in this post). I don't know of any advice that evolutionary psychology pioneer Edward O. Wilson or sociobiology sympathizer Jared Diamond has for psychotherapists. Yet they believe that evolutionary psychology proves that the free market is evil and self-destructive and that the government must curtail industrial production to prevent the West's "collapse" (as if their brand of Statism never caused the "collapse" of a society). Indeed, the late Ronald E. Merrill, who claimed to sympathize with Objectivism, bought into that ridiculously Malthusian assumption: Say's Law has refuted Merrill for the past 200 years in the West. And it has refuted him in East Asia for the past 30 years. Or, to say it in simpler terms, Merrill's prediction fails to come true to the extent that a society lives under economic freedom. If evolutionary psychologists applied many of their current assumptions to psychotherapy, I think that the results would be pretty terrible. The authors of the book Mean Genes have a view of human nature that is comparable to Sigmund Freud's (which is Platonic in the long run), though they don't admit that their view is Freudian. Mean Genes's authors, Terry Burnham and Jay Phelan, imagine a Freudian mind-body dichotomy where none exists. They believe that, on the one hand, a person has his rationality. In his rational mind, he knows that he must think long-range and about his long-term survival. That's their equivalent of the "ego" and "superego" (in the Freudian sense). On the other hand, insist Burnham and Phelan, humans have an uncivilized, irrational, biologically-evolved set of predispositions that somehow "tempt" you to only think short-range and seek immediate gratification. That is Burnham and Phelan's version of the "id." In Mean Genes, Burnham and Phelan maintain that it is good when a person can allow his rationality (his mind and soul, or "ego" and "superego") to triumph over the "temptations" of his or her own evolution-created biological impulses (his body, or "id"). And Edward O. Wilson endorsed this book. Burnham, Phelan, and Wilson believe in the nonsensical view that the human mind is constantly at war with one's "inborn biology" because they do not admit that the human mind is part of a person's "inborn biology." What I find hilarious on so many levels that evolutionary psychologists try to separate themselves from "Social Darwinists." They constantly say, "We are not Social Darwinists like Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner." Please forgive my long interlude in discussing "Social Darwinism"; by the end, I will show why this is relevant to the "prescriptive" elements of evolutionary psychology and not a true digression. First, historians have yet to cite a single example of either Spencer or Sumner calling himself a "Social Darwinist." The term "Social Darwinism" became popular long after the two died. No one who has ever been dubbed a "ninteenth-century Social Darwinist" popularly used that term for himself in public. One may be surprised to find that, though "Social Darwinism" is considered a ninteenth-century ideology, this term was not widely used before 1944. Actually, it was a pejorative epithet that leftwing historian Richard Hofstadter coined in 1944 to smear anyone who believed that some people in society deserved to have some "higher status" than another, even if that "status" merely involved being richer than other people. Hofstadter and his followers (particularly John Kenneth Galbraith) pretty much created a strawman image that they applied to Herbert Spencer, W. G. Sumner, and anyone else who wanted a reduction in welfare spending. Galbraith puts the following words into Spencer's mouth: When somebody goes from rags to riches, it is necessarily because he has superior genes. And then this rich guy can spread his superior "get rich" genes to the next generation. If somebody stays poor, it is because he has inferior "stay poor" genes, so poor people should just die without reproducing so that they can spare the human race of passing on their inferior genes. That's a misrepresentation of what Spencer and Sumner said. Contrary to the leftists' smear, Spencer and Sumner didn't hate poor people per se. They did, however, say that many poor people in economically-freer countries like America and England are ultimately responsible for their own financial situation (and they had very harsh words for drug addicts) and that there is such a thing as "misguided philanthropy." Leftwing historians quote Spencer and Sumner's criticisms of drug addicts out of context in order to make it sound like they hated poor people as such. Plus, Spencer didn't even agree with Charles Darwin about natural selection; he believed evolution occurred in the way that Jean-Baptiste Lamarck described. Spencer did not even have a concept of "genes" in the Gregor Mendelian sense. Spencer -- characterized by the Left as the ultimate "social Darwinist," did not use the adjective of "Darwinist" for himself. (In fact, Spencer believed that it was Darwin who should have learned more from him). Ironically, the economist who comes closest to making a "Social Darwinist argument against the welfare state," as described by Hofstadter and Galbraith, is an economist widely hailed and cited by leftists, environmentalists, and evolutionary pscyhologists: Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus. When Malthus said that population will eventually outstrip food production in the West, he actually thought he was arguing against the welfare state. Malthus said that, if welfare spending and private charity keep increasing, then the population of poor people will grow too big and limit the amount of food available for the entire population. Malthus believed that if you discontinue welfare (and even vaccinations) for the poor, then this will prevent the population from growing too big, which will then leave enough food resources for everyone. To some extent, Rev. Malthus really did just want poor people to die so there would be less "competition for natural resources." Malthus, like every collectivist who follows in his footsteps, failed to acknowledge that free enterprise provides the greatest profits to those who can increase a region's "carrying capacity." (And one of the first economists to dispute him on this was -- you guessed it! -- Jean-Baptiste Say.) Spencer and Sumner, contra Rev. Malthus, strongly advocated private charity (something one would never know when going by the words of Hofstadter, Galbraith, and practically any leftwing or conservative intellectual), and, in fact, Spencer made the nauseating argument that a person was necessarily evil if he were rich and did not give to charity (this appears to be Andrew Carnegie's favorite aspect of Spencer's philosophy). Thus, the leftwingers' critiques of Spencer and Sumner are based on what are misunderstandings at best and distortions at worst. Leonard Peikoff and Ayn Rand are among the very few intellectuals to publicly criticize Spencer for what he actually deserved to be criticized for (his embarrasing concessions to socialist ideology) and Dr. Peikoff is one of the few people to take Sumner to task for his actual failings. Anyhow, in Social Darwinism in American Thought Hofstadter first presents his strawman argument against "free-market Social Darwinism" and then he equivocates it with other ideologies that use "evolutionary" terms to say that some people deserve a higher status than others, such as (1) advocates of state-imposed eugenics (like Charles Davenport and Karl Pearson), who argued that states should coercively sterilize people who have mentally-relatives, (2) supporters of "scientific racism," who said that whites are inherently superior to other races, (3) those who argued for "imperialism" because different countries are in "competition" and a country's superiority is proven by its victory in war, and (4) Nazis who simultaneously espoused state-imposed eugenics, imperialism, and "scientific racism." Herbert Spencer was a classical liberal who argued for laissez faire (aside from his atrocious concessions to altruism and his agreement with David Ricardo and Henry George that all land rents should be taxed 100 percent), and yet Hofstadter, Galbraith, and other leftists chose to exploit his evolutionary rhetoric to lump free-market advocacy together with the statism of state-mandated eugenics and National Socialism. Spencer and Sumner said that rich people in a free market deserved their "economic power" because they earned it. Statist eugenicists and fascists said that dictators had political power because they had genes that made them superior. Just because Spencer, Sumner and these statists all talked about evolution and "defended inequality," Hofstadter, Galbraith, and the rest of the Left chose to classify all of them in the package deal of "Social Darwinists." Basically, Hofstadter's underlying point was that any classical liberal who argued against the New Deal and the welfare state was really a crypto-Nazi. And this is why I find it extremely funny that evolutionary psychologists try to separate themselves from the "Social Darwinism movement" -- there never really was a Social Darwinism movement! Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner were wishy-washy classical liberals who tried to invoke evolution in their arguments, and they emphatically denounced another political movement that Hofstadter called "Social Darwinism" -- British colonization of other countries. The eugenicists espoused genetic determinism. Spencer and Sumner did not. In some sense, the term "evolutionary psychology," as well as its synonym, "sociobiology," do sound like "Social Darwinism." In the case of "evolutionary psychology," both "psychology" and "Social" refer to behavior, while "evolutionary" refers to "Darwinism." Likewise, with "sociobiology," "socio-" means "Social," while "biology" has to do with "Darwinism." When Edward O. Wilson created the modern "evolutionary psychology" movement in the 1970s by writing the book Sociobiology, he was attacked by campus Marxist groups who said that he was trying to revive "the Social Darwinism of John D. Rockefeller and Adolf Hitler." And do you know what Wilson's response was? He said that he resented seeing his own work be equated with the evils of "Rockefeller and Hitler." Neither E. O. Wilson or his critics perceived any difference between John D. Rockefeller, Sr.'s economic leverage and Hitler's mass murder. This is why I see "Social Darwinist" as an anti-concept. Its literal meaning is "Someone who tries to apply evolutionary theories to the social sciences." But its underlying meaning is, "Anyone who disagrees with egalitarian statism is a Nazi who wants poor people to die." This is why we see often see leftists and conservatives smearing Ayn Rand as a "Social Darwinist." Because of all this, I find much humor in sociobiology-sympathizer Jared Diamond disclaiming "the Social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner," as he repeats ad naseum the arguments of Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus, who much more accurately fits the modern image of a "Social Darwinist economist" than do either Spencer or Sumner. What's even funnier about Diamond proclaming himself to be unlike and superior to Sumner is that, in the early 1900s, Sumner even anticipated the central point to Diamond's Pulitzer-Prize winning book Guns, Germs, and Steel. According to Guns, Germs, every society is the way it is today because of its geographic conditions. Basically, Diamond says that every society has certain customs today because of "gene-culture co-evolution." Edward O. Wilson's "gene-culture co-evolution" stems from the idea that the passage of customs from one generation of people to another is the result of human beings having genes that make it easy for them to be conditioned. Great apes learn certain behaviors through copying what they see, and, in some ways, so do human beings (for instance, a baby learns to talk by observing adult speech and then trying to copy it). Among humans, it is not only "genetically programmed" behaviors that determine which people are most successful at propagating their genes, but also the skills that they learn. To the extent that a set of learned behaviors affect which groups of people become "reproductively successful," varieties in conditioning itself affect whose genes are passed on. In this way, says Wilson, customs and social mores themselves become factors in determining which members of society have the easiest time passing on their genes in the long run. Anyhow, all human cultures undego the process of "gene-culture co-evolution" simultaneously. In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond contends that the West is dominant today because Europeans got a "head start" as a result of the Eurasian region having a natural environment most conducive to agriculture. Basically, he says that the Mesopotamians invented agriculture first because they lived in the best geographic location, and that these customs spread throughout Europe thanks to geographic circumstance. Then Diamond makes the ridiculous (il)logical leap that, just because Eurasians got this "head start," all Western prosperity existing today should be attributed much more to luck than hard work, rationality, or economic freedom. Diamond's contempt for "Social Darwinism" is here laughable, because his argument was already made by "Social Darwinist" William Graham Sumner in his 1907 book Folkways. Sumner contended that every society has its current set of customs because a society's geographic circumstances led to certain customs being adopted through the natural selection of "gene-culture co-evolution" (not the term he used). For instance, he noticed that people wore very little clothes in hot regions, while they wore a lot of clothes where it was cold. In this sense, Sumner, so demonized by the academic Left, actually helped form a concept held very dearly by the academic Left today: "cultural relativism." Wikipedia claims he even coined the term "ethnocentrism," which the academic Left now employs as a euphemism for "evil." Sumner admitted, though, that certain traditions could outlive their usefulness and, at some point, they should be abandoned (such as the ridiclous practice of sacrificing somebody's life to appease the gods). Sumner is different from his academic descendants in that he admitted that one could objectively judge some non-Western customs to be counterproductive. Anyhow, given that Sumner anticipated Diamond by decades in saying that a given society's customs were determined by a combination of "geography" and the "naturally selective" interaction between geographic environment and generation-to-generation conditioning, it is ironic that Diamond is today hailed as a genius while everyone scorns Sumner. Incidentally, what is so specious about Diamond's Guns, Germs argument is that it gives insufficient credit to what sustains societal longevity in the long term. If a guy won a many-mile triathlon after having a two-second head start, should we attribute his victory solely to that two-second head start? Or could we say that, even if his head start was unfair, that guy still had to exert some effort to win? When people buy into Diamond's idea that "the West dominates because of its geographic head start, and that's all there is to it," they ignore the fact that civilizations are sustained in the long term by economic freedom. The Mesopotmians lived in what is now Iraq. If geography were everything, why isn't Iraq still the world's richest region? If the natural resources in a geographic environment are everything, then why are Russia, Latin America, and Africa -- so abundant in natural resources -- so poor? And why are Japan and Hong Kong -- which are so poor in natural resouces that the latter doesn't even have adequate farming land -- so wealthy per-capita? Jared Diamond, like so many evolutionary psychologists, comes to specious conclusions as a result of dropping context. This is why so many evolutionary psychologists make prescriptions for public policy that are outright execrable. However, evolutionary psychologists are more insightful than most political advocates in one sense: they are much more aware, under certain circumstances, that life is not a zero-sum game. Despite the Malthusianism of so many of its adherents, there are some people in evolutionary psychology who admit that peaceful commerce is a positive-sum game. Game Theorist and evolutionary pscyhologist Robert L. Trivers, as well as science writer Matt Ridley, observe that, when both buyer and seller make a peaceful trade without violating anyone's rights, both sides profit. They admit that this is a "positive-sum game" (John von Neumann's term) in which all participants win. In this sense, Ayn Rand's observation that there is not a conflict of interests between rational individuals actually anticipates a popular notion of evolutionary psychologists and Game Theorists. Unfortunately, these evolutionary psychologists and Game Theorists have their semantics all mixed up. Because both sides benefit in a peaceful commercial transaction, Robert L. Trivers and Matt Ridley refer to commerce as "reciprocal altruism." What insanity! Trivers, Ridley, et al. consider voluntary trade to be "altruism" because your participation in a trade benefits someone else. They don't care that altruism, as coined by Auguste Comte, involves sacrifice of the self -- something completely absent in a mutually profitable exchange. Better terms would be "mutually self-interested beneficience" or "mutual profit."
  11. Hey Hal, thanks for the reply! This is a good point, and I'm kind of stuck on the sidelines with this one. One example I can give you of a culture having a different idea of "beauty" is the idea that an Ancient Hawaiian queen was beautiful if she were fat. That contadicts Western standards. In Survival of the Prettiest, Nancy Etcoff has a rebuttal to this, but I don't know if I completely agree with her. Anyhow, evolutionary psychologists reply that there are some transcultural beauty standards. They say that in experiments conducted in both the East and West, there is a correlation between how attractive someone is rated and how symmetrical his or her face is. The more symmetical, the more good-looking a person is considered on average (the evolutionary pscyhologists' computers say that former President Clinton has a very mathematically symmetrical face). With respect to certain royal women being considered better-looking if they're fat in some cultures, Dr. Etcoff replies that this is an exception that has to do with status. Since food is scarce in many tribal cultures, a high-status woman having tremendous girth is a sign of her wealth. However, Dr. Etcoff maintains that, in the lower classes, thinner is still considered preferrable. I would like to discuss a phenomenon I once believed disproved the idea of "transcultural beauty," but one I now think is evidence of the other viewpoint. I saw some news reports of some women in some East Asian cultures (I wish I could remember which countries) who wear certain special collars to artificially elongate their necks. Their necks grow unnaturally long. When I saw that on TV, my immediate reaction was, "Ewwwwww!!!" I thought right there that that proved that conceptions of beauty varied from culture to culture. However, Dr. Etcoff says that, in Western culture, men on average prefer women to have necks that are slightly longer than normal. Thus, it can be argued that East Asian women who artificially elongate their necks actually share the Western notion that women are better-looking with long necks, and that it's just that women in these Asian countries take it to such an extreme that Westerners no longer find them attractive. That's very true. There's nothing inherently irrational about a guy finding a woman attractive based on looks. This only becomes a problem when the guy drops context and judges the woman's attractiveness primarily on these grounds. I think one problem with evolutionary psychologists is that, when they see a guy judging a woman based on the "whole package," especially on her personality, rather than just her physical health, the evolutionary psychologist says, "Oh, this is the triumph of the human mind over biology." What utter Platonic/Hume-ish poppycock!! The rational mind is an evolutionary consequence of biology, and so a person's exercise of rationality is entirely consistent with his or her biological nature. I have read that some evolutionary psychologists say that, to some extent, people of different ethnicities might have different taste with regard to things like nostril size, nose shape, eyelid type, etc. I believe that Dr. Etcoff said that, on average, people tend to be attracted toward people of similar ethnicities, though, of course, people fall in love with those of different ethnicities all the time, especially in America. Evolutionary psychologists admit that certain behaviors in human beings are more the result of "conditioning" instead of "genetic programming," but they do not concede that this is outside the realm of their field. Edward O. Wilson and primatologist Frans de Waal say that the fact that a human being can learn new behaviors through conditioning -- such as driving a car, as there is obviously no "driving gene" -- is itself a consequence of natural selection. For instance, many chimpanzees will place a stick into an ant hole, let the ants crawl up the stick, and then eat the ants on it. Evolutionary psychologists maintain that this is the result of evolution even if there is no combination of genes "programming" chimps to perform this complex action. The model can be like this: There are two chimps, neither of which have genes that "program" them to use a stick when eating ants. However, one chimp is "Easily-Conditioned Chimp," who has genes that make him or her more receptive to learning new behaviors. "No-Conditioning Chimp" has genes that make it difficult for him or her to learn new skills. If "No-Conditioning Chimp" does not learn new skills in an perilous environment, he will probably die, and his "no-conditioning genes" perish with him. "Easily-Conditioned Chimp," on the other hand, learns the new skill of eating ants in the manner I described earlier. He lives and has babies. These babies in no way inherit a gene for "placing a stick in an ant hole and then eating the ants off the stick." However, these babies do inherit the genes that make it easy for them to learn new behaviors through conditioning and through imitation. When the babies with the "easily conditioned" gene combinations observe their parent eating ants that way, they eventually learn to behave that way themselves. Among the chimpanzees, whether or not some members of the species acquire a certain trait through conditioning -- rather than through "genetic programming" -- will determine which members will have the opportunity to pass on their genes in the long term. I have heard that Matt Ridley has written an entire book on this subject, saying that "nature" and "nurture" are in this kind of eternal feedback loop. I have come across a similar argument from Edward O. Wilson, saying that "nature" and "nurture" co-exist simultaneously in any environment, though, as is typical with him, he did not acknowledge the importance of free will in human beings.
  12. I believe that evolutionary psychologists do have some good points; it's just that a number of them go overboard in proclaiming that people are "meat machines" without free will, whose personality traits are "genetically programmed." I notice that a particularly egregious fallacy of evolutionary psychologists like Jared Diamond and Edward O. Wilson is that they cannot tell the differences between human beings and chimpanzees. Diamond and Wilson quite correctly note a number of behavioral similarites between chimps and humans. But then this leads them to ignore certain important differences. They observe that chimp populations actually do go through a Malthusian cycle in which the population exceeds the food supply, leading to many chimps in a band dying from starvation, and also to some clans of chimps "making war" on other chimps for resources. Diamond and Wilson then conclude that this must necesarily happen to human beings living under capitalism, too. What they ignore is that capitalism leaves human beings free to exercise their rational faculty in combating the problem of resource depletion by discovering new methods of extracting greater levels of output while using fewer and smaller inputs of natural resources and manhours. Every input of natural resources and manhours represents a cost to the entrepreneur, so the market rewards entrepreneurs who can reduce such inputs while maintaining output. Because they do not allow for such intellectual freedom, it is socialist economies that inevitably suffer from the Malthusian "collapses" that plague chimps. That's Say's Law of Markets (it was a misrepresentation when John Maynard Keynes summarized Say's Law as "supply creates its own demand"). Say's Law is actually "production necessarily precedes consumption." And Atlas Shrugged demonstrated this point far more clearly than Say did. But because Jared Diamond and Edward O. Wilson insist on refusing to see a difference between rationally efficacious humans and arational (or pre-rational) chimps, this all goes over their heads. However, I do believe that evolution does describe certain basic human behaviors that are analogous to other members of the animal kingdom. For instance, why do human beings find sex physically pleasurable? The physical pleasure from sex is a consequence of natural selection -- its purpose is to provide an incentive for passing on the gene. It goes like this. Suppose there are two mammals of the same species. "Pro-Sex Mammal" has a gene that makes sex physically pleasurable for him. "Anti-Sex Mammal" has a gene that makes sex physically displeasurable for him. Thus, "Anti-Sex Mammal" will refrain from having sex. He won't pass on his genes to the next generation. When he dies, his genes die with him. Contrariwise, "Pro-Sex Mammal," seeking pleasure from sex, does copulate. And he passes those "pro-sex" genes on to another generation. Over a period of generations, the members in these species with the "sex is pleasurable" gene grow more plentiful, while those with the "sex is uncomfortable" gene are gradually phased out. In fact, the "I find sex pleasurable" gene is self-perpetuating. It's a meme. Of course, all of this is pre-rational. I am describing a phenomenon that has occurred millions of years before the evolution of the human rational faculty. But I believe it's the same reason why people find others physically attractive. In our modern industrial times, we consider it shallow to want to marry someone and have kids with him or her solely on the basis of physical attractiveness. But, as far as natural selection is concerned, that wasn't as bad an idea in prehistoric times when the average human lifespan was 27 years and life was much more dangerous. In prehistoric times, it was very easy to judge someone's health just by looking at him or her. Without modern medicine, people contracted diseases which made their presence very obvious on the outside, such as smallpox. Large sections of the population were grotesquely deformed by syphilis. If someone was what we modern people would call "ugly," he or she more than likely had a terribly dangerous disease. The survival of the gene was largely contingent upon a person avoiding sex with an "ugly" person because (1) he or she might pass his or her disease onto you, making it difficult for you to parent, (2) if that disease is genetic, he or she will probably pass on those genes to another generation, creating children that will probably not survive in the long term (of course, I doubt any caveman had such concepts of genetics) (3) even if healthy children result from mating with an "ugly" person, that "ugly" person probably would not live long enough to raise and protect those children before they themselves reached mating-age. Such prehistoric humans did not reject "ugly" mates for such conscious reasons, of course. There was just the visceral response of "disease-ugly = not worthy of mating with." Of course, the human rational faculty eventually culminated in the emergence of the Industrial Revolution, which lengthened lifespans from 27 years to 47 years in the duration of 1800-1900, and then to 77 years by 1988. The result of the Industrial Revolution is that the majority of the Western population is so much healthier than the vast majority of prehistoric human population. By prehistoric standards, "healthfulness" among Westerners is the rule, whereas it was exception in prehistoric times. Someone whom we may consider "not good-looking" by our modern standards will not necessarily have a shorter lifespan than someone we call "good-looking." We still don't ignore good looks entirely, of course. And much of our concern with physical appearance can be attributed to evolution. For instance, if I look at a woman I consider good-looking, I might have the visceral reaction of, "Wow! She's hot!! I want to ask her out." A part of that can be attributed to genes. Yet the discovery of fire and the inventions of written language and the wheel had much more to do with the flourishing of Homo sapiens than someone "having a visceral aversion to people who look like they have terrible diseases." As Dr. Ellen Kenner observed, Why is that? For a lower mammal, it's good enough to mate with a member of the same species solely on the basis of a superficial assessment of that member's health. For modern human beings, however, choosing a rational person with a good personality is lieklier to yield the long-term survival of one's genes than on picking someone who's good-looking but also dangerous and mentally unstable. Some evolutionary psychologists ignore that volition -- free will -- is also a consequence of the evolution of human biology. I believe that evolutionary psychology provides adequate explanations of how certain "pre-rational" or "proto-rational" (as opposed to "necessarily irrational") behaviors in human beings came into existence, such as being physically attracted to someone, or learning a new skill through imitation. I would say, though, that evolutionary pscyhologists would avoid many errors if they recognized that whether one exercises his or her rational faculty -- the greatest evolutionary adaptation of all -- has much more to do with whether one survives in the long-term and passes on his or her genes in the long term (if he or she so chooses) than "genetically-created predispositions" and urges. But this raises a question I would like to ask all of you about. In a very interesting book titled Survival of the Prettiest, psychologist Nancy Etcoff discusses an experiment. First, the photographs of a certain various people are shown to a group of adults, and the people in the photos are rated on how "good-looking" they are. When those same photographs are shown to newborn infants, says Dr. Etcoff, the experimenters found that, on average, the people rated as "best-looking" by the adults were also the ones whose pictures the babies stared at for the longest intervals. This leads some evolutionary psychologists to conclude that the idea of human beauty is innate. Even if the experimenters' methodology is "on the level," I disagree with the conclusion that this proves that there are innate ideas. I make this distinction because I believe that an idea is a conceptual integration. A baby may have the same visceral reaction to a "good-looking person" that an adult may have, but that's just a reaction to various concretes. That's not the same as a baby making the integration of, "What all of these faces have in common is that I like looking at all of them." That sort of integration comes later, probably when the baby is learning some words. What do you think?
  13. I have taken this test several times since 1998, and I have scored alternately as an INTJ, INTP, and INFJ. With respect to Ayn Rand being classified as an INTJ by Jung typology psychologist David R. Keirsey, Jr. (whose "Keirsey Temperament Sorter" was alluded to in the 1999 remake of The Haunting), I have not come across any evidence of Ayn Rand taking the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. I suspect that what really happened is just that Dr. Keirsey liked Ayn Rand's books and thought she and her protagonists were good examples of "NT Rationals," hence his references to Miss Rand on his website and in both editions of his book Please Understand Me. In other words, Dr. Keirsey is probably just inferring that Ayn Rand was an INTJ. Some other MBTI expert might surmise that she was an INTP. You may notice that Dr. Keirsey's assessment of John F. Kennedy, Sr., conflicts with that of other MBTI experts. Dr. Keirsey classifies JFK as an "ESTP" while TypeLogic.Com says he was an INTJ. That's a three-letter difference. I suspect that one reason why people often say, "This test has accurately described me" is that it loaded with compliments and several generalities. When the test describes someone as "independent," what is the likelihood that this person will say, "No, I'm a blind conformist"? This reminds me of an experiment that magician James Randi conducted. He told a college class to submit certain bits of information about their birthdays to an astrologer. The astrologer then made a personalized reading of each student and put each student's reading in a envelope with the individual student's name on it. Then, all in the same class session, Randi passed each student his or her envelope and had them read their personalized horoscope right then and there. Randi then said, "If this psychic reading of your personality is very accurate and specific, raise your hand." Everyone in the class did. Randi then said, "All right, now everyone pass your horoscope to the person behind you. Those of you in the back row will pass your horoscope to the person in the front row." It turned out that everyone received the exact same horoscope reading, word-for-word. When reporter John Stossel re-did this experiment, he also revealed to the class that the "personalized reading" they received was actually done for an executed murderer. Randi explained that everyone in the class thought the horoscope was so accurate because it spoke in terms of certain generalities, like, "You feel that you're not living up to your full potential." I have an idea for a double-blind experiment testing the accuracy of the MBTI. I don't know much about what people have done in psychology, so I'm not sure if such a test has not already been performed. Anyway, this is my suggestion. You have two randomly-sampled groups of people, and, in each group, each person takes the MBTI and then receives his or her personalized results. No test-taker in any group may discuss his or her results with anyone else. Anyhow, upon receiving his or her results, the test-taker must then rate the accuracy of the test on a scale from 1 to 10, 10 being "perfectly accurate." In the control group, each test-taker receives the correct results. If you come out as an INTJ, then you will receive a description of an INTJ. In the experimental group, however, each test-taker will receive results that have two wrong letters. If the test-taker gets an INTJ score, then he or she will get the results for an ENTP, INFP, ISTP, or ENFJ. Of course, this test-taker will be told that these are his or her actual results. If the MBTI is reliable in measuring your personality, then the control group should noticeably be ranking its results, on average, as more reliable than the experimental group's. Of course, even then, a criticism of the MBTI can be made on the grounds that the test is merely "telling" you what you have already told the test. As woolcutt, also an Oo.net member, observed to me, many of the test questions are like this: "Are you: "(1) A synonym for Introverted? "(2) A synonym for Extroverted?" If you often pick answers that are a synonym for "Introvert," should it be surprising that that MBTI ends up telling you that you're an introvert? What do you think?
  14. softwareNerd sure is right about the cost of living! It may be true that a lot of the high cost of living in Hawaii can be attributed to the fact that it is an archipelago, but a number of regulations make it even more expensive to live here than it otherwise would be. For example, a federal law called the Jones Act, which was enacted as a "temporary" measure during World War II, forbids foreign ships from sailing from one U.S. port to another. The law requires that the only vessels that may make trips between U.S. ports are those that are built entirely in the United States and are manned solely by U.S. citizens. So basically, whenever a Japanese ship decides to drop off cargo for U.S. customers, it has to choose between docking in Hawaii or, say, California. Quite logically, the Japanese ship chooses the significantly larger market of the continent. In order for Hawaii to receive foreign goods, the state's businesses have to pay one of two companies -- Matson Navigation or Horizon Lines (formerly CSX, which I think Treasury Secretary John Snow previously worked for) -- to sail all the way to the U.S. mainland to pick up all of their imported merchandise. Naturally, the cost is passed on to consumers. I'm very glad to hear (read?) that woolcutt is on Oahu. The fifiteth state could use a lot more students of Objectivism. This is a most welcome development! I've been saying that all my life.
  15. Hey, you're going to the University of Hawai'i at Manoa? I can't tell you how awesome that is!!
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