Sexually dimorphic facial features vary according to level of autistic-like traits in the general population.
“three-dimensional (3D) facial images were collected from 208 young adult males and females recruited from the general population. Twenty-three facial distances were measured from these images and a gender classification and scoring algorithm was employed to identify a set of six facial features that most effectively distinguished male from female faces. In study 2, measurements of these six features were compared for groups of young adults selected for high (n = 46) or low (n = 66) levels of autistic-like traits.
RESULTS:
For each sex, four of the six sexually dimorphic facial distances significantly differentiated participants with high levels of autistic-like traits from those with low trait levels. All four features were less masculinised for high-trait males compared to low-trait males. Three of four features were less feminised for high-trait females compared to low-trait females. One feature was, however, not consistent with the general pattern of findings and was more feminised among females who reported more autistic-like traits. Based on the four significantly different facial distances for each sex, discriminant function analysis correctly classified 89.7% of the males and 88.9% of the females into their respective high- and low-trait groups.”
I wonder if they controlled for family’s overall androgyny level/IQ/ethnicity.
I know it shouldn’t surprise me when people post outright, bold-faced lies about, say, the nature of humanity, but somehow I still stare in shock for a split second or two before struggling with whether or not to respond.
It’s generally a bad idea to respond, another thing you would think I’d have learned by now. No one likes the guy who starts every comment with, “Actually…”
Today’s lie was, to paraphrase slightly due to memory being imperfect, “Animals are so loving and compassionate, even to members not of their own species! Humans totally fail at compassion. We should learn from our ape cousins and ancestors!” The sentiments were accompanied by an adorable picture of an orangutan holding a baby tiger.
Okay, the exclamation points are my own additions.
First, the obvious: This shit is a baldfaced lie. If animals were regularly compassionate and loving to members of other species, lions would be vegans and running adoption agencies for baby gazelles whose parents had fallen victim to unfortunate accidents. If animals were regularly loving and compassionate, we wouldn’t make a big deal out of it every time a hippo and turtle hang out together. Does someone write a picture book documenting every set of human kids who become friends? Or every human who feeds a pet? Of course not. We only document these animal stories because they’re unusual.
Reality is boring. Lies entertain.
“But wait,” I hear you saying, “My dog totally loves me.”
Your dog is the result of thousands of years of selective breeding specifically for friendliness to humans. Also, you give it food. Does your dog give you food?
No.
Anyway, how nice are animals?
“Altruism” is defined (by the Wikipedia, anyway,) as, “behaviour by an individual that increases the fitness of another individual while decreasing the fitness of the actor.” Wikipedia defines “compassion” as a, “response to the suffering of others that motivates a desire to help.”
I’m not going to even try to define “love.”
Now, the definition of altruism itself hints that inter-species altruism probably isn’t a thing you’re going to see very often, because if the altruist increases the genes of another species at the expense of their own genes, then whatever genes originally drove the altruist to be altruistic become less common. Over time, the inter-species altruist gets replaced by everyone else, and altruism disappears.
This doesn’t mean that no one can ever be altruistic–altruism works just fine if it’s directed at your near kin. Animals that have a strong instinct to care for their family members and a certain level of intelligence can even apply that caring instinct to non-family. But I wouldn’t expect much friendliness from a crocodile.
It does means that claims about widespread altruism among animals toward other animals that aren’t family are probably nonsense.
The vast majority of observed instances of animal altruism involve close kin, pack members, or behavior that would normally be directed toward one’s kin but happened, by accident, to involve a non-related individual. The Wikipedia list on the subject, while incomplete and imperfect, gives a good impression.
In reality, the vast, vast majority of animals in this world do not give a shit about members not of their own species. Most of them don’t even care about members of their own species who aren’t family, and some will even eat their own children.
What about claim two, that humans suck at compassion?
Certainly some of us do. Humans aren’t as nice as I wish we were. Compassion, trust, kindness, etc., are all traits I would like to see more of in humans. But compared to animals, we look like Mother Theresa. How many animals set out little houses, baths, and seed-filled feeders for other animals? How many animals buy cancer treatments for their pets? For that matter, how many animals feed and care for a pet, period?
These behaviors are almost exclusively human.
Humans adopt orphans, run into burning buildings to rescue each other, fund social welfare nets, and spend a lot of time trying to prove to each other just how much they care about each other. Movies and novels basically wouldn’t exist without our capacity to empathize with strangers.
Humans support this level of altruism because our societies have bred us, like dogs, for it. (And since different societies are different, that means that different societies have bred different types/levels of altruism and compassion.) It is only in modern, first-world societies that we see anything resembling wide-spread altruism. Slavery–generally outlawed throughout the West in the late 17 or 1800s–is still common throughout many parts of Africa and the rest of the third world. If you really want to break your heart, just go read about Cambodian children sold as sex slaves at the age of 5. (Clearly the solution is more orangutans.)
(Seriously, what is the point of having a military if we don’t occasionally swoop into those brothels, behead everyone running the place, and then leave their heads on pikes about the city as warnings to everyone else?)
How about the final claim: Should we learn from the other apes?
Which do you think is friendlier, your dog or a wolf? The dog, obviously.
Human society has been getting steadily less violent for about as long as we’ve managed to account. Everyday life in non-state and pre-state societies is/was about as violent as Russia during WWII, only a bit more spread out. Chimpanzees, like wolves, are well-known for their violence. They wage war, form alliances to overthrow their leaders, and murder chimpanzee babies in order to breed faster with their mothers.
But what about bonobos?
I’ll grant that they have a lot of sex. They’re also known to be less aggressive than chimpanzees. This is not the same as being less aggressive than H sapiens. Until I see some data on bonobo homicide, I’m going to continue suspecting that bonobos are more violent than humans. Remember, some human societies–25 of them, though several of those are teeny–have gotten their murder rates down below 1 in 100,000 people. Since 50,000 is the high end estimate of number of bonobos on earth, if even one bonobo kills another bonobo once every two years, they’d still have 6x the homicide rate of Japan.
Not to mention that, unsurprisingly, empathy and “emotional intelligence” appear to correlaterather well withregular intelligence–and since humans are noticeably smarter (on average) than chimps, gorillas, bonobos, or tigers, this implies that we are probably better at empathizing with others, feeling compassion, and being generally altruistic.
This is pretty obvious to just about anyone who has ever had to deal with a bully, or looked at the average IQs of criminals.
All of which leads us back to our initial quandary: Why do people tell (and believe) such obvious lies?
I posit two reasons:
1. The other is but a foil for the self, and most people don’t really process words into their exact meanings, but into internal feeling-states. So when they say, “Animals are so caring and compassionate; we should be more like them,” they actually mean, “I like being caring and compassionate; you should be more like me.”
2. People who are caring and compassionate tend also to be caring and compassionate about animals, so thinking nice things about animals because it makes them happy.
Most of the time, people seem to remember that crime rates are actually lower among humans than among wild animals, and so don’t get too close to bears. (Sometimes they forget, but Gnon has his way with them.) But I do occasionally encounter people who really, truly seem to believe this. They really think that humans are irredeemably evil, and the world would be better off without us. But a world without humans would be a world with even less empathy and compassion than our current world, not more.
Here’s a hypothetical for you. Suppose Population A and Population B both live in a country. Population A started the place. They built it from scratch–farms, roads, transportation networks, the whole sheboodle. Population B doesn’t do so well financially, educationally, or organizationally, but they sure do have a lot of kids. In fact, while PopA has a modest 2 kids per couple, PopB does its best to turn out 6 or 7.
Most of PopA is totally oblivious, but a few smart guys in PopA can do math, and realize that pretty soon, PopB will outnumber them. Some among them start claiming that if they let PopB run things, well, things’ll just stop running.
I hypothesize that humans have only so many shits to give.
Some of us start out with more inherent ability to care than others do, but however much caring you’ve got in you, there’s probably not a lot you can do to increase it beyond that basic amount.
What you can do, however, is shift it around.
If things are going really badly for yourself, you’ll dedicate most of your energy to yourself–dealing with sickness, job loss, divorce, etc., leave very little energy leftover for anyone else. You are simply empty. You have no more shits to give.
If things are going badly for someone close to you–family or friend–you’ll dedicate much of your energy to them. A sick or suffering child, for example, will completely absorb your care.
Beyond your immediate circle of close friends and family, the ability to care about others drops dramatically, as the number of others increases dramatically. You might give a suffering acquaintance $5 or an hour of your time, but it is rare to otherwise go out of one’s way for strangers.
There are just way too many people in this category to care deeply about all of them. You don’t have that much time in your day. You can, however, care vaguely about their well-being. You can read about an earthquake in Nepal and feel really bad for those people.
One of the goals of moralists and philosophers has been (I think) to try to increase peoples’ concern for the well-being of others. If concern for others can actually be *increased*, then we may be able to care about ever-bigger groups of people. This would be especially good for people in modern society, as we now live among millions of people in countries of hundreds of millions on a planet with billions, while possessing nuclear weapons and the ability to destroy our own environment, it is pretty important that we feel at least some vague feelings of responsibility toward people who are not within our immediate friend/family circles.
Even if moralizers and the like can only cause a small increase in the amount of caring we can do, that still could be the difference between nuking a million people or not, so that’s still a valuable thing to try.
(Note that this kind of large-scale concern is probably entirely evolutionarily novel, as the ability to even know that people exist on the other side of the planet is evolutionarily novel. Most people throughout human history lived more or less in tiny hunter-gatherer bands and people not in their bands were basically enemies; it is only in a handful of countries over the past couple thousand years or so that this basic pattern has shifted.)
But to the extent that the number of shits we can give is fixed, we might end up just shuffling around our areas of concern.
And doing that seems likely to be prone to a variety of difficulties, like outrage fatigue (being unable to sustain a high level of caring for very long,) missing vital things that we should have been concerned about while being concerned about other things, and fucking things up via trying to fix problems we don’t actually know the first thing about and then getting distracted by the next concerning thing without ever making sure we actually improved things.
Well-meaning people often try hard to care about lots of things; they feel like they should be, somehow, treating others as they would themselves–that is, extending to everyone in the world the same level of caring and compassion. This is physically impossible, which leads to well-meaning people feeling bad about their inability to measure up to their standards of goodness. As Scot Alexander points out, it’s better to set reasonable goals for yourself and accomplish them than to set unreasonable goals and then fail.
My own recommendation is to beware of “caring” that is really just social posturing (putting someone down for not being hip to the latest political vocabulary, or not knowing very much about an obscure issue,) or any case of suddenly caring about the plight of “others” far away from you whom you didn’t care about five minutes ago. (Natural disasters excepted, as they obviously cause a significant change in people’s conditions overnight.) Understand your limits–realize that trying to solve problems of people you’ve never met and whom you know virtually nothing about is probably not going to work, but you can make life better for your friends, family, and local community. You can concentrate on understanding a few specific issues and devote time and resources to those.
So I was reading a fairytale to the younguns, “…’Spin me all this,’ said the Queen, ‘and when it is finished, you shall have my eldest son for your husband. Your poverty is a matter of no consequence to me, for I consider that your unremitting industry is an all sufficient dowry.”
I paused and said to my husband, “This is a German fairytale.”
We both started laughing.
There is something about German seriousness and industriousness that I find amusing; I suppose that makes Germans one of the few ethnic groups I find funny. It’s always with such little self-awareness that my German friends seem to comment about how they just don’t know why they work so hard and are such perfectionists.
Asian friends, similarly, complain about how they just can’t stop themselves from working hard and paying attention to tiny details, even when they’re quite sick or actually want to stop hyper-focusing on a particular project.
At any rate, I stand by my initial assessment of Rumpelstiltskin.
Meanwhile, have you seen the lovely new pictures of Pluto?
Isn’t this fucking amazing?
Charon, Pluto’s biggest moon.
Two to Tango
Oh, wait, those are Jupiter and Io. Well, I like them, too.
Empathy: the psychological identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.
False empathy is claiming empathy with people one has never met/has no connection with, for the purpose of harming/denying empathy to someone right in front of oneself, someone with whom you ought to have some sort of connection.
It is generally expressed as, “yes, I see you are hurting terribly, but I do not care because of your opinion on X”, or even, “No, you cannot actually be hurting, because of your opinion on X.”
This is not empathy. It’s a form of bullying; it drives people apart and decreases trust.
(Another form of false empathy is identifying with the suffering of others, but being completely clueless about their hopes, joys, angers, humor, or basically the vast majority of emotions and motivations they feel.)
The Huffington Post reports that The Murder Rate for Hispanics is Twice that for Whites. HuffPo is talking about victimization rates–that is, the number of Hispanics murdered, not murdering. But murder is largely a within-group phenomenon–that is, people tend to target their own–so most of those dead Hispanics were probably killed by other Hispanics.
The Color of Crime reports incarceration rates that match HuffPo’s victimization rates:
(And, in general, the Color of Crime report demonstrates that incarceration rates reflect actual offending rates.)
Note that the Color of Crime graph is not an absolute rate, but a multiple–a multiple of 1 means that the crime rate is equal to the white crime rate; a multiple of 2 means it is twice the white crime rate; a multiple of 0.5 means the rate is half that of whites. Asians tend to offend at statistically insignificant rates. Pacific Islanders apparently really like stealing cars (maybe it’s just easier to find stolen cars on a small island in the middle of the ocean than on a big continent.) High manslaughter among the Indians is probably a result of drunk driving. And Hispanics commit all crimes at a rate of slightly less than 2.5 times that of whites.
“Ah, but “Hispanics” and “Hispanic immigrants” are not the same group,” I hear you saying. That is irrelevant; the children of immigrants only get here via their parents immigrating, and it appears that the children of immigrants actually have much higher crime rates than their parents. No one is comforted that their attacker’s parents were immigrants, rather than immigrants themselves. Either way, immigration is at play.
Other people estimate other crime rates:
Source: La Griffe du Lion, Crime and the Hispanic Effect. In this case, the match between the HuffPo data and the Color of Crime data makes me trust it better than La Griffe du Lion’s, even though I normally find La Griffe pretty credible.
Why such debate over crime rates? Because the FBI hasn’t historically counted “Hispanics” in its crime stats (though I hear they are going to start.) “Hispanic” isn’t a race, it’s just a word that means that you or your ancestors spoke Spanish. Hispanics therefore can be–and are–members of any race.
Now, there is quite obviously something major going on in our data: the black crime rate. Yes, the Hispanic crime rate is lower than the black crime rate.
Let’s play with some numbers. Let’s suppose we’ve got 320 million Americans. We’ll estimate the black crime rate at 20 out of 1000, the white at 5/1000, and the Hispanic at 10/1ooo.
If our population is 10% black + 90% white = 2 black crimes / 1000 + 4.5 white crimes / 1000 = 2,080,000 total crimes. (This reflects the demographics of 1920.)
If our population is 10% black + 65% white + 25% Hispanic = 2 black crimes / 1000 + 3.25 white crimes / 1000 + 2.5 Hispanic crimes / 1000 = 2,160,000 total crimes. (This is closer to our modern demographics.)
That is, 80,000 extra crimes per year.
(Obviously I am simplifying by leaving out small groups like Indians and Asians, [who don’t particularly commit much crime, anyway.])
Why yes, Barbie, math is hard. But this is 5th grade math. Murdoch really ought to have mastered it already.
But what about El Paso? According to Wikipedia list of cities by crime rate, Plano, TX, has 1/3 the violent crime rate of El Paso. Its murder rate is less than 12% of El Paso’s. If you’ve ever been to Plano, the reasons are obvious: It’s full of Asians and middle class whites, and Asians don’t commit much crime. Lincoln, Nebraska is also safer than El Paso, and Portland, Oregon has a lower murder rate.
El Paso’s relatively low crime rate is because violent crime in the US is largely driven by black crime rates, and there aren’t a lot of blacks in El Paso. If you happen to replace a black community with an Hispanic one, you will get a lower crime rate. But unlike whites, blacks as a percent of the US haven’t really been dropping, so this would only be a local effect.
Also, I do wonder whether El Paso’s not-legally-in-the-country sub-population is very likely to call the police when crimes against them occur.
At any rate, let’s have a look at Mexico’s murder rate:
Mexico is one of the top scorers, at 21.5. The US rate is 4.7.
Now, immigration is not random, so a country’s emigrants aren’t necessarily going to reflect the country’s overall crime rates. But since criminality does have a fairly large genetic component, the Mexican (and other Latin American countries’) crime rates are high enough to give pause.
What about the claim that all immigrants have a lower crime rate than Americans?
That depends, I suppose, on how we define “all immigrants.” Are we speaking globally of the aggregate of all immigrants headed anywhere? I have no idea if anyone has even collected such data. According to the Wikipedia page on Immigration and Crime,
“The Handbook of Crime Correlates (2009), a review of studies of correlates with crime, states that most studies on immigrants have found higher rates of crime. However, this varies greatly depending on the country of origin, with immigrants from some regions having lower crime rates than the indigenous population. In the US, studies have found lower crime rates among immigrants than among non-immigrants. Other studies suggest that immigration generally does not lead to an increase in crime, and may in some instances, suppress such trends. Other statistics, such as those from Europe, show higher crime rates among immigrant populations.”
In other words, trying to aggregate all immigrants is dumb, because different immigrant groups (and their children) commit crime at different rates. Japanese immigrants in LA have a different crime rate than Somalis in Minneapolis (and not because of any inherent differences between LA and Minneapolis.) Indonesian immigrants have low crime rates; Moroccans have higher rates.
Here are some more quotes from the Wikipedia page on immigration and crime:
“the relative proportion … of crimes by non-Japanese is substantially higher than those by Japanese … per capita Africans are responsible for 3.5 times as much crime as Japanese natives.
“According to the figures from Danmarks Statistik, crime rate among refugees and their descendants is 73% higher than for the male population average, even when taking into account their socioeconomic background. A report from Teori- og Metodecentret from 2006 found that seven out of ten young people placed on the secured youth institutions in Denmark are immigrants (with 40 percent of them being refugees).
“According to official statistics, 21.0% of rapes have been committed by foreigners in Finland. Foreigners comprise 2.2% of the population.
“A 2006 study found that the share of immigrants has a positive and significant impact on the crime rate …
“In Berlin, young male immigrants are three times more likely to commit violent crimes than their German peers.
“Official statistics show that immigrants are responsible for about half of the criminal activity in Greece. The Greek police have admitted that armed gangs entering the country from neighbouring Albania or Bulgaria could have been attracted by reports that many people have been withdrawing cash from banks and stashing it in their homes.
” More than half of Moroccan-Dutch youths aged 18 to 24 years in Rotterdam have been in trouble with the police for the suspicion of a crime. Young Antillean and Surinamese Rotterdammers are strongly overrepresented in crime statistics. Of them, 40 percent have been suspected. Of indigenous young people aged from 18 to 24, 18% percent already came in contact with criminal law. … of 447 criminal files, 63% teenagers convicted of serious crime are children of parents born outside the Netherlands. … The proportion of these persons in the suspect population is therefore almost twice as high as the share of immigrants among the Dutch population. The highest suspect rates per capita are found among first (4.9) and second generation (7.1) male migrants from a non‐western background. Rates for so‐called ‘western migrants’ are very close to those of the native Dutch.
“The report shows that, of 131 individuals charged with the 152 [Norwegian] rapes in which the perpetrator could be identified, 45.8% were of African, Middle Eastern or Asian origin while 54.2% were of Norwegian, other European or American origin.
“In Switzerland, 69.7% of prison population had no Swiss citizenship, compared to 22.1% of total resident population (as of 2008).
“[In Sweden,] immigrants were found to be four times more likely to be investigated for lethal violence and robbery than ethnic Swedes. In addition, immigrants were three times more likely to be investigated for violent assault, and five times more likely to be investigated for sex crimes. Overall, North Africa and Western Asia were strongly overrepresented in the crime statistics.”
Okay, so clearly some immigrants, in some places, commit crime. But what about immigrants in the US?
“According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2001, 4% of Hispanic males in their twenties and thirties were in prison or jail, compared to 1.8% of non-Hispanic white males.”
Occidental Dissent has done everyone a favor and disaggregated the Arizona Crime data by race, producing these colorful pie charts:
The crime rate among Asian immigrants, by contrast, is of course very low–down around 30% (or less) of the white rate. It makes a big difference where your immigrants come from.
Now, there is more to life than crime rates. But I reserve the right to decide which kind of risks and how much of them I am willing to take, based on actual, honest data, not based on mass media billionaire owners lying to me.
Why is Murdoch lying?
Perhaps he’s just really dumb. Or maybe he lives in a really rich area where crime (and unemployment) just aren’t things people worry about. Maybe he’s just trying to signal liberal tribal identity. Or maybe–like many people in the business of employing other people–he stands to personally benefit from the importation of millions of low-wage migrants.
While we’re at it:
No, no. That’s Ron Paul. Ron Paul is a libertarian. Rand Paul is a regular ol’ conservative. I know they’re easy to confuse since their names sound similar, but if I can keep them straight, then so can you.
I’ve long wondered why comets have such eccentric orbits and come from the far outer reaches of the solar system. Why aren’t there more asteroids with eccentric orbits? Why aren’t there comets in round orbits? Why don’t they generally hang out closer to the sun?
Happily, I think I’ve figured it out. Yes, a comet is a “snowball in space.” But a comet isn’t just formed when liquid water freezes, as it often does on Earth. A comet is formed when a body gets so cold, the air on it freezes. The nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, etc. This only happens very far from the sun–so comets can only form far to the sun. If they formed close-in, their gases wouldn’t freeze.
So long as a frozen body stays way out there away from the sun, we’re not going to see it. It’s only when comets come closer to the sun (say, by getting knocked out of their original orbits,) that their gases begin to sublimate under the sun’s glare and they appear as bright, fiery comets in the night sky. Then, if it is lucky, the comet swings back to its frigid neighborhood before it totally melts away.
This explains why the comets we see have such eccentric orbits–the eccentricity allows the comet to freeze, sublimate, and freeze again. Without that orbit, no bright comet.
I just remembered an essay I wrote back in my school days, comparing rates of Behavior X in the US to various European countries, and recommending that we should, as a public policy matter, adopt legal standards on the matter closer to the European ones, but forgot to control for ethnicity.
In retrospect, it seems like such an obvious thing I should have controlled for when presenting the data.😦
Effective Altruists mean well. They want to be moral people. They just don’t quite get what morality is. This leads to amusing results like EAs stressing out to themselves about whether or not they should donate all of their money to make animals happy and, if they don’t sacrifice themselves to the “save the cockroaches” fund, are they being meta-inconsistent?
The best synthesis of game-theoretic morality and evolutionary morality is that morality is about mutual systems of responsibility toward each other. You have no moral duties toward people (animals, beings, etc.,) who have none toward you. Your dog loves you and would sacrifice himself for you, so you have a moral obligation to your dog. A random animal feels no obligation to you and would not help you in even the most dire of situations. You have no moral obligation to them. (Nice people are nice to animals anyway because niceness is a genetic trait, and so nice people are nice to everyone.)
The EA calculations fail to take into account the opportunity cost of your altruism: if I donate all of my money to other animals, I no longer have money to buy bones for my dog, and my dog will be unhappy. If I spend my excess money on malaria nets for strangers in Africa, then I can’t spend that money on medical treatment for my own children.
If you feel compelled to do something about Problem X, then it’s a good idea to take the EA route and try to do so effectively. If I am concerned about malaria, then of course I should spend my time/money doing whatever is best to fight malaria.
As I mentioned in my post about “the other”, a lot of people just use our ideas/demands about what’s best for people they really have no personal interest in as a bludgeon in political debates with people they strongly dislike. If you are really concerned about far-off others, then by all means, better the EA route than the “destroying people’s careers via Twitter” route.
But morality, ultimately, is about your relationships with people. EA does not account for this, and so is wrong.
