Crawl Across the Ocean

Thursday, May 31, 2012

Rare Gem

The Globe and Mail is pretty pathetic these days (and not in a sympathetic way), but this is pretty awesome.

Yon don't often see this:


"Paris Hilton wears a slitty gown at amfAR's Cinema Against AIDS event during the Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, France, last week."

...preceded by this:


"Thousands of Quebec students march through Montreal to protest university tuition fee hikes. Oh wait. Sorry about that, English Canada. You didn't come here to look at a bunch of self-centred, entitled people who don't know the value of a dollar and obviously crave attention. I don't know what I was thinking. You have no time for those kind of people."

More at the link.

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Wednesday, May 30, 2012

105. The Righteous Mind - Part 2

Note: This post is the one hundred and fifth in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click here for the full listing of the series. The first post in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.

This week the topic is the book, "The Righteous Mind" by Jonathan Haidt. Having read the book, I highly recommend the NY Times review of it as an excellent summary.

Note that we have encountered the work of Jonathan Haidt before, albeit indirectly, in this earlier post which discussed an essay by Steven Pinker, which was written as a reaction to Haidt's work.

Today's post covers the first of Haidt's three main arguments, that:

1) People don't make rational decisions to decide what is moral, but instead have instinctive reactions regarding morality and then rationalize their instinctive reaction after the fact. Haidt likens the rational, conscious part of the brain to a rider sitting on an elephant (the part of the brain which makes the instinctive moral judgement) and argues that the rider has little control.

In fact, Haidt argues that the primary function of the ration part of the brain is not to conduct dispassionate analysis, but rather to come up with reasons to support whatever instinctive judgment the elephant (the intuitive part of the brain) has already come up with. Haidt recounts a number of experiments which support his thesis, including one where people were hypnotized to have negative associations with certain words, and then read passages describing moral violations some of which included the code word and some that didn't. The researchers found that passages containing negative code words lead to stronger negative reactions from the readers. To their surprise, even a story which didn't describe any moral transgression at all, and simply said either that, "Dad tries to take topics that appeal to both professors and students in order to stimulate discussion, or the same thing but worded so that "Dan often picks topics" found that in a third of respondents, inclusion of a negative code word lead them to morally condemn Dan. The researchers had asked people to explain their reaction and those who reacted negatively to Dan said things like, "Dan is a popularity seeking snob' or "I don't know, it just seems like he's up to something."

Haidt argues that the intuitive part of our brain is always active, instantly judging everything and everyone we come across as favourable or unfavourable, and then the 'rational' part of our brain steps in to provide reasonable sounding arguments to support this position. In one study, (echoed in the news recently), researches found that people who were more intelligent were able to come up with more reasons to support whatever position they held, but greater intelligence did not help at all in coming up with reasons for the opposing point of view. In other words, being smarter just makes you better able to rationalize your own intuitive reactions, not better able to understand other opinions.

Haidt figures that in evolution, it was more important for people to be able to maintain their social reputation (by explaining their actions, creating arguments to support their gut (intuitive) reactions and so on) than it was for them to come to accurate conclusions about what was true.

Haidt does allow for some capacity of the rational part of the brain to do more than just support the intuitive part. He cites a study in which if people were forced to wait 2 minutes before responding to some stimulus, then they would be less likely to just go with the gut reaction and more likely to come to a reasoned conclusion. But mostly Haidt is pessimistic about the ability of the individual to question their own biases or challenge their own intuitive reactions and beliefs - he believes that we need other people to challenge us and that society needs a back and forth between people of different viewpoints in order for people to be exposed to multiple viewpoints and have a chance to update their opinions based on competing arguments rather than just constantly searching out more supporting evidence for what they already believe.

In the last chapter of the first section of the book, Haidt has a list of bullet points summarizing the argument so far, that we care obsessively about our reputation, that conscious reasoning is like a press secretary that argues on our behalf, not a scientist searching for truth, and that reasoning can take us to almost any conclusion because we ask, 'can I believe it?' about things we want to believe and 'Must I believe it?" about things we don't.

But I wanted to focus on his last bullet point which is as follows:

"In moral and political matters we are often groupish, rather than selfish. We deploy our reasoning skills to support our team, and to demonstrate commitment to our team."

Atrios expresses this in characteristically pithy fashion, as "It's tribal." an further notes that, "Policy preferences mostly aren't about narrow personal economic considerations, even for the rich."

It's interesting that Haidt focused in on the political realm, home to the guardian syndrome, which is filled with interpersonal ethics such as 'be loyal' as compared to the commercial syndrome where the duty to other people is pretty much limited to not screwing them over (foregoing force and fraud). In this he is echoing some of the earlier works we have encountered such as Hans Ritschl, Howard Margolis and Plato.

Disappointingly, Haidt does not really delve into the question of how or why commercial activity or science might lack the groupishness or tribalness that is present in morality (as seen by Haidt) and in politics, or why politics in particular sees this tribal behaviour.

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Wednesday, May 09, 2012

104. The Righteous Mind, Part 1

Note: This post is the one hundred and fourth in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click here for the full listing of the series. The first post in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.

This week the topic is the book, "The Righteous Mind" by Jonathan Haidt. Having read the book, I highly recommend the NY Times review of it as an excellent summary.

Note that we have encountered the work of Jonathan Haidt before, albeit indirectly, in this earlier post which discussed an essay by Steven Pinker, which was written as a reaction to Haidt's work.

The Righteous Mind has three main arguments:

1) People don't make rational decisions to decide what is moral, but instead have instinctive reactions regarding morality and then rationalize their instinctive reaction after the fact. Haidt likens the rational, conscious part of the brain to a rider sitting on an elephant (the part of the brain which makes the instinctive moral judgement) and argues that the rider has little control.

2) Rather than seeing people as having no morality at all and being solely self-interested or even just having a moral system oriented solely around not doing harm or being unfair, Haidt argues that in addition to caring about care/harm and fairness/cheating, people also care about freedom/oppression, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion and sanctity/degradation. Haidt compares these moral senses to tastebuds, and according to his studies, people that are "WEIRD" (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic) tend to to focus more on Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating and Freedom/Oppression, while Conservatives have a wider range of moral values (note: you can take Haidt's test here (registration required) - I tried it and scored higher than both the typical American liberal and the typical American Conservative on care, fairness, loyalty and authority, and lower than both on sanctity - even though I am Western, Educated, Rich and Democratic, perhaps my lack of exposure to Industrial workplaces made the difference :)

3) That people are 90% chimp and 10% bee, meaning that people are a mix of self-interested and group-interested. I won't recount the old arguments about how on the one hand, being selfish helps individual genes reproduce while on the other hand cooperative groups can outcompete selfish ones, but Haidt offers lots of support for the notion that evolution offerred ample opportunity for humans to evolve a nature that is at least partly group-interested rather than being purely self-interested.


I do recommend Haidt's book, it is easy to read, entertaining, covers a lot of ground, and will change the way you interpret other people's (and perhaps your own) expression of opinions and moral views.

Additionally, Haidt is well read, marshals lots of empirical evidence for his arguments, doesn't seem to be following a rigid ideological agenda and seems willing to consider new information and change his views accordingly.

The next few posts will look at some of Haidt's arguments in a bit more detail and get into some of the areas where, in my opinion, there is some room for improvement in his thesis.

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