In your garden-variety discussions of communism verses everything else, someone generally brings up the 85 to 100 million deaths attributed to communist regimes, and of course someone else responds that this is, as it were, merely a bug; a flaw due to having incorrectly implemented Marx’s ideas.
But after one too many death threats from a self-described Marxist (over, if I recall correctly, whether or not Rachel Dolezal is a terrible racist or was just trying to be helpful,) I thought to myself, “You know, what if the whole killing-all-your-enemies thing is really more of a feature than a bug?”
Of course, “Let’s kill lots of people!” tends not to be the greatest rallying cry for polite society, but it is hardly a secret that a great many political regimes have killed lots of people.
Just talk to anyone whose grandparents happen to be German about WWII, and you’ll probably hear a spiel along the lines of “The Hitler Youth just meant a hot meal in a time when people were hungry. Grandpa didn’t really want to invade Poland or kill all the Jews or any of that stuff.”
It’s as though all of these guys mysteriously disappeared:
Here’s a theory: most of these people were actually totally on board with the kill-the-enemies agenda.
Now, to be honest, most of the people I know personally who call themselves Communists are really nice people who aren’t interested in killing anyone. But some of them I’m not so sure of, and some I’ve met, I’m quite sure would happily ship their enemies off to Siberia. All the while swearing, of course, that they were just in it for the stew.
Communist Party of Great Britain at London May Day march, 2008
As for the original communists, the ones advocating “class warfare,” killing their enemies was probably the entire point.
This post wouldn’t be complete without hipster Stalin:
North Sentinel Island Map showing location of North Sentinel Island (red) relative to the rest of the Andaman IslandsMap showing the distance between the Andaman Islands (small islands south of Myanmar) and land.
The Sentinelese appear to have split off from the rest of humanity approximately 48,500 years ago, and aside from occasional contact with other members of the Andaman islands, have remained isolated ever since.
People have occasionally landed on or near Sentinel island, but the islanders have all resisted contact, generally by shooting arrows at anyone who gets too close. Even National Geographic hasn’t got any pictures of them–when they tried to make a documentary on the island, armed with gifts, they had to retreat after the director took an arrow in the thigh. The last guys whose boat accidentally drifted onto their beach got killed and buried in shallow graves on the beach.
North Sentinel Island is technically owned by India, but India has given up trying to make peaceful contact, and it would probably look bad to just bomb the place.
So what do we know about the Sentinelese?
Obviously not a whole lot, since most of what we know of them has been observed from a distance.
The whole island is about the size of Manhattan, and probably inhabited by 40-500 people. They’re generally characterized as Negritos, a term used for the shorter than average but taller than Pygmies, dark-skinned people of the Andaman Islands and certain groups in the Philippines, Thailand, and Malaysia. The term is only descriptive; different Negrito tribes may not be related to each other at all. (I promised I’d get around to the Negritos eventually.)
Aside from stuff that has randomly washed up on their island or was given to them by folks trying to make contact, they have only stone tools and, according to the Wikipedia, appear not to have fire.
But a little more research suggests that Wikipedia may just be wrong on this point; during the search for the lost Malaysian jetliner, smoke was observed rising from North Sentinele, which implies that the people there probably do have fire.
At any rate, we do know that they have bows and arrows, boats, and spears.
When National Geographic tried to make contact, they left a plastic toy car, coconuts, a live pig, a doll, and aluminum cookware on the beach before getting shot at. After they retreated, they observed the Sentinelese shoot and bury the pig (not eat it?) and, if the Wikipedia is accurate, shoot and bury the doll. They took the coconuts and pans; no word of the car’s fate.
In 1970, a group of Indian anthropologists that came near the island had a decidedly strange incident:
Quite a few discarded their weapons and gestured to us to throw the fish. The women came out of the shade to watch our antics… A few men came and picked up the fish. They appeared to be gratified, but there did not seem to be much softening to their hostile attitude… They all began shouting some incomprehensible words. We shouted back and gestured to indicate that we wanted to be friends. The tension did not ease. At this moment, a strange thing happened — a woman paired off with a warrior and sat on the sand in a passionate embrace. This act was being repeated by other women, each claiming a warrior for herself, a sort of community mating, as it were. Thus did the militant group diminish. This continued for quite some time and when the tempo of this frenzied dance of desire abated, the couples retired into the shade of the jungle. However, some warriors were still on guard. We got close to the shore and threw some more fish which were immediately retrieved by a few youngsters. It was well past noon and we headed back to the ship…
Virtually nothing is known about the Sentinelese language, though it is speculated that it is related to the Onge language of the Andaman islands. However, attempts at using the Onge as translators have failed, as the Onge themselves cannot understand a word of Sentinelese.
A British expedition in the 1880s that got a decent look at the island claimed that, of all the nearby groups, Sentinelese culture most closely resembled Onge culture, so it is still possible that the languages are related, albeit distantly.
Since much more is known about the Onge, I’m going to speak briefly about them:
Onge man collecting honey, Andaman Islands
The Onge are marked in blue on the map above; today they live chiefly on Little Andaman Island in the south, but in the past they ranged further north, closer to to the Sentinelese. Contact with the outside world has reduced their population from almost 700 people (1900) to about 100. (There may well have been >700 people before 1900, that’s just the first date I have numbers for.) Strangely, the Onge appear to be the world’s least fertile people, with 40% of couples suffering infertility. Wikipedia estimates their Net Reproductive Rate (similar to TFR, but only looks at daughters) at 0.91, which is below replacement, however, their population appears to have held steady for the past 30 years, so perhaps the problem is working itself out.
Why such infertility? The most obvious guesses (IMO) are some sort of environmental poison/effect; some sort of diseased-induced infertility, like gonorrheal scaring (please note that I have no idea if any of the Onge have ever had gonorrhea, but it is a common cause of infertility;) or a side effect of inbreeding/lack of genetic diversity following their extreme population collapse.
Genetically, the Onge appear to have been isolated for an extremely long time. They all share the same mitochondrial DNA, haplotype M32, which is not found anywhere outside of the Andaman Islands. (The larger umbrella-group M, to which all M-varieties belong, is one of the world’s most wide-spread lineages, emerging either shortly before the Out of Africa event, or shortly after it, but is most reliably concentrated in Asia, with several ancient lineages in India.)
The Onge language is related to the languages of some of the other tribes in the Andaman Islands, and speculated to be part of the greater Austronesian language family. (Considering that the whole Indo-European language family is about, what, 4-6,000 years old, I am a little skeptical of our ability to reconstruct too much about a language that may have diverged 40,000+ years ago.)
Onge Y-DNA belongs to Haplogroup D-M174, which emerged in Asia about 60,000 years ago and isn’t found outside of Asia. It is found today among Tibetans, the Ainu, and the Andaman Islanders, suggesting that these people are all (at least partially) descended from a common source that split off from other humans around 60,000 years ago, or just after the OoA (relatively speaking.) D-M174 is also found in small amounts in China and central/east Asia.
The Ainu, IIRC, also have a particular tooth shape that is commonly found in Melanesia, but not outside of it, and a small amount (about 15%, I think,) of Siberian DNA. And, of course, we now have evidence of Melanesian DNA showing up in the Amazon rainforest, not to mention the curious concentration of archaic Denisovan admixture in Melanesians, despite the only Denisovan remains we’ve found so far coming from Russia. However, it appears that there is no Denisovan DNA in the Andaman Islanders, so maybe they split off before the Denisovan admixture advent.
The sum of the evidence suggests a single band of people, perhaps most closely resembling the Negritos, spread 60,000 years ago along the coast of southern Asia and spread far into the interior, reaching at least as far as Tibet, the Andaman Islands, and northern Japan, and possibly even crossing the Bering Strait and down to the tip of South America. (Since Melanesians do not appear to have ever spread to Polynesia, I suspect they did not boat straight across the Pacific, but maybe we just haven’t yet found Melanesian remains in Polynesia.)
Over the ensuing millenia, later population waves, like the Polynesians and the common ancestors of east Asians like the Han and the Japanese, migrated into the area, leaving only a few isolated remnants of Haplogroup D-M174 in far-flung, difficult to reach places like the Andaman islands, the Himalayan Plateau, and the coldest parts of Japan. Likewise, Melanesian DNA in the New World seems to have best survived in one of its harshest, most difficult to penetrate habitats: the rain forest.
This all gets back to my theory of genetic survival at the fringes, (discussed here,) which I hope to devote a full post to soon. The history of the world is the group with better tech conquering the group with worse tech, and then getting conquered in turn by a group with even better tech.
The island of Taiwan illustrates this well; the most recent immigration wave happened in 1949, when the ROC lost their war with the PRC and evacuated 2 million of their people to Taiwan, a nation of 6 million at the time. Taiwan had previously (temporarily) been conquered by the Japanese, and before that, by other Chinese people, who began arriving around 1300. They’ve been gradually defeating/replacing the aboriginal Taiwanese, who are now a very small population, and the aboriginal Taiwanese themselves have legends about having wiped out a negrito-like people who predated their arrival, but I consider such legends only potentially true. Each group got conquered by the next group with better tech.
The available evidence suggests that they split off from the rest of the human population ages upon ages ago, and have been effectively isolated from everyone but their immediate neighbors ever since. Though technically their island is considered part of India, as a practical matter, they govern themselves. They have managed to retain their independent status for so long by living on a tiny, hard-to-reach island and enforcing a strict immigration policy of killing anyone who shows up on their beach.
Given that the Sentinelese would probably all die of the common cold if they ever did let foreigners onto their island, their policy is not unreasonable. You wouldn’t want to let some plague-bearing foreigner kill you with their germs, either. Unfortunately, the disease situation is unlikely to reverse itself; their population is just too small to withstand contact with the outside world. Too-long isolation in such a tiny place has cut them off from all the technological progress of the past 40,000 to 60,000 years, and their population is too small to develop much tech internally. To be fair, their strategy has worked so far. But now they’re stuck, maintaining their tiny island against the odds until someone decides to show up with guns and do some logging, fishing, or whatever they feel like, at which point there’s a good chance they’ll be wiped out.
Long term, total isolation is a policy with very low survival odds.
After some thought, the best option I can think of for the Sentinelese, other than continuing as they are and hoping for the best (after all, the rest of the world could destroy itself in a nuclear holocaust and leave them behind to continue doing their thing for the next 40,000 years,) is to expand their numbers and send excess people to the other Andaman Islands. Sure, most of those people would probably get colds and die, and if not the colds, alcohol’s a likely culprit, but as long as they keep exporting people, eventually some of them will survive, and create a breeding population/intermix with the other Andamanese until they have the numbers/immunity to interact with the outside world.
Edit: Hopefully done! Please let me know if you notice any bad links.
With 200+ posts, managing the archives gets a little unwieldy. So I have attempted to make a table of contents thus far, grouped broadly by category. If you have any ideas for better ways to organize this (or notice any errors), I’d be happy to hear them.
Memes, Religion, and Morality
“Meme theory” posits that we can understand the spread of ideas by comparing them to viruses. These posts begin by looking at the way different environments/technologies influence the evolution of different kinds of memes, influencing morality and religion.
Where there are memes, there are genes; all cultures (and environments) select for people who succeed in those cultures. These posts examine some genetics basics and theories on how our changing cultural-technical environments may have selected for specific traits found among modern people.
The broad story of human history is migration, in which the group with the better organization and technology tends to wipe out and replace those without. These posts look at human history through a genetic and anthropologic lens, especially migration, assimilation, replacement, and attempts at exit.
An attempt at understanding the neurological, psychological, and perhaps environmental traits that influence the way people think about politics and identify as “conservatives” or “liberals.”
“Congressman Duncan Hunter, left, a California Republican and Marine Corps combat veteran, is calling for Navy Secretary Ray Mabus to resign after Mabus criticized the Marine Corps’ gender integration research. …
“The military is on the cusp of historic change, with a mandate to open all combat roles to women by January. Each of the services has until Oct. 1 to request any exemptions to that policy.
Mabus has made his intentions clear, saying he won’t allow either the Navy or the Marine Corps to keep any specialties closed to women. …
Days later, Mabus went a step further, telling NPR that the Marine Corps’ study was flawed. He reiterated his position again this week during a speaking engagement in Ohio. …
“Mabus also has suggested the study’s results were predetermined.
“It started out with a fairly large component of the men thinking ‘this is not a good idea,’ and ‘women will never be able to do this,’ ” Mabus told NPR in an interview broadcast on Sept. 11. “When you start out with that mindset, you’re almost presupposing the outcome.””
“Ok, been silent long enough on this. I have been a part of this process from the beginning and I am just going to put it out there. The Secretary of the Navy is way off base on this and to say the things he is saying is is flat out counter to the interests of national security and is unfair to the women who participated in this study.We selected our best women for this test unit, selected our most mature female leaders as well. The men (me included) were the most progressive and open minded that you could get. The commander of this unit was a seasoned and successful infantryman. The XO of this unit was as good as they get, so good the USMC made her the CO of the Officer candidate school.
This was as stacked as a unit could get with the best Marines to give it a 100 percent success rate as we possibly could. End result? The best women in the GCEITF as a group in regard to infantry operations were equal or below in most all cases to the lowest 5 percent of men as a group in this test study.
I just selected the SgtMaj of the unit to head up our senior enlisted academy at Camp Lejeune, NC. No one went in to this with the mentality that we did not want this to succeed. No Marine, regardless of gender would do that. With our limited manpower we cannot afford to not train eveyone to the best of their abilities.
They are slower on all accounts in almost every technical and tactical aspect and physically weaker in every aspect across the range of military operations. SECNAV has stated that he has made his mind up even before the release of these results and that the USMC test unit will not change his mind on anything.
Listen up folks. Your senior leadership of this country does not want to see America overwhelmingly succeed on the battlefield, it wants to ensure that everyone has an opportunity to pursue whatever they want regardless of the outcome on national security. The infantry is not Ranger School. That is just a school like any other school and is not a feeder specifically to the infantry.
Anyone can go to that school that meets the prereqs, just like airborne school. Kudos to the two women who graduated. They are badasses in their own right. In regards to the infantry… There is no trophy for second place. You perform or die.
Make no mistake. In this realm, you want your fastest, most fit, most physical and most lethal person you can possibly put on the battlefield to overwhelm the enemy’s ability to counter what you are throwing at them and in every test case, that person has turned out to be a man.
There is nothing gender biased about this, it is what it is. You will never see a female Quarterback in the NFL, there will never be a female center on any NHL team and you will never see a female batting in the number 4 spot for the New York Yankees. It is what it is. As a country we preach equality.
But to place these mandates on the military before this country has even considered making females register, just like males, for the selective service is in all aspects out of touch with reality. Equality and equal opportunity start before you raise your right hand and swear and oath to this country.
Yes, we are an all volunteer force at the moment. Should this country however need to mobilize rapidly again to face the threats of the world like our grandfathers did, it will once again look to the military age males of this country to fill the ranks because last I checked, we did not require women to register for the selective service.
Until that happens, we should not even be wasting our time even thinking about opening up the infantry to women.
To my female Marine friends out there, I love you to death, you are the best of the best and you have my continued admiration for what you do and to the Marines of the GCEITF….you are tops in my book for taking up the challenge…regardless what the SECNAV says about you not being the best that we could have put in that unit because you were….on all accounts.”
This was posted on FB communities for the Marines and Infantry, rather than an “official” source like a news article, so I can’t claim 100% certainty that someone didn’t just make it up. However, if you want the full United States Marine Corps Assessment of Women in Service Assignments, this looks about as legit as it gets. Since it’s all images, I’m not going to quote, but one of the things it does note is that the vast, vast majority of jobs in the military are already open to women; only a few of the very front-line, combat jobs are under discussion.
These are jobs where raw strength matters a lot, and the average person–male or female–probably isn’t cut out for such work, but females are far less likely than males to qualify.
My own opinion is that, in an ideal world, we would allow everyone into all jobs and just determine whether they are qualified or not via a test. But if many of the women who’ve been through boot camp and training and are genuinely trying still can’t do the job, how many qualified women are we even talking about? I’ve seen people trying to argue that nowadays weightlifting is getting more popular with women, so more women will be strong enough to qualify, but what these folks miss is that the men who qualify are already doing strength training; it’s not like anyone can just naturally lift 200 pounds. Mere strength training is not enough; these women would have to do far more strength training than the male recruits. We are running up, here, against human limits. Yes, there are some women who are both qualified for the job and actually have an interest in it, but how many? And when we find these few women, will the military actually gain strength from them, or will the logistics of integrating them into otherwise all-male units outweigh the benefits? I hate to be crass, but we women menstruate; supply chains would need to take this into account.
Frankly, if the draft returns, the last place I’d like to be is combat (and I guarantee you don’t want me there, either.)
So while on my walk today, I got to thinking about various potential implications of the hippocampal theory of time preference.
The short version if you don’t want to read yesterday’s post is that one’s degree of impulsivity/ability to plan / high or low time preference seems to be mediated by an interaction between the nucleus accumbens, which seems to a desire center, and the hippocampus, which does a lot of IQ-related tasks like learn new things and track objects through space. Humans with hippocampal damage become amnesiacs; rats with the connection between their nucleus accumbens and hipocampus severed lose their ability to delay gratification even for superior rewards, becoming slaves to instant gratification.
So, my suspicion:
Relatively strong hippocampus => inhibition of the nucleus accumbens => low time preference.
Relatively weak hippocamus => uninhibited nucleus accumbens => high time preference (aka impulsivity.)
Also, Strong hippocampus = skill at high IQ tasks.
Shamelessly stolen from Jayman’s post. As usual, I recommend it.
(Other theories on the subject: Intelligent people make lots of money and so marry attractive people, resulting in a general correlation between IQ and attractiveness; there is something about eating too much or the particular foods being eaten that causes brain degeneration.)
People generally claim that overweight people lack “willpower.” Note that I am not arguing about willpower; willpower is only a tiny part of the equation.
The skinny people I know do not have willpower. They just do not have big appetites. They are not sitting there saying, “OMG, I am so hungry, but I am going to force myself not to eat right now;” they just don’t actually feel that much hunger.
The fat people I know have big appetites. They’ve always had big appetites. Some of them have documented large appetites going back to infancy. Sure, their ability to stay on a diet may be directly affected by willpower, but they’re starting from a fundamentally different hunger setpoint.
So what might be going on is just a matter of whether the hippocampus or nucleus accumbens happens to be dominant. Where the NE is dominant, the person feels hunger (and all desires) quite strongly. Where the hippocampus is dominant, the person simply doesn’t feel as much hunger (or other desires.)
That a strong hippocampus also leads to high IQ may just be, essentially, a side effect of this trade-off between the two regions.
We might expect, therefore, to see higher inhibition in smart people across a range of behaviors–take socializing, sex, and drug use. *Wanders off to Google*
So, first of all, it looks like there’s a study that claims that higher IQ people do more drugs than lower IQ people. Since the study only looks at self-reported drug use, and most people lie about their illegal drug use, I consider this study probably not very useful; also, drug use is not the same as drug addiction, and there’s a big difference between trying something once and doing it compulsively.
I am reminded here of a story about P. A. M. Dirac, one of my favorite scientists:
“An anecdote recounted in a review of the 2009 biography tells of Werner Heisenberg and Dirac sailing on an ocean liner to a conference in Japan in August 1929. “Both still in their twenties, and unmarried, they made an odd couple. Heisenberg was a ladies’ man who constantly flirted and danced, while Dirac—’an Edwardian geek’, as biographer Graham Farmelo puts it—suffered agonies if forced into any kind of socialising or small talk. ‘Why do you dance?’ Dirac asked his companion. ‘When there are nice girls, it is a pleasure,’ Heisenberg replied. Dirac pondered this notion, then blurted out: ‘But, Heisenberg, how do you know beforehand that the girls are nice?'”[30]” (from the Wikipedia.)
Folks speculate that Dirac was autistic; obviously folks don’t speculate such things about Heisenberg.
Autism I have previously speculated may be a side effect of the recent evolution of high math IQ, and the current theory implies a potential correlation between various ASDs and inhibition.
The atypical gamma response to contextual modulation that we identified can be seen as the link between the behavioral output (atypical visual perception) and the underlying brain mechanism (an imbalance in excitatory and inhibitory neuronal processing). The impaired inhibition–excitation balance is suggested to be part of the core etiological pathway of ASD (Ecker et al., 2013). Gamma oscillations emerge from interactions between neuronal excitation and inhibition (Buzsaki and Wang, 2012), are important for neuronal communication (Fries, 2009), and have been associated with e.g., perceptual grouping mechanisms (Singer, 1999).
“It has been suggested that the restricted, stereotyped and repetitive behaviours typically found in autism are underpinned by deficits of inhibitory control. … Following sham, adults with autism relative to controls had reduced activation in key inhibitory regions of inferior frontal cortex and thalamus, but increased activation of caudate and cerebellum. However, brain activation was modulated in opposite ways by depletion in each group. Within autistic individuals depletion upregulated fronto-thalamic activations and downregulated striato-cerebellar activations toward control sham levels, completely ‘normalizing’ the fronto-cerebellar dysfunctions. The opposite pattern occurred in controls. Moreover, the severity of autism was related to the degree of differential modulation by depletion within frontal, striatal and thalamic regions. Our findings demonstrate that individuals with autism have abnormal inhibitory networks, and that serotonin has a differential, opposite, effect on them in adults with and without autism. Together these factors may partially explain the severity of autistic behaviours and/or provide a novel (tractable) treatment target.”
This may not have anything at all to do with the hippocampus-NA system, of course.
““What we found in animal models and others have found postmortem in schizophrenic patients is that the hippocampus is lacking a certain type of GABA-ergic [GABA-producing] neuron that puts the brakes on the system,” says Grace. “What we’re trying to do is fix the GABA system that’s broken and, by doing that, stabilize the system so the dopamine system responses are back to normal, so that we can actually fix what’s wrong rather than trying to patch it several steps downstream.””
Wow, I made it through two whole posts on the brain without mentioning the amygdala even once.
I’ve known for a while that women live longer than men, Hispanic Americans live longer than Euro Americans, and the oldest people in the US are disproportionately black:
At 116 years old, Susannah Mushatt Jones is not only the oldest woman in the US, but also the entire world.
One theory I considered was that higher infant mortality rates in Mexico (I don’t actually know the infant mortality rates in Mexico, this is just an idea,) results in the deaths of premature infants and others with severe health problems, whereas in the US these infants survive for several years–maybe even decades–before dying. The population of Hispanic immigrants, therefore, does not include these children–they’re already gone–but the US population does. This could result in a higher life expectancy among the immigrants than among non-immigrants.
But what about women and blacks? Their infant mortality would be included in the native rates, and even if worse medical care resulted in higher infant mortality among them, this still wouldn’t explain why so many supercentenarians are black.
We already know that different people age at different rates, but it appears as well that different races age at different rates, with black brains aging the slowest:
“Results of the regression analysis revealed significant effects of age, sex, vascular disease history, and race/ethnicity on relative brain volume (F5,685 = 38.290, P < .001). For each additional year in age, there was an associated 0.3% decrease in relative brain volume (β = −0.003, t = 10.34, P < .001) (Figure 2). Relative brain volume among women was 2% larger than that among men (β = 0.02, t = 5.93, P < .001). Hispanic (β = 0.03, t = 7.20, P < .001) and African American (β = 0.02, t = 4.09, P < .001) participants had 2.8% and 1.6% larger relative brain volumes than white subjects, respectively. Finally, for each additional vascular disease, there was a 0.5% associated reduction in relative brain volume (β = −0.005, t = −2.70, P < .001). When interaction terms were entered into the model, none were significant, demonstrating that the association of vascular disease history and age with relative brain volume did not differ across race/ethnicity or sex. Analysis of variance controlling for age and vascular disease history confirmed main effects of sex (F1,685 = 34.906, P < .001) and race/ethnicity (F2,685 = 23.528, P < .001) but no sex × race/ethnicity interaction (F2,685 = 0.167, P =.85) (Figure 3).“
Relative brain volume across racial/ethnic groups and by sex.relationship among chronologic age, race/ethnicity, and relative brain volume.
So why are white males (at least in these samples) aging so quickly?
Time Preference isn’t sexy and exciting, like anything related to, well, sex. It isn’t controversial like IQ and gender. In fact, most of the ink spilled on the subject isn’t even found in evolutionary or evolutionary psychology texts, but over in economics papers about things like interest rates that no one but economists would want to read.
So why do I think Time Preference is so important?
Because I think Low Time Preference is the true root of high intelligence.
First, what is Time Preference?
Time Preference (aka future time orientation, time discounting, delay discounting, temporal discounting,) is the degree to which you value having a particular item today versus having it tomorrow. “High time preference” means you want things right now, whereas “low time preference” means you’re willing to wait.
A relatively famous test of Time Preference is to offer a child a cookie right now, but tell them they can have two cookies if they wait 10 minutes. Some children take the cookie right now, some wait ten minutes, and some try to wait ten minutes but succumb to the cookie right now about halfway through.
Obviously, many factors can influence your Time Preference–if you haven’t eaten in several days, for example, you’ll probably not only eat the cookie right away, but also start punching me until I give you the second cookie. If you don’t like cookies, you won’t have any trouble waiting for another, but you won’t have much to do with it. Etc. But all these things held equal, your basic inclination toward high or low time preference is probably biological–and by “biological,” I mean, “mostly genetic.”
The scientists train rats to touch pictures with their noses in return for sugar cubes. Picture A gives them one cube right away, while picture B gives them more cubes after a delay. If the delay is too long or the reward too small, the rats just take the one cube right away. But there’s a sweet spot–apparently 4 cubes after a short wait—where the rats will figure it’s worth their while to tap picture B instead of picture A.
But if you snip the connection between the rats’ hippocampi and nucleus accumbenses, suddenly they lose all ability to wait for sugar cubes and just eat their sugar cubes right now, like a pack of golden retrievers in a room full of squeaky toys. They become completely unable to wait for the better payout of four sugar cubes, no matter how much they might want to.
So we know that this connection between the hippocampus and the nucleus accumbens is vitally important to your Time Orientation, though I don’t know what other modifications, such as low hippocampal volume or low nucleus accumbens would do.
So what do the hippocampus and nucleus accumbens do?
According to the Wikipedia, the hippocampus plays an important part in inhibition, memory, and spatial orientation. People with damaged hippocampi become amnesiacs, unable to form new memories.There is a pretty direct relationship between hippocampus size and memory, as documented primarily in old people:
“There is, however, a reliable relationship between the size of the hippocampus and memory performance — meaning that not all elderly people show hippocampal shrinkage, but those who do tend to perform less well on some memory tasks.[71] There are also reports that memory tasks tend to produce less hippocampal activation in elderly than in young subjects.[71] Furthermore, a randomized-control study published in 2011 found that aerobic exercise could increase the size of the hippocampus in adults aged 55 to 80 and also improve spatial memory.” (wikipedia)
Amnesiacs (and Alzheimer’s patients) also get lost a lot, which seems like a perfectly natural side effect of not being able to remember where you are, except that rat experiments show something even more interesting: specific cells that light up as the rats move around, encoding data about where they are.
“Neural activity sampled from 30 to 40 randomly chosen place cells carries enough information to allow a rat’s location to be reconstructed with high confidence.” (wikipedia)
“Spatial firing patterns of 8 place cells recorded from the CA1 layer of a rat. The rat ran back and forth along an elevated track, stopping at each end to eat a small food reward. Dots indicate positions where action potentials were recorded, with color indicating which neuron emitted that action potential.” (from Wikipedia)
According to Wikipedia, the Inhibition function theory is a little older, but seems like a perfectly reasonable theory to me.
“[Inhibition function theory] derived much of its justification from two observations: first, that animals with hippocampal damage tend to be hyperactive; second, that animals with hippocampal damage often have difficulty learning to inhibit responses that they have previously been taught, especially if the response requires remaining quiet as in a passive avoidance test.”
This is, of course, exactly what the scientists found when they separated the rats’ hippocampi from their nucleus accumbenses–they lost all ability to inhibit their impulses in order to delay gratification, even for a better payout.
In other word, the hippocampus lets you learn, process the moment of objects through space (spatial reasoning) and helps you suppress your inhibitions–that is, it is directly involved in IQ and Time Preference.
Dopaminergic input from the VTA modulate the activity of neurons within the nucleus accumbens. These neurons are activated directly or indirectly by euphoriant drugs (e.g., amphetamine, opiates, etc.) and by participating in rewarding experiences (e.g., sex, music, exercise, etc.).[11][12] …
The shell of the nucleus accumbens is involved in the cognitive processing of motivational salience (wanting) as well as reward perception and positive reinforcement effects.[6] Particularly important are the effects of drug and naturally rewarding stimuli on the NAc shell because these effects are related to addiction.[6]Addictive drugs have a larger effect on dopamine release in the shell than in the core.[6] The specific subset of ventral tegmental area projection neurons that synapse onto the D1-type medium spiny neurons in the shell are responsible for the immediate perception of the rewarding property of a stimulus (e.g., drug reward).[3][4] …
The nucleus accumbens core is involved in the cognitive processing of motor function related to reward and reinforcement.[6] Specifically, the core encodes new motor programs which facilitate the acquisition of a given reward in the future.[6]
So it sounds to me like the point of the nucleus accumbens is to learn “That was awesome! Let’s do it again!” or “That was bad! Let’s not do it again!”
Together, the nucleus accumbens + hippocampus can learn “4 sugar cubes in a few seconds is way better than 1 sugar cube right now.” Apart, the nucleus accumbens just says, “Sugar cubes! Sugar cubes! Sugar cubes!” and jams the lever that says “Sugar cube right now!” and there is nothing the hippocampus can do about it.
What distinguishes humans from all other animals? Our big brains, intellects, or impressive vocabularies?
It is our ability to acquire new knowledge and use it to plan and build complex, multi-generational societies.
Ants and bees live in complex societies, but they do not plan them. Monkeys, dolphins, squirrels, and even rats can plan for the future, but only humans plan and build cities.
Even the hunter-gatherer must plan for the future; a small tendril only a few inches high is noted during the wet season, then returned to in the dry, when it is little more than a withered stem, and the water-storing root beneath it harvested. The farmer facing winter stores up grain and wood; the city engineer plans a water and sewer system large enough to handle the next hundred years’ projected growth.
All of these activities require the interaction between the hippocampus and nucleus accumbens. The nucleus accumbens tells us that water is good, grain is tasty, fire is warm, and that clean drinking water and flushable toilets are awesome. The hippocampus reminds us that the dry season is coming, and so we should save–and remember–that root until we need it. It reminds us that we will be cold and hungry in winter if we don’t save our grain and spend a hours and hours chopping wood right now. It reminds us that not only is it good to organize the city so that everyone can have clean drinking water and flushable toilets right now, but that we should also make sure the system will keep working even as new people enter the city over time.
Disconnect these two, and your ability to plan goes down the drain. You eat all of your roots now, devour your seed corn, refuse to chop wood, and say, well, yes, running water would be nice, but that would require so much planning.
As I have mentioned before, I think Europeans (and probably a few other groups whose history I’m just not as familiar with and so I cannot comment on) IQ increased quite a bit in the past thousand years or so, and not just because the Catholic Church banned cousin marriage. During this time, manorialism became a big deal throughout Western Europe, and the people who exhibited good impulse control, worked hard, delayed gratification, and were able to accurately calculate the long-term effects of their actions tended to succeed (that is, have lots of children) and pass on their clever traits to their children. I suspect that selective pressure for “be a good manorial employee” was particularly strong in German, (and possibly Japan, now that I think about it,) resulting in the Germanic rigidity that makes them such good engineers.
Nothing in the manorial environment directly selected for engineering ability, higher math, large vocabularies, or really anything that we mean when we normally talk about IQ. But I do expect manorial life to select for those who could control their impulses and plan for the future, resulting in a run-away effect of increasingly clever people constructing increasingly complex societies in which people had to be increasingly good at dealing with complexity and planning to survive.
Ultimately, I see pure mathematical ability as a side effect of being able to accurately predict the effects of one’s actions and plan for the future (eg, “It will be an extra long winter, so I will need extra bushels of corn,”) and the ability to plan for the future as a side effect of being able to accurately represent the path of objects through space and remember lessons one has learned. All of these things, ultimately, are the same operations, just oriented differently through the space-time continuum.
Since your brain is, of course, built from the same DNA code as the rest of you, we would expect brain functions to have some amount of genetic heritablity, which is exactly what we find:
“A meta-analysis of twin, family and adoption studies was conducted to estimate the magnitude of genetic and environmental influences on impulsivity. The best fitting model for 41 key studies (58 independent samples from 14 month old infants to adults; N=27,147) included equal proportions of variance due to genetic (0.50) and non-shared environmental (0.50) influences, with genetic effects being both additive (0.38) and non-additive (0.12). Shared environmental effects were unimportant in explaining individual differences in impulsivity. Age, sex, and study design (twin vs. adoption) were all significant moderators of the magnitude of genetic and environmental influences on impulsivity. The relative contribution of genetic effects (broad sense heritability) and unique environmental effects were also found to be important throughout development from childhood to adulthood. Total genetic effects were found to be important for all ages, but appeared to be strongest in children. Analyses also demonstrated that genetic effects appeared to be stronger in males than in females.”
“Shared environmental effects” in a study like this means “the environment you and your siblings grew up in, like your household and school.” In this case, shared effects were unimportant–that means that parenting had no effect on the impulsivity of adopted children raised together in the same household. Non-shared environmental influences are basically random–you bumped your head as a kid, your mom drank during pregnancy, you were really hungry or pissed off during the test, etc., and maybe even cultural norms.
So your ability to plan for the future appears to be part genetic, and part random luck.
We recently discussed the Boers as an example of reactionary exit gone wrong. I posit that motorcycle clubs area uniquely American form of reactionary exit, tribalism, and spontaneous social organization.
I became interested in biker culture shortly after the shootout in Waco that left 9 people dead, 20 injured, 239 detained, and 177 arrested and charged with engaging in organized crime. The bikers who weighed in on the stories had a very different opinion of the day’s events than the official story reported on the news. Many were absolutely convinced that the WACO police, perhaps operating from nearby rooftops, had shot the bikers themselves and then arrested everyone on site. Furthermore, they asserted, the Waco police were targeting any biker who rode through the city for arrest. “It’s open season on bikers.”
Everyone I happened to chat with who wasn’t a biker seemed overjoyed at the opportunity to tweet about hundreds of white criminal gang members killing each other and getting arrested.
After months of protests and arguments over whether the police murdered an innocent black guy or killed a criminal in self-defense, the difference in attitudes toward a possible case of the police murdering nine people who happened to be white was striking.
So what’s up with bikers? Who are they? What makes them tick? Why do they join clubs? And why do they love Harley Davidsons so much?
I’ve discovered that there are not a lot of good ethnographies of biker culture, and those that are out there focus on the 1%s, or Outlaw Motorcycle Clubs (often referred to as OMGs or Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs in law enforcement publications.) The focus of my research has not been on Outlaw clubs, because I don’t think it’s very sensible to try to understand 100% of something by only reading about 1% of it, but rather the average Harley-riding motorcycle enthusiast.
Since I don’t have the spare time necessary for real fieldwork in a biker club, I have merely been talking talking with bikers about their experiences and researching them via the internet, rather than taking the immersive approach. I hope that I have not gotten anything terribly wrong, but if I have, feel free to let me know.
First, though, a little terminology:
Organizations for motorcycle enthusiasts are called clubs, not gangs. Even the Hells Angels is officially the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club.
“Outlaw” motorcycle clubs are a real thing that really exist, and yes, some of them engage in some form of illegal activity. However, Outlaws are a small % of people who like motorcycles. Most motorcyclists are not outlaws.
Some bikers ride things that are not Harleys, but in biker culture, Harleys are the bike.
So. Who are bikers?
While bikers come in all shapes and sizes, from girls just riding their Vespas to work in Tokyo to rich guys puttering around on the weekend, biker culture in the US is solidly working class, white, and male.
In fact, I strongly suspect that the vast majority of bikers are ethnically mostly Borderland Scots + Scots-Irish + Cavaliers from south-eastern England (and Wales?,) but mot of their ancestors have been in this country for a couple hundred years, if not longer. In other words, they are old stock Southerners and Appalachians, and quite ethnically distinct both from the Puritans of the North and from the more recent immigrants, like the Catholic Irish, Germans, Scandinavians, etc. Many of them have ancestors or great- uncles who fought for the Confederacy or at least lived through the war. (Heck, I have sill-living relatives who are old enough that they heard first-hand stories from their relatives about the Civil War.)
Personality-wise, this is a group that is strongly ethno-nationalist and committed to the warrior ethos. I cannot help but see the Scottish reiver, no longer able to ride across the English border to steal cattle or women but still driven by that basic instinct, hopping aboard his Harley and roaring down the open road.
The most common occupation among bikers is military. Some huge percentage of them are vets or even current military; I’m not sure how many, but it’s a correlation that’s impossible to miss.
I don’t think this is just a coincidence; either something about both motorcycles and military employment attract the same group of people, or something about being in the military makes people ride Harleys.
WWII Harley Davidson Motorcycles
I suspect it’s a little of each.
Many of the famous clubs were founded by vets; the Hells Angels, for example, are named after the WWII flying squadron Hells Angels:
The useful thing about this is that the attitudes of bikers are therefore likely to be similar to the attitudes of army grunts I’ve been sorta-studying, since there’s a huge overlap between the two groups.
The other thing motorcyclists are really into is religion, chiefly Protestant Christianity. I know the Southern Baptists are big in the South, but I don’t get the impression that Bikers are particularly Baptist–rather, I get the impression that they prefer more independent churches that cater more to the working/lower class (probably a lot of Charismatics), while Baptists lean more middle class.
In other words, Guns, God, and Glory.
To summarize, bikers are primarily working class, white, Southern men whose ancestors hailed from parts of Britain outside the Hajnal Line; they’re veterans, deeply religious, and strongly nationalist.
This is a group that, in every day life, is treated by the rest of society as low-status in pretty much every way. Elites look down on devout Christians and equate their beliefs with actual mental illness; Southerners and their symbols are despised; nationalistic whites have no place in polite society; and it is really harder to get lower in any social ladder than being screamed at by your superior officers in the army and then shot at by the enemy.
Being a biker, I theorize, not only satisfies a variety of instinctual/mental desires, like the enjoyment of riding down the open road, but also serves as a way to create an alternate society (exit) in which they are on top, rather than on the bottom. At work, you might just be an average Joe who lays carpet or digs ditches all day for crappy pay, but hop on your Harley and you are the king of the road and no one fucks with you.
What makes bikers tick?
Bikers are generally anarcho-tribalists who would die to defend their family or nation, but view the Federal Government as a hostile, occupying force that would march them into a mushroom cloud to save a few dollars on animal subjects for radiation testing. Most don’t use the term “Cathedral,” but they understand the concept intuitively.
Back in the 60s and 70s, I suspect that many clubs were explicitly whites-only, but in my all of my conversations with bikers, I have not heard a single racist word. Even if a lot of the symbolism dates back to the Confederacy or has white power undertones, today the symbols seem to function more as a “fuck you” to society and represent in-group solidarity more than out-group dislike.
In-group solidarity and loyalty are vitally important in the biker world. “Band of Brothers” doesn’t just refer to guys in the army; it’s also a motorcycle club. Motorcycle clubs–and biker culture more generally–provide a sense of fierce tribal identity in a society that is otherwise anonymous, anomized, indifferent and huge.
The shared experience of being military veterans, as mentioned before, is an inseperable part of the biker experience. For many of these guys, war–be it WWII, Korea, Vietnam, or Iraq–was a traumatic experience, and they received little to no support upon returning to civilian life. The adrenaline rush of the motorcycle, fuck all attitude, and brotherhood of riders appealed to the returning war veteran’s psyche and provided the status and support society lacked.
Why Motorcycle Clubs?
One of the most interesting things about biker clubs is that they exist at all. Why do guys whose whole mystique is “fuck the system” form their own organizational structures with rules?
The obvious reason is that it’s safer to ride in groups than alone; cars have this nasty habit of accidentally running over bikers. Riding in packs makes bikers more visible and thus safer:
The other reason is that the club is a thede, an ethny, a tribe. People who are only a few centuries removed from a actual tribal clan system still have an instinctual desire to belong to a tight-knit group that has each other’s backs against the world.
If you’ve ever seen pictures of bikers, you’ve probably noticed that the pictures hardly ever show their faces. Rather, they show the backs of their jackets, where their club patches are displayed:
As far as I know, every club has its own, unique patches, but they all seem to have the same basic structure–a large central patch, with two more patches directly above and below it. EG:
1) Top rocker – used for club name 2) Club logo plus MC (Motorcycle club) patch 3) Bottom rocker – used for territory 4) 1% signifying “outlaw” intent (Note that the vast majority of bikers do not belong to Outlaw clubs) 5) Club name or location 6) Office or rank held within club 7) Side patch
The basic structure is remarkably similar across clubs–so whether you ride with an anti-child abuse club, a religious club, a charity club, a “we just like bikes” club, or even a housewives club, chances are your patches will still have the same basic layout as even the most outlaw of Outlaw clubs.
Christian Motorcycle Association colors. Source: Wikipedia
The patches are big so they can be easily read at a distance, and loudly proclaim each wearer’s tribal identity. (In fact, many clubs’ names even include words like “tribe,” “pagan,” or otherwise evoke a tribal identity.)
This should go without saying, but don’t wear a patch you haven’t earned.
While there are probably some clubs you can join just by filling out a form and paying some dues, most clubs appear to have pretty strict rules about who can and can’t join, and some clubs are harder to get into than Harvard. Like all goods, that which is obtained cheaply is not worth much. Brotherhood is not given easily; you don’t promise to have someone’s back without first making sure their back is worth having.
Practically speaking, if you’re going to be publicly associating yourself with a group of people, it makes sense to be careful about who you take into that group. If one of your club members makes a big stink at a bar, the owners might not let your club back into the bar. If one of your club members gets into a fight with another club, retribution could come down on you.
Since the available ethnographies all focus on Outlaw clubs, (and they’re quite old,) I only know about their procedures, and long story short, you have to know a guy. A prospective club member gradually meets and gets to know everyone in the club. He hangs out with them for a year or so, and then they vote on whether or not to accept him into the club. If anyone votes “no,” that’s a no.
One of the useful things about basing one’s tribal identity around motorcycle ownership is that it is a very difficult identity to fake. Motorcycles are expensive, joining a club is difficult and members are often well-known to each other, and the patches function like very large ID cards.
If you are extending brotherhood and solidarity to others in your tribe, it is best to make sure your thedic symbols are difficult to counterfeit.
Motorcycle clubs are a form of spontaneous human organization and ethnic symbolism. No one sat down and said, “Hey, know what will make motorcycle riding way more awesome? A government to make a bunch laws about it!” but that is precisely what they’ve done. They have made their own society.
If you want to make a better world, go out and make it.
Why Harley Davidsons?
While many people ride things that are not Harleys, for many bikers, the Harley is the only bike.
This is a Harley:
These are not Harleys:
Don’t ride a Vespa to Sturgis.
Harley riders have an intense level of brand loyalty and a passion for their machines that we mere car drivers rarely match. Honestly, I don’t consider it unusual to see a half-assembled motorcycle sitting in biker’s living room.
There are two, possibly three main reasons for this loyalty:
Harley Davidson is an American brand, and bikers are strongly nationalistic. Why would a red-blooded American send his money to anyone other than a fellow American worker, making a fellow American motorcycle?
The Harley looks more like a bad-ass working class bike, whereas the BMW and Kawasaki bikes look like futuristic designs for rich people. The aesthetics are totally different. (And obviously the Vespa is right out.)
Price and modifiability? Working on the bike is a biker past time; guys with limited incomes would prefer to be able to fix their own bikes.
This is also a Harley:
Women and Motorcycles
The motorcycle world is mostly male but obviously some bikers are female, and if Google image search is anything to go by, they are all very well-endowed and scantily clad.
Most of the women who are into motorcycles are probably married to or dating men who are into motorcycles, and like doing fun things with their partners. Some are also really into the bikes; the world is vast; it contains multitudes.
The female bikers I have talked to have not had much appreciation for feminism as a political or practical philosophy. As one of the anthropologists who has studied bikers noted, Women’s Lib hasn’t really reached the biker world, at least as of when they were still calling it Women’s Lib. Nevertheless, biker chicks are not wilting damsels keen on wearing pretty pink shoes and shopping. In fact, I strongly recommend against insulting them or pissing them off, as getting punched really hurts.
Do biker lives matter?
I certainly hope so.
Bikers represent one form of exit, the creation of a parallel society with its own tribes, institutions, and rules, within which bikes are high-status and enjoy the benefits of tribalism. They are anarchists who spontaneously made governments in order to advance their own freedom. Their thedic symbols (principally motorcycles and patches) are difficult to fake and therefore high-value. The motorcycle itself provides a great deal of enjoyment, perhaps assuaging some primal, instinctual need to ride fast on the open road.
And the bikers I know are good folks whose company I enjoy.
However, The Atlantic article notes that, “the significance of these figures may be hugely overblown. “Everybody who’s remotely professionally involved in this kind of stuff knows that beyond about 10, 15, 20 years, [population estimates] are basically useless,” says Dr. Sean Fox of the University of Bristol in the U.K.”
Personally, I’d still be worried.
1. Rare events / things are likely to be over-represented in survey results due to random chance, if the chance of randomly picking that option among the survey items is higher than the chance of it occurring in real life. For example, let’s suppose I hand out 1000 surveys with three options to select from:
Heterosexual
Homosexual
Asexual
Then chances are I will end up with an over-representation of asexuals. In real life, asexuality is rare–a British survey estimates it at about 1% of the British population, so I expect to get about 10 surveys marked asexual. But let’s suppose some people decide to just fill my survey out completely at random because they’re just here for the free M&Ms, or they’re not paying very good attention and mark the wrong box, or I accidentally make a mistake while tallying up the numbers. Then the chances of randomly ticking “asexual” are 33%. If 1% of responses are randomly incorrect, then I will get an additional 3.3 or so asexuals–that is, I will over-estimate the asexual population by about 33%. If 3% of responses are incorrect, then fully half of my reported asexuals aren’t asexual at all.
This problem will only get worse if there are two rare categories you can select on my survey. Suppose you can also select your race:
White
Black
Hispanic
Anything else
And we’re doing this survey in Comanche, TX, where Whites are 80%, Blacks are 1%, Hispanics are about 17%, and everyone else is about 2%.
The statistical odds of a black asexual in Comanche, TX, assuming these are independent variables, are therefore around 0.01%–in other words, we probably shouldn’t find any, so let’s hand out our survey to 10,000 people so we have a reasonable chance of finding one. (You know, pretending that Comanche has 10,000 people.)
If you’re filling this survey out randomly for the M&Ms, you’ve got a 25% chance of marking black and a 33% chance of marking asexual, for an 8.3% chance of marking both. If 1% of people do this, then we should see about 8 black asexuals–about 8 times as many as we ought to see.
A prominent real life demonstration of this effect was Pat Buchanan’s performance in the 2000 election in Florida. Voters had a close to 33% chance of randomly voting Buchanan if they mis-poked the ballot, but only 0.4% of people nationwide voted for Buchanan. This resulted in a large over-counting of votes for Buchanan.
Pop Palm Beach= 1.135 million * 51.3% voting rate = 582,255 voters. 0.4% of that is 2,329 votes. But if 1%–5,822–of those voters vote randomly, that’s another 1,921 votes for Buchanan. If the difference between winning and losing in Palm Beach comes down to less than 2,000 votes, then random chance, not democracy, is casting the deciding vote.
If your error rate goes above 1%, things obviously get even worse.
(To his credit, Pat Buchanan freely admitted that his anomalously high numbers in Palm Beach were probably due to people getting mixed up about the ballot.)
2. The black (African American) IQ score distribution may be wider and/or less normal than claimed.
The number of high-scoring blacks does not line up with the expected number of high-scoring blacks based on IQ distribution estimates. Pumpkin Person does a good breakdown of the math on this one, in their post, “Are too many U.S. blacks scoring high on IQ tests?“
The point of the post was that the morals people advocate have a lot to do with whatever happens to be a problem in their personal lives or the personal lives of the people around them.
Let’s run through a quick hypothetical. Suppose you grew up in a neighborhood with a lot of gang violence. You are not in a gang; in fact, you think gang violence is really bad. So you, like many people in your community, have joined many “anti-violence” organizations, go to anti-violence rallies, describe yourself as an Anti-Violence Crusader, etc.
Now let’s suppose you met someone from a far away community who was not an AVC. After staring at him in shock and horror for a moment, you burst out, “What do you mean you aren’t anti-violence? What are you, some kind of gang lover?”
Your new acquaintance scratches his head for a moment, then says, “Actually, I’m more of an anti-police brutality advocate, because the police in my community keep assaulting innocent people.”
You are now thoroughly horrified; the last thing you think any community needs is a more restrained police presence.
But your acquaintance is not actually an evil gang-violence advocate; gang violence just isn’t a problem in his community. Likewise, you are not actually advocating police brutality against innocent people; police brutality just isn’t a problem where you live.
Most people are not advocating universal moral principles that will work for everyone in the world, but instead are trying to help the people they know and address the problems they see in everyday life (or the media they consume).
If you know people whose lives were destroyed by divorce, then chances are you will have a rather dim view of divorce and will advocate against it. If divorce is a thing that doesn’t happen very often in your community, then chances are you won’t give it much thought. Within that context, people’s morals are probably basically functional, at least in the short-term.
This leads us to an obvious danger: advocating one particular situational morality to people in a different situation. This is generally called being a busy-body. A morality that has been transplanted out of the area it belongs in is likely to be highly damaging to the people it is inflicted upon.
The point was not “Oooh, Liberals are better than Conservatives; everyone should convert to atheism and go attend the nearest LGBTQ meeting.” I have no particular reason to believe that either of these behaviors leads to better life outcomes, much less that they would work for you. If anything, I suspect that conservative Christianity (of any stripe) is of great comfort and help to people enduring personal hardship. The idea that Evangelical Protestantism is uniquely causing high divorce rates in Appalachia is silly.
Long term, of course, what happens to be working now may not keep working; I think this is more or less what is happening in America (and much of the world) today. Changing conditions require changing priorities. Technology is changing incredibly quickly, and conditions in America (and the world) today are not what they were even a decade ago. An instinct for altruism that was functional in the conditions of 1800s Sweden, where the priority for survival was probably group cooperation to survive the winters, may be directly detrimental to Swedes in today’s world of smartphones and mass transportation, where non-Swedes can easily move to Sweden and take advantage of the Swedes’ generosity.
